Photo Above: The British nuclear submarine HMS Vigilant test fires the Trident II nuclear ballistic missile. Because of their capacity, nuclear-powered submarines are ideal for carrying nuclear weapons or for later being adapted to carry such weapons. All of the U.S. and Britain’s massive arsenal of submarine-launched nuclear missiles are carried on nuclear-powered submarines.
Torpedo the AUKUS
Submarine Deal!
Stand with Socialistic China
to Stand by Working Class Interests
23 September 2021: Australia’s rulers have dragged the Asia Pacific another step closer to a catastrophic war. Last week, they announced a deal for the U.S. and Britain to help equip the Australian military with nuclear submarines. The deal will replace the contract that Canberra awarded to France to provide the military with French-designed conventional submarines. Like that previous project, the nuclear submarine plan is squarely aimed against the world’s most populous country, the Peoples Republic of China (PRC). Even Washington and Canberra’s announcement of the deal was meant to antagonise China. It sure succeeded in doing that! A Chinese spokesman responded by rightly pointing out that the nuclear cooperation deal has “seriously undermined regional peace and stability.”
In rushing to announce the submarine deal before details were finalised, Joe Biden, Scott Morrison and Boris Johnson were hoping to distract from their regimes’ humiliating defeat in Afghanistan. Their nuclear submarine bombshell came as part of announcing the formation of a new alliance between the three regimes, called AUKUS. This will see even more U.S. troops and bomber aircraft stationed on Australian bases. The Liberal government claims that the new alliance “would help to provide peace and stability to the Indo-Pacific region.” What utter rubbish! During their occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan and their air strikes on Syria, the U.S., Australian and British militaries callously killed hundreds of thousands of civilians through “accidental” bombings of wedding parties, hospitals, civilian vehicles and residential homes. In Afghanistan, Australia’s highly paid special forces troops massacred farmers, executed unarmed prisoners, flew racist Nazi and Confederate flags, tortured villagers and slit the throats of teenage boys. In 2011, the joint U.S.-Australia Pine Gap spy base in the Northern Territory was used to pinpoint NATO air strikes on Libya that killed tens of thousands of civilians and left that country in bloody turmoil ever since. The AUKUS regimes are the world’s biggest purveyors of terror. They unleash their military might to bash the world into a “stable” political shape that maximizes the ability of the corporate bosses that they serve to superexploit the labour and natural resources of poorer countries. AUKUS will enhance the ability of all three regimes do this. Although its main target will be the PRC and her socialistic neighbour and ally, North Korea, AUKUS will inevitably also be deployed in new colonial expeditions in the Middle East and Asia. Most of the world’s masses, especially the youth of today, are rightly concerned about the grave threat posed by climate change. However, we must understand that the threat to humanity from imperialist war is an even more immediate threat and one that has already taken millions of lives in the 21st century. Let us resist! Down with AUKUS! Oppose all U.S., Australian and British military interventions! Let us demand: Not one submarine, not one missile, not one warplane, not one soldier for the Australian imperialist military! All U.S. troops and bases out of Australia! Close Pine Gap!
Photo Credit: Wakal Koshar/AFP
The Added Threat Posed by Nuclear Submarines
Given popular aversion within Australia to nuclear weapons, the Liberal government insisted that the new submarines would not lead to the deployment of nuclear weapons. However, that section of the ruling class that dream of becoming a nuclear weapons power will surely use the acquisition of war machines using nuclear energy as a beachhead from which to make a future push for such weapons. Moreover, the added capacity of nuclear submarines makes them ideal platforms for the future deployment of submarine-launched nuclear missiles. That is why the only six countries that currently possess nuclear submarines are simultaneously the world’s six biggest nuclear weapons powers.
However, even Australia’s acquisition of nuclear submarines by themselves is a major escalation of the anti-PRC, Cold War. Nuclear-powered submarines have much greater range than conventional ones. In other words, Canberra is getting these submarines for use far from Australia’s waters. In particular, they are meant to be deployed in the South China Sea. As the name South China Sea indicates, these are waters off China’s coast – thousands of kilometres from Australia. The excuse that the AUKUS powers give for their warship intrusions into the South China Sea is that they are “defending maritime laws” in waters through which a great deal of world trade passes. But most of that trade involves the passing of goods to and from … China! Does China really need to be stopped from harming China’s trade with other countries?! As for the Australian regime’s actual commitment to international maritime law, it is enough to note that successive Australian governments spat on the international law of the sea by trying to impose sovereignty over resource-rich waters that belonged to East Timor. When East Timor resisted, Canberra gained the advantage in border negotiations by secretly installing listening devices in East Timorese government offices … under the cover of an aid project!
Issues over the South China Sea were actually once but a low-level border dispute involving not only China but also competing claims between other Asian countries. However, Washington, Canberra and London then interfered in order to inflame the disputes and seek to gang up regional allies against China. Now they claim that it is actually China that is the “threat.” However, not only is the PRC the only world power not to have fought in an actual shooting conflict this century, she has actually never been involved in a single war for the last more than forty years. Despite having four times the U.S. population, China only has one-third of the military budget of the U.S. and eighteen times fewer nuclear weapons. Per person, Australia’s military expenditure is six times higher than China’s (of significant powers only the U.S., Israel and Saudi Arabia have higher per capita defence spending than Australia). And with the nuclear submarine project and the Morrison government’s announcement last year of $270 billion of new weapons – including long-range missiles – that gap is set to get even greater. So it is actually the PRC that is facing intimidation. Fearsome fleets of U.S., Australian and British warships are provocatively ploughing through China-claimed waters not far off the coast of major Chinese cities. We aren’t seeing Chinese aircraft carrier fleets sailing off the coast of Sydney, are we? Although, if the AUKUS powers keep on threatening the PRC that is how she may end up responding.
A Cold War Drive against a Socialistic State
So why are Australia’s rulers putting so much public money into antagonizing China? Morrison has refused to give a price tag for the new type of submarines but all experts agree that it will be much more than the previous French contract – perhaps well over $150 billion. That is a lot more than the federal government’s entire annual expenditure on Health and Education combined! Moreover, this could be just a drop in the ocean of the full economic cost of the Cold War escalation. To appreciate why, consider this. See how angry the French got when they lost the $90 billion submarine contract? Then imagine if Australia, a country with an economy just half the size of France’s, were to lose an even bigger contract than that one … every six months! Well, that is what is being risked by provoking China. In the first six months of this year alone, Australia obtained a whopping $103 billion from exports to China. Imagine then if the Chinese government did to Australia what Morrison just did to France! And they are certainly being provoked to do so!
Given that Australia’s population is made up of roughly ten million households, every Australian household would receive $20,600 each year if the benefits from exports to China were divided up evenly between all households! Unfortunately, Australia’s capitalist system means that while working class people do gain much from exports to China it is the likes of billionaires Gina Rinehart and Andrew Forest who obtain a greatly disproportionate share of the benefits. So, given that this layer is the ruling class, the class that all Australian governments serve, why are Australian governments then risking the massive profits of their masters for the sake of confronting the PRC? We can understand why if we look at some of the latest political developments within China itself. In July, PRC authorities decreed that platforms employing food delivery workers must guarantee drivers and riders the minimum wage and must provide their workers with social insurance. Food delivery workers in Australia would love to have these same measures applied here but are far from gaining such rights. July also saw the PRC send the stocks of multi-billion dollar education corporations crashing by banning all firms providing private tutoring from making a profit. The new rule has the stated aims of reducing inequality in education between those who can afford expensive tutoring and those that cannot and at preventing education being distorted and “hijacked by capital.” Several months earlier, the PRC began a crackdown on tech corporations in a bid to curb “disorderly expansion of capital” in the sector. The companies are owned by many of China’s richest capitalists. Authorities first targeted the two giants owned by China’s then richest person, Jack Ma. One of the Ma companies, Ant Financial, was forced to cancel a share sale that would have netted Ma billions and then had to restructure the company in a way that will greatly curb its profits. The other of Ma’s firms, e-commerce giant Alibaba was hit with a nearly $4 billion fine. With his firms being brought to heel for their monopolistic behavior and exploitation of workers, Ma even chose to disappear from the public eye to avoid demands for him to be arrested to multiply on Chinese social media. Ma feared meeting the same fate that so many other greedy billionaires before him have met in China. Could you imagine James Packer or Gina Rinehart having to do that here? And that is the point! In the PRC, the capitalist class does not rule like they do in Australia. Capitalists do exist in China and unfortunately PRC authorities have allowed them to gain way too much influence. However, it is still the working class that has ultimate state power in China, albeit in a deformed, incomplete and fragile form. And alongside this, it is socialistic state-owned enterprises that dominate the PRC’s backbone economic sectors. All this the Australian capitalist rulers and their U.S., British, French and Japanese counterparts find threatening, to say the least. This is despite PRC leaders repeatedly making it clear that they have no intention of helping workers in the West liberate themselves from capitalist rule (PRC leaders are wrong about this – they should be backing workers class struggle in the capitalist world). Australia’s capitalist rulers view the PRC in just the same way that capitalist owners of an individual business view the growth of very strong and militant trade union branches in other workplaces in their industry. They find it terrifying! Australia’s ruling class are willing to risk short-term profits, even hundreds of billions of dollars of it, to snuff out what they know is an existential threat to their rule of exploitation.
When it comes down to it, the hostility between the U.S. and Australian capitalist rulers on the one hand and the PRC on the other is an international expression of the struggle at the enterprise level between capitalist business owners and the workers that they exploit. In this conflict, working class people in Australia, the U.S. and indeed the whole world are on one side: the side of the PRC. The working class and its allies – all the opponents of capitalism – must unite in mass actions to defend the PRC workers state and demand: U.S./Australia/Britain – Get out of the South China Sea! U.S. troops out of South Korea! End your military encirclement of the PRC and DPRK! Stop your funding for anticommunist groups within China – including the anti-PRC opposition in Hong Kong! Down with your bogus “human rights” attacks on the PRC over Xinjiang, Tibet and Hong Kong that are used to justify your Cold War drive! Stop your persecution of sympathisers of the PRC and DPRK in Australia: Repeal the McCarthyist “foreign interference” laws! Dismantle the anti-PRC “Universities Foreign Interference Taskforce”!
The Cold War and the Australian Left
The ALP wasted no time in declaring its support for AUKUS and the nuclear submarine project. This is hardly a surprise! The ALP is as committed to the Cold War as the right-wing Liberal-National coalition. In contrast, Greens leader Adam Bandt stated that the submarine decision increases the prospect of nuclear war. Yet, at the same time, The Greens are a key part of the PRC-bashing propaganda campaign. Bandt joins the imperialist condemnation of China’s moves to contain the violent, pro-colonial forces in Hong Kong. Similarly, The Greens have endorsed the completely hysterical claim that China is “committing cultural genocide” against her Muslim Uyghur minority in Xinjiang (a claim that most Muslim-majority countries and, indeed, much of the world have rejected – instead praising China’s treatment of Uyghurs). In truth, the anti-China Uyghurs that the Western imperialists and The Greens back make up but a small proportion of the Uyghur population. They are led by filthy rich capitalists who want to overturn China’s socialistic system; and who mobilise behind their cause extreme fundamentalists that want to drive down the relatively liberated status that Uyghur women in the PRC enjoy to the level which women have been enduring in neighbouring Afghanistan ever since the leftist, pro-Soviet government there was toppled by Western-backed reactionaries in 1992. As over Hong Kong, The Greens have actually taken an even more combative anti-PRC position on Xinjiang than the right-wing Morrison government –even demanding that the government launch sanctions on China. In doing so, The Greens do much to feed the anti-PRC hostility that underpins the nuclear submarine project – thereby undermining their own opposition to it.
Most of Australia’s Far Left groups have adopted a broadly similar stance to The Greens. The closest to The Greens in terms of China policy is the Socialist Alternative (SAlt) group. They do say that, “Australia isn’t a victim of Chinese bullying” and appeal that, “We have to stop the coming war with China.” Yet like The Greens, SAlt assists the anti-PRC war drive by spreading just about every lie spewed by the big business and government-owned media outlets about the life of China’s masses. Indeed, they do this so rabidly that they would make the most pro-Trump Sky News hack or extreme anti-China, far-right MP (like George Christensen, Craig Kelly and Andrew Hastie) proud. The Solidarity and Socialist Alliance groups take a similar stance to SAlt except that Solidarity, at least nominally, place slightly greater emphasis on opposing the U.S. and Australian imperialists in the Cold War and Socialist Alliance put still somewhat greater emphasis on standing against Western imperialism. Yet just like SAlt, in 2019, Solidarity and Socialist Alliance joined together with anticommunist Hong Kong international students, opponents of the Vietnamese Revolution and other apologists for Western imperialism in rallies supporting the Washington-backed, rich-kid rioters in Hong Kong. Meanwhile, all these groups have echoed the imperialist lie campaign claiming that China is committing “genocide” in Xinjiang. In summary, what these groups are doing is equivalent to what many liberals did in the lead up to the 2003 U.S./Australian invasion of Iraq: they stated opposition to a war but insisted on condemning Iraq for possessing the weapons of mass destruction that they never had; and in doing so helped echo the bogus claims that were used to justify the invasion.
Socialist anti-PRC groups attempt to give a “Marxist” basis to their hostility to the PRC. In particular, following the “teachings” of late British leftist Tony Cliff, Socialist Alternative and Solidarity both claim that the PRC is just another capitalist state. Yet, the fact that the PRC has been able to crack down against many of its very biggest capitalists over the last few years is only possible because the capitalist class does not hold state power in China. Indeed, the capitalist bigwigs in the West know this all too well. Read the panic in the Western mainstream media’s finance pages – where the capitalists strategise amongst themselves. “Xi Jinping’s Capitalist Smackdown Sparks a $1 Trillion Reckoning” headlines Yahoo Finance on August 2, complaining that, “true to their Communist roots, China’s leaders have no problem trampling on the interests of venture capital, private equity or stock investors when they conflict with its long-term development plan.” Moreover, there is absolutely no way one can explain why the Australian capitalists that gain such gigantic profits from exporting to the PRC (the source of a whopping 35% of this country’s export revenue) would risk those profits for the sake of confronting China, other than for the fact that they are congenitally opposed to the PRC because she is a workers state. If China were just another capitalist country, Australia’s capitalists would instead do everything possible to have good relations with China. They would also seek to persuade the U.S. to pull back from harming the goose that lays the Australian capitalists’ golden eggs. Instead, the very opposite is happening: Australia’s rulers are egging on the U.S. to be ever more confrontational towards the PRC.
Socialist Alternative and Solidarity’s ludicrous claim that “China is capitalist” is not just a product of bad analysis. Ultimately, the line is a bending to the anti-PRC hostility of larger Laborite, green and progressive-liberal milieus and, more generally, an accommodation to the anti-communist “public opinion” created by capitalist propaganda. That is why even left groups that are, in the abstract, completely opposed to Tony Cliff’s theories end up with an almost identical line to the Cliffite groups. Thus, the Australian Communist Party (ACP) and the Communist Party of Australia (Marxist-Leninist), i.e. the CPA (M-L), which are both avowedly “Marxist-Leninist” groups sympathetic to Stalin, join their Cliffite rivals in claiming that China is “capitalist” and, therefore, the Chinese state needs to be opposed. Although the CPA (M-L) have declared, “No to nuclear-powered submarines!”, in their very statement announcing that position, they feed into the lying anti-communist and nationalist fear campaign that China could potentially subjugate Australia by stating that: “We no more want to be under China’s thumb than we do to remain under that of the US. But supporting the provocations of one imperialist power against another is not an act of independence. It is not in our interests.” Left groups have their different symbols and different claimed ideologies. These are all important. But in the end: actions speak louder than words! On the crucial defining question of China, the ACP and CPA (M-L) are but Cliffites in “Marxist-Leninist” clothing. Even if one were to make the contentious claim that all these anti-PRC groups do slightly more to hinder the anti-China war drive than they do to fuel it – by feeding into the anti-PRC propaganda that energises the war drive – it remains the fact that these anti-PRC leftists stand on a program that would assist the imperialists to achieve their counterrevolutionary war aims by other means: that is, by the internal destruction of the PRC state.
That leaves the Communist Party of Australia (CPA) and ourselves in Trotskyist Platform (TP) as the only two active socialist groups in Australia that sympathise with the PRC and that refuse to feed into any of the imperialist propaganda that is being used to “justify” the war drive against her. Unfortunately, other than for determined cadre in their Queensland Branch and some members in Sydney, the CPA is, at the moment, too timid when it comes to taking actual action in defence of the PRC and shies away from consistently emphasizing the class character of the PRC as a workers state. Apparently, this is partly a result of the group seeking détente with some of their own members who have an anti-PRC bent. It seems likely to also be a consequence of the party seeking a broad popular front alliance with the strongly anti-PRC Greens and similar forces. We say that if seeking a popular front alliance with The Greens is undermining a workers’ party’s defence of the PRC then that only underscores our point that working class interests cannot advance through alliances with capitalist parties like The Greens. Defence of working-class state power in the world’s most populous country cannot be an optional extra for communists! It is a duty and one that has enormous implications for the fate of humanity.
We need to heed the lessons of the gigantic defeat suffered by the international working class when the former Soviet workers state was destroyed by capitalist counterrevolution in 1991-92. The USSR collapsed not only because, weakened by bureaucratic deformation and the resulting depoliticisation of the masses, it was unable to bear the enormous weight of imperialist pressure upon her but also because the working class and Left movements in the imperialist countries failed to mobilise action to relieve that pressure. We must not let that happen to socialistic China! We in TP commit to work hard to build actions in defence of the PRC workers state and in opposition to the PRC-bashing political campaign. We look forward to joining in united front actions with other genuine leftists committed to these same goals. A taste of the kind of action that we fight for was seen on the October Labour Day Public Holiday in NSW in 2019 when a united front action, built mainly by the Australian-Chinese Workers Association and ourselves in TP, saw up to 70 people march through the streets of Sydney calling to “Stand With Red China” and “Condemn Hong Kong’s Pro-Colonial Rich Kid Rioters”.
Opposing the Anti-China War Drive Means
Opposing Australia’s Capitalist Rulers
Other than for the serious failure of much of the Far Left to actually take a stance in defence of the PRC, there is another big problem with the Left’s response to the Cold War. To the extent that groups and individuals oppose the anti-China war preparations, their strategy is largely to try and pressure the Australian ruling class to seek greater independence from the USA. A clear codification of this perspective was expressed in an article in the CPA Guardian issue of 13 September titled, “McCarthyism on the Rise in Australian Universities.” We actually do not want to single out this article for criticism because most of the article happens to be a very useful piece that courageously exposes McCarthyist attacks on supporters of China and rebuts some of the “human rights” propaganda against the PRC. However, as the conclusion of the article gives a succinct outline of the current perspective of most of those on the Left that don’t buy the Cold War, it is worth quoting here. The article concludes that: “The actions of the Chinese nation speaks volumes over the deceptions of the US empire, and will be trusted moving forward. Australian politicians need to recognise this and put themselves on the right side of history. Any delay in this will only see Australia follow the US into isolation from the rest of the world.” This formulation is based on two notions. Firstly, that Australian ruling class politicians are currently acting against their own self interests by waging Cold War against China. And secondly, that Australia’s involvement in this campaign is only driven by a wish to follow the USA. However, both these propositions are false.
Capitalist ruling classes have always been very conscious of what is good for their class interests. Australia’s pro-capitalist politicians are confronting socialistic China precisely because that is what the class that they serve requires of them. Even though Australia’s capitalists gain huge profits from trade with China they are willing to risk all that to confront China for three closely intertwined reasons. Firstly, by engaging in mutually beneficial economic relations with the ex-colonial countries, China is obstructing the ability of the Western and Japanese imperialists to exploit the peoples of these “Third World” countries. Secondly, capitalist ruling classes calculate, quite correctly from their point of view, that no matter how much they gain from trading with China they could gain many times greater profits if they could smash the PRC workers state and turn all of China into a giant sweatshop for imperialist exploitation. Thirdly, as China’s economy strengthens, Australia’s rulers fear that her society will become more and more attractive to working class people in the capitalist world. They worry that Australia’s masses will eventually start to know about how the PRC used its socialist system to control COVID in a way that no other large country has been able to and about how – despite the pandemic – in 2020 the PRC reached her goal of lifting every single resident in China out of extreme poverty. The capitalist ruling class is terrified that workers here will then draw the conclusion that what they need to do is to fight for socialism here. These three reasons are, indeed, the very same reasons why the American capitalist class is also targeting the PRC. And that is the point! The Australian rulers are not “following” the U.S. into a hostile stance against China. Rather both regimes are coming together based on common opposition to the PRC. The ANZUS and now AUKUS alliance have always been about shared imperial interests. Australia’s rulers are not puppets of the U.S. but imperialist predators in their own right. To be sure, they are junior partners in the alliance with America. But this is not in the same way that, say, PNG is subjugated by Australian imperialism. Instead, it is in the same way that a local mafia crook hooks up with the godfather to make sure that his local sphere of plunder is more secure. Australia’s capitalists are neither being pressured nor tricked by Washington into hostility towards China. Australia’s capitalists need the might of the U.S. to help them pull off their own ambition to crush socialistic rule in the PRC.
Indeed, it has been apparent that the Australian imperialists have been even more confrontational towards the PRC than their American counterparts. To some degree, they have been dragging their U.S. allies into an ever more openly aggressive anti-PRC stance. A Wikileaks exposé of a 2009 meeting between then prime minister, Kevin Rudd, and then U.S. Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, shows that it was Rudd who was trying to convince Clinton of the need for “preparing to deploy force” against China. Part of the reason why Canberra is more extreme than Washington is that Australia is part of the Asia and western Pacific region that is also China’s neighbourhood. The semi-colonial countries that Australian capitalists rob in large amounts – like PNG, Fiji, East Timor, Indonesia and the Philippines – are all fairly near China and have each already developed significant ties with the PRC. In contrast to Australia’s capitalists, the U.S. giant has many other neocolonies elsewhere. Australia’s capitalists thus find that a greater proportion of their imperial interests are being impeded by China than what their U.S. counterparts are experiencing.
All this means that it is impossible to convince the Australian ruling class – and those elements of the middle class that accept capitalist rule – to pull back from hostility to the PRC. Nor is it possible to convince them to abandon their alliance with the U.S. and Britain. They are doing all this because it is good for them! However, what we can do is mobilise such a level of struggle that we force the Australian imperialists to retreat from implementing their Cold War projects. But how are we to build such powerful resistance? Our starting point must be the understanding that while this Cold War drive against the PRC is in the interests of Australia’s small capitalist ruling class it is completely against the interests of the entire working class and most middle class people too. Therefore, we must build the movement against the nuclear submarine project and in defence of the PRC workers state by appealing to the working class. However, one cannot appeal to the working class and its class interests if one is simultaneously appealing to capitalist interests. It is one or the other! Thus, the strategy of appealing to the Australian capitalists to be “on the right side of history” and to “achieve greater independence” undermines the fight to mobilise working class resistance to the Cold War drive.
What we need to be saying to working class people is something like this: Your greedy capitalist bosses and their state have been casualising your jobs, attacking your unions, making you bear the economic pain of COVID while giving huge handouts to their own mates (like the huge Jobkeeper grants to Gerry Harvey) and killing Aboriginal people in custody and now they want you to be prepared to help them fight a war for their interests against the world’s most populous country. They want you to sacrifice huge amounts of public money – resources that could be used for providing badly needed public housing, public aged care centres, more nurses and improved TAFE – for the sake of this war drive. And they want you to risk losing your jobs in an economic collapse that may well follow their further antagonizing of this country’s biggest export market. All this to confront a state where it is the working class that holds state power. We must resist this! Our interests lie with defending the targeted state, the PRC, where it is public ownership – the form of economy that favours working class interests – that is dominant. By standing by the PRC we are standing by its nationalization of the banks, by its provision of huge amounts of low-rent public housing for its people and by its crackdowns on capitalist bigwigs. And by doing so we will be helping our fight for the same things here. Although working class rule in the PRC is deformed and contested its continued existence is a huge conquest for working class people all over the world. It must be defended, just like we must always defend a trade union against any attack by bosses trying to destroy it.
The Inevitability of Horrific Wars under Capitalism
The Morrison government hoped that other countries would accept their nuclear submarine plans. Instead, the leaders of two large Asian countries, Malaysia and Indonesia, have already criticised the project. Although these capitalist rulers share the Australian rulers’ fears that the growing strength of an Asian socialistic power could eventually inspire threats to their own rule, they also appreciate China’s mutually beneficial economic relations with their countries. Those relations with China have enabled these ex-colonies to gain trade, capital and technology (including high-speed trains and more recently safe Chinese COVID vaccines) without being exploited. Malaysia and Indonesia worry that if the PRC is totally contained, their countries will again be bullied and ripped off by the Western imperialists.
Meanwhile, people in the U.S. and Australia have been shocked at just how strident France has been in opposition to the AUKUS deal. For the French capitalists, it is not only that they lost a $90 billion contract. They are furious that major strategic decisions are being made by the Anglo powers behind their backs. For the same reason both Germany and the president of the EU (Ursula von der Leyen) also condemned the secret negotiation of the AUKUS pact. All this is a reflection of the serious imperialist rivalries that exist between the U.S.-led Anglo powers, on the one hand, and Germany, France and some other continental European imperialists on the other. After Trump emphasised the divergent interests of the U.S. from its sometimes European allies, Biden had been hoping to forge a pan-imperialist alliance against socialistic China. That is what Washington successfully pulled off to help defeat the Soviet Union. However, as the current blow up over AUKUS shows, this time the major imperialists will have a harder time building such an alliance. This is because capitalism is in a more advanced state of economic decay than it was thirty years ago. The major capitalist powers have never fully recovered from the late noughties Great Recession. And now they have all handled COVID in a disastrous way. What all this means is that each of the imperial powers more desperately needs to seek out new markets, new sources of raw materials to grab and new masses of cheap labour to exploit in the “Third World” in order to stave off economic crises at home. That means that each imperialist power must inevitably come into sharp conflict with other imperial powers seeking to grab the same spheres of exploitation. Nevertheless, all the imperialist ruling classes do understand that the emergence of a giant socialistic power in the form of the PRC threatens all their interests. This is the case not only for the Anglo rulers but for the rulers of France, Germany and Japan too. For example, the French capitalists as one of the most active imperialist predators in Africa are fearful that China’s ever increasing development assistance and mutually beneficial cooperation with African countries will more and more impede French ambitions in Africa. In the end it is not impossible that the various capitalist powers will again be able to temporarily contain their rivalries enough to allow them to forge a grand anti-communist alliance.
Whichever way global relations play out, decaying capitalism, if it is not first stopped by revolutionary struggle of the working class led masses, is inevitably driving humanity towards a new calamitous world war of some type. This could be an inter-imperialist war between the different imperialist powers like World War I. Or, if the imperialists do succeed in suppressing their own rivalries long enough to all gang up against the PRC workers state, it could be a class war like the 1950-53 Korean War and the later Vietnam War. Quite possible is a hybrid type of world war that involves inter-imperialist battles simultaneously with class battles between capitalist powers and a workers state – just like World War II was. The frightening thing is that in the next world war all sides will be armed with nuclear weapons. That is why, in mobilising actions to resist the anti-PRC Cold War drive, we must wage these struggles in such a way that they always advance the masses towards the revolutionary overturn of capitalist rule. Only when capitalist rule is swept away in all the imperialist countries can we be sure that the present, blood-soaked rulers of the U.S., Australia and Britain do not end up destroying humanity. To fight for such international socialist revolution we must defend the conquests that the toiling classes have already won. That is why – however deformed by hostile pressure they may be from the “ideal” – we must stand by the Chinese, Cuban, North Korean, Laotian and Vietnamese workers states. Now more than ever the working class masses of the world must unite!
