Today, the world’s attention is fixed on Iran—not in the face of an ordinary political crisis, nor merely in continuation of waves of uprising drowned in blood, but upon Iran as a horrific killing field and the scene of a bloody war. The scale of this massacre is so shocking that it compels everyone to react; everyone says that something must be done. Yet for many of these powers, media outlets, and political forces, “doing something” means handing Iran’s fate over to bombers, foreign states, and regime-change projects. It is precisely here that the continuation of a dreadful historical tragedy is taking shape.
The horrific massacre carried out by one of the most ruthless states of global capitalism has once again shown that the savage Islamic regime recognizes no limits to its brutality. The recent massive uprising, in its own course—and at the very moment it became tied to hopes of salvation from above instead of organization from below—was transformed into a revolt that the regime managed to divert, framing it as part of a proxy war and turning city streets into a bloody battlefield against the insurgent people.
Now, at the very moment when the bodies of many victims of this massacre are still hidden in Islamic killing grounds; at the very moment when shock and mourning flow through the streets, the U.S. war machine is moving toward Iran. And once again, under these painful conditions, the criminals and murderers of thousands of protesting people—alongside the actors of the “help is on the way” scenario—are busy bargaining at the negotiation table: bargaining over a filthy deal to preserve the rule of the killers, or to launch yet another war to continue the slaughter. Today, the blood of thousands has become one of the cards in this dirty game of power and deals. The outcome of this process can be nothing but one of two possibilities: either a deal accompanied by symbolic military actions, or a bloody war whose main victims will once again be the enraged people.
The media of power and the merchants of the political marketplace are impatiently awaiting the transformation that is supposed to emerge from the negotiations. A transformation which, according to their promises, will turn Iran into a scene where destructive bombs and the explosion of the regime’s political and military centers will open the way for angry groups of people to storm the ruins of the Islamic despots, take revenge on criminals, and perhaps—through vengeance—heal the wounds etched into their hearts and bring the reign of blood and slaughter to an end. But this image, far from being grounded in lessons drawn from the catastrophic defeat of the blood-drenched uprising, is the product of the fantasies of powers and paid media. The catastrophe continues precisely from here.
What the U.S. president and his allies shouted—“help is on the way,” “seize political centers”—was not a message of solidarity, but a message of turning people’s blood into an instrument of geopolitical pressure. A process that reveals itself step by step after the massacre: deals at the top, slaughter at the bottom. What Trump and his right- and left-wing allies promote is not global solidarity, but participation in this deal; becoming actors on the political stage, alongside negotiation tables and battlefields, and turning into playing cards in the hands of global powers.
It is this tragic reality and historical political deadlock that has produced the re-alignment of political alternatives and the formation of their undeclared alliance today: a front on one side of which stand neo-fascists and nationalist forces of the “Iranian MAGA” movement, and on the other, bankrupt leftists thirsty for power and fame. A united front—open or hidden—around the logic of foreign intervention and the fantasy of freedom descending from the sky.
This bitter truth must be stated clearly: without an independent working-class pole, every social explosion—even the most heroic—will either be drowned in blood or expropriated. And today we stand precisely at the point where both dangers are simultaneously present: repression from within and war from without.
But the internationalist response begins exactly here. This regime must be consigned to the graveyard of history. Yet we must not allow the spilled blood of thousands to become a red carpet beneath the feet of new despots. Global powers and their allies are not forces of liberation; they are forces of power redistribution through war and deals. U.S. military action, just like regional maneuvers for negotiation, is not the end of the catastrophe but the beginning of another: civil war, proxy war, social collapse, and the reproduction of the slaughter on a larger scale.
Liberation does not descend from the sky: not from U.S. warships, not from Tel Aviv’s war rooms, not from the crowns and thrones of monarchists. Liberation rises from below: from the immense economic and social power of the working class. The only force capable of paralyzing the machinery of repression, shutting down the arteries of the economy, and depriving the regime of its ability to continue the massacre is the very class upon whose shoulders the production and reproduction of society rests. Those who believe transformation is possible through reliance on foreign powers are alien to this immense economic and social power.
The historical task today is to build this independent pole: political and organizational structuring, a general strike, linking economic and political struggle, and transforming scattered rage into class power. Not joining the war, not joining the deal, but rebuilding the horizon of liberation.
Our real front is the front of Iranian workers with workers of the world. The future of Iran will not be decided by regime-change projects, but by the independent organization of the proletariat. Only through this path can the massacre be halted, war repelled, and this savage regime consigned to history—not by bombs, but by social revolution.
Let us not allow the blood spilled on the streets to become a red carpet for new despots. Let us not allow this uprising to be turned into an instrument of power struggles and proxy wars.
By creating anti-war, anti-capitalist nuclei in neighborhoods and workplaces, let us transform the coming war of capitalist powers into a war against capitalism itself
February 2026
Internationalist Workers’ Organization