This text was written for discussion at an international “revolutionary defeatist” meeting in Minerve, France, in August. A report on this gathering will be posted later.
Otto Dix: Wounded Soldier, 1916
0. Why this text?
Because the instinctive reaction of most people who are worried and repulsed by the growing number of wars and the atrocities they lead to, is to assume that they are caused by bad leaders, aggressive politics, unjust ideologies, and to support the side that seems less bad, more peaceful and less unjust. It is not self-evident to grasp that these bad leaders and aggressive politics are themselves a product of the social relation that is capital, and that this social relation will continue to produce such leaders and politics and ever more catastrophic destruction, as it sinks deeper into its self-created crisis. Slogans or simplistic tales are not enough to convince many who are genuinely determined to fight war that, in order to do so, they must fight capitalism. We must be able to demonstrate to them that we live in a global social order that brutally clashes with the needs of humanity. That it is a system at war with the planet, at war with life itself. Fighting back, defeating the capitalist order and all its warring factions, is the only war that makes sense. That is what “revolutionary defeatism” means. Those who defend it must develop a deep understanding of how capitalism entails crisis and how capitalist crisis leads to war at an ever larger scale. This text wants to contribute to this understanding. The points 1 to 4 develop the theoretical foundation for it. The points 5 to 14 examine the connection capitalism-crisis-war in history. The points 15-16 make the balance sheet for today and ponder what the present obstacles to global war are.
To clear the path, let me begin by recognizing that war is not something specific to capitalism, that it has existed as long as humanity itself. Even in “primitive communism”, the classless, stateless way of living that characterized the first 99 % of human existence, wars were frequent, according to archeologists. i We humans are a violent species, in that aspect closer to chimps than to bonobos. But human nature is not a fixed, immutable package deposited by genes in each individual, it is to the contrary in its essence social and evolving. Humans do have the extraordinary capacity to change not only their environment but also themselves.
War stood at the cradle of class society. Both for offensive and defensive purposes, societies became dependent on a specialized corps of warriors, from which a ruling class emerged. In both classless and class-based pre-capitalist societies, most wars were waged to obtain concrete things: food, cattle, slaves, hunting grounds, fertile land, gold, etc. The purpose of production as well was to obtain things that were wanted for their concrete usefulness. That would change only when the capitalist mode of production became dominant. From then on, the making of useful things shifted from being the goal of production to being the means towards the real goal: accumulating abstract value, the key to all wealth in the capitalist world.
1. Capitalism
How did war change when capitalism came to the fore? In some ways, it did not change at all. The greed and lust for power of the ruling classes, their desire to exploit the opportunities for plunder, those remained constant sources of violent conflict. But in other ways, war became quite different. Mac Intosh distinguished two types of war in capitalism’s ascendant period ii . The first, “fought to consolidate the emerging nation-state or to expand its frontiers, typically led to the redrawing of the political map, but not to the expulsion or extermination of populations. But a second type of war, war between capitalist states and pre-capitalist states or societies, colonial wars, the expression of a nascent imperialism, did involve the reduction to slavery or the extermination of native populations, ideologically constructed as sub-human or non-human.” Whereas, in the first type, the defeat of an enemy did not entail his destruction, and the distinction between combatant and non-combatant, soldier and civilian, was by and large respected, in the second, such distinctions did not exist, wars were genocidal and racism was was their necessary ideological substructure.
But in the 20th century wars between capitalist states took on characteristics of the second type; they became increasingly genocidal. Accompanied by racist and xenophobic propaganda, they erased the distinction between combatants and non-combatants. The extermination of the enemy – including the civilian population — became an integral part of the very structure and organization of war.
Why this change? Because capitalism changed. Driven by the hunt for the extra-profit that results from lowering the labor time-content of commodities below the social average, capitalism, over the course of the 19th century, created a new production process centered around technology that became dominant around the world. It unleashed labor productivity but it also brought capitalism’s inherent contradictions to the surface.
In capitalism, as said, the goal of production is not to satisfy concrete needs. Production does not occur unless it results in profit. That is the purpose of the undertaking: to turn money into more money, or M – M’. To make more money is easy, it just can be printed. But that doesn’t increase wealth, if that’s all that happens, it only causes inflation. It’s not money as such capital is after, it is money that represents value. The purpose of capitalism is to accumulate value. Value grows because of exploitation: production results in more value than the value invested in it because workers create more value than the value of their wages.
So the accumulation process can be represented in this way:
M – C – C’ – M’ (etc)
Money M buys Commodities C (means of production, including labor power) which produce Commodities C’, and those, when sold, become Money M’. M’ is greater than M because C’ is greater than C: surplus value is added. For the accumulation process to continue, the bulk of M’ must then again become commodities that are productively consumed, change C into C’. So, throughout the process, value remains value, but it metamorphoses again and again. Its form changes from money into production forces and then into the commodities resulting from production and then into money again, before it can re-enter the production process to continue the accumulation process.
But value is not stable. Each of these points of transformation entails the risk of failure to transform, and the penalty for that is devalorization. The changes which the capitalist production process underwent during what has been called ‘the transition to the real domination of capital’ – turned these latent risks into real crises:
C- C’: in this phase, value grows because surplus value is added. But the more the production process is technology-centered, the less labor power is consumed in it, the less surplus value is added, even though the rate of exploitation may have sharply increased. The limit to the creation of surplus value, and thus to profit, is that it can only a part of the living labor expended. “The barrier always remains the relation between the fractional part of the day which expresses necessary labour, and the entire working day. It can move only within these boundaries.” So capitalism’s tendency to replace human labor by machines implies a tendential decline of the rate of profit and a potential crisis caused by a shortage of profit. It also means, not only that capitalism is forced to grow, but also that this compulsion to grow becomes stronger, the more capitalism is developed. The more productivity growth already has reduced the part of the working day spent on necessary labor (what the workers need to survive), the more growth is needed to compensate for the fact that it becomes increasingly difficult to diminish necessary labor further. So, “the more developed capital already is, the more surplus labour it has created, the more terribly must it develop the productive force in order to realize itself [… ] The self-realization of capital becomes more difficult to the extent that it has already been realized.”iii
C’ – M’: In this phase, the value must be realized, the commodities that were produced must be sold. But the technification of production goes hand in hand with its scale-enhancement: the value is spread over ever more commodities which must be sold for the value to morph into the next phase of the accumulation process. However, an increase of the capacity to produce commodities does not imply a synced increase in the solvable demand for them. Demand for goods that are unproductively consumed can always be increased, but for the accumulation of value to continue, the bulk of the commodities must be destined for productive use and thus have a use-value that makes this possible. The capacity to absorb such commodities increasingly lags behind the capacity to produce them.
So in this phase, there is a growing tendential crisis of overcapacity, of overproduction.
M – C: Once the commodities are sold and the value contained in them has morphed into money, the bulk of that money must be invested in production for the accumulation process to continue. But while the phase C – M, the transformation of commodities into money, is a more or less immediate obligation – commodities that aren’t sold lose their value – this is not so for M – C, the transformation of money back into commodities. While all other commodities are perishable money, money seemingly is the “imperishable commodity” that can be hoarded instead of spent. The more difficult it becomes to accomplish the phase C – C’ (because of a falling rate of profit) and the phase C’ – M’ (because of market saturation) the greater the incentive not to accomplish M – C. As a result, an ever larger part of the value ends up in finances and stays there, instead of being invested in production where new value is created. But the value of money is only seemingly imperishable. It can be no more than the value of the commodities it circulates plus the value of the future production that it sets in motion. Anything beyond that is fictitious capital. At some point, the overaccumulation of money-capital and the corresponding lack of creation of new value undermine the incentive to produce, because the belief that money can store value is collapsing. Then the whole system, which, after all, is based on the belief that value and real wealth are the same, risks to unravel.
2. Crisis
Notwithstanding their lip service to liberty, capitalists and their governments essentially have no choice: The law of value dictates their behavior. It orders them to exploit, to destroy the environment, to wage wars. It tells them they must grow their capital or be killed by the competition.
When technology advances so that production rests more on machines and automation and less on living labor, the capitalist is not free to choose whether to invest in it or not. He has to. If he doesn’t, his production price becomes too high to compete, or otherwise said, the social value of the commodities in his sector (on which their market price is based) sinks below the individual value of his product. The more technology’s progress has this repeated effect in a given sector, the more the threshold for productive capital formation rises (as more capital needs to be invested in machinery) and the more the value of its products fall, resulting in a declining rate of profit. At the same time, the technological change imposes a scale-enhancement of production, which eventually collides with the narrow base on which consumption in capitalist society rests .
What prevents this process to continue to the point that there is no longer any incentive to accomplish C – C’ and production grinds to a halt, is crisis. What triggers a crisis is the combined effect of a declining rate of profit and overproduction. It is the logical result of the generalized use of advanced, scale-enhancing and living labor-reducing technology. What a crisis does is devalorize the existing capital. Through scores of bankruptcies, fire sales, layoffs, wage-cuts, austerity measures etc, the means of production, both constant capital (machines, infrastructure, raw materials) and variable capital (labor power) are cheapened. As a result, surplus value increases relative to the cost of producing it. The rate of profit rises again.
Crisis is why the value accumulation process takes on a cyclical form, rather than progressing in a linear way to a point X at which accumulation becomes impossible. It is the necessary moment of correction that has to occur again and again to overcome capitalism’s immanent contradictions. However, the intervals and the intensity are not predictable, as other factors play a role. The phase of crisis can be short or extended, it can be a mild recession or a deep depression. What is predictable is that it is painful, not just for the working class but for the capitalist class as well. It is bad for its profits and can trigger class struggle, threaten its control over society. So the ruling class often tries to attenuate the crisis’s impact, or even -as we will see further – to postpone it, to kick the can down the road. But by doing so, it deprives the accumulation process from a necessary corrective moment, thereby letting the causes which make the correction necessary fester to the point that only a more drastic cure can reset the conditions for value accumulation.
3. War
Capital as a whole has characteristics and limits which are different from those of individual capitalists or countries. By the end of the 19th century we can speak of a capitalist world economy that exists as an interconnected entity. A giant, complex machine of which all the different capitals are cogs that must cooperate and yet are fundamentally divided by competition. It has no general headquarters, there’s nobody at the steering wheel of this machine, but it has an inherent ‘logic’ which compels it to grow regardless the consequences and to violently attack the obstacles to its growth, the barriers to value-accumulation.
Cycles of value-accumulation contain an expansive phase, in which new technology spreads and capital grows, and a phase of gradual decline, in which the generalization of the more capital-intensive production methods cause the average rate of profit to fall and the scale-enhancement that these production methods entail leads to overcapacity. The more developed capital is, the larger the value of the past surplus labor that it contains, the more difficult the valorization-process becomes. The social capital must valorize, grow in value, or lose its value, devalorize.The point is reached that not enough new value (surplus value) is being created and realized to valorize all the existing capital. Then there must be deep destruction of value that capitalism had accumulated in previous decades before a new era of expansion becomes possible. Since the twentieth century the size of the recurring imbalance between the value of existing capital and newly created value has become so large that a crisis alone does not suffice to accomplish the necessary devalorization. Industrially organized military destruction became a part of the accumulation process.
A global crisis reveals that there is too much capital in all its forms: too much constant and variable capital that cannot be used for producing profit and is a dead weight on the system, too much financial capital that takes an ever larger bite out of new surplus value. The past devours the future. Global war destroys some of that past, eliminating excess capital in all its forms: massively demolishing infrastructure (constant capital) murdering millions of proletarians (variable capital), wiping out debt and other holdings (financial capital). In this way war continues or replaces the corrective action that economic crisis performs for the value-based system.
It goes without saying that war, even more than economic crisis, is disastrous for the proletariat. It is also disastrous for many capitalists, yet necessary for capitalism. The first world war was seen by many revolutionaries as the beginning of a new period in the history of capitalism. The Third International in its founding document, drafted by Trotsky, called it the decadence of capitalism, a new epoch of crisis in which the system had exhausted its growth potential and was ripe for revolution. They were mistaken. Capitalism indeed had entered a new period but its hallmark is not permanent stagnation; on the contrary, growth accelerated in the 20th century. But it was not only growth of productive forces but of destructive forces as well. The hallmark of the new period was that phases of massive self-destruction became integral parts of the ‘life’ cycle of global capital.
This does not imply that global war is automatically followed by a period of prosperity. Other factors play a role, especially the policies adopted in the aftermath of war by the ruling class, as we will see further.
4. Imperialism
Effect and intention should not be confused. Usually the capitalist states do not wage war with the intention to destroy excess capital. On the contrary, they do it to obtain more capital, more land, more raw materials and other resources, more markets. Imperialism is in their DNA.
Indeed, imperialism is in part what created capitalism in the 16th and 17th centuries. As Marx noted: “The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the indigenous population of that continent, the beginnings of the conquest and plunder of India, and the conversion of Africa into a preserve for the commercial hunting of blackskins, are all things which characterize the dawn of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief moments of primitive accumulation”. iv
In the 18th century a second kind of imperialist conquest gathered steam, now with settler colonialism as its main purpose. The development of capitalism in Europe brought increased productivity, including agricultural productivity, as well as medical advances, resulting in a population explosion. The European population grew from 150 million in 1750 to more than 400 million by 1900 which enabled a wave of emigration – and thus of capitalist expansion – so massive that in most parts of the world with temperate climates, the population is now of predominantly European descent.
A third kind of imperialist conquest emerged in the late 19th century, after the regions suitable for settler colonialism had all been taken. Now the capitalist powers, in full transition to the real domination of capital, conquered the rest of the world, hungry for the raw materials that their burgeoning industries required.
What all three kinds of imperialist conquest had in common was the treatment of indigenous people as objects that were, depending on the circumstances, killed, starved, chased away or savagely exploited as slaves or forced laborers. The invention of race was an essential ideological requisite for this. In this regard the imperialist wars waged against non-capitalist societies were different from the wars which occurred in the same period in Europe. But the use of ideology to dehumanize the enemy, including its civilian population, returned in the inter-imperialist wars in the 20th century.
Sometimes it was opportunity that triggered imperialist war. Sometimes it was necessity, economic pressure. Sometimes it was a combination of both. The earlier kind of imperialist conquest was mostly a matter of opportunity; the opportunity to make fabulous profits by using slave labor to produce sugar and other coveted exotic commodities and forced labor to mine precious metals. There was pressure from crises as well but these crises were not yet caused by the fundamental contradictions of the capitalist economy but by exogenous factors like pandemics, bad harvests, religious wars and speculation. It was in the 19th century, when the transition to the real domination of capital advanced in leaps and bounds, that the cyclical course of value accumulation became increasingly pronounced, with a crisis at the end of each cycle setting the conditions for a new one. But it wasn’t simply a mechanical succession of cycles. Other, contingent causal factors interfered. And we need to take into account that the industrial mode of production was developing in a pre-industrial environment and profited greatly from its interactions with it. We also have to keep in mind the errors in monetary and other policies reflecting the political immaturity and lack of experience of the capitalist class, as well as the impact of the working class struggle.
5. The long depression
The most serious economic crisis of the 19th century occurred towards the end. It is known as “the long depression” (1873 -1897), an extended period containing several financial crises and recessions interspersed with spurts of rapid growth, and violent class struggle. Yet it overlaps with what is known as “the second industrial revolution” (roughly: 1870 – 1914), with scores of technological innovations ( gasoline fuel and the internal combustion engine, automobiles, airplanes, the chemical industry, the telegraph and the telephone, radios, electricity and more), rapid productivity-growth, the beginning of mass production (assembly lines, taylorism, fordism), giant factories, a big shift from agricultural to industrial employment, enormous development of railroads and other means of transportation and a vast increase of international trade, among its main features. At first sight, these two developments seem contradictory, yet they are related.
Britain, the first industrialized country, was the dominant economic power in the 19th century, the richest and most powerful. But despite its superior competitive position its exports were limited both by natural conditions (the high cost of transportation) and artificial ones (tariffs). At the same time, when advanced, labor-saving production methods became the norm, prices fell on its domestic market and so did profit-rates. This encouraged British capital, in search of a higher rate of profit, to invest in countries which were at a lower stage in the transition to real domination and thus still used less productive, more labor-intensive production methods. This fostered the horizontal spread of real domination in Europe and beyond (especially the US). This dynamic accelerated when the depression began and deflation (collapsing prices) worsened. While British capitalists invested increasing quantities of capital abroad (financing, among others, railroad construction in several countries), at home, its growth-rate and profit-rate declined. Domestic investment became so low that from 1873 to 1913 growth of productivity (output per capita) fell to zero.
But elsewhere in western Europe productivity grew fast. Faster even in the US which in the 1890’s surpassed the industrial capacity of Britain. Germany did so in the first decade of the 20th century. The enormous expansion of the railroads and the use of large steamships facilitated the scale-enhancement of production and the internationalization of commerce. But the very success of the modern industry also sharpened the inherent contradictions of capitalism, creating the three crisis-causing bottlenecks in the value accumulation cycle :
– in C – C’: the declining value content of commodities lead to a declining rate of profit, most notable in the most developed country, Britain;
– in C’ – M’: the increased productivity and scale-enhancement of production created overcapacity, growing difficulty to realize the value of the output;
– in M’ – C: as a result of the above, a growing portion of the value converted in money did not return to the production process but remained in the money-form, inflating financial bubbles.
What triggers a crisis usually is a bursting of such a bubble, a collapse of the belief in the ability of money or other financial assets to hold value. That is what happened in 1873. The panic, starting in the Austrian stock exchange and spreading from country to country, is considered to be the first truly international crisis. Several others followed. The one of 1893 was the most severe.
A steep decline of prices characterized the period. That prices would come down was to be expected, given the growth of productivity. But that alone did not explain the amount of deflation. The price of grain in 1894 was only a third of what it had been in 1867, the price of cotton fell by nearly 50 percent from 1872 to 1877, the price of iron halved between 1870s and 1890, and so on. The falling rate of profit and growing overproduction pulled them so low and caused the bankruptcy of thousands of companies and growing unemployment.
This created more room for others and accelerated the concentration of capital. But the larger companies got in trouble too. One way to defend themselves against the falling prices was to limit competition through seeking a monopoly on the market or through the formation of cartels – agreements between a limited number of large companies to set the market price. In Germany the number of cartels grew from 4 in 1875 to more than 100 in 1890 and almost 1000 in 1914. It was a step in the direction of state capitalism.
Politically, the capitalist class reacted to the crisis in a defensive and an offensive way. Defensively: to shield their home market from foreign competition, all of the major powers, with the exception of Britain, imposed high tariffs. Engels called them protective walls behind which they prepared for war over the domination of the European markets.
Offensively, the capitalist states launched a new round of imperialist conquest. In a short period of time they grabbed what was not yet taken in the two previous waves of imperialism, and also robbed colonies of weaker capitalist nations like Spain. Most spectacular was the so-called “Scramble for Africa”. While in 1870 European countries controlled 10 percent of the African continent, in 1914 they had taken 90 percent.
These invasions were openly justified as necessary because overproduction forced them to find new markets abroad. in his famous “March of the Flag” speech (1898) US senator and government spokesman Albert Beveridge exulted the conquest of Cuba and the Philippines in the Spanish-American war. He recalled the earlier expansions of the USA that resulted from wars against European powers and indigenous peoples. He praised these past conquests but stated they had not been driven by necessity: “While we did not need the territory taken during the past century at the time it was acquired, we do need what we have taken in 1898, and we need it now. Today, we are raising more than we can consume. Today, we are making more than we can use. Therefore, we must find new markets for our produce, new occupation for our capital, new work for our labor. Fate has written our policy for us; the trade of the world must and shall be ours”. Similar sentiments were expressed in Berlin, London and other capitals.
6. A world market
“By the beginning of the twentieth century it was possible to speak meaningfully of a world economy in which virtually every inhabited portion participated at least minimally, though Europe was by far the most important. It was in fact the dynamic centre that stimulated the whole.”v
The real domination of capital had conquered the globe, not in the sense that the specifically capitalist mode of production was everywhere nor that even in the central countries its development was completed, but meaning that it had fashioned an integrated worldwide system of production and circulation in which the different parts were conditioned by their place in the whole.
Despite the tariffs, international trade kept growing. In 1913 foreign trade per capita was more than 25 times higher than in 1800. Since the turn of the century global competition imposed the same prices for the same commodities on the world market. While over the course of the 19th century countries in southern, eastern and northern Europe as well as Russia and Japan, had been able to start their own industrial revolution, with the help of tariffs and foreign investment and the natural limitations to foreign trade, this was no longer possible in the 20th century. With few exceptions, the gap between developed and underdeveloped countries became impossible to bridge. The more so because the ‘second industrial revolution had raised the threshold for capital formation considerably. It took a lot more capital to set production in motion than even only 30 years earlier. The big winners of the period were giants like Ford, General Motors, US Steel, Standard Oil, BASF, Bayer, Krupp, Siemens, Schneider-Creusot, Shell, Vickers and others that would continue to play an important role in the coming wars and remain big players throughout the century.
They profited from the demise of many thousands of businesses, whose bankruptcies had wiped out billions (of dollars etc) of debt. So the crisis cleared the deck enough to make room for a recovery in the new century. But the growth was also fueled by the accelerating arms race. The major powers were spending heavily on building up their navies, stockpiling artillery and so on, while also undertaking large infrastructural projects in function of their war plans. The state took on an expanding role in the organization of the capitalist economy.
Meanwhile, there were signs that a new crisis was brewing. A telltale sign was the inflationary trend of financial assets, whose prices were bid up. In the US for instance, the paper value of non-agrarian companies doubled between 1900 and 1912, while the GDP had an average annual growth of 3,9%. A global bubble of fictitious capital was forming.
Tensions between the great powers were mounting. The late imperialist wave had done little to relieve the pressure. In spite of the protective tariffs, the industrial imperialist nations continued to trade predominantly with each other. With the exception of India, the colonies did not provide a significant market for them. The compulsory scale-enhancement of capitalism could no longer be supported by the imperialist conquest of the rest of the world. This changed capitalist imperialism form outward-directed to inward directed.
7. World War One
The bigger the canons, the more canon-fodder is consumed. The growth of capitalism’s productiveness went hand in hand with the growth of its destructiveness The wars between France (first the revolutionary republic, then Napoleon) and other European nations between 1792 and 1815 took more than 3 million lives. In the American “civil” war in the 1860’s more than 600 000 soldiers perished. In the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-1871 almost 200 000 died and in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905 more than 170 000. Yet horrible as they were, these wars, as well as the imperialist wars in Asia, America and Africa generally served the purpose of building modern nations and fostering capitalism’s expansion. World War one did not.
In World War 1 capital did not violently expand, it devoured itself. For the first time, all developed capitalist countries engaged in a common cannibalistic destruction of capital on a massive, global scale. It cost the lives of 10 million soldiers and 13 million civilians, including victims of massacres like the Armenian genocide, famine and epidemics like the 1918 flu which the war brought along (all these and elsewhere mentioned casualty figures are approximate of course, no-one knows for sure).
World war one opened the most murderous era so far recorded in history. Far more humans died in war in the 20th century ( approx. 231 million) than in all the preceding history (approx. 170 million) . The massacres and cruelty that once were the exception, at least in the wars between European states, now became the rule. “Clausewitz, writing after the Napoleonic wars, took it for granted that the armed forces of civilized states did not put their prisoners of war to death or devastate countries”vi but in the first world war such practices, previously reserved for subduing “inferior” races in non-capitalist regions, became “normal”. As Hobsbawn writes, “the limitless sacrifices which governments imposed on their own men as they drove them into the holocaust of Verdun and Ypres set a sinister precedent, if only for imposing even more unlimited massacres on the enemy”.vii
Ypres, 1917
Like previously in the wars against indigenous people, the distinction between combatants and non-combatants was shattered. In the preceding 19th century wars ( the Crimean war, the American ‘civil’ war, the Franco-Prussian war, the Russo-Japanese war) only 5 to 10 % of the deaths were civilians. In World War One 56 % of the deaths were civilians. And it would only get worse from there on: in World War Two the figure rose to 63 % and in subsequent wars it climbed still higher.
Commercial competition had become military competition, inter-imperialist war over the markets and resources of Europe. All inter-imperialist wars are aimed at overwhelming the enemy by destroying all his resources: weapons, soldiers, arms factories, their workers, the entire civilian population. Always, the goal is to maximize one’s share of the redistribution of power and capital that war brings. Always, the population, first and foremost the working class, is the victim.
The entire economy of society was mobilized for war. Human slaughter was carried out with the latest science and technology. The warring powers set up special agencies to monitor scientific research in all fields and to stimulate research for their war needs. Weapons became increasingly complex. Their production required ever greater scientific and industrial means.
Of the three largest economies of the world, Germany had the strongest incentive. Britain had its empire, the US had its large, unified domestic market which allowed its capitalists to scale faster and more efficiently than the Europeans. German capital felt boxed in, deprived of the markets it needed, it accused its competitors of “einkreisung” (encirclement) and demanded “Lebensraum!” (living space). That became the battle cry for frenzied propaganda, mirrored by similar nationalist indoctrination in the other countries, all accompanied by a demonization of the enemy, which would facilitate the barbarization of the conflict. World War One was the first major war waged under conditions of democratic politics. Nationalism and Democracy allowed capital to mobilize the population effectively. Obviously, the capitalist class couldn’t wage war at this scale without the assent of the workers who produced the weapons and fought and died on the battlefields. So-called working class organizations made the war possible. By rallying the working class behind the battle flags, the majority of the parties and trade-unions of the Second International proved that they were really organs of their respective capitalist states.
Lebensraum was the geopolitical goal of the German attack. In 1914 the government adopted a program of territorial expansion and ethnic cleansing (the “Septemberprogramm”) as the official “Kriegsziel” (war goal). It mainly aimed to remove Slavic and Jewish populations from the borderlands and repopulate those areas with German colonists. But Germany lost the war and the September plan remained unrealized. The plan was overtly racist but that was far from unusual. In the US, for instance, the Jim Crow terror ruled the South at that time, the president (Wilson) was a member of the Ku Klux Klan and the previous president (Ted Roosevelt) an admirer of the racist pseudo-science eugenics. Crude racism fitted the moment.
So while it might not be apparent at first sight, there was a clear connection between World War One and the economic crisis of capitalism in its three manifestations: a declining rate of profit, market saturation and financial over-accumulation. These convinced the ruling class of the necessity of war. But apart from necessity, we must also consider the possibility created by real domination: the possibility to apply mass production technology to military production, the possibility to make use of a vast supply of recruits, already subjectivated for their role by the collective discipline of factory-work, and to use the dense railroad network for rapid troop movements, all of this allowed capitalism’s generals to dream of waging war like it had never been waged before. And of course, there were the memories of previous wars, going back quite a while, and the still fresh lust for revenge they left behind; and also the hubris, the sheer stupidity…
8. The interbellum
But how effective was World War I in restoring the conditions for value accumulation? Did it reduce the burden of non-valorizing capital enough? The recovery was limited and short-lived. The reconstruction did not provide a huge demand like after World War II. “Compared with the war of 1939-1945 the first World War caused little material damage and not one large European city was destroyed or even seriously damaged”.viii Superfluous variable capital (workers ) was massively destroyed (one third of the men born between 1892 en 1895 in Britain, France and Germany was killed in the war, and it was worse in Russia) but this did not result in a cheaper and meeker workforce for capital. Widespread proletarian anger, revolts and revolutions challenged capitalist rule as never before. However, in regard to diminishing the claims of existing financial capital on new surplus value, the effect of the war was significant. World War I and its preparation required a sharp increase of state-capitalism. This entailed, among other things, raising taxation to unprecedented levels to finance the war expenses. In this way a large portion of the unproductive wealth of the owners of capital (which in the preceding period, known as “the Gilded Age” or “La Belle Epoque” had risen very high compared to GDP) was channeled to armaments and consequently destroyed. The graph below illustrates this clearly. It shows the market value of private capital of France (circles) Britain (squares) and Germany (triangles) in this period, compared to national income. Obviously the latter hasn’t increased, so the sharp decline of the ratio is entirely due to the elimination of (unproductive) capital.ix However, parasitic forms of capital also increased at the expense of productive, value-creating capital, in the form of war debts and especially the crushing reparation costs imposed on Germany and Austria, which impeded growth and caused hyper-inflation (the Mark dropped from 4,2 to the dollar in 1914 to 4,2 trillion to the dollar in 1923).
Another obstacle to growth was political: protectionist tariffs were kept in place and even increased, thwarting the enlargement of the market which industries needed to be profitable. So growth was slow: global GDP rose from $2.3 trillion billion in 1913 to $2.7 trillion by 1928 (in 2025 USD). The main winner of the war, the US, did best. Growth accelerated in “the Roaring Twenties”. The backlog of technological innovation was unleashed and made its way through the economy. Productivity increased in the US with 43% from 1919 to 1929. Fordist assembly-line mass production spread from the car industry to other sectors and from the US to Europe and Japan. But it didn’t last long. The rise of the organic composition of capital (the ratio technology/living labor) made the general rate of profit decline. Overcapacity reappeared. Growth in Europe stalled. A flight of capital, away from productive investment towards the financial assets of the strongest country, accelerated. The stock market in the US doubled in value in 1928-29. With the real economy pulling in one way and the financial market in another, the bubble burst. With the krach of 1929 the “Great Depression” began, and it lasted until the war broke out.
This time the causal link between global crisis and world war the was more apparent. World war pulled the capitalist world economy out of the crisis by continuing the devalorization of capital which the Great Depression set in motion. Some claim it wasn’t the war but the New Deal policy of US president FDR (Roosevelt) that ended the crisis. That this view is espoused by reformists who want to cure capitalism with state-capitalist measures should not surprise us, but it can also be heard in the left communist milieu.x However, the historical evidence does not bear it out. It is not that the policy did have no impact at all on growth and employment but that impact was quite modest. In essence, it served war preparation. FDR’s New Deal started in 1933. America’s industrial production, which fell in the 1930’s by nearly 47 % returned to its predepression numbers only by 1942. Unemployment, at 24.9 % in 1933, was still as high as 17.2 % in 1939 and was only wiped out by America’s entrance into the world war itself. The greatest impact of the New Deal, and its plethora of programs, was to blunt the spreading radicalism of the working class, for whom mere existence had become increasingly desperate. Perhaps its most important part was the Wagner Act, which opened the legal way to mass industrial unionism, thus providing a means to control working class resistance, and channel its outbreaks into a network of institutions where it could be contained. The vaunted economic “recovery” for which the capitalist left celebrates the New Deal was due to war production and inter-imperialist war itself, a war that the US was prepared to fight not just because of its capacity to produce the necessary armaments but because the New Deal had created the institutions through which the danger of class struggle had been neutralized. So the real fruit of the New Deal was war.
The same must be said about the policies of the Popular Front in France, a coalition of social-democrats and stalinists which won the elections in 1936, following a massive strike wave. The target of the Popular Front, beyond ending the strike wave, which it promptly did, was an assault on the power of the “200 families” that controlled the Bank of France, and thereby gain control of the money supply, and the nationalization of the armaments industry, all in function of war preparation.
Many of the economic and social programs of both the New Deal and the Popular Front bear a startling resemblance to programs initiated by Hitler and his Nazi regime, confronting the same global crisis: deficit spending, state control or even nationalization of banking and industry, protectionism, the creation of unions to manage the working class, and massive investments in war production, which diminished unemployment and the threat it represented, and which was an imperative for capital as its “solution” to the crisis – imperialist world war – became clear.
When he came to power in 1933, Hitler declared: “the State should retain supervision and each property owner should consider himself appointed by the state”. The expansion of state capitalism went even further than in other Western countries but it went hand in hand with a tight collaboration with the country’s largest companies and a forced concentration of capital. One of the Nazi Party’s first steps was to eliminate small corporations and forbidding the establishment of new ones. Large public works programs, such as the construction of the Autobahnen, stimulated the economy and reduced unemployment more effectively than the New Deal did, but also created a gigantic deficit problem to which imperialist war was the intended solution.
In Stalin’s USSR preparation for the war started early. Military spending increasing tenfold between 1927 and 1932. By 1939 the USSR was one of the world’s top producers of military hardware, rivaling Nazi Germany. The massive war effort was accompanied by massive propaganda promoting militarism, patriotism, and the personality-cult of Stalin. Dissent was crushed through terror, purges, show trials and labor camps.
Japan, whose economy also suffered badly at the onset of the Great Depression, seized Manchuria in 1931 to secure raw materials like coal and iron and ramped up domestic production of strategic goods to achieve self-sufficiency. By 1937 Japan had shifted to a complete war-oriented command economy, with centralized planning, civilian firms converted into arms producers and state control over prices, wages, and credit. Japanese society in the 1930’s was flooded with militarist ideology and a cult of obedience, sacrifice, and the superiority of Japanese people over other “races”.
Thus, in different countries we can see common features in the decade preceding world war II, such as:
– deep economic crisis, expansion of state-capitalism;
– increasing inter-imperialist rivalry, increasing military spending;
– growing number of military invasions (1931: Japan > Manchuria, 1935: Italy > Abyssinia, 1938: Germany > Czechoslovakia ) as preludes to total war;
– increasing tariffs, a striving for self-sufficiency in industrial production;
– populist nationalist propaganda and a dehumanization of people of other nations or races;
– authoritarian rule and great leader idolatry (Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, FDR, the ‘divine’ emperor Hirohito)
Similarities with the period before World War One and with our current time are not coincidental.
9. World War Two
Once again, necessity (lack of profit, lack of markets) turned commercial battles into military ones. Once again, possibility (the prodigious productivity growth under capital’s real domination) turned these battles into unprecedented apocalyptic self-destruction.
Imperialist conquest was once again the goal of the war. Victory, once again, was not decided by who had the best generals or the most courageous soldiers, but by who could invest the most constant capital in the production of military hardware and who could invest the most variable capital (soldiers) to produce weapons and to fight and die for their capitalist rulers.
The US was the main winner of World War Two because it had the greatest industrial capacity, located far from the battlefields. And while this capacity had been paralyzed by the depression, the war unleashed it. Growth resumed because a basic rule of capitalism was temporarily suspended: needs, not profit decided what was produced and what not. Only it was not human needs but the needs of the capitalist war machine. in 1940 private sector investment was still below the level of 1929. So the state took over capital investment (M -C), diverting resources (value) to the production of arms and other needs of the war economy, closely controlling the operation of private industry. The massive war spending more than doubled the economic output, ending the Great Depression.
The other main winner of World War Two was the Russian empire, then named Soviet Union, although by then the soviets (workers councils) were long dead. It won thanks to its vast surface, the over-extension of the German army and the great number of cannon fodder at its disposition. But the working class paid a terrible price for the victory of its rulers: the country suffered an estimated 22 to 27 million deaths, of which 16 to 17.4 million civilians.
So ‘winning’ is a relative concept in war. The working class of all countries lost. But in terms of imperialist gains, both the US and the USSR won big in World War Two.
10. The need for destruction
What the story of the Great Depression and the second world war showed was that, once capitalism is in the depth of a long depression, there must be deep destruction of much that capitalism had accumulated in previous decades before a new era of expansion becomes possible. There is no policy that can avoid that. That doesn’t mean that this destruction is the purpose of the warring parties but in the second world war in many instances it was. There was vast destruction that served no military purpose, such as the extensive bombing of large cities which had no strategic importance or the demolition of non-military industry. Clearly, in regard to diminishing the global stock of constant capital and creating a market for reconstruction, world war 2 was way more effective than world war 1.
It was even more effective in killing off ‘superfluous’ population. Estimates of the number of people who died in this war range from 66 to 85 million. That includes 21 to 25 million military deaths and 45 to 60 million civilian deaths. The incidents of mass murder during this war are far too numerous to recount. In some cases the killing does not seem to have been the purpose, it just happened because of the indifference of capital for human life, because people are just numbers, dispensable when they can’t be profitably exploited. An example of this is the Bengal famine of 1943 in India, in which more than 3 million people starved to death because policies of the government of Winston Churchill aimed at impoverishing the population and seizing its rice. xi Another example is the Henan famine of 1942–1943 in China, in which at least 2 million died. The main cause was grain requisitioning by the Japanese army, leaving civilians with little to eat.
The Auschwitz Death Factory
But in other cases, killing as many civilians as possible was the deliberate aim. The one that stands out among many other horrors is the Jewish holocaust. It stands out not only because of the number of people that were killed – six million Jews plus many of other targeted minorities such as the Roma – but also because of the industrial methods employed. The system of extermination functioned like a factory, whose product was death. Jews were its raw material. The whole undertaking – building the infrastructure, rounding up of Jews in several countries, transporting them, etc – was expensive and took away considerable resources from the war effort. It seems completely irrational. And it was, of course, but there was a logic to it. The logic of capital. The immanent tendencies of the capitalist mode of production, which propel it towards a catastrophic economic crisis, also drive it towards genocide.
There were two complementary ‘logical’ paths leading to Holocaust.
The frenetic growth of the productive forces under capital’s real domination means always more production with relatively less workers and therefore, when no more expansion is possible, the ejection of ever more workers from the production process. As the Great Depression made painfully clear, this creates over time a population which, from the point of view of capital, is superfluous. No surplus value can be squeezed from it, to the contrary, it has become a burden for capital, a dead weight that it must bear, at the expense of its profitability. The existence of such a surplus population can create the conditions for mass murder, inserting the extermination of whole groups of people into the very `logic’ of capital.
“Lebensraum” was once again the battle cry of German capital. The very concept of needing “more room to live” implies that someone else must make room for you. This someone else must then be subjectified in racist terms as surplus population. The Nazi Generalplan Ost (‘Master Plan for the East’) stipulated that that most of the population of Central and Eastern Europe would have to be removed permanently, through starvation, `resettlement’ beyond the Urals or mass executions. The idea was not new but the Generalplan was not cooked up by some crazy Nazi, it was designed by technocrats and academics in the German state’s think tanks and bureaucratic offices. Its framework was the German capital’s goal of challenging Anglo-American domination of the world market through the creation of a vast economic space (Grossraumwirtschaft) in continental Europe under a greater Germany’s hegemony.
The planned new borders for the Reich
According to the plan, this German dominated Europe needed to be self-sufficient in food production in order to withstand a naval blockade like the one in world war one and that required an agricultural modernization entailing an “adjustment” of the ratio between “productive” and “unproductive” population groups. The planners wanted to remove the economic backwardness of the lands to the east of Germany which they saw as overpopulated by Slavic “untermenschen” with small landholdings and a very low productivity. For the sake of economic progress, those had to go, like the racially inferior indigenous Americans has been removed for the sake of the USA’s progress. The extermination of the Jews was the first step of this demographic project that proposed not only one “final solution” but serial genocides, planned in detail to be carried out over several decades. xii
But besides this ‘rational’ plan for capitalist expansion, there was another capitalist ‘logic’ leading to Auschwitz.
The more capital’s real domination penetrates the whole of society, the more it destroys any remnants of pre-capitalist and working class-based community life. Those who have been uprooted – geographically, economically, politically, and culturally – are left with a powerful longing for their lost communities. The more frustrating, unsatisfying, and insecure the world shaped by capital has become, the stronger this feeling, which under certain conditions, such as those in Germany in the interbellum, can be captured by the state.
“The Nazi vision of a racially pure community, a Volksgemeinschaft, was directly linked to the effects of capitalism’s destruction of all genuine communal bonds, and to the void that it left in its wake.”xiii
What Hitler’s party succeeded in doing, not in the least because of the crushing defeat of the working class revolution in Germany in the early 1920’s, was to create a false community, a “mass” that brought individuals together, not on the base of common class interests, but on the base of speaking the same language, having the same ethnic, cultural-historical background. Their unity had no rational base, it was based on emotions and identification with the great leader.
“The formation of the mass both provides a substitute gratification for the genuine longing for community felt by the multitude of the population, and a basis upon which the ruling class can establish its hegemony. […] However, the basis upon which such a mass is constituted, the identity upon which the pure community is established, necessarily entails the exclusion of those who do not share the common historico-cultural bases of the mass. Those excluded, the Other, racial, ethnic, or religious minorities, though they inhabit the same territorial space, become alien elements within the putatively `homogeneous’ world of the pure community.”
The Other, in this case the Jews within the German Volksgemeinschaft, then becomes the scapegoat for all the real pain and frustrations of the mass. The more crisis ridden a society becomes, the more urgently the ruling class needs to channel the anger it causes onto the scapegoat. The greater the rage of the mass against the scapegoat, the more the ruling class can use this rage to mobilize the mass behind its projects, especially war.
“That rage against alterity can become a basis for a genocidal project directed at the Other, whose very existence is seen and felt to be a mortal danger to the pure community. One outcome of that rage against alterity can be seen in the orgiastic bloodletting that characterized so much of the killing during the Holocaust.”
So those two approaches to “solving” the capitalist problem of surplus population, an imperialist one and one aimed at controlling and mobilizing its own population, merged in the ideology and policies of the Nazi state:
“The ‘cold’, rational, organization of the factories of death and the transport networks that served them, administered by desk killers like Adolf Eichmann, must be linked to the `hot’ rage and uncontrolled lust and aggression witnessed by Landau, in order to have a comprehensive picture of the unfolding of the Nazi genocide. The source of both these facets of the Holocaust (…) is to be found in the trajectory of late capitalism”.
11. The capitalists learned something
In regard to destroying excess financial capital that claimed new surplus value from the productive forces, world war two was a success. The treasuries of almost all countries of continental Europe were completely wiped out. All German Mark-denominated assets had lost 90% of their value. Even in the US, where the war destroyed nothing and the huge demand generated by the war had tripled industrial production, the fact that non-agricultural fixed capital in 1947 was valued as just barely exceeding that of 1929 (54,9 to 53,6 billion in constant 1947 dollars) testifies to the devalorization that had taken place. Even more than in World War One, with high taxes the state took capital from the rich and used it (not intentionally but de facto) for the destruction of value.
After World War One the industrial recovery had been hampered by heavy reparation obligations imposed on the losers of the war. That mistake was not repeated after World War Two. A short recession because of slumping demand after the war ended reminded Washington of the need of American industry – now producing almost half of the world’s industrial goods – for a global market. With its Marshall Plan (1948–1952) the US invested $13 billion (over $140 billion in today’s USD) to rebuild Western Europe. Germany received 11% of it. Billions more went to Japan and other Asian countries. Britain still had to repay its war debt to the US and Canada (34,5 billion in today’s USD) but it was the largest recipient of Marshall Plan money (40 billion in today’s USD). Japan and Germany were prohibited to rearm substantially which helped them to grow their economy faster than others. Another fast grower was South-Korea which received massive American investment after the Korean war, in part motivated by the Cold War goal of making it a showcase that contrasted favorably to ‘communist’ North Korea.
Still more important than the Marshall plan were the Bretton Woods Accords, concluded by the US and 43 allied countries even before the war had ended. It created a vast global market with the US dollar (to which all other currencies were ‘pegged’ at a fixed exchange rate) as the common exchange and treasury currency. This prevented a return to the trade and currency wars of the past and allowed for a quick pace of reconstruction, the integration of backed up technological innovation into the civilian economy, and a vast expansion of the scale of production within the US-dominated bloc.
The managers of capital showed they had learned something. They moved away from protectionism, they absorbed the ideas of Keynes and became smart in using fiscal and monetary policies that were previously reserved for wartime or not used at all. The state obviously did not play the same role as during the war but it did not retreat from the economy either. Governments kept an expanded role in economic planning. International trade grew fast. The world economy enjoyed three decades of above average growth.
12. The hot Cold War
And yet, capitalists learned nothing. The horrors of the World War Two did not pause them for a minute. The scale-enhancement of the economy after the war sharpened the contradiction between the competitive relation between nations and their need for global markets and resources.
The winners of the inter-imperialist war divided the European spoils in Yalta in 1945 but beyond Europe the borders between their spheres of influence remained fluid. So it didn’t take long after the end of the war for new wars to break out between the two main imperialist powers. However the US and the USSR did not fight each other directly but only through proxies. Decolonization increased the opportunities. Their intense rivalry was called “the Cold War” but it wasn’t cold at all. Estimates of the number of people who died in wars and because of consequences of wars (famines, displacement, genocide…) in the Cold War period (1946-1991) range from 25 to 45 million. Again, a large majority of those victims were civilians. The United Nations Organization, founded at the end of WW II to ‘maintain international peace and security’, failed at that and even participated in several conflicts, beginning with the bloody Korean war in 1950. Still, the UN’s Security Council in which the main imperialists have a veto, was an instrument to prevent unwanted escalation. All members of the Security Council kept a large army and a huge military industry, especially the USSR and the US, who were also the main arms exporters. In his farewell speech in 1961 US president Eisenhower famously warned about the dangerous influence of the “military-industrial complex” whose profits increase, the more conflicts there are. The influence of the military-industrial complex has only grown since then.
The continuing focus on military development is evident from the fact that many innovations in non-military production that impacted people’s daily life, such as computers, airliners, lasers, microwave ovens and the internet, had their origin in government-directed military research.
There were several reasons why the Cold War never became a hot war between the two superpowers but the main one probably was that they both developed the military capacity to destroy each other several times over without having the capacity to defend themselves against such doomsday weapons. “MAD” (short for: “Mutual Assured Destruction”) is how the American Strategic Command baptized the stalemate. Mad indeed. It began with the single most horrific terrorist act in human history: the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945 -never before were so many innocent people willfully killed in an instant – arguably was less aimed at finishing the war than at impressing Russia. It was the start of the nuclear arms race which did not stop when the MAD-stalemate was reached. While the destructive power of intercontinental interballistic missiles (ICBMs) raised the threshold of nuclear war improbably high, in the 1980’s the US deployed intermediate range nuclear missiles in Europe, and both sides developed (short range) tactical nuclear weapons as well. This lowered the nuclear threshold considerably and provoked massive but ineffectual protests in Europe. On top of that, the US increased its military spending steeply in the 1980’s and announced its intention to develop space-based weapons that could shoot down incoming ICBMs, which would – in theory – break the MAD-stalemate. The fact that Russia found it increasingly difficult to keep up with the pace in the arms race was one of the main reasons why in 1991 it threw in the towel and disbanded the ‘Soviet’ Union.
13. The return of the crisis
The steady post-war growth began to sputter in the mid 1960s and ended in a full blown crisis in the 1970s. The “golden years” were over. The three potential bottlenecks in the circuit of value (C- C’, C’ – M, and M – C ) reappeared.
C – C’: as a result of the steadily climbing organic composition of capital (the ratio constant capital / living labor) the rate of profit declined sharply. This trend was aggravated by the international wave of intense working class resistance against attempts to increase the rate of exploitation in the 1960s and 1970s. It was also worsened by the weight of the Cold War expenditures, including the war in Vietnam, and the (OPEC) oil price hikes.
Chart of the Rate of Profit of the G 20 countries (together 85% of the global GDP). Source: Penn World Tables/ Michael Roberts
C’ – M: the mass of profits did not compensate for the falling rate because the global demand did not keep pace with the productive capacity once Europe and Japan regained their competitive edge. Following Keynes’ recipe, the capitalist states increased spending to subsidize industry and consumer demand. But this was addressing the symptoms, not the cause of the crisis. The increase of money in circulation without a corresponding increase of value in circulation resulted in a growing loss of money’s buying power, a dangerous rise of inflation. Meanwhile, the economy continued to stagnate. This unexpected outcome required the coinage of a new word: “stagflation”. Hyper-inflation made money increasingly unable to represent value. The threat of a breakdown loomed.
M – C: The falling rate of profit and galloping inflation discouraged investment in production. Money sought shelter in the hoard. Investors shifted toward hard assets like gold and real estate to preserve value. The gold price rose with 2200 % in the 1970s.
In the early 1980s inflation was tamed with high interest rates. The resulting deep recession squeezed excess money out of circulation. Capitalism began to restructure industrial production to make it less vulnerable to workers struggles. Harsh austerity was imposed on the working class. Deficit spending was not ended but increased, in the US in particular. However, through tax cuts, social spending cuts, deregulation of financial markets and increased military spending, the state assured that capital was the direct beneficiary. This alleviated the downward pressure on the profit-rate and because the increased spending did not stimulate general demand, it did not fan inflation. Ever since, US deficit spending, and thus the US federal debt, has continued to increase at an ever faster pace:
The US could do this because of the legacy of the war and its aftermath: its dollar remained the world’s currency, used in international trade and hoarded by central banks and owners of capital everywhere, even though the Bretton Woods rule that anchored it – its convertibility in gold – had been dropped in 1971 to allow a faster expansion of the money supply. And the US could maintain this advantage because of its economic and military power. The latter is essential and periodically reinforced with a demonstration of superiority, the most recent one in the Middle East. Because of its unique position in the world’s financial system, the US could be for many countries ‘the market of the last resort’ on which they became dependent in an otherwise saturated world. Year after year, the US could increase its debt and run an enormous trade deficit without suffering damage to the position of its currency. From 1975 to 2024, the US accumulated over $20 trillion in trade deficits. Meanwhile, other countries increased their vested interest in the dollar: the more their own treasury consisted of dollar assets, the more it was in their interest not to do anything that would diminish the dollar’s market value.
Competition forced the different states to increase their spending in order to prop up the value of their own capital and, to discourage it from leaving the country. In the 1980’s the financial assets of the OECD (the most developed countries) grew twice as fast as their economies. In 1992 their “value” was twice that of their GNP, in 2000 three times, and so on it went.
The inevitable result was increasing income inequality, not as a the direct cause but as a result of capitalism’s crisis.
In the 1990s the so-called “third industrial revolution”, based on information technology (IT) picked up speed. As in previous ‘industrial revolutions’, this opened the door for high tech companies to reap fabulous profits based on monopolistic market positions. It further increased capital’s real domination, providing ways to intensify exploitation and integrating sectors like services into the circuit of capital. But the automation which it made possible evicted millions from the production process and, despite the success of the few, over time pulled down the average rate of profit because of the relative decline of living labor in production, the only source of surplus value.
IT and the cheapening of communication and transportation it entailed, also gave an enormous boost to ‘globalization’, the massive investment of capital from the West to South-East Asia and Eastern Europe, to combine modern constant capital with cheap wages. This countered the tendential fall of the rate of profit and reduced the cost of imports for the developed countries, thereby limiting inflation. But as more and more of the ’Fordist’ industry moved to Asia, the industrial base of the US, and to a lesser degree also of European countries, hollowed out. And while the industry that was moved from West to East in the 1990s and early 2000s was still of the basic fordist assembly line manufacturing type (textiles, auto parts etc), later on, high tech industry followed the same path, peaking in the 2010’s.
China was the main beneficiary of Western investment, because of its huge potential market, but also because its Stalinist rulers proved to be highly adept at managing capital and exploiting workers. Apple alone invested between 2003 and 2015 over $100 billion in China and between 2016 and 2021 a staggering $275 billion, which is more than double the inflation-adjusted cost of the Marshall Plan. Thanks to these and many other investments China succeeded in becoming the world’s number one in industrial production.
While ‘globalization’ was a trend which integrated many millions in the global circuit of capital, at the same time it also destroyed many less efficient industries around the world, especially in the so-called ‘global south’ , thereby excluding many millions from the global production chain, making them superfluous for capital. Hence a swelling stream of migrants flowed from South to North.
But this build-up of productive capacity in Asia once again clogged the three bottlenecks in the value accumulation circuit, resulting in saturated markets, a falling general rate of profit and a flight into financial assets, the latter leading to the formation of bubbles of fictitious capital doomed to explode. There had been local crises: in 1990 Japan’s stock market lost half its value; real estate went down by more than two thirds. Overnight, assets turned into liabilities and Japan’s mighty banks were suddenly awash in a sea of red ink. In 1997, this happened to the Southeast-Asian “tiger’ economies. But in 2008, the same threatened to occur globally, starting in the heart of the system, the US. A great panic ensued, a domino effect of collapses, not only of banks and companies but also of countries was feared, and the only way to avoid it was for the central banks to create money like crazy.
Together, the central banks of the US, the EU, Japan and China created close to $100 trillion in new money between 2008 and 2022. One of their methods was “Quantitative Easing” which basically meant forking money over to companies and banks to prevent them from going bankrupt. There was no alternative. The pyramid scheme must continue or collapse. New money has to be fed into it, to prop up the value of the old. Fictitious capital must be created to maintain the belief that the value of all that capital is no fiction.
It hasn’t stopped since. Global debt has accrued with $210 trillion since 2008, an increase of 216%, and stood at $323 trillion in 2024, or 340% of the world’s GDP. If this continues, interest payments and military spending will eventually consume the entire budgets of all countries! The federal debt of the US alone is expanding with one trillion USD every 6, 5 months. xiv So far, a global depression has been avoided, but the conditions leading up to it are worse every year. And each year, worse catastrophies caused by climate change, which capitalism keeps turbocharging because of its compulsion to grow and its addiction to fossil fuel, are adding to the pressure. To avoid the pain of economic depression, capitalism is exacerbating the underlying need for massive destruction and increasing the incentives for imperialism.
14. Capital beats the war drums again
In the period since the end of the Cold War (1991-2025) global yearly military expenditures have increased with $1.6 trillion or 133 % , from $1.2 trillion to $2.8 billion. But this figure is likely an undercount, as it seems that not all expenditures are accurately reported.
Following the end of the Cold War, global military spending declined in the 1990s. In Russia most of all but elsewhere too. Many hoped that we were heading for disarmament, that capitalism did not carry militarism and wars in its belly. The illusions were short-lived. The arms race between the US and Russia and their rivalry was on a pause, America was the only superpower left, but the collapse of the relative ‘order’ of the Cold War period lead to new inter-imperialist conflicts in the guise of ‘civil wars’, such as in ex-Yugoslavia and in Rwanda, both leading to atrocious genocidal slaughter.
Globalization widened the interests of capital around the globe and also created, in the peripheral countries, huge numbers of young unemployed people deprived by capitalism of a future. ‘Islamist’ capitalist organizations aspiring state power found it easy to recruit cannon fodder from their ranks, to challenge the hegemonic power of the US with asymmetric warfare. To their terrorist attacks the US responded with its ‘War on Terror’, on which it spent, from 2001 to 2025, more than $10.3 trillion (most of it paid with debt). This comprised not only counter terrorist operations in more than 80 countries but also wars (Iraq, Afghanistan) aimed at strengthening its military dominance, especially over the Middle East. For those wars, the terrorist danger was merely a pretext. The same is true for much what was done within the US to increase the control of the state over its citizens and expand its repressive powers, all in the name of ‘Homeland Security’.
In Russia, after a chaotic period in which the ruling class privatized and recomposed itself, which was accompanied by massive corruption and the impoverishment of the working class, the state, under Putin’s leadership, began to reassert itself and rebuild Russia’s military might. Meanwhile Western capital had already achieved a deep penetration of territories that were previously a part of the USSR. Lacking the power to control the financial circuits of capital, Russia could only respond by asserting the control of land, of territory. Given the weakness of Russian capital, the exercise of that control could neither be economic nor indirect; it had to be military and brutal. To prevent the further disaggregation of its territorial space, to keep control of the Caucasus and its oil and gas wealth, Russia unleashed a ferocious war and ethnic cleansing in Chechnya, Ingushetia, and Dagestan (1999-2000). The horrors of war were supported by a vicious xenophobic propaganda campaign. The designation of the racial “Other,” in the form of Chechens or Muslims, as a danger to holy mother Russia; the identification of Chechens with terrorism and the hunt for Caucasians in Russian cities orchestrated by the Kremlin, created an atmosphere of fear and hatred among masses of Russians, which helped Putin to consolidate power and laid a basis for further war efforts in Georgia (2008) and Ukraine (2014 and 2022-today).
The Ukraine war drags on, despite massive losses on both sides. The war effort weighs heavily on the Russian economy which would be in recession were it not for the growth of the military industry. The war now consumes 30% of the state’s annual budget. At the very least it wants to annex the industrial Donbast. Its bleak economic prospect fans its imperialist appetite.
China’s military budget is the second largest in the world and the fastest rising. Yet it’s still small compared to that of the US.xv In terms of number of ships, its navy is larger than the American and its nuclear arsenal is expanding rapidly. It has one big advantage: its industrial capacity has grown larger than that of the US and that would be crucial in a protracted war. America’s industrial base has been seriously eroded. That could be the US’s Achilles heel in a war with China. War is a voracious consumer. It was thanks to its superior industrial power that the US won both world wars. China is trying to impose dominance in the strategically important South China sea, intimidating other nations. And it made clear that, one way or another, it wants to get Taiwan back. For China too, its economic situation incites imperialism. Awash in unsold commodities, its overproducing, deflating economy is in desperate need of larger markets. But China is not yet ready to confront America’s military might. For now, it is playing defense, while trying to catch up both in military and civilian high tech production. The US, meanwhile, is playing offense, trying to prohibit the entire world to sell advanced chips (especially those enabling AI) or chip making technology to China and imposing tariffs to diminish dependency on Chinese imports. In the somewhat longer term, China hopes to provide a viable alternative to the dollar as international currency, which potentially could undercut America’s financial power, and thus also its ability to impose its diktats on others.
The American military budget is more than three times larger than the Chinese and six times larger than that of Russia. When military expenditures of other departments (such as Energy which manages the nuclear arsenal, Homeland Security and others) are added to the Pentagon budget, the US’s annual military spending now exceeds $1 trillion. It possesses superiority in all types of weaponry and operates more than 800 military bases in other countries around the world. Furthermore, this year it has successfully obtained the commitment from its NATO partners to increase their military spending to 5% of their GNP, in large part by buying American military hardware, and it is pushing its Asian partners to make similar commitments or even more (Taiwan is asked to spend as high as 10% of its GNP on war preparation).
The more the crisis deepens, and is fanned by the effects of the accelerating climate-change, the more contender states have an incentive to challenge the dominant power, the US. The US strategy is to defeat contenders by isolating them, by building strong US-allied coalitions around them. Thus it has isolated Russia by integrating former republics of the USSR into its sphere, culminating in the fight over Ukraine, and it has concluded military agreements with almost all countries around China’s south coast, including Japan, South Korea,Vietnam, Taiwan, the Philippines, Australia and New Zealand (sometimes called ‘the Asian NATO). In the Middle East, it has brokered agreements between Israel and several Arab states (the ‘Abraham accords’) and then unleashed the Israeli army, not only to pursue its own imperialist goals, but also to break the back of several of America’s enemies in the region and to demonstrate to all, including Iran, the superiority of its destructive capacity. The fact that no other nation came to Iran’s help when it was bombed by Israel and the US shows that, so far, there isn’t yet a solid bloc opposing the US
hegemony. Washington has tightened its grip on the Middle East, which is since long a principal geopolitical objective of the US. Given the region’s fossil fuel reserves and China’s lack thereof, this would be a crucial asset in a war with China.
US capital’s focus on preparing for war against China is bipartisan. In July 2024 the Commission on the National Defense Strategy, an ‘independent body of experts’ created by Congress, released its report which reputedly reflects the thinking of Washington’s circles of power beyond their partisan differences. According to the report, “The threats the United States faces are the most serious and most challenging the nation has encountered since 1945 and include the potential for near-term major war. The United States last fought a global conflict during World War II [and] it is not prepared today.” Russia and China are the top threats, says the report, but it is mainly concerned about China’s combination of industrial strength and growing military power. One of its main recommendations is rebuilding industrial capacity: “The Commission finds that the U.S. defense industrial base (DIB) is unable to meet the equipment, technology, and munitions needs of the United States and its allies and partners. A protracted conflict, especially in multiple theaters, would require much greater capacity to produce, maintain, and replenish weapons and munitions.” According to the Trump government, restoring the American industrial basis is the goal of its tariff policy, especially of the high tariffs to protect basic industries like steel and aluminum.
Another emphasis of the Commission’s report is the need to prepare the population for global war, which requires a broad ‘”education” effort. “The U.S. public are largely unaware of the dangers the United States faces or the costs (financial and otherwise) required to adequately prepare [….] They have not internalized the costs of the United States losing its position as a world superpower. A bipartisan “call to arms” is urgently needed […] The support and resolve of the American public are indispensable […] we support calls for increased levels of public and civil service to help provide a renewed sense of engagement and patriotism among the American people”.
The same kind of “education” is happening in Europe. The French government directed all hospitals to prepare for war by March 2026. The European Commission recently issued new guidelines to its member states this year, in which it recommended different measures to raise the population’s awareness of the need to be prepared for war. All European citizens must stock up on emergency supplies to survive for at least 72 hours when war breaks out. The Commission plans to organize an annual ‘preparedness day’ in all member states. “Preparedness requires a complete change in the way citizens think”, the Commission stated. NATO secretary-general Rutte concurred: “We need a war mentality”. Similar “educational” efforts are taking place all over the world. Our rulers, the managers of Capital, want to change how we think, so that we will kill each other for their sake.
This brochure was sent by the Swedish government to all inhabitants of the country. We read: “In this brochure, you will learn how to prepare yourself and what to do if a crisis or war comes. You are part of Sweden’s preparedness.”(…) “An alert alarm means that there is war or an immediate threat of war. The entire total defense must be mobilized immediately and society must prepare for war.” (…) “From the year you turn 16 until the year you turn 70, you are liable for total defense and are obliged to contribute to total defense”. And so on…
15. Similarities and some differences between today and pre-global war periods in the past
– the capitalist world economy in dire straits, today arguably more than ever out of possible remedies;
– increased military spending everywhere, and, to pay for it, increased attacks on the social wage and increased public debt;
– a return to protectionist policies;
– increased nationalist and bellicist propaganda in many countries;
– personality-cult of “great leaders” (Trump, Putin, Modi et al);
– leaders of great powers openly claiming imperialist annexations (Russia>Ukraine, China>Taiwan, US>Panama Canal, Greenland, Canada);
– multiplication of new conflicts and unfreezing of old conflicts between states over borders (India-Pakistan, Armenia-Azerbaijan, Thailand-Cambodia, Sudan-South Sudan, Congo-Rwanda);
– ‘civil’ wars which are really wars between factions of the state, each supported by various foreign powers, over territory and resources (Ethiopia, Sudan, Syria, Yemen, Myanmar, Mali, Congo);
– total or partial collapse of the central state, armed gangs filling the vacuum (Haiti, Libya, Somalia, Lebanon, Colombia, Mexican cartels);
– wars aimed at ethnic cleansing (Nagorno-Karabakh) and genocide (Darfur, Gaza);
– scapegoating of minorities to unite the country in hate and to justify ethnic cleansing (Palestinians in Israel/Palestine, Rohingya in Myanmar, Haitians in the Dominican Republic, undocumented migrants in the US, Europe and elsewhere and many more;
– war moving from periphery to central areas of the capitalist world economy (Europe, Middle East);
– proliferation of nuclear weapons and the US, Russia and China ‘updating’ their nuclear arsenals;
– accelerated development of new weaponry by the great powers, advanced technology becoming ever more important on the battlefield (drones, hypersonic missiles, cyber warfare, satellites, AI).
GAZA 2025
16. Obstacles on the road to World War Three
1. Economic interdependence
It is clear that in today’s world the reproduction of the economy is globalized, so that an all-out war involving the big countries would not only be incredibly destructive but it would also crash their economies. It would be suicidal and therefore the ruling class has a strong incentive to prevent it.
That is what many thought as well at the eve of the first world war. One of the most popular books at that time was “The Great Illusion” in which Norman Angell proved that the war wouldn’t happen. “By impressive examples and incontrovertible argument Angell showed that in the present financial and economic interdependence of nations, the victor would suffer equally with the vanquished, therefore war had become unprofitable; therefore no nation would be so foolish as to start one. Already translated into eleven languages, The Great Illusion had become a cult.”xvi Karl Kautsky, then called “the pope of Marxism”, was of the same opinion. As was Viscount Esher, adviser of the British king, who argued that the inevitable catastrophic consequences of twentieth century war would be “so pregnant with restraining influences” as to make war unthinkable. Unfortunately, The Great Illusion turned out to be a great illusion.
However, it is true that the today’s world economy is much more globalized than it was back then. It is almost impossible to buy commodities that are not made with labor from different countries, even continents. For a sustained global war to become possible, trade patterns would have to change, to make essential production independent of imports from enemy countries. Taiwan provides a good example. It’s no secret that Beijing wants to annex the island, where almost 90 % of the world’s advanced microchips are made. Chinese control of Taiwan would change the whole power picture. But an invasion would mean war. China might win it, but it’s hard to imagine that the chip factories would remain intact. And it’s even harder to believe that Taiwan’s chip industry would continue to run and export during such a war. So great is the world’s dependency that the loss of Taiwanese chips would plunge the global economy into a deep depression. The temporary interruption of chip production in Taiwan during the COVID pandemic caused $200 billion in losses for the American auto industry. Nobody has any interest in Taiwanese chip production being halted, neither China nor the US. That is considered Taiwan’s “silicon shield”. But Washington still finds it necessary to add a sword to that shield. The South China sea is getting crowded with war vessels. The silicon shield could turn out to be another great illusion. xvii Trump’s tariffs on China are aimed at reducing the American dependence on Chinese imports but their initial high level provoked such a strong negative reaction from American businesses and stock markets that he was forced to lower them. Still, the direction of the policy hasn’t changed. Trade sanctions, now decoupling Russia and Europe and redirecting Russian trade towards India and China, also restructure global trade. But it seems clear that it will take years to bend the trade patterns in such a way as to make global war possible.
However, a total decoupling would not be necessary. Capitalist nations have shown in the past that they can trade with each other and fight each other at the same time. During World War One, Britain continued trading with Germany and other enemy states until as late as October 1, 1918—just weeks before the Armistice. During World War Two, neutral states like Switzerland, Sweden, and Spain acted as middlemen, allowing goods to flow between the Allied and Axis powers. U.S. companies like IBM, Ford, and Standard Oil had business ties with German subsidiaries that continued into the early war years.
2. The unequal balance of power
Despite claims to the contrary of American warmongers, at this moment the US possesses an overwhelming military advantage over its rivals, especially when the military capacity of its allies in Europe, Asia, and elsewhere, and the weakening of Russia as a result of its major losses in the Ukraine war, are taken into account. This too is an obstacle to global war, at least in the near future. But alliances can chance. Furthermore, there are many examples in history of wars started by the intrinsically weaker side. Often delusional overconfidence played a role, as well as the calculation that delivering the first strike (the South’s attack on Fort Sumter in the American civil war, Hitler’s Blitzkrieg, Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor) would yield a decisive advantage.
3. The nuclear threshold
Since WW2 it has been a striking feature of all wars in which major powers took part that they never used their most potent weapons. That is new in world history, because never before did countries run the risk that the use of their most destructive arsenal would lead to their own annihilation. The nuclear threat has indeed been a brake on war escalation. In the war over Ukraine, the US, and to a lesser extent its European allies, have given the Ukrainian army sophisticated weapons such as state of the art missiles guided by American satellites to moving targets. But they have not sent them long range missiles or other weapons that would give Ukraine the capacity to launch attacks deep into Russia. Putin could and did use nuclear blackmail. Russia announced in 2020 a new ‘Presidential Directive on Nuclear Deterrence’, lowering the nuclear threshold “to avoid the escalation of military actions and the termination of such actions on conditions that are unacceptable to Russia and its allies.” The language was deliberately vague to keep the enemy guessing. What are these “unacceptable conditions”? Zelensky and others said Putin was just bluffing and probably he was but there was no appetite to test him. It wasn’t in the interest of the US to escalate the war anyway. At the level that it was, it was meeting all the American objectives: significantly degrading Russia’s military power, making Europe buy American gas and weapons, etc. But can the nuclear arsenals deter the nations from escalating to global war when push comes to shove?
A conflict could escalate to global war without ever crossing the nuclear threshold. Scientific and technological research joked to capitalism relentlessly keeps increasing the destructive power of ‘conventional’ (non-nuclear) weapons and the speed at which they can reach their target and escape detection by defensive systems. Such weapons, like the new hypersonic missiles, or ‘hybrid’ weapons like ‘dirty bombs’ that combine conventional explosives with radioactive material, or chemical or biological weapons may lower the nuclear threshold, make it appear that an escalation to tactical nuclear weapons is not such a big step, especially in the eyes of the side that is losing. And so on, to the next step… To trust in the sanity and rationality of the ruling class to avoid such a course of events would be foolish.
4. The lack of social submission
This is the most important factor. Without the (enthusiastic or grudging) consent of the population, especially the working class, capitalism cannot wage war. The oxygen on which the war-machine depends is the exploitation of the proletariat, the extraction of surplus value. It would be paralyzed without it. War can’t be waged without exploitation and it cannot be stopped without ending exploitation. War constitutes the ultimate degree of capitalist exploitation: It’s no longer just labor which capital demands from the exploited, but their very life or that of their children.
How willing is today’s working class to give it? The Gallup opinion polling company asked the question: “If there were a war that involved [YOUR COUNTRY], would you be willing to fight for your country?” to fairly large sample groups in 64 countries at the end of 2014 and again in 45 countries at the end of 2023. xviii It’s true that opinion polls need to be taken with a grain of salt and one has to be careful not to conclude too much from them. Still, some of the results tell us something.
One positive conclusion is that the willingness to fight for one’s country (= for one’s ruling class) is diminishing – 64 % answered ‘yes’ in 2014, which sunk to 52 % in 2023 – despite all the patriotic propaganda in this period. The highest “yes” scores are in the ‘global south’, especially in the Middle East/ North Africa. The lowest are in the traditional developed countries, especially in Western Europe and Japan. The latter country scores the lowest: only 11 % in 2014 and 9 % in 2023 said yes. Could Hiroshima and Nagasaki have something to do with that? In the US, the yes score is 44 % in 2014 and 41 % in 2023. In China it is 71 % in 2014. Unfortunately that country wasn’t polled in 2023. In Russia, the yes score dropped from 59 % in 2014 to 32 %. Obviously, the direct experience of war had an impact. Russia also had the highest “Don’t know/No response” score in 2023 (48 %). That’s no surprise, given that expressing opposition to the war – or even just calling it ‘a war’ – is a criminal offense there. According to another Gallup poll, in Ukraine the willingness to fight dropped from 73% in 2022 to 24% in 2025.
Experience makes a difference – not only direct experience, but also the historical experience. In the case of the proletariat in Russia: the immense hope kindled by the October Revolution, which then was crushed and followed by the Stalinist nightmare, the death world of World War Two (no country suffered worse) and all these years of being ruled by the stifling one-party capitalist state pretending to be communist, then chaos and the restoration of ‘order’ by the corrupt Putin regime – all that cannot but leave traces on consciousness.
There are no opinion polls from 1914 or 1939 but from the historical evidence it appears that the willingness to fight for one’s country was much higher back then. What is lacking today is class consciousness: without the awareness of being part of a class with interests different from those of capital, we are just individuals longing for community, vulnerable to nationalist propaganda. In the years before the first world war, there seemed to be more class consciousness. Millions of workers were members of what were considered to be working class organizations, unions and political parties that belonged to the Second International. The International declared at its Stuttgart Congress (1907) that it was the duty of the working class to prevent war using all effective means, including mass strikes, and reaffirmed this at its Basel Congress (1912). But when the war broke out, they forgot all this, and almost all parties and unions supported the war at the side of their own bourgeoisie, sending millions of workers to their death. How come? The rapidly advancing real domination of capital was not limited to the production process, it infiltrated all aspects of society. The value form, the capital-labor relation, had penetrated all institutions, all large permanent social structures. The war revealed that these so-called working class organizations had been absorbed into the fabric of the capitalist state. Their diminished influence is not a step backwards for the working class, on the contrary.
In the interwar period, the international wave of proletarian revolutions and revolts that followed World War One was defeated everywhere, even where it had won. This weighted heavily on the consciousness of the working class and it weakened the class, made it more difficult to fight back effectively when confronted by mass unemployment and other misery during the Great Depression, which otherwise could have been the period of class war in which revolutionary proletarian consciousness was forged, blocking the path to war.
Today no such experience of historic defeats is weighting on the proletariat. But there are other obstacles on its path. To return to the example of Russia: it seems clear, and not just from the above mentioned poll, that Putin does not have the population behind him like for instance Hitler did before WW2. He’s not setting up patriotic spectacles, he’s not waging grand campaigns to engage all Russians in the glorious war. On the contrary, he tried to shield the civilian population from the war’s impact, sought to maintain an atmosphere in the large cities of central Russia as if there was no war at all. He made great efforts to avoid having to deploy the bulk of his army, instead sending mercenaries (Chechens and the Wagner brigade), prisoners (in exchange for freedom if they survive) and imported North Korean soldiers to the front. This doesn’t show great confidence. Putin can not escalate the war like Hitler could because of this lack of ideological control. Still, despite Russia’s heavy losses -so far a million casualties (deaths and seriously wounded) on a population of 144 million – he’s able to continue the war without mass protests, without interruptions in the military industry, without collective mass desertions. That is not reassuring. Many have deserted and many more have left the country to avoid the war. The same happened in Ukraine: many deserted, many fleed the country but none of that has prevented the war from dragging on. We see many individual acts of resistance but rarely they are congealing into collective, class based struggle. But there may be acts of collective resistance that we don’t know about. A recent one occurred on August first, in the Ukrainian city of Vinnytsia, where a riot erupted when demonstrators demanded the release of men arrested for refusing enlistment and forced open the gates of the stadium where those prisoners were being held. Other recent working class action against war happened in the ports of Genoa, Marseille and Athens when dockworkers refused to load weapons and steel on ships going to Israel. Even in the latter, heavily indoctrinated country, collective resistance against the war is rising.
Still, given the gravity of the situation, it is far from enough. Is individualism a hallmark of our times? Is the new information technology, which once looked so promising by eroding the material base of nationalist and other divisions, by providing handy means of communication for rioting and discussing, by encouraging exchanges without money transactions, is it now shackling everyone to his/her/their phone, atomizing and alienating us, enclosing us with algorithms into the echo chambers of phony communities, erasing all borders between facts and fantasy, now even more convincingly with AI, becoming portals into our brains for cynical demagogues and manipulative charlatans? Is it the triumph of capital’s real domination, its colonization of the human mind?
It may be premature to draw such conclusions. Today’s proletariat has not been tested yet, like it was before the world wars of the past. But the test is surely coming. It remains to be seen how strong these echo chambers will remain, how effectively all the patriotic propaganda will have changed us, when a global depression hits and the attacks on working class’s living standards necessarily becomes much broader. The ‘collective worker’ is still the only social force capable to prevent another total war and to end capitalism. Perhaps the shock of economic breakdown will wake it up, make us conscious of the fact that our collective self-preservation requires a refusal to obey, a break with Capital and its political representatives in all nations, Russia, America, China and Europe included.
Sanderr
August 2025
i See: Lawrence Keeley: War Before Civilization.
ii Mac Intosh: Theses on War
iii Marx; Grundrisse, p.340 (Penguin Ed.)
iv Marx: Capital, Volume 1, chapter 31, p.915 (Penguin ed.)
v Rondo Cameron, A Concise Economic History of the World, p. 275, Oxford University Press, 1993. Several other economic data in this text are also from this book.
vi Eric Hobsbawm: On History, The New Press, 1997, p. 255
vii Id., p,256
viii John Keegan: The first World War, Chapter 1, Random House 1998
ix Chart from: Thomas Piketty: Capital in the twenty- century, p.26 , Harvard University Press 2024. Piketty is a reformist and thus anti-revolutionary economist but his book, the most comprehensive study ever on income inequality, contains important material showing when unproductive capital rose or declined compared to productive investment.
x See: Controverses #8, 2024: Plaidoyer pour une analyse marxiste et non schématique des guerres: “le New Deal n’est pas la continuation de la crise mais la sortie de crise” (“The New Deal is not the continuation of the crisis but the way out of the crisis”.)
xi On the advice of John Manyard Keynes the British authorities induced inflation by massively printing the local currency. This raised the prices of foodstuffs steeply but not the wages. That was one of the main causes of the famine. Keynes reasoned, apparently correctly, that raising taxes on the population would lead to revolt while this sly method would not, because people would not understand the cause of the price increases.
xii An excellent account of the Generalplan Ost can be found in: Götz Aly and Susanne Heim: “Architects of Annihilation: Auschwitz and the Logic of Destruction”, Princeton University Press 2003 . Also: Mac Intosh: Marxism and the Holocaust, Internationalist Perspective 49, 2008
xiii This quote and the following ones in part 10 are from Mac Intosh: Marxism and the Holocaust, Internationalist Perspective 49, 2008
xiv Average based on the last three years
xv This is disputed. According to the (American) Commission on the National Defense Strategy “China’s overall annual spending on defense is estimated at as much as $711 billion” wich would be more than twice as much as the official figure.
xvi Barbara Tuchman, writing about the year 1910 in: The Guns of August, Ballantine Books 1994, p. 10
xvii More on this in Sanderr: Hot and Cold War https://internationalistperspective.org/hot-and-cold-war/
xviii Results can be found at: https://www.gallup.com.pk/bb_old_site/Polls/180315.pdf and https://www.gallup-international.com/survey-results-and-news/survey-result/fewer-people-are-willing-to-fight-for-their-country-compared-to-ten-years-ago
Addendum: War preparation in the USA: A Snapshot
There isn’t really a switch to a war economy, since, as everybody knows, it existed here already. Still, according to the report released last year by the Commission on the National Defense Strategy, an ‘independent body of experts’ created by Congress, the US, despite its mighty ‘military industrial complex’ and its gigantic ‘Defense’ budget, isn’t ready for total war against China and Russia. “The Commission finds that the U.S. defense industrial base is unable to meet the equipment, technology, and munitions needs of the United States and its allies. A protracted conflict, especially in multiple theaters, would require much greater capacity to produce, maintain, and replenish weapons and munitions.” According to the Trump government, restoring the American industrial basis is the goal of its tariff policy, especially of the high tariffs to protect basic industries like steel and aluminum.
Military production: In many ways Trump continued initiatives the Biden administration took for what it called ‘Defense Industrial Base Revitalization’ such as accelerating the weapons acquisition system and expanding areas such as shipbuilding (incl. nuclear submarines) and artillery production (monthly artillery shell output increased from 14,000 to 55,000, with a goal of 100,000 by 2026).
For the 10th year in a row, the “Defense” budget has increased. If we take into account the military spending of other departments (such as the Department of Energy, which manages the nuclear weapons, and Homeland Security) annual military spending now exceeds $1 trillion. To make room for it in the budget (as well as for tax cuts for the owners of capital) drastic social cuts have been imposed, mainly on Medicaid (resulting in 12 million people losing health coverage) and programs like food aid for the poor. The Trump administration also successfully pressured NATO-allies and Asian allies to increase their military expenditures, and thus to buy a lot more weapons from the American military industrial complex.
In April Trump issued an Executive Order titled “Modernizing Defense Acquisitions and Spurring Innovation in the Defense Industrial Base”. Among other things it creates greater involvement of Silicon Valley in weapon production, with a focus on AI, autonomous systems, drones and satellite-based warfare. This benefits tech companies like Palantir and SpaceX, but also traditional military firms like Lockheed Martin which received huge orders for the new F-35 fighter jet and space-based missile systems. The U.S. has also begun early production of the B61-13 nuclear gravity bomb, seven months ahead of schedule. This bomb, 24 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb, is designed for precision targeting and will be deployed on B-2 and B-21 stealth bombers. Long range nuclear missile production is still halted because of the second START treaty between the U.S. and Russia, but that will expire in February and many expect a new nuclear arms race after that. AI is being integrated into nuclear command, control, and communications systems to support rapid decision-making, increasing the risk of preemptive nuclear use. There is also an arms race going on in hypersonic missiles which are extremely fast (Mach 5+) and can evade traditional missile defenses. The US, China, and Russia are all aggressively developing these systems which blur the line between conventional and nuclear weapons.
Increased weapon use: According to a recent report by the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED), since Trump’s re-entry into office, the US has carried out 529 air attacks in 240 locations across the Middle East, Central Asia and Africa. That figure, which accounts for just the first five months of Trump’s second term, is already nearing the 555 attacks launched by the Biden administration over his whole term.
Saber rattling: In early August Trump ordered to move US nuclear submarines to a more offensive position, in reaction to a threatening tweet of Russia’s ex president Medvedev. And for the first time since 2008, the U.S. moved B61-12 bombs to a forward position in the UK.
In September, the name of the “Department of Defense” was changed into “Department of War”. At least that’s more honest.
Economic war: Biden declared a worldwide prohibition to sell to China advanced chips as well as the hardware to make them. Curiously, that has been somewhat softened by Trump. Both sanctions and tariffs were used with the aim of decoupling the economies of the West from Russia and China. But that’s not easy, especially not from China. Trump had to withdraw from steep tariffs under economic pressure (from 245% to 30% but they still may increase again and there is an additional 40% tariff on trans-shipments (goods China exports through another country like Mexico). Decoupling is bad for profits and would be an absolute necessity for a major war but it is very difficult.
Ideological preparation: the Commission on the National Defense Strategy stressed the need for a major propaganda effort to increase patriotism. The main initiative in this regard is the Trump campaign against undocumented immigrants. Economically, it makes no sense, US capital is losing money as a result. The purpose is to forge a national community through inflaming common hate of outsiders, whose Otherness “pollutes the blood of America” as Trump said.