Hormuz: tankers on fire, and it is the peoples who will pay

According to franceinfo, Iran announces that two oil tankers and a tugboat caught fire in the Strait of Hormuz. Since the start of the conflict, still according to franceinfo, Tehran has locked this passage and regularly targets ships that try to cross it without its authorisation. Washington responds with a blockade of Iranian ports. The rest, we do not yet know: the dispatch says nothing about the cause of the fires, the identity of the vessels, or the fate of the crews. We will not speculate about possible victims. There are sailors aboard these boats, and they are workers, not pawns.

What follows is our reading, not an established fact.

First, the place. A strait is not a backdrop, it is a potential toll booth. Whoever holds it can tax, slow down, strangle. Iran shuts one door and decides who passes. The United States shuts the other door, that of Iranian ports. Each claims to defend a principle: sovereignty on one side, freedom of navigation on the other. Translation: each wants to control the tap.

Cui bono? Let us ask it straight away. Not the crews. Not the Iranian people, choked by the blockade. Not consumers, who absorb the rising price of energy and transport. Those who profit, on the other hand, are the maritime insurers, who raise risk premiums, the well-placed shipowners, the oil traders who speculate on scarcity, and the arms-industry firms whose order books are filling up. The dispatch quantifies nothing, and we will not invent a figure. The logic, however, is well known.

The theorists of imperialism described it: when financial capital seeks outlets, raw materials and spheres of influence, rivalry between powers ends up moving from treaties to warships. Sanctions, blockades and military alliances are, through this lens, the political shell of economic competition. A port blockade is not a moral gesture. It is a sanction pushed to its logical end: cutting a rival off from its markets.

The official discourse, for its part, will be well rehearsed. We will hear of "maritime security", "stability", "a rules-based order". The rules, curiously, apply mostly to those who do not have the biggest fleet. Lenin already mocked those who cover the predatory interests of "their" bourgeoisie with grand phrases about defending the homeland. The phrases change; the interest remains.

We should nonetheless avoid the symmetrical trap. The Iranian power is not a camp of progress just because it confronts Washington. It defends a state, a ruling class, oil revenues. The strait is the stake of two state apparatuses, not of the workers who cross it, nor of those who fill up their tanks.

What to watch in the coming days: who claims responsibility, who accuses whom, who insures these ships, and how crude prices react. The fires in Hormuz are a fact. The war for control of the passage, however, is a system. And the bill, as always, is not sent to those who start it.