Middle East in Flames: Next Step Toward Global Capitalist War

Statement of the Internationalist Communist Tendency

Our aversion to war is not just for humanitarian and sentimental reasons, but the fact that it is ultimately conducted against the proletariat.

Onorato Damen at the first conference of the PCInt, 29 December 1945

Over four years ago we raised the spectre of an insoluble capitalist crisis leading the world towards a generalised imperialist war. Two months later Russia invaded Ukraine. Since then the war-drive has deepened.

And now the US is once again waging war in the Middle East. Trump and Netanyahu have attacked Iran, again – a little over six months after the ‘Twelve Day War’ was declared by Trump to have ended Iran’s nuclear threat,⁽¹⁾ a little more than six years after we were writing about another round of US sabre-rattling over Iran.⁽²⁾ Six years ago, although Iran was in an inferior position – it has never had the US’s military might, the US has by far the most powerful military machine in the world – the US was mired in problems in Afghanistan, and Iran could count on allies in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen and Palestine.

Now, the US is free of Afghanistan (having suffered a serious setback forcing it to hand the country back to its allies-turned-enemies the Taliban, of course), and most of Iran’s allies have been severely weakened or destroyed; Hamas and Hezbollah by Israel, the Assad regime by the ghosts of ISIS and Al Qa’eda in the HTS.⁽³⁾ Iran can still count on some support from militia groups in Iraq and the de-facto government of Yemen (the Shi’ite militia of the ‘Houthi’ warlords that controls the majority of the country), but for the moment Iran’s regional allies are much more limited than before.

A year ago, we were warning that the ‘ceasefires’ were a pause for regrouping and re-arming for a new round of conflict.⁽⁴⁾ Since then Israel and the US launched their major attack on Iran in June 2025, and now this latest round which really brings us to the brink of a disastrous conflict.

Increasingly, the anarchy of nations trying to scramble for advantage is risking full scale world war. There are plenty of limited wars going on – the civil wars in Sudan and Congo, the war in Ukraine, and many others – which constantly threaten to spill out of their regional limitations. The war in the Middle East is doing just that. After the attack on Israel by Hamas and other allied militant groups in Gaza on 7 October 2023, we warned that this risked a widening of the conflict.⁽⁵⁾ Since then Israel has attacked Iran, Lebanon, Qatar, Syria; the US has attacked Iran; Iran has attacked Israel, Syria, the UAE, Saudi Arabia; and Yemen has attacked Israel. All these attacks increase the risk of widening and intensifying the conflict.

This is the inevitable result of a capitalist system that has no solution to its own contradictions, which have been building since the end of the ‘post-war boom’, the period of reconstruction after the Second World War. This period ended definitively in the early 1970s. Increasingly unable to generate sufficient profits, states must turn to war both to destroy competitors and to gain control of vital resources (oil, rare-earth metals, and increasingly, water). The necessity of war becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy; wars are necessary to control resources that are needed for military purposes; and at home, austerity and repression are needed to discipline the working class which otherwise would revolt against the conditions required to go to war. As we have seen in both Iran and the US, the militarisation of policing is a precursor to military action abroad. In the US, this has been under the guise of ICE ‘immigration enforcement’, as well as the policing of the BLM protests five years ago or the ‘Cop Cities’ programmes under Biden & Harris; in Iran, the brutal crackdown on the recent wave of protests there has left untold thousands dead – a pattern that has been repeated over and over in the history of the Islamic Republic. Damen’s words in 1945, in the aftermath of the slaughter of the Second World War, remind us that ultimately it is the working class that pays the highest price, and thus, the catastrophic effects of capitalism’s wars fall most heavily on the class that has both the least to gain from them, and also, the only solution to the insanity, by posing its own perspective of communist revolution.

The ‘left’ in the west is opposing this latest escalation of the conflict, but only in so far as they oppose the US and Israeli governments. Some groups have already called for defence of Iran and its government – the same government that a month ago massacred thousands of its own citizens, drowning their protests against economic collapse and repression in blood.

This is always the answer of the capitalist left. Supporting brutal regimes throughout the world because their policies are at odds with the US is merely business as usual. So what if a government is opposed to the US or allied with it? So what if this boss or that boss, this president or that president, this dictator or that dictator is in charge? Class struggle has nothing to do with workers supporting this or that capitalist alliance or bloc at an international level, nothing to do with the flag a government flies as it oppresses its own workers and makes war on the workers of its rivals.

Across the world, welfare spending is being cut and states are increasing arms spending, re-arming and militarising. The US's manoeuvring over Greenland and its interference in Venezuela are steps towards securing the Americas in preparation for war.⁽⁶⁾ Chinese belligerence in the South China Sea, as well as its courting of nations in Africa and South America, are part of its preparations. The Russian invasion of Ukraine itself is also a somewhat desperate operation to gain an advantage for when the generalised war comes. This is the path we're heading on.

In this situation, it's the task of internationalists everywhere, to say to all workers 'this is what is happening: the state is militarising, its neighbours are militarising, increasing oppression and austerity at home are the preparation for war abroad; and there is no way out other than the revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist system that creates this insane world'. For sure there's no 'royal road' – just a hard and thankless task of doing what we can where we can to spread the realisation that capitalism is literally a dead-end system and we have nothing to gain by letting it continue.

We are aware of different statement from many different groups that take up internationalist positions. But statements and declarations are not enough in this situation. The perspective we put forward is the same now as it was in the aftermath of the Hamas attacks on Israel in October 2023 – that all revolutionaries need to put aside sectarian differences and take seriously the task of organising against this brutal and inhuman system.⁽⁷⁾

In this historical period it is indispensable that revolutionaries all over the world come together to begin to work for the formation of a world communist party, the necessary tool for the successful overthrow of the capitalist system.

No war but class war to end imperialist barbarism, before it is too late.

Internationalist Communist Tendency