WeeklyWorker

26.06.2025
Keep on marching ... but, more, much more, is needed

War, genocide and ceasefire

Iranian left - within the country and without - must facilitate, encourage and take full advantage of any loosening of the ayatollahs' grip, through an immediate programme designed to defend the lives and interests of the broad mass of the population. A statement of the CPGB Provisional Central Committee

It is all looking very choreographed. After American B-2 bombers and cruise missiles struck Iran’s nuclear facilities at Fordow, Natanz and Esfahan on June 21, there came a token retaliation. On June 23 Iran launched missiles at the US Al Udeid military base in Qatar. Advanced warning was given and none got through. A US-brokered ceasefire between Israel and Iran followed. It can only but be fragile and temporary.

The present crisis was triggered by Israel’s full-scale attack on June 13: Operation Rising Lion. Israel claimed that Iran lay just weeks away from making nine nuclear weapons - a widely derided lie. Doubtless the International Atomic Energy Agency board declared Iran in breach of its obligations under the Non-Proliferation Treaty for the first time in what was a highly political 19 to 3 vote (there were 11 abstentions). But that hardly amounts to the imminent threat of Israel becoming a “victim of a nuclear holocaust”.

In the making

Indeed, Iranian negotiators seem to have been under the impression that a deal with the US was within reach in the next round of talks in Oman (due to have taken place on June 15). No less to the point, Israel’s operation was “eight months in the making” and America’s own military operation likewise “took months and weeks of positioning and preparation” (Pete Hegseth).

Why did Israel attack when it did? Netanyahu saw a window of opportunity to achieve two long-held strategic objectives. First, knock out - or at the least thoroughly degrade - a regional rival. Second, use conflict with Iran as a cover to ‘finish the job’ with the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. Mass expulsions would coincide with, or be followed by, annexations and the realisation of the Zionist dream of a Greater Israel.

Benjamin Netanyahu, along with most Zionists, cynically paints Iran as being “singularly hellbent on Israel’s annihilation”. Naturally, the Tehran regime pays lip-service to opposing Israel and calls for “a single, democratic Palestinian state” through “holding a referendum of all the original inhabitants”, including Muslims, Jews and Christians. Hardly practical - requiring, one presumes, the exodus, or expulsion, of all post-1948 migrants (them and their offspring and descendants). However, as shown by June 13 and subsequent events, Iran is in no position to do anything about Palestine. Israel is militarily strong, Iran pathetically weak. Not that the ayatollahs actually want to help the Palestinians - well, apart, that is, from using them as pawns when and if the opportunity arises.

Had Iran the technical wherewithal to build, launch and deliver a nuclear warhead that could destroy Tel Aviv or Haifa, it would be highly unlikely to embark on any such suicidal course. After all, what would happen immediately afterwards? Total destruction. Israel has at least 140 nuclear warheads. And the Tehran regime is concerned with one thing above all else - survival. That is why, perhaps, it might have calculated on achieving a near-ready nuclear weapon capability in order to act as a deterrent. It is not gripped by some Islamic death wish - a racist commonplace peddled in the Israeli media.

Of course, what began on June 13 was never a war of conquest. Israel simply lacks the military capacity to do that. Nor did the US want to take such a course. Iran has a population of around 90 million. An invading army would not be greeted as liberators by the mass of the population. No, on the contrary, it would face determined resistance of the kind seen in Iraq - except on a far bigger and more deadly scale.

Netanyahu talked of regime change. However, for a managed regime change to happen there would need to be an alternative regime waiting in the wings. You cannot bring about regime change with bombs and missiles launched from F-14s, F-16s, F-35s and B-2s. There was certainly no credible ‘great leader’ about to be parachuted in by the US-Israel, who would galvanise the Iranian population behind them. The Mujahadeen-e-Khalq of Maryam Rajavi is almost universally regarded as a crazy, weird cult … and it certainly has no mass base in Iran itself. As for the royalists and Reza Pahlavi - though he is heavily financed and promoted by the US and Israel - no serious commentator rates his chances. Some upper-class exiles like to imagine his father, Mohammad Reza, as an enlightened despot, but within Iran itself few want to swap the theocracy they know and hate for a return to a monarchy that their parents hated and overthrew.

Here in Britain we should certainly keep marching. Solidarity with Palestinians, especially those in Gaza, is rightly joined with ‘Hands off Iran’ calls. However, more must be done. Workers at airports and ports can be won to refuse to handle goods, especially arms, headed for Israel. Such agitation would be more than timely.

Defeat

Expecting workers at Rolls Royce, BAE Systems or Leonardo to strike and maybe put themselves out of a much needed job is an altogether bigger ask. Moralistic attacks on ordinary workers should, though, be avoided at all cost. However, despite remaining in the realms of the symbolic, it is quite right to demand that the UK government rescind all export licences for military-related goods going to Israel.

David Lammy sheds crocodile tears over Gaza, but will, for example, do nothing to block the delivery of UK-made spares for Israel’s F-35s. He dares not upset Trump and the US. Maintaining the recent trade deal with the US matters infinitely more than the lives of Palestinians.

We must openly declare for the revolutionary defeat of our ‘own’ side: that is, Israel, its US sponsor and its UK and other such enablers. What that poses is going beyond the ‘strike and street’ politics of protest doggedly pursued by the Socialist Workers Party, Socialist Party in England and Wales, Revolutionary Communist Party and the other confessional sects. We need to embrace the politics of power.

Jeremy Corbyn’s much touted new outfit is worse than useless here. The same goes for George Galloway’s Workers Party of Britain and the Green Party, even if led by the soft left’s latest messiah, the born-again Zack Polanski. Such organisations are verbally committed to doing little more than tinkering with the system. They accept the existing constitution, the existing state and the existing capitalist socio-economic order. None of them even so much as question wage slavery.

They claim to want a peaceful, just and democratic capitalism. But capitalism is unpeaceful, unjust and undemocratic. So their effective role is to reinforce ideological illusions … and thereby ultimately serve capitalism. No, what is needed is a principled, mass Communist Party. Only such a party, organised on an international scale, can lead the working class to state power and put an end to the global capitalist system of greed, imperialist exploitation … and war.

Defence

What about Iran? We have no corresponding wish to see Iran defeated. The Iranian left - within the country and without - must, of course, facilitate, encourage and take full advantage of any loosening of the ayatollah’s grip, through an immediate programme designed to defend the lives and interests of the broad mass of the population.

Demands should certainly be raised for a rigorous and comprehensive rationing system. Everyone must receive according to their needs. Basic goods should be distributed for free or strictly price-capped. This is a particularly urgent question, especially for the precariat, who have in recent weeks seen their incomes drop almost to zero.

The huge black-market rackets run by regime insiders are widely known. These criminals should suffer confiscation of all ill-gotten gains and receive suitable punishment.

Local volunteer committees came together to handle the challenges of the Covid pandemic. Something like that needs to be encouraged under conditions of war and near war. Elected neighbourhood committees could monitor price caps, help establish early-warning systems, along with locating suitable air raid shelters in the metro system, deep tunnels and basements.

Privatised industries, such as telecommunications, steel, water and power generation, must immediately be brought back under direct state control. Those companies withholding the payment of wages should face confiscation. Banks and insurance companies must be nationalised and the country’s $6.3 billion foreign debt repudiated.

The regime must not be allowed to blame its humiliating inability to defend the country on the left and other progressive forces. Root out Mossad agents in the state apparatus, yes. Otherwise release all political prisoners, annul all restrictive laws directed against women, socialists and trade union activists.

Programme

Above all, the mass of the population needs to be won to a programme that preserves the unity of the country and makes it truly worth defending from Israeli (and US) aggression. That can only be done by demanding:

Crucially, theocratic rule must be ended. Elections to a constituent assembly, working class state power and the fullest democracy then become realisable. But more still is needed. Proletarian internationalism is vital. An isolated revolution in Iran would suffer sanctions, air attacks and sabotage a hundred times worse than anything we have seen so far. To survive, the revolution must spread to Iraq, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Egypt and come to the rescue of Lebanon, Syria, the West Bank and Gaza.

The idea of working class rule can also, of course, reach into Israel, Russia, Europe, China and America itself. If we are going to save humanity from the real and growing danger of big-power conflict and nuclear war, that is our best hope.

It is: socialism or barbarism.

June 24 2025