What Causes World Wars here ♦ Working Class Must Free Itself here ♦ Sinners: Destroy Money and Capital here ♦
Letter: What Causes World Wars? How Can We End Them?
“Trump is completely destroying the country and the world. The economy is a mess. It will get a lot worse with oil prices going up every day. Killing all those people! Alienating allies. China is beating the US at everything!” said a friend who is very worried about what’s going on.
I explained that the US is the declining imperialist power and China is a rising one. “Yes, everyone knows that,” she said.
We have to ask ourselves why there have been two world wars and now we are heading into World War III.
“What is the root cause of this?” I asked. “What is it in the nature of capitalism that leads to ever more destructive world wars? How come humankind hasn’t figured out how to stop that from happening?”
She didn’t have an answer.
I said that no imperialist power in the history of capitalism has given up its hegemony without fighting to the death to keep or regain it. We talked about how the Versailles treaty that ended World War I was a humiliation. The German rulers used it to whip up nationalism to launch their Nazi campaign to conquer Europe and especially the Soviet Union. The US is like a cornered beast, like Germany between World Wars I and II. The US must try to halt China’s rise militarily.
She thought that sounded right.
I said that to end this murderous cycle we have to put an end to capitalism. Capitalism, based on competition to exploit workers for maximum profit, makes murderous world wars inevitable. Capitalist profit comes only from exploiting workers’ labor power. As competition increases, the capitalists invest in more machines with fewer workers. Exploiting fewer workers, the capitalists’ rate of profit declines. Their “solution” is to fight to destroy their competitors’ factories, resources, and workers.
There is less anti-communism now. Many people all over respond positively to communist ideas of destroying capitalism and its wage slavery and producing only for human need, not for profit.
A danger is that people will support China as the lesser of two evils instead of fighting to get rid of capitalism.
She didn’t think anyone would support China. I disagreed. Many people worldwide think China is the lesser of two evils. They don’t necessarily see that China aims to replace the US as the number one imperialist exploiter.
I explained the only answer is to mobilize the masses to turn the imperialist war into revolutions for communism. Communism: collectivity instead of competition and exploitation.
In times like these people are open to radical change. We have to be active with them presenting the communist solution now when they seek answers.
During World War I, the Russian workers and soldiers overthrew the capitalist government. After World War II the Chinese working class and soldiers did the same.
Today, the world is more interconnected than ever as capitalism viciously attacks our class worldwide. A victory in one country could be multiplied many times over. The masses will fight for communism—when they understand it.
This discussion will continue.
—Experienced comrade
Letter: The Working Class Must Free Itself from the Capitalists in the US and Worldwide
There is a narrative that we must support the Iranian government and not show, now, its exploitative and oppressive character because that would help the murderous capitalist USA. This narrative disarms the workers of the world.
In Israel, they are trying to resume the trials against Netanyahu. Charges include his documented financing of Hamas to weaken Al-Fatah and the Palestinian Authority of the late Yasser Arafat and his successor Mahmoud Abbas. They were convicted by Islamic Jihad for signing the “two-state” Oslo Accords.
The working class in the USA, in Iran, in Palestine-Israel, and the rest of the world must rebel, unite, and fight for emancipation from all capitalists.
There is a widespread idea that Netanyahu involved Trump in the war, that “the tail wags the dog” and that by doing the dirty work he has become the head. This clouds the fact that although the US capitalist class (which includes Zionist bankers and industrialists) has disagreements about how to maintain its hegemony, it needs that war.
Similarly, European capitalists, including Britain, need Israel’s dominance in the area to sustain their business globally.
All capitalists, without exception, are evil. Right now oil producers are getting richer while the working class suffers from rising prices due to wars.
They will continue their bloody wars, until the working class ends them by ending the capitalists themselves.
—Comrade in Mexico
Letter: Sinners: Destroy Money and Capital with Revolutionary Communist Violence
The vampire film Sinners won four Oscars. The writer, producer, and director, Ryan Coogler, won Best Original Screenplay.
“What did you think of the movie?” I asked several friends.
“I loved it; it has so many layers that I need to watch it again.”
“I really liked how blues music formed an integral part of the plot.”
“The relentless fight against the vampires was impressive,” were some answers.
However, everyone I spoke with overlooked the subtle yet scathing critique of money—and, by extension, capital. In his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Marx developed the idea of money as the supreme social nexus. Money becomes the “universal agent of separation” and an “inverted force” that transforms fidelity into infidelity, love into hatred, and virtue into vice.
In the film, the Moore twins attempt to use money earned in Chicago to “buy” their way back into the community—and their redemption. However, that money (the nexus) acts as a barrier. Locals view them with suspicion. And in the end, capital fails to purchase the respect or security they seek within a segregated and racist system. Here, money supplants genuine human relationships. Instead of connecting through who we are, we connect through what we can buy.
Marx wrote that money can make a cowardly man appear brave or cause an ugly man to be “loved.” The gold coins offered by the vampire Remmick are part of this inversion. The promise of wealth transforms the desire for freedom of characters like Mary into eternal servitude. Money “inverts” their humanity: to attain “eternal life” (wealth/power), they must die as humans and become parasites (vampires).
“Capital is dead labor which, vampire-like, only lives by sucking live labor, and lives the more, the more live labor it sucks,” Marx says in Capital. In Sinners, vampirism serves as a literal representation of this Marxist concept. The vampires do not merely seek blood; they seek to appropriate cultural vitality and art—specifically the blues—to transform them into inert commodities.
In the section of Capital analyzing the transition from feudalism to capitalism, Marx adds; “If money, according to Augier, ‘comes into the world with a bloodstain on one cheek,’ capital is born dripping blood and dirt from every pore, from head to foot.”
This is capitalism, born feeding itself on the blood of humanity. It has robbed us of our very existence. And it continues to do so. Especially in times of environmental destruction, of repeated genocides, of kidnappings and disappearances, of a third World War, and many other atrocities.
Here, the only option we have is organized violence. Like that of the Choctaw vampire hunters and the community faced with the onslaught they confronted, depicted in Sinners.
Yet, unlike theirs, ours will be an organized, revolutionary, and communist violence that will unearth capitalism—along with its capital and its money—completely and finally. And in the process, we will be building a communist world—one developing and marching toward its full maturity where every single human being will live to their full humanity.
—Marxist Poet
Read more about Marx’s Capital here