Faced with the horror of capitalism, there is only one alternative: communist revolution

Submitted by International Review on

From Ukraine to Iran, from Sudan to Gaza, via Yemen – where the Houthis, who are now blocking the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, are clashing with Saudi Arabia – deadlocked conflicts are multiplying in every corner of the world, becoming bogged down in quagmires and spreading inexorably, plunging populations into utter desolation and horror. In Ukraine, for almost five years now (longer than the First World War!), bombs have been raining down relentlessly, targeting residential buildings, hospitals, schools and energy infrastructure indiscriminately. To date, two million people, both civilians and military personnel, have been killed or injured. And it is far from over, as both sides are determined not to give an inch, engaging in an irrational, deadly escalation! Ukrainian drones and missiles are striking e-commerce logistics centres and refineries right in the heart of Russia. Under pressure from these attacks and the sanctions that are bleeding its economy dry, Russian imperialism is stepping up its provocations against the NATO powers.[1] The increasingly widespread use of drones, state-of-the-art missiles, satellites, artificial intelligence and robots heralds ever more atrocities. And as this ‘War 2.0’ cannot do without cannon fodder, both sides are attempting to conscript civilians by the hundreds of thousands and are conducting a ruthless hunt for deserters!

A few hundred kilometres to the east, in the Middle East, in Iran, following the thousands of victims of the crackdown on the Trump-encouraged uprising against the regime, the deluge of bombs from Operation ‘Epic Fury’ unleashed by the United States – intended to bring the mullahs’ regime to its knees – is of such intensity that it is depleting the ammunition stocks of the world’s leading military power. This fiasco, with no foreseeable end in sight, is causing nothing but massive destruction, unprecedented chaos and death amongst the civilian population.

And Uncle Sam’s insane and bloodthirsty ‘fury’ does not stop there, as it is now the people of Yemen and Syria who are bearing the brunt of its firepower. For its part, its ally, Israel, categorically rejects the ‘peace plan’ proposed by Trump and his clique, relentlessly pursuing its crusade: incursions into Lebanon and Syria, horrific atrocities in the Gaza Strip, and commando operations by its settlers against Palestinian civilians in the West Bank. At the same time, new fault lines are emerging between Turkey, Israel, Saudi Arabia and the Emirates – the seeds of future clashes.

But these past few months have not only been marked by the worsening of the chaos of war. All over the world, people have had to cope with the intensification of climate and environmental disruption: unprecedented heatwaves making life unbearable for over a billion people; massive forest fires on the outskirts of major cities such as Bordeaux and Madrid; landslides; floods; and mudslides sweeping away everything in their path, as in Nepal and Tibet at the end of August. The intensification of the El Niño phenomenon could have devastating and unprecedented effects in the coming months, particularly in Latin America and South-East Asia. While this is merely a first glimpse of what life on Earth will be like at temperatures approaching 50 °C, the consequences for human life are already dramatic. Over the past four years, in Europe alone, nearly 200,000 people are thought to have died as a result of extreme temperatures! The drying up of rivers and groundwater reserves is disrupting supply chains,[2] causing a fall in agricultural production and even affecting nuclear energy generation. The risk of food shortages looms over regions such as India, Central Asia and even Europe. Tunisia, for its part, is directly affected by a shortage of drinking water, which touches much of the population.

These combined effects of the escalating conflict and the climate crisis are clearly a major factor in the worsening of an economic situation that was already severely deteriorated. The closure or disruption of key global trade routes such as the Strait of Hormuz and the Bab el-Mandeb Strait have not only triggered the most severe oil crisis in history but have also caused a considerable slowdown in trade. These new shocks, by disrupting global production, raising fears of shortages, and causing inflation to soar (to its highest level in Europe for three years), are further exacerbating the economic crisis of the already severely weakened capitalist system.

This situation further reduces the fiscal manoeuvre room of the world’s major economic powers, which are already strangled by their abysmal levels of debt. This is happening even as the G20 warns of the risks of debt defaults, which could lead to a financial crisis of major proportions. Thus, Germany – which until recently was regarded as ‘the showcase of the Western economy’ but has been profoundly destabilised by successive shocks to its economic model – is seeing its key industrial flagships, such as the automotive sector, undergo a veritable upheaval: Volkswagen is planning to cut 100,000 jobs, while Mercedes is considering increasing working hours by 30 per cent to 40 per cent, even as Berlin embarks on a vast rearmament programme, with the floodgates of debt wide open. In the United States, China and Europe, unemployment is already rising everywhere. And as usual, all states and governments are determined to make the working class pay for the crisis through massive attacks on healthcare, pensions and education systems – all while the prices of basic necessities continue to skyrocket, plunging exploited workers ever deeper into precariousness and impoverishment.

A step in the deadly spiral of capitalism

All these upheavals shaking the entire world represent a brutal acceleration of the deadly spiral in which capitalism is caught. Thus, the conflict in Iran is not simply ‘just another war’, but a powerful intensification of imperialist rivalries where every nation for itself, chaos and uncertainty are now the norm. Not only is the US deadlock turning things upside down in the competition between local powers for regional hegemony – between Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Turkey and Israel (with the fallout from their confrontation spilling over into the Horn of Africa and Sudan), but more broadly, it is the entire ‘international order’ established in the wake of the Second World War in 1945 that is shattering, even foreshadowing possible direct clashes between former allies. The United States, as exemplified by its power grab in Venezuela, its openly expressed ambitions to annex Greenland or to make Canada the 51st state of the Union, is the primary driving force behind this fragmentation of the world, in which all competing states are vying with one another in an escalation of militarism and the arms race…

Forty years ago, following the collapse of the Eastern Bloc and the deafening campaign proclaiming ‘the death of communism’, the bourgeoisie could still make us believe that democracy and the market economy would lead humanity to peace and universal happiness; now, however, the reality of a world with no future whatsoever—other than a descent into barbarism—has become too obvious to be denied. At the start of the decade, the ICC stated that “the 2020s of the 21st century are shaping up to be one of the most turbulent periods in history and are already piling up indescribable catastrophes and suffering. They began with the Covid-19 pandemic […] and a war in the heart of Europe, which has already been raging for more than nine months and whose outcome no one can predict. Capitalism has entered a phase of serious turmoil on all fronts. Behind this accumulation and intertwining of upheavals looms the threat of the destruction of humanity.”

While the presence in power (or the threat of coming to power) of populist bourgeois cliques, their aberrant political views and their programme — which is ill-suited to defending the real interests of national capital — combined with their utter incompetence, constitute in themselves an additional factor exacerbating the chaos, we must not lose sight of the fact that all states and all governments, regardless of their political leanings, are also deliberately contributing to this manufacture of chaos and catastrophe:

– by exacerbating rivalries, competition and the tendency for each state to play its own hand in order to safeguard its own interests alone, as exemplified by the tariff war initiated by the United States, in which China, the European Union and Canada are also participating;

– through total negligence toward the so-called ‘fight against global warming’. While states had, until now, at least gone to the trouble of pretending to take the climate issue seriously, the world’s major powers (the United States, the European Union) are now dismantling and outright abandoning the meagre ‘environmental protection’ measures on the altar of competition, the endless exploitation of natural resources and imperialist rivalries between nations;

– but above all, through the escalation and proliferation of wars deliberately and willingly instigated by states and governments. Whether they cloak themselves in the mantle of democracy and human rights, of ‘Make America Great Again’, of the messianic ‘Greater Israel’ or even of the Chinese dream of revenge for ‘the century of humiliation’, all nations, all factions of the bourgeoisie, are endorsing and preparing for war, as evidenced by the colossal armament programmes that continue to soar worldwide.

But far from being separate from one another, the combined effects of the economic crisis, war, the bourgeoisie’s loss of control over its own system, and the climate crisis interact and multiply their impact. While each of these factors represents, in and of itself, a serious risk of collapse, their combined effects far exceed the mere sum of the effects of each taken in isolation. The consequences of this entire chain of destruction for the exploited class across the globe are immeasurable. Soaring prices, falling wages, longer working hours, redundancies, unemployment… Everywhere, colossal military spending, which is suffocating national economies, is taking its toll and driving the working class ever further into absolute poverty. Working harder, for longer hours each week and throughout one’s life, while seeing access to healthcare, education and pensions curtailed… Such are the sacrifices imposed by all governments in the name of the nation’s greater good!

The absolute necessity for the proletarian revolution

But for several years now, far from bowing their heads and enduring their plight in silence, the working class has been raising its head on an international scale. Following the ‘Summer of Discontent’ in the UK in 2022, the movement against pension reforms in France in the winter of 2023, the strikes in the US – particularly in the automotive sector – in late summer 2023, the struggles against the government’s austerity policies in Belgium in the spring of 2025, it is now the Airbus workers in Spain who are leading the way by attempting to organise themselves autonomously through general assemblies where the workers themselves decide on their struggle. [3] All this momentum, however embryonic it may be, demonstrates one thing: far from being consigned to the dustbin of history, the working class is the only social force capable of uniting across borders to overthrow this dying society and sow the new seeds of the future.

To achieve this, the proletariat must fight consciously on its own terms—that is, as an autonomous class—in order to defend its living conditions that are under attack, and rediscover the path to its forgotten historical experience, reclaim its lost class identity, and go far beyond mere resistance to the bourgeoisie’s attacks. To this end, the working class must wage an intense and mass struggle, and engage in in-depth reflection in order to overcome the obstacles—particularly those that obscure and hinder the conditions of its struggle; it must reconnect with the full experience of the past, to rediscover its capacity for initiative and the full memory of the best of the working class movement’s experience and tradition. Only in this way will it be able to realise that it alone holds the keys to the future of communist society. A society free from exploitation and profit, capable of building a social order founded on consciousness informed by scientific knowledge, and of harnessing technical advances not in the service of destruction but for the fulfilment of human needs.

ICC, 19 September 2026

 

[1] As exemplified by the Russian navy and air force’s shows of force in the Baltic Sea, the drone attack on Leipzig Airport, and the bombing of a train on Ukrainian territory heading for Warsaw, just a few kilometres from the Polish border – incidents to which NATO has responded with military manoeuvres around the Kaliningrad enclave.

[2] During August, falling water levels on the Rhine made navigation impossible in some places, disrupting the inland waterway transport network. Navigation on the Panama Canal also had to be slowed down for the same reasons.

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Capitalism’s deadly spiral