Black Lodges || The current escalation against Iran by the United States and its allies demands careful attention. It would be misleading to suggest that I have not been closely following developments, attempting to discern the dynamics in play, and engaging in discussion with colleagues and friends who are similarly attentive; much of the reflection that follows emerges from these exchanges. It bears emphasising that understanding and interpreting events of this magnitude is rarely, if ever, a solitary endeavour. Analysis of complex geopolitical processes requires collective reflection and dialogue.
The purpose here is not to catalogue what is occurring or to speculate on possible trajectories, but rather to consider the implications for action, particularly for those who regard anti-imperialist engagement as more than rhetorical or digital expression. Given the patterns of the last twenty-five years, marked by the escalating violence, unaccountable decision-making, and systemic irresponsibility of the ruling capitalist class, there is little room for treating these developments with anything less than gravity.
While it may appear unusual to consider events through the lens of individual agency, the circumstances demand recognition of the stakes involved. If the work of those committed to resisting imperial domination is to retain significance, it must confront directly the structural and material consequences of these global power dynamics. Engagement in such a context is not simply a matter of ethical alignment or opinion, but of evaluating what forms of resistance, intervention, and solidarity are feasible and necessary within the constraints imposed by global political and economic hierarchies.
Before any position on Iran can be meaningfully articulated, it is necessary to recognise that anti-imperialism, understood not as an identity or moral stance but as a political commitment, is defined by its translation into action rather than by interpretation or evaluation.
Anti-imperialism occupies a central place within revolutionary socialist theory not as an optional ethical commitment or a secondary foreign-policy preference, but as a structural necessity arising from socialism’s analysis of capitalism as a global system. If socialism seeks the transformation of capitalist social relations, then it must confront not only exploitation within national economies but also the international mechanisms through which capitalism stabilises, expands, and reproduces itself. Imperialism, in this framework, is not an external distortion of capitalism; it is one of its essential operating conditions.
The classical formulation of this relationship appears most clearly in the work of Lenin, who described imperialism as the stage of capitalism characterised by monopoly capital, financial domination, the export of capital, and the division of the world into spheres of influence. While elements of this analysis have been revised and debated, the core insight remains essential within our revolutionary socialist thought: advanced capitalist economies rely upon unequal global relations to sustain accumulation, manage crises, and mitigate domestic instability [the ‘stages theory’ of history embraced by Political Marxists is generally discredited; their inability to reconstruct their politics would appear to account for their hostility towards James C. Scott in particular. Ahistorical 19th century dogma dies hard amongst those who would have statues of themselves built in public parks – CA].
From this perspective, imperialism performs several functions that make anti-imperialism strategically indispensable to revolutionary politics.
By extracting value through unequal trade, debt regimes, resource control, and geopolitical leverage, advanced economies are able to sustain higher living standards, social stability, and political legitimacy at home. This externalisation of exploitation helps to blunt class conflict within the core. Revolutionary socialism, which depends upon the development of class consciousness and material contradiction, cannot ignore the ways in which imperial privilege moderates domestic unrest and ties sections of the working population to the global hierarchy.
This dynamic was central to the theory of the “labour aristocracy,” later developed by Rosa Luxemburg and others, who argued that a portion of workers in imperial centres benefit materially from global inequality. Anti-imperialism, in this sense, is not primarily an expression of international solidarity as a moral ideal; it is a condition for breaking the material and ideological integration of workers into imperial capitalism.
Revolutionary socialism is grounded in the idea that capitalism is a world system and that its overthrow ultimately depends upon international struggle. Imperial relations, however, structure the world into hierarchies of power, dependency, and development, producing divergent material interests and political conditions across regions. Military intervention, sanctions, regime change, and economic coercion weaken labour movements in targeted countries, destroy state capacity, and often replace social conflict with conditions of survival.
Capitalist economies are structurally prone to over-accumulation, falling profitability, and stagnation. External expansion, through new markets, resource access, financial penetration, and geopolitical control, has historically served as a means of absorbing surplus capital and deferring crisis. This means that imperial expansion is not an episodic policy choice but a systemic response to internal contradiction. Any project aimed at confronting capitalism domestically must therefore address the external strategies through which the system stabilises itself.
Imperialism is sustained not only by economic and military power but also by narratives of civilisational hierarchy, humanitarian intervention, national security, and moral responsibility. These narratives frame external coercion as necessary, benevolent, or inevitable, and they cultivate identification between domestic populations and the global interests of their ruling classes. The result is a political culture in which opposition to foreign intervention appears unpatriotic, naïve, or morally suspect.
For revolutionary socialism, which depends upon the political independence of the working class, this ideological integration poses a significant obstacle. Anti-imperialism becomes essential not only to challenge external domination but also to disrupt the identification between workers and the geopolitical ambitions of their own states.
Historically, many of the most significant anti-capitalist upheavals have occurred in regions shaped by colonial or semi-colonial domination and uneven development produces explosive social contradictions in the periphery, where imperial pressure intersects with local class conflict. If imperial power intervenes to contain or reverse such processes, the possibility of systemic rupture is reduced. Supporting struggles against imperial domination therefore becomes part of a broader strategy of weakening capitalism at its global fault lines.
In this sense, anti-imperialism connects the local and the global dimensions of revolutionary politics. It challenges the material foundations of capitalist stability, disrupts ideological consent, and affirms the principle that socialism cannot be realised within one national framework while the broader system of global domination remains intact.
For revolutionary socialism, then, anti-imperialism is important not primarily because it expresses solidarity, although solidarity follows from it, but because it addresses the structural conditions through which capitalism reproduces itself on a world scale. Without it, socialism risks becoming either nationally confined, materially dependent on global inequality, or politically reconciled to the very system it seeks to overcome.
Again, before any position on Iran can be meaningfully articulated, a more fundamental question requires examination: what does it entail, in practice rather than in sentiment, to identify as anti-imperialist? Considered not as an identity or moral orientation but as a political commitment, anti-imperialism cannot be reduced to interpretation, evaluation, or the cultivation of critical distance. Its coherence depends upon its relation to action.
This tension between interpretation and practice runs throughout the work of Karl Marx and is most succinctly captured in the well-known formulation:
“The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.”
The proposition is frequently cited as a rhetorical device, yet its theoretical implications are exacting. It challenges the adequacy of analysis detached from consequence and questions the assumption that political understanding is complete once a balanced or informed opinion has been reached. Within this framework, the significance of a political position lies less in its moral refinement than in its practical orientation: which forces it reinforces, which structures it legitimises, and which relations of power it leaves intact or seeks to transform.
When applied to contemporary discussions of imperialism, this perspective exposes a recurring displacement. A considerable portion of debate among those who consider themselves critical of Western power centres on the internal characteristics of states targeted by imperial pressure. Iran, in particular, is frequently positioned as an object of moral scrutiny: the nature of its political system, the repressive dimensions of its governance, the ideological character of its leadership, and the degree to which its domestic order merits approval or condemnation.
However, such a framework risks mislocating the primary site of political responsibility. For those situated within the advanced capitalist core, the decisive question cannot be confined to evaluative judgments about the Iranian state. Rather, attention must be directed towards the material practices of their own governments and ruling classes: economic sanctions, financial exclusion, diplomatic isolation, military encirclement, covert destabilisation, and the persistent normalisation of strategic threat.The central political task is therefore not the production of morally satisfying assessments of Iran’s internal order, but the contestation of the imperial apparatus operating in one’s own name.
This reorientation becomes more pressing when the epistemic conditions under which knowledge about Iran is produced are considered. For most observers within Western societies, direct familiarity with Iranian social and political life is limited. Available information is mediated through institutional environments embedded within states that have, for decades, formally defined Iran as an adversarial power and pursued policies aimed at its containment, transformation, or strategic weakening. Media representation, expert analysis, policy discourse, and think-tank commentary are not generated within a politically neutral informational field. Their selection, emphasis, and framing occur within a geopolitical context structured by antagonism.
Such an observation does not imply that all criticism of the Iranian government is unfounded. It does, however, suggest that the moral landscape presented to Western audiences is necessarily selective and strategic. Certain forms of repression or social conflict are foregrounded, while others, particularly those produced or intensified by sanctions and external pressure, receive comparatively limited attention. The cumulative effect is the production of a moral consensus that aligns, often implicitly, with existing imperial policy orientations.
Within this context, moral judgement cannot be assumed to function independently of ideological reproduction. Interpretation, when detached from an analysis of power, risks becoming politically inert or, in some instances, politically functional for the very structures it appears to critique. A politics organised around observation and evaluation alone may enable a sense of ethical engagement while leaving the material mechanisms of domination entirely undisturbed.
The resulting configuration resembles a form of geopolitical spectatorship. One expresses concern regarding the Iranian state, debates its legitimacy, and refines one’s critical position, while the concrete processes of economic coercion and strategic pressure continue largely uncontested and yet the imperial state most directly accountable to the observer encounters little sustained opposition.
From an anti-imperialist perspective, this inversion of priority is analytically and politically problematic. The principal responsibility of those located within imperial centres lies not in the moral adjudication of targeted states but in the disruption, de-legitimation, and limitation of their own states’ capacity to project coercive power externally.
Read in this light, Marx’s injunction acquires renewed relevance. The operative question is not what position one holds regarding Iran as a distant object of analysis, but what relation one maintains to the imperial policies enacted by one’s own political and economic institutions.
Once framed in these terms, the limited political significance of many Western debates about Iran becomes apparent. Whether one regards the Iranian government as reformist or authoritarian, progressive or reactionary, does not alter the material reality of economic strangulation through sanctions. Nor does moral approval or disapproval affect the strategic objectives underpinning policies of containment. Personal ethical positions, however carefully formulated, do not in themselves constrain imperial power; only organised opposition to the mechanisms through which that power operates possesses such capacity.
Moreover, sustained emphasis on Iran’s internal character may function, intentionally or otherwise, as a justificatory discourse for external coercion. When a state is constructed primarily through the language of repression and illegitimacy, economic punishment and diplomatic isolation can be reframed as necessary or even humanitarian measures. In this way, moral discourse risks serving as a conduit through which imperial strategies acquire normative legitimacy.
To claim an anti-imperialist position while reproducing this logic entails a conceptual inconsistency. Anti-imperialism does not require endorsement of the political systems of states subject to Western pressure. It does, however, require the refusal to grant one’s own ruling class the authority to discipline, restructure, or economically asphyxiate other societies.
The argument becomes more demanding at this point. If imperialism is understood as a structural relation of domination, then opposition to it cannot be conditional upon the perceived moral adequacy of its targets. Imperial power does not select objects of intervention on the basis of democratic standards but according to strategic alignment and geopolitical utility. To oppose imperialism only where the targeted state conforms to particular ideological expectations risks transforming anti-imperialism into a form of selective moralism rather than a consistent political position.
For those located within the imperial core, the practical implications are consequently modest in appearance but significant in effect. Anti-imperialist practice is oriented primarily towards domestic political terrain: opposition to sanctions regimes, resistance to military escalation, critique of informational narratives that prepare public consent for confrontation, and sustained attention to the economic and strategic interests that underlie foreign policy.
Such a politics offers little of the moral clarity associated with identifying virtuous or villainous regimes abroad. Its focus is instead directed towards the forms of structural violence embedded within one’s own state, economy, and informational environment.
In this respect, Marx’s formulation may be read as a warning. Understanding global inequality, geopolitical conflict, or imperial strategy without engaging the institutions through which these are enacted risks collapsing critique into accommodation. In the case of Iran, this suggests that Western moral positions regarding the character of the Iranian state, however nuanced or well intentioned, remain politically secondary to the question of whether one’s own society contributes to its economic and strategic coercion.
If anti-imperialism is to retain analytical and political coherence, it must therefore begin at this point: not with the judgement of societies subjected to imperial pressure, but with sustained efforts to constrain the capacity of one’s own capitalist state to act imperially. Only under such conditions does critical interpretation move beyond description and assume the character of practical transformation.
Discover more from Class Autonomy
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
