It’s a well-known fact, even outside of Marxist circles, that many modern wars are not fought for the benefit of anyone but the capitalists. For Marxists, however, seeing the imperialist state defeated in war can have revolutionary potential. As Lenin stated in his Essay “The Defeat of One’s Own Government in the Imperialist War”, the wars fought between imperialist powers are reactionary in nature, that is to say they are fought to defend each power’s status as an imperial state. In such a conflict, then, the desire to see the defeat of one’s own imperialist state is desirable as a setback of that anti-revolutionary order. While this may seem counterintuitive due to how these conflicts between imperialist powers are portrayed, the defeat of the imperialist state that you live in does not equate to wanting the other imperialist power to win. Rather, Marxists believe in exploiting that defeat to the benefit of the unspoken third side of any inter-imperialist conflict: the workers.
The want to see your home empire fail is, at its core, revolutionary-specifically known as “revolutionary defeatism”. . Lenin states in his essay The Defeat of One’s Own Government in the Imperialist War, that the Paris Commune, one of the first major revolutionary events, was not defeated by the revolutionary spirits of those who fought for it, but instead by the joint power of both Otto von Bismarck and Adolphe Thiers, the leaders of Germany and France respectively which led to the formerly opposed capitalist powers of France and Germany uniting to destroy the revolutionary movement and restore the defeated France to the ranks of the imperialist powers. We reject the false dichotomy between wishing to see the failure of the imperialist states we live in and the desire for another empire to win. This false binary drove many social-chauvinists, or reactionary socialists, to support their home nation’s imperial ventures as a means to progressing to some future state where the revolution would be more favorable. The collaboration between “hostile” capitalist powers to fight the Paris Commune (and again, in the support many European countries provided to the counter-revolutionary White Army after World War I), shows that any capitalist state will uphold capitalism in other countries. Lenin understood the driving force behind this revolutionary defeatism-to desire the failure of imperialism, you must wish for all empires to fall in the name of revolutionary action. It is important to note that this does not mean spontaneous, reckless action, but instead means the concerted effort by the proletariat of any empire to resist war, both in the name of failure for their capitalist rulers and in the name of failure for the opposing empire. This is only possible with an effort by the proletariat to see all empires fail, whether it be at home or abroad.
Imperial wars are beneficial only to the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie sits back and reaps the benefits of new markets and labor pools secured in victory, while the workers of the proletariat must not only fight and die in the war, but also support the war effort through their productive power. If the proletariat decided as one to not support the empire, the war effort would crumble. Imperial war itself is driven into existence by the dominant class in a society, which places the bourgeoisie as the main culprit in warmongering. If one were to think about the position of the working class in these wars, they would quickly come to the conclusion that the proletariat is being coerced into supporting their own pain and suffering. If the proletariat was to have the power to decide whether or not war would be beneficial to them as a class, absent the bourgeois propaganda we discussed in our episode on nationalism, they would largely answer “no”. The wars for markets and labor only see death to the proletariat in the name of ever more profits for the bourgeois.
We have seen this many times over, whether it be colonial wars where European powers cleaved apart sections of Africa to serve as extraction points for raw materials and labor, or the contemporary oil wars the United States has waged to secure mineral and oil rights in the middle east and the value of the “petro-dollar” as the global reserve currency. These wars were widely fought by the proletarian masses within the home country, with support from the downtrodden colonial subjects that were taken advantage of by the imperial power. The working class is forced to fight for resources they will never have control over, given only the smallest rewards in return compared to the drastic economic benefits the bourgeoisie stand to gain from the war.
This should lead all Marxists to agree that these wars are not for the proletariat’s benefit, but instead for the ongoing suppression of the proletariat and its revolutionary potential. This suppression comes in many forms, from the literal destruction of revolutionary movements through state violence, to the more sinister approach of turning the home proletariat against the global proletariat. This is done through a process where the proletariat of the home empire is elevated materially just enough to set them above the wider global proletariat, creating a labor aristocracy. The labor aristocracy is, for all intents and purposes, simply a richer form of proletarian. They are an elevated form of the working class, which sees a heightened level of pay to dissuade revolutionary action, but are still only workers to be exploited in the name of profits.
We see this phenomenon most clearly in the United States and Europe. The workers of these states have been sated by increased pay and a shift from back-breaking industrial work to a mostly service-based economy, which has all been fed by the rampant exploitation of what is often called the Neo-colonial world, The third world, or the underdeveloped world. These countries are forced to support the imperialist empires through the subversion of autonomy by way of international private enterprise owned by the bourgeois interests of the American and European nations. It makes sense why the IMF and World Bank would consistently loan under-developed countries massive amounts of money solely for the purpose of increasing foreign investment into primarily extractive industry in these states. It’s a game where these financial institutions lend money to the country on the condition that the money is used to further the productivity of the foreign private sector, as these countries are all but controlled by foreign private enterprise.
Neo-colonialism itself requires the complete control of the subject nation by the private sector of the empire. It’s why we see countries in Africa and Latin America dominated by European businesses. Take, for example, Nestle’s control of the cocoa plantations in West Africa, where they only just recently, within the past few years, began to feel the reckoning of using child slave-wage labor to harvest their crops. The average Swiss worker hasn’t seen that level of economic pain in centuries due to this. Another example would be the highly specialized work done in parts of China, while the Bauxite and Lithium required to facilitate said work is mined directly from Sub-Saharan Africa. While China’s proletariat is not quite at the level of wealth of “Western” labor aristocracy, as even their proletariat is forced to work demeaning jobs for almost no pay, the discrepancy between the average Chinese worker and the average African miner is astounding. China has also expanded its own reach into other parts of the Global South. Its Belt and Roads Initiative has touched all parts of Asia and Africa with the goal of improving infrastructure and economic development. The catch? The projects funded by the Initiative are Chinese run, constructed, and owned. Meaning that not only are the local workers losing out of their own country’s natural resources, but they are also losing out on the very possibility of working to build the infrastructure meant to generate their “own” economic growth.
In other cases, the control of resources and labor is far more overt. Over the past decade Russia has made use of state-supported and semi-official Private Military Companies – most prominently the infamous “Wagner Group,” to exert political and economic control over the natural resources of countries such as Libya, Mali, the Central African Republic, Burkina Faso, Sudan, and Mozambique. With the promise of bringing experienced soldiers for the purpose of fighting terrorists and rebels, groups like Wagner were able to secure direct control over the extraction of key resources and funneling them back to Russia and Wagner’s private financial backers. Even after Wagner mutinied in Ukraine, its Africa-based operations were taken over by a new PMC: Africa Corp. A poor attempt at a rebrand, containing many of the same personnel from the Wagner days with the same exploitative agenda.
It would be different if a socialist state were to take over new lands to spread the revolution, but this is simply not the case in any war since the Soviet Union’s transition from a Socialist State to Stalin’s creation of a State Capitalist regime. Simply put, the world is once again carved up by imperial systems, with the western world slowly but surely fracturing with the policies of Trump, and the Eastern, state capitalist world being dominated by China. If there were to be another world war, it would be catastrophic, not just for these empires, but for the global proletariat writ large. That’s why, from the highly developed cities of the west to the impoverished factory towns of the third world, revolutionary defeatism is so important. The only way for the proletariat to win in a reactionary war is to simply not participate. We must see the end of all empires, whether that empire be Red, White, and Blue, or simply just Red.