The massacre in Paris has produced an outcry that it is a crime against humanity. The international bourgeoisie hovers between despair and indignation, between fear and calls for revenge. From all sides we hear cries for a "just war" to counteract "holy war". West versus East, Christian tradition against Islamic fundamentalism. France wants to avenge the victims by striking at the strategic heart of Isis. Isis attacks Paris to avenge the French government's decision to enter the war in Syria. In reality the conflict is between a nascent imperialism that took its first tragic steps in "its" Middle East and those of the Western imperialist world where for years Middle Eastern oil has been the motive for its military interventions.

In fact this war has been going on for years. France, USA, Britain, today even Putin's Russia, are warmongers who destroy the present to economically (oil and gas) ensure the future. Previously it was Iraq and Afghanistan then Libya. Today it is Syria and tomorrow it will be some other area or country which has a minimum of economic and strategic interest.

The hypocritical West mourns its innocent victims but forgets that the monster which has killed them came into being thanks to Western support and was only cast aside when it took an independent road by positioning itself between one imperialism and another. The West also forgets that such murderous outrage is also the result of its own imperialist barbarism. This has transformed the Middle East into a perpetual battlefield to strip it of its wealth, before abandoning it to the deepest misery. Surrounded by the devastation of war, much of the population faces hunger and the denial of any future other than that of escape to the countries which have caused the misery in the first place.

Isis’ barbarity stems from its economic and political interests, as a nascent imperialist state claiming to stand for the underprivileged masses who have accepted their religion as the only road to salvation and have sold their dignity as an exploited class on this earth for an unattainable happiness after death. Their barbarism involves fighting an "asymmetric" war against unarmed civilians, decimating them like animals for slaughter.

But barbarism also takes the form of Western imperialism which wages wars of total destruction, taking hundreds of thousands of civilian lives, solely to satisfy its own capitalist interests and perpetuate the life of an economic system which can only survive by creating economic crises, hunger, unemployment and the harshest exploitation for millions of workers. Such wars can only be fought against by the very exploited who have been reduced to destitution by the capitalist system.

The massacre in Paris should give pause for thought to all those who hear the tragic news without trying to go a little further. 1) The French ruling class, like the rest of the international bourgeoisie, will use the horrible carnage to intensify its war activities. Whilst everyone is apparently against Isis, in fact every imperialism is searching for its own economic advantage at a time of sluggish economic crisis where there are still no signs of a robust recovery. 2) The barbarism in Paris echoes the barbarity of the drones on the battlefields of Syria which are killing thousands of civilians, bombing hospitals and dishing out devastating "collateral damage" everywhere.

It is not a matter of talking about barbarism in the plural, of choosing who is more barbarous or who is the most evil. The question is not which is the most horrible for the media to transmit – the execution of prisoners or the slaughter of civilians in a football stadium or at a concert; or is it more terrible to learn in a tragic "video game" that some drone has destroyed dozens of families or burned a few hundred shepherds with their flocks. Barbarism is barbarism.

It is capitalist BARBARISM that has to be fought against, regardless of ideology and the religious instruments used by all sides whenever it suits them. Capitalism’s perpetual crisis which destroys productive capacity takes the shape of imperialist war and death. Capitalism creates crisis. As the crisis accelerates the effects of imperialist manoeuvres get worse. Imperialism creates imperialism in its own image and likeness. Barbarism creates barbarism in an endless cycle. The only one way to break it is by resuming the class struggle. The hundreds of millions of exploited workers who are innocent victims of massacres and wars need to distance themselves from these barbaric societies. They need to find a way of breaking out of the cage in which capitalist society has forced them. They have to think of an alternative to present-day society and its intolerable barbarity. They must think in terms of class, of war against war, the barbarity of war and those who incite it whilst asking for workers sympathy and understanding. And then there will be less warfare, fewer ideologies or religions to justify war, fewer massacres like the one in Paris or whatever else there is to come. This is the way, the only possible way, to develop the independent struggle of the exploited class against wars and the economic system that generates them.

FD