This post is reshared from the interview of the Revolutionary Communist International Tendency (RCIT) with Slingers (the international branch of Manjanigh). The interview is available in several languages, including Spanish and French.
Question: Hi, comrade, thanks for taking the time for this interview. Could you briefly introduce your organisation?
Answer: Manjanigh is a revolutionary communist organisation rooted in the political struggles of Iranian society and in the internationalist tradition of the Iranian left. Our aim is to contribute to rebuilding independent communist politics through which workers and oppressed people can organise themselves, overthrow capitalist rule, and begin constructing a socialist society.
We understand this task through the history of the revolution and counter-revolution in Iran. The 1979 Revolution overthrew the Pahlavi monarchy and opened new possibilities for popular power, including workers’ councils (Showras), neighbourhood committees, and organisations among women, students, and oppressed nationalities. These possibilities were violently defeated as the Islamic Republic consolidated power, dismantled independent organisations, and subjected the revolutionary left and labour movement to mass imprisonment, execution, and exile. Our politics begins from this history of defeat, but also from the experiences of resistance that survived it.
Our political independence is defined against the false choice imposed on Iranian society today: either the Islamic Republic or the monarchist and pro-imperialist opposition. We oppose US–Israeli aggression, Zionist colonialism, sanctions, assassinations, and regime change. We also oppose the Islamic Republic as a capitalist, clerical-security state that exploits and represses workers, women, oppressed nationalities, migrants, dissidents, and the poor.
These forces are not the same and do not occupy the same position in the world system. But opposition to imperialist aggression cannot mean political confidence in the Islamic Republic, just as opposition to the Islamic Republic cannot justify support for imperialism.
Our internationalism follows from this position. The struggle in Iran is inseparable from struggles across West Asia and North Africa, from the liberation of Palestine, and from class struggle inside the imperialist centres themselves. Socialist emancipation may begin within national borders, but it cannot be secured within them alone.
Our public work includes political analysis, publication, communist education, intervention in debates within the Iranian and international left, and solidarity with workers, women, oppressed nationalities, political prisoners, and anti-imperialist struggles. Slingers is Manjanigh’s international arm, through which we communicate our politics internationally and build relations with revolutionary, labour, feminist, anti-racist, anti-war, and anti-colonial forces beyond Iran. Given the conditions of surveillance, repression, and war, we do not publicly discuss our internal structure, membership, or practical organising methods.
Q: How do you characterise the US–Israeli war against Iran, how do you assess the situation so far, and what slogans have you raised?
A: We characterise the US–Israeli war against Iran as an imperialist and Zionist war of aggression. The asymmetry is decisive. The United States remains the dominant military and financial power in the world system, and Israel is a settler-colonial state with its own expansionist aims and a central military role in the US regional order. Iran, by contrast, is a capitalist state occupying a subordinate position within the world system and subjected to decades of sanctions, military threats, sabotage, assassination, and economic coercion. The reactionary character of the Islamic Republic does not erase this asymmetry or change the identity of the aggressors.
This war is not an isolated military event. It is the escalation of a longer system of imperialist pressure. US power operates not only through bombs and bases, but also through dollar-centred finance, sanctions, banking restrictions, shipping and insurance controls, technology denial, and pressure on third countries. These mechanisms have restricted Iran’s access to trade, finance, and productive capacity long before the military assault began.
China has provided Iran with an important commercial outlet, especially under sanctions, but this has not freed Iran from imperialist hierarchy. It has changed the channels through which Iran remains connected to the world market. Iran can continue to sell, buy, and reroute parts of its trade, but often on worse terms, through more restricted actors, with less control over payments, technology, investment, and financial settlement. In this sense, China-facing trade mitigates certain pressures while reproducing others. It does not abolish Iran’s subordinate position in global capitalism.
The war also has a regional logic. West Asia, and specifically Persian Gulf is central to energy flows, shipping routes, logistical infrastructure, and the financial surpluses generated by oil and gas. The US is trying to preserve its authority over this regional order in a period of relative decline, while consolidating an arrangement centred on Israel and allied Gulf states. The aim is to degrade Iran’s military and infrastructural capacities, weaken the regional forces associated with it, and make Iran’s access to trade, finance, and technology conditional on strategic submission. Regime change was one possible route to this objective. If that failed (which seems to be the case so far), a coerced settlement that preserves the Islamic Republic while subordinating it more firmly to the US regional order would still serve important imperialist aims.
This does not mean that the Islamic Republic is anti-capitalist or emancipatory. It is a capitalist, religious-security state integrated into the world market. Its ruling class does not want sanctions or war; it seeks access to global trade and investment while preserving its regional influence. Its conflict with the US and Israeli does not turn it into a representative of the working class or an emancipatory anti-imperialist force. The same state that claims to defend national sovereignty has imprisoned workers, executed political opponents, repressed women and queer people, and subjected oppressed nationalities to systematic violence.
We therefore reject both dominant lies about the war. The first is the imperialist lie that bombing Iran can bring democracy, women’s liberation, secularism, or human rights. Bombs, sanctions, and regime change projects cannot emancipate the Iranian people. They transfer political initiative to foreign states, monarchists, technocrats, and sections of the Iranian bourgeoisie.
The second lie is the state’s claim that anti-imperialism requires national unity behind the Islamic Republic and its military-security apparatus. Workers and revolutionary forces must not suspend their struggles, accept repression, or subordinate themselves to the IRGC in the name of national defence.
Our opposition to the aggression is unconditional. It does not depend on the Islamic Republic becoming progressive. We want the US and Israeli aggressors defeated and forced to retreat. But such a defeat would not by itself be a victory for the Iranian working class if it only strengthens the regime’s capacity to repress, impose austerity, and discipline society from above.
For us, the defeat of aggression does not mean continuing the war under the command of the Islamic Republic. It means stopping the aggressors from imposing their political objectives while preserving the capacity for class struggle inside Iran. The retreat of external aggression should clear the ground for workers and oppressed people to confront their own ruling class through their own independent power.
Q: How do you characterise the regime?
A: We characterise the Islamic Republic as a capitalist, clerical-security state. It is organised through a specifically Shi’a juridical and political order, centred on the office of the Leader, the Guardian Council, the judiciary, the Revolutionary Guards, and the security services. It contains elected institutions, but these institutions operate within strict limits. Elections regulate conflicts inside the ruling order; they do not allow the population to determine the fundamental structure of the state.
Religion is therefore not only ideological decoration. Shi’a jurisprudence shapes the constitution, the legal system, gender relations, and the state’s claims to legitimacy. But religion alone does not explain the regime. To describe the Islamic Republic only as a clerical or Islamic state obscures its class character. It protects capitalist property relations, disciplines labour, and secures accumulation for private, state, and parastatal capital.
The central government does not make the state socialist or anti-capitalist. Successive governments have pursued privatisation, marketisation, commodification of social provision, and cuts to subsidies. In many cases, privatisation has transferred public assets to politically connected firms, foundations, banks, pension funds, holding companies, and military-linked contractors. Neoliberal restructuring and militarised accumulation have developed together.
The ruling class is not a completely unified bloc. It contains competing industrial, financial, bureaucratic, clerical, and military-security fractions. These fractions disagree over access to state resources, foreign economic orientation, and the distribution of profits. Some have sought closer integration with Western capital, while others have benefited from protected markets, sanctions-evasion networks, and commercial relations with China and Russia. But these are conflicts within the ruling class over the direction and control of accumulation; they are not conflicts between capitalist and socialist projects.
The state’s class rule is inseparable from its political and social forms of domination. It represses independent unions, criminalises strikes, casualises labour, and makes workers, pensioners, migrants, and the poor absorb the costs of sanctions and crisis. Its patriarchal family law, compulsory gender norms, control over bodies and sexuality, and unequal burden of unpaid care help reproduce the social order. Persian-centred state nationalism, regional inequality, and the repression of oppressed nationalities are likewise constitutive elements of the state.
Internationally, Iran is neither outside global capitalism nor part of the dominant imperialist core. It is a formally sovereign capitalist state with its own ruling class, coercive apparatus, but it occupies a subordinate and heavily constrained position within the world economy. It does not command a global currency, major financial centres, or the technological and military capacities possessed by the dominant imperialist powers. Sanctions and war therefore place real pressure on the Iranian state. But the regime responds to this pressure by transferring its costs onto workers and oppressed people.
This is the contradiction we insist on. The Islamic Republic is subjected to imperialist coercion from a position of structural inequality, but it also exercises capitalist class rule over the people of Iran. Its subordinate position does not make it progressive. Its repression does not make imperialist aggression legitimate.
We therefore defend Iran and its population against imperialist aggression without politically defending the Islamic Republic. And we oppose the Islamic Republic without entering into alliance with the imperialist forces attacking it.
Q: What is your assessment of the bourgeois opposition forces like Reza Pahlavi and the pro-Western liberals?
A: We characterise the monarchists and the pro-Western liberal opposition as different currents within the bourgeois opposition. They are not politically identical. Some liberals oppose monarchy, war, and sanctions and defend secular government, elections, civil liberties, and equality before the law. Communists also defend these rights. What makes these currents bourgeois is not that every person supporting them belongs to the capitalist class, or that every democratic demand they raise is false. It is that their political programmes preserve capitalist property relations, reconstruct the capitalist state under new leadership, and prevent workers and oppressed people from exercising power through their own organisations.
The monarchist project is the most openly reactionary wing of this opposition. It draws political legitimacy from the Pahlavi dynasty, whose rule rested on dictatorship, suppression of communists and independent workers’ organisations, forced national homogenisation, and close military and economic integration with the United States. Its presentation of the pre-1979 monarchy as an era of stability and modernisation erases the exploitation, inequality, dispossession, and state violence that produced the revolution.
Reza Pahlavi presents himself as a temporary leader who will guide Iran toward a future referendum. Yet his own transition plan assigns him authority before any democratic mandate has been established. It designates him “Leader of the National Uprising” and commander-in-chief, gives him powers over the transitional legislature, executive, judiciary, and senior military leadership, and places the transition under institutions appointed from above. Elections and referendums are promised later, after the decisive distribution of political and coercive power has already occurred. This is an elite-managed transfer of power, not self-government by the people who have fought the Islamic Republic.
The same class project is visible in his economic programme. It prioritises private property, market liberalisation, privatisation, foreign investment, and rapid reintegration into the global economy. Workers appear principally as a labour force to be retained, retrained, and made productive. They do not appear as a class entitled to control factories, banks, energy resources, or the reconstruction process. Under conditions of war and impoverishment, such a transition would allow domestic elites, diaspora capital, and foreign corporations to acquire public assets while collective resistance is weakened. Removing the IRGC from parts of the economy would not by itself transfer power to workers; assets could simply pass from one faction of capital to another.
The monarchist project also proposes a reorganisation of the coercive apparatus rather than its replacement under popular control. The IRGC’s armed units would be incorporated into a centralised national army, while a new intelligence and security organisation would replace the existing agencies. The central question therefore remains unanswered: who would command these institutions, and against whom would they be used when workers strike, oppressed nationalities demand self-determination, or communities resist privatisation and dispossession?
Pahlavi’s support for US and Israeli military intervention exposes the external foundation of this project. He has argued that foreign attack could weaken the Islamic Republic and accelerate its collapse. This transfers political initiative from people struggling inside Iran to the states bombing the country. Military intervention is not a neutral instrument that can be used for democratic purposes. It destroys infrastructure, fragments society, expands the power of armed actors, and gives the intervening states leverage over the political order that follows. A transition dependent on US and Israeli military power would be structured around their strategic interests, regardless of how frequently its representatives invoke Iranian self-determination.
Pro-Western liberals differ from the monarchists in important respects. Many support a secular republic, constitutional government, civil liberties, and formal gender equality. Some reject Pahlavi’s dynastic claim and the authoritarian behaviour of sections of the monarchist movement. These distinctions are important but the dominant liberal strategy also assigns the leading role to technocrats, diaspora networks, business elites, and international institutions. Workers are expected to mobilise against the Islamic Republic and then surrender political initiative to those considered qualified to govern.
Our disagreement with liberalism therefore extends beyond its foreign policy. Formal legal equality is indispensable, but capitalist property relations make the exercise of that equality profoundly unequal. Freedom of association means little when workers can be dismissed for organising. Legal equality for women remains materially restricted by economic dependence, privatised care, and insecure employment. Equal individual citizenship does not resolve the collective oppression of Kurdish, Baluch, Arab, and other peoples if territorial integrity is declared an overriding and immutable principle. Liberal democracy leaves control over production, investment, media, housing, and social reproduction in the hands of capital.
We reject the suffocating choice between the Islamic Republic and an externally supported monarchist or liberal transition. The alternative must be built through workers’ organisations, strike committees, councils, neighbourhood assemblies, and organisations of oppressed proletariats. Only such forces can dismantle the existing repressive apparatus, prevent its reconstruction under another elite, and place production and social life under democratic control. Neither the Shah’s son, liberal technocrats, nor reform within the Islamic Republic can substitute for the organised power of workers and oppressed people themselves.
Q: What are the conditions of the Iranian working class and workers’ movement under dictatorship and war?
A: The Iranian working class is facing a severe crisis of survival and organisation. Inflation, wage collapse, unemployment, unpaid wages, pension insecurity, workplace deaths, repression, and the destruction caused by war have all intensified conditions that were already unbearable before the latest military assault.
Precarity is now one of the central forms of labour control. Large sections of the working class work through temporary contracts, subcontracting, informal employment, or arrangements with little effective labour law protection. Employers use economic crisis to impose dismissals, delayed wages, and unpaid leave, while the state restricts independent organisation and criminalises strikes. Sanctions and war deepen these pressures by disrupting supply chains, energy access, transport, production, and prices.
The war has made this situation worse. Critical infrastructure and major industrial sectors, including oil, gas, petrochemicals, steel, logistics, and parts of the digital economy, have been damaged or disrupted. Official estimates in April 2026 suggested that more than one million direct jobs were lost and around two million people directly or indirectly pushed into unemployment. The direction is clear, workers are paying the price of both imperialist aggression and the regime’s inability to protect social life.
Yet the working class has not disappeared as a political force. In recent years, we have seen repeated strikes and protests by teachers, pensioners, oil and petrochemical contract workers, nurses, truck drivers, municipal workers, industrial workers, and others. Many of these struggles begin from immediate demands: wages, pensions, contracts, unpaid salaries, insurance, safety, and cost of living. But they also raise wider political questions as they expose corruption, privatisation, state violence, and the question of who controls production and social wealth.
The main weakness remains fragmentation. Many struggles are militant but isolated. The state works to prevent coordination across sectors, cities, and regions; it represses organisers, exhausts local struggles, and presents wartime dissent as treason. Under war conditions, even defensive labour action can become more dangerous.
So we have to be sober. Anger does not automatically produce revolutionary organisation. The working class has accumulated major experiences of struggle, from Haft Tappeh and Ahvaz steel to teachers, pensioners, and oil and petrochemical workers. But the central strategic task is to transform dispersed and defensive struggles into durable forms of organisation that can survive repression, connect workplaces to wider social struggles, and link economic demands to the fight against dictatorship, imperialist war, and capitalist rule.
Q: How do you view the situation of national minorities in Iran?
A: We would first say that the term “minorities” is itself limited. We are speaking about nationally oppressed peoples in Iran: Kurds, Baluchis, Arabs, Azeris, Turkmen, Lurs, and others whose languages, cultures, territories, resources, and political rights have been subordinated to a Persian-centred nation-state.
This oppression is not only cultural. It is also economic, territorial, religious, ecological, and military. In Kurdistan, national oppression has taken the form of intense securitisation and repression because of the long history of Kurdish political organisation and struggle. In Baluchistan, extreme poverty, border labour, executions, and state violence are combined with religious oppression against a largely Sunni population. In Khuzestan and Arab regions, oppression is tied to oil extraction, water transfer, ecological destruction, dispossession, and the repression of Arab identity. Similar dynamics of uneven development, cultural denial, and resource plunder affect other non-Persian regions in different ways.
For us, national oppression is rooted in the formation of the capitalist nation-state in Iran and reproduced through class rule, centralised state power, and uneven development. But this does not mean reducing national oppression to class oppression alone. It has its own linguistic, cultural, religious, territorial, and political forms, and these must be confronted directly.
We defend the full rights of oppressed peoples which includes linguistic rights, cultural rights, religious freedom, regional self-government, an end to militarisation, and the right to self-determination, including the right to separation. But we do not think any formula (independence, federalism, autonomy, or any other arrangements) is automatically progressive in itself. Its content depends on which class forces lead it and whose interests it serves.
A purely bourgeois-nationalist solution can replace Persian centralism with local ruling classes that continue to exploit workers, women, peasants, border labourers, and the poor. At the same time, a left that ignores national oppression in the name of abstract class unity only reproduces the violence of the central state. Both positions are dead ends.
Our position is that the working classes of oppressed peoples must determine their own future through their own organisations that includes councils, assemblies, unions, women’s organisations, student networks, and regional forms of popular power. The struggle against national oppression has to be connected to the struggle against capitalism, patriarchy, ecological destruction, and imperialism.
This also means recognising concrete reparative measures. Regions devastated by extraction, water transfer, militarisation, and systematic deprivation need forms of positive discrimination, ecological repair, local control over resources, revival of local economies, and investment decided by the people of those regions themselves.
So our position is neither forced national unity nor abstract separatism from above. We defend the right of oppressed peoples to decide their own future. But we believe that real liberation will come only when that decision is made by the organised workers and oppressed of each region, not by the central state, local bourgeois forces, or imperialist powers.
Q: How do you see the situation of women in Iran?
A: Women have been at the centre of the crisis of the Islamic Republic. The state’s control over women’s bodies, clothing, sexuality, mobility, family life, and labour is one of the foundations to its rule.
But Iranian women’s struggle did not begin with the Islamic Republic. It has a long history, going back at least to the Constitutional Revolution in 1905, when women organised around education, political participation, legal rights, and social equality. The Islamic Republic inherited a society in which women had already fought for generations to enter schools, workplaces, political organisations, and public life. This is why the state’s project was not simply to impose a dress code. It was to reorganise gender relations as part of a new counter-revolutionary order.
This became clear immediately after the 1979 Revolution. In March 1979, women protested Khomeini’s announcement that women should observe Islamic dress in government offices. Compulsory hijab was later generalised and legally enforced, becoming mandatory in public by 1983. But compulsory veiling was only one part of a broader system of patriarchal family law, unequal inheritance and testimony, restrictions on sexuality and bodily autonomy, gender segregation, state control over reproduction, and the ideological construction of women primarily as mothers, wives, and reproducers of the Islamic social order.
Women have continuously resisted this order. The Girls of Revolution Street, beginning with Vida Movahed’s public protest against compulsory hijab in December 2017, gave visible form to a much longer struggle against the state’s control over women’s bodies. The 2022 uprising after the killing of Jina Mahsa Amini was therefore not sudden. It condensed decades of accumulated anger against compulsory veiling, morality policing, economic insecurity, patriarchal violence, national oppression, and the everyday humiliation imposed by the state.
The slogan “Woman, Life, Freedom” expressed something powerful as it linked bodily autonomy to life itself; to dignity, freedom, social existence, and the possibility of collective emancipation. But the slogan was also fought over. Monarchists, liberals, Western states, and Zionist forces tried to appropriate it and turn Iranian women’s struggle into an argument for sanctions, war, or regime change. The Islamic Republic also tried to manage and distort it. During the war, it briefly tolerated images of unveiled women in pro-state gatherings while continuing to punish women and businesses over compulsory hijab. This was a sort-term tactical propaganda. Most recently state renewed closures of cafés and businesses over hijab enforcement, as well as continued prosecution, surveillance, vehicle impoundment, and punishment of women defying compulsory veiling.
So we should be clear, the fact that many women now appear unveiled in Tehran and other cities does not mean the struggle has been won. It means women have forced the state into a crisis of enforcement. The state can no longer impose the old order without resistance, but it has not abandoned its claim over women’s bodies. The battle continues in the streets, workplaces, schools, courts, prisons, families, and digital spaces.
For us, women’s liberation is not reducible to hijab, although the struggle against compulsory dress codes is essential. It is a struggle against gendered violence, sexual control, economic dependence, legal inequality, workplace exploitation, and the state’s power to define women’s role in society. This is also why we do not separate women’s liberation from capitalism. Capitalist society depends on women’s paid and unpaid labour in homes, hospitals, schools, factories, service work, informal work, and care work. War and austerity intensify this burden by throwing more responsibility for survival back onto households, where women are expected to absorb the crisis.
Individual rights are necessary, but they are not enough. A woman may have formal legal equality and still be trapped by poverty, insecure work, privatised care, domestic violence, unemployment, or dependence on the family. Real liberation requires bodily autonomy, equal rights in law and social life, freedom from compulsory veiling and all compulsory gender norms, freedom of sexuality and gender expression, socialisation of care, economic independence, labour rights, and women’s full participation in revolutionary organisation.
Women in Iran are not merely victims of the Islamic Republic. They are among the most militant political subjects in society. Any revolutionary programme that treats women’s liberation as secondary, or postpones it until after the “main” class struggle, will reproduce the same patriarchal order in another form. The struggle against the Islamic Republic, capitalism, imperialism, and patriarchy has to be fought together.
Q: What are the main points of your program for the liberation of the workers and oppressed in Iran?
Our programme begins from the question of power. Liberation cannot come through elite transition, reform from above, or Western-backed regime change. It requires workers and oppressed people to build their own organs of power in workplaces, neighbourhoods, universities, schools, prisons, and oppressed regions.
This means turning dispersed struggles into coordinated force: workers’ councils, strike committees, neighbourhood assemblies, women’s and queer organising, student networks, and organisations of oppressed nationalities. These forms must be able to challenge both the capitalist state and the bourgeois opposition.
Economically, we argue for breaking the power of the ruling class over production, finance, housing, land, and social reproduction. Strategic sectors such as oil, gas, petrochemicals, transport, steel, mining, banking, and major industries should be brought under democratic workers’ and social control, not bureaucratic state ownership from above.
Our programme links class struggle to struggles against patriarchy, national oppression, ecological destruction, and authoritarian violence. These are not secondary questions to be postponed until after the class struggle; they are part of remaking society from below.
Internationally, we are anti-imperialist and internationalist. We oppose sanctions, war, occupation, Zionism, and imperialist intervention. But anti-imperialism does not mean loyalty to the Iranian state. It means solidarity between workers and oppressed peoples across the region and beyond.
In short, liberation requires neither monarchy, nor reform of the Islamic Republic, nor imperialist regime change, nor nationalist unity behind the state. It requires the independent revolutionary power of workers and the oppressed.
Q: Can you tell us a bit about the different currents within the Iranian left?
A: The Iranian left is fragmented, and this fragmentation has deep historical roots: the destruction of the left after the revolution, mass executions, exile, nationalism, reformism, NGO-isation, and repeated defeats.
Very broadly, we can identify several currents:
One current is the neo-campist or so-called “Axis of Resistance” left, although the term itself is debated. This current tends to understand global politics as a conflict between a Western imperialist bloc and an Eastern or anti-Western bloc. Because it sees the Islamic Republic as part of a camp resisting US imperialism, it often treats the regime as progressive, or at least as a force that must be defended politically in the name of anti-imperialism. In practice, this means minimising the capitalist and repressive character of the Islamic Republic, postponing revolution in the name of the external threat, and reducing anti-imperialism to defence of the state. Some of these currents therefore end up close to reformism, because they argue that revolution is impossible or undesirable so long as imperialism remains the main danger.
A second current is the social-democratic, republican, or liberal-left current. This current is often very critical of the Islamic Republic and speaks in the language of democracy, civil society, secularism, republicanism, and individual rights. It may produce useful critiques of repression, corruption, authoritarianism, and inequality. But it often lacks a clear anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist programme. Its horizon can become a democratic capitalist republic, institutional reform, or civil society pressure, without confronting the class structure of the Iranian state, sanctions, imperialist pressure, or the bourgeois character of the pro-Western opposition.
Finally, there are revolutionary Marxist and communist currents trying to reconstruct an independent class line. These currents reject both the Islamic Republic and imperialist regime change. They also reject the idea that the future of Iran can be handed to monarchists, liberals, nationalist elites, or reformist factions of the state. But these forces remain small, dispersed, and often divided by exile politics, organisational traditions, and theoretical disputes.
Our criticism of much of the Iranian left is that it collapses into one side of a false binary. One side becomes so focused on imperialism that it loses sight of the Islamic Republic as a capitalist and repressive state. Another side becomes so focused on the Islamic Republic that it becomes soft on imperialist pressure, sanctions, assassinations, or liberal-monarchist alternatives. For example, some celebrate sanctions on IRGC officials without understanding that sanctions never remain confined to officials; they reorganise the whole economy and deepen pressure on ordinary people. Others celebrate the assassination of regime figures without recognising that if imperialism can kill the most powerful figures in the state, then no worker, activist, dissident, or ordinary person is safe either.
We think a revolutionary line must oppose both sides without ambiguity: against imperialism, sanctions, Zionism, and regime change; against the Islamic Republic, capitalism, patriarchy, and national oppression; and for the independent organisation of workers and the oppressed.
- Q:Are there any final words which you would like to add?
A: Yes. We think the Iranian situation poses a serious test for the international left. It is easy to take a one-sided position from outside Iran. Some see only the Islamic Republic and therefore become vulnerable to imperialist narratives. Others see only imperialism and therefore become vulnerable to apologetics for the Iranian state.
Our position is that revolutionary politics must begin from the people who are crushed by both: workers whose wages are destroyed by inflation and sanctions; women who face patriarchal state violence; oppressed nationalities who face militarisation; political prisoners facing execution; and ordinary people who are bombed by imperialism and repressed by their own state.
We defend Iran against imperialist aggression, but we do not confuse Iran with its ruling class. We defend the right of the people to resist war, sanctions, dictatorship, exploitation, patriarchy, and national oppression. The future of Iran must not be decided by US bombs, Israeli strategy, royalist nostalgia, liberal technocrats, or the Islamic Republic’s military-security apparatus. It must be decided by the organised power of workers and the oppressed themselves.
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