Capitalism is Conflict

 

Horror and indignation. There are no other words to describe the attacks which have struck the cities and towns of Ukraine. No cause can ever justify such monstrous acts.

 

Governments who rule the destinies of nations are but the tools of the moneyed interest. Their quarrels are dictated by avarice and lust of power on the part of the class to which they belong. The people who fight under their flags in the various armies do indeed imagine they are fighting the battles of their own country, but in what country has it ever happened that the people have profited by foreign conquest?

The influence which impels war today is the influence of capitalism. Every war now is a capitalist move for new markets, and it is move capitalism must make or perish. The mad scramble for wealth that this century has witnessed has resulted in lifting almost every country into the circle of competition for trade. Competition between capitalists drives them to seek newer foreign markets.

Modern wars, in the opinion of the Socialist Party, are caused by the conflict of nations for markets, sources of raw material, fields for investment, and spheres of influence. As long as the capitalist system remains, and with it those conditions which flow automatically from the operation of the capitalist system, recurring wars, are inevitable. Our party has always stated that it is impossible to prevent wars without abolishing the capitalist system which breeds war. It may be possible to delay war for a while, but eventually, it is impossible to prevent wars while this system, and its conflicts of rival nations, remain. Wars are caused by international economic conflicts, and not by the goodwill or bad will of some people?

That does not eliminate the possibility of incidental attacks being caused by the acts of this or that ruling group of one country or another, but fundamentally wars are caused by the efforts of all the capitalist powers to expand into other fields. The only way they can get them is by taking them away from some other power because the whole world has been divided up among a small group of competing powers. That is what leads to war, regardless of the will of the people. We do not maintain that the ruling groups of any nation really desired the war. We have stated many times that they would have been glad to have avoided it, but they could not avoid it and maintain the capitalist system in their country. Our party is unalterably opposed to all wars. We do not give any support to any war. We do not vote for it; we do not vote for any that promotes it; we do not speak for it; we do not write for it. We are in opposition to it. We write against it and we speak against it.

Is it the "fate" of humanity always to be at war? Will mankind always be divided into antagonistic camps, which, men call "their country, their fatherland"? And must they always slaughter one another with murderous weapons, murder, mutilate and burn, laying waste to beautiful towns and cities? Must the world always be one vast slaughter-house? Must the world always be one vast arsenal with each war yet greater and more terrible than the other? Yes! Always! as long as capitalism exists! So long as capitalism exists, so long as capitalism rules, so long as the state is in the hands of the capitalists, so long as the bosses hold power, then so long will there be wars! War is a vital necessity for the capitalist class.

Certainly, there is one war we endorse. The class war. The war to end wage-slavery, to end capitalism with its evils of misery and degradation, prostitution and crime. The war to end war. And until that war is ended we do not want peace—because such peace will be the peace of the beggar and the slave.

War will become a horrible memory of the past only with the termination of the system of wealth production for private gain — with the advent of socialism. As yet the dark forces of capitalism are stronger than socialism. Capitalism is the cause of war. To abolish war we must abolish capitalism. This is the whole crux of the matter.

They start wars, not us

For the bankers and industrialists, for the oil magnates, for the munitions makers and stock exchange speculators for all the capitalist vultures, war is an opportunity to make billions out of human carnage. In public, in the media, they yearn for peace and say they have nothing to gain by war, but they have waited for years,  prepared for it and they had secretly wished and hoped for it to happen even if they did cloak themselves in the guise of peace.  The production of war materials can now incentify the bankers and industrialists into investing in manufacturing again, bring back the idle factories; bring back the idle billions resting in the coffers of the banks into the process of circulation. The droves of capitalists and their lobbyists are swarming around governments in order to solicit weapon orders.

 Their hirelings in the media are all striving unselfishly to accomplish one great common end, the defence of the nation against a dangerous outside enemy to camouflage the real character of this merciless plundering and unprecedented pilfering of the people’s pockets, to fill the bosses' bank balances.

The socialist, who has learned to understand the essence of capitalism, sees also clearly the cause of this war. International conflict is a product of capitalism; we cannot destroy the one without overthrowing the other. The socialist struggle against economic slavery at home cuts at the roots of war. The socialist version of internationalism is based, first and foremost, upon the abolition of the capitalist system and exploitation.  Socialists have a different job: to bring to the fore the necessity for a SOCIALIST world before humanity’s hopes of peace and security can be achieved.

It is clear then that working people must be opposed to every war. They look upon the workers of foreign lands as their brothers and sisters, their comrades, but upon the owning class of their own country as their enemies and oppressors. Class-conscious workers desire to carry on the class struggle in order to abolish capitalism and to establish a cooperative community, a socialist society. Workers without class consciousness are easily tricked by the old catchwords, love of nation and patriotism. Thus the war was made popular among the working class. Yet, in pursuit of capitalist self-interest, members of the working class are routinely regarded by their rulers as disposable.

An understanding of the dynamics of society brings the awareness of class interests and how workers should respond to them. That is why we stand out against capitalism's wars. Modern war is fought to settle the squabbles of capitalism’s master class; it does not involve the interests of the ordinary people except that it brings them nothing but suffering. If the working class refuse to fight—as we say they should—it should be on these grounds—and this would apply to all wars.

The Socialist Party’s case against war arises from an analysis of capitalism and our opposition to it. Capitalism, based on class ownership of the means of wealth production and distribution, generates a relentless search by the various capitalist powers for markets and sources of raw materials. These are essential ingredients in the ever-growing chase for profits — the lifeblood of the system. The capitalist class tries to solve this antagonism between powers by diplomatic measures, or the turning of the screw by the more powerful on the weaker. But if this fails then war can be the outcome, and even in this age of nuclear annihilation the threat of war still dominates the foreign policies of in particular the major powers. So the socialist opposition to war is not a pacifist or a moral one but an inescapable conclusion of our general case. M The total abolition of war and the threat of war will only be realised with the overthrow of capitalism and the restructuring of society on the basis of common ownership and production solely to meet human needs. 

How to End Wars

 

The people of the world have had far more than enough of war. The Socialist Party bases its answer to the problem of war squarely upon an analysis of the nature of war and of capitalism. Any other basis must lead to lies, illusions, or demagogy. It points out that so long as capitalism endures, wars will come, that war under capitalism is not an “accident” or an “exceptional event” but an integral part of the very mechanism of capitalism. War is just as much a part of capitalism as are economic crises. You cannot have capitalism without having periodic crises, and you cannot have capitalism without periodically having wars. The causes which bring about wars, the inescapable need for every advanced capitalist nation to attempt to expand its markets, gain cheaper sources of raw materials, find new outlets beyond the internal market for capital investment, can none of them be eliminated without eliminating capitalism itself.

Every government is therefore committed to war as an instrument of national policy by the very fact that it is a capitalist government. To ask it to renounce war is like asking a person to renounce oxygen.

It follows that the struggle against war, the genuine struggle, is simply an aspect of the struggle against capitalism and for socialism. This is the truth of the matter, however unpleasant a truth it may seem. If capitalism necessarily brings about war, you obviously cannot get rid of war without getting rid of capitalism. To divorce the struggle against wars from the struggle against capitalism is in reality to give up the struggle against war, so far as any possible effectiveness is concerned.  This simple truth is systematically obscured by the corporate media. So many people wish to satisfy. their consciences by feeling that they are working for peace but at the same time they do not wish to take the risk of working against capitalism. To these persons, we must say: Deliberately or unconsciously you are fooling yourselves. Which do you really want – peace or capitalism? You cannot have both. If you are unwilling to give up capitalism, then your pretended fight for peace is a fraud, and a fraud that aids no one but the war-makers.

The day-by-day class struggle of the workers, which by strengthening the working class is implicitly directed against capitalism, is thus a far more realistic means of checking the war preparations than all of the pacifism, isolation and collective security ever imagined. Fear of what the workers may do is the only real hindrance to the war-makers. They laugh at, and exploit to their own ends, the propaganda of isolation and collective security.

In the end, however, the overthrow of capitalism itself is the only conceivable means for stopping war. Socialism, and it alone, will end wars because socialism and it alone will root out the causes of war. The program of the socialist revolution, when the question is finally and fully understood, is the only anti-war platform. The answer to war, the only answer, is the socialist revolution.

The world socialist revolution

 

There is ample room in a socialist world for the peoples of the world cooperating for their common good, but there is no room in a capitalist world for rival powers, each seeking profit through the capture of markets, the conquest of raw materials and the control of trade routes and strategic points for their strategic protection. For all of them, the watchword is “grow or shrivel.” it is the law of capitalism, the law of the jungle. The only programme the ruling class will maintain is one that is calculated to save their own skins.

We do not venture to cast the horoscope; we cannot inform our readers what the stars foretell. When the working class understand their class position they will establish socialism and in doing so remove all barriers to world unity, but they will do it in their own way, not according to any leader’s plan but in a manner that will surprise all leaders and would-be leaders.

Workers aspire to real changes, not illusory ones. This does not mean replacing one government with another. It means getting rid of the government of the capitalists. The political power we want, workers' power, will grow from the upsurge of mass struggles. It must be based on the organs of struggle the workers create for themselves – plant and neighbourhood committees supervising production, expropriating the bosses and managing a planned economy directly, a society radically different from the sinister caricatures of socialism provided by the former USSR. The socialism we want will be international. It will be built by the workers of the entire world. Workers' power is not the power of a party but the exercise of power by the workers themselves organised in their own councils and factory and neighbourhood committees.

We are against violence in general and want to build a socialist society and socialist world free of violence. Violence is inherent in capitalist society-not only in its police and army, and not only expressed in the horror of war, but also in the daily, continual violence done to individuals in the exploitation of man by man. We want to eliminate the source of this massive violence: capitalism.

 Real socialism has nothing to do with reforming capitalism, making it run better. We enter the elections, applying the democratic rights that are part of the electoral process. These rights themselves were wrested from the ruling powers by the people in past struggles. We do not create illusions in the electoral process, but, unfortunately, the vast majority of the people still hold such illusions. Since these illusions do exist, however, the working people take the elections seriously. To abstain from them would mean to allow the reformists, who do reinforce illusions in the elections and in capitalism, to go unchallenged.

The Socialist Party knows that the working class, being the lowest in the social system, cannot emancipate itself without as a result emancipating all others. Is it always necessary for one generation to wade through oceans of blood and heap up mountains of human sacrifice that the next generation may learn a grain of truth from it all? It is not enough to join the pacifists, who proclaim peace among the nations while helping to perpetuate the war among the classes, a war which in reality, is at the bottom of all other wars.

It is this war of the classes that we must concentrate upon, and in that connection the war against false values, against evil institutions, against all social atrocities.

Our Day is Dawning

 Everybody wants peace, everybody professes to be a lover of peace, everybody cries for peace and the more we hear of it, the more we see peace endangered. But if, as is true, men and women of all parties hate war and are sincerely anxious to prevent it, why cannot we all get together for that purpose? The sincere desire for peace shown by the capitalist parties is nullified by their overriding will to maintain the capitalist system of society.

The capitalist drive towards war is assuming irresistible dimensions. Elaborate preparations, hidden and open, are being made for a possible expansion of the Russian-Ukrainian war, a new showdown between NATO and Russia. Diplomatic meetings are going on in every country in Europe. Desperately the capitalists are attempting to find some way out of the impasse in which they have landed. To the workers, we say: your enemy is not the workers in other lands; it is the capitalist class at home. There is only one way to prevent war and if it breaks out to end it, namely, by the overthrow of capitalism, the real root from which war springs. The widespread hope of the people for an end to war after the present slaughter is doomed to disappointment.

The solidarity of the working class finds no limits in the frontiers of the different countries that were erected in previous centuries. The more the working-class of any country becomes politically independent of the other classes, the more it becomes conscious of its international solidarity, the more it discards and combats every sort of national hostility, the more it becomes the determined champion of peace in the world.

Not solidarity but competition is therefore the principle on which is based the capitalistic spirit. The more capitalism develops, the keener the competition among capitalists, the more exasperated their struggle for profit, the more they hate each other and fight against each other with all the means at their disposal. The keener the competition of the different nations on the universal market, the more bitter their animosity towards each other, the greater their mutual distrust, their mutual hostility. This growing distrust and hostility are not due to some peculiar malice or wickedness of some person or nation; it is found in every capitalistic nation and is the natural outcome of growing capitalism. It must grow in the ruling classes as long as capitalism is growing, and so it must endanger the peace of the world to an ever-increasing degree. If it does not lead to war it leads to growing armaments that become an intolerable burden for the nations, as intolerable and pernicious in the long run as war itself and ultimately leading to war.

Growing distrust and hostility among nations, tend to make war more pernicious for capitalism itself. The capitalist class does not mind destruction and bloodshed if it gains by them, as it has shown by many commercial and colonial wars of the past centuries. The British capitalists have money enough to throw against bloodstained Putin, but none for the starving unemployed of their own nation. So the capitalist would not mind war were there anything to be gained by it. But today capital has much more to lose than to pain by war, it endangers by it the very foundations of its own existence.

The more capitalism develops, the more complicated a piece of machinery it becomes, machinery, extending over the whole world, with innumerable wheels, that are moving one another and in which the stopping of one stops all the rest. And at the same time, as we have seen, the growing hostility among nations tends to the forming of alliances among them, alliances not for the purpose of peace but of war, alliances that will not make peace universal, but war universal.  Never was universal peace more necessary to it than today, and never has war tended more to be universal than today.

We, socialists, hold in contempt the contemptible “patriotism” inculcated in the minds of workers by their unscrupulous masters which have poisoned the minds and hearts of millions of victims of the war. It is “patriotism” of the workers of one nation to fall upon and kill the workers of another nation to enlarge the possessions of their masters and increase their piles of riches, and as long as the poor, deluded toiling workers are fooled by “patriotism,” they will serve as cannon fodder and no power on earth can save them from their fate.

Choose Peace

 

The cause of war today is capitalism; the line-up in war is forced on the countries concerned by their interests as capitalist competitors for wealth and trade. The factors that cause wars determine also how the warring governments shall group themselves, these factors are indivisible.

The battle has already begun in earnest—on the soil of a country, Ukraine. Towns are bombed, villages entirely destroyed, the civil populations, the aged and the sick, have to drag themselves from their homesteads and flee from the combatants in frantic endeavour to save their lives. This terror cannot be imagined, it can only be experienced. What will come next ? Will total war spread to neighbouring countries? The decision rests with the class into whose keeping the workers have foolishly given their destiny. Whichever side makes the next move we are certain of one fact: that it will not be decided in the interests of the workers. In the opinion of our rulers, we were born to work and to suffer. It is an opinion which only a growing movement for socialism can change.

Real progress can only be assured through the growing understanding of working-class people in all lands, an understanding of the world and the social forces that make it what it is to-day. Socialist campaigning plays a most important part in that mental awakening. History calls upon the working class to take the initiative. We of the Socialist Party accept our share of that responsibility. Our work will go on. In our estimation the difference between the two rival oligarchies and the interests behind them are not worth the loss of a single  life. This war is basically a struggle between capitalists vying to extend their influence and control. The world is divided into an owning class and a dispossessed class, the capitalist class and the working class.

While working peoples should enjoy autonomy in social and cultural life, the world has become so closely knit that national sovereignty must be subordinated to international unity. The removal of the economic causes of war by whole-hearted recognition that the abundant resources of the earth make the struggle for markets and raw materials unnecessary, and the establishment of an international economic organisation for the distribution of the world’s resources according to the needs of all peoples.

 

It is the harsh reality that  that the problem of peace and war is one for the capitalist class. Socialists cannot even remotely affect the issue. It is sheer moonshine to talk of a “socialist peace” in a world where there is a non-socialist working class. More, it is fantastic delusion. In whatever way peace will come it will certainly not be a socialist peace. Socialists can only continue to express their opposition to war.And war is only one of the social problems thrown up by capitalism . Only our political party in this country able to apply a revolutionary approach to the problems of capitalism, because it is the Socialist Party.

The claims of anti-war pacifists are Utopian, because they are based upon misunderstandings of the capitalist system. Like all other reformers who have preceded them, the pacifist movements  are attempting to achieve the impossible : they want to retain capitalism, but wish to eliminate the evils it engenders. Reformers of one school or another have, for generations, been trying to realise that happy state of affairs. With what result? The development of capitalism proceeds unhindered and defeats their efforts every time: wars, degrading poverty, malnutrition, environmental destruction and countless other evils inseparable from capitalism are still with us. 

Capitalism cannot be adapted and made to function for the benefit of the mass of the population. Socialists are opposed to the parasitic capitalist class living off the sweat and blood  of the workers.

The socialist solution for the world’s ills is a simple one, but it needs the cooperation of the majority.

In a socialist society, all will co-operate to produce and distribute the things man needs. In return, every member will have free access to the means of life.

Poverty will not exist, because we shall have production for use only, and modern technique assures us of a gigantic output of goods.

Unemployment nor over-work will not exist, because all those who are physically and mentally able will assist in production.

Wars will cease, because there will be no rivalries for markets. Goods will be made solely for use, not for profit. National boundaries will become meaningless, since the workers of all lands will be co-operating to satisfy each other’s needs. Their interests will be identical. The effort that is now put into the manufacture of armaments will, under Socialism, be directed to the providing of the things all can enjoy.

 

The armed forces, being unnecessary in socialist society, its members will give their energies to production.

 

Obviously, the standard of living of the workers would be greatly increased by the introduction of socialism, and would go on increasing with each new invention and improved process of production.

It is up to you, then, fellow worker. Are you going to organise for socialism?