WAR AND INDUSTRIALISED IMPERIALISM TODAY
Socialistworker.co.uk
May 20 2008
UK
Our series ends with Neil Faulkner looking at the potential to abolish
war for good
At the beginning of the First World War, lines of French infantry
in blue coats and red trousers charged machine guns and modern
artillery. The French lost one man in four in a month.
Three years later, the face of war had changed forever. Battles lasted
for months. They extended across dozens of square miles. The landscape
became a brown wasteland of rubble, tree stumps, shell-holes, barbed
wire, and dead bodies.
Usually no one could be seen. The soldiers lived in underground
complexes of trenches and tunnels. When attacking, they crept forwards
in small groups using all available cover.
Casualties were still horrendous. Over a million men were killed in
the 1916 Battle of the Somme. The British gained a few miles. It made
no difference to the outcome of the war.
Capitalism had plunged humanity into an abyss of carnage, destruction,
and waste. Industrial society’s capacity to satisfy human need through
mass production had been turned into its opposite – industrialised
slaughter.
Mass conscription created armies of millions. The Prussian army at
Waterloo in 1815 was 60,000 men. On the Western Front in 1914 the
Germans fielded 1.5 million.
Mass production provided the guns and munitions to keep such huge
masses fighting.
The British had 156 artillery pieces at Waterloo in 1815. They fired
a few thousand rounds in total. At the Somme in 1916 they had 1,400
artillery pieces. They fired nearly two million shells in a few days.
A technological arms race took off as scientists and engineers devised
new killing machines.
In 1914, there were tens of thousands of cavalry. By 1918, there were
thousands of tanks.
The result was a war of stalemate and attrition. Industrial output
was decisive – the demand was always for more guns, more shells, more
explosive. Millions of workers were mobilised in war industries. The
"home front" became a target of bombing and blockade.
The trenches of the First World War have become symbolic of the
slaughter. But they did not cause it – in fact, they provided
protection from the "storm of steel" on battlefields dominated by
firepower.
The cause of the slaughter was twofold.
First, the great powers were divided by imperial rivalry as their
industries grew and competed. Second, when the powers clashed, these
same industries could mass produce the means of destruction.
That is one reason why the Second World War was longer and bloodier
than the First. It lasted six years and killed 60 million compared
with four years and ten million. Global industrial capacity was that
much greater 20 years later. It is highly likely that a world war
today would be the worst in history.
Societies are torn apart by the slaughter and privation inherent in
modern industrialised war.
To maintain support for war, the propaganda of the ruling class
demonises "the enemy" and vilifies "traitors" and "spies". Sometimes
this spills over into genocidal racism.
The Ottoman Turks murdered 1.5 million Armenians in an internal
"war on terror" in 1915.
A generation later, even genocide had been industrialised – the Nazis
murdered six million Jews and up to six million other "sub-humans".
The danger for the ruling class is that soldiers and workers will
revolt against a murderous war of attrition. Instead of continuing
a bosses’ war for empire and profit, they might put class interests
before national hatreds, and make common cause with soldiers and
workers in "enemy" states.
The First World War was ended by just such a revolt from below. A wave
of protest and revolution swept across Europe from 1917 onwards. First
Russia withdrew from the war, shutting down the Eastern Front. Then
Germany, ending the war on the Western Front.
Thereafter, for several years, the revolution threatened to go
global. Popular revulsion against war almost brought down the ruling
classes everywhere. Capitalism survived by a whisker.
There have been many revolts against war since.
The Vietnam War was ended by the combination of Vietnamese guerrilla
resistance and the anti-war movement in the rest of the world. The
US empire and its British supporters face similar defeat in Iraq today.
The lessons are clear. Industrialised imperialism deploys more powerful
means of destruction than ever before. Mass protest can sometimes
stop the war machines. But only revolution to overthrow capitalism
altogether can end war forever and create a world at peace.