This is the English translation of the original introduction to our book, Nella Terza guerra mondiale. Un lessico politico per le lotte del presente (DeriveApprodi, 2025). We are now publishing its English translation as a free ebook. Read online the 2026 Preface to the English edition, and download and share the book.
In the Third World War: A Political Lexicon for Today’s Struggles
This book emerges from three years of struggle against the war. Immediately after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, we—together with hundreds of activists from the Permanent Assembly Against the War, which was formed within the Transnational Social Strike Platform—worked to find ways to break the fronts that were rapidly solidifying. Activists from Russia and Ukraine began to speak with others from virtually every part of the world, and at times we managed to build forms of joint initiative. After 7 October 2023 and the invasion of Gaza, the assemblies grew to include Palestinians and Israelis as well. Again, we tried not to get sucked into the logic that builds existential enemies outside of any consideration of the social, sexual and historical relationships within which war conflicts mature. This political choice has never meant practising an easy equidistance; instead, it has required taking a clear stand against war and its world.
However, the experience of these many assemblies—and of the many agreements they produced—also revealed the limits of the discourses and initiatives. Divergent positions often led to paralysis and even aphasia, or to a conscious decision to bracket the war in order to find convergence on almost anything else. Without cataloguing everything we have seen and heard over these three years, we want at least to note this: without reflecting on how we speak about war, and how we try to read it alongside all the other conflicts in everyday life, we cannot come to terms with it.
This book was written as a response to this need. It does not claim to describe the current war in all its facets and internal dynamics, nor to situate it fully within the history of wars. Nor do we aim to retrace the myriad of ways in which peace and war have become tools of domestic political legitimisation since Donald Trump’s election. Instead, we argue that it is essential to recognise war as an urgency that cannot be ignored by anyone unwilling to accept the present order of things. For this reason, we discuss several key terms through which the discourse of war extends beyond the battlefield. These terms redefine large domains of political intervention—migration, climate conflicts, the state—as well as the concepts that legitimate war (militarism) and those that make its contestation so difficult (decoloniality and resistance). Our aim is to help build a lexicon for the struggles of the present: one that equips us with tools to oppose war and overcome the deadlocks that have hindered us in recent years. Faced with the omnipresence and apparent omnipotence of weapons, we have taken a step back and returned to the weak weapon of criticism, armed with the conviction that it can move us a few steps forward in our opposition to war.
Beyond rejecting the rule of weapons, we hold that a radical critique of war is necessary because war cannot serve as a model for class struggle. War claims to establish compact and homogenous fronts by simplifying and neutralising social relations, making it impossible to grasp or develop their complexity. Its logic is the ideological and material elimination of everything—and especially everyone—that exceeds the war fronts. It is the armed denial of the multiplicity of differences that make up contemporary living labour and gives no practical guidance on how these differences might be organised.
The political hypothesis underlying this work begins from this critique of war and the recognition that the Russian invasion of Ukraine marked the start of the Third World War. By this, we do not intend to conjure up the image of an unstoppable escalation and inevitable widening of the conflict. We are not interested here in pursuing the geopolitical dimension of the war or drawing up future scenarios of an international order. We are not interested in war as a system of order in which different regimes can be identified, each with its own capacities of governance. Instead, we approach war from the standpoint of living labour in all its heterogeneity, convinced that locating our own position within and across war’s fronts is the first step toward overturning its logic.
As in the first two world wars, the decisive issue in this Third World War is not the hegemony of one or several states, but the governance of the living labour in the world market. The Third World War hypothesis allows us to move beyond the particularities of individual conflicts—conflicts in which some wars are deemed paradigmatic and others secondary, some enemies the only true ones. Speaking of a Third World War creates a field of visibility in which a common logic can be recognised across acts of war, whether in Ukraine, Taiwan, Gaza or Rojava. Above all, it opens the possibility for different forms of anti-war struggle to communicate with one another. In this way, we aim to inscribe onto the map of geopolitics a different history: that of other conflicts and divisions.
This political hypothesis can be fully understood only within a transnational dimension—one that today marks the difficulty, if not the impossibility, of politically governing the world market and what has been called globalisation in recent decades. Within this transnational framework, the governance of living labour becomes increasingly complex, and war and militarism return as plausible instruments of command. The tensions in the Middle East (Iran, Israel, Turkey, Syria), as well as those in the United States and Russia, clearly reveal a shared attempt to respond to the fractures running through regimes of social governance across vast regions of the planet.
While it remains possible that war could assume a genuinely global dimension, our question is not how to prevent war from spreading, but how this war can end. We ask whether living labour, in all its multiplicity, can exert a political claim on the ending of war. Can the peace we seek be something other than a condition that must simply be endured? Because violence, devastation and massacres overwhelmingly fall upon the poor, women, migrants and wage-earners in every case, it is absolutely necessary to open space for action and reflection against war. What is at stake is the possibility of producing organisational processes commensurate with the transnational importance of living labour.
It would seem reasonable, at this point, to note that the hypothesis of an emerging Third World War is not contradicted by the fact that it is not fought with the same intensity everywhere—from Donald Trump’s actions to Vladimir Putin’s intentions to the European Union’s ‘rearmed peace’. Meanwhile, Benjamin Netanyahu is allowed to ignore that the hour of peace has come, enabling Israel to continue slaughtering Palestinians with impunity. The Pax Trumpiana—for now more proclaimed than concretely achieved—likewise includes the bombing of Yemen and the continual threat toward Iran and its oppressive regime, from which many Iranians also seek liberation.
Many will insist that a bad peace is almost always preferable to any war. And it is undeniably true that those living under bombardment, facing hunger, cold and imminent death, welcome any peace or even a fragile truce. In the face of war, of any war, the first demand is always that the weapons fall silent.
Yet despite the peace plans and ceasefires that have been proposed, we still consider the Third World War hypothesis valid. The fragments of peace currently granted to us appear to be merely the continuation of war by other means. The Pax Trumpiana is justified as necessary for processes of capital valorisation—above all US accumulation—and is presented as a “Versailles of capital”: a series of peace agreements proposed, imposed or coerced in the name of the needs of US capitalism. After World War I, Lord Keynes argued that the Versailles peace contradicted economic reason and would therefore lead inevitably to another war. We, by contrast, argue that Pax Trumpiana’s attempt to crush the social and political conflicts proliferating worldwide prevents the causes of war from being eliminated.
Peace cannot consist in the territorial concessions that the Ukrainian government may be forced to accept in exchange for access to rare minerals. Peace cannot rest on the pacification of the Middle East through legitimising Israel’s war of extermination against the Palestinians. Peace cannot mean that economic supremacy is pursued through threatened or imposed trade tariffs. And peace cannot be built upon the persecution of migrants—by legal or illegal means—or upon the legal suppression of all forms of sexual freedom.
Trump’s supposed pacifism is not the opposite of Biden’s warmongering; it is its continuation. In both cases, war is severed from the social contradictions of the US and the world, and social relations are overwritten according to its logic. Their synthesis is easily visible in the European Commission’s policies: it first rearmed Ukraine and now resolutely aims to rearm the EU, fully aware that, in both cases, war erases any possibility for social reconstruction. Because the political and social roots of war are not being addressed, we do not believe that a genuine prospect of peace is emerging.
Commenting on Zelensky’s theatrical ouster from the White House, Viktor Orbán declared: Strong men make peace, while weak men make war. In this formulation, peace becomes the legitimating privilege of the “strong man,” the figure to be trusted—or rather, submitted to. It becomes the misogynistic and patriarchal fantasy of a man who imposes a hierarchy of interest through his superior will, a peace that coincides with subservience to power. This is the opposite of what we have understood in recent years as the transnational politics of peace.
This is not a pacifist book. Our concern is not to end the war by imagining peace treaties or proposing truces. Those who seek peace at any cost fail to see that in doing so, they simply reproduce the old conception of peace as the mere absence of war. They overlook the fact that peace is the continuation of war by other means, that it is a peace subservient to the despotic power of a capital in its political incarnations. For such perspectives, the absence of bombs is enough: social conflicts, tensions, and daily oppressions are assumed to resolve themselves. We disagree. While we welcome every truce and pause in wartime violence with relief and joy, in this book, we attempt to look at war not only through the lens of danger, death, and destruction—though these must be avoided at all costs—but also from the standpoint of the organisational processes we can create within and against war (TSS Platform 2023). Our problem is not simply to condemn war but to oppose its harsh reality with words and practices that escape its logic.
Preface to the English edition
When we published the Italian edition of this book in May 2025, it was already clear that what we called the Pax Trumpiana was an integral part of the Third World War scenario. The fragments of peace achieved have been nothing but the continuation of war by other means, while both peace and war have become tools of domestic politics and ways to impose the needs of US capitalism. Since he took office, the “pacifist” Trump bombed Iran, Iraq, Syria, Somalia, Yemen, and Nigeria, and now has attacked Venezuela and kidnapped its president, Nicolás Maduro. He did so to force a reversal of the policies of state control over strategic commodities—oil first and foremost—set in motion by Hugo Chávez twenty-five years ago, and thereby to curb Russian, and above all Chinese, influence in Latin America. The “special military operation” ordered by the Trump administration lays bare the essentially void nature of any appeal to international law. It belongs fully to the Third World War—understood as beginning with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine—because it is driven by an arrogant and desperate attempt to reassert U.S. supremacy amid a transnational disorder that is increasingly ungovernable.
The celebration of supposedly irresistible American power confirms that militarism is steering the White House: military action is explicitly legitimized as the means to secure safety and profits for the United States and for those who submit to its claim to hegemony over the Western Hemisphere. This is one of the key principles of Trump’s new National Security Strategy. For this reason, the military operation in Venezuela goes well beyond the aim of “regime change”, an aim that, day by day, appears less relevant and less necessary in light of Caracas’s readiness to cooperate. It also goes beyond the repudiation of national sovereignty and peoples’ self-determination, principles that international law has in any case ceased to safeguard for some time now.
In this transnational disorder, it is no longer necessary to invoke the exporting of democracy—which for today’s West has become little more than an antiquarian relic—to justify war. Nor is it any longer necessary to wrap brutality in the cloak of progress, civilization, or modernization: the old rhetorical screens have fallen. War is asserted openly as war—an ever-available means of seizing other people’s territories and resources, and a tool for ensuring the valorization of capital. The Trumpian state thus behaves like a textbook imperialist state, promising individual capitalists fresh opportunities for valorization and a smoother rhythm of accumulation, but it does so in a phase defined by instability and shocks—features of a world war that cannot, in truth, be governed.
We must therefore ask: does this resurgence of imperialism amount to its full-scale return, or is it rather a posture—an ideological maneuver saturated with militarism—without the material foundations to give it real substance? Placing the latest events in Venezuela within the Third World War means for us to question the old words that were used to read a reality that has by now irrevocably passed. As a matter of fact, if there are continuities with Nineteenth- and early Twentieth-century imperialism, and with the neocolonialism of the late twentieth century—“the last stage of imperialism,” in Kwame Nkrumah’s famous formulation—there are also stark differences. The major oil firms have proved slow, if not openly reluctant, to fall in behind Trump’s imperial designs. And Trump’s insistence that he will be the one to decide Venezuela’s fate does not resolve the issue of the institutional, financial, and political guarantees that companies demand before making investments.
Trump’s imperial projections—and the surplus of political command he must continually invoke the more its ineffectiveness becomes apparent—do not, in short, offer capital a safe bargain, as was the case in classical imperialism and, in different ways, in neocolonialism. And this is not because of the still-uncertain transition at the top of the Caracas government, but because no state—not even the United States—now possesses the capacity to tame the transnational disorder and impose stable political control over it. There is no longer a Wilhelmine empire able to mobilize German industrial and financial capital for its power politics in Africa and Asia; but neither is there a Gaullist state that, with one hand, abandoned Algeria while, with the other, escorted French energy companies into the heart of the Sahara to exploit its oil fields, according to the classic neocolonial model. Nor is there any longer a George W. Bush state that, through “international policing,” could still aspire to restore an order and a peace steeped in terror to the global market. Those state forms have been swallowed by the swirls of transnational disorder, and they are unlikely to resurface.
However much it postures as a collective capitalist, it is therefore reasonable to doubt that the Trumpian state can truly function as one today, given capital’s fully transnational character and the infrastructural power that operates within global production chains. Beyond the United States’ overt imperial stance, alignment between the state—in this case, the United States—and the largest capitalist firms is far from guaranteed. That is also why the Trump administration must lift its chin and flex its muscles, proclaiming that it can subordinate to its designs a transnational capital that has long made instrumental use of the state when necessary while retaining wide margins of autonomy. In this way, too, the militarist ideology that fuels the world disorder of war is displayed—an ideology that, within national borders, is meant to bind together social blocs that are beginning to fray or to revolt, as they did in Minneapolis, New York, Portland, and other U.S. cities against the unpunished violence of ICE’s thuggish squads.
The price Trumpian militarism is extracting from living labor in the United States is enormous. Dismantling what remains of the social content of the old twentieth-century state and replacing it with a state free to act through its military apparatus requires the full availability for work of men and women who have been stripped, among other things, of collective bargaining—even in those workplaces where it continued, battered, to survive. Resignation to dark times is never an answer. Instead, we must look to those subjects who move beneath Trump’s imperial pretensions, within and against the contradictions and limits of his militarism as of his fragile peace projects, to make out the contours of a plausible social opposition—one whose image is currently obscured by a muscular display of force in Latin America and, tomorrow, perhaps in Greenland.
To underline the contradictions of this purported imperialism does not mean waiting for opposition to Trump to come from transnational corporations, which will, as always, find spaces in which to expand their balance sheets. In the context of the climate crisis, the capital Trump would like to command reveals its irrationality precisely in its refusal to abandon—or even scale back—fossil fuels. If Trump speaks of Venezuela only in terms of oil, it is nonetheless clear that all his threats toward Latin American countries are part both of a global trajectory of confrontation with China’s rise and of a kind of encirclement war against the progressive governments of Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico. Trump and Trumpism are trying to settle accounts with governments that have actually intervened in wealth distribution and in long-standing hierarchies, unleashing processes of mass politicization.
From our standpoint, however, we also have to reckon with the limits of those experiences and with the contradictions and polarizations they generated within their own social base, so as not to capitulate to what today may otherwise appear as total political impotence in the face of the violent and uncontrolled ascent of the right in countries such as Chile, Bolivia, and Argentina. From the standpoint of living labor, it is not possible today to defend the indefensible Maduro or to mourn Chávez’s Bolivarian project. For this reason, beyond the geopolitical puzzle of Latin America and without indulging in nostalgia, our concern is to reassert the standpoint of women, workers, and migrants—even now, when that standpoint seems to vanish before the apparently unchallenged supremacy of armed violence, state authoritarianism, militarism, and patriarchy.
We must recognize that labor, feminist, and Indigenous movements in Venezuela do not accommodate themselves to the present state of affairs. We must stand with the miners of the Orinoco Mining Arc, whom Maduro—already with Decree 2248—handed over to hyper-exploitation and sexual violence, to forms of slave- and child-labor fed by U.S., Canadian, Russian, and Chinese multinationals, and whose conditions will certainly not improve under the new Trumpian course. Beneath the surface of a bankrupt Bolivarianism—one that has financed Venezuela’s recent economic growth by compressing workers’ wages—there is a social conflict to improve living and working conditions that, in the public as in the private sector, has challenged government repression and today constitutes the only credible opposition to Trump’s plans and the tenets of the only politics of peace that erases the very causes of war.
We must therefore take their side, as well as the side of the tens of thousands of Venezuelan migrants on U.S. soil who, already deprived by Trump of guarantees of residence, now wonder what will become of their permits once Venezuela is supposed to return to being a country “freed” from the odious “dictator.” The specter of deportation makes clear one of the principal spoils of this war—especially since National Security demands that whatever government sits in Caracas manage migration flows from Venezuela according to the principle of profitable security.
In the search of a lexicon for the struggles of the present, we ask: does the lens of anti-imperialism really help us understand these movements, and what they share with those who, on this side of the ocean, oppose a Europe at war, and with those in the United States who reject Trump’s policies? We doubt it, because it tends to reproduce the logic of campist geopolitics, preventing us from fully embracing the transnational character that social struggles, too, must now assume if they are to unfold politically. Transnational disorder nullifies any hope of socialism in a single country—or a single region—and of an internationalism that nourishes false hopes in “resistant” states or conjures alliances among peoples who are not invincibly united but are traversed by fractures and differences that can be rearticulated only on a transnational level. The transnational dimension does not pose merely a quantitative problem of scale, but a qualitative one: it changes the nature of the social relation of capital within, across, and beyond state borders and therefore demands a new organizational structure of class relations—no longer recomposable within any international, national, regional, bipolar, or multipolar order. The essay added as an appendix to this English edition, and previously published in Italian on our website, shows that the genocide in Gaza and the project of the Gaza Riviera cannot be understood simply as the repetition of a century-long colonial logic but needs to be considered as the reactivation of that conflict within new transnational dynamics.
Anti-imperialist and campist options thus remain perpetually one step behind a Third World War that, day after day, presses forward, intensifies, and ramifies. We will not build opposition to this war and to Trump’s imperial plans by backing supposed dissident governments. They don’t become our friends simply because they are outside of the Western axis. We will build an opposition to the Third World War only from the movements and struggles of women, LGBTQ+ people, migrants, workers, students, and working people that already exist or are taking shape. We need a transnational politics of peace to expand these movements and struggles and to rearticulate them within a broader political space in which all those who, everywhere, are paying the military and social costs of the world war now under way can communicate and recognize one another. A politics capable of opposing a war that is not localized in a single point but claims to saturate our entire lives—leaving them suspended by the thread of bombardment on battlefields, crushing them elsewhere in the gears of unending labor, impoverishing them everywhere until not even the shadow of refusal and insubordination remains.
Yet this nightmare of a Trumpian night is not already reality, nor it is our destiny. Not only do we see flashes of opposition to the current administration spreading across the United States; in Palestine as in Ukraine, in Iran as in Venezuela, men and women have never ceased to fight against the “double siege” of those who bring war and extermination from outside and those who, from within, seek to neutralize every form of struggle that is not subordinated to the logic of blood and oppression that war itself imposes. This is the path traced by those who, in recent years, have survived and resisted missiles, drones, and snipers. It seems to us a path worth taking also for those who, on this side of the world, within a Europe at war, are struggling—in a more or less organized way—against militarism and its logic.
At the end of the book, we wrote that, against the inevitability of war, we need to build an organization that should turn our politics of peace into a practical guide for preparing the conditions of a transnational social strike against the war and its world. In autumn 2025 we saw dozens of Italian cities being stormed by workers, students, migrants, women, men and LGBTQ+ on strike against the genocide in Palestine and the logic of war, while hundreds of thousands of people were demonstrating around the world. We have seen students in Germany going on strike in 100 cities against the introduction of compulsory military service. We are now seeing millions of people in Iran risking their lives and refusing to entrust their liberation from the Islamic Republic to the bombs threatened by Trump. Now we can sense what a strike against war can actually mean more clearly than we did one year ago. This makes the call for a transnational organization that is up to the task of making this possibility a long-lasting force even more urgent.
