These perspectives were discussed by the CWO at our last General Meeting in December 2025. The new year opened with the US attack on Venezuela, yet another indication of the drive to generalised war across the world. On our website we have commented on these latest imperialist developments and highlighted some of the internationalist statements released by other groups. If one thing is certain, it's that now is the time for dialogue and cooperation between internationalists who recognise the seriousness of the world situation.

2025 left us with the bitter aftertaste of "ceasefires" and "peace deals" which did nothing to resolve the underlying causes of ongoing conflicts (or indeed even to stop the killing), rumblings of a trillion-dollar AI bubble which could trigger another financial crash, and yet more climate conferences which failed to agree on any real course of action to stave off the collapse of the ecosystem (leaving COP's own president to declare that bypassing official negotiations is now a necessity). Then of course there was the wave of mass protests which, while they demonstrated the deep anger and utter desperation felt by millions around the world, were, at best, only able to replace one corrupt leader with another.

Everywhere we look, we are seeing military preparations, persecution of the "other", and attacks on wages and conditions of workers. But there is no such thing as an absolutely hopeless situation. And in order to understand how humanity can get out of the current impasse, we also need to understand how we got here.

All Empires Fall

The destruction wrought by the Second World War allowed for the mass devaluation of capital, creating the conditions for an economic boom that lasted roughly until the late 1960s. On 15 August 1971, when Nixon announced his decision to end the convertibility of the US dollar to gold, he said his intention was "to create a new prosperity without war". Fifty years later, that vision is now well and truly dead, buried by the very contradictions inherent to the capitalist system itself. The Nixon shock only kicked the can down the road and led to widespread speculation, the flooding of international markets with fictitious capital, massive unemployment and abandonment of much of manufacturing and heavy industry as cheap consumer goods were accessed from low-wage China. Whilst globalisation, privatisation, restructuring, and all the other expedients resorted to in the last half century to revive profits brought short-term promise, in the long-term they failed to cancel out the tendencies towards diminishing profitability in the "real" economy. Continued financial uncertainty and increased competition mean the options for capital are narrowing resulting in the current rise in "pre-emptive" militarism. Global military spending is at post-war record levels while the world is already being torn apart by an amount of conflicts not seen since the Second World War. The drive to war is out in the open.

The financial crash of 2008 was a sign of things to come. Austerity became the word of the day, but not all countries were affected equally. The US – having become the world's foremost superpower in the course of the Second World War and having overcome the challenge from the USSR in the Cold War – was now the starting point for a speculative bubble in housing, which brought about a global economic recession. China – having built a massive labour force under Mao, and opening up to international capital after the reforms of Deng – weathered the storms and capitalised on the opportunity. China, the new "workshop of the world", a young economic empire built on the export of cheap commodities, had by 2014 surpassed the US as the world's largest trading nation, and by 2016, became the world's second-largest economy after the US. According to some estimates, it might take the top spot before the end of the decade.

And this is the critical imperialist conflict. Whilst China continues to stealthily grow both its economy and military, as well as its imperial reach across the world, a debt-ridden US has been faced with the greatest challenge to the hegemony it established in 1945. The irony is that this challenge is largely an unintended consequence of past US policies in dealing with the crisis of capital accumulation over the last half century. Globalisation was a response to workers in the heartlands of capitalism refusing to accept a cut in living standards from the 1970s onwards. The "solution" was for Western, especially US, capital to move South and East. This brought mass unemployment to the West but the investment helped kick start China's rise as a manufacturing power. The danger was not immediately obvious at the time since the relative decline of US manufacturing was masked by the role of the dollar as the currency of international trade, particularly the oil trade (the petro dollar). This has been the key to US dominance since the Nixon shock. As most countries needed to buy oil, they needed to hold dollars. These dollars, derived from trading in real commodities, were generally held in US bonds. This has allowed the US to fund its deficit by issuing low interest bonds to the rest of the world. The importance of the oil trade being in dollars was shown by the violent overthrow of regimes which proposed trading their oil in other currencies. This was the fate of Saddam Hussein in Iraq and Muammar Gaddafi in Libya.

Today the US dollar's "exorbitant privilege" is under a far greater threat from China and Russia. In its place an alternative payment system is being constructed and is already in use in the BRICS group of states. China, the world's largest buyer of oil, is now paying for it in renminbi. The Chinese renminbi is on the rise, now making up 8.5% of global currency trade and gaining some foothold in Latin America, Africa and the Middle East, where, critically, Saudi Arabia did not renew the 50-year agreement with the US, made in 1974 to sell its oil in dollars, and has begun taking renminbi for oil sold to China. The significant factor here is that trades outside the dollar mean they do not go through US banks so they lose their cut and the US is less able to draw in value created by workers worldwide, as well as monitor trade and sanction countries who refuse to do its bidding. Hence the unanimity in the US ruling class over China. Though they disagree on how to respond to this, both the Republicans and the Democrats agree on one thing, and that is China being the main challenge to US supremacy.

But Trump's MAGA movement is not only a break with past policies, Republican or Democrat. It is a veritable abandonment of the pillars of the "rules-based world order" that has been at the core of US imperialist policy since 1945. The fact that the US government is now quite openly declaring that the so-called international law and Geneva Conventions no longer apply to it, even though these agreements were the cornerstones of the post-war settlement, which it constructed and from which it was the main beneficiary, is a sign of real desperation. The post-war international role of the dollar was just one of these enormous benefits. The Trump MAGA camp now claims that these agreements allowed the rest of the world (including US allies) to "rip the US off," and hence they must all pay tribute.

However, Trump's economic threats have had the opposite effect. The upshot of his tariff war has been a decrease in confidence in the safety of the dollar. Foreign states are reducing their holding of US bonds. In 2020, 55% of US bonds were bought by foreign buyers but in 2025 this had decreased to 35%. The decrease in foreign buyers has caused the interest rate to rise which in turn is causing the financing of the enormous US debt (now $38 trillion) to become an even bigger problem as servicing it is now equal or greater than the entire US defence budget. The situation is becoming critical.

And where the US still has some significant advantage is on the military front. The diplomatic twists and turns of the Trump administration, no matter how irrational they may seem, have to be understood in the context of an empire attempting to retain control over a world slowly slipping from its grasp. An example is the US is pushing the burden of the war in Ukraine onto Europe. It has obliged its NATO allies to increase military spending to a target of 5% of GDP. It has forced allies like the EU, Japan and South Korea to promise to invest in strategic sectors of American industry. This being the price demanded for reducing Trump's tariffs on their exports to the US. The US hopes this will aid reindustrialisation. The promised funds, to be invested over a period of 10 years, amount to billions of dollars. Again this is a measure of weakness and desperation.

The US has stood firmly behind Israel's massacres in Gaza and creeping takeover of the West Bank as it aims to redraw the balance of power in the region. It continues to surround China with military bases while arming Taiwan. Far from retreating into the Western hemisphere, there is a policy of fighting tooth and nail to retain hegemony worldwide. Demands for the handing over of Greenland, the attacks on Venezuelan ships and boats, all demonstrate that far from seeking "peace deals" the US is now embarked on an aggressive attempt to secure whatever resources it can get. Even the phony "ceasefire" deals in Ukraine or the Congo are about US acquisition of raw materials or the contracts for post-war reconstruction. And it goes beyond proxy wars, funding of guerilla wars, destabilisation, sanctions and tariffs. Now traditional US allies are not immune from interference either. The so-called "Illiberal International" demands "free speech" (aka conspiracy theories) for the ultra-right "patriots" who toe the Trump line on migrants, Islamic terrorism and climate change. This is the soundtrack for the dying days of the "rules-based world order".

And those dying days are counted in blood. Ukraine, Palestine, Sudan. These conflicts have dominated the news for the last three years. Untold misery and horror, tens of thousands of dead, whole cities destroyed, and millions of lives changed forever. They are not accidents, but the direct consequence of a world divided into nation-states competing for influence, resources and land. And they are not the only flashpoints for future confrontations: Taiwan, Venezuela, Kashmir, are just some of the other powder kegs. Attempts to appeal to international law to end ongoing conflicts have revealed an ugly truth: imperialist interests, rather than any humanitarian concerns, determine when conflicts are allowed to start and end. Likewise, talk of a "green transition" is now on the backburner. Modern warfare emits massive amounts of greenhouse gas and pollution and still requires fossil fuels. A perfect storm of crises emerges, where economic, military and environmental emergencies are all feeding each other.

Nation or Class

In other words, humanity stands at a critical juncture. But humanity under capitalism is not one undifferentiated mass; within each nation-state is a society divided into two main social classes whose interests are fundamentally at odds. Those who labour for a wage, and those who employ labour for a profit. The working class whose unpaid labour is the source of the profits of the capitalist class. And the capitalist class which, with their urge to maintain profitability, is dragging all of humanity into a rat race to the bottom: a future of war, repression and austerity, where the rich get richer through the suffering of the poor. The question still remains whether the working class, that sleeping giant which everyday makes the world turn around, will let itself be dragged along silently.

It is no surprise that, seeing their world turned upside down and anxious about their own meagre livelihoods, instead of targeting their anger at the capitalist system, many have sought solace and safety in the nationalist myth, repeated as it is in schools and in the media. "We" – the citizens, the nation – "are all in it together". So say the politicians and the bosses. The "others" – migrants, refugees, LGBT communities, religious minorities, etc. – are "the enemy within". So say the far-right demagogues funded by the more Machiavellian elements of the capitalist class. This kind of nationalism, although purporting to be an alternative to the failures of the political parties of the establishment, in reality is a product of that same establishment, fuelled by the same drive to war. So it's no accident, or figment of the imagination, that this nationalist revival is being encouraged around the world, from the White House all the way down.

The situation in the UK is emblematic of wider trends. 50 years of economic restructuring and class defeats have undermined the very social fabric of working class communities. Values such as solidarity and collective action have been systematically undermined in favour of atomisation and self-interest. Casual contracts, irregular hours of work, automation and digitalisation of workplaces, have all made it more difficult for workers to defend their economic interests, or even to recognise these interests as something they have in common. Benefits have been slashed and the NHS is at breaking point. And since the Conservative and Labour governments of recent decades have only delivered managed decline, it is all too easy for the far-right to step in with their false promises that life will get better if only the migrants were kicked out.

All of this divide and rule has had a drastic effect on the ability of workers to defend their wages and conditions. Even where strikes and protests take place, they do so on a sectoral and limited basis, and mostly end with the trade unions negotiating a return to work without any real gains. The end result is that 50 of the richest UK families now hold more wealth than 50% of the UK population. And almost 50% of UK workers are living pay cheque to pay cheque, many having to resort to food banks or holding down two jobs just to cover daily expenses. If workers blame each other for their misery, they are easier to exploit and ultimately to send off to war to fight each other for the interests of the rich.

Another World is Still Possible

Capitalism – a system premised on the existence of wage labour, private property and money exchange – has created the ultimate incentive: profit. Whether it is leaders of the world's foremost superpower allowing the destruction of an entire city in order to turn it into a riviera for the rich, fossil-fuel bosses continuing to wreck the planet's ecosystems despite all the scientific warnings, or online influencers generating racist AI content for clicks, they all have one thing in common: making money, consequences be damned. A social and economic system which rewards the undermining of our very existence as a species cannot be reformed. It has to be overthrown. But this can only be accomplished by the concerted action of the working class, the only force capable of carrying out a real social transformation from the bottom to the top.

And here, internationalists – those politicised elements within the working class who already understand the historical mission of their class in the struggle for a stateless, classless, moneyless society, a society where humans don't exploit and oppress each other for profit, but instead work together to fulfil our varied needs – have a special responsibility. Unlike all the other political tendencies, which only ask workers to vote, sign up and pay up, on the assumption that we should leave it to politicians to solve all our problems, internationalists have to tell the truth. The only salvation lies in workers' own activity, the strength of their organisation and solidarity which has to go beyond the trade union straitjacket and all individual identity divisions imposed by capitalism. This is no time for idle polemics, navel gazing or retreating to the ivory tower. Strikes and protests are happening around the world, but as our political ancestors have always said, without a revolutionary internationalist reference point these struggles will all inevitably exhaust themselves within the system.

We are not saying a Third World War is going to break out tomorrow, nor that it will necessarily play out in the same way as the First and Second World Wars – rearmament takes time and we are dealing with much more advanced technologies and hybrid tactics. But it's undeniable the world is spiralling in that direction and while it's still possible, internationalists need to come together, and bring their alternative message to the wider working class, hopefully planting the seeds that can sprout a real movement for another world.