Every Remembrance Day, the state tells us to honour the sacrifice of those who fought and died for Britain. Yet it never asks us to remember the real reasons why millions were sent to their deaths.
When finance and production are concentrated in the hands of monopolies and banks, ruling classes seek new markets and territories to exploit, leeching surplus value from the international working class. This process continues today, visible in the war in Ukraine and in the new investment schemes for Gaza.
Remembrance Day conceals this reality. It asks us to mourn ‘our fallen soldiers’ without ever questioning why they fell. It sanctifies imperialist wars as noble defences of ‘freedom’ when, in truth, they serve only to enrich the capitalist class. Through minutes of silence, poppies, and military parades, grief is turned into loyalty: private sorrow becomes public devotion to the state, transforming remembrance into obedience.
This ideological training begins early. Schools frame militarism as virtue, teaching children to respect hierarchy, discipline, and sacrifice under the guise of patriotism. The result is a culture where questioning the army or the nation becomes an act of moral betrayal.
Beneath this emotional conditioning lies a vast political economy. War teeds profits for arms producers, banks, and corporations that rebuild what they destroy. Military alliances like NATO secure these interests globally, ensuring that destruction remains a lucrative business.
Meanwhile, the media plays its part, repackaging wars for profit as humanitarian missions, erasing anti-war resistance, and presenting imperial plunder as a progressive and democratic development.
Even sections of the left have capitulated to this narrative. The Labour Party, long complicit in British imperialism – from Attlee’s colonial interventions to Blair’s wars – uses Remembrance to reaffirm its loyalty to the state. Every year, its leaders appear in poppies, reciting the same national myth of ‘sacrifice for peace’. Even those once hailed as radical, like Corbyn, adopt these rituals under pressure, mistaking moral respectability for political principle. By accepting the symbolism of the poppy and the language of national mourning, the left helps to reproduce the very ideology it claims to oppose.
By presenting imperialist wars as accidents of history rather than products of capitalism, the ruling class, and those who believe its lies, turn remembrance into submission, grief into loyalty, and death into a lesson in national duty, masking exploitation and oppression as an unavoidable cost of civilisation.
On this Remembrance Day, we refuse to glorify the service of the dead. Instead, we call on the working class to fight for its own emancipation rather than dying for a nation that doesn’t belong to them. True remembrance means exposing those who sent, and continue to send, millions to their deaths for the profits of a few.