Is the Iranian regime about to collapse? Protests in every major city suggest it’s possible and if so, not before time. For nearly fifty years the population has been crushed by a medieval theocratic dictatorship which has executed tens of thousands of political prisoners and Muslim ‘apostates’ (non-believers). All this in the wake of a revolution which rejected the hated western-backed shah, together with other western-associated concepts like freedom of thought and women’s equality. 

Now, because the regime has been printing excess money, the rial/dollar rate has gone from 42,000 in December to over 900,000 in mid-January. The biggest irony? Far from abolishing capitalism, some of the protesters are demanding the return of the shah’s son as ruler!/

Open discussion on recent events

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Recent media attention has focused on the Socialist Rifle Association (SRA), a US-based left-wing organisation promoting firearms training and “working-class armed self-defence,” after a Democratic Senate candidate in Maine was criticised for past posts encouraging people to join it. Reports suggest growing gun ownership among LGBTQ and left-liberal Americans driven by fear of political repression, while a Cato Institute FOIA request revealed the SRA is under FBI investigation. The SRA presents itself as a left-wing counterpoint to right-wing gun culture, framing firearms as tools for community defence and resistance to authoritarianism. However, this trend reflects not a coherent ideological shift but widespread anxiety produced by capitalism – economic insecurity, political polarisation, violent policing, and commodified security – conditions that push different social groups to arm themselves defensively.

This episode criticises the SRA’s use of revolutionary rhetoric, particularly selective quotations from Marx and implied links to Leninist traditions, arguing these ideas are taken out of their historical and theoretical context. Marx’s later view emphasised democratic, majority-led self-emancipation rather than armed minorities or vanguards, and the piece contends that firearms cannot resolve capitalism’s structural causes of insecurity and division. Drawing on historical examples and socialist theory, it argues that armed groups – left or right – reproduce capitalism’s logic of coercion and offer consumerist, individualised responses to systemic problems. Socialism cannot be achieved or defended by militias or vigilantes, but only through conscious, democratic, and mass political organisation; the SRA is therefore a defensive reaction to social breakdown rather than a genuine revolutionary alternative.

Taken from the January 2026 edition of The Socialist Standard.

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We’ll probably never know whether the kidnapping of Maduro has been timed to distract from Trump’s domestic political woes. What we do know is that this latest act illustrates the nonsense of the concepts of international law and national sovereignty.

When one mob within the global capitalist class perceives that its interests are threatened by another mob, it doesn’t take too long for the gloves to come off and the violence to begin.

The propaganda machine is up and running, claiming the kidnapping was about ‘stabilisation’ of the region and the orange clown saying that the US ‘will take care of the country’. Nonsense. It’s just another turf war in the gangster society we know as capitalism.

https://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/