The Growing Crisis of the Capitalist System  Pushes It Towards War

Covid-19, as we have repeatedly said, did not cause the economic crisis but aggravated it, exciting the tension between imperialisms. The crisis in world trade caused by the pandemic, the so-called breakdown of production chains with the shortage of some components essential to production, such as semiconductors, and of some raw materials such as rare earths, the contest for the production and distribution of vaccines, mutual accusations of responsibility for the spread of the virus, etc. they made evident the contrasts between the States and their weaknesses.

The approaching economic crisis will be more devastating than that of 2009 and will occur in this context of growing international tension. Hence the tendency of States to increase their commitment to rearmament, despite the budgetary problems deriving from the decline in the reproduction of capital.

This global tension was confirmed in June by the new US President Biden’s first trip abroad to participate in the G7 in Cornwall and subsequently at the 14th NATO summit. Biden’s goal was to announce that “the US is back” and to reunite the alliance with the major industrialized countries to oppose the threats coming above all from China and Russia. But things did not go according to his wishes.

Not even the subsequent G8 summit, attended by the United Kingdom, Italy, France, Germany, Japan, Canada, the United States and the European Union and, demonstrating the interest shifted to the Pacific, to which Australia, India, South Korea, South Africa and the sultanate of Brunei were invited, did not give the desired results, that is, the unanimity under the US umbrella that Washington set out to achieve. Despite the inexistence of a common EU foreign policy, it highlighted the differences between the US and the major European States.

Germany, on the strength of its economic ties with China, the primary destination for its exports, declared that “it is better to be in favor of something than against”, and even France did not seem willing to follow the US in this new cold war against China.

In response to the conclusions of the G7 China affirmed that the days are over when “a small group of countries could decide the destinies of the world”. In the meantime, with the unofficial approval of the government, a cartoon has circulated on digital channels, which imitates Leonardo da Vinci’s fresco “The Last Supper”, depicting different animals, each representing one of the world powers, intent on transforming toilet paper in dollars and sharing a cake in the shape of China. The central place is occupied by the American eagle. Trials of the cold war in preparation for the “hot” one.

The various strategic visions in the Western field also emerged in the subsequent NATO summit. The US imposed its agenda by dedicating much of the final document to condemning Russia and expanding the Alliance’s action to the Pacific Ocean and China’s borders. However, nothing has been decided regarding the nearby and increasingly warmer Mediterranean. In the same document, after heated negotiations, it was declared that China represents a “systemic challenge” for the West, while Washington would have liked it to be openly defined “an adversary”.
Despite The Crisis, World Military Spending Continues To Grow

Data on world military spending published in April 2011 by the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London and the International Peace Research Institute Stockholm confirm that these diplomatic and trade tensions have prompted most of the major States to expand military spending. In fact, both Institutes agree in their analyzes that in 2020, despite the worsening of the economic crisis and the spread of the pandemic, spending recorded a sharp increase in the world as a whole, unlike what had happened in the previous crisis of 2009.

According to the calculations of the IISS in 2020, while global economic production fell by 3.5%, there was a 3.9% increase, in real terms, in world spending on armaments. In proportion to GDP, it went from 1.85% in 2019 to 2.08% in 2020. In absolute values, it would have exceeded 1,830 billion dollars.

According to SIPRI estimates, global GDP would have decreased by 4.4% while world military spending would have increased by 2.6%, reaching as much as 1,981 billion dollars. The increase would be the largest since 2009, at the end of the last global economic crisis.

It must be acknowledged that the rule of capital, in its catastrophic and destructive imperialist phase, despite the economic and health crisis, is spending more and more money on cannons and less and less on “butter”. We Marxists are not surprised.

In 1915, after the outbreak of the First World War, Lenin made ours the famous phrase of General Von Clausevitz, “War is the continuation of politics by other means”. The concept could be clarified by stating that war is also the continuation by other means, by violent means, of the economy, commerce, finance. Militarism is an inseparable part of capitalism and it is an illusion in the capitalist regime to hypothesize the possibility of universal peace, of long term collaboration between States. For the regime of capital, there is no other way out of the economic crisis than war, the generalized and planned destruction of goods and means of production, including millions of proletarians, to “rejuvenate” and start a new cycle of accumulation. So it happened with the first and, even more so, with the second imperialist war. From this awareness derives the fact that in the programs of the decision making centers of the military apparatuses of the various States there is a demand for enormous resources to keep the armed forces efficient and ready for use.

The size of the expenditure naturally reflects the global power hierarchy.

United States dominates, China follows

It is still the United States that distances itself with a far greater commitment than all other States by maintaining and strengthening their formidable arsenal. In 2020, US military spending rose for the third consecutive year after seven years of slight decline. Reduced due to the crisis of 2009, it has not yet returned to the highs of that time: in 2009 and 2010 it was 4.9% of GDP, then it dropped to 3.3% in 2017 and 2018, to then rise again. at 3.4% in 2019 and 3.7% in 2020. This year, spending exceeded 778 billion dollars, with an increase of 4.4% compared to 2019. It is an effort aimed at confirming control over entire planet and to maintain strategic superiority in the first place over China, identified as the first global opponent.

US military spending alone contributes 39% of the world total. And this has been happening at least since 1989, the year of the collapse of the USSR. Despite all the crunches and lost positions in the economic, financial and commercial spheres, the US maintains a clear supremacy in the military sector.

But their supremacy comes from afar. Already in 1931, in full economic depression, Trotski in an interview with the “Manchester Guardian” observed: “The potential preponderance of the United States on the world market is much greater than that of Britain in the brightest days of its world hegemony, gross way in the three quarters of the last century. This potential force will inevitably have to transform into a kinetic force and one day the world will witness the explosion of American aggression in every sector of our planet. The future historian will write in his books: «The famous crisis of 30-33? It was a turning point in the entire history of the United States, as it imposed such a reconversion of the spiritual and political goals that it transformed the old Monroe doctrine “America to the Americans” in that “The whole world to the Americans”».

The second country that spends the most on armaments is China, which in 2020 invested 252 billion dollars, about one third of the United States in absolute value. to 1.7% of Chinese GDP against 3.7% in the US. After a few years in which Beijing’s spending in absolute values had increased by 45% every year, in 2020 it increased by about 2% According to SIPRI: «The continued growth in Chinese spending is partly due to the country’s longterm military expansion and modernization plans, in line with the declared desire to catch up with the other major military powers». Traditionally a power continental, has now clearly expressed its will to oppose the dominant position of the United States and its allies in the Pacific, the ocean on which its ports open and through which the country trades most of its goods. Beijing aspires to the role of maximum economic power but its capitalists are aware that the acquisition of that role cannot take place if it fails to compete with the other powers on the military level, and with the USA in the first place. For this reason, China is dedicating great resources to strengthening above all the navy, the air force and the missile arsenal. At A Distance The Regional Powers At a distance from the two main imperialisms follow what we could define regional powers, India (72.9 billion dollars); Russia (61.7), Great Britain (59.2), Saudi Arabia (57.5), Germany and France (with 52.8 and 52.7 respectively) and finally Japan (48, 1) and South Korea (46.0).

It should be noted, in reading this ranking, how India, despite competing with China for the number of inhabitants and despite having atomic weapons, on the military level is still a medium power and, above all, dependent on imports from abroad for the main weapon systems, although in recent years it has been making great efforts to achieve autonomy in various sectors, especially the army and air force, minus the navy.

Russia reduced its military spending from 3.9% in 2009 to 3.4% in 2011, before rising to 5.4% in 2016. It subsequently fell again to 3.7% in 2018 and to 3.8% in 2019 to grow to 4.3% in 2020. Although spending is significant compared to GDP, in absolute values it remains comparable to that of a medium power, denying Putinian patriotic rhetoric that would aim to restore the glories ” imperial “. However, Moscow has a tradition, diplomatic ties, a technological level and a network of military industries that allow it to be in second place worldwide as an arms exporter, surpassed only by the United States.

In the last three years, despite being waging a bloody, and costly, war in Yemen, Saudi Arabia has greatly reduced its spending on armaments, also due to the fall in the price of oil which has cut State revenues. This allowed Great Britain, which instead continued to spend more and more, to earn third place in the group, leaving France and Germany behind.

It should be noted that France, despite its relative modest spending, last year gained third place in the world ranking of arms exporters.

Obviously, all countries export unscrupulously despite declaring that their sales are conditioned by respect for “human rights” by buyers: it is not for nothing that one of the States that is among the largest buyers is Egypt. Pecunia non olet!

Japan is engaged in a major rearmament process which mainly concerns the fleet. For this purpose, the government intends to exceed the previous limit of 1% of GDP for military spending. Furthermore, all legislative restrictions on arms exports have recently been removed. Tokyo in this phase constitutes the main ally of the United States in the fight against China. South Korea is also engaged in a decisive rearmament process that has accelerated in recent years, also under the pressure of the US, to keep both North Korea and China at bay. Seoul is also trying to reduce its dependence on imports by adopting domestically built weapon systems that appear to have given excellent results in both the aeronautical and maritime fields.

The total expenditure for the ten States cited so far is about 1,464 billion dollars, 74% of global military spending.

Minor But Well-Armed Powers

After the two main ones, there is a third group of powers that we can define as minor: Italy (28.9 billion dollars), Australia (27.5), Brazil (25.1), Canada (22.7), Israel (21.7), Turkey (17.7). Sipri has no data available for the United Arab Emirates but they certainly rank in this group.

These three groups of powers, 17 States in all, account for about 82% of world military spending.

We can therefore confirm what Lenin wrote a century ago: a small group of imperialist and militarist States dominate the world.

Only The Non-Pacifist Proletariat Is Anti-Militarist and Anti-War

But the extent of the expenditure on armaments, the number of aircraft ships or soldiers, are not enough to define the effective war strength of a State.

At the end of the 1980s we witnessed, without a single cannon shot being fired, the disintegration of one of the most powerful armies in the world, that of the Soviet Union, which the new Russian State had to reconstitute almost entirely. Of the approximately 3.4 million Soviet soldiers, only about 2.7 million entered the ranks of the Russian armed forces, only to be reduced to about a million at the end of the century as immense quantities of armament were abandoned.

The Armed Forces are efficient if the State works, if the economy and politics work, if society as a whole supports them. This is why the bourgeoisie attaches so much importance to propaganda in favor of the military, trying to disguise its function of defense of the bourgeois State, and for this reason the action of the Communist Party and of the class unions in clearly opposing militarism and war is so important, above all by refusing any class collaboration for the defense of the bourgeois fatherland and its national economy.

After the fall of the “Soviet” empire and the drastic reduction in military spending by Russia and the satellite countries, the United States also began to reduce spending, which fell from 6.1% of GDP in 1988 to 3.1% of 2001. This temporary reduction in the arms expenditure of the then two major powers was used by the bourgeois left and the pacifist movement to sow the illusion that a general war was now averted forever and that an era of peaceful relations was opening up between the States. This reactionary illusion did not last long, and now the US is once again defining Russia as an enemy, openly declaring that China is the global strategic opponent, and Moscow and Beijing are responding in kind. The same parties of the parliamentary “left” boast their nationalism and incite rearmament, as the head of the Labor Party in Great Britain did recently, perhaps justifying it with the fight against “terrorism”, with the protection of the national economy and with the defense of jobs in the war industry.

It is only the proletariat, organized and self conscious, framed in its class unions and with the leadership of its party, which can oppose militarism and imperialist war by preparing its class war against the regime of Capital.