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As we write (the beginning of September) the attack on Syria promised by “pacifist” Obama, followed dutifully by the tail-wagging “socialist” Hollande, with his nostalgia for past French imperialist glories, has not yet become operational. But this is irrelevant. The past twenty years have been a horrifying sequence of more or less uninterrupted, bloody wars, the massacre of civilian populations and open, state-perpetrated anti-proletarian terrorism. If and when the attack may be made and in whatever way (“limited” or “extended” in the cynical language of the military command headquarters and war-mongering politics), it would be just one more link in a chain of fire that has been closing around the throat of the world proletariat for some time now, moving closer to the citadels of capitalism every day.

Over the coming months there will be no lack of new episodes in the crisis of over-production of goods and capital that has for some time been shaking the capitalist mode of production. More bubbles are swelling and the amazing course of the “emerging countries” is already experiencing a slowdown. We’re in for some surprises and action by communistswill be of even greater and more fundamental importance in order to analyze the facts andintervene, organizing and directing the struggles that will inevitably and increasingly spring out of the social substrata.

For the growth of capital, military expenditure is an absolute necessity. It is how the State finances the security its capitalists need to ensure themselves of sources of foreign wealth, the subordination of workers both at home and abroad, the direct and immediate use of natural resources, the management of factories and the power of national capitalism. To guarantee profits, the State “commandeers” nature and labour, not only at home but also worldwide. This is how military expenditure and the destructive power of an army truly become the real production force of capitalism, the real guarantee of continuity in the production process. Nagasaki, Hiroshima, Dresden, Berlin, Warsaw are exemplary sites of capital’s destructive power: nothing else!

Between partisans and loyalists, nationalists and mercenaries, all supplied by arms from imperialist instigators, the programmed assassination of proletarians is being planned, according to the same old script.

As communists and internationalists, we know from memory and from the science of history that in the age of imperialism class rule and oppression become more widespread and more intense. The economic crisis strews growing poverty and a trail of death amongst proletarians all over the world. War is the natural habitat of capitalism: indeed imperialism means more intense international competition, harsh trade wars and exportation of capitals which inevitably come into conflict with one another, control of the sources of raw materials and their transport routes and thus the attempt to exclude competitors, right up to the uncontrolled explosion of conflicts that are at first local and later, in perspective and in the presence of the necessary, favourable material conditions, worldwide.