War Without End

Imperialism Will Not Stop Its Quest To Destroy Iran

If the ceasefire between Iran and Israel holds then I would say that the analysis of Comrade Bahman Azad have been proven correct regarding the actual problems of the Iranian government and state. It is clear that there is a great deal of genuine Iranian patriotism and revolutionary spirit in Iran, this is why the US decapitation strategy was not successful and the prospects for "regime change" via war waged by either Israel or the US directly are slim to non-existent. What has been revealed though is the weaknesses imposed on Iran by the continuing influence of the Iranian compradors who, desperate to access US controlled markets and have imperialist capital "invest" in Iran. These elements are held in check to an extent but they have shown they are willing to sell out the country and can do an awful lot of damage. The imperialists are on the slide now but they are still able to pull off a lot tricks and they know how to exploit the weaknesses in their opponents systems. The weaknesses of all of the BRICS nations lie, at heart, in them all still being tied to a US imperialist run "globalised" system where the dominant role of the western nations still counts for a lot.

We must remember that Russia did not remove itself from the US dominated global system, the US threw them out, if it were up to the wretched Russian capitalist class they'd still be there grovelling to Trump. Even now the Russian government moves at a glacial pace sometimes because it has to pander to the whims of the bourgeoisie who grasp at every chance that things could go "back to normal" with the USA. It was the role of the masses in Donbas and in wider Russia combined with the relentless imperialist aggression that has forced change within Russia and a more radical turn to be taken by the Putin led government. The same process can and must take place within Iran. The consolidation of Iranian society behind the leadership of Khamenei and apparent irrelevance Pezeshkian tells us a lot about the potential here. The Iranian masses must now drive the process of freeing Iran completely from the west forward and this means rediscovering the more radical elements of the Islamic revolution and limiting the power of the wretched compradors to sell the country out.

There has been much chatter in "multipolarist" circles about the refusal by the Iranian government to obtain Russian S400 systems before the latest aggressions carried out by the imperialists. President Putin indicated in recent comments that the Russian side was willing to provide these but the Iranian government had not asked for them except in the most limited fashion around certain nuclear facilities. One explanation given for this was that the Iranians wanted to rely on their own systems. I do not believe this explanation in the slightest, just as I do not believe that Ayatollah Khamenei's fatwa against the pursuit of nuclear weapons is the reason why Iran has not developed them as yet. In both cases the role of the comprador bourgeoisie is key in that they are desperate to reach a deal (any deal) with the US. This leads them to consistently try to limit the eastern turn towards China and Russia in spite of the fact that the US is openly threatening Iran constantly. This reveals not only a weakness inside Iran but with the multipolar world more generally.

Imperialism Weakened But Dangerous

The emergent multipolar grew out of a quarter of a century where the dominance of US imperialism was almost unquestioned. The US, British ruling classes were able to construct a system (in a process called globalisation) where they reached the perfect expression of an imperialist system as analysed over a century ago by both Lenin and Rudolf Hilferding. The deindustrialisation of imperial core nations accelerated dramatically in the 1990s as the US, British and Europeans gained the ability to export capital without limits anywhere in the world (only China and Russia were able to resist this to any degree) and set the terms of trade globally. This meant that the capitalist classes of the entire world were now tied into a US/British led system and that their interests became entwined with it. This was not a process without tensions of course and there still exists the divisions between national bourgeoisies and compradors but the line between the two has become increasingly blurred over the last period. Some bourgeois chafe against the US led system but those who have the largest interests and wish to do any international business at all are tied to it. The alternative systems that US sanctions forced countries like Russia and China to develop are still relatively new. The dollar still dominates international payments, despite having its position somewhat eroded and the US still gains certain advantages from this. Politically speaking, the biggest advantage comes from the fact that the need to use the dollar in international trade. The very real limits to US power have now been exposed both by the war in Ukraine, which the US led side is losing very badly and the US’s inability to defeat the Islamic Republic of Iran. US imperialism can no longer risk the kind of military commitments that it made in Korea and Vietnam. As Chairman Mao once observed, the US ruling class’s links to the US masses are far too weak to withstand the kind of mass casualties that a war on Russia or Iran would bring with it.

The latest war on Iran revealed those weaknesses again as Trump engaged in all manner of grandiose pronouncements but backed off open war with Iran fearing the consequences. The limits to “multipolarism” though must be acknowledged here. The BRICS nations are not unified by anything other than the fact that wish to do business without the US having the right of veto over them. This has already posed a challenge to the imperialists but these nations are also all products of a time of global reaction. Even the national bourgeois elements within them fear the masses of their own nations, they constantly seek to limit politicisation of the proletariat and peasantry and want to arrange an “orderly transition” to a new global system. This is a dream though as imperialism is not going to simply negotiate itself out of existence. Ultimately its hold on the nations of the neo-colonial world which are trying to free themselves will only be broken by revolutionary methods and that can only be done by mass struggle.

The War Will Continue

The US miscalculated badly in this latest war against Iran and they have failed to achieve any of their objectives. It would be very foolish to say though that they cannot cause Iran significant problems. The Iranians can overcome these issues but it will take a struggle that is waged both externally, against the imperialists, and internally against the compradors to secure Iran against US aggression. We will explore more of these issues in part of this series of essays exploring the nature “multipolarism”.