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From Labor Action, Vol. 14 No. 18, 1 May 1950, p. 5.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the ETOL.
We live in the epoch of the COLD WAR, that is to say, in that period in the decline of world society in which the preparations for war have become a permanent and major determinant of the domestic and foreign policy of every nation of any consequence.
It is a period unique in the history of mankind, for it can be terminated, science assures us, by the extinction of all human life. What the wrath of God was seemingly not provoked to do throughout the centuries, the wrath of men can now easily achieve.
Nobody wants the war.
Everybody expects it.
How is it that we all find ourselves participants of one sort or another in such a living nightmare?
We are witness of the decline of a great system. It began in small Italian seaport towns in the fifteenth century and reached its full amplitude in the nineteenth and its name was capitalism.
Already in the nineteenth century, however, Marx and Engels, two of the most brilliant men of a brilliant century, were able to indicate the internal contradictions which were to arrest and reverse the orderly development of the historically fated system.
World War I was the first great manifestation of the social exhaustion of capitalism. The major capitalist countries, having divided up the entire globe into spheres of exploitation, and unable to develop their internal market because of the dependence of continuing production upon profits, fell upon each other. Armaments production and the rehabilitation of world economy following World War I gave capitalism a temporary respite.
The immanent contradictions of world capitalism having remained unresolved, however, the stage was once more set for a new conflict. Germany, Italy and Japan, latecomers in the international market – Germany a defeated power and Italy and Japan nominal victors in World War I – found them-.sclves in a loose alliance. Opposed to them were the major elements of the 1914 coalition – England, France and the United States. Once again the world was ravaged by a war of unprecedented destruction and bestiality.
In both World War I and World War II Marxists gave no political support to either side. Why?
Marxists locate the origin of war in the existence of the BASIC DRIVES of capitalism. Only world socialism, which will destroy the economic and political roots of war, can make of war a historical curiosity. It is not a question of a peace-loving capitalism pitted against an aggressive one. Today’s sated peace-loving capitalism is yesterday’s hungry, aggressive one digesting its spoils. World War I and World War II were therefore not the product of an aggressive German imperialism. These wars were fought to decide who was to have the right to exploit the colonial areas and the small nations of the globe.
The seizure of German territory following both World War I and World War II sufficiently exposed the real, and very material, issues at stake. German aims were not a whit superior, as Hitler demonstrated during his consolidation of Europe in 1940–42.
It was not, therefore, simply a question of a struggle of democracy against Prussian militarism in 1914, nor o£’democracy against German fascism in World War II. In 1914 czarist despotism was a partner in the projected reformation of German militarism. In 1941 the most finished totalitarianism the’ world has ever endived. Russia, was cast in the same role.
It was not a question of a twisted Wilhelm or a paranoid Hitler. The SOCIAL forces behind them were plain for all informed persons to see. Over twenty years before World War I Engels had predicted the exact lineups – long before the INDIVIDUAL protagonists had emerged. Hitler himself clearly enough posed the struggle of World War II as system against system long, before war broke out.
Out of World War II, which was to have destroyed the aggressor nations and ensure peace, have emerged two monster aggressive imperialisms, the United States and Russia, both of which are preparing for a gigantic military showdown.
Motivating United States policy in the first instance is the fear for the disappearance of the capitalist market in colonial countries and of the engulfing of West European capitalism by Stalinism. Painful as such an eventuality could be under current domestic conditions, it would have catastrophic repercussions upon the United States economy under conditions of overproduction in the home market. The United States needs not a contracting market but an expanding one.
From this follow all the measures which come under the heading of the COLD War: the economic rehabilitation of Europe through the Marshall Plan, the arming of Western Europe under the provisions of the Atlantic Pact, the ideological campaign conducted via the Voice of America, and the “anti-communist” (and anti-democratic) campaign now being waged by the government against all significantly dissident opinion.
Russia does not need markets upon which she can dispose of surplus products. Rather does she need areas whose industrial production. technically skilled personnel and military facilities can be appropriated for her own use. From this follows her economic coordination of the countries behind the Iron Curtain, the massive military preparations extending from the China coast to Eastern Germany, and the interminable propaganda waged in all countries of the world by the Moscow-controlled Communist Parties.
The Independent Socialist League gives no political support to either of these regimes, for their aims are both reactionary.
A foretaste of what the world might be like were the United States to win is afforded by current policy – that is policy operative at a time when in the interests of the war against Russia the United States has to make CONCESSIONS to peoples and to classes. Germany and Japan, two major powers, do not have the right of self-determinations. They are in all essential respects under the control of the United States, a control exercised through conservative and. even reactionary semi-quisling types.
Classic imperialist powers such as France maintain their colonial empires thanks almost solely to United States money, arms and political support. Even major victor powers such as England exist on sufferance. All Western Europe, in short, lives in the shadow of United States economic and military might. As capitalist powers their star has all but set.
Russia’s current record, thanks to the solicitude of the United States press, is well known. It is a frightful compound of economic exploitation, police rule, national oppression and cultural barbarism.
Each power center is seeking the absorption of the other. This can, in the not-so-long run, result onlf in a war, the probable results, of which will render the question of who will be the victor of something less than decisive importance. For the United States to win such a war (if such a victory is possible at all will mean such ah expenditure of lives, human energy and material wealth as to force the regimentation of United States society far beyond the point envisaged by most people who are presently thinking on the problem.
A victory for the United States would mean the domination of the world by a single capitalist power: that is, the rest of the world would be deduced to economic and, as a corollary, political subjection; The United States would become an aspirant for the role of world’s oppressor – “aspirant” because it is guaranteed in advance that a humanity which strives toward freedom will resist.
Such a victory would mean a stultification of the world’s productive apparatus and, the economic laws of capitalism as exposed by Marx remaining in effect, the world would slowly sink into a new barbarism based upon the highest level of machine technique in which a capitalist elite and their dependents would, with more or less success, rule over a debased majority.
Were Russia to win. much the same conditions would ensue, with the probable exception that the degeneration would begin on a lower level.
Only the introduction of socialism in the United States, in Russia and in the rest of the world can save mankind from the impasse into which it is daily plunging deeper and deeper. The Independent Socialist League still stands committed to the principle of the third camp, which formed the axis of its program ten years ago when our tendency was formally organized six months before Pearl Harbor. Today, as then, we support the cause of the world working class against both Russian and United States imperialism.
To profess support of Russian imperialism, no matter how critically (as does the Socialist Workers Party), not only spreads the illusion that such support somehow, somewhere, sometime facilitates the transition to socialism, but it plays into the hands of the totalitarian Stalinist bureaucrats, who cover their reactionary regime with socialist demagogy, and into the hands of the spokesmen for United States imperialism, who experience no difficulty, even while being scrupulously truthful, in depicting just what the nature of such "socialism" is.
To profess support of democratic United States imperialism against Russian imperialism, as do most liberal-labor leaders and the Socialist Party, is also to aid the reactionary aims of the United States government and to provide the Stalinists the opportunity of offering their demagogic alternative program, especially among the European and Asiatic workers, who see not at all unclearly the real intentions of the United States abroad.
“But” – it may be interposed by those whose thinking has been disoriented by the smallness of the socialist movement and the allenveloping pressure of capitalist propaganda – “would it not be better for United States imperialism, however bad it may be – and it IS bad! – to win? After all, though the government may curb civil liberties it does not dtterly destroy them as do the Stalinists when they take power. And we need a basic minimum of elbow room in order to propagate our doctrine, don’t we?"
The logic of this statement is simple to develop – and is self-destructive. If it is desirable for the United States to win, then it is desirable for it to win as quickly and as cheaply as possible in terms of human lives and material wealth. That means an atomic preventive war as soon as possible. But, unfortunately, modern wars are not won so easily – a long, large-scale land operation would still be necessary. The economic and political necessities of such a war would have a disastrous effect upon socialist formations, since democratic rights could hardly hope to survive in their present form. Further, such a preventive war, with all its attendant horrors, would furnish immense capital to the Stalinists and hopelessly compromise any socialist who bore any part of the blame for it.
The task is to preserve the socialist tradition and to extend its influence. To tie one's fate to United States imperialism is to lose one’s identity – and therefore to lose one’s reason for existence. The basis for the Third Camp position fortunately exists. All of Western Europe chafes uneasily at the prospect of being the battleground for two imperialisms with neither of whose interests they can identify themselves. The time is ripe for a Western Union independent of the two major combatants as the first early step toward a socialist regroupment.
For us the correct position upon the war which threatens can be summed up in two propositions:
At this juncture in the history of our time any other course is illusion.
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