Our imperialist ruling class has chosen which path it wants to take. It seeks an outcome where this proxy war with Russia keeps going, like the Vietnam War did after Nixon promised to negotiate its end. Even after Trump was elected on a mandate to end the Ukraine war, the neocons in his circle have managed to circumvent the popular will, and sabotage all efforts to reach a deal Russia would reasonably agree to. The latest indication of this came on Friday, when Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the administration will decide “in a matter of days” whether to simply “move on” from negotiating on Ukraine.
In all likelihood, the decision will be to give up on peace, and this was entirely predictable. In his first term, Trump advanced the empire’s cold war escalations against Russia even more than Obama did, and during his 2024 campaign everything showed he’d remained captured by the deep state. This was when we saw the rise of Silicon Valley MAGA, which has served as a facilitator in the effort to make neocons guide Trump’s policy. Some have gone along with Silicon Valley MAGA’s psyop, where tech billionaires get sold as anti-establishment heroes; but for much of the MAGA base, and the broader American masses, this scheme against the people is unacceptable. As Carlos Garrido has observed about how Trump’s working class supporters have reacted to what he’s done:
These discontented workers have not only taken note of Trump’s continued bellicosity (after he promised to be an “anti-war” president) and his failure to dismantle the deep state in any significant and not merely symbolic capacity, but also, how in the country itself no serious policies are being taken or proposed to improve the dire living situation of the working masses…This situation led the prominent working-class X influencer, “Texas Trucker,” to tweet at Trump, Secretary of the Department of Transportation Sean Duffy, and Vice President J.D. Vance the following: “It’s sad. [Are] all truckers in America going to have to join the American Communist Party to get justice in America. They seem to be the only ones standing with us and for us.” The melancholy in this statement demonstrates the awareness of Trump’s betrayal of MAGA, and the realization that the essential demands of the MAGA working class base can only be realized through another political project.
The Trump White House will do its best to distract from this next betrayal it’s planning, where the hopes for a Ukraine peace agreement get destroyed beyond all repair. But no matter how much culture war propaganda our ruling class promotes, it won’t reverse the great consciousness shift that’s happening. It won’t stop Americans from experiencing the economic destruction that our government is engineering, or from seeing how much the wars have to do with this destruction. More and more of the American people are going to seek a solution to this great outrage. And by doing so, they’ll be aligning themselves with the fight of the Russian people, who are now tasked with fighting off an enemy which has shown it isn’t interested in compromise.
If this conflict won’t be resolved through a compromise, then it can only be resolved through the full defeat of those who started it. Through the destruction of Ukraine’s fascist U.S. coup regime, the restoration of democracy to Ukraine, and the election of a Ukrainian president who won’t continue assisting Washington’s aggression’s. These things were always indispensable for reaching peace; any “peace” that doesn’t involve the ousting of the Banderite junta would be nothing more than a temporary hold-off before war inevitably starts again. A compromise on Ukraine would not have been a good thing; only through denazification can another crisis like this one be prevented.
This is a reality that’s so often been ignored, even within much of the antiwar movement. Both the liberal pro-NATO zealots, and the liberal-aligned “antiwar” left orgs, have sought to obscure why Russia got involved in Ukraine in the first place. It entered this fight because Ukraine was taken over by a Nazi coup regime, and this regime will continue instigating conflict until Russia forces a fundamental change.
Part of the Russian people’s struggle has been to make its bourgeois government authentically pursue denazification in Ukraine, and not capitulate to Washington. So far, the Kremlin has become willing to state that denazification is non-negotiable, which is worth something; Russia has evidently taken strong enough of a stance that Washington feels it won’t get what it wants from negotiations. The question is whether the Kremlin will act consistently with this statement, and not allow the continued existence of any state formation that’s controlled by the imperialists.
As Dimitrios Patelis of the World Anti-Imperialist Platform has observed, thus far Russia hasn’t actually tried to bring about such an outcome, leading to “stagnation” in many areas of Russia’s strategic progress. And this problem can only be rectified through rebuilding the proletarian movement, both in Russia and across the globe. Writes Patelis:
The stagnation in Ukraine and the strategically significant tactical successes of the [imperialist] axis in West Asia and Transcaucasia show the decline and exhaustion of the power, traditional relations and prestige that the RF drew from some achievements (technological, military, ideological, etc.) of the USSR and the internationalist anti-imperialist policy of early socialism in the 20th century…The same is true of the remnants/shadows of those who were once associated with the system of early socialism, the “non-aligned movement” and anti-imperialism…Mere negation, the rejection of the domination of the imperialist axis is not enough. The generic and vague, abstract anti-imperialism, which in reality leaves the strategic initiative to the enemy, is no longer enough. A conscious foundation and formulation of the positive prospect, the alternative strategy and tactics of the pole of socialism and anti-imperialism is what is needed
Such is the shared mission of the Russian and American people at this moment: to build a popular movement, specifically of the kind which seeks final victory for the working class. This revolutionary process will look different in Russia than it does here, because Russia’s biggest problem is attacks from the outside. But as the CPRF has pointed out, the country’s bourgeoisie continue to perpetuate unacceptable conditions for the proletariat; it’s also holding back the anti-imperialist struggle.
The task of defeating Russia’s bourgeoisie is up to the Russian people; it’s necessary to criticize Russia’s liberal ruling class, but as Americans our primary task lies within our own class struggle. For us in the United States to overcome our capitalist crisis, and act as effective allies of imperialism’s global targets, we must learn from the Marxist-Leninist tradition of our Russian counterparts. This means building a real mass proletarian party, a project which the ACP’s members are greatly helping with.
In all parts of the capitalist world, deepening contradictions are forcing the workers to act. And now that the rulers of capitalism’s core have decided to continue their assault on Russia’s people, the workers in both Russia and America have the task of jointly defeating the hegemon. For our purposes as U.S. communists, what we must focus on is undermining the imperial war machine from within, and providing Russia’s war effort with real support; the support that can only come from a strong international workers movement.
By killing the prospects for compromise on Ukraine, the neocons have furthered the liberal “antiwar” movement’s collapse, making it so that there are only two camps with real relevance: those who support the empire’s offensive, and those who seek to defeat the empire by any means necessary. With Palestine, we’re seeing the same process: the liberal Zionists are getting sidelined by the outright genocidal faction, creating a clearer polarization between the pro-genocide camp and the pro-liberation camp.
In all areas of our geopolitical struggle, boundaries of demarcation are becoming easier to see; and the liberal actors who are “neutral” in this conflict, or who promote a vague “anti-imperialism,” have been exposing themselves. This has everything to do with the escalation of our third world war, and the ever-greater strain the war is putting on the capitalist system. Through collective organization, scientific socialism, and the mobilization of the masses, the world’s workers will thwart the hegemon’s great assault.
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