Cuba’s victory at Playa Girón registered the first great defeat of U.S. imperialism in the Americas. It will not be the last. That will occur right here.

--Jack Barnes, from Cuba and the Coming American Revolution

This statement, referring to how Cuban working people in 1961 defeated a U.S.-organized mercenary invasion of revolutionary Cuba, is the heart of what socialist workers and young socialists are campaigning for today.

As Washington moves toward a massive bombing assault and ground invasion of Iraq, it’s important to see the broader picture. The aim of the U.S. rulers is not simply to crush Iraq and impose a U.S.-dominated protectorate there, but to redivide the oil and other resources of the Middle East and around the world.

This is not because of the particular intentions of the current occupants of the White House and Congressional seats. The problem is the system itself--imperialism, a system built on the exploitation of workers and farmers at home and the subjugation of oppressed peoples throughout the world. The billionaire families who rule the United States and other imperialist nations are driven to conquer more markets, wealth, and sources of cheap labor around the world for the survival of their system. They confront each other in increasingly violent competition for these sources of wealth. This is why the war on Iraq is one of a series of imperialist wars that will continue to unfold for an extended period.

What fuels this drive to war is the long-term decline of the capitalist system, which has now accelerated, as seen in the bursting of the giant speculative bubble of the 1990s, the onset of a depression in the United States and the world, and the threat of a massive financial collapse.

The wars abroad are simply an extension of the U.S. rulers’ assaults on the wages, social gains, and rights of workers and farmers at home. A graphic illustration of this is how the White House has intervened in the West Coast dockworkers struggle, using the argument of "national security" to invoke the antilabor Taft-Hartley Act. But the U.S. rulers are also preparing for the working-class resistance their assault will generate. That is why the Clinton administration set up--and the Bush administration just activated--the North American Command, designed to carry out military operations inside the United States for the first time in more than a century. Its target is working people right here at home.

Any defeat of the U.S. imperialist rulers strengthens working people everywhere. In distinction to many radical currents today, communist workers are not "antiwar" advocates, or even simply "internationalists," but proletarian internationalists who favor the defeat of imperialism, including in its war on Iraq and the peoples of the Mideast.

This drive toward war and the spiraling world depression are signs of an imperialist system that is acting out of weakness, not strength. Understanding this fact weighs in the balance for workers who, by refusing to subordinate their struggles to the bosses’ demand for sacrifice in the "national interest," are also the biggest obstacle to the imperialists’ war aims abroad.

A socialist revolution in the United States is not only necessary but inevitable, because of the very functioning of capitalism and the conditions and class conflicts it generates. What is not inevitable is whether that revolution will succeed--that will depend on whether workers and farmers have forged a movement that can lead millions to take power out of the hands of the capitalist rulers. That is what the Socialist Workers campaigners are about--building the revolutionary movement that can bring down the world’s final empire.  
 
 
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