Today Trump has announced the United States directly attacked the Islamic Republic of Iran, conducting bombing strikes on several areas and sites throughout the country. These attacks occurred following more than a week of increasingly aggressive and war-like rhetoric from the US government after Israel initiated their own bombing campaign against Iran on June 13th. Codenamed Operation Rising Lion, the surprise bombing campaign by Israel is just another manifestation of their broader offensive of genocide, murder and brutal war throughout the Middle East, and particularly against the Palestinian people. The Israeli attack targeted population centers, disregarded all basic rules of war, and in general had no regard for the lives of peoples they consider “inferior” according to their genocidal Zionist ideology. Now Israel’s attack on Iran has passed from having indirect material backing, to direct military support from the US.
The United States is the main enemy of the oppressed peoples of the world, and Israel is one of its primary auxiliary/proxy forces in the carrying out of the US’s agenda and interests. The United States and Israel are clearly colluding to use these wars of aggression as a method for implementing the schemes of Imperialism, such as so-called “regime change” in Iran. Since its inception, the modern imperialist powers have used violence and war as their primary tool for the subjugation of the global majority and the super-exploitation of these oppressed peoples. There is, furthermore, a tendency for the United States as the premier imperialist power to increase its violence towards and its attacks on the people, internally and externally, as the generalized crisis of imperialism worsens. Thus the current offensive on the immigrant masses in the United States, the erosion of democratic rights and worsening of living standards in bourgeois democracies around the world, and the US-Israeli imperialist war of aggression on Iran must be understood as all interconnected manifestations of the ongoing general crisis of international Imperialism.
It is a special duty for US revolutionaries to carry out concrete solidarity with oppressed peoples. The only way forward is for these attacks to be met with mass resistance, and ultimately defeated with Socialist Revolution. As Lenin and international revolutionaries first discovered during World War 1, Imperialism has become the main dividing line in the socialist movement. Our relation to Imperialism and how we orient ourselves towards it is the line of demarcation between being a revisionist or opportunist and being a revolutionary, between being on the side of the exploiters and oppressors and being on the side of the proletariat and oppressed peoples of the world. We must defend, raise up, and develop true solidarity with the resistance of the oppressed peoples to US imperialism through carrying out the work of revolution here in the very belly of the beast.
In our case our stance must be firm, powerful, principled, and focused. We must mobilize the masses with actions, protests, events, and other works to defeat this war of aggression, and resist US Imperialism more broadly. To do this we utilize and leverage the array of mass organizations we have initiated and constructed for this precise purpose. The People’s Defense Committees and their affiliated organizations, the New Labor Organizing Committee shop organizations and workers circles, the Revolutionary Student Union chapters, these are our main vehicles for struggle in this fight. Their leaderships, in consultation and collaboration with their local members and our theoretical publications, must work to broaden and elevate the spontaneous mass frustration and anger that is sure to emerge out of this war, just as is occurring with the mass deportation and as occurred in the 2000s with the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
We must use our actions, our agitation, our propaganda, and our political education during this to politicize the masses regarding the roots of this war (i.e., the modern capitalist system – Imperialism), and its only real solution both in the US: (the overthrow of US Imperialism and the establishment of a New State of the workers) and internationally (the overthrow of World Imperialism and the establishment of socialism in all nations of the world). This work must raise the masses’ consciousness, and educate them to replace the ideologies of the ruling class with the class stand, world outlook, and methods of the proletariat; the modern working class.
Through this mobilization and politicization, we must organize the masses into our class-conscious, militant and popular machineries in the different sectors. We must integrate them first as contacts and then as members, must give them tasks to do, and develop them in the fields of ideology, politics, and organization. We must identify and target the most capable, most principled, and most militant masses and activists we encounter for recruitment, and work to unite with them on our lines and work. We must raise up powerful forms of mass organization, utilizing principles and methods of our class such as democratic centralism, collective leadership, and security protocols, to construct committees, fronts, and groups that organize the rebellion of the masses to extend that rebellion and more solidly tie all of this mass work to our broader goal which is the seizure of power for the workers and oppressed peoples.
In the struggle to come we raise up the following slogans:
Down with US Imperialism!
Down with the Zionist Genocide!
Defeat Imperialism, Organize for Revolution!
Long Live the People’s Resistance in Palestine and Iran!
[Image credit: Vahid Salemi/AP Photo]
