Tendency towards the subordination of production and of the organization of the state to the needs of war, whether present or future. It therefore manifests itself as an increase in military spending running parallel to the development of the authoritarian character of the state and the militarization of social life.
Origin
Militarism is a product of the extreme and simultaneous development of the internal contradictions -class struggle- and the external contradictions of a society; it appears in the decadence of modes of production. In capitalism it already emerges with imperialism and becomes universal with the system's entry into decadence. It marks social life in every state, but especially in those that, because their political apparatus came out of the counterrevolution -Stalinism, fascism, etc.- or because they had weaker national capitals, took on extremely centralized forms of state capitalism.
External and internal functions of militarism and its relation to the workers
The proletariat knows that [Germany's] international policy essentially aims at fighting and suppressing, by violent and crude means, the social and political difficulties facing the ruling classes; in a word, it is a policy of Bonapartist confusion and deception.
It knows that the enemies of the workers keep the fire of chauvinism burning in order to safeguard their own interests; […]
It also knows that the wars the ruling classes provoke in the service of their own interests demand of the proletariat the most terrible sacrifices, both in material goods and in human lives. In exchange for which, once the job is done, they are offered miserable invalidity pensions, veterans' welfare, barrel organs to beg with, and kicks of every kind.
The proletariat knows that after every war a volcano of mud, brutality and coarseness spreads over the peoples that took part in it and sets civilization back many years.
It likewise knows that the fatherland for which it is supposed to fight is not its fatherland; that for the proletariat of all countries there is only one real enemy: the capitalist class, which oppresses and exploits the proletariat; that the proletariat of each country is firmly bound, by its interests, to the proletariat of all other countries; that before the common interests of the international proletariat all national interests diminish in importance; and that the international coalition of exploitation and slavery must be met by the international coalition of the exploited and the enslaved.
It knows that the proletariat, insofar as it is used in a war, is led to fight against its own brothers and class comrades, and therefore against its own interests.
That is why the position taken by the class-conscious proletariat towards this international function of the army, as towards every policy of capitalist expansion, is not merely cold but deeply and consciously hostile. The fundamental task of the proletariat is to wage a struggle to the death against militarism; and every day it becomes more aware of this. [...]
But militarism does not only have the function of defense and attack against the external enemy; it also plays an internal role, owing to the ever more intense class struggle and the growth of proletarian class consciousness. This shapes, day by day, both the formal aspect of militarism and its essence: namely, the protection of the ruling social order, the support of capitalism and of all reaction against the liberation struggle of the working class.
Here it shows itself as a pure instrument of class struggle, an instrument in the hands of the ruling classes, intended, with the collaboration of the police and the courts, of the school and the church, to halt the development of class consciousness; and thereby to secure, whatever the cost and even against the will of the majority of the people, the power of a minority in the state and the freedom to exploit.
This is how militarism appears before our eyes: it claims to be nothing less than the squaring of the circle; it arms the people against itself; it dares, by trying by every means to artificially introduce a generational division into our social structure, to turn the worker into the exploiter, enemy and murderer of his own class comrades and friends, of his parents, his brothers and his children, of his own past and future; it wants to be democratic and despotic, enlightened and mechanical, popular and an enemy of the people, all at the same time.
Karl Liebknecht. Militarism and Anti-Militarism, 1906
Militarism and accumulation
In any case, in all the central countries the defense of militarism, in the form of a defense of the strategic character of military production and of its weight within total state expenditure, must also be considered from the standpoint of the logic of accumulation. The military industry was the first sector which, being entirely dependent on the state, made it possible to create a "productive" outlet for capital that would act as a "locomotive" for the rate of profit of national capital.
In practice, militarism, on the basis of indirect taxation, works in both directions: at the expense of the normal living conditions of the working class, it ensures both the maintenance of the organ of capitalist rule (the standing army) and the creation of a magnificent field of accumulation for capital.
Rosa Luxemburg. The Accumulation of Capital, 1913.