The neoliberal era was dominated by ruthless exploitation and capitalist triumphalism about the “end of history.” However, this was accompanied by a naïve optimism that enlightened liberal capitalism could do away with the wars of the past and bring about an era of peace. There was talk about a “peace dividend,” the idea that the end of the Cold War would allow massive disarmament and free up vast amounts of wealth for the common good. Things obviously didn’t turn out that way.
Even in its time, this capitalist fantasy was never realized. Nonetheless, the neoliberal era did achieve relative stability between rival capitalist camps. As that era comes to an end, we’re entering a new age of disorder. Capitalism remains as predatory and exploitative as before, but now with a ramping up of militarization and global conflict. In 2023, global military spending reached an all-time high of over $2.4 trillion, a 6.8% increase from 2022. The idea of a “peace dividend” now seems quaint.
The financial crash of 2007-8 shook neoliberalism’s relative stability. Looking for a way out of the crisis, national capitalists looked to protectionism and decoupling. The process is still slow economically but speeding up on the political front. Imperialist rivalries have coalesced around two main camps based around U.S. and Chinese imperialism.
This inter-imperialist conflict dramatically produced hot wars, first with Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and then with Israel’s unleashing a genocidal war on Gaza. Added to this are less talked about hot wars in places like Sudan or the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh. Other global flashpoints remain teetering on the verge of open conflict: such as Essequibo (region disputed between Guyana and Venezuela), the Balkans, and the South China Sea. Foremost is Taiwan, where an open war would represent a dramatic escalation even compared to the war in Ukraine.
Clearly, enlightened, liberal capitalism has proved incapable of ushering in an era of peace. But that doesn’t mean we have to be resigned to endless wars for all eternity. While Marxists are not pacifists, we are optimistic about the possibility of achieving a world that does away with the social basis for war. Key to this is the role of the working class in changing society. In particular, internationalist solidarity of the working class globally has the ability to directly take on the forces responsible for war, militarism, and imperialism.
Wars Under Capitalism
War is nothing short of a tragedy. In 2023 alone, wars and violent conflicts claimed over 170,000 lives and displaced over 114 million people. War has left people starving and shattered lives. But it’s important to understand what material forces drive wars. For this, Marxists often point to the words of the Prussian General and military theorist Carl von Clausewitz who deemed war “the continuation of politics by other means.”
The Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky challenged those conservative forces who saw war as eternal on the grounds that “conflict is fundamental to everything that lives.” In contrast, Trotsky argued, “While conflict is the lot of everything that lives, war is a purely historical, human phenomenon.” He further developed Clausewitz’s conception by elaborating on the forces that shaped wars under capitalism:
“The economy has become fundamentally world-wide in character. But the appropriation of profit, that is, the right to skim the cream of this world economy, has remained in the hands of the bourgeois classes of particular nations. Thus, if the roots of our present wars are to be sought in ‘nature’, this is not biological nature and not even human nature in general, but the social ‘nature’ of the bourgeoisie, which was formed and developed as an exploiting, appropriating, ruling, profiteering and plundering class that forces the working masses to fight for its bourgeois aims.” (The Military Writings of Leon Trotsky, vol 2)
In its infancy, the capitalist nation state was able to play a progressive role, doing away with the regional wars between small feudal principalities. But Trotsky was writing in the aftermath of World War I. By then global capitalism had consolidated itself as a few big imperialist powers fought to partition and re-partition the world into their own spheres of influence. These same forces prevented colonial and semi-colonial countries from developing into viable nation states. These same patterns have become even more entrenched in the various proxy conflicts of today’s inter-imperialist conflict.
This is why Marxists approach war not from the question of one national boundary versus another, but from the standpoint of the interests of the working class as a whole. This was especially important in World War One when many of the leaders of the socialist movement discredited themselves by supporting their own bourgeoisie in the war. This was often defended by pointing to some encroachment on national territory a rival power had inflicted, but it ultimately served imperialist aims.
In the current wars, we’re not seeing direct military confrontation between the main imperialist powers, though this could happen in the future. Instead, the overall inter-imperialist conflict is reflected with proxy conflicts between different countries in the blocs. For example, NATO is ramping up support for Ukraine while China gives various forms of support to Russia. While Biden has declared “rock solid and unwavering” support for Israel in its genocidal war on Gaza, Iran’s so-called “axis of resistance” is less about Palestinian liberation and more about Iran’s own regional imperialist ambitions, as well as its ties to Russia and China. For those looking for a means to liberation, “support” from a rival imperialist power can seem like a quick fix, but it doesn’t offer a real solution.
The current situation parallels the period immediately before the First World War. During the Balkan Wars of 1912-13, smaller Balkan countries waged wars to assert themselves in the context of surrounding imperialist powers. However, those surrounding powers championed the national rights of certain Balkan countries as a prop against their rival imperialists. The First Balkan War was seemingly a united struggle of the Balkan countries against Ottoman imperialism. However, a Second Balkan War broke out a year later as those countries were pitted against each other by the great powers and their own bourgeoisie.
The Marxist opposition to imperialism is nonetheless tied to a defense of the right of oppressed nations for self-determination. This did not mean support for the nationalist calls made by the Balkan bourgeoisie for “Greater Bulgaria,” “Greater Serbia,” and “Greater Greece.” The revolutionary socialists in the Balkans and Eastern Europe answered that with the call for a Balkan federation as an explicit counter to attempts of the Great Powers to pose as liberators. Today, socialists counter the division of the world into imperialist spheres of influence with a free and voluntary federation of socialist states.
War, Peace & Revolution
With this view of the social basis of war, revolutionaries like Trotsky were dismissive of the various attempts to end wars through negotiations between the capitalist powers. When the League of Nations formed in 1920 to attempt this task, Trotsky dismissed it as the idea “that the united world economy is to be seen as a joint-stock company of brigands in which the profits should be shared among the capitalists of all countries without any wars between them.” These words could just as easily be applied to the United Nations today.
Nonetheless the desire for peace was a powerful mover of working-class struggle. At the start of the war, Lenin articulated his concept of “revolutionary defeatism” which involved turning anger at the imperialist war into a revolutionary struggle. This concept is often misunderstood. However, one of his main examples of the concept was the Christmas truce, in which British and German troops fraternized on no man’s land in defiance of their officers over Christmas. By 1917, the slogan of “Bread, peace, and land!” became one of the driving demands of the Russian revolution. These examples provide a model for current anti-war struggles.
The Russian Revolution itself was largely peaceful, driven by a mass uprising. However, it didn’t immediately end wars. In fact, the deposed Russian ruling class, backed by global imperialism, forced a civil war on revolutionary Russia in order to regain their privileges. It was while fighting that civil war that Trotsky felt compelled to challenge those who saw war as inevitable. Even in these circumstances, the desire to take the masses out of war was a key task the revolutionaries had to face.
One of the first set of debates after the Russian Revolution concerned the peace negotiations at Brest-Litovsk to take Russia out of the First World War. Conservative forces in Russian society, including the right wing of the socialist movement, denounced the negotiations from a Russian chauvinist perspective. At the same time, an ultra-left wing within the Bolsheviks, led by Nikolai Bukharin, advocated waging a revolutionary war against Germany as distinct from the imperialist war pre-revolutionary Russia was waging. In truth continuing the war with imperialist Germany at this point could have been disastrous for the fledgling revolutionary government.
The German government was rotten to the core, and the treaty Brest-Litovsk treaty was written on the German government’s terms. However, Bukharin under-estimated the need for the Bolsheviks to demonstrate their commitment to “Bread, peace, and land.” It was necessary to end the imperialist war, even if that meant giving up territory.
Lenin and Trotsky also understood that a treaty between revolutionary Russia and the German Empire wouldn’t be any more a guarantor of long-term peace than the League of Nations. The treaty didn’t do away with the class struggle, and that still remained the way to bring peace.
By signing the treaty, revolutionary Russia was able to preserve its existence to serve as a pole of attraction when further revolutionary upheavals broke out. Shortly after signing the Brest-Litovsk treaty, Germany itself faced its own revolutionary uprising in 1918. Further upheavals broke out in Hungary in 1919, Italy in 1920, and elsewhere. Although these revolutions were derailed by conservative leadership, they posed a far more effective weapon in ending war than appealing to arms from a rival power.
Meanwhile, the support for the right of nations to self-determination helped lessen the danger of the civil war. After Brest-Litovsk Finland and the Baltic states soon saw reactionary capitalist governments come to power and physically crush the workers movement in those countries. However, the Bolsheviks willingness to support their independence, in contrast to the Russian imperialist views of the white army, meant that those countries were unwilling to join with their fellow capitalist states in crushing revolutionary Russia.
The exact program for socialists in achieving peace isn’t straightforward. Even Lenin and Trotsky had disagreements about the exact response to Brest-Litovsk. Lenin advocated signing the treaty, while Trotsky advocated pulling out of the war without formally signing the treaty. In the end Lenin’s approach won out while Trotsky’s approach was later applied in peace negotiations with the kingdom of Romania.
However, after the bureaucratic degeneration of the Soviet Union under Stalin, the entire method of the Bolsheviks was abandoned. Leading up to World War Two, Stalin adopted a “popular front” approach of appealing to an allegedly progressive wing of imperialism against fascism. At the same time, he signed a nonaggression pact with Hitler that involved partitioning up Poland between the two countries. These policies served to throw the workers movement into disarray. Nonetheless, the original approach of the Bolsheviks remains valid today.
Capitalism Can’t Bring Peace
Capitalism, for its part, has failed to win peace. The United Nations, like the League of Nations before it, is a largely impotent body. Attempts at negotiated peace, like the Oslo Accords in Israel/Palestine and the Bucharest Summit between NATO and Russia have failed. In Taiwan, the capitalist powers attempt to maintain peace through a set of mental gymnastics called “One China, Two Systems,” which allows the U.S. to support de facto independence for Taiwan while recognizing China’s de jure claim over the island. Growing US-China tensions have revealed how unstable peace is that’s founded on mental gymnastics.
Fundamental to the failure of these capitalist solutions is that they’re negotiated by the different nations’ ruling classes in their own interests. These ruling classes uphold the very economic system that pushes society to war. It’s a product of the “social ‘nature’ of the bourgeoisie” that Trotsky referred to.
Unlike capitalism, workers’ governments can win peace. Marxists oppose all imperialist wars. At the same time, we uphold the right to national self-determination, including the right of oppressed nations to form independent states. However, Marxists don’t base this on support for the bourgeoisies of individual nations, but on the basis of an independent, working-class program. Fraternization of troops, and anti-war strikes and demonstrations, can point the way forward to stop the imperialist war machine. Ultimately, a worldwide socialist society based on a high level of material well-being will see the “withering away” of state forces of repression and the disappearance of borders and nation states.
This doesn’t mean war will instantly disappear after a socialist revolution. But it paves the way for doing away with the social basis of war. This is why, even in the midst of civil war, Trotsky could optimistically declare: “This particular form of conflict, war, changed along with changes in human economy, and may, under certain historical conditions, disappear altogether.”