An ideology that defines "peace" as a totalizing social objective above the interests of the classes that make up society.
The meaning of pacifism
Pacifism conceals the fact that "peace", like all the other issues at stake in a class society, does not stand apart from or above the interests of the classes that make it up. This was true even when capitalism was still in its phase of historical ascent, when it was a progressive mode of production that pushed human development forward.
There is absolutely no social terrain, from the most primary material conditions to the most subtle moral conditions, on which the possessing classes and the conscious proletariat adopt the same attitude and appear as an undifferentiated "people" [...] In those respects in which the formal aspirations and interests of the proletariat and of the bourgeoisie as a whole, or of its progressive sector, seem identical or common, as for example in democratic aspirations, the identity of forms and slogans conceals a complete divergence of content and of practical policy.
Rosa Luxemburg. The National Question and Autonomy, 1908
Peace is one of those cases where the same term covers antagonistic objectives and needs. For the bourgeoisie all over the world in capitalist decadence, imperialism has become what water is to a fish, a medium so universal and omnipresent that it is incapable of conceiving a peace that is not imperialist, that is, one that does not reflect and reproduce the conditions of imperialism. Its own form of organization in this historical stage, state capitalism, is born of the exacerbation of the tendencies characteristic of imperialism towards concentration and centralization in the state, under the conditions of world wars.
Blind to the difference in class interests regarding war and to the material, economic base that drives them, pacifism tells us that in the face of the threat of war we have to "defend peace", "communicate for peace", "educate for peace", learn "nonviolent conflict resolution", practice "nonviolence"... But the tendencies that lead us to war do not originate in a supposed "congenital violence" of our species, nor in bad upbringing or difficulties in communicating.
And they are certainly not remedied by turning the other cheek in our daily disputes, still less by expressing an abstract dislike of the militarism and warmongering of states, as if they were mere "bad choices" of the ruling class and not an expression of the needs of national capital, of each and every national capital.
The tendency towards war is embedded in the very logic of capitalist decadence. To pretend otherwise, to play at giving cultural or ethical answers to a problem that is not played out on that terrain, only serves to divert attention and to blame the very workers who suffer its most direct consequences. That is why the same politicians and media that prepare the war also encourage political pacifism. Pacifism, with its ethical, individualistic, cultural approach... is an ideological inhibitor of the danger, ever present for the bourgeoisie, that the war against the "external enemy" may turn into an internal class war.
The history of the 20th and 21st centuries has shown that only the class struggle has effectively confronted war, and only when it was led by slogans and practices expressing the revolutionary defeatism of the workers.