Miguel Ángel | Unión Proletariá (Spain)
On June 24 and 25, the governments of NATO member countries will meet in The Hague to, among other issues, agree on an increase in military spending to 5% of each member state’s gross domestic product. For Spain, this will mean 90 billion euros, almost one in every four euros of public spending, squandered at the expense of what the population needs: improved access to healthcare, education, housing, care for the elderly, employment, food, and other basic necessities, etc. The Spanish government has already increased military spending by €4 billion, cutting €1 billion from education. The European Union is going to mobilize €800 billion for its Rearm Europe plan, even if it has to relax the spending and debt ceiling set by its Stability and Growth Pact since 1997.
We must raise a human tide against this new crime of NATO. How can we achieve this before it manages to engulf us in the flames of a Third World War?
First, we must expose the falsehood of the justifications for this new arms race. No country is attacking us.
They claim that China and Russia threaten the West, the European Union, and also Spain, as if these “partners” contributed to our security rather than putting it at risk. It is not China and Russia that surround us with their armies, but rather NATO that has them surrounded with its military bases. Furthermore, the military spending of the Atlantic Alliance is more than double that of China and Russia combined. In 2024, that of the European Union countries increased by 11.7% in real terms, reaching $457 billion. Russia’s, on the other hand, remained below a third of this figure ($145.9 billion).
The threat from China is that it produces cheaper and better than the old Western powers. What is wrong with that, when there are still so many basic needs to be met in the world? If the West wants other countries to buy its goods too, it should learn from China and invest more in science, technology, and economic efficiency, instead of squandering money on obscene profits for the richest and on militarism to intimidate others.
As for Russia, we are told that it has invaded Ukraine and will end up doing the same to the rest of Europe if we do not defeat it on the battlefield. First of all, it is absurd to pretend to defeat on the battlefield a Russia that, if it sees its existence threatened, has enough nuclear weapons to destroy human life on Earth. All the falseness of Western propaganda lies in its idea that Russia covets foreign territories. The thief believes that everyone is like him! Russia does not need more territories to exploit: it is already the largest country in the world, with the greatest natural, agricultural, and industrial wealth to distribute among a rather sparse population. Soviet Russia was the first colonialist country to recognize the right of the other peoples of the former Tsarist empire to form their own states and to secede. And in 1991, with the crisis of the Soviet Union, they gained independence without Russia preventing them. What other country has behaved in such a democratic, civilized, and peaceful manner toward its former colonies?
Western governments, on the other hand, have not for a moment relented in their efforts to destroy the USSR, because it was the first state run by the workers and also to seize its wealth. In the 1990s, they succeeded, in addition to subjugating and humiliating its largest republic: Russia. All that capitalist counterrevolutionary orgy cost the workers of the East and West billions of dollars spent on the arms race, on corrupting Eastern European leaders, on infiltrating and buying agents of influence, on financing and arming reactionary and separatist groups to bring them to power in order to incorporate their countries into NATO’s political-military structures, etc. They promised Gorbachev that the Atlantic Alliance would not expand beyond Germany, and ended up pushing it to Russia’s very borders.
Meanwhile, they harassed it from Chechnya, Georgia, Moldova, and the Baltic republics. After several attempts, in 2014, they succeeded in placing their pawns in power in Ukraine, began to transform it into a NATO military base for aggression against Russia, exacerbated national hostility towards the Russian-speaking population in the south-east of the country, massacred them by the thousands, etc. When the Russian capitalist leaders realized that the goal of the Western elites was not only to destroy Soviet socialism but also Russia’s sovereignty, and when they were able to restore their economy and military capacity, they had no choice but to react: in February 2022, they recognized the independence of Donbass and intervened militarily in its support against the NATO-controlled neo-Nazi regime in Kiev (40 of the world’s most powerful states waging war on Russia through Ukraine).
Moscow did not want this war, nor did it want to dominate Ukraine or other former Soviet countries and former members of the Warsaw Pact: the threat to world peace does not come from the East, but from the West, and for Russia it is a matter of legitimate defense and survival. Its increasingly evident military superiority over the puppet regime in Kiev is leading the imperialists to raise the stakes by multiplying military spending and accelerating preparations for direct war with Russia (terrorist attacks against civilians, actions against strategic nuclear assets, Defender Europe 25 maneuvers with 90,000 troops from 29 countries, continued support for Kiev and sanctions against the Kremlin, etc.).
Secondly, there is the question of why Western leaders behave so aggressively towards Russia and China, but also towards Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Palestine, Iran, the DPRK, Yemen, the DRC, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, etc.; and, previously, towards Yugoslavia, Libya, Syria, etc. All these peoples have in common that they refuse to be subjugated by Western governments. For them, these countries are a bad example for other peoples who still allow themselves to be dominated. Europe, North America, and Japan built their economic and military power on the basis of colonial plunder and cannot maintain it without keeping other peoples (as well as their own workers) subjugated and underdeveloped. For this collective West, the development of the USSR-Russia, China, and others reduces their markets, that is, their ability to hoard global wealth. Hence, they need to sanction them, block them, impose tariffs on them, divide them, destabilize them, besiege them, invade them, etc.
But that is not all. The highly developed capitalist regime of the Western countries is coming up against limits that are not only external but above all internal. For more than a century, it has been dominated by giant monopolies which, in addition to oppressing the proletariat and the other popular classes, also oppress the economic mechanism itself by pursuing superprofits without regard for the consequences. Currently, the three financial giants BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street (the “Big Three”) control assets equivalent to the combined GDP of the United States and China, as well as 88% of the 500 largest US companies (S&P 500). It took two world wars for this financial monopoly capitalism to emerge from its first collapse, and since the 1970s it has once again become bogged down, unable to regain its post-war vigor despite its apparent victory in the “Cold War”: declining economic growth rates and rising inequality and indebtedness are inexorably pushing the Western powers toward war.
Growing public investment in armaments will provide enormous profits for capitalist corporations, but this effect will be short-lived because it will increase inequality and social instability in every country and lead the economy into further stagnation… unless the military standoff with Russia and China results in victories and conquests or, at least, major concessions on their part.
No matter how much the US Republicans and Democrats, the US and European leaders, Donald Trump and Elon Musk, etc., fight among themselves, the pressure against China, Russia, and other sovereign states by the imperialists will not cease, because the economic situation of the imperialists demands it, and also because they hope to repeat their victory over the Soviet Union if they maintain this pressure over time.
In conclusion, by its very nature, the imperialist political and economic regime of the West is leading the world toward greater inequality, oppression, instability, and war, even though modern technology already makes it possible to ensure an increasingly prosperous life for all human beings. The problem is social and can only be solved by replacing the capitalist atomization of workers with their collective action. To develop the class struggle of the proletariat for socialism, we must follow the path proposed by the Anti-Imperialist World Platform: strengthen the communist movement, purging it of those who seek to prevent its unity of action with the other forces on the planet that are fighting against war, fascism, and imperialism.
In Unión Proletaria, we support the Platform continuing to expand its ranks with the greatest diversity of forces sincerely opposed to imperialism, agreeing on positions and actions to be implemented in each country and evaluating the results of their implementation.
Long live the World Anti-Imperialist Platform!
