Capitalism’s war is against life itself.

The Socialist Party looks at war in a fundamentally different way from other political persuasions. We contend that war in the modern world is caused by the workings of capitalism with its struggles over trade, investments, oil and other resources. The workers of the world have an identity of interests and have nothing at stake in the thieves’ quarrels of their masters. The working class owns no country. None of the resources are theirs; they have nothing to fight for and everything to gain by uniting to end the system that enslaves them and produces wars and other terrible problems. To cover up its slaughter, capitalism has always raised the cry of freedom. Wage-slavery is capitalism’s freedom for the working class. The Socialist Party rejects the plea of the “left" that the nationalist ambitions of the native ruling class are worth dying for. This amounts to workers killing each other to determine who shall be their future exploiters. Nationalism is a divisive anti-working class concept. National sovereignty is a bosses’ issue.

It is all right for the hypocritical press and politicians to scream “terrorism” and “atrocities”, but what about the society that puts guns into men’s hands in the first place? What about the leading statesmen of the world who have presided over the organised butchery of tens of millions of workers, who test and stockpile nuclear bombs capable of wiping out all life on earth, who poison the atmosphere with radiation causing thousands of deaths each year from leukaemia, who sell massive armaments around the world for profit, and the propaganda machine which strives to make it all acceptable in the name of freedom and humanity? It is absurd to separate a few individuals and say they are culpable and complicit when they are involved in situations created by society. The real culprit, will, of course, get away with it. What really needs indicting here is the capitalist system. A system that trains young men still in their teens to kill, a system that brutalises and degrades all humanity. The idea of world-consciousness; of being opposed to all wars and coming to understand the cause of war, has yet to take hold in significant proportions. This will come with the general growth of socialist understanding.

The consistent opposition of the Socialist Party to all wars has proven to be the only valid position. The establishment of socialism demands the unity and co-operation of the workers of the world. Such unity and cooperation can only arise from Socialist understanding, that means a clear recognition of the need to change society. To establish a system without frontiers or armed forces, where the scramble for trade and profits no longer exists. The resources of the earth, instead of being a class monopoly used to exploit and destroy, will be commonly owned and used solely to satisfy human needs. Food is not produced because people need it. There are plenty of hungry people in the world but nobody is going to produce food for them unless they can buy it. Food is produced for profit—“no profit, then no food” is the rule of the farmer, the miller, the baker, the grocer and every food vendor. So long as food is produced for profit then just so long will food be faked and adulterated and falsified by advertisements to increase profits.

The many conferences to deal with climate change that has been planned are bound to fail in the same way as the disarmament conferences failed, and because of the same reason. The prime cause of environmental problems is capitalism itself, for capitalism cannot function without polluting the world. No doubt efforts will be made to stem the tide, but capitalism is bound to fail to conquer this problem for it is capitalism itself that is creating it.  No amount of regulation and legislation on pollution would put this matter right. Politicians and corporations cannot fix the world because it means getting rid of the profit motive in society. There is a myth that governments could take control of capitalism if they really wanted to. Capitalism steers the decisions of governments. Many activists come into politics through their disgust at one or another of capitalism’s evils. To many it has seemed that governments lack the will or are too treacherous to deal with the problems and that it doesn’t matter who the votes are cast for, the result is the same — human misery on a vast scale. Thus they come to the conclusion that the ballot is useless, a kiss on a piece of paper. Is it as simple as that? Is it really lack of will that prevents governments solving the problems? The fact is that the majority either supports capitalism or can see no alternative way of running society except on a production for profit basis. It is a lack of desire for socialism that keeps capitalism going. Governments have no choice but to run the system the best way they know how.  The vote can be a weapon of emancipation or self-inflicted repression, depending on the person behind it.

The Socialist Party claims that the idea of a world without social classes in which the means of production will be commonly owned is produced out of the revulsion of capitalism’s problems, its wars, crime, poverty, alienation. that the values and institutions of capitalism increasingly come into conflict with the growing desire of the working class to live in a society more in harmony with their needs. In short, socialist consciousness is a product of capitalism’s problems. Now, there is no evidence to suggest that members of the armed forces are any more backward than other workers in factories or offices. Their ideas are pretty much the same on matters of sport, sex or politics. They do not live in a vacuum. So, how likely is the soldier to obey a command to suppress a socialist working class? We do not see the ballot as a cure-all; it is majority understanding of socialism which counts most.