Although yesterday I indicated general agreement with the Workers' World article with the exception of the portion under the heading "Working class enters anti-war movement", my position on one other part should be clarified as well:
During the first half of the 20th century, imperialist war was driven by inter-imperialist rivalry and struggles over which country would be able to loot the colonial peoples. During the latter part of the 20th century, war and the threat of war were driven by the struggle of imperialism against the socialist camp and the national liberation movements — the Cold War.
Now the permanent tendency of imperialism toward war and militarism is driven by the drive for reconquest of the territories lost in that period.
This part of the article is obviously key, as it addresses the historical record of the imperialist era of capitalism in very broad strokes. As indicated yesterday, I largely agree with the above quote, but my take on some aspects of the historical record might merit some clarification.
Following their correct summation of the period up through World War 2, Workers' World proceeds to lay out two distinctive periods that corresponded to actual U.S. government policies respectively called the Plan for the American Century (1947-1997) and the Plan for the New American Century (1997-present), which literally laid out/lay out (as applicable) strategies for world conquest. In the first of these post-WW2 periods, the U.S. won the basic victory, establishing itself as the sole surviving superpower. The second, current period is characterized by a drive to consolidate that victory by eliminating the phenomenon of "rogue states". All of this is correct. And yes, in the current period, all the imperialists are essentially united under American leadership against the remaining "rogue states" and those who seek to establish "rogue states".
However, this statement from the above quote..."During the latter part of the 20th century, war and the threat of war were driven by the struggle of imperialism against the socialist camp and the national liberation movements — the Cold War"....is somewhat a mischaracterization stemming from the WWP's persistent refusal to recognize that, for the most of the Cold War, the Soviet Union was not a socialist country, but a mighty imperialist power in its own right. The Cold War had a number of periods:
In the first period, which lasted roughly one decade (1945-55ish), the Soviet Union was still a socialist country and at the head of the socialist and anti-imperialist camp. For most of this period, tensions between the U.S. and the USSR were especially high and even spilled over into actual combat with each other in the Korean War. Tensions gradually cooled from 1951 on, as Soviet leader Joseph Stalin started considering the Korean War a stalemate and spent the next couple years negotiated a cease-fire. Then, after Stalin died and the Korean War ended in 1953, new Soviet leadership emerged at the top that was qualitatively more amenable to re-establishing diplomatic ties with the imperialists.
The second period began in 1956, when a new Soviet leader by the name of Nikita Khrushchev denounced Stalin as a "criminal" and jettisoned the previous view that an atomic/nuclear showdown between the socialist and capitalist camps was ultimately inevitable due to the belligerence of the latter, embracing instead a theory and policy of permanent "peaceful co-existence" with the imperialists. To rationalize this collaborative, anti-antagonistic policy, Khrushchev also put forward the theory of the "peaceful transition" into socialism, i.e. of the possibility of proletarian revolution without warfare. This policy shift on the USSR's part yielded a major split in the global anti-U.S. camp, led generally by socialist China. The Chinese Communists under Mao Zedong's leadership argued that the Soviet leadership was now pointing that country away from the objective of world revolution and in the direction of rapprochement with the imperialists and that the accomplishment of said feat would be impossible unless they abandoned socialism. The abandonment of socialism, they contended, would be a precondition for diplomatic rapprochement with the imperialists under U.S. leadership. Thus, it was argued, Khrushchev was a revisionist: someone who, while claiming to be a Marxist and perhaps even believing themself one, takes up politics that are fundamentally irreconcilable with Marxism. In 1963, Khrushchev did indeed reorganize the Soviet economy along profit lines, thus effectively restoring capitalism under a system of broad state ownership. But try as he did, Khrushchev was never able to establish a close diplomatic relationship with the U.S., and the Soviet Union under Leonid Brezhnev saw an opening through which to make imperialist inroads of the country's own against U.S. imperialism in the Vietnam War and other national liberation struggles. Thus began the third period of the Cold War in the mid-1960s.
Under Brezhnev's leadership, the USSR undertook an aggressive foreign policy, literally taking a large number of semi-colonies and conquering those states under its influence that sought to challenge that influence. Meanwhile, from the start of the second period, China had been seeking to establish its leadership of the Cold War against the imperialist camp led by the United States, recognizing that the Soviet Union wasn't seriously looking to finish the world proletarian revolution. China's Cultural Revolution period (1966-69) marked the height of this effort. But the Chinese Maoists had not initially fully recognized the distinction between the compromising yet still ultimately socialist state of affairs on the USSR's part during the second period of the Cold War and that of the country's aggressive, social-imperialist policies that began in earnest in this new, third period of the Cold War. By the time of the Cultural Revolution, there had been some recognition that the Soviet Union was now basically capitalist, but no clear-cut recognition as yet that it was actually a highly aggressive imperialist power. That recognition came in 1968 and '69, when the USSR invaded and subjugated Czechoslovakia and repeatedly attacked China. It also came out in 1969 that the Soviet Union had developed more extensive plans for a nuclear confrontation with China than it had for one with the United States. Now it was clear: the imperialist camp now definitely included the Soviet Union, and as an aggressive superpower in its own right. From that point on, China wrongly took up an opportunistic policy of establishing a united front with the USA against Soviet social-imperialism. The latter was of much closer proximity to China and thus was viewed as the more imminent danger...to China. Had they thought more about what the greater danger to the world overall was, they might have acted differently and in a more principled way. Anyhow, America happily obliged, thus, over the course of the 1970s and early '80s, wiping out the socialist camp (which, during this period, consisted of China, Albania, North Vietnam, and Democratic Kampuchea) indirectly by bringing the leader of the remaining socialist camp, China, on a certain level, into its camp. By 1986, there were no remaining socialist states on Earth and the U.S. had clearly regained the upper hand in the Cold War against its bourgeois rival, the USSR. Now began the fourth and final period of the Cold War: the capitulation of the Soviet Union to the United States.
So I just wanted to clarify that there were these complex twists and turns to the Cold War. China's rapprochement with the United States in the 1970s and '80s was likely the single most determining factor in the outcome. In that move, one-fourth of humanity lost the socialist system and went back to capitalism, in league with the world's top-dog oppressor: it's main purveyor of violence and exploitation. So I would tend to argue that the Cold War, as an anti-imperialist low-level war, was basically lost in 1971, when the decision was made by the Chinese government to meet with U.S. president Nixon and to oust the opponents of that meet from the People's Liberation Army, and thus from essential control of the state. We are only just now recovering ideologically from that disaster. With the (real) socialist camp out of the way, America found beating out its only significant imperialist rival, the Soviet Union, comparatively easy. As I think you might be able to see by now, my take on the nature of the Cold War differs quite a lot from the WWP's pro-Soviet account. My take is considerably more complex. But on the ultimate outcome of the Cold War, the defeat of the socialist camp generally (IMO completely) and the establishment of America as the sole remaining superpower, we agree.
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