On October 1st the IDF invaded Lebanon with the brutal objective of creating a security belt south of the Litani river. The Lebanese army withdrew, with some return fire, from the ‘blue line’, and hours later Iran launched retaliatory missile attacks with some piercing Israel’s various anti-missile systems. For Iran, the killing of Hassan Nasrallah was the final straw following the assassinations of Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran and many IRGC generals. During the preceding weeks, the Israeli secret intelligence agency, Mossad, had sabotaged comms devices, assassinating Hezbollah militants, killing and injuring hundreds of civilians in the process, to cause disarray in Hezbollah’s chain of command. The Lebanese death toll already includes over two thousand civilians, and Israel has lost dozens of soldiers, though undoubtedly one of the greatest catastrophes is the more than 1.2 million displaced within Lebanon.

Ever since the war in Ukraine, the world has seen a sharp rise in imperialist tension the world over, indicating a push towards generalized war. Lebanon is notably important in this development. The roots of this clash span almost a century, though the systemic cause remains imperialism as a condition of capitalism. Following political conflicts within Lebanon in the 70s, Israel invaded in 1982 with US support to dismantle Palestinian and pro-Palestinian groups. The IDF met with disappointment and eventual defeat. Israel remained in South Lebanon until 2000, after Hezbollah’s offensive left them in disarray, and the IDFs occupation failed to halt the missiles fired into Israel. Hezbollah’s integration into mainstream Lebanese politics as a result of this historic role is now backfiring in the midst of growing political and economic crises, with blame piling at their feet. The economy is fragmented; like Lebanon’s political system, sectarian parties circle over workers and what few scraps of capital can be salvaged like vultures after carrion. Far from any alternative for the working class, Hezbollah demands the proletariat to march on behalf of bourgeois power politics.

Since their exit from Lebanon, Israel has maintained Hezbollah as one of their great boogeymen, alongside Iran and Hamas. It has become a convenient tool for the ruling class to continue forcing their workers into a siege mentality. These boogeymen can be repeatedly invoked to push away perennial crises and their symptoms. For example, Netanyahu’s exorbitant corruption and the mounting housing crisis are key issues that the capitalists can ‘solve’ by pointing at these adversaries and forcing workers to the front lines to kill other workers. This is how the ruling class can justify its endless siege on Gaza, and how they can continue rationalizing the thousands of dead piling up in the streets. However, the problems that generalized war aims to solve are systemic in nature; with or without Hamas or Hezbollah, the Israeli ruling class (like any other imperialist power) will always feel the pressure to turn to war when the contradictions of capital begin mounting.

While many workers around the world are preoccupied by calls for ceasefires, the historical basis for this conflict precludes any long term peace, because it lies at the root of capitalism. So long as the accumulation of capital is the ultimate necessity, it creates the ultimate political means to send workers to the front lines, alongside all the horrors that can be found there, including genocide. Therefore, only the total defeat of capitalism at the hands of the international working class can truly end the atrocities before our eyes. For both Israel and Hezbollah, workers are variables on a balance sheet, and whether in peacetime or war time, workers are always held by the throat to preserve bourgeois order, either offensively or defensively.

It is also far more than just a localized conflict, as it unfolds at the intersection of imperialist blocs. For instance, the US is dependent on Israeli technical aid for waging war in the Middle East; Israel sees this and Iran's current weakness as the golden opportunity to deliver a serious blow against Iran’s ‘Axis of Resistance’. As a result, the US has no other option than to support Israeli aggression ensuring even greater mayhem and working-class bloodshed the world over. It should not be forgotten also, that although Iran is recoiling for the moment, the option of total war may seem preferable to its ruling class over death by a thousand cuts from its proxies being knocked out one by one. Such an unfolding would therefore open a second major confrontation between a US led bloc, and the alliance of convenience between Russia and Iran; given that any such conflict would take place across the intermediary country of Iraq, no ‘great power’ would sit around while the havoc unfolds.

It is in times of crisis such as these that communism (a world without borders, states and exploitation) offers an antidote to war. To fight for it workers around the globe must assemble on an international platform and mobilize for the defeat of all nations as part of their revolutionary objective to overthrow capitalism once and for all. Workers must struggle against domestic war efforts through the combined strategy of strikes, stoppages, and slowdowns on a political basis. Workers in Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, Iran, Europe, America, etc., can cease the rain of hell upon our class brothers and sisters by these means, but only if this becomes a revolutionary assault against the bourgeois state can capitalist barbarism be ended for good. As the world revolutionary wave of 1917-1921 sparked in Russia showed us, the mass organization of the international working class can not only provide an effective opposition to war but kick it into the dustbin of history.

No War but the Class War! Workers of the World Unite!