A Tale of Colliding World Views

In December, documents were released asserting two radically different political perspectives. 

They could not be more different.

On December 4, under the President of the United States’ Seal, the White House published the administration’s 2025 National Security Strategy, expressing the government's current evaluation of the global challenges facing it. 

The next day, December 5, the Communist Party of Greece (KKE) publicly announced its forthcoming 22nd Congress, followed by the publication of its Theses of the Central Committee-- the product of long preparatory discussions by the KKE’s members-- constituting an assessment of the state of the world and the Party’s approach to it. 

A comparison of the two documents presents a violent clash of class outlooks.

The US National Security Strategy

The US ruling class-- in its current incarnation-- intends to maintain or re-establish US economic domination and grease the wheels for US corporations to succeed internationally. In this regard, the Trump administration is no different than earlier administrations, except-- perhaps-- being more transparent in this goal.

More specifically, extracting policy from the section on the Western Hemisphere, the strategy includes:

1. Militarizing the seas and the oceans. Previous administrations portrayed military force as an instrument of guaranteeing free “access” to trade. This administration, under the “America First” ideology explicitly uses military force to promote US economic success, foregoing the charade of promoting free trade for all.

2. Accessing strategic resources. In the document’s laundered language, the goal is “to identify strategic points and resources… with a view to their protection and joint development with regional partners.” More candidly, US policy makers in this administration project power to privilege US corporations in resource-rich countries like Bolivia or the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

3. Making it hard for other countries to compete. “The terms of our alliances, and the terms upon which we provide any kind of aid, must be contingent on winding down adversarial outside influence—from control of military installations, ports, and key infrastructure to the purchase of strategic assets broadly defined.” The strategy endorsed by the document uses economic leverage to deny success to others.

4. Helping US corporations to dominate. “[W]e will reform our own system to expedite approvals and licensing—again, to make ourselves the partner of first choice. The choice all countries should face is whether they want to live in an American-led world of sovereign countries and free economies or in a parallel one in which they are influenced by [other] countries…” Specifically and adamantly, “[e]very U.S. Government official that interacts with… countries should understand that part of their job is to help American companies compete and succeed.”

5. Accepting that “[t]he United States must also resist and reverse measures such as targeted taxation, unfair regulation, and expropriation that disadvantage U.S. businesses.” Of course, this policy only reiterates what every US administration for more than a hundred years has sought since the intervention in Cuba and the Philippines: a free hand for US economic exploitation.

While these goals are extracted from Trump’s new Monroe Doctrine for the Western Hemisphere, they are barely disguised as policy for the rest of the world. However, they represent considerable continuity with the foreign policy of earlier administrations, though shorn of any pretense to global fairness.

Commentators have been surprised with the Trump administration’s focus on the Western Hemisphere over the often-bitter hostility towards the People’s Republic of China. Surely, that simply acknowledges the formidable economic and military power of the PRC. US policy makers of Trump’s world have been forced to recognize that-- no matter how much they would like otherwise-- the US is in no position to bully the PRC. Therefore, they accept that they can only adjust or modify their economic relationship. Competing with the PRC-- the US’s most formidable rival-- consists, instead, in bullying those who do business with their rival.

The administration is explicit on how to “compete” for the allegiance of their Chinese rivals’ economic collaborators: “China’s state-led and state-backed companies excel in building physical and digital infrastructure, and China has recycled perhaps $1.3 trillion of its trade surpluses into loans to its trading partners. America and its allies have not yet formulated, much less executed, a joint plan for the so-called ‘Global South,’ but together possess tremendous resources. Europe, Japan, South Korea, and others hold net foreign assets of $7 trillion. International financial institutions, including the multilateral development banks, possess combined assets of $1.5 trillion. While mission creep has undermined some of these institutions’ effectiveness, this administration is dedicated to using its leadership position to implement reforms that ensure they serve American interests.” [my emphasis] Thus, the document reveals the carrot to the US stick.

Almost in passing, by merely observing the European Union’s weaknesses and vulnerabilities, the Trump administration demonstrates that it considers the EU to be another rival, albeit a rival retaining some important historical ties-- neither a protectorate, nor currently a competitor of great concern.

The US National Security Strategy paper offers the latest insight into the thinking now directing the still-greatest power in the imperialist system. It is a blue print for the security of US business interests and not of the security and well-being of the people.

The KKE Theses of the Central Committee 

How does the Greek Communist Party view the current state of the world?

The KKE is one of the few Marxist organizations relatively untarnished by the collapse of the Soviet Union. It conceded little to the mass retreat from Leninist principles. It refused to flirt with the widespread ideological marriage of markets and socialism. It held fast to the centrality of class in the analysis of the contemporary world. Where much of today’s left rails against an ever-changing, seemingly unrelated basket of grievances, the KKE defends the classical Marxist understanding that the central, determinative contradiction remains the contradiction between capital and labor, nationally and internationally.

Certainly, that should make Greek Communist thinking of interest to all those who question the strategic aims of the leaders of the most powerful state in the capitalist system.

KKE sees a class-divided world moving toward relative and absolute impoverishment of working people, long-term unemployment, and an unfavorable balance of power between capital and labor. Technological innovation is skewed dramatically in support of the interests of capital. Pursuit of profit continues to dangerously degrade the environment. 

As a result of the weakness of labor in confronting capital, the capitalist system is suffering from an overaccumulation of capital. Hyper-exploitation has produced a mass of capital, seeking-- with greater and greater difficulty-- to find (safe) profitable investment opportunities (one might well view the orgy of investment in AI as an attempt to create such an opportunity). 

KKE understands the recessionary pressures experienced in Europe, Japan, and Asia as the effects of this crisis of the return on investment. Efforts to manage this crisis-- Keynesian or otherwise-- have failed. Specifically, the liberal project of green technology (e.g., the Green New Deal) and the Central Bank project (e.g., interest-rate manipulation, qualitative easing) were unsuccessful in restoring a solid foundation for the rate of profit.

Further, the capitalist powers have invested in the war economy, both in response to inter-imperialist contradictions and to absorb capital.

Militarism serves to destroy and devalue capital through the never-ending conflicts arising from imperialist rivalries. They caution that this military buildup increases sharply the risk of even larger wars, possibly world wars.

The KKE stresses competition between existing nations-- great powers, alliances, and emerging blocs--- fueling the existing wars, flashpoints, and severe clashes endangering our world. They contend that:

The USA, which still holds the leading position, is trying to halt the shift in the balance of power in China’s favour. International financial institutions have already downgraded the US credit rating. This trend is reflected in the decline of the US share and the significant increase of China’s share in Gross World Product (global GDP) between 2000 and 2025, in the significant difference in growth rates between the USA and China, the large US trade deficit in bilateral trade with China and the EU, and the sharp rise in US public debt. 

Within the global imperialist system, both the PRC and Russia present challenges to US hegemony, and US nationalist, protectionist policies are also “... sharpening contradictions within the Euro-Atlantic camp and causing a deterioration in relations between the USA and the EU, Canada and Australia. They are exacerbating intra-bourgeois contradictions within the USA, which are also reflected in developments within the bourgeois political system. They are increasing the likelihood of the decline of the dollar as an international currency. They have a negative impact on international trade and reinforce the downward trend in the international capitalist economy.”

Of the major powers, the KKE sees the European Union as losing ground “relative to the USA and China”, which is feeding the existing turn to the right in many Eurozone countries.

The war in Ukraine is the result of today’s Great Power rivalries-- it is an imperialist war. The KKE asserts:

In the three-and-a-half years of this war, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians and Russians have lost their lives, mainly young people of the working class and the poor popular strata. Approximately twenty-five million people have fled their homes. Homes and public infrastructure have been destroyed on a massive scale. Amidst the ruins, capitalist states and monopolies are competing for the “reconstruction” of Ukraine, viewing it as an “investment opportunity.” This will cost hundreds of billions of euros, a burden that the people will be made to bear… The outbreak of contradictions and realignments within imperialist alliances as imperialist conflict and competition unfold is neither paradoxical nor unprecedented, but a typical feature of imperialist wars. It can lead to former adversaries becoming allies, and former allies becoming adversaries.

Similarly, the KKE views the war in the Middle East as an imperialist war: 

The Israeli war machine supported by the USA and the EU, launched a massive operation in the Gaza Strip, using the Hamas attack as a pretext. This operation resulted in the deaths and injuries of tens of thousands of innocent people, including unarmed civilians, young children, women and elderly people….The imperialist nature of the war in the Middle East and the bourgeois character of Hamas and the Palestinian Authority do not invalidate the just struggle of the Palestinian people and other peoples in the region, who resist and fight against foreign occupation and other imperialist plans. Through this struggle, they can create the conditions necessary to free themselves once and for all from the system of exploitation and war.

For those who may be interested, the current assessment bears remarkable consistency and continuity with the Theses for the 20th Congress developed nearly a decade ago.

Serious-minded people seeking an understanding of the perilous, contentious, and confusing world in which we are living should welcome the revealing contrast between the two perspectives outlined here. One outlook only recognizes the interests of a minority of advantage-seeking, privileged individuals and soulless corporations, while the other recognizes the common fate and pressing needs of the majority of the world’s people who are found within a well-defined social class.

One doesn’t have to agree with all of the conclusions shared by the Greek Communists, but one must acknowledge that they are drawn from an effort to create a world far distant from the one arrogantly defended in the 2025 National Security Strategy of the United States of America. Moreover, the KKE unabashedly supports a class line-- on the working peoples’ side of the barricades. It argues that exploitation is the crucial social relation that decides whether employment, equality, living standards, health care, education, security, or peace are won or lost. Moreover, KKE unequivocally sides with the exploited.

Finding our way free from the Trumpian world and those conditions that produced it will require a clear and deep analysis. The KKE Theses provide a solid foundation of both clarity and depth. 

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com

BRICS Will Fail to Deliver Anti-imperialism

Multipolarity-- the idea that there are more than one decisive economic actors in the global economy-- is an important fact. More than anything else, the rise of the People's Republic of China demonstrates that fact. The size and rate of growth, along with the expansive Belt and Road Initiative, establishes that the PRC functions somewhat independently of the world’s most powerful player in the global market-- the US. While the PRC spurns the language of rivalry, characterizing its desired relationship with the US as one of cooperation or partnership, the mere fact that the US rejects that relationship creates another competitive pole in the global economy, centered on the PRC.

Similarly, the US ruling class has sought to absorb the post-Soviet world-- Russia, Eastern Europe, and other former Soviet collaborators-- into the US-dominated economic order. The US demands that they play the same game and by the same rules or be banished from participation. When they object or defy accepting these terms, they, too, necessarily become alternative poles.

As other formerly minor or compliant participants-- Brazil, India, etc.-- have risen in economic stature, they can also represent counters to US unipolarity.

The tendency away from the US’s complete dominance of the international market economy is a reality of our time. No rational person can dispute this fact (though the tendency could easily reverse).

Since the origin of international trade, there have been conflicting tendencies and counter-tendencies toward concentration and diversity, toward monopoly and competition, and toward unipolarity and multipolarity. It is the very nature, the very essence of market exchange that a privileged trader will arise to dominate, only to be challenged by rivals who subsequently share or dominate the market, with the process repeating or reversing. As Friedrich Engels insisted: “In short, competition passes over into monopoly. On the other hand, monopoly cannot stem the tide of competition-- indeed, it itself breeds competition.”

History shows many empires or countries rising to dominate an arena of commerce or trade over its trading “partners”: Venetian dominance in the Mediterranean, Dutch dominance in European trade with the Spice Islands, successive European empires’ dominance of the trading in slaves, British dominance of the opium trade with China, etc. In nearly all cases, other empires or nations challenge and often prevail.

With the rise of the Cold War, the immensely powerful US assumed and maintained the leading role in ruling and protecting the capitalist order, then over half of the world’s population. After the fall of the Soviet Union, US leaders sought to extend their dominance over the entire world, envisioning a new order codifying and guaranteeing the existing inequalities and the established uneven development. Of course, this status privileges US interests.

If this state of affairs constitutes what people consider to be unipolarity, then it is clear that it is not sustainable. Competitors unfailingly will rise to challenge US dominance. Rivals will strive to break the US economic reign, through innovation, deception, trickery, market manipulation, alliances, and even open conflict. That is the way of capitalism.

And that is what is happening.

Thus, the alternating tendencies toward multipolarity and unipolarity are inevitable consequences of market exchange in a world of private ownership and national self-interest.

It should be noted that-- everything else remaining the same-- this dynamic will guarantee neither that working people will benefit nor be disadvantaged by changes in existing poles. Changes in the relative economic position of nation-states in the global economy is neutral with regard to the fate of those living in class societies. A worker or peasant may gain little from a trend from unipolarity to multipolarity-- any gain will be determined by other factors.

*****

There is, however, an entirely different understanding of multipolarity, unrelated to the factual tendency of competition to drive the global economy toward a unipolar or multipolar world. Since the time of Karl Kautsky, leftists have invested in multipolarity as a moral response to imperialism, an antidote to economic exploitation, as anti-imperialism. Nation-states were and are believed to rationally accept a stable order based on common interests and fair and equitable relations (if only the predators were tamed!). Lenin mocked this view and World War I crushed it. 

But it doesn’t go away! The illusion of a brotherhood of capitalist powers accepting fair and equitable relations stubbornly persists!

Liberals and social democrats invested heavily in the League of Nations, a reset of the rules of international politics and economics after the disaster of World War I. Both little nations and big nations were expected to live amicably under its umbrella. The League promised to stifle the aggression and domination of great powers. Within two decades World War was again on the agenda.

Once again, after World War II, a new “multipolar” institution came into being-- the United Nations. Dominated by capitalist powers (most also beholden puppets of the US ruling class), the promise of diverse poles ensuring peace, harmony, and fairness gave way to manipulation, indecision, and-- on the best day-- impotence. The UN-- today, a multipolar institution governing capitalist-oriented nation-states-- is a modern-day farce.

Now, we have BRICS-- an alliance of a motley assortment of states with different ideologies, different modes of governance, different economies, different levels of development, and different commitments to social justice, but a common interest in finding some benefit from rearranging the existing world order. Centrists and leftists of every stripe have adopted BRICS and BRICS+ as an anti-imperialist front. With little reflection on history, with little appreciation of diversity, and especially with little understanding of market-based economies, they imagine that nation-states driven by self interest will somehow construct a common organization governed by mutual interest. Kautsky would embrace this shallow hope. Lenin would summarily dismiss it.

Persistently and consistently, I have challenged this misguided concept of anti-imperialism. BRICS is no more an answer to imperialism than an alliance of corporations is an answer to capitalist exploitation. 

And that is the tragedy of the BRICS solution to imperialism. It fails to address the foundation of imperialism: the capitalist mode of production. It distracts social justice warriors, and even some Marxists, from the root cause of growing inequality within and between nations. Through ignorance or frustration, it creates the false hope of tempering exploitation without confronting capitalism.

*****

Where theoretical arguments fail, I have proposed a practical test of multipolarity and, specifically, BRICS. If BRICS is an anti-imperialist alternative, then it-- or its most committed members-- must stand tall against the most glaring, most egregious acts of imperialism. I have suggested that the response of BRICS members to the atrocities in Gaza are a litmus test of commitment to anti-imperialism, a test which BRICS has failed abysmally.

One might think that the recent UN Security Council vote on the US/Israeli plan to further maintain Gaza as a semi-colony-- brazenly ruled as brutally as the old Belgian Congo-- might have ignited a resistance from the “anti-imperialism” of BRICS. Instead, BRICS’s most vocal friends of Gaza choose to abstain from the vote. 

And, yes, one would think that these scandalous abstentions would cause many multipolaristas to pause, and rethink their delusion of an anti-imperialist BRICS.

And many on the left have recoiled from this plan and criticized the Russian and Chinese abstentions. The Palestinian Communist Party denounced the vote, as did other Communist and Workers parties.

In an article entitled “BRICS Are the New Defenders of Free Trade, the WTO, the IMF and the World Bank” and Support Genocide by Continuing to Trade with Israel, Yves Smith of Naked Capitalism vigorously challenges BRICS on Gaza, and cites others, including left podcaster Fiorella Isabel and left journalist Vanessa Beeley’s similar critiques.

Nonetheless, apologists like the Friends of Socialist China defend China and Russia’s abstention. They argue bizarrely that: “For China, or Russia, to have exercised the veto would only have weakened their position vis-à-vis the Arab and Islamic nations and correspondingly further strengthened that of the United States.” As though voting against the Security Council resolution would have cost them friendship with some of the backstabbers of the Palestinian cause and defying the US plan would have somehow strengthened the already compliant US relationship with these same traitors to Gaza’s fate.

Since the Gaza resolution, the US has launched an offensive against Venezuelan sovereignty. US military might is staged in waters offshore from Venezuela, insisting that the Venezuelan people bow to US pressure. The threat is real and accompanied by the disgusting demonstration of US power by the murderous killing of boats’ crews in international waters, killings that have no established legitimacy. 

How have the PRC and Russia-- the “spear” of BRICS anti-imperialism-- responded?

Kejal Vyas and James T. Areddy, writing in The Wall Street Journal, state smugly: “For two decades, Venezuela cultivated anti-American allies across the globe, from Russia and China to Cuba and Iran, in the hope of forming a new world order that could stand up to Washington. It isn’t working.” They understand that Cuba and Iran are in no position economically to help Venezuela. As for Russia and China, the authors conclude: “Both countries are trying to negotiate major diplomatic and trade deals with Trump now, giving them little incentive to waste political capital on Venezuela.” 

It should be clearly understood that Russia, the PRC, and other BRICS states have the sovereign right to forge their own or an independent collective foreign policy, regardless of what others might want. Sadly, unlike in the throes of the Cold War against socialist states, no great power or alliance is willing to risk confrontation with other great powers, where willingness to do so is historically the measure of authentic anti-imperialism.

It should be equally clear that those who elevate the BRICs countries to the status of anti-imperialist icons are doing the left a disservice. However well-meaning some of the BRICS leaders may be, they fall far short of constituting an anti-imperialist bloc. To continue the fantasy that rallying around BRICS is the basis for an anti-imperialist front only deflects the left from attacking the foundation of imperialism: capitalism. 

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com