The anti-imperialist cause’s victory will require giving up illusions of “peace” with the aggressors
Above: graffiti in Tula says “we do not abandon our own,” referencing Russia’s war to rescue the Donbass
Among those who are connected to the globe’s popular revolutionary struggles, Russia’s Operation Z has provided much hope and inspiration. It’s fueled the Sahel’s revolution against neo-colonialism, it’s helped encourage the Palestinian resistance to carry out Operation Al Aqsa Flood, and it’s likely contributed to Iran’s recent acts of boldness in retaliating against the Zionist occupier. As part of this chain reaction effect, Iran’s successes in fighting the imperial hegemon will no doubt have their own global impact, and give more confidence to the world’s anti-imperialist forces.
These developments have shown that the empire is no longer as strong as it once was, and that it was never as strong as it appeared; Vietnam’s victory exposed the hegemon’s weaknesses over fifty years ago, but now these weaknesses are being revealed in a way that’s more frequent and repeated. As the momentum from this revolt continues, though, there is a reality that’s extremely important for us to keep in mind: any wins our cause experiences will come from bottom-up revolutionary struggle, and that struggle will entail real sacrifices. Sacrifices that we cannot afford to overlook, and that we’ll be confronted with during the most crucial moments in this conflict.
What we are experiencing is a world war, one that’s being waged by the world’s exploited and subjugated masses against the forces of global capital. And because of the class character of this war, it is not a conflict that can be ended through any “peace” deal between the imperialists and those fighting them. That would just be a repeat of the “peaceful coexistence” policy which led to the Soviet Union’s downfall; and within Russia and Iran, there are influential capitalist elements that seek to implement just such a policy.
This is something that I’ve brought up many times during this last year, when we’ve seen these bourgeois forces often hold back Russia and Iran in important ways. Iran’s liberal reformers delayed the retaliation for Haniyeh’s assassination by several months, while Russia’s U.S.-friendly capitalists have kept the country’s war progress stagnant in many areas. With this last month, though, Iran in particular has gone in a much more revolutionary direction; which proves that when our enemies carry out a provocation, this can be used to fortify and mobilize the anti-imperialist forces.
It’s only been when the revolutionary elements in these countries have gained new political victories that they’ve made further progress in their efforts to combat the hegemon. And the way they’ve gotten these victories is by building the necessary institutional strength, which can let the revolutionary side win out during the moments the enemy strikes.
An important lesson from these events, one which anti-imperialists all around the world can apply to our practice, is that “detente” means covert imperialism. If Washington succeeds in winning Russia or Iran towards aligning with U.S. interests, Washington will not stop its aggressions, but rather shift the war towards China; China is the central target in the new cold war, and the efforts to subdue Russia and Iran are ultimately about making the empire able to attack the PRC. Moreover, making Russia and Iran into U.S. client states would necessarily entail turning their workers into subjects of imperialist exploitation.
These are some of the most important things for Operation Z’s supporters to be discussing, because it’s with this insight that we can know where to take our movement. Z created a historical moment in which many of us became aware of what side to take, and we rallied behind Russia’s anti-fascist operation as an extension of all our other anti-imperialist activities. This was the right direction for our struggle, but it needs to be only one phase in our collective development. The next step is for us to become more engaged with the class war that produced Z; to take on a role of actively advancing the struggle against capitalist power.
This is something that many more are coming to understand as all of these conflicts intensify, and the path towards revolutionary victory gets clearer. In both the class war, and the geopolitical struggle, we have been witnessing events that can only be made sense of through a real analysis of what class warfare means. We can’t explain the Luigi movement without class analysis; we can’t explain Z without recognizing the proletarian struggles that produced it. Class is at the root of all of these developments, and this is nothing new; class struggle has always been the driving force of history. It’s when we grasp what this means for our struggle that we get a real sense of which steps to carry out next.
The ideological actors who’ve been pushing the “detente” psyop advance a mentality of pacifism, and of placing trust within top-down forces to end imperialism’s wars. This is what Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff has promoted: the expectation that simply through diplomacy, we’ll be able to achieve “peace.” It’s a narrative that the U.S. media has been using for decades to vilify the Palestinian resistance, where if only both sides were to resolve not to fight, then there would be no more violence.
To combat this psyop, in part we will need to spread education about what national liberation means. But the most important aspect of this task, the one which can save newly radicalized people from going down an ultra-leftist or demoralized path, is the task of bringing people into the actual class struggle. Of leading the workers to use their economic leverage, both to fight for their own interests and to disable the war machine.
Washington’s strike on Iran last month has made more of the people aware that change won’t come from electoralism, and that only popular struggle can defeat the deep state. The strike was also in itself a psyop, though, one that succeeded just by being seen as having had great material impact; the U.S. greatly exaggerated the extent of the damage it did, and it was that covertly minimal nature of the strike which let the stock market immediately recover. The imperial state is playing a psychological warfare game with these provocations, one that’s designed to massively inflate Washington’s perceived strength.
The national capitalists in Russia and Iran will go along with this false narrative of American invincibility, as they can use it to justify selling out their countries; the pro-detente “antiwar” voices can use this narrative to create a sense that the anti-imperialist forces are fighting a futile battle, and we therefore shouldn’t support them. These forces keep exposing that narrative by successfully beating back the aggressors; and we can use these examples of resistance to raise morale, like we’ve been doing with Z. For anti-imperialists in the United States, the crucial thing is that we don’t expect our allies abroad to do the work for us, and that we build a revolutionary project where we are.
This is our only path forward, and we will need to stick to that path no matter what. Our enemies will use crackdowns to try to chill us into inaction, or present us with opportunistic paths that involve promoting their psyops; these moments of choice will come up more and more as the conflict escalates. Throughout this time, we need to make sure our organizations have the strength to continue making progress in the struggle, no matter how much pressure gets put onto them.
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