The Winds of War

In this historical phase—eighty years after the immense tragedy of the Second Imperialist War—the specter of an international conflict once again looms on the horizon. For us Marxists, it marks the inevitable culmination of capitalism’s general crisis: a necessary convulsion to resolve its contradictions, wipe out debts and credits accumulated through the profit cycle, and destroy the surplus of commodities that can no longer be absorbed—including the surplus of human labour-power. This is all done in order for the cycle to restart once more the infernal loop of accumulation, driven by production.

For proof, we need only look to history. There has been no economic expansion since the Industrial Revolution that rivals the one unleashed after 1945.

Communists do not oppose war out of pacifistic moralism. They understand that inter-imperialist conflicts are a catastrophe for the global proletariat—unless it is broken at the onset.

Such a conflict will bring untold devastation, amplified by the destructive capabilities of our time. If humanity could endure this great tribulation, the resurgence of a powerful revolutionary class movement will be more difficult than ever. Harder still, the creation of a movement capable of dismantling the profit system and the entire machinery that sustains it—chief among them, the State itself.

Our doctrine exposes the root contradictions of capitalism. We have no room for petty-bourgeois pacifism. Instead, we call to turn imperialist war into class war.

Without this, peace remains an impossibility. Naturally, this is a projection—no one has a crystal ball to foresee the exact moment.

It doesn’t matter that the populations in the imperialist centers are far from a “war sentiment.” It doesn’t matter that aspirations for peace currently prevails among the majority of society.

Once the financial and economic crisis drags both the proletariat and the middle class (who have hitherto thrived in the shade of capitalism) into misery, it’ll be easy to find “enemies” to direct the armies against. Schools, media outlets, and so on will fervently compete with each other to incite defense of sacred borders. They will smear any who seek to overthrow the national order, who violate the freedom and independence of the European homelands.

We’re already getting a taste of this in our daily lives. War hysteria is obsessively pushed, and “enemies” already named. They are those who supposedly threaten “our way of life, “our” customs, and “our” civilisation.

Even now, with that horizon barely in view, the hounds are already loose against the usual suspects—the enemies of the beloved democratic façade.

This is a fact. Yet it does not, and must not, disturb our revolutionary work.

The drumbeats of jingoism have already taken hold of the media. Any who try to push back do so from within the bounds of impotent petty-bourgeois pacifism.

Derelict Europe, a hollow construct born of feeble national bourgeoisies, has already lined up against the so-called enemy in the East. They dream up tales of a supranational “European” army to repel an attack that is no more than a phantom. All the while, the postwar US led military alliance begins to fray, as American forces pivot toward the Pacific to confront the rising Asian giant—dominant in both production and exports.

Evidently, even Europe’s bureaucrats can sense where the next fronts will be and are now scrambling to make sure they’re ready.

While the United States gears its war effort toward the Pacific, the burden of containing Eastern Europe is shifted onto the shoulders of the European powers.

Of course, without real backing from the US, the task is impossible. Any talk of handling it independently, as dreamed up by the French and British governments, is pure delusion.

A separate matter altogether is the rearmament of Germany. This is the real game-changing development that upends the entire European balance between the US, Europe, and Russia.

It’s common knowledge that the bourgeois need to “defend” the borders in the East has unleashed a warmongering frenzy in the European states.

Thus, the unmistakable signs of the coming imperialist slaughter are already present in today’s situation:

the financial crisis, the crisis of production (more and more shoddily poorly disguised by accounting tricks used to inflate GDP figures), and the trade war—which historically tends to precede military conflict.

We have seen this unfold in recent days.

All it took was for a raving fanatic—the leader of a declining but still dominant global power—to formally announce plans to pull back funding from Europe, while once again brandishing the threat of tariffs to curb imports undermining the country’s economy. In response, the EU descended into panic, rushing to present its own program to defend domestic production, albeit with uncertain prospects.

Oddly enough, the devastating loss of cheap Russian energy was met not with protest, but with near-celebration and then promptly swept under the rug.

The United States threatened a full-blown trade war by announcing aggressive tariffs against both allies and foes. Although most were ultimately scaled back to a more measured 10% and selectively applied—except in the case of China. China is the US’s true commercial, political, and military adversary and tariffs reached as high as 140% on a wide range of products.

At the heart of it all lies the imperative to contain the imperialist giant that now poses an objective threat to the waning supremacy of the US.

Politically or militarily, it makes little difference  that the measures have been paused for “everyone else” for 90 days. What comes after remains entirely unclear, even to the President himself.

But this is insignificant to us.

What truly matters is that the international trade agreements, once treated as eternal commandments of capitalist order, have been unceremoniously torn up. Meanwhile, we see a world increasingly destabilised by ongoing wars, mounting threats, and tensions ready to erupt, disrupting the global balance after eighty years of relative peace among the imperialist powers.

As for all the other states, their fate will be determined by the shifting tactical circumstances and needs of American capitalism.

Following the 2008 subprimes crisis—the worst financial crisis since the Second World War—capitalism has lurched between recoveries and fresh crises, each arriving more quickly than the last. Yet all of this has occurred within a framework of relative military stability, where even the many bloody wars never truly threatened the overall structure established after the world war.

Even the Cuban Missile Crisis, which is often seen as the closest the world came to nuclear war, did not pose a genuine risk of a new global conflict—though at the time it felt, to many, as if war were just a step away.

But above all, the decades that followed marked a period of relative peace within the social sphere of the capitalist metropolises.

Wars would of course break out, but only in the periphery. They weren’t less destructive or devastating, but they were kept at a distance, contained so as not to disrupt the imperialist core.

International treaties, the legal fictions of a so-called supranational order upheld by impotent institutions, placed an illusory “legal” seal on an already fragile military peace.

Likewise, in the metropolises of Capital, the working class and the other subordinate strata of the social body have placed themselves the complete subordination of the national States. The flare-ups of social insurrection that characterized the post-war period, up until the storming of heaven by the October Revolution, no longer appear on the historical scene.

After the Second World War, as the global situation gradually stabilised and spheres of influence became firmly established, social struggle grew steadily weaker and more infantile. This first occurred under the weight of Stalinism, and then through political and trade union opportunism. Exceptional moments did break through—such as the uprisings of 1968 or the Polish shipyard strikes—briefly reminded the bourgeoisie where the real threat to their dominance lies.

The lesson the bourgeoisie learned was not in vain.

The capitalist state has always managed to defuse and eventually silence every attempt at revolt from the working class. Even those that violently erupted in the peripheries were grinded down into pulp.

The war in Southeast Asia and the continuous clashes in the Middle East and Africa denote the shifting fractures and realignments at the edges of imperial influence. Even Europe’s own conflict which resulted in Yugoslavia’s fragmentation took place against a backdrop of financial instability. Yet none of these crises, despite their severity, were decisive enough to trigger the collapse of the capitalist system.

That is why, until now, the idea of a generalized war among the imperialist powers never appeared as a truly imminent event. In this phase, however, it feels closer than ever.

The fate of the capitalist process appears sealed.

War fronts are multiplying: from the invasion of Ukraine, to the Middle East, where the genocide in Palestine gives way to rising tensions with a nuclear-aspiring Iran, and to a Syria dismembered and under foreign occupation. In the Pacific, the question of Taiwan stands at the heart of an impending confrontation between China and the United States.

It is only the international proletariat, stateless and without borders, that can and must halt the madness of capitalism’s drive to war.