Today, while the U.S. focuses on its major competitor for world markets, capitalist-imperialist China, the world is awash with ever new and often temporary economic alliances aimed at advantaging one or another group of capitalist competitors. In sharp contrast to the post-WWII Cold War period, today there are no wars between nations with fundamentally different social systems, that is, workers’ states vs. capitalist states.
The BRICS alignment, Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, for example, is organized to advance the ruling class interests of each of these more or less powerful capitalist states. The politics of the leaders, however rightwing, reformist, or whatever, are subordinate to advancing their economic interests, in every case to the disadvantage of poorer nations and the working class in general. The same with the Silk Road and other trading blocs established by China. The U.S./NATO/European Union military/economic alliance similarly serves the interests of the ruling class elite.
U.S. bluster about this or that competitor being a human rights abuser barely masks the glaring reality that the U.S. imperialist beast, daily slaughters and exploits poor and oppressed people around the world.
Of the twenty states generally thought of as being part of Latin America, eleven now have governments of the far right, subordinate to the policies of U.S. imperialism. These include Argentina (Javier Milei since 2023), Bolivia (Rodrigo Paz since 2025), Chile (José Antonio Kast since 2026), Colombia (de la Espriella since 2026), Costa Rica (Laura Fernández since 2026), Ecuador (Daniel Noboa since 2023), El Salvador (Nayib Bukele since 2019), Honduras (Nasry Asfura since 2026), Panama (José Raúl Mulino since 2024), Paraguay (Santiago Peña since 2023), and Peru (Keiko Fujimori since 2026). In every case, these governments’ impose polices that increasingly integrate their regimes into the international institutions of the imperialist beast and its alliance with the Zionist apartheid Israel.
That China and Russia have but a handful of foreign military bases around the world do NOT inform us that their “investments” are benign. By definition, there are no generous/benevolent capitalist states. China’s development loans and projects around the world aim at the extraction of surplus value via direct labor exploitation, or unpayable loans for infrastructure development projects that end up, after default, in China’s confiscation of major foreign facilities, as with China’s acquisition of major ports in Sri Lanka and other Chinese-financed massive infrastructure projects in Latin America, Africa, and elsewhere.
China, with a GDP that today approaches or actually exceeds the U.S., and with some 1,000 billionaires, as compared to some 800 in the U.S., is undoubtedly a major capitalist-imperialist exploiter on the world stage. [Socialist Action’s lengthy 2018 National Convention resolution designating China as imperialist fully demonstrates this proposition.]
National liberation struggles: The right of self-determination of poor and oppressed peoples
We begin here with the central principle that has guided revolutionary socialists with regard to imperialist war and intervention in poor and oppressed countries the world over. We unconditionally support the right of these nations to self-determination, that is, to be free from imperialist or colonial occupation, intervention and war in all of their manifestations. This single principle was central to the victory of the 1917 Russian Revolution, which freed Czarist Russia’s conquered peoples, the infamous “prison house of nationalities,” setting the example for revolutionary fighters the world over. Today U.S. imperialism, with 1,100 military bases in 110 countries [Recent Congressional reports put the number of countries with ongoing U.S. military operations at 159!] reigns as “the chief cop of the world.” Its overriding objective is the subjugation and exploitation of poor and oppressed people and nations to advance the economic interests of U.S. imperialism.
Every U.S. war, or U.S.-supported war, overt or covert, in recent decades, and long before, including in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Iran, Libya, Nicaragua, Grenada, Venezuela, Chile, Cuba, Bolivia, Brazil, Peru, El Salvador, Serbia, across Africa, the Middle East, in Palestine and beyond, has been aimed at advancing the interests of U.S. imperialism’s corporate elite.
Our position in the U.S. antiwar movement with regard to all has always been “U.S. Out Now! Hands Off! Bring the Troops Home Now! and Self-determination For All Poor and Oppressed People and Nations!
We hold this view regardless of the politics and class orientation of the leaders of the nations under imperialist attack. Indeed, with few exceptions, the leadership of the resistance to imperialist intervention has been variations of bourgeois nationalism, or even clerical nationalism. Although socialists have often been active participants in national liberations struggles, they have rarely been the central leaders. When they have been among the leaders, as in the Cuban Revolution, the anti-imperialist struggle has led to socialist revolution.
But socialist leadership or not, however critical for the final outcome of any and all national liberation struggles, we begin, again, with our unconditional rejection of imperialist intervention. We do so with the full knowledge that the defeat of the imperialist interveners opens the door wider for the anti-imperialist struggle to become an anti-capitalist struggle, that is, to proceed to the construction of a socialist society, in accord with our fundamental conception of permanent revolution.
As participants in national liberation struggles, revolutionary socialists aim to build mass revolutionary socialist parties aimed at winning the masses to our socialist perspectives and program. These include efforts to win the masses to social measures that bring broader layers into the struggle, measures that bourgeois nationalist leaders most often oppose, including land reform and nationalizations under workers control. That is, we apply the method of the Transitional Program. Any abstention or opposition of revolutionary socialists to supporting national liberation struggles against imperialist intervention can only reduce them to sterile sectarians, or worse.
We say worse because we have been witness in our ranks to currents that utterly failed to understand the essence of our anti-imperialist/self-determination/national liberation programmatic conceptions, as with the split we were compelled to endure a few years ago when a minority falsely characterized the U.S.-abetted, financed and orchestrated imperialist war against Syria as a civil war between the Syria masses on the one side and the Bashar Assad government on the other. This minority effectively sided with the U.S.-backed jihadists aimed at Assad’s overthrow while Socialist Action advocated the military victory of Assad’s army against the U.S.-orchestrated war. Tragically, comrades in Socialist Action found themselves on opposite sides of a war that today few, if any, consider anything but yet another U.S. imperialist slaughter, a slaughter that took the lives of 500,000 Syrians. We were for the defeat of the U.S./NATO/Gulf State monarchies backed invaders and the military victory of the Assad government against them. Had we forces inside Syria we would have had the same position and acted on it.
With regard to the 20-year U.S. war in Afghanistan, we have seen a similar twisted interpretations of the right of self-determination wherein the Fourth International’s hatred for the reactionary Taliban leadership of the struggle against U.S. intervention led them to unclear, to say the least, conclusions when the U.S. was forced to withdraw several years ago. Socialist Action hailed the U.S. defeat as a victory for the Afghan people while the FI misleaders, ambiguous at best, bemoaned the U.S. withdrawal based on the Taliban’s reactionary positions on women, as if the U.S. imperialist occupiers, who murdered an estimated million Afghanis, were more progressive with regard to women’s rights! That several “radical” women’s rights supporters aligned with the FI took positions in U.S.-sponsored Afghan NGO’s established under the imperialist occupation, tragically was a factor in the FI’s equivocations and its refusal to characterize the U.S. withdrawal and the Taliban victory as a defeat for U.S. imperialism.
[Editor’ note: Socialist Action is no longer a fraternal affiliate of the Fourth International. Our fraternal status, and therefore absence of any formal affiliation, was mandated by reactionary U.S. legislation prohibiting affiliation with international communist organizations. In any case, the Fourth International terminated this fraternal status due to their rejection of Socialist Action’s views on a broad range of critical issues, ranging from Ukraine and Syria to the rejection by the FI of its historic programmatic views on the need to construct revolutionary parties on the Leninist model.]
The “law of identity” in politics
Another dispute that roiled and divided antiwar and socialist organizations was the Syrian government’s request for Russian aid during the U.S.-imperialist orchestrated war. We have written volumes on this dispute, including two popular pamphlets. In accord with our stance regarding the unconditional right of self-determination of poor and oppressed nations, we supported the right of the beleaguered Syrian government to seek the aid of Russia as well as Iran and the Lebanese-based Hezbollah. In fact, had the Syrian’s not sought such aid, and received it, in short order Syria would have become a virtual U.S. colony. The U.S.-backed jihadists in combination with NATO and the Gulf State monarchies, at that moment occupied almost three-quarters of Syria’s land mass and were poised on the outskirts of Damascus, to take control of its capital and strategic city.
Citing the fact that Russia was a capitalist-imperialist nation, albeit, one of qualitatively lesser import on a world scale, the Fourth International and, again, a minority in Socialist Action, opposed the Russian intervention. This took the form of their advocacy that Socialist Action should propose to the United National Antiwar Coalition (UNAC) a modest united front antiwar coalition that we helped to form, demand “U.S. and Russia Out Now! Their thesis was that both Russia and the U.S. were equally imperialist nations and that revolutionaries do not take sides between competing imperialisms. In sharp contrast, our analysis began with the facts as opposed to the abstract “identity” theses wherein we were supposedly obligated to equally condemn all imperialisms.
The facts were presented and debated in infinite detail, with Socialist Action repeatedly concluding that the essence of the war in Syria was a U.S./NATO/Gulf State monarchy orchestrated war to remove the Syrian government, dismember Syria, divide up its vast fossil fuel and agricultural resources and replace its government with a U.S.-controlled puppet regime.
Socialist Action repeatedly debated this issue in the course of five years, including at several National Committee plenums and at two national conventions. Without exception, the majority of our elected leadership and rank-and-file, following full democratic debate, affirmed the positions outlined above.
We will only add here that today, as a result of ever-deepening U.S. and Zionist intervention and war against the Syrian Assad government, that government has been overthrown and Syria’s overall resources have been increasingly awarded to U.S. capitalism, Israel and their regional allies.
For a democratic secular Palestine
Today the “two-state solution” to the Israel/Palestine issue is largely rejected in recognition of the fact that the genocidal Israeli Zionist state, by force and violence, ongoing exclusion/expulsion, endless new “settlements,” imprisonment and mass murder has largely reduced historic Palestinian to tiny, isolated, disconnected, Zionist Army-occupied, non-viable entities that are more like prisons than any semblance of an independent nation. Socialist Action’s historic position supporting a democratic secular Palestine with the right of return of all disposed Palestinians, is today accepted among most Palestinian organizations, the broad U.S. left and in the U.S. and the world populations more generally – all a reflection of the growing understanding that the great imperialist powers intervene and fund the Zionist state in a similar manner that they do with regard to poor, oppressed and imperialist-occupied nations and peoples around the world. Needless to say, the achievement of a democratic, secular Palestine, where Arabs Jews, Christians and all others can live together in peace and harmony is predicated on broader revolutionary developments in the Middle East, including a socialist federation of the region that replaces the present imperialist-backed various dictatorships and the historically imperialist-divided region with a socialist order that prioritizes the fulfillment of human needs and equality as opposed to capitalist profit, exploitation and endless war.
The war in Ukraine
Today, the war in Ukraine has seriously divided large components of the U.S. and the international antiwar movement more generally. We have written extensively on this debate and adopted a series of texts and resolutions, the most recent of which appears on our website entitled, “Ukraine: No to the U.S.-orchestrated War and Fascist Coup.” July 24, 2022. We propose that Socialist Action retain in full our past resolutions on Ukraine and the views expressed in the two lengthy pamphlets we have published on Ukraine.
To be continued….
