The moment Israel began bombing Iran, US left-wing organizations “wheeled out one regime apologist after another.” In “The Anti-Imperialist Imperialism Club,” Arya Zahedi argues that this “form of anti-imperialism is an incredible obstacle to building a renewed internationalism.”

The recent “12-day war” between Israel and Iran represents the latest manifestation of the rapid descent into generalized barbarism to which the capitalist system has condemned the world. While there is a supposed ceasefire at the moment, every peace under this system is only preparation for the next war. The war between Israel and Iran is not isolated to a conflict between two countries, nor the wider Middle East for that matter, but is part of the expanding wars that are an outcome of capital’s own dynamic.

While recent conflicts have brought to bear the old question of imperialism, many of the confusions and illusions of the past have returned with it. Generally speaking, much of the left takes an approach to anti-imperialism that is ideological, meaning they fail to critique how “common sense” shapes their own presuppositions. In so doing, ideology both disguises and performs the fundamental processes that give rise to it. “Anti-Imperialism” is ideological because it obscures social conflicts taking place within Iran, including but not limited to class struggles, and helps to mystify the place of the Islamic Republic within the broader order of global capitalist production and international trade. No sooner had the first Israeli bombs rained upon Iran than many of the larger left-wing organizations and media in the US-from the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) and Workers World, to Democratic Socialists of America, to Democracy Now!-wheeled out one regime apologist after another.

The conflicting tendencies of global capitalist production occur at a range of scales, but are driven fundamentally by the class relation. They take the form of borders, nation-states, and interstate competition for a variety of reasons, among them the need to maintain a system of international labor arbitrage or to maintain privileged access to raw materials and supply chains. Real national conflicts can take on a fetish character, the form of appearance of the uneven and tumultuous nature of capitalist reproduction. Indeed, the externalization of social conflict-using conflict with an external enemy to maintain social unity-has been a mainstay of the Republic’s domestic policy since the Revolution, critical to maintaining its existence over decades of turbulence. Today, in the aftermath of the recent war, the state is once again using external conflict to establish internal order and social unity. This is the core logic of geopolitics-national realpolitik uncoupled from the social relations that constrain and condition it. These issues are far from just analytical, as the ideological form of anti-imperialism is an incredible obstacle to building a renewed internationalism.

For many on the US left, Iranian history apparently stopped with the overthrow of the Shah in 1979. Closer inspection reveals that the ultimate victory of the Islamic Republic was the result of a counter-revolution, whose objective was to put back in the bottle the social movements that were released during the revolutionary upheaval. Some know better, but they are manipulators, giving partial truths to a naïve young audience. These charlatans have been around long enough, and love to discuss the Iranian communist movement to gain legitimacy, only to rally around their executioners [1]. The Islamic Republic repressed the Iranian left as the Shah wished he could. Even before the fall of the Shah, the Khomeinists, as well as the liberal Islamists, were open about their disdain for Marxism and communism. In truth, anti-imperialism was used, and continues to be used, not only as a form of establishing political dominance, but also as a means to further exploit labor. By illuminating the internal relations of Iran and its relation to the imperialist system globally, we can better see how “anti-imperialism” functions as the ideological form of the very social relations that it obscures and therefore reproduces.

Revolution

The Iranian Revolution was one of the great mass revolutions of the twentieth century. Whereas most of the revolutions of the global south had taken place under conditions of underdevelopment, where feudal relations were still dominant, the forces behind the Iranian Revolution were the product of two decades of rapid and uneven capitalist development. Unlike these other revolutions, feudal relations had already been transformed into capitalist relations through the development enacted by the Shah’s regime.

In the early 1960s, under pressure from the US, the Shah began to adopt liberal economic reforms [2]. This was the basis for what was titled the “White Revolution” [3]. These reforms included the enfranchisement of women, creation of literacy corps, industrialization and development plans, profit-sharing in certain industries, and land reform. The “White Revolution” was also an attempt to build a popular base and advance an image of the regime as a kind of benevolent despot reformer. Yet the reforms didn’t include any check on state power and they solidified the dictatorship even further. The reforms were opposed by the clergy, and the main points of contention were votes for women, the removal of requirements for civil servants, and most importantly land reform. Much of the upper echelons of the clergy had vast land holdings given to them as religious endowments. The dictatorial aspects of the reforms were the target of the secular nationalist and left-wing opposition, whose slogan was “Reforms, yes! Dictatorship, no!” The religious opposition opposed the reforms as a whole.

This opposition broke out into the uprising of June 1963, which was suppressed with extreme violence and dispelled any hope of democratic reforms for a whole generation of activists [4]. Until the eve of the revolution, Iran continued on the path of rapid development which superseded people’s needs or redistribution. Most importantly, land reform succeeded in transforming Iran from a semi-feudal agricultural society into a modern capitalist nation. While Iran had been undergoing a process of integration and peripheralization into the capitalist world system since the 19th century, it was really only after the early 1960s that capitalist relations became dominant within the Iranian economy, fully extending throughout the countryside. The biggest aristocrats were able to keep their land if they transformed into capitalist agriculture and hired wage-labor or if they leased their land to multinationals. While there was some limited resistance from the aristocracy, most eventually followed suit and saw that it served their interest. Many from the landed aristocracy were encouraged to invest in industry and given ministerial positions for going along with the program. While they had to surrender their political autonomy in the countryside to the state, they gained substantial social and economic power.

Many of the landless who remained worked as agricultural wage laborers, but the vast majority swelled the ranks of a semi-proletariat who migrated into the cities. Tehran’s population doubled from 1963-1973; many searched for employment within the vast and expanding construction industry. Industrialization begets an industrial proletariat, along with white-collar workers and the professional middle class, expanding the number of students going abroad for education. Migrants flooded the cities and found the alienation of modern urban life; unlike the older generations of peasants and workers, they lacked stable forms of community, institutions, and socialization. Their old forms of community in the countryside were disrupted, and there was no radical alternative in the cities, creating conditions that would play an important role in shaping the revolution and giving the clergy an advantage in the struggle for hegemony. The entire weight of state repression was carried by the left and secular-nationalist opposition. No trade unions, political parties, or other forms of working-class association were permitted. In this environment, the mosque offered a form of community and a space for dissent, one controlled carefully by the clergy. The Shah believed that religion could be used as a way to circumvent the communist movement, giving relative freedom to clerics and religious figures.

As long as the price of oil continued to rise, the state could maintain relative social peace. While there was widespread dissent and frustration, the growing middle-class, white-collar workers, and even many technically-skilled blue collar industrial workers in key industries could be kept in check through the expanding economy. But growth never lasts forever. Unemployment began to rise in the 1970s as the price of oil stabilized and then declined. Inflation spread simultaneously and, in 1977, the government of Premier Amuzegar responded by manufacturing a recession. This compounded growing unemployment, particularly among the new or semi-proletariat. As proletarianization continued to draw former agricultural workers into the cities, the construction industry was the only industry that could absorb these new wage laborers who did not yet have the technical skills for service work or highly-specialized industrial labor. The slowing economy hit the construction sector hard. Increasing stagflation and labor unrest followed.

After 1977, the year inflation more than doubled to a staggering 27.3% [5], demonstrations by various forms of opposition became more frequent and ubiquitous. While industrial workers had orchestrated wildcat strikes since around 1973, it wasn’t until 1978 that these strikes began to generalize, culminating in the mass strike of Fall 1978. The death knell of the regime sounded when oil workers joined the strike and shut off the most important economic resource of the state. The fall of the Shah’s regime would be unthinkable without this mass strike. Over a year of strikes, demonstrations, and riots finally culminated in the general insurrection of February 9-11, 1979. The final nail was pounded into the coffin.

In the course of the mass strike and insurrection, partisan conflict spread and competition for a revolutionary vanguard function intensified. Throughout industry, the proletariat had transformed strike committees into worker’s councils (shora in Persian). Councils, committees, and assemblies were not just limited to factories, but spread to schools, universities, farms, and even military barracks. But while the factory committees were shaped by the involvement of left-wing groups, the neighborhood committees were dominated by the Islamists, as many of them were organized through the mosques. These committees were controlled by a Khomeinist secret central committee. The Revolutionary Guards (Pasdaran) formed out of these committees, purging non-loyalists from their ranks. The RG were also a counterweight to the well-armed left-wing guerrilla groups who increased in numbers and popularity during the course of the revolution, particularly among younger non-religious people.

To firmly establish their hegemony over the revolution, the clergy and petit-bourgeoisie around Khomeini increasingly utilized the language of anti-imperialism and populism, co-opting terms and symbols from the left. In the ideological character of anti-imperialism, the Khomeinists found a ready-made tool of obfuscation and common-sense explanation of their appeal and eventual victory. Anti-imperialism was the midwife by which a new form of bourgeois dictatorship was established. It is not satisfactory to see the revolution in two, easily delineated moments, a heroic revolutionary period followed by a counter-revolution. Rather, the revolution and counter-revolution were, as they often are, intertwined.

The spectacle of anti-imperialism reached a climax with the US embassy hostage crisis. While it is often recalled as a great humbling of American imperialism, the reality had much more to do with domestic conflicts. Taking hostages allowed the Khomeinists to take the lead over their rivals as the vanguard of the anti-imperialist struggle. At a time when social conflicts were raging-with rebellions in the provinces, intensifying student movements, protests against new gender laws and dress codes, and ongoing conflicts in workplaces between management and the workers’ councils-and disappointments with the course of the revolution were becoming more apparent, the hostage crisis unified the nation around an international spectacle that was beamed into their homes daily. The embassy became a spot of constant rally and mobilization. It brought about the fall of the liberal nationalists of the provisional government, and more importantly, it was a way to gain an advantage over the left. It came at an opportune time for the Khomeinists. Frustration was growing among the population over economic issues, but also the increasingly repressive environment. Strikes were increasing, and this was to the benefit of the left-wing groups. All of this was snuffed with the spectacle of the embassy siege [6].

While the embassy crisis helped to strengthen its hegemony, it was the war with Iraq that solidified the Islamic Republic, institutionalizing the Revolutionary Guard and ushering in a dark period for class struggle. Strikes were banned and workers who organized any disruptions were accused of being agents of imperialism. Ideological mobilization was accompanied by severe repression, with imprisonment and summary executions becoming the order of the day. Even the left-wing organizations that had firmly supported the regime such as the Tudeh Party and the Fediayan Majority were not spared [7]. Three years into the war, Iraq was willing to sue for peace, but Khomeini rejected the offer. He and his supporters understood that, so long as the war continued, they could impose social unity.

The war finally came to an end in the fall of 1988, and along with it, one final bloodletting. Khomeini issued an edict instructing his supporters to purge the prisons of the left-wing opposition, with conservative estimates suggesting 5,000 executions in the summer of 1988 alone. The next year Khomeini died, and the charismatic leader that held together the ruling coalition was no longer there to mediate it.

Republic

The following decade witnessed an unfolding “economy first” policy. The remaining radical populist elements were tempered in favor of economic liberalization. The populist ideologies that valorized the poor and the oppressed were replaced with praise of the honest merchant, the consecration of private property, and the recommendations of the International Monetary Fund. During this period, privatization of Iranian enterprises and services rapidly increased, with struggles arising to protect subsidies for basic commodities such as cooking oil, flour, and gas. With the opposition defeated and the unchallenged rule of the state established, it was really the case that “Locke replaced Habakkuk” [8].

The strain of economic liberalization throughout the 1990s came to a head with the student riots of 1999, which kicked off when right-wing thugs attacked students protesting the closure of a liberal newspaper. Despite being framed as a liberal reform movement of recently politicized students, this sequence was the largest demonstration against the government since the immediate post-revolutionary years. It wasn’t long until militant working-class activity returned to the scene.

Increased labor activism began in the mid-2000s and has continued since in many sectors. Beginning in this period, one major struggle has been to form independent unions separate from the state. As economic conditions worsened, populism regained strength and right-wing populist Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was elected in 2005. For all the rhetoric against elites, austerity continued for the working class. Ironically, austerity, in particular the removal of subsidies, was more successful under the populist Ahmadinejad than the liberal Khatami. Ahmadinejad increased repression as well as populist demagoguery. During this time, Ahmadinejad became the darling of the anti-imperialist left, particularly when Hugo Chavez embraced him and called him his “brother”. His second term began with what came to be known as the “Green Movement” claiming that the election was stolen against his reformist rival. While another sequence of protests ensued, this also represented an end for reformism. For Iranian workers and students, it was apparent that neither the reformists nor the conservatives offered any future.

Despite decades of privatization, the Iranian economy is today still heavily tied to the state via nationalized oil and natural gas industries. For example, the National Iranian Oil Company is the largest economic unit in the entire country. Essential to the economy of the Islamic Republic are the bonyads or foundations. Listed as “charitable” organizations, bonyads control about 20% of Iran’s GDP. After the revolution, the Pahlavi Foundation (Bonyad-e Pahlavi) which represented the economic interests and investments of the royal court, hidden from official scrutiny, was taken over and renamed as the Foundation of the Oppressed (Bonyad-e Mostazafin). In reality, Bonyad-e Mostazafin is functionally a holding company-the largest in the Middle East-involved in numerous sectors of the economy. Today, it is the country’s second-largest commercial enterprise after the National Iranian Oil Company. Bonyads are closely affiliated with the revolutionary guard, which in turn is under the control of the office of the Supreme Leader. While US firms may have been kicked out after the revolution, capital from other imperialist powers rushed in quickly to fill the gap. Foreign direct investment continues to flow from British, French, German, Japanese, and increasingly Chinese multinationals, attracted by “Free Economic Zones,” such as the South Pars Energy Zone. These massive complexes employ hundreds of thousands of precarious and poorly paid workers, crammed into dire living conditions to serve foreign capital in one of the hottest areas of the world [9].

Over the past decade, austerity and police repression have become focal points of social conflict. Strikes and demonstrations have increased in frequency, periodically erupting into generalized uprisings or insurrections, as in the case of the 2018-2019 general strike or the 2019-2020 protests, which had economic hardship, corruption, or rising energy prices as their proximate causes. Each time, the state has responded with severe repression [10], which only feeds the anti-government sentiment that underwrites the next explosion. Indeed, the cycle of unrest has been characterized by a crescendo motion. The most recent apparent crest was the Jina Uprising of late 2022 and early 2023, sparked by the police murder of Jina Amini [11]. While triggered by particular grievances or demands, these protest sequences demonstrate that the issues of class conflict, environmental destruction, state repression, ethnic racism, or gender oppression cannot be cleaved from each other. This becomes more manifest with every explosion. Yet it is precisely this incongruent composition and aspirational unity that exposes contemporary Iranian social movements to the same counterrevolutionary forces that defeated the Revolution of 1979. The specter of national unity creeps in the shadows cast by every failed insurrection. The slogans of the left again become appropriated and devoid of their political content [12].

Remains

In recent years, no other sequence of events has done more than the “12 day war” to resurrect what seemed to be a moribund ideology, another “blessing” to the regime [13]. Quite predictably, a large section of the populace has rallied around the flag. Today, the ultra-wealthy who make their profits through connections to the state can hide their exploitation behind the external threat of imperialism. While the working classes struggle to pay rent or afford basic commodities, the lavish lifestyles of the northern suburbs of Tehran remain hidden behind this conflict. The war gave the ruling class an opportunity to increase austerity in the name of national sacrifice. The Islamic Republic’s position as a central piece in the “Axis of Resistance” [14] makes it even more difficult for many leftists in the west to get a clear picture of how it really operates. Iran maintains certain anti-imperial positions and at the same time facilitates fundamentally reactionary policies and developmental pathways-an anti-imperial imperialism [15]. This is in fact the history of capitalist development. Taking these illusory forms at face value cost the Iranian left quite dearly during the Revolution.

Despite the anti-imperialist demagoguery, the Islamic Republic has always been willing to be integrated into the international bourgeois community. The idea that the United States is intransigent in its opposition to the Islamic Republic, and vice versa-that the current Iranian regime is intransigent in its “resistance”-is the stuff of comic books and bad spy movies. Iran has a bourgeoisie, and like all bourgeoisies, it is first and foremost concerned with preserving its interests; this supersedes ideological loyalty to any political power. There is certainly an element of the Iranian bourgeoisie, even those currently loyal to the regime, who would want to maintain the Islamic Republic but without some of the excesses and with a more “rational” administration of capital. Decades of IMF restructuring, liberalization, and austerity have demonstrated the current Iranian administration’s desire to join the global economic order. The capitalist class will work to preserve its interests, perhaps even jettison their fealty to the current regime if it suits them. To suggest otherwise is pure idealism.

With the recent resurgence in nationalism, the fissures within the working class are beginning to re-emerge, primarily along lines of fidelity to the Islamic Republic. The official and ossified organizations-the state-affiliated unions-have dawned the garb of the flag, while autonomous working-class organs continue the uphill battle of militant opposition. Under the cover of national security, Iran has deported over half a million Afghan migrants since the end of the “12 day war” [16]. These latest attacks are but the most recent expressions of a well-worn strategy. The fact that both Iran and the United States are engaging in similar attacks against their most vulnerable migrant population is not a coincidence but reveals a general tendency shaping interstate competition and internal national reaction. Meanwhile, demonstrations and confrontations remain frequent occurrences in the face of the day-to-day indignities and miseries that accompany austerity, such as daily energy blackouts and water shut offs which frequently take place during the hottest times of the year. The war may have smothered the threat of revolution for now, but the material conditions that spurred masses of Iranian society to rebellion remain.

We must ask fundamental questions. Who are our comrades in the struggle against capitalism? Is it our fellow workers, teachers, child rights activists, undocumented migrants facing racism and deportation, or is it generals, merchants, clerics, and bureaucrats? What is the social composition of the so-called “resistance” forces that appear on the global stage? To whom or what do they answer? These questions can be asked of every national medium of capital accumulation, not just Iran. We must move beyond a facile allegiance to anti-imperialism, otherwise we risk abandoning our fellow workers and students to their exploiters and executioners.

Footnotes

1 A prime example is someone like Vijay Prashad, who is knowledgeable about the communist movement in Iran, but uses this knowledge and history to somehow gain support for the very regime that crushed this movement. ↩

2 The Kennedy administration’s foreign policy plans targeted specific strategic regions which were to undergo certain capitalist reforms from above. Brazil was another nation chosen under the Kennedy plan. ↩

3 Also known as the “Shah-People Revolution” by the regime. ↩

4 It was this generation that formed the base of the two main guerrilla groups that would play a central role in the 1979 revolution, the left-Islamist Sazeman-e Mujahideen-e Khalq (The Organization of People’s Mujahideen Guerillas), commonly referred to as the Mujahideen and the Marxist-Leninist Sazeman-e Cherikha-ye Fedaiyan-e Khalq (The Organization of People’s Fedaiyan Geuriallas) more commonly referred to as the Fedaiyan. They were frustrated with the reformism of the older generation of the nationalist National Front and communist Tudeh Party. ↩

5 World Bank ↩

6 At the same time that the US embassy was being occupied, the “Labor House,” Khaneh-ye Kar, which served as the de facto ministry of labor, was occupied by unemployed workers. Needless to say, this was just one among many examples of militant worker activity that was lost in the spectacle of the hostage crisis. ↩

7 The Tudeh and Fedaiyan Majority were tolerated until 1983. After Khomeini rejected the ceasefire, the regime turned against these final remaining Marxist organizations. The central committee of the Tudeh were dragged in front of television cameras to denounce Marxism and confess to being Soviet spies. This was mainly to win the ideological war against Marxism. ↩

8 Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. ↩

9 Many of the workers here are on precarious temporary contracts. Indeed, the oil industry has a hierarchy between this floating surplus population and more stable skilled workers with permanent or long-term contracts and who receive much higher pay. The latter are even represented by government affiliated unions. The much larger pool of workers on temporary contracts who deal with poor conditions and precarity have been successful in organizing their own autonomous union and conducted a number of important strikes in recent years. In 2021-2022, they waged a large strike that spread to a number of other cities and even beyond the energy sector. ↩

10 The worst incident unfolded in late 2019 with “Bloody Aban,” resulting in an untold number of protesters killed or disappeared. ↩

11 For a balance sheet of the Jina Uprising, see Assareh Assa , “The Jina Rebellion: Elements of an Analysis of the Movement in Iran,” The Brooklyn Rail, May 2023, ↩

12 The slogan popularized during the Jina Uprising, “Woman, Life, Freedom,” has its origins in the radical feminist wing of the Kurdish movement. It was transformed into a general ideological slogan, an umbrella that includes workers and oppressed nationalities, while at the same time chanted by celebrities and the partisans of the deposed monarchy. ↩

13 When the war began, Iran was in the third week of a nationwide truckers strike. The strike was gaining momentum at the time and was becoming a concern. Then the bombs fell. ↩

14 The “Axis of Resistance” is an informal political coalition across the Middle East, formed by Iran and intended to undermine the influence of the US and Israel in the region. Member organizations include Hezbollah, Islamic Resistance in Iraq, the Popular Mobilization Forces (Iraq), Yemeni Houthis, and a range of Palestinian resistance groups, including Hamas. ↩

15 One thing that distinguishes the Khomenist movement from the Shah’s regime, especially in its early phase, is that it was anti-developmentalist and anti-productivist. It embodies a kind of petit-bourgeois utopian populism that appeals to both the newly arriving migrants, lumpen or semi-proletarians, and the merchants and artisans of the bazaar. ↩

16 Iran Forcibly Deports Nearly 600,000 Afghan Migrants Amid Post-War Crackdown ↩