Today the world witnesses another oil drenched proletarian slaughter unfolding in the Middle East. As images of dead American soldiers unloaded from U.S. cargo planes in coffins draped in the stars and stripes trickled into newsfeeds in the opening week of the conflict in order to stir patriotic sentimentality, we were reminded of scenes of the “forever wars” of the early 2000’s where over one million Iraqi and Afghan proletarians died amid the U.S. struggle to conquer for Wall St, Iraqi oil, CIA management of Afghan opium fields, and enlarged stocks for Halliburton, Lockheed Martin and Blackwater. Yet the war only confirms a basic reality that only our Party has underscored for well over half a century. That the intensifying overproduction crisis, inherent to the capitalist mode of production, is the defining feature driving today’s conflicts within world imperialism.

The inter-imperialist war being waged today in Iran, similar to the recent interventions in Venezuela, are a product of this crisis. A war which disrupts oil production in the region will enable U.S. oil monopolies to continue to grow their advantage within global energy export markets against its gulf and OPEC+ oil cartel competition while increasing —and thereby financing—demand for its military arms industry.

Achieving energy “dominance” is an important strategy in U.S. imperialism’s effort to economically contain Chinese imperialism; however, it will come at the cost of increasingly ballooning the U.S. national debt, hastening the next catastrophic economic crisis. Such debt is sustainable only with financial domination, and this with military domination.

Meanwhile the Iranian bourgeois will use the war to consolidate its hold over the increasingly rebellious industrial proletariat, sacrificing them to keep the profits of oil sold to China flowing into their pockets.

The war in Iran is a further stage in a process destined to lead to a third world war, if the proletariat does not prevent it. The strategies of the various imperialisms are not always clear, not even to the capitalists themselves. The Chinese and Russian imperialisms are in trouble: they lack the strength to oppose the militarily stronger US imperialism, so for now they appear to be doing nothing beyond making perfunctory declarations. Naturally, they will continue to arm Iran and assist it with the intelligence provided by their satellites: Iran is too important to China and Russia, economically, militarily, and strategically. Leaving that country in the hands of a rival imperialism would be a severe blow to both. The difficulty lies in doing this without overreaching. They certainly haven’t forgotten what happened during the US and NATO war against Serbia in 1999: China was providing Serbia with information on NATO troop movements, and then, "by mistake", the Chinese embassy in Belgrade was hit by three US missiles.

Even the militarily strongest imperialism, the US, has its problems: if it were to wage two or three wars simultaneously, it would face considerable difficulties. The Pentagon appears to be less than enthusiastic about the war with Iran, since if it were to drag on for a long time, its reduced stockpile of missiles and various military hardware would be insufficient to sustain a potential new war.

The various European states are tempted to pursue their own imperialist policies, but lacking the strength, they vacillate between serving their perennial master, the United States, and timidly distancing themselves from it. They know they risk, like Harlequin, serving two masters, and being beaten by both the old and the new, be it China or whoever. They therefore mask their impotence by invoking "democracy" and "international law".

American capitalists would like to replicate what happened in Venezuela, supporting a power, new or old, that obeys their orders and, among other things, sells or doesn’t sell oil according to their interests. Evidently this is not as easy to achieve in Iran as it was in Venezuela.

Meanwhile, they could arm some ethnic and religious minorities, such as the Kurds, Baloch, Arabs, and perhaps even the Azeris. An attempt appears to be underway with the Kurds, whose nationalist parties in Syria were abandoned by the US, which had supported them, a few weeks prior to the war. This, however, does not necessarily mean that this approach will not actually be attempted. Kurdish bourgeois leaders have always sold themselves to the bourgeoisies of other countries to fight their host state or rival Kurdish groups, effectively acting—increasingly—as mercenary militias.

Thus Iran would be divided into zones of influence, as has already happened in Iraq and Syria, forced to abdicate its claims to regional imperialism.

The State of Israel, on behalf of the Americans, would thus strengthen its dominance over the entire Near and Middle East, finding itself competing only with Turkish imperialism which, even before the current war, appeared to be the new main adversary of Israeli imperialism, replacing Iranian imperialism.

Propaganda about "Greater Israel" and similar religious and Jewish supremacism, serve the aims of American imperialism, of which Israel is merely the most important vassal and faithful executor. It is the heir of Eichmann, not of the millions of Jews exterminated by Nazism. By controlling the Middle East, American capitalists would be able to move from a position of strength against their main enemy, China, against which the war against Iran is first and foremost directed.

But all these more or less plausible strategies of imperialism, which is the supreme stage of capitalism and not a moral category, have a weak point: the emergence of that "stone guest"—the proletariat.

Even in the purely theoretical—and impossible—hypothesis of a single imperialist country absolutely dominating the world, it would not be immune to the worsening economic crisis of capitalist overproduction and, therefore, the need to increase the level of exploitation of the international working class, thereby fueling the class struggle. Far from being stronger because it was free of opposing imperialisms, it would instead be weaker because it could not slow and divert the class struggle with war, with the external enemy, with nationalism, with the massacres and destruction of war.

This explains the deepest meaning and purpose of the imperialist war: a war against the proletariat and the revolution, even before being a war for the division of the profits obtained from the exploitation of the proletariat.

And from this we can see the only way to prevent or stop imperialist war. As long as the proletariat remains virtually immobile and petrified, capitalism is able to wage all the wars and massacres it wants, as we all see. When the "stone guest" moves and presents itself to the power of the bourgeoisie, as has happened throughout history and will happen again, the latter is doomed.

Obviously, for the bourgeoisie to be doomed, the proletariat must not appear as a disorganized mass of individuals, but rather organized within its class union, and led by its Communist Party. This is the only logical response the proletarian can have to world war.

We therefore reiterate our usual slogans: Bread and Peace - War or Revolution - The Proletarians Have No Homeland - The Enemy Is in Their Own Home.

Oil futures surged after the war with Iran began in late February 2026. Brent crude jumped 10-13% in price, to about $80-82 per barrel in the first days of the conflict and later climbed toward $90-$100, briefly approaching $120 during peak fears that fighting could disrupt shipments through the Strait of Hormuz. Ultimately, delivering a potential $63 billion windfall to U.S. oil producers in the opening days. The conflict also boosted military spending, channeling billions toward U.S. defense contractors including Lockheed Martin, RTX Corporation, and Northrop Grumman, as new orders for missile defense systems, aircraft, and munitions pile up.

While maximally the U.S. may have hoped to quickly establish a puppet state in Iran with the decapitation of the Ayatollah, it has demonstrated it’s hesitancy to fully commit to the conflict and reluctance to engage in massive destruction of the Iranian state’s oil industry which would completely destabilize the country economically, leading to chaos, or even maybe the waking of the aforementioned stone guest...Yet the United States whether or not it accomplishes its maximal aim will continue to reap massive rewards from an extension of the conflict. Commenting on the war Trump recently stated “The United States is the largest Oil Producer in the World… when oil prices go up, we make a lot of money.”

While higher oil prices in fact benefit the U.S., it must cautiously work to control how high they rise. Thus, U.S. strikes on Iranian energy sites have been carefully calibrated rather than aimed at completely destroying Iran’s entire oil industry. While some facilities linked to military logistics or shipping have reportedly been targeted, core export infrastructure, such as terminals and loading facilities that handle most Iranian crude, have so far largely remained operational, and tankers have continued leaving Iranian ports. The main reason appears to be concern over global energy markets. Destroying Iran’s infrastructure could trigger a major supply shock and drive prices sharply higher. As the measured nature of sanctions on Russian oil show, U.S. imperialism is keenly aware of the risk that out of control energy prices would have on the economy as a whole. While thousands of proletarians are massacring the architects of the war, the capitalist class on both sides sit back, openly collaborating together as they coldly calculate how much more blood of their respective proletarians’ blood must be spilt to keep profit rates up.

As we stated in our TICP 434 after the emergence of the short war between Israel and Iran last year: “The conflict between Israel and Iran last June triggered an initial surge in oil prices. However, they quickly returned to previous levels once the ceasefire was announced and the absence of serious supply disruptions was confirmed. The propaganda war, the manipulation of information, and all the staged displays, while suffocating, failed to substantially alter market perceptions of supply and demand.…Increased production capacity in the West and increased supply from OPEC+ could offset the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, but this will only be tested when the infernal forces of imperialism push for a protracted military confrontation…The inter-imperialist contradictions within the oil business reflect the tendency toward overproduction, which exacerbates competition, and represent an important component in the general clash of imperialisms for the redistribution of the world. They add to the material conditions leading to world war, which only the proletariat, resuming the class struggle, can stop, transforming it into a revolutionary war that will put an end to capitalism and the rule of the bourgeoisie across the planet.”

Today we watch one year later as this very situation plays out, and the cynical forces of global imperialism constantly test and probe the situation with each drone strike and bombing run to evaluate the response of stock markets and oil futures to deliver for the dominant capital the most preferred price point.

Lenin argued in Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, that monopolies controlling raw materials gain decisive power over the wider economy because industries that dominate key resources can dictate conditions to downstream producers. Oil remains the most important commodity in the global economy, supplying roughly one-third of the world’s primary energy consumption and underpinning transportation, manufacturing, agriculture, and global trade. Because production costs in major fields can be as low as $3–$10 per barrel while market prices often range between $60–$100, control over oil production and distribution can generate enormous monopoly rents, allowing dominant energy firms and states to exert powerful influence over global prices, supply chains, and economic activity.

As we noted in our 2013 study Oil, Monopolies and Imperialism “Henry Kissinger warned in 2005, competition for access to energy can become “a matter of life and death” for nations.” This life and death battle by the dominant imperialist powers for control of “black gold” has played out in successive phases since the birth of the industry. Before World War II, the global oil industry was shaped by the rise of powerful monopolies competing for control of markets, colonial territories, and new oil fields across regions such as Venezuela, Mexico, Persia, and Indonesia. After the war, the focus of global oil politics shifted to the Middle East, where vast reserves and cheap production drew the intervention of Western powers and international oil companies, which used their economic and military influence to dominate production and capture the wealth of the oil-producing countries. Oil prices were relatively stable from 1900 until the early 1970s, but after the 1973 OPEC oil crisis they became far more volatile. Since then, the United States has established a broad military presence across the Middle East,, while repeatedly intervening to ensure the financial subordination of the regional oil producing states and their sale of oil, “at the right price”.

Yet over the past decade the global oil market has been fundamentally transformed with the rise of U.S. shale production. With output increasing from about 5 million barrels per day in 2008 to more than 13 million by the early 2020s, the United States has become the world’s largest oil producer and exporter. This shift demonstrated the alignment between the capitalist state’s long-term military strategy and the financial interests of it’s industrial monopolies, as both Democratic and Republican administrations promoted domestic energy development under the banner of “energy independence,” supporting research, tax incentives, and regulatory frameworks partly funded through the U.S. Department of Energy that advanced technologies such as horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing. The rapid growth of U.S. production added millions of barrels of new supply to global markets and played a major role in creating the 2014–2016 oil glut, pushing prices down from over $100 per barrel to around $30, severely impacting oil-dependent economies such as Venezuela, Nigeria, Russia, and Saudi Arabia, where government budgets relied heavily on petroleum revenues and the sharp collapse in oil prices triggered fiscal crises, currency instability, and economic contraction.

The collapse of oil prices during the global glut had particularly devastating consequences for Venezuela, whose economy depended overwhelmingly on petroleum exports, which accounted for about 96% of export revenues. As prices fell and global supply surged, the country lost critical foreign currency and government income, triggering hyperinflation, shortages of basic goods, and mass emigration. The crisis spiraled into one of the deepest economic collapses in modern history, with Venezuela’s GDP shrinking by more than 75% between roughly 2014 and 2020–2021 as falling oil revenues and declining production devastated the economy so deeply it still has not recovered.

After the lifting of the U.S. crude export ban in 2015, U.S. exports began to rapidly flood onto markets while the rival oil exporting imperialisms suffered. In his 2018 address to the United Nations General Assembly, Donald Trump delivered his speech, which had just witnessed the destruction of the Venezuelan economy, and announced the next phase of U.S. imperialism’s global protection racket, stating

“We have unleashed America’s energy potential. The United States is now the largest energy producer anywhere on the face of the Earth. Soon we will be exporting energy all over the world… We are becoming energy dominant. America stands ready to export our abundant, affordable energy. We ask our friends and allies to reject energy policies that harm their interests and threaten their sovereignty.”

The 2017 U.S. Department of Energy report Energy Dominance: The Next Steps argued that expanding domestic drilling, pipelines, and export infrastructure would allow the United States to “use our energy resources as a strategic asset,” a strategy reinforced by policies opening new offshore areas to drilling, accelerating pipeline approvals, and rapidly expanding LNG exports.

Alongside this expansion, Washington increasingly used sanctions against major oil-producing states. Subsequently the U.S. issued renewed sanctions which reduced Iran’s exports from about 2.5 million barrels per day in 2018 to under 500,000 barrels per day by 2020, while sanctions on Venezuela contributed to exports falling from roughly 2 million barrels per day in 2017 to about 600,000–700,000 barrels per day by 2020. By restricting these producers’ ability to access global markets while expanding its own export capacity, the United States was able to increase its share of global oil trade, with U.S. companies growing their market share to roughly 13% of global crude exports.

Yet despite its recent expansion, there are structural limits to U.S. dominance in global energy markets. Forecasts from the U.S. Energy Information Administration have predicted U.S. oil production to peak in the late 2020s, reaching roughly 14 million barrels per day around 2027 before gradually declining to about 11.3 million barrels per day by 2050 as the shale boom fades. However, shale reservoirs differ significantly from conventional fields. Their low-permeability rock means wells decline rapidly, often losing more than half their output within the first year, requiring constant drilling to maintain production. As the most productive “sweet spots” are exhausted and lower-quality rock remains, sustaining output becomes increasingly costly and dependent on high oil prices and continuous investment. If prices fall or drilling slows, production can decline quickly, leading many analysts to believe the rapid growth of U.S. shale may eventually plateau and decline, allowing conventional producers, particularly in the Middle East, to retake their lost share of global oil markets over the next few decades.

Today many U.S. shale operations require oil prices roughly between $50-70 per barrel to remain profitable according to the Federal Reserve Dallas Energy Survey. Likewise, a price above $70 per barrel is needed for companies to start expanding drilling programs, while at $80-90+ there are strong incentives for rapid production growth, and at $90-$120 there is estimated to be maximal growth potential.

Prior to the war in Iran prices sat at around $65 per barrel and as of March 7th they have grown to nearly $120. Before the conflict, many industry analysts expected U.S. shale growth to slow or even decline due to global oversupply, and declining drilling investment with forecasts of oil prices declining to $55 per barrel by 2027.

Thus, the War in Iran conveniently presents the U.S. oil industry with the climbing price it has needed to avoid stagnation and decline. Demonstrating that the war itself is driven by capitals need to maintain its profit rates amid the growing over production crisis, particularly within the oil market.

The immediate losers from the shock to shipping through the Strait of Hormuz are Saudi Arabia and the wider Gulf oil producers. Their export system is the one physically disrupted, militarily exposed, and commercially stranded by the war. The Strait normally carries about 20 million barrels of oil per day, roughly one-fifth of global petroleum consumption and about a quarter of seaborne oil trade. When the conflict escalated, flows through the chokepoint collapsed dramatically, with tanker traffic falling by more than 80 percent during the peak of the disruption. Saudi Arabia is the largest exporter relying on this corridor, accounting for roughly 37% of crude shipments passing through Hormuz, followed by Iraq, the UAE, Iran, and Kuwait. With attacks on shipping and energy infrastructure spreading across the Gulf, the region’s export system has effectively become a battlefield. Saudi Aramco has warned that a prolonged closure would have “catastrophic consequences” for global oil markets (of which they must mean their own) and Gulf governments have begun openly questioning the long-standing arrangement under which Washington was supposed to guarantee the security of their energy exports. Even proposals for naval convoy systems would restore only a fraction (10%) of normal tanker traffic, leaving a hard physical ceiling on how much crude the region can move. Saudi Arabia has attempted to redirect some exports through its East-West pipeline to the Red Sea port of Yanbu, bypassing Hormuz entirely, but the system can carry only about 5 million barrels per day, far below the kingdom’s normal export capacity of roughly 7–8 million barrels per day. As a result, even with maximum use of this pipeline network, a large portion of Gulf oil production remains effectively trapped behind the bottleneck created by the war.

While Gulf production is constrained, rival producers are either continuing to sell or are positioning themselves to capture the gap. Russia has seen a surge in energy revenues as higher prices and shifting trade flows boost its exports to Asian buyers. Iran, despite being at the center of the war, has continued exporting crude. Its key export hub at Kharg Island, responsible for around 90% of Iranian oil exports and capable of loading up to 2 million barrels per day, remains critical to shipments that still reach international markets, primarily China. The United States as we have shown is also positioned to benefit from the disruption. Government forecasts, which prior to the war predicted declining production, now expect production to climb further to roughly 13.8 million barrels per day by 2027 as higher prices encourage additional drilling.

U.S. capital markets are already responding to this shift. Financial institutions are investing in new tanker capacity scheduled for delivery later in the decade, and Washington has assembled a multi-billion-dollar insurance program to keep oil shipments moving through risky waters. One example is the reported order by JP Morgan-linked interests for three new Suezmax crude tankers at South Korea’s Samsung Heavy Industries, vessels expected to be delivered by February 2029. Industry reporting noted that the deal reflects expectations that “long-term geopolitical tensions and tighter shipping supply” will sustain demand for large crude carriers capable of moving oil outside the most vulnerable Gulf routes. At the same time the U.S. government has backed a $20 billion maritime insurance and reinsurance program to stabilize tanker traffic through dangerous waters such as the Strait of Hormuz. Taken together, these moves show that major financial actors are not treating the disruption as a short-lived crisis but are allocating capital on the assumption that global oil flows will remain unstable long enough for non-Gulf suppliers to expand their market share.

Analysts estimate that the conflict has already removed around 10 million barrels per day of production across Gulf countries, one of the largest disruptions in modern oil markets. Because restarting large oil fields can be complex and risky, some wells may never return to their previous productivity even after the conflict ends. In effect, geopolitical disruptions can transform a short-term export blockage into long-term reductions in global oil capacity, tightening supply and raising the baseline price of energy worldwide.

The stakes are enormous because Asia dominates demand for Gulf oil. Nearly 90% of crude shipped through the Strait of Hormuz is destined for Asian markets, with China alone receiving about 38% of the total and India roughly 15%. India’s dependence on Middle Eastern oil makes it particularly vulnerable to disruptions from the Iran war. The country consumes about 5 million barrels of oil per day and imports roughly 80–85 % of its crude, with around 55–60 % of those imports coming from Persian Gulf producers.

As Gulf supply becomes more uncertain amid the Iran conflict, U.S. officials and energy companies are seeking to capture a larger share of India’s import market, potentially redirecting a portion of the country’s roughly 3 million barrels per day of Middle Eastern crude imports toward American exports of which it has already captured about $4.5 billion in purchases in the first half of 2025, amid the escalating enforcement of sanctions against Russian “shadow fleet tankers” contributing to a 24% year-on-year rise in India’s imports from the United States.

For decades the political foundation of the energy system rested on the petrodollar arrangement, in which Gulf oil, especially Saudi exports, was sold largely in U.S. dollars and recycled through American financial markets. But the rise of shale production has changed that balance. The United States has become both a major oil exporter and the world’s largest exporter of liquefied natural gas, putting it into direct competition with the Gulf producers that once formed the backbone of the American-led energy order. Of course in capitalist competition, alliances built around yesterday’s market conditions can quickly give way to rivalry once the structure of production changes.

Saudi Arabia has responded to this shifting landscape by diversifying its political and economic relationships. China has become the largest buyer of Gulf crude and a growing diplomatic player in the region, mediating the 2023 Saudi-Iran rapprochement.

Just as the October 7, 2023, massacre, carried out by Hamas and the Islamic Jihadist group under Iranian mandate, aimed to sever the Abraham Accords between Israel and the UAE, and their possible extension, so today’s US and Israeli war on Iran aims, among other things, to sever relations between Iran and Saudi Arabia, sponsored by Chinese imperialism. Perhaps the UAE’s adherence to the Abraham Accords is the reason why, at least in the first week of the war, Iran launched more missiles and drones against this country than against Israel.

While the conflict is benefiting the US oil industry, it is also harming the Gulf countries, albeit to a different extent for each country. Saudi Arabia alone has reportedly reduced production by around 2–2.5 million barrels per day, down from 10–10.9 million barrels per day prior to the war. while the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, and Iraq have also cut output, bringing total regional reductions to more than five million barrels per day. As Gulf exports shrink, producers outside the region, particularly the United States, Russia, and even Iran itself, are positioned to fill the gap.

From a broader economic perspective, the war in Iran reflects the pressures of a global energy market marked by intense competition and periodic oversupply. With world production exceeding 100 million barrels per day and major producers fighting for access to the fastest-growing Asian markets, geopolitical conflict increasingly intersects with commercial rivalry. The struggle over shipping routes, sanctions, and energy diplomacy is therefore not merely a regional dispute but part of a larger contest over who controls the future flows of oil in the world economy fundamentally shaped by monopolistic dynamics which shapes the imperialist conflicts waging the world over as capitalism desperately workers to maintain its profit rates.

While in the early days of the war in the U.S. the liberals played their confusionist part, to convince the public that the war on Iran comes out of thin air and is launched merely to distract the ballot dropping philistines from Trump’s personal political troubles related to the Epstein files, the ruling bourgeois faction makes no serious effort to justify its war on any real grounds other than that of advancing its own naked profit interest. The reality is that the Iran war is merely the latest development in a years-long conflict of escalating sanctions by the U.S. against foreign oil producing countries and increased use of the U.S. armed forces to regulate and control transportation of competitors’ oil across the world. The connection between the inter-imperialist war in Ukraine and the U.S. quarrel with Russian imperialism, along with the recent attack on Venezuela and Iran are all threaded together under the U.S. quest to cut into these oil producing countries who for years have fueled the growth of Chinese industrial power and now offer to do the same for India. While U.S. imperialism’s industrial power wanes, it intends to leverage itself as the dominant oil producer and military power, to maintain its status as the dominant financial power.

The United States was the only country, along with Germany, to recover and surpass the peak of industrial production before the 2008 crisis. This was thanks to increased oil production. The US manufacturing output index never recovered to its pre-crisis level. Germany, however, which had recovered, saw its industrial and manufacturing power hit by the war in Ukraine.

At the start of Trump’s second term he pushed for cheaper global oil to support consumer purchasing power and offset inflation. Even as U.S. production reached a record 13.6 million barrels per day in 2025, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, and as exports fell about 3% to roughly 4.0 million barrels per day, partly because more crude remained in the United States to refill the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. At the same time, oil executives argued that prices above roughly $70–$80 per barrel were necessary to justify expanding shale drilling, reflecting the cyclical structure of the oil industry in which high prices stimulate new drilling that eventually increases supply and pushes prices downward, while low prices trigger bankruptcies and consolidation before the cycle begins again. During 2025, rising exports from Iran and Venezuela increased global supply and competed with U.S. crude in key markets, aided by the expansion of a sanctions-evading “shadow fleet” of tankers and shifting trade patterns linked to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which reshaped global oil flows and encouraged discounted crude sales to Asian buyers, particularly China. At the same time, enforcement of sanctions at sea became more difficult as U.S. naval resources were stretched across multiple theaters, while weaker global demand growth due to tariffs, refinery maintenance cycles, and logistical bottlenecks at Gulf Coast export terminals further limited the expansion of U.S. oil exports despite record domestic production. We can see here the economic incentive of U.S. imperialism’s sudden blitz against its oil competitors in Venezuela and Iran.

The sanctions reimposed by the Trump administration on Iran in 2018, after withdrawing from the nuclear treaty negotiated by Obama, were explicitly directed at the oil sector and introduced at a moment when U.S. officials argued that rising American production gave Washington new freedom to wield economic pressure. Oil had been targeted in earlier sanctions, particularly the U.S. and EU measures imposed in 2012 that cut Iranian exports roughly in half. However, the 2018 campaign marked a renewed effort to choke off Iran’s main source of state revenue. Announcing the sanctions, Donald Trump pledged the “highest level of economic sanctions,” aiming to reduce Iran’s oil exports to “zero.” U.S. officials argued that rising American oil and gas production had changed the strategic landscape, allowing Washington to sanction rival producers without triggering supply crises. Within this framework, the “maximum pressure” campaign sought not only to force concessions over Iran’s nuclear program but also to cut down to size a major exporter from global markets and reinforce the role of U.S. and allied producers in the international energy market.

Iran’s oil exports collapsed after the reimposition of U.S. sanctions in 2018, reaching their lowest levels around 2020-2021 at roughly 200,000-300,000 barrels per day, dropping from 2 million per day or 5% of global oil market share to less than 1%. Over the following years exports slowly recovered, first to around 600,000–800,000 bpd by 2021, and then surged after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, eventually climbing to roughly 1.5–2.0 million bpd in 2024–2025, with some months exceeding 2 million bpd. A key factor enabling this recovery was the rapid expansion of the “shadow fleet”. These same logistical networks that Russia began using to bypass Western oil sanctions after 2022 also created a much larger pool of vessels, intermediaries, and trading structures that Iran could use to move crude outside the traditional maritime and financial system. Because these shipments frequently occur through complex chains involving offshore traders, re-flagged vessels, and blending of crude grades, tracking and proving sanctions violations became significantly more difficult.

Western governments gradually escalated enforcement from financial penalties to direct maritime intervention. The United States and European states sanctioned hundreds of vessels linked to Russia’s energy trade, detained suspect ships in European ports, and carried out interdictions targeting tankers transporting sanctioned crude. For example, European authorities seized several shadow-fleet tankers carrying Russian oil in Baltic and North Sea ports, while the United States pursued and seized vessels linked to Venezuelan and Iranian oil exports in the Caribbean and Atlantic.

Sanctions enforcement increasingly triggered military responses or coercive maritime actions from targeted states. Financial pressure, insurance bans, banking restrictions, and the G7 price cap gradually evolved into a campaign involving naval patrols, and confrontations with rival states’ military forces.

Leading up to the opening of the U.S. and Israeli offensive in Iran in March of 2026, the Persian Gulf saw months of escalating maritime confrontations. On February 5, 2026, Iran seized two foreign oil tankers near Farsi Island in the Persian Gulf, accusing them of smuggling about 1 million liters of fuel, and detained fifteen crew members, an incident that occurred amid rising tensions and just before renewed U.S.-Iran nuclear talks. Earlier, on February 3, 2026, several pairs of Iranian Revolutionary Guard gunboats approached a U.S.-flagged tanker in the Strait of Hormuz, prompting the vessel to be escorted away by a U.S. warship. These incidents occurred alongside a series of Iranian military demonstrations aimed at the region’s key energy corridor. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps launched live-fire naval exercises in the Strait of Hormuz on February 1–2, followed by a larger exercise beginning February 16, during which missiles and drones were tested and parts of the waterway were temporarily closed for security reasons. The Strait, through which roughly 20% of global oil trade passes, was partially shut for several hours on February 17 while Iranian forces conducted drills and missile launches intended to demonstrate their ability to control the chokepoint.

Together with the Iranian ship seizures, naval exercises, and temporary closures of the Strait of Hormuz, this cycle of maritime confrontations, sanctions enforcement, and military maneuvers in one of the world’s most important oil corridors steadily raised the risk of direct conflict, predictably escalating into the current war.

The early stages of the war in Iran already illustrate the familiar economic pattern of modern imperial conflict: immense state expenditures and growing national debt, alongside private corporate gains. The U.S. government spent about $5.6 billion on munitions in the first two days of strikes alone, and administration officials estimate the war cost over $11 billion in its first six days, with Congress preparing potential supplemental funding requests approaching $50 billion to sustain operations and rebuild military inventories just a week later. One month in and the Pentagon is also preparing plans for a request of $200 billion to sustain operations in the region. Such wars generate windfalls for energy and defense corporations while enlarging the state’s deficits and borrowing. Yet the state cannot infinitely borrow without growing the risk of a catastrophic economic crisis. The dynamic is not new. The financial crisis of 2008 exposed the contradiction between the massive destructive expenditures of imperial war and the declining capacity of the economy to sustain them. For years the American bourgeoisie had financed the occupation of Iraq through debt while presenting the conflict as a defense of national security. But when the financial system itself entered a crisis with banks collapsing, credit freezing, and millions losing their jobs and homes, the cost of the war appeared in a different light, and support for continued military campaigns among the bourgeois eroded.

Contemporary wars rely on extremely expensive and complex systems—precision-guided munitions, advanced aircraft, drones, and satellite-supported targeting—that are consumed far more quickly in sustained combat than they can be replaced. In the war in Ukraine, for example, the United States was reportedly producing only about 14,000 155mm artillery shells per month before 2022, while Ukrainian forces at times fired 6,000-8,000 shells per day, forcing emergency efforts to expand production toward 70,000–100,000 per month—a process expected to take years. Similarly, stocks of advanced weapons such as Javelin anti-tank missiles and Stinger air-defense systems were significantly depleted, with production lines having to be restarted or expanded after years of limited output. U.S. defense officials have acknowledged that current “consumption rates… are far beyond what most defense industries were prepared to supply,” highlighting the mismatch between peacetime production capacity and wartime demand.

At the same time, the cost and complexity of modern systems significantly slow their replacement: advanced missiles can cost hundreds of thousands to several million dollars each, while platforms like the F-35 Lightning II require long production timelines and highly specialized supply chains, leading analysts from institutions such as the Center for Strategic and International Studies and RAND Corporation to warn that rebuilding stockpiles of precision munitions could take several years even with expanded funding.

Historically, when technologically advanced arsenals are exhausted or constrained, warfare has tended to revert toward more labor-intensive forms, relying on larger numbers of troops to sustain operations. In this sense, the very capital-intensive character of modern militaries contains a limit: as the cost and scarcity of advanced systems collide with the demands of prolonged war, states may be forced back toward mobilizing proletarian soldiers on a larger scale. The implication is that beneath the surface of high-tech warfare, the underlying social reality reasserts itself, the potential reappearance of mass armies, bringing the ruling class once again into direct confrontation with an armed proletarian force. While the war in Iran has so far not seen mass deployments of U.S. troops like happened in Iraq, Karoline Levitt claims Trump refuses to take a draft of Americans for the war “off the table”. While a mass land invasion of Iran is unlikely it is not impossible and will in fact likely be necessary if the U.S. finds itself wrapped up in a long term conventional war.

Warfare today is far more capital-intensive than in the past, as seen in the contrast with World War II, when the United States produced over 300,000 aircraft and tens of thousands of tanks at relatively low unit costs,such as the B-24 bomber at about $300,000 (≈$5–6 million today),whereas modern systems involve dramatically higher costs, with an F-35 priced at $80-100 million, aircraft carriers exceeding $13 billion, precision-guided missiles costing $1-4 million per use, and recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan reaching $2-3 million per soldier per year. As Friedrich Engels observed, “nothing is more dependent on economic conditions than precisely the army and navy,” and in this case the highly financialized, debt-laden, and speculative character of the U.S. economy is reflected in a military that is extraordinarily expensive, technologically advanced, and dependent on continuous flows of capital. Such a force, while immensely destructive, is also structurally burdened by the same contradictions as the economy that produces it, suggesting that when confronted with deeper social crises and potential mass opposition, it carries within it the limits and instabilities of the system it defends

The connection between war spending, economic crisis, and social upheaval amid mass conscription has historical precedence. The Vietnam War contributed significantly to the fiscal and monetary instability of the late 1960s as military expenditures surged while taxation lagged behind, fueling inflation and helping destabilize the international monetary system before the collapse of the Bretton Woods order in 1971. In earlier centuries similar pressures contributed towards revolutionary crises. The enormous debts accumulated by the French monarchy during the Seven Years’ War and the American War of Independence crippled state finances and helped provoke the upheavals of 1789. Most dramatically, the Russian Revolution of 1917 emerged from the catastrophe of the First World War, when military spending, economic breakdown, and mass casualties shattered the tsarist regime and radicalized workers and soldiers alike.

Mass warfare initially disciplines society under the authority of the state, but it also generates a dangerous contradiction for ruling classes: it arms and trains the very population that may later challenge its authority. During the Second World War the American bourgeoisie managed to maintain relatively strong ideological cohesion by presenting the conflict as a collective struggle against fascism. By contrast, the Vietnam War increasingly appeared as a colonial intervention fought for geopolitical advantage rather than a defense of society as a whole. As casualties mounted and living standards stagnated, class contradictions led to open opposition domestically and in the armed forces themselves. Thousands of incidents of desertion, refusal of orders, and “fragging” of officers revealed deep demoralization and class contradictions within the ranks. The experience convinced the American ruling class to abandon the mass draft army and replace it with the professional volunteer military that exists today.

Today the U.S. bourgeois are so arrogant and so decadent in their ways they make no effort at all to even justify their conflicts to the whole of society, but it is exactly this arrogance and false certainty of the final defeat of the proletariat, that will one day contribute to their downfall when the working masses awaken from their long slumber.

Capitalism Will Die & the Proletarian Will Be It’s Grave Digger

In the present context, the war in Iran must be understood as an expression of the deepening contradictions of global capitalism, rooted in overproduction, intensified competition, and the declining rate of profit. As the preceding analysis has shown, the struggle over oil, control of production, shipping chokepoints like the Strait of Hormuz, and access to Asian markets, has become central to inter-imperialist rivalry. The conflict reflects not simply geopolitical maneuvering but the attempt of competing capitalist powers to resolve economic stagnation through the violent redistribution of markets and resources. At the same time, the war unfolds against a backdrop of mounting sovereign debt among all the states of the world, with military expenditures generating profits for monopolies while forcing capitalist states to reduce funding for counter revolutionary social programs and increase its attacks on the working class, thus intensifying social contradictions which will inevitably lead to the mass resurgence of the global class struggle.

Historically, capitalism has sought to overcome crises through war, but this has always required enormous financial expansion. During World War II, the United States was able to sustain unprecedented levels of spending through massive debt accumulation, war bond campaigns, and state-directed economic mobilization, while the postwar order was stabilized through the creation of the Bretton Woods system, which reorganized global finance around the dollar and U.S. credit. This framework underpinned decades of expansion, allowing the international banking system to absorb and circulate growing levels of debt. Yet this very system now shows signs of exhaustion: the mechanisms that once enabled recovery have become sources of strain, as debt accumulates without corresponding productive growth and the financial architecture of global capitalism is increasingly stretched to its limits.

Today, the conditions that once made large-scale wartime expansion financially and materially viable have fundamentally eroded. During World War II, the United States was able to sustain an enormous war effort through a coordinated system of war bond sales, mass taxation, deficit spending, and direct monetary support from the Federal Reserve, all under conditions of full economic mobilization. War bonds alone financed roughly 40–50% of total costs, while measures like the Revenue Act of 1942 transformed income tax into a mass tax and pushed top marginal rates above 90%. Federal spending surged from about 10% of GDP in 1940 to over 40% by 1945, and total debt rose from roughly 40% to 120% of GDP. Crucially, this was made possible by specific historical conditions: unused industrial capacity from the Great Depression, a high domestic savings rate that could be redirected into state debt, strict rationing and price controls to suppress inflation, and a manufacturing base capable of rapidly converting civilian production into military output. The Bretton Woods system that followed institutionalized this model internationally, embedding U.S. financial dominance and enabling the global expansion of credit in the postwar period.

By contrast, contemporary states enter new conflicts from a far weaker position. The United States today already carries debt at or above 100% of GDP in peacetime, meaning a comparable wartime surge would push debt to unprecedented levels. The economy is highly debt leveraged across households, corporations, and government, leaving far less room for expansion through war bond borrowing. Unlike the WWII period, when total U.S. debt across households, corporations, and government was roughly around 100–120% of GDP, today it exceeds approximately 250–300% of GDP, meaning the entire economy is already highly leveraged and has far less capacity to sustain additional large-scale borrowing without risking financial instability.

As large portions of sovereign debt come due in the next few years, governments are being forced to refinance obligations that were originally issued under ultra-low interest rates at much higher current rates, dramatically increasing their cost of borrowing. According to recent global debt data, roughly 40–50% of sovereign debt in advanced and developing economies will mature by 2027, meaning trillions of dollars must be rolled over in a far more expensive financial environment. At the same time, many major economies are already running persistent deficits, so rising interest payments,now consuming tens or even hundreds of billions annually, are being financed through additional borrowing rather than revenue. This creates a compounding effect: governments are increasingly issuing new debt not to invest or stimulate growth, but simply to pay interest on existing obligations. As debt levels rise and refinancing costs increase, lenders begin to demand higher yields to compensate for perceived risk, further increasing borrowing costs. In turn, higher interest rates worsen fiscal balances, forcing even more borrowing. This feedback loop, often described as a “debt death spiral”,can reach a tipping point where credit markets begin to doubt a state’s ability to repay, making refinancing prohibitively expensive or unavailable altogether. At that stage, even advanced capitalist economies can face conditions historically associated with major systemic breakdowns rather than modern stability—conditions seen in earlier crises such as the post–World War I debt crises, the hyperinflation of Weimar Germany hyperinflation, or the widespread defaults and currency collapses of the Great Depression. In those periods, governments facing unsustainable debt burdens and rising borrowing costs were forced into sharp austerity, experienced rapid currency devaluation, or outright defaulted on their obligations. What was once considered characteristic of “less developed” or earlier capitalist phases,state bankruptcy, collapse of credit, and severe social dislocation re-emerges as a real possibility even for advanced economies when debt dynamics spiral beyond control.

At a deeper level, the turn toward war reflects the inability of capital to resolve its crisis through productive investment. Overcapacity in key sectors, including energy, and weak effective demand constrain profitable expansion, leading capital to seek alternative outlets in speculation, financialization, and ultimately militarism. The war in Iran, by disrupting production and raising prices, temporarily alleviates competitive pressures within the oil market, but it does so at the cost of further destabilizing the global economy. Rather than overcoming the contradictions of overproduction, war can work to intensify them in certain contexts, diverting resources into destruction while expanding the debt burden that weighs on future accumulation.

Finally, the social dimension of this crisis is already visible. The rising unrest among the Iranian proletariat prior to the outbreak of war serves as a canary in the coal mine of future proletarian defeatism. As economic pressures mount and states shift the costs of crisis onto the working class through austerity, inflation, and open repression, conditions are created for renewed waves of class struggle in the future. As Friedrich Engels presciently warned ahead of world war 1, “A world war… will lead to the bankruptcy of states and to such a general exhaustion that the conditions for the ultimate victory of the working class will be created.” The current trajectory of imperialist conflict—driven by overproduction yet financed through unsustainable debt—thus points not toward stabilization, but toward an escalating convergence of economic crisis and class confrontation on a global scale. The current wave of intensifying inter-imperialist war and rivalry will only be met with intensifying economic and social contradictions. Despite all of the bourgeois ever greater destructive powers, despite their ever growing totalitarian state apparatus they cannot escape the reality that ultimately capital sows the seeds of its destruction by forcing them at once to rearm the proletarian masses in open inter-imperialist warfare and simultaneously giving birth to greater class struggle as the world economies descend into chaos.

The imperialist war between states can only be stopped by class struggle until capitalism is overthrown!

The threats from the US and Israel have finally led to open war, which promises to be more extensive and longer lasting than the twelve days of fighting last June. Ten states across the Middle East are already directly involved: from the Red Sea (Yemen) to the Persian Gulf, Jordan, and Lebanon. The bourgeoisies of Germany, the United Kingdom, and France have also issued a joint statement declaring their readiness to take “defensive action” to safeguard their dirty interests in the area, and Paris has already sent a military ship to Cyprus and deployed its aircraft carrier in the Mediterranean.

At the same time, two days before February 28, Pakistan declared war on Afghanistan, both bordering Iran to the east, accusing it of having become a “colony of India” and bombing the capital Kabul. With the forgotten conflict in Sudan, the war involves a territorial strip of over 5,000 kilometers, from East Africa to the Mediterranean to the Indian subcontinent.

The United States, no longer the world’s leading industrial power, is still the world’s leading military power. As long as it enjoys this advantage, it seeks to exploit it, with preventive wars, to gain positions of strength – military, in trade routes, and in control of resources – to the detriment of its European competitors, Russia, and, above all, Chinese imperialism, which is pressing hard, in preparation for World War III.

Above and beyond the division of spheres of influence – that is, the profits obtained from the exploitation of the working class in all countries – the various national bourgeoisies, whether allies or enemies, grind out profits through war. The Russian energy giants Gazprom Neft and Rosneft, as well as the Chinese arms manufacturers Norinco and Avic and the oil company Petrochina, have seen their share prices rise sharply thanks to the new war. More generally, China’s close financial and commercial ties with Russia and Iran, and at the same time with Israel and the United States, confirm that war is a business for all bourgeoisies.

As always, it is the defenseless civilians, first and foremost the proletariat, who pay for the disputes between the capitalist oligarchs. The real political content of imperialist war is to be against the proletariat of all countries and for the benefit of the international bourgeoisie. Even European and American workers who – for now – are not being bombed will see their living conditions worsen as prices and military spending rise.

The issue of Iran’s nuclear program or Israel’s security is only a pretext. What drives states to war and rearmament is the global economic crisis of overproduction: goods are not selling at home and are increasingly difficult to export to saturated markets contested by competitors; the mass of fictitious financial capital is multiplying until the next speculative bubble explodes; the trade war is intensifying with tariffs used to revive languishing domestic production.

The arms race is inevitable in capitalism: only the war economy, the devastating destruction that will follow, and the subsequent reconstruction can give new life to dying capitalism.

The overthrow of the Ayatollah regime, which has lasted 47 years, to the rescue of the Iranian people is also a pretext. The brutal repression of the uprising, with tens of thousands of Iranians killed, tortured, or arrested, took place almost two months ago. The US and Israel are intervening only now, after the dirty work has been done. The proclamations of support for the rebels by the US and Israel during the demonstrations in early January were only useful to the Iranian regime, which could better point to them as colluding with foreign forces and massacre them. Today’s bombings unite the opposition forces around nationalism and therefore around the regime, isolating the workers who instinctively feel that they have no homeland to defend but only their own class interests and who, in fighting for them, put into practice anti-bourgeois, anti-national, internationalist, revolutionary proletarian defeatism. The bourgeoisies that proclaim themselves irreconcilable enemies are united by their interest in seeing the Iranian proletariat crushed, bled dry, and remain oppressed.

Iranian workers should not be deceived by the bourgeois regime’s changes of appearance, as unfortunately happened in 1979 with the fall of the Shah and the rise to power of the Ayatollahs, mainly due to the responsibility of the false workers’ parties, first and foremost the Tudeh, the party of Stalinist opportunism in Iran. The words of the Tehran tram workers’ union – the Sherkat-e Vahed – in its greeting to the 53rd congress of the French CGT in 2023 are worth remembering: "When the profits of the capitalists are at stake... there is no substantial difference between the capitalist states of the world... We expect nothing from the capitalist states and powers that pursue only their own interests. We rely solely on the strength of the working class in Iran and the support of workers’ movements around the world. Long live international workers’ solidarity!" (Tehran, March 27, 2023).

Theocracy, democracy and fascism are just guises to mask the dictatorship of Capital over the wage-earning class. The conditions of workers cannot improve in an increasingly agonizing capitalism headed for war. The combative and courageous Iranian proletariat will have to confront its own bourgeoisie and its political representatives, in suits or dressing gowns, by extending and unifying strikes in defense of wages, blocking production, and setting an example for workers throughout the Middle East. Although long and difficult, this is the only path for the working class to avoid sliding into the abyss into which the anti-historical society of capital is about to plunge the whole of humanity.

“Realistic” and “concrete” nationalist and reformist perspectives only serve to hinder the class struggle and lead to disillusionment, defeat, and new repression. For over a hundred years, nationalist propaganda, both right-wing and left-wing, serving the interests of this or that bourgeoisie, Western or Eastern, has led to the same scenario of war and misery, without resolving any of the imperialist disputes and contradictions, either in the Middle East or elsewhere.

Humanity must not be liberated from the Mullahs, from Putin, from Trump, from terrorism, but from Capital!

The only force that can defeat the dying imperialisms is the international working class, organized in class-based unions and led by its revolutionary communist party.

Against war between States for war between classes!

The enemy of the proletariat is its own bourgeois regime!

Workers have no country!

For more than a month, Iran has been the scene of a new wave of protests that have been developing for several years in alternating phases, adding to those of the two-year period between 2019 and 2020, the civil rights-focused uprisings of 2022, and the most recent clashes between 2024 and 2025.

The Iranian economy has been in crisis for well over a decade, with average GDP growth over the last 10 years of only 1%, worsened this year in June by the 12-day war against the U.S. and Israel and, at the end of September, by the reintroduction of sanctions by the UN and the EU in response to Iran’s alleged non-compliance with nuclear agreements, with measures to freeze bank assets and restrict oil sales.

To date, Iran remains the third largest country in the world in terms of oil reserves with 13.3% of the global amount and the second largest in terms of gas reserves at 16.2%. The country’s economy, although severely affected by previous international sanctions, had managed to sustain itself by circumventing them, with the help of China, which receives 90% of its oil and gas exports through the Strait of Hormuz. The resumption of sanctions, defeats on the external front, with the downsizing of Hezbollah in Lebanon, the fall of Assad in Syria, and the truce agreement in Gaza signed by the regional imperialist powers – Qatar and Turkey – which together with Iran support Hamas, have dealt a severe blow to the bourgeois regime in Ayatollah robes, discouraging foreign investment and forcing the devaluation of the rial, which had already closed 2024 at an all-time low of 821 thousand to the dollar, rising to 915 thousand in June and 1.4 million in the last month, with a devastating 20% collapse in December alone.

The exceptional weakening of the currency has led to increased inflation. The collapse of Ayandeh Bank, which the Iranian state acquired to prevent its bankruptcy, has exacerbated this process. Since Iran depends on imports for a significant portion of its food, raw materials, and other goods, the collapse of the currency has had a decisive impact on purchases from abroad, with increases in wholesale and retail prices. According to the country’s Statistics Center, inflation rose by 42% in December compared to the previous year, while food inflation reached 70% and that of medicine and health product inflation reached 50%. The average wage – increasingly eroded by inflation – stands at around $200 per month, while trade union organisations, in a context where unions independent of the capitalist regime are illegal, estimate that a minimum of $550 is needed to support a family. The unemployment rate reached 7.2% in December.

The now-uncontrollable discontent has exploded with shop closures in the bazaars and student demonstrations in universities in 31 regions and over 200 cities, some of which, such as Abadan, Ahvaz, and Malekshahi County, seem to have fallen into the hands of the demonstrators, with police forces forced to flee. However, there has been a rise in workers’ strikes for months, intensifying in December, mainly in the oil and mining sectors. In early December, thousands of employees at the South Pars gas complex in Asaluyeh, on the Persian Gulf coast, protested at several refineries with strikes and demonstrations. During the same period, workers at the North Drilling Company have halted operations on several onshore and offshore platforms. These actions have followed previous strikes in the mines, including the Zarshuran Gold Mine in the south-southest of Tabriz, as well as steelworkers in Hamadan (300 km west-southwest of Tehran) and in industries in the province of Fars. Pensioners and public sector workers have protested alongside industrial workers, demanding the payment of pensions and access to healthcare.

In this climate, the United States has threatened to intervene ’in favour of the demonstrators,’ but it is not easy to understand whether they will opt for regime change as happened, with the roles reversed, in 1979 against the pro-Western Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi; or for a change within the framework of the theocratic regime, preserving it, as appears to have happened with regard to the so-called Bolivarian regime in Venezuela, as both are considered the best at playing the role of gendarme against the proletariat.

In the West, a certain "nationalist left" has from the outset downplayed the street clashes as the result of a conspiracy, a covert manoeuvre by the CIA and Mossad. In reality, today as yesterday, even without the incitement of any secret service, countless demonstrators, many of whom have been arrested and killed, are protesting for better living conditions and spontaneously hate a regime that starves them, represses them, and eliminates all forms of civil and trade union rights. Promoting the interests of a bourgeoisie that hides behind Islamic priests and uses its own working class as cannon fodder as ’popular resistance’ or ’anti-imperialist’ reveals the nature and position of parties that are entirely internal to the needs, conflicts, and wars of bourgeois States, Stalinist and ex-Stalinist parties and currents that not only have nothing to do with communism but are not even an expression of the working class, imprisoning and subjugating its immediate and historical interests in the lie of ’national reality.’ Regional powers are linked to this or that imperialist superpower. They are also in competition among themselves, but in any case hostile to their respective working classes, starved, exploited, and massacred.

In Iran too, the working class, without the presence of a revolutionary communist party, will once again be forced to fight at the tail end of the interests of merchants and the petty bourgeoisie, deluding itself in a change of government, as has happened many times before in the country’s history. The workers’ struggle for better living conditions against their own governments is always objectively revolutionary. Today, it must fight to achieve its autonomy of programme and movement as a social class, nationally and internationally, above all divisions and closures within categories and companies.

The uprising in Iran has been brutally crushed by the theocratic regime that the Iranian bourgeoisie has relied on for 47 years to protect its interests against the working class.

Demonstrations involving tens of thousands of young people, women, workers, students, and bazaar traders chanting for Khamenei’s death in dozens of cities and most of the country’s provinces – with fierce clashes in which the repressive forces were overwhelmed, and many of their henchmen killed in some cases – were not enough. However weakened, the regime maintains a social base sufficient to withstand the shocks of increasingly harsh revolts.

This social base is founded on the network of interests of the military and paramilitary forces fattened by oil revenues and other capitalist activities, supported by Chinese and Russian imperialism.

An increasingly-centralized state and military power, intertwined with economic power, is characteristic of capitalism in its senile, putrescent phase, which corresponds to the true nature of capitalist political regimes, fascism, covered by ideological cloaks worn according to opportunity: from the robes of the ayatollahs, to false Bolivarian socialism, to democracy, to false Chinese socialism.

In Iran too, until the working class mobilizes, organized in class unions, with a generalized strike movement that overcomes divisions between companies, categories, and localities and blocks the national capitalist economy to the bitter end, the revolts will continue to break like waves against the regime’s dam, nullifying the enormous sacrifice of the lives of young people, women, and proletarians.

The imperialist powers that support the Ayatollah regime and those that appear to oppose it are united by their interest in keeping the Iranian working class oppressed and preventing it from taking the lead in the struggle.

This is why the US and Israel support the monarchist opposition and make grand proclamations of support for the rioters: they know that in this way they weaken the uprising, because they reinforce the regime’s narrative that it is the result of a foreign conspiracy, not of worsening living conditions and the denial of all civil, trade union, and political freedoms! The more Trump makes proclamations in support of the rioters, the better the executioner can hang and the police can shoot in the streets.

US imperialism certainly has no interest in the overthrow of the regime if led by the working class, which would risk igniting class struggle throughout the Middle East. In fact, no regime in the area has expressed the slightest solidarity with the rioters: they tremble with fear that social revolt will break out against them!

For the US, on the other hand, it is desirable to achieve a “change” that preserves intact the repressive apparatus – of which the Shi’ite clergy is an essential part – charged with keeping the Iranian proletariat terrorized and oppressed, with a revolt movement bled dry and dominated by the most reactionary parties, and which only diverts oil, gas, and revenues away from China.

This is similar to what was done to the regime of false Bolivarian socialism in Venezuela, which surrendered its leader without resistance and made new agreements on oil, while the police and armed paramilitary gangs continue to patrol the streets of Caracas.

The working class, in Iran as in the rest of the world, has no allies in any regime regardless of their bourgeois “democratic” or “authoritarian” leanings because, above these masks, they are all capitalist regimes. Its only ally is the proletariat of all countries, in the international unity of the working class, and the only political outlet is not democracy – which, as the politics of all the European capitalist states and the US demonstrate, is only a perfidious mystification of their nature – but socialism, the communist program of overcoming capitalism.

As in the rest of the world, the Iranian working class needs to reconnect with the party of the international communist revolution, sweeping away the ideological confusion of a century of counter-revolution, with its falsifications of communism; it must start with the Stalinist one, which in Iran, in the name of a false anti-imperialism, led the Tudeh in 1979 to the suicidal tactic of a united front with Khomeini!

Today, the followers of that policy are the same people who throw mud at the Iranian uprising and absolve the executioner! Anti-imperialism without anti-capitalism – which points to only the alliance of states allied with the US as imperialist and not that of the opposing global and regional capitalist powers, led by China – is just misleading propaganda to push workers towards World War III.

The struggle of the working class in Iran is of crucial importance for workers around the world because its victory would deal a severe blow to the imperialist war machine that feeds on the conflict between Israel and Iran in the Middle East. The Israeli regime represses internal opposition with the specter of an external enemy and the Ayatollah regime, while crushing ethnic minorities within its borders, exploits the oppression of the Palestinians only to extend the claws of its imperialist policy to the Mediterranean.

Among the scenarios we had hypothesized regarding the evolution of tensions between the United States and Venezuela, it appears that with the military incursion and the abduction of President Maduro on January 3, the intermediate scenario has materialized: attacks against specific targets such as drug trafficking, but without escalating to open military intervention involving the deployment of troops on the ground, as was done in Iraq. U.S. imperialism needs to move quickly to define its geographical sphere of influence against other imperialist powers—notably China—and to seize Venezuela’s rich mineral reserves.

The full significance of Venezuelan oil for the United States will be felt in the medium and long term rather than the short term, as massive investments are required to restore the infrastructure to operation. In the immediate term, the United States will appropriate a larger share of Venezuelan production. By the end of 2025, 27% of Venezuelan oil was sold to the United States, with the remainder going to China and others. The major oil companies summoned by Trump to invest in Venezuela know that for the remainder of this decade, they would be dedicating resources to restoring production infrastructure without reaping any profits. According to the new trade “agreements” between the United States and Venezuela, oil production could reach 1,200,000 barrels in 2026 and continue to rise between 2027 and 2028.

But, however hungry the global oil sharks may be, they need security, guarantees, and legal certainty that they will not lose their investments. In reality, the peace of mind they need is of a political and military nature. The Trump government understands this, so much so that it maintains a military presence in the Caribbean, but there will be no shortage of those who will wait to see how the confrontation with China unfolds and how it might influence investments in Venezuela.

It should be noted that in the oil sector, a symbiosis has developed between the United States and Venezuela over the past decades; refineries in the southern United States, primarily in Texas, were designed to process the heavy, sulfur-rich crude from Venezuela and Mexico. Since the shale oil currently produced by the United States is very light, Gulf Coast facilities must blend it with heavy crude.

In the new situation, the United States intends to shift from controlling Venezuelan oil through sanctions to “operational and financial dominance” over Venezuelan oil with the support of the ruling Chavismo, placing Venezuela in a status equivalent to a protectorate. And even if Chavismo were to be replaced by a new political actor, it has developed strong ties with the Venezuelan bourgeoisie and controls all institutions: the “transition” could take years. And the U.S. government knows that at the moment there is no party capable of replacing Chavismo without the support of troops on the ground, as it sought to do in Iraq.

Within a matter of days, if not hours, both the U.S. and Venezuelan governments have made rapid progress on a series of measures aimed at facilitating the entry of Western oil companies as part of an investment plan proposed by Washington. This plan includes U.S. government-backed company asset security guarantees, control over oil sales proceeds—which will be deposited in accounts controlled by the U.S. Treasury at international banks—and the mandatory use of U.S. technology, future capital expenditures earmarked for the purchase of platforms, pipelines, and equipment manufactured exclusively in the United States. The first proceeds from sales have already been deposited in Qatar, worth approximately $300 million, and will be transferred from there to the Central Bank of Venezuela, which in turn will distribute them among five private banks that will make the funds available to businesses in priority economic sectors.

It is estimated that by 2026, Venezuela could receive approximately $12 billion in revenue from sales (which would increase not so much due to higher production as to the application of market prices rather than black-market prices, which have been suppressed by U.S. sanctions), as well as from the release of funds withheld by the IMF and other credits. Consequently, significant growth in the Venezuelan economy is projected for 2026.

These concessions from Washington and Caracas were so well-coordinated and swift that it is evident the plan had been devised long in advance by both parties and agreed upon many months before the military action on January 3. The sanctions were an obstacle not only to the Venezuelan government, the Central Bank, and companies such as PDVSA and others, but also to the multinationals themselves: Chevron could exceed 200,000 barrels per day by the end of 2026.

The U.S. government has resumed issuing entry visas to Venezuelans and is coordinating the reopening of the embassy in Caracas. It has also released Venezuela’s funds held by the IMF and reinstated the country in the SWIFT system, from which it had been excluded due to sanctions.

The trust fund soon to be established by the United States has been named the “Tripartite Custodianship Agreement,” under an agreement between the governments of the United States, Venezuela, and Qatar; its Management Committee consists of a delegate from the U.S. Treasury, representatives from 14 oil companies, and the Venezuelan government, which therefore cannot dispose of its assets. Through this trust fund, the United States will put a cryptocurrency called the “digital dollar,” or “digital bolivar,” into circulation, which is supposed to maintain a constant 1:1 parity with the dollar, guaranteed by the Federal Reserve. Meanwhile, Venezuela’s bourgeois government—which still declares itself Chavista—has, in perfect sync with the United States, presented a reform of the Hydrocarbons Law to the National Assembly to loosen state control and attract foreign investment.

The so-called “Chevron model” will be legally permitted, granting foreign companies much broader operational control and greater autonomy in managing oil fields and marketing crude oil, thereby superseding the current provisions governing joint ventures controlled by PDVSA and ensuring legal certainty for these companies.

Part of the oil revenues would be allocated to social protection, healthcare, public services, and the reconstruction of infrastructure, the electrical grid, and the industrial sector. The pricing law will also be revised, subject to agreement with companies (as was already the case in practice), primarily regarding goods and services for popular consumption.

A reduction in the tax burden and royalties from the current 30% is planned, along with a reduction in the state’s stake from 51% of the shareholding in joint ventures. Administrative procedures have also been simplified, and a revision of the civil, commercial, and criminal codes is underway. Reform of the mining law is underway “to attract significant international investment” in the extraction of gold, coal, iron, and bauxite.

But, even if less is said about it, a reform of labor law is in the air, aimed at eliminating the retroactive application of social benefits, removing obstacles to outsourcing and precarious employment, and addressing long-standing demands from business owners. Regarding wages and pensions in the immediate term, while the legal framework is being rethought, the government is announcing special bonuses.

The U.S. government’s intention is to restore historical production levels (between 3 and 3.5 million barrels per day) to bring the price of oil down to around $50. However, firms like Wood Mackenzie and Columbia University warn that 2 million barrels per day won’t be reached until 2030, and it will take a full decade to reach 3.5 million. Trump has stated that “Big Oil,” the major oil companies, should invest at least $100 billion. Experts agree; $10 billion per year will be needed over the next 10 years.

While U.S. imperialism carries out this aggressive operation, we have not observed any decisive reactions from Chinese or Russian imperialism. Russia has stated that its companies will continue to operate normally in Venezuela. The government has declared that it will maintain diplomatic and commercial relations with China and other countries.

The Metamorphosis of Bourgeois Democracy

Meanwhile, the “Chavista” government has ensured the functioning of institutions and peace in the workplace. The protests against the abduction of Maduro and his wife are being promoted by the government. The release of approximately 200 prisoners out of the more than 800 detained since the post-election period of 2024 has begun slowly; union leaders remain in prison. It is important for the United States that Venezuela maintain social peace, that nothing disrupts the operations of the oil companies.

Under the national state of emergency declared by the government, there have been some arrests—isolated and unclear in nature—on charges of “inciting hatred and treason against the homeland” and for “supporting the U.S. attack against Venezuela.” However, the government has exercised restraint in its repression, though without reducing the deployment of police forces on the streets.

Various scenarios are being hypothesized by the bourgeoisie and the parties within the bourgeois democratic spectrum, ranging from the maintenance of Chavism’s “21st-century socialism”—with some figures replaced—to a “democratic transition” via a national emergency government led by opposition politicians.

U.S. imperialism will impose the solution that allows it to achieve its objectives at the lowest possible cost and, above all, without having to deploy troops on the ground. In the context of the global inter-imperialist conflict, Venezuela is merely a pawn, the theater of broader operations.

Obviously, we are talking about the possible trajectories of the situation within the framework of bourgeois democracy and capitalism—whether in its fascist or formally electoral forms—which have nothing to do with revolutionary scenarios. Nor are they progressive or reactionary in terms of the bourgeois organization of nations and states.

For the workers’ movement, whatever course the political transition in Venezuela takes, it will amount to a change in the administrators of the interests of the bourgeoisie and imperialism—new faces of the proletariat’s class enemies. Under capitalism, any type of government is the management committee of the bourgeois class, with the function of defending the broader interests of national capital. Even when some ruler believes himself to be the General, in reality he is nothing more than a sergeant. While the right and the reformist left dream of a “democratic transition,” the workers’ movement must break with this tangle of confusion and return to the path from which it has strayed for a century: the program of revolution.

Lost Patriotism

In Venezuela, too, the lie of defending the nation, the homeland, and sovereignty has been spectacularly debunked. It was, however, a bourgeois myth, monstrously embraced by the unions and the falsely left-wing parties. Chavismo, already a fervent champion of Bolivarian ideology and patriotism, despite the outrage of the kidnapping of Maduro and his wife on January 3, immediately bowed down before Trump’s boorish daily demands. Yet all the leaders of Chavismo had sworn, before the U.S. attack, “in the face of any imperialist aggression, the Venezuelan government will not hand over even a single barrel of oil to the United States”—which was already a falsehood, given that they had never acted against Chevron, the sanctions, or the economic blockade.

Now they cynically claim that there is no problem with expanding oil deals with the United States—which are normal in relations between two countries—as if the legitimate incumbent president were not in prison in New York and as if those killed at Fuerte Tiuna had not been gunned down by the Marines.

The Venezuelan people, raised on the ideology of defending the homeland since elementary school and on Chavismo as a Bolivarian bulwark, would have expected an attitude opposite to the current government’s diplomatic complacency toward the United States. But the current government, still Chavista, has stated that it maintains trade relations and delivers oil to the United States because it “practices Bolivarian diplomacy of peace.” Conversely, the reopening of the U.S. embassy in Caracas is planned.

The patriotic narrative is collapsing, not only that of Chavismo but also that of the opposition, which is itself patriotic and subservient to the interests of the national bourgeoisie. The opposition builds its argument on two fronts: on the one hand, unity with Chavismo, “because above party lines we are all Venezuelans,” and it raises no objections to concessions to the United States regarding oil; on the other hand, it approves the U.S. invasion for the “fight against drug trafficking.”

Thus, even the so-called “democratic opposition” has lowered the banners of defending the homeland, whether it remains in the shadow of Chavism or brazenly kowtows to Trump. The Chavistas mock the opposition because Trump has scorned opposition leader María Corina Machado; the democratic opposition mocks the Chavistas for bowing to Trump’s orders. Meanwhile, Trump meets with and lectures both Delsy Rodríguez and María Corina Machado. Both factions of bourgeois politicians are scrambling to prove to U.S. imperialism that they are the most reliable option to defend its interests in Venezuela. This is the caricatured reality of Venezuelan patriotism.

Workers, bewildered by the propaganda of both bourgeois fronts for decades, suddenly find themselves facing a theater of the absurd, a scenario that refutes all the justifications used to try to divert them from the struggle for their true class interests.

But patriotic propaganda is already echoing south of the Rio Grande. The national bourgeoisies are threatened by U.S. imperialism, and to defend their businesses—which grow only through the brutal exploitation of wage earners—they call on them to make sacrifices. The governments of Latin America are indeed on alert, but willing to negotiate with imperialism for their slice of the pie, within that economic space they call their homeland.

Whatever the outcome of this imperialist division, nothing but exploitation awaits the working class, while the natural resources of the various countries will go to swell the bank accounts of national and foreign capitalists. With greater or lesser penetration of private and foreign capital into the various sectors of the economy, the working class must clearly identify its class enemy. It does not matter to them whether the ownership structure of companies is predominantly state-owned or private, and it is an illusion to think that their situation will improve with the arrival of multinationals and Western capital: these vultures compete with one another based exclusively on the misery of wage workers. Neither gains nor demands will be granted without a determined struggle.

The Stateless Class

The working class and all strata oppressed by capital are the “cannon fodder” that will be sent to the front under national flags. The attitude of communists is against imperialist war: the working class has no homeland to defend. On the contrary, it will engage in revolutionary defeatism; proletarian soldiers, led by their communist party, will turn their weapons against the bourgeoisie and its governments in every country.

Along with bourgeois politicians and the fake left, the trade union federations and central bodies have maintained a complicit silence and have not promoted any workers’ mobilization, which places them on the side of the enemies of the working class. Only a few exceptions have proposed struggle, albeit with nationalist, legalistic, democratic, and bourgeois aims.

Moreover, in Venezuela, none of the imperialist powers (the United States, China, Russia, Iran, etc.) is actually interested in preventing drug trafficking, international law, respect for democracy, or human rights. All are driven by economic interests, by control over the production and commercialization of oil, gas, gold, etc., each seeking to obtain the largest slice of the pie.

And this struggle includes the Venezuelan bourgeoisie, whether it is represented by Chavismo, the “democratic opposition,” or the infamous “left” that speaks of “democratic socialism,” a “workers’ and people’s plan,” and even the “defense of the constitution.”It is an illusion to think that the imperialist powers will sit down at a table to agree on how to divide up the world.

World War III is inevitable. The U.S. attack on Venezuela on January 3 and the threats against Mexico, Colombia, Cuba, and Greenland are only the latest moves by one imperialist power to seize the initiative from its Chinese, Russian, and other rivals, drawing demarcation lines over what it considers its own domains. The division of the world, of markets, of raw materials, of strategically valuable areas, of currencies, and of capital, will occur only as a result of conflict and the testing of strength, with all the destruction and death that this entails.

In Venezuela as well, whatever the situation may be, the working class must take the autonomous path of organizing itself and fighting for its demands, starting with a significant increase in wages and pensions. The convergence of the workers’ movement into an indefinite general strike with no essential services will become the best expression of the unity of action among wage workers. This resurgence of the class struggle will clash with the entire spectrum of bourgeois parties and with the leaders of the regime’s treacherous trade unionism.

The transformation of the economic struggle into a political struggle—into the proletariat’s struggle for the seizure of power—will depend on the degree of influence the revolutionary party manages to achieve.

This February, the war in Ukraine will exceed four years, the longest and most intense clash between regular armies since the end of World War II. It therefore constitutes a fundamental test, both for the states involved, and for the proletariat that is its victim. Despite this, relations between world imperialisms are going through such a stormy period that this war has been relegated to the background by the international media.

The impromptu promises of the U.S. president, newly re-elected a year ago, to bring the fighting to a swift end by proposing a division of the Ukrainian spoils between the United States and Russia, have been met with opposition from many European states, excluded from the banquet despite their involvement in the war, while Russia has shown no interest in accepting a compromise agreement.

Just recently, behind the scenes at the World Economic Forum in Davos, a revived Zelensky met again with Trump and other U.S. trustees who were negotiating with the Kremlin.

Zelensky, despite having just received another $90 billion from the European Union – which is busy finding a way to keep Greenland’s ice – did not hesitate to harshly criticize it for its indecision toward Russia, and announced a first three-way meeting in the United Arab Emirates between the US, Russia, and Ukraine, which was then held on January 23 and 24.

Thus, the Ukrainian bourgeoisie, in dire straits, seems to be moving away from the embrace of the EU, finally forced to surrender itself into the hands of the U.S. We shall see.

During these long years of war, the Ukrainian and Russian proletariat have paid a very high price in human lives, some regions of Ukraine have been reduced to rubble, but the material damage is also considerable in Russia.

This destruction will affect the proletariat of both countries for generations to come. Against the backdrop of this tragic context, a political class of inconsequential actors continues to organize useless summits, “high-level” meetings, called “peace negotiations”, a media spectacle behind which the opposing imperialist fronts continue to fuel the war. At this moment, no government has a real interest in ending the war, despite its obvious futility.

Russia Wins (for now)

Russia, with an army that has been on the offensive across the entire front for more than a year, has no interest in peace unless it obtains most of what it demanded when it invaded in February 2022. Basically: NATO must stay out of Ukraine; the four eastern oblasts must be recognized as part of Russia, as already enshrined in the Constitution; the Ukrainian army must be reduced to no more than 70-80,000 troops, and for the sole purpose of maintaining internal social order.

Russia’s successes, due to its growing superiority in troops, equipment, and firepower, allowed Putin to state on December 27 that “if the authorities in Kyiv do not want to resolve the issue peacefully, we will resolve all the problems that await us with a special military operation and military means”. This does not seem like bluster to us. The Russian army has already conquered 19-20% of Ukraine’s territory, including Crimea, and continues to hammer energy infrastructure, industrial areas, military bases, and especially the port of Odessa with ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and drones on a regular basis. Ukrainian air defenses are proving increasingly ineffective against these attacks. The Ukrainian army is falling apart while the Russian army is growing stronger. It is winning the war and is therefore in a position to dictate the terms of a possible peace agreement, or to impose it de facto once it has achieved its objectives.

The Massacre of Proletarians in Uniform

The most reliable estimates put Russian casualties between 250,000 and 350,000, while those of the Kiev army may have exceeded 800,000. This assessment contradicts Western propaganda, which always speaks of ‘very high Russian losses.’

For many months, the Russian army, which has far superior firepower to the Ukrainians in terms of artillery, drones, and air power, has been able to strike hard at enemy lines.

The situation also favors Russia in terms of recruitment. According to various sources, the Ukrainian army endured approximately 300,000 desertions in 2025, at least 850,000 men of draft age are hiding from recruiters, and approximately 650,000 remain abroad to avoid wearing the uniform. The Russian army, on the other hand, fights by enlisting between 360,000 and 400,000 contract volunteers per year, rather than sending conscripts to the front, and suffers from fewer desertions as a result. It has already planned to enlist 409,000 in 2026.

It seems clear to us that if Russian soldiers were sent to their deaths in “mass assaults”, as the Ukrainian general staff claims, there would not be so many volunteers, despite the good pay.

The Economic Crisis

Western propaganda continues to claim that Russia is in the throes of a serious economic crisis and high inflation, caused mainly by Western sanctions, which should soon lead to political and military collapse.

This too is an illusion. Before the economic crisis causes internal divisions and social unrest that would force an end to the war – something we hope for but which, unfortunately, will not happen in the short term – the Russian army will force Ukraine to surrender unconditionally, the Ukrainian bourgeoisie will lose all its wealth, and its allies will have to come to terms with this.

The Criminal Steadfastness of the Ukrainian Government

However, the Ukrainian government still refuses to cede territory and continues to seek military and financial aid from the West, despite the lack of reserves, rampant desertions, and incomplete replacements of brigades.

But the Kiev government’s stance is not one of national pride, as European warmongering propaganda would have us believe, but of subservience to the party of war at any cost. Zelensky has no other choice, having sold out his own proletariat to his American and European masters. This meant first resisting the invasion, then continuing the war, against all military logic and against any consideration of simple mercy towards his own people.

An article in Le Monde diplomatique argues that “it would be morally unthinkable for Zelensky’s forces, which have sent thousands of soldiers to their deaths to preserve Donbass, to voluntarily surrender the positions they still hold (...) The army would probably refuse to obey.” A capitulation on the other hand, which is what this would be, would certainly be welcomed with enthusiasm by the soldiers at the front, and also with great relief by the civilian population. But the demobilization of the army could trigger a political crisis, the outbreak of unrest, or perhaps even a civil war.

On the other hand, if the Russian government were to give up the occupation of the whole of Donbass, it could not pass off the end of the war as a victory, and this would probably lead to an internal crisis.

Just as the Russian bourgeoisie sacrificed the proletariat, who has nothing to gain from this war, to defend its interests, threatened by the bourgeoisie of the West, the Ukrainian bourgeoisie sacrificed the proletariat for the sake of Ukrainian capitalists, in service to Washington and Berlin. The chickens may come home to roost.

As we clearly wrote in March 2022, a few days after the outbreak of the war: "The working class of Ukraine would have nothing to lose from an immediate surrender of its bourgeoisie in the face of the Russian invasion. Symmetrically, the workers of Russia have nothing to gain from a victory of their state in Ukraine. But the bourgeoisie of Ukraine wanted war, just as much as their Western ‘protectors’ and the Russian bourgeoisie.”

The Internal Situation

Already in 2014, well before the outbreak of the war, we noted how the economic crisis had caused “a massive emigration in Ukraine: the population, which had reached 52,179,210 inhabitants in 1993, steadily declined in the following years, reaching 45,593,300 in 2012. This demonstrates the severity of the crisis and the suffering the population had to endure. For the proletariat and the middle classes, it was like being at war.”

But in the following years, the situation worsened: currently, there are over 8 million Ukrainians abroad, with about 6 million in the EU. 1.8 million were internally displaced by the war in Donbass from 2014 to 2022, and another 5.7 million by the Russian invasion in 2022.

The current population is less than 37 million, compared to 146 million in Russia, a ratio of four to one.

From a financial point of view, Ukraine is also bankrupt. According to International Monetary Fund estimates, it will need at least $160 billion by this spring.

The indefinite continuation of the fighting, bombing, and destruction when the military game is already over, on the one hand demonstrates the strength of the war party, supported by the capitalist oligarchies, the producers, and the arms dealers. On the other, it confirms the weakness of the international proletarian movement, and of the Ukrainian one in particular. In the absence of strong unions and a class-based party, it is incapable of mounting a reaction capable of blocking the imperialist war from below.

The Non-Existent European Union

In this situation of extreme global tensions, the European Union has once again demonstrated that it does not exist as a unified body. The states have acted autonomously and in conflict with each other, showing that the causes of the conflicts of the last century are far from gone.

The EU’s top leaders are crying out about the Russian threat, with the Cossack cavalry ready to drink from the Trevi Fountain, as Christian Democratic propaganda claimed in Italy in 1948, and are launching a huge rearmament plan. But in reality, it is individual states that are rearming, with Germany at the forefront.

Every bourgeoisie in Europe, large and small, is defending its own interests and sphere of influence, strengthening nationalist policies, patriotic spirit, and above all the military budget, in preparation for the future clash that they desire. The Polish president summed up this disastrous policy well with the motto “Money today or blood tomorrow,” which in reality means “Money today and blood tomorrow.”

Even the Ukrainian president in Davos did not spare criticism of the ailing European Union, despite the fact that it had just allocated another $90 billion in aid! This is completely insufficient, but with this additional “loan” EU leaders have confirmed that they are still betting on war “to the last Ukrainian.” In fact, these funds would be “guaranteed” by Russia’s payment of reparations, a prospect that is currently highly unlikely.

On the other hand, the European Union has accepted all the dictates imposed in recent months by the United States, from military spending at 6% of GDP to $600 billion for investment in US industry and $750 billion to purchase expensive American gas, after rejecting cheap Russian gas.

The European states represent the weakest capitalist bloc, and they are paying the consequences.

But the proletariat of Europe must shun the political sirens that extol the unity of the Union, its “values” of democracy and freedom. Enabling the bourgeoisies of the continent to defend themselves from pressure from the East as well as from the West would only mean the birth of a third imperialist bloc opposed to those of the United States and China. The international proletariat would have nothing to gain from this. A clash between capitalist blocs is brewing that has nothing to do with the interests of the proletariat. It is with the propaganda of the defense of the homeland, of freedom, of democracy, of peace, that the transversal and international war party will attempt to drag the proletarians to the front.

NATO Collapses

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) has also become embroiled in the conflict. As we wrote in our 2022 article: "Officially, since 2014, NATO has had a constant presence in the organization and training of the devastated Ukrainian army. It is clear that work was being done to expand the conflict from a local one involving the separatist republics to an open and general conflict. The presence of Western military structures represented an important Atlantic outpost on Ukrainian territory, even if temporarily outside the Alliance. More recently, under the presidency of the docile former actor Zelensky (2020-21), Ukraine even became an operational area for NATO exercises, with provocative operations to put pressure on neighboring Russia.”

During these four years of war, the member states of the organization have taken very different positions, suffice it to think of the policies pursued by Hungary or Turkey or the opposing ones of Great Britain or Poland.

Despite the Secretary General’s proclamations against the “existential” threat posed by Russia and China, the results are few and far between, and the internal differences between the allies on the level of involvement, timing, and final objectives reveal the absence of a common vision and unmask the propaganda efforts to make the Atlantic Alliance appear a monolithic and cohesive force.

NATO’s political role in this war is ambiguous: it is an active party to the conflict, in fact, but continues to present itself as a non-belligerent entity so as not to openly challenge Moscow. The hypocrisy of formal non-intervention and substantial military support is a clear sign that there is no clear and coherent shared political line. The United States, which has been the linchpin of the Atlantic Alliance since its inception, makes no secret of its desire to ‘emancipate’ itself from it. The guidelines of the new National Defense Strategy, released by the Pentagon, state: ’The absolute priority of the armed forces is to defend the United States. The Department will therefore prioritize this objective, including defending American interests throughout the Western Hemisphere.“ It continues: ”While U.S. forces focus on defending the homeland and the Indo-Pacific, our allies and partners will take primary responsibility for their own defense, with essential but more limited support from U.S. forces.”

On the Grand Chessboard of Dying Capitalism

The war in Ukraine, which pits NATO against Russia, is in fact more a war between the United States and Europe, especially Germany. Washington makes no secret of its satisfaction at having broken the commercial, industrial, and financial ties that united some European countries, Germany foremost among them, with Russia. It has cut off gas and oil supplies and forced European states to drastically increase their military budgets, to the benefit of US arms giants. The Pentagon declares that Russia is not the adversary, openly contradicting the narrative of the NATO Secretary General and drastically reducing military and economic aid to Ukraine. At this point, NATO no longer has a reason to exist, although it will probably continue to stand, surviving itself.

NATO military bases are thus increasingly revealing themselves for what they have always been: strongholds of US imperialism’s military occupation of Western Europe, imposed after victory in World War II. Its purpose has also been to keep a combative proletariat subjugated, in collaboration with the Warsaw Pact states, which were responsible for crushing the working class in Eastern Europe.

Meanwhile, the huge presence of Chinese mega-capitalism is quietly imposing itself on the world.

How long will Berlin wait before demanding accountability for the sabotage of the Nord Stream gas pipelines, ordered by the US and carried out by a Ukrainian commando unit? Will they put the pro-Nazi Alternative for Germany in government for this?

The contradictions of imperialism are becoming increasingly evident as the crisis deepens and war approaches.

New Scenarios

These new scenarios are causing concern among the bourgeois international diplomatic corps.

The capitalist regime, in its phase of decadent imperialism, is heading straight for war. A catastrophic third world war can only be prevented by the rise of international proletarian reaction.

To achieve this, vast trade union organizations are needed, under the influence of a strong international communist party. These will work to ensure that the proletariat of every country, even if “attacked”, does not join the war or defend the “sacred borders”. Because the enemy is their own national bourgeoisie, whether it cloaks itself in fascist banners or democratic robes. It will fraternize with the proletarian “invading” soldiers, who are also being sent to slaughter, and will prepare for the only war favorable to the proletariat, that of liberating itself, through communist revolution, from this infamous political regime!

This is the immense but exciting task that lies ahead for our comrades in the coming months and years.

A lightning operation: in 12 days, HTS forces under the command of Al-Sharaa, Syria’s new president, forced the SDF to renounce their autonomy and sign a draconian agreement. Founded in 2011 and dominated numerically and politically by the YPG (People’s Protection Units), the SDF was the main Kurdish militia and armed wing of the autonomous administration of the fertile Rojava region. After fighting began in early January, a ceasefire was reached on the 18th, radically redefining the balance of power in northeastern Syria.

For the Kurds, it is more of a surrender than a compromise, providing for the de facto dissolution of the SDF, their integration as individuals into the Syrian army, and the return to the state of most of the territories they had controlled since 2011, occupied by the Syrian army: Aleppo, Raqqa, and Deir Ezzor, on the border with the Rojava region.

The fall of Rojava marks the end of Kurdish autonomy in an oil-rich region over which various ethnic factions are trying to impose their control. Like any territorial dispute within the anti-historical regime of capital, the war remains a clash between factions for control of energy sources and their sale. Furthermore, the region, being the most fertile in all of Syria, is fundamental for the production of cereals and cotton.

Its economy – contrary to the beliefs of left-wing simpletons and those faithful to the religion of resistance, who idolize popular democracies and socialisms scattered here and there around the world – is characterized by capitalist relations. The industries, managed by the state according to commercial and wage criteria, have developed mainly thanks to oil and gas revenues, which the SDF itself traded with the old Assad regime that fell only a year ago. This is estimated to be several hundred million dollars a year, a deal that, in early 2025, Kurdish capitalists began to entertain with the new government in Damascus.

What a socialist revolution in Rojava! The foolish Western national-communists need only see a few state-owned industries and cooperatives within capitalism to immediately see red!

The struggle for control of these lands is not for the “defense of socialism and revolution”, but only a dispute between capitalists for control of markets and resources in a historical phase in which national liberation struggles no longer have any reason to exist. Even for the Kurds, as demonstrated in previous articles (see issue 434, “Self-liquidation of the PKK sanctions anti-historical national liberation struggles”), conflicts for the recognition or defense of autonomous nation states are past their prime, so much so that they are sucked into broader disputes between the great imperialisms over the division of entire continents and control of markets.

It is no coincidence that both the Palestinian and Kurdish bourgeoisies have submitted to the same capitalist powers that oppress them as nationalities, to the extent that we are witnessing several short circuits: Qatar and Turkey, which finance Hamas in Gaza, are allies of the US, which manipulates Israel. The Kurds, historical enemies of Turkey, relied on protection from the US rather than on the mobilization of their own lower classes, as well as from Israel.

Furthermore, Kurdish nationalists themselves have often expressed their intention to act as oppressors and have put this into practice: the leader of the Democratic Unity Party (PYD) has spoken openly about expelling Arabs from Kurdish-majority regions, and his government has opened fire on demonstrators in the Kurdish city of Amuda and tortured dissidents. Armenians and Assyrians have openly denounced the indoctrination into the cult of Öcalan in the education system of the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES).

In this tangle of interests and alliances, where one man’s friend is another man’s enemy and today’s ally is tomorrow’s sacrifice, there is no longer any prospect of progress for workers in the various areas other than the transition from one oppressor to another. The Kurdish and Palestinian proletarians must regain their class autonomy and organize themselves to fight independently of their bourgeoisie, not for an impossible national liberation but for the communist revolution.

The liberation of nations with their state affirmations has already taken place. Capitalism now promises only reactionary wars. The only real and authentic struggle for the liberation of Palestinian, Kurdish, Jewish, Arab, and workers around the world lies in the overthrow of capitalism, which is the cause of all the upheavals we are witnessing today. This historic task can only be achieved if workers manage to unite and organize themselves under the leadership of genuine class unions for increasingly widespread economic strikes in defense of their living conditions, and only through the leadership of their genuine revolutionary party, for the slow, tortuous but indispensable establishment of the true communism of tomorrow.

Minnesota ICE Raids

On January 23rd, about 50,000 people went to the streets in Minneapolis in response to the continuous terror carried out by the capitalist state’s ICE agents, brought to a head by the brutal killing of Renee Good, whose instinctual defence of her class must be praised and who in action revealed the forces of capital in their naked dictatorship of society. She was among one of the many victims already claimed by the state apparatus with about 30 killed prior to her. Our duty is to explain the forces that set the field for such episodes of violence which are always present, tolerated everyday by the proletariat and rarely reported in the capitalist press, but which come out the seams of society like the smoke from industrial plants that breathe life to our society.

The deployment of ICE across the country has targeted “sanctuary” cities to raise terror and discipline the migrant section of the working class. We have reported that similar actions have taken place in Chicago, Los Angeles, Charlotte, and now Minneapolis. It has become evident to everyone that the justification of deporting criminals holds very little weight given that more than 70% of deportees have no prior convictions. The aforementioned cities also on top of being “sanctuary havens” which limit, but never stop, to varying degrees the complicity of the local governments with federal immigration enforcement also boast significant migrant workers both documented and not. If we look at the table below for 2016 immigration population levels within the cities that have been targets of the raids. We note that they have varied across the board in hosting unauthorized immigration populations as a fraction of the total population in relation to the national average in 2016 of 3.3%. Los Angeles at 6.9% more than double the national average thanks to its proximity to the border along with Chicago at 4.1% right behind is Charlotte and lastly Minneapolis at 2%. However, this does not take into account the recent migration wave during the past 5 years which saw 11 million immigrants arrive into the United States. For the time being, noting the concentration of the populations will suffice and further context will be elucidated once we investigate the economic developments.

Latest Immigration Wave

Looking at overall immigrant trends, including authorized immigrants, shows how the total immigrant population has increased substantially in the past decades and how the composition of the immigrant population has varied across the past two centuries This latest surge has set a historical record pushing the immigrant population, as a percent of the total United States population, from 14.8% in 1890 to 15.8% at the beginning in 2025.

Furthermore we can note that the vast majority of the undocumented migrant section of the working class in the United States is of working age (77%) from 16-64 in contrast to the native working class (60.4%). From which industry, commerce, and financial capital can draw life from in industries where low wage labour is especially taxing to bodies such as in construction and agriculture.

The cause of the recent wave is undoubtedly the coupling of the COVID pandemic crisis with the economic slowdown at the tail end of 2018/19. An exodus that has its roots in the underdevelopment of Latin American economies as a consequence of the colonialism of the past and today global imperialism. These historical developments have relegated Latin American economies as subordinates to the capital of the dominating imperialist powers, mainly Yankee. For reference, in 2025, the top foreign investors were the United States at $11.8 billion, then Spain at $8.4 billion followed by China at $4.7 billion. Meanwhile the Mexican bourgeoisie itself desperately needs workers to establish its own internal markets and domestic production, as the expansion of maquiladoras continues to develop a proletariat population with increasing consumption demands. Meanwhile Mexico itself has started to export capital; growing its own foreign direct investments as it aspires to become its own regional imperialism. The dominant imperialism uses its military and financial instruments to perpetuate Latin America to auxiliary positions within global productive forces by developing their economies for exportation of manufactured goods, resources extraction and agricultural products, while maintaining financial domination, however, as we have seen in China over the last decades such actions have the consequence of eventually giving rise to an increasingly powerful capitalist class in the subordinate country empowered with a growing industrial base which can eventually transform into a rival. Along with the exportation of goods manufactured by and for foreign corporations, comes the exportation of profits that leave many sectors of the economy, especially domestic industrialization at a low level and it finds itself in a difficult position to develop especially in competition from the international market (see Monographs on Latin America, 1950 - 1995). The result is an economy that is still unable to engage the majority of workers into the capital production process, relegating them to informal work where wages remain below official minimum wages and to unemployment and underemployment. In Mexico’s case, the drug economy has become a viable “employer” which notes the severity of the situation. As a consequence, when crises occur as did during the late 1960s, mid 1980s, and early 1990s, these economies created an influx of migrants coming out of Latin America.

Yet, today we see that in Mexico’s case, its economy is transforming increasingly into an emerging rival industrial contender despite its continued subordination to U.S. imperialism. It has significantly expanded its infrastructure through large-scale highway investment and development programs. The federal government’s 2026–2030 Infrastructure Investment Plan, projects a total investment of MX$5.6 trillion. For 2026 alone, the plan anticipates an additional MX$722 billion, on top of the MX$900 billion already budgeted for improvements in energy, railways, highways, ports, health, water, and education. The country’s national road network now spans about 989,000 km, including over 11,000 km of toll highways, while the government announced MXN 53 billion (≈$2.7 billion) in road infrastructure spending for 2025 and plans to build around 3,000 km of new priority roads. At the same time, Mexico has been increasing domestic production capacity: local production in the transportation infrastructure sector, for example, grew from $5.7 billion in 2020 to over $12 billion in 2023, reflecting stronger internal industrial activity. Government policy has also explicitly aimed to strengthen the domestic market and raise investment above 25% of GDP by 2026, supporting a shift toward producing more goods for internal consumption and reinforcing domestic supply chains

Looking from 1965 and onwards the majority of immigrants coming into the United States are from Latin America, around 50%, with 23% originating from Mexico reaching its peak during 2007 before trending downward. Workers facing low wages and deteriorating conditions flee the boundaries of their nation state to another in search of liveable wages–that is, to survive. The native bourgeoisie, especially the Mexican, have historically been laissez-faire on enforcing control along the United States-Mexican Border as it helps them relieve the mass of unemployed workers avoiding a greater social crisis of their own, hoping to also take advantage of a trained workforce once they came back all while receiving significant contribution to their GDP from remittances sent back home from migrant workers. Recent developments show that Mexico has ramped up control of its own southern border along Guatemala to prevent the influx of South American proletarians at the behest of the Americans, which benefits the Mexican bourgeoisie. Control of the northern border is also expected to increase.

In the United States, the latest trends from 2000 until 2023 show almost a doubling of unauthorized immigrants, the majority of whom are employed ‘illegally’. An explosive rate that has not been experienced since the 1990 to 2000 period. It wasn’t until 2007 that we saw a decrease in the unauthorized population as a result of the economic crisis, with estimated populations decreasing from 12.2 million to 11 million in 2017, continuing until 2019 where it stood at 10.2 million. Picking back up around the start of the COVID epidemic in 2021 to 10.5 million. Despite these fluctuations, in the last 30 years, the unauthorized population has exploded by 400% from 3.5 million to 14 million. The need to manage the incoming immigration population on a permanent basis has been slowly developing in the United States, the organs to deport and discipline the increasing mass of immigrant workers (i.e. manage) has become imperative, the occasional deportation campaigns or integration of workers by amnesty have been historically exhausted in the current status of global capitalism that awaits the next crisis.

To elucidate this historic outlook we can quote the Federation for American Immigration Reform’s (FAIR) representative, Roger Conner, who in 1982 spoke to the bourgeoisie perspective on immigration from Latin America in relation to the United States in rather Malthusian terms at a time when it had not yet reached these current historic levels and when the economic situation was not as bleak:

“To charge [racism against us], I respond that the issue in the modern immigration debate isn’t the race or ethnicity of the people, it is the numbers of people who are coming…. I don’t believe we can [absorb the present flow] and meet the needs of minority and disadvantaged Americans for a better standard of living, and I don’t think we can protect the natural resource base of this country for the future generations at that level of people in the United States”.

Ignoring the hypocrisy about protecting the future for the next generations, the bourgeoisie can only look at cutting the mass of workers from the productive process as it cannot engage them in capital expansion and so it relegates them to starvation.

Thus, only as a historical development in this chapter of the capitalist epoch can we understand ICE as functions of the state, that is the capitalist state, in its efforts to address a mass of workers which it cannot do without for use as cheap labour in multiple sectors such as construction, agriculture and service activities, in fact Trump has made assurances to those industries that they will not be hurt, but also the need to mitigate a section of the working class that is politically expendable and “do away with” when no longer at service of capital but a possible explosive element when unemployed without access to the traditional welfare programs which have pacified native workers-now currently being attacked by the current administration. This reserve army of labor thus can present a potential risk to capital if it grows too large. We can look at the unionization campaigns of Mexican and Filipino workers in California during the 60s and the mass mobilization of 2006 against H.R. 4437, a bill that sought to criminalize undocumented immigrants to get a picture of the latent combativity of this section of the working class due to its precarious existence.

Immigrant Labor and Economic Industries

Looking at the distribution of the unauthorized immigrant workers by the industries which hire a significant amount of immigrants in proportion to their total workforce, using a similar dataset from the Center of Migration Studies and US industry data, we can look at the change in economic output by industry and their recent changes to grasp the direction of these sectors.

The data shows modest growth in all sectors, except for a diminishing one in construction and Admin/Waste Services, ranging from 1.8% to 17.27% during the COVID epidemic from 2019 to 2024. On a 20 year basis, the growth of all sectors, except construction with a -6.69%, are still positive ranging from low end in agriculture at 22.2% and at 59.1% for the upper range by the Admin, support, & waste management services. The construction sector has seen a contraction still not reaching peak spending levels prior to the recession of ‘07/08. We are not yet seeing a general contraction in all industries that disproportionately hire immigrants except in construction with an estimated unauthorized population of 2.8 million workers. It is this sector that is first showing the retreat of the covid economic upsurge, and specifically the retreat of capital in certain sectors.

Economic Developments

Through capital’s own impetus to increase productivity, AI advancements also increase the risk of jobs associated with immigrant populations being automated, including those in the service sector, which is at the highest risk of shrinking the necessary work force. According to a study by National Equity Atlas the accommodation and service industry has job tasks with a high probability of being computerized at 73% (~8.5 million jobs at risk), retail trade at 66% (~11.5 million jobs at risk), admin and waste management at 66% (~4.3 million jobs at risk), and construction at 59% (~6 million).

In the agriculture, while the sector has not experienced a contraction, the smaller farmers are increasingly worried of being proletarianized with more bankruptcies occurring every year, (by end of 2025, there were 15,000 fewer farms) due to the high international competition, and lack of entry to foreign markets like India, which have excluded tariff free duties on products grown in their country, in addition to domestic competition of the more high yielding large industrial farms. This layer of the bourgeoisie stands to benefit from the reduced H2-A wages for agriculture just recently announced and a climate of anti immigration where working conditions can further be deteriorated.

Amidst a looming crisis, capital and its state must contend with the expected increase in unemployment. It does this by readying to use the instruments of oppression on the politically vulnerable sections of the working class which finds itself cut off from the native workers by the poisonous miasma of chauvinism and its own historical defeats. The modernized deportation tools like the usage of technologies developed to oversee and monitor populations such as those employed in Gaza by the state of Israel, and the expanding network of the prison detention center complex have yet to be used to their full capacities and are continuously increasing.

Currently, the interior deportations by ICE, are estimated at 333,000 in Fiscal Year (FY) 2025, which does not include exterior deportations at ports of entry by Custom and Border Protection Agency which we can estimate at 270,000 for a total of 600,000 still short of the administration’s 1 million deportations a year. The nature of the data makes it hard to estimate the actual deportations and removals as DHS has not discerned the total removal by ICE deportations; However, it is becoming evident that interior removal and deportations are higher than the external deportations at points of entry especially along the Mexico-US border. For comparison, last fiscal year during Biden’s term in FY 2024, it was estimated that 685,000 deportations took place with ICE conducting 271,000 removals, a doubling from 143,000 in FY 2023. The discernment between the two levers of the bourgeois state is from border removals to interior removals, where the current direction is aiming at removing migrant workers further away from the border at a much more rapid pace.

This development is further validated by the expansion of the deportation infrastructure in which ICE has been given a $45 billion carte blanche check to buy and retrofit warehouses, moving away from subcontracting space in existing facilities to an “Amazon” warehouse model. This “ICE Detention Reengineering Initiative” aims at centralizing and having the capacity to hold anywhere from 70,000 to 100,000 migrant workers at a given time. The supposed blockade of immigration enforcement by Democratic officials is crumbling as quickly as it was built. Even in New Mexico, local obstruction has been little more than a temporary speed bump. By leveraging federal contracting, ICE has not only outmaneuvered its critics but has ensured that the "resistance" remains largely toothless and increasingly irrelevant

We can conclude that the immigrant populations are tied to these industries to a significant degree that we can see this management of the labour force taking after the ebbs and flows of their economic activities requiring the ever increasing management of the workforce which has been built up in recent decades and exploded in the last 5 years. If workers cannot find wages to survive at home, they surely cannot find them in the very same United States for long especially when industries start to falter. More dangerous is the idea that sanctuary cities, that is local governments who aim to protect immigrant workers through legislation and limiting cooperation, can offer an effective means of resistance to the unleashed terror by ICE or provide a life worth living for that matter. Especially, if one takes the time to look into the reality of the laws and policies within these “sanctuaries”.

History of Sanctuary Cities

The Sanctuary movement kicked off in the 80s when Guatemalan and Salvadorean refugees started to pour into American Cities due to civil war ravaging those countries, as a result of the imperialist rivalry being waged between the USSR and the U.S. who supported contending bourgeois factions across Latin America. Local religious communities in Arizona and California, declared their churches as sanctuaries for refugees amidst reports of deported refugees by the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), whose deportation operations are now replaced by ICE, dying once returning to their respective countries of origin. The amnesty given to refugees fleeing from political conflicts were not given to the Guatemalan and Salvadorans as the bourgeoisie declared them “economic migrants”. Rather it would be more accurate to say it handed enemies of their puppet states back into their grasp. In 1983-85, activists documented the inhuman treatment of detainees at the INS Port Isabel Detention Center in Texas. At the peak of the moment in 1986-87, 20 cities and 2 states passed resolutions, mostly public statements, to declare themselves as sanctuaries for Central American migrants. San Francisco, being the only city to issue an ordinance limiting municipal employees’ cooperation with the INS in 1989. The historical result of this activist movement resulted in shelter for these fleeing workers in some cities and which would only culminate into a lawsuit against the supreme court for imposing amnesty restrictions and giving special provision in immigration hearings for migrants from these countries.

Today’s Sanctuary cities and counties or jurisdictions have evolved to mean legal jurisdictions that afford some level of protection to undocumented immigrants in relation to federal immigration enforcement. It does this generally by limiting the amount of cooperation local law enforcement has with federal agencies, noting that it does not actively prevent them from carrying out their missions where they are deployed. States like California can prevent any municipality from having 287(g) agreements which deputize local law enforcement for immigration enforcement. Some cities issue public resolutions which are nothing more than statements and others share information with federal enforcement in a limited way such as providing fingerprints.

The mayor of Chicago’s latest executive order in October 2025 “prohibits” ICE from using city owned property such as parking lots, garages, and vacant lots for staging - by posting signs. City employees who observed ICE using the facilities are "encouraged-but not required” to report to their supervisor to let the city administration know of the violations. Private owners may request the same signage to post on their private property. Here’s the response from the ‘Welcoming City’ which can only document the terror unleashed on the immigrant worker!

Noting the reality and limitations that at best carve some minor relief in contrast to more conservative jurisdictions, we can dive into the working conditions of the immigrant workers within these "sanctuaries". In Minnesota, the immigrant worker can survive but to call it life worth living is something only a sycophant can proclaim.

The Minnesota Case

The January 23rd mobilization was brought forth in a very half hearted matter by multiple groups drawing from the multitude of classes. In Minneapolis’s case, a big factor has been businesses mobilizing by closing their shops in protests of the ICE raids. It will be rather shortsighted to see this as fruitful development in the protection of immigrant workers given that these businesses, despite their support, rely on the low wage population of immigrants to draw profits. It goes to say, that immigrants are employed and depend on these businesses to secure a wage and living but on the other hand they are subject to increasing exploitation by the employing class on a social average basis. One only needs to look at the wage theft rate amongst immigrant workers employed in the metropolitan area of the Twin cities to see the reality of this relationship.

In the construction sector, one in four workers experience wage theft from employers which disproportionately hire unauthorized immigrant workers on top of employers regularly skirting safety regulations. The same sector was responsible for one in five of the annual deaths occurring in the private sector during 2023 according to the official US labor statistics. Despite the labor legislation that stipulates protection from wage thefts, especially in so-called “sanctuary” cities, it is in most cases not enforced to its full degree and little is recovered from these measures. In Minneapolis’s case only $2 million was recovered in 2025 from the estimated $90 million stolen each year from 2013 to 2022 in unpaid wages or minimum wage violations (i.e. paying below the municipal standards of $16.37/hr). The recent city budget, under democrat Mayor Jacob Frey who made a great spectacle of “standing up” to ICE, proposed a cut to the program responsible for enforcing wage regulations from $658,824 to $309,646 out of the city’s $7.8 million budget allocated to civil rights. Contrast this to the municipal budget for the police department which stands at $230 million this year!

Looking at the trend within the Minneapolis Metropolitan area economy, the wage theft rate is highest in sectors that disproportionately hire immigrants and minority workers–of particular note is that Minneapolis has rates that surpass the state averages. Industries with the highest violation rates include food services and drinking places (11.3%), social assistance (8.3%), and personal and laundry services (7.2%).