You are right to oppose U.S. war moves in Ukraine and around the world. But demanding that this system “fund people's needs, not the war machine” is leading you in exactly the wrong direction! Here are 3 reasons why:

1. Hundreds of thousands of people have died in the war in Ukraine. Millions have become refugees. In what is now a proxy war with the U.S. and NATO using Ukrainians as cannon fodder to weaken their imperialist rival, Russia, two nuclear-armed rival superpowers are facing off and endangering humanity with World War 3. This could spiral out into nuclear catastrophe. And you think Americans should concern themselves with their pocketbooks?! The immorality of this is astounding. It is the well-worn path of pandering to people’s narrowest concerns reinforcing the American chauvinism that puts “American needs” above the lives and futures of people all over the world and all humanity.

What we urgently need is a radically different dynamic—people standing up for the interests of humanity, and NOT with their rival contending imperialists.

2. The basis on which Americans' “cost of living” is cheapened—through global networks of exploitation with hundreds of millions of people, especially women and over 150 million children toiling in the sweatshops, mines and farmlands—is enforced by that war machine. The wealth of America—as unevenly as it may be distributed—comes from the parasitism of capitalism-imperialism with the U.S. feeding off the rest of the world. This parasitism rests on the brutality, terror, violence and torture of the American military with its 750 bases in over 80 countries, proxy wars, coups and invasions. 

And anyway, we live under a system of capitalism-imperialism which cannot be made to “meet the people's needs.”  It is an economic and political system which can only run according to certain rules and dynamics. It is a system driven, not by human need or rational development, but by blind cutthroat competition over the more profitable exploitation of people and the resources of the planet. This system can't be reformed to be other than what it is, it must be overthrown through an ACTUAL revolution. 

3. Instead of seeing ourselves as "Americans" and acting around narrow self-interest, we should identify and stand with oppressed and exploited humanity the world over and fight together with them to bring in a whole new world.  Instead of appealing for a better share of the spoils of empire, what we need to be doing is organizing now for revolution—to defeat and dismantle the violent repressive institutions of this system and establish a radically different, and far better, state power with an economic and political system that can put humanity's resources and knowledge to meeting people's needs and act as a base area for revolution around the world. There is a concrete blueprint for this in the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America, written by the revolutionary leader and author of the new communism, Bob Avakian.

We are in a rare time when this revolution has become more possible. The rulers at the top of this society are splitting apart. The “democratic” norms that have held this country together since the Civil War are being ripped up by a fascist Republican Party, while the Democratic Party threatens the future of humanity. These accelerating changes are horrific, dangerous AND also create a heightened possibility to wrench something emancipating from this—real revolution. But people need to break with their loyalty to this vicious monster of a country and become a revolutionary people fighting for the interests of humanity. 

“We can no longer afford to allow these imperialists
to dominate the world and to determine the destiny of humanity.
They need to be overthrown as quickly as possible.”

—Bob Avakian, from The Bob Avakian Interviews at youtube.com/therevcoms

NO U.S./NATO WAR WITH RUSSIA!
STOP U.S. THREATS AGAINST CHINA!  

NO WORLD WAR 3!
IT’S THIS SYSTEM, NOT HUMANITY,
THAT NEEDS TO BECOME EXTINCT!  

WE DON’T ACCEPT THEIR FUTURE—
IT’S TIME TO GET ORGANIZED FOR A REAL REVOLUTION.