Only he is a Marxist who extends the recognition of the class struggle to the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat. This is touchstone on which the real understanding and recognition of Marxism is to be tested. V.I.Lenin
Economic and Philosophic Science Review
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No 1670 March 18th 2026                                                                                                                                            40p 

Brutal and genocidally fascist  US-Zionist blitz of Iran and Lebanon is the next notch in the imperialist system’s crisis plunge into WW3. But however “successful” cynically bragged destruction is painted by demented Trumpites and fanatical Jewish occupiers it will solve nothing as their system unstoppably plunges into Catastrophic economic breakdown with dollar collapse unfolding and AI led share hysteria teetering on the abyss. Just the opposite, the frenzied warmongering is magnifying slump disaster while splitting the imperialists wide open at home and internationally. The need for communist revolutionary rationality never clearer but still blocked by fake-“left” pacifism and anti-communism. Leninism crucial

The Empire’s crisis-driven inhuman massacre and destruction of Iran and Lebanon’s people and infrastructure continues in conjunction with its gross Zionist attack dog but even with overwhelming firepower this bully-boy bragged fascist onslaught is already a disaster.
The whole world is reeling from the economic and political consequences of this demented fanaticism (Zionist and US “Christian fundamentalist”) driven by and magnifying ten times the already Catastrophic implosion of imperialist world finance, as monopoly capitalism hits the giant concrete wall of its own inescapable contradictions (see page 6).
The onslaught, the next chapter in the bourgeoisie’s desperate warmongering “escape plan” from its crisis, imposing World War Three on humanity as a “solution” to its total collapse, is a further sounding of the death knell for this filthy, wasteful and degenerately brutal class system of vicious exploitation, genocide  and ecocidal planet-threatening plunder.  
Sheer overwhelming military power and fascist atrocity might prevail for the moment but only now by pulverising the entire region in a display of such horrifying depravity and murderous destructive reaction that it will drive the hatred of the great billions-strong majority of the world to incandescence.
Worldwide, hatred for the whole genocidally vicious imperialist/Zionist order, already in a non-stop ferment for nearly three decades at its barbaric inequalities, arrogance and corruption, and especially its disgusting sadistic and fascist hate-filled genocide of the Palestinian people, is at boiling point.
The new war and imperialism’s degenerate, psychotically contemptuous bragging about its own might-is-right “strength” can only push the masses further down the road to the revolutionary turmoil that must eventually bring this whole foetid mess of the bourgeois system to an end, to build a communist future.
For the moment they remain without the conscious Marxist understanding and revolutionary party leadership that is vital if their struggles are to be transformed into a great class war to completely overturn this destructive and deranged ruling class, the only path out of the increasing devastation which has already seen half a dozen countries ripped to shreds.
That conscious perspective still remains blocked by a century of brainwashing anti-communism from the bourgeoisie and the totally brain dead retreat from any Leninist challenge to it, through revisionist stupidity, retreat and complacency, and even worse Trotskyist petty bourgeois hostility to workers state discipline.
All ignore the glaring reality of a system which has turned to outright fascist barbarity and brutal open dictatorship as its only means of survival and the lesson that delivers of the now incontrovertible need for a revolutionary end to it, not hopeless “no to war” protest.
Staggeringly, despite barmy religious ideology and its own puritanical and repressive backwardness, the defiance of the Ayatollocracy in Tehran has a better spirit, looking more and more indigestible as the days pass.
And for all the desperate efforts (over years) by the Western intelligence agency psyops departments to feed the willingly compliant media with ever more lurid ultra-lie propaganda talltales about “mass slaughter” of a supposed “popular opposition” and fantasy mass movement for “regime change” – including, most absurdly, the idiotic notion of a widespread demand to reinstall the vicious Pahlavi Shah monarchy whose Savak terror police was the most hated in all the world until overthrown in 1979 – its support has actually grown as the bombs have fallen.
Far from stirring a ludicrously postulated “mass uprising” against the “regime” (as Goebbels psyops insists on calling it) the Western onslaught has hugely re-invigorated anti-imperialist sentiment in the majority of its 90 million strong population.
Contrary to the lying Western media assertions fed by the CIA and Israeli intelligence, the great majority are fully for the fightback against imperialist blitzkrieg and long-running siding with the resistance struggle of the genocidally persecuted Palestinian people, channelled through backing the bourgeois nationalist government temporarily, (for as long as it fights).
While total support as such for the reactionary mullahs would be misplaced and no long term or even medium term solution for the masses in Iran, who need a revolutionary Marxist perspective for a communist future just like everyone else on earth (see below), popular anti-Western feeling is nevertheless helping strike powerful and useful blows against the depravity and barbarity of the bankrupt imperialist order and its ever-more planet-threatening tyranny and exploitation of mass humanity and nature too.
As Leninism has always indicated, defeats of any kind for the imperialist ruling class from any direction should be welcomed.
These can split the ruling class and open up the path to the deeper understanding and the deliberately-built and fought for revolutionary Leninist consciousness which alone can guide the struggle to bring this now completely sick, rotten and repressive capitalist epoch to an end and set mankind on the road to rationality, building socialism under workers state control.
So much damage has the Iranian resistance, and some allied forces in Iraq and Lebanon, been able to inflict, despite the enormous disparity between their resources and the combined US-Zionist military power, that the Trumpites even floated a winding-up of their attacks, declaring “victory” after just 10 days without displacing the Iranian government leadership, a seeming excuse to cover a partial retreat as the hoped for “collapse” did not happen and the potential for (or actual?) US casualties and damage mounts up, huge expenses increase (a reported $1billion a day minimum and possibly over $15bn in just over the first week), domestic dissension gets feverish in America splitting the “MAGA” movement (including now some very senior figures like Joe Kent), and international economic paralysis spreads dissension with “allies”.
The bourgeois press has been totting up the costs in billions of dollars, massively disrupted trade and economic chaos as well as the loss of international political trust in the US from both the other imperialist powers – standing back – and from the degenerate little stooge gangster sheikhdoms and thug monarchies whose feudal backwardness and grotesque wealth the US claims to “protect” all around the Persian/Arabian Gulf.
All are sitting on potential gunpowder kegs of rebellion and discontent. 
Egypt alone has 105 million people, many in desperate poverty, in strong sympathy with the Palestinian people and the general Arab nationalist cause, and with their astonishing millions-strong spontaneously revolutionary street upheavals of the 2011 Arab Spring, and its military coup suppression, still smouldering beneath the surface:

The extent of miscalculation was laid bare in recent days, as Iran threatened to fire at commercial oil tankers transiting the Strait of Hormuz, the strategic choke point through which all ships must pass on their way out of the Persian Gulf. In response to the Iranian threats, (and now blockage - ed) commercial shipping has come to a standstill in the Gulf, oil prices have spiked, and the Trump administration has scrambled to find ways to tamp down an economic crisis that has triggered higher gasoline prices for Americans.
The episode is emblematic of how much Mr. Trump and his advisers misjudged how Iran would respond to a conflict that the government in Tehran sees as an existential threat. Iran has responded far more aggressively than it did during last June’s 12-day war, firing barrages of missiles and drones at U.S. military bases, cities in Arab nations across the Middle East, and on Israeli population centers.
U.S. officials have had to adjust plans on the fly, from hastily ordering the evacuation of embassies to developing policy proposals to reduce gas prices.
[..]Efforts to resume shipments have been complicated by intelligence that Iran was preparing to lay mines in the strait, one U.S. official said. The Iranian operation was only in its earliest stages, but the preparatory efforts spooked the Trump administration. The U.S. military said on Tuesday evening that its forces had attacked 16 Iranian mine-laying vessels near the strait.
The confidence that White House officials had that the shipping lanes could stay open is surprising given that Mr. Trump authorized a military campaign last year against the Houthis, a Yemeni group backed by Iran, that had used missile and drone attacks to bring maritime commerce in the Red Sea to a halt.
As the conflict has roiled global markets, Republicans in Washington have grown concerned about rising oil prices damaging their efforts to sell an economic agenda to voters ahead of the midterm elections.
The search for pathways out of the war has gained urgency since the weekend, as global oil prices surge and as the United States burns through costly munitions. Pentagon officials said in recent closed-door briefings on Capitol Hill that the military used up $5.6 billion of munitions in the first two days of the war alone, according to three congressional officials. That is a far larger amount and munitions burn rate than had been publicly disclosed. The Washington Post reported on the figure on Monday.
*************
The intensity of the retaliatory strikes has signaled that Iran was more prepared for the war than many in the Trump administration had anticipated, U.S. military officials say.
Iran has fired thousands of missiles and drones at both U.S. and allied country military sites across the region. The United States and its allies have intercepted most of them, U.S. officials say, but at least 11 American military bases or installations have been damaged — nearly half of all such sites in the region.
It is difficult to estimate the full cost of damage inflicted by Iran’s retaliatory strikes. A Pentagon assessment provided to Congress last week put the cost of the single strike on the U.S. Navy Fifth Fleet headquarters in Bahrain on Feb. 28 at about $200 million, according to a congressional official.
An additional U.S. service member was killed in a separate Iranian strike on March 1 at a U.S. base in Saudi Arabia, bringing the toll to seven, the Pentagon said on Sunday.
The pace of Iranian attacks has slowed since the war’s opening days, but the strikes have continued. Al Udeid Air Base, Ali Al Salem Air Base, Al Dhafra Air Base, Camp Buehring and the Navy’s Fifth Fleet headquarters have all been struck more than once.
Missiles launched from Iran have flown as far away as Turkey. On March 4, NATO intercepted an Iranian ballistic missile headed toward Incirlik Air Base in Turkey, according to a senior U.S. military official. The base hosts a large U.S. Air Force contingent. Iran’s military denied firing the missile.  A second Iranian missile was shot down by NATO.
Among the costliest American losses to infrastructure have been to the air defense systems that protect U.S. and allied interests across the Middle East.
Iran has systematically targeted radar and communications systems, including components of the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense system, known as THAAD, which uses a radar to track and intercept incoming aerial threats throughout the region.
At Muwaffaq Salti Air Base, an important hub for the U.S. Air Force in Jordan, satellite imagery from February shows radar equipment at the base’s southern edge. An image taken two days after the war began shows severe damage to what appears to be an air defense sensor.
Military budget and contract documents indicate a single radar unit of this type can cost up to half a billion dollars.
Gulf nations have also bought air defense equipment from American companies and deployed them near critical infrastructure, including oil refineries. Those foreign radar systems share information with the U.S. military, forming what defense analysts describe as a de facto, expanded U.S. military sensor network.
Iran has targeted such sites where air defense equipment was recently observed, like the Al Ruwais facility in the United Arab Emirates. Satellite imagery of the site from last year shows a THAAD unit near storage structures.
A satellite image taken after Iranian attacks shows significant damage to the storage structures. The Times was unable to verify whether the mobile THAAD unit was inside the storage structures at the time of the strikes.
Near Umm Dahal in Qatar, a long range AN/FPS-132 radar — built at a cost of $1.1 billion to provide early warning coverage across a 3,000 mile radius — apparently sustained damage to its main radar structure, as seen in satellite imagery.
Iran has also struck nonmilitary U.S. targets such as the consulate in Dubai, and embassies in Kuwait City, Kuwait, and Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, forcing temporary closures. There have been no reported injuries in any of these attacks.
On Saturday night, the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad was targeted in a rocket attack. No casualties were reported.
*************
There are so far six US military personnel who have been publicly declared killed, all of them in Kuwait (significantly more since - ed). The country seems to have sustained the most damage to its numerous US-operated military sites. Judging by the president’s own words, he may be priming the public for larger casualty numbers to come.
“Sadly, there will likely be more before it ends,” Trump said earlier this week. “That’s the way it is.”
The chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, Dan Cain, echoed that sentiment.
“We expect to take additional losses, and as always, we will work to minimise US losses,” he told reporters at a Pentagon press conference.
Iran has ability to prolong war on US and Israel, says top Iranian military expert
Andrew Leber, assistant professor at Tulane University’s department of political science and Middle East and North Africa studies programme, told MEE the US has “complete informational control over what happens” on its bases in the Gulf, indicating there may be further unannounced losses.
To that end, a now-deleted LinkedIn job posting by government contractor Joint Technology Solution Inc this week called for part-time “Personal Effects Specialists” to inventory and process the personal items of US personnel killed overseas. 
On 4 March, US Central Command denied Iran’s claim of having killed 100 American troops. 
It’s unclear whether the number of wounded includes the two US personnel that The Washington Post revealed were inside a Crowne Plaza hotel in the Bahraini capital, Manama, on 1 March, when it was hit by an Iranian strike. The paper cited an internal State Department cable. 
Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, told Al Jazeera earlier this week that the Americans “evacuated their bases and moved into hotels, turning civilians into human shields”.
The nature of the hotel attack, in particular, also suggests there was a level of human intelligence-gathering involved, not just satellite surveillance.
“Iran does have a pretty large network of intelligence assets in the Gulf, so that’s also plausible as well,” Grajewski noted. 
*************
South Korea has voiced opposition to the redeployment of US air defense assets from its territory to the Middle East but is not in a position to block the move, Seoul has said.
With the US-Israeli war with Iran and Tehran’s retaliatory strikes on American assets in the region entering their 12th day, some media reports alleged that air defense systems used by Gulf nations were running “dangerously low” on interceptors.
Speaking at a cabinet meeting on Tuesday, South Korean President Lee Jae-myung addressed reports that some American weaponry stationed at Osan Air Base, a major US Air Force installation in the country, may have been transferred to American bases in Saudi Arabia and the UAE. According to media reports, US military transport aircraft have been arriving at and departing from the base over the past week.
South Korea hosts a major US military presence as part of a decades-long security pact aimed at deterring nuclear-armed North Korea. Around 28,000 US troops are stationed in the country alongside advanced air defense systems, including Patriot interceptors.
Another US ally, Japan, which hosts major American military bases, has reportedly redeployed two guided-missile destroyers to the Arabian Sea to support US-Israeli operations against Iran.
The head of Japan’s main opposition party, Junya Ogawa, reportedly told parliament on Monday that Japan “has not permitted the stationing of US forces so they can sortie from those bases to fire missiles toward the Middle East” when they are supposed to be ensuring Japan’s security.

The usual shifty Trump retractions and reversals (bully-boy perfidy billed as “clever” dealmaking) may see the “war over” notion withdrawn (maybe several times) but momentary loss of nerve by the White House or not, the whole gigantic cowardly barbarity remains a gigantic political and economic failure.
However much its gigantic military force pulverises an entire country it will do nothing to solve the colossal crisis turmoil of the capitalist system which is the real problem facing the Empire and its ever greater and ludicrously unequal monopoly dominance.
Already some 30 years of ever more bludgeoning blitz and torture war efforts, from the vicious multi-nation NATO ganging up to callously pound tiny revisionist-nationalist Serbia in 1998, through the devastation, demolition and blitz massacre of hundreds of thousands in Iraq and Afghanistan, to the ripping apart of Libya, Syria and Yemen, and later Ukraine, by Nato forces, by Zionist and Saudi proxies and Western skulduggery, have failed to salvage things one iota for imperialist domination and once unchallenged world economic plunder and exploitation.
And the Western backed, financed and armed genocidal destruction of Gaza, using the fanaticism of the Zionist-Jewish master-race occupation to terror-suppress the ever intensifying national liberation resistance of the Palestinian people, for the moment led by Hamas and associated groups, has achieved no more, despite the imposition of levels of horrifying public butchery, sadistic torture and massacre and maiming, to parallel the worst atrocities in history relatively speaking. 
After nearly 30 months of constant butchery and destruction since the October 2023 breakout from besieged Gaza, (essentially one giant concentration camp for two million Palestinians since 2006) the ever more sophisticated, competent and dogged resistance to the out-of-time landtheft occupation of the Palestinian lands is still there and still not disarmed.
And the blitz-pounded, homeless, freezing, starved, cynically tortured, horribly maimed and massacre-bereaved Gazan people, whose suffering is beyond the comprehension of most of the world, still remain on their side, in positive support and determination to recover the land they have been dispossessed of, by over 100 years of terrorising Jewish ethnic cleansing occupation ignored, or even initially backed by imperialist-stooge United Nations partition “decree”.
That has not diminished even in the teeth of non-stop efforts by Western intelligence propaganda to find (very) rare minority voices in Gaza willing to “speak out against” Hamas and other fighters like Islamic Jihad, and some secular forces, through war-weariness, exhaustion and trauma, in an attempt to spread defeatism and capitulation, along with Zionism’s recruitment of a few dozen disgusting “trustee” style collaborators in criminal gangs, to further terrorise and demoralise – the whole all dutifully justified, embroidered and parroted by a mainstream media whose grubby venality and craven reaction has plunged new depths since the Zionist genocide started and even more with this outright fascist onslaught on Iran. 
Despite the treachery of the stooge bourgeois opportunist and semi-feudal statelets on the Gulf and in Morocco, Jordan, Oman and above all Egypt, the whole Arab street in the Middle East supports the Gazans and the just as persecuted West Bank residents, constantly hounded, murdered and driven off their land by terror and demolition.
So do the billions throughout the rest of the relentlessly tyrannised Third world.
And none of these several hundred million Arabs and billions elsewhere are going to accept forever being whipped into any kind of line themselves, let alone that of docile acceptance of a restored neocolonialism to allow the trouble-free domination and world exploitation that racist imperialism believes to be its “right” (as ultra-reactionary US Secretary of State Marco Rubio made explicit recently in an extraordinary speech at the European Security conference, calling for a reversion to old-style brute-force pre-WW2 colonialism with open supremacy for the “topdog” USA) and which supposedly would solve its problems.
Just the opposite – as widely predicted, and feared by the rest of imperialism, the warmongering devastation in Iran has turned the screw tighter on an already crisis-wracked world trade system.
Every other “war solution” over three decades has solved nothing either and simply humiliated imperialism as the bombing, massacres, gross torture and corrupt arbitrary deathsquad invasions have triggered renewed and intensified anti-imperialist sentiment, with all the effort to impose “democracy” (!!!) driven out of Iraq, then Afghanistan, and not even getting off the ground in Libya, Syria and Yemen.
And the deliberately provoked NATO war in Ukraine has equally been a disaster in as far as its ostensible purpose is concerned, the defeat of the “Russian invasion”, which was aiding the country’s large minority of Russian speakers in the east, after eight years of murderous persecution by Kiev reactionary nationalism killing thousands.
The “bogeyman” Putin’s special operation, triggered by years of NATO buildup in East Europe and the two decades of skulduggery to train and foster the Nazi-minded Swastika-toting Ukrainian nationalist rightwing and its eventual installation in power in the 2014 CIA/MI6-run violent Maidan colour revolution coup, has brought these Kiev proxies to their knees and driven back their Western, particularly British and European, support.
And that setback has split the imperialists wide open as the US has withdrawn to cut its losses, leaving  the European bourgeoisies to carry the can.
They are desperate to keep the war going with ever more deranged hysteria about “imminent Russian invasion”, as an excuse for their own bourgeois political and economic failure and as a distraction for public opinion, keeping it stampeded behind fears of an “external enemy” and jingoist finger-pointing scapegoating, combined with a hatred for the memory of communism which still lingers favourably in the once-Soviet population (even though Vladimir Putin’s Bonapartist state itself is long way from Sovietism, acting in the interests of the counter-revolutionary oligarch capitalist restoration. Leninism would equally be clear only to welcome defeat for the major imperialists but without any illusions in supporting Putinism (especially in the light of its readiness to compromise with the US)). 
While imperialist America shared that anti-Moscow aim initially, and its further aim of surrounding China, its underlying purpose in the Ukraine war was always at least as much against European imperialism’s industrial and commercial capacities.
By blocking off (and blowing up NordStream access to) cheap Siberian gas and oil, and other cooperation with Russia, the US has been able to diminish the ever more telling trade competition which has been hammering the US’s market position for many decades.
With that main trade war purpose achieved, the more isolationist wing of the US bourgeoisie saw no point in continuing the colossal expenses involved in propping up the Ukrainians in the teeth of a rolling defeat from yet another indigestible war victim and this time with nuclear arms.
Now Iran is only intensifying the intractable contradictions – including political hostility reflecting the cutthroat trade competition with the EU rivals – to cataclysmic levels as oil prices go sky high, stock markets lurch, inflation accelerates, air travel grinds to a halt and “stability” cracks apart.
It does not hurt Washington that the US, with its own self-sufficiency in oil from 20 years of environmentally damaging “fracking” re-establishing itself as the world’s largest producer, is least affected by the Middle East shutdown, though no one is sheltered from the massive world market price hikes suffocating daily life and about to send every other commodity sky high too.
Meanwhile, symbolising the implosion of the entire world monopoly capitalist order, if incidentally, is an end to the extraordinary complacent, philistine and smug existence of the most empty-headed of the world’s self-centred petty bourgeoisie, rubbing shoulders with assorted criminal reprobates, on-the-make “Internet” wideboy speculators, Russian and Ukrainian mafia exiles, “bitcoin racketeers” and other useless flotsam, assembled in the ridiculous and unsustainable desert mirage cities of endless high-rise hotels and “high-end” shopping malls, founded on backward feudal hubris (buying-in expertise), on sand, slavery and costly desalinated water.
Everything has now been blown apart and will never be the same again, as once more the bourgeois press was reporting earlier and which is even more the case since:

Since President Trump launched a new war with Iran, he has portrayed it as a shock-and-awe assault with few lasting consequences, especially for Americans. On Monday in Florida, he called it a “brief disruption.”
Experts say it is rapidly becoming something else entirely: a jolt to the global security order and economy that far exceeds those delivered by other recent conflicts in the Middle East.
Mr. Trump’s war, now nearly two weeks old, is already reshaping travel patterns, energy dependencies, living costs, trade routes and strategic partnerships. Countries typically shielded from regional conflict, like Cyprus and the United Arab Emirates, have faced retaliatory Iranian fire. The fallout could disrupt midterm elections in the United States, tilt the war calculus in Ukraine and force China into a major economic pivot.
Those effects may compound if Mr. Trump presses ahead with the war, particularly if Iran escalates its counter-attacks and blocks ship traffic through the critical oil passage of the Strait of Hormuz. Some economists are already invoking a dreaded memory for any U.S. president — the specter of oil-shock-induced stagflation, with growth stalling and prices roaring upward.
[..]The war is most immediately and viscerally affecting the Middle East. Attacks across the region have killed more than a thousand people and wrought extensive damage to critical infrastructure and the environment — unleashing plumes of noxious smoke and black rain over Tehran after Israeli strikes on fuel depots.
The conflict has shaken the foundation of the Persian Gulf economies, cracking their carefully cultivated images as safe havens in a turbulent region. Iran has launched more attacks on the Gulf countries than it has on Israel, according to an American war monitor, hitting five-star hotels, damaging desalination plants and sending tourists fleeing for evacuation routes.

[To be accurate it is the US/Zionist blitzing which began this, hitting Iran’s Qeshm Island water plant – and Tehran disputes that it hit Bahrain in response, alleging a false flag operation like several others of supposed missile attacks on Arab states by the Zionists hoping to stampede them into attacking Iran too - ed] 

Airports in Dubai and Abu Dhabi, in the United Arab Emirates, have come under attack. European officials are still attempting to rescue their citizens who have been marooned in what once seemed like tranquil vacation spots. The U.S. State Department, after initially facing criticism for acting too slowly, said it had organized over two dozen charter flights and had evacuated thousands of Americans from the Middle East.
Experts warn that reputational damage will linger in the Gulf. Beyond the wealth those countries possess, “the real currency was confidence,” Emile Hokayem, a Middle East expert at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, said in a panel discussion this week.
“It wasn’t just the money, it’s the fact that they could realistically tell people it’s a good business environment, you will feel safe,” he added. “We’re immune to regional politics. You can invest here. You can use us for your trade, your airlines, for your comms, your tech and so on. And that’s what the Iranians are after, right?”
For much of the rest of the world, one of the first pains from the war was felt at the gasoline pump. When tankers stopped moving through the Strait of Hormuz, oil prices jumped above $100 a barrel on global markets, though they have receded somewhat in recent days. Emmanuel Macron, the French president, said on Monday that his country would send 10 warships to the region, potentially to escort vessels through the strait.
Trump administration officials and European leaders have explored options in recent days to reduce gasoline prices, which have risen along with the global price of oil. Economists have begun warning that if the oil shock persists for weeks, it could ignite an escalating set of price increases across economies, while weighing on economic growth — a fate similar to the stagflation that followed the 1979 Iranian revolution.
“Whether history repeats itself all depends on how long this conflict lasts,” researchers at Deutsche Bank wrote this week.
The loss of access to cheap oil is an emerging risk for China — and not the only one. Chinese exporters have become increasingly reliant on Middle Eastern consumers. A disruption to Middle Eastern economies could limit sales of Chinese goods there, undercutting China’s own growth.
The surge in oil prices are, conversely, helping Russia — by bolstering the oil revenues that help to fund Moscow’s war machine in Ukraine. Europeans are also worried that the heavy fighting in the Middle East will indirectly harm Ukrainian defenses: The more interceptor missiles are used by the United States and its allies to counter Iran, the fewer are available to Ukraine for its defense against Russian attacks.
In the United States, the war appears already to be a political liability for Mr. Trump. It has relatively little public support compared to previous wars. Democrats are seizing on rising energy costs to court voters ahead of midterm elections that were already focused on the rising cost of living.
More immediately, it has cast a shadow over an event Mr. Trump had hoped would be a signature American triumph under his presidency: the men’s soccer World Cup, which is set to kick off this summer in the United States, Canada and Mexico. Iran is one of the teams scheduled to compete. But it’s unclear if its team will be able to — and what might happen if it can’t.
“The United States and Israel have been waging war against Iran for over a week. We share many of their goals,” said Chancellor Friedrich Merz of Germany on Tuesday. “But with each day of the war, more questions arise. We are particularly concerned that there appears to be no common plan for bringing this war to a swift and convincing conclusion.”

For all the increasingly disastrous details of the current war (who would want to go to the US now for the World Cup???) it is the decades long crisis, and its repeated eruptions, in “Black Mondays”, credit collapses and currency meltdowns, breaking into outright Catastrophe in the 2009 global credit and banking failures, – Alistair Darling’s near “economic nuclear winter” – which workers need to grasp as the fundamental driver of all this warmongering and chaos.
That is the complete opposite to the shallow view of a new economic crisis being a consequence of this war as the philistine bourgeois economic pundits currently put it, echoed by much of the shallow fake-“left”.
They mostly parrot the bourgeois politicians’ risible lies about a “return to growth and prosperity” being blown “off course”, the endless excuse of these mountebanks and frauds, (and none more so than the supine grovellers of the Labour Party and a century of their treachery rescuing the moribund capitalist system in Britain whenever it was in deeper trouble than its usual ossified incompetence under the chinless-wonder ruling class and its “aristocratic” hangers-on). 
The same tired and cynical old lie formula pretending that a few tinkerings to “restore growth” have met “unexpected problems” is once again being wheeled out as an excuse for the continuing decline of British capitalism’s even-worse-than-the-rest position which these grotesque frauds are paid to cover-up knowing full well it is unsolvable and as January’s “no-growth” figures yet again make clear:

The UK economy unexpectedly flatlined in January, stoking concerns over growth amid the global energy price shock triggered by the US-Israel war on Iran.
Figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) showed 0% growth in gross domestic product (GDP), down from an increase of 0.1% in December, as the economy failed to recover from uncertainty surrounding the chancellor Rachel Reeves’s autumn budget.
Falling significantly short of City predictions for growth of 0.2%, the figures came as the UK and other countries faced a potentially severe economic hit as the Middle East conflict drove up oil and gas prices, hitting consumers with higher living costs.
The pound fell against the US dollar after the figures were released.
In a fresh blow to the Labour government’s growth ambitions after a challenging start to the year, output in the service sector flatlined amid falls in recruitment activity and the hospitality sector.
Unemployment in the UK has risen to the highest level in five years in recent months, with businesses complaining that employer tax increases and a rising national living wage are hitting jobs. Hiring has fallen most in sectors such as hospitality and retail.

But there is nothing “unexpected” about this, or the much wider world collapse (Trump makes similar excuses), for Marxist understanding which has warned of such failures from the mid-19th century onwards when Marx published his Capital (see page 6), setting out in detail just why the whole profit system is doomed to non-stop cycles of bankrupting and agonising Slump disasters, market implosion and ever worsening collapses regularly wreaking massive deprivation, unemployment, starvation, misery and hunger and pain, on top of the gross inequalities, ratrace stress, alienation, truncated hopes and stifled opportunity of “normal” capitalist existence during shortlived “upturns”. 
And, as Lenin further explained, these cycles inevitably reach world war levels of destruction in the imperialist epoch, (the Highest Stage of Capitalism, as his book describes it) as ever mounting monopoly concentration brings tradewar rivalries to literally to-the-death levels of deadly market competition and the full-on horrors of industrialised conflict.
Without grasping this fundamental basis for collapse and conflict, the inescapable expression of capitalism’s very workings, the working class will never properly understand the real underlying cause of the warmongering hell being unleashed and just how far it will go, never-endingly into Catastrophe until so much capital has been destroyed that the whole process can start up again (and in the modern imperialist saturated world that means war beyond WW1 and WW2 on a scale never before seen –  as even the Iran blitzing already shows with unparalleled intensity and atrocity in just 20 days).
Of course the impact of this latest war “solution” does additionally ratchet up the current phase of the crisis pushing the imperialist world even closer to the edge of the abyss of total implosion as oil prices rocket, other commodity movements grind to a halt and international confidence plunges.
But that is only the latest lurch of an ever worsening sequence of collapses, implosions, financial earthquakes and shocks building up and shaking the capitalist world starting from the last great “oil shock” in the 1970s, itself the consequence of the great shaking of the dollar in the wake of the humiliation of the Vietnam war defeat and the near victory of the Arab masses over the monstrous Zionist master-race occupation of Palestine in the 1973 Yom Kippur war, with Tel Aviv rescued then, as now, by the financial, intelligence and armaments support of the US and the intertwined American-Jewish freemasonry which exerts major pressure on its decisions.
Each of these accumulating crises (devastating enough) are part of the general and ever deepening Great Catastrophe that the whole system has been plunging towards inexorably, and which is built into its contradiction-riddled profit seeking nature.
What the horrific, wilful and sadistic destruction being inflicted on Iran, Lebanon and Iraq – and continuing inside the Zionist occupied Palestine itself where the 2½ year-long bomb and starvation genocide of the Gazan masses is being ramped up again alongside settler fascist terror-killing ethnic cleansing on the West Bank – does make clear is the now demented and increasingly nasty insanity of the collapsing imperialist order as it flounders and writhes in historic failure and paralysis.
These horrors, and the hell of civil war Sudan, the barbarity of the M23/Rwanda Congo invasion, the deliberately provoked Kiev-Nazi war against Russia in Ukraine, the intimidation of Latin America through the Venezuela kidnap raid and the US siege strangulation of communist Cuba, and more, are a foretaste of the complete breakdown and destruction of everything that has been taken as stable and fixed in world affairs, erupting everywhere:

Hundreds were feared dead after a strike on a hospital treating drug users in the Afghan capital of Kabul, which officials from Afghanistan blamed on the Pakistani military.
Afghanistan’s deputy government spokesperson Hamdullah Fitrat said the death toll had “so far” reached 400 people, while about 250 people had been reported injured. He said most of those killed and wounded were patients undergoing treatment at the facility.
Pakistan rejected the claim as false and misleading and said it “precisely targeted military installations and terrorist support infrastructure” on Monday night, dismissing allegations it had hit a civilian target.
Sharafat Zaman, the Taliban’s health ministry spokesperson, said there were about 3,000 patients in the state-run Omid hospital at the time of the strike. Local television stations posted footage of firefighters struggling to extinguish flames among the ruins of a building.
“The whole place caught fire. It was like doomsday,” said Ahmad, 50, a security guard at the hospital. Of the 25 people staying in the hospital’s staff dormitory, he was the only one to survive.
The strikes were reported to begin around 9pm on Monday night. Omid Stanikzai, 31, a security guard at the drug treatment centre, told AFP the assault began with the firing of anti-aircraft guns.
“There were military units all around us,” he said. “When these military units fired on the jet, the jet dropped bombs and a fire broke out.”
Witnesses reported severe damage to the building, with sections collapsing after the strike. On Tuesday morning, only blackened walls and piles of debris remained while rescue teams searched the rubble for survivors.
Ambulance driver Haji Fahim said he had arrived at the hospital to find “everything was burning, people were burning”.
[...]This is the third time that Pakistan has targeted Kabul with missile strikes in recent weeks. In a post on X, Pakistan’s ministry of information said Monday night’s strikes “precisely targeted military installations and terrorist support infrastructure including technical equipment storage and ammunition storage of Afghan Taliban” as well as Afghanistan-based Pakistani militants in Kabul.
Islamabad has described the situation with Afghanistan as an “open war”. The fighting began in late February after Afghanistan launched cross-border attacks in response to Pakistani airstrikes inside Afghanistan. The clashes disrupted a ceasefire brokered by Qatar in October.
The conflict is the worst to break out between the former allies and has displaced upwards of 20,000 people. Relations began to fray over the Afghan Taliban’s alleged role in giving a safe haven and sponsorship to radical militants, particularly the Pakistan Taliban, that have been responsible for a surge in deadly terrorist attacks in Pakistan. Afghanistan’s Taliban government have denied any involvement in cross-border terrorism in Pakistan.
The deadly fighting also continued along the volatile border areas. Afghan officials said four people, including two children, were killed and 10 other people were wounded in south-eastern Afghanistan in an exchange of fire on Monday.
On Sunday, Pakistan said a mortar fired from Afghanistan hit a house in north-western Bajaur district, killing four members of a family.

Eventually Washington has to take on directly all the rival imperialist powers whose trade war competition has been undermining the US topdog position for decades and decades, notably Germany (and its EU acolytes) and Japan.
Just those tensions have been escalated by Trumpism, even during its first term, and certainly now.
And that understanding, from a Marxist objective perspective makes clear that this war is not essentially about Iran as such, and US imperialist hatred for the Tehran regime, nor a desire for revenge on the humiliations the mullahs have imposed on the West over the 50 year existence of the Islamic State.
Those are be real enough factors, but this is about war in general and the US smashing down all resistance and opposition to its continued supremacy by sheer barbaric intimidation and wilful destruction, intimidating the whole world to bully tribute, to feed its economy, now totally bankrupted by capitalism’s own crisis mechanisms and the demented printing of inflationary dollar credit to keep it all propped up.   
Serbia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Libya, and Syria are all aspects of this turn to overt international WW3 aggression, on top of the “routine” wars, coups, assassinations, and terror tyrannies imposed on the Third World by the whole of Western imperialism for a century and a half, and most of all by the US both pre-WW2 and especially after 1945 when it had suppressed its rivals and become supreme monopoly power (in the remaining imperialist world, still the largest part of humanity despite the stunning victories of the Red Army over Nazism, massive expansion of the Soviet camp and the huge wave of anti-colonialism and communist revolution it inspired, not least in China, Korea, Cuba and Vietnam).
Utter collapse of reason and rationality and all that is considered “normal life” is what is meant  by “crisis” and Catastrophe in Marxist understanding, the kind of upending of world society seen as the 1914 Great War exploded from the seeming “blue-skies” of smug Edwardian Empire prosperity, and later the even greater horror-disruption of the Second World War.
An even greater, hard-to-comprehend scale of turmoil is coming this time as world war, deferred for decades by the system’s extent, complexity and reach, now unfolds. 
That is a million miles from the notions of “crisis” put forwards by the shallow pseudo-Marxism and dilettante “revolution” posturing of petty bourgeois “leftism” of all kinds, from class collaborating “official” trade unionism, left-Labourism, revisionist “Stop War” pacifism and Trotskyist posturing, where “crisis”, if it is examined at all, means only some “strong economic headwinds” or additional slump austerity, or episodic disruption to be stood firmly against or resisted by “making the rich pay”, while battling for a return to “stability” (frequently tied up with varieties of the Stalin-originated notion of permanent peaceful coexistence with the imperialist world, usually in the modern form of  “multipolarity”).
But this is an utterly disarming delusion, covering up a retreat from the only perspective that can end this world disaster, the revolutionary class war overturn of an imperialism whose truly barbaric bourgeois dictatorship face is more and more in the open, revealed as the fascist reality its “democratic freedom” rule has always been behind the parliamentary, presidential or “United Nations international law” façade (which little of the tyrannically exploited Third World, or Global South, has ever doubted, under the stream of fascist stooge regimes which imperialism has encouraged, or directly installed and financed, throughout the twentieth century to maintain its overall control and slave-driving exploitation “rights” for its multinational monopoly corporations).
Any “stability” there has been purely temporary in the wake of past (mostly world war) crises when enough capital had been destroyed to allow a return to investment (for the survivors) and “boom” for a period, as notably in the long post-WW2 rock-and-roll bluejeans consumerist uptick.
But even that only produced any gains for the working class in the richest countries and that just pathetic reform crumbs, and only because of the looming threat of hugely popular communist achievements and Soviet Red Army victories catching on in the working class forcing the bourgeois to offer something to head off the revolutionary sentiment that would follow. 
But there is no stability to be had now, just the increasing paralysis and incompetent racketeering of corrupt monopoly capitalist society (shit filled rivers and beaches, burned out high rise flats, and homelessness, non-existent dentistry, Big Pharma and Covid crony profiteering, Post Office scandals and waves of drug despair, societal breakdown into crime and knife and gang violence etc etc etc etc) all falling apart into anarchic chaos – with a ruling class unable to solve the contradictions that are inbuilt into the enormous, hugely complex, and ever more extended   and world penetrating system of production for private profit, and its non-stop monopolisation and concentration of ever more enormous wealth and power into ever fewer hands while impoverishing the 99(.9999)% of the masses.  
As Marx first, and then Lenin and other analysed, (see box below) it must collapse, because effectively no one can afford to buy anything any more, (save the billionaires and the degenerate layers of smaller fry capitalists and the petty bourgeois managers, lawyers, accountants and advertisers etc lavishly paid to service their needs and a few still boom-corrupted workers) and certainly not at the prices necessary for the rich to cream off a huge profit (without which there is no basis to capitalism).
The raging frustration and arrogant entitlement of the ruling class at this paralysis sees only one way out, to smash down and destroy all those around who are “to blame” for what is actually the failure of their own system, starting with “terrorists” and “jihadists” and especially “communists” and all others coming close to rebellion against these historic iniquities.
Victims and scapegoats are selected and persecuted with hysterical and vicious jingoism both within society and abroad, demonising entire sectors of the population or countries abroad, whipping up hatreds and fears with ever more exaggerated lies and fabrications (against Muslims eg against the bogeyman Putin in Russia or against Chinese spies lurking everywhere allegedly, even in the toaster(!)). 
Brute force and intimidation is the necessity for a ruling class on the ropes, lashing out internationally and cracking down domestically with increasingly fascist intimidation against any protest at all as clear from the bourgeois press:

A group of protesters in Texas was found guilty of providing support for terrorism and other charges on Friday in a closely watched case in which prosecutors alleged anti-ICE activists were actually part of an antifa cell.
The case was seen as a major test of the first amendment and whether the government could use a broad anti-terrorism statute to prosecute leftwing protesters. It marked the first time the government alleged individuals were part of an antifa terrorist cell in a criminal prosecution.
Nine defendants – Benjamin Song, Zachary Evetts, Autumn Hill, Meagan Morris, Maricela Rueda, Savanna Batten, Ines Soto, Elizabeth Soto and Daniel Sanchez-Estrada – were all tried together in the case. They faced a mix of charges of providing material support to terrorists, rioting, attempted murder, as well as firearms and explosive charges.
Sanchez-Estrada was the only defendant not at the protest, and was only charged with corruptly concealing a document or record, after prosecutors say he moved leftwing zines following the arrest of his wife, Maricela Rueda, on the Fourth of July. Song also escaped after the incident and there was an 11-day manhunt for him. Several other people were charged with assisting Song during that period.
The nine defendants were convicted on all of the charges they faced, with limited exceptions. Of the five charged with attempted murder and firearms charges, Evetts, Hill, Morris and Rueda were acquitted. Song was acquitted on two charges of attempted murder and convicted on one. He was also convicted of the firearms charges.
Song faces a minimum of 20 years and a maximum of life in prison, according to the US attorney for the northern district of Texas. Arnold, Evetts, Morris, Rueda, Batten, Elizabeth Soto and Ines Soto each face between 10 and 60 years in prison. Sanchez Estrada faces up to 40 years.
The DFW Support Committee, a coalition that has been supporting the defendants, said in a post on X they were “heartbroken”. The defendants also face state charges.
“This is only the beginning. We will continue to fight the remaining charges until every defendant is home,” the group said. “Everything about this trial from beginning to end has proven what we have said all along: this is a sham trial, built on political persecution and ideological attacks coming from the top.”
“Antifa is a domestic terrorist organization that has been allowed to flourish in Democrat-led cities – not under President Trump,” Pam Bondi, the attorney general, said in a statement. “Today’s verdict on terrorism charges will not be the last as the Trump administration systematically dismantles antifa and finally halts their violence on America’s streets.”
After the killing of Charlie Kirk last year, Trump administration officials vowed to go after leftwing groups and designated antifa, short for anti-fascist, as a domestic terrorist group, even though the president did not have the lawful authority to do so. Antifa is also not an organization but instead used to describe a constellation of leftwing beliefs. Some have described antifa as an idea and equated designating it a terror organization akin to designating Marxism or feminism as a terror group.

These vicious but panicking bourgeois moves, echoed in other countries including the UK where the protestors have been designated “terrorist” merely for verbally supporting anarchic groups such as Palestine Action, are shattering illusions in “democratic paths”.
Now the true nature of bourgeois rule is dawning on petty bourgeois academic opinion too, though despairingly presented as a “loss” of something that never really existed and was always a giant hoodwinking fraud:

The US is no longer a democracy. One of the most credible global sources on the health of democratic nations now says this outright. The Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Institute at Gothenburg University reaches the alarming conclusion in its annual report, that the US is hurtling towards autocracy at a faster rate than Hungary and Turkey.
“Our data on the USA goes back to 1789. What we’re seeing now is the most severe magnitude of democratic backsliding ever in the country,” says Staffan Lindberg, founder of the institute.
Since 2012, Lindberg has led his small group of researchers in Sweden to become the world’s leading source for analysis of the health of global democracy. In their latest report, published on Tuesday, they conclude that the US, for the first time in more than half a century, has lost its long-term status as a liberal democracy. The country is now going through a process the report calls “autocratisation”.
“For Orbán in Hungary, it took about four years, for Vučić in Serbia, it took eight years, and for Erdoğan in Turkey and Modi in India, it took about 10 years to accomplish the suppression of democratic institutions that Trump has achieved in only one year,” Lindberg says.
US democracy is now back at the worst recorded level since 1965, when US civil rights laws first introduced de facto universal suffrage. All progress made since then has been erased, according to the report.
Worldwide, democracy has receded to its lowest levels since the mid-70s. A record 41% (3.4 billion) of the world’s population currently resides in countries where democracy is deteriorating, the report claims, .
The researchers use 48 different metrics to assess democratic health, such as the freedom of expression and the media, the quality of elections and the observance of the rule of law. The resulting “liberal democracy index” shows that the speed with which US democracy is being dismantled is unprecedented in modern history. The main factor is a “rapid and aggressive concentration of powers in the presidency”, Lindberg says. Congress has been marginalised, jeopardising the “checks and balances” (judicial and legislative constraints on the executive) so crucial to US democracy. At the same time, civil rights have been rapidly declining and freedom of expression is now at its lowest level since the 1940s.
“We’ve seen a very fast concentration of power in the executive wing. The legislative branch has practically abdicated its powers to the president. It no longer functions as a check on executive power,” Lindberg says.

As Lenin repeatedly spelt out, “democracy” in capitalism has only ever been the cover for bourgeois dictatorship (see quotes in EPSR No956, or 1065 eg from State and Revolution, or Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky, and more). 
The fact that this very useful way for the ruling class to keep control – possibly the best trick ever devised in its capacity to fool mass opinion into believing it is choosing the direction society is going – is now so openly being abandoned, underlines the depth of its is difficulties. 
 And it is that context of overall crisis and collapse which explains the vague and indefinite war “aims” of the Trumpites which have nothing to do with “defending the freedom” of the allegedly repressed population, with seeing off alleged “nuclear threats” or “containing the threat from its missiles”.
  After so great a credit extended boomtime, and so great a penetration of the system into the whole planet, the only conclusion is that capitalism will destroy everything. It must be ended completely and most of all its dominant entity the US Empire.
Without taking on the complex and profound task of understanding this whole system and its fatal contradictions, the descent into disaster will continue.  
In fact workers will be run rings round with “explanations” based only on the superficial “causes”, and bogeys (labelled “terrorists” mostly) as the supposed malevolent and “evil” forces and influences who are “stopping everything from running smoothly” and who therefore have to be suppressed and killed. 
And those “enemies” will be and are misrepresented, distorted, or outright fabricated, larded with poisonous jingoism and scapegoating and usually turned upside down – as with the Ukraine war blamed on Russia and laughably pretending to be looking out for the interests of the “poor benighted Ukrainian people” or the monstrous pretence that the Zionists are “merely” “defending themselves” when it is their violently established occupation of another people’s land, the terror-assisted colonial theft of Palestine from its indigenous people, living there continuously for a minimum 1500 years which is the cause and generator of the resistance against it.   
The non-stop Palestinian liberation struggle, and the wider Middle East struggle, beginning as far back as the 1930s and particularly since 1945 can never end for as long as the artificial “state of Israel” continues, except and until every last Palestinian and Arab around them is killed, as the fanatical Zionists are now so obviously intent on doing (and have been all the way back to the 1948 foundation, as the EPSR has repeatedly warned).    
Public opinion is just as manipulated by the demented lies over Iran and ever more lurid lies about the scale and extent of supposed “killings” of demonstrators  which rapidly escalated in the weeks before the bombing. Even the cynicism of the petty bourgeois Private Eye did not resist:

On 8 and 9 January, at least 6,400 Iranians were confirmed killed by security forces, while another 17,000 deaths remain under review - people shot dead in the street, while in hospital or in custody, in an organised, military-style operation, according to estimates from the New York-based Center for Human Rights Iran (CHRI).
The crackdown afterwards was equally brutal. During an internet blackout, a violent repression sought to purge any appetite for protest. Esfandiar Aban of the CHRI said they had evidence of “a coordinated campaign of mass killing and enforced disappearance, deliberately carried out in places where the world cannot see”.
“Entire cities have been turned into killing fields and secret prisons,” Aban said. “People are shot in the streets, taken from their homes at night, and then erased - no names, no records, no answers for their families.” He said mass arrests began straight after the protests, with security patrols, drone surveillance and stop-and-search by day and house-raids by night, dragging away teenagers who had chanted slogans, doctors and nurses who had treated the injured, lawyers who had advised the accused and anyone who had commented on social media in support of the protests.[..]

And so forth. But in what way are “estimates” and wild assertions by a “New York based” partisan expatriate organisation supposed to constitute “evidence”  of anything, particularly when there are no videos or photos of these supposed “killing fields”????
The rest of the media went even further allowing assorted interviewees to fling wild figures around unchallenged, which rapidly reached “30,000” from one American general on the Today programme to “40,000” simply asserted by Labourite “Lord” Neil Kinnock on Broadcasting House.
 No one has to defend the Ayatollahs in order to be clear that the demonstrations in January were a deliberately put up job provoked by the West, yet another of its colour revolution petty bourgeois movements stampeded with hundreds of intermingled provocateurs instigating violent attacks on police stations and state forces precisely to force the hand of the government into correspondingly violent responses.
That is hardly a “conspiracy” theory since the Zionists openly declared that they had multiple Mossad agents operating, as some US politicians celebrated:

“Happy New Year to every Iranian in the streets. Also to every Mossad agent walking beside them,” former US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said in a X/Twitter post on Friday evening.
Pompeo’s post came amid widespread and days-long protests against the Islamic Republic that have flared up across the country.
“The Iranian regime is in trouble,” Pompeo added. “Bringing in mercenaries is its last best hope.”  

The demented stories willingly reproduced by the Western media are an integral part of the warmongering attack on Iran, part of the elaborate and long-gestating Goebbels demonisation to prepare Western public opinion to accept the monstrous destructive blitzkrieg as “justified”.
They parallel the equally lurid nonsense pumped out constantly over the Ukraine war, with just as many evidence-free or context free-assertions about “civilians killed” etc from the reactionary (and deeply corrupt) Kiev authorities left unchallenged or unprobed, along with wild assertions from the Ukrainians about “genocide” by the Russians flung around even when just a single (unverified) death is asserted.  
No great subtlety is required to see the glaring disparity with the reality of actual genocide still unfolding against the Palestinians and now against the Lebanese resistance who have tried to fight back alongside the Gazans,  taking dozens, or hundreds of lives daily despite the supposed year long “ceasefire” in Lebanon and now one established for Gaza:

A few days ago, I was walking with a friend through the tents in al-Mawasi, southern Gaza. We were heading to a small cafe I have frequented since my roof became fabric. 
The ground beneath us was mud, the winter air heavy, and the faces around us heavier still. We were talking about the formation of the US-led “Board of Peace”, in a phase of the so-called ceasefire that is supposedly defined by stability and reconstruction. 
At that exact moment, the sound of an explosion tore through the air. We stopped talking, and I found myself asking: how is this a ceasefire? How can peace be declared while explosions still echo above our heads?
For Palestinians in the enclave, it was supposed to mean at least a brief moment of stability. Instead, very little has changed.
The first thing I imagined when I heard the word “ceasefire” was leaving our tent. In Mawasi, thousands of displaced families are still unable to return to their homes, amid the ongoing presence of the occupation in nearby communities. 
Many people believed a ceasefire would be followed by an Israeli withdrawal. That has not happened.
Some houses are partially intact and technically habitable, but they sit near Israeli “yellow zones” - areas marked by daily violations. Families are afraid to return; the threat of a sudden strike or incursion outweighs the comfort of concrete walls. 
Many families have chosen a cold tent sinking in rain, rather than a home overshadowed by danger. Mine is one.
We still carry the key to my relatives’ apartment. The door stands, and the walls are still there. But when I recently went back, I heard tanks, and explosions close enough to feel in my chest. 
Many homes have been bombed since the “ceasefire” supposedly took effect. Around 2,500 more buildings have been razed in that period, (since) last October. 
If a ceasefire means returning home, it has not happened. If it means the destruction stops, that has not happened.
A ceasefire was also supposed to mean freedom of movement - and education was my way out, my narrow opening towards a different future. 
During the war - amid tents, blackouts and universities reduced to rubble - we students clung to our studies as if they were a lifeline. Schools became shelters, and campuses were destroyed, but thousands continued studying online. Education was not a luxury; it was a way to preserve meaning in the midst of erasure.
By the end of 2025, I secured university offers abroad. I believed the ceasefire would bring something concrete: open crossings for students with offers abroad, and for patients in need of urgent medical care. Instead, the crossings continue to operate in a limited and unpredictable manner. 
Restrictions persist. Procedures remain opaque. Scholarships earned through years of work hang in uncertainty, and patients often face life-threatening delays for treatment abroad. Trapped at the border, thousands of people share this suspended reality. 
Issa was a friend from the Rafah neighbourhood where I lived before the war. He was his family’s sole provider. During the famine, he risked going to what people here call “death traps” to get aid, despite sniper fire. He survived bombardment, bullets and hunger.
Then came the ceasefire. He had recently become engaged, and for a moment, life seemed to be cautiously resurfacing. But in January, shrapnel struck his chest during an Israeli strike on a market in Mawasi. We buried Issa during the “ceasefire”.
He is not an exception. Since the ceasefire was declared, more than 400 Palestinians have been killed and more than 1,150 injured.

Israel used internationally prohibited thermal and thermobaric weapons, leaving thousands of Palestinian bodies “evaporated” as a result, an investigation by Al Jazeera revealed. 
Civil defence teams in Gaza documented over 2,800 cases of Palestinians who just vanished since the beginning of Israel’s genocidal war, the Al Jazeera Arabic programme, The Rest of the Story, reported.
What is left of these bodies is only pieces of flesh, specks of blood or even ash.
Since the start of the war on Gaza in October 2023, Israel has obliterated most of the Gaza Strip, reducing entire neighbourhoods, including schools, businessess and medical facilities, to rubble.
Israeli soldiers and combat engineers have laid explosives and triggered controlled demolitions inside countless homes, while armoured bulldozers have systematically levelled building after building.
More than mere explosives, experts and testimonies have attributed the vaporisation of people to Israel’s use of US-supplied thermal and thermobaric weapons, referred to as vacuum or aerosol bombs, capable of generating temperatures exceeding 3,500 degrees Celsius (6,332 degrees Fahrenheit).
The intense heat is often generated by tritonal, which is a mixture of TNT and aluminium powder used in American-made bombs.
Civil defence spokesperson Mahmoud Basal told Al Jazeera that teams cross reference the known number of inhabitants in a house with the recovered bodies.  
“If a family tells us there were five people inside, and we only recover three intact bodies, we treat the remaining two as ‘evaporated’ only after an exhaustive search yields nothing but biological traces - blood spray on walls or small fragments like scalps,” he explained.
[..]investigation identified several US-manufactured munitions used in Gaza, including the MK-84 “Hammer”, BLU-109 bunker buster, and GBU-39 small diameter bomb.
The BLU-109 bunker buster was reportedly used in an attack on al-Mawasi, an area Israel previously declared a “safe zone” for forcibly displaced Palestinians in September 2024, evaporating 22 Palestinians. 
Meanwhile the GBU-39 is said to have been used in an attack on al-Tabin school in eastern Gaza City. Basal confirmed finding fragments of the weaponry at sites where bodies had vanished.
“The horrific testimonies provided by citizens and doctors in northern Gaza following the air strikes and massacres carried out against innocent civilians, and the confirmation of cases of targeting with weapons and ammunition that lead to the vaporisation of bodies strongly point to the use of internationally banned weapons by the terrorist occupation army,” the Palestinian movement said.
So far, Israel has killed more than 72,037 people and destroyed nearly 90 percent of the territory’s infrastructure.  

But such is the low level of theoretical and philosophical understanding in the brainwashed Western population that public opinion is still fooled into support for “plucky Ukraine” even as the croaking green fascist Zelensky offers drone technology to the Zionists and allied Western forces.
That confusion is not only down to the fake-“left” but their retreats and anti-communism play right into bourgeois hands.
So the Trots, as exemplified by the “intellectual” CPGB’s Weekly Worker, call for an escalation of popular revolt against the Tehran government just as the Zionist/US attacks are in full swing:

No-one in their right mind would underestimate how bombs and wars actually engender an enraged sense of patriotism and nationalism. In the last few days, most of what I have had to struggle with is to try to convince young Iranians - who until last week were strongly critical of the Islamic Republic and now say this is not the time to criticise the Islamic Republic - that this is precisely the time to do so and to organise for its overthrow from below. You can be against this war and not fall into the trap of becoming a supporter of the new supreme leader or the current interim council.    

A previous article covered  up this treachery by prefacing it with a notionally correct call for “defeat” of the West – immediately followed by a list of demands to be pressed for which amount to a call for revolution. 
Of course demand for defeat for the main enemy imperialism, (not simply the pacifist “against the war”) does not imply any support for the backward Ayatollahs – but to mount an internal struggle for overthrow at this moment is to undermine the very force which would defeat imperialism and amounts to supporting the attack on them.
Other elements of the fake-“left”, such as the revisionist museum Stalinists of the Lalkar/Proletarian cause just as much confusion from another direction, namely by their all out support for Iran as supposedly an “axis of resistance”.  
But the mullahs are not the future at all and need to be overthrown, as soon as there is any kind of breathing space. It will not be done by the Trots however, hostile to the dictatorship of the proletariat. 
Leninism is needed.  Tony Lee

E P S R BOX

Leaving the world to be run by the greed of the capitalist monopolies can never stop resulting in periodic crises where trade-war destruction MUST rule, and to which the only antidote is Revolution and a strong workers state, --- as these essentials of Marxist-Leninist SCIENCE explain.

Only the crisis events of collapsing imperialist rule interpreted in this Marxist-Leninist light will educate a mass workers party of leadership to do the necessary tasks.

The Revisionist retreat from the Soviet workers state because of crawling to shallow Western glitz and shame at their own past bureaucratic mistakes has only proved the soundness of Lenin's 'State & Revolution' science about a very long period of proletarian dictatorship being the only way for the world to see-off monopoly imperialist warmongering, now back with a vengeance.

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It is often said and written that the main point in Marx's teachings is the class struggle; but this is not true. And from this untruth very often springs the opportunist distortion of Marxism, its falsification in such a way as to make it acceptable to the bourgeoisie. For the doctrine of the class struggle was created not by Marx, but by the bourgeoisie before Marx, and generally speaking it is acceptable to the bourgeoisie. Those who recognise only the class struggle are not yet Marxists;  they may be found to be still within the boundaries of bourgeois thinking and bourgeois politics. To confine Marxism to the doctrine of the class struggle means curtailing Marxism, distorting it, reducing it to something which is acceptable to the bourgeoisie. Only he is a Marxist who extends the recognition of the class struggle to the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat. This is what constitutes the most profound difference between the Marxist and the ordinary petty (as well as big) bourgeois. This is the touchstone on which the real understanding and recognition of Marxism is to be tested. And it is not surprising that when the history of Europe brought the working class face to face with this question as a practical issue, not only all the opportunists and reformists, but all the "Kautskyites" (people who vacillate between reformism and Marxism) proved to be miserable philistines and petty-bourgeois democrats who repudiate the dictatorship of the proletariat. V.I.Lenin

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"The last cause of all real crises always remains the poverty and restricted consumption of the masses as compared to the tendency of capitalist production to develop the productive forces as if only the absolute power of consumption of the entire society would be their limit." (Capital. Vol III. P568.)

*******

" For many a decade past", wrote Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto of 1848, "the history of industry and commerce is but the history of the revolt of modern productive forces against modern conditions of production, against the property relations that are the conditions for the existence of the bourgeoisie and of its rule. It is enough to mention the commercial crises that by their periodical return put the existence of the entire bourgeois society on its trial, each time more threateningly. In these crisis a great part, not only of the existing products, but also of the previously created productive forces, are periodically destroyed. In these crises there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity - the epidemic of overproduction. Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed. And why? Because there is too much civilisation, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce. The productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary...they have become too powerful for these conditions, by which they are fettered, and so soon as they overcome these fetters, they bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property. The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them."

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The conditions of bourgeois democracy very often compel us to take a certain stand on a multitude of small and petty reforms, but we must be able, or learn, to take such a position on these reforms. (in such a manner) that - to oversimplify the matter for the sake of clarity - five minutes of every half-hour speech are devoted to reforms and twenty-five minutes to the coming revolution. (Lenin Dec 1916: Principles involved in the war issue.)

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