As North Korea continues to defy the U.S. with the threat of more nuclear weapons tests, it no longer seems impossible that the small country’s military rulers might spark a second Korean War (see box). What is certain, however, is that the underlying inter-imperialist struggle is an even graver danger for the world’s working class. As China enables North Korea’s missile rattling, a widening conflict with the U.S. seems to be growing.
North Korea’s latest war-leaning rhetoric was provoked by U.S. rulers, who conducted joint war exercises with South Korea in March. Pyongyang, North Korea is following the pattern set by the U.S. as it moved from World War II into the Cold War against the Soviet Union by way of mass slaughters in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Once the U.S. rulers had the atom bomb, they had to show they could use it — otherwise, they would lose deterrent power against their enemy. But if North Korea’s military is attempting to make its meager atomic arsenal a realistic threat, there could be unintended consequences for both sides.
While Beijing doesn’t directly call the shots in Pyongyang, China has propped up North Korea with fuel and cash and reliable support at the United Nations, all for long-term, geo-strategic reasons. A nuclear-armed, super-militarized, virulently anti-U.S. North Korea buffers 880 miles of China’s land border, as well as adjacent waters. Its growing potential to nuke South Korea weakens the leverage of the 30,000 U.S. troops who remain in the South.
Currently U.S. war planners are focused firmly on China, the main economic, political, and military challenge to U.S. imperialism. This explains the U.S. rulers’ fervent attempts to assemble an alliance of anti-China powers for any future confrontation. It also accounts for their furious anti-communist media blitz against North Korea, which is repeatedly referred to as a “communist state.” In fact, a communist state—one where the working class holds state power—exists nowhere in today’s world, and certainly not in fascist North Korea.
Unintended Consequences
As shown by the warships and planes stationed off the Korean peninsula, President Barack Obama and the capitalist class he represents are taking North Korea very seriously. As ex-Defense Department hack Patrick Cronin, now senior director at the finance capital- and Pentagon-funded Center for a New American Security think tank, wrote in Foreign Policy (4/5/13):
The Korean Peninsula is on a knife’s edge, one fateful step from war….There is no single red line that, when crossed, would trigger war, but the potential for miscalculation and escalation is high….The desire to show strength, the fear of looking weak, and the presence of tons of hardware provides more than enough tinder that a spark could start a peninsula-wide conflagration. An accident — such as a straying missile, an incident at sea or in the air, a shooting near the Northern Limit Line or the Demilitarized Zone — could trigger an action-reaction cycle that could spiral out of control if Pyongyang, running out of threats or low-level provocations, were to gamble on a more daring move. It might calculate that a bold gesture would sow doubt and dissent in South Korea, drive a risk-averse United States to back down and restrain its eager ally, and hand China a fait accompli in which Beijing has no alternative to protecting its upstart neighbor.
From the Council on Foreign Relations, another ultra-imperialist policy factory, comes an even more ominous message. Korea expert Scott Snyder warned that a “miscalculation could have deadly consequences.. [W]e had the Deputy Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter passing through South Korea during [North Korea’s winter nuclear] exercises and...signaling to the North Koreans that the U.S. had a nuclear response as an option” (CFR, 4/1/13).
The short-term possibility of war in Korea, or in Iran, could embroil U.S. capitalists in a local or regional conflict. Presently, their longer-term outlook remains fixed on China, which outnumbers the U.S. in population by about four to one. According to Chuck Hagel, Obama’s new defense secretary, U.S. rulers are desperately seeking a war-making coalition to include India, Indonesia, Brazil and Turkey. While India’s population nearly matches China’s (1.27 billion against 1.36 billion), U.S. strategists find it lacking in loyalty and purpose.
The Rothschilds are pro-U.S. British billionaires who own the influential Economist magazine. They recently ran an editorial (3/30/13) criticizing India for failing to pull its weight against China weight or to proclaim its allegiance to the U.S. war machine:
India is often spoken of in the same breath as China because of its billion-plus population, economic promise, value as a trading partner and growing military capabilities.... But whereas China’s rise is a given, India is still widely seen as a nearly-power that cannot quite get its act together.... India’s huge potential to be a force for stability and an upholder of the rules-based international system is far from being realized. One big reason is that the country lacks the culture to pursue an active security policy.... India should start to shape its own destiny and the fate of its region. It needs to take strategy more seriously.... And it needs a well-funded navy that can become both a provider of maritime security along some of the world’s busiest sea-lanes...to shoulder the responsibilities of a great power. Most of all, though, India needs to give up its outdated philosophy of non-alignment.
U.S. Becoming A
Second-Rate Power?
U.S. rulers are haunted by the growing threat that rival imperialists will displace the U.S. as the world’s top dog. They know if they lose control over the world’s vital resources, especially oil and gas, they will become a second-rate power. They realize they must build for the contingency of an expansive conflict down the road, even as they plan for what may be more imminent combat in Korea or Iran.
These bosses also have an Achilles heel — racism. To motivate the U.S. military, they promote a racist outlook by demonizing the enemy as sub-human, much as they did in Iraq. But workers in the countries which the U.S. seeks as allies have long been victims of the same imperialist, colonial racism. And the Pentagon cannot assume that its own troops will automatically follow its racist lead.
For the working class, the picture is fundamentally different. Wars of all sizes, forced upon us by competing capitalist nation states, may well occur in the short term. Our long-range goal, however, lies in forging a working-class, communist revolution from the crucible of any profit-driven world war.
May Day — The Workers’ Answer
Our class’s necessity, in short, is to turn imperialist war into class war for a worker-run society. We can achieve this only by building a mass, revolutionary communist party of millions, the Progressive Labor Party. To that end, we must win workers and youth in all the rulers’ organizations, including the military, to the necessity of wiping out the capitalist profit system, the root of all evils afflicting our class.
That’s why building PLP is the order of the day, symbolized by the masses of workers and youth who will celebrate and march on May Day, the holiday of the international working class. May Day was born in the 1886 general strike of Chicago’s workers for the eight-hour day. It continues to unite the world’s workers by fighting against capitalism’s exploitation, racism, sexism and war. On May Day, as noted by communism’s founders, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, our class marches under one flag. We hold the red flag high, led by one communist party worldwide for our emancipation from the hell of the bosses’ profit system.
Join us!

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1950 Korean War: Prelude to 2013?

When World War II ended, the Korean peninsula, in the wake of its occupation by the defeated Japanese fascists, was “temporarily” divided into North and South. The South was controlled by former fascist collaborators with the Japanese who were now protected by U.S. rulers. The North was led by anti-fascists who had fought these collaborators.
In June 1950, a war erupted between North and South. The U.S. said the North invaded—a claim open to dispute. On June 25, the early editions of the New York Times ran an Associated Press dispatch reporting that the South’s troops had crossed into North Korea. But later editions dropped that story and launched a full-scale media offensive claiming the North had initiated the clash.
Whatever happened, the conflict became a war between the Soviet/China-backed North and the U.S.-backed South. The Cold War became hot. The U.S. drove the North’s army toward the border with China. Commanding General Douglas MacArthur wanted to cross that border, but the tide turned when massed Chinese volunteers drove the U.S. forces back into the South. U.S. President Truman fired MacArthur. Eventually the U.S. ruling class decided it had no choice but to settle the conflict at the original North-South dividing line, which has stood to this day, with 30,000 U.S. troops staying in the South. One million Koreans lost their lives in the war.
Unfortunately, the Soviet Union — having kept many capitalist features, including the wage system — failed to develop communism and reverted to a state capitalist regime. The North Korean leadership, caught up in the Cold War against the U.S. and its South Korean puppet, became a Soviet puppet. Following the Soviet example, it developed into its present fascist state.
Workers throughout the Korean peninsula, on both sides of the line, are suffering under the capitalist yoke. Only communism will free them from this exploitation and the constant threat of imperialist war.