If the politics of capitalism are the political-governmental personification of the cycle of production and its wars are the formal transformation of its politics, the inevitable struggle of the working masses against this system must and can, with the occurrence of wars, establish a deeper, more solid and firmer formation against the economy, politics, and the rule of capital. The dominant idea has been that the war of states will inevitably lead to the weakening, regression, and catastrophic ebb of the workers’ movement. In general, this has been the case, but what has happened, like many other historical events, has not been the necessity, the unchangeable destiny of the working masses. The bourgeoisie and its government are trying with all their might to do what has happened so far. Under the deceptive banner of “homeland”, “religion”, “democracy”, “defence of the ancestral homeland”, “respect for historical integrity”, to turn the working masses into thousands upon thousands of infantries in their war-making army. They will send them to the altar, distribute all the damages, casualties, destruction, and various astronomical costs of the war on their miserable livelihoods, while simultaneously and in conjunction with this, they will remove the labour movement from its class battlefield as completely as possible and turn it into an instrument for the realization of their anti-human goals. This is a task that the capitalist class, based on its class nature, pursues with all necessary measures, utilizing all political, social, civil, scientific, and engineering institutions of its thoughts, and resorts to every barbarity to achieve it, and the working class has also miserably consented. Our argument is that neither the success of capitalist states, nor the ruin and entrapment of the working masses and the labour movement in the trap of the bourgeoisie, is “the fate of fate”!!, “the destined order of history”!! there was no such fate, the course of events could have taken a different course, in terms of appearance the most “radical” orientation or strategy adopted by the working class in the struggle against the capitalist states is the tactic that Lenin and the Russian workers used. With the rebelliousness of the First World War, they raised the banner of transforming the imperialist war into a class war in Russia from 1914 onwards. A strategy that, compared to the decadent, destructive and criminal approach of the social democratic parties, had a dazzling and instructive shine, but it lacked the anti-capitalist charge, was captive to the anti-imperialist, anti-socialist regime. The Russian labour movement in those conditions and under that banner could have taken important anti-capitalist steps, which it did not do, but with the same Leninist strategy, it significantly changed the balance of power in its Favor, to the detriment of the bourgeoisie. All this is a matter of the past, the discussion now is what the Iranian workers can do in today’s conditions, amidst the genocidal and holocaust-creating waves of war by the fiercest beasts of the global, regional, and domestic bourgeoisie. Raising this question does not imply that the continuation of the war is the only possibility of confrontation between the United States, Israel, and their allies with the Islamic regime of Iran. What now prevails under the name of a ceasefire, albeit a half-hearted and completely fragile one, may last for a long time or at least indefinitely. This is not only predictable, but certain data make its probability heavier than the resumption of war. No action, decision, or massacre of the American state machine or any other government can be attributed to the temperament, approach, or specific style of statesmanship of the president, prime minister, or leader. This ruling also applies to Trump, despite all his multiplicity of personalities, wavering votes, and moment-to-moment changes in his options. He was not the only one who started the recent 12-day or 40-day wars, who decided to declare a ceasefire. It replaced the bombings with a naval blockade. A long chain of the most predatory, warmongering, holocaust-making statesmen of the degenerate capitalism of America and Israel have been and are partners and accomplices in adopting these orientations, committing crimes, and barbarities. In the meantime, Netanyahu and his partners, the so-called “Zionist” bourgeoisie, have a completely superior, more decisive role. This spectrum, in the current conditions of capitalism, needs a being with the characteristics of Trump. A person who has no other criteria, model, rule, or standard other than securing the interests of the constantly revising section of the bourgeoisie. It is considered “unpredictable”, the distance between the verdict of war and peace, the opposing options, everything is momentary, but all of them are locked to the needs, interests, and expectations of this capital pole. Trump and Netanyahu started the recent war with the agreement of this chain of power, they saw many bottlenecks ahead in the process of the war, they realized that their assessment of issues such as the reaction of tens of millions of Iranian protesters and the prospect of the fall of the Islamic Republic, the missile arsenals and defensive and offensive capabilities of the regime was incorrect, the role of the Strait of Hormuz, the severe impact of the blockage of energy channels on the crisis-stricken world economy, they did not see the blockade of their ally in particular, they did not think about the enormous volume of inevitable losses inflicted on Israel, the Arab countries, and the United States itself, their expectations about removing the Middle East from the control of China’s galactic economic transactions and dealing a crushing blow to the rebellious Chinese rival were dreamy, all of these had a significant impact on the decision of the ruling bourgeoisie of the day in America, Israel to accept the ceasefire, but the final word was not miscalculations but learning a lesson from the Islamic regime. After 40 days of war, the initiators of the war learned from the Islamic regime that they could replace the naval blockade with the bombings for a while, and they did so in practice. How long will they continue? It depends on many data and factors, such as the dimensions of the regime’s economic and missile resilience, repression, what is going on in the cycle of reproduction of global capital, especially in the United States, Europe, and its partners, regional and international pressures on the warring parties, and other components. However, as a result of all of this, the possibility of the continuation of “no peace, no war,” a written or unwritten “ceasefire,” cannot be ignored in any way. This possibility exists, but theorizing and placing it in the position of a belief or opinion is only for those who are fond of opinion-making and analysis. It is not just Trump who, according to some, is unpredictable; every moment, global capitalism is pregnant with the occurrence of genocide, war-making, and barbarism. It is in this context that the important question above was raised: What should and can Iranian workers do if the criminal war between the US, Israeli, and Islamic regimes breaks out again?
The first point of the answer is that from the disasters born of war, an opening towards opportunity must be opened. If the bourgeoisie makes war a gift for pushing back the class struggle, deepening and developing ever more violently the subjugation of the working masses, the workers’ movement must make the anti-war struggle an opportunity for a more conscious, more planned attack on the basis of capitalist existence. This is a difficult task, but not impossible. War creates profound disruption at the very heart of the economy, political order, and police of capitalist society, especially in the more vulnerable society, and in particular in the society that has already been the target of the crushing storm of protest, anger, and campaign of the working masses. A huge part of the planning power, the police force, the repression, the field capacity of the capitalist state are concentrated around the confrontation with the rival or rivals and the defence of its own survival. War expands the scope of discontent, anger, and rebellion of the working masses, melting their remaining illusions. The cycle of production shatters the entire capitalist organization, severely disrupts the centres of work. It unleashes a storm of unemployment, brings poverty and misery to the lives of millions of people. Education, health, transportation, the lifeline of the masses are shattered. It is clear that this is not always and everywhere the case. In the eight-year inhuman war between the Iranian and Iraqi regimes, despite the sacrifice of a million workers, the catastrophic galactic destructions did not occur, but in the current terrible war, especially considering the destructive power of the octopus war machine of the United States, there is a possibility of all or most of them occurring. To date, more than two million workers have been fired from various work centres and added to the large number of previously unemployed. More than two million others are in imminent danger of unemployment. Various institutions of the Islamic regime have repeatedly and emphatically stated that about 9 to 11 million people who earn their living entirely or partially, with low, medium, or high percentages, through digital and Internet-related jobs, have all had their livelihoods cut off. Let us think that the savage Holocaust-makers of the era, Trump and Netanyahu and the evildoers under their command, will put into practice what they have in mind or have promised, bombing and destroying all energy facilities, roads, ports, bridges, communication lines, all the fruits of the labour of successive generations of the working class. Undoubtedly, the greater part of the work cycle will remain uncycled. Imports and exports will be disrupted on a large scale, and the remaining centres of production will be closed down one after another. The key question is, what will the sixty million working masses do under such conditions? How will they survive and make a living even if they are not bombed? The idea that the warmongers will not go that far!! is a deeply hollow illusion. There is no conceivable crime that capitalism and its governments, from the most brutal fascists to the most famous democracies, would not commit or would not hesitate to commit, if necessary, if necessary for their survival, if necessary for domination and the maintenance of their superior position. The working class is forced to factor all these possibilities into its calculations with the highest coefficient and to find a way to overcome them. The most fundamental problem facing the working masses in this regard is that in such a war, they are not faced with a single enemy, not just with the ruling capitalist regime in society, which is simultaneously faced with several homicidal octopus’ powers. The powers, the states that are fighting against each other, but the working class is forced to fight against all of them simultaneously. For the simple reason that they are all fighting against our existence and survival. It is a great tragedy that the war of states against each other not only does not facilitate the process of our ongoing campaign against the ruling regime but also makes the process of struggle more difficult in every way. We must fight them all and at the same time be vigilant that our war against one of the two opposing fronts does not benefit the other front. In view of all these points, our proposal as a group of anti-capitalist workers in the current situation is that:
1 – As the most urgent, vital, and urgent task, let us extend a helping hand to all the working masses throughout the world, let us firmly, decisively, and quite rightly call upon them to condemn the war as loudly, firmly, resolutely, and widely as possible, to call the war of the states against each other their total war, the war of the genocidal capitalist system against the international working class, and to demand an immediate end to the war. Let us call upon all the workers of the world not to be content with mere paper condemnations, bureaucratic protests without any effect, street campaigns, even if they are millions in number but they are trivial and lack the slightest deterrent, but to take action. Let us disrupt the cycle of production and the foundations of the capitalist order everywhere, in all countries, and most of all in America.
2 – Let’s forget an obvious principle of class struggle. The realization of any goal, from imposing daily demands on the capitalist class and its state to overthrowing regimes and destroying the system of wage slavery, whether in the struggle of states or in normal conditions, requires the use of power. The working class does not seek force and does not want power to dominate and rule over others, but it needs a kind of counter-power to act against the power of capitalism and establish a world without exploitation, violence, power, classes, and the state at the top. In the absence of this organized anti-capitalist council, it is unable to play any role, not only for liberating itself and humanity from the evil of the capitalist octopus’s existence, but also for its own lowly and basic livelihood. The criminal war of America and Israel against the Islamic regime, despite the massive galactic killings and destruction or its crushing blows to the class struggle of the workers, does not block the grounds and possibilities for organizing this anti-power and does not make it impossible. During these 40 days of war, the working masses, if not in this area, but in other areas, and specifically in the areas of their vital and livelihood issues, entered into many cooperations, fusions, and sympathies. In the war between the Iran and Iraq regimes, the Islamic Republic, with its vast mobilization capacity, took control of matters related to all aspects of the working masses from the very first minutes. In the current situation, it does not have such facilities at all. The organized forces of the regime are incapable of doing anything other than repression and genocide; the relationship between tens of millions of workers and them is that of rebellious people ready to revolt against the most hated, most rejected forces of tyranny and barbarity. On this basis, the working masses themselves are forced to find the necessary solutions to resolve some health, medical, educational, transportation, food distribution, securing the necessities of life from the clutches of the capitalist hoarder, fighting against overselling, government thieves of medicine, food, etc. War creates this situation on a significant level, and activists of the labour movement, the working masses, find the opportunity to turn this situation, in addition to what was mentioned above as the inevitable consequences of war, into a kind of opportunity to organize their own anti-capitalist council.
3 – War will intensify the pressure of sanctions, further disrupting the international trade chain needed to reproduce social capital. Most factories, companies, holding companies, industrial, commercial, and digital giants will be added to the many closed institutions due to lack of access to the necessities of the work and production cycle. These centres will become unprofitable for their owners and will go bankrupt, but for the working masses, who see production not as a melting pot of humanity and a roaring river of profit, but as a pure human activity that meets the needs of life, they may become a source of livelihood and a stronghold of struggle. It is not important what they are producing now, the issue is how a mountain of machinery, technology, means of production, achievements of the present and previous generations, can be put to the service of livelihood. This is the question that faces the working class. A class whose millions are university educated, specialists in various industrial fields, technical experts in various fields of work. A population that, hand in hand with the vast mass of the chain, has the capacity to seize most of the closed institutions, put them into operation, and make them a formidable bulwark of struggle against the capitalists and their government. Such an approach is more feasible in some areas such as agriculture, animal husbandry, fisheries, food production, clothing, and even medicine. Many areas can be set up even without a fundamental need for imports. The labour movement and determined, resolute activists of the anti-capitalist class struggle must campaign for such solutions, the meaning of class struggle is to grapple with the mountain of obstacles in the way, challenge them, and overcome them. This is only the decadent reformism of the capitalists that locks everything into petitions, strikes and peaceful legal protests, a fake democratic anti-regime, street campaigns to change the state model of the genocidal system of wage slavery, even if it falsely flies the banner of “anti-capitalism”, it dissolves under this banner in the common and familiar versions of the bourgeois right and left oppositions. The struggle against war for the working class, unlike the reformists, is not about chanting a bunch of empty slogans, pouring into the streets, anti-war rhetoric, playing the practical role of transferring power from one bourgeois mafia to another, which is an integral part of the class struggle against capitalism. The workers have the capacity to make the war an opportunity to organize their own national council, to take the path of elevating the daily movement to an organized counter-power against capitalism, to link the deterioration of their livelihood and welfare amid the flames of war with the process of seizing the centres of work and production, their planning and council administration, to take control of as many industrial establishments as possible, and to establish their own counter-council power more firmly and vigorously. The capitalists’ chain stores should be taken over by the councils and made into distribution centres for public food among the residents without any buying or selling. All the empty houses should be taken out of the hands of the capitalist owners and made into places for the homeless to live. This is the true meaning of anti-war, and it is only with this approach that we fight against all the governments and powers of the capital that are war-mongering, holocaust-making. If we do not do this, we will definitely become the instruments of one genocidal front against another.
4 – The apparently left wing of the bourgeois opposition sometimes speaks of helping to field the “Third Voice” in the leftist movement in general and including the anti-war movement.!! A voice that is apparently against the Islamic Republic and at the same time against the American and Israeli warmongers and their domestic mercenaries like Reza Pahlavi. The third voice of this group is a rhetorical, deceptive reconstruction of the same familiar terms as “people” and “nation”, its only dignity and mission is to drag the working masses into the quagmire of the transfer of power from the rulers of the capitalist day to another group of the capitalist class. There is no doubt that a high percentage of them have good intentions, the problem is not that their intentions are not good. The problem is that this intention is the product of capitalist thought workshops. Firstly – there is no third voice, the voice or red cry of the worker is against the exploitation, power, sovereignty, ownership, cruelty, barbarity, warmongering and genocide of capitalism, otherwise it is the voice of a section, a faction, an opposition of the capitalist class that sees opposition to war as a means to deceive the workers and turn them into the black army of the seizure of power, to take the place of the rulers of the day. Secondly – the workers’ anti-war is an inseparable part of the class struggle, the anti-capitalist campaign and the growing continuation of this struggle in the specific conditions of war.
5 – As we have always said, raising the above points will cause a wave of protest from many. This protest that the workers do not have such capacity and ability, the pressure of repression does not allow such things. The idea that the working class would take such a path is pure fantasy!! And a long series of such exaggerations that do not need to be repeated. In the eyes of this group, the history of the development of human societies is the history of “the impossibility of any event not having already occurred!! The possibility of any new fundamental change being locked into the occurrence of its old one”!!, “the absolute helplessness of the exploited, the oppressed, the downtrodden in the campaign to change the dominant material relations of each era”!! The history of mankind’s submission to the appeasing or militant refinement of the forms of production and the economic and social formations of the era, their patience as a Job for the deterministic dawn of the conditions of transformation and liberation, the dependence of the subordinates on their saviours beyond themselves, the dissolution and integration of all forms of their protest into the determined frameworks of the dominant system!! If history were to proceed according to their beliefs and ideas, neither the slaves of Rome should have raised the banner of the anti-slavery struggle, nor would the serfs and peasants of the Middle Ages have been allowed to fight against the feudal system, nor would the workers of France have had the right to divide the capital of the country into Paris, workers and capitalists in June 1848. Neither the glorious uprising of the Communards nor the hasty establishment of the Paris Commune should have happened, nor were the Russian workers allowed to adopt the strategy of transforming the imperialist war into a “class war” and to march on until the October Revolution. Nor were the accursed Algerians allowed to fight the French colonial-imperialist octopus, nor were the Vietnamese workers and the “Viet Cong” able to bury the corpse of the American imperialists’ inhuman domination under the sediments of the Pacific Ocean. None of this should have happened because it had never happened before!! But the problem of the Department of History of the Community in question is not limited to this. A “brilliant” chapter! Their argument in the present day is that the working masses of no country have so far shown any inclination to elevate their daily struggles to an organized anti-capitalist soviet movement, and therefore, to talk about the possibility of this movement rising and taking the field in the current situation is wishful thinking!! It is a miraculous lesson in history!! It is as if all the Roman slaves from East to West surrounded the “Spartacus”, “Aristonicus”, “Sanomachus” and begged them to please, to issue the order for the uprising!! Or the small and large serfs, peasants, and peasants of this and that corner of the world revolted like a flood, went to the “heroes” and implored them to lead their great uprisings!! I wish these “leaders” could remove the curtain of the rotten illusion woven by capitalism from their eyes of knowledge to see that historical realities have been and will definitely be contrary to their imagination. Slaves, serfs, peasants, serfs, subordinates, labourers, the cursed by the dictates of social existence, conditions, work, and exploitation were bombs of discontent, but not all of them were necessarily moulded and reacted the same way, did not think the same way, many were not prepared for the campaign. They might have fled. For a long time, when people talked about uprisings, they responded with “it’s not possible,” “it’s impossible,” “it’s a dream.” The discontented people who were ready to rise were considered strange people, and they were branded with ambition, thirst for fame and power, and the desire to become partners in slaveholding, feudalism, and landowning nobility. While others thought more or less differently, had more discernment, less conservatism, more courage and boldness, and had the power to find solutions and solve problems. It was these who bore the brunt of the struggle. They were taking important steps forward. They played an effective role in paving the way for the struggle. Do not misunderstand. This does not mean at all to ignore the essential, gross differences between the class movements of different periods in history and to generalize the indicators of the struggle of the slaves and peasants to the anti-capitalist struggle of the working class. We have written in detail about the difficulties, obstacles, and complexities of the anti-wage slavery movement in other writings. The power of fetishism, witchcraft, and thought engineering of the cycle of economic, political, civil, cultural, and social reproduction of capitalism and the plague that it inflicts on the consciousness, cognition, and struggle of the working masses is certainly fundamentally different from what existed under the dominance of previous production relations and the pre-capitalist commodity economy. There is no doubt about this, but the points mentioned above are completely true in the present era, regarding the process of development, growth, organization, awareness, rise and maturity of the anti-capitalist movement of the working class. Workers are not all the same anywhere, not even in any factory. Aware and unaware, experienced and inexperienced or less experienced, illiterate and educated with different levels, brave and conservative, bold and cowardly, resourceful and helpless, capable and incapable, many have strengths that others do not. They have weaknesses, shortcomings that others do not have. One is a skilled speaker, another writes, a third is neither but excels in uniting workers, a fourth can do things that none of his comrades can do as well as he can. The key issue is that those who are more knowledgeable, more capable, with deeper knowledge, more experience, with greater capacity for decision-making, who are braver, bolder, and more progressive should come forward, the more deeply they can be integrated with the mass of the chain. They should boil with them, become companions, allies, comrades, and allies. They should become a unified class whole, a movement, and pursue all these things in the depths of the ongoing struggle, in strikes, protests, riots, uprisings, marches, rebellions, and uprisings of their class with the aim of elevating these struggles to a nationwide, organized, council movement against wage labour and against the existence of capitalism. What has been done so far has either been completely the opposite of this, or else it has had no direction, class charge, or anti-capitalist content. They have been the saviours who have raised the banner of struggle, anti-imperialist revolution, democracy, and wage-labour socialism, and have turned the progressives, the more informed, the solution-seekers, the capable, and the activists of the labour movement into showcases for their own party, group, union, and syndicate stalls, and have derailed the working masses from the anti-wage-labour campaign and made them agents of the conquest of political power. They have been the ones who have injected the diverse intellectual products of the capitalist thought engineering workshops into the consciousness of the workers. They have been making a fuss everywhere that the workers are not prepared to fight against wage slavery. The only thing the workers have done is to act as an agent of the bourgeois opposition to settle their scores with the rulers of the day. The dark incident that has occurred throughout the 20th century is what they think and write about, but it is the vast mass of tens of millions of Iranian workers who must decide. They should look at their distant and recent past. The scattered strikes confined to work centres for more than a century, their mostly fruitless nature, the street riots aimed at genocide, the failed uprisings, the sterile and confiscated revolutions of Bahman 1979 and the 1906 Constitutional Revolution, the black periods of massacre and bloodbath after the 3rd of Hut 1920 and the 30th of Khordad 1981, the storm of struggles from 1941 to 1953 and the hateful coup of August 18, 1953, the raging uprisings of January 2017, November 2019, the “Woman, Life, Freedom” story, and finally the glorious January 2026 movement and the Tatar-Nazi invasion of the Islamic regime with tens of thousands of deaths, all of them are before us. Let us explore the real roots of the failures, the failures. It does not require extraordinary intelligence and insight to realize that you have suffered the most failures, that you have not achieved any significant achievements, because you have not fought against the foundation of capitalism. You have been running after the scoundrels year after year. You have changed from the darkness of the army of one bourgeois right or left opposition to the infantry of another opposition. You have replaced one ruling regime of capital with another regime of the same octopus system. Your living conditions, welfare, medicine, treatment, shelter, everything has remained terribly bleak. In the last 47 years, each month has become worse, more unbearable than the previous month. During these hundred years, the only step we have never taken has been a real anti-capitalist campaign, nationwide organization, and conciliation of our movement against the system of wage slavery. Throughout this century and several decades, the same oppositions who made you the black part of their army, have worked to seize power and settle accounts with their rivals, just like the descendants of their day, have been telling you that now is not the time for anti-capitalist dialogue!! You are not prepared for such a struggle! The talk of eradicating wage slavery is a dream and Platonic ideals!! The basis of all versions, their sermons was and is that workers are incapable of doing anything other than settling accounts between various bourgeois mafias, replacing one capitalist state with another. A sermon that has preachers today more than ever before, and it is the workers who must decide whether to continue the past or, in any circumstances, including in the storm of war between predatory capitalist states, to pursue the work that has been briefly described above and in detail in the writings and numerous other books of the “abolition of wage labour” approach?
Nasser Paydar April 2026