From the Strategy of the Revolutionary Left in the 1970s to a Tool of the “Resistance Axis” Left for Justifying the Existing Capitalist Order
Yashar Darolshafa
[1] This essay was originally published in Persian on 31 May 2026 on the Iranian Marxist website Naghd. The original Persian text is available here.
Introduction: A Dispute over a Formulation, or a Dispute over the Meaning of the Left?
In recent years, one of the most striking theoretical shifts within the Iranian left has been the revival of the formulation “the people–imperialism contradiction” to justify a form of politics that not only has little in common with the revolutionary left of the 1970s, but in some respects stands in direct opposition to it. This revival is less a reinterpretation of a historical legacy than an appropriation and transformation of it. A concept that emerged within a revolutionary strategy has been turned into a tool for defending an established order.
At the same time, some currents—especially those associated with the tradition known as Worker-Communism—have criticized this formulation. Their critiques have played an important role in exposing its later populist and nationalist uses. Yet they have also made a problematic generalization. They have extended their critique of “people’s socialism” beyond its later, distorted versions to the original theorists who first developed the formulation. In other words, a critique that should be directed at later followers and distorted reinterpretations has also been applied to the original theoretical moment itself.
This essay is written at the intersection of these two errors. On the one hand, it examines how the current often described as the “Resistance Axis left” has exploited the idea of the people–imperialism contradiction to legitimize an established power bloc. On the other hand, it challenges the hasty extension of the critique of people’s socialism to the original formulation developed by the founders of the Organization of Iranian People’s Fedai Guerrillas.
The aim of this essay is neither to defend the past nostalgically nor to reject it outright. Rather, it seeks to recover a historical formulation by reading it carefully in its original context. It also shows how a concept born within a revolutionary strategy can be transformed into an instrument for legitimizing state power.
1. The Formulation of the “People–Imperialism Contradiction” in Its Historical Context
To understand what “the people” (khalq) means in formulations such as the “people–imperialism contradiction,” we must first avoid a common misunderstanding.
The people is not an ontological social category. It is not a homogeneous social whole, nor is it another name for the nation. It is a historical and strategic formulation that emerged under specific conditions of struggle.
What were those conditions? For the left in the Global South during the twentieth century, the issue was not simply capitalism as an abstract system. It was a particular form of capitalism intertwined with imperialist domination, structural dependency, and political repression. As Bijan Jazani’s theoretical framework makes clear, society was understood not as a fully developed capitalist formation, but as an incomplete or transitional one—a form of dependent capitalism.
This point is crucial. When the object of analysis is itself an unfinished totality, the classical—and correct—formulation of the contradiction between labor and capital is not, by itself, sufficient to explain the concrete historical situation. At this point, the formulation of the principal contradiction becomes a practical question.
It is precisely here that Jazani makes an important theoretical move. Without denying the contradiction between labor and capital, he argues that under dependent capitalism this contradiction alone cannot explain the “revolutionary content” of the situation. Why? Because part of the system of domination operates not only within society but also through its connection to external, imperialist domination. For this reason, he proposes a formulation in which the principal contradiction appears as the people versus the anti-people. This contradiction is a condensed expression of that very intertwining.
At this point, however, we must be careful. If “the people” is understood as a homogeneous whole, the entire framework collapses. Jazani explicitly states that the people is composed of heterogeneous forces: workers, peasants, the petty bourgeoisie, and even remnants of the national bourgeoisie. In other words, this is not a pre-given unity. It is a contradictory alliance. The central question, therefore, is not what the people are, but how these heterogeneous forces can be organized in a revolutionary direction.
1.1. The People as a Response to a Deadlock
At this point, we must return to the historical context. Bijan Jazani and the other leading theorists and founders of Iran’s guerrilla left developed their ideas at a time when the experience of the Tudeh Party had reached a dead end, mass organization had been crushed, and the possibility of open political activity had almost disappeared—or, at least, this was how they assessed the political conditions they faced. Under such circumstances, the main issue for those fighting the existing order was not simply to “develop a correct analysis”. It was to “make political action possible”. “The people” emerged precisely as a response to this deadlock. It became the name for rebuilding a united front of struggle under conditions in which none of its constituent forces could carry the struggle forward on its own. In other words, “the people” did not describe an existing reality. It created a political possibility.
The writings of the leading theorists of Iran’s armed struggle make this equally clear. Their concern was not only that the masses lived under exploitation and repression. They also argued that a real rupture had developed between the revolutionary vanguard and the masses. This rupture was produced by state repression, earlier defeats, widespread distrust, and the regime’s police apparatus. In this theoretical framework, “the people” was therefore not the name of a political subject already present on the historical stage. It was the name of the possibility of connecting dispersed social forces. These forces had to be brought out of fragmentation, distrust, and political passivity through revolutionary practice. In this sense, “the people” did not exist in advance. It had to be created, interpellated, and organized.
On the one hand, “the people” did not mean a unified and contradiction-free nation. On the other hand, it was not simply another name for the working class. “The people” was the name of a strategic configuration of struggle under conditions in which no single social force—especially in the repressive climate that followed earlier defeats—could carry the burden of revolution alone. This formulation did not deny the internal contradictions among these forces. Rather, it sought to suspend them temporarily and organize them around a common struggle against political deadlock and imperialist domination.
1.2. The Strategic Function: From Naming to Organizing
This formulation did not remain at the conceptual level. Its importance lay precisely in its ability to make revolutionary practice possible. In Jazani’s theoretical framework, the content of every revolution is determined by its principal contradiction. That contradiction, in turn, determines the revolution’s driving forces and its allies. The term “the people” was therefore not just a matter of vocabulary. It was a practical choice. It identified which social forces should form a common front. It defined the principal enemy. Most importantly, it determined the political horizon within which the struggle would unfold.
From this perspective, “the people” was an organizing tool. It connected different levels of struggle—anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist, and anti-dictatorial—into a single practical whole.
The argument was not that the contradiction between labor and capital had become unimportant. Nor was it that this contradiction should be postponed until some distant future after the establishment of bourgeois democracy. Rather, under dependent capitalism, monarchical dictatorship, imperialist domination, and political repression, the very possibility of building a broad and organized class struggle was understood to depend on breaking that political deadlock. For this reason, the founders of Iran’s guerrilla left did not invoke the people’s front in order to replace the working class with a vague national subject called “the people”. Instead, they sought to define a practical political field within which the working class could turn the question of leadership into a real and concrete political issue within a broader revolutionary struggle.
1.3. The Question of Leadership: Where Everything Is Decided
But does this mean that the proletarian orientation is lost?
Jazani’s answer—and, more precisely, the answer pursued in practice by organizations such as the Organization of Iranian People’s Fedai Guerrillas—is no. The reason is simple but decisive: “the people” is a united front, but the question of its leadership remains open and contested.
The writings of the founders of the guerrilla movement state this explicitly. They argue that the fate of the revolution depends not only on objective conditions but also on “subjective conditions”, above all on the question of leadership. If the working class succeeds in taking leadership, the revolution can move toward “people’s democracy” and open the possibility of a transition to socialism. If it fails to do so, the same alliance may stop at the stage of bourgeois democracy. In other words, “the people” neither guarantees liberation nor prevents it. It is the political field within which the question of leadership becomes decisive.
For this reason, their stage-based approach should not be confused with the passive view that bourgeois democracy must first be established, while the socialist struggle is postponed to a distant future. In the theoretical frameworks of Jazani and Ahmadzadeh, the democratic or national character of the revolutionary stage did not mean abandoning proletarian leadership. Quite the opposite. Their argument was that if leadership of this united front fell into the hands of non-working-class forces, the revolution would remain limited to bourgeois or national democracy. But if the vanguard of the working class secured leadership, the same democratic revolution could develop into “people’s democracy” and become the first step toward socialism.
This is where the connection to Lenin’s discussions in The Tasks of the Russian Social-Democrats (1897) and Two Tactics of Social-Democracy in the Democratic Revolution (1905) becomes clear. In The Tasks of the Russian Social-Democrats, Lenin writes:
“The Social-Democrats support [the progressive bourgeoisie] only because this hastens the downfall of the common enemy. They expect nothing from these temporary allies, and they make no concessions to them.” (Persian translation by Pourhormozan, Collected Works, Vol. 1, Ferdowsi Publications, p. 171)
He continues:
“While pointing to the solidarity of the various groups opposed to absolutism with the workers, the Social-Democrats will always distinguish the workers from them. They will always explain the temporary and conditional character of this solidarity. They will always emphasize the class independence of the proletariat, which tomorrow may find itself confronting today’s allies.” (Ibid., p. 172)
The same logic appears in Lenin’s stage-based understanding of revolution. In Two Tactics, he writes:
“In reply to the anarchist objection that we are postponing the socialist revolution, we say that we are not postponing it. We are taking the first step toward it by the only possible and correct path: the path of the democratic republic. Anyone who seeks another road to socialism, bypassing political democracy, will inevitably reach absurd and reactionary conclusions, both economically and politically.” (Persian translation by Pourhormozan, Collected Works, Vol. 2, Ferdowsi Publications, p. 813)
Lenin also anticipated the objection that the very idea of bourgeois democracy during a revolution was ambiguous. He answered:
“There is bourgeois democracy and bourgeois democracy. The Zemstvo constitutionalist or supporter of an upper chamber who speaks of universal suffrage while secretly bargaining with Tsarism for a mutilated constitution is a bourgeois democrat. So too is the peasant who rises with arms against landlords and officials and, in his naïve republicanism, demands the overthrow of the Tsar. Germany has a bourgeois-democratic system, and so does England. Austria has one, and so do the United States and Switzerland. Woe to the Marxist who, during the democratic revolution, fails to see the differences between these various forms and stages of democracy, and merely repeats that this is, after all, a bourgeois revolution producing bourgeois results.” (Ibid., p. 835)
These passages provide the answer that the founders of Iran’s guerrilla left would likely have given to their more radical critics, who regarded every form of “stage-based understanding of revolution” as non-communist. Following Lenin, one might say that there are different kinds of stage-based theories of revolution.
The difference becomes clear when we compare this perspective with the Tudeh Party’s justification for its inaction during the coup of 19 August 1953. In a pamphlet titled “On August Coup”, published in February 1954, the party wrote:
“Stalin divided the revolutionary development of colonial and semi-colonial countries into three stages:
1.The anti-imperialist revolution.
2.The bourgeois-democratic revolution.
3.The socialist revolution.
[…] The first stage is the national revolution. At this stage, the bourgeoisie as a whole—except for the comprador layer—supports the revolution and opposes imperialism. At the same time, the broad peasant movement and peasant uprisings against feudal landlords have not yet developed. Because of the relative weakness of the proletariat and the limited participation of the peasantry in the anti-imperialist movement, leadership remains in the hands of the bourgeoisie, whose tendency is toward compromise and whose struggle against imperialism is hesitant and unstable. […] Although the revolutionary movement in Iran has existed for decades and has achieved victories in the past, it still remains in its first stage. […] If, in the second stage of the revolution, leadership—and therefore responsibility for its outcome—belongs to us, then in the first stage leadership belongs to the bourgeoisie, and responsibility rests primarily with it.” (Quoted in The Past Is the Lamp of the Future, p. 700, Qoqnoos Publications, 1983)
As we can see, this is also a stage-based theory of revolution. Yet it has almost nothing in common with the stage-based understanding of the founders of Iran’s guerrilla left. They believed that even during the anti-imperialist and democratic stage, the proletariat, through its revolutionary vanguard, had to lead the revolution.
This view is entirely consistent with another passage from Lenin’s Two Tactics:
“Social-Democracy tells the proletariat: our revolution is a people’s revolution. Therefore, as the most advanced class and the only class that is revolutionary to the end, you must devote all your efforts not only to taking the most active part in it, but also to assuming its leadership. You must not confine yourself within the narrow limits of class struggle, especially in the sense of a purely trade-union movement. On the contrary, you must broaden the scope and content of your struggle so that it embraces not only all the tasks of the present Russian democratic revolution, but also those of the future socialist revolution. Without neglecting the trade-union movement or refusing to use even the smallest legal opportunities, you must place at the forefront the tasks of armed insurrection, the creation of a revolutionary army, and the establishment of a revolutionary government as the only means of securing the complete victory of the people over Tsarism and achieving a democratic republic and genuine political freedom.” (Persian translation by Pourhormozan, Collected Works, Vol. 2, Ferdowsi Publications, p. 905)
When Lenin has Social-Democracy tell the proletariat that it “must not confine itself within the narrow limits of class struggle,” figures such as Jazani and Ahmadzadeh understood this to mean that the Iranian working class should see itself as one of the forces constituting “the people’s” front.
One may reject every version of a stage-based theory of revolution—including Lenin’s—and regard it as incompatible with communism. That is a legitimate theoretical position. But this is different from treating the Tudeh Party’s conception and that of Iran’s guerrilla left as if they were the same. They were not.
1.4. The Decisive Difference: A Tool, Not a Substitute
From this discussion, we can draw a conclusion that is essential to the argument.
In Jazani’s theoretical framework, the people–imperialism contradiction does not replace the contradiction between labor and capital. Rather, it is a formulation that makes that contradiction politically operative under specific historical conditions. More precisely, it functions as a “mediating” concept. It translates the fundamental contradiction of capitalism into a form that can become a material force in a dependent, colonial, or semi-colonial context. This is why it serves two purposes at once. On the one hand, it makes it possible to organize a broad united front. On the other hand, by keeping the question of leadership open, it potentially preserves a proletarian orientation. It is important to stress that I am referring to the potential within Jazani’s theoretical framework, not to whether the Iranian guerrilla movement before the 1979 Revolution actually succeeded in building such a broad front or maintaining its proletarian orientation.
The main conclusion is therefore this: within this tradition, “the people” is not a social essence. It is a political technology. It is a means of reconstructing the possibility of revolution under conditions where society is marked by structural dependency, class formation is uneven, and the political sphere is subject to repression. Under such conditions, without this mediating concept, the contradiction between labor and capital remains at an abstract level. Yet without resolving the question of leadership, the same mediating concept can easily become an instrument of political deviation. It is precisely here that both its revolutionary potential and the danger of its distortion emerge.
2. From a Revolutionary Formulation to State Ideology: The Turn after 1979
In the previous section, we saw how the people–imperialism contradiction functioned, in a specific historical context, as a tool for organizing revolutionary practice. We must now turn to the moment when this tool lost its original function—or, more accurately, when its function was displaced. This shift was neither sudden nor purely theoretical. It was the result of a specific response to a specific historical event: the 1979 Iranian Revolution.
2.1. Where Does the Problem Begin?
The problem emerged with a paradoxical new situation. For the first time, a regime came to power that could not easily be described as dependent on imperialism. Its official discourse was explicitly anti-arrogance (estekbar-setizi), and at the ideological level it presented itself as the representative of the downtrodden (mostaz’afin).
This essay does not examine the profound conceptual differences between arrogance (estekbar) and imperialism, or between the downtrodden (mostaz’afin) and the proletariat. Nor does it discuss the theoretical and political consequences of ignoring these differences and treating them as mere differences in terminology. For the sake of argument, however, let us assume that the left currents defending the people–imperialism contradiction were genuinely unable to distinguish these concepts.
In the aftermath of the February 1979 Revolution, the simple division that had structured the earlier formulation, the people versus a regime dependent on imperialism, appeared to disappear. A new situation emerged in which the ruling regime could seemingly define itself within the same political language and the same conceptual framework. This was precisely the point at which the crisis began.
2.2. The First Slippage: Equating Political Discourse with Class Position
At this point, a subtle but decisive shift occurred among some of the heirs of this tradition.
Instead of analyzing the regime’s material and class position, they focused on its discourse. Put more simply, anti-arrogance (estekbar-setizi) was no longer treated as a political claim. It was taken as an objective social position. Likewise, advocacy for the downtrodden (mostaz’af-gara’i) was no longer understood as a strategy of ideological mobilization. It was read as the genuine expression of a class front.
As a result, the following equation emerged: if the regime took a stance against the United States and imperialism, then it must belong to “the people’s” camp. At this point, the formulation ceased to be an analytical tool. It became an ideological shortcut.
Why was this slippage possible? In my view, it cannot simply be reduced to a “theoretical error”, nor can it be seen as the direct outcome of the original formulation developed by its founders. If that were the case, then every political force that adopted this formulation should have arrived at the same conclusion. But history shows exactly the opposite. Within the very same tradition, in particular, among those who claimed to continue Jazani’s line. one faction moved toward supporting the Islamic Republic (the Majority Organization), while another including currents such as Rah-e Fadaee and part of the Minority Organization, stood firmly against it on the basis of the same theoretical framework. The issue, therefore, was not an “inevitable internal logic”. It was the way this formulation was applied to a new historical situation.
2.3. The Moment of Testing: Facts That Should Have Raised Doubts
It is easy to claim that Marx’s silence on the precise nature of communism later made it possible for socialism to be equated with state capitalism in the twentieth century. Or to argue that Stalinism was the logical outcome of Marxism. Similar claims are common. For example, many Marxist and even Leninist scholars have argued that Lenin’s understanding of materialism and dialectics in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism was deeply influenced by Feuerbach. Yet in his Philosophical Notebooks on Hegel’s Logic, we encounter a very different Lenin: a fully Hegelian Marxist.
From this perspective, we should remember that the authors of the people–imperialism contradiction did not live to witness the decisive years between 1976 and 1979. Had they been alive, could they really have ignored the following developments and continued to regard the anti-Shah and anti-American clerical movement of the 1970s as a progressive anti-imperialist force?
The first event. Before the victory of the revolution, Ayatollah Khomeini ordered the creation of a “Committee for the Coordination and Review of Strikes”. Its members included Mehdi Bazargan, Yadollah Sahabi, Moinfar, Bahonar, and Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. Its task was to end strikes that threatened production in key industries and endangered the country’s survival. On 30 January 1979, about three weeks before the revolution’s victory, the committee had persuaded 118 production units to end their strikes.
The second event. Khomeini’s long letter of 13 February 1978 to the Islamic Associations of Iranian Students in Europe. In one important passage, he wrote:
“…You must invite non-Islamic groups, whose beliefs and practices are contrary to Islam and who are inclined toward other schools of thought, whatever they may be, to the progressive and justice-seeking school of Islam. If they do not accept, you must dissociate yourselves from them—or at least avoid them, regardless of who they are. […] Our youth must know that the extensive propaganda of international communism, like the noisy propaganda of world imperialism, serves only to deceive and exploit the oppressed masses. […] You must be vigilant and ensure, with the greatest care and awareness, that those who are not committed to Islam in all its dimensions, even if they agree with you on some principles are first invited to commit themselves to Islam. If this proves ineffective, avoid allowing them to participate in Islamic gatherings and associations.” (Sahifeh-ye Imam, Vol. 3, p. 321)
The third event. The gradual shift in U.S. policy toward the revolution. This did not mean that the United States had originally intended to abandon the Shah. Rather, it reflected its growing recognition that preserving his rule had become impossible. The issue was not that the United States wanted the Shah removed from the beginning or that it engineered the revolution. Such an interpretation not only contradicts the explosive power of the revolutionary movement itself, but also unintentionally reinforces the reactionary narrative that reduces the 1979 Revolution to a Western project for bringing the clergy to power.
What became clear was that, as strikes spread, the administrative and economic apparatus became paralyzed, divisions appeared within the army, and millions took to the streets. The United States concluded that the Shah could no longer be saved through routine repression or political management. At the very least, the costs and risks had become so great that they threatened the complete collapse of the dependent order it sought to preserve. From that point onward, U.S. policy was not about creating the revolution. It was about containing the damage caused by a revolution that it could no longer stop.
Within this context, U.S. contacts with the anti-Shah clergy should be understood as part of a strategy of damage control. As Washington lost hope of preserving its preferred ally, the Shah, it sought to limit the possibility that the revolutionary process would come under the hegemony of the left and other radical forces. It therefore attempted to steer the transfer of power toward a force that opposed the Shah and, at least rhetorically, also opposed the United States, but that was socially, ideologically, and politically anti-left, hostile to independent working-class organization, and opposed to a socialist horizon. In other words, the U.S. green light to the clergy was not evidence that the revolution itself was an American project. It was evidence of an imperialist attempt to contain the consequences of a revolution that could no longer be prevented.
If we take seriously the theoretical views and political practice of figures such as Jazani, we must conclude that developments like these would almost certainly have made them question whether the anti-Shah and anti-imperialist clerical movement of the 1970s belonged within the people’s camp. Such doubts could have led them to ask whether they were simply witnessing another case of anti-imperialism versus dependency, or whether they were facing a more complex alignment of forces that appeared to be of the people, but were in fact anti-people.
At this point, we must move beyond the level of concepts and look at political practice. As the revolution approached victory, the left remained weakly organized and had only limited capacity for independent intervention. Under these conditions, the temptation to find a place within the emerging order grew much stronger. In such circumstances, the people–imperialism formulation could acquire an entirely different function. It no longer served as a tool for criticizing power and reorganizing struggle against it. Instead, it became a tool for justifying political proximity to power. This was the real shift: from analyzing contradictions to choosing a political position.
2.4. Mansoor Hekmat’s Critique of So-Called “People’s Socialism”: Correct, but Ahistorical
At this point, the critique developed by the Union of Communist Militants in Mansoor Hekmat’s essay “The Three Sources and Three Components of Iranian People’s Socialism,” published in November 1980, is, at one level, entirely justified and even necessary. Hekmat correctly shows how, in some readings of the people–imperialism contradiction, imperialism is separated from capitalism and understood as an external force. He also shows how this separation makes it possible to sanitize domestic capitalism.
One passage in The Three Sources and Three Components expresses this critique in particularly sharp but clear terms. Hekmat argues that “people’s socialists” do not reach the conclusion that the forces they once included in the people’s front are in fact counter-revolutionary through Marxist analysis. Rather, they arrive at this conclusion only after accumulating experience and only with a delay. His target here is “empiricism”: a mode of understanding that follows events instead of beginning from structural analysis. Up to this point, the critique is understandable. The problem begins when the exposure of a real political tendency turns into a claim of absolute epistemological superiority.
In effect, Hekmat argues the following:
The central error of people’s socialism—treating the national bourgeoisie or the anti-Shah and anti-American clergy, understood as a radical petty bourgeoisie, as part of the people’s front, is not merely possible. It is inevitable if one begins from the people–imperialism contradiction. But if this were true, then every political force that adopted this formulation should have followed the same path. History clearly shows that they did not. This simple fact undermines the claim of necessity. What we are dealing with is a possibility, not a predetermined outcome.
The deeper problem with Hekmat’s critique lies at the epistemological level. His account, and later the tradition that became known as Worker-Communism, contains a recurring irony toward what it calls “people’s socialism”. The implication is always the same: “It could have been understood from the beginning.” “There was no need for such bloody historical experience.” “A correct Marxist analysis could have predicted the trajectory of these forces in advance.” On the surface, this appears to be a defense of the scientific method, Marxism instead of Feuerbachianism. In practice, however, it leads to a problematic conclusion: that one can arrive at a complete and error-free understanding of reality without engaging in political practice, without passing through real historical contradictions, and simply through scientific abstraction. At precisely this point, the critique of the empiricism of people’s socialism slips into a form of abstract theoreticism.
Marxism now appears less as a method of engaging with reality than as a system for predicting it. Yet Marxism is a method in which theory and practice stand in a dialectical relationship, constantly correcting one another. Here we must draw an important distinction. What Worker-Communism criticizes is empiricism, the accumulation of facts without a theoretical framework. What existed in the guerrilla tradition, at least up to 1976, was praxis: active engagement with reality, together with the possibility of theoretical revision. These two are not the same.
The Worker-Communist framework rests on a hidden assumption. It assumes that one can begin from a pure point of departure, a complete Marxist understanding of the contradiction between labor and capital—and proceed from there to revolutionary practice without major deviations. But the history of the left, both in Iran and internationally, does not support this assumption. Political traditions built around the labor–capital contradiction have repeatedly drifted toward reformism, economism, or even political passivity.
Many student activists in the Students for Freedom and Equality movement (DAB), whose politics were grounded precisely in this formulation, have today become supporters of the Resistance Axis left. Can the Worker-Communist approach explain how someone who once embraced a Marxist understanding of the labor–capital contradiction could later, drawing on the language of that very tradition, slide into the logic of “people’s socialism”?
One may therefore conclude that the Worker-Communist critique of what it calls “people’s socialism” is valid insofar as it exposes some of its genuine errors. But when that critique reconstructs itself as an intellectually superior position as one that already knew the answer in advance, it falls into the very error it condemns. It severs theory from practice and turns Marxism into a predictive system operating from above.
At this point, we should return to a simple Marxist principle: knowledge is not the fully developed precondition of action. It is both the outcome of practice and one of the conditions for its continued reproduction. The real question is not who knew the truth beforehand. It is which theoretical framework possesses the capacity to revise itself through practice.
If we accept this criterion, then we can no longer dismiss an entire theoretical tradition as mistaken from the outset simply on the basis of retrospective judgment. Just as the restoration of capitalism and the repressive character of the experiences of actually existing socialism compelled many Marxists, in the face of widespread abandonment of Marxism, to reclaim the revolutionary Marxist tradition through careful and critical reinterpretations, so too the task here is not to defend the past out of nostalgia. It is to recover a theoretical tradition from within itself against what are understood as its distortions.
Marx himself undertook such a task in his critique of Lassalleanism. Rosa Luxemburg did the same in her critique of Bernstein. Lenin did so in his polemics against Kautsky. Lukács defended the Hegelian core of Marxism against anti-Hegelian interpretations.
3. The Misuse by the Resistance Axis: Reviving a Historically Specific Formulation in the Service of the Bourgeoisie
To explain why the Resistance Axis formulation reaches the opposite conclusion despite relying on some real historical facts, we must first take a step back. Its advocates do point to a historical reality. At one stage of capitalist development, especially in many peripheral countries, it was meaningful to distinguish between the national bourgeoisie and the comprador bourgeoisie. This distinction reflected real historical conditions.
The problem is that they apply this historical reality within a framework that no longer corresponds to contemporary conditions. As a result, it becomes a tool for justifying the current configuration of power. In this framework, an institution such as the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) is presented as the national bourgeoisie, while forces such as the Iran Chamber of Commerce are portrayed as the comprador bourgeoisie.
To untangle this issue, we must trace the historical transformation of capitalism itself. We must move from a period in which it was possible to speak of relatively distinct factions within the bourgeoisie to a situation in which circuits of capital accumulation have become deeply intertwined. In this new context, the old distinction gives way to a unified and networked totality of capital.
Only through this historical reconstruction can we understand why reviving those old categories today is no longer analytically illuminating. Instead, it serves to justify the repressive capitalist order that currently exists.
3.1. A Brief History of the Bourgeoisie: From the Contradiction Between Two Bourgeois Blocs to the Intertwining of Circuits of Capital
To understand why the distinction between the national bourgeoisie and the comprador bourgeoisie once had real meaning, we must return to the historical emergence of capitalism. At that time, capital had not yet reached its current level of concentration and integration. Contradictions within the bourgeoisie itself appeared as relatively distinct blocs.
This was clearly visible in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century England. The commercial bourgeoisie, operating through colonial trade networks, benefited from importing cheap goods such as textiles from India—and selling them in domestic and foreign markets. In contrast, the emerging industrial bourgeoisie, centered in cities such as Manchester and Birmingham, depended on protecting the domestic market and securing a monopoly over industrial production. This was a conflict between two different logics of accumulation. One was based on circulation and trade. The other was based on industrial production. As a result, economic policies such as tariffs and import regulations—became direct arenas of struggle between these two sections of the bourgeoisie.
As industrial capital consolidated its hegemony in the metropolitan centers, this contradiction gradually shifted to the global level. What had once been a conflict within England between commercial and industrial capital became a relationship between the metropole and the periphery. Industrialized countries became centers of production, while colonies and semi-colonies became suppliers of raw materials and markets for manufactured goods. The strategy pursued at this stage was clear: weaken or destroy domestic production in the periphery and integrate it into the global division of labor as a supplier of raw materials and a consumer of industrial products.
It was under these conditions that a national bourgeoisie emerged in many peripheral countries, including those in the Middle East. This bourgeoisie was generally active in developing productive sectors such as workshops, light industry, and domestic manufacturing. Its interests often conflicted with the penetration of foreign capital and imported goods. At the same time, another layer of merchants, intermediaries, and political-economic elites emerged. Their interests were directly tied to imports, commercial brokerage, and connections with foreign capital. Classical Marxist literature referred to this layer as the comprador bourgeoisie.
In Iran, from the late Qajar period through the reign of Reza Shah, this contradiction appeared in various forms. It could be seen in the conflicts between domestic producers and merchants dependent on imports, as well as in state efforts to build national industries despite pressure from foreign trade. At this stage, the distinction between forces seeking to develop domestic production and those acting as intermediaries within the global trading system was a real material distinction, not merely a theoretical construction.
A similar pattern appears in Marx’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. In the sections on wages of labor, profit of capital, and rent of land, Marx initially identifies three classes: the worker (owner of labor-power), the capitalist (owner of capital), and the landlord (owner of land). Yet he later shows how the capitalist can become a landlord, and the landlord a capitalist, so that the two ultimately merge into a single class.
This picture gradually changed as capitalist relations deepened, especially from the second half of the twentieth century onward. The decisive change was not simply the growth of capital. It was the transformation of the way capital itself was organized. Industrial, financial, and commercial capital merged within large corporations, banks, and diversified conglomerates. Global value chains expanded. States themselves became active participants in the process of capital accumulation.
Under these conditions, it is no longer possible to speak of independent sectors of the bourgeoisie whose interests remain structurally opposed over the long term. Industrial capital cannot function without financial capital. Commercial capital serves the realization of value produced by industry. The state, as the guarantor of the conditions for accumulation, is itself integrated into this network. The result is what we might call a “networked or multi-circuit bourgeoisie”: a class in which the same actors may simultaneously operate in production, trade, finance, and real estate.
This situation is clearly visible in contemporary Iran. Large institutions and enterprises including quasi-state organizations are simultaneously involved in industrial projects, banking, imports, contracting, and financial markets. Under these conditions, attempting to divide them into national and comprador bourgeoisies amounts to artificially splitting an integrated whole into imaginary parts.
Thus, although the distinction between the national bourgeoisie and the comprador bourgeoisie once rested on a real material basis the reality of a developing and internally divided capitalism, we now face a different situation. That distinction has largely lost its analytical relevance. What remains is not a contradiction between two different bourgeoisies, but contradictions within a single bourgeois class operating across multiple circuits of accumulation. It is precisely at this point that reviving the old distinction ceases to be an analytical tool and becomes an ideological one. It serves to present one section of this integrated capitalist class as somehow “national” and “of the people”.
3.2. What Does the Iranian Case Tell Us?
In my earlier article, “Lost in the Labyrinth of Categories” (September 2018), which was a critique of Mohammad Maljoo, I approached this issue from a different angle. I argued that, under present conditions, separating the industrial bourgeoisie from the commercial bourgeoisie is fundamentally mistaken. I also explained how this reasoning works. By identifying “aggressive financialization” as the source of Iran’s economic crisis, it ultimately supports a form of “capitalist productivism” and obscures the real objectives of political struggle.
My argument drew on Sohrab Shabahang’s valuable study, Classes in Capitalist Society and the Characteristics of Iran’s Socio-Economic Structure, which is grounded in both theoretical and statistical evidence. Here I will summarize part of that argument.
Commercial bourgeoisie in Iran operates in at least three sectors:
1.The purchase and sale of goods produced by small producers whose production is either non-capitalist or only indirectly subordinated to capital (such as dried fruits and carpets).
2.The circulation of imported consumer goods that do not enter the domestic production process, and whose profits also do not return to domestic production.
3.The circulation of goods produced under capitalist relations, as well as raw materials and intermediate goods used in capitalist production.
The third sector accounts for by far the largest share of imports. It is true that, despite the dominance of productive capital, large spaces have remained open for commercial capital. Those active in this sphere enjoy considerable influence within state institutions. They shape economic, financial, and monetary policy. They also influence the banking system and the allocation of credit and financial facilities.
At the same time, the rapid growth of banks and financial institutions over the past decade reflects something else. These institutions emerged because industrial projects required financing in order to generate returns sufficient to pay interest on deposits. In other words, interest-bearing capital, rather than being separate from productive capital, is fundamentally bank capital intertwined with capitalist production in Iran.
Ramin Motamednejad’s major study, “The Political Economy of Iranian Capitalism,” documents this interdependence in detail. He shows how large industrial groups owned by state, quasi-state, and public non-state institutions fully exploited the speculative opportunities that emerged during the 1990s.
Alongside their industrial and productive activities, these groups expanded into brokerage and speculation. They established investment companies, financial institutions, credit organizations, and commercial firms. In doing so, they took advantage of postwar privatization, new permits for high-rise construction and urban development, the reopening of the Tehran Stock Exchange in 1989, the return of multiple exchange rates, and privileged access to bank credit through political connections.
As a result, Iranian capitalism entered a new phase during the 2000s. Motamednejad describes this phase as “networked and monopolistic capitalism.” The industrial groups sought new and broader fields for investment and profitability. Their aim was to move from primitive accumulation toward a more extensive process of capital accumulation.
It was in this context that private banks began to appear one after another after 2000. By attracting public deposits with very low real interest rates, they redirected these funds into expanding circuits of capital. These included commercial circuits (such as chain stores), financial and banking circuits (such as currency exchange businesses), real estate (such as high-rise construction), and even sports enterprises (such as profitable football clubs).
Ghadir Investment Company provides a good example. For many years it was the largest investment company listed on the Tehran Stock Exchange. It was originally affiliated with Bank Saderat before being transferred in 2009 to the Armed Forces Social Security Organization (SATA). Through a number of holding companies, it organized investments across many sectors: electricity and power plants, petrochemicals, mining, heavy industry (including steel and automobiles), construction, cement, transportation, and financial-commercial services.
Based on this evidence, Motamednejad correctly argues that failing to recognize the simultaneous presence of a single bourgeois institution across multiple circuits of capital has led some scholars such as Hossein Raghfar to conclude that capitalism does not really exist in Iran. According to this view, wealth is simply distributed arbitrarily within a form of crony capitalism among competing interest groups. Similar arguments appear in Mehrdad Vahabi’s concept of an “economy of plunder” based on anfal, or in Kamal Athari’s description of Iran as “neo-feudal.”
Motamednejad reaches a different conclusion. Contemporary Iranian capitalism is a single economic system whose various components industrial, commercial, monetary, banking, financial, real estate, and intermediary capital form interconnected and inseparable links in one chain.
It is precisely here that the contradiction within the Resistance Axis formulation becomes clear. If capital in Iran has this structure, then the claim that one part of it is national (for example, the IRGC) while another part is comprador (for example, the Iran Chamber of Commerce) can only be defended if these sectors can actually be separated from one another. Yet the empirical evidence shows exactly the opposite.
In practice:
-The same institution described as industrial is also active in finance and commerce.
-The same bank accused of rent-seeking also invests in industrial production.
-The same holding companies presented as national are deeply integrated into international financial and trading networks.
What follows from this?
To preserve the Resistance Axis formulation, capital must be given a Janus-faced character.
At one moment it is productive; at another, unproductive. At one level it is national; at another, comprador.
This is no longer analysis. It is the fragmentation of an integrated totality in order to preserve a theoretical assumption that ultimately justifies existing relations of domination.
Part of this error stems from the misuse of a genuine distinction in Marxist political economy: the distinction between productive and unproductive labor, and consequently between productive and unproductive capital. Marx discusses this distinction extensively in the Grundrisse and Capital, and it has generated a large body of commentary. Its purpose, however, was never to divide the bourgeoisie into two opposing political camps. Rather, it was intended to analyze how value is produced and realized.
Within Marx’s theoretical framework, a capitalist may participate in the production of value at one moment and in its circulation or realization at another. This is a functional distinction within a single integrated system. It is not a boundary separating two different kinds of bourgeoisie one supposedly progressive and the other reactionary.
In the Resistance Axis formulation, however, this distinction undergoes an illegitimate leap. It is elevated from the level of economic analysis to the level of class politics.
3.3. The Comprador Bourgeoisie: An Analytical Error or the Fantasy of Saving the Father?
At this point, we are dealing with a psychological and ideological mechanism that is more than a simple analytical error. It also involves displacement and denial. In its discourse, the Resistance Axis subject constantly speaks of the oligarchy, the comprador bourgeoisie, the Chamber of Commerce, neoliberals, and domestic pro-NATO figures. Yet it is precisely through this language that it conceals its relationship to the capitalist order as a whole. By constantly attacking one section of capital, it frees itself from the responsibility of defending capital as such. Its selective criticism of “the oligarchs” allows it to avoid confronting its real political role: in practice, it launders the reputation of an anti-worker and anti-left regime in the name of anti-imperialism.
From this perspective, the “comprador bourgeoisie” functions less as an analytical category than as a psychological object of projection. It becomes a container into which all the ugliness of capitalism is poured. This allows the rest of the system, namely, the state, security, military, and monopolistic capitalism that the Resistance Axis favors to continue presenting itself as “popular”, “pro-downtrodden”, and “anti-imperialist”.
Accordingly, the Resistance Axis subject does not see itself as a cog in the machinery that justifies an aggressive capitalist order. Instead, it imagines itself as a sincere reformer who seeks to rescue capitalism from its bad elements: infiltrators, Westernizers, Chamber of Commerce elites, clerics, neoliberals, pro-NATO figures, feminists, ethnic activists, and deviant pseudo-leftists.
This is its central fantasy. The system is fundamentally anti-imperialist, popular, and potentially emancipatory. It merely needs to be cleansed of undesirable elements. Consequently, whenever the material reality of repression, exploitation, executions, imprisonment, privatization, subcontracting, wage suppression, the destruction of independent labor organizations, the repression of women, the repression of ethnic minorities, and the elimination of the left becomes impossible to ignore, a defensive mechanism is immediately activated. These abuses are attributed either to infiltrators, isolated mistakes, imperialist pressure, issues that should not be exaggerated for now, or matters that should not provide ammunition to the enemy.
For this current, the gallows and the bullets directed at protesters are all interpreted within the horizon of anti-imperialism. Anyone who protests against these executions or shootings is presumed either to be pro-NATO or to have fallen victim to enemy propaganda.
Within this imagination, the category of pro-NATO becomes infinitely elastic. It includes reformists who supported Rouhani or Zarif, the bourgeoisie of the Chamber of Commerce, misled protesting workers, pseudo-left intellectuals, feminists associated with the Jina uprising, separatist ethnic activists, and anyone who dares to say: “Repression is repression, even if the repressive state shouts Death to America.”
Within this framework, the anti-imperialist Islamic Republic, by definition, has no conflict with workers, women, feminists, genuine leftists, or sincere critics. If repression has occurred, it must have been the work of Zionist or imperialist infiltrators within the security or military apparatus seeking to discredit the regime. If it later becomes clear that no infiltrators were involved, another explanation is ready: yes, mistakes were made. Even the most anti-imperialist regimes are not free from error. Criticism is acceptable, but only if it does not benefit the enemy. One must not make a mountain out of a molehill for example, by emphasizing the number of executions.
This is precisely the point where political critique must be joined to psychoanalytic critique. The Resistance Axis subject cannot confront the fact that its beloved object, the imagined anti-imperialist state, is in reality a repressive capitalist state. It therefore creates a separation between the system and the system’s mistakes, between its supposedly anti-imperialist essence and the bad behavior of certain individuals, between structural repression and isolated errors.
These distinctions serve an obvious psychological function: they preserve love for the object. The subject must continue loving the regime as the historical subject of anti-imperialism without being forced to see the blood of workers, women, protesters, political prisoners, and persecuted leftists on that regime’s hands. The blood is therefore attributed to infiltrators, liberals, pro-NATO figures, administrative mistakes, or wartime conditions.
For this reason, its position is never merely a matter of geopolitical analysis. It expresses an emotional loyalty to a powerful father who, no matter how violent he becomes, must still be regarded as fundamentally benevolent.
-If the father beats you, it must have been necessary.
-If he beats you severely, the bad advisers around him are to blame.
-If he kills, circumstances were exceptionally difficult.
-If he kills again, we must be careful not to let the enemy exploit the situation.
At this point, anti-imperialism is transformed from a politics of emancipation into a patriarchal theology of the state. The state may make mistakes, but its essence remains pure. It may repress, but its historical direction is correct. It may crush workers, but in its historical totality it remains devoted to the downtrodden.
A complementary mechanism operates alongside this one. Any critique that approaches the existing state not simply as the material container of collective survival, but as a concrete capitalist, security, and repressive state, is immediately dismissed through a postcolonial gesture. Such criticism is accused of reproducing a Eurocentric, anti-state, or colonial perspective.
A clear example is the argument that left intellectuals, by separating the regime from the people, become accomplices in the colonial project of destroying statehood and depoliticizing society. They are therefore told that they must accept the responsibility of sovereignty and, in effect, take responsibility for the Islamic Republic itself. Yet this argument contains a decisive slippage. It begins with the valid proposition that without state institutions and defensive capacities, societies in the Global South are vulnerable to imperialism. It then leaps to the conclusion that one must therefore defend this actually existing state, with its existing class structure, security apparatus, and anti-worker character (see, for example, the writings of Amir Khorasani or Omid Mehrgan).
This argument deliberately ignores the crucial distinction between recognizing the necessity of statehood and legitimizing the existing state.
The accusation of Eurocentrism thus performs a defensive function. Whenever the repression of workers, women, leftists, minorities, or protesters is raised, the response is: “You think like European leftists who have grown accustomed to security. You do not understand the realities of states in the Global South.” In this way, criticism of the state is silenced in the name of anti-colonialism.
Through this postcolonial posture, the Resistance Axis subject reconstructs the same patriarchal theology once again. The father may be harsh. He may make mistakes. He may beat us. Yet in a world full of wolves, he remains our only historical refuge. Therefore, we should not dwell too much on the wounds he inflicts.
This is the fantasy that allows the Resistance Axis subject to stand alongside an aggressive capitalist order while still imagining itself as the defender of the oppressed.
The problem, then, is not simply that this current mis-analyzes Iranian capitalism. The deeper problem is that, through a political fantasy, it deprives itself of the ability to see reality. Every piece of evidence against the IRI becomes evidence against infiltrators. Every act of repression becomes a tactical error. Every workers’ protest becomes an enemy operation. Every feminist demand becomes a liberal-imperialist conspiracy. Every left critique becomes the work of pseudo-left pro-NATO forces.
Such a political subject does not respond to reality. It continually rewrites reality in order to protect its beloved object. That is precisely what makes it dangerous.
4. The End of the National Bourgeoisie and Rethinking Imperialism
In Chapter Five of Delinking (1990), titled “Alternative Development for Africa and the Third World,” Samir Amin argues that history has shown that, in our time, the national bourgeoisie can no longer play the role it once played in nineteenth-century Europe, North America, and Japan:
“The global expansion of capitalism has been accompanied, in the periphery, by growing social inequality, while in the centers of the system it has created conditions for lower levels of social inequality and for a relatively stable distribution, which serves as the basis for democratic consensus. Since the bourgeoisie in the periphery is unable to control the local process of accumulation, and since this process must constantly adapt itself to the constraints of global accumulation, the project of establishing a bourgeois national state is not merely weakened by unfavorable external conditions; it becomes impossible. Consequently, because of its weakness, the peripheral state necessarily becomes authoritarian. To survive, it must avoid confrontation with the dominant imperialist powers and seek instead to improve its international position at the expense of more vulnerable peripheral partners. The conclusion is that social and political democracy, as well as international solidarity among peoples, requires us to abandon the myth of the ‘national bourgeoisie’ and replace the ‘national-bourgeois’ program with a ‘national-popular’ one.” (Samir Amin, Alternative Development for the Third World, Persian translation by Saeed Gazarani, Farhang-e Towseh, Nos. 4, February–March 1993)
If we take this point of departure seriously, then what we see today in Resistance Axis narratives is not simply an analytical mistake. It is a return to a concept that historical reality itself has rendered obsolete. The issue is no longer which section of the bourgeoisie is national and which is comprador. Rather, the distinction itself has lost its relevance under conditions of globally integrated capital.
From here, we can go one step further. The same error that appears domestically as the division of the bourgeoisie into two supposedly distinct camps reappears at the global level in another form. This time, it takes the form of attributing an anti-imperialist character to certain capitalist powers—such as China—in opposition to others, such as the United States. In other words, just as one section of capital is purified as national within a country, one section of global capitalism is portrayed as emancipatory on the international stage.
This leads us to a fundamental contradiction. How is it possible, within the unified logic of global capitalism, to understand anti-imperialism as an intrinsic characteristic of one part of that very system?
The answer reveals that what is often presented as anti-imperialism is, in many cases, nothing more than a moral and political reinterpretation of competition within capitalism itself. The problem begins precisely here: when rivalry between capitalist powers is no longer understood as part of the logic of capital accumulation, but is instead represented as a struggle between good and evil.
4.1. Castrating the Concept of Imperialism: When U.S. Bullying Replaces the Analysis of Global Capitalism
The Resistance Axis understands imperialism in moral, state-centered, and territorial terms. In this view, imperialism means U.S. military intervention, the dominance of the dollar, coups, sanctions, aircraft carriers, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the petrodollar. All of these are real. The problem is that they are manifestations of imperialism, not the concept of imperialism itself.
The central error of the Resistance Axis is that it takes the visible crimes of U.S. imperialism and turns them into an empirical and moral definition of imperialism. It then excludes from the category of imperialism any capitalist power that does not reproduce precisely these American forms of domination. This is why they ask: “Where has China organized a coup? Where has it sent aircraft carriers? Where is its global dollar?” But this question itself reveals a theoretical weakness. In Marxism, imperialism is not a list of the ugly actions of a state. It is a historical configuration of the relationship between capital, the state, global competition, value transfer, the world hierarchy, and political coercion.
If we begin with thinkers such as Michael Kidron, and the tradition continued by Chris Harman and Alex Callinicos, the strength of their analysis lies in connecting imperialism not simply to the foreign policy of states but to organized capitalist competition on a global scale. Although Kidron argues that imperialism is not capitalism’s highest stage, but one of its historical stages, he emphasizes the concentration of capital, finance capital, the export of capital, colonialism, and competition among major powers. In other words, imperialism emerges when capital no longer fits within national borders and states become coercive organizers of global competition (see Imperialism: Highest Stage but One, Nika Publications).
From this perspective, China cannot be absolved simply by asking whether it has invaded Iraq like the United States. The real question is this: What role does China play in the contemporary organization of global capital? Does it occupy a decisive position in global value chains, the export of capital, technological competition, control over resources, debt creation, infrastructure projects, and the restructuring of the international division of labor? If the answer is yes, then China is no longer merely a victimized developing country. It is a rising capitalist power pursuing its own forms of intervention, influence, accumulation, and competition.
Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin, despite the criticisms that can be made of their theory of the informal American empire, clarify an important point. Contemporary imperialism must be understood through the role of states in organizing and securing the global conditions for capital accumulation. They argue that imperialism requires us to examine how states facilitate, organize, and guarantee the international expansion of capitalist social relations, markets, and private property rights. From this perspective, the United States, because of its hegemonic position, has built and maintained the legal, financial, military, and institutional architecture of global capitalism. Yet this does not mean, contrary to the Resistance Axis interpretation, that only the United States can be imperialist. It means that every major power should be evaluated according to its role in reproducing the global capitalist order, not according to its anti-American rhetoric.
Ellen Meiksins Wood shows that capitalist imperialism differs fundamentally from pre-capitalist empires. Capitalism can exercise domination without direct territorial occupation. It can do so through markets, economic compulsion, property relations, debt, trade, and formally independent states. In her account, the new imperialism operates in a world where international relations have themselves become predominantly capitalist and are regulated by the imperatives of capitalism. This insight is crucial for criticizing the Resistance Axis. If imperialism consists not only of tanks and military occupation but also of domination through markets, investment, debt, and structural dependency, then China must also be assessed according to these criteria, not according to whether it imitates the military practices of the United States.
David Harvey, through his distinction between the territorial logic of power and the capitalist logic of power, provides another useful analytical tool. Although Harvey’s theory of the new imperialism has serious theoretical problems, his concept of spatio-temporal fixes shows how capital seeks geographical expansion, infrastructure projects, territorial appropriation, debt, and spatial restructuring in order to resolve crises of overaccumulation. This is precisely how China should be understood. Initiatives such as the Belt and Road Initiative cannot simply be described as assistance to the Global South. They are simultaneously projects for the export of capital, the stabilization of trade routes, the absorption of industrial overcapacity, the securing of access to resources, and the construction of spheres of influence. These projects may not involve bombing or military occupation, but they are by no means external to the imperialist logic of capital.
Giovanni Arrighi introduces a further level of complexity. In Adam Smith in Beijing and his discussion of China’s rise, he emphasizes the possibility of a distinctive Chinese path of development, one that should not simply be equated with the classical Western model. Arrighi’s contribution is valuable because it prevents us from ignoring the differences between China and the United States. Yet these differences do not justify morally idealizing China. One may accept that China’s model differs from that of the United States or Western Europe, for example, China did not pursue domestic shock therapy without concluding that China is emancipatory. Differences in the form of integration into global capitalism, in state strategy, or in relations with the world market do not imply an escape from the logic of capital or an intention to transcend it.
Even analyses sympathetic to China must acknowledge that it has become capitalist without surrendering domestic state control. This contradiction appears in Michael Roberts’s assessment of China’s economic development. On the one hand, China has retained control over the commanding heights of the economy. On the other hand, it has become deeply integrated into global capitalism. Here one must respond to the Resistance Axis by insisting that strong state institutions, economic planning, state control over banks, or the rejection of shock therapy do not by themselves indicate a transition toward socialism. State capitalism, guided capitalism, or state-directed capitalism remain forms of capitalism if the capital–labor relation, accumulation, competition, profit, the world market, and value production remain at their core.
This is why the claim that China is a capitalist society in transition to socialism requires serious criticism. If China contains billionaires, financial speculation, housing crises, enormous debt, private corporations, the exploitation of migrant workers, export competition, and deep integration into global value chains, then the mere existence of a Communist Party or state supervision is insufficient grounds for describing it as socialist in transition. Michael Roberts himself asks how an economy supposedly moving toward socialism can coexist with billionaires and financial speculation on such a large scale.
The Resistance Axis has a fundamental blind spot. It understands imperialism as a place, not as a social relation. The United States is imperialist because it is America. China is not imperialist because it is anti-American. Marxism rejects precisely this territorial logic. Imperialism is neither the evil essence of the West nor a cultural characteristic of the United States. It is a historically specific form of capitalist competition and domination on a global scale. Consequently, a state may oppose the hegemonic power while still operating according to the logic of imperialism. Opposition to the hegemon is not necessarily opposition to imperialism. It may simply be a struggle over a larger share within the imperialist order itself.
This also answers one of the Resistance Axis’s favorite questions: “If the IRGC wanted to integrate into global capitalism, how do you explain its threat to close the Strait of Hormuz? Didn’t this endanger the political economy of imperialism? Didn’t it paralyze global capitalism?”
The answer is straightforward. Disrupting the circulation of capital does not necessarily mean stepping outside the logic of capital. Trade wars, sanctions, blockades, energy threats, tariffs, and even regional wars can all be moments within competition inside the same system. Not every disruption of capitalist circulation is anti-capitalist. Sometimes it is precisely a bargaining instrument for securing a stronger position within that circulation. Such disruptions demonstrate to rival states the costs they can impose in order to negotiate a more advantageous place within the continuing capitalist order.
The policies of the Islamic Republic and the IRGC should be understood in this way. Threats to close the Strait of Hormuz, support for regional allies, tensions with the United States, or closer ties with China do not in themselves indicate a desire to leave the logic of global capitalism. They are forms of survival strategy, geopolitical bargaining, the pricing of regional influence, and efforts to secure a place in the restructuring of the world order. A state that depends on global circuits of capital for oil exports, imports, currency stability, infrastructure investment, banking transactions, energy contracts, and technology does not escape the logic of capital simply by adopting anti-American rhetoric. It merely seeks another route through which to reproduce itself.
China, therefore, is not an alternative to imperialism for the Islamic Republic. It is one possible route toward renewed integration into global capitalism. Just as the domestic bourgeoisie cannot be divided into a national and a comprador camp, global capital cannot be divided into an imperialist America and an emancipatory China. This is precisely what I mean by the castration of the concept of imperialism: reducing it from a global relation of capital to a matter of geopolitical morality.
The Resistance Axis observes the crimes of the United States and reduces imperialism to American behavior. It observes China’s differences from the United States and absolves China of imperialism. It observes the Islamic Republic’s conflict with the United States and casts the IRGC as an anti-imperialist force. Yet at every stage of this reasoning, the central category disappears: capital itself—capital as a global social relation, rather than a flag, a geography, a morality, or the distinction between East and West.
4.2. From Opposition to Imperialism to the Shore of Socialism!
In response to the previous critique of the Resistance Axis’s impoverished understanding of imperialism, its advocates might argue as follows:
According to your framework, any meaningful resistance to imperialism becomes impossible. All states are embedded in capitalist relations, and conflicts such as those between Iran and the United States, or China and the United States, are reduced to competition within capitalism. This analysis is therefore too abstract. It is obvious that the working class, with trade unions and communist parties that are not in power, cannot confront the dollar, the International Monetary Fund, or periodic U.S. military interventions. Only states can do that. We must recognize a spectrum within capitalism: some states are less committed to the logic of capital than others. Those less committed states can indeed be anti-imperialist. If we fail to analyze the global geopolitical situation realistically, then socialism and communism become utopian ideas that exist only on paper, waiting for some future force with perfectly clean hands that will never arrive. The transition to socialism means walking through the swamp of capitalism. Anyone who walks through that swamp will inevitably get their hands and feet dirty. When they finally reach the shore of socialism, they will naturally be covered in mud, which they can gradually wash away. This is what China and similar countries are doing. We should not mistake the mud on their bodies for a love of remaining in the capitalist swamp. Instead of focusing on the mud, we should see the direction in which they are moving—toward the socialist shore.
Several hidden assumptions lie behind this argument. Once they are brought to light, its contradictions become visible.
First, it assumes that states can exist within capitalism while being meaningfully less subject to the logic of capital. Yet, as we saw in the discussion of the new theories of imperialism, the modern state is itself one of the principal agents of the reproduction of capital, not something external to it. Even the strongest states, when operating internationally, must function within the circuits of accumulation, competition, capital attraction, currency stabilization, inflation management, and labor control. Being less committed to capital can only mean a different mode of integration into the same logic, not a departure from it.
Second, it assumes that every conflict with the United States is necessarily an anti-imperialist moment. This is precisely where the analysis falls from the level of social relations to that of political positions. The conflict between Iran and the United States, or between China and the United States, is not necessarily a conflict between capital and imperialism. It may instead be a struggle over shares of power, geopolitical position, or different forms of integration into the same capitalist order. Just as competition among the European powers in the nineteenth century was not anti-capitalist but another form of capitalist expansion.
Third, the metaphor of the swamp although it appears realistic functions in practice as a blank check. This metaphor is often justified by reference to one of Lenin’s well-known speeches. In his report to the Second All-Russia Congress of Trade Unions on 20 January 1919, Lenin stated:
“The workers have never been separated from the old society by a Great Wall of China. They still retain much of the traditional mentality of capitalist society. The workers are building a new society without themselves becoming new people or cleansing themselves of the filth of the old world. They are still knee-deep in that filth. We can only dream of cleansing ourselves of it. To imagine that this can be done all at once would be completely utopian. It would be so utopian that it would bury socialism in practice. No, that is not how we intend to build socialism. We are building it while still standing on the soil of capitalist society, struggling with weaknesses and shortcomings that also affect working people and drag the proletariat down. Many old customs and habits continue to divide people and hinder this struggle, and we still feel the force of the old saying: ‘Every man for himself, and the devil take the hindmost.’” (Quoted in Paul Sweezy, The Transition to Socialism, Persian translation by H. Riahi)
The problem is this: if every policy can be justified in the name of passing through the swamp, then no material criterion remains for judging the direction of movement. The repression of workers, for example, can easily be explained as part of this passage through the swamp. Workers may be portrayed as still contaminated by bourgeois habits that lead them to rebel against the revolutionary state, making repression appear as an unfortunate necessity. The same argument can also justify remaining within the logic of capitalist accumulation.
But what guarantees that this movement is really heading toward the shore of socialism, rather than simply becoming another stable form of life within the same swamp? This is precisely the point at which the Resistance Axis abandons any concrete analysis of the relations of production and replaces it with an ideological trust in the intentions of states.
Fourth, the argument makes another important shift. It moves from the actual capacities of the working class to its presumed incapacity. We are told that workers cannot confront the dollar or the International Monetary Fund. It is true that their direct means are limited. But the conclusion drawn from this is mistaken. Instead of treating this limitation as a problem of organization and political strategy, it becomes a justification for transferring politics to states. Instead of asking how social power can be built, the argument says: since workers do not yet possess such power, they must rely on states instead.
4.3. From the Illusion of Class Struggle to Proletarian Anti-Imperialism
But what positive answer can be given to the question of struggle against imperialism without being accused of abstraction?
The starting point must be this: when anti-imperialism is separated from the critique of capital, it inevitably becomes a politics in which the working class is turned into the rear guard of one capitalist bloc. But this does not mean adopting a position of indifference or saying that all sides are the same. On the contrary, it is possible to formulate a concrete and independent politics.
First, we must distinguish between analyzing inter-state conflicts and adopting a class position. We can and should examine how conflicts between Iran and the United States, or China and the United States, affect the balance of forces. But this does not require identifying with either side.
Second, we must focus on the points where the working class can actually intervene. Workers cannot close the Strait of Hormuz. But they can fight privatization, austerity, wage repression, indebtedness, rising rents, and every attempt to shift the costs of crisis onto them. These struggles may appear local. Yet they are precisely the points at which local conditions connect to the global order.
Third, local struggles must be linked to an international horizon, not to states. Genuine anti-imperialism takes shape through transnational worker solidarity, opposition to war, resistance to sanctions that destroy people’s lives, and the exposure of the role played by one’s own state in reproducing the same global order.
Fourth, the central criterion of judgment must once again be the capital–labor relation. Any state, however intense its conflict with the United States, cannot simply be described as moving toward socialism if it relies domestically on capital accumulation, the repression of workers, and the reproduction of inequality. This is not an abstract criterion. It is the most precise material one.
We can therefore agree with Lenin that the transition to socialism must pass through this contaminated world. But this does not mean treating every form of contamination as evidence of movement toward socialism. There is a difference between moving through the swamp and building a house in the swamp while calling it a journey toward the shore.
The issue is not keeping one’s hands clean. The issue is ensuring that the direction of movement is not lost within the logic of capital itself. In the name of realism, politics must not once again lead workers to line up behind one bloc of capital—this time under the banner of anti-imperialism.
At this point, supporters of the Resistance Axis will respond with arguments such as the following:
Yes, this is exactly what we are saying. Now that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is confronting the world’s most important imperialist power through this war and has refused to submit to it, we on the left must join the people attending the nightly rallies and give those gatherings a political direction. We must pressure the Pezeshkian government to stop making concessions to the oligarchs and the comprador bourgeoisie. By adopting pro-worker policies, we can place the regime back on the path toward fulfilling the ideals of the February 1979 Revolution.
The statements, articles, and speeches of the Communist Preparation Organization provide an example of this argument. In one of its recent statements, titled “One Step Forward for the Street,” the group explicitly claims that the street has now entered a new phase of struggle because it is simultaneously raising slogans against the United States and against rising prices. It concludes that a road map toward a prosperous society can now be drawn from this very street.
The group argues that, unlike the economic uprisings of 2017–18 and 2019—other uprisings are not mentioned because it considers all of them regime-change movements serving imperialist objectives—this time society’s defensive mechanism has been activated and has summoned the spirit of 1979 in order to resist social decline.
This analysis can be summarized as follows:
Geopolitical resistance + economic demands = the possibility of shifting the regime to the left from within?!
What such approaches fail to explain is that these groups have repeatedly mobilized around slogans against economic corruption before. What, then, has been the outcome of this model of making demands and exposing corruption?
The activities of the current known as the Justice-Seeking Students, from around 2014 onward, offer a well-known example. So do the exposés produced by figures associated with it, such as Vahid Ashtari, Amirhossein Sabeti—a member of parliament affiliated with the Paydari Front—and Ali Alizadeh’s program Jedaal.
Before the recent war, around 90 percent of their programs focused on exposing economic corruption under headings such as the oligarchs, the comprador bourgeoisie, and neoliberalism. They have now returned to the same focus once again.
They repeatedly wrote open letters to Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Eje’i, the head of the Islamic Republic’s judiciary. They demanded the execution of politically and economically corrupt figures, ranging from Zarif and Rouhani to Madanizadeh and Sadegh al-Hosseini.
An even more significant example is the establishment of the New Islamic Civilization Party by Seyed Yasser Jabraeili. Jabraeili is one of the favored figures of the Resistance Axis left. During the controversy over the removal of the preferential exchange rate in May 2022, he wrote boldly on X:
“I regard the removal of the 4,200-toman exchange rate and the increase in gasoline prices as a full-scale conspiracy against Raisi. Just as there was no news of the Chicago boys who, together with the IMF, designed the shock therapy in May 2019 after the catastrophe of November 2019, the same will happen this time. The accusing finger will be pointed at the president.”
He continued to defend this position until Ayatollah Khamenei’s statement on 30 August 2023, during a meeting with the president and cabinet. Khamenei said:
“In the case of removing the preferential exchange rate, which was a necessary measure, the reasons for the decision and its benefits and effects should have been clearly explained to the people.”
After all these exposés, what has the hard core of power actually done?
Babak Zanjani has rebuilt his empire. Ali Ansari still walks free despite the corruption surrounding Ayandeh Bank. Multi-billion luxury towers continue to rise. Shopping malls continue to profit. Luxury compounds such as Bastihills in Lavasan remain untouched, and their number keeps growing. Workers are dismissed by the hundreds. And so on.
Against this background, groups such as the Communist Preparation Organization do not explain how class struggle is supposed to advance through appeals to the judiciary. The judiciary is the coercive arm of the state. It is, in Marx’s terms, part of the executive committee of the bourgeoisie. How, then, can asking it to act against the bourgeoisie become a path for class struggle?
It is not enough to say, “This time is different,” or “This street is no longer the same street.” We should instead recognize that this cycle has failed. It failed not because there was too little pressure from below, but because its starting point was wrong.
Looked at more closely, these so-called new communists are followers of Saeed Hajjarian’s famous formula: pressure from below, bargaining at the top. They believe that if revolutionary people intensify pressure in the streets against corruption, figures such as Amirhossein Sabeti and Yasser Jabraeili can bargain within the ruling institutions. In this way, they hope to restore the spirit of 1979 to the body of the regime.
It may seem unnecessary to repeat how closely this resembles the policies of the Tudeh Party and the Majority Organization during the first four years after the 1979 Revolution. The difference is that, at that time, the revolution had only just occurred. Left-wing discourse was hegemonic across society. Structural adjustment and the “Chicago Boys” had not yet entered the scene.
In the present situation, the metaphor of moving from the capitalist swamp toward the socialist shore is translated into the following claim: under social pressure, a capitalist state can become the carrier of a socialist project. This is no longer simple optimism. It is a complete transformation of the meaning of class politics.
What follows from this critique? Should the working-class participants in the nightly gatherings simply be abandoned? No. But they should no longer be sold illusions.
A communist organization can address monarchist workers and help them develop class consciousness. It can also address workers who support the Islamic Republic, whether they identify with the conservative or the reformist faction. There is nothing unprecedented about this. The Tudeh Party once invested substantial ideological and organizational effort in military personnel and achieved some results.
To understand what is now presented by currents such as the Communist Preparation Organization, and where it belongs within the history of left-wing politics, we must take a step back. We should not treat it as an accidental deviation. We should see it as the reproduction of a historical dead end: the dead end that social democracy reached in its confrontation with neoliberalism.
The similarity is not mainly formal. It lies in the structure of the argument and in its political horizon.
During the final decades of the twentieth century, when neoliberalism was consolidating itself, social democrats denounced privatization, wage cuts, and the weakening of trade unions. They called on workers to resist. At times, their language was even more radical than that of communists.
Yet this rhetorical radicalism never produced a political horizon beyond reforming the same order. In the end, the argument always returned to the same conclusion: the existing system must be managed better because no real alternative exists.
What we now see in Resistance Axis narratives, and in groups such as the Communist Preparation Organization, is a new version of the same logic. They expose the “oligarchs.” They attack “neoliberalism.” They call for street mobilization against corruption and rising prices. But their horizon remains limited to moving the existing state to the left, returning it to the ideals of 1979, and reforming the existing structure from within.
At first glance, one might argue that the two cases are not comparable. Social democracy operated within liberal states, while these groups operate within a supposedly anti-imperialist state. But this difference is superficial. The deeper similarity lies in an assumption shared by both. They believe that a capitalist state can be pressured into acting in the interests of workers without breaking the logic of capital accumulation.
In the social-democratic experience, this assumption took the form of the welfare state and Keynesian policies. In today’s narratives, it appears as a call to return to the revolution’s ideals of social justice and to strengthen supposedly anti-imperialist factions within the ruling establishment. In both cases, however, a fundamental issue is ignored: the material conditions that once made such compromises possible no longer exist.
The European welfare state and Keynesian policies were products of an exceptional historical conjuncture. Capital had been massively destroyed during the Second World War. Profit rates were high. Nation-states had greater power to regulate capital flows. Most importantly, an organized working class, backed by the real threat of socialism, forced capital to make concessions.
The so-called golden age of capitalism did not emerge from the system’s inherent rationality. It resulted from a particular balance of forces. When those conditions collapsed during the 1970s because of falling profit rates, the globalization of capital, and stagflation, the concessions previously granted were gradually withdrawn.
Social democracy did not fail simply because it betrayed its principles. It failed because it could no longer succeed. The structure of capitalism no longer permitted the same level of redistribution and class compromise.
From this point onward, the retreat of social democracy did not remain confined to theory or party programs. It quickly took governmental and legislative form. Members of parliament, political parties, and governments continued to speak the language of social justice, workers’ protection, and the welfare state. Yet they became the administrators of privatization, labor-market flexibilization, wage restraint, trade-union weakening, fiscal austerity, and the neoliberal reconstruction of the state.
The bitter irony was that this turn was justified in the language of realism. The world had changed, they said. Capital must not be driven away. Economies had to remain competitive. Capitalism had to be administered in a more rational and humane way.
In practice, however, this realism turned them into cogs in the machinery of the same aggressive capitalism they claimed to restrain.
From this perspective, the distance is very short between slogans such as good capitalism, social capitalism, rational capitalism, capitalism for the oppressed, or even idealized versions of the Chinese model of capitalism—capitalism without shock therapy—and the implementation of the harshest anti-worker policies.
Once the struggle to abolish the logic of capital is abandoned in the name of realism, politics ceases to mean organizing a force capable of rupture. It becomes the art of managing more efficiently the same order that crushes workers and the oppressed. This is the point at which the Resistance Axis tendency still imagines itself as concerned about workers. Yet in practice, it adopts the language, tools, and functions of the very relations that destroy workers’ livelihoods in the name of national security, arrest them and their supporters, and send them to the gallows.
If we apply this analysis to present-day Iran, several simple but decisive questions arise. Is the Islamic Republic in a position to grant lasting and meaningful concessions to the working class? Do the structures of profit, accumulation, and integration into the global market permit such concessions? Does capital in Iran operate within a closed national framework that can be redirected through domestic pressure? The answer to all these questions is no. Under such conditions, a politics based on moving the state to the left or returning it to the path of social justice is not a solution. It reproduces the same social-democratic dead end under far more difficult conditions.
This is why the radicalism of groups such as the Communist Preparation Organization is, in reality, a form of selling illusions to the class. Social democracy told workers that a better life could be built within the existing system. In other words, it repeated in left-wing language Margaret Thatcher’s famous proposition: There is no alternative.
Today’s narratives claim that the same system can be redirected in favor of workers by relying on its supposedly good elements. In both cases, the result is the same. Instead of organizing independently and confronting the logic of capital, the working class places its hopes in reform from above. When these reforms, which are condemned to fail from the outset—do not materialize, the resulting disappointment creates fertile ground for a turn toward the far right.
The European experience of recent decades shows this clearly. The growth of right-wing populism, and the appeal of forces that blame migrants or an “overly large state” for the crisis, demonstrate how the failure of social-democratic politics can weaken the left and strengthen the right.
Ultimately, just as social democracy confined the working class within a closed horizon by promising to reform capitalism, these currents do the same through the promise that the regime can return to 1979 or that the state can be moved to the left. The difference is that social democracy made these promises during a period when limited and temporary concessions were still materially possible. These new narratives emerge at a time when those possibilities have largely disappeared. This may make them even more dangerous. They do not open a path forward. Instead, through the production of illusions, they keep the working class on a road whose destination is already known: becoming the foot soldiers of the very order they were supposed to transform.
- A Critique of the “Critique of People’s Socialism”: Revisiting the Razmandegan Organization
So far, we have shown how the Resistance Axis narrative reduces anti-imperialism from a material position within capitalism to a moral and ideological gesture. We must now take a step back. We need to return to the historical formulation from which this misuse draws strength: the people–imperialism contradiction.
The Resistance Axis exploits a gap that emerged between this formulation and the critiques directed against it. This gap was deepened by the way the current known as Worker-Communism approached the issue.
Earlier, we discussed the importance of Mansoor Hekmat’s critique of what he called people’s socialism. We also showed that reducing the problem to an epistemological crisis had serious consequences. It helped create the conditions for the Resistance Axis to revive the people–imperialism contradiction at the wrong historical moment and use it for its own purposes.
The critique offered at the time by currents such as the Razmandegan Organization focused precisely on this problem. They argued that reducing the crisis of the movement to a methodological deviation was itself an oversimplification. They stressed that the question of imperialism and the analysis of social structure were not merely matters of theoretical error. They formed the real point of crisis in the relationship between theory and practice. Different currents reached different conclusions not simply because some were ignorant. They did so within a complex historical situation. In other words, methodology matters. But methodology does not operate in a vacuum. It is formed within real history, under specific pressures, limitations, and possibilities.
This point is also important for criticizing the Resistance Axis understanding of imperialism today. The crisis in the understanding of imperialism cannot be reduced simply to an incorrect method of knowledge. Nor can it be explained only through practical experience. The possibility of misuse emerges precisely in the gap between the two. The Resistance Axis operates within this gap. On the one hand, it points to real experiences: U.S. aggression, the dominance of the dollar, and global inequality. This gives it the appearance of realism. On the other hand, it ignores the methodological critique of the people–imperialism contradiction. It reconstructs that formulation in a crude and pre-dialectical form.
A key point appears in the writings of the Razmandegan Organization. They argue that the problem is not simply that different currents had an incorrect understanding of imperialism. The point is that these understandings were formed within a real crisis. This shifts the issue from the level of intellectual error to the level of the historical production of knowledge. The insight of Razmandegan lies precisely here. They understood that one cannot stand at the end of a historical process, rely on a more coherent theoretical framework, and reconstruct the entire path as an avoidable error. In their view, such an approach is itself a form of metaphysics, this time, a metaphysics of critique.
Yet we must now address a further challenge. Saying that the guerrillas reached these conclusions through experience does not explain why other forces, under the same conditions, reached different conclusions. Razmandegan itself raises this question, but does not develop it fully.
Today, many people repeat the formulations of the Resistance Axis while, paradoxically, denying that they belong to it. Some even insult the best-known figures associated with this tendency. Yet they still say: “We reached this analysis through undeniable realities: war, sanctions, U.S. domination, and Iran’s resistance.”
If critique is based only on experience or practice, we do not have sufficient tools to challenge this claim. We must therefore fully develop what appears only in an embryonic form in Razmandegan’s critique: a genuinely dialectical understanding of knowledge. Such an understanding takes refuge neither in pure method nor in raw experience. Instead, it shows how knowledge is formed within a contradictory historical field. It develops through choices, defeats, and repeated acts of reflection.
5.1. Is Revolutionary Critique a Futile Theoretical Exercise When Action Is Constrained?
In his important essay Marxism: Positive Critique, Negative Critique, Valamanesh argues that knowledge is neither mere description nor mere explanation. At its core, it is critique. Critique simultaneously understands reality and grasps it in relation to its potential for transformation.
He also argues that description, if it remains at the level of description, is reduced to a static and ideological representation of reality. Explanation, if it goes no further, is limited to identifying causal relations within the existing reality.
In the essays collected in Description, Explanation, Critique, Kamal Khosravi further shows that social knowledge is always produced within social relations themselves. It cannot be separated from them. The knowing subject does not stand outside the social world. Rather, it exists within it and is involved in the very relations it seeks to understand.
From this perspective, a dialectical understanding of knowledge means the following:
-Knowledge is a historical process, not a collection of correct propositions.
-Knowledge is the product of a relationship, not of a fixed position.
-Most importantly, knowledge is always formed through the tension between the universal and the particular, necessity and possibility, experience and abstraction.
In his essay On the First Manifesto of Critique [Website], Khosravi also explains that an exclusive emphasis either on particularity or on universality leads to error. What is required is to grasp their dialectic. Every apparently unique situation can be understood only within a broader historical universality, while every universality acquires meaning only through its particular historical expressions.
If we bring these arguments together, we can now restate the original proposition more fully.
A dialectical understanding of knowledge means recognizing that no truth exists outside the historical process of discovery, correction, failure, and reconstruction. It means accepting that error is not an accidental deviation but a moment within the process of knowledge itself. And it means understanding that theory is not a substitute for practice. It is one moment of practice.
Building on these arguments, we can now add something to the Razmandegan Organization’s critique of Mansoor Hekmat. Knowledge is not only historical. It is also a product of struggle. For this reason, every theoretical framework must be criticized not only for its internal logic but also for its position within the field of political struggle.
From this perspective, we can no longer say that “people’s socialism” went astray merely because of epistemological mistakes. Nor can we say that it was corrected simply through historical experience. Instead, we must show how a conceptual framework, within a specific historical field, creates particular possibilities and limitations for both knowledge and action.
This brings us back to the original proposition. Knowledge is neither a mirror of reality nor its judge. It is one moment within reality’s own movement. Truth is produced only through contradiction, error, and continual reflection.
Many revolutionary leftists believe that the possibility of effective action has become severely limited. There is no revolutionary organization. The objective conditions of repression postpone every meaningful intervention. Under such circumstances, criticizing the Resistance Axis may appear to be nothing more than an abstract exercise without any practical consequence.
Yet what was once called “theoretical struggle”, if it truly takes the form of critique, is itself a moment of revolutionary practice. It is neither a prelude to practice nor a substitute for it. It is one of the forms through which revolutionary practice is realized. Failing to recognize this leads many revolutionary leftists, in the name of moving beyond abstract discussions, to fall into the temptation of a degraded political realism.
Without a coherent and militant revolutionary critique, social discontent itself can easily be absorbed into frameworks such as state anti-imperialism, governmental social justice, or other forms of system-compatible ideology.
From this perspective, sharpening the weapon of critique when the possibilities for direct action are limited is not a secondary tactical choice. It is a strategic necessity. This is so for three reasons. First, without it, alternative horizons disappear. What remains are only different versions of the existing order. Second, without it, even resistance itself can easily become an instrument for reproducing the very order it appears to oppose. Third, without it, every future form of organization will emerge from a level of political consciousness that is already incapable of breaking this cycle.
In other words, if we take a dialectical understanding of knowledge seriously, we must accept that, at moments like these, critique is not a substitute for action but a condition of its possibility. This does not mean that critique alone is sufficient. It means that without critique, every form of action however radical it may appear, can ultimately be absorbed into the dominant logic.
This is why it must be emphasized again and again that, during periods when revolutionary action is objectively constrained, the greatest defeat is not “practical passivity” but “theoretical retreat”. The former may be temporary. The latter weakens the very horizon of emancipation itself.
Conclusion: Reclaiming Concepts, Not Returning to the Past
The history of the people–imperialism contradiction shows that no concept, even one born in a revolutionary moment, has meaning outside its historical context, its field of political forces, and the fate of the practice to which it belongs. A concept that once sought to connect different levels of struggle under conditions of dependent capitalism, political repression, and imperialist domination can later be appropriated by those who use it to legitimize a capitalist, security-driven, and anti-worker state. This transformation is not simply the result of the bad intentions of later interpreters. It demonstrates that when concepts are detached from their historical context, their class content, and their practical horizon, they can easily cease to be instruments of critique and become instruments of legitimation.
For this reason, reclaiming this formulation from the Resistance Axis does not mean returning to it. Nor does it mean reviving distinctions such as national bourgeoisie and comprador bourgeoisie in a world where capital, the state, finance, trade, industry, and militarism have become deeply intertwined.
If this tradition still has anything to offer today, it is not its ready-made answers but its method: taking concrete historical conditions seriously; translating abstract concepts into the language of organizing and real struggle; and, above all, understanding practice as the place where theory is not merely applied but also revised. From this perspective, fidelity to Bijan Jazani and Masoud Ahmadzadeh does not consist in repeating their vocabulary. It consists in recovering the same theoretical courage with which they confronted the conditions of their own time. Today’s conditions can no longer be understood through the myths of the national bourgeoisie, the anti-imperialist state, or capitalism on behalf of the oppressed.
The problem with the Resistance Axis is not simply that it offers an incorrect analysis of Iranian capitalism or global imperialism. The problem is that this error serves a political and psychological function. By invoking categories such as the comprador bourgeoisie, the oligarchs, the pro-NATO camp, and foreign infiltrators, it shifts the burden of capitalism’s violence away from the existing order as a whole and places it on only one part of it. In this way, it preserves its preferred state as an anti-imperialist father figure. Every act of repression becomes a mistake. Every execution becomes a necessity. Every workers’ protest becomes an enemy conspiracy. Every left-wing critique is dismissed as Eurocentrism or as unwitting support for colonialism. At this point, we are no longer dealing with analysis. We are dealing with a mechanism for rewriting reality, a mechanism whose purpose is to preserve loyalty to the state, even when the state speaks through the most naked forms of class coercion.
Yet criticizing this misuse should not lead us to erase the history of the original formulation altogether. That would merely produce another form of historical purification. Reducing the entire people–imperialism tradition to an inevitable deviation is just as ahistorical as reviving it uncritically to justify the existing order. One approach freezes and sanctifies the past. The other dismisses it as wholly false and useless. In both cases, what is lost is the possibility of a critical reappropriation of the tradition. We lose the ability to understand how a concept could once open a space for emancipatory politics, and how the same concept, once detached from questions of leadership, class independence, and the critique of the state, could become a vehicle of domination.
Ultimately, the debate over the people–imperialism contradiction is not a dispute over terminology. It is a dispute over how the left relates to its own concepts. Does it treat them as living tools for understanding, organizing, and transforming the world? Or does it reduce them to labels for choosing geopolitical camps, absolving state power, and suspending class struggle?
If there is a lesson to be drawn from this history, it is neither a return to the formulas of the past nor a retreat into the abstract certainties of the present. The lesson is that no concept remains emancipatory unless it remains connected to emancipatory practice.
Concepts must therefore be returned to their historical field—not so that we may repeat the past, but so that we do not allow the language of revolution to become the language of the state, the language of anti-imperialism to become the language of capital, or the language of the people to become the language of their own repression.
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