“There Is No Peace!” That was the banner headline on the Aug. 18, 1945, issue of the Militant, featuring the Socialist Workers Party National Committee Manifesto we’re reprinting below. Earlier that month, the U.S. capitalist rulers had unleashed history’s first nuclear weapons, annihilating some 200,000 people in the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The subsequent unconditional surrender of Washington’s wartime rival in Tokyo brought to an end imperialism’s second world slaughter in less than a quarter century. During that war, close to 85 million lives were sacrificed on the altar of cutthroat competition and conflict among the wealthiest and mightiest ruling classes, as they fought to redivide the earth.
“Only World Socialism Can Save Mankind From Atomic Destruction In Another Imperialist War!” the headline declared. “Workers Of America! You Must Take Power Into Your Own Hands!”
The headline had been written by Militant staff writer Evelyn Reed. Nearly a decade later, Reed took a central part in a seemingly unrelated political debate in the SWP — unrelated at first glance only — contributing an article on, “Marxism and the Woman Question.” It is one of the main articles in the book Cosmetics, Fashion, and the Exploitation of Women, an expanded edition of which has recently been published by Pathfinder Press.
The capitalist system, wrote Reed, “degrades and oppresses the great mass of women” by exploiting their discontents and fears in order “to stoke the fires of unlimited sales and profits” by means of advertising-driven marketing of cosmetics and fashion. It’s all part of how the ruling families “prop up and perpetuate this ruthless profit system and its continued victimization of women,” she said.
Far from being an unrelated question, the 1945 SWP manifesto was addressing the inevitable consequences of the same “ruthless profit system” and the same need for working people to embark on a revolutionary road forward for the toilers, women and all the oppressed and exploited.
Educate and organize working class
Eighty years after the SWP manifesto first appeared, it provides an essential understanding of the class forces driving the trade conflicts, social devastation and wars and pogroms shaking the world today. It underlines how the seeds of a third world war were sown by the victors of the second one, as well as the stakes for the working class in preventing another global imperialist slaughter in coming years — this time with multiple nuclear-armed powers across the globe.
All this, the SWP manifesto explains, can only be prevented by building proletarian parties in the U.S. and worldwide, to educate and organize working people along a course of irreconcilable class struggle, aimed at advancing the conquest of state power by the working class and its exploited allies. A course to settle on a world scale which class will rule.
The atrocities perpetrated by the U.S. rulers in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were part and parcel of their course throughout World War II. For the first time in modern warfare, Washington, and its ally in London, carried out the systematic slaughter of civilian populations through the firebombing of Hamburg in 1943, Dresden in 1945 and Tokyo and other Japanese cities in 1945.
Driven to revolutionary action
“Hatred of imperialist war, and fear of what the future holds, is driving the workers to revolutionary political conclusions,” the 1945 SWP statement said.
Such revolutionary action had already begun. In Europe, prerevolutionary struggles erupted in Greece, in France and in Italy. In each case, working people were blocked from conquering power by the treachery of Stalinist leaderships of Communist Parties that looked to Moscow and acted on Stalin’s orders not to disrupt the postwar carve-up of Europe into “spheres of influence” by London, Moscow and Washington. These parties also stood behind their own imperialist rulers in seeking to block independence for colonies in Vietnam, Korea, Africa and elsewhere.*
At war’s end, there were huge demonstrations of GIs at U.S. bases in the Pacific and elsewhere demanding they be brought home now. The U.S. rulers were put on notice that workers and farmers in uniform wouldn’t fight and die in Washington’s attempts to contain revolutions against colonial domination, including in China. Their actions forced the U.S. government to demobilize the troops.
“Only the working class,” the SWP said in 1945, “can deal a death-blow to this foul system. The workers can rally the broadest masses to their liberating banner and can change the world.”
That same revolutionary working-class course is being presented by Socialist Workers Party candidates running for office in 2025.
New, more dangerous wars today
In the wake of Moscow’s bloody invasion of Ukraine — the biggest land war in Europe since World War II — and Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, massacre of Jews in Israel — the biggest pogrom since the Holocaust — the rivalries built into the imperialist epoch for more than a century and a quarter are again heating up. Ruling classes worldwide are rearming and seeking new alliances, all the better to try to redivide and plunder the world for their own benefit. Growing numbers of workers are watching these big shifts — and talking among themselves, their families and with co-workers about the fact that new and more dangerous wars are inevitable.
After Washington’s victory in World War II, the imperialist rulers shoved aside their allies and foes alike and put together a new world order under their own domination. It was a world order that has been marked ever since by further brutal slaughters — in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and other countries where oppressed peoples have fought for national rights and against superexploitation. The U.S. rulers have waged a 65-year-long political, economic and financial war against Cuba’s socialist revolution led by Fidel Castro.
More than once, Washington has threatened to unleash nuclear weapons to advance U.S. capital’s class interests.
Today no new power is emerging capable of replacing the Washington-dominated world order. Instead, each of the world’s rival capitalist ruling classes are chained together in a common decline, as they vie for markets, natural resources, low-wage labor and military sway. The U.S. rulers have been weakened, but they remain on top of the heap.
Reading the SWP manifesto, “There Is No Peace!” provides workers today with an honest appraisal of what the propertied ruling families of the world’s final empire have done before to maintain their wealth and domination — and what they are prepared to do again.
In August 1945, the Socialist Workers Party called on workers to “enlist with us in the great battle for a new world.” Join with the SWP candidates and their supporters today as they campaign around the country.
* To distinguish the Socialist Workers Party from Stalinist parties, the manifesto explains the SWP is “Trotskyist.” That is, it supports the fight led by Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky to defend V.I. Lenin’s revolutionary Marxist course.