The Ukraine war is not just about Ukraine or Russia. It is the first step on the road to a wider war. Tomorrow we will be suffering what the population of Ukraine is suffering today. Both Russian and Ukrainian workers are suffering death at the fronts to defend ... what? The property and interests of their oligarchic cliques. For our rulers, defence of “the nation” makes sense since they own most of it. For the rest of the population, imperialist war means the loss of home and livelihood and for many, the loss of life itself.

We underestimate the consequences of this war at our peril. The US and its allies may not actually be sending troops into battle against the Russian forces, but the amount of Western weaponry deployed in Ukraine first provoked the Russian invasion and has made a material difference to the outcome. Worse, it has started an arms race. NATO has already sent so many weapons and munitions to Ukraine that they have now discovered their reserves are nearly exhausted. Weapon production lines which have lain dormant for almost three decades are now being turned back on. New investment has had to be made to get them up to scale. Arms spending was already on the increase after the Russians took back Crimea in 2014, but within a few months of the Ukraine War starting, global military spending passed $2 trillion for the first time with at least 60% of it in NATO states. The US still spends more on arms than the next 9 states put together but all plan to spend more. Germany, which has pledged €100 billion to “military modernisation” since the war started, has overturned its long-standing position of refusing to sell arms into a war zone. This new arms race is an irrevocable step towards a wider conflict.

Globalisation (which brought cheap goods to the world on the backs of super-cheap labour in the periphery) is now in reverse gear. Protectionism is on the rise, with the United States in the lead. Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) involves billions of dollars in massive state subsidies to new ‘green’ businesses to promote the US position and undermine China in the ‘green technology’ race. On the military front, whilst Sweden and Finland are entering NATO, the “pariah” powers of Russia, China and Iran are militarily and economically closer together to evade Western (in reality, US) sanctions.

The USA’s bitterly divided ruling class agrees only about the China peril since it has the economic power to become a threat to the central plank of US hegemony — the still mighty dollar. But the war has done more to undermine it than all the cheap Chinese commodities did during peace. Today more countries are reducing their dollar holdings and others have stopped using it as either a reserve or trading currency. Blinken and Biden rarely make a speech without pointing to the greater threat posed by China whether via its technology (Huawei and TikTok) or its threat to Taiwan. A whole slew of US generals and ex-military men are currently competing to predict precisely when China will invade Taiwan, giving dates that range from 2024 to the end of the decade. Beijing’s goal has always been to retake Taiwan as it aims to become the world’s dominant superpower by 2049. China has carefully built up its economic power, but the global capitalist crisis has not spared it either. It is now bailing out its banks (already reeling from a burst property- boom bubble) as various parts of the infrastructure of the Belt and Road initiative have turned out to be white elephants. Now, Chinese rhetoric is beginning to match that of the US, especially since the US (which already has some 400 bases with 300,000 troops and 60% of its navy in the Pacific) has built a series of anti-Chinese alliances across Asia. Although China trails well behind the US in military hardware, it would be fighting a regional war in its own backyard on more equal terms. Certainly China’s recent three day military exercise in the Pacific involving 120 flight ‘sorties’ just east of Taiwan and south of Japan emphasise China is gearing up to follow Xi’s ‘dare to struggle, dare to win’ mantra.

These are the sort of calculations that preoccupy the rulers of the global imperialist order. The world’s workers have absolutely no interest in any of them. Our war strategy has to be about how to develop and strengthen our collective resistance to ALL of capitalism’s attacks, no matter where they occur.

No War but the Class War: Latest News

As capitalism steps up its war propaganda it will once again call upon us to die “for our country” or “democracy”. But “workers have no country”. We don’t own land or factories, which are the wealth of nations. That is the prerogative of the property-owning capitalist class. Workers have no material interest in supporting either side in these imperialist wars. We reject all the excuses and alibis that are trotted out to make us give our lives to protect their wealth. Their democracy is a sham. They have drawn up the rules of a political game that ensures the safety of the system no matter who wins. It is “democracy for the moneybags”, as recent history has confirmed in the corrupt awarding of contracts to government supporters everywhere.

We cannot win more than temporary palliatives as long as we play by their rules. Whilst they are stepping up their violence at home and abroad, we have to step up the resistance. Whilst their weapons are tear gas, batons, bombs and missiles, ours are consciousness that a new world is yet possible and our collective organisation. The latter involves not only creating organisations of struggle wherever wage workers live and work but also an international political organisation to coordinate and guide that struggle against, not just this or that state, but the entire global system. There are many internationalists around the world who can see all this but who are trapped in the debates of the past. The issues today are too serious for useless polemics, which generate voluminous academic tomes, or sitting on the sidelines. We need a positive engagement to begin to build an international body to lead the global fightback. This is why we have joined with other internationalists, both in and out of organisations, in No War but the Class War committees to prepare resistance. This is not a quick fix and we don’t expect dramatic early results but we guess it will be too late to organise once the war wave engulfs us all.

Starting in Liverpool, committees have been organised around the world on the basis of the five points they drafted:

• Against capitalism, imperialism and all nationalisms. No support for any national capitals, “lesser evils”, or states in formation.
• For a society where states, wage-labour, private property, money and production for profit are replaced by a world of freely associated producers.
• Against the economic and political attacks that the current war, and the ones to come, will unleash on the working class.
• For the self-organised struggle of the working class, for the formation of independent strike committees, mass assemblies and workers’ councils.
• Against oppression and exploitation, for the unity of the working class and the coming together of genuine internationalists.

Since then further committees have been formed across the world in Montreal, Toronto, Lambertville, Paris, Glasgow, South Korea, and Turkey. In the week we go to press two further committees have been formed in Chicago and Miami. For the latest information start with the Miami page: nwbcwmiami.wordpress.com and find a group near you or get advice on how to set up a group where you are from the existing groups.

The above article is taken from the current edition (No. 62) of Aurora, bulletin of the Communist Workers’ Organisation. The content of this Aurora is based on the collective May Day statement issued by the political groups of the Internationalist Communist Tendency to which the CWO belongs. See leftcom.org for the full version.