Editorial Note: US Rampage 2026 — How to Defend Ourselves

We are only in the third month, but this year has already outdone even 2025 when it comes to American imperialist reaction. Trump bombed Nigeria over the Christmas holidays; then began the new year by bombing Venezuela and kidnapping its president; followed by imposing a starvation blockade of Cuba and threatening a number of other Latin American countries—as well as Greenland—with invasion. Now the US and Israel have unleashed another war on Iran, assassinating the country’s Supreme Leader. This threatens to engulf the whole region in a protracted war and plunge the global economy into recession. In the US itself, imperialist marauding abroad is reflected domestically in growing reaction and capitalist decay—ICE’s deadly anti-immigrant rampage, cop terror against black people, union-busting.

It’s clear enough that major world changes are happening, but it’s hard to make sense of them and get oriented amid the relentless pounding of events. Where are we headed, what are the driving forces, and what are revolutionaries to do about any of it? To form a coherent and realistic picture of the turning point we are in, we must start from the top. The main factor shaping world events is US imperialism’s attempt to overcome the increasing gap between its dominant global role and declining economic power. Events this year paint a stark picture of how this is being done. On the one hand, we have Trump’s aggressive foreign policy. Although incoherent and self-contradictory in many ways, the overarching unity and force of this policy is precisely that it expresses American imperialism’s readiness to drag the whole world down into a spiral of chaos and death to stay on top. On the other hand, the countries whose growing economic power threatens the US—first of all China—have no coherent policy to counter it. As Trump shreds the liberal world order established by US hegemony, the main response of Communist Party of China (CPC) leaders and other heads of BRICS+ countries is to drone on about the need to maintain that order.

What must revolutionaries do in this situation? In the face of American imperialist reaction, we need to fight. But we can only fight effectively if we face reality squarely. Many revolutionaries internationally see a rising tide on the left matching the growth of right-wing reaction. Unfortunately, this view is totally at odds with reality. Most importantly, it completely ignores the dominant moods in the working class—which in the West and Japan is largely moving to the right, not the left; and in the Global South has not yet shown signs of increased militancy, playing no major role in the mass protests of the past year.

That is not to downplay the great revolutionary potential, particularly among the industrial proletariat of the Global South. Forging a class-struggle pole to defend ourselves against US empire is the way to unify the workers movement and shift the balance of forces in favour of the working class and oppressed. But to play our part in this task, revolutionaries must wake up, bracing ourselves and our class for “a reactionary period of capitalist offensive, in which the living conditions of working people will be attacked on a scale not seen in decades”. As we explained in the article motivating this sober outlook, this in no way means resigning ourselves to a one-sided battle or standing aside passively:

We also need to take a hard look at the weak state of the left, debating and clarifying how we got here and the lessons that must be drawn to re-orient and go forward. That is what the articles in this issue of AmaBolsheviki Amnyama seek to do. Throughout, they confront the main obstacles holding back the revolutionary left and cut through organisational and other counterproductive divisions in order to help clarify and re-orient. These articles cover the major conflicts in the world today, including defence of Iran (page 3) and Cuba (page 5). They also address the need for united-front defence of the left against state repression—from the cases of Xolani Khoza (page 17) and Julius Malema (page 4) in South Africa, to Booker Omole in Kenya and Fred M’membe in Zambia (page 16). Other topics of note include the fight against femicide at the workplace, where we put forward an approach which seeks to strengthen working-class unity as opposed to reliance on the bosses and their state (see page 6). The article from our Philippines comrades (page 8) should be of particular interest to readers here because it draws lessons from the defeat of the recent anti-corruption protests there, putting forward a class-struggle, anti-imperialist path for the movement.

The war on Iran casts a glaring spotlight on the traps that keep the left from fighting for a revolutionary working-class pole against US imperialism. On the one hand are those that take a neutral position in this war. Repudiating the need to take a side with Iran against the US and Israel, they resort to pious pacifism (“No to war!”, or pseudo-radical variants like “No war but the class war!”). Their main argument is to point to the bloody repression of the Iranian regime against women, leftists and popular protests, and to proclaim that this must be done away with. It is absolutely true that the bloody mullahs must be overthrown; however, to use that as a justification for refusing to defend Iran in the current war is the worst capitulation to imperialism and Zionism. It willfully ignores that what’s decisive is what force overthrows the regime. Standing by and allowing this to be done on American terms means aiding and abetting the most reactionary outcome—not only for the masses of Iran and the region, but for the whole world. In contrast, defending Iran against the US and Israel is the only way to stand with the Iranian people and put them in a position to settle accounts with the mullahs on their own terms.

Does that mean we must put our hopes in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) to lead the struggle against imperialism and Zionism? Absolutely not. That is the trap that another section of the left falls into. In the Global South this is definitely the more challenging obstacle to deal with, because it appeals to those with a burning hatred for imperialism but sends them to another dead end. This view is prevalent in the current war, with the IRGC putting up stiff military resistance to the overwhelming military power of the US and Israel, including blocking the Strait of Hormuz which threatens major disruption to the world economy. As communists, we certainly strive for a defeat of the current US-Israeli offensive and to drive the imperialists out of West Asia. “However”, as G. Perrault writes, “it is precisely because we have a militant stance in this conflict that we must warn against the danger of complacency” (“Don’t Underestimate US Imperialism”, page 3). In that article, comrade Perrault warns against the danger of viewing the current war through the old lens, ignoring the fact that the US rulers are now ready to accept a much higher price to keep the world under the American boot. Electoral results, symbolic victories and short-term economic disruption are not decisive; what matters is the balance of forces among the parties, their internal coherence and their resolve to fight. Analysing the conflict through this lens, the article shows how the IRGC’s strategy and policies undermine the defence of the country, and motivates how the left and anti-imperialist forces must put their own strategy forward.

Something that looms large in the Iran war—especially for anti-imperialists in South Africa and other places that have been in Trump’s crosshairs and are even more vulnerable, militarily—is the utter lack of resistance from Iran’s allies in BRICS+. Particularly when it comes to China, this does not fit with the dominant view of a rising super-power intent on supplanting the US. Why is China not using its huge military power to seriously protect its allies? Why is it barely using its economic power against the US? The answer is simple: China is not vying for world domination. While China’s economic rise has been substantial and undermined US dominance, the Communist Party of China (CPC) regime plays a conservative role on the world stage, hoping beyond hope that it can continue this gradual rise within the US world system. This illusion is now colliding with US imperialism’s implacable hostility.

Here again, the left divides into two main trends, both incapable of explaining this and offering a revolutionary path forward. On one side are those who see China as imperialist and see the changes in the world as signifying the intensification of inter-imperialist rivalry with the US. We debunk this in “The Fallacy of the Inter-Imperialist Analysis” (page 10). As that article explains, this position leads to confusion and capitulation in the revolutionary movement. It is particularly disarming to revolutionaries in the Global South, where the notion of Chinese “imperialism” vying with the US, despite some recent inroads, is still largely (and correctly) dismissed as out of touch with reality. On the contrary, China is widely seen as a model to emulate in seeking liberation from imperialist subjugation and national development. This is an undeniably progressive sentiment, but to unleash it revolutionaries must expose how the CPC’s bureaucratic, non-revolutionary strategy, undermines the anti-imperialist struggle and China’s own defence. The article, “China: Defend Venezuela, Resist America!” (page 31), is an example of this—it contrasts to the approach of the EFF, SACP and others who take China’s achievements as a justification to apologise for the CPC’s betrayals.

At the end of 2024, Ramaphosa and Co were still telling themselves Trump’s return was no big deal and South Africa could remain insulated from the “spats among global powers”. This fantasy did not last long. The country is being tossed about like a small ship on the gigantic waves of global chaos unleashed by American empire. Ramaphosa performs an elaborate tightrope walk—vacillating between “tough talk” against Trump’s bullying and capitulations—which in the end only demoralises the black masses while emboldening US imperialism. But as much as the ANC and DA are loathed by ever greater sections of the black masses, the left has been incapable of tapping into this discontent and the GNU has remained relatively stable. If anything, the left and workers movement are even weaker and more fractured than before the GNU was formed.

Several articles in this issue address the different political obstacles on the left to overcoming this weakness and forging real anti-imperialist unity—despite there being a lot of talk lately about the need for such unity. One important obstacle can be seen in the refusal by much of the left and trade unions to take a stand against the persecution of Julius Malema and the EFF in the courts. This attack, dictated by Trump, threatens all leftists, workers and liberation fighters; resisting it is also in the interest of workers in the US, as comrade Erica explains in the speech on page 4. In an effort to combat the left’s sectarianism and promote anti-imperialist unity in action, we initiated the Open Letter to Abahlali baseMjondolo, AMCU, NUMSA and SAFTU reprinted on page 18, which was supported by the Socialist Party of Azania (SOPA) and Solidarity Action Committee Collective (SACC), as well as the Azanian Section of the Fourth International, the Committee to Defend Xolani Khoza and several individual signatories. Much more work is needed in this regard, centred on waging a struggle within the trade unions, and we look forward to collaboration with others on this (as well as continuing to expose the far leftists who act as centrist obstacles—see page 19 regarding the role of WASP leader M. Sebei).

Two of these organisations (SOPA and SACC) participated in a public debate on “The National Question, Class Struggle and the Tasks of Revolutionaries” (see page 12), which was very relevant to the far left’s sectarianism and current weakness. As the Spartacist speaker argued in the debate, while there are many reasons for the present weakness of the revolutionary left in SA, the central one is the failure to carry out our main task: competing with the nationalists for leadership of the national liberation struggle. This was quite controversial, with the most extreme view being that of the International Bolshevik Tendency (IBT) speaker—who charged us with betrayal of Marxist principles for our efforts to carry out this task in relation to the EFF, which is by far the most influential left-wing opposition to the ANC (see also the presentation reprinted on page 24, from an earlier debate with the IBT). Carrying this position to its logical conclusion, the IBT later demonstrably refused to defend Malema or add its support to the Open Letter pushing for socialists and trade unions to do so.

Many on the left disparage the importance of such debate among far left groups who are all fairly small. There are many reasons why this is mistaken. First, it ignores that many of the problems facing the far left today are also the causes of the weakened and fragmented state of the whole workers movement. It is only by confronting them and clarifying the lines of division through principled debate that these weaknesses will be overcome. Second, despite our very small forces this work demonstrates in practice the possibility of struggling for unity in action while at the same time competing against the parliamentarist-nationalist strategy of the EFF.

The EFF leadership takes advantage of the far left’s sectarianism in order to bolster the claim that it offers the only viable option for those who support radical demands like land expropriation without compensation and want to fight Trump and defend the EFF. In reality, despite their denunciations of Ramaphosa’s capitulation to white monopoly capital and the GNU’s attacks on the black masses, Malema and Co nonetheless see the ANC’s foreign policy as progressive and anti-imperialist, clinging to the illusion that Ramaphosa will stand up to Trump if only the left steps in to lend him a backbone. Revolutionaries must expose this contradiction and combat these illusions. This is necessary to break through the paralysis in the face of Trump’s onslaught. The articles “What Strategy Do We Need to Win?” (page 32) and “A Class-Struggle, Anti-Imperialist Response to the Water Crisis” (page 7) are examples of how this can be done.