BY MARY-ALICE WATERS  
“Twenty-one years have elapsed since the end of the last world conflagration, and various publications in every language are celebrating this event, symbolized by the defeat of Japan. A climate of optimism is apparent in many sectors of the different camps into which the world is divided.” Yet, “it is appropriate to ask whether this peace is real.”

These were the words with which Ernesto Che Guevara opened his 1966 Message to the Tricontinental, “Create two, three…many Vietnams: That is the watchword.”

These words are an appropriate place to begin today—not only because this message, Che’s last major political article, was published thirty years ago in the magazine that has taken the initiative to bring together the participants in this international symposium. Far more important is the fact that Che’s Message to the Tricontinental so accurately depicts the imperialist reality of the world we seek to change, the reality we must face unflinchingly if our anti-imperialist struggle is to be victorious, within the United States as elsewhere.

Che’s words remind us how well he understood the world in which, at the side of Fidel and others, he helped lead the working people of Cuba to establish the first free territory of the Americas and open a new chapter in the history of the modern working-class movement. They help focus our attention on the most important change that has occurred over the thirty years since Che’s death: the fact that the relationship of class forces in a world still dominated by imperialism—with ups and downs, advances and setbacks—has shifted in favor of the oppressed and exploited.

The post-World War II economic and social order christened by Washington’s heinous flood of fire against the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is still with us. But the “climate of optimism” Che pointed to in 1966 is no more. Today’s climate is rather one of foreboding among the imperialist masters, marked by short periods of “irrational exuberance” (to quote the top central banker serving the U.S. rulers) and lengthening periods of gloom; heightened anxiety among the middle classes of all countries who count on the propertied rulers for protection and stability; social polarization marked by aggressive probes by rightist and incipient fascist currents; and, most important of all, signs of resistance and rising defensive struggles among those from whose labor capital extracts surplus value in an attempt to reverse its long-term crisis.

In the United States, for the first time in years, an important section of the working class nationwide, the UPS (United Parcel Service) workers organized by the Teamsters union, emerged victorious from a hard-fought strike that drew popular support in the United States as well as worldwide attention. A new preoccupation is palpable in serious bourgeois circles in the United States, as they face the prospect of more frequent and more successful working-class resistance to declining real wages, accelerated speedup, two-tier pay scales, and other stratagems that seek to divide workers and weaken solidarity on the job. The employers are also considering the upsetting implications for their precarious economic health of the possibility that defensive battles by workers may set an example and bring weighty reinforcements to other social struggles—against police brutality, for immigrants’ rights, in support of women’s equality, against racist discrimination.

The United States is no exception in this regard. Throughout the imperialist world, and especially in Europe, the pattern of growing resistance and sharpening class conflict is evident.

Those who dominated the other two “sectors of the different camps into which the world is divided”—to whom Che referred almost thirty years ago and who, as he noted, shared the “climate of optimism” with imperialism’s ruling families—also find the weather sharply changed. The bureaucratic castes that dominated much of what was termed the socialist camp today find themselves in disarray as they run after a declining capitalist system. And the bourgeoisies of the third world—from Mexico to Malaysia—are discovering the awful truth that the so-called miracle of emerging market economies doesn’t culminate in emerged industrially advanced capitalist countries, stable currencies, and broadening well-being, but leads instead to explosive instability and increased domination and ownership by all the parasitic forms of imperial capital. Both these formerly optimistic ruling elites today confront urban and rural toilers in greater numbers, toilers increasingly impatient with the long wait for the promised capitalist prosperity for all.

The dawn of the twenty-first century brings with it not a new international order but speculative frenzies and growing capitalist division and disarray. Che was right: the peace was not real.  
 
 
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