Why has CND failed? (1963)

From the April 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

The way from Aldermaston is now a well trodden road. For some unilateralists, perhaps too well trodden; it is no secret that this year’s march may be the last.

CND have always made the most of the art of clever publicity; possibly this is what they will be remembered for before anything else. They have sat in the roadway, planted seeds on the other side of airfield wire, auctioned the Air Force’s nuclear bombers. This, said CND, was the way to attract support for the case for banning the bomb. Have they failed, or succeeded?

CND has failed. This country is now no nearer to abandoning its nuclear weapons than it was when CND came into existence. The present government, as well as any which is likely to take power in the foreseeable future, is firm on this. That affable, informative fellow the Average Man, when asked if he is in favour of getting rid of nuclear weapons, will reply that of course he is in favour—provided Russia and America and the rest of the world give up theirs as well. That is the answer he would have given before the first Aldermaston march. With him, in other words, we are back at Square One.

Whether they admit to it or not, CND implicity recognise their failure. They have still not tested the effect of their smart publicity at the polls. The few unilateralists who are in, or near to, Parliament are careful to stand first under the banner of one of the big capitalist parties, who are all committed to keep the bomb when they are in power. A pure CND candidate would win very few votes. In fact, the marches and demonstrations have not affected the enduring support which the mass of the British working class give to their masters’ interests. This is what CND have been up against and they have made no headway. But the weapons which they set out to abolish have made headway. They have got bigger and stronger and more terrifying and they can reach ever further across the world.

The Campaign is not the first reformist organisation to come roaring onto the scene, full of enthusiasm and good intentions, only to fail. There have been plenty of others before and they have always failed for the same basic reason. The Aldermaston marchers have been travelling in exactly the wrong direction, have been coming in at the wrong end. Their propaganda has taken no account of the reasons for the existence of nuclear weapons. This has not necessarily been through ignorance of those reasons; perhaps some members of CND know them well enough. But such organisations cannot, by their very nature, concentrate upon the cause of the evils they try to deal with.

Reformists always treat their problems in isolation from the rest of capitalism. Pacifists think of war as a problem on its own; charitable organisations consider poverty to be something like a personal accident. CND regards the Bomb as an evil which can be separated from its surroundings.

But nuclear weapons have not come upon us haphazardly. They are, in fact, another stage in the development of weapons which has followed closely the economic and social growth of society. Ever since primitive man first fumbled with his crude missiles, weapons have been important to men. At first they were productive—they could bring man his food. But the development of class society brought men into conflict over wider issues than the possession of a carcass, and weapons were used in these conflicts. They were also used to suppress the under-classes in society. This was the situation which capitalism found waiting for it and which, like previous systems, it adapted to its interests.

Capitalism separated its workers from weapons in the same way as it separated them from the means of production. Its wealth is made in concentrated factories, from material which has been brought from all over the world. The people who make this wealth do not own the factories, the material nor the finished product; they only work, in fact, when it suits the capitalist to allow them to do so. Similarly, the people who use capitalism's weapons do not own them and are only brought into contact with them, in the Armed Forces, when capitalism’s interests demand that they should be. This social development has taken place at the same time as capitalism has expanded its weapons in the technical sense. Today, the dominant armaments are of such a nature that it is quite impossible for the people who operate them to own them.

The development of capitalism’s weapons has been a natural result of the expansion of its productive powers. It is a drab, familiar story. One of capitalism’s first modern wars—the American Civil War—gave birth to the Gatling gun, a forerunner of the machine guns which, with their pitiless killing, were a dominant weapon in the First World War. That war also saw the beginning of the answer to the machine gun—the tanks lumbering painfully across No Man’s Land. It also saw, more ominously, the first organised air-raids against a civilian population. We may wonder, now, at the terror which Breithaupt and Mathy and the other Zeppelin commanders struck into London, with their tiny, scattered bombs, for these weapons were the predecessors of those, smaller than a Zeppelin, which can now wipe out London in a few seconds.

Nuclear bombs were the child of the Second World War. It is grimly appropriate that the destruction of Hiroshima should have been watched by one of the successors of the Zeppelin commanders— Leonard Cheshire, who was awarded the V.C. for his part in the terror bombing of German cities. Since 1945 baby has grown up a lot and is now frightening the life out of us with his destructive potential. Baby has many names—Skybolt, Polaris and whatever the Russians call their mass killers.

Protests

Capitalism’s contribution to the development of man’s weapons has been that, more than any other social system, it has organised human skill and knowledge to make it possible for man to destroy himself. We might expect that there will be protests about this. CND protests; so do many other organisations. Some of them tell us how much better the world would be without war. The Guardian of March 11th last gave an account of a report by a study group of an organisation called the United World Trust:

It concludes by emphasising “ the enormous benefit ” that disarmament would bring to every section of the community. “It will provide a unique opportunity for the Government to promote a faster rate of economic growth and prosperity for all,” it claims.

This seems quite unexceptional, until we reflect that the same argument is used about all the other wasteful problems of capitalism. We all know that life would be very much better if they were all abolished. But that is where the reformists always fail; despite all their efforts, the problems remain and life is not so good. 

So what are we to do about it? Human knowledge and technical skill are bound to develop with the passing of time. There is nothing wrong in this; in a sensible world it could be of immense benefit to humanity. Certainly we cannot turn time backwards. Man cannot lose the knowledge he has gained—even the knowledge which is useless and harmful. He cannot forget how to fly, nor how to make explosives, nor can he lose the principles of nuclear power. Such knowledge could be an asset to society. If it is a curse, as it is at present, our job is to find the reason for this; rather than blame the knowledge, we should try to discover why it is put to such anti-social uses.

Modern war springs from the basis of capitalism. A social system which makes its wealth for sale has got to have an interest in its markets and in fields of cheap, accessible raw materials. But it will find that its markets, for one reason or another, are limited and so it will have to fight over them. It will find that it's impossible to agree over the right to the raw materials and so it will have to fight over that as well. Capitalism causes modern war and so it needs the best of modem weapons to fight them with. That is why it so readily adapts its techniques of social production to the making and the using of weapons and harnesses invaluable human knowledge and skill in the dreaming up of ever more horrific armaments.

Capitalism debases human ability and diverts it from what is its most useful and sensible field. Capitalism makes clever scientists into destructive fiends. It searches out the cataclysmic secrets of the very substance of matter. It takes the boy next door and turns him into a paratrooper or a bomber pilot; it transforms gentle men into brutal killers.

CND, and some of the other reformists, see part of this and they do not like what they see. But they blame the government, or perhaps the soldiers, or the scientists. That is all futility and failure. The right place to start solving these problems is at the bottom—at the basis of capitalist society. Until Socialism is established, there will be many more Aldermastons and even bigger and worse bombs will be made there. The unilateralists have failed, but that is not to say that the energy and social conscience which some of them may have cannot be put to good use.

Why don't you come our way?

Ivan