The War to End All Wars turns 100

Scan page 12

The 100th anniversary of the great imperialist slaugh­ ter known as World War I takes place this year. With 37 million casualties, over 16 million dead, and 20 million wounded, it was one of the bloodiest chapters of history.

In the coming months the bourgeois press and his­ torians will write about the causes and will give all the answers except the correct one, which is that the war was the logical outcome of capitalism’s relentless pursuit of profit, regardless of the consequences. The more honest bourgeois historians might say that na­ tionalism, imperialism, and militarism caused the war, but these are merely effects of capitalism’s drive to “accumulate, accumulate, accumulate.” War has prov­ en an excellent tool in the endless quest to accumulate.

Prior to World War I, bourgeois apologists were pointing to the 100 years of relative “peace” that the rise of capitalism had brought—the last major Euro­ pean war had been the Napoleonic war, approximate­ ly 100 years earlier. But peace “at home” was bought with blood in the colonies and the mass murder of in­ digenous peoples throughout North America.

Capitalism was promising that everyone’s living standards would gradually rise without the ugly business of revolutions. Even many Marxist parties, including the largest—the Social Democratic Party (SPD) of Germany—accepted this gradualist approach and reserved talk of workers’ control and a socialist economy for speeches at May Day parades and politi­ cal rallies.

But beneath the surface, the internal contradictions inherent in capitalism continued to play out. What Marxists call “the crisis of overproduction” left many countries worried about opening new markets abroad because their own markets were saturated—hence the need to expand through imperialism and carve up the world into colonies. Germany got a late start and was busy scrambling for a foothold in Africa. There were diplomatic incidents in Morocco, adding to the tensions in Europe.

Competition with other colonial powers requires a military, support for which is won by fanning the flames of nationalism, which can get out of hand. Ger­ many was building up its navy, to rival Great Britain on the high seas.

And Tsarist Russia had its eyes on the Balkans and the rotting Ottoman Empire, specifically Turkey.

Prior to World War I, a massive arms race took place, and all the European countries were armed to the teeth—there was no “peace through strength.” At the same time, socialist parties were gaining steam, and labor unrest was growing. One British officer summed up the situation: “A good big war just now might do a lot of good in killing Socialist nonsense and would probably put a stop to all this labor unrest.”

War has served capitalism well. The capitalists use militarism, national patriotism, and imperialism to distract people from the core exploitation that is the capitalist system. War takes peoples’ minds off the ex­ ploitation of the bosses and class conflict and focuses them instead on hating some “other”—the citizens of another capitalist state. The last phrase in the Com­ munist Manifesto begins “workers of the world unite.” It is not “workers of the world, first help your capital­ ists slaughter other workers and then unite.” The SPD in Germany discarded this most basic tenet of Marx­ ism—internationalism. The working class must not fight the working class of other countries but the rul­ ing class of their own country.

V.I. Lenin and Leon Trotsky saw through the capitalist smokescreen and opposed the war throughout. When a comrade said to Lenin, “war is terrible” he replied, “Yes, it is terrible, terribly profitable.” The Bolshevik slogan “land, bread, and peace” and their continuous opposition to the war helped propel them to power.

But when a movement like the Bolsheviks in Rus­ sia rises up and questions the irrational nature of the capitalist war-making system, the capitalists will do everything in their power to quash or deform it. The capitalists will never forgive the Bolsheviks for pub­ lishing their secret treaties, pointing out the undemo­ cratic nature of their governments and the stupidity of the slaughter that was occurring in World War I.

Despite the Bolsheviks’ offering very favorable treaty terms to the capitalist nations, their governments in­ sisted on trying to crush the Bolshevik revolution with an invasion force from at least 14 countries, material and financial support for the White armies, and block­ (Right) Two wounded British soldiers walk arm in arm with a wounded German soldier to a hospital.

(Left) U.S. recruiting poster during World War I.

ades and sabotage of the devastated Russian economy.

In our time as well, capitalist governments, media, and bourgeois intellectuals continue to disparage and dismiss the Russian Revolution and communist ideals as if the inevitable outcome must be brutal dictator­ ship. If they were being honest, they would observe the more intimate and direct connections between capitalism, militarism, and war.

Capitalist dogma likewise lauds the maximization of private profits. Bourgeois economists repeatedly state, without any proof, that capitalism is the most rational and effective system for distributing “scarce” resourc­ es. If we assume (as economists love to do) that the system is wonderful and that war is terrible, defend­ ers of capitalism are left with the unenviable task of explaining all the capitalist wars. They tie themselves in knots blaming such elements as human nature, mis­ understandings, miscommunication, or the assassina­ tion of some worthless monarch.

The paradox that cannot be resolved is that capital­ ism requires an entire society to accept as its goal the maximization of profit by a few powerful individuals. While this outcome might make sense for the power­ ful individuals, it is illogical for society as a whole. Mil­ itarism and war become the method for solving this contradiction.

Capitalists do not want to pay the price for research and development; they only want the profits that re­ sult. Through the military budget (the U.S. spent $518 billion on the Pentagon in 2013), these costs are so­ cialized. This massive distortion of spending priorities away from what “rational” people would collectively choose—tackling the climate crisis, producing clean energy, health care for all, education for all, eradicat­ ing poverty—cannot be accomplished in the presence of true democracy. Therefore, we have fake democracy and a population made irrational with fear of some mysterious other rather than the true enemy. The in­ evitable outcome is perpetual war.

History never repeats itself exactly, but the world today looks much like it did prior to World War I. Chi­ na, the United States, and Europe are carving up Af­ rica—AGAIN. The United States is scrambling to build (continued on page 9, in “What the U.S. gained in World War I”)

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12 SOCIALIST ACTION FEBRUARY 2014 War has proven an excellent tool in capitalism’s endless quest to ‘accumulate.’