The International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) in Australia is holding an online public meeting on Saturday, April 24, at 4 p.m. [AEST], to discuss the way forward in the fight against the advanced US-led preparations for a catastrophic war against China.
The IYSSE invites all students and young people in Australia, New Zealand, throughout the region and internationally, to participate in the meeting, which will examine questions of life and death for billions of people across the Asia-Pacific. Click the link below to register for the meeting:
https://zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_6EqC01BKRWulBQhXDg8q5Q
Since his inauguration, US President Joseph Biden has intensified an anti-China campaign that was initiated by Obama and further accelerated under Trump. Biden is inflaming regional flashpoints, especially Taiwan, waging a hypocritical campaign over Chinese human rights violations and engaging in “alliance building” aimed at furthering the encirclement of China.
Senior US generals have declared they expect a war between Beijing and Taiwan within the next five years. Given that they are ratcheting-up the conflict between China and the island-state, these declarations have the character of a timeline for a US-led conflict and not a disinterested prediction. Plans are afoot for the placement of US missiles on Taiwan and Japan. Australia has announced its own missile production program. And moves are afoot to formalise the “Quad,” a de facto alliance of the most powerful militaries in the region—the US, Australia, Japan and India—directed against Beijing.
The US war drive is aimed at offsetting the economic and geopolitical decline of American imperialism through the use of military means. Its goal is the reduction of China, viewed as the chief threat to American capitalism’s global hegemony, to the position of a semi-colony. This can be achieved only through war.
Countries throughout the Asia-Pacific, including Australia and New Zealand, are fully-aligned with these catastrophic preparations. They are participating in the build-up because of their close alliance with the US, and to further their own imperialist aims, especially in the Pacific. Both countries have been centres of a McCarthyite campaign against supposed Chinese foreign interference, aimed at legitimising the military drive and cracking down on anti-war opposition.
The preparations for conflict are being carried out behind the backs of the population. This is because the military generals and capitalist politicians are well aware that war is opposed by the vast mass of the population. The IYSSE meeting is part of the fight by the world Trotskyist movement to lift the veil of secrecy surrounding the war drive.
The fight against war is inseparable from the emerging struggles of the working class against inequality, austerity and an assault on jobs, wages and conditions. War abroad means war at home. On the pretext of the pandemic, the Australian ruling elite is carrying out sweeping economic restructuring, aimed at making the working class pay for the crisis of capitalism. While corporate profits are at record highs, wages are stagnating. Unemployment and poverty are growing, as hundreds of thousands of workers have been laid-off, and public health and education continue to be attacked. Labor and the unions, who are also the greatest cheerleaders of the war drive, are spearheading this offensive against the working class.
Young people have been particularly impacted by the rise of joblessness and the uncertainties of education. Under capitalism, the youth face a future of war, social misery and economic devastation.
The meeting will outline the only viable basis for opposing the plans for conflict, as part of the fight for the social and democratic rights of ordinary people. A new international anti-war movement of the working class must be built. It can only go forward, based on a socialist program that targets the source of war, the capitalist nation-state system, and that is aimed at the worldwide unification of workers and young people against their “own” governments and ruling elites.