Capitalist Crisis Brings World War and Fascism

The Fight for Communism Is the Fight of Our Lives here ♦ Soldiers and Sailors are Key here ♦

The Fight for Communism Is the Fight of Our Lives

July 30— The US imperialists’ tariffs are provoking anger and defiance from the Indian, Chinese, and Russian imperialists.  They are driving India, China, and Russia closer together, and all the BRICS nations to strengthen their ties. The competing imperialists are threatening each other with shooting wars over their trade wars.  

The fight between the imperialists for world domination is the main aspect of the main contradiction of capitalism: the workers versus the bosses. As their fight for markets and resources sharpens, so does their attack on the masses.

The US and Chinese capitalists are challenging each other worldwide, with proxy nations, with accelerating pace and greater intensity.  The US bloc includes Europe, Japan, South Korea, Israel, and Australia. Quantitative changes are leading to qualitative change: we are in the initial stages of World War III. 

In this global capitalist economic crisis, all the rulers need fascism to try to divide and control the working class, prevent revolution, and get workers to fight and die for the imperialists. Fascism is not a personality trait. It is the systemic capitalist political response to global economic crisis, its inability to meet the population’s needs, and preparation for full World War.

The working class is in a fight for our lives with the bosses for survival. We have an urgent need and opportunity to mobilize for communist revolution.

The US and European economies are weakening internally and externally, increasing their debt and attacking the working class.  They divide the working class with anti-immigrant racism and violence. They shift resources from social services and infrastructure to the military and the wealthy, using workers’ taxes to pay for their own demise.  

This is also true of the rest of the world, but Chinese and Russian capitalists are faring better.  They are opening trade routes in Asia, Africa, and South America. That means those routes are closing to the west.  The tariffs against the BRICS and the new sanctions are further driving the BRICS and potential BRICS members away from the US dollar.  This is increasing the US debt crisis.

Chinese imperialism now controls close to 90% of critical technologies, almost 30% of global manufacturing, and most of the minerals and metals critical for manufacturing.  Russia has improved its economy despite mountains of sanctions. It is even selling gas and oil to Europe.  Their alliance is attacking US imperialism’s economic development. 

This inter-imperialist rivalry is driving the world towards unavoidable conventional, targeted and limited nuclear, and then strategic nuclear global war.  

We cannot let this happen.  There is only one way to stop the capitalist economic crisis solution of all-out world war: revolution for communism.

The US workforce has shrunk by millions of jobs since January 2025. The banking giant Goldman Sachs estimates that 300 million jobs could be destroyed globally by AI by 2030. This will mostly affect white-collar jobs, but it will also hit blue collar jobs, like auto workers.

The US uses sanctions, tariffs, the US dollar, and military proxies to fight the imperialist China/Russia alliance.  The China/Russia alliance uses trade routes, BRICS, withholding precious metals to fight the US bloc.  Both are fighting for capitalist world domination—to exploit the working class.

Whatever the world’s capitalist politicians pitch to the masses, this is the real battle. Who will control the world’s labor power, resources, and markets? The US rulers are the declining imperialists and therefore the most aggressive and dangerous. But all the other imperialists will also fight to the last drop of workers’ blood unless the masses, led by the International Communist Workers’ Party, stop them with communist revolution. 

The working class will win!

Ignoring or downplaying the danger of full world war will not stop it. Neither will hoping for or demanding peace, nor voting for supposedly “less warlike” capitalist politicians. 

By relying on soldiers, workers, and youth, the masses can and will end deadly imperialist wars and capitalism with communist revolution. That means building the International Communist Workers’ Party. ICWP has confidence that by showing our friends, fellow activists, and the masses the true nature of deadly capitalism and the communist solution, they will join us in the fight of our lives: to end capitalism and build communism.

Soldiers and Sailors are Key

How do we know we can win? 

Early in a third world war, it’s crucial to understand how to end imperialist wars and the system that inevitably grinds them out—once and for all with communist revolution. 

Soldiers and sailors—enlisted personnel in every branch of all bosses’ armed forces—are the key to victory.  The imperialist and capitalist rulers do not fight their own wars. They send the youth of our class to do their fighting for them. They are able to recruit the most oppressed youth of our international working class to fight for them because the alternatives are increasingly godawful. 

In the US, the military recruits young people among immigrants, Black youth facing unemployment and police terror, white youth in the depressed sectors devastated by industrial decline and opioid addiction. 

The Russian army fighting in Ukraine recruits Indian youth, especially those from Kashmir, who face extreme poverty and high unemployment as well as a war at home.

We can and must win these soldiers, and millions like them, to the only alternative—communist revolution.  Revolution takes armed struggle. The political stance of those whom the bosses arm will be crucial. If we can win our class siblings to turn their weapons on the rulers and join their class in fighting for communism, we can win. If the military remains loyal to the rulers, we will lose. It’s as simple—and as urgent—as that.

Soldiers and sailors are our neighbors, our workmates, our family. They face the same contradictions as the rest of us—the working-class unity and exploitation, the racism and solidarity of working-class life. 

As we build our international party, mobilizing the working masses for communism, we are reaching out to enlisted personnel. ICWP comrades in South Africa, India, and the US have written about this work in Red Flag. Our party also has experience in organizing within the bosses’ military, as did our predecessors in the 20th century. As global war accelerates, so must this crucial work. 

To Victory!

More on communist military work: here

Front page of this issue