The events that continue to follow on one another in the Middle East certainly don’t find us unprepared.  We have always pointed to that area (even before 1945, as can be seen in the pages of our Prometeo, published in the years between the two world wars) as one of those where the contradictions of capitalism are to be felt the most, exploding more and more frequently and violently – as happened in the Balkans around the time of the First World War.  Another area of increasing tension has its centre in Ukraine: so we might say that a single faultline of social and political instability links Europe to the Middle East.

Under the pressure of the world crisis of the capitalist mode of production, the situation in the Middle East is getting more critical, day by day.  However it may develop in the near future, the war between Israel and Iran is, at one and the same time, a symptom and an accelerator, adding to its gravity.

The State of Israel, already committed to ethnic cleansing in and around Gaza, is performing to perfection the role it was assigned right after the Second World War by the victorious imperialist powers, first and foremost the USA and USSR closely followed by France and England: the role and function of armed gendarme, paid and supported by the interests of world capitalism, at the heart of a region bursting with crude oil, gas and other precious raw materials, as well as being a crossroads of international trade.  On their part, all the local bourgeoisies (Arab or not) have done, whether laymen or bigots, corrupt and reactionary, fearful of the more powerful imperialisms, has been to hang on as hard as they can to the deposits of black gold, following the scent of money, no matter whether dollars, rubles, euros or yen.

The two recent, cold-blooded homicides committed by the agents of the Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the United States Border Patrol (USBP) in Minneapolis (Minnesota) have rightly caused great anger and generated protests more or less all over the United States spontaneous protests following the numerous, just as spontaneous, initiatives that had taken place in previous weeks with the aim of hindering the repressive action taken by the ICE and USBP.  It is naturally a good thing that an increasing number of people feel the urge to react against what is happening.  However (under the added pressure of violent material contradictions), this should be accompanied by a clearer awareness of some fundamental issues.

ICE and USBP are federal agencies: this means the armed wing of the central State. That is to say, structures designed for repression, independently of existing governments, which are in turn extensions of the ruling class’s business committees.  This is their function, in a society divided into classes such as the society of capital, profit and savage competition. The State is not a disinterested organism:  it is a complex structure that answers directly to the need for survival of bourgeois power and thus acts to repress all those phenomena that may threaten the correct operation of capitalism’s main activity – the extraction of plusvalue.

For decades the massacre of Palestinian proletarians by the State of Israel has been causing bloodshed in Gaza and around with at least 70 thousand recorded deaths, in a Middle East that is increasingly tormented and being shaken to its core day by day. For over two years now, amidst almost total indifference, a bloody „internal“ conflict has been dragging on in Sudan with hundreds and thousands of deaths and refugees, in an Africa that has long been the stage for ever greater penetration by the most powerful imperialisms or those aspiring to be so, always ready to fuel or extend „civil wars“ in one country or another, selling arms to win „advantage positions“, bombing local populations to „bring them democracy“ (the recent US bombings in Nigeria are advertised as the „defence of innocent Christians“!).  In the East, the western and eastern borders of India are just as many hotbeds of unresolved contrasts and in the so-called Indo-Pacific and between the North and South China Seas, wars and local squabbles alternate with growing tension between the old and new imperialisms (USA and China over Taiwan, but not only).  The crucial Red Sea artery, along which, between its two extremities at the Suez Canal and the Straits of Bab-el-Mandeb, gigantic container vessels, oil tankers and military convoys navigate, is still a bone of contention (not by chance at the end of 2025 Israel was the first State in the world to recognise the independence of the separatist Somaliland already proclaimed in 1991, whilst the clash between Saudi Arabia, Yemen and the United Arab Emirates reignites). Central and South America live in a state of constant instability, as the „backyeards “ of US imperialism (another old story, now reinvented with the attack on Venezuela), which has no scruples about dropping bombs here and there, under the pretext of the… „war on the drugs trade.“

A report published at the start of July by the Children’s Commissioner for England ^[1], printed in the Guardian of 8/7 and taken up again by the Italian daily newspaper „Il Fatto Quotidiano“ of 11/7, declares quite explicitly that: “the findings in this work highlight real hardship; an almost-Dickensian level of poverty facing some children in England today. […] Children do not talk about poverty as an abstract concept. They talk in simple but powerful terms about how it feels to not have enough money to do the same things as their friends, or to feel a sense of shame at being seen as ‚lesser’. […] they spoke with candour about things that most people would consider basic, but which for them are out of their reach: a safe home that isn’t mouldy – or full of rats, a bed big enough to stretch out in, basic food like bacon, a place to do their homework, having the heating on, privacy in the bathroom and being able to wash, having their friends over, not having to travel hours to school, or having a local park to play safely in where the grass isn’t overgrown and unusable”.

The genocide implemented by the State of Israel against the proletarians in and around the Gaza Strip (leaving aside for the moment the „deeds” of Israeli settlers supported by their army in the West Bank) has not „only“ been responsible for 60 thousand or, according to some independent sources, 100 thousand deaths. How many future deaths are to come due to the consequences of crippling injuries, the impossibility of surviving after the loss of limbs, of being unable to access the necessary treatment for pre-existing health conditions or those that may have developed over whole months of unceasing slaughter or that will occur in the near future because of devastated hospital facilities? Or else, far more cruelly, due purely to hunger and malnutrition. There are many faces to genocide. The physical and material devastation from air, land and sea attacks on towns, villages and countryside is increasingly rendering more or less the whole of the region uninhabitable: how is survival possible amongst the tottering skeletons of the few houses still standing, along streets wiped out by bombing, amidst dry and unusable cisterns and water pipes, wrecked drainage and blown-up electricity networks, on a territory made uninhabitable by land-mines, radioactive munitions and poisoned soil and sub-soil?

Only a few months ago, when commenting the outcome of America’s presidential elections, we concluded that for some time now in the United States there has been “an often dramatic social situation affecting almost all sectors of the workforce across every region of this vast country. Struggles have multiplied over the years, sometimes conducted by official trade unions with a shameful history behind them and facing strong pressure from workers; and sometimes as an expression of grassroots organizations, which are something of a novelty in the complicated post-World War II era. It’s very simple: workers in the land that symbolizes imperialist domination are in dire straits and can’t take it any more”. And we recalled the series of struggles and unrest that had broken out in diverse sectors in the world of work, from the dockers to the Boeing workers, from workers in the food industry to the coal miners of Alabama, from the joiners, to the installers, to the maintenance staff of telephone companies, from the Amazon workforce to that of the service sector and the so-called gig economy and so on (see: “A Few Words about the US Elections“, the internationalist, no. 11/2025).

We are totally unsurprised by the recent events upsetting the world, bringing discussions over the „third world war“ into bars and TV talk shows. We are not interested here in attacking the more or less fascist bourgeois right wing: it is a declared enemy. The problem instead consists in the reformist false friends, pacifists and democrats: all of whom have deceived and continue to deceive our class, maintaining that it is still possible to improve capitalism, eliminating its contradictions. At times they even pretend they’re communists: but communism is the active and organised negation of bourgeois rule, both in its democratic and in its fascist guises. Being communist means opposing all imperialist wars, declaring open war on capital and first and foremost on our own bourgeoisie.