Remembrance Day: War, Myth and Reality

91 years ago today, the First World War finally ended. The man-made hell in Europe marked the dawn of a new age of industrialized slaughter. Its dubious status as "the war to end all wars" became a bad joke almost immediately following the Armistice, contradicted most visibly by the even greater atrocities of the Second World War. Even today, historians disagree on the causes of World War I, a needless conflict that inalterably changed the course of human development in the 20th century and beyond. War is a contagion that feeds on the collective sense of anger and tragedy engendered by every previous conflict. But even today, the historical conditions that allowed, even encouraged, such collective madness, endure through the continued dominance of the capitalist mode of production.

The world of 1914 was in many ways as globalized as our own. It was the heyday of imperialism, and the European powers had carved up most of the world in an effort to lay claim to raw materials and captive markets that would help enrich the ruling classes of each respective country. Long before the assassination in Sarajevo, there was no room left for each of the powers to expand without encroaching on the territory of the others. In his 1915 pamphlet War and the International, Leon Trotsky explained that the move to total war was borne out of the inevitable contradictions between international capitalist markets and the outmoded, artificial boundaries imposed by the nation-state:

The present war is at bottom a revolt of the forces of production against the political form of nation and state. It means the collapse of the national state as an independent economic unit.

The nation must continue to exist as a cultural, ideological and psychological fact, but its economic foundation has been pulled from under its feet. All talk of the present bloody clash being the work of national defense is either hypocrisy or blindness. On the contrary, the real objective significance of the War is the breakdown of the present national economic centers, and the substitution of a world economy in its stead. But the way the governments propose to solve this problem of imperialism is not through the intelligent, organized cooperation of all of humanity’s producers, but through the exploitation of the world’s economic system by the capitalist class of the victorious country; which country is by this War to be transformed from a Great Power into a World Power.

The War proclaims the downfall of the national state. Yet at the same time it proclaims the downfall of the capitalist system of economy. By means of the national state, capitalism has revolutionized the whole economic system of the world. It has divided the whole earth among the oligarchies of the great powers, around which were grouped the satellites, the small nations, who lived off the rivalry between the great ones. The future development of world economy on the capitalistic basis means a ceaseless struggle for new and ever new fields of capitalist exploitation, which must be obtained from one and the same source, the earth. The economic rivalry under the banner of militarism is accompanied by robbery and destruction which violate the elementary principles of human economy. World production revolts not only against the confusion produced by national and state divisions but also against the capitalist economic organizations, which has now turned into barbarous disorganization and chaos.

The War of 1914 is the most colossal breakdown in history of an economic system destroyed by its inherent contradictions. …

Capitalism has created the material conditions of a new Socialist economic system. Imperialism has led the capitalist nations into historic chaos. The War of 1914 shows the way out of this chaos by violently urging the proletariat on to the path of Revolution.

The results of the First World War ultimately satisfied no one save the United States, which was the only Great Power left relatively unscathed by the calamity. The Treaty of Versailles paved the way for the Second World War, which was ultimately fought for the same reasons as the First; namely, rising powers (Germany and Japan) were dissatisfied with the restrictions placed on their access to international markets by existing geopolitical power arrangements. In 1914, Germany's chief rivals were France and Great Britain; by 1939, with France and Britain weakened by the strain of fighting the last war, it was the USA that ultimately represented the greatest challenge to German supremacy.

The fact that the world wars were fought out of conflicting economic and geopolitical interests between the Great Powers has been distorted and romanticized in the time since; as always, the winners write the history books. The propaganda message of the Allied powers in the First and Second World Wars - i.e. that this was a fight against militarism and dictatorship on behalf of freedom and democracy - has become ingrained as official historical truth, aided by the undeniable brutality of the Nazi and Japanese war machines amid atrocities such as the Holocaust and the Rape of Nanking. But we should not permit historical romanticism to get in the way of analyzing the real concerns of the ruling classes in each belligerent nation. As Glenn Greenwald reminded us today in a story about the increasingly autocratic Iraqi administration of Nouri al-Maliki, governments do not fight wars to spread freedom, democracy and human rights. They do it for more basic economic interests - not for the country as a whole, mind you, but to ensure the elites continue to reap the benefits of captive markets around the globe.

Note this analysis by veteran British Trotskyist Barbara Slaughter, who lived through World War II as a young girl. She beautifully punctures the Churchillian myth proffered by the government of the time and since adopted by all Western governments, getting to the reality of the situation:

After the fall of France, Churchill and the government propaganda machine portrayed Britain as a brave little island fighting on behalf of the people of the world for the defence of democracy. And this was widely accepted. The country was mobilised into the war effort, and a whole generation of youth was conscripted into the armed forces believing they were in fighting for democracy against the evils of fascism.

But far from being just a “little island,” Britain was the most powerful colonial nation the world had ever seen. The British Empire made up one-fifth of the earth’s surface, including the Indian subcontinent as well as vast regions in Africa.

The colonial peoples were cruelly oppressed and exploited and the British bourgeoisie extracted vast raw materials and financial resources from every corner of the globe. It was this power which was challenged by the German war machine. In order to become a world power, the German bourgeoisie required access to the resources of the world. And the establishment of Germany as a world power was something which the British ruling class could not tolerate.

The only possible response of all the major capitalist powers to the economic crisis that was raging in the 1920s and 30s was trade war, leading to military conflict.

In 1938, Trotsky had warned of the imminence of war, which he described as “a catastrophe that threatened the whole culture of mankind.” And what was the essence of that conflict? It was an imperialist war waged by the capitalist great powers—“democratic” and fascist alike—for the division of the world and its resources in the interests of profit.

If the ruling classes' lust for dominance and access to global markets was the key impetus to two world wars, can we now say that this gruesome period in human history is well and truly over? Sadly, no. As long as the capitalist mode of production persists, the bourgeoisie of each Great Power will aim to establish its own predominance in the zero-sum game of global hegemony. Frank Capra's World War II-era American propaganda film Why We Fight pointed to the potential for Axis domination of the Eurasian land mass as the key factor in compelling the USA to join the war effort. Today, the leading ideologues of American imperialism - most notably former Carter advisor and current Obama advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski in his book The Grand Chessboard - emphasize the continued importance of U.S. dominance over Eurasia and its ample natural resources. Is it any wonder that the seemingly pointless war in Afghanistan - with its key strategic location in central Asia - continues to command unswerving support among ruling classes in Canada, the United States and Europe?

As the United States continues its historical decline - aggravated by the inability of the American political-media establishment to see beyond its own imperialistic hubris (biggest economic crisis since the Great Depression? Expand the war into Pakistan!) - we see the potential for rival powers like China, India and Russia to step into the fray and advance the economic interests of their own elites. The key question is, as the United States is further weakened and these powers grow ever stronger, will we see a new global conflict? I used to think the possibility was remote, given the deeply entangled trade relationship between "frenemies" China and the United States. However, as America becomes ever weaker economically, might it exploit the one area in which it is still indisputably a world leader - i.e., military force?

As this article helpfully explains, that is precisely what the world's premier rogue state has been up to for the last 20 years. The United States has engaged in military action against Iraq, the Balkan states, Afghanistan, Iraq again, and is now seemingly determined to pursue a war against Iran. The military-industrial complex, the backbone of the American economy since the Cold War (and, for all intents and purposes, the Second World War), has truly spun out of control. I wouldn't be surprised if, like Germany in the 1930s (to use a tired comparison), the country's elites turn to renewed war as an economic stimulus. They seem to prefer that to any other option.

Remembrance Day should be a day in which we reflect on the colossal waste and pointless slaughter of war. Sometimes we do, but even today we feel the need to justify the killing through abstract ideals, proclaiming that Canadian soldiers in World War I died "fighting for democracy". Perhaps the individual soldiers did, but the politicians who sent them there most certainly did not. Warren Beatty, as American Communist John Reed in the film Reds, had a piece of dialogue that summed it up best. When asked about the causes of the First World War, the Reed character simply responds, "profits".

It's a considerably less romantic picture than the one we commonly associate with slain soldiers, but an absolutely essential perspective if we are to educate the people about the true causes of war and the need to end the subjugation of human life to corporate profiteering. Sanitized war memorials and regurgitation of contemporary propaganda only serve to remythologize the pointless slaughter.