As a Red Flag reader in Syria put it, “Not far from where I am there is a constant barrage of gun fire…/ received your newspaper online. I cannot sleep tonight, not because of the gunfire, but the fire of the communist world that is our future. One hundred years ago our class demolished the power of the capitalists in Russia. Today we have to finish the work of our class that was smashed. Long live communism. Communism and nothing but communism!”
They have gassed and barrel-bombed them. They have bombarded them with white phosphorus and depleted uranium shells. They have blown up their houses, occupied and terrorized whole neighborhoods. They have stuck them in tents in refugee camps. They have destroyed farms, schools, factories and all the ways people make a living.
And where have they done all this? We could be talking about Syria, Iraq, Gaza, Yemen, Libya, Afghanistan Northern Nigeria. Southern Sudan, Kashmir, Ukraine … just to name the hot spots of the last few years. And what’s the result of it all? So far, they have solved nothing! There is no end to their wars.
And who are they? Capitalists. Syrian or Saudi capitalists, Israeli or Palestinian or Yemeni or Iranian or Iraqi capitalists and so on. The media frames their conflicts as civil wars or regional wars or illegal invasions because they have to hide the reality that these are capitalist versus capitalist wars.
The way they are characterized channels the way we talk about them. That’s why Red Flag plays such a vital role. Understanding them as capitalist versus capitalist wars immediately puts the need for communist revolution front and center.
They are fought to bring profits to this or that capitalist group. And the local capitalists are backed by imperialists like the US, China, Russia and one or two others who control or want to control the world!
The immediate cause of the war in Syria is which pipeline will carry whose gas to Europe. Two proposed pipelines cross in Syria -one backed by Russia carrying natural gas from Iran through Iraq and Syria to Europe and one backed by the US carrying natural gas from Qatar through Syria to Turkey and Europe.
Depending on which pipeline wins out, the gas will either be sold in US Dollars (strengthening the Dollar as the world’s reserve currency) or in Euros (weakening it.)
Even more crucially, the US wants its pipeline to take Qatar’s gas to Europe to break Russia’s chokehold on energy to Europe. As long as Russia controls Europe’s source of natural gas, the European Union is unable to defy Russia and side with the US on issues that affects Russia’s interests, especially war. This is a life and death question for the Russians, who are fighting to make sure they can keep Europe at their mercy.
The pipelines are the immediate cause of the war in Syria but they have everything to do with the sharpening rivalry between the main imperialist powers, whose overall cause is the general crisis of world capitalism.
So far, over 400,000 Syrians are dead. Millions are displaced. Yet, neither pipeline has been built, and not one cubic foot of natural gas has been sold – either in US dollars or Euros! Private property- the right to own and control the resources of the world- is a major feature of capitalism. What’s 400,000 dead next to the projection of profits! That’s the way capitalists think.
Everything in common—that’s the way communists think. The need to share and share alike those resources is a defining feature of the communist world our revolution will build. As they expand their global wars, the imperialists will be forced to draft into their armies the young students and workers who they attack at every turn. These young soldiers, won to a vision of a world without borders and exploitation, can turn the capitalists’ global wars into revolutionary wars for communism. Let the capitalists expand their wars! We will finish them!
Trump: Warmaker for the US Ruling Class
Before the US Presidential election in November 2016, Red Flag warned that the choice at the ballot-box was between war (Clinton) or fascism (Trump), but that whatever they chose, they’d get the other thrown in for free.
That’s because the interests of the capitalist class in the US (and around the world) dictate the policies of the capitalist state. Capitalist crisis leads to fascism and imperialist war. It’s the bosses’ only strategy to get out of their crisis. It’s not a question of choice, or personality—but their only plan for survival.
We’ve got another plan—to put an end to capitalism, its crises and wars by mobilizing the masses for communism.
Trump started his presidency with a series of fascist attacks: the refugee travel ban, deportations of immigrants, closing women’s health care clinics around the world, declaring open-season for racist police murders, attacks on the lives of LGBTQ Americans.
But it’s only been in the past two weeks that Trump has become a war-maker as well, with US missile strikes on Shayrat airbase in Syria, dropping the “Mother of all Bombs” in Afghanistan, and mobilizing an “armada” to the Korean Peninsula.
Although Trump ran his campaign on echoing the “America First” isolationism of the openly fascist Steve Bannon alt-right, the events of the past two weeks seem to signal a real change. What the media is posing as a fight between Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and former Breitbart editor Steve Bannon is not personal, but political. It’s the main wing of the US ruling class beginning to exercise some control over the President in the realm of foreign policy.
Bannon has been forced off the National Security Council by the generals in charge of national security. When Hillary Clinton called for Trump to “take out Assad’s airfields,” he did so, two hours later. The Democrats in Congress supported this attack. The bosses’ media, including New York Times and the Washington Post loved it.
When Trump ran for office, he said NATO was obsolete. Now he says it’s not. The missile attack on Syria intensifies the contradictions between the US and Russian imperialists and brings us closer to World War III. It makes it more urgent for us to build the International Communist Workers’ Party to mobilize the masses for communism as the only force that can put an end to imperialist war.
