La Sinistra Comunista Internazionale

In Iran, where the bourgeois Islamic regime carried out the massacre of thousands of proletarians in January, a war has been unleashed by the United States and Israel under the pretext of bringing about a regime change and with the aim of establishing democracy. The only result these warmongers will achieve is to further destabilise and destroy the lives of millions of people belonging to the proletarian class. This ongoing war is not our war, but the war of all capitalist states and powers, whatever side they are on, against workers — that is, the class with no reserves. But this is nothing new: every capitalist and imperialist war is a war against the proletariat, either to eliminate the “surplus population” and revive a crisis-ridden world economy, or to annihilate it as a “dangerous class” for the bourgeois order.

The Islamic Republic, the United States, Israel and all the capitalist actors operating in the Middle Eastern theatre of war are invariably common enemies of the proletariat. Whatever the outcome of this war, and whatever its consequences — including the institutional form the Iranian state may take — armed intervention will mean the destruction of workers’ lives and, for the survivors, a drastic worsening of living and working conditions. The proletarians and workers of Iran, as in all the states involved in the conflict, should not expect any salvific interventions from the imperialist warmongers, nor should they harbour any illusions about the miraculous virtues of bourgeois democracy.

Capitalist States, regardless of their form or allegiance, use war as an instrument of survival in the contest between rival powers and as a means of controlling the proletariat. At a time when the world is once again being overwhelmed by violence, bombing and death, we must reiterate a basic truth: the real victims are always the proletariat, not states, ideologies or borders. Instead of being the battleground for our class — the international working class against capitalism and all nation states — the world has increasingly become the stage for the ferocity of capitalist warmongers vying for global dominance.

The United States, Europe, Russia, China, India and Iran itself, together with states elsewhere in the world, play their role as mass murderers through various forms of intervention: their wars concern the distribution of profit, power and property in order to protect and defend the existence of capital by pitting the proletariat — militarily organised and deployed on opposite sides — against itself. This atrocious truth is written in the history stained with the blood of millions.

The struggle of the proletariat must not take the side of any belligerent state, because all states, whatever their political form, are invariably its mortal enemies. Defeatism towards one’s own state and the unity of the international proletariat above all borders are not empty words but the only means by which the proletarian class can act against this inhuman order or, conversely, be challenged by its organised power. The proletariat is the class from whose hands all social production springs, and from its current temporary inertia that the survival of all states and of capital derives. Only by reclaiming its strength and organising it outside national fronts and blocs, can the proletariat transform the war and peace of cannibalistic capital into opportunities for its class revolt.

The opposite attitude is to defend one or the other bourgeois nation-state at war, under the banner of “anti-imperialism”, as advocated by social democrats, chauvinists and counter-revolutionaries who masquerade as “Marxists” or “anarchists”. This partisan, campist position always defends one of the states, one of the imperialist camps or blocs at war.

We are in favour of the defeat of all nation states at war, or rather, of the transformation of imperialist war into revolutionary class war. In short, this is the meaning of revolutionary defeatism and proletarian internationalism. The class struggle today is still too weak and, when it emerges, it does so in a chaotic form because it emerges from the systemic chaos in which historical and global capitalism finds itself.

Consequently, contradiction and chaos prevent proletarian internationalism and revolutionary defeatism from developing, both in practice and in theory. From a practical point of view, it would have been necessary to see the development the struggle of the proletariat in Gaza both against the occupation by the Israeli army and against the armed apparatus of the Palestinian bourgeoisie. Similarly, it would have been necessary to witness a wider extension of the struggle of proletarians in uniform in sabotaging the war along the Russian-Ukrainian border. From a theoretical point of view, one can observe different positions and controversies on these issues among the radical minorities of the international proletariat. Despite the current contradictions, complexities, and limitations of this systemic chaos, the class struggle exists, revolts exist and, therefore, the necessity and possibility of social revolution also exist.

In this context, we support the struggle of the proletariat in the Iranian region against the Iranian bourgeois state, the struggles of the American and Israeli proletariats against their respective states, and likewise in all regions and countries without exception. To the Iranian proletarians, who have already paid a heavy price in blood, we say that their struggle must not be diverted towards objectives that do not correspond to their class interests, such as the form of government within the bourgeois order. The crown, the turban, or the ballot box of liberal democracy are all expressions of a single power intent on preserving capitalist relations and the continuation of wage slavery. What is presented as “transition”, “salvation” or “reconstruction” is not an answer to poverty, exploitation, or repression, nor is it a path towards human liberation, but rather a manoeuvre to divert the struggle from its true course, which must lead to the abolition of wage labour and the dismantling of the capitalist order. Any claim to the contrary is either deception or betrayal.

3 March 2026