From the December 2022 SWP convention resolution, “The Low Point of Labor Resistance Is Behind Us.”
No nonproliferation zones, arms limitation treaties, or diplomatic pacts between imperialist powers and other nuclear-armed regimes can or will advance the fight to stop the global spread and eventual use of such weapons. Nor will the call for unilateral nuclear disarmament of Washington and other governments. No propertied ruling class is going to disarm and risk its own wealth and power, while its competitors and enemies remain nuclear-armed to the teeth.
“‘Disarmament’?” asks our 1938 founding resolution, the Transitional Program, drafted by Leon Trotsky. “But the entire question revolves around who will disarm whom. The only disarmament which can avert or end war is the disarmament of the bourgeoisie by the workers.” That became more true, not less, with the advent of nuclear weapons.
As communists and other class-conscious workers organize to advance a revolutionary struggle for workers power in the United States, our guide on these political and programmatic questions, as with many others, is the Transitional Program, including its section, “The struggle against imperialism and war.”
“Not one man and not one penny” for the imperialist government, its budget, and its war machine, states our program, summing up one central aspect of our proletarian continuity from the Bolsheviks under Lenin to this day.
As Lenin wrote in the article “The ‘Disarmament’ Slogan” in 1916: “Only after the proletariat has disarmed the bourgeoisie will it be able, without betraying its world-historic mission, to consign all armaments to the scrap-heap.” All, for us, includes conventional and nuclear weapons.