It probably wouldn't hurt, but it doesn't have a lot to do with pacifism -- you can love your enemies while you torture them to death. It would be very godlike. But I digress. I would agree with the pacifist label except that people mean many different things by pacifism. For many people, pacifism does not abjure the right of concrete, immediate self-defense, for instance. The major defect I see with war, besides of course its moral deficits, is that one can't use war to get rid of the State -- the system of permanent, institutionalized social coercion -- because war _is_ the State; State relations are best for carrying on wars and will prevail. One might, therefore, choose to go to war to defend a better state from a worse one, e.g. fend off the Nazis in favor of retaining a liberal polity, but one can't expect to further improve matters by getting rid of the liberal, capitalist state too using the same methods. I think what we observe in history accords with my theory. -- Gordon
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Well, this seems to be a rather class-less depiction of war and the state. (And by "class-less" I don't mean "without style.") Wars are either fought between competing state interests of the same class (i.e. the imperialist wars I and II), while revolutions-- usually civil wars-- are fought by two separate classes, one in power and one not. Just because both sides posess weapons and use the same tactics, doesn't mean they represent the same class interests.
But you are of course right, Gordon, in your contention that wars just confer state power. To be more exact, it is actually the state power of a particular class. But a proletarian state would be entirely different in character than a bourgeois state, just as a bourgeois state was different from a feudal one. The proletarian revolution-- i.e., the socialist permanent revolution-- is the final transfer of state power. Only from a socialist state apparatus can the level of production, distribution, and efficiency be increased to the extent where the state no longer needs to exist. My own study and analysis seems to lead me to the conclusion that neither the bourgeois capitalist model, nor an immediate transition to a stateless society, can advance production in a sustainable and meaningful way that can benefit everyone.
If this sort of a revolution fails to be permanent and international-- as was the character of the pre-emptive proletarian revolutions in the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, etc., because backward economic conditions prevailed and the world revolutionary tide receded-- then the revolution will be a failure. But, revolutions have a better chance of succeeding in the advanced capitalist countries, where up to now proletarians have failed to seize power.
As for the authority of war, revolution, and the state, Engels wrote famously:
"But the anti-authoritarians demand that the authoritarian political state be abolished at one stroke, even before the social conditions that gave birth to it have been destroyed. They demand that the first act of the social revolution shall be the abolition of authority. Have these gentlemen ever seen a revolution? A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets, and cannon-- authoritarian means, if such there be at all; and if the victorious party does not want to have fought in vain, it must maintain this rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionaries. Would the Paris Commune have lasted a single day if it had not made use of this authority of the armed people against the bourgeois? Should we not, on the contrary, reproach it for not having used it freely enough? Therefore, either one of two things: either the anti-authoritarians don't know what they are talking about, in which case they are creating nothing but confusion, or they do know, and in that case they are betraying the movement of the proletariat. In either case they serve the reaction."
(from Engels, "On Authority", 1874)
Best, David