Russia’s president recently explained just how dire of a situation NATO has created, and how much worse it could get:
We were forced to try to end the war that the West started in 2014 by force of arms. And Russia will end this war by force of arms, freeing the entire territory of the former Ukraine from the United States and Ukrainian Nazis. There are no other options. The Ukrainian army of the US and NATO will be defeated, no matter what new types of weapons it receives from the West. The more weapons there are, the fewer Ukrainians and what used to be Ukraine will remain. Direct intervention by NATO’s European armies will not change the outcome. But in this case, the fire of war will engulf the whole of Europe. It looks like the US is ready for that too.
Kosovo is where the imperialists are the furthest along in this project to expand the war to the rest of Europe. NATO is arming Kosovo’s Albanian fascist regime, letting it intensify its violent oppression against the ethnic Serbs within its borders. This human rights travesty is being whitewashed by NATO’s psyops, which demonize the Serbs, and showing that Washington seeks to build a new fascist war machine across the continent. A war machine that it intends to use as a means for facilitating the next phase in the new cold war, the phase where upon failing to destabilize Russia, the imperialists conduct a hybrid war against BRICs. As well as against all the other countries that threaten to break away from imperial control.
The effects of this global hybrid war will be disastrous, and with the Ukraine proxy war’s failure becoming impossible to ignore, it could start sooner than we’d like to think. Yet if we in the core navigate our conditions properly, we’ll help make this moment of global upheaval lead to a new wave of workers revolutions.
Conflicts have a history of preceding vast gains for the proletarian revolutionary cause. World War I led to the 1917 revolution, World War II led to China’s revolution. To make this series of conflicts the U.S. empire is instigating amid its decline into another catalyst event of that kind, we have to unite the people in the core around the task of defeating U.S. hegemony. Which we can do by appealing to the ways that the proxy war, and the austerity policies the bourgeoisie are imposing in the midst of it, are further harming an already strained working class.
The social base for this cause is emerging on its own, in accordance with the deterioration of working class conditions that the war is creating. Support for the Ukraine aid effort has been declining since last fall, when it started becoming apparent that the experts had lied about how easy this war would be. Which isn’t enough to produce a spontaneous uprising against the war machine in the same category as the anti-police revolts, yet has expanded the amount of the population which is revolution-compatible. Which is open to the anti-imperialist perspective, and by extension to the other ideas necessary for working people to assert their class interests. That’s why our foremost priority at this stage in the class struggle should be to build a platform, via a combination of media and demonstrations, that can bring this counter-hegemonic perspective to the majority of the people.
The conditions that have made the majority in the core compatible with revolutionary politics are ones where even as U.S. working hours have vastly gone up over the last half-century, the workers have been seeing lower and lower wages. A decline that’s been greatly accelerated by the inflation crisis that the proxy war has worsened. In this situation, the workers are largely forced to inhabit absurd roles, “bullshit jobs” where it’s obvious that the jobs only exist to keep an exploitative system running. Confronted with a reality where their jobs are not only absurd, but fast declining in their reward due to the chaos the war machine creates, the workers are experiencing a new level of alienation from their labor. It’s so apparent to them that they’re being used to feed a machine, and could soon be discarded as this machine continues to decay. It’s our job to give them the educational tools to expand on this knowledge, and inform them about how they can escape this system.
They can escape it by not just replacing our capitalist dictatorship with workers democracy, but fixing the economic problem this dictatorship has created. That problem being modern America’s lack of working class-beneficial industrialization. Industry in this country today is overwhelmingly about building weapons, not about producing goods that grow the wealth of our communities or building infrastructure. When the workers come into power, they’ll be able to eliminate our society’s poverty in the equivalent way to how China’s socialist project has made destitution a thing of the past: by carrying out growth and development. And by doing so in a way that’s reduced emissions, so much that the PRC is nearly a decade ahead of its Paris pledge goals.
That’s the argument we can use to bring the majority of the people to socialism: it’s only through socialism that we can replace all of the bullshit, low-paying jobs with ones that actually enrich our society. That let the workers build high-speed railways, goods within new factories that will exist on this continent, and the other things we’ll need to make this revolution successful in the long term. Such a revitalization of industry is not only compatible with rectifying the colonial contradiction, and ending the exploitation of the lands which belong to the indigenous First Nations. It’s necessary for their liberation from this exploitation, and thereby for the elimination of the social inequalities that prevent the workers of different backgrounds from coming into unity. The U.S. empire’s internal colonies, being the parts of the population that have been the most impoverished by capitalism, need the benefits of socialist re-industrialization the most. We only need to look at the state of infrastructure within the tribes and the poor Black communities for this to be apparent.
This green re-industrialization is the harmonious, prosperous future we’re capable of bringing to the heart of the empire after we’ve defeated the imperial state. There are growing parts of the globe where imperialism’s violence and exploitation have been put to an end, China’s Xi Jinping is bringing peace to the world while giving the Global South the tools to develop. Yet even though the revolutionary cause is doing increasingly well internationally, domestically the situation is bleak. If we build the institutional power and base of mass consciousness necessary for helping weaken U.S. hegemony, we’ll thereby make the state’s defeat possible, letting us bring China’s type of progress into our part of the globe.
As the imperial structure contracts, it’s bringing the societies of the core countries to collapse. Inflation, pandemic, housing crisis, mental health crisis, incidents of hasty violence among strangers, mass shootings, rising fascism, breakdown of infrastructure, censorship, scapegoating of the poor for corporate-created problems, greater militarization of the police state, these are the symptoms of a decrepit system’s failing to end. With the expansions of the Ukraine conflict, these societal ills are to grow in their scope and severity. Communists are not accelerationists, we don’t celebrate the speeding up of social decline because we know the human consequences of it. We only do the work to bring our society to a new system of power, so that we can construct a better mode of living and heal these wounds.
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