"Talisman Sabre 2023: LARPing for War on China" by Workers League

 

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Source: Red Fire

Talisman Sabre 2023: LARPing for War on China

30-07-2023: Largely out of the gaze of the mainstream media, the 2023 version of the Talisman Sabre military exercises will take place across Australia from the 22nd of July to the 4th of August. These war games have been held biennially since 2005, but the current drills are the largest to have ever taken place. Taking part with the Australian armed forces will be more than 30 000 military personnel from 13 nations, with others attending as observers. Armed forces from Fiji, France, Indonesia, Japan, Republic of Korea, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Tonga, the United Kingdom (UK) and Canada will take part – with military delegations from the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand attending as observers. For the first time, Germany will take an active part in the war games.[1] The simulated exercises will stretch across the states of New South Wales, Queensland, Northern Territory and Western Australia. In another first, the Pacific Ocean external Australian territory of Norfolk Island (situated midway between New Caledonia and New Zealand) will be a staging post for some of the military manoeuvres.

Rehearsal for war

It is an open secret that Talisman Sabre 2023 is in practice a live action role play (LARP) for war on Australia’s giant Pacific neighbour, the People’s Republic of China (PRC). This is not stated openly, but anyone can reasonably surmise that during the military exercises Norfolk Island will double as Taiwan, as part of the duplicitous attempt by Washington to break Taiwan away from mainland China – even if it means World War III. Talisman Sabre is officially aimed at improving “inter-operability” with the US military, meaning the Pentagon will lead the charge into conflict with the PRC, sooner or later, with other “partner” nations bringing up the rear. Australian Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles baldly states that Talisman Sabre aims at a “stable Indo-Pacific through an upholding of the rules-based order”.[2] Needless to say, the “rules-based order” is a euphemism for US (United States of America) led imperialism, which makes its own rules and expects all other nations to follow them – even if they are not informed what the “rules” are supposed to be.

Washington and its quisling satraps are desperately attempting to resurrect the dominant role it held over the globe during the 20th century. Yet this is a forlorn hope, as the Western capitalist economies stumble over backfiring sanctions imposed on Russia as part of NATO’s proxy war via Ukraine. The sanctions have had little to no effect on the Russian economy but have rebounded especially against the countries of the EU (European Union), and to a lesser extent in the US itself. Yet the contrast of the West’s floundering economies vis-à-vis the enormous Chinese economy is striking. In the US, workers’ wages have not increased in real terms since 1973 – a period of 50 years.[3] In the PRC, on the other hand, average workers’ wages have tripled just in the last 10 years.[4] In fact, the wage increases in the PRC over the last fifteen years have lead to some Western corporations set up in China actually relocating back to the US and other lower wage countries.[5] Some of these Western firms had outsourced their production to the PRC in the 1990s to take advantage of the then lower wages, but have seen this “benefit” evaporate in the face of annual substantial wage rises.

Stark comparison

Today, the PRC’s economy is the world’s second largest, yet if taken on the basis of Purchasing Power Parity (PPP – the amount of goods and services that can be purchased for a given amount of money), China’s economy has been the world’s leader since 2014.[6] In terms of GDP (Gross Domestic Product) growth today, the comparison between the PRC and the West is even more stark. Despite the nonsensical and harmful Covid lockdowns imposed on the economy for two years, China’s GDP growth is 5.5% for the first half of 2023.[7] During the same period, Australia’s GDP growth is a pathetic 0.2%[8], which is basically a recession. The US is faring slightly better, at 2%.[9] Yet the former European powerhouse economies are in negative growth, with Germany at minus 0.1 and the UK at minus 0.3.[10] Some say the economic outlook in Germany and the UK has never looked bleaker.

Working people in the West are also struggling with surging inflation. In Australia, even though the  current official inflation rate is down to 5.6%,[11] it has hovered around 7% over the last 12 months. The average inflation rate in the EU is 8%,[12] though in reality even higher. In the US, inflation has slowed to 3% in June, but this is down from a four decade high of 9.1% in June 2022.[13] Simultaneously, the inflation rate in the PRC at the end of June 2023 is….0.0% !![14] Over the last ten years, inflation did reach 4.5% in 2019, but other than that inflation in China has been lower than 2.5%, and usually in the 1% range. While the masses struggle and even some workers with full-time employment slide further into poverty in the West, cost of living pressures in the PRC, the world’s second largest country population wise (India is now slightly larger) – are more or less non-existent.

The PRC is not lacking for infrastructure either, in contrast to the West. Grabbing the headlines has been the PRC’s development of high-speed rail lines. The PRC already has more than 2500 high-speed rail trains in operation, which alone is more than the rest of the world combined.[15] While the PRC currently has 38 000 kilometres of high-speed rail lines, the state-owned China Railway Group has plans to double the length of this network by 2035.[16] By contrast the US has one train which reaches 150 miles per hour on a 16 mile segment of track in New Jersey, and a spate of projects in California, Texas and Nevada which have yet to get off the ground.[17] Meanwhile, the aging US rail network is plagued by derailments, which occur at the astonishing rate of around three per day.[18] Australia’s legacy of attempts to establish even one high speed rail line are the butt of ongoing jokes. The Australian federal government has spent around 150 million dollars on studies about the feasibility of high-speed rail over four decades,[19] yet not one kilometre of high-speed rail has been built, in a vast continent which desperately needs to ease road and domestic air travel congestion.

Cooperation, not war

What accounts for such clear-cut differences between the economic performance of the Western economies and the economy of the PRC ? It is evident that the PRC long ago abolished the capitalist mode of production, and therefore its economic activity is not primarily activated by the relentless pursuit of private profit for a numerically tiny elite. While private enterprise is certainly used on the Chinese mainland, it is subordinate to the gigantic state-owned enterprises which dominate manufacturing, scientific research and development, infrastructure building and maintenance, quantum computing, telecommunications and much more. Banking and finance is largely state-owned, and the land itself has been nationalised. These are the fruits of the epic socialist revolution during the mid part of the 20th century in China, in which hundreds of millions of workers and peasants rose up and overthrew landlords which had oppressed them for millennia, and European colonialist powers which had subjected them to a “century of humiliation”. Imperialism “lost” China at that point, and this hard-won independence is paying dividends for Chinese workers to this day.

US led imperialism cannot tolerate even the smallest rival (witness the bombing of the Nord Stream pipelines to prevent German economic cooperation with Russia), let alone a peer competitor – and certainly not one which has the ability to surpass it. From the moment the PRC was conceived in 1949, Washington has carried out wars, subversion, destablisation and attempted colour revolutions both within the PRC and in the countries which lie on its borders – with the ultimate aim of regime change in Beijing. The Korean War and the Vietnam War were the earliest attempts, which has been followed by decades of arming and funding (and often creating) “opposition” parties and movements in Myanmar, Thailand and Cambodia, to name a few. However, as long as Chinese workers experience vastly improved living standards, continually rising wages and the building of new infrastructure the People’s Republic of China will not and cannot be overthrown. Not by a long shot. Hence, the “need” of the imperialists for regime change via external means – a catastrophic world war.

Talisman Sabre 2023 is just one cog in the imperialist juggernaut aimed at the PRC. To be sure, while workers in China retain state power, they do not directly hold political power. This is exercised by a conservative and bureaucratic caste, which rigidly adheres to the twin Stalinist nostrums of “socialism in one country” and “peaceful coexistence”. While acknowledging the historical role of both Maoism and the Communist Party of China (CPC) what is required is a proletarian political revolution which establishes the democratic rule of workers’ councils, combined with workers’ revolutions in the capitalist West, to open the road to international socialism. Yet this political task is today subordinate to the unconditional military defence of the PRC against imperialism, in order to stave off the dire threat of a calamitous war which would cause incalculable damage and the loss of millions of innocent lives. The best method of avoiding such a cataclysm is for advanced workers to mould internationally linked vanguard parties based on authentic Trotskyism, i.e., genuine Marxism. A future of regional cooperation rather than conflict is possible once working people lay capitalism to rest.

WORKERS LEAGUE