bboc/32_Even_if_the_abolition_of_capitalism_would_not_be_enough_Monique_and_Roland_Weyl.tex

\chapter[Even if socialism wouldn't be enough]{Even if capitalism's abolition wouldn't be enough...}

\chapterauthor{Monique and Roland WEYL}


\begin{quote}
\enquote{Capitalism carries war like the cloud carries the storm}
\end{quote}

\rauthor{Jean Jaurès}


First an aphorism: \enquote{Come on! There have always been wars and there always will be}. And then its consolidation: \enquote{Look what happened in socialist countries}.

It is true, there have always been wars, wars between tribes or ethnic groups, between principalities, between states, the powerful imposing by force their domination over populations to conquer their lands, seize their wealth and enslave their men and women.
War is never more than one of the means of domination of the weak by the powerful.

With capitalism, war takes on other dimensions, another meaning. It ceases to be localized to become global, planetary... what about tomorrow? Cosmic? It takes on a permanent character.
It begins with economic war, ideological warfare, accompanied by blockade measures and also as other prerequisites \enquote{low-intensity} conflicts and serious local conflicts that can be generalized to the whole world.
Once \enquote{over}, war continues as we have seen and we see with the Gulf War, the victorious United States imposing on the Iraqi population a blockade more deadly than the war itself.
War permanently affects the world to such an extent that, like the temperature for disease, war now is measured in degrees:
Hot War or Cold War, a new Cold War between the countries of the North and the Countries of the South having taken over from the old Cold War between East and West.

Finally, war (like localized wars) spares no one: millions of victims, military and civilian populations, including children (see the UNICEF report).
The use of increasingly sophisticated weapons of mass destruction is not limited to military forces, nor to the blockade, the old method of siege that the United States already advocated in the last century over Cuba when it wanted to substitute its domination for that of the Spanish.
The agenda sent in 1898 by Secretary of State for War Bekenbridge to General Miles commanding the American expeditionary force in Cuba deserves to be quoted again as it is indicative of the methods used to establish domination over peoples:
\enquote{We must clean up the land, even if we had to resort to the means that Divine Providence had used in Sodom and Gomorrah.
We must destroy everything within range of our guns. We must impose the blockade so that hunger and plague reduce the number of civilians and decimate the army.}

We need to go even further. War meets the needs of capitalism.
A flourishing arms trade generates immense profits, illicit, criminal profits, which Fidel Castro, on the subject of the arms race, denounced in his speech at the seventh summit of the Non-Aligned:
\enquote{This genocide by omission that humanity commits every day by sentencing thousands of human beings to death by the mere fact of allocating so many resources to developing the means to kill them in another way.}

For many supporters of capitalism for whom \enquote{war is better than unemployment}, it is an ideal means of reducing unemployment:
it sacrifices useless workers, and, with peace restored, it is the source of new profits in reconstruction.

But war is also, and perhaps above all, in the intrinsic nature of capitalism insofar as it is an almost unavoidable instrument for the solution of conflictual competitions in the control of markets, where the constant reduction in purchasing power generated by the law of profit reduces the available outlets accordingly.

Isn't this all that Jaurès' formula implies?
Even if its author, the first victim of the 14-18 war, could not know the abominable butchery, nor could he imagine the indiscriminate bombing of civilian populations, the burned towns and villages (the Oradour and the Lidice), the deportations and extermination camps, and the use of nuclear weapons on the populations of two cities of a Japan ready to capitulate.
But it is probably extrapolating the sentence of Jaurès to get from it what he did not say, that to abolish capitalism would be enough to put an end to the relations of exploitation and domination and to ensure to individuals and peoples happiness, freedom and peace.
It can only be said that war is inherent in capitalism, which does not mean that it has a monopoly on it. It simply means that in capitalism war is not eradicatable, whereas it can be eradicated once capitalism is ousted.

In these times of despair, in order to obtain from individuals and peoples that they resign themselves to the sustainability of capitalism, the construction of a world freed from the relations of exploitation over men and domination over peoples is presented to them as an unachievable utopia , and for this nothing is easier than to draw a line under socialism from the rout of an experiment, and from his slippages and mistakes, some of which have been tragic.

Admittedly, the often-repeated formula \enquote{Socialism is Peace} proceeded first of all from an overly simple \emph{a contrario} reasoning:
since capitalism generates war, the abolition of capitalism eliminates war by eliminating its cause.
More substantially, it was consistent to consider that, since the ambition of socialism was to put an end to the relations of exploitation and domination, war, the extreme means of domination over other peoples and over one's own people, was a phenomenon alien to socialism.

In fact, the impregnation of human fraternity with the ideals of all the successive schools of socialism necessarily carried with it the corollary of pacifism, and it was this coherence that was to inspire one of the first acts of the Socialist Revolution in power when Lenin signed the famous \enquote{Decree on Peace}, and its call for the intervention of peoples as opposed to secret diplomacy.
No doubt subsequently, this solemn proclamation was often lost sight of, but it is still necessary to relativize the reasons, because it is inadmissible to close any ambition on the pretext of a disappointed ambition.

From this capitalism itself cannot be exonerated. First of all, it is necessary to underline the perverse role played by the war situation with which the Soviet Union was constantly confronted:
the intervention of the former opponents of the 14-18 war against the young Soviet state considered a dangerous example (was there not the Spartacist revolution, the mutinies in the French army);
then support for Hitler and fascist regimes as bulwarks against communism; 
then, after the defeat of the fascist regimes, thanks in large part to the sacrifices of the USSR, the Cold War with subversive actions against the USSR and its allies, the threat of using atomic weapons of which the United States until September 1949 had a monopoly; 
finally the crazy gear of the arms race.

It is therefore impossible not to place in this context everything that in Soviet policy has moved away from the spirit of the \enquote{decree on peace}, to replace the pacifist investment in the Peoples' Movement with the option of military solutions and negotiations between powers, to hide its defensive impregnation, however bad an advisor it may be.

Certainly, it will be difficult for historians to arbitrate, even in the indisputable role played by the Soviet Union for the benefit of world peace and which greatly motivated the solidarities from which it benefited, which is due to the coherence of socialist ideals or the concern for its security.

This does not preclude the need to recognise the whole positive aspect of the balance sheet, in particular the role played by the USSR in drawing up the new principles of international law enshrined in the Charter of the United Nations, making the right of peoples to self-determination, non-interference in their affairs and the negotiated solution of conflicts the rules of world relations.
The capitalist powers, starting with the United States, accepted these rules only with their defending bodies, so that they never ceased to violate them and to work to eliminate them in order to return to the good old previous right, exclusively based on power relations.

The tragedy is that the USSR allowed itself to be attracted to this field by putting Peace dependent on chancellery negotiations and compromises between superpowers.
Added to this are the damaging consequences of the ideology of the \enquote{fortress} which, like the security ideology produced internal phenomena of overstateization, was to generate a defensive psychosis in the responsibility for which one cannot comfortably ignore the role that the state of siege and the incessant provocations of capitalism may have played.

Curiously, paradoxically, the shift seems to have been with Khrushchev, when the logic of the Stockholm call, had given way to the strategy of the godasse on the tribune of the UN, then to the red telephone and the logic of the arms race, and the ideology of \enquote{fortress} that it generated, to the various SALT agreements, to the fatal trap of the Cheevernadzian illusion that the fate of the world was in the friend-friend of the two superpowers.

Nevertheless, history has shown that there can be armed conflicts between socialist countries where the explanation by the context of a capitalist environment is not necessarily convincing.
We were already not far from it between the USSR and China, and it was necessary to take the step of painful realizations during the Chinese aggression against Vietnam.
It was discovered, with heartbreak, that there could be wars between socialist countries. It was therefore necessary to revise everything, here too learn not to idealize:
socialism too could carry war with it. Was this a denial of the fundamental antithesis?

We simply learned that socialism does not \emph{ipso facto} eliminate war, just as we had (painfully) learned that it did not \emph{ipso facto} eradicate delinquency, corruption, careerism.

Then? Did Jaurès fool us?

Is it because there was Chernobyl, because there were still accidents at work, alcoholism, thieves in socialist countries, that this exonerates capitalism of its intrinsic guilt in the massive character of the deviances it exudes?

One of the main mistakes of the ideologues of the socialist countries, and more particularly of the thurifers\rfootnote{Someone who burns incense in a religious, particularly Christian, ceremony, but figuratively an \emph{apologist of the highest order} in this context} of the State, will undoubtedly have been to omit the transitory nature of the system they were in charge of, to lose sight of the classic distinction between a stage of society governed by a conflictual competition in the distribution of the available and a stage that is delivered from it.

Socialism does not put an end overnight to the dissatisfaction of all the needs of men, and it must be deduced from this that as long as there is conflictual competition for the distribution of the available, there cannot be no competition for mastery and therefore domination.

Why not then return to the simple idea that war is the ultimate means of domination?

It is in this that we can say that \emph{\enquote{homo homini lupus}} but in this only, and therefore that war is not eliminated \emph{ipso facto} by the abolition of capitalism, but will be when this abolition has allowed man to strip the wolf to flourish as a man.

The most elementary humanism therefore commands to reject the abominable aphorism of the fatality of war.
If lucidity dictates that it is not enough to abolish capitalism to eliminate it, as long as the legacy and the after-effects are not expurgated, the truth also requires us to admit that to capitalism, and capitalism alone, because of its nature based on exploitation, war is intrinsic.

It is intrinsic to it because capitalism is based on competition in the appropriation of human resources, because its nature and its raison d'être are to confiscate them from humanity and for this to dominate it, if necessary with the new forms of domination that we know today.
The widespread attack on peoples and their irruption in international affairs is working to force them to surrender their sovereignty to international or supranational institutions (IMF-EU-NAFTA) while waiting for exacerbated competition for markets to lead to armed war, which is never far from economic war.

Yes, intrinsic to capitalism, because its irremissible original flaw is that within it itself the competitions of domination and market masters, the mastery of spaces, and human livestock, are confronted in a process sharpened by the increasing reduction of consumption capacities.


\rauthor{Monique and Roland Weyl}


Monique and Roland Weyl are lawyers, authors of \emph{Démocratie, pouvoir du peuple; Se libérer de Maastricht} (Democracy, Power of the People; Free yourself from Maastricht) (Temps des cerises).