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Yemen: March 18—Masses protest murderous blockade of fuel, food and other necessities amidst Saudi-led war.
Deadly Imperialist War Spreads in Ukraine and Worldwide—Building a New Communist World on the Ashes of the Old
March 28—None of the key aspects to the war raging in Ukraine feature in Russian or US propaganda.
Capitalism, built on the exploitation of the majority for the profits of a few, has always relied on brute force. As it develops, the world of competitive capitalist states transforms into a world of imperialist blocs. The violence of battle fields expands to the brutality of “total war” targeting neighborhoods, hospitals, and all civil life.
The Russian barbarities that are televised today are the same barbarities that were hidden yesterday when the US committed them throughout southeast Asia, Latin America, and Iraq.
They are the same barbarities that capitalist India is committing today in Kashmir, Israel in Gaza and the West Bank, Turkey in Syria, Saudi Arabia in Yemen, the Chinese-backed Myanmar military in Myanmar, and especially Ethiopia in Tigray, where as many as half a million people have died so far from fighting, starvation, and lack of medical attention.
In every case, national capitalists are carrying out the agenda of some imperialist power.
Yet the Russian invasion of Ukraine is not just another regional war. It will intensify every conflict presently underway. “The war in Ukraine is like a powerful earthquake that will have ripple effects throughout the global economy, especially in poor countries,” declared Kristalina Georgiva, head of the International Monetary Fund.
“The US and NATO want to fight Russia until the last Ukrainian standing,” observed Major General Bakshi (Indian Army, retired).
“We [NATO] are waging total economic and financial war against Russia, Putin, and his government,” confirmed the French minister of finance. While Ukrainian civilians (with or without NATO weapons) are dying alongside working-class Russian soldiers, US and NATO bankers and hedge fund directors are eliminating their rivals!
“A new world is being born,” says Martin Wolf, a major columnist in the influential Financial Times of London. “The hope for peaceful relations is fading. In the long term, the emergence of two blocs with deep splits between them is likely. Even nuclear war is, alas, conceivable.”
Wolf is not the only one talking of nuclear war: all three leaders, Putin, Zelenskyy, and Biden, have referenced it.
Masses are already feeling the effects in eastern Africa, which relies heavily on imported wheat (90% of it from Russia and Ukraine). This is deadly in places like Somalia, which is in the grip of a severe drought. On March 16, the president of Kazakhstan spoke of spikes in food prices and currency volatility as fallout from the war in Ukraine. Hunger is beginning to stalk the working class across Central Asia.
The rulers understand food insecurity was a catalyst to the Arab Spring revolts of 2011-2012. Can another wave of protests be far behind? The need and opportunity for communist revolution is even more urgent now.
The other major Russian export is oil. Capitalists regard oil as more important than wheat because the profits of the few are more important to them than the survival of the masses. US imperialists thought sanctions would hit Russia hard. But their policy is backfiring.
India, the world’s third-largest oil importer, is exploring ways to buy discounted Russian oil for rupees, possibly using the Chinese yuan as a reference currency. Qatar and other OPEC countries are also considering a switch from dollars to yuan.
The world of regional wars, unchecked Covid, and economic hardships is further ruptured. The Russian invasion of Ukraine suddenly shakes the very foundation of the global world order.
Arguing who is to blame for this war – the Russian oligarchs and imperialists led by Putin, or the US imperialists led by Biden – misses the point. They both are. “It takes two to tango.”
Imperialism is the outgrowth of capitalism, which uses tremendous wealth against the increasingly impoverished masses. It makes devastating wars inevitable.
Imperialism has proved itself incapable of providing for the masses’ needs in the face of its drive to profits. As long as imperialism dominates our world, war will be inevitable, and the threat of nuclear devastation will hang over us.
It will take the communist (not socialist) revolution we are mobilizing to end that threat and build a world that meets the needs of the mass of humanity.
A new world is being born, but not one imaginable to the Financial Times analyst. In that new communist world, there will be no dollars, rubles, yuan, or any type of currency. No wealth or poverty. No borders to divide us and no nations to make war. No nuclear weapons and no addiction to fossil fuels that are leading to climate catastrophe.
Instead, the masses will produce and share all life’s necessities (and eventually luxuries) so that we care for each other and welcome everyone everywhere.
This new world is already being born everywhere that the International Communist Workers’ Party is on the move. The work we do today prepares us for the new world that’s on its way.
When the Rulers Talk “Peace,” You’d Better Get Your Helmet
The Soviet Union (the major rival to US imperialism) collapsed in 1989. European capitalist leaders had a vision of co-operation on a continental scale. The French and German rulers talked of joining Comecon (the transnational market of the Soviets and Eastern Europe) with the newly upgraded European Economic Union.
The Warsaw Pact (the armed might of the Soviets and Eastern Europe) and its adversary NATO could both be disbanded. A giant land-based market could stretch, in Mitterrand’s words, “from the Atlantic to the Urals” and even beyond. The plan had only one problem: the US had no place in it.
It was a plan for capitalist prosperity that sidelined US imperialism, whose Army occupied Western Europe. So the dream of a Pan-European Federation was quickly replaced by a US-led financial attack called “Shock Therapy.” Instead of bargaining as a trading bloc, each eastern European country had to come cap-in-hand to the main Western European countries and International Monetary Fund.
This trashed European dreams. It set Comecon countries in competition against each other. In the end, it stripped them of productive capacity, closing or buying out factories. It forced drastic cuts to their social services. It created poverty and death on a scale equal to any military war. According to UNICEF, the excess mortality in Russia, Ukraine, Bulgaria, Hungary, and Poland between 1989 and 1993 was 800,000 people
Trade war, however barbaric, cannot bring “peace.” It can provoke resistance and revolution. Thus NATO bombed Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1995, and four years later the now-destroyed multi-ethnic Yugoslavia. Only then were eastern European workers forced to accept NATO’s “peaceful” intentions.
While the Russian capitalists were bringing “peace” to Chechnya by reducing its capital city, Grozny, to rubble, the NATO-led capitalists were “bombing Serbia back to the Stone Age.”
And NATO marched closer and closer to Ukraine, shutting down auto plants (among other productive facilities) in Western Europe to re-open them in eastern Europe
(see Red Flag: “Slaving for Wages, We Make Cars, They make Profits” https//icwpredflag.org/DepthE/WeMakeCars.html.)
It was setting the stage for the present war.