Notes from the [Post]War Days 8
This note will, for now, be the last published under the title “Notes from the [Post]War Days” in Manjanigh [Slingers]. Beyond this, a more detailed text on the future outlook from the perspective of class struggle will be released in the coming days. Nevertheless, the central theme and substance of this series of notes is one to which we will return repeatedly, in order to mark the boundaries and delineate the lines of division. For the battles ahead, and the hostile fronts engaged in them, will ultimately be grounded in these very boundaries and divisions.
After the twelve-day war and the ceasefire between Israel and Iran, many voices were heard not only from pro-government forces and pseudo-leftists aligned with the so-called Axis of Resistance, but also, from time to time, within certain other leftist currents; voices that defended or even praised the Islamic Republic’s military arsenal and what was described as its “defensive capability.” At first glance, such defense and praise may appear reasonable: one could argue that without this military arsenal and “defensive capability,” Iran would have had no means of deterrence and thus no possibility of reaching a ceasefire. For the moment, however, let us set aside the important question of whether this “defensive capability” is genuine or whether its scale and effectiveness are exaggerated. During those twelve days, senior military commanders and leading nuclear scientists were killed; many of the army and IRGC bases suffered serious damage; in the final days, missile launches toward Israel amounted practically to suicide missions, since the launch sites were almost immediately targeted and destroyed. The country’s main nuclear facilities were directly bombed by the United States. Numerous state institutions, such as the offices of Iran’s state broadcaster, were also attacked. According to official statements, the highest-ranking political leaders after Ali Khamenei survived only by sheer chance.
We will therefore, for the moment, accept the claim that the Islamic Republic’s military arsenal constituted a form of defensive capability which ultimately led to the ceasefire. From this perspective, one could affirm the necessity of expanding and strengthening it as something self-evident. Yet within this entire narrative lies a fundamental and deliberate deception. This fabrication, propagated by security and quasi-security apparatuses, as well as by those who, intoxicated by the spectacle of a few missiles launches, mistake fire for victory, reduces the question of resistance against imperialism to a purely military matter. In doing so, it confines resistance to the exclusive domain of the ruling political power, instead of understanding it as a social matter. But to grasp resistance as a social matter inevitably exposes the historic and class complicity of the ruling political power with the long-term objectives of imperialism. It also renders impossible any form of compromise, even temporary, with this capitalist ruling power. This is why the admonishing tone of various pseudo-left currents aligned with the Axis of Resistance, from Jedaal and Hemmat platforms to Kargah TV, directed at the rulers of the Islamic Republic to “revise their economic policies,” is nothing but a mixture of foolishness and fraud. Foolishness, because it assumes that the Islamic Republic’s economic policies are the outcome of the decisions of two or three bankers, economists, or influential politicians. And fraud, because it seeks to persuade others to believe this nonsense as well.
These factions, despite their verbal declarations of loyalty to the ideals of the 1979 Revolution, have nothing to do with that revolution. By seeking the revival of the revolution within the very counterrevolution that seized political power only through the bloody suppression of the revolution itself, they place themselves not on the side of 1979 but in the historical and logical continuity of the counterrevolution that emerged victorious from that struggle. Thus, at the very first step, they deny the class struggle over the fate of the 1979 Revolution and the class that triumphed in it. In the next step, they separate the anti-capitalist struggle from the anti-imperialist struggle. In doing so, they demand both the task of anti-imperialist struggle and, paradoxically, the task of socialist policymaking from a force rooted within the ruling capitalist order. Finally, in order to win the attention of that very ruling capitalist power, they point toward opportunities for trade and economic expansion with Russia and China as alternatives to Western imperialism.
In the end, they are merely variant forms of the same Western-oriented reformists, cast as the sole “demons” supporting capital, so that the responsibility for maintaining the capitalist order is lifted from other factions of capital, leaving the possibility of “reform” open. Their workers, in the final analysis, are no different from those of the right-wing opposition to the Islamic Republic. These workers are classless, expected to wait passively, without participating in class struggle or exercising agency, until the ruling capitalist order comes to its senses. At that point, it is assumed, they will be granted some portion of the plundered public resources, fragments of the expropriated commons, and a limited space for purely trade-union (never political) intervention in the division of labor and the administration of affairs.
The main issue that the “missile lovers” deny and ignore is that resistance against imperialism and various forms of imperialist intervention, which war is only one manifestation of, is far more a social matter than a military one. Yet the Islamic Republic has, step by step throughout its entire rule (not just in recent years) systematically dismantled the capacities of Iranian society to resist such interventions. In a documentary about one of the U.S. coups against Hugo Chávez’s government in Venezuela, residents of a marginalized neighborhood in Caracas were shown fortifying their district and arming themselves to confront the coup plotters. One member of these spontaneously organized revolutionary brigades said in an interview: “Our struggle is not to defend the Chávez government; our struggle is to defend ourselves, because if the coup succeeds, the coup plotters will slaughter the people of the barrios.” Over more than four decades, through the expropriation of public property, extensive privatizations, the devaluation of labor, destabilization of the working class, price liberalization, the elimination of subsidies, the commodification of education and healthcare, and dozens of other policies serving the interests of capital holders, the Islamic Republic has effectively stripped Iranian society of the means to resist imperialism.
The segment of society that has endured more than four decades of the Islamic Republic’s capitalist policies and has, through lived experience, come to understand the implications of the Republic’s implementation of international agreements with global imperialist institutions such as the IMF, the World Bank, and the WTO cannot, like the petty-bourgeois pseudo-left “missile lovers,” separate capitalism from imperialism or defer the pursuit of justice. Postponing the realization of justice to an indeterminate future comes only from the class that still possesses the means, whether materially or even ideologically, to survive under current conditions. This does not include the majority who, through an interconnected process of impoverishment and gradual neoliberal assaults, have been driven into destitution.
In this way, those who separate the anti-capitalist struggle from anti-imperialist resistance and, in the face of the Islamic Republic’s capitalist policies, confine themselves to brotherly advice (advice they already know will have no material impact and will not disrupt the current course of affairs) are, in fact, simultaneously complicit in consolidating and strengthening domestic capitalism while also facilitating the conditions for imperialist intervention. Their rhetoric, in fact, serves precisely to reinforce the widespread myth that in relation to the Islamic Republic, the problem is not capitalism itself. Rather, the issue is the supposed incompetence and lack of foresight of the Islamic Republic’s rulers in implementing capitalism effectively, privatizing properly, and creating opportunities for foreign investment. Meanwhile, the working class, urban poor, and the subalterns, who witness the destruction of their lives under the bombardment of the Islamic Republic’s neoliberal policy packages and struggle in poverty and destitution, are simultaneously bombarded by a dominant discourse organized across both the government and opposition. This discourse tells them that the problem is not capitalism itself, but the way it is implemented, and that the Islamic Republic’s policies are essentially “communist.” Efforts to “raise awareness” among the working class are futile in confronting these dominant myths. Consciousness is a capacity that emerges within class struggle and through class struggle, not through leaflets, videos, or statements from labor experts, especially when those statements are in stark contradiction with the lived experiences of the class itself. For an objective understanding of this, it is enough to recall the workers of Haft-Tappeh and Ahvaz Steel during the brilliant struggles of the summer and fall of 2018 and the rise of class consciousness among them. At the same time, one can remember the simultaneous wailing of all pro-capital factions, both inside and outside the government, defending the “principle of privatization” and the “principle of capitalism,” which received a decisive response from the strikes and protests of the working class itself.
For the anti-imperialists obsessed with missiles, who explicitly or implicitly separate the anti-capitalist struggle from anti-imperialist resistance in any relation with the Islamic Republic, these brilliant moments of working-class agency are seen as signs of deviation and misguidance. This is why all forces within this spectrum, from Kargah TV to Tadarok, depict the present moment as a time of flourishing and the rise of trade-union and class struggle among the working class. However, what the working class actually experiences in daily life are widespread waves of layoffs and workforce “adjustments,” continuously delayed wages, the destruction of social security, the systematic removal of labor protections, the outsourcing of everything to facilitate exploitation, reducing employer costs through the elimination of safety and insurance, and the increasing collusion of state institutions with capitalist entities such as chambers of commerce, industry, and private capital.
For the oppressed working class, whose class horizons have been blinded by state violence and repression, unlike the petty bourgeois who suddenly become patriotic and nationalist, the options in practice are reduced to a choice between two forms of bombardment, at least one of which promises a so-called “better future,”. In this way, the “missile lovers,” through their complicity in this repression, by denying, minimizing, or dismissing class antagonism as a fundamental conflict and framing the conflict with imperialism as the primary contradiction within which other conflicts and forms of oppression, including class struggle, can temporarily be ignored, open the path for imperialist interventions. These interventions benefit precisely from the suppression of class struggle and the working class and are only possible in the absence of the agency of the working class, the urban poor, and the subaltern.
The confusion of various pseudo-left currents aligned with the Axis of Resistance stems from their expectation of anti-imperialist resistance from a government that deliberately exterminates the very subjects who, through class struggle, have an irreconcilable conflict with imperialism whether through bullets fired directly at uprisings and protests, through imposed poverty and malnutrition, or through inadequate healthcare and housing. Resistance against imperialism is not only about missiles; the real question is who controls the missiles and which social forces have the capacity, and more importantly the prior possibility, to resist imperialism. Otherwise, when missiles are fired precisely at the same moment that the latest IMF directives are implemented, the Ministry of Economy is handed to a minister trained in the school of Milton Friedman’s coup specialists, and the highest government officials insist on uncompromising implementation of current economic policies, the missiles will serve only as a prelude to compromise with imperialism.
The step-by-step retreats and passivity of the Islamic Republic following the October 7 operation by the Palestinian resistance and the onset of the massacre in Gaza are related less to the government’s military capacity than to a society that has already been surrendered to imperialism under the policies of governance. This surrender did not begin a decade ago, nor with Hassan Rouhani’s government, nor with the economic adjustments of the Rafsanjani era. It began precisely at the moment when the Khomeinist counterrevolution violently suppressed and dismantled councils and revolutionary committees in factories and production centers, neighborhoods, universities and schools, offices, villages, and everywhere they had emerged. From this perspective, we agree that resistance against imperialism is only possible through a return to the ideals of the 1979 Revolution, their continuation, and the transformation of the social order in line with them. But this return and reclamation is not achieved through alliance with or praise of the counterrevolution that holds “defensive capability” and “military monopoly.” It is achieved through a revolutionary struggle against the ruling order whose governance has been secured solely through the suppression of the revolution and its ideals.
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