On July 27-28 the IWG held its first AGM. The meeting was a great achievement with most of the affiliate attending in person or tuning in elsewhere. The meeting served as a major milestone in the development for the ICT’s US affiliate serving as an example of its organizational capabilities.

Imperialism

Modern imperialism was brought on by the concentration of capital and the development of a world capitalist economy. During capitalism's ascendency after each accumulation cycle ended there would be capital devaluations through bankruptcies, restructuring, rationalizations or writing off capital values. The effect this had would also include cheapening productive capital, thus allowing for the most dominant firms to further consolidate into monopolies.

Each successive accumulation cycle would last ten years and earlier in the 19th century they weren't concurrent due to the world economy being more disjointed. Eventually this led to each successive accumulation cycle beginning with a greater organic capital composition (ratio of constant capital to variable capital, the source of surplus value). The capitalist system would require a greater rate of exploitation to valorize the existing mass of capital in order for the system to properly function.

Eventually this leads to capitalism's basic economic mechanisms, i.e. the boom- bust- cycles ceasing to function as a regulator of the economy, instead it would plunge the system into growing disorder. Capitalism’s growing requirements ensured the capitalist system would be plunged into a permanent crisis marking capitalism’s decadence.

Imperialism is the outward expression of the breakdown of capitalism's economic mechanism. It's not an option of policy made by states rather it's how states are forced to relate towards each other under the conditions of capitalist decadence. While state capitalism is the super structural expression of decadence. State capitalism is the state assuming a greater role to do what capitalists will not or can't because the economic mechanism doesn’t incentivize them to do.

Competition: From Between Individual Capitalist,To Between States

During the later half of the 19th century the concentration of capital into monopolies would also be fully achieved by capitalistically backwards states (such as the German, Japanese, Austro- Hungarian,Russian empires, the Kingdom of Italy, etc) through predominately political means by using state measures to concentrate capital, or not directly competing on the free market but by erecting barriers on free trade and relying more on military and diplomatic means to compete.

In conditions of permanent crisis this is a sharper form of competition in the arena of international Imperialism and the more established, oftentimes more democratic states would follow the lead throughout both periods of generalized imperialist wars. This was despite the declared support for free market capitalism by democracies as well, there was no going back as seen with the attempts to liberalize and restore civil society after each world war.

Throughout the late 19th century until the first world war the capitalists system was mired in the long depression. Financial capital was now predominant over productive capital and the state had to increase its role in controlling the contradictions in capitalist society.The state would begin attempting to mitigate capitalism's own insoluble contradictions from eroding the system and stabilizing conditions during depression to prevent the total breakdown of social cohesion.

The state would take a role in modernizing less productive spheres of industry and preparing zthe country for total war. The British Coal Mine Act was a great example of this in a democratic country. Ownership of the stagnant coal industry moved from monopolies to a state managed board which oversaw ancillary industries involved in mining. The state would heavily rationalize the industry and pay the former owners in state bonds. This also serves as a way to redistribute surplus- profits into the state finances in order to prevent earlier investments from crashing.

Competition had shifted from individual capitalist monopolies to states contending for their own continued viability in the conditions of deep crisis. The state's life blood is taxable fiscal income and the state has to play a prominent role in promoting their nation's social capital. States take an active role in securing future profits and forming alliances to ensure their leading industries continue to profit. The state will pursue various national solutions at the expense of other nations' social capital and the international proletariat.

The expediants used were insulating leading industries from market fluctuations through tariffs, interest rates, strategic devaluations, bailouts and aggressive mercantile policies to stimulate industrial activity or securing new sources of raw materials. While all Imperialist states will try to deny others from enjoying these advantages on the Imperialist arena, this can include geostrategic conflicts that have no clear advantages at first but hold great importance for ensuring future profits, such as the Russo- Ukrainian conflict. Russia’s main consideration in the war above all others is ensuring NATO’s ring around it isn't closed in Eastern Europe.

In times of capitalist prosperity the capitalists are able to share profits, while in times of crisis they desperately seek to offload their losses onto their competitors; this is mirrored at the geopolitical scale in imperialism. It must be noted that nearly a century ago before WW2 the British Empire reached its zenith. During the great depression, the accelerated decline of trade and the move towards autarky the gold in London city had a lower competitive edge than the four year plans or the blitzkrieg in handling the multiplying crises.

So long as things go well, competition effects an operating fraternity of the capitalist class, as we have seen in the case of the equalisation of the general rate of profit, so that each shares in the common loot in proportion to the size of his respective investment. But as soon as it no longer is a question of sharing profits, but of sharing losses, everyone tries to reduce his own share to a minimum and to shove it off upon another. The class, as such, must inevitably lose. How much the individual capitalist must bear of the loss, i.e., to what extent he must share in it at all, is decided by strength and cunning, and competition then becomes a fight among hostile brothers. The antagonism between each individual capitalist's interests and those of the capitalist class as a whole, then comes to the surface, just as previously the identity of these interests operated in practice through competition.

In the Russo - Ukrainian war, Russia and the consolidating US dominated western imperialist bloc, sees this as a defensive war of great magnitude. Russia sees a post Euro- Maiden Ukraine’s refusal to demilitarize and Zelensky’s closer relations with president Biden’s administration as a further act of aggression by NATO on its doorstep. Also as an encroachment into what's viewed as Russia’s sphere of interest, Ukraine and Belarus are of utmost geostrategic importance for Russia’s defense against NATO. Zelensky’s administration had received $4 billion in military aid packages in the immediate lead up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

During the 2024 Munich Security Conference it was however made clear to the consolidating western imperialist bloc that China is the main threat. While Russia must be boxed in or bled dry to help further neutralize China which poses the greatest threat to US imperialism’s main weapon, its financial dominance.

This informs why military and financial aid keeps getting poured into Ukraine despite growing opposition in most western countries and in the EU. The US has also been able to redirect the Imperialist interest of EU members of NATO near exclusively towards its own interest. These states now contribute 3% of their GDP towards NATO contributions and have become more reliant on the US for their energy requirements, at a much greater cost plunging the European economy while boosting the USD.

The Ukrainian state was also able to restructure its military and potentially threaten Russian gains in the Donetsk and Crimea peninsula. Russia has also been managing for nearly 8 years a refugee crisis of substantial magnitude where millions of Russian speaking Ukrainians had already fled due to the separatist crisis. The crisis was caused by Ukrainian ultra nationalist policies after Euro Maiden while the Russian separatist were egged on by Russian imperialism to keep the Ukrainian government entangled. Presidents Putin and Zelensky had both refused arbitration in the lead up to the conflict and accused each other of being dictators or western proxies all while appealing to ultra- nationalism to anoint the up eventual bloodbath in the lead up to February, 2022.

Imperialist Wars are Total Wars No One Is Safe !

With the onset of the imperialist epoch traditional diplomacy and statecraft were thrown out the window, including the 1907 Hague convention. Before wars had a relatively minimal impact on civilians and the economy. Generalized war aims to destroy the national economy, infrastructure, the civilian populations of enemies and to coerce neutral states to join an imperialist bloc. The objectives to destroy rival imperialism’s abilities to wage war are as important to the battles on the front lines.

Based on the precedent for traditional diplomacy, wars would be pitched battles between a state's military followed by a settled peace. There's no such thing in generalized war when the focus is shifted to completely annihilating the rival imperialist bloc.

During WW1 allied supreme commander Foch, was asked by the German delegation in November, 1918 what the conditions for surrender were. Foch replied that there weren't any and demanded Germany’s total, unconditional, surrender. Germany had no delegations at the treaty of Versailles negotiations and former central powers would be under economic sanctions and naval blockades until 1919 further exacerbating the civilian death toll. In 1918, 400, 000 had already died of malnutrition and related diseases and 120,000 more from Spanish Flu. This would lead to strike waves from Hamburg Germany to Vienna across the central powers bloc causing the states to seek an armistice to put down the German revolution, move demobilizing soldiers away from France preventing fraternizing, continue to fight on the Eastern front against the Bolsheviks to ensure their isolation and against the Hungarian revolution. The second world war would confirm this again when the Big Three, Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill continued prosecuting the war until the bitter end demanding complete and unconditional surrender.

In the lead up to imperialist wars the state is greatly empowered to eliminate any working - class resistance. Workers become incorporated into the state’s war mobilization. This includes producing war material in lieu of consumer goods and conscription. This was done either through democratic means if possible such as the unions being transformed into state offices, all major parties forming popular front governments or a government of national unity, etc. On the other hand there was what could be qualified as fascistic, corporatist, conservative corporatist/ synarchist states, or the USSR’s socialism which became the most complete of any all state regimes. In the latter examples all workers' resistance was preemptively crushed by the state which was either monopolized by a party movement or the state itself in examples of self-coup d'état’s. These state's tended to be in constant crisis and experienced a much greater amount of class activity and responses towards deteriorating conditions.

The fascist states were revanchists as they sought to revise the makeup of the world imperialist arena more in their favor. Their ideological justifications came from redressing treaties which forced them to concede their territorial integrity and pay harsh reparations. These were overall attempts to prevent them from threatening the Imperialists that were satisfied with the new order. Many axis states were also left out of the winners circle such as Italy and Japan.

In an Imperialist war both the current order and revisionist bloc view the war as a defensive one for their own continued viability. The revisionists see their capitalist opportunities limited and are oftentimes on the back foot, weaker and poorer states who attempted with increasingly autarkic economic policies to break out of the grips of the most dominant imperialist.

They have less tools in their repertoire and must rely on militarism to break out. While the states in favor of the current order will rearm for defense only and - some, but all factions are ideologically in a great defensive struggle for their own continued viability. All are in an offensive struggle too the oftentimes democratic states need to box in their revisionist counterparts to ensure their nations social capital more opportunities for future profits, also they'll ensure greater future benefits from being winners by annexing economically or geostrategically valuable territories and demanding the vanquished imperialist to demilitarize.

The allied imperialist bloc also had an interest in profiting, the USA took many strategic ports from the UK and implemented the domination of the USD at the Bretton Woods agreement. The USSR partitioned Poland, became the military protectorates of the Baltic states before their eventual annexation, Finland had land annexed for security and was barred from most post war alliances and created the eastern bloc (non convertible currencies)and Warsaw pact security sphere. The UK wanted to maintain its influence over all of Europe and used the struggle for democracy against Nazi illegalism as their rationale. France wanted to regain its influence lost to Germany in the little entente and Austria, while forcing a greater national revenge on Germany.

Even more minor states such as Poland that are considered the victims of Nazi and Soviet imperialism were becoming aggressors, under the guise of national defense. Emboldened by the Munich agreement and egged on by British and French diplomacy Poland would annex land during the partitioning of Czechoslovakia, force an ultimatum on Lithuania to reopen diplomatic and economic relations and try to prevent Germany from accessing the free city of Danzig.

When the imperialist epoch was ushered in it was France which would be qualified as a revanchist state. They sought to redress the Treaty of Frankfurt closing the Franco - Prussian war. French politics from the period into the end of WW2 was heavily focused on national revenge.

WW2 was quantitatively deadlier in military and civilian casualties and the destruction of economic infrastructure. It was made possible by technological advances and the imperialist objectives dictating the complete destruction of the revisionist, axis bloc. 70-85 million died directly from the war, or war - related disease and famine. Two thirds of the casualties were civilians, imperialist wars showed that the entire nation was at war including the variable capital (workers) mobilized for conscription or pauperized in war production and destruction. There was nowhere to flee for safety neutral states were coerced into joining a bloc, producing commodities for the war for a bloc or maintaining a mobilized military and ramping up war production in lieu of consumer goods for workers and heavily repressing workers responses such as in neutral Turkey during WW2, or Egypt which had to support the allied defense of the Western desert placing most of its economic infrastructure at the allies disposal.

The western democracies would turn away Jewish, political and ethnic refugees fleeing Germany and the Nazi advances in order to further strain the axis’s capacity to persecute their deadly adventurism, this would also be used as justifications during the Wannsee conference for the final solution in 1942. The democratic countries became corporatist, even fascistic, incorporating workers and stripping the most basic basic liberties granted to workers in the past for their support. Allied internment and population evacuations were anointed as a defense against fascism. Populations were indicted for their ethnicity as seen with the allied interments of German, Italian and Japanese citizens or Russia moving Chechens further into central Asia.

Overall showing the generalized nature of the war the democratic state took on most expressions of fascism. The differences between the US’s armament program, Germany’s four year plan and Reichwerk and the USSR’s five year plans were quantitative and were all for Imperialist war.

All diplomatic overtures before the Russian invasion of Ukraine and for a cease fire have been in vain. They've shown there will be no such diplomatic settlement in modern imperialism. Similarly can be seen in all major conflict zones across the world right now. Both Russia and Ukraine have refused to adhere to the Minsk and Minsk II accords and have accused each other of doing the same. Similarly with all the failed diplomacy in bringing an end to the slaughter in Gaza.

In Ethiopia despite the peace agreement to end the Tigray war it appears the conditions aren't being respected by the federal state. It has greatly empowered ultra- nationalist factions of politicians that have protracted the internal conflict zones where the federal state and rebels are being backed by one or another imperialist. Or the Nagorno- Karabakh war, Armenia has found its traditional allies in the region unable to decisively intervene due to their own crises. The Armenian ultra- nationalist politicians have refused to negotiate with Azerbaijan over the disputed territory. Greece and France have been supplying some military aid and diplomatic lobbying for Armenia in opposition to Turkey which will be the main beneficiary of Azerbaijan’s offenses.

The Sudanese War which has produced the largest current humanitarian crisis by the numbers of people affected by displacement and famine wasn't curtailed by the Jebah accords. Alliances with regional powers have been constantly shifting as none see a clear interest in the armed forces or the Rapid Support Force militias.

Neither is Houthi’s missile attacks on ships flagged by Israeli or western states coming to an end anytime soon. It's currently the largest naval operation since WW2, serving as a massive flashpoint and is bigger than subduing the Houthi movement. Rather the US and EU allied bloc is interested in countering Russian, Iranian and Chinese intrigue in the red sea. The Russian,Iranian and the Chinese Navies have been patrolling the red sea to protect their established oil interest and keeping the lanes open for themselves. The Houthi haven't attacked their ships. The situation has gotten so hot that the USA had offered the Houthi movement to drop sanctions and grant recognition in exchange for ceasing attacks in a bid to not overcommit in the region.

Lastly through the Sahel and Sub- Saharan Africa you've had what's been coined as the “Coup d'état Belt” which is fueled by sanctions placed on Russia and Iran. The military factions of capitalist in these states control lucrative black market gold and mining rings. This has been a great geostrategic setback for France especially as many are in the CFA sphere. The AES states are proposing a gold currency which goes up against the regional power ECOWAS.

This Isn't Another Cold War

After World War Two the world was divided by two unequal super powers. The USA and USSR, this is in contrast to before the war and the multiple great powers constantly switching which alliance suits their own interest best. Many will attempt to bring up the potential for nuclear war, the many national liberation wars, the perennial wars in the Middle East, North Africa and south Asia and lastly the massive build up of arms in this period to obstruct this significance.

Both the USA and USSR were generally satisfied super powers neither were revanchists. During the war through the mass destruction and devaluation of capital, over exploiting resources and slaughter of workers opened a nearly 25 year accumulation cycle that lasted into the 1970s. The bourgeoisie understand the great deal of crises war can bring and still prefer many other expediencies to handle the reemergence of the crisis of profitability, the bourgeoisie have been able to manage deepening crisis for up to 50 + years, now it's becoming increasingly palliative measures.

The USSR would support proxies to keep the USA out of its sphere of influence while the USA would do similar to stop the spread of what was dubbed communism, but the economy was really just state-capitalism heavily based on armament. This was also the case for post colonial states struggling for their viability across Asia, Africa and the America's no matter which bloc they joined. They all had massive waste production expenditures in order to elbow out other regional contenders in the world market through creating a strong state then more unified markets. Many of these states would also become creditors the most dominant states as debtors. In order to ensure their earlier investments and because of the higher profits in the capitalist heartlands profits found their way back to the most developed states. Waste expenditures, reliance on rents from state industries and constant failures to modernize would cause many of these wars from the Arab - Israeli wars, Indo - Pakistani, the intrigues of the Arab Cold war (mainly divided between support for the USA or USSR and pan - Arabism) and the Iran - Saudi Arabian proxy wars. Many states that developed out of dominions or a monocultural colony were sort of an inversion of capitalism in its ascendency.

After world war two with Bretton Wood,the Marshall Plan and the post war reconstruction bank the USD was able to enjoy to this very day an unprecedented position in world imperialism as the de- facto sole reserve currency. This was much greater in scale than predecessors such as the UK’s imperial preference when all dominions had to hold reserves of the British Pound.

The USD was able to maintain a rake on international financial capital through this since the vast majority (nearly 80%) of all international transactions are done with the USD. This ensures public and private financial institutions in the USA have steady flows of capital. The USSR and other states under a similar productivist state- capitalist model had to erect barriers against the USD. The iron curtain was just currency that didn't have an exchange rate with the USD. This includes agreements to sell strategic commodities such as oil in USD exclusively; this is to further set back China behind the imperialist considerations of the USA.

Nuclear weapons weren't the only reason why the two superpowers never had a direct confrontation. There was for one other expediencies used to offset falling profits besides war after the post war accumulation cycle ended. It was also calculated by the KGB that the USSR couldn't keep up the war for arms production. The USSR had already spent 25% of its GDP on arms while the US spent 7% of its GDP on arms. Imperialist peace is still costly as neither wanted to revise the world capitalist order.

This would eventually lead to the collapse of the USSR when there were attempts to restructure their capital towards more higher profit industries for future arms production. Nuclear weapons are just one of another red line measures every bloc in WW2 had gas and nerve agents but only used them when the other army couldn't retaliate. Firebombing in Dresden, Kyoto and Tokyo killed nearly as many people as the nuclear blast in Nagasaki and Hiroshima. The doctrine for targeting became that there is no such thing as a non belligerent civilian. As seen too with the bombing campaign in the UK by Germany or on all economic infrastructure throughout the revisionist bloc and unrestricted usage of submarine warfare in the oceans against cargo ships.

We're not entering an economic boom after devaluing a massive amount of capital values. In order to offset the decline in the rate of profit, states attempted to liberalize their economies to stimulate investments in higher profit industries and not decrease the rate of profit anymore. The most successful measures have been the deregulation of finance and shipping low profit basic industries to Asia and Latin America along with other expedients such as just in time inventory management to scrape up pennies on shipping.

Interest rates have been used to attempt to stimulate investments into productive capital in order to employ workers and generate taxable fiscal income. But this has only further stimulated speculation on securities as seen through the 90s-2000s culminating in the 2007- 2008 subprime mortgage crisis. Lower rates became the main expedient used to mitigate the crisis through increased speculation and investments into US financial institutions, the financial sector was bailed out by states and austerity measures were enacted to refinance the state credit systems. Public debts ballooned and so did speculation placing massive amounts of pressure on the world capitalist system before even covid- 19 and the war in Ukraine; which have themselves caused inflationary pressure.

The Economic Offense & Consolidating Blocs

There's no longer blocs headed by super powers rather blocs of ever shifting alliances as seen in the period between 1879-1945. The USSR bloc was already finished when the Warsaw pact and Comecon collapsed. It became a clear fact in 1988-1991 and finally with the USSR dissolving. Then in 1992 -4 with there being no new union of states treaty and the ruble bloc collapsed.

There was also however an unintended consequence with the rise of China as the main contending imperialist power due to massive investments into China to offset falling purchasing power in the west. The USA remains the most economically, financially and the militarily dominant imperialist state. After the collapse of the USSR in 1991 the US remained the sole superpower and has expected every state to curtail their interest and act unilaterally behind its sole interest.

This has begun to be undermined mainly by the growing influence of the Chinese Yuan, through its massive economic projects such as the Belt and Road initiative and the growth of it in transactions with Russia due to sanctions. The failed adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq have also undermined American unilateralism and has increasingly made it off-centered, along with the US's great economic and diplomatic support for the increasingly unpopular slaughter in Gaza.

When Israel is now making the fronts more protracted into potentially Lebanon and Syria. As seen with Austro- Hungarian adventures in the Balkans after the Young Turks Revolution in 1907 sometimes the tail can wag the dog. Now China is meditating on relations in the middle east between the Fatah and Hamas to form a Palestinian Authority government for reconciliation. The US is losing its diplomatic leverage in the region, the Beijing declaration goes against the positions held by the US, that Hamas can't have a place in the Palestinian Authority anymore. More recently Israel has assassinated the leaders of Hamas and a revolutionary guard corp member in Iran ! Not to litigate the many militia leaders assassinated in Bierut, Syria or Iraq but Israel’s ruling cliques are heading for a regional war.

Sanctions remain the US’s most pointed weapon. Secretary Mulder views them as a way to prevent war but they will be the most decisive factor in creating a bloc of states that are heavily sanctioned such as Russia and Iran with China, but also states such as North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela or even states fearing sanctions such as Turkey, UAE, India, etc.

India may seem surprising due to their known hostilities with China. But India has been sanctioned for decades for nuclear weapons testing, occupation of Kashmir, US diplomatic preference for Pakistan, economic relations with Iran and Russia and is frustrated by the one-sidedness of defense and intelligence alliances with the USA such as QUAD which has seen US naval patrols in India’s exclusive operation zones. There's already been a massive growth in trade between Russia and China in exclusively Yuan valued at $240 billion.

Worldwide there's sanctions and the fear of having USD accounts frozen as seen with Afghanistan’s Taliban government having $11 billion in frozen assets that could've been used for food, fuel and medicine. This coal bunker imperialism has also promoted states to hedge their reserves in gold as seen with the UAE, Myanmar and Turkey and even crypto currency due to sanctions and the high valuations of the USD which makes various state’s fiscal policies increasingly untenable.

Sanctions have pushed these states closer together in what could be considered blocs until 2006 Russia supported the sanctions on Iran, China would enforce banking sanctions on North Korea, Venezuela was for the most part a US ally in great part due to the sheer influence of the USA in the Americas over the past 200 years. Sanctioning has shown to decouple the US with even its former allies and create more states weary of ending up sanctioned.

Economic sanctions were in fact predictions for the complete outbreak of world war two; it would give the revisionist bloc further ideological justifications for their Imperialist adventures. Sanctions were never an alternative to a generalized war. Germany and Japan would learn lessons from the first world war, both states would attempt policies of autarky despite their futility. The 1936 Nazi four year plan would be for the purpose of future war no differently than the US sanctions placed on Japan in 1941 due to Japan pursuing an Imperialist project on much of mainland China and overrunning much of China in 1937. The USSR’s five year plans and the Nazi four year plans made them from time to time common allies and the two's relationship would grow from these corporatist economics policies through the Molotov Ribbentrop Pact.

The sanctions affected Japan’s oil imports which were a threat to the Greater East Asia Co- Prosperity Sphere. The Dutch east indies had massive oil reserves and the Netherlands were already under Nazi occupation leaving a struggling overseas administration garrisoning Indonesia and on top of that nationalist stirrings. Japan however knew they had to be able to decisively knock the USA out and the UK to gain control over the seas for that to be achievable. This led to the coordinated Malay peninsula campaign and the assault on the Pacific fleet in Pearl harbor in December 1941.

Japan’s offensive capabilities would be crushed only six months later after the battle of Midway, the coral sea campaign around Australia and the Solomon islands campaign. Similarly the axis’s operation Barbosa would be a massive strategic failure and they'd have astronomical casualties without destroying the USSR’s ability to continue the war, Moscow wasn't taken and summer offenses took them thousands of miles deeper into Russia to the strategic oil center Stalingrad where the axis were defeated. Most co- belligerents had their entire armies decimated such as the Kingdom of Hungary, Romania, Tsardom of Bulgaria and Slovakia. The balance of force was on the allies side by then with the USA having the entire western hemisphere on lockdown through expanding its military to keep every state in the America’s on the allies side. This is despite the fact that many states such as Argentina, Chile, etc would have been able to benefit from the Nazi and Japanese barter system. Africa was also under free France and Belgium’s free Congo, north Africa and the middle east were utter axis failures. The axis were completely militarily on the backfoot in Europe and Asia and could only muster the occasional counter to the allies' offenses.

A trade offensive is also a part of an Imperialist war in order to counter a deep crisis. States begin to go beyond intervening into the economy and will induce economic activity attempting to achieve full utilization of productive capital and employment. But this becomes clear preparations for the upcoming war, it can go beyond direct munitions production and can be used to deny rival states resources as seen in the struggle over Latin America where the USA would buy all strategic raw material at any quantity. Or to deny markets and forge diplomatic and potential military alliances such as Japan and Germany’s trade offense into the same region and Africa as a part of the barter system. The axis and these peripheral states lacked foreign exchange for importing raw material on one hand and machinery on the other. Today this is best seen with the Belt and Road initiative with China and accusations by the USA that China is dumping strategic green energy commodities. They use the same justifications that it's a necessity for their nation, who's on the back foot. Workers need employment and the periphery needs these products so it's a just cause ! Similarly with the expansion of oil, energy and graphic chip production by the USA to counter Russian and Chinese authoritarianism !

The Rifts Between Imperialist Are Growing

The USA has done nicely in all major conflict zones for example not a single US soldier has been lost in Ukraine. Though the war has cost the USA financially it's on the other hand ended any chance for the EU or UK from kicking out from the USA. Their dependency on NATO has grown exponentially and for US energy. Each EU state has been implementing one sanction after another on Russia and has been made to follow the US’s sanctions on Iran. NATO has also been able to expand into Sweden and Finland since the war began.

Europe isn't the only area where dominance is contested; there's also the Indian and Pacific oceans. Security alliances in the Pacific between the USA, Philippines, Japan and Australia have been cooperating with NATO in Germany. The USA has also formed between itself, the UK and Australia the AUKUS defense pact. The global economy is becoming more regionalized and the global links that inhibited war are dwindling.

China, Russia,Iran and to a lesser extent North Korea are the revanchists who see themselves boxed in and denied the same capitalist opportunities as their western counterparts. For Russia this has been made crystal clear and has long shown that it's been in retreat since 1991 when it lost control over its satellite states and its ruble bloc. All while NATO states, missiles and military bases have been on Russian borders for thirty years. Putin openly declared that the dissolution of the USSR was the greatest geopolitical disaster in the last century. This posturing has allowed western Imperialists to anoint Zelensky’s government as a bastion of democracy despite outlawing opposition, mass conscription and suspension of all basic democratic rights. While Russia has always portrayed themselves on the backfoot and declared this as a great patriotic war a relic of Stalinism in WW2. It animated his capitalist and Orthodox allies' support for the war and used it to crush any resistance to his regime of exception based on war production and conscription.

Chinese imperialism has been mainly based on its economic strength and what would be considered soft imperialism. The Hokuo system allowed for there to be a second class of workers in special economic zones. Also the strategic willingness to degrade the environment and workers living standards, along with aggressive rationalizations and restructuring made China a much more competitive contender than the USSR.

China and the USA are on near equal footing economically and by 2049 it's projected that China will be the undisputed imperialist power. China has more to lose and has a real chance to contend against the USA and enforce its domination across the world through a military, economic and financial offense with the Belt and Road initiative. Chinese imperialism is itself crisis ridden and has as much control as any other Imperialist state over the march towards war. Hostilities aren't hidden either between the USA and China when Secretary Bliken has stated not on my watch pertaining to China's projected dominance. Blocs such as AUKUS and QUAD were created to box China in the Pacific leading to the potential confrontation in the future.

Worker’s Response

The multiple wars going on such as that in Ukraine,Gaza or Sudan to name a few are horrifying. The wars are products of a decadent social system, capitalism has always been exploitative where the working class is alienated from social production by the capitalist class. Capitalist competition has long been transformed into a struggle between states to ensure their survival, at the expense of workers globally. Worker's fighting for their country is just that, fighting for the propertied class who owns it. Workers are forced to endure the conditions of war and be mobilized for war to ensure the continued survival of a system they have no interest in.

Nationalism is the ideology of the bourgeois revolution which created modern capitalism free from past trappings that limited it to merchant and usury forms of capitalism. Nationalism created a citizenry with a national ideology that makes workers believe that they share a homogeneous interest no matter their class. In peace workers are wage laborers who can barely reproduce their own existence, in war workers are kidnapped by impressment gangs to get butchered on the front lines or are collateral damage in bombing raids.

Workers and workers organizations have resisted against world wars in the past. In 1915 the Russian, Serbian, Bulgarian and Polish parties reprised that the only war worth fighting was the class war against capitalism. The British socialist Percy Goldsborough was imprisoned for refusing to support the war and wrote that much on his prison cell wall during WW1.

In 1917 the revolutionary wave was sparked in Russia before spreading in Germany and around the world, bringing the first world war to an end. It forced a tearse alliance with former entente and central powers to crush the communist revolution. The internationalist message was reprised again by the ICT’s ancestors the PCInt during a strike wave in the middle of the Italian civil war. The PCInt was the only party formed during the strike waves against world war two which called for revolutionary defeatism in both the allied and axis Imperialist blocs.

Workers faced immense challenges defending themselves against capitalism’s assaults before the wars. The class has been in near full retreat for forty years, firms have been further rationalized leading to outsourcing, unemployment and fragmentation of productive units. Workers conditions are far more precarious and many are semi unemployed in the gig economy which offers workers no rest or security. We're in a current period of relatively low class activity, and thus class consciousness, where there's very few situations for workers to develop even class identity.

It's important to consistently expose the capitalist left including many anarchists who support this or that Imperialist camp. It's usually for sentimental reasons such as the high death toll, authoritarianism,for democracy or against conscription. But they lack a proper analysis of capitalism and can't see this is a direct outcome of capitalism’s imperialism and that it's not the whim of politicians. The working class can't be strengthened through supporting one imperialist camp against another; this takes workers off of their own terrain and further excludes the development of class consciousness. The class struggle continues in war time. The only way for wars to end is for capitalism to be dead and buried by the only social force capable, which is the working class.