The devastation and chaos workers face in Ukraine as a result of the ongoing fight between pro-Russian forces and Ukranian troops reveal what the bosses have in store for the international working class. While the fighting is confined for the moment to eastern Ukraine, increasingly hostile rhetoric by both sides and their imperialist financiers, the U.S. and Russia, threatens armed combat throughout Eastern Europe and beyond. As Reuters reported:
More than 45,000 Russian troops as well as war planes and submarines started military exercises across much of the country on Monday [Mar. 16]...President Vladimir Putin called the Navy’s Northern Fleet to full combat readiness in exercises in Russia’s Arctic North apparently aimed at dwarfing military drills in neighboring Norway, a NATO member.
NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, is the pro-U.S. imperialist military bloc in Western Europe. Three days later, Russia announced it had “doubled the number of troops taking part in mass drills…to 80,000” (Agence France-Presse, 3/19/15).
The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) is the U.S. warmakers’ leading think tank. Representing the dominant finance capital wing of the U.S. ruling class, the CFR warned:
Russian armed forces are in the midst of a historic overhaul....Russian interventions in Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014–2015...demonstrate that President Vladimir Putin is prepared to use military might to reestablish Russian hegemony….[T]he Russian military budget has more than doubled over the last decade (3/20/15).
World Wars: Crucibles for Revolution
In short, the competition between U.S. and Russian capitalists — for resources, markets, and geopolitical strongholds — is escalating. Current tensions follow Vladimir Lenin’s 1917 analysis, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism. As Lenin explained, imperialist countries like the U.S., China and Russia are constantly re-dividing the world through war. (The U.S. rulers used Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor to enter World War II and fight their Japanese and German imperialist rivals. The bosses may use Ukraine as an excuse to launch wider wars.)
As bosses in both countries strive to both motivate the working class for a wider imperialist confrontation, discipline workers through increased racist unemployment and intensified racist terror. But Lenin also showed that the world capitalist system is temporarily weakened by imperialist war, giving the working class opportunities for revolution. World War I and World War II, history’s two global conflicts, both proved to be crucibles for revolutionary movements. Those great advances were later reversed, as both Russia and then China decayed into profit-based systems with a capitalist elite. But today the Progressive Labor Party is organizing in 27 countries to smash capitalism once and for all with communist revolution!
A Line in the Sand
In The Grand Chessboard (1997), war planner Zbigniew Brzezinski outlined U.S. imperialism’s need to conquer Central Asian countries like Afghanistan. Earlier, as national security advisor, he helped write the Carter Doctrine, which drew a line in the Middle East sand. This policy, backed by every U.S. president over the last 35 years, states that the U.S. will defend its oil interests in the Persian Gulf “by any means necessary, including military force.” On March 9, Brzezinski told the Center for Strategic and International Studies, another ruling-class think tank:
The Russian army today is ... three to four years from being ready for a sustained military campaign against a well-armed professional military, namely [the U.S.] This is strikingly similar to the situation in 1938-1939, when...Hitler decided to go after Czechoslovakia.
But if the bosses who control Russia decide they cannot wait to mass their ground troops, they have a quicker option: nuclear weapons. As ABC News reported (3/19/15):
Russia plans to station state-of-the art missiles ... and deploy nuclear-capable bombers ... amid bitter tensions with the West over Ukraine....The missiles, which are capable of hitting enemy targets up to 310 miles away with high precision, can be equipped with a nuclear or a conventional warhead. From Kaliningrad, they could reach several NATO member states.
It isn’t only Moscow hastening the outbreak of World War III [see box]:
A planned U.S. military exercise near Russia’s border...set to begin Saturday, will involve a convoy of 120 U.S. Army Strykers. Over ten days, the eight-wheel drive combat vehicles will stop in a different border area community each night to showcase the ability of U.S. forces to transport troops quickly, and to assure Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland of NATO’s commitment (Military.com, 3/20/15).
Turn World War Into Class War
Our class has no stake in this ruthless battle among bosses. Both Putin and Barack Obama fight their wars on behalf of the billionaire capitalists they serve. Both are ready to sacrifice the lives of millions of workers. Meanwhile, China continues to ramp up its military spending to project its power beyond Asia to Africa and Latin America, the “backyard” of U.S. imperialism since the 1820s.
The Progressive Labor Party is organizing a mass movement of millions of workers worldwide to upset the bosses’ plans for slaughter. We are waging anti-racist battles big and small on the job, on the campus and in the bosses’ militaries. Most of all, we are preparing to turn the next big war into class war for communist revolution. Join us!
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Imagining the Bosses’ Next War
On March 17, the Atlantic Council, a war-bent U.S. think tank, hosted a symposium called “How the Next Great War Begins.” Financed by such imperialist mainstays as Chevron, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Council focused on fictionalized predictions of how wars break out and play out. It awarded its top prize to “Coffee, Wi-Fi, and the Moon,” an essay that foresees “a combination of weaponized Wi-Fi, hackable body implants, and great power politics sparking the next Great War” after a U.S-engineered assassination of Vladimir Putin.
James Stavridis, the retired NATO supreme commander who led the bloodbath to rid Libya of Chinese and Russian oil firms, urged the assembly not to forget China. He plugged a forthcoming book, Ghost Fleet: A Novel of the Next World War. As described by Amazon:
The United States, China, and Russia eye each other across a twenty-first century version of the Cold War, which suddenly heats up at sea, on land, in the air, in outer space, and in cyberspace. The fighting involves everything from stealthy robotic–drone strikes to old warships from the navy’s “ghost fleet.”
“Ghost fleet” refers to the hundreds of warships and freighters the U.S. Navy is keeping mothballed for World War III. Ghost Fleet’s authors, August Cole and P.W. Singer, are no harmless dreamers. Cole runs Atlantic Council’s Art of Future War project, while Singer has cashed fat checks from the Pentagon, the FBI, and the Call of Duty video game. Like other gore-soaked games of its genre, Call of Duty features gratuitous, carnage with no connection to real places or the working people who live in those places.
The war novel-and-game industry is explicitly tied to the Pentagon and military contractors. They are designed to build support and help recruit willing killers for the U.S. ruling class.