*Special Statement*
I don’t normally comment on current events unless they are connected to economic events or theories of capitalist economic crises. However, the terrorist acts in Paris that led to the deaths of at least 130 civilians and the injuring of scores of others forces an exception.
I deplore the deaths of civilians in Paris whose only crime was enjoying a night of partying, drinking and music, a “crime” I have been guilty of myself. This follows the terrorist attack in Beirut and the apparent bombing of a Russian airliner that crashed in Egypt causing the deaths of 224 passengers. All these acts seem to be the work of supporters of the Islamic State, also called ISIS, ISIL and Daesh.
The media has shown much more concern about the mostly white Western European victims in Paris than they have for the victims on the Russian plane, not to speak of the victims of Islamic State terror attacks in the Muslim countries such as the recent attack in Beirut. But bad as the carnage caused by the terrorist acts organized or encouraged by the Islamic state have been, it pales before the much greater number of civilians that are being killed not only in Syria but in many other countries being attacked by U.S. imperialism and its satellites such has France.
Even if we count the nearly 3,000 people killed in the Twin Towers attack on September 11, 2001—also innocent bystanders whose only “crime” was showing up at work at the World Trade Center in New York that day—the total number of civilians killed by individual or small-group terrorist actions such as those carried out by the Islamic State or al-Qaeda is still dwarfed by the number of dead resulting from the terrorist war against terror waged by the U.S. government, Israel and the Empire’s imperialist satellite states against the peoples of the Muslim world and beyond. Are the lives of white Parisians more valuable than of “brown” Syrians, Iraqis or Palestinians? I say no! Black and Brown lives matter just as much!
It is also worth noting that the “war on terror” launched by George W. Bush and continued under President Obama has been joined with great enthusiasm by the French government. Paris is hoping the U.S. will allow France to once again become the colonial master in all but name of Syria.
The war on terror is itself being waged with terrorist methods. That is, the government of the U.S. and its satellites are using methods of warfare that in the past were associated with individual and small-group terrorist acts. One famous example is the assassination of Crown Prince Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie by Serbian nationalist terrorists in June 1914.
A Critique of Crisis Theory 
Having just read your introduction, I felt the need to comment on your assumptions regarding the nature of ISIS.
It is astonishing that the vast majority of radical leftists in the West (even those of Orthodox Marxist-Leninist persuasions) have largely fallen victims to the MSM propaganda as well as offcial western government claims in relation to this so-called ISIS.
The truth about ISIS, is that they are nothing but mercenary colonial troops for the NATO-GCC-Israel Empire. This has several advantages for NATO and assorted lackeys.
a) ISIS fighters are infinitely cheaper (at maximum a few hundred USD per month) than official NATO troops would be.
b) They are quite numerous. The sheer number of poor and downtrodden Sunni Muslims all over the Muslim world provides NATO-GCC and their Intelligence Services with an inexhaustible pool of manpower to throw at their geopolitical enemies (Syria, Iran, Iraq, Russia, Pakistan and even China) This is especially true in places where the US Empire has wrought havoc and has brutalized the population. Libya was quickly turned into a Jihadi-mercenary haven for NATO during and after the NATO-sponsored war against the Qadafi “regime”
c) They are expendable. Unlike the death of US or European soldiers, which causes sorrow and reaction back home, the death of poor Sunni Muslims poses precisely zero problems for NATO governments.
d) ISIS also provides NATO with plausible deniability. Since the MSM are quite capable of convincing the wider population that ISIS is somehow an autonomous and organic movement that grows out of the backwardness and “secterianism” of the Muslim world, the true geopolitical intentions behind the actions of ISIS remain hidden from the general public.
e) ISIS also provides the perfect excuse for NATO or other NATO proxies to subsequently move into the areas captured by ISIS beforehand under the pretext of saving the world from this savage, oriental “death-cult”. In this way, NATO gets to consolidate (on the cheap) the geopolitcal gains earned by its ISIS proxy-tool.
f) Since ISIS is supposed to be this autonomous “death-cult” it is at the same time allowed to perform acts of intimidation that no NATO army could ever get away with in this day of mass media. Can anyone imagine the US or French Armies terrorizing their opponents in the manner in which the so-called ISIS do? It would be a total public relations disaster.
The evidence behind the true nature of ISIS is immense (in Iraq and Syria it is an open secret) but recently, the Russian government in the form of the MoD came publicly out with detailed and extensive satellite imagery of industrial scale theft of Syrian and Iraqi oil from ISIS-held territory and into Turkey. The chance of any of this having taken place without the full knowledge of the rest of the NATO members is absolutely zero. But one only has to look at the people that ISIS is indeed fighting against:
a) Assad’s “regime”
b) Iran-affiliated Iraqi Shias.
c) Russia
d) The Yemeni Army and Houthis tribes (enemies of KSA & UAE)
e) They have now appeared in full force in Afghanistan from which they (NATO) hope to destabilize former Soviet Central Asia and also prospective Chinese ally, Pakistan.
This is the Russian satellite evidence:
Also, in relation to alleged “terrorist attacks” see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_flag
Basically, Western Imperial policies hide behind a trick that almost all respectable intellectuals, and even those on the most radical left, fall for: “Conspiracy Theorist”