Internationalist Statement on the War in Iran

An Internationalist Statement on the War in Iran-March 3, 2026

Published by

Lasinistracomunistainternazionale (Italy, Schio): sinistracomunistainternazionale.com/

In Iran, where the Islamic bourgeois regime massacred thousands of proletarians in January, the war unleashed by the United States and Israel under the pretext of bringing about regime change and with the aim of establishing democracy has broken out. The result achieved by these brigands will only be to further destabilize and destroy the lives of millions of human beings belonging to the proletarian class. The ongoing war is not our war, but that of all capitalist states and powers, regardless of their camp, against the workers—that is, the class without reserve. But this is nothing new, for every capitalist and imperialist war is a war against the proletariat: either to eliminate the “surplus population” and revive the global economy in crisis, or to annihilate it as a “dangerous class” to the bourgeois order.

The Islamic Republic, the United States, Israel, and all the capitalist actors operating on the Middle Eastern theater of war are invariably the common enemies of the proletariat. Whatever the outcome of this war and whatever its consequences—including the institutional form the Iranian state will take—the result of this armed intervention will be the destruction of workers’ lives and, for the survivors, a drastic deterioration of their living and working conditions. The proletarians and workers of Iran, like those of all the states involved in the conflict, must not expect any salvific interventions from the imperialist warmongers and must harbor no illusions regarding the miraculous virtues of bourgeois democracy.

Capitalist states, whatever their forms and alignments, use war as an instrument of survival in the struggle between rival powers and to control the proletariat. At a time when the world is once again engulfed by violence, bombings, and death, we must reaffirm a basic truth: the real victims are always the proletariat, and certainly not states, ideologies, or borders. Instead of being the battlefield of our class—the international working class against capitalism and all nation-states—the world has increasingly become the theater of the ferocity of capitalist warmongers vying for world domination.

The United States, Europe, Russia, China, India, and even Iran, along with all the states of the rest of the world, play their role as mass murderers through various forms of intervention: their wars concern the distribution of profits, power, and property in order to protect and defend the existence of capital by making the proletarians—militarily organized and lined up on opposing fronts—kill one another.

This atrocious truth is written in history with the blood of millions of human beings.

The proletariat’s struggle must not take sides with any of the belligerent states, for all of them, regardless of their political form, are invariably its mortal enemies. Defeatism against one’s own state, the unity of the international proletariat across all borders, are not empty words, but the only tools at the proletarian class’s disposal to act against this inhuman order or, conversely, to be challenged by its organized power. The proletariat is the class from which all social production emanates, and from its current temporary inertia stems the survival of all states and all capital. Only by reclaiming its strength and organizing it outside of national fronts and blocs can the proletariat transform the war and peace of cannibalistic capital into opportunities for its class revolt.

The opposite stance consists of defending one or another of the bourgeois nation-states at war, under the banner of “anti-imperialism,” as advocated by social democrats, chauvinists, and counter-revolutionaries disguised as “Marxists” and “anarchists.” This “partisan” and “campist” position (= support for one camp or another) always defends one of the imperialist states and camps or blocs at war.

We are in favor 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 is still too weak today, and when it does manifest itself, it does so in a chaotic manner, as it emerges from the systemic chaos in which historical and global capitalism finds itself.

Consequently, contradictions and chaos prevent proletarian internationalism and revolutionary defeatism from developing, both in practice and in theory. From a practical standpoint, the struggle of the Gaza proletariat should have developed against both the Israeli army’s occupation and the armed apparatuses of the Palestinian bourgeoisie. Similarly, we should have witnessed a greater expansion of the struggle by the proletariat in uniform to sabotage the war on the Russian-Ukrainian border. From a theoretical standpoint, we observe the various positions and debates on these issues among the radical minorities of the international proletariat. Despite all the contradictions, complexities, and current limitations of this systemic chaos, the class struggle exists, revolts exist, and, consequently, the necessity and possibility of a social revolution exist.

In this context, we support the struggle of the proletariat in the Iranian region against the Iranian bourgeois state, the struggle of the American proletariat as well as that of the Israeli proletariat against their respective states, and so on in all regions and all countries without exception. To the Iranian proletariat, who have already paid an enormous price in blood, we say that their struggle must not be diverted toward objectives that do not serve 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 determined to preserve capitalist relations and perpetuate wage slavery. What is presented as a “transition,” a “salvation,” or a “reconstruction” is not a response to poverty, exploitation, or repression, nor a path toward human liberation, but a maneuver aimed at diverting the struggle from its true course, which must lead to the abolition of wage labor and the dismantling of the capitalist order. Any claim to the contrary is a deception or a betrayal.

March 3, 2026