No, it is not a war. It is preparation for war, while the major states of America, Europe, Russia and Asia are already revving up the engines. Whether it’s “terrorism” or “the war on terror”, they both stand for advance notice of the coming war.

It is not the war of the Islamic State against the West. It is the war of competing imperialisms. Even if the perpetrators of this umpteenth act of terror are youths pushed to fanaticism, the instigators are to be found in the corridors of power of the state authorities of the entire world.
The Islamic State is not the expression of the impoverished classes of the Arab countries and it does not defend their interests. Nor does it even represent the armed force of Arab national bourgeoisies wishing to free themselves of foreign, ex-colonial or imperialist oppression.

Islamic State’s strength lies in those who direct it from abroad; they are mercenary troops who conveniently hide their trade behind the smokescreen of religion. Their direct financiers are some of the petro-monarchies of the Gulf, engaged in an internecine struggle, and their discreet protector is the imperialist front currently lined up behind the USA, which arms them and sends them off to fight, or fights them, according to the colossal interests of all the capitalist powers, strangled by the economic crisis for which they see no end.

Bourgeois propaganda turns the truth on its head: in the Arab countries the pretense of Islamic revolution only hides the reaction of the dominant bourgeois and landed classes behind a thick ideological fog, and its primary victims are the proletarians of these countries. The daily bombings in the squares and markets of Baghdad, Aleppo, Islamabad, Beirut, Damascus, Kabul, Tripoli and Istanbul bear an anti-proletarian mark, one of wars between bourgeois gangs.

Communists do not deliver a moral judgement on the war and on its atrocities; they know that violence is intrinsic to class society, founded exclusively on the power of dominion and on terror, even when it is not necessary to use it directly but only to threaten it. Terrorism is an instrument of war, which can be used between the states as well as between classes. This is the terrorism employed by some bourgeois states against others, and of all states against the international working class, in order to divide it according to artificial ideological barriers and to prevent the possibility of any re-emergence of class unity. We know “campaigns of violence” all too well. They are warnings and signals that, for nearly a half century, also in Europe, the bourgeoisies believe are useful to hurl at one another – though obviously it is proletarians who bear the brunt.

A few hundred dead are nothing for the monstrous world of capital. The God of profit demands far more human sacrifices. Militarism is the one true essence of capital, in particular of the western imperialist democracies that talk about peace but are busy preparing the next round of global butchery. A war built, instigated and desired for the survival of Capital, at the cost of millions of proletarian lives.

The dominant classes profit from every pretext and from every popular emotion to subordinate the working class to their discipline, to terrorize it, to squeeze it between the threat of foreign violence and the violence which the bourgeoisie applies directly, and constantly reinforces.

Communists therefore keep their distance from every abstract condemnation of violence, from the bourgeoisie’s every utterance of false piety and indignation, and from every demonstration of solidarity with states and with the bourgeoisies of the world, first and foremost with those of their own countries.

The prolonged agony of capitalist society will unleash an unimaginable series of horrors and lies, even beyond those of the First and Second World Wars. In response the working class, and above all its communist party, must be ready to maintain an uncompromisingly firm line against everyone and everything, first in respect of the truth of its class science, and then, alone, against all of its enemies.

Capitalism will not die if not through a violent death at the hands of the communist proletariat. The only possible “war on terrorism” is the one against this barbarous social system, therefore the only one that has communist revolution as its final objective.

By contrast those who accept capitalism, in any of its forms and in any of its guises, is compelled to accept its present-day terrorism and will be condemned to submit to its coming war of the future.