The degree reached by the crisis and the resulting impasse for capital, makes the dynamics of the generalized imperialist war, which was until then only a perspective playing an indirect role – if one can say so – in the course of events, a direct, immediate factor today of the policies, decisions, reflections of the governments and capitalist classes of each nation and imperialist powers. The war in Ukraine is its first clear and obvious illustration for all.”

(Theses on the Significance and Implications of the Imperialist War in Ukraine, March 2nd 2022), cf. RoW #21)

Not yet in power [1], Trump is threatening to buy, if not invade, Panama, Greenland and even Canada! Just as Putin invaded Georgia and Ukraine. Just as Israel is seizing the West Bank, Gaza and the Syrian Golan Heights. As China’s Xi claims Taiwan. Just as Hitler invaded Austria and Czechoslovakia. Mussolini, Ethiopia. Whether he means it or not, whether he realizes it or not, it is a sign of the times and of the course towards generalized war opened up by the outbreak of imperialist war in Ukraine.

The mere announcement of his victory has accelerated and triggered a cascade of events; in Ukraine and the Middle East, where butchery and massacres are unleashed, while others are being prepared, in Asia for example. Governmental political instability, particularly in Western countries such as Canada, Korea, Germany and France, is taking hold, so to speak. And the widespread rise of so-called “radical” or “illiberal” right-wing parties, with their nationalist, chauvinist and xenophobic rhetoric, is generalizing. Like fascism in the 1930s, today’s radical right-wingers “are expressing, through an upsurge in their activity, the full complexity of troubled situations moving towards war.” [2] Trump’s threats of protectionism and all-out trade and currency wars are sowing panic among all economic rivals.

In 2016, Trump’s motto Make America Great Again was the American bourgeoisie’s response to the predicted and, in part, begun decline of its power in the first two decades of this century. His previous term and that of Biden largely made America great again. Trump’s re-election means both that the American bourgeoisie is committed with determination and violence to the confrontations announced and that it has taken into account its current limits.

“In a potential conflict with China, U.S. forces would blow through their munitions inventory in a matter of weeks, and it would take years for the U.S. defense industrial base to produce replacements. Rising personnel costs, along with an endless array of peacetime missions, are stretching U.S. forces thin.“ [3]

This finding was certainly the main reason for choosing Trump over Kamala Harris and the Democrats. [4] Buying time to prepare – economically, politically and ideologically – and to rearm up to the military stakes of the widespread conflict to come. The situation also calls for a “disruptive” discourse, involving provocations and aggression on all fronts, and transgressions of the classic rules of bourgeois democracy and, if need be, of the American Constitution. Just like international rules. Even geographical: Trump wants to rename the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America. For all these “transgressions” that the situation imposes, it needs to find characters who are sufficiently “megalomaniacal” to embody and carry out the violation of the rules governing the existing imperialist order. Watching and listening to Trump, how can we not fail to think of Charlie Chaplin’s Dictator? Not to laugh at it – although sometimes... – but for the historical parallel. Trump? The right man in the right place.

Generalized world war is not inevitable

“This era looks to some analysts more like the 1930s, with its collapse of the global order, than the decades after the second world war.” (The Guardian, Editorial, January 1st 2024)

In the international bourgeois press, there are numerous references to the 1930s and the pre-WWII period, as well as parallels drawn with today’s situation. While we should be wary of schematic historical comparisons, at the risk of copying yesterday’s situation to today’s, the fact remains that past experience must serve us – proletarians and revolutionary communists – well and shed light on the new situations we have to face – particularly if we want to assume the role of a political vanguard of the international proletariat. But is this not the fundamental reason why the proletariat produces political minorities and its party?

The situations in the 1930s and today have many features in common: they were preceded and heralded by the economic crises of 1929 and 2008, which capital was unable to “overcome”, let alone “resolve”; the result was heightened imperialist tensions, forcing the least “well-stocked” imperialists – yesterday Germany defeated in 1918, today Russia, yesterday Japan, tomorrow China – strangled by the US policy of “containment” for the latter, to embark on warlike adventures and territorial conquests in order to loosen the stranglehold imposed on them; the dynamic towards generalized war is then set in motion, inevitably causing upheavals of all kinds – economic, political, social, ideological, etc., to adapt all production and state apparatuses as quickly as possible to the preparation for the war that lays ahead. The analogy with the 1930s is therefore valid as far as these characteristics are concerned.

There’s another factor to take into account: the class struggle. If only because the bourgeoisie must “make the workers pay the costs of a terrible economic crisis in order to meet the necessities of war.” [5] Here too, the analogy works. But there are a few differences, one of which seems crucial to the resolution of the historical dilemma: the dynamics of class struggle and the situation of the exploited and revolutionary class, the proletariat. In the 1930s, the proletariat had just suffered, and was still suffering, a series of bloody political and ideological historical defeats following the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the international revolutionary wave of 1917 to 1923 that followed it. Although what some call the “class instinct” remained predominant in the proletarian ranks, it was essentially identified with the defense of the USSR and Stalinism, or the defense of democracy against fascism. The proletarian masses tended to side with the counter-revolution. Today, there is no “class instinct” attached to any particular ideology. Certainly, proletarians at the international level are largely subject to bourgeois ideology and the economic and political attacks of their respective national bourgeoisies. Certainly, they are not in a position, except sporadically [6], to launch open struggles against capital, if only for economic objectives. But the very course of class struggle is not as marked or defined by counter-revolution as it was in the 1930s. It is noteworthy that, to date, there have been no nationalist and chauvinist street demonstrations or other significant mobilizations in support of the war. Not in Russia, Ukraine, Europe or anywhere else...

And there is another fundamental factor of political order. Yesterday, the liquidation of the class party – the Communist International – by Stalinism and counter-revolution, and the seizure of the masses by left-wing parties, especially Stalinist parties, only served to accentuate their disorientation, the generalization of their defeat and the course towards war. Today, if there is still no class party – far from it – there are no left-wing bourgeois parties to which the working masses adhere en masse and behind which they mobilize. While the proletariat’s relationship with capital in 2025 may not look much better than it did in the 1930s, the dynamics of this relationship are not the same.

The way forward is resisting all attacks on living and working conditions, refusing all sacrifice in the name of defending the company and the country, breaking the isolation of struggles and seeking to extend them, as we said in the previous issue. Establishing a line of defense is essential to bring together the most combative and dynamic forces of the proletariat. These are the very ones who will offer the proletarian alternative to war and unite the less combative sectors and fractions in the struggle. This is the slogan – albeit a general one – that today’s communist vanguards, in the absence of a party, must make their own, defend, propagate and... apply – with more direct and concrete slogans – to immediate and local situations.