“You know you almost died on Saturday,” said former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter last week, speaking both to podcast host Nima Alkhorshid and to everyone listening. “Do you know that? Are you aware of that? Or are you pretending it didn’t happen? Because had Joe Biden signed off on the proposal that Keir Starmer, the prime minister of the United Kingdom, brought in to greenlight the use of Stormshadow cruise missiles and American ATACMS missiles against targets inside Russia, we’d all be dead. Because it would have triggered a nuclear war. The Russians said, from Vladimir Putin to the ambassador of the United Nations to the Russian ambassador here in the United States, that this would be an act of war.” Ritter then spoke louder, seeking to truly emphasize the point he was making. “In fact, the Russian ambassador at the United Nations in session with the Security Council said it will be a declaration of war.”
The only thing that stopped Starmer’s plan from becoming reality, said Ritter, was that there were people in Biden’s circle who told him Starmer had the wrong idea. Who were able to see reality, and understand that Russia’s warning was serious. Starmer, and his faction of the UK ruling class, have embraced the “Russia is bluffing” narrative because they have the biggest incentive to escalate this conflict.
Britain’s new empire, which exists in a neo-colonial extractive network of multinational corporations, can only stay alive if Russia gets defeated. British capital’s access to the Global South is in imminent danger of being cut off, because Russia and the broader Eurasian economy have been threatening to overtake the old order. That’s why it was the UK which provided Ukraine with depleted uranium last summer: the British monopoly bourgeoisie views winning this conflict as a life-or-death matter. As soon as BRICS becomes too successful at competing with the U.S.-centralized empire, this empire’s financial dominance will be lost. Which means Britain, the small island country that lost its most important colonies, will experience an acceleration of its capitalist collapse.
The core of imperialism the United States will be left practically just as isolated, making its ruling class need to pivot towards a new front of warfare. The USA’s super-rich, and their servants in the deep state, are already preparing for this shift in strategy. Or at least they’re trying to; the different factions among them can’t come to a consensus on what to do next. Faced with the collapse of Zionism, and the backfiring of Washington’s Ukraine maneuver, it’s hard to figure out which path would best alleviate monopoly capital’s crisis. That’s why we just almost died: there are plenty of actors within the U.S. imperial state who are willing to listen to Britain’s absurd triumphalist ideas about Ukraine, because like the British, these actors are desperate. They can’t accept an outcome where Russia wins, so they’re looking for a magical solution that will reverse Russia’s victory. The Ukraine proxy war was supposed to destabilize China’s biggest strategic partner, making the PRC able to be subdued. Instead, this conflict Washington instigated has propelled BRICS to massive influence.
It’s because Washington picked this fight that every country suddenly got forced to pick a side in the geopolitical conflict, prompting BRICS membership to explode. And due to this new momentum within BRICS, Venezuela (for the most recent example) has become scheduled to soon join the grouping, and to take on a poverty alleviation role within it. It’s developments like these that reduce the effectiveness of Washington’s economic warfare, and therefore its broader influence. Though the sanctions Trump imposed on Venezuela were able to massively shrink its economy, the country’s GDP has since gotten much closer to a full recovery, and its entry into BRICS will speed up this healing process.
That’s increasingly the story for other parts of the Global South, as well as for the west Asian and post-Soviet countries: they’re partnering with China, and thereby achieving the growth the imperialists have tried to stop them from getting. Because these parts of the globe are gaining a more equal footing with the imperialist countries, the neo-colonial system is becoming more imperiled. And these things wouldn’t be happening so speedily if not for the poor geopolitical gamble that Washington made by provoking Russia.
These victories for the globe’s anti-imperialist forces show that escalation can be something we take advantage of. That our enemies can so easily do something reckless, and give us unprecedented opportunities for advancing the struggle. This is the way we need to view the perilous situation that NATO has put the world in: as a moment when our enemies are acting far too bold for their own good.
The danger from the empire’s cold war escalations is real, but the empire is acting like this out of desperation. If we maneuver our situation right, the masses of the United States will overthrow our imperial state, which is creating the conditions for its own demise. A crucial part of this task is to raise awareness about the danger our government is putting us in, and to rally the people against the war machine. Ritter has called for this in his op-ed reacting to the day when we almost died:
We were one stroke of the pen away from this outcome on Friday, Sept. 13, 2024. This isn’t a drill. This isn’t an academic exercise. This is the real world. This is life or death. This is your future held hostage by a madman in Kiev, backed by lunatics in Europe. The question is — what are we going to do about it? There is an election on Nov. 5 where the next commander-in-chief of the United States will be selected by “we, the people.” This person will be the one holding the pen in any future scenario where life or death decisions that could manifest into a general nuclear war will be made. It is incumbent upon we, the people, to make sure that Americans demand the candidates for this office articulate their policy vision regarding the war in Ukraine, the prospects of peace with Russia, and what they will do to prevent the outbreak of nuclear war. But they won’t do that if we, the people, remain silent about the issue.
For this mass mobilization to work, we’re going to need to ensure it survives the state’s present crackdown on dissent, which has everything to do with the war drive.
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It’s no coincidence that we’re seeing this combination of escalatory behaviors from the ruling class at the same time when the world is about to see a pivotal moment within the Eurasian economy’s rise. Next month’s BRICS meeting is going to represent a serious threat to U.S. financial dominance, because as the empire’s own strategists have warned, BRICS is catalyzing a repeat of the imperial downfalls from the past.
At the start of this year, a PressTV editorial reported that “In a recent op-ed for the Foreign Policy magazine, former White House economist Joe Sullivan warned that a BRICS currency could topple the dollar and put it in a similar position as the British pound, which slipped from international dominance in the 1800s. Sullivan touched on major sway of the bloc in commodities markets where Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the UAE are among the world’s top exporters of fossil fuels, while Brazil, China, and Russia are major exporters of precious metals. Saudi Arabia, Sullivan said, owns over $100 billion in US bonds, which has helped bring BRICS’ total holdings in US Treasury over $1 trillion.” Apparently this comes back to Britain as well.
The imperialists see the direction things are going in, and they’ve concluded that the only way to save themselves is by destroying a massive amount of humanity and its civilization. This means sacrificing the United States. And though the military commanders are (thus far) able to listen to the warnings of nuclear war, the elites are still trying to enact this sacrifice in a different way. A way where the country undergoes a collapse; not a civil war, at least in the traditional sense, but a breakdown of civil order and social relations. This unraveling is occurring through the engineered degrowth of our economy, and through violence that the state makes possible.
The country will experience a kind of civil war where our communities get attacked by armed fanatics who have help from the feds, like the latest attempted Trump assassin. As well as by lumpen mobs, like the xenophobic rioters that terrorized Muslims across the UK in August. That wave of violence was made possible by social media psyops, ones the intelligence centers have been proliferating in order to exacerbate ethnic and religious tensions. And when the world was appalled by the outcome of this targeted hate campaign, Keir Starmer got an opportunity to expand the state’s reach, creating a precedent to criminalize anti-imperialist work and labor organizing.
As the decline of imperialism accelerates Britain’s collapse, the U.S. deep state is using the UK as a testing ground for the things our ruling class aims to do here. The elites want to perpetuate a cycle of division, anger, bloodshed, and state power grabs. And we’ll soon see them apply this method amid the 2024 election, which is a big opportunity for creating unrest that justifies repression. These operations within the core imperialist countries are about creating the conditions for a new big war. One that’s not intended to be nuclear, but would absolutely raise the danger of nuclear holocaust, and would entail incomprehensible human costs regardless.
It’s not guaranteed that the present level of tensions with Russia will go away on their own, without the emergence of a much bigger anti-imperialist movement. Washington won’t necessarily choose of its own volition to de-escalate; things could go in many different directions. It would make some kind of strategic sense for the U.S. empire to abandon Ukraine following the election, but this would go against everything Kamala Harris has said she plans to do. And we saw what happened the last time Trump won the presidency: he said he would end the wars, then he easily got swayed towards escalating with Russia.
Because there’s this lack of consensus, we can tell which things Washington is more likely to do, but we can’t say for certain, as the most fanatical factions could still win out. It’s apparent that the dominant wing of the imperial strategic establishment fears a direct confrontation with Iran, because that war would destroy the U.S. economy. But there are plenty of zealots within the establishment that are glad to let the Zionist entity drag us into war with Iran, like how there are many that would let Britain drag us into war with Russia. Our ruling class is not necessarily rational, so just because a war with the Russia-China-Iran trio would be guaranteed to backfire on the empire, doesn’t mean there aren’t powerful actors working to bring about this outcome.
Moreover, there are highly provocative actions that all the most influential parts of the government and bourgeoisie seek to carry out. They can agree that we must keep inflaming the tensions over Taiwan; that we must keep backing the “Israeli” rogue Nazi state, even as it threatens war with Iran; that we should keep funding NATO, whether directly or by making Europe pay more into it like Trump wants to do. And though Trump’s faction wants to restart diplomacy with the DPRK, this isn’t something that any of the high-level bourgeoisie are serious about helping him achieve.
Elon Musk is backing Trump, but Musk is a controlled deep state op. So even if he personally likes the idea of peace with the DPRK, there are signs that he won’t challenge the deep state’s efforts to steer MAGA in a pro-imperialist direction. For example, when the intelligence centers have worked to prevent the DPRK from trending on Twitter during pivotal moments in the discourse, Musk hasn’t bothered to rectify this issue. The will to reverse these escalations doesn’t exist among the monopolists; progress can only come from the forces with a material interest in ending the imperial system. That’s where we need to look for allies as our class struggle enters into its next stage, and both our perils and opportunities get more numerous.
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The big lesson from Russia’s Operation Z, as well as from the October 7 Operation al-Aqsa Flood, is that the costs of resisting imperialism must be taken on. That the enemy is going to hurt you as punishment for defying it, and this can’t deter you from doing what’s necessary for victory. When it’s undeniable that taking a certain action will bring the empire’s defeat, as was the case for Z and for al-Aqsa Flood, this is the mentality to have. It’s imperative that we internalize this reality at the present moment, because now is when the circumstances are truly about to test us; when we’re soon to be confronted with the next phase of the counterinsurgency, and see what the price of resistance means.
Both the pro-Harris and pro-Trump wings of monopoly capital seek to expand repression. There are elements of the ruling class whose best interest is in ending the imperial order, and that therefore could be brought towards an alliance against this crackdown. But these elements are exclusively in the lower levels of the bourgeoisie; they’re the types of entrepreneurs whose profits depend on domestic industries, rather than on international financial investments. It’s necessary to form a united front against monopoly capital, which is increasingly squeezing out their smaller-scale businesses; we just shouldn’t expect these elements to provide us with protection against the purge. No protection racket for communists will emerge from within the government, which the monopolist deep state has dictatorial control over.
This protection racket can instead be built from within our own networks; from within the institutions that we construct, and that we connect to the forces which are compatible with proletarian revolution. To survive, we must follow the model that other revolutionaries have adopted when their work has been illegalized; the model where they form clandestine groups, each of them individually small, which fit into a larger structure. The goal is to ensure that each cadre will keep working, regardless of whatever happens. If any one leader becomes indisposed, or even if many people get imprisoned, the ones who remain must be prepared to continue carrying out operations.
Making our orgs regimented in this way is instrumental towards transitioning from strategic defensive—where we’re fighting just to survive—towards strategic equilibrium, where we can act on an equal footing with the established political elements. And when we get to the stage after that, which is strategic offensive, we’ll have the tools required for confronting the imperial state. If it were possible to create protection rackets within the existing state, then reaching strategic equilibrium would be easier. But that’s not the reality we’re facing; the ruling class is going in the direction of abandoning the more open “democratic” system, and instead acting to eliminate all pretenses of freedom. In this scenario, strategic equilibrium is going to to look like communists gaining influence outside the existing government, not within it. And strategic offensive is going to look like communists partnering with our allies to defeat a highly violent fascist state.
To prevail amid this dire situation, we must account for the question of territory. For how we’re going to render our class enemies, and their police, unable to extend their reach into where we operate. The lumpen elements which we’re at odds with already have this question figured out; gangs can carve out spaces where the cops are afraid to go. The ideologically motivated “counter-gangs” that the state is cultivating are prepared to gain territory, because the government will support them against us. We need to learn to compete with these reactionary forces in this arena, or we’ll have nowhere to go when our class struggle escalates further. Our enemies will have full control over the chessboard of land. We’re capable of avoiding such an outcome; we’ll avoid it by applying the lessons from the global anti-imperialist movement’s recent victories.
The fear that we’ll replicate these victories, and bring this wave of change into the empire’s core, is at the heart of why our class enemies are acting so recklessly. When the less rational actors among them try desperately to beat Russia, and convince themselves that escalating the conflict won’t bring nuclear war, it’s in part because they want to demoralize anti-imperialists. They want to prove that Washington didn’t make a mistake by entering into this conflict, Russia did. Since it began almost three years ago, Operation Z hasn’t just accelerated imperialism’s economic decline; it’s accelerated the global uprisings against the hegemon, helping inspire more acts of defiance. Seeing a country militarily beat the hegemon gave great encouragement to the people who carried out last year’s Sahel revolutions, and to the people behind al-Aqsa Flood. Next it could do this for our own struggle against monopoly capital. Russia’s victory has proven that we can win as well, no matter what our enemies try to do to us.
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