[Militant No. 505, 30 May 1980, p. 8 and 9]
Military rivalry and war – potentially the danger of a totally destructive world war – is rooted in capitalist society.
How could it be otherwise in a system based on class exploitation and oppression, with irreconcilable national rivalries between the powers and the neo-colonial exploitation of oppressed nationalities?
This is a fundamental question – ultimately the fundamental question for the labour movement.
The NEC Statement, in the section ‚Policy for Peace‘, rightly opposes the monstrous, world-wide accumulation of armaments. It correctly says that „a third world war would destroy civilisation …“, but provides no real explanation for the arms race, and offers no analysis of the social, economic, and class factors which determine the ultimate question of war or peace.
End this grotesque waste on armaments
Since the end of the second world war there has supposedly been ‚peace.‘ Yet every year since 1945 there has been a ’small‘ war somewhere. Since 1955, in fact , there have been 120 armed conflicts in 65 countries , limited of course to conventional arms but claiming an estimated 25 million lives. This bloodshed was mainly in under-developed countries of the former colonial world, the gruesome consequences of imperialism’s poisoned legacy of national conflicts and social crisis.
World war between the super powers – the United States and Russia, which dominate respectively the imperialist and Stalinist camps – has been ruled out by the prevailing balance of forces. But the contradiction between the capitalist states, on one side, and the deformed workers‘ states of Russia and Eastern Europe, on the other, two fundamentally opposed social systems, has produced an ever accelerating race to stock-pile nuclear weapons.
Workers are paying £1,000,000 an hour for Britains defences‘
In 1978, £212,000 million was squandered internationally for military purposes, £60,000 million of this on armaments – 70% higher in real terms than in 1960. This is when over 660 million people in the ‚developing countries‘ go without basic necessities of life and 8 million children die every year of hunger and illnesses related to malnutrition.
In Britain, too, workers are paying for an enormous burden of military spending, with ‚defence‘ currently devouring £1 million an hour. Despite drastic cuts in social spending. the Tories are increasing ‚defence‘ spending by 3% a year in real terms, pushing it up to a monstrous £8,000 million a year.
The Tory spokesmen of British capitalism are deluding themselves that they can maintain an ‚independent nuclear deterrent,‘ apparently oblivious of the fact that Britain’s arms, though a colossal waste, are nevertheless like so many pea-shooters compared to the weaponry of US imperialism and the Russian bureaucracy.
Scandalously, the last Labour government (a fact not mentioned in the statement) also continued to increase arms spending, secretly (among other things) approving £1,000 million spending on modernising Polaris This deliberate contradiction of conference policy must be vigorously condemned by the party.
The statement says „The next Labour government will reduce the proportion of the nation’s resources devoted to defence so that the burden will be brought into line with that carried by our main European allies.“ But it is necessary to go further than this!
The capitalist governments of Europe are not the ‚allies‘ of the working class. The labour movement has no interest whatsoever in the maintenance of useless expenditure on arms. The next Labour government must end this expenditure and, as the statement rightly says, provide alternative employment for workers in defence industries, converting the sophisticated technology now squandered on arms to socially useful projects. Labour should also cut off all arms sales to reactionary governments.
The ranks of the labour movement, however, must be warned that a sharp reduction of arms spending would provoke a furious reaction from the capitalists. Notwithstanding its delusions of military grandeur, the ruling class regards defence spending as vital to defend its property and power, against both foreign rivals and its own working class. Appeals to humanitarian principles and ‚reason‘ will have no effect as far as the capitalists are concerned.
Labour must go to the root of the problem, the class tyranny of capitalism which can be maintained, in the last analysis, only by armed force. An attack on arms expenditure must be part and parcel of a programme to take over the commanding heights of the economy and introduce a socialist plan of production.
Spiralling arms race will not be ended by talks
The statement’s „policy for peace,“ however, is unfortunately completely divorced from the fundamental social and economic problems facing the working class (except for passing reference to the solutions to the ’north-south‘ conflict proposed by the Brandt Commission). Referring to the world arms race, the statement says „we shall campaign for international peace, international co-operation, and international development“; a Labour government would enter „immediately into East-West negotiations,“ attempting „to breath new life into the disarmament negotiations.“
But it is utterly utopian to rely on capitalist governments or the Stalinist bureaucracy making any real steps towards disarmament, just as it would be to rely on capitalism limiting unemployment or the bureaucracy granting workers‘ democracy.
How many times have the super powers, and lesser powers, pledged themselves to „peace” and „disarmament“? None of the many post-war negotiations or dozens of „peace“ treaties , including SALT and „Detente“, have made the slightest difference. The arms race is rooted in the social antagonisms within capitalism, and between the capitalist West and the Stalinist East. While the capitalist class and the Stalinist bureaucracy rule over their respective working classes, no amount of humanitarian pressure, appeals to „reason“ or the like, will force them to abandon military preparations.
In the case of the Russian bureaucracy, nuclear stockpiling is a preventative measure for fear of imperialism, which was the first to manufacture (and use in Japan) and stock-pile nuclear arms. In the case of the United States and the imperialist powers, nuclear stockpiling is motivated by fear of the Soviet bureaucracy’s overwhelming superiority of conventional forces, which would enable them to take Europe and parts of the Middle East in weeks, or even days.
Once begun, the arms race has a crazy logic of its own, despite the crippling burden it now imposes on both the American and Russian economies.
With a balance of nuclear terror, the super powers‘ stock-piles cancel each other out. Both have the power to wipe out humanity several times over. Despite this satanic „overkill,“ however, the military strategists on both sides are madly striving to achieve a “first-strike capacity“ capable of knocking out their opponent’s nuclear arsenal, and eliminating the power of retaliation. This is why both sides are continually manoeuvring over the question of „supervision,“ about which neither can trust the other.
The SALT II agreement, for instance, even if implemented, will have little effect on the Soviet-American arms race. It „obliges“ both superpowers to scrap a few already obsolete nuclear weapons, but actually allows them to build up their stocks of even more sophisticated weapons (up to 14,000 nuclear warheads each). Prior to the signing of SALT II , however, Carter had already approved the US’s MX mobile missile system, clearly intended to achieve a massive „first-strike“ capacity and inevitably giving a new twist to the arms spiral, with steps by the Soviet bureaucracy to produce a counter-system as soon as possible.
Class relations decide the question of world war
Even if temporary arms reductions were genuinely agreed, the fundamental antagonisms between the powers would make it certain that in the event of renewed tension and conflict science and technology would rapidly be applied again to the development of even more sophisticated and destructive weapons. As it is, however, the revolution in Iran and especially the Russian invasion of Afghanistan have been seized on by the leaders of American imperialism as the excuse for a new and even more costly round of nuclear arms building.
Has Afghanistan in fact brought the danger of a third world war nearer? The NEC Statement clearly contends that because of this and other recent events „the danger of (a third world war) breaking out is growing alarmingly.“
In reality, however, Afghanistan (which is a relatively minor conflict compared to the long war over the fate of Vietnam) is just one symptom of imperialism’s world-wide crisis, which has brought about the domino-like collapse of its puppet dictators and sharpening economic difficulties. The intolerable contradictions developing throughout a decayed capitalist system internationally; together with the growing problems in the Stalinist states, has inevitably led to growing instability and a heightening of international tensions. Afghanistan, which is far less serious in its implications for imperialism than the revolution in Iran or the possible overthrow of its client regime in South Korea, is being used by the US as a diversion and as the pretext for whipping up reactionary, nationalist fervour.
Afghanistan is not a new „Sarajevo,“ and recent events have not made world war nay more likely. The Statement is mistaken in implying that it is the build-up of nuclear arms itself which makes war inevitable, or that it is diplomatic misunderstandings or the mistakes of „world ‚leaders“ which can precipitate world war.
The fundamental question of war or peace depends not on relations between the powers, but on relations between the classes.
Given the existing balance of class forces, with the enormous power of the workers‘ organisations in the advanced countries and elsewhere, and while the capitalist class is itself in direct control, nuclear war is ruled out. The idea of „limited nuclear war“ is absurd. A „limited“ or so-called „tactical“ nuclear engagement would inevitably lead to a holocaust, resulting in the complete destruction of capitalism, Stalinism and most of humanity, contaminating the earth indefinitely. Total destruction is not in the interest of the exploiting capitalist class (or the parasitic bureaucratic caste of the Eastern Bloc).
The threat of world war is not a problem to be given priority over the struggle for socialism – because socialism is the only way of averting nuclear annihilation
But the present balance cannot last indefinitely . World capitalism is rotten-ripe for socialism, and if the working class fails we would then face the hell-black prospect of counter-revolutionary reaction which would make nuclear war inevitable.
The world would be at the mercy of Bonapartist dictators equipped with atomic hardware. Consider Pinochet with nuclear missiles, or the maniacal American generals in Vietnam who used mass terror weapons like blanket bombing, napalm, and lethal defoliants. What if they had a free hand?
With the intense aggravation of class tensions which will accompany capitalism’s death agony, such madmen, unbalanced by the crisis, would sooner or later attempt to resolve their problems with a „first-strike“ against Russia. It would be the carrying out of Hitler’s final order: „Destroy everything!“
This is the terrifying danger we face in the next ten to twenty years – unless the working class of America, Europe and Japan take power land establish socialism.
The threat of world war, therefore, is not – as the Statement implies – a problem of such urgency that it must be given priority over the struggle for socialism. On the contrary, socialism is the only means by which the ultimate threat of nuclear annihilation can be averted. The inevitability of nuclear war if the workers fail to take power is the fundamental reason for the urgent necessity of transforming society on socialist lines.
The present strength of the workers internationally, moreover, not only makes it impossible for the imperialists to launch a world war, but gives the working class an overwhelming superiority of social power in the battle to decide the future of society. What is as yet lacking is the mass consciousness of the need for socialism, and the organisation of the exploited classes around a clear programme. Putting „peace“ before socialism could only delay the development of conscious, mass support for socialist aims.
The labour movement in Britain and internationally must explain the necessity of socialism to avoid nuclear war – and point to what could be achieved if, with a world-wide plan of production, the science and technology now squandered on arms were used to eradicate hunger, disease, and the terrible poverty and human misery which exists throughout the world. The living standards of the whole world population could be raised enormously, with a dramatic reduction of the working day and working week. The material well-being of the earth’s people could for the first time be assured, and human culture would flourish as never before.
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