The ACP urges all workers to note the warnings currently being given by their rulers about the threat of war with China and to prepare to give the appropriate response. In recent days, the secretary of the Home Affairs Department, Mike Pezzullo, has urged us the hear the “drums of the war” and be ready “to send off, yet again, our warriors to fight”. He was echoing the sentiments of the Defence Minister, Peter Dutton, who said that war with China over Taiwan should not be discounted.

Assistant Defence Minister Andrew Hastie reminded us, as if any such reminder were needed, that the essential role of the ADF is to apply “lethal force”. Of course, to justify a military adventure and mobilise the population for war, there has to be a range of excuses introduced to manufacture consent. So, we hear endless stories about China’s alleged “genocide” of the Uyghur people in Xinjiang province, aggression in the South China Sea and against Taiwan and repression of “pro-democracy” protestors in Hong Kong.

We can ignore all the bleating about human rights. Imperialist countries, with the US in command, have supported and armed history’s most blood-curdling and repressive regimes. The real reasons for war have to do with trade, markets and control in the region and beyond. The bans on Australian coal, wine and other exports have incensed the local bourgeoisie and brought it back in behind the 70-year-old Australia-US Alliance more firmly than before.

China’s growing influence and the challenge it brings to Australian-supported US hegemony is behind the growing aggressiveness of the puppets in the federal parliament. They have defaulted to the side of the US in this conflict. Of course, this harms Australia’s relations with many of our neighbours, and it is worthy of note how New Zealand is developing closer ties with China. As is the nature of capitalist hegemony, nations have to pick a side, but we must be clear, this is not an ideological contest between socialism and capitalism. It is a showdown between the capitalism that has grown up inside China and its older rivals in the region.

Some on the “left” and right have dismissed the threat of an actual fighting war with China. Their argument runs that, minor conflicts in the global south aside, “wars” are now fought and won in the economic sphere. It is not in anybody’s interest to wipe out all that productive capacity in what would be an unimaginably deadly conflict, they say.

This same argument was advanced by German social democrat, Karl Kautsky, around the turn of the twentieth century. Unfortunately for his theory of an essentially peaceful age of “ultra-imperialism”, WW1 broke out in 1914 and, by the time it concluded in 1918, forty million lives had been lost. Modern day advocates of “ultra-imperialism” forget that if capitalists can make profit from war, they will.

We cannot afford to gamble on the prospect of war with China. What is clear is that capitalism and its drive to seize and control socially produced wealth inevitably leads to war. The evidence of centuries of the dominance of this social system has proven that. Lenin disagreed profoundly with Kautsky and his fantasy of peaceful capitalism. He advised workers to prepare for war, not for war on behalf of their masters’ financial interests, but in their own interests and to dispose of the source of all future wars in the process. We should heed his advice. The road to achieving that goal will be long and difficult but the Australian Communist Party is committed to this course.

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