China’s nuclear test on 8 June sparked off a wave of protest. Greenpeace sent one of its ships to Shanghai. Demonstrators gathered outside Chinese embassies in Asia and Europe. Socialists are opposed to all weapon tests of any kind by any government but we know that governments don’t take any notice of protests.
They can't allow themselves to as under capitalism, where all states compete against each other for profits and spheres of influences, might is right. All capitalist states (and China is a capitalist state) must seek to arm themselves with the most effective weapons they can afford, including weapons of mass destruction like nuclear bombs.
The test ban treaty, which China says it will sign when its current series of tests is over is just a cynical move by the nuclear powers to maintain their monopoly of this particular weapon of mass destruction. Possessing nuclear weapons gives them an advantage which they don’t want any more of their rivals to possess. They won’t give up their nuclear bombs and missiles but they want to stop other states developing them. There will never be nuclear disarmament under capitalism so the threat of a nuclear war will exist as long as capitalism does.
Socialism is opposed to war and to what war represents. At the same time it is the only solution to the conditions that breed war. It is a new form of society in which the people of the world will work harmoniously together for their mutual benefit, for there will be no privilege, property or profit to cause enmity. No coercion will be needed because each part of the world will gain from co-operating harmoniously with the rest. With the establishment of socialism, i.e. a worldwide system without frontiers where the means of production and distribution are held in common and things are produced solely in order to meet human needs, war will disappear and humanity will have taken the first step out of the jungle.
Some anti-nuclear protesters, while agreeing that capitalism is the cause of war in the modern world, maintain that although a new social organisation may be necessary, a nuclear war would prevent the establishment of this, perhaps for all time, and therefore the anti-nuclear movement should be given priority over socialism.
This argument is logically unsound. It assumes that which has yet to be demonstrated. It pre-supposes that such a campaign will be able to prevent a nuclear war occurring. But for it to “succeed” it would have to have a majority of people who were opposed unconditionally to nuclear weapons, in the major countries of the world. These majorities would have to be prepared to oppose their own ruling classes, to put aside all, nationalistic feeling and be immune from all attempts of their rulers to influence them during periods of international crisis and tension.
Is it possible that such internationalist solidarity could be achieved by a movement which would be composed of so many fundamentally diverse elements and which lacked any clear conception of an alternative to our inhuman social system, No, only a revolutionary socialist consciousness could ensure such a united unshakeable attitude and in that event the question of opposition to nuclear weapons alone would be redundant.
Our view is that there is no way out of the contemporary dilemma other than by the building of a new kind of society. Socialists re-affirm the supreme relevance of Marx's classic exhortation—Workers of All Countries—Unite!
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