Posted on September 30, 2026 by fredocorvo
Social conflict inside the transition to “warfighting readiness”
By M.O.
Since the beginning of 2026, the British working class has faced two developments that increasingly intersect.
On one side, workers have continued to confront declining real wages, understaffed public services, redundancies, industrial restructuring, insecure employment, and pressure on local government, health care, and higher education.
On the other, the British state has moved beyond simply increasing the military budget. It is reorganizing industry, technology, infrastructure, skills, and labor around what the government itself calls “warfighting readiness.”
The Defence Investment Plan published on June 30 provides £298 billion for defense over four years. The government says that this represents more than £60 billion above the level implied by the previous spending baseline. Core NATO defense expenditure is scheduled to reach 2.7 percent of GDP from 2027-28, with a government commitment to 3 percent in the next Parliament and a NATO commitment to 3.5 percent by 2035. [1]
This transformation should not be reduced to the slogan that every pound spent on weapons is a pound removed from hospitals or schools.
The relationship is more fundamental.
The British state is beginning to reorganize collective social labor around the requirements of intensified interstate competition and preparation for major war.
For workers, the central question increasingly becomes:
Who decides how society’s labor, productive capacity, infrastructure, technology, and knowledge are used?
1. The British working class has changed, but not disappeared
Britain is no longer dominated by the enormous industrial concentrations associated with coal, steel, shipbuilding, automobile manufacturing, and the old engineering industries.
But the decline of traditional industrial employment did not abolish the working class.
Wage labor spread through logistics, warehouses, health care, universities, schools, retail, telecommunications, transport, delivery services, data centers, aviation, food processing, and long subcontracting chains.
At the same time, strategically important industrial concentrations survived.
BAE Systems, Rolls-Royce, Babcock, Airbus, MBDA, shipyards on the Clyde, submarine construction at Barrow-in-Furness, nuclear facilities, aerospace plants, electronics companies, and thousands of suppliers remain deeply embedded in British capitalism.
Modern warfare makes the relationship between these apparently separate workers visible.
A submarine requires steelworkers, welders, electricians, nuclear engineers, software developers, logistics workers, railway workers, dockworkers, and thousands of suppliers.
A military aircraft requires aerospace workers, electronics, engines, software, communications, fuel, maintenance, and transport.
An army preparing for major war requires hospitals, ports, railways, roads, energy networks, communications systems, warehouses, and civilian industrial capacity.
Modern militarization is therefore increasingly the militarization of collective social labor.
2. Worker resistance continues, but remains fragmented
Official figures show that industrial conflict did not disappear in 2026. In July alone, the Office for National Statistics recorded 63 stoppages in progress and approximately 34,000 working days lost, divided between public- and private-sector disputes. [2] Some conflicts have been particularly revealing.
Resident doctors in England continued the long dispute over pay erosion, staffing, and employment prospects. A planned June walkout would have been the sixteenth round of strike action since the dispute began in 2023 before it was suspended for a membership vote on a new offer. [3]
Local-government workers faced similar pressures. In July, nearly 200,000 council and school workers in England and Wales began voting on industrial action after UNISON rejected a 3.3 percent pay offer. The workers included teaching assistants, social workers, refuse workers, housing staff, librarians, and other local-government employees. UNISON calculated that their real wages had fallen substantially since 2010. [4]
Universities have become another major center of conflict. By September, staff at Edinburgh, Dundee, Nottingham, and other universities were fighting redundancies, departmental closures, and restructuring. Edinburgh faced a huge financial deficit; Nottingham proposed eliminating roughly 10 percent of its workforce. Strike ballots, marking boycotts, and industrial action spread through a sector experiencing a profound funding crisis. [5]
These struggles demonstrate that the working class is not passive. But they remain overwhelmingly separated by employer, sector, union, and territorial administration. That fragmentation contrasts sharply with the state’s own increasingly integrated planning.
3. The state already thinks in terms of one integrated war economy
The 2025 Strategic Defence Review stated explicitly that Britain must move toward “warfighting readiness.” Its conception of defense goes far beyond soldiers and weapons. The Review discusses military intelligence, artificial intelligence, communications, health care, infrastructure, civilian technology, private investment, startups, supply chains, and industrial labor. Most revealingly, it explicitly names “the trade unions and their members” among those whose participation is required for the planned increase in defense-industry productivity. [6]
The significance is considerable. The state understands that modern war cannot be prepared by the Ministry of Defence alone. It requires workers. Not just soldiers. It requires engineers, factory workers, technicians, nurses, software developers, railway workers, port workers, researchers, construction workers, energy workers, and logistics workers.
The British state is therefore already looking at society as an interconnected productive system whose capacities must become available for war. Workers generally still confront the same system separately.
4. Nearly £300 billion for military transformation
The Defence Investment Plan makes the scale clearer.
The government plans approximately £298 billion of defense expenditure over four years. [1]
The Ministry of Defence budget is projected at:
2026-27: £68.3 billion;
2027-28: £73.8 billion;
2028-29: £76.5 billion;
2029-30: £79.1 billion. [1]
The government also announced an additional £15 billion investment package.
Among the priorities are:
more than £5 billion for military drones;
nearly £2 billion for a “Digital Targeting Web” using AI and software;
£790 million for homeland air, drone, and missile defense;
£11 billion for munitions and weapons;
new long-range strike systems;
counter-drone systems;
military artificial intelligence;
and at least six new energetics and munitions factories by 2030. [7]
This is not ordinary replacement of aging equipment. It represents an attempt to reconstruct Britain’s capacity to sustain prolonged, technologically advanced warfare.
5. Rearmament is becoming industrial policy
The British government repeatedly presents increased defense expenditure not simply as military necessity but as an economic growth strategy. The June investment package was promoted as supporting nearly 60,000 additional direct and indirect industrial jobs by the end of the decade, bringing the forecast number of jobs supported by defense expenditure to more than half a million. [7] This is politically important. Military expenditure is being integrated with:
industrial policy;
regional development;
employment;
apprenticeships;
technology;
artificial intelligence;
advanced manufacturing;
shipbuilding;
aerospace;
nuclear engineering;
and supply-chain policy.
The distinction between “defense policy” and “economic policy” consequently becomes less clear. This creates a contradiction for workers. Military investment can genuinely create employment. A worker in Barrow, Glasgow, Derby, Belfast, Bristol, Lancashire, or South Yorkshire may depend directly or indirectly on military contracts. The worker’s immediate need for employment can therefore become attached to the state’s need for rearmament.
6. England: the industrial core of rearmament
Much of Britain’s military-industrial structure is concentrated in England.
Barrow-in-Furness is central to submarine construction.
Derby is crucial to nuclear submarine propulsion through Rolls-Royce.
Lancashire remains a major aerospace center.
Bristol and the southwest contain aerospace, missile, electronics, and technology industries.
The Midlands retain engineering and advanced manufacturing capacity.
The government’s commitment to continuous submarine production and expansion of weapons production will increase the strategic importance of these concentrations. [6]
But another development deserves attention. Industrial capacity that might otherwise disappear can increasingly be rescued or reorganized because it is militarily useful. The September government intervention concerning Speciality Steels UK illustrates the possibility. The company’s facilities in South Yorkshire and the West Midlands produce specialist steels relevant to aerospace and defense production.
Here the worker may confront a brutal apparent alternative: accept integration into the war economy or lose the job. But this opposition is not created by workers. It results from capitalist decisions about what production is profitable or strategically necessary.
The machines exist.
The skills exist.
The workers exist.
The social needs also exist.
The real question is who decides what those productive forces will produce.
7. Scotland: shipbuilding, nuclear weapons, and the contradiction of employment
Scotland occupies a particularly contradictory position.
The Clyde shipyards are central to British naval construction.
BAE Systems facilities at Govan and Scotstoun produce warships for the Royal Navy.
Faslane is central to Britain’s nuclear submarine system.
Rosyth remains important to naval maintenance and engineering.
Thousands of jobs depend directly or indirectly on these activities.
This allows militarization to be presented as industrial protection.
For a shipyard worker, a frigate contract means wages, apprenticeship opportunities, and employment. But from the standpoint of the working class internationally, the military purpose of the ship does not become progressive because workers received wages for constructing it. The contradiction is therefore real. A working-class alternative cannot simply demand that military shipyards close and leave workers unemployed. But neither can it accept the argument that workers must support British naval power because their livelihoods depend upon it. The productive facilities could produce other socially necessary goods. The decisive problem is control over production.
8. Wales: military technology and the dispersed supply chain
Wales does not contain military-industrial concentrations on the same scale as Barrow or the Clyde, but Welsh workers are integrated into British defense through aerospace, electronics, maintenance, training, cybertechnology, manufacturing, and supply chains.
This illustrates a broader feature of contemporary militarization. A worker does not need to work in a factory marked “arms manufacturer” to contribute to military production. A company making sensors, electronic components, advanced materials, software, precision engineering products, or communications equipment can participate simultaneously in civilian and military markets. Dual-use production therefore expands the social basis of militarization while making it less visible.
9. Northern Ireland: aerospace, missiles, and the problem of national divisions
Northern Ireland provides another important example. Aerospace and defense production around Belfast forms part of multinational production chains. Workers there enter the same global industrial networks as workers in Britain, Ireland, continental Europe, and North America. Yet political life remains strongly structured around British and Irish national identities.
From a working-class standpoint, both frameworks obscure the material relationship. A Protestant aerospace worker and a Catholic aerospace worker sell their labor power under the same capitalist relations. Their interests are not determined by whether Northern Ireland should remain British or become part of a united Ireland. Nor do their class interests coincide with those of British or Irish capital.
Militarization strengthens the need to break with both national frameworks because workers can otherwise be mobilized behind competing states and national projects.
10. The munitions program changes the meaning of industrial capacity
The commitment to build at least six new energetics and munitions factories by 2030 deserves particular attention. The Strategic Defence Review originally called for an “always on” munitions capability that could rapidly increase output during a crisis or war. [6] The 2026 Defence Investment Plan expanded this ambition.
The government now plans £11 billion for munitions and weapons, explicitly seeking larger stockpiles and greater national production capacity. [7] An “always on” arms industry means that peacetime production is deliberately organized so that it can be accelerated during war. Factories therefore become reserve military capacity. So do their workers.
This changes the relationship between labor policy and military planning. The state does not merely need workers today. It needs a workforce whose skills, training, supply chains, and workplaces can be mobilized rapidly tomorrow.
11. Artificial intelligence and the militarization of technical labor
The British buildup is not primarily a return to the industrial warfare of 1914 or 1939. Artificial intelligence, autonomous systems, drones, digital targeting, cyberwarfare, space systems, and electronic warfare occupy central positions. The government has allocated nearly £2 billion to a Digital Targeting Web and substantial sums to AI and autonomous military systems. [7] This means militarization reaches deeply into occupations often considered civilian:
software engineering;
data analysis;
robotics;
telecommunications;
university research;
electronics;
cybersecurity;
artificial intelligence.
Technical workers therefore acquire growing strategic importance. The same programmer whose skills can improve health systems or transport networks can develop military targeting software. The same university laboratory can conduct civilian research or receive defense funding.
Militarization is increasingly embedded in the ordinary circulation of knowledge and labor.
12. Health care: social crisis and military necessity
The continuing struggle of resident doctors exposes another contradiction. Workers are told that NHS resources are limited and that pay restoration must remain financially constrained. Yet military planning recognizes that medical capacity is indispensable to war. The Strategic Defence Review called for rebuilding Defence Medical Services and explicitly demanded cooperation with the Department of Health and Social Care so military personnel can be supported “in peacetime and in war.”[6]
A major conflict would inevitably require civilian hospitals, doctors, nurses, transport, pharmaceuticals, blood supplies, and emergency infrastructure. The same health workers who experience understaffing and wage pressure in everyday capitalism become strategically indispensable once the state prepares for war. This contradiction should not be reduced to “NHS versus defense.” It reveals something deeper: health care is part of the material infrastructure upon which the entire society, including its military apparatus, depends.
13. Universities: austerity in one part, military demand in another
The university crisis makes the same contradiction visible from another direction. In 2026, universities across Britain announced redundancies, departmental closures, and restructuring. Employees at Edinburgh, Dundee, Nottingham, and elsewhere responded with industrial action. [5] Yet the war economy requires precisely the scientific and technical capacities concentrated in universities:
engineering;
AI;
cybersecurity;
nuclear science;
aerospace;
robotics;
advanced materials;
quantum technology.
The problem is therefore not simply that education receives too little while defense receives too much. The university itself is increasingly divided between fields considered economically or strategically useful and activities subjected to retrenchment. Military demand can become one mechanism through which research and education are reorganized. The result is a subtler form of militarization: not soldiers entering universities, but military priorities entering research funding, technological development, and career structures.
14. The unions occupy a seemingly contradictory position
The British case makes the union question unusually clear because the government’s own Strategic Defence Review explicitly includes trade unions and their members among the forces necessary to increase military-industrial productivity. [6] This is not accidental.
The state needs unions because military expansion requires labor stability.
Workers must be recruited.
Skills must be developed.
Production schedules must increase.
Workplace disputes must be negotiated.
Productivity must rise.
The union apparatus has therefore become an intermediary between workers and the war economy. This does not mean union members or workplace militants support militarization. Nor does it mean all union leaderships adopt the same position.
In 2026, UCU and sections of other unions explicitly opposed increased military spending. UCU promoted a “wages not weapons” position at the Trades Union Congress, while several unions participated in antiwar initiatives. [8] However, this doesn’t represent a genuine opposition to militarism because the structural problem of militarization remains. Other unions and sections of the same labor movement support defense contracts because they provide employment.
A shipbuilding union can demand more naval orders.
An aerospace union can defend military contracts.
A manufacturing union can call for weapons to be produced domestically rather than imported.
The apparent worker interest then becomes: British weapons built by British workers. This converts employment protection into economic nationalism.
15. “Jobs in defense” can bind workers to the state
The government understands the political importance of employment. That is why almost every major defense announcement emphasizes “British jobs.” This argument can be powerful. Workers cannot live from abstract promises of future social transformation. They need wages now.
But the conclusion that workers must therefore support military production does not follow. If a factory can manufacture missile components, it possesses machinery, skilled labor, engineering knowledge, energy, and organizational capacity. Those productive forces could be used differently. The problem is capitalist ownership and state priorities. Workers should therefore oppose both alternatives imposed upon them: redundancy or weapons production.
The demand should instead be: no layoffs, no wage cuts, and collective worker control over conversion toward socially useful production.
16. Rearmament and social cuts: a real connection, but not simple bookkeeping
The 2026 Defence Investment Plan provides an unusually concrete example of the financial connection. The government’s own funding explanation includes reductions in departmental capital budgets and additional savings from transport and energy budgets as elements financing the £15 billion increase in defense investment. [1]
This makes it impossible to claim that military expansion exists in a completely separate fiscal universe. But the relationship should still not be reduced to one-for-one accounting. Military spending can also be financed through borrowing, taxation, asset sales, economic growth, or future reductions. The deeper issue is political priority.
The state is protecting and expanding military expenditure while workers in local government, universities, health care, and other sectors are told that resources are limited. The state thereby decides which forms of social labor must expand and which must contract.
17. The Labour government does not represent a working-class alternative to militarization
The militarization program is being implemented by a Labour government. That fact has particular historical importance in Britain because of Labour’s institutional relationship with the trade unions. But government by a party historically connected with organized labor does not change the capitalist function of the state. The government must administer:
state finances;
capital accumulation;
international competitiveness;
military alliances;
industrial strategy;
the armed forces;
and Britain’s position in the world system.
Consequently, it confronts workers as an employer, budget authority, and organizer of national capital. The disputes with doctors, local-government workers, university staff, and other workers demonstrate this concretely. The issue is not that Labour has betrayed an otherwise naturally working-class state. The state remains an organ for administering capitalist society regardless of which parliamentary party forms the government.
18. The British working class possesses enormous potential power
The development of the war economy nevertheless creates a contradiction for the state. The more integrated military preparation becomes, the more dependent it becomes on workers who remain outside the armed forces.
Dockworkers can interrupt logistics.
Rail workers can interrupt transport.
Engineers can interrupt maintenance.
Aerospace workers can interrupt aircraft production.
Shipyard workers can interrupt naval construction.
Software workers can interrupt digital systems.
Health workers can interrupt medical capacity.
Energy workers can interrupt the power supply.
This does not mean every strike automatically becomes antiwar. It means that workers’ material position gives them potential power over the infrastructure of militarization. The problem is that this power remains fragmented.
19. From union-controlled disputes to workers controlling their own struggles
The central question is therefore that of organization. A strike confined to one bargaining unit normally remains a dispute over the price and conditions of labor power. It can win improvements. But it leaves the broader organization of production untouched.
A different dynamic can emerge when workers begin to control struggles through general assemblies open to all workers involved. Such assemblies can:
determine demands;
decide strike action;
elect delegates with explicit mandates;
recall those delegates;
control negotiations;
send direct delegations to other workplaces;
contact suppliers;
and establish links across industries and national borders.
This is fundamentally different from asking union executives to coordinate more effectively. The center of decision moves toward the workers themselves.
20. The international production chain is the natural terrain for extension
British military industry is not really national.
Airbus connects Britain with France, Germany, Spain, and other countries.
MBDA links British, French, Italian, German, and Spanish capital.
The F-35 program connects British production to the United States and a multinational supplier network.
Naval, aerospace, electronics, and nuclear production depend upon international supply chains.
Capital coordinates internationally every day. Workers organized by unions are normally kept within national collective bargaining systems. That asymmetry strengthens capital. If British aerospace workers struggle, the logical extension is therefore not simply another British union campaign. They can establish direct contact with workers producing the same systems elsewhere. Common demands over wages, working time, layoffs, production pressure, and workplace control can create practical internationalism before workers agree on every political question.
Conclusion: The state integrates the war economy; workers must integrate their struggles
Britain in 2026 reveals a double movement.
Workers remain divided into thousands of bargaining units, employers, sectors, unions, and regional administrations.
The state, meanwhile, increasingly integrates:
industry;
transport;
health;
science;
artificial intelligence;
energy;
skills;
trade unions;
infrastructure;
and labor power
into preparations for war.
The state already understands the material unity of social production. The working class has yet to organize on the same level. The decisive development would therefore not simply be a larger antiwar demonstration or a parliamentary demand for lower military spending. It would be workers beginning to connect their immediate struggles themselves.
The resident doctor fighting pay erosion, the university worker resisting redundancy, the council worker defending wages, the Barrow shipbuilder, the Clyde shipyard worker, the aerospace worker, and the railway worker occupy different workplaces. But they participate in one interconnected system of social production.
Militarization makes that connection more visible. The alternative is neither a more peaceful British capitalism nor an independent European military policy. It is the development of workers’ own organization across workplaces, industries, regions, and borders — capable ultimately of deciding collectively what society produces, how it produces it, and for whose needs.
M.O. 30-9-2026
Appendix
Aurora: Internationalism Is Not Enough — The Missing Bridge Between Class Struggle and Workers’ Power
The August 2026 issue of Aurora, published by the Communist Workers’ Organisation (CWO), deserves a different kind of criticism from reformist or left-nationalist publications.
Its principal article, “The World May Be on Fire… But There Is An Alternative,” rejects support for capitalist states, identifies contemporary wars as imperialist conflicts, locates the alternative in the international working class, and explicitly calls for greater class unity and self-organization. [A1] These are important points of agreement.
The problem is not that Aurora chooses the wrong imperialist camp. It does not. The problem lies in the gap between its general revolutionary conclusions and the concrete development of workers’ struggle.
1. Aurora correctly rejects all imperialist camps
The strongest part of the argument is its internationalism. The wars in Ukraine, Iran, Palestine, Lebanon, Sudan, Congo, Myanmar, and elsewhere are not presented as separate moral tragedies requiring workers to select the “better” state. They are understood within a capitalist world increasingly characterized by interstate competition and war. [A1] That distinguishes the CWO from much of the bourgeois left.
It does not present Russia or China as progressive counterweights to American imperialism. Nor does it defend NATO, Britain, or European rearmament.
For proletarian internationalism this is indispensable. Workers have no national state to defend.
2. But the US-China framework risks becoming too schematic
The article identifies the struggle for world supremacy between the United States and China as lying “at the root” of many contemporary conflicts. [A1] There is substantial truth here.
The US-China relationship has become the central long-term axis of global interstate competition. But this formulation can become too schematic if other powers are interpreted primarily through that bipolar structure. Russia pursues interests that are not reducible to Chinese policy. Iran has its own regional interests. Turkey, Saudi Arabia, India, the European powers, Israel, and other states maneuver according to their own accumulation, security, and regional requirements. The international system is therefore not simply two coherent imperialist camps moving mechanically toward confrontation.
Capitalist internationalization and interstate rivalry create shifting alignments, temporary agreements, contradictory dependencies, and conflicts inside supposed blocs.
For workers, this matters because a predetermined two-camp schema can obscure the actual development of imperialist relations.
3. Crisis should not become a predetermined theory of collapse
Aurora argues that capitalism has moved from expedient to expedient since the end of the postwar boom and has failed to restore the profitability capable of producing another comparable economic boom. [A1] Again, there is a real problem being identified.
But there is a danger in turning long-term capitalist difficulties into a predetermined trajectory toward terminal crisis and generalized war. Capitalism does not need to be historically healthy to continue accumulating.
It can restructure.
It can destroy capital.
It can shift production geographically.
It can introduce new technologies.
It can intensify exploitation.
It can create new industries while destroying old ones.
The development of China itself demonstrates the enormous geographical transformations possible within world accumulation. The alternative to theories of capitalist stability is therefore not a theory of inevitable collapse. A more concrete analysis must follow:
uneven accumulation;
uneven profitability;
uneven productivity;
financial structures;
internationalization of capital;
technological change;
state competition;
and above all the changing relationship between capital and wage labor.
Generalized war is a real possibility. It should not become the predetermined destination to which every development is made to point.
4. The working class appears at the end of the analysis
The article’s final section correctly states that the working class holds the key to a different society. [A1] But this creates a structural problem in the argument. Much of the preceding analysis concerns states, wars, ruling classes, economic crisis, and geopolitical competition. The working class then enters primarily as the solution. Yet the working class is already an active element inside the development being analyzed.
Workers produce weapons.
Workers operate ports.
Workers maintain railways.
Workers write software.
Workers build submarines.
Workers staff hospitals.
Workers resist speedup.
Workers fight layoffs.
Workers strike over wages.
Workers migrate.
Workers refuse military service.
Workers’ behavior is therefore not merely a future answer to capitalist crisis. It is one of the forces shaping capitalism now.
5. “The working class must take matters into its own hands” is correct but insufficient
Aurora says that workers must take matters into their own hands. It refers positively to strikes, protests, resistance to conscription, class unity, and self-organization. [A1] But what does this mean inside an actual workplace conflict? Suppose workers at an aerospace factory strike against worsening conditions. (See Lessons of the Airbus Spain strike of 2026)
Should they wait for the union to extend the strike?
Should revolutionaries demand that union leaders organize solidarity?
Should workers elect their own strike committee?
Should an assembly be open to nonunion workers?
Should delegates receive binding mandates?
Should they be recallable?
Should workers directly approach suppliers?
Should they contact workers at the same company abroad?
These are not secondary organizational details.
They concern the actual process through which the working class can become an independent social force.
6. Self-organization must be defined concretely
Workers’ self-organization does not simply mean workers becoming militant. Nor does it mean supporting a more radical union faction. It means workers themselves becoming the decision-making center of the struggle. A general assembly open to all workers involved can decide:
the demands;
the methods of struggle;
whether negotiations occur;
who conducts them;
what mandate negotiators possess;
whether an agreement is accepted;
and whether the struggle should extend.
Delegates can be elected for specific tasks and recalled immediately when they cease to carry out their mandate. This creates a fundamentally different relationship from permanent representation. The distinction is crucial because communist politics is not merely about what workers demand. It is about workers developing the capacity to decide collectively.
7. The British war economy provides concrete opportunities to develop this argument
The CWO is operating in a country where the government itself now says that trade unions and their members are necessary to increase defense-industry productivity. [6] This should be a central subject for revolutionary intervention. The British state is integrating workers into war preparation not mainly through patriotic speeches but through employment.
More submarine jobs.
More aerospace jobs.
More apprenticeships.
More steel orders.
More munitions factories.
More engineering careers.
The ideology of militarization therefore appears materially as: your job depends on defense. A revolutionary response cannot remain at the level of: workers have no country. It must confront the immediate material contradiction. What should workers do when refusing military production appears to threaten their employment? The answer must include opposition to layoffs and wage cuts combined with workers’ control over conversion toward socially useful production. Otherwise internationalism remains politically correct but practically abstract.
8. The unions should be analyzed through their state function, not by their ‘betrayals’
The ICT has long criticized trade unionism. But the British situation allows a more precise explanation. The problem is not simply that union leaders betray workers. The government’s own defense strategy shows why unions are useful to capital.
They organize labor.
They negotiate productivity.
They manage disputes.
They participate in training.
They negotiate restructuring.
They can defend national industrial employment.
They therefore help integrate workers into military-industrial policy even while bargaining for better wages.
This is particularly clear when unions demand that military contracts remain in Britain to protect “British jobs.” The national interest of British industry then becomes identified with the interests of British workers. That is precisely the identification proletarian internationalism must break.
9. But anti-union criticism is not enough either
Workers do not become autonomous merely by distrusting union officials. Nor does forming a new “rank-and-file” organization automatically solve the problem. A permanent alternative organization can itself become another representative apparatus. The decisive criterion is different: Where does decision-making power reside?
If it resides in assemblies of the workers themselves, organizations and political minorities can propose, argue, and participate.
If it resides in a permanent apparatus — official or unofficial, moderate or radical — workers remain represented rather than self-organized.
This distinction should be central to revolutionary intervention.
10. The question of revolutionary organization remains unresolved
Here a deeper difference with the ICT emerges. The ICT considers the construction of an international revolutionary political organization indispensable. There is substantial agreement that communist minorities are necessary. Workers’ struggles do not automatically generate a complete understanding of capitalism, imperialism, the state, or communist transformation. Communist organizations have important tasks:
analyzing capitalism;
preserving historical experience;
criticizing nationalism;
defending proletarian internationalism;
intervening in struggles;
connecting experiences internationally;
and arguing for workers’ self-organization.
The disagreement begins when political organization is assigned the task of providing the political leadership through which the class becomes capable of taking power. This can reintroduce, at another level, precisely the separation between leaders and led that self-organization is supposed to overcome.
11. Communist organizations cannot manufacture class consciousness
Aurora says that the more people who are politically prepared for revolution, the sooner the working class as a whole will be able to abolish capitalism. [A1] There is truth in this. Revolutionary minorities can accelerate clarification. But proletarian consciousness is not primarily a body of correct ideas transferred from revolutionaries to workers. It develops through the interaction of:
workers’ position in capitalist production;
their everyday experience;
bourgeois ideology;
collective struggle;
discussion;
organization;
defeats;
victories;
and the intervention of communist minorities.
Workers change their understanding while changing their own activity. This is why independent struggle is not simply a vehicle for spreading communist ideas. It is itself a process through which consciousness can change.
12. The decisive test comes when workers reject the communists’ proposal
The difference between political contribution and political leadership becomes clearest when workers disagree with revolutionaries. Suppose a general assembly decides to end a strike. Communists believe this is a mistake. What happens?
They should argue against the decision.
They should explain the consequences.
They should attempt to persuade other workers.
But if the assembly maintains its decision, the communists cannot claim a higher authority derived from their program. The class can only emancipate itself through its own experience. That necessarily includes mistakes. An organization that reserves to itself a superior right to determine the political direction of workers ultimately substitutes itself for the class.
13. From workplace assemblies to workers’ councils
The relationship between immediate struggles and revolution therefore deserves much more attention than Aurora gives it.
Workers do not jump directly from isolated strikes to world revolution.
The movement can develop through extension.
An assembly at one workplace sends delegates to another.
Workers discover common demands.
Delegates meet across enterprises.
Strike committees coordinate across sectors.
Local coordinating bodies emerge. These bodies can eventually confront questions extending beyond wages:
transport;
food;
energy;
health;
production;
distribution;
public order.
At that point organs originally created for struggle can begin assuming social functions. The distinction between a strike committee and a workers’ council is therefore not simply organizational size. It concerns the widening content of workers’ collective decision-making.
14. War preparation makes this development especially important
The British state is already integrating civilian society for possible war. It is connecting military production, health care, AI, ports, industry, unions, infrastructure, and research. Workers can oppose this effectively only by developing connections across precisely those same divisions.
A munitions worker alone cannot stop militarization.
A doctor alone cannot.
A railway worker alone cannot.
But workers who begin connecting these struggles can discover that they collectively operate the material system upon which both capital accumulation and military power depend. This is where opposition to war can grow organically from class struggle.
15. Antiwar politics should not be separated from immediate struggles
A common weakness of antiwar politics is that workers are approached first as citizens who should adopt an antiwar position. A communist intervention should begin from their material position as workers.
A railway worker fighting staffing cuts already confronts the organization of transport.
A health worker fighting understaffing already confronts the allocation of medical capacity.
An aerospace worker fighting speedup already confronts the organization of strategic production.
A university worker fighting redundancies already confronts decisions about knowledge and research.
The connection to militarization can emerge from those struggles themselves. The question becomes: Why are workers told that their immediate needs are unaffordable while their collective labor is increasingly reorganized for war? And eventually: Why should capital and the state decide what our labor is used for at all?
16. Internationalism becomes practical through production chains
Aurora correctly insists that the working class is global. [A1] But global class unity becomes materially meaningful when workers establish direct connections.
A British Airbus worker and a Spanish Airbus worker share an employer.
British and French MBDA workers participate in the same missile-production system.
Dockworkers in different countries move the same commodities.
Rail workers transport components belonging to international production chains.
Internationalism therefore need not begin with agreement on a revolutionary platform.
Workers can establish direct relations around concrete struggles.
This practical experience can undermine nationalism more effectively than propaganda alone.
17. The goal is not a revolutionary minority organization acting for the class
The contribution of revolutionary organizations remains indispensable. But their success should ultimately be measured by something paradoxical: the degree to which workers become capable of acting without being led by them.
Communists can clarify.
They can warn.
They can connect experiences.
They can defend internationalism when nationalism becomes popular.
They can preserve historical lessons when struggles decline.
But the organization cannot become the political command center of the proletariat. The working class must itself become the conscious subject of communist transformation.
Conclusion to the Appendix
The August 2026 Aurora starts from essential positions:
capitalism generates imperialist conflict;
workers have no capitalist camp to support;
the working class is international;
capitalism cannot be abolished through parliamentary reform;
class unity and self-organization are necessary.
The weakness lies not principally in these conclusions but in the missing intermediate movement. How does a fragmented class become capable of acting independently? The answer cannot simply be:
through more strikes;
through a larger revolutionary organization;
or through the arrival of a sufficiently deep capitalist crisis.
It develops when workers begin to transform their own activity:
from following negotiations to controlling them;
from union ballots to collective assemblies;
from permanent representatives to mandated and recallable delegates;
from isolated workplaces to direct delegations;
from national bargaining to international workplace connections;
from demanding control over wages to questioning control over production;
and eventually from managing struggles to managing social production itself.
The British state is already integrating society in preparation for war. It links factories, universities, hospitals, ports, technology, infrastructure, and workers into one strategic system. The revolutionary answer must therefore be equally concrete. Not simply: “No war but the class war.” But: workers themselves organizing the class struggle through which the power to make war can be taken out of the hands of every capitalist state.
Sources
[1] UK Ministry of Defence and HM Treasury,
The Defence Investment Plan,
June 30, 2026. The plan provides £298 billion over four years; the
accompanying funding explanation details the projected MOD budgets
and the government’s NATO spending trajectory.
Defence
Investment Plan
Defence
Investment Plan funding explanation
[2] Office for National Statistics,
Workplace disputes and working
conditions, data released September
15, 2026. July 2026: 63 stoppages and 34,000 working days lost.
ONS
workplace disputes data
[3] Reuters, June 13, 2026, on the resident-doctor dispute in England and suspension of planned strike action for a membership vote.
[4] UNISON, Council
and school staff begin vote on pay strikes,
July 9, 2026. Nearly 200,000 local-government and school workers in
England and Wales were balloted following rejection of a 3.3 percent
offer.
UNISON
report on the local-government ballot
[5] The Guardian, September 30, 2026, on university strikes and restructuring at Edinburgh, Dundee, Nottingham, and elsewhere.
[6] UK Government, Strategic
Defence Review 2025 — Making Britain Safer: secure at home, strong
abroad. Particularly relevant are
the sections on “warfighting readiness,” munitions capacity,
Defence Medical Services, dual-use technology, industry, private
investment, and the explicit role assigned to trade unions and their
members in raising industrial productivity.
Strategic
Defence Review 2025
[7] UK Government, £15
billion new funding boost to transform Armed Forces and keep the UK
safe, June 30, 2026. Details
include the drone program, Digital Targeting Web, munitions
expenditure, AI, missile defense, new factories, and employment
projections.
UK
government announcement on the additional £15 billion
[8] Tribune, September 2026, interview with UCU General Secretary Jo Grady on the union’s “wages not weapons” initiative and attempts by several unions to oppose increased militarization. This is useful evidence of divisions within trade unions and should not be treated as evidence that the institutional union problem has disappeared.
[A1] Communist Workers’ Organisation /
Internationalist Communist Tendency, Aurora,
August 2026, No. 76. The central article is “The World May Be on
Fire… But There Is An Alternative.” Aurora
describes itself as the ICT broadsheet intended for intervention
among workers.
Aurora
August 2026 issue
The
World May Be on Fire… But There Is An Alternative
communisme de gauche
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