How to end war

The Socialist Party has always maintained that war is an inevitable consequence of the capitalist mode of production and that its competitive drive for the domination of markets, trade routes, favourable treaties, and possession of valuable resources is the root cause of all wars. War holds no interest for the working class, except they will be the ones dying, injured, and displaced, as even a victory will not change the system of exploitation and wage labour. Only a victory in the class war can do that.

Socialists believe that workers have no country, only a common interest with all other workers of the world and religious promises of pie in the sky when you die are not compatible with historical materialism and finding human-made solutions. Thus, we roundly condemn the terror of all sides who are quite content to murder fellow workers in the name of nationalism and religion. Only when realise that their struggles are not based on national or religious lines but on the class struggle between worker and capitalist, and, along with other workers of the world, they unite to create a cooperative, democratic world will wars such as this one be relegated to the annals of human history.

The Socialist Party holds that capitalism is a highly competitive system where the spoils go to the winners in the form of vast wealth and profits to be shared by that tiny minority of humanity that owns the factories, land, resources etc. Losing means going out of business or being taken over. Companies compete for cheap labour, markets, more favourable trade treaties, resources, strategic territory, trade routes, any anything that will give them an edge over their rivals. Although disputes are often resolved with agreements and treaties, occasionally, but with some regularity, disputes are so intense, and involve so much wealth or valuable resource, that war is declared to settle things. This occurs often enough to give us perpetual war somewhere on the planet. All of this is too big for even the large corporations to take on so they look to their country’s government to act on their behalf. Standing armies are kept by every state government for this purpose. They may be called ‘Defence Departments’ but they exist to ensure favourable trading conditions for their capitalist class. In no war, have the ordinary people of one country threatened the lives of the ordinary people of another. Yet it is these very people who are called on to sacrifice their lives. As always, when war threatens, the servants of the owning class, the government, beat the drums of patriotism, democracy, and national security in order to con the working people into thinking that it is in their interests to do the fighting.

 Socialists believe that it is mankind’s nature to be peaceful, cooperative, and compassionate as demonstrated for eons until the advent of private property from the agrarian revolution to the present day. These qualities are even evident today in the way human beings treat each other most of the time in many situations. The concentration and control of the means of production into the hands of the small group of owners who run the system in their interests at the expense of the vast majority mitigates against human nature and strives to teach us that it is good and natural to go to war, to allow the deaths of tens of thousands of fellow humans every day for the lack of a few pennies worth of medicine, or easily provided clean water or food. This leads the Socialist Party to conclude that the incredible waste demonstrated by the military-industrial Complex, for example, (the world’s scientists plus huge amounts of labour and materials, are used to make killing more efficient) is not for defence and security, but for the simple reason of maintaining the present inequitable system and that is the root cause of conflicts and wars. Peace organisations should be congratulated for their humanitarian outlook and attempts to stop war but they must also be reminded to work to end the cause of all conflicts - capitalism - and work for a socialist society of common ownership if they don’t want to spend every Saturday for the next several decades protesting one war after another.