To End Their War

On Marxism, War & Pacifism

Morning Comrades.

A few years ago I wrote a piece on here entitled Endgame that asked more questions than it provided answers, and it sadly, needs to be revisited again, as the last few days feel increasing threatening. It might well be a generational aspect, but for anyone my age that grew up during the Cold War, the ever present threat of war and specifically, nuclear war was a dominating theme in every day life. Whether or not the threat was real is a questions for historians, especially in regards to the 1970s and 1980s but I still had nuclear war drills in school. Granted, I grew up on the biggest NATO base in Northern Europe, about 70miles away from the Iron Curtain, with an insane amount of nuclear tipped long range having been stationed there and thus, logic demand that our “home” was a clear target for the then existing Soviet Union. This does not, however, change the fact that the threat of war was palatable and much of what we consider “left wing activism” started from an anti-war and anti-nuclear point of view. Growing up, the idea of war was the biggest point of resistance for many of us starting in this “movement”, and for clarity I dislike using these worn out terms for whatever the hell it was we were doing.

In light of the fact, as mentioned on Monday, that Biden and thus NATO, has authorised the use of long range missiles to use against and inside Russia, Putin has announced an official change in their nuclear policy, as Reuters reports:

“Russian President Vladimir Putin issued a warning to the United States on Tuesday, lowering the threshold for a nuclear strike just days after the administration of Joe Biden reportedly allowed Ukraine to fire American missiles deep into Russia.

The updated doctrine, formally known as “The basics of state policy in the field of nuclear deterrence”, outlines the threats that would make Russia, the world’s biggest nuclear power, contemplate using such weapons. Russia would consider a nuclear strike if it, or its ally Belarus, faced aggression “with the use of conventional weapons that created a critical threat to their sovereignty and (or) their territorial integrity”, the new doctrine said.

The previous doctrine, set out in a 2020 decree, said Russia may use nuclear weapons in case of a nuclear attack by an enemy or a conventional attack that threatened the existence of the state.”

I realise that many of us have gotten to a stage where politics and political statements have become meaningless and yet I cannot shake the dread that I thought was over and done with.

To be absolutely clear from the get go, I genuinely abhor war, have always posited myself deeply within the anti-war idea from both personal and ideological reasons. Nevertheless, without a root cause analysis all these identifiers become and are useless, irrelevant even, as they are deeply entrenched in identity chauvinism unless they can and are backed up by the above as well as material praxis.

As far as I can remember the countries that I have lived in, even be their “citizen” for what it is worth, have been at war, a solid 46 years at this point. War has been and is omnipresent and yet since time immemorial it has been decried as the worst reality humanity can experience, and rightly so, it truly is beyond imaginable horrors. Our bourgeoise indoctrination has us believing that war is the collapse of humanity, a noble cause of defence and all the other bullshit that moralises working class poor to go into a meat grinder for the capitalist class. Most aptly, I recall the military theorist Carl von Clausewitz when he said: “war is the continuation of politics by other means”. I posit to go even further and say that war is the continuation of capitalism by other means, as capitalism posits on class war, the exploitation by any means necessary to increase profits. In addition to the horrors and suffering that are the results of war, this understanding war as the continuation of capitalism by other means is what has always and will always pit me against it and the root cause that brings about these horrors.

With the failures of the anti-war movement in our generations I wanted to get into it a little deeper here, first with a root cause analysis of what we are looking at and the ideally on Friday on the surface level contradictions of pacifism and class war. Additionally, to be utterly clear, one of the primary end goals of our revolution is the end all wars, the end the conceptual need for it, so let’s get into it.