These are dangerous times. The post-war boom ended half a century ago. With it went capitalism’s last promise of a relatively better life. In the 1970s and ‘80s workers resisted the first attempts to make us pay for the crisis.⁽¹⁾ Yet despite the militancy, this only provoked industrial shutdowns in capitalism’s heartlands. Mass unemployment followed and working class communities were destroyed as jobs went to China and other low labour cost places.

So began the decline in living standards where wages as a share of GDP have dropped continually since 1979. But this did not solve the capitalists’ problems.

Their next dodge was deregulation, especially of finance. Banks created “new financial instruments” to disguise speculative dodgy loans. This all came crashing down in 2007-8. States bailed out banks “too big to fail”. We got “austerity” while tech billionaires and big finance blossomed on the back of cuts for everyone else. The 2020 pandemic only underlined the growing inequity of the system. Whilst two thirds of the world’s population sank into deeper poverty, the five richest men in the world doubled their wealth. Now the top 1% of the world’s population own more than 95% of all the wealth. Warren Buffet, one of the super-rich, summed it up two decades ago: “there is a class war and my class is winning it”.

Imperialist War

But if capitalist peace is increasingly unbearable, the war in Ukraine and the mass murder in Gaza and Lebanon (not to mention the other “forgotten” conflicts around the world), show where the crisis of a decaying capitalism is taking the world. Over 125 years of imperialist rivalry have already brought us two world and countless proxy wars. They are not fought by armies alone. They demand massive destruction of the enemy’s economic infrastructure and their populations. Today it is no secret that the US world order, established in 1945 and based on the domination of the dollar, is being challenged, not least by the rise of China. The one thing Democrats and Republicans do agree on is “the China threat”. Biden’s rhetoric during the Ukraine war has been against China as well as Russia, and everyone knows that Trump will step up the tariff war against “the strategic enemy” in January. History tells us trade wars end in “shooting wars”. A war between the US and China would have dire consequences for us all.

Not quite yet. War in Ukraine has shown that weapons and supply lines have to be honed. But the war climate already exists. Decades of capitalist stagnation would, you might assume, turn most people against the system. But it’s much easier to blame falling living standards and shit jobs on something, or rather someone, more concrete.

And who better than migrants? For racists and nationalists they are “the other” to be demonised. As life becomes more difficult “they” become “the problem”. Attacking the foreigner morphs into defending “our country”. Nationalist ideology is growing everywhere, as can be seen with Brexit and the racist riots after the Southport stabbings,⁽²⁾ to the rise of the xenophobic far right conspiracy theorists across Europe, America, India and beyond.

“National identity” is a necessary part of war preparations. When our rulers ask us to fight for “the country” they are talking about fighting to defend their capital and their property. But workers have no capital and, as Marx noted, have no country to defend. Of course the propaganda media plays on our ties with friends and family and where we happen to be born, but capitalist wars are not about that – they are about defending what the capitalists own. Flag waving, military commemorations, disparaging of ‘misfits’ always accompany mobilisation for their wars.

So How Can Imperialist War be Stopped?

Not through pious calls for peace nor by individual actions. We applaud the hundreds of thousands who have deserted the war in Ukraine and Russia but that does not end it. We applaud those who try to sabotage the war machine. These are exemplary actions but are unlikely to stop war. The working class — the only class which is united globally by its common experience of capitalist exploitation — is capable of putting an end to the system but only if it wakes up to the power it has. A class conscious mass movement like the one which ended the First World War in Russia, Germany, Austria, and Bulgaria can not only end war but also the capitalist system that spawns wars.

Today, after decades of class retreat we are not starting from a great place. However, start we must. We do not know how long we have, but we must use the time to prepare a response. Thousands of workers already understand that the system is failing – capitalism’s peace fails them every day. Internationalists everywhere have to reach out to them to give a lead in building a movement capable of achieving enough critical mass to reach every section of the working class in all lands.

We can only do this by drawing together all those who can see the need for a world without states, without borders and where the satisfaction of every human’s basic needs replaces the drive for profit. Here we need to focus on what unites us rather than what divides us. This is why we have relaunched the No War but the Class War (NWBCW) committees to work with others from different political traditions across the world. It is still in its infancy but is open to the ideas of others (as we stated in our address to the participants of the Prague Action Week).⁽³⁾ NWBCW’s basic positions have recently been taken up by internationalists in Sweden (see the statement below). We have a world to save as well as win.

The above article is taken from the current edition (No. 69) of Aurora, bulletin of the Communist Workers’ Organisation.

Notes:

(1) See e.g. our recent article Blast From the Past: Revolutionary Perspectives on Strikes in Scotland

(2) UK Riots: Racist Right in the Service of Capitalism

(3) To the Internationalists Attending the Prague Week of Action

No War but the Class War: A Statement from Sweden

Capitalism today is a global imperialist system and war is a means of redistributing the world and its resources among the major powers. In times of economic crisis, when competition between capitalist states intensifies, military solutions become the preferred method for this. Today, around fifty armed conflicts rage around the world.

50 years after the end of the post-war economic boom, the ruling class is now running out of options and capitalism must consider all possibilities to try to increase profitability and ensure profit - and thus the survival of the system. It is from this perspective that we should look at the formation of ‘alliances of convenience’, behind which the larger conflict between the US and China over world domination is playing out.

No national project can escape this framework. As Rosa Luxemburg already put it: ‘The small nations, whose ruling classes are complicit appendages of their counterparts in the big states, are merely pawns in the imperialist game of the great powers and are used, like their working masses, as tools to be sacrificed to capitalist interests after the war.’ Thus all talk of national liberation, of the right of nations to self-determination, now becomes a historical contradiction. Revolutionary defeatism, by which we mean opposing imperialist war with class war, is as relevant today as it was a century ago.

The war in Ukraine, and subsequently in Gaza, has put the question of a revolutionary response to war on the agenda. For us, the answer is crystal clear: proletarian internationalism, revolutionary defeatism, no war but the class war!

The No War but the Class War (NWBCW) initiative aims to encourage the formation of local committees of genuine internationalists from different political tendencies and groupings. The hope is to create an example of how we can relate constructively both to each other and to the working class at large. We have proposed the following five principles as a basis for joint activity:

• Against capitalism, imperialism and all forms of nationalism. No support for any national capitals, ‘lesser evils’ or new states in formation.
• For a society where the state, wage labour, private property, money and production for profit are replaced by a world of freely associated producers.
• Against the economic and political attacks to which the present and future war will expose the working class.
• For the independent struggle of the working class, for the formation of independent strike committees, general meetings and workers' councils.
• Against oppression and exploitation, for working class unity and the coming together of genuine internationalists.

The first committee was formed in Liverpool (UK) in 2022 and since then groups in Italy, USA, South Korea and others have followed. These committees have sought to bring the internationalist message to protests and picket lines wherever the working class takes up the struggle. Do not hesitate to contact us if you agree and find it interesting!