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There is a familiar argument about European rearmament that begins in the right place. Follow the money. Examine the contracts, the factories being expanded, the public expenditure being redirected and the corporations whose order books are filling up. The problem comes when the consequences of war are turned into its cause. Arms manufacturers profit from rearmament, therefore rearmament must ultimately exist because arms manufacturers require it. Russia becomes little more than the threat through which European capitalism legitimates something it already wanted to do.
I just can’t make that argument fit the material facts.
Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, an act the UN General Assembly described as aggression in violation of the UN Charter and has continued to describe in 2026 as a war initiated by the Russian Federation. Four years after the full-scale invasion, the UN was still describing the war in precisely those terms Russia has also reorganised a substantial part of its own economy around sustaining the conflict. Its military expenditure reached an estimated $190 billion in 2025, equivalent to 7.5 per cent of GDP. Russia is not simply an ideological construction produced by NATO communiqués. It is a capitalist state using military force to pursue territorial and geopolitical objectives.
That doesn’t make the economic order being built in response politically neutral. European military spending rose by 14 per cent in 2025 to $864 billion, but the larger transformation can’t be measured simply by counting missiles or artillery shells. The European Commission wants defence production lines substantially expanded and delivery times shortened. It wants a genuine EU-wide defence market and has set a target of reskilling 200,000 workers for the defence industry. It also proposes measuring the sector through its contribution to GDP, employment, expanded production facilities and defence start-ups. These are the foundations of an industrial structure intended to last.
Capital doesn’t have to manufacture a crisis before it can accumulate from it. Rheinmetall can benefit enormously from European fear of Russia without having created Putin, the Russian state, the invasion of Ukraine or the strategic problem facing governments on Russia’s western border. Once contracts are signed and factories expanded, however, something changes. Capital has been committed, workers have been hired and political constituencies begin to form around continued production. The initial cause of increased military expenditure and the interests created by that expenditure are no longer the same thing.
That difference is easily lost because it is much simpler to imagine a single capitalist interest standing behind everything. States don’t work like that and neither does capital. European governments have interests in territorial security and in maintaining the institutions through which their own power is exercised. European defence manufacturers compete with American manufacturers. Firms dependent upon cheap energy don’t necessarily have the same interests as weapons producers benefiting from geopolitical confrontation. Finance can make money from rearmament without having identical strategic interests to the companies manufacturing the weapons. Capital is a social relation, not a committee meeting in which everybody agrees beforehand what history is going to do.
The fiscal response makes the restructuring unusually visible. The European Union spent years surrounding public expenditure with rules presented as hard economic constraints, yet defence has acquired its own exceptional treatment. By June 2026, 18 EU member states had activated the national escape clause allowing additional fiscal flexibility for increased defence spending. The mechanism permits deviations of up to 1.5 per cent of GDP from the normal expenditure path for defence while other spending remains subject to the existing framework. The Council states explicitly that other expenditure remains bound by the budgetary rules.
The conclusion is not that there was secretly an unlimited reservoir of money that governments maliciously withheld from hospitals and housing. Fiscal capacity is more complicated than that. What has been exposed is the political character of the rules themselves. Constraints presented as immovable can be altered when states decide that circumstances require it. The question raised by the present turn towards defence is therefore sharper than the familiar complaint that governments somehow found the money for bombs. It concerns why particular forms of state expenditure are granted exceptions that others are not.
Workers can’t be treated as spectators to this process or as people whose interests can be read automatically from their class position. A Ukrainian railway worker has a material interest in whether the railway remains under Ukrainian control. A nurse has a material interest in whether the hospital in which she works is occupied or destroyed. A Polish worker can regard Russian military power as threatening without having been manipulated into doing so by an arms-company advertising campaign. Homes, workplaces and political organisations exist inside territories, however historically contingent the borders around those territories may be.
There is an equally material contradiction on the other side. Military production creates jobs. It can create apprenticeships and maintain manufacturing capacity in places where civilian industry has been allowed to disappear. The worker employed producing artillery shells may dislike the war while knowing that a cancelled contract threatens the income paying the mortgage. A town hollowed out by forty years of deindustrialisation may experience a new defence factory less as the arrival of militarism than as the return of skilled industrial employment. None of this makes the arms industry socially benign. It shows why simply revealing that somebody profits from war doesn’t constitute an analysis of the social relationships produced by it.
Capitalism reproduces itself partly by making the reproduction of everyday life dependent upon wages generated inside capitalist production. A defence worker doesn’t have to believe in militarism to become materially dependent upon military expenditure. Once tens of thousands of workers, suppliers and communities have become incorporated into an expanded defence sector, reductions in spending cease to affect only shareholders. The industry begins to acquire a social base beyond the owners of the companies themselves.
Something similar happens inside the state. The EU’s Readiness Roadmap envisages expanded production capacity, military mobility corridors and a much larger integrated European defence market. These are not emergency consignments of ammunition that disappear when the fighting ends. They involve physical infrastructure and bureaucratic capacity. The more resources invested in them, the more interests exist in maintaining and using them. An external threat can therefore be perfectly real while the economic response to it gradually develops a logic that is no longer reducible to that threat alone.
This is why reducing the whole process to manufactured fear misses what is actually happening. Putin doesn’t become less responsible for invading Ukraine because defence companies profit from the consequences. Those companies don’t become disinterested public servants because the Russian threat is real. European states can have rational security concerns while also constructing an industrial system whose owners and workers will have material reasons to resist its dismantling later. None of those propositions cancels the others.
The harder question concerns what happens if the strategic conditions change. Production lines will still exist. Skilled workforces will still have jobs tied to them. Investors will expect returns and governments will have institutions organised around procurement. The European Commission is already seeking multi-year industrial demand capable of giving the defence sector greater stability and predictability. Once that infrastructure becomes embedded in European capitalism, military expenditure will have constituencies that didn’t exist on the same scale before the war.
A materialist politics loses something important whenever it turns Russia into little more than the villain required by Western capital. It also loses something when the reality of Russian aggression becomes a reason to stop examining what is being constructed in response. The war is real. The accumulation taking place around it is real too. The political economy now emerging from their interaction can’t be understood by pretending that either half of that equation is an illusion.
Thanks for reading Anti-Capitalist Musings. It is a small operation, and I hope it offers something worth your time. There will be no premium subscriber content here: everything published will remain free to read. If you value these pieces and want to support the writing, buying me a coffee helps fund media subscriptions and the books that keep the analysis grounded. Every contribution, however modest, is genuinely appreciated.
Curious article. You (rightly) criticise European rearmament as having its own internal logic and capitalistic drivers but then argue that it is not simply something 'capitalism already wanted to do' but is instead a response to a genuine 'threat' (without then making any suggestions as to what an appropriate 'non-capitalistic' response to that 'threat' might be).
Your justification for the 'threat' (at least in the article) appears to rest entirely on the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Which undeniably proves that Russia presents a threat to Ukraine, but as to Europe (I deliberately exclude Ukraine from being part of Europe as it has no more valid claim to membership than say, Turkey), the claim is more questionable. Of course, Russia certainly presets a threat whilst Europe offers materials and military assistance to Ukraine, they are at war with Ukraine so if other parties are offering direct offensive assistance to their enemy then why should those parties not expect to be targeted?
It is fair to say that the armaments industry and all that goes with it is not an inevitable output of capitalism - capitalism can operate happily without, although it does always require some source of force to maintain the status quo. So a specific switch in resources towards military expenditure is a choice that is driven by factors outside capitalism (history, strategic resources and cultural conflicts). So it is possible to say those factors may justify a particular political stance - wherein capitalistic profit seeking occurs, but is not the driver of the stance.
What I find interesting is that the centre-left (who might traditionally be expected to take an 'anti war' stance) have almost universally signed up to the traditional neocon anti-Russia (I use that term rather than 'Putin' deliberately because when a countries regime is demonised it is almost always as a proxy for the country itself) stance, whereas the far right are the ones questioning that narrative. The argument that they share fascistic tendencies with Putin (and receive large amounts of funding from him) I find unconvincing - if Russia genuinely presents a threat of direct takeover to European states then why would believers in nationalism support it? I think it is far more likely that they simply do not perceive Russia as a threat worth directing large amounts of resources towards (which is the traditional 'anti war' stance).
No doubt many on the left will argue "well Russia invaded Ukraine, and aggression cannot be rewarded", which is fine in principle but is effectively usually just a framing device which says "well X started it so it's their fault" and does nothing to evaluate the context before it "started" or provide any indication of what might be an appropriate solution (other than unconditional surrender by X) (this is the typical Israel spiel that Hamas "started it" on November 7 and so any actions that Israel subsequently takes against them are justified). In practice we are faced with a choice of a negotiated solution (which inevitably will mean 'rewarding' Russia in some ways), or an open-ended conflict in which slaughter continues on both sides until Russia decides to unilaterally withdraw because it is no longer 'worth it'. I call this the "Afghanistan option" and that didn't really end well, did it?
"The European Union spent years surrounding public expenditure with rules presented as hard economic constraints."
As did the UK and America. But they were always a lie. Any country with a fiat currency can effectively spend whatever it wants. The EU had to work harder on the wall of bullshit because of the Euro, but got to the same point. The point is always to have a "because". "We can't spend more on medical care/ education/ housing/ food... 'because'" The things we can't spend money on that are necessary for humans surviving and thriving are many. And they are all lies. Neo-liberal economics is the only thing that prevents us doing this and all of the "economic targets" for governments are lies, to be shrugged off as soon as a plausible excuse is available. The reason they can make an exception for the equipment of war is simple: it benefits the Epstein class, and helps manage a further transfer of wealth from the poor to the very very rich. There is no sense in sticking with an economic system that has only ever had bad results for the majority of people, unless that system is in some way enriching a minority of people. That is exactly what is happening. This is why Trump's grotesque bills get passed, and this is why Andy Burnham is coming into conflict with his masters. Everything that comes out of the Bank of England is a lie. Richard Murphy (UK) and Steve Keen (Aus) give chapter and verse on this. Steve is one of the few economists who predicted the credit crunch. There is no reason for anyone to be poor in this country. Except to make someone else rich.