23.01.2025

Questions of war and peace

Once again it has become common to talk about genocide and the danger of nuclear war. How should we respond? Paul Cooper reports on last weekend’s Winter Communist University

Set against the horrors unleashed in Palestine and Ukraine, it was more than appropriate that this year’s Winter Communist University focused on the theme of ‘War and peace’. A range of excellent introductions and discussion was lapped up by 70 registrations, with many hundreds more watching livestreams on YouTube, Facebook and TikTok. We estimate that this will grow into thousands and can refer comrades to uploaded content on our YouTube channel. Do not forget to like and share, comrades!

Taking place over the weekend of January 17-19, the CU was opened by Mike Macnair, who began deliberations on the Friday evening by exploring war as the continuation of politics/policy by other means. Tracing the origin of this maxim, Mike explored the unfinished work of Carl Von Clausewitz (1780-1831), who originally identified war as “nothing but the continuation of state policy by other means”.

From this work stems the notion of state functions as both the prioritisation of change and ‘business as usual’ at various points. However, both amount to the same fundamental priority - not least the pursuit of the priorities of the ruling class. Intriguingly Von Clausewitz identifies war as the fundamental intercourse of the human race. Chillingly war - likened to trade, as opposed to the arts - was “conflict of great interest, settled by bloodshed”. Today we call this international relations and comrade Macnair provided US president George Bush junior’s Iraq War II as the continuation of unfinished business left over from his father, George Bush senior. The ‘American Century’ aimed to spread its version of ‘democracy’ through first bombing Iraq in the ‘shock and awe’ operation and then putting 200,000 boots on the ground.

Citing examples from Babylon and Rome, comrade Macnair located ancient and pre-feudal war as having different priorities, primarily as a means of slave-taking. War in the modern era has surprisingly been viewed as generally more bloody, when contrasted to this past model. The feudal war was identified around land capture and looting, not to mention the medieval equivalent of package holidays in the form of pilgrimage and the procurement of holy sites (pilgrims were noted as being a cash cow for the church).

In more modern times, capitalist warfare can be identified as segmented into three elements. Enclosure, from Britain to the colonies, drove peasants from the land, leading to internal/external migration, feeding a new working class, thanks to emerging factory production. Beyond enclosure, competition seeking monopoly has sought control over fractions of trade, leading to conflict between imperial powers. Finally war as an economic stimulus from the production and sale of arms - the contemporary war in Ukraine was provided as an example (for the USA, not the EU).

Fundamentally, war is a product of class society and can only be ended by ending class society.

Ceasefire

Saturday morning’s double-header saw Moshé Machover and Yassamine Mather explore the contemporary question of ‘Israel’s war-mongering and how to respond’. Comrade Machover identified the latest ceasefire as being fundamentally the same as the Biden plan of May 2024, with Netanyahu clearly falling short of any Damascene conversion towards an equitable settlement. An edited version of his opening is included in this edition of the paper.

Yassamine Mather identified the next stage of the peace plan as being scheduled for six weeks time, with no clear idea of any probable outcome being evident. The ceasefire cannot be seen as peace, but a break within 100 years of conflict. Yassamine echoed Moshé in identifying the importance of this issue as a litmus test for the left. Those soft on Israel join US imperialism. In terms of allies, she took apart both Russia and Iran, both seeking to further their own strategic interests, as opposed to championing liberation.

In terms of Egypt, clearly blowback was an ongoing concern for Biden administration strategists. The Sisi military-bureaucratic capitalist regime is weak and the Muslim Brotherhood still organises and has deep social roots. As for the so-called ‘Axis of Resistance’, it has proved itself to be a paper tiger. Then there is the Trump administration. For all his talk of bringing peace, we should not forget that he supports an expanded Israel and the Zionist colonial project.

Militia

On Saturday afternoon, Jack Conrad explored the issue of the people’s/workers’ militia question. He noted this as a demand that is mocked and scoffed at by most of what passes for the ‘left’ today. He recounted arguments within successive broad lefts: Socialist Alliance, Respect, Left Unity and Labour Left Alliance. He cited Dave Kellaway, a member of Anticapitalist Resistance’s editorial board, and his plans for the next broad left party (Transform, Collective or whatever).

While he does not want to censor anyone (oh, no), Kellaway is determined to find ways to ensure that calls for a people’s militia are marginalised, silenced. There is also Robert Griffiths, general secretary of the Morning Star’s Communist Party of Britain. He not only has described the call for a people’s militia as crazy, an invitation to MI5 snoopers. He actually banned his hapless members having any involvement in discussion or debates about the question.

And yet in terms of the modern world, comrade Conrad explained, the superiority of the people’s militia over the standing army was long common currency amongst progressive thinkers and revolutionary democrats alike. Nicholas Machiavelli founded and led the militia of the Florentine Republic. Immanuel Kant advocated the abolition of secret treaties and replacing the standing army with the militia. The American revolutionaries of 1776 opposed the ‘bane’ of the standing army and insisted on a ‘well armed’ popular militia too.

Marx and Engels, Germany’s social democrats, Europe’s social democrats, including our Labour Party in Britain championed the people’s militia. Engels famously wrote his pamphlet Can Europe disarm? both as a way of popularising the idea of the militia and as a means of mapping out the Marx-Engels revolutionary strategy. Success in elections to the lower house was to be combined with an ability to defend an actual or an expected working class majority with the people’s militia (including, if need be, by mutiny).

Whilst some on the timid left might consider the demand as inevitably leading to Mad Max-style chaos, the opposite is true. The popular militia is an instrument for securing peace! A popular military is great for defending a country against foreign invasion. Pretty useless when it comes to staging invasions. Switzerland was cited as an example.

There are also those misguided by the ‘transitional method’. Whereas German social democrats, Mensheviks and Bolsheviks and 1900 British Labourites openly raised the demand for a popular militia, too many ‘revolutionaries’ shamefully keep their heads down. They say there is ‘no demand’ for the people’s militia ‘out there’, so, as the vanguard, they won’t demand it. Others from that same tradition raise the call for a workers’ militia when they get really, really excited (almost invariably mistakenly). They imagine the workers’ militia is superior to the people’s militia!

Comrade Conrad cited the situation in Russia during 1917. With the police swept away with the fall of tsarism, workers formed the Red Guards to keep order and defend the gains of the revolution. Lenin and the Bolsheviks were in full support. They saw the Red Guards as a step in the direction towards the people’s militia.

Aukus and China

It was late at night for Marcus Strom, who gave a talk, direct from Australia, on Aukus (the trilateral ‘security partnership’ between Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States) and the coming war with China. It was noted that the US policy has recently changed from engagement to strangulation. This must be considered as part of the attempt to reverse US decline.

While US imperialism remains the global hegemon, there is the possibility of a China, Russia and Iran bloc (envisaged as the worst possible scenario by Zbigniew Brzezinski in his The grand chessboard (1997)). Other than this bloc, the US faces no serious challenge. Not Brics, not the EU, not the pink wave in Latin America.

As relating to Australia, comrade Strom argued that policy had hardened from the time of aprevious prime minister, Kevin Rudd (a fluent Chinese speaker). Australia has thrown in its lot with America (the choice that was really made back in 1942 with the humiliating British surrender of Singapore).

Meanwhile the US strategic approach to the People’s Republic of China has hardened noticeably from May 2020 with a return to World War I-type dynamics, as opposed to cold war. Despite this he argued that it would be wrong to necessarily see the same outcome emerge, there being an absence of multiple rival imperial projects. Crucially there is the absence of anything like a serious working class threat. Once a global power in its own right, today the working class exists more as an idea (when it comes to taking power).

Aukus policy itself has pledged Australia to find half a trillion dollars over the coming three decades. The US/UK is indemnified from loss, should problems arise within this process, which will additionally facilitate yet more strategically placed US bases. China itself wants to avoid direct confrontation with the US, but is preparing for one, should this become inevitable, and some of its war planners say conflict is inevitable (nuclear war requires the other side to think that you are mad enough to unleash mutually assured destruction).

With regard to the left, it is at a very low ebb. There is no serious partyist project in Australia. Comrade Strom also discussed the social nature of China. It would be foolish to defend it as a deformed workers’ state, because it is not a workers’ state. China needs to be analysed in all its contradictory complexity.

Non-agreement

The final CU session saw Lars T Lih explore the theme of ‘The Bolsheviks in 1917: “revolutionary defeatism” or “non-agreement defencism”?’ Lars started his talk noting that the Bolsheviks adopted this slogan to distinguish themselves not only from the social-imperialist ‘left’, but from those tempted to conciliate the social-imperialist ‘left’ (including a certain “left Kautskyite L Trotsky”). Revolutionary defeatism meant more than militant opposition to World War I. It meant a commitment to fight for revolution even at the risk of the defeat of one’s ‘own’ country!

However, the Bolsheviks dropped the ‘revolutionary defeatism’ slogan at the beginning of 1917 and this phrase was never applied subsequently. This leads us to consider what replaced it.

The Bolsheviks wanted to defend the popular revolution against both the advancing German threat and the danger of internal counterrevolution. That meant opposing anything that encouraged soldiers to desert and head off back to their villages - acts of individual indiscipline, weakening the morale of those at the front. The Bolsheviks certainly opposed sabotaging the war effort. The Provisional government was doing just that through its sheer incompetence and refusal to conclude a just peace (by breaking with Anglo-French imperialism and publishing the secret treaties and committing to no annexations, etc).

But the Bolsheviks also wanted to advance the revolution to the point where power passed into the hands of the people, the narod (ie, all ‘power to the soviets’). For them, that could not realistically be done through an agreement with bourgeois society (and therefore the self-appointed Provisional government). That was the position of the right wing of the Menshevik and Socialist Revolutionary parties ... which soon, after October 1917, landed many of them in the camp of white counterrevolution and the far right.

The tactical shift in the Bolshevik manner of presentation had already occurred before Lenin’s return to Russia from Switzerland. Far from Lenin objecting, apart from this or that minor detail, the Bolsheviks were solidly united behind what Lars calls ‘non-agreement defencism’. Once they had won back their majority, this would signal the beginning of the end of the bourgeois Provisional government (even if headed by a pro-war socialist: ie Alexander Kerensky).

Looking back at the debates over the approach to the war, Lenin in the spring of 1918 insisted on the central fact that “The main thing was the soviets had come over from agreementising to us”. All Bolsheviks agreed on that.

The Second Congress of the Soviets, meeting in Petrograd October 1917, voted to approve the Bolshevik-led overthrow of the Provisional government that happened just a few days before, and agreed, by a solid majority, to the new soviet government proposed by the Bolsheviks. Headed by Lenin, it was later added to with the appointment of non-agreementist Left SR commissars.

A playlist of all five sessions of
Communist University Winter 2025 is available at youtube.com/@CommunistPartyofGreatBritain/playlists.