A Scapegoat for the Capitalist Regime

The prevailing theory explaining the causes of the war in Iran and the Middle East is that it was the product of Trump’s reckless policy, aimed not only at pursuing U.S. global dominance but at doing so in a crude, cynical, and unscrupulous manner—merely to demonstrate strength, arrogance, and oppression as an end in itself. A madman, it is constantly repeated.

Trump is said to have plunged into the conflict with Iran due to his terrible personal qualities combined with his inability to fulfill his role. He is said to have done so without a strategy, unable to extricate himself from the quagmire he has gotten himself into, thereby damaging the global economy and the U.S. economy itself.

This is what the most prominent commentators and newspapers of the international bourgeois press—from the New York Times to the Guardian to El País, to name a few—as well as, in every country, the parties of the bourgeois left and a large part of the opportunist left, maintain.

This is not surprising because this narrative is extremely useful to global capitalism, as it absolves it of all responsibility, mystifying the nature of both the specific Middle Eastern conflict and the global one that is brewing, and placing the blame on a single man, a particular bourgeois policy, and a single imperialist country.

We, first and foremost, assert that there is no man less free to make decisions than the leader of the world’s greatest power, who is in that position because the colossal interests of the country’s industrial and financial conglomerates willed it so, and for their sake.

Trump’s statements are not the result of his whims but are carefully prepared by a dedicated, sophisticated, and heavily funded apparatus. Through them, the U.S. bourgeois regime—not Trump—addresses its various interlocutors: the working class and the petty bourgeoisie within the country, the global financial markets, and both allied and enemy powers.

Power does not belong to Trump but to an apparatus that serves the dominant interests of U.S. national capitalism; it belongs to the bourgeoisie—the major industrial and financial groups—which exercises it through its state apparatus. This is the case in every capitalist country, that is, throughout the world, certainly not just in the United States.

Since capitalism is based on the accumulation of capital within corporate units, it is, for this reason, anarchic, and there are constant conflicts and clashes between the various productive and financial sectors.

This gives rise to clashes, even violent ones, within bourgeois politics, with factions of the bourgeoisie dissatisfied with the current administrators of the general interest of national capitalism, who opportunistically raise the usual arguments that always converge on the accusation that the government is failing to defend the national interest—an ideological, that is, misleading, formula with which the ruling class conceals the interests of capital, transposing onto the national level the hypocrisy that every boss employs in his company by calling it “one big family” in front of the workers!

Fascism—the real political content of bourgeois regimes in the final, supreme phase of the capitalist mode of production: imperialism—serves not only to control the working class through the subjugation and co-optation of reformist-led unions, but also to discipline the various bourgeois factions in the general interest of national capitalism.

Not only is Trump by no means free to do and say whatever he wants, but he is also not at all plagued by the problem of the midterm elections and future presidential elections—yet another piece of nonsense peddled by paid commentators around the world.

Just as the parties of the bourgeois left serve to deceive the working class, so those of the right deceive the petty bourgeoisie and the labor aristocracy.

With every election cycle, the betrayal of campaign promises plays out, generally leading to the banal outcome of an electoral victory for the previously defeated party. This is the so-called alternation of power, a mechanism useful for maintaining control over the wage-earning class, which must be convinced that it can defend its interests through the ballot box rather than through struggle. A mechanism that is clearly becoming increasingly worn out, as indicated by voter turnout data.

In reality, there are no distinct parties but rather political-business cliques of a single party—that of the national bourgeois regime—not unlike what occurs in more authoritarian regimes, such as in China, Russia, and Iran.

Trump acts on the orders of those pulling the strings behind his figurehead persona, which serves to mask the true nature of political power, doing the dirty work for the entire ruling class that put him there.

Once he has completed his task, his “misdeeds” and bluster—which make him so “special” and behind which the idiocy of the bourgeois press and political opportunism are lost—will allow:
   - on the one hand, the Democrats to return to governing the general interests of U.S. capitalism with substantial continuity with all previous administrations, just as, for example, Obama held the record for deporting undocumented immigrants, Biden supported the Israeli regime for two years in massacring 80,000 Palestinians, and all have pursued, as we will see below, U.S. supremacy in the global hydrocarbon market;
   - on the other hand, the Republicans to reinvent themselves, simply by presenting a new leader in the next elections.

Trump’s excesses thus serve to breathe a little more life and credibility into the electoral mechanism, slowing down its process of erosion. Increasingly reactionary political monstrosities are useful to bourgeois regimes for several reasons:    - they contribute to the formation of an increasingly barbarized political and social environment, to accustom and subjugate the working class;
   - they reassure the petty bourgeoisie—terrified, hysterical, powerless—in the face of its impending fate of being relegated to the proletariat and the sub-proletariat;
   - they restore the electoral system and democracy to a state of innocence, allowing the bourgeois left to recapture the illusion of a fleeting victory by calling on workers to vote against fascism.

This will continue until the Communist Party is strengthened, establishing a solid bond with the working class fighting for its immediate, basic, economic, and union-related needs.

A War Useful to U.S. Capitalism

a) Dominance in the Global Hydrocarbons Market

Along with the idea that political power belongs to the pitifully exceptional figure of a puppet in the hands of the ruling class and that the war in the Middle East is the product of its will, we must demolish another, even more pernicious notion that this political mystification brings with it.

The various bourgeois interpretations of imperialist wars share an essential characteristic: politics and economics are presented as watertight compartments.

Politics—which is supposedly afflicted by the eternal evils inherent in human nature: the lust for power, selfishness, etc.—is said to harm the capitalist economy, which, though not without its own contradictions, would supposedly shun war because it is detrimental to it.

To the common sense, this appears plausible, as non-bourgeois people experience the destruction of war as a loss for society. The reality of capitalism is inverted: destruction clears the market of the goods that had saturated it at the end of a previous historical period of capitalist accumulation, thus allowing for its recovery. Capitalism demonstrates in this way its inhuman and reactionary character.

Bourgeois ideology, therefore, seeks to keep the proletariat in a state of ignorance regarding a rudimentary conception of history that divides society into watertight compartments, so that on the one hand there would be a gradual progress of labor, the economy, and the productive forces, and on the other, the political world marked by the eternal struggle between good and evil.

Two fixed dimensions, always identical to themselves, in which no law of development can be discerned, to which one must resign oneself, and which thus sanction the inevitability of the existing political and social order.

Ultimately, unable to acknowledge its capitalist nature, war is explained by bourgeois ideology as the product of a leader’s madness: Hitler, Trump, Putin, Netanyahu. To whom would stand in opposition the level-headed men of the ruling class. Madness, explaining nothing, explains everything! Just like conspiracies.

This reading of history, reduced to the level of a soap opera, is dismantled by communism by showing that war is not an event that harms the capitalist economy; it is not a rupture but rather the product of its normal functioning, as it, at a certain stage of its development, suits it—indeed, becomes indispensable.

Specifically regarding the war in Iran, we begin by showing how it does not harm but rather defends the interests of U.S. national capitalism, in its struggle for the division of global markets and profits.

A key element in understanding this assertion lies in the radical shift brought about by technology for extracting oil and gas from shale (shale oil), through horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing (fracking) of the rock.

Historically both oil producers and major net importers (imports exceeded exports), this technology has enabled the U.S. to become the world’s leading producer since 2014, a net exporter of oil since 2019, and the fourth-largest oil-exporting country since 2021—behind Saudi Arabia, Russia, and Canada, and ahead of Iraq.

Since 2023, the U.S. has also become the world’s leading gas producer thanks—in addition to the development of shale extraction—to investments in new liquefaction plants. The growing demand for gas has made these investments profitable, and the war in Ukraine, which began in February 2022, and the resulting sanctions on Russian oil and gas have been decisive in this regard.

It is necessary to have a clear understanding of the importance that hydrocarbon extraction has come to hold in U.S. capitalism. This is illustrated by the fact that, following the 2008 crisis, for years the United States and Germany were the only old national capitalist economies—so-called Western ones—to have reached and then surpassed their pre-crisis peak in industrial production.

But, unlike Germany, the United States was able to achieve this result only thanks to the role that shale oil extraction came to play, starting precisely in 2010: without this contribution, manufacturing output in 2024 would still have been a full 7.6% below the 2007 peak, which is, moreover, a worsening compared to the -5.5% of 2022.

It is clearly not out of context to note that Germany, just as it was regaining ground after the decline caused by the Covid pandemic—which had brought its industrial production below the 2007 peak—saw that recovery halted due to the war in Ukraine. In 2022, industrial production was 1.6% lower than in 2007, and in the three years since then, it has continued to decline.

The war in Ukraine, which has been ongoing for over four years, has dealt a severe blow to the United States’ main Atlantic rival. The new war in Iran is dealing a second blow to German imperialism—and, clearly, not only to that.

Shale oil production in the U.S. rose from 0.2 million barrels per day (mb/d) in 2009 to 2.8 mb/d in 2013, to 4.2 mb/d in 2014, to a peak of 8 mb/d in 2023, and then fell to 7.2 mb/d last year (2025). In 2025, the United States exported 4 million barrels per day, 85 times more than in 2011, but slightly less than in 2023 and 2024.

The distinctive feature of shale oil is its high production cost. If the international price of oil approaches the $60 threshold, oil profits dwindle. A price around $80–90 per barrel guarantees good profits, and around $100–110 encourages investment and expansion of production.

As early as April of last year, bourgeois economists had predicted a drop in oil prices for the current year—reflecting a decline in demand and thus presumably a worsening of the overproduction crisis—which would have exacerbated the decline in U.S. oil production already underway since 2024. Steel production in China—which in 2023 accounted for 54% of global steel production and is the world’s largest oil importer—has been declining for two years.

The war in Iran, which began on February 28—with the blockade of maritime traffic through the Strait of Hormuz first imposed by Iran starting March 1, and then with the counter-blockade imposed by the United States starting April 20—has led to an average price from April to the present of $100 per barrel, compared to an average price of $77 per barrel over the past six months.

This benefits not only oil and gas extraction but also the production of refined products (gasoline, diesel, kerosene...), which has already reached maximum production capacity in the U.S. A record number of oil tankers, gas carriers, and chemical tankers are crossing the oceans to and from U.S. ports. Gas that Italy, for example, used to purchase primarily from Qatar has largely been replaced with gas purchased from the United States. Edison, holder of Italy’s largest gas supply contract with Qatar, announced in mid-April that it had already managed to replace 7 of the 10 shipments that Doha was supposed to send between April and June. Six out of seven of these shipments now come from the United States.

The same is true for several countries in the Far East, which were major buyers of oil and gas from the Persian Gulf.

It is clear that, from the perspective of the oil industry—which, as we have seen, plays a very important role in U.S. capitalism—the so-called “quagmire” into which Trump’s folly was said to have dragged the country is, in fact, a paradise of profits!

There is also the relative advantage over competitors in the division of world markets. While the U.S., as the world’s leading oil producer, benefits from an oil price of around $100 per barrel, countries that are major importers, such as Germany and China, can only suffer as a result.

Although China has invested heavily in the production of renewable energy technologies and electric vehicles, and has diversified its sources of hydrocarbon supply, more than 60% of its electricity consumption still depends on fossil fuels, and approximately 16% of its oil imports come from the Persian Gulf.

b) For the financial dominance of the dollar

The second factor closely linked to the extraction, refining, and export of hydrocarbons is the United States’ massive public debt.

The growth of public debt is in itself merely a reflection of the growth of the capital stock, of capitalist accumulation. What is revealing of capital’s difficulty in accumulating, however, is the rising ratio of public debt to GDP. For the U.S., this ratio was 33.1% in 2001, 103.3% in 2014, and 123.3% in 2024.

A sudden increase, which is very dangerous in the long run, but which for now remains at a sustainable level, considering that a much weaker form of capitalism like Italy’s has a public debt-to-GDP ratio of around 135%, which has remained at this level for about a decade, while Japan’s is as high as 230%.

To finance the U.S. public debt, it is necessary to maintain the dollar as the international currency of exchange, as this offers a guarantee of strength and stability and thus makes the sale of U.S. Treasury bonds (treasuries) attractive.

Given that between 80% and 90% of hydrocarbons are purchased in dollars—excluding those subject to U.S.-imposed sanctions, such as Russian and Iranian gas and oil —the rise in prices implies not only increased oil revenues for major U.S. companies but also greater use and demand for the dollar on the international market, thereby strengthening it as an international currency and ultimately bolstering U.S. public debt.

The dollar’s role as an international currency of exchange was secured by the United States through its military victory in World War II, which cemented the industrial and financial superiority of that form of capitalism—then at the height of its power—replacing the pound sterling.

In 1944, the United States produced 40% of the world’s armaments. By the end of the war, with 6% of the world’s population, it accounted for nearly half of global production, held more than 50% of the world’s gold reserves, controlled 52% of the merchant fleet, and enjoyed technological leadership in nearly every sector.

This power has been in decline for decades, threatened, as is well known, by China’s industrial might, the world’s leading manufacturing nation, accounting for over 30% of global manufacturing output. But the economic superiority enjoyed by the United States at the end of World War II is not even comparable to that enjoyed today by Chinese imperialism, which, though the world’s leading manufacturer, operates within a world that has fully embraced the capitalist mode of production, with a plurality of competing medium- and large-scale capitalist powers, starting with India.

Furthermore, U.S. national capitalism, struggling against its inexorable decline, clashes with Chinese capitalism, which, however, it is erroneous to still consider “young” and is instead correct to define as already fully mature, having itself been afflicted for several years by a full-blown crisis of overproduction. China has gone from a public debt-to-GDP ratio of 39.3% in 2014 to nearly 90% in 2025.

Nevertheless, the industrial superiority of Chinese imperialism inevitably tends to erode U.S. financial dominance and, with it, the role of the dollar, undermining the sustainability of Washington’s national debt.

The sharp increase in U.S. exports of oil, gas, and refined products serves to slow this process.

Thus, while it is true that military intervention in the Middle East comes at a high cost to the U.S.—which operates the world’s largest military fleet—this is an investment of primary importance for this national capitalism.

This leads to the third factor for which war serves U.S. capitalism.

c) For the War Industry

The U.S. military is the largest in the world, and the defense industry clearly plays a major role within the industrial complex of the world’s leading imperialist power. The United States is also the world’s leading arms exporter, accounting for a full 40% of global exports.

For them, war is a massive public investment in the enormous national war-making industrial apparatus. It also serves, for this purpose, as a crucial test bed for weapons, weapon systems, and the armed forces—navy, air force, and army—as a whole, as well as for the research and development system, which then trickles down to the civilian sector.

Far from being uneconomical, therefore, the war waged by the United States in Iran, with the aid of its Israeli vassal state, on the one hand represents a massive public investment that, to use the bourgeois economic terminology dear to the left, serves an anti-cyclical function—that is, countering a recession already underway—and on the other hand partially shifts the effects of the overproduction crisis onto European and Asian competitors.

It is true that rising gas and oil prices will lead to higher inflation. The same applies to various fertilizer components, such as urea, 30% of whose international trade passes through the Strait of Hormuz. But this inflationary surge will affect all countries. And in this context, given the above, the world’s leading imperialist power will enjoy a relative advantage.

Furthermore, to the extent that inflation growth remains contained, it would only partially suppress consumption, Section II of capitalist production, and to a lesser extent Section I, which pertains to the production of the means of production. Moderate inflation, by raising the prices of all goods—except wages, which require a workers’ struggle to be raised—and thus a slower process in any case—increases profits and is therefore beneficial for the capitalist economy.

The United States has strived to keep the price of oil at the right level: not above $100–110 per barrel. To this end, it suspended sanctions on Russian oil and, for a brief period, on Iranian oil as well.

Subsequently, the United Arab Emirates’ exit from OPEC and its declarations of intent to increase production by one million barrels per day served as another useful element toward this end—a move not coincidentally welcomed very positively by the U.S. administration, which was obviously aware of it.

The clash between regional capitalist powers in the Persian Gulf

The UAE’s decision to leave OPEC introduces another important aspect of the war in Iran.

The countries suffering most from this conflict are those in the Persian Gulf: Iraq, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Kuwait. There are significant differences.

The blockade of shipping traffic through the Strait of Hormuz primarily affects Qatar, the world’s largest gas exporter. In 2025, it exported approximately 12.5 billion cubic feet of gas per day, of which 8.6 billion cubic feet were shipped by sea and the remainder via pipelines; however, apart from the Arab Gas Pipeline that reaches the Mediterranean, these pipelines have Bahrain, Oman, and the UAE—that is, other Persian Gulf countries—and therefore cannot serve as a substitute for the gas tankers blocked in the Gulf.

The bombing of the Qatari Ras Laffan facility—the production hub of the country’s gas exports—reduced its output by approximately 17%, and it could take up to five years to restore previous production levels.

The UAE has also suffered massive missile and drone attacks, on a scale far greater than those launched against Israel and greater than any other country in the region. But they were protected, as it turned out, by Israeli anti-missile systems deployed in the country, with Israeli military personnel assisting in their operation. This marks a significant step forward in the mutually supportive relationship between the two countries, which came to the fore with the 2020 Abraham Accords.

Egypt also sent military aircraft to defend the UAE, with Al Sisi declaring: “What harms the UAE harms Egypt.”

Both the UAE and Saudi Arabia have pipelines, unlike Qatar, that bypass the Strait of Hormuz. Saudi Arabia, which exported approximately 7 million barrels per day in 2025—the world’s leading oil exporter—has a pipeline that runs from the eastern coast of the Persian Gulf to the western coast of the Red Sea, with a capacity of over 4 million barrels per day. The UAE, which exported approximately 3 million barrels per day in 2025, has a portion of its coastline on the Gulf of Oman, beyond the Strait of Hormuz, where the Fujairah oil port is located, connected to the Abu Dhabi area by a pipeline with a capacity of 1.5 million barrels per day. In recent weeks, it has emerged that four gas tankers from the UAE managed to reach Indian ports, confirming that this regional power has been relatively less affected by the conflict, as it is more protected by the framework of alliances of U.S. imperialism.

A few days ago, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia announced that they had reached a major economic-military agreement. Saudi Arabia has guaranteed—though it is unclear exactly what economic benefits—the deployment of 8,000 Pakistani soldiers in its defense, a number that could theoretically rise to 80,000, a squadron of JF-17 Thunder fighter jets—jointly developed by China and Pakistan—and a Chinese HQ-9 air defense system. The agreement, at least in part, appears to be a response to the UAE’s withdrawal from OPEC.

Iraq, the world’s third-largest oil exporter at 4 million barrels per day, exports about half of that via pipelines to Turkey—and from there to Europe—as well as to Egypt, Jordan, and Israel.

Iran appears, in theory, to be the country most vulnerable to a blockade of the Strait of Hormuz. Eighty percent of oil exports are loaded onto tankers at terminals on Kharg Island, and between 80% and 90% of exports—between 2 and 3 million barrels per day in 2025 – are purchased by China. Between 40% and 50% of government revenue comes from hydrocarbon exports, which account for 70% of the country’s total exports. An extreme vulnerability.

In recent years, as sanctions have been intensified, Iran has been able to export oil through a so-called “shadow fleet,” but has had to sell it at a reduced price, similar to what is happening in Russia, about $10 per barrel below the market price.

In theory, the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz should be a noose tightening rapidly around the Iranian regime’s neck, while U.S. imperialism benefits from an oil price hovering around $100 per barrel. However, it is unclear how effective the U.S. blockade actually is against the ships of Iran’s shadow fleet, which turn off their transponders (radio systems) and are undetectable by standard civilian vessel-tracking systems.

The U.S. blockade targets vessels traveling to and from Iranian ports. Iraq, for example, is reported to have signed an agreement with Iran, paying a fee to the bourgeois regime in Tehran to allow ships departing from its two ports of Basra and Umm Qasr to pass through. These are vessels that the U.S. Navy does not block and on which Iranian oil could be transported by sea. It cannot even be ruled out that a portion of oil tankers might pass through the Strait and reach China even with U.S. consent, amid a context of pressure, showdowns, and negotiations. In any case, the blockade is unlikely to be total.

Furthermore, the quantity of Iranian oil already at sea must be taken into account. In the months leading up to the conflict, the Iranian regime, anticipating the attack, had significantly increased shipments and exports, reaching 3 million barrels per day. When, on March 20, the United States announced a one-month suspension of sanctions on Iranian oil—which was not renewed, as it was superseded on April 13 by blockade of ships to and from Iranian ports in the waters of the Arabian Sea, near the Gulf of Oman—it was estimated that 170 million barrels were at sea, equivalent to about two and a half months of exports at the 2025 rate and roughly 80 very large crude carriers (VLCCs). Two months have passed since then.

The United States and Israel could easily strike the island of Kharg, bringing the country to its knees for years. But the Iranian regime threatens to strike oil infrastructure in the Gulf countries—pipelines, gas pipelines, refineries, ports—to obstruct, including through the Houthis, navigation through the Bab el Mandeb Strait, through which 10% of global maritime trade passes, as occurred in December 2023 and January 2024, and to cut the undersea internet cables that run through the Strait of Hormuz.

The escalation of the conflict, should even just a portion of these threats materialize, would lead to a further rise in hydrocarbon prices and inflation, sufficient to nullify the positive economic effects for U.S. imperialism.

Taken together, these factors reveal just how false the claim is that the current U.S. administration lacks a strategy. The strikes against the Venezuelan regime in early January and against Iran two months later is part of the objective of ensuring a growing dominant role for the U.S. oil industry in the world market, thereby strengthening the financial dominance of the leading global imperialist power and making its enormous military expenditures—necessary to secure such conditions—sustainable.

The U.S. strike against Iran clearly has nothing to do with the nature of that regime and, ultimately, has little to do with the specific capitalist interests of the Iranian bourgeoisie. By striking Iran, the United States has reduced competition in the oil market from the Persian Gulf petro-monarchies, dealt a second blow to the European imperialist powers—major importers of hydrocarbons, first and foremost Germany—and choked off the main oil and gas supply route of its primary global imperialist rival, China, for which 45–50% of oil imports and nearly 30% of gas imports pass through the Strait of Hormuz.

In the specific Middle Eastern context, the conflict plays on the rivalries between Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE and further strengthens Israel against its rival regional power, Iran, to the point that for months now, several commentators have been pointing to Turkish imperialism as the new main rival to Israeli imperialism.

Chinese imperialism, which possesses a large amount of strategic oil reserves, appears for now to have responded to the Hormuz blockade by drastically reducing oil and gas imports. As the world’s leading importer of hydrocarbons, this has been a factor in keeping prices within certain limits, allowing the Chinese capitalist giant to spend less.

At the same time, it is important to note that U.S. gas exports to China, which had peaked at 4 billion tons per year in 2020, fell to 3.6 billion tons per year in 2021, 2.1 billion tons per year in 2022, 0.5 billion tons per year in 2023, and to zero starting in 2024.

A War Against the Struggle of the Iranian Proletariat

While the strategy of U.S. imperialism is coherent and discernible, what appears entirely inconsistent is the propaganda used to justify the attack on the Iranian bourgeois regime.

Since the days of the January uprising, the U.S. administration has issued repeated statements of support for the protesters, claiming it would intervene militarily to defend them from the regime that, in the meantime, was killing them by the thousands.

The military intervention by the U.S. and Israel finally arrived on February 28, more than a month after the bloody repression had taken place. Perhaps they were afraid that, by intervening sooner, the uprising might actually succeed!

Furthermore, the United States and several other bourgeois regimes and right-wing parties (in Italy, the majority ruling party) have heavily funded and openly supported the son of the last Shah deposed in 1979, Reza Pahlavi, as an alternative to the Ayatollahs’ regime, setting up a movement called MIGA – Make Iran Great Again – which was very aggressive toward other Iranian political forces, especially those on the left, present at demonstrations by Iranian communities abroad, and which openly called for U.S. military intervention. The climax of this movement was the demonstration of 100,000 people in Munich on February 14.

As stated in our repeated positions, through international leaflets and articles, the proclamations of support for the rebels by the United States and Israel only helped the Iranian regime, which was thus able to more easily discredit and repress the uprising by portraying it as a tool of hostile foreign powers; just as military intervention has blocked any resurgence of the working-class struggle and protests by other social strata, uniting the bourgeois political opposition around the regime.

The war has also put an end to the demonstrations in support of the Iranian monarchy, which had so fervently called for it.

Pahlavi seems to have met a fate similar to that of Nobel Peace Prize laureate Maria Corina Machado, who was used by Trump to fuel propaganda against the Venezuelan regime and then cast aside in favor of leading figures of the “Bolivarian socialism” regime — starting with the new president, Delcy Rodriguez: former minister of foreign affairs, economy, and hydrocarbons — who turned on her heel within a day without any of the 5 million bayonets invoked by Maduro firing a single shot in her defense.

In the aftermath of Ayatollah Khamenei’s assassination, in fact, Trump declared that he wanted a say in who his successor should be. Beyond the usual arrogance typically displayed in such a statement, the substantive shift it implied was the abandonment of the previous propagandistic stance—calling for the destruction of the Shiite theocratic regime—and its replacement with the more pragmatic goal of a mere internal change within the regime. Exactly the opposite of what was done in Venezuela.

The value of the proclamations in defense of democracy by the U.S. administration and those in defense of socialism by the Venezuelan regime have shown identical consistency!

Military intervention, far from reinvigorating the struggle movement within Iran—and indeed, by establishing a social and political climate of wartime emergency— fostered repression through dozens of executions and hundreds of arrests, and within the ranks of the bourgeois regime, it has favored the factions most closely tied to the military apparatus—namely, the Pasdaran—who control an ever-growing portion of the country’s capitalist economy.

It is confirmed once again that capitalist, imperialist war is the most valuable weapon of bourgeois regimes against the class struggle, precisely when, due to the objectively degrading social conditions, the struggle shows signs of its inevitable eruption.

The uprising of the Iranian proletariat is a threat to the bourgeoisies throughout the Middle East, because it risks spreading and mobilizing the proletarian masses in neighboring Arab countries. The spread of the class struggle across national borders is by no means a remote possibility, as the so-called Arab Spring of 2010–2011 demonstrated.

It is also a threat to the Israeli bourgeoisie, which, if the Ayatollahs’ regime were to collapse at the hands of the working-class struggle, would see the specter of the external enemy—with which it disciplines its wage-earning class—vanish.

War has come to the rescue, yes, but of the bourgeois regime in Ayatollah’s robes, against the Iranian proletariat and that of the entire Middle East.

Imperialist war, false anti‑imperialism, proletarian revolution

We have seen how, through war, U.S. imperialism seeks to gain an advantage over its competitors by shifting the bulk of the burden of the advancing crisis of overproduction onto them—a fundamental point not to be overlooked—a crisis that grips them all.

Chinese imperialism, which is the prime candidate to wrest global profit dominance from the United States—just as the latter did with Britain—is no less beset by the crisis, and we have already seen it showing clear signs of premature aging, which we will recapitulate. The recent real estate crisis, a manifestation of speculation that arises when capitalist accumulation stalls; the sudden rise in the public debt-to-GDP ratio; and the decline in industrial production to the point that the country has experienced an almost deflationary condition over the past three years—these are unequivocal indicators of this trend.

To find an outlet for its excess capital, Chinese imperialism must become increasingly invasive and aggressive, first economically, then militarily, on the international stage. This leads to an inevitable clash with rival imperialisms over the division of the world, primarily with that of Washington.

It is therefore unforgivably naive, if not a supreme piece of trickery, to present the imperialist conflict unfolding before our eyes—the third in just over a century—as the responsibility of only one side of the capitalist powers, hiding behind the fact that the United States is waging preventive wars within the framework of this general clash.

It is the usual petty trick of blaming the war on the side that strikes first, in order to hide how it develops and springs from the economic and political system as a whole, which ultimately has an absolute need for war.

In fact, for U.S. imperialism, attacking Venezuela, Iran, and tomorrow Cuba and Greenland serves to gain positions of strength in view of the general clash into which all world powers know they must and want to throw themselves—and, above all, throw the proletariat.

The true enemy of the entire bourgeoisie, in fact—far more than the ruling classes of rival countries—is the economic crisis and the social revolution it implies: it is the threat of proletarian revolution.

All bourgeois regimes, from the democratic ones to those more or less openly authoritarian, from those in Islamic garb to those painted red to usurp the name of socialism, are rearming themselves in anticipation of the clash in which to destroy the immense stockpile of goods that increasingly suffocates the markets, preventing the further accumulation of capital, and in which to send the proletariat to a fratricidal slaughter with their class brothers in other countries, in the interest of the capitalists masked as national interest.

In this endeavor, the bourgeoisie is aided by the parties of the bourgeois and opportunist left, which endorse the idea of an eternal struggle of the oppressed nations against the oppressor. This is the ideological framework used by Mussolini when he pitted the proletarian nations against the “demo-pluto-Jewish” ones. The goal would no longer be the overcoming of capitalism—socialism—but the peaceful coexistence of capitalist states. Or at most, the military defeat of the oppressive capitalist states, identified as the sole imperialist powers, would be a necessary step before the struggle for socialism could begin. This struggle of capitalist states that exploit hundreds of millions of proletarians and poor peasants against other capitalist states that do the same but which, due to historical circumstances, are at that particular historical moment superior in power, is presented as an anti-imperialist struggle. Imperialism, which Lenin explains is the final stage of capitalism’s development, is reduced to a characteristic specific to only a few countries, not to a mode of production that envelops the entire planet in an inextricable web of economic relations. The clash between dominant imperialist powers and imperialist powers seeking to displace them in the division of global profits is presented as an anti-imperialist and anti-colonial struggle.

Bourgeois states, entirely at the service of the most ruthless capitalist accumulation carried out through the exploitation of the proletarians living within them, are adorned with the label of anti-imperialist forces simply because they clash militarily with the currently dominant imperialist power. They no longer even need to pretend to be socialists, as is the case with China, but a regime like Iran’s is also perfectly acceptable—a regime that, by its own admission, suppressed over 3,000 demonstrators in the streets over the course of about ten days last January.

The concept of anti-colonial struggle, which for Marxism was situated within the class struggle during the transitional period of certain countries and geo-historical areas from pre-capitalist modes of production to capitalism, has been stripped by moribund opportunism of any connection to the class struggle and socialism and filled with bourgeois ideological preconceptions, rendered – as they preach – eternal.

It goes without saying that the proletariat of all countries in the world has no friends either in so-called Western imperialism or in those who claim to be the bearers of a world of peace and respect for international law, and who merely aspire to replace the former in their dominant and privileged position in international markets.

The working class can stop the imperialist war that is brewing and advancing by refusing to take sides on its fronts, denouncing them all as bourgeois and its enemies. Imperialism is fought through class struggle, not through war between states. It is fought through the international unity of the working class, which, in practice, is achieved by placing the struggle against one’s own national bourgeoisie above all else, never showing solidarity with it against a so-called foreign power. The foreign power that oppresses the world proletariat is capitalism.

Until the working class seizes political power within a country by wresting it from the bourgeoisie through revolution and establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat, it must refuse to shed blood in wars between imperialist powers for the benefit of its own bourgeoisie. As long as power lies with the bourgeoisie, the sooner one’s own country is defeated in war, the less proletarian blood will be shed. Until power is seized by the proletariat, the only struggle to be waged, the only blood workers must accept shedding, is that of the class struggle.

In Iran, too, workers must organize themselves into unions independent of the bourgeois regime—class-based unions—that center their organization around territorial structures, to unite workers across corporate divisions, and to fight through ever-larger strikes for their immediate interests: wage and pension increases, a reduction in the workday, and full pay for laid-off workers. The International Communist Party points to the vital role of this elementary, economic, trade-union class struggle. Its intensification, together with the strengthening of our party within the ranks of the proletarian class and in class-based trade union organizations, leads the movement to rise to the political level, to the struggle for power, to revolution.