The competing states and their leaders, whether they are presented as ‘authoritarian’ or ‘democratic’, are seeking to impose sacrifices on the proletariat everywhere in the name of the ‘indispensable’ war economy’
Whether it is Putin's Russia, Xi Jinping's China, Trump's United States or Von der Leyen's European Union, “the time has come for rearmament”! The new German Chancellor says: “From now on, the following rule must apply to our defence: whatever the cost!” President Macron wants to “strengthen our armies as quickly as possible”, as does British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who has announced military spending “unprecedented since the end of the Cold War.”
Intense warmongering and militaristic propaganda
To impose these colossal sums, in the midst of an economic and financial crisis, against a backdrop of staggering public deficits, the most effective strategy remains manipulation through fear: “Who can believe that today's Russia will stop at Ukraine?” (Macron). Should we not at all costs “deter tyrants like Vladimir Putin?” (Starmer).
In reality, in this obsolete capitalist system, all states are imperialist, small or large, aggressors as well as the aggressed, all defending only the cold-blooded interests of the national capital. All are gangsters, greedy monsters wallowing in a sea of blood, who, when they are not drinking the blood of civilians are preparing the future carnage which they have calculatingly decided upon. And as always, these warmongers take the usual precautions to cynically justify the monstrosity of their barbaric enterprises, always in the name of ‘peace’ and ‘values’! Isn't Putin himself fighting ‘Nazis’? Doesn't the French Minister of the Economy, Eric Lombard, defend a democratic ‘economy of peace’ in order to buy his instruments of death?
Everywhere, the working class is subjected to this intense propaganda, to the media steamroller that tries to persuade us with nauseating speeches that military spending is ‘necessary’ and that arms production must ‘inevitably increase’. All for reasons presented everywhere as ‘ethical’! Polls then flourish, designed to gauge, manipulate and feed the same discourse seeking to persuade us that it is necessary to ‘defend one's homeland’!
But to claim that war and the militarisation of society are a ‘necessary evil’, something obvious, against which nothing can be done unless we want to risk even greater massacres, is an odious lie. Militarisation and war are always the fruits of the barbaric decisions of the ruling class and the very expression of the impasse into which the decomposing capitalist system is sinking more and more. The world wars of the past, like the abominable massacres in the Gaza Strip or in Ukraine today, are not the product of the ‘madness’ of this or that leader, but the expression of the historical dead-end reached by the capitalist system, of its inability to offer anything other than to drag the working class and all of humanity into ever more vast, apocalyptic spirals of destruction. What lies behind all the fine talk of ‘peace’ is nothing less than the transformation of ever larger areas into fields of ruins, into new Ukraines, Syrias or Palestines![1]
More anti-working class attacks
All this belligerent agitation in turn fuels the same arms race, and everywhere the rulers are asking the working class to foot the bill. The planned military budgets in Europe already exceed 2% of current GDP. The European plan ‘ReArm Europe’ envisages releasing 800 billion euros for the purchase of weapons of war. Germany alone plans to commit 1000 billion euros to its defence. The military programming law 2024-2030 in France provides for a sum of 413 billion!
The exploited are starting to feel the effects of all this in terms of attacks on their living conditions. By hammering home the message that we can no longer count on the ‘dividends of peace’, the bourgeoisie is paving the way for the acceptance of sacrifices in the service of mass murder. Blowing hot and cold, coating speeches with a language of ‘truth’, the prospects is one of massive attacks on the social level: health, pensions, education... For NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, “this cannot wait... Countries are investing up to a quarter of their GDP in pensions, health systems or social security. We need a small fraction of that money to strengthen our defence.” What he is careful not to say is that this “small fraction”, taken from systems already bled dry, can only further impoverish millions of people. This is a cynical euphemism that in reality means the axing of social budgets, social security, unemployment or health insurance.
The growth of the war economy is also presented to us as a source of ‘industrial relocation’ to ‘promote employment’. This is also a sinister hypocrisy that aims to justify an intensification of arms production that will only come at the price of a headlong rush into debt, a plunge into global recession, but also an intensification of exploitation and a general deterioration of the living conditions of the proletariat. While arms companies may well reap substantial profits along the way, the economy, from the point of view of global capital, will be weighed down by an immense waste of resources; capital will be sterilised in unproductive arms stocks. At best, these weapons can only rust; at worst, they can kill and destroy, generalising the policy of ‘scorched earth’! In short, this means a greatly increased devaluation of capital, which already generates inflation, attacks and poverty!
Class struggle is a vital necessity
This nightmarish situation must not be accepted by the working class. We, as a class, can only denounce all the preparations for war and all the speeches aimed at mobilising the proletariat and the population behind the ‘nation’ for ‘peace’ and the defence of alleged ‘democratic values’. The working class must be wary of and fight against its false friends on the left and the far left in particular, who are multiplying the most devious speeches. They pile up obstacles to the development of working class consciousness by proposing false alternatives that are ideological traps: either through pacifist mobilisations, thus covering up the responsibility of capitalism, or by openly advocating support for one military camp against the other, justifying the massacre in the name of the ‘lesser evil’. [2] In both cases, the main principles of these ideological poisons are the division of the working class and the defence of capital, and always in the name of ‘democracy’! The traps of ‘defending democracy’ are all the more dangerous as they exploit a real feeling of anger in reaction to the various attacks, such as the numerous demonstrations on 5 April in the United States, channelled into an anti-Trumpist or anti-Musk mobilisations. These same traps are being set with calls to support a series of popular protest movements in many countries such as Turkey, Serbia and South Korea. The aim is to push workers towards the ballot box or bourgeois opposition parties by making them believe that it would be possible to organise capitalist society in a more humane and just way, which is a gross lie: capitalism can no longer be ‘progressive’. Worn down to the bone, it has nothing left to offer! It is indeed bankrupt and increasingly destructive.
The miasma of its decomposition and the social fragmentation it engenders are themselves used for these ideological ends by the ruling class in an attempt to chloroform, to obscure the search for the only viable and possible perspective, the one bequeathed by the experience of the workers’ movement and the class struggle: the perspective of communism.
Clearly, the bourgeoisie is trying to mask the fact that militarisation necessarily goes hand in hand with attacks on the working class. And it is precisely on its own class terrain, in the dynamic of workers' struggles against current and future attacks, that the proletariat will be able to develop its strength and its awareness of the bankruptcy of capitalism. The only way to offer the prospect of a viable alternative society is therefore to refuse and reject the bourgeoisie’s ideological campaigns outright, to fight against the logic imposed against the bloodthirsty monster that is capitalism.
WH, 5 April 2025
[1] China's military manoeuvres and provocations around Taiwan in early April, in response to Trump's irrational decisions and recent provocations over tariffs and his imperialist intentions, are a brutal testament to this.
[2]This is what leads leftists, for example, to openly support the Hamas massacres in Gaza in the name of ‘anti-colonialism’.