Above: this week’s million-strong march in Yemen, which was held in response to Trump’s war crimes against the Yemeni people
Triumph over imperialism can only be won on the basis of class struggle. Of mobilizing the popular masses through a revolutionary program, led by workers parties and global workers formations. This is the most important message we need to be promoting at the present stage, because though there is widespread desire to see the imperial order defeated, the institutional structures needed to defeat imperialism haven’t yet been sufficiently built up. Big revolutionary parties and coalitions do exist, but they’re mainly in the colonized or formerly colonized countries. And imperialism won’t be overthrown until those within the imperialist countries, most of all the United States, carry out workers revolution where we are. As our government expands its genocide against the world’s most vulnerable peoples, we must build the mass power needed to stop the war machine, and to enable global workers victory.
It’s not enough for the world to have become multipolar, or for BRICS to have gained prominence. These developments are objectively positive for the revolutionary cause, but we can’t let our celebrations of them distract from any facet of the class struggle. We need to adopt a synthesis between the “multipolarist” perspective, and the perspective that’s centrally focused on class.
The geopolitical struggle cannot come at the expense of the class struggle, and the same is true the other way around. Both struggles fit within the same category, and are interdependent on each other. That’s why the Marxist-Leninist formations which understand today’s conditions have no problem with emphasizing both at once. Amid Trump’s mass murder of Yemenis, and the renewed campaign of massacres against Gazans, these are the kinds of voices we need to be looking to.
“According to our scientific analysis of events, this war is a singular conflict with several active or potential operational theatres and fronts,” states Greece’s Revolutionary Unification Party, writing on behalf of the World Anti-Imperialist Platform. “This imperialist attack together with the criminal Zionist regime, is a desperate attempt to regain lost power in the global balance of power. It is a war for planetary domination by US-led imperialism, and for the subjugation of peoples through ethnic cleansing and genocide, while increasing the likelihood of a massive thermonuclear war that could result in the annihilation of all life on the planet.” The World Federation of Trade Unions is another example of such an anti-imperialist united front. It said this month: “For the WFTU it is clear that as the imperialist aggression intensifies, our solidarity must intensify too. The workers from all around the world are in a continues struggle of supporting the Palestinian people! The militant trade unions join their voices with the Palestinian people, condemn the imperialist hypocrisy.”
These types of principled anti-imperialist sentiments are so valuable because among left-wing or “socialist” orgs, they are not universally shared. There are many groups that claim to be fighting for the workers, while assisting in capitalism’s wars by calling all U.S. adversaries “imperialist” or “authoritarian.” They say they’re against U.S. imperialism, but they make sure to add that they’re also against the biggest forces which challenge Washington’s dominance. These parts of the left need to be struggled against. In our present political climate, though, the left has come to be quite isolated. It’s tied itself to the Democratic Party, and the Democrats have destroyed their political brand. Today, the bigger ideological threat is the “right populist” element, which claims to challenge monopoly capital while opposing class struggle.
Some of these right-wing “dissident” actors support Trump, and present him as a serious challenger of the liberal Atlanticist order. Others promote a modern Hitlerite ideology, and oppose Trump from that angle. Whatever form of right-wing psyop they’re propagating, their role is to divert the discourse away from class struggle. To make it appear as though workers revolution, and the proletarian party-building which this entails, are unnecessary to defeating the imperial system.
This lie is supported by a certain other narrative, one which much of alt media is responsible for pushing. This is the narrative that BRICS and multipolarity can bring peace on their own, when the truth is the opposite; it’s because of these emergent threats to U.S. hegemony that the imperialists are only going to keep escalating their wars. When faced with existential threats, the hegemon will react by becoming more aggressive, and these aggressions will continue until U.S. workers revolution comes. That’s the practical reality we must understand in order to wage this struggle effectively.
There is a growing split between the forces that represent this right opportunist “dissident” perspective, and the forces that align with the class struggle. And October 7 was the catalyst for this split, not just because it exposed the pro-Zionist “antiwar” right-wingers but because it led to major new geopolitical events. Two years ago, when Ukraine was the main foreign policy issue, anti-Zionists could more easily work with the “anti-Ukraine, pro-Israel” crowd. But since then, any latent pro-Zionist sentiments among this crowd have come to the forefront. These biases have caused the pro-Zionist “dissidents” to endorse genocide against Palestine, support the aggressions against Iran, and endorse or ignore the crimes against Yemen, Lebanon, and Syria. They’ve also made it clear that they’ll back the next attacks on China; this is the position of Tulsi Gabbard, who’s said the U.S. and India must come together against the PRC. And many of Gabbard’s fellow “antiwar” conservatives share that stance.
These new developments in our world war have forced everybody to choose which path they want to go on. And the resulting breakup within the antiwar movement is ultimately a good thing, because it’s always necessary for a movement to get rid of elements that aren’t compatible with it in the long term.
It’s this process, where the unprincipled actors reveal themselves, that helped the WFTU become such a clear voice for the workers of the exploited nations. As soon as World War II ended, and the Allied imperial powers no longer needed to align with the Soviets, the bourgeois trade unions initiated a split with the WFTU. In doing so, they created an extremely visible boundary of demarcation between the unions that stood with imperialism, and the unions that stood for ending global exploitation. Today’s opportunists, both on the left and the right, have exposed their true intentions. And this lets us better carry forth the revolutionary project that the WFTU represents.
The revolutionary side has been vindicated by all the things we’ve seen since October 7. It’s been proven that we can’t vote our way out of imperialist wars, and that multipolarity can’t bring imperialism’s defeat without a popular struggle. To take advantage of this moment, the foremost thing we must do is build up the workers movement, both through the unions and through our own proletarian organizations.
An indispensable part of this project is to deepen our ties with the global revolutionary movement, and such ties do already exist. Labor Today International acts as the U.S. affiliate of the WFTU, in defiance of the efforts by established union leaders to split American labor from the Global South. Shortly after its founding last summer, the American Communist Party became a U.S. cohort of the World Anti-Imperialist Platform, signing its Paris Declaration. We are making progress. These international alliances are being strengthened, alongside the revolutionary elements of the U.S. labor movement. Our task is to make sure this progress continues amid the next war escalations, which will precipitate efforts by the state to crush dissent. We must resist these efforts, for the sake of both our own people and the entire world.
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