Against Capitalism & War

We enter 2025 with genocide still raging in Gaza, Israel has also attacked Lebanon and with the collapse of the Assad dictatorship took the opportunity to invade and continues to occupy the Syrian side of Mount Hermon. Russia maintains military bases in coastal areas of Syria while US forces remain in the northeast. Turkey has taken advantage of the collapse of the Assad regime to launch renewed attacks against the Syrian Democratic Forces. The Russia-Ukraine war is entering it’s tenth year while Sudan, Myanmar, and Ethiopia continue to be devastated by war. These are just a few of the close to 50 wars being waged across the globe.

The post-cold war dominance of the United States is being challenged, not least by China, while imperialist powers jostle to improve or maintain their position in the global capitalist system. How can we oppose growing capitalist warfare? Nationalism nor defence of the powerful and wealthy of ‘our’ own countries are no solution. Nationalism is the basis for mobilisation of working-class people in every capitalist war and every capitalist war demands we are pitted against each other to kill and be killed, maimed, sacrificed for the interests of the wealthy.

In assessing how we can best oppose capitalist warfare across the globe we have to acknowledge that capitalist ‘peace’, which has left the working class arguably weaker than at anytime since the end of the second world war, means that we are not starting from an ideal situation. We support the deserters and refugees fleeing war across the globe and reject the turning of local nationalist sentiment against them. We applaud those who have used sabotage against the military industrial machine and those who have refused to serve. This is not enough. Faced with the prospect of global conflict on an unprecedented scale demands revolutionary class organisation on an unprecedented scale - and yet the revolutionary working class is ill prepared for the challenge.

We need to be clear - in this capitalist world system with its rapacious drive towards war we need to generalise our opposition to imperialism and militarism. There are no ‘just capitalist wars’ - we need to build a generalised anti-war movement that is actually opposed to war! Anything less keeps us on a path towards destruction in the pursuit of profit for a handful who imagine themselves our masters. The struggle against war and militarism must go hand in hand with renewal of revolutionary working class self organisation. The better organised we are the more we can utilise the power that we have to end each and every war on this planet.

War is hardwired into the capitalist system. It is a means of redistributing the world’s resources, of physically carving up resources among the ‘victors’ - and let us also be clear, no matter who wins the working class are never victors. We always lose. In times of economic instability and flux, states resort to intensified warfare. Military solutions become the preferred option for consolidating, defending or extending the power and wealth of the already wealthy and powerful.

In 1922 (granted, the anarcho-syndicalist movement organised a greater number of our class), the International Workers’ Association included the following section on War and Militarism in its founding declaration. It provides food for thought for those still seriously seeking to oppose militarism and war over 100 years later:

War and Militarism
Militarism is the system of monopolistic State violence for the purpose of defence and expansion of the national theatre of exploitation (defensive war or war of aggression), for bringing fresh theatres of exploitation under control (colonial war) and for coming down hard on the rebellious popular masses (strikes, unrest, rioting).

In every instance, the object is to preserve and increase the profits of the ruling classes, to wit, the proletariat’s enemy class.

Militarism is the last and the mightiest resort at the bourgeoisie’s disposal in keeping the working class under the thumb and snuffing out its struggles for freedom.

Everywhere that a new militarism has been moulded in national or liberation struggles (Russia, China), it has always rebounded against the workers themselves, because, by its very nature, it is an instrument for repressing the masses for the benefit of a privileged class and needs must oppose all freedom.

So it is the primordial task of the working class not just to combat the capitalist materialism of the present but also to do away with militarism as such. The best means of combating militarism will be those that best suit the anti-militarist mentality.

Above all, the point is to break up the mind-set of militarism, discipline and submissiveness by means of active propaganda, educating soldiers and undermining the foundations of armies so that they lose their efficacy against the workers. Volunteer armies, White armies, fascist armies, etc., should be the subjects of boycott even in peace time.

Since the bulk of the military is made up of workers and since the technology of modern warfare in its present state, is wholly dependent upon war industries, the workers have it in their power to bring all militaristic activity to a halt by refusing to serve, strikes, sabotage and boycott, even should that military action be undertaken by White troops.

The best way of laying the groundwork in the here and now for such mass action is the individual refusal to serve and for the organised proletariat to refuse to manufacture weaponry.

Above all else, the object is to thwart the outbreak of a new war and, to this end, banish the main causes of war and militarism by means of effecting an economic transformation of our current social order (social revolution).

Congress therefore calls upon all IWA affiliated organisations:

1. To spread, by practical means and with immediate effect, the refusal to manufacture war materials.

2. To persuade the workers in arms plants or in firms likely to be turned into such, that the working class has a duty to answer the threat of war with the threat of strike, to seize war materials and all other materials that might be used to manufacture same; and to render the factories useless to capitalism.

3. Affiliated organisations must, wherever they can, set up General Strike
Committees, whose task it will be to look into ways and means of seizing the factories, holding them and, in the event of their being in danger of recapture by the capitalists, destroying them. They must also look into ways and means of seizing the nerve centres of national organisation; rail centres and rail lines, mines, power stations, posts and telegraphs, water distribution points, health services and pharmaceutical products; they must take hostages from among the bourgeoisie, politicians, clergy and bankers.

In short, they must work flat-out to turn the insurrectionist general strike into successful revolution.