Earlier this week I sat down with Yanis Varoufakis and Grace Blakeley on a livestream to ask a question I’ve been circling for weeks now – why is there so little resistance to this war in Iran, and what would it take to actually build it?
Events are now moving faster than any of us anticipated. Key oil and gas fields in the region are burning, the war has entered a dangerous new phase, and the pressure to act – as well as the cost of not acting – has increased sharply. I came away from the conversation with a few thoughts I wanted to set down while they’re fresh.
On winning the argument
First let me admit something: this entire conversation, including this piece, is still at the level of arguments. Which narrative works, which frame lands best. The left constantly assumes – and I’m as guilty of this as anyone — that the best argument wins. (I’ve written about the internal culture that produces this assumption.)
Well, it doesn’t. We can be completely right and still lose, because of poor organisation, internal fighting, or just bad strategy. The best argument is only part of the work. We also need the organisation to put it in front of the people who need to hear it — and a clear ask ready for when they do. We must not discount that.
On the outrage of the day
Both Grace and Yanis mentioned something that landed hard: the sense of powerlessness that comes from being angry about everything at once. The Epstein files, Gaza, the strikes on Iran... there’s a constant churn of outrage, with no obvious way to direct it.
Social media is optimised to produce precisely this kind of thinking: a new emergency every 24 hours. It gives us what feels like a front row seat at a pivotal moment in history, and does all it can to keep us right on it. With outrage after outrage splintering our attention, this makes it nearly impossible for any organiser to see a campaign through to its conclusion. And the Establishment, of course, benefits.
The answer is simple to state and hard to do: pick one fight we can win, and stay in it. Don’t get lost refreshing feeds, as I did after the livestream until 3am (yes, it’s hard). Play the long game; choose what not to be angry about today.
On winnable goals
The outrage question is about what we demand of ourselves. But in our livestream, we also talked about what we should be demanding of governments.
Many petitions and protest banners are calling to “stop the bombing” or “hands off Iran”. I understand the instinct. But movements need specific, achievable goals instead of big, overarching – and overwhelming – ones.
Martin Luther King didn’t campaign on everything at once. Chris Smalls (who I’ve interviewed) didn’t run a general labour campaign – he organised one Amazon warehouse around one set of demands. The QuitGPT boycott didn’t call for an end to AI or Big Tech — it picked one company, one contract, one ask.
The idea isn’t to find something easy, but rather something that concentrates attention. The most important shifts in history never started with a clear path to total victory. They started with a particular pressure point, and people willing to push it. The same logic applies here.
The good news is that when it comes to US actions in this new age of empire, the chain of complicity is now visible in a way it rarely is — the bases, the overflights, the data, the finance. That visibility provides an opening that many movements have not yet realised. We can call for no overflights through our airspace, no NATO assets for Hormuz operations. Some of these demands are already partially won — Spain has refused US base access and held firm under trade threats, and NATO rejected Trump’s call to join Hormuz operations. Those are the models.
On scale and mass movements
Grace spoke about the need for community, solidarity, larger structures — something that helps people feel powerful again. I hear this often, especially now: “they have the power, but we have the numbers”. It’s a very leftist vision, of the many vs the few.
I don’t disagree with it. But I’d challenge the assumption underneath it: that mass is the precondition for power.
The evidence is messier than that. One person impersonating Eli Lilly on Twitter crashed their stock and forced a national conversation on insulin pricing. Two people gluing themselves to a painting got more climate coverage in a week that most organised marches get in a year. Neither required a mass movement. Both required targeting, good timing, and nerve.
Yes, small actions don’t sustain a long campaign. And mass still matters for some goals. But a targeted action that works proves something more valuable: that action produces results. That’s what brings people back.
The almost-religious attachment to scale in activist circles often clouds strategy rather than sharpens it. The right question isn't “how do we grow?” It’s “what’s the smallest force capable of achieving this specific goal?" Those are different questions, and they lead to different campaigns.
On language and the pivot to affordability
We also talked about the focus on affordability – that once the war hits home (as it’s already doing – petrol prices are up 20% here in Greece), there will be an opening for people will act. And that this kind of material-first messaging (as opposed to the ethical or humanitarian argument about the horrors of war) is the way to go.
But the language has to match. The word “oligarchy” came up. Have you ever heard anyone, outside of a political science lecture, actually use that word in conversation? There’s a reason it doesn’t travel – it describes a system, not a cost. Now look at the title of the mass protests being organised in the US right now: “No Kings”. So simple a child gets it.
The move is the same in both cases: describe a feeling, not a system. Not “the oligarchs are taking over” but “everything is getting more expensive and here's who’s responsible.” Concede the moral baseline, then pivot hard to lived experience. Mamdani did it in New York. Polanski is attempting it in the UK. That’s the model.
A last thought I keep coming back to
The problem isn’t that we lack power. It’s that we’re not concentrating it. What fight, right now, builds the widest coalition around a shared material condition — and has a specific, verifiable target that can actually be won?
That’s the question I’d want every organiser watching the show to sit with. Not ‘how do we grow the movement’ — but: what’s the next concrete thing we can break?
The war is not waiting for us to figure this out.
Five things worth reading
- Eric Blanc on why there is no anti-war movement. He covers much of the same ground I do, but from a US organiser’s perspective – and has some valuable insights on mobilising vs organising.
- Micah Sifry makes the case that protests work. He charts 14 months of anti-Trump protest has produced measurable results. It challenges some of what I’ve been arguing. Worth reading.
- Iason Athanasiadis on the use of AI in the US-Israel war on Iran. Deep, well-researched, a vital read.
- Corey Robin on why the opinion shift on Israel has finally reached the point where it needs a concrete demand attached to it — and what that demand should be. I wrote about pushing this window open last June; Robin is asking what we do now that it has moved.
- Software developer Andy Allen on the joy of building slow. Nothing to do with Iran. Everything to do with how we should be thinking about the work.
From the archive
Vague demands don’t win campaigns. This piece from 2022 on why your demands need to be concrete and measurable is more relevant now than when I wrote it.
Mehran Khalili
One more thing
You can’t stop the war, but you might be able to stop one thing that enables it. Start there.