Iran

Let's cut through the media fog and get to the point. The American attack in Baghdad which killed 10 people, including two Iranian politicians and Qassem Suleimani, a strong man of the Iranian regime, poses a series of problems to which we should give precise answers, even if based for now only on piecemeal information.

How to make sense of these mushrooming mass protests-cum-rebellions which have no clear class character, owe their lightening speed of organisation largely to the rallying capacity of social media, which have few distinct or established leaders and whose often contradictory demands are constantly changing and are now emulating each other?

On the morning of June 13, two oil tankers were attacked in the Gulf of Oman. One was the Front Altair, owned by the Norwegian company Frontline, but flying the flag of the Marshall Islands. It was carrying a cargo of ethanol from Qatar to Taiwan. The second was the Kokuka Courageous of the Japanese company, Kokuka Sangyo, flying the Panamanian flag which was carrying methanol from Saudi Arabia to Singapore.

To see the new phase of the crisis, which began with the bursting of the speculative bubble in 2008, as just a repeat of the same decades-long pattern of boom and bust, is a mistake. It is a gross misunderstanding of the impasse that capitalism has come to today.