The Axis of Resistance is winning the economic war, meaning it will triumph like Russia & China have

Above: Axis of Resistance supporters in Khiam, Lebanon celebrating the recent ceasefire, which signaled weakness for “Israel” even though it soon broke the deal.

While evaluating how successful the Axis of Resistance has been in fighting the imperial enemy, we must account for the economic aspect of this conflict. The region’s anti-imperialist forces have brought an energy crisis upon “Israel,” weakened its capital, expanded the global boycott of the Zionist state, and created a population drain within the Zionist-controlled territories. It’s only when we look at these things the Axis has done to weaken the “Israeli” Nazi entity’s market vitality that we can see how strong the anti-imperialist side has become. This isn’t because the resistors have been failing in the military realm; Hamas, the Houthis, and Hezbollah have all been highly effective at battling the empire through arms. And the states within the Axis have also been making great military gains; the pro-Assad Syrian forces are making the terrorists retreat, something which Iran and Iraq have helped make possible.

There have also been military setbacks; since Raisi was assassinated in May, Iran’s resistance efforts have largely been held back by the country’s U.S.-friendly political faction. And this has led to tactical defeats, including the death of Nasrallah. These realities can’t be ignored; but it wouldn’t be accurate to say that the resistance is losing, both because of its many ongoing military gains and because it’s crippled the Zionist entity’s economy.

The economics of warfare are often overlooked by commentators, leading to skewed perceptions of conflicts. The imperialist media has avoided talking about Russia’s success in economically defeating the United States, which is definitive and took place years ago. Almost all we’ve heard about Ukraine is the kinetic part of the war, with the reporting on this being distorted to make Kiev look far stronger than it actually is. Not only has Russia had many more military wins than we’ve been told, but it’s also triumphed on the economic front, which is at least as important as the military front. 

The main reason Washington instigated this conflict was because it wanted to destroy Russia’s economy, leading to Russia’s collapse and leaving China without a crucial strategic partner. Because the sanctions have failed to stop Russia’s economy from growing, and this economic warfare has backfired upon the imperialist countries, Russia truly won this war years ago. 

Ukraine never had a chance of winning in the military realm, but the main part of Washington’s plan depended on there being a larger-scale economic defeat for Russia; the war itself has only been a means for trying to wear Russia down, and Washington views Ukraine as nothing more than a disposable tool. The hegemon has managed to drag the war on for years, but because it’s been able to neither overwhelm Russia with arms nor sabotage its internal civic balance, this conflict has been a net loss for the imperialists. 

That’s why at this point, I’d be surprised if Washington starts a proxy war with China: Russia’s victory has proven that a Taiwan conflict would be nothing but disastrous for imperial interests. China has already won its own economic war with the hegemon; it’s gained the partnership of massive parts of the Global South, which overall loves its Belt and Road Initiative projects, and Russia’s Ukraine action has catalyzed a great expansion for BRICS. China and its partner the DPRK are formidable opponents for the empire just in terms of arms; but when you also consider how successful Eurasia has become in economically fighting the empire, it becomes truly clear how doomed the imperial system is.

These things don’t negate the reality that Iran is being undermined by internal liberal actors, and that this has given the enemy more opportunities for violence. But these things do refute the doomerist perspectives on the anti-imperialist struggle. They show how significant it is that the Axis of Resistance has created an economic crisis for “Israel.” When you make your adversary unable to function on a social and market level, this greatly impacts the strategic situation. The imperialists understand this quite well; they use sanctions as a standard part of their warfare. The Zionist entity also knows this; its original plan for getting rid of Hamas was to economically strangulate Gaza, and thereby make Gaza’s people rise up. But the empire and its settler proxy have failed to unseat any Resistance Axis leaderships; they’ve all held on, even as the imperial forces have used genocidal methods. Now they’re turning the enemy’s economic sabotage methods against it, to the effect that “Israel” is inexorably headed for its demise.

That Palestine will be fully liberated is no longer in any question. The big questions that remain are whether Iran will throw off the influence of its pro-appeasement national bourgeoisie; and whether the anti-imperialist forces will defeat Turkey’s neo-Ottoman U.S. proxy regime. However seriously we must take the threats posed by Iran and Turkey’s pro-imperialist elements, there is hope for victory in both areas.

A decade ago, Russia was in a situation comparable to the one Iran is now. The U.S. had just overthrown the government of its neighbor and historic sibling country; now, Ukraine’s Nazi coup regime was shelling the Donbass people as punishment for asserting their self-determination. But Putin and his government would refuse to embark upon a denazification project until eight years later, after Kiev had already created mass graves. The anti-imperialist faction within Russia ultimately won, though. 

Will Iran’s internal struggle exactly resemble the one Russia has undergone? I don’t believe so, because Iran’s U.S.-friendly president Pezeshkian has acted with a kind of cowardice that we’ve never seen from Putin. He blocked Khamenei from retaliating for Haniyeh’s assassination, he only allowed a response after Nasrallah died because of his treachery, and now he’s not letting Iran retaliate after “Israel” crossed clear red lines last month. Part of Putin’s reasoning for delaying the Ukraine operation was that he needed to prepare Russia’s economy for war beforehand; and of course he ought to have carried out these preparations from the start, but he’s shown willingness to enact the economic reforms necessary for fighting the imperialists. Pezeshkian and his camp can only be expected to resist any attempts at such reforms, and to keep pushing for further neoliberalization. If these actors got their way, Iran would act like Jordan: engaging in big talk about Palestine, while fully complying with the empire.

Turkey’s path towards kicking out its pro-imperialist elements is the same as Iran’s: a mass struggle against those who seek to assist the hegemon’s genocidal goals. And such a counter-force will have an opportunity to appear as the economic pressures continue building up. The more severe capitalism’s contradictions become, the more the masses will be incentivized to act, whether in Turkey, Iran, or any other country where neoliberalism has taken hold. Shifting away from neoliberalism was the only way modern Russia could prevent a social revolution; any government that refuses to go in this direction will increasingly provoke the wrath of its own people. 

There are plenty of leftists and “communists” who seek to guide this popular outrage in a direction that helps imperialism; many Turkish “Marxists” oppose the anti-imperialist bloc, and many Iranian “Marxists” prioritize the revolutionary state’s overthrow. Though distorters of Marxism exist essentially everywhere, they won’t sabotage the struggle if a genuine workers movement gets built; if the interests of the proletariat, rather than the sensibilities of the intellectual class, define the struggle’s direction. As someone who lives in the United States, it’s obviously not my role to fulfill this task in any other country than my own. But as I work to build such a movement in the empire’s core, I seek to do whatever possible to aid those who are doing this abroad. It’s a crucial part of our duty to support the Axis of Resistance, which needs as many real allies as it can get.

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Centering Palestine is how to resist the genocide. Both the Trump & anti-Trump movements distract from this.

Since the 2024 presidential election got both of its main nominees confirmed, the Palestinians have been in a worse situation than ever. Between when the Zionist entity began its extermination campaign in October 2023, and when the U.S. media gained an effective means for distraction in July, the entity’s activities were constrained to a certain extent. As Norman Finkelstein has observed, the “Israeli” Nazi state understands the importance of the USA’s news cycle; it knows that the more the news is talking about Gaza or the West Bank, the more risky it is to assault the civilians within these places. His point is that like Nazi Germany, “Israel” needed a cover before it could implement its Final Solution. So for the first half-year or so following October 7, “Israel” needed to calculate how many atrocities it could get away with. The “Israeli” sentiments about wanting to nuke Gaza, Finkelstein has said, represent the true desires of the Zionist entity; the entity has only been waiting for a moment when it will be enabled to act with that level of boldness.

When the student revolts happened in late spring, the discourse became further focused on Palestine, which extended this period of relative “Israeli” hesitancy. It was when the protests momentarily lulled, and U.S. politics became more focused on personalities, that the genocide could be brought to its next phase; that “Israel” could accelerate its mass murder efforts with a reliable narrative cover.

Part of this cover involved an effort to hide the true death numbers, and pretend the count is under fifty-thousand when it’s most certainly many times bigger than that. “Israel” has also been murdering ever-more of the journalists who document its crimes. And the additional part of this campaign to hide reality, the one which makes the other concealment tactics work, has been the effort to de-center Palestine in the discourse. If the Gaza protests were to have maintained their initial impact, there would have been sustained public attention on the genocide, and the attempts to obscure Zionism’s crimes would have been made mostly ineffective. But the USA’s national conversation has instead been diverted towards political theater, letting “Israel” act with minimal scrutiny from the American public.

The U.S. media and political elites were always going to carry out such a diversion; they never liked having to talk about “Israel” so much, so they would redirect the discourse at the first opportunity. This narrative manipulation wouldn’t have succeeded, though, if the activist leaders hadn’t joined in on the effort to de-center Palestine. If they hadn’t largely lost interest in talking about the genocide, and pivoted towards fixating on Trump. That’s where a crucial part of the blame lies: in the organizing figures who had an opportunity to sustain the pro-Palestine movement’s momentum, but decided instead to tail the liberals.

For the last decade, the empire’s propaganda machine has been able to use Trump’s presence within politics to carry out these kinds of diversions. Trump’s narrative role is a big discourse psyop, where the conversation gets made to revolve around one personality. And it’s participated in both by the side which thinks Trump will save our society; and by the side which thinks Trump is the new Hitler. With the rise of the anti-woke psyop, where the right gets presented as a revolutionary alternative, MAGA has become especially easy to co-opt for these purposes. 

At the moment, this psyop’s main purpose is to convince conservatives that Palestine is a “woke” issue. And this narrative depends on the discourse psyop’s wokeist side. It depends on there being an unserious, adventuristic leftist element that represents the pro-Palestine cause in the worst ways possible, and alienates the masses from the struggle.

This element hurts the Palestinian cause by shifting attention away from Palestine itself; by emphasizing Trump, or U.S. culture war fights, or other such distractions. Its main priority is neither a sincere effort to center Palestine, nor an analysis of how imperialism hurts the workers; at this point, its rhetoric has largely become indistinguishable from that of the Democratic Party’s “radical” controlled opposition wing. That’s what we see from PSL, DSA, and the other NGO-aligned groups which have joined to plan an Inauguration Day protest. This protest’s page of course mentions the Gaza genocide, but there’s a reason why it doesn’t center the genocide: when you’re seeking NGO backing, the opportune decision right now is to copy the aesthetics of the Democrat “ResistanceTM” color revolution. 

When the pro-Palestine movement is led by actors who aren’t even particularly interested in advocating for Palestine, Zionism’s anti-woke propagandists are able to fill the discourse vacuum. They can depict Palestine as just another distraction by liberal elites, and sell their pseudo-solution: a country that’s run by the Elon Musk wing of big tech, where further privatization will supposedly revitalize our economy. It’s degrowth sold as progress, with the country being destroyed by extreme neoliberalization and expanded economic wars. 

As much as the Trump faction of our ruling class wants to destroy China as well, the PRC has gained too much strength for Washington to defeat it. So the route the Trump White House takes with China will likely be to lean more onto trade war bluster, while labeling Palestine supporters as Chinese agents. This McCarthyist campaign is already happening, and the deep state will be fully united with Trump on criminalizing dissent. That’s how the empire hopes to beat back a pro-Palestine movement that can’t truly be gotten rid of, no matter how much the state suppresses its members. 

However severe the crackdown gets, the people will keep mobilizing against our government’s genocidal actions; the empire’s goal is to make the movement’s organizations weak enough that they can’t give the masses adequate support. Then the empire will be able to achieve its next short-term goals for west Asia, such as annexing the West Bank and continuing the rampage against Gaza; along with its larger goals, namely expanding the proxy wars in places like Syria.

The hegemon is acting on the retreat; nothing it can do will stop “Israel” from ending. So it can only try to delay this outcome, while increasingly leaning onto Turkey for warfare assistance in the region. Washington is not going to succeed in overthrowing Syria’s government, colonizing Lebanon, destabilizing Iran, or preventing Palestine’s full liberation. On all fronts of this world war, the imperialists are guaranteed to lose. The worst thing they can do at this point is expand the genocide in a way that takes millions of more lives. We can and must save these souls. That’s a core part of what needs to motivate us as we proceed with the class struggle: rescuing those who the empire seeks to exterminate. Should we let ourselves be sidetracked from this task, we’ll aid our class enemies, and betray those who need us the most.

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Workers brought the anti-imperialist struggle to where it is now. Next they’ll deal capitalism a fatal blow.

Above: miners in Donbass demonstrating against Washington’s Ukraine coup in 2014, photo by Ivan Sekretarev/AP

During the last ten years, as we’ve entered into a third world war, the global working class has been regaining the agency which it lost with the Soviet Union’s demise. That’s the conclusion I’ve come to upon discovering how big a role the Donbass region’s miners had in making Russia’s Ukraine action possible. From this piece of history, we can draw a connection to the growing anti-imperialist activities of workers throughout other countries, and figure out the direction all of this is going in. The logical conclusion of everything we’ve seen so far is for a new wave of revolutions to occur, helping the USA’s workers overthrow their own government; which will represent the loss of monopoly capital’s most valuable asset, and a turning point in humanity’s evolution.

This story of rekindled hope begins ten years ago in the former eastern Ukraine, which is now Russian territory. The U.S. had just carried out its fascist coup in Kiev, and the effort to resist this new Nazi state was being led by the proletariat. The coal miners, and the predominant parts of their union leadership, had an instrumental role in making the Donbass separatist effort succeed. This was reported even by the U.S. media, like in this article by Gabriela Baczynska of Reuters:

The protesters, from Ukraine's largest mine workers' union, waved DNR flags and banners that read "We will revive the power of the Donbass". The Donbass, comprising coal mines and steel mills, is Ukraine's industrial heartland. "I want peace and to be able to work and make money. I want the occupying soldiers to leave and return to their Kiev junta," said Valery, who works at the state-owned Abakumova mine. He said the miners backed the DNR, which was declared after a makeshift referendum on May 11 condemned by Kiev and the West…Coal miner Vladislav said he hoped Russia would recognize the DNR as an independent state, adding: "But I can also live on bread and water if that is what it takes to win independence." The Union of Mine Workers to which most of Wednesday's protesters belong has close links to the Party of the Regions, which ousted president Yanukovich once led. Some independent miners' unions distanced themselves from Wednesday's rally in Donetsk. "We did not organize this action," said Mykola Volynko, head of the Independent Miners' Trade Union of the Donbass, on Ukrainian television.

These opposition forces within the unions, which sought to promote liberal pro-NATO ideas and capitulate to the fascists, weren’t able to gain enough support. Against the will of the east’s popular masses, their attempts to interfere were futile; the peoples of Crimea and Donbass overwhelmingly backed the efforts to break away from Kiev’s rule, and to then defend the east from invasion. And the miners from the remaining Ukrainian territory have since experienced things that show which side in this conflict the workers ought to side with. 

As was reported by the CIA’s own Radio Free Europe in 2016, miners became outraged by the Ukrainian government’s refusal to compensate their labor. The fascist state has treated them like they’re worthless, even as their work has provided life-saving energy for a Ukraine that’s been ravaged by war. And though the fascists have terrorized Ukraine’s workers movement into submission, such developments make both Ukraine and Russia readier for the eventual socialist restoration. Under the surface of this conflict, a shift has been happening, wherein the proletariat has progressively turned the power balance back in its favor.

Within Russia, this process has looked like the workers applying pressure upon the state, and increasingly getting results. Russia’s labor movement has made such gains because the country’s state was not totally transformed by the anti-communist coup; however much destruction the Yeltsin camp inflicted, it couldn’t manage to demolish the entirety of the Soviet structure. How could it? All of today’s Russia exists on foundations that the Soviets built. And this has aided the mass efforts to turn Russia back into an anti-imperialist force. As observed by my fellow Marxist-Leninist AvantGarde1917:

The Russian economy predominantly adheres to capitalist principles, permitting private ownership and free enterprise to address gaps in numerous consumer sectors —both temporarily in the 1920s, and again temporarily today. Nevertheless, these contradictions signify a transitional phase rather than being the product of a definitive counter-revolution, unlike other former soviet republics—where the counter-revolution was final and successful.

In light of Putin’s electoral victory in 2024—reflecting widespread support and the highest turnout rate since 1990, his favorability among the working class is not incidental. This is a working class which largely, and increasingly, views the state leadership as one which represents their own interests and will. Putin’s policies, such as the re-nationalization of energy resources, increased state investment in infrastructure, the reinstatement of social protections such as healthcare and pensions, and indeed the Special Military Operation (SMO), have reinstated a sense of stability, pride, and dignity among a populace that endured significant hardship during the neoliberal crisis of the 1990s. The experiment with neoliberalism is viewed as having been attempted, rejected, and reversed.

It’s because neoliberalism has been progressively dismantled in Russia that the country was prepared to militarily defeat the imperialists; only through nationalizations could Russia have a war economy. Throughout the next eight years after Euromaidan, as Kiev collectively punished the Donbass people and the mass graves got larger, the revolutionary forces kept gathering strength. The evils which everyone was witnessing from Kiev showed everyone how right the Donbass separatists were, and how urgent was the task of combating fascism. Then in February 2022, when Kiev launched an offensive that would have left Donbass like Gaza, Russia’s government granted the proletariat its wish. The Donbass people were rescued.

The Communist Party of the Russian Federation pushed for intervention from inside the legislature, and that’s an important part within this story. But we can’t forget that the essence of these pressure efforts came from the bottom-up. From the most organic and raw desires of the working masses, who were seeing their people again being menaced by fascism. This fundamentally proletarian character of the Russian SMO’s origins refutes all arguments about the operation being “imperialist,” or being primarily driven by Russian capitalist interests. Such narratives erase the contributions of the workers who’ve been fighting to defeat fascism, and to repair the damages from the USSR’s fall.

All of this is crucial to understanding the broader, global revolutionary process that’s now underway. The SMO has been an indispensable catalyst within this process, and that’s because of its proletarian nature; Russia’s operation wouldn’t have happened in the first place without the Donbass proletariat. And neither would have all the positive impacts that the SMO has had on the anti-colonial struggle, the geopolitical struggle, or the class struggle within all nations.

From the Ukraine conflict, the imperialist bourgeoisie have gained an expansion for NATO and more war profits; yet these “victories” have cost them everything. The Global South has united against Washington, making BRICS greatly expand and the dollar further decline; the contradictions within the imperialist countries have intensified, provoking the workers in ways that have only begun; a growing antiwar backlash has come about, with our ruling class now scrambling to manage it. The Donbass miners created a domino effect that’s vastly accelerated the decline of the globe’s largest superpower. And this will ultimately bring an unprecedented series of revolts, inspired by Russia’s success in fighting back against monopoly capital.

This wave of rebellions has already begun; we’re just in the beginning stage of it. It started with the revolution in the Sahel, whose participants have outwardly shown they feel greater hope because of Russia’s efforts to combat colonial interests. Next came the Al Aqsa Flood Operation, a paradigm-shattering strategic triumph which was undertaken in part because Russia had shown such a victory was possible. In the spring of 2022, voices within Hamas were openly talking about the new hope that the SMO represented, showing Russia’s action had influenced the organization’s morale and military thinking. Every part in this great liberation story is connected, and the connections will become more apparent as the story continues to be written.

The imperialists are trying to write a story of their own, defined by division and instability. They’ve used the Zionist entity’s expanding genocide as a cover for new assaults upon civilization, activating their terror forces for another insurgency within Syria. And the crucial force behind this operation has been Turkey, the country whose leader is providing indispensable material assistance to the genocide. 

As the “Israeli” settler colony continues to unravel, Washington will try to make Turkey its new primary tool for spreading chaos across west Asia. And the facilitators of these future proxy wars will claim to have been pro-Palestine all along, like how Erdogan does. Yet the regime’s lies don’t fool the Turkish workers, who are now staging their own uprising. They’ve been carrying out raids on ships that are bound for “Israel,” obstructing Erdogan’s aid to the genocide in any ways they can. Their example must inspire freedom-loving peoples all around the globe, like how the Donbass miners have. And though our media in the United States does all it can to hide developments like these, it’s worthwhile for us to bring this story to the workers here, to the best extent that we can. If we do the work, we’ll expand these recent revolutionary gains into where we live, and make our own contribution to a wider collective victory.

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If you appreciate my work, I hope you become a one-time or regular donor to my Patreon account. Like most of us, I’m feeling the economic pressures amid late-stage capitalism, and I need money to keep fighting for a new system that works for all of us. Go to my Patreon here. 

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