Multipolarity, Iran’s coming retaliation, & how these next escalations will impact the class struggle

Rainear Shea
RAINER'S NEWSLETTER

Photo by Vahid Salemi of AP

The era of multipolarity has come; there’s no undoing this, that’s simply the historical stage we’ve entered into. And the emergence of this geopolitical age has contributed to a broader trend within the evolution of class struggle: the trend where revolutions have transitioned away from the form they mainly existed in during the Russian revolution, and civil wars have taken on a larger role. Today, civil wars are more likely to start prior to the overthrow of a given state. As policing has grown more technologically advanced, and surveillance has invaded all aspects of life, the most successful rebellion method which subjugated people have recently utilized is a military one. A practice of exploiting the weaknesses within the oppressor’s panoptic spying systems, as Operation Al Aqsa Flood did.  [This is assuming the Hamas attack was indeed a surprise, and not a false flag, with the Netanyahu regime simply allowing it to happen to justify its genocide.—Ed]

Revolts like this one have been happening since the slave uprisings of ancient times, but in today’s era, the tactics from these types of actions are more widely applicable than ever. When the same policing and surveillance tools that the “Israeli” Nazi state uses have been exported across the globe, class struggle needs to evolve accordingly. As the capitalist world becomes “Israelified,” the global proletariat is prompted to fight back in ways which resemble how the Palestinians have fought back. This is the type of confrontation that imperialism’s crises are bringing us towards.

The more our third world war escalates, the more the class struggle is going to include elements of this new paradigm, because the growth in contradictions always reveals things about the class struggle’s nature. For us in the empire’s core to win our class war, we must acclimate to this strategic reality. We need to take example from anti-imperialists like Khamenei, who reject the arguments of those that seek a false “peace” with the imperialist enemy. They know that a future can only be built if they defeat the enemy by any means necessary. This is why Khamenei has called for a retaliation that will truly establish deterrence, repudiating Iran’s U.S.-friendly political faction.

It’s quite likely that Khamenei’s faction will succeed in making this plan a reality. And when it happens, we within the core will need to fight back against our government’s ensuing crackdown. Our ruling class is making sure that the United States will experience a civil war; not a “civil war” in the traditional sense, but in the sense that reactionary ultraviolent actors will increasingly bring chaos to our society. The bourgeois state is taking advantage of the poverty it’s engineered, cultivating criminal gangs that act to destabilize our social structure. It’s perpetuating shootings, assaults, and the other anti-social acts that are common in modern America, while creating violent political “counter-gangs” on both the left and the right. After this election, these counter-gangs will be mobilized, creating spectacles of unrest that justify new repressive measures. 

This repression won’t stop Iran from crippling the empire’s west Asian military operations; Washington will lose its “Israeli” strategic outpost. But if we’re not sufficiently prepared, then the empire will be able to start its planned war in east Asia. Unless we fortify our organizations, the state will subdue us, and fascism will pursue its next destructive schemes without internal opposition. There’s a limit to what imperialism and fascism can do, since Eurasia has become so strong and many countries are under anti-imperialist control; but the forces of reaction maintain the ability to wipe out much of humanity. They’re exterminating hundreds of thousands in Gaza right now, and they’ll expand this extermination campaign into as many places as they can. 

This is the nature of class conflict in the multipolar era: wars, both geopolitical and civil, are escalating in all areas. The anti-imperialist camp’s rise doesn’t yet mean the reactionary side can no longer commit genocide, or carry out purges of dissent, or proliferate chaos; it means that both sides are increasingly active in fighting each other. Russia’s success in beating NATO showed this; the strategic situation has changed, and it’s become much easier for anti-imperialists to prevail on the battlefield. How many will take advantage of these new opportunities remains to be determined.

Last week’s BRICS summit provided a clearer sense of who will join in on the war against the U.S. empire, and who will acquiesce to the empire. Brazil, led by the supposedly anti-imperialist Lula, vetoed the entry of Venezuela into BRICS. And fascist India blocked the entry of Pakistan and Turkey, which was less surprising but still a setback. These developments represent a major twist, because there’s evidence that the U.S. color revolution apparatus has intended to target Brazil and India in the past; a report from last summer by the neocon think tank the Eurasia Group listed these countries as among the geopolitical “swing states,” the players that have potential to come into China’s orbit. After the work that Modi and Lula just did to assist in the hybrid war against BRICS, it’s less likely that Washington will try to overthrow them, because they’ve shown themselves to be valuable assets.

These weren’t the only states included on the list, though; South Africa, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, and Turkey were also described as potential candidates for regime change. Turkey is now perhaps the biggest target among these, because it was subjected to a terrorist attack right when these BRICS decisions were in motion. Fighters from the PKK—the U.S.-aligned Kurdish ethnic nationalist group—attacked a Turkish defense company at the same moment when Turkey was closest to joining BRICS. This operation was about sending a message: whoever tries to build an economy that’s separate from the United States won’t be allowed to live in peace. This was a threat towards countries like India, one which likely helped push India to betray Turkey.

For now, Washington and its proxies have managed to delay Turkey’s transition away from U.S. dependence, while keeping Venezuela and Pakistan limited in their ability to circumvent Washington’s sanctions. But this is not the end of the story, and the actions Iran will soon take are going to give everyone else more openings to defy the hegemon.

Turkey’s recent efforts to break free from U.S. influence have been due to shifts within the balance of forces, which increasingly favor the global proletariat. Communists shouldn’t support Erdogan; rather we should support Turkey’s people as they struggle to get their material needs met, and to end their government’s complicity in the genocide. Increasingly, they’ve been successful in getting their government to work towards building ties with the Eurasian economy. And because the empire has blocked Turkey’s people from accessing the benefits of BRICS, Turkey’s anti-imperialist mass momentum can only grow.

Last month saw the introduction of a BRICS blockchain currency that makes countries less dependent on the dollar; if Turkey’s workers aren’t allowed to benefit from this, then the mass dissatisfaction driving the country’s recent policy shift is going to get bigger. Over 80% of Turks feel that the country is in an economic crisis, and that’s made the government try to make up for its past errors; as Turkey’s bourgeois state continues to feel more imperiled, the pressure to join with the anti-imperialist camp will get more acute. The popular outrage over the Gaza genocide, and the anger at Erdogan for his role in this, are also fueling the instability; either Turkey’s regime will obey the people’s anti-imperialist will, or it will face new kinds of blowback.

We’re seeing that blowback right now; when it recently got revealed that Turkey was still doing business with “Israel,” despite the government’s claim that these business ties had ended, a crowd of Turkish people raided the port where goods to “Israel” were being shipped. In more and more places, we’re seeing the masses mobilize to resist the hegemon; in places like Georgia, it’s taken the form of electoral defeats for the pro-NATO camp, while in places like Turkey it’s becoming a rebellion against the government. If a given regime refuses to do the right thing, then the masses will start interfering with essential matters of commerce.

In Iran, there’s another mass effort to pressure the government into resisting imperialism. Its focus is not on combating the government as a whole, but on empowering one political element: Khamenei’s faction. It’s only the reformer faction, represented by Iran’s president Pezeshkian, that Iran’s anti-imperialist masses are angry at. The thing which provoked their wrath was when Nasrallah got assassinated, and then much attention came upon Pezeshkian over his stance that Iran shouldn’t retaliate. It was now undeniable that the “peace deal” which Pezeshkian had made with Netanyahu in July—where Netanyahu promised a ceasefire in Lebanon if Iran didn’t retaliate for Haniyah’s assassination—was totally fake.

The way that Russia has beaten the United States is by understanding economics better than its enemy. As Michael Hudson concluded last year, the U.S. ruling class is illiterate about some of the most basic laws of economics. And this has made it unable to manage the Ukraine war’s blowback, like how Russia has.

Pezeshkian and the reformers had pretended that they’d made Lebanon safe, and as part of this charade they told Nasrallah he could travel in Beirut without risk of getting struck. When he was struck (along with 200 surrounding civilians), Iran’s masses mobilized against the “ceasefire,” and Pezeshkian was pressured to stop interfering with Khamenei’s counter-attack efforts. Since then, Iran has also pulled out of the Treaty for the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, and ceased all nuclear talks with Washington. These decisions have destroyed the plans the reformers had of reinstating the Iran nuclear deal. Iran is now in place to complete its first nuclear weapon, with the only remaining prerequisite being for Iran to gain enough political will; and many Iranian lawmakers have already called for the creation of this weapon. So those who seek to attack Iran with nuclear weapons now have no choice but to act as if Iran has nuclear capabilities, because the reformers have lost too much influence to prevent that outcome.

Iran’s internal power struggle isn’t over yet, though. The imperialists want to assassinate Khamenei next, as is apparent from the kinds of psyops that they’ve been putting forth about Iran. The empire’s propagandists have been codedly calling for Khamenei’s death, and this is a direct reaction to his statement that a major retaliation must come. As was explained last week by Ruslan, the Iranian communist who’s been working to repudiate the reformer faction’s arguments:

Ayatollah Khamenei's speech calling for retaliation has left all the Pezeshkian-Ghalibaf "National Consensus" coalition and foreign-backed Opposition people completely dumb-founded. I'll explain why and what all of this means…Khamenei clearly outlined in his speech that indeed Israel is greatly exaggerating the impact of their attack, but we must not underestimate the Israelis either. He is correct as passing this off & not retaliating allows Israel to cross yet another red line…Some politicians began scrambling and echoing Khamenei's tune, like the Head of the Judiciary, Ejei. However, the entire "National Consensus" Pezeshkian-Ghalibaf alliance began changing his words and presenting them as a call not to retaliate or to retaliate at a later date…

The foreign-backed Opposition and channels like BBC Persian and Iran International are now shocked as well, saying that this must be a sign that Ayatollah Khamenei is suffering from “ill health” and has “lost his mind.” Immediately after the speech, New York Times published an article saying Khamenei is “about to die”, giving his enemies (both implicit & explicit) in Iran an excuse to kill him and get away with it. Aka Westophiles implement a similar action as to what likely happened to Raisi. Opposition channels are even analysing his speech saying “you can hear impending death in Khamenei's voice”. They're essentially calling for his assassination now.

Ruslan’s conclusion was that in order to truly ensure the imperial collaborators lose, Iran must undergo significant socialistic economic reforms. This is partly because such policies would disempower the Pezeshkian-aligned bourgeois actors who’ve been working to undo Iran’s proletarian gains. It’s also because in order to have an economy that could handle a full confrontation with the Zionists and the imperialists, Iran will need to get rid of its economy’s neoliberal aspects. To attain a war economy, Iran must do what Russia has done, and implement major nationalizations. 

For everyone who seeks to defeat the hegemon, this lesson is crucial to internalize, because economics must be considered while waging any war. As our allies abroad bring the imperial state closer to collapse, and our class war gets closer to its most intense phase, we must account for this strategic reality. We must prepare to outmaneuver our adversary in the economic realm, which will also get us in place to build the post-revolution society.

The way that Russia has beaten the United States is by understanding economics better than its enemy. As Michael Hudson concluded last year, the U.S. ruling class is illiterate about some of the most basic laws of economics. And this has made it unable to manage the Ukraine war’s blowback, like how Russia has:

They had never dreamed that Russia would have an alternative or China would have an alternative as to what to do. And that’s because they don’t think of economics in the United States as a system. For them, a market exists without government playing any role at all, without policy playing any role at all…this free enterprise market idea that governments should not play any role at all, any subsidy, and certainly shouldn’t tax, this anti-government idea has put blinders on American foreign policy, so they have no imagination that Russia could do exactly what [Alex] is talking about, that, of course, they’ve done, as any reasonable person would have done, as China has done. That’s the irony of all this.

The outcome is that while Washington’s enemies have continued to grow stronger—and have done so in part because of the sanctions—Washington has come to oversee a country whose collapse is accelerating. Hudson has concluded that as long as the U.S. remains tied into the imperialist system, its only trajectory can be downward:

There is no right thing that the United States can do. It’s in a trap. It’s in what economists call the optimum position. Mathematicians say it’s optimum because whatever you do is going to make things worse. And the United States has painted itself into a corner. And the only way it could get out of the corner would be to be a different kind of a country, a different kind of an economy. For instance, as long as the United States has the enormous military spending throughout the rest of the world, that’s going to be pumping dollars into the world economy. And if other countries do not relend this money to the United States Treasury or the US economy, then the dollar is going to go down and down. The United States can’t really compete given the way in which it’s structured, its medical care and its housing and its finance.

As I’ve written about in the past, the imperial state has great hubris when it comes to the military aspect of its warfare, and this overconfidence could be its undoing. The strategists behind the domestic counterinsurgency have created their plans based on how they’ve waged wars abroad, meaning they’ll repeat their past mistakes: underestimating the local population, not anticipating the blowback from their aggressions, embarking on grand impractical schemes. The war with Russia has revealed another kind of self-defeating arrogance among these actors: the belief that no system could ever be more effective than the “free market” monopolist order. 

As Hudson observes, the true believers in unregulated austerity capitalism don’t even think of their preferred system as a system; they think it’s transcended the rules of reality, and therefore don’t see any reason to modify it for wartime. So while the most neoliberalized countries have suffered from this conflict, countries like Russia have achieved growth by shifting away from the neoliberal model.

That’s the great weakness of our enemies: they believe their own lies about how the world works, and so are caught unprepared when their opponents construct superior systems. A crucial part of how we’ll win is by engaging with the economy in ways the monopolists can’t understand; by creating businesses that can fund our organization-building, and help establish the foundations for the new economy which we’ll ultimately bring into being. The parts of the ruling class that Hudson talks about don’t know the strength which small entrepreneurship can provide; they genuinely believe that only monopoly finance capital is capable of succeeding, and that any system with a different basis will fail. If they can’t build a war economy now, then they won’t build a war economy in the event of a civil conflict. And should our government decide to pursue full war with Iran, then the economic collapse will hugely accelerate, making that domestic conflict a much greater possibility.

Will Iran take the same path that Russia has, and commit to a resistance war while sidelining the neoliberal elements? It’s looking more likely each day, but we can’t be complacent. We must help ensure the anti-imperialist camp’s victory, and work to ruin our own government’s plans for war. We must increase our mobilizations against the imperial project, while building cadres and networks which have the material basis for winning. These are the strategic lessons to take from Khamenei’s recent struggles: reject the notions of peace through appeasement, and account for the economic question. If we let these ideas guide our next actions, we’ll be able to take advantage of the opportunities before us.

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