CITY AM, the business and financial newspaper, published an opinion piece yesterday which included a lengthy quote from Karl Marx on the profound effects of war on social systems.
Marx has long been dismissed by bourgeois economists as a relic of the 19th century whose analysis of capitalism has no relevance in the ‘modern world’.
Now suddenly some are finding that Marx, who analysed capitalism as a social and economic system of crisis and that the shock of war exposed all the weaknesses of a system that has outlived its usefulness, is extremely relevant today.
Headed: ‘War will expose weakness of Europe’ the author, Paul Ormerod (honorary professor at the University of Manchester and an economist at Volterra Partners LLP) quotes from a pamphlet by Marx on the Crimean War of the 1850s.
Marx wrote: ‘The redeeming feature of war is that it puts a nation to the test. As exposure to the atmosphere reduces all mummies to instant dissolution, so war passes supreme judgement upon social systems that have outlived their vitality.’
As Ormerod notes, this ‘pithy’ paragraph by Marx accurately describes the ‘effect of a major shock on a socio-economic system which lacks resilience’.
Ormerod identifies the world banking crash in 2008 followed by the Covid pandemic and now a third, ‘namely the distinct possibility that America will no longer defend Europe’ as the shocks that have destroyed any semblance of capitalist strength.
The banking crash of 2008 resulted in the central banks of the UK and EU pouring billions into the banks to keep them from crashing into bankruptcy – driving up national debts and imposing vicious austerity cuts to workers wages and benefits in order to bail out the bankers.
Covid was a further shock as the working class of Europe refused to be driven back to work in life-threatening conditions, just to keep the bosses in profit.
Now, the latest cataclysmic shock is the terror of the ruling classes of the UK and EU over US President Donald Trump ending America’s military protection of Europe. US imperialism is dumping its former allies and pivoting towards its main enemy in China and to wars to re-order the world in the Middle East.
UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer has declared he is putting Britain on a ‘war footing’ and joining with France and Germany in a ‘coalition of the willing’ to send troops to Ukraine to keep a war that is already lost going.
The massive expenditure on the drive to war by these governments can only be achieved through the complete destruction of the wages, jobs and social benefits of the working class in the UK and Europe.
As Ormerod notes, following World War II the UK and Europe ‘followed what we might usefully describe as the social democratic welfare model’.
The social democratic welfare model wasn’t just handed by a benevolent capitalist class to workers.
It was fought for by a working class that returned from the carnage of a world war determined not to be driven back to the poverty of the 1930s Depression era.
Capitalism was forced to make concessions out of fear of a working class revolutionised by the imperialist war.
But today, that ‘model’ has been shattered as the crumbling economic structure of weak European capitalism can no longer afford any concessions to workers.
In place of the social democratic model, leaders like Starmer are demanding that workers pay the price for the capitalist crisis by accepting all the gains of the past being sacrificed in the name of national security for the ruling class.
Ormerod writes that: ‘It is hard to escape the conclusion that Marx’s words … apply to Western Europe today.’
With capitalism collapsing under the weight of the crisis the only future is for the working class of Britain and Europe exert their strength by uniting in the demand that their trade union leaders call mass strike action to bring down their governments and go forward to workers’ governments and socialism – consigning capitalism to the dung heap of history where it belongs.
Join the WRP and Young Socialists in Britain and build sections of the International Committee of the Fourth International across Europe to provide the leadership required for the victory of the European Socialist Revolution.