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.