How have the Russian people, and the many others who are waging military campaigns against the imperial hegemon, all managed to subdue the strongest superpower? The process that led to today’s outcome, where the imperialists and their proxies are losing on all fronts, has been one of correctly assessing the given conditions and then acting in accordance with those conditions. The Russians, the Palestinian resistance, and the Houthis all started out in a place of being subjugated by the imperial beast. Then, by uniting, strategizing, and mobilizing, they found a way to make the oppressors into the losers.
This is all intuitive when one starts to think about how power balances get flipped, but examining the nature of the path towards anti-imperialist triumph is important. We in the empire’s core are at a stage where it’s more urgent than ever for us to study such struggles. An opportunity is here for us to gain an equivalent victory, one we can win by outmaneuvering the monopoly finance capitalists which run our government.
For the many participants in the class struggle who’ve been paying attention to the Ukraine conflict—and who’ve rejected the pro-imperialist arguments designed to discredit Russia’s operation—these developments have held a special significance. Russia’s victory over NATO is an unprecedented type of event in living memory, where an anti-imperialist force has been able to win on a scale which profoundly discredits the empire. Observed a recent Strategic Culture Foundation editorial about how much the imperialists have narratively invested into this conflict, and how meaningful it therefore is that Russia has beaten them:
The proxy war using Ukraine as a battlefield has reached a historic endpoint. The defeat is due to Russia’s formidable armed forces, Moscow’s political defiance, and the tenacity of the Russian people as seen most recently in the overwhelmingly popular re-election of President Vladimir Putin. The United States and its imperialist minions are in a deep quandary as they are forced to face a historical moment of nemesis. The Western enemies can’t publicly accept defeat – politically it’s going to be hell for these warmongering criminals when Western citizens fully realize the horrific losses and culpability of their so-called elected governments. Russia’s enemies have thrown everything into the Ukraine proxy war – over $200 billion in weapons and financial support – and they have failed to inflict their much-sought-after ulterior objective of strategically defeating Russia. They are the ones now facing strategic defeat.
This triumph, along with the parallel successes of the African, Palestinian, and Yemeni freedom fighters, represent an indispensable part of how the world will defeat international capital. The next big step, aside from the next victories the pro-multipolar forces will win, is a new wave of workers revolutions. Multipolarity is only one stage in the transition towards worldwide triumph for socialism, though multipolarity’s own importance can’t be understated. These great recent events in the shift away from U.S. hegemony have weakened international capital, giving the class struggle greater ability to succeed. They’ve also provided the workers movement with crucial lessons.
What the last couple years have taught us is that the predominant parts of the socialist movement within the imperialist countries aren’t committed to the anti-imperialist cause. Which means the only way we can contribute to the further weakening of the hegemon, and therefore make proletarian victory possible, is by building a united front against monopoly capital. A front that’s by nature independent from the left opportunist elements, which seek to divide the workers from the anti-imperialist countries while keeping our social movements stuck in a narrow “leftist” bubble.
The Party of Communists USA, one of the orgs that’s been participating in the effort to broaden the antiwar movement beyond that bubble, has been compelled to repudiate the NATO-compatible narratives put forth by many of its “socialist” peers. The party recently wrote about the NATO-complicit role of Greece’s predominant communist formations, which affirm the hegemon’s narrative about Russia being an aggressor:
They practically deny that the main danger today comes from the imperialism of the U.S.A. and its plundering allies from the NATO bloc; they profess a kind of theory of the imperialist pyramid, where all the imperialists fight among themselves. The comrades even claim that they, “the Communist Parties, based on Marxism-Leninism and proletarian internationalism, have intensified their anti-imperialist struggle.” What can be said here? The comrades have indeed intensified the noise effects and the flow of verbal accusations, but by not waging a targeted struggle against outright fascism, and the main source of fascism – the reactionary financial capital of U.S. imperialism, they thereby divert the source of fascism from responsibility by their assertions that all belligerents are equally responsible for the war. We assert that on the part of Russia the military actions are largely of a forced, defensive nature against the aggression of the USA and NATO, unleashed by the hands of the Nazis of Kiev. The military defeat and dismemberment of Russia, its repetition of the fate of Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya is in no way in the interests of the world working class.
Such tacit defenses of the NATO war machine are connected with the types of practice that take the revolutionary character out of socialism, and reduce it to an appendage for liberal politics. When somebody is operating according to the logic that PCUSA counters here, where all serious anti-imperialist efforts are viewed as threats towards class struggle, then the idea of a united front against the hegemon is easy to reject. A perspective that sees anti-imperialism as secondary allows for the insular practices which define modern “leftism” in the United States, and in places like Greece where there’s incentive to appease the imperial comprador class.
This struggle will be won on the basis of recognizing what our enemy’s greatest strategic weaknesses are. And because the capitalist system in the core depends on the continuation of imperialism, and of the foreign policies which keep imperial extraction possible, these vulnerabilities can be found on the narrative front.
At this stage, the most impactful thing we can do is take away the State Department’s ability to define the discourse, because discourse management is how the ruling class can keep the liberal order stable. When the discourse gets to be beyond the State Department’s control, the class struggle can no longer be held back by the pro-imperialist “left” gatekeepers. The opportunistic layer of the labor movement that PCUSA decries loses its narrative dominance, as the empire’s narratives on foreign policy have come to be no longer the default. Beyond the niche spaces that the opportunists can narratively police, the wider discourse has swung towards an anti-imperialist position, making authentic sources of dissent better able to rise.
Already, anti-imperialists in the U.S. have partly been able to achieve that outcome. We’ve done so by building an antiwar alliance which the compatible “left” doesn’t control, and by frustrating our government’s attempts at hiding its Ukraine loss. We’re seeing the shifts in the power balance that such disruptions can bring, and the state’s reactions to these shifts. The FBI just made an effort to intimidate the Libertarian Party over its associations with people who are friendly to anti-imperialist countries. This attack on civil liberties is by extension directed at communists, especially pro-Russian U.S. communist orgs like PCUSA and CPI; as these groups are among the ones with the most direct ties to the hegemon’s challengers. Evidently, the state sees such communists as synonymous with the antiwar libertarians, and is determined to wage war on all of them at once.
After the trial for the Uhuru 3 that will take place this September, we’ll doubtless see escalations in these types of crackdowns on international solidarity work. The state’s goal is to preemptively crush the orgs involved in this united front, making the “neither NATO nor Russia” left opportunist orgs into the only legal entities within the activist sphere. And even the members of those orgs won’t truly be safe, because the state is also coming for those who so much as do pro-Palestine activism. An all-encompassing repressive wave is emerging. But we’re capable of overcoming this next phase in the counterinsurgency, and outmaneuvering the empire like our global allies in this fight have done.
We’ve fulfilled the first steps in our own mission to unite, strategize, and mobilize against monopoly finance capital. What remains in this mission is going to involve fighting for our movement’s survival amid ever-intensifying attacks. If we navigate this situation correctly, though, the way in which we’ll be operating is going to extend beyond the reactive or the defensive.
There’s an unprecedented opportunity to rally this country’s masses against the imperialist deep state which keeps them under corporate dictatorship, and is determined to fully destroy their economic wellbeing. Should we demonstrate the will and the discipline, we’ll make it so that our organizations keep making progress within this struggle, even if the state decides to drive us underground. The enemy we face is preparing for such an assault upon us because it faces terminal decline. Let’s take advantage of this growing weakness within it.
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