Here we go again. The BBC and the rest of the Western media stenographers have set their sights to low Earth orbit, breathlessly reporting that some heavy machinery is shifting dirt and pouring concrete in the Iranian desert. According to the satellite-gazing apparatchiks, new trenches and reinforced structures are popping up near missile sites. Cue the synchronized gasping in the editorial boardrooms from London to Washington, where well-tailored commentators who have never so much as swung a pickaxe or operated a skid-steer suddenly become tactical experts in the art of subterranean warfare.
On any job site from Liverpool to Pittsburgh to Tehran, a worker knows what digging a hole means: it means dust in your lungs, busted knuckles, and an aching back for a paycheck that barely covers this week’s groceries. But when viewed through the proprietary lens of corporate-funded defense think tanks, earthworks cease to be human labor and magically transform into a cassus belli. The corporate press does not see concrete, steel rebar, and the exploited labor of the Global South; they see a pretext to grease the skids of the global arms bazaar.
Antonio Gramsci warned us long ago about the cultural hegemony of the ruling class, that suffocating consensus where the interests of capital are laundered as common sense. When our masters look up at satellite photos of Iran, the hegemonic apparatus kicks into high gear. We are instructed to fear the concrete bunker five thousand miles away, even as our own bridges crumble, our public transport collapses, and our emergency rooms run out of beds. It is the classic imperial sleight of hand: point across the ocean at an external enemy so the workers at home forget about the landlord hiking their rent and the boss wage-thefting their overtime.
Let us be entirely clear about the class dynamics at play here. The ruling class in Tehran, insulated by oil wealth and religious authoritarianism, is not an ally of the international proletariat. They crush strikes, throw independent trade unionists into Evin prison, and enforce brutal austerity while their domestic oligarchs fatten themselves on state contracts. Their military posturing and subterranean construction projects do nothing to lift the Iranian working class out of the misery wrought by decades of Western sanctions and domestic capitalist exploitation. The workers dig the bunkers, but the mullahs and generals sit in the air-conditioned boardrooms.
Yet the response from the Western imperial core is even more cynical. Every high-resolution snapshot published by establishment outlets serves as an unsolicited pitch deck for Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and BAE Systems. When the press prints these satellite images with grave warnings about missile capabilities, share prices bump on the stock exchange. The defense contractors pop champagne, the Pentagon lobbies for another trillion-dollar allocation out of our stolen tax dollars, and the working class is told that there is simply no money left to fix the potholes, staff the schools, or fund universal healthcare.
I spent years on the shop floor as a union steward, listening to management tell us with a straight face that the company could not afford a two-percent cost-of-living raise. Then you would look at the capital expenditure reports and see hundreds of millions allocated for vanity projects and shareholder buybacks. The geopolitical landscape works on the exact same grift, just blown up to the scale of continents. Our rulers tell us the cupboard is bare for the working class, but the minute a private satellite spots an Iranian backhoe breaking ground, the treasury doors fly wide open for the procurement of bunker-busting bombs.
War is, and has always been, the ultimate racket of the capitalist order. It destroys excess capital, violently resets markets, and disciplines the domestic working class under the false banner of national unity. We are living through what Gramsci called the interregnum, where the old imperialist order is dying and the new one cannot yet be born, creating a terrifying terrain of morbid symptoms. These satellite photos, transformed into war propaganda by the bourgeois press, are precisely that kind of morbid symptom.
The task of the working class in the West is not to line up behind the war hawks or swallow the manufactured panic fed to us by billionaire-owned news outlets. Our duty is class solidarity across national borders. The concrete finishers and heavy-equipment operators in Iran have far more in common with a machinist in Manchester or a forklift driver in Detroit than either does with their respective ruling classes. We must refuse to let the bosses turn construction projects into battlefields, and we must demand that every penny earmarked for foreign slaughter be stripped from the defense vultures and returned to the hands that built this world.