Marxism-Leninism on War and Army - Wars between opposing systems
Fyodorov
WARS BETWEEN OPPOSING SOCIAL SYSTEMS
The victory of the Soviet Union in the Second World War, the formation of the powerful world socialist camp and the disintegration of the ignoble colonial system have brought about historical changes in the international situation. The monopoly-dominated sphere has considerably contracted and this has led to a sharp intensification in the aggressiveness of the imperialist states. The US monopoly bourgeoisie has become the main bulwark of aggression and international reaction.
The aggressive actions of the US imperialists found a clear expression in the aggressive war against the Korean People’s Democratic Republic, in the organisation of counter–revolutionary plots against Cuba, in the barbarous bombing raids of the US interventionists of the territory of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. All these aggressive actions have the character of armed clashes between states with opposing social systems—imperialism and socialism—and are part of the overall imperialist plan of preparing a new world war.
Social Character of the World War Under Preparation by the Imperialists
At the end of the ’forties the US imperialists launched a feverish arms race Counting on the monopoly of atomic weapons they began to knock together military blocs, to build nuclear bases and to improve the armed forces with a view to enabling them to carry out aggressive and military police functions.
From this moment onwards the threat of a destructive war has been hanging over the socialist countries and the whole world. The US monopoly bourgeoisie constantly inculcates the peoples with the idea that a world war against the USSR and the whole socialist camp is inevitable. “Between the free West and the communist movement, there can be no reconciliation, no real coexistence. The confrontation is absolute.... The defence of civilisation is tantamount to the destruction of the communist movement throughout the world." [99•1
Hatching criminal plans of an aggressive war, US imperialism is continually stepping up the arms race, attempts to stir up the activity of the military blocs created for aggression against the Soviet Union and other socialist countries, intensifying the ideological struggle against them and endeavours to hamper their economic development.
But imperialism is unable to recover the historical initiative it has lost, or to reverse the modern world developments. It is quite obvious that the reactionary political aims of the imperialists are adventuristic. They contradict the objective laws of social development. Therefore the nuclear war imperialism is planning against the socialist community with the aim of stopping the forward march of history will be 100regressive as concerns its social role and most reactionary as regards its political content. On the part of the peoples of the socialist states and of progressive mankind as a whole, it will be a holy war for freedom and independence, a just liberation war. Such a world war will be a violent and tense struggle between opposing social forces, a class war on an international scale.
Because of this sharply pronounced class character the political and military aims of the sides at war will be decisive and the use of nuclear weapons will lend it an unprecedentedly destructive character. A thermonuclear war would kill hundreds of millions of people, lay waste entire countries, inflict irretrievable losses to material and spiritual culture. Mankind would be thrown back for many decades.
To lull the vigilance of the peoples, the US militarists are discussing the possibility of limiting the nuclear war. The prudence of the opponents, they say, will make it possible to “co-ordinate” their nuclear strikes and to limit the targets against which these weapons would be aimed. According to the Western military “theoreticians” such limitations will reduce the destruction of material values and the privations of the peoples to a minimum.
The deliberate falsehood of these assurances is easily exposed. The propaganda of “limited wars" is intended to pacify public opinion, to accustom people to the thought that nuclear war is possible. At the same time all talk about confining nuclear strikes only to military objectives is intended to camouflage the plans for a preemptive war (first strike) against the socialist countries.
The peoples of the world cannot rely on the chance that the imperialist aggressors will be “prudent” and will establish certain limits to the use of nuclear missiles. Their efforts must be concentrated on reining in the imperialists before it is too late, on depriving them of the possibility of applying deathdealing weapons, on preventing thermonuclear war.
The relation of the class-political forces and the organisation and conscious will of the people are crucially important to a solution of the issue of war or peace. In modern conditions the struggle by the progressive social forces can play a decisive part in averting war. The international working class, the most consistent fighter against imperialist wars, has a great organisational role to play in this struggle of all the 101people. The unity of action by the world proletariat, the international unity of all forces of socialism are of decisive importance to the struggle for peace and for the freedom of peoples, for the progressive development of human society.
“An extremely important form of the struggle against the threat of imperialism starting another world war,” Leonid Brezhnev said, “is to organise a collective rebuff to the actions of the aggressors whenever they launch military adventures in any part of the world. The most striking example of this is the rebuff which US aggression has received in Vietnam." [101•1
Imperialism no longer holds a dominant position in international life, the role of the socialist system has grown, as has also the influence exerted by the newly independent states and the mass of the people in the capitalist countries. Conditions are shaping in which new norms in international life can triumph over imperialist aggressive policies.
The new type of international relations is expressed in the foreign policy of the socialist states. These relations are founded on the principle of equality and sovereignty of all countries, on the principle of peace and security of the peoples. The peace-loving policy of the socialist countries is permeated with ideas of genuine humanism. It is called, upon to ensure mutually advantageous co-operation and friendship between the nations. Socialism has offered mankind the only rational principles of interstate relations at a time when the world is divided into two systems—the principle of peaceful coexistence between states with different social systems, that was advanced by Lenin.
It is the internationalist duty of the world working class to support the peace-loving policy of the socialist states, their constructive proposals, directed at relaxing international tension, at consolidating peace. “The defence of peace is inseparably linked up with the struggle to compel the imperialists to accept peaceful coexistence of states with different social systems." [101•2
For the policy of peaceful coexistence to be implemented there must be decisive action by the mass of the people against imperialism.
Should it turn out to be impossible to foil the criminal plans of the imperialists and should a war break out, it will be the holy duty of the international working-class movement and of all of progressive mankind to use all and every means to render the aggressor harmless as quickly as possible, to disarm him and to stop him from escalating the destructive war. The sooner and the more resolutely the peoples will do away with the reactionary system of imperialism, the smaller will be their sacrifices in the war.
The World War and the Socialist Revolution
The basic law of the socialist revolution, as clearly formulated by Lenin, states that revolution breaks out in every capitalist country in the presence of a direct revolutionary situation arising out of a deep national crisis and of all the objective and subjective conditions for a revolutionary upheaval.
The socialist revolution relies not on plots, not on the arbitrary actions of separate organisations, but on the strength of the advanced class and on the political activity of the working masses. Only the enemies of socialism can stupidly insist on an “export” of revolution, on an encroachment by world socialism by means of force on the “free institutions" of the capitalist world. Revolution is not made to order but ripens in the process of historical development and breaks out at moments conditioned by a whole complex of internal and external factors.
War is not an essential element in that complex, is not the decisive condition for revolution, there is no simple and direct link between war and revolution. Imperialist wars do not always lead to revolution and not every revolution is preceded by a war. Yet, war and revolution are not isolated political phenomena. There is a definite connection between them. This connection manifested itself most clearly in the First and Second World Wars, which exerted a major impact on the revolutionary process.
World war exacerbates the internal and external contradictions of capitalism, erodes the state apparatus of the bourgeoisie and gives rise to a deep political crisis of the whole system of imperialism. War raises the people’s political awareness, creates the conditions in which the working people rise to struggle against the bourgeois system. The trials of war and the heavy toll of human lives the unjust war exacts 103objectively impel the people to revolution. Lenin meant this when in 1917 he said that world war inevitably leads to revolution.
Already the First World War revealed the obvious incompatibility between the interests of the people and the government of every warring country. It sharply exacerbated the class contradictions of capitalist society, brought on a deep all-embracing crisis that undermined the socio-political basis of imperialism. According to Lenin the First World War “created such an immense crisis, has so strained the material and moral forces of the people, has dealt such blows at the entire modern social organisation that humanity must now choose between perishing or entrusting its fate to the most revolutionary class for the swiftest and most radical transition to a superior mode of production". [103•1
Having collected in a single focus all the contradictions, the war weakened the world capitalist system, awakened the masses, drew them into political life, raised them to independent historical action. It created favourable conditions for the proletariat’s revolutionary struggle for the state power.
Under these conditions it is the internationalist duty of the Marxist Parties to reveal the social contradictions deepened by the war, to mould the class consciousness of the working people, to rally the proletariat of all countries in the struggle against imperialism, against the culprits and initiators of the war.
During the First World War Lenin said that from the viewpoint of social progress the reactionary war conducted by the monopolists to strengthen the system of wage slavery can be opposed only by a war of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie, notably a civil war for the destruction of capitalist rule. The consistent struggle for the transformation of imperialist war into a civil war was the only correct tactics the working class and its party could adopt. This tactics has lost none of its pertinence today, but, of course, the concrete international situation and the relation of forces must be considered before it is applied.
The Second World War fully confirmed the correctness of Lenin’s proposition that the choice of the forms and methods 104of the anti-war struggle depends on the specific features of the prevailing situation. An upshot of the struggle of the imperialists for world domination, this war threatened the peoples with enslavement and therefore roused many millions to intense political activity. Already the first months of the war revealed the deep-rooted contradictions between the will of the peoples and the reactionary aims of the British and French governments. The progressive forces in those countries demanded that the German fascist aggression should be decisively rebuffed, but the governments strove to make a deal with the nazis, refused to take decisive military action and adopted a wait-and-see policy. This contradiction determined the entire political situation during the initial period of the war, which came to be known as the “phoney war”.
At the same time, considering the reactionary aims of nazi Germany, which threatened to enslave all the peoples of the world, the Communists of Britain, France and other bourgeois states could not advance the slogan of the defeat of their governments and the transformation of the imperialist war into a civil war. This slogan did not correspond to the existing political and military situation and would only have promoted the aims of the nazis. In the conditions prevailing during that period of the war, the Communist Parties in the bourgeois-democratic countries had to strengthen the antifascist general democratic front and to expose the conciliatory positions of the ruling circles, their attempts to come to terms with the nazi clique and to join the anti-Soviet bloc.
While the contradictory nature of the Second World War led to the adoption of specific tactics by the proletariat, it did not remove the class struggle in the capitalist countries of the anti-Hitler coalition. The selfish aims of the monopolists, their policies of dragging out the war and their attempts to use the armed forces to strangle the national liberation movement caused dissatisfaction on the part of the working people and intensified the class struggle.
In most European countries, occupied by the nazis, the anti-fascist war of the peoples assumed the character of u revolutionary struggle. This was a result of the alignment of the class forces in the national liberation movement. The exploiter classes of such countries as Czechoslovakia, Poland 105and Yugoslavia either co-operated with the aggressors or looked for guidance from the emigre governments which had betrayed their people.
The capitalists and landowners were afraid of a nationwide struggle against the nazis and did everything they could to obstruct it. The patriotic forces who embarked on war against the invaders clashed with the reactionary classes at home. It would have been impossible to complete the struggle against the nazi aggressors without first smashing the domestic pro-fascist forces.
The national liberation war in those countries inevitably combined with the struggle for a revolutionary transformation of the socio-political system. The task of national liberation was indissolubly linked with that of the social liberation of the proletariat and of all the working people. Without national liberation from nazi oppression it would have been impossible to carry out the democratic tasks and to introduce radical social reforms. At the same time the war for national liberation of necessity included the revolutionary struggle of the democratic forces against the pro-fascist elements within the bourgeois-democratic countries.
World war exerts a different influence on the maturing of the revolutionary crisis in the different capitalist countries. It is generally stronger where the states at war pursue an unjust, aggressive policy. In that event the conflict between the people and the governments that have unleashed the war becomes particularly sharp. But the action of this general regularity depends on the course of the military operations, the morale of the people, the organisation of the working class, the political regime in the country, and on many other factors.
In nazi Germany, for example, despite the reactionary character of the war, the immiserisation of the people, the enormous number of victims and the defeats at the front, there were no social forces capable of overthrowing the nazi system. The ideology of racialism poisoned the minds of a large part of the German nation—it was unable to free itself from nazi reaction on its own. One of the reasons why the heroic efforts of the Communists, who showed the way out of the war and to the alliance of the anti-nazi elements, did not lead to the necessary results was the refusal by the Social-Democratic Party to form a united front with the 106Communists in the struggle against the nazis. Only the rout of the nazi armed forces freed Germany from Hitler’s tyranny.
Thus, the maturing of a revolutionary crisis and the further fate of the revolutionary movement in the capitalist countries drawn into the Second World War, were determined by the sum total of the internal and external factors in every individual country. The anti-fascist war objectively evolved the need for far-reaching revolutionary changes of all aspects of social life. The implementation of these changes in each country was determined not only by the internal relation of class forces, but also by the military and political situation shaping in the course of the Second World War.
Historical experience has confirmed that not war but the social contradictions and the development of the class struggle within countries are the mainspring of revolutionary transformations. In definite conditions world war intensifies the activity of the working people and urges them on to revolutionary action.
However, while world wars under some conditions may rouse the masses to struggle, they may under different conditions temporarily restrain the revolutionary process. Historical experience shows that the military way for the development of the world revolutionary process is neither the most universal nor the easiest one. A revolution following a war, connected with war or flaring up during a war, is “a particularly painful birth" of the new social system. War disorganises the economic life of a country, affects the social processes, the consciousness and morals of the people, teaches them to resolve political problems by means of armed force, and makes the building of socialism more difficult.
If previous wars with conventional weapons had such an effect, what will be the effect of a possible thermonuclear war on the revolutionary process? Undoubtedly, a new world war, should it be unleashed by the imperialists, will bury the capitalist system. But the cause of the struggle for socialism throughout the world is linked with peace, not war. War is not necessary to develop the world revolutionary process and to ensure the triumph of socialism throughout the world. Only adventurists, who care nothing for the fate of historical progress, can say that development impelled by war is more desirable to the working class than the peaceful competition 107between countries with different social systems, which is leading to the triumph of communism. Peace and socialism are indivisible: socialism creates the socio-economic basis for the peaceful co-operation of peoples, and peace promotes the development of the world revolutionary process and the triumph of socialism in all countries.
Notes
[99•1] A. Burke, “Power and Peace’.’, Orbis, Vol. VI, No. 2, Summer 1962, pp. 197, 198.
[101•1] International Meeting of Communist and Workers’ Parties, Moscow 1969, Prague, 1969, p. 144.
[101•2] Ibid., p. 30.
[103•1] V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 25, pp. 363–64.
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