When the leaders speak of peace
The common folk know
That war is coming.
When the leaders curse war
The mobilization order is already written out.
-Bertolt Brecht, A German War Primer
Around the planet, the potential for global war among imperialists is escalating—and with it the threat of devastation for the international working class. At the moment, the Russian rulers loom as the U.S. bosses’ sharpest rivals. As Russia pursues an undeclared war with NATO ally Ukraine and moving nuclear-capable weapons near NATO borders, the Pentagon prepares to mobilize heavy weaponry and up to 5,000 troops in the Baltic states and former Eastern Bloc. Tensions between the two imperialist powers are higher than at any time since the Cold War. Seeking both battlefield superiority and game-changing alliances, they seem to be on a collision course.
Imperialist war is essential to capitalism. Rival capitalists must either expand their profit-making empires or fall to one of their rivals, a competition that creates constant instability and periodic crises. Each day, even during “peacetime,” this grow-or-die behavior devastates hundreds of millions of workers. It will end only when millions throughout the world join and help to lead a mass Progressive Labor Party, and to smash this racist, sexist, and imperialist profit system with armed communist revolution.
The Russians Are Coming
When Barack Obama nominated General Joe Dunford to be chairman of the Pentagon’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, it reflected the imperialist needs of the biggest U.S. capitalists. According to the Wall Street Journal (7/10/15), Dunford told Congress:
Russia poses the biggest threat to U.S. national security….Amid potential threats that include China, Islamic State, Iranian influence across the Middle East and other challenges...If you want to talk about a nation that could pose an existential threat to the United States, you’d have to point to Russia,” Gen. Dunford said….North Korea, China and Islamic State are what he ranks as the second, third and fourth among potential security challenges.
Dunford’s remarks echoed those made the same day by a leading bank for U.S. imperialism. As Business Insider reported (7/10/15):
The Russia-NATO confrontation is becoming one of the defining aspects of the global strategic landscape. And according to the head of Goldman Sachs’s Office of Global Security, the situation is going to remain tense — or even intensify. Robert Dannenberg, who is also a 24-year CIA veteran, believes that Russia is the top strategic threat from a U.S. perspective. “We are in an extraordinarily dangerous time right now because both Russia and NATO are starting to exercise substantial military activity in close proximity to each other.”
While military buildups by both sides in Europe are heavily publicized, it’s less well known that “U.S. Army Alaska troops…have been taking part in a massive training exercise stretching from Alaska to Australia. Training exercise Talisman Saber involves over 33,000 military personnel from three continents” (Alaska Public Media, 7/10/15). This U.S.-led rehearsal targets both Russia and China with “airborne operations…uncommon…since World War II…The goal is to be able to drop an instant fighting force on the other side of the world within 24 hours” (APM).
Courting India
While U.S. rulers are glad to have Australia as a coalition partner, their bigger wish is to count India and its billion-plus population as an ally. But the bosses of Russia and China may have a better offer for India’s bosses. BRICS, an anti-U.S. economic coalition of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, recently founded its own bank to challenge the U.S.-backed IMF and World Bank. As the imperialists in Russia court allies of their own, BRICS is also developing a military alliance.
India is set to become a full-fledged member of the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation (SCO), a Eurasian political and military alliance that includes China and most of Central Asia, Russian President Vladimir Putin said yesterday.
“Under your (Putin’s) leadership in BRICS, India has become a member of SCO. I am very grateful,” the [Indian] prime minister said (Gulf Times, 7/9/15).
Unite Soldiers, Workers, Students
Another challenge to the U.S. rulers’ global war schemes comes from within, and it is one that PLP members and friends can use to our advantage. While regular U.S. army troops rehearse a European invasion with large-scale tank exercises at Fort Riley, Kansas, U.S. Special Forces are practicing a counterinsurgency Operation “Jade Helm” at bases throughout the U.S. Southwest. Many workers in the Southwest furiously oppose Jade Helm as an attempt to impose Ferguson-style federal martial law. States like Texas, Virginia, Georgia, Idaho, and the Carolinas provide U.S. rulers with the bulk of their enlisted cannon fodder. Many of these soldiers are white workers temporarily under the influence of racism and false ideologies like libertarianism. These bad ideas obscure the real source of their suffering: capitalism.
There is more immediate opportunity, however, in the hundreds of thousands of GIs who reject the Obama/Bush/Clinton/Exxon/JP Morgan/Goldman agenda for imperialist war and fascist control at home. By focusing its organizing efforts on students, industrial workers and soldiers, PLP is the one force capable of uniting these GIs with U.S. workers in the South and Southwest who are frustrated by mass unemployment, and with working-class Black, Latin and immigrant class sisters and brothers who face intensifying racist terror.
All the elections in the world cannot settle the imperialists’ disputes. The wars to come will be more devastating than any the world has ever seen. World War I and World War II were both settled by revolutions led by communists. PLP is building an international mass movement of millions to finish the job and smash the capitalist profit system once and for all. Join us!