July 28, 2014 marks one hundred years since the beginning of the First World War (WWI), first military confrontation characterized by Lenin in the preface to the French and German editions of his enlightened work "Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism", as an imperialist war (ie, a war for the division of the world, for the partition and the new distribution of the colonies, of the "spheres of influence" of finance capital, etc.). Later, Lenin added: “Capitalism has grown into a world system of colonial oppression and of the financial strangulation of the overwhelming majority of the population of the world by a handful of “advanced” countries. And this “booty” is shared between two or three powerful world plunderers armed to the teeth (America, Great Britain, Japan), who are drawing the whole world into their war over the division of their booty.”

When studying the phenomenon of war, Marxists - Leninists we start from the concept outlined by Karl Marie von Clausewitz (1780-1831), in his famous work "On War", which conceptualized: "War is a mere continuation of politics by other means ... We see, therefore, that war is not merely a political act but a real political instrument, a continuation of political activity, an embodiment of the same by other means". Add to this definition the need to study the phenomenon of war in close liaison with the historical period in which it matures and materializes; Lenin speaks about this: "It is impossible to understand a war without understanding the time, so the political content of every war must be determined in each case, establish "what is the class character of a war, why it was unleashed, what classes sustain it, what historical and historical-economical conditions have originated it."

Meanwhile Engels concludes that whatever the causes of war, its root is in the economy. In his famous work Anti-Dühring, where he developed the Theory of Violence and Power, he notes that: "(...) Violence is no more than the means and (...), however, the goal lies in the economic benefit”, stressing that military violence is itself a political act. From these thesis, Marxism concludes that wars are the result of a society of antagonistic classes, they are triggered and are held in the name of economic and political objectives of a particular class.

Another relevant aspect which Lenin worked about has to do with the social character of war, which expresses the most notable aspects of its political content, its social and class orientation, the consistency or not of the political objectives of each party at war with the fundamental direction of social progress. He affirmed that if the political objectives of the war are in the course of social progress, i.e., if they come from the affirmation of social justice, the liberation of the workers from social oppression and exploitation, that war is just. Conversely, if the goal is to subjugate other peoples, to conquer foreign lands, to plunder the riches of another country, to assert the dominance of an exploiting class over another, this war is unjust. Hence, from revealing the essence and class character of wars we address the problem of their characterization and classification, for which, we insist, is of paramount importance to determine the fact of its political content, that is, the political objectives or the parties at war and the class contradictions, states and coalitions that underlie them, as this war political content determines its progressive or reactionary role in the history of development of human society and from there its just or unjust character, consistent with the interests or not of the labouring masses. Hence, Lenin concludes that the legitimacy and justness of war can be established "only from the point of view of the proletariat and its struggle for emancipation, we do not accept any other point of view."

Leaning on dialectical and historical materialism, Lenin reveals the interconnectedness of imperialist politics and armed violence, showing that it is the instrument used by imperialism to strengthen and expand the class rule of the monopoly bourgeoisie.

When these formulations are reviewed, their early pre-clarity is surprising, since the recent U.S. history testifies that the military interference in the affairs of other countries has become the standard of the dominant class governing the main enclave of imperialism worldwide. According to data from the book: "The U.S. strategy" by E. Krippendorff (pro-imperialist ideologue), the U.S. military intervened in the affairs of other states and peoples 161 times between 1798 and 1945, and 55 times between 1945 and 1969. From 1969 until the early 90s, the U.S. used more than ten times its armed forces against other sovereign countries and regimes, being the majority of these armed invasions, "undeclared" wars. Thus we infer the rapid increase that this phenomenon has undergone from the late eighteenth century to the late twentieth century.

Today we find so alarming the deepening of capitalist competition in the international economic market and the political contradictions between the major imperialist states, the growth of inequality in economic and political development, the increasing intensification of the contradictions between the monopolies, their increasing merger with the State and the subordination of the latter to the interests of those. This confirms more every day that the policy of imperialism is the concentrated expression of the economy and the latter integrates the causes and factors that create war, which is imposed on the peoples anywhere in the world. By analyzing the activities of U.S. imperialism in the Middle East, we see how they grew after WWI. The U.S. monopolies were determined to get oil concessions there, despite the determined opposition of England and France, who dominated the region. As a result of a bitter struggle with the English competitors, the powerful U.S. oil companies, with great help from the U.S. state apparatus, gradually penetrated the oil extraction industry of the Middle Eastern countries. However, even in 1940 the British firms controlled 72% of all explored oil reserves there, while the Americans were entitled only 9.8%. But the United States managed to create a basis for future expansion in the Middle East on the eve of the Second World War (WWII). American concessions in Saudi Arabia constituted the main outpost.

In parallel to this developments, the interventionist trends of U.S. policy in the Middle East were markedly demonstrated after the end of WWII. During the post war years the Middle East occupied one of the first places in the priorities of U.S. foreign policy, which is explained by the fact that, in parallel with the U.S. economic expansion in the region, its military-strategic and political significance in the global plans of the U.S. grew unswervingly, with significant deployments of military forces in the region and the different types of war that currently take place in that part of the world with the clear purpose of establishing a deployment of forces capable of controlling the main trade corridors of the wide border area ranging and integrating the territories of Russia and China.

For decades, the alliance between major monopolies and the representatives of the imperialist military machine embedded in the American state structure has been consolidating. This alliance has a deeply reactionary character and increasingly influences the policies of several imperialist states and becomes increasingly aggressive, given that the nature of its program, plans and objectives shows that: 1) After WWII, the program to achieve world hegemony proclaimed by U.S. monopoly capital led to a militarization never seen before in American history, accompanied by an arms race and the subjection of all activities of the country to the demands of politics "from positions of strength", 2) The progress and development of the scientific-technical revolution in the twentieth century transformed military production and contributed to the emergence of new consortia, with powerful new monopoly capital industries supported by massive investments, which worked primarily for the needs of war, and 3) The growing influence and real power of the Secretary of Defense in the decisions regarding the direction and character of the development of the economy of the U.S. is determined by the above mentioned, which confirms the relationship between the military imperialist apparatus and the monopolies.

Already in 1917, Lenin wrote that the United States “have completely sunk into the all-European filthy, bloody morass of bureaucratic-military institutions which subordinate everything to themselves, and suppress everything”. American militarism inherited the greed from the past, being always ready to rudely and unceremoniously intrude in the affairs of the rest of the peoples.

After WWII, the militarization of the U.S. followed an upward and firm path. The Leninist description of militarism remains valid for U.S. militarism acting "as a military force that serves the capitalist countries in their international confrontations”. The highly reactionary character of imperialism goes back to the founding days of the U.S. as a nation, as expressed in 1845 by the journalist John L. O'Sullivan in New York's journal Democratic Review. In his article, O'Sullivan explained the reasons for the necessary territorial expansion of the United States and supported the annexation of Texas. He said: "And that claim is by the right of our manifest destiny to overspread and to possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given us for the development of the great experiment of liberty and federated self-government entrusted to us. It is a right as having a tree to get the air and land required for the full development of their capacities and growth that targets". Then in 1853 the "democrat" senator Stephen Arnold Douglas, said that the "United States is destined to exercise hegemony on the continent through battleships and guns". As we know, in this period, the expansionist nature of the U.S. reached peak in the nineteenth century with the usurpation of more than half of the territory of Mexico, that the Treaty of (imperialist) Peace Guadalupe - Hidalgo, guaranteed the annexation of a vast area of more than 2 million square kilometers located north of the Rio Grande. Later, the northern victory in the American Civil War definitely strengthened the dominance of the pro-imperialist conservative ideology of the already prosperous industrial-financial bourgeoisie over the archaic and conservative ideology of the Southern aristocracy, limited to agricultural production dependent on slave labour.

Finally, as proof of the most retrograde ideology of imperialism in this period, take the book, "Diplomacy" by Henry Kissinger. The content of the introductory chapter called “The New World Order” is undoubtedly a clear expression of the ultra-reactionary ideological essence of one of the main ideologists during the twentieth century; it says: "Almost as if according to some natural law, in every century seems to emerge a country with the power, the will, and the intellectual and moral impetus to shape the entire international system in accordance with its own values​​". With this statement, the author attempts to give ideological foundation to the interventionist and militaristic policy of U.S. imperialism, as if it were a fact previously predetermined or preconceived by an above earthly power. This anti-historical idea of predestination supports the claims of various ideologues of imperialism, to which he added the worship of force and militarism, racial theory, Malthusianism to finally ascend to the fiercest anti-communism through ideological conceptual foundations of imperialism, expressed by A.T. Mahan, Moltke and Schlieffen, H. Morgenthau and A. Schlesinger, C. Woodruff, Mackinder, and N. Spykman who, among others, back up the idea that there are "civilized" and "politically underdeveloped" nations in the world. The former have to assume the leadership of the world, regardless of the way they should use to achieve this: by exterminating inferior races and peoples or by the subjection by force of those whose extermination is not achieved. These theses are therefore those that continue today serving as support and justification for the actions developed for example by the Zionist state of Israel against the Palestinian people, or the French imperialist state against the Libyan people or the mercenary organizations openly supported by the Americans and the combined forces of the member states of NATO against the Syrian state, where today the imperialist aggression develops under different operational modalities in its realization, but with the same goals of plunder, territorial and economic control at the service of the widening of the limits of their policy and consolidation of their power in the Middle East.

When analyzing the final outcome reached by the Allied powers during World War II, the U.S. and the USSR, based on the Yalta, Potsdam and Tehran agreements among others, agreed to a new division of the world, being established boundaries and limits of their geopolitical and military areas. Since the end of WWII on May 9th, 1945, and until the fall of the Berlin Wall, the political and military strategy of imperialism was aimed at the containment of the progress of the proletarian, anti-imperialist and socialist revolution and the defeat of the socialist camp. On the other hand, the goal of the socialist bloc led by the USSR was the defeat of imperialism, while moving forward in the development and consolidation of the socialist model as a precondition for the building of communism. The way in which the great military contest of WWII was finally resolved gave rise to the so-called bipolar world, in which for decades all regional conflicts would be explained in the context of the East-West confrontation: The Cold War, expression of a new way of imperialist confrontation determined by the completion, prior to the end of WWII, of the atomic bomb and the possibility of a war using these weapons of mass destruction (the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were nuclear attacks ordered by Harry Truman, President of the United States which took place on August 6 and 9, 1945) led to the policy of deterrence between the two major powers, USA and the USSR, and determined the course of confrontation for decades. Today, only the Democratic People's Republic of Korea uses nuclear deterrence as a factor preventing imperialism so far from the total control of the strategic peninsula in Southeast Asia.

Armed conflict then became a Strategy of Indirect Confrontation. Examples: Iran, Guatemala, Hungary, Korea, Cuba, Nicaragua, Dominican Republic, Honduras, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Central America, Cambodia, Laos, Czechoslovakia, Chile, etc.

Indirect Confrontation Strategy triggered the specialization of the covert operations sections where the forms of struggle used achieve the goals of control of entire societies, without having to move armies to execute the traditional invasions of U.S. marines, which were and are "the routine activity abroad the Marine Corps" [1].

Covert Operations and the type of activity which is now classified within the range “Military Operations Other than War” [2] were used in Iran and Guatemala in the 50s and in Chile in 1973 to name but a few. These activities “other than war” are constituted by the systematic use of psychological warfare in all its forms. The violence and the deployment of agents to operate in the country to destabilize, to support and training forces of pro-imperialist organizations from the target country.

Building favourable realities for destabilizing, using private companies for mass information (television, printed press, radio, internet, etc.) with the aim to misinform, confuse, stigmatize and install within the subjectivity of the masses mechanisms of exacerbation in order to achieve insurrectionary social explosions are one of the cornerstones of this type or modality of imperialist confrontation. Another component that accompanies these operations is the application of military actions carried out by mercenaries and paramilitaries, as happened on April 11, 2002, during the coup against the Bolivarian Revolution aiming at the seizing of power through armed way using the civilian population and members of the Army. Within these activities “other than war” the same goal is pursued by the funding of pro-imperialist political organizations, NGOs, to participate in elections and, through electoral means, take control of the societies. In both cases, these objectives could only be achieved with an army, which would be used in the event of failure of other methods including Military Operations Other than War.

This operational redesign for the aggression of peoples and governments eventually produced the destruction of the countries of the socialist bloc. The Soviet Union is thus defeated in the Cold War. This defeat of the USSR and the socialist camp left U.S. imperialism without a justification for continuing the policy of aggression and thus contain and defeat the revolutionary processes in their areas of influence. The strategy of indirect confrontation, which had been designed in the context of bipolarity, where there was a real threat of war with a power of mass destruction, was left without effect, but the military force of global characteristics of American imperialism and its regional operational commands and databases deployed in the world remained intact. But the most important for the American Imperialist Corporate State are the military budgets that increased to cover the contracts of the military industrial complex, the multinationals producing weapons and the rest of the whole complex network of production, education and training troops.

All this intricate military-corporate scaffolding left without the necessary justification to continue with the preparation of annual budgets. On the other hand, once defeated the Soviet Union and the Socialist Bloc dismembered, the advance plans of International Monopoly Financial Capital towards Asia and the countries that were part of the Socialist Bloc forced the Imperialist Corporate States to develop a foreign policy in line with the expansion goals of Great International Monopoly Capital, within the Neoliberal Globalization process that had already begun. The procedure is now to realize the exploitation of the world's peoples and plunder of raw materials, energy, water and biodiversity, without an enemy that could have contained the expansion. It is therefore the final offensive of imperialism to impose on the world the government of imperialist corporations and subjugate the people on a global scale to a new form of slavery.

The new strategic concept of the war, based on the alleged threats to national security, is directed to the Southern, neocolonial and dependent from imperialist economy countries. Thus, the American Imperialist Corporate State protects the profits of the Military and Industrial Complex and the health of the U.S. economy itself in the long period of economic recession. The new post cold war military policy of aggression seeks to protect the interests of the Imperialist Corporate State and the profits of Great Interational Monopoly Capital, to whom represents, and consolidate American military hegemony, basis of the international politics in the current period.

Hence, in the last decade imperialism has been changing the ways of conducting armed conflicts and wars. From the analysis of these, it is found that besides the state armies, private military companies (PMCs), Private Security Companies (PSC), paramilitary organizations, private armies and mercenaries are increasingly emerging as new actors of war. These new actors or private companies develop activities in the areas of recruitment of qualified personnel to offer in service to military missions, in military advice, reconnaissance and intelligence tasks and military training. The growing expansion of this global business has now reached an estimated 200 billion dollars annually. Iraq is now the most advanced example of the privatization of war with 180,000 contractors working on military or security duties.

Thus the participation of states in the wars is “blurred” and UN and international law lose weight. It is offshore business and offshore law. The regulatory factors of the war, the responsibilities of governments and nations languish. In extreme cases the pro-imperialist armies (NATO) are involved with the consent of the UN to force "peace" and subjugate the peoples with international legitimacy.

Between 1994 and 2004, only the U.S. government signed over three thousand contracts with PMCs for services to troops in missions abroad. In 2003, the Pentagon estimated that from the 87,000 billion for the Iraq war, 30,000 million would go to pay the PMCs. Hence, the same year, much of the highly developed weapon systems of warships in the Gulf were handled by specialists from four different PMCs as well as the weapons systems of Predator unmanned aerial vehicles, the Global Hawks and B-2 Stealth bombers. In Iraq, are employees of PMCs those conducting patrolling, surveillance of buildings and infrastructure, as well as escort and security services to U.S. and Iraqi personalities. These elite corps are composed among others by South African mercenaries from most of the security services and army special units of the former apartheid regime (Battalion 32, Vlakplaas and Koevoet).

The Department of Defense is the main contractor of mercenaries, hence the new doctrinal conception of war is defined as decentralized, placing the emphasis on the use of non-state military forces, or paramilitary, and with it the war has passed to be a gigantic universe of expanding business.

Among the PMCs noted for their participation in imperialist wars and armed conflicts promoted by this we can include: Blackwater USA, founded in 1997 by Erik Prince, a former officer of the Navy Seals, which recruits its staff between different bodies of Special forces, namely: Navy Seals [3], Army Rangers and Delta Force. In Colombia, with the subsidiary ID Systems Blackwater. It works in recruitment activities for the Iraq war. Erinys International, founded by Alastier Morrison, a former British officer who has a small private army of 1,500 South Africans, maintains offices in Midrand (South Africa) and Dubai, Britain and Baghdad. He received a contract for $ 39.5 million for training Iraqi security forces to guard pipelines in this country, a task which also takes place in Colombia for the British Petrol (BP) as well as for other companies in Angola and in the Niger Delta. Triple Canopy currently operates in El Salvador, Peru, Chile and Honduras, aimed at the recruitment of qualified personnel for the war in the Middle East. Tactical Network Consulting Group, with operations in Chile and Neskowin, directed by José Miguel Pizarro, a former officer in Pinochet's army, for the selection and recruitment of personnel with military training to be hired for war in Iraq. Your Solutions, 3D Global Solutions and Gesegur SAC (Security Management Private Company), with sorting and recruitment tasks in Peru and Honduras. EPI & Security, with operations in Ecuador, through the U.S. citizen Jeffrey Shippy, who was stationed at the U.S. military base, held in Manta, Ecuador until 2009. TESS and Inveco International Corporation, with operations in Brazil with similar purposes and Crawford & Company, led by Jeffrey Bowman, whose matrix is based in Atlanta, USA and bases of operations in Chile, Bolivia, Peru and Colombia, for the development of covert activities to the orders of the CIA to promote low-intensity operations against governments considered hostile. Under the expansion of this novel highly lucrative activity, have been adding and preparing complete contingent of former military and police officers from Latin American countries, which in the past received training and instruction from the U.S. Southern Command, in criminal methods of counterinsurgency. All of these personnel thickens the databases of PMCs that operate by contracting with the Pentagon and potentially constitute a "small" but well trained counterrevolutionary army, ready to operate anywhere in the world when their employer requires with wide guarantee of protection to ensure impunity for their actions. In this sense, in February 2006, Donald Rumsfeld had classified the PMC as part of the U.S. military machine, removing them, so, of civil justice. Also, the governor of Iraq, Paul Bremer (imposed by the U.S. after the invasion), signed a decree that awarded the PMCs and PSCs immunity from Iraqi prosecution.

There is one case that we can not avoid to mention in this work, the one referred to the operations being conducted by imperialism in Colombia, its main geostrategic location in the region, led not only to counteract the development of the popular and insurgent movement of the Colombian people, but to ensure early control of a vast territory that will consolidate its political and military hegemony in the region. Just to give an idea of the magnitude of the Private Military Corporations operating in Colombia, we provide data from a 2007 report that the State Department of the U.S., issued at the request of the Congress of this country, in which all PMCs contracted by the U.S. government for the performance of work in Colombia during 2006 are listed. According to this list, the U.S. government canceled the PMCs a total of 309.6 million dollars, distributed in about 25 Private Military Corporations (PMCs), where the following are highlighted: DynCorp, dedicated to work on "spraying" of drug crops -intelligence gathering by air and logistical support for covert military operations-, with a workforce of over 30,000 "employees", acts both in Iraq and in Colombia, and Northrop Grumman, which is engaged in the operation of radar stations for airspace control and provision of military and intelligence services in the field of telecommunications.

The restructuring and deployment of military forces has been modified since the defeat of the USSR and the disintegration of the socialist bloc, which not only accelerated the process of concentration of capital but has given a new dynamic in the activity of global monopolies, with the emergence of new markets, investment and expansion areas of the monopolies. Thus, the exploitation of peoples has acquired global levels by a handful of corporations, the fundamental contradiction of the capitalist relation between the capital and labour, which was reduced to the boundaries of the capitalist countries, after processing into imperialism, as Lenin pointed out, Foreign Direct Investment has become increasingly important in the global economy, promoted by the International Financial Monopoly Capital. Mergers, acquisitions and reinvestment in neo-colonial and dependent countries and economies in transition to capitalism have produced a growing income stream to the multinationals that are based in the imperialist countries. The exploitation has been globalized and deepened and has taken the form of overexploitation of labour through the maquilas. This expansion of imperialism is generating global confrontation between capital and labour. The present era is still, and ever more clearly, the expression of the era of proletarian revolution, of socialist revolution, which was uncovered by Lenin in the beginning of the past century. Consequently, the conflicts and wars of aggression of imperialism have increased, led by the Imperialist Corporate State of the United States, a country that has achieved the development of an unprecedented military power in the history of mankind. To the Great International Monopoly Capital in the financial, commercial, technological and military fields we have to add a large Military Global Network (MGN) which is embodied in the various commands: Northern Command, USNORTHCOM, its acronym in English, Central Command, USCENTCOM, European Command, USEUCOM, Pacific Command, SPACOM, Southern Command USSOUTHCOM, and more recently (2004), the creation of the command for Africa.

This organization of the U.S. Army has been strengthened following the defeat of the Soviet Union in the Cold War. This map of the world shows us what they call Responsibility Areas, covering the whole earth. The U.S. has placed their fleets in areas never thought, for example in the Persian Gulf. A fleet from Central Command USCENTCOM, which has nuclear weapons and is used as a platform for projecting forces in the war of imperialist aggression against the peoples of Afghanistan and Iraq. All this restructuring of U.S. military policy aimed at deepening the attack on the peoples of the world started in 1989, with the collapse of the USSR, the invasion of Panama and the first war of aggression against the people of Iraq and is followed by a growing list of wars and conflicts whose dynamism has been accelerated since the controversial attack on the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001 and the declaration of war on terrorism on a global scale.

Nowadays we can say that after the defeat of the USSR, wars and armed conflicts went global with no limitations. Wars and conflicts transited from the wars between imperialist states to the struggle between Transnational Corporations represented by the Imperialist Corporate States and the peoples of the neocolonial and dependent states. In general, the war of plunder against the peoples of the Third World, their raw materials, energy, water and biodiversity, necessary for capitalist accumulation on a global scale becomes increasingly violent and ruthless. The furious struggle for the conquest of land, raw materials and areas of influence between different groups of capitalists, which were expressed at the time of the World Wars between Imperialist States was transformed after the defeat of USSR. The merger of the Large Imperialist Corporations, WTO and the rest of trade agreements like the Free Trade ones have dispelled the wars between Imperialist Corporate States. But at the same time, the restructuring of power has altered the balance of world power. That is where the international Class Struggle is inscribed and hence the nature and necessity of the international organization of the working class, the workers and peoples of the world to face the brutal onslaught of the global imperialist system in the coming years.

For communists the solution of the problems associated with war and peace presupposes a deep understanding of the history, origins and essence of these phenomena in the first place. It must be said that both war and peace have primarily a class nature, hence not every war is an absolute evil and not any peace is good for everyone. When considering the class analysis of war, Lenin makes it absolutely clear that imperialist wars are unjust, but also imperialist peace is, as it seeks to establish universal rule of imperialism, replacing the existing order in other countries by the American model: bourgeois representative democracy and free markets, development of the international relations subordinated to their interests while making sure the right to intervene in the internal affairs of other countries. Also to perform military repression against countries deemed hostile to their interests and to establish the so-called areas of vital interests to the national security of the U.S. As a counterpart to this class oriented characterization of unjust war and peace, Lenin stated that the only just and liberating war is the one that establishes a peace based on justice, truly democratic and which secures the historical progress of society on the basis of human emancipation from the yoke of capital exploitation, as well as its socio-economic and spiritual prosperity.

When analyzing war and peace from the conception of Marxism -Leninism, we should not only consider the class character but also the historical character. War is a phenomenon that corresponds to a particular stage of human history, hence we should keep in mind that Leninist conceptions about war and peace are valid today, except in the case of a world war in which humanity would be placed at the risk of the use of nuclear weapons, the outcome of which presupposes the very disappearance of life on earth. Lenin says, "End the wars, bring peace among the peoples, make stop looting and violence: it is precisely our ideals...". The road to this ideal is complex and contradictory, but the advanced social forces, whose vanguard are Communists, look with security and optimism to the future and do everything to make it closer.

In this struggle the communists, consistent with the principles of proletarian internationalism, we advocate the maximum cohesion of the revolutionary forces worldwide. The communists do not seek abstract unity of the revolutionary forces, i.e. the unity on behalf of the unity, but the unity on behalf of a specific purpose and this is the struggle against imperialism and this for the reason that imperialism is today the main enemy of peace and national and social progress. Hence at this stage it constitutes the main enemy of the communist, progressive and democratic movement worldwide. This is so because the communist parties are the best prepared contingent, more aware and armed with the only scientific theory of social development, of the anti-imperialist front. Hence, just the international communist movement is the force able to formulate the most full and multifaceted program of anti-imperialist struggle in the current period.