Iran-Israel: Capital Celebrates War

The recent escalation of tensions between Iran and Israel represents yet another manifestation of the bourgeoisie’s inherently bellicose nature. While bourgeois propaganda frames this confrontation as a matter of “national security” or “resistance,” reality reveals an imperialist war rooted in the enduring contradictions of capitalist production.

Behind nationalist and religious rhetoric lie concrete interests: the struggle for control over energy resources and commercial trade routes.

The shallow and contemptible rhetoric of the bourgeoisie reappears today, as always, in its worn repertoire. The search for the “guilty” and the “innocent,” the “aggressor’ and the ‘victim,’ is nothing but a recycling of Capital’s permanent lie—used to mask the true nature of conflicts between states. Nothing new under the sun. As we already exposed with the clarity of revolutionary Marxism in our June 1967 text — Out with the obscene hypocrisy of bourgeois propaganda of war and peace! (Il Programma Comunista, No. 12/1967)

“Argument No. 1: there is war because there has been a sinister ‘aggressor” and a meek “victim”; let us rush to defend the latter, condemn the former, and there will be peace. We replied then and we reply today that, even if it were possible to establish who fired the first shot (and it will never be possible), the rifle shot does not fall from the sky: it is the epilogue, not the origin, of a war — political, commercial, diplomatic — that is perpetually waged in the depth of commodity society and money, of wages and profit, the capitalist society; a war that will continue to rage after the alleged aggressor has been removed by the alleged victims. We said it, and this way it was.”

The main facts of the current conflict

In recent months, armed confrontation between the Israeli military apparatus and that of the Islamic Republic has escalated to unprecedented levels. Direct clashes have multiplied, drawing allies into the war’s vortex either directly or indirectly.

The State of Israel, the long arm of Atlantic imperialism in the Middle East, has launched a vast military offensive against Iran. The campaign targets scientific and industrial installations, leaders linked to the nuclear programme, senior officers of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), and infrastructure strategic to Tehran’s power projection. As expected, this operation is cloaked in the usual “preventive justification”—an alleged security necessity that masks the true imperialist character behind hypocritical defensive language. The real goal: prevent a regional competitor from developing autonomous offensive capabilities, thereby escaping the military monopoly of currently dominant powers.

While sections of bourgeois intelligence continue questioning Iran’s actual capacity to produce nuclear weapons in the short term—citing low uranium enrichment levels and the absence of plutonium production facilities—the possibility cannot be excluded that the Islamic regime might opt for more primitive, heavier, and less sophisticated weapons that nonetheless serve intimidation purposes. On 19 June, the operational deployment of Sejjil missiles revealed the maturity of Iran’s missile program, which has now reached efficiency levels higher than predicted by competing imperialist strategic centers. These missiles can carry heavy warheads, demonstrating that the nuclear option, even in its crudest form, is no longer mere hypothesis.

The Iranian bourgeoisie responded to the Israeli offensive with a series of missile launches, alternating the cadence and type of missiles with the declared aim of saturating the Zionist air defences, quickly wearing down their reserves of interceptors and striking targets considered crucial to the enemy’s economic and military apparatus. These include the financial district of the economic capital, the Haifa refinery — a key hub of the national energy network — strategic port and airport infrastructure, telecommunications centres and intelligence apparatus.

What might appear “counterintuitive” to the naive eyes of petty-bourgeois pacifism proves perfectly consistent with Capital’s political economy. Since the current war cycle began—inaugurated by the armed action of October 7, 2023—Israeli financial markets have suffered no systemic contraction. Instead, they have recorded steady gains. This only confirms, once again, the parasitic and superstructural character of financial capital, which sees not horror in war, but opportunity. For capital, material destruction represents no loss—it announces new destruction, new production, new circulation, new accumulation.

The Iranian attack of June 19 against Tel Aviv’s financial district exemplifies this logic. Missiles striking the Israeli Stock Exchange building caused brief trading suspension but barely scratched the profit machine. When trading resumed, the TA-35 index rose 2.3%, driven by defense stocks. Capital’s indifference to the physical collapse of its most iconic structures confirms it has no roots, no national identity. Capital has no homeland, no religion, no ethics. Where death and ruin strike millions of proletarians, it already envisions returns, interest, and dividends.

In this context, “post-war reconstruction” — a slogan already being bandied about by Western imperialist centres — is nothing more than the other side of planned destruction. Concrete on corpses, steel on rubble, billion-dollar contracts on the blood of Iranian, Arab and Israeli proletarians: this is the true face of capitalism at war. The ridiculous caricature generated by artificial intelligence — with US President Trump triumphantly strolling through a Gaza “rebuilt” in his own image — is not a grotesque deviation, but a lucid and cynical anticipation of the real programme of the Western bourgeoisie. And it was Trump himself who spread this representation, as if to sanction the definitive fusion between financial capital, spectacular technology and war of annihilation.

A total victory for the Israeli state — however unlikely — would open up a “golden age” for the Atlantic bourgeoisie: the normalisation of relations with the oil monarchies that signed the Abraham Accords, the elimination of the Palestinian question as a hindrance, and the hoped-for geopolitical downsizing of Iran. From this perspective, genocide and regime change are considered mere entry costs for accessing a pacified and subjugated market. The new Pax imperialis, if it succeeds, will be nothing more than the silence of the grave under the sovereignty of capital.

Already today, the military-industrial complex, energy companies and construction companies are posting record profits.

The Economic Roots of the Conflict and the Illusion of a Diplomatic “Solution”

Faced with the escalation of war, the chorus of bourgeois pacifists ritualistically calls for a “return to dialogue” and new “peace agreements” – illusions that betray a radical misunderstanding of the nature of imperialist conflict. These champions of democratic peace forget that international treaties are not instruments of justice, but instruments of rule of capitalist domination: they crystallise existing power relations and legitimise the conquests of temporary winners.

The history of the Middle East is littered with ‘peace agreements’ that have turned out to be mere armistices preparing the ground for new carnage: Oslo, Camp David, the Roadmap have all failed systematically because they merely treat the political symptoms without touching the economic roots of the conflict. A genuine peace agreement would require the elimination of the capitalist system itself – precisely what imperialist diplomacy cannot conceive without denying itself.

The evolution of the conflict will depend on the balance of power between the imperialist blocs. Washington, committed to containing China, may prefer an indirect approach, while Beijing—which absorbs over 90% of Iran’s hydrocarbon exports—has already deployed electronic warfare vessels in the Persian Gulf. The Israeli offensive, while decimating the Iranian leadership and exploiting the collapse of Syria to isolate Tehran, cannot sustain itself without the American strategic umbrella. The central question remains: are the United States willing to engage in a direct confrontation with China for hegemony in the Middle East? The answer will determine whether the regional conflict will become the spark of a new global imperialist slaughter.

The Mirror Totalitarianism of Iran and Israel

A Marxist analysis of the current situation in the Middle East shows that Iran and Israel, far from representing antagonistic poles in a supposed clash of civilisations, are in fact twin expressions of bourgeois class oppression. Beyond ideological mystifications, both states demonstrate identical mastery in the art of social control and systematic repression of dissent. Their supposed rivalry is nothing more than a mask behind which hides the class solidarity between national bourgeoisies engaged in the common task of exploiting their respective working masses.

Both regimes have perfected the same instruments of domination: pervasive censorship of information, the use of war propaganda to stifle internal protests, and the complete militarisation of civil society, which has been transformed into a huge barracks at the service of national capital.

In the case of Iran, the censorship apparatus of the theocratic bourgeoisie methodically cracks down on traditional media, the internet and social media. Any voice that dares to raise criticism against the war adventure is “educatively” silenced, while those who have the temerity to question the regime’s warmongering policy are destined to attend accelerated political re-education courses in the country’s prisons. The state propaganda apparatus systematically presents the imperialist conflict as a holy war against Zionism, cynically exploiting religion, the rhetoric of martyrdom and the “red flag of vengeance” to silence dissidents – a perfect dialectical synthesis of religious mysticism and police terrorism.

In the Israeli case, the substance does not change, only the ideological orchestration. The Zionist state’s military censorship democratically “protects” strategic information about the conflict, while the press “enjoys” the democratic freedom of being subject to severe restrictions on its reporting. Anyone who dares to criticise the war policy is immediately accused of treason – a practice that is one of the most established traditions of liberal democracies. The propaganda apparatus instrumentally wields the memory of the Holocaust to pre-emptively bless any massacre, thus transforming the historical memory of Jewish persecution into a carte blanche to legitimise future atrocities against oppressed peoples.

Israeli social media are systematically flooded with advertising material extolling the alleged charitable deeds of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, taking scrupulous care never to mention the tanks of democratic peace that daily machine-gun Palestinian proletarians as they queue for bread to survive. At the same time, cameras broadcast live images of clear skies over Tel Aviv, sunshine and swallows. There is total censorship of any self-produced video showing the horrors of this war. The democratic fiction proceeds smoothly: nothing must disturb the bourgeois peace, Israel proclaims itself invincible and its defences are presented as inviolable.

This substantial identity between the two bourgeois regimes reveals the inconsistency of all those currents that claim to side now with one imperialist camp and now with the other. The international proletariat has nothing in common with either the Iranian theocracy or Zionist democracy: both represent different forms of the same capitalist oppression that must be swept away by the world communist revolution.

Trade Union Piecards Confirm Themselves

The union piecards of the Histadrut have disciplinedly fulfilled their historical function as collaborators of the state apparatus and watchdogs of the bourgeois order. Facing no organised resistance within the Israeli proletariat — which is fragmented, disoriented and devoid of any independent class consciousness — the union leadership, headed by Arnon Bar-David, was able to immediately declare its full support for the war of aggression waged by the Netanyahu government, confirming itself as one of the central cogs in the national war machine.

The Histadrut responded to the 12% wage increase in the civilian sectors, due solely to the temporary shortage of labour, with yet another patriotic statement: ‘The duty of the union is to support the homeland in danger’. Since the beginning of the military operation in Gaza, no demands have been made on behalf of the working class: only a sterile and bureaucratic statement calling for the wages of workers unable to reach their workplaces to be paid. Not a word, however, for the 45,000 Palestinian proletarians thrown into starvation by the forced suspension of work permits. No denunciation of the huge cuts in social spending, destined to directly finance the war effort.

Not content with this, the trade union centre promoted among its members — and indirectly among the entire Israeli proletariat — a campaign to subscribe to so-called ‘patriotic loans’, collecting 280 million shekels from workers’ pockets to support the war economy.

Not even a whisper of dissent was expressed by the Histadrut against the Israeli military operation against Iran. As in the case of Gaza, the union reconfirmed its role as a social buffer for bourgeois war, setting up an assistance fund — reserved exclusively for its members — for those affected by the bombings, with the sole aim of pre-emptively stifling any form of discontent that might emerge from the home front.

The conduct of the official Iranian trade unions, embodied by the so-called Islamic Labour Councils — corporate bodies established by the post-“revolutionary” regime of 1979 to discipline the proletariat within the legal-religious framework of the Islamic Republic — is specular. Throughout the conflict, these bodies did not perform any autonomous protest function, limiting themselves to carrying out the orders of the state apparatus, mobilising workers in welfare activities in favour of the displaced and appealing for national unity in the name of “resistance against the Zionist entity”. In reality, their real function — yesterday as today — is to prevent the formation of independent proletarian organisations, stifling any impulse towards class struggle under the veil of religious ideology and national subordination.

The False Alternative of Regime Change

One of the most insidious narratives accompanying the current cycle of war is that of so-called ‘regime change’ in Iran. Both Western imperialist propaganda and that of the Israeli state converge on one point: presenting the fall of the Ayatollah regime as a panacea for the ills of the region, as if the replacement of the political form could abolish the material contradictions that generate the conflict. Bourgeois impudence even goes so far as to make explicit statements: the German chancellor, no longer even bothering with the veil of diplomatic hypocrisy, has stated that Israel “is doing the dirty work for all of us”. European capital applauds, even if it remains behind the scenes for now.

From the point of view of revolutionary Marxism, this narrative is false at its root. As our party has always affirmed, the enemy is not the regime as such, but the economic-social form that it represents and defends with its repressive apparatus. It is not the form of the state that determines its nature, but the content of the relations of production that underpin it.

A regime change that leaves the rule of capital intact is nothing more than political window dressing: a metamorphosis of form, not a break with substance. The Iranian regime, founded on bourgeois theocracy, and the Israeli regime, based on a bourgeois democracy under alleged siege, are two different—but not contradictory—expressions of the same class rule.

Both subject the proletariat to national discipline, both use war as a tool of internal stabilisation, both serve national and transnational capital. Their ideological or geopolitical differences do not cancel out their common social function: to perpetuate the exploitation of wage labour, to guarantee the order of capitalist production, to annihilate any embryo of autonomous struggle by the proletariat.

A possible “regime change” in Iran — if not accompanied by a social revolution that abolishes the capitalist mode of production — would only replace one mask with another. A liberal, secular or pro-Western government would not transform the condition of the Iranian proletariat at all: it would continue to exploit it, repress it, harness it to the national state machine and the mechanisms of profit.

The history of the Middle East is overflowing with such changes of facade: monarchies overthrown by republics, republics sold off to technocracies, military replaced by civilians — but everywhere class rule has remained intact. The bourgeoisie willingly changes its political representatives, as long as its economic privileges remain intact.

Regime change is often just a way of giving new legitimacy to a system of exploitation that has lost credibility among the masses. The political form may change — from monarchy to republic, from theocracy to parliamentary democracy — but the economic substance remains unchanged: the private appropriation of the surplus value extracted from wage labour.

The modern history of Iran provides a crystal-clear example of this continuity in form and essence. The Iranian nuclear programme is not a creation of the Islamic Republic: it was launched in 1957, under the pro-Western regime of Shah Reza Pahlavi, as part of the American imperialist project “Atoms for Peace”. It was US imperialism that installed the first reactor in Tehran, and in 1974 the monarchist government signed billion-dollar contracts with Western companies for the construction of nuclear power plants: a bourgeois programme, serving national capitalist development, already disguised at the time as technological modernisation.

The Shah’s regime, beloved by Western imperialism, was no less bloody than the current one. Founded on the ferocity of the SAVAK — a secret police apparatus trained by the CIA — monarchical Iran specialised in the industrial export of torture. Its instruments of repression, the fruit of national technological “excellence”, were sold to democratic and dictatorial regimes alike, transforming suffering into a commodity and pain into business. Red-hot chairs, acid nasal sprays, and the “Apollo” electric chair — with a metal mask to amplify the screams of the tortured — were the cream of the crop of repressive engineering made in Iran: a veritable niche product in the global free market.

The Islamic revolution of 1979 did nothing but replace one form of bourgeois rule with another. Where there was once a militarist monarchy, there is now a militarist theocracy. The nuclear programme has continued, and workers continue to be exploited. The rhetoric has changed, but not the substance: Iranian capital continues to accumulate, now under the banner of Islam instead of the monarchy.

The Iranian proletariat must beware of the deceptive siren songs of all those self-styled “workers” parties’ which, in the hour of crisis for the theocratic regime, are rushing to pick up the legacy of bourgeois power: the Mojahedin of the national-democrats of Kalak, the Kurdish nationalist factions waving the flag of petty-bourgeois self-determination, the Pahlavian neo-fascists nostalgically invoking the return of the imperialist monarchy, and the whole plethora of liberal-social democratic formations swarming in the university student movement.

But the Iranian proletariat must neither fall into the error of identifying itself with Hekmatism, which, while retaining the merit of denouncing the imperialist character of the present war and exposing the betrayal of these bourgeois opposition movements that pander to the workers, nevertheless remains imprisoned in democratic and gradualist rhetoric, incapable of proposing a genuine revolutionary alternative to the proletariat. This current, while proclaiming itself authentically Marxist, cannot free itself from the shackles of gradualism, culturalism, councilism and therefore democratic illusions.

The position of revolutionary communists cannot be reduced to sterile humanitarian propaganda to defend the proletariat from the effects of war – a task that belongs to the welfare organisations of the bourgeoisie. Communists cannot compete with the Islamic Labour Councils by remaining on their same level! The historical duty of the communist vanguard is instead to organize the Iranian proletarian movement in the perspective of transforming the imperialist war into a revolutionary civil war between the classes. Only in this way can the proletariat escape the blackmail of national unity and definitively break the chains that bind it to its exploiters, whether they are dressed with Nehru jackets or collars.

The Proletariat, the Perspective, and the Party

What position should the international proletariat take in this imperialist slaughterhouse? The answer is unequivocal: the workers have no homeland to defend, they have no interest in shedding their blood for one of the bourgeois factions in struggle.

The Iranian regime and the Zionist state are equally enemies of the working class: both ruthlessly exploit their proletarians, both use war to stifle internal contradictions, both annihilate any attempt at autonomous workers’ organisation. The Persian workers sacrificed for the ‘glory of the Islamic revolution’ and the Jewish workers sacrificed for ‘national security’ are victims of the same capitalist logic.

The proletariat has no homeland: its homeland is the whole world, its enemy is world capital. When the bourgeois slaughter each other, the proletariat must turn its weapons against the bourgeoisie.

This position, far from being utopian, is the only realistic one: every time the working class has allowed itself to be dragged into imperialist carnage, it has emerged decimated and subjugated. Imperialist war dialectically contains the seeds of its own negation: social destruction, the sharpening of contradictions and growing militarisation create the conditions for revolutionary crisis.

It will be decisive for the proletariat to rediscover its class autonomy, its courage and independent spirit, in order to transform the imperialist war into a revolutionary civil war.

The most emblematic example of capitalist logic: while missiles rained down on the Tel Aviv stock exchange, the stock market rose vertiginously. Military stocks, security companies and construction companies posted record profits. Capital had already monetised the present destruction, transforming it into future investment. Against this logic of death, pacifist moralising or reforms of international law are useless: what is needed is proletarian revolution, the overthrow of the capitalist mode of production. The revolutionary party must prepare for this final showdown, leading the working class to the historic crossroads: socialism or barbarism.

The International Communist Party rejects petty-bourgeois hysteria and pseudo-revolutionary rhetoric saturated with pacifist or humanitarian moralism. It does not offer false “concrete solutions” when these do not exist. Small and weak, it nevertheless remains invincible as long as it keeps its strategic compass steady, immune to opportunistic compromises, democratic whining and nationalist exaltation. Revolution matures in the times of history, not in subjective impatience.