by João Alves
We publish below an unofficial translation of an article originally appearing on A Nova Democracia here.
Mired in wars of prey, imperialism deepens its general crisis. The anti-imperialist revolutionary struggle in Palestine brought to light the situation of imperialism. The masses must redouble their will to fight and challenge to dethrone the emperor.
The heroic national resistance of Palestine revealed a characteristic of the new moment of revolutions that we are entering. In it, we see regional confrontations that flare up and escalate simultaneously, at an unprecedented pace, and involving the most multifaceted and, at the same time, intertwined interests.
While the Resistance traps the genocidal forces of the Zionist State in the quagmire that the Gaza Strip has become, the Yankees are forced to reactivate their operations in North Africa to try to neutralize the intrepid Yemeni people who do not accept passively watching the attempted Palestinian Holocaust. This would be enough to place Yankee imperialism at a severe strategic crossroads: but, on top of that, the escalation of the conflict in Ukraine, in which Russian imperialism is recovering some positions, forces the Yankee imperialists to escalate the threats of a war between the two, without precedents.
At the same time, the Yankees have Asia as their biggest long-term concern. There, China launched its far-reaching “New Silk Road” strategy and reached new bases for the dispute with the Yankees, penetrating its capital into vast zones of influence and semi-colonies of Yankee imperialism; The Chinese social-imperialist regime has also increased military spending and established that the main contradiction to be resolved is “defense capacity”, that is, here too, the greater militarization of its society and economy for the war of conquest. In return, the Yankee imperialists responded with training of military vessels in the South Sea, strengthening the territories of Taiwan and Hong Kong, hostile to the social-imperialist regime; at the same time, it has established in its strategic policy that the greatest threat to American security, in perspective, is social-imperialist China.
Therefore, the global imperialist system has already prepared itself to increase wars and conflicts around the world: in the last two years, a dizzying increase in global military spending has been recorded. The equivalent of R$10.9 trillion [USD$2.07 trillion] was moved with weapons and military equipment. Greater than Brazil’s GDP, the value is only smaller than that spent during the Second World War and is driven by these two conflicts of greater magnitude in recent times.
For such a scenario, the European Union will allocate 240 million euros to military spending. A European Union diplomat stated that it is necessary to “prepare for much more demanding times”, indicating that war will continue to be the main trend in the coming years. Russia, the atomic superpower, announced that it will allocate two-fifths of its economy to the war industry: 376 billion euros. Although all superpowers and imperialist powers are spending more and more on the military terrain, it is the North Americans who take the lead, with 4.5 trillion dollars (41% of the total spent worldwide).
Such an arms race by the imperialists, by surpassing their rivals in means of war to impose their interests on each other, takes place on very fragile ground, however.
When the Chinese real estate monopoly Evergrande announced its bankruptcy on August 18, 2023, the warning of danger was raised in all imperialist powers. China, which is the second country that spends the most on military matters, has shown a downward trend in its economic growth rate since 2018. That year, China had a growth rate of 6.6%, the lowest in 40 years until then. For 2030, growth of 3% per year is expected – in Chinese terms, which has been growing on average 10% per year for forty years, this is a catastrophe. With the growth of the “real estate and financial bubble”, it is no longer possible to prevent the crisis of Chinese capitalism, which will necessarily come, affecting all the main economies, without exception.
Both in statements and in actions, imperialists admit the danger of what they call “multicrises”, a euphemism for the general crisis of decomposition of the world system. The Economist magazine released a recent survey in which it admits, despite being an institution that defends the old order, that more than 92% of the world’s population does not live in regimes with full democratic freedoms. If the ideologues of the old order, who exist precisely to beautify it, are forced to admit in these terms the gravity of their crisis, it is an expressive sign of the times. Times, in fact, when 43% of the North American population estimates that a civil war is likely in the next 10 years.
There is no doubt that we find ourselves, right now, in those historical moments in which, by analogy, we observe the slow collapse of an old decaying structure. The anti-imperialist revolutionary struggles, essentially in Palestine, brought to light the degrading situation of imperialism. The masses must rely on these examples, redouble their will to fight and challenge to dethrone the emperor, after all, the Palestinian cause shows with singular clarity: he is already falling.
