La Sinistra Comunista Internazionale

The start of Donald Trump’s second term as US president coincides with a new phase in the foreign policy of the world’s leading imperialist power. The US government has announced a protectionist shift in economic policy and at the same time has made it clear to its political and military allies that it is no longer willing to bear the financial burden of ‘common defence’ within NATO as it has done until now.

It is clear that the new direction taken by the US administration is part of a coherent political position aimed at ushering in a new cycle of ‘international relations’ following a script that the United States has followed on other occasions in history. ‘Isolationism’, ‘unilateralism’ and ‘protectionism’ are key terms behind which we can glimpse the preparations of the world’s greatest military power to face a new season characterised by heightened imperialist tensions, generalised rearmament and the multiplication of regional wars, leading to a fatal imperialist clash between the great powers. In this sense, the latest swing of the US administration’s pendulum aims to accelerate the process of extensive rearmament in which, the tendency of the US war industry to produce highly sophisticated weapons intended mainly for use in low-intensity wars, where they can make the difference between the warring parties, will be accompanied by a rapid and frenetic growth in mass production aimed at supplying millions of men who will have to be ready to fight simultaneously on several war theatres in every corner of the planet.

In recent decades, there has been a pronounced trend in the arms industry to focus on the development of innovative, high-tech weapons at the expense of large-scale production of more technologically mature weapons. This divergence in the growth rates of these distinct sectors of the military industry can be explained by the fact that more advanced weapons guarantee higher profits because they are the result of labour-intensive production, even if the labour is highly skilled. Furthermore, high-tech weapons guarantee higher profits thanks to the particular market conditions in which they are sold: producing countries can sell these weapons, developed by monopolistic companies, to ‘friendly countries’ at whatever price they want.

The difficulty of the United States and European countries in organising mass production of weapons, the relative shortage of which has already emerged during the war in Ukraine, is also highlighted in an article published by the French newspaper Le Monde on 22 July. In one passage, we read: ‘For decades, the French defence industrial and technological base had certainly remained intact despite budget cuts, but it was designed to produce small quantities of high-tech materials. Overcoming the obstacle of mass production is therefore not easy’.

The imposition on NATO partners of additional spending on armaments, which will soon reach 5% of gross domestic product, is another aspect of a general rearmament in which every capitalist power is forced to keep pace so as not to run the risk of becoming easy prey for rival imperialisms when the hour of the general war of capital strikes.

The differences of opinion between the Trump administration and the European Union on customs policy and ‘defence’ have been presented as a cooling of relations between two traditional allies, glossing over the fact that they are not two entities that are similar in terms of their constitution and economic and military strength. In fact, while the United States, thanks to its military strength, is still the power at the top of the world imperialist hierarchy, albeit in a devastating decline, on the other side of the Atlantic we do not have a cohesive continental bloc, as the pro-European rhetoric would have us believe. In reality, the European Union is a collection of states whose interests do not coincide, but are often in competition with each other, held together by phantom institutions lacking real power and supported by what, under the guise of a deluge of superfluous EU legislation, appears to be a frail and fragile treaty. 

The 800 billion euro plan for so-called ‘European common defence’, launched last March by the European Council, is an operation of dubious effectiveness, yet it bears the sinister name ‘Readiness 2030’, clearly alluding to ‘being ready’ by 2030 to face a war of major proportions. So, for the five short years that, in the minds of European puppeteers (or aspiring puppeteers), precede the outbreak of a new global war, the programme presented to workers will prove, long before the bombs fall on the prosperous citadels of capital, to be a hellish circle of suffering, sacrifice, tears and blood.

One thing that the mandarins of the European Union fail to mention is that it is highly problematic to establish a ‘common defence’ among states that will not give up their particular interests in order to strengthen a treaty whose primary purpose is to mediate between their respective and conflicting spheres of interest. The most likely scenario as the crisis deepens is that of a war in Europe between European states, regardless of whether they are currently part of the EU or not, and that the overcoming of budgetary constraints will have been agreed by the entire assembly of European nations. Two world wars have been fought on the soil of the Old Continent, precisely over the issue of European unification under German hegemony. If Germany has had this tendency to retrace this path more than once, it is due to compelling economic factors that go far beyond the proverbial Prussian stubbornness or the equally proverbial Hitlerian ‘wickedness’.

When it comes to military spending, the philistine pacifist or the ‘broad-minded’ petty bourgeois writhes in pain at the diversion of state resources from health, education, humanitarian and charitable causes, etc. The limitation of those on the ‘left’ or those with a generally ‘common sense’ communist stance who presume to dictate the expenditure chapters of the bourgeois state budget is that they generally fail to ask themselves a fundamental question: how much of the total social product will be diverted from satisfying the needs of the proletariat (and therefore from its consumption) by the arms race, even regardless of the proportion of public spending allocated to armaments in relation to other items of state budget expenditure?

For us Marxists, the question of rearmament in a theoretical sense is on a different level from that of political economy, i.e. the dead science that is concerned with recipes for keeping the agonising capitalist mode of production alive. Our approach to the issue of militarism is to consider it as an aspect intrinsically linked to the process of capital accumulation, with all its necessary repercussions in the field of the distribution of the social product. In fact, in our view, the production and distribution of the social product are solidly intertwined, and any consideration that neglects the necessary link between the two phenomena cannot have any scientific value.

The aspect we wish to emphasise is that highlighted by Rosa Luxemburg over a century ago in her work The Accumulation of Capital (1913): ‘From the economic point of view, militarism appears to capital as a means of realising surplus value, that is, as a field of accumulation’. Once this point has been established, we must ask ourselves “who is the purchaser of the mass of products in which the capitalised surplus value is hidden”. The text highlights how the state and its organs should be excluded from the category of ‘consumers’, since they should be aligned ‘as representatives of derived income, in the same category as the usufructuaries of surplus value […] to which also belong the representatives of the liberal professions and the infinite variety of parasites of today’s society (‘priests, parish priests, professors, prostitutes, soldiers’)” and we would add journalists and swindlers from NGOs and humanitarian missions. However, this explanation “is acceptable only on two conditions“: 1) that it is admitted that the state has no other sources of income than other sources of taxation in addition to capitalist surplus value and proletarian wages; 2) that the state, including its organs, is conceived as a pure consumer. In this sense, when it comes to the ‘personal consumption of state employees (and therefore also of ‘warriors’), this means that – insofar as this consumption is contested by the workers’ means – there is a partial transfer of consumption from the working class to the appendage of the capitalist class’. Therefore, if ‘the entire amount of indirect taxes extorted from workers (which represent a levy on their consumption)’ is ‘used to pay the salaries of state employees and to supply the army with the necessary means of subsistence’, then ‘no shift will occur in the reproduction of social capital’. In fact, considering the two destinations of the social product, i.e. consumption and the means of production, they ‘remain unchanged’ because ‘the overall needs of society have not changed either in quality or quantity’. In this case, what has changed is the amount of wages, understood as ‘the monetary expression of the labour force’, which is now ‘exchanged for a smaller quantity of means of consumption’. What happens to the part of workers’ wages that goes to civil servants and the military? ‘In place of workers’ consumption, consumption by the organs of the capitalist state takes over to the same extent’. In essence, this redistribution acts as an intensification of exploitation, which manifests itself as greater extraction of relative surplus value within the same production process. Thus, the greater share of relative surplus value is ‘reserved for the consumption of the capitalist class and its appendages’.

“The bleeding of the working class through the mechanism of indirect taxation, in order to maintain the machinery of the capitalist state, has its origin in an increase in surplus value, and precisely in the part of it that is consumed; only that this additional division between surplus value and variable capital takes place post festum, after the exchange between capital and labour power has taken place”.

However, if “the working class did not bear most of the costs of maintaining state employees and the ‘military’, it would be the capitalist class that would have to bear them: it would have to allocate a corresponding part of surplus value to the maintenance of the organs of its class rule, either at the expense of its own consumption, which it would therefore have to limit, or, more probably, at the expense of the part of surplus value destined for capitalisation”.

Here we must pause for reflection, moving away from the issue of rearmament in relation to the process of accumulation. The reference to the attitude of the working class in a context marked by preparations for war is of fundamental importance. Luxemburg wrote this text only a year before the outbreak of the First World War, noting how opportunism in the labour movement and the trade unions had already begun the ignoble work of subordinating the working class “to the interests of the nation” and thus to rearmament. More than a century has passed since then, during which all sorts of crimes have been committed in the massacres of countless bourgeois wars. Two world wars have taken place and we are most likely on the eve of a third. It is up to us to draw the conclusion that without the work of opportunism and the treacherous trade unions, which for decades have been integrated into the apparatus of the capitalist state, in short, without the substantial destruction of the workers’ movement and the annihilation of all independence of the working class from the bourgeois regime, this subordination of the proletariat to the war needs of the enemy class would not have been possible.

Returning to the thread of the argument on the effects of rearmament, it is necessary to observe how the terms of the question change “when the means concentrated in the hands of the state through the tax system are used for the production of war materials”. In this case, “variable capital as money-capital of a certain magnitude serves now as before to set in motion the corresponding quantity of living labour, and thus to exploit the corresponding constant capital for productive purposes and to generate the corresponding quantity of surplus value”. Therefore, in these terms, rearmament does not merely act as a transfer of purchasing power from the working class to the capitalist state, but since a smaller amount of means of subsistence has to be produced for the maintenance of the working class, the state’s demand ‘is not directed towards means of consumption’ but ‘towards a specific category of products: the instruments of militarism, both on land and at sea’. Thus, economic militarism acts “by ensuring, at the expense of the normal living conditions of the working class, both the maintenance of the organs of capital’s rule, the permanent armies, and the widest field of capital accumulation”. 

The text we refer to takes into account a crucial aspect of the effects of rearmament: the result on the process of accumulation of the contraction of variable capital in relation to total capital, once the reduction in the availability of means of subsistence is paid for by the working class, would also be felt in the internal relations of the bourgeois class because “what the large number of capitalists who produce means of subsistence for the mass of workers lose in sales would go to a small group of large industrialists in the war industry”.

It is not difficult to transfer the practical consequences of this internal reshuffling of the bourgeoisie to the present day: the factions of the state bourgeoisie that are committed to diverting total capital resources to the arms industry are acquiring ever greater power and therefore greater weight within the ruling class itself. The case of Leonardo, which has become the leading company in the Italian manufacturing sector, is emblematic in this regard. The networks of interests that are strengthening around the production of machines for killing humans will also be in a more advantageous position than the bourgeois strata and (especially in agriculture) the petty bourgeoisie who derive their profits from the production of means of subsistence.
This tendency towards the affirmation of the network of interests linked to the arms industry is a fact rooted in the history of capitalism, and as early as 1961, in his farewell address to the nation, US President Dwight Eisenhower stated: ‘We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist’. This tendency towards the strengthening of this ‘military-industrial complex’ was therefore already significant in the post-war accumulation phase, when manufacturing production was growing at a rapid pace in the most industrialised countries. It should come as no surprise that with the crisis of accumulation that matured in the mid-1970s and became chronic in the following half-century, it became more evident in all countries, including the newly industrialised ones.

However, there is another aspect of the social effects of the capitalist crisis that must be taken into account. Our current has always highlighted that one of the causes of social unrest in a phase of capitalist economic crisis is the tendency for the prices of agricultural and livestock products intended for the basic consumption of the proletariat to fall more slowly than those of industrial manufactured goods. This is due to the fact that manufacturing, thanks to incessant technical innovations, involves sharply decreasing average social reproduction times. Even in agriculture, ‘production costs’ are slowly decreasing due to improvements brought about by the mechanisation of cultivation, seed selection, the use of fertilisers, etc. But the rate of capital turnover in agriculture cannot be determined at will. A shift of social production resources from mass consumption to arms expenditure will widen the gap between the two sectors (agricultural and industrial) in terms of the rate of reduction of the average socially necessary labour time for the production of goods. This will inevitably make further tightening of the proletariat’s living conditions necessary. We can also deduce this truth from Marx’s description of the opposite case of an increase in workers’ consumption. An increase in wages following a fruitful cycle of struggles and the consequent increase in the demand for consumer goods by the proletariat will shift a substantial part of capital to the agricultural sector. This, even if only in the medium term, will lead to a more sustained reduction in the prices of basic necessities (“Wage Labour and Capital”).

Up to this point, the text of ‘The Accumulation of Capital’ helps us to understand the facts of the present with remarkable precision, especially without entering into the issue of its ‘sub-consumptionist’ approach and therefore, from a Marxist point of view, the essentially misleading Luxemburgian reading of the causes of the capitalist crisis, which for us is entirely intrinsic to production itself, beyond any consideration of the issue of distribution. The tendency of the rate of profit to fall can always and in any case be attributed to the increase in the organic composition of capital and has no secondary causes of a distributive nature.

The Marxist theory of crisis described in the third volume of Capital warns us that this fall is a ‘tendencious’ process because it is dialectically subject to opposing causes. In fact, capitalist accumulation itself offers capital palliatives that tend to slow down the catastrophic course of the dire prognosis pronounced by Marx over 160 years ago regarding the historical course of the capitalist mode of production. These counter-tendencies or ‘antagonistic causes’ include recipes that have all been put in place by the capitalist class to slow down its decline. Among these is the intensification of the rate of exploitation, which, as we have seen so far, is an essential recipe of economic militarism itself to cope with the effects of the crisis, which rearmament alone cannot cure, despite the delusional promise of infrastructure renewal. In this regard, we must consider the sixth and final antagonistic cause considered by Marx in Chapter XIV of the Third Book of Capital: capital destined for interest (and therefore for financial rent) slows down the race to increase the organic composition of capital to the extent that it is not reinvested in constant capital. This is a further element confirming our thesis that the preparation for war feeds itself, simultaneously reinforcing the causes and effects of the crisis: the growth of the organic composition is exacerbated in order to withstand the competition of the economic militarism of other powers, while the rate of profit tends towards zero. Thus, the ‘optimal’ conditions are hastily prepared for the leap into the great rejuvenation bath for the capital of general war, which will destroy surplus commodities, capital and labour power. In this way, over a century ago, the ‘mystery’ of the multiple trap of economic militarism was revealed.

It is the task of the proletariat to fight to break the cage that will lead them seamlessly from the life sentence of wage labour to extermination on the battlefields. The proletariat must take its destiny into its own hands without wasting its energy on the absolute utopia of general ‘disarmament’ that avoids war while remaining within the framework of bourgeois society.  In doing so, the proletariat would fall into the trap of bourgeois politics and its mystifications, which is a losing game for it. Faced with the advancing spectre of war, the proletariat must fight first and foremost for its immediate economic interests and therefore for an increase in its consumption, which is the most effective antagonist of rearmament itself.

For this reason, all forms of pretence or hypocrisy must be rejected in the face of the blackmail of the so-called “national interest”, which will increasingly turn into an appeal to “defend the homeland”. The proletarians have no homeland and no interests in common with the bourgeoisie, which wants to lead them to the slaughter of a new general war. To fight for wage increases, for the reduction of working hours with equal pay, and for full wages for the unemployed means to scatter obstacles in the path of the rearmament of the states, which inevitably leads to war.  Transforming these demands into concrete results will enable the proletariat to find itself in a less unfavourable political position when the dilemma of “war or revolution” arises. For the historical task of the proletariat (as well as its supreme interest) is to transform the war of states into a class war at the first opportunity.