War is the continuation of politics by other means. The creation of the EU was both inevitable, and also the most progressive human achievement in history. But, its foundation is still contradictory. It is a union of nation states, but each of those nation states, still seeks to pursue its own national interests through it. Such contradictions are only overcome when a strong centralised state is established, which the EU is in the process of bringing about. Smaller and weaker states in the EU have an interest in it, because outside it, they would be easy prey for larger states, but larger, more powerful states such as Germany and France, have an interest in ensuring that their own national interest is safeguarded at the same time. Britain, as a previous world hegemon, and with a powerful petty-bourgeoisie, has always only seen the EU in terms of what it could get out of it, and so always been antagonistic to it, and in competition with it. Brexit was its culmination, and so, of itself, puts Britain on a collision course with its much bigger competitor, and so on a path to war with it.
In Nature, there is a process called self-organisation. Gravity, for example, pulls together scattered particles of gas and dust to form stars and planetary systems, just as it pulls together stars and planetary systems into galaxies, and even, pulls together galaxies, which collide, merge, or absorb one another. The same processes apply in relation to social systems. Scattered communities come into contact with each other, and interact. They exchange surplus products to their overall advantage, and out of this develops commodity production, as each deliberately produces products, now, solely for the purpose of exchanging them. The producers come to be concentrated in towns, where the markets for these commodities exist. The towns grow bigger, and the markets grow bigger too. The markets create competition between the commodity producers, leading to differentiation. The losers eventually become proletarians, and the winners become bourgeois who take over the means of production of the former, and employ the losers as wage workers.
Industrial capital, thereby develops, and the continued competition means that some capitals get bigger, whilst others get taken over. The larger the capitals, the greater their efficient level of output, the larger markets they require, and so drives towards the replacement of the old principalities into nation states, as single markets, with single currencies, fiscal regimes, laws and so on. A classic example of this process was the creation of the German state in the 19th century, brought together essentially by the power of Prussia within it. When the Franco-Prussian War began, with Prussia annexing Alsace-Lorraine, Marx and Engels supported Prussia, because they saw it within this context of the drawing together of the German Lander into a German nation state, which they saw as a progressive development, especially as a counter to Tsarist Russia, which was the bulwark of European reaction.
Marx wrote to Engels,
“If the Prussians win, the centralisation of the state power will be useful for the centralisation of the German working class. German predominance would also transfer the centre of gravity of the workers' movement in Western Europe from France to Germany, and one has only to compare the movement in the two countries from 1866 till now to see that the German working class is superior to the French both theoretically and organisationally. Their predominance over the French on the world stage would also mean the predominance of our theory over Proudhon's, etc.”
(Marx to Engels July 20th 1870)
There was no element of sentimentality or moralism in Marx's approach to these questions, but solely what acted to hasten the process of social development, and of the position of the working-class within it. When they later changed their position on the war, it was again based upon that same motivation. But, this fundamental dynamic remains that competition means that, just as larger capitals absorb smaller capitals, and get bigger, so large states absorb small ones, and get bigger. They do it either peaceably, and by voluntary association, or by war. It is an historically progressive process either way, but obviously, socialists prefer the former route. As Trotsky put it,
“Capitalism has transferred into the field of international relations the same methods applied by it in “regulating” the internal economic life of the nations. The path of competition is the path of systematically annihilating the small and medium-sized enterprises and of achieving the supremacy of big capital. World competition of the capitalist forces means the systematic subjection of the small, medium-sized and backward nations by the great and greatest capitalist powers. The more developed the technique of capitalism, the greater the role played by finance capital and the higher the demands of militarism, all the more grows the dependency of the small states on the great powers. This process, forming as it does an integral element of imperialist mechanics, flourishes undisturbed also in times of peace by means of state loans, railway and other concessions, military-diplomatic agreements, etc. The war uncovered and accelerated this process by introducing the factor of open violence. The war destroys the last shreds of the “independence” of small states, quite apart from the military outcome, of the conflict between the two basic enemy camps.”
Brexit, of itself, was a declaration of war by Britain on the EU. It was a declaration that Britain which had attempted to privilege its interests over the rest of the EU, from inside it, now intended to privilege its interests over the EU from outside it. It intended to set itself up in competition with the EU, rather than seeing its own interests being furthered as part of the EU. Such competition always leads to war, if only economic war, as the state stands behind it, and these states rather than just competing capitals, are thereby, brought into conflict. Economic war, always tends to lead to shooting wars, at specific conjunctures in history. Politics is concentrated economics, and it is the continuation of this politics by other means that leads to war.
The material conditions that create the conjunctures that lead to economic wars flowing over into shooting wars are those determined by the long wave cycle. The crucial conjuncture is that between the end of the uptrend, and the start of the downtrend, i.e. the crisis phase. As Trotsky puts it, in The Curve of Capitalist Development,
“If periodic replacements of “normal” booms by “normal” crises find their reflection in all spheres of social life, then a transition from an entire boom epoch to one of decline, or vice versa, engenders the greatest historical disturbances; and it is not hard to show that in many cases revolutions and wars straddle the borderline between two different epochs of economic development, i.e., the junction of two different segments of the capitalist curve. To analyse all of modern history from this standpoint is truly one of the most gratifying tasks of dialectical materialism.”
The mechanism is not that of clockwork, or set precisely according to dates on a calendar. For example, a global long wave uptrend began in 1843 and ended around 1865. Its effect can be seen as early as the Crimean War, however, in 1853, as the power of the Ottoman Empire went into decline, and the Russian Empire sought to expand at its expense. The Russian defeat, in turn, led to it embarking at a much faster pace on the path of its own capitalist development, with the Emancipation of the Serfs, in 1861, creating the conditions for the development of the market and commodity production, with the peasants being more rapidly differentiated into bourgeois and proletarians. It is also the time in which the US Civil War occurs (1861-5), as Northern industrial capital asserts its interests against an essentially feudal Southern economy, turning it into an internal colony, and, at the same time, asserting the dominance of a centralised federal state over the individual states of the union. It is the time both of the Franco-Prussian War, as part also, as set out above, of the formation of a German unified state, and of the Paris Commune.
Moving forward to the next such conjuncture, it begins around 1914-20. The most obvious manifestation is WWI, as a now unified German state attempts to create a unified European state under its domination, whilst France attempts to assert its dominance within Europe, and Britain seeks to see the project of a unified Europe defeated altogether, as it seeks to defend its own hegemony. It is further manifest in the Russian Revolution, German Revolution, and others of the time.
The fourth long wave uptrend ended in 1974, but its demise had already been prefigured. 1968, saw the Prague Spring, and the May events in France, along with social conflicts across the globe in Ireland, and the US over civil rights and so on. The 1970's saw it translated into widespread industrial struggles, as inflation rose and workers, still in the driving seat, as labour was scarce, and trades union organisation was strong, won wage rises to compensate. But, it also saw the Portuguese revolution, revolutions in Angola, Mozambique, Namibia, Zimbabwe and elsewhere, as well as the victory of Vietnam over US imperialism. It saw the overthrow of the Shah of Iran.
The fifth long wave uptrend began in 1999. It was curtailed after 2010, as states across the globe, following the 2008 financial meltdown, acted to undermine economic growth. They implemented fiscal austerity to slow growth, and simultaneously printed vast amounts of money tokens used to buy up property and financial assets, fuelling a speculative frenzy that also acted to suck money and money-capital out of the real economy, and into gambling in these asset markets. Had it not been for that, the end of the fifth uptrend, would have been around 2024. But, having been put in hibernation since 2010 that has now been extended. The dynamic of the cycle has continued to try to force its way through all of the measures used to suppress it, so that by 2018, it was already causing interest rates to rise, and asset prices to fall sharply. Only trade wars, and then forced lockdowns and lockouts suppressed it once more.
Even so, employment levels across the globe have continued to rise. Increased employment, even with constant wages, means a growing wage fund, demand and so increased economic activity, with competition again forcing capitals to accumulate capital, and employ even more labour. But, now, its obvious that the contradictions of the measures taken have burst out into both rising interest rates, as the demand for capital exceeds the supply, and rising inflation rates, as all of the money printing has devalued currencies, and continues to do so. The dams are breached, and the dynamic of the long wave is set to assert itself once more. We may, now, have 12-15 years of the uptrend to run, but that means that the battlefields of the coming crisis phase are coming into view. The proxy wars in the Middle East, and in Ukraine, are simply the most obvious.
These imperialist wars, when they come are never as might have been anticipated in the years before them, because they always involve jockeying for position, between the various powers, ahead of the shooting. In the 1920's, for example, the two leading imperialist states were Britain and the US. Both began to develop their arsenals in anticipation of war between them, with the US, developing its navy to counter the global reach of Britain via its own navy, and imperial possessions. Yet, the war when it came was again between France and Germany, and then the US and Germany/Japan. Britain, as with France, had effectively been defeated, by 1940, and was isolated on its island, until the US entered the war, turning Britain into its own armed encampment, for the rest of the war, a function it continued to play, thereafter, in one form or another.
But, that also demonstrated a point. Having overrun France, and isolated Britain, by 1940, Germany had created a European state under its domination. Italy and the other European Axis powers, essentially acted as vassals of Germany. But, this large European economy had great power and advantages that could now be brought to bear, and was only matched by the economic might of the other large economic powers, the US and USSR. That again illustrates the idiocy of Brexit, as it stands in the face of all historic experience.
It is an aberration. Brexit is the project of a reactionary petty-bourgeoisie that grew powerful from the 1980's onwards, as Thatcher's policy of deindustrialisation undermined the development of large-scale industrial capital in Britain. Combined with the policies of conservative social democracy to emphasise the idea that wealth creation could come from inflating asset price bubbles, which then diverted capital away from real capital accumulation it not only led to large numbers of workers becoming self-employed, as a form of return to subsistence peasant production, but encouraged the growth of such inefficient, small scale production, and of the petty-bourgeoisie along with it.
That is the social force that dominates the Tory Party, and the core support for economic nationalism. But, petty-bourgeois ideas also dominate social-democracy too. It is obvious in the dominance of Labour by the forces of Blue Labour, and the Left of social-democracy has always been infected by it, from the days of The Moseley Memorandum, to the AES in the 1970's and 80's, to Corbyn's Brexitism of more recent times. When it comes to the EU, British social-democrats have never approached it from the perspective of what is good for European workers interests, and the rational development of capital, but only from the perspective of what is good for Britain, i.e. specifically British capital, which in reality means only the interests of the British petty-bourgeoisie. They too continually view things through its lens, as with their calls to penalise big capital with windfall taxes and so on, and to subsidise the reactionary small capitals, welfarism and so on.
The battle lines between Britain and the EU are, therefore, clearly drawn. The Tory Party as the clearest representative of that reactionary petty-bourgeoisie is pushing the Brexit agenda. It seeks to undermine the position of workers, and to slash regulation as a means of doing it. It is hamstrung by the reality that Britain remains economically dominated by the EU, and its own economy is dominated, not by the petty-bourgeoisie, who are merely numerically preponderant, but by large-scale socialised capital, which is international and hostile to Brexit. So, whilst Johnson claims to have “Got Brexit done”, the reality is that its only Britain's political role in the EU that has disappeared, and Brexit continues to hog the headlines, now in relation to the Protocol.
The less influence Britain has, the louder it proclaims having taken back, and to be implementing control. The pronouncements about ripping up the Protocol are of that order. Will Britain actually do it? Its uncertain. At the moment, the talk is that any legislation to do so would take more than a year to go through parliament, with no change in the intervening period, leaving plenty of time for new arrangements with the EU to have been implemented prior to any such breach. The question is whether a DUP with a death wish, will go along with that, or insist on the Protocol being scrapped, as its price for not collapsing the NI Executive. At the same time, the US, keen to keep the EU on side, whilst it continues its proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, warns Britain not to scrap the Protocol. These are the normal manoeuvrings of states in the periods leading up to wars, as they jockey for position in forming alliances.
The US knows that if the EU were to reach some modus vivendi with Russia, given that it is the EU that is dependent on Russian energy, grain and other primary products, not the US, then, given the developing Eurasian bloc between Russia and China, this would be an overwhelmingly powerful economic bloc that would be more than a match for a declining US economic power. Again, although currently the proxy wars are between NATO and Russia/China, it is the EU, which still represents the main competitor for the US. Its no coincidence that it is the EU that has borne all the pain of US military-strategic policy in the Middle-East and Eastern Europe. Britain acted as US agent inside the EU, which is why the US opposed Brexit, and now, will seek to prevent Britain causing further division in Europe over the fall-out from it, in respect of the Protocol.
In many ways, of course, if Britain does provoke conflict over the Protocol, it would be advantageous to the EU, as indeed was Brexit itself. Brexit forced the EU to come together even more, and support for it grew stronger. A war between Britain and the EU, even just a trade war, would have the same function that Marx and Engels described in relation to the Franco-Prussian War, and the more rapid consolidation of the German State. A war between Britain and the EU would force the EU to consolidate and integrate into an actual European state much more quickly, a development, which would be wholly progressive and in the interests of European workers, in the way that Marx and Engels discussed. They changed their position on Alsace-Lorraine, because they saw its inhabitants resisting it, and a France of the future fighting to restore it, thereby, dividing workers. But, no such thing is likely in relation to say, Northern Ireland, or Scotland, the majority of whose electors have voted to remain inside the EU.
And, the parallels are obvious. The first arena is Northern Ireland, with an abandonment of the Protocol leading to an immediate response in terms of trade between Northern Ireland and the Republic. Given that Northern Ireland now relies on its economic relations with the Republic, its economy having grown faster than the rest of Britain, as a result of it, the impetus to a Border Poll in the North, and unification with the South is brought forward. The EU, in such conditions would have every reason to put its thumb on the scales in terms of open support for unification. In the interim, as inevitable barriers went up between the North and the Republic, the EU would be incentivised to use its Border Force, to assist the Irish Republic in enforcing it, setting up an immediate point of conflict between the EU and British state along the border.
Britain and the EU are already in conflict over fishing rights, discussion of which has gone somewhat quiet in recent months as other conflicts have hogged the headlines. In part that is because, as a result of Brexit, many of the British fishing fleets went bust. But, as economic war between a Britain trying to emphasise its own national interests and ambitions, and an EU more than capable of defending itself, conflict at sea over fishing rights is an obvious arena for actual violence to erupt. Such as the case in the 1970's, in relation to the Cod Wars, between Britain and Iceland, in the North Sea. Britain lost those, and would be even more at a disadvantage against the power of the EU.
But, that would be just part of the economic sanctions that the EU would impose on Britain, which given the current conditions of labour shortages, supply bottle necks, and high levels of inflation, would soon be felt inside Britain itself. In addition, the intention of Scotland to separate from England, in order to remain inside the EU is another obvious arena of conflict, in which the EU would have every incentive to support Scotland as against England, insisting on its right to free secession, and standing behind it with its own state power, if need be. Another obvious such arena of conflict is Gibraltar, but, others would be on the agenda too. For example, the EU would have little reason to support Britain as against Argentina in a renewed dispute over the Falklands/Malvinas, and the EU would also have every reason to look unfavourably on all of the British tax havens such as on the Channel Islands and so on.
The roads to war are many and diverse, but all arrive at the same destination.
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