US Imperialism in Crisis Threatens World War here ♦ The enemy of your enemy isn’t always your friend here ♦
US Imperialism in Crisis Threatens World War: Workers Must Take History in Our Hands and Defeat All Imperialists
May 30— When unemployment, extreme weather, hunger, and violence stalk our neighborhoods, intensifying global conflicts can seem remote if not irrelevant. But they’re not. They shape our struggles, our lives, and our deaths—for now.
During US President Biden’s recent visit to South Korea and Japan, a reporter in Tokyo asked whether the US would respond “militarily” if China sought to retake Taiwan. “Yes,” he said.
Did he mean it? An official 2018 report warned of a “decisive military defeat” for the US in a war over Taiwan. Would US imperialism accept this – or escalate into a full-scale third world war?
This article reports recent US diplomatic setbacks in Asia and Europe that could lead a desperate declining power to launch or provoke all-out war. It explains why the response of the working class must be communist revolution rather than supporting some other imperialist power.
Masses worldwide are not sorry to see viciously racist US imperialism struggling to find allies and regain its former global supremacy.
In Tokyo, Biden met with top officials of India, Australia, and Japan. He hoped to consolidate an alliance with fascist Modi of India. India has a long-standing border dispute with China and wants to limit Chinese naval activity in the Indian Ocean. So the meeting was able to agree on a new real-time maritime tracking system. But Biden failed to get Modi to support sanctions against India’s long-term ally Russia.
Chinese imperialists, meanwhile, launched a bold diplomatic initiative to pry ten south Pacific Island nations away from the US and into its orbit. Several of these voted with the US and against China in the UN to exclude Russia from the Human Rights Council. One – Papua New Guinea—recently agreed to a new US-UK-Australia naval base on its territory.
But these island nations are now negotiating with China. China has not gotten the grand multilateral agreement it wants. But it has signed bilateral agreements, island by island, in a region formerly dominated by the US. Another setback for US imperialism.
NATO Expands in Europe but US Grip Weakens
The US seeks to take advantage of Russia’s floundering invasion of Ukraine. Finland and Sweden are ready to join NATO. But Turkey, once subservient to US imperialism, threatens to block this.
Erdogan cites Sweden’s policy of granting asylum to Kurdish separatists that Turkey considers “terrorists.” More important, though, Turkey is not on board with NATO’s stand on Ukraine. Instead it wants to be a “mediator” between Russia and Ukraine.
The upshot: Erdogan is challenging US leadership of NATO. At worst, Turkey could leave NATO and ally with Russia.
Intensifying global conflicts are shaping our struggles, our lives, and our deaths right now, in ways that we can’t always see clearly. The international working class can change that by mobilizing massive communist class struggle against all capitalists, all imperialists.
Communist class struggle must become the main force driving world events. So that we can win an armed revolution for a world without borders or nations to fight over. A communist world where a massive and inclusive International Communist Workers’ Party will organize production and distribution, without money or markets, to meet our needs.
That’s the answer to the unemployment, hunger, and violence that stalk our neighborhoods. It’s the start of a solution to the rising oceans that threaten whole Pacific islands and the rising temperatures burning up large parts of the world.
Let’s understand how intensifying global conflicts create increasing urgency and increasing opportunities for soldiers, sailors, workers, and youth to lead masses to the communist world we need.
The enemy of your enemy isn’t always your friend
That’s an example of the dialectical materialist principle of the “negation of the negation.”
German imperialism under the Nazis was the enemy of the Soviet Union. After Pearl Harbor, Germany declared war on the US. US imperialism became the enemy of Nazi Germany. But it was no friend to the Soviet Union. It only opened a “second front” once the Red Army was chasing the Nazis back to Berlin. This, although the Soviets had by then betrayed working-class internationalism and their original communist goals.
Many today who rightfully hate US imperialism see its enemies – Russia and China – as the friends of the masses, or at least as a “lesser-evil.” But all capitalism, all imperialism, attacks workers. It destroys our lives in its inescapable drive to maximize profits.
We side with industrial workers from Shenzhen to Sri Lanka to San Salvador to Port Elizabeth who slave under the yoke of Chinese capitalism. With the Russian masses who worry about price increases, corruption, unemployment, poverty, and sharpening inequality.
With the Russian soldiers sent to kill and die in Ukraine for no reason that makes sense to them—and with Russian and Ukrainian soldiers who are refusing to fight their bosses’ wars. Those soldiers show the revolutionary potential for communists again to organize soldiers to turn the guns around and fight for our class.
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