Against War When It Matters

 

Our fellow workers must not think of their country but of their solidarity with the workers of all countries.

1. Modern wars are part and parcel of the capitalist system.
 

2. Each capitalist nation is continually driven to seek new markets, new sources of raw materials and new areas for investment.
 

3. The capitalist need to expand continually makes each industrially developed power an imperialist aggressor – whether it is Britain, Russia, China or the United States.
 

4. There can be no end to the imperialist war without an end to capitalism.
 

5. Permanent peace is only possible when planned production for use has taken the place of competitive production for profits.

The Parties within the World Socialist Movement stand uniquely against capitalism. We reject that system utterly and completely in whatever guise it appears. We reject capitalism utterly precisely because there are no solutions to its abundant miseries, like war and unemployment. War, like poverty, slums, unemployment, crime and the rest are not really problems of capitalism; they are integral parts of that system; they exist everywhere the system exists and for as long as the system has existed. They will continue to last as long as capitalism itself lasts.

It is this inevitable competition for markets, this necessary built-in compulsion of each capitalist enterprise to improve its profitability by enlarging its market share, that creates the material conditions for friction between the nations of capitalism.

Within the nation-state conflict is resolved by the legal process and, while the friction created by competitive interests are frequently vicious, it would not, for obvious reasons, suit the national capitalist interest if the naked force became the arbiter in disputes between individual capitalist enterprises.

On the international scene, the situation is different. Some attempts are made to create institutions, like the old League of Nations and the present United Nations, to resolve conflicts of interest between nations. But such institutions themselves necessarily reflect the conflicting economic interests of their members and, anyway, it is impossible to resolve amicably conflicts between national interests when the sense of “justice” of the parties involved are conditioned by the requirements of economic gain and, sometimes, even economic survival.

So each nation-state must maintain its own armed forces to protect the wealth of its national capitalist class from the predatory aspirations of its trade rivals. Sources of raw materials, markets, trade routes and strategic areas for their protection or acquisition have got to be defended by force of arms if necessary or to be gained by force of arms. They represent the vital life’s blood of capitalism and no price in human lives or materials can be too high to achieve them or to keep them.

Within the national state, this means the creation of conditions that make capitalism acceptable to the great majority of the people it exploits. This requires a system of education that underpins the “reasonableness” and inevitability of capitalism and the promotion of “moral” concepts by benign propaganda; it requires a press, radio and television that may be allowed the “democratic right” of criticism but ultimately promotes the notion that, while things might be done better, the capitalist way-of-life is as natural as the seasons. The needs of the capitalist class are nurtured and protected and the fiction created that there is a common “national interest” which is, above all, good and which must be preserved and protected—if necessary by the public power of coercion.

Outside the state, the competing interests of the various national groups of capitalists are promoted by diplomacy and, ultimately, by the capacity of their armed forces to inflict death and destruction on the peoples of any other nation-state that threatens their economic interest.

The whole, obscene setup, with its appalling waste, is even more dangerous because it not only threatens devastating wars and arms buildups over the marketing needs of capitalism but creates hatreds and divisions which acquire an independent propensity for violence and war.

Only in socialism is a lasting solution to war to be found. Socialism is a form of social organisation wherein the sole criterion governing the production of all wealth will be the satisfaction of human needs.

All the resources of the earth, including the tools of production and the means of distribution, will be the property of humanity as a whole and people will apply their skills and energies to these resources in order to produce the things needed by the whole of society.