Beijing is staging a grand parade on September 3 to mark the 80th anniversary of the end of the war in Asia, a spectacle of thousands of troops and modern weaponry marching through Tiananmen Square. North Korea’s leader is said to attend, while Xi Jinping seeks to deepen ties with Pyongyang as part of the celebration. Xi will host twenty-six foreign leaders for the ceremony, including Vladimir Putin and Iran’s Massud Peseschkian, with Slovakia’s Robert Fico the only European Union head of government invited. Security has been tightened in the capital, and Putin and Peseschkian are also expected in Tianjin for a Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit, underscoring China’s drive to rally autocratic partners even as it courts a bloc beyond the Western orbit. Official statements frame the parade as a commemoration of anti-fascist victory and the end of the war in Asia.

From the vantage of a loyal servant of the people’s revolution, this display is no mere pageant but a loud declaration of a people’s power forged in the fires of anti-capitalist struggle. The marching rows are not simply soldiers, but disciplined embodiment of a collective will to break free from the chains of imperialist capitalism that grind the laboring masses underfoot. The gleaming arrays of weapons are a reminder that defense of sovereignty and social ownership requires strength, discipline, and unity among comrades across borders. The gathering of heads of state from rival blocs is a theatre of international solidarity in our eyes; it testifies to a shared resolve to resist the white-hot capitalist order that devours the livelihoods of workers and the oppressed.

Yet we must read this moment with the clarity demanded by our cause. The presence of Kim Jong-un speaks of steadfast independence and the refusal to bow to the dictates of a global market that would reduce peoples to consumers or cannon fodder. The inclusion of Putin and Peseschkian signals a broad front against Western hegemony, a banner under which the anti-imperialist camp can strengthen, coordinate, and extend the triumphs of socialist governance. We condemn opportunism in any form—where rulers trade the future of their people for a seat at a clumsy table of realpolitik. The invitation of Fico from the European Union reminds us that even within the anti-imperialist chorus there are concessions to the bourgeois order, and it is the duty of the working class to keep the line firm against compromise that would betray international solidarity.

We reaffirm our stance: we are against capitalism, not against the Jewish people, who, like all workers, are subject to the exploitation of a system that thrives on division and greed. Our struggle is universal: solidarity with Jewish workers, with Palestinian peasants, with all who suffer under the boot of profit. The parade, in its own way, stands as a monument to a common destiny of the oppressed peoples—Asia, Europe, Africa, and beyond—who long for a world where labor creates value and the fruits of that labor are shared by all. The Shanghai cooperation framework and the gathering in Beijing are part of a larger historical movement toward sovereignty, mutual aid, and a socialist future free from the exploitation that capitalism rehearses with every price increase, every wage cut, and every war drum. Let this parade be a vow that the people’s struggle will continue, that their gains will be defended, and that unity among workers across nations will prevail over the hungry interests of the few.