Spy balloons and social networks... the drums of war between China and the US resound

By Damián Vekelo

After Nancy Pelosi's provocative visit to Taiwan, which marked a turning point between the imperialist powers, the waters seemed to have calmed down. However, the economic crisis inevitably pushes the great powers to fight savagely for the markets, a dynamic that exceeds the will of governments. For that reason, whether or not they are fit to go to war, there is an objective tendency that drives them there.  

Now, that fight has returned to take on a public tone: The Pentagon denounced the presence of an alleged Chinese spy balloon over United States airspace for a couple of days. The complaint comes at a time of high tension in relations between the powers. Xi Jinping's government asked "not to exaggerate" the matter and explained that it is a device for meteorological purposes.  

A few days ago, a senator from the most warmongering party of the Yankee bourgeoisie, the Democrats, proposed controlling Tik Tok, from which China would obtain valuable information. Michael Bennet, a Colorado Democrat and member of the Intelligence Committee, called on Alphabet's Apple and Google CEOs to remove TikTok, the Chinese-owned video-sharing platform, from their app stores, citing national security concerns “serious”.  

Like most social media platforms, TikTok collects extensive and sophisticated data from its users, including facial and voice prints," Bennett wrote to Apple's Tim Cook and Alphabet's Sundar Pichai. TikTok raises a unique concern because Chinese law obliges ByteDance, its Beijing-based parent, to "support, assist, and cooperate with state intelligence work”.  

This warmongering trend is typical of capitalism in crisis, which in its imperialist era tends to resolve these crises of overproduction and insufficient markets by destroying part of the planet and murdering millions of people, in order to create a cycle of economic expansion on scorched earth.  

The Russian stagnation in Ukraine, the tremendous difficulty of the United States in facing a new war after its defeat in Afghanistan and the defeat of mass restrictions and quarantines -in the name of "health"- in China, put the great powers in a difficult situation to put their armies face to face. However, as we pointed out at the beginning, objective tendencies force the imperialists to face that course.  

It is that war is, basically, the exacerbation or most open form of the class struggle, which is not waged only between the bourgeoisie and the proletarians, but also between the capitalists, who know that these situations create revolutionary conditions that they do not want to face. In this sense, the working class of the great powers shows something of its power, refusing - in one and a thousand ways - to become cannon fodder for the capitalists.  

The more the conflict between imperialists advances, involving the colonial or semi-colonial bourgeoisies - which are aligned for one side or the other - the workers and popular struggles will deepen and radicalize. We revolutionaries must prepare ourselves to intervene in these, with a program that puts the underlying question at the center, the need to put an end to Capitalism and impose a workers' government that begins the path towards Socialism.

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