Oil flows through the Strait of Hormuz have largely been halted. Nationwide gas prices hit $4 a gallon on March 31, according to AAA.
Analysts warn prices could reach $6 or $7 in California by midsummer. The cause is the practical shutdown of the Strait of Hormuz, one of the main arteries through which global capitalism moves its energy supply.
The U.S. has been bombing Iran since late February. It has not reopened the strait. It is burning through weapons trying. These facts have led some bourgeois analysts to describe Iran as an emerging pole of power. That is a surface description, not a class analysis. Lenin’s analysis of imperialism shows what is actually at work.
Lenin defined imperialism as a stage of capitalism in which monopoly capital uses the state and its military power to control raw materials, markets and investment outlets.
The postwar order built by Washington — the petrodollar system, the network of bases and client states across West Asia, the carrier groups in the Persian Gulf — is how that power has been enforced.
Hormuz is the narrowest point in that system. Roughly a third of the world’s seaborne oil passes through it. Oil and petrochemicals from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the UAE, Iraq and Qatar move through that corridor. The dollar’s role in oil pricing — a pillar of U.S. financial dominance since the 1970s — rests in part on that flow staying open.
Iran is not an imperialist power in Lenin’s sense. It does not seek to carve up the world among monopolies. What it has done is position itself at the system’s weakest point. It has not seized the means of production. It has seized control over the movement of what imperialism most depends on.
Traffic through Hormuz has dropped by more than 90% since the war began. Iran has not physically blocked the strait — and it hasn’t had to. War-risk insurance has been pulled, and even occasional hits on tankers are enough to disrupt traffic. Modern capitalism runs on oil delivered on time, at scale and at predictable cost. Break that predictability, and the whole system starts to come apart.
Washington cannot restore that stability because the U.S. ruling class built a system to dominate global circulation, then stripped down the industrial base it now needs to wage war. The U.S. entered this war with thin stocks of key weapons, and by April multiple assessments said those inventories were hitting critical lows. These weapons are slow to make and hard to replace. That is not just a planning failure. It is the result of decades of gutting the industrial base.
Since the 1970s, the U.S. ruling class has shifted manufacturing overseas and driven investment toward financial returns instead of production. Defense contractors were reorganized around shareholder value, not industrial capacity. Weapons are built to be costly, not to be produced quickly or replaced in large numbers.
The result is a military that burns through irreplaceable inventory against an adversary using cheaper, asymmetric weapons and cannot replace it fast enough to keep up. Over four decades, the U.S. ruling class extracted so much value from the productive base that it weakened the very war machine on which its global power depends.
Iran did not create the contradictions now tearing U.S. imperialist strategy apart. Imperialism created them. Iran is exploiting them at the system’s most vulnerable point, patiently and at a fraction of the cost. Imperialism is capitalism in decay. As that decay deepens, the system grows more unstable and more dangerous. In the Strait of Hormuz, that is now plain to see.
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