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The video gives a clear example of what anti-Semitism is and what it is not. Criticising Israel, a nation state, is not anti-Semitism. Opposing Zionism is not anti-Semitism either. Zionism, a racist ideology or Jewish extremism, is at the heart of the crisis in the Middle East and Israel's genocide in Gaza and the occupied territories.
The image used by the Trump Administration that Bernie Sanders refers to in the video, is clearly anti-Semitic propaganda. It is undeniable when one looks at the image the Nazis used to whip up hatred and violence against Jews in Germany and throughout Europe.
Then there is another example on the left; the poster used by the White Army forces, the counterrevolutionaries in Russia that fought the Bolsheviks and the Russian workers' that overthrew feudalism and capitalism. The US, Britain and France had forces in that game.
The poster is an image of Leon Trotsky a key leader of the Russian Revolution in that same role as the devilish Jew. Many of the Bolshevik leaders were Jews as were many revolutionaries fighting to overthrow Tzarism, the brutal feudal regime that had discriminated against them for centuries, forcing them to live in selected areas and waging regular pogroms (mob riots) against their communities.The capitalists of Western Europe supported the White Army. Up until this period Russia's economy was in the grasp of western banks and western capitalists were afraid their assets would be appropriated if the Russian Revolution was successful.
It's inconceivable that Trump and his advisors aren't aware of the Anti-Semitic nature of their campaign material. Trump can just deny it as he did when asked what he thought about the Signal fiasco (see video to the right) as there's no real consequences for doing so; there is no opposition party in the US and the trade union hierarchy is silent in the main. It's my view that the Jew hating image is directed at his extreme right wing White Nationalist, Evangelical Christian, Neo-fascist base, a right bunch of anti-Semites, all of them.
Trump, unlike Hitler does not have an organised right wing militia he can call out at any moment smash strikes, protests and opposition in the streets. But there are numerous groups, some of whom answered his call on jan 6th to storm the US Capitol, that can and will fill the role of Hitlers Brownshirts at some point in time-----the image is fodder for them.
I think Trump is in a stronger position this time around if he is forced to quit after this term in some way or another, and will just as likely call his thugs out again. Workers, organised and unnorganized need to take this seriously and be prepare to defend ourselves and our communities with our own self defence organisations if events turn really bad really fast.
I wanted to provide a first-hand report from a community event that I attended last weekend in Southern Arizona. On Saturday, March 22nd, I participated in the Cesar Chavez/Dolores Huerta March and Rally. I first heard about this event during a general membership meeting of my local union and eventually I received an invite text message that was sent out to members about two weeks before. Since this was the 25th Annual March I thought it might have a decent turnout.
Before I begin, I want to make a few points perfectly clear to readers of this article. First, I am pro worker and support any attempts to develop militant fighting labor unions that are democratically run by members from within. Second, I do not support the “team concept” that has allowed the labor union leadership of the past several decades to abandon its responsibility to represent and protect the interests of dues paying members over their financial interests with the bosses and the alliances with one (sometimes both) of the two major political parties of capital and big business. Lastly, this is not a hit piece designed to shut down activism. However, I think it is important to identify where workers might be able to seek common interests and have a collective opportunity to fight back against the current and future mobilization of government resources against the working class and poor in our society.
I am a public sector employee in an at-will state where multiple state and regional governments have divided their workforce of full-time positions. Some workers have union protections, others are at-will employees, and another group are contractors from one of the many staffing agencies and nonprofits in the area. My particular job is with an organization that has more than 4,000 non-management positions, although 700 of them are at-will employees who can be fired at any time. Of this group only a little more than 100 employees are dues paying members of our division of the local union. I don’t have the exact figures of active members for all divisions in the local, but judging by the turnout at this event, it can’t be too many.
On the morning of the event I drove to the southside of town to a community park which was to be the rally point at the end of the march. We were told that shuttles would be available to transport marchers to the starting point, a local high school some 2.2 miles away, and upon my arrival I was able to locate our tent and the few members setting up. I had a handful of co-workers tell me they couldn’t make it, but I was hopeful that a few others would come through and take part in this activity. Unfortunately, I was holding out in vain because I was the only person from my division who showed up. Again, our local has multiple divisions, but two had nobody show up to represent them, two others had only one person each (myself included), and another had about half a dozen members present. If you include the four full-time staffers we would be lucky if a dozen folks were there from our union.
To complicate matters further, the shuttle vans weren’t running as efficiently as promised and people had to carpool to drop off marchers at the starting point. As members piled out of trucks and SUVs, right away we could see tables with tee shirts and the local media was present. With small drones buzzing overhead, a few police officers and vehicles were there mainly to provide traffic blocks.
The event was kicked off by members of the local Native American tribe performing an indigenous ritual. We heard from the event organizers, a county supervisor and her family who were there as well as the mayor. A U.S. Congressional Representative had recently passed away, so this event was also billed as a memorial for his family and supporters. Less than a half dozen unions were present, but participants from various movements brought their signs and banners. Groups representing Veterans for Peace and Free Palestine had a cadre of activists and the usual suspects of self-described socialist revolutionaries were out with about ten members. An estimation of the total marchers for this portion of the event was about 150 people.
The crowd exited the high school parking lot and made its way through a small neighborhood that had the occasional resident coming outside and waving. Once on the main road, the route turned south and went past the Veterans Administration Health Center. Aside from the extended wait times at traffic lights, and the sporadic horn honks and waves, it was a typical Saturday morning for a community that had folks eating at local restaurants, shopping at discount stores, and working in the countless vehicle repair shops and garages.
For most of the march people were repeating the cliched chants in unison with shouts of “this is what democracy looks like”, “Trump must go”, and “Si se puede.” But about a mile short of the finish line, the chants were less enthusiastic and the honorary group that was leading the march peeled off with a few hugs and kisses before jumping into vehicles waiting along the route. I found out almost immediately that they would be speaking at a “fighting oligarchy” Bernie Sanders/AOC event at a local high school and they would not be addressing the crowd gathered at the park.
The final mile eventually had the crowd enter into the park where more tents had been set up and a car club had filled one side of the parking lot with low-riders. There were speeches by representatives from community groups and more dances and music by performers. The only other event of notice was when I met an organizer from the Starbucks union and had a brief conversation about his activities. I quickly realized that this event was a dud and I decided to go home.
I had noticed an increase in traffic around the military base on my way to the park that morning and as I was driving away I could see jets flying overhead. Later that afternoon I saw news flashes from the Bernie-AOC rally. The radio stated 30,000 and other outlets reported only 20,000. Let’s just say they had 10,000 and that was exponentially greater than our tiny march on the southside. Both events paled in comparison to the total number of attendees at the air show. It’s been going on for more than 30 years and has been reported to routinely draw more than 100,000 spectators in previous events. We love our spectacle!
Back to Sanders and the progressives inside the Democratic Party. From what I gathered, Bernie wasn’t offering anything new from the position he has held since he ran for president in 2016. When he had a chance to contest the primary election with a floor vote, his first act was to tell his supporters to vote for Hillary Clinton. He wasn’t alone. Dolores Huerta was also telling voters to do the same. In spite of a push by countless voters to form an alternative, all of the Democratic Party front groups, donors, and political action committees shepherded voters to the polls in the name of a “brand new congress” that would be “indivisible.” Alexandria Ocasio Cortez was elected in those midterms and she quickly became a media darling as one of a small group of progressive women of color referred to as “the Squad.” Not much happened, however, when the squad was in position to leverage their votes for Speaker of the House into supporting Medicare for All. Pelosi was able to hold them in check and she was quick to remind everyone that the Democrats were capitalists.
Biden and Harris came to office in 2020 and workers seem to have completely forgotten that “worker Joe” from blue-collar Scranton came out against the railway strikes during his presidency. What was the call to voters in 2024? Huerta, Sanders, and AOC told everyone to vote for Harris. That was a catastrophe that resulted in Trump regaining the White House.
In the first two months of the second Trump presidency, the ruling class is making drastic changes to the federal government, foreign policy, and U.S. labor law. His blatant disregard for the accepted norms of Washington are in full-effect. He half-ass followed these protocols during his first time in office partly because he was surrounded by insiders during the beginning of his term. He is now surrounded by sycophants and ineptitude en masse, but he has pulled the mask off of the charade in American politics.
His closing of many institutions and downsizing the regulatory agencies of the government has called the bluff of the Democratic Party and their allies in the media and what is left of the labor union leadership. When the Senate could have voted down a continuing resolution to keep the government funded and forced a slowdown to the madness, Trump knew that too many Democrats like Schumer and Co. wouldn’t risk biting the corporate hand that feeds them and keeps their campaign funds rolling in. So, what options do working class families and the poor actually have when it comes to voting for change?
My excitement about building a labor union to fight back has been diminished when even organized labor isn’t offering a way out. Voting blue no matter who didn’t work in 2018 and it will not work now. It appears labor leadership is going to crank up the same old song and dance about voting for a Democrat to fight Trump’s “fascism.”
This is an approach that many “woking class” voters are rushing into. I met with a coworker and fellow union member a few days before this march. He told me that he was too busy helping out a state assembly person, a Democrat from a real estate family in the area. He was recently elected in 2024 and, like AOC, he was a Democratic Party insider interning for congresspersons and working in all of the campaigns. One of his first moves in office was to propose a bill to adopt the term “howdy” as the official state greeting. Is this the resistance? I didn’t have neither the energy, nor the time to argue with my coworker. He will find out eventually.
What I have realized over the course of the events of the past week, including the funeral of the U.S. House Rep, is that there is no real response to Trump from those who claim to be leading the resistance. He has a party that is almost in lockstep behind him, a significant portion of American business owners, tech billionaires including Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerburg, and the Alphabet bunch are all behind him. The question remains where will many of his working class supporters go? Especially, when they begin to lose the benefits and programs they are relying on to survive because Musk and Trump’s other corporate handlers are slashing and burning the regulatory structure of the federal government.
Perhaps the consistency of Bernie Sanders' message will finally resonate with working class voters, but the solution has to be something other than voting for the other team. With active union membership at historic lows and labor unions under new attacks at the federal level (not discounting decades of anti-worker laws and court decisions) could the new worker movement against capital come from outside of the traditional means seen in the past? Will it look like the #RedforEd movements in 2018?
When sixty percent of Americans are living paycheck-to-paycheck and the wealthiest people getting even more tax breaks, it is clear that the system has been tilted in favor of the ruling class. I am of the opinion that this is just the latest in a long line of attacks that goes back to right after World War II when a bi-partisan Congress passed the Taft-Hartley Act to limit labor power in the U.S. Follow that up with the Red Scare, a resurgence of conservative values, the end of the Cold War, and a downward economic slide for most workers and we have our current predicament.
When this new movement takes hold and begins to push back against the austerity measures of the capitalists who control the levers of government, it will more than likely be composed of workers from all backgrounds and voting blocs. Let’s not forget that Trump and Harris both received more than 75 million votes in the 2024 election. However, 90 million eligible voters didn’t even cast a ballot. Who might they be waiting on? Will they become part of this new worker’s movement and become politically active in the future?
If Bernie and Co. really want to challenge Trump and the oligarchy in the U.S. they should be running campaigns centered on the day-to-day issues confronting most Americans. Instead, they are promising more of the same tired rhetoric to re-elect their team who, after getting into office, then does nothing to deliver on those promises. The truth of the matter is that the two parties of capital will not solve the problems created by our current political economy. At the end of the day, a progressive democrat is still a democrat… even if they claim to be a democratic socialist.
This realization also holds true to our history and the history of Chavez and Huerta. They accomplished much for farm workers during the 1960s, only to become staunch supporters of the Democratic Party. They were reformers at best, and political party machine operators in the end. True revolutionaries like Epifanio Camacho were erased from working class struggles because he knew that you had to confront the power of the wealthy with the power of the masses. Camacho was also a militant socialist.
I am hopeful new leaders will rise up from within the working class and take the lead on demanding more. The current system is rigged and broken and workers should not vote for either party until candidates come forward from a bottom-up labor movement. They should challenge the ineffective union leadership which has been collaborating with the ruling classes for nearly a century.
Until you see someone fighting for Medicare-for-All, raising the minimum wage, more affordable housing, quality education for everyone, and healthy nutritious food as a right, keep your enthusiasm tampered and do your best to help your friends and neighbors. I am reminded of a movie from many years ago titled, “All the King’s Men.” The main character is a politician running for governor in Louisiana and he makes campaign stops at county fairs and rural community events. Anyway, he often ends his speeches with the following:
“You’re a hick, and nobody ever helped a hick but a hick himself.”
Workers in the U.S. are going to have to stop waiting for a savior to lead them to the promised land because they will never show up. Workers are going to have to take the reins of society themselves if we are going to see any positive changes aimed to help them in the near future.
The statement above expresses the reason Marx is so demonized. A simple slogan, an appeal like "workers of all countries unite" terrifies the ruling class. It's equivalent to "unite the slaves" during the rule of the slaveocracy in the US or in Ancient Greece. "Land to the peasants" is another example for the feudal economic system.
It is a recognition that human society consists of classes and that these classes are based on their role in the social production of human needs and therefore human life.
The government of Guatemala led by Arbenz offered to buy its own land from the United Fruit company that was joined at the hip to the US government in 1953. Arbenz offered to pay market prices but the US government demanded ten times the price knowing Guatemala could not afford to pay it. Arbenz wanted to give the land to rural Guatemalans, mostly indigenous people so they could produce food for themselves. The US government overthrew Arbenz, blamed communism and placed a flunky in power.
Same with Iran in 1953-54. Iran wanted to control its own oil industry so the US along with the British that owned it, overthrew the democratically elected government of Iran and installed the Shah. The threat of communism was excuse once again.
Millions of working class people, rural and urban, die because they resist class oppression. We know we are exploited, all workers understand what the "boss" is and does.
And there's a reason Marx's views are seen as the solution to the violence and destruction of capitalism and the so called free market by millions of people throughout the world---because they are a solution.
That various groups or undemocratic or autocratic regimes claim the legacy of Marxism is not due to the failure of this philosophy or what is really a way of understanding the world and world history and a method for freeing humanity from class oppression and controlling our own destiny. It's the interpretation and false application of it.
That a philosophical understanding of how the world actually works can be so violently opposed by the ruling classes, is so viciously assaulted, is truth enough to its validity.
As Marx stated, "Philosophers have only interpreted the world-----the point is to change it.”
The Trump administration turned longstanding U.S. policy on its head this week by stating that foreign governments like Russia, China and Iran don’t really want to pick a fight with the United States.
The administration’s Annual Threat Assessment released on Tuesday is as close to an articulation of a Trump doctrine as anything we’ve seen so far. But in a week dominated by Signal-gate coverage, the assessment has been roundly ignored by the news media.
Drawing on information from across the entire intelligence community (IC), the annual assessment normally feels like a predictable laundry list of “threats” that sound more like a fundraising pitch for the national security state than serious analysis.
Not this time.
The intelligence agencies conclude that Russia overall has been weakened by the Ukraine war, even though Vladimir Putin’s grip on power is stronger than ever. But absent is the usual rhetoric about Moscow’s broader (and certain) threat to Western Europe.
The Ukraine war is also characterized as being seen by Russia as a “proxy conflict with the West” and thus an element of a new Cold War. In the past year, the assessment says, Russia has “seized the upper hand” in what it calls “a grinding war of attrition” playing into to Russia’s military advantages.
U.S. intelligence’s concern here isn’t that Russia poses a threat to the West — remarkably, the assessment never once mentions NATO! — but more that Moscow might secure more concessions in the negotiations to end the war. (The assessment points to the “increased risk of nuclear war” as creating “urgency” for the U.S. to end to the war.)
“Concerns over escalation control and directly confronting the United States”have held Putin back from moving further on Europe, the assessment says. Such concerns have even “tempered the pace and scope” of Russia’s relationships with other adversary nations. And the future outside of Russia’s immediate military gains doesn't look bright, with mounting demographic and economic challenges.
China, which both the Obama and Biden administrations cast as the chief national security threat to U.S. (and the source of inevitable conflict), gets similarly unusual treatment. “China’s leaders will seek opportunities to reduce tension with Washington,” the assessment says.
While warning that China “seeks to compete with the United States as the leading economic power in the world” and will “continue to expand its coercive and subversive malign influence activities to weaken the United States internally and globally,” the assessment downplays the military threat. It instead focuses on the possibility of “miscalculations potentially leading to conflict.”
There is little talk of China as a threat to its neighbors, and the tone seems to focus on avoiding conflict. China is “more cautious than Russia, Iran, and North Korea about risking its economic and diplomatic image in the world by being too aggressive and disruptive,” the assessment concludes.
On Iran there’s another significant departure from the rhetoric of the Biden administration, and even Trump’s own rhetoric. Noting the many blows that Iran has sustained in the past year and a half — to its proxies like Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis, in the loss of Syria, and to Iran’s own air defenses and military forces — the assessment says that leaders in Tehran are beginning “to raise fundamental questions regarding Iran’s approach.”
The section concludes with remarks that make Iran sound less like the foreboding ‘greatest sponsor of terrorism’ Washington usually describes it as and instead almost meek. “Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei continues to desire to avoid embroiling Iran in an expanded, direct conflict with the United States and its allies,” the assessment says, adding that “Iranian leaders recognize the country is at one of its most fragile points since the Iran-Iraq war” — the bloody conflict that devastated Iran in the 80s.
Even on the subject of the hermit kingdom, North Korea, the assessment avoids the familiar hyperbole. “Since coming to power, Kim generally hasrelied on non-lethal coercive activities … to win concessions and counter U.S. and South Korean military, diplomatic, and civilian activities,” the assessment says. Gone is the ominous talk of a 15-minute march to Seoul.
Two months into the administration, for all its chaos, this is no Reagan-like military buildup threatening to bury its enemies, or Bush-style tirade about the Axis of Evil. Instead, the intelligence agencies have articulated a view of the world that is fairly coolheaded.
The leading "threat" to America, befitting Trump’s personal focus, is identified as transnational criminal organizations (like cartels), which for the first time appears as the first section of the annual assessment. With fentanyl and synthetic opioids racking up 52,000 American deaths in one year alone, as the report notes, it’s hard to argue against this being a bigger threat than, say, North Korea.
The relatively judicious picture is jarring to see coming from the national security state, for whom fear mongering about adversary nations is an Olympic sport, with medals awarded in the next budget. Let’s see if the intelligence is heeded.
Warmongering has reached fever pitch in Europe. It all started with the US under Trump deciding that paying for the military ‘protection’ of European capitals from potential enemies was not worth it. Trump wants to stop the US paying for the bulk of the financing of NATO and providing its military might and he wants to end the Ukraine-Russia conflict so he can concentrate US imperialist strategy on the ‘Western hemisphere’ and the Pacific, with the aim of ‘containing’ and weakening China’s economic rise.
Trump’s strategy has panicked the European ruling elites. They are suddenly concerned that Ukraine will lose to the Russian forces and before long Putin will be at the borders of Germany or as UK premier Keir Starmer and a former head of MI5 both claim, “in British streets”.
Whatever the validity of this supposed danger, the opportunity has been created for Europe’s military and secret services to ‘up the ante’ and call for an end to the so-called ‘peace dividend’ that began after the fall of the dreaded Soviet Union and now begin the process of rearmament. The EU Foreign Policy Chief Kaja Kallas spelt out the EU’s foreign policy as she saw it: “If together we are not able to put enough pressure on Moscow, then how can we claim that we can defeat China?”
Several arguments are offered for rearming European capitalism. Bronwen Maddox, director of Chatham House, the international relations ‘think-tank’, which mainly presents the views of the British military state, kicked it off with the claim that “spending on ‘defence’ “is the greatest public benefit of all” because it is necessary for the survival of ‘democracy’ against authoritarian forces. But there is a price to be paid for defending democracy: “the UK may have to borrow more to pay for the defence spending it so urgently needs. In the next year and beyond, politicians will have to brace themselves to reclaim money through cuts to sickness benefits, pensions and healthcare.” She went on: “If it took decades to build up this spending, it may take decades to reverse it,” so Britain needs to get on with it. “Starmer will soon have to name a date by which the UK will meet 2.5 per cent of GDP on military spending — and there is already a chorus arguing that this figure needs to be higher. In the end, politicians will have to persuade voters to surrender some of their benefits to pay for defence.”
Martin Wolf, the liberal Keynesian economic guru of the Financial Times, launched in:“spending on defence will need to rise substantially. Note that it was 5 per cent of UK GDP, or more, in the 1970s and 1980s. It may not need to be at those levels in the long term: modern Russia is not the Soviet Union. Yet it may need to be as high as that during the build-up, especially if the US does withdraw.”
How to pay for this? “If defence spending is to be permanently higher, taxes must rise, unless the government can find sufficient spending cuts, which is doubtful.” But don’t worry, spending on tanks, troops and missiles is actually beneficial to an economy, says Wolf. “The UK can also realistically expect economic returns on its defence investments. Historically, wars have been the mother of innovation.” He then cites the wonderful examples of the gains that Israel and Ukraine have made from their wars: “Israel’s “start up economy” began in its army. The Ukrainians now have revolutionised drone warfare.” He does not mention the human cost involved in innovation by war. Wolf moves on: “The crucial point, however, is that the need to spend significantly more on defence should be viewed as more than just a necessity and also more than just a cost, though both are true. If done in the right way, it is also an economic opportunity.” So war is the way out of economic stagnation.
Wolf shouts that Britain needs to get on with it: “If the US is no longer a proponent and defender of liberal democracy, the only force potentially strong enough to fill the gap is Europe. If Europeans are to succeed with this heavy task, they must begin by securing their home. Their ability to do so will depend in turn on resources, time, will and cohesion ….. Undoubtedly, Europe can substantially increase its spending on defence.” Wolf argued that we must defend the vaunted “European values” of personal freedom and liberal democracy. “To do so will be economically costly and even dangerous but necessary… because “Europe has ‘fifth columns’ almost everywhere.” He concluded that “If Europe does not mobilise quickly in its own defence, liberal democracy might founder altogether. Today feels a bit like the 1930s. This time, alas, the US looks to be on the wrong side.”
‘Progressive conservative’, FT columnist Janan Ganesh spelt it out baldly: “Europe must trim its welfare state to build a warfare state. There is no way of defending the continent without cuts to social spending.” He made it clear that the gains working people made after the end of WW2 but were gradually whittled away in the last 40 years must now be totally dispensed with. “The mission now is to defend Europe’s lives. How, if not through a smaller welfare state, is a better-armed continent to be funded?” The golden age of the post-war welfare state is not possible anymore. “Anyone under 80 who has spent their life in Europe can be excused for regarding a giant (sic – MR) welfare state as the natural way of things. In truth, it was the product of strange historical circumstances, which prevailed in the second half of the 20th century and no longer do.”
Yes, correct, the gains for working people in the golden age were the exception from the norm in capitalism (‘strange historical circumstances’). But now “pension and healthcare liabilities were going to be hard enough for the working population to meet even before the current defence shock…..Governments will have to be stingier with the old. Or, if that is unthinkable given their voting weight, the blade will have to fall on more productive areas of spending … Either way, the welfare state as we have known it must retreat somewhat: not enough that we will no longer call it by that name, but enough to hurt.”Ganesh, the true conservative, sees rearmament as an opportunity for capital to make the necessary reductions in welfare and public services. “Spending cuts are easier to sell on behalf of defence than on behalf of a generalised notion of efficiency…. Still, that isn’t the purpose of defence, and politicians must insist on this point. The purpose is survival.” So so-called ‘liberal capitalism’ needs to survive and that means cutting living standards for the poorest and spending money on going to war. From welfare state to warfare state.
Poland’s Prime minister Donald Tusk took the warmongering up another notch. He said that Poland “must reach for the most modern possibilities, also related to nuclear weapons and modern unconventional weapons”. We can presume that ‘unconventional’ meant chemical weapons? Tusk: “I say this with full responsibility, it is not enough to purchase conventional weapons, the most traditional ones.”
So nearly everywhere in Europe, the call is for increased ‘defence’ spending and rearmament. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has proposed a Rearm Europe Plan which aims to mobilise up to €800 billion to finance a massive ramp-up in defence spending. “We are in an era of re-armament, and Europe is ready to massively boost its defence spending, both to respond to the short-term urgency to act and to support Ukraine, but also to address the long-term need to take on more responsibility for our own European security,” she said. Under an ’emergency escape clause’, the EU Commission will call for increased spending on arms even if it breaks existing fiscal rules. Unused COVID funds (E90bn) and more borrowing through a “new instrument” will follow, to provide €150 billion in loans to member states to finance joint defence investments in pan-European capabilities including air and missile defence, artillery systems, missiles and ammunition, drones and anti-drone systems. Von der Leyen claimed that if EU countries increase their defence spending by 1.5% of GDP on average, €650 billion could be freed up over the coming four years. But there would be no extra funding for investment, infrastructure projects or public services, because Europe must devote its resources for preparing for war.
At the same time, as the FT put it, the British government “is making a rapid transition from green to battleship grey by now placing defence at the heart of its approach to technology and manufacturing.” Starmer announced a rise in defence spending to 2.5% of GDP by 2027 and an ambition to reach 3% into the 2030s. Britain’s finance minister Rachel Reeves, who has been steadily cutting spending on child credits, winter payments for the aged and disability benefits, announced that the remit of the Labour government’s new National Wealth Fund would be changed to let it invest in defence. British arms manufacturers are cock a hoop. “Leaving aside the ethics of weapons production, which deters some investors, there is plenty to like about defence as an industrial strategy” said one CEO.
Over in Germany, the Chancellor-elect in the new coalition government, Friedrich Merz, pushed through the German parliament a law to end the so-called ‘fiscal brake’ that made it illegal for German governments to borrow beyond a strict limit or raise debt to pay for public spending. But now military deficit spending has priority above everything else, the only budget with no limit. The defence spending target will dwarf the deficit spending available for climate control and for badly needed infrastructure.
Annual government spending due to the new German fiscal package will be larger than the spending boom that came with the postwar Marshall Plan and with German reunification in the early 1990s.
That brings me to the economic arguments for military spending. Can military expenditure kickstart an economy that is stuck in a depression, as much of Europe has been since the end of the Great Recession in 2009? Some Keynesians think so. German arms manufacturer Rheinmetall says that Volkswagen’s idle Osnabrück factory could be a prime candidate for conversion to military production. Keynesian economist, Matthew Klein, co-author with Michael Pettis of Trade Wars are Class Wars, greeted this news: “Germany is already building tanks. I am encouraging them to build many more tanks.”
The theory of ‘military Keynesianism’ has a history. One variant of this was the concept of the ‘permanent arms economy’ that was espoused by some Marxists to explain why the major economies did not go into a depression after the end of WW2, but instead entered a long boom with only mild recessions, that lasted until the 1974-5 international slump. This ‘golden age’ could only be explained, they said, by permanent military spending to keep up aggregate demand and sustain full employment.
But the evidence for this theory of the post-war boom is not there. UK government military spending fell from over 12% of GDP in 1952 to around 7% in 1960 and declined through the 1960s to reach about 5% by the end of the decade. And yet the British economy did better than at any time since. In all the advanced capitalist countries, defence spending was a substantially smaller fraction of total output by the end of the 1960s than in the early 1950s: from 10.2% of GDP in 1952-53 at the height of the Korean War; to only 6.5% by 1967. Yet economic growth was sustained pretty much through the 1960s and early 1970s.
The post-war boom was not the result of Keynesian-style government spending on arms, but is explained by the post-war high rate of profitability on capital invested by the major economies. If anything, it was the other way around. Because the major economies were growing relatively fast and profitability was high, governments could afford to sustain military spending as part of their geopolitical ‘cold war’ objective to weaken and crush the Soviet Union – the then main enemy of imperialism.
Above all, military Keynesianism is against the interests of working people and humanity. Are we in favour of making arms to kill people in order to create jobs? This argument, often promoted by some trade union leaders, puts money before lives. Keynes once said: “The government should pay people to dig holes in the ground and then fill them up.” People would reply. “that’s stupid, why not pay people to build roads and schools.” Keynes would respond saying “Fine, pay them to build schools. The point is it doesn’t matter what they do as long as the government is creating jobs”.
Keynes was wrong. It does matter. Keynesianism advocates digging holes and filling them up to create jobs. Military Keynesianism advocates digging graves and filling them with bodies to create jobs. If it does not matter how jobs are created then why not dramatically increase tobacco production and promote the addiction to create jobs? Currently, most people would oppose this as being directly harmful to people’s health. Making weapons (conventional and unconventional) is also directly harmful. And there are plenty of other socially useful products and services that could deliver jobs and wages for workers (like schools and homes).
The UK government’s defence minister John Healey recently insisted that boosting the arms budget would “make our defence industry the driver of economic growth in this country”. Great news. Unfortunately for Healey, the UK’s arms industry’s trade association (ADS) estimates the UK has around 55,000 arms export jobs and another 115,00 employed in the Ministry of Defence. Even if you include the latter, that is only 0.5% of the UK workforce (see CAAT’s Arms to Renewables briefing for details). Even in the US, the ratio is much the same.
There is a theoretical question often at debate in Marxist political economy. It is whether the production of weapons is productive of value in a capitalist economy. The answer is that it is, for arms producers. The arms contractors deliver goods (weapons) which are paid for by the government. The labour producing them, therefore, is productive of value and surplus value. But at the level of the whole economy, arms production is unproductive of future value, in the same way that ‘luxury goods’ for just capitalist consumption are. Arms production and luxury goods do not re-enter the next production process, either as means of production or as means of subsistence for the working class. While being productive of surplus value for the arms capitalists, the production of weapons is not reproductive and thus threatens the reproduction of capital. So if the increase in the overall production of surplus value in an economy slows and the profitability of productive capital begins to fall, then reducing available surplus value for productive investment in order to invest in military spending can damage the ‘health’ of the capitalist accumulation process.
The outcome depends on the effect on the profitability of capital. The military sector generally has a higher organic composition of capital than the average in an economy as it incorporates leading-edge technologies. So the arms sector would tend to push down the average rate of profit. On the other hand, if taxes collected by the state (or cuts in civil spending) to pay for arms manufacture are high, then wealth that might otherwise go to labour can be distributed to capital and thus can add to available surplus value. Military expenditure may have a mildly positive effect on profit rates in arms-exporting countries but not for arms-importing ones. In the latter, spending on the military is a deduction from available profits for productive investment.
In the greater scheme of things, arms spending cannot be decisive for the health of the capitalist economy. On the other hand, all-out war can help capitalism out of depression and slump. It is a key argument of Marxist economics (at least in my version) that capitalist economies can only recover in a sustained way if average profitability for the productive sectors of the economy rises significantly. And that would require sufficient destruction in the value of ‘dead capital’ (past accumulation) that is no longer profitable to employ.
The Great Depression of the 1930s in the US economy lasted so long because profitability did not recover throughout that decade. In 1938, the US corporate rate of profit was still less than half the rate of 1929. Profitability only picked up once the war economy was underway, by 1940 onwards.
So it was not ‘military Keynesianism’ that took the US economy out of the Great Depression – as some Keynesians like to think. US economic recovery from the Great Depression did not start until the world war was underway. Investment took off only from 1941 (Pearl Harbor) onwards to reach, as a share of GDP, more than double the level that investment stood at in 1940. Why was that? Well, it was not the result of a pick-up in private sector investment. What happened was a massive rise in government investment and spending. In 1940, private sector investment was still below the level of 1929 and actually fell further during the war. The state sector took over nearly all investment, as resources (value) were diverted to the production of arms and other security measures in a full war economy.
But is not increased government investment and consumption a form of Keynesian stimulus, but just at a higher level? Well, no. The difference is revealed in the continued collapse of consumption. The war economy was paid for by restricting the opportunities for workers to spend their incomes from their war-time jobs. There was forced saving through the purchase of war bonds, rationing and increased taxation to pay for the war. Government investment meant the direction and planning of production by government decree. The war economy did not stimulate the private sector, it replaced the ‘free market’ and capitalist investment for profit. Consumption did not restore economic growth as Keynesians (and those who see the cause of crisis in under-consumption) would expect; instead it was investment in mainly weapons of mass destruction.
The war decisively ended the depression. American industry was revitalized by the war and many sectors were oriented to defence production (for example, aerospace and electronics) or completely dependent on it (atomic energy). The war’s rapid scientific and technological changes continued and intensified trends begun during the Great Depression. As the war severely damaged every major economy in the world except for the US, American capitalism gained economic and political hegemony after 1945.
Guiglelmo Carchedi explained: “Why did the war bring about such a jump in profitability in the 1940‐5 period? The denominator of the rate not only did not rise, but dropped because the physical depreciation of the means of production was greater than new investments. At the same time, unemployment practically disappeared. Decreasing unemployment made higher wages possible. But higher wages did not dent profitability. In fact, the conversion of civilian into military industries reduced the supply of civilian goods. Higher wages and the limited production of consumer goods meant that labour’s purchasing power had to be greatly compressed in order to avoid inflation. This was achieved by instituting the first general income tax, discouraging consumer spending (consumer credit was prohibited) and stimulating consumer saving, principally through investment in war bonds. Consequently, labour was forced to postpone the expenditure of a sizeable portion of wages. At the same time labour’s rate of exploitation increased. In essence, the war effort was a labour‐financed massive production of means of destruction.”
Let Keynes sum it up:“It is, it seems, politically impossible for a capitalistic democracy to organize expenditure on the scale necessary to make the grand experiments which would prove my case — except in war conditions,” from The New Republic (quoted from P. Renshaw, Journal of Contemporary History 1999 vol. 34 (3) p. 377 -364).
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