Editorial for Revolutionary Perspectives 28 (Series 4), summarising the perspectives discussion from the CWO AGM held in Manchester, May 2026.

As we and others on the Communist Left predicted some years back, the insoluble economic crisis is forcing our capitalist masters into rivalries which presage a much wider conflict. Despite numerous planned or implemented "ceasefires" and "peace deals", the war in Ukraine has now dragged on for more than four years, the war in Palestine for nearly three. The crisis has since only intensified and with the outbreak of the US-Israel war on Iran we have arrived at a new and dramatic turn in the global drive to war. Almost six months of missiles and drones raining down across the Middle East has left thousands dead and caused major damage to energy infrastructure in the Gulf States. Most significant of all has been the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, one of the world's most important trade routes for oil, gas and fertilisers, first by an Iranian, then a US blockade, and once again by Iran.

Imperialist war is not just fought by the military but also by the "economic weapons" of sanctions, tariffs and other embargoes. The US has long intended to enact a regime change in Iran, and over the last half a century it has not only sanctioned the Islamic Republic but has threatened fines and penalties against any state or company which breaks those sanctions (via blocking access to funds and the world banking system). This is all part of the wider imperialist struggle which is ultimately about countering the rise of the US' principal imperialist rival, China. Gaining control of China's oil supply from Iran would be a significant boon for the US and a repeat of its manœuvres in Venezuela. At present this has failed, and the "peace talks" meander on with little sign of regime change in Iran.

In this asymmetric economic warfare, Iran has found a powerful weapon of counter-attack in the closure of the Strait: an attack which, however, increases the impact of the war on the rest of the world. From the Japanese industry's oil supply to African farmers having no fertilisers for this year's crops, the consequences are grim. The ships stranded in the Strait of Hormuz are slow to move, partially due to the fouling of the hulls by seaweed and barnacles grown from sitting too long in temperate water, and also due the still present risk of capture or blockade by the Iranian Navy. What was once an international trading highway, now appears to be becoming an Iranian toll road.

Oil exporters are scrambling to find ways to redirect their oil or soften the blow to their oil and gas exports. Saudi Arabia has been pumping their oil across the Arabian peninsula to the Red Sea port of Yanbu. The UAE is limited in its ability to redirect oil and has left OPEC, seemingly to be able to make up for lost production when the Strait reopens, without having to worry about quotas. This has brought it away from Saudi Arabia and closer to the US. Oil importers like India and China have had to rely more on Russia (in the case of India, with the US's explicit blessing; in the case of China, through gritted teeth). Damage to infrastructure means that even if trade properly reopens tomorrow, it may take years to recover capacity. This new energy shock, while not as immediately dramatic as the energy shock of 2022 and the advent of the war in Ukraine in terms of its effects on inflation, still adds to the dangerous level of volatility of the global economy, with all the attendant impact on the cost of living for the working class. In the short to medium term we will likely continue to see increases to the costs of basic goods like food and petrol, which are heavily reliant on oil and gas supply chains.

The OPEC cartel that the UAE has left is part of the "petrodollar" system which became one of the pillars of the post-war global economic system when the post-war boom ended and the US was forced, in the face of declining profit rates, to abandon the gold standard for dollar on which the whole post-war capitalist order had been based. This freed the US to print dollars to cover its deficits. They could maintain this position only because the dollar was the main trading currency of world capitalism, especially for oil, so the rest of the world paid. By recycling profits from oil sales priced in dollars back into the US financial system, the oil producers reap massive profits, and stability is provided to the US dollar as the world's reserve currency.

The US' "exorbitant privilege" of being able to print money has allowed it to maintain its military, which can then act as the "world's policeman" and make sure any threats to US and dollar hegemony are quashed. That was the plan at least. In fact, over the last few decades the recycling of oil funds in this way has dried up. The largest importers of oil are now the Asian economies, and the US is largely self-sufficient. The Gulf states are increasingly putting their profits into sovereign wealth funds rather than US banks. Dollar dominance is also seeing further signs of strain because of the war. Iran has been collecting tolls from tankers trying to pass the Strait of Hormuz in Iranian rial and apparently even yuan rather than dollars. For US's imperialist rivals, particularly China, the undermining of the US dollar as the currency of global trade, especially oil trade, is a key strategy in overturning US global hegemony. Before the war Saudi Arabia was selling oil to China in yuan and the Iran war will accelerate the move away from the dollar. US concern is shown by US treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, vainly demanding that Iran sell oil, agreed under the June Memorandum of Understanding, in US dollars.

The central bank of China, in collaboration with others, is progressing in its development of an international payment system to rival SWIFT, the American control of which has been used to sanction any state deemed hostile to the US hegemony as well as individuals from China. However, the yuan faces a credibility problem in leading financial markets in a world still dominated by the dollar and it will take more than a few deals in Africa and Latin America to shake that hold. It remains however a source of friction as the US interventions in Venezuela, Cuba and the Colombian elections demonstrate.

The Iran war has also been a strategic failure for both the US and Israel. As we already mentioned, neither has been able to achieve their object of enacting Iranian regime change. Nor has Israel been able to remove Hezbollah or Hamas from their redoubts despite superior armament capacities. For the US, the biggest impact is the dent in their image as the "world's policeman". If the US is unable to maintain the system of global capitalism and the trade routes and supply chains it depends on, who will? The answer is far from settled and the lines around which a conflict could be drawn are far from clear, but it is being posed in the starkest terms yet.

In short, we can see how the wars in Ukraine and Iran are both episodes of a global imperialist struggle which the US and its allies are waging against China. This war drive ultimately stems from a structural economic crisis of the capitalist system, which is unable to overcome the tendency for profit rates to fall, making the valorisation of the existing mass of capital more and more difficult. This, in turn, leads to attempts to gain control of strategic materials, such as oil or rare earths, as well as trade routes and strategic positions, to prevent rivals from acquiring these.

Despite these wars and the threats to the global economy, the stock market (and not just military stock) is booming. Elon Musk has become the world's first trillionaire on the back of the initial public offering of SpaceX, the rocket company which has been able to cash in on the AI hype, even though the relationship of the technology to its profit margins is not immediately obvious. OpenAI, Anthropic, Nvidia and others are all able to raise billions in investments on the most optimistic of profit estimates. It's become commonplace to call it a speculative bubble, yet there is no denting the enthusiasm of the AI boosters. Their delirium in the hunt for financial profits only begins to make sense when we understand how few and far between the avenues for profitable industrial investment are. Capitalists are forced to believe in the hype because the alternative, that this is mostly fluff and that the productivity gains from AI use are not sufficient to offset their investments, is an admission of failure of capitalism itself, not to mention the culmination of 250 years of US history. As it is, it's hard to see what all these AI tools are going to be used for, other than replacing monotonous jobs with increasing unemployment and powering an even more oppressive state with optimised surveillance and weapons systems.

Meanwhile in the UK...

In the UK, deep problems abound. Symptomatic of this, the country has just seen the resignation of its seventh Prime Minister in a decade. Keir Starmer was elected in 2024 with a landslide that was indicative of widespread displeasure with "broken Britain" and the Tory party that had ruled for the previous 13 years. Since Starmer's Labour Party was elected, they have been rudderless and wracked by scandals, much like the governments they were supposed to be a change from. Cuts, and threats of cuts to benefits and public services have made them deeply unpopular. Starmer's role (or lack of a role) in the appointment of former New Labour "prince of darkness" and known associate of Jeffrey Epstein, Peter Mandelson, has further tarnished him. Attempts to enact a harsher migration regime, repressions against those protesting the Gaza genocide, and u-turns on transgender rights, have alienated their usual liberal and leftist base, but weren't anywhere near draconian enough to satisfy the right wing critics they were trying to court. He is being replaced by Andy Burnham, the former mayor of Greater Manchester. Relatively popular for a politician, he comes with no more solutions than his predecessor other than playing on redressing the north-south divide.

The summer has brought with it again the now familiar race riots across the UK (the latest being Northern Ireland, where former paramilitaries have taken to burning the homes and cars of people identified as "immigrants", whether "illegal" or not). It is only the latest instance of migrants being scapegoated for the deep failings of British capitalism. In a sign of how far the political dial is shifting, the rival far-right populist party Restore Britain is challenging Reform UK with direct calls for "remigration" of ethnic minorities.

Despite (or perhaps because of) the economic situation, the working class has not been able to challenge the drive to war and climate destruction which is where capitalism is taking us. There has been sporadic resistance, but at the moment mainly confined to sectors like the NHS or universities. The ongoing crisis in both sectors is a consequence of cuts to government funding, which is driving the privatisation of health and social care and the marketisation of education. As a result, staff conditions are being undermined and the quality of the service being provided is getting worse and worse. These could be the starting points for a wider fightback, but there are some serious barriers to overcome (on one hand, the unions which keep the workforce divided; on the other, the mindset of just defending one's trade, which remains common among many doctors and lecturers).

No War but the Class War!

The tasks facing the working class are monumental. The problems seen in the UK are not unique, they are replicated in all the main centres of capitalism, and there is little sign that in the immediate future the working class worldwide can overcome the weight of the last century of counter-revolution and pose its own alternative to the continuance of capitalism. In order to do so, the working class needs to rediscover its own militancy and recover its confidence in itself as an international social force with the power to change society. As part of this process, we think a necessary factor is an organisation of revolutionaries, the most class-conscious workers united in a militant political opposition to capitalism, capable of coordinating a genuine class response. But at the moment, revolutionary groups are tiny, scattered, and barely in touch with the working class as a whole. This is not entirely in our gift, since it also depends on the revival of a real class resistance. We cannot control the state of the class struggle worldwide. What we can control is what we as revolutionaries do in these circumstances and how we relate to it.

As class-conscious militants, part of our task is to spread this revolutionary perspective. At present, workers barely know that revolutionary groups exist, and of those who do, many would find it difficult to say where we differed from the parties and groups of the capitalist left. Though a lot of workers are disillusioned with conventional politics, or even the ability of capitalism to provide a future, for many the answer is not working for the revolutionary reconstitution of society but a retreat into fatalism or the pursuit of political novelty, where successive saviours prove unable to solve the problems that loom so large for all of us – but never mind, another snake-oil salesman will be along to capture popular opinion with another scheme to save capitalism.

The majority of the working class even in the centres of capitalism has little idea that the answer to these problems lies in our own hands. The drive to global war is a product of the functioning of capitalism itself and only the overthrow of capitalism can prevent another global conflagration. Only a mass movement of the world working class against the global capitalist class can overthrow capitalism. It is now over a century since the working class attempted to overthrow capitalism at the end of the First World War, most significantly in Russia where the working class created its own organs of mass decision making (the workers' councils, or soviets) and where, for a time there existed a revolutionary organisation, which held out for world revolution (the Bolshevik Party which spearheaded the foundation of a new International). The failure of this attempt has produced 100 years of counter-revolution which, in turn, have led to divisions in the ranks of internationalist revolutionaries and a low level of consciousness amongst the world's workers. Today's revolutionaries need to dismiss capitalism's message from fake history: that all workers' political organisations lead to dictatorship. On the contrary, the need has never been clearer for a world revolutionary party with a programme for the working class today distilled from the lessons of our past. Key amongst these are that the working class can never "delegate to others its historical mission, and it does not give power away to anyone, not even to its political party", and that "socialism cannot be implemented by a minority, by the party … it can be implemented only by tens of millions when they have learned to do it for themselves". The capitalist class is openly preparing for a general war. Defence spending is being increased and the funds for this are being provided by cuts to social spending. At the same time our rulers in both the UK and Europe are openly calling for conscription and asking workers to make sacrifices for war, be that their lives or livelihoods.

The ultimate victims of all these wars are the global working class, the vast majority on whose economic exploitation this system is based. Internationalists have to reveal the link between general austerity and the drive to war. To take this message to the wider working class, we have been involved in the No War but the Class War (NWBCW) initiative: committees of internationalists from various tendencies working together on the basis of the following five points:

• Against capitalism, imperialism and all nationalisms. No support for any national capitals, "lesser evils", or states in formation.
• For a society where states, wage-labour, private property, money and production for profit are replaced by a world of freely associated producers.
• Against the economic and political attacks that the current war, and the ones to come, will unleash on the working class.
• For the self-organised struggle of the working class, for the formation of independent strike committees, mass assemblies and workers' councils.
• Against oppression and exploitation, for the unity of the working class and the coming together of genuine internationalists.

We would urge all internationalists, whatever their background, to work with us in such committees, or to form similar groups whether the ICT is present in their locality or not. The point for us is that internationalists – whether they call themselves Marxists, Anarchists or whatever else; whether they agree on our economic analyses or not; whether they have a similar conception or not to ours on the nature of revolutionary organisation – should use NWBCW committees as a tool of intervention in everyday struggles happening in the here and now, to link the horrors of capitalism, including the drive to war and the environmental crisis, to the day-to-day trials we all experience: low wages and increasing exploitation, declining services, unemployment and poor living conditions. It is the nature of capitalism to increase the misery of the working class in order to preserve itself, and that misery is felt both individually through the degradation of our living and working conditions, and collectively when the ruling class runs out of room for manoeuvre and drags us to war. The class war is real; we experience it every day. We need to organise to resist. The NWBCW committees are a way for revolutionaries to do that, and we urge everyone who agrees that capitalism is dragging us to destruction to join us in organising to oppose it, to build a better world rid of wars, oppression and exploitation.