Bogus Anti-imperialism and the Fight for Peace

Where VI Lenin in 1916 wove together a theory of imperialism that placed capitalist exploitation and accumulation at its core, explaining competition between greater and lesser powers and their coalitions and alliances as leading to war, a prominent Marxist, Karl Kautsky, asserted that war or the threat of war would persuade states to coexist, to put aside rivalries and create-- in Kautsky’s words-- “...a federation of the strongest, who renounce their arms race.” 

Lenin believed that competition between great powers will inevitably result in war; Kautsky believed that competition between great powers will inevitably bring a settled peace.

Similarly, today’s advocates of multipolarity argue that the only obstacle to the world imagined by Kautsky is the United States. As the former Cold War leader of the capitalist order, the US is now the meddler, war monger, aggressor, and imperialist standing in the way of a multipolar world that will establish a more tolerant, cooperative, and peaceful world. 

Advocates see the agency for this Kautskyian utopia in the BRICS coalition, established formally in 2009, subsequently adding new members and partners along the way. Its supporters remind us that BRICS+ commands a greater share of global GDP than does the G7 nations or the EU. The original BRICS economies grew by a stunning 356.27% between 1990 and 2019. 

Despite these impressive economic numbers, BRICS’s most zealous proponents posture the alliance as representative of the peripheral “Global South” --as the arm of the ‘have-nots’-- in the struggle against the ‘haves’ of the core-- the US and its Eurasian allies.

While this may make a soothing story, a popular source of hope for peace and social justice, it completely fails the test presented by the realities of this moment. Measured by any rigorous standards of inquiry, multipolarity is a fraud.

On its face, the idea that an alleged powerhouse economic bloc is the advocate, the savior for the poorest, most disadvantaged countries is surely paradoxical. No one would take a similar claim seriously if it came from the mouths of foreign ministers of the G7 or the EU.

But the failure of the BRICS fantasy is best shown by examining BRICS and its member states' response to recent monumental world events.  

On the genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza by Israeli forces: BRICS and its member states voiced some stern objections, but took no substantial measures to stop it or to punish Israel. In fact, they continued their substantial economic relations with the rogue state, failed to defy the Israeli blockade, and offered no material aid to the Palestinians.

On the aggression against Venezuelan sovereignty: BRICS and some of its member states raised objections, but took no concrete action; some benefitted from the US action, some were set back by it. Security agents from material-poor Cuba heroically gave their lives resisting the invasion.

On the attack on the Islamic Republic of Iran (a BRICS member state) by the US and Israel: BRICS and its member states again voiced objections, but offered little or no material support. As The Wall Street Journal noted “Iran has sought for years to build closer military ties with China and Russia, but its powerful friends are proving reluctant to step forward as the regime faces the most acute U.S. threat to its survival in decades.” 

On the escalating aggression against Cuba, suffering acute energy crises under the intensified US blockade: old beneficiaries of Cuban internationalist sacrifices-- including BRICS members and partners-- are offering marginal support for socialist Cuba as it faces possibly its worst existential crisis. 

If BRICS is the guarantor of the interests of the so-called Global South against US and Israeli aggression, if this is the counterforce to imperialism that US and European leftists imagine, then much of the world needs new, more militant friends. The facts contradict the false theory of multipolarity and its embodiment in the BRICS alliance. Rather than exhibiting a new spirit of cooperation, mutual interest, internationalism, and solidarity, the BRICS members seem bent on basing foreign policy on narrow self-interest.

Critics are, however, stepping forward, some with doubts, some with sharp and incisive rebukes of the multipolarity dogma and the BRICS myth. 

Many doubters were repelled by the recent UN Security Council vote crafted by the US and condemning Iran’s retaliation against US allies on the Arabian Peninsula, without calling out the war’s initiators, the US and Israel.

Betwa Sharma, writing in Consortium News, protests that “both Moscow and Beijing abandoned Tehran by abstaining on a March 11 U.N. Security Council resolution that falsely portrayed Iran as the aggressor. China and Russia’s own interests took precedence over a BRICS partner under attack.”

She concludes: 

The war on Iran has exposed the fragility of BRICS as a rising alternative to the U.S.-led global order.

U.S. economic pressure and geopolitical shocks, especially the attack on Iran, have revealed BRICS less as a unified bloc with a common strategic goal, than a collection of countries with overlapping interests that diverge sharply under pressure.

Focusing mainly on Gaza, Patrick Bond recently wrote a detailed, scathing exposé of BRICS hypocrisy.

Bond acknowledges that BRIC member, South Africa, provided 15% of Israel’s coal needs as of 2025. As for another BRICS founding member, “...in addition to wheat and metals, Russia sells coal and – in just the two years since the genocide began in 2023 – made 105 oil transfers comprising 30% of Israel’s total crude and 45% of refined petroleum imported, via Novorossiysk (originating from BRICS-partner Kazakhstan.”

Bond reports on another founding member: "Chinese drones (tens of thousands by now) made by DJI and Autel buzz Gaza and the West Bank, and are used to drop grenades on civilians… and moreover, a Chinese parastatal owns the new Haifa Bayport while another built the ‘union-busting’ Ashdod harbour, which together have facilitated a 5% annual increase in bilateral trade since 2021, confirming Netanyahu’s 2017 term for the two economies, namely, a 'marriage made in heaven.'"

Further: “New Delhi assures a strengthened Israeli-Indian military alliance, the September 2025 Bilateral Investment Treaty, and Modi’s ‘Special Strategic Partnership’ solidaristic visit to the Knesset featuring ‘immense progress’ in ‘defence, security, and more.’”

Bond reveals similar embarrassing economic ties between other BRICS members and Israel, including with Brazil, UAE, Egypt, Ethiopia, and Indonesia. He concludes by asserting that, in fact, the “BRICS Promote Global-Corporate Power Under the Cover of Multipolarism.” 

Facts, facts, facts… they often make for stubborn, unfriendly encounters with cherished theories and opinions. At least some of our friends on the left are paying attention.

In a moving “j’accuse”, Josué Veloz Serrade writes in his article translated and posted on Black Agenda Report of “un multilaterismo hipócrita”-- a hypocritical multilateralism toward Cuba.

Veloz Serrade casts scorn on all of the nations that could respond to Cuba’s abandonment before an existential threat from the US Empire, especially those who preach multipolarity and hail BRICS as the anti-Empire:

In their rhetoric, Russia and China demand an end to unipolarity, the construction of a multipolar world, respect for international law, and, in particular, for the sovereignty of each country. But their real desire, revealed by their actions rather than their words, is the gradual integration into the rules of the very system they claim to contest…

As bitter as it may be to hear, by abandoning Cuba, they are not simply being pragmatic; they are admitting that their real goal is not the transformation of the world order, but the negotiation of a more comfortable place within it…

…they have incorporated the logic of the imperial playing field—its institutions, its markets, its values, its rules, its default ideology—to such an extent that they have become incapable of imagining political action that breaks with that field, even though they proclaim it necessary in their rhetoric…

The Empire supports its allies to the very end because it understands that loyalty to its own is a condition of its own power. But Cuba’s allies do the opposite: they abandon it when the political cost of supporting Cuba outweighs the benefit of not doing so…

Those who today are abandoning Cuba are not only calculating their own narrow interests; they are also, in a way, renouncing their own desire for transformation. The abandonment of Cuba is the renunciation of the possibility of another world… 

Progressive Latin American governments, the BRICS, American and Western European left-wing parties, solidarity organizations that today look the other way: all have found, in one way or another, their niche within the order. They have obtained their share of recognition, their space for comfortable dissent, their permitted or simply tolerated gestures. And in that process, they have ceased to see Cuba as a mirror of what they could be, instead viewing it as an uncomfortable reminder of what they have ceased to be, but above all of what they never were…

Those who today betray Cuba are betraying themselves. Not in a metaphorical sense, but in a strategic one. A world order that claims to be multipolar but fails to protect the most vulnerable when the Master tightens the screws is not an alternative order; it is a decentralized extension of unipolarity, a system in which the ritual invocation of multipolarity is a rhetorical exercise in futility… 

Veloz Serrade’s bitter eloquence speaks not only to the fraud of multipolarity and the hypocrisy of BRICS, but to the possible loss of the last outpost of authentic solidarity, internationalism, and anti-imperialism. The hope of a just world may well be extinguished for millions who saw Cuba as a beacon.

Multipolarity is neither anti-imperialist nor a substitute for fighting the imperialist system. Those who are invested in multipolarity and the ‘promise’ of BRICS do grave disservice to the fight for global justice and for peace. The shame of BRICS failure to resist brazen, death-dealing aggression against weaker parties will fall on them as well.

There can be no effective anti-war movement in this time without clarity on the imperialist system. Peace is only attainable if we understand and resist the causes of war, while not deferring or relying on a group of countries committed to protecting or improving their place in that system. 

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com

The Peace Question and Imperialism

The war in Ukraine is a propaganda war, with all of the belligerents, sponsors, and their allies churning out-- through an abjectly subservient media-- masses of lies and disinformation. In this regard, they resemble other wars, but with an added dose of shamelessness.

For that reason, it is difficult to discern how the war is being conducted or who has the military advantage at any time. Like all modern wars, atrocity stories abound and losses are wildly exaggerated.

But what separates this war from wars in the recent and not-so-recent past is the near-absence of an organized anti-war movement. It is more than a curious oddity that there are few actions in the streets or campaigns of influence or resistance to stop the mayhem of this brutal war. Sure, there are generic appeals to cut military budgets or oppose war philosophically, but little action to stop this particular war. In spite of the so-called “fog” of war, everyone knows that soldiers and civilians alike are dying in significant numbers, that bodies are ripped apart, homes destroyed, and people dislodged from their homes. No amount of “fog” can hide this.

Of course, there are a few prominent voices-- Pope Francis, even Henry Kissinger-- who have called for a cessation of fighting and negotiations. And Communists and trade unionists in Italy, Greece, and Turkey have blocked NATO weapons shipments, staged demonstrations, and picketed embassies.

But in most cities, states, and countries, there are few actions directed against the war in Ukraine. And most surprisingly, the leftists in Europe and the Americas, usually leading the way against war, are largely silent. They haven’t even minimally demanded that their own countries stay out of this war.

Instead, they have tacitly or openly sided with one belligerent or another. I have written and spoken on different occasions against taking sides in the conflict. Moreover, I have sought to place the war in the context of classical imperialism and suggested that the left’s support of either belligerent or its sponsors is misplaced, akin to the collapse of left opposition at the beginning of World War I. In that case, the left succumbed to narrow nationalist appeals. In this case, the left is succumbing to a muddled concept of imperialism and anti-imperialism.

Rather than repeat the argument, it might be useful to look at how and why leftists justify their support for one side or the other and refrain from adding their voice to the cause of peace in Ukraine.

It is easy to dismiss those who uncritically support Ukraine. Apart from the rabid nationalists of the “Glory to Ukraine” crowd, who welcome the conflict and hope to draw the Western capitalist countries into a crusade against Russia, there are those who simplistically see the war as a naked aggression with no back story. From ignorance of the post-Soviet Ukrainian history of corruption, reaction, Western meddling and aggression, or from willful collaboration with US and NATO intrigue, these new Cold Warriors seek a Russian defeat and have no interest in an immediate peaceful settlement or concern about the mayhem.

Against them are the more measured comrades who, remembering the Cold War standoff between the US and its allies and the Soviet Union and its allies, conflate today’s Russia with the Soviet Union. They recognize how the Soviet Union constituted a pole of resistance that countered and sometimes reversed the Cold War imperialist alliance’s designs on the world. US imperialism, the dominant imperialist power at the time, was effectively checked by the Soviet Union from 1945 until the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991. These anti-imperialists see Russia, in its war on Ukraine, as a similar emerging pole against US imperialism and see Russia’s invasion as an expression of a break-up of the absolute military and economic US dominance of the world established after the departure of the Soviet Union. For them, a multipolar world is in birth.

There are shards of truth in this view, but Russia is not the Soviet Union. It does not share its ideology; rather, its motives replace Soviet internationalism with an aspiring great power nationalism. While it exploits cracks in US global hegemony, it does not offer an alternative vision or unconditional assistance to the victims of capitalism and imperialism. In that regard, Russia is no Cuba, either.

Russia’s foreign policy is capitalist opportunism: friends with Turkey or Israel one moment, in conflict the next moment. Russia aligns with Saudi Arabia when it's economically profitable, while fighting Saudi proxies in Syria. There are no consistent principles guiding it. Nor can there be for a country that rejected socialism for capitalism. Those who see Russian foreign policy and alliances as progressive are very selective in their examples.

Russia’s leaders readily embrace the capitalist ethos and reject the Soviet project, though they appeal, when needed, to Soviet symbols and traditions when useful.

It may be true that the Russian invasion ultimately will achieve the goals sought by its ruling class. And it may be true that these gains will come at the expense of US imperialism and its ruling class, but how does that move us any closer to a world of peace and social justice? The rivalries remain, the goals of the respective ruling classes remain uncertain and unstable, despite their claims of peace-loving and democracy-seeking; and the danger of conflict remains high or even higher.

There are others who envision the war-- insofar as Russia is challenging US power-- as a blow for those on the bottom of what we might envision as the imperialist “pyramid” -- the developing countries. Jenny Clegg, for example, writing in The Morning Star, sees the development of “competitors” to US dominance as establishing the first steps toward a multipolar world. She correctly notes that multipolarity “is not a policy but an emerging objective trend…”

Further, she sees unequal exchange between the highly developed countries and the developing countries as the principal contradiction-- the contradiction defining imperialism and anti-imperialism.

While this center-periphery distinction was popular and influential among independent Western “Marxists” in the era when the working classes in the center-- the West-- were generally tamed by social democratic opportunism, it was neither particularly insightful nor of continued relevance. Marx went to great lengths to show that exchange, under capitalist relations of production, was not generally unequal-- values exchange for values. But those same relations of production always produce and reproduce inequality. The locus of inequality-- capitalist exploitation-- is embedded in the capitalist system, not in the thievery of unequal exchange.

As Lenin elaborated, uneven development is a feature of relations between people, social institutions, firms in the same industry, between industries, and between countries, and even continents. It is not unequal exchange that accounts for the uneven development, but differences in the pace of development, cultural and social practices, political and other institutions, and most importantly, especially in the epoch of imperialism, the stunting effects of colonialism, neo-colonialism, and their legacy.

In the last half-century, technological developments have freed capitalists to move, access, and service the material productive forces-- factories, transportation networks, resources-- in order to gain access to formerly inaccessible labor markets, cheapening labor in general. At the same time, this development created rising living standards in some developing countries, while lowering them in some advanced capitalist countries.

Consequently, some capitalist countries-- like India, Turkey, Brazil, Indonesia-- have become powerful rivals to the late-twentieth-century great powers.

The concept of “unequal” exchange as an explanation for the inequality between developed and developing countries (and for the difference between imperialism and anti-imperialism) fails because it implies that should exchanges become equal, that same inequality between states would evaporate. Even more importantly, it suggests that equal exchange-- and not an end of capitalism-- would signal the demise of imperialism.

To understand imperialism as a conflict between advancing and lagging development based upon the unequal terms of economic activity-- a kind of organized thievery-- is to misunderstand the nature of exploitation under capitalism. Intense competition between players-- big and small-- for markets, resources, labor, and capital are the essence of capitalism and imperialism. There is no sharp line between this competition and war.

Clegg wants us to believe that in a multipolar world, with US power diminished, establishing equal exchange will bring forth a period of civil, well-behaved, respectful competition. She insists that this contrast with today’s dangerous world is captured by the distinction between competition and rivalry, a distinction that I think few will find satisfying. In an aside, she explains: “competition is not the same as rivalry-- think competing in a race as opposed to deliberately tripping over your rival in that race.” To think that sporting competition doesn’t evolve commonly into no-holds-barred conflict and into violence is surely out of touch with the history of both sports and international politics in the twentieth century.

From the reliance on the now intellectually fashionable and prominent rational choice or game theory to the behavior of capitalist enterprises, from the constant haggling over borders, sea lanes and territorial waters to establishment of military and economic alliances, there is little evidence that capitalist countries are striving for a fair economic playing field with fixed, transparent, and respected rules. "Win-win" is not part of the capitalist vocabulary.

Clegg writes of “the old-- US hegemonic power” as having “been in relative decline” and the “new-- a more equal distribution of wealth and power” as developing, albeit slowly. While one might happily concede that aspects of US power and influence have been challenged and dampened, while one might add that the US shows many signs of economic, political, and social decline, it does not follow, nor is it likely, that any “new distribution of wealth and power” will be more equitable or just. And most importantly, even if wealth and power were more equitably distributed between countries, there is little reason to believe it would be more equitably distributed within those countries. Clegg’s multipolarity can make no such promises to the working classes.

Finally, there are those on the left who have carried on a lifelong struggle against US imperialism and can only see an enemy of our enemy as our friend. There are few people on the righteous left now alive who can remember a time when the US was not the leading great power and the anchor for the capitalist alliance against socialism, socialism as a legitimate political current, as a rival to global capitalism, and as a pole rallying the forces of anti-imperialism.

Therefore, it is hard to envision the world not benefitting from the defanging of US imperialism, from its fall as a great power. No great power in our time has caused more deadly mischief. But that surely displays a weak understanding of capitalism and its stages of development.

There were nationalist leaders in various countries under the boot of British imperialism in the interwar period who welcomed the rise of Hitler and Tojo, greeting them as possible saviors from hundreds of years of suppression by the British Empire, the leading imperialist of the time.

Subhas Chandra Bose, for example, an Indian nationalist leader who was once president of the Indian National Congress, was so deeply committed to overthrowing British rule in India that he actively and unapologetically collaborated with the Nazis and Japanese in World War II. This myopia is an extreme version of the blinders worn by many anti-imperialists who fail to understand the logic of imperialism and its unbreakable link to capitalism.

Chandra Bose demonstrates the hollowness of narrow nationalism and obsessive self-regard over viewing the world through the lens of class and class solidarity.

The struggle against US imperialism, like the struggle against its predecessor, the British Empire, will ultimately be resolved at home when the people finally refuse to continue paying the price for their rulers’ grand designs. Of course, those oppressed by imperialism play an equally important role, that of resisters; though imperialism like rust, never sleeps. It is an imperative, a demand made by capitalist accumulation-- if it is defeated in one place, it will surely find another place to satisfy its lust. This dynamic only finally ends when our world finds socialism. The wishful thinking of a benign capitalism with all participants peacefully on an even playing field is just that-- a wishful thought.

Multipolarity-- a notion first discussed by bourgeois academics looking for tools to understand the dynamics of global relations-- has been adopted by a segment of the anti-imperialist left. While it assuredly describes an actual trend emerging, as Jenny Clegg acknowledges, it has often been presented as an anti-imperialist stage shifting the world balance of forces in the direction of a better world.

I have argued that this is a retreat from classical imperialism as understood by VI Lenin and his followers. In the context of an unstable world in ideological disorder and suffering untold crises, there are no guarantees that the poles that emerge or challenge the post-Cold War super-pole are a step forward or a step back simply because they are alternative poles. Undoubtedly, any resistance that weakens the asymmetry of power that the US holds should be welcome. But we should not presume that every opponent will become a force for stability, justice, and peace. Knowing what we know about the history of capitalism from its first expansionist era accumulating involuntary human capital to exploit the riches of the new world should chasten our expectations about new rivals to US imperialism.

With the fall of the Soviet Union as a backdrop and the uncertainty left in its wake, we should be cautious about anointing any new candidates for the role of arch-rival not only to US imperialism, but to all imperialism as well as its genesis, capitalism.

While the left futilely disputes the victim and the victimizer, working people are dying unnecessarily, suffering horrific wounds, homelessness, and despair-- all the products of modern war. Working class lives should not be proxies in ideological debates. Events will decide who has the correct understanding of imperialism, but history will not be kind to those who failed, in the meantime, to oppose the war and to seek a peaceful solution.

Greg Godels
zzsblogml@gmail.com

No to the Imperialist War!

Amidst echoes of 1914 and World War I, the political left-- far less potent than a century ago-- is split between the contestants in a European war.

As in 1914, the rush to pick sides in the conflict in Ukraine clouds all judgment, conjuring the adolescent emotions engaged while witnessing a schoolyard fight. Some on the left portray Ukraine as an innocent victim of a notorious bully and the bully’s long history of belligerence.

Others, long cognizant of the nefarious role of the US and NATO in bringing perceived rivals, renegades, or defiers to their knees, see Russia as the hapless victim of betrayed promises and existential threats.

Those who rush to Ukraine’s defense without qualification display an ignorance of history and the transparent roles of all the players in the global imperialist chess game. They also succumb to the crudest propaganda campaign since the 2003 exaggerations and fabrications employed to sell the Iraq invasion. Their jump onto the Western imperialist bandwagon is, at best, naive beyond hope, at worst, complicit in the aggressive foreign policy of the US and NATO.

Invoking Ukraine’s right to self-determination would seem to have more credibility. But it is necessary to remember how Western imperialism has often twisted the doctrine to fit its own predatory goals. When Vietnam was moving towards independence, the US and its allies artificially created a Republic of Vietnam in the south, basing US support and long war on defending its right of self-determination against “Communist aggression.” The West used the same ruse with mineral-rich Katanga, Kosovo, and oil-rich Cabinda to name a few. Ukraine lost any pretense of self-determination after it underwent a Western-sponsored coup in 2014. Western imperialism is always anxious to defend the spurious right of self-determination of its clients and puppets.

On the other hand, those opposing the unqualified support of “heroic” Ukraine certainly have a case. The aggressive posture of the US and NATO towards Russia since the fall of the Soviet Union is real, though seldom explored by anyone in the monopoly-media commentariat. Surrounding Russia with NATO member states, bases, war-game simulations, and troop deployments is inexplicable, except by attributing hostile intent. Meddling in the civil and political life through unrequested NGOs and bombarding Russia’s citizens with critical, oppositional messages cannot be seen as friendly acts.

Nonetheless, these acts of aggression fall short of military action and do not justify military action by another party. Saber-rattling is qualitatively different from going to war. An invasion is not a justified response.

Also, the proffered notion that the Russian invasion was actually a defensive action to rescue the Russian-speaking citizens of Eastern Ukraine reeks of the same doublespeak that the US and NATO employ with their putrid doctrine of humanitarian interventionism. The shame of this excuse for imperialist aggression does not validate it for Russian use.

A strong case can be made that the Russian leadership was once again drawn into the ‘Brzezinsky trap.’ US signals before the invasion were remarkably ambiguous. While the US military and State Department were warning of a Russian build-up and imminent invasion, the usual, expected bellicose warnings were not heard from Washington. Typically, when a great power senses that a rival is threatening, it responds with exaggerated threats of its own, military maneuvers, troop build-ups, heightened alerts, etc. Instead, President Biden gave assurances that the US would not be drawn into a war.

Brzezinski, President Carter’s National Security Advisor, devised a scheme to draw the Soviet Union into a long, bloody, fruitless war in Afghanistan by encouraging and supporting Islamic zealots to destabilize a country on the USSR border.

Similarly, George Bush, the elder, allowed his ambassador to give mixed signals about a US response to Saddam Hussein when Hussein contemplated an invasion of Kuwait. Hussein took the bait, precipitating a US invasion of Iraq.

If it was a trap and the Russian leadership fell for it, then not only was the invasion not justifiable, but it was tragically misguided. The result, to date, has generated greater military, economic, and public pressure on the Russian Federation, a situation that Russian leaders said they wanted to forestall with their action.

Thus, defending Russia’s invasion, despite the context, is defending the indefensible.

Many want to portray Russia as “anti-imperialist,” given its commendable acts of opposition to US aggression in countries like Syria, Cuba, or Venezuela. But as I explained in an earlier article, that is not a helpful way of understanding Russia’s role in the imperialist system and certainly not consistent with V.I. Lenin’s theory of imperialism. Those who harbor this illusion-- whether from Cold War nostalgia or a misreading of Lenin’s writings-- are attempting to detach today’s Russia from its capitalist economic base and deny that its rulers act on behalf of its capitalist class.

It is possible to grant that Russia objectively acted against US imperialism in militarily aiding Syria while also asserting that the conflict in Ukraine is an imperialist war. That is, the battle raging in Ukraine is, in the final analysis, fought over the material interests of capitalist ruling classes, not the interests of the people of Ukraine or Russia.

The great tragedy is that the broad left-- the historical foil to war and imperialism-- remains divided, confused, and inactive while a bloody, destructive war rages, threatening to expand and escalate. As the war continues with no resolution, the only winner is US imperialism.

In sharp contrast, over 40 Communist Parties have signed a joint statement --No to the Imperialist War in Ukraine!-- affirming that the war in Ukraine is an imperialist war and that the people “have no interest in siding with one or another imperialist or alliance that serves the interests of the monopolies.” The statement recognizes that ending the conflict-- “the meat grinder of imperialist war” -- is the foremost task and goes further to “demand the closure of military bases, the return home of troops from missions abroad, to strengthen the struggle for the disengagement of the countries from imperialist plans and alliances such as NATO and the EU.”

One signatory-- the Greek Communist Party-- has led the way by protesting at the US and Russian embassies, organizing mass demonstrations against the war, and leading the effort to stop NATO weapons shipments. Italian labor organizations have also resisted NATO arms shipments.

To the magazine’s credit, the editor of Monthly Review, the influential US left publication demonstrates a similar understanding:

At present, we are once again seeing “an old-style struggle for power” in the form of a war in Ukraine, which has taken on a “ghostly character” because of the presence of thermonuclear weapons on both sides of what… is essentially a “proxy war” between two capitalist states: the United States (along with the whole of NATO) and Russia.

By bringing the threat of nuclear war into sharp focus, editor John Bellamy Foster shows the folly of those caught in the blame-game, those immobilized by the allure of war pornography spread by monopoly capital’s powerful propaganda machine, and underscores the urgency of stopping the war now.

To perhaps the surprise of some, Pope Francis has brought clarity to the war in Ukraine, in earthy, but direct language. Supposedly, he told the Russian Orthodox Patriarch that the Russian church leader should not be “Putin’s altar boy.” While this brought glee from those supporting “Glory to Ukraine” at all costs, he followed up with the charge that the cause of the war might be the “barking of NATO at the door of Russia,” an apt metaphor. The Pope's blunt analysis supports his commitment to ending the war above all other concerns. He has offered to visit all belligerents and negotiate, the sane way to end hostilities.

While Pope Francis’s position as peacemaker may seem unremarkable, it must be placed against the backdrop of the “just war” concept that has allowed Catholics and church leaders in the past to tailor the Church’s message to please right-wing regimes, war makers, and xenophobia, while appearing doctrinaire.

A recent commentary in The Wall Street Journal explores the Church’s historic relationship to the concept. Francis seems to prefer a just peace to a just war, forestalling its expansion and flirtation with nuclear war.

We can but hope that these sane voices can unite a divided left into vacating the debate hall and returning to the streets to protest an imperialist war and the elites that profit at the expense of the masses. We cannot repeat the mistakes of 1914.

Greg Godels
zzsblogml@gmail.com

Blood and Oil

The Washington Post, the New York Times, and Reuters report that their sources have revealed the CIA is concluding (with its surely-by-now suspect “high confidence”) that the highest echelon of the Saudi Arabian government, including the Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, ordered the assassination of Jamal Khashoggi. Khashoggi’s murder at the Saudi embassy has occupied US headlines for the last six weeks. While it appears to be a particularly gruesome and brazen act, one cannot but recoil from the callous selectivity of the US media, a media that heretofore ignored or minimized the horrors inflicted upon tens of thousands of Yemeni people by the same Saudi government and its coalition allies.

As though choreographed for the moment, a study suddenly appeared last week proclaiming Saudi savagery (Aid Group Says 85,000 Children May Have Died of Hunger in Yemen) and capturing the attention of The New York Times, Washington Post,Time,The Independent, Voice of America, etc. Overnight, the US media discovered atrocities already well documented over the last three years by the UN and foreign and alternative media. Suspiciously, the aid group releasing the study was thrown out of Pakistan in 2015 charged with covering a bogus CIA vaccination program.
 
One might be led to believe that the violently imposed social, cultural, and political backwardness of the Saudi family regime and its bloody actions was unknown until the Khoshoggi affair. However, it is only politically expedient to recognize it now with a rift in the ruling class.

But what is one to make of this leak from anonymous CIA sources to the media?

Like so much of the unattributed information and misinformation driving the US entertainment-oriented media, the leaks stir the political pot without adding certainty or clarity.

Apart from information tantalizingly dangled by Turkish authorities, the CIA leakers additionally claim a phone intercept between the Crown Prince’s brother in Washington, DC and Khashoggi, assuring his safety for a visit to the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. The CIA sources assert that the call was made at the behest of the Crown Prince. Therefore, they conclude that bin Salman’s motive for the call was to set up the Khashoggi murder.

The corporate media have taken the matter as proven despite no official confirmation from top CIA officials or other government agencies. For the entertainment-industrial complex, the Khashoggi affair is just another opportunity to bait President Trump-- a firm supporter of the newly installed Crown Prince--  into another episode of prevarication, bluster, and outrageousness. And the simultaneous “discovery” of Saudi Arabia's bloody massacre of Yemen only adds to the case against Trump.

In the meantime, President Trump squirms before the broad national and international revulsion over the killing.

Is the revulsion over the Khashoggi killing sufficient for the US and the NATO allies to kick Saudi Arabia to the curb? Will they jettison their long reliable “policeman” over the Islamic world and their intermediary in imperial domination?

Soaked with self-righteousness, US and European leaders act as if they had forgotten the dirty work that the Arabian head choppers did for them, for example, in Afghanistan, in the former Yugoslavia, in supporting Israel, in Libya, and, of course, in Syria.

Like the US media, Erdogan’s Turkey stoked the assassination into a major crisis. They willingly exposed their illegal wiretap in order to discredit Saudi Arabia and drive a wedge between the Saudis and the US. They have also sided with Qatar in its defiance of the other Arabian monarchies.

Qatar, in turn, has conveniently befriended Iran with whom it shares an enormous natural gas field. Iran, like Turkey, has engaged in an off-again, on-again friendship with Russia. In the case of Turkey, Erdogan plays the US against Russia over arms sales. Round one went to Russia with its sale of its sophisticated ground-to-air defense system, annoying the US to no end. Though the US cancelled its offer of the defense industry’s crown jewel, the F-35, the Turkish leaders know that the US desperately needs to sell the fighter to rationalize the development costs. Erdogan would like to trade closer relations with the US (and not Russia), arms sales, and a muting of the Khashoggi affair to get their hands on Fethullah Gülen, the alleged coup plotter living in the US.

Alongside the gore of assassination and weapons sales haunting the Middle East, there is, as there always is, the specter of oil (energy). Saudi Arabia has sought to reset its role in the energy nexus. New leadership hopes to shed its image of unreconstructed tribalism, it attempts to diversify its vast wealth, and it looks to jump-start its capitalist normalization by making ARAMCO, the Saudi energy firm, a publicly traded corporation.

But the emergence of its long-time energy partner, the US, as an energy rival has deflected those goals. First, the Saudis tried to discipline the US energy industry by driving prices below cost of production, bullying the revived US fracking industry and taming its growth. With billions of investor funds propping up the US industry, the plan failed.

Saddled with enormous and growing expenses from the Yemeni war, the Saudis reverted to their traditional role as ‘CEO’ of OPEC, guiding the oil producers toward a stable mix of sustainable and profitable prices.

But their close friends in the Trump Administration overturned that effort. Taking the Trump sanctions against Iran at face value, the Saudis and the other oil producers ramped up production to fill the void. However, the Administration negotiated large exceptions to the sanctions, turning the increase into an overproduction glut and collapsing prices.

Sensing a betrayal of the alliance, the Saudis are embarking on an independent policy of drastically reducing production and urging others to do so as well. The oil wars are escalating.

With the Saudi-US alliance frayed, Putin has made nice to the Saudis in recent months.

If the Middle East seems a cauldron of chaos, drama, and frictions, it is only one of several centers of growing tension and conflict. Southeast Asia is becoming the scene of US-PRC rivalry, with different countries taking different sides, with influence peddling through loans and projects, and with threats and counter-threats.

Further, the European Union continues to barely hang together, wracked by ever more powerful centrifugal political forces. And South America continues to suffer sharp political and economic instability.

To those still viewing the world through the prism of the Cold War or the brief period of global US hegemony, today’s world appears as a great mystery-- a moment of intense drama and inexplicable chaos. The Cold War-- for all of its dangers-- operated under a fairly strict set of unspoken rules, even when reckless leaders like Ronald Reagan were in power. During the post-Soviet, short-lived US global regnum, all but a few countries accepted some US governance.

But today, states are in intense competition for economic advantage as Lenin's Imperialism foresaw. Capitalist countries are replaying the intense competition typical of human interactions under capitalism, but on the regional and international level. Alliances are formed and broken; contradictory new ones are formed in the blink of an eye. International rules and regulations are under siege as countries seek to gain an economic edge. Cooperation, always a tenuous global achievement, has dissolved to reveal a feral pursuit of national self-interest. A ruthless zero-sum logic replaces the heralded “win-win” attitude of global players during more stable economic times.  

The more powerful economies are attempting to construct hegemonic blocs to bring rivals to bay. Lesser powers are seeking regional hegemony or the most advantageous place in a larger constellation. The anarchy of unrestrained market competition has finally and decisively penetrated international relations. And there is no going back to a non-existent “golden era.”

But we have seen this before.

Today’s aggressive rivalries resemble only too well those smoldering before World War One. Like the pre-WWI period, big and small powers vie for economic advantage, taking every opportunity to expand the exploitative tentacles of their capitalist enterprises. As Lenin foresaw over a hundred years ago, the voracious hunger for new markets, for new sources of exploitation, and new resources inevitably leads to war.
That is where the toxic combination of economic decline and intensifying inter-state rivalries is taking us. As the danger of a spark igniting a disastrous regional or global war grows, too many good people are engaged in the machinations and maneuvers of bourgeois politics to now recognize the looming catastrophe.

Now, more than ever, we need a powerful movement for peace. Nothing could be more urgent.

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com