No War but Class War

From The New Scientist :-
So many accounts of human behaviour emphasise conflict. Robert Sussman from Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri believes the popular focus on violence and warfare is disproportionate. "Statistically, it is more common for humans to be cooperative and to attempt to get along than it is for them to be uncooperative and aggressive towards one another," he says. And he is not alone in this view.

A growing number of experts are now arguing that the urge to wage war is not innate . Among them are anthropologists Carolyn and Melvin Ember from Yale University, who argue that biology alone cannot explain documented patterns of warfare. "There is variation in the frequency of warfare when you look around the world at any given time," says Melvin Ember. "That suggests to me that we are not dealing with genes or a biological propensity.

Anthropologist Douglas Fry of Åbo Akademi University in Turku, Finland, agrees. In his book, Beyond War, he identified 74 "non-warring cultures" that contradict the idea that war is universal. Humans "have a substantial capacity for dealing with conflicts non-violently", he says. One group might simply "vote with its feet" and walk away from the other. Alternatively, a third party might mediate a resolution. Or in rare cases, a man might be so compulsively aggressive and violent that others in the band would banish or even kill him. "In band society, no one likes a bully," says Fry.

Brian Ferguson of Rutgers University in Newark, New Jersey, also believes that there is nothing in the fossil or archaeological record supporting the claim that our ancestors have been waging war against each other for hundreds of thousands, let alone millions, of years. The first clear-cut evidence of violence against groups as opposed to individuals appears about 14,000 years ago, he says. War emerged when humans shifted from a nomadic existence to a settled one and was commonly tied to agriculture, Ferguson says. "With a vested interest in their lands, food stores and especially rich fishing sites, people could no longer walk away from trouble."

Archaeologist Steven LeBlanc of Harvard University says that war is not a biological compulsion but a rational response to environmental conditions such as swelling populations and dwindling food supplies. LeBlanc describes how warlike Native American tribes such as the Hopi embraced peace when it was imposed on them by outsiders. "We are definitely malleable and susceptible to cultural influence," he says. Warfare is "not so hard-wired that it can't stop".

The SPGB has said war is not natural. It is artificially produced by human beings as an integral part of a particular social system. In the world today there is constant economic competition between nations. When the rivalry becomes too intense, the next step is often military conflict.
The fundamental principle of this social system is competition. There is rivalry between different groups of capitalist enterprises, who all seek to sell their commodities to the same people in the same world market. In order to complete the process of taking their profits, the capitalists need workers to exploit and they also need mineral resources, trade routes to transport goods along and areas of domination with markets of people to sell their goods to. It is competition over these things which drives nations towards war. There can be no capitalism without conflicts of economic interest. From these arise the national rivalries and hatreds and the fears which may at any time provoke war on a terrifying scale.

Modern wars are not to be explained by some supposed vicious and aggressive streak in human nature. It is not the mass of the populations of any country who desire war and plan years ahead to prepare for it. So little is it true that the human nature of the man in the street lusts for war that there is hardly a country in the world which does not have to employ force in the form of conscription to compel its able-bodied population, first to train and then to fight. Always it is the governments which, having been pushed towards war by the rivalries of capitalism, lay their plans and organise the forces of destruction after having gone to unlimited trouble to win over the reluctant masses to acceptance of the need for war preparations and war. In these orgies of death and destruction which capitalism periodically and inevitably produces, workers suffer and die not for their own interests but for those of their masters.

In all wars, as the Socialist Party said on the outbreak of the first world war, "there are no interests at stake justifying the shedding of a single drop of working class blood"