August 15, 2023
Stephen Gowans
People’s Voice, the newspaper of the Communist Party of Canada, published an article on 2023 August 1 calling for “comprehensive nuclear disarmament” and Canada’s exit from all “aggressive, imperialist military alliances.”
As an explanation of how Canada, as a non-nuclear power, supports the nuclear weapons strategy of the United States, the article does a creditable job.
But it misses the point.
If our concern is to spare humanity the mass destruction of global war, it is not nuclear warfare alone that is the problem, but industrial-scale warfare of which nuclear warfare is only one possible part. Hiroshima and Nagasaki are not, contrary to popular opinion, the greatest instances of mass destruction in history. That distinction belongs to the March 4-5, 1945 US firebombing of Tokyo.
“In the summer of 1945, the U.S. Army Air Force carried out one of the most intense campaigns of city destruction in the history of the world.” In a campaign leading up to the atomic bombings, 66 “cities in Japan were attacked and all of them were either partially or completely destroyed.” According to historian Ward Wilson, “The destruction caused by conventional attacks was huge. Night after night, all summer long, cities would go up in smoke.”
The first to be attacked was Japan’s major city, Tokyo. On March 4 and March 5, wave after wave of US bombers dropped conventional incendiary bombs on the city, killing as many as 150,000 people. That incident, not Hiroshima, “remains the single most destructive attack on a city in the history of war.”
Three weeks earlier, US and British bombers had incinerated Dresden, the subject of Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse Five. According to Yuki Tanaka, “During the 14-hour long raid, massive quantities of incendiaries burnt large areas of this city, that housed no military facility, and killed many civilians. The estimated victim toll varies between 70,000 and 135,000, the majority being women, children and old people.”
Estimated number of people killed
- Firebombing of Tokyo, 70,000 to 150,000
- Atomic bombing of Hiroshima, 90,000 to 146,000
- Firebombing of Dresden, 70,000 to 135,000
- Atomic bombing of Nagasaki, 60,000 to 80,000
Approximately 100 million people died in the industrial-scale warfare of the two world wars. Some 200,000 people, 0.2%, died from atomic bombing. Eliminating atomic bombs alone won’t eliminate the massive destructive power of conventional warfare. This is true, a fortiori, when we consider that developments in conventional armaments since WWII have increased the destructive power of these weapons by orders of magnitude. There are now conventional bombs that approach the destructive power of the Hiroshima bomb. It is not nuclear weapons that need to be eliminated, but war fought on an industrial scale.
What good would come of eliminating nuclear weapons, if 100 million people or more were killed in future wars with conventional weapons? The capability to lay waste to much of the world by conventional warfare is well within the means of humanity. Indeed, some analysts favor the spread of nuclear weapons precisely because they fear that without the weapons’ formidable deterrent power, humanity will be repeatedly led down the path of mass destruction by conventional means. In light of this, two questions need to be asked:
- What are the causes of war?
- What must be done to eliminate them?
The Second International, a multi-country organization of socialist and labor parties, had answers to these questions. The sum and substance of the organization’s diagnosis of the cause of war, and prescription for its elimination, was expressed in a series of resolutions on militarism and international conflict. One of these resolutions, prepared by August Bebel, with amendments by V.I. Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg and Julius Martov, is emblematic of the Second International’s thinking on the cause of war and its elimination.
Bebel et al. anticipated that large-scale wars in the modern era of capitalism would be wars among states driven by capitalist imperatives. Wars would break out as “the consequence of … competition in the world market.” Every state, the resolution noted, “is eager not only to preserve its markets but also to conquer new ones, principally by the subjugation of foreign nations and the confiscation of their lands.”
The Bolsheviks Nicolai Bukharin and Evgeni Preobrazhensky expressed this point this way in their ABC of Communism. Each “producer wants to entice away the others’ customers, to corner the market. This struggle assumes various forms: it begins with the competition between two factory owners; it ends in the world, wherein capitalist States wrestle with one another for the world market.”
The solution to capitalist-driven wars, in the view of these Marxists, was twofold. First, socialists would lead workers of all lands to join hands against war. Second, they would “employ all their forces to use the economic and political crisis created by the war in order to rouse the masses of the people and thereby hasten the downfall of capitalist class rule.”
Lenin insisted that it was not the business of socialists to help one set of states against another, but to use the struggle between them to overthrow them all. Unfortunately, the Second International, while paying lip service to this view before the war, quailed at the decisive moment. This galvanized Lenin to spearhead the creation of the Third International, from which the CPC emerged. The new international’s aim was to carry through the commitments the Second International accepted in words but renounced in deeds.
As the nominal successor to Lenin in Canada, it might be expected that the CPC’s orientation to questions of peace and war would bear the stamp of Lenin. Sadly, this isn’t the case. Indeed, in one statement on the war in Ukraine, the party dismissed the approach of Lenin as “not a completely accurate or particularly helpful assessment, especially at this critical moment.” It seems the party inspired by Lenin, has moved on from Lenin.
Had it not, it might have called on the working people of all lands, of North America, Europe, Russia, and Ukraine, to join hands, in connection with the war in Ukraine, to work for the war’s speedy termination. Instead, it campaigns against NATO alone, insisting dishonestly and unconvincingly that as a Canadian party it must deal only with Canada’s capitalist class. The mendacity of the party’s position is revealed in its zeal for demonstrating in front of the US embassy and US consulates. Evidently, the party regards US capitalists as much their own as Canada’s—but not the Russian or Chinese.
The truth of the matter is that the party’s rejection of the Leninist response to war, lies in its rejection of the Leninist understanding of the origin of war. The party’s view is that the roots of the war in Ukraine lie, not in capitalist rivalry, but in a drive to war that is unique to the United States and its NATO allies.
In contradistinction to the CPC, Lenin argued that socialism “will remain faithful to itself only if it does not join one or the other imperialist bourgeoisie, if it says that ‘both are worst’, if it wishes the defeat of the imperialist bourgeoisie in every country.” In its conduct, and often in its words as well, the CPC refuses to say “both are worst” and wishes only for the defeat of the imperialist bourgeoisie of the US orbit.
Without the foundation of a Leninist analysis, it comes as no surprise, then, that the party is devoted to what Lenin denounced as bourgeois pacificism, the idea that disarmament treaties and leagues of nations can create a world of peace among cut-throat capitalist competitors.
In this vein, the party calls for Canada to sign and ratify a treaty that prohibits non-nuclear states from acquiring nuclear weapons and which additionally requires nuclear-armed states to phase out their nuclear arsenals, a treaty much like the existing Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Canada is already a member of the NPT. The NPT is proof that nuclear weapons treaties neither prevent proliferation, produce disarmament, or reduce the risk of major war. In fact, one can argue, along with Pyongyang, that North Korea’s exit from the NPT is the major reason why the United States has not undertaken an overt war against the DPRK.
Inasmuch as Ottawa does not develop, test, produce, stockpile, station, transfer, use or threaten to use nuclear weapons (since it has none to do any of these things with), Ottawa’s joining the treaty would be a matter of no significance. It would commit Ottawa to not doing what it already doesn’t do.
What’s more, Canada’s withdrawal from NATO would not be so consequential as to meaningfully reduce the risk of war. Much as the CPC would like to think that Canada plays in the big leagues, its withdrawal from NATO would hardly be noticed. The war in Ukraine would continue unabated, as would the rivalry between the United States and Russia and the United States and China. As for the capitalist womb in which wars gestate, that too would be left intact. Canadians are as likely to be incinerated in a global war with their country outside NATO as inside it.
Lenin complained that advocacy of disarmament instils “in the workers the idea that the present bourgeois governments of the imperialist powers are not bound to each other by thousands of threads of finance capital and by scores or hundreds of corresponding secret treaties (i.e., predatory, plundering treaties, preparing the way for imperialist war).”
“It is sheer bourgeois deception to preach reforms,” wrote Lenin, “as a solution for problems for which history and the actual political situation demand revolutionary solutions.”
A cogent analysis, but then, the party, for whom Lenin’s thinking is no longer “a completely accurate or particularly helpful assessment, especially at this critical moment,” moved on from Lenin long ago. It basks these days in the warm embrace of bourgeois pacifism and proposals whose effect in saving the world from another global conflagration if implemented would be largely meaningless.
What's Left 
A case can be made that France, Britain, Japan, Germany, and Italy, can also wage wars on an industrial scale. They did so in the past, and therefore could readily do so again, especially in view of the fact that as a consequence of their considerable economic development since the second world war their capacity to wage wars of industrial extermination has increased by orders of magnitude.
None of the countries that benefit from nuclear weapons–not the US, not China, not Russia–have any intention of dismantling their nuclear arsenals. On the contrary, China is expanding its arsenal; the US and Russia are upgrading theirs.
A call for for disarmament based on the recognition that nuclear war could destroy humanity is Quixotic and utopian. Nuclear-armed states are well aware of the enormous dangers of nuclear war, but are compelled by the logic of capitalist and nation-state rivalry and the international system to possess them.
A Marxist would argue that if you want people to abandon religious superstition, you don’t attack their religion, but change the conditions that make religion necessary.
Likewise. if you want countries to avoid the dangers of nuclear war, you don’t tell people and their leaders that nuclear war is dangerous (they already know); you change the conditions that make military nuclearization necessary.
In other words, you transcend the logic of capitalist and nation-state rivalry and the international system that promotes military nuclearization. You change the bourgeois order. That’s why Lenin labelled measures such as the disarmament campaign the CPC promotes as “bourgeois pacifism.” It is a measure based on the assumption that war is not an inevitable product of the bourgeois order and that a peaceful capitalism is possible if the rivalry among capitalist-driven nation-states is held in check by pacifist guardrails such as disarmament treaties and leagues of nations.
(The obvious flaw in the thinking underlying disarmament treaties is that in an anarchic international system, that is, one without an overarching sovereign police authority to compel adherence to treaties by the use or threat of armed force, what is to stop a state from reneging on its treaty commitments? The idea that popular opinion will force states to adhere to agreements to conduct themselves in pacific ways flies in the face of an almost inexhaustible multitude of disconfirming instances from history, distant and recent. To cite but one example: International law, the UN, the UN Security Council, and the massive mobilization of US and world popular opinion against Bush Jr’s war on Iraq did not prevent the war from going ahead.)
So, there’s an opportunity cost here. Channeling energies into utopian and Quixotic bourgeois pacifist measures that won’t make one iota of difference squanders energy that could be channeled into meaningful efforts to transcend the bourgeois order–efforts that can make a difference.
Lenin argued, cogently I think, that promoting the utopian idea that disarmament is achievable by mobilizing popular energy to press governments to join disarmament treaties, instills in the working class the illusion that war on a industrial scale can be averted by means other than transcending the conditions that compel states to arm and go to war.
To put it another way, the message to the CPC is, If you want the threat of nuclear war to continue to escalate, keep doing what you’re doing, because what you’re doing (a) is making no difference and (b) is diverting energy away from measures that could make a difference, i.e., rather than being simply ineffective, your actions are harmful.
It’s astonishing to think that a party that traces its origins to the thinking of Lenin has strayed so far from its roots. Lenin would have scorned the campaign the party endorses as “preacher’s” nonsense and a mere expression of “pious benevolence.”
In an earlier post I looked at two contradictory positions on war that have been present among socialist and labor parties since the Second International: (1) Capitalism = war, therefore ending war = abolishing capitalism; and (2) War can be prevented within the context of capitalist society by a vigorous peace movement. The CPC is clearly in the second camp, even though the Third International, from which it sprang, was in the first.
To further illustrate the problem of bourgeois pacifism, let’s consider a parallel situation.
Walter Russell Mead, a columnist with the Wall Street Journal, attributed in this column , I think correctly, the US military presence in West Asia to capitalist rivalry .
He wrote: “America’s position in the Middle East gives us leverage over China’s energy supplies. It can ensure that the Middle East sovereign wealth funds prefer our tech and industrial sectors over those of our rivals. It can maintain the profitable defense relationships that help keep American arms makers ahead in a competitive arena.”
If one objects to US domination of West Asia, one could mount a campaign to pressure countries to sign and ratify a treaty to ban imperialism. It should be obvious, however, that such an effort would be Quixotic. Countries that have the means to dominate other countries would not willingly give up the advantages that accrue from this capability, and even if they did, what would compel them to honor the treaty’s terms?
As Mead points out, the US dominates West Asia because domination creates economic advantages for corporate USA. The way to end imperialism, is to transcend the system of capitalist and nation-state rivalry that delivers rewards to countries for dominating other countries.
In a system of international anarchy, where there is no enforceable governance of international law because there is no sovereign police authority to compel compliance, and where compliance is therefore strictly voluntary, the conduct of the constituent parts, the nation-states, is governed by an underlying system of rewards and penalties from which the constituents cannot voluntarily exit. That system is one structured by capitalism. In a world of cut-throat capitalist competition, states do what they must to survive, and do what they can to make their business sectors thrive. That means, if a state has the means to subordinate other states in order to use them as instruments of achieving their capitalist ends, they will do so. Until this system is dismantled and replaced by one that rewards different conduct, the system and the conduct it selects will continue, regardless of law, treaties, and popular opinion.
An approach to eliminating objectionable conduct, whether nuclear weapons or imperialism, by eliminating its causes is radical; it strikes at the root of a problem (radical comes from the Latin word for root). Treaties, leagues of nations, international law, public opinion, are attempts, and not very effective ones, to suppress the symptoms of a disease, rather than eradicating it.
Anti-war activists and anti-imperialists who are not at the same time radical socialists–who are not radical socialists above all else–are promoters of culs de sac and fantastical projects.
A sound argument. However, not many countries besides the US, China, and Russia have the capacity to defend their interests by waging wars on an industrial scale. This, in my opinion, is the rationale for the calls for nuclear disarmament.