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Zelenskys peace plan Sinwar assassination and the BRICS summit AGAINST THE ST

Against The Stream · 2024-10-25

Core Argument

The central thesis is that the current phase of global capitalist crisis is producing a qualitatively new kind of imperialist irrationality. The old bourgeois capacity for strategic thinking — for making concessions in the general interest of the system — has collapsed. Political leaders like Netanyahu and Zelenskyy, and by extension the US and European powers backing them, are acting on the basis of narrow, short-term interests: avoiding prison, winning elections, satisfying the most rabid faction of their base. This is not merely incompetence but a structural feature of a system in decline. The consequence is that imperialism is actively undermining its own position — pushing Russia and China together, destabilising allied regimes in Egypt and Jordan, and creating the conditions for revolutionary explosions that will ultimately bury the system it is trying to save.

The episode argues this through three flashpoints: the assassination of Yahya Sinwar, Zelenskyy's "victory plan", and the BRICS summit in Kazan. Each demonstrates the same dynamic — a declining US-led imperialist order lashing out erratically, failing to achieve its objectives, and inadvertently accelerating the very forces that threaten it.

Theoretical Grounding

The analysis sits firmly within the classical Marxist tradition of imperialist war and revolution, drawing most directly on Lenin's theory of imperialism as the highest stage of capitalism and Trotsky's understanding of combined and uneven development. The key theoretical move is the application of the concept of decadent capitalism — the idea that when the system can no longer expand and make concessions, its political representatives lose the capacity for rational long-term planning. This is not presented as a mechanical economic law but as a concrete political observation: the system's contradictions have become so acute that even the most intelligent bourgeois analysts (like the former US ambassador Ryan Crocker quoted in the episode) are ignored.

The episode also draws on Engels' 1887 prediction of a coming world war, cited explicitly, to frame the current conflicts as preparatory to revolutionary upheaval. The argument that "war leads to revolution" is not a slogan but a historical generalisation rooted in the experience of 1917, 1945, and the post-war wave of decolonisation.

There is a clear rejection of any notion that a "multi-polar world" is inherently progressive. The episode insists that the rise of China, Russia, and the BRICS represents not a fairer order but a more unstable one — a world of competing imperialisms and regional warlords. This distinguishes the analysis from both liberal internationalism and from the "anti-imperialist" campism that uncritically celebrates any power that opposes the US.

Conjunctural Relevance

The episode is tightly anchored to specific events from October 2024:

Gaza/Palestine: The assassination of Yahya Sinwar and the release of drone footage intended to humiliate Palestinians has backfired, making him more popular dead than alive. The episode cites Wall Street Journal reporting showing that even displaced Palestinians who had turned against Hamas changed their minds after seeing Sinwar die fighting. The analysis connects this to the broader destabilisation of allied regimes — Egypt has arrested 120 people for pro-Palestinian protests; Saudi Arabia's NBC offices were raided in Baghdad after the kingdom welcomed Sinwar's death. Netanyahu's behaviour is driven by his personal legal situation (a court appearance scheduled for December) and the need to satisfy settler fanatics, not by any rational calculation of Israeli security.

Ukraine: Zelenskyy's "victory plan" — demanding NATO membership, no territorial concessions, and threatening to build a nuclear bomb — has been met with a cold shoulder. The Ramstein meeting was cancelled; Biden met Scholz, Macron, and Starmer in Germany but did not invite Zelenskyy. The episode cites Walter Mead in the Wall Street Journal to argue that Putin's price for peace is rising daily and that the West's strategy — to weaken Russia through sanctions and attrition — has failed. The economic cost to Europe, particularly Germany, is emphasised: Biden received Germany's highest honour while having "destroyed the German economy".

BRICS Summit (Kazan, October 2024): The summit is presented as proof that the West's attempt to isolate Russia has failed. Attendees included China, India, Iran, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Turkey (a NATO member), Egypt, and the UN Secretary-General. The episode notes that the UN chief did not attend the Ukraine peace summit in Switzerland but did attend this one. The analysis stresses that these countries have conflicting interests — Saudi-Iranian rivalry, Sino-Indian border disputes — but are being pushed together by US "weaponisation" of the dollar and sanctions regime, particularly the freezing of $200 billion in Russian assets.

Where the Argument Continues

The episode is deliberately introductory — it covers three crises in a single broadcast and does not develop any one in full theoretical depth. The argument about the decadence of bourgeois leadership and the collapse of strategic rationality is a thread that runs through the broader Against the Stream corpus and the RCI's theoretical journal, The Spectre of Communism.

Listeners should look to earlier episodes on the Ukraine war (particularly those covering the Istanbul peace talks and Boris Johnson's intervention) for a fuller account of how the war was provoked and prolonged. The analysis of the Middle East connects to the RCI's ongoing work on the Arab revolutions and the question of revolutionary leadership in the region — the episode gestures towards the argument that the solution to the Palestinian question lies in the overthrow of the Egyptian and Jordanian regimes, which is developed in RCI pamphlets on the region.

The BRICS analysis is a continuation of the RCI's long-standing position that the "multi-polar world" is not a progressive alternative but a more unstable phase of interimperialist rivalry. This is argued at greater length in The Spectre of Communism articles on the decline of US hegemony.

Connections

  • Lenin, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism — the theoretical foundation for understanding interimperialist rivalry and the drive towards war.
  • Trotsky, The War and the International — on the relationship between imperialist war and revolutionary opportunity.
  • Engels, 1887 preface to The Class Struggles in France — the passage on the coming world war, cited in the episode.
  • RCI, The Spectre of Communism (journal) — for fuller theoretical development of the crisis of bourgeois leadership and the concept of decadent capitalism.
  • Against the Stream episodes on Ukraine (2022-2024) — for the detailed account of the Istanbul negotiations and the West's role in sabotaging peace.
  • RCI pamphlets on the Arab revolutions — for the analysis of Egypt and Jordan as the weak links in the regional imperialist chain.

Key Quotes

  1. "When capitalism was going through the period of growth and it was expanding and it could actually make serious concessions to working people... you had political leaders that could actually think of the general interest of the system. We're getting to the point where people like Netanyahu — and not just Netanyahu, we have them across Europe, we have them in Latin America, we have them in America — they are incapable of thinking in a rational way. But that reflects the state of the system as a whole."

  2. "What's good for the system as a whole isn't necessarily good in the short term for the different parts that make up the system. That's the fundamentals of capitalism. And the behaviour is not decided by the whole — the behaviour is decided by the parts."

  3. "They've used Ukraine like a pawn. It's sometimes difficult to adopt certain positions... because the initial idea would be 'so you think we should give up territory, we should defend our sovereignty'. But sometimes you have to tell the truth. Telling the truth sometimes is tough. We've been telling the truth that there was no way they could defeat Russia."

  4. "Outside of Washington and the G7 and the European Union, it is hard to appreciate just how much resentment there is of Western hypocrisy and hegemony. All mortar helping to bond the loose membership of BRICS."

  5. "If you look at the first and the second world war, how did they end? The first ended with the Russian Revolution, the German Revolution, the Hungarian, the Italian — a wave of revolution. The second ended with the Civil War in Greece, the resistance in Italy, the resistance in France... a huge wave of class struggle. War leads to revolution."