Capitalism is a sick system which outlived its useful purpose a long time ago. In the epoch of its senile decline it breeds war, racism, poverty, and hunger. Imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism, is characterised by the struggle between different gangs of capitalist robbers for the sharing out of the loot. Today, as the loot shrinks under the impact of the crisis of capitalism, their struggle intensifies and we see a renewed drive towards militarism and war.
The war on Gaza has given us the most graphic demonstration of the savagery of capitalism. The western imperialists have given their wholehearted, enthusiastic support to, and material assistance in, the genocidal slaughter of 40,000 defenceless men, women, and children by the Israeli war machine. In so doing, they have exploded all their hypocritical talk about ‘western values’, the ‘rules based international order’, and the inviolability of human rights.
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All their sermons and crocodile tears about Russian war crimes in Ukraine have been exposed as hypocrisy. It is not for Ukrainian freedom or sovereignty, but to weaken Russia as a rival power that the Ukrainian people have been thrown as cannon fodder into another imperialist slaughter.
These wars, in Gaza and Ukraine, are just two examples of the barbarism that capitalism is whipping up across the globe. Gaza, Ukraine, Congo, Sudan, rising tensions across the Taiwan Strait, wars and civil wars in over 30 countries around the world: this is the picture of the future that capitalism has in store for mankind.
In the epoch of capitalism’s death agony, reactionary and imperialist wars are spreading. Millions of ordinary poor and working-class people are the ones paying for it: in deaths, injuries and disease; through the mass displacement of 117 million people and counting; in the destruction of livelihoods and higher prices. All this for the profits of an unelected, unaccountable handful of billionaire parasites.
But there is another side to this process. Millions, even hundreds of millions, are being radicalised. They are looking for a fighting lead against militarism, against war, and against imperialism. The millions protesting the Gaza war and the mass encampment movement proved that.
The time is ripe for a broad-based, international campaign around a clear programme to fight militarism and imperialism. Towards this end, the Revolutionary Communist International proposes the following programme as the starting point for such a campaign, and we call upon every individual or organisation seriously opposed to imperialist war to contact us, to put their name to the same campaign, and to join us in this task.
We aim to reach into every campus, school, workers’ organisation, union and workplace, to give a clear expression to the rising anger in society, and direct it against the culprits responsible for the barbarism now rising around us: our imperialist ruling classes.
Healthcare not warfare! Books not bombs!
As the capitalist system enters into crisis, as markets shrink and investment opportunities evaporate, the struggle of the imperialist powers reaches an ever higher pitch. All around the globe, they are sharpening their knives in order to defend and extend their markets, spheres of influence, and fields of investment.
The cry has gone up from the ruling class everywhere: guns before butter! In 2023 alone, global defence spending rose by 9 percent to a record $2.2 trillion a year. That’s $306 being spent annually on means of destruction for every man, woman and child on the planet.
The imperialists have made clear that their militarisation plans have barely commenced / Image: public domain
They can find this largesse for the military sector. They can find billions in military aid for the Israeli war machine and the bloody meat grinder in Ukraine. And yet, for decades we have been told the cupboards are bare, that we have lived beyond our means and must therefore accept attacks to education, healthcare, and other public services. At the same time as they are preparing even further cuts in public services, they are pledging eye watering sums for the military.
The same ladies and gentlemen who claim they cannot find funding for education, found vast sums to reduce the homes of the 2 million inhabitants of Gaza to rubble. They claim they cannot afford to build new schools and universities at home, yet they found the money to reduce all 12 of Gaza’s universities to dust in the first 100 days of the war.
In Europe, military spending rose 16 percent year on year in 2023. Shortly after the outbreak of the Ukraine war in 2022, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz announced a new €100 billion pot to be spent on German rearmament. This comes on top of a 55 percent increase in defence spending since 2014.
That money has to come from somewhere, and this year, €30.6 billion will be cut from public spending across the board, touching healthcare, childcare, and public transport. And this is just the beginning.
In Britain, in the last year alone, defence spending rose by 7.9 percent. Compare this with a 1.2 percent cut in healthcare planned for 2024, the biggest real terms cut to health spending in Britain since the 1970s. Britain's new 'Labour' Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, insisted that he couldn't promise money for the crumbling health care system or hungry children but he immediately pledged billions in arms for Ukraine.
The situation is the same in other imperialist countries. In Japan spending on defence is up 11 percent in a year; in Sweden 12 percent. The picture is the same almost everywhere.
At NATO’s 75th anniversary summit this year, it was announced that a record number of the alliance’s members are spending over 2 percent of GDP on defence: 23 out of the bloc's 31 members, up from just three 10 years ago. And yet, even this was not deemed good enough.
The imperialists have made clear that their militarisation plans have barely commenced. They are preparing for an epoch of war and destruction, one into which their system draws us ever deeper. An ever-greater proportion of human effort will be wasted in the utterly unproductive manufacture of arms.
Far from adding anything to the economy, arms manufacturing is directed precisely at destroying production. Hundreds of billions being spent this way without anything productive or useful being created will inevitably stoke further inflation, which will be felt by millions. We will be thus forced to pay for rearmament a second time: not just in smaller budgets for education, healthcare, etc., but in higher prices.
Imagine what could be done with this figure of $2.2 trillion a year and rising. This money alone would cover two-thirds of the estimated $3.5 trillion per annum investment estimated to be necessary to fight climate change. Or we could give everyone free, quality education. How many doctors and nurses could be trained to staff revamped healthcare systems that at present are being allowed to crumble? A mere $40 billion annually (less than 2 percent of global military spending) could feed the 850 million people presently living in hunger.
In one fell swoop, we could solve any number of the numerous problems humanity faces. And why are we not doing so? Only because the imperialist vultures must protect their profits and domains with bristling walls of guns, tanks and artillery.
We say:
Smash NATO and other imperialist treaties and organisations!
Healthcare not warfare!
Books not bombs!
Expropriate the banks and weapons manufacturers!
Where there are trillion-dollar troughs, there are those with their snouts buried in them. The death merchants, like Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, General Dynamics, BAE Systems and others, are licking their lips at the prospect of an epoch of heightened imperialist war.
“You know, the Israel situation obviously is a terrible one, frankly,” the Chief Financial Officer of arms manufacturer General Dynamics lamented at a meeting with investors two weeks after the commencement of Israel’s full-scale slaughter in Gaza began. But his demeanour changed the next instant, as he outlined the fabulous prospects that the war opened up for orders of artillery shells.
The death merchants are licking their lips at the prospect of an epoch of heightened imperialist war / Image: Ministry of Defense of Ukraine, Wikimedia Commons
As Lenin famously put it more than a century ago: “War is ‘terrible’? Yes, terribly profitable.”
Since February 2022, British arms manufacturer, BAE Systems, has seen its share price double, and it expects its sales to rise a further 12 percent in 2024. Whilst the rest of the world economy wallows in the doldrums, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics and Northrop Grumman expect their share prices to rise between 5 and 7 percent this year.
These corporations are regularly making 10 to 12 percent annual returns by fuelling the imperialists’ war machines. Where else on Earth are such immense returns being made?
Supermarkets, energy giants, and others are also regularly taking advantage of disruption to supply chains and other spill out of war to boost prices, not to mention those that sweep in once a war is over to profit from reconstruction. We say: confiscate the profits derived from militarism and expropriate the war industries.
Many pacifist advocates of disarmament, with the best of intentions, call for the closure of arms factories. But in so doing, they inadvertently serve to alienate this powerful sector of workers, who would thereby be laid off. Hundreds of thousands of highly-skilled workers are employed in the arms industries. This is not to mention the numerous academics whose research is bent by investors from the defence sector towards advancing the art of mass murder. Instead of throwing the workers, along with the factories, on the scrap heap, these skills must be put to better use.
Rather than shutting down these factories, the nationalisation of the arms industry and major banks under workers’ control would allow them to be repurposed to create socially useful goods. Under workers’ control, with full funding from the expropriated banking sector and seized profits of the arms dealers, the workers would easily be able to develop plans to repurpose factories.
Instead of creating means of destruction, in a very short space of time, they could turn out socially useful goods, connected to budding green industries for example. The possibility has been demonstrated in practice: we point to the example of the Lucas plan in Britain in the 1970s, when workers at an arms factory developed precisely such a detailed, costed plan for the repurposing of their factory.
Therefore, we say:
Expropriate the war profiteers!
Expropriate the merchants of death!
Expropriate the banks that are tied by a million threads to the war industries!
No to compensation!
All nationalised companies to be put under workers’ control to retool factories for socially useful purposes!
Defend democratic rights!
All throughout the West, this rush towards militarism is taking place under the same slogans: battleships and bombs are needed to ‘ensure our safety’ and ‘safeguard our democracy’.
And what about this ‘democracy’ that they are supposedly ‘safeguarding’? Everywhere, militarisation is accompanied by the same thing: censorship, a hysterical campaign against all opposition to military adventures, outright repression, and the erosion of hard-won democratic rights.
The war on Gaza is receiving full support from western regimes / Image: own work
The war on Gaza is receiving full support from western regimes, despite the fact that the vast majority of the population opposes it. Where is the ‘democracy’ here?
In Germany, the ruling class has really whipped up hysteria. They are now mixing up their full support for slaughter in Gaza with an anti-immigrant, Islamophobic campaign, with new laws being introduced that would scandalously require new citizens to acknowledge the state of Israel’s right to exist.
We’ve seen peaceful anti-genocide protests banned, student societies closed down, and encampments brutally repressed by police from UCLA to the University of Amsterdam. The same police stand idly by whilst Zionist mobs attack defenceless students. In Germany and France, we’ve seen attempts to ban pro-Palestine protests. Former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis was even banned from entering Germany for a Palestine solidarity conference. Where is the sacred right to ‘free assembly’?
Meanwhile those that oppose the ongoing wars in Ukraine and Gaza are smeared by the ‘free’ press as ‘Putin agents’, ‘antisemites’, ‘Hamas sympathisers’, and so on. In France we’ve seen a vicious campaign by the press and all parties, of right and ‘left’, attacking Mélenchon and La France Insoumise as ‘antisemitic’ for opposing the Gaza war. Here is the much-celebrated ‘free press’ in action.
If nothing else, we are told that under capitalism we all have one, inviolable democratic right: the right to spend our money how we want. And yet many governments are now openly discussing anti-BDS laws, which would make it illegal to urge people to boycott Israel. Many US states and US and British universities and public bodies already have such bans against BDS in place.
We are told that capitalism and democracy inevitably go together. This illusion is evaporating upon contact with reality. In times of boom, at least in the rich countries, the ruling class could afford to allow certain democratic freedoms. But the sharper class and national antagonisms become, the more the ruling class is forced to dispense with the formalities of democracy. For the bankrupt capitalist class, this is a luxury they can less and less afford.
We say:
Defend the right to free speech! No silencing of the anti-imperialists.
Defend the right to protest! Against repression of the anti-war movement!
End the criminalisation of the movement against the slaughter in Gaza!
To end war we must end capitalism!
Capitalism means war. Since the eruption of the crisis in 2008, markets and investment opportunities have been shrinking. Capitalism has outlived itself. The productive forces are suffocating in the straightjacket of national markets and private property. The rise of militarism and war, as each imperialist power tries to carve out markets and resources at the expense of its competitors, is the logical end point of the crisis of capitalism.
The relative decline of US imperialism is accentuating this process. It is no longer able to prevent its rivals from asserting themselves at a regional level. Its allies also understand that they must rely on their own military might to defend their interests, hence the military build up in Europe and the Pacific region.
The world’s various gangs of robbers, enemies and friends of the US alike, have carefully studied the bloody horror unfolding in Ukraine, which has exposed America’s weakness. The theatres of the imperialist wars and proxy wars to come promise to be deadly, attritional meat grinders. For that, soldiers, conventional weapons, and huge amounts of artillery will be required.
The theatres of the imperialist wars and proxy wars to come promise to be deadly, attritional meat grinders / Image: Ministry of Defense of Ukraine, Wikimedia Commons
The workers and the youth will be the ones to pay: with their living standards and with their lives. On top of the hundreds of billions being poured into war industries, we have the open discussion of reintroducing conscription in many countries for the first time since the Cold War.
Lamentably, the so-called Left, to the extent that it has not fallen into line with one or another imperialist power, has restricted itself to the most pathetic pacifist appeals for ‘peace’ – and, worse still, for organisations like the United Nations to step in. But imperialist ‘peace’ always forms merely the prelude to and the period of preparation for new imperialist wars.
As for the United Nations, Lenin’s description of its predecessor, the League of Nations, is quite apt: it is merely a “thieves’ kitchen”. It is just a forum where the rights and livelihoods of entire peoples are traded as small change in the relations between imperialist powers. When the thieves cannot agree among themselves, it is useless. When US imperialism can get the approval of the UN for its imperialist aims abroad, as in the Korean war in 1950-53, the assassination of Lumumba in Congo in 1961, the Gulf War of 1991, and the military intervention in Haiti from 2004, it is happy to use the body as a fig-leaf for its naked interests. When the UN votes resolutions it does not like (as in the case of Cuba and Palestine), it safely ignores them in the knowledge that there will be no consequences.
What the pacifists fail to understand is that militarism and war are not the product of evil policies on the part of this or that bourgeois party or ministry. No international body can ‘rise above’ the belligerents and impose peace on the world. War and militarism are an organic, necessary result of capitalism in its epoch of imperialist decay.
As Clausewitz brilliantly explained, “war is merely the continuation of politics by other means.” And the policy of revolutionary communists in times of imperialist war is merely the continuation of our policy in times of imperialist peace.
In the heart of the imperialist countries, in the words of that great revolutionary and fighter against militarism, Karl Liebknecht, “our main enemy is at home!” We must fight to bring down the warmongers at home, to stop the imperialist designs of our own ruling class. Only class war can halt the imperialist war machine. Only socialist revolution can overthrow capitalism and open the way for a true era of peace.
We therefore reiterate our appeal. To workers, to young people, to left-wing and communist organisations, to trade union branches, student groups and to anyone serious about ending war, militarism and imperialism: let us work together.
We wish to work with all those who agree on these fundamental points towards building a serious international, revolutionary, anti-imperialist campaign against militarism and war. The mood is there for it, it is our job to organise it and give it a clear political programme of action. We say:
Against imperialism and militarism! Stop endless wars!
Down with the warmongers!
Peace between peoples, war against the billionaires!
Workers of the World Unite!