Revolutionary Defeatism Against Rampant Militarism in Europe: The Enemy is at Home!

The attempt by American imperialism to both mire Russia in a brutal military clash in Ukraine and bend it economically with sanctions has clashed with the harsh reality of a war that Russia is winning on the ground. This has led to a prevailing conviction in Washington of the need to scale back military and financial commitments on the Ukrainian front, in order to shift focus—and resources—towards the Asian front against Chinese imperialism.

A potential agreement between the Americans and Russians is being obstructed—albeit with varying degrees—by the Europeans, who remain aligned with the earlier strategy dictated by the old Biden administration. That is, to continue the war until Russia’s defeat.

This strategy took root in Europe even if against the interests of European states themselves. That was the case for Germany in particular, which had seen its powerful industry thrive partly thanks to access to low-cost energy resources from Russia.

European bourgeois are now facing the prospect of an agreement with Moscow that, given Russia’s military dominance in Ukraine, would resemble an outright “surrender”. As such, the former—already economically defeated since they had to renounce the cheap Russian energy in favor of other, more expensive sources—have no other option but to press on with the war against Russia. The illusion they chase in an old one: militarily defeat Russia in order to plunder its wealth and invade the Eastern markets.

The First “Radiant Days”

In the current phase of the Russia-Ukraine war, after the Americans have started to pull out of the conflict, it has mainly been the Europeans pushing Ukrainians to die on the battlefield. Zelensky’s attitude reflects nothing more than the Europeans’ opposition to a deal with Russia.

Ukraine—which has thus far been used and allowed itself to be used in this war—now stands on the verge of being abandoned by the Americans, clinging desperately to the fragile hand extended by the Europeans.

The risk facing Kyiv and other European capitals is significant, given the real possibility of a collapse of Ukraine’s internal front.

This clearly illustrates that, in imperialist wars, the true enemy of any bourgeois state is not so much the army of the opposing country, but its own proletariat—just as in October 1917, during the height of World War I, when the war between states was turned into the class war that lead to the overthrow of bourgeois power.

The Ukrainian state apparatus is therefore forced to use brutal methods to subdue its own proletarians and drag them to the front. Likewise, European bourgeois find themselves fighting the internal battle against their own proletariat, asking for sacrifices to halt the “Russian aggression.”

It is no surprise then that in Europe, in support of the continuation of the war, we have already witnessed the first “radiant days,” with initial interventionist demonstrations such as the one in Rome on March 15th.

The bellicism of European states relies on the  mass of petty-bourgeois parasites sustained by the spoils of imperialist plunder. For them, “less Europe” simply means a reduced capacity for European imperialisms’ to loot the rest of the world and provide for their parasitic upkeep.

The warmongering stance of the ruling classes of various European countries thus finds its foot soldiers in these petty-bourgeois, parasitic strata, who increasingly sense the decline of their social standing. They express this through “Europeanism,” the pious wish for “more Europe,” for greater political unity among EU member states—advocating different versions of the same petty-bourgeois, reactionary ideology. Moved by the fear of falling into the ranks of the proletariat, they cling to their own imperialism, revealing their inherently reactionary nature.

As demonstrated by the participation of the CGIL (Italian General Confederation of Labour) in the March 15 demonstration, opportunism also adopts the reactionary Europeanist ideology, further confirming our classical positions on imperialism, masterfully outlined by Lenin:

“Imperialism, which means the partitioning of the world, and the exploitation of other countries besides China, which means high monopoly profits for a handful of very rich countries, makes it economically possible to bribe the upper strata of the proletariat, and thereby fosters, gives shape to, and strengthens opportunism.”

The Meaning of European Rearmament

Europeanist propaganda—with its nauseating debate on a “common defense”—and the anti-Marxist position of the self-proclaimed communists who blather about a supposed common European imperialism, are once again contradicted by the reality of the European rearmament issue. After all, such rearmament can only be the rearmament of individual nation-states.

The European rearmament project was announced by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen on March 4 and soon after accepted by the European Parliament.

This plan consists of five key points, the most important being the ability for EU member states to exclude defense spending from the deficit rules of the Stability and Growth Pact, up to 1.5% of GDP.

According to analysts, this exemption could result in €200-250 billion per year in defense investments, potentially reaching €650 billion over four years, plus €150 billion in EU funding. Military spending as a percentage of GDP would rise from the current 1.9% to 3% by 2028.

It is clear that this EU-conceived rearmament plan remains confined within the national borders of a politically divided Europe.

That is, the European states will rearm themselves, but each on its own.

Germany will lead the way, having immediately seized this as an opportunity to remove defense spending from the public deficit. Setting aside its much-vaunted fiscal austerity, it has outlined a rearmament plan that would allow the conversion of its crisis-hit industry to military production.

As early as March 18th, the German parliament approved a massive investment plan, including constitutional budget rule changes to facilitate rearmament and investment in defense and infrastructure.

Estimates suggest Germany could invest €1–1.5 trillion over the next decade.

This German rearmament marks the end of the post-World War II Europe as we have come to know it, as no other country could match Germany’s spending power.

A critical point must be clarified, against both Europeanist propaganda and the anti-Marxist positions of self-styled communists. The enemy the European proletariat will face—one that may wave the blue-starred EU flag today—will ultimately be the national bourgeoisies of each European country. While they may occasionally align due to coinciding interests, they may just as well turn on each other, as happened in the past century.

Nothing new for the Party, just a confirmation of our traditional assessments:

“Europe (and the world) will not truly be united until the proletarian revolution has overthrown the national states and established an international proletarian power.

Until then, all the reformist and megalomaniac propaganda for a United Europe will collide with the objective limitations and contradictions of the capitalist mode of production. The solemn signatures of ambassadors and ministers will not be enough to overcome them.”

(Il Programma Comunista, no. 11 and 12, 1962)

Limits of European Militarism

The European rearmament plans will inevitably not only concern weapons but also the need for soldiers to wield them—or more bluntly, cannon fodder to send to the front.

The war in Ukraine has dispelled all theories about future wars being hyper-technological and requiring minimal manpower.

From the frontlines in Ukraine comes the clear lesson: modern war needs mass armies.

This makes the European rearmament plans look like “paper tigers”—threatening due to the massive resources allocated to weapons spending but fragile due to the lack of large numbers of men to send into battle.

A case in point is the saga of the so-called “willing”. This is the group of European countries—led by Britain and France—that want to send troops to Ukraine but cannot. That is due to the hesitancy of the rest of the EU, the predictable internal opposition that would build up as coffins return from the front, and especially the  lack of preparedness to face Russia’s war machine.

European armies are small, often only tens of thousands strong, and there is no realistic prospect of significantly increasing those numbers.

Even analysts serving the bourgeoisie acknowledge the dire outlook of having to fight wars like Ukraine’s with insufficient personnel.

The threatening scenario for European imperialisms is worsened by purely demographic factors—Europe’s aging population and low birth rates—as well as moral factors, given the lack of ideological fervor to build an interventionist internal front capable of mobilizing masses of men.

Expedients seen in the Ukraine war—female conscription, recruiting prisoners and mercenaries—are unlikely to solve the issue  of mass army building.

Soon, the question will arise: who will be sent to die?

The bourgeoisie and its lackeys know what’s at stake.

On one hand, the risk of becoming entangled in protracted wars without sufficient manpower; on the other, the danger of internal social upheaval in the attempt to mobilize the required forces.

Lessons from the Ukraine War

As European bourgeoisies embark on massive arms spending —costs that will be shouldered by the proletariat, worsening its living conditions— we can already see the future in the fate reserved to the  Ukrainian and Russian workers sent to the slaughter in the imperialist war.

Reports from an anti-militarist group in Kharkiv noted that in late 2024, the Ukrainian army was heading toward total collapse.

This was exacerbated by the shift in U.S. policy toward halting military aid.

However, during winter, a crackdown on discipline brought the situation back under control.

The economic conditions, due to the lack of job opportunities for those who leave the army, also work against the disintegration of the Ukrainian army, forcing many of those who had left to return.

For now, the Ukrainian state manages to control the front through a combination of repression and economic pressure: on one hand, the death penalty for deserters, and on the other, hunger forcing fugitives to rejoin the army due to lack of employment.

The disobedience of entire military units in Ukraine is now a distant memory, from those early months of the war when numerous videos had circulated—recorded by those  very soldiers refusing to follow orders from military commanders. And there is currently no serious threat to the regime from discontented civilians.

However, episodes of opposition to the ongoing war are not lacking. These go beyond the pattern of individual rebellion and constitute an embryonic form of organized struggle.

For example, at the end of May, in the Khmelnytskyi region, the local population opposed forced conscription by attacking and surrounding the vehicle of the recruiters who had captured a man to send him to the front.

It was the very authorities in charge of recruitment in the region who issued an unusual statement regarding the incident:

“According to available information, the vehicle was damaged, and the actions of the citizens showed signs of organized resistance to the exercise of official functions by representatives of the Ukrainian Armed Forces.”

Therefore, although the Ukrainian army is in a grave situation, the state apparatus —through its organs of repression— has at least for the moment, prevented a collapse at the front. However, forcibly sending men to the front and detaining all those deemed unreliable could have far more negative repercussions than letting a few soldiers escape, potentially triggering military and civilian revolts.

Revolutionary Defeatism

From a class perspective the current situation seems to offer no concrete revolutionary way out. However, the Party of the proletariat is well aware—from the lessons learned in the fire of past class struggles—that the true limit of the current, predominant militarism lies within itself. That is the necessity of militarily organizing millions of proletarians for war aims. Yet, if organized and led by the Party, these same proletarians could turn their weapons against their own state.

Already in Anti-Dühring, Engels, analyzing the Franco-Prussian war, had impeccably formulated how militarism itself gives rise to the possibility of revolution:

“The army has become the main purpose of the state, and an end in itself; the peoples are there only to provide soldiers and feed them. Militarism dominates and is swallowing Europe. But this militarism also bears within itself the seed of its own destruction. Competition among the individual states forces them, on the one hand, to spend more money each year on the army and navy, artillery, etc., thus more and more hastening their financial collapse; and, on the other hand, to resort to universal compulsory military service more and more extensively, thus in the long run making the whole people familiar with the use of arms, and therefore enabling them at a given moment to make their will prevail against the warlords in command.  And this moment will arrive as soon as the mass of the people—town and country workers and peasants—will have a will.  At this point the armies of the princes become transformed into armies of the people; the machine refuses to work and militarism collapses by the dialectics of its own evolution. What the bourgeois democracy of 1848 could not accomplish, just because it was bourgeois and not proletarian, namely, to give the labouring masses a will whose content would be in accord with their class position—socialism will infallibly secure. And this will mean the bursting asunder from within of militarism and with it of all standing armies.”

We are not in the realm of the brilliant theories of our teachers here. This was the real experience of the proletariat in its struggle against the class enemy, as the events of the Franco-Prussian war—and the crushing of the Paris Commune—marked a historical lesson of fundamental importance. One that Lenin and his Party would doctrinally restore and put into practice in October.

In the fire of imperialist war, the call for defeatism was the action of all those currents in Europe that remained firmly anchored to Marxism. It found fertile ground in Russia, where desertion and organized rebellion against military commanders formed the base from which the revolutionary struggle erupted and led to the seizure of power.

While the rearmament plans of the European states define the present and future of the European proletariat, today just as in the last century, proletarians face the prospect of becoming cannon fodder in the war looming ever closer.

“The enemy is in our own country!” was the cry of the internationalists against the first world slaughter. As then, so now, that enemy is the bourgeoisie of one’s own country. Through the brutal state apparatus firmly in its hands, it keeps the proletariat subjugated, waiting to send millions of workers into the already much-foretold war.