The bourgeoisie governs through crisis, profits from catastrophe, and offers the masses a choice between reaction and ruin. The working class has begun to refuse, but it must also organize to achieve revolution.
Executive Committee of the Communist International
On May 24, 2026, the President of the United States told a reporter that there was a “fifty-fifty” chance he would make a deal with Iran or “blow them to kingdom come.” He said he would decide by Sunday.
This sentence, spoken by telephone from the White House, received without shock by the international press and reproduced as routine political news, is the distilled grammar of the epoch. The leader of the most powerful imperialist state announces, in the language of a gambler, that the alternative to his terms is the destruction of a nation of ninety million people. Three thousand Iranians are already dead. Thirteen U.S. soldiers are dead. The Strait of Hormuz has been closed for eighty-one days. Oil stands above $100 a barrel. Twenty percent of the world’s petroleum supply has been removed from the market. Fertilizer shipments have been disrupted in time for the planting season. The United Nations has warned of a new wave of food-price inflation across Africa and South Asia. The cost to the U.S. treasury exceeds $25 billion. The cost to the working class of every country on earth is beyond calculation.
The world holds its breath.
We do not hold ours. We have seen this before. The Executive Committee of the Communist International addresses the working class and all exploited people with an assessment of the international situation, not because the situation is novel, but because its acceleration demands that the class-conscious elements of the proletariat see clearly what is happening, name it accurately, and draw the necessary organizational conclusions.
I. War and the Logic of Empire
The war against Iran, launched on February 28 by joint American and Israeli strikes, is not an isolated event. It is the sharpest expression of a general crisis that has deepened without interruption since the financial collapse of 2008, and that has now entered a phase of open military violence among states and economic warfare against the global working class.
The stated pretext (Iran’s nuclear program) dissolved on examination years ago. The 2015 agreement, which Iran was verifiably complying with, was abandoned by the United States in 2018, not because Iran had violated its terms, but because it recognized Iran as a negotiating partner rather than a subject. The sanctions reimposed after withdrawal, the Israeli strikes of 2025, and the U.S. bombardment of 2026 form a single escalating sequence whose objective is not nonproliferation but subordination: the compulsion of a regionally significant state to accept its assigned place within the U.S.-managed order.
The closure of the Strait of Hormuz by Iranian forces on March 4 imposed costs that the U.S. economy, with its relative energy independence, could absorb (gasoline at four dollars a gallon is a political irritation in North America), but that the economies of the Global South could not. Gulf states lost an estimated $1.1 billion per day in oil revenue. Iraqi and Kuwaiti production was curtailed. Liquefied natural gas from Qatar ceased flowing. The price was paid by the textile factories of Bangladesh, the fishing fleets of East Africa, and the agricultural districts of South Asia, where fertilizer is manufactured from natural gas and where its price determines whether a smallholder can plant. The European Trade Union Confederation, representing 93 organizations in 41 countries, stated on May Day that working people refuse to pay the cost of this war.
The deal now under negotiation (if it materializes) will require Iran to surrender its enriched uranium, possibly to the United States itself, suspend its nuclear program, and reopen the Strait. In exchange, Washington will gradually lift sanctions and release frozen Iranian funds. The terms reproduce the structure of every unequal settlement imposed by imperial power on a defeated adversary since the treaties forced upon the Ottoman Empire and Qing China in the nineteenth century: the defeated party surrenders sovereignty over its own resources and, in return, receives the privilege of participating in a market controlled by the victor. That the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Senator Roger Wicker, denounced even a 60-day ceasefire as a “disaster” reveals that within the U.S. ruling class, there exists a faction that considers the war’s military destruction of Iran an end in itself, irrespective of any diplomatic settlement. The disagreement between this faction and the faction represented by the negotiators Witkoff and Kushner is not over the objective (both seek Iranian subordination) but over whether a dictated peace or continued bombing serves that objective more effectively.
The working class of all countries has no stake in either option.
II. The Offensive of Reaction
The war is waged by a government that represents the most aggressive consolidation of far-right power in the imperial core since the 1930s. But the U.S. situation is not exceptional.
In Argentina, Javier Milei, who has declared that in his government “there will be no cultural Marxism,” won the presidency in 2023 on an anarcho-capitalist platform and consolidated his position in the 2025 midterm elections with over 40 percent of the vote. His program is the purest expression of the bourgeoisie’s current ideological preference: the total commodification of social life, the destruction of public services, the elimination of labor protections, and the redirection of all social surplus to capital, accompanied by culture-war demagogy designed to fragment the working class along lines of gender, nationality, and religion.
In Chile, José Antonio Kast took office in March 2026, after winning the presidential runoff in December with 58.2 percent of the vote, defeating Jeannette Jara, the former labor minister in the Boric government. We do not pass over the significance of this lightly. Chile has returned to the right. Kast, who has described Pinochet’s dictatorship in qualified terms and whose political formation lies in the same current of Catholic-nationalist conservatism that provided the ideological scaffolding for the 1973 anti-Allende coup, now governs from La Moneda. The palace that burned under the bombs 53 years ago has been handed back to the reactionaries.
In Bolivia, the right-wing candidate Rodrigo Paz Pereira won the October 2025 presidential runoff, ending decades of dominance by the Movimiento al Socialismo. In Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro was seized by U.S. special forces on January 3, 2026, and transported to New York to face narcoterrorism charges. Whatever one’s assessment of the Maduro government, the spectacle of a foreign military force kidnapping the head of state of a sovereign nation and removing him to the territory of the kidnapping power for trial is an act of colonial violence without recent precedent. It was received in the bourgeois press with equanimity.
In Italy, Giorgia Meloni (whose party, Fratelli d’Italia, traces its lineage to the fascist Movimento Sociale Italiano) has governed since 2022. In Austria, the Freedom Party entered government under Herbert Kickl. In India, Narendra Modi continues to govern through a Hindu-nationalist apparatus that systematically marginalizes the Muslim minority, represses labor organizations, and dismantles the remnants of the Nehruvian welfare state while accelerating the transfer of public assets to a handful of monopoly capitalists. Across the European continent, formerly ostracized ethno-nationalist parties have entered governing coalitions or extracted concessions from centrist governments terrified of losing voters to anti-elite populism.
The pattern is not accidental. It is structural. When the rate of profit falls, when the contradictions of accumulation sharpen, when the living standards of the working class can no longer be maintained without cutting into the share of capital, the bourgeoisie faces a choice: redistribute downward or discipline the population. It has chosen discipline. The far right is the instrument of that discipline. It is not an aberration from liberalism but its emergency mode.
III. On the Illusions of Liberal Restoration
The defeats suffered by the far right in Hungary, France, and Italy in the spring of 2026 have produced a wave of cautious optimism in the liberal press. Let us examine what these defeats consist of and what they do not.
In Hungary, Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party was reduced from 135 seats to 55 in the April 12 elections, replaced by the Tisza party of Péter Magyar, which captured 138 of 199 seats, more than the two-thirds majority required to dismantle Orbán’s constitutional architecture. This is presented as a victory for democracy. It is a change of management. Magyar’s Tisza party is a center-right, pro-European formation whose program is the restoration of the institutional norms of EU liberalism: rule of law, media freedom, anti-corruption measures, integration into the structures of European capital. It is not a party of the working class. It does not propose to reverse the privatizations that impoverished Hungarian workers after 1989. It does not challenge Hungary’s membership in NATO, its subordination to European Central Bank monetary policy, or the fundamental class relations of Hungarian society. Orbán’s national-conservative authoritarianism and Magyar’s liberal Europeanism are not opposed systems. They are alternating strategies of bourgeois governance, and the working class is the object of both.
In France, centrist and left-leaning candidates won local elections in Paris, Lyon, and Marseille in March, defeating the National Rally’s bid for a municipal foothold. In Italy, Meloni lost a referendum on judicial reform, with 53.5 percent voting against, amid a higher-than-expected turnout. These are real setbacks for the far right, not victories for the working class. The forces that defeated Le Pen’s candidates are the same forces that imposed the 2023 pension reform over the largest protest movement in France since 1968. The forces that defeated Meloni’s referendum are, in substantial part, the forces of the Italian center-left, which governed for years while presiding over deindustrialization, austerity, and the erosion of labor rights. The working class is invited to celebrate the defeat of one enemy by the temporary success of another.
The Seventh World Congress of the Communist International, established in 1935, held that fascism and bourgeois democracy are not antithetical systems but alternating forms through which the bourgeoisie exercises its class rule. When the democratic form can no longer contain the contradictions of accumulation–when strikes intensify, when the masses radicalize, when the colonial periphery revolts–the bourgeoisie turns to fascism. When fascism exhausts itself, discredits itself, or becomes an obstacle to the international coordination that capital requires, the bourgeoisie restores the democratic form. Neither transition represents a change in the class character of the state. The worker who mistakes the replacement of Orbán by Magyar, or of Le Pen by Macron’s successors, has not yet understood the nature of the enemy.
IV. On Our Own Defeats
The Executive Committee does not issue assessments only of the enemy’s situation. We owe the working class an honest accounting of our own.
On May 4, 2026, the Left Democratic Front led by the Communist Party of India (Marxist) suffered a sweeping defeat in the Kerala state assembly elections. The LDF collapsed from 99 seats to 35. The CPI(M) was reduced from its position as the governing party to a rump of 26 seats. The Congress-led United Democratic Front captured 102 of 140 seats.
Kerala was the most significant territorial achievement of the communist movement in the democratic world. For a decade, under Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan, the LDF governed a state of thirty-five million people, implementing land reform, expanding public health infrastructure, maintaining secular governance, and demonstrating that a communist-led administration could deliver material improvements within the constraints of a bourgeois federal system. The loss of Kerala is not a tactical setback. It is a strategic defeat that the International must analyze with the seriousness it demands.
The immediate causes are legible: anti-incumbency sentiment in a state whose electorate has historically alternated between the two major fronts, the erosion of the LDF’s COVID-era mandate, specific policy failures and corruption allegations, and the inability of the CPI(M) to retain the loyalty of younger voters and sections of the working class drawn to the Congress party’s promises. These explanations are necessary, but alone they are not sufficient.
The deeper question is whether the model of communist governance within the institutions of the bourgeois state, without breaking the framework of capitalist production relations, can produce durable gains for the working class, or whether it inevitably reproduces the cycle of election, administration, exhaustion, and defeat that has defined the CPI(M)’s trajectory in Kerala and West Bengal alike. This question is not new. It has been debated within the International since the earliest congresses. The Kerala defeat sharpens it intolerably.
We will not pretend that this defeat does not affect us. It does. What we will not do is treat it as a reason for despair. The communist movement in India possesses organizational depth, cadre experience, and mass-organizational infrastructure that no electoral result can erase overnight. The task is not to mourn but to analyze, criticize, and reorganize. The International’s sections in India, and the E.C.C.I. itself, will undertake this work in the period ahead.
V. The Earth Burns and Capital Profits
The year 2026 is on course to be the warmest or second-warmest in recorded history. An El Niño event of potentially extreme intensity is forming in the tropical Pacific. In the first four months of the year, 150 million hectares of land have burned worldwide, 50% more than the recent average and double the area burned in 2024. In March, a heatwave struck the southwestern United States that climate scientists determined would have been “virtually impossible without human-induced climate change.” Deadly flooding has struck Kenya, Brazil, Peru, the United Arab Emirates, and Pakistan in the first five months of the year alone.
These are not natural disasters but the material consequences of a mode of production that treats the atmosphere as a waste dump and the biosphere as raw material. The destruction is distributed along class lines with a precision that would be remarkable if it were not so consistent. Heat kills five hundred and forty-six thousand people annually, according to UN estimates, overwhelmingly in the Global South, overwhelmingly among agricultural laborers, construction workers, street vendors, and the urban poor who have no access to cooling, no ability to stop working, and no insurance. The deaths are systematically undercounted because heat does not produce the visible images that trigger emergency funding.
The convergence of the war and the climate crisis at the point of food production deserves the attention of every section of the international community. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz disrupted not only petroleum but also the flow of natural gas from which nitrogenous fertilizer is manufactured. The UN warned in April that these disruptions threaten the next planting season across regions already stressed by drought, flooding, and soil degradation. War and climate change are not parallel crises. They are the same crisis, the crisis of a system that subordinates all human and natural resources to the requirements of capital accumulation and that has no mechanism, no incentive, and no capacity to stop.
The bourgeoisie’s response is instructive. Insurance companies, financial institutions whose entire business models depend on actuarial risk prediction, are withdrawing from markets where climate damage has become uninsurable. They are not denying the science. They are reading their own balance sheets. When capital itself can no longer price the risk of its own production system, the system has entered a phase of decomposition that no reform, no carbon market, no green bond, and no net-zero pledge will arrest. The Programme of the Communist International states that imperialism “tries to remove this contradiction by hacking a road with fire and sword towards a single world state-capitalist trust.” The fire is no longer metaphorical.
VI. The Masses Move
Against this panorama of war, reaction, ecological destruction, and political defeat, the Executive Committee records a countervailing fact: the working class has begun to move.
On March 28, 2026, an estimated eight million people participated in the third iteration of the No Kings protests across the United States, the largest sustained domestic protest movement in the imperial core in decades, directed against the concentration of executive power, the assault on democratic rights, and the Trump administration’s war against the working population.
On May 1, 2026, International Workers’ Day, more than three thousand events were held across the United States under the banner of May Day Strong, organized around the call “No Work, No School, No Shopping.” Five hundred labor unions, student organizations, and community groups participated. Over 100,000 students walked out of their schools. Twenty public school districts in North Carolina alone were forced to close due to staff absences.
Across Europe, May Day demonstrations filled the streets of Paris, Lyon, Lisbon, Rome, Athens, and Istanbul. From Seoul to Jakarta to Manila to São Paulo, workers marched. The theme was the same everywhere: wages, prices, war, and the distribution of the burden.
The International does not overstate the significance of these mobilizations. We have seen mass movements before (movements larger, more militant, and more politically coherent than those that exist today) and we have seen them defeated, co-opted, dispersed, and absorbed. The No Kings movement in the United States, for all its scale, lacks organizational structure, programmatic clarity, and class independence. It is a movement of refusal, but refusal alone has never been sufficient to change the conditions that produce what is being refused. The May Day mobilizations were impressive in their geographic breadth but uneven in their political content: some were militant labor actions; others were civic rituals with no follow-through.
The objective conditions for revolutionary politics are more favorable than at any point in decades. The crisis of capitalism is general and accelerating. The ruling class is divided between reaction and a liberalism that has nothing to offer. The working class is in motion across every continent. But the subjective factor–the party, the program, the international coordination, the revolutionary consciousness that transforms spontaneous resistance into organized political power–lags behind the objective situation. This gap is not a mystery. It is the legacy of a century of defeats, betrayals, repressions, and the International’s own errors and failures. Closing it is the central task of the communist movement in the present period.
VII. The Task
To the Sections operating in the imperialist core, movements must be deepened from protest into a political organization. The connection between war abroad and austerity at home must be made concrete in every workplace, every union branch, every neighborhood. The workers who marched on May Day must be organized into structures that survive the day’s enthusiasm.
To the Sections operating in the countries of the Global South: the convergence of the energy, food, and climate crises creates conditions of acute immiseration that will produce either organized working-class resistance or the further advance of reaction. The International’s task is to ensure that the former prevails. The agrarian question (land, water, seeds, energy, debt) remains the axis of struggle in most of the world.
To the comrades in India: the Kerala defeat demands an honest accounting rather than a defensive posture. The masses have not abandoned the communist movement. They have withdrawn their mandate from a specific government. The distinction matters. The work of analysis and reorganization begins now.
To all Sections: the International exists because the working class is international and its enemy is international. No national section can solve the crisis of the present period alone.
The bourgeoisie announces its intentions openly. Fifty-fifty, says the President: a deal or annihilation. The odds he offers are not his to set. They belong to the working class, which has not yet placed its bet–but which is, in its millions, approaching the table.
24 May 2026 Issued by the Executive Committee of the Communist International
Note: This article is part of an alternate-history literary project. The Communist International (Comintern) was dissolved in 1943 and no longer exists as an active organization. This text is a work of political fiction and satire. All factual claims about current events are based on verified reporting; the interpretive framework is fictional.
The Communist International 
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