By Kamran Nayeri, August 30, 2026
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Protest on the 40th day since the death of Mahsa/Jina Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish-Iranian who died after being arrested by the morality police in Tehran on September 22, 2022.
On August 20, The Guardian
published an Open
Letter, “To Iran’s political prisoners, trapped ‘between two blades of a
scissors’”, by 23 prominent leftists mostly from the United States and Western
Europe: “We write to you from a place of deep solidarity, our hearts heavy with
the knowledge of the struggle you face within Iran’s prisons: the torture, the
systematic neglect, the enforced silence, and the brutal reality of sham trials
and executions.”
The authors go further:
“And we stand
in solidarity with you, as you are at the intersection of two sources of
oppression.
“On one side,
you face the Islamic Republic that, from its inception, enforced absolute
social and political control based on an exclusionary ideology. It is a system
that claims to counter imperial power while using its very logic of domination
and systems of carcerality, torture and execution.
“On the other
side, you face the aggression and violence of the very imperialist and Zionist
forces the Islamic Republic purports to stand against.” (my emphases).
The Open Letter has ignited a much-needed
public discussion.
This essay contributes to this
discussion by examining aspects of the twin problems of how to defend Iran
against imperialist and Zionist aggression while fighting for the release of
political prisoners in Iran.
As an Iranian American socialist
since 1971 who participated in organized Iranian socialist movement (1975-1982)
and organized socialist movements in the U.S. since 1982, I have firsthand
experience in defense of Iranian political prisoners as well as participating
as a leader of the Iranian Trotskyist movement and a co-founder of the Workers
Unity Party in the Iranian revolution (1979-82) with the goal of helping the
Iranian working people to form their own government based on their own
grassroots organizations, in particular the workers and peasants shora
(council) movements.
To proceed, I'll cite some notable
earlier contributions focusing on the “scissors” analogy that frames the Open
Letter.
Vijay Prashad, the executive
director of the Tricontinental Institute for Social Research, in “Against
the False Symmetry of the Scissors: An Open Letter While Iran Resists an
Illegal War of Aggression,” criticizes the “scissors” analogy:
“The central
image, two blades of a scissors, is evocative but erroneous. It suggests that
one of the blades is the Islamic Republic and the other blade is the United
States and Israel, with the Iranian people being cut by the two of them. The
error of the scissors is not merely that its blades are unequal. It is that the
image makes the aggressor and the attacked appear as parallel sources of the
same danger, stripping away the history and hierarchy that connect them. US
imperialism is not simply one oppression alongside another. It is the force
that has encircled Iran, devastated the region, armed Israel, imposed sanctions
upon an entire population, and now brought war to Iranian territory. Your
letter places the aggression and its target in the same moral frame.” (emphasis
added)
Thus, the political framework Prashad
uses is what was called Third Worldism in the 1960s and later “anti-imperialism,”
which frames the main problem Iranian working people face as imperialism rather
than the clerical capitalist Islamic Republic. Indeed, he considers the Islamic
Republic regime (which he identifies with Iran as the country) to be an
anti-imperialist force facing off against United States imperialism and Israeli
Zionism. Thus, he praises the Islamic Republic policy of forming what they call
the Axis of
Resistance.
Farah Mokhtareizadeh, in “Who
Names the World? Anti-Imperialism and Iran's Political Prisoners,” correctly
points out:
“Prashad’s
argument becomes more difficult when he moves from geopolitical asymmetry to
political timing. There is a time to make demands and a time to act in
solidarity, he suggests, implying that certain demands upon the Iranian state
should recede while imperial war continues. The difficulty is that prisoners
live both dangers in the same present tense. An execution sentence does not
pause for war, and a prison door does not unlock because the state holding the
key confronts a greater external power. The question becomes not whether
Iranian repression exists but whether Iranians must postpone naming or
resisting that repression until some safer political moment arrives.”
She notes that the scissors analogy
was used by Keyvan Mohtadi, a labor activist and former political prisoner, on
June 24, 2025, the day after Israeli bombing of Evin Prison, about the political
prisoners held inside, including his wife, the labor organizer Anisha
Asadollahi.
Thus, Mokhtareizadeh shows how opposition
to imperialist and Zionist war and freedom of political prisoners are
intertwined and reinforcing.
The false scissors analogy
At the same time, Mokhtareizadeh’s
example shows that the scissors analogy itself betrays a considerable section
of the left regarding Iran since the 1979 revolution that overthrew the
U.S.-installed dictatorship of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. There can be no doubt that the clerical
capitalist Islamic Republic and imperialism oppress the Iranian working people.
However, were they not oppressed by Mohammad Reza Shah’s dictatorial regime and
imperialism before the 1979 Iranian revolution?
Of course they were, as the 1979 revolution was anti-dictatorial and
anti-imperialist. The scissors analogy refers to the fact that the 1979
revolution overthrew the U.S.-installed regime of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, and
because of the weakness of the working class and socialist movements, put the
power in the hands of ayatollah Khomeini, who proceeded to create the Islamic
Republic, which is independent of imperialism, by crushing grassroots movements
of the working people unleashed by that revolution.
The 1979 Iranian revolution
threatened the dominance of imperialism, Zionism, and reactionary Arab regimes
in the Middle East. Contrary to the dominant view propagated by both the
Islamic Republic and imperialism, the 1979 revolution was not an Islamic
Revolution. It was an anti-dictatorial, anti-imperialist, national democratic
revolution aspiring to democracy, freedom, and social justice.
However, the Iranian people who
lived under dictatorship had no chance to discuss what kind of society,
economy, or state they wished to create after they overthrew the Pahlavi
dynasty. The labor movement, especially
oil workers, played a significant role in the revolution, but it was
politically unprepared to lead the revolution. The left was largely influenced
by Stalinism, the ideology that envisioned a national democratic movement led
by an anti-imperialist leader. The Tudeh Party held the totalitarian Soviet
Union as the Actually Existing Socialism, and pro-China Stalinists (Maoists)
held a similar view of the revolution. What is more, Stalinism of the Iranian
socialist currents trained them as an undemocratic force. Here is an example: right
after the victorious insurrection of February 9-12, two groups of Iranian
Trotskyists merged in the Socialist Workers Party. They planned to hold their first public
meeting at Tehran Polytechnic (now Amir Kabir University) in central Tehran. A
group of Maoists, Communist Union اتحادیه کمونیست ها), physically attacked and disrupted the
meeting. The reason was Stalinism. Both Moscow and Beijing continued Stalin’s
campaign against Trotsky and Trotskyism until the Soviet Union collapsed and
China became the world's leading capitalist power! Meanwhile, Iranian labor and
socialist movements never made defending democratic and political rights their
central concern. Thus, when Khomeini declared mandatory Islamic dress for women
who were government employees, the protest in Tehran included a rally in front
of Tehran University and a march to Azadi Square, which was attacked by
semi-fascist Islamic gangs and drew only 20,000 mostly younger women (at the
time, Tehran had 3 million people). The labor movement and many leftist groups
did not mobilize to participate in or defend it.
Political Islam and the Axis of
Resistance
Thus, the power people took by
months of mass struggle and three days of armed insurrection across the country
was handed over to Ayatollah Khomeini, who began to institutionalize the
theocratic capitalist Islamic Republic. In the early 1970s, while in exile in
Iraq, Khomeini wrote a pamphlet titled Velayat-e Faghih (the rule of
Islamic Jurists). He argued that Muslims everywhere are ruled by non-Muslims
and demanded the formation of an Islamic government ruled by Islamic Jurists. The
1979 revolution gave Khomeini that opportunity to establish it in Iran, which
he was able to do by deceit and by bloody repression.
Of course, consolidating the
Islamic Republic required destroying grassroots movements of working people,
including the workers’ shora (council) movement resulting from the 1979 revolution,
suppression of oppressed nationalities, systematic oppression of women, as well
as any independent political party. Thus, the 1979 Iranian revolution was
destroyed through bloody repression by the clerical capitalist Islamic
Republic, not by imperialism! (Nayeri, 2025, Chapter One, Chapter Two, pp.
51-56).
However, Khomeini’s vision required
expanding the Islamic Republic's power among Shiites in the Middle East. This
led to the formation of the Axis of Resistance. This created a new form of
confrontation with imperialism and Zionism over their domination of the Middle
East and their decades-long struggle to overthrow the Islamic Republic. Prashad
mistakes this trajectory for anti-imperialism and anti-Zionism.
Rejecting Dependency School politics
By now it must be clear that how to
stop imperialist and Zionist attacks on Iran and at the same time fight for Iranian
people’s political rights, especially through building a movement to free all
political prisoners, requires theoretical certifications. The “anti-imperialist”
framework reflects the dominance of Dependency School (DS) in the 1950s and
1960s, which waned in the 1970s.
In the post-World War II period,
anticolonial revolution swept much of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. It
raised questions about their development. The Dependency School (DS) refers to
a group of different theories that shared the idea that the backwardness of the
periphery of world capitalism was due to imperialism. Thus, those who
subscribed to DS theories framed their political theories on
“anti-imperialism.” At the same time, Latin American nationalist economists
formulated the initial DS theories (Nayeri, 2023B, Chapter 3), two prominent
socialist dependency theories emerged: Paul Baran's Political Economy of
Growth (1957; for a critique see Nayeri, 2023B, Chapter pp. 82-118) and Arghiri
Emmanuel’s Unequal Exchange: A Study of the Imperialism of Trade
(1972, for a critique see Nayeri 2023B, Chapter 4).
However, DS theories did not jive
with Marx's historical materialism, which focuses on modes of production and
relations of production to understand society and history. Instead, both Baran
and Emanuel focus on imperialism as an external force and the sphere of
circulation to explain the periphery's economic backwardness.
By the late 1970s, the DS school began
to decline as countries in the periphery of capitalism industrialized,
beginning with South Korea and, by the new century, China, which is now
outcompeting the United States as the leading world capitalist economy.
Thus, Parshad’s outdated, mistaken
DS framework leads him to support the expansionist policies of the clerical
capitalist Islamic Republic in the name of “anti-imperialism.”
From Marx’s point of view, capital
is self-expanding value. Thus, capital will outgrow its geographical location,
and each capitalist state would protect its capitalist interests outside its
borders. That is sufficient to explain the economic basis of wars, including
World War I and World War II. In fact,
Hilferding’s claim in Finance Capital (1910) that an era of finance capital
(later called monopoly capital) and Marx’s labor theory of value, his theory of
how the capitalist mode of production functions, is obsolete was based on his
mistaking Marx’s theory of competition as being similar to the neoclassical
theory of Perfect Competition (Nayeri, 2023B, pp. 11-45). Thus, Lenin’s
Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916), based largely on
Hilferding’s work, is also mistaken. At any rate, in the same work Lenin
identifies imperialism with the export of capital from advanced capitalist
states to the periphery and views this as developing the forces of production
there. Thus, DS socialists have been
wrong both in constructing their theories and in claiming they are Marxist.
Questions of program, strategy,
and tactics
Still, many socialists would agree
that the defense of the political prisoners in Iran must be put in the context
of U.S. imperialism and Israeli Zionism to attack Iran. This does not mean that defending
democracy and freedom of political expression is subordinate to requirements of
fighting imperialism and Zionism. In fact, I would argue in a moment that
the two are intertwined and complementary. That is, the Islamic Republic has
for almost half a century undermined effective struggle against imperialism and
Zionism by attacking individual, democratic and political rights in Iran.
The authors of the Open Letter
write: “The Iranian authorities must stop their inhumane practice of death and
incarceration now. And the US and Israel must end their barbaric wars and
brutal sanctions that knowingly devastate our communities.” This formulation in
the Open Letter leaves out the “regime change” agenda of imperialism and
Zionism untouched. Not only was regime change the stated goal of the
U.S./Israeli war against Iran, but it is the active foreign policy of the Trump
administration, as we saw in Venezuela and now see in Cuba. What Trump was able
to achieve in Venezuela was what has been called “the shortest war in history”:
Nicolas Maudura and his wife were abducted, and Delcy Rodríguez, his vice
president, agreed to govern in accordance with Marco Rubio's instructions in
Venezuela (Pager and Kurmanaev, July 11, 2026). Neither should we stand quiet
when the U.S. and Israelis assassinate leaders of the Islamic
Republic.
The public and the left in the West
have failed to actively oppose Israeli genocide in Gaza backed by the U.S. and
European imperialist powers! Why would it be any different in the case of sanctions
and war against Iran that have been unfolding since the 1979 revolution?
The key question the Open Letter raises
is how can a massive enough anti-war movement be built to stop the U.S./Israeli
war against Iran? At the same time, how can
an effective movement be built to stay the hands of the clerical capitalist
Islamic Republic?
The answer to the first question
depends on mass radicalization among working people and youth. No sign of it on
the horizon, although nobody really knows how and when such radicalizations
unfold.
The answer to the second question
largely depends on the working people and socialist currents in Iran for the
simple reason that the Islamic Republic continues to enjoy a mass base in Iran
that has gone along with its repressive policies.
To overcome this obstacle, a principled
anti-imperialist vision to uphold the sovereignty of the Iranian people is the
necessary framework for advancing the goals of enhancing political space in
Iran and freedom of political prisoners.
Building a movement of the
working people in Iran to challenge the Islamic Republic
The great masses who made the Iranian
revolution of 1979 aspired to democracy, freedom, independence, and social
justice. Ayatollah Khomeini destroyed grassroots movements that aspired to this
vision to install the clerical capitalist Islamic Republic. We need to take up
those aspirations and develop them to address the needs of Iran and the world
in the twenty-first century.
Earlier I argued that the Islamic Republic
is NOT anti-imperialist, that it opposes U.S. imperialism and Israeli Zionism
from the narrow vision of Islamic fundamentalism.
As socialists, we need to oppose
imperialism and Zionism because they are manifestations of capital as
self-expanding value, thus, the capitalist mode of production, mixed with ideologically
backward colonial notions. The United States imperialism is the expression of
Manifest Destiny, and Zionism is the colonial-settler ideology of occupation
and ethnic cleansing of Palestine.
Thus, to defend the sovereignty of
the Iranian working people, socialists in Iran must oppose the U.S./Israeli war
with a program of action of their own in sharp contrast to the current policies
of the Islamic Republic. I would propose the following for discussion among
Iranian working people. A key lesson of
the 1979 revolution was that people were united on what/who they did not want
but not on what kind of society and economy they wanted and how it would be
run.
I propose the following as a
conversation starter.
·
Freedom of expression,
freedom of the press, freedom of association, especially for the oppressed
nationalities, women, and defenders of nature.
·
Freedom for working people
to establish their own organizations, such as unions and shoras.
·
Freedom of all political prisoners.
End all forms of torture and capital punishment now!
·
No arbitrary arrests, presumption
of innocence until proven guilty by a jury of one’s peers, and the right to due
process. Dissolve the Islamic courts.
·
The right of the people to
vote and to elect the representatives of their choice.
·
The right to form
committees of people's representatives that would be responsible to the people
themselves and not to the state.
·
The right to arm the people
and organize a people's militia; dissolve all repressive armed forces of the
Islamic Republic.
·
The right of the mass
organizations of the people to administer all the affairs of the towns and
provinces.
·
The right to liberation and
voluntary cooperation of all the peoples and nationalities living in Iran.
·
The right of Iran to
political and economic independence from imperialism.
·
For workers’ control and
management of all state industries and all enterprises that refuse to serve the
interests of their workers and the working people in general.
·
For a constituent assembly organized
by the movements of working people to draft a new constitution. For a workers’
state.
·
For the right to clean air
and water. For the rights of nature to prosper without human exploitation. For a
society at peace with itself and at peace with nature
The future Iranian revolution needs
to be an ecological socialist revolution because of the existential world
ecological crises: catastrophic global warming and climate change, the Sixth
Extinction, recurrent pandemics, and nuclear holocaust. I propose Ecocentric Socialism
as a vision to aspire to (Nayeri, 2023A, especially Chapter 19).
Building a movement to free all
political prisoners in Iran
My experience in a successful campaign
to free political prisoners in Iran dates to the 1970s, as in the Committee for
Artistic and Intellectual Freedom in Iran (CAIFI). Formed in New York in 1973
to defend Reza Baraheni, the well-known Iranian author, poet, and literary
critic of Azeri origin, and a founder of the Writers Association of Iran, who
was arrested, tortured, and held in prison. CAIFI challenged the ultra-left
sectarian view of the Confederation of Iranian Students (dominated by Maoists
and nationalists), who did not believe political prisoners could be freed through
mass work, and in some cases they did not even consider defending political
prisoners they did not hold to be “revolutionaries.” CAIFI, by contrast,
believed in defending all political prisoners regardless of ideology, selecting
a few prominent political prisoners to draw public attention to the plight of
all political prisoners and building the broadest possible coalition through
democratic organizational methods. CAIFI won over the support of some prominent
liberal and leftist Americans, including Kay Boyle, Daniel Ellsberg, Ramsey
Clark, and Angela Davis, a former political prisoner and signer of the Open
Letter, who supported CAIFI. CAIFI gained
momentum when, under international pressure, Baraheni was released, traveled to
the U.S., and agreed to be a keynote speaker at CAIFI-sponsored events,
attracting even more support for its campaigns.
In just a few years, CAIFI became the most successful defender of the
Shah's political prisoners. CAIFI's
mission was finally accomplished when the February 1979 revolution freed all
the Shah's political prisoners.
CAIFI was formed in the United
States, the main supporter of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi's dictatorship, where
public opinion mattered. The Islamic Republic’s mass base is inside Iran. Thus,
it is necessary to build a defense committee inside Iran, building on CAIFI
and other successful defense efforts.
References:
Nayeri, Kamran. Whose Planet?
Essays on Ecocentric Socialism. 2023.
_____________. Toward a Theory of
Uneven and Combined Late Capitalist Development. 2023.
_____________. Between Dreams and
Reality: Essays on Revolution and Socialism. 2025.
Pager, Tyler and Anatoly Kurmanaev. “How
Marco Rubio Is Running Venezuela From Afar.” The New York Times, July 11,
2026.
