Rapacious wars over land and labor have marked the capitalist system since it replaced feudal rule. The drive to ever-deadlier world war is a permanent reality in the imperialist epoch, announced in the Spanish-American War in 1898. Today, the rivalry between Washington, weakened but still dominant, and its competitors is rapidly accelerating, destabilizing the imperialist “world order.”
Every new military conflict advances the imperialist rulers’ march toward a third world war, from Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine to Hamas’ Oct. 7 pogrom in Israel, to Washington’s invasion of Venezuela and its threats of further interventions elsewhere.
The U.S. rulers are driving to extend their control across the Western Hemisphere. And they are pushing to rebuild and expand U.S. industry to churn out the weapons of war they will need. Their world supremacy is based on ceaseless competition to dominate their rivals and preventing the development of revolutionary struggles that threaten capitalist rule. Washington is using its assaults on Venezuela to press forward its drive to overturn Cuba’s socialist revolution.
These conflicts show there is no “international law,” founded on virtuous principles that float above the class struggle to guide relations between rival powers. Each country is ruled by a capitalist class that is driven to compete or die under the dog-eat-dog laws of their exploitative social system. It’s the national class interests of the U.S. ruling families for markets, resources and labor to exploit that is the foundation of the march toward new wars, not which of the Democratic or Republican parties hold the White House.
Following Washington’s invasion of Venezuela, President Donald Trump made threats to take Greenland from the rulers of Denmark, one of its NATO “allies.” His administration calls for building a new “Golden Fleet” of battleships to defend U.S. imperialism in every corner of the globe.
The U.S. government is not “our” government. It advances the interests of the U.S. capitalist class, never those of working people. In contrast to capitalist rulers, working people seek to live in peace with fellow workers worldwide.
For years Washington acted on the illusion it had won the Cold War, believing it could use military power across the globe without facing any serious challenge. It more and more acts on the reality it lost the Cold War and confronts today a serious challenge from the rising economic and military clout of China’s state-capitalist rulers and their allies. Washington is moving to more directly confront its foes. It seeks to push Beijing back in Latin America, Africa and the Middle East, and to contain the Chinese rulers’ expansionist moves in the Pacific.
The rulers in Beijing, Moscow and Tehran are trying to counter Washington. They are part of the Beijing-led BRICS bloc that began joint naval exercises off the coast of South Africa Jan. 10.
With the imperialist war drive intensifying today, the stakes for the working class grow. Only by taking state power into our own hands can the working class prevent the indescribable horrors of another Holocaust and a calamitous third world war.
Preparation for the class battles that will make a socialist revolution possible takes place wherever working people resist the bosses’ attacks, extend solidarity to fellow workers, and speak out against Washington’s assaults against Venezuela, Cuba and elsewhere.
In the course of these fights, and in the deeper struggles that lie ahead, workers learn our interests are incompatible with those of the bosses and their parties. We must build a party of our own. A party that fights to unleash the immense power of the working class, the one class that has the capacity to transform society and build a new world free of war. To be part of that struggle, join the Socialist Workers Party.