Capitalism’s ruthless new order

As long as capitalism survives, there will be no reckoning for the Gaza genocide or the naked aggression of Western imperialism in the Middle East.

Every day, Israeli soldiers murder dozens of defenceless and starving Palestinians queuing for rations among the rubble of their now almost uninhabitable homeland. That no government in the world will do anything about it should be evidence enough of the impunity.

Now, Tel Aviv and Washington are exporting even more violence to yet another country, Iran. How many deaths in this region are they responsible for over the last 25 years? Up to 4.7 million, according to Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs. Yet these murderers receive sinecures rather than sanctions.

This perennial spectacle of mass murder, and the spectre of more of it, have not elicited a rethinking of priorities among those who rule the world, let alone contrition or reparations. Instead, they are launching more wars and preparing for others—everywhere. Twenty-seven million active-duty military personnel are spread across the globe. But even this is insufficient.

“If you have weapons, don’t abandon them; if you have the ability to produce weapons, produce them. Weapons of all kinds”, Lithuanian Defence Minister Dovilė Šakalienė last week told Yaroslav Trofimov, the Wall Street Journal’s chief foreign affairs correspondent. “Saying let’s disarm, let’s be peaceful pigeons—that’s suicidal.”

This exhortation is but a reflection of what’s already happening. Global military spending is rapidly expanding, increasing by nearly 40 percent in real terms over the last decade to US$2.7 trillion (A$4.2 trillion) and accounting for approximately 7 percent of government expenditures worldwide. All indications suggest that this is only the beginning, as an increase in the means of violence in one country begets a commensurate increase in its neighbours’ and competitors’ capacities.

The US, Russia, UK, France, China, India, Pakistan, North Korea and Israel together already possess more than 12,000 nuclear weapons. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, 2,100 are “kept in a state of high operational alert on ballistic missiles”—more than enough destructive capability to eradicate all human life several times over.

Yet more countries are reportedly considering joining this nuclear club—a death cult by any reasonable definition. “The era of nuclear weapons reductions appears to have ended”, notes the SIPRI Yearbook 2025, released this month. “The signs are that a new qualitative nuclear arms race is gearing up and, compared with the last one, the risks are likely to be more diverse and more serious.”

It is too generous to say that the great challenges of the 21st century—the climate catastrophe and decimation of the planet’s ecosystems, the 700 million people undernourished and living in extreme poverty, the 2.2 billion without drinking water, the 3.5 billion lacking safe sanitation services, and more—are afterthoughts to the imperialist states and their capitalist ruling classes.

Increasingly, the primary feature of their system is destruction: destruction of living standards, destruction of life-support systems, destruction of cities and countries and peoples and spirit. The more it destroys, the wealthier the class of billionaires at the top becomes. The arms dealers, the fossil fuel barons, the tech oligarchs, the financiers—all of them profiting, and profiting all the more, as the destitution and destruction increase.

This is capitalism’s logic: unchecked, unending rapaciousness.

Last century, at least 180 million people were killed because of war; not a single year passed without cannons being fired or bombs being dropped. But every part of the world is now linked to the rest by some means. As long as this system grinds on, there will be no respite, let alone a reckoning, and no escaping the calamities resulting from so many natural resources and so much human energy being devoted to the military-industrial complex.

With the world entering a potentially even more destructive phase, there is an urgent need to tear down the existing imperialist order and replace it with a socialist order: a society run according to the maxim “from each according to their ability, to each according to their need”, and in which cooperation, rather than competition, is the guiding principle.