“National wars against the imperial powers are not only possible and probable; they are inevitable, progressive, and revolutionary”

V. I. Lenin.

“It is obvious that the use or threat of force no longer can or must be an instrument of foreign policy”

M. S. Gorbachev.

The rhetoric of the leadership of the world's most powerful Marxist state has changed over the last seventy years. The more recent oratory is warmly welcomed in Western circles, especially when accompanied by specific pledges of unilateral military force reductions. But what if Marxist nations, irrespective of particular leaders or styles of leadership, possess a political culture and bureaucratic organization which mandates a persistent militarism? Perhaps there are limits to the demilitarization of socialist nations—limits which are not reciprocal to any behavior of Western capitalist nations, but which arise from the structure of socialist institutions. Put more broadly, do political, economic, and social systems change because leaders want them to?

Marxists typically argue exactly this point, using capitalism as their example. The maintenance of a large military establishment undergirds the modern capitalist economy. According to this argument, if it were not for the prop provided by military spending, advanced capitalism would fall victim to its most pervasive internal “contradiction”—underconsumption. In order to absorb “surplus capital” capitalist governments must increase spending; they cannot spend on welfare functions without undermining work incentive, so they spend on the military instead (Baran and Sweezy, 1968;Melman, 1972). This spending not only uses up surplus capital, but also provides capitalist states with the wherewithal to support imperialism.