The world looked on in horror when, on June 21, US warplanes carried out a massive air strike against Iran. This included the use of “bunker buster” bombs, the biggest non-nuclear bomb known to exist. In the aftermath, Donald Trump rushed through a ceasefire with Iran and Israel and declared the conflict over. Despite this, stability in the Middle East is precarious. Worse, the Israeli state’s genocide in Gaza is ongoing and devastating. Palestinians are being killed at aid sites and children are dying of starvation.

Many workers and young people around the world are looking for any way to oppose the violence. The Israeli state’s devastation and the threat of a regional war require building an international anti-war movement. International, working-class solidarity is the best way to oppose the imperialist slaughter.

It’s not enough, however, for the anti-war movement to know what it’s against. We need political clarity about what we are fighting for. We want a world free from imperialist war, state violence, and national oppression. This means opposing all imperialism, not just American imperialism, but imperialists like Russia and China as well.

This requires a clear opposition to the regime in Iran, a right-wing dictatorship closely linked to Russian and Chinese imperialism and with regional imperialist ambitions of its own. The Iranian government has portrayed itself as leading an “Axis of Resistance” against Israel. But the anti-war movement needs a clear understanding that the Iranian state doesn’t represent a genuine force of liberation for either the Palestinian or the Iranian people.

Opposing All Imperialism

The starting point for socialists in the United States is to acknowledge the central responsibility of US imperialism in spreading chaos and devastation throughout the region. Its crimes range from steadfast support to Israel, to waging wars for oil against Iraq, to a history of propping up dictators like the Shah of Iran and Saddam Hussein in Iraq. US imperialism has undermined the whole region for the benefit of a few American billionaires and corporations.

But socialists reject the idea that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” A key tenet of Marxism is recognizing the class struggle underpinning society. This means not conflating the workers of a country with its government. Opposing the Israeli state in no way means supporting the Iranian state or vice versa.

The Iranian government is a pro-capitalist dictatorship that maintains rule through brutal repression and right-wing religious fundamentalism. Women’s rights are suppressed at the hands of the “morality police.” Being LGBTQ is punishable by death. Trade unions are illegal and unionists and Marxists are routinely imprisoned.

Beyond state repression, life in Iran means living with 22% youth unemployment and 38% food inflation. It means living through a housing crisis where some residents in Tehran spend over 50% of their income on rent. This crisis is exacerbated by US sanctions but is nonetheless a consequence of Iranian capitalism.

Internal opposition to the Iranian state has seen four rebellions since 2009, the most recent being the “Women, Life, Freedom” movement. These were brutally suppressed by the government. These rebellions also reveal a history of struggle in Iran which genuinely points a way forward.

A History Of Struggle

The current government in Iran dates to the 1979 revolution that overthrew the US-backed dictatorship of the Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. This was a genuinely mass movement against imperialist exploitation. The revolution was led by the working class, including labor unions and Marxists. Street demonstrations and insurrection were backed by general strikes.

However, the revolution ended up dominated by the mullahs led by the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Khomeini played a marginal role at the beginning of the revolution and his aides were in covert negotiations with the US when the revolution broke out. However, the Communist party, called the Tudeh Party, influenced by Stalinist distortions of Marxism, argued that workers had to support the Ayatollah as a progressive anti-imperialist. On assuming leadership, the mullahs waged a counter-revolution, arresting the workers, unionists, and Marxists who made the revolution in the first place.

The current regime in Iran dresses up in the garb of the 1979 revolution. But it’s actually the product of the Ayatollah’s counter-revolution.

Since then the Iranian dictatorship has faced political upheaval. The 2009 “Green Revolution” against election rigging prefigured the revolutions across the Middle East and North Africa two years later. In 2022, Iran was shaken by the “Woman, Life, Freedom” uprising. This was in response to the murder by the “morality police” of a Kurdish-Iranian woman, Jina Amini. We should not underestimate the West’s desire to co-opt these movements for their own regime change aims, but fundamentally the needs of working people in Iran cannot be realized under a Western-style, capitalist “democracy” or under the present theocracy.

The Iranian regime’s military support for Hamas is rooted in its imperial ambitions in the region, not the real liberation of working-class people, in the occupied Palestinian territories or otherwise. The struggle of the Palestinian people against Israeli state repression only stands to benefit from mass struggles demanding basic needs, in Iran and across the Middle East. But you can’t stand in solidarity with these struggles while defending the Iranian government. The international struggle of the working class holds the key to shutting down production and can challenge the whole capitalist system. Deals between dictatorships and imperialist powers can’t accomplish that.

Role Of Socialists In The US

While socialists have to staunchly oppose the Iranian state, we also have to be clear that the main enemy is at home. The biggest danger in the US is accommodation to Trump, the Israeli state, and US imperialism. First and foremost, socialists support building the widest possible anti-war movement in the streets.

This is in stark contrast to the approach of Democratic party politicians, who by and large support war and imperialism. Chuck Schumer ridiculously used the term TACO (Trump Always Chickens Out) to criticize Trump for being insufficiently pro-imperialist: talking tough on Iran, then “chickening out” and trying to negotiate a deal. (Of course, Trump 180’ed again when he ordered the air strike.) 

The responses from Bernie Sanders and AOC were slight improvements. They opposed Trump’s air strikes and AOC went so far as to call for impeachment. However, they limited their opposition to critiquing Trump for bypassing Congress. Trump’s authoritarian tendencies are genuinely alarming, but it’s ridiculous to limit opposition to imperialist war to procedural questions.

Unfortunately, the lack of a genuine mass movement and the failure of the Democratic Party has left the isolationist far right within the Republican Party as the most vocal opposition to intervention in Iran. Talk show host Tucker Carlson and Q-Anon conspiracy theorist Marjorie Taylor Greene, vehement enemies of the working class, ended up the most prominent figures demanding “no more foreign wars, no more regime change.”

In contrast to Greene, we call for the working class to take independent action against the war. This should include organizing strikes or refusing to handle cargo destined for the Israel Defense Forces. We need to rebuild the campus movement that began with last year’s encampments. We need to demand an end to US military aid to Israel and to instead redirect those billions of dollars to social services.
Socialists support peace, but we need to point out that the current conflict is the direct result of imperialist policies. As long as capitalism remains intact, real peace is not possible for working people anywhere.