Social War

“ War tests not alone physical strength but also the excellence of the social organization and particularly of the group solidarity. The proportion of fighting men that can be got into the field is an element in the result. This, in turn, depends on the amount of social cohesion that has been developed. Indifference of the individual to the fate of the rest, of parts of a group to the fate of other parts, felt divergence of interest, jealousies, dissensions, internal strife, all point the way to ruin and must be provided against by resort to social control. ”

“ SOCIAL WAR IN DEMOCRACY
It is one of those popular assumptions of our time which, although never distinctly formulated, have such an important part in all our accepted faiths, that social forces change in the progress of civilization, so that, for example, slavery and feudalism pass away completely. The students of social history, however, find that social forces are ever the same ”

“ The analogy which exists between strikes accompanied by violence and war is prolific of consequences. No one doubts (except d'Estournelles de Constant) that it was war that provided the republics of antiquity with the ideas which form the ornament of our modern culture. The social war, for which the proletariat ceaselessly prepares itself in the syndicates, may engender the elements of a new civilisation suited to a people of producers. I continually call the attention of my young friends to the problems presented by Socialism considered from the point of view of a civilisation of producers ”

“ The cries of distress from the prisons and penitentiaries and places of misery which cannot reach the public will sound one fine day more clearly in the ears of those who now stop their ears and will help to wake up humanity to the only holy struggle known by us Social-Democrats,—for peace against war, against the capitalistic order of society, for Socialism! ”

“ But the social democrats soon became convinced that the existing powers of state and society would not yield their positions without a combat. Glorification [233] of bloody struggles of laborers in the past became ever more common. Laborers were taught that they had, in times gone by, seized the sword and sacrificed life in behalf of their wealthy oppressors; they were told that they must next use the weapons of war in their own behalf, to fight for the day of their own deliverance from bondage. ”

“ The social revolution is an extension of that war in which each great strike is an episode; this is the reason why Syndicalists speak of that revolution in the language of strikes; for them Socialism is reduced to the conception, the expectation of, and the preparation for the general strike, which, like the Napoleonic battle, is to completely annihilate a condemned régime. ”

“ I would not touch one of them except in cases of extreme necessity.' But the simple introduction of peace, law, order, free competition for wealth and honour, with an education to match, will inevitably cause a social revolution. By merely suppressing violence and intestine war, you produce such a revolution in a country, which has for centuries been the theatre of disorder and war, as surely as by damming a river you produce a lake. ”

“ Very logically, therefore, the abler and bolder labor agitators proclaim that labor levies actual war against society, and that in that war there can be no truce until irresponsible capital has capitulated. ”

“ The only question that remains—and it is a question the future alone will solve—is the particular point at which this ancient and overgrown stronghold of war, now [339] being invested so vigorously from so many sides, will finally be overthrown, whether from within or from without, whether by its own inherent weakness, by the persuasive reasonableness of developing civilization, by the self-interest of the commercial and financial classes, or by the ruthless indignation of the proletariat. ”

“ But victims would not submit without resistance, and once more we come to the result that no effect can be expected from this undertaking but social war, and a convulsion of the entire social system, whose consequences defy analysis or prediction. ”

“ Still, it was by the conflicts of rulers that the great nations have been formed out of a chaos of struggling clans; that peace and order, therefore, have been substituted for violence, throughout broad territories; that law has taken the place of private war; moreover, that the privileges of selfish orders have been suppressed through the development of a larger and more civilised national organisation ”

“ State Socialism would be advantageous, because they would go up one in the social hierarchy.
But all oppositions become extraordinarily clear when conflicts are supposed to be enlarged to the size of the general strike; then all parts of the economico-judicial structure, in so far as the latter is looked upon from the point of view of the class war, reach the summit of their perfection; society is plainly divided into two camps, and only into two, on a field of battle. ”

“ The issues with which our modern sentiment chiefly concerns itself are the conditions of labour, the progress of women, the social evil, and—for the past two years—the overwhelming question of peace and war. ”

“ So that we have come to this—that it is not only the traditional attitude of the state which is hostile to the free efflorescence of social groups but the actual condition of society under the present industrial system. A state of war, even of suppressed war, makes for a forced fellowship of partisans, and not for the free fellowship of partners. ”

“ Add to all this, that civilisation, which sows dissension and [62] war on every side; which employs a great part of its powers in unproductive labor or even in destruction; which furthermore diminishes the public wealth by the unnecessary friction and discord it introduces into industry; add to all this, I say, that this same social system has for its special characteristic to produce a repugnance for work—a disgust for labor. ”

“ Under present conditions the antagonism of economic and social interests results in relentless war among the social units, and creates an insurmountable obstacle in the way of a co-operative commonwealth. ”

“ When we do that we see that the individual scramble is a minor, subordinate point in the great movements of classes and nations. In any serious work, in any social crisis, in any undertaking on a national scale we see not separate, atomised scrambling individuals, but ordered groups, classes and nations warring against each other. ”

“ The war has not only defeated their political aspirations, but it has broken up their whole social organization. When the rebellion was put down they found themselves not only conquered in a political and military sense, but economically ruined. ”

“ A. To begin with, we perceive immediately that the political general strike does not presuppose a class war concentrated on a field of battle in which the proletariat attacks the middle class; the division of society into two antagonistic armies disappears, for this class of revolt is possible with any kind of social structure. In the past many revolutions were the result of coalitions between discontented groups ”

“ Thus in a fully segregated society in time of peace the moral support of the citizen comes from his social class and his immediate circle, his professional associations, his church, his chapel, his trade union and his clubs, rather than directly from the nation in which he is a unit. ”

“ The soldier wants a war, which will carry off half his comrades and secure him promotion; the undertaker wants burials; monopolists and forestallers want famine, to double or treble the price of grain; the architect, the carpenter, the mason, want conflagrations, that will burn down a hundred houses to give activity to their branches of business.
By Matthew Arnold (English essayist and poet, 1822-1888)
Our inequality materializes our upper class, vulgarizes our middle class, brutalizes our lower class. ”

“ and in the same way the innumerable people who took part in the war acted in accord with their personal characteristics, habits, circumstances, and aims. They were moved by fear or vanity, rejoiced or were indignant, reasoned, imagining that they knew what they were doing and did it of their own free will, but they all were involuntary tools of history, carrying on a work concealed from them but comprehensible to us. Such is the inevitable fate of men of action, and the higher they stand in the social hierarchy the less are they free. ”

“ Beneficent, I say, because the class struggle must be understood not in the contemptible sense of a Saturnalia of fist-fights and outrages, of malevolence and personal violence, but must be worthily conceived as a great social drama. With all my heart I hope that this conflict may be settled, for the progress of civilization, without bloody convulsions, but historical destiny has decreed the conflict, and it is not given to us or to others to avert or postpone it. ”

“ Yet this is the very policy which the socialists have announced in their declaration of war against present-day society--to capture the political machinery of society and by that machinery destroy present-day society. ”

“ If one's point of view is that of the anarchist, he is led inevitably to make his war upon individuals. The more sensitive and sincere he is, the more bitter and implacable becomes that war. If one's point of view is based on what is now called the economic interpretation of history, one is emancipated, in so far as that is possible for emotional beings, from all hatred of individuals, and one sees before him only the necessity of readjusting the economic basis of our common life in order to achieve a more nearly perfect social order. ”

“ And I saw the world-wide war which is waged in every land against freedom and union—the fight of caste against caste, of class against class, of masters with slaves, of the state against its citizens, of the thousand and one Frankenstein monsters of commerce and industry and politics and religion, fighting against the human beings who have created them. ”

“ And there can be no doubt that, if socialism fulfills the purpose which its advocates have in mind, these early struggles in its history will become the object of endless research and commentary. The calumnies, the feuds, the misunderstandings, the clashing of doctrines, the antagonism of the ruling spirits, the plots and conspiracies, the victories and defeats—all these various phases of this war to the death between socialists and anarchists—will in that case present to history the most vital struggle of this age. ”

“ The common people will welter in bloody chaos, while the parties of traditional order will fly to bloody reaction. Class wars, racial wars, wars between the nations of yesterday, wars between the nations which have just been formed, blind social convulsions, with no further aim than the gratification of the hatreds, the envies, the crazy dreams of an hour of life looking forward to no morrow.... ”

“ The institution has in all ages been clung to with the tenacity of death; clung to until it sapped and destroyed the foundations of society; clung to until all law became violence; clung to until virtue was a thing only of history; clung to until industry folded its arms—until commerce reefed every sail—until the fields were desolate and the cities silent, except where the poor free asked for bread, and the slave for mercy; clung to until the slave forging the sword of civil war from his fetters drenched the land in the master's blood. Civil war has been the great liberator of the world. ”

“ Then and then only shall we be in position to destroy the parasitic class aggression, the class robbery, out of which grows the class struggle—the civil war in the shop, and the war, the civil war, of the toil-stained brothers of the working class on the battlefield. ”

“ But this is not all, and you will have but a faint conception of the evil if you do not consider that to all these vices of society, which dry up the sources of wealth and prosperity, must be added the struggle, the discord, the war, in short under many names and many forms which society cherishes and cultivates between the individuals that compose it. ”

“ And this land of promise, this region which so long witnessed the extremes of political magnanimity and turpitude, this arena where the vital question of labor, as modified by involuntary servitude, and free activity, found its most practical solution—was, and is, legitimately, appropriately, and naturally, the scene of the fiercest strife for national existence—where the claims and the climax of freedom and faith culminated in all the desolation of civil war. ”

“ In these great crises of universal history, the ordinary aspects of the class struggle assume a violent, catastrophic expression, developing into war, civil war, and into the searing, magnificent upheavals of the Revolution. ”

“ Who, then, are the aiders, abettors & users of force? Who are the real revolutionists? Are they not those who hold and exercise power over their fellows, they who use clubs & bayonetts, prisons & scaffolds? The great class conflict now gathering throughout the world is created by our social system of industrial slavery. ”

“ For they hoped that in stirring the working classes of the world to demand peace from their Governments they would be putting into their hands the sword that was necessary for the Social Revolution, in which cause they had, like many of their friends, spent the best years of their lives. ”

“ And only thus can we explain the strange spectacle, inexplicable to any other country, that a Government in whose formation Social Democracy has had a share, and which at every division is supported by the Socialists, knows no other means of meeting a strike save by forbidding meetings, introducing a state of siege and militarizing! ”