On: Middle East: Kuwait hit by missiles and drones

The drone and missile strikes in Kuwait - another link in the chain of imperial accumulation. Capital does not conquer for glory; it does so because stagnation is death. The Persian Gulf is no exception. The oil beneath its sands is not merely a resource - it is the lifeblood of industrial expansion, the surplus that must be pumped, refined, and consumed. When one artery clogs, another is seized. The US strikes in Iran, Iran’s retaliation, the missiles falling on Kuwait - this is not a clash of civilizations. It is the violent choreography of capital’s endless expansion, each move justified by security, by deterrence, by the sacred right of the market to flow unimpeded.

The reform trap here is the illusion of containment. The US calls its strikes “measured.” Iran calls its strikes “proportionate.” Kuwait is just collateral damage in the ledger of deterrence. But deterrence is never defensive. It is the preemptive strike against the possibility of true sovereignty - against any force that might say: no, this oil stays in the ground, this wealth belongs to the people who live above it. The entire region is a pressure cooker, and the heat is not accidental. It is the necessary condition for the extraction of surplus value on a planetary scale.

And what of the working class in Kuwait, in Iran, in the US? They are told this is about national honor, about security, about civilization. But the only civilization at stake is the one that treats human life as a variable cost in the equation of accumulation. The missiles do not fall on empty deserts. They fall on workers’ neighborhoods, on hospitals, on schools - on the very infrastructure that could be used to meet human needs instead of feeding the war machine.

The bureaucratic machines of empire and state are already calculating the next move. The oil will flow. The profits will be counted. The dead will be buried under headlines about “escalation management.” But where is the mass strike against this cycle? Where is the refusal of the working class to be cannon fodder for capital’s expansion? The spontaneous energy of the masses is the only force that can break this cycle - and yet it is precisely this energy that the bureaucracies of war and reform seek to suppress, to channel, to redirect into their own institutional logic.

Freedom in this world is the freedom of the war profiteer to sign another contract, the freedom of the general to deploy another drone. The test of any movement is whether it protects the dissenter who says: stop. But in the shadow of the missiles, dissent is already a crime.