Hands Off the People of Iran

Netanyahu is bent on death, destruction and gore. Donald Trump gave the green light – that much is obvious. Now he has approved attack plans and is demanding ‘unconditional surrender’. Jack Conrad presents the communist alternative to capitalist barbarism and war
We long expected it. Now it has happened. Beginning in the early hours of Friday the 13th of June, Israel launched a full-scale assault on Iran. Operation Rising Lion should not be expected to stop “till it devours the prey and drinks the blood of the slain”.1

Benjamin Netanyahu justified his criminal action with the allegation that Iran lay just weeks away from making nine nuclear weapons – a widely derided lie.2 Doubtless the International Atomic Energy Agency board declared Iran in breach of its obligations under the Non-Proliferation Treaty in what was a highly political 19 to 3 vote (there were 11 abstentions).3 But that hardly amounts to the imminent threat of Israel becoming a “victim of a nuclear holocaust”. Indeed, Iranian negotiators seem to have been under the impression that a deal with the US was within reach in the next round of talks in Oman (due to have taken place on June 15). No less to the point, Rising Lion was “eight months in the making”.4

So why did Israel attack when it did? Netanyahu saw a window of opportunity to achieve two long-held strategic objectives. First, knock out – or at the least thoroughly degrade – a regional rival. Second, use the cover of war to ‘finish the job’ with the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. Mass expulsions would be followed by annexations and the realisation of the Zionist dream of a Greater Israel.

Netanyahu, along with most Zionists, cynically paints Iran as being “singularly hellbent on Israel’s annihilation”.5 Naturally, the Tehran regime pays lip-service to opposing Israel and calls for “a single, democratic Palestinian state” through “holding a referendum of all the original inhabitants”, including Muslims, Jews and Christians.6 Hardly practical – requiring, one presumes, the exodus, or expulsion, of all post-1948 migrants (them and their often mixed offspring and descendants). Anyway, as shown by June 13, Iran is in no position to do much about anything. Israel is militarily strong, Iran pathetically weak. Not that the ayatollahs actually want to help the Palestinians – well, apart, that is, from using them as pawns whenever possible.

If Iran had the technical wherewithal to build, launch and deliver a nuclear warhead that could destroy Tel Aviv or Haifa, it is highly unlikely to embark on any such suicidal course. After all, what would happen immediately afterwards? Total destruction. Israel has at least 140 nuclear warheads. And the Tehran regime is concerned with one thing above all else – survival. That is why, perhaps, it might have calculated on achieving a near-ready nuclear weapon capability, in order to act as a deterrent. It is not gripped by some Islamic death wish – that is for sure. A racist commonplace peddled in the Israeli media.

Of course, what began on June 13 is not a war of conquest. Israel simply lacks the military capacity to do that.7 Iran has a population of around 90 million. An invading Israeli, or American, army, will not be greeted as liberators by the mass of the population. No, on the contrary, they would face determined resistance of the kind seen in Iraq – except on a far bigger and more deadly scale.

Nor can Israel destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities that lie buried deep underground at Natanz and Fordow. It possesses neither the heavy bombers nor the heavy ordnance needed for such a task. Though it would perhaps take several days, the US with its B-2s and 30,000lb GBU-57 bunker busters, might conceivably be able to wreak the necessary destruction. But with what results? Huge amounts of radioactive material possibly released into the atmosphere.

Israel can, however, pound, assassinate and sabotage to the point of triggering economic collapse. Likewise it can decapitate Iran politically and militarily, to the point where Tehran loses effective control over national minority areas such as Kurdistan and Baluchistan and thereby facilitates the country’s break-up. Israel, if it manages to provoke Iran sufficiently – that is, in terms of triggering retaliatory overreach – can also realistically hope get the United States directly involved in the war. Clearly that is Netanyahu’s plan. Whether or not he succeeds is, though, entirely another matter.

Netanyahu claims to be committed to regime change in Iran, yet the very next day he promised that “Tehran will burn”. Leaving that contradictory narrative aside, for regime change to happen there needs to be an alternative regime waiting in the wings. You cannot bring about regime change with bombs and missiles launched from F-14s, F-16s and F-35s. There is certainly no credible ‘great leader’ about to be parachuted in by the US-Israel who will galvanise the Iranian population behind them. Maryam Rajavi and her Mujahadeen-e-Khalq are almost universally regarded as a crazy, weird cult … and it certainly has no mass base in Iran itself. As for the royalists and Reza Pahlavi, though he is heavily financed and promoted by the US and Israel, few serious commentators rate his chances. Some upper class exiles like to imagine his father, Mohammad Reza, as an enlightened despot, but within Iran itself few want to swap the theocracy they know and hate for a return to a monarchy that their parents hated and overthrew.

A Revolutionary Guard or army coup, national breakaways, warlordism and the Somalification of Iran is another matter. They are realistic possibilities and would bring with them all kinds of potentially dreadful unknowns.

In desperation the ayatollah’s regime could conceivably launch waves of drones and missiles against Saudi oil facilities or US bases in the region. Just what Netanyahu is banking on. The same goes with withdrawing from the NPT and going for a nuclear bomb or closing the Strait of Hormuz – the world’s most important “oil transit chokepoint”.8

US involvement would see Iran either suing for peace or reduced to rubble – for America sweet revenge. The overthrow of the shah in 1979 and the ensuing 444 days hostage crisis still rankles with the US state apparatus. Already, however, there are reports of Iran signalling Israel and the US that it wants to de‑escalate, agree a ceasefire and resume talks on its nuclear programme. However, Netanyahu is not in listening mode. Nor is Trump. Indeed, while he says he has no plans to kill supreme leader Ali Khamenei “for now”, he is demanding Iran’s “unconditional surrender”.9 To further spread panic he advises the entire ten million population of Tehran to evacuate the city.

What can be done?
Here in Britain we should certainly keep marching. Solidarity with Palestinians, especially, of course, those in Gaza, is rightly joined with ‘Hands off Iran’ calls. More must be done. Workers at airports and ports can be won to refuse to handle goods, especially arms, headed for Israel. Such agitation would be more than timely. Expecting workers at Rolls Royce, BAE Systems or Leonardo to strike and maybe put themselves out of a much needed job is an altogether bigger ask. Moralistic attacks on ordinary workers should, though, be avoided at all cost. However, despite remaining in the realms of the symbolic, it is quite right to demand that the UK government rescind all export licences for military-related goods going to Israel.

David Lammy sheds crocodile tears and calls for restraint, but will, for example, do nothing to block the delivery of UK-made spares for Israel’s F-35s. He dares not upset Trump and the US. Keeping the recent trade deal with the US matters infinitely more than the lives of countless Palestinians and Iranians.

We must openly declare for the defeat of our ‘own’ side: that is, Israel, its US sponsor and its UK and other such enablers. What that poses is going beyond the ‘strike and street’ politics of protest doggedly pursued by the Socialist Workers Party, Socialist Party in England and Wales, Revolutionary Communist Party and the other confessional sects. We need to embrace the politics of power.

Jeremy Corbyn’s much touted new outfit is worse than useless here. The same goes for George Galloway’s Workers Party of Britain and the Green Party, even if led by the soft left’s latest messiah, the born again Zack Polanski. Such organisations are verbally committed to doing little more than tinkering with the system. They accept the existing constitution, the existing state and the existing capitalist socio-economic order. None of them even so much as question wage slavery. They claim to want a peaceful, just and democratic capitalism. But capitalism is unpeaceful, unjust and undemocratic. So their effective role is to reinforce ideological illusions … and thereby ultimately serve capitalism. No, what is needed is a principled, mass Communist Party. Only such a party, organised on an international scale, can lead the working class to state power and put an end to the global capitalist system of greed, imperialist exploitation … and war.

What about Iran? We have no corresponding wish to see Iran defeated. The Iranian left – within the country and without – must, of course, facilitate, encourage and take full advantage of any loosening of the ayatollah’s grip, through an immediate programme designed to defend the lives and interests of the broad mass of the population.

Demands should certainly be raised for a rigorous and comprehensive rationing system. Everyone must receive according to their needs. The huge black-market rackets run by regime insiders are widely known and there ought to be demands that these criminals suffer confiscation of all ill-gotten gains and receive suitable punishment. Basic necessities must be strictly price-capped. Abandoned apartments allocated to homeless individuals and families. Elected popular committees would ensure everything is fair and above board. Privatized industries such as telecommunications, steel, water and power generation must be brought back under direct state control. Those companies withholding the payment of wages should face confiscation. Banks and insurance companies must be nationalized and the country’s $6.3 billion foreign debt repudiated. A system of sirens needs to be established to provide early warning of air attacks. Clearly marked bomb shelters must be established throughout Tehran’s underground metro system, road tunnels and basements and made available to the general population as a matter of urgency.

Above all, the left needs to organise around a programme of how to make the country worth defending from Israeli (and US) aggression. That can only be done by demanding freedom of speech and assembly, the separation of mosque and state, secularism in all spheres of public life, annulling oppressive laws against women, releasing political prisoners, allowing unrestricted workers’ self-organisation, arming the whole population, abolishing the standing army, the Revolutionary Guards and the basij. Crucially, theocratic rule must be ended.

Elections to a constituent assembly, working class state power and the fullest democracy then become realisable. But more still is needed. Proletarian internationalism is vital. A revolution in Iran must spread to Iraq, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Egypt and come to the rescue of Lebanon, Syria, the West Bank and Gaza.

Expansionism
Israel is not only determined to destroy Iran: it is set on territorial expansion on four fronts: Lebanon, Syria, the West Bank and Gaza. In Lebanon and Syria the pattern follows the classic ‘defensive imperialism’ of ‘buffer zones’. In the case of southern Syria the new ‘buffer zone’ is there to defend the already annexed Golan Heights ‘buffer zone’ (seized in 1967).

However, when it comes to the West Bank and Gaza, the main drive is ideological, not military. Zionism as a settler-colonial project is at the very least committed to incorporating, in its entirety, mandate Palestine. On the West Bank, Israel has already displaced around 40,000 and killed around 1,000 Palestinians since October 7 2023. Meanwhile, Gaza stands on the edge of starvation, ethnic cleansing and genocide – facilitated by the so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. A second nakba is being readied.

Bezalel Smotrich, finance minister and leader of the far-right Religious Zionism Party, triumphantly describes the situation in Gaza as being on the “threshold of the gates of hell”.10 He clearly approves and supports a policy of genocide. No wonder there have been moves by the International Criminal Court to issue an arrest warrant on him too … along with the one already in place on Benjamin Netanyahu.

Strangely, given the huge death toll and the comprehensive devastation of Gaza, there are those panglossians who claimed that Israel “cannot win” in Gaza, that Israel is “unequivocally losing” its war in Gaza, or that the Israel has already “lost in Gaza”.11 All true … if Israel’s war aims were ever about totally destroying Hamas and bringing home all war captives (dead and alive). However, that was never Netanyahu’s intention.

Netanyahu is many things, but he is no fool. His war aims were never about destroying Hamas. Its social roots are far too deep for that. Certainly the war captives are little more than a nuisance for him, when it comes to Israeli domestic politics. He knows it and so do the tens of thousands of relatives, friends and supporters who have time and again demonstrated in Tel Aviv’s Hostage Square.

If you really wanted the war captives back from the tunnels, tents and bomb shelters of Gaza, then direct negotiations with Hamas would have been an absolute priority. And destroying Hamas and negotiating with Hamas are, to put it mildly, mutually incompatible.

No, the real war aim of Netanyahu and his cabinet is to uproot the indigenous population within mandate Palestine in order to realise their greater Israel: from Gaza they will be driven into Egypt’s Sinai, from the West Bank over into Jordan. And, of course, Trump is gung-ho.

October 7
The part desperate, part audacious Operation al-Aqsa Flood prison break on October 7 2023, carried out by Hamas, along with other sections of the Joint Room resistance movement, caught the Israeli high command altogether unprepared – a “complete failure” now openly acknowledged by its military.12

Not surprisingly, there has been speculation that Netanyahu and his cronies were in some way “deliberately” complicit in allowing the whole thing to happen.13 It was, after all, a year in the preparation. Warnings were consistently ignored. Hamas military commanders were themselves certainly surprised by the ability of their al-Qassam fighters to go way beyond what had been originally planned as a suicide mission. Expectations were of something like an 80% casualty rate. Military targets, IDF outposts, police stations thereby gave way to what Hamas itself calls “some faults” in the operation: the totally pointless killing of innocent civilians … and baseless stories of beheading babies and mass rapes.14

October 7 did, though, provide Netanyahu with the political excuse needed for the Israel Defence Forces to pulverise its way into Gaza (and the upping of settler terrorism in the West Bank). True, Israeli public opinion subsequently became deeply divided between what we might call the ‘peace party’ and the ‘war party’. Nonetheless, the war party commands a Knesset majority and has grown into a clear public opinion poll majority with the attack on Iran (83% of Jewish Israeli’s support, only 16% oppose15). Netanyahu himself has every reason to keep the wars in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria and now Iran going on and on … after all, not only does he want to keep his coalition together and stay out of jail: he wants a Greater Israel.

Let us revisit this defining background. Zionists typically claim that Jews have a right to the whole of mandate Palestine (either because of the approval of the Balfour declaration by the League of Nations in July 1922 or Yahweh’s promise to Abraham in Genesis). True, there are profound differences over the constitutional set-up in this Greater Israel. Liberal, or General, Zionism says it is committed to market capitalism, secularism, democratic values and the rule of law (which can, of course, see unelected judges overrule Knesset votes). However, there are those – ie, the religious Zionists – who envisage a Greater Israel as a Jewish theocracy. Fringe elements even want Jerusalem’s al-Aqsa mosque demolished and replaced by a Third Temple – the prelude for the second coming of Jesus for messianic Christians. While secular Jews are viewed as heretics, there is a call for non-Jews, the Children of Noah (Bnei Noach), to observe god’s laws and support his chosen people – perhaps a future source for urgently needed new settlers.16

Some religious Zionists even hanker after a greater Greater Israel – based on various biblical passages: Genesis, Numbers, Ezekiel. At its largest extent their Eretz Israel stretches from the Nile to the Euphrates.17 Of course, any such Israel would come with a poisoned chalice: an oppressed Arab majority. The Zionist conquistadors would have to permanently deny them elementary rights. The newly acquired Arab population would be far too big to do much else with.

Either way, Israel, as a project, is predicated on expansionism. The aliyah (Hebrew for ‘ascent’ – or migration to Israel) constitutes a fundamental part of the Zionist project and is enshrined in Israel’s ‘law of return’ (enacted by the Knesset in July 1950). Any Jew, no matter where they live, no matter how dubious their Jewish antecedents, has the legal right to assisted settlement in Israel, as well as automatic citizenship.

A heterogeneous mixture of the genuinely desperate, the cruelly duped, secular dreamers, religious fanatics and cheap adventurers have come to the promised land over the years. Between 1948 and 1992 Israel took in 2,242,500 Jewish migrants. The bulk from eastern Europe – displaced by World War II – and the centres of Jewry in the Arab world and the Soviet Union. Some 85% of Ethiopia’s 170,000 Jewish population, the Falasha, or Habashim, have gone to Israel under the law of return too. Before October 7, however, the flow of migrants had been reduced to a mere trickle. With October 7 that inward trickle became a 470,000 outward flood … but, predictably, all but a few soon returned to what is their national home.18

Israel needs people. Or, put more accurately, Israel needs Jewish people. Even a little Israel relies on long-term net Jewish immigration … net Jewish emigration, if it were sustained, would indeed mean that the “collapse of Israel has become foreseeable”.19

Today Israel has a record population of just over 10 million.20 However, some 20% of them are Palestinian Arabs. They are, of course, treated as second-class citizens in what is rightly regarded as an apartheid state. Officially, after all, Israel was founded as and continues to be a Jewish state for Jewish people. Meanwhile, there are some 5.9 million UN-registered Palestinian refugees – in Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon.21 There is also a Palestinian diaspora living in Saudi Arabia, the Gulf states, the US, Britain, Germany, Chile, Argentina and many other countries besides.

Nation-in-arms
Following the 1967 Six Day War, Israel’s main arms supplier has been the US (before that it was France). Not that there was an instant love affair between the two countries. George Marshall, president Harry S Truman’s secretary of state, was more than cool about recognising Israel in May 1948. Nor was John Foster Dulles, Dwight Eisenhower’s secretary of state, pro-Israel. It was the rise of Arab nationalism, and the turn towards the Soviet Union instigated by Egypt’s Gamal Abdul Nasser, that led to a US shift. From 1958 the US-Israel alliance slowly expanded in scope and took its present form after the Yom Kippur War of 1973.22 Noam Chomsky, it should be noted, dates US support for the Greater Israel position to 1970, when Henry Kissinger succeeded in “taking over Middle East affairs”.23

By any measure, US economic and military aid to Israel has been considerable. In the 1946-2024 period it amounted to well over $310 billion (in constant 2022 dollars). Today Washington’s largesse mainly goes to support Israel’s already potent military machine: Israel is on a short list of “major non-Nato allies” that gives it privileged access to the most advanced US military platforms and technologies. There is an agreement to supply Israel with a military package worth some $3.8 billion annually till 2028.24 In return for imperial sponsorship, the country acts as a US “strategic asset” in the Middle East (a region which, it just so happens, possesses something like 50% of the world’s readily accessible oil reserves).25

There were those on the left who foolishly welcomed the election of Barack Obama in 2008 – the Morning Star’s Communist Party of Britain, George Galloway, Stop the War Coalition – because they hoped he would chart a fundamentally different, peaceful, more even-handed course in the Middle East. As we predicted at the time, they were bound to be “sadly disappointed”.26 Whatever the skin colour of the president, America is determined to reverse its decline and that means that big-power antagonisms become ever more acute. Indeed, Obama and his secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, undertook the “pivot to Asia” in 2016: the main aim clearly being to block the rise of China – a policy seamlessly continued by the Biden and Trump administrations.27

As for Israel, there has, of course, been no change: unwavering US support is combined with a prolonged economic and diplomatic campaign to reduce, to hem in, Iran and stop it acquiring nuclear weapons. This makes Israel the regional superpower in the Middle East. Even without the ‘special relationship’ with the US, Israel has repeatedly fought, invaded and defeated its Arab neighbours: 1948, 1956 and 1967. After that there followed the 1973 war with Egypt and Syria and the four wars in Lebanon (1978, 1982, 2006 and 2023).

Israel’s armed forces are vastly superior, compared with any Arab country or any conceivable combination of them. It is not a matter of total numbers under arms or the percentage of GDP spent on arms. Israel’s IDF is better led, better trained and better equipped, that is for sure. Moreover, culturally Israel is a highly militarised society. It is a “nation-in-arms” (Ben-Gurion).

Haim Bresheeth-Žabner calls the IDF “an army like no other”.28 In fact, the IDF constitutes the spinal cord of Israel’s national identity. Not country of origin, not religious sect, not political affiliation. The IDF forged the “new Jew” envisaged by Theodor Herzl from the “base elements” coming from middle Europe, the Soviet Union, the Arab countries, Ethiopia and America. Israel has thereby become a modern-day Sparta. Not surprisingly, military experts rank the country amongst the world’s most powerful states. We have already mentioned the nuclear warheads … and Israel certainly has the means of delivering them from land, sea and sky.

Divide and rule
Territorially, economically and politically Palestine is, of course, cleaved between Hamas in a pulverised Gaza and Fatah in the diced and sliced West Bank – two statelets for one people. Uncompromisingly, the 1988 Hamas charter demands an end to the Zionist state of Israel and its replacement by a single Islamic state of Palestine. True, Hamas leaders living in the relative safety of Qatar intransigently refuse to recognise Israel. Nonetheless, Hamas has offered a “long-term truce” in return for Israel withdrawing from all territories it has occupied since 1967: in effect a two-state ‘solution’.

Though Israel encouraged the formation and growth of Hamas from the mid-1980s onwards in order to weaken Fatah, after its landslide victory in the January 2006 elections and the Fatah June coup in the West Bank, Israel imposed its asphyxiating blockade on Gaza. That said, since 2018 Netanyahu’s government allowed Hamas to receive “infusions” of Qatari cash and granted tens of thousands of work permits to Gazan residents. The idea was to keep the Palestinians divided and thereby render any Israel-Palestine two-state ‘solution’ practically inoperable. Hence the Palestinian Authority on the West Bank was treated as a “burden”, while Hamas in Gaza was treated as an “asset”.29 That is, until October 7 2023 – what has been called Israel’s Pearl Harbour.

Leaders of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation – dominated by Fatah – preside over a series of disconnected Arab reservations on the West Bank euphemistically called the Palestinian Authority. Its president, Mahmoud Abbas, pleads for a two-state ‘solution’ and roundly condemns Israel’s invasion of Gaza. He is, however, to all intents and purposes a creature of Israel – a collaborator, a quisling. To put it mildly, he is widely despised.

The PLO’s present line dates back to 1988, when the demand for a return to the status quo ante 1948 was formally abandoned. Fatah had been steadily moving in this direction since the mid-70s; however, the final turning point was the US-brokered Oslo accord, signed in August 1993 by PLO chair Yasser Arafat and Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin. The PLO effectively conceded Israeli hegemony over the whole of mandate Palestine in return for local self-government in Gaza and the West Bank. Abject surrender. The vital questions of Jewish settlements on the West Bank and the right of Palestinians to return to their lands were put aside. A diplomatic triumph for the US and Israel.

Fragmented
What about Israel itself? Its politics are notoriously fragmented. At least a dozen blocs – many with multiple components – are represented in the Knesset. But virtually the entire Israeli-Jewish political spectrum unitedly opposes any kind of democratic settlement with the Palestinians. The nationalist and religious hard right, including Netanyahu’s Likud, has absolutely no truck with any notion of Palestinian statehood. In general Zionists merely talk the talk. Only the left, which relies on Israeli-Arab votes, is serious about a two-state ‘solution’: and that means Palestinians settling for the West Bank and Gaza, and nothing more.

Working class politics in Israel – that is, Israeli-Jewish working class politics – hardly exists, at least at this moment in time, as an effective collectivity. Historically there has been a remorseless shift from voting for the Labor Party to parties of the right in an attempt to preserve national privileges – the Jewish-Israeli working class being a labour aristocracy that has seen its social power substantially eroded by years of neoliberalism.30 In 1983 membership of the trade union federation, Histadrut, stood at 1.6 million; today it is around 570,000. Histadrut, note, once the spearhead of Zionist colonisation, has also been shorn of its role in health, banking and as a very substantial employer in its own right.

Histadrut needs to be put into the context of colonisation. Marxists have distinguished between various types of colonies: plantation colonies, exploitation colonies, colonies properly so-called, etc. Broadly the colonisation of the India, Congo, South Africa type saw the exploiters enslave people, gaining a fat profit from the native workforce, including peasant farmers, through all manner of barely concealed forms of robbery, cheating and double dealing. That went hand-in-hand with staffing an army officer corps, running a bureaucracy and managing railroads, docks, etc. The colonisers therefore constituted a relatively narrow caste who often maintained close ties with the imperial homeland (to which they often returned, having made their fortunes).

Nonetheless, it must be understood that in terms of political economy Israel is what Karl Kautsky called a “work colony”31 or what Moshé Machover prefers to call an “exclusion colony”.32 Instead of constituting themselves as a narrow, often highly privileged, caste, the colonisers make up the full spectrum of classes: bourgeoisie, petty bourgeoisie, small farmers, workers, unemployed reserve workers, etc. Instead of relying on the labour of the indigenous population, it is either replaced, marginalised or driven to the point of extinction. Examples: USA, Canada, Australia.

Israel is definitely an exclusion colony. Despite present-day claims, Zionism was never a national liberation movement. It was always, as it first presented itself, crucially in Theodor Herzl’s foundational Der Judenstaat (1896), a colonial-settler project that would rely on Jewish labour playing the vanguard role: “The poorest will go first to cultivate the soil. In accordance with a preconceived plan, they will construct roads, bridges, railways and telegraph installations; regulate rivers; and build their own dwellings; their labour will create trade, trade will create markets and markets will attract new settlers.”33 Hence, whatever the socialistic pretentions of Labor Zionism, from the beginning, Israel owed far more to the Blut und Boden (blood and soil) ideology of late 19th century European reaction, than anything remotely progressive.

Lenni Brenner makes the point:

Enthusiasm for Blut und Boden were part of Zionism before the first modern Zionist ever left Europe. Race Zionism was a curious offshoot of racial anti-Semitism. True, these Zionists argued, the Jews were a pure race – certainly purer than, say, the Germans who, as even the pan-Germanics conceded, had a huge admixture of Slavic blood. But to these Zionists even their racial purity could not overcome the one flaw in Jewish existence: they did not have their own Jewish Boden. If the Teutonic racists could see themselves as Übermenschen (supermen), these Hebrew racists did not see the Jews in that light; rather, it was the reverse. They believed that because they lacked their own Boden the Jews were Untermenschen and therefore, for their ‘hosts’, little more than leeches: the world pest.34

To get themselves the soil necessary for national salvation, the Zionists, for good ideological reasons, latched upon Palestine. What marked them out, when they went there, was not that to begin with they were a minority of the population in Ottoman and then mandate Palestine. No, the Zionist project relied on propertyless migrants coming from all manner of different countries, while exercising “no coercive power over the indigenous population”.35

That began to change with the formation of the Haganah militia, but it was poorly armed and could only manage defensive operations till the 1940s. At first the Zionists were substantially dependent on external sources of capital too. After all, they had to purchase land from wealthy native owners and most certainly relied on the good will of an imperial sponsor (to begin with Britain, which agreed the Balfour declaration in November 1917). This in the expectation of “forming for England ‘a little loyal Jewish Ulster’ in a sea of potentially hostile Arabism”.36 The Ottoman empire was about to be carved-up by Anglo-French imperialism and that necessitated finding, or creating, willing collaborators. France promoted the historically established Maronite Christians in mandate Lebanon, the British turned to the incoming Zionist Jews in mandate Palestine.

Histadrut played a determining role in what was to become the political economy of Israel. It organised Jewish workers and forced the Jewish capitalist class to grant all manner of concessions – not least barring indigenous, cheaper, Arab labour from whole sectors of the economy (relaxed somewhat after statehood). Histadrut also provided Labor Zionism with the money, the votes and the organisation needed to make it the dominant force politically from the mid-1930s till the late 1970s. So it was far removed from being a trade union federation of the type normally seen in the so-called west.

British left
Obediently reflecting British imperial interests, mainstream Labourism has traditionally maintained a sympathetic attitude towards Zionism. Poale Zion – now the Jewish Labour Movement – affiliated to the Labour Party in 1920. Successive Labour conferences voted in favour of establishing a Jewish state in Palestine. Labour considered the Israeli Labor Party a fraternal organisation and maintained close contacts. From the early 1960s the TUC was giving Histadrut financial aid for its Afro-Asian Institute – a wonderful means for Israel to spread its diplomatic influence. Trade union tops regularly spoke out against Arab feudalism, backwardness and the influence of Nazi ideas.

As for the ‘official’ CPGB, in the late 1940s it temporarily abandoned its historic hostility to Zionism. It formed a National Jewish Committee, which supported Jewish migration into Palestine and land purchases. Stalin, myopically, saw nothing more than a chance to weaken British influence in the Middle East by supporting Zionism … including with the supply of Czech arms.

Hence, toadyingly, in 1948, the ‘official’ CPGB wholeheartedly welcomed the establishment of Israel, greeting the state’s foundation as “a big step toward fulfilment of self-determination of the peoples of Palestine” and “a great sign of the times”.37 After 2,000 years of supposed uninterrupted persecution the Jewish people had liberated themselves at last. In parliament its MPs, Willie Gallacher and Phil Piratin, sponsored an early day motion condemning the Arab states for their 1948 intervention in Palestine, urging the Labour government to recognise Israel and demanding an immediate end to military aid for Arab states.

On the Labour left Edward Short, Jennie Lee and Tony Benn were proud to be counted amongst the Labour Friends of Israel. They routinely cited the kibbutz as a brave socialist experiment. Eric Heffer even defended Israel’s continued occupation of the West Bank and Gaza after 1967 on the grounds that Israel was “the only genuine democratic and socialist-oriented state in the Middle East”.38

Next to nothing of that left now remains. Today Israel counts amongst those countries dominated by the hard right and is therefore regarded as an abomination by those who regard themselves as being in the least bit progressive. True, there is still a pro-Zionist ‘left’. But it is, thankfully, marginal and widely despised: the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty comes to mind, so does the CPB’s resident Zionist, Mary Davis, and her grotesque ‘Anti-Semitism awareness courses’ (as if the Morning Star’s CPB has an anti-Semitism problem, when, in actual fact, it has a pro-Zionism problem).

Does this mean that the left has lighted upon a correct programmatic orientation? Hardly – instead we are presented with a range of positions, all of which are far from adequate.

We have already mentioned the AWL and the Morning Star’s CPB. Essentially their two-state ‘solution’ echoes the PLO, Fatah, the Israeli Labor Party … and the international liberal consensus. It amounts to economistic Zionism. A little Israel – an Israel returned to its pre-1967 borders – is expected to live peacefully alongside a West Bank and Gaza Strip Palestine. Except, of course, it will not.

For appearances sake, till Trump, US administrations promoted this touching picture of the wolf lying down with the lamb. But, in practice, the US has backed Israeli aggression to the hilt. The same goes for its allies, such as the UK, Germany and Italy. So there was no repetition of the early 1990s, when apartheid in South Africa was negotiated away in a US-sponsored deal, which gave black citizens the vote in return for the African National Congress leaving capitalist big business intact.

In Israel-Palestine there is no overwhelming oppressed national majority. There is no threat of a revolutionary explosion. The odds are completely stacked in Israel’s favour. That is why Hamas resorted to desperate suicide missions and the PLO and Fatah are reduced to impotent verbal gestures, pathetic diplomatic pleading and effective collaboration with the Israeli occupiers. Recognising this, the likes of the AWL, CPB … and various Labour left odds and sods clutch at anti-democratic liberal protests and peaceniks such as Standing Together – that and common economic struggles in Israel, which are supposed to weld together Hebrew and Arab workers into a lever for social change.

In fact, Zionism acts to keep workers inside Israel structurally divided. That means legal, political and material privileges for Israeli-Jewish workers, privileges they will hang onto for dear life … unless there is something much better on offer (Israeli-Jewish workers, especially those at the bottom end of the labour market have no wish to compete with Arab-Israeli/Palestinian worst-paid labour as equals, that is for sure).

As a justification for the two-state ‘solution’ we are assured that an Israel-Palestine rapprochement would provide the solid, democratic foundations, from where alone the struggle for socialism can begin. In other words, their two-state ‘solution’ is based on a combination of naive wishful thinking and mechanical, stageist, reasoning. Note, trade union politics – ie, struggles over wages and conditions – always find themselves cut short by the high politics of war, security, national privilege, etc. There have been no Histadrut strikes demanding equal civil rights for Palestinians, ending the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and/or calling for the end of the war with Iran. Nor should any such development be expected within the narrow confines of today’s circumstances.

SPEW offers a ‘socialist’ version of the two-state ‘solution’. It calls for a ‘socialist’ Israel alongside a ‘socialist’ West Bank-Gaza Strip Palestine. Israel, it should be noted, is treated as a ‘normal’ country: the idea of it remaining a “settler state” is dismissed out of hand.39 That despite the starvation imposed on Gaza, the second-class status of Israeli Arabs and the remorseless announcements of yet more Jewish settler ‘outposts’ on the West Bank – there are already 720,000 settlers in the occupied territories (including east Jerusalem).

Anyway, why on earth two such socialist states would remain separate, especially given the substantial population crossover, is a complete mystery. No less to the point, the means of achieving such an outcome relies almost entirely on trade union politics, which by its very nature is sectional and confined to the relationship between sellers and buyers of the labour-power commodity. Hence trade union politics as trade union politics does little more than reproduce the division of the working class. On the one side, nationally privileged labour aristocrats and, on the other, a nationally oppressed underclass.

Then there is the left version of the old PLO single-Palestine ‘solution’: the SWP being the quintessential example. Ignoring the history, power, connections and wishes of the Israeli-Jewish population, there is the call for the abolition, the dismantling of Israel and in its place “one secular, democratic [capitalist – JC] state built on the principle of equal rights for all citizens, including Israeli Jews”.40

The SWP has long ago given up trying to seriously think through what is and what is not a viable strategy in Israel-Palestine.41 What it is primarily interested in nowadays – especially post-October 7 – is posturing. The SWP strives might and main to present itself to the mass pro-Palestine demonstrations, not least its Muslim contingents, as the most militant, most implacable opponents of everything Israeli – and thereby sell a few more papers and gain a few more fleeting recruits. Politically, though, the result amounts to tailing Hamas.

Needless to say then, the Israeli-Jewish working class is deemed to be entirely incapable of playing any positive role. Israeli Jews, most of whom consider themselves secular, will paradoxically be allowed individual religious freedom, but not collective national rights under the SWP’s single-Palestine ‘solution’. Israeli Jews are often defined away as a non-nation by the economistic left, but, even when it is admitted that they do constitute a nation, they are classified as an oppressive, counterrevolutionary one, which should thereby be denied the right to self-determination, presumably in perpetuity.

That this would transform the Israeli-Jewish population into an oppressed nationality never seems to occur to economistic advocates of a single capitalist Palestine. So, for example, in a secular, capitalist Palestine, Israeli-Jews would have “language rights, freedom of worship and the right to their own culture, but political rights? No.”42 Of course, a nation threatened with a denial of political and national rights is likely to fight tooth and claw against any such outcome.

Objectively, though, the balance of forces are violently against a single-capitalist-state ‘solution’. There are some 7.2 million Israeli-Jews (settlements included). About 10‑11 million Palestinians worldwide; but only 6-7 million of them live in Israel, the occupied territories, Syria, Jordan and Lebanon. It is fair to say, then, that any projected single Palestinian state would include roughly equivalent numbers of Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs. Assuming, that is, no forcible movement of peoples. No attempt to drive the Israeli Jews into the sea. No closure of refugee camps and the dumping of Palestinians over to the west side of the Jordan river. No round-up and expulsion of Palestinian workers in Saudi Arabia, etc. Therefore what is being proposed is a ‘unity’ where one half of the population gets no say in matters – impractical and in strategic terms really dumb.

After all, the Israeli-Jewish working class has everything to lose and nothing to gain from such a single-capitalist-state ‘solution’ that is more or less guaranteed to be neither secular nor democratic. They are, therefore, more than likely to resist any such outcome with all their strength. The whole of the 20th century since 1933, but especially the 1943-45 holocaust, tells us that. Without military conquest – a highly unlikely and in and of itself an unwelcome outcome – the immediate demand for a single-state ‘solution’ is entirely illusory. Translated into the ‘Palestine shall be free from the river to the sea’ slogan, it goes down well on street demonstrations, but offers zilch in terms of bringing about a rapprochement between the two peoples in Israel-Palestine and advancing common working class interests.

The call for a single Palestinian state “may seem completely utopian”, the SWP’s Alex Callinicos once owned up. He also correctly stated that there is “very clear evidence that the two-state solution cannot work”. Crucially, there exists, he says, the “massive imbalance of power between the two sides. Israel is one of the greatest military powers in the world, backed and subsidised by the US.”43 Right again.

Hence, it is pertinent to ask exactly who is going to establish the single Palestinian state. After all, according to comrade Callinicos himself, the Palestinians are incapable of achieving any kind of viable state alongside Israel by their efforts alone. How then can we expect them to establish a single state against the wishes of the global US hegemon and the vast mass of 7.2 million Israeli-Jews? Perhaps what the SWP therefore envisaged as its agent of change was the Axis of Resistance – which is today a busted flush combination of Lebanon’s Hezbollah, Hamas, Yemen’s Houthis … and the Islamic Republic of Iran. In the SWP imagination the Axis could, not unreasonably, be joined by Muslim Brotherhood governments in Egypt, Syria and Jordan.

An anti-working class agency, if ever there was one. However, such a pan-Islamic alliance (leave aside the Shia and Sunni divisions) could, conceivably, defeat Israel, as Saladin’s forces defeated the outremer, crusader, kingdom of Jerusalem in 1187. But that would, though, hardly produce a secular Palestinian state. Nor would it produce a democratic Palestinian state. True, if such an unlikely combination were to come together – and, just as unlikely, achieve military victory over Israel – it might lead to a mass exodus of Jews (to who knows where). But if that did not happen, the Jewish-Israeli population would have to be subject to extraordinarily harsh measures to crush the inevitable resistance. The poles of national oppression would, yes, thereby be reversed. But, we are told, what does that matter? It would, be ‘national liberation’ via the destruction of the settler-colony … and from the (nuclear?) ashes, hopefully some kind of ‘socialism’ would arise. Not something any genuine Marxist would care to countenance.

Though it might be an inconvenient truth, no democratic solution can be won without the consent of Israeli Jews – that is, a clearly expressed majority of them. Those Humpty Dumpties who claim otherwise are coining a contranym, whereby words become their opposite. Democracy is divorced from basic democratic rights. – it becomes a denial of basic democratic rights.

Yet the fact is, despite the warnings, pained outrage and courage of Israeli-Jewish socialists, anti-Zionists and pacifists, the Israeli-Jewish population at large consistently, often overwhelmingly, supports the wars of their elected politicians, generals and capitalist masters, irrespective of the hatred of Israel that this inevitably engenders.

Why? Israel is a colonial-settler state and all such states face a fundamental problem: what to do with the people whose land has been robbed. During the wars of 1947-49 and 1967 well over a million Palestinians fled or were forcibly driven out. Palestinians in Israel, Gaza and the West Bank are therefore ‘unfinished business’.

Both the Palestinian enemy within and the Palestinian enemy without engender a permanent state of insecurity. Israeli Jews know they are resented, know they are hated. When it comes to worst-paid labour, the Palestinians willingly undercut them. Then there are the Knesset votes of ‘official communists’ and Islamists, the Hamas October 7 prisons breakout, the Hezbollah rockets and Iran’s “race” to acquire nuclear bombs. Understandably, the Israeli-Jewish population feels under constant threat and therefore – insecure, frightened, vengeful, maddened – willingly supports, urges on Israeli aggression, oppression and even genocide. The vain hope is to crush or finally remove all such threats and dangers – an oppressor’s peace.

Does it follow that Israelis cannot make a democratic peace with Palestinians? That any Israeli settlement with the Palestinians is bound to be a sham? There can certainly be no democratic peace with Israel as a Zionist state – any more than there can be with an Islamic Palestine.

Zionism is, arguably, a nationalism sui generis. While it now boasts a homeland, Zionism claims purchase over the loyalty of all Jews, even though the majority of the people-religion are not Israeli and do not speak everyday Hebrew (around 40% of the world’s Jewish population lives in the US, roughly the same as in Israel). No less to the point, the Zionist state is committed to expansion and denying elementary rights to a good portion of the population it rules over (ie, the Palestinians in Israel and the occupied territories).

Nevertheless, the Israeli-Jewish people, the Hebrew-speaking nation, is a real, living entity and cannot be dismissed or discounted just because Israel began and continues to be a settler-colonial state. Israel emerged out of the last phase of the British empire, in the midst of a terroristic civil war and unforgivable crimes that no-one should forget. That said, there is no reason for refusing to recognise the definite, historically constituted Hebrew nation which took state form with the May 14 1948 declaration of Israeli independence.

And since then millions of Jews have migrated to Israel, learnt Hebrew, intermarried, had children, assimilated, and made and remade the Israeli-Jewish nation. Today some 80% are ‘sabras’ – Israeli born – and mostly second or third generation.44 Hence, the Israeli-Jewish nation not only inhabits a common territory and shares a common language: it is historically constituted.

Of course, most, if not all, the world’s states came into existence by way of terrible oppression. But, while fully taking into account history, any consistently democratic programme must be squarely based on contemporary realities – crucially human facts on the ground. Abolition of Zionist Israel, legal equality for all, secularism, halting expansionism and withdrawing from the occupied territories are basic (minimal) programmatic demands. None of that, however, should be taken as synonymous with an eviscerating reconstruction of the pre-1948 situation. One might just as well call for the abolition of the US, Canada, Australia, etc, and a return of lands to the enfeebled remnants of the aboriginal populations.

The only realistic, progressive and humane programme must be based on a mutual recognition by both Palestinians and Israeli Jews of each other’s national rights. Needless to say, it would be an excellent thing if both nations chose to happily live side by side or, even better, to slowly merge together into a single nation. No rational human being would want to oppose either such outcome. The question is, though, how to arrive at such a happy outcome? Given where we are situated today, our discussion must necessarily return to the question of agency.

Arab nation
No democratic solution for the Israel/Palestine conflict can be achieved in isolation. Objective circumstances simply do not permit it. That is as certain as anything can be in this uncertain world.

By themselves the Palestinians – debilitatingly split between Hamas and Fatah – palpably lack the ability to achieve anything beyond abject surrender or hopeless resistance. Certainly not a single Palestinian state, where Israeli Jews have ‘full’ religious rights, but no national rights. There is, however, a way to cut through the Gordian knot: widen the strategic front. There are nearly 300 million Arabs in a contiguous territory that stretches from the Atlantic Ocean, across north Africa, down the Nile to north Sudan, and all the way to the Persian Gulf and up to the Caspian Sea.

Though studded here and there with national minorities – Kurds, Assyrians, Turks, Armenians, Berbers, etc – there is a definite Arab or Arabised community. Despite being separated into 25 different states and divided by religion and religious sect – Sunni, Shi’ite, Alaouite, Ismaili, Druze, Orthodox Christian, Catholic Christian, Maronite, Nestorian, etc – they share a living bond of pan-Arab consciousness, born not only of a common language, but of a closely related history. Arabs are binational. There are Moroccans, Yemenis, Egyptians, Jordanians, etc. But there is also a wider Arab identity, which has its origins going back to the Muslim conquests of the 7th and 8th centuries.

The most well-known candidate for Arab unifier was Nasser. This uncrowned Bonaparte led the Free Officers’ revolution in 1952, which overthrew the pro-British monarchy of Farouk I. Nasser then oversaw a radical agrarian reform programme, nationalised the Suez canal, allied Egypt with the Soviet Union and put his country on the course of state-capitalist development. This went hand-in-hand with crushing both the Muslim Brotherhood and the working class movement.

Nasser called it ‘Arab socialism’. Especially with his success in the 1956 crisis – an Israeli invasion followed by a pre-planned joint French and British intervention and then an unexpected American veto – his popularity soared throughout the Arab world. Pro-Nasser Arab socialist parties, groups and conspiracies were sponsored or established themselves. His name became almost synonymous with pan-Arabism.

Nasser demanded that natural resources be used for the benefit of all Arabs – hugely popular with those below. Everyone knew he meant oil. Of course, the house of Saud instantly became an implacable enemy. Yet because of mass pressure the Ba’athist authorities in Syria sought a merger. Despite the repression suffered by their co-thinkers in Egypt, the ‘official communists’ and the Syrian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood likewise favoured unity.

The United Arab Republic was formed on February 1 1958. Nasser was appointed president and Cairo became the capital. Yet the UAR proved momentary. Syrian capitalists did not gain access to the Egyptian market and Egyptian administrative personnel were viewed by Syrian officers, bureaucrats and top politicians as acting like colonial officials. The union ignominiously collapsed in 1961. Opposition came from the Damascus street. However, from then onwards the UAR became a hollow pretence. It united no other country apart from Egypt.

The 1967 Six Day War with Israel proved to be the final straw for Nasserism. Israel’s blitzkrieg destroyed the airforces of Egypt, Syria and Jordan on the ground and by the end of the hostilities Israel occupied the Gaza Strip, Sinai, the West Bank and the Golan Heights. Nasser was humiliated and died soon afterwards, a broken man.

Evidently, however, Arab reunification remains a burning, but unfulfilled, task. The fact that Nasser’s short-lived UAR saw the light of day is testimony to mass support for Arab unity. No less to the point, what was a potent sentiment in the 1950s and well into the 1970s needs to be revived in the 21st century and given a new democratic and class content.

So we are not talking about reviving Nasserism. Nor are we talking about something akin to the pan-Slavism of Ľudovít Štúr, which excused so many of the wars and intrigues of the late Russian empire. No, communists need to take the lead in the fight for pan-Arab unity – as Marx and Engels and their comrades in the Communist League did in the fight for German unity. Such a fight, is, of course, inseparable from the task of building a mass Communist Party – first in each Arab country and then throughout the Arab world. A Communist Party of Arabia.

What of reconciliation between Hebrews and the Palestinians? That can only happen in the context of sweeping away Iran’s theocracy, the Hashemite kingdom of Jordan, Lebanon’s sectarian warlord plutocracy, Egypt’s military bureaucratic regime, the House of Saud, the petty Gulf sheikdoms – and the establishment of working class rule throughout the Middle East. Israel could be offered federal status, with the confident expectation that such an invitation would receive a positive response from below.45

Hence, the road to a united working class in Palestine passes through Amman, it passes through Tehran, it passes through Beirut, it passes through Cairo and it passes through Riyadh46.

Israel’s military operation takes its name from Numbers xxiii,24. A typically gory passage in what Christians call the Old Testament. In full the verse reads: “Behold, a people! As a lioness it rises up and as a lion it lifts itself; till it devours the prey and drinks the blood of the slain.”↩︎

“As recently as 25 March, Tulsi Gabbard, the US director of national intelligence, told the Senate intelligence committee that the American intelligence community had assessed that Iran was not actively pursuing a nuclear weapon” (The Guardian June 13 2025). See also A England ‘Was Iran really developing nuclear weapons?’ Financial Times June 16 2025; ‘Was Iran really racing for nukes?’ The Economist June 13 2025.↩︎

It should be pointed out that Isreal is a non-signatory to the 1968 Non-Proliferation Treaty, which requires existing “nuclear weapon states” to disarm and commit themselves to the exclusive use of nuclear technology for peaceful purposes (see disarmament.unoda.org/wmd/nuclear/npt). So the United States, Britain, France, Russia and China are definitely in breach of the NPT.↩︎

www.axios.com/2025/06/13/how-israel-executed-strike-iran-nuclear.↩︎

Jewish News June 16 2025.↩︎

www.presstv.ir/Detail/2025/05/24/748493/Iran-Israel-two-state-solution-Palestine-genocide-United-States-talks.↩︎

Special forces operations are a different matter and seem already to have happened on June 13 with Mossad’s drone attacks on air defences launched from within Iran.↩︎

About 25% of the world’s oil trade and a third of liquified natural gas passes through the strait – see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strait_of_Hormuz.↩︎

The Independent June 17 2025.↩︎

www.middleeastmonitor.com/20250302-israels-smotrich-calls-for-opening-gates-of-hell-on-gaza-after-halt-of-humanitarian-aid.↩︎

In order: Sophie Squire ‘Six months of slaughter, six months of resistance’ Socialist Worker April 3 2024; Ofer Cassif of the ‘official communist’ Hadash party in Israel; and US ‘realist’ John Mearsheimer Al Jazeera January 24 2025.↩︎

www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/2/28/what-has-the-report-into-israeli-military-failures-on-october-7-said.↩︎

www.eurasiareview.com/15022024-did-israel-deliberately-ignore-warnings-of-an-attack-by-hamas-to-enable-them-to-destroy-gaza-oped.↩︎

Hamas Our narrative … Operation al-Aqsa Flood p8.↩︎

The Jerusalem Post June 17 2025.↩︎

See R Feldman Messianic Zionism in the digital age: Jews, Noahides and the Third Temple imaginary New Brunswick NJ 2024.↩︎

“On that day the Lord made a covenant with Abram, saying, ‘To your descendants I give this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the Euphrates, the land of the Kenites, Kenizzites, Kadmonites, the Kadomites, the Hittites, Perizzites, Rephaims, Amorites, Canaanites, Girgashites and the Jebusites” (Genesis xv, 18-1).↩︎

www.jpr.org.uk/insights/israels-jewish-demography-changing-and-it-so-diasporas.↩︎

I Pappé, ‘The collapse of Zionism’ New Left Review June 21 2024.↩︎

The Jewish Chronicle January 6 2025.↩︎

www.unrwa.org/palestine-refugees.↩︎

See A Ben-Zvi Decade of transition: Eisenhower, Kennedy and the origins of the American-Israeli alliance New York NY 1998.↩︎

N Chomsky The fateful triangle: the United States, Israel and the Palestinians London 1983, p43.↩︎

www.cfr.org/article/us-aid-israel-four-charts.↩︎

www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/israel-strategic-asset-united-states-0.↩︎

J Conrad, ‘Zionist imperatives and the Arab solution’ Weekly Worker January 22 2009: weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/753/zionist-imperatives-and-the-arab-solution.↩︎

H Clinton, ‘America’s Pacific century’ Foreign Policy November 2011.↩︎

H Bresheeth-Žabner An army like no other: how the Israeli Defence Force made a nation London 2020, p13.↩︎

The Times of Israel October 8 2023.↩︎

The thesis of the Jewish-Israel working class being a labour aristocracy is closely associated with Maxime Rodinson. See his Israel: a colonial settler state? New York NY 1973.↩︎

See M Macnair (intro) Karl Kautsky: on colonialism London 2013.↩︎

M Machover, ‘Colonialism and the natives’ Weekly Worker December 17 2015: weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1087/colonialism-and-the-natives.↩︎

www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/25282/pg25282-images.html.↩︎

www.marxists.org/history/etol/document/mideast/agedict/ch02.htm.↩︎

M Shalev The labour movement in Israel: ideology and political economy Westview CO 1996, p1.↩︎

R Storrs Orientations London 1937, p405. Sir Ronald Storrs served as British military governor of Jerusalem in 1917.↩︎

Daily Worker May 15 1948.↩︎

E Heffer, ‘Why Labour should support Israel’ Labour looks at Israel: 1967-1971 London 1971, p31.↩︎

J Horton Socialism Today February 2 2024.↩︎

SWP pamphlet Palestine, resistance, revolution and the struggle for freedom London 2023, p28.↩︎

Eg, the SWP’s co-thinker in Germany, Ramsis Kilani, comes out with the bog-standard “strikes and mass mobilisations” and “workers developing their own capability for revolutionary self-governance” catch phrases. But, though he denounces “Stalinist conceptions of a revolution by ‘stages’”, that is actually what he advocates (R Kilani ‘Strategies for liberation: old and new arguments in the Palestinian left’ International Socialism No183, Summer 2024). Incidentally, Die Linke, Germany’s so-called ‘left’ party, disgracefully expelled the comrade on entirely bogus charges of “anti-Semitism” in December 2024. Anne Alexander, the SWP’s Middle East expert, confirms the stagism when she writes of her perspectives for Palestine having “two aspects”: “The first would be a [altogether improbable – JC] revolution inside Palestine, led by Palestinians, for a single democratic and secular state, achieved through the dismantling of the whole social and political system of apartheid by a movement from below.” The second aspect being “a revolutionary process outside Palestine” (A Alexander ‘Palestine: between permanent war and permanent revolution’ International Socialism No181, Winter 2023). Nowhere does she mention ‘socialism’, ‘working class state power’ or ‘social revolution’ … or even words to that effect.↩︎

Tony Greenstein, Letters Weekly Worker June 27 2024.↩︎

Socialist Worker August 5 2006.↩︎

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabra_(person).↩︎

A perspective advanced by Jabra Nicola and Moshé Machover in June 1969. See M Machover Israelis and Palestinians: conflict and resolution Chicago IL 2012, pp15-25.↩︎

To paraphrase George Habash, first general PFLP secretary, and before him Ahmad Shukeiri, first PLO chair (see JT Buck The decline of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine Hampshire College MA, 2013, p4).↩︎

Netanyahu has been wanting to attack Iran for years. Now that the war with Iran has begun, he can finish the job in Gaza and the West Bank, warns Moshé Machover
Israel’s war of aggression against Iran is anything but surprising. In fact, I predicted all this back in 2012, when I explained why Israel, specifically under the Netanyahu government, is drawn towards attacking Iran.1 Since then it has been a recurring theme in Netanyahu’s call on the United States to allow Israel to do the job. He has repeatedly made ‘weapons of mass destruction’ speeches, alleging that Iran is preparing to launch a nuclear attack on Israel.

Long time
The reason why this war has taken so long to come about is that previous US administrations were wary of allowing Israel to start a conflict that may end up in a larger war involving the US itself. America still recalls the bitter experience of previous conflicts in which it got entangled, and which ended not too happily for America – although much less happily for the people attacked (in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and so forth). However, the current president is less inhibited. Donald Trump had the reputation of being ‘peace-loving’, preferring economic warfare to the armed kind; but he is notoriously volatile. There is no doubt that he personally gave the green light to Israel’s latest unsurprising attack.

I think it is useful to explain the background to this, because it is not just a coincidental act on Israel’s part; so let us look at the motivation and the reasoning behind it. It is a consequence – an offshoot – of Israel’s overriding strategic aim: to complete the Zionist project of colonisation over the whole Land of Israel, which includes, of course, the area between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River at the very least.

In fact, the actual coveted area is ill-defined, but is ultimately rooted in the divine promise of Jehovah to Abraham in the book of Genesis.2 Completing the Zionist project of colonisation implies, entails and necessitates territorial expansion (that is to say, annexing added bits of the ‘promised land’) and ethnic cleansing over the whole of this territory. The Zionist project aims to establish a Jewish nation-state in that land, which means that it must be inhabited by a stable, large majority of Jews, whereas the Palestinian, or non-Jewish, inhabitants are surplus to requirements, and must be got rid of one way or another.

Another precondition for completing the Zionist project is securing regional hegemony. Israel must be a regional superpower, an absolute nuclear monopolist. Israel must not only be the only regional state in possession of nuclear weapons: it must be the only state in the region that has the potential to develop nuclear bombs. That is to say, Israel aims at becoming a monopolist of not only nuclear weapons, but nuclear capability, which is not the same thing at all, because there are several states in the world that have nuclear capability, but are, for one reason or another, not actually in possession of nuclear weapons. These aims – territorial expansion, ethnic cleansing and securing regional hegemony – are interconnected. One follows from the other and, in fact, one entails the other.

One reason why the completion of the Zionist project requires Israel to be a local hegemon on the most elementary level is that colonisation provokes opposition by other states. There is obviously regional opposition to the expansion of the state of Israel. Therefore, because colonisation and the completion of the Zionist project entails territorial expansion, it provokes opposition by the neighbouring states, at whose expense Israel is expanding, or who regard Israel’s expansion as a potential danger to themselves. It also provokes opposition and solidarity by the people in the surrounding region – that is to say, most of the population in the Arab east, who are motivated by solidarity with the Palestinian people and who are therefore pushing their governments, despite themselves, to show some opposition. So, on this very elementary level, Israel needs to be militarily superior to the surrounding states.

Natural mother
On a more profound historical level, the Zionist project has always been in need of imperialist sponsorship. It did not have a natural mother country, and therefore it needed a surrogate. Compare this to a local mafioso who needs to sell himself to a global mafia boss, for whom Israel is the best choice for regional deputy. So Israel needs the protection of the dominant hegemonic imperialist state – currently the United States – granting it the position of ‘sheriff’ or deputy in the Middle East region. There is a mutual interest, therefore, in promoting Israel as a powerful local ally and enforcer: that is to say, Israel has a particular value for imperialism. While the USA is an extremely powerful state, in order to secure its interests in the region, it must rely on a local powerful state – so Israel has an inbuilt need to show itself as the most powerful and most ruthless.

The local wars provoked by Israel are an excellent opportunity for expansion and ethnic cleansing in order to further the strategic aim of the completion of the Zionist project of colonisation. To illustrate this: The Guardian of June 14 has the headline, “Strikes on Iran ease pressure on Israel to end starvation in Gaza”.3 In other words, in the weeks before Israel’s assault on Iran, there had been an increasing acceptance (albeit too little, too late) by western governments of the pressure from below to ‘do something’ about the ethnic cleansing and genocide in Gaza. In the UK, France and even Germany there was mounting pressure to demand that Israel call a halt to the genocide.

But now that Israel has attacked Iran on behalf of the western imperialist ‘community’, the pressure has been eased. Its strikes on Iran ease the pressure on it to end the starvation of Gazans. This is an illustration of how a regional war – in this case quite openly initiated by Israel – helps to further the Zionist project of ethnic cleansing.

Here is another headline, this time from Haaretz: “Gaza residents say IDF escalated attacks in the Strip since Israel launched war on Iran.” Israel’s genocidal stranglehold on Gaza has not abated, now that it is concentrating on its war with Iran. Not at all – actually quite the contrary. Since Israel’s attack on Iran is condoned by western imperialist states, the pressure on it has been eased, at least for the moment, and this enables it to perpetrate ethnic cleansing in the Gaza Strip – and no doubt very soon in the West Bank too – without incurring diplomatic pressure on the part of the western powers.

So Israel’s war on Iran serves two of its aims: asserting regional hegemony; and serving as a smokescreen, behind which ethnic cleansing can proceed all the more ruthlessly. But then, of course, as Keir Starmer keeps reminding us, “Israel has the right to defend itself”.

Articles by Yassamine Mather and Moshé Machover are edited versions of their June 15 Online Communist Forum talks.

See ‘Netanyahu’s war wish’ Weekly Worker February 9 2012: weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/900/netanyahus-war-wish.↩︎

See ‘Promise myth as template’ Weekly Worker July 25 2024: weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1501/promise-myth-as-template.↩︎

.www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jun/14/israel-attack-on-iran-slows-diplomatic-momentum-to-halt-gaza-war.↩︎

Peering into the darkness

Yassamine Mather questions the western nuclear bomb narrative, discounts the chances of managed regime change and insists that Israel’s war is not only against the regime. Millions of ordinary Iranians are in danger and must be defended
In its compliance with the US agenda, the media keep telling us that Israel’s current attack on Iran is a preventive war. There is, of course, a distinction between ‘preventive’ and ‘pre-emptive’ – those of us who have debated the Iran-Iraq war ad infinitum have argued that maybe Saddam Hussein’s attack on Iran was pre-emptive. He knew Iran was going to attack Iraq.

You could say that pre-emptive war is legitimate then – but ‘preventive war’ is not. That is when it is claimed that, at some undetermined time in the future, we will be at risk because a particular state might attack us. In this case, Israel and its allies, including G7 leaders, are arguing that at an indeterminate time in the future, Iran might have a nuclear bomb and will be able to launch a devastating attack. It is unbelievable that such nonsense is peddled by western governments and accepted by their subservient press and media. When I am interviewed by reporters about the existential threat posed by Iran, I ask, “Well, where exactly is this atomic bomb?”

Let us start with last week’s meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency. Even the compliant, pro-US mass media cannot deny the fact that this meeting, which apparently – at least, according to Benjamin Netanyahu – is the reason this attack took place, did not conclude that Iran has achieved nuclear weapons capability.

Non-compliance
The report is clear, Iran has 408.6 kg of 60% enriched uranium, while the uranium used in a nuclear weapon needs 90% enrichment. Yet this was presented as non-compliance with the Nuclear Proliferation Treaty, which many European countries had signed up to. On the other hand, Israel, which has always refused to join the NPT, has some 140 nuclear warheads, and it possesses fissile material (mainly plutonium) for up to 200-300 more. It has the delivery system for these weapons too, with the Jericho II/III ballistic missiles, as well as Dolphin-class submarines capable of launching nuclear-armed cruise missiles.

There was another bizarre thing about this meeting. IAEA claims that Iran had stolen some of its secret documents. It is difficult to see how this could have happened, but all we know is that Iran hacked an Israeli nuclear document file. Some commentators have pointed out that IAEA is saving its nuclear documents that were stolen during the hacking of Israeli papers. In other words, no-one should have any trust in IAEA. There seems no end to the hypocrisy shown by global capitalism and its international institutions.

The current Israeli onslaught has multiple components and is very well-programmed and rehearsed. Stage one was the IDF attack on Iran’s top leaders. Then nuclear installations were targeted, while the latest stage is the attack on oil and gas reserves.

The Iranian government now claims this resulted in a victory for itself. Even by the standards of Iranian propaganda, this is ridiculous. They were taken by surprise, fooled by the nuclear negotiations in Oman. The reason I say this is that reliable information indicates that the reformist faction set to lead the negotiations on June 15 were under the impression that a deal with the US was possible – they told others that a final deal was imminent. That was total nonsense. However, if there was progress in the US-Iran talks, this could explain Netanyahu’s timing. He was keen to scupper the talks at all costs.

The question remains: how far did the US support the initial attack? Trump gave the green light, as he admitted on June 13. His post on Truth Social read, “Israel is likely to attack shortly”, and added: “I still think we should carry on with negotiations.” The real issue is whether Trump knew the full extent of the attack. Probably. Some argue he believed a limited strike would give the US and its Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, leverage in Oman. Trump has repeatedly said that Iran is a difficult negotiator, but he has also insisted that applying pressure can yield progress.

If the US now joins Israel in attacking nuclear plants, the consequences will be severe. Mohamed El Baradei – former IAEA head – has stated clearly that attacking nuclear facilities is irresponsible due to the risk of radiation. His comments referred to Israel’s previous strikes on above-ground support structures. However, an assault on the underground enrichment sections would be an entirely different matter.

Bunker-busting bombs are believed to be the only conventional weapons capable of penetrating up to 60 metres of reinforced concrete. These munitions can only be delivered by the B-2 stealth bomber. The United States has recently stationed a squadron of them on Diego Garcia, an island some 2,400 miles from Iran’s southern coast – well within operational range.

In the last few days, members of my family have frequently asked me, “Are we going to be poisoned by nuclear radiation?” The answer, at this stage, is probably not. The reasoning is simple: although the facilities have sustained damage, it appears to be superficial or at a low level. Most uranium enrichment takes place deep underground. If those inner sections had been hit, we would know. IAEA chief Rafael Grossi was quoted as saying on June 17 that they are monitoring the situation and have observed “no damage to the basics.”

However, this could all change if the 30 warplanes sent by the United States to the region on June 16-17 – reportedly including bunker-buster-equipped bombers – are used.

Regime change
Netanyahu, for his part, appears eager for the war to escalate and is seeking active involvement from the US and possibly European states. If such an attack occurs and radioactive material is released at the scale experts anticipate, it could be far worse than Chornobyl, where a catastrophic nuclear accident occurred in 1986. As the Qataris and other Gulf Arab states have warned, it would place millions of civilians at grave risk. That is an extremely serious issue – and, to be honest, I do not have a clear answer.

We also have the concept of ‘regime change’. Netanyahu has recently appealed to the Iranian people on what I call ‘Mossad Persian TV’ (Iran International TV), saying, “Fight your regime and join our war against the Islamic Republic.” Of course, he also said that there was the possibility that “We’ll burn the capital flat to the earth” – hardly a good tactic. If you are trying to turn a population against their government, telling them you could well destroy their homes if they do not “join our war” does not help. In addition the US president has told Tehran’s population of ten million to leave town!

Having said that, I think regime change is more in the imagination of the Iranian rightwing opposition: the Iran Zionists, royalists or the Mojahedin-e-Khalq. Most ordinary Iranians, even non-political ones, hate MEK more than the regime. They remain Islamist, and they stand no chance, despite financial support from Arab countries and political support from prominent US Republicans, as well as Liz Truss! Meanwhile, the royalists have some supporters, gained by relentless pro-Zionist western media propaganda portraying Israel as a ‘poor little democracy surrounded by barbarians’.

However, they are hardly a serious option. The regime will not collapse in the next few days, unless we see a major escalation, with the direct involvement of the USA or the assassination of Khamenei, as Trump threatens. However, none of this will be ‘regime change’, because there is no viable alternative. While sustained attacks could eventually lead to chaos or even civil war, supporters of the royalists, including those groomed by Israel, have been notably absent from major cities since the bombings started. This may be because the level of support for the royalists had been grossly exaggerated by propaganda outlets like Iran International TV. Alternatively, it could be that their leaders are simply too afraid to go public.

One thing is clear: the wave of bombing has fuelled nationalism. While most ordinary people dislike the regime, they are unlikely to support Netanyahu, Trump or anyone associated with them, when they are under aerial attack and forced to abandon their homes.

That said, the regime’s infrastructure is clearly under pressure. Those who can afford to are fleeing the major cities, and many shops are running out of basic supplies. If the current level of attacks continues, the regime will likely lose its grip on power. However, in the absence of any alternative, one can envisage chaos and eventual civil war.

If the US fails to broker a deal, Israel’s goal of destroying Iran’s nuclear facilities can only be achieved via direct American intervention. Only the US has the necessary military capability for such a strike. In that scenario, Iran might attempt to block the Strait of Hormuz – through which 20% of the world’s oil supply passes. However, I assume the US would respond with overwhelming force, destroying any Iranian naval or military units attempting to do so.

I think Netanyahu has given a gift to the Islamic Republic. Anti-Israel demonstrations (probably originally organised by the government) are now huge in Tehran and other major cities. The overwhelming sentiment in Iran is nationalism – a deep-seated pride in Iran’s 3,000-year (or, according to some, 7,000-year) history. Nationalism trumps everything else: underestimating it is a serious mistake.

Options
What are Iran’s options? None look good, especially as Iran has lost its allies. When recent attacks were launched against Hezbollah and Syria, we said that this was not really about them – the main enemy is Iran. Hamas is weak (and its relationship with Iran is tumultuous – allies during some periods, enemies during others, like the Syrian civil war). Hamas recently complained publicly about the lack of support from Iran as well as Hezbollah after October 2023.

Iran and Syria have been allies, but with contradictions. The Assad regime was useless, but Iran had Revolutionary Guard bases in Syria – not because they loved Assad, but in order to be closer to Israel if Tehran was attacked by the Zionist state. As for Hezbollah, it is very much weaker now: Lebanon’s new government restricts it, and the assassination of its leader, Hassan Nasrallah, combined with heavy losses (like the Beirut port explosion, which terrified ordinary Lebanese citizens), limits its capability. Iran has the Houthis – on June 13, videos showed large crowds in Yemen supporting Palestine and clapping during Iran’s attack on Tel Aviv. But that is strategically insignificant. There can be no Iranian victory in this conflict, given the total imbalance.

As Moshé Machover has pointed out, Netanyahu has focused on this for years. He claimed Iran’s nuclear bomb was “years away” 30 years ago, “months away” five years ago, and now “days away”. The reality is, Iran is far from full nuclear capability – it is not just a question of nuclear enrichment, but weapons delivery, which remains problematic. Comparing military capabilities, Iran has just over 90 million people, as opposed to Israel’s 10 million, so, yes, Iran has more soldiers, but this war will be fought with drones, missiles and air power – areas where Israel is far better equipped. Some Iranian ballistic missiles have penetrated the Iron Dome, but most are destroyed before they get there.

Iran’s options are limited:

Close the Strait of Hormuz: Oil prices have risen due to war and this would cause another dramatic spike. But China most likely would not want this and might strongly advise against it.
Attack US/European citizens or military in neighbouring countries: This would prompt harsher retaliation against Iran. Attacking civilians in particular would backfire.
Secret negotiations: Despite the cancellation of the Oman talks, secret negotiations might still be going on. The Islamic Republic survives by being ruthlessly pragmatic (eg, the Iran-Contra affair in the 1980s).
The mistakes we should not make include the following. First, separating the war from the Iranian people: an Iranian ‘left’ group recently declared: “This is a war between Israel and Iran. Nothing to do with the Iranian people.” How stupid! Iranian people are dying; their houses are being destroyed. Israel (an extreme rightwing state) is attacking another country. If this war continues, many thousands will die.

An IDF leaflet reads: “Iran is now priority one; Gaza second” – yes, because in Gaza they are not fighting: they are starving people and forcing them to move and move again. For Netanyahu, this is yet another benefit of the war headlines having shifted from Gaza to Iran, while Gaza’s suffering has not stopped.

This war is with the Iranian people. The first victims will be Iran’s working class. One Israeli target on June 15 was Tabriz with its factories – places where workers have held strikes and demonstrations against the Islamic Republic in recent months. Will they now take Netanyahu’s flag and support the royalists? No. The Tabriz Tractor Company and Asaluyeh factory have historically been left strongholds. Stupid leaflets separating the people from the war will not help the Iranian left.

I also object to the kind of mislabelling of Iran by groups like the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty, which calls Iran a “sub-imperialist” or “regional imperialist” power. Of course, that might have been true under the shah. Today, however, Iran’s Islamic Republic is barely surviving. It cannot defend its capital or even feed its people. Decades of western sanctions have wrecked the economy and profoundly weakened the working class. Moreover, the Iranian left is fragmented, confused and in many ways compromised. Globally there will be solidarity with Iranian people – not the regime. Apart from saying that, what happens in the short to medium term is impossible to predict at this moment in time.

In der heutigen Welt spielen Unternehmen, Konzerne und Institutionen eine wichtige Rolle in der Wirtschaft eines jeden Landes. Ihr Einfluss zeigt sich auf allen Ebenen, von der Bereitstellung offener Stellen über die Umsetzung von Innovationen bis hin zur Entwicklung öffentlicher Kommunikation. Dieser Artikel befasst sich mit der Untersuchung verschiedener Elemente des Einflusses der Wirtschaft auf die Entwicklung des Staates und der Identifizierung der Hauptelemente, die zu einem stetigen Wirtschaftswachstum beitragen. Eine ausführliche Einführung in deutsche Unternehmen finden Sie im Kapitel https://znaki.fm/de/teams/ viele Bewertungen verschiedener Firmen.

Historischer Kontext

Die Chronologie des Handels beginnt mit der Entstehung primärer Handelsunternehmen in der Antike. Im Mittelalter wurden Wirtschaftsverbände und Handwerksbetriebe zu den ersten Vereinigungsstrukturen von Unternehmern. Dann entwickelten sich aus solchen Strukturen Großkonzerne, die zur Grundlage der modernen Wirtschaft wurden. Industriereform des 19. Jahrhunderts. spielte in diesem Prozess eine Schlüsselrolle und führte zur Entstehung bedeutender Produktionsstätten und globaler Handelsunternehmen.

Einfluss von Unternehmen auf die Wirtschaft

Schaffung von Arbeitsplätzen in Deutschland. Unternehmen sind wichtige Arbeitgeber und schaffen Millionen von Arbeitsplätzen. Dieser Einfluss kann in klare und indirekte unterteilt werden. Die eindeutigen Auswirkungen äußern sich in der Beschäftigung der Bevölkerung im Unternehmen selbst, während die unklaren Auswirkungen mit der Entstehung von Leerständen in Lieferketten und angrenzenden Bereichen verbunden sind.

Der Sinn von Fabriken zur finanziellen Verbesserung ist unbestreitbar. Die industrielle Revolution war ein Faktor zur Verbesserung der Wirtschaft der meisten Länder und ermöglichte ihnen den Übergang von einer Agrar- zu einer Fabrikgesellschaft. In jeder Phase der Währungsentwicklung änderte sich die Rolle des Unternehmens, blieb jedoch notwendig.

Ungültige Beschäftigung	Stellenangebote in ähnlichen Branchen
Einflussbereich	Beispiel für Auswirkungen
Gültige Beschäftigung	Offene Stellen im Unternehmen

Verbesserungsbeiträge

Unternehmen spielen eine wichtige Rolle bei der Verbesserung von Neuheiten und Erfindungen. Die meisten von ihnen investieren erhebliche Mittel in Forschung und Entwicklung (F&E), was zur technischen Verbesserung beiträgt. Investitionen in Innovation bieten einem Land die Chance, auf der Weltbühne wettbewerbsfähig zu bleiben und Produkte und Dienstleistungen mit hohem Mehrwert zu erfinden.

Politischer Einfluss

Lobbying und Gesetze. Unternehmen sind durch Mäzenatentum stark in die Gesetzgebung eingebunden. Sie wollen gute Bedingungen für persönliche Geschäfte und die Interaktion mit staatlichen Institutionen schaffen. Schutz kann sowohl einen positiven Charakter haben, der zur Entwicklung der Wirtschaft beiträgt, als auch einen negativen, der zur Entstehung von Korruptionsmethoden führt. Für eine klarere Einführung in das Material empfehlen wir Ihnen, die Unterhaltungswebsite https://znaki.fm/de/ zu besuchen Ihnen ein klares Verständnis der Echtheit dieses Materials vermitteln.

Steuerrichtlinie

Unternehmen haben immer noch großen Einfluss auf die Finanzpolitik des Landes. Sie sind die ersten Zahler der Beiträge, die das Volksgeld bilden. Diese Finanzmittel werden verwendet, um in alle Arten von öffentlichen Programmen zu investieren und das System zu verbessern. Somit wirkt sich das erfolgreiche Zusammenleben der Wirtschaft direkt auf das Wohlergehen der Gesellschaft aus.

Regulierungs- und Kartellmethoden. Auch die Rolle des Landes bei der Regulierung des Unternehmens ist von Bedeutung. Antimonopoltechniken werden eingesetzt, um die Monopolisierung von Unternehmen zu verhindern und einen fairen Wettbewerb sicherzustellen. Volksinstitutionen überwachen die Einhaltung der Gesetze und verhindern die Ausbeutung durch führende Unternehmen. Beispiele für gute Kartellmaßnahmen sind die Spaltung führender Unternehmen und die Einführung von Bußgeldern wegen Missachtung des Wettbewerbsrechts.

Herausforderungen und Schwierigkeiten

Zahlungsinstabilität. Das Unternehmertum steht vor einer Reihe von Hindernissen, unter denen die Zahlungsinstabilität eine Schlüsselrolle spielt. Finanzielle Momente können sich negativ auf die Arbeit von Unternehmen auswirken und zu Stellenabbau und geringeren Investitionen führen. Solche Krisen können erhebliche Folgen für die staatliche Wirtschaft haben und erfordern ein sofortiges Eingreifen des Staates, um die Situation zu verbessern.

Risikomonopole eines Unternehmens

Das Monopol eines Unternehmens auf dem Markt kann zu vielen wirtschaftlichen und sozialen Problemen führen. Erstens schränkt es häufig den Wettbewerb ein, was zu höheren Aufschlägen für Produkte und Dienstleistungen führen kann. Fehlt der Wettbewerbsdruck, kann der Einzelunternehmer überhöhte Preisaufschläge festlegen, weil den Verbrauchern keine Alternativen zur Verfügung stehen. Dies hat negative Auswirkungen auf den Wohlstand der Gesellschaft und verringert die Verfügbarkeit grundlegender Güter und Dienstleistungen. Darüber hinaus verringert der verringerte Wettbewerb den Anreiz zur Innovation und zur Verbesserung der Produktqualität, da der Monopolist nicht um Verbraucher konkurrieren muss, was die technologische Entwicklung und den Fortschritt in der Branche verlangsamen kann.

Zweitens kann ein Monopol zur Dominanz der Wirtschafts- und Staatsmacht in den Händen eines Unternehmens führen. Dies führt zu einer Krise für liberale Transaktionen und die legitime Verteilung von Materialien. Der alleinige Eigentümer, der über erhebliche finanzielle Mittel verfügt, hat das Recht, Einfluss auf Regulierungs- und Regulierungsbehörden zu nehmen und Aspekte des Unternehmens zum Nachteil der gesellschaftlichen Ansichten bekannt zu machen. Eine solche staatliche Konzentration beeinträchtigt die Marktmechanismen und kann zu Korruption, unfairen Arbeitsbedingungen und Umweltproblemen führen. Schließlich verhindert das Monopol eines Unternehmens die kontinuierliche Entwicklung der Wirtschaft und die Stabilität der Gesellschaft und führt zu Unklarheiten und Diskriminierung.

Die größten Unternehmen der Welt

Unternehmen	Schätzung (Billionen USD)	Der Gastgeber
Google	1,6	Alphabet Inc.
Netflix	0,2	Unternehmen eröffnen
Apple Inc.	2,5	Öffentliches Unternehmen
Saudi Aramco	2.1	Regierung von Saudi-Arabien
Amazon.com Inc.	1,5	Allgemeines Massenunternehmen
Microsoft Corporation	2.3	Unternehmen eröffnen
Entdeckung	0,03	Warner Bros. Discovery, Inc.
Alphabet Inc. (Google)	1,6	Firma eröffnen
Pixar	0,007	Die Walt Disney Company

Schlussfolgerung

Unternehmen, Verbände und Unternehmen haben einen wesentlichen Einfluss auf die Verbesserung des Staates. Ihre Rolle ist bedeutsam und umfasst die Schaffung vakanter Stellen, die Umsetzung von Innovationen, die Einflussnahme auf den Haushalt sowie die Mitwirkung an der politischen Arbeit. Allerdings gibt es auch Hindernisse, die einen verantwortungsvollen Umgang und eine wirksame Beseitigung erfordern. Der kontinuierliche Geschäftsfortschritt ist ein Schlüsselmechanismus für die Verbesserung des Zahlungsverkehrs und des Lebens der Gesellschaft.

Ethische Fragen

Unternehmen sind immer noch mit moralischen Problemen wie Bestechung und unethischem Verhalten konfrontiert. Diese Probleme können die öffentliche Akzeptanz des Unternehmertums untergraben und dem Ruf eines Unternehmens schaden. Um solche Situationen zu verhindern, ist es notwendig, die Unternehmenskultur zu verbessern, die auf ethischen Grundsätzen und Klarheit basiert.

Illusions in so-called bourgeois democracy persist – as do illusions in workers’ councils. Mike Macnair stresses the necessity of a mass party

As Yassamine Mather has pointed out in her contribution, the Iranian left is affected by illusions in the possible role of shoras (councils) as an alternative to the regime. However, there were widespread shoras in the revolution of 1979 and immediately afterwards; but that did not lead to an upshot which was in the interests of the working class as a whole. I am going to discuss other examples, and what the underlying logic of the issue is.

I should say at the outset that there is an alternative line, which is that of the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty, and probably other organisations with similar positions. What has to be done now is to fight for ‘bourgeois democracy’, on the grounds that the workers’ movement is too weak to pose the question of workers’ power. In practice this means to prettify the policy of the American government, which claims to stand for ‘democracy’ and ‘human rights’ in Iran, as elsewhere.

But US interventions do not deliver these aims. Rather, they produce at best states radically impoverished from the pre-intervention situation, and paralysed by sectarian constitutions and corruption, as in Lebanon or Iraq; more probably they produce ‘Somalification’, meaning state failure, as in Libya. The US, since it failed to impose its preferred order in Vietnam, has pursued a policy of simply inflicting destruction. In each case it claims that it is going to create democracy, liberty and human rights. But none of these claims are to be believed, any more than the Romans’ claim that they invaded Britain in 43 AD, or the Spaniards’ claim that the conquistadors invaded central and southern America in the 1500s, to end human sacrifice and bring about ‘civilisation’.

Is a regime of councils an alternative? The idea that such a regime solves decision-making problems and renders it unnecessary to worry about creating a real party is a very common idea of the far left globally, not just the Iranian far left. Moreover, when they talk about the ‘revolutionary party’, as often as not what they mean is not a party in the same sense as the mass parties of the Second International or the Bolshevik Party. Rather, the ‘party’ in far-leftist views is to be a little group that is the ‘general staff of revolution’. It is to be a little cog, which drives the larger wheel (the councils), and the councils in turn are to be the big wheel which drives mass mobilisations.

This is a common far-left view, which comes out of people in the 1960s-70s reading Lenin’s State and revolution in the cheap Beijing or Moscow editions then available. It is a very substantial misreading of that work, because it fails to recognise that the Bolshevik Party at the time of the revolution of February 1917, although held down by repression in the war, had been the majority party of the Russian working class: the party which in 1912 won all the working class constituencies in duma elections and which put out a daily newspaper with a circulation of tens of thousands in Petrograd – even under conditions of limited legality. I have written about this confusion in an article in the Weekly Worker¹ and a bit more generally in my book Revolutionary strategy (chapter two).

I give several examples there, but here I am going to give only two, which display slightly different problems.

Germany, Austria

The revolution of 1918-19 led to the creation of workers’ councils all across Germany – very large-scale indeed. There were congresses of the workers’ councils. But the rightwing Majority Social Democrats were able to persuade the trade union militants who had been involved in setting up the councils to ban political parties. The effect was that the Majority Social Democrats were still represented by way of the trade union officials, who were not excluded. (In addition there were soldiers’ councils – not, as in Russia, of the other ranks only, but including officers …). The councils on this basis were able to become instruments of the Majority Social Democrats to stabilise capitalism – just as in Iran many shoras became ‘Islamic shoras’, instruments of the developing Islamic Republic.

The ‘German lesson’ is, then, that councils without a mass workers’ political party become an agency of whatever actually existing mass political force is available to take the lead.

Another very different example is Austria, again in 1918-21. Here workers’ councils and worker factory committees were set up all over urban, suburban and industrial areas. Otto Bauer in his participant History of the Austrian Revolution (abridged translation 1925) tells us the result. The collapse of the old regime and revolution radically dislocated production. So the workers in the factories set up factory councils and they asked the Austrian Social Democratic leadership (to paraphrase), ‘The bosses have run away and we have taken over the factories, so what should we do now?’ What should they be producing in these factories? How do they get coal to fire the steam engines to run the machinery? How do they intersect with the needs of the larger society? What relationship are they going to have with the peasantry, who are the people producing food?

Now I do not think the Austrian Social Democrat leadership showed the degree of cynical manipulation of the Majority Social-Democrats in Germany, who allied with the far-right veterans organisation, the Stahlhelm, to suppress the left, and agreed with the Entente powers to keep German troops in the Baltic states as an intervention against the Russian Revolution. But the Austrians were equally committed to a peaceful road, avoiding civil war at all costs, and they were equally committed to remaining within a national framework. On that basis, they formed the judgment that the only thing which they could do was to get the councils to keep production going as far as they possibly could, and to make deals with the Entente powers to get coal into the country, and to make concessions all across the board to the peasantry and to capital in order to get the economy working. Hence, though less violently than the German Majority Social Democrats, they restabilised capitalism.

It should be said, incidentally, that neither the Majority Social Democrats in Germany nor the Austrian Social Democrats actually avoided civil war: they merely postponed it – from one which the workers might have won in 1918‑21 to one which the workers were guaranteed to lose in 1933-34, leading in turn to the Europe-wide civil war of 1939-45 (massively more destructive than a German/Austrian civil war in 1918-21 would have been).

The ‘Austrian lesson’ then is that having the councils does not solve the practical problems which are posed as soon as you take power. As soon as it is no longer the boss who is running the factory, you have to run it. And in order to run the factory you need to establish relations with all other sections of the social order which will enable the factory to run, and to do something useful for society. You need a central decision-making authority; and you need to have thought about an alternative national policy, in advance of the point when the bosses run away and you take over the factories.

Britain

I offer another – this time British – example of how this is an immediate problem. It is from a report in the (Conservative) Times newspaper about the crisis in the national health service. It turns out that a very large component of this crisis is due to ‘bed-blocking’, in that beds are taken up by aged patients, who do not need hospital treatment any more, but cannot be discharged, because local authorities cannot provide care to support them in their homes. The present Tory government proposes to ‘solve’ or at least ameliorate this problem by block-booking large numbers of hotel rooms into which to dump the aged, who are going to be discharged from hospital on the basis that their treatment is finished in order to free up hospital beds. Block-booking hotels will, of course, pass money to Conservative Party donors and activists, but will be substantially more expensive at the end of the day than restoring local authority funding …

This is only part of a complex story. In essence, the David Cameron government’s ‘austerity’ policy in 2010-16 was directed against soft targets in public spending, which meant local authorities. The Tories had already radically squeezed local authority funding by creating the ‘uniform business rate’ controlled by central government, which was regressive against small businesses for the benefit of big capital and consistently rose by less than the rate of inflation, and they and the Blair and Brown governments had refused any revaluation of house properties for the remaining local authority property taxes. The result was that local authorities have been completely dependent on central government funds. Squeezing them meant that ‘social care’ for the aged in their own homes could not be afforded. Hence there has been a growing tendency, beginning well before Covid, for hospital facilities to be ‘squeezed’ by bed-blocking.

Lying behind this story is a long-term campaign of the Tory Party, going back all the way to the foundation of the NHS in 1948, to gradually persuade the general public that ‘we can’t afford public healthcare free at the point of use’, and instead healthcare needs to be rationed by access to money: also that we need an insurance-based system (run by US private healthcare firms which have poured substantial amounts of money into the Tory Party, its think-tanks and lobbying operations). The ‘NHS crisis’ is thus the latest iteration of the policy of degrading public housing, public education, and so on, on the road to privatisation. The Tories plan these operations to take place step by step over decades.

There are two lessons from this story. The first is that saving the NHS cannot be a matter of industrial action – or of ‘workers’ control’ of the health service facilities themselves. It involves resource choices affecting society as a whole – and not just about NHS funding, but also local authority funding (and, it should be added, various other public health issues, like effective enforcement of housing standards, the availability of heating, and so on). Planning is fundamental. Soviet ‘planning’ failed, at the end of the day; but the post-1991 global experiment has categorically disproved the claimed superiority of market mechanisms.

A common left response (the AWL again) is the call to ‘tax the rich’ – or, in the alternative, to run a bigger budget deficit. The debacle of the Truss administration illustrates the uselessness of these projects: controlling the movement of capital is essential to any method to break free of the dictatorship of the financial sector.

I do not know enough about the details of policy issues in Iran to be able to draw the parallels out fully. But the point is – as with the Austrian lesson – that the workers’ movement needs to work out its own policy for healthcare, the care of the elderly, education, housing, transport, and so on. As long as it does not do so, it will be pulled along as a tail by one or another initiative of the capitalist class and its political representatives. This point was, in fact, made by Karl Marx as long ago as 1864 in the Inaugural Address of the First International.

The second lesson relates to the conduct of multi-generational fraud by the Tory Party as an institutional group and the advertising-funded, and hence corrupt, media. Our rulers set out to divide us along national lines: in Britain, for example, to split the workers’ movement between UK unionism and Scottish nationalism, or between Brexiteering nationalism and European Union neoliberalism. Again, these are long-prepared fraudulent operations. In Iran, in the immediate aftermath of 1979 a lot of the left gave partial backing to the Islamists as ‘really nationalists’ opposed to US imperialism. The supposed radicalism of the Islamists turned out to be delusive. Today, a substantial part of the left cherishes symmetrical delusions about the ‘democratic’ credentials of the USA and its covert propaganda outlets.

Short

We need the means of combating these frauds, over the same timescale. That means that we need “poor men’s guardians” – the expression which was used in the 19th century for the early working class papers. The movement needs to reconstitute its own ability to speak, and to pursue and publicise a long-term agenda which can combat those of the Tory Party in Britain and the Islamic Republic leadership in Iran.

The workers’ movement has had a bad experience in the last century with ‘official’ communist parties dependent on the USSR, its police and its erratic diplomatic agendas; and, outside those, sects based on disagreements about points of theory and tactical issues. But, in spite of these bad experiences, fundamentally we need a struggle for a workers’ political party, which can both put forward policy proposals and establish media which are not dependent either on advertising or on taking money from dodgy sources.

That requires a party based on a political platform, which sets out both goals that reach altogether beyond the capitalist order (the ‘maximum’ programme) and immediate proposals – particularly for constitutional change, which gives power to the working class as a class (the ‘minimum’ programme). Both are needed and the whole programme needs to be short and succinct – the 1891 Erfurt Programme of the German Social Democratic Party is in translation 850 words long, while the 1903 programme of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party is 2,550 words.

This must be a summary programme, which enables a party to get beyond personal trust in individual leaders and their individual theories, and allows it to become a working institution of the class.

mike.macnair@weeklyworker.co.uk

First published here.

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1. ‘Control the bureaucrats’, November 11 2004: weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/552/control-the-bureaucrats.↩︎

This is Yassamine Mather’s introduction to a recent meeting on the protests in Iran- watch the video here. A google-translated Farsi version is here:

We are here to discuss recent events in Iran and their national and regional repercussions.

The demonstrations have been going on for four months now. The regime has reacted by executing four and killing hundreds of others during various clashes.

Some on the Iranian left have described this as a revolutionary situation, but I hesitate to do this for various reasons. True, the protests are continuing – on January 8, for example, we saw major demonstrations in most Iranian cities. However, they are much more sporadic – repression is taking its toll and the threat of further executions are taken very seriously. Also internet communication is hampered and as a result of all this we are mostly witnessing specific protests that mark a particular event, such as those marking the anniversary of the shooting down of a Ukrainian passenger plane in 2020, carrying mainly Iranian passengers. It was targeted by either the Iranian army or the Revolutionary Guards, who apparently mistook it for a US rocket.

There are also many demonstrations marking the 40th day since the death of people who died at the hands of the security forces during protests. We can certainly say that the government is facing a serious crisis. However, so far there has been no rebellion within the security forces themselves – we do not see soldiers or low-ranking security agents turning their guns against their officers. However, no-one can deny that even the conservative factions within the Islamic Republic regime are now talking of the need for fundamental reform. Of course, everyone is aware that such calls are too little, too late, and unlikely to change the course of events. So what we are seeing are attempts at lengthening the life of the regime, but right now we are not witnessing open conflict within the ruling circles – we are not at that stage yet.

I should add that workers’ protests are gaining momentum, although we are still in the initial stages of nationwide strike action.

Under these circumstances we must get to grips with a number of issues. First, the regional context – this is important, because, obviously, there is a new government in Israel and, at least in terms of rhetoric, it seems determined to start a military conflict with Iran’s Islamic Republic. At the same time there are many conservatives in the Iranian regime who are hoping that conflict with Israel, or maybe even some other power, will save them; in some ways it will be god’s gift to divert attention from protests that are today challenging their rule.

Israel and Saudi Arabia have done their best over the last three months to increase divisions within Iran by using national and ethnic minorities as pawns. But this has not worked so far. That does not mean that it will never work, but currently, as some Iranian leftwing websites have been pointing out, inside the country we seem to be in a ‘post-nationalist’, ‘post-ethnic’ era. For example, the protests in Kurdistan are supported by Baluchistan, with its slogans about the Azerbaijan region, and there seems to be a sense of solidarity.

This can easily be ended and there are a number of dangerous alternative possibilities. Some, including rightwing royalists, former or current Mojahedin, and even some on the so-called Iranian exile ‘left’, are actively seeking US support for regime change in Iran. All sorts of alternatives are being considered by, amongst others, the US, and these could certainly increase national and ethnic tensions.

Mike Macnair will talk about the illusions of the Iranian left – in exile and maybe even inside Iran. I have personally given up hope in the exile left, but even inside Iran, the left seems to believe that these protests can achieve fundamental change without any organisation, plan or strategy.

The Iranian left has suffered many defeats and there seems to be a phobia about central issues, such as working class organisation within a principled party, plus the nature of socialism and the aim of communism. Instead sections of the left talk about the current protests being spontaneous and celebrate this. In one sense I would also celebrate this spontaneity – at least the protests are not being led by the right wing, but, according to some, such spontaneity will automatically lead to a revolution. They believe that workers’ councils, etc, will evolve into a revolutionary regime.

Amongst some on the Iranian left this obsession with spontaneity, combined with a phobia against anything that is Marxist-organised or party-orientated, has led them to put aside the whole history of the last 44 years since the 1979 Islamic revolution. At that time we saw the setting up of reactionary Islamic councils, yet some on the ‘left’ are not ruling out the formation of similar councils as part of the mass action against the regime. We need to address such matters – and not least the concept of the principled unity of the left, which again seems to be being neglected. Of course, there have been many failed attempts at political unity, but that does not justify the current isolationist mood.

But let us start with Moshé Machover, who will talk about the regional context, including the ‘cold war’ that has been going on between Iran and Israel, plus the potential threat of real war.

Yassamine Mather celebrates the continuing mass protests, recognises their limitations, laments the parlous state of the left and urges unity around the basic principles upheld by Hopi

(This article is based on Yassamine’s talk in this video)

You would not know from the media that the protests are continuing – they are now entering a third month. They are widespread, militant and still large.

The ‘reformist’ faction of the Iranian government – and their allies in what I call sections of the ‘reformist left’ – have been saying that there is a slight dip, but I cannot see any sign of it. I can understand why they are saying this, because it fits their agenda of promoting a ‘peaceful resolution to this problem’. But I do not see any way in which the current crisis can be resolved peacefully, given the anger on the streets and among young people. On the contrary, we are witnessing a rise in some forms of protest that did not exist before. The actions on university campuses are quite remarkable and clearly there is now some level of coordination: there have been nationwide protests on the same day, for instance.

However, there is no doubt that the repression is continuing. A large number of teenagers – mostly school students – have been killed by state forces. In Tehran alone, there are 1,000 detained protestors – at least according to the government. Opposition figures are much higher – some of those arrested have been released, and some have been rearrested. But I have to stress that the government has not yet used its full might. A quote from Kiumars Heydari, commander of Iran’s ground army, is helpful, even though he might have said this for obvious propaganda purposes: he claimed the state has held back, because “Ayatollah Khamenei doesn’t want us to use the kind of force we want to deploy”. In one sense we can take this comment with a pinch of salt, since at least 300 protestors have been killed. However, maybe it is true that they could have done worse over the last 60 days and killed thousands.

Security forces are mainly using metal baton rounds which are different from live ammunition, in that, while they inflict horrible pain, incapacitate, cause internal injuries, they do not normally result in death. If Heydari’s claim is true, we have to say that supreme leader Ali Khamenei is more astute than the shah, who unleashed the army against protestors, leading to a huge number of casualties. But Iran’s current ruler is planning for the long term. Of course, he wants protestors to be punished and is prepared to see many killed, claiming that what they are doing is all the work of the US and its allies. At the same time, though, he is clever enough not to escalate the response to a stage where there would be general slaughter.

There is currently a debate about if and when the Islamic Revolutionary Guards will be fully deployed. Would it be worse for them or for the demonstrators? It can be worse for them because, a bit like Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky, who proudly announced that he had merged the far-right, volunteer Azov Brigade into the army, the Iranian government has also brought the Revolutionary Guards into its army. But using both the conscript army and Revolutionary Guards can lead to a situation, when it comes to shooting down protestors, where some soldiers will refuse to obey orders.

Throughout Iran, women are now being seen without headscarves on the streets, at work, in coffee shops, in banks, on the metro … So the regime’s attempts to enforce the wearing of the hijab have failed. A good number of Iranian sportswomen have also refused to wear the hijab during competitions or when receiving medals – even inside the country. There is a corresponding rebellion against sexual segregation. On university campuses students have torn down the partitions separating males from females in canteens and other social areas.

Power

All this shows how ordinary citizens are gaining confidence in their own power to oppose repression. Moreover, we are seeing novel forms of protest, for example, ‘amameh parani’. Teenagers approach a mullah from behind and push off his turban – some clerics are saying they no longer wear their religious garb when they walk the streets.

There are, given everything, all sorts of splits and divisions opening up above. For example, Molavi Abdolhamid, a senior Sunni cleric who leads Friday prayers in the Sistan and Baluchistan province, has openly challenged the propaganda of the Iranian rightwing press, which is insisting that there are no mass protests.

That said, I think we have to keep pointing out the limitations of the current protests – the absence of serious political organisation, the lack of programme, no authoritative leadership, etc. In these circumstances we are seeing clear attempts by the US state department to concoct, promote and insert its figureheads. The US was originally backing the son of the former shah, but that did not work. Student and youth protestors have been chanting anti-shah as well as anti-regime slogans. Then the US tried to promote a presenter on Voice of America, who supported former president Akbar Rafsanjani and then his successor, Mohammad Khatami. But that did not work out either. Then there is the Mojahedin-e-Khalq, which is promoted mainly by Saudi Arabia. But again there is a slight problem. You cannot successfully promote a religious cult whose leader wears a headscarf, whose Tirana-based members are mostly in their 60s and 70s, and whom no-one inside Iran takes at all seriously.

Last week the US representative at the United Nations, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, took Iranian-born Nazamin Boniadi to the general assembly. She lives in California, is a British citizen but supposedly represents the protestors in Iran. Her claim to fame is as a film and TV actor. She is also a former girlfriend of Tom Cruise (he sent her to the Church of Scientology for religious education). But people in Iran are not that stupid: as soon as her UN speech was broadcast, they Googled her and were astonished at the Biden administration’s strange choice! She has only ever visited Iran once – as a teenager.

The US is also promoting Hamed Esmaeilion, someone who, if I understand it correctly, lost his wife and daughter when Iran accidentally shot down Ukraine International’s flight number PS752 in January 2020. He spoke at the protest in Berlin, and he is now looking like a Zelensky double with the same kind of clothes and hairstyle. None of this would matter very much if the left was not tailing all these totally unconvincing Nato/US figureheads (in that sense one can detect the threat of a ‘colour revolution’).

The Saudi position is clear – as pushed ad infinitum on its Persian TV station. Saudi-Arabia wants to Balkanise Iran into any number of small ‘nations’ – it certainly does not want a powerful neighbour. If you listen to pro-Saudi commentators and analysts, as I did recently at a forum organised by the journal Foreign Affairs, you will find that their version of recent Middle Eastern history is truly bizarre. Iran should be blamed for every war and act of destruction in the region. Syria was the fault of Iran. Lebanon was the fault of Iran. The Palestinian-Israeli conflict is the fault of Iran. There was no mention of the Iraq war, of al Qa’eda and Islamic State, who were supported and financed by the Persian Gulf emirates, and no mention of Yemen, the US bombing of Libya and Syria, and so on.

Of course, Iran’s Islamic Republic is responsible for many of the atrocities in the region, but such a one-sided, false presentation of events is just nonsense. The amazing thing was that the politicians who were listening to this analysis seemed to accept this distorted version of history – I am not sure if it is historical illiteracy or just sheer opportunism. Lebanon’s Shia population long predates the coming to power of the Safavid dynasty in Iran who brought about the rule of Shia Islam – it did not all start with Hezbollah and Khomeini. The Saudi falsification of history is part of a narrative that tries to increase tension between Iran’s many nationalities. But so far, in the current protests, despite relentless efforts, their plan has not worked: on the contrary, there is unprecedented unity between the various nationalities. Leftwingers inside Iran talk of the ‘post-nationalist’ era.

Then we have Israel, once again under Binyamin Netanyahu, with its talk of ‘going to war’ with Iran, while in Iraq it is Muqtada al-Sadr who openly worries about the protests in Iran. As the senior Shia cleric in Basra, he is outraged by the ‘amameh parani’, as well as the defiance over the hijab – what if it spreads, he asked, to other countries? Here I assume he means Iraq, but, as far as I know, the government in Baghdad has not imposed the obligatory wearing of the hijab. However, thanks to the wonderful invasion that Bush and Blair managed in 2003, there are Shia strongholds policed by government forces where women cannot walk without a headscarf.

Working class

What about working class protests? So far workers’ actions have been sporadic and dispersed. As I keep reminding comrades who say the working class will ‘get there’, we have to be realistic. The Iranian working class is not in the same position as in February 1979. One important section – the oil workers – are no longer employed by a single entity, the National Iranian Oil Company – the neoliberal economic policies of the regime mean that we are now looking at hundreds of contract companies in the refinery section and even in the exploration of oil. Some of these privatised components of the oil industry are associated with and even owned by leaders of Revolutionary Guards. Therefore organising nationwide protests in the industry is much more difficult.

Having said that, we are seeing a number of oil workers’ protests, including the threat of a strike by those employed on permanent contracts – probably around 30% of this industry’s total workforce. We also have petrochemical workers who staged a short protest strike and Ahvaz steel-plant workers expressing their opposition to the regime. But we are not seeing major strikes – more the closure of shops and bazaars in Kurdish and other provincial cities. As you can imagine, the bazaar is not exactly a radical force.

The teachers union is very active and gaining support, while medics have also become involved – they are pointing to the horrific injuries people are getting from metal baton rounds. In addition 600 academics and lecturers in Iranian universities have been protesting against the presence of military forces on campuses and their mass arrest of students. They are calling for the release of all students.

Left

What about the left? Here I think there is there is a parallel to Ukraine in some ways. On the one hand, we have a section of the left which is saying that the US is in decline, while Iran did its best to accommodate the nuclear deal between 2015 and 2018 – it was Donald Trump who walked out. Iran has no choice but to ally itself with China and Russia, they say, justifying this by claiming China imposes a lower rate of exploitation! Such arguments are supported by sections of the press inside Iran. If you look at websites such as Tasnim and Fars News, the intelligentsia of the rightwing, conservative factions of the Islamic Republic are saying the same thing: ‘It wasn’t our choice. The west didn’t respect the deal signed by Obama, and we have to live with new allies, such as Russia and China.’ The supporters of this line include an outspoken ex-Maoist and his followers, as well as Rahe Tudeh (a split from the ‘official communist’ Tudeh party). Then there are student activists in Iran who call themselves the “axis of resistance”, which came into being on campuses during the Trump era. They are definitely not Muslim and consider themselves to be on the left.

It is very difficult to give percentages, but I would estimate that the pro-Russia, pro-China Iranian left accounts for less than 5% of the left as a whole. The majority of the left – possibly over 80% – are pro-US, pro-Nato. They might not admit to that, but decades of neoliberal capitalism have influenced their politics, whether they realise it or not. And here I include people who say they are opposed to any military intervention by the US, even though it is obvious from what they say and write, and indeed the ‘alternatives’ they propose, that they are siding with the US.

Among self-avowed Marxists, there is a whole swathe of people who at the end of the day believe that the working class in Iran is ‘backward’, that a period of US-sponsored bourgeois democracy, however imperfect, will bring enlightenment. All you can say to these deluded groups and individuals is: ‘Yes, this worked in Iraq, didn’t it? It worked in Libya. So let’s have it in Iran too!’ In this category I would include a very large chunk of the organisations that calls themselves ‘left’.

But there are significant differences between such groups. On the one hand, you have the Organisation of Iranian People’s Fadaian (Majority), who are actually close to the ‘reformists’ in the Islamic Republic. They say, ‘Let us not have any violence by the protestors.’ But where is the violence from protestors? More’s the pity, the protestors do not have weapons; they are beaten, gassed, arrested, imprisoned, killed.

The latest, most idiotic argument I have seen – which actually shows how contagious this type of stupidity is, as it moves from Fadaian (Majority) into sections of what claims to be ‘the radical left’ – can be found in an article on the Rahe Kargar website, which states that the demonstrations in Iran should be about ‘life’, not death – implying we should avoid slogans such as ‘Death to the dictator!’ (Khamenei) or ‘Death to the shah!’ and here I think the author has moved so far to the right that his main concern regarding the slogan is not Khamenei, but the shah.

In reality, when the slogan, ‘Death to …’, is used in Iran, it does not literally mean that those specified should actually be killed. It means ‘Down with’ a particular system and its regime – so what is wrong with that? Since it is actually the slogan widely heard inside the country, why should we self-censor and only talk about ‘life’? How can we say this, when ‘life’ is not exactly great for the great majority of the Iranian population, many of whom are suffering from inadequate food and lack of medicines. And, apparently, we ought not to talk about the overthrow of all the various factions of the Islamic regime. This is the kind of stupid, passive, rightward-moving sentiment that is gathering traction when you look at the Iranian left.

It seems to me that most of the various four or five factions of the Fadaian minority, together with a number of factions within the Worker Communist Party, as well as both factions of Rahe Kargar, are echoing the same pro-western, soft, liberal message: let us confine ourselves to the slogan ‘Women, life, freedom’.

Fortunately I am no longer the only one who has written about the limitations of this slogan and I must emphasise that the rightwing tendency I have described is often limited to the leadership, while most of the members are opposed to such views. However, their websites, TV interviews and articles reflect the leadership position – against which the majority must now rally, because, if the crunch comes, the purveyors of such views would support foreign intervention. They would support more sanctions. All this arises partly from despair after so many years of exile, partly from the triumph of western liberal propaganda and partly from sheer ignorance of the current global situation.

In Hands off the People of Iran, we have maintained two slogans: ‘No to imperialist interventions’ and ‘No to the Islamic Republic’. I am pleased to report that increasingly members of the groups I have mentioned above, who are angry at the rightwing turn of their own leadership, are getting in touch asking to join Hopi. We are in a unique position to intervene in terms of solidarity with the current protests, in that we support calls for the revolutionary overthrow of the Islamic Republic, while exposing endless attempts by the Biden administration and its allies in Europe to manufacture an alternative state in exile, along with its idiotic attempts to manufacture pro-US leaders for the Iranian protests.

When it comes to the Tehran regime, change from above will be very different from that in Iraq or, dare I say, Libya. With the exception of Israel, no-one is talking of war or even limited military action, such as air strikes. The so-called ‘targeted sanctions’ have had little effect – except to enrich those in power and impoverish ordinary Iranians – and it is the same with propaganda pumped out by the US, UK, Saudi, etc, media.

Postscript

Since my talk on November 12, upon which this article is based, we have witnessed an escalation of the demonstrations and protests on university campuses and in towns across the country. On November 15 a false claim that the Islamic Republic is planning to execute 15,000 protestors went viral on Instagram – major figures such as Justin Trudeau have helped spread this fake news.

Irrespective of the outcome of the current protests, over the coming months we in Hopi will need to organise solidarity from below, including from trade unions. We need to organise talks, seminars and debates that address the current global situation, including illusions about China’s economic relations with so-called developing countries. We need to explain also the shortcomings of liberal democracy, including the current state of women’s ‘equality’ in advanced capitalist countries. Iranian young people have many illusions about the ‘rule of law’ and western civil society, so we need to expose the profound shortcomings of such models, while at the same time stressing our opposition to the authoritarianism in Russia, China, etc.

We will have to deal with fake news – we can and should help comrades in Iran combat network limitations imposed by the regime, as well as helping them to hide their identity and encrypt their messages, so as to protect them from the prying eyes and ears of the regime’s security forces.

All this requires activist volunteers, and I hope that comrades who read this article will get in touch with Hopi at hopi.protests@gmail.com and let us know how they can help.

First published in the Weekly Worker.