Introduction
The outbreak of hostilities between the United States and Isreal against Iran calls for an explanation. While liberal commentators often frame the conflict as a “moral crusade” for “human rights” or “nuclear non-proliferation,” the socialist critique offers a more considered analysis of a global system driven by competition and making profit.
Central to this perspective is the belief that the war is not an isolated diplomatic failure, but a functional necessity of the global capitalist system. Like all wars in capitalism, it is a result of a conflict between nation states over trade routes, markets, resources like oil and gas, strategic spheres of influence, trade routes and containing rival capitalist states.
First a question which should be asked by workers. Why do wars happen given that everyone you ask says that they are against war, that wars only cause destruction and distress and never solve any problems? It is quite a paradox. Politicians all declare they detest war; Governments spend a small fortune on diplomacy in attempts to prevent wars. World institutions, like the United Nations, are funded at vast expense in order to prevent wars happening.
Wars, like the one in Iran, are extremely destructive. They cause terrible waste -waste of human lives, waste of economic resources, destruction of whole cities. There are long-term consequences to: survivors who are disabled or scarred mentally and emotionally by the trauma of explosions, collapsing buildings and the dead and the injured buried under rubble. Huge numbers are displaced as refugees seeking safety in camps, their futures shattered.
So, the question is: who could possibly benefit from war? Or put another way, in whose interests are wars fought? To answer that we need to show how the capitalist system operates. It is the socialist contention that modern wars are fought because of the rivalries between various sections of the capitalist class. War being the last resort to resolve these rivalries.
Capitalism is a system where competition is the rule. At one level, there is commercial competition between companies. At another level, the capitalists of one country are in competition with the capitalists of other countries. Countries compete at every turn: to gain control of key raw materials or mineral resources, to economise on transport and distribution costs, and to organise production so as to produce their commodities as cheaply as possible. They spend a lot on advertising and marketing to ensure that customers will choose their products or services as against those of their competitors.
At times commercial competition heats up, boiling over into armed conflict war. To find out in whose interest wars are fought you need to know what they are about, what they are really fought over, not what the politicians say they are about.
The socialist position is that every country, the whole world, is divided into two classes with opposing interests. There is the vast majority who own little except their ability to work for a wage or salary, and there is the small, but powerful, minority: those who own and control the land, factories, mines, oil wells, transport and communication systems and distribution points along with the commodities produced. So, when wars break out, over raw materials, trade routes, or markets, it is obvious that they are being fought in the interests of some section of the capitalist class, not in the interests of the working class. Wars are fought over the employers’ interests, not the workers. Workers do not have a country to defend or fight over.
War propaganda is used to distract the working class from recognising their class interests. In wartime, workers are bombarded with hyped-up propaganda about the so-called ‘national interest’ and the ideology of nationalism. Workers are urged to see the workers of other countries as the enemy, whereas their real enemy is the worldwide capitalist class.
In short, socialists oppose war because we object to being forced to kill our fellow-workers in the interests of employers, and also because war propaganda drowns the issue of the class struggle, the worldwide struggle of labour against capital. We oppose Isreal, the United States and the theocratic dictatorship in Iran. Socialists say a plague on all your houses.
Capitalism creates insoluble problems, including war because the capitalist system, through the wages system, is one of exploitation.
Because socialism is in the interests of the world’s working class and capitalism is not, we are confident that the working class will organise itself, worldwide, in a democratic political movement to rid the world of a system which has outlived its usefulness long ago. It is in our interests, and in our power, to build a better world.
When a majority of the working class understand and want socialism, then it can be achieved by them taking conscious political action top elect delegates to Parliament (and its equivalent in other countries) to capture political power so that the capitalist class may be dispossessed.
This capture of the machinery of government will ensure control over the armed forces of the nation and so prevent them being used against the socialist majority. From then on class society’s coercive state will be transformed from “an instrument of oppression” into the “agent of emancipation”, the midwife assisting at the birth of socialism.
The choice you have is between capitalism and socialism – between competition and war, on the one hand, and co-operation and peace, on the other. Capitalism has no solution to the problem of war. Only socialism -world socialism -is the answer.
