Ukraine & the acceleration of the U.S. empire’s collapse

What the West's masters of war and empire are finding out, in spite of all of their bellicosity around Ukraine, is that actions have consequences. That when they provoke a nuclear superpower into war, they’ll get many more drawbacks than they expect. This applies not just to what’s occurring in Ukraine militarily, where Zelensky is being forced to beg NATO for more arms aid every day and Kiev’s war industry has been mostly wiped out, but to the backlash from Washington’s attempts to exploit the situation. After the U.S. and its puppets have imposed ridiculously extreme sanctions on Russia, the Ruble has recovered, and the U.S. bloc is the side that will suffer the most economic harm. Consumers throughout the West are being brought towards a breaking point by shortages and rising prices as further economic shocks loom amid a pandemic. Regardless of what happens in the conflict itself, these and other destabilizing events for the West have left the global power balance irrevocably shifted in favor of the rising powers, including China, Iran, and their smaller anti-imperialist allies.

What happens when an empire encounters this level of disconnect between what its ruling institutions say is reality, and what reality actually turns out to be? When we’re told that wars make us richer and safer in the long term, then Washington instigates a war that undeniably does the opposite? When we’re told that the time is up for the Russian/Chinese bloc, then this bloc comes out even stronger as the imperialist bloc gets thrown into chaos? The only victory that the imperialists have had during this conflict is a restoration of unity among the imperialist powers, where even formerly Russian-tied countries like Germany have been fully absorbed into Washington’s cold war effort. But what if all this is doing is dragging more imperialist countries towards the same self-destructive path, giving imperialism less chance for survival by destroying its potential to mitigate the risks from what Washington is doing? If every imperialist country is behind this war effort, none of them will be able to avoid the collision course that this effort represents.

What they’ll collide with is the reality of late-stage capitalism, its destabilizing impacts multiplied by the worldwide chaos that Washington has unleashed within Ukraine. Capitalism depends on war, and does so to an increasing degree as capital’s crises grow more severe. Yet war is what will likely be the catalyst for capitalism’s death. Look at the consequences of the wars that the capitalists have started since feudalism was fully replaced by capitalism, and the era of late-stage capitalism therefore began. World War I allowed the Russian Revolution to occur. World War II was so damaging towards China that its nationalist government fell in parallel to the czarist autocracy, leading to China’s communist revolution. Washington’s reactive invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq started off the U.S. empire’s great collapse, where the U.S. has lost international credibility amid the rise of its rivals. Now Ukraine, and all the factors that led up to its descent into proxy warfare, is causing further cracks for the weakened imperialist structure.

The imperialists are trying to mitigate this blowback by “winning the information war,” or at least claiming to be. They’re cracking down on everything from ideologically disfavored subreddits to historic pieces of Russian literature, trying to reinforce the anti-Russian cultural hegemony they’ve been cultivating for the last decade of renewed great-power competition. It’s a milder version of the repressive campaign that NATO’s puppet regime in Kiev has been waging, where ethnic Russians are getting targeted by fascist paramilitaries in an effort to create a Ukraine that’s optimal for a U.S. proxy war effort. Yet all of this reeks of desperation.

As Mao said, U.S. imperialism is at the same time a real tiger and a paper tiger. Even in such a late stage of its decline, it’s capable of inflicting great damage, recently shown by Washington’s successful coups in Pakistan and Africa. It also just conquered Germany for the third time in the last century, as Michael Hudson has phrased it. Yet when it comes to whether Washington can fulfill its broader goals—that being the destabilization of Russia and subsequent regime change in China—its success is a fantasy. It’s more likely that Washington’s economic war on Russia will bring about the end of the U.S. dollar’s reserve currency status, causing the Balkanization of global currency as countries loosen ties to the dollar so the sanctions have less impact on them. A trend that exposes how tenuous the unity among Washington’s allies truly is.

Despite these encouraging signs, we must constantly investigate the material realities so that we don’t fail to take the appropriate actions. We must not ignore the obstacles to the global victory of proletarian revolution, which come both from the U.S. empire and from Russia’s capitalist state. Russia’s foreign policy frequently serves to weaken imperialism, and Russia lacks the strength of capital to qualify as an imperialist power. Plus, since Russia wouldn’t be carrying out this intervention if not for the pressures that NATO has placed upon it, what it’s doing in Ukraine is not imperialist by even the most broad of definitions. Yet Russia is unambiguously not socialist, and international solidarity requires supporting the overthrow of its current state by the communist movement within the country. We must be able to reconcile these realities.

These are the facts communists must accept to avoid both aiding the imperialists, and promoting revisionism. The idea that Russia’s actions are imperialist is one of the pieces of propaganda that the imperialists put forth, and therefore advances Washington’s goal of installing a U.S. puppet regime within the country. (The same goes for the claim that China is imperialist). And the idea that Russia is anything other than a bourgeois state requiring proletarian revolution is counterrevolutionary to promote in any capacity. Thankfully no serious Marxist-Leninist shares the latter stance, but there’s a risk of anti-imperialists falling prey to the propaganda of figures like Aleksandr Dugin, who seeks to popularize Russian nationalism with a reactionary bent. Nuance is how to defend from all of these incorrect ideas.

If we fall prey neither to imperialist psychological operations, nor to ideological diversions like Dugin’s “National Bolshevism” (which in the U.S. is represented by reactionary strains like the “patriotic socialists”), we can properly take advantage of imperialism’s weakening. This means solidarity with Cuba, China, Korea, and other countries that are socialist or undergoing class struggles. Studying these examples can teach communists in the imperial center how to accurately assess our own conditions, and their distinct characteristics—such as settler-colonialism and dependency on global extraction. 

It’s not enough to recognize that imperialism is in crisis. We also have to judge how to respond to this crisis, analyzing the contradictions and counterrevolutionary obstacles that are part of it. Then we can correctly follow the mandates that the masses pass onto us as imperialism’s decline causes greater economic deprivation, and as proletarian revolution in turn becomes a practical necessity. This is a rise in deprivation that’s caused both by the decline of U.S. hegemony itself, and by imperialism’s self-destructive reactions to it in the form of sanctions. Both factors serve to advance imperialism closer towards its extinction.

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