From Washington’s war against Iran, to Beijing’s military expansion in the Pacific, Moscow’s war to conquer Ukraine, and squabbles over who will dominate Europe, the capitalist rulers worldwide are preparing for new wars to redivide the world for their profit and plunder at the expense of their rivals.
Each is driven by the fact that more wars, with horrific consequences in the nuclear era, are inevitable. They’re increasing war production and their armed forces, and developing ever-more deadly weapons.
The U.S. rulers emerged from World War II as the dominant imperialist power. They act more and more on the conviction that the world’s natural resources and the labor of working people everywhere are theirs to take. Cuba’s socialist revolution is a special target of their assaults today, because of the powerful example it sets to working people the world over.
Alongside these spreading conflicts, Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, pogrom announced plans, backed by Tehran, to advance the group’s longstanding threat of carrying out a new Holocaust.
The reality of the imperialist epoch we’re living in was first explained by Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin during the First World War.
“For the first time the world is completely divided up, so that in the future only redivision is possible, i.e., territory can only pass from one ‘owner’ to another,” Lenin wrote. “An essential feature of imperialism is the rivalry between several great powers in the striving for hegemony, i.e., for the conquest of territory, not so much directly for themselves as to weaken the adversary and undermine his hegemony.”
Imperialism has already bred two world wars, the Nazi Holocaust, the unleashing of nuclear destruction, and countless other atrocities. The rulers’ struggles to repartition the world under their subjugation, Lenin explained, inevitably provokes explosive struggles for national liberation and moves by working people in the advanced capitalist world to free ourselves from exploitation and oppression.
Just as inevitably, when sections of the ruling class think their dog-eat-dog system is producing a growing challenge by the working people they exploit, they turn to fascist thugs to unleash deadly assaults on oppressed nationalities, unionists and vanguard workers. The capitalists target Jews as a scapegoat for their own brutal rule, promoting pogroms like the Hitler regime did across Europe in World War II.
After the U.S. rulers dropped atom bombs on Japan, they declared they had won the war. “There Is No Peace!” was the banner headline on that week’s Militant. It contained a manifesto by the Socialist Workers Party’s National Committee saying, “Only World Socialism Can Save Mankind From Atomic Destruction in Another Imperialist War! Workers Of America! You Must Take Power Into Your Own Hands!”
The SWP acts on that course today. Join us in building the proletarian party and leadership that is needed to organize millions of workers to take power from the capitalist war makers, to make socialist revolutions in a growing number of countries worldwide. This is the only road to peace.