Capitalism’s ‘Social-Peace’ is Class War!

“War Is Peace!” – George Orwell ‘1984’

Hundreds of thousands have marched repeatedly in London and across these islands against the carnage of the Gaza war.  Many expressing their impotent outrage at the suffering. 

Most however as partisans of one capitalist state solution or another, blind to or ignoring of their own experience of the state’s relationship to war and our class.  How’s that working?  It isn’t. It is instead weaponised turning communities against each other as alleged hate speech. 

Without open class conflict it can achieve nothing that doesn’t suit the interests of the rival belligerents and their respective capitalist bloc sponsors. And why one war but not another?

It’s hardly surprising that people are fatigued by their exposure to the horror of war.  A sense of powerlessness threatens to overwhelm us. Easier to imagine that it could never be us rather than acknowledge the blood is spilling on our doorstep.

We are daily witness to such horrors that t it seems beyond our imagination. How could this be? What could it be like? Could it ever be us?

If we want to conjure an image of what Ukraine might be like think of towns like Cannock or Whitby or Newport reduced to rubble. If you think of Gaza imagine somewhere between the size of the Isle of Wight and the Isle of Man flattened by the bombs of the proud capitals of ‘democracy’.

Beyond where we want to go are the shocking memories of Sarah Everard at the hands of a serving police officer. Think of the tens of thousands raped, murdered, slaughtered by proud men in uniforms endorsed by their governments!  ‘Democratic’ or otherwise makes little difference to the victims.

This is neither far away or long ago but now, no further than a holiday you may have thought of in Gran Canaria or Cyprus. And these are only the wars the media is reporting on, much of the rest of the world is aflame: Sudan; Ethiopia; Congo; Myanmar, to name a few.

The war is no further away than the nearest arms or components factory.  No further than the nearest logistics depot, transport hub, communications centre.  The war is where the ports and airports are, the military bases and their reserve volunteers’ stations.

It is the rail networks and motorways, the towns, estates, cities and factories where we as workers’ pay the price of war in widening poverty and worsening austerity.  Worsening conditions, lower pay and the threat of military call up or conscription.

In truth we cannot move without being at war and when we notice it, the rhetorical guns blaze “disrupter, extremist, terrorist!”  We are already, through our toleration of their economic planning and its social and political consequences, being partially conscripted by capitalism and its state actors into its destructive rivalry.

The blood and treasure of our labour is being stolen and squandered to steal the treasure of the labour of others like ourselves!

Where we notice and try to act our protest and resistance is squandered too.  Marshalled by capitalisms loyal ‘left wing’ opposition into the passivity of marches to support or oppose one side or the other.  The abattoir or the slaughterhouse!

This is not peace! It is capitalisms ‘Social-Peace’ of order, discipline, defamation and control.  The bloodied Home-Front of their fratricidal wars next door.

If in doubt of the violence of their Social-Peace, reflect on the defeated strikes, the disaster of the care sector, Covid and the collapsing health services, the 25% annual increase in rough sleepers and the lengthening food banks queues!

This is their war against our class at home while they openly talk of expanding their wars abroad fed by enforceable military service.  If it achieves nothing else, it creates fear and a misplaced gratitude for the devil you-know – their Social Peace.

Here and abroad, it is capitalism and its state that is the disrupter, the extremist, the terrorist!  Don’t just march, organise and act:  this ‘Warfare State’ is the enemy at home and our resistance to it, our struggle with it, our ‘Class War’ is our necessary, best and urgent response against it!

Article by Dreyfus