In the wake of the slaughter of workers in Paris, there is no limit to the selective outrage and grief of the capitalist ruling class. The small-scale terrorists of the Islamic State (ISIS) are now targeted for an intensified aerial bombardment by the biggest, most lethal terrorists the world has ever known: the imperialist bosses of the United States and Europe. As imperialist cheerleader Roger Cohen wrote in the New York Times, “Saving Paris from the Islamic State will take ruthlessness — but save it we must” (11/21/15).
After barely registering the ISIS bombings that killed more than 40 people in Lebanon the day before, the capitalist media—egged on by shameless U.S. presidential candidates—whipped up a racist frenzy against Muslim, Black and immigrant workers. Donald Trump called for the closure of mosques and a national Muslim registry. Jeb Bush—a “moderate,” mainstream Republican—clamored to close U.S. borders to all Muslim refugees.
The Paris bombings and shootings were a cowardly, despicable attack on unarmed workers. But we must not forget that thousands are murdered by capitalist state terror every day. When the U.S. bosses aren’t bombing hospitals in Afghanistan, they are wiping out whole families with reckless drone strikes. They’re shattering the lives of millions with mass racist incarceration, deportation and unemployment. To divert attention from their own monstrous crimes, the bosses are exploiting fears of ISIS and Al Qaeda to stir anti-Muslim racism and divide workers against one another.
At stake is the immense oil wealth of the Middle East. The imperialists in Russia and China want this cheaply extracted oil for themselves, while U.S. and European capitalists will stop at nothing to secure their control over it.
Racism, sexism and endless imperialist war—this is what capitalism offers the international working class. The Progressive Labor Party organizes in more than 25 countries to smash all racist borders with communist revolution. We call on all workers to stand together, fight back, and refuse to be suckered into the rulers’ global game of divide and conquer!
Fascism: Bosses Discipline for War
Heightened racism and police terror against the working class is one aspect of rising fascism. Another aspect is the move by U.S. and European bosses to discipline their own ranks and sort out disputes among the billionaires. Where will the next big global conflict play out—and who will foot the bill? These questions must be resolved if the bosses hope to get workers to accept a military draft, and to fight and die in the next major ground war.
In the book The Prize, Daniel Yergin shows how control over oil determines the course of capitalist empire. While challenged internationally by rival Russian and Chinese bosses, and domestically by the Koch brothers, the main wing of the U.S. ruling class still dictates the global production and distribution of oil through companies like Citigroup and ExxonMobil. This finance capital wing will stop at nothing to coerce the Koch faction to fall in line—or to smash them, if need be.
In their responses to the Paris attacks, there was little real difference between liberal Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republicans Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz. Clinton proposed a no-fly zone over Syria; Rubio, another mainstreamer, pushed for “a substantially increased commitment” of ground forces; Cruz, a Tea Party favorite, clamored for air strikes with more “tolerance for civilian casualties” (New York Times, 11/14/15). All three were calling for a re-escalated U.S. assault in the devastated region, which means a future of yet more death and displacement for millions of workers.
ISIS: Exxon’s Mirror Image
The origins of ISIS trace back to 2003 and the U.S. imperialist-led genocide in Iraq, when Saddam Hussein’s regime fell out with Exxon over oil profits. “Even with the influx of thousands of foreign fighters, almost all of the leaders of the Islamic State are former Iraqi officers” (Washington Post, 4/4/15). This explains ISIS’s military success, as well as its ability to pump oil to fund its own anti-worker atrocities. As Bloomberg News reports, “the terrorist group is actually taking in $500 million from oil a year” (11/19/15).
Beneath its religious façade, the ISIS ideology is all about profits, soaked in workers’ blood. When U.S., French, Russian or Chinese bosses work themselves into a made-for-media rage over ISIS terrorism, they are screaming at their own reflection.
Bosses’ Nightmare: International Working Class Unity
Over the last 50 years, U.S. and allied bosses have been constrained by a history of mass, militant anti-imperialist movements. In 1964, in New York’s Times Square, the Progressive Labor Party led the first U.S. demonstration against the Vietnam War, part of a worldwide anti-imperialist, anti-racist upsurge. This international wave of strikes, rebellions and military mutinies, led mainly by Black workers and soldiers, was so powerful that today’s bosses remain unable—as of yet—to mobilize for a major ground war.
The capitalists’ ruthlessness should not be underestimated, however. Some bosses are banking on another world-altering event like 9/11, the attack on the World Trade Center in New York on September 11, 2001, to rally U.S. workers to war. According to The Economist magazine, another finance capital mouthpiece:
With each attack that [ISIS] unleashes on the West, the [need] to use Western troops against it will grow. In the terrible event of a large strike on American soil, the matter would be settled (11/21/15).
As CHALLENGE went to press, U.S. imperialist ally Turkey shot down a Russian warplane over Syria for allegedly violating Turkish airspace. This incident will spur even greater efforts from bosses on all sides to impose fascism on the working class as they prepare for wider imperialist wars.
For now, the bosses are taking incremental steps toward fascism. In police states like France and Belgium, machine gun-toting cops sweep Arab neighborhoods. In Chicago, the bosses are girding for working-class rebellion after the belated video release of a kkkop murdering Black teen Laquan McDonald. Meanwhile, the New York Police Department is rolling out an “anti-terrorism” Critical Response Command: 527 kkkops with military-grade weapons and armor (New York Times, 11/20/15).
But PLP says: Fight back! The international working class still holds all the cards, including the potential to overthrow the entire murderous capitalist system. In our unions and mass organizations, workers must sharpen the struggle against the bosses’ drive for imperialist war. We must fight the racist and sexist divisions the rulers attempt to force upon us. No capitalist politician or reform can liberate our class. We need a communist movement of millions of workers, students and soldiers to smash imperialism and destroy capitalism forever with communist revolution.
And we need you to help lead this mass movement. Join us!
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French Bosses No Stranger to Terrorism
Massacres of workers must be condemned, be they in Beirut or Paris. But when it comes to terrorizing the working class, ISIS can’t compete with the brutal and racist history of the French imperialists. The French motto of “Liberté, egalité, fraternité” (liberty, equality, fraternity) rings as hollow as ISIS claims of religious purity. After its defeat in the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804), the first successful revolt against slavery in history, the French rulers continued to terrorize the world, mainly western and central Africa, out of a “duty to civilize inferior races,” as dictated by French colonial boss Jules Ferry in a parliamentary speech of 1885.
But workers fought back. During World War II, through the Francs-Tireurs et Partisans (FTP), immigrant and native-born communist workers led the massive resistance to the Nazi occupation. By that point, the international communist movement no longer advocated armed revolution. When the French bosses were returned to power, they showed what they’d learned from their Nazi mentors. Here are just two examples.
On December 1, 1944, white French soldiers received orders to indiscriminately murder African prisoners of war who’d been interned at the Nazis’ notorious Camp Thiaroye in the colony of French West Africa (later Sénégal). The death toll is unknown. More than a thousand of the African soldiers had mutinied when the French bosses refused to pay them as much as white soldiers. Survivors were sentenced by military tribunal to ten years in prison. A 1988 film on the massacre by the late anti-imperialist filmmaker, Ousmene Sembene, was banned in France and couldn’t find distribution until 2005. The French government refused to admit to the crime until 2012. Even today, this shameful history is ignored by schools in both France and Senegal.
On October 17, 1961, Paris became the site of another massacre by the French capitalist rulers. In northern Africa, armed Algerian workers were bringing French imperialists to their knees. Led by former Nazi collaborator Maurice Papon, who’d deported more than 1,000 Jews to the death camps during World War II, French government security forces tortured Muslim workers in Paris’s Palais du Sports and slaughtered more than 200 of them, dumping their bodies into the River Seine. French cops also arrested 11,000 workers for demonstrating against Nazi-style identification cards and curfews for “Algerian Muslim workers.”
When the U.S. and French bosses wail about ISIS committing the worst atrocity “on French soil” since World War II, they reveal their contempt for the lives of Arab, Muslim and African workers. The massacres of 1944 and 1961 fail to qualify as “atrocities” in the bosses’ eyes. Nor does the French bosses’ mass deportation of Jewish workers to Nazi death camps during World War II. Nor does the murder of tens of thousands of workers in the imperialist war in Algeria itself. The descendants of those victims are among the more than five million members of today’s Algerian community in France, jammed into apartheid slums surrounding Paris.
These atrocities will end only when the imperialist murderers are wiped off the face of the earth by a communist-led international working class.
