Stopping a War/Chapter 17
17. Working Class Action against War
The decision of the French workers to adopt these class conscious tactics marks a very important change in the attitude of the working class of Europe toward war. Heretofore, the European workers have been satisfied to carry on general propaganda during peace times and then, when war did break out, to fight patriotically for "victory" and "glory." Such tactics imply the acceptance of the economic situation out of which wars grow, and merely oppose each particular war as it arises without any effort to get back to its causes or to prevent it at the source.
The French workers who organized the campaign against the Moroccan War of 1925 decided to fight the economic system primarily and the war only incidentally. Their campaign was not so much a campaign against war as it was a campaign against bankers, profiteers and concessionaires whose activities make war inevitable.
Class conscious working class action against war may take several forms. First, there is anti-war and anti-militarist propaganda which points out the causes of war and shows how owners profit while workers pay. Second, there is the propaganda in the shops and in the industries. This may include anything from a boycott or a refusal to handle military stores to a general strike whose object is the paralysis of the government in its effort to conduct the war. Third, there is the propaganda in the army and navy. This propaganda may aim merely to undermine the morale of the soldiers and destroy their confidence in the government, or its object may be mutiny and aggressive refusal of service on the part of the enlisted men.
Anti-war propaganda can be carried on legally so long as the government permits it. Political boycotts and strikes are effective only when the workers are thoroughly united. A general mutiny on the part of the army and navy presupposes a revolutionary situation of a very intense character. The leaders of the French movement steered a course which involved neither a general strike nor a general mutiny but which was aimed to undermine both industrial and military capitalist morale and to lead to fraternization with their fellow workers in the Riff.