We need change

 

In spite of the dire straits many people find themselves in, most still think that capitalism is the best and only economic system. The World Socialist Movement, however, is convinced that the capitalist world economic system, is an irrational system. It is a system that is a disaster for over 90% of the world’s population. We hold a vision of a future world that is worth getting on board with. We think that an economy should produce real goods and services. 

 Movements like the environmentalists which hope to persuade governments of capitalism to operate this destructive system in a more gentle way are doomed to failure.

We live in a society in which we are bombarded from an early age with the idea of the nation. We are said to be "British" or “American”. And yet, for most people, this just happens to be the place in which we sell our ability to work in order to survive.  The amount of land most of us truly own could be fitted into a window-box or flower-pot.

The flag-waving of nationalism is not just childish pomp and pride. The countries for which we are asked to kill are not ours. Those who do have a stake in the nation are those who own it: the class of employers, landlords and investors referred to politely as "the business community". And what are they in conflict over? They are quarrelling — at the conference table where possible, over the battlefield and our dead bodies where necessary — about the dividing of the spoils which are derived from the productive work of the majority. There are four main bones of contention between the various national groupings of capitalists.

1. Markets

Employers only receive profit if they sell the goods we have produced for them. In trying to sell goods, they are in competition with one another. States look after their local capitalists in this respect, by organising import controls and other ways of turning trade to the advantage of some capitalists at the expense of others. These moves are always backed up by force.

 

2. Raw Materials

Just as important to capitalists, in their pursuit of profit, is the need to gain and defend sources of minerals and other raw materials. This applied in the nineteenth-century Franco-Prussian wars over the coal and steel of Alsace-Lorraine and inspired the British invasion of Afghanistan in 1897 as well as the Russian repeat performance years later. 

 

3. Territory

Thirdly, there is the constant struggle between the various states of the world, whether private- or state-capitalist, over the control of the earth itself, divided as it is into artificial fragments by national boundaries. Since the Second World War, for example, there has been an almost constant series of border disputes between India, China and Russia.

 

4. Trade Routes

Finally, in order to sell their goods and realise their profit, the capitalist class of the world have to be able to transport goods and materials freely. The Suez Canal crisis of 1956 in which Egypt was in conflict with Britain, France and Israel, was a conflict over a vital trade route.

 

Of course, these economic factors leading to warfare have to operate through the agency of human consciousness, with all its complications. The many popular rationalisations of war suggest that religion or culture are leading us to the battlefield. These are often the concepts employed by governments to persuade individual workers to flock to mass suicide, but they are not the root cause of the conflict. Having recognised that it is the system of production for profit that causes war. we have no option but to seek to replace it with a system of production for use. The capitalist class do not, in general, profit from war, but their system is beyond even their control. When the market dictates they invest in weapons to protect their investments, they have no choice but to follow where their share prices lead.

 The only true Peace Movement is one that stands for the abolition of all weapons, through the abolition of the social system which has made them necessary. We can talk seriously about the prospect of permanent world peace only on the basis of transforming social relationships. This is a practical proposition; to hope for the competition in the marketplace between rival gangs of robbers to be carried out without murder is an idle dream. At the moment we are human commodities, watching our lives being bought and sold on the labour market. But we can use the power of conscious cooperation to reverse the current trend towards collective suicide. The only way to avoid war is to create a socialist society.