Because the hegemon couldn’t gain victory over the North Vietnamese, it felt compelled to continue with the war effort, which made the genocidal nature of imperialism’s warfare methods more difficult to conceal. The DC leadership came to be increasingly in conflict with the will of the people, stubbornly prolonging its slaughter of non-combatants (including children) in the futile hope that Washington could still win. The protests that occurred in reaction to these atrocities were not what ended the war, but these atrocities did create a mass consciousness shift, furthering the breakdown of public faith in the USA’s ruling institutions.
The reason why these events weren’t followed by further escalations in the class conflict is that the U.S. communist movement got successfully suppressed, leaving the architects of the coming austerity policies with no effective opposition. Half a century later, after these policies have greatly shrunken the aristocracy of labor and made the workers desperate for change, communism has a serious chance of becoming relevant again. And the way it’s gained this new hope is by correctly navigating the conditions of these last couple years, wherein the empire’s latest defeats have catalyzed a rise in anti-imperialist consciousness.
Only one year ago, this was not yet the case. Even though on an international level, the world’s revolutionary forces had great hope, in the imperial center the situation was still bleak. Recent imperialist crimes like the initiation of the new cold war, the U.S.-backed genocide against Yemen, and the recent massacres of Palestinians hadn’t so far brought about anywhere near the kind of mass mobilization that the Iraq invasion produced. It appeared that the generation of people who were born following the turn of the millennium had settled into the habits which our ruling elites want them to embrace, those being apathy, nihilistic thinking, and embrace of the terminally online lifestyle. During these last couple of months, though, the youth have mobilized for Gaza on a scale comparable to that of the Iraq protests. And unlike in 2003, today there’s a growing organizational force that’s capable of sustaining the resistance effort’s momentum.
The anti-Bush movement couldn’t sustain itself because its only sources of leadership were ones that sought not to stop the wars, but to organize for its own sake. This was the sentiment that ANSWER’s Brian Becker articulated in 2007, when he said that his org’s goal was merely to turn more people into organizers because ending the wars supposedly wasn’t realistic.
This was a self-fulfilling prophecy. When one believes that stopping imperialist wars isn’t possible, naturally one is going to fail in this task, which will then reinforce that dogma among its believers. These are the kinds of ostensibly socialist projects that come to be most visible when the successes of 20th century U.S. socialism are long in the past, and a controlled opposition needs to be cultivated so dissent can be kept neutralized. At some point, people were going to try to rebuild that serious old version of the movement. And it was the Ukraine proxy war that made this effort into a substantial threat towards the compatible left’s organizing monopoly.
The crucial point of contention between the compatible left, and this insurgent force that’s suddenly grown in relevance, has been the issue of whether to support Russia in its war against Ukrainian fascism. Whereas the established left orgs have taken the “neither NATO nor Russia” stance, these insurgents have recognized that if it’s an imperative to support Palestine’s struggle against Zionism, then it’s also an imperative to support Russia’s struggle against Banderism. It’s this willingness to be principled on anti-imperialism, no matter what the anti-Russian left-liberals think, that makes these insurgent forces represent a genuine threat towards the imperial state. Not only because they’re consistent about narratively resisting the empire, but because their refusal to tail left-liberals comes from a desire to reach the broad masses.
Though the ANSWER clique has been able to seize a leadership role within the recent anti-imperialist demonstrations, there’s a growing mandate for this clique to be replaced by something which can keep up the movement’s momentum. The imperialists are in an even more desperate and reactive place than they were during Vietnam or Iraq, and this means the wars they’re now waging are liable to intensify our capitalist crises to an unprecedented degree. Which means the people who’ve been gaining anti-imperialist consciousness are guaranteed to grow ever more desirous of authentic solutions to these crises.
Less and less of our society can afford to be led towards the same self-defeating activist projects that left opportunists have been perpetuating for so long. With our accelerating decline in living standards, the amount of them with a material incentive to take our revolutionary tasks seriously grows by the day.
We’ve already made great progress towards bringing the people into our project during this last year. We’ve successfully organized multi-tendency antiwar rallies that have gained mainstream attention, and connected many anti-imperialists who used to be isolated from each other. Our next task is to make this coalition strong enough that it renders the compatible left no longer able to gain the kind of control over mass movements which it’s still able to. Then we’ll bring the same level of success for the anti-imperialist movement that’s already come to exist throughout so much of the rest of the globe. We’ve come far in the last twelve months, but this needs to only be the start. If we do the work required for building this movement, we’ll make the resistance efforts by Washington’s challengers lead to proletarian victory in the core.
The World Anti-Imperialist Platform—one of the formations in this antiwar coalition—has concluded that the wars which Washington is provoking could indeed bring about the empire’s demise. That is at least so long as actors like the Platform remain resolute in fulfilling their role within this process:
Against the barbaric repression of imperialism and the fascist forces, in the face of the slander and divisive efforts of the international sectarian opportunist forces, and in order to achieve the three goals of the Platform, the Platform has not taken a single step back or faltered, and has always bravely faced and overcome trials and difficulties. We will continue to move forward with our indomitable struggle, chanting the slogans “Proletarians of the world, unite” and “People united will never defeated” from the ranks of the struggle. Like World War II formed the world anti-fascist front, defeated the fascist forces, dealt a major blow to the imperialist powers, and achieved a great high tide for the communist and anti-imperialist movements, World War III will form the world anti-imperialist front, deal a decisive blow to the imperialist powers, and achieve a new great upsurge for the communist and anti-imperialist movements.
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