John Bellamy Foster: Today, as Mészáros has argued, and as Hugo Chávez was prepared to argue on a world stage, we need a New International. The only force that can combat imperialism today is a worldwide struggle of workers (what I like to call an emerging “environmental proletariat,” reflecting the extended material struggles of our time) in which human solidarity is globalized. In my book Naked Imperialism I argued that the present, “potentially most dangerous phase of imperialism” (as István Mészaros calls it) was brought into being by the demise of the Soviet Union, which allowed the United States as the sole remaining, superpower—though relying also on NATO—to initiate regime change in parts of the Middle East, Central Asia, northern Africa, parts of Eastern Europe, and elsewhere, initiating what in the Council of Foreign Relations in the United States (the main think tank of U.S. imperialism) is being called a “New Thirty Years War.” Any mere standing back and letting this happen without resistance—for example under the delusion that this is simply “anti-terrorism” or “humanitarian intervention”—is to sign over the world to the global forces of destruction. Local struggles against imperialism will always occur; the global struggle means that the world’s people as a whole must link to these local struggles and come to the aid of them, creating an unbreakable chain. Fortunately, again, there are contradictions, in the economic, political, and ecological realms, that are driving people together. Today’s imperialist intervention might even be seen as a desperate effort by the powers that be to prevent the emergence a more unified global revolt, by seeking to drive a wedge in between. More here.