This is what we are dealing with now in Iran: Imperialist powers, led by the United States, are preparing the ground for an attack, portending bombardment, civil war, and immense destruction. At the same time, the Iranian state has sealed off the country, cut all lines of communication, and is killing those inside. The government broadcasts, on its own television service, images of the corpses of its victims lying in the street in front of Tehran’s forensic medicine office, stating baldly that they “were killed.” To justify this horrific crime, it also broadcasts scenes of public property being set on fire, and shamelessly, after two years of genocidal Israeli propaganda about “human shields,” the Iranian state has adopted the same discourse for itself, issuing official statements warning families not to allow their teenagers and young people to join the protests, because “the terrorists” will use them as “human shields.”
How have these competing death cults come to encircle Iran from within and without? As Iranians living outside Iran, we do not prescribe any practical cure or program for those inside Iran, with whom we currently have almost no means of communication. We do, however, insist on two inseparable tasks: reckoning with the horrifying scale of state violence and assigning responsibility to the state itself, while equally recognizing the imperialist chorus behind calls for military strikes against Iran on so-called humanitarian grounds. Our aim is to give a concrete analysis of the situation, while acknowledging everything we do not and cannot know. Three main determinations are at work in the current conjuncture: the class character and political economy underlying the uprising; the dimension of imperialist intervention; and, among emerging protest formations, the political hegemony of the fascist right.
The ongoing uprising is rooted in the political economy of structural adjustment, which forms the unstable medium through which revolt becomes contagious. Due to tensions with Washington, Iran was never admitted to the World Trade Organization despite repeated applications, and it has maintained no meaningful relationship with the International Monetary Fund. Nevertheless, beginning in the 1990s, Iran pursued its own domestic variant of neoliberalism, propagated in think tanks and universities and by economic experts, who largely repeated the IMF’s prescriptions. Economic freedom, according to the prevailing ideology among Iranian centrists and reformists, could plant the seeds of political freedom. The privatization of state-owned firms and factories; reforms to welfare legislation governing the rights of workers and pensioners; the addition every few years of new clauses to the Labor Law, permitting expanded use of temporary workers and the contracting-out of hiring; the gradual removal of subsidies on basic goods, including fuel and other essential commodities: All these have been pursued over the years, albeit with varying speed and intensity.1
These policies have also been met with resistance. Since the 1990s, a significant share of strikes and protests by workers, teachers, nurses, and pensioners have targeted privatization, flexibilization, temporary contracts, and the commodification of basic services such as education and health care. Meanwhile, shock-therapy measures—particularly subsidy removal, fuel price hikes, and price liberalization—have repeatedly triggered uprisings, which were violently crushed. Under the structural adjustment plan of Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the president who inaugurated Iran’s neoliberalization, and amid inflation rates surpassing 50 percent, urban surplus populations revolted in Mashhad (1992), Islamshahr (1995), and other cities. The military suppression of these revolts—with a significant number of deaths and executions—was far more violent than subsequent crackdowns on the student protests of 1999 and the Green Movement of 2009. Still, the backlash forced both the Rafsanjani and Khatami administrations to proceed more cautiously with economic liberalization. Then, under Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and with the onset of sanctions, these policies were again pursued more aggressively; Ahmadinejad was even praised by the IMF for cutting subsidies and raising energy prices. The same trajectory has continued since.
Yet the manner in which these policies were implemented reveals something deeper: the Iranian state’s willingness to repeatedly gamble on shock. The subsidy-targeting plan under Ahmadinejad was already on the agenda in 2008, but it was likely the burning of twelve gas stations that delayed its full implementation until late 2010, during the Green Movement protests, when the assumption prevailed that with society already in shock, it was a propitious moment to push through reforms. This time around, following Israel’s attacks and amid a state of wartime emergency, the state has placed yet another wager: Again presuming a generalized state of shock, it moved to liberalize gasoline prices, raise the official dollar exchange rate, and—amid unfolding protests—abolish the preferential exchange rate, which had served to contain prices of vital goods such as food and medicine.
Today, more than 90 percent of Iran’s labor force is precariously employed under temporary contracts, while a labyrinth of contractor firms—entrenched by their proximity to state power—dominate infrastructural projects and strategic industries, including oil, petrochemicals, mining, road construction, and automobile manufacturing. Official annual inflation is reported at around 42 percent, while estimates suggest the real rate has exceeded 50 percent. Food price inflation has surpassed 70 percent, with costs of some basic goods up by 110 percent. Available data indicate that nearly 40 percent of the population has fallen below the poverty line; at just over 15 million tomans (around $100), the monthly national minimum wage is less than half of the household poverty threshold of 40 million tomans. Even shopkeepers and business owners are confronting poverty: The overwhelming majority of Iran’s three million small retailers—who, together with their families, comprise roughly ten million people, out of a population of ninety million—have lost their margins due to the expansion of chain stores, shopping malls, and online platforms.
Undeniably, Western sanctions have further worsened the economic situation on multiple fronts. But while many accounts focus only on the direct effects of sanctions—depressed government revenues, resulting in chronic budget deficits—the worst damage is more indirect. In an effort to circumvent sanctions, the state fostered a new class of trusted middlemen, composed largely of relatives of officials who, operating through shadow companies, sold oil to Chinese buyers in exchange for dollars. Instead of remitting the proceeds to the state, these inside dealers have hoarded them in real estate across Dubai, Turkey, and Malaysia. The bulk of Iran’s exports—around 80 percent, or roughly $40 billion—are now controlled by oligarchs in the form of large state-linked enterprises in the petrochemical, oil, and mining sectors. According to official statements, $18 billion in export earnings failed to return to the country in the past year alone.
Beginning with the 1979 Revolution, para-statal military and religious foundations absorbed the assets of the previous regime, forming a parallel economic body.2 In addition to the four major foundations, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (Sepah‑e Pasdaran) has itself developed into a powerful economic actor since the late 1980s, initially moving into reconstruction and infrastructure projects after the Iran–Iraq War, and then expanding through the 1990s and 2000s into construction, engineering, oil and gas, telecommunications, banking, and other sectors. The IRGC’s economic rise has accelerated under successive governments, with affiliated conglomerates such as the Khatam al‑Anbiya Construction Headquarters securing large state contracts and a dominant position in key industries. These foundations, including the IRGC’s extensive economic network, operate largely outside the legislative and administrative authority of the government, including the central bank, and are directly supervised by the Office of the Supreme Leader.
Following the intensification of sanctions during Ahmadinejad’s term, the parasitic relationship of these foundations with the government reversed, such that today it is the government itself that parasitizes these foundations which, according to estimates by the economist Mehrdad Vahabi, together now control over 55 percent of Iran’s GDP. These groups, which already dominate the largest shares of the nation’s wealth, have been able to consolidate and expand their control through opaque auctions, in collusion with successive governments.
This is the frame in which immiseration, impoverishment, and widening class divides in contemporary Iran must be understood. Nevertheless, abject poverty does not automatically lead to revolt; nor do “sanctions” alone drive populations into the streets. It is instead the deliberate engineering of economic shocks—the first law of social thermodynamics—administered by policymakers who understand that the social unrest generated by austerity can only be managed, not prevented.
These policies have also reconfigured the state itself. Rather than shrinking, the Iranian state has mutated into an apparatus of authoritarian austerity: fiscally disciplined, physically coercive, and interventionist in the monetary and financial sphere, while retreating from universal welfare and redistribution.3 Social justice is thus reduced to a technical matter of administrative inclusion and exclusion, and society itself appears not as a political subject but as a risk to be managed through “transparency,” persuasion, and policing. The structural reforms pursued by Ali Madani-Zadeh—the current minister of economy, a University of Chicago economics graduate and the latest heir to Chicago-style neoliberalism—are a class project aimed at reproducing the state and its dominant class fractions under crisis, even as they further undermine social reproduction in wartime conditions.
Here we see the logic of what one of us has called Iran’s “suicidal state.” Threatened simultaneously by external war and internal crisis, the state chooses to wage economic war on its own populations rather than purchase domestic peace through welfare. The suicidal state does not miscalculate; its rationality is structurally bounded by the imperative to reproduce itself, at the price of death administered to the populations it governs. Populations resist—repeatedly, intermittently, and with varying intensity—and the fact that previous waves of resistance have been truncated by repression does not mean they will not return.
Without a doubt, the current uprising is symbolically dominated by the fascist right under (neo-)Pahlavism.4 The current discursive war among the Iranian opposition’s various political tendencies began in 2022, during Jina’s Uprising, with each antagonistic fraction seeking to cast its own project as the true force of Iranian resistance. Yet that war of position appears to have been won, for the moment, by the Pahlavist camp. Reza Pahlavi, the long-exiled son of the widely despised Shah deposed during the 1979 revolution, has emerged as the figurehead of the current uprising, while other opposition actors from republican and nationalist currents scramble to ride his political coattails—not out of genuine acceptance, but on the basis that his hegemony represents an “opportunity,” and with the promise to confront him after the fall of the current Iranian state. However, such political immediacy is always captured by the hegemonic project, as 1979 taught us.5
The largest crowds of the current protests appeared on the streets in response to Pahlavi’s call for a mass march on the evening of January 8; at Pahlavi’s urging, many wore face masks and black clothing. While the black dress appeared to be a practical choice for nighttime demonstrations, its historical irony as the dress code of fascist movements (the blackshirts) is not lost on us. Nor is the Pahlavist fascist hostility toward Jina’s Uprising and its central slogan, “Woman, Life, Freedom”; toward national minorities in Iran; toward gender and sexual minorities; and toward Afghan migrants and refugees. Pahlavi stands in alignment, too, with the genocide in Gaza, and with Israel, Trumpism, neoliberalism, and autocracy.
Hegemonic victories are fought and won in the symbolic order, and in that arena, the reactionary right coalesced around Reza Pahlavi has prevailed. The Pahlavists now claim these crowds as their source of legitimacy, the embodiment of a formless, undifferentiated “people” who wish to be subjugated to the One (the monarch, the Shah). Of course, no such formless people exists. That supposedly homogeneous and whole is instead riddled with antagonisms, fractures, and contradictions. But these “real” antagonistic differentiations have not been mediated or organized; they do not yet represent really existing forces within the political field, except in regions such as Kurdistan (Rojhelat), Baluchistan, and Ahwaz, where national minorities have established their own forces, all of which reject Pahlavism, whatever their own preferred ideologies and political models.
Through the US-based National Union for Democracy in Iran, the Pahlavist fraction has already put forward its “day after” program, in a pamphlet titled Field Manual for the Emergency, which calls for a state headed by Pahlavi, with executive, judiciary, and legislative councils all selected by Pahlavi himself. The text does not renounce the death penalty in the transition period, not even as a token concession to other oppositional currents, particularly leftists, who might otherwise fear renewed massacres under a new autocracy.6 Their guidebook for struggle, Guard-e-Javidan, or The ImmortalGuard—named after Mohammad Reza Pahlavi’s personal guard force and elite combat branch of the defunct Imperial Army—is an homage to neo-Nazi theories of organizational destabilization and race war in Western democracies, which emphasize decentralized structures and action “in small cells,” as formulated by figures such as Louis Beam and Tom Metzger and groups like the White Aryan Resistance. Moreover, the Pahlavist base has not only refused to condemn Israel’s genocide in Gaza but has actively cheered on the massacre, embracing Israel’s narrative of “Hamas terrorists,” and echoing Zionist rhetoric by branding the Islamic Republic “the head of the snake.” In demanding the restoration of the monarchy, Pahlavists have idolized Trump as their champion, affectionately calling him “President-e Ghalbha,” “the president of hearts.”
For months, Iran has effectively been in a suspended state of war. On June 13, 2025, Israel carried out coordinated strikes on Iranian nuclear, military, and missile sites, to which Iran responded with ballistic missiles and drones. On June 22, the United States followed up with its own attacks on Iranian nuclear facilities, reportedly targeting sites at Natanz, Fordow, and Isfahan. The United Kingdom, France, and Germany also provide direct military assistance to the Zionist state. In other words, what Israel launched in Iran was a war of the united Western imperialist bloc against another country, with regime change as its explicit aim. Unlike earlier adventures in Iraq or Afghanistan, however, the model of regime change being pursued is closer to NATO’s in Libya in 2011: The goal is not necessarily to topple the Iranian state outright and install another in its place, but to ignite a permanent civil war that ensures no authority in Iran can rebuild itself for the foreseeable future.7
Six months after the June attacks, and only a few days after protests erupted, US President Donald Trump issued a warning to the Iranian government against using violent force against demonstrators. The United States was “locked and loaded,” he declared, and ready to “rescue” protesters from Iranian state violence. Other foreign intelligence and state actors openly signaled support for anti-regime unrest. At the same time, various Israeli officials released video messages backing Iranian demonstrators, and former US secretary of state and CIA director Mike Pompeo tweeted, “Happy New Year to every Iranian in the streets. Also to every Mossad agent walking beside them.”
This alignment is the culmination of an imperialist project decades in the making. In justifying his genocide in Gaza and aggression against other countries—now including Iran, Yemen, Lebanon, Syria, and Qatar—Benjamin Netanyahu often deploys the rhetoric of freedom, human rights, democracy, and security, all saturated with imperialist invocations of “modern” and “Western” values. Likewise, before the Revolution, Iran was cast in Western media as trapped in premodern stagnation and backwardness, while the American-aligned Shah was heralded as a force of modernization. Mohammad Reza Pahlavi’s autocratic violence and systemic repression were conveniently overlooked, justified by the ideological fiction that he was the only bulwark against reactionary Islamic forces, and was propelling a recalcitrant nation toward modernity. Such narratives bear all the marks of colonial self-absolution: The colonizer, directly or indirectly, is the harbinger of civilization, compelled to uplift the primitive and reluctant colonized. This logic endures today in the adulation bestowed on Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, celebrated as a modernizing visionary despite—or precisely because of—his ruthlessness.
With the 1979 Revolution, however, these Western fictions suddenly inverted. The Iranian nation now became the emblem of a noble ancient civilization, oppressed by the atavistic barbarism of a theocratic state. For decades, the Iranian state has been depicted as a medieval clique of reactionary mullahs, an entity utterly antithetical to the values embodied by the West and its models of governance. Yet when the West confronts this ostensibly archaic force, it resorts to sanctions on trade and financial flows, a punitive mechanism that inherently affirms—and depends on—Iran’s uneven but undeniable integration into global capitalism.
The Islamic Republic thus appears in imperialist rhetoric as both a premodern outlier and capitalist actor, a contradiction conveniently obscured by narratives of civilizational conflict. In October 2024, when Western officials such as Emmanuel Macron appeared to waver on further arms shipments to Israel, Netanyahu lashed out: “As Israel fights the forces of barbarism led by Iran, all civilized countries should be standing firmly by Israel’s side.” Launching his war on Iran last June, Netanyahu pitched the conflict to American media as “a battle of civilization against barbarism,” “of good against evil.” “Today it is Tel Aviv,” he warned, “tomorrow it is New York.” This simpleminded moralism again took on a humanitarian guise: “We are not bombing the population,” Netanyahu insisted, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. The goal of the Israeli campaign, he claimed, was to “bring freedom to the people of Iran.”
In 1996, reflecting on the aftermath of Hamas suicide bombings in an essay titled “The Campaign Against ‘Islamic Terror,’” Edward Said noted the “arrogan[ce]” of “the Israeli and American response, with its sanctimonious choruses against terrorism, Hamas, Islamic fundamentalism, and its equally odious hymns to peacemaking, the peace process, and the peace of the brave.” Said likewise saw through the emerging discourse around Iran, identifying its deeper structure: “Israel and the United States, deliberately using the weapons of mass media, psychological warfare, and political pressure, have . . . been leading a campaign against Islam (with Iran as its main agent) as the origin of terror and ‘fundamentalism.’” Said saw a cold war logic transposed to new ideological terrain, now “settled on ‘Islam’ as the manufactured opponent.”
Pahlavism is not the only Iranian force aligned with imperialist interventionism. During Israel’s strikes in mid-June, several opposition currents openly welcomed the assault, or depicted it as a necessary prelude to regime change and even a catalyst for protest. This interventionist discourse circulates especially among the Iranian diaspora. From liberal republican groups and human rights lawyers to the People’s Mojahedin Organization (MEK) to prominent cultural figures, a broad pro-intervention consensus has emerged far beyond monarchist circles. Earlier this month, seven prominent diaspora figures, including the Nobel-winning human rights attorney Shirin Ebadi, pleaded with the US president to step in, warning that “every minute of delay will expand the dimensions of the crime against the defenceless people of Iran.”
Iran today thus stands between the models of a Pinochet-style liberalized Chile and a NATO-style “liberated” Libya, entangled in what amounts to a political three-body problem. Where, in this dismal situation, should the left locate itself?
The current protests are a reminder that the class character of an uprising cannot be conflated with its political character. Class struggle may be the motor of history, but it is mediated by the problem of organization, of how to link different collectivities in struggle and translate this into political hegemony. Most protesters are members of one or several strata of Iran’s surplus populations—youth, manual laborers, the unemployed, the urban poor, slum residents—but this fact alone does not, sadly, make the uprising an authentically proletarian one. Conversely, the political hegemony of a struggle does not immediately explain its class character. The fascist right can become hegemonic in a situation of class struggle just as much as can the radical left. And the acquisition of hegemony is a symbolic operation, enacted within chains of equivalence.
Then there is the imperialist dimension. The imperialist threat is never absent from the struggles of impoverished or marginalized populations in West Asia, North Africa, and the Global South generally. Imperialist forces cannot be allowed to overdetermine the political hegemony or class character of such struggles; but neither can they be rhetorically mobilized to discredit them, as some leftist observers of the Iranian situation have been too quick to do.
The reality is that in Iran today, none of the determining forces outlined above can authorize a leftist force to take a direct, immediate, and affirmative practical position. Moreover, even if such a position were available, no organized leftist force currently exists in Iran that could take it. Any immediacy in dealing with the situation, any fetishism of “action” for its own sake that attempts to bypass this fact will only lend itself to one of the aforementioned projects.
Certainly a theoretical position is possible. The current state apparatus—now dependent on its killing machine to enforce neoliberal authoritarianism and austerity, and adopting the discourse of “human shields”—must disappear; the fascist right must be defeated; and the imperialist bloc must keep its hands off Iranian sovereignty. But in practice, this can mean only a negative intervention aimed at halting the massacre. What such an intervention would entail in real terms, we do not yet know. We can only hope that it takes the form of a mass revolt capable of undoing the death-cult powers that currently surround Iran.
If we may be so bold, we offer a few recommendations to our comrades across the left outside Iran. To those of you living in imperial centers, or for whom the Palestinian struggle rightly constitutes the primary horizon of anti-imperialist politics: We understand that your analysis of Iran is mediated by geopolitics. But do not try to derive a political program for populations inside Iran that, in practice, translates into support for the Iranian state. You would not support a hypothetical liberalized Pinochetist Chile and its killing machine merely because it opposed Washington; you should not do so for the Islamic Republic, either. Conversely, if Iran itself forms your central focus, or if you are an Iranian leftist in the diaspora, do not be so hasty in bracketing out the determining role of imperialism in the current conjuncture, nor in underestimating or denying the real and reactionary hegemony of Pahlavism in the existing opposition. You would not accept a Libya “liberated” by imperial military intervention; you should not normalize the same scenario for Iran.
Finally, and by way of self-criticism, the impossible impasse we find ourselves in today is the result of a dual abandonment. On the one hand, large sections of the Western left have abandoned Iran’s working classes and national minorities. On the other, much of the Iranian left has refused to engage seriously with the extended choreography of American imperialism, which continues to consume the Middle East through both soft and hard armaments—culture and bombs. Both these failures, of the international and Iranian left, are evident in the rise of Pahlavism, a popular fascist front that has managed to leverage Zionist and American sentiment to mobilize immiserated masses.
Attending equally to all these antagonisms—resisting the Pahlavist right and the state’s counterrevolutionary authoritarian project, while refusing imperialist solutions—leaves only a difficult and narrow space for any meaningful alternative. But in a situation where no viable leftist force yet exists, it is the only space available. “One can never be radical enough,” said Lenin, “that is to say, one must always try to be as radical as reality itself.”
This trend notably intensified after June 2005, when Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader, issued a new interpretation of Article 44 of the Constitution, which concerns the country’s economic system, in response to obstacles encountered in the privatization drive. This new interpretation redefined Iranian economic policy in a way that eased the privatization of basic and strategic industries. ↩
The largest of these foundations was Bonyad-e-Mostazafan (the Foundation for the Oppressed), which traces its origins to a decree issued in February 1979 by Ayatollah Khomeini, addressed to the Islamic Revolutionary Council. Under this decree, Bonyad-e-Mostazafan was charged with confiscating all movable and immovable assets of the Pahlavi dynasty, along with those of its branches, affiliates, and associated figures, ostensibly for the benefit of workers and the poor. Later came Setad-e Ejraei-e Farman-e Emam (the Execution of Imam Khomeini’s Order), established roughly one month before Khomeini’s death in 1989, by a decree granting it authority over all unclaimed and unidentified property including unclaimed inheritances, estates without heirs—largely composed of the remaining assets of the affiliates of the previous regime and in some cases religious minorities especially the Baha’is—and assets placed under the Supreme Leader’s control through khums obligations, the settlement of religious liabilities, the enforcement of Article 49 of the Constitution, or other applicable laws. ↩
For instance, under its own labor laws, the Pezeshkian government should have raised salaries proportionately with inflation; instead, the initial proposal was a meager 20 percent increase, which parliament later raised to a still inadequate 30 percent for the following year, after the outbreak of protests—and with no change to the reduced benefits and welfare payments still affecting many employed and retired workers. ↩
Some commentators who might object that the current protests, like Iranian society, are socially and politically heterogeneous—resorting to immaterial invocations of the multiplicity of the social milieu—are in fact saying nothing. Of course there is multiplicity; hegemony is meaningless unless it is being a hegemony over a multiplicity. A political force like (neo-)Pahlavism acquires hegemony precisely when it dominates different forces and stands above them within the hierarchical organization of forces in a social field. ↩
The conceptual pairing of organization and mediation, as employed here, is not opposed to the spontaneity of the masses as such. Rather, it is opposed to immediacy: a set of positions that attribute a necessarily revolutionary character to the current uprising. Crucially, immediacy does not hinge on a distinction between organization and the absence of organization; instead, it grounds its claims on the assertion of a concrete, really existing revolutionary current—one presumed to be prominent or widespread enough to constitute an actual determining factor in the outcome of the uprising. By insisting on mediation/organization, we mean to contest this asserted social fact—namely, that such a revolutionary actuality already exists and is shaping the future trajectory of the uprising. As for unmediated potentials, we do not deny their existence; what we contest is their actuality in this historical conjuncture. ↩
The document abolishes the Islamic Republic’s legal architecture for capital punishment, explicitly identifying the death penalty and stoning as laws to be repealed. Yet the transitional justice section remains conspicuously silent on executions: it speaks of “public trials” and “punishment,” but does not commit to non-executability, nor does it articulate a restorative framework for justice. This ambiguity is not accidental. It leaves open the symbolic possibility of retributive spectacle as a form of legitimacy, while refusing to alienate right-wing constituencies who fantasize about revolutionary purges. In this sense, the document abolishes the death penalty as law while preserving the political imaginary of exception—an ambiguity consistent with a movement that aims to hegemonize opposition forces under a reactionary banner without conceding to left critiques of carcerality or state violence. ↩
Moreover, judging from Syrian and Venezuelan precedents—and from recent remarks about Pahlavi by Trump and his cronies—there appears to be no real consensus on seeking to install him at the head of a prospective puppet regime in Tehran. Should the current revolt continue, it is not implausible that a faction of the Revolutionary Guards might attempt to preempt the situation by staging a coup of their own, inaugurating a distinct form of Bonapartism while simultaneously seeking an arrangement with the United States and Israel. After all, the Islamic Republic’s system of governance, as elaborated above, is already an indigenous variant of contemporary US-style neoliberalism. ↩
If you like this article, please subscribe or leave a tax-deductible tip below to support n+1.
No comments yet. Be the first to comment!