We are marching today to honor the great holiday of the international working class: May Day. We are uniting to build a worldwide movement, led by the Progressive Labor Party, to destroy capitalism and erect a communist society run by and for workers. PLP groups in more than twenty countries are dedicated to challenging the rival imperialist powers as they battle for control over the earth’s resources — especially oil and gas — and to exploit our class. We workers produce everything of value; the bosses steal the value of our labor for their profits, the lifeblood of capitalism.
Inevitably, the leading imperialists — and especially the rulers of the United States, Russia and China — will settle their intensifying competition in a major war, just as they did in World Wars I and II. They will use the world’s workers as cannon fodder to kill the opposing bosses’ workers. They desperately need our class to choose one nationalist side over another.
But we have no stake in these devastating fights over profits. We oppose all bosses. We must turn their imperialist wars into a class war for our interests. We need to organize a revolution to bury capitalism once and for all.
U.S. Oligarchs vs. Russian Oligarchs
As of the moment, the leading edge of this inter-imperialist rivalry pits the bosses of ExxonMobil and JPMorgan Chase, represented by warrior-in-chief Barack Obama, against Russian bosses led by Vladimir Putin — dictator against dictator, oligarchs against oligarchs. To counter Putin’s goal of an empire built from the former republics of the Soviet Union, Obama is following a potentially catastrophic New Cold War policy endorsed by the most powerful U.S. capitalists. (See box on the old Cold War.)
Obama’s New Cold War combines economic pressure (bolstered by growing U.S. energy leverage from recent discoveries of oil and gas) with a sharp reminder of the U.S.’s nuclear superiority and its readiness to use it. For our class, the stakes couldn’t be higher. During the first Cold War, U.S. rulers slaughtered three million workers and farmers to contain Soviet (and later Chinese) influence in Vietnam. In standoffs like the Cuban missile crisis, U.S.-Soviet military brinksmanship imperiled the lives of hundreds of millions more.
On April 16, Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) think tank, wrote, “The strategy needed to resist Putin’s efforts to expand Russia’s influence beyond its borders — and to induce change within them — resembles nothing so much as the ‘containment’ doctrine that guided Western policy for the four decades of the Cold War” (CFR website). The CFR was founded by heavyweights of U.S. finance and industry: JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, ExxonMobil and Chevron. David Rockefeller, longtime leader of the finance capital wing of the U.S. ruling class, is honorary chairman.
For these arch-imperialists’ benefit, Haass asked Obama to impose “stronger sanctions” targeting Russian financial institutions, and to weaken Russia’s energy stranglehold on Ukraine and much of Western Europe” by exporting U.S. oil and gas. He also ominously demanded that Obama “increase...America’s presence in select NATO countries.” (See box on NATO on page 4.)
The next day, the CFR clarified Haass’s deadly message with an article, “NATO After Crimea,” by Pentagon advisor and liberal Brookings Institution fellow Michael O’Hanlon. It called for 3,000 to 7,000 GIs to be stationed in Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania to create “a trip wire along the border with Russia.” Under official NATO doctrine, the term “trip wire” has nuclear significance. Translation: If Soviet troops crossed NATO borders, U.S. rulers would retaliate with atomic bombs on Russian cities.
Only U.S. Rulers Used A-Bomb
The “trip wire” scenario relies on the Big Lie that paints conventionally armed Russian invaders as the nuclear initiators. “You made us do it,” the U.S. will retort. But “trip wire” is actually a euphemism for Washington’s dreaded first-strike stance — the use of nuclear weapons to destroy the enemy’s capacity to respond. (U.S. bosses are the only ones ever to use the atomic bomb.) The “trip wire” strategy ruled NATO planning from 1957 to 1968, when the U.S.-dominated alliance had more bombs than the Soviet bloc but fewer troops and tanks near likely battle zones. U.S. warlords perceive a similar imbalance today. So they are dusting off NATO document MC 14/2.
The document’s history is outlined in a 1975 Defense Department report to Congress: “The so-called ‘trip-wire’ response [was] stated in Military Committee Document 14/2 during the period of unquestioned United States nuclear superiority. MC14/2 emphasized deterrence through the threat of massive retaliation with nuclear weapons in lieu of large conventional [U.S.-led] forces.”
The MC 14/2’s original trip-wire ultimatum, now being revived by Obama and the imperialist liberal media, was laid out as follows:
The principal elements of the deterrent are adequate nuclear and other ready forces and the manifest determination to retaliate against any aggressor with all the forces at our disposal, including nuclear weapons, which the defense of NATO would require.
U.S. Sends Ground Troops
On April 16, just before Haass and O’Hanlon made their pitches for nuclear gunboat diplomacy, the Washington Post, an outlet closely linked to war-bent U.S. liberal bosses, printed an Op Ed article by imperialist flunky James Jeffrey. Jeffrey served MobilExxon as U.S. ambassador to Iraq from 2010 to 2012 and then was hired by the energy company directly. He has strong-armed Exxon’s stated right to pump oil simultaneously from bitterly conflicted regions of the country, even though these actions destabilize the fragile nation (Reuters, 2/8/13). In the Post piece, Jeffrey welcomed a renewed “trip wire” prospect of facing down Russia with nuclear threats — and even retaking territory Putin has seized. He wrote:
Examples of effective ground force “tripwires” date to the U.S. brigade in Berlin during the Cold War. The best way to send Putin a tough message and possibly deflect a Russian campaign against more vulnerable NATO states is to back up our commitment to the sanctity of NATO territory with ground troops, the only military deployment that can make such commitments unequivocal.
To its credit, the administration has dispatched fighter aircraft to Poland and the Baltic states to reinforce NATO fighter patrols and exercises. But these deployments, as with ships temporarily in the Black Sea, have inherent weaknesses as political signals. They cannot hold terrain — the ultimate arbiter of any military calculus — and can be easily withdrawn if trouble brews. Troops, even limited in number, send a much more powerful message. More difficult to rapidly withdraw, once deployed, they can make the point that the United States is serious about defending NATO’s eastern borders.
The big capitalists welcome Barack Obama’s recent efforts in the Ukraine crisis, as evidenced by the bosses’ top liberal mouthpiece: “Even as the crisis in Ukraine continues to defy easy resolution, President Obama and his national security team are looking beyond the immediate conflict to forge a new long-term approach to Russia that applies an updated version of the Cold War strategy of containment” (New York Times, 4/20/14). A half century ago, U.S. capitalists’ “containment” policy explicitly threatened nuclear war. It does so again today.
The U.S. rulers’ problem is that they aren’t close to the military mobilization they need for a decisive confrontation of rivals Russia and China. The U.S. working class stands opposed to war, especially after Iraq and Afghanistan. U.S. workers are beset by mass racist unemployment, inadequate and costly healthcare, racist attacks by the bosses’ cops, increasing poverty, and mass racist incarceration, especially of black and Latino workers and youth. Putin and his capitalist cronies face a similar obstacle, with Russian workers increasingly disenchanted as the country’s economy gets squeezed in the fight over Ukraine.
Destroying capitalism, the system that causes these problems, is the only answer for workers in the U.S., Russia and worldwide. Achieving that goal means building a revolutionary party to lead and guide the working class with communist ideas. That’s what the Progressive Labor Party is all about. Join PLP and fight to bury the bosses and their racist, sexist, war-driven system.
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Cold War Was Pretty Hot
The old Cold War began in 1946, immediately following World War II, when the U.S. and the Soviet Union had been allies. U.S. rulers realized that the then-socialist Soviet Union, led by the Bolshevik Party, wasn’t merely the main force that defeated Hitler’s Nazi Germany. The USSR also inspired tens of millions of workers in Asia, Africa and Latin America to try to free themselves from the colonial imperialists of the U.S., Britain and France. By 1949, the Chinese Communist Party had led a revolution and emancipated hundreds of millions of workers and peasants.
U.S. rulers turned to a policy of “containment” to hem in the Soviet Union and smash anti-colonial liberation movements backed by the Soviets. Thus emerged the Cold War. It was “cold” in the sense that neither side seemed ready to employ the newly destructive atomic bomb to destroy one another, despite the willingness of the U.S. ruling class to use it to obliterate the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, when it alone had the bomb, and murder a quarter-million workers in 1945.
Even so, the Cold War was never a peaceful time. Innumerable “small” wars erupted. In 1950, U.S. rulers fought the Soviet Union and China in the three-year Korean War. U.S. bosses invaded or helped overthrow governments in Guatemala, the Dominican Republic, Grenada, and Chile, among many others. But a turning point came in Vietnam, when U.S. forces were driven out in defeat.
By the late 1960s, the Soviet Union had reverted to full-blown capitalism. The seeds of this regression were contained in the retention of features of the profit system, especially a wage system that created tiers of privilege in the working class. Eventually, a new class system developed in the USSR. Support for anti-colonial national liberation movements degenerated into an imperialist operation for Soviet expansionism. From that point on, the Cold War became an imperialist rivalry between the rulers of the U.S. and the USSR. It ended in 1989 with the collapse of the Soviet Union, due mainly to internal weaknesses.
