The unfinished peace: how war transitions to decades of economic and social conflict

“ The North, victorious, forgot; but the South, broken and defeated, remembered. Until I had been a good while in the South and talked with many people I had no idea what a social cataclysm like the Civil War really meant to those who are defeated, how long it echoes in the hearts of men and women. The Negro has indeed suffered—suffered on his way upward; but the white man, with his higher cultivation, his keener sensibilities, his memories of a departed glory, has suffered far more. ”

“ The collapse of the old order, the humiliation of defeat, the bereavement and bankruptcy involved, represented, with its obscure miseries and tragedies, the social revolution the most unrecorded and undepicted, in proportion to its magnitude, that ever was; so that this reversion of the starved spirit to the things of the heroic age, the four epic years, is a definite soothing salve—a sentiment which has, moreover, in the South, to cultivate, itself, intellectually, from season to season, the field over which it ranges, and to sow with its own hands such crops as it may harvest. ”

“ It is only in the North and West, among the descendants of the men who fought and died for the Union, that we find the principles for which their fathers stood, forgotten or cowardly surrendered. For these men to allow the colored man to be robbed of his rights by the descendants of those who fought to destroy the Union and to perpetuate slavery is to dishonor the memory of their fathers; is virtually to say, that they were wrong, and that the rebels were right. Such an attitude is an affront to every loyal white man who fell during the war or who fought for the Union and the cause of freedom. ”

“ There are others equally worthy of mention who are known to be our friends, our sympathizers, our well-wishers.
8VIII. At the end of these fifty years of freedom, we find ourselves shut out of a great many avenues of employment. There are not many things that we can get to do. This is due mainly to race antipathy, to a growing indisposition on the part of the whites, to work with us. The outlook in this respect is not growing brighter, but rather darker and darker. The disposition seems to be to limit our activities to the most menial occupations, or to shut us out entirely. ”

“ Then, at last, when the country is no longer distracted by a fierce conflict between Congress and the President; when the great results of the war are placed beyond the reach of a reaction; when peace is assured by the fact that every class of society has its rights secured, and when we have a President whose ambition it is to follow the enlightened judgment of the people, then at last the people may safely devote their undivided attention to the important and pressing questions of social improvement and material prosperity. ”

“ The large number of teachers, lawyers, doctors, ministers, now to be found among us, as compared with fifty years ago, show the same thing.
Nor need I speak of the changed condition that these fifty years have wrought in our economic condition. We are still poor; we still have to struggle to make ends meet, to keep the wolf from the 4door; but there can be no doubt that we are very much better off now than we were fifty years ago. ”

“ Why is it, finally, that with the enormous extension of political rights and privileges during the past fifty years, there has occurred a social, political, and industrial degeneration that fills with alarm the thoughtful minds of all countries? Aside from the demoralization due to the destructive wars fought since the Crimean, the answer to these questions is to be found in the fact that at bottom politics is a form of civil war, that politicians are a species of condottieri, and that to both may be traced all the ethics and evils of a state of chronic war itself. ”

“ During and after the war, however, the demand for a reconstruction of the world’s entire political and economic structure became more insistent. Radical ideas as to what ought to be done, and radical proposals as to how it ought to be done were brought forth and spread. The world found itself, almost in a day, face to face with demands for the complete repudiation of democracy as an ideal and of individualism as a principle of economic organization. Proposals for state socialism, guild socialism, communism, and a dictatorship of the proletariat were put forth aggressively on every hand. ”

“ Then came the civil war, and after four years of struggle their whole power and pride lay shivered to atoms at our feet; their sons dead by tens of thousands on the battlefields of this country; their fields and their homes devastated; their fortunes destroyed; and more than that, the whole social system in which they had their very being, with all their hopes and pride, utterly wiped out; slavery forever abolished, and the slaves themselves created a political power before which they had to bow their heads ”

“ War releases all that is brutal in man, and places woman in a peculiarly helpless position; therefore it is a prolific immediate source of prostitution. But the ultimate and permanent source is the source of war itself, the economic exploitation of man by man. So long as society is organized to protect the exploiter, so long will peace be an incessant struggle—for more wealth with the privileged classes; for existence with the exploited masses—and war will be, as it has always been, merely a final explosion of the struggling forces. ”

“ These three phases of competition are accompanied by three forms of war—the economic war, the class war and international wars.
All three forms of war have an economic background. The economic war is the contest for resources, trade, markets, monopolies and investment opportunities. The class war [Pg 155] between the exploiter and the exploited, grows out of the economic relations existing between the owner and the worker. International wars are fought for economic advantage—for resources, trade, markets. ”

“ Shall the Nation endure it longer? Shall we struggle on and on until the welcome day comes when his term shall expire? The people say 'No'; men struggling in business say 'No'; men longing for peace and harmony in the land say 'No'; the loyal men of the South, who have been abused and hunted by wicked rebels, say 'No'; and I trust that the answer of all these may be the answer of this House to-day, and the answer of the Senate of the United States within a reasonable time after these articles shall be sent to them. ”

“ But this unification of the social life, by the working of the capitalist form of production, developed itself from the beginning, and continues to develop itself, not according to preconceived rules, plans and designs, but, on the contrary, by reason of frictions and struggles, which in their sum form a colossal complication of antitheses. War without and war within. Struggle incessant among the nations, and struggles incessant between the members of each nation. ”

“ Reason is not so simple nor so unrelated a thing, for the material things that each nation wants, and the means by which the nation gets them, seem to the nation preeminently just and reasonable. However pompous the superstructure of ethics and ideals, the solid foundation of war, as of other social developments, is economic. So long as nations, or at all events their ruling groups, have conflicting economic interests, war is inevitable.
According to the Socialist, therefore, war and capitalism were inseparable. War must continue so long as the wage-system continued. ”

“ In the earlier part of the essay the social cleavages are embarrassingly revealed,—the ignominy of being a manual laborer or, worse still, a domestic servant, and the consequent struggle to escape from toil and all the conditions that surround it. This leads quickly to a study of the economic situation in a republic where every man is for himself. ”

“ The eighteenth century was the age of individualism, laissez faire and freedom. Everything was in process of emancipation except woman.
The attention of economists at this time was directed to that region of social life in which the behavior of the individual is most individualistic and least controlled, namely, the market place. The economic man, as the classical economists conceived him, is more completely embodied in the trader in the auction pit, than in any other figure in any other situation in society. And the trader in that position performs a very important social function. ”

“ Such a principle means war, means waste, means wide-spread social demoralization; and it must, if society is to endure, be succeeded at no distant day by some true principle of accommodation and harmony, in virtue of which it shall become the interest of the laboring classes to promote the creation of wealth by faithful and intelligent work, and the interest of the capitalist class to extend the fullest measure of justice to those whose labor fructifies their capital. ”

“ The development and the extension of the [Pg 60] bourgeois system have been rapid and colossal in these last fifty years. It already invades sacred and ancient Russia and it is creating, not only in America, Australia and in India, but even in Japan, new centers of modern production, thus complicating the conditions of competition and the entanglements of the world market. The consequences of political changes have been produced, or will not be long to wait for. ”

“ We need to impress ourselves with the importance of being efficient. We must know how to do things; we must know how to do things well. It isn't enough that a thing is done; it must be well done. Quality in work is the thing that tells; and more and more as competition increases we must impress ourselves with that fact. The old adage, "Whatever is worth doing at all, is worth doing well," we cannot too strongly impress ourselves with. Inefficiency puts an individual of a race always at a disadvantage. ”

“ When the long struggle was ended and economic equality, guaranteed by the public administration of capital, had been established, the people got together from all parts of the land enormous collections of what you used to call the evidences of value, which, while purporting to be certificates of property in things, had been really certificates of the ownership of men, deriving, as we have seen, their whole value from the serfs attached to the things by the constraint of bodily necessities. ”

“ White again, "America is joining the world movement towards equal opportunity for all men in our modern civilization," then indeed the greatest political and economic struggle of history, the final conflict between capitalism and Socialism, is at hand. ”

“ For these reasons, we, members of the Provisional Government of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, solemnly declare to the world that Vietnam has the right to be a free and independent country and in fact it already has been so. The entire Vietnamese people are determined to mobilise all their physical and mental strength, to sacrifice their lives and property in order to safeguard their independence and liberty. ”

“ Since 1930, under the leadership of the Communist Party of Vietnam founded and trained by President Ho Chi Minh, our People have waged a protracted struggle full of hardship and sacrifice for national independence and freedom and for their own happiness. In the wake of the triumph of the August Revolution, on September 2, 1945, President Ho Chi Minh read the Proclamation of Independence, declaring the birth of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, now the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. ”

“ Article 48 The State shall develop to the full the people's patriotism and revolutionary heroism, educate the entire people in matters of national defence and security, enact a regime of military service and rear-area policies, build up the national-defence industry to ensure proper equipment for the armed forces. It shall harmonise national defence with the economy and vice versa, seek to ensure proper material and spiritual living conditions for officers and soldiers, national-defence workers and employees. ”

“ With the will and strength of the entire nation and the assistance of friends around the world, our People have gained great victories in the struggles to liberate the nation, reunify the country, defend the Fatherland and fulfill international duties, and have recorded resounding achievements of historical significance in the cause of renewing and building the country toward socialism. ”

“ The People's Court / Office of Supervision and Control Article 126 It is the duty of the People's Court and the People's Office of Supervision and Control to, within the bounds of their functions, safeguard socialist legality, the socialist regime and the people's mastery, the property of the State and the collectives, the lives, property, freedom, honour and dignity of the citizen. ”

“ Article 65 The people's armed forces shall show absolute loyalty to the Fatherland, the People, the Party and the State; protect the independence, sovereignty, unity and territorial integrity of the Fatherland, national security, and social order and safety; safeguard the People, the Party, the State and the socialist regime; and join the entire people in national construction and the performance of international duties. ”

“ In the light of Marxism-Leninism and Ho Chi Minh's thought, carrying into effect the Programme of national construction in the period of transition to socialism, the Vietnamese people vow to unite millions as one, uphold the spirit of self-reliance in building the country, carry out a foreign policy of independence, sovereignty, peace, friendship and cooperation with all nations, strictly abide by the Constitution, and win ever greater successes in their effort to renovate, build and defend their motherland. ”

“ The war showed the impotence of the present order to assure even a reasonable measure of human happiness and well-being. Of what profit the material benefits of a civilization that takes a toll of thirty-five millions of lives and that wrecks the economic machinery of a continent in four short years? Yet the failure of the revolutionary forces to avail themselves of the opportunity presented by the war proved the unreadiness of the masses to throw off the yoke of the old régime and to lay the foundations of a new order. ”

“ The human race has no guarantee of the success of any experiment, and recent experiences with the war, and with the present post-war plight of Europe suggest that the capitalist experiment will fail disastrously unless some extraordinarily successful efforts are made to put things to rights.
Society experiments, trying first one means of advancement and then another. A certain number of these new ventures, which prove to be of social advantage, are adopted [Pg 141] and incorporated into the social structure. The vast majority are rejected as inadequate to meet the social need. ”

“ Politically and economically the struggle reached and passed its high point between 1914 and 1945. The subsequent years have revealed the aftermath--a down-graded Europe and an ascendant Asia.
Empire building has been made prohibitively expensive by the revolution in science and technology; if the human family is to survive in anything like its present numbers, a way must be found to end the use of war as a means of attaining social objectives. New techniques, chiefly non-competitive, must be discovered and employed in the maintenance of social relations. ”

“ Not only must war be abandoned as a means of achieving social objectives, but exploitation of nature and man must be superceded by a planet-wide life style that conserves natural wealth and shifts the center of economic endeavor from competition to cooperation.
Abandonment of war as an instrument of policy and the renunciation of exploitation of man by man and nation by nation as a means of enrichment would put an end to the scandalous and corrosive extremes of riches and poverty that have cursed every civilization of which we have a written record. ”

“ There are plans and policies, looking to the relief of the more pressing economic and social difficulties, but all of them are conditioned upon the establishment of some world power that shall prove competent to handle world affairs. Out of this chaos there must emerge, first, clear thinking as to the next steps that are to be taken in the reorganization of the world; second, a willingness to make the concessions necessary to this reorganization, and third a conscious purpose to build a better living place for human society. ”