The militarisation of politics can happen anywhere. That is why Marxists raise the democratic demand today for the abolition of the standing army and for a popular militia, argues Marcus Strom.
When US President Donald Trump and his Secretary of War Pete Hegseth addressed senior military officers at Marine Corps Base Quantico on 30 September, the headlines focused on the culture-war theatrics – attacks on “woke” culture and calls for “male-level” fitness standards. Important indicators as these are as to the intent of such authoritarian demagogues, behind the bluster lies something far more dangerous: a declaration that the US armed forces will increasingly be used at home – against US citizens.
“Only in recent decades did politicians somehow come to believe that our job is to police the far reaches of Kenya and Somalia, while America is under invasion from within,” Trump said. “We’re under invasion from within, no different than a foreign enemy, but more difficult in many ways because they don’t wear uniforms.” This chilling declaration of war on US citizens is an echo of Margaret Thatcher calling the British miners the “enemy within” in the 1980s.
Trump further told the assembled generals that America’s “lawless cities” could serve as “training grounds” for troops. He praised past deployments of the National Guard in places like Portland and Los Angeles, where soldiers were used against protesters, and he spoke approvingly of ICE – the federal immigration agency – effectively operating as a paramilitary force against migrants, or anyone who looks like a migrant. This comes amid his administration’s formal designation of Antifa, a loose network of anti-fascist activists, as a domestic terrorist organisation.
Imperial violence comes home
These developments show how quickly imperial violence abroad can turn inward. The machinery of repression – surveillance, militarised policing and propaganda – that was built to project US power globally is now being prepared for domestic use. A similar arc occurred in Britain a generation ago, as the methods used to suppress the Provisional IRA and the community that supported it were brought home, markedly to crush the Miners’ Great Strike of 1985-85. It continues to have echoes in British police tactics today.
Australians should be wary, too, and not think we are isolated from such an inward turn from outward militarism. The Albanese government is embracing the rising militaristic zeitgeist with something approaching zeal. Whether this be the obvious notes of AUKUS and the profligate spending on nuclear submarines we might never get and certainly don’t need, or recruitment reminiscent of “blackbirding” to the Australian Defence Force of Melanesians through the PNG Pukpuk Treaty.
While the government won’t explicitly dance to the demand of US Secretary of War Hegseth’s demand that Canberra spend 3.5 percent of GDP on defence, Defence Minister Richard Marles and Minister for Defence Industry Pat Conroy talk up Australia’s defence spending. CommBank’s chief economist, Luke Yeaman told the Financial Times Australia’s defence budget will hit 3 percent of GDP within a decade, in a report that Canberra will spend at least $765 billion on armaments in the next decade.
This arming for war is of deep concern, not just for global security, but because for the capitalist class and its standing army, the line between external and internal “security” can easily blur. It is not only a waste of public resources, it skews the political trajectory of the state.
Only by convention does the Australian government have control of the armed forces. The commander-in-chief is, of course, the Governor-General – a reserve power we should take seriously.
Australia not immune
Australia has its own history of the armed forces being used against workers. The most notorious example is the 1949 coal strike, when the Chifley Labor government deployed troops to dig and transport coal in defiance of striking miners. Forty years later, during the 1989 pilots’ dispute, the Hawke government used the Royal Australian Air Force to break the strike by transporting passengers – effectively militarising industrial relations.
In both cases, the military was mobilised not to defend the country but to discipline the labour movement. That pattern mirrors the logic now being revived in Washington. When economic and social tensions rise, ruling classes reach for the standing army.
Marxists have long argued that the standing army – a professional, permanent force – is not a neutral institution. It exists to protect the property and power of the ruling class. Abroad, it serves imperialism; at home, it stands as a barrier against radical democratic transformation.
For more than 150 years, radical democrats and socialists have counterposed to this a popular militia: a democratically controlled, citizen-based defence organisation. Such a concept was once mainstream in the workers’ movement – the first election platform of the British Labour Party even called for the “abolition of the standing army and the establishment of a citizen force”.
The Australian left, by contrast, remains timid on this question. Many groups restrict themselves to vague calls for “cutting defence spending”, avoiding the harder question of who controls the armed forces and for what purpose.
At the last federal election, the Socialist Alliance called to cut the $56 billion defence budget ‘in half’. When pressed on what they intend to do with a $28 billion defence budget, the blank stares of incomprehension said it all. These comrades don’t even take their own election platform seriously, so why should the working class?
The Victorian Socialists were not any better. They just called for ‘cuts’ to the defence budget, while simultaneously calling for the SAS to be disbanded. The silence over the status of the ADF says it all.
Without a democratic minimum program, any manner of ‘demand’ that might mobilise people at the ballot box is deemed adequate. Meanwhile, they keep their ‘revolutionary’ program tucked away for another day. Completely useless.
What a democratic defence policy could look like
Marxists are not pacifists. A genuinely democratic republic needs a defence system built on the sovereignty of the people – not on military bureaucracy, the crown or subservience to imperial alliances. A modern popular militia could be organised along similar lines to the State Emergency Service, combining a small professional core with a broadly trained citizen force. Switzerland already operates such a model.
A draft democratic defence policy might include these points:
- The militarised state is aimed at war and support for imperialism; it does not defend the real interests of the Australian people.
- A democratically managed conscription militia can guarantee the safety of a new democratic republic.
- Democratic and union rights for soldiers; election of officers.
- No participation in imperialist wars.
- Removal of foreign bases; end AUKUS and ANZUS. Abandon the Five Eyes security pact.
Trump’s “war on woke” may sound absurd, but it signals a real threat – the normalisation of domestic militarisation under the guise of restoring discipline and patriotism. Australia, tied as it is to US military doctrine and alliances, is not immune from following a similar path, no matter how benign the current government may seem on such domestic issues.
If the left is serious about democracy and socialism – the rule of the working class – it must start talking about a new and democratic defence policy. That means disbanding the standing army and replacing it with a citizen defence force that serves the people, not the powerful.
This is no abstract demand ‘for the revolution’, it is a democratic and much needed demand for today.