The imperialists are the architects of their own demise. As Mao observed, ultimately 90 percent of the world’s population will rise up against the imperialists as a consequence of how wide the imperialists seek to extend their tyrannical reach. Now, in the midst of a decline for U.S. global influence that the Pentagon itself acknowledged in 2017, imperialism’s reactions to these geopolitical losses are serving to speed up the shift towards that point of overwhelming anti-imperialist revolt.
In the last three years alone, U.S. “counterterrorism” actions have touched 85 countries, 7 of which have been victims of U.S. air or drone strikes and 8 of which have been subject to U.S. combat operations. The hypocrisy of these actions are glaring, since the U.S. has aided jihadist terrorist groups in Syria and Yemen while backing terroristic fascist paramilitaries in Colombia and Ukraine. It’s also apparent in the destructive actions of the “War on Terror” more broadly, since hundreds of thousands of civilians have died from U.S. wars since 9/11 and more than 37 million have either become displaced or become refugees because of these conflicts.
The blowback towards U.S. strategic interests from these and other recent imperialist provocations grows more apparent every month. As a consequence of Washington’s “humanitarian” sanctions on Xinjiang, which have cost the province jobs and driven down living standards for the Chinese Uyghurs Washington supposedly wants to help, the Chinese masses have abandoned their formerly warm attitude towards America and instead come to recognize Washington for the untrustworthy bad actor it is. The failure of the Pentagon’s delusional attempt to recruit Vietnam as a military ally in the cold war on China exposes the same trend of Washington’s belligerence turning potential friends against it; Vietnam knows not to work with the imperialists because the imperialists showed long ago how little they care about the wellbeing of Vietnam’s people.
Because of Washington’s fanning the flames of paramilitary violence in Colombia, government peace talks with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia are being undermined. Because of the massacres that Colombia’s government is carrying out against anti-austerity protesters, the empire’s image of representing “human rights” is being undermined — a dynamic that’s also at play when it comes to Israel’s massacres of Palestinians. Since these are two of the countries where the U.S. has been coordinating with the given governments to carry out out its “counterterrorism” operations, Washington’s militarism from these last several years has a clear role behind these losses.
Because of Washington’s military buildup and economic warfare against both Russia and China, a Russo-Sino alliance has emerged that wasn’t present during most of the previous cold war. Due to Washington’s leveraging the IMF to impose unprecedented measures of austerity, privatization, and wage cuts on 81 countries during the pandemic, protest movements against neoliberalism have been heating up from Colombia to India to Haiti. In the latter neo-colony, protesters have been especially direct in their anti-imperialism, burning American flags in outrage over Washington’s role behind the recent power grabs of the country’s dictator.
The imperialists and the international bourgeoisie may be currently gaining territory in Latin America through their momentarily successful campaign to beat back Colombia’s armed rebels, and they may have successfully sabotaged the attempted election of Ecuador’s anti-IMF candidate last month. But in the long term, these counterrevolutionary measures will lead to more imperialist losses like the recent one in Bolivia, where the socialists regained power last year following the 2019 CIA coup. As the collapse of neoliberalism continues, and the imperialists attempt to tighten their grip, the world will continue to come closer towards a new wave of socialist revolutions.
This wave will no doubt begin in the neo-colonies, but ultimately it will spread into the core imperialist countries. The same process of intensifying capitalist contradictions is afflicting both of these parts of the globe, it’s just developing faster in the exploited part. And the development towards revolution within both is being sped up by the bourgeoisie’s reactive attempts to suppress the liberation struggles, a phenomenon which Lenin described upon witnessing the bourgeoisie’s actions following the victory of the proletariat in Russia:
Since the proletarian revolution in Russia and its victories on an international scale, expected neither by the bourgeoisie nor the philistines, the entire world has become different, and the bourgeoisie everywhere has become different too. It is terrified of “Bolshevism”, exasperated by it almost to the point of frenzy, and for that very reason it is, on the one hand, precipitating the progress of events and, on the other, concentrating on the forcible suppression of Bolshevism, thereby weakening its own position in a number of other fields. In their tactics the Communists in all the advanced countries must take both these circumstances into account.
The irrational nature of this bourgeois reaction to the onset of the age of socialist revolutions, continued Lenin, is apparent in how the bourgeoisie’s obsessive anti-communist propaganda has unintentionally caused more people to study Marxist theory:
When the American bourgeoisie, which has completely lost its head, seizes thousands and thousands of people on suspicion of Bolshevism, creates an atmosphere of panic, and broadcasts stories of Bolshevik plots; when, despite all its wisdom and experience, the British bourgeoisie — the most “solid” in the world — makes incredible blunders, founds richly endowed “anti-Bolshevik societies”, creates a special literature on Bolshevism, and recruits an extra number of scientists, agitators and clergymen to combat it, we must salute and thank the capitalists. They are working for us. They are helping us to get the masses interested in the essence and significance of Bolshevism, and they cannot do otherwise, for they have already failed to ignore Bolshevism and stifle it. But at the same time, the bourgeoisie sees practically only one aspect of Bolshevism — insurrection, violence, and terror; it therefore strives to prepare itself for resistance and opposition primarily in this field.
Isn’t this dynamic of the bourgeoisie’s self-destructive hyper-fixation on revolutionary “terror” apparent today in Colombia, where neo-Nazi elements have influenced the police and the military to embrace a crackpot combat doctrine that treats every facet of the class struggle as a hidden avenue for “terrorism” and therefore rationalizes extreme state violence that encourages the masses to resist further? Or in Israel, where every facet of Palestinian society is portrayed as a branch of “The Hamas” and the Zionist state consequently carries out atrocities that solidify civilian support for armed Palestinian resistance groups of all types? These are the characteristics of a colonial system that’s disregarding strategic intelligence in the class war due to its inclination towards panic and hyperbole.
It’s this poorly thought out franticness of the Latin American bourgeoisie’s resistance to the proletarian movement, provoked by Bolivia’s recent liberation like how the Russian revolution provoked the Red Scare of 1917 and onward, that will likely make Latin America a starting location for the coming wave of revolutions. If Latin America isn’t the place where it starts, another part of the Global South will be. Maybe even a revolution to abolish Israel within Palestine will be the starting point.
What might help make this wave spread into the core imperialist countries is the fact that within these countries, the imperialists are replicating the self-destructive fixation on anti-communist propaganda that Lenin described. Like how the bourgeoisie were flooding society with anti-Bolshevik propaganda, today’s bourgeoisie are flooding society with propaganda against the Communist Party of China, promoting fabricated claims about “Uyghur genocide,” Chinese “authoritarianism,” and (most ironically) Chinese “imperialism.”
While the cleverer imperialist propagandists (like John Bolton) are attempting to avoid the past side effect of promoting class consciousness through portraying China as “not truly socialist,” the prevalence of this anti-Chinese demagoguery is still bringing about a modern equivalent of the dynamic Lenin described. The empire’s constant lies about China have prompted communists and responsible journalists to defend China, and in the process educate people about the gains that Socialism with Chinese Characteristics has brought.
This is going to slowly grow awareness of the need for carrying out the type of proletarian revolution that’s lifted over 800 million Chinese out of poverty. Just as during the aftermath of the Russian revolution, the bourgeoisie’s reactive attempts to stop civilization’s progression towards socialism are ironically speeding up this progression.
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