In typical mainstream reporting, the Ukraine war is simplistically interpreted as a gruesome spectacle with clearly assigned roles: here the Shire, there Mordor; on the one side Harry Potter, on the other Lord Voldemort, the absolute Good and Hitler. In fact, on the day after the first anniversary of the Russian invasion, NATO itself proclaimed from its official Twitter account: ‘Ukraine is hosting one of the great epics of this century: “We are Harry Potter and William Wallace, the Na’vi and Han Solo. We’re escaping from Shawshank and blowing up the Death Star. We are fighting with the Harkonnens and challenging Thanos.”’ And how do you proceed against absolute evil? You deploy all available means, accepting all the consequences. Or, as the French-Israeli sociologist Eva Illouz argued in an interview published by the German weekly Die Zeit: ‘Maybe only an annihilating defeat will be able to help Russia find a way out of its dictatorial history.’ That the flagship of German liberalism headlined this interview with the Illouz quote ‘Ich wünsche mir einen totalen Sieg’ (‘I wish for total victory’) eighty years to the day since Joseph Goebbels’s ‘Wollt Ihr den totalen Krieg?’ (‘Do You Want Total War’) speech may have been more than telling with regards to the liberal intelligentsia’s mindset.
Still, the real situation is more complex than liberals would have it. The Ukraine war has to be seen in the context of capitalism and its contemporary crises. Only by doing this can we identify the paths to peace.
A Six-Dimensional Crisis
The epoch we are living through has to be understood as a long-term crisis of global capitalism whose beginnings reach back to the 2007 global financial crisis. It is a multiple crisis, with six dimensions.
The first dimension is accumulation — it is thus a crisis of neoliberalism as a class project, which since the 1970s has shifted the balance of power between capital and labour worldwide to the detriment of labour. This can be seen in the declining wage share and amassing of gigantic billion-euro fortunes in the hands of the bourgeoisie. If it is not to be devalued, the surplus capital that has accumulated in the hands of this ‘0.1 per cent’ must seek out profitable spheres of investment. The result is speculative bubbles, from the financial markets to the global real-estate markets, which from the perspective of the wage-working class takes the form of the new housing question in large and middle-sized cities.
At the same time, the search for profitable capital investments creates a process of capitalist land-grabbing. Internally, this ranges from the privatisation of telecommunications, rail, postal services, and apartment co-ops to the financialisation of pensions — in other words, the transformation of public common goods into commodified services subordinated to the profit principle. Externally, capitalist land-grabbing takes the form of free-trade initiatives or debt-imperialist shock privatisations such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund have made into conditions for the granting of emergency loans in the last four decades.
Global financial-market capitalism is essentially in a crisis of accumulation that is continually deferred by the states whose function it is to centrally manage such crises. To enable spheres of investment for over-accumulated capital, governments — always in the name of the competitiveness of their financial centres from New York to London and Frankfurt — deregulated the financial markets, relaxed the equity requirements for the large banks with their opaque financial derivates such as ‘subprime mortgages’ and ‘collateralised debt obligations’, thus creating the conditions for the global financial crisis. Then, following the government bailouts of the ‘system-relevant’ banks, the financial and bank crisis became a sovereign debt crisis, to which in turn the states of the capitalist ‘West,’ i.e. the U.S. and the EU, reacted with austerity policy, that is, they shifted the costs of the crisis and the bank bailouts to the overindebted PIIGS (Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece, Spain) and their own working classes. It was thus a deep crisis process, which continually made capitalist land-grabbing an objective necessity, but which simultaneously aggravated a crisis of representation and liberal democracy (see below).
The second dimension is a crisis of gender relations, which ultimately has to do with neoliberalism’s feminising of the labour market. The Fordist masculine breadwinner model, which rested on the unpaid reproductive work of housewives, was transformed — as a result of feminist struggles but also due to stagnating real and ‘family wages’ (Friedrich Engels) — into a ‘dual-earner model’. At the same time, the feminist demand to unite family and profession with full-time employment beyond the ‘part-time’ and ‘pensioner poverty’ traps could never be realised because under restrictive budgetary policies the expansion of fully funded, free daycare and eldercare either was not implemented or did not keep pace. The result was and is the extreme double burden and overexploitation of feminine labour within the patriarchal context. The family constitutes capitalism’s constant resource for the reproduction of labour power and the creation of new wage-workers. Malign societal structures are encroaching on private relationships. The struggle for emancipation under these conditions inevitably entails conflicts over distribution as regards unpaid reproductive work in the household. Austerity policy, especially in the wake of the global financial and euro crisis, added to the burden on families and aggravated the crisis of gender relations. This is especially true of the southern European countries in which care activities, such as eldercare, were transferred back onto families or could only be performed at the cost of labour power from eastern Europe, which, as a result, became scarce in the source countries.
The third dimension is a crisis of social cohesion. Since it frees humanity of socially necessary labour, which now becomes automated labour, the Fourth Industrial Revolution could be a blessing. But because digitalisation is occurring in a capital-driven context, it functions as a curse that brings fear of job loss deep into the ‘professional middle classes’ — journalists, translators, physicians, lawyers, etc. The fear of downward social mobility is intensified in combination with the reconstruction of the welfare state into a workfare state, which, based in a conservative-negative image of humanity, has more in common with feudal-patriarchal poor relief than a social rights-based social security system. Because this reconstruction carried out in the 1990s and 2000s in the face of social resistance involves threatening sanctions to compel people to accept poorly paid work for which they are overqualified, this bullying acts like a system of ‘communicating vessels’ (Klaus Dörre) which at the same time frightens and disciplines the entire workforce. With this, the neoliberal state has brought the realistic fear of downward social mobility and a corresponding willingness to accept wage restraint, etc. deep into the wage-working middle-income strata.
The first three dimensions of the crisis feed into the fourth — a deep crisis of representation, democracy, and of the liberal party system itself. The market-driven evolution of society polarises it into winners and losers, into islands of affluence and dependent regions — in other words, into global norths and souths, into the semi-functioning northern EU and the largely deindustrialised southern Europe, into the metropolitan regions centred on Paris, Germany’s south and southwest, northern Italy, etc. on the one side, and the dependent regions in northern Germany, northern France, southern Italy, etc. There is likewise a split between the moderately well-functioning inner-city districts of European capitals and dependent peripheries such as Clichy-sous-Bois, Molenbeek, or Marzahn-Hellersdorf, where the proletariat’s intense hatred of the system often takes the form of right-wing extremism or Salafism. This social polarisation has understandably expressed itself politically. After the defeats of the left — the anti-austerity movements in southern Europe (for example, Syriza in Greece, and Podemos in Spain), Jeremy Corbyn’s narrow defeat in Great Britain in 2017, and the two-time presidential candidacy of Bernie Sanders in the USA — the crisis of liberal centrism has essentially only benefitted right-wing authoritarian nationalism. Certainly, this nationalism offers no basic alternatives. It embodies a mere blind revolt against the symptoms of globalised crisis capitalism — migration, crime, gender struggles, decay of public goods, etc. — rather than the root causes. At the same time, one aspect of the crisis of democracy is that liberal centrism, instead of removing the fertile soil on which right-wing authoritarian nationalism grows, composed as it is of fears of social decline, feelings of social powerlessness, etc., insulates itself still more when it sees the rise of right-wing authoritarian nationalism, and — in the best case — cultivates a kind of impotent finger-wagging antifascism. Even then, it appropriates the social interpretative patterns and demagogy of the far right in terms of migration, asylum rights, criminality, anti-communism, etc.
The fifth dimension is a crisis in the relation of humanity to nature. It includes the crisis of ecological sustainability. And at its centre today is the ongoing climate catastrophe, the irreversible loss of biodiversity (species extinction), and the depletion of natural resources. The crisis reveals the systemic contradiction that the planet is finite while capitalism is a system that cannot function without infinite growth. ‘Green capitalism’, which is supposed to be climate-neutral, is a dangerous illusion and chimera because, as the British-American theoretician of capitalism David Harvey has shown, CO2 reduction through increased technological efficiency has always and will continue to be neutralised just by the massive growth alone, that is, the sum of newly created goods in a capitalism compelled to permanently grow. Thus, according to World Bank data, global gross domestic product basically grew exponentially between 1960 and 2022, from 1.38 trillion US dollars (1960) to 11.34 trillion (1980) and 33.85 trillion (2000) to 200.56 trillion in 2022.
Along with the climate catastrophe and attempts to cushion it through electrification based on renewable energies, there are still other dimensions, especially if the tipping points are exceeded. These include geopolitical rivalries and the wars fought for rare raw materials which are now suddenly needed for electrification (lithium, silicon, cobalt, etc.), climate refugee flows, the continuous rise of right-wing authoritarian nationalism, racism, and the accelerated walling off of refugees.
The sixth dimension is already implicit in all this — an all-encompassing crisis of world order. It is characterised by the relative decline of the USA as a hegemonic power, which had reconstructed capitalism in the West after 1945, and the rise of China, along with the high-tech rivalry between the two countries. With China, for the first time in world history, a country has successfully liberated itself from its colonial and imperialist peripheralisation. The Soviet Union attempted this and made itself into a superpower which was even able to defeat German fascism. But in the end, it collapsed. China’s rise and the decline of the US as the last remaining superpower after 1991 is linked to the question of whether this hegemonic shift can take place peacefully or will lead to global military clashes. Historically, the decline of one hegemonic power and the rise of a new one has, as a rule, been associated with major warfare. Critical social scientists call this situation ‘systemic chaos’ (Giovanni Arrighi), while conservative realists speak of the ‘Thucydides Trap’. The US historian Graham T. Allison has shown that 12 of 16 comparable situations of hegemonic and power shifts in world order resulted in such wars.
It would be a misunderstanding to rank the six dimensions of the crisis in some order of importance, even if the crisis of the capitalist economy and the question of profitability and profit-maximisation systemically play a role in all the dimensions, none of which can be understood without its substructure of capitalist property relations and accumulation. Nor should the six dimensions be understood as a matter of addition, when there is in fact a process of multiplication. The six-dimensional crisis becomes a permanent crisis of bourgeois-capitalist world society precisely because crisis phenomena in one sphere lead to the sudden sharpening, in other spheres, of crises that had apparently been solved by state management; in other words, through spill-over effects, crises mutually reinforce and reignite each other.
What follows from this hypocrisy and double standards is the recognition that foreign policy concerns not values but interests.
The Ukraine war today reveals the contradictions in the world order of imperialist rivalries, to which the geopolitical competition for geographic spaces that can be land-grabbed also belongs. Furthermore, it has profound effects on the accumulation crisis, on social cohesion, and liberal democracy. Inflation, it is true, is caused not only by the Ukraine war. The higher cost of living had already been a consequence of collapsed global supply chains as a result of the pandemic. However, especially in Europe the war is the main driver of the increase in the costs of living. In turn, it impacts the crisis of democracy. Ultimately, it is impossible to impoverish broad swathes of the population — not only relatively, which has been ongoing, but now also in absolute terms — without political consequences. It is no accident that in Germany, for example, polls show that the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) is now the second strongest party nationwide, just behind the Christian Democrats (CDU/CSU) — and in East Germany it looks to be by far the strongest. The fact that in many European countries like France or Sweden left-wing forces have more or less followed the lines of their governments and gone along with the prevailing geopolitics of the Western imperialist elites makes it easy for the far right to benefit from the crisis of democracy and strong anti-establishment sentiments, in what amounts to a general ‘populist moment’. Even in those states where the massive anti-austerity protests of the early to mid-2010s led to left-wing surges, the defeat of those forces in combination with left-wing confusion over the Ukraine war is boosting the far right. This includes Portugal after the 2024 national election, Greece and, of course, Italy and France.
The double standard of ‘values-driven foreign policy’
My first thesis is that the Ukraine war must be understood in the context of this six-dimensional crisis. The second is that it cannot be grasped without an understanding of the crisis of world order and the US-China rivalry, understood as the decisive conflict of the 21st century.
We are told that there needs to be a ‘values-driven foreign policy’ in view of the Russian attack on Ukraine. Many decent people will click ‘like’ — for who could be against a foreign policy that conforms to our ethical concepts? In the meantime, the assertion of values-driven foreign policy runs into considerable contradictions, for it is, I will try to show, thoroughly hypocritical.
We are also told that no country can allow its military, political, or economic alliances to be dictated to it. Accordingly, ‘Ukraine’ too, meaning its government, has a right to sovereignty. However, in the end it is not the Ukrainian state but NATO that by unanimous vote makes decisions on accession candidates, and its member states must do so by considering whether the accession serves the peace and security interests of a region.
To recognise the hypocrisy behind the sovereignty argument, we need not look back at the rich historical examples from the Monroe Doctrine to the Cuban Missile Crisis nor consider how the US would react today if revolutionary Cuba, crushed as it is by the US embargo, or the democratically elected left governments in Colombia, Venezuela, or even Mexico decided to form an alliance with China and to host its military infrastructure. It is enough just to look at the immediate present of identical state protagonists. For example, shortly after the beginning of the Ukraine war, the Solomon Islands in the West Pacific decided to construct a Chinese military base, just like one of the close to 800 worldwide which the US maintains. But now, while western liberals sing the hymn of sovereignty and the US insists that only Ukraine can decide whom it wants to ally with, the Biden administration is openly threatening the Solomon Islands with war.
Western foreign policy which today prefers to speak of a non-codified ‘rules-based international order’ rather than of international law — which it has often enough violated, as Russia is now doing — today invokes Article 51 of the UN Charter, which contains the right to self-defence of nations attacked in violation of international law, and waters down the Charter’s otherwise extensive prohibition of the use of force. The argument is made — even by Die Linke politician Gregor Gysi — that we are morally obliged to enable attacked countries that claim this right to implement it, including through arms deliveries. However, if this ‘values-driven’ principle were to be applied consistently, then the current German government would also have to send weapons to the Kurds in northern Syria and northern Iraq, that is, to de facto deliver them to the Iraqi government and the Syrian head of state Bashir al Assad, so that they can defend themselves against an invasion by NATO partner Erdoğan. We would also have to consider whether it is not also ‘morally obligatory’ to send weapons to Polisario in the Western Sahara, which is occupied by the Kingdom of Morocco, a Western ally coddled for its role in blocking refugees. Or whether weapons need to be supplied to the rebels in Yemen, rather than have the German Economy Ministry under Robert Habeck (a Green politician) lift the export ban on arms to Saudi Arabia, which had earlier been imposed in October 2022 after the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Berlin has indeed sent weapons and, in January 2024, €38.9 billion worth of fighter jets to the Gulf dictatorship, which it is deploying in its genocidal war in Yemen. An aspect of the pointed reality of this ‘value-driven foreign policy’ is that these ‘dictatorships waging fossil wars’ — to use Green jargon — happen to be ‘our’ fossil-war-waging dictatorships. They were and are precisely the historic allies of the US and NATO. Needless to say, the Western tolerance of Israeli war crimes against the civilian population in Gaza — even within the first few weeks, more civilians died there than in Ukraine — can hardly improve the credibility of the West’s foreign policy, as the responses of Namibia and South Africa to Germany’s stance in the Israel/Palestine conflict show.
What follows from this hypocrisy and double standards is the recognition that foreign policy concerns not values but interests. Values are superficial legitimation screens and, in the best of cases, play a role when they do not contradict essential interests and geopolitical objectives.
However, if the US has up to now sent $75 billion in military aid to the Ukrainian government — which according to a study by the Kiel Institute for the World Economy exceeds the average annual expenditure for even the US’s own war in Afghanistan; if, as New Left Review editor Susan Watkins has shown, in the West no war — not even its own ones in Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan, or Libya — has been given so much media coverage even though Western countries are officially not even active participants; then all this points to self-evident concrete interests. Analysing them is the prerequisite for deciding who defines them, which classes they particularly serve, and whether there could also be other definitions of interests.
Interests and Conflicts of Interest in the Ukraine War
To speak of this war means to begin with Russia, because it began the war on 24 February 2022 — or rather, escalated the geopolitical conflict over Ukraine that had been ongoing since at least George W. Bush’s attempt to bring Ukraine into NATO in 2008 and the 2014 Ukrainian civil war. Insofar as the Russian justifications amount to classic war lies, which tailgate those of the West in its recent wars (preventive war according to Article 51 of the UN Charter against an imminent aggression; the allegedly imminent genocide in East Ukraine and consequent ‘responsibility to protect’; ‘de-Nazification’, for every power will somehow find ‘its Hitler’), we have to inquire into the Russian state’s actual interests.
Western liberalism, above all in its green-liberal variety, derives its understanding of foreign policy from texts which you can readily Google. This is how ‘young global leaders’ learn it today, at universities rotted by discourse analysis and in ‘transatlantic bridges’. Liberals argue that Putin’s speeches are Great Russian ethno-nationalist. In them, he is said to deny Ukraine’s right to exist, and from this fact it is concluded that Putin is carrying out a ‘war of annihilation’ against the Ukrainian people. It is suggested that Putin is Hitler, and in the end Hitler could also only be defeated with weapons. This historical-revisionist comparison, which outdoes even conventional relativism and the neo-Nazi NPD’s historical distortions, then makes possible, indeed almost requires, every form of liberal extremism because the idea of negotiating, possibly unconditionally, with the new ‘Russian Hitler’ an end to the senseless blood-shedding — in a war that is unwinnable for either side — is immediately labelled ‘appeasement’ in the spirit of the 1938 ‘Munich Agreement’ , indeed collaboration with ‘Hitler’. The liberal assertions here are in stark contrast to the actual military strategic circumstances and the military strategic approach of the Russian government itself. There certainly have been war crimes, such as those of Bucha which were demonstrably committed by Russian troops — in war, such crimes are almost always perpetrated by the second wave of troops supposed to ‘pacify’ conquered territory. The Russian government evidently encourages such acts, since Bucha and other crimes against humanity, such as rapes or the killing of civilians, presumably go unpunished.
However, the nonchalance with which Western liberalism deals with a possible nuclear escalation by counting on the Putin government’s rationality, while otherwise accusing it of the greatest irrationality, and imagining that it would hit on the insane idea of deploying 190,000 soldiers to capture, occupy, and control a country initially with 44 million inhabitants and a 600,000 square kilometre territory — three times the size of Great Britain and twice that of Italy — outdoes all known fact-free political fantasy. It is so fantastic that it could only come from political circles, state-related ‘security’ think tanks, and from bourgeois media apparatuses far removed from the actually existing military, from people who never had to face the music and thus frivolously call for military ‘solutions’, while the actual militaries, who know the limits of military solutions from ‘on the ground’ experience with wars in Afghanistan, Mali, or Iraq, act far more prudently.
Of course, every civilian death is one too many. The war crimes need to be roundly condemned, and demanding of the Russian state that it penalise them and see that justice is done to the families will have to be part of peace negotiations. Nevertheless, it must be clear that if what is involved here is a ‘war of annihilation’, such as the Nazis waged in Eastern Europe, we would — in a population of 44 million — statistically be talking of the death of millions of civilians rather than the 10,000 plus civilian dead which the UN quotes. Therefore, such assertions that these war crimes are expressions of an intentional genocidal ‘war of annihilation’ are intolerable distortions of history and trivialisation of the Nazis’ ‘Generalplan Ost’, of ‘Operation Barbarossa’, and of the Holocaust. Needless to say, that those who ceaselessly term Russia’s invasion in Ukraine a ‘war of annihilation’ are usually the same people who refuse to even debate whether the 35,000-plus (mostly civilian) dead in Gaza during Israel’s retaliation against Hamas’s October 7 attacks, or the planned assault on Rafah, could be a sign of ‘ethnic cleansing’ — instead accusing those who make such accusations of being antisemitic.
In place of liberal ideology and its perceived truths (‘truthiness’ as the US comedian Stephen Colbert calls them) what is needed in order merely to make reason-based political decisions is an evidence-based analysis. This is the prerequisite for peace and security in Europe. My thesis on the goals of the Russian attack, which fit the on-the-ground military action, is: Putin wanted, on the one hand, to stabilise the wavering ‘Donbass’ and especially to militarily force Ukraine’s alliance-neutrality. To achieve this, the probable intention was to create a power vacuum through a quick advance to Kyiv, which then would have enabled a regime change. Even among European media and political leaders, where the suggestion was that Volodymyr Zelensky should flee, there was no belief in the Ukrainian armed forces’ capacity for defence because there was no clear sense of the actual military aid Ukraine had received from the United States after 2014. Following Zelensky’s flight, Russia could have installed the more Russia-friendly opposition leader Viktor Medvedchuk as interim president, who in the wake of a corruption affair involving Zelensky was actually ahead in polls. In so doing, Putin, as an ex-KGB man, would have probably been acting on the basis of Soviet experiences and tried and tested demonstrations of power such as the invasion of Hungary in 1956 or Czechoslovakia in 1968 according to the motto: ‘thus far and no further!’, undergirded by military power.
At the same time, for Putin his foreign policy also involved distraction from serious domestic-policy problems. The failure of the strategy to diversify the economy and to implement a digital economy resting on increasing raw-material prices on the world market are also consequences of the global financial crisis. In Russia too it made neoliberal budget cuts necessary. Ultimately, the big 2018-29 pension reform moved the pensionable age for women from 50 to 55 and for men from 55 to 60 — and this in the context of sharply falling life expectancy (the ‘Russian Mortality Crisis’) as a result of the shock privatisations and social crisis of the 1990s. This reform was very unpopular and there was massive resistance. As much as 80 per cent of the population rejected it. But a similar proportion share the perception that the West encircled Russia in its moment of weakness and broke its promise not to expand NATO eastward. Against this background the confrontational policy worked to stabilise Putin’s rule. As a ‘strategy of diversion’ (Charles Beard) it also served Putin’s continued grip on power. Conversely, all those in the West who were serious about international solidarity and human rights — those who honourably wanted to be rid of Putin in the interests of the Russian people — should have stressed a policy of détente so that the inner social contradictions in Russia could unfold. It is, in fact, absurd that currently social democrats and the left have to go through a mea culpa ‘walk to Canossa,’ i.e. they have to apologise for having once believed in a policy of détente and ‘change through rapprochement’, while in the last thirty years in the West — from Kosovo through Iraq to NATO’s eastward expansion supported by military manoeuvres — what predominated was not a policy of détente but one of imperial expansion and confrontation.
US interests: weakening Russia and containing China
Washington’s declared goal consists, then, in a ‘permanent weakening’ of Russia. In this respect, it has succeeded. With its war in Ukraine, Russia is destroying not only its neighbouring country but is doing massive damage to itself. The arms industry was one of the few sectors where Russia was still competitive. After the US it was in fact the world’s second largest arms exporter. Through the war Russia now needs these weapons for itself. At the same time the West’s sanctions policy is impeding armaments exports. In times of booming arms markets, Russia is thus losing — probably permanently — its shares in these global markets above all to the US but also, as the example of India shows, to France.
But what interests the US in the Ukraine war — which it chanced upon as a ‘historical find’ (Alain Lipietz) — is not just weakening Russia. Its interests lie in the context of its openly proclaimed global strategy to defend its superpower status against competitors. To that effect, one of its goals in Ukraine is also the weakening of Europe by making it dependent on the US. Understanding the reasons for this is crucial. They go far back to before the time of the coup and civil war in Ukraine, Russia’s annexation of Crimea, the secession of the Donbass supported and secured by Russia, the collapse of Minsk II and the ultimate annexation of the so-called ‘people’s republics’ of Luhansk and Donetsk. They also constitute the background for the famous ‘fuck the EU’ telephone call by Victoria Nuland from Ukraine in 2014, which, because it was intercepted was made known to the public.
The Ukraine war cannot be understood, as we have said, outside of the US-China conflict, which is prioritised by strategic thinking in the US (and not only there) and is the underpinning for the United States’ definition of its interests in the conflict with Russia and also in the Gaza War.
Since it joined the World Trade Organisation (WTO) in 2001, China has evolved from being the world’s extended workbench to a high-tech rival of the central capitalist states. In many areas of the ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’ the People’s Republic, thanks to the Communist Party’s state direction of its economy, is now competitive and in no few cases a world market leader. This goes for the large future-technology sectors such as big data and artificial intelligence (with its derived technologies such as ‘smart city’, language and facial recognition, etc.), the fifth and sixth generation of mobile communications (with derived technologies such as ‘autonomous driving’), and the green technologies needed for a climate-neutral, post-fossil economy: solar and windpower plants, water power technologies, and high-speed trains with which the People’s Republic has systematically opened up the whole country and which it is now constructing worldwide from Laos to Central Africa. Also in the construction of electric cars, a powerful competitor to western firms has developed, which was seen in the September 2023 International Automobile Show in Munich and the EU’s current intention to levy protective tariffs.
China’s rise is at the same time a world-historical first in that, as we have noted, it is the world’s first country to have successfully freed itself from its (post-)colonial-imperialist dependency. The People’s Republic seems to have succeeded where the Soviet Union in the end failed. China resonates in the ‘Global South’ as a model of success. In 1978, its per capita income was at the level of Haiti’s and remained parallel to it up to 2000. But today the world’s largest middle class lives there, because China has pulled some 770 million people out of poverty. The decline of extreme poverty worldwide and the achievement of the corresponding UN goals are essentially due solely to China’s rise and its anti-poverty campaign, which was concluded in 2021 on the hundredth anniversary of the CP’s founding. And China’s enormous domestic political stability is tied to this.
China’s rise is a continual source of unease for its neighbours and even within the allied BRICS countries because it has had a de-industrialising effect on them. Nevertheless, the wish in the Global South to imitate China’s path or to be attached to it is evident. This also explains the seismic shift in the world order, which is seen in the expansion of the BRICS states with the memberships of Argentina (subsequently revoked by its ‘anarcho-capitalist’ president Javier Milei), Egypt, Ethiopia, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Iran as of 1 January 2024. It is also seen in the fact that the attempt of the NATO states to isolate Russia in the UN General Assembly failed. And the list of further candidates for the BRICS is long.
In view of this historical challenge, in 2011 the US proclaimed its pivot to Asia and declared this to be ‘America’s Pacific century’, as then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton wrote in a seminal Foreign Policy article. The openly stated goal is to maintain China in a subordinate position in the hierarchical international division of labour. This means preserving the world order upheld by the WTO regulatory machinery and extreme patent conventions such as the TRIPS, in which the ‘unequal exchange’ (Samir Amin) of high technology for raw materials and cheap industrial production occurs together with the transfer of ‘tributes’ (Arrighi) to the imperialist centres.
Up to now, however, all US strategies to contain China have failed. Already the strategy of the Iraq War (2003-2011), which aimed at controlling global fossil resources was directed against the (fossil) resource-poor China and its hunger for industrialisation. For this reason, too, North Korea was counted by the Bush administration in 2002 as part of the ‘Axis of Evil’, in order to justify a military presence in the South China Sea.
In view of the failure of Bush’s policy in Iraq, Barack Obama’s ‘Pivot to East Asia’ launched a strategy of sea route control through bilateral military agreements with China’s neighbouring states. It implied an increasing challenge to the ‘One-China Policy’, in force until today, in terms of Taiwan and the militarisation of the Western Pacific. Obama’s initiative represented an attempt to encircle China and threaten it with the strangulation of its export economy. It was no empty threat, for four-fifths of China’s foreign trade then went through the South China Sea, the Strait of Malacca, and the Suez Canal.
This strategy foundered on China’s reaction — with the Eighteenth National Congress of the CPC in November 2012, Beijing sought first to reduce its export dependency and push domestic economic development, for which China today sees still further developmental opportunities insofar as its ‘new urbanisation’ strategy also promises a higher consumption level. Secondly, the Belt and Road Initiative shifted larger volumes of trade to the Eurasian landmass. And thirdly, China took precautions against a possible naval blockade in the South China Sea through the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor which it negotiated in 2015 to connect it directly with the Indian Ocean and the Suez Canal, tolerating the continued terrorist attacks by Islamist fighters against Chinese engineers.
This failure of Obama’s ‘containment’ led to an economic war, begun by Trump and intensified by the Biden Administration, which aims to take advantage of China’s dependency on imported microchips which are used in almost all high-tech products, from cell phones to laptops and cars. This ‘chip war’ (Chris Miller) rests on the fact that microchip production due to its capital intensity is prey to extreme monopoly tendencies. Actually, with its close to 60 per cent market share, the Taiwanese firm TSMC already has monopoly status and should sooner or later fully outcompete its most serious rival Intel. While many branches of China’s high-tech economy increasingly dispose of completely integrated production chains — for example in the production of renewable energies, which are autonomous from lithium production to storage batteries — China is certainly vulnerable when it comes to semiconductors. The calculation is that here is where China’s edge can be broken. Whether China can overcome this deficit and soon produce microchips with a size of 3 to 4 nanometres is just as controversial as the question of how much farther TSMC can develop.
The US under Biden is tying the economic war to an intensification of its military presence and a growing number of volatile military manoeuvres in the Western Pacific. The US justifies this by maintaining that the chain of islands situated in the South China Sea at nearly 12,500 kilometres west of the US Pacific coast belong to what it claims as its national security zone.
In addition, Taiwan serves as justification. Although the US, just like the EU and almost the entire world, recognises the ‘One-China Policy’ and Beijing’s goal of a ‘peaceful reunification’ with mainland China — which is why the US theoretically may not maintain diplomatic relations with the government in Taipei and in fact does not do so — the Biden Administration has increasingly moved away from this policy. Three events marked a qualitative leap: In October 2021 Biden declared that the US would wage war on the side of Taiwan against China, if this latter were to invade. In summer 2022, the then chair of the US House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan against China’s loud protests. And, finally, the US government broke another taboo in its foreign policy at the beginning of November 2023 as the military build-up of Taiwan was, for the first time since 1979, carried out not in the form of credits but as direct military aid paid by US taxpayers. To do this, the US used the Foreign Military Financing programme.
Against the background of its own colonial experience, China reacted to this US policy change with irritation. The fear is great that the US could strangle China by stationing (nuclear) missiles right on its doorstep. This new course, Beijing maintains, endangers China’s ‘sovereignty and its security’. More critical sectors of the US state apparatuses are arguing that this policy could bring China to end its toleration of Taiwan’s autonomous status and militarily carry out the ‘reunification’ it seeks. In this, a particular inner-Chinese dynamic could result from the clear tendency to securitisation in reaction to the 2011 Arab Spring and the West’s openly aired regime-change intentions. Against this backdrop, the danger of sleepwalking into a Third World War in the South China Sea is today even greater than in Ukraine.
The ‘American Empire’, the EU, and the rise of China
The US’s strategic difficulties have their origins in the lack of any historical template for the Chinese challenges — and also of any related practical knowledge. The US would have to integrate China into its ‘empire’, as it had done at the end of World War II with (West) Germany, Japan, and South Korea. At that time, it was de facto the only victorious power among the Allies, because the Soviet Union had been bled to death by Germany’s ‘war of annihilation in the East’, while in order to carry out the war Great Britain and France had run up a huge debt to the US and, moreover, were faltering colonial empires entangled in succeeding years in bloody and costly wars. By contrast, the US controlled about 50 per cent of global GDP. For the ‘Grand Area’ of the capitalist West, for whose creation it had driven the Cold War, it created the international financial architecture: the Bretton-Woods system with the US dollar as the reserve currency, Wall Street as the central site of capital investment, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank. Moreover, West Germany, Japan, and South Korea, which it had restored capitalistically and integrated into its empire, had been defeated or occupied and had to a great extent lost their sovereignty.
On the other hand, China, viewed economically, is already by far the world’s largest economy measured in its share of global GDP and all the more so when adjusted for purchasing power. According to IMF data, in the wake of the incipient policy of ‘opening up’ under Deng Xiaoping its share of global GDP rose from 2.26 percent (1980) and 7.65 percent in 2001, the year it joined the WTO, over 11.08 percent at the beginning of the global financial crisis, and 18.44 percent in 2022. By contrast, the US’ share in 2022 was only 15.5 percent. The IMF forecasts that the gap will grow further: China can have 19.65 percent of global GDP by 2028, with the US at only 14.49 percent. What is crucial here is that in view of China’s increasingly integrated production chains, which includes the launch of its own airplane production in 2023, it will become increasingly difficult to brake China’s rise using purely economic leverage. This also explains the growing importance of military means and other forms of the open use of force.
In addition, seen politically China is — unlike West Germany, Japan, and South Korea in their time — a sovereign state which, in its own self-perception, finds itself in a process of ‘rejuvenation’ after 200 years of peripheralisation and exploitation by the ‘eight imperial powers’. What helps make this possible is that this 4,000-year-old civilisation, while indeed absorbing and synthesising many western influences, has, by contrast with other postcolonial emerging countries such as Brazil or South Africa, never lost its cultural identity, including its language, writing, traditional medicine, etc. And, finally, China is no small country but a stable state with about the same surface area as the US and four times the population.
The US is thus facing a historic challenge and has to overcome it with significantly diminished economic, financial, political, as well as knowledge and ideological resources. The hope for a ‘unipolar moment’ expressed in the US after the collapse of the Soviet Union has not been fulfilled.
Obama’s pivot to Asia already contained the clearly communicated objective of a transatlantic division of labour against China. The US sees the European NATO countries as subordinate co-managers of the ‘American Empire’. At the Warsaw Security Forum even General Ben Hodges, the former Commander of the United States Army Europe, linked his thesis of a probable war against China in the next 15 years to the perception that the ‘United States does not have the capacity to do everything it needs to do in Europe and in the Pacific to deal with the Chinese threat’.
The related demands made by the US have been translated by European transatlanticists into the language of the ‘new responsibility’, as formulated by the think tank Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik, together with the German Marshall Fund of the United States, in its November 2012 commissioned study Neue Macht — neue Verantwortung, which also formed the basis of the coalition pact for the Christian-Democratic/Green federal government in 2013. Already at that time, ‘new responsibility’ meant more out-of-area military interventions, above all along the line running from Ukraine through Syria and Libya to sub-Saharan Africa, in order to free up the US for its pivot to Asia. When Trump was elected in 2016, the US threatened to terminate its alliance commitments according to NATO Article 5 if the European NATO countries did not upgrade their weaponry to unburden the US and meet the 2 percent goal — that is, reserve at least 2 percent of annual GDP for arms expenditures. In Europe the final draft of these demands was ironically expressed in the language of Europe’s ‘strategic autonomy’ from the US.
At the same time, large parts of the power bloc in the EU see in the US’ demands for ‘more responsibility’ the possibility of improving the EU’s position as a sub-hegemon and also of more fully pursuing its own geopolitical ambitions in the future with greater autonomy. Also to this end the Permanent Structured Cooperation (PESCO) and the European Defence Fund (EDF) arose not in contradiction to NATO but in parallel with it, as preliminary stages of an EU Army with its own competitive arms industry.
For the transnational capital groups that dominate the power bloc in the US state, NATO was historically the vehicle to control Europe. Accordingly, it put great store by the idea that each round of EU eastward expansion should be preceded by a corresponding NATO expansion. NATO’s first General Secretary, Baron Hastings Ismay, once described the organisation’s function: ‘to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down’. In other words: splitting Europe, the US’s imperial dominance, and asymmetrical transatlanticism in relation to Germany and soon also to stubborn France, as the potential bearers of a more independent politics and Eurasian integration. Up to the present, NATO, which actually lost its function when the Warsaw Pact was dissolved, fulfils this function of splitting Europe and upholding the transatlantic division of labour.
But it would be wrong to understand this only as a one-way-street imperialism. The ‘new imperialism’ has to be understood as an ‘asymmetrical ultra-imperialism’, that is, as the common profiting by the ‘western’-dominated world order of the ‘American Empire’. Alongside its political dimension in NATO, the cohesion of an ‘Atlantic ruling class’ (Kees van der Pijl) has a decisive
socio-economic face: the transnationalised corporations. For with the emergence of a ‘transnational capitalist class’ (Lesley Sklair) the coherence of the ‘American Empire’ has also a class-based societal foundation. In the global
financial crisis this class worked to counter protectionist tendencies.
And yet the worry over the fragmentation of the ‘Empire’ and the need to consolidate it always remains. For alongside cooperation and cohesion, competition and conflict continue to be at work — the interests of companies are not necessarily identical with those of the whole state/civil society complex. For example, in terms of energy supply, for companies based in Germany the tie with Russia was a ‘comparative cost advantage’. The fact that the sword of Damocles of de-industrialisation hangs over Europe’s industrially strong countries (such as Germany but also the Benelux countries, Poland, etc.) due to the shift from inexpensive Russian energy resources to much more expense US fracking gas, is an expression of these conflicting interests between the US and Europe. For the US, the consolidation of transatlanticism also relies on the aggravation of conflicts in Europe, which then generate the call for military strength and justify NATO and the US supremacy in Europe as the military protectorate power. A policy of détente and the construction of a European architecture of collective security — which includes Russia in the spirit of the classic social-democratic détente policy, based on the recognition that security in Europe without, let alone against, Russia is unthinkable — would have made NATO superfluous and in so doing also have tended to make the transatlantic division of labour unnecessary. Thus, for the US the conflict and the splitting of Europe (from Russia) were and are the precondition of its dominant position in Europe, which in turn forms the basis of its hegemony in the world and its military and non-military defence.
For this reason, initiatives for a rapprochement between European states and Russia after the end of the Cold War must have been a thorn in the eye of the US. This applies to the ambitions of Russian governments to build a European ‘common home’, as Mikhail Gorbachev put it in 1987. It applies to the goal that Vladimir Putin announced in 1999, right after he assumed office, of even joining NATO. It applies to Putin’s 2001 proposal, greeted by the applause of all the deputies present in the Bundestag, of together developing a strong and independent position in the world through connecting Europe’s ‘own possibilities to Russia’s human, territorial, and natural resources, as well as to Russia’s economic, cultural, and defence potentials’. And through the construction of a common security architecture of disarmament and arms controls. And it applies to the Russian government’s proposal as late as 2010 of an economic union ‘from Lisbon to Vladivostok’.
Against this backdrop and right after the war began, a former vice-chair of the European Commission and EU Commissioner for Enlargement, Günter Verheugen, stressed that it is ‘urgently necessary … to understand the whole prehistory of the Ukraine war’. The EU must ‘be ready … to come to terms with its own mistakes’. It was a mistake, he said, to keep Russia out of the EU’s Eastern Partnership after 2007. The Russian government interpreted this ‘move as a claim made by the EU on a sphere of influence in the former Soviet sphere of influence that was directed against Russia’. At that time there were ‘very clear opportunities for a constructive inclusion of Russia in a partnership’ that were not used. According to Verheugen, two questions need to be answered: ‘Who made the Minsk Agreement fail, and who or what drove the EU to participate in 2013 in a regime change operation in Ukraine?’
Even the head of the Munich Security Conference until 2022, Wolfgang Ischinger — who could never be suspected of being a Putin sympathiser — sees Western co-culpability: The policy of destabilising the Russian government in the former Soviet Republics, from Georgia to Ukraine, was instituted after the Bush Administration’s aggressive attempt during the 2008 NATO Summit in Bucharest to draw the economically, ethno-linguistically, culturally, politically, and ideologically divided Ukraine into NATO against its constitution then in force, which stipulated its neutrality, and against the will of the majority of Ukraine’s population, as well as against the security interests and declared will of the governments of Germany, France, etc. Russia’s actions, as Ischinger argued, followed an instrumental logic that NATO, for good reasons, would not take states into its military alliance when they were embroiled in conflict — which triggered Russia’s politics of destabilisation using the issue of Russian natives abroad, i.e. in the former Soviet republics.
And so, Ukraine was torn apart by the reciprocal pull by the West and the East, into a western part dominated by an agrarian oligarchy thirsting for
European outlet markets and an eastern part (the Donbas) dominated by a heavy-industry oligarchy dependent on Russian and Eurasian markets. This latter feared western alignments and EU association because it simply could not be competitive in the face of western companies.
From the Ukraine war to the new asymmetrical transatlanticism
NATO, and thus the US, is substantially encouraging the Ukraine War. If France’s president Emmanuel Macron, who as a former Wall Street banker was anything but a Gaullist, declared NATO to be ‘brain-dead’, today NATO is so invigorated it can hardly move. The Russian government catastrophically miscalculated — instead of a neutral Ukraine it is now dealing with a NATO border that is massively armed and extended today by about 1,340 kilometres. Russia has been driven, massively and permanently weakened in the context of the impending new bloc confrontations, into China’s arms.
Today the talk is again of the ‘Iron Curtain’ — a concept, moreover, which Adenauer and Churchill took over from Goebbels and his stay-the-course propaganda against the Red Army. Today the new ‘Iron Curtain’ justifies the gigantic armament projects in Europe’s NATO countries, where German Social Democrats are outdoing each other: 100 billion euros (Olaf Scholz), 200 billion euros (Boris Pistorius), and even 300 billion euros (Eva Högl), while former Green Party politicians like former Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer are demanding a German nuclear bomb and a permanent military budget of 3-4 percent of GDP.
The transatlantic division of labour is therefore producing itself indirectly through the Ukraine War and the threat from Russia.
In the words of economic historian Adam Tooze, one could say: the US is the only winner of this war, for its result is a new asymmetrical transatlanticism, which reinforces Europe’s dependency on the US.
This dependency rests on four dimensions. The first is that of energy policy. If long-term treaties substitute inexpensive natural gas and oil from Russia with twice as expensive liquid gas (LNG) from the US or from the Gulf dictatorships aligned with it, then this increases energy dependency.
The second dimension of dependency involves economic policy. If energy costs are raised to such an extent in an industrially strong country like Germany with high export dependency, then this strengthens US competitiveness, which is additionally supported by the CHIPS and Science Act (9 August 2022), the Inflation Reduction Act (16 August 2022) and other economic-nationalist practices. At the same time the US is connecting the Ukraine War with the openly declared goal of de-coupling Europe from China. It is bringing export-oriented countries like Germany into still greater dependency on the US domestic market, which US presidents from Reagan to Trump have always used as power leverage in order to implement their economic goals — in Trump’s trade agenda these were: improved market access, extended patent and property rights, and dismantling state-interventionist practices.
The third dimension is geopolitical. If a new bloc confrontation emerges who will most profit from it? It would be the country with the greatest arms budget representing 39 percent of all global arms expenditures. It is the country with a worldwide imperium supported by 800 military bases, which also is home to the world’s six largest weapons-manufacturing firms. Even if the Europeans now say that they want to strengthen their own industries, their weapons production is still a military-Keynesian stimulus package for the US, since roughly 50 percent of all European NATO states’ arms expenditures are imports from the US.
This is connected to the fourth dimension: industrial-policy-technology dependency. Until 1945 the weapons-manufacturing industry was still dependent on general industrial production. Since then, the relationship has been reversed, with technological innovation dependent on weapons manufacturing. In her The Entrepreneurial State, Mariana Mazzucato worked out that everything in an iPhone (interfaces, etc.) is the result of state-funded research and development in the arms industry and not of genial capital entrepreneurship in general. The current armaments wave encompasses most Western industrialised countries, from Japan and Qatar to Australia. At the same time China is also upgrading its weapons. We are thus dealing with a a new arms race. If the US, as the largest weapons exporter, profits from this development, then this will also lead to the further reinforcement of its lead in industrial policy and technological innovation. Ultimately, this development will considerably increase the EU’s dependency. In the context of a new bloc confrontation, it could result in two competing high-tech centres, the US and China, surrounded by each of their satellite states and their respective supply chains and military alliances.
The Ukraine war in the context of the six-dimensional crisis
Contemplating alternatives to this war requires being conscious of its character. Russia’s invasion was doubtless a violation of international law. But the picture is complicated because it is also the result of geopolitical rivalries dating to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. This is why it has long since turned into a proxy war of the US/NATO with Russia on the territory of Ukraine, also with an eye to China. As such it has turned out to be an ‘unwinnable war’ (Foreign Affairs), which has entered a phase of war of position and attrition accompanied by continued appalling bloodshed.
Against this backdrop there are four inconvenient truths in this war. One concerns its prehistory: To repeat, had there been a collective security architecture including Russia, perhaps even a Eurasian economic union, this war would not have occurred. People would not be dying in Ukraine and the country would not be torn apart.
The second inconvenient truth is the immense potential for escalation, which is already a reality. With the destruction of the infrastructure for water and energy in the midst of the Ukrainian winter and a poor and extremely vulnerable population this escalation is a war crime. The potential for still more escalation exists through thermobaric, chemical, or tactical nuclear weapons. Still more, the potential is structurally embedded in NATO’s active involvement in the war because in the wake of the failure of the 2023 Ukrainian offensive the numerical superiority of Russia has asserted itself. This means that irrespective of which weapons systems the NATO countries send, the Ukrainian government is running out of soldiers to operate them. It is also against this background that we can understand the EU’s efforts to effect the deportation of Ukrainian men between the ages of 18 and 60 who are fit for military duty. A direct war between NATO and Russia is thus logically built into the weapons deliveries if Ukraine is not to lose the war, which also explains the increasing nervousness among the western foreign-policy establishments and the idea of imposing a negotiation diktat on Zelensky. He increasingly feels ‘betrayed’ by the ‘West’ while he also has to deal with ever more harsh criticism from the state apparatuses which are telling him that the war is no longer winnable.
The third inconvenient truth is that there will be no military solution outside of a total collapse of either the Ukrainian or the Russian armed forces. From this follows the fourth really inconvenient and certainly unappetising truth. The probability of a reconquest of the Crimea and Donbas is by now almost nil — regardless of how long the war lasts. This prompts the question of whether this war, in which outside Bakhmut and elsewhere up to a thousand soldiers die every day, should still be waged for just a couple more kilometres of destroyed territory. The answer to this question is the political necessity of ending this war as quickly as possible. This war must end — in the interests of the civilian population which has been overrun by it. The war must end in the name of the Ukrainian and Russian working class which is being sent to slaughter. But it also has to be ended in the name of the working classes in Europe, in order to prevent the creeping impoverishment of large sectors of the populations. And, finally, the war must also end especially in the interest of the lower classes in the Global South where distributional conflicts have been greatly aggravated through inflation and food sovereignty crises. When these crises become ethnicised and ‘confessionalised’ and, in the worst case, lead to state collapse, then the West and possibly Russia will want to intervene militarily again in order to get the conflicts under control and prevent refugee flows to Europe. This is, moreover, also the reason why African states have pushed for diplomatic initiatives. They see the danger of state collapse.
The Ukraine crisis is an expression of the six-dimensional crisis of global capitalism. It is an expression of the crisis of the world order, which underlies the action of the individual state protagonists. The Russian actions are associated with the geopolitical rivalries in Europe, which is also the arena of the much bigger conflict between the declining US and the ascending China.
At the same time capitalist land-grabbing is seen as a welcome side effect. For private, profit-maximising capital the prospects for the massive fire-sale privatisations of Ukrainian state property, which the Zelensky government already negotiated with the IMF and the world’s largest and US-based capital investment fund Blackrock Inc. in 2022, are obviously highly profitable. For the state protagonists the converse is also true — Ukraine will demand major financial resources above all from the Europeans, and its reconstruction, which the Government of Ukraine, the World Bank, the European Commission, and the UN have estimated will amount to US$411 billion, will hang on the drip feed from European taxpayers, that is, the working classes who pay wage taxes.
The Left’s capacity to act
For the socialist labour movements in Europe, it should be clear that it is not enough to be oriented to diplomacy, a freezing of the conflict, and peace negotiations. There is a real possibility that the war will end through forced negotiations from above or war weariness from below. But left-wing politics has to go beyond this and take account of the new bloc confrontation. Political action in the long-term crisis of global capitalism must aim to address its six dimensions simultaneously. Then there would be grounds to hope for positive spill-over effects rather than negative ones, for example if social justice cushions the crisis of democracy or if de-escalation and détente that deal with the crisis of the world order set free potential for the mitigation of the ecological and climate crisis.
For this, the prevention of the new bloc confrontation is the decisive key. The ruling class tells us that we are threatened by a new global authoritarianism from without and have to arm ourselves against it, which of course means that priorities and concrete resources have to be shifted away from dealing with the other crisis dimensions and therefore also from climate justice, social justice, gender justice, and social cohesion.
However, the authoritarianism does not come from without. It comes from within. It comes when social injustices deepen the crisis of democracy and there is no prospect of a solidary path out of the six-dimensional crisis. Rightwing authoritarian nationalism wins if there is no left alternative and if trade unions are weak. For in that case, the barbarising, exclusivist discourse of the right runs rampant — discourses which are moored to the perception that there is no longer enough to go around for all.
The new Cold War, which proclaims the battle of ‘liberal democracy’ against the ‘autocracies’, is in truth a global programme of de-democratisation and barbarisation. The point is: If we arrive at a new bloc confrontation, if the new arms race progresses, then in all countries — from China to Russia and Ukraine, from the US to Germany and France — social justice, democracy, liberality, and civility will come under pressure everywhere, and nationalism, militarism, authoritarianism, racism, and de-civilising will proliferate throughout the world. Therefore, anyone who is serious about the defence of democracy and humaneness must pursue a policy of détente. Only in this way can humanity not slide into barbarism; and only in this way can contradictions develop and progressive movements flourish in all countries.
In addition, a new bloc confrontation will escalate the climate catastrophe. Compliance with the 1.5 percent goal of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is completely unrealistic under conditions of a bloc confrontation. Therefore, the demand has to be for a new Ostpolitik, which is new in a twofold sense: on the one hand, because it will inevitably have to run completely counter to the dominant discourse, and, on the other hand, because today it would have to be extended to encompass China. In a new Cold War, in which a global conflagration always lies dormant, the broad working populations will lose everywhere; but they will all gain from working together to overcome the six-dimensional crisis.
Acting in this direction begins in the here and now. Despite all grounds for pessimism and resignation we should be encouraged in this part of the world that global capitalism’s deep contradictions within the six-dimensional crisis have given rise to a structural convergence today of the social question, the question of peace, and the climate question. They straddle and encompass all six dimensions of the systemic crisis: accumulation, gender relations, social cohesion, democracy, ecology/climate, and the world order.
For if it is true that the impoverishment of sections of the population cannot be averted as long as the trade unions only concentrate on their core wage concerns, then the ending of the Ukraine War, which is in fact the main driver of inflation, has to be on the agenda of the trade unions and socialist movements in Europe. And that produces a convergence with the issue of peace. And if it is true that a new bloc confrontation will escalate the climate catastrophe, this puts a convergence of the peace and climate questions on the table.
The task consists of turning the structural convergence of the social question, peace, and the climate question into a political-practical convergence of trade unions, the climate, and the peace movements. Capitalism’s contradictions in its permanent crisis are the driving force of change. And they are also, to echo Bertolt Brecht, our hope.