The ‘peace’ fraud and the proliferation of destructive wars

If we were to believe the speeches delivered when Trump made an appearance in the Israeli Knesset just after the latest ‘ceasefire’ was signed in the Middle East, we are witnessing one of the greatest peace accords in history, opening a new period of peace and prosperity in that hitherto war-ravaged region. Praise for Trump’s achievement knew no bounds: he was even compared to the Persian monarch Cyrus the Great in the ancient world, who freed the Jews from Babylonian captivity and enabled the building of the Second Temple in Jerusalem. Before Trump, Cyrus was the only non-Jew to earn the qualification of Messiah.

Informed bourgeois commentators were more circumspect. While welcoming the ceasefire and the prospect of the resumption of humanitarian aid to ruined, starving Gaza, they pointed out that Trump’s 20-point plan offered very few concrete steps forward towards the disarming of Hamas, the rebuilding of Gaza under a new ‘technocratic’ administration; that it holds out a vague prospect of Palestinian statehood but does not mention Israel’s occupation and virtual annexation of the West Bank or the Israeli government’s intractable opposition to the very idea of an independent Palestinian state. And indeed, there has been little let up in the violence since the deal was signed. Hamas has been publicly executing opponents to its rule in Gaza City, Israel has - with the justification of ‘protecting’ the ceasefire against Hamas violations - resumed air strikes and is blocking the Rafah crossing that would allow convoys of aid into Gaza. It has also been carrying out raids in Lebanon, with over a hundred fatalities. In other words, even the short-term survival of the ceasefire and the delivery of food, medicine and other necessities is in doubt, let alone any more distant horizon of 'peace' in the Middle East.

Trump’s other ceasefire arrangements, which according to him justify the title “President of Peace”, are no less hollow.

Soon after the signing of the ceasefire in Gaza, the planned meeting in Hungary between Trump and Putin was cancelled. This war, which Trump once boasted he could fix in 24 hours once he was president, drags on, with ever more destructive weapons being piled up and unleashed by both sides: the possibility of a viable end to the war in Ukraine also remains remote. The ceasefire in Congo is continually being breached, and tensions between nuclear armed Pakistan and India keep flaring up despite the ceasefire agreement. Pakistan welcomed Trump's intervention in this conflict and nominated him for the Nobel Peace prize, but India played down Trump’s role, insisting that the deal was essentially the work of the armies of the two states. Meanwhile, a new round of massacres is taking place in Sudan, and an Islamist group close to Al Qaida is about to take control of the capital of Mali.

But the USA’s rhetoric about peace is also exposed as a fraud by the actual military and political stances being adopted by the Trump regime, especially in its backyard: immediately after he returned to the White House in January this year, Trump started making menacing noises about taking control of Greenland, Canada and the Panama Canal, and in April the US struck a deal with Panama which allows the deployment of American troops along the Canal. Today the US is carrying out murderous air strikes on boats allegedly involved in drug-running in the Caribbean and ramping up its threats against Colombia and Venezuela in particular, who are denounced as “narco-states” or as adjuncts of Russia and China in Latin America. At the same time Washington bailed out the Trump-friendly Milei regime in Argentina with a package of 20 billion dollars, aimed at providing a counter-weight against the influence of China in Argentina. This financial  injection was accompanied by the message that further economic aid would be abandoned if Milei lost the forthcoming mid-term elections: all this certainly played its part in Milei’s large victory. 

And of course, the US has never ceased supplying Israel with the weapons it has used to destroy Gaza and mount repeated raids on Lebanon, Syria, and Iran – with the US directly joining the attack on Iran’s nuclear capabilities. But we are not just talking about the US. Every state, and in particular the western European ‘democracies’, has begun pouring huge amounts of money and resources into building up their arms industries, accompanied by incessant propaganda about the need for the ‘West’ to be ready to defend itself against Russian or Chinese aggression.

The reality is that war and preparations for war are spreading across the planet, that existing military conflicts have become increasingly chaotic, irrational and difficult to resolve, and that capitalism in decomposition is caught up in a spiral of destruction, most spectacular in Gaza but no less devastating in Ukraine and other regions of the world, which the tends to escape the control of the ruling class. Capitalism in terminal decay is war without end. As we wrote in our first orientation text on militarism and decomposition in 1991:

“In reality, if militarism, imperialism, and war are identified to such an extent with the period of decadence, it is because the latter corresponds to the fact that capitalist relations of production have become a barrier to the development of the productive forces: the perfectly irrational nature, on the global economic level, of military spending and war only expresses the aberration of these production relations' continued existence. In particular, the permanent and increasing self-destruction of capital which results from this mode of life symbolizes this system's death-agony and reveals clearly that it has been condemned by history”[1].

The spiral of destruction and the necessity of internationalism

Another term we have used for this deadly spiral is the “whirlwind effect”, where each of capitalism’s crises – economic, ecological, military, political etc – tends to reinforce each other and push each other onto a new level. Thus the growing political irresponsibility of capitalism’s “political class”, expressed in its purest form in the various populist factions and above all by Trump who declared at the UN that global warming was the biggest hoax in history, can only further undermine the already minimal efforts of the bourgeoisie to mitigate the ecological crisis At the same time the shift towards a war economy will encourage the growth of the most polluting and carbon-heavy sectors of industry. And wars themselves are ecological disasters: because of the devastation and poisoning of agricultural land, Gaza won’t be able to grow its own food for many years, and rebuilding its ruined homes, schools and hospitals from scratch will emit huge amounts of carbon.

Within this whirlwind, the drive towards war is the most powerful factor, the eye of the storm. And to push the war drive forward, the class that produces most of the world’s wealth, the working class, will be called upon to make the necessary sacrifices – of their wages, working conditions, access to health, pensions and education, and ultimately of their lives. But it’s here that a real obstacle to war can be located. Not in the deals and agreements between capitalist criminals, but in the defensive struggles of the working class in the face of a society which can offer them nothing but poverty and destruction. And these struggles are more than a pious hope, because since 2022 we have seen a clear tendency for workers in numerous countries to affirm their class interests against the capitalist’s demands to pull in their belts and put up with never-ending attacks on their living standards. In themselves, workers’ defensive struggles can only temporarily obstruct the war drive. To end it completely will demand a profonde politicisation of the struggle, the recognition that the global system of capitalism must be overturned and replaced with a new and higher form of social life.

The necessity for the struggle to mature politically points to the indispensable role of the political organisations that the working class has given rise to in its historic battle against this system. We are not referring here to the parties of the official left who are often the enforcers of austerity against the working class, nor to their ‘radical left’ adjuncts, but to the authentically communist organisations who stand up for the independent struggle of the working class against all factions of the ruling class, and above all who defend the principle of internationalism, opposing all the gangs and states engaged in capitalism’s wars: in brief, the organisations of the international communist left. Given that these organisations are still a small minority, swimming against the tide of pro-war, nationalist and pacifist mystifications, the ICC has always advocated the maximum possible discussion and cooperation between these groups.

But it is no less necessary for the discussion between these organisations to clarify their most important differences. While the group of the communist left tend to agree that war has become capitalism’s way of life, and on the necessity for workers and revolutionaries to oppose all sides, there are considerable differences of analysis regarding the process through which this “permanent and increasing self-destruction of capital” is taking place. For the majority of groups, in particular the Internationalist Communist Tendency and the various Bordigist ‘parties’, the deepening of the economic crisis and the proliferation of military conflicts are proof that we are once again heading towards the reconstitution of imperialist blocs and a disciplined march towards a Third World War. For the ICC, this is not on the agenda for the foreseeable future, and those who are convinced by the prospect of a new generalised war run the risk, under the impact of the recent 'peace' treaties, of relaxing their vigilance and ignoring the far more pressing danger facing the working class: that the whirlwind of destruction will overwhelm it before it is able to raise its struggles to the historic level required to overturn the capitalist mode of production. We aim to develop this argument in another article in this issue of the Review: “Are we heading towards a Third World War?”.

ICC, November 2025

 

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[1] “Orientation text: Militarism and decomposition”, International Review 64