Russian Tensions

[Roberto]

I largely agree with the emphasis on material interests, although I would add one qualification. We should be careful not to imagine the capitalist class as a single conscious body capable of collectively calculating when war has become too expensive and then simply turning it off.

Capitalism is competitive not only between individual capitals but also between states and blocs of capital. Different sections of the owning class can have conflicting interests. What benefits arms manufacturers may damage other industries; what benefits one national capital may threaten another; and what appears rational to one state from the standpoint of strategic competition may impose enormous costs upon capital elsewhere.

That is precisely why capitalism can produce wars which, viewed retrospectively, seem economically disastrous. There does not have to be a conspiracy or a single capitalist command centre directing everything. Competition itself can generate the conflict.

Political leaders and military establishments also acquire interests of their own, but ultimately they operate within a society whose wealth is produced by workers and whose states depend upon maintaining the conditions for capital accumulation.

So I would not confidently predict when Russia will be reintegrated into the wider world economy. But the general point remains important: today’s mortal enemies can become tomorrow’s trading partners when economic and strategic circumstances change. Capital has no permanent friendships, only changing interests.

And this brings us back to the position of workers. Whether Russian, Ukrainian, American, Chinese or European, they are repeatedly asked to identify their interests with those of “their” state and “their” national capitalist class.

Yet workers do the fighting, produce the weapons, finance states through the wealth they create, suffer the destruction and are then expected to rebuild what war has destroyed.

That old definition of a rifle therefore captures something profound:

“A steel tube with a member of the working class at each end.”

The socialist answer is not to decide which worker at which end of the rifle represents the more deserving national interest. It is to ask why workers should be pointing rifles at one another in defence of competing interests that are not fundamentally their own.

The tragedy is not simply that wars are expensive for capitalism. It is that workers are persuaded that conflicts between competing states and ruling classes are their conflicts too.

[Author]

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