Above: the “earthquake bomb” that Israel dropped on Syria in December 2024.
This week, the UN’s Mohamad Safa resigned from his position to tell the world that Washington is strongly considering a nuclear attack against Iran. We should take the danger of this happening very seriously, and we must reckon with the apocalyptic harm that Zionism and imperialism have already inflicted on the region’s people during this war. The “worst-case scenario” has already come for all of the people in Lebanon, Gaza, and Iran who Washington has murdered in these last few weeks alone. But when we see these mass-scale atrocities and plans for nuclear holocaust, we need to recognize just how desperate of a mentality our enemies are now operating off of. This isn’t the posture of a confident empire, it’s how Washington is acting when Iran has just taken away its ability to gain submission. The Axis of Resistance has dismantled U.S. hard power in West Asia, to a degree where the foreign policy heads are now deeply wishing to re-create Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Whether they actually will do this is hard to predict. Telling from the history of when the imperialists have been faced with existential dilemmas, it is clear that they now have two paths forward: take the assault to a nuclear level, or pull back. And it would make the most strategic sense for them to retreat, though this would come with perilous costs for the stability of the capitalist system. It would be a repeat of the shift towards pacifism that the rulers of the imperialist powers undertook after the first world war, when the destabilizing nature of their war-making forced the system into perilous compromises.
Wrote Stalin in 1924 about why these compromises were so risky:
Would the bourgeoisie have undertaken this risky experiment with pacifism if it had not been compelled to do so; would it have done so of its own free will? Of course, not! This is the second time that the bourgeoisie is undertaking the experiment with pacifism since the end of the imperialist war. The first experiment was made immediately after the war, when it seemed that revolution was knocking at the door. The second experiment is being undertaken now, after Poincaré’s and Curzon’s risky experiments. Who would dare deny that imperialism will have to pay dearly for this swinging of the bourgeoisie from pacifism to rabid imperialism and back again, that this is pushing vast masses of workers out of their habitual philistine rut, that it is drawing the most backward sections of the proletariat into politics and is helping to revolutionise them?
Of course, “democratic pacifism” is not yet the Kerensky regime, for the Kerensky regime implies dual power, the collapse of bourgeois power and the coming into being of the foundations of proletarian power. But, there can scarcely be any doubt that pacifism signifies the immense awakening of the masses, the fact that the masses are being drawn into politics; that pacifism is shaking bourgeois rule and preparing the ground for revolutionary upheavals. And precisely for this reason pacifism is bound to lead not to the strengthening, but to the weakening of bourgeois rule, not to the postponement of the revolution for an indefinite period, but to its acceleration.
Our ruling class knows to switch up its cultural propaganda mode every couple of years, alternating between the “trad” type of brazen right-wing politics and “progressive” imperialist politics. It is now looking like the next maneuver will be to push “democratic socialism,” and switch from the Trump administration’s unapologetic fascist violence to “humanitarian” liberalism. The problem is that the empire can’t just go back to the Obama era, when the U.S. could destroy entire countries while domestic politics remained unaffected by these wars. Gaza has changed the way that an entire generation views foreign policy. What the U.S. ruling class faces is truly a new version of that whiplash which Stalin described, where the masses inevitably grow more radicalized by imperialist destruction and inconsistent rulership.
When the empire embraces the “progressive” image, this will not be something the bourgeoisie do of their own volition. It will be a reaction to the dangers that Trump 2.0’s brazen policy is creating for the imperial order. The point of Trump 2.0 was to fully take the mask off of imperialism, thereby letting our ruling class wage unrestrained war against both the Global South and the American workers. But this policy is not sustainable, because if the empire keeps attacking both of these populations, the system will collapse from within. And the history which Stalin discusses shows what the bourgeoisie do when they’ve just taken their provocations too far: pull back, and try to appease the masses within the imperialist countries through social-democratic reforms.
When we understand that this will be the next maneuver by our class enemies, we can effectively fight against their schemes, both in the long term and in the immediate battle. The Zionist right has already discredited itself, to the extent that the pendulum is beginning to swing away from the right and back towards the center. And the biggest ideological threat comes from the social fascists who seek to divert antiwar, class-conscious sentiments, not just from the left-leaning Americans but also the disillusioned MAGA supporters.
The Democratic Party’s pseudo-populist wing has started on a campaign to draw in a real mass base by appropriating certain parts of revolutionary rhetoric—and, crucially, by getting rid of the woke rhetoric that keeps one’s political brand confined to the left. The next strategy of the Democrats will not be wokeness, but rather the promotion of classic welfare capitalism, with the goal being to rebuild the labor aristocracy.
If our enemies were to successfully restore the labor aristocracy, this in itself would be a bad thing for the anti-imperialist cause, as it would create more Americans with a major material stake in imperialism. However, Stalin’s analysis shows that the road to this restoration will be fraught with dangers for the system. As he explains, the embrace of “pacifism” and social democracy is an indication of advancement in the revolutionary consciousness of the masses, which has forced the bourgeoisie to try appeasing the people. And for this stabilizing effort to work, the bourgeoisie will also need to end its imperial onslaught. Which is where our enemies are caught in an impossible dilemma, because for U.S. hegemony to be sustained, Washington will have to wage a long-term series of wars and proxy wars against China.
The social fascists will be tasked with this mission of intensifying imperialist warfare, at the same moment when pulling back is most important for the system’s internal survival. This contradiction will make the scheme fall, if we go hard enough in exposing and out-organizing the social fascists. Their strategy of warfare will be to activate a plan for unprecedented, catastrophically destructive color revolutions, designed to destabilize the Global South. We must not allow the ideology behind these color revolutions to go unchallenged. The next big task in the workers movement will be to struggle fiercely against the “humanitarian” regime change deceptions, showing them to represent the same evils that the Zionist right is advancing.
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