Stopping a War/Chapter 4
4. What Could the Workers Do?
Hostilities began between the French and the Riffians during April, 1925. Officially the date is April 28, although there is some dispute concerning the exact day. On May Day, 1925, the French armies were again taking the field. France was at war.
There were many apologists for the Riff War. French journalists described it as an effort to maintain French "prestige" in North Africa. French politicians insisted that the unstable Painlevé Ministry did not want the war but considered it an inevitable phase of French colonial policy. French militarists accepted the struggle as a welcome relief from the years of inaction that had followed the signing of the Armistice. To official France, a war was a war.
But to the French workers war meant higher prices, higher taxes, privation, suffering, death. Millions of them were ready to oppose the Moroccan campaign.
When the Riff War threatened, multitudes of French workers desired to prevent it. When it broke out they wished to stop it. They knew that the imperial government of France had forced the war and that the imperialists would not make peace until their economic objectives had been attained. They were equally certain that the League of Nations would do nothing to enforce peace. The unrebuked rape of Egypt by Great Britain during the preceding year was too fresh in their minds to allow them to have many illusions about the usefulness of the League in a war crisis forced by one of the League's leading members.
If the Government would not stop the war, and if the League could not stop it, some new method must be found to meet the crisis. The leaders of progressive working class opinion in France decided that the only hope for effective opposition to the war lay in organized working class action. They therefore determined to oppose the war; to attack and expose the French ruling class during the war as war makers and war profiteers, and to make every effort to fraternize with their fellow workers in the "enemy country," the Riff.