World Socialism or World Violence? (1976)

From the March 1976 issue of the Socialist Standard

A little over a year ago the television programme A Man Called Ironside, presented an episode entitled “The Armageddon Gang”, which depicted a mad scientist who came within seconds of firing H-bomb rockets and starting World War III. This was presented as entertainment and it was accepted as such. The conditioning that has taken place to make the prospect of total world annihilation acceptable, is surely the ultimate obscenity. There was no outcry from the Longford-Whitehouse camp. This scientist was “mad”. The capitalist system which produces H-bomb stockpiles, is “normal”.

A few days later a TV documentary on mugging was shown. This centred on Brixton in South London. They interviewed a police chief, Commander Marshall, who made the point that the police can never solve the problem alone; society as a whole has to realize it is a part of wider issues, housing, education and employment. This aspect of violence is still very much in the news, being endlessly debated, like other social problems, but with no end in sight.

In Brixton, some 79 per cent. of mugging is said to be carried out by black people; mainly youths. If you are black, live in a slum, failed by the “education” system and unemployed, you may become a mugger. If you are white and in similar circumstances you too may turn to mugging or other forms of crime. To say this is a product of poverty, is to say it is a product of capitalism. Because of its property relationships, capitalism has always failed to integrate human beings with society. The profit motive is a completely dehumanized driving force.

Some young black people who had been involved in mugging were interviewed during the programme. They said their motive was to get money, to buy clothes and to be like other people. They were asked if they felt anything for their victims and replied in the negative. Again, the hostility between the individual and society is socially generated. People are not naturally anti-social, as the police chief said; you have to look at housing, education and employment. You have to look at the system.

Capitalism sets no higher standard. It is a violent society preaching a phoney morality. While its pundits talk of “law and order” out of one side of their mouths, out of the other they urge young people to train as professional killers. Every newspaper carries recruitment advertisements for the army, navy or air-force which invite young people to learn a trade— and become professionals in the sophisticated refinements of modern mass-murder and destruction.

A generation has grown up knowing nothing but wars. Since the end of the second “war to end war” in 1945, there has been an endless succession of wars all over the world. Some of these wars may be in distant places but, with modern means of communication, they invade every living room and are part of the violent environment. The war in Korea slaughtered more than a million people. The war in Vietnam, which raged for nearly thirty years, was started by a Labour government, and a Labour government carried on conscription in so-called peace time.

Throughout its existence the Socialist Party of Great Britain has maintained the position re-stated in the 1950 edition of our pamphlet The Socialist Party and War:

  War can solve no working-class problem. It cuts across the fundamental identity of interest of the workers of the world, setting sections of this class at enmity with each other in the interest of sections of the capitalists. It elevates force into the position of arbiter in place of the common human desire for mutual peace and happiness. Its effect is wholly evil. It depraves all the participants by forcing them to concentrate upon the best methods of producing misery and annihilating each other. It elevates lying, cheating, disabling and murdering opponents into virtues, confers distinctions upon those who practise these means most successfully, and inaugurates training courses on a vast scale to produce efficiency. Young men and women, in their most impressionable years, have the vile methods of warfare impressed upon them so thoroughly that they lose a balanced outlook on life and are impregnated with the idea that force, with all its baseness, and not reason, is the final solution in all problems. Many of those who have been subjected to the atmosphere of war remain addicted to violence when war has come to a temporary end.

Around the world selling armaments is big business. America, Russia, China, France, Czechoslovakia and Britain are selling massive quantities of arms and military equipment. The morality of capitalism never gets in the way of profits or commercial, strategic and vested interests. When the icy fact is understood that these major capitalist powers have the means to wipe out all life on earth, the mugger becomes small beer in comparison. But then muggers are illegal and lack the “dignity and bearing” of statesmen.

Practically all organized violence is aimed at gain. The possession or retention of wealth, money, resources or territory. Violence therefore derives overwhelmingly from the class-property basis of existing society.Violence used in power-struggles for so-called national independence comes in this category. It means the replacement of one gang of thieves by another. Violence is the final sanction of all ruling classes. The modern state-machine is a virtual monopoly of violence. As much as violence maims or murders those on whom it is practised, it brutalizes and degrades those who advocate and practise it, whether society labels them as muggers or soldiers, terrorists or politicians.

It is important to realize that violence is not an exceptional thing practised by an anti-social few. It is accepted and frequently applauded by the vast majority of “ordinary” people. They accept the spurious justifications of the Stalins, Wilsons, Nixons, Heaths, Fords and Brezhnevs. “We” need H-bombs and militarism, because “they” have them.

Those organizations such as IS, WRP, IMG, the anarchists and the CP, which see the class struggle in terms of barricades, street fighting, confrontations and smashing the state, are all anti-Socialist and anti- working-class. Political power gained by desperate minorities through armed insurrection can only lead to state capitalism and dictatorship and reflect working-class unreadiness for Socialism. In condemning all this as Socialists always have, we also condemn the bombings, brutality and blood-letting of the self-styled guerillas, whether they be for Black Power, Palestine Liberation or the IRA. All such movements whether racists, nationalist or religious, are anti-working class. They all help to sustain an atmosphere of hatred and foster the notion that violence is a rational arbiter in settling disputes and influencing attitudes. The SPGB and its Companion Parties reject this. We reject the standards of capitalism. We promote UNDERSTANDING as the mainspring of social change.

All other political parties have a prior commitment to violence as part of the power-structure of the system they ALL seek to run. Every party seeking power to maintain capitalism (in whatever guise) has to build and preserve the coercive state apparatus. The SPGB and our Companion Parties have no prior commitment to violence. Neither do we have any record of support for war. Our commitment is to Socialist understanding and to the democratic process of majority decision.

In order to strip the capitalist class of their ownership of the means of production and distribution, and to usher in common ownership, a world-wide majority of the working class with Socialist ideas will use the vote to gain control of the state machine This will take the armed forces and police out of the hands of the political agents of capitalism, and so remove the coercive threat to the triumph of the politically-conscious working class. There is no way to gain possession of the means of production for the whole of society, without first capturing political power. Just as the armed forces and police function to protect private property institutions whilst the state is in the hands of the capitalists, so the capitalists are powerless to preserve their ownership once the state is taken from them.

Any violent minority seeking to get back to capitalism, will be seen to be acting against the will of the great majority and can only further isolate themselves. They could not reverse the irreversible process of history which has led to the decision to change society.

Socialism will end the long and terrible history of violence. Having been established democratically it will continue to be run democratically. When there are no longer any classes of owners and non-owners, there will be a common interest in the happiness and welfare of everybody. Humanity will have come of age.

Harry Baldwin