Comrades Redbeard and Toussaint

“If imperialist world war presents itself, first, we are opposed to it, second, we do not fear it as we center on revolution, third, to focus on revolution means to wage people’s war led by the proletariat through its Communist Parties, and fourth, this people’s war must be specified in each type of country according to the type of revolution.” – Chairman Gonzalo

The world’s attention rests on the Ukraine-Russia border where Russian junior imperialism and decrepit Yankee/NATO imperialism engage in yet another saber rattling contest. It should be noted that Yankee imperialism, which has proven both unwilling and unable to tend to the needs of its people in the midst of an inflationary crisis, a pandemic, and a coming recession, is more than able to deliver heaps of weapons and ammunition to Ukraine. Imperialism is a system of continuous and constant war in one part or another of the world to secure markets and as part of strategic plans centered around looting and destruction on behalf of monopoly capital. While revisionists stupidly come out in support of Russian imperialism because it is weaker, and bourgeois pacifists continue to sit on their rainbow clouds, Maoists must realize that as long as imperialism is allowed to exist and as long as there remain no revolutionary Communist Parties in the first world that truly fulfill the tasks set for the vanguard of the proletariat, imperialist wars will continue to destroy the people of the world.

Revisionists bellow endlessly about some hypothetical “World War III” in the future, much as Khrushchev joined the Americans in using blackmail and alarmism about nuclear war to attempt to undermine the struggle against modern revisionism and imperialism led by the anti-revisionist forces, of which the Communist Party of China stood at the forefront. Now that the proletarian revolutionary line has been temporarily defeated in China, leading to the ascendance of the bourgeoisie from within the Party as Mao and his comrades predicted, Communists must realize that there is no socialist bloc or actually existing socialism. Communist Parties taking Maoism as their weapon and guiding ideology must be formed and protracted people’s war, which is universally applicable, must be waged against imperialism in all countries. If a Party is not Maoist, it is a fake, rotten party, a toy party. Revisionists form “solidarity groups” with the imperialist regimes in China and Russia, claiming that they are combating Yankee imperialism, yet Yankee imperialism continues to ride roughshod all over the world, with the revisionists’ organizations serving as nothing as lobbyists, and poor examples of lobbyists as that, since they have no money to bribe bourgeois politicians with. Another way is possible and must be followed, that of organizing and training the most advanced from among the masses for the tasks ahead. In essence, more Maoist cadres and organizers must be built from among the workers, the students, and other progressive strata of society.

Will Russia launch a full invasion of Ukraine with the goal of conquest of its entire territory? Bourgeois military strategists, including Ukrainian ones, say no. Will there continue to be deaths, incursions, and other atrocities committed against the working class people of the region and world? Yes, because imperialism of all kinds still remains. As long as imperialism holds the world, people will die.

It’s telling that the countries that stand to lose the most in this crisis, Ukraine and Russia, are downplaying the risk of a shooting war, while the united states and the most feckless jellyfish in its imperialist entourage, Britain, are doing their best to whip up hysteria. They portray the crisis as one caused by ravenous, irrational, Nazi-like Russian aggression, with no word about the massive expansion of NATO towards Russia-in betrayal of the promises the united states made to the USSR and post-Soviet Russia in the 1990s.  As the talk of an “imminent” Russian offensive grows practically more unhinged by the day, the unnamed u.s. intelligence sources so beloved by the corporate press have fallen into cartoonishness, even going so far as to suggest that Russia was planning a video of a fake Ukrainian attack on Russian-speaking civilians, complete with crisis actors and corpses! This is too ridiculous even for a Call of Duty video game plot line. The major powers of Western imperialism, including France, Germany (a country highly dependent on Russian gas) and the Washington-London axis, have made little effort to hide their strategic divisions on the Ukraine crisis, with the former urging diplomacy and restraint while the latter try to have their cake and eat it too.

The tension between the united states and Ukrainian government is even more blatant. For example, the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, spoke with Joe Biden via phone on January 27, and during this call, Biden reportedly hyped the imminence of a Russian invasion, while Zelensky emphasized that the situation is dangerous but stable. Unnamed Ukrainian sources described the conversation as heated, but both administrations denied that characterization. Demonstrating the strength of Washington’s “friendship,” Biden also told Zelensky that the u.s. and NATO would not send any soldiers into Ukraine, or send the most advanced tools in its arsenal of death. The loyalty of the American imperialists ends where their skin begins! In press statements, Zelensky has publicly bristled at American fearmongering and recklessness, which are damaging the Ukrainian economy. To add to the contradictions, the Biden and Putin regimes support the Minsk II Agreement of 2015, while ultranationalist Ukrainian forces, who exercise little power in high office but all too much in the streets, violently oppose it. Moscow, for its part, continues its military buildup and chides the u.s. for ignoring its main security demands (primarily the removal of NATO forces from Eastern Europe and assurances that Ukraine and Georgia will never be invited into NATO), but proceeds with direct diplomacy with both Ukraine and its supposed guardian, the United States. Most recently, Putin and French president Emmanuel Macron have held lengthy discussions over the crisis.

Overestimating the rationality of the capitalist-imperialists East or West would be as much of a mistake as underestimating their stupidity and incompetence, especially during a bout of brinkmanship like this, but the possibility of de-escalation still exists. The Ukrainian and Russian proletarian masses have no desire or interest in war. They have lived under the sword for thousands of years, and have lost tens of millions of their countrymen and women in the 20th Century alone. There was a brief socialist respite with the liberation of the proletariat and peasant masses through their conquest of power and the founding of the very first socialist state, the USSR, but this project eventually was captured by the bourgeoisie from within in the Fifties, blundering through three more decades until finally collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions in 1991. The only ones who lust for war are the most reckless imperialists and outright fascists-the NATO expansionists who won’t be satisfied until u.s. missile batteries ring the suburbs of Moscow, the Ukrainian fascists and ultra-nationalists who wish to continue the brutal work of Third Reich collaborator Stephan Bandera, the weapons dealers Boeing and Raytheon, and others who live off other people’s blood. Other than the military-industrial complex, there seems to be little appetite within the global capitalist classes, let alone the national ones in Russia and Ukraine, for a more destructive conflict in the region. For example, one of the richest men in Ukraine, Dmytro Firtash, has published an article calling for his country to become a neutral “Switzerland of Eurasia.” 

Mao once wrote that we Communists “are advocates of the abolition of war, we do not war; but war can only be abolished through war, and in order to get rid of the gun it is necessary to take up the gun.”  The working people of the world want peace, but Lenin taught that the only cure for imperialist war is revolutionary war. Revolutionary war in this decade and this century means People’s War that sweeps the entire Earth, toppling the ruling class in country after country until Communism has unified the entire world. Only then will war cease, with the cessation of exploitation of human by human for immense riches concentrated in the hands of the few. The former Soviet Union, as we saw at the beginning of the year with the uprising in Kazakhstan, remains a hotbed. Putin himself has termed the collapse of the USSR “a geopolitical disaster”, with criminal elements tied to the old revisionist “communist” party apparatus becoming the ruling class. The wages of the revisionism and social imperialism of the old and dead USSR continue to be paid in the people’s blood. Undoubtedly, there will arise new, Maoist Communist Parties in this region to take up the tasks of the class, the primary one being the overthrow of the old state through revolutionary violence.