Engels saw the elements of that process that led to increasing militarism and militarisation requiring universal conscription and military spending that ruined economies by the draining of surplus-value and potential for capital accumulation. He certainly would not have been a proponent of the nonsense of the “Left” Keynesian notions of The Permanent Arms Economy. But, it was not just that the resolution, by war, of those conflicts and creation of large, multinational states, reduces the relative amount those states must commit to the means of destruction, as a result of economies of scale. That process is similar to the unproductive costs of large companies, competing against each other, until they merge, as one company takes over the other. The military, also, experiences the same thing that other labour processes do, which is that, in order to reduce the amount of labour required, which detracts from actual production, but also creates those conditions Engels describes, of an armed and trained proletariat, it replaces military labour with fixed capital, tanks, ever larger battleships, planes, missiles and so on.
This, also, changes the nature of warfare. Hundreds of thousands of proletarians, stuck in trenches for month after month, gradually gaining the awareness that, in similar trenches, a few hundred yards away, are other workers, identical to them, and drafted into the opposing army to fight, not for their own interests, but those of their ruling class, are the conditions that lead to mutiny, to the formation of revolutionary cells within the army, and to them turning their guns on their own ruling classes, as happened in 1917. When the process of killing is immediate and personal, in that manner, it is hard not to see that that those you are killing and maiming are not only human beings, but people like your own friends and family, with their own children. That is not the case when you are simply firing shells at coordinates on a map, miles away, and still less when you are sitting in a control room firing missiles with many, many more times the killing power of the individual soldier with a rifle.
After WWII, imperialism is driven to try to pursue its ultimate logic of a global state, a global single market, but is still constrained by those existing material conditions. Even in the US, a failure to establish a fully centralised state, and, instead, to settle for a federal state, leads to continued friction between states, pursuing their own interests, and is used by reactionaries, as again witnessed with Trump. The failure, also, leads to a failure to develop truly national parties, with a common national programme, increasing the role of the individual representative. Even more is that the case with the proto-federal state in the EU. Various global, para state bodies, such as GATT/WTO, World Bank, and IMF were established, but, without an actual world state, they become either toothless, or just instruments of the dominant US imperialism, as does the UN and its agencies, again seen with the ICJ and ICC, when they seek to uphold international law, in relation to the Zionist genocide against Palestinians.
The existence of the USSR gave the impetus for US imperialism to create NATO, with its imperialist allies in Europe, but NATO is, also, dominated by US imperialism, and simply a tool for the implementation of the interests of US imperialism across the globe. As US imperialism has declined, relatively, as China and other economies have risen, the divergent interests of US imperialism and EU imperialism, become sharpened. The EU is the world's largest single market, and, thereby, despite the rapid growth of Chinese imperialism, the main competitor to US imperialism. The military is the means by which each imperialism promotes its own specific interests in the continuation of economic competition, and trade wars, by other means. Consequently, NATO, as the military expression of US interests, stands, increasingly, in contradiction to the EU, and interests of EU imperialism, whose logic drives towards the creation of its own military organisation, i.e. an EU army.
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