Forgetting War

It is the duty of our fellow-workers to achieve real peace—a peace guaranteed by the identity of interest of all the members of society. Such a peace can only be obtained by the realisation of socialism. The genuine working-class movement must take power out of the hands of privileged politicians and parasites, take its own destiny in both hands, and wage class war against capitalism, militarism, and repression.

 Pacifists may be antimilitarists and opposed to all wars, aspiring for perfect peace, yearning for brotherly love, but they are dreamers and ignore the nature of the profit system under which we live. Experience has shown that pacifist organisations spread confusion, and do more harm than good, dissipating energies and raising false hopes. The representatives of capitalist interests, however, have learned from grim experience that a system of exploitation such as the present can only be preserved by force. Armies are required by the master class to keep the subject class in slavery and wars are inseparable from a system of private property. The Socialist Party, therefore, goes to the root of the matter. The Socialist is concerned with the abolition of capitalism, without which war cannot be eliminated. The system depends upon the ignorance of the masses of workers and therefore until the workers obtain real knowledge of the causes of their conditions and organise in agreement with that knowledge—there is no possibility of abolishing the effects of the system. The only thing that can undermine the power of the ruling class is working-class political knowledge; the only way in which the political control can be wrested from the ruling class is by political action based sternly upon sound working-class political understanding. 

Any party claiming to represent the workers’ interests which calls upon workers to support their masters’ wars surrenders its right to be described as a party of labour. To the class-conscious workers who comprehend their position in society it is a matter of indifference which section of the international master class is the best equipped with weapons of war. Whichever side wins or loses, the workers of both sides lose their lives or gain nothing if they survive. The working class has not one shred of interest to justify their participation in any of capitalism’s wars.  Members of the Socialist Party would point out that the war is part of a whole related pattern of social problems generated by capitalism; and because it is part of a related pattern, the war cannot be attacked in isolation from the rest of the pattern or from its roots in the needs of capitalist society; the only way this problem, and others like it, can be permanently solved is to establish a system of society in which the means of production are owned and democratically controlled by the whole people, and goods are produced for use and not for competitive exchange and profit.

The Socialist Party advocates the organisation of the working class for the capture of the political machinery in order that a new social order may be established in which the means of life will be owned in common by all and in which therefore there will be no need for the forcible protection of property and the slaughter of millions of producers in order to decide which bunch of parasites shall control the trade routes and markets of the world. The only way in which mankind can bring about a social change and build a fraternal society, free of war, is to establish socialism. This will not come about as an expression of non-violence but as the conscious act of a socialist working-class.  To establish socialism the working-class of the world must first understand and want it. They must, in other words, free themselves from ideas which at present keep capitalism in being—including ideas like pacifism—and consciously choose the new society in which men can truly live in brotherhood and build a world for human beings.