Contribution by the Party of Labour of Austria

Dear comrades,

We would like to thank the Communist Party of Greece for organising the teleconference ‘On the struggle of the communists against the EU, its war economy and the involvement of bourgeois governments in imperialist wars’.

24 February marks the third anniversary of the beginning of the imperialist war in Ukraine. The war itself is a result of the exacerbated intra-imperialist contradictions, which have further intensified since the beginning of the war.

The intensification of the contradictions is a result of the crisis of capitalism and the race for spheres of influence, markets, access to raw materials and transport routes among the monopolies, which has been exacerbated by the crisis. The battle of the monopolies is destabilising ever larger parts of the world. While the battle in Ukraine has been going on for almost three years now, a brutal war has been raging in Sudan for almost two years. Israel's genocidal war against the Palestinian people in Gaza has lasted more than a year, which Israel, NATO and the EU have used to strengthen their own military position in the region at the cost of a greatly increased threat of war that threatens to drag an entire region into the abyss and has not yet been averted. Agreements between the imperialists on the division of power are being broken again at ever shorter intervals when one side sees a favourable opportunity to reorganise the situation.

The European Union has never been anything other than an imperialist alliance to guarantee and optimise capitalist exploitation by monopoly capital. As such, the EU has been trying to respond to the crisis of capitalism with an increasing switch to a war economy since the beginning of the imperialist war in Ukraine at the latest. Since March 2024, the European Union has been openly propagating the switch to a war economy. At that time, the EU Commission presented the goal of strengthening the European arms industry. The central aim is to build up and expand the European arms industry and strengthen its ability to wage war. The independence of the military of the EU member states from other players is to be strengthened. At present, the EU member states still buy the majority of their military equipment from the USA, but by 2030 half of all defence equipment is to come from the EU itself and by 2035 the proportion is even to be increased to 60 percent. At the same time, military expenses are continuing to rise in all EU member states.

In Austria, which is still officially neutral, defence spending in 2022 was 2.7 billion euros and is set to rise to 4.7 billion euros by 2026, which corresponds to an increase of around 56 per cent. From 2024 to 2030, an additional 20 billion euros are also to be made available for additional investment in the Austrian Armed Forces. The Austrian arms industry is also celebrating major orders, such as the 225 Pandur wheeled armoured tanks for the Austrian Armed Forces, which are being produced at the Vienna-Simmering production site for the German armaments group Rheinmetall.

At the same time, discussions have been taking place for months in the bourgeois media about the fact that the state coffers are empty and that a new government yet to be formed would have to carry out extensive attacks, particularly on the social rights of the working class. Industry and bourgeois politics are outdoing each other with anti-social proposals, including the cancellation of continued pay on the first day of sick leave, cuts to unemployment benefits, the abolition of educational leave and the abolition of the so-called climate bonus.

The election of Donald Trump as the new US president will not change this development. Rather, it will reinforce the tendency in the European Union to further increase its own capacity for action. When Trump proposes an agreement to freeze the imperialist war in Ukraine, there is a reason for this. Trump wants to free up further capacities for the increasingly escalating conflict with capitalist China. According to the current US government, the conflict with capitalist Russia should be resolved by the European Union itself. This does not look like lasting peace; on the contrary, cracks are also opening up within the Euro-Atlantic bloc of NATO, the EU and the USA. Back in November 2022, the then French Minister of Economy and Finance Bruno Le Maire gave an interview in which he stated that there was a risk that the EU could fall behind in the conflict between the USA and China for supremacy in third place. At the time, Le Maire called for the EU to take a united stance against the USA and China.

The tendency under Trump to withdraw from the war in Ukraine will only strengthen the efforts of European capital to act more independently in economic, political and increasingly also military terms. This could open up further lines of conflict and fracture in the imperialist world system, which could further destabilise the situation and increase the risk of war.

The way out for the working class and the peoples of the world does not lie in supporting one or another imperialist alliance or bloc, neither in the imperialist war in Ukraine, where some claim to be waging an anti-fascist war and others claim to be defending democracy and freedom, nor in any other imperialist conflict or war.

The imperialist conflicts and wars are the result of the private ownership of the means of production, from which the struggle for the greatest possible profit springs, leading to ever new crises, conflicts and wars.

The only way out for the working class and the peoples of the world is to help their own interests to prevail. Helping their own interests to prevail means putting an end to the private ownership of the means of production and thus to the exploitation of man by man. It means taking the path of socialist and communist construction.