p The history of class society abounds in military clashes and conflicts. In the past 5,500 years mankind was plunged into war more than 14,000 times. In the first half of this century alone there were two destructive world wars. All social progress in antagonistic formations brings bloodshed and suffering to the people. In the words of Marx, this progress was like a “hideous pagan idol, who would not drink the nectar but from the skulls of the slain".  [13•1 

p But, wars are no fatal inevitability in human social development, they are a socio-historical phenomenon. There was a time when people did not know wars, and a time will come when wars will have been done away with once and for all.

p As all socio-historical phenomena, the emergence of wars, their nature and place in history are subject to the laws of social development revealed by Marxism-Leninism.

p As distinct from pre-Marxist theories and the anti- scientific views of modern bourgeois ideologists, the founders of Marxism proved that the history of society is a logical, natural process. It is based on the historically determined nature and level of development of the social productive forces. The objective relations of production, which do not depend on the will of people, and which in their aggregate comprise the social system, are built on this material 14 foundation. The character of the social contradictions and the way in which they are resolved depend on economic relations. The economic system ultimately determines all social, political and ideological relations, including also the conditions for the emergence of wars.

p In class society war has become a means of resolving the antagonistic contradictions of social development.

p The armed clashes between primeval tribes were a sideline occupation, an aspect of the labour process, admittedly a unique one, directed at the seizure of hunting grounds, pastures, etc. Marx characterised the armed struggle of primeval tribes as a great common effort, directed at the solution of the common task of seizing objective subsistence conditions, at their preservation and protection. All the male members of the tribal group, sometimes also the women, had to participate in this “war”. All able-bodied members participated in “combat” with their instruments of labour, their hunting weapons, since at that time these were the only instruments used in the struggle for existence. Armed clashes often ended in the destruction of some tribes, but never in their enslavement. Prisoners were not made slaves. They were either eaten, or became fully-fledged members of the victorious tribe. At that stage there were as yet no social forces to organise and conduct wars so as to achieve definite economic and political aims. There was also no special organisation of armed people, as there were no special arms for fighting.

p Hence, the armed clashes of primeval tribal groups and clans, who did not know private ownership and division into classes, were not wars in the real sense of the word.

p The point is that war has two organically interrelated aspects—the socio-political and the military-technical. The first expresses the social, class nature of war, its political essence; the second characterises the specifics of the war, of the armed struggle. In using the term “war” to designate armed clashes in pre-class society, Marx and Engels referred to the second aspect. Clashes between tribes are reminiscent of wars in exploiter societies only by their second aspect.

p War emerged as a socio-political phenomenon at a definite stage of social development, namely, with the disintegration of the primeval system and the emergence of the slave-owning mode of production, when private ownership of the means of production appeared, when society was 15 divided into antagonistic classes, and the state emerged. Private property bred social violence. The exploiter classes legalised organised armed struggle aimed at winning material gains, enslaving people and enhancing the economic and political rule of those classes.

p Exposing the vulgar “force theory”, Engels showed that it was not war that had given rise to property inequality and classes, but, on the contrary, that private ownership and the division of society into classes had transformed the armed clashes of primeval tribes into war as a socio- political phenomenon. Only then did wars become a constant venture of the exploiters.

Thus, as a socio-historical phenomenon, serving the political aims of definite classes, war first emerged in exploiter society; it is the product and constant concomitant of class antagonistic society.