The All-Empire Worker’s League and its Member Organizations call on all Communists, all local Marxist cells, and all those who love the people and yearn for liberation, to engage in immediate efforts to unify and solidify their local allegiances. We urge any and all Marxist-Leninist cells within the US empire or its junior partners Canada and Mexico to contact the League directly to begin the process of integration into a country-wide network capable of opposing the imperialist war machine.

Fight, fail, fight again!

On the morning of the 28th of February 2026, the Great Satan and its vassal in occupied Palestine launched a cluster of missiles at the Islamic Republic of Iran. Just in the opening salvo, the settler-terrorist regime has bombed a school and killed over a hundred school-aged children, decisively bringing the devastation of the children’s holocaust in Gaza to the heartlands of another nation. As thus proven, the imperialists will stop at nothing to reassert their hegemony, to rescue the “Pax Americana,” because they cannot stop. The abyss of financial collapse and imperial decline looms wide in the imaginations of the yankee elites, as well it should. To preserve the empire and their place in it, no crime is too criminal, however grotesque, and no atrocity is too atrocious, however vast. No destruction is too devastating, however permanent and disfiguring for the shared future for humanity. Anything and everything is on the table, no matter the consequences.

Today the Third World War is being fought on every continent. The genocides waged by the imperialists in Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo continue unabated. The Alliance of Sahel States continues its open rebellion against the neo-colonial system. The battle with Revolutionary Yemen over control of the Red Sea reignites. Missiles launched by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps rain down across the empire’s “middle east.” Sirens blare once again in the heart of the forward base colony in occupied Palestine. Resistance forces in occupied Iraq launch a new offensive against the imperialists. The decade-long struggle by the Russian Federation to wrest Ukraine from the clutches of the neo-nazi NATO coup regime continues to grind at the unity of the US-NATO-EU imperialist cartel. The people’s struggle for control of the state in Bolivia carries on despite setbacks, and besieged Venezuela and Cuba persist and develop national autonomy with the assistance of the multipolar powers. Soldiers of the Korean People’s Army march triumphant in Pyongyang on their return from the Kursk front, bringing home valuable modern combat experience against imperial troops for use in the defense of their homeland. The Taiwan question looms at the forefront of east Asian politics.

The Palestinian people of Gaza, silenced and forgotten by the West, still struggle for their lives against floods, cold, disease, and starvation, as the colony’s encirclement and genocidal siege continues unabated in its third year. With every passing hour the disfigurement and trauma of colonial genocide is laid ever heavier on the lives and minds of hundreds of thousands of innocents.

At every turn for the past five centuries, the settler-colonial invasion and occupation of our beautiful continent by imperialist Europe and its “United States” has revealed itself to operate according to raw violence and self-interest alone — and today more people than ever before in all of world history stand witness to the unremittent and unabashed savagery of the euro-amerikan imperial system and are asking themselves, “what is to be done?”

Inside the borders of the US empire, the ICE secret police continue to kidnap innocents and doom untold thousands to die in concentration camps. Migrant workers, refugees, and Indigenous people are targeted for ethnic cleansing, and resistance is stamped out by increasingly militarized police forces. The empire’s oppressed wage a daily struggle for survival against a still-rampaging but censored SARS-2 pandemic, eugenicist labor policies, and ever more openly-genocidal ableism and transphobic violence. And yet the “progressives” of the imperial heart of darkness itself are talking about their 2028 electoral candidates, as if this war is merely a matter of legislative policy. Many “socialists” insist that revolution is impossible, and the Four Opportunist Parties continue their strategies of co-opting spontaneous organizing and demobilizing radical movements. For those of us in the imperial core, the question of how to respond, how to organize, and how to start winning, weighs more heavily and more urgently than ever.

Take stock of the international situation, of how ever more of the world is drawn into conflict with the empire. Then take stock of your local situation, of how ever more people around you are drawn into antagonism with the system. Settlers splinter into fragmentary interest groups as the solution to the crisis of imperialism becomes a more contentious and pressing issue, or they simply “check out” of political engagement altogether, preferring to numb themselves with the bread and circuses of our age. At the same time, the oppressed are drawn to co-operate and resist together, or die alone. As the international situation shifts, it is reflected in the local conditions we experience. Just as the settlers here are more and more at each others’ throats, the member states of the NATO imperialist cartel descend into infighting as their position worsens and continues to destabilize. The experience of the first two world wars of the capitalist-imperialist era taught us that global war is the standard modus operandi of how the global capitalist system resolves its internal crises. Furthermore, the experience of the first two world wars taught us that only revolutionary war can put an end to these conflicts. The first world war was ended by revolutionary uprisings in Russia and Germany, and the second by the united efforts of the revolutionary peoples of the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and China. No such revolutionary force directly threatens the heartlands of the imperialist forces today as the Soviet Union and its allies once did, and so this third world war will only end as the first did: when the revolutionary masses within the empire unite and put an end to it. These masses are the millions in occupied New Afrika and the occupied First Nations, and the millions of settlers oppressed by their state on the basis of their ability, gender, sexuality, and age.

In fighting all of these wars the empire is running out of ammunition; its production simply can’t keep up. Where it can’t control us with naked force, it seeks to intimidate us with pervasive surveillance. But always remember that the empire doesn’t have the manpower to surveil all of us. This is why it pours its finances into AI to do the work for it (as well as to create venues for speculation and parasitism). The empire aims to have the repression infrastructure it needs built before the AI bubble bursts, but rampant corruption and insufficient electrical infrastructure call even that goal into question. It has taken the combined efforts of billions of people in struggle over the last century to bring the empire to its knees, and our task is paltry by comparison: organize a few million more to at last tear out the empire’s heart on behalf of all humanity. We have to turn the third world war into the second US civil war, and carry this war to vanquish the settler empire once and for all. Only a policy of revolutionary defeatism, the pursuit of the empire’s defeat and complete capitulation to its enemies from within, can provide us the concrete foundation for building revolutionary unity among our organizations. All revolutionary and anti-imperialist organizations must struggle between one another for unity on this line, and where such organizations do not yet exist, they must be built.

Iraq was bombed into desolation — its electricity grid, water systems, hospitals, roads, bridges, and even sewage systems were reduced to rubble. Their bloodlust still unquenched, the U.S. used depleted uranium rounds, poisoning the land and condemning generations to birth defects and cancer. Former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, when asked whether she regretted the slaughter of over half a million Iraqi children, calmly declared on 60 Minutes that it was “worth it”  (Twaij, 2022). A personal memory, I recall once watching a lecture by Arundhati Roy who remarked on the U.S. justification of the bombing of Iraq, “We are expected to believe that the U.S. Marines were sent on a feminist mission.” One truly has to applaud the audacity of the lie. However, this kind of propaganda is hardly uncommon in the history of U.S. imperialism; it is very much par for the course that they hide behind the language of human rights and progressive Western feminism to justify their carte blanche bombing campaigns that eviscerate women, men, and children alike. The hypocrisy cannot be ignored — a woman in a position of senior leadership in the U.S. actively contributed to a campaign that resulted in the catastrophic rollback of women’s rights, safety, and security.

In Syria, America waged a relentless crusade to overthrow Bashar al-Assad, once again cloaking itself in the rhetoric of “democracy and human rights” — not unlike Iraq (and countless other cases throughout the 20th century). As a result, the nation that was once called the cradle of civilization is today a blood-soaked nightmare of unimaginable human tragedy, all because the U.S. demanded a regime change in favor of someone more amenable to their investor and business class interests (Naiman, 2015).

To add to the ensuing horror even further, America continues its crusade of calamity in Yemen, where its bombs continue to shred civilian infrastructure, while American money and weapons fuel Saudi aggression. Meanwhile, Israel, armed to the teeth with U.S. military aid, carries out daily atrocities with impunity, trampling human rights as the world watches in silence (Saleh, 2025). And I have only scratched the surface of American imperialism — and only over the last few decades, in just one part of the world — all while it claims to act under the moral mission of civilization and humanitarianism.

Is it reasonable, then, to expect nations broken and shattered by such wars and foreign intervention to function in any democratic manner? We do not — and cannot — know what these nations might look like today had they been allowed to develop on their own terms, guided by the specific and unique cultural, material, and economic practices democratically determined by their own citizens. The argument is often made that West Asian nations remain undeveloped because Islam is a backward religion that breeds terrorism and oppression — as if religious belief alone determines the course of a nation’s progress. But progress is not born of ideology; it comes from the democratic participation of the masses and the historical and material conditions in which they live and struggle. The idea that faith in a particular god sets the limits of development is not only wrong — it is ahistorical and frankly, absurd. The Western Liberal Democracies, dripping with a colonial arrogance so vast and insatiable it eclipses all of history, lecture such nations on “Progressive Politics.” Yet was it not these same nations that razed to the ground even the tiniest sliver of hope and institutional framework required to achieve such a thing?

Furthermore, if the Western model of development is so superior — if the ideals of the Enlightenment were truly as revolutionary as they are claimed to be – then why did it take centuries for women, Black people, people of color, Indigenous peoples, minorities, Queer communities, and immigrants to even begin to be treated with dignity and granted equal rights? And that struggle, I should add, is still far from over. As a glaring example, just four years of Donald Trump was enough to destabilize the American “Democratic” system so thoroughly that the federal right to abortion — Roe v. Wade — was overturned. Just four years of one reactionary leader. Now imagine decades of that, layered with war, foreign occupation, sabotage, and poverty, with not a single institution left standing to hold back the worst instincts of violence and repression. That is — and has been — the reality for much of West Asia, and far beyond.

Not only has Western liberalism failed to deliver on these rights and promises throughout its historical development, but it continues to fail — with equal, if not greater, force — even today. On this, I offer both historical and contemporary evidence. Consider first what the famed liberal hero Alexis de Tocqueville had to say about the workers’ revolt of the June Days Uprising in 1848: “After the outbreak of the workers’ revolt, de Tocqueville was not only in favor of conferring emergency powers on Cavaignac but recommended shooting on sight anyone caught ‘in a posture of defense’” (Losurdo, 2011, ch. 10).

Now consider Joe Biden, the self-proclaimed champion of the working class, who calls himself the “most pro-union president” and has been hailed by historians as the greatest advocate for workers since Franklin Delano Roosevelt (Loomis, 2024). Yet this same president blocked a bill that would have granted sick leave to railroad workers, denying the demands of more than 115,000 workers who had gone on strike in 2022. And this was not some anomaly or failing of character — it is the function of liberalism itself, which gives with one hand and takes with the other, only retreating when popular movements threaten its order. Even on the rare occasions when liberals do offer concessions, they are steadily eroded into nothing by one reformist negation after another. As Losurdo (2011) writes, “At issue was canceling, or more or less drastically reducing, the democratic concessions won from liberal society by the popular movement.” And as de Tocqueville made clear, when that fails, the gun will do. As the old saying goes: scratch a liberal, and a fascist bleeds.

If we are indeed asked to believe that liberalism is an ideology adorned with glitter and gold, then we must confront an unavoidable question: how can such ideas give rise to some of the most depraved acts of horror ever known to humanity? The contradiction between liberalism’s glittering promises and its reality is precisely the primordial force that necessitates its overwhelming need to oppress.

To further emphasize: as we have already demonstrated, these liberal ideas were never inherently superior; they were not even exclusively European. The Renaissance and the Enlightenment — pillars of so-called “Western thought” — emerged only through a deep engagement with earlier Greek and Roman texts, which in turn drew heavily on the scholarly achievements of Egyptians, Persians, Indians, and Mesopotamians (modern-day Iraq) (Davidson, 2006). Yet today, many of these regions are dismissed by the West as “uncivilized” or “underdeveloped.” The irony would almost be laughable, were it not so tragically real. As Michael Parenti observed, “The third world is not underdeveloped, they are overexploited.”

Moreover, even in their European form, these ideas were never truly progressive; they were always fundamentally Hobbesian and Machiavellian in their outlook on human nature. It was only the emergence of genuinely revolutionary ideas that forced liberals to concede to democratic ideals. The liberal framework, as we have discussed, can only muster reforms that preserve the existing state machinery, whereas revolutionary thought dares to transcend it. Consider the institution of slavery: a liberal might express shock at the slave’s plight and propose marginal improvements — better clothing or food — while the revolutionary would cry out, “Come, comrade, let us shatter the chains of slavery!” That is precisely the kind of transformative progress that followed the Bolshevik Revolution when peasants gained literacy and women secured equal pay, voting rights, and the opportunity to hold office (Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women, 1983). Throughout history, liberals have consistently resisted the sweeping democratic changes championed by revolutionary movements.

Is it any wonder, then, that nations devastated by Western colonial and imperial ambitions remain broken beyond comprehension? Those of us in the West who are not members of racially or economically privileged groups did not receive our rights out of benevolence; rather, we were forced, for the first time in history, to compete with a rival political system that was materially superior and genuinely progressive. It was this competitive drive — fueled by the extraordinary social and human progress of the Soviet Union, combined with decades of development untainted by colonial or imperial interference — that enabled Western societies to evolve into what they are today.

If these same conditions were systematically denied to nations in the Global South through neocolonial exploitation, debt entrapment, illegal coups, and invasions, then it is not only unfair but intellectually dishonest to blame them solely for their own lack of progress.

If we were to allow these nations to develop according to their own histories — if we were to let their people prosper on their own terms, and if the forces of production, labor, and industry were free to drive genuine democratic participation — then, just as in every other society, the rights of minorities, women, and other oppressed groups would naturally flourish over time. Not out of moral charity, but because the conditions of their growth would make progress inevitable. We are told to measure progress by the standards of those who denied it to others. But given the chance — given peace, sovereignty, and the right to chart their own course — these nations would not need lectures from the West. They would show us what real progress looks like.

Citations:

1. Al-Shammari, M. (2023), “Women’s Education: Cultural and Religious Solutions from the Heart of Afghanistan”, Middle East Council on Global Affairs, https://mecouncil.org/publication/womens-education-cultural-and-religious-solutions-from-the-heart-of-afghanistan/
2. Twaij, A (2022), “Let’s remember Madeleine Albright for who she really was”, Al Jazeera, https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2022/3/25/lets-remember-madeleine-albright-as-who-she-really-was
3. Naiman, R (2015), “WikiLeaks Reveals How the US Aggressively Pursued Regime Change in Syria, Igniting a Bloodbath”, Truthout, https://truthout.org/articles/wikileaks-reveals-how-the-us-aggressively-pursued-regime-change-in-syria-igniting-a-bloodbath/
4. Davidson, N (2006), “Islam and the Enlightenment”, Socialist Worker, https://socialistworker.co.uk/socialist-review-archive/islam-and-enlightenment/
5. Saleh, A. (2025), “Yemen dismantles UK-Saudi espionage network and continues to attack strategic US and Israeli targets”, Peoples Dispatch, https://peoplesdispatch.org/2025/01/08/yemen-dismantles-uk-saudi-espionage-network-and-continues-to-attack-strategic-us-and-israeli-targets/
6. Loomis, E. (2024), “Biden’s labor report card: Historian gives ‘Union Joe’ a higher grade than any president since FDR” Government Executive, https://www.govexec.com/management/2024/05/bidens-labor-report-card-historian-gives-union-joe-higher-grade-any-president-fdr/397002/
7. Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (1983), United Nations, https://www.un.org/womenwatch/daw/cedaw/cedaw25years/content/english/CONCLUDING_COMMENTS/Russian_Federation/Union_of_Soviet_Socialist_Republic-CO-1.pdf