To End All Wars

 Throughout history philosophers and politicians deplore the miseries of war. They still deplore them but war remains in all its brutality. Only the victims can alter this. Every war brings a flood of declarations and statements relating to its cause and proposals for its future prevention. After World War One  the  League of Nations was thought to be the panacea, but it failed. The end of the Second World War created the United Nations and that has failed. The bitter fact is that the world is no safer for peace today. The great lesson is that the war-like nature of capitalism continues.

Our party has always stated that it is impossible to prevent wars without abolishing the capitalist system which breeds war.  It is impossible to prevent wars while this system, and its conflicts between nations, remain. The Socialist Party holds the opinion that wars are caused by international economic conflicts, and not by the goodwill or bad will of some people. 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. Our party is unalterably opposed to all wars. We write against them; we speak against them and we campaign against any participation in wars.

We say if the working class dissipate their political energies by pursuing plans and schemes calculated to solve the problem of war by adjusting the political relationships of nation-states, then they will be faced in the future with more war and all the horror and tragedy it brings. War is a product of capitalist society and its conflicts, and the solution lies in the abolition of this system and its replacement with socialism; there is no other way.

We do not believe in capitalism. We do not want any blood shed to make profits for the capitalists. The main fact is that wars are a product of the clashing economic interest of various property owners in different parts of the world who struggle for markets, trade routes, sources of supply of raw materials, and so forth. While private property with its clashing sectional interest remains war in all its barbarity will always cast a shadow over the planet, a world disfigured by its warfare by torturing, murdering, persecuting, and raping. Given the conditions that lead to war then war will always produce barbarities that have upset and disturb people. The solution is the building of a new system of society in which private ownership will have no place.

 Wars will stop when people no longer support the social system that gives rise to them and replace it with one where wars are a thing of the past. What iv n s needed was a clear analysis of why humans go to war. It is not because of our genes, our natures or our beliefs. It is because capitalists make themselves richer and more powerful by obtaining more and more markets and trade routes and exploitable populations and raw materials. And until capitalism is abolished, its ruthless, competitive drive for profits will condemn workers to die needlessly in wars.

Wars can be stopped forever by simply removing the reasons for their existence. A system where property law and violence separate people into two classes can be replaced by one in which all property, wealth, and land is held in common, and where the owning class no longer has the ability to sustain itself. This system is called socialism which does away with governments and private (as opposed to personal) property, freeing the sum of all the world's wealth to be shared equally by all humans and removing the need to fight over anything. Socialism, and the end of all war, is not a utopia or a lunatic's pipe dream, but a real solution to many problems. Are you ready to take the first steps to end war?