[lbo-talk] Platypus: what we are, what we do, and why

[James Heartfield]

The way I see it, Marx was not interested in war as such, broadly he drew his moral preferences from what was in the interests of the development of society (which he saw as conflictual). His judgement was, roughly, that the wars of national unification up until 1870 were a net gain, but that thereafter militarism was _on the whole_ a bad thing. I might have given the wrong impression: He wasn't motivated by a desire to divide the working class but to unite it, which was why he favoured the unification of Germany and Italy. But he did think it was a good thing that the working class was won away from support for the status quo, which was why he was excited by the controversy over the Fenian outrages. His writings on India are more mixed than is sometimes thought. He did write that the British helped develop the country, but on other occasions that they were a destructive influence. But yes, he did not support the rights of the Highlanders to resist the British Crown (though he did get into some trouble for describing the way that the Duchess of Sutherland forced them off the land).

I don't know Bakunin's writing except through Marx's arguments against it, but I think that he took a much more optimistic view of German unification than Bakunin did.

Chris wrote: ' it seems that here we are talking about something that divides the working class inside a capitalist society (Britain) and by extension wars between capitalist nations (such as WWI), and so is not applicable to wars between capitalist countries and non (pre)capitalist ones that don't have a working class, like Britain in India for example.'