FIGHT FOR COMMUNISM!
	International Communist Workers Party
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Most Red Flag readers know that two Muslim terrorists killed twelve journalists of the satirical magazine “Charlie Hebdo” in Paris on January 7th.   Another four hostages died in a Jewish grocery store in a related attack.  The provocation was a series of anti-Muslim cartoons that Charlie Hebdo published.
Racism – whether directed against Jewish or Muslim people, black or immigrant or indigenous people – is a cornerstone of capitalism everywhere.  We can end it by destroying the wage system that is its material basis.   (See Red Flag, v. 5 #22, p. 2) 
The ideological struggle against racism will escalate as we fight to build communism. Millions of workers and soldiers and youth will mobilize against class enemies who use racism to undermine the power of the working class. 
The French ruling class immediately pushed the line, “I am Charlie Hebdo!” This message lit up the Arc de Triomphe in central Paris and spread quickly worldwide over social media. “Defend freedom of expression!”  “Stop the fascist Islamic terrorists!”
Pretty soon, the response came:  “I am NOT Charlie Hebdo!”  “They shouldn’t have been killed, but freedom of expression doesn’t justify racism!”  “Down with Islamophobia!”
To complicate matters, Charlie Hebdo was founded in the 1960s by leftists. It is anti-religion – all religion.   It opposes LePen’s openly racist National Front, which leads in recent electoral polls.  How can it be racist?
A former Charlie Hebdo writer explained in an open letter:  “The obsessive pounding on Muslims to which your weekly has devoted itself for more than a decade…has powerfully contributed to popularizing among ‘left-wing’ opinion the idea that Islam is a major ‘problem’ in French society.” 
The 9/11 attacks, the writer argues,  “set off a process of ideological reformatting…We see people with whom we were close…abruptly start to cut loose with a stream of racist idiocies.”
 
Islamophobia:  Not Just in France
Charlie Hebdo capitulated to the racist fear promoted by the US imperialists and their mass media after 9/11 to justify their atrocious murderous oil wars that have killed millions.  It devalued the lives of so-called “collateral damage.”
The rulers’ state terror and their ideological attacks will continue to sharpen as the global crisis of capitalism intensifies and escalates into world war. 
Since the Charlie Hebdo attack, over 1400 farmers in India have committed suicide, unable to repay loans.  Boko Haram has massacred 2000 Nigerian workers.  The civil war in Ukraine is intensifying.  Capitalism, as Lenin said, is “endless horror” that leaves no place safe for the working class.
The only answer for the international working class is to mobilize the masses openly for communism.  Anything else leads into a swamp of opportunism and, sooner or later, racism and nationalism.
Throughout Europe, rulers have used Islamophobia to win non-Muslim workers attacked by “austerity” measures to blame immigrants instead of fighting to destroy capitalism.  French bans on Islamic women’s head-coverings (hijab, niqab) have led to physical attacks on working-class women wearing them. 
Muslim workers are rightfully angry, but not mainly about cartoons or even hijabs.  They hate the racist super-exploitation and mass incarceration they face.  This, on top of the disastrous impacts of imperialism on the countries they came from. 
We must see them – as the “I am not Charlie” crowd doesn’t — as potential makers of history.

History Shows Us:  Rely on the Masses
The big-time terrorists are the imperialists themselves (see article, p. 3).  But the small-time terrorists who attacked Charlie Hebdo are also enemies of the working class. 
Individual acts of terrorism cannot destroy the French capitalist class that murdered millions of workers from Senegal to Haiti, from Vietnam to Algeria, from the Central African Republic to Syria. 
In contrast, the Haitian revolution of 1791-1804 was a massive uprising of enslaved workers that abolished slavery, defeated Napoleon’s mighty French army, and terrified the slaveocracy of the new US republic. 
In the heart of the French empire, masses of heroic workers led by the first communist International briefly seized state power in 1871, establishing the Paris Commune.  It was the first time in history that workers, led by Communists, took state power.
These monumental struggles, although brief and incomplete triumphs, were crucial in paving the way for the more advanced revolutions in Russia and China in the 20th century. From all of them we have learned that our final triumph depends on mobilizing the masses directly for communism, and nothing less. 
We must build one massive International Communist Workers’ Party that unites our class across all the bosses’ divisions of “race,” “nationality” and religion.  
We have nothing to lose but our chains.  We have a communist world to win!

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