“And even amid mass death and social misery, the United States is intensifying its campaign against Russia and China. The latest military budget, approaching $1 trillion, is the largest in history. The past year has witnessed a dangerous escalation of imperialist provocations against Russia and China. The American media, in particular, has attempted to incite popular hatred against China with entirely fabricated claims that the pandemic was caused by a virus manufactured in a ‘Wuhan lab.’ This lie has been supplemented by a vicious propaganda campaign accusing the Chinese government of carrying out genocide against the Uyghur people.”

• U.S. claims of virus manufacturing are backed by China’s own response, which accuses the U.S. of having manufactured the virus.  No one with any access to scientific information argues that the virus has natural origins.  The WSWS theory serves only the UN and its WHO agency. Lenin called its earlier counterpart, the League of Nations, established after World War I, the “the den of thieves.” The WSWS has no business backing the “den of thieves” and their pseudoscience aimed  at positioning themselves as mediators in a conflict between the post-war empire and the new rising empire emerging from post-Stalinist China and post-Stalinist Russia.  
• China’s government, established by Mao, a servant of Stalin, does not arise from the same revolutionary leadership provided by Lenin and the “Old Bolsheviks” that Stalin massacred as part of his counter-revolution aimed at securing the position of the bureaucrats through an alliance with Nazi-fascism.  China’s bureaucrats will follow the Stalinist tradition and sign secret deals with the worst of the fascists. The nano-bureaucracy, without Democratic Power on their tails, would do the same.

“The deliberate incitement of anti-Russian and anti-Chinese hatred is obviously directed toward legitimizing American and European preparations for war in pursuit of global imperialist interests. However, such propaganda and the military conflicts to which they lead serve an additional critical purpose: the deflection of growing domestic popular anger away from national governments and outward toward ‘foreign enemies.’ Governments will exploit the danger of war to escalate domestic political repression of mounting internal social opposition.”

• This argument threatens the basic principles of Marxism.  The propaganda does not lead to war, except in the minds of those consciously betraying Marxist principles.  The economics of overproduction and declining profits within national boundaries leads to war.  The propaganda comes later, as an after-effect.  To argue otherwise turns the party into a servant of the imperialist system that constantly lays blame on the people for their wars and their ignorance and hate. The propaganda, these counter-revolutionary bureaucrats claim, has either cleverly fooled them or worse, reproduced the people’s own chauvinist ideas in artistic form.

• The domestic repression of political dissent can only conquer the revolutionary movement if they become the method by which the nano-bureaucracy suppresses dissent against its own back pedaling.  The working class seeks to drive the revolution forward.  The nano-bureaucracy suppresses dissent within the revolution, threatening the formation of a workers’ state, or the new Democratic Power that rises irreconcilably against the old Money Power.  This gives the government a free hand to hunt down revolutionaries under the guise of a defense of the ruling tyrannical faction.  This corrupt layer, supposedly, would come to the defense of the workers during the revolution.  In fact, they would serve to suppress any new workers’ government established by the world revolution with a war on its real leaders and an alliance with Stalinist, neo-fascist, or other reactionary forces.

“The working class is ready to fight. But it is shackled by reactionary bureaucratic organizations that suppress every expression of resistance.”

• The reactionary bureaucracy has changed the role of the SEP in its relationship to its membership.  It regards them with distrust and suspicion while welcoming the real threats, such as former New York Times editors and open defenders of the Democratic Party.  Only an open break with bureaucratic processes in favor of an active policy of inclusion in discussion will break the hold of the bureaucracy on the working class and the revolutionary movement.  The building of Democratic Power as an alternative to the factional tyranny and lawlessness of the nano-bureaucracy will set off an explosive social and politic process that rocks the entire capitalist state to its foundation.

“New pathways for mass struggle must be created.”

• Creativity must manifest itself a specific and established art form in order to have any social value.  The best form for the revolution has already been revealed through the Russian revolution and its leading revolutionary party.  Without an experienced revolutionary leadership, the movement would be smashed on the rocks after a long journey.  New pathways can only lead to defeat unless proven absolutely necessary in practice and, more importantly in theory.  

“When the war broke out in July 1914, following the assassination of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand, soldiers went off to the battlefield with the expectation that they would be home by Christmas… As with the war, so too with the pandemic. The pandemic will continue until there is a conscious and independent intervention of the working class to remove control of the management and direction of the response to the virus from the capitalist ruling elites and into its own hands.”

• In Their Morals and Ours, Trotsky warns us not to judge the violence of the slave fighting for freedom as equal to the violence of the oppressor.  Here, the SEP has done just that.  Trotsky wrote approvingly of the Black Hand, the group that assassinated the likely heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian empire.  He supported Serbian nationalism in its struggle to break the chains of national oppression imposed upon it by imperialism.  The assassination did not occur as any “natural act”, as some spontaneous rising of barbaric half-animals. 

• The pandemic too, even by the WSWS’s own reluctant admission, does not have natural origins. They deny or completely shut down discussion about the laboratory technology publicly acknowledged to exist for the manipulation of RNA to manufacture viruses.  Along with this denial, obviously comes the denial of all evidence that such technology had been used to prepare the Covid-19 virus for its first hosts outside the lab. 

• They also ignore the history of German militarism as the rising new empire.  German nationalism, the struggle of the German people to unite across national boundaries had definite progressive dimensions.  Yet, like Chinese nationalism, it also contained the germ of horrific military conflicts with the sole intention of establishing the German state as equal to the French and British states in imperialist affairs.  In the case of China, it wants to establish itself with equal force to the Western European and US empires.

• The more obvious comparison, the Spanish flu of 1918-1919 does not enter into this argument.  The Spanish flu occurred after 1917, after the Russian Revolution as a punishment by the counter-revolution.  As with the reactionary policy of herd immunity without vaccines, the authorities of that day surely found ways to use the virus to cause attrition among the ranks of opposing armies.  No one denies the history of the use of poison gas by the imperialist armies during World War I.  The revolution that set off the reactionary coronavirus has not yet made it into power, but it has broken barriers in unexpected ways.  When it sweeps away the old governments, once the virus hurdle has been cleared, it will do so on a truly international scale, having been prepared in theory as an international revolution with international organization as its dependable engine.