Ending War

Capitalism is war, plain and simple. It’s not just market society with a war on top, it is war all the way down, and can only be properly understood as such. Peace is a social myth we have constructed to delude or amuse ourselves in our leisure moments eating rat stew in the trenches.

War is an inevitable concomitant of capitalist competition for trade, trade routes, raw materials and exploitative opportunities. When tough negotiations fail, war is always an option under some pretext.

Nation states, schools and commercial businesses are organised hierarchically, like armies, and we are all reluctant conscripts, squaddies whose task it is to fight whoever we’re told to fight, whose received ambition may be to make NCO or officer but whose real ambition, if we’re not blinded by patriotism or xenophobia or bloodlust, is to not get killed.

Understanding that capitalism is war helps to make sense of the news in a way that nothing else does. Random acts of violence no longer seem random. The fear and the paranoia and the endless search for scapegoats and snake-oil cures become explicable, even predictable. The impotent and irrelevant posturing of politicians are meaningless precisely because they are war propaganda, as bogus as Hollywood fantasies, monarchical pomp or religious preaching. This is not civil society with a few oddballs and quirks, it is society in shellshock, having a continuous mental breakdown.

And where do you fit in? There’s no room for shirkers or ‘conshies’ in this war. You don’t have a choice not to fight. If you struggle to make ends meet, you’re in the war. If you struggle against disability prejudice, you’re in the war. If you feel oppressed by white racists, loud-mouthed bigots, the council, the boss at work, the ‘male gaze’, you’re in the war. You don’t have a choice not to fight, but you do have a choice what to fight, and how to fight.

For socialists, the only part of this war that makes any sense, which is worth fighting, that might realistically stand a chance of ending war forever, is the class war, the war against the idea of capitalism itself, the mindset of private property and public poverty, the universal acceptance of oppression. Everyone else is fighting to win, or not lose, or just survive. If we were to win the class war, it would remove the main reason for fighting all the other wars. In socialism, society could finally start to recover from the hell it has put itself through.

Stop electing leaders and elect yourselves to common ownership and democratic control of all the world’s wealth with workers worldwide.

All wars are fought on behalf of the ruling class. Fought over markets, trade routes, vital resources, with intense competition and geopolitical rivalries and ambitions and the last two great wars were not fought for any grand ideal, despite the rhetoric employed to engage workers in the slaughter of their brothers and sisters fellow workers, whom they had more in common with than the bellicose parasite capitalist class of all nations, sending them to their doom.

War, wrapped in the cant of nationalism is used by ruling elites to thwart and destroy the aspirations of workingmen and -women and distract us from our disempowerment.

“Wars throughout history have been waged for conquest and plunder. … And that is war, in a nutshell,” the five-time socialist presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs said during World War I. “The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.” Debs, who in 1912 received almost a million votes, was sentenced to 10 years in prison for saying this. “I have been accused of obstructing the war,” Debs said in court. “I admit it. I abhor war. I would oppose war if I stood alone.”

A member of the IWW once addressed a court:

“You ask me why the I.W.W. is not patriotic to the United States. If you were a bum without a blanket; if you had left your wife and kids when you went west for a job, and had never located them since; if your job had never kept you long enough in a place to qualify you to vote; if you slept in a lousy, sour bunkhouse, and ate food just as rotten as they could give you and get by with it; if deputy sheriffs shot your cooking cans full of holes and spilled your grub on the ground; if your wages were lowered on you when the bosses thought they had you down; if there was one law for Ford, Suhr, and Mooney and another for Harry Thaw: if every person who represented law and order and the nation beat you up, railroaded you to jail, and the good Christian people cheered and told them to go to it, how in hell do you expect a man to be patriotic? This war is a business man’s war and we don’t see why we should go out and get shot in order to save the lovely state of affairs that we now enjoy.”