Workers’ Revolution can Stop World War 3!
The whole world is watching while events seem to be rushing towards world war like a bullet train. Revolutionary Marxists know that this is not the result of human error, or an ‘irrational’ imperialist policy, but the inevitable result of rival imperialist powers fighting to the death over repartitioning the world economy. It is important that the most militant leaders of the working class understand this truth so they can push aside all attempts by the reformist and nationalist left to compromise with the imperialist ruling classes to sthe betray the workers.
Only the independent arming of the world’s workers can derail the bullet train of imperialist war. So, the crisis of the world economy and the drive to war is in the final analysis the crisis of the leadership of the working class. We need a new international party of revolutionary Marxists to lead the fight to turn imperialist war into civil war – class war between the bourgeois ruling class and the proletariat.
Inter-imperialist war comes to a head when one side is declining and the other side is rising to take its place. The declining power has nothing to lose and so will use any means necessary to win. This explains why the US is provoking a world war with Russia and China as its growing rivals to take its place as the global hegemon. The wars against Ukraine, Palestine and China have resulted from US imperialism in its terminal decline. The decay and destruction of global capitalism is centred in the bourgeois leadership of the US ruling class, the ‘neo conservatives’ who know there is no future for their class short of winning a war. These warmongers claim that only the US can survive a nuclear war and continue to rule over the planet.
That is how the US terminal crisis becomes the world’s crisis, and ultimately the crisis of the revolutionary leadership of the world’s workers. The US provoked the war in Ukraine to break-up and defeat Russia, so as to weaken China, its main rival for global economic power. It has sold this war as a proxy war between Ukraine and Russia so that much of the left bought the lie that the role of US and NATO was merely supporting Ukraine to fight Russia to stop it invading the EU. Similarly, the US narrative on Taiwan is that communist China’s rise as the biggest producer of commodities is a political threat to ‘Western Values’. This plan backfired as Russia was always winning the war in Ukraine and forming a stronger alliance with China.
The US and NATO did not learn this lesson and are now beginning to engage in direct warfare with Russia, proving that the war was always an imperialist war between US and Russia over China. In the same vein the US neo-cons caught up in a presidential election are allowing Netanyahu to draw Iran into its genocide against Gaza though the Administration does not want a direct war with Iran, yet.
How do US workers organise to stop the US provoking a Third World War? In the period before the outbreak WW2 Trotsky stated that to turn the war into a class war, the workers had to be armed to overthrow the state. To succeed, the propaganda war against the ‘main enemy’ of fascism in Europe had to be rejected and the class enemy at home confronted as the main enemy. Today the situation makes it clear that the fascists are at home. US imperialism on its last legs proves that it will use fascism as the last resort to retain power. The US complicity in the 2014 fascist coup in Ukraine, its backing of Zionist Israel in its genocide of Gaza, and its use of any means necessary to win a war against China proves that the US ruling class is the main enemy.
Trotsky devised the Proletarian Military Policy to organise and arm workers in the unions, and conscripts in the military, on the basis of workers’ democracy. Workers would be prepared to defend themselves against the state in a civil war and be ready to overthrow it and build a workers’ Government. This policy failed at that time, as the Trotskyist leadership capitulated to the bosses’ call to fight fascism in Europe rather than the ruling class at home. This time the stakes are higher and the depth of the crisis is such that the proletariat has no choice but to fight for and win the socialist revolution, or face the destruction of humanity and civilisation in nuclear war.
