I reproduce here a polemical article, originally published on Marxist Forum in June 2025 during the Israel-Iran conflict, against various campist, defencist, social-patriotic calls and groups who identify themselves as “Marxists”.
US-ISRAEL WAR ON IRAN
Defeatism & Class Independence
“During a reactionary war a revolutionary class cannot but desire the defeat of its government. This is axiomatic, and disputed only by conscious partisans or helpless satellites of the social-chauvinists.”
V.I. Lenin
i.
The seemingly unprovoked bombings of US-Israel in Iran has sparked a wave of agitation and unrest in both the international bourgeois and proletarian camps. Some factions of the ruling class are uneasy about the escalation, some see opportunity in a looming global reorganization of power, and some directly benefit from and provide financial and spiritual sanctity to the escalation. Nonetheless, the ruling faction of the ruling class, the hegemonic US bourgeoisie, represents the overall interests of the movement of global capital and its attempt to penetrate the Middle East in order to further consolidate and integrate it into the American status quo of the global capitalist order, and seems very ecstatic to have finally a pivoting point after years of provoking escalation in Iran. The constructed narrative is a deterrent war, if not to prevent Iran from developing nuclear military power, then a war to eliminate a potentially-existing nuclear threat in the Middle-Eastern region. Who suffers, who bears all the brunt of imperialist reorganization, reconstruction, and bourgeois in-fighting, of course, is the working class. The capitalist crisis is felt by workers not only in the Middle-Eastern epicenter, but throughout the globe. Commodities rise in prices, wages remain stagnant, military conscription is mandated and forcibly involves workers to kill and die for their bourgeoisie, imperialist military domination tightens in the periphery, and the death toll keeps rising. By appearances alone it is currently a war between barely a handful of states, and yet the quakes generated by their marches, bombs, guns, and speeches shake violently the entire capitalist world.
ii.
Alongside this, social-patriotic and defencist calls from various militant and revolutionary organizations, some claiming to be “Marxist” in principle, begin to make rounds within sections of the presently-fragmented workers’ movement. Some groups go so far as to create elaborate apologies for why the workers of the world should support one state over another, and what the class will gain in this act of ol’ bunk defencism. The workers of the world, the social-patriots say, must “take a side”, implying that the independence and internationalism of the class is not a side to take, and even worse, a commitment to “pacifism”! Built on the foundation of shaky “anti-imperialism”, these groups understand the inter-imperialist warring of bourgeois states to be one oppressing another, and that this state policy of oppression of another state is itself what constitutes imperialism. To oppose imperialism means, therefore, to oppose the military subjugation of one bourgeois state by another. All states must live in harmony with each other; only then will imperialism cease. “Marxists” of the 21st century, if you can believe it!
These groups, stuck in 19th-century pre-WW1 thinking, framed in Second International opportunism, rally the workers behind petty-bourgeois slogans of national defense and democracy. As rationale, they justify this by saying they support the peoples and not the states, while at the same time effectively identifying the interests of the people with those of their state. They deny the autonomy of the workers and insist that they have converging interests with their respective local bourgeoisies, an apologia for subordinating the workers’ movement under the bourgeoisie-under-attack in the name of the state, known to us as nationalism. All justified by the vulgar misunderstanding of imperialism to be a military-economic policy of great states imposed over other weaker states. To reiterate Lenin, imperialism is the superstructure of capitalism. Imperialism is inherent to the internal logic of capital and cannot be done away with without the revolutionary overcoming of capitalism itself. Wars are waged for surplus value, for greater exploitation, for total counterrevolution, for the total capitalist subsumption of humanity. Once this instance of war is over, it is guaranteed to repeat again at some place in some other time, and the same chauvinistic slogans we will see flying in the air again, seeking to once more postpone class struggle so more proletarians can spill their blood in the name of the little nation stomped by the big nation. Plagued by political pragmatism and a chronic lack of confidence in the workers of the world, the “Marxists” do the job of the national bourgeoisie for it, with full revolutionary conviction! They convince themselves with their whole chests that their slogans and mobilizations are to the benefit and interest of the real movement. What such apologia achieves instead is the further confusion and fragmentation of the working class already fatigued and low in morale from decades of counterrevolution. For the revolutionary defeatists, the desire for the defeat of one’s own state does not mean a desire for another state’s victory; all workers must desire the defeat of their governments in war, not only in demise from other states, but in its revolutionary actions as a class organized against its own state!
iii.
The workers of the world are bound by the exploitation and alienation of their social existence by capital, in whatever corner of the world they find themselves, in history and in the present. As Marxists, inseparable from the struggle for communism, we are distinguished from the working class in only two ways: (1) by pointing out and bringing to the front the common interests of the entire proletariat, independently of all nationality; and, as a necessary consequence, (2) by always and everywhere representing the interests of the movement as a whole. We insist on the age-old Marxist position: only the independent organization, struggle, and fraternity of the international workers can put an end to the barbarism of capitalism. So only the internationalism of the working class can put an end to all imperialist warring. Accordingly, we encourage the working peoples of all nations to commit treason against their states as declarations of class independence.
Workers must not buy into the petty-bourgeois revolutionists’ political “pragmatism” of class-collaboration (known simply to us as Liberalism); the side of the international working class is the side against both warring blocs and against world-capitalism itself. Opportunists renounce the class struggle in wartime—they see the “primary contradiction” to be that of military competition between actively hostile states, which implicate the unity of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat in such an endeavor. It is national struggle first before class struggle. They think that class struggle takes primacy only in times of “relative peace” and do not realize that they are thinking with the obfuscated frameworks constructed by the bourgeois; they do not see that, for the bourgeoisie, the duration of peace is merely preparation for war! Stripped of all bourgeois pretense and civility, naked in its class truth, the side of the international working class is neither a pacifist nor a neutral side but a side that is explicitly hostile to the bourgeoisies of the world. Class struggle takes primacy—indeed class is the sole basis of struggle—even and especially in wartime. The “anti-war” line of class struggle: we, the workers, declare war with the global capitalist system!
iv.
We do not stand in defense of Iran or any other bourgeois nation-state against imperialist aggressors, but push for the partition of the nation into two camps engaged in civil war, and we are on the side of the proletarian camp against both its government and the aggressor. The Iranian working class, along with the militant and conscious US and Israeli workers, must do what it can to fraternize with the workers of the Middle East and mobilize as a class along the revolutionary-defeatist line. There can be no compromise in this matter; the Iranian workers are not obligated to put their energy behind the Iranian Islamic bourgeois state and its defense against the bourgeoisie of the US, Israel, and the European Union. In no serious slave uprising will one observe the slaves uniting with their slave-owners against other slave-owners.
From imperialist war to civil war, and finally to open confrontation in world revolution: there is no war but class war! Stand with the Iranian and Middle-Eastern workers! Agitate for the fraternization of the workers of the world! Against world-capitalist barbarism! Forward, unto socialism!
To Read:
Lenin, ‘The Defeat of One’s Own Government in the Imperialist War’ – https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1915/jul/26.htm
Anti-Capitalist Workers, ‘For Class Struggle Against All Capitalists’, communiques from Iranian communist workers – https://internationalistcommunists.org/2025/06/20/against-wars-in-the-middle-east-for-class-struggle-against-all-capitalists/