This article is based on the talk Catalinotto made during Workers World Party’s May 18 national meeting in New York City to discuss “The decline of imperialism, the global class struggle today, the changing working class and the tasks of the party.”

One of the reference points for this discussion is Sam Marcy’s 1950s analysis of the world situation entitled, “The Global Class War.” Marcy’s essay provided a framework for understanding the worldwide class battles during the post-World War II period while the Soviet Union existed. When some battle broke out in that global class war, this framework helped communists understand what side to take.

As Marcy explained it, the 1950’s world was divided into the following confrontations: (1) the ruling class in the imperialist, colonialist states (mainly North America, West Europe and Japan) led by Washington and the socialist camp led by the Soviet Union and, after 1949, China; (2) the same imperialist states and peoples in oppressed nations fighting for independence, who were often allied with the socialist camp; (3) the capitalists and the workers in all capitalist countries.

To give a few examples using this framework, WWP supported the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea against the 1950s U.S.-led intervention and supported the struggles for national liberation in Vietnam, Algeria, South Africa and Palestine. WWP also supported the Soviet intervention in Hungary in 1956 to stop a counterrevolution. WWP comrades supported all strikes by U.S.-based unions against the bosses, supported the Civil Rights Movement against Jim Crow racist laws and supported the Black Liberation Movement for self-determination in the U.S.

This support was based not necessarily on 100% ideological agreement but by the attitude that these forces were “on the same side” in the global class war.

The experience of that period was that only peoples led by communist parties that smashed the colonial state and brought their own workers’ state into existence, or some close variation of this, won lasting independence. Examples were China, DPRK, Cuba, Vietnam, with temporary or partial successes in Zimbabwe, Yemen, Ethiopia, Nicaragua and in the former Portuguese colonies in Africa.

Once peoples had won independence, often based on guerrilla wars that mobilized most of the population behind the fight for liberation, the revolutionaries faced a new (and some say an even greater) challenge. They had to direct an entire society and in a global economy still dominated by imperialism.

The 1989-91 counterrevolution in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe uprooted this earlier framework. The counterrevolution did not end the global class war. It changed its form.

Confident in their domination, the strategists of the U.S. ruling class in the 1990s called for mobilizing all the imperialist states as U.S. junior partners in NATO and similar military alliances. Their goal was to reconquer whatever parts of the world had managed to liberate themselves even partially during the existence of the Soviet Union. (Think of Yugoslavia, Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya, Ukraine.)

The U.S. government’s strategic analyses made clear as early as 1992 that the U.S. goal was to make the U.S.-based imperialist ruling class dominant for the entire 21st century, if not forever (Defense Planning Guidance, 1992), by not allowing any rival to develop. They expected to pick apart Russia and make its parts subservient to imperialism and to provoke a counterrevolution in China.

When the Chinese government opened their country’s economy to investment, the capitalist strategists planned not only to exploit the massive working class there but to open a path for private owners of the means of production to overturn the Chinese Communist Party. U.S. agencies would support uprisings of minority peoples inside China (Tibet, Xinxiang). And they would encourage Chinese capitalists to take more control in the Chinese state and then take China apart piece by piece.

Chinese capitalists exist and have substantial weight in the Chinese economy. They include some 600 billionaires. Up to now, however, to the dismay of the imperialists, the 100-million-strong Communist Party of China has kept these Chinese capitalists in check, that is, away from state power.

And the CPC has used its ability to intervene in the economy to prevent a collapse (think of the 2008-09 financial meltdown and the 2020-2022 Covid 19 crisis), despite China’s integration into an imperialist-dominated world economy. In a unique achievement, the Chinese economy developed so that some 800 million Chinese people rose from below the poverty line.

Economists believe China is socialist

Now imperialist economists, instead of predicting that Beijing will open the Chinese economy to imperialist control, predict that China will be the dominant economic power. Marxist analysts — Carlos Martinez, Claudio Katz, Rémy Herrera, Richard Wolff, to name just a few — some of whom earlier argued that China was taking the capitalist road, now confidently declare that China is still basically socialist.

Because WWP has been trained during seven decades in international solidarity, we in WWP take, for example, the following positions: We support the liberation of the Sahel from imperialism. We support the Axis of Resistance in West Asia in its effort to expel the imperialists. We support the liberation of Palestine. We support Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua against Yankee imperialism.

We see NATO as an aggressive imperialist tool and want its defeat in Ukraine. We support socialist China against imperialist militarism. The ruling classes in the U.S., West Europe, Japan, Canada and Australia are left planning intense militarization to confront China and are waging that class war against their working classes at home to pay for it.

We also support the struggle of the multinational working class in the United States to defend what it has and to fight for more.

But the analysis of revolutionaries should be more explainable than gut support, which is mainly based on determined opposition to whatever the imperialists do, although that’s an excellent starting point. Better would be to reconstruct a framework that explains the still existing global class war, with today’s division of the world’s forces, exploiters and exploited, oppressors and oppressed.

So let us together develop a new framework for today’s global class war that can make it easier to explain to fellow workers and oppressed peoples which side are our comrades and which are our enemies.

Meanwhile, let us participate in what is now a defensive struggle of the working class in the U.S. and turn it into a struggle that can dismantle the war drive, obstruct the intervention of NATO, stop U.S. economic sanctions, aid the defense of socialist China and assist the liberation of Palestine.