This statistic stunned me: In the past five years, NATO’s European members and Canada increased their military spending at a higher pace than the six European great powers in the five years preceding World War I. Today, there are more active armed conflicts around the world than at any moment since 1946. All but one are in the Global South, and NATO countries are heavily implicated in all of them. Europe’s rearmament is therefore both a symptom of a renewed assault on the countries of the Global South, and, unmistakably, reflects preparations for a wider global war. That is why the 30 October day of action by Europe’s dockworkers is so vital. It is not only aimed at stopping weapons flows to the Zionist entity. It takes shot at imperialism’s entire military apparatus, which wages war on the global periphery while decimating whatever remains of Europe’s social democratic arrangement. In Europe, these kinds of actions are as rare as they are risky. In Italy, for example, ports are now designated as national security sites — the Italian State Prosecutor recently declared that Italy is part of a “fragmented and hybrid world war” — and strikes can be subject to severe legal penalties. And yet they are urgent. More than 50 years ago, Frantz Fanon asked when the “sleeping beauty” of the European proletariat might rise to the moment and acknowledge that it has often rallied "behind the position of our common masters on colonial issues”. The dockworkers are preparing to break with that long impasse. That is why we are launching a fundraiser to support participating workers and unions ahead of the strike on October 30. Please contribute what you can. If the campaign succeeds, we hope to take it further afield — to all sites where workers can arrest the flows powering NATO’s war machine.