Thomas Paine

The matter is this: we are asked to judge the legitimacy of a war not by the abstract machinery of capital, nor by the ghostly traditions of European statecraft, but by the immediate, undeniable reality of a home struck by fire. The question is whether any of the reasons given for the current arrangement would survive a conversation with someone who owed it nothing.

My socialist interlocutor argues that the war is merely an expression of the internal logic of capital accumulation, a symptom of a system that seeks new fields of profit when domestic markets saturate. He is correct that war is often the final resort of exhausted economies, and he is right to look beyond the immediate explosion to the structures that make such explosions possible. I concede that the pursuit of profit has historically been a powerful engine of conflict. However, his framework commits a fatal error of abstraction. It treats the suffering of the individual as a statistical inevitability of a system, rather than a moral catastrophe that demands immediate judgment. To say that Russia’s invasion is “not an aberration of capitalism” is to strip the aggressor of agency and the victim of dignity. It reduces the burning of Kyiv to a line item in a global ledger. This is not reason; it is a surrender of moral clarity to economic determinism. If we accept that all violence is merely the working out of capital’s logic, we remove the possibility of choosing otherwise. We become spectators to a machine we claim to understand but refuse to stop.

My conservative interlocutor appeals to the “civil night,” that fragile agreement among men to sleep in peace, preserved by centuries of European statecraft. He warns against the dissolution of the distinction between soldier and civilian, a distinction he claims is the bedrock of civilized society. Here, too, I find a kernel of truth. The protection of the innocent is the primary duty of any legitimate government. But his defense rests on a dangerous foundation: the authority of tradition. He asks us to value the “accumulated wisdom” of the past, implying that because a distinction has existed for centuries, it possesses an inherent sanctity that must be defended. This is the hereditary argument applied to peace. It suggests that the peace of the past was a gift of statecraft, rather than a right of nature.

Let us strip away the historical costume. Does the right of a civilian to sleep in peace depend on the precedents of European diplomacy? No. It depends on the fact that they are human beings. The conservative argument is weak because it defends the form of civilization rather than the substance of human rights. If the “old order” is shattered, as he fears, it is not because the principle of civilian immunity is false, but because the institutions that claimed to protect it have failed. To cling to the “latent function” of old sanctuaries is to mistake the map for the territory. The sanctuary is not sacred because it was respected in 1700; it is sacred because it is a home.

Both opponents, in their different ways, defer to an external authority. The socialist defers to the invisible hand of capital; the conservative defers to the invisible hand of history. I defer to neither. I defer to the reader’s own capacity to judge what is right and what is wrong, here and now.

The socialist sees a system; the conservative sees a tradition. I see a man in a house, and a missile in the sky. The system may explain why the missile was built; the tradition may explain why the rules were broken. But neither explains why the man should die. That is a question of immediate justice, not structural analysis or historical preservation.

We must distinguish between society and government, and by extension, between the causes of war and the justification of it. Society is what people create together; government is what they tolerate. When government fails to protect the society, it becomes a parasitic force. The socialist is right to identify the parasitic nature of the war economy. The conservative is right to identify the failure of the protective function of the state. But both are wrong to look for the solution in the past or in the abstract. The solution lies in the present assertion of rights.

The urgency of this moment is not merely political; it is existential. We are not debating the merits of a treaty or the efficiency of a market. We are debating whether the right to life is contingent on the stability of the global order or the continuity of historical precedent. It is not. It is inherent.

Therefore, we must reject the socialist’s fatalism and the conservative’s nostalgia. We must assert that the violation of the home is a crime against nature, regardless of the economic incentives that drove the aggressor or the diplomatic failures that allowed it. The reader is invited to consider whether the arrangement, if proposed today for the first time, would be accepted by any reasonable person. Would a reasonable person accept that their home is a target because of the rate of profit? No. Would they accept it because the old rules of war are “fragile”? No. They would accept it only if they believed that their own safety was secondary to the interests of kings, capitalists, or historians.

The argument reduces to this: the right to life is not inherited from the past, nor is it granted by the system. It is claimed by the individual, in the present, against all who would deny it. The machinery of war is not an inevitable expression of capital, nor is it a tragic erosion of tradition. It is a choice. And it is a choice that we, as reasonable people, must condemn not because it breaks a rule, but because it breaks a human being.

The reader needs no intermediary to understand this. The fire speaks for itself. The question is whether we have the courage to listen to it, without the comfort of our theories or the shield of our traditions.

Rosa Luxemburg

The proposed reform addresses the symptom of border disputes while leaving the structural cause of imperialist accumulation intact. This is not an oversight. It is the function of reform.

The libertarian argues that the aggression against Ukraine is a philosophical error, a belief that “power is a thing to be held, rather than a trust to be exercised.” He contends that the aggressor’s claim rests on the absurd notion that the past has a veto over the present, that the dead are more entitled to the earth than the living. I concede the moral clarity of this observation. It is true that no amount of historical grievance justifies the bombardment of civilian centers. The horror of the drone strikes is undeniable, and the violation of the sanctity of the home is a crime against humanity that no political theory can sanitize.

However, the libertarian framework stops at the level of individual consent and abstract rights, treating the state as a moral agent that has simply lost its way. This is a dangerous abstraction. It ignores the material engine that drives the state. The aggression is not merely a philosophical error; it is the logical outcome of a system that requires expansion to survive. Capitalism does not stop at the border because capital itself has no borders. The search for new markets, new resources, and new fields of accumulation is not an aberration of the state; it is the imperative of the economic structure. When the domestic market is saturated, the drive for profit pushes outward, seeking to break through the barriers of national sovereignty. The “inheritance” the libertarian mocks is often a cover for the seizure of strategic resources and trade routes that are essential for the continued accumulation of capital in the aggressor’s sphere. To treat this as a mere failure of consent is to ignore the fact that the consent of the governed is often manufactured by the very economic pressures that demand expansion.

The conservative opponent speaks of the “civil night” and the “fragile, hard-won agreement among men to sleep in peace.” He laments the dissolution of the distinction between soldier and civilian, warning against the intellectual surrender that accepts total war as inevitable. I agree that the destruction of the sanctuary of the home is a regression. The erosion of the boundary between combatant and non-combatant is a feature of modern imperialist warfare, designed to break the will of the population and secure total control over the territory.

Yet, the conservative analysis treats this distinction as a permanent feature of civilized society, a bedrock that can be preserved through statecraft and wisdom. This is a historical illusion. The “civil night” was never a natural state; it was a temporary truce in the ongoing struggle for dominance, maintained only when the costs of war exceeded the profits of peace. The conservative seeks to restore the old order, to patch the surface of the conflict without addressing the underlying logic that makes such conflicts inevitable. He asks what accumulated wisdom is being burned, but he does not ask why the fire was lit in the first place. The wisdom of the old order was the wisdom of the ruling class, which used the distinction between soldier and civilian to protect its own interests while sacrificing the lives of the working class on both sides of the border.

The divergence between our frameworks is fundamental. The libertarian and the conservative both seek to preserve the existing structure of society, one by appealing to individual rights and the other to traditional order. Both fail to see that the structure itself is the problem. The aggression is not an accident of bad philosophy or bad statecraft; it is the result of a system that produces inequality and conflict as necessary conditions for its own reproduction. The reformist approach, whether it comes from the left or the right, seeks to stabilize this system, to make it more humane, more just, more peaceful. But a system that requires the exploitation of labor and the expansion of markets cannot be made humane without ceasing to be capitalist.

The question is not how to restore the “civil night” or how to ensure that power is held as a trust. The question is how to dismantle the structure that turns power into a weapon and land into a commodity. The working class in Ukraine, in Russia, and across Europe shares a common interest in ending this war, but that interest can only be realized through collective action, not through appeals to the conscience of the state or the wisdom of tradition. The party that acts for the class without the class has already made the error it was formed to correct. We must not substitute the programme of the party for the self-activity of the masses. The only way to break the cycle of imperialist violence is to build a socialist politics that is both structurally serious and democratically committed, one that challenges the accumulation logic at its root rather than merely regularizing its conditions.

The reform trap is clear: any solution that leaves the capitalist mode of production intact will eventually lead back to the same violence, because the pressure to expand and accumulate will remain. The drones and missiles are not just weapons; they are the physical manifestation of a system that has reached its limits. To address the symptom without addressing the cause is to prepare for the next war, not to prevent it. We must trace the reform to its structural effect: does it challenge the accumulation logic, or does it merely regularize conditions within it? If it does the latter, it is not a solution; it is a delay. And in the meantime, the bodies pile up.