World War I: Crime and Punishment

http://www.counterpunch.org/2018/01/12/world-war-i-crime-and-punishment
Date Written:  2018-01-12
Publisher:  CounterPunch
Year Published:  2018
Resource Type:  Article
Cx Number:  CX22545

Jacques Pauwels' The Great Class War is a contribution to the ideological front in the struggle for a world without wars, for in resetting the story of that war in the Marxist frame, he loosens our ties to idealist interpretations that obscure the class nature of wars, naturalize war as an inevitable part of life, and force us to assume and share a guilt that largely rests on the shoulders of a profiteering and exploitative class, which holds the power of decision making through its control of political, economic, military, police, and media powers and grants us a vote that is largely cosmetic.

Abstract: 
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Excerpt:

It had always been, The Great Class War argues, an intention by the ruling political and economic elite to set the world to sword and fire, ending in a murderous determination on all political sides to go ahead with the crime of aggression, pit man against man and nation against all for which ten million ephemeral lives were lost--the urban poor, the peasants and near serfs, the colonial subjects, and, too, the officer class of the aristocracy and bourgeoisie. Initially swept into the war by the tide of propaganda of the upper-class culture of war idealism, Abrahamic-creed zeal, and national patriotism, the working class was urged with the collusion of the social democrat leaders of each belligerent nation, "Proletarians of the world, kill each other."

The essential novelty--and it is a crucial one--of Pauwels' study of WW I is the sustained, unflinching refusal to bend the knee to the authority of class-less perspectives from which the war has been traditionally represented even in the best accounts. His study relies on the method of Marxist class analysis, woefully absent from dominant narratives of history.