Mainstream Weekly17 August 2026
Consider the Strait of Hormuz. A narrow passage between the Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean, it carries roughly one-fifth of global petroleum supply. Any disruption there-a seized tanker, a mine, a military escalation-sends immediate shockwaves through oil prices, shipping insurance, stock markets, and geopolitical alliances. Why does a single waterway have such enormous leverage over the global economy? The answer reveals something fundamental about how capitalism itself has changed over the past several decades.
It used to be said that the struggle for more economic and political equality had to be based in the workplace, in the factory. The old picture was straightforward: exploitation happened where labor was organized; solidarity formed through shared work; emancipation began when workers recognized their common interests and transformed the relations of production. The workplace was the primary arena of political struggle.
That picture no longer accurately describes the world we live in. Over the past several decades, it has become ever clearer that the control of circulation mechanisms has become even more important to the creation of economic value than the control of production itself. The ability to make goods still matters, but production itself has become dependent on vast infrastructures that determine whether goods, capital, energy, information, and finance are permitted to move. The central question is no longer simply who owns the factory. It is who controls the shipping routes, financial clearing systems, digital platforms, energy corridors, ports, sanctions regimes, and maritime security on which every modern economy depends.
Contemporary capitalism, as Charles Taylor states, rests on two inseparable foundations: trade and security. Markets cannot exist without secure routes through which goods, capital, and information circulate. Shipping depends on naval protection. Finance depends on trusted payment systems. Digital commerce depends on stable communications infrastructure. Insurance, maritime law, logistics, and geopolitical stability are not secondary supports of capitalism—they are among its constitutive conditions. Production creates value, but circulation determines whether that value can exist economically at all.
The Strait of Hormuz is simply the most vivid and current example of this larger transformation. Its strategic importance shows that contemporary power increasingly lies in the ability to regulate circulation, rather than production itself. This is not a regional curiosity; it is a window into a broad shift that has reshaped global capitalism over the past several decades. Across the world, many of the most influential companies achieve their dominance less through ownership of factories and more through control over networks, logistics, platforms, data, and market access. If you control the infrastructure—the payment systems, the shipping routes, the digital platforms—you can launch companies like Amazon or Meta and turn them into global financial giants. Their success presupposes stable trade routes, secure financial systems, reliable communications, and political orders capable of sustaining international exchange.
This shift also helps explain why Iran occupies an unusual position in contemporary geopolitics. Whether through its geographic location, its regional alliances, or its ability to threaten maritime routes and energy flows, Iran holds leverage that cannot be understood through labor theory alone. The country’s strategic importance derives less from its factories and more from its position within the infrastructures through which the global economy operates. Political conflict therefore occurs not only through armies or workplaces, but through sanctions, financial restrictions, shipping routes, insurance markets, ports, and energy networks.
The experience of ordinary Iranians reflects this transformation directly. Economic hardship is certainly connected to labor, but it is experienced just as acutely through inflation caused by sanctions, restrictions on international banking, currency instability, disruption in trade, and uncertainty surrounding regional security. Alienation is no longer confined to the factory floor—it can also occur through the infrastructures that organize circulation itself. Customs, the exchange rate, the shipping terminal, and the financial network can be sources of oppression and exploitation just as much as the workplace.
My sense is that they now see the source of injustice as lying precisely at the border and at customs- in the sanctions and in the unjust structure of the global economy itself.
Since the assassination on Ayatollah Khamenei, I have observed a shift in public sentiment. People seem to feel more sympathy toward the government. Many believe that in order to break this unjust structure, Iran needs to gain some degree of control over the Strait of Hormuz and impose tariffs on it-even a small one-so that it could serve as a pretext or leverage point for Iran to reconnect with the world’s banking and financial systems. In other words, the strait is not just a geopolitical symbol; it is seen here as a potential mechanism for reclaiming economic agency.
So what does this mean for how we think about politics and power? If this diagnosis is correct, then we must reconsider where leverage actually lies today. Labor remains indispensable, but it is no longer sufficient as the primary lens for understanding political domination. A politics concerned only with the workplace risks overlooking the mechanisms through which contemporary power is actually exercised. Today, leverage increasingly lies in the ability to govern movement-control over the flow of capital, shipping, customs, banking, and monetary sovereignty. And for those who lack structural power, the only way to obtain it may be through asymmetric means: blockades, strategic sacrifice, and the ability to disrupt the circulation on which others depend. Until that structural power is achieved, reconciliation can become a trap.
I suspect people might say that the United States will not allow that and will destroy all of Iran’s infrastructure, and even Iranian civilization itself. In fact, from the Iranian perspective, what prevented the city from being completely destroyed and children from being killed on a massive scale - unlike in Gaza - was Iran’s reciprocal deterrent capability. The belief is that the other side truly intended to turn Iran’s cities into piles of rubble.
On the very first day of the war, an Iranian officer appeared on state television and assured the public not to worry, because Iranian missiles can also reach American soil. In fact, there is a deep conviction that Iran can inflict a similar level of pain on the United States, thereby compelling it to surrender sooner rather than later.
This is why the Strait of Hormuz matters far beyond the Middle East. It symbolizes a transformation in the geography of power itself. The decisive conflicts of our century increasingly occur over ports rather than factories, logistics rather than workshops, financial systems rather than assembly lines, and maritime corridors rather than industrial districts. The infrastructures of circulation have become the new terrain on which both domination and resistance are organized.
The question we are left with, then, is no longer simply how workers can reclaim the means of production. It is whether genuine political transformation is possible without also transforming the infrastructures that govern global circulation itself. Whoever commands these infrastructures holds extraordinary leverage over states, markets, and populations alike. In the twenty-first century, the struggle for freedom increasingly begins not in the factory, but in the networks through which the world moves.
(Author: PhD Student, Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, Iran; Email: ghalanderi[at]mail.um.ac.ir )