WAR! WHAT IS IT GOOD FOR?
War is good for forging national unity. War helps to both create new nation
states and submerge class and other conflicts in an existing nation-state.
Nationalism always tries to make the dispossessed and exploited, who make
up most of the population, identify with their exploiters and so perpetuates
this inhuman society. War is good for national liberation rackets, which
can use a war situation as a way of bargaining with world powers in conflict
with the local ruling powers and each other. War is good for polarising
arbitrary groups of human beings into enemy camps, which allows various
gangs of rulers to exploit them more effectively. War is thus a boon for
nationalist, islamist, democratic, fascist, "communist" governments
and would-be governments.
War is good for mopping up the surplus population. In the last war against
Iraq only a handful of US and British troops were killed but up to 200,000
Iraqi soldiers were massacred. Many of these were Kurds or other people
the regime wanted to punish. They were press-ganged and put in the front
line. Both the Iraqi regime and the Allies collude in the wholesale slaughter
of hundreds of thousands of people surplus to the economies' requirements.
As the development of the world economy and technology throws more people
into permanent or semi-permanent unemployment war provides a useful way
of managing these impoverished masses.
War is good for generating fear. Like the periodic moral panics over refugees,
gypsies, child abuse, the war on drugs, and the reporting of violent crime,
war is a way of terrorising the general population. War is good for turning
our fears into racism, further repression and surveillance. War is good
for making us feel happy with our lot and accepting more sacrifices. War
is good for suppressing class struggles such as the firefighters' strike.
War is good for generating fatalism. Faced with the apparent 'inevitability'
of warfare people adopt the view that nothing can be done and despair of
the possibility of collective struggle. This reinforces the fatalism towards
starvation and suffering and the fatalism about the need to work and the
inevitability of the economy. War is good for religion. Religion is a way
of reinforcing national identities. War is good for god - religious rackets
always profit from war. War is good for charities and NGOs, who promote
capitalist development in the name of feeding the starving.
War is good for particular sectors of the economy, such as arms production
and the media. War is good for the economy in general. Investment in armaments
and other war preparations are often undertaken as a policy of stimulating
demand, as in the US now. And it modernises and restructures sectors of
the economy as obsolete plant and infrastructure is blown to bits and reconstructed
on a more profitable basis. And it creates war refugees who'll work for
almost nothing. And it enables social spending to be cut without anyone
complaining too much. And we could go on ...
War is good for justifying peace. In peace time millions of people are killed
and maimed each year in industrial "accidents" and journeys to
work. Even without these deaths and injuries capitalist society is the denial
of the possibility of a social humanity. Capital is the shattering of the
world into nations, classes, and individuals to aid a self-expanding exploitation,
mutating human creativity into waged-work. What we need is a community of
struggle (such as when workers take collective action e.g. a strike) and
a struggle for world human community. A revolution centred on the proletariat,
for a classless society beyond economy. For a truly human life, for a life
worth living.
To contact us, e-mail: nowar_buttheclasswar@yahoo.co.uk <mailto:nowar_buttheclasswar@yahoo.co.uk>
or write to: NWBTCW, c/o BM Cat, London, WC1N 3XX.