I'm less pessimistic about the end of war and its relation to inequality. Consider the following facts: until 1945, the nations of Europe were pretty much constantly in a "state of war" with each other -- not necessarily fighting, but preparing to fight, even through the "long peace" of the post-Napoleonic years. Nowadays it seems that the likelihood that the advanced industrial countries would think of trying to resolve a dispute by war is small.
Moreover, with the growth of the EU and even NATO, the sphere of nations that in some sense is included in this zone of nonaggression is widening. The wars we have seen since the War are wars on national liberation or imperialist aggression against or among poor countries -- Iraq, Nicaragua, Vietnam, Korea, Indo-Pak, China-Vietnam, Vietnam-DK, Etritria, East Timor, and the like.
So there is some reason to think that the richer capitalist democracies will not fight each other -- a version, if you like, of Kautsky's old "superimperialism" thesis that Lenin so derided (at that time rightly) in 1916. If this is true, then maybe peace will come when everybody's rich enough and entangled in trade, commercial, and security agreements. Of course that may take some doing . . .
jks
--- Jon Johanning <jjohanning at igc.org> wrote:
> On Friday, April 30, 2004, at 11:16 AM, Miles
> Jackson wrote:
>
> > Even this personalizes it too much for my taste.
> Rather: the problem
> > is the capitalist social structure that
> facilitates this kind of
> > reckless militarism.
>
> Unfortunately, I don't think that's the main
> problem, as far as war is
> concerned.
>
> After all, war has been around the human race for
> tens, maybe hundreds
> of thousand years (depending on how you define it --
> more or less
> organized violence between groups, perhaps). In
> perhaps the weakest
> part of his whole theory, Marx argued that, because
> capitalism had a
> beginning, it will have and end, and suggested
> (without much real
> proof, I think) that social evils in general would
> end with it, because
> there would be no more class divisions in society,
> and what causes
> social evils besides class?
>
> Well, I fear that a lot more causes war than class
> division; even if
> capitalism were eliminated, I doubt that it would do
> much to end war,
> because there are lots of things people can fight
> about besides
> economic issues, if they want to. The only way I can
> see war ending is
> for the human race to learn how to settle all of its
> disputes by
> negotiation and mediation without threatening
> violence, and since
> threatening violence is a very efficacious way of
> ensuring that your
> side will have the upper hand in subsequent
> negotiations (assuming that
> there aren't any negotiations because you've
> completely annihilated
> your enemies), the "without threatening violence"
> part of this
> statement is the crucial one. We know how to
> negotiate; we don't know
> how to negotiate without fighting first.
>
> The problem of ending capitalism and the problem of
> ending war are two
> separate ones, it seems to me; solving either one
> will not solve the
> other, and, hard as it is, I think the former one
> will be solved before
> the latter one.
>
> Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org
> __________________________________
> Had I been present at the Creation, I would have
> given some useful
> hints for the better ordering of the universe. --
> Attr. to Alfonso the
> Wise, King of Castile
>
> ___________________________________
>
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