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The simultaneity is not accidental. A new crisis around Cuba is developing at the same time as Washington and its allies are preparing to break the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz. The two theatres are not identical, but they are linked by the same strategic logic: the United States is trying to prove that it can still control decisive routes, discipline allies, and impose political outcomes in zones that affect world power. In the Gulf this concerns a maritime energy chokepoint; in the Caribbean it concerns the old American claim to a privileged sphere of influence. In both cases, Trump is trying to convert a regional crisis into a demonstration of restored imperial credibility.

That is why the comparison with the Kennedy-era Cuba crisis is both illuminating and misleading.

A new Cuba crisis, but not a replay of 1962

The classical Cuba crisis of October 1962 was a nuclear deployment crisis. Soviet medium-range missiles on Cuban soil altered the military balance in the western hemisphere and raised the immediate risk of nuclear war. Kennedy answered with a naval quarantine backed by the credible possibility of invasion and escalation. The essence of the crisis lay in the combination of three elements: direct superpower confrontation, offensive strategic weapons, and compressed decision time.

The present Trump-Rubio Cuba crisis has a different structure. Its central lever is not a newly discovered Russian missile deployment, but an economic strangulation strategy directed at a weakened Cuban state. Trump has repeatedly floated the possibility of a “friendly takeover” and even declared that Cuba might be taken “friendly” or otherwise. Rubio has combined regime-change pressure with selective signals about humanitarian relief and market openings. The pressure point is fuel. Cuba’s energy system has been pushed toward collapse by the interruption of oil supplies, blackouts, declining tourism income, and the broader deterioration of the island’s external support structure. Russian and Chinese backing exists, but so far it appears as limited economic and diplomatic support, not as a Caribbean equivalent of 1962 missile deployment.

This difference matters. The analogy with Kennedy is valid only at the level of hemisphere doctrine and coercive signaling. Washington is again treating Cuba not as a sovereign actor but as a problem to be settled in line with U.S. strategic interests. Rubio, like anti-Castro hardliners before him, frames the issue as unfinished historical business. Trump adds the language of takeover, transaction, and spectacle. In that sense the crisis revives the older grammar of U.S. power in the Caribbean basin.

But the analogy becomes false when it suggests that history is simply repeating itself. There is no evidence at present of a Soviet-style deployment of strategic weapons, no symmetrical superpower military standoff at sea, and no equivalent of the 1962 back-channel bargain in which Washington removed missiles from Turkey while Moscow withdrew missiles from Cuba. The present confrontation is less a missile crisis than a regime-change crisis conducted under conditions of energy scarcity and geopolitical opportunism.

The real parallel: coercion under cover of emergency

The true parallel between Kennedy’s Cuba crisis and the Trump-Rubio crisis lies elsewhere. In both cases, Washington converts a security narrative into a doctrine of exceptional action in its near abroad.

Kennedy used the language of strategic emergency to justify quarantine and escalation readiness. Trump and Rubio use the language of state failure, humanitarian breakdown, migration risk, criminality, and regional instability to justify extraordinary leverage over Cuba’s political future. The method is different, but the imperial presupposition is the same: the United States reserves for itself the right to decide which crises near its coast are intolerable, what form of internal order is acceptable there, and how external powers may or may not engage.

In 1962 the slogan was anti-Soviet defense. In 2026 the operative slogans are humanitarian rescue, democratic transition, and the ending of Communist rule. But these slogans conceal a material objective. A post-Castro or post-PCC transition supervised by Washington would seek to reorder Cuban property relations, tourism, logistics, finance, and energy dependency in favor of U.S.-aligned capital. Rubio’s maximalism and Trump’s business language converge here. The issue is not merely ideology; it is the political form through which capital, investment, labor discipline, and strategic access will be reorganized.

The false perspectives produced by the 1962 analogy

The return of Cuba-crisis language easily produces three false perspectives.

The first false perspective is to imagine that a hard confrontation with Cuba would necessarily strengthen Russia in the western hemisphere in the same way that the 1962 crisis raised Soviet prestige. That overstates Moscow’s present room for maneuver. Russia can still use Cuba symbolically, diplomatically, and to a limited extent energetically. But it is engaged elsewhere, and its current support is much thinner than the Soviet commitment of the early 1960s.

The second false perspective is to imagine that a decisive U.S. move against Havana would be cheap and clean. Even if Washington does not intend a formal invasion, coercive collapse can generate uncontrolled migration, administrative breakdown, black-market militarization, and prolonged instability. The destruction of an exhausted state does not automatically create a governable pro-U.S. order.

The third false perspective is to imagine that Cuban workers would stand outside the confrontation as passive beneficiaries of either side’s victory. That repeats one of the oldest errors of Cold War thinking. A victory for the PCC under Russian or Chinese cover would preserve exploitation under a decaying state-capitalist apparatus. A victory for Trumpist capital would reorganize exploitation under a new political management more openly subordinated to foreign investment and the U.S. strategic orbit. The political form of bourgeois social domination changes; the proletarian condition remains.

Hormuz: the global energy chokepoint in the same strategic picture

The blockade of the Strait of Hormuz is of a different magnitude. Whereas Cuba matters above all as a political-strategic test of U.S. hemispheric authority, Hormuz is a direct artery of the world energy system. A closure or semi-closure immediately affects shipping, insurance, oil prices, gas markets, and inflation expectations far beyond the region.

What links Hormuz to Cuba is that Trump can present both theatres as opportunities to restore “freedom” through coercion: freedom of navigation in the Gulf and political “freedom” in Cuba. In practice both are forms of imperialist ordering. In Hormuz the U.S. seeks to prove that it and its partners can reopen a maritime corridor under military pressure. In Cuba it seeks to prove that no rival power can secure a durable foothold ninety miles from Florida while an anti-U.S. regime survives in conditions of severe weakness.

This is why the development of allied support matters.

How U.S. partners are moving toward support for a mission in Hormuz

The movement is no longer merely rhetorical. Britain, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Japan, and Canada have declared themselves ready to contribute to appropriate efforts to ensure safe passage through the Strait of Hormuz and to stabilize energy markets. The European Union has simultaneously called for a moratorium on strikes against energy and water facilities, while also moving to reinforce its existing naval missions and improve coordination for freedom of navigation once conditions permit.

This does not yet amount to a unified NATO-style war plan for Hormuz. The EU is calling for it, but the US is reluctant. Big business is profiting from rising fuel prices (oil and gas). The US has raised prices, which it intends to ‘offset’ by purchasing Russian oil for one month without coercive measures. The plan is better understood as a coalition of graduated support. Some partners will contribute naval assets; others intelligence, logistics, insurance backstopping, diplomatic cover, sanctions enforcement, or strategic petroleum releases. Japan’s participation is especially important, because it signals that the problem is being framed not as a local Gulf conflict but as a global supply-security issue. The Netherlands and Italy matter because they indicate that even medium powers are being pulled into a U.S.-led stabilisation architecture. Canada’s inclusion broadens the legitimacy claim beyond the immediate European core.

Yet this support remains conditional and uneven. European governments are acutely aware that they are vulnerable both to energy shocks and to domestic political backlash if they are seen as being dragged into another open-ended U.S. operation. Hence the dual posture: support freedom of navigation, but also demand restraint; prepare for escort and deterrence, but insist on a moratorium on attacks against civilian energy infrastructure.

The energy war problem: what Israeli and Iranian attacks can do

The current Middle Eastern escalation has shown why any mission to reopen Hormuz is inseparable from the wider problem of attacks on energy infrastructure. Israeli strikes on Iran’s South Pars field and related facilities, together with Iranian strikes affecting Israeli refining and wider regional energy assets, have already demonstrated how quickly a maritime crisis can merge with a continental infrastructure war.

This creates four difficulties.

First, shipping security alone is insufficient. Even if tanker traffic is partially restored, attacks on gas fields, refineries, export terminals, power lines, desalination infrastructure, and petrochemical hubs can keep energy prices high and market confidence low.

Second, escalation becomes nonlinear. If one side believes maritime interdiction is failing, it may shift toward deeper strikes on fixed infrastructure. The result is not only higher prices but longer recovery times. The IMF warns that international trade will decline significantly within the next year.

Third, allied unity becomes more fragile as economic interests diverge. Import-dependent states such as Japan, South Korea, India, and many EU member states want rapid de-escalation and stable supply. By contrast, the United States, Britain, and some more hawkish allied circles may prefer continued pressure on Iran even at a higher economic cost. However, there are tensions between the U.S. and U.K. governments.

Fourth, the distinction between military and civilian targets becomes politically unsustainable. The more both sides hit energy nodes, the harder it becomes for U.S. partners to defend a mission publicly as a clean law-enforcement operation in defense of navigation. Inter-imperialist war is total war on all the resources of the enemy, including its population.

There are also possibilities. A visible coalition presence can lower insurance panic, deter opportunistic attacks on commercial shipping, reassure producers, and create room for emergency supply releases and rerouting. If combined with political pressure on both Israel and Iran to stop striking energy infrastructure, it can help contain a spiral that would otherwise spread far beyond the Gulf. But that possibility depends on Washington’s willingness to impose limits not only on Iran but also on Israel. Without that symmetry, the mission will look like selective enforcement in favor of one belligerent bloc.

What Trump could gain from a conflict around Cuba

Trump could gain several things from a Cuba confrontation.

He could project restored American dominance in the Caribbean after years in which U.S. authority appeared contested or distracted. He could satisfy a domestic political constituency centered in south Florida that has long treated the destruction of Castroism as unfinished business. He could present himself as the man who handled two chokepoints at once: reopening Hormuz abroad and politically breaking Cuba at home. He could also aim at an economic prize. A post-PCC Cuba would open opportunities in tourism, real estate, infrastructure, energy distribution, agribusiness, and finance under conditions likely favorable to U.S. capital.

In strategic terms, Trump might also calculate that forcing Cuba away from Russia and China would be a relatively cheap demonstration that the United States still controls escalation in its own hemisphere.

What Trump could lose

But the risks are substantial.

A Cuba crisis could undermine the very message of controlled strength that Trump wants to send in Hormuz. If the Gulf requires allied coordination and energy-market stabilization, a parallel Caribbean confrontation could look like overextension. A mass migration crisis from Cuba would create immediate domestic political costs for Florida and the federal government. Latin American states could react against open U.S. tutelage, even governments otherwise cautious toward Havana. If coercion fails to produce quick elite realignment inside Cuba, Washington could end up owning the consequences of social collapse without securing a stable successor order.

Trump could also lose strategically if Russia turns Cuba into a propaganda and diplomatic counter-front. Moscow does not need to reproduce 1962 to complicate Washington’s position. Limited oil deliveries, financial assistance, cyber cooperation, intelligence signaling, or simply sustained diplomatic defiance may be enough to keep the crisis alive and to expose the gap between Trump’s rhetoric and his actual room for maneuver.

The Cuban proletariat as victim of the U.S.-Russia confrontation

For the proletariat, the decisive point is that the Cuban proletariat is not confronted with a choice between liberation and oppression, but with rival forms of capitalist domination.

On the one side stands the PCC’s exhausted state-capitalist order. It presides over blackouts, shortages, wage erosion, decaying infrastructure, repression, and a shrinking capacity to reproduce even the minimum conditions for accumulation. The army and the party apparatus defend not a workers’ power but a bureaucratic-bourgeois management of exploitation in mixed forms: state, semi-private, military-commercial, informal, and increasingly desperate.

On the other side stands the promise of Trumpist transition. This is presented as rescue through investment, fuel, goods, tourism, and political opening. But the social content is plain enough. A transition supervised by U.S. power would aim to purge hostile sectors of the old apparatus, reorganize the economy for profitable insertion into U.S.-centered circuits, and impose a new discipline on labor under the banner of normalization. There may be more goods on the shelves and more capital in circulation. There would not, for that reason alone, be emancipation.

Russia’s and China’s role does not alter this basic structure. Russian aid can delay collapse, provide fuel, and help Havana resist immediate surrender, but only if any effective U.S. blockade is first broken or circumvented. But it does so in the context of Moscow’s own strategic rivalry with Washington. Cuba becomes a bargaining chip, a symbolic outpost, and a political signal. The workers do not control this game. They pay for it through blackouts, scarcity, insecurity, and the permanent pressure to line up behind one bourgeois camp against another. Right now, administrative control over the workforce is being reimposed, just as it has been so many times before. The government’s “we will resist for the homeland” campaigns insist that the problems stem from the U.S. embargo and the Helms-Burton Act. This is a biased and self-serving view. Many countries and companies invest in Cuba. However, there are solvency and debt problems, as well as legal and de facto interference by the state bureaucracy in the economy.

That is why the formula drawn from the broader internationalist texts remains exact here as well. The enemy is not only external. It is also internal. The Cuban working class is squeezed between an exhausted ruling apparatus that still demands discipline in the name of sovereignty, in fact dependence on states like Mexico, Venezuela and Russia or another external power – the USA – that offers market salvation in exchange for deeper incorporation into its own imperialist bloc.

The result is tragic but not exceptional. Cuba is not outside the world system; it is a compressed expression of it. Hormuz shows the same system at the level of global energy routes. Cuba shows it at the level of a weakened island caught between rival powers. In both cases, the working class pays for strategic contests it did not choose.

Conclusion

The relationship between the new Cuba crisis and the blockade of Hormuz lies in the return of chokepoint politics under conditions of general imperial instability. One chokepoint is maritime and global; the other is political and hemispheric. Trump seeks advantage in both. He wants to demonstrate that the United States can secure sea lanes, discipline adversaries, command allies, and reorder weak regimes close to home.

The parallel with Kennedy’s Cuba crisis therefore contains a real core: the reaffirmation of U.S. exceptional rights in its sphere. But it becomes deceptive when it masks the specific structure of the present conflict. This is not primarily a missile crisis. It is a crisis of energy pressure, regime-change signaling, collapsing state capacity, and selective great-power backing.

For the Cuban proletariat, none of the available bourgeois exits is emancipatory. Whether Cuba remains under the PCC with Russian or Chinese assistance or is opened under Trump-Rubio pressure to a new wave of U.S.-aligned capital, workers remain exposed to exploitation, political subordination, and the external shocks of inter-imperialist rivalry. The central fact is not national destiny, but class position. That is the point at which the Caribbean crisis and the Gulf crisis finally meet.

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Les thèses suivantes et leurs explications s’inscrivent dans un débat en cours qui, pour l’instant, n’a pas abouti à un accord total. Compte tenu de l’urgence de publier un point de vue communiste de conseil sur cette guerre qui évolue rapidement, nous poursuivrons ce débat prochainement. Si d’autres participants publient leur point de vue, nous y ferons référence ici.

De la guerre actuelle au Moyen-Orient, de la rivalité entre les blocs et des tâches de la classe ouvrière

Thèses communistes des conseils, mars 2026

Thèse 1. La guerre actuelle au Moyen-Orient doit être compris d’abord dans la dynamique fondamentale de l’impérialisme, et ensuite dans le contexte plus large de la montée des conflits mondiaux depuis 2022.

Thèse 2. La Première Guerre mondiale a marqué l’entrée définitive du capitalisme dans l’époque impérialiste, et le problème stratégique essentiel posé alors au prolétariat reste le problème stratégique essentiel aujourd’hui.

Thèse 3. Sous l’impérialisme, comme l’avait compris Gorter, toute lutte de classe est nécessairement internationaliste.

Thèse 4. La guerre actuelle traduit le renforcement temporaire de l’axe États-Unis-Israël dans la région et la détérioration du réseau dirigé par l’Iran, mais cela ne constitue pas une résolution stratégique stable.

Thèse 5. Les objectifs démocratiques et humanitaires invoqués pour l’offensive américano-israélienne sont des alibis idéologiques, et non le véritable contenu de la guerre.

Thèse 6. Un changement total de régime en Iran est improbable, non pas parce qu’il est techniquement impossible, mais parce qu’il comporte de sérieux risques stratégiques pour les États-Unis et Israël.

Thèse 7. Le danger d’une guerre civile et de la décomposition de l’État en Iran est réel, et une telle issue serait catastrophique pour le prolétariat.

Thèse 8. Le blocus du détroit d’Ormuz résume le conflit géopolitique plus large et montre à quel point les grandes puissances sont touchées différemment.

Thèse 9. Les deux blocs rivaux sont bien réels, mais ils ne sont pas des répliques fidèles de ceux de 1914 ou de 1939 ; ils sont plus lâches, plus hétérogènes et marqués par des contradictions internes.

Thèse 10. On peut distinguer trois grands scénarios, mais aucun n’offre d’issue positive pour le prolétariat à moins qu’il n’intervienne de manière indépendante.

Thèse 11. Toutes les factions bellicistes doivent être dénoncées, y compris celles qui présentent la guerre, le changement de régime, la défaite ou la victoire d’un camp impérialiste comme bénéfiques pour le prolétariat.

Thèse 12. Remarque sur la confusion : tant le « défaitisme révolutionnaire » que la « guerre contre la guerre » peuvent devenir des formules trompeuses lorsqu’elles sont détachées des conditions actuelles.

Thèse 13. L’axe positif est la lutte autonome de la classe ouvrière, capable d’entraîner derrière elle d’autres couches opprimées.

Thèse 14. L’horizon n’est pas la paix sous le capitalisme, mais la révolution prolétarienne et la révolution mondiale.

Thèse 1. La guerre actuelle au Moyen-Orient doit être compris d’abord dans la dynamique fondamentale de l’impérialisme, et ensuite dans le contexte plus large de la montée des conflits mondiaux depuis 2022.

La guerre actuelle ne peut être comprise comme une explosion locale causée simplement par la religion, l’autoritarisme, le terrorisme, la psychologie nationale ou les ambitions personnelles de dirigeants particuliers. Elle doit être située dans la phase historique du capitalisme inaugurée par la Première Guerre mondiale : la phase dans laquelle chaque capital national est contraint de se positionner dans un monde déjà divisé entre États et blocs rivaux. Dans cette phase, la guerre n’est pas un écart accidentel par rapport à la normalité capitaliste. C’est l’une des formes concentrées par lesquelles s’exprime la concurrence capitaliste lorsque les conflits autour des marchés, des voies de communication, des ressources, des technologies, de la main-d’œuvre et des positions militaires s’intensifient.

Depuis l’invasion russe de l’Ukraine en 2022, les tensions mondiales ne se sont pas orientées vers une stabilisation, mais vers un élargissement de la confrontation militaire, diplomatique, économique et logistique. La guerre en Ukraine, l’exacerbation de la rivalité entre les États-Unis et la Chine, la militarisation de la mer Rouge et du Golfe, le renforcement des sanctions et l’importance croissante des couloirs énergétiques et des goulets d’étranglement maritimes font tous partie du même processus mondial, tout comme les guerres au Myanmar, au Soudan, au Pakistan, en Afghanistan et ailleurs. La guerre actuelle au Moyen-Orient est un théâtre de ce processus, et non une exception isolée.

Pour la classe ouvrière, cela signifie qu’il n’existe pas de question « régionale » séparable de la question mondiale. Les travailleurs d’Iran, d’Israël, du Liban, des monarchies du Golfe, d’Europe, de Chine, d’Inde et des États-Unis sont entraînés dans la même totalité impérialiste, bien que de différentes manières et à des rythmes différents. Toute analyse qui ignore l’impérialisme désoriente inévitablement la résistance prolétarienne.

Thèse 2. La Première Guerre mondiale a marqué l’entrée définitive du capitalisme dans l’époque impérialiste, et le problème stratégique essentiel posé alors au prolétariat reste le problème stratégique essentiel aujourd’hui.

La Première Guerre mondiale a suivi l’achèvement effectif de la conquête et du partage des régions décisives du globe par les grandes puissances capitalistes. Une fois le monde divisé, la lutte entre les capitaux s’est de plus en plus transformée en lutte pour le redécoupage. Traités, alliances, courses aux armements, domination « post »-coloniale et semi-coloniale, et enfin guerre mondiale : tout cela a découlé de cette situation. Les contradictions capitalistes n’ont pas été abolies par la guerre ; elles ont été temporairement déplacées et réorganisées par la destruction et la redistribution.

Cette même logique persiste aujourd’hui à un niveau technique plus élevé. Les systèmes numériques, la guerre des missiles, la surveillance navale, les réseaux de « proxies », les sanctions, les capacités cybernétiques, les drones et les infrastructures énergétiques ont transformé les moyens, mais pas les relations sociales sous-jacentes. Chaque faction bourgeoise cherche toujours la meilleure place pour « son » capital au sein de la concurrence nationale et entre blocs. Chacune sacrifie « ses » travailleurs par une exploitation intensifiée, la répression, le déplacement, les traumatismes et la mort.

Pour la classe ouvrière, cela signifie que la pression pour s’identifier au sort de « son » propre État en temps de guerre n’est pas une anomalie, mais un mécanisme permanent de l’impérialisme. Le prolétariat doit partir de sa propre position de classe, et non des besoins stratégiques d’un État quelconque.

Thèse 3. Sous l’impérialisme, comme l’avait compris Gorter, toute lutte de classe est nécessairement internationaliste.

Il ne s’agit pas d’un appel moral à la solidarité dans l’abstrait, mais d’une vérité matérielle. Sous l’impérialisme, le capital est interconnecté à l’échelle mondiale et les conflits entre États s’articulent à l’échelle mondiale. Par conséquent, toute lutte ouvrière sérieuse se heurte immédiatement à des conditions internationales : inflation transmise par les marchés mondiaux, sanctions, chocs énergétiques, budgets militarisés, flux de réfugiés, perturbations des chaînes d’approvisionnement et campagnes idéologiques pour l’unité nationale.

Dire que toute lutte de classe est internationaliste sous l’impérialisme signifie qu’aucune lutte prolétarienne ne peut rester politiquement complète si elle reste enfermée dans des formes de conscience nationales. Même lorsqu’une lutte commence autour des salaires, des prix, des licenciements, de l’alimentation, du carburant, de la conscription, de la discrimination ou de la répression policière dans une localité donnée, son véritable ennemi est un ordre social qui opère à l’échelle internationale et subordonne chaque localité aux exigences de l’accumulation du capital et de la concurrence militaire.

Pour la classe ouvrière, cela signifie : les travailleurs iraniens ne peuvent s’émanciper par la « défense nationale » contre les États-Unis et Israël, ni avec leur « aide » ; les travailleurs israéliens ne peuvent s’émanciper par une victoire militaire sur l’Iran et ses alliés, ni par la victoire de ces « États ennemis » ; les travailleurs libanais, irakiens, yéménites, du Golfe, européens, chinois, russes et américains ne peuvent s’émanciper en soutenant l’un ou l’autre camp qui leur semble moins dangereux dans l’immédiat. La seule politique de classe adéquate face à l’impérialisme est la politique de classe internationaliste.

Thèse 4. La guerre actuelle traduit le renforcement temporaire de l’axe États-Unis-Israël dans la région et la détérioration du réseau dirigé par l’Iran, mais cela ne constitue pas une résolution stratégique stable.

À l’heure actuelle, le bloc dirigé par les États-Unis semble gagner du terrain au Moyen-Orient, surtout grâce à l’action combinée de la puissance américaine et de l’initiative militaire israélienne. L’Iran et les forces régionales qui lui sont liées ont vu leurs capacités et leur liberté de manœuvre se détériorer :

• Le Hezbollah subit une pression militaire et politique intense au Liban.
• Les Houthis continuent de semer le trouble, mais ils font l’objet d’une surveillance et d’attaques constantes. La marge de manœuvre de l’Iran pour s’imposer dans la région s’est réduite.
• En Syrie, les positions de l’Iran ont disparu lorsque le gouvernement Assad a été renversé par manque de soutien de la part de l’armée russe.
• La Russie et la Biélorussie, déjà affaiblies dans la région et contraintes de mener une politique d’économie stratégique ailleurs (en Ukraine), n’ont pas inversé cette tendance.
• Le système industriel chinois reste dépendant des approvisionnements énergétiques maritimes en provenance d’Iran. Ainsi, l’affaiblissement de l’Iran a mis en évidence l’une des faiblesses de la Chine.

Dans le même temps, les États arabes et islamiques ne se sont pas ralliés à l’Iran au sein d’un front anti-israélien significatif. Au contraire, de nombreux États à direction sunnite préfèrent un affaiblissement du pôle iranien tant que le conflit ne les déstabilise pas directement. La logique des Accords d’Abraham – normalisation commerciale avec Israël sous le patronage américain – n’a pas disparu. Elle a été mise à rude épreuve, mais n’a pas été supplantée.

Pour la classe ouvrière, cela signifie qu’un avantage temporaire pour un bloc n’est pas la libération. Le succès de l’axe États-Unis-Israël n’affaiblit pas l’impérialisme en tant que tel ; il redistribue les forces au sein de l’impérialisme. Le prolétariat ne gagne rien à la défaite d’un exploiteur par un autre exploiteur. C’est pourquoi le slogan de Lénine sur le « défaitisme révolutionnaire » prêtait déjà à confusion à l’époque.

Thèse 5. Les objectifs démocratiques et humanitaires invoqués pour l’offensive américano-israélienne sont des alibis idéologiques, et non le véritable contenu de la guerre.

Les affirmations selon lesquelles la guerre est menée pour libérer les manifestants, défendre les femmes, sauver les minorités ou apporter la démocratie en Iran ne constituent pas le véritable moteur de l’offensive. Les États-Unis et Israël n’ont pas besoin d’une république démocratique en Iran pour garantir leurs intérêts. Ce dont ils ont besoin, c’est d’une capacité réduite de l’Iran à faire obstacle à leur projet régional et, plus largement, à servir de pivot utile à l’alignement Chine-Russie.

Washington et Tel-Aviv peuvent très bien s’accommoder d’un changement de cap au sein de l’appareil d’État iranien existant, à condition que la configuration qui en résulte freine le militarisme régional qui leur est hostile, affaiblisse les liens avec la Chine et la Russie, et permette une réorganisation de la politique étrangère et économique iranienne. Un changement contrôlé au sein du régime, ou une recomposition entre les factions bourgeoises, pourrait donc s’avérer plus utile qu’un effondrement incontrôlé.

Pour la classe ouvrière, cela signifie que les slogans démocratiques brandis par les États impérialistes ne sont généralement que des masques dissimulant des objectifs stratégiques. Les travailleurs ne doivent pas confondre l’affaiblissement d’un régime théocratique par une force militaire étrangère avec leur propre émancipation.

Thèse 6. Un changement total de régime en Iran est improbable, non pas parce qu’il est techniquement impossible, mais parce qu’il comporte de sérieux risques stratégiques pour les États-Unis et Israël.

Un renversement complet de l’État iranien pourrait produire des effets contraires aux intérêts de Washington et de Tel-Aviv. Israël n’a aucun intérêt à voir émerger un autre client régional fort et autonome dont les ambitions pourraient à terme diluer sa propre position privilégiée de partenaire armé central des États-Unis dans la région. Les États-Unis, pour leur part, ont des raisons d’éviter un scénario qui nécessiterait une occupation prolongée, une reconstruction massive, une guerre de factions imprévisible ou un vide stratégique facilement repénétré par des puissances rivales.

Les issues les plus plausibles sont plus restreintes : un affaiblissement du régime actuel ; un changement de ligne au sein du régime ; une recomposition négociée ou forcée entre les factions bourgeoises ; ou une situation instable prolongée dans laquelle l’État existant survit mais sous une forme affaiblie. Le soi-disant « modèle vénézuélien » — pression, usure, réalignement interne, accommodement sélectif — pourrait s’avérer plus utile à Washington et à Israël que la tentative de démanteler d’un seul coup l’ensemble de l’appareil d’État.

Si les manifestations contre les ayatollahs et leur appareil militaire et policier répressif devaient reprendre, le gouvernement américain pourrait encourager un changement de régime politique. Si la classe ouvrière venait à gagner du terrain et à s’imposer dans ces manifestations, les États-Unis seraient intéressés par un tel changement de régime bourgeois afin de préserver le capitalisme.
Il est probable que les États-Unis encourageraient l’émergence de tendances autonomistes (kurdes, azéries, baloutches…) afin que l’État qui se développerait alors ait une capacité plus limitée.

Pour la classe ouvrière, cela signifie que les travailleurs doivent rejeter ces deux illusions : l’illusion selon laquelle une guerre étrangère apportera la libération, et l’illusion selon laquelle la survie du régime existant est un moindre mal qui mérite d’être défendu. Ces deux voies maintiennent le prolétariat lié à des issues bourgeoises.

Thèse 7. Le danger d’une guerre civile et de la décomposition de l’État en Iran est réel, et une telle issue serait catastrophique pour le prolétariat.

Si l’autorité centrale se fracture brutalement, le résultat probable n’est pas l’émancipation sociale, mais une multiplication des factions armées bourgeoises et petite-bourgeoises : vestiges du régime, cliques militaires, forces ethno-nationalistes, hommes d’influence provinciaux, courants islamistes, réseaux criminels, milices soutenues par l’étranger et appareils de sécurité rivaux. Une telle évolution dévasterait les conditions de vie de la classe ouvrière, fragmenterait la classe sur le plan territorial et politique, aggraverait la terreur et créerait un terrain fertile pour toutes les forces de nature bourgeoise conservatrice.

Dans le même temps, un effondrement de l’État iranien pourrait ouvrir la voie à de nouvelles interventions du bloc rival, y compris sous la forme d’un retour de la Chine ou de la Russie sur les plans économique, logistique, politique ou secret. L’effondrement de l’État n’abolirait pas l’impérialisme ; il en multiplierait les formes.

Pour la classe ouvrière, cela signifie que le choix ne se pose pas entre la guerre impérialiste et la guerre civile d’un côté, et la paix sociale de l’autre. La seule alternative prolétarienne est la lutte de classe autonome contre toutes les factions bourgeoises avant qu’elles ne puissent entraîner la société dans une désintégration généralisée.

Thèse 8. Le blocus du détroit d’Ormuz résume le conflit géopolitique plus large et montre à quel point les grandes puissances sont touchées différemment.

Comme l’explique l’article sur le blocus du détroit d’Ormuz, ce goulet d’étranglement n’est pas seulement un corridor énergétique, mais un instrument stratégique. Les États-Unis sont moins directement dépendants des flux énergétiques du Golfe qu’au cours des décennies précédentes, mais conservent une influence navale écrasante sur la réouverture de la circulation maritime. L’Europe est moins directement dépendante que l’Asie de l’Est en termes de volume, mais très vulnérable en raison de la répercussion des prix, de la pénurie de GNL et de son insuffisance militaire. La Chine est la plus exposée sur le plan structurel, car son système industriel reste fortement dépendant des flux énergétiques maritimes que d’autres peuvent mettre en péril ou réguler.

La crise d’Ormuz met donc en évidence une hiérarchie au sein des blocs. L’Europe peut contribuer aux missions d’escorte et apporter un soutien politique, mais elle reste dépendante des États-Unis pour sa profondeur stratégique. La Chine peut signaler sa présence et rechercher des accords, mais elle ne peut pas encore garantir de manière indépendante sa propre sécurité maritime dans le Golfe. L’Iran peut perturber, mais pas imposer un ordre alternatif durable.

Pour la classe ouvrière, cela signifie que la guerre énergétique n’est pas extérieure à la vie quotidienne. Elle se répercute sous forme d’inflation, de pénuries, d’austérité, de chômage, de budgets militarisés et d’une discipline de travail renforcée sur tous les continents.

Thèse 9. Les deux blocs rivaux sont bien réels, mais ils ne sont pas des répliques fidèles de ceux de 1914 ou de 1939 ; ils sont plus lâches, plus hétérogènes et marqués par des contradictions internes.

D’un côté se trouve le bloc centré sur les États-Unis, avec Israël comme avant-poste armé décisif dans la région et l’Europe comme composante subordonnée mais active. De l’autre côté se trouve un alignement antagoniste plus lâche autour de la Chine et de la Russie, auquel s’intègrent l’Iran et, à des degrés divers, divers auxiliaires ou partenaires régionaux (Biélorussie, Corée du Nord). Ce deuxième bloc est moins intégré sur les plans institutionnel et militaire que le premier, mais il n’en est pas moins réel en tant qu’alignement stratégique façonné par les sanctions, la logistique, les transferts d’armes, les liens énergétiques, la couverture diplomatique et l’opposition commune à la prédominance américaine.

Au sein de ces deux blocs, il existe des contradictions. L’Europe cherche à gagner en marge de manœuvre mais reste subordonnée à la primauté militaire américaine. Les monarchies du Golfe saluent l’affaiblissement de l’Iran tout en craignant une escalade incontrôlée. La Chine souhaite préserver l’Iran comme contrepoids, mais pas au prix d’une guerre directe avec les États-Unis. La Russie veut contrecarrer la puissance américaine, mais dispose de moyens limités et de priorités concurrentes. L’Inde est courtisée par Washington pour empêcher une dérive vers le camp sino-russe.

Pour la classe ouvrière, cela signifie que les contradictions au sein d’un bloc ne sont pas « progressistes », mais ne constituent que des alternatives bourgeoises, éloignant le prolétariat de son terrain de classe. Ces contradictions ne sont pas non plus le signe d’un affaiblissement des blocs, ni même de l’impossibilité d’une Troisième Guerre mondiale. Les divisions entre les puissances bourgeoises ne sont pas des raisons de choisir le « camp du moindre mal ».

Thèse 10. On peut distinguer trois grands scénarios, mais aucun n’offre d’issue positive pour le prolétariat à moins qu’il n’intervienne de manière indépendante.

Le premier scénario est la poursuite d’une guerre sélective et asymétrique : frappes aériennes ciblées, bombardements d’usure, assassinats, affaiblissement des forces par procuration, contrôle maritime, étranglement économique et pression politique visant à remodeler le régime iranien et l’équilibre régional sans effondrement total de l’État. Cela reviendrait à une démonstration de force majeure de la part de l’axe États-Unis-Israël et qui pourrait accentuer la leçon imposée aux autres acteurs régionaux.

Le deuxième scénario est un engagement militaire de plus grande envergure, avec des opérations terrestres élargies menées par des alliés locaux (les Kurdes) ou directement par les forces américaines, visant à imposer une restructuration plus décisive du pouvoir en Iran et dans la région. Cela exigerait des ressources plus importantes, augmenterait le risque de revers et entraînerait de vives tensions internes aux États-Unis, ainsi qu’une résistance de la Turquie, qui se sentirait menacée par l’intervention de l’armée kurde.

Le troisième scénario est celui d’une désintégration prolongée : fragmentation de l’État iranien, guerre civile, débordement régional, catastrophe des réfugiés et interventions extérieures récurrentes. Ce serait une issue extrêmement sanglante, surtout compte tenu de la taille, de la composition sociale et du poids stratégique de l’Iran.

Pour la classe ouvrière, cela ne signifie qu’aucun de ces scénarios n’est en soi favorable. Le prolétariat n’a même pas le pouvoir de faire un choix. Choisir entre ces alternatives revient à soutenir l’une des factions ou l’un des camps impérialistes, en payant de sa sueur et de son sang le coût de la guerre au service des intérêts capitalistes. Seule l’émergence d’une lutte des classes indépendante de tous les camps peut ouvrir une autre voie historique.

Thèse 11. Toutes les factions bellicistes doivent être dénoncées, y compris celles qui présentent la guerre, le changement de régime, la défaite ou la victoire d’un camp impérialiste comme bénéfiques pour le prolétariat.

Les militaristes déclarés servent évidemment le capital. Mais il en va de même pour de nombreux « pacifistes » qui réduisent la question à un plaidoyer humanitaire tout en restant dans le cadre de la diplomatie d’État, des alignements de camps ou de l’impérialisme démocratique. De même, tous ceux qui soutiennent que la victoire de l’axe États-Unis-Israël moderniserait la région, ou que la résistance de l’Iran et de ses alliés renforcerait l’anti-impérialisme, ou encore que la défaite d’un camp soit intrinsèquement révolutionnaire, induisent le prolétariat en erreur.

La classe ouvrière ne peut pas déléguer sa tâche historique aux missiles, aux sanctions, aux ingénieurs de régime, aux milices patriotiques ou aux conférences diplomatiques. Chaque camp promet des souffrances aujourd’hui et la justice plus tard. En réalité, chaque camp exige le sacrifice prolétarien au profit de résultats bourgeois.

Pour la classe ouvrière, cela signifie rejeter la mobilisation de guerre sous toutes ses formes, qu’elle soit militaire, patriotique, humanitaire, démocratique, anti-occidentale, anti-chiite, anti-sunnite, antisioniste, anti-iranienne ou toute autre variante qui subordonne les travailleurs aux objectifs de l’État.

Thèse 12. Remarque sur la confusion : tant le « défaitisme révolutionnaire » que la « guerre contre la guerre » peuvent devenir des formules trompeuses lorsqu’elles sont détachées des conditions actuelles.

Si le « défaitisme révolutionnaire » est compris de manière mécanique, il risque d’être perçu comme une ligne militaire plutôt que comme une ligne de classe : comme si les travailleurs devaient chercher la défaite militaire de « leur » État par un autre État, ou orienter leur lutte en fonction des aléas du champ de bataille. Cela militarise la politique de classe et brouille le terrain indépendant de la lutte prolétarienne.

Si la « guerre contre la guerre » est utilisée comme une formule purement morale ou militante, elle peut dissoudre le contenu de classe spécifique de la lutte dans une posture anti-guerre générique, rassemblant des strates hétérogènes sans clarifier le rôle autonome du prolétariat. L’utilisation du terme « guerre des classes » implique une militarisation de la politique de classe en termes bourgeois et obscurcit le terrain indépendant de la lutte prolétarienne.

Le point décisif n’est pas la fidélité verbale à de vieilles formules, mais la clarté politique dans les conditions actuelles : la guerre interimpérialiste apporte la misère au prolétariat quel que soit son résultat immédiat, et la lutte des travailleurs doit s’organiser sur une base de classe autonome contre tous les États et toutes les économies de guerre.

Pour la classe ouvrière, cela signifie : ni soutenir la défaite militaire d’un camp par un autre, ni dissoudre la politique de classe dans une politique de paix abstraite. Construire la lutte de classe contre l’exploitation, la militarisation, la répression, les pénuries et l’unité nationale.

Thèse 13. L’axe positif est la lutte autonome de la classe ouvrière, capable d’entraîner derrière elle d’autres couches opprimées.

Le prolétariat n’a pas d’armée de l’air indépendante, pas de corps diplomatique, pas de services de renseignement, et pas de territoire national à défendre. Son pouvoir réside ailleurs : dans son rôle dans la production, les transports, la logistique, la reproduction sociale, les systèmes énergétiques, les communications et la circulation. Lorsque les travailleurs se battent sur leur propre terrain – contre les baisses de salaire, contre l’inflation, contre les licenciements, contre la militarisation du travail, contre la conscription, contre la répression, contre les divisions racistes et sectaires – ils commencent à se constituer en une force sociale distincte de toutes les factions bourgeoises.

Une telle lutte peut rassembler autour d’elle les paysans pauvres, les couches précaires, les populations déplacées, les couches moyennes appauvries et tous ceux qui sont écrasés par la guerre et la crise, mais seulement si la lutte prolétarienne reste autonome. Le prolétariat ne dirige pas par le biais d’une représentation nationaliste, mais par des méthodes de classe : assemblées de masse, délégués élus et révocables, comités de grève, extension intersectorielle, refus des divisions sectaires et clarification politique par la lutte collective.

Pour la classe ouvrière, cela signifie : toute lutte défensive contre les conséquences de la guerre contient, en germe, la possibilité d’une offensive plus large contre l’ordre social tout entier.

Thèse 14. L’horizon n’est pas la paix sous le capitalisme, mais la révolution prolétarienne et la révolution mondiale.

La lutte commence sur le plan défensif, car les travailleurs sont d’abord attaqués sur les salaires, les prix, l’alimentation, le logement, le carburant, la sécurité, la mobilité, les droits et la vie elle-même. Mais si elle s’étend à tous les segments de la classe, s’organise de manière autonome, clarifie ses objectifs et affronte directement l’État, elle peut passer à l’offensive. Cette offensive ne peut se limiter au remplacement d’un gouvernement par un autre. Elle doit viser la destruction de tous les États, le démantèlement de toutes les armées permanentes et de tous les appareils coercitifs, l’expropriation du capital et le transfert du pouvoir à des conseils ouvriers liés au niveau international.

Seul un tel mouvement peut ouvrir une transition dans laquelle la production n’est plus organisée pour la valeur, le profit, la concurrence et la guerre, mais en fonction des besoins sociaux. La régulation consciente de la production sur la base de l’heure de travail, et d’autres mesures préfigurant un mode de production communiste, ne peuvent être des cadeaux d’aucune force bourgeoise. Elles ne peuvent naître que du pouvoir mondial des conseils ouvriers.

Pour la classe ouvrière, cela signifie : la réponse à la guerre impérialiste n’est pas un capitalisme pacifié, mais le pouvoir prolétarien international.

Au prolétariat d’Iran : Ni les ayatollahs, ni les bombardiers étrangers. Organisez-vous en tant que classe contre la guerre, la répression et l’unité nationale.

Au prolétariat d’Israël : votre ennemi n’est pas le travailleur d’Iran ou du Liban, mais votre propre État, le capital et la machine de guerre.

Au prolétariat du Liban, d’Irak, du Yémen et de toute la région : rejetez toutes les milices, les dirigeants sectaires et les fronts patriotiques. Luttez sur votre propre terrain de classe.

Au prolétariat des États du Golfe, en particulier aux travailleurs migrants : c’est vous qui faites fonctionner les ports, le pétrole, la logistique et les villes. Refusez la division par passeport, ethnicité ou religion. Votre exploitation commune est la base d’une lutte commune.

Au prolétariat d’Europe, des États-Unis, de Chine, de Russie, d’Inde et du monde entier : aucun soutien à aucun bloc. Aucun sacrifice pour la sécurité énergétique, les sanctions, l’armement ou la grandeur nationale. Transformez la résistance à la guerre en lutte de classe contre votre propre bourgeoisie.

Des luttes défensives contre les conséquences de la guerre, vers une extension à tous les segments de la classe ; de l’extension, vers l’organisation autonome et la conscience de classe ; à partir de là, vers une lutte offensive pour la destruction de tous les États et pour le pouvoir mondial des conseils ouvriers ; de là, vers des mesures préfigurant la production communiste sur la base du temps de travail socialement nécessaire, contre la valeur d’échange, contre la guerre et contre le capital lui-même.

Anibal, Fredo Corvo. 14 mars 2026.

Council-communist theses, March 2026

The following theses and their explanations are part of an ongoing discussion that, for the time being, has not resulted in complete agreement. Given the urgency of publishing a council communist point of view on the rapidly developing war, we will continue this discussion soon. If other parties publish their point of view, we will refer to it here.

On the Present War in the Middle East, the Rivalry of the Blocs, and the Tasks of the Working Class

1. The present war in the Middle East must be placed first within the basic dynamics of imperialism, and second within the broader rise of global conflict since 2022. Explanation

2. The First World War marked capitalism’s definitive entry into the imperialist epoch, and the essential strategic problem posed to the proletariat then remains the essential strategic problem today. Explanation

3. Under imperialism, as Gorter grasped, all class struggle is necessarily internationalist. Explanation

4. The present war expresses the temporary strengthening of the U.S.–Israel axis in the region and the deterioration of the Iranian-led network, but this does not amount to a stable strategic resolution. Explanation

5. The stated democratic and humanitarian objectives of the U.S.–Israeli offensive are ideological alibis, not the real content of the war. Explanation

6. A total regime change in Iran is improbable not because it is technically impossible, but because it carries serious strategic risks for the U.S. and Israel. Explanation

7. The danger of civil war and state decomposition in Iran is real, and such an outcome would be catastrophic for the proletariat. Explanation

8. The blockade of the Strait of Hormuz condenses the wider geopolitical conflict and shows how differently the major powers are affected. Explanation

9. The two rival blocs are real, but they are not fixed replicas of 1914 or 1939; they are looser, more uneven, and internally contradictory. Explanation

10. Three broad scenarios can be distinguished, but none offers a positive outcome for the proletariat unless it intervenes independently. Explanation

11. All pro-war factions must be denounced, including those that present war, regime change, defeat, or victory of one imperialist camp as beneficial for the proletariat. Explanation

12. Note on confusion: both “revolutionary defeatism” and “war against the war” can become misleading formulas when detached from present conditions. Explanation

13. The positive axis is the autonomous struggle of the working class, capable of drawing other oppressed strata behind it. Explanation

14. The horizon is not peace under capitalism but proletarian revolution and world revolution. Explanation

Thesis 1. The present war in the Middle East must be placed first within the basic dynamics of imperialism, and second within the broader rise of global conflict since 2022.

The current war cannot be understood as a local explosion caused simply by religion, authoritarianism, terrorism, national psychology, or the personal ambitions of particular rulers. It must be situated within the historical phase of capitalism inaugurated by the First World War: the phase in which every national capital is compelled to position itself in a world already divided among competing states and blocs. In this phase, war is not an accidental deviation from capitalist normality. It is one of the concentrated forms through which capitalist competition is fought when conflicts over markets, routes, resources, technologies, labour, and military positions become more acute.

Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, global tensions have not moved toward stabilization but toward widening military, diplomatic, economic, and logistical confrontation. The war in Ukraine, the sharpening of U.S.–China rivalry, the militarization of the Red Sea and the Gulf, the consolidation of sanctions, and the mounting centrality of energy corridors and maritime chokepoints all form part of the same world process, as are the wars in Myanmar, Sudan, Pakistan – Afghanistan, and others. The present Middle Eastern war is one theatre in that process, not an isolated exception.

For the working class this means: there is no “regional” question separable from the world question. Workers in Iran, Israel, Lebanon, the Gulf monarchies, Europe, China, India, and the United States are drawn into the same imperialist totality, though in different ways and at different speeds. Any analysis that ignores imperialism inevitably disorients proletarian resistance.

Thesis 2. The First World War marked capitalism’s definitive entry into the imperialist epoch, and the essential strategic problem posed to the proletariat then remains the essential strategic problem today.

The First World War followed the effective completion of the conquest and partition of the decisive regions of the globe by the great capitalist powers. Once the world was divided, the struggle among capitals increasingly turned into struggle for redivision. Treaties, alliances, arms races, ‘post’-colonial and semi-colonial domination, and finally world war all arose from that condition. Capitalist contradictions were not abolished by war; they were temporarily displaced and reorganized through destruction and redistribution.

That same logic persists today at a higher technical level. Digital systems, missile warfare, naval surveillance, proxy networks, sanctions, cyber capabilities, drones, and energy infrastructure have transformed the means, but not the underlying social relation. Each bourgeois faction still seeks the best place for “its” capital inside national and bloc competition. Each sacrifices “its” workers through intensified exploitation, repression, displacement, trauma, and death.

For the working class this means: the pressure to identify with the fate of one’s “own” state in wartime is not an anomaly but a permanent mechanism of imperialism. The proletariat must begin from its own class position, not from the strategic needs of any state.

Thesis 3. Under imperialism, as Gorter grasped, all class struggle is necessarily internationalist.

This is not a moral appeal to solidarity in the abstract, but a material truth. Under imperialism, capital is globally interconnected and state conflict is globally articulated. Therefore, every serious workers’ struggle immediately confronts international conditions: inflation transmitted through world markets, sanctions, energy shocks, militarized budgets, refugee flows, supply-chain disruptions, and ideological campaigns for national unity.

To say that all class struggle is internationalist under imperialism means that no proletarian struggle can remain politically complete if it remains imprisoned within national forms of consciousness. Even when a struggle begins over wages, prices, layoffs, food, fuel, conscription, discrimination, or police repression in one locality, its real enemy is a social order that operates internationally and subordinates every locality to the requirements of capital accumulation and military competition.

For the working class this means: Iranian workers cannot emancipate themselves through “national defence” against the United States and Israel, nor with their “help”; Israeli workers cannot emancipate themselves through military victory over Iran and its allies, nor by the victory by these “enemy states”; Lebanese, Iraqi, Yemeni, Gulf, European, Chinese, Russian, and American workers cannot emancipate themselves by supporting one or the other camp that appears less immediately dangerous to them. The only class politics adequate to imperialism is internationalist class politics.

Thesis 4. The present war expresses the temporary strengthening of the U.S.–Israel axis in the region and the deterioration of the Iranian-led network, but this does not amount to a stable strategic resolution.

At present, the bloc led by the United States appears to be gaining ground in the Middle East, above all through the combined role of U.S. power and Israeli military initiative. Iran and the regional forces linked to it have suffered deterioration in capacity and freedom of maneuver:

• Hezbollah is under intense military pressure and political pressure inside Lebanon.
• The Houthis remain disruptive but are under constant surveillance and attack. Iran’s room for regional projection has narrowed.
• In Syria, Iran’s positions have disappeared when the Assad government was removed by lack of support from the Russian military.
• Russia and Belarus, already weakened in the region and forced into strategic economy elsewhere (Ukraine), have not reversed this decline.
• China’s industrial system remains dependent on maritime energy inflows from Iran. Thus, the weakening of Iran has exposed one of China’s weaknesses.

At the same time, Arab and Islamic states have not rallied behind Iran in any meaningful anti-Israeli front. On the contrary, many Sunni-led states prefer a weakening of the Iranian pole so long as the conflict does not destabilize them directly. The Abraham Accords logic—commercial normalization with Israel under U.S. patronage—has not disappeared. It has been strained, but not superseded.

For the working class this means: a temporary advantage for one bloc is not liberation. The success of the U.S.–Israel axis does not weaken imperialism as such; it redistributes strength within imperialism. The proletariat gains nothing from the defeat of one exploiter by another exploiter. This is why Lenin’s slogan of “revolutionary defeatism” was already confusing at the time.

Thesis 5. The stated democratic and humanitarian objectives of the U.S.–Israeli offensive are ideological alibis, not the real content of the war.

Claims that the war is being fought to liberate demonstrators, defend women, rescue minorities, or bring democracy to Iran are not the real motor of the offensive. The United States and Israel do not require a democratic republic in Iran in order to secure their interests. What they require is a reduced capacity of Iran to obstruct their regional design and, more broadly, to serve as a useful node for the China–Russia alignment.

Washington and Tel Aviv can perfectly well live with a change of course inside the existing Iranian state apparatus, provided that the resulting configuration curbs regional militarism hostile to them, weakens links to China and Russia, and permits a reorganization of Iranian foreign and economic policy. A controlled shift within the regime, or a recomposition among bourgeois factions, may therefore be more useful than an uncontrolled collapse.

For the working class this means: democratic slogans raised by imperialist states are usually masks for strategic aims. Workers must not confuse the weakening of a theocratic regime by foreign military force with their own emancipation.

Thesis 6. A total regime change in Iran is improbable not because it is technically impossible, but because it carries serious strategic risks for the U.S. and Israel.

A complete overthrow of the Iranian state could produce effects contrary to the interests of both Washington and Tel Aviv. Israel has no interest in producing another strong, autonomous regional client with ambitions that could eventually dilute its own privileged position as the central U.S. armed partner in the region. The United States, for its part, has reasons to avoid an outcome that would require prolonged occupation, massive reconstruction, unpredictable factional war, or a strategic vacuum easily penetrated again by rival powers.

The more plausible outcomes are narrower: a weakening of the present regime; a change of line within the regime; a negotiated or forced recomposition among bourgeois factions; or a prolonged unstable situation in which the existing state survives but in diminished form. The so-called Venezuelan model—pressure, attrition, internal realignment, selective accommodation—may be more useful to Washington and Israel than the attempt to smash the entire state machine at once.

If protests against the ayatollahs and their repressive military and police apparatus were to reignite, the US government might encourage a change in the political regime. If the working class were to gain ground and prominence in these protests, the United States would be interested in such a bourgeois regime change in order to maintain capitalism.
It is likely that the USA would encourage the emergence of autonomist tendencies (Kurdish, Azeri, Baluchi…) so that the state that would then develop would have a more limited capacity.

For the working class this means: workers should reject both illusions—the illusion that foreign war will bring liberation, and the illusion that the survival of the existing regime is a lesser evil worth defending. Both roads keep the proletariat tied to bourgeois outcomes.

Thesis 7. The danger of civil war and state decomposition in Iran is real, and such an outcome would be catastrophic for the proletariat.

If central authority fractures sharply, the likely result is not social emancipation but a multiplication of armed bourgeois and petty-bourgeois factions: regime remnants, military cliques, ethnic-nationalist forces, provincial power brokers, Islamist currents, criminal networks, foreign-backed militias, and rival security apparatuses. Such a development would devastate working-class living conditions, fragment the class territorially and politically, deepen terror, and create fertile ground for all forces of a conservative bourgeois nature.

At the same time, a breakdown of the Iranian state could open the space for renewed interventions by the rival bloc, including forms of Chinese or Russian re-entry at the economic, logistical, political, or covert level. State collapse would not abolish imperialism; it would multiply its forms.

For the working class this means: the alternative is not between imperialist war and civil war on the one hand, and social peace on the other. The only proletarian alternative is autonomous class struggle against all bourgeois factions before they can drag society into generalized disintegration.

Thesis 8. The blockade of the Strait of Hormuz condenses the wider geopolitical conflict and shows how differently the major powers are affected.

As argued in the article on the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, the chokepoint is not only an energy corridor but a strategic instrument. The United States is less directly dependent on Gulf energy flows than in earlier decades, yet retains overwhelming naval leverage over the reopening of maritime circulation. Europe is less directly dependent than East Asia in volume terms, but highly vulnerable through price transmission, LNG tightening, and military insufficiency. China is the most structurally exposed, because its industrial system remains heavily dependent on maritime energy inflows that others can endanger or regulate.

The Hormuz crisis therefore makes visible a hierarchy inside the blocs. Europe can contribute to escort missions and political cover, but it remains dependent on the United States for strategic depth. China can signal presence and seek arrangements, but it cannot yet guarantee its own maritime security independently in the Gulf. Iran can disrupt, but not impose a durable alternative order.

For the working class this means: the energy war is not external to daily life. It returns as inflation, shortages, austerity, unemployment, militarized budgets, and intensified labor discipline across continents.

Thesis 9. The two rival blocs are real, but they are not fixed replicas of 1914 or 1939; they are looser, more uneven, and internally contradictory.

On one side stands the bloc centred on the United States, with Israel as its decisive armed outpost in the region and Europe as a subordinate but active component. On the other side stands a looser adversarial alignment around China and Russia, with Iran, and in different degrees various regional auxiliaries or partners, woven into it (Belarus, Northern Korea). This second bloc is less integrated institutionally and militarily than the first, but it is nonetheless real as a strategic alignment shaped by sanctions, logistics, arms transfers, energy ties, diplomatic cover, and shared opposition to U.S. predominance.

Within both blocs there are contradictions. Europe seeks more room for manoeuvre but remains subordinate to U.S. military primacy. Gulf monarchies welcome the weakening of Iran while fearing uncontrolled escalation. China wants Iran preserved as a counterweight, but not at the price of direct war with the United States. Russia wants to frustrate U.S. power, but has limited means and competing priorities. India is courted by Washington to prevent a drift toward the Sino-Russian side.

For the working class this means that contradictions inside a bloc are not ‘progressive’ but only bourgeois alternatives, keeping the proletariat away from its class terrain. Nor are these contradictions a sign of weakening of the blocs or even the impossibility of WW3. Divisions among bourgeois powers are not reasons to choose the “lesser evil camp.”

Thesis 10. Three broad scenarios can be distinguished, but none offers a positive outcome for the proletariat unless it intervenes independently.

The first scenario is continued selective and asymmetrical warfare: targeted air strikes, attritional bombardment, assassinations, proxy degradation, maritime control, economic strangulation, and political pressure designed to reshape the Iranian regime and the regional balance without total state collapse. This would amount to a major demonstration of force by the U.S.–Israel axis and would likely deepen the lesson being imposed on other regional actors.

The second scenario is a larger military engagement, with expanded ground operations by local allies (Kurds) or directly by U.S. forces, aimed at forcing a more decisive restructuring of power in Iran and the region. This would demand greater resources, expand the risk of setbacks, and intense domestic strain in the USA, and resistance of Turkey, feeling threatened by enforcement of Kurdish military.

The third scenario is prolonged disintegration: fragmentation of the Iranian state, civil war, regional spillover, refugee catastrophe, and recurrent external interventions. This would be an extremely bloody outcome, especially given Iran’s size, social composition, and strategic weight.

For the working class this means none of these scenarios is in itself favorable. The proletariat even has not the power to implement a choice. Choosing between these alternatives is nothing else than supporting one of the imperialist factions or camps, paying with its sweat and blood the costs of war in capitalist interests. Only the emergence of class struggle independent of all camps can open another historical path.

Thesis 11. All pro-war factions must be denounced, including those that present war, regime change, defeat, or victory of one imperialist camp as beneficial for the proletariat.

Open militarists obviously serve capital. But so do many “pacifists” who reduce the issue to humanitarian pleading while remaining within the framework of state diplomacy, campist alignments, or democratic imperialism. Likewise, all who argue that the victory of the U.S.–Israel axis would modernize the region, or that the endurance of Iran and its allies would strengthen anti-imperialism, or that one camp’s defeat is intrinsically revolutionary, all mislead the proletariat.

The working class cannot outsource its historical task to missiles, sanctions, regime engineers, patriotic militias, or diplomatic conferences. Every camp promises suffering now and justice later. In reality, every camp demands proletarian sacrifice for bourgeois outcomes.

For the working class, this means rejecting war mobilization in all its forms, whether military, patriotic, humanitarian, democratic, anti-Western, anti-Shiite, anti-Sunni, anti-Zionist, anti-Iranian, or any other variant that subordinates workers to the goals of the state.

Thesis 12. Note on confusion: both “revolutionary defeatism” and “war against the war” can become misleading formulas when detached from present conditions.

If “revolutionary defeatism” is understood mechanically, it risks being heard as a military line rather than a class line: as if workers should seek the military defeat of “their” state by another state, or orient their struggle around the fortunes of the battlefield. That militarizes class politics and blurs the independent terrain of proletarian struggle.

If “war against the war” is used as a purely moral or activist formula, it can dissolve the specific class content of the struggle into a generic anti-war posture, gathering heterogeneous strata without clarifying the proletariat’s autonomous role. The use of the term “class war” implies a militarization of class politics in bourgeois terms and obscures the independent terrain of proletarian struggle.

The decisive point is not verbal fidelity to old formulas but political clarity in present conditions: inter-imperialist war brings misery to the proletariat whatever its immediate outcome, and workers’ struggle must organize itself on an autonomous class basis against all states and all war economies.

For the working class this means: neither support the military defeat of one camp by another, nor dissolve class politics into abstract peace politics. Build class struggle against exploitation, militarization, repression, shortages, and national unity.

Thesis 13. The positive axis is the autonomous struggle of the working class, capable of drawing other oppressed strata behind it.

The proletariat has no independent air force, no diplomatic corps, no intelligence services, and no national territory to defend. Its power lies elsewhere: in its role in production, transport, logistics, social reproduction, energy systems, communications, and circulation. When workers fight on their own terrain—against wage cuts, against inflation, against layoffs, against militarization of labour, against conscription, against repression, against racist and sectarian division—they begin to constitute themselves as a social force distinct from all bourgeois factions.

Such struggle can gather around itself poor peasants, precarious layers, displaced populations, impoverished middle strata, and all those crushed by war and crisis, but only if proletarian struggle remains autonomous. The proletariat leads not through nationalist representation but through class methods: mass assemblies, elected and revocable delegates, strike committees, extension across sectors, refusal of sectarian division, and political clarification through collective struggle.

For the working class this means: every defensive struggle against the consequences of war contains, in embryo, the possibility of a wider offensive against the whole social order.

Thesis 14. The horizon is not peace under capitalism but proletarian revolution and world revolution.

The struggle begins defensively, because workers are first attacked on wages, prices, food, housing, fuel, safety, mobility, rights, and life itself. But if it extends across all segments of the class, organizes autonomously, clarifies its aims, and confronts the state directly, it can pass to the offensive. That offensive cannot stop at replacing one government by another. It must aim at the destruction of all states, the dismantling of all standing armies and coercive apparatuses, the expropriation of capital, and the transfer of power to workers’ councils linked internationally.

Only such a movement can open a transition in which production is no longer organized for value, profit, competition, and war, but according to social need. The conscious regulation of production of the basis of the working hour, and other measures prefiguring a communist mode of production cannot be gifts from any bourgeois force. They can arise only from the world power of workers’ councils.

For the working class this means: the answer to imperialist war is not pacified capitalism, but international proletarian power.

To the proletariat in Iran: Neither the Ayatollahs nor the bombers from abroad. Organize as a class against war, repression, and national unity.

To the proletariat in Israel: Your enemy is not the worker in Iran or Lebanon, but your own state, capital, and war machine.

To the proletariat in Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen, and across the region: Reject all militias, sectarian leaders, and patriotic fronts. Fight on your own class terrain.

To the proletariat in the Gulf states, especially migrant workers: You move the ports, oil, logistics, and cities. Refuse division by passport, ethnicity, or religion. Your common exploitation is the basis of common struggle.

To the proletariat in Europe, the United States, China, Russia, India, and worldwide: No support for any bloc. No sacrifices for energy security, sanctions, armament, or national greatness. Turn resistance to war into class struggle against your own bourgeoisie.

From defensive struggles against the consequences of war, toward extension across all segments of the class; from extension, toward autonomous organization and class consciousness; from that basis, toward offensive struggle for the destruction of all states and for the world power of workers’ councils; from there, toward measures prefiguring communist production on the basis of socially necessary working time, against exchange value, against war, and against capital itself.

Anibal, Fredo Corvo. March 14th. 2026.

By G.O. Updated to 10 March 2026

The blockage of the Strait of Hormuz is not just another Middle Eastern security crisis. It is a concentrated test of the present world order: of the military reach of the United States, of Europe’s attempt to act strategically without fully escaping dependence on Washington, and of China’s vulnerability as an industrial power whose energy lifelines remain exposed at sea. The strait is only a narrow waterway between Iran and Oman, but its closure has effects far beyond the Gulf. It connects the Persian Gulf to the Gulf of Oman and the Indian Ocean, and through it passes a decisive share of globally traded oil and liquefied natural gas. When traffic is impeded there, the issue is not only supply interruption. It is also insurance, freight rates, rerouting, refinery planning, stock drawdowns, inflation, naval deployments, and political leverage.

In the current crisis, the military dimension and the energy dimension cannot be separated. A blockade, partial closure, or even a temporary suppression of commercial traffic rapidly becomes a struggle over who bears the costs of securing maritime circulation. It is also a struggle over who can weaponize chokepoints more effectively: Iran through disruption and threat, the United States and its allies through escort power and control over reopening, and China through pressure for restored flows while trying to avoid direct entanglement.

1. Unequal dependence: the United States, Europe, and China

The first point that requires precision is that the United States, Europe, and China are not dependent on Middle Eastern energy in the same way.

The United States: less dependent on imports, still exposed to prices and alliances

The United States is far less directly dependent on oil and gas transiting Hormuz than it was in earlier decades. Domestic oil and gas production, shale development, a diversified import structure, and the maintenance of emergency reserves have reduced the immediate physical vulnerability of the US economy to a Gulf disruption. Washington is therefore not in the same position as an Asian importer whose refineries rely directly on Gulf cargoes.

But reduced import dependence does not mean strategic indifference. The United States remains deeply exposed in three ways.

First, oil is globally priced. Even if the US imports relatively little from the Gulf compared with the past, a major disruption at Hormuz raises world prices. That feeds into fuel, freight, inflation, and financial volatility inside the US economy.

Second, Washington is tied to the security architecture of Gulf monarchies and to Israel. The US Navy’s role is therefore not only commercial but political: preserving alliance credibility, protecting sea lanes, and preventing Iran from demonstrating that it can rewrite the regional balance through maritime coercion.

Third, American leverage comes precisely from the fact that it can intervene militarily from a position of lower direct energy dependence than its rivals. In blunt geopolitical terms, the United States suffers from a Hormuz shock, be it less than Europe, but China suffers more from a prolonged closure. That asymmetry matters.

Europe: less direct oil dependence, sharper vulnerability in gas and price transmission

Europe’s dependence is more indirect than commonly assumed, but also more fragile in a specific way. European oil systems are more diversified than those of East Asia. Europe no longer relies structurally on Middle Eastern supply in the old simple form. Norway is central for pipeline gas, the United States has become the dominant LNG supplier, and the continent has spent the post-2022 years reorganizing energy procurement away from former patterns.

Yet Europe remains highly vulnerable to a Hormuz crisis for two reasons.

The first is price transmission. Europe imports energy, and even when the interrupted flows are largely destined elsewhere, a supply shock pushes up global benchmark prices. European industry, transport, and households therefore pay through higher prices even when the most affected cargoes are bound for Asia.

The second is gas. Europe’s direct share of LNG coming through Hormuz is smaller than Asia’s, but it is not negligible. A disruption to Qatari and Emirati LNG tightens the global LNG market, which is exactly where Europe turned after the reduction of Russian pipeline gas. That means Europe is not simply a spectator to an Asian energy crisis. It becomes a buyer in a tighter, more expensive spot market, with storage, winter security, and industrial competitiveness immediately affected.

In strategic terms, Europe’s problem is not identical to America’s. It has military interests in freedom of navigation, but fewer independent means. It has energy exposure, but not the naval capacity to manage the whole corridor alone. That is why the French initiative matters: it is an attempt to show that Europe can protect shipping and defend a member state such as Cyprus while still presenting the mission as defensive rather than openly coercive.

China: the most structurally exposed great power

China is the most directly exposed of the three. Its industrial economy remains heavily dependent on imported hydrocarbons, and a very large share of Gulf crude moving through Hormuz is destined for Asian markets. China can diversify suppliers only within limits. Russian pipeline and seaborne supply, domestic coal, renewable expansion, and strategic reserves all help, but they do not erase its dependence on maritime inflows from the Gulf.

China’s vulnerability is not only quantitative but strategic. The key issue is that the sea lanes remain exposed to naval power largely dominated by the United States and its allies. Beijing can build reserves, long-term contracts, refinery flexibility, and alternative overland links, but it cannot yet neutralize the structural fact that the Indian Ocean and Gulf maritime system remain vulnerable to blockade, interdiction, escort control, and insurance disruption.

That is why the current crisis is so serious for China. If the strait is reopened under a regime effectively controlled by the US and European navies, China may regain access in formal terms while still facing political and commercial discrimination through inspection, escort dependence, sanctions enforcement, freight prioritization, or insurance penalties. And if flows of Iranian oil are selectively targeted, China is hit not only as a general importer but as the principal buyer of discounted Iranian crude.

2. Actuality: Macron’s mission, Trump’s leverage, Kharg Island, and China’s reaction

The recent reporting presents a clear picture: the Hormuz crisis is moving from generalized alarm to organized naval management.

French President Emmanuel Macron announced from Cyprus that France is preparing a “purely defensive” mission, together with European and non-European states, to escort tankers and container ships once the most intense phase of the conflict subsides. The purpose is to reopen the strait gradually rather than pretend it can be normalized in a single move. The political language is highly revealing. France emphasizes defence, escort, and freedom of navigation. It does not present the mission as war against Iran, but as security for maritime circulation and solidarity with threatened European allies, above all Cyprus.

This framing serves several functions at once. It legitimizes European military presence without formally folding it into a US-led offensive logic. It also creates space for countries – like Spain – that do not want to appear as direct participants in escalation but do want commercial traffic restored. In this sense, the mission is defensive in mandate, but strategic in effect: whoever organizes escort corridors shapes the terms on which maritime trade resumes.

Macron also linked the move to reinforcement of the EU’s Aspides maritime operation. That is important because Aspides already provides a ready-made institutional shell for a wider European naval role, even though its resources remain limited. The current crisis is therefore not starting from zero. It is building on an existing European defensive naval framework and pushing it eastward into a sharper geopolitical conflict.

At the same time, Donald Trump has spoken in a much harsher register. His camp claims Iran’s naval capability has been badly damaged and signals readiness to impose order on the strait. Trump has even floated ideas such as taking control of maritime passage and discussing levies or passage charges. In practical terms, this points toward a familiar pattern: freedom of navigation is presented as a universal principle, but the actual reopening of traffic is treated as something that can be administered, priced, and politically conditioned by the states possessing overwhelming naval power.

This is where the discussion of Kharg Island becomes strategically significant. Kharg is not merely a symbolic Iranian outpost. It is the central terminal through which the overwhelming bulk of Iranian oil exports pass. Military talk in the United States about seizing, neutralizing, or blockading the island is therefore not peripheral speculation. It concerns the possibility of crippling Iranian exports at the source rather than only contesting the strait downstream.

Historically, this is not a new fantasy. The fact that similar options were examined in 1979, yet judged too risky because of escalation and oil shock, shows the structural dilemma. Kharg is militarily tempting precisely because it is economically decisive. But striking or occupying it would also be a drastic escalation with consequences for global markets, regional retaliation, and legal legitimacy. The point is not that such a move is certain. The point is that it has re-entered the field of practical discussion.

For China, all this is alarming. Beijing has demanded that the strait be reopened, and recent reports indicate it is seeking arrangements that would preserve at least some flow of crude and LNG. The reported deployment near the Gulf of Oman of the Liaowang-1 intelligence ship, escorted by major Chinese naval combatants, underlines the seriousness with which China views the crisis. Beijing is still acting cautiously. It is not openly challenging the emerging escort structure. But it is gathering intelligence, signaling presence, and preparing for a prolonged contest over maritime access.

China’s reaction reveals a central fact of the crisis: a Hormuz blockade is not only an Iran-West confrontation. It is also a pressure point in the broader US-China rivalry. If Iranian exports are interrupted and the reopening regime is controlled by US-aligned naval power, China’s energy security and bargaining position deteriorate simultaneously.

3. The latest non-US naval participation

The most recent developments show that the naval response is already becoming multinational beyond the United States.

France is the central non-US driver. Paris has announced the deployment of about a dozen naval vessels across the eastern Mediterranean, Red Sea, and potentially the Strait of Hormuz, including the aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle, its carrier group, additional warships, and helicopter carriers. France has also signaled that it will increase its naval contribution to the Aspides framework, with an escort role for commercial shipping once conditions allow.

The Netherlands has now committed a frigate to the Mediterranean at France’s request. Officially, the ship is being sent to protect Cyprus and secure maritime traffic endangered by the broader Middle Eastern escalation. While not yet described as a dedicated Hormuz escort vessel in the narrow technical sense, the deployment is clearly tied to the same chain of operations and gives the French-led framework more command-and-air-defence depth.

Spain is also part of the emerging non-US naval concentration. The frigate Cristóbal Colón has been reported as moving to support the French-led deployment connected with Cyprus and the eastern Mediterranean. That matters because Spain adds a modern air-defence platform and demonstrates that the response is not limited to the traditional Anglo-American core.

Greece has politically backed reinforcement of the maritime mission and has a direct stake through both Cyprus and Greek shipping exposure. Greek pressure to strengthen Aspides is therefore not rhetorical. It reflects a country whose merchant fleet and strategic position are directly tied to the reopening of Gulf routes.

Italy also appears increasingly relevant, both because Aspides operates under Italian command structures and because Italian naval assets remain central to the EU’s broader maritime posture in the region. The exact future composition of a Hormuz-specific escort package is still fluid, but the trend is clear: the non-US coalition is taking shape around France, with Dutch, Spanish, Greek, and Italian involvement in varying forms.

The British position is more hesitant than the French one. London has assets in theatre and remains militarily important, but the most recent reporting points to caution about dispatching the kind of high-profile naval force that would match the French move. That does not mean British absence. It means a more selective posture.

Conclusion

The blockade of the Strait of Hormuz exposes a world economy that remains globally integrated but strategically fragmented. The United States is less directly dependent on Gulf energy than before, yet still central because it alone can organize maritime force on the necessary scale. Europe is less dependent than Asia in volume terms, yet highly vulnerable through prices, LNG tightness, and military insufficiency. China is the most structurally exposed because its industrial power still rests on maritime energy flows that others can endanger.

Macron’s proposed mission shows Europe trying to occupy an intermediate position: defensive, legalistic, and multilateral in language, but unmistakably strategic in effect. Trump’s rhetoric points in a different direction: overt control, coercive leverage, and possible direct pressure on Iranian export infrastructure such as Kharg Island. China’s deployment of an intelligence ship and escorts shows that Beijing understands what is at stake, even if it still seeks to avoid a direct naval showdown.

The immediate issue is reopening passage. The deeper issue is who controls the terms of reopening. That question will shape not only oil prices and shipping routes, but also the wider balance between the United States, Europe, China, and the regional states drawn into their competition.

By R.O., March 7th, 2026

On Zaher Baher, The Assumed Fall of Iran’s regime and Reza Pahlavi’s rise. 24/02/2026.

Zaher Baher’s article starts from a real contradiction but resolves it in the wrong direction. He sees clearly enough that imperialist war, externally managed regime change, and the restoration of monarchy would not bring emancipation to the exploited in Iran. He also rightly notes that the existing Islamic Republic has imposed decades of repression, executions, patriarchal domination, militarization, and regional reaction. But from these correct observations he draws a conclusion that disarms the proletariat politically: that even a democratic or monarchist replacement would be “no worse” than the current regime because it would supposedly open a breathing space for organization and prepare the terrain for a later social revolution.

That thesis mistakes a hypothetical political opening for a class opening. It confuses a rearrangement of state forms with an advance in proletarian power. And in the present Iranian situation, this confusion is not secondary. It has strategic consequences.

1. The central question is not which regime would be more tolerable, but which class can impose its own solution

The decisive problem in Iran today is not that the population has several realistic political alternatives from which it must select the least bad. The decisive problem is that the working class does not currently possess the social and political strength to determine the outcome of the crisis according to its own interests.

That is the starting point from which every serious proletarian analysis must proceed. Where the working class is not organized as an autonomous force, the fall or weakening of one regime does not produce an open field of neutral possibilities. It produces a struggle among already constituted bourgeois forces: old state apparatuses, military fractions, exiled oppositions, monarchists, liberals, ethnic-national currents, foreign intelligence networks, regional powers, and the international sponsors who seek a more useful management of capital, labour, territory, and war.

Under such conditions, the question “Is a democratic transition preferable?” is posed in abstraction from the real relation of forces. Democracy does not arrive as empty political space waiting to be filled by workers’ self-organization. It arrives, where it arrives at all, as the political form through which another bloc of bourgeois forces seeks to stabilize rule, reorganize coercion, re-legitimize exploitation, and dissolve class antagonism into citizenship, national reconstruction, constitutionalism, elections, and civil society.

Baher presents the potential collapse of the Islamic Republic as the creation of “space to breathe freely.” But this formulation already accepts the democratic-liberal illusion that the principal obstacle is merely lack of civic space, and that once repression is relaxed, unions, publications, movements, and debates will naturally proliferate and move society in an emancipatory direction. History gives no grounds for such confidence. Between the weakening of one state form and the independent strengthening of the proletariat there is no automatic bridge.

2. The proletariat does not need a democratic detour; it needs class autonomy

If the working class in Iran had the strength to decide among political alternatives, it would not choose between the Islamic Republic and bourgeois democracy as if standing before two ballot papers. Its own historic solution would be entirely different: proletarian revolution through workers’ councils, extension of strikes, self-organization in workplaces and neighbourhoods, arming of the exploited against repression, destruction of the bourgeois state machine, and internationalization of the struggle.

That is not a propagandistic embellishment added from outside. It follows from the nature of the proletariat as a class. The workers’ struggle can defend itself durably only by becoming politically autonomous from all bourgeois camps. Once it subordinates itself to the “lesser evil” of democratic transition, anti-theocratic coalition, national salvation, or reconstruction, it ceases to act as an independent class and becomes infantry for a regime change whose result will be a new framework for wage labour, exploitation, and repression.

The issue is therefore not whether democratic rights are in the abstract better than naked clerical despotism. The issue is whether advocacy of democracy, under present conditions, helps the working class constitute itself as a class against capital, or whether it binds workers to a bourgeois camp hostile to that project. In Iran today, the answer is the second.

To recommend democracy now is not to provide workers with a weapon. It is to redirect their discontent away from autonomous class organization and toward support—active or passive—for a different state form that would inherit the same capitalist social relations. This is not tactical realism. It is political expropriation.

3. Baher replaces class analysis with a sociology of anticipated freedoms

A revealing feature of Baher’s argument is that nearly all the gains he expects from regime collapse are formulated in the language of public liberties: seminars, open debate, press freedom, publishing, associations, unions, human-rights initiatives, women’s groups, environmental campaigns, and anti-authoritarian networks. But the article never demonstrates why these forms, under the hegemony of a bourgeois-democratic transition, would strengthen the proletariat as a class rather than fragment it into issue-based constituencies managed within the new order.

This is the classic weakness of democratic radicalism. It substitutes a plurality of social actors for the specific antagonism between capital and labour. Workers appear not as the potentially ruling class, but as one oppressed component among many, to be empowered through broader civil freedoms. Yet the entire modern history of democratic transitions shows that such freedoms are perfectly compatible with the disciplining of labour, privatization, inflation, unemployment, anti-strike measures, reconstruction under foreign patronage, and new ideological mechanisms of national unity.

Indeed, the very language of “human rights,” “self-esteem,” “freedom,” and “confidence” can function as the moral rhetoric through which the proletariat is invited to postpone its own material antagonism in the name of a higher collective transition. A new regime does not need immediately to restore the full level of old repression. It can initially incorporate, legalize, consult, and pluralize—while simultaneously isolating disruptive class struggle as irresponsible, extremist, destabilizing, foreign-influenced, or harmful to democratization.

Baher imagines that overthrowing the existing regime would generate a durable confidence among the masses and therefore make renewed submission less likely. This is a psychological substitute for political economy. Confidence is not power. The workers’ ability to resist a new regime depends on organization rooted in production, collective struggle, councils or council-type organs, strike capacity, links across sectors, and political clarity regarding the class nature of the transition. Without that, the memory of having helped topple one regime can easily become the ideological capital of the next regime.

4. “Not worse than the mullahs” is a false criterion

The claim that a monarchist or democratic replacement would be “no worse” than the present regime is both politically vague and strategically dangerous.

No worse for whom, in what timeframe, and on what terrain? A new regime may initially execute fewer people, allow somewhat wider expression, and relax some social controls. But these relative differences do not decide the class question. A bourgeois regime can be less visibly brutal in form while more effective in integrating, demobilizing, and ideologically neutralizing the proletariat. Open dictatorship and democratic management are not alternatives from outside capitalism; they are two forms through which capitalist domination may be organized according to circumstance.

The mullahs rule through an openly repressive fusion of clerical authority, security coercion, and nationalist legitimacy. A democratic or monarchist successor would likely seek broader consent, international recognition, capital inflows, reconstruction, and the political pacification of the population after crisis. For the working class, this may prove not an easier field of independent struggle but a more difficult one, because repression would be combined with illusions: nation-building, civic participation, anti-corruption promises, women’s visibility in elite politics, legal union frameworks, and the claim that further unrest threatens the hard-won transition.

What clerical despotism cannot secure through consent, democracy often secures through participation. In that sense, to advocate democratic replacement now is not to strengthen the conditions for proletarian resistance, but to prepare its ideological containment.

5. The article underestimates how bourgeois opposition feeds on proletarian weakness

Baher’s text speaks as if the collapse of the current regime would generate an undetermined political fluidity from which emancipatory initiatives might spring. But the actual balance of forces suggests something harsher. The absence of a centralized proletarian alternative does not create egalitarian openness; it advantages the best financed, most internationally connected, militarily protected, media-saturated, and diplomatically supported bourgeois actors.

That is precisely why Reza Pahlavi and related democratic-liberal milieus matter. Not because they represent a universally desired solution, but because they are already positioned as recognizable instruments of transition for external and internal bourgeois interests. Their strength is inversely related to proletarian autonomy. The more workers fail to appear as an independent pole, the more the crisis is narrated as a contest between tyranny and democracy, theocracy and monarchy, dictatorship and human rights, East and West, isolation and normalization.

Once this framing dominates, the working class is pressured to align with the allegedly more progressive camp in order not to appear indifferent to suffering. But this moral blackmail only conceals the material fact that every bourgeois camp proposes a different method of governing labour, not ending exploitation.

6. The promise that democracy would help prepare social revolution reverses the real order of things

Baher suggests that democratic change would lay the groundwork for future social revolution. This is the old schema according to which workers must first assist in creating a freer political terrain, and only afterwards pursue their own class aims. Historically, this logic has repeatedly subordinated proletarian struggle to bourgeois tasks.

The actual relation is the reverse. Only the autonomous struggle of the proletariat can create conditions in which democratic concessions, when they occur, are not simply absorbed into renewed capitalist domination. Democratic rights detached from class autonomy do not prepare revolution; they prepare adaptation. They foster activists, NGOs, legal oppositions, media spheres, and recognized intermediaries, all of which can become transmission belts for the stabilization of a new order.

Where workers enter such a transition primarily as citizens, victims, communities, or democratic stakeholders rather than as a class antagonistic to capital, they emerge politically weaker even if the police are temporarily less omnipresent. The democratic form then becomes the burial ground of revolutionary possibility.

7. The immediate task is not to choose a future government, but to defend proletarian independence against all of them

In the current Iranian situation, the proletariat faces attacks from the existing regime and would face attacks from any successor regime oriented toward capitalist stabilization. That is why the strategic imperative is not to decide which bourgeois alternative is more breathable, but to maintain and deepen an independent line of class defense.

This means refusing every political perspective that asks workers to suspend their own program in favour of regime change, national rescue, anti-fascist unity, democratic transition, or geopolitical realignment. It means judging every slogan, alliance, and demand according to one criterion: does it increase the proletariat’s capacity to act independently against capital and the state?

Measured by that criterion, choosing “democracy” now is not a neutral or preparatory move. It weakens the proletariat twice.

First, it weakens it in the present by dissolving class antagonism into a people’s front against the mullahs. Workers then appear primarily as members of a suffering nation rather than as an exploited class with distinct interests irreconcilable with every bourgeois opposition.

Second, it weakens it in advance against the regime that would follow, because it helps install that regime with political credit borrowed from the masses. What is presented as a tactical alliance against today’s despotism becomes tomorrow’s obstacle to resisting the new administrators of austerity, labour discipline, militarization, and foreign alignment.

8. The only consistent proletarian standpoint

A consistent proletarian position therefore has to say three things simultaneously.

First, no support for the Islamic Republic, no minimization of its repression, and no illusion that it can be reformed in the interests of workers.

Second, no support for democratic, monarchist, nationalist, or externally sponsored alternatives that seek to inherit state power and reorganize capitalist rule under a different political form.

Third, affirmation that the only genuinely emancipatory alternative—if and when the working class becomes capable of imposing it—is proletarian revolution through organs of workers’ power, not parliamentary transition, civil-society pluralism, or constituent renewal.

This standpoint may appear “negative” only to those who demand immediate alignment with one bourgeois camp or another. In reality it is the sole position that preserves the historical independence of the proletariat.

Conclusion

Baher is right to reject illusions in war and to distrust the mythology of liberation by foreign intervention. But he ultimately reproduces a different illusion: that democratic regime change, even under bourgeois leadership, would likely improve the strategic position of the working class and prepare the road toward social revolution.

In the present balance of forces, that conclusion is untenable. The working class in Iran does not currently hold the power to arbitrate among political alternatives according to its own interests. Therefore the practical meaning of choosing “democracy” is not an advance toward workers’ rule, but subordination to another bourgeois project. And because every successor regime would necessarily attack labour in order to stabilize capitalist order, such subordination would not only weaken a supposed popular struggle for regime change; it would definitely weaken the proletariat in its defense against the attacks of the next regime.

The task is not democratic substitution, but class independence. Not confidence in an opening created from above, but preparation for struggle from below. Not the choice of a better ruling form, but the perspective—however difficult and presently distant—of workers’ councils and proletarian revolution.

R.O., March 7th, 2026

Spanish

By R.O. March 7th, 2026

My attention was drawn to the article written in Persian, “The 1979 Revolution: From Utopianism to Unlearned Lessons” by Kaveh Dadgari, dated February 2025 and 2026. Due to my lack of knowledge of the Iranian language, I only have access to an unauthorized English translation by Deepl.com. I can only hope I am accurately reflecting the article.

Kaveh Dadgari deserves credit for attacking several lies that still poison discussion of 1979. He rejects the pious mythology according to which the fall of the Shah was somehow betrayed only afterward, as though the mass movement had first opened an emancipatory horizon and was only later kidnapped by the clergy. He also rightly attacks the bourgeois left for its cowardice, opportunism, and retrospective self-exoneration. And he correctly rejects illusions in the global power structure—whether Western or Eastern—whose major powers have dealt with Iran not as liberators, but as calculating states pursuing strategic advantage.

So far, so good. But Dadgari’s text does not break decisively with the ideology that made the defeat possible. It simply repackages it. Beneath the sharp tone lies an old and familiar political core: democratic-liberal oppositionism. Clerical despotism is condemned in the name of secularism, democracy, rights, pluralism, national reconstruction, welfare, and harmonious coexistence with the modern world. In other words, one bourgeois program is denounced only so that another bourgeois program can be smuggled in as the answer.

That is the central problem. Dadgari wants to settle accounts with 1979, but he does not really settle them. He attacks the Islamist version of mystification while preserving the democratic one. He denounces the bourgeois left, but only to rebuild another cross-class opposition on ideological foundations more acceptable to the West. He condemns the outcome of the ‘revolution’, yet remains trapped in the political horizon that guaranteed that outcome: the subordination of the exploited to a supposedly universal camp of “the people,” “freedom,” and “democracy.”

1. Dadgari’s real target is not capitalism, but ‘backward’ capitalism

The first point must be stated plainly: Dadgari does not oppose capitalist domination as such. He opposes a particularly brutal, archaic, clerically organized form of it. His complaint is not that wage labor, class rule, the state, national capital, and imperialist integration have remained intact. His complaint is that they are administered by a reactionary theocratic regime rather than by a secular, pluralist, modern state.

That is why the key positive terms in his text are always the standard vocabulary of liberal bourgeois opposition: democracy, secularism, human rights, welfare, progress, plural leadership, and integration with the modern world. The promised future is not the abolition of the capitalist social order, but its refurbishment under a more civilized political form. The content is perfectly clear. The desired Iran is still a national-capitalist Iran—less suffocating, less clerical, and more compatible with the ideological norms of modern liberal governance, rather than with the crude reality of the dictatorship of capital.

This matters because it reveals what his critique can and cannot do. It can expose the barbarism of the Islamic Republic. It can shame those leftists who knelt before Khomeinism or excused it. It can denounce geopolitical hypocrisy. But it cannot explain why the working class was defeated, because it never breaks with the basic political framework in which that defeat occurred.

2. The democratic fraud: replacing class antagonism with “the people”

Dadgari’s entire perspective rests on the classic fraud of bourgeois opposition politics: the replacement of classes by “the people.” This category is always politically convenient because it erases the decisive antagonism in society. The exploited and the exploiters are invited into one moral community, supposedly united against tyranny. Workers, students, professionals, reformist capitalists, liberal intellectuals, national modernizers, and disillusioned elites are all folded into one grand social subject.

This is not a minor rhetorical weakness. It is the mechanism by which proletarian autonomy is buried.

The working class does not disappear because it is physically absent. It disappears because it is politically dissolved. It is asked not to fight as a class with its own program and methods, but to merge into a democratic bloc. It is told that its independent interests must wait until despotism is removed, modern institutions are built, pluralism is secured, and rights are guaranteed. The old poison returns in a cleaner bottle.

That is why Dadgari’s text, for all its anti-clerical ferocity, remains squarely on bourgeois terrain. He does not call for workers to separate themselves from all factions of the bourgeois opposition. He does not insist on class organs, class methods, class demands, and class independence. He calls, instead, for a better version of the national political community. This is exactly the kind of politics through which the proletariat is neutralized.

3. He condemns the bourgeois left without grasping why it was bourgeois

Dadgari is right to denounce the bourgeois left. Much of it was disgraceful. It sanctified “the people,” worshipped anti-Shah populism, romanticized reactionary currents in the name of anti-imperialism, and handed ideological cover to the very forces that would later crush workers, women, minorities, and dissidents. Even after catastrophe, many of these currents refused serious self-criticism. On this point, Dadgari is entirely justified.

But he does not go far enough, because he misidentifies the root of their failure. Their problem was not merely that they misjudged Khomeini, or that they were too timid, too romantic, or insufficiently democratic. Their problem was that they were bourgeois. They did what bourgeois-left currents always do: subordinate class struggle to a larger national or popular cause.

They did not betray democracy. They betrayed proletarian independence.

This distinction is decisive. Once the problem is defined as a failure to defend secular democracy firmly enough, the remedy becomes a more lucid democratic politics. But that leaves the essential mechanism intact. Workers are still assigned to a cross-class camp. They are still asked to fight for a national political transformation whose social content remains capitalist. They are still transformed into foot soldiers for another ruling project.

Dadgari’s critique therefore recoils into the very logic it claims to reject. He condemns one version of frontism—clerical-populist frontism—only to advocate another: secular-democratic frontism.

4. The fairy tale of the progressive alternative

Running through Dadgari’s text is the implication that a different outcome was possible if only a more secular, rational, democratic, and socially conscious leadership had prevailed. This is the old fairy tale of the missed progressive alternative. It is attractive because it allows one to condemn the actual outcome without abandoning the terrain of bourgeois politics. One need only imagine that the wrong camp won.

But this is exactly the illusion that must be destroyed.

In the period in question, no faction of the bourgeoisie in Iran offered emancipation. None. Not the monarchy. Not the clergy. Not the nationalists. Not the reformers. Not the Stalinists. Not the guerrilla romantics. Not the democratic republicans. The choice was between different forms of capitalist management under the pressure of world imperialism, crisis, and class conflict.

Once that is understood, the whole democratic lament changes character. The tragedy of 1979 was not that Iran missed its proper liberal modernity. The tragedy was that the working class failed to assert itself independently and was swallowed by an interclass movement. That is the decisive lesson. Dadgari evades it because to face it would require breaking with his own political horizon.

5. His anti-imperialist lucidity stops exactly where it should begin

Dadgari is strongest when attacking the international order. He sees that the great powers did not approach Iran as guardians of liberty. He sees accommodation, manipulation, strategic use, and cynical calculation. He rejects the childish fantasy that liberation might arrive through foreign patrons or geopolitical realignment. This is important and correct.

But here too he stops halfway. He treats the problem largely as hypocrisy, moral bankruptcy, and double standards, as though the global order were scandalous because it fails to honor its declared principles. That is still too weak.

The problem is not primarily hypocrisy. It is capitalism organized internationally as imperialism. States do not misbehave because they are insincere liberals. They act according to the compulsions of military rivalry, accumulation, sanctions policy, resource access, strategic corridors, regional leverage, and bloc competition. Their democratic or socialist language is decoration. Their real content is power.

To denounce the global structure without naming its material logic is to blunt the analysis at the critical point. One remains in the register of ethical protest, not historical explanation. And ethical protest, however indignant, never arms the proletariat politically.

6. Women, youth, students: real courage, inadequate politics

Dadgari turns hopefully toward women, youth, students, and a new “social left.” The impulse is understandable. These sectors have often shown extraordinary courage, especially where fear, repression, and ideological suffocation seemed total. Their struggles have punctured the legitimacy of the regime and shattered much inherited nonsense.

But courage is not a class perspective.

Women are not a class. Youth are not a class. Students are not a class. They may become decisive moments within broader struggles, and they may radicalize the social atmosphere. But by themselves they do not provide an alternative principle of social organization. Only the working class occupies a position from which capitalist reproduction can be interrupted, generalized, and politically reorganized. Only the proletariat can move from protest to social confrontation with the state on terrain that strikes at the material basis of the system.

Dadgari does not deny workers, but he marginalizes them. He disperses the question into a broad democratic sociology of the oppressed. That is politically fatal. It substitutes a coalition of grievances for a class capable of transforming society. Once again, the result is a return to cross-class oppositionism.

7. Secularism is not a class program

One must be absolutely clear on this point: secularism, in itself, is not a proletarian principle. Historically, it could be preferable to theocracy as a condition of struggle in the era of bourgeois revolution. It may replace certain forms of ideological coercion with others, more liberal in form. It may widen a legal space in which conflicts can be mediated in the interests of capital. But it does not abolish exploitation. A secular capitalist republic remains a machine of wage labor, police, prisons, borders, armies, and national competition.

Dadgari treats secular democracy as though it carries an emancipatory content of its own. It does not. At best, it changes the juridical and ideological form in which class domination is exercised. At worst, it becomes the respectable language by which workers are rallied behind their own exploiters.

This is why the opposition between theocracy and democracy is politically insufficient. It is real, but superficial. It concerns the form of rule, not its class substance. A worker remains exploited under both. A strike is repressed under both, albeit with different slogans. A state that speaks in the name of God and one that speaks in the name of citizens are both capitalist states.

8. What a serious reckoning with 1979 would require

A serious reckoning with 1979 would begin by refusing every consoling myth.

It would refuse the myth that the ‘revolution’ was sound in essence and merely stolen later. It would refuse the myth that the left failed because it was insufficiently liberal. It would refuse the myth that a proper secular-democratic path remained historically available as a route to emancipation. It would refuse the myth that the main subject is “the people.” It would refuse the myth that integration into the modern world means anything other than reintegration into global capitalism on revised terms.

Instead, it would state plainly that every politics that subordinates the proletariat to a national, democratic, anti-dictatorial, anti-imperialist, or popular bloc is a politics of defeat. It would say that the bourgeois left was not wrong by accident, but by social nature. It would say that no salvation lies in choosing the enlightened wing of national capital against the obscurantist wing. It would say that the only real alternative is working-class autonomy against all bourgeois factions.

That means: strikes, mass assemblies, revocable delegates, extension across sectors, refusal of national unity, rejection of every popular front, and an openly internationalist opposition to both domestic repression and global imperialist rivalry. Not democratic redemption. Class struggle.

Conclusion

Dadgari’s anger is often justified. His targets are frequently the right ones. He is right to spit on the sanctified legend of 1979. He is right to expose the miserable role of the bourgeois left. He is right to reject illusions in the benevolence of the global powers.

But he does not escape the political universe that produced the disaster. He remains a prisoner of democratic-liberal ideology. He wants a secular, plural, rights-based, socially responsible capitalism and mistakes this for historical lucidity. He attacks one bourgeois illusion while defending another.

That is why his critique, though sharper than much apologetic rubbish, remains fundamentally inadequate. It clears away clerical mystification only to replace it with democratic mystification. It condemns the old popular front only to sketch a new one. It denounces defeat while preserving the framework of defeat.

The task is not to rescue 1979 for democracy. The task is to bury every politics that subordinates the working class to democracy, nation, religion, modernization, or the people. Until that break is made, every denunciation remains half-blind, and every new beginning prepares an old end.

Iran now finds itself at the center of a war in the Middle East. After repeated calls by Trump to the Iranian people to rise up, there followed another denial that the American goal of the war is regime change. Indeed, US policy towards Venezuela seems to be content with a few changes in its favor of the otherwise unchanged Maduro regime. The main goal of the US around the world is to reduce the influence of the opposing imperialist bloc of China-Russia-Iran-North Korea. The Iranian working class is being sacrificed by all variants of Iranian nationalism and imperialism to their goal of gaining as much advantage as possible from the redistribution of the world into spheres of influence. In contrast, we as council communists propose: 

• not for Iran, not for the US or Israel, not for China or Russia. 
• for the struggle of the working class in defense of the attacks on their standard of living, on their very lives
• for the further development of the proletarian struggle to develop revolutionary consciousness and organization in revolutionary councils
• for the beginning of the world revolution, the establishment of worldwide power of the workers’ councils and the transformation of capitalist society into a society without capital, without classes and without states.

R.O. March 7th, 2026

Spanish

G.O. March 6th, 2026

This article explains how the current Middle East war and China’s 2026 economic plans affect the rivalry between the United States (US) and China. Their opposition is in a sense between the USA as most important world power since two World Wars and China as a rising economic, political and military power as its contender. This opposition can develop into a Third World War with the Pacific Ocean at its center, where World War One and Two centered on the Atlantic Ocean. The article describes the power balance in terms of  money and industry, military strength, and global influence—and how the current Middle East war and China’s plans affect the rivalry. The article also makes clear how the present war and war preparations on both sides worsen the living situation of the working class. In stead of ‘defending’ the ‘people’ against ‘the enemy’, war and war preparations attack the proletariat in all states and urge for a unified working-class struggle against all states.

What “power” means here

Power is not one number. A country is powerful when it can keep going under pressure.

A powerful country can usually:

1. Pay for big projects and crises (without crashing its economy)
2. Make important goods (machines, electronics, weapons parts)
3. Protect trade routes (ships, ports, sea lanes)
4. Build new technology and protect key supply chains
5. Work with allies (or convince others to cooperate)

The US and China are strong in different ways.

• The US is strongest in global finance and alliances. The question is how much longer the US can run the Dollar-press, and when its irritation of its allies leads to a real breaking point.
• China is strongest in manufacturing and government planning to build key industries. Its state-capitalist planning is well suited for war, but it may lead to lack of efficiency and corruption. Its large working class suffers partly from unemployment, job-insecurity and inflation. It may suddenly rise in mass movements against its openly totalitarian state, as the world has never seen.

What changed after February 2022

Three changes since 2022 made the US–China rivalry sharper.

The Russia–Ukraine war and sanctions

The war in Ukraine led to many sanctions (punishments) on Russia. This changed trade and banking around the world. Many governments also started spending more on defense and stockpiling important goods.

The Middle East war and the Strait of Hormuz

A major part of today’s Middle East war is the risk around the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow sea route that many oil ships use.

Reuters reported in early March 2026 that the war caused serious disruption around Hormuz: higher risk, insurance problems, and rising shipping costs. Reuters also reported that the EBRD (for Abbreviations, see the list) president warned that the conflict and Hormuz problems pushed oil prices up and could hurt growth and raise inflation.

Why this matters:

• If oil gets more expensive, prices rise in many countries, not compensated in rises of wages and allowances. 
• If insurance companies refuse to cover ships, ships may not sail.
• If shipping slows, factories and stores can run short of supplies.

The economic effect on the world’s working class are certain, its reaction is not predictable.

China’s yearly plan and five-year plan

China uses official plans to guide the economy.

• The 14th Five-Year Plan covered 2021–2025.
• China is now moving into the 15th Five-Year Plan (2026–2030).

Reporting around China’s National People’s Congress (NPC) in March 2026 described a lower growth target for 2026. The shift into the 15th Five-Year Plan (2026–2030) is occurring under a “security-heavy” macro climate. Reporting around China’s National People’s Congress in March 2026 indicated a lower growth target for 2026 and a renewed emphasis on technological self-reliance and national security. The draft outline was submitted to the legislature for review, and the Government Work Report underscored priority areas tied to high-quality development and security indicators.

This matters geopolitically because planning is a tool for mobilization speed: not military mobilization alone, but industrial mobilization—redirecting investment, coordinating standards, and building redundant capacity in strategic sectors.

Abbreviations (quick dictionary)

• A2/AD — anti-access/area-denial (ways to make it hard for an enemy to enter or operate in an area)
• C2 — command and control (how leaders give orders and manage forces)
• C4ISR — command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (the “information system” modern militaries use to see, decide, and act)
• CMC — Central Military Commission (China’s top military leadership)
• DoD — US Department of Defense
• EBRD — European Bank for Reconstruction and Development
• EU — European Union
• GDP — gross domestic product (how much a country produces in a year)
• IMF — International Monetary Fund
• IP — intellectual property (patents, software, designs)
• ISR — intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (finding and tracking information)
• NATO — North Atlantic Treaty Organization (a US-led military alliance)
• NPC — National People’s Congress (China’s main law-making meeting)
• PLA — People’s Liberation Army (China’s military)
• PPP — purchasing power parity (a way to compare countries by adjusting for prices)
• R&D — research and development
• SIPRI — Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (tracks military spending)
• WEO — World Economic Outlook (an IMF report)

Economic balance: who is stronger at what?

GDP and what it does (and does not) show

GDP (gross domestic product) measures how much a country produces in a year.

• In nominal GDP (measured in current dollars), the US is still larger than China.
• In PPP (purchasing power parity) comparisons (adjusting for prices), China can look similar or larger, depending on the dataset.

The IMF (International Monetary Fund) publishes the WEO (World Economic Outlook), a common source for GDP levels and forecasts.

But GDP totals can hide important details. Two structural facts matter a lot:

• The US is a finance center. Because the dollar is central to world finance, US banking rules and sanctions can affect many countries. 
• China is a manufacturing center. It can produce huge volumes and can often scale factories quickly.

So, the key question is not only “Who is bigger?” It is also: “Who controls the most important bottlenecks?”

Why the US has an advantage

The US has three big strengths.

1. Money power. The US can borrow in dollars at large scale and uses the financial system to enforce sanctions.
2. Allies. The US has many security partners, including NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) and allies in Asia. These alliances share bases, training, and sometimes weapons production.
3. Innovation. The US has strong universities and companies. It earns a lot from IP (intellectual property) like patents and software.

US weaknesses include political division at home – reflecting a proletariat suffering form endemic unemployment and inflation –  and some industrial bottlenecks (dependency on … China).

Why China has an advantage

China’s advantage is industrial depth plus planning.

China is not only “cheap labor.” It also has:

• networks of factories that supply each other
• major infrastructure (ports, rail, power)
• a government that can push credit, subsidies, and rules to build key industries

The goal is often substitution: replacing foreign parts and technology with domestic versions so outsiders cannot “turn off” critical supply.

Military balance: spending and real capability

Military spending is not the same as military power, but it helps show long-term capacity.

What SIPRI reports

SIPRI (Stockholm International Peace Research Institute) reported:

• World military spending reached $2.718 trillion in 2024.
• The US spent $997 billion.
• China spent an estimated $314 billion.

That is a large gap in dollars. However, “dollars spent” do not translate linearly into combat power. China’s domestic cost structure can purchase more labor and certain inputs per dollar, while the US pays a premium for global basing, personnel costs, and technologically complex systems.

A better way to compare is to ask what spending produces:

1. Readiness: are forces trained, supplied, and ready?
2. Power projection: can a country move forces far away and keep them supplied?
3. Information and coordination: can forces see the battlefield and act together?

The last point includes ISR (intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance) and C2 (command and control), plus the larger network often described as C4ISR.

US military strengths

The US is still the only country that has proven it can run very large operations in many regions at once, with strong logistics. This comes from bases, transport capacity, and alliances.

In the Middle East war, the US can surge ships and aircraft quickly and coordinate with partners. But it also faces internal political costs (Trump’s voters do not like wars) and must manage allies under stress, f.e. its NATO-allies, EU-countries complaining about international law, most vehemently expressed by Spain.^[1]

China’s military trajectory

China focuses on building strong regional power—especially in the Western Pacific—rather than copying the US global base system. For a WW3 confrontation with the USA, there is no proof of China’s capacity or incapacity: It has never been at war outside its borders.

The US DoD (Department of Defense) 2025 report describes continued modernization of China’s PLA (People’s Liberation Army) with major target dates in 2027, 2035, and 2049. The report also notes reforms that put key forces under tighter CMC (Central Military Commission) control.

China’s strengths include rapid shipbuilding and strong missile forces. China’s challenges include integrating complex joint operations and dealing with organizational problems (including corruption crackdowns).

Why alliances matter so much

One of the biggest differences is alliances.

• The US has many formal allies that provide bases and intelligence.
• China has partners, but fewer formal mutual-defense alliances.

Allies spread costs and multiply industrial capacity. China’s common response is to raise the cost of US intervention using A2/AD (anti-access/area-denial) systems—missiles, air defenses, and surveillance that make it risky for enemies to approach.

How the Middle East war changes the rivalry

The war affects the US–China balance through four main channels.

1. Energy prices and inflation. If oil prices rise, many countries face higher costs.
2. Shipping and insurance. Modern trade depends on insurers pricing risk. If insurers cancel war-risk coverage, ships may stop moving.
3. Coalition stress. The US must keep allies together while costs rise.
4. Opportunity costs. A large Middle East crisis can pull US attention and resources away from the Indo-Pacific.

China faces a direct energy risk because it imports a lot of oil. Reuters reported that China’s 2026–2030 energy planning includes stable domestic oil output goals, higher gas ambitions, and strategic stockpiling.

Since China’ s ally Russia ^[2] has been hit by limitation of its gaz exports to Europe – following US-sanctions against its invasion of Ukraine – Russia exports more and more natural gas to China.

Conclusion: what “balance” means in 2026

A simple line like “the US is richer” or “China is rising” misses the real picture.

• The US leads in global finance, alliances, and long-range power projection.
• China leads in manufacturing depth and in using planning to build strategic industries.

The Middle East war raises the value of energy security, shipping safety, and supply-chain control. It does not automatically make one side win, but it increases pressure on both sides to become more resilient.

The US has an advantage in money and allies; China has an advantage in industrial mobilization—both are tested by war, sanctions, and energy-route risk.

And what about the world working class? As we wrote before: 

• They pay for this armament and war feast with cuts to wages and benefits, social services, and all kinds of care. 
• They pay with their health and their lives. 
• Every bourgeois faction within a state and every state within a bloc hopes to gain the most from a redistribution of imperialist spheres of influence through a third world war. 
• In contrast, the working class of all states has only one interest: to defend itself against attacks on its standard of living. This struggle must develop into a fight against the state and for another society, without wars, without classes, without a state.

The international working class has no durable interest in camp alignment. Its interest lies in autonomous organization, international coordination, and resistance to the transfer of war costs onto labor. In the present conjuncture, that is not only normatively defensible; it is strategically realistic.

G.O. 6-3-2026

Appendix: key figures and short excerpts

Key figures

• SIPRI: world military spending $2.718 trillion (2024).
• SIPRI: US $997 billion (2024); China $314 billion (estimated, 2024).
• Reuters (March 2026): shipping and insurance disruptions linked to the Iran war and Hormuz risk; oil price increases reported in connection with closure/disruption.
• Reuters (March 2026): China’s 2026–2030 energy plan includes steady domestic oil output goals, gas expansion, and strategic stockpiling.
• US DoD (2025): PLA modernization milestones referenced for 2027, 2035, 2049.

Short attributed excerpts

• SIPRI: “World military expenditure rose to $2718 billion in 2024.”
• SIPRI: “The USA’s military spending was $997 billion in 2024, while China’s was an estimated $314 billion.”
• US DoD (2025): “The PLA … will continue to develop capabilities to achieve its 2027, 2035, and 2049 modernization milestones.”

^[1] For a critical evaluation of the tensions between the USA and Europe, see F.C. The Greenland Crisis, NATO, and the Illusion of European Autonomy and Fredo Corvo, Aníbal, With the EU and NATO toward World War III USA-China. The dream of European independence. 

^[2] For the relationship China-Russia, see G.O. The Strategic Formation of an Imperialist Bloc around China. 

Spanish

IRBIL, Iraq (AP) – Iranian Kurdish dissident groups based in northern Iraq are preparing a possible cross-border military operation in Iran, while the United States has asked Iraqi Kurds to provide support, Kurdish officials told The Associated Press on Wednesday.

Kurdish groups are widely seen as the best-organized segment of Iran’s fragmented opposition and are believed to have thousands of trained fighters. Their entry into the war could pose a major challenge to the beleaguered authorities in Tehran, as well as risk dragging Iraq further into the conflict.

Khalil Nadiri, an official with the Kurdistan Freedom Party (PAK), based in the semi-autonomous Kurdish region of northern Iraq, said some of its forces had moved on Wednesday into areas near the Iranian border and were awaiting further instructions.

He added, without elaborating, that U.S. officials had contacted leaders of Kurdish opposition groups to discuss a possible operation.

Asked about reports that the U.S. government is weighing the possibility of arming Iranian Kurdish groups, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told reporters Wednesday, “None of our objectives are based on supporting or arming any particular force. So we are aware of what other entities may be doing, but our objectives don’t revolve around that.”

Before a new Middle East war was triggered by the U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran last Saturday, the PAK had claimed responsibility for attacks on the Revolutionary Guard in response to Tehran’s violent crackdown on protesters. However, an official of the group clarified that it had not sent forces to Iran from Iraq.

If Iranian and Iraqi Kurdish groups join the war, it would be the first entry of a ground force into the conflict. The Kurds have combat experience from their fight against the Islamic State group.

An official from Komala — another of the Iranian Kurdish groups — said Wednesday that their forces are ready to cross the border in a matter of a week to 10 days and were “waiting for the conditions to be right.” He spoke on condition of anonymity for security reasons.

Kurds in Iran have a long history of grievances and uprisings against both the current Islamic Republic and the monarchy that preceded it. During the rule of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Kurds were marginalized and repressed, provoking occasional uprisings.

After the 1979 Islamic Revolution, the new theocratic government also fought Kurdish insurgents. Iranian forces destroyed Kurdish towns and villages in clashes that left thousands dead.

While sharing a desire to see the current authorities overthrown, the Kurds have also clashed with other opposition groups – in particular, the faction led by the son of the former shah, Reza Pahlavi, who has accused the Kurds of being separatists seeking to dismember Iran.

Iraqi Kurds, reluctant to join the fray

The possible operation has left Iraqi Kurdish regional leaders in a delicate position.

Three Iraqi Kurdish officials told the AP that a phone call took place Sunday between U.S. President Donald Trump and Masoud Barzani and Bafel Talabani – leaders of the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, (PUK), the two main Kurdish parties in Iraq – to discuss the situation in Iran.

They spoke on condition of anonymity as they were not authorized to comment publicly.

According to one of the officials, Trump asked the Iraqi Kurds to provide military support to Iranian Kurdish groups during operations in Iran and to open the border to allow free movement of Iranian Kurdish groups.

When asked about the phone conversation and reports that Trump has sought military support for Iranian Kurdish groups, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said, “He did speak with Kurdish leaders regarding our base that we have in northern Iraq,” but denied that the president had agreed on a specific plan.

The Iraqi Kurdish official noted that Iraqi Kurds fear that getting directly involved in the conflict would provoke a forceful Iranian response. The Kurdish region has come under a series of Iranian drone and missile attacks in recent days, targeting U.S. military bases and Kurdish groups, as well as the U.S. consulate in Irbil.

Although most of the attacks have been intercepted, civilian homes have been damaged and the region is suffering from power outages after a major gas field halted operations for security reasons.

The PUK confirmed in a statement that Talabani spoke by phone with Trump, who “provided clarity and vision on U.S. objectives in the war.” The statement said the PUK “believes the best solution is to return to the negotiating table.”

Spokesmen for the Kurdish regional government in Iraq and Barzani declined to comment.

The Axios news portal was the first to report on the call between Trump and Kurdish leaders, while CNN reported that the Washington administration was in talks with Kurdish groups about the possibility of providing military support.

Iraq seeks to seal the border

The presence of armed Kurdish groups in northern Iraq has been a sticking point between Baghdad and Tehran.

Iraq reached an agreement with Iran in 2023 to disarm the groups and move them from their bases near the Iranian border – where they posed an armed threat to Tehran – to camps designated by Baghdad.

Their military bases were closed and their movement within Iraq was restricted, but the groups did not lay down their arms.

Iraq’s National Security Advisor Qassim al-Araji said on social networking site X that Ali Bagheri, undersecretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, had requested in a call between the two “for Iraq to take the necessary measures to prevent any opposition group from infiltrating the border between the two countries.”

Al-Araji asserted that Iraq is committed to “prevent any group from infiltrating or crossing the Iranian border or carrying out terrorist acts from Iraqi territory” and noted that border security was tightened.

In addition to Iranian retaliation, any move by Iraqi Kurds to join a cross-border attack is likely to stoke tensions with Iranian-backed Iraqi militias, which have already claimed responsibility for missile and drone attacks on Irbil in recent days.

Abdul-Zahra reported from Baghdad. Associated Press writers Abby Sewell in Beirut and Konstantin Toropin and Michelle Price in Washington contributed to this report.

Source: https://apnews.com/article/kurdos-iran-irak-guerra-trump-israel-6e2be04df33c5215b6c97d31764a751f

CNN has said the U.S. is arming Kurdish militias in the west of the country in an effort to incite an uprising against what is left of the regime. At the border, where Moran is after leaving the country, there is no “mass departure,” but he does say that on the crossing from Tehran to Turkey there are many families and carloads of belongings seeking refuge in other regions away from the Iranian capital.

Source: https://cadenaser.com/nacional/2026/03/04/eeuu-estaria-armando-a-los-kurdos-para-lanzar-una-rebelion-contra-el-regimen-irani-cadena-ser/

Repeated lessons

Comment by Anibal

The nationalist movements are usually pawns in the hands of imperialist capital powers, to play militarily in the imperialist dynamics of combat against their enemies: other powers, states and bourgeois forces: imperialists.

In Northern Syria we have seen how the Kurdish nationalists followed the US…which then left them in the lurch.

It is not by chance, it is the inescapable logic of the imperialist dynamics of capitalism, that only the international revolution of the proletariat against capital can inflect and overcome, if it succeeds in eradicating the bourgeois states and opening the period of transition from capitalism to communism.

Either that or a deepening of the imperialist dynamics up to an ultra-devastating World War III, nuclearized to the maximum.

Is it in the interest of the US government and Israel to introduce a nationalist wedge in Iran? It is obvious that yes… as there are also other nationalisms, of the Baluchi or Azeri type.

Source: Grupos disidentes kurdos afirman que se preparan para luchar contra Irán con apoyo de EEUU.

Added News and Comment

March 5th, the Dutch daily newspaper Trouw published an article based on the above CNN source that reported the following statement, which is typical of the reality of imperialism of all bourgeois groups, including national “liberation”:

“It’s very dangerous,” the Kurdish official told CNN regarding the planned operation in Iran. “But what else can we do? We can’t go against America.”

Trouw continues:

“If the Kurdish offensive goes ahead, the Americans are taking a considerable risk of further destabilizing the region. NATO ally Turkey is watching the arming of Kurdish fighters so close to its border with suspicion. The Turkish government is currently engaged in a complicated peace process with the Kurdish rebel movement PKK, which has been fighting for autonomy in southeastern Turkey for decades.
Moreover, there is a risk that the conflict could spread to Iraq. Iranian forces have already fired rockets at Kurdish militia positions in northern Iraq. According to the Iranians, the targets were ‘separatist groups.’ The targets were camps belonging to Iranian Kurds who oppose the Tehran regime.”

The following theses are the preliminary result of a discussion of some comrades, reflecting the agreements they reached. As such, some questions have been clarified, and others have still to be discussed. The theses concentrate on imperialism and isolation as important factors in Russian revolution. They are not about the internal counterrevolution by Bolshevism in power, their mistakes on state capitalism and their crimes against the working class.

Theses

1) Imperialism is not a state policy, but the historical phase of capitalism in which accumulation depends on the world market and all states are bound to capitalist accumulation. In this phase, no national state (or bourgeois) faction can stand outside of interstate competition and permanent militarization, regardless of their ideological self- presentation.

2) The First World War marked the definitive entry of capitalism into the phase of imperialism. WW1 was the consequence of the completion of the capitalist conquest of the most important regions of the Earth (end of colonial expansion, circa 1900). All national capitals became necessarily pitted against each other because the inherent dynamic of globalized capitalism is based on disputes over markets, territories, strategic military control, sources of raw materials and energy, and the control of labor flows. States signed treaties with other states, and eventually two blocs emerged that confronted each other on a global scale. Each capital, each bourgeois faction determines its place in the national capital and in the choice of one bloc against the other in the quest to gain as much advantage as possible from the redistribution of the earth into capitalist spheres of influence through imperialist war. To this end, each faction of the bourgeoisie sacrifices ‘its’ proletariat to intensified exploitation, trauma, and death. Thus, imperialist wars are not external deviations from capitalist development, but a concentrated form of interstate competition. War does not resolve’ capitalist contradictions; it redistributes power relations, territories, resources, and strategic positions, and temporarily displaces or reconfigures contradictions under specific economic, political, and military conditions. Any theory of revolution or class struggle that neglects or abstracts from this fact is necessarily incomplete ^[1].

3) The revolutions of 1905 and 1917 cannot be understood primarily within a national framework. They were moments in the crisis of the world imperialist system opened by the completion of the capitalist conquest of the earth about 1900. The Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905 shocked the colonialist states because it showed that a non-European state could be colonialist, or better imperialist. The consequences of this war led to the revolution of 1905. October 1917 was a proletarian political revolution precisely because it expressed an
international class response to imperialist war, not because of Russia’s level of economic development taken in isolation.

4) The revolutions of 1905 and February 1917 marked the weakening, respectively the collapse of tsarist state forms under pressure from war and capitalist contradictions, followed by efforts to strengthen the imperialist state by some political ‘reforms’. October 1917 marked the proletarian attempt to break that dynamic by transforming imperialist war into class war. The bourgeois/proletarian contradiction remains real, but the outcome was determined by the balance of class forces: where the workers’ councils failed to consolidate exclusive proletarian power, bourgeois and petty-bourgeois forces recompose state power in the form of the Sovnarkom ^[2].

5) In the imperialist phase, the classical schema of bourgeois revolutions loses its central explanatory value. Once capitalism is globally dominant, no “unfinished bourgeois tasks” open a new historical regime of progressive capitalist development in the classical sense; subsequent state and institutional restructurings reproduce the same imperialist system.

6) Internationalism is a material condition for the proletariat’s victory in the imperialist phase. The outcome of October depended on the extension of revolution beyond national borders; its isolation reflected the international defeat of the working class. However, international isolation should not hide the internal weaknesses of the Russian proletariat as a whole (such as ceding power from the councils to the Sovnarkom) and of its minority, the Bolshevik Party (such as the false theory of “state socialism”).

7) The degeneration of the Russian Revolution and consolidation of state capitalism were rooted in material isolation and international defeat but were also politically mediated through the strategic line of the Third International (especially 1920–1921), which increasingly subordinated international proletarian strategy to the policy of the Russian state.

8) Contemporary inter-imperialist rivalry reproduces, at a higher technical and historical level, the same strategic problems faced by the proletariat in 1914–1918: pressure on the working class to support one bloc against another. Analysis of the class struggle that removes the category of imperialism produces political disorientation.

9) Historical and theoretical work is assessed by its contribution to proletarian clarity and organization under current imperialist conditions. This does not exclude non-immediate research; it places both short-cycle and long-cycle inquiry within a class horizon. The decisive question is not how to classify 1917 within inherited schemas, but whether present theory equips the working class to confront imperialist war through an internationalist class line.

M.S., S.S., F.C., Aníbal

Endnotes 

^[1] “To demonstrate this necessity to the social utopians, it is not at all necessary to argue that capitalism cannot continue to exist without expansion. This expansion, the opening up of other parts of the world as markets, suppliers of raw materials and, to demonstrate this necessity to the social utopians, it is not at all necessary to argue that capitalism cannot continue to exist without expansion. This expansion, the opening up of other parts of the world as markets, suppliers of raw materials and, finally, as reservoirs of labour, has existed in all periods of capitalism and is only now assuming an increasingly gigantic character. Imperialism is the particular form of expansion of the era in which the production of means of production has become the most important and dominant branch of industry. Domination by iron and steel entails a different policy from the former domination by the textile industry. The extraction of iron ore in Morocco requires a large capital enterprise, and this requires the political domination of the French government in Morocco. The export of locomotives, rails and cannons to Turkey requires the construction of railways and, therefore, the political control – immediate or indirect – of German capital in those countries. This is also necessary in order to exclude competitors. This political dominance cannot be obtained or defended in any other way than through the development of power, coercion, armament, military force and the construction of fleets. Why is this imperialism necessary? Not because capitalism would go bankrupt economically, could not continue without imperialism, or because there are feudal-military ruling cliques. But simply because the big capitalists want this imperialism. They want it because it is in their interest, because they make colossal amounts of money from it. And they can do it because they are the most powerful and control all of capitalism. Kautsky once said that imperialism was a question of power. 

This is correct, but not in the sense that he meant. He said: this is not a question not of necessity, but of power – and by this he meant that the other capitalists, who had no interest in imperialism, could suddenly put an end to it as soon as they turned their power against the imperialists. Theoretically, this was certainly conceivable; but the fact that it did not happen in practice, that on the contrary imperialism continued to gain ground, already showed that there were flaws in the theory. Once again, he contrasted two things that go together. He said: imperialism is not necessary, but a question of power. We say: imperialism is a question of power, and therefore it is necessary. The development of capitalism has strengthened and increased the power of big business, which wants imperialism, and has steadily reduced resistance among the petty bourgeoisie, and even among the workers! That is why imperialism is now supreme, that is, necessary. Because this power and its growth are no accident, nor is the slower and future growth of the power of the proletariat, on which socialism depends. They have their origin in the economic development of modern capitalism” (Anton Pannekoek, “The Economic Necessity of Imperialism”, 1916).

^[2] The Council of Peoples Commissars, or Russian Federative Soviet Republic (RSFSR)

Les thèses suivantes sont le résultat préliminaire d’une discussion entre certains camarades, reflétant les accords auxquels ils sont parvenus. À ce titre, certaines questions ont été clarifiées, tandis que d’autres doivent encore être discutées. Les thèses se concentrent sur l’impérialisme et l’isolement en tant que facteurs importants de la révolution russe. Elles ne traitent pas de la contre-révolution interne menée par le bolchevisme au pouvoir, de ses erreurs en matière de capitalisme d’État et de ses crimes contre la classe ouvrière.

Thèses

1) L’impérialisme n’est pas une politique d’État, mais la phase historique du capitalisme dans laquelle l’accumulation dépend du marché mondial et tous les États sont liés à l’accumulation capitaliste. Dans cette phase, aucune faction nationale (ou bourgeoise) ne peut se tenir à l’écart de la concurrence interétatique et de la militarisation permanente, quelle que soit son image idéologique.

2) La Première Guerre mondiale a marqué l’entrée définitive du capitalisme dans la phase de l’impérialisme. La Première Guerre mondiale a été la conséquence de l’achèvement de la conquête capitaliste des régions les plus importantes de la Terre (fin de l’expansion coloniale, vers 1900). Toutes les capitales nationales se sont nécessairement affrontées, car la dynamique inhérente au capitalisme mondialisé repose sur des conflits autour des marchés, des territoires, du contrôle militaire stratégique, des sources de matières premières et d’énergie, et du contrôle des flux de main-d’œuvre. Les États ont signé des traités avec d’autres États, et deux blocs ont fini par émerger, s’affrontant à l’échelle mondiale. Chaque capitale, chaque faction bourgeoise détermine sa place dans le capital national et dans le choix d’un bloc contre l’autre dans la quête d’obtenir le plus d’avantages possible de la redistribution de la Terre en sphères d’influence capitalistes par le biais de la guerre impérialiste. À cette fin, chaque faction de la bourgeoisie sacrifie « son » prolétariat à une exploitation intensifiée, à des traumatismes et à la mort. Ainsi, les guerres impérialistes ne sont pas des déviations externes du développement capitaliste, mais une forme concentrée de concurrence interétatique. La guerre ne résout pas les contradictions capitalistes ; elle redistribue les relations de pouvoir, les territoires, les ressources et les positions stratégiques, et déplace ou reconfigure temporairement les contradictions dans des conditions économiques, politiques et militaires spécifiques. Toute théorie de la révolution ou de la lutte des classes qui néglige ou fait abstraction de ce fait est nécessairement incomplète ^[1].

3) Les révolutions de 1905 et 1917 ne peuvent être comprises essentiellement dans un cadre national. Elles ont été des moments de la crise du système impérialiste mondial ouverte par l’achèvement de la conquête capitaliste de la terre vers 1900. La guerre russo-japonaise de 1904-1905 a choqué les États colonialistes car elle a montré qu’un État non européen pouvait être colonialiste, ou plutôt impérialiste. Les conséquences de cette guerre ont conduit à la révolution de 1905. Octobre 1917 a été une révolution politique prolétarienne précisément parce qu’elle exprimait une réponse internationale de classe à la guerre impérialiste, et non en raison du niveau de développement économique de la Russie pris isolément.

4) Les révolutions de 1905 et de février 1917 ont marqué l’affaiblissement, puis l’effondrement des formes étatiques tsaristes sous la pression de la guerre et des contradictions capitalistes, suivis par des efforts visant à renforcer l’État impérialiste par certaines « réformes » politiques. Octobre 1917 a marqué la tentative prolétarienne de briser cette dynamique en transformant la guerre impérialiste en guerre de classe. La contradiction entre bourgeoisie et prolétariat reste réelle, mais l’issue a été déterminée par l’équilibre des forces de classe : là où les conseils ouvriers n’ont pas réussi à consolider le pouvoir prolétarien exclusif, les forces bourgeoises et petites-bourgeoises ont recomposé le pouvoir d’État sous la forme du Sovnarkom ^[2].

5) Dans la phase impérialiste, le schéma classique des révolutions bourgeoises perd sa valeur explicative centrale. Une fois que le capitalisme est dominant à l’échelle mondiale, aucune « tâche bourgeoise inachevée » n’ouvre un nouveau régime historique de développement capitaliste progressiste au sens classique du terme ; les restructurations étatiques et institutionnelles qui suivent reproduisent le même système impérialiste.

6) L’internationalisme est une condition matérielle pour la victoire du prolétariat dans la phase impérialiste. L’issue d’Octobre dépendait de l’extension de la révolution au-delà des frontières nationales ; son isolement reflétait la défaite internationale de la classe ouvrière. Cependant, l’isolement international ne doit pas masquer les faiblesses internes du prolétariat russe dans son ensemble (telles que la cession du pouvoir des conseils au Sovnarkom) et de sa minorité, le Parti bolchevique (telles que la fausse théorie du « socialisme d’État »).

7) La dégénérescence de la révolution russe et la consolidation du capitalisme d’État trouvaient leur origine dans l’isolement matériel et la défaite internationale, mais elles ont également été politiquement médiatisées par la ligne stratégique de la Troisième Internationale (en particulier en 1920-1921), qui a de plus en plus subordonné la stratégie prolétarienne internationale à la politique de l’État russe.

8) La rivalité interimpérialiste contemporaine reproduit, à un niveau technique et historique plus élevé, les mêmes problèmes stratégiques auxquels le prolétariat a été confronté en 1914-1918 : la pression exercée sur la classe ouvrière pour qu’elle soutienne un bloc contre un autre. Une analyse de la lutte des classes qui élimine la catégorie de l’impérialisme entraîne une désorientation politique.

9) Le travail historique et théorique est évalué en fonction de sa contribution à la clarté et à l’organisation prolétariennes dans les conditions impérialistes actuelles. Cela n’exclut pas la recherche non immédiate ; cela place les recherches à court et à long terme dans une perspective de classe. La question décisive n’est pas de savoir comment classer 1917 dans les schémas hérités, mais si la théorie actuelle permet à la classe ouvrière d’affronter la guerre impérialiste à travers une ligne de classe internationaliste.

M.S., S.S., F.C., Aníbal

Notes de fin

^[1] « Pour démontrer cette nécessité aux utopistes sociaux, il n’est pas du tout nécessaire d’argumenter que le capitalisme ne peut continuer à exister sans expansion. Cette expansion, l’ouverture d’autres parties du monde en tant que marchés, fournisseurs de matières premières et, enfin, réservoirs de main-d’œuvre, a existé à toutes les époques du capitalisme et ne fait que prendre aujourd’hui un caractère de plus en plus gigantesque. L’impérialisme est la forme particulière d’expansion de l’époque où la production des moyens de production est devenue la branche la plus importante et la plus dominante de l’industrie. La domination par le fer et l’acier implique une politique différente de l’ancienne domination par l’industrie textile. L’extraction du minerai de fer au Maroc nécessite une entreprise à gros capitaux, ce qui exige la domination politique du gouvernement français au Maroc. L’exportation de locomotives, de rails et de canons vers la Turquie nécessite la construction de chemins de fer et, par conséquent, le contrôle politique – direct ou indirect – du capital allemand dans ces pays. Cela est également nécessaire pour exclure les concurrents. Cette domination politique ne peut être obtenue ou défendue autrement que par le développement du pouvoir, la coercition, l’armement, la force militaire et la construction de flottes. Pourquoi cet impérialisme est-il nécessaire ? Non pas parce que le capitalisme ferait faillite économiquement, ne pourrait pas continuer sans impérialisme, ou parce qu’il existe des cliques dirigeantes féodales et militaires. Mais simplement parce que les grands capitalistes veulent cet impérialisme. Ils le veulent parce qu’il est dans leur intérêt, parce qu’ils en tirent des profits colossaux. Et ils peuvent le faire parce qu’ils sont les plus puissants et contrôlent tout le capitalisme. Kautsky a dit un jour que l’impérialisme était une question de pouvoir. C’est exact, mais pas dans le sens où il l’entendait.
Il a dit : ce n’est pas une question de nécessité, mais de pouvoir – et par là, il voulait dire que les autres capitalistes, qui n’avaient aucun intérêt dans l’impérialisme, pouvaient soudainement y mettre fin dès qu’ils tournaient leur pouvoir contre les impérialistes. Théoriquement, cela était certainement concevable ; mais le fait que cela ne se soit pas produit dans la pratique, que, au contraire, l’impérialisme ait continué à gagner du terrain, montrait déjà que cette théorie comportait des failles. Une fois de plus, il a opposé deux choses qui vont de pair. Il a dit : l’impérialisme n’est pas une question de nécessité, mais de pouvoir. Nous disons : l’impérialisme est une question de pouvoir, et donc il est nécessaire. Le développement du capitalisme a renforcé et accru le pouvoir des grandes entreprises, qui veulent l’impérialisme, et a progressivement réduit la résistance de la petite bourgeoisie, et même des travailleurs ! C’est pourquoi l’impérialisme est désormais suprême, c’est-à-dire nécessaire. Car ce pouvoir et sa croissance ne sont pas le fruit du hasard, pas plus que la croissance plus lente et future du pouvoir du prolétariat, dont dépend le socialisme. Ils trouvent leur origine dans le développement économique du capitalisme moderne » (Anton Pannekoek, « The economic necessity of imperialism », 1916).

^[2] Le Conseil des commissaires du peuple, ou du République socialiste fédérative soviétique de Russie (RSFSR)