Note #6: Adam Tooze and the liberal case for militarism; Australian strike figures; Marxist dictionary: “proletariat”

Prominent economic historian and commentator Adam Tooze defended the German government’s and Europe’s rearmament plans last week, telling readers of his Chartbook newsletter that doubling military spending is “perfectly sensible” because liberal Europe must have credible, competent deterrence to Russian aggression.

It was a reminder that the success of imperialist policy usually depends less on hawkish warmongers and more on people otherwise generally opposed to human slaughter—but who make a reasonable case for it when push comes to shove. In this case, slaughter itself is not immediatly at stake, but a huge transfer of wealth from workers to the war industries. As Valentina Romei, Sam Fleming and Alan Smith note in the Financial Times:

While the EU spends slightly less than 2 per cent of its GDP on defence today, European leaders are openly debating lifting spending to as much as 3.5 per cent of GDP or higher in the coming decade, a level not seen in continental Europe since the late 1960s.

Spending at this level between 1995 and 2023 would have required EU member states to allocate an extra $387bn a year to defence ... The uplift for the UK, which spent 2.3 per cent of GDP on defence in 2023, would have been $35bn a year over the same period—roughly equivalent to annual public spending on housing and local amenities …

In 2024, EU defence spending reached an estimated €326bn—about 1.9 per cent of EU GDP, up from €214bn in 2021. That is higher than an average of about €150bn in the 15 years to 2019, according to the European Council.

But estimates of the required step-up are of a different magnitude, from €160bn per year over the next five years estimated by Goldman Sachs to a range of €230bn to €460bn per year estimated by Pantheon Macroeconomics. While higher borrowing can cover some initial outlays for countries with the fiscal space to do so, the cost of rearmament will ultimately be shouldered by taxpayers and beneficiaries of the continent’s social security nets.

Bear with me as I detour back 111 years—we’ll return to Adam Tooze shortly. An infamous example of the case for war being most effectively made by nominally antiwar voices is that of European socialist parties in 1914, led by their French and German parliamentarians voting for war in the first week of August.

In the annals of the socialist movement, Karl Kautsky, a leader of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), takes the most fire for the catastrophe—particularly from Lenin in his 1915 pamphlet Socialism and War. But it was Hugo Haase, a leader of the SPD parliamentary faction, who publicly delivered the capitulation. A key figure in the antiwar movement, Haase led street demonstrations against German participation in the month before the country formally entered the war. Indeed, the SPD had mobilised close to 750,000 in demonstrations and antiwar meetings throughout July, including more than 100,000 in Berlin just a week before the party’s about face.

In a 3 August caucus meeting—just days after the government had declared war on Russia—he argued against SPD parliamentary support for government war loans. But he lost the vote and bowed to party discipline. The next day, the pacifist became the public face of the argument for slaughter. The threat of Russian despotism hung over Germany, Haase said, putting “its future development toward liberty” in jeopardy. The “fatherland” had to defend itself; there was no choice but to fight to protect Germany’s independence. International friendship, freedom and peace would have to wait until after the conflict. Haase’s short address to the Reichstag, in which he delivered the SPD’s official justification for voting for the war loans, reads in part:

We are threatened by the terrors of enemy invasion. It is not for or against war we are deciding today; rather we must decide on the means necessary for the defence of our country ... A victory of Russian despotism, stained with the blood of the best among its own people, would put much­—indeed, everything—at stake for our nation and its future development toward liberty. We must ward off this danger; we must protect the culture and independence of our own country. Thus, we are making good on what we have always emphasised: in the hour of danger, we are not deserting the Fatherland.

In doing so, we feel that we are in accord with the [Socialist] International, which has always recognised every nation’s right to national sovereignty and self-defence, just as we agree with it in condemning any war of aggression or conquest … We hope that the cruel experience of suffering in this war will awaken in many millions of people the abhorrence of war and will win them over to the ideals of socialism and world peace.

In taking up the idea of “national defence”, the socialists, in one sense, had been played (although their nationalist impulses were also strongly related to their reformism). A week earlier, Kurt Riezler, a confidant of the German chancellor, wrote in his diary: “How should the Social Democrats be treated when war comes? Immediately make sure to negotiate with them ourselves, humanely … This is what the chancellor wants to do … stress defensive war”.

In France, the dynamic was similar—except that, allied with Russia, the French government said it was defending the country against German aggression. As Gerd Krumeich, writing in the International Encyclopedia of the First World War, notes:

During the July crisis [the period of escalating tensions across Europe], the French government also put a priority on doing everything to demonstrate the country’s defensive posture to the Socialist and bourgeois left, who together had held a clear majority in parliament since May 1914.

Socialist party (officially called the French Section of the Workers International) leader Jean Jaurès was murdered by a nationalist on 31 July; France declared war a few days later. The Socialists then joined the Sacred Union­—a political truce through which it backed the war effort. Krumeich cites a 3 August diary entry by French President Raymond Poincaré, who, naturally, had the same idea as Riezler:

France has done everything possible … It was essential to force Germany, which was wholly responsible for the aggression, to announce its intentions publicly. If we ourselves had been forced to declare war, there would have been discussion in France about the Russian-French alliance, and then the national élan would have become fragile.

But more than any organic national enthusiasm, Poincaré relied on the eagerness of the socialists not simply to declare a truce in the class war, but to administer the imperialist war itself. As Leonard Smith, Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau and Annette Becker write in France and the Great War, 1914-1918:

[P]erhaps the most significant testimony to the incorporation of the political Left into the Union sacrée was a non-event. Minister of the Interior Louis Malvy decided not to round up the nearly 2,000 anarchists, syndicalists, and socialists whose names were inscribed in Carnet B, a list of persons drawn up as likely to disrupt a general mobilization. On August 26, Viviani enlarged the war cabinet, bringing in among others Jules Guesde and Marcel Sembat, two socialists who agreed for the first time to take part in a “bourgeois” government. Another socialist, Albert Thomas, would eventually run the ministry managing the production of armaments.

“The war to end all wars” followed, grinding on for more than four years. The US government later estimated that more than 65 million troops were mobilised across the continent, 57 percent of whom were killed or wounded. Civilian deaths on top of this perhaps reached 13 million, most reportedly due to starvation and disease. The German and French working classes paid a hefty price, as the table below shows. Perhaps more shocking than the casualties, however, was that the powerful and broadly anti-war workers’ movement had been abandoned by its own leaders and was therefore left in disarray.

Some of the more tragic recollections come from Alfred Rosmer, a revolutionary syndicalist who later joined the Communist International, describing his attempts in Paris to pull together opposition to the unfolding disaster. :

The republican leaders knew how to portray this war as a people’s war. The spirit that could be observed in the workers’ neighbourhoods did not seem so very different from that in the bourgeois and aristocratic areas. The denunciations and the (more or less discrete) visits from the police had already begun. The unanimity of the press—and the newspapers of Jaurès and of the syndicalists spoke like the others—had greatly contributed to creating this situation. All sorts of fake news was in circulation …

The only thing left to do was make an inventory of those forces which had not been swept away by the current … From what could be seen in the working-class neighbourhoods, this mood [passivity] appeared to be widespread. Abandoned to themselves, the workers who remained had not been able to resist the tide. The same people that we had seen at Pré-Saint-Gervais on all the demonstrations against the war were now swept into the crusade against “Prussian militarism”.

It’s with these anecdotes in mind that we return to Adam Tooze. He can’t be decried as a traitor like Kautsky or Hasse, if only because he is far to the right of them politically and irrelevant to the socialist and workers’ movements—to the extent that we can talk of these in 2025. And no doubt he is right, as a point of fact, to say that the European rearmament proposed today is trifling compared to the spending during the total wars of 1914-18 or 1939-45 (which is the key point he makes in the newsletter):

The challenger powers [in the lead-up to WWII] led by the Soviet Union and then fascist Italy, Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan envisioned their politics … as projects of total mobilization. Interwar German military theorists borrowed from the Soviet Union the idea of a Wehrstaat (Defense state). Once rearmament began in earnest in the early 1930s they made those visions real. Spending in “peacetime” surged to levels never before seen …

It should be jarring, to say the least, to see Nazi rearmament and the era of “war economies” invoked as a common sense reference points for Europe’s defense policy today. In fact, nothing like the mobilization of the 1930s and 1940s is being contemplated even by the boldest European military planners. For very good reason it is not Nazi rearmament but British appeasement era levels of spending that offer a sensible reference point for Europe today.

But the thing that stands out, to me at least, is that Tooze has a fairly economistic view of “total mobilisation”, conflating it with “war economy”. Perhaps the most famous of the interwar writers, at least now, is Ernst Jünger, who we came across in Note #2, and who wrote of the American victory in WWI:

Who can doubt that America … emerged the obvious victor? Its course was already decided not by the degree to which a state was a “military state”, but by the degree to which it was capable of Total Mobilisation.

By this he meant (I think), in part, the capacity of the state to carry the population, to marshal all its energies—not simply labour and capital in war production, but something resembling a spiritual, social and psychological mobilisation. How else to feed the killing fields but with motivated fodder, and families who do not resist sending their sons and fathers to murder and be murdered.

It’s precisely this type of broad mobilisation that US imperial strategists today lament as being difficult to engineer due to a lack of interest on the part of many young people to enlist as soldiers, a lack of veneration for the military project, a lack of appreciation for the stakes of global competition. That’s why one bipartisan report (last year’s “Report of the Commission on the National Defense Strategy”) notes pointedly: “The biggest difference between today and the Cold War is in the homeland”.

Ironically, social democrats and liberals making a reasonable case for “natioanl defence” will be a crucial aspect of any total mobilisation that does come in the future. A prerequisite for total mobilisation is a degree of consensus on something resembling the position Tooze puts in his newsletter: no one should panic and everyone should support rearmament as a matter of prudent self-defence.

Defensive arguments of this type can be made by any harebrained imperialist government in the modern era—in which armies are staffed by citizen workers and in which war efforts require a domestic social, ideological and economic mobilisation. That’s what makes this historian’s argument so diabolical: it is time-tested, and precisely the one most capable of manufacturing consent for the indefensible.

---

Striking out

The latest Australian strike figures were released last week. In the twelve months ending December 2024, there were 194 registered disputes involving 89,000 workers. That’s out of an employed population of around 14.5 million. So about 0.6 percent of employed workers took industrial action last year.

Why do socialists say that this is disastrous? Because, despite what many bosses say, industrial action isn’t about not going to work. Strikes are not for lazy stay-at-homers. They require organising and argument, recruiting people to the relevant trade union, building confidence in a workplace, standing up to intimidation (from the boss and sometimes from the media, the union leaders or even the government), perhaps coordinating a picket line, visiting other workplaces to ask for solidarity or to fundraise—on and on it goes.

Often, strikes are months or even years in the making, led by dedicated militants who spent countless hours visiting and arguing with workmates in their homes, turning up to work early or staying late to talk to people before or after their shifts, arranging weekend bbqs to talk strategy, and more. Strikes create leaders and activists well before the strike actually happens.

When it’s done well, industrial action is a huge mobilisation. It is political and industrial exercise; hence common talk about workers using their “industrial muscle”. But when that muscle is not being used, like regular muscles it atrophes. Imagine the declining physical health of a population in which only 0.6 percent of people perform any medium- or high-intensity exercise in any given year. That’s what we’re facing in the worker’s movement—and have been for several decades.

This is why socialists always talk about the need for strikes and other forms of industrial action: the working class movement loses power like a boxer losing conditioning when they stop training and sparring. If the workers’ movement gets ever more out of practice and out of shape, it becomes less capable of fighting against exploitation and oppression in the workplace. And it becomes less capable of asserting itself more broadly—shaping popular opinion in society and imposing its will on politicians, for example.

Without industrial action and standing up to the bosses, individual workers lose confidence and can come to accept that their lot in life is just following orders and being treated like a cog in the machine.

---

The A-Z of Marxism

Have you ever listened to a lawyer, a politician or an academic and thought, “Why don’t they just speak in plain English?” Left-wing activists also occasionally use terms that aren’t much understood outside of our own circles. That’s partly because the socialist movement throughout its history has created a vernacular of working-class struggle, which we want to preserve and promote, even if it’s not widely used at the moment. So we’re creating an activist dictionary, “The A-Z of Marxism”, to help readers understand the language of socialism and trade unionism (including words in this very paragraph, such as “left wing”, “struggle”, “working class”, “activist”, “socialist” and “movement”).

Today’s entry is…

Proletariat

Archaic word for “working class”. In ancient Rome, “proletariat” referred to landless free men impoverished by the extension of slavery. In the 1800s, Karl Marx used the word to refer to the growing social class of industrial workers employed by capitalists. There are few reasons to use “proletariat” or “proletarian” today, even when quoting nineteenth-century texts. “Working class” is a more accessible phrase, although it too comes with a bag full of confusions.