To those in the peace movement, the need for its existence is obvious. Vast numbers of people are dying, being maimed, starved, made homeless, and forced to migrate as a result of U.S. weapons, sanctions, and interventions. Irreplaceable resources are being poured into war making and preparations for war, rather than being used to provide for our human and environmental needs. Billionaires are becoming even more rich and powerful, resorting to ever more violent means of preserving their wealth and control over resources, both here in the U.S. and abroad.

The great majority of people in the U.S. want a peaceful world, but many need to be convinced of the need for a peace movement and to participate in it. Many also need to be convinced that peace is possible.

To be successful in bringing about both peace and justice, the movement must grow in size and breadth to deepen its understanding of the causes of war.

What hinders this two-way growth of the peace movement? The problem is at least threefold. There are ideological factors. There are issues related to strategy and tactics. And the U.S. ruling class, which has every motivation to prevent the development of a mass peace movement, uses its incredible resources to do so.

We must distinguish between mass, often largely spontaneous antiwar upsurges against this or that specific war and the longer term peace movement. Many wars — including proxy wars and economic wars, as well as targeted assassinations and coups, carry on without any mass resistance being launched against them. But there remains a consistent peace movement made up of activists who understand that devastating wars that go on, even without active bombing, and that without justice, there is no peace. These antiwar upsurges are a component of the peace movement, and the peace movement is a component of these mass upsurges.

War is a consequence of the evolution of capitalism, especially in its monopoly capital, or imperialist, stage.

Marxist-Leninists understand that capitalism ultimately drives war. The constant push toward war, though it can be halted through mass resistance, is an inevitable consequence of the evolution of capitalism, especially in its monopoly capital, or imperialist, stage. War is profitable to the few; peace uplifts the many. Currently, many, if not most, of those active on behalf of peace and justice are not anti-imperialists. For them, the connection between the underlying economic system and the war imperative is missing. One certainly is not required to be anti-imperialist to make important contributions to the struggle for peace. But without building an anti-monopoly coalition, we cannot root out the violence and devastation. Without making this connection, antiwar forces lurch from opposing this war to opposing or even supporting that war, while not conceiving of a common thread. Without an understanding of imperialism, many exhibit inconsistency in their positions — e.g. opposing the genocide of Palestinians while calling to continue the war in Ukraine, or opposing the blockade against Cuba while calling for regime change in Venezuela.

For imperialist countries, World Wars I and II were waged to contest who would rule the world. Not all the countries that fought in World War II were imperialist. China and the Soviet Union, for example, following the socialist path, had no big monopoly capitalists seeking to expand their control over the world market. But by 1945, it was clear that the U.S. had become far and away the world’s most powerful imperialist country. The only state that truly challenged its top dog status was the U.S.S.R., a major factor that led to the Cold War. The Soviet Union had made the pivotal contribution to winning WWII, primarily in the European theater. As a result, it was devastated and exhausted by the war.

Most of the wars fought since then have been waged by the U.S. and its allies, aiming to continue colonizing or recolonizing smaller, less developed states. Across Southeast and West Asia, from Africa to Latin America, and even within Europe, most of the bloodshed — targeting mainly civilians — has come about as a result of U.S. imperialism and its allies seeking to control markets and resources and minimize labor costs to maximize corporate profits.

The U.S.-led wars on Korea from 1950–53, and on Vietnam from 1945–1975, both undeclared by Congress, were ended largely because the U.S. military, despite its overwhelming firepower, was seriously bloodied and fought to a standstill by indigenous forces that were unwilling to allow their homelands to continue to be ruled by foreigners, and also by growing domestic antiwar sentiment — including among U.S. troops, and by a growing international peace movements.

This is not the place to provide a full historical review of the many other U.S. invasions and proxy wars. In some cases, U.S. imperialism achieved its objectives, such as in the Dominican Republic, Panama, Yugoslavia, Libya and Syria. In other cases, such as in Afghanistan, it was driven out of the countries it sought to dominate, though not necessarily by popular forces. At this writing, the proxy war in Ukraine is a losing proposition for the people on all sides, while the U.S. financial-industrial-military complex continues to rake in trillions of dollars producing instruments of death. Syria has been turned over to U.S. proxy terrorists and the Turkish and Israeli militaries. The U.S.-supported genocide of the Palestinian peoples is shamelessly ongoing, as is the strangulation of Cuba. Now there is also the active bombing of Venezuelan ships and the threat to decapitate Venezuela’s political leadership. Few media reports cover the civil war in Sudan, financed by U.S. allies in the Middle East, or the longstanding resource contest in the Congo. At the center of the instability being generated in the Congo stand the interests of U.S. tech monopolies and their access to an immense supply of cheap cobalt and other minerals essential to high tech products.

Peace movement history

Immediately after WWII, which for the U.S. concluded with the brutal and unnecessary atomic bombing of Japan, the U.S. refused to internationalize atomic weapons stockpiles. This initiated the nuclear weapons race. It also initiated the “ban the bomb” movement. Tens of millions of signatures were gathered worldwide via Stockholm Appeal petitions to the United Nations.

In 1949, the U.S. created NATO as an arm of the Pentagon, among other reasons, to circumvent any of the United Nations’ international democratic limitations on its power.

The ban the bomb movement was superseded in the midst of a massive struggle for civil rights. As the U.S. war on Southeast Asia expanded in the mid 1960s, the Vietnam antiwar campaigns took precedence. These mainly youth-led campaigns faltered when Nixon ended U.S. direct involvement, and then fizzled as Vietnam gained victory in 1975.

Ban the bomb was reincarnated as the Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign early in the 1980s as Ronald Reagan threatened Europe and the U.S.S.R. with destabilizing medium-range missiles. By the late ‘80s, the older and newer anti-nuclear weapons campaigns coalesced into the SANE–FREEZE coalition that later became the Peace Action–led movement.

Much of the leadership of these nuclear weapons abolition campaigns narrowly focused on extirpating a single weapons system possessed only by a few states. They largely remained at arms length from opposing imperialist wars, coups, and leader assassinations, and generally distanced itself from various national liberation struggles.

There were further divisions in the peace movement during the existence of the Soviet Union. Anti-communists differed from the pro-war crowd by decrying “a pox on both your houses.” Anti-communists refused to acknowledge U.S. imperialism, which, as Lenin defined it, is necessitated by the natural development of capitalism.

After the collapse of the U.S.S.R., instead of demilitarizing, the U.S. brandished its massive war and economic extortion machinery against minor powers, while the antiwar movement remained disunited and frequently exhibited such divisions. In the illegal wars on Iraq in 1990, Serbia in 1999, and on Libya and Syria, and in the imperialist sanctions against Venezuela and Nicaragua, the goals of a united peace movement remained unrealized. In particular, whenever the ruling class mounted a campaign to demonize a national leader to justify either a direct or proxy war, the peace movement was weakened when components of it bought into the demonization. One need only mention leaders of the denoted nations — Hussein, Milosevic, Gaddafi, Assad, Chavez, Maduro and Ortega — to reveal splits in the peace movement. Fidel Castro continued to be dehumanized to justify the 1960s invasion and ongoing massive sanctions against Cuba.

Opposition to President George W. Bush’s “you are with us or you are with the terrorists” response to the September 2001 attacks mainly came from the left of the peace movement. But opposition to Bush’s insistence on invading Iraq again in 2003 was broad and massive. It led to the creation of United for Peace and Justice, a huge antiwar coalition that managed to bring hundreds of thousands of protesters into the streets. Once the Bush administration, ignoring the protests, actually invaded Iraq, the peace movement slowly subsided. What remained continued pushing for the U.S. to abide by treaties that limit nuclear weapons. These were mostly local peace actions, and the peace movement was unable to generate any substantial, visible, national peace pressure.

Today’s peace movement

Following the Russian 2022 military invasion into Ukraine, the peace movement was unable to unify around demands for a ceasefire or to stop the flood of U.S. weapons into the region, again exposing underlying ideological fissures within the movement. Repeating a dreary pattern fed by massive propaganda, the leader of yet another country, in this case Russia’s Vladimir Putin, was being demonized in the U.S. and other big business media. Parts of the peace movement in the U.S. failed to maintain consistent pro-peace positions and to keep the focus of their fire against U.S. foreign and military policy. Some accepted U.S. military aid to Ukraine as a defense of that country’s sovereignty, rather than a threat to it. Others failed to oppose the Russian invasion. These factors contributed to disarming an already weakly unified peace movement.

There are many threads to the divisions that arose in response to the Russian invasion.

These included:

• NATO’s ongoing expansion and weaponization up to Russia’s borders.
• The 2014 U.S. and neo-Nazi engineered coup overthrowing the legitimate Ukrainian government and enacting policies to attack ethnically Russian Ukrainians in the east.
• Anti-Russia sentiment stemming from both Cold War–era anti-Sovietism and to a large extent U.S. imperialism’s competition with Russia over which country would supply fossil fuels to Europe.
• The war on Syria, in which Russia and the U.S./NATO and Israel took opposite sides.
• The exploitation by Democratic leadership of apparent connections between Putin and Trump in the 2016 elections.

It is very clear that parts of the peace movement, including Marxists and non-Marxists, continue to support U.S.–NATO imperialism and the proxy war in Ukraine. They downplay the loss of life and the extensive destruction, ignore the real attacks against ethnically Russian Ukrainians by neo-Nazis and the existential provocations against Russia itself. They effectively support an imperialist-installed, anti-Communist, and corrupt Ukrainian government in Kyiv. There are those who claim to be in the peace movement who are urging continued war to the last Ukrainian or the dissolution of the Russian Federation.

The antiwar movement is affected by which political party controls the White House, exacerbating contradictions in the popular front. While the wars on Iraq and Afghanistan started under George W. Bush continued apace under Barack Obama, many of the latter’s Democratic Party supporters stopped criticizing U.S. war policies. The Obama administration’s terroristic destruction of Libya and weaponization of religious fanatics invading Syria drew little opposition in Congress among most Democrats. His designating $1 trillion (now closer to $2 trillion) to modernize the U.S. nuclear arsenal was similarly shrugged off. Too many Democrats, inconsistently antiwar, put their party interests above peace.

Sections of the peace movement have failed in different ways to make the connection between the fight for peace abroad and the struggle for democracy at home.

It is also the case that the latest outbreak of the Israeli genocide of Palestinians began with the support of the Biden administration. The mass movement against that genocide and in defense of the right to self-determinination for Palestinians, the greatest peace movement in the U.S. since 2003, developed under the Biden administration. Under Biden, we also saw the beginning of massive repression against those defending Palestinian lives and land. That movement has suffered further serious setbacks resulting from Trump and MAGA’s early targeting of it with even more mass repression. We also witnessed the divisions that developed between it and the broader anti-MAGA movement in the leadup to the 2024 elections. In both cases, sections of the peace movement have failed in different ways to make the connection between the fight for peace abroad and the struggle for democracy at home.

The two war parties

Historically, people in the peace movement have considered the Republicans to be the war party. However, reality is more complex. In 2025, many MAGA Republicans have said they want to stop sending weapons to Ukraine in order to redirect that money toward further militarization of the U.S. southern border. It remains to be seen whether they will finally fold to Trump’s mercurial policies, or alternatively split from them. Most big business Democrats, however, vote to continue the war in Ukraine. The leadership of both parties is unified in promoting the genocide in Gaza, ignoring the massive anti-genocide, pro-Palestinian, movement that arose in schools, universities, churches, and union halls. The Republicans and Democratic leadership are also united in their senseless commitment to preparing for war on China. At the same time, most elected officials who do support peace movement demands are, at this stage, usually elected as Democrats.

It’s clear that by October 2023, the U.S. peace movement was a shell, weak and divided, kept alive by graying generations that had opposed the war on Vietnam with only a few young people and few people of color.

What happened in occupied Palestine on and following October 7 is well known to today’s activists, young and old. The violent breakout of Palestinians, imprisoned in Gaza for decades with essentially no chance to live normally, and regularly used for target practice by the Israeli military, became the excuse to initiate a long-planned, brutal and genocidal response by Israel. The genocide, in turn, has generated massive opposition in the U.S. and globally. As in the ’60s and ’70s, it is driven primarily by college youth, now joined by pro-Palestine and progressive Arab, Muslim, and Jewish communities, as well as broader peace groups.

Demands to divest from weapons manufacturers are a vital challenge to the prerogatives of big capital to invest wherever it can make the greatest profits.

The nature of the peace movement in the U.S. changed dramatically in October 2023. Demands by students for their college administrators to reveal their investment portfolios and divest them from manufacturers of weapons destined for Israel, then from all weapons manufacturers, are a vital challenge to the prerogatives of big capital to invest wherever it decides to make the greatest profits. University administrations across the country met the demands with equally massive crackdowns on student encampments, protests, and organizations. University repression expanded under the Trump administration with the weaponization of antisemitism as an excuse to broadly eviscerate First Amendment rights.

The student movements have been creative in resistance, but it is clear that over the course of the summer of 2024, university administrators developed their own war plans to threaten student leaders with serious consequences for demanding justice for Palestinians. In this context, shortly before the November 2024 elections, the Heritage Foundation published its anti-communist Project Esther, a plan for mass repression and infiltration aimed at wiping out the pro-Palestine movement. Now in office, Trump has weaponized an already repressive immigration apparatus to further weaken peace forces. His “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence” decree, and the FBI defining transgender people as “violent extremists,” moves the struggle into new territory for the domestic peace movement.

Although some students have broadened the pro-Palestine movement by linking up with other targets of imperialism — including African Americans and immigrant communities — overall, the greater part of this movement is narrowly focused. What the U.S. is doing to Cubans, starving them into submission, is less visible than the genocide of Palestinians, but no less a deadly result of imperialism. This is not to imply that the fierce opposition to genocide should be diluted in any way. Rather, we must recognize that imperialism has separate branches we must oppose, but its roots are in monopoly capitalism. U.S. big business leads the way, cajoling others in Europe and elsewhere into the role of junior partner. The slaughter and starvation that Israel, the U.S., and Europe are carrying out today represent examples of imperialism across the world stage.

As the Trump administration attempts to implement fascist control, with simultaneous attacks on many fronts, the peace movements are in the midst of a rapidly changing firestorm. Political winds appear and disappear, constantly altering direction. The situation requires all the social justice movements to unify around a resolute vision which can peacefully challenge U.S. imperialism at home and abroad with massive resistance and nimble tactics.

What now?

There exist bright shoots of struggle. The Poor People’s Campaign, for one, includes a plank calling for a $350 billion cut in military spending. Peace organizers must consider building on this and other existing initiatives.

Some national trade unions, especially the International Longshore and Warehouse Union and The United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE), have taken principled stands against imperialist wars, but many more are needed. Last year, a good number joined the National Labor Network for Ceasefire and passed resolutions calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. Other organizations representing mass democratic forces within the anti-MAGA movement also passed ceasefire resolutions. These included Working Families Party, United We Dream, the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the Black Church PAC’s Faith Leaders for Ceasefire, the Movement 4 Black Lives, the Sunrise movement, and others. Even some more centrist forces, including environmental groups like the Sierra Club, have called for a ceasefire in Gaza.

How can organizers help to bring these labor and democratic forces fully into constructing an irresistible and unified peace and social justice movement?

Extensive collective work is needed to achieve the aims of these organizations. How can organizers help to bring these labor and democratic forces fully into constructing an irresistible and unified peace and social justice movement? How can organizers elaborate programs for a just transition that would provide good jobs in a peaceful green economy to generate that unity?

The November 8 CPUSA Peace Conference II is the next step to understanding what a Marxist-Leninist, anti-imperialist party can and must contribute to deepening understanding and strengthening unity between today’s existing peace movement and all social justice movements.

History challenges the Communist Party to broaden the U.S. and global peace movement to include vast numbers of union members, civil rights and anti-racist activists, immigrants rights movements, women’s and LGBTQ equality struggles, environmental and youth activists, and all generally peace-minded people. These forces must be moved into united action demanding an end to war, an end to the war economy, and a just transition to a green peace economy where workers and oppressed peoples thrive. The time is now for a mass, working-class-led democratic movement demanding people, peace, and planet before profits!

The opinions of the author do not necessarily reflect the positions of the CPUSA

Images: People march in August 2024 to demand #NotAnotherBomb, photo by Dean Tulkoff / Jews for Racial & Economic Justice Action (X); People protest Iraq War in D.C. (Verso Books)