Late last year, the U.S. imperialist propaganda machine cranked out another “game” Call of Duty Modern Warfare III  to encourage young workers to enlist in their bloodsoaked military and die for oil profits. The U.S. imperialists know that they are facing ever increasing competition and in fact are already deeply engaged in the wars in Israel/Palestine and Ukraine/Russia. Just as Russia, Ukraine, and Israel are desperately attempting to recruit or coerce youth to join their militaries, so too does the U.S. military as it leverages video games to boost its dismal recruiting as it prepares for further, more expansive wars.

For 20 years, Activision Blizzard has launched new versions of Call of Duty (CoD) “ripped from the headlines” video games mimicking U.S. imperialists’ actions globally. One version of CoD replicated the assassination of Qassem Soleimani, leader of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, while another duplicated U.S. bombing of Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990.

Call of Duty: propaganda in service of U.S. imeprialism
The veil all but disappears, as the Marine Corps Entertainment Media Liaison Office is credited as a consultant and Activision Blizzard consistently credits the Marines across the franchise. CoD is not just profitable war fan-fiction, (earning $27 billion from 2013 to 2020), it is tied insidiously to the U.S. military. Activision Blizzard is infested with U.S. State Department and Defense Department personnel, making CoD military propaganda. With over 90 percent of American children playing video games, the military is deepening its reach to Twitch and Discord gamers, to lure prospective soldiers. Such blatant activity has prompted Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (still a misleader for workers) to sponsor a House amendment to ban the military from such activities. CoD is intended to manipulate the working class to fight for the bosses’ wars, accept U.S.imperialism, and join the military.

Who are the imperialist agents in Activision Blizzard?
Chief among these is Frances Townsend, Activision Blizzard’s senior counsel and executive vice president until September 2022 when AB merged with Microsoft. She was Assistant Commandant for Intelligence for the United States Coast Guard, counter-terrorism deputy for  Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and a member of the National Security Council under President George Bush. She serves as trustee of the Atlantic Council, which actively strategizes how NATO can manage foreign affairs and, she also serves on the boards of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, and the International Republican Institute. These are all bosses’ think tanks strategizing on how to promote U.S. imperialism.

Another Activision capitalist agent is Brian Joseph Bulatao who is their current chief administrative officer. He previously was appointed to be the CIA’s Chief Operating Officer by CIA Director Mike Pompeo.
Grant Dixton is Activision’s Chief Legal Counsel.  He previously was a law clerk at the U.S. Supreme Court and the senior vice president of Boeing, a military aerospace company. As loyal servants of the U.S. empire, Bulatao and Dixton make CoD military propaganda and reflect the intimate connection between video game media and military production for war.

Promoting nationalism and war crimes with historical lies
To help increase support for U.S. imperialism, CoD revises history portraying the U.S. as the hero, promoting the notion that war crimes like torture are necessary, and desensitizes players to atrocities.
One such alteration of history includes the “Highway of Death” which was a real event following the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait where the U.S. military bombed the retreating Iraqi army along with innocent civilians and refugees. However, in the Modern Warfare version, the attack is carried out by the Russians. The player’s assignment in Modern Warfare II is to kill a 'fictional' Iranian General “Ghorbrani.” He even has a white beard and similar attire as Qassem Soleimani who in 2020 was actually  assassinated by a drone strike ordered by former President Donald Trump.

In the 2019 edition of CoD, the player executes no-knock raids in the middle of the night, killing anyone whose reasonable response is to shoot back. For example, a fictional mother reaching for a firearm to protect her child is shot. While players can't engage in friendly fire in the game a baby can be killed, either in cold blood or for leverage against parents in the interrogation room.

Modern Warfare 2's “Borderline” mission takes place in the U.S./Mexico border. The player navigates an alley in a residential area until reaching one of the houses, barging in and "de-escalating" by aiming at the civilians. If the player fails to do this, the fictional civilians kill the player.

Also from Modern Warfare 2, in the mission "Hardpoint," participants pilot a helicopter providing air support to ground teams in the fictional region of Las Almas, Mexico. In the process of fighting off cartel members, the player destroys a school, church, restaurant, gas station and market!
In the first game of the Call of Duty: Black Ops series the player is tasked with killing Fidel Castro during the Bay of Pigs, a failed CIA-backed coup.

Overall, Call of Duty promotes imperialism and fascist myths that U.S. intervention saves lives, torture gets results, and "we get dirty, so the world stays clean." This encourages capitalist war, imperialism, racism and implicates Activision Blizzard as part of the sprawling military industrial complex.

COD recruiting youth to kill and die for U.S imperialism
The U.S. military has never shied away from exploring any relationship, charity or otherwise which promotes soldier recruitment.   The U.S. Armed Forces have recently started Twitch channels on which actual soldiers stream games online where viewers can donate and be convinced to join. Twitch viewers in the Army’s channel are repeatedly assaulted with chat prompts to “win a Xbox Elite Series 2 controller” The link simultaneously opens a recruiting form with no additional mention of the contest. These solicitations are aimed at kids as young as 12, who line up to be contacted by the U.S. military once they reach 16, the minimum age at which recruiters may legally contact someone in the United States. In 2022, the U.S. Army spent millions of dollars to host tournaments with high profile streamers, targeting Gen-z youth, especially Black, Latin, and young women close to recruitment age (Vice News, 12/1/22)

Our response to the imperialists’ murderous “Call of Duty” must be one of our own – Let’s embrace our “call of duty” to smash racism, sexism, and capitalism with communist revolution as part of an international process to destroy the roots of exploitation and imperialist war. This “call of duty” is not a game, it is reality.

World military situation mirrors 1930s
Foreign Affairs, 1/26–World War II began as a trio of loosely connected contests for primacy in key regions stretching from Europe to the Asia-Pacific—contests that eventually climaxed and coalesced in globally consuming ways. The history…illustrates uncomfortable parallels to the situation Washington currently confronts…​​with wars in eastern Europe and the Middle East already raging, and ties between revisionist states becoming more pronounced, all it would take is a clash in the contested western Pacific to bring about another awful scenario—one in which intense, interrelated regional struggles overwhelm the international system and create a crisis of global security unlike anything since 1945. A world at risk could become a world at war.
The parallels between this earlier era and the present are striking. Today, as in the 1930s, the international system is facing three sharp regional challenges…Russia and China are drawing closer through their “no limits” strategic partnership, which features arms sales, deepening defense-technological cooperation, and displays of geopolitical solidarity such as military exercises in global hot spots…the Sino-Russian partnership has pacified what was once the world’s most militarized border and enabled both countries to focus on their contests with Washington and its friends.

Preparing soldiers to fight in nuclear war
Business Insider, 1/26–Russian scientists have created a new simulator to train Moscow's troops on how to operate in the event of a nuclear explosion…The simulator… is set to be used in military exercises to prepare Russian ground forces for post-explosion combat missions, the state-run Tass news agency reported on Tuesday. State media said the simulator would also instruct chemical, biological, and radiation reconnaissance teams on how to find the epicenter and determine the characteristics of a blast.

"The purpose of the model is to simulate what a nuclear strike looks like — the shock effect, flash of light and mushroom cloud of a ground-based nuclear explosion," the description of the simulator's patent says, according to Tass.

The US is working toward upgrading its silo-based intercontinental ballistic missiles, building new bombers, and developing ballistic-missile submarines. In October, the Pentagon announced that it would pursue a new variant of the B61 nuclear gravity bomb, an air-launched weapon to be designated the B61-13, pending approval from lawmakers.

Farmers aim to shut down Paris
France24, 1/28–Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin on Sunday tasked law enforcement officials with putting into place "extensive security measures" to prevent farmers from blocking Paris area airports or its Rungis market and “to prohibit any entry into Paris”. The leaders of two of France's largest farming unions said Saturday that members from the regions around Paris "will begin an indefinite siege of the capital" on Monday. "All the major roads leading to the capital will be occupied by farmers," they said, announcing their intention to blockade the massive Rungis wholesale food market south of the capital. French farmers are furious at what they say is a squeeze on purchase prices for produce by supermarket and industrial buyers, as well as complex environmental regulations. But the last straw for many was the phasing-out of a tax break on diesel fuel for farm equipment.

West African nations move further away from French control
Al Jazeera, 1/28–Three military-led West African nations have announced their immediate withdrawal from regional bloc ECOWAS, accusing the body of becoming a threat to its members. Niger, Mali and Burkina Faso “decide in complete sovereignty on the immediate withdrawal” from the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), read a joint statement published on Sunday. ECOWAS “under the influence of foreign powers, betraying its founding principles, has become a threat to its member states and its population”, read the statement…“There is bad faith within this organization,” lamented Ali Mahaman Lamine Zeine, Niger’s army-appointed prime minister…The three countries have cut military ties with France, the former colonial power. France once had a strong presence across the Sahel, but announced the withdrawal of its troops from the three countries after the coups.

Felt ‘urgency and emotional rawness’
I was impressed by the seriousness of the comrades at the recent cadre school. The school was proof the Party is developing young, working-class, Black and Latin, women leadership to lead the working class to power.

The discussions were advanced, focused, and honest. People shared their questions and disagreements, and we struggled for everyone to be heard. People came from different walks of life, but we were united in our commitment to study the world and fight for a communist future.

We contemplated some of the most complicated issues we face in the class struggle, like the need to confront nationalism and fight for internationalism, the need to fight directly for communism, the necessity of armed struggle and revolutionary violence to defeat the capitalist class once and for all.

You could feel the urgency and emotional rawness in the voices of the comrades in the room: the fate of the international working class is on our shoulders! I came away feeling fortified to apply myself more resolutely to struggling in my neighborhood to win my friends and neighbors to the Progressive Labor Party.

CHICAGO, December 23 – Members of the international communist Progressive Labor Party (PLP) here are putting the racist liberal bosses on blast for their role in murdering our working-class siblings. Today and earlier in the week we have shared communist solidarity outside a mass shelter for migrant workers and families on the city’s near west side, where a five-year-old boy named Jean Carlos Martinez Rivero fell ill and died on December 17th.

As communist revolutionaries, we openly declare that a racist capitalist system that cannot guarantee the safety of children doesn’t deserve to exist and needs to be destroyed. While liberal politicians like Mayor Brandon Johnson offer empty words of condolences and point blame at their political rivals for stoking chaos, none of them have any real solutions for the genocides unleashed on our class. Their position under the system keeps them beholden to capitalism’s need for profit and war.

The only solution to genocide and war, to this sick system murdering children from Chicago to Gaza, is to build a revolutionary class struggle under the leadership of the mass PLP. When we say justice for Jean Carlos and so many others, we mean building the fight for an egalitarian communist world!

In the scene with communist solidarity
The thing most tragic about the death of Jean Carlos is that it was almost certainly avoidable. He and his family had been staying at the former warehouse turned shelter for barely three weeks, herded like cattle next to hundreds of others in a public health catastrophe. Over 2,000 migrant workers and youth were cramped at the same wretched site. In addition to Jean Carlos, four other children and two adults from the shelter were hospitalized in the same week (WTTW, 12/21).

Community organizers quickly organized a memorial vigil outside the shelter for Jean Carlos on the Wednesday after his death. PLP members attended, bringing not just our sympathy, medicine, and some clothes to donate but also our righteous class anger. While everyone present found some comfort in grieving collectively, many workers felt inspired by our sign that read “Justice for Jean Carlos – A system that can’t guarantee the safety of children doesn’t deserve to exist.” Many came up to take pictures, get a copy of CHALLENGE, exchange contact information, and share stories of their struggles under the system.

Today we returned to the same site with an even larger contingent of comrades to continue expressing our solidarity with workers all over the world. We brought pitchers full of warm champurrado to share, along with more CHALLENGEs, medicine, and winter clothing. PLP members took to the bullhorn and gave speeches in Spanish that placed the blame squarely on the bosses for so much chaos. We quickly distributed close to 200 CHALLENGEs and made more contacts.

In a situation of seemingly inescapable desperation and disorder, we point out not only the limits but also the potential. As one comrade shared in his speech, “We are a small party of workers and students. We don’t have many resources and we haven’t taken state power yet from the bosses. But what we do have is our communist ideas and internationalism, which are powerful and will one day create a revolution to build a better world.”

The capitalists’ “solutions” are killing us
The train wreck of a response from the Chicago city bosses to tens of thousands of migrant workers and youth arriving over the past year and a half demonstrates not only their treachery to our class but also the bankruptcy of their so-called “solutions.”

“Progressive” but still capitalist politicians like Brandon Johnson can call out the blatant racism of gutter fascists like Texas Governor Greg Abbott or Florida’s Ron DeSantis for sending busloads of workers from the southern U.S. states. However, his criticism conveniently leaves out the role that his faction of the U.S. ruling class, the Big Fascist wing, has historically played in destabilizing national economies around the world through their control of international finance capital and command of the world’s largest military.

These Big Fascist bosses (mostly Democratic Party “liberal” hacks) position themselves as the more “humane” alternative even as their aid can never be more than a Band-Aid on a mortal wound. Even if shelter conditions were to dramatically improve, there is little to no path for most migrant workers to integrate themselves more widely into a capitalist system in crisis. The status quo of the system will continue to relegate them into positions of instability and as a reserve labor pool for the bosses to super-exploit for higher profits.

We must contrast such notions of capitalism’s “charity” with our vision for a worker-run communist society. Beyond just the working class receiving what we need based on our collective control of distribution, we would be free of the alienation and waste of potential that exists under capitalism. Billions of workers would finally be able to contribute towards the organization and functioning of society.

Planting the seeds for an egalitarian world
Such a reality might seem far off, but we can see the seeds of a more communist world planted in the current struggle. Countless workers in the city have volunteered their time in recent months -- from cooks to carpenters to student doctors -- not because they expect to be paid, but rather because they understand their common existence with workers forced to migrate by capitalism.

PLP will continue to fight alongside workers wherever we are to minimize the immediate harm of this racist system while stressing the need to overthrow it entirely. In the memory of Jean Carlos and so many others, we deserve nothing less.