Révolution Permanente: defending the nation means defending imperialism!

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The French Trotskyist group Révolution Permanente (RP), which emerged from a split within the New Anti-Capitalist Party (NPA), attempts to explain, with regard to the war between Iran and the United States: ‘Why we are in favour of the defeat of the United States’[1]. The various Trotskyist factions are no strangers to this sort of approach. One might recall, in this regard, their stance on the Vietnam War, the conflict in Nicaragua, the First Gulf War, and the conflict in the former Yugoslavia… On each occasion, they have taken sides in these conflicts between nations, always following the same logic: in defence of ‘the weaker nation’ against the stronger one, and very often, therefore, against the United States. In the name of defending an “oppressed nation” and the struggle against “US imperialism”, RP follows in this tradition of the left wing of capital and explicitly calls for the defence of Iran in the name of proletarian internationalism.

The main reason put forward by RP to justify this stance is that “imperialism wants to crush an oppressed nation”. Today, a country such as Iran, which finances and arms veritable parallel armies in various countries such as Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen and the Gaza Strip, is pursuing a particularly aggressive imperialist policy towards its Israeli, Saudi and American adversaries, with the aim of achieving genuine regional supremacy. Within its own borders, the ‘oppressed’ Iranian bourgeoisie has also never hesitated to brutally suppress any expression of discontent: large-scale arrests during the bus drivers’ strike in January 2006; the crackdown on strikers at Haft Tappeh in 2018; the November 2019 movement against fuel price rises; and the ‘thirst revolt’ in 2021… And this is what RP labels an “oppressed nation”!

All states are imperialist!

In RP’s misleading propaganda, imperialism is equated with the United States and “the most powerful states”. What, then, are we to make of Rwanda, which has been plundering eastern Congo for thirty years; of Eritrea, sending its troops into Tigray; or of Azerbaijan, driving the population out of Nagorno-Karabakh? There are no superpowers here, nor any docile puppets of Washington or the European Union. From Algeria to Vietnam, ‘national liberation’ or ‘anti-colonial’ wars have systematically given rise to exploitative states just like any others, suppressing workers’ strikes and waging war on their neighbours. The reality is that all states, even the weakest, pursue their own policies of carnage and plunder, on their own scale.

With the onset of capitalism’s period of decline, during the First World War, there began what the Communist International identified as early as 1919 as the “era of imperialism’” in which no national capital can develop except at the expense of others. In her pamphlet The Crisis of Social Democracy, Rosa Luxemburg also denounced the idea that only certain countries could be imperialist. She asserted, on the contrary, that “imperialist policy is not the work of a single country or a group of countries. It is the product of the global evolution of capitalism at a given stage of its development. It is an international phenomenon by nature, an inseparable whole that can only be understood in terms of its reciprocal relationships and from which no state can escape’. In decadent capitalism, imperialism is, in fact, the only genuine policy of all states. There can therefore no longer be any progressive national bourgeoisie or war of liberation. Even small states are compelled to be imperialist on their own scale, all the more so in the state of decomposition into which capitalism is sinking and where the most extreme ‘every man for himself’ now reigns.

In this context, behind their ‘anti-imperialism’ and their so-called ‘support for oppressed peoples’, RP and the many parties of the left of capital seek to disarm and deceive the proletariat in its struggle against capitalism, to prevent it from understanding why war is a product of decadent capitalism and the decomposition of bourgeois society over recent decades. By suggesting that fighting against war means defending this or that nation, rather than capitalism as a whole, RP and its ilk produce nothing but division amongst workers and recruitment-based ideologies, a world away from proletarian positions.

Even though Révolution Permanente may at times label Iran as ‘imperialist’, deliberately sowing confusion, it is also, and above all, entirely in line with the rhetoric of the bourgeois clique in power in Iran, which is only too happy to argue that it must be helped to defend itself against ‘American-Zionist aggression’. In other words, behind the smokescreen of its radical rhetoric, through the notion that there are so-called “oppressed nations”, Révolution Permanente is merely defending a ‘sacred union’ with a bourgeoisie that has demonstrated time and again the barbarity with which it is capable of dealing with any challenge to its power.[2][2]

War between bourgeois nations never weakens imperialism…

Of course, by suggesting that imperialism in the conflict with Iran is embodied solely by the United States, RP can continue to lie shamelessly by claiming that “an American defeat will be a defeat for imperialism” and that this will further the struggle of the working class in the Middle East and around the world. And on this point, the explanation given in the article by Révolution Permanente distorts and seeks to discredit genuine proletarian internationalism, by fraudulently claiming that refusing to support one side against another amounts to irresponsible ‘pacifism’: “The ongoing war is a striking example of why revolutionaries take the side of the oppressed nation’s military against an imperialist oppressor. In contrast to pacifist or ‘neutral’ positions that equate the oppressed Iran with the world’s leading power, a revolutionary policy always takes a stand in favour of imperialism’s defeat at the hands of a semi-colonial nation, as this can only strengthen the capacity of the exploited and oppressed to fight for their emancipation, all the more so when a major imperialist power is involved. Whilst a victory for imperialism would allow it to impose its rule on the oppressed nation whilst expanding its room for manoeuvre throughout the world, a confirmed defeat reshuffles the regional balance of power and, above all, class relations”. A fine example of the old recruiting sergeant’s refrain of the bourgeois left and its lies!

Failing to support an imperialist camp does not in any way mean merely ‘playing them off against each other’—Iran and the United States. In reality, it is a matter of rejecting the logic of being drawn into war—into which capitalism inevitably drags us if the proletariat does not rise up against it—and of rejecting the lies spouted ad nauseam during every conflict, which would have us believe that the situation will improve if the ‘lesser evil’ ’ prevails, and that the proletariat will take a step towards its liberation by following ‘its’ nation!

No! Capitalism has no solution to war: every new conflict brings, and will continue to bring, further carnage, further destruction and mass murder! Capitalism has reached such a level of contradiction and decomposition that, from now on, every conflict results in the ruin of the warring sides and even more deadly chaos. This is demonstrated every day by the increasingly chaotic and uncontrollable conflicts in the Middle East, just as it is by the war in Ukraine. The defeat of the United States in Iran will never give rise to a new regional ‘order’, but only to ever-greater instability and massacres. Far from combating this fundamental trend of decaying capitalism, Révolution Permanente tries to convince us to go along with it, to follow all the bourgeois cliques in the race towards generalised war.

… it is always a defeat for the proletariat!

Contrary to what RP claims, a bourgeoisie weakened or defeated in the course of an imperialist conflict has never served to strengthen the proletariat’s struggle. The weakening of the French bourgeoisie, in the context of its defeat by Germany in 1870, did nothing to prevent it from massacring the Communards with the complicit support of Prussia. The fact, for example, that the German bourgeoisie was militarily defeated in 1918 did not prevent it from subsequently crushing the revolution in Germany. And it was not the weakness of the Russian bourgeoisie that led to the Bolsheviks’ triumph, but the latter’s ability to put forward clear slogans and mobilise the working class against the murderous logic of capitalism.

The Iranian bourgeoisie has already shown that when its order is threatened, it does not hesitate: it fires into the crowd! Whether in the United States or in Iran, it is only nationalist ideology that is strengthened by the spiral of war. The weakening of a national section of the bourgeoisie, however powerful it may be, will in no way lead to a strengthening of the working class’s consciousness, nor will it push it towards greater unity or towards its own self-organisation. In reality, all wars are disasters for the proletariat, both physically and politically: thousands of workers are conscripted into the armed forces and die under the bombs, only to end up politically defeated and subjugated to their ‘victorious’ bourgeoisie! The failure of the United States in Iran shows that the Revolutionary Guards have emerged stronger and the Iranian ‘nation’ is even more united than before the war, despite a population bled dry. Is this the ‘strengthening’ of the proletariat?

“Workers have no country”!

The internationalism advocated by Révolution Permanente is therefore just as adulterated as that of its Trotskyist counterparts. When RP calls for the defeat of the United States and Israel at the hands of Iran, it is merely calling on the working class to support the war, to wage it and to continue it until one of the belligerents is defeated. This is precisely what Trotsky, Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht and all internationalists refused to do in 1914. It is very precisely what the Serbian Socialist Party—despite being situated in a country that was ‘attacked’ and ‘oppressed’—refused to do at the start of the First World War.

What destroys imperialism cannot be another nation that is imperialist by its very nature. What drives back the bourgeoisie is the class struggle. One of the proletariat’s primary tasks is to defend itself on its own ground against the capitalist logic of sacrifice and attack. It was the Paris Commune that brought the fighting between the French and the Prussians to a standstill in 1870, even though the French bourgeoisie took advantage of this to crush that revolutionary uprising. It was the revolution in Russia and the threat of its spread to Germany that forced the various warring nations to put their conflicts on hold in the face of the revolutionary peril. Revolutionaries do not merely ‘set the belligerents against one another’; on the contrary, they call for class struggle! Even when the ideological pressure from the bourgeoisie is at its peak, they defend proletarian internationalism at all costs and the necessity of class autonomy, rejecting any form of ‘sacred union’, whatever the nation.

The proletariat is the only class that has no material interest in these conflicts and that possesses the historical power to put a stop to them by overthrowing the capitalist system. Of course, the road to revolution is still very long, and the working class does not currently have the strength to stand up directly against armed conflicts and prevent them. It is therefore primarily through the struggle against the economic effects of war (budget cuts, inflation, etc.) that the proletariat can begin to genuinely oppose it, as it has done in recent years in many central countries, including the United States. It is above all through collective reflection, debate and clarification (which RP and their ilk seek to undermine) that revolutionary minorities will forge the political weapons the proletariat will need tomorrow to overthrow capitalism and its wars.

HD, 20 August 2026

 

 

 

 

[1] « Iran. Pourquoi nous sommes pour la défaite des États-Unis », Armes de la critique (2026).

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Trotskyism and war