https://whatwayforward.wordpress.com/2016/09/29/for-a-materialist-perspective-on-the-threat-of-renewed-world-war/

1.  You conclude against irrationality, perhaps correctly, but far from completely. Conclusions require discussion to prevent their falling into one-sidedness. You open up a serious flaw in ignoring that in a divided society, irrationality becomes rational, in that one side benefits from the other side’s mistakes. This contradiction, which produces irrationality on both sides, ends in unity that takes a rational form. That rationality we can observe and act upon only as outside actors, or the advocates of revolutionary social change. They can deal with their irrationality by forming committees and other decision-making bodies, congresses or even the League of Nations and the United Nations. This they may combine with oversight by mass-media, but then irrationality has its own rejoinders, such as group-think, mass hysteria, or mass conformity, not to mention centralized illegal government spying, torture, political prisons, and other autocratic means by which irrationality rises.

That being said, your conclusion can, from certain angles, prove true, but the revolutionary conclusion must remain within its social context to maintain its basis in scientific, materialist thought. Capitalism arose in Europe during the total breakdown of the existing system due to the crusades and the black plague. This did not destroy the entire world, but only one region and part of another, and not totally, but more to the tune of one third. Neither Europe nor the world could tolerate such destruction ever again, making necessary the abandonment of feudal society.

Socialism may arise from the paralysis caused by the threats inherent in a seemingly inevitable Third World War. In all likelihood, the great powers may sign treaties, as they did before World War II with regard to chemical and biological weapons, to limit the use of nuclear weapons. As was the case with World War II in Nazi Germany, nuclear weapons could be turned by a government against its own people, making possible a longer, more completely destructive war, except for the rich, to stabilize capitalism. The rich could keep their money safe in stocks, bonds, and other liquid securities while the physical capital of the world exploded into similarly tiny fragments.

See this image: https://qph.fs.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-c25701ff358a90b9f2e86cd7fe5444d6

The Nazi regime used chemical weapons to fight partisans and Red Army soldiers under siege.

2.  Your theory that capitalism, as a human construction, could not destroy all of humanity does seem strong. However, there exist divisions within society that force one side to call another less than human. Bringing one part of humanity to the point of extinction would not seem wrong if that one part were deemed a mortal threat to the other, or were deemed unworthy of the attention of the world regardless of the measures employed against them, or were deemed alien, subhuman, wild and undomesticated or some other such demeaning classification. In Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, a dystopian society separated economic classes to create separate races that would not interbreed, while the lower class or race repeatedly bore comparisons to animals that they could kill en masse. In other words, the workers’ revolution, a threat to capitalist society, could be deemed too dangerous to be allowed to exist. If capitalism’s maintenance required the extermination of a billion workers, capitalist authority could classify them as targets for nuclear war. That would leave 6 billion more workers to slave under capitalism for another generation. If those billion were far away enough, and the damage could be contained, then in their minds, it would justify such an action.

Whether those 6 billion that are left will carry the revolution through to the end depends on the work of the ICFI. Whether the paralysis that exists to prevent such an Armageddon will lead to a relatively peaceful revolution based on the inability of capitalism to contain democracy within anti-socialist, counter-revolutionary parties, depends on the work of the ICFI. For that reason, the party bureaucracy, or its historical bi-product, the Stalin-Kamenev leadership of the Bolsheviks, the current leadership of the SEP, needs a historic realignment and a return to principled Marxist leadership.

Bill van Auken allows the “end of the world” theories to form an abusive relationship between the party and the working class. The workers cannot, according to his theory, decide to form a revolutionary workers’ government without abusive, or in other strains of the same theory, violent treatment from the revolutionary party. This theory and attitude cannot but stand in contradiction to Leninism. Furthermore, Van Auken, in his arguments about Castroism, leaves out any discussion of the role of fascist military governments and the SLL-OCI split that left the workers without even a core of Marxist leadership. This incomplete discussion leaves Marxism open to and defenseless before Armageddon theories that may animate small groups to action, but cannot guide a mass party to safety from persecution or its leadership to responsibility with the power entrusted to them. That guidance can only come from a complete assimilation of the entire history of Marxist revolutionary struggle.

3.  One further related issue, Rights Lost in 2006:

https://randomposter33.wordpress.com/2018/09/08/rights-lost-in-2006/#comments