Letter: Social Insanity (M. Rubel)

Dear Editors,
I should like to bring to the attention of your readers a double question, about the so-called “balance of terror”. I am hoping to encourage some debate on this, having already tried without great success to obtain some response from the so-called “intellectual elite” on this matter. What difference is there between the “totalitarian” political regimes where the voice of reason is automatically stifled, and the so-called liberal regimes, where the free voice of irrationality overwhelmingly stifles, in practice, the voice of reason? Don’t these two types of regime suffer from the same malady, which we might call a kind of politico-military paranoia? With regard to the future of humanity, these rival oligarchies show themselves to be accomplices caught up in one demented course, based on a barbaric strategy: “If you want peace, prepare for a universal holocaust”.
Maximilien Rubel
Paris

Reply
We endorse fully the suggestion that the governments of both West and East are engaged in a kind of madness, or irrationality which threatens to end in a nuclear war which would probably wipe out a large percentage of the human race. We would add two important points. Firstly, the “madness” of leaders and governments to which our correspondent refers cannot be considered in isolation from the rest of the population. Their power is ultimately a reflection of the failure of the working class to assert its interests; their ability to inflict “paranoia” and the hatreds of nationalism and warfare on the rest of us arises directly out of our acquiescence. Secondly, weapons proliferate not for their own sake, but in order to fight wars, and wars in their turn do not take place in isolation from social forces. The cause of war in the modern world is the competition between rival capitalist power blocs, including Russia and China as well as the more openly capitalist countries. They compete over markets, trade routes and raw materials: all sources of profit for the propertied minority within each state. These issues need not concern the working class majority, who are merely used as cannon fodder.

The only way to end the madness of preparing for a universal holocaust is to prepare for a universal revolution. This revolution must democratically replace the profit system with the common ownership of the world’s resources. For this, we need a majority of socialists, and the present growth of the socialist movement must be actively encouraged by all who seek to remove the threat of war from the face of the earth.
EDITORS