The U.S. and Israel have begun their imperialist war on Iran, with an inaugural bombing of a school full of children. Iran has, in turn, attacked U.S. imperialist outposts in the region. The Iranian strategy is clear: if Iran is to be turned into another Iraq or Afghanistan, then all those who are unabashed allies of the U.S. empire shall join them as well. However, the indomitable Iranian state has, without any equivocation, established the main enemy: the U.S. and its lackies.
The Iranian state, from its liberal to conservative wings, is aware that the only way the Iranian people will be freed from the sword of Damocles held over them, is to conduct themselves offensively. This war comes at a time when some Iranians anxiously watch their cities burn, waiting to see if their loved ones are next, while others dance and cheer in the streets of Stockholm, Toronto, and even Tehran. The Iranian working class, fragmented and politically disorganized, has not yet emerged as an independent force in shaping the trajectory of this war. Many on the Iranian left are still stuck in a discourse of trying to present the Islamic Republic as the actual empire in the Middle East, with colonies in Iraq and Syria.
Among leftists, there exists a discourse that functions as a tool of manufacturing consent for imperialism. It would have us believe that Iraq’s tragedy was not born of American occupation but of Iranian intrusion. The violence in the Middle East, the authoritarian nature of the states that inhabit it, and the constant state of crises are all endemic to the people of the region itself. These leftists claim they are against both U.S. imperialism and the “authoritarianism” of the Islamic Republic, as though these were symmetrical phenomena. They paint a picture of imperialism in the style of a morality play—power crushing the powerless—rather than as a determinate system of capital accumulation that organizes the hierarchy of states. Imperialism ceases to be a structure and becomes an attitude; capitalism disappears, and in its place stands a generic denunciation of “authoritarianism.”
This is not confined to debates about Iran. Across the contemporary left, analysis of global imperialist structure has been abandoned in favour of cataloguing the political formations in Russia, China, or Iran. The result is predictable: because Western powers have accumulated vast surpluses and stabilized a labour aristocracy at home, and because they can afford parliamentary pluralism financed by super-profits extracted from the periphery, they appear more liberal and democratic, and thus—by this logic—less imperial.
We recently saw this inversion articulated in a panel1 concerning Venezuela, the Caribbean, and Iran, where the Iranian panelist presented the position that the imperial danger in the region emanates not only from Washington but also from Moscow, Beijing, and Tehran. Such reasoning does not merely misidentify the balance of forces; it disarms anti-imperialism at its core.
The political consequence is grave. When imperialism is reduced to a moral category, the bombing of one’s own country can be rationalized as a blow against “authoritarianism.” We now witness sectors of the diaspora cheering strikes on their homeland, insisting they are anti-regime rather than pro-imperialist. But historical materialism does not judge by intention; it judges by objective alignment. To support military aggression led by the U.S. and its allies is to participate, whatever one’s subjective protestations, in an imperialist campaign.
The refrain “Yes, America is imperialist, but so is the Islamic Republic” is not dialectics; it is false equivalence. It collapses the distinction between a global hegemon that structures the world market and a sanctioned regional state operating within that structure. In practice, this relativism functions as ideological cover for aggression and fragments opposition within the imperial core. At a moment of escalating confrontation, clarity is not optional: there is an imperialist war unfolding, and any discourse that obscures its principal axis objectively strengthens it.
These ideas and those who represent them might not be enunciated from our enemies, but they objectively align with imperialist policy and must be isolated, marginalized, and even fought against.
We at AWAS stand steadfast with the forces across the Middle East fighting imperialism. The situation is looking more and more like a war with a horizon beyond the spirit of our time. We call on all progressive forces in the imperial core to organize the largest front against imperialist aggression. However, we are not pacificists; we know the only way the people of Iran can be freed from imperialist aggression is through a revolution that would end the capitalist regimes in the West.
How long have we protested for a world beyond war, for a dream of a perpetual peace with cosmopolitan intent?2 It is time to become Marxist Realists and call instead for the preparation of resistance and defence against the war that imperialism has brought to our doorsteps. It is high time we organize the working class to defend themselves in the war imposed on them by their capitalist regime here at home.
- Scholars Strike for Liberation, “From Venezuela, the Caribbean to Iran: Capitalism, Imperialism, Sanctions and Protests,” YouTube, January 28, 2026, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qNreEQJkSu4. ↩︎
- In his book Perpetual Peace and essay “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose”,” Immanuel Kant presents an image of philosophical history in which humanity is maturing toward liberal democratic republics that would have to listen to their people to justify going to war. Kant thought this would produce a cosmopolitan world where, although all states would be advanced capitalist states there would be a state of perpetual peace among them. In the 20th century, many liberal theorists used this idea to argue that the liberal democratic societies of western Europe exhibit this phenomena (liberal democratic republics do not go to war with each other) and laid the groundwork for liberal interventionism in places like Vietnam and Iraq. It became clear that although Kant thought his perpetual peace was a regulative ideal, it functioned as the ideology of capitalist states as they organize the world according to the dictates of capital itself, and call those societies that resist it unliberal “authoritarian.” The regulative ideal of perpetual peace uses the protests in the West to create the notion about the West as a progressive liberal state worth preserving, as opposed to the terrible authoritarianism of all those who stand against it. For a full reading, please refer to Kant. ↩︎