by Doug Lorimer

Washington’s war against the people of Vietnam lasted 15 years. By its end in 1975, the Vietnamese had won a victory against the mightiest military power of all time. But it came at the cost of over 4 million dead.

The antiwar movement in this country and in the United States played a major role in winning that victory. It made the domestic political cost of continuing the war too high for imperialist rulers, and as I mentioned earlier, it helped politically undermine the US military as a reliable fighting force.

Since the emergence of imperialist capitalism, the ordering of political power among the various nation-states has shifted considerably. At the beginning of the imperialist epoch, the principal global reality was the growing rivalry among the imperialist nation-states leading to the first and second world wars. The victory of the world’s first socialist state, the Soviet Union, against Nazi Germany’s imperialist onslaught posed an external challenge to the capitalist system, leading to the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the US rulers and their imperialist allies.

The character of warfare since half of the 20th century has been marked, on the one hand, by imperialist conquest and domination, and on the other by its dialectical opposite: wars of national liberation against imperialist conquest and domination.

Modern imperialist war has an inherent contradiction, which often explodes in revolutionary fury at the end of the conflict. The imperialist ruling class often requires mass mobilisations, the mass conscription of working people into its army and heavy taxation for a war that benefits only itself. To overcome this contradiction, the imperialist rulers have to lie to their own people to gain mass support. The primary lie is: “We did not want this war. It was unavoidable, forced upon us by enemy aggression. We are only defending our nation.”

By the beginning of the 20th century, the rise of capitalist monopolies and finance capital had laid the basis for a new stage of world capitalism, the imperialism stage, and a different era of warfare: imperialist war.

By the end of the 19th century, capitalism had broken out of the restricted limits of national economy. Competition among the major groups of capitalists, new investment outlets, markets, strategic raw materials and cheap supplies of labour-power became global.