The bombing of Iran by the imperialist United States and the vicious apartheid state of Israel is a desperate move that could ignite a broader regional or global conflict. Under claims of curbing the nuclear ambitions of Iran’s capitalist bosses, the U.S. ruling class is seeking to reassert its sway over the Middle East, a vital source of the oil and gas that fuel the imperialists’ war machines and generate trillions of dollars in profits each year (OilPrice.com, 2/14/23).
More than a thousand people were killed and thousands more wounded in June’s “12-Day War” (en-hrana.org, 6/28). The great majority were Iranian civilians, though Israel’s vaunted Iron Dome defense system also showed its vulnerability. Millions of workers were forced to flee Iran’s capital Tehran (Al Jazeera, 6/26). After the U.S. engineered what will likely be a temporary ceasefire, State-Terrorist-in-Chief Donald Trump declared “mission accomplished” and boasted that Iran’s nuclear sites were “decimated” and its nuclear program set back for years, a claim that may or may not be true.
But communists know there can never be real peace under capitalism. World war is an inevitable outcome of a system built on competition, nationalism, racism, and the drive for maximum profit. Today, with the U.S. losing more and more ground to imperialist China, war feels even closer. When Iran showered Israel with ballistic missiles and the U.S. targeted Iran with B-2 bombers, old redlines were crossed. As the U.S. dollar declines and China leverages its industrial supremacy, the global economic crisis of capitalism may lead some bosses to see mass destruction as a better option than the status quo of stagnation and decay.
At the same time, the carnage of warfare lays bare the ruthless nature of capitalism and imperialism. By destroying workers’ illusions about the profit system, it can trigger revolution. World War I saw the Bolsheviks establish the first workers’ state, the Soviet Union. Shortly after fascism was defeated under communist leadership in World War II, workers and peasants in China seized state power.
As the capitalist world becomes ever more unstable, we must urgently build the mass international Progressive Labor Party. Our task is to lead the working class to take power once more—from the genocidal U.S. rulers, from Israel’s nazi war criminals, from the corrupt and brutal Iranian mullahs who have impoverished tens of millions. Our aim is to build an egalitarian communist society where all workers can flourish. Join us!
Oil at the root of bloody imperialist conflict
Iran contains the third-largest oil reserves in the world, after Venezuela and Saudi Arabia, (U.S. Energy Information Administration, 5/23). It controls the Strait of Hormuz, a strategic passageway for 20 percent of the world’s oil (The Street, 6/14). The June attacks on Iran are by extension an assault on imperialist arch-rival China, which buys the bulk of Iranian crude oil (USIP, 6/23). Beyond Iran, six of China’s top ten oil suppliers are in or around the Persian Gulf, an incentive for the U.S. to attempt to regain dominance in the region (Newsweek, 6/19). It’s also a powerful motive to instigate regime change in Iran—just as a CIA coup toppled Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953, after he moved to nationalize the country’s oil industry.
The downside for the U.S. bosses is that their Middle East entanglements complicate their long-term strategy of a “pivot to Asia” to encircle and eventually confront China across the Pacific Ocean. Though the U.S. has used Israel as a regional proxy by arming the Zionist regime to the teeth, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has proven an unreliable ally. The wanton slaughter across Gaza has made Israel a pariah and given the U.S. a black eye in its global competition with the Chinese bosses. While U.S. military dominance makes it tactically strong, its strategic weakness is more glaring by the day.
Trump does the bidding of U.S. liberal rulers
Iran’s oil wealth and its ties to China and Russia have painted the country with a bullseye since the Islamic “revolution” of 1979 overthrew Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, a willing U.S. lapdog. For nearly half a century, the U.S. has imposed sanctions on the sale of Iranian oil, a form of deadly collective punishment against workers and children that has led to widespread shortages of essential medicines, food, and even water (thelancet.com, 8/10/19).
In this context, Trump and his America First faction of U.S. bosses seem to be pursuing a long-term goal of finance capital, the liberal main wing of the U.S. ruling class. In response, the liberal bosses have voiced mild outrage—laced with their standard cynicism and hypocrisy—that Congress wasn’t consulted beforehand. California Senator Adam Schiff told Trump to “now focus on helping Israel defend itself” (6/13). Fake leftist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called for Trump’s impeachment (Wall Street Journal, 6/24), but only because he’d failed to follow proper protocol. The liberal bosses understand the need to mislead workers to support a longer and broader war, one that will demand a commitment of ground troops as well as missiles and bombs.
Challenge nationalism with communist internationalism
The world’s bosses are expert at whipping up nationalism among workers to serve their own ends. In Israel, Jewish workers and youth are fed a constant diet of racist lies to see Arab workers as less than human. In the U.S., as seen in the recent No Kings rallies, liberal racist bosses are funneling mass resistance to Trump’s open gutter racism into calls for unity and patriotism. In Iran, despite the deep unpopularity of the reactionary, sexist Islamic regime, hundreds of thousands marched to oppose the June bombings (AP, 6/28).
But the poisonous sway of nationalism can be defeated if communists remain bold in asserting working-class internationalism in word and deed. As fascism rises and the drums of war beat louder, winning our fellow workers to class struggle, and ultimately to PLP, is more crucial than ever. Let’s provide bold political leadership in our workplaces, classrooms, unions, and neighborhoods. Let’s draw inspiration from the ongoing mass fightback against genocide in Gaza, anti-immigrant racism, and mass deportations and displacement. Most of all, let’s connect these attacks to their capitalist roots and put forward the communist alternative. Let’s fight today for the communist world that we so urgently need! No war but class war with PLP!
