IN HER speech on Wednesday night at the Lord Mayor’s banquet, Tory Foreign Secretary Liz Truss declared that Britain is in a state of war with Russia.
Truss announced: ‘We are already stepping up in Ukraine. The war in Ukraine is our war – it is everyone’s war because Ukraine’s victory is a strategic imperative for all of us.’
It is certainly a strategic imperative for the imperialists to wage a victorious war against Russia to carry out the regime change they desperately need to throw the country open to capitalism.
But this is certainly not the imperative of the working class in Britain or Europe who are being forced to pay the price for this war of conquest.
The sanctions that Truss boasts are harming the Russian economy are, in fact, devastating the lives of UK, US and EU workers as energy costs and inflation are driven into the stratosphere.
Even this is not enough for Truss, who declared: ‘We need to go further … That means cutting off all oil and gas imports once and for all.’
No oil or gas to heat homes, prices driven through the roof and industry forced to close, is a price worth paying for regime change for Truss!
Escalating the war was Truss’s aim, when she said: ‘We are doubling down. We will keep going further and faster to push Russia out of the whole of the Ukraine.’
This means invading the independent Donbass republics, along with the Crimea which voted overwhelmingly to break with Ukraine after the imperialist-financed, fascist-backed coup in 2014.
This is the all-out world war that Truss is calling for as she told the assembled dignitaries ‘we must be prepared for the long haul’. Truss admitted that this was not without risk but she insisted: ‘We have always been risk takers.’
The risks Truss is willing to take is to plunge Europe into a never-ending war that could easily turn into a nuclear war. The risk to millions of lives is again nothing for the ruling class, as it drives to stave off a capitalist collapse through wars to reorder the world, killing millions of workers in the process.
This reordering doesn’t end with smashing Russia. China is also on the agenda of the ruling class.
Truss called for the G7 group of leading capitalist nations to become ‘an economic NATO’, warning China: ‘They will not continue to rise if they do not play by the rules,’ enforced by a ‘global NATO’ that would exert its dominance in the Indo-Pacific region, ensuring that ‘the Pacific is protected’ from China.
Truss demanded a massive increase in military spending by the imperialist nations to pay for this new ‘reshaping of the global security order’.
Truss wants the power to dictate to the world to be concentrated solely in the hands of the G7 nations (US, UK, France, Germany, Italy, Canada and Japan), with the freedom to intervene politically and militarily in any part of the globe to further the interests of imperialism.
Truss’s speech was clearly designed to appeal to the Tory Party membership, as she positions herself to be the next leader of the Tory Party after Johnson has been dispatched, a latter-day Margaret Thatcher leading the troops into battle, invading Russia and then China, slaughtering millions to keep capitalism going!
Her speech laid bare the intentions of the imperialist powers to risk all, including nuclear war, to destroy Russia and China which capitalism fears have overtaken it economically and pose a threat to its very existence.
Of necessity, this war must be waged simultaneously on the working class at home to attempt to make them pay for the hundreds of billions being spent to try to keep this bankrupt, outmoded capitalist system alive.
Now Truss has raised the spectre of hundreds of millions of corpses. However, despite these ravings, the working class has the power to stop the war at home and abroad in its tracks by mobilising mass strike action to bring down the capitalist governments and bring in workers’ governments that will expropriate the capitalists and declare an end to capitalism and all imperialist wars.
In Britain, the TUC has called a massive demonstration in London on 18 June. This must become the focal point for the calling of a general strike to kick out the Tories, bring in socialism and going forward to the victory of the world socialist revolution.
