Capitalism caught in the spiral of endless wars

The ravages of three years of war in Ukraine, like the unspeakable barbarity of the fifteen-month Israeli-Palestinian conflict which has set the whole of the Middle East ablaze, are a terrible illustration of the wars engendered by the period of the decomposition of capitalism.

Whatever truces or ceasefires may be concluded in the context of future imperialist manoeuvres, they can only be temporary and will only represent momentary pauses in the reinforcement of the barbaric militarism which characterises the capitalist mode of production.

In February 2022, Putin declared that the Russian army would advance rapidly in Ukraine by means of a “special military operation” of short duration. Three years have passed and, although missiles and artillery continue to destroy entire cities and claim thousands of lives, the war has reached a point where neither side is making significant progress, making military operations even more desperate and destructive. It is difficult to know with any certainty how many people have been killed or wounded in the war, but the media are now talking about more than a million dead or wounded, and the protagonists are finding it increasingly difficult to recruit cannon fodder to fill ‘gaps’ on the front line.

In the Middle East, following the barbaric attack by Hamas, the retaliation by the State of Israel is causing destruction and massacres that are reaching an unimaginable level of savagery. Like Putin, Netanyahu, after the bloody attack on 7 October 2023, promised that in three months he would finish off Hamas: this has already been going on for more than a year and the barbarity it has unleashed has continued to grow. Israel has indiscriminately dropped 85,000 tonnes of explosives, the equivalent of three times the amount of explosive material contained in the bombs dropped on London, Hamburg and Dresden during the Second World War! These ferocious attacks left almost 45,000 people dead, more than 10,000 missing and almost 90,000 injured, many of them mutilated, including thousands of children. According to Save the Children, every day since the start of the war in Gaza, around ten children have lost their legs. In addition to the horror of the bombardments, there is hunger and diseases such as polio and hepatitis, which are spreading because of the inhuman sanitary conditions.

All this warlike madness that has been going on for so long in Ukraine and the Gaza Strip is now spreading to other countries, extending the spiral of chaos and barbarity. After the fighting in southern Lebanon and the bombing of Beirut, the renewed fighting in Syria, which led to the rapid overthrow of Bashar Al Assad, is a good illustration of how instability is spreading. Substantial military support from Russia and Iran had enabled Al Assad to prevail at the end of the Syrian civil war from 2011 to 2020, even if the situation was precarious. With the military weakening of Assad's allies, in particular with Russia trapped in Ukraine and Hezbollah occupied in Lebanon, their military support has been greatly reduced, leading to a loss of control of the situation by the regime. This was exploited by the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) group to attack and overthrow the government. However, Al Assad's flight in no way means that the new regime that has taken power in Damascus has a coherent, unified project. On the contrary, a multitude of more or less radical ‘democratic’ or ‘Islamist’ groups, Christian, Shiite or Sunni, Kurdish, Arab or Druze, are more than ever involved in the confrontations for control of the territory or parts of it, with the mafia of imperialist sponsors behind them: Turkey, Israel, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United States, Iran, the European countries and perhaps even Russia, each with its own agenda and its own imperialist interests. More than ever, Syria, and the Middle East in general, represent a hotbed of multiple tensions that push towards war and militarism.

War and militarism, barbaric expressions of decadent capitalism

Numerous new and sophisticated weapons have been deployed in Ukraine and the Middle East: missile defence shields, attack drones, manipulation of communication systems to transform them into explosive devices, etc. The budgets that the various states allocate to the purchase of conventional weapons and to the modernisation or expansion of the atomic arsenal are also exploding. According to data from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), global military spending in 2023 will amount to 2,443 billion dollars, an increase of 7% compared to 2022 (the highest growth rate since 2009). And both the orders and the statements made by heads of state on every continent give us no reason to expect anything other than an impressive general expansion in militarisation, which at the same time is leading to a remarkable increase in the profits of arms companies.

But does this mean that war has a positive effect on the capitalist economy? Capitalism was born in the mud and blood of war and plunder, but their role and function have changed over time. In the ascendant period of capitalism, military expenditure and war itself were a means of expanding the market and stimulating the development of the productive forces, because the new regions conquered required new means of production and subsistence. In contrast, the entry into the period of decadence (which began with the First World War) indicated that solvent markets had been globally distributed and that capitalist relations of production had become an obstacle to the development of the productive forces. In this context, the capitalist system certainly finds in war (and its preparation) an impetus for the production of armaments but, as means of destruction, they do not benefit the accumulation of capital. War represents, in reality, a sterilisation of capital. However, this does not mean, as the Gauche Communiste de France already explained, “that war has become the aim of capitalist production, since this remains the production of surplus value, but that war becomes the permanent way of life in decadent capitalism”[1]. In the period of decomposition of capitalism, which constitutes the last phase of the irreversible decline of this mode of production, the characteristics of decadence are not only maintained, but accentuated, so that war not only continues to have no positive economic function but now presents itself as a trigger for ever-increasing economic and political chaos, thereby losing its strategic purpose. The objective of war is increasingly reduced to irrational mass destruction, making it one of the main factors threatening humanity with total annihilation. The threat of nuclear confrontation is tragic testimony to this.

This dynamic is clearly illustrated in current wars such as in Ukraine and Gaza. Russia and Israel have razed or wiped out entire cities and permanently contaminated farmland with their bombs, so that the benefit they will derive from a hypothetical end to the war will be limited to fields of ruins. The disgusting massacres of civilians and children, like the bombing of nuclear power stations in Ukraine, underline the qualitative change that war takes in decomposition, which becomes increasingly irrational, since the sole objective is to destabilise or destroy the adversary by systematically practising a ‘scorched earth’ policy. In this sense, if “the fabrication of sophisticated systems of destruction has become the symbol of a modem high-performance economy… these technological 'marvels', which have just shown their murderous efficiency in the Middle East, are, from the standpoint of production, of the economy, a gigantic waste”[2].

The bourgeoisie is increasing budgets... in order to extend destruction and massacres.

The growing development of militarisation has recently led some countries which had abandoned compulsory military service to reintroduce it, as in Latvia and Sweden, and the CDU party has even proposed it in Germany. Above all, it is reflected in the widespread pressure to increase military spending, with various bourgeois spokesmen campaigning, for example, for the need for NATO countries to go well beyond the agreed 2% of GNP spent on defence. In a scenario where Trump's United States will play the America First card more than ever, even towards ‘friendly’ countries that thought they were safe under the US nuclear umbrella, European countries are urgently seeking to strengthen their military infrastructures and are sharply increasing their military spending to better defend their own imperialist ambitions. When the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, says: “We have to spend more, we have to spend better, we have to spend European”, she sums up the strategy of expanding Europe's military infrastructure and an autonomous European arms industry.

In reality, the trend towards an explosion in arms spending is global, stimulated by an all-out advance in militarism. Every state is under pressure to strengthen its military power. This basically reflects the pressure of the growing instability of imperialist relations in the world.

Tatlin, 14 January 2025

 

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[1] 50 years ago: The real causes of the Second World War, International Review 59, “Report on the international Situation”, GCF, July 1945.

[2] Where are we in the crisis?: Economic crisis and militarism, International Review 65.