The November 20 Europe-wide International Youth Strike has been called at a time when, for many people – young and old – there is growing anger at governments that are cutting our services while they boost funding on war – and who will willingly send thousands off to their deaths in wars to be fought for their interests – not for ours.
November 20th was also agreed as the date for
the walkouts by the 20 different youth organisations involved – at the
suggestion of Socialist Students – because it coincides with the last day of
the next round of COP talks – where the global politicians will get together to
let off yet more hot air, instead of agreeing on the decisive action needed to
stop a climate crisis whose dire effects are now becoming starkly obvious, even
in countries that thought it was just somebody else’s problem.
As socialists, we understand that all those issues – war,
cuts and climate crisis – are an inevitable result of a capitalist system in
terminal decline where, in order to protect their profits, the super-rich want
to steal away everything that the working class organised to win from them in
the past – like council homes, free education, the NHS and, now latest in their
crosshairs, disability benefits.
The capitalist classes of the world act in the interest
of their own individual
nation states, so they won’t enact the global plan needed to tackle climate
change. Instead, they just look to short-term profit, competing with other
nations to get a bigger share of the pie. That doesn’t stop at just tariffs and
trade wars, now it will increasingly mean actual wars – if not yet nuclear world
war - as even they realise that will be the end even for them - but certainly
the kind of regional conflicts we already see, and there will be more to come.
Starmer’s 2025 Strategic Defence Review spelt out how, in
the view of the military tops, the UK could no longer plan for only having to fight
distant overseas conflicts against ‘non-state’ forces – like the Taliban in
Afghanistan - but that direct “state-on-state war” was back on the agenda. The
war between Russia and Ukraine was, not without justification, identified
as a turning-point pointing the way for the wars to come. The so-called post-Cold War ‘peace dividend’ when, after
the collapse of the Stalinist regimes in Russia and Eastern Europe, military
spending fell, is well and truly over.
That’s the background to why the recent NATO summit agreed
to commit its members to boosting military-related spending to 5% of gross
domestic product (GDP) by 2035 – 3.5% on ‘hard defence’ and another 1.5% on top
on military-related infrastructure and ‘civil preparedness’. And Burnham’s
government is fully behind that target. In fact, his new Chancellor, John
Healey, was one of those that put the final knives into Starmer, resigning as
his Defence Secretary, complaining that Starmer’s defence investment plan didn’t
go far enough. Now Healey will be preparing for an October Budget that will increase
military spending, while making cuts elsewhere.
Even to
meet Starmer’s original defence investment plan means finding £6.8 billion from
unidentified cuts to other departments’ previously agreed capital budgets and
another entirely unfunded £4.7 billion on top. To raise military spending to
the full 3.5% of GDP would mean an extra £25 billion a year. Reaching the 5%
target would produce a ‘security budget’ of £151 billion in today’s values,
bigger for example than the combined government budgets for housing and
education from pre-school to university.
How do we
stop this drive towards war? Well, working-class struggle can limit what the
capitalists are able to get away with. The memories of Vietnam still weigh on
even a President like Trump in pulling back from sending ‘boots on the ground’
into Iran. In 2025, Italian dockers took strike action against the Gaza genocide.
The Youth Strike is an initial step towards building mass opposition here.
But, in
building that movement, whatever the horrors of war, we don’t make just a pacifist
appeal for ‘peace’. We understand that war is an inevitable consequence of
capitalism and that only a movement that aims at a complete change of system,
to win a democratic world socialist planned economy that takes control of
society out of the capitalists’ hands across the globe, can really end the
threat of war.
But we
also recognise that there will be many workers – including even some of the youth
we come across at the schools and colleges – who will be swayed by the growing pro-war
propaganda that Britain needs to defend itself, with Putin’s Russia being held
up as the main threat. Of course, it’s worth pointing out that Putin hasn’t
even been able to defeat Ukraine, let alone go further, say into the Baltic
States. The war, and the failure of his initial supposedly speedy invasion plans
– when the first Russian divisions had dress uniforms packed in their bags
ready for their victory parades in Kyiv – has exposed Russia’s weakness, not
its strength.
However, that
war continues ever on, adding to workers’ fears, ones that are certainly being
played on in countries nearer Russia, like Germany, where the government is
looking to reintroduce military conscription. That is not yet on the cards here
– at least not for the army, perhaps only as unpaid labour for the likes of
Sainsburys! Those rising fears also explain the turnaround in public opinion in
Finland from opposing NATO membership to overwhelmingly supporting it.
But the
UK defence plans require building personnel numbers back up again – there’s now
only 74,000 in the British army. Hence, the army recruitment videos and the
moves to boost cadets in schools – as well as the “Defence Universities
Alliance” being developed to strengthen links between universities and the arms
companies.
There
will be a mixed consciousness amongst workers we meet, one where we will have
to be sensitive to people’s fears. Genuine socialists have always had to do so,
especially of course at the start of an actual war, when the general mood will
understandably be to fight against an invader. That was the mood of the Ukrainian
workers that Putin underestimated when he first sent in his tanks.
Lenin’s
position in World War One has often been caricatured as being just one of ‘defeatism’
– using his 1915 quote that “during a reactionary war a revolutionary class
cannot but desire the defeat of its government” – and that military defeats eventually
lead to revolutionary upheavals (which did indeed prove to be the case). But this
was Lenin bending the stick in speaking to his own Party members, to cut across
the tide of wartime patriotism that had already seen Europe’s various socialist
parties line up with their own imperialist governments.
In
speaking to the wider working class, Lenin took a different approach, one that
stressed that, in order to really fight for their freedom, workers needed to
fight the capitalists too. And those capitalists couldn’t be trusted to fight
the war, they were too busy making profits while sending soldiers to die in the
trenches. But if the banks, industry and arms companies were nationalised under
workers’ control, then not only would workers be in a better position to defend
Russia, they would also be defending a Russia that they owned and controlled - a
workers’ state not a bosses’ one – from which they could appeal to the workers
of other countries to do the same, and agree a genuine peace.
In Britain
in World War Two, the supporters of Trotsky’s Left Opposition in the Workers
International League – who played an important role not publicised in our
school history books (!) – like campaigning for London Underground stations to
be opened as bomb shelters – argued in the same way, that you couldn’t trust a reactionary
Tory like Churchill to defeat Hitler and that what was needed was:
· the
arming and organising of the workers under their own control;
· the
election of officers by the workers;
· control
of production by the workers to end the chaos in the war industries;
· the
immediate nationalisation of the armament industry, mines, banks, railways, and
big industry;
· the
granting of freedom and self-determination to India and the colonies and a
Socialist appeal to the workers of Germany and Europe.
When we were
in the leadership of the LPYS in the 1980s, we made similar demands, pointing
out that the Tories had been supplying the Argentine dictatorship with arms
only 10 days before the Falklands conflict, and calling for trade union rights
for servicemen and women; the abolition of Courts Martial; the right to refuse
to be used to break strikes; and to leave on contractual notice when you want
to – like any other worker.
These are
demands that might again be important ones to raise when a layer of young
workers are conscripted to the army – not militarily but through having no
other job prospects – particularly when, as in the past, they will be called
upon to put down the strikes and unrest which will break out in working class
communities. And, of course, there will also be workers in the arms industry
themselves where the demand to protect jobs through a transition to other skilled
work – not least in climate jobs – has to be linked to a demand for workers’
control and nationalisation.
That’s the background to the tumultuous period we are entering – and the November 20 ‘Fight For Our Futures, Not Their Wars’ walkout can be a step in building the forces needed to help fight for such a programme.
See also:
Resisting the new militarism plans from the latest 'Socialism Today' magazine
and the Socialist Students website.
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