DEFEAT THE U.S. MILITARY OFFENSIVE AGAINST LATIN AMERICA, NIGERIA!
TURN THE INTER-IMPERIALIST COMPETITION FOR VENEZUELA AND NIGERIA INTO A HEMISPHERIC WORKING CLASS OFFENSIVE AGAINST WASHINGTON/BRUSSELS, MOSCOW AND BEIJING!
NO WAR ON LATIN AMERICA! FOR A GENERAL STRIKE NOW! FOR AN INTERNATIONAL WORKERS UNITED FRONT AGAINST FASCISM!
From backyard to frontyard
America First the MAGA slogan is being reinterpreted from faux populist anti-war isolationism to the refloating of the Monroe Doctrine and Manifest Destiny, consolidating the U.S. sphere of influence in “our own backyard.” Yes folks, one too many black eyes from China’s BRI expansion across Asia, Africa and into Europe has Trump dancing to a new tune. Belting out the plan on his podcast, as if its the Horst Wessel song on Kristellknacht, fascist Nick Fuentes, leading podcaster for the Groypers, tells MAGA’s anti-war isolationists to be damned: “our oil is under their soil” (Venezuela, Mexico, coast of Brazil.) “America First!” now means we take back the semi-colonial global south as America First (and then take Canada, Mexico and Central America.) First the pretence: “Narco-Terror,” (and here you can now add Mexico to the target list); second the pretext: shoot up civilians in unidentified boats; third, the War For Oil!
The U.S. ruling class never thought it could lose Latin America. A few centuries of chronic underdevelopment, run by malleable capitalist generals, politicians and strongmen financially subservient to western imperialist interests— how could that slip out of the hands of the IMF and World Bank and into the clutches of China? Outsourcing use value production to China proletarianized the “sleeping giant” which now has the industrial might to challenge western imperialism in what was formerly“its own backyard.”
Now the western hemisphere is the “frontyard!” Everywhere else, across all of Eurasia, the U.S. has suffered successive defeats with China getting the lion’s share of resources critical to the next industrial revolution. Now the U.S. has to recolonize the western hemisphere and double down on its hegemony over the world’s oil markets, the hegemony the remaining value of the dollar rests upon! Capital, Wall Street, and not just the twisted Trumpsters, weigh the costs and benefits of war plans. Some of them or their think tanks already know this will be a last ditch stand versus Chinese imperialism for world domination.
This is not a continuation of the history of the U.S. ‘backyard’. Then the U.S. controlled its backyard to launch its rise to imperialist hegemony. Today the backyard becomes the ‘frontyard’- And overnight it would appear that Nigeria is ‘frontyard’ for our bourgeoisie as well. Don’t be fooled that Trump will rescue any Christians. His interest is oil. Boko Haram have shown for 20 years they will kill anybody, when Trump’s real motivation is desire to explode the deal Nigeria just struck with China before the ink dries. Trump’s bluster has brought immediate diplomatic warnings from China, who say they’ll stand with Lagos.
Trump is taking it on the chin in a last ditch stand against imperialist China for the survival of U.S. hegemonic power. Trump cannot win wars to reverse China’s strangle hold over critical resources. He has met with defeat on all fronts in Eurasia. He has been forced to back down on China tariffs. Even “down under” in Australia, long considered an extension of the U.S. backyard, BHP announced it will settle 30% of its iron ore trade with China in Yuan (RMB). The de-dollarization is underway, contagious and unstoppable.The U.S. is now forced to turn to re-colonisation wars against the whole of the Americas, including Canada and Mexico, to meet the ‘challenge’ of China.
History then
Venezuela oil was always treated as an American asset and profit center. U.S. big banks and big oil did not need to own the oil to profit from it! Financing the industrial build out, the extraction, refining, distribution and marketing kept profits flowing from Caracas to Wall Street. Despite a series of nationalizations the Venezuelan people never reaped the full reward for the treasure under their soil and waters. To this day western courts hold Venezuela liable for over ten billion dollars to Conoco-Phillips and Exxon Mobil. Where is the Workers Party ready to abolish the debt and expropriate foreign and national capital to abolish exploitation and corruption by running the economy under democratic workers control and planning? We have no illusions in, and give no political support to Maduro and the PSUV.
A revolutionary workers’ party is needed everywhere, and we call for a new revolutionary workers’ International formed of such parties. This will require a new cadre of militant workers tested in class struggle. Its urgent task will be the resolving of the crisis of leadership of the proletariat. The objectively necessary step this moment calls for is the International Workers’ Antifascist United Front.
The U.S. military and CIA make careers training, guiding, funding and organizing Central and South American militaries and secret police at the notorious School of the Americas (SOA) established in 1946. This was shut down in 2000 due to uproar over war crimes committed by its graduates. It was reopened in 2001 and is now known as Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC). Despite the rise and fall of Bolivarianism or the “pink tides” as liberals and social democrats trade offices with rightists and ultra rightists, the military officer corps becomes a corrupt caste, entrenched and reassured with rightists and/or paramilitaries standing by. Witness the strong support of Bolsonaristas among military families and for military coups as a legitimate political option.
Liberal USA mythology asserts that Latin and South America are its protectorates and that the U.S. policy is to be a “good neighbor.’ The “white man’s burden” dictated that its population of brown skinned mulattos and indigenous are not quite civilized enough for “democracy.” They could be uplifted as protectorates under the guidance of generals and bourgeois statesmen while Gun Boat diplomacy could keep the locals in line and keep any challenger empires at bay. Such was the work of the SOA, now WHINSEC. All of Latin and South America was made to bow to Wall Street via the IMF and World Bank in Malthusian debt slavery. And then the world changed.
Here comes China
The post World War Two boom imploded across North America. The only way out for the U.S. capitalists was to destroy capitals (the rust belt lay fallow and workers were thrown out of the workforce) and hire cheaper, more profitable workers by outsourcing manufacturing to China. Within twenty years the working class in China was defeated at Tienanmin and capitalism was restored via Special Enterprise Zones and the capitalist restoration plans codified at the 14th CCP Congress. It took another twenty years of the Chinese slow road of capitalist restoration for the trajectory and elevation of China as an emergent imperialist power to become evident, palpable and provable. See Class Warrior, vol. 1, no.6. and our Draft Theses on Imperialism and the Terminal Crisis.
China proletarianized its population and became a major industrial and manufacturing power producing use values needed globally. None in the West foresaw (or if they did see it they played it down) the decline of western economic power as they invited China into the WTO in 2001.
Lo and behold, China’s industrial might and hungry population need raw materials, food commodities and markets across Latin America, Africa and the Global South. The ¾ of a Trillion dollars in U.S. foreign debt China holds combines with rising labor productivity to give China the leverage to open new markets without acting militarily to undercut the western competitors.
Eight years into the “Go Global” or Zou Chuqu “looking outward” investment policy gave rise to an emergent imperialist China which sustained the world economy during the Global Financial Crisis of 2008-09. By 2011 the U.S. ruling class understood the trajectory was toward global inter-imperialist conflict and directed Obama to ‘pivot’ toward Asia to hold back the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). The Great Game turned to gunboat diplomacy from the South China Sea to the Straits of Hormuz. But markets are not made in the board rooms of banks, on the backroads, along pipelines nor the high seas. They are made by the capacity of monopoly capitalist states to undercut their rivals in exploiting labor power.
Home Front
While the West was drumbeating for war over Taiwan and testing Iran with operation “Midnight Hammer,” China was forging new markets across the Global South especially in the U.S. ‘backyard’. Today, in the Americas, Trump cannot compete with BRICS and is going to war to reverse their influence in the hemisphere by regime changes in Venezuela and Colombia. Bailing out his anarcho-capitalist protege Milei’s failed Argentine regime is less ideological than just being pure corruption, both of which the mainstream media ignores. Likewise regime change in Brazil, a founding BRICS member, has long been foremost in Trump’s plan to restore control over the U.S. ‘back yard’. We predict he will publicly salivate over Brazil soon and Lula and his popular front, so much less popular than in years past, will not be able to grovel enough to accommodate Trump’s ambitions. Trump (or his successor) will pursue regime change.
While we call for the end of U.S. imperialism in the Americas, China/Russia in the BRICS do not represent any way out for workers and poor farmers. ‘Socialism’ of the Chinese kind is not an alternative to imperialism but a new form of monopoly capitalism that emerges in the vacuum left by the declining U.S.. Cuba’s soviet-oriented “socialism” was no match against U.S. semi-colonial servitude. Nicaraguan Sandinismo, Venezuelan Chavismo, Lula’s PT and the so-called pink tide of Bolivarian socialism, all made popular fronts with their national bourgeoisies. Once the “revolutionary” episode of Guevarism was safely buried, Stalinism never challenged capitalism or imperialism to liberate the masses from the clutches of the corrupt capitalist class.
Rather, Chavismo, like all the various nationalist regimes leaning on the back of the working class, managed a semi-colonial state of servitude which today navigates between the declining U.S.-led western imperialism and the industrial powerhouse and imperialist competitors China and Russia. Pushed to the economic wall by the U.S., Maduro cries for a lifeline and possible military defense from the BRICS bloc, even as his long-term low price oil deal with China has made Venezuelans poor. Trump now retails a rubbish 75% vote for the rightist Nobel Prize winner and begins his offshore killing spree without evidence or Congressional approval. He will need a more plausible scenario than his 2020 “Bay of Piglets” fiasco. He has problems paying the troops right now and he has frightened many officers with both his international and domestic policies. Nevertheless, he sees his role as a McKinley, building the power of the empire, and he will try it. That is unless his hand is smacked down by aroused wage labor, by a Workers’ hemispheric, indeed international Antifascist United Front!
BRICS advocates argue China, unlike the west, does not use its military power; rather it uses soft power to create Win-Win opportunities with the semi-colonies. Market opportunities which are attractive to the market makers. But the working class, whose new bosses answer to China, find their historic contractual arrangements won in class battle with western imperialism are rewritten at the workers’ expense with the support of the allegedly progressive compradors of the national bourgeoisie. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss! Witness the experience of the Rossing Miners in Namibia (International Labor Solidarity Committee for Namibian Miners) and the struggle of the Clover workers in South Africa (Defend 5,000 Striking South African Clover Workers!).
Enemies, Foreign and Domestic
You can as easily imagine the Trump administration as the subject of a satirical situation comedy or a “graphic novel” comic book. Trump tells Nigeria to prepare for his “sweet” war to defend his “beloved Christians.” Memory doesn’t quickly answer when you ask what sort of head of state in this century ever spoke this way in public. But this tells you something that is seldom revealed. Hatred of whole peoples, religious traditions, thought that is not Nativist, not White settler Protestant, Capitalist, is the “intellectual” life and private discourse of the embittered losers, the U.S. ruling class. Credible, if not CIA accredited reporters inform us of the ‘comeback’ of ‘population control,’ euthenasia as mental hygiene and Eugenics racism in the polite society where “anybody who was anybody” was a friend of Jeffrey Epstein. And Trump has more enemies than those he has had indicted for opposing him.
Just like Pinochet he has enumerated who his many sorts of enemies of the state are in the new National Security Memorandum 701. Each can expect repressions from the Department Of Justice or his private but taxpayer-funded secret police! We will need truly international solidarity in defense of these victims of state terror. They will be legion. They will be all of us. The defense work necessary will find today’s spontaneity lacking; WE NEED A REVOLUTIONARY WORKERS’ PARTY!
Against fascist repressions we call for Union-organized Labor-Black-Brown Community Defense Guards! These will be needed to defend the many picket lines and sitdown strikes that will be the response to mass layoffs whether the state-integrated Union bureaucrats approve of the tactic or not. These workers-led militias will be needed to defend the antiwar movement, again regardless of what the liberal bureaucrats may try. They have done next to nothing to defend the rights of non-white workers against deportation, nor the free speech rights of foreign-born students defending Palestine. The initiative must come from the union ranks! These Defense Guards will be the muscle of the “flying squads” of the General Strike and the nucleus of the Army of workers and oppressed at the service of the Workers’ Councils and all its constituent mass organizations in their struggle for exclusively Working Class Political state power. To popularize the historic revolutionary workers program including these Workers’ Defense units a fighting workers’ party is indispensable!
Capitalism in its terminal crisis spirals, the decaying western imperialist powers fall further into authoritarianism. Behind every enemy of the fascist Trump and the U.S. ruling capitalist class prances the specter of communism. Cuomo warned NYC will not survive when Mamdani turns it socialist. Soft liberal social democrats like Mamdani are attacked alongside Maduro, Gustavo Petro (Columbia’s President) and Lula; none of whom pose a threat to the capitalist world order, but these are the new cast of enemies arranged beside “Bolsheviks, Jihadists, pimps and drug dealers.” Such a cabal of accusations is sufficient grounds for invading Caracas, Bogota, Lagos and New York City. Safer by far than invading China to stop its growing relations with Japan, South Korea and Australia, but just as reckless. In NYC as in Caracas, Bogota and Lagos the working class must be armed to defeat the U.S. invasion.
Crisis of working class leadership
The crisis of working class leadership was already apparent to Trotsky in 1938, and not limited to the U.S. alone. Before he was taken from us by Stalin’s agent he highlighted the integration of the trade union leaderships into the state and its projects. This was 1940 and the bureaucrats’ first job was to line workers up for world war. Soon this would become the bureaucrats’ war on class consciousness itself. Those who did not take up this line of ‘middle class’ politics and conception of world history were purged and replaced with mob associates and crooked cops and their relatives.It was easy enough to sell this victory disease view with the real increase in purchasing power that was a departure from the life of workers in all previous eras. The bureaucrats supported all the cold war treaty organizations, the “more bang for the buck” and each deployment and war, initially even including Viet Nam.
So identified were the Democrats with the sale of this ‘middle class’ prattle that it became possible for the ‘other’ party to revive talk of the self-interests of the working class without turning red in the face. This began even in Eisenhower’s day in the Republican Party election platform. But in practical terms the only reality this turn had was a useful characterization of the Democrats, Stevenson but also others, as “eggheads,” i.e. ivory tower intellectuals. Trump has taken the resentment dimension of this workerism and pumped it up so that ‘have not’ and especially non-union white workers identify with his call to Make America Great Again, with him and his McKinleyism for greater empire.
Like every other project of his, this war drive is already turning into a bust.That does not mean it won’t be pursued anyway. We are entering a darker and worse version of the 1938 conditions, both internationally and at home. We see more opposition to his war threats from the military brass than from his ostensible opposition. Almost all 535 legislators of the two houses are AIPAC funds recipients, their careers living and dying with the fate of Israel. They may beef about Trump’s war on renewable energy sources, but they are in the front of the land rush for carbon offsets, and if some of them at the local level called for closing Rikers Island, Guantanamo and private prisons, they’ve shut up tight about all that today. The way “interests” are represented, i.e. re-election funds are raised, guarantees they will find their ways to rally round the flag. Therefore Trotsky’s urgent call to us has even greater weight and relevance now:
“The primary slogan for this struggle is: complete and unconditional independence of the trade unions in relation to the capitalist state. This means a struggle to turn the trade unions into the organs of the broad exploited masses and not the organs of a labor aristocracy.” (Trotsky unfinished writing on the trade unions)
“They (the trade unions) can no longer be reformist, because the objective conditions leave no room for any serious and lasting reforms. The trade unions of our time can either serve as secondary instruments of imperialist capitalism for the subordination and disciplining of workers and for obstructing the revolution, or, on the contrary, the trade unions can become the instruments of the revolutionary movement of the proletariat.”
“On average, each person on America’s top 10 rich list gained $69.8 billion over the past year—they made 833,631 times more than what the typical American household takes home.”(Fortune) At the same time forty two million people in poverty are having their food stamps (SNAP) denied by Trump’s who is trying to eliminate them. Illusions in electoralism, where a “blue wave” of Democrats, will somehow miraculously rescue us from the fascism of the cryptocoin and Artificial Intelligence bourgeoisie are FATAL! With all the dancing in the streets the celebrants ignore how Spanberger the new Virginia Governor was a CIA agent.
Workers need our own fighting party and we need our transitional program:
NO WAR ON SOUTH AMERICA! NO WAR ON NIGERIA!
U.S. workers stop Trump’s Fascist regime changes!
Victory to the Palestinian Resistance! Defeat the USA and its proxy Israel! Imperialists Hands off Iran! Defend Anti-Imperialist protesters and class war prisoners.
Hot cargo military goods and block military shipments at the ports and airports.
Dockers, ILWU, ILA, IAM take the lead! Shut the ports and air bases with general strike against war, mass marches and occupations! Smash anti-labor laws by mass strike action!
Soldiers don’t fight the rich man’s wars! National Guard and soldiers refuse deployment at home and abroad! Build enlisted persons unions, establish a Come Home Now movement to close foreign bases and bring our navy home.
Unite the working class, native-born, immigrant and internationally! Smash ICE through workers’ mobilizations. Stop the deportations!
To defeat the fascist MAGA regime Labor must break from the Democrats and build a mass fighting workers labor party! Prepare the indefinite General Strike for Workers Power!
Build mass workers assemblies to: ensure the hungry are fed, the homeless are housed, immigrant families are defended and ICE is stopped wherever it goes.
Fight for a Workers Government to enforce the program of the United Front!
Build a New International with Revolutionary workers parties in every nation based on the method of the 1938 Transitional Program!
11/05/25 Communist Workers Group U.S.
