Today, there are two worlds. The one where a bright, prosperous life is being built for humanity, and the one where the forces of greed are bringing humanity backwards through destruction and intensified subjugation. The side of greed is increasingly threatened by the progression of history, so it’s ever more desperately trying to crush the side of progress. It will do anything to stop the rise of global communism, and to maintain the bloody reign of the U.S. empire. That includes exploiting the climate crisis to bring the rest of the planet down with it, and to come out on top by default. If the imperialists aren’t defeated, they’ll burn the world down just to spite the material reality that they so despise being confronted with.
This mad reactionary struggle, where the forces of capital and empire will sacrifice tens of millions of more lives and the biosphere’s existence for the sake of keeping their profits up, is indicated in the growing contrast between the warring sides of progress and reaction. The side of progress—China, Cuba, the DPRK, Vietnam, Laos, Venezuela, Bolivia, and the other anti-imperialist countries—has been experiencing unprecedented advances in living conditions. China has lifted over 800 million out of poverty and eliminated extreme impoverishment; Vietnam has had a parallel success at improving living standards; the DPRK and Cuba have continued to build up the structures supporting their end goal of similar prosperity, despite the grievous harm that U.S. sanctions are still able to cause towards them; even Ethiopia, an anti-imperialist country that’s undergoing a famine at the hands of imperialist destabilization, is coming to stand on its own feet economically with China’s aid.
Similar stories of resilience and incremental progress are to varying degrees shared across the rest of the places that have broken free from imperial control, such as with Venezuela’s anti-poverty victories or with Bolivia’s rebuilding its social support systems after the reversal of its 2019 CIA coup. It’s mainly because of these anti-imperialist successes, particularly the Chinese example, that liberals like Bill Gates or Steven Pinker have been able to point to data showing that global deprivation has been going down in many respects. What they leave out is that this last half-century’s unprecedented progress in getting people better lives has overwhelmingly come from socialism, mainly Marxism-Leninism specifically. As much as liberals throughout the West seek to devalue China’s Marxist-Leninist example by calling it “state capitalist,” and leaving out the context of how China’s governmental structure is fundamentally based around proletarian democracy, the reality is that poverty has been combated in spite of capitalism. Which is ironically the system they aim to defend by making these arguments.
On the other side, in the parts of the world that remain under Washington’s grip, things have been getting worse. Inequality in the United States and essentially all the other imperialist countries, including the Scandinavian ones, has been growing. In the imperial center most of all, this has correlated with intensifying systemic injustices, such as a deadly militarization of the abusive police, an expansion of an inhumane for-profit prison system through migrant detention, and climate-related environmental crises that have pushed the poorest deeper into desperation. In the U.S. empire’s neo-colonies, the trend has looked different, but the situation has been deteriorating in other ways that the liberal optimists neglect to focus on. In Brazil, for instance, inequality may not have been increasing during the same decades when it was rising throughout the imperialist countries, but since the pandemic hit, the poverty alleviation progress it had made has been swiftly undone. And that progress itself happened within the context of Brazil having already been one of the hemisphere’s most unequal countries prior to the pandemic.
In Brazil, to preempt the turn towards the emerging multipolar order, the imperialists will at some point apply the destabilization tactics they’ve already used on places like Ethiopia. These tactics consist of the aiding of terrorist groups, the instigation of civil wars, the sabotage of infrastructure via proxy forces, starvation sanctions, meddling that incites violent unrest, coups or coup attempts, and disinformation campaigns designed to ethnically divide the local populations. Many of these maneuvers have already been used in Brazil in the last decade—they’re how Bolsonaro got into power—and such tools have recently been used in Haiti, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Cuba, and Venezuela.
Eventually, all of Latin America will be subject to the empire’s chaos-manufacturing efforts, as will all of the rest of the exploited world. It’s the logical conclusion of how Washington has chosen to react to the global rise of class struggle: by trying to make countries into failed states before they can break free from neo-colonialism, and by trying to destabilize countries which have already broken free. With the coming of the new great-power competition, all a country has to do to become a destabilization target is join China’s Belt and Road Initiative; this is the offense that’s made Myanmar, Ethiopia, and Eritrea subject to U.S. subversion efforts. The factor that provides a boost to every front of Washington’s growing campaign to manufacture crises, the variable that the imperialists clearly see as their windfall in an increasingly desperate moment for U.S. hegemony, is global warming.
It’s appropriate that whereas the anti-imperialist bloc has been building up its living standards, and has been reducing its emissions through the environmental progress of countries like China, the imperialist bloc has been continuing to worsen its climate impacts. With every raise in the U.S. military budget, the planet gets hit harder by the single largest institutional source of greenhouse gas emissions, which is the American war machine.
Some dare call it conspiracy, though I would say it’s merely a byproduct of capitalism’s innate processes. Capitalism led to imperialism, which exacerbated the climate crisis. The climate crisis then made it far easier for the imperialists to destroy the nations that are rising up against them amid the decline of Pax Americana; Syria was an example of this, as the country’s drought was exploited by Washington’s jihadists to start off the war. Pentagon documents have indicated that U.S. strategists aim to inflict similar climate-related harm on Bangladesh (a BRI country), and last year Kamala Harris provided insight into the military elite’s attitude towards global warming by stating that water wars will no doubt happen in the near future. Harris said this sentiment has been repeated many times by U.S. military insiders, who clearly have intentions for using climate catastrophes as pretexts for intervention. Of course, those interventions won’t come before these countries have been targeted by CIA-backed terrorists, who will be portrayed as heroes in alternative to the demonized governments.
The U.S. empire aims to leverage global warming to greatly shrink the global range of civilization, like it’s already used Covid-19 to try to do; Washington’s tightening of sanctions on Cuba, Iran, Venezuela, and other countries throughout the pandemic, its exploitation of the virus to demonize China, and its use of the crisis to impose further global austerity measures are only a prelude to what it will do in the coming decades. Because this pandemic’s impacts will be small compared to the cumulative impacts of the climate crisis. We must build solidarity within the global communist and anti-imperialist movements to stop the forces of reaction from succeeding, to keep the side of progress from being torn apart by this vicious scheme.
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