Paris attacks: not a war between races and religions – but preparation for imperialist war

The Paris massacre, which they say was carried out by ‘Islamic extremists’, has been uniformly described by every bourgeois regime and across the media as the latest episode in an inevitable clash between civilizations, religions and races. Over and over again we are told that ‘we will all’ have to defend ourselves against this aggression, against these acts of war. So the leaders of the European States all solemnly took to the streets, with the massed ranks of people of all classes lined up behind them, exalting ‘our Western values’ of liberty and democracy.

In short we say that a dismal melodrama has been served up as the perfect way to push patriotism and national solidarity. Virtually no-one has denounced the evident contradictions in the carefully orchestrated script being pumped out by the media. People have taken the bait and are moved: the old method of state terrorism. This is how it will always be in the absence of an anti-bourgeois opposition party, a party that can only be, revolutionary and communist.

We won’t go into the history of terrorist campaigns here, although in Britain, Italy and other countries we have already had enough experience of them.

To wage war it is necessary to gain the moral and material submission of those who are to be sent off to die. And since they cannot admit the real reasons for imperialist wars – the egotistical interests of big capital in all countries – they have to come up with a mythology to befuddle the minds of the proletariat and petty-bourgeoisie.

On one side the First World War was explained as a struggle against German militarism and on the other side as a struggle against a brutal, feudal Czar. The Second World War would be justified as the struggle of democracy and socialism against Nazism and fascism. Under these false banners millions of proletarians, considered surplus to the requirements of capitalist accumulation, were sent off to the slaughter. Only the revolutionary communists would hold firm during these tragic events and denounce the monstrous deception.

Then preparations for a Third World War began with the opposition between western liberalism and Russian statism, which was falsely passed off as communism. Now they have added the even more inconsistent phantom of ‘Islamic terrorism’, which supposedly declared war on ‘us’ starting from September 11.

Yes, a phantom. ‘Terrorism’ is not the ends, but the means. And it is one used by all States when they need it. There is little, or nothing, Islamic about it, neither in the sense of a religious doctrine, nor as a programme related to the social situation or national-political aims of any of the Arab countries. In fact, these terrorists, ranging from the so-called lone wolves to large well-equipped armies, are nothing more than mercenaries enlisted by the major capitalist powers.

The established religions, without exception, are docile instruments of the State and entirely counter-revolutionary. In the Arab, Middle Eastern and Islamic countries they play an especially important role in repressing working-class struggles and organisations.

But this is a very strange war, in which the casualties are not the police and the armed forces of the ‘Western enemy’ but the common people, with terrorist bombings in markets, on trains, etc. These actions are not designed to weaken the forces of the enemy but on the contrary to strengthen them, as the massive demonstration in Paris has clearly demonstrated.

So, we agree with them. Yes, we are at war! But it is a war against the global working class, a day-to-day war to distract workers from their own struggles and their need to reorganise on a class basis, a war against the workers of the world who, wherever they are, in the North or South, Europe or the Middle East, in the USA as in Russia and Asia, remain, out of historical necessity, the one real and uncontainable mortal enemy of this rotten society.

In opposition to all the government spokesmen, right and left, who are earnestly hawking their so-called ‘alternative’ perspectives, all of them finely tuned in defence of Capital (whose needs must never be questioned) we have one reply: In this battlefield between the imperialist powers, proletarians again run the risk of being overwhelmed by national, ethnic and religious divisions, of yielding to the ruling class.

This ruling class may appear to be divided into two hostile camps but in reality it is united in the defence of its interests and its power.

The only ally of the working people is the theoretical strength and practice of communism. Humanity’s future lies only in the final battle to overthrow capitalism. This is the direction in which the world proletariat must follow: Workers of the World Unite!