Turn the Escalation Toward
Fascism and World War into Advances for the Next
Proletarian Revolution
A Statement from the
Editorial Board of Railroad
April 2026
1. Features of the Present
Conjuncture1
The Editorial Board of
Railroad,
the theoretical organ of the (New) Communist Party of Canada, has
prepared this analysis and statement on the present conjuncture in
the world in the wake of the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran breaking out
into a full-blown regional war since February 28, 2026. Owing to the
rapidly developing nature of the war, this statement is less
concerned with capturing and analyzing every breaking development and
more focused on identifying and analyzing the contradictions in the
world that led to its breaking out, and how Communists must orient to
these contradictions.
We address this statement to
Communists and other revolutionaries, progressive people’s
movements and anyone with any conscience whatsoever in this Canadian
prison house of nations, in the seething, declining United States to
our south and across all the crisis-ridden imperialist countries.
Most especially, we address this statement to our comrades both here
in Canada and abroad and to the advanced masses across our country
who, we believe, can be organized and elevated—are
being organized and elevated—into
the revolutionary struggle for socialism.
As we were finalizing this
statement, the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran was entering its second
month. Yemen’s Houthis had entered the fight against the U.S. and
Israel, adding the Red Sea as yet another front to the expanding war.
Some 14 or 15 countries had already been pulled into the war, with
the main belligerents—the U.S.-Israeli alliance versus
Iran—seemingly locked into what military analysts call an
“escalation ladder.” There seems to be no clear or easy way out
for either side in the immediate moment, with both sides capable of a
lot more fighting and, therefore, with the potential for much greater
destruction and expansion of the war.
Starting February 28,
decapitation strikes launched against the Islamic Republic
assassinated Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and a number of other leading
figures in Iran’s political and military establishment. With this
first wave of strikes failing to cause the regime change or collapse
that the U.S. and Israel were hoping for, their war then expanded
into the all-out destruction of Iran’s infrastructure and the
collective punishment of its population. In the first month of the
war, this included (to name only a few): the destruction of major oil
depots in Tehran on March 7, a desalination facility on March 8, a
bombing raid on Kargh Island (which processes and exports some 90% of
Iran’s crude oil) on March 13, and the bombing of the South Pars
gas field (one of the largest natural gas fields in the world) on
March 18. As of March 21, just three weeks into the war, more than
80,000 civilian sites in Iran had been attacked, including 266
medical facilities and 498 schools.2
As of March 29, Iran’s Health Ministry reported that the civilian
death toll had reached 2,076, including 216 children, with another
26,500 people injured. The U.S. and Israel have openly discussed
dismembering, occupying and even using “tactical nuclear weapons”
against Iran. Three weeks into the war, Trump began threatening
Iran’s power-generating infrastructure, then paused his threats
while claiming that negotiations were ongoing—a fact flatly
rejected by Iran and ridiculed as the Trump regime “negotiating
with itself”—all this while the U.S. was moving thousands of
marines and other special operations forces into the region in what
many suspect to be preparations for some kind of ground invasion.
The
ruins of the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ school in Minab where over
175 people were killed, the vast majority of them children, after a
U.S. double-tap strike on the opening day of the war, February 28,
2026.
The current aerial and naval
war against Iran, of course, didn’t begin on February 28—it is
only the latest, most destructive and globally consequential stage of
the war on Iran. The current aggression was preceded by the wave of
terrorism unleashed by the American and Israeli intelligence
apparatuses in January 2026 amid mass protests in Iran.3
These protests were sparked by the ratcheted-up economic warfare
carried out by U.S. imperialism throughout 2025, which Treasury
Secretary Scott Bessent openly boasted about at the World Economic
Forum.4
And in June 2025, the U.S.-Israeli “Twelve-Day War” targeted
numerous Iranian military and civilian targets, supposedly
“annihilating,” according to Trump, Iran’s underground nuclear
program after the U.S. dropped three massive “bunker-buster”
bombs. Six months later, U.S. imperialism and the Zionist regime are
giving the same justifications for their war on Iran, arguing once
again that Iran’s nuclear capabilities must be eliminated.
Facing existential-level
destruction from U.S. imperialism and Zionist expansionism,
the Islamic
Republic in Iran has retaliated with everything it can throw at its
enemies in a steady barrage of asymmetrical counter-attacks, hitting
U.S. assets and Israeli and Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries’
facilities and infrastructure across the region. It is clear to
us—just as it is to many people in the world, despite the barrage
of imperialist propaganda—that Iran has consistently acted in
measured retaliation
so far, even while signalling and demonstrating that it is capable of
escalating much further if the present war crimes being executed by
the U.S. and Israel cross more lines. Iran’s missile system has
degraded and punctured its enemies’ interceptor systems repeatedly,
and embarrassingly, revealing that Iran is also capable of unleashing
existential damage to U.S. interests in the region, to Israel and to
the GCC countries.
To put it unequivocally, the
war against Iran by the U.S. and Israel is a war
of aggression. This
fact places Iran and the Axis of Resistance in a war (or wars) of
national liberation against imperialism and Zionist expansionism. At
the same time, behind the West Asian (or Middle Eastern) theatre of
war there is also the much greater power struggle between the
competing imperialist interests—namely the rival blocs led by the
U.S. versus China and Russia. While the present escalation certainly
threatens to spiral into an even greater global war, the principal
contradiction in
this moment is the
criminal war by U.S. imperialism and Zionist expansionism against the
oppressed countries and peoples of West Asia (namely, Iran, Lebanon,
Palestine, Yemen, Iraq and Syria).
We should offer a few remarks
to clarify why, at this moment, the principal contradiction is a war
of aggression against oppressed countries. During the development of
our thinking and writing this analysis, some of us saw in the present
escalation principally
the inter-imperialist contradiction at play in the world. Certainly,
the inter-imperialist contradiction is
fundamental to understanding global developments now—and even in
understanding this particular war. However, as we sharpened our view
in the course of writing and debating the rapidly unfolding events,
it has become clear to us that the main contradiction in this war
thus far is between the U.S. and Israel (a declining superpower and
its expansionist junior partner, respectively) on the one hand, and
Iran, an oppressed country, on the other hand. Russia and China have
so far not directly involved themselves in the fighting. Nor are they
supplying, aiding or backing Iran anywhere near as openly or directly
as the E.U., the U.S., and Canada have backed Ukraine in the war
against the Russian occupation. Iran is among the countries being
redivided
among the imperialist powers and is not itself fighting for the
redivision of the world as the imperialist powers are. This means
that Iran is, in this moment, fighting a national liberation war.
After years of preparation for such aggression, as well as resistance
to Israeli expansionism and U.S. imperialism across the region, Iran
has influenced many of the national-liberation forces of the region
and built out the Axis of Resistance with Islamist forces (though not
so much Marxist-Leninist and Maoist forces in the region).
Despite being an oppressed
country, its ideological influence and practical solidarity (with the
help of its oil revenues) have made Iran into a regional power in its
own right (not unlike Venezuela at the height of Bolivarianism
throughout Latin America). Iran, with its own national bourgeoisie,
has been asserting its independence and influence across the region
(again, like Venezuela5).
Iran certainly leans toward the China-Russia side of the
inter-imperialist contradiction, but to consider Iran a proxy
would be to gloss over the national-liberation struggles that have
been building up and boiling over across West Asia for many decades,
first in defence of Palestine, also as expressed in the
Arab-nationalist regimes of decades past, in the 1979 Iranian
revolution and then the rise of the popular-Islamic resistance
movements that followed it. It’s important to remember that the
Islamic turn of the national-liberation struggles of the region came
after the capitulation, collapse or failure of the more
secular-nationalist states and movements to adequately confront
imperialism and Zionism in the preceding decades—not to mention in
the wake of the retreat of the proletarian revolution on the world
scale from the late 1970s onward. In the vacuum left by the triumph
of revisionism and the defeat of real socialism and proletarian
internationalism in the world after 1976, the national resistance
movements of West Asia were reforged in an Islamic direction amid the
never-ending carnage of Zionism and U.S. imperialism across the
region.6
The most notable examples here pertain to Lebanon in the early 1980s
with the emergence of Hezbollah, and later the emergence of Hamas in
the years following the capitulation of the Palestine Liberation
Organization.
Fighters
of the al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas, who with the
Houthis of Yemen, Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Islamic Republic of
Iran, compose the anti-Zionist, anti-U.S. Axis of Resistance.
We say all this to bring out
the national-liberation
dimension to the
present war in West Asia, even as inter-imperialist rivalry is also
present and shaping developments within the war. The same can be said
about the kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and the
subsequent coercion of the Bolivarian Republic back into U.S.
imperialism’s geopolitical fold in January 2026.7
Venezuela’s Russian and Chinese backers did little to avoid losing
their influence over Venezuela, even though the kidnapping of Maduro
and subsequent coercion of the Bolivarian regime affected their
interests. In an even starker example, the war in Gaza is almost
purely a war of national liberation against U.S. imperialism and
Israeli colonial expansion. In this genocidal war of aggression, the
rival imperialist alliance of Russia-China has been wholly absent,
only sometimes intervening rhetorically at UN meetings.8
We underscore the primacy of the imperialism vs. oppressed country
nature of the war against Iran and the region more broadly precisely
because, across the whole world, inter-imperialist contradictions are
indeed intensifying, making it easy to conflate, confuse or collapse
the former contradictions into the latter. The analysis that follows
in this article attempts to sketch out that wider world of
inter-imperialist contradictions to help us understand the pivotal
role of the U.S.-Israeli war in Iran as imperialist powers jockey for
position and redivision of the world yet again.
Zooming out from the Persian
Gulf to take stock of the wider implications of the expanding war,
its shockwaves have already been felt across the world. For weeks,
global energy markets have been seized by the closing off of the
Strait of Hormuz to Western shipping and energy interests9
and by the destruction and damage inflicted to oil and gas
infrastructure across the region. The entry of the Houthis of Yemen
into the war in its second month gives the Axis of Resistance further
leverage to disrupt international shipping, energy markets and the
global economy. The ensuing energy crisis has already spiked fuel
prices, which is not soon expected to climb back down, with economic
analysts forecasting much greater inflation on the horizon as
fertilizer shortages spike global food costs. Rising costs of
production and critical shortages will also lead to economic
slowdowns, or shutdowns, while consumption will recede as inflation
rises, causing greater recession. This regional war has already
become a global crisis—one that U.S. imperialism and Zionist
expansionism bear full responsibility for.
The other NATO countries have
so far resisted getting pulled into the war directly,10
despite the pressure bearing down on them from without by U.S.
imperialism and from within as the deteriorating economic situations
in each of their countries are only made worse by the fallout of the
war. Most notably, Spain has denied the U.S. used of its airspace for
Iran war-related flights, and Italy denied the U.S. access to an air
base in Sicily. Beyond these examples, however, the ruling classes
and governments of the Western imperialist powers have been largely
running diplomatic cover for U.S. imperialism and Zionism while
parroting the U.S.-Israeli propaganda points, bolstering their own
repressive apparatuses as they stand by and watch Trump and
Netanyahu’s criminal war unfold.
At the centre of the world’s
destabilization is the coming to power of the fascistic Trump-MAGA
regime in January 2025, the exacerbation of deep contradictions
within American society and the strategic decline of U.S.
imperialism. As we will further discuss below, the second Trump
administration has pushed the U.S. state toward fascism, even as its
hold over executive power is unstable. While the Trump-MAGA regime
has largely subordinated the liberal bourgeoisie and its power
centres (Democratic Party, non-MAGA sections of the bourgeois press,
academic institutions, etc.) over the past year, it has neither
completely defeated its liberal opposition nor been able to withstand
acute popular resistance, as demonstrated by the people of
Minneapolis in early 2026 when they beat back ICE in their city. The
domestic situation in the U.S. has worsened by every conceivable
measure, contradicting all of Trump’s “American First” promises
(with the only exception being Trump’s mass deportation agenda),
while the war in Iran also marks a sharp break from Trump’s
campaign promise of never starting another “forever war,”
especially in the Middle East. Finally, the release of the Epstein
files (however partial and limited) has further divided Trump’s
base, since the MAGA movement, once so agitated and mobilized by
QAnon conspiracy theories, has been forced to confront the fact that
their redeemer, Donald J. Trump, was embedded in the highest echelons
of Epstein’s associates and their repugnant child abuse,
trafficking and pedophilia cult. The liberal bourgeoisie currently
hopes that the chaos and disorder of the Trump-MAGA regime will lead
to Trump losing control of the Congress and the Senate in the midterm
elections at the end of 2026. But with signs that the midterm
elections could be rigged or compromised in any number of ways to
keep Trump and MAGA firmly in power, it’s anyone’s guess whether
the liberal bourgeoisie and Trump’s other opponents will resist
further assaults on the U.S.’s domestic constitutional order by the
Trump-MAGA regime.
These breakneck developments
on the domestic front in the U.S. have been matched by the
unprecedented moves by the Trump regime to go rogue with U.S.
imperialism at the international level, unilaterally destabilizing
the capitalist-imperialist world order that the U.S. spent the
previous eight decades meticulously constructing and imposing since
the end of World War II. The present international order has seen
U.S. imperialism’s relative position slip in recent decades from
unmatched hegemon to a crisis-ridden superpower that can no longer
impose its will even against middle powers (let alone major powers).
In its desperate attempt to slow, halt or reverse the relative
strategic decline of U.S. imperialism, the Trump-MAGA regime, with
its proclamation of the “Donroe Doctrine,” has inaugurated a new
phase of open reconquest and redivision of the world, with Venezuela
and Iran only the latest targets, and Cuba being choked off (causing
immense suffering for the people of the island nation), while a
number of other countries face similar threats of aggression.
Evidently, the era of colonialism is not over.
The greatest danger
immediately ahead seems to lie in the U.S.-Israeli alliance’s push
for even greater escalation in the face of an intractable Iranian
resistance, supported and aided to some extent by its allies in the
Axis of Resistance. Trump’s 15 points for Iran’s capitulation
issued in the last week of March 2026 stood light-years apart from
the maximalist demands that Iran set out in the opening weeks of the
war, which included the complete lifting of U.S. sanctions on Iran,
withdrawal of U.S. troops from Arab nations, the dismantling of
Israel’s nuclear weapons, full withdrawal of Israel from Gaza, the
West Bank, the Golan Heights and Shebaa Farms and Netanyahu standing
trial for war crimes and genocide. The U.S. and Israel have no easy
diplomatic means for retreat, while the crises on their domestic
fronts that both Trump and Netanyahu face make it difficult for
either of them to walk back from the present war. Despite the
inconceivable destruction already levelled at it, Iran hasn’t
appeared anywhere near ready to capitulate (all the while trolling
Trump and Netanyahu with Lego mini-fig diss tracks). Any level of
defeat, or incredulously declared “victory,” in the Iran war will
only deepen the domestic crises in the U.S. (and Israel).
From our vantage point in
Canada over the past month, it has seemed to some of us as though,
metaphorically speaking, we’ve been standing on a coastline in the
minutes preceding a tsunami. These minutes may end up lasting days,
months, perhaps even a few more years before the monstrous waves
begin to crash, given the syncopated rhythm of imperialism (because,
as Lenin put it, these are the “weeks where decades happen”). So
rapid have the developments at the international level been over the
past year that it is widely, casually debated today—not only among
Communists, but also among the masses—whether we are on the brink
of World War Three, are now entering it, or have already been trapped
within it for the past few years.
The world is plagued by
capitalist crises that the bourgeoisie is incapable of resolving to
the satisfaction of the broad masses and has thus turned toward
fascism—that supremely nihilistic ideological deformation that
provides cover for imperialist war, pits the masses against one
another and holds out grotesque promises and false solutions to the
crises of capitalism—to manage and safeguard its power. The
ideological and political degeneration of the masses under the
influence of fascism further ups the urgency for Communists to seize
the moment with heightened class struggle, internationalism and
programs for revolution that can give the masses a historical
off-ramp from the future of imperialist war and fascism that the
present world order guarantees. To be sure, however, to tens and
hundreds of millions of people across the world—in Gaza, Iran,
Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Ukraine, Pakistan, Afghanistan, numerous
fronts in Africa and many other parts of the world—the waves of
inter-imperialist rivalry and imperialist aggression have already
been crashing down upon their societies. Yet, at the same time, out
of apparent sight, along the shifting tectonic plates of
inter-imperialist contradictions, even greater pressure mounts and
greater geopolitical earthquakes loom, as the global situation
deteriorates further.
The
aftermath of Israeli airstrikes on the Dahiyeh neighbourhood in
southern Beirut in October 2024, which has been attacked again, along
with numerous other sites in Lebanon, since the onset of the
U.S.-Israeli war on Iran and the subsequent war of aggression against
Lebanon by Israel. Since March 2, 2026, more than 1.2 million people
have been displaced and 2,000 have been killed in Lebanon alone.
However things unfold in the
war against Iran in the coming weeks or months, we must be clear
about these deeper contradictions and crises that wrack the
capitalist-imperialist world system today, so we can remould
ourselves for the gargantuan tasks ahead of us and so that our
agitation and propaganda among the masses, not to mention our
practical programs for class struggle, are correctly oriented to the
profound crises and revolutionary possibilities that are coming (or
are already here). The masses are clamouring to understand the world
today, and we Communists cannot lag behind.
In the sections that follow,
we consider the escalating war in West Asia in terms of the broader
conjuncture in which we are situated by taking stock of the cascading
crises and contradictions developing across the world. We identify
the deeper, protracted crisis (or crises) of capital accumulation by
looking at fundamental changes that have taken place in the postwar
era when U.S. imperialism first established its hegemony over the
capitalist world and explore some of the major political-economic
changes from the 1970s onward.
With a clearer view to the
crises and contradictions shaping the present world, we bring our
analysis back to Canada, which is currently contending with an
exceptional combination of internal and external challenges. Canada
faces not one but two secessionist movements, direct threats from
U.S. imperialism, a looming global recession (or depression) and Mark
Carney’s Liberal government dragging the country down the road of
militarism and corporatism. Once we map the current terrain upon
which we are taking steps in advancing the proletarian revolution, we
conclude by reaffirming the revolutionary tasks that befall us, which
the Political Program of the (N)CPC laid out in 2023.
This analysis of the current
conjuncture is, like all scientific endeavours, a work in progress.
We welcome sincere engagement and critical feedback from all
comrades, supporters and friends of the (N)CPC, our journal, Railroad
and the
international proletarian revolution.
2. The Escalation of the
Crisis at all Levels
The Political Program of
the (New) Communist Party of Canada
identifies three major contradictions in the world today: first,
among the imperialists; second, between the imperialists and
dominated countries; and third, between the bourgeoisie and the
proletariat. A fourth potential and also former contradiction between
socialism and capitalism ceases to exist in the world today, but when
this contradiction did exist for the better half of the twentieth
century (1917–1976), as the international proletarian revolution
was advancing, it was central to world developments and held out the
ultimate possibility of defeating the imperialist powers, ending
colonialism and beating back the bourgeoisie once and for all. In
other words, the advance of the international proletarian revolution
once carried the possibility, and certainly the objective, of
bringing about a permanent resolution to the above-named major
contradictions in the world. However, since the defeat and retreat of
the international proletarian revolution from 1976 onward, and the
disappearance of the contradiction between socialism and capitalism
on the world scale, the three other major contradictions in the world
have only intensified, bringing the world, once again, to the brink
of another world war and with fascism taking root or taking power in
more countries. From Gaza to Venezuela, Cuba, Iran and Lebanon,
brazen colonial oppression and conquest have returned to the scene of
history with a vengeance. The major imperialist powers are
manoeuvring against one another with increasing strife to maintain or
advance their positions in a fractious world order, especially at the
initiative of U.S. imperialism. Whereas two generations ago the
Western bourgeoisie was celebrating the victory of liberal democracy
and capitalism in the Cold War as the “end of history,” 35 years
later the capitalist-imperialist world is going up in flames once
again.
To understand how the present
war on Iran and the global energy and economic crises it is
precipitating are bringing all the major contradictions in the world
to a head, we must establish a longer view concerning the development
of these contradictions. However the war against Iran unfolds or
resolves in the coming weeks or months, the contradictions animating
this war will not soon subside.
2.1 From
the advancing international proletarian revolution to new imperialist
wars of redivision
In the eight decades since the
end of World War II, U.S. imperialism has been the ringleader of the
capitalist-imperialist world system. In the immediate postwar
decades, U.S. imperialism had to contend with the formidable threat
of the rising socialist bloc that was forged out of the two world
wars, and it did so in part through the development of a new
geopolitical infrastructure. The U.S.-designed and imposed postwar
global order—or the liberal “rules-based international order,”
structured around the United Nations—was a Cold-War creation
intended to moderate the rivalry between the capitalist-imperialist
and socialist powers, especially in the age of nuclear warfare. But
this U.S.-led international architecture changed, and adapted to the
changes unfolding within, the socialist countries.
We understand, like all
anti-revisionist Communists, that counter-revolutions took place in
the Soviet Union from 1953 to 1956 and after 1976 in China that
overthrew the proletarian-socialist states that preceded them. These
counter-revolutions occurred in and through the Communist Parties of
these countries, nominally the same parties that had led the greatest
revolutions in human history. Maoist-Communists specifically
understand these counter-revolutions to have emerged out of real
class struggle in those Communist Parties and in those societies,
class struggles that, by one means or another, ultimately saw the
reconquest of power by new bourgeoisies from within these socialist
societies. By contrast, the competing and more hegemonic narrative
held by bourgeois propagandists and revisionist-“Communists”
alike is that socialism survived in the Soviet Union right up until
its collapse in 1991 and survives to this day, or is presently still
under construction, in China. These revisionist accounts utterly
obscure not only how a new class of capitalist oligarchs and
billionaires reemerged within, and now rein, in China, Russia and the
rest of the formerly Soviet countries, but also how the formerly
(truly) socialist bloc was dragged back into the
capitalist-imperialist world system. The implications of this
bourgeois obfuscation are numerous—topmost among them is the
mystification of the contradictions playing out in the world today.
To counter the prevalent and ultimately false narratives of this or
that great power fighting this or that “authoritarianism” of its
rivals, we need to delve back into this history to reveal the true
inter-imperialist nature of these contradictions. While this
historical accounting may be familiar to Maoists and other
anti-revisionist Communists, the hegemony of the bourgeois and
revisionist narratives concerning this history makes this a matter of
great confusion. It is far from clear in the minds of most of the
masses and thus it bears restating here.
When they were still ruled by
dictatorships of the proletariat, the Soviet Union and China
industrialized largely of their own accord and were pushed to build
out their own international order, in part by design and in part by
the sieges, subversion, embargoes and extreme opposition maintained
by the imperialist countries against them. It is a world-historic
accomplishment that the international proletarian revolution
succeeded in the period between 1917 and 1976 in taking, advancing
and holding on to industrial power that, at times, rivalled that of
the capitalist-imperialist powers while providing rapidly rising
qualities of life to the broad masses of people (and with none of the
industrial and colonial forms of slavery or subjugation
characteristic of capitalist development). Between 1917 and the early
1950s, the international proletarian revolution advanced arduously
through a world in turmoil and war. The socialist bloc of humanity
that was consolidated out of the ashes of two world wars and a number
of other imperialist wars of aggression set an example for and
inspired the more populous section of humanity that remained under
the boot of capitalism-imperialism in the dominated and colonial
countries. Many Communist Parties of the world and the anti-colonial
national liberation movements they led, supported or allied with
demonstrated in real time that socialism was the
alternative to capitalism-imperialism, creating openings for further
sections of humanity to make their break from capitalist and colonial
domination.
But in a tragedy of the
grandest historical proportions, the socialist bloc was unable to
fully consolidate itself before counter-revolution pulled one of the
major socialist powers, the Soviet Union, off the road of proletarian
internationalism (under Khrushchev, between 1953-6). This reversal of
the revolutionary tide in the Soviet Union became the basis for the
“Sino-Soviet split” that followed it. Revolutionary China under
Mao’s leadership was forced to stand alone, face threats from the
new social imperialism of the Soviet Union and undertake its
industrialization strictly endogenously with little help from abroad.
Yet, socialist China advanced anyway, despite the various imperialist
forces stacked against it. China’s construction of socialism not
only proceeded at a pace and scale matching developments in the
Soviet Union a generation earlier, but it did so while applying key
lessons gleaned from studying Soviet socialist development and its
shortcomings. Key among these lessons was that the revolutionary
process under socialism must aim not
only to advance
the forces of
production, but to
also, more importantly, transform and revolutionize the relations
of production in
the process (i.e., to overthrow bourgeois class relations during
socialist construction, rather than re-engender them).
A
scene of workers at a generator factory in China during the Great
Proletarian Cultural Revolution, taken from the documentary How
Yukong Moved the Mountains, which provides documentary evidence for
what it meant to revolutionize the relations of production while
building socialism.
What it meant when new
bourgeoisies emerged or took power from within the socialist
countries is that the relations of production were diverted sharply
back in the direction of capitalist relations of production, first by
allowing bureaucratic-capitalist managerial power to overtake the
narrowing divide between mental and manual labour, and later and more
openly in the form of the direct private ownership of the means of
production.11
The counter-revolutionary
overthrow of the dictatorships of the proletariat within
each of these great socialist powers were naturally expressed, later,
in the transformation of the external
relations of these countries across the now qualitatively transformed
“socialist bloc.” Mao criticized the Soviet Union from Khrushchev
onward as practising “social imperialism,” which was a new kind
of imperialism emerging out of the new kind of ruling class (but
still capitalist in essence) that had seized power in the Soviet
Union in 1953. While the bourgeois propagandists and
revisionist-Marxist trends would have us believe that socialism
remained standing until the dramatic disintegration of the Soviet
Union decades later in 1991, or that it continues on today in China,
these bourgeois
historical accounts obscure the decades-long, continuously advancing
processes that brought new bourgeoisies to power in both the Soviet
Union (and later Russia) and China starting from those fateful years
of counter-revolution. If we fail to understand this, then we fail to
apprehend the emerging capitalist markets, monopolies and, later,
inter-imperialist forms of competition, that emerged in the world
since the overthrow of genuine socialism.
While bourgeois historians
mark the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991 as the ultimate
and official end of socialism, this revisionist historiography
obscures how this moment in history merely represents the dramatic
division of the spoils among the then-disintegrating Soviet
bourgeoisie, a bourgeoisie that had been consolidating its capitalist
class position over the course of decades preceding that moment.
After the fall of the Soviet Union, this is how the Russian
Federation became a new kind of hegemon among the formerly
socialist-bloc countries, the sum of which were all more or less
ruled by their own post-Soviet capitalist
oligarchies.
China’s re-entry into the
capitalist-imperialist system came about through a distinct sequence
of events, but no less to the interest of the capitalist-billionaire
class of that country as well as of capitalist-imperialists the world
over. Instead of disintegrating the Communist Party after the
bourgeoisie came to power in China, the bourgeoisie continued to work
through
the Communist Party, rendering it into a formidable command structure
that unified its class interests, facilitated China’s integration
into the capitalist-imperialist system on the best possible terms
(for China’s bourgeoisie, that is) and resubordinated the Chinese
proletariat after the Cultural Revolution and the death of Mao Zedong
in 1976. The new bourgeoisie under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping
exploited the enormous prestige of the Communist Party in China to
keep its hold on power and a lid on the new social contradictions
that were sure to emerge on the capitalist road of development.
Over the past half-century,
1976–2026, the Communist Party of China, from Deng Xiaoping to Xi
Jinping, has been a Communist Party in name only—one that fears and
loathes the Cultural Revolution and reviles everything Mao Zedong and
the CCP under his leadership stood for and much of what the masses in
China had spent the previous half-century fighting for.
Incredibly—and to the great confusion of the masses of people
across the world who have not been exposed to the real nature of
these historical developments and have instead been bombarded with
the bourgeois and revisionist accounts—China’s “Communist
Party” has overseen the development of a capitalist
superpower that
has been displacing and impeding U.S. imperialism’s preeminence in
the world for the past two decades.
You
know the capitalist-imperialist world system is in serious crisis
when Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin are the (sane) adults in the room.
Stepping back now from the
counter-revolutions in the Soviet Union and China which overthrew
socialism and ultimately gave rise to new capitalist-imperialist
powers: amid these tragic reversals for the international proletarian
revolution, the “Third World” of newly independent and formerly
colonized countries were decisively coerced back into the
exploitative fold of capitalist international relations. This did not
happen all at once, however, but step by step. In those places, where
the proletarian revolutionary struggles or popular anti-colonial
movements were strong enough to push back against imperialism to some
extent, and where some degree of independence from the dictates or
designs of U.S. imperialism was achieved, it would take new coups,
counter-revolutions or wars of aggression for the imperialists to
reclaim control. West Asia and North Africa provide pertinent cases
in point for our analysis here.
Nationalist anti-U.S. and
anti-Zionist regimes claimed power for varying lengths of time,
sometimes decades, in Algeria, Libya, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Yemen and
also Iran after the 1979 overthrow of the Anglo-American
imperialist-installed and -backed Shah monarchist regime. Many
decades of imperialist wars, proxy conflicts and regime-change
operations later, and Iran and Yemen are the only remaining
anti-U.S., anti-Zionist countries to have survived in the region. In
Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Morocco, U.S.- and Zionist-friendly
monarchies have ruled for decades, while the Gulf States have arisen
as vassals to Anglo-American imperialism and get by as oil and gas
rentier states playing host to U.S. military installations and living
off the labour of the millions of Asian and African migrant workers
who have few rights in those countries. Outside small oases of
Western-imperialist settlement (Israel) and vassalage (the GCC,
Jordan, Morocco), the Arab and West Asian world has been under a
constant state of siege and occupation for the last half-century.
Amid this, Iran has emerged as the only remaining major stronghold of
opposition to U.S. imperialism and Zionism in the region, making it a
beacon for resistance to the U.S. and Israel and thus shaping the
character of the national-resistance movements of the region.
Now, with their latest war,
the U.S. and Israel are making a major power play to remove Iran,
their biggest obstacle to dominating West Asia.12
But this war is proving to be a fool’s errand of world-historic
proportions for U.S. imperialism and Zionism. From the genocidal
destruction of Gaza to the siege on Lebanon and now the war in Iran,
the masses of the region, and the people of the world, will not soon
forget the crimes of U.S. imperialism and Zionism. The future of tens
of millions of people ravaged by the U.S.-Israeli aggression hang in
the balance. So too does the fate of the U.S.-led world order that is
so evidently in crisis today. The outcome of this war could be a
turning point in the development of both U.S. imperialism and Israel.
Certainly, this outcome will shape the near-future of the fascist
Trump and Netanyahu administrations. Significant proportions of
American and Israeli society, not to mention the rest of the world,
can also see the insanity of this war. The world is being locked into
the vice grips of global energy and economic crises. If we are to
grasp the full range of contradictions behind this war and how things
have come to the point of such explosive developments, we require a
deeper analysis of the material underpinnings that form the basis for
the inter-imperialist rivalries and contradictions in the world
today. These economic underpinnings are the competing blocs of
monopoly-capitalist powers in the world, which have developed to the
point where the market competition among them is being overtaken by
shooting and killing and destroying whole countries to conquer new
markets. This surfeit of profit-chasing, warmongering ruling classes
is just another expression of the overaccumulation of capital on a
world scale, to which we now turn our attention.
2.2 The reemerging
capitalist crisis of overaccumulation
After 25 years of postwar boom
and economic stability, driven by Keynesian monetary policies that
financed public and private spending through debt, by the early 1970s
the U.S. economy entered a period of economic slowdown that saw both
a rise in unemployment and inflation. The cost of the Vietnam War, a
fairly extensive social welfare system, relatively intact wages and
job protections secured by unions and the labour movement (for
certain segments of the population, at least, but a considerable part
nonetheless), coupled with increased global competition from other
imperialist countries, resulted in economic stagnation and rising
interest rates. As the rate of profit fell across productive sectors,
including construction, chemical production, oil refining, and
manufacturing (specifically in steel and other metals, heavy
equipment, the automotive industry, and the manufacturing of
appliances) capitalists were investing less and less in the
productive forces, which led to even further economic slowdown and
stagnating job growth.13
Combined, these conditions
created what bourgeois economists termed stagflation.
We believe,
however, this is best understood as a crisis
of the overaccumulation of capital.
By the 1970s, economic stagnation was characterized by an abundance
of uncirculating, uninvested capital that coexisted with high
unemployment, high interest rates, rising debt (consumer and
industrial) and a falling rate of profit in core productive sectors,
all of which compelled capitalists to withhold further investment in
the productive forces, further exacerbating economic slowdown. The
GDP in the U.S. contracted by -0.7% in 1970 and reached –3.1% by
1975, while unemployment rose to nearly 5% in 1970, hit 8.2% in 1975
and stayed high throughout the decade. Inflation hovered around 5%
through the 1970s as well. Unlike cyclical economic downturns, the
“stagflation” of the 1970s was paradoxical, seemingly defying the
rules of the capitalist marketplace. This was a crisis characterized
by too much capital and
too much labour at the same time, which should have combined to
produce further economic growth, but instead caused a prolonged arc
of declining economic growth in core productive sectors. The previous
major period of the crisis of overaccumulation of capital, the Great
Depression, “solved” the problem with the market crashing
cataclysmically, delivering widespread loss of capital, industrial
shutdowns, skyrocketing unemployment and a defaulting banking system,
which resulted in tremendously deleterious social consequences.
Clearly, the Great Depression was not a socially conscious solution
to the problem. So the sluggish economic situation in the U.S. in the
early 1970s was a serious problem.
The Nixon government responded
to these challenges with innovations. First, in 1971 Richard Nixon
took the U.S. dollar off the gold standard, which ended, in practice,
the Bretton Woods system devised at the end of World War Two that had
guaranteed world currencies’ convertibility to the U.S. dollar,
with the dollar’s value itself backed by gold at $35 per ounce. For
the previous quarter-century, the regulation of the global financial
system through the Bretton Woods system, the International Monetary
Fund and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Redevelopment
(the early precursor to the World Bank) allowed for, by current
standards, a fairly regulated global market with stable currency
exchange rates and controlled inflation, conditions that facilitated
both the reconstruction necessary after the devastation delivered by
World War II and the United States’ aggressive rise to global
economic dominance.14
The post-Bretton Woods system, on the other hand, opened the way for
fiat currencies whose value floated in relation to one another.
Then, rather brilliantly from
the perspective of U.S. hegemony, in 1973 Nixon made a pact with
Saudi Arabia to price its oil exports exclusively in U.S. dollars,
paving the way for the U.S. dollar to become the “Petrodollar,”
the key token of transaction in the world economy. The USD became the
world’s de facto
reserve currency.
U.S.
President Richard Nixon shakes hands with King Faisal in Riyadh,
Saudi Arabia on June 15, 1974, as war criminal and U.S. Secretary of
State Henry Kissinger looks on from the centre-background. Kissinger,
who met with King Faisal six months earlier also in Riyadh, was
instrumental to the U.S.-Saudi pact that formed the basis for the
Petrodollar system in the wake of the October 1973 Arab-Israeli War
and the global energy crisis that followed it.
This created the impetus for
the Federal Reserve to print more U.S. currency, since countries that
depended on Saudi Arabia’s oil exports needed the dollar to make
their purchase. Even while the U.S. faced increased competition from
German and Japanese industry, the sustained demand for U.S. dollars
propelled the U.S. economy forward. In exchange for trading in U.S.
dollars, Saudi Arabia received guaranteed military support and
defence from the U.S., solidifying, next to Israel, the
longest-running U.S. collaboration in the region. Since the U.S.
dollar no longer had to be convertible into gold after 1971, the U.S.
could print money essentially on demand. The only threat to this
system, as later decades would reveal, would be other oil-producing
powers who chose to exercise some independence and denominate their
oil sales outside the Petrodollar system. Iraq, Libya, Venezuela and
now Iran have all faced the wrath of U.S. imperialism for not playing
by the rules of this hegemonic setup.
With the development of
capitalism in China and its manufacturing sector becoming the
“factory of the world” in the 1990s–2010s, China accumulated
enormous sums of U.S. treasury bills, giving it increasing leverage
with the U.S. in the otherwise U.S.-dominated global financial
system. Over this same period of time, the restoration of capitalism
in the former Soviet Union, and specifically in Russia, brought
forward one of the world’s energy superpowers. The development of
capitalism in Russia and China has created new poles of trade and
transaction, which pose a major threat to U.S. hegemony. This is the
monopoly and financial capitalist backdrop to the economic and
military war playing out around the Strait of Hormuz, and why Iran
has been letting through shipping denominated in Chinese yuan
and blocking all capital connected to the U.S.-led global financial
and economic systems. This is what has driven the U.S. to, by
mid-April, threaten and begin a naval blockade around Iran’s
blockade. Behind the economic and energy crises, which seem
unavoidable now in the coming weeks and months, there lies the ruling
financial interests at the core of U.S. imperialism.
The U.S.-Saudi pact and the
origin of the Petrodollar are also a major part of the story of the
financialization of the global economy under U.S. supremacy through
“neoliberal globalization.” As the USD became the world’s
reserve currency, countries held more and more U.S. dollars and
invested those back into U.S. financial markets. One of the main
features of the re-subjugation of the newly independent countries was
the use of debt and international finance to impose conditions on the
dominated countries that facilitated unequal trade agreements, the
offshoring of production, the globalization of the proletariat and
all manner of war and plunder against the oppressed countries. Dizzy
with the profits reaped by expanding and deepening the exploitation
of the international working class through newly globalized
production chains and all the other plunder of the oppressed
countries, monopoly-finance capitalists amassed gargantuan sums of
wealth. This surplus of capital in the imperialist countries required
(and requires) new ways for money to make money, especially when the
other ways have become saturated, monopolized markets. New forms of
rent-extraction, and a higher degree of parasitism by the ruling
class, is the only way forward for monopoly-finance capital. These
are the class relations that constitute the great immiseration
unfolding across much of humanity in this historical period.
A key thing to highlight here
is that a crisis of capitalist overaccumulation was already becoming
a problem with the reemergence of Japan and Germany as industrial
competitors (in the form of excess productive capacity in the world
and growing international competition). The Petrodollar system
offered a financial way forward for U.S. imperialism that maintained
its hegemonic position amid the concrete forms of overaccumulation
that were manifesting by the early 1970s. What is known as
“neoliberal globalization” in the academic literature and
practically understood now by most mainstream commentators, was the
set of policy shifts and reorientations taken up U.S. imperialism,
the Anglo-American imperialist alliance and their junior partners,
other allies and vassals. Privatization, lowering corporate taxes,
financial deregulation, the explosion of real estate, insurance and
other exotic forms of finance, the explosion of public and private
debt, gutting of public spending, the imposition of austerity on the
people—it all amounts to a one-sided class struggle, which the
masses in many of the imperialist countries have been subjected to
over the past forty years, since the collapse or retreat of their
revolutionary vanguards and the retreat of the international
proletarian revolution on an international scale.
It’s remarkable that this
latest major outbreak of war is centred on a part of the world, West
Asia, that was as much centre stage in the 1970s as U.S. imperialism
was reconstituting its hegemony in the world. As we have seen,
deepening its hold on the region came via its pact with the Saudis,
backing the Zionist colonial expansion, beating back pan-Arab
nationalism, which was dealt a major blow with, first, Sadat in
Egypt, later with the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, and most
recently with the overthrow of Assad in Syria and the coming to power
of former al-Qaida and ISIS leader al-Julani (Ahmed Hussein
al-Sharaa). U.S. imperialism and Zionism have anchored their power
across the region through genocidal colonization and ruthless
military attacks. The defeat of pan-Arabism and secular-nationalist
trend unfolded, it should be noted, alongside the
counter-revolutionary wave rolling out across the transitioning
socialist bloc. The cost of U.S. imperialism’s unfolding presence
in the region and Israel’s fascist colonization of surrounding
peoples and lands has victimized and displaced tens
of millions of people,
and killed no less than many millions. Naturally, this violence and
colonial subjugation has cultivated a near-universal opposition among
the people of West Asia. In this historical period, the Axis of
Resistance has captured and mobilized that opposition. This has been
the concrete form taken by anti-imperialism in West Asia amid the
retreat, and containment to a few pockets, of the international
proletarian revolution across the region (namely, parts of Palestine
and Turkey and Kurdistan).
An
image of the comrades of the Communist Party of
Turkey-Marxist-Leninist (Türkiye Komünist
Partisi-Marksist-Leninist, TKP-ML) from their Second Congress in the
summer of 2024, one among a number of the armed-Communist forces in
Turkey-Kurdistan and West Asia.
It’s painful to imagine the
world that was lost or within reach of the international proletariat
just a decade or two prior, between the 1950s–60s. It was a great
fortune to U.S. imperialism in the 1970s that China underwent
counter-revolution and that the dictatorship of the proletariat was
overthrown, when just a few years prior, when Mao Zedong was still a
leading influence in the party and the Cultural Revolution in China
was going strong, Chinese revolutionaries celebrated and pledged
their support for Black-revolutionary and anti-imperialist forces in
the U.S., and vice versa. The oppressed world combined with a huge
swathe of the younger generations in the imperialist countries to
hail Vietnamese guerrillas dealing blows to U.S. imperialism and the
advancing proletarian revolution in China. The legitimacy of the
Soviet Union waned amid growing anti-revisionist Marxist-Leninist
movements that were at the forefront of the next revolutionary tide
and rejected the reactionary developments in the Soviet Union. And
then, with the counter-revolution in China, by the mid-1970s,
two-thirds of the world’s population were being thrown back into
the world market to be feasted on by the imperialists once again
(again, not all at once, but with the flow starting to move
decisively back in a direction favourable to imperialism). This meant
new opportunities for U.S. capital (and that of its allies) to
penetrate, first, the newly independent countries, and eventually the
formerly Soviet and Chinese markets. The bourgeoisies, new and old,
in these contested markets welcomed this new era of “peaceful
coexistence” with the U.S.-led imperialists. For some time, between
the 1980s–2000s, the imperialists feasted together. But in the
medium-to-longer term, U.S. imperialism would reach strict limits in
these new markets, faced by other imperialist powers grounded in
their own specific monopoly-capitalist, ruling-class
structures—especially, Russia and China. Granted, Russia and China
have enormous distinctions between each other’s forms of
imperialist power, just as they each have their distinctions from how
U.S. imperialism has operated in the world since the 1970s. To
understand the great inter-imperialist conflagration that has been
developing in the world for some years now is to understand how these
distinct capitalist-imperialist powers are colliding with one another
in the present international political and economic system.
2.3 From
the defeat of the international proletarian revolution to the crisis
(or crises) of overaccumulation in the imperialist countries
Moving on to the home fronts
of the imperialist countries, the defeat of real socialism in the
world allowed the capitalist-imperialists to lay siege to the postwar
social contract. The neoliberal consensus overtaking ruling-class
circles across the Anglo-American imperialist countries (AAIA) from
the 1980s blazed the way in this siege, with most other countries of
the world allied with them. This many-sided offensive by capital
included attacks on organized labour, the restructuring and
deregulation of work for the globalizing world (which implied global
wage-scaling) forced migration by various imperialist machinations,
the globalization of production, the shifting of the tax burden onto
the popular classes, with deep tax cuts for the rich, the explosion
of public and private debt, the privatization of public goods and
services, and laying siege to any and all others aspect of the
postwar consensus of Keynesianism and (supposed) class peace. With
the international proletarian revolution beat back, it was the
letting loose of the complete domination of capital. In the
imperialist countries, these transformations have squeezed the
working class in a vice grip that has only continued to tighten over
the past 40 or more years.
The
leading figures who inaugurated the now widely disgraced, discredited
and repudiated neoliberal era—AAIA heads of state for the U.S., the
U.K. and Canada, Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and Brian
Mulroney—after meeting each other on June 20, 1988.
By the 1990s, globalization
was in full swing, seeing the establishment of the World Trade
Organization, the European Economic Area single market, the
introduction of the Euro, and the North American Free Trade Agreement
(NAFTA) between the U.S., Canada and Mexico, among a slew of other
free-trade agreements across the world. Meanwhile, the privatization
of housing, health care and education in the imperialist countries
wrested open new markets for the investment of capital and the
realization of new financial profits.
As neoliberal attacks on
labour pinched the working class and as opportunities for the lower
sections of the petty bourgeoisie narrowed, the masses became more
reliant on debt to make up the gap, with wages less and less able to
cover the costs of the reproduction for the working class.
Single-earner family households, over the decades, were necessarily
replaced by households with two or more income earners just to keep
up, placing increasing strain on working-class families and
individuals. Over time, the dream of owning and paying off a home
disappeared for more and more of the population. And if a mortgage on
a home could be secured, it came at the expense of being “house
poor” with every adult in the home being pushed into the labour
force just to “make ends meet” (which is the common expression
for a phenomenon Marx identified a century and a half ago as the
pushing down of the proletariat to its most basic cost of
reproduction). But eventually, the amount of consumer and mortgage
debt would become too much for the masses, revealing these markets to
be one giant speculative bubble.
When the exotic financial
products of mortgage-backed securities15
came crashing down in the subprime mortgage crisis between 2006 and
2008, setting off the Great Financial Crisis, the central banks of
the U.S. and its Western imperialist allies, including Canada,
stepped in to shore up monopoly-finance capital—not
the masses—to
the tune of many trillions of dollars. The financial oligarchy and
its institutions, we were told, had become “too big to fail.” In
one of the greatest transfers of wealth in history, the costs of the
financial crisis were socialized through the printing of money and
reinflating those very same financial institutions with the
interest-free money to cover their losses and to go on lending and
investing in the world economy. Years later, these moves by
monopoly-finance capital have led to a whole new wave of
concentration of capital and wealth, as represented in the rise of
private equity firms, hedge funds and asset management companies that
control whole swathes of global production. (Think BlackRock,
Vanguard, etc.)16
Ironically, a major part of
the demand in the global economy sustained after the GFC came not
from the continuously stagnating, increasingly financialized
Western-imperialist countries, where capital was plentiful but
struggled to sustain profit margins and economic growth in the
productive sector, but rather from the rise of Chinese demand. Many a
bourgeois economist has correctly identified that a major factor in
propping up the global economy post-2008 has been the capital demands
and consumptive power of China’s growing economy over the past two
decades. From its real estate bubble to the expansion of domestic
consumption, and through to China’s enormous global investments
through its Belt and Road Initiative and related capital-intensive
projects abroad, capitalist China has, ironically, been a major part
of keeping the U.S.-led imperialist system afloat. After 2008, China
pivoted from being the “factory of the world” to becoming a
capitalist-imperialist power. The most significant evidence for this
is the whole parallel international economic and financial
architecture built up around and through China’s Belt and Road
Initiative. For these reasons, the 2010s were pivotal in the
escalation of inter-imperialist rivalry in the global economy, as the
previously mutually beneficial and interdependent economic
relationship forged between U.S. imperialism and the rising economic
power of China (since the latter’s entry into the World Trade
Organization in 2001) eventually transformed into the increasingly
antagonistic contradiction that we have witnessed in recent years
since the Obama administration “pivoted” to East Asia, pulling,
dragging, as many of its imperialist allies and subalterns as it
could along with it. Canada under Trudeau kowtowed to U.S.
imperialism in 2018 when it arrested Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou
amid the growing geopolitical rivalry, throwing Canada’s lot firmly
in with U.S. imperialism’s strategic imperatives. U.S.
imperialism’s support for the Western-aligned “pro-democracy”
movement in Hong Kong, the tensions in policy over the future of
Taiwan, the Trump 1.0 administration’s racist scapegoating of China
for the pandemic and its origins, the subsequent trade war and
protectionist measures levied against China, the industrial
competition in innumerable sectors and all the other geopolitical
contests and tensions playing out between the U.S. and China are all
signs of the power struggle that has been unfolding between these two
great powers in recent years. This contradiction is reaching a high
point as the world waits with bated breath to see if the U.S.’s
counter naval blockade around the Strait of Hormuz tries to stop
Chinese tankers.
So we see that, while in the
short term U.S. monopoly-capitalist firms benefited enormously
between the 1990s and the 2010s from having branch plants and
subcontractors in China (Apple, Tesla, Walmart, to name a few among
innumerable manufacturers and retailers that have benefited American
and western companies), which reaped major profits from the heavily
exploited labour of hundreds of millions of Chinese workers, in the
long term, this strategy eventually propelled Chinese capitalism into
a position of both financial power and industrial supremacy, which is
what makes it today the up-and-coming economic superpower.
Meanwhile, the protracted
economic crises in the imperialist countries of low-growth, popular
austerity, the decline of real wages, crushing debt, all of which
have worsened since 2020, along with cost-of-living inflation since
then, have engendered intractable social and political crises in the
imperialist countries. These are conditions out of which, absent a
communist vanguard party in the U.S. and in many other imperialist
countries, fascism has been able to cultivate a mass following in the
form of MAGA, and other fascistic and nativist movements have been
able to grow, metastasize and take hold. These are the conditions out
of which the most reactionary sections of the imperialist ruling
classes are stepping forward with fascist solutions and the
reactionary mobilization of the masses.
Since the Great Financial
Crisis (GFC) of 2007–09, financial and economic crises have
unfolded in quicker succession and growing impact. This has included
the sovereign debt crises of the 2010s that gripped a number of the
more peripheral European countries (the “PIIGS,” or Europe’s
inner periphery—Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain),
followed later by the great market manipulations and
monopoly-capitalist interests intertwined with COVID-19 lockdowns.
COVID-19 wasn’t only
a calamitously mismanaged global health crisis, but a crisis that
created the emergency conditions out of which monopoly-finance
capital was able to swindle and manoeuvre on par with the scale of
the bank bailouts—or “quantitative easing”—that followed the
GFC just over a decade prior.
By the late 2010s, even the
bourgeois economists were ringing alarm bells that another GFC-level
collapse could be on the horizon. The inflated stock valuations and
the concentration of obscene scales of financial wealth and power by
sovereign funds, hedge funds and private equity firms, made possible
by the bailouts and cheap money coming out of the GFC, began to
appear as tenuous and inflated as real estate in the U.S. had become
prior to the subprime mortgage crisis. No one could predict how the
next economic collapse would unfold, however (except perhaps for the
global consultancy firms that handed blueprints over to the world’s
governments for how to manage the pandemic, whose role in COVID-19
pandemic management fuelled conspiratorial and right-libertarian
reaction). COVID-19 lockdowns crashed stock markets temporarily, but
were ultimately a boon for monopoly capitalists, like tech capital
and the online retailing giants, as a huge unemployment wave was
imposed and as lockdowns opened up new and greater markets for
monopoly capital while huge swathes of the market were closed off to
smaller firms and businesses locked out of their brick-and-mortar
operations during lockdowns. This is why that part of the petty
bourgeoisie that saw their businesses and small enterprises wiped out
between 2020 and 2022 became a strong social base for movements like
the Freedom Convoy and other right-populist or conspiracist movements
that seemed to many to carry the deepest criticisms of, and pose the
greatest opposition, to pandemic lockdowns.17
While both sides of the culture-war divide were busy becoming amateur
virologists in those years, monopoly-finance capital was, once again,
advancing its concentration, centralization and accumulation of
capital at the expense of the many.
Here we are again, as humanity
was just under a century ago, on the eve of what many predict will be
a global depression, amid escalating inter-imperialist rivalry and
war. Major economies are wracked with public debt like never before,
as in the U.K., France and most especially the U.S., which carries
almost $40 trillion in debt. How the U.S. will cope with and deal
with this debt is one of the major questions facing the near-future
of U.S. power. Losing the Petrodollar is certainly not
a strategic shift that U.S. imperialism can afford or sustain without
a significant shift from its position of preeminence in the world
economy and domestic destabilization. This is what makes this war in
Iran such a dangerous one, and U.S. imperialism’s moves under the
Trump-MAGA regime so reckless. U.S. imperialism can’t afford a
defeat or retreat.
However the world manages to
come out of the present conjuncture of crises, however things resolve
in the short term, we must mind the fact that the resolution of all
of the last few crises has only permitted very short reprieves for
monopoly-finance capital, giving them just a few more years of
breathing room, at the expense of enormous costs for major parts of
humanity and the world, and all while setting the stage for even
bigger crashes later. This is the shape of today’s crises, or
crisis, of capitalist overaccumulation.
2.4 The
instability of U.S. imperialism at the centre of it all
Throughout 2025, it has been
widely recognized that recession in the U.S. has been held back only
by the hundreds of billions of dollars in capital18
ploughed into the data centre and AI boom over the past year, without
which the U.S. would have already formally entered a recession. Many
a bourgeois commentator has expressed concern at the AI boom being
the next boom-bust cycle in the U.S. and, by extension, the world
economy. Despite this frenzied investment, according to Goldman Sachs
Chief Economist Jan Hatzius, AI contributed “basically zero” to
GDP growth in 2025, despite soaring tech company valuations.19
However, a sure source of profits amid this tech boom is and will
continue to be government contracts in the military, intelligence and
repressive apparatuses, which U.S. imperialism under both the Trump
2.0 and Biden administrations have been and were only too ready to
lay out the capital and conditions for.
Like
a large fractal image of the much smaller semiconductor chips and
circuit boards that are packed and stacked into such data centres,
here is an image of Meta’s $30-billion Hyperion data centre, its
largest to date, which is now under construction in Richland Parish,
Louisiana. Hyperion will require 10 natural-gas power plants,
delivering 5.2 gigawatts of power (which, by comparison, exceeds
Toronto’s peak power consumption of 4.6 gigawatts on its hottest
summer days) and will consume as much water per day as 77,000 North
American households.
This AI and data centre bubble
ties in with inter-imperialist contradictions in the world today in
ways that run deeper than idle capital in the hands of
monopoly-finance capital seeking the next big fix. At present, the
U.S. maintains only a very slight edge in the tech sector,
particularly in its production of semiconductors and processing
power. But the U.S. is quickly losing this lead to China. Following
up on Biden’s protectionist measures to defend and accelerate the
U.S.’s industrial edge in this field, Trump 2.0 has leaped ahead by
making major direct investments in American tech companies
(ironically, not so different from how the U.S.’s rival in the
Chinese Communist Party and Chinese state manage and support their
own strategic industries—but that’s a different story for a
different time). It’s in this state-monopoly capitalist nexus of
power relations developing between U.S. tech capital and U.S.
imperialism, which has accelerated under Trump 2.0, that we find the
highest echelons of the new fascism: new levels of surveillance,
means for suppression and increasingly targeted, algorithm-driven
ways to categorize, track and eliminate enemies within the broader
development of a corporatist state-monopoly capitalism.20
There is a lot at stake for
U.S. imperialism in maintaining its tech supremacy in the coming
years, considering its otherwise declining strategic position. This
is overwhelmingly apparent today in the high-tech, drone and
AI-driven wars we are seeing in Iran and Ukraine. So, if the cost of
slowing the strategic decline of U.S. imperialism is building data
centres that are larger than small towns, that sap whole energy grids
and spike the costs of energy for consumers and fuel the climate
crisis, then so be it—no declining hegemon has ever exited history
peacefully and without a bang.
In this context, Taiwan today
has become yet another major geopolitical fault line in the world not
only because China’s emerging power will allow it to more easily
reclaim the rogue island back under its sovereign rule at some point
in the future, but also because Taiwan is a manufacturing hub for the
world’s most advanced semiconductors. Taiwan has for years been the
world’s leading centre of chip production. With the U.S. aiming to
constrain China for as long as possible from getting ahead in this
crucial aspect of global tech production, losing control of Taiwan in
the next few years would be a significant blow to U.S. imperialism
and a significant gain for China. This is why the U.S. has been
building out its domestic-production capabilities in this sector in
the past couple years. The U.S. could not survive an
inter-imperialist war for very long without the domestic industrial
capacity in these high-tech forces of production. The wars in Ukraine
and especially in Iran have demonstrated how significant these
technological gains are for sustaining, fighting and prevailing in
these protracted regional wars of attrition.
The enormous tension in the
sum of the contradictions laid out above makes the global situation
today dynamic and explosive. On the one hand, although a waning
hegemon, the U.S. possesses the world’s leading military
capabilities, and its financial system remains at the heart of the
global economy, although more and more tenuously. On the other hand,
it is confronted today by the more economically dynamic China, which
possesses all the ingredients necessary to overtake the U.S. economy
and power in most respects, soon, and in some ways it already has.
Over the past couple decades of the relative decline of U.S.
hegemony, the U.S. has failed to decisively win most of its military
adventures and geopolitical contests, from Afghanistan and Iraq to
Ukraine. Those geopolitical fronts and war theatres in which U.S.
imperialism has gained anything at all have only come through
enormous savagery, destabilization, and considerable blows to its
international legitimacy, from the proxy war in Syria that eventually
removed Assad and brought to power former al-Qaida and ISIS leader
Jolani as the ally of U.S. imperialism, to the U.S.’s unwavering
support for the genocidal and expansionist Zionist regime in Gaza,
the brazen kidnapping of Maduro and now the war against Iran.
Meanwhile, as fuel costs
skyrocket (with crude oil jumping by 40–50% to well over
$100/barrel), Russia stands to benefit to some extent from the war in
the Persian Gulf. On March 13, only two weeks into the war, Trump,
incredibly, pulled back U.S. sanctions on Russian oil sales, allowing
Russia to reap major rents on the global oil economy after it endured
years of a war of attrition with Ukraine as well as economic
sanction. As for China, the second-largest consumer of petroleum in
the world after the U.S. and the largest recipient of oil coming
through the Strait of Hormuz, it presently faces a serious threat in
losing a close ally and a major oil supplier. Though China has become
considerably more energy independent as it has shifted to renewables
over the past decade of domestic capital investment, China does not
want to see itself become dependent on U.S. energy if the war and
destruction across the Persian Gulf carry on.
The last two decades of
transition from one superpower in the world to two or more is what
accounts for the incredibly dangerous geopolitical crisis that grips
the world right now, the same kind of transition that brought about
two world wars in the previous century. While U.S. imperialism has
been “pivoting” to confront China explicitly through the previous
three presidencies, from Biden to Trump 1.0 to Obama, the Trump-MAGA
regime represents an acceleration toward more decisive, and
potentially catastrophic, confrontation.
2.5 Internal
contradictions in the U.S. drive its war machine
Amid these past decades of
U.S.-imperialist decline and growing popular malaise, right-wing
populism and fascistic movements have made major strides in the
reactionary mobilization of the masses, far more than any of the
revolutionary mobilizations of the masses, which have been only
momentary, spontaneous and unable to sustain in the absence of a
formidable and proven Communist Party that can lead the masses, or at
least sections of it, and accumulate revolutionary forces.
In Canada, where the
accumulation of revolutionary forces has been barely more advanced
than across the rest of the imperialist countries, there are urgent
possibilities in front of us, and these can be seized upon with the
application of disciplined proletarian-revolutionary organization.
Where the revolutionary mobilization of the masses is fully possible
but not being organized, then we see (and expect) the reactionary
mobilization and organization of the masses to unfold instead. The
Trump-MAGA regime in the U.S. in the present historical conjuncture
described above has marked a dangerous leap in the reactionary
mobilization of the U.S. masses. This constellation of forces makes
the possibility for revolutionary explosions and advances real and
full of tension.
Apprehending the depth and
extent of the crisis, or crises, of U.S. imperialism today, as we
have attempted to do above in the broadest strokes, has been
necessary to make some sense of the seemingly chaotic and frantic
moves by U.S. imperialism in the world today. Despite what many
liberals in the U.S. would have us all believe, the present woes of
the U.S. are not reducible to Trump (or Netanyahu) and their
monstrous personalities. It is the other way around. The construction
and mobilization of the MAGA camp over the past decade have captured
and weaponized popular disaffection and grievances into a movement of
reactionary economic populism with vague, mythical dreams of
recasting America and U.S. imperialism. This has (apologies) trumped
and displaced the previously hegemonic neoliberal consensus. We have
the Democratic Party in the U.S. and the Liberals in Canada to thank
for playing no small part in the emergence of right-wing reaction, as
these two parties have spared no costs in recent decades to suppress
such a force of economic populism from emerging in their own bases,
and advance their own neoliberal governance, which they did while
plastering the most vapid identity politics over the most regressive
policies. It was years of these kinds of neoliberal governance that
fuelled the right-wing reaction that is now laying siege to anything
it can tag or associate with EDI.
After learning the lessons of
the first Trump administration, the Trump-MAGA regime took to the
offensive immediately upon coming to power in January 2025. In the
hearts and minds of its “America First” social base was the
belief that better days were coming for the American people (or at
least for white American people) under Trump. Instead, year one has
served up further social decline, political instability, economic
chaos, new wars and further fascistic developments. Trump’s radical
departure from this isolationist foreign policy agenda and the
disastrous domestic policies have only deepened the contradictions
and crises of American society. The working class and popular masses
in the U.S. continue to see their costs of living soar and living
standards sharply decline, while the crypto, tech and other monopoly
capitalists grift and thieve out in the open like never before.
In the year or so since
Trump’s return to the White House, the Trump-MAGA regime has been
bulldozing anyone and anything standing in its way. After the
pardoning of nearly 1,600 of the “Jan. 6” MAGA putschists on the
first day of Trump’s second administration, the emerging Trump-MAGA
regime wasted no time in forcing its agenda on both the domestic and
international levels. Domestically, we’ve seen repeated shutdowns
and mass layoffs of whole sections of the U.S. government, which has
aimed at both subduing opposition and dismantling departments that
are more in service to the people than monopoly capitalism.
Meanwhile, it’s cut taxes for the rich like never before, which is
the downstream outcome of slashing public systems. These attacks on
the masses have been paired with dozens of other illegal and
unconstitutional moves by the Trump-MAGA regime, which in the course
of the first year were largely rubber-stamped by the
Republican-stacked Supreme Court. The Trump-MAGA White House’s
unconstitutional arrests, detentions and deportations of hundreds of
thousands of people have shocked popular opinion and shaken up some
of Trump’s base, especially as ICE violence began taking out U.S.
citizens. The federalizing of the National Guard and its deployment
in Los Angeles, D.C. and Minneapolis constituted egregious power
grabs and armed shows of force by the Trump-MAGA regime. The extent
of Trump 2.0’s unbridled breach of the “rule of law,” along
with the inability of the U.S. constitutional order to limit and
constrain it,21
warrants us considering that U.S. imperialism has entered a
qualitatively distinct moment in its evolution (or rather,
degeneration), which can only be considered a step in a fascist
direction.
The Immigration and Customs
Enforcement (ICE) wing of the repressive apparatus has added roughly
12,000 new deportation officers in 2025, which more than doubled its
officers from 10,000 the year prior. Many of these new officers were
lured with signing bonuses of up to $50,000, paid out of the some $73
billion in new funding allocated to the agency last year by the
Trump-MAGA regime. This virtually private paramilitary force under
the command of the Trump-MAGA regime, taken with the unprecedented
acts of the Executive Branch’s federalization of the National
Guard, and the threats made or materialized against the Trump-MAGA
camp’s political opponents (Democrats broadly and anyone that can
be identified with the Left, especially since the assassination of
Charlie Kirk22)
have all been signs of the shift into some kind of fascism in the
U.S.
But as the masses have pushed
back (like in Minneapolis) and have continued to seethe with
indignation, as the Trump-MAGA camp is tripped up and falls within
its own web of contradictions (as demonstrated with the Epstein
files) the domestic situation in the U.S. is fully pregnant with
contradictory and opposing possibilities.
After Venezuela, Trump might
have seriously thought that a repeat in Iran could keep wind in the
sails of his imperiled administration—except now the war has just
blown up an even bigger crisis on top of the already-explosive
domestic contradictions (the same goes for Netanyahu in Israel).
Despite the detainment and deportation of hundreds of thousands of
people already, U.S. unemployment numbers continue to rise, reaching
levels not seen since the end of the COVID-19 pandemic. Meanwhile,
the main investments propping up the American economy and stock
market today are data centres and its related infrastructure that
can’t save the U.S. economy in the short term because data-centre
construction and operation yields nowhere near the level of long-term
employment that previous industrial booms have yielded. Additionally,
as we’ve all been told, this infrastructure is designed to displace
and replace a significant part of the labour force. So, the U.S.
economy faces no real way out of its domestic economic crises, even
in the short term, making the danger of fascism, imperialist wars of
aggression and inter-imperialist rivalry and world war that much more
real in the present conjuncture. There is no telling how much bigger
a disaster Trump and Netanyahu’s disastrous Iran war will become.
But we can be certain that the heightened contradictions in the
present world will not disappear in the coming months and years, not
without a significant reorganization of the world—by war or
revolution.
2.6 The
spectacular demise of the rules-based international order
Turning our attention to the
rest of the world over the past year… We have seen the Trump-MAGA
regime smash through the “Washington Consensus”23
that U.S. imperialism imposed on the world over the preceding 30 or
so years. The main expression of the U.S.’s sharp turn against the
globalized world order has been its trade war and the imposition of
universal tariffs on all countries of the world. One of the main
justifications advanced by Trump and his cabinet members for global
tariffs has been to balance the U.S.’s long-running trade deficit,
and maybe also rake in hundreds of billions of dollars in customs
revenue (essentially, by taxing its own consumers). In the lead-up to
and in the wake of the “Liberation Day” tariffs of a year ago,
this gave the U.S. greater leverage in its bilateral relations with
all countries across the world who wanted access to the U.S. domestic
market, which remains the top export destination in the world
economy. While liberals can only see in Trump moves of a demented
megalomaniac, a more materialist explanation of the situation reveals
that the policy moves of the Trump-MAGA regime as not just that—even
if that is one level of things—but also the urgent and desperate
attempts of a section of the ruling class in the U.S. to shore up its
power. Has it all worked? It’s no so clear. Calamity is the
outcome, anyway.
Paired with its economic war
against the world, the Trump-MAGA regime’s threats to its allies
(Canada, Greenland, Europe, NATO…) and its shake-up of its
political-military alliances is the other major aspect of its
shifting relationship to the world. Trump 2.0’s tariffs and
economic threats definitely played a part in forcing its NATO allies
and vassals to assume a far greater share of the burden of running
the capitalist-imperialist world system when they agreed to push up
their military budgets to 5% of their GDPs. The push for NATO
rearmament has been intended to push Europe more into rivalry and war
with Russia, thereby allowing the U.S. to better pivot to and focus
on its confrontation with China, while also preparing those allies to
pull their weight in an inter-imperialist war. For years, NATO urged
its member countries to push their defence spending up to 2% of GDP.
But in the wake of Trump’s global trade war, in the spring of 2025
NATO succeeded in railroading its member states into assuming a
mandate to push up military spending to 5% of GDP. Some may see this
as a “military Keynesian” solution to the problem of economic
stagnation in the West. But given that the technical composition of
militarism and military production today is not what it was during
the 1930s, or even during the Cold War, these military expenditures
are not likely to yield the kind of economic recovery that pulled the
U.S. and Western powers out of the Great Depression and sustained
growth well into the 1960s.24
Since the 1980s, the number of jobs in the U.S. in military
production has dropped by 2/3 from 3 million to 1 million. Meanwhile,
the shift in public expenditure to war and militarism will further
gut socially useful forms of public spending, which is precisely
what’s happening in Canada now.
Another plank of the
Trump-MAGA regime has been to seize control over the U.S. Federal
Reserve. In the opening months of Trump 2.0, the Trump-MAGA regime
bullied or sacked opponents at the Federal Reserve, like Chair Jerome
Powell and Lisa Cook, while pushing for a policy change in the
direction of lowering interest rates. The prevailing fear in the
financial world is that by giving Trump control over the Fed, and
therefore the USD printing press, the regime risks exacerbating
inflation in the U.S. and in the world economy by giving Trump more
control over the global financial system. Over this past year, the
U.S. dollar lost about 10% of its value, as more parts of the world
economy move to divest from a devaluing USD and riskier U.S. Treasury
bills. This trend, if it continues, will elevate the cost of U.S.
borrowing within the world economy (because “T-bill yields,” what
the U.S. would have to pay out, would necessarily rise). In turn, the
accumulation of U.S. public debt would accelerate, further
undermining U.S. global financial hegemony and the status of the USD
as the world’s reserve currency. This may be why Xi Jinping
announced in January 2026 that China would begin taking measures to
see the renminbi become the world’s new reserve currency amid the
developing trend worldwide away from the U.S. dollar over the course
of 2025.25
But the de-dollarization of the world economy would be a catastrophic
shift for all imperialist powers and capital tied to U.S. financial
interests, including China (which is why it hasn’t happened yet).
These are the threats and liabilities—financial, economic and
geopolitical—that the Trump-MAGA regime faces in managing and
mitigating the declining U.S. imperialist hegemon right now. This is
a major part of what accounts for the U.S. going rogue from the
international order that U.S. imperialism itself constructed over the
past few decades. Trump’s trade war, which is coercing its “allies”
and other trading partners into better terms of trade for U.S.
imperialism, is just the U.S. trying to recuperate some of the ground
it lost in recent decades within the capitalist-imperialist system.
It’s anyone’s guess whether these desperate and urgent moves by
the Trump-MAGA regime will stabilize U.S. imperialism in the short
term, or accelerate its decline, but a growing chorus of imperialist
figureheads, technocrats and world leaders have been suggesting that
it could indeed be the latter. More and more of the world, including
the U.S.’s erstwhile allies, are looking to China as the more
stabilizing force in the present capitalist-imperialist world. The
contradictions that ensnare U.S. imperialism today, and by extension
the world, are unavoidable and lie at the heart of the now-exploding
contradictions.
While
the sections of the fascist MAGA movement still thanking Jesus for
Trump in 2026 may be considerably smaller than a year ago (or at any
point over the past decade), it remains an open question what
direction the MAGA coalition will take and what power it will hold in
the coming months and years.
3. Canada—At the Table
and on the Menu
While the January 2025 New
Year’s statement in Railroad
#1 stated that
“the deterioration of the international situation [could not] be
ignored” and recognized that we were “witnessing the acceleration
of inter-imperialist contradictions on a global scale,” we did not
foresee, like most people, the pace with which and extent to which
these inter-imperialist contradictions would shake up (though not yet
break up) the Western imperialist pacts.
Adding to what’s already
been said above about the Trump-MAGA regime’s desperate campaign to
arrest or reverse the strategic decline of U.S. imperialism, over the
span of the last year or so, the White House has treated its allies
with threats of (i) the U.S.’s departure from NATO if other members
do not ramp up their share of military expenditures to 5% of GDP (and
more recently, to fight in the war against Iran) and (ii) with
invasion or annexation, specifically in the cases of Greenland and
Canada. Finally, (iii) amid the U.S.-Israeli war in Iran, the global
crisis arising from Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz26
has further divided NATO, which Trump has continued to verbally
attack, raising questions among its own members about the future of
the military pact.27
In this tumultuous global
situation, Canada has taken on the airs of betrayed ally, an identity
the Carney government has cultivated while charting a course for the
Canadian bourgeoisie. Most of the Canadian bourgeoisie seems to want
to carry on with the existing capitalist-imperialist world system,
even as this system is on the brink of even more war. In the present
conjuncture, Canadian imperialism is both in contradiction with and
utterly dependent on and still allied to U.S. imperialism.
While Canada endured the
on-again, off-again threats and taunts of being annexed, invaded or
dismembered by the U.S. over much of the last year, even more
threatening to the Canadian bourgeoisie as a whole has been the
secessionist movements in Alberta and Quebec that have emerged out of
regional dissatisfactions both with the Canadian federation in
general and with the governing Liberal Party in particular. Some of
these dissatisfactions are legitimate, while others have an utterly
reactionary character—they are all being seized upon and integrated
into different kinds of reactionary politics in different parts of
the country. This is the powder keg Canada has become while it faces
pressures from its criminal allies, the U.S. imperialists and the
fascist Zionists, to join their desperate and murderous conquests.
There are many ways things could unfold in the coming years. In any
case, the proletarian revolution in this country will have to find
its footing and advance on increasingly perilous ground.
The single greatest factor in
Canadian politics over the past year has been the Trump-MAGA regime
coming to power and the subsequent downturn in U.S.-Canada relations
that followed it. Sure, the snide “Governor” jabs by
President-Elect Trump were already being made in late 2024 against
the (by then) lame duck prime minister Justin Trudeau. But most
people at the time would have brushed off Trump’s remarks as the
kind of shit-talking we have all come to expect from him. After all,
how could Trump resist kicking down on Trudeau’s Liberal government
while it was nearing its collapse in late 2024? Remember that
Trudeau’s government held on to power for almost a decade with its
woke-branded neoliberal governance, which makes it the
longest-running government in the Western world over that tumultuous
decade. But as Trump took office for the second time, pushing aside a
bankrupt, genocide-sponsoring Democratic Party that offered no
alternative for the people but more (neo)liberalism, it unleashed its
global trade war against foes and friends alike. The annexationist
remarks against Canada became louder and more frequent, with Trump’s
threats moving from bluster to increasing possibility. In response to
the materializing threat of the Trump-MAGA regime, the political
conversation in Canada in the first quarter of 2025 fixated on these
new threats emanating out of the White House. Suddenly, incredibly,
the expression “U.S. imperialism” was being discussed by the
national broadcaster and in the bourgeois press like never before.
Not surprising, however, is how short-lived this “anti-imperialism”
in Canada’s bourgeois press was, and how quickly it disappeared
when it came to the kidnapping of Maduro and the onset of the war
against Iran.
In the years immediately
preceding Trump 2.0, our international readers should be reminded,
Canada was also experiencing the proliferation of right-populist
opinion, dissatisfaction and opposition to the ruling Trudeau Liberal
government. For years, Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre had
been leveraging and pushing on this rightward shift in Canada’s
political discourse to re-energize the base of the Conservative
Party, and his position within it, in preparation for the demise of
the Trudeau government. Trudeau’s handling of the COVID-19
pandemic, which was experienced differently by different sections of
the population (and agitated a major section if it), along with his
recruitment of millions of new international students and workers
into Canada during these years, followed by the inflation of 2021–23
and the dramatic worsening of the housing crisis, all combined to
discredit and assure the collapse of the Trudeau government and the
defeat of the Liberals in the coming federal election. Poilievre
tapped into and helped cultivate the same sorts of right-populist and
conspiratorial movements that, south of the border, made up a major
part of the MAGA movement. However, Poilievre channelled all of that
into his own brand of right-populist conservatism. By late 2024,
victory for Poilievre’s Conservative Party in the coming election
not only seemed certain, but it seemed like the federal Conservatives
might even clinch a majority government after a decade out of power.
At the time Trump was re-elected in late 2024, a lot of
Canadians—ready or not and like it or not—were anticipating their
own kind of rightist-reactionary government to be in power at some
point in 2025 right alongside Trump 2.0.
But then, as the Trump regime
oriented itself antagonistically against Canada and its other allies,
with global tariffs and repeated threats of annexation, the Liberal
Party turned on a dime and redefined itself. It scrapped the by-then
bankrupt Trudeau brand, and with the help of the bourgeois press and
other outlets of respectable public opinion the Liberals fomented a
new wave of Canadian nationalism. Through the first half of 2025,
this new “elbows up” Canadian nationalism was forged in the
popular imagination as Canada finally standing up to the U.S. against
the spate of insults and threats emanating from the Trump
administration, which this Canadian nationalism framed as a betrayal
of Canada’s contributions to the Anglo-American imperialist pact.
As the chaos and threats of
the Trump regime unfolded over the past year, the culture-war
divisions that had been gripping Canada (just as much as they had
been in the U.S.) over the preceding years were pushed into the
background by this new wave of national concern. With no small amount
of irony, Trump openly stated his preference for the Liberal Carney
against the right-populist Poilievre during the 2025 federal
elections in Canada, giving Carney a headwind in the polls leading up
to election day. Then, in one of the most unanticipated turns of
events in the history of Canadian politics, the Liberals secured a
near-majority in Parliament in the April 2025 federal election, which
has by mid-April 2026 (as we were completing this analysis) become a
majority after a series of surprising floor crossings and won
by-elections.
The Liberal Party’s
rebranding operation over the past year and a half wouldn’t have
been possible without the liberal bourgeoisie and its media
apparatuses, which embraced Carney and his career serving
monopoly-finance capital in the AAIA countries, across both the
public and private sectors, as the kind of man for the job of Prime
Minister in a time of crisis. The Canadian electorate bought it—what
alternative did they have? Poilievre lost steam in popular opinion as
a boomer conservatism reached for the experienced conservative banker
put in front of them.
Hailed
by many commentators in Canada (at the time, for a moment) as one of
the most important speeches from a Canadian prime minister, Mark
Carney’s speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January
2026 and its “values-based realism” has not aged well as Carney
has done nothing more than diversify the paths for Canadian
imperialism and its means of aggrandizement amid the turbulent waters
of inter-imperialist rivalry today, striking new economic deals with
countries across the world, including with erstwhile rival states
like China, while condoning U.S. imperialist crimes whenever and
wherever it’s convenient.
What’s been the track record
to date of this supposed saviour of Canada, which some sections of
the liberal-bourgeois press in the Western world have gone so far as
to don a leader of the resistance to the new Trumpian world order?
Carney’s speech at the World Economic Forum in January 2026 came as
a bold affront to the Trump regime in that specific moment, revealing
the shifting balances in the transatlantic imperialist alliance. But
it must be underscored that Carney’s program has been nothing more
than the continuation of neoliberal-imperialist globalization of the
past four decades, but accelerated and intensified with more
militarism, corporatism, emergency preparations and repressive laws.
This is the state of Canadian imperialism amid the calamitous
collisions that are unfolding in the world. In this situation, the
Carney government is struggling to remain
an ally to U.S. imperialism, and is probably just trying to wait out
the rest of the Trump administration.
The “elbows up”
nationalism has since been channelled into the new militarism
mandated by NATO’s 5% spending targets, which Canada has now
adopted to both appease U.S. imperialism and also bolster its
strength in its alliance to it. Most of the Canadian bourgeoisie is
not interested
in seeing its domestic market carved and swallowed up by American
interests. What Canada’s monopoly-financial capitalists want is a
continued coexistence with U.S. imperialism within the AAIA and NATO
frameworks, even if that alliance looks different than it has over
the past 80 years. These policies are what makes the Carney Liberal
government a perfect representative for the Canadian bourgeoisie’s
interests at this point in time.
It’s true that Carney’s
government has been among the most vocal of the U.S.’s erstwhile
allies in opposing the Trump-MAGA regime’s disruption to the
multilateral international system. Carney’s Davos speech appealed
to other middle powers to move on from the destabilizing
international order by reforging their relations with each other. The
Carney government’s independent initiative amid Trump’s tariff
chaos is also evident in his Liberal government’s scaling back of
diplomatic tensions with China and India, both of which he signed new
trade deals with. New trade deals have also been made with Japan,
Australia, Qatar, UAE, South Korea, Malaysia, Indonesia and Mexico,
and multiple other agreements are in the works. Some of these deals
have created real tension with U.S. interests, such as Carney’s
dramatic lowering of the tariff on Chinese electric vehicles entering
Canada from 100% to 6.1%, and agreeing to take 49,000 Chinese EVs in
exchange for China lowering its 85% tariff against Canadian canola to
15%.
But along with this
independence comes Canada’s continuing overall unity with U.S.
imperialism. Carney’s government continues to back, at least
diplomatically, the U.S.’s ongoing imperialist endeavours. This was
the case with Canada’s approval of Maduro’s kidnapping and the
seizing of Venezuela’s oil, followed by Canada’s basic approval
for the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran. With the Canadian imperialists
still hitched to the wagon of American imperialism, Canada has all
but signed up for any near-future military and geopolitical
catastrophes that the fascistic Trump regime, or any future
administration of U.S. imperialism, embarks upon.
With Canada’s adoption of
NATO’s 5%-of-GDP military spending mandate, what followed later in
2025 was the cutting of some 40,000 jobs from the federal public
service, while the Canadian government shifted its spending toward
its new military-industrial priorities. Canada is also taking
initiative among its NATO allies for the creation of a new rearmament
and “defence-industrial” bank, reportedly to be headquartered
somewhere in Canada. The creation of this bank would make Canada a
financial capital of the Western alliance in its drive into
militarism. As we were writing in late March 2026, Canada hosted
negotiations in Montreal for the creation of this bank. The
combination of these financial and military-industrial developments
will soak up hundreds of billions of dollars in investments in the
coming years for finance capital, some part of which will get
invested in Canada’s militarizing economy.
Complementing the militarism
of the Carney government is its corporatism. The Carney government
has also leveraged whatever remains of the bourgeois-nationalist
sentiment invoked in the first part of 2025 to force through a whole
new series of “nation-building projects.” While arguments of
economic sovereignty and the need to tie together Canada’s internal
market and industrial regions more effectively through internal trade
and infrastructural development have some material basis, we cannot
overlook how these projects will be a boon for Canada’s monopoly
capitalists far more than for the people. The passage of Bill C-5 in
the federal parliament and Bill 5 in the Ontario legislature in 2025,
for instance, are key examples of how Canadian levels of government
have utilized the present trade crises and tensions with the U.S. to
ram through infrastructure and resource-extraction projects that
trample over the rights of Indigenous peoples, the interests of
workers, rural communities and the environment.
But not all of Canada is going
along with the new conservative brand of Liberal governance. In the
Prairie provinces, especially in Alberta and across rural Prairie
regions, the populist right is much stronger and more concentrated
than anywhere elsewhere in Canada. The Liberals’ re-election has
put even greater winds in the sails of Prairie disaffection and
Albertan separatism.28
Alberta premier Danielle Smith has committed to permit a referendum
to proceed if a citizens’ initiative petition gets 178,000
signatures during a four-month period, after her government updated
legislation earlier in the year to allow referendum questions on such
a petition to proceed without having first been assessed for their
constitutionality. The floated Alberta referendum questions are
dominated by anti-immigration proposals: to increase Alberta’s
control over immigration, to decrease migrants to Alberta (a federal
jurisdiction) and to remove social programs that Alberta controls for
migrants and constitutional questions about whether more power should
devolve to Alberta as a province, possibly paving a way to
secession.29
At present, it is estimated that about 26% of Albertans support
separation, but that number shoots way up when we look at the rural
prairie regions.
While
Alberta’s separatist movement as a whole is not united on U.S.
annexation, a segment of that movement certainly does hold that
position.
Meanwhile, on the other side
of the Canadian federation, amid the collapsing, corrupt CAQ party in
Quebec at the provincial level, Quebec reactionary and separatist
party, the Parti Québécois, has been gaining popularity, especially
given the absence of a proletarian-socialist alternative for the
working class and popular masses. Framed in the past as a centre-left
party, the PQ has redirected itself over the last decade toward a
conservative nationalism that has pushed anti-immigration laws and
agitated against the Muslim population. The PQ is promising to hold
another referendum on Quebec’s separation from Canada should it win
the October 2026 election.
It’s no surprise that both
referendum movements have been mobilizing anti-immigrant sentiments,
seizing upon the shifting public opinion over the past few years
against the record levels of immigration to Canada following the
COVID-19 pandemic. While the Carney government has not so brazenly
attacked the basic rights of working immigrant masses in the ways we
are seeing in the U.S. under the Trump-MAGA regime, Carney’s
parliament is ultimately orienting its policies in a similar
direction, albeit in more liberal ways. Carney’s “Immigration
Levels Plan” sets out to achieve “sustainable immigration
levels,” by reducing the number of temporary residents in the
country by nearly half from 674,000 in 2025 to 304,000 by the end of
2027. Canada has experienced a 74% reduction in study permits since
January 2024, with 2026 numbers already half that of 2025. Hundreds
of thousands of workers in Canada in 2026 are seeing their status
expire, driving many into losing their status. Deportations are now
at a record high, with the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA)
currently deporting 400 people a week. The June 2025 Strong Borders
Act gives new powers to law enforcement to intervene in immigration,
with funding for the CBSA to enforce it. Carney has committed to
reduce the temporary resident population from 7.4% of the country’s
population (as of 2024) to less than 5% by the end of 2027.
One might think that Carney’s
immigration policy changes would appease reactionary politics in
Alberta, but his liberal brand of militarist populism won’t be
enough in itself. Alberta has long been in conflict with the federal
government over oil revenues, from the National Energy Program in the
1980s to the pipeline conflicts in the 2010s. With the signing of the
“Canada-Alberta Memorandum of Understanding” in November 2025
that would move Alberta’s oil and gas to Pacific markets, Carney
has been working to woo Albertan public opinion back into the federal
fold.30
The B.C. premier, feigning Indigenous consultation concerns,
expressed consternation at not being included in the MOU. B.C. will
need to officially buy in, but it’s clear they are united with
Alberta’s resource development goals and aim to be a cornerstone of
Carney’s new “nation-building” project, which has already
fast-tracked six major energy and mining infrastructure projects.31
These include two major electricity projects, a hydroelectric plant
in Nunavut that will dam two rivers, and the twinning of an
electricity transmission line from interior B.C. to the B.C. coast.
The third project will rely on this energy: a liquefied natural gas
export facility on B.C.’s coast. The last three projects are
open-pit mining developments: nickel sulphide north of Timmins,
Ontario, graphite in Saint-Michel-des-Saints, Quebec, and tungsten
and molybdenum in Sisson Brook, New Brunswick. At least seven more
projects are being considered. Many of these have First Nations
partnerships, marking another Carney-era shift—from reconciliation
and consultation to making business deals.
These infrastructural,
resource extraction and military-industrial developments will line
the pockets of Canada’s monopoly-finance capitalists, while
propping up a small section of Canada’s population in the coming
years. But conditions are looking much grimmer for the vast majority
of the population. Despite slowing growth of the immigrant labour
force, unemployment continues to rise, with the official rate hitting
6.7% in February 2026, during which Canada lost some 84,000 jobs.32
Meanwhile, the condo market has plummeted in the big cities over the
past couple years, while higher interest rates are pressing down
heavily on mortgage holders, many of whom are working-class or
lower-petty-bourgeois families who are massively in debt and possibly
even “underwater” right now (in other words, owing more money on
real estate than its present market value). Even the “experts”
have begun sounding the alarm about the fact that the single biggest
capital asset class in Canadian society is presently deflating. The
knock-on effect will be rising foreclosures and defaults among the
heavily indebted borrowers, many of whom will have seen their small
savings wiped out if they bought at the top of the market. These are
the existing trends, even before the fallout from the global energy
crisis really begins to make itself felt.
Amid the crises looming and
already here, it is entirely possible that one or
both of these
separatist movements could win their referenda, with Quebec currently
more likely than Alberta, according to polls. The geopolitical
earthquakes and tsunamis of political tumult we anticipate in the
coming months and years could tip the scales in favour of one or both
of these separatist movements. How would the U.S. respond to this? In
the case of Alberta, this has already been a matter of open
discussion in the MAGA movement, right up to Trump’s cabinet. While
U.S. imperialism doesn’t seem to be very interested in absorbing a
French-speaking population, Canada’s oil wealth might just be
enough. While it is not clear that the majority of the Albertan
separatist opinion is looking to be absorbed by the U.S., a
secessionist Alberta would certainly rewrite the geopolitical
situation of Canada.
How would the Canadian state
respond to developments heading in any of these directions? Would it
repress these developments by force?
These referenda could also
fail, and Canada could become more united amid the destabilizing
force to the south of it. That unity could have a progressive
character, but it is more likely, under the reigning class relations,
to have a fascistic character. Canada is already making preparations
for stronger repressive measures and a more robust repressive
apparatus, as it has been doing since October 7, 2023, with the
criminalization of dissent against the movement in support of
Palestine. This is in addition to the other forms of repression that
are likely to intensify, like the doxxing campaigns by Zionists and
fascists, police harassment and so on.
There is virtually no way
forward that isn’t beset with war and strife, with fascist
movements gaining more ground or taking power. The class struggle is
intensifying. Popular suffering is guaranteed and already rampant.
All this makes the ground for proletarian-socialist revolution that
much riper and more urgent.
4. Grasp the Revolutionary
Imperative
4.1 Looking
back to comprehend the battles ahead
Situated as we are in an
imperialist country, some of the most crucial lessons for us to apply
to the current conjuncture lie in those of the history of the
Communist International in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s. The
Communist Parties of that period were on the front lines of opposing
the spread of fascism in Italy, Germany, Spain and many other
countries, winning over vast segments of the working class through
their mass work and agitation-propaganda, building the United Front
and countering the penetration of fascism among the popular masses.
We still have much to learn from these methods of work.33
No
image better captures that great wave of armed and revolutionary
popular power constructed through the partisan resistance to fascism
in Europe than that of the everyday women partisans who joined the
armed struggle by the tens of thousands—with 100,000 in Italy
alone, among which these women counted themselves in April 1945
during the liberation of Milan.
When inter-imperialist
contradictions erupted into open war and when fascism attempted to
destroy the socialist Soviet Union and put an end to socialist
construction in the early 1940s, these same parties carried out armed
struggle, building partisan armies throughout Europe. Outside the
main imperialist centres, in Central and Eastern Europe, these armed
struggles led to the founding of the People’s Democracies. In
Western and Southern Europe, they ended in compromises with the
bourgeoisie, which granted limited economic victories for the working
class but also set the stage for the development of
capitalism-imperialism, as we have outlined above, to drag the world
right back to the brink of fascism and another calamitous global war.
The point is that these
Communist Parties were large and powerful organizations. Having been
constituted from the wreckage of the discredited Socialist Parties of
the Second International, the Communist Parties of the Third
International came into being with many thousands of members, with a
pre-existing socialist press, with skilled organizers, agitators,
propagandists and leaders ready to take up the necessary
revolutionary work and with a significant mass base among the working
class. The broad enthusiasm among the advanced workers for the
October Revolution enabled the Communist Parties to expand their
influence rapidly. As the fascist menace rose, the Communists
established combat organizations of various shapes and sizes. In
Germany, for instance, the Red Fighters’ Front was a well-organized
militia with tens of thousands of members who fought rival fascist
and social-democratic paramilitaries in defence of the Party. In
general, we must say these parties were well versed in clandestine
work, if only because in that time even simple labour organizing
demanded the use of clandestine methods. We point this out not to
disregard the political and practical limits of a good number of
these parties, like the electoralist deviations and very limited
degrees of Bolshevization of some of these parties,34
but to underline the resources that they had at their disposal.
To this, we must add that the
Third International was led by, and benefited from the assistance of,
the socialist Soviet Union. Material resources and advice from
seasoned revolutionaries were available to Communists in the
capitalist countries. When the National-Socialists seized power in
Germany, for instance, many German Communists found refuge in the
U.S.S.R. In the end, what was most instrumental in overcoming fascism
in continental Europe was the heroic war effort of the Soviet Union
and its Red Army.
This brings us to where we’re
going with this overview of the past: despite the relative strength
of the Communist Movement from the 1920s to 1945, fascism was only
defeated, war was only ended, at the cost of enormous sacrifices. By
the end of that period, the European parties had been driven
underground—in Italy starting in the second half of the 1920s, in
Germany in 1933, in Spain after the defeat of the Republicans, in
France at the beginning of the war, et cetera. Tens of thousands of
revolutionaries had been arrested or executed. The Soviet Union
suffered enormous human and material losses. Strong revolutionary
organizations, the likes of which simply no longer exist in any
imperialist country today, allied with the first socialist country in
human history, could only wrest victory from the jaws of defeat at
such tremendous cost.
On the coastlines, under
the prairie sky, from the mountains to the tundra: the tasks before
us
It is difficult for many
activists in the imperialist countries to wrap their heads around the
fact that all of this occurred within living memory. The clash
between fascism and socialism that we have described does not lie in
some far-away past, but only a few generations back. Similar
conditions to the ones that gave rise to the two previous world wars
and to the rise of fascism are here again. As we have made clear
above, we do not think that fascism immediately confronts us in
Canada, but we do think conditions will continue to deteriorate as
the bourgeoisie resorts to fascistic tactics and as class unrest
intensifies in an organized fashion and is methodically undertaken.
Reflecting upon the experience
of our Communist forebears in the 1920s and ’30s reveals a stark
truth: we are not prepared for what lies ahead. The situation may
demand more of our subjective material than we assess ourselves
capable of turning over. But we must step forward anyway, because
more wars, economic downturn and fascist threats approach us, among
other crises cascading across the capitalist-imperialist world
system. The international proletarian revolution may be the only
thing that can divert humanity from these calamities. Certainly,
parts of the oppressed world may be the first to throw off the yoke
of imperialism by themselves once again (and this is precisely what a
number of communist-led people’s wars and revolutionary movements
in the oppressed countries have been fighting for decades in the
Philippines, India, Turkey/Kurdistan, and so on). Perhaps the Axis of
Resistance will deliver a significant blow to U.S. imperialism and
Zionism and their vassals and allies in the Arab world. But we
Communists in the imperialist countries would be cowards, shrinking
from our historic duties, if we sat around waiting for revolution to
happen in some far-off places. The only guarantee we have in halting
the present escalation of war and the march toward militarism and
fascism, in escaping from the clutches of this crisis-ridden
capitalist-imperialist world system, is a major popular revolution
that breaks the
chain of
imperialist unity across the NATO countries, that smashes the grip of
monopoly-finance capital in at least one of the countries in the NATO
alliance. This would have world-historic consequences. The subsequent
counter-revolution could drag the whole of the Western-imperialist
alliance into a spiral of counter-revolution and further revolution.
For decades, the oppressed
countries have been brimming with popular upsurge, revolutionary
possibility and, in some cases, protracted people’s wars. But these
alone have not yet been enough to face and overcome the genocidal
onslaught of the imperialist powers, as the unmatched heroism of the
Palestinian people, the Lebanese people and the Yemeni people today
are showing us. It would be utterly cowardly for anyone calling
themselves a “communist” in the imperialist countries to take a
passive position in this world of revolt by maintaining that the
revolution needs to happen “over there” before it can happen
“over here.” We are already living in times where the masses are
ready, more than ever, for revolutionary answers and ways forward,
and the imperialist countries are brimming with popular discontent,
revolutionary openings and the slide into fascism.
We are under no illusions that
the proletariat and the broader masses in the imperialist countries
are anywhere near ready to unfold a proletarian revolution and seize
power. But things can develop quickly, especially if communist
vanguard parties can reconstitute themselves among the masses and in
the proletarian struggles in the imperialist countries in the coming
years. Important strides in this direction have come through the
constitution of the Organizing Committees of the (New) Communist
Party of Canada back in 2021, the convening of the Party’s Founding
Congress in 2023 and the subsequent work of consolidation and
expansion across this large prison house of nations known as Canada.
Steps like these in Communist party-building have not been taken in
Canada since the late 1970s; so while there is still a very long and
difficult way to go still, our optimism is grounded in practice and
some key developments in recent years.
To press ahead further and to
make the strides that need to be made in the coming years, we assert
and recapitulate the positions taken by the (N)CPC through a series
of statements over the past year:
We must be ruthlessly
critical of the limits of the left in the imperialist countries.
In particular, we must be self-critical about the failure of Maoists
and Marxist-Leninists in most of the imperialist countries to
establish organizations larger than a few dozen people, or in the
best cases a few hundred. We must ask ourselves why, identify all
shortcomings and help to correct them posthaste as part of our
proletarian internationalist responsibilities.
It is urgent to build
mass work among the proletariat on a whole new scale.
This work must serve to bring large sections of the working class
into political conflict with the bourgeoisie. Only in this way will
large numbers of proletarians become committed and competent
revolutionaries. The masses who want to fight must have the reflex
of joining our mass organizations and not those of the reaction.
Communists must work to
develop a broad movement out in the open that rallies all
progressive people’s forces toward a common socialist cause. We
must be bold and audacious in our projection of a socialist horizon,
and we must get to work popularizing a new vision for society that
counters the bourgeois dead ends and nihilistic, fascist
“alternatives.”
It is also necessary, and
this is a crucial task for any truly revolutionary organization, to
build a robust apparatus that will not collapse as soon as the
bourgeoisie decides to blow on it.
Revolutionary parties in the imperialist countries must be capable
of working outside the purview of bourgeois legality and have a
minimal capability for special forms of work, even when such special
work is not yet warranted by their local conditions. Only by
building all these tools, along with and amid wide-ranging and
deep-reaching mass work, will we give ourselves a fighting chance
should the worst come to pass.
Victory is not guaranteed—only
the immensity and torment of the struggles ahead of us are. So we may
as well struggle to win, which we can only do by convincing many
others around us to rise from their passivity and build the
proletarian revolutionary vanguard that will be required to wrest
humanity from the existential risks and crises it faces. We have a
world to win or a world to lose, and the supposed inevitability of
the latter option—which is bourgeois cynicism, defeat and
despair—needs to be smashed.
To all those Communist,
revolutionary, progressive and conscious peoples in Canada and the
imperialist countries, let us fully comprehend our moment and the
necessary tasks at hand. Let us take up the Political Program of the
(N)CPC, apply its directives and popularize its viewpoints and
positions. If we can adequately organize ourselves, we are
historically positioned to deliver disorienting blows within the
centres of imperialism and help release a chain reaction that could
lead to world developments the kind and character of which, it is
true, none of us can claim to foresee from our current vantage point,
but which have been achieved before by people like ourselves. That we
cannot foresee it, nor guarantee it, must not prevent us from turning
ourselves wholeheartedly over to the effort and the cause, because it
is only by doing so that we can win.
Whatever becomes of the
present escalation in the Persian Gulf, let us deepen our wells of
steadfast determination, resilience, audacity and fighting spirit.
Let us commit to serious, properly paced training that enables us to
grow roots ever deeper in the class and respond nimbly to
opportunities as they arise. Let us fight to win the world we could
lose.
Revolutionary will,
The Editorial Board of
Railroad
1.
The following statement from the Editorial Board of Railroad
builds from, and significantly expands upon, two statements given by
other sections of (New) Communist Party of Canada to conferences of
fraternal parties in 2025, specifically: “Once again, we must turn
the escalation toward world war into an escalation toward proletarian
revolution,” by the International Department of the (N)CPC given to
the Italian CARC Party’s conference, Stop the Third World War of
the U.S., Zionist and European imperialists on September 28, 2025;
and “To stand against fascism and war, we need fighting Communist
Parties,” from by the Executive Bureau of the, CC (N)CPC to the
International Theoretical Conference on Fascism and Imperialism in
the 21st Century in the Imperialist Heartlands, hosted by the
National Democratic Front of the Philippines from November 28 to 29,
2025. These statements have not been reproduced by the (N)CPC, but
are available in the conference proceedings from these two events.
2.
Statement by President of Iranian Red Crescent Society, Pirhossein
Kolivand, 21 March 2026. (Available at:
https://www.nationalheraldindia.com/amp/story/international/over-80000-civilian-places-attacked-by-us-israel-since-war-began-iran)
3.
These covert operations were publicly alluded to by Israeli Heritage
Minister Amichai Eliyahu before Netanyahu ordered his ministers to
refuse further interviews. Motamedi, Maziar, “Narrative war: Who
killed thousands during Iran’s nationwide protests?” Al
Jazeera, 19
January 2026. (Available at:
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/1/19/narrative-war-who-killed-thousands-during-irans-nationwide-protests)
4.
According to his interview at the World Economic Forum in Davos,
Switzerland, January 2026, it was his department’s “economic
statecraft” that engineered a shortage of U.S. dollars in Iran by
disrupting the supply chain for Iran’s oil exports and implementing
so-called “secondary sanctions” that further blocked Iran from
the global financial system. This contributed to the collapse of the
country’s currency, the rial, causing soaring inflation (food
prices rose 72%), which was followed by civil unrest beginning in
late December 2025. (See:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nuqtAtSVKwQ)
5.
Except that in the case of Venezuela, the national bourgeoisie is
more of the bureaucrat-capitalist variety—what some have called the
“Boli-bourgeoisie”—not to be confused with those sections of
the bourgeoisie firmly aligned with U.S. imperialism.
6.
We say this with full recognition that Communist-led
national-liberation forces remain significant and active across
Palestine, Turkey and Kurdistan and, to a lesser extent, in other
countries in the region.
7.
While the U.S. did not and could not orchestrate a regime change in
Venezuela, it has forced the Bolivarian Republic to prostrate itself
before U.S. imperialism as the latter seized control of Venezuela’s
oil.
8.
We sincerely hope that at least some of the Xi Jinping fanboys and
other “Marxist-Leninists” out there can take pause for a moment,
give their heads a shake, sit with and reflect upon what Gaza,
Venezuela and the war in Iran today say about their cynical,
revisionist, opportunist and passive orientation toward their
long-awaited multipolar world and maybe redeem themselves by becoming
real revolutionaries.
9.
Note that through the first month of the war, Iran had been letting
through oil shipments to its allies and, as we were completing our
writing, had just announced it would begin lifting restrictions for
certain other non-hostile countries. All this reveals larger
geopolitical factors at play, which are discussed in greater detail
below. (See
https://gulfnews.com/world/mena/inside-irans-hormuz-strategy-who-can-pass-and-who-cant-1.500495192)
10.
Most of the 32 NATO countries have officially remained neutral or
noncommittal about the U.S.-Israel war with Iran. Only six of the 32
NATO countries have issued statements in support of U.S.-Israel’s
war since it began on February 28: Canada, Czech Republic, Albania,
North Macedonia, Lithuania and Latvia—though none of these
countries have expressed interest in getting involved.
11.
For more on the question of counter-revolution and capitalist
restoration in the formerly socialist countries, see (among many
other works) Martin Nicolaus’s The
Restoration of Capitalism
in the Soviet Union
(1975, Liberator Press) and Pao-Yu Ching’s Revolution
and Counter-Revolution: China’s Continuing Class Struggle Since
Liberation (2021,
Foreign Languages Press).
12.
Not that the Zionists will stop their genocidal expansionism after
Iran, Lebanon and Palestine. A number of leading figures in Israel,
including former prime minister Neftali Bennett, having recently
commented that Turkey is Israel’s next major strategic threat after
Iran. See Simon Speakman Cordall, “Turkish ‘threat’ talked up
in Israel as Netanyahu focuses on new alliances,” AlJazeera,
February 23, 2026
(available at:
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/2/23/turkish-threat-talked-up-israel-netanyahu-focuses-new-alliances).
13.
Robert Brenner, The
Economics of Global Turbulence: The Advanced Capitalist Economies
from Long Boom to Long Downturn, 1945–2005.
14.
The U.S. controlled two-thirds of the world’s gold when the Bretton
Woods agreement was brokered in 1944 in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire.
15.
These were financial products consisting of bundled-together mortgage
payments that allowed capitalists to bet on the ability of homeowners
to make their mortgage payments in the future.
16.
While taking a very limited and erroneous position on how to deal
with the supremacy of finance capital, Stephen Maher and Scott
Aquano’s The Fall
and Rise of American Finance: From JP Morgan to Blackrock
offers a decent chronology for the developments of finance capital in
the post-2008 world.
17.
See the social investigation on the Freedom Convoy movement in
Canada, “War in the enemy’s camp,” in kites
#7, by comrades Jorge, Paul and Arthur (May 2022).
18.
Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta and Amazon reported $370 billion in capital
expenditures for AI data centres in 2025.
19.
Atlantic Council interview with Goldman Sachs Chief Economist Jan
Hatzius, January 2026: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZHN0-ZNe_4
20.
These are formidable technologies in the hands of the bourgeoisie, to
be sure, but we also shouldn’t overestimate these technologies,
lest we enter into the conspiratorial and libertarian fantasyland of
all-powerful, all-seeing, omnipotent “totalitarian” powers, which
is a false conception of the bourgeois State and the main competitor
to the correct Leninist conception of the State as a unity of
opposites, an aggregate of class antagonism in society, a complex
reflection of the class struggle and always a dictatorship of one
class or another.
21.
The recent Supreme Court ruling that Trump’s tariffs violated
federal law and exceeded Presidential authority would seem to be an
exception to this. Time will tell how the Trump administration
manoeuvres around the judicial system further.
22.
The unprecedented conviction of “North Texas Antifa” in the
recent Prairieland case, in which the federal government brought
domestic terrorism charges against Left activists, is one of the most
significant examples of this.
23.
The “Washington Consensus” was a set of economic policies pushed
upon developing countries by the International Monetary Fund, World
Bank and the U.S. since the 1980s and ’90s that have imposed
privatization, debt dependence and the subordination of those
countries’ economies within U.S.-dominated global capitalism.
24.
Though, we will remark that military Keynesianism has kept the
Russian economy somewhat afloat amid the sanctions and war in Ukraine
over the past few years, so militarism can’t be totally disregarded
as a sink for market-hungry capital with nowhere else to go.
25.
See Stephanie Yang, “China reveals its plan to challenge the U.S.
dollar for dominance. Could it ever work?,” CNN, February 3, 2026
(available at:
https://www.cnn.com/2026/02/03/money/china-dollar-currency-challenge-hnk-intl).
26.
Or, to be more precise, Lloyd’s of London closure of the Strait of
Hormuz as the shipping insurance giant withdrew its insurance for
vessels in the Persian Gulf amid the war.
27.
The Trump-MAGA regime breaking the U.S. off from NATO, even if only
temporarily, would give Israel an opening to attack Turkey (see
footnote 12), which it cannot do while Turkey and the U.S. are both
NATO members.
28.
Part of the (N)CPC-CC’s recently published line, “On women,
ideology, capitalism and revolution,” treats the rise of
American-based churches in the Prairies, which seems necessary to
more deeply understand the Albertan rural separatist sentiment.
29.
https://calgary.citynews.ca/2026/02/19/alberta-referendum-questions-october-2026/
30.
Canada-Alberta Memorandum of Understanding:
https://www.pm.gc.ca/en/news/backgrounders/2025/11/27/canada-alberta-memorandum-understanding
31.
https://financialpost.com/commodities/mining/need-to-know-six-new-nation-building-projects-carney-list
32.
https://www.investmentexecutive.com/news/unemployment-rate-hits-6-7-after-canada-lost-84000-jobs-in-february/
33.
See Gilles Gauthier’s “Correct Our Tactics and Methods of Leading
Struggle,” which is also appearing in Railroad
#2.
34.
This question of the limitations of the first wave of Communist
Parties, especially those in the imperialist countries, is an
important topic for us, which is part of what draws us to the
analysis and answers given to this question in the (new) Communist
Party of Italy’s “Four Main Issues for Debate in the
International Communist Movement.” We may soon publish our own
response to this document.
