The Endless War

The Imperial Strategy from Gaza to the Endgame

Morning Comrades,

Before we get into the thick of it this week I wanted to offer an interpretation of where we are at globally speaking, seeing that we are once again in one of those weeks in which decades happens.

If you’ve been awake at any point in the last two decades, you don’t need convincing that something is deeply wrong with the world order. The pattern is clear: endless war, collapsing social contracts at home, and a media machine that sells “freedom” while backing bombs dropped on children. What we’re seeing isn’t chaos, it’s a strategy. A strategy of maintaining global capitalist hegemony by force wherever necessary.

This isn’t just about foreign policy, it’s about capitalism itself in its final, violent stages, desperately holding onto the illusion of “one world order” where the West dictates the terms and everyone else bleeds for it.

Let’s break that down, not just to understand it, but to figure out what it means for us, the workers caught in the machine, especially in the heart of the empire.

The Foundations: Post-WWII and the Architecture of Empire

After WWII, the U.S. emerged as the global capitalist hegemon. The Marshall Plan, Bretton Woods, the IMF, and NATO were not just reconstruction, they were an imperial strategy to permanently subordinate the world economy to U.S. finance capital. As scholars like Michael Hudson and David Harvey have argued, the dollar standard replaced European colonialism with an updated model of financial domination.

Equally, as Frantz Fanon warned, imperialism did not end, it transformed. What followed was the Cold War: not primarily about ideology, but about global markets and resource control. The USSR and aligned movements represented, in however incomplete a form, a challenge to Western capitalist supremacy.

With the Soviet collapse in 1991, the U.S. declared itself the “indispensable nation,” and the West, particularly the U.S. and EU, moved into open unipolar empire mode. This is what Samir Amin and Immanuel Wallerstein call the logic of center-periphery extraction, now with no systemic rival, but that was temporary. Other civilisations, other centers of political and economic power, were always going to rise again. And that, not “freedom,” not “democracy” is why these wars keep happening.

Gaza Was the Announcement

The genocidal assault on Gaza is not just about Israel. Israel is the West’s outpost of military technology, surveillance, and settler-colonial discipline. Gaza announced to the world: if you resist Western hegemony, we will exterminate you.

Zionism is not merely an ethno-nationalist project; it is the spear-tip of global Western imperial power in the Middle East. It provides a live demonstration of settler power disciplining an indigenous population while selling the act as “counter-terrorism.”

As Ghassan Kanafani made clear decades ago, Zionism is European colonialism rebranded. The genocide taking place in Gaza’s is the mask coming off.

Ukraine Was the Experiment

Ukraine was where the Western ruling class tested whether the world would tolerate open proxy warfare against a major rival (Russia) under the branding of “defending democracy.”

Let’s be clear: Putin is no anti-imperialist hero, Russia’s capitalist class is itself brutal and oligarchic. But the war was provoked by NATO expansion, which directly contradicted promises made to Gorbachev. As the Tricontinental Institute have pointed out, this war is not about Ukrainian sovereignty, it’s about market control, pipelines, weapons sales, and keeping Europe locked into U.S. dependency.

Ukraine was the test: Would Europe fall back into line? Could the Western media keep the masses compliant while their economies were dragged into recession by sanctions? Could the U.S. still discipline the “allies”?

The answer was: partially. Germany cracked. The European working class began to wake up. But the war profits rolled in.

Iran Is the Escalation

Iran represents a qualitatively different threat, not because of military might, but because of ideological defiance. The Iranian state refuses integration into the U.S.-dominated global financial system. The threat is symbolic as much as strategic.

The killing of Qassem Soleimani in 2020 was a key escalation, as is the tightening of sanctions. The growing military alliances between Iran, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and regional anti-Western forces (with support from China and Russia) have created a real multipolar resistance.

As Arghiri Emmanuel argued, imperialism requires unequal exchange to function. Iran, by rejecting that structure, disrupts the “normal” flows of capital and energy that Western capitalism depends on.

So escalation is inevitable. Not because Iran is evil, but because capitalism cannot tolerate autonomy.

China and Russia Are the Endgame

Finally, China and Russia pose the structural threat: they are powerful enough to organise alternative trade routes, currency systems (BRICS), and even technological supply chains outside of Western control. The Belt and Road Initiative is a direct assault on the dollar system.

Western imperialists know this is it. As Lenin explained in Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, the great powers go to war not out of personal animus, but because their national capitals must expand or die.

This is the imperial logic bringing us toward world war. The West cannot coexist with a genuinely multipolar order without risking its capitalist supremacy collapsing from within.

As Radhika Desai now argues, we’re seeing the breakdown of dollar imperialism and that’s why the risks of global conflict are rising.

What Does This Mean for Us?

For workers in the West, especially in the U.S. and Europe, this is the key: our ruling classes are going to drag us into war after war to maintain a global capitalist system that gives us nothing but declining living standards, police repression, and alienation.

We cannot “vote” our way out of this. As Rosa Luxemburg put it: it’s socialism or barbarism.

So what do we do?

• Reject imperialist propaganda in all its forms, including its progressive masks. There is no such thing as a “humanitarian” U.S. war.

• Organize working-class power independently of bourgeois parties. Electoral politics alone cannot and will not stop empire.

• Refuse imperial war, refuse military enlistment, disrupt weapons shipments, and organise strikes in industries feeding the war machine (energy, transport, tech, logistics).

• International solidarity is not charity, it’s necessity. Victory for anti-imperialist forces abroad weakens our oppressors at home.

• Prepare for escalation. This system is not going quietly. It will use every tool: mass surveillance, paramilitary policing, anti-terrorism rhetoric, and the co-optation of liberal “lefts” to sell war in progressive language.

Militant working-class organisation is no longer optional, it is survival.

This is not just geopolitics. This is the death throes of global capitalism. Either we break with it, or it will break us, with world war, with fascism, with climate collapse.

As Lenin said: the proletariat has no fatherland. Our fight is global, or it is nothing at all.

Gaza was the announcement. Ukraine was the experiment. Iran is the escalation. China and Russia are the endgame.

Our role? To be the end of this empire.

As always, thank you for your time and attention.

Yours, warmly,

V.

---

Selected References

• Lenin, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism

• Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

• Michael Hudson, Super Imperialism

• Samir Amin, Eurocentrism

• Vijay Prashad, Washington Bullets

• Radhika Desai, Geopolitical Economy

• Rosa Luxemburg, The Junius Pamphlet