The War will end
The leaders will shake hands
The old woman will keep waiting for her
Martyred son
The girl will wait for her
Beloved husband
And those children will wait for their hero father
I do not know we sold our homeland
But I saw who paid the price.
Palestine’s national poet Mahmoud Darwish in these lines expressed in the most soaring and stark ways the realities and injustice of dispossession, rootlessness of refugees and the ache of belonging to one’s land. Words are often the only weapon available to fight back, finding the power to shape perception. In terms of perception, Trump seemed to have suffered at home because of the war while Netanyahu seems to have bolstered his strongman image at home. Several surveys in both these countries indicate this. Some in US are even demanding Trump’s impeachment. The only way out for him is a deal with Iran that helps fill the US’s coffers. The US will go for mid-term poll in September and Israel will hold elections in October this year. Can the two leaders be capable of offering an honest answer?
War is often narrated through maps, missiles and men in power. It is framed as strategy, deterrence or survival- especially in a volatile axis involving the US, Israel and Iran. Yet, as Darwish reminds us, the true ledger of war is not written in treaties but in absence: the empty chair at dinner, the unanswered call, the long wait that never ends.
The ongoing US-Israel-Iran conflict is not a clash of civilizations, religious essences or abstract political ambitions in a vacuum. Scientifically, it is rooted in the material contradictions of global capitalism, the struggle for control over resources, strategic geopolitical dominance and the reproduction of bourgeois power amid declining profitability and inter-imperialist rivalries. The wages of war are the human cost, economic disruption and ideological fog that fall overwhelmingly on the proletariat and oppressed masses, sacrificed on the altar of capital accumulation and ruling class survival. Scientifically, history is driven by class struggle with modes of production shaping social relations, states and conflicts. Monopoly capitalism leads to the division of the world among great powers, export of capital and inevitable wars for redivision when contradictions sharpen.
In this conflict the US, as the declining hegemony of late capitalism, seeks to maintain unchallenged to Middle Eastern energy resources and prevent any challenge to dollar dominance or its regional outpost (Israel). Strikes aimed at regime change and crippling Iran’s missile nuclear programmes serve to secure oil flows and deter rivals like china and Russia, who have economic ties Iran. Israel functions as a settler-colonial outpost of western imperialism, its expansionist policies (settlements, regional strikes) tied to securing buffers and resources while suppressing Palestinian resistance –a classic divide-and-rule mechanism that fragments the regional working class. Iran, a theocratic capitalist state with its own bourgeois layers, resists as a regional power defending its sphere of influence through proxies. Its axis of resistance is not proletarian internationalism but national bourgeois maneuvering within the imperialist system- anti-US in rhetoric, yet fully capitalist in exploiting its own workers and peasants.
The 2026 escalation, following earlier exchanges in 2024-2025, disrupted global shipping through Hormuz, spiked oil prices and caused billions in damage- hallmarks of how inter-capitalist rivalries socialize costs while privatizing gains for arms manufacturers, energy conglomerates and military contractors.
There is no aberration; capitalism’s tendency towards over accumulation and falling profit rates drives militarism as a ‘spatial fix’ (Harvey) or outlet for surplus capital. Wars become necessary to destroy excess capacity, open new markets and discipline labour.
The death of people sacrificed at the altar of political ambition is scientifically demystified as such ambition is not individual pathology or heroic folly but the structural logic of the ruling class. The bourgeoisie (US policymakers, Israeli elites, Iranian theocrats) do not sacrifice their own in equal measure; they mobilize the proletariat- workers, peasants, conscripts, civilians-as cannon fodder while insulating themselves. Millions displaced, economies shattered and global ripple effects (fuel shortages, inflation) hit the poorest hardest. These are not collateral damage but the inevitable byproduct of capitalist war, the devaluation of human life when it belongs to the propertyless class.
Scientifically, humanism insists on the concrete suffering of the masses. The dead are not abstract statistics but workers, whose labour power was exploited in life and expended in death for alien interests-securing pipelines, deterring revolutions or propping up nationalist myths. Iran’s working class, already strained by sanctions and internal repression, faces heightened misery; Palestinian and Lebanese proletarians bear the proxy brunt; even US-Israeli soldiers(often from working class backgrounds) die for empire. This is the wages of war-surplus value extracted, then bodies expended, to resolve capitalist contradictions temporarily. Rulers on all sides frame it ideologically- ‘self-defense’, ‘regime change’, ‘resistance’-to obscure class reality. Yet the altar is capital: arms profit soar, while the international working class pays in blood and poverty.
Throughout world history, wars have followed this pattern. The Crimean war, American Civil War and Franco-Prussian war serve ruling class consolidation, resource grabs or deflection of internal class tensions, while propagandists elevate ‘heroes’ and obscure the mass sacrifice. Roman conquests, Mongol invasions, crusades were lionized as heroes expanding civilization or faith. Millions of peasants and slaves died-sacrificed for tribute, land and slave labour. None threatened to wipe out a civilization in the total sense; they subjugated or assimilated, as the mode of production demanded living labour. Napoleonic wars glorified liberators while devastating European proletarians and colonial subjects. World War I killed millions of workers in trenches for colonial revision and capital export. World War II saw fascist and allied and allied leaders portrayed existential saviors, yet it was monopoly capital’s crisis(Great Depression) manifesting in total war-tens of millions dead, including genocides as extreme accumulation by dispossession. The atomic bombings and firebombings came closest to wiping out civilizations enabled by industrialized capitalism’s productive forces turned destructive.
Science rejects the ‘great man’ theory. Heroes are bourgeois constructs; the true historical agents are classes. The sacrificed mankind – proletarians across borders- have repeatedly shown potential for transcendence, as in the Paris Commune, Russian Revolution or anti-colonial struggles where class consciousness turned war into civil war against exploiters. Critically, this US-Israel-Iran war reveals capitalism’s barbarism in its senile phase- unable to resolve its crises peacefully; it exports destruction while the ruling classes of all sides share a material interest in suppressing their domestic working classes. Iran’s theocracy exploits anti-imperialist rhetoric to crush internal dissent (workers’ strikes, women’s protests); the US/Israel use democracy and security to mask domination.
A genuine scientific response rejects both ‘campism’ (uncritical support for Iran as anti-imperialist) and social chauvinism (backing our bourgeoisie). The task is revolutionary defeatism. Workers in the US/Israel should oppose their own ruling class’s war efforts through strikes and sabotage; Iranian workers should fight their theocratic capitalists without inviting imperialist liberation which only strengthens reaction. The only just war is the class war-international proletarian solidarity against the global bourgeoisie.
History bears testimony to this that no war has ended exploitation; only socialist revolution can. The wages of war will continue mounting –more dead at the altar-until the working class seizes the means of production, abolishes classes and ends the system that turns human labour and life into commodities for profit. This analysis demands action in terms of building independent working class organizations across borders, exposing the material roots and fighting for a world where no civilization or human is threatened by the imperatives of capital.
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