Pacific workers: turn U.S. War on China into Class War!
US PREPARING NUCLEAR WAR IN ASIA/PACIFIC!
A hot war in the Asia Pacific will be nuclear war and the likely end of humanity. Why are China and the US preparing for such a war? Clearly the US sees China as an existential threat to its global hegemony and China recognizes that war with the US is a threat to its own existence as a new imperialist power. We can understand why this should be so when we see China’s phenomenally rapid growth since 2000. Yet the US cannot win an economic or nuclear war with China, and it is the US’ allies and the workers of the world that will pay the ultimate price for this war. The workers and farmers of the Asia Pacific must unite to prevent a nuclear war between US and China by fighting a global class war to smash rotten capitalism and create the conditions for socialist revolution!
Why the US targets China
China emerged from its 200 year colonial subservience to Western imperialism in 1949 by making a national revolution against its bourgeoisie and imperialist occupiers. But like Russia before it, short of a global socialist world revolution, it was stuck in the capitalist world economy and could not escape its isolation and stagnation. Yet against the triumphant refrain of ‘the end of history’, China restored capitalism and returned to the world market in 1992 without being re-colonised by Western imperialism. The one party bureaucratic state opened up to imperialism, but on its own terms – as a monopoly capitalist state regulating the economy. It was able to transfer Western technology while blocking Western finance capital gaining control of the economy.
In Marxist terms this was an unprecedented case of uneven and combined development. In the same period when the US economy began to destroy its productive forces in futile wars from Vietnam to Ukraine, China capitalized on its history as a bureaucratic state run economy allowing it to morph seamlessly into an advanced state capitalism while the rest of the world stagnated. It rapidly developing as an imperialist power and is now the largest industrialized world economy. China is now producing more value than the combined G7.
China, along with Russia, on a similar but slower trajectory, are both expanding at the expense of the Western powers in historic decline. They head the rapidly growing BRICS as a new trading and economic bloc that is already replacing the Western ‘rules based order’ destroying the forces of production. The US cannot compete for the finite resources to restore its productive capacity, its debt multiplying and its loss of value transfer from the rest of the world devaluing the $US. The US economy cannot produce enough value to compete with China’s ‘overproduction’ of value. It is forced to resort to the parasitism of economic and military wars to break up Russia and contain and defeat China.
Why the US will lose the War
The US openly states it will go to war with China by 2025.Yet this war is already in its early stages as both the US and China skirmish along the zone of contact from the Philippines through Taiwan and Okinawa (See Cover) to Japan. China does not need a war to win the economic race. It is expanding its sphere of influence through the growth of BRICS as more and more states decide to become members, including most recently, Turkiye.
Most ASEAN and Pacific states are already aligned with China as it easily out-performs the US in the region. China promises economic ‘win win’ deals while the US bullies its traditional allies to join its military alliances, using sanctions to lock them out of the BRICS, sacrificing their own economies and their security as nuclear targets. The workers and farmers sucked into the US military alliance will suffer major losses of jobs, living standards and as war escalates, their lives – like Ukraine’s workers and farmers fighting the proxy US war against Russia.
The US cannot win a nuclear war with China because its military capacity to contain China is inferior. It admits that its modern medium range missiles in the Philippines and Japan along with those on Taiwan, Okinawa and the ROK are insufficient to overcome China’s anti-missile systems. This deficiency should prevent any rational actor from making a pre-emptive nuclear strike on China but Neo-cons are not rational. A failed pre-emptive strike would mean that its forward bases in the Philippines, Taiwan, ROK and Japan will bear the full brunt of a China response.
Scott Ritter in his “Highway to Hell” discusses the new US nuclear deployment plan for the use of nuclear weapons. It was devised for the war with Russia where its missile stock is mainly earmarked for attacking Russia. Russia has also recently revised its nuclear doctrine to respond to any existential threat by lowering the threshold for its pre-emptive strike. Putin has stated that US backing of Ukraine’s plan to launch medium range missiles against strategic targets in Russia is crossing a red line that meets that new threshold for pre-emptive strike against Ukraine.
Similarly, facing any such existential threat, China faces the same decision. As a deterrent, China has built 360 silos for hypersonic missiles with 10 separate warheads in secret locations spread widely across the country. This means a US first strike cannot take out China. The US plan to speed up producing more warheads will trigger an arms race that threatens Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) and human nuclear extinction ahead of the climate catastrophe!
For a Socialist Australasia
Behind the zone of contact in the wider Asia Pacific the two imperialist rivals compete for allies against each other. The US is beefing up its post WW2 military alliances with Australia and NZ who today act as its political pawns in the Asia Pacific rather than declaring their neutrality in a war between US and China. The split in the EU as Germany and Spain rebel against the imposition of crippling tariffs on China EVs by the EU indicates that other Western imperialist powers do not want to destroy their struggling economies by sanctioning China. Why should the semi-colonial states in the Asia Pacific submit to such sanctions to save the US Empire?
It is in the interests of the workers and poor farmers of Australasia to join forces with those of the rest of the Asia Pacific to refuse to submit such crippling sanctions and tariffs, or die in nuclear wars between their imperialist oppressors.
What will it take for Australia and NZ to stop blindly following US imperialism into a world war as its pet poodles? They play a role as deputy sheriffs warning Pacific states abandon their ‘deals’ with China and enroll for nuclear Armageddon. We have to convince workers and poor farmers that under pro-US leaders, they like other client state of the US, Japan and the ROK, will sacrifice their jobs, and their lives, so that the US can destroy the economic productivity of their major trading partner, China.
In the event of nuclear war, Australia and NZ, and the majority of small Island states, will all face the same fate – destruction.
The possibility of Asia Pacific leaders breaking from US military policy and joining the BRICS may allow them to escape the immediate risks of participating in a US war. Their economies may benefit in the short term and avoid being targeted by China in the event of a war.
Nevertheless, China is an imperialist power which has to exploit workers to accumulate profits. It will not submit to its rival in the event of nuclear war. To avoid being caught up in the imperialist war we need workers and peasants in all of the neo-colonies to break from both imperialist states and their client regimes now!
For a mass party of labour with a transitional program to mobilize workers and peasants in the Asia Pacific!
For workers and Farmers councils! For self defence militias! Turn imperialist war into class war! Down with all imperialist powers and their national bourgeois and labour bureaucratic agents and proxies!
Australia and New Zealand must complete their national revolutions as socialist republics within a Pacific Federation of Socialist Republics from Kanaky to Hawaii!
