Why does capitalism produce war and climate breakdown?

New to Marxism: Session 5 of 6

Imperialism, war and the struggle for a habitable world

Capitalism has created a world economy. Production stretches across borders, and the labour of billions of people is connected through global chains of supply, transport and finance. Yet this integrated economy is divided among private capitals and competing nation states.

That contradiction lies behind imperialist domination, recurring war and the failure to stop ecological breakdown. Powerful states and corporations struggle over markets, resources, investment and strategic advantage. Each seeks to shift the economic and environmental costs onto workers, oppressed nations and future generations.

Ending war and restoring a habitable planet require the working class to break with its own rulers, support the liberation of oppressed peoples and replace competition for profit with democratic international planning.

What you will learn

• What Marxists mean by imperialism and why it is a system, not simply an aggressive foreign policy.
• How to distinguish wars of imperialist rivalry from struggles against national oppression.
• Why climate breakdown is rooted in capitalist ownership, competition and unequal development—and what a socialist transition would involve.

Capitalism becomes imperialism

Capitalism always developed through a world market, colonial conquest and competition between states. By the late nineteenth century, however, production and banking had become increasingly concentrated. Large companies and banks dominated whole industries, capital was exported across the world in search of higher returns, and the major powers divided territories and spheres of influence among themselves.

Lenin described this stage as imperialism. He did not mean that every country or company had become equally powerful, or that colonial rule was its only form. Imperialism is a hierarchy. A small number of states have the financial, military and political power to shape the world economy, while weaker countries are subjected to decisions made elsewhere.

Direct colonial rule has largely given way to formal independence, but domination continues through foreign ownership, debt, unequal trade, control of technology, military bases, sanctions and political intervention. A country may have its own government and flag while its economy is organised around exporting raw materials, servicing debt or providing cheap labour for foreign capital. Marxists have often called such countries semi-colonies.

Imperialism is therefore not simply a policy that a more peaceful government can discard while leaving capitalism intact. Banks and corporations need states to enforce contracts, protect investments and secure access to markets and resources. States depend in turn on the strength of the capitals based within their borders. Economic competition and geopolitical rivalry are bound together.

Nor does opposition to the established Western powers make another capitalist state anti-imperialist. Russia and China pursue the interests of their own ruling classes, use economic and military power to expand their influence and compete with the United States and its allies. The imperialist system contains powers of unequal strength, but workers have no interest in treating any of them as a progressive camp.

Why rivalry leads to war

Capitalist competition does not automatically produce a war at every moment. States negotiate, trade, form alliances and sometimes accept rules that serve their common interests. But agreements operate within a struggle over who sets the rules and gains the greatest advantage.

As economic and strategic power changes, rising powers challenge arrangements created by established ones. Governments compete for trade routes, energy supplies, minerals, military positions and political influence. They build armed forces not only to fight, but to make threats credible and compel other states to concede.

War is therefore not an interruption of politics by irrational violence. It is the continuation of political conflict by military means. Rulers present their wars as the defence of civilisation, democracy, security or the nation. Marxists look beneath these claims and ask: which classes and states are fighting, what material interests are at stake, and what political order would each side impose?

This approach also explains why opposing one alliance is not enough. Nato is an imperialist military alliance dominated by the United States, and socialists in Britain should demand that Britain leave Nato, close its overseas bases and dismantle the British war machine. But Russia’s and China’s conflicts with Nato do not turn their governments into representatives of the world’s oppressed. Choosing the supposedly lesser imperialist camp leaves workers subordinate to a rival ruling class.

In a conflict between imperialist powers, the working class should support neither side. Its main responsibility is to fight its own ruling class, resist militarism and austerity, organise across borders and turn opposition to war into a struggle against the system that produces it. This is not passive neutrality. It is an independent class position against every imperialist camp.

Not every war has the same character

Pacifism condemns war in general, but it cannot tell us how an occupied people should resist or how a ruling class can be prevented from crushing a revolution. Marxists oppose the violence of exploitation and oppression, but recognise that surrendering the means of force to the oppressor does not create peace.

Wars must be analysed concretely. A war between imperialist states to divide territory, markets or influence is reactionary on both sides. A war by an oppressed nation against colonial occupation or imperialist domination has a different character. Ireland’s struggle for independence from Britain, for example, could not be equated with a war between Britain and a rival empire.

Socialists defend the right of oppressed nations to self-determination, including the right to form a separate state. We support their resistance to imperialism even when it is led by nationalist, religious or other non-socialist organisations. But military support against the oppressor is not political endorsement. Revolutionaries retain the right to criticise the leadership, defend workers and the oppressed within the movement, and fight for an independent working-class programme.

A struggle can also be entangled with rivalry between greater powers. An oppressed nation may obtain weapons or diplomatic support from an imperialist state pursuing its own interests. That fact does not by itself erase the nation’s right to resist, but it makes working-class political independence more urgent. The task is neither to abandon the oppressed nor to become an instrument of their would-be patron.

National liberation and permanent revolution

National oppression denies a people control over its territory and political future. It is reinforced through occupation, annexation, colonial borders, economic dependency or the suppression of language and democratic rights. Fighting it can mobilise workers, peasants and the poor on an enormous scale.

The capitalist classes of oppressed countries may also clash with imperialism. But their wealth and power usually tie them to foreign capital, large landowners and the existing state. They fear an independent movement of workers and poor peasants more than they want a complete break with imperialist domination. They therefore tend to compromise, limit the struggle or reproduce oppression once in office.

The strategy of permanent revolution begins from this contradiction. In countries subordinated by imperialism, the working class must fight to lead the peasantry and all the oppressed. It must combine the struggle for national freedom, democracy and land reform with the fight to expropriate capital and establish workers’ power. These tasks cannot be separated into a completed capitalist stage followed, at some distant point, by socialism.

Nor can liberation be secured within one country alone. Imperialist pressure, the world market and military threats will remain. A victorious workers’ revolution must appeal to workers internationally and seek to spread the revolution. National liberation is completed not by creating another state that competes within capitalism, but by opening the road to an international socialist federation.

Why capitalism destabilises nature

Human beings are part of nature and every society must transform the natural world to live. The problem is not production as such, technology or an undifferentiated ‘humanity’. It is the social system that decides what is produced, how it is produced and who bears the consequences.

Under capitalism, land, energy and raw materials appear to businesses as costs. Pollution, ill health, exhausted soil and greenhouse gases can be pushed outside the company accounts and imposed on the wider population. A firm that voluntarily pays the full social and environmental cost may be undercut by competitors that do not. Each capital is therefore driven towards decisions that can be ruinous for society as a whole.

Private ownership also fragments decisions that need to be coordinated. Electricity generation, transport, housing, agriculture and industry must be transformed together, but each is controlled by competing companies and investors. New technologies are developed and deployed according to expected profit, not a democratically determined assessment of social and ecological need.

Capitalist states can regulate industry and invest in cleaner technology. Campaigns can win important reforms, and socialists fight for every measure that cuts emissions, pollution and waste. But governments also defend national competitiveness, fossil-fuel interests and their access to strategic resources. Carbon markets, corporate promises and appeals to individual consumption leave ownership and the drive to accumulate untouched.

The result is a double failure. The market cannot plan the rapid transition that is needed, while rival states cannot sustain the equal international cooperation on which it depends.

Climate justice is international

Responsibility for ecological breakdown is profoundly unequal. The imperialist powers accumulated wealth through colonial plunder, fossil-fuel industrialisation and the extraction of resources and labour from the rest of the world. Their corporations continue to move polluting production and waste across borders while retaining control of profits, finance and technology.

Workers and poor people contribute least yet suffer most from floods, heat, food insecurity, pollution and forced displacement. Countries kept poor by imperialism have fewer resources to adapt, while debt payments and corporate ownership restrict their ability to choose a different path of development.

Climate policy that ignores these inequalities will deepen them. Workers cannot be made to pay through lost jobs, higher household costs or cuts in living standards. Poorer countries cannot be told to abandon development while rich states monopolise resources and technology. Nor should climate displacement become a pretext for fortified borders and repression.

Imperialist countries owe extensive resources and technology to the countries bearing the greatest damage—without debt, privatisation or political conditions. This is not charity. It is part of repairing the consequences of a world system built through exploitation and dispossession.

A democratically planned transition

The productive knowledge and technology needed to begin a transition already exist. The obstacle is the capitalist ownership of the resources required to carry it through.

Energy, transport, construction, agriculture, the banks and the major industries should be taken into public ownership without compensation to the wealthy shareholders and placed under workers’ control. Nationalisation alone is not enough if the same managers make decisions from above or enterprises continue to operate for commercial return. Workers, consumers and affected communities must determine priorities through elected and recallable representatives.

A democratic plan could rapidly expand renewable energy and free public transport, insulate and rebuild housing, reorganise industry, restore ecosystems and reduce unnecessary production. It could share work by reducing hours without loss of pay and guarantee workers moving out of destructive industries retraining, secure jobs and existing incomes. Those workers possess knowledge essential to transforming production and must be agents of the transition, not its victims.

Such planning must be international. Resources, technology and production chains cross every border, while climate breakdown cannot be contained within one country. Workers’ governments would need to cooperate, pool resources and replace competition with a common plan based on need and ecological repair.

The same struggle therefore confronts both militarism and environmental destruction. Workers must break with their own imperialist rulers, unite with the oppressed and take control of production. Only international socialism can remove the material roots of war and organise a just transition to a habitable world.

Key terms

• Imperialism: the world system of domination and rivalry among powerful capitalist states, finance and multinational corporations.
• Finance capital: the concentrated power created through the close integration of banks, financial institutions and large industrial capitals.
• Semi-colony: a formally independent country whose economy and politics remain subordinated to imperialist powers and capital.
• Self-determination: the right of an oppressed nation to determine its own political future, including separation and the formation of an independent state.
• Permanent revolution: the strategy by which the working class leads democratic and national struggles into socialist revolution and extends them internationally.
• Just transition: the reorganisation of production needed to restore the environment while guaranteeing workers jobs, incomes, services and democratic control.

Read and discuss

For a group session, everyone should read this guide and at least one of the two short introductory readings.

Start here

• Workers Power, I is for Imperialism — a short introduction to monopoly, finance capital and the division of the world among rival powers (about 7 minutes).
• Workers Power, W is for War — why Marxists analyse the class character of a war rather than treating every war as the same (about 7 minutes).

Go deeper

• Workers Power, Towards a green capitalism? — why market mechanisms and nationally limited reforms cannot replace public ownership and international democratic planning.
• V. I. Lenin, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism — the classic Marxist analysis of monopoly, finance capital, capital export and rivalry among the great powers.

Questions for discussion

1. Why is imperialism a system rather than simply an aggressive policy?
2. How can a formally independent country remain subordinated to imperialist capital?
3. What questions should Marxists ask to determine the character of a war?
4. How can socialists support national resistance without supporting its political leadership?
5. Why do competition and private ownership obstruct an adequate response to climate breakdown?
6. What would make a green transition both democratic and just?

Activity: find the system behind the crisis

Divide into two groups. One chooses a current war or international confrontation; the other chooses a climate or energy policy. Each group identifies the main states, corporations and classes involved; the economic or strategic interests at stake; who bears the costs; and the position or demands an independent working-class movement should advance.

Compare the results. Where do private ownership, imperialist hierarchy and competition between states appear in each case? What forms of international solidarity and democratic control would be needed to overcome them?