Poster above reads “Workers and free peoples of the world, unite against the enemies of humanity”
The Trump White House has launched a bombing campaign against Yemen, and let the Zionist entity start massacring Gazans by the hundreds again, because it believes this is how to win over China’s biggest partnered countries. The idea is to intimidate Russia and Iran by showing them how much destruction Washington can bring, causing them to appease the United States. The only way this plan will be stopped is if the global workers movement tips the balance of forces, and takes away the empire’s leverage. And the only reason why it still has so much sway is because the proletariat hasn’t yet regained enough of the power it lost with the USSR’s fall.
We have great potential to bring about such a recovery for the proletarian cause; class antagonisms are intensifying all across the capitalist world. We can strike back at the imperial enemy, if we understand the nature of its plans and which factors it’s depending on to succeed.
Within Russia and Iran, there are major ruling class elements that want to appease the hegemon. That want to abandon the Palestinians, sell out to the multinational corporations, and forsake China as Washington prepares for war in East Asia. These liberal capitalist actors want people to believe that it’s in the best interests of their countries to give the empire what it wants. They want to reinforce the story that Washington is telling about itself, wherein supposedly the USA is so strong that no one would dare challenge it. By committing these atrocities against the world’s poorest and most vulnerable peoples, the imperialists are trying to convince all their adversaries that this could happen to anyone; that Gaza’s fate will inevitably be the fate of everybody who stands against Washington.
This isn’t true, of course. States like Russia and Iran are absolutely able to beat back U.S. aggression, and this has been proven many times over. But the liberal capitulationists in these countries are pretending the hegemon is much stronger than it really is, because this serves their goal of imperial collaboration. The empire’s supposed strength is an illusion; it’s going after the easiest targets for a reason. Washington’s primacy has declined massively during these last couple decades, and this is demonstrated by all the recent examples of its power faltering. The U.S. has already lost the economic war to China. It’s already been bested by the Sahel’s revolutionary forces, lost Yemen to the Houthi revolutionaries, and failed to recolonize Venezuela or Bolivia. Even its success at ousting Assad has come with the price of drawing Washington into a new quagmire, hurting its plans for East Asia. There are so many areas of vulnerability for the imperial enemy, and it can be defeated if the world’s workers strike in the right ways.
What really showed how weak Washington has become was when Russia exhausted the weapons supplies of the NATO countries. This achievement was nothing to dismiss; it’s partly because Russia did so well in the war that Hamas decided to launch Operation Al Aqsa Flood, and that many African countries kicked out the U.S. military. The world’s revolutionary forces have noticed that the hegemon has grown much more vulnerable, and they’ve been taking advantage of this. The anti-imperialist cause has been seeing tremendous progress. The danger is that this progress will be reversed by the opportunistic forces, not just in Russia or Iran but throughout the broader globe.
In most places, the revolutionary forces are not yet firmly in power; and especially in the imperialist countries, the nominally “socialist” or “antiwar” movements have been thoroughly captured by imperialism-compatible actors. Right now, what these actors primarily want to do is reach a “peace” where Russia and Iran have been rendered subservient to the hegemon, and unwilling to counter its next aggressions. They haven’t fully accomplished this, and lately Iran in particular has been going in a more defiant direction (as shown by Khamenei’s declaration that Iran won’t negotiate with the USA). But should Russia agree to end its operation without achieving its strategic goals, Ukraine and Washington will have in effect won; and the entire global liberation struggle will have experienced a disastrous setback.
This is one reason why it’s always been the correct position to support Russia’s Operation Z: the more of the world gets behind the military effort, the harder it is for Russia’s liberal bourgeoisie to frustrate the operation’s progress. But to fully support Z, and the global revolutionary effort that it represents, we must advance the class struggle. We must build the institutions of proletarian power that can challenge the imperial state, and that can act as strong allies within a worldwide united front.
This is the task that was so essential to building an effective pro-Palestine movement, but that the USA’s organized left failed to carry out. We could have mounted a resistance to the genocide that exercised great economic power; that had millions of participants who could hurt the imperial system by refusing to work. Because the movement lacked such a substantial proletarian base, it couldn’t stop Palestine’s holocaust. And until we rectify this problem, the anti-imperialist movement will remain inadequate on Palestine, Ukraine, and all other fronts.
Should we cure this flaw within our operations, and gain the tools to assert our agency as a class, we’ll be in position to define how the next stage of our third world war unfolds. We’ll be able to frustrate Washington’s push towards war with China. We’ll be able to obstruct the extermination campaign against Palestine, as well as the other genocidal assaults the empire is perpetrating across West Asia. And when it comes to Ukraine, we won’t just be able to make it harder for NATO to wage its proxy war on Russia; if we act fast enough, and with the correct strategy, we’ll also contribute to the fulfillment of Operation Z’s goals. Which would make Washington’s “bomb until the world submits” strategy utterly backfire, and bring about an unprecedented victory for the revolutionary cause.
What we must do to achieve this, beyond establishing organized labor ties or building our own worker orgs, is create structures that will let us keep operating amid the state’s most extreme crackdowns. We must study the history of how dissidents have maintained their organizations when their work has been criminalized, and apply the lessons from this to our modern surveillance age. We must create backup plans to replace any leaders who get disappeared by the state. We must be flexible, and ready to pivot towards new organizing models should we get forced underground.
All the while, we absolutely must mobilize to prevent state repression, like we have for the African People’s Socialist Party. But should the crackdown succeed in any areas, we’ll need to be ready to migrate towards backup institutions, ones which are more resilient. As our class enemies go on the offensive, we must have the mentality that any failure is an opportunity for new progress.
It’s this same strategic thinking that we must employ should the present antiwar efforts fail, and the Trump administration end up prolonging the Ukraine conflict. If Trump refuses to stop aiding Kiev, Russia will be forced to keep fighting, helping the revolutionary forces pressure Putin to fulfill Z’s objectives. It’s also possible that Trump’s White House will pivot away from the Ukrainian front, or that Putin will let the operation end prematurely by agreeing to Washington’s demands. In that case, we’ll need to concentrate our anti-imperialist activities upon resisting the bombing campaigns in West Asia, and on defending China. We must focus on these other fronts regardless, but the outcome of the Ukrainian front still has yet to be determined.
We can’t impact the geopolitical struggle simply by speaking truth to power. We must also mobilize on an organizational level, and bring the workers into a mass effort at defeating U.S. hegemony. This is the revolt that can make Washington’s genocidal plan fail, and bring us closer to a new wave of workers revolutions.
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