To fall in the abyss of war or to build a future for all?

We live in strange times. We would call them, once again, the times of monsters. The international bourgeoisie is joining forces against the interests of the lower classes in order to escape from the economic crisis that it has caused. After the pandemic, the big trusts of bosses in the West searched for a way out of the freezing of production. Their puppets, the politicians, have found the way. Their exit is called “war economy”.

The working class, for so many years, has not paid attention to the statements and moves of the bourgeois politicians of the EU. Now the workers are surprised that the new Belgian coalition government intends to smash what is left of the welfare state and spend the money on military armaments. But it’s not a surprise. For more than ten years now, the imperialist powers have been engaged in a “proxy war” to re-shape spheres of influence, land, energy resources, raw materials and fields of production. The biggest theater of these wars was the invasion of Russian imperialists into Ukraine. It’s in this context that working class must understand what is going on in Belgium.

In a document sent to the member states on 24 September and cited by Euronews, 28 European “defense” companies said that EU financial support should be targeted at the domestic sector. The short-term plan “should also serve as a test case to learn quickly in order to follow a longer-term, more ambitious program after 2028”, said the letter, which was signed by monopolistic groups such as Leonardo, SAAB, Airbus, Rheinmetall and Indra. Under the European Defense Industrial Strategy, the 27 EU countries – 23 of which are also NATO members – set a target of spending 50% of their military budget on arms procurement exclusively from EU groups by 2030, a target that will rise to 60% by 2035. This was last year and very few gave attention.

Piotr Kropotkin (1913) : “We know that all great States have favored, besides their own arsenals, the establishment of huge private factories, where guns, armor-plates for ironclads of lesser size, shells, gunpowder, cartridges, etc., are manufactured… Now, it is perfectly evident that the direct advantage of those capitalists who have invested their capital in such concerns lies in keeping up rumors of war in order to persuade us that armaments are necessary, and even spreading panic if need be. In fact, they do so.”

By the new year and the form of the new EU Commission we can see what that meant. Like a chorus, we can hear everyday admins of NATO, EU, bankers, industrialists, mass media (the bourgeois class) saying exactly the same things to force us to accept our misery : “Europe must rethink its welfare and build a war economy” and “if we want peace we must be prepared for a war”. So clear. From all of them. It’s not by luck. They had a plan. The best example we could give is the german Rheinmetall, which has already converted civil sites into military production lines. The best of all ? Rheinmetall announced a 38% jump in net profit in 2024 and predicts a sales boost as the warmongers of EU Commission push for increases on military capacity. So, the stuck industrial production of Germany found an assistance to restart. They thank US president Trump for his moves and as Politico was writing on the 20^th of January : “That also explains why the industry is relatively relaxed about Trump. If he pulls the U.S. out of NATO and leaves Europe to go it alone, the continent will have to rely on its own arms companies, netting them a surge of contracts.” What an opportunity, right ?

Emma Goldman wrote back in 1915 : “That which has driven the masses of Europe into the trenches and to the battlefields is not their inner longing for war ; it must be traced to the cut-throat competition for military equipment, for more efficient armies, for larger warships, for more powerful cannon. You cannot build up a standing army and then throw it back into a box like tin soldiers. Armies equipped to the teeth with weapons, with highly developed instruments ofmurder and backed by their military interests, have their own dynamic functions. We have but to examine into the nature of militarism to realize the truism of this contention.”

And then, here we are. The working class who suffers decisions from above. All the cuts on social welfare, the extension of working period for pensions and the rest of neoliberal, anti-social measures announced by the new government are nothing but an open declaration of class war in order to protect the profits of the Capital. What we propose is to organize on the basis of our class interests. The workers against the bosses. Class versus class. Our class must build relations of solidarity both within the territory we live in and internationally. We have also to recognize that our enemy is here, in Belgium, in the EU, in NATO. And it’s the internationalist solidarity and organization that can make it evident once again in the eyes and dreams of the world proletariat that the imperialists and all reactionaries are nothing but paper tigers in front of the peoples who are determined to fight.

We respond to Theo Francken’s proposals to convert civil onto military production lines with some words of The Anarchist International Anti-war Manifesto (Feb. 1915) : “To the workers in factory and mine it is necessary to recall that the rifles they now have in their hands have been used against them in the days of strike and of revolt and that later on they will be again used against them in order to compel them to undergo and endure capitalist exploitation.”

If we want to keep the flame of possibility for a change burning, we have to find a way to create the necessary political cracks in the bourgeois and state politics. We must aim to re-point, re-inspire and re-mobilize ourselves towards the path of revolutionary perspective. If we insist so much on this direction, that is, on the need to rally to a revolutionary policy, it is because the conditions that are currently raging today will inevitably lead there. And we have to be ready, prepared and properly organized so that, as a class and as a movement, we can play an organic role in the production of anti-imperialist, anticapitalist and revolutionary policies.

We should set as an objective the creation of relations and structures that will propose another social model, beyond the logic imposed by capitalism. The creation of communities of struggle within the class, the creation of spaces and infrastructures that can support these communities, must be prioritized.

Contrary to the logic that says that we must resist x or y issue, we propose the logic of autonomous policy-making beyond the specific issues. This is a way to offer an example that says we are capable of producing politics by us for us, without the mediation of those above and in favor of our interests. So, to produce a positive policy and activity and not the one we are used to, namely the policy of “against”.

Finally, we must say that it will be even more important that anti-war voices remain raised and firm when the whole of society will have fallen into the trap of pro-war rhetoric and attitudes. What finished the First World War was the revolution in Russia and its spread to the other centers of imperialist countries. We should take this as an example and stick to a position against the wars of rulers and also against the fake peace of the exploitative system that we are now being offered. It means to create the circumstances which can make a revolutionary broke out possible.