Neue Debatte - Special Edition - Long Essay on Left Strategy #002 - 04/2017 | Page 75

13 Strategic goal: Eradicate war
We have to challenge the perhaps most powerful, most illegally op-
erating, large scale corrupting, scrupulous, and dangerous branch of
industry ever, which nevertheless is deeply anchored in state and so-
ciety, above all in the USA.
I propose for an initiating international campaign:
13.2 Ban all export of weapons, military goods and spare parts
This implies for the activists to name for their country all companies
concerned and to be brought down. We need legal initiatives in par-
liaments and administrations. We have to win trade Unions for cam-
paigning against specific export permits or the production of new
types of weapons. We have to join hands with the opposition in wea-
ponry buying regimes and states. We have to challenge NATO and all
other military alliances independent of their political camp. We must
help set right the notion of soldiers in the nation armies of the world,
on who is friend and who the enemy and what they are really sup-
posed to fight and die for.
13.3 “Swords to ploughshares!” Transform the war industries
One of the most important political problems concerned is the ques-
tion of losing jobs by shutting down armament productions. We have
to argue on central and company trade union level by help of science
and research for concepts to rearrange armament production for civil
peace fabrication of sophisticated, useful and needed machines, ve-
hicles, planes, etc. The staff of the companies in question will surely
know much better than everybody else what will be reasonable and
viable.
How to finance restructuring without losing a single workplace? First
of all you need a public fund to be filled with the enormous profits
and subsidies of the branch. If the shareholders and proprietors of
these armaments companies join in they will be asked to bring in all
the stock, reserves and receivables for the noble project. If they
won’t and insist on their capitalist power of disposal to do what they
like, they have to be expropriated, their assets being cleared with the
project costs of the reorganization up to the time a new production
pays for itself. The government will also be able to add funds from a
radical realignment of the armed forces of the country.
I am performing a sort of brainstorming, not to start campaigning
(nobody can do this alone) but to give an impression of the hard, long
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