In December 2024, when south Korea’s President Yoon tried to carry out a coup on behalf of Washington, the popular revolutionary forces gained a victory. According to Stephen Cho of the World Anti-Imperialist Platform, the mass backlash against Yoon’s actions was what stopped the Korean War from again becoming a “hot” conflict. Imperialism’s plan was to use the coup as a starting point for such a war against the DPRK, but the efforts of the people successfully thwarted this scheme. Korea’s revolutionary movement did the equivalent of what the U.S. and European antiwar movements have been trying to do for so long, and used popular power to preemptively shut down the next big war.
Like when Russia’s workers movement pressured its government into rescuing the Donbass from fascism, or when Palestine’s liberation struggle struck an unprecedented blow against the occupier on October 7, this development was a great victory for the anti-imperialist cause. As the hegemon has escalated its provocations during this last generation, the world’s popular movements have been able to gain many new wins, turning our third world war into a catalyst for revolutionary change. For these movements to triumph on a greater level, though, and end the hegemon’s genocidal rampage, those of us who oppose imperialist war will need to take another step.
We’ll have to commit towards supporting all efforts by the anti-imperialist forces towards resisting the hegemon through military force, and not reaffirm the narratives of the elements which seek appeasement. Within Russia and Iran, as well as in the sphere of dissident politics, there are bourgeois elements which advocate for reaching “peace” deals that would only constrain these countries in their resistance efforts. Which would thereby enable NATO to build its forces back up in Ukraine, let the Zionist entity commit its crimes while facing a greatly weakened resistance, and let Washington pursue war with China as the PRC finds its biggest international partnerships weakened. These will be the outcomes if Trump’s foreign policy strategy succeeds, and we must alert the anti-imperialist movement to such dangers.
It’s not likely that those scenarios will fully be realized, but if they’re even partly brought into being, it will mean grievous setbacks for the liberation struggle. Setbacks that would follow the significant losses our cause has already experienced with the fall of Syria, and the consequential blows to the anti-Zionist resistance. Syria alone must be enough to shatter any illusions about “strategic patience” being the best way to handle the empire’s aggressions; such dangerously naive thinking must be discarded, in favor of a posture that’s truly dedicated towards defeating the enemy. This is the posture that comes from basing your movement within the class struggle; within the knowledge that there cannot be “peaceful coexistence” between the exploiting and exploited classes, any more than there can be “peace” between the imperialist and anti-imperialist forces.
In 1939, when Mao was responding to how the ruling classes of the “democratic” imperialist countries refused to commit to a united front against fascism, he identified the tendency for bourgeois liberal elements to undermine resistance against aggression. Because of their class interests, observed Mao, these liberals will always be reluctant to unify with the revolutionary forces—even when this is the only way to save their own countries from fascism:
The bourgeoisie of the so-called democratic states fear on the one hand that the fascist states may violate their interests; but they fear the development of the revolutionary forces even more. They fear the Soviet Union, they fear the liberation movements of the peoples of their own countries, they fear the liberation movements in the colonies and semi- colonies. Consequently, they rejected a genuine united front against aggression and a genuine war against aggression involving the participation of the Soviet Union, and they organized by themselves a united counter-revolutionary front, they undertook by themselves a robbers' war of pillage.
These things Mao said all apply today, even though the alignments within this global power struggle have shifted. What’s changed since the start of the last world war is that monopoly finance capital has become more concentrated, with the United States being the modern world’s definitive capitalist center. For this reason, the U.S. is the only true imperialist country in our time; the capitalist elements in every other country revolve around this center, making none of them actually independent. This is true for the capitalist ruling classes within Russia, Iran, and the other countries which have become in conflict with imperialism but remain under bourgeois governments. And when we understand this reality about today’s conditions, we can gain clarity about how to remedy the anti-imperialist movement’s internal weaknesses.
That Russia and Iran’s capitalists aren’t independent from the United States refutes the ultra-leftist dogma about these countries being imperialist powers. It also refutes the right opportunist notions about how the workers and capitalists within these countries share a unified, strategically based interest in defeating imperialism. Any alliances that these classes make are tactical in nature; the capitalists are always acting with the hope of discarding the anti-imperialist united front, and making concessions towards Washington.
Their material interests are distinct from those of the workers; whereas the capitalists would only benefit from their countries being turned into U.S. client states, the workers would be turned into tools for neo-colonial exploitation. Which would negate any short-term benefits that could come from a lifting of Washington’s sanctions. The U.S. empire, and by extension the capitalists in these countries, are holding the sanctions over the heads of these workers as an argument for why they must go along with appeasement. Their message is that if you want imperialism to stop strangulating your societies, then the only thing you can do is give in to the aggressor’s demands. This is how they’re trying to trick the workers, not just inside these countries but everywhere else, into believing the answer is to make “peace” with the financial monopolists.
The only outcome in which the workers win is if U.S. imperialism gets defeated. U.S. finance capital and its global appendages are trying to convince us that what we need is not to beat imperialism, but to make friends with it. And this is a perilous fallacy. We only need to look at Washington’s drive towards a catastrophically deadly war with China, or at the holocaust it’s already committing against the Palestinians, to know that it’s not in imperialism’s nature to want peace.
A real peace movement is not one that advocates for the world’s capitalists to come together so that they can mutually crush the workers, and make way for new assaults against colonized peoples and workers states. A real peace movement focuses its efforts not on making “peace” deals that would advance these malign goals, but on obstructing the war machine’s schemes, as occupied Korea’s popular struggle did last winter. It also focuses on solidarity with the targets of imperialism’s violence, as these Korean dissident forces do in spite of their country’s laws against pro-DPRK speech.
For those of us in the USA, and the other countries that help wage imperialist wars, our role is to work towards forcing our governments into abandoning its plans for further violence. It’s also to strengthen the united front with the revolutionary currents within the countries our government is attacking, helping ensure that if imperialism keeps assaulting their people, they’ll defeat the aggressor. We have to combat these covertly pro-imperialist iterations of “peace” politics, while upholding the principle of self-defense.
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