PARTISAN!

Dear comrades,

On the 13th of June, 2025, Israel launched a series of missile attacks on locations across Iran, including residential areas and nuclear and military facilities. Seventy-eight people were killed and more than 320 wounded, the majority of whom were civilians. The following day, Iran retaliated with remote missile strikes on military structures in Israel, including an attack on Tel Aviv. As of the time of writing, the conflict has only continued to escalate, and the death toll continues to mount.

What will happen now?

As the attacks on Iran continue, the position of the United States has been inconsistent and ever-changing. Initially, Israeli media claimed that the attacks had backing from the U.S., the latter of which denied involvement, in line with years of their own opposition to a direct attack on Iran by Israel. Trump has since, however, made vague promises for how the U.S. plans to end the conflict – claiming he is looking for a solution “better than a ceasefire”. This should be taken as a threat to engage the U.S. in direct conflict with Iran. The form such an engagement would take is currently unclear, be it limited to missile strikes, or a full-scale invasion. Regardless of the exact form an intervention may take, it is the responsibility of communists to oppose all imperialist onslaughts on the global working-class.

The Communist Position

The various regional powers of the Middle East attempt to retain and expand their own influence in the region through proxies, and occasionally, open conflict. The Israeli state was founded on the genocide of the Palestinian people which continues to this day. Israel continues to bombard and inflict carnage on the Gaza Strip, and continues to support accelerating settlement expansion in the West Bank. It is openly a Jewish ethnostate, and one that is Jewish-supremacist.

Iran, since the Islamic Revolution in 1979, has been ruled by a reactionary clerical caste that has entrenched a brutal anti-communist, anti-woman, and anti-worker apparatus. The Islamic regime has also failed to retaliate against attacks by Israel and the US in the past; largely due to its own incapacity to emerge victorious from any tit-for-tat escalation this would inevitably cause. The Islamic regime is structurally limited from building capacity to oppose such an onslaught, as it is isolated from any potential for mass support abroad due to its nationalist character. Whilst the working-class of the Middle East may wish to expel the imperialists, the mullahs stand in the way of constructing the necessary internationalist front. The Axis of Resistance does not constitute such a front, on the contrary, it is simply a tool of Iranian Realpolitik.

Iran’s support for the Axis of Resistance should not be seen as a principled act of anti-imperialism, but rather simply as a means to prevent Israel from directly attacking Iran, instead busying them in conflicts with Hamas and Hezbollah. Had Iran taken a principled anti-imperialist position, they would have long-ago retaliated against Israel for its attacks on their coalition partners, and not waited until bombardments were unleashed on Tehran. This cynicism on the part of Iran should not be brushed aside: they had collaborated with the occupation of Iraq in 2003, and even offered to cease support for Hamas and Hezbollah in exchange for the normalisation of relations with the U.S.

The Revolutionary Communist Organisation echoes the call of the Communist Party of Iran to oppose supporting the Islamic regime, and to instead fight to intensify the workers’ struggle in the country: turning the imperialist war into a regional revolutionary rupture that will sweep aside Israel. Whilst this specific struggle is not one comrades will likely be able to directly assist with in Australia, it is regardless of importance that we highlight it as the correct position. This is necessary to orient the socialist movement in Australia into adopting a disciplined, well-formed outlook that will enable the work of building an anti-imperialist movement that is truly internationalist in its scope.

Our fight in Australia

The means for socialists and radical workers in Australia to directly fight the assault on Iran are of course incredibly limited. We do, however, maintain the responsibility of rebuilding a thriving anti-imperialist movement at home. The tasks of socialists in Australia are as follows:

1. First and foremost, we must oppose any support by the Australian state for Israel in this conflict, as they continue to provide for the Holocaust in Gaza. We must oppose any deployment of Australian troops overseas, or any facilitation of such deployment. We must demand the closure of all U.S. military and spy bases in Australia, the Middle East, and around the world.
2. Comrades must collectively work towards creating and advocating for up-to-date, materialist critiques of not just American and Israeli imperialism in the Middle East, but Australia’s relation to it. We must also link this towards a more complete view of how this relates to imperialism on a broader regional and global scale. A good step towards this is the establishment of more public study and discussion groups. A great base for such efforts would be within the soon-to-be-established Socialist Party.
3. Propagandise on the specific material nature of Australian support for not just the Israeli military, but for its own and for others worldwide. The Australian state is attempting to establish its own defence industry, which already enables and creates some of the latest war machines of our age. A well-known example of this is the production of the F-35 fighter jet’s uplock actuator system, which enables the opening and closing of the jet’s doors and is necessary for its flight. Manufacturing for this part is only done by one provider in Australia. Agitation around these sectors and their production is necessary for establishing both an accurate understanding of their place in world imperialism and strategies to fight it.
4. Comrades must fight for an internationalist outlook, and push the understanding in both the socialist and workers’ movements that the proletariat is one worldwide class, undivided by borders. We must fight the tendency among socialists to uncritically barrack behind bourgeois anti-imperialists from the Global South, such as the Axis of Resistance. These chauvinistic tendencies need to be cast aside if we are serious about building a revolutionary movement, one, that to be successful, must embrace all men as brothers.

We demand the reconstruction of a mass, anti-imperialist struggle that can bring an end to militarism. A movement that is independent of the bourgeois anti-imperialists, and that is united in a final, international class struggle in the form of the one war the working-class must fight: the global class war.