Will it ever be possible to stop the war in Iraq?

The ruling parties, the enormous and global apparatus of the Church, and the regime-aligned labor unions—which have organized massive demonstrations against the war in European capitals, alongside smaller protests in dozens of countries around the world—have responded that the war can be stopped. They invoke the UN Charter and national constitutions which, like the Italian one, reject war; they pit against governments and parliaments the force of public opinion, which today—by a majority—opposes the war in every country, from Europe to the United States, from Japan to Russia. The most radical among them are threatening acts of civil disobedience to assert their rejection of war “without any ifs or buts.”

Meanwhile, the governments of France and Germany, supported by Russia and China, are currently opposing that war—but only to defend their imperialist interests in Iraq and the region, which are threatened by the U.S. offensive; on the opposite side, even Washington and London declare their intention to go to war against Iraq to defend world peace, which they claim is threatened by “terrorism” and the “rogue states” that protect it.

Yet, in this climate of a general “search for peace,” the war will happen, “no ifs, ands, or buts,” and no pacifist, interclassist, and nonviolent movement will be able to stop it. Never, in the long century that has just ended—marked by terrible wars between rival imperialist camps and by hundreds of their “local” interventions—has a war been prevented by forces invoking democratic and interclassist pacifism. Nor has a war ever been prevented by the democratic vote of a parliament.

War will break out because global Capital is thirsty for blood and destruction: the world economy is stagnating, and the United States needs war to escape the crisis of its economy, which has been in recession for many months now. There is a need to divide up Iraqi and Middle Eastern oil and, to this end, to secure strategic positions vital to the impending clash among imperialist powers: the United States of America, Europe, Russia, China, India, and Japan. It will be the Thirty Years’ War referred to by the spokesperson for the U.S. military-industrial complex, George W. Bush.

We communists know how readily the bourgeoisie’s “seasonal” pacifism is transformed into interventionism as economic expediency shifts. We recall that the pacifism of the Churches has always, at the opportune moment, turned into a blessing for the armies; we denounce the pacifism of the states as a propaganda tool used to justify their militarism; we recall that the pacifism of the regime-aligned unions has always served as a tool for patriotic conscription and for discipline in the production of war. Only the mobilization of the working class—which forms the backbone of the bourgeois armies and provides them with strength and blood—can prevent war.

In an article with the pointed title “Pacifism: Servant of Imperialism,” written in the first half of 1917 during the First World Slaughter, Leon Trotsky wrote: “There have never been as many pacifists in the world as there are today, when men are killing one another in every country. Every historical epoch has not only its own technology and political form, but also a form of hypocrisy peculiar to it. Once, peoples destroyed one another in the name of the Christian teaching of love for humanity. Today, only backward governments invoke Christ [or Allah, ed.]. Advanced nations are cutting each other’s throats in the name of Peace. Wilson drags America into war in the name of the League of Nations [today the UN] and perpetual peace. Kerensky and Tsereteli [democratic and “left-wing” leaders of the bourgeois government in Russia] call for the offensive in the interest of imminent peace.”

A few months later, the war on the Eastern Front came to a halt: the Russian proletariat, under the leadership of the Bolshevik Party, fraternized with the German “enemy” and abandoned the trenches to turn their rifles on their own bourgeoisie; it seized political power and imposed peace on all of Europe, under the threat of international revolution.

Only the victory of the counterrevolution—in Russia and worldwide—and the subjugation of the international proletariat to bourgeois economics and ideology, which persisted for so many decades, allowed other bourgeois wars to halt the wheel of history and erase the memory of those events from the younger generations of the proletariat. It is up to the party—the historical memory of the class—to remember and point the way forward.

In Italy, the anti-concertative unions—which joined the Rome demonstration and mobilized workers to attend it—must bear in mind that the current “idyll” among all classes centered on “no to war” is merely superficial, ephemeral, unfounded, and fallacious, and that they will soon find themselves completely alone even on the issue of class-based anti-militarism. They have issued the call for a general strike against the war. Among the confederal unions, to date, the FIOM has reportedly responded, with lukewarm support from the CGIL. The UIL has already headed to the front lines, like the Alpine troops; the CISL is sitting on the fence, calling for peace but not lifting a finger. But the history of the last century teaches us that regime-aligned unions—and the CGIL is a regime-aligned union—will never take a stand against the interests of the national economy and politics. The same judgment applies, of course, to the parliamentary parties, even those on the “left.”

No one is under the illusion that a strike—especially one carried out in the current manner, lasting just one day or one shift, ensuring essential services, and called by minority unions (even if the FIOM and CGIL were involved)—could serve as a deterrent to the bourgeoisie and the state against joining the war. However, it is a necessary step today toward the reorganization of the working class, without which it will be impossible for the working class to oppose not only new local wars tomorrow, but also a new world war—which may not be far off.