OUR ENEMY
Wherever it operates, capitalism cannot remain static. Competition between capitalist groups accelerates the need for each group to produce huge masses of commodities that can be profitably sold at competitive prices. Having secured these commodities there come the capitalists of each country the need to sell them. Competition for markets, fields of exploitation, and trade routes are rife and the rival competitors find that friction between themselves becomes ever more serious.
It is in this framework of exploitation and competition that Russia, with its growing industrial and agricultural capacity, finds itself thrown into conflict with America—the country most likely to endanger its future capitalist development.
America’s vast resources and advancement in war weapons, however, are sufficient, should war break out, to tax or even overcome the strength of Russia—if it were alone. The motive behind Russia’s attempted annexation of Ukraine now begins to show itself. It is gathering strength for a possible war not only against America but any other rival power such as the European Union.
To take sides in the conflict between opposing spheres of capitalist interests is to give credibility to the system which generates the very conditions that create conflicts.
As socialism changes the basis of society, so it will bring in changed social relationships which will immediately be expressed and recognised in human harmony. Social ownership of the means of living entails a class-free society, a world of united people whose entire interests are entirely as one. So socialism will replace antagonism with cooperation; it will substitute abundance for scarcity and human welfare for minority dominance.
The Socialist Party fights to end wars, not in order to go back to the old world of so-called ‘peace’, of economic recessions recurring military crises, of armament manufacturing, but in order that working people prevail against the war-makers, against the criminal ruling classes responsible for war.
We fight so there shall be no more war profiteers, no more spending of hundreds and thousands of millions on the weapons of destruction, while the sick and the aged are short of benefits for their barest needs of existence.
We fight for a world in which the skill of the workers and the wonders of the modern industry shall be used to provide in abundance all the needs of the people and fill every home with plenty; in which the people will own the wealth they produce, and all will have work and all will have leisure; in which want and poverty will become as forgotten memory as war.
We fight for a world in which peoples will live at peace, because the power of the Stock Exchange speculators, of the arms magnates and the fomenters of war, will have been broken and ended; in which oppression and domination will have been abolished and in its place the union of free peoples of world-building; in which everyone will be free and equal and will partake in the common advance of humanity.
The whole thing about nationalism is some accident of language, accent or local behaviour. The whole horror of nationalism is its resolve to maim and kill any other if such a person doesn't share its particular language, accent or local behaviour. Thus, politicians, generals and other functionaries of capitalism exploit fears to make themselves great.
We are without nationalism, religion or racialism. We are socialists. We are in the process of becoming truly human. That is the appeal of socialism. Every human being on the planet enjoys community. We all love to sing together. We all love to dance together. We are human.
We fight for a free socialist world. Join the Socialist Party and help win this new world, uniting fellow-workers in the struggle against fratricidal wars.
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