The problem is not Trident, it's capitalist wars

Anti-Trident demonstrations are taking place across Scotland ahead of a House of Commons vote on whether to renew Britain's nuclear deterrent. Thousands of people are attending 36 protests in cities and towns including Glasgow, Edinburgh, Aberdeen, Dundee, Inverness and Dumfries. The Scottish Scrap Trident Coalition, which organised the rallies, said about 7,000 people had attended. A demonstration at the Mound in Edinburgh attracted about 500 peoplewhile there was a rally at Buchanan Street's steps in Glasgow. Smaller rallies also took place outside Scotland's cities, including Cromarty in the Highlands and the North Ayrshire town of Largs, where about 50 people attended.

Getting rid of Trident makes barely a dent in the global killing machine fuelled by capitalism's wars over our bosses' markets and resources. Long ago at the corner of Sauchiehall Street, stalwarts of the Socialist Party of Great Britain stood to greet a CND march with a huge banner and slogan which read: "This demonstration is useless—You must first destroy capitalism." Sad but true, nevertheless.

If you are opposed to war and all that it represents—as any right thinking person should be—you will advocate policies and take actions which will make war impossible, by removing its causes. That is, you will seek to transform society in the interests of human beings as a whole, without restriction to so-called race, nationality or gender, by establishing socialism in place of capitalism. To object to some weapons which might be used in wars, whilst implicitly tolerating others—is to accept the inevitability of war, and the social system which underpins it. Your efforts, because they oppose only certain kinds of war, and not war itself, serve, whether intentionally or otherwise, to make war more likely. It makes the likelihood of enlightenment and desirable change the more difficult. However concerned you may feel about the welfare of the human race, your actions betray the very constituency you claim to serve.  Campaigning against nuclear weapons is an irrelevance. Nuclear weapons are unlikely to be used in Syria, or Iraq, or South Sudan, or any of the other myriad "trouble spots" across the globe. Tens of millions of people have been killed since the end of World War II, and not a nuclear weapon fired in action. Are you unconcerned about such matters? By what contorted logic does "manner of death" come to mean more to you than "fact of death"?

We accept that the protestors were well motivated: that to use a cliché, "they care". But actions if they are to be effective require more, to be effective it must be appropriate. If you really care you will want to campaign for an absence of nuclear weapons and war—in a word, for socialism. What is needed is to go beyond a moral outcry and to attack the system which creates war. Good intentions will not solve the problem of war but there is a revolutionary alternative: "You must first destroy capitalism".