What we are witnessing today in the expansion of wars on regional and transregional scales is not a sudden development, but an intensification of contradictions that had already manifested in other forms, including proxy wars. The issue is not the replacement of one form by another, but the dialectical coexistence and interweaving of multiple forms of war within the framework of a deeper crisis: the crisis in the total reproduction of capital.
In periods when capitalism was still capable of relatively containing its crises, proxy wars functioned as mechanisms for regulating contradictions and shifting costs. However, with the deepening of the accumulation crisis and the growing inability to reproduce normal conditions of profitability, these mechanisms are no longer sufficient. The result is not their disappearance, but their expansion and combination with more direct and extensive forms of violence. Proxy wars, direct wars, economic warfare, and geopolitical conflict now operate as a unified whole.
In this sense, the U.S. and Israeli war against Iran is not an exception, but one node within a global network of conflicts. From Ukraine to the Red Sea, from Lebanon to Africa, we are not dealing with isolated wars, but with a common logic: the transformation of the crisis of capital reproduction into a cycle of war, destruction, and coercive restructuring. This corresponds to what Lenin identified as imperialism—the stage at which global competition between capitals becomes competition between states, ultimately leading to war.
However, what we are witnessing today goes beyond the mere redivision of the world. It points to a deeper crisis—one that calls into question the very possibility of reproducing this division itself. Under such conditions, war becomes not only an instrument of expansion, but an expression of the inability to sustain the existing order.
Strategic chokepoints such as the Strait of Hormuz thus acquire heightened significance. These are not merely geographical passages, but material nodes of global capitalist reproduction, where energy flows, capital circulation, and geopolitical stability intersect. Disruptions in these nodes are immediately transmitted into global livelihood crises.
As Marx noted, capital produces not only commodities but also the conditions of its own reproduction. Yet under crisis conditions, this reproduction can no longer proceed normally. What emerges instead is not a stable new order, but a process of destruction, instability, and violent reconfiguration.
Destruction, therefore, must not be understood as a “solution” to crisis, but as its form of manifestation. As Rosa Luxemburg argued, capital accumulation requires continuous expansion into non-capitalist spheres; when this expansion is constrained, contradictions erupt explosively. Today, war has become one of the principal forms of this coercive expansion—yet not as a resolution, but as an intensification of crisis.
The current tendency is thus not toward a singular “world war,” but toward the globalization of war zones. The distinction between local and global war is collapsing, giving rise to a network of interconnected conflicts in which economic, political, and military dimensions operate as a unified totality. This can be understood as the militarization of social reproduction.
At the same time, this process is neither linear nor one-dimensional. Proxy wars have not disappeared; they now coexist with more direct forms of conflict. What has changed is their horizon: an increasing tendency toward expansion, interconnection, and transregional escalation.
In this context, the role of the working class must be understood materially. It is not merely a victim, but a force capable of disruption. This disruption does not arise from moral protest, but from intervention in the very nodes upon which capital reproduction depends: ports, energy industries, transport networks, and production centers.
As Sultan-Zadeh emphasized, the decisive force lies not at the level of states, but in the material organization of the working class.
Therefore, the response cannot remain at the level of abstract opposition to war. What is required is the construction of a real internationalist praxis: linking workers’ struggles across borders, breaking nationalist divisions, and transforming the struggle against war into a material force capable of disrupting the reproduction of capital.
In the absence of such a force, wars will not only continue, but intensify and expand. Yet within this crisis lies another possibility: that the very forces targeted by these wars may become the force capable of halting them.
Internationalist Workers Organization
10 April 2026
