The Crisis of Global Imperialism
Security, it seems, can only be measured in ever-higher degrees of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) consumed by the Military-industrial Complex (MIC). The fact that global arms spending already stood at a record $2.4 trillion in 2023 hardly merits a passing reference; nor the dominance of the United States as the global, military superpower; nor the UK’s role as colonial servant to the United States and, itself, a leading European country in military spending and a major exporter of armaments to authoritarian regimes.
Instead of responding to the real, existential crisis of irreversible climate change on anything like the scale approaching that for endless war, our leaders sternly admonish us on the new military spectres and the dangers they represent. The ‘axis of evil’ has been reincarnated by them as the ‘arc of authoritarianism’, intent on destroying the very foundations of Western democracy. This requires a form of direct, global military confrontation not seen since the height of the Cold War.
Then, there was a genuine, ideological alternative offered by communist and socialist movements around the world that provided a revolutionary challenge to Western imperialism and inspired popular struggles for democracy, rather than one dominated now by the capitalist-imperialist powers of the United States, Russia and China – the axis of exploitation. All are integral to the functioning of a global, capitalist economy run in the interests of political and corporate elites that are taking us towards irreversible climate change.
The United States emerged from the Second World War with clear military supremacy. When faced with the challenge of independence movements and to protect the interests of Western capitalism, it carried out a series of brutal invasions, as in Korea and Vietnam, that left millions dead and the countries devastated. For decades, this pattern of military confrontation continued, directly between the United States and the Soviet Union, with proxy wars, subversion of popular/left governments and support for pro-Western authoritarian regimes that terrorised political opponents.
The end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union could have heralded a new era based on conventional and nuclear disarmament and, as advanced by the United Nation’s Brundtland Commission and many others, a peace dividend contributing to programmes for environmental and economic security. Rather than a sea-change in international relations, the post-Cold War years were simply another stage in extending US military supremacy and corporate power over the global economy. Any prospects for a substantial peace dividend were deliberately suppressed by the United States as it exploited the Soviet Union’s disintegration.
Throughout the 1990s, Russia was subject to a form of economic and political humiliation. Working people experienced mass unemployment and terrible poverty. State industries were sold off in an orgy of privatisation that established a billionaire kleptocracy and a capitalist, political elite from which Putin would emerge as undisputed leader. The United States, despite assurances to the Soviet Union during the disarmament negotiations of the mid 1980s, enlarged Nato and incorporated previous member countries of the Warsaw Pact bordering on Russia. It also extended its capacity for power projection through a network of military bases and carrier fleets in the Middle East and the Pacific.
The invasion of Iraq to protect Western control of oil supplies in the Persian Gulf confirmed that any hopes for a post-Cold War reconstruction of international security were simply fantasies. Russia, under Putin, experienced an economic recovery stimulated by oil and gas exports that funded the rebuilding of its arms industries. He exploited the sense of national humiliation and betrayal by the West to consolidate control and assert Russia’s status as a regional power, with territorial ambitions through the annexation of Crimea and the invasion of East Ukraine.
China, nominally communist, but fully integrated into the global, capitalist economy with its own corporate and political elites and forms of working-class exploitation, steadily expanded military capacity. The focus was on the construction of a carrier fleet to counter the United States’ presence in the Pacific and assert its claims over Taiwan to be retaken, if necessary, by force.
The long, capitalist-imperialist crisis has entered its most dangerous phase. Not only is the threat of conventional and even nuclear war greater than ever, there is also the terrifying prospect of ecological collapse as the imperialists prioritise the long-term profits of their petro-chemical corporations, through new investment in oil and gas supplies, over the immediate necessity of eliminating carbon emissions.
Assuming that a major war is avoided, the arms race will continue to demand ever-increasing levels of military spending in the classic spiral of action and counter-action. Vast resources that are desperately needed by working-class communities around the world for economic and environmental security will be consumed in the black-hole of the global MIC.
The UK and Labour’s Plans for Rearmament
In the UK, there has been a depressingly predictable consensus that military expenditure must be increased substantially. The Conservatives had committed to a figure of 2.5% of GDP a year from the present level of 2.2%. Labour has made a similar commitment, with the proviso that such a large increase is dependent on overall economic conditions. Assuming a trend of low growth over the next five years, the arms budget would rise from £52.8 billion in 2023 to between £65-75 billion a year.
Militarists argue that an increase of this magnitude would be some compensation for the ‘hollowing out’ of capabilities that had taken place over the last ten years, conveniently ignoring the fact that the UK remains one of the leading European states in arms expenditure. While there were overall reductions made to the levels of military personnel, modernisation remained a priority across all the armed services for nuclear and conventional weapons. The arms procurement budget was protected throughout the period of austerity economics, when massive reductions were being made to other areas of public expenditure, including a 50% cut in central government grant to local authority budgets that resulted in the loss of half-a-million jobs and of vital services for working people.
How the increased funding will be allocated depends on the inevitable security review that the Labour government carries out. The main questions will be whether armed forces numbers are increased, how to fill the spending gap on existing programmes that are experiencing delays and cost over-runs, and allocating extra resources for any new equipment orders identified in the review.
The firm commitment to military expenditure stands in sharp contrast to other areas of public spending, in particular, green energy investment. Previously, Labour had put forward plans for a £30 billion fund but this has been eviscerated. The prioritisation of arms spending is made in terms of national security, but also by asserting that military procurement will be a boost to the economy, providing employment across a range of manufacturing sectors in aerospace, shipbuilding and engineering.
This is based on a discredited form of military keynesianism that uses as its model, World War Two, and the temporary transition from civil to arms manufacturing. Since then, and despite high levels of military spending, direct arms employment has declined from over 500,000 in the 1980s to an estimated 130,000 in 2023, driven by a process of restructuring, plant closures and corporate consolidation that has left BAE Systems as the main provider of fighter aircraft and naval shipbuilding.
There remain some concentrations of arms employment, such as Barrow-in-Furness, in Cumbria for nuclear submarines and around Preston in Lancashire for fighter aircraft but even here the decline in employment has been significant. For example, the first Trident fleet constructed in the late 1980s and the early 1990s employed 14,000 workers during the peak period of production, but will be less than half that for the new programme. Even a substantial rise in arms procurement on major platforms such as submarines and fighter aircraft will only sustain present levels of employment at these locations.
If new equipment orders are made that provide some extra employment, they will reinforce regional disparities. The focus will be on missiles, drones and possible applications of Artificial Intelligence, favouring specialist electronics manufacturers that are clustered in the South East and have strong relationships with government research establishments there.
An alternative economic approach has focused on the opportunity costs of arms spending, identifying how similar levels of public investment in the civil economy generate greater employment, as in renewable energy, providing direct economic and environmental benefits including a fairer, regional distribution of skilled, manufacturing work and reduced carbon emissions.
Arms Conversion and Real Security
The military lobby is a powerful one at the heart of the MIC, representing arms manufacturing associations, military commanders, politicians and senior civil servants. They stress how government has a responsibility to maintain indigenous capacity for armaments and high-technology investment. Some trade union leaders, as in the GMB, echo these claims to secure jobs for their members in what remains one of the most heavily-unionised sectors of manufacturing.
But there has always been a broader, trade unionism that supports arms conversion as part of the labour movement’s historical role in internationalism and disarmament. The most well-known conversion initiative was the Lucas Plan in the mid 1970s, when shop stewards from the different sites of the Lucas Aerospace company, a major arms manufacturer, responded to the threat of redundancies by developing an alternative plan. The proposals included medical, environmental and transportation equipment, stressing how the skills of the workers and the technological capacity of the company could produce civil alternatives that were socially useful.
Other initiatives included the Barrow Alternative Employment Committee (BAEC), in the mid-1980s, that had representation from the main unions in the shipyard. Its report ‘Oceans of Work’ called for government funding of a marine-technology research centre based in Barrow to develop the first generation of renewable energy systems, particularly offshore wind and wave power, as the focus for a major new industry.
Lacking government support, none of these plans were implemented but they demonstrate how a national, arms conversion programme, transferring military spending to civil investment, could have made a significant contribution to the economy and certainly counter the claims that disarmament need have a detrimental impact on jobs.
It is difficult to imagine a worse global crisis than the one that faces us now of imperial war and environmental collapse. The real existential threat for all working-class communities around the world is irreversible climate change that can only be resolved by focusing public investment on the transformation to a post-carbon economy. Yet, on present trends, global military expenditure will rise from $2.4 trillion towards $3 trillion a year in a grim, military stand-off risking conventional and nuclear war. In the UK, pressure will continue to push the arms budget higher and towards £80-£85 billion a year by 2030.
We desperately need a different vision than that of permanent war preparation, one that builds on the Labour movement’s historical support for international disarmament and a democratic-socialist alternative to capitalism. The last Cold-War crisis in the early 1980s provides the clearest, historical comparison. Ronald Reagan characterised the Soviet Union as the ‘evil empire’ and rapidly expanded the US arms budget followed, inevitably, by the Thatcher government in the UK. Nor was it coincidental that militarism should combine with a sustained attack on the labour movement, crushing the miners strike and destroying organised trade union opposition, in order to drive through the neo-liberal agenda of privatisation and the dismantling of public services.
Even in such a hostile environment, the Labour movement offered a comprehensive plan for radical change, an Alternative Economic Strategy, that was far more ambitious than anything proposed today. It called for extensive public ownership with democratic planning and control directly by workers in those industries, and for a new international order through conventional and nuclear disarmament.
Conclusion
The security priorities of Starmer in 2024 are little different to those of Thatcher in 1984. Arms spending will be vastly increased while other areas of public expenditure are subject to what is, effectively, an extension of austerity economics. The most symbolic is the decimation of green energy investment from what, itself, was a modest programme that pales in comparison to the scale of the transition required.
This will be the lasting legacy of a Labour government, adding fuel to the fire of the global arms race in support of US imperialism, promoting arms exports to authoritarian regimes and pouring vast resources into arms spending that should have been used as public investment for the transformation to a post-carbon economy.
It was a Republican President, Dwight Eisenhower, who made the famous ‘Chance for Peace’ speech, after the death of Stalin in 1953 and when the Cold War was still in its early stages:
“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed…. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”
For generations, militarists have, in the interests of capitalist elites, dictated the political agenda of the major powers, wasting vast technological resources and the skills of workers to construct and expand the global MIC. How would the world look now if those resources had been transferred in the form of a peace dividend for environmental and economic security? As the dangers of neo-liberal imperialism and militarism become more acute and the threat of rapid climate breakdown more obvious, now is the time to offer a radical, democratic-socialist alternative.
No material barriers exist to building the first, post-military and post-carbon economy on the principles of democratic ownership and control. The main objectives are an indigenous manufacturing base providing self-sufficiency in renewables, a programme of insulation for all older housing and the construction of new council houses built to high, environmental standards, along with investment in food production, public transport and the public utilities. As well as directly benefiting working people through skilled employment across all regions, it would contribute to the elimination of carbon emissions and serve as an example of real economic and environmental security.
This can still be the lasting legacy of the Labour movement, through the inspirational vision of arms conversion, disarmament and international, working-class solidarity.
Steven Schofield
July 2024
