Your Enemy Is at Home, Not in Iran

An article against war propaganda, imperialist robbery and our role in resisting it

André Masson. Tauromachie. 1937. via Wikiart

I usually don’t use my articles to respond to current events, because that often makes meaningful structural analysis more difficult or downright impossible. I also happen to be a (very) slow writer. Right now, though? It feels impossible to write anything else, and there are always general points that can be applied to the concrete situation.

So, let’s talk about what the Israeli attack on Iran means, and along what lines it needs to be resisted.

About half an hour after the first explosions rocked Tehran, the internationally wanted genocidaire and terrorist Netanyahu gave a speech in English clearly aimed at Western audiences, trying to justify the attack. This is a familiar play by now. One line still stood out to me:

“Iran plans to give those weapons, nuclear weapons, to its terrorist proxies. That would make the nightmare of nuclear terrorism all too real. The increasing range of Iran’s ballistic missiles would bring that nuclear nightmare to the cities of Europe and eventually to America.”

On that note, Israel’s very own ex-PM Naftali Bennett also released a hilariously terrible propaganda video about Netanyahu’s fantasy scenario, which I just can’t keep from you, because it is a perfect example of how dysfunctional Israeli messaging has become in the face of their genocide-induced image collapse:

Does that sound and look familiar? Well, those of you who were around for the start of the Iraq War—or those of you who studied it after the fact—might remember the fantastical narratives about imminent attacks by Saddam Hussein’s ‘powerful’ military forces and their (fabricated) al-Qaida allies, prepared to strike European and American cities with chemical weapons. This was one of the many lies the war was built on, and how consent for it was established; always secondary to the grand lie of nuclear weapons, but not irrelevant. Saddam was painted as the Hitler of Baghdad, and what do you do with Hitler? You have to put him down with overwhelming force.

Did people actually believe that London, Paris and Washington were in danger of being struck by ballistic missiles carrying sarin gas? Well, the short answer is no, and even popularised stories about the panic buying of gas masks and such are mostly later exaggerations.

In that spirit:

Do people actually believe that Iran would have any interest, reason or sudden breakdown severe enough to strike targets in Europe or the US with entirely theoretical nuclear weapons? Obviously, no. The claim is utterly ridiculous even to the most die-hard regime change advocates, but that’s not what this is about in the first place.

Saddam’s Iraq and today’s Iran are neither the first nor the last states to receive this treatment of being recast as a danger to Western metropoles. Assad was once decried as another Hitler during the height of the Syrian Civil War, when the US, the comprador Gulf States and their European allies still had hopes of a quick overthrow of the state. Before him, it was Gaddafi, painted as the epitome of a ruthless murderer of his own people and, more importantly, an international sponsor of ‘terrorism’. And long before him? Britain and France famously tried to frame Egypt’s Nasser as the ‘Mussolini of the Nile’ while attempting to reoccupy the Suez Canal with Israeli support in 1956. The list goes on. These are different set pieces, but the same old justifications for imperialist war, murder and robbery.

The point of this increasingly rabid rhetoric isn’t so much to convince people of its validity, but to make these war narratives part of the acceptable discourse; to prepare the way for action.

Most ‘experts’ who are currently being paraded through the bourgeois media smugly wave off the ridiculous claims that Tehran is close to unleashing a nuclear holocaust, while with the other hand they wag their finger and decry the instability the ‘regime’ brings to the region, that it has provoked Israel and needs to respect ‘valid security concerns’, that Iran must be reasonable and avoid further conflict, that they should restart talks even as they are being bombed, and so on and so forth. If all else fails, perhaps some human rights experts and Middle Eastern Studies graduates from American universities can be drummed up to point at various detainees, political prisoners and upcoming executions in Iran to condemn in the harshest terms. Famously, Israeli missiles never kill women or gay people, nor would the US ever execute oppressed minorities. In the Western bourgeois media, only Muslims do—especially if they are on the wrong side of the next war.

Even as I’m finishing this article, the consent machine is running hot. While Iran is retaliating against Tel Aviv, over at CNN, official Israeli spokespeople and unofficial Israeli spokespeople are given a platform to swear vengeance, cry injustice, and demand further terror against the people of Iran, Palestine and just about anyone else you can imagine.

All of them, from state officials to journalists at the bottom of the self-replicating propaganda machine, are ultimately united in their purpose, consciously or not:

This purpose is to convince people thousands of miles away that their enemy is the state of Iran, and that the missiles, drones and incendiary bombs travelling from Tel-Aviv to Tehran and the rest of the country are not only in their interest, but also in the interest of the people of Iran who are yearning for liberation from the ‘mullah regime’. Already, the leading Western states—the US, France, the UK, Germany, Italy and their dependents—are once again rallying behind the Israeli colonial state and its supposed right of ‘self-defence’ against the war it started, all while continuing to support the genocide against Palestinians. It is looking increasingly like they are prepared to take part in yet another brutal redivision of the world at the expense of tens of millions by attempting to dismantle Iran and tear apart one of the central pillars of resistance to US domination in the region.

This is the result of the world system of imperialist capitalism, the primary enemy of the international proletariat. It must be resisted at all costs, but the question is, how can it be resisted? What is the correct political line in the face of an imperialist war of aggression?

To answer these questions, let’s talk about the contradictions of imperialism and their effects on Iran’s position.

Imperialism and Its Many Enemies

Iron Dome interceptions over Tel-Aviv, via Wall Street Journal

The primary contradiction of all things political, as long as capitalism remains the dominant mode of production, remains between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. So far, so good.

However, in today’s age, where the vast majority of the world has long been divided between the dominant capitalist states and their monopolies, this conflict expresses itself through the general bourgeois interest of perpetuating imperialism, while the general proletarian interest is to resist it. The imperialist bourgeoisie and their states seek to redivide the world in their favor, smash open new markets, and subjugate proletarians under increasingly miserable conditions to drive down the cost of labor while bribing their domestic working class into compliance with the help of accumulated superprofits. All of this objectively turns the global proletariat, especially in the most exploited regions of the world, into the imperialists’ uncompromising enemies, resulting in the anti-imperialist struggle, now immanent to the class conflict.

But, of course, those aren’t the imperialists’ only enemies. The concrete lines of these conflicts depend on the local conditions, but their ranks are often joined by:

• Smallholding peasants, middle peasants and even agricultural landowners who cannot compete with the flood of foreign products, are bought out of their land or the land they work, become dependent on high-industry products to stay competitive, or get ruined by price-dumping schemes.

• The petit-bourgeoisie, represented by independent lawyers and doctors, shopkeepers, food-stall owners, and just about any other ‘small-business’ you can imagine, who are outcompeted and proletarianized in the process.

• Even the sections of the domestic bourgeoisie, whose particular branches of commodity production can’t be integrated by the imperialist bourgeoisie and are instead entirely subordinated, ultimately threatening the former’s profits and market-share, or even their very class position.

All of them can turn against imperialism, but unlike proletarians, this isn’t a result of their class position in general, but rather a question of secondary contradictions, which are entirely circumstantial and can lead them right back into the camp of the imperialist bourgeoisie if it is in their immediate interest.

Beyond that, the imperialists are also in competition with each other for who gets to exploit which territories of the globe and which sections of its proletarians. Over time, these conflicts intensify and become unresolvable via purely economic means, creating the stage for inter-imperialist war, as they did before during the First and Second World War.

The reason I’m telling you this is because it is necessary to understand the role of any given state in the general struggle between imperialism and anti-imperialism, to understand the nature of the conflicts this state is involved in; it is necessary to develop a political line against ‘unjust’ wars, and find a way to intervene in ‘just’ wars in a way that advances the revolutionary proletarian political line.

As Lenin wrote in 1915, contrasting wars of oppressed states with wars between the imperialists:

“For example, if tomorrow, Morocco were to declare war on France, India on England, Persia or China on Russia, and so forth, those would be ‘just,’ ‘defensive’ wars, irrespective of who attacked first; and every Socialist would sympathise with the victory of the oppressed, dependent, unequal states against the oppressing, slaveowning, predatory ‘great’ powers.

But picture to yourselves a slave-owner who owned 100 slaves warring against a slave-owner who owned 200 slaves for a more ‘just’ distribution of slaves. Clearly, the application of the term ‘defensive’ war, or war ‘for the defence of the fatherland’ in such a case would be historically false, and in practice would be sheer deception of the common people, of philistines, of ignorant people, by the astute slaveowners. Precisely in this way are the present-day imperialist bourgeoisie deceiving the peoples by means of ‘national ideology’ and the term ‘defence of the fatherland’ in the present war between slave-owners for fortifying and strengthening slavery.”

— Lenin, Socialism and War, 1915

Using Lenin’s framework, it is absolutely clear that, for example, the so-called ‘war’ between Israel and Palestine is a ‘just’ war for Palestinians, fighting for their liberation and against genocide. You don’t need to be a communist to understand this.

Whenever zionists decry the October 7th attacks, what is the answer? History did not start on October 7th! This argument—an instinctively correct argument—actually isn’t so much about who started it, but rather about the conditions inflicted upon Palestinians by the Zionist colonial project: Those of colonial subjugation, national oppression and genocide. Any war against such conditions is by definition a ‘just’ war; a ‘defensive’ war; a war of national liberation. This is obvious to anyone with a functioning moral compass that hasn’t been eaten away by genocidal ideology.

Now, if we look at the case of Iran, the situation isn’t quite as obvious. Iran may have been attacked by Israel, but as we have seen above, the question of who attacked first hardly matters—it is about the objective position of the war parties in the world imperialist system and their goals within it.

The Class Character of Iran and the War

Smoke rising from Tel-Aviv after Iranian retaliation strike, via Al Jazeera

This article obviously can’t give a comprehensive or even vaguely adequate overview of Iranian history, so for the sake of brevity, I will stick to the class character of the 1979 Iranian Revolution that toppled the Shah’s puppet dictatorship, and how this class character persists today. The Shahist state was, despite what flag-waving fascists who support the Shah’s restoration from California might make you believe, a project of the comprador bourgeoisie, in alliance with Washington and the Israeli state, designed to keep a steady flow of oil exports and deny it to the Soviet Union. Iran was effectively a semi-colony. This worked for some time, until the comprador bourgeoisie overstepped and tried to assert more direct control of Iran’s resources, ultimately resulting in failure and, with that, a showcase of their real weakness in the face of imperialist domination. The vicious cycle of protest followed by inadequate repression came to a head in 1978-79.

The Iranian revolution was mainly an urban movement that managed to mobilize the peasantry behind national liberation from foreign domination, not dissimilar to other anti-colonial movements of the prior decade. This movement was chiefly led by the urban proletariat and the urban petit-bourgeoisie, with the latter ultimately winning out by entering into a generalised alliance with the small-holding peasantry, middle peasants, vast sections of the reactionary and feudal intelligentsia, and above all the non-comprador sections of the national bourgeoisie. They defeated the proletariat, and with that, the progressive tendency, marked by the suppression of the Tudeh Party and its allies among the larger communist movement. This is the class base of the so-called ‘Islamic Revolution’, which swept away the semi-colonial structures and the ruling comprador bourgeoisie, and replaced them with a class-collaborationist state dominated by the petit-bourgeoisie and a new national bourgeoisie. Iran may be a bourgeois dictatorship, but once again, the secondary contradictions can’t be ignored.

Right after the revolution, the United States and its regional puppets conspired with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, which had only recently abandoned cooperation with the Soviet Union, to seize the Persian oil fields and choke the new state in the crib. What followed was a decade of brutal war and imperialist siege to win back what had been lost with the Shahist state’s collapse. This brutal assault by imperialism never allowed the Iranian national bourgeoisie to enter into unequal cooperation with the bourgeoisie of the imperial core, since they had to defend their very existence, forcing them to take on a circumstantial anti-imperialist position—in short, they never had the opportunity to become a comprador bourgeoisie¹. Since then, the Iranian bourgeoisie has been defending their little parcel of the world market against all foreign impositions, while attempting to dislodge the US—and above all their colonial outpost in Israel—from the wider region.

This is why Iran is taking on an objectively anti-imperialist position, despite its reactionary class character as a bourgeois class-collaborationist state, weighed down by feudal remnants. Usually, this would be a breeding ground for fascism, but the Iranian bourgeoisie does not have the resources or sufficiently developed productive forces to transition toward finance capital as its primary form of accumulation, which is a structural necessity of fascism. Only proletarian dictatorships are anti-imperialist by their basic class character, but other classes may take on this position under pressure from imperialism, and this is the exact case in Iran.

This leaves us with only one conclusion:

Iran has been a state under siege by Western imperialism since 1979, and now this siege has escalated to a full frontal assault, led by the imperial core’s attack dog in the region, Israel. It is a ‘just’ war, not least of all because it could dislodge the genocidal Zionist regime. However, and this is what differentiates Marxists from campists who pick their favorite bourgeois state, the secondary contradictions never invalidate the primary contradiction, and in the case of Iran, this, of course, remains the contradiction between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie.

This puts the Iranian working class into a supremely difficult position, but that changes nothing about the correct line. The enemy of the Iranian proletariat is not only the imperialists who seek to dismantle their state, throwing them into chaos as they have done in Libya and Syria, and then right into neo-colonial domination; the enemy of the Iranian proletariat is also the bourgeois class-collaborationist state, and the reactionary classes allied to it. The only state that can actually be free from imperialist domination, and with that liberate Iran, is the dictatorship of the proletariat. The concrete political line to achieve this is not decided in Western discussion, but by the Iranian working class and their organisations. Understanding the class character of the current situation is only the first step.

And what is ‘our’ task in the face of a war of imperialist aggression? And by ‘our’, I’m referring to those who live in the imperial core, who are still the majority of my readers.

Well, I’ll let Karl Liebknecht, one of the most principled enemies of imperialist war in the history of my country, say it in his own words, but you might have guessed it from the title:

“The main enemy of every people is in their own country! […] Ally yourselves to the international class struggle against the conspiracies of secret diplomacy, against imperialism, against war, for peace within the socialist spirit.

The main enemy is at home!“

Your enemy is not Iran, and it is certainly not the Iranian people; it is and has always been imperialism. It is the states of imperial core—The United States, France, the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, and their many dependents—giving unconditional support to their genocidal puppet regime in Tel-Aviv, as they have done for the last twenty months, and as they have done for the last seventy-odd years.

Solidarity with our class sisters and brothers in Iran, Palestine and wherever else the imperialists may strike is the slogan of the hour. When they scream at us ‘down with the mullah regime,’ our answer must be:

Down with the regime in Washington, in Paris, in London, in Berlin, in Rome and in Tel-Aviv!

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Thank you for reading!

Once again, it took a whole month to put out an article, but this one was actually written in the span of a few days. The topic is important, and the words kept coming. This is good news, because there are other articles close to done that would have usually taken the place of this one, until Israel's bombing of Tehran changed my plans.

Look forward to that! I hope this commentary on recent events isn’t too far off from what you expect, but I think the analysis was worth it.

If you made it all the way down here, consider leaving some of your thoughts in the comments. I’m always glad to read your opinions and discussions.

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1. There is a case to be made that Iran’s national bourgeoisie has recently become more and more subordinated to Chinese finance capital, but this would blow the entire article out of proportion and get me bogged down in a dozen preemptive arguments against Dengists, so that is a topic for another day.