For the expropriation of the war industry, under labor control

6/9/2025

For an antimilitarist response that goes beyond pacifism.

“War is a gigantic commercial enterprise, especially for the war industry. That is why the "200 families" are the first defenders of patriotism and the first provocateurs of war.. Workers' control over the war industry is the first step against war manufacturers.

To the slogan of the reformists "tax on war profits" we contrast the slogan "confiscation of war profits and expropriation of companies that work for war". Where the war industry is already nationalized, like in France, the slogan of workers control retains all its value: The proletariat has no more confidence in the State of the bourgeoisie than it can have in the individual.. Not a man, not a cent for the bourgeois government!

Not a weapons program, but a program of public utility works!”.

(Trotsky, 1938, of the transition program)

The arms race crosses all imperialist countries. The war in Ukraine has undoubtedly been a factor in accelerating this race. But the race has a planetary reach enormously broader than Ukraine.

Russian imperialism already relies on a full-fledged war economy, investing in the military apparatus 6% of its own GDP. Chinese imperialism is developing its military capabilities to unprecedented levels on land, air and sea, Its defense budget already exceeds 500 billion annually, its fleet has surpassed the American one.

American imperialism, under the second Trump administration (that some would like “pacifist”), promotes massive new investment in weapons: along with tax reduction for capitalists, Increased military spending is the main area of ​​investment of the money saved with social cuts in the current Trump budget law. If the Pentagon, unlike the State Department, has stopped several times in connection with aid to Ukraine, It's because American generals want to fill their arsenals and not empty them (even when US arsenals. THE. they already have, to give an idea, from 13.700 Patriot missiles).

European imperialisms have just agreed in NATO to double or triple their investments in weapons (until the 5% del START), already facilitated by the safeguard clauses provided for in the new Stability Pact (possibility of increasing by 1,5% the defense budget).

Trump's pressures, but above all the threat of an American disengagement from the European front, have pushed all the imperialist governments of the Old Continent beyond the old spending limits. Everyone. The “left” government of Spanish imperialism, that the parties of the European left exalt as an example, avoided putting the veto within the NATO framework, signed the agreement on the increase of 5% of military expenses like the others, and has already ordered an increase in military spending in its budget, beyond the “pacifist” poses in front of the cameras.

The truth is that all European imperialisms, without exception, follow the militaristic route. In an international capitalist framework in which military power has always been one of the measures of imperialist ambitions, European governments cannot do anything else. Only by rebuilding their own military power can they hope for a place at the table in the future division of the world., without being crushed, as they are today, between the US. UU., China and Russia.

At the same time, The union of European imperialisms is crossed more than ever by strong national rivalries also in the military field..

Germany has established an unprecedented post-war rearmament plan, and without possible comparison in Europe, thanks to a margin of financial maneuver that no other European country has. The demand for German military primacy in Europe is already on the table of continental balances. Germany's projection towards Northern Europe, as a possible protective shield – in the face of the threat of a Trumpist disengagement –, rests on this base.

France reacts to German competition by doubling its military budget in the decade 2017-2027 and sealing a pact with Great Britain based on the common possession of the nuclear weapon and the common presence in the UN Security Council: the Franco-British offer of a protective nuclear umbrella over Europe, controlled by London and Paris, It is a replica of Berlin's ambitions. In this way, Great Britain enters into the internal contradictions of the EU, contributing its experienced war record..

Italian imperialism fully participates in the great game. It has supported US imperialism and its policy in the Middle East and Africa to capitalize in its favor on the decomposition of the French colonial area in the Sahel., and has asked in return for American recognition of Italian primacy in the Mediterranean. The arrival of Donald Trump has complicated the operation, but he has not canceled it. The sharp increase in military spending in Italy, since the announced increase of 4.000 million in the next budget law, It is an unavoidable element. Just as the understanding with German imperialism is openly anti-French..

The tricolor war industry is the first beneficiary of this general context. Leonardo, Fincantieri, OTO Melara, Iveco, The big arms capitalists see their shares rise on the stock market and their businesses expand: in the construction of the most powerful military fighter in the world in consortium with Great Britain and Japan, in the manufacture of new tanks in synergy with Germany, in the construction of the military fleet of the Gulf countries, in the global military naval industry. Including the EE. UU.: The Italian Foreign Minister recently showed US Secretary of State Marco Rubio the best of Fincantieri plants in Wisconsin and Florida, and Leonardo's factories in Virginia, Ohio, North Carolina, California, NY, Alabama and Arizona, as proof of the Italian contribution to the American military apparatus and, so, as a reason (expected) of attention and consideration towards Italy, perhaps in terms of tariffs.

But it's not all. Projects for possible war reconversion of parts of the automobile and components industry advance in Italy, in perfect parallel with similar German and French projects. The jump in military investment, forced by the new world framework, It is used as an antidote to economic stagnation and recessionary pressures. A new tonic for Italian capitalism. Naturally, like all over the world, at the expense of their employees.

In this general framework, the total impotence of pacifist illusions emerges with increasing evidence. Even when they are sincere. Even when they are not rhetorical cover for some new imperialist power and its “peace solutions.”.

The direction of world politics, in a historical perspective, march towards war. The imperialist wars, from the Russian invasion of Ukraine to the US bombing of Iran, They mark the tremors that run through the planet like a seismograph. The criminal and warmongering policy of the Zionist State, beyond its specificities, is in perfect harmony with the power politics that sweeps the world, and it is not by chance that it uses the support or complicity of all the imperialist powers, old and new, without exception.

The idea that any right to national self-determination of oppressed peoples can be entrusted to phantasmagorical “peace conferences” organized by the UN and blessed by the Pope only measures the legacy of the old fraudulent illusions about imperialist diplomacy., just when those illusions are beaten and humiliated every day by the new framework of world relations. The idea that a pacifist recommendation to its own imperialist government can stop the militarist path is no less illusory.. Only the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism and imperialism can liberate a future of true and just peace for humanity and for every oppressed people..

Precisely for this, in imperialist countries, from home imperialism, It is important to equip ourselves with slogans and demands that draw a bridge between the sincere demand for anti-militarist peace, the refusal to pay war expenses with social cuts, and the necessary anti-capitalist perspective.

The demand for expropriation without compensation and under workers control of the war industry can and must enter into every mobilization against war and against the war economy., together with the defense of the right of resistance of each oppressed people.

The demand for the expropriation of the war industry belongs to the best tradition of the revolutionary labor movement, and today it is extraordinarily topical. concentrates, on the internal plane, against the heart of current dominant politics. Against the conversion of industry to war production, the conversion of part of the military industry into civil production must be planned.. And no conversion of the war industry can occur while respecting the rights of workers without expropriating its shareholders – the “war manufacturers” – and without workers' control.. For all these reasons, the demand for the expropriation of the war industry questions the bourgeois order of society.. That is why it raises the need for a workers' government as the only possible alternative..

To those who defend “our” war industry, and above all your property, in the name of the defense of the homeland (whether national or EU) – perhaps evoking precisely the winds of war that blow in the world – we respond with the words of Trotsky:

"Defense of the homeland"? But behind this abstraction the bourgeoisie hides the defense of its benefits and its looting.. We are ready to defend the homeland against foreign capitalists, if we put chains on our own capitalists and prevent them from attacking another's country, if the workers and peasants become the true owners of the country, if national wealth passes from the hands of a tiny minority to the hands of the people, if the army stops being an instrument of the exploiters and becomes an instrument of the exploited.

We must know how to translate these fundamental ideas into more particular and concrete ideas according to the course of events and the evolution of the mood of the masses.. further, We must rigorously distinguish between the pacifism of the diplomat, from the teacher, of the journalist and the pacifism of the carpenter, of the day laborer or the laundress. In the first case, pacifism is a cover for imperialism. In the second it is the confused expression of a distrust towards imperialism.

When the small farmer or the worker talks about defending the country, understand home defense, of his family and the family of others from the enemy invasion, of the bombs, of asphyxiating gases. The capitalist and his journalist, for defense of the country, They understand the conquest of colonies and markets, the extension through plunder of the “national” share in world income. Pacifism and bourgeois patriotism are completely lies. In pacifism and even in the patriotism of the oppressed there are elements that reflect, on the one hand, hatred against destructive war and, for another, the attachment to what they consider their good and that they must know how to grasp to draw the necessary revolutionary conclusions. "We must know how to antagonistically contrast these two forms of pacifism and patriotism."

(Trotsky, 1938, Transition program)

Exactly. Much of the left often does, paradoxically, the opposite: adapts to bourgeois pacifism (of their own imperialism or of foreign imperialism) and refuses to translate workers' and popular pacifism into revolutionary terms.

Demanding the expropriation of the war industry is a way of translating and updating the lesson of the old leader of the Red Army, in the more general framework of revolutionary politics.

Workers Communist Party