Peace is Subversive!

“The histories of whole peoples were wiped out for precisely the same reason that the history of the working class movement in recent times is wiped out: it does not suit the conquerors for it to be known, because traditions keep alive the spirit of revolt.”   Albert Meltzer

Who remembers the “Christmas Truce”?  As 1,200,000 soldiers from both sides of the Russia-Ukraine conflict face each other across a 600-mile-long frozen line of no-man’s land in dugouts and trenches, we scream at the manipulation and violence against our class!

We recall the spontaneous ‘refusal’ truce that broke out in similar circumstances 109 years ago along the Western Front in the First World War.

Spanning the borders of Belgium and France, this ‘Christmas Truce’ as it became known, saw 100,000 or more combatants from the opposing armies making the decision to connect and not fight. 

A fifth of the front line ceased to function because of the instinctive mutual solidarity of workers, not yet fully militarised or traumatised by the warfare-state.

Some of us will remember the firsthand stories of our grandparents. Others, the tales of their family. For most it will be unheard off, and if it is, with little acknowledgement. The memory of peace and solidarity is subversive.

Those precious two days are largely hidden from us by official censorship and denial. In reality, given the betrayal of the organised Labour Movement at the outbreak of the First World War, choosing bosses and states over our class, real workers face-to-face making peace was our last best chance. 

Finally, ordered and even shelled back to their trenches, at least 22,000,000 workers were to die in the next seven years until the bloodletting of the capitalist meat grinder tired itself out.

Ukraine has called for another 500,000 men under arms. admitting that that is doubling its current force.  What is not admitted is the growing lack of public support for the conflict, and the attempt by many to avoid conscription by one means or another.  Including fleeing or buying their way out.  Over 40,000 are now documented.

Russia, despite its advantage in numbers. is so desperate to avoid the obvious impact of mass mobilisation on its society, that having run out of prisoners to force into combat, it is now resorting to pressing into service migrants and asylum seekers taken from the border with Finland and Ukrainian prisoners of war.  For the refugees, if they survive the higher casualty rate than the Ukrainians, after six months they win residency in a militarised autocracy.

In a paradoxical irony, the Gaza- Israel war is turning the lands where the mythology that originated the concept of Christmas was born, into a blood bathed Armageddon.  In 3 months twice as many civilians have died and four times the civilian infrastructure destroyed than in the Ukraine after two years.

Truce here at best is a violent pause that continues the starvation and immiseration of our class.  The working-class have no borders, but nor does the pitiless butchery carried out under the banners of nation states and their proxies. 

In all cases, refusing to fight, desertion, protestation or demanding peace against the goals of capitalisms agents is greeted by states first as cowardly disloyalty and second as seditious treason. Yet how else can war be stopped in a combatant zone?

In the latter half of the First World War in the absence of truce, mutinies became more widespread and more frequent culminating ultimately in revolutionary upheaval in an attempt to change the world. A desperate and divided capitalism managed then to unite long enough to defeat it. 

And here we are again. The path to world war has been described as a conglomeration of numerous conflicts.  With an eye on history, opposition to war now is more than needed but urgent if our class Is not to be consumed again by the millions in another global conflagration.  One that this time could end all wars through our extinction!

The call for ceasefires, the demand for peace is rejected because if it doesn’t meet the goals of the capitalist class, it is subversive, seditious, and a threat to their power.  We should not delude ourselves that peace is the opposite of the active struggle against war.

Refusal or annihilation, war or revolution? This is the existential question our class faces. That is why we say the class war is the peace movement. No war between peoples, no peace between classes, that is what we mean by No War But The Class War!

By Dreyfus