A key event in the unwinding of Keir Starmer’s floundering premiership was the resignation, on June 11, of the previously ultra-loyalist John Healey as defence secretary. Coming on the eve of the Makerfield by-election which saw Andy Burnham return to Westminster, and just weeks before a NATO summit to re-commit its member states to a 5% of gross domestic product (GDP) military-related spending target by 2035, it was a coup de grâce moment.
Healey departed, complaining that the Starmer government’s proposed defence investment plan “falls well short of what is required for defence and the country at this dangerous time” and that he could not, therefore, present it to parliament. The investment plan was meant to deliver the recommendations of the Labour government’s 2025 Strategic Defence Review, which argued for a transformation of the UK’s armed forces. From a military still shaped by the tasks “of the post-Cold War era” – for “conflicts primarily fought against non-state actors on Europe’s periphery and beyond” – and not for the new era begun by Russia’s “inflection point” invasion of Ukraine in 2022, “with state-on-state war” back on the agenda. But the investment plan only proposed a 2.7% of GDP spend by 2030 harrumphed Healey, “the date when NATO has warned we could face a Russian attack”. (The Guardian, 1 July)
Three weeks later Healey was installed as chancellor in Burnham’s cabinet, with the new prime minister taking time out from assembling his government to assure the NATO general secretary Mark Rutte in a same-day call that Healey’s appointment was his “signal of intent” towards the UK’s previously agreed military spending commitments. This was reiterated by the new defence secretary, Wes Streeting, at the Farnborough airshow, boastfully speaking of military spending being a priority under Burnham even though that will have “an opportunity cost across government” on other department budgets. (The Guardian, 23 July)
The NATO ‘5%-of-GDP on national security’ target breaks down into 3.5% on ‘hard defence’ and another 1.5% on military-related infrastructure and ‘civil preparedness’, so the actual amounts involved do of course have some elasticity. But even to meet Starmer’s defence investment plan in Healey’s first budget in October means finding £6.8 billion from unidentified cuts to other departments’ previously agreed capital budgets and another entirely unfunded £4.7 billion on top. To raise military spending to the full 3.5% of GDP would mean an extra £25 billion a year. Reaching the 5% target would produce a ‘security budget’ of £151 billion in today’s values, bigger for example than the combined government budgets for housing and education from pre-school to university. The so-called post-Cold War ‘peace dividend’, which after the 1989-1991 collapse of the Stalinist regimes in Russia and Eastern Europe saw a significant fall in UK military spending as a percentage of GDP (from an average 6.4% in the 1960s, for example), is well and truly over.
What an indictment this is of capitalism, the globally dominant economic and social system of organising human relations after its claimed ‘victory’ over ‘socialism’ nearly 40 years ago now. The decrepit rulers of the decomposing Stalinist regimes – which were not socialist but grotesque bureaucratic caricatures of socialism – were replaced by newly-formed capitalist classes, equally corrupt and authoritarian, but definitively capitalist. So why couldn’t capitalism, reinvigorated and triumphant, now create a world of peace and democracy, environmentally sustainable prosperity, and justice and harmony among all peoples? Because it is a system based on perpetual competition for ever greater sources of profit, between both rival capitalist companies, and nationally organised capitalist classes represented in contending nation states. Peace and harmony don’t come into it. War, however, does.
There are specific political, social, economic and historical factors involved in every decision by capitalist governments to go to war. Wars do not develop for the sake of it but are “the continuation of policy with other means”, in the still relevant words of the 19th century Prussian military theorist, General Von Clauswitz. Not least in the capitalist politicians’ considerations is the fear that their rule, and capitalism’s wider interests, would be put at greater risk by going to war from a movement of opposition at home than they would be by not going to war, or continuing a war once it has begun. But fear of a mass movement – a social factor acting as a check on even the most belligerent capitalist political and military leaders – does not permanently remove the threat of war. If the result of a mass movement, even of a revolution achieving a governmental overturn, is to ultimately leave the capitalist ruling class in power over the economy, the media, and the institutions of the state, they will return again to the policies of exploitation, division and war inherent in their system.
“To condemn war is easy; to overcome it is difficult”, wrote the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky in an appeal to an anti-war congress held in Amsterdam in 1932. “The struggle against war is a struggle against the classes which rule society and which hold in their hands both its productive forces and its destructive weapons”. To limit the fight to a cross-class call for disarmament and peace is not a means to stop or prevent war: “States do not fight because they are armed. On the contrary, they forge arms when they have to fight”. Only a movement that aims at a complete change of system, to a democratic world socialist planned economy that takes control of society out of the capitalists’ hands across the globe, can really end the threat of war.
Hype and reality
War is inherent in capitalism – ‘capitalism means war’, said Vladimir Lenin, the co-leader with Trotsky of the 1917 October revolution. But not at all times and under all conditions, and there is much hyperbole in the current war-talk of the capitalist politicians and their alleged ‘expert’ advisors. One of the authors of the UK Strategic Defence Review, Fiona Hill, for example, has stated that ‘in some form’ world war three has already begun. (Newsweek, 11 April 2025) Hill, appointed by Starmer to conduct the review alongside the ex-NATO general secretary George Robertson and the former head of the Joint Forces Command General Sir Richard Barrons, was previously a member of the US National Security Council.
But to say that “we’re already in a situation where you could describe this as World War III structurally” is wild exaggeration. When British capitalism actually was involved in a world war in 1939-1945 its military spending peaked at 52% of GDP, not 3.5% or even 5%! It is pure propaganda to try and overcome the limited public support there is for a new militarism, to attempt to shape the critical ‘social factor’ that weighs in questions of war and peace.
The same point applies to Healey’s and others talk of ‘a Russian attack by 2030’. The Strategic Defence Review is correct to identify “Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 [as] a strategic inflection point” since the end of the Cold War. The Socialism Today editorial immediately following the invasion, entitled A New Era Of World Relations Has Begun, identified the significance of this first instance, since the collapse of Stalinism, of a world power with nuclear weapons attempting to impose its territorial-strategic goals against a nation state militarily supplied by the US and NATO member states, not by diplomacy but by force of arms. (Socialism Today, Issue No.257) But context is critical in assessing the real situation.
The Cold War had created a common interest between the different national capitalist powers, a ‘glue’ to patch-over their conflicting interests. Tensions persisted but a lid was kept on them by the check made on world capitalism by the very existence of the non-capitalist Stalinist states. With the removal of this overriding system clash which had pushed the capitalist nation states together, inter-imperialist rivalries resurfaced and deepened, including those with what was now a capitalist Russia. Tentatively at first, in the immediate post-Stalinist era of barely challenged US hegemony, but now definitively, in a new multi-polar world. It is a new situation.
It is also true that the now consolidated Russian capitalist class has moved to assert its interests, intervening in the ‘near abroad’ nations that were part of the Soviet Union, in Georgia, Transdniestria in Moldova, Armenia and Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine, in 2014 and then the full invasion of 2022. In the present conflagration there clearly is a great disparity between the economic and military capacities of the Russian state on the one hand, and US imperialism and the NATO member states currently still backing Ukraine on the other, but the war remains a clash between rival capitalist powers. No ‘side’, certainly, offers any way forward to the working class and different nationalities of the region or internationally.
But the war has starkly revealed not the strength of Russian capitalism – and its alleged ‘threat to the Western world’ – but its weakness. Putin, as a fellow mafia capitalist, had the measure of his Ukrainian oligarch counterparts, understanding that they sought alignment with the EU and NATO only to protect their corruptly attained wealth from the clutches of his mob. He completely discounted however the national consciousness of the Ukrainian masses – their will to resist subjugation to a Russian kleptocracy – rejecting the very idea of Ukraine as a nation in a speech on the eve of the invasion. But far from the expected parade into Kyiv – the first detachments of Russian soldiers carried dress uniforms in their kit – the war has lasted longer than the time it took to expel the German army from the USSR in world war two, puncturing the myth of Russian military prowess.
NATO ‘analysts’ now estimate that it would take Russia three-to-seven years to re-build its armed forces to the standard they were prior to the war, on the assumption that the current level of military spending could be sustained into ‘peacetime’. On the other hand, as the now ex-chief economist of Russia’s VEB bank Andrei Klepach has said, in the speech to fellow bankers in May that got him fired, the pressure on the economy of the war is inexorably leading to a “social crisis”, that will erupt “when no one particularly expects it”. War, in history, has indeed many times been the midwife of revolution. And in Ukraine too, in a society where, before the war and exacerbated since, there were just 6,700 or so ‘high-net worth individuals’ with more than $1m in ready assets dominating the economy, unrest is mounting as the latest corruption scandals move ever closer to Volodymyr Zelenskyy-linked oligarchs.
However exactly it is that Russia’s war with Ukraine reaches a conclusion, as both regimes stagger on, what is absolutely certain is that there is no prospect of ‘peace and harmony’ being achieved, either regionally or internationally, on the basis of capitalism in this new era of crises and global turmoil. The Strategic Defence Review argues that “the UK last faced a direct military threat from a highly capable state adversary during the Cold War”, and that “until recently such a war against another country with advanced military forces was unthinkable”. But that is not the situation any longer.
Meeting consciousness on war
The Strategic Defence Review is permeated with the haunting concern of the ruling class that there is insufficient public support for the new “integrated, whole-of-society approach” which it argues is needed to meet the military requirements of British capitalism in this era – a new militarism, to give it its right name. And not just at the level of the funding that will be needed. On the launch of the review Fiona Hill spoke of Britain needing “a different mindset”, based on greater internal cohesion and ‘social resilience’, with the aim being that ‘defence’ should be seen as “people engag[ing] in all kinds of different ways… in support of their communities”. (The Guardian, 7 June 2025)
To try and achieve this ‘mindset reset’ the review calls for a continual “public outreach” campaign, including the Department for Education developing “understanding of the armed forces among young people” and an expansion of cadet forces in schools and communities. ‘Anchor partnerships’ must be built with “a small set of trusted universities”, it proposed, to develop military science and technology. To reverse the decline in forces numbers from a Cold War peak of 311,000 regular personnel – with the army today, at 73,790, its smallest since 1714 and facing “a longstanding recruitment and retention crisis” – the review talks hopefully of “a national conversation led by the government” that maybe could “reconnect defence with society”.
More realistic however was an earlier Ministry of Defence Concepts and Doctrine Centre study, Global Strategic Trends to 2045, which had identified as a critical future ‘security risk’ a “growing sense of disconnection from long-established governing structures” in the decade following the 2007-2009 economic crash. The 2024 World Values Survey too, in a series which began in 1981, found the lowest ever proportion of 16-29 year olds answering yes to the question, ‘would you be willing to fight for your country?’. This is not the new generation signalling acquiescence to the prospect of ‘rule by Russia’ or any other designated ‘enemy’ but a symptom of a profound alienation from all the institutions of capitalism, including the promotion by capitalist politicians of militarism as the only way to guarantee their future.
On the other hand, as the recent European Council on Foreign Relations survey showed, support for higher defence spending has risen compared to last year in every European state except Italy, the only country where a majority remain opposed. This followed the dramatic switch in opinion in Finland, from just 24% support for NATO membership in the annual government survey in December 2021, before the Russian invasion of Ukraine – to the Finnish government, involving both the Social Democratic Party and the Greens, taking the country into NATO membership in April 2023 with an 82% approval rating. Meanwhile, in Germany, where there have been substantial school student strikes in opposition to the possible resumption of conscription – which has been suspended since 2011 – a rise in the number of people applying to exclude themselves from service on conscientious grounds (from 2,249 in 2024 to 5,862 in the first half of 2026) has also seen an increase, albeit smaller, in numbers opting to waive their previously granted conscientious objector status.
How to relate to a mixed and ever-changing consciousness on war is a question that Marxists have had to confront throughout the history of the workers’ movement. It was a theme explored in an article by Peter Taaffe on the approach adopted by Lenin, first published in a special world war one hundredth anniversary edition of Socialism Today, No.180, July-August 2014, and reprinted in this issue on page 20.
Lenin took a clear, principled class position of opposition to the war from its outset, and sharply condemned the leaders of the Second International of social democratic and workers’ parties who lined up behind their own governments and capitalists to justify it. But he also, contrary to the one-sided caricature presented by many on the revolutionary left, related his programme to the developing consciousness of the working class and its different layers. Most obviously, in the maelstrom after February 1917, when the revolution that had overthrown the Tsar had yet to be completed, as workers’ parties shared power with the capitalists, the war continued, and capitalist and landlord property relations were preserved.
As Peter Taaffe argues, however, “this did not mean the repetition of mere propaganda against the war” in the months that led to October. Lenin was “aware of the mass yearning for peace and also a fear of the ‘foreign invader’”, which could not be dismissed. “While opposing the war, Lenin and the Bolsheviks recognised that it was a fact” and developed a programme around the axis of workers’ control, for the economy but also in relation to the war, to develop the consciousness of the working class towards taking control of society into their own hands.
So how can this approach be applied in today’s new era of rising capitalist militarism?
Challenging the new militarism
“The connection between the UK Armed Forces and wider society is the longstanding and necessary foundation for the defence of the country”, intones the Strategic Defence Review. “The Armed Forces recruit from, and operate with the consent of, the society they serve and protect” it says; although the authors spoil their honeyed phrasing when in another section, probably inadvertently, they reverse the relationship by speaking of “reconnecting society with the Armed Forces”. Who is the primary subject being ‘served’ here – the armed forces or society? – and, most importantly, which class in ‘society’ is being ‘protected’ and which class is the ‘servant’?
It is true that, in the post-Cold War era, the old armed forces operational manuals, which listed in detail the internal security functions of the army for the capitalists in dealing with “unlawful assemblies, strikes and picketing, civil disobedience” and so on, have been formally withdrawn. During the strike wave of 2022-2023, however, so many of the replacement ‘Military Aid to Civilian Authorities’ orders were made – in a period when the armed forces’ pay awards were well below inflation – that the former Chief of the General Staff Richard Dannatt publicly worried that troops might begin to “think I joined to be a soldier, not a strike-breaker”. (The Guardian, 12 December 2022)
And the reaction of the military tops to Jeremy Corbyn’s unexpected ascent to the leadership of the Labour Party in 2015 was another occasion when the mask slipped, showing which class interests in ‘society’ the military still ‘serves and protects’. The chief of the defence staff, General Sir Nicholas Houghton, openly said he would “worry” if Corbyn’s unilateralist views were “translated into power”. The Royal United Services Institute weighed in, asserting that “the armed forces don’t belong to the government, they belong to the monarch” – who they swear their oath of allegiance to – and that while they would accept a Corbyn government’s policy directive they “would want to know it was a genuinely democratically mandated decision”. (The Guardian, 26 January, 2016) And then there was the case, in 2019, of soldiers stationed in Afghanistan who were discovered using a poster of Corbyn for target practice, who were ‘disciplined’ but remained in the forces.
Will such instances be part of the discussion in the proposed “public outreach events” on “the role wider society must play in the UK’s security and resilience”, or in the campaign to “develop understanding of the Armed Forces” among young people in schools, colleges and universities? And what about the army’s role in the 1926 general strike, or the shooting of striking South Wales miners at Tonypandy in 1911, or tanks on the streets of ‘Red Clydeside’ Glasgow in 1919, as other pertinent examples among many? The workers’ movement, and the November 20 ‘Fight For Our Futures, Not Their Wars’ international youth walkout campaigners, will have to fight to make sure that they are. After all, surely a ‘conversation’ involves more than one voice?
Including alternatives to the hierarchical, elite military caste system that dominates the UK’s armed forces, reflecting its imperial history, with 70% or so of top military officers privately educated, while the ranks are denied basic rights available to the rest of society. The Strategic Review, under the unconsciously humorous sub-heading, A Culture of Empowerment, touts the creation of an Armed Forces Commissioner “as a direct point of contact for Armed Forces personnel and their families” and “the new Tri-Services complaints unit”. But why not trade union rights for armed forces personnel, a set working week in peacetime and time off in lieu of overtime, or the ability to resign at one-to-three months’ notice, like other workers? Or the right to actively participate in political parties, elections, public meetings and demonstrations, and the end of their lesser legal status under military law?
The TUC conference in 1911 debated a motion from the Glassblowers’ Union, seconded by the Gas Workers’ Union leader and Labour MP Will Thorne, calling for “a real citizen army, free entirely from military law during times of peace, officered entirely by the selection of the rank and file”. The motion was lost but it was in the tradition of many of the parties of the Second International, with the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), for example, in its politically defining Erfurt Programme adopted in 1891, calling for the replacement of the standing army by ‘the armed people’, in the form of a militia. In Russia, on the fall of the Tsar in February 1917, soldiers formed committees and sent representatives to the newly-formed soviets (councils) of workers’ and soldiers’ deputies, the first act of which in Petrograd – Order Number One – was to decree the election of officers by the rank-and-file.
But even the most extensive democratisation of the armed forces only poses the question of control. It doesn’t resolve it, however, if the working class does not rise to a consciousness of itself as the leader in the construction of a new society. It did so in Russia during the course of the tumultuous events of 1917 because of the “well-honed strategy and tactics” of Lenin and Trotsky at the head of Bolshevik Party, “not through the constant repetition of abstract propagandism” against war, as Peter Taaffe puts it. In contrast, just 23 years after the adoption of the Erfurt Programme, the SPD leaders in the Reichstag voted for credits to support the world war one spending demands of the Kaiser and the German capitalists.
The tasks ahead
As well as the consequences for international relations brought about by the collapse of Stalinism in 1989-1991, there was the enormous impact these historic events had on the consciousness and combativity of the working class and its organisations. Both in the trade unions and the workers’ traditional social democratic parties, the latter being transformed into capitalist formations as exemplified by the Labour Party in Britain becoming Tony Blair’s New Labour.
But the working class did not suffer the same crushing defeats, shattering its trade union and political organisations, as it did in a series of countries in the 1920s and 1930s, the decisive factor in preparing the conditions for a new war after the horrors of 1914-1918. It is true, as the Socialist Party general secretary, Hannah Sell, argues in her article in this three hundredth edition of Socialism Today on page twelve, Our Theoretical Tasks, that the recovery of the working-class movement in “the long winter sleep” since the collapse of Stalinism has been slow and arduous and is by no means complete, with “working-class consciousness still lagging enormously behind objective reality”. But “we must not underestimate how it will catch up in great leaps at a certain stage on the basis of experience in struggle”, she concludes.
Including in the experience of both capitalism’s drive to militarism in this new, tumultuous era, and the reaction that will develop to it. Beginning, in the immediate months ahead, with the November 20 ‘Fight For Our Futures, Not Their Wars’ international youth walkout.