"Respect the right of the Iranian people to overthrow their own tyrant."
Radical Socialist Statement on the Illegal and Unjustified Attack on Iran
Introductory note
Radical Socialist, the Indian socialist organisation with long fraternal ties to the Fourth International, has issued a clear statement condemning the US-Israeli attack on Iran and correctly identifying the negotiation process as cover for a military operation already in preparation. Their analysis of what Washington and Tel Aviv actually want from a post-strike Iran — not a democratic order, which would threaten the network of compliant regional despots, but a more accommodating despotism — is sharp and underreported elsewhere. Their observation that the attack was launched on a date of Israeli commemorative significance deserves wider attention.
Red Mole republishes this statement in a spirit of comradely solidarity, while noting one analytical gap: it has almost nothing to say about the Iranian working class as a political subject. This is, it should be said, is central to Radical Socialist’s own January 16 statement, which Red Mole also republished, and which remains one of the clearest expressions of genuine Fourth International internationalism issued anywhere during the current crisis. That statement placed Iranian workers at its centre, quoted the Workers’ Union of Tehran and Suburbs Company directly, and made the connection between campist apologetics and the theocracy’s own rhetorical structure with precision:
“The right of the Iranians to choose their own government appears mostly as a postscript or is entirely dismissed because ‘the time is not right.’ This is the same logic used by the Iranian state to routinely suppress the labour movement.”
And it centred what the Tehran workers themselves had already said:
“The path to the liberation of workers and toilers does not lie in the path of a leader carved from above the people, nor in reliance on foreign powers, nor through factions within the government. Rather, it lies in the path of unity, solidarity, and the creation of independent organizations in the workplace and on a national level.”
That formulation refutes both the monarchist restoration project and the campist counsel of patience in a single sentence. It is the standard against which all solidarity statements on Iran should be measured, including this one. The seven thousand dead protesters, the general strike that paralysed 31 provinces in January, the Haft Tappeh sugar workers whose January 3 statement explicitly rejected both theocracy and monarchist restoration: these forces are the only emancipatory horizon that does not reproduce, in a new form, the substitutionist logic the March statement rightly condemns in Washington and Tel Aviv.
Opposing the bombs and supporting the uprising are not sequential tasks. They are simultaneous and mutually constitutive. Radical Socialist demonstrated that in January. The international left needs to say both together now, as the bombs are falling.
That means asking what solidarity requires in practice: finding the Iranian teachers’ union networks, the Woman Life Freedom diaspora organisations active in British, French, and German cities, the Kurdish and Azerbaijani political organisations that have maintained structures through decades of repression, and asking what they need. Communications infrastructure. Legal defence funds. Trade union connections that bypass both the Islamic Labour Councils and the monarchist lobby. The school strike that killed 148 people in southern Iran today will be used by some to justify the attack and by others to mourn the bombs in isolation from the regime that has been killing Iranian children for decades. Neither response constitutes solidarity.
This round of the uprising may be suppressed. Hungary 1956 was suppressed. Tehran 1980 was betrayed. The Fourth International stood with those workers not because victory was guaranteed but because solidarity was correct. The forces that crushed those movements proved incapable of resolving the underlying contradictions; within decades, the regimes that had deployed tanks against workers’ councils became the primary agents of capitalist restoration. The question is not whether every uprising succeeds immediately. It is whether the international left will have been on the right side when the history is written.
The bombs will not liberate Iran. But neither will statements, however correct, that stop at condemning the bombers. Radical Socialist showed in January what the fuller position looks like. The question now is whether the international left can hold it together under the pressure of the moment.
Radical Socialist Statement on the Illegal and Unjustified Attack on Iran
It is now clear that the negotiation process between the US and Iran on the latter’s nuclear energy infrastructure and potential capabilities was meant to serve as a cover while Israel and the US were jointly preparing for a military assault to create stronger conditions for a possible regime change in Iran that would be more accommodating to their respective and shared political ambitions. It is not a coincidence that the day chosen for the attack was an official Israeli commemoration according to Scriptural sources, of the alleged day of deliverance in the pre-Christian era for the Jewish community in ancient Persia (today’s Iran). Moreover, everyone including the West knows that the only country in the region to possess nuclear weapons which will not give them up, is Israel. This inauguration of a war that can extend to the other parts of the region must be forcefully and unequivocally condemned. As for the claim by Washington that this assault is partly motivated by the desire to support the popular struggle against a theocratic dictatorship, this is dishonest dissimulation. You don’t show respect for a people’s national independence by kidnapping or assassinating presidents (Maduro and Khameini), or show a humane commitment to the Iranian public by bombing different cities and causing large-scale destruction and civilian deaths. One must respect the right of the Iranian people to overthrow their own tyrant. The main reasons for this joint attack lie in the regional and geopolitical ambitions of Israel and the US respectively.
Trump is more committed than even previous US administrations to maintaining Israel as its regional gendarme to control much of the Middle East while being more willing than previous US governments to use brute military force to intervene and expand US areas of control especially in the Indo-Pacific region and in the Arctic as long as direct ground invasions with the risk of serious casualties among US military personnel is avoided. Israel has successfully used the October 2023 Hamas assault as an excuse to launch a wider military campaign that has enabled it to gain more territory and control in Syria and Lebanon, to forcibly expand Israeli settlements in the West Bank as well as carry out a genocide in Gaza that has resulted in its greater direct military control and ghettoization of a greatly diminished Palestinian population. And this has been done with the connivance of the US whose Board of Peace is meant to preserve, and protect, in the longer term, this new situation of a much wider regional hegemony of Israel that can also serve the interests of the Trump government. Given the huge asymmetry between the military capabilities of Iran and those of its opponents, the former can only hope that by attacking various US military bases in the region and causing significant casualties to US personnel there, it can push Washington, and therefore Tel Aviv, to call some kind of a halt to this war. Even so, at least in the short run, the US-Israel combination will have gained strategic political-military ground.
The governments of the Arab countries housing such bases and suffering such territorial attacks are, more likely than not, to become more accommodating to the US. As a corollary to this shift, they will have to further reassure Israel that they pose no serious threat to it whether by joining the Abraham Accords or through more informal ways. Only the overthrow of one or more of these Arab governments by their own publics that are rightly and genuinely hostile to the brutal and imperialist behaviours of Israel and the US, can hope to reorganise the regional strategic map in a much more progressive and just direction. But this is not an immediate perspective or perhaps even a short-term prospect. As expected, major Western European powers have in one form or the other endorsed what the US and Israel have just done. Others, like India, merely give mealy-mouthed statements of concern about violation of territorial sovereignty without even naming either the victim, Iran, or the victimisers, Israel and the US, let alone taking any practical steps to help the former or hinder the latter. Russia and China have made more forceful statements but any expectations from sections of the Indian left that either will take serious steps to oppose the US will be belied. It remains to be seen even to what extent in current circumstances of a raging ongoing war, what military help China might give as distinct from replenishing military supplies when matters quieten down and it is safer politically to do so as well as being economically lucrative.
What are the likely consequences within Iran from what has happened? Neither the US nor Israel want any genuine non-theocratic and democratic political order to emerge in that country. That would constitute a threat to the US’s other anti-democratic and monarchical despotic regimes that are its allies in the region and which also informally carry out substantial trade with Israel, especially imports of military hardware. A despotic Iranian regime that will more willingly toe the American line is enough. But even this is by no means a certainty. It is as likely, if not more so, that the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), which is the real institutional power domestically in Iran, will control the reins of government for some unknown period and continue to see the US as the Great Satan.
Progressives everywhere must, of course, voice their opposition to what the US and Israel have just done and call on their own governments to show a much stiffer political spine as well as to take a more moral and democratic stand against such violations of international and humanitarian law. Large-scale political protests by the ordinary public in as many countries as possible are required more than ever.
US and Israel to Halt the War on Iran Immediately and Pay Compensation to the Iranian People!
For a Middle East Zone Free of All Weapons of Mass Destruction, Including Nuclear Weapons!
No to US Imperialism and to Israeli Colonialism and Expansionism!