THE WEAKNESS OF THE ANTI-WAR MOVEMENT
The weakness of the anti-war movement is that the majority want nothing
more than a return to capitalist "peace" rather than the overthrow of the
system that causes war
According to the Guardian (15 October), government ministers were
genuinely surprised at the estimated 20,000 plus demonstrators who turned
out the previous Saturday for a Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND)
peace march against the war in Afghanistan. The editors of the Guardian
themselves must have been surprised, since earlier the same week they had
published opinion polls showing 86 percent support for the war. Opponents
of the war have already had a number of surprisingly large turnouts, given
the short notice and word-of-mouth methods of announcing their meetings.
In clear distinction to the recent "anti-capitalist" demonstrations, these
events were attended by an immensely broad range of background and age.
One of the demonstrators was old enough to recall
being handcuffed to a Socialist Party member, as a conscientious objector
during the Second World War. Compared with crowds at other political
events, they were relatively receptive to taking the literature being
distributed by Socialist Party members present.
Alongside this various committees have been formed: "Media Workers Against
the War", "Artists Against the War" and "Lawyers Against the War", usually
with a significant SWP-leninists-twatskyists) organisational input. This
mushroom-like proliferation of organisations and their prominence within
the anti-war movement that exists demonstrates the degree to which it is
dominated by leftist notions and agendas.
The aim, indeed their very existence, is focussed on the war itself, as an
immediate crisis, without developing any broad analysis of the system of
society that spawned it, with themselves as the unifying organisations
drawing together the disparate groups and agendas involved in opposing the
war.
Many of the protestors are dyed-in-the-wool pacifists, whilst others are
leftists, and still others Islamists, united only in their opposition to
this particular war, not their reasons for opposing it. This was made
abundantly clear at the CND march. Trafalgar square had been booked, some
time before the September 11 attack, by the Palestine Solidarity Campaign
(PSC) for their own cause, but they handed it over to CND for their
anti-war march.
A number of speakers, including one from the PSC, used the occasion of the
war to push the Palestinian nationalist case as a cure for international
terrorism. The number of mosques thanked by the meeting chair for their
help in organising the event indicated why slightly more turned out in
opposition to this war compared with the Kosovan conflict. The chair also
thanked the Stop the War Coalition for helping organise the event. So, the
front of a front was working in a front with CND to hold the march.
Speaker after speaker at each of the meetings have trotted out a long list
of reforms, from George Monbiot's suggestion of a Tobin Tax and an
International Clearing House to alleviate world poverty, to Tariq Ali's
more conventional leftist approach of assessing the situation in national
terms such as placing the Palestinian question at the centre, to the
general cry for a standing International World Court to try "crimes
against humanity".
The best CND could manage was a weak call to "negotiate". The only glimmer
of hope has been that the nebulous threat from "terrorists" has made the
situation resistant to attempts to nationalise the problems into a
conflict between specific states, thus speakers have had to talk much more
in terms of a world solution.
The problem with this approach, above and beyond the mendacity of leftist
fronts, is that it fetishises the crisis (both in philosophical, and more
popular usages of the word, the latter, specifically for all the
"activists" who long for a campaign to throw themselves into).
It sees the immediate situation of open conflict as the problem, the
simple solution of which is to simply pull back the troops. It doesn't go
beyond that to examine the fact that if states have weapons and armies,
they are there to be used. It fails to look at how conflict is actually
continuous in the present world. It simply adopts (and promotes) a simple
moralist position, "War is bad, mmm'kay?"
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