At least since Washington started the conflict in Syria, we’ve been living through what’s essentially a third world war. And as Mao predicted, when a third world war came, this would compel the globe’s masses to carry out workers revolutions on an unprecedented scale:
We stand firmly for peace and against war. However, if the imperialists insist on unleashing another war, we should not be afraid of it. Our attitude on this question is the same as our attitude towards any disturbance: first, we are against it; second, we are not afraid of it. The First World War was followed by the birth of the Soviet Union with a population of 200 million. The Second World War was followed by the emergence of the socialist camp with a combined population of 900 million. If the imperialists insist on launching a third world war, it is certain that several hundred million more will turn to socialism, and then there will not be much room left on earth for the imperialists; it is also likely that the whole structure of imperialism will utterly collapse.
Does this optimistic way of thinking about World War III still apply? It does, because now that the imperialists have instigated another worldwide conflict, hundreds of millions of workers are indeed being radicalized by the ensuing instability. Most of them haven’t yet turned to socialism, but they have been forced to respond to the upheavals that NATO’s provocations have brought about.
I’m mainly talking about the economic chaos that’s been created by Washington’s proxy war against Russia, which has sped up the dollar’s decline while giving the capitalists an excuse to massively drive up prices. For the workers in the United States and its satellite countries, these shocks have been too much to accept; the only way for them to respond is by becoming disillusioned, and seeking out new political solutions. It’s quite plausible that the Ukraine proxy war, in combination with the other aggressions our government will launch during this period, are going to catalyze a new wave of workers revolutions. For this to happen, though, we are going to need to organize these radicalized workers. To give them the education and institutional power they’ll need for overthrowing their imperialist dictatorship, which is the only way that the global capitalist structure can truly collapse.
Something the anti-imperialist movement needs to understand about collapse is that without that aspect of collective organization, of active effort to advance the class struggle, what “collapse” will mean is a major worsening in the conditions of the underclass. At worst, it will mean extermination campaigns against entire peoples, like we’re seeing right now in Gaza. Crisis is not the enemy of capitalism, but a central part of capitalism; the only capitalist crises that bring revolution are the crises that happen when the people have already built up enough power of their own. As long as the capitalists are the ones with serious power, whatever collapse that happens is going to be used to expand the violence against the masses.
The factor that truly matters is whether the proletariat, and its class allies, have managed to construct a popular organ which can make the workers win. And in a moment like this, when the world’s workers movement is still a long way from rebuilding itself after its 20th century defeats, there are plenty of pseudo-revolutionary ideologies that seek to direct us away from the proletarian cause. That interpret a development like the Ukraine proxy war blowback not as a reason for redoubling our workers struggle efforts, but as some sort of proof that imperialism will inevitably fall apart on its own.
This is the dangerously naive expectation that gets propagated when we analyze U.S. hegemony’s decline not with a class perspective; but rather with a mechanistic thinking about how historical change happens. It would be mechanistic and idealistic to believe that when imperialism gets fully defeated, this will happen not through the overthrow of the U.S. capitalist class but through reforms to the U.S. government. Yet this is the notion that’s dominated “peace” discourse during the Trump 2.0 era.
The Trump White House, especially its special envoy Steve Witkoff, have worked to sell the idea that they seek “peace” with Washington’s adversaries. And though Trump’s bombing of Iran this June largely discredited him as a “peace” president in the eyes of his base, Trump won’t be the last figure to try to use “detente” as a cover for imperial schemes. Washington still seeks to use diplomacy to draw in China’s strategic partnets, and accepting this as a serious “peace” strategy isn’t just dangerous because it helps advance the war on China; it’s also harmful because it diverts us from the class struggle.
If we let the anti-capitalist struggle be separated from the anti-imperialist cause, this will make it no longer anti-imperialism, but a vehicle for bringing about imperialist “peace”; which is really just preparation for the next war. Lenin warned that “it is impossible to escape imperialist war, and imperialist peace … which inevitably engenders imperialist war, it is impossible to escape that inferno, except by a Bolshevik struggle and a Bolshevik revolution.”
What Lenin sought to combat with this statement was liberal pacifism, which both uncritically treats imperialist “peace” as something to strive for and opposes workers revolution on the basis of “class peace.” These two ideas have always been fundamentally connected, and Lenin’s response towards them was to affirm the need for centering the class war: “We are advancing towards the socialist revolution consciously, firmly and unswervingly, knowing that it is not separated from the bourgeois-democratic revolution by a Chinese Wall, and knowing…struggle alone will determine how far we shall advance, what part of this immense and lofty task we shall accomplish, and to what extent we shall succeed in consolidating our victories. Time will show.”
Since Russia started the operation, time has shown that certain anti-imperialist states weren’t prepared to survive the crises of this era. Syria has been lost for now, and so has Bolivia. We also still haven’t ended the Gaza holocaust, which is a task that represents the great test of strength for the workers movement in our time. The popular revolutionary forces have been strengthened in other areas, though. China keeps growing, Russia’s workers movement has kept it on a path of resistance, Palestine’s resistance has rendered Zionist victory untenable, Hezbollah remains a serious threat despite what U.S. propaganda has said, the DPRK has adopted a sterner posture towards Washington; these are among the biggest recent developments that aid our cause.
For those of us in the countries that are still under monopoly capitalist rule, a key task is to learn from the examples of these successes, particularly the Global South movements which have beaten back the empire’s violence. The reformist path of imperialist and class “peace” is suicide; the only future is in committing to the fight against the hegemon, and for the proletariat’s victory.
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