Revolution is a Choice You Make, Part 1: Capitalism and the Coming War
Editor’s Note: this article is the first piece of the 3-part article: Revolution is a Choice You Make.
The Growing Crisis
War. Climate change. Pandemics. Recession. Genocide. Our world is entering a period of protracted crisis on multiple fronts. There is one cause, the system we all live and work within: capitalism.
The system that blanketed the entire globe now staggers on in its imperialist phase. This system is not marked by stability or progress, but by profit-seeking, competition, and power. For every meteoric rise in stock prices, it leaves in its wake: scorched earth, leveled cities, and billions of shattered lives. Capitalism is defined by periods of accumulation, followed by periods where the over-accumulated capital must find outlets to disperse. Crisis ensues.
Increasingly, world affairs are driven by the deepening competition between competing capitals. The confrontation between imperialist blocs—U.S.-EU-NATO on one side, and China-Russia-Iran on the other—is no longer theoretical. The opening salvos are already being fired in Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan, Congo, Syria, and beyond. These are not isolated conflicts. They are expressions of a deepening contradiction in the global order—a sharpening struggle between declining and rising powers.
Since October 7, Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza has become the most barbaric nexus of this crisis. It is not simply a regional conflict—it is a brutal, genocidal enactment of imperialist logic on the part of Israel, fully backed and armed by the United States. This is not an aberration. This is not the first genocide capitalism has generated. This is the rule.
As terrifying as the moment may be, it is not hopeless. For every Auschwitz, there was a Stalingrad. Every empire had its revolutionaries. We must meet the moment clearly and fight like it all the future is on our hands—we have a world to win.
Capitalism: Our Enemy is the System Itself
At its core, capitalism is generalized commodity production. That is, a system where nearly every single thing, good, service, and relationship is produced and circulated not to meet human needs, but to be exchanged in the pursuit of profit. Production for exchange, for profit, for accumulation.
In the United States, this logic consumes all of life. Food, housing, healthcare, education, nature, even time itself is commodified. Ultimately, our own labor power as humans is key to the entire process, our labor power is the one commodity that creates value when it is used and thus the capitalists need an entire class of people to be selling their labor power as a commodity: the working class.
Between the workers and the capitalists, there is no neutral ground, no escaping the system. There are only commodities and the competition that determines their production and distribution.
Competition is relentless at all levels. Thousands of producers meet each other on the battlefield of the market for profit and survival. From corner stores to global corporations, all are locked in this eternal war. And in this competition, there are winners and losers. Those that win become monopolies. But even at that scale, the same logic reigns true: perpetually chasing growth, increasing shareholder value, seeking new markets, forever attempting expansion.
At the level of monopolies, the terrain evolves from national to international. Capital seeks to expand, to continue competing for markets, resources, trade routes, and labor. Often, this necessitates war. Imperialism is not a foreign policy decision, it is the inevitable consequence of the laws of capitalism. The world is a battlefield for capital. And the casualties are counted equally in dollars and corpses.
Attendees wave flags at the National Mall during the 57th presidential inauguration in Washington, D.C., Jan. 21, 2013.
Palestine Is a Center of Our Struggle
Nowhere is this barbarous logic clearer than in Gaza. That strip of besieged land is the concentrated expression of imperialist violence.
Israel’s war is not “retaliation.” It is extermination. Hospitals, schools, bakeries, homes—all targeted. Tens of thousands slaughtered, perhaps hundreds of thousands dead remain uncounted. Children bombed, maimed. Journalists murdered. Entire families erased from the face of the earth. This is not an accident of war. It is a strategy for total annihilation, enacted by Israel against the people of Palestine with the funds of U.S. imperialism.
This is capitalism unmasked. An aggressive settler-colonial state carrying out genocide with the full backing of the so-called “democracies.”
In the face of such odds, the people of Gaza resist. And in doing so, they have ignited millions across the world.
From Jakarta to Chicago, from South Africa to Yemen, the call for Palestine has stirred a fresh wave of international solidarity. Protests have erupted. Students have put their futures on the line. Workers have blocked shipments. The spell of neutrality is breaking.
But solidarity alone is not enough. Mourning must become militancy. Outrage must evolve into organization. The liberation of Palestine cannot be delegated to hashtags and half-measures. It demands a revolutionary force, rooted in the working class who truly wield the power in capitalist society and are thus capable of dismantling the war machine.
Palestine is a focal point of the working class revolution. Gaza shows us both the horror of what exists, and the courage of what can rise against it.
War Again
A new world war is on the horizon—it is already unfolding. In the words of J.P. Morgan Chase CEO Jaime Dimon: “World War III has already begun. You already have battles on the ground being coordinated in multiple countries.”
After a brief two decades of unparalleled supremacy in the imperialist system, the U.S. now faces rising competition. China has grown in industrial and financial power. Russia reasserts itself militarily. Iran expands its regional influence. These are capitalist states, governed by the same logic of commodity production as the USA, vying for their place atop the imperialist pyramid.
And the U.S. responds as any experienced competitor would: with encirclement, sanctions, maneuvers, and force.
The battlegrounds multiply: Ukraine, the Middle East, the South China Sea, the Sahel states, and more. Warfare takes on multiple forms. The competition threatens to escalate to full-blown war on more fronts.
The capitalist-imperialist system cannot sustain peace, it bursts at the seams.
B2 Bomber used by the US in the strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities.
In June 2025, escalation in the Middle East nearly tipped into a grand war. After an Israeli airstrike hit Iranian military assets, Iran retaliated with a coordinated and devastating missile barrage on Israeli territory. Frighteningly, the U.S. launched targeted strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities in their territory. For a moment, war between the U.S. and Iran, and possibly more states, seemed imminent.
The US and Iran backed down from increased responses. The moment passed. For now. This event revealed how quickly this fragile system can veer into catastrophe. One bombing run, one naval clash, one false flag and the world slides towards a generalized war.
Opposed to US capital since the 1979 Revolution, Iran has grown its influence in the region, developing into a formidable adversary in the region where the US enjoyed tremendous influence. Russia and China, who have developed closer and closer economic and diplomatic ties with Iran, find their interests increasingly aligned. These three heavyweights in the imperialist system grow closer as a bloc, but their alliances remain far from cohesive presently, leaving an opening for the US that finds its dominant position in the world grievously threatened.
This is the logical outcome of capitalism-imperialism. A world divided into competing blocs of capital cannot sustain peace. War is not a deviation from capitalism. It is its highest expression. Conflict must, eventually, explode. And it will, unless the working class intervenes, consciously as a revolutionary force.
In the face of this imperialist war path and evolving climate crisis, our revolutionary struggle as the working class is imbued with a sense of cataclysmic urgency. The movement will not be built automatically, it will be built actively by the revolutionary workers who consciously choose the struggle for socialism-communism, who choose to meet this historic moment. We must decide, before it is too late and the moment decides for us.