Above: an Armenian soldier guarding the border with Azerbaijan
At this moment, a lesson from history that all antiwar-minded people must apply is the lesson about what imperialist “peace” means. Whenever an imperialist country makes “peace,” this is only a preparation for the launching of the next wars. This is because imperialism isn’t a policy, it’s a system, a system that by its nature will never stop pursuing new conflicts. And with Russia-Ukraine, or Armenia-Azerbaijan, or any of the other conflicts where Washington claims to want to bring a permanent resolution, the underlying goal is to prepare for renewed assaults. Moreover, whatever “benefits” that these countries may get from agreeing to detente with the aggressor, they’ll come at the cost of compromising the efforts at resisting the hegemon.
Though I don’t expect the upcoming Trump-Putin Alaska meeting to be what ends the fighting, for Putin to be entertaining detente is a warning sign. As Dimitrios Patelis of the World Anti-Imperialist Platform concluded this spring after being able to assess three years worth of Russian military performance, Russia’s war progress has been avoidably stagnating at many points throughout this conflict. And this is because Russia’s bourgeoisie have been able to sow indecisiveness within the government over what exactly the goal in Ukraine should be. As long as there’s this dynamic where the government vacillates between resistance and detente, the political will to fight will remain weakened, giving the enemy more openings to advance.
The desire of Russia’s capitalists is to end the sanctions as soon as possible, which means they’re completely willing to sacrifice the anti-imperialist cause for the sake of their own economic interests. They’ve propagated the false hope that if Russia only makes enough compromises, Washington will cease its campaign of aggressions; which is a belief that can only empower the imperialists to take their offensive further.
The balance of forces within Russia, and throughout the wider globe, has not yet been sufficiently tipped in the favor of the workers; it’s Russia’s capitalists who hold the bulk of the leverage, and they’re intent on rendering Russia’s anti-fascist campaign in Ukraine incomplete so that Washington will unfreeze their assets. By incomplete, I mean unsuccessful in the mission of eliminating Ukraine’s Nazi state. The fascist menace will survive, and NATO will use it to re-arm for a new proxy war. The Alaska meeting is not a victory for the antiwar cause; it’s a setup for the hegemon’s next chess maneuver, which is to bind its targets through phony “peace” deals that give Washington more opportunities for global destruction.
The Armenia-Azerbaijan deal illustrates why this supposed path towards peace is a false one. The deal was set up to let the U.S. place troops along the Araz corridor, the land to the south of Armenia and Azerbaijan that’s at the northern border of Iran. The USA, Turkey, and the Zionist entity will use this new advantage to sow further chaos across the region, making for a future proxy war that puts greater pressure upon all of Eurasia’s anti-imperialist countries.
We can’t say exactly how soon these attacks will come, but I believe they’ll happen sooner than later, because the old imperialist cycle of “war, peace, war again” has been sped up. The imperial system now needs constant wars to survive, and Washington’s strategists know that U.S. hegemony can only be extended through perpetual conflicts with China or its strategic partners. Undoing China’s rise is the central goal behind all of these schemes, and the stronger China gets, the more intense we can expect the empire’s attacks to become. It’s only a question of which parts of the world these assaults will be directed at during any given moment.
We must not be tempted into believing that the Alaska talks represent a turn away from finance capital’s war-making schemes; any “peace” that Russia gets while the United States remains a capitalist country can only be a ploy, designed to enable even greater violent fomentation.
The danger doesn’t come from the strength of the U.S. empire; Trump and Washington are not strong, we must make this clear. The danger comes from the potential for America’s monopolists to successfully conspire with the capitalists inside these target countries, whether the target is Russia, Iran, or other anti-imperialist states, so that the resistance forces can be undermined.
This is how the resistance in Donbass could be failed by Russia at a critical moment; this is how Ansarallah, Hezbollah, and Hamas could see their Iranian support obstructed by Iran’s liberal reformers. It’s also how the global workers movement could be diverted towards idealistic notions of class collaboration, giving the monopolists and their accomplices a greater ability to instigate war in East Asia. We don’t need to imagine such hypothetical scenarios, though, to understand what kinds of repercussions class collaboration has; a people are being exterminated right now in Gaza because of the preexisting weaknesses within the anti-imperialist movement. Weaknesses which came from how this movement isn’t sufficiently connected to workers struggle, and how the proletariat hasn’t yet built back up the power it lost in the 20th century.
To rectify this problem, we must fully commit to waging the struggle’s new phase. Committing means more than merely adopting the correct form; it’s not enough to just support the resistance forces and speak out against the false “peace” deals, though this is important. We need to embody the content of a dedicated revolutionary movement. This means advancing the class struggle within one’s own conditions, which is the only way one can actually advance international solidarity. We need to support Russia in its effort to finish this war, as we need to support every other anti-imperialist force; this support doesn’t mean anything practical, though, unless we act to strengthen the working class within our own countries.
Building up the global proletarian united front is the only material way we can help the Russian workers see this war through. It’s also instrumental in bringing about the worker actions that can further economically isolate “Israel,” and that can weaken the imperial war machine. Many within the antiwar movement already know this on a theoretical level, but always our movement is at risk of being diverted away from the actions that the struggle calls for; and the notion about being able to reach “peace” through inter-capitalist cooperation is one of those things that can lead us astray.
This notion depends on the idea that the Russian capitalists, who are the ones which got Putin to agree to this talk, have the same interests as the workers. In reality, these capitalists share a greater common interest with the U.S. monopolists than they do with the Russian proletariat. Whatever alliances that a country’s bourgeoisie make with the workers are purely tactical; they do not make the class contradictions go away. And communists can make those tactical alliances, but this must not change how our fundamental alignment is with the workers. As long as we stay true to this principle, and consistently act in the interests of the workers, we’ll play a positive role in the global anti-imperialist war.
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