The World Divided in Four…
The zeitgeist of this moment is the division of the world between three great imperialist powers. The USA remains the hegemonic capitalist-imperialist superpower dominating global production and oppressing and exploiting the workers of the world, while the fascistic state-bourgeoisie and imperialist governments of Russia and phony-socialist/social-imperialist China race to catch up, biting off chunks of the world as their own semicolonies. China has been hard at work doing this in Africa; of late, though, the crisis that has really made the state of affairs clear is the inter-imperialist proxy conflict in Ukraine.
Russia and China, being respectively second- and third-place imperialist parasites, tend to either ignore or gently aid each other. The US, meanwhile, has an uneasy relationship with its two junior peers. Of course, in many cases the three are in easy cooperation; even the US needs Russian oil, for instance, and, as we are seeing now, when the inter-imperialist contradictions become inflamed between these three the proletariat suffer from the breaking-down of distribution of use values and the resultant escalations in scarcity and market-price for necessities. But the US bourgeoisie and their state and social order must maintain global cultural hegemony, and so even as in a sense the three powers support each other, the US bourgeois society’s cultural superstructure encourages insidious bigotry in its own masses against the masses of the two rivals. Thusly the working classes of the world are divided; the People of each imperialist power, its smaller imperialist allies (like Japan and Saudi Arabia, allied to the US), and its colonies and semicolonies are taught not to unify with their brethren internationally but instead to bow down to “their” parasites against the other powers and the fellow-masses who fall under those powers.
Anyway, let us return to Ukraine: a number of people have suggested that the reason the hordes of idiot bourgeois liberals care about Ukrainian casualties and refugees- when they care so little about the Yemenis, for instance- is that the Ukrainians are “white” Europeans. I think this is probably part of the truth. But the more significant issue is that, unlike any other war in the world at the moment, this war poses a real challenge to the hegemonic imperialist power of the US and its NATO and EU allies and semicolonies. In 2014, the fascist-led civil uprising known as the “Euromaidan” replaced Ukraine’s Russian comprador government with an EU/USA comprador government; Ukraine became an economic semicolony of these allied powers. This was a major encroachment of the US forces into the zone of the Russians, and Ukraine is tremendously important to the imperialist ambitions of the US and EU (hence the push to get it into the NATO league of US puppet states, which was a significant prologue to the present stage of the war in Ukraine).
Ukraine, whichever faction of imperialist bourgeoisie hold it, is of tremendous strategic significance. It is large, it is centrally located in Europe betwixt two zones of domination (US-EU and Russian imperialism), it is relatively rich in fisheries and natural gas. The US imperialists were eager to incorporate it into their NATO empire, and now the Russians want it for theirs. Thus we see, in US mass culture as manufactured under bourgeois rule, the surge in absurd anti-Russianism. Bars, we are told, are now foregoing alliteration in the name of performative wokeness: serving Kyiv Mules! No doubt this will soon put a stop to Putin! Yesterday I saw a feature on CNN trying on absurd and tenuous evidence to prove Vladimir Putin the wealthiest man in the world- obviously trying to redirect the American workers’ rage at the absurd decadence of their own exploiters toward the people of the enemy imperialist states. Of course, Putin is an exorbitantly wealthy capitalist, though far from the richest, and the Russian state is a terrible, violent, reactionary imperialist force. But all the same is true of our own oligarchs (a word curiously reserved for the Russian bourgeoisie, though it applies quite well to a man like our very own Richard Sackler); and, of course, such pathetic gestures as these will do nothing to Putin- all they will lead to is unjust animosity toward any Russian proletarians living in this country.
One is or course reminded of the cultural atmosphere in the last two years at the height of the Covid19 pandemic, with the most reactionary sections of the bourgeois media heaping all manner of slander on the Chinese, while the more “left” sections paid only pathetic lip service to their defense. “The Chinese,” they said, “are devious schemers! They grew this virus in their labs! They’re stupid, and their food is repulsive! It is because of their strange eating habits we are cursed with pestilence! They’re all collectivists; they have no individuality and all slave away for the schemes of Xi Jinping!” On and on and on; slander, slander, slander! Again: of course Xi Jinping and the reactionary Dengist Chinese government are duplicitous, evil, etc., but the attacks (rhetorical and physical) on Chinese-ness conceptually did nothing to them; all they did was further divide the working classes of the different countries against each other.
It can be seen clearly, then, in the bourgeois culture in which we live: the new paradigm of geopolitics emerging is the division of the world and its exploited workers and oppressed peoples between the three mightiest imperialist powers.
“But have you not mentioned the division of the world in four?” asks the astute reader; and she is right, I have. I will speak now of the fourth division.
The fourth division is made up of those areas of land, population, and production and political-economic life, small but surviving and growing in spite of state brutality, which are under the control of developing new democratic states, building towards socialism and the democratic class dictatorship of the proletariat: those places in the world where power is being conquered for the masses and working majority class through proletarian- and communist-led revolutionary protracted people’s war. It is made up also of that contingent of people, itself also growing as well as moving toward starting more revolutionary war efforts, who are in every country dedicated to establishing and fighting for revolutionary Marxist-Leninist-Maoist communist parties. In short, the fourth division is the International Communist Movement. We of the ICM in every country have a duty to fight against the division of the world between three imperialist powers, and for its unification under communism. Our position regarding the war in Ukraine and every other inter-imperialist war is to cheer on the destruction of every contesting imperialist power, to encourage the overthrow of the bourgeois state whether its figurehead is Biden or Trump, Putin or Navalny, Pushilin or Zelensky. Our position is that which Lenin advocated regarding the first world war and other such conflicts: for the transformation of every imperialist campaign waged between states into a civil war for the destruction of the imperialist and comprador-bureaucrat bourgeois states, and the construction of socialism!
