War, the Highest Expression of the Bourgeois Crisis and the Ultimate Attempt to Defend Capitalism

When class division first appeared in human history, war became a recurring phenomenon, its causes always being of an economic nature. But it was only with the advent of capitalism that war became a mechanism indispensable to its survival, particularly in its peak phase of full development: the Imperialist phase.

We wrote in 1946

It is to the credit of the Marxist school, which has remained faithful to the dialectical method, that it has identified, in the current stage of development of the capitalist mode of production, the fundamental causes and tragic inevitability of war. 

The national wars effectively brought to a close the era of individualistic economy, the waning of which had laid the groundwork for the nascent accumulation of capital. The colonial wars would later being to a close the classic era of the race to conquer the export markets needed to absorb ceaseless overproduction of the capitalist countries. 

The first World War certainly ushered in a period of repeated imperialist wars. In economic terms, what was merely a trend yesterday has now become a living reality; the process of centralisation has led to the monopolistic organisation of the economy, with high finance wielding unchallenged control over its levers of power. This is no coincidence; anonymous and unscrupulous finance capital has supplanted traditional capitalist technical expertise from the helm, and or has subjugated it, for the contest between colossal international monopoly complexes that demand firm political power in the hands of those in charge, or for the capacity for initiative and manoeuvre in the vast and turbulent seas of global economic policy, or the readiness and decisiveness to ward off setbacks, or to embark on this or that venture capable of ensuring a high rate of profit. In any case, profit is defended by conquering and securing firm positions against the forces of economic competition on a national and international scale and, above all, by increasing and centralising that political power, police and military, which alone can provide capital with the material means to counter the danger of a decline in profit, thereby cutting workers’ wages.    

At this stage, the interplay between political forces is reduced to its simplest form. Whatever their origins, programmes, or immediate and ultimate objectives, political parties will serve the cause of imperialism and bow to whatever demands are made of them or they are inexorably cast to the margins of national life and even physically wiped out if they dare to take an active stance and engage in any form of resistance.

Trade unions, which are directly or indirectly subservient to the state, cease to be organs of the class struggle or class defence and become effectively organs of collaborations between the two classes. 

The press becomes that perfectly organised chain, with a government department acting as its hub, entrusted with the grave and delicate task of steering public opinion and whipping it into a frenzy, preparing it mentally for the need to make greater and greater sacrifices of money, freedom, and blood. 

In schools, cultural centres, the traditional forms of democracy – the parliament – and wherever there may be free exchange of ideas, there is the intervention of the state, imposing, from above, a uniform discipline, the weight of a hierarchy, and the stamp of a fundamental, obsessive, idea: one that subordinates everything to the preservation of capitalist privilege. (a translation of “Alle radici della guerra”, Prometeo n.1, 1946)

Thusly, far from arising from ideological conflicts, it is common practice to portray armed conflicts as a struggle between civilisation and barbarism, between freedom and slaver, between justice and tyranny etc., wars are rooted in the pressing need of individual national economies to continually expand their productive capacities, and therefore to constantly find new markets for their products and new opportunities to exploit their capital: the unbridled competition to which they are compelled in order to survive inevitably lead to the brutal act of war. Once, of course, the possibilities for ‘peaceful’ competition have been exhausted.

It was inevitable that the capitalist economy would evolve towards its monopolistic, or imperialist, phase, during which its structure reaches its peak of development, pushing itself to the extreme, while, at the same time, exacerbating and revealing the very reasons for its own decline.

The irreconcilable contradictions inherent in the capitalist system, present from its very inception, accompany it throughout its early development through its prodigious rise, until it looms large in its final and decadent phase. The capitalist economy never frees itself from its dual tendency: a constant decline in purchasing power relative to the growing general capacity for production, from which, derives a corresponding decline in the consumption of the goods produced.

Capital seeks to escape this gnarling contradiction that grips it by expanding production on an ever larger scale, something accumulation readily allows, and by providing markets capable of absorbing this increase output. But, while the technical production process proceeds without pause or limitation in its own development, the world of consumption inexorably reaches the point of saturation. Growing overproduction is thus met by a growing scarcity of outlets.

This is the calamity inherent in the capitalist economy, which will force the only two radical solutions: war or revolution, both of which are the political manifestation of the irreconcilable conflict of interests between the two opposing forces, capitalism and the proletariat. Thus, far from being accidental, war functions as a mechanism for the restart and regeneration of the capitalist economy. The only way for capital to resolve its intrinsic limit of over accumulation and restart the cycle of accumulation is the physical elimination of accumulated capital in the form of commodities, means of production, and infrastructure.

The choice to go to war, however, is not merely Capital’s last ditch attempt to remedy its intrinsic material contradictions through destruction and subsequent reconstruction, but also the frantic and desperate political attempt by the bourgeoisie to defend itself as the ruling class against the fury of the proletariat, driven by the lowering of living condition and having been vainly promised by capitalism an even more prosperous existence. The ruling class fights for its very survival so fights to strip the only class with the historical role of opposing war, the proletariat doing this through its opposition to capitalism, of any capacity to fight, and it does fight with every means at its disposal, including democratic corruption, fascist force, and coercion, and it does not shy away from provoking and fuelling wars through which it draws the attention of the masses with the aim of diverting them from the political and class issues that directly concern them, as well as the previously discussed destruction of over production. The moment the ruling class succeeds in interrupting the historical course towards a revolutionary outcome and has sent the proletariat to the front lines, it has found the solution to its crisis.

In the imperialist phase, the oppressive machinery of the modern state ruthlessly fulfils its role as guardian and political protector of the economic monopoly complex. It becomes the most deadly weapon at the service of the bourgeoisie, necessary for the preliminary and complete annihilation of the forces of revolution, thereby paving the way for war: it is the time of the blind fury of decadent capitalism and its ruling class, gripped by the despair of feeling within themselves the irremediable growth of the causes of their own historical demise.

We wrote in 1943:

War is therefore also the supreme manifestation of an insoluble crisis within bourgeois society. It breaks out when every possibility of peacefully resolving the social crisis has been exhausted, within the countries most directly concerned with world domination and in their mutual relations. Capitalist society is then faced with the dilemma of either revolution or war. And war breaks out precisely because the revolution has not taken place; in turn, it is the extreme means to which the bourgeoisie resorts to abruptly halt the course of a new revolutionary wave; to ideologically destroy the proletariat through the corruption and disarray that accompanies war, and physically through massacre. In this sense, all the belligerent countries have a common interest: the annihilation of the proletariat as a class. ( a translation of “La guerra vista de noi – La guerra, espressione massima della crisi borghese – La guerra, supremo tentativo di difesa del capitalismo”, Prometeo n.2, December 1943)

The forces of capitalism, having entered the infernal vortex of war between opposing imperialist powers, in our view as Marxists, cannot in any way be divided into opposing forces where some are progressive and others reactionary; we therefore harbour no sympathy for either side of global imperialism.

The Communist Party must do everything in its power to free the proletariat from the ideology of war, bring it back to the terrain of the class struggle, and channel as much of its strength as possible into exploiting any favourable situation that might enable it to raise, in concrete terms, the question of transforming the imperialist war into a social war.

War is nothing more than the continuation, on a different plane and by different means, of the same bourgeois capitalist policy: it is therefore inconceivable that the proletarian Party should direct its forces alongside those who lead it. And if this were to happen, war would become the inexorable slippery slope that causes the proletarian vanguards themselves to slide towards counter-revolution.

The proletariat, under the leadership of its Party, can and must seize the bourgeois war as an opportunity to fraternise with the proletarians of the, stated, opposing camp, to unleash civil war and strike the blow of revolution, convince them of the certainty of the impossibility of reforming Capital to meet the living needs of the workers and convince them that the only solution for achieving an existence in line with the Species-Being is the radical and definitive overcoming of capitalism. The violent seizure of power and the consequent establishment of the proletarian dictatorship, a temporary yet indispensable necessity of the workers’ state in the complex transition from the capitalist to the socialist economy, will lead to Communism, a classless, stateless society, free from the mercantilist essence of the societies that preceded it, the primary need of the human species for its genuine and free realisation, for its survival and peaceful continuation.