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The Political issues in the US-led war drive against China and the threat of WW3 – Online event

September 21, 2022 @ 8:30 pm - 9:30 pm

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 21, 2022 AT 8:30 PM PDT

IYSSE UniMelb AGM:

Public Anyone on or off Facebook
The International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) club at the University of Melbourne is holding its Annual General Meeting (AGM) at 1:30pm on Thursday, 22 September at this Zoom link:
https://us06web.zoom.us/j/84358928845…
We encourage the widest attendance at our AGM to ensure that the only anti-war and genuine socialist revolutionary club on campus remains affiliated.
Following the formal business of the AGM, the IYSSE will hold a political discussion on the US-led war drive against China and the danger of a catastrophic world war involving nuclear weapons.
Last week’s trip by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to Taiwan has enormously escalated the US conflict with China, triggering the greatest military crisis in the Taiwan Strait in a generation. The Biden administration is carrying out actions that it consciously knows will lead to military conflict with China, which is regarded in Washington as the greatest threat to US global hegemony.
The IYSSE insists that students and youth must oppose this deliberate provocation which threatens to spiral out of control, risking countless lives in Taiwan, China, the Asia/Pacific region and the US itself.
Already engaged in a proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, the US and its fellow imperialist allies – including those represented by the entire political establishment in Australia – are driving humanity toward open conflict between nuclear-armed powers.
As a central pillar in US foreign strategy and war aims in the Asia-Pacific, successive Australian governments have placed the country, behind the backs of the population, on the frontline of the US war drive against China.
Far from being a “lesser evil,” the newly elected federal Labor Party government of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has fully embraced the US-Australia military alliance and has echoed the bellicose war drumming of the Biden administration in Washington.
Within hours of being sworn in, Albanese rushed to be involved in discussions of the Quad – a military alliance between the US, Japan, Australia and India targeting China. Foreign Minister Penny Wong branded Chinese military exercises in the Taiwan Strait as “deeply concerning” and “disproportionate and destabilising.” Australian Defence Minister Richard Marles went further, accusing China of having breached the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, with its live-fire drills.
The allegation of a breach of international law is deliberately incendiary. Its clear aim is to justify, in advance, further US-led provocations, including military actions, on the grounds that they are a defence of the “international rules-based order.”
Imperialist aggression and war must be stopped!
But in order to counter imperialism, young people must understand the essential political and economic causes of war.
War cannot be prevented by replacing one representative or party of capitalism with another. This is because war does not arise out of the intentions or personality of this or that capitalist leader.
Militarism and war are the product of the objective conditions of the capitalist nation-state system itself. War emerges due to the inherent contradictions of capitalism between the integrated world economy and its division into antagonistic nation states, and between the private owndership of the means of
production and the socialised nature of production operated by a billions-strong international working class.
The intractable breakdown of capitalism is sharpest in the centre of world imperialism: the United States.
Wracked by immense internal social tensions and economic crises, the US ruling elite is fearful that the position of global superpower, cemented after the Second World War, is under threat.
In order to wrestle back control, US imperialism is targeting Russia and China which it sees as the main threats to its ability to maintain hegemonic rule. Events in Ukraine and Taiwan demonstrate that the US is prepared to throw humanity into a catastrophic nuclear war to meet its ends.
With remarkable prescience, great Russian Marxist Leon Trotsky – co-leader of the 1917 Russian Revolution with Vladmir Lenin – foresaw the ruthlessness of US imperialism nearly 100 years ago.
In 1928, Trotsky wrote: “In the period of crisis the hegemony of the United States will operate more completely, more openly, and more ruthlessly than in the period of boom.”
US geopolitical aims of are only one component of the war drive. Facing an uncontrollable medical, economic, and social crisis, the US ruling class is eager to use military to secure “national unity.”
The escalation of the conflict with China will be accompanied by sweeping attacks on the social and economic rights of the working class and demands that workers sacrifice their living standards in the name of the war effort.
But there is mass opposition in the working class and youth to war.
Workers and youth face a massive social crisis as the cost of living soars amid record inflation, wages fall or stagnate, climate change poses environmental destruction, the COVID-19 pandemic rages on, and governments employ evermore authoritarian policies to suppress the class struggle.
The ruling elite can no longer rule in the old way as it demands ever greater sacrifices of the working class – from their living standards to their lives themselves. Meanwhile, the working class cannot live in the old way.
Growing anger and social discontent is propelling workers around the world into open struggle not only against capitalist governments, but the trade unions and other pro-corporate, anti-worker organisations that seek to funnel discontent back behind the capitalist system.
An international anti-war movement of youth and students must urgently be built to avoid catastrophe. Such a movement must be oriented to the working class as the only social force capable of ending the irrational and predatory capitalist system. The international anti-war movement must be based on the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism and its replacement with a socialist system based on social need, not private profit.
To discuss these and other critical political issues, as well as helping reaffiliate the IYSSE at the University of Melbourne, we urge you to attend the AGM.

Details

Date:
September 21, 2022
Time:
8:30 pm - 9:30 pm