Lenin on the Arms Race

Engels wrote in Anti-Duhring (1877), that: "Militarism dominates and is swallowing Europe. But this militarism also bears within itself the seed of its own destruction. Competition among the individual states forces them, on the one hand, to spend more money each year on the army and navy, artillery, etc., thus more and more hastening their financial collapse..." Engels agreed with Marx, who stated in his notebooks that "war ... in economic terms ... is the direct equivalent of a nation throwing a part of its capital into the water."

Writing in "Who Stands to Gain?"on the eve of World War I, Lenin saw the arms race as a source of super-profit for capitalist investors: In Europe, "the states that call themselves 'civilised', is now engaged in a mad armaments hurdle-race. In thousands of ways, in thousands of newspapers, from thousands of pulpits, they shout and clamour about patriotism, culture, native land, peace, and progress - and all in order to justify new expenditures of tens and hundreds of millions of rubles for all manner of weapons of destruction - for guns, dreadnoughts, etc. ... the renowned British firm Armstrong, Whitworth & Co ... engaged mainly in the manufacture of 'armaments' declared a dividend of 12. percent. Dividends of 12.5 per cent mean that capital is doubled in 8 years. and this is in addition to all kinds of fees to directors, etc."

In a second article, "Armaments and Capitalism", Lenin elaborates on this theme: "we find that admirals and prominent statesmen of both parties, Conservative and Liberal, are shareholders and directors of shipyards, and of gunpowder, dynamite, ordnance and other factories. A shower of gold is pouring straight into the pockets of bourgeois politicians, who have got together in an exclusive international gang engaged in instigating an armaments race among the peoples and fleecing these trustful, stupid, dull and submissive peoples like sheep."

Once World War I broke out, the destructiveness of the arms race became even more evident. The 7th All-Russia Conference of the Bolshevik Party, under Lenin's leadership, stated that the war "has already led to the mass destruction material values, to exhaustion of productive forces, and to such a growth in the war industry that it is impossible to produce even the absolutely necessary minimum of consumer goods and means of production."

Military spending and production imposes a burden on a socialist economy even more than it does on a capitalist economy. The war communism that the Soviet Union was forced to undertake from 1918 through 1920 produced disastrous consequences for the new Soviet Economy, which was only overcome by turning to the New Economic Policy or NEP in 1921. Later, face with the Nazi invasion of World War II, the Soviets had no choice but to further militarize their economy, for which they would pay a great price after the war.

The price of militarism came to a head during the Cold War when the Soviet Union matched the military spending of the West, but based on an economy only half as big. As a result, the Soviet Union ended up in economic collapse. By the end, if one wanted a decent pair of leather boots or reliable television set or computer, one had to import it from abroad, because all the good leather and electronic equipment went to the military. The Capitalist West boasted with good reason that they had "spent the Soviet Union into the grave" by means of the arms race.

Although militarism always carries the seeds of its own downfall, a capitalist culture of war can apparently survive longer than a socialist culture of war, because capitalism profits greatly from imperialist economic relations with other countries, while socialism does not.

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