What Kim Il Sung did was provide a practical route towards making imperialism’s aggressions backfire. Mao believed that imperialism’s next big war would catalyze capitalism’s final defeat; he expressed an optimism about the third world war that made sense during the historical moment in which he was speaking, but that we shouldn’t uncritically apply to today. Since that time, the Soviet Union has been destroyed, and the global communist movement has yet to rebuild itself after this foundational blow. Therefore if we are to turn Mao’s prediction about the third world war into a reality, we’ll first need to carry out such a rebuilding process. Russia’s anti-fascist war has created better conditions for us to do this, and Iran’s war of resistance has made these conditions better still. But we have to actually do the work.
Wrote Kim Il Sung about the necessity of actively seizing upon the opportunities that history presents to revolutionaries:
For a revolution to take place, the subjective and objective situation should be created for it. The revolution in each country should be carried out to suit the specific realities, in which the objective revolutionary situation is created. This, however, by no means signifies that the revolution can develop or ripen of itself. The revolution can always be advanced and brought to maturity only through an active and hard struggle of the revolutionaries. If an active struggle is neglected, only waiting for a favourable situation to arise by reason of the arduousness of the revolution, revolutionary forces cannot be fostered. Revolutionary forces cannot be prepared spontaneously without any struggle, they can be fostered and strengthened only through a hard struggle. If preparations are not made to meet the decisive hour of the revolution by preserving the revolutionary forces against the enemy's suppression and, at the same time, constantly accumulating and building them up through a positive struggle, it will be impossible to win victory in the revolution even when the objective situation has been created.
This is the working-class movement’s role in our third world war: to organize the masses, within our respective countries, towards confronting the global capitalist ruling class and its puppet states. To translate the fallout from imperialism’s growing military conflicts into a galvanization of workers power. After the anti-fascist war began in 2022, the globe’s socialist parties were given an opportunity to take on such an active role. They were given the choice to take a pro-Ukraine or “neutral” position on the conflict; or to side with the working-class forces that had compelled Russia’s bourgeois government into confronting the hegemon.
Many of these parties failed this test by forsaking solidarity with the anti-fascist resisters. But as Washington continues to expand its aggressions, and this keeps provoking more of the world’s peoples into counter-offensives, these kinds of tests for our movement will keep appearing. And if we continue to build up strength for the working-class forces which reject imperial opportunism, we’ll be in a better position the next time a pivotal act of resistance occurs.
We must reconstruct the workers movement on the foundation of the solidarity principle that Kim explained, in which communists unify with all who are working to defeat the primary enemy:
In Asia, Africa and Latin America there are socialist and neutral countries, and big and small countries. All these countries except the puppet regimes of the imperialists and their satellite states constitute anti-imperialist, anti-U.S. forces. Despite the differences of state socio-political systems, political views and religious beliefs, the peoples of the countries in these areas, as the oppressed nations who were suppressed and exploited by the imperialists and colonialists, have the common goal and aspiration to achieve national independence and national prosperity against imperialism and old and new colonialism. The differences of state socio-political systems, political views or religious beliefs can by no means be an obstacle in the way of joint struggle against U.S. imperialism. All countries should form an anti-imperialist united front and take anti-U.S. joint action to crush the common enemy and attain the common goal.
This statement is the ultimate refutation of the argument that we can’t support anti-imperialist countries if they have bourgeois governments. When we entered into World War Three, it was inevitable that this would become a prominent talking point among the dogmatic opportunists, who’ve so far had notable success in holding Marxism back during our new geopolitical era. But the more new fronts open up in the resistance to Washington’s siege, the more these opportunists will expose themselves, and the wider the struggle’s potential will grow.
With the war on Iran, this kind of imperialism-compatible “Marxism” has appeared again, though in a different form than it did with Ukraine. The Tudeh Party, the tool for Zionist psyops that claims to speak for Iran’s working class, has come out with a series of poisonous statements—the worst of which blames the victim, saying that Khamenei “drove the country to the brink of war and destruction.” And dozens of communist parties around the globe, many of which took the position that Ukraine is an “inter-imperialist war,” have endorsed a separate statement that repeats Zionist narratives about Iran’s response to the protests—with Tudeh being the source the statement cites for these narratives. The hegemon’s latest maneuvers against Iran have revealed how many CPs give credence to Tudeh, and have thereby given us a better sense of where we must turn to for anti-imperialist solidarity.
One of the places where such solidarity can be found is the new socialist international, which was founded last month in Moscow by the American Communist Party and other allies of the struggle. Something important to note about these other allies, as it pertains to Kim Il Sung’s point about unity, is that they include parties which describe themselves as “social democratic.” This is the case for A Just Russia (abbreviation SR); SR is social democratic, yet it’s joined with this new international, because in practice it’s more revolutionary than those Tudeh-aligned CPs.
SR is an example of the historical phenomenon where “social democracy” has come to mean completely different things within the countries resisting imperialism, vs. the countries that benefit from imperial extraction. Social democrats in the United States or Europe are as a rule complicit in Washington’s world war, and in the genocide against Palestine. But when you’re a social democrat in a country whose working masses are engaged in active combat with the hegemon, or are being exploited by the hegemon on a neo-colonial level, then the only way to even have a popular presence is by being anti-imperialist. Within the primary battle that’s being fought, whether you embrace Marxism-Leninism is a secondary matter. We’re also seeing this in Bolivia’s Movement for Socialism party, which isn’t Marxist-Leninist yet is playing a pivotal role within Bolivia’s new popular anti-austerity revolt.
When the workers retake power in Bolivia, the dogmatic opportunist “ML” parties will no doubt find a reason to oppose the people’s government, as they’ve found a reason to oppose Venezuela’s revolutionary government. And the communists who truly understand what Marxism-Leninism means will continue exposing these traitors, while offering the world’s people an alternative path. This is the path that Kim Il Sung explained we would need to take in order to defeat the enemy we’re facing. We will embrace the role that communists were meant to have when the third world war began; the role where we unify with the other forces that are resisting the United States, and thereby show communists to be deserving of leadership.
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