A FRIGHTENING WORLD

 Marx and Engels did support certain nationalist movements and some wars but this was TO BRING CAPITALISM TO FEUDAL STATES or to give the CAPITALIST CLASS POLITICAL POWER so it could create the prerequisites of socialism, an actual working class within an industrialised society. So Marx and Engels sided with Prussia against the Slavs, Britain and France against Tsarist Russia and even Prussia against France so as to strengthen the unification of Germany. Such policies are no longer valid in our own time. Capitalism is now the predominant system and its the working class that is the decisive class, not the capitalists.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union the despotic empire that came into being, in many ways, preserved the most reactionary traditions of Tsarist Russia.  The new ruling class had no need of any human rights, freedom or democracy. To safeguard their stolen assets the ideology most suitable to cultivate for this purpose was nationalism.

Socialists are opposed to war because under capitalism wars are always about capitalist access to sources of raw materials, markets, trade routes, investment outlets or strategic points and places to control these.  War is caused by the struggles between national capitalist Powers over markets and economic resources. This can only be cured by the abolition of capitalism. The world is dominated by a system based on conflict – conflict over resources of all kinds, conflict between competing property interests and the states that represent them.

The parties of the World Socialist Movement are unique in opposing all war – not just certain types of war or certain situations. This is based on a recognition that the interests of the working women and men who usually make up the cannon-fodder and collateral damage of war can never be aligned with states and governments. We oppose the monopoly that the global owning class have over ownership of the Earth’s productive resources that are the usual spoils of armed conflict. 

Socialists are not against peace movements within capitalism. We know that the world faces problems of the greatest urgency and we know that the global social revolution is not an immediate prospect. We have no wish to hold human survival hostage to the attainment of our ideals. Please go ahead and prove us wrong by abolishing war without abolishing capitalism. Nothing, apart from socialism itself, would make us happier. The trouble is that we simply cannot conceive how it can be achieved.

That is why we see no alternative to working for socialism. We predict that unless the war machine that is capitalism is politically challenged by a majority – armed with an understanding of how it works – then in the years ahead we will still have wars raging around the globe, with ever more sophisticated weaponry. 

The fate of Russia and Ukraine is inseparable from the fate of humanity, and we can struggle for a better world for ourselves only by trying to build a better world for everyone.