Version imprimableWar always belongs to the people not fighting themselves: the commanders, the decision-makers, the owners of the military industries and the media executives. And not to those who die, whose homes are destroyed or who cannot afford to feed themselves properly.
The din of war and threats, especially at a time when the political legitimacy of the Iranian regime has eroded to the lowest level - with economic collapse and social uprisings between December 2017 and 2023 - is reaching a point where only a ‘state of war’ can restore total control over society. In such a context, any popular demands can be easily stifled by labelling them as ‘collusion with the enemy’.
On the Israeli side, the situation is hardly any different: the Zionist regime, engaged in systematic ethnic and racial cleansing, exploits every opportunity to promote the image of a ‘country besieged by its enemies’. This allows it both to pursue its expansionist policies on the occupied lands and to relegate its internal crises - from anti-corruption protests to social fractures - to the background.
War is the continuation of politics by other means. And in the era of capitalist domination, politics is nothing more than the reproduction of the interests of the dominant minority. The apparatuses of state are nothing more than those charged with managing the common affairs of the globalised bourgeoisie.
What difference does it make whether this minority is in Tehran or Tel Aviv, when both feed on the blood of peoples for their survival? Both levy taxes on the labour of workers and the destitute, invest them in missiles, drones, the ‘iron dome’, and, in the end, leave these exploited people under the rubble or in the clutter of cemeteries.
The working masses have no interest in this war. What is destroyed under the bombardments is not just infrastructure or factories, but also the possibility of social transformation. War serves to freeze the existing ‘order’. At a time when, in Iran, women are fighting for freedom, teachers for decent wages, workers for their right to organise, and when, in Palestine and elsewhere, popular movements against the occupation are taking shape, this war, with all its rage, savagery and destruction, is raining down to stifle demands, bury hopes and redefine the future solely in the form of dust and weapons.
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Never before has a third direction been so urgently needed: a voice that comes not from military headquarters or financial centres, but from those whose bodies fall beneath the rubble.
Not with official slogans or bloodied flags, but with the awareness that salvation from this deadly cycle lies not in the victory of one ‘side’ against the other but in the defeat of both.
If the masses submit to war, they are in reality surrendering their lives and their destiny to destruction. But this voice must not be limited to ‘negation’. It must insist on struggle and resistance.
The third voice must emerge from the heart of shared suffering and the dream of liberation, to become a network of solidarity between the dispossessed in all those territories where capitalist ‘order’ and states turn borders into trenches and streets into battlefields.
We must learn to reflect what emerges from resistance, instead of repeating the narratives of the dominant powers: experiences forged not in the offices of politicians, but under the weight of rubble, in the voices of bereaved mothers, and the slogans of strikers.
We need to get organised, because in times of war it’s not just physical existence that’s threatened, but also the capacity for collective action, communication and independent dialogue.
When the Internet is cut off and the media become the mouthpieces of the warmongers, what remains is our link with each other. And that link must be resistance, not as a temporary reaction, but as a force that calls us to common expression, mutual support and perseverance in the darkest of times.
18 June 2025
