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.