Capitalist Peace – Ethel Mannin (1938)

From ‘Spain and the World’, October 28, 1938, London, UK

The world is at peace. That is to say there is no actual world war such as we knew in 1914-18 on. There is a war of Fascist aggression in China, and in Spain, and a war against British Imperialism in Palestine. As I write there are reports of mass air-raids in China, 500 Japanese machines in one attack; Arabs have recently been killed in Palestine at the rate of thirty and forty a day, their villages bombed, their property confiscated; British troops have been ‘cleaning-up’ Jerusalem; there have keen a fresh bout of air-raids on Barcelona, and savage attacks made by the Fascists near Madrid. But the world is at peace. Peace, we know, was made instead of war at Munich when four capitalist-imperialist powers came to an agreement; if they hadn’t come to this agreement there really WOULD have been war, all over the place……

Imagine the reaction of an observer from another planet coming to take a look at Earth and being assured that peace has been made, that the world was not at present engaged in war. He would only be able to conclude either that peace and war did not mean to the inhabitants of Earth what he understood these things to mean, or that the human beings of this planet were all stark raving mad. He could only cry, ‘Tis a mad world, my masters!’

But why should anyone expect world-wide peace in a capitalist-imperialist world? So long as States exist they will need protection from the lust for power of other states. Power and the State are inseparable. So long as there are States there must be war, for a State is a jealous body, possessive, grasping, ambitious.

It has been suggested in various quarters that a United States of Europe would solve the question of war by the abolition of nationalist jealousies and strivings for power. But what happens to the Imperialist question under such arrangement? The coloured peoples then have not merely one Imperialist Government to fight against, German or French or Dutch or Belgian, or whatever it is, but a whole Federation of Imperialist Governments; a United States of Europe would mean a united front of capitalists and imperialists so far as the world’s subject peoples are concerned — and they too are human beings, though it is common when speaking of the rights and wrongs of suffering humanity to think only in terms of white people. The tendency is to think altogether too much in terms of races; there is only one race, the human race, some of whom are black, some white, and some yellow.

So long as there is private ownership of the world’s natural riches, coal, oil, iron ore, timber, gold, and of the means of production, so long is war inevitable, because there will be the Haves and the Have-Nots among nations and individuals. In short, so long as the capitalist system survives. Capitalism cannot guarantee permanent peace. It is not in its interests to do so; sooner or later, however much its statesmen may talk of peace, it is going to be in its interests to wage a war, a war of aggression — expansion is the word used nowadays — or a war for the protection of its interests.

Thus whereas it was not in British interests to go to war over Czechoslavakia, it was very much to British interests to ‘restore order’ in Palestine, and whereas giving away slices of another state’s country is one thing, giving away slices of one’s own imperialist possessions is quite another. When statesmen, averting war for the time being, assert that they are peace-loving men, they mean that they are in favour of avoiding the expense of a war unless it is profitable to wage it: when it is a matter of protecting vested interests, or of colonial expansion, or of asserting the authority of a mandate, it is a case of ‘expense be blowed’, and human lives with it.

That is why the purely pacifist case of non-violence is not enough; it is not enough to realise that war is anti-social, barbaric, and refuse to co-operate in it; non-cooperation by all means, but the need is to cooperate in the struggle against the root-causes of war. Useless to refuse to have anything to do with an evil, to abominate that evil, yet do nothing to help root it out of society. Anti-fascist fronts will never abolish war, even if they succeed in crushing fascism.

Supposing that fascism is crushed in the world today, finally and forever — do we enter the millennium? Was the world so fine a place before Hitler and Mussolini came to power? Is Franco the only enemy of Spain, the Japanese the only menace in China? Supposing the Republican Government wins in Spain, and Italy and Germany become democracies once more? One set of evils will be crushed, but what of the evils that remain? There will be no Fascist bosses, but the capitalist and imperialist bosses remain; there will still be unemployment, inequalities, foodstuffs destroyed in order to keep up prices whilst thousands go hungry; the workers will still be bottom dogs, earning by their blood and sweat what others spend in their pride; there will still be the everlasting threat of war, in which the workers are called upon to pay with their lives for possessions not theirs.

There is a great danger in regarding Fascism as the supreme evil of the world today. Fascism is an evil, but it is, like war, merely a by-product of the fundamental evil which is the capitalist system. Supposing the crisis had not been aborted at Munich, and there had been a large-scale European war for the protection of Czechoslavakia’s interests and the crushing of Fascism; millions of lives would have been lost, hundred of thousands of them would have been non-combatants; the horrors of Guernica and Bilbao and Madrid would have been enacted in England, France, Germany, Czechoslavakia. Nazism might have been crushed, and Czechoslavakia left intact as arranged by the Versailles Treaty — when it was the conquering powers who wore the jackboots and made frontier markings on maps, and were as little concerned with minority rights as Hitler is with the Sudetan Germans.

The ‘just’ war for ‘democracy’ might have achieved what it set out to achieve, at the cost of millions of lives and wreckage unspeakable: what then? The status quo is preserved in the so-called democratic countries, and democracy restored to the erstwhile fascist states. How much does this benefit the workers? What does it contribute to future peace, the solution of the unemployment problem, the abolition of social inequalities, and the guarantee of security for the mass of people? Precisely nothing. The workers have nothing to gain by capitalist war or peace. At best, capitalist peace merely preserves the status quo — and we know what that means; the preservation of imperialism and a system corrupt from top to top.

The workers must always serve the state: the state will never serve the workers. Make no mistake about that. The state is not concerned with the laws of mutual aid, but with the preservation of the interests of those at the top.

No Capitalist statesman can be trusted; no capitalist peace can last. There can be no security for humanity until there has been brought to pass ‘the withering away of the State’, and only one thing can effect that, the upheaval of social revolution. IN SHORT IF THE WORKERS OF THE WORLD REALLY WANT PEACE THEY WILL NOT HAVE TO LEAVE IT TO STATESMEN AND LEAGUES OF CAPITALIST-IMPERIALIST NATIONS, BUT MAKE IT THEMSELVES.