War! -what is it good for? Well, capitalism actually by Richard Searle

The economic system we all live under was born, as Marx succinctly put it, ‘red in tooth and claw’. The arms trade, the defence industry, security interests, national interests, which every way they call it, they are all prefaced on killing.

There’s no polite way of putting it: for this economic system to succeed, continue and renew itself, others must die. The wars of the 20th century have killed millions. We have turned it ‘art of war’ into an industrial process

In the eight short years of 21st century, and estimated one million more have joined the tally of war dead, from Central Africa and the Middle East, to the Caucuses and the Andes How far we come from the slaughter of the trenches of WW1?

We now have high-tech wars in Afghanistan and Iraq where missiles fired from pilotless drones are directed from thousands of miles away in command rooms in the USA. Those who fire the missiles never have to step foot in the country of those they kill. This is the iron fist of globalisation.

We can now turn on our televisions or Log-on and see wars being fought in real time. Our society puts its best brains to work finding more efficient ways of killing people. Our governments subsidise the arms industries, gives bribes to the purchasers and justify this by saying it’s protecting jobs. There exists an absurd and obscene contradiction at the very heart of capitalism. It provides the potential to extend life but is driven to end life. The combined defence budgets of the world for one year would eradicate world hunger, provide clean drinking for every person on the planet, an education for every child, could provide the medicine for every person with HIV and still have plenty of change left over. Resistance to this logic, this drive to destruction, has always been there. It has been resisted by passive and active means. There have been those who have refused to fight and those who have turned their guns on their masters. The 15th February 2003, turning point in modern history. The convergence of global protests on one day in 2003 marked a first in human history. Protests moved through 12 time zones around the world, Those protests were organised from the grassroots up. They combined differing forces, movements and traditions. Those protests joined up the world as never before This is our immediate heritage not an event from another era. It showed how far we have come together, our potential, our ability to communicate with new technology but it showed us how far we still need to go.

Those protests were at once a victory in mobilisation, but within short space of time some participants read the 15th February as a defeat. The threat of war that had brought them on the streets had gone ahead. ‘We had marched in our millions but the bombs still fell’.

Un-ravelling all the lessons, layers and contradictions of the 15th February 2003 provides the key to developing our strategies to stop the masters of war.

What is the impact of 15th February ? Is it too early to tell?

Discuss