How does a Marxist approach this question of “the right to security and to life.” We approach it in the same way we approach all other such questions, not on the basis of abstract concepts and principles, such as “the right to national self-determination”, but on the basis of an objective analysis of material conditions, and concrete reality.
We can say, in the abstract, that all citizens should have a right to life and security, but that does not at all mean we have to conclude that, here and now, they actually do have such a right, or any reasonable expectation of such a right being forthcoming from the capitalist state, precisely because that is not its function. Its function is to protect the interests of the ruling class, not the mass of society comprised of workers. We can say that there should be some abstract right to national self-determination, but it does not mean, in the age of imperialism, that any such right is objectively feasible, or exists, even for the largest states. Nor does it commit us to supporting any such right where it really means defence of the capitalist state or of the ruling-class, which constitutes our immediate class enemy. That includes where that ruling class is conducting a national liberation war. We support only the self-determination of the working-class, and its class war, against that ruling-class.
By saying that all citizens should have a right to life and security, but that so long as capitalism and the capitalist state exists, no such right exists, for workers, we also present the conclusion from that. If workers are to have that right, concretely, and not as some abstract principle, they have to bring it about for themselves, and often, not only for themselves, as an alternative to a misguided belief that the capitalist state will provide it, but in militant opposition to that state.
If workers want an actual right to life and security, and not the fiction of it presented by the AWL, and other bourgeois liberals, they have to replace the reality of the insecurity of the capitalist market, with their own control of the means of production, and the increased rational planning of that production; if they want to be safe on the streets, and not subject to being harassed by police, they have to create democratically controlled workers' self-policing of communities; if they want to be able to defend their own lives and security, they need workers defence squads and militia to protect picket lines, and to protect the workplaces when they exert workers control over them, and when that results in attacks from the state, backed up by fascist paramilitaries.
In the case of war with some other state, rather than the capitalist state protecting workers, it is always the other way around that the state calls upon workers to protect it! It is the workers who are expected to risk their lives, as soldiers in defence of the state and the ruling class, not vice versa. It is the workers who are called upon to continue war production, whilst the state demands they do so, for worse wages, and worse conditions, and removes any of their basic rights to strike and so on. A look at the way that happened in WWI and II, makes that clear, and the same is happening, today, in Ukraine and Russia, as well as in Israel.
In fact, it could also be seen during lockdowns. One of the basic elements of the state, in Britain, is the NHS, but what were workers told, not that they had a right to be protected by the NHS, but rather that they were expected to protect the NHS! In other words, that they should demur from going to the hospital so that it could be devoted to dealing with COVID infections, infections which, themselves, were largely spreading because of a failure to focus attention on protecting those actually at risk from the virus, i.e. the elderly, particularly in hospitals and care homes!
By noting that workers should have such rights, but do not, and cannot so long as capitalism exists, we present the solution to that problem, of organising workers to, here and now, establish their own means of demanding and enforcing such rights, independent of the capitalist state, via the creation of worker owned and controlled cooperatives, to occupy and impose workers control over other production, to establish factory committees, to democratically and directly control all means of production, to create workers defence squads to protect workplaces, picket lines and so on from attack by fascists and the state, to create workers councils/soviets, as local organs of workers power and democracy, so as to ensure the arming of the working class to protect its life and security, arms in hand, against the attacks of the ruling class – foreign and domestic.
That is the basis of Permanent Revolution, as described by Marx, and later by Trotsky and Lenin. It is the basis of revolutionary defeatism, and the slogan “The Main Enemy Is At Home”, and its concomitant, that we call on workers to turn all national and imperialist wars into a global civil war, conducted by workers, against the bourgeoisie. And, rather than the appeals to the capitalist state, and subordination of workers to the capitalist state, for the purpose of defence of the fatherland as proposed by social-imperialists like the AWL, it is this call to turn national wars into civil wars, of a global class war by the working-class against the bourgeoisie, that constitutes the program of Marxism, and of the self-emancipation of the proletariat.
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