The attack on Iran by the U.S. and Israel is one of the clearest signs yet of U.S. imperialist weakness masquerading as strength. As Iran chokes off oil and gas trade through the Strait of Hormuz, and State-Terrorist-in-Chief Donald Trump barrels along with no apparent strategy or end game, the scope of the conflict widens by the day. There is no predicting the outcome. Trump could panic at rising fuel prices, declare victory, and end his chaotic campaign; or both sides could dig in for a long and blood-soaked conflict; or some unforeseen escalation could push the bosses closer to world war. In a period of deepening capitalist crisis, volatility is the order of the day.
But some things are clear. One is that workers, as always, will pay the price for the rulers’ ruthless battle to control the Persian Gulf’s oil and gas, the lifeblood of capitalist economies and militaries. More than a thousand workers and children in Iran have already been killed, including 150 schoolgirls slaughtered by a U.S. Tomahawk missile (Guardian, 3/10). Airstrikes on oil depots in Tehran, a city of ten million people, set off huge sulfurous fires and toxic black rain that will seed future epidemics of heart and lung disease and cancer (New York Times, 3/10). In Beirut and southern Lebanon, Israeli bombs have massacred at least 570 and displaced 780,000 more (newarab.com, 3/11). Iran’s equally vicious rulers have countered with cluster bombs, munitions banned by 120 countries, but used repeatedly by Israel and the U.S. to target civilians (Times of India, 3/9).
What’s also clear is that the bosses have no solution for the contradictions of capitalism, a system built on racist and sexist inequality, exploitation, and an insatiable drive for maximum profit. As competition sharpens between a declining U.S., a rising China, and an opportunistic Russia, current or impending proxy wars will spread misery from Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo to India and Pakistan. None of these clashes are happenstance. As Vladimir Lenin wrote in 1915, the grow-or-die imperative of monopoly-stage capitalism forces imperialists into war over resources and markets.
As long as the parasitic rulers and their profit system survive, a hellscape future is in store for our class.
But two years later, Lenin and the Bolsheviks also showed that imperialist war opens the door to communist revolution. The international revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party fights to smash this racist, sexist, imperialist system once and for all!
Chinese interests threatened
Iran is a nation of 90 million mostly impoverished workers whose corrupt and fascist rulers use religion to shore up their base of support (see back page). Despite losing several top leaders and absorbing the region’s most intensive bombing since the 2003 Iraq war, the Iranian bosses are leveraging their geopolitical advantage to disrupt much of the world’s commerce, travel, and energy supply lines. They’re also having some military success; they destroyed the U.S.-made missile defense radar system in Jordan, damaged the one in Qatar, and may have hit the radars in Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates (twz.com, 3/7). They also killed six U.S. soldiers in a drone strike in Kuwait and have injured dozens and forced mass evacuations in Israel.
While China’s ruling class may not be wedded to the current regime in Iran, it’s committed to keeping its foothold in the region—and to keep cheap oil flowing for its industry and transport, not to mention its fighter jets. Around half of China’s oil imports come from the Persian Gulf, and 14 percent of its seaborne oil from Iran (moderndiplomacy.eu, 1/13). The Chinese imperialists cannot allow the U.S., their main rival, to disrupt this crucial traffic indefinitely, or to wreck Iranian ports that China needs to skirt U.S.-controlled maritime routes for its Belt and Road Initiative (specialeurasia.com, 3/1). Nor can China sit passively by as the U.S. blusters about Iran’s “unconditional surrender” and hints of a ground invasion. After the initial U.S. attack, two Iranian ships left a Chinese chemical-storage port known for loading sodium perchlorate, a rocket fuel precursor that Iran needs to rebuild its missile stockpiles (Washington Post, 3/7).
With the global oil market on tilt, Russia’s bosses are cashing in. The price of Russian oil shot up close to 50 percent, and the U.S. was forced to grant India a 30-day sanctions waiver to buy it. Russia is now sharing satellite intelligence with Iran to target U.S. aircraft and warships (Washington Post, 3/6). It’s not hard to imagine a scenario where even indirect military aid might precipitate a more pointed superpower confrontation.
U.S. imperialism backfires
Control of the Middle East, which sits on half the world’s oil reserves, has been a bedrock necessity of U.S. ruling class policy since the CIA coup to restore the Shah of Iran in 1953. But after the Iranian Revolution brought the ayatollahs to power in 1979, the U.S. bosses have squandered lives and treasure in one humiliating setback after the next: Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya. Though Iran’s capitalist bosses were economically hamstrung by U.S. sanctions, they bolstered their regional influence with proxy militias and workers’ hard-earned hatred of U.S. imperialism. From the first Obama administration, U.S. power projection grew dependent on Israel’s genocidal Zionist regime. As the U.S. became isolated from its Western allies, Obama and later Biden knew the country wasn’t ready for all-out war with Iran, much less its backers in Moscow or Beijing—hence the 2015 nuclear deal.
The U.S. killing machine remains fearsome, as we’re seeing in Tehran today. But as Mao Zedong pointed out, the bosses are tactically strong but strategically weak. Enter Donald Trump, the diseased creature of a rotting and divided empire.
Trump reminds us that accidental factors can shape history alongside historically inevitable ones. We know that sooner or later, material conditions will compel the U.S. to move toward full-blown fascism and world war. While the U.S. bosses still aren’t ready for that war today, Trump’s ego and ignorance and twitchy trigger finger could jump the gun to deploy the deadliest force in human history. The dysregulation of Trump’s reign is spiraling the danger and decay he inherited in wildly new and unpredictable directions.
Fight for communist internationalism: MARCH ON MAY DAY!
If the erratic Trump is the bosses’ biggest variable, the ultimate wild card in the class war is the power of a united, conscious working class. The outbreak of global demonstrations to protest the U.S. and Israeli slaughter in Gaza showed proof that an internationalist heartbeat persists in masses around the world. As Progressive Labor Party has found in Minneapolis, the working class is open to revolutionary communist politics, even in the belly of U.S. imperialism.
What the working class is won to fight for sets limits on what the ruling class can do. Our task is to push our limits and win the working class to communism. When workers worldwide defend the lives of children from Haiti to Iran as heroically as workers in Minneapolis defend their Black and immigrant neighbors, we will be on the road to communist revolution. It’s the only road that can turn us away from the bosses’ death march and transform imperialist war into a global class war for communism. Let’s make May 1 a massive day of disruption and general strikes, and join PLP on May 2 for marches and more. FIGHT BACK!
