On February 15, 1915, as Europe descended into the carnage of World War I, a group of prominent anarchists — including Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, and Errico Malatesta — published what would become known as the Anti-War Manifesto. The document opens with a stark description:
Europe in flames, tens of millions of men at loggerheads in the most frightful butchery in recorded history, hundreds of millions of women and children in tears, the economic, intellectual and moral life of seven great peoples brutally suspended.
Over a century later, as Europe once again prepares for large-scale conflict, this time with Russia, the manifesto reads as if it were written yesterday. The patterns it identified — the manufacturing of consent, the false distinctions between “defensive” and “offensive” wars, the profit motives behind militarization, and the consolidation of state power through fear — are playing out with eerie precision in 2025.
The Inevitability of War Under the State System
The manifesto’s central thesis was radical then and remains so now: war is not an aberration or a failure of diplomacy, but the natural and inevitable consequence of the State system itself.
…war is permanently incubating within the existing body of society and that armed conflict, be it specific or general, in the colonies or in Europe, is the natural consequence and necessary, inescapable destiny of a regime founded upon the economic inequality of its citizens.
This analysis cuts through the noise of contemporary geopolitical discourse. We’re told that Europe must rearm to defend against Russian aggression, that NATO expansion is purely defensive, that military buildup is a reluctant necessity. But the manifesto exposes this narrative as fundamentally dishonest. States do not prepare for war reluctantly — they require war, or at minimum the permanent threat of war, to justify their existence and maintain their power.
Consider the current situation: Europe is committing 800 billion euros to rearmament1. Defense budgets are swelling across the continent. Poland’s Prime Minister has called for mandatory military training for all Polish men2. British officials tell the Prime Minister that the Army must spend billions on weapons “now”. This is not defensive preparation — this is the “feverish preparation of the most formidable armaments” the manifesto warned about, the “continual refinement of war materials” that makes conflict inevitable rather than preventing it.
No Distinction Between Offensive and Defensive Wars
One of the manifesto’s most powerful insights is its rejection of the offensive/defensive war distinction:
…it is naive and puerile, once the causes and the occasions of strife have been multiplied, to try to define the degree of blame attaching to such and such a government. No distinction is possible between offensive wars and defensive wars.
This remains profoundly relevant. NATO’s eastward expansion is framed as purely defensive, protecting small nations from Russian aggression. Russia frames its actions as defensive responses to NATO encirclement. Both sides produce documents, intelligence reports, and historical justifications to prove they are the “unblemished defender of the right and of freedom, the champion of civilization”.
The manifesto cuts through this:
…None of the belligerents has any right to lay claim to civilization, just as none of them is entitled to claim legitimate self-defense.
In 1915, this applied to the German State with its militarism, the Russian State with its gulags, the French State with its colonial conquests, and the British Empire with its global oppression. Today, it applies equally to NATO’s bombing campaigns disguised as humanitarian interventions, Russia’s authoritarian repression, Europe’s arms sales fueling conflicts worldwide, and the West’s support for genocide in Palestine.
Manufacturing Consent Through Media and Fear
The manifesto identified how states use media and propaganda to manufacture public consent for war:
The misfortune of the peoples, who were nevertheless all deeply committed to peace, is that they trusted in the State with its scheming diplomats, in democracy and in the political parties to avert war. That trust was deliberately abused and continues to be abused when those in government, with the help of their whole press, persuade their respective peoples that this war is a war of liberation.
This pattern is unmistakable in contemporary Europe. Media outlets that once maintained some critical distance now broadcast weekly reports on “new threats to the UK from Russia”. Politicians deliver speeches priming populations for sacrifice: “Sons and daughters, colleagues, veterans will all have a part to play to build, to serve, and if necessary to fight”. The language of inevitability saturates public discourse: “We are at a crossroads in history”, “This is not a moment for more talk”, “We must be prepared for the scale of war our grandparents and great-grandparents endured”.
This is not journalism or political leadership — it is propaganda designed to shift public opinion from skepticism to acceptance, from peace to war readiness. The manifesto understood this: states do not stumble into war; they deliberately cultivate it, using their control of information and narrative to transform populations “deeply committed to peace” into populations willing to sacrifice their children.
The Real Beneficiaries: Arms Manufacturers and the Powerful
The manifesto identified the State’s true nature and purpose:
The State is merely oppression organized for the benefit of a privileged minority.
This system, the manifesto explained, operates by “placing the world of labor under the narrow, painful oversight of a minority of parasites who hold both political power and economic might”.
This analysis is vindicated daily in contemporary Europe. European weapons companies are experiencing unprecedented profits. Arms manufacturers and their shareholders — which include European, British, Russian, and American leaders — are “laughing all the way to the bank”. An 800 billion euro rearmament plan represents the largest transfer of public wealth to private military contractors in European history.
Meanwhile, working-class Europeans face collapsing social services, austerity measures, and stagnant wages. The same governments that claim there is no money for healthcare, education, or housing somehow find hundreds of billions for weapons. This is not coincidence — it is exactly what the manifesto predicted: war serves the powerful, not the people.
Hybrid Warfare and the Expansion of State Control
The manifesto warned that war would be used to consolidate state power and suppress dissent. In the contemporary context, this takes forms the 1915 anarchists couldn’t have imagined, but which perfectly fit their analysis.
“Hybrid warfare” — cyberattacks, infrastructure sabotage, election interference — provides states with the perfect justification for expanding surveillance, censorship, and control. Whether Russia is actually behind warehouse fires in Poland3 or undersea cable cuts4 matters less than the fact that these accusations shift public attitudes toward accepting war and surrendering civil liberties.
The manifesto understood this dynamic: “That trust was deliberately abused and continues to be abused”. Today, the abuse takes the form of using real or imagined hybrid threats to justify increased state powers, restricted speech, and the marginalization of anti-war voices as unpatriotic, naive or even traitorous.
The Weapons They Use Against Workers
One of the manifesto’s most powerful passages addresses soldiers and workers directly:
To the factory workers, we must be a reminder that the rifles they now hold in their hands have been used against them during strikes and legitimate revolts, and will again be deployed against them later to force them to submit to the employers’ exploitation.
This remains devastatingly true. The same military and police forces being prepared for war with Russia are regularly deployed against striking workers, social movements, and protesters across Europe. The same surveillance technologies justified for “national security” are used to monitor and suppress labor organizing. The same emergency powers invoked for external threats are wielded against internal dissent.
European states are not preparing to defend workers — they are preparing to control them. The manifesto’s call to expose this hypocrisy is as urgent now as it was in 1915.
Nuclear Annihilation: The Ultimate Expression of State Violence
The manifesto could not have anticipated nuclear weapons, but its analysis of state violence applies with terrifying precision. The doctrine of mutually assured destruction — the idea that if everyone promises to push the button, no one will — is exactly the kind of high-stakes gamble that the manifesto warned against.
Consider the absurdity: European and Russian leaders are escalating tensions between nuclear-armed powers over territorial disputes, spheres of influence, and economic interests that benefit only the ruling class. The populations who would be incinerated in a nuclear exchange have no stake in these conflicts. A Polish factory worker has more in common with a Russian factory worker than either has with their respective defense ministers. Yet both are expected to accept the possibility of nuclear war as a reasonable price for “security”.
This is the manifesto’s analysis taken to its logical extreme. The State system doesn’t just produce conventional war — it produces the conditions for species-level extinction. And for what? So that NATO can expand eastward? So that Russia can maintain its sphere of influence? So that arms manufacturers can profit from the largest rearmament program in European history? So that politicians can consolidate power through fear?
The nuclear threat reveals the ultimate bankruptcy of statist logic. Every argument for nuclear deterrence rests on the assumption that rational actors will never push the button — but the entire history of state violence demonstrates that states are not rational actors. They are machines designed to concentrate power and serve elite interests, and they will risk everything, including human survival, to maintain that power.
We are told that nuclear weapons keep the peace, that the threat of annihilation prevents war. But this is precisely the kind of doublethink the manifesto exposed. What kind of “peace” requires the constant threat of extinction? What kind of “security” is built on arsenals capable of ending human civilization? This is not peace — it is a hostage situation where entire populations are held at gunpoint by their own governments.
And the escalation continues. NATO expansion, military exercises near Russian borders, Russian nuclear saber-rattling, Western officials casually discussing “limited nuclear war” as if such a thing were possible — each step brings us closer to the precipice. The manifesto understood that war becomes inevitable when states prepare for it, when they build the machinery and cultivate the mindset. We are not preparing for the possibility of nuclear war — we are making it inevitable.
The people who will decide whether to launch nuclear weapons — politicians, generals, state officials — will make that decision from bunkers. They have escape plans. Their families have been briefed. The ruling class has always sent others to die in their wars, but nuclear weapons take this to a new level: they can end civilization while ensuring their own short-term survival.
This is the ultimate endpoint of the State system the manifesto condemned: the potential extinction of human civilization in service of state power and elite interests. And yet, European and Russian leaders continue to escalate, continue to prepare, continue to beat the drums of war — because it serves them politically and economically, regardless of the cost to ordinary people.
The manifesto’s call to “undermine and break up the various States” was urgent in 1915. In the nuclear age, it is a matter of species survival. Every day the State system continues, every day we allow politicians and generals to play their games of brinksmanship with nuclear arsenals, we risk everything. Not just our lives, not just our children’s lives, but the entire future of human existence.
There is no defensive use of nuclear weapons. There is no just nuclear war. There is only the insanity of a system that would rather risk extinction than surrender power.
Who Does Escalation Serve?
The manifesto asked us to identify who benefits from war. The answer in 2025 is clear:
Politicians first. The threat of war keeps domestic populations compliant. Electorates prefer “security governments” over parties that diverge from the mainstream. Elections can be delayed or cancelled in states of emergency. At a time of growing European disunity, war gives leaders who believe in the EU project a reason to demand unity.
Arms manufacturers and their shareholders. European weapons companies are already reaping massive profits. Politicians across Europe beating the war drums own shares in these companies. The 800 billion euro rearmament plan represents the largest peacetime transfer of public wealth to private military contractors in history.
The State itself. War justifies expanded powers, increased surveillance, suppression of dissent, and the suspension of civil liberties. It provides the perfect excuse for austerity, for demanding sacrifice from workers while enriching the wealthy, for consolidating power in the hands of the few.
The Only War of Liberation
The manifesto’s conclusion remains its most radical and most necessary message:
There is but one war of liberation: the one waged in every country by the oppressed against the oppressor, by the exploited against the exploiter. Our task is to summon the slaves to revolt against their masters.
This is the truth that European and Russian leaders fear most: that working-class Europeans and Russians have far more in common with each other than with their respective ruling classes. That the real enemy is not across borders but within them — the politicians, arms manufacturers, and economic elites who profit from war while ordinary people die.
The manifesto called for anarchists to “undermine and break up the various States, cultivating the spirit of rebellion and acting as midwife to the discontent in the peoples and in the armies”. This remains the task today: to expose the lies, to reveal who truly benefits from war, to build solidarity across borders, and to resist the machinery of death that states are constructing.
A Century of Vindication
The Anti-War Manifesto was written in 1915, but it could have been written yesterday. Every pattern it identified — the inevitability of war under the State system, the false distinctions between offensive and defensive conflicts, the manufacturing of consent through propaganda, the profit motives of arms manufacturers, the use of war to consolidate state power — is playing out in real-time as Europe prepares for conflict with Russia.
The manifesto’s analysis has been vindicated by a century of history: two world wars, countless colonial conflicts, the Cold War, the War on Terror, and now the renewed specter of great power conflict. At every stage, states have claimed to fight for civilization, freedom, and defense while actually serving the interests of the powerful and sacrificing the lives of ordinary people.
As European populations are primed for war, as defense budgets swell, as media outlets broadcast weekly threats, as politicians demand sacrifice, the manifesto’s message could not be more urgent: war serves the powerful, not the people. The only war worth fighting is the one against those who would send us to kill and die for their interests.
The anarchists of 1915 understood this. We must understand it today. And we must act on it before it’s too late.
Further Reading:
Footnotes
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European Commission, “ReArm Europe plan / Readiness 2030”, Future of European Defence, 2025, https://commission.europa.eu/topics/defence/future-european-defence_en ↩
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“Poland to introduce ‘military training for every adult male’”, Notes from Poland, March 7, 2025, https://notesfrompoland.com/2025/03/07/poland-to-introduce-military-training-for-every-adult-male/ ↩
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“Poland says Russian secret service behind 2024 fire in Warsaw shopping centre”, Reuters, May 11, 2025, https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/poland-says-russian-secret-service-behind-2024-fire-warsaw-shopping-centre-2025-05-11/ ↩
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“2024 Baltic Sea submarine cable disruptions”, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Baltic_Sea_submarine_cable_disruptions ↩