Worldwide Attack on Workers here ♦ Ending Drug Addiction here ♦
A Worldwide Attack on Workers
Today’s capitalist rulers are waging a global drug war — not against drugs, but against the working class. From South Africa to the United States to Ecuador and beyond, they use addiction as a political weapon to pacify, divide, and destroy angry, unemployed youth before they can rebel.
This is not new. The tactic began in the 18th century when China led the world in manufacturing and trade. Britain, unable to compete, found another way to conquer: opium. In the 19th century, British merchants and warships flooded China with addiction, draining silver, devastating communities, crippling workers and soldiers, and derailing a rising civilization.
The Opium Wars were not just about trade — they were about domination. One empire drugged the industrial workers and soldiers of another into submission.
Addiction as Control: The Imperial Template
The British Empire used opium to balance trade and keep China dependent. The United States later adopted the same imperial formula.
When US agencies flooded Black neighborhoods with crack cocaine in the 1980s, it was no accident — it was social control. The same racist logic shaped US policy in Latin America, where drug corridors became tools for military and political domination. Even US soldiers in Vietnam were kept numb and disposable through the heroin pipeline that followed them home.
Each empire invents its own version of opium. The function remains constant: destroy potential resistance, keep the exploited docile, and profit from their suffering.
Nationalism as the New Opium
Two centuries later, China’s rulers are reviving the memory of that trauma — not to resist imperialism, but to reproduce it. Xi Jinping’s government has turned remembrance of the Opium Wars into a national cult of humiliation and revenge. Statues of Lin Zexu, the Qing official who once fought opium smuggling, now serve as icons of obedience to the capitalist state.
The message is clear: obey, unite, and prepare to defend the motherland. But this is no liberation. It’s a mirror image of the very imperialism that once devastated China, now draped in red flags and patriotic slogans.
Today, the Chinese ruling class sells a different drug — not opium or fentanyl, but nationalism. Outrage becomes addictive; loyalty becomes a narcotic. The Party’s capitalist elite preach “never forget national humiliation” while presiding over sweatshops, billionaires, and censorship. Lin Zexu’s legacy is repackaged as propaganda to silence workers, migrants, and dissenters.
The logic is the same one the British once enforced: profit, hierarchy, and exploitation. The only difference is the flag.
Dog Eat Dog: Capitalism’s Endless War
Empires fall, but the system remains. Britain’s empire gave way to US hegemony; now US dominance is challenged by Chinese imperialism. The names change, but capitalism’s global battlefield stays the same. Nations, corporations, and elites compete for markets, resources, and labor, while workers everywhere pay the price.
Just as Britain once drowned China in opium to cripple a rival, the United States now hides its own imperialist crimes behind a “war on drugs.” US missiles strike small boats off Venezuela’s coast, claiming to target “narco-terrorists,” though no credible evidence exists. The real goal is control — not morality.
This is not a clash of civilizations. It’s a clash of capitalist powers. Each empire promises freedom from the last and ends up enslaving the same people — the workers. The problem isn’t who wins. It’s the game itself.
The Lesson of the Opium Wars
When Xi’s government urges the people to “never forget national humiliation,” we can agree — but not on their terms. We must remember how empires, old and new, profit from misery, weaponize addiction and nationalism, and pit workers against each other.
The answer isn’t to replace one empire with another. It’s to end the system that breeds them — the system that treats workers’ lives as expendable tools of profit.
Communism offers what no capitalist empire can: a world without exploitation, consumption, or conquest. International working-class power can end every addiction — not only to opium and oil, but to money, competition, and domination.
Only then will we close the chapter that began with British gunboats and continues today through trade wars, drug crises, and proxy battles. Until that day, humanity remains high on the same poison — capitalism — but the antidote is coming.
Ending Drug Addiction Requires a Society Based on Collectivity and Human Connection
After the Chinese Revolution in 1949, one of the most devastating crises the new government faced was mass opium addiction. Generations had been ravaged by the opium trade. There were seventy million opium addicts. Yet within only five years, the Chinese masses led by the Chinese Communist Party achieved what many thought impossible: near-total eradication of opium use.
Addiction had thrived under conditions of imperialist exploitation. The revolutionary state fought, at least in its beginning years, to put collective welfare over profit. The masses joined the fight. The material basis of addiction was removed.
The campaign was inspired by communist ideas to end opium addiction as part of building a society to meet the masses’ needs. Addicts were treated not as criminals but as victims of imperialist exploitation. They were offered medical detoxification, support, work opportunities, and above all, a sense of social purpose. Instead of growing poppies for opium and money, farmers were encouraged to grow nourishing food. Dealers and traffickers faced legal consequences, but ending addiction—not punishment—was the guiding principle.
What made this possible was collective will and effort. After years of fighting successfully for revolution, the masses understood that their liberation required freeing themselves or their relatives from opium addiction. Families were encouraged to help addicted relatives.
Contrast this with our current crisis: addiction fragmented into private pain, pushing profit-making drugs and digital “dopamine machines.” Capitalist medicine treats symptoms while the capitalists continue to exploit and attack us. To end addiction, we need a revolution that, this time, destroys capitalism and builds communism, which ends all exploitation and meets the masses’ needs.
Capitalism pushes disconnection. We cannot “treat” addiction in isolation from its roots. Liberation requires transforming the capitalist system that breeds addiction. Our task is to replace craving with connection, and profit with purpose, capitalism with communism.
China’s lesson teaches us that when the masses work towards creating a system based on collectivity and human connections and replace the system based on profit and money, the masses can and will overcome even the most entrenched epidemics.
See our manifesto, Mobilize the Workers for Communism for an explanation of how China ended up capitalist here