Blair is right!

      
     
  Former Labour Cabinet Minister, Claire Short, describes Tony Blair as
"delusional". We don't know about that,but he does seem to think that he too,
like his buddy George Bush, is the commander in chief of his country's armed
forces.

 Last month he was televised making a speech on board a warship in the Plymouth
naval base surrounded by khaki-clad soldiers and camouflaged armoured cars.

 Exactly the sort of background Bush chooses to make his pro-war 
pronouncements, but he has an excuse in that, constitutionally, 
he is the commander in chief.Blair is just the Queen's first minister.

 Blair told the assembled military personnel that he wanted them and the
rest of Britain's armed forces to be "warfighters" and not mere "peacekeepers"
and pledged,to prepare for the future wars he foresees,"increased expenditure
on equipment,personnel and the conditions of our armed forces".

It was an extraordinary display of gung-ho militarism from the head of a
Labour government whose first Foreign Secretary declared that Labour, 
unlike the Tories,would pursue "an ethical foreign policy" and from the
leader of a party that once used to pride itself on being the peace party.
But, given world capitalism, his argument has a ruthless logic.

 Blair drew a distinction between "hard power" (military might) and "soft power"
(diplomacy) and argued that if Britain "retreated" into maintaining its armed
forces merely for peacekeeping then "inexorably" its "soft power" would be 
weakened too.

 According to the Financial Times (12 January),he said that "the main risk for
the future was not gung-ho leaders too keen to embark on military adventure 
- but those who concluded that military engagement was too difficult and
thereby fall into a passive disengagement"; in which case "the result would be
'Britain's reach,effect and influence qualitatively reduced'".

 It's an argument that can't be faulted.Capitalism is a world-wide system
involving a competitive struggle for profits in which all states vie with
each other to influence the course of events in favour of profit-seeking
enterprises from within their borders. Normally this takes the form of 
diplomatic initiatives and manoeuvrings but the weight other states attach
to these depends on whether they think the state in question has the means
- and the determination - to back them up.

The means can be - still in the realm of Blair's "soft power" - economic
retaliation or sabre-rattling, but to be credible a state must ultimately
be prepared to do more than merely have big sabres or just rattle them.

 Blair's model, Mrs Thatcher, understood this well (even if at the time he
himself didn't, sporting as he then did a CND badge). Which is why when
third-rate power Argentina took over the Falkland Islands she sent out
the "task force" to recover them. If she hadn't, Britain's credibility
and standing in the international pecking order would have gone down.

 So Blair is right. Without armed forces trained and equipped for "war 
fighting"(and killing and dying) beyond its frontiers, Britain's "reach,
effect and influence" to further the interests of its capitalist class 
in the international arena will be weakened.

 The terrifying fact is that it is not him who is deluding himself
(at least not on this point) but those who believe that an ethical
foreign policy is possible. 

 The international state-system that world capitalism has engendered
is not one where there are any rules. It's every state for itself,
no favours given and woe to the weak. If Britain's rivals on the 
world stage thought that its government had moral scruples about going
all the way in employing its armed forces they would give less weight
to its diplomatic initiatives in defence of its capitalist class.

So, what are we to conclude? By all means let those who want a world
without war denounce every war that takes place but without the illusion
that we can get states within capitalism to renounce war as a policy option.

This will never happen as it goes against the whole logic of the capitalist
state-system. Once again, it is quite literally true that world-wide
socialism is the only framework within which a lasting peace can exist.
Let us, therefore, work for it as the priority of priorities.    

Introducing The Socialist Party


The Socialist Party is like no other political party in Britain. It is made
up of people who have joined together because we want to get rid of
the profit system and establish real socialism. 

Our aim is to persuade others to become  socialist and act for themselves,
organising democratically and without leaders, to bring about the kind of
society that we are advocating in this journal. 
We are solely concerned with building a movement of socialists for socialism. 

We are not a reformist party with a programme of
policies to patch up capitalism.

We use every possible opportunity to make new socialists. 
We publish pamphlets and books, as well as CDs, DVDs and 
various other informative material.

We also give talks and take part in debates; attend rallies, meetings 
and demos; run educational conferences; host internet discussion forums,
make films presenting our ideas, and contest elections when practical. 
Socialist literature is available in Arabic, Bengali, Dutch, Esperanto,
French, German,Italian, Polish, Spanish, Swedish and Turkish as well 
as English.

The more of you who join the Socialist Party the more we will be able
to get our ideas across, the more experiences we will be able to draw
on and greater will be the new ideas for building the movement which 
you will be able to bring us.

The Socialist Party is an organisation of equals. There is no leader and
there are no followers. So, if you are going to join we want you to be
sure that you agree fully with what we stand for and that we are satisfied
that you understand the case for socialism.

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