FIGHT FOR COMMUNISM!
	International Communist Workers Party
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In October 1918, in the last days of World War I, a sailors’ rebellion at Wilmershaven, Germany spread to nearby Kiel. Thousands of workers occupied ships and buildings and eventually seized control of the whole city. By November 3 the mutinies had blossomed into a revolution. Inspired by the communist revolution in Russia, they also formed soldiers and workers’ councils. Within days the German war effort crumbled and Kaiser Wilhelm II abdicated his throne. But the German revolution was for capitalist democracy, not for communism. Twenty years later, the world was again at war.

The Syrian masses are “voting with their feet” against the deadly four-year civil war between the Assad government and many rebel groups including the Islamic State (ISIS).  About 22 million people lived in Syria in 2011.  Close to half are now homeless (internally displaced or forced to migrate) and about 250,000 are dead. 
This war – like others raging elsewhere – creates a desperate need and tremendous opportunities to mobilize masses everywhere for communism. 
Who’s behind ISIS? Capitalists! And Assad and the Syrian state? Other capitalists! Although main-stream media will never admit it, it’s a war of capitalists versus capitalists. And not just rival gangs of regional capitalists. Syria is one front in the long-simmering war for world dominance mainly between US imperialism and its imperialist rivals China and Russia.
Some self-declared anti-imperialists support the butcher Assad, arguing that the US is the “main enemy.”  Others want a “no-fly zone” led by US war criminals to keep Assad from bombing Syrian civilians.  The Syrian masses, including those in squalid refugee camps and those trapped between fences in Europe, will gain nothing by supporting either capitalist gang.  But if they organize to turn the guns around and take power into their own hands they can help lead the way toward communism. 
Syria is not an isolated case.  From the Iraq-Turkey border in the North to the Yemeni beaches in the South there are eight different battlefronts in the Middle East.  They involve twelve Armies and two major powers (the US and Russia).   The recent Russian offensive in Syria has significantly sharpened the situation.
Three years ago, the Israeli bombardment of Gaza seemed exceptional in its brutality. Since then an appalling list of cities, towns and villages have been bombed and shelled to rubble in Yemen, Iraq and Syria as well as Palestine.
War is how capitalism determines “peacetime” trade relations and national borders. The US victory in World War II won it access to the world’s key raw material:  Mideast oil.  It enabled the US to establish military bases in Western Europe and Japan, plus institutions of imperialist domination:  the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the World Trade Organization.
Today the spreading world capitalist crisis is increasing global tensions.  Like it or not, the rulers are dragging us on a course that will lead to another world war. That hellish war will decide which robber billionaires (Russian, Chinese or US) will make the rules for plundering the world’s resources and exploiting the world’s masses. 
That is, unless the communist-led masses seize the time and wrest power from capitalist warmakers everywhere.
Capitalist war is terrifyingly destructive.  World War II killed about 4% of the world’s population. Japan’s industrial capacity was destroyed. Much of Germany’s was too, and more was dismantled afterward.  German steel production was capped at 25% of the prewar level, and car production at 10%. 
But we must understand war dialectically and not allow its brutality to immobilize us with “shock and awe.” At the very moment that capitalism’s productive forces explode in bombs and missiles, its essential weakness is exposed.  Both capitalist World Wars unleashed a tsunami of revolutionary energy among the masses. (See Russian Revolution, page 16.)  
Capitalism’s fatal flaw is that it can’t openly mobilize armies to fight for the bosses’ system of wage slavery and profits.  That’s why communism still haunts the capitalists although it is not presently a mass force.
Communism will replace the profit motive with the human motive:  production for need, not profit. Even diehard capitalists realize that when the masses seize that idea, no force in the world will be able to stop us.
Unable to mobilize an ideological defense of profits, the capitalists rally the masses around religion (Islam, Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism) or nationalism (Palestinian, Kurdish, Syrian statehood) or flat-out racism.  

But their need to lie is a strategic weakness.  Sooner or later their web of deceit begins to unravel. At that moment the masses can turn in a revolutionary fury.  Communists within the bosses’ armed forces can organize this fury into a Red Army that, united with industrial workers, will end capitalism forever.
Already opportunities are growing.  Masses are in motion.  Minds are opening to communism.  For example, Palestinian youth are again rising up against Israeli fascism and rejecting the leadership of Hamas and the PLO.   Amidst an atmosphere of racist terror, more Israeli soldiers are speaking out against the atrocities they’re ordered to commit.  
Communism and only communism – not pacifism or nationalism or religion – can unite rebellious workers, soldiers and youth worldwide.  Communism has no need to conceal its true aims because nearly everyone stands to gain in a society organized around the human motive. 
On the contrary:  communism needs to spread its true aims far and wide because such a society can only be realized by masses consciously committed to the communist goal. 
Earlier communist movements didn’t do this.  We must learn from their mistakes as well as from their heroic struggles especially during the extreme hardships imposed by world war.

Let the imperialists start their wars.  The communist-inspired masses will end them!
Past Red Flag articles have described mutinies and resistance movements that emerged in periods of world war.  In coming issues we will write about mass mutinies in France during World War I, the communist-led resistance movement in Greece during and after World War II and more.  

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