Imperialist war is an extension of the class war waged by capitalists against workers in the world’s industrial heartlands. Revolutionary socialists have said something like this since at least the 1880s and 1890s.
In those decades, Wilhelm Liebknecht in Germany and Ernest Belfort Bax in Britain argued that colonial annexations were about “exporting” capitalism’s domestic problems—unemployment and overproduction—to other parts of the world. The next generation of Marxists argued that, once the great powers had annexed the whole world, capitalism had to turn on itself, transforming the means of production into means of destruction and workers into enemy soldiers fighting and dying for their respective country’s capitalist class.
The argument by no means downplays the horrific slaughters carried out in other areas of the world, such as by the Belgians in the Congo or, more recently, the genocide in Gaza. On the contrary, it is an attempt to show that world capitalism is not simply a system of markets, but of violence and coercion, and to explain the connections between domestic and foreign policy.
Some of the connections have become more evident through the US-Israeli attack on Iran and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. There’s the talk of fuel rationing (for workers, but not capitalists) and the Reserve Bank governor is openly threatening to engineer a recession—put hundreds of thousands of people out of work and into poverty—to preserve “price stability” for the capitalists and financiers. But this is only a small taste of how imperialist war is linked to class war.
The connection was much clearer a century ago, when capitalists across Europe forced workers to kill each other during the First World War. Casualties totalled more than 37 million, including at least 8.5 million killed. To prosecute the war, governments imposed martial law, domestic rationing, conscription (military slavery), and bans on political and industrial organising. The link between class war and imperialist war became so obvious that the conflict ended only when workers’ revolutions against the capitalists erupted in 1917-18.
Yet, since the end of the Second World War, the connections have been less evident. There are two main reasons for this. First, most imperialist hot wars in the last 80 years involved powerful states invading much weaker states. So the number of casualties among soldiers from the imperialist countries has been much lower than in the generalised conflicts of WWI and WWII. The dead have piled up primarily in capitalism’s periphery: Korea, Vietnam, Central America, Iraq, Afghanistan and so on.
Second, the more limited military mobilisations, combined with a period of relative prosperity—economic expansion and rising living standards—have allowed wars to be waged with less domestic “sacrifice”. By and large, there have been few “emergency measures” such as rationing, wage freezes or cuts, the banning of political opposition or the suspension of elections. (Not always, of course: in the US, there was military conscription/slavery during the Korean and Vietnam wars.)
Times, however, are changing. On the one hand, the rise of China as a challenge to US global domination raises the prospect of more serious inter-imperialist conflict. That is spurring a return to the “total mobilisation” mentality of previous times, which involved marshalling ever greater social and economic resources to military ends.
On the other hand, the period of relative prosperity has also come to an end in many countries, and states have less capacity to fund their war machines without making workers’ lives much more miserable. Russia today is an obvious case. But pretty much all the major Western powers are significantly indebted and are either foreshadowing or implementing major cuts to social spending to fund military expansions.
So the link between imperialist war and class war is becoming clearer again, even in the absence of a major inter-imperialist conflict.
In Europe, ruling-class figures have been saying for several years that social welfare is a relic of the twentieth century and that governments must prioritise rearmament spending. In Australia, there is an ongoing campaign bemoaning how terrible it is that spending on the national disability scheme is approaching the level of military spending—the implication being that it’s preposterous to waste all this money trying to look after people when the country needs to prepare for war. The upcoming federal budget will reflect these priorities, with the Department of Defence getting more handouts while the scramble continues to rein in NDIS spending.
But the link is most evident in the United States, where the latest White House budget asks Congress to increase military spending by more than 40 percent, to US$1.5 trillion, while gutting social spending. President Trump is explicit about the link, reportedly telling a private White House luncheon this month: “It’s not possible for us to take care of day care, Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things ... We have to take care of one thing: military protection”.
These two things—expanding military might and deteriorating conditions of the working class; imperialist war and class war—are becoming increasingly linked everywhere. And ruling-class demands for working-class sacrifice are key to understanding why far-right and fascist parties are being embraced by sections of the capitalist class in all the major Western powers: the US, Britain, Germany, France and Italy.
Imperialist war and class war are one war—a war waged by capitalists against workers everywhere. In the coming years, it will be impossible to defend working-class living standards without also opposing militarism. Likewise, it will be next to impossible to build a solid and sustainable political opposition to imperialism and militarism without linking them to the increasing attacks on workers and the oppressed at home.
