Solidarity of the entire working class against the barbarism of global capitalism!

With the outbreak of war in Iran, once again the Middle East is being ravaged by fire and bloodshed. Once again, the US state has deployed a massive military force in the region.

And now, a deluge of bombs and missiles is raining down on the civilian population, held hostage by the imperialist rivalries of all the belligerent states.

Schools, hospitals and working-class neighbourhoods are being destroyed on a daily basis! Women, children and the elderly are desperately trying to escape the bloodbath, wandering through the rubble and ruins, stepping over the corpses littering the streets of Tehran, Beirut and many other cities besides.

Peace under capitalism is the peace of the grave!

To justify this new imperialist slaughter, the enemies of the Iranian state, led by Trump and Netanyahu, are calling on the working class to continue taking to the streets against the bloodthirsty regime of the mullahs, in the name of a supposedly ‘humanitarian’ cause. They are calling on them to be massacred by once again handing them over, bound hand and foot, to the savage repression of the mullahs’ regime

These warmongers thus claim to be defending the cause of the Iranian people and all the oppressed.

Pure hypocrisy and shameless lies!

With the Iranian state’s retaliation, the escalation of war only serves to further exacerbate the barbarism and chaos in this region of the world.

Trump has thrust the deaths of Khamenei and certain dignitaries from his inner circle into the spotlight, to demonstrate to us that the world’s leading ‘democratic’ power can save humanity from dictators.

With the deployment of Operation ‘Epic Fury’, Trump is demonstrating that the United States, once the ‘world’s policeman’, has become the primary agent of destabilisation across the globe. We can be certain that ‘Pax Americana’ will continue to plunge the Middle East into ever bloodier chaos wwith the involvement of other states and other bourgeois cliques (Saudi Arabia, Hezbollah, pro-Iranian militias in Iraq).

Let’s not delude ourselves! Neither the United States nor any bourgeois state can bring humanity peace, prosperity, or any new ‘world order’. Quite the contrary. ‘Peace’ under capitalism has always been the peace of the grave! Ukraine, Gaza, Lebanon, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan, the Congo… all these zones of armed conflict show what awaits all of humanity, across the entire planet, if capitalism is not overthrown.

Workers must not support any imperialist camp!

We are being bombarded with incessant calls for patriotism, for a ‘Sacred Union’ behind national flags, behind the fanaticism of religious cliques in countries dominated by Islamist fundamentalism.

Even if the Mullahs’ regime collapses, no new regime will be able to bring the Iranian people any respite or stability. As long as capitalism dominates the planet, wars and chaos can only continue to intensify.

In this umpteenth imperialist war, as in all the others before it, the proletariat must not allow itself to be held hostage to interests that are not its own.

It has nothing to gain from it! For this war is not theirs! To allow ourselves to be roped in behind this or that bourgeois clique, to line up behind one camp against another, is to defend the interests of our exploiters.

We are all concerned by the massacres in Iran!

What served as a pretext for the escalation of war was the bloody repression of the mass demonstrations in Iran, caused by the worsening economic crisis and the impoverishment not only of small traders, but above all of the working class.

In this revolt of the Iranian ‘people’ against the dizzying deterioration of their material living conditions, the proletariat was lost amidst the other non-exploiting sections of the population. In this revolt born of despair, it was unable to assert itself as an autonomous class.

But the Iranian workers, who have a long tradition of militant struggle, will have no choice but to fight against the rising prices of food and basic necessities. For they can no longer feed their children today. In Iran, as in the most developed countries: ‘enough is enough!’

We cannot stand by and watch the massacres in Iran! We cannot remain indifferent.

This war is not a distant and ‘exotic’ conflict.

We, the proletarians of the world, are all affected by what is happening ‘over there’!

It is our class brothers and sisters in Iran who are falling by the tens of thousands every day under the bombs and machine-gun fire of our exploiters and murderers.

It is our blood that all these vultures are spilling on the altar of capitalism!

The proletarians of all countries can and must express their solidarity with the exploited and massacred class in Iran.

Not by allowing themselves to be lulled to sleep by the left-wing and far-left parties of capital, which merely denounce the massive bombings by Yankee imperialism whilst lending their support to the Iranian state. As for denouncing the illegal nature of the intervention, this is merely to better advocate the ‘legal’ war of the ‘international coalitions’. It is the same trap as defending ‘humanitarian’ war. All wars are imperialist! As Lenin said regarding the League of Nations: the UN, NATO… are all dens of thieves.

The only solidarity that the proletarians of all countries must show to their class brothers and sisters  in Iran (and in all the states of the Middle East) is the mass struggle against ‘their’ own national bourgeoisie, against their exploiters and murderers, against all states and their governments, whether right-wing or left-wing.

It is the same ruling class that is sowing terror and death in Iran and imposing waves of redundancies, precariousness and rising unemployment upon us here.

It is the same system of exploitation, global capitalism, that is plunging us into misery and unleashing its warlike barbarism!

The bloodbath currently engulfing Iran is a call to responsibility for the proletariat of all countries, particularly its most experienced battalions in Western Europe, the ‘richest’ and most developed nations of capitalism.

It is only by developing its autonomous struggles on its own class terrain, against capitalist exploitation, that the proletariat of the core countries situated at the historical heart of capitalism will be able to offer a future to all humanity, drawing with it the exploited of the whole world.

Capitalism was born in Europe amidst mud and blood. It is in this part of the world that the working class has already endured the cruel experience of two world wars.

Let us remember that it was the development of the revolutionary wave in Russia and Germany that forced the bourgeoisie of the great ‘democratic’ powers to bring an end to the first global holocaust of 1914–18

The working class of the core capitalist countries has a long experience of class struggles against the imperialist crusades of ‘their’ national bourgeoisie. It has a long experience of the ideological deceptions that served merely as pretexts to enlist them on the battlefields in the name of defending ‘democracy’ against dictatorial regimes, civilisation against barbarism, and all the rest of it.

Because its interests are diametrically opposed to those of its exploiters, the working class is the only force in society capable of putting an end to the wars, slaughters and  chaos into which capitalism inexorably plunges the entire human race!

What is the answer to the barbarism of war?

To put an end to the dictatorship of the global bourgeoisie, to build a new society without war and without exploitation, the proletarians of the whole world must wage massive, united and widespread struggles across national borders. For the proletarians have no country! In Russia or Ukraine, in Gaza or Israel, everywhere, always, workers must refuse to kill their class brothers and sisters, fraternise, and turn against their exploiters.

To succeed in developing the revolutionary perspective, the exploited masses must first refuse to be conscripted behind national flags, refuse to serve as cannon fodder, and refuse all the sacrifices imposed by the ruling class in the name of defending the state and the national economy!

To fight en masse against the devastating effects of the global economic crisis—a permanent and irresolvable crisis—is to begin to get to the root of the bloody chaos and  barbarism of war; it is the start of the path towards the necessary politicisation of the struggles. To march towards revolution, the exploited masses must develop their class consciousness.

By stepping up our struggles against the encroachments of capital and against the barbarism of war, we must assert our unity and our international class solidarity – a class that has no particular interests to defend.

Faced with the gravity of the challenges posed by capitalism’s descent into decomposition, and faced with this new witches' sabbath in Iran, there is but one slogan:

Down with war! Down with capitalism!

International solidarity of the entire working class!

Workers of all countries, unite!

International Communist Current

Public Meeting

To collectively build a path of struggle towards revolution, it is vital to come together to debate and organise. The ICC’s public meetings are one of the possible venues for such gatherings.

In response to the escalation of the war in the Middle East, the ICC is organising a series of public meetings on 21 and 22 March in all countries where it is present, to:

• Define the internationalist position against all those who support one side or the other in this inter-imperialist bloodbath.

• Analyse the development of global capitalism and the catastrophic future it holds for humanity

• Discuss the challenges facing the working class, which must contend with the acceleration of war and chaos.

Online meeting in English: Sunday 22 March, 2pm to 5pm UK time. If you want to attend, write to us at [email protected]

 

Website: www.internationalism.org