Social peace and imperialist war

We are republishing here, without changing a single comma, a Party’s text of 1960, which articulates Marxism’s invariant positions on the great topic of imperialism both in peace and in war.

(From “Il comunista”; no. 174 ; July-September 2022)

Back Sumary

 

 

INTRODUCTION

 

This text – Paix sociale et guerre imperialiste – which summarises the positions of revolutionary communism on the nature and characteristics of wars within the historical development of bourgeois society, as well as on the theoretical and class political line which the proletariat should follow in this respect, was published in our journal « Programme communiste », issue 11, April/June 1960, when the Stalinist Soviet Union still existed with all its false socialism, spiced up with the impossible « peaceful coexistence » between imperialist brigands.

The text took up an editorial in the previous issue of the January/March 1960 issue of the Programme communiste, which, under the title « Honte et mensonge de la détente » (Shame and lies of the detente) criticised the illusion of a new pacifist course of capitalism in which tensions and conflicts between dominant or domination seeking imperialisms could be calmed. This illusion was raised by the long visit of Khrushchev, First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, to his American counterpart, President Eisenhower, in September 1959.

This editorial therefore reminded us that : « The truth is that capitalism and peace are incompatible and that war has its roots not in the human will, even of the ruling class, but in the laws of the capitalist economy, which no human will can change. »

Today, amidst the roar of guns in Ukraine and as the spectre of a new imperialist world war is looming, these lines, which were targeting all bourgeois discourses on peace or peaceful coexistence up to now, take on their full significance : they remind proletarians of all camps that the present war in Eastern Europe is not their war, but the war of world imperialism, of which their « democratic » or « neo-Soviet » countries, with their obvious contradictions, are a part. The bourgeois pacifist discourses of the charlatans and metaphysicians of the period of the great « reconciliation » and « openness » between yesterday’s enemies had as their basic objective the political disarmament of the working class and its harmony with the social peace which is a real fact.

However, once the haze of this vaunted, magnificent encounter had passed, imperialism continued its advance in the production of conventional or nuclear weapons at an even faster pace, developing the most sophisticated and deadliest technologies in both camps to prepare for the general wars that it claimed it could avoid thanks to the re-established dialogue between the two superpowers.

The arms race was crowned by the continuation and extension of wars against countries that were trying to free themselves from the colonial yoke, and also against those countries, bourgeois and embedded in the capitalist economy, labelled « criminal » or « terrorist », that were trying to assert themselves locally against and despite all the dictates of imperialist domination. These wars became a testing ground for this deadly arsenal, a training field for military strategies and tactics, and an opportunity to assess the military capabilities of the adversary and its strength in defending its imperialist interests and its influence on a world scale.

The time of the discourses of war is coming, and in the future the discourses of peace will return to the forefront of the political and ideological scene of the bourgeoisie, if the proletariat does not reconquer the terrain of the class struggle to stand up against capitalism.

These discourses, however, prepare nothing but a future for new wars, all the way to the world war.

 

 

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For statesmen as well as astrologers, for politicians as well as trade union bureaucrats, 1960 is the year of the triumph of peace. But it has needed half a century of the decline of the workers’ movement so that this peace, in the shadow of which massacres and exploitation, torture and plunder take place, could be presented to the weakened masses as a « workers’ victory ».

In the past, workers’ action against the war was inseparable from the social demand for emancipation. The rejection of the « supreme sacrifice » on the altar of the fatherland was nothing but the logical extension of the rejection of exploitation on the economic plane. Workers, who did not accept that the plunder of the labour force should be recognised as natural and eternal, equally refused to admit that the wars of capitalism were legitimate and uninterruptible. What is more, they resolved that, if the bourgeoisie were to commit such an outrage and unleash a fire of war throughout the whole of Europe, they would immediately smother it in the blood of social revolution.

This bold resolution and this solemn commitment by the trade unions and workers’ parties dates back to fifty years ago. Today’s scenario is quite different : we have « communist » leaders who abandon even the most elementary demands of the workers in the name of peace; heads of pseudo-socialist states who shake hands with financial magnates and arms merchants; trade union leaders for whom the threat of war does not justify social revolt but, on the contrary, constitutes an important reason for renouncing it; and, finally, people and parties who have not only replaced agitation, strikes and class struggle with « signature-gathering campaigns » under the symbol of the « dove », servilely pleading for peace in poverty, but who, moreover, propagate within the proletariat the most disgraceful, hypocritical and false version of the causes of war : i.e. the bourgeois version. The ignorance of the masses, the greed of the powerful, the ambition of the heads of state or, worse still, the mutual misunderstanding between peoples divided by supposedly different social regimes : this is the explanation of wars and the threats of war which are jointly propagated by Russian and American propaganda, by Khrushchev and Eisenhower. An explanation which democrats and reactionaries, « socialists » and « communists », have seized upon for their part in the tremendous rhythm of the rotary presses and the deafening noise of the radios...

 

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Since the beginning of the proletarian movement, Marxists have never stopped fighting against such « explanation ». Starting from Clausewitz’s famous theorem – « war is the continuation of policy with other means » – they have made it clear to the capitalist bourgeoisie that, as revolutionaries and staunch opponents of all exploitation, they will never forget in the face of any war, whatever its immediate motivation, that the only cause of modern wars lies in the mercantile-capitalist form of production. For a war to break out, to end and complete with the consolidation of this society, any conflict other than that of the military protagonists must be set aside. War is therefore inconsistent with the class struggle, which must first be muted. If this has been achieved, if the proletariat has believed in the « reasons » put forward in favour of sacred unity, if the mentioned parties have accepted the principle of an interest superior to the interests of the workers’ revolution (rights, civilisation, homeland and democracy, etc.), it matters little in this case, from the perspective of the exploited classes, which state emerges victorious from the conflict : in any case, capitalism wins. For this reason, the real proletarian party defines itself not based on its attitude towards war or peace in general, but towards capitalism, which can equally well get along with either of these two equally odious and equally shameful faces of bourgeois domination.

 

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If we consider that there have been necessary and progressive wars – we shall see how and why – the great question arises whether wars of this kind, which the proletariat must support with all its strength and not condemn, are still possible today. To distance ourselves from the opportunism that has infected the whole of the two Internationals, let us say at once that neither the First World War of 1914-1918 nor the Second World War of 1939-1945 can in any way be put in such a category. These formidable turmoils, which led to the mobilisation of huge social masses in regular armies or in the ranks of « partisans », were nothing more than hideous conflicts between capitalist powers vying for labour force to exploit, natural resources to plunder, and markets to dominate. These hideous massacres were perpetrated by military states armed to the teeth only to sanctify the victory of the most rapacious form of capitalist exploitation, whose bastion resided neither in Prussian militarism nor in Hitler’s fascist regime, but in the heart of the democratic coalition in which the force of England and the USA dominated.

However, the condemnation of both world wars, whose imperialist character cannot, in our opinion, be questioned in good faith, does not prevent us from admitting that there have been and still are legitimate wars. For here, in fact, Marxists differ very clearly from pacifists, who not only have the fault of being « whiny », impotent and without resonance, but also of acting on an ideological plane of non-violence, which implies acceptance of the real causes of modern wars, i.e. the existence of capitalist society. This always leads them to end up clustering in one or other of the opposing military camps, as many of them did during the last war, when they opted to covertly support Hitler’s regime or to become « authentic resistance fighters », or to lengthen the list of sterile martyrdom, the formalisation of which the bourgeois state in Anglo-Saxon countries even treats legally by enshrining a certain « conscientious objection ». Marxism, on the other hand, studies every military conflict not according to abstract and empty principles of humanity, but examines its scope and consequences from the point of view of the interests of the proletariat, i.e. socialism. However, socialism is not only alien to the classical values of bourgeois society : freedom, democracy, national integrity, but it must smash them, or it will never exist. Freedom is always only the freedom of the rich and powerful. Democracy is only an illusory levelling of relations, the abolition of antiquated privileges that disappear only to give way to the thousand times more exorbitant privileges of capital. National integrity is nothing but the preservation of the social and historical framework that guarantees these privileges. In short, these ideological principles, this structure of the economy, law and civil administration, which each of the last two wars claimed to want to defend to the last breath, are, in fact, in the exclusive interest of the bourgeois class, the direct enemy of the workers (or of the proletariat).

There was, however, a whole phase of history, quite a long one, during which the proletariat had a direct interest in the victory of the bourgeoisie over the old aristocratic classes, and during which its party, the « International Workingmen’s Association, » openly desired the support of the workers in any struggle for the overthrow of monarchical absolutism, the conquest of bourgeois freedoms, the constitution, or the defence of the national units. There were two main reasons for this tactic, one economic and social, the other political and historical. On the one hand, socialism is impossible without the mass development on a global scale of the only class capable of realising it : the proletariat. There is no proletariat without capitalism; there is no capitalism without the bourgeois revolution, which will « liberate » the labour force trapped in the bonds of personal relations or narrow guild organisation. On the other hand, it is only in the democratic regime, with the development of political activity characteristic of modern societies, that the antagonistic interests of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie clash with absolute clarity.

Without dwelling here on the conditions that the proletarian party set for the momentary support (on a historical scale, of course) of bourgeois revolutions and movements for national unification, let us make it clear from the outset that the goal of establishing capitalist forms of production and a corresponding political structure was never an end for Marxists, but a stage that had to be got over, not to fall asleep in the would-be paradise of « democracy », but on the contrary to hasten its destruction. This support for national and bourgeois democratic movements disappears once this stage is completed, once the countries in which it took place become definitively part of the capitalist mode of production. For this reason, and after the terrible and murderous experience of bourgeois criminality experienced by the English, German and French proletarians, the support for national movements and wars was extinguished in the rivers of blood of the Paris Commune of 1871, after which any « common front » between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat in Western capitalist Europe became a betrayal of the revolutionary and socialist cause. Marx made this clear in one of his most brilliant pamphlets : the massacre of the Paris Communards marked the definitive end of all necessary and progressive war for this part of the world. This historical demarcation, which is faithfully taken up by the real communist programme, is not a purely theoretical deduction, but the expression of an important historical fact : the bourgeoisie already in 1871 consciously renounced the political categorical commitment to the defence of national frontiers, « the last heroic act of which the old society is capable », and put the defence of its class privileges first, not hesitating to negotiate with the leader of the enemy armies, as Thiers did then with Bismarck, to strike against its own proletariat. The latter, which supported the movement for national unification only to develop its own class forces through the generalisation of the capitalist productive forces, does not take the place of the bourgeoisie in this task after capitalism has been established and when it is now necessary to overthrow it.

Moreover, the bourgeoisie’s resignation to being a revolutionary class is amplified and subsequently exposed by the central phenomenon of the twentieth century : imperialism. The bourgeoisie will, of course, be wary of admitting that its wars are now nothing more than wars of robbery and conquest. To disguise its aims, it will continue to invoke the defence of the sacred soil of the fatherland and the social conquests which it attained a hundred years ago and which it has not ceased to trample on since. But these will be only cowardly pretexts for violating the no less sacred soil of other fatherlands, for inflicting upon them its own subjection, either with a military brutality comparable to and surpassing that of the armies of the old monarchies, or with the hypocritical economic domination of big capital, which does no longer content itself with ruling over old Europe, and now brings its ravages to other continents, enslaving entire populations in its colonies, plundering the natural wealth of Africa and Asia.

 

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But this imperialist exploitation, despite its delays and contradictions, plays despite its will a remarkable revolutionary role in awakening to modern political movement populations hitherto closed to any mass movement for social emancipation. And this phenomenon has the effect that all the bourgeois ideological « values » undergo a curious reversal, which ultimately reaches the confirmation of Marxist analysis and its revolutionary perspective. Do the subjugated colonial peoples claim from their position the political rights that the peoples of Europe claimed a hundred years ago? The democratic bourgeoisie responds with vilification and violent repression : the independence of the peoples of Asia and Africa is a utopian dream fabricated by paid « agitators ». Does the sacrosanct freedom of labour, which has provided European capitalism with its industrial army of starving wage workers, turns against the colonial exploitation lacking the labour force that leaves the latifundia or the industries of the fast-growing industries of the mushroom towns (1)? The white bourgeoisie responds with coercion, forced labour or sanctions that the indigenous population cannot pay for, condemning them to forced labour on the colonists’ land. Do the colonised peoples finally decide to claim national sovereignty, as the peoples of Europe once did when enslaved by dynasties? This is just a savage rebellion, an attack on the « integrity of the territory ». This is how the bourgeoisie writes its own interpretation in blood and weapons, fully in tune with the interpretation given in the « Communist Manifesto » : freedom consists in the exploitation of all labour power, whether by good or by force, the nation is the domain of this exploitation and the nation - state is the instrument of oppression that guarantees it.

But for the international proletariat, the revolutionary and worldwide class, which represents the liberation of humanity from all exploitation and slavery, are their wars not necessary and progressive in case the nations subjugated by imperialism take up arms? Is it not legitimate to rebel against a system that doubles economic exploitation with racial oppression, and worse, reinforces the former by sanctifying the latter? A whole generation of reformist socialists have ignored this and confined themselves to demanding equal rights for exploited indigenous peoples to the « citizens » of the metropolises, thus obscuring the odious flip side of advocating the « defence of peace » in the shadow of which thousands of atrocities are committed daily that have nothing to envy with those customary in times of war. While the great financial and industrial powers of the West have been partitioning other continents, relocating whole populations, and enslaving them alternately with the whip and with the scent of missionary incense, peace has, in fact, reigned in the well-stocked metropolises, where the shameless and obtuse bourgeoisie paraded its luxury before the eyes of the starving proletariat, betrayed by their leaders, which nevertheless still retained enough sense of international solidarity to oppose colonialist plunder. That even then, the uprising of the coloured peoples, although without result, was socially justified, that it responded to a historical necessity, is clearly seen today, when the countries still subjugated yesterday are finally coming, despite the vicissitudes and betrayals, to national sovereignty. It is certainly not the end of their social misery, nor the highest goal that the domestic bourgeoisie, like those of Europe two centuries ago, would like to order to the popular uprising, but it is creating and developing new capitalisms, creating and developing new armies of proletarians for socialism. If this movement had had the same scope forty years ago, if the call of the proletariat of Europe, emboldened by the Russian October Revolution, had been answered by the mass uprising of millions of the exploited in Asia and Africa, imperialism would certainly have lost this contest, capitalism would not have been able to resist the proletarian onslaught, there would not have been the Stalinist counter-revolution, and socialism would have already liberated at least the old continent and its colonies.

 

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Here it is worth referring to the fundamental fulcrum of Lenin, the one that the impostors in Moscow had to falsify and distort with the utmost zeal to continue to claim Marxism and communism with impunity, while violating its principles by joining the most shameful and unacceptable war. Lenin called legitimate war every war waged against the exploitation of backward countries or countries colonised by imperialist powers, and every armed uprising directed against dynasties or powers of a feudal character which, as accomplices and bulwarks of the slavery of such countries by European capital, were holding back their economic development and preserving their barbaric and obsolete social forms (2).

By contrast, he referred to as unjust war any conflict that arises as a result of competition between capitalist powers and rivals for the repartition of territories dominated by capitalism, whether through military coercion linked to the preservation of ancient local despotic forms or through a thick network of financial interests. This categorisation was firmly set against bourgeois conceptions of « legitimate defence » and « first aggressor ». It brought to the fore the general character of the war that had just broken out : the imperialist war of the slave-holders « to increase the enslavement of the colonies », « by means of a “more equitable” distribution and sebsequent more concerted exploitation of them » (3). It is possible and inevitable that in such wars, the peoples of one or the other military camp facing each other will find themselves actually enslaved and under the occupation of the troops of the other belligerent. But this in no way changes the general character of the war, and does not justify one in regarding it as « just » or « defensive. » The war of 1914-1918, Lenin explained, was imperialist, for it was not in reality about the specific fate of either belligerent’s own national territory, nor about their national sovereignty, but about their colonial spoils, the extent of their own areas of oppression and exploitation. For the rich and amply supplied imperialisms, it was about protecting the fruits of their colonial plunder, and for the new and hitherto ill-supplied imperialisms, it was about wresting it from them. And « it is not the business of socialists to help the younger and stronger robber (Germany) to plunder the older and overgorged robbers » (4). To those who referred to the invasion of Belgium in 1914 to justify their adherence to the sacred patriotic unity, Lenin replied that it was true that the German army had invaded Belgian territory, but that under these conditions, that is, under the conditions of imperialist war, « it is impossible to help Belgium otherwise than by helping to throttle Austria or Turkey » (5). And he added : « Where does “defence of the fatherland” come here? » Such a fatherland can only be defended by the subjection of other fatherlands, i.e. not only of the belligerent countries but also of the oppressed countries whose domination the rival imperialisms are vying for precisely through war.

It is very true that the warmongering and national chauvinist propaganda of the bourgeoisie is amplified by the very consequences of the catastrophe it has caused : populations that are militarily occupied and confronted with the myriad sufferings and oppressions that this entails inevitably tend to forget the responsibility of their own ruling leaders for the war and the exploitative and class oppressive nature of the state power that calls them to fight the aggressor. This gives revolutionaries all the more reason to vigorously denounce the historical and social character of the interpretation of the Holocaust to which the entire international proletariat is subjected.

« Whoever advocates », Lenin concludes, « participation in the present war is perpetuating the imperialist oppression of nations. Whoever advocates taking advantage of the present embarrassments of the governments so as to fight for the social revolution is championing the real freedom of really all nations, which is possible only under socialism » (6).

 

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The war of 1914-1918 was therefore an imperialist war : German capitalism, which had entered the international scene too late to have colonies, was aiming at the colonies of its neighbours; England saw in it a dangerous rival, penetrating its markets and which had to be put down; France, though partially cured of its desire for revenge after 1870, had literally pushed the tottering Tsarist regime into war, which owed it 10 billion gold francs and could only extricate itself from this debt by targeting the spoils of the Ottoman Empire on the brink of ruin.

But did anything else happen in the 1939-1945 war? It is not at all difficult to recognise identical economic causes, the only ones that bear significance in the profit – based production system. The Treaty of Versailles between the victors and the vanquished in the First World War sanctified the « division of the world », which, with its extortions and absurdities, posed a real challenge to any prospect of a lasting truce between exacerbated imperialisms. Hitler’s Germany, like Wilhelm II’s Germany, was suffocating within its national structure and demanding its « living space ». To isolate and control it, France and England wove around it a network of alliances that inevitably led them to defend the borders of the states bordering the Third Reich, given that the latter, to satisfy its need for economic expansion as well as to safeguard its social stability, would no longer hesitate to violate the articles of the 1918 Treaty. Such an opportunity arose in connection with the situation of the « Sudeten Germans », the German minority in Czechoslovakia. But it was no more than a pretext : for twenty years we had witnessed a political and military concentration of forces that left no one in doubt about the intentions of the opposing coalitions, whose states were equally committed, albeit at different levels, to the production of weapons and the war instruments, equally determined, albeit for opposing reasons – one to preserve, the other to usurp – to plunge the social masses into a second world massacre, were preparing for a new partition of the world between the well-fed imperialisms and the well-hungry imperialisms.

But again, such a solution to the capitalist contradictions would not have been possible without the help of the « workers » parties, traitors to the revolution and socialism; and once again it had to disguise its real causes and objectives under powerful ideological pretext. In the First World War, as has already been said, such a pretext was the defence of law and civilisation against Prussian militarism. In the second, it was justified as the defence of freedom and democracy against fascism. But before disproving this argumentation, which is as false as it is effective, it must be remembered that the imperialist character of the 1939-1945 war was recognised, at least for a time, by those who would otherwise have become the new « extremists »: that is, the fake communists of the parties directed by Moscow.

In fact, although the Stalinist Party, beginning with the Popular Front (Front populaire) in 1936, had become the most decisive agent of a national policy of intransigence and armaments against the « Hitlerian menace », although it had used all its influence on the working masses to persuade them, to sacrifice all their immediate demands to this policy, it did not hesitate in September 1939 to denounce the conflict that had just broken out as a machination of the City of London aimed not only at Hitler’s Germany but also at Soviet Russia. It maintained this position as long as Russia maintained relations with Hitler over the partition of Poland, and abandoned it only when Hitler’s Germany turned against its ally and threw its panzer divisions into the area of the vast Russian Plain. For the « communists » obeying orders from Moscow, there was not a shadow of doubt that this war was once again becoming a « just » and legitimate war, and that the most urgent duty of the proletarians was to lay down their lives for a new defence of civilisation, this time against « Nazi barbarism ».

This brief summary would already suffice to demonstrate that these aspects of the second imperialist war have nothing whatsoever to do with Lenin’s criteria mentioned above, and that this war was formulated entirely and simply based on the national and capitalist interests of the impostors in the Kremlin. However, there were people, obstinate opponents of Stalin’s regime and considering themselves faithful and firm followers of Leninist doctrine, who nevertheless believed that the participation of the « workers » state in this conflict altered its historical and social significance. In fact, the Russian state had already ceased to be a proletarian state : the watersheds of its evolution on the path of capitalist degeneration are faithfully reflected in the policy of the « communist » parties of Europe, in their alliances with the opportunist parties of social democracy and with the unadulterated bourgeois parties, as well as in Russian diplomacy, which, at the behest of Stalin, gave its approval to the politics of « national defence » of the French Laval government and, in the person of the « delegate » Georgi Dimitrov, made its entry into the League of Nations, which, according to Lenin, was the « den of robbers » of capitalism. But even if it could perhaps be assumed that the Russian state had not yet fully completed its retrograde fall into the capitalist form at the time of the declaration of war, the mere fact that it had joined the conflict and called on the world proletariat to mobilise in one camp or another, instead of calling on it to revolt against its own bourgeoisie, would, strictly following Lenin’s scheme, suffice to demonstrate that it had already lost its last socialist and proletarian vestiges.

In fact, if we just transpose Lenin’s argumentation to that time, then it was impossible to help – not only Belgium – but also Czechoslovakia, Poland, France and all the countries occupied by the German army otherwise than by helping the Allies, especially England and the USA to throttle their colonies and the countries they exploit. It is so true that Russia, to fit into the anti-fascist coalition, had to proceed to the liquidation of the International: that is, the to deliver each of its sections into the hands of their own bourgeoisie, to command the Indian party to cease all anti-English activities, to officially dissolve the American party, while its loyal French party had not even waited for war to « help throttle » in 1937 the North African Star (Étoile Nord-Africaine) – an Algerian organisation led by Messala Hadj which was banned by the Popular Front government and slandered by Thorez’s disciples as « fascist » because it was fighting against French colonialism.

But one could say that the question of the nature of the « political regimes » was a war issue. Would the victory of democracy and the defeat of fascism have been useless? Based on the above criteria, according to which war can only be approved by the proletariat if it represents a struggle against backward social forms, the opposition between fascism and democracy is unacceptable, since they are two equally bourgeois and capitalist forms of government. Moreover, it is not real. It is true that the anti-fascist cause owes its success among the working masses to the fact that fascism was really a counter-revolutionary reaction of the bourgeoisie in the face of the proletarian menace. But the real workers’ struggle against fascism could not be but a struggle between classes, and not between states, all of which had taken the path of the capitalist mode of production and all of which were subjugated to the purposes of capital. In fact, when fascism was more than a word and a bogeyman capable of hastily effecting sacred unity, when Italian or German fascism proceeded to crush workers’ organisations and liquidate their militants, all the bourgeoisies of the world were in open or hypocritical solidarity with it. When the bourgeois governments adopted the anti-fascist narrative to which workers’ opportunism gave rise, it was nothing more than a pretext to justify imperialist war. But if fascism represents historically a political form of capitalism, if it embodies the profound aspects of the economic and structural centralisation of this regime, if it is characterised by an unprecedented extension of social violence, police arbitrariness and control over the individuals’ private lives, then it is certain that it was fascism, not democracy, that won the war, and that the abominable methods that Hitler’s regime, no doubt with obvious monstrous dimensions, generalised, were inherited by the governments of the « Liberation », just as they inherited US army surplus.

A war, as we have already said, is not characterised by the ideological banners it waves, but by its objective causes, which in a market-capitalist system of production are always linked to the interests of the ruling classes. « An imperialist war », said Lenin, « does not cease to be imperialist when charlatans or phrase – mongers or petty – bourgeois philistines put forward sentimental “slogans”, but only when the class which is conducting the imperialist war, and is bound to it by millions of economic threads (and even ropes), is really overthrown and is replaced at the helm of state by the really revolutionary class, the proletariat. There is no other way of getting out of an imperialist war, as also out of an imperialist predatory peace”. »

 

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The war for freedom and national independence has a real social content when the corresponding economic objective also has a real basis, as was the case in pre-capitalist Europe and as is still the case in the colonised countries of Asia and Africa. There, as here in the past, freedom means emancipation from ancient serfdom and emergence of new forms of associated labour, national unity, development of the internal market and growth of the productive forces. The social character of a war is always derived from the nature of the economic contradictions which have given rise to it. In the phase of full capitalism, it is no longer the new forces of a young productive system struggling against an obsolete state superstructure that determine the war conflicts between the great powers, but the competitive struggle between two monopolistic groups within the same production system. It can only be escaped, or avoided, as Lenin said, by revolution. Therefore, the alternative of « war or peace », to which workers’ opportunism, the accomplice of capitalism, would like to subject the standpoint and action of the working masses, is doubly false. Firstly, because peace cannot be other than a temporary adjustment of the contradictions whose eruption is the cause of war, or, in other words because capitalist peace without class struggle can produce nothing but imperialist war. Secondly, because war cannot be « avoided » except by revolution, against which the pacifist ideology that entails social peace necessarily turns its back.

The older, the more saturated, the more rampant capitalism becomes, the more imperative and inexorable its internal dynamics, the greater the risks of war. The more the technical means of production are developed, the more utopian are the attempts at agreement between states to limit the application of these means to war preparations, and the more reprehensible is the « workers », « communist » propaganda that gives them credibility. Despite the foolish conviction that the imminent danger of nuclear destruction of mankind would compel the heads of state to retreat, such feverish endeavour to improve quantitatively and qualitatively the means of destruction entails an enormous increase in the unproductive part of the economy and in the mass of products taken off the market, which is still the decisive factor of the « war » within the « peace ». The outbreak of war conflict will be all the more rapid and terrible the greater the amount of labour incorporated into the war machinery and wasted in the pursuit of destructive aims. This truth cannot be hidden from the working class by Marxists : if the proletarian movement does not awaken to life, if it does not find the strength to contest the direction of society with the capitalist classes before the outbreak of nuclear war, then nothing will be able to stop it; no agreements between heads of state, no individual or mass protests, but only the difficult resumption of the struggle for the destruction of the existing powers. Official propaganda proclaims again and again the necessity of « armaments » to prevent war, or the urgency of « agreeing » to reduce armaments to prevent it. In reality, governments are neither masters of war nor of peace. They are only the masters, with the complicity of the opportunists, of social peace, i.e. of the various means that enable them to prevent the proletariat from imposing its own solution. War and peace are not different roads, they are two stops on the same road, the road of social preservation and perpetuation of capitalism, which the social masses, like a blind herd, still obediently follow, deceived by their leaders, and even going so far as to applaud those who direct them towards the sinister destination. The only two truly opposing roads are that of capitalism and that of socialist revolution. They are not parallel and never run side by side.

Only once in history have we been at a « crossroad » that opened a new road away from the road of capitalism. It was at the end of the First World War and during the Russian Revolution. Since the proletariat had seized power in a large country, since the workers’ movement, betrayed by its leadership, was able to recover and abandon the policy of sacred unity into which it had been led astray by the opportunism of the Social Democrats, the communists were able to launch the watchword of transforming the imperialist war into a revolutionary civil war.

Today, when the communist movement has fallen into an even more shameful marasmus than the previous one, and when the coercive, political and ideological power of the state apparatuses has increased tenfold, it is nevertheless the revolution that will have to prevent the first guided missiles from being fired, or risk a long and terrible step backwards not only for the proletarian movement but for the whole of society. The proletariat, if it is to completely neutralise the sowers of death, to put the super-perfected devices of destruction already on the ground out of operation, to stop the infernal machinery which the bourgeoisie has the power, like a sorcerer’s apprentice, to unleash, can rely only on its own action and on itself. The notion of this only and true reality is the first condition for the resurgence of the proletariat. This is by no means depressing or defeatist, because it’s the key to harnessing those formidable sources of energy still hidden in the working masses. The latter, fragmented and disarrayed, no longer even feel of their existence, but will triumphantly rediscover them when they have regained their unity and their class organisation.

 

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(1) « Mushroom towns » refers to a large district (also called a town) that quickly sprang up on the outskirts of long-established cities, providing housing for the masses of wage workers destined for exploitation in nearby factories. These are towns made up of long blocks of buildings that are more or less all the same and have very few services, and which have sprung up like mushrooms after the rain, especially after the Second World War in the context of feverish post-war reconstruction.

(2) The pamphlet « Socialism and War » (Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 21, Progress Publishers, Moscow) presents a selection of Lenin’s texts from 1915 and conveys this standpoint in a way that leaves no room for ambiguity : « The period of 1789-1871 left behind it deep marks and revolutionary memories. There could be no development of the proletarian struggle for socialism prior to the overthrow of feudalism, absolutism and alien oppression. When, in speaking of the wars of such periods, socialists stressed the legitimacy of “ defensive ” wars, they always had these aims in mind, namely revolution against medievalism and serfdom. By a “ defensive ” war socialists have always understood a “ just ” war in this particular sense (Wilhelm Liebknecht once expressed himself precisely in this way) [Lenin is referring to W. Liebknecht’s speech at the Erfurt Congress of the German Social Democracy in 1891, ed.]. It is only in this sense that socialists have always regarded wars “ for the defence of the fatherland ”, or “ defensive ” wars, as legitimate, progressive and just. For example, if tomorrow, Morocco were to declare war on France, or India on Britain, or Persia or China on Russia, and so on, these would be “ just ”, and “ defensive ” wars, irrespective of who would be the first to attack; any socialist would wish the oppressed, dependent and unequal states victory over the oppressor, slave-holding and predatory “ Great’ Powers ” » (p. 300-301).

(3) Ibid, p. 303-304

(4) Ibid, p. 303

(5) Ibid, p. 305

(6) Ibid, p. 305-306

 

 

International Communist Party

www.pcint.org