This article is the editorial for issue #5 of Communist Revolution. Subscribe here!
At the time of writing, on April 22, we are emerging from a tense week in which the Middle East has come very close to exploding into a regional war. After exchanging missiles, Iran and Israel have tacitly agreed to conclude the current round of attacks. But the Middle East remains a powder keg, with no shortage of potential sparks.
The next spark could come from Rafah, the last Gaza enclave the Israeli army has not sent troops to. Netanyahu has promised the far right rabid dogs in his cabinet that he will invade.
An invasion of Rafah could prompt an Arab regime to do something under pressure from the masses. Already, the regime in Jordan, where a large part of the population is of Palestinian origin, is hanging by a thread after weeks of demonstrations.
Egypt, too, is on the brink, surviving only thanks to funding (to the tune of $55 billion in the last two months) from the IMF, the World Bank and other imperialist states. Sisi’s government surely remembers how the 1952 officers’ revolt that brought Nasser to power was partly the result of the regime’s failure to intervene during the Nakba.
War or revolution (or both): such is the outlook for the Middle East.
For workers in Canada and Quebec, these developments cannot be ignored. A regional war would have direct effects on workers here—not to mention the unspeakable suffering it would exacerbate in the Middle East.
The region produces 33 per cent of the world’s oil, and around 20 per cent of the world’s oil transit passes through it, via the Strait of Hormuz. A war would cause the price of oil to explode. Inflation would soar, far beyond what we’ve already seen with the war in Ukraine and the COVID-19 pandemic.
At a time when working people are already tightening their belts, war could throw many of them into destitution.
Not to mention that our governments would respond by increasing military spending, at taxpayers’ expense.
The first victims of a war would be the workers and poor of the Middle East—the second, the workers and poor of the rest of the planet.
Here we see how the capitalist system is interconnected on a global scale.
The decisions of a madman, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, 10,000 km away from us, who wants a war with Iran to save his career, could lead thousands of people here into unemployment, homelessness and misery.
The genocide in Palestine is funded by American taxpayers’ money, and committed with weapons built by American, German, French, Italian and Canadian workers. The American imperialists and their allies support Israel because it provides them with a heavily-armed outpost in an oil-rich region next to the Suez Canal, a crucial transit point for world trade.
This means that the enemies of the Palestinians are also the enemies of the workers of Quebec and Canada.
They’re the war-mongering imperialists in Ottawa, Washington and Tel Aviv. They’re the same ones who are destroying the planet, hoarding housing and throwing us out on the curb, jacking up food prices, exploiting us and paying us starvation wages.
To put an end to incessant war, genocide and large-scale misery, we need a revolution to overthrow them.
There is revolutionary potential in all countries, especially in the Middle East. In country after country, the masses could rise up at any moment. A new Intifada is brewing, and we must be ready to support them, and prepare our own Intifada, here too. Already there is a mass movement of campus encampments spreading in western countries which aid Israel.
That’s why the Revolutionary Communist Party is helping to build a Revolutionary Communist International. The capitalist hydra must be slain everywhere. A world revolution requires a world Communist Party.
The Revolutionary Communist International, to be launched in June, aims to coordinate the work of revolutionary communists around the world. We are not a federation or collection of individual communist parties around the world. We are a united party, sharing the same banner and program, bringing together workers on all five continents.
In country after country, from Canada to the United States, Palestine to Egypt, workers must overthrow the capitalist war-mongers. There will never be genuine peace as long as the working class allows the capitalists to remain in power.
