Inter-imperialist rivalry, class independence and the struggle for a revolutionary internationalism: An interview with Blanca Missé (Part II)

Blanca Missé is an associate professor at San Francisco State University and a Workers Voice member, who is active with the Ukraine Solidarity Network and the Labor for Palestine National Network. Together with Ashley Smith, she is co-host of The Real News Network podcast series Solidarity Without Exception.

In the second part of this extensive interview with Federico Fuentes for LINKS International Journal of Socialist Renewal, Missé looks at inter-imperialist rivalry today, the need to oppose all imperialisms and the case for a class-based internationalism. In Part I, Missé argued for reclaiming Vladimir Lenin’s method for analysing imperialism and suggested updates, particularly on understanding China and Russia’s global status.

Most socialists would agree that after the Cold War, world politics came to be dominated by United States/Western imperialism. Yet a relative shift appears to be taking place not just with China and Russia’s shifting global status but even smaller nations, such as Turkey and Saudi Arabia, flexing military power beyond their borders. In general terms, how can we understand these dynamics within the global imperialist system?

I agree that the Cold War world order with the US as the undisputed global hegemon, backed by other Western imperialist powers, is over. We are witnessing a crisis of historical proportions of the old world order, akin to the one that preceded World War I and World War II.

Our new world order is marked by the rise of new imperialisms — China and Russia — and growing inter-imperialist rivalry as the US and China compete for world hegemony. This rivalry is asymmetric and unstable, and the emerging alliances and blocs around the two dominant powers are by no means set in stone, as multiple contradictions persist in the different alignments. However, Donald Trump’s arrival to power in the US in 2025 accelerates the ongoing dynamics of the imperialist crisis, with a further boost to the arms race and, potentially, the return to more aggressive, militaristic or annexationist imperialist policies.

This new form of imperialism is closer to the one that existed in the first half of the 20th century. It is also marked by rising competition between imperialist states seeking to exploit and dominate the semi-colonial world, national liberation and democratic struggles becoming intertwined with inter-imperialist competition, and complex hierarchies among different imperialist powers with fluid, changing alliances.

Today, there are also emerging sub-imperialist or regional powers, such as Turkey and Saudi Arabia, who play the role of junior partners of imperialist powers when contradictions sharpen, while maintaining their own regional ambitions.

The growing US–China conflict seems to point to the end of globalisation. How should we understand this rivalry, given that the two economies are more integrated than ever?

The growing US–China conflict definitely marks a drastic change in the commercial and economic status quo of so-called neoliberal globalisation. We are witnessing a ferocious rivalry, combined with an established interdependence and a reversal of roles.

The ideological and diplomatic roles are changing, almost reversed. The US and Europe — the decaying imperialist bloc — are increasingly turning to protectionism and threats of military force, while the rising one is paradoxically projecting universalist ambitions and privileging the use of its soft power. It is similar to the situation before WWII, where Germany and Japan established protective tariffs to protect their areas of influence under threat. Japan, for example, established a “yen bloc” with its colonies and occupied territories, restricting foreign currency exchange within this bloc.

The central conundrum today, though, remains the dialectical relation between the rivalry and interdependence of the US and China. China and the US’s economies are more deeply integrated than ever, yet unevenly. This interdependence, in turn, fuels escalating competition over markets, technologies and geopolitical influence to reach a greater autonomy.

US imperialism remains the world’s dominant economic and military power. An article earlier this year in Foreign Affairs noted its corporations still control the commanding heights of the global economy: “As of March 2024, nine of the world's ten largest firms by market capitalization were American; China's largest firm, Tencent, ranked twenty-sixth.”

The US also continues to attract the most foreign investment and high-skilled immigrants. In 2022, US firms generated 38% of global corporate profits, with their allies accounting for another 35%, compared to China’s 16%. And Western companies still dominate high-value sectors — finance, aerospace, biotechnology and digital technologies — anchored by the so-called Magnificent 7 (Apple, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Tesla). US leadership in AI and quantum computing is being challenged, but its overall technological ecosystem remains unmatched.

China, however, has emerged as the most dynamic rising imperialist power, leveraging state planning, industrial policy and global infrastructure projects to expand its reach. It has overtaken the US in several key areas, particularly raw materials and manufacturing, accounting for 30% of global production compared to 15.9% for the US. It is rapidly advancing in electric vehicles, green technologies and scientific investment, now contributing 19.5% of global GDP, versus 12.7% for the US. This ascent represents not the reversal of globalisation but a profound reconfiguration of it — one where China has embedded itself at the centre of global supply chains once dominated by the West.

This integration creates contradictions for Washington. Former US president Joe Biden’s “de-risking” strategy, combining selective tariffs and semiconductor sanctions, sought to slow China’s rise without triggering systemic collapse. Yet many in the US establishment argue for a faster, more comprehensive industrial decoupling by relocating production to the US or its allies. Such a move could cripple Chinese growth in the short term but carries enormous global risks.

A recent study suggests that a large-scale decoupling could hit China’s GDP by 15–51%, inflicting 5–11 times more disruption on its economy than on the US, while also severely harming Germany and Japan, two key US allies. A premature trade war, thus, is not in the US’s interest, as it could deepen its own structural weaknesses and accelerate the decline of Western hegemony.

Yet, Trump is constantly taunting it. For example, the last trade deal with China led to a 28.5% year-over-year decline in US imports from China between April 2024 and April 2025. Ports such as Los Angeles and Long Beach faced declines exceeding 30% when comparing May 2024 to May 2025. If this move reduces the trade deficit, it also threatens the US’s social and economic fabric, with jobs on the line and higher inflation.

Financial interdependence further complicates this rivalry. China remains the second-largest foreign holder of US debt, owning $768 billion (8.9%) as of November 2024, second only to Japan. At the same time, as The Economist recently wrote, the dollar’s global dominance continues to provide Washington with immense structural advantages: “Being the heart of the dollar financial system saves America over $100bn a year in interest bills.”

This monetary hegemony is now contested by China’s efforts to internationalise the renminbi through its Cross-Border Interbank Payment System (CIPS), launched in 2015 to facilitate Belt and Road transactions. By 2023, CIPS had connected more than 1300 participants in 100 countries, and the renminbi’s share of global payments rose from 0.5% in 2007 to 7% in 2022, making it the fifth most-used currency in 2023.

Economic ties between the two powers makes confrontation costly. Yet, those same ties mean that every technological or geopolitical advance by one is perceived as an existential threat by the other. In the Marxist tradition, we know that the only ways out of a growing inter-imperialist rivalry of this magnitude are world war … or world revolution.

How do you view the concept of multipolarity, which is promoted by some on the left as a progressive or anti-imperialist alternative for the Global South?

The concept of multipolarity, pushed by some sectors of national liberation struggles as well as by Stalinist and Maoist groups, as a progressive “step forward” from the postwar “unipolar world” under US hegemony, has several flaws. The most glaring is that it eschews any Marxist analysis of the nature of these “poles” and their relations.

Is a world polarised by inter-imperialist rivalry “better” than a world crushed by one dominant imperialist power? For socialists, all imperialisms must be equally opposed. The framework of “multipolarity” is usually put forward to deliberately obscure the imperialist nature of China and Russia, the new powerful contestants of US/Western imperialist dominance.

In fact, the whole concept of multipolarity was co-opted and promoted at the 2024 meetings of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization in Astana and the BRICS [Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa] summit in Kazan. It is no coincidence that leaders such as [Russian president] Vladimir Putin and [Chinese president] Xi Jinping reaffirmed their commitment to creating an “equitable multipolar world order,” one no longer dominated by the imperialist West.

The Kazan Declaration— a 43-page document calling for reforms to global institutions such as the United Nations and the International Monetary Fund — celebrated the rise of new “centres of power” as the foundation for a more “just” and “balanced” world. But can a world structured around competition for resources and markets, aiming to generate ever higher returns on investment, truly achieve equity and democracy, or does it merely reproduce imperialist relations in new forms?

From a Marxist perspective, a genuinely “multipolar” imperialism — that is, a world without permanent tensions and conflict around hegemony that functions according to agreed-upon regulations for competition with “balanced” deals and agreements instead of wars — is impossible. It is as utopian and deceptive as the US-sponsored ideology of globalisation was in the ’90s and beyond. That ideology used “free market” discourse to mask the role of capital and national states in shaping markets to benefit a transnational class, while promoting the now worn-down universalist rhetoric of bringing prosperity and democracy to all. In fact, it increased structural inequalities and relations of domination by Western imperialist powers over the semi-colonial world.

Lenin defined imperialism as a stage of capitalism characterised by the struggle among great powers for markets and influence. In this light, the rhetoric of multipolarity is merely a veil to conceal a new phase of inter-imperialist competition, particularly driven by China’s emergence as a global capitalist power. The Kazan Declaration and the embrace of multipolarity thus symbolise not transcending imperialism but transforming it — or rather, the unoriginal recycling of the tenets of liberalism by a new player looking to legitimise its expansion.

Why should the world socialist movement, especially in the semi-colonial world that struggled to expose the false propaganda of US-promoted “globalisation”, today embrace the same platitudes repackaged and regurgitated by the Chinese imperialist state? Particularly when it equally erases class struggle and the agency of working people globally?

The rising discourse of multipolarity since the first Trump election, and especially since 2024, is not accidental. As Trump rapidly abandons the façade of US-led “multilateralism” and a “rule-based” world order for dead-end protectionism, blackmail and coercion , China embraces “multilateral” diplomacy’s mirror twin of “multipolar” diplomacy. The most dynamic imperialism today, China is doing what the US did in the immediate post-WWII period: it sets a universalising narrative to assert its geopolitical ambitions and secure new allies. The framing of multipolarity is just a set of basic talking points to recruit new members to the Belt and Road Initiative, the BRICS summits led by China, or the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.

China has an obvious ideological advantage in the face of the US retreat, and the rise of chauvinist and xenophobic forms of nationalism in the decaying Western powers: it can capitalise on the countless and horrendous crimes of its rivals in the Americas, Africa and Asia, and even use its recent anti-colonial struggles to appeal to the semi-colonial world’s accumulated resentment. But this rhetoric does not erase the truth of Chinese imperialist domination.

China’s vast concentration of capital — three times Japan’s and four times Germany’s — along with its growing role as the world’s second-largest exporter of capital, shows the regime aims to secure new forms of exploitation and value transfer from the semi-colonial world to this new centre of world accumulation. This is why it should be combated equally, and its propaganda machine about multipolarity debunked.

Is it possible to advocate for non-alignment with blocs (neutrality) without abandoning solidarity? Is there any chance of building bridges between anti-imperialist struggles when these different struggles confront different powers and may seek support from rival powers, as with Ukraine?

It is not only possible, but necessary! It is better to call such a position one of class independence, to carry out practical solidarity and to differentiate it from the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) of states, which is today a mainstream, purely diplomatic formation. Most of the formally independent countries of the NAM do not have the material means to enforce genuine non-alignment. In fact, they are forced to “align” their foreign policy and economies to meet the demands and pressures of big imperialist powers.

Therefore, regardless of where you are, to effectively avoid allying with any of the rival imperialisms in current world disputes, you need first to establish clear independence from your own national capitalist government and parties, as most are either imperialists or are pressured by imperialist forces.

I start with this precision about the methods of internationalist solidarity because, without this understanding, it is virtually impossible to connect the liberation struggles of Palestine and Ukraine, or Palestine and Syria. Leon Trotsky explained this principle in the Transitional Program when he stated that “workers of imperialist countries … cannot help an anti-imperialist country through their own government, no matter what the diplomatic and military relations between the two countries at a given moment might be.” The working class of any imperialist country must “remain in class opposition to its own government and supports the non-imperialist ‘ally’ through its own methods, i.e., through the methods of the international class struggle (agitation not only against their perfidious allies, but also in favor of a workers’ state in a colonial country; boycott, strikes, in one case; rejection of boycott and strikes in another case, etc.)”.

To avoid falling into a selective anti-imperialism — which proclaims unconditional support for liberation movements in abstract but, in practice, adjusts its stance according to perceived national interests or presumed hierarchies of struggle — you must have a class-based analysis, and more importantly, to develop an organic connection with the working class. Without real levers to organise meaningful working-class solidarity, the risk is that true internationalist solidarity remains rhetorical.

Even for small groups, there are many possibilities for direct solidarity among the exploited and oppressed across borders who are engaged in liberation struggles. What is missing is a socialist movement with an internationalist perspective, orienting itself to the working class and willing to carry out meaningful initiatives to drive a wedge between competing capitalist solutions to war.

For example, the Ukraine Solidarity Network in the US, of which my organisation is a member, has carried out several solidarity initiatives. In 2023, it toured socialist Ukrainian activist Hanna Perekhoda and two Russian socialists and antiwar activists, Ilya Budraitskis and Ilya Matveev, to offer US workers and youth an alternative perspective on the war.

In 2024, it raised funds for portable electric generators for two independent trade unions — the Free Trade Union of Railway Workers and the Independent Trade Union of Miners of Ukraine — and in 2025, it started a larger fundraiser for the Ukrainian Nurses Union. These are concrete campaigns socialists can bring to unions and community groups to explain the need for material solidarity with the Ukrainian working class and provide essential perspectives from those on the ground, directly impacted by the war.

The main obstacle to building those bonds of solidarity is the nationalist framings and imperialist manoeuvres imposed from above, which seek to contain, divert and exploit national liberation struggles.

The nationalist and bourgeois framing of the national liberation wars and democratic struggles is promoted by the current governments — whether [Ukrainian president] Volodymyr Zelensky, Hamas, [Syria dictator Bashar al-]Assad, or the Axis of Resistance. It aims to confine these struggles within national borders for purely military objectives and to serve their narrow, short-term interests. The main focus is preserving relations with other national bourgeois forces at the expense of internationalist working-class solidarity.

It also seeks to hide the class contradictions at work. As socialists, our goal is to develop two vital dynamics that bourgeois nationalism wants to erase: the internationalist and socialist ones, by strengthening the position of the most conscious elements in the resistance.

Zelensky compared the actions of the Palestinian resistance on October 7, 2023, to Russia’s aggression against his own country, thereby reversing roles and portraying the oppressed as the oppressor. He did this because his own analysis was not only blinded by colonial and Zionist ideology, and Israeli state propaganda encouraging Ukrainian Jewish immigration to the settler colony, but also because it aligned with US and European Union foreign policies.

These imperialist efforts from above to disconnect Ukraine from Palestine were also carried out by Joe Biden, Putin and Xi Jinping — Biden mostly by trying to co-opt Ukraine. While it was absolutely legitimate in the eyes of successive US and EU governments to arm the Ukrainian resistance, they continued to massively arm Israel during the genocide while criminalising the Palestinian resistance and solidarity movement. Meanwhile, China supported Russia’s invasion and showed mild sympathy for Palestine.

The internationalist socialist movement, on the other hand, refused to align with either imperialist narrative of selective solidarity. Instead, in Western imperialist countries, the task was emphasising building mass solidarity with Palestine, revealing the true aims of the limited material aid to Ukraine, and to develop independent forms of solidarity.

To those in our class in solidarity with Ukraine, we argued that the only reliable allies of the Ukrainian working class are the workers in Europe and the US, including the youth protesting US complicity in the Israeli genocide against Palestinians. In the Palestinian movement, we stressed the need to connect with other national liberation movements to expose the hypocrisy of imperialist governments and oppose their military plans. In all cases, we needed an independent response from working people.

This is why the USN issued several statements to dispute and correct the divisive narrative put forth by Zelensky and Biden, in order to build bridges between these two key movements. The network explained that “both Ukraine and Palestine are facing wars waged on them by powers that seek not only to subjugate them militarily but to erase them as a people with their own national identity,” and promoted the slogan: “From Ukraine to Palestine, Occupation is a Crime.”

It also endorsed all statements and demonstrations of cross-solidarity between these movements to foster dialogue. It opposed the military budgets that claimed to support one struggle (Ukraine) at the expense of others (Palestine, immigrant rights). The USN accomplished this because it is a broad, united front independent of the Democratic Party. The ongoing challenge is bringing this discussion into the labour movements in the US, Ukraine, and Palestine.

Would you say the same logic applies to connecting the struggles that emerged during the Arab Spring to the liberation of Palestine?

Absolutely. The same can be said of the need to connect the struggle to free Palestine to that of the Syrian and Iranian masses, for example. Furthering the existing solidarity between these struggles requires debunking, with patience and facts, the false narratives put forth by those who want to keep them separate.

The former Assad regime declared itself a “resistance state” defending Palestine. These empty words contrast with its brutal repression of its own population, including Palestinians living in Syria (notably in Yarmouk Camp, besieged and bombed during the war), and of solidarity demonstrations with Palestine. We should also recall its long record of betrayal of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation in the ’70s and ’80s.

Articulating these struggles is already taking place in the Syrian and Palestinian diaspora, as well as among sectors of the Palestinian resistance and Syrian activists such as Rama Kudaimi or Joseph Daher. As Daher recently stated: “The liberation of Palestine is connected to the liberation of the popular classes of the Middle East and North Africa, and of the internationalist support of leftist popular classes against the complicity of their own state in a genocide and an apartheid state.”

Similarly, the Iranian regime, which adopts a rhetorical anti-imperialist stance, uses the Palestinian struggle more than it materially supports it. The campaign against the West and the funding of Hezbollah and other guerrillas mainly serve as a geopolitical tool for the regime to strengthen its regional influence and distract from the social struggles and repression it carries out at home.

If Iran had directly engaged in a confrontation with Israel or the US to support Palestinian liberation, despite our many criticisms of this bloody regime, we would have rallied the entire socialist and working-class movement to support and defend those actions. However, the regime has refused to do so for two major reasons: its deepening ties with other imperialist powers, such as Russia and China, who oppose any regional war; and [Ayatollah Ali] Khamenei’s hopes for a limited détente with Washington.

The real forces capable of leading genuine internationalist cross-sector solidarity with Ukraine, Palestine, Syria, Iran, and beyond are those rooted in the working class and popular movements that are already engaged in their own freedom struggles. They are articulating, in an incipient manner, a fight against imperialism, combined with a challenge to their own national bourgeois regimes, whether pro-Western or cloaked in “anti-imperialist” rhetoric.

In the Middle East, the joining up of the many democratic and liberation struggles unleashed by the different waves of the Arab Spring and the ongoing heroic Palestinian resistance is more urgent than ever. Concretely, this means a new Intifada to reignite the spirit of the Arab Spring — a regional uprising of the masses for Palestine that simultaneously challenges the complicity and inaction of their own governments, advancing demands for bread, freedom and true independence.

It also requires a new working-class leadership to emerge through struggle that can realise the full potential of the national liberation struggle — not only confronting foreign occupation but also economic exploitation, the denial of democratic rights and environmental destruction. As with Ukraine, completing the anti-colonial struggle is inseparable from the socialist revolution that unites the oppressed across borders in a common struggle.

What do you see anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist internationalism looking like in the 21st century?

Clearly, any anti-imperialist internationalism begins with opposing all imperialisms, including regional and minor ones. This cannot be taken for granted today because many trends within the Stalinist and Maoist left groups oppose this and defend China in various confused ways: either by claiming that China is still a workers' state or a form of socialism, or by stating that it is a state capitalist formation but not an imperialist one. There are crucial issues in the class struggle that socialists cannot waver or hesitate over.

We know that Lenin wrote Imperialism in 1916 to lay the theoretical groundwork for two principal axes of the Marxist program during a deep crisis in the Second International: organising workers to refuse to support either imperialist power in the war by actively combating all chauvinist tendencies, and the need to most coherently defend the right of nations to self-determination to the final consequences.

Today, socialists and Marxists need to confront the prospect of imperialist wars by refusing to capitulate to pressures by either imperialist bloc, thereby opposing the ongoing arms race while supporting, in a principled way, the national liberation and democratic struggles that will continue emerging.

This means we must be able to correctly discern national liberation struggles from inter-imperialist ones, and formulate a clear program that workers and youth can understand and support, with concrete initiatives.

Regarding national liberation struggles, let us imagine that the US attacks Venezuela or Iran. We should unequivocally defend the right of both countries to self-determination. However, if you are in the US, it is not enough to say that the Venezuelan or Iranian people “should decide their own fate free of foreign intervention”. If there is a war, socialists need to take a resolute military side with the semi-colonial country under attack, regardless of criticisms of its regime.

This means providing direct material aid to working people in those semi-colonial countries, while explaining the limits of their capitalist governments in defending them and carefully criticising those governments’ wrongdoings. It also means exposing rival imperialist manoeuvres aimed at co-opting these liberation struggles. It is the same policy that principled revolutionary forces enforce today in support of Ukraine and Palestine.

While supporting the resistance movements of the oppressed, we must maintain our political independence and find the best ways to express our criticism of the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois leaderships guiding these struggles. This is most effective and accurate when it comes from independent social forces within the resistance movements themselves; therefore, there is an urgent need to link ourselves with them.

Inter-imperialist rivalry does not eliminate the potential for successful national liberation struggles, nor does it lessen the duty of socialists to stand with the oppressed — it merely makes this task more complex and challenging. Within these struggles, as in all economic and democratic battles, Marxists must advance an independent working-class alternative to the catastrophe being prepared by rival capitalist blocs.

On the prospects of inter-imperialist war, in the event of a war between China and the US, we need to define a clear policy. We cannot be more against the US than China, or a bit with China because the US is a worse imperialism, etc. Confronted with anti-imperialist rivalry, trade wars, military scuffles, and eventual war, the policy of Marxists should be clear: we do not support any imperialist power, we actively support the independent organisation of the working class in our countries to decide its position on the war, and we will explore the best ways to apply revolutionary defeatism. In the US, for example, the Socialist Workers Party found ways to carry that out during WWII with the Military Proletarian Policy.

The second challenge is that the two kinds of wars I mentioned — national liberation and imperialist — are often combined, as was the case in Syria and is the case in Ukraine today. When the old imperialist world order is in crisis, and a new one is emerging, there are no “pure” conflicts. All national liberation struggles are inevitably wrapped in inter-imperialist rivalry, and imperialist manoeuvres to coopt them. The lessons from the Fourth Internationalists in the Second Italo-Ethiopian War and the Second Sino-Japanese War are invaluable and must be fully assimilated today. The challenge is to combine the struggles.

With the Syrian uprising of 2011, for example, it was the duty of socialists not to remain neutral, waiting for a socialist leadership that could be “safely” supported to spontaneously emerge. Instead, the urgent task was to embrace the mass movement for democratic reforms while simultaneously defending the working-class struggle internally and unequivocally opposing any interference from foreign powers. It was just as important to clearly defend Syria against any US intervention, even under the guise of “aiding” the democracy movement, as it was to oppose Russia’s support for the Assad regime.

Now comes the anti-capitalist aspect of internationalism — the anti-imperialist struggle. In both efforts for democratic freedoms and national liberation, and in opposition to imperialist wars, socialists inevitably find themselves engaging in unity of action with broader social forces — nationalist, reformist or even bourgeois — that oppose imperialist domination for their own reasons. It is precisely in this contradictory terrain that Trotsky’s transitional method becomes indispensable.

Let us consider Ukraine, as it is a good example of how the tasks of national liberation have, during the war, become more closely linked to socialist ones. The Zelensky government, due to its bourgeois character and direct collaboration with US imperialism and local capitalist interests, serves as a barrier to mobilising all social forces of resistance against Putin’s invasion. In fact, Zelensky has already mortgaged Ukraine’s future through the economic concessions and rebuilding deals signed with Western powers.

Yet this betrayal must be used to stop supporting the military victory of Ukraine against Russia in this just national liberation war. It means that workers need an independent stance in the war, one that sides with the resistance without giving political support to the Ukrainian government.

Our socialist comrades today call, along with independent unions and other socialist groups, for transforming the entire economy to serve workers’ needs and win the war, and for severing any ties that would condition their independence on any foreign power. Concretely, they are putting forward a program that directly challenges Zelensky’s neoliberal policies by calling for the urgent centralisation of the entire economy under state control, under workers’ control, the renationalisation of land and industrial assets that were privatised and lost to Western investors, and the development of a national military industry focused on winning the war — not generating profits for oligarchs and transnational corporations. This also involves confiscating all Russian assets and companies, as well as Ukrainian oligarchs supporting the aggressor regime, and refusing to sign any future debt agreements with Western powers.

The key to winning the Ukraine war and laying the foundations for a truly independent Ukraine is the independent political organisation of working people in Ukraine and abroad to provide Ukrainians with all the material support they need. And this logic applies to all national liberation struggles.

This means placing at the centre a workers’ program of action capable of addressing the urgent needs of the exploited and oppressed, promoting concrete initiatives of self-organisation to strengthen the class’s capacity for independent struggle, and advancing an emergency environmental plan that confronts both capitalist destruction and imperialist war.