3686. The U.S./Israeli War Against Iran and The Future of Life on Earth

 By Kamran Nayeri, March 16, 2026

A neighborhood in Tehran after U.S./Israeli bombings. Photo credit: The New York Times

“In our epoch, which is the epoch of imperialism, i.e., of world economy and world politics under the hegemony of finance capital, not a single communist party can establish its program by proceeding solely or mainly from conditions and tendencies of developments in its own country.” Leon Trotsky, The Third International After Lenin. 1928.

When I first read this passage in 1972, it resonated with me for two reasons: I realized how deeply modern human society is interconnected within the capitalist world economy, and because I understood why Trotsky’s theory of Permanent Revolution is revolutionary and Stalin’s theory of “socialism in one country” was counterrevolutionary.

Years later, I learned that the theory of finance capital (imperialism) of Hilferding on the basis of which Bukharin and Lenin theories of imperialism are constructed to explain the origins of World War I was a mistaken break with Marx’s theory of the capitalist mode of production, which has important ramifications for understanding the nature of capitalism (Nayeri 2023B, Chapter 4), hence what would be needed to transcend it to reach socialism (Nayeri, 2025, Chapter Six). Since 2009, I have learned that human society itself is deeply embedded in and depends on the web of life. This would require us to develop new theories of capitalism and socialism grounded in an integrated theory of society and nature. I have developed  Ecocentric Socialism as such a theory (Nayeri, 2023A; Chapter 19).

This essay provides a different framework for understanding the war Israel and the U.S. have launched against Iran on February 28, 2026, not just from the mainstream analyses but also from what is presented by much of the Left.

The war must be opposed not just because it is unjust, illegal, and disruptive of the capitalist world economy, and has been causing untold number of working people in Iran and the Middle East misery or that it is a Zionist and imperialist war against Iran, but because it is yet another facet of the crisis of anthropocentric industrial capitalist civilization of which the U.S., Israel, and Iran are all integral parts and it that it has and will have vast adverse implication for the future of life in in the region and in the world.

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The essay further develops the analyses presented in two more recent writings. In “The Dead End of U.S./Israeli War Against Iran (Nayeri, June 22, 2025),” I analyzed the 12-day war that Israel started on June 13, 2025, to argue that the actual goal of Israel's and the U.S. 's war was to reverse the gains of the 1979 Iranian revolution. That revolution overthrew the U.S.-installed regime of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi (the Shah), which had become increasingly dictatorial and despised by the millions of Iranian people. The Shah’s regime was part of the anti-communist Central Treaty Organization (CENTO) alliance and a supporter of the colonial settler states of South Africa and the Israeli apartheid regimes.

I further argued that the Islamic Republic, while independent of Western imperialism, was a counter-revolutionary force that by the summer of 1982 consolidated itself by brutally destroying all independent grassroots organizations that emerged from the 1979 revolution. The Islamic Republic was the brainchild of Ayatollah Khomeini, who in the early 1970s wrote a pamphlet advocating the creation of an Islamic government ruled by Velayat-e Faghih (Islamic Jurisprudence) to unify Muslims (at least Shiites). This vision requires expanding the Islamic Republic's power across the Middle East.

Thus, there has been, since 1979, an ongoing conflict between the U.S. as the leader of Western imperialism, Israeli Zionism, and the Islamic Republic; all three are expansionist, reactionary ideologies backed by state power and struggling for domination in the Middle East.

In  “Foreign Policy of the Second Trump Administration” (Nayeri, February 16, 2026), I argued that the rise of the White supremacist Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement with Trump as its leader represent a reaction to the relative decline of U.S. imperialism and an end to the so-called Pax Americana (American Peace; some called the American Century) as China has been able to industrialize and surpass the United States as the leading capitalist power. Concurrently, the European economies have been experiencing slow growth for some time. Thus, the world dominance of European civilization that began five hundred years ago has come to an end, as Asian civilizations, especially China, rise up.

The shift of the center of world power in the past has been marked by violence and wars. When Germany and the United States industrialized and surpassed Britain as the dominant industrial capitalist power, the world witnessed the bloody inter-imperialist World Wars I and II, which ended with the United States' supremacy.

Thus, we live in a very dangerous time for the following reasons.

First, the inter-imperialist rivalry is increasing and can lead to a world war in which the main contenders are nuclear states.

Second, regional wars, such as the Ukraine and Iran wars, as terrible as they are, can easily escalate into a world war. Three weeks into the US/Israel war against Iran, it has already spread to the rest of the Middle East and effectively closed the flow of oil through the Strait of Hormuz, damaging the world economy. The war is threatening the Gulf states that depend on desalination plants for their water on the non-polluted Persian Gulf, which is open to shipping to bring in their food and export their oil.

Third, the world faces existential ecological crises such as catastrophic climate change, the Sixth Extinction, recurrent pandemics, and nuclear holocaust. To address these crises, a coordinated response by all countries, especially the most powerful, is required. Instead, we face increased rivalry and hostility among capitalist states.

Fourth, the only historical agency to act in the interest of humanity and life on Earth is the working people. If they are not organized and mobilized to act in the interest of all life on Earth, the existential crises we face can lead to the collapse of civilization and possibly the end of humanity. However, only democracy from below would allow the widest public discussion necessary to adopt the actions needed to address the crisis of anthropocentric, industrial capitalist civilization. However, increased rivalry among capitalist states and certainly this war tends to limit working people's democratic participation in deciding their own future.

Israel/US relations

Ervand Abrahamian (2026), a well-regarded historian of the Middle East, has argued that since the Obama presidency, the U.S. political class has relegated its foreign policy to Israel. This view has been shared by others, including Mazzatti et.al. 2026). Secretary of State Marco Rubio has said that the Trump administration “was pulled into this war” after Israel began attacking Iran in the early morning of Saturday, February 28 (Stein, March 2, 2026).  Abrahamian argues that the US's dependency on Israel is reflected in the fact that it has Middle East specialists in its foreign policy decision-making teams.

I would argue that there are more ideological/political reasons for the US following the Israelis' lead in the Middle East.  In his first term as the President, Trump tore up the 2015 agreement between the Islamic Republic of Iran and a group of world powers: the P5+1 (the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council—the United States, the United Kingdom, Russia, France, and China—plus Germany) and the European Union. Although that agreement held up well in opening the Islamic Republic's nuclear industry to international inspection. Trump's action fulfilled Benjamin Netanyahu's opposition to the agreement. In response, the Islamic Republic resumed uranium enrichment to 60 percent. They viewed this as their bargaining chip to remove sanctions. Instead, the US and its European allies increased the sanctions, and tensions increased.

Christian Zionism and Trump’s second term presidency

The U.S. played a central role in the creation of the State of Israel in Palestine in 1948, at the time of colonial revolution and Arab nationalism, to serve as a Garrison State. The concept of the Garrison State was introduced in a seminal, highly influential 1941 article in the American Journal of Sociology by political scientist and sociologist Harold Lasswell, who outlined the possibility of a political-military elite composed of "specialists in violence" in modern states.

The animosity of Israel with Palestinians and Arab neighbors manifested in a series of wars in which weak Arab neighbors were defeated, and Israel took ever more territory in Palestine and beyond.

Since the 1960s, the alliance between Israel and the United States has grown in economic, strategic, and military aspects. The U.S. has played a key role in ensuring good relations between Arab nations and Israel. In turn, Israel provides a strategic American foothold in the region as well as intelligence and advanced technological partnerships. Relations with Israel are an important factor in the U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East.

The importance of Israel in the U.S. Middle East policy was underscored by Senator Joseph Biden, a self-described Zionist, who argued the annual U.S. aid to Israel is a “good investment” and that if there were no state of Israel, the U.S. would have to create one!

As Sharp (2025) writes in a report for the U.S. Congress:

“Israel is the largest cumulative recipient of U.S. foreign assistance since World War II. Successive Administrations, working with Congress, have provided Israel with assistance reflective of robust domestic U.S. support for Israel and its security; shared strategic goals in the Middle East; and historical ties dating from U.S. support for the creation of Israel in 1948. To date, the United States has provided Israel with $174 billion (in current, or non-inflation-adjusted, dollars) in bilateral assistance and missile defense funding.

“Over the last two decades, including during Israel's ongoing conflict with Hamas, American public attitudes toward Israel, as expressed in public-opinion polling, have shifted somewhat when compared to previous eras. Though lawmakers continue to vote in favor of U.S. assistance to Israel, there have been calls from some political and ideological groups to reevaluate the long-standing U.S.-Israeli assistance relationship.

“In 2016, the U.S. and Israeli governments signed their third 10-year Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) on military aid, covering FY2019 to FY2028. Under the terms of the MOU, the United States pledged to provide—subject to congressional appropriation—$38 billion in military aid ($33 billion in Foreign Military Financing (FMF) grants plus $5 billion in missile defense appropriations) to Israel. While negotiations over the next MOU have yet to start, U.S. and Israeli experts and government officials have already started to formulate proposals to shape future U.S.-Israeli military cooperation.

“Since the Hamas-led attacks of October 7, 2023, and Israel's subsequent conflicts in Gaza, Lebanon, and Iran, Congress has provided emergency supplemental military assistance to Israel and appropriated funding beyond the annual MOU terms for joint U.S.-Israeli missile defense programs. In April 2024, Congress passed P.L. 118-50 (Making emergency supplemental appropriations for the fiscal year ending September 30, 2024, and for other purposes). That act included, among other things, $3.5 billion in FMF for Israel. The act also included $5.2 billion in defense appropriations for missile defense ($4 billion) and Israel's new laser defense system, Iron Beam ($1.2 billion). (Sharp, 2025)”

There is also an overlooked religious/ideological basis for the current U.S. unqualified support for Israel: Christian Zionism. Christian Zionists are evangelical Christians who espouse the return of the Jewish people to the Holy Land as a precondition for the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. “During the 1980s, as the Republican Party forged alliances with the emerging religious right, Israel would become a core cause for the GOP. (Goldman, 2025).”

“A major impetus behind the movement is the belief that the Jews’ return will lead to the Second Coming of Jesus. Christian Zionists also believe that by blessing and supporting Israel, considered both as the collective Jewish people and the modern state, they themselves will be blessed by God.” (Comstock, January 23, 2026).

With the Republican Party in power in Washington since the 2024 elections, Christian Zionism holds sway in Washington.: 83% of Republicans view Israel favorably, compared with 33% of Democrats. Republicans in Congress are pushing to use the biblical terms “Judea and Samaria” instead of the West Bank. Evangelical Christian Zionists continue to call for support of the Israeli right and of settlers in the occupied territories. 25 to 30 percent of Trump supporters are estimated to be Christian Zionists (Stanley, February 5, 2025).

Trump's second administration includes Christian Zionists in key posts, including the Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Paula White-Cain, Trump’s personal pastor for over two decades, is a Christian Zionist. She has a long history of vocal support for Israel. She was influential in Trump’s decision to relocate the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem in 2017 and the push to sign the Abraham Accords to get more Arab states to recognize Israel in 2020.

Trump picked two Zionists who have personal and business ties to him, Jared Kushner (son-in-law) and Steve Witkoff, to represent the U.S. government in negotiations with the Islamic Republic. These were not negotiations but a series of meetings to convey an ultimatum to the Islamic Republic that if it did not accept Trump’s demand, Iran would be attacked. Thus, Abbas Araghchi, the Islamic Republic's foreign minister and the negotiator, complained at every opportunity that the Iranian side would respond only if treated as an equal and that the U.S. side was issuing demands rather than negotiating, which requires concessions on both sides to reach a The Netanyahu government's strategy for dominance in the Middle East

Benjamin Netanyahu, currently wanted by the International Criminal Court for the war crimes of starvation as a method of warfare and of intentionally directing an attack against the civilian population, and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts from at least 8 October 2023 until at least 20 May 2024, has been the longest-serving prime minister of Israel. This is not an accident: as a colonial-settler regime, Israel has been systematically aiming to capture more land of the historic Palestine, hence it has built an apartheid state in which Palestinians are treated as second-class citizens.

Netanyahu has been a driving force for these Zionist policies. He used Hamas’s rebellion against the Israeli-imposed open prison policy on Gaza to wage a genocidal war there and, at the same time, encourage building of settlements in the West Bank.

On April 12, 2025, Iran entered negotiations with Trump’s administration aimed at reaching a nuclear peace agreement. Trump set a 60-day deadline for Iran to reach an agreement. After the deadline passed without an agreement, Israel attacked Iran on June 13. Lazar (June 13, 2025) wrote in Times of Israel about how these negotiations were used by Israel and the U.S. to give the Islamic Republic a sense of security before a surprise attack.

In his second term, emboldened by his return to the White House, Trump has pursued gunboat diplomacy, using U.S. military superiority to advance the U.S. sphere of influence and support the U.S. economy.

The US joined the Israeli war against Iran on February 28. Netanyahu had assured Trump that, with the Axis of Resistance weakened with the fall of the Ba'athist regime in Syria, degradation of Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, and being deeply unpopular among a large part of the population inside Iran, it was possible to overthrow it and install a regime favorable to Washington and Israel. This would ensure U.S./Israeli domination of the Middle East.

Thus, the current U.S./Israel war against Iran is the continuation of the Israel/U.S. genocidal war in Gaza. After it became clear that the Islamic Republic would not crumble with the onset of this war and there would be no mass uprising against Iranians who would welcome the invading Israeli and American militaries, the Gaza strategy to carpet bomb Iranian cities was adopted, leading to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz by the Iranian forces. The success of the asymmetrical war strategy that was developed after the eight-year-long war with Iraq has kept the Zionist and imperialist forces at bay, creating a deadlock in the war.

The closure of the Strait of Hormuz has quickly pushed oil prices above $100 a barrel and forced governments to tap their strategic reserves to keep their economies running. If the Strait of Hormuz is mined, it may take months before shipping through it returns to normal. These factors tie the hands of Israel and the U.S. from their plans to massively bombard Iran.

The resistance by the Islamic Republic in this war has further weakened the United States as a declining power.

The crisis of the anthropocentric industrial capitalist civilization

War is a continuation of politics with violent means. Politics is concentrated economics. For five thousand years, civilizations have been built on the expropriation of nature by the exploitation of the working people. In the capitalist epoch, wars are driven by the laws of motion of capital. This undercurrent for wars is wrapped in old ideological motives. The Crusades (1095-1291 AD), a series of military campaigns launched by the papacy against Muslim rulers to recover and defend the Holy Land, were encouraged by promises of spiritual reward. Trump’s war against Venezuela, dressed as a war against drug cartels and for democratic elections, proved to be for a subservient government in Caracas and control over Venezuela's oil. The Zionist appeal to the bible and Moses is for taking over the land of Palestine from its people.

Yet the ever-increasing wealth of the ruling classes and nations is only possible by further degradation of the natural basis of life on Mother Earth. Thus, the Ukraine, Gaza, and Iran wars are not just social crises but also the intensification of existential ecological crises worldwide.

The fossil fuel industry, on which the Gulf states and Iran rely, remains the largest contributor to catastrophic climate change, accounting for 59-65% of emissions from 1990 to 2019.

Middle Eastern countries will also be among the early victims of climate change.

“The countries of the Middle East, especially Arabic-speaking ones, are among the world’s most exposed states to the accelerating impacts of human-caused climate change, including soaring heat waves, declining precipitation, extended droughts, more intense sandstorms and floods, and rising sea levels. But the consequences will be felt unevenly across the region. Resource-poor countries that lack adaptive capacities like infrastructure, technology, and human and physical capital will suffer more acutely, especially as global warming contributes to the degradation of rural livelihoods and jeopardizes food security. The effects will magnify preexisting inequities and decades of unsustainable government policies, particularly those related to water and land management” (Wehrly, 2024).

Francis and Fonseca (2025) add:

“Model projections for the ‘business-as-usual’ climate change scenario indicate that half of the population in the Middle East and North African region (roughly 600 million people) could be exposed to recurring super- and ultra-extreme heatwaves, which will feature air temperatures up to 56 °C and higher lasting for several weeks at a time, in the second half of this century21. Even though the aridity in the MENA region has significantly increased in recent decades, extreme rainfall events may be more impactful in a warming world.”(Francis and Fonseca, 2024).

The working people, the only social force that can stop this madness, must demand an end to the U.S. and Israeli war against Iran and organize ourself to discuss and adopt alternative for a better world in which humans would live in peace with each other and with the rest of life on Earth.

 

References:

Abrahamian, Ervand. “Can Iran Survive? An Urgent Discussion on the US-Israel War on Iran” Verso Books, March 20, 2026.

Berman, Lazar. “How an Israeli-American Deception Campaign Lulled Iran into a False Sense of Security.” Times of Israel. June 15, 2025.

Francis, Diana and Ricardo Fonseca. “Recent and projected changes in climate patterns in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region.” Nature. May 4, 2024

Comstock, Frannie. “Christian Zionism.” Britanica. January 23, 2026.“

Goldman, Shalom. “Christian Zionism hasn’t always been a conservative evangelical creed – churches’ views of Israel have evolved over decades.” The Conversation. April 2, 2025.

Mazetti,  Mark Mazzetti, Julian E. Barnes, Tyler Pager, et al. “How Trump Decided to Go to War.”  The New York Times, March 2, 2026.

Nayeri, Kamran. Whose Planet? Essays on Ecocentric Socialism. 2023A.

_____________. Toward a Theory of Uneven and Combined Late Capitalist Development. 2023B.

_____________. Between Dreams and Reality: Essays on Revolution and Socialism. 2025.

_____________. “The Dead End of U.S./Israeli War Against Iran.” Our Place in the World: A Journal of Ecosocialism. June 22, 2025.

_____________. “Foreign Policy of the Second Trump Administration.” Our Place in the World: A Journal of Ecosocialism.  February 16, 2026.

Olmsted, Judith. “Let’s Just Do It: How Netanyahu Convinced Trump to Bomb Iran.” New Republic. March 2, 2026.

Sharp, Jermey M. “U.S. Foreign Aid to Israel: Overview and Developments since October 7, 2023.” May 28, 2025.

Stanley, Tiffany. “Why conservative American evangelicals are among Israel’s strongest supporters.” Associated Press. February 5, 2025.

Stein, Chris. “US strikes on Iran triggered by Israel’s plan to launch attack, Rubio says.” March 2, 2026. The Guardian.

 Wehrey, Fredric. “Introduction” in Frederic Wehrey, et.al. “Climate Change and Vulnerability in the Middle East,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Jul 6, 2023.

3309. How Britain Helped Islamic Republic of Iran to Destroy the Pro-Soviet Union Tudeh Party

By Mark Curtis and Phil Miller, Maverick Insider, January 21, 2020

Nouraldin Kianouri, Secretary-General of Tudeh Party "confessed" on television to a plot against the Islamic Republic.  Many Tudeh leaders and rank-and-filers, as well as Fedayeen Majority leaders and rank-and-filers, were arrested tortured and executed in the 1983 wave of repression. 

The UK’s secret intelligence service, MI6, worked with the CIA to provide a list of alleged Soviet agents in Iran to Ayatollah Khomeini’s theocratic regime, which took power after the overthrow of the UK-backed Shah in 1979. The information was used by the regime to execute leading members of the Iranian communist party, the Tudeh.

The British files also highlight how at least one Foreign Office official considered how the UK might benefit from the forced confessions given by Tudeh members at the time, which were believed to be extracted under torture.

The files suggest British policy was motivated by the desire to curry favour with Iran’s new rulers, rather than concerns over Cold War geopolitics or Soviet influence in Iran, which was recognised to be minimal.

The hit list

The list of Iranians allegedly working for the Soviet Union in Iran was provided to Britain by Vladimir Kuzichkin, a major in the KGB who defected to the UK in June 1982, as reported by the New York Times and London Times in 1986. The information gleaned by MI6 from Kuzichkin – who was responsible for maintaining contacts with the Tudeh party, the main leftist organisation in Iran established in the 1940s – was also shared with the CIA, and passed on to Tehran.

The Iranian regime proceeded to round up over 1,000 members of the Tudeh party and eventually executed as many as 200. The party was banned and forced underground.

Britain’s senior official in Iran at that time, Nicholas Barrington, states in his memoir that Kuzichkin’s information simply “found its way” to the Iranian authorities after the Russian’s defection, without specifying the British role.

Files from the time – when Barrington was head of the British Interests Section in Tehran since Iran and the UK had cut full diplomatic relations – suggest that British officials supported Iran’s repression of the Tudeh.

Telegram from Nicholas Barrington, the UK’s senior official in Iran, to the Foreign Office in London, 9 May 1983. (National Archives)

‘A significant step’

As Iran’s crackdown was under way, Barrington met a senior Iranian official on 5 May 1983 seeking British views “on his government’s action against the Tudeh”, which, he said, was evidence of “Iranian independence of the big powers”.

Barrington replied, according to his memorandum on the meeting: “I said I had never doubted this independence. The latest Iranian [actions] seemed to me a significant step.”

The Iranian official then mentioned to Barrington a “confession” forced by the new regime which had aired the previous night on Iranian television by a Tudeh member who had previously been jailed for 24 years under the Shah. The activist was said by the Iranian official to have previously revealed nothing “despite all the Savak’s tortures” – referring to the former regime’s brutal security service.

Barrington commented: “I said, half in jest, that perhaps the Islamic Republic’s torture was more effective than that of the Shah.”

By this time, Barrington and other British officials were well aware of Iranian repression. On the same day he met the Iranian official, Barrington had informed the Foreign Office in London of the “destruction of the Tudeh”.

He noted that “it is widely believed that some [Tudeh members] have already suffered the death penalty and the rest will do so soon”. He added that “the public have been taking the law into their own hands” in dealing with Tudeh members and “no doubt scores will be settled and some comparatively innocent will suffer with the guilty”.

 Telegram from Nicholas Barrington, the UK’s senior official in Iran, to the Foreign Office in London, 5 May 1983. (National Archives)

 Telegram from Nicholas Barrington, the UK’s senior official in Iran, to the Foreign Office in London, 5 May 1983. (National Archives)

Earlier, in February 1983, when Iran arrested a number of Tudeh members, Barrington commented that “it looks as if the regime are making a determined effort to root out the Tudeh”. By April, Barrington was informed by a Hungarian diplomat that “several hundred” Tudeh members were in prison, who were expected to be dealt with by a military court.

Barrington did not lament the Iranian regime’s actions, but rather saw them as an opportunity. He wrote that fellow European heads of mission “felt that it was time for Western European and like-minded countries to keep their lines open to Iran”.

No evidence could be found in the 1983 files that UK officials did anything other than approve of this severe repression.

Barrington later wrote in his memoir that “there was money to be made” in Iran where “an important part of our work was maintaining British commercial links with Iran and promoting exports”.

By July 1983, another British official in Tehran, Chris Rundle, told the Foreign Office that “some rank-and-file members are being executed and there are rumours of large-scale executions”. He added that the “best estimates here are that about 80% of the Tudeh members in Iran have been arrested, the rest having gone into hiding or escaped”.

Extracted confessions

The Iranian regime’s aim to destroy the Tudeh party was made easier by the forced “confessions” it extracted from two key figures – Noureddin Kianouri, the party’s secretary-general, and Mahmoud Etemadzadeh, editor of the party newspaper.

On 30 April 1983, after nearly two months in jail, Kianouri and Etemadzadeh appeared on television, saying that the Tudeh had worked against Iran and spied for the Soviet Union. Barrington noted that, “The pressures, or threats, in detention must have been great judging by the appearance of the two men.”

A British file from its embassy in Moscow noted a report from Pravda – the official newspaper of the Soviet regime – claiming that the confessions “had been extracted by Gestapo-like methods inherited from the Savak”.

Despite this, the head of the Middle East and North Africa department in the Foreign Office, Oliver Miles, suggested that the “admissions” on television might be useful to Britain. He noted that “there could well be references to friendly parties in other countries which we might be able to make use of”, such as the Tudeh’s relations with the Syrian Communist Party.

Miles also noted: “Libya and Algeria also have tolerable relations with Iran, and it is just possible that something interesting might crop up in that connexion [sic] too”, before adding, “I should be grateful if whoever is principally concerned with studying the material could bear this point in mind”.

Memorandum by Oliver Miles, head of the Middle East and North Africa Department, Foreign Office, 6 May 1983. (National Archives)

Three days later, Barrington reported: “Tudeh cadres are being rounded up in the provinces.”

On 4 May 1983, when Iran expelled 18 Soviet diplomats, Barrington noted: “The action against the Tudeh has received the seal of Khomeini’s approval…he praises the revolutionary guards, the other security forces and the judiciary for ridding Iran of the Tudeh, which he referred to as a mottled snake which had been working to overthrow Islam”.

‘A major landmark’

Barrington told the Foreign Office in May 1983 that due to the destruction of the Tudeh “a major landmark has been reached in Soviet/Iranian relations and perhaps also in the history of Communist parties overseas”.

Yet the files suggest that Britain’s support for Iranian repression of the Tudeh cannot be principally explained as a Cold War episode to counter Soviet influence. Officials did not fear the Iranian regime would turn to the Soviet Union since it was implacably opposed to its communism.

There were various sources of friction between Iran and the Soviet Union at this time, notably Moscow’s arming of Iraq, with whom Iran had been at war since 1980. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 had also resulted in millions of Afghans fleeing into Iran.

Neither were the Soviets prepared to go to great lengths to support the Tudeh. Barrington stated in a July 1982 letter to London – by which time Kuzichkin was in the UK passing on information – that while the Islamic regime was in power in Iran, the Russians were “prepared to play it cool and ditch the Tudeh Party, if necessary”.

Barrington went on to receive a knighthood and became Britain’s High Commissioner to Pakistan.

Formal approval for working with the CIA to pass Kuzichkin’s information to the Iranian regime was probably made by then prime minister Margaret Thatcher, foreign secretary Francis Pym and head of MI6, Colin Figures.

An unsuccessful attempt was made to contact Sir Nicholas Barrington for a comment. DM

Mark Curtis is editor and Phil Miller is staff reporter, for Declassified UK, a journalism organisation investigating UK foreign, security and intelligence policies. They tweet at @DeclassifiedUK, @markcurtis30 and @pmillerinfo

2793. The Islamic Republic's Endgame: On the Recent Protests in Iran

By Kamran Nayeri, January 12, 2018

Protesters in Mashhad on December 28, 2017.

Introduction

Street protests that began in the northeastern city of Mashhad (pop. 2.8 million) in Iran (pop. 80 million) on December 28 and spread to some 80 cities, towns, and some villages, have been suppressed or otherwise ended by January 3 when the Revolution Guards (incorrectly translated as the Revolutionary Guards) were sent to the remaining trouble spots in Isfahan, Hamadan, and Lorestan to quell any protest.  At least 21 protestors were killed and according to a member of parliament, more than 3,500 have been jailed. On January 3, the government also organized demonstrations of tens of thousands of supporters of the Islamic Republic to politically isolate the protesters.  Meanwhile, Internet access for selected regions was disrupted and access of the social messing site Telegraph with 40 million subscribers in Iran was cut off. Still, the protests have captured the imagination of many Iranians and the international community.  

In what follows, I will outline some basic facts about these protests in section 1. These are collected from news articles and commentaries about the protests. However, much of these fails to place the protests in their historical context which includes the rise and demise of the 1979 revolution and the role of Shi'ite clergy in it.  Sections 2 will deal with the historical context, including the role of the Shi'ite clergy.  Section 3, will outline the counter-revolutionary role of Ayatollah Khomeini and the Islamic Republic that destroyed the 1979 revolution against Shah's autocracy by imposing a theocratic capitalist regime in its place, now opposed even in the urban poor and some rural population.  In section 4, I will argue that the recent protest marks the beginning of the end of the theocratic capitalist regime and suggest a way forward for the radicalizing youth and working people in Iran drawing on the historical experience of Iranian people as well as the current social and ecological crisis in Iran and the world.  

1. Some facts about the recent protests

Governmental factional struggle sparked the protests

According to the New York Times reporter in Iran, Thomas Erdbrink, in November President Hassan Rouhani had leaked the draft government budget that including its traditionally secret portion which showed how much money is being allocated to the religious institutions. For the first time, the public learned that “billions of dollars were going to hard-line organizations, the military, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, and religious foundations that enrich the clerical elite. At the same time, the budget proposed to end cash subsidies for millions of citizens, increase fuel prices and privatize public schools.” As the public learned about it resentment began to build up. A young man told Erdbrink: “There were all these religious organs that received high budgets, while we struggle with constant unemployment.”

In a maneuver to turn the public anger away from the “hardliners” towards the President and the “reformist” wing of the Islamic Republic, a demonstration was organized in the city of Mashhad that blamed the economic problems on the Rouhani government (I will explain what these factions represent later). But the genuinely angry protestors chanted not only “death of Rouhani” but also “death to the dictator” (that is the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei).  According to Erdbrink, the prominent hardliner Friday prayer leader of Mashhad, Ahmad Alamolhoda, was summoned by Iran’s National Security Council to explain his role in the demonstration.  In a subsequent article, Erdbrink cites Iran’s Prosecutor General, Mohammad Jafar Montazeri, who on a television appearance included the former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad among the international and domestic forces behind the unrest.  In his second term as president, Ahmadinejad, a hardliner, came into conflict with the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, and in the last presidential election, he was disqualified as a candidate.  Ahmadinejad is a religious disciple of the extremist cleric Mohammad Taghi Meshbah-Yazdi, who openly opposes the democratic rule, whose Islamic foundation was to receive eight times more funds in the proposed government budget than a decade ago.

Thus, the Mashhad protest that was probably organized by the hardliners to target the reformists got out of control, denouncing the Supreme Leader, hence the Islamic Republic.  The news of this protest provoked sympathy protests across the country where similar resentments of the Islamic Republic are widespread.  

Mostly poor young working people in small towns protested

Reports confirm that the bulk of the protestors were young low-income working people in smaller cities, towns and some villages.  At the time of the 1979 revolution, two-thirds of the population of 35 million was rural. Today, two-thirds of the 80 million population lives in urban settings defined as municipalities with 5,000 or more.   The traditional rural population has historically been the bedrock of Shi’ite clergy.  Thus, urbanization has loosened the religious influence on the current generation that has either migrated into nearby town or have been part of the urbanization of the old villages.  Of course, some urban working class youth, as well as university students and unemployed college graduates, also participated in the protests.  Young people make up half the Iran’s population and those arrested have an average age of under 25.  Most analysts believe that unemployment among youth runs at about 40% while inflation is about 15%. Reza Fiyouzat cites a report by the head of Imam Khomeini Relief Foundation, Parviz Fattah, that said (link in Farsi) that between 10 to 12 million Iranians live in absolute poverty. He also draws attention to a World Bank 2016 report that praises Iran’s implementation of its structural adjustment program.  Of course, neoliberal policies and structural adjustment programs have been central to government economic policies since the presidency of Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani (1989-1997).  Promoted by the IMF and the World Bank, these programs have been widely criticized for their adverse impact of the working people, including by increasing poverty (for brief accessible review see, Anup Shah, 2013, for more detailed studies, see Joseph E. Stiglitz).  

The politics of the protests

The revolt against the Islamic Republic is not surprising in a theocracy where political protest is routinely discouraged and suppressed.  There is no legal political party operating in Iran; even the Islamic Republic party organized by Khomeini’s lieutenants was dissolved in the late 1980s. Thus, economic, social, cultural, and political grievances cannot be aired by the population in a systematic and organized fashion much less democratically discussed.  When people protest they risk arrest, prison, torture, and even execution. The Islamic Republic’s 38 year history includes coup attempts by various highly placed individuals, sharp conflicts resulting in imprisonment or house arrest of its statesmen (a former prime minister, Mir Hossein Mousavi, and a former speaker of the parliament, Mehdi Karroubi, who were presidential candidates in the disputed 2009 elections have been under house arrest since).  Thus, protests in Iran tend to be explosive.  In addition, the recent protests were mostly spontaneous, small (a few hundred to a few thousand), and scattered as they did not gain active support from the middle-class Iranians in larger cities.  They included political demands such as freedom for political prisoners and demands for economic equality.  One slogan that was repeated in a number of protests was “work, bread, freedom,” (kaar, naan, aazaadi). Mina Khanlarzadeh cites a statement by a coalition of some of the small but independent labor groups that is worth noting:

“Today, we see the eruption of the accumulation of working class people’s rage due to, on the one hand, looting and defalcation of milliards by highest officials, people, and financial institutions that are related to the government and, on the other hand, poverty and misery of millions of people, unemployment of millions of workers and youths, the beatings of street vendors and the killings of Kurdish koolbars [porters who carry commodities on their backs commuting between Iran and Iraq border], the imposition of wages several times below poverty level on workers, and the  imprisonment and torture in response to any demands of social justice and freedom.”

Intervention by the imperialist and rightists forces

Ayatollah Khamenei has placed the blame for the protests on foreign powers without naming anyone. Montazeri in his TV appearance names the United States, Israel, and Saudi Arabia, longtime enemies of the Iranian revolution of 1979 who have worked for decades to replace the Islamic Republic with a regime friendly to them. The Trump administration has used the protests to push its goal of derailing the nuclear agreement which Israel and Saudi regime also oppose without any success (for a discussion of the nuclear agreement, see, Nayeri, 2015). Their Iranian cronies, Reza Pahlavi, the son of the deposed Shah who lives in the Washington area, and the Mujahedin who are based in France and funded by the Saudis, joined the fray.  Although these reactionary forces are a shadow of their former selves, the defeat of the Iranian revolution by the Islamic Republic, and its oppressive theocratic capitalist policies continue to make some Iranian vulnerable to the imperialist and rightist campaigns.  Thus, in the Green Movement of 2009 as well as the recent protests there were slogans that counterposed the aid given to Palestinians and other Arabs to the economic needs of the Iranian people.  Thus, I find Fiyouzat’s argument unconvincing that the slogan “Not Gaza, Not Lebanon; I give my life for Iran!” chanted in a few protests is actually a criticism of the Islamic Republic policy that like the Arab regimes uses Palestinian, Lebanese, and Syrian peoples’ crisis for its own end.  He has no way to verify this claim and anti-Arab prejudice in Iran is as prevalent as the well-documented anti-Afghani prejudice.  These are both the leftover from the Fars (Persian) chauvinism of the Shah’s time. Similarly, I think Fiyouzat is mistaken to dismiss the calls for the return of “Reza Shah.” 

Fiyouzat, like all other commentators I have read, does not place the recent protests in the context of the 1979 revolution and its defeat. But before I take that up it is necessary to briefly recall what Shi’ite Islam represents in the Iranian society and history.

2. Placing the protests in the historical context

Shi’ite Islam in the class and state formations

To understand the clerical capitalist Islamic Republic regime, it is necessary to understand the role of Shi’ite Islam in class and state formations in Iran.  The ascendence of Shi’ism to the official religion of Iran originated in the Safavid dynasty (1501-1722) that also inaugurated the modern Iranian nation-state.  Thus, Shi’ism became the state-sponsored religion and remained so until the rise of the Islamic Republic in which the relationship was reversed, it is now the state that is sponsored by the Shi’ite hierarchy. I will get back to this soon.  

For over 2,000 years, Iran was an agrarian economy based on the village (deh). Under the Safavids, there were three primary forms of private landholdings (amlāk) that include at least one but typically many villages. These were (1) private estates of large landlords; (2) the private estates of the reigning Shah considered separately from the estates owned by the crown and called amlāk-e ḵāṣṣa or amlāk-e ḵāleṣa; and (3) private estates set aside in special trusts by owners for the permanent benefit of heirs and descendants in accordance with Shi'ite legal principles and known as waqf-e ḵāṣṣ.  Thus, the Shi'ite clergy has been tied to land ownership and the royal court for centuries.  However, in the late nineteenth century, European ideas of Enlightenment and modernity penetrated Iran which laid the intellectual basis for the Constitutional Revolution (1906-11). In the twentieth century, this landownership system became an impediment to the development of capitalism in Iran and increasingly questionable politically.  To facilitate the former and to undermine his enemies on the right and the left, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi carried out a program of land reform. 

"By 1962 a land reform law was enacted. This law, which was implemented in stages over a decade, effectively abolished amlāk by making it unlawful for a single landowner to possess agricultural property in excess of one village. Landlords were required to sell all surplus villages to the government, which in turn arranged for their resale to the peasants who held cultivating rights. A by-product of this program was the virtual disappearance of all the traditional dues and servitudes the peasants had rendered to landlords. As a consequence of the land reform program, amlāk, which had been a characteristic feature of Iranian land tenure patterns for more than two thousand years, virtually ceased to exist." (Hooglund, 1989). 

The Shi’ite clergy has been closely tied with the bazaar merchants who in turn were linked with their supplier both artisans and agricultural producers in Iran and abroad.

“The bāzār was and is a social institution, comprising religious, commercial, political, and social elements. The bāzār is the center par excellence of personal transactions, commerce, and communication in urban life; thus one needs to under­stand the bāzār’s function within its context, the city. In Iran, the city forms a political, commercial, cultural, and religious center for its hinterland. The bāzār has played a very important role in this relationship, reflecting the character of the Muslim city.” (Floor, 1989)

The bazaar also had had a political function:

“The Friday mosque—the main religious and political center of the city—and the bāzār are always found together. In the mosque the population prayed in congregation, came to hear proclamations of its rulers, and gave vent to feelings about the ruler’s policies.” (ibid.)

The merchant class has had a tense relationship with the royal court and some prominent merchant have supported mass protests in the 20th century, yet they have consistently served as a conservative force.  Thus, while the bazaar merchants participated in the Constitution Revolution, they did so in sit-in at the British embassy. It was not unusual for big merchants to have dual Russian citizenship as it helped with their overseas trading practices and offered them a measure of protection against the royal court. 

Thus, the Shah’s modernization programs, which included the extension of the right to vote to women and land reform, directly threatened the interests of the Shi’ite hierarchy and its landowning and merchant allies resulting in the June 1963 revolt organized by Khomeini and other clerics. The revolt was crushed and Khomeini imprisoned. His life was spared and he was exiled to Iraq only after key Shi’ite clerics conferred him the title of Ayatollah raising the risk of any harm to him by the government.  Ayatollah Khomeini who had already positioned himself as an anti-American and anti-Israeli politician who wants to “protect” society from “decadence” went on be become the leader of a section of Shi’ite clergy that opposed the Shah and played a key role in the mass movement that overthrew him in the 1979 revolution. 

The social function of the Shi’ite clergy

It is also important to understand how the organizational form of the Shi'ite clergy and its social function. The current organizational form of Shi’ite clergy and its social function is through Marja or the system of emulation of a religious authority.  This was founded in the 1830s when Mohammed Hassan Najafi became the first transnational Shi’ite religious authority (marja) in Najaf, Iraq. Najafi created a universal patronage network through which he received religious taxes and endowment incomes, and appointed religious representatives from Shi’ite cities from Iraq to India.  

“In the 16th Century, Shi’ite jurists [mujtahids] had established a new conceptual theory describing the relationship between [Shi’ite] community leaders and Shi’ite worshipers. According to the theory, each worshiper should either reach the highest educational level in Shi’ite jurisprudence (ijtihad) or follow a living person who has attained such a level. The theory of ‘following’ (taqlid) was intertwined with another significant theory, which permitted Shi’ite jurists to receive religious taxes on behalf of the infallible and hidden twelfth Shi’ite Imam. It is believed that this Imam will return at the end of time to establish a just global government. Thereafter, a new form of Shi’ite leadership emerged that both provided the monarchy with legitimacy and was protected by it, but was also financially independent from it.” (Khalaji, no date)

Thus, in addition to their waqf landholding (described above), the Shi’ite mujtahids also benefitted from taxes they collected. There are two forms of such taxes. Khums (Arabic for a fifth) is a tax paid equal to a fifth of the surplus from the income left after annual expenses of a Muslim’s that is paid to a mujtahid.  Zakat is a tax on income-generating property or asset paid to a mujtahid.  The mujtahid is supposed to spend such revenue for the welfare of the Shi’ite community such as orphaned children and for religious affairs, such as scholarships for a new crop of talabeh (seminary students) recruited from adolescent boys usually from the villages.

The Islamic Republic added to these sources of revenue for the Shi’ite clergy portions of the state’s revenue which is given to the religious institutions as part of the secret annual government budgets. 

3. The Islamic Republic as the counter-revolution

We can now understand the counter-revolutionary role played by Ayatollah Khomeini and the Islamic Republic in crushing of the February 1979 revolution that overthrow the U.S.-installed and U.S.-backed dictatorship of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.  Alireza Nassab and I have outlined this elsewhere (Nayeri and Nassab, 2006).  Here it is helpful to outline the major junctures in the rise and fall of the February 1979 revolution.

The revolution had a humble beginning in the clash between Tehran shantytown dwellers who were defending their homes from demolishment with the police in the summer of 1977.  Like todays’ protestors, they had come to the cities, many to Tehran, in search of work because of the Shah’s land reform that had improvised large sections of the peasantry who were deprived of any access to land or had lost their land due to inadequate support for small family farmers.  Despite the defeat of the shantytown dwellers, social protests continued and by February 1978 a million people marched in the city of Tabriz chanting anti-Shah slogans. Despite much brutality by the regime, by October 1978 the oil workers had capped a national wave of strikes with their own general strike that shut off the flow of oil to the Shah’s regime while distributing it to the population.  By November 1978, many millions of Iranian (one account put it at 17 million out of the population of 35 million) took to the streets of major cities.  On January 16, 1979, the Shah and his family fled the country leaving behind a caretaker government headed by the bourgeois nationalist Shahpour Bakhtiar. By February 1, Ayatollah Khomeini who enjoyed massive support because of his opposition to the Shah’s regime since 1963 returned and appointed a Muslim nationalist, Mehdi Bazargan, the head of the Freedom Movement (Nehzat-e Azadi), to form a provisional government.  On February 11, the youth and armed urban guerrillas joined a garrison of air force technicians in east Tehran who had just pledged their support for the revolution to ward off an attack on the technicians by the elite Imperial Guard.  Almost all of Tehran mobilized and the youth and working people laid siege to the Shah’s armed forces, police, and prisons.  By the end of the day, the Shah’s caretaker government had collapsed. In the next two days, all of the Shah’s army, police, gendarmerie, and secret police were crushed in the entire country. Political prisoners who were still in jail were freed. National television and radio stations were in the hands of the people as were all newspapers.  The Iranian working people had armed themselves and taken control of every lever of power. The capitalist and landlord classes with ties to the regime as well as the top brass and state bureaucrats had left the country or were in hiding, or have been detained.  A lion share of the economy and social and cultural affairs were in the hands of the working people who began a council movement in workplaces, schools, and universities, in villages, among the oppressed nationalities, in neighborhoods,  and even in what was left of the armed forces.  Given the anti-capitalist dynamics of the revolution, workers and peasants could have moved towards forming their own government.  

Instead, they handed over the power to Ayatollah Khomeini. But Ayatollah Khomeini opposed the Shah from the standpoint of the Shi’ite clergy, not from the standpoint of the interests of the working people.  What followed made this abundantly clear.  Within 48 hours, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani headed a group of armed supporters to take over the national TV and Radio stations from its employees to impose an Islamic censorship on the news and programming (Rafsanjani says in his memoir that he wanted to make sure the national radio and TV spoke of the ISLAMIC revolution, not revolution).  As the International Women’s Day was approaching, Ayatollah Khomeini issued an edict that required women to wear the Islamic hijab.   When women opposed this and protested, their gatherings and march were attacked by semi-fascist Hezbollah gangs armed with stick, knives, and chains. A few years later, a cleric member of the Islamic Consultive Assembly (parliament) revealed that he had organized the Hezbollah goons. By Iranian New Year (March 21) the air force was bombing Turkmen Sahra on the Caspian sea where the oppressed Turkmen nationality lives and they had organized peasants shoras (councils) to take over the land they cultivated. On March 30 and 31, Khomeini staged an undemocratic referendum in which the population was given the choice of continuing with the monarchy which they had just overthrown or the undefined Islamic Republic. The voters rejected the monarchy by over 98% majority giving Khomeini and his allies the opportunity to claim that such huge majority actually wanted a theocracy in place of autocracy!  By the summer, instead of a constituent assembly organized by the grassroots movements of the working people, Khomeini organized an Islamic Constitutional Assembly of the clergy that drafted a constitution that was crowned by Vilayat-e Faqih (Guardianship of the Islamic Jurist) which gave absolute power to one man (or group of them) over the affairs of the country. Before the year’s end, this theocratic capitalist constitution was put to a vote and approved. Meanwhile, all freedoms that were won by the people in the February revolution such as freedom of the press, freedom of association, freedom of religion, freedom of assembly and protest were suppressed. In April, a mass-circulation daily, Ayandegan, which was critical of Khomeini, was shut down. This was followed by a war waged against the Kurdish people who have been struggling for self-determination for decades. At the same time, armed Hezbollah gangs were used to ransack headquarters of socialist parties and 40 newspapers were shut down. 

It took until the end of 1982 to co-opt or crush all grassroots movements, opposition parties (liberal and socialist) and consolidate the Islamic Republic.  By the summer of 1988, Khomeini decided to purge the prisons of the remaining socialist and Mujahedin supporters.  A wave of mass execution followed. Amnesty International estimated “over 4,482 disappeared prisoners during this time.” This crime of the Islamic Republic was so horrendous that Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri who was picked by Khomeini himself as his successor publicly condemned it. Khomeini was outraged and placed Montazeri under house arrest where he remained until his death. 

Hardliners and reformists

Clever politicians, Khomeini, and his lieutenants began to build a new state structure instead of relying on those left by the Shah.  They also created their own party, the Islamic Republic party.  By the end of the 1980s the Islamic Republic party was dissolved and in effect, Iran became a country without any well-known and mass-based political party.  But the clergy was far from united in their views of the best policies to pursue and many factions emerge, united, split, and disappeared in the past 38 years of theocracy. What has become consistent is a two-camp political system where “hardliners” and “reformists’ (sometimes called “moderates”) vie for power.  The roots of this division go back at least to the Constitutional Revolution when the clergy was split between the Mašrūṭa and mašrūʿa factions. 

From the outset, the ʿolamāʾ [Shi’ite hierarchy, KN] had stressed the necessity for compatibility between constitutional demands and Islamic principles. There was a consensus that restraining the ruler’s power and creating a consultative council would preserve the “substance of Islam” (bayża-ye Eslām) against domestic tyranny and European domination. What remained in dispute, however, was the role of the ʿolamāʾ. Islamic constitutionalists claimed a leading role for the clergy in the new order. As early as 1324/1906 Ḥājī Mīrzā Ebrāhīm Šīrāzī had defended the authority of the ʿolamāʾ against the secular intellectuals. Addressing Moḥammad-ʿAlī Mīrzā, then crown prince, he declared: “Up to now our opinion was that the government consists of the men of the state and learned politicians, and not of unripened Westernizers, rotten materialists, and dried-up newspaper readers who [only] learned [to criticize] the despotic absolutist government. Yet Persia is an Islamic republic (jomhūrī-e eslāmī), for from earlier times to the present the ʿolamāʾ of every people and every city rebelled against the provincial governors, and the [central] government dismissed the governors with the blessing of the [leaders] of the public . . . Therefore, our republic is the envy of France and America” (Tārīḵ-e bīdārī I, pp. 395-97). On the other hand, Shaikh Fażl-Allāh Nūrī saw the mašrūṭa, the growth of secularism in the Majles, and anti-ʿolamāʾ sentiments in the anjomans and in the press as detrimental to the Šarīʿa and the supremacy of its representatives. Many ʿolamāʾ agreed. Nūrī’s opposition to mašrūṭa was also provoked by the influence and popularity of his chief rival, Behbahānī. (Amanat, 1992)

Of course, today’s “hardliners” and “reformists” articulate their policies in the context of a much different world than that in the late nineteenth century and early 20th century.  Still, it is not difficult to trace their conceptions of the Islamic Republic to those held by Shaikh Fażl-Allāh Nūrī or Ḥājī Mīrzā Ebrāhīm Šīrāzī.  Add to this ideological differences, the fact that the “hardliners” have controlled the Revolution Guard Corp  (Revolutionary Guards Corp), and the Bassij Mobilization Corp ( The Organization for Mobilization of the Oppressed), the judiciary, and the national TV and radio stations where their ideological views are expressed and implemented daily. Given that the Revolution Guard Corp and some religious foundations controlled by “hardliners” hold a significant part of the economic and financial assets, they are somewhat less willing to support neoliberal policies that the “reformists” typically embrace.  Still, both camps by and large have agreed to implement structural adjustment programs that has shifted the social base of the Islamic Republic. Meanwhile, the economy and the state remain, 38 years after the revolution, still dependent on revenue from oil and gas.  

Where the two camps differ most clearly is with their relation to the civil society and relations with the West.  The “reformists” are willing to tolerate secular Iranians and enter into agreements with the West as long as they do not pose a threat to the Islamic Republic. The “hardliners” view secularists and Western values as dangerous to the Islamic Republic.  Needless to say, their anti-Western views are not anti-imperialism.  Khomeini’s slogan was “Neither the West nor the East, Islamic Republic.” 

4. The road forward

The sociopolitical base of the Islamic Republic narrows  

Let’ recall that the recent protests were largely by the young low-income working people who live in smaller towns and some villages with a recent or still some ties to the land.  While relatively small, scattered, disorganized, and proved easily repressed, this wave of protests has signaled an important shift in politics in Iran.  Let me explain why. 

Because of its anti-democratic and anti-working class nature, the Islamic Republic quickly lost its support among the more class-conscious workers, especially the industrial working class, and among much of the modern, but not traditional, middle class.  Still, when the counter-revolutionary Iraqi invasion of Iran began on September 22, 1980, the population rallied in support of the defensive war effort.  In 18 months, Khorramshahr, the last city that was still occupied by the Iraqi forces, was liberated at the expense of the lives of 30,000 Iranians; Saddam Hussein’s army was cleared off the Iranian territory except for a few narrow bands along the border. It was high time to sue for peace and negotiate for an end to the hostilities.  As Fidel Castro put it, it was a fratricidal war; it was instigated by the megalomanic Saddam Hussein who was supported by imperialism as well as the Soviet Union that provided it with military hardware. Instead, Khomeini campaigned for the “liberation of Karbala,” the Shi’ite holy site in Iraq, with the slogan of “The road to Jerusalem goes through Karbala.”  The revolutionary defensive war degenerated into a Shi’ite Iran vs. Sunni Arabs struggle. The Islamic Republic used imagery of the Hidden Imam to urge World War I human wave attacks by Iranian volunteers resulting in massive human losses. The war quickly lost its popular backing in Tehran and other larger cities and among the working class and middle classes, especially as the Islamic Republic used the war to militarize workplaces and society to suppress the grassroots movements and its political opponents. What enabled Khomeini to pursue his repressive anti-democratic and anti-working class policies and the war effort was the backing of the traditional middle class in the urban centers and rural and small-town population.  Thus the war dragged on until August 1988 when Khomeini finally accepted a ceasefire and a negotiated settlement. Over one million Iraqis and Iranians had fallen victim to the policies of Saddam Hussein and Ayatollah Khomeini, with untold economic and social devastation for both countries.  

The recent protests showed that at least a section of Iran’s rural population who have moved into the smaller towns no longer supports the Islamic Republic and some actively oppose it.  This spells trouble for the future of the Islamic Republic. Its social base has been narrowing.  The Shah’s autocracy was toppled despite his military might, and large-scale use of the police, secret police (SAVAK), prisons, and torture and executions, because its political base narrowed sufficiently by the fall of 1978.  A similar process may be at work in Iran today.  

A new radicalization, a new generation

The Islamic Republic counter-revolution demoralized the generation that made the 1979 revolution.  It took until the July 1999 student protests in Tehran and other cities demanding basic democratic that a new generation began to radicalize (Nayeri, 1999; Nayeri, 2000).  This was followed by a resurgence of the labor movement that demanded independent workers’ organizations spearheaded by the Syndicate of Workers of the United Bus Company of Tehran and Suburbs (UBCTS) with 17,000 employees, including some 10,000 bus drivers. Although the Islamic Republic labor law does not provide for the right to strike the bus drivers staged a strike for their union in December 2005 (Nayeri and Khosroshahi, 2006).  Other union organizing efforts followed such as the strike by the Haft-Tapeh sugar cane workers in southern Iran in 2007.  

In 2010, up to three million supporters of the “reformist” candidates Mir-Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi, protested the outcome of the presidential election that declared Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the “hardliner’ incumbent the winner.  Becoming known as the Green Movement, these protests shook the Islamic Republic regime because of the split it caused between the “hardliners” and “reformists” in the streets. Yet, it differed dramatically with the student and workers struggles preceding it because the latter strived for universal democratic and labor rights without giving political support to any section of the theocratic capitalist Islamic Republic. Those who joined the Green Movement politically supported Mousavi who was Khomeini’s prime minister (1981-89) when the decisive blows to the revolution were delivered or Karoubi who was the Speaker of the parliament (2000-04) and both still supported and continued to support the Islamic Republic.  Significantly, the recent protests not only did not appeal to the Green Movement but equally protested “hardliners” and “reformists” by taking a position against the Islamic Republic.  Further, while some of the former Green Movement spokespersons (such as Behzad Nabavi) have belittled the recent protests, the independent labor movement organizations have stood up in solidarity with them (see, the statement by the Bus workers’ syndicate of Tehran and sugarcane workers’ syndicate of Haft Tapeh). Similarly, some university students joined the protests or supported them and a list of 50 college students arrested has been published. 

For an ecocentric ecological socialist Iran

A recent statement about the Iranian protests recalled Karl Marx’s motto in Class Struggle in France: “The revolution is dead! Long live the revolution!” The new generation of radicalized youth and working people could similarly exclaim: “The 1979 Revolution was betrayed! Long live the coming revolution!”  It is hard to imagine that the coming Iranian revolution will not build on the lessons of the February 1979 revolution, in particular, the grassroots mass organizations, the shora (council) movement, the only leadership that could guarantee both democracy and socialism. Both theory and history have proved that neither is possible and sustainable without self-organization and self-activity of the working people.  

However, at least some in the new generation also know something the generation who made the 1979 revolution did not know—the ecological crisis that has been simmering in Iran and worldwide.  A seldom noticed part of Thomas Erdbrink report in the January 2 issue of the New York Times tells us:

“For decades, those living in Iran’s provincial towns and villages were regarded as the backbone of the country’s Islamic regime. They tended to be conservative, averse to change and pious followers of the sober Islamic lifestyle promoted by the state.

“In less than a decade, all that has changed. A 14-year drought has emptied villages, with residents moving to nearby cities where they often struggle to find jobs. Access to satellite television and, more important, the mobile internet has widened their world.”

In his excellent article, “The Role of Water Crisis in the Recent Iran Protests,” Louis Proyect  discusses how the drought, capitalist agriculture, and state mismanagement have contributed to the water crisis in Iran which in turn has added to the socioeconomic crisis in rural regions which as Edrbrink and I noted has been the bedrock of support for the Islamic Republic. 

As Proyect notes the water crisis also contributed to a similar political crisis in Syria and the brutal war that followed.  The Israeli occupation of increasing regions of Palestine also is motivated in part by the water crisis.  In fact, the water crisis is a world phenomenon.  Here are some United Nations figures:

• 2.1 billion people lack access to safely managed drinking water services. (WHO/UNICEF 2017)
• 4.5 billion people lack safely managed sanitation services. (WHO/UNICEF 2017)
• 340,000 children under five die every year from diarrhoeal diseases. (WHO/UNICEF 2015)
• Water scarcity already affects four out of every 10 people. (WHO)
• 90% of all natural disasters are water-related. (UNISDR)
• 80% of wastewater flows back into the ecosystem without being treated or reused (UNESCO, 2017).
• Around two-thirds of the world’s transboundary rivers do not have a cooperative management framework. (SIWI)
• Agriculture accounts for 70% of global water withdrawal. (FAO)
• Roughly 75% of all industrial water withdrawals are used for energy production. (UNESCO, 2014)

But the world water crisis is part of an integrated social and planetary crisis caused by the anthropocentric industrial capitalist civilization that includes three existential threats to the humanity and much of life on Earth: climate change, the Sixth Extinction, and nuclear war now being threatened against North Korea by the United States.  Thus, the challenge the new generation of radicalized youth and working people in Iran face is not simply to replace the Islamic Republic with a democratic republic of working people but one that can join others across the globe to replace the anthropocentric industrial capitalist civilization with an ecocentric ecological socialist mode of production that will ensure social harmony as well as ecological harmony with the rest of nature.  As part of a growing ecological socialist movement, I have discussed our current predicament and the possible road forward (Nayeri 2013A; Nayeri 2013B; Nayeri 2017).  The interested reader may find convincing evidence and argument for a truly radical change in society, economy, and culture.  Needless to say, given the existential threat we face time is of the essence.  The future of the world depends on the youth and working people of Iran and the world. 

Reference:

Algar, Hamid. “Shiʿism in Iran Since the Safavids.” Encyclopædia Iranica, 2006.

Amanat, Ahmad. “Consitutional Revolution: Intellectual Background.” Encyclopædia Iranica, 1992. 

Balland, Daniel, and Marcel Bazin. “Deh,” Encyclopædia Iranica, 1994.

Erdbrink, Thomas. “Hard-Liners and Reformers Tapped Iranians’ Ire. Now, Both Are Protest Targets.” The New York Times, January 2, 2018. 

—————————. “As Iran Erupts in Protest, Tehran Is Notably Quiet,” The New York Time, January 3, 2018. 

—————————-. “Iran Lashes Out at Its Enemies, at Home and Abroad, Amid Protests.” The New York Times, January 4, 2018. 

Fiyouzat, Reza. “The Iranian People’s Uprising,” The North Star, republished in Our Place in the World: A Journal of Ecosocialism, January 3, 2018. 

Floor, Willem. “Bāzār: Organization and Function,” Encyclopædia Iranica, 1989. 

Hooglund, Eric. “Amlāk,” Encyclopædia Iranica, 1989. 

Iranian Workers' Solidarity Network. “Haft Tapeh Sugar Cane workers in southern Iran go on strike.” In Defense of Marxism, October 2007. 

Khallaji, Mehdi. “The Shi’ite Clerical Establishment,” no date. 

Khanlarzadeh, Mina. “Iran's Streets Again,” Z-blog, republished in our Place in the World: A Journal of Ecosocialism, January 4, 2018. 

Matthee, Rudi. “Safavid Dynasty,” Encyclopædia Iranica, 2008.
Nayeri, Kamran. "Student Protests in Iran." Socialist Action, December 1999. Republished in Our Place in the World: A Journal of Ecosocialism. 
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Nayeri, Kamran, and Yadullah Khosroshahi. “Tehran Bus Drivers Strike Marks Revival of Iranian Labor Movement.” Our Place in the World: A Journal of Ecosocialism. February 2006. 
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The Syndicate of Workers of Tehran and Suburbs Bus Company and the Syndicate of Workers of Haft Tapeh Sugarcane Company. “Tehran Bus Workers & Haft Tapeh Sugarcane Workers Defend Iran's Protestors.” Our Place in the World: A Journal of Ecosocialism. January 2018.