- by Peter Farmer
- The Guardian
- Issue #2119
That was the slogan of the Young Pioneers a scouts-like club in the socialist German Democratic Republic, also known as East Germany. Communists like to talk about peace, but doesn’t everyone dislike war? What’s particularly communist about wanting peace? Doesn’t everyone think peace is a good thing? It turns out there are some very good reasons why communists particularly strive for peace. They understand war clearly.
Communists work for the aims of the working class. War affects the working class much more than it affects other classes. Whenever there’s a war, it’s mostly the working class who are required to do the killing and the dying. It’s the working class who suffer the brunt of the injuries of war. The wealthy can have “other priorities” as US vice president Dick Cheney said when asked why he hadn’t gone to war at a time when other men his age had to.
The working class also have less resources for coping with the effects of war. War brings poverty from loss of jobs and destruction of houses. At this very moment, Israel is bombing the poorest parts of Beirut, quite possibly because that will harm the most vulnerable people and put the most strain on the state.
War and preparing for war is used as a distraction for the working class, to keep them from pursuing their class interests. The nationalism that leads to war encourages workers to ignore their real enemies, and focus their energy on foreigners, or groups who look different. War keeps workers serving capital under the belief that they’re serving their country. This is a strategy as old as time, which is why the saying that ‘Patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels’ persists. It’s especially true of capitalist scoundrels. The 1996-2007 Howard government, led by free-market zealot John Howard invested a huge amount of time and money into pumping up ANZAC day into a sacred national holiday, and tipped enormous sums into the Australian War memorial, turning it into what someone called “a Yasakuni Shrine for the Liberal Party.”
Even when there’s no war, war spending hurts working people more. Look at ‘defence’ spending in Australia. A government that says it can’t afford to make unemployment benefits livable, or really improve medical funding, can afford to spend $368 billion dollars on the AUKUS project, signing up for nuclear powered submarines we don’t need. It can also afford to sign contracts with Israeli military company Elbit worth around $900 million. We could fund free dental care with that money.
Or, look at the USA, which has the world’s largest military budget, crumbling infrastructure, and some of the developed world’s worst health outcomes.
Communists are internationalists. They understand that class interests have no borders. Workers in the UK, France, Australia, and Japan, are all being ripped off by companies like Amazon. Capital is not nationalistic,although capitalists like to pretend they are.
Socialists have fought against fascism and in defence of socialist revolutions. Without the Soviet Union, the outcome of World War II would have been very different. However, socialism doesn’t need to use war as a cloak for the interests of capital.
So while anybody can dislike the idea of war, communists have the best reasons for opposing it. That’s why we have a Peace Notes column and that’s why we campaign to give peace a budget!
