by Terry Moon

For Trump-world, it’s the fantasy of the strongman deal: praise the regime, get a “gesture,” declare progress, move on. For a slice of the Western Left, it’s the fantasy of the anti-imperialist story staying clean: if the regime can be described as rational, pragmatic, and capable of “responding,” then it can be kept inside the comforting script where the main villain is always Washington, and the people being crushed by the regime are inconvenient footnotes. Different ideologies, same outcome: the normalization of fascism.
—Siyavash Shahabi

The Iranian regime has appeared to shut down the uprising by mass murder of thousands of their own people who were demanding a better life. Some say there are up to 13,000 dead, many more wounded and over 20,000 jailed. We will probably never know the full extent of the human carnage which is continuing, even now.

Iran’s thugs reportedly blocked off streets and killed protesters en masse and there are reports of prisoners dying from torture and being subjected to sexual assault. Despite Trump’s lies, the regime never stopped killing protesters. To hide this crime against humanity, they have closed down the internet. That this is working for them is clear when papers like The New York Times and Washington Post had almost nothing on the continuing struggle.

A HISTORY WRITTEN IN REVOLUTIONS

The history of Iran is written in revolutions, struggles for freedom. We can look as far back as 1906 when, inspired by the Russian Revolution of 1905, Iranians took to the streets and overthrew the Shah. As the Marxist-Humanist revolutionary Raya Dunayevskaya wrote: “The uniqueness in Iran was that what had started out, indigenously enough, as a secret organization, became Anjumen (Soviets), a very nearly dual government—local units organized independently of the Shah and the Majlis (Parliament) by popular elections, defending their independence on the ground that there was too much bureaucratic corruption in the government.”

Women’s participation—so clear in the Revolution of 1979-80 and in the 2022 Woman Life Freedom uprising—was evident in 1906-1911. W. Morgan Shuster’s “Personal Narrative” describes how women “held pistols under their skirts or in the folds of their sleeves….During the five years following the successful but bloodless revolution in 1906 against the oppressions and cruelty of the Shah, a feverish and at times fierce light shone in the veiled eyes of Persia’s women, and in their struggle for liberty and its modern expressions, they broke through some of the most sacred customs which for centuries past had bound their sex in the land of Iran.”¹

What seems to have escaped today’s pundits is that the Iranian masses have overthrown some of the worst tyrants, including Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who was propped up by the USA. That Revolution of 1979-80 was made from below by masses self-organizing into councils (anjumans and shoras) of workers, women, students, neighborhoods. While the Revolution was almost immediately stolen by the counter-revolutionary bloody Khomeini regime, that did not stop the women from marching in the thousands on International Women’s Day 1979 warning the world and their male Iranian comrades that “At the dawn of freedom, we have no freedom!”

The Green Revolution of 2009 did not overthrow the regime but did reveal its willingness to slaughter its own citizens. Woman Life Freedom in 2022 showed how revolution arises where it is least expected and the savageness of the regime as it bashed in the heads of high-school girls, shot thousands in the street, jailed thousands more and blinded hundreds with metal pellets—something ICE in the U.S. is doing now using teargas canisters.² Activists with Woman Life Freedom are still being murdered by the Khamenei regime. The Abdorrahman Boroumand Center For Human Rights in Iran documented 2,045 executions last year, the highest number in 30 years, including 26 executions that took place recently in just 48 hours. Today Iranians are saying that the deaths in the latest uprising are so widespread that everyone knows someone who was killed.

MANY REASONS FOR REVOLT

There are many reasons Iranians are compelled to overthrow the present regime. They are living in a state that fails them on every level.

• Drought is so bad in Iran that Tehran, a city of 9.7 million people, may soon have to evacuate. The lack of water became dire because of human actions and inaction exacerbated by climate change. Iran’s leaders including the Shah and the present regime abandoned Iran’s 3,000-year-old qanat aquifer system which had watered cities and agriculture. The Shah constructed 58 dams, many on rivers too small to sustain them, leading to more evaporation from reservoirs. More than one million groundwater pumps were installed, depleting the aquifers. Nothing changed since the 1979 stolen Revolution. In short, there were never any thought-out plans for water conservation, nor are there any now.
  
• On Jan. 6 the exchange rate became 1.47 million rials to one U.S. dollar and dropped to zero against the Euro which means it can’t be accepted in the European Union. This kind of disruption caused by sanctions, weak economic growth and inflation, wipes out people’s savings and impoverishes them to the extent that it is hard to feed their families. According to the draft budget for the next fiscal year, the vast majority of oil exports and other revenue will go to military, security and religious institutions, leaving the majority of the population in poverty. The disdain the state has for the people was revealed in the paltry $7/month offered to poor families.
  
• The state mandates what women can wear, showcasing the state’s ability to control the most personal aspects of a human being’s life. It claims mandatory hijab is what holds society together. It is a cover for demanding women adhere to a religious doctrine that considers them less than men, does not allow them to sing in public or travel freely. They are unequal under law and it is almost impossible to escape arranged marriages or abusive relationships.
  
• The regime controls what ideas can be expressed. It brutally discriminates against its extensive minority population. It has no free elections and the country is dominated by old male religious fanatics who impose their antiquated, racist and misogynistic ideas on the entire population. The IRGC, the so-called “Revolutionary” Guards, have become a capitalist class that enriches itself at the expense of the Iranian people while oppressing them at the same time. The recognized labor unions are state entities and independent unions are illegal, causing workers to be chronically underpaid and subjected to the whims of their superiors.

THE MOVEMENT FROM PRACTICE IS ITSELF A FORM OF THEORY

Everyone has ideas about what the Iranian masses can do, but missing is actually listening to what the people are saying for themselves. One idea coming mostly from outside of Iran is to install Reza Pahlavi, the son of the Shah overthrown in 1979. Pahlavi calls himself Iran’s “crown prince in exile” seeming that it has never occurred to him that the Iranian masses would like a different kind of government than a monarchy.

Siyavash Shahabi, author of “The Fire Next Time” blog, tells us why Pahlavi is so popular with the bourgeoise and some of the Left: “The neoliberal left, especially, can’t grasp the political and intellectual foundations of an anti-capitalist uprising, so it clings to top-down storylines like a flotation device. That’s why they keep repeating ‘Pahlavi, Pahlavi, Pahlavi,’ even though he has no real legitimacy inside Iran. It’s an easy narrative: neat, televised, familiar. A ‘leader,’ a ‘transition,’ a ‘plan.’ Something that looks like their own politics, just in a different accent.”

Shahabi’s critique is true of leaders of countries like the U.S. and Israel who are so terrified of revolution—the unknown—that they jump at any chance for something familiar. Pahlavi, a craven opportunist who has never set foot in Iran since 1979, only began calling for Iranians to take to the streets twelve days after the uprising had started. He promised to give them what those like Trump want: a “responsible transition.” Abbas Amanat, “an acclaimed historian of Iran,” told the Washington Post that “Pahlavi, despite all the publicity, is a deceptive mirage. He neither has the personality, nor the organized support.” Some of that lack of support comes from his genuflecting to the likes of Trump and Netanyahu.

Some in the Left want Pahlavi or some other anointed leader because they cannot imagine a successful revolution without a vanguard—be that an organization or a person. They do not understand the power of leaderlessness (or “leaderfulness”) that the Black Lives Matter movement explored, or that the movement from below can create organizations like the Soviets (councils) or the feminists’ “small groups,” that have amazing power without subjecting people to their rule.

THE UPRISING SPEAKS FOR ITSELF

Let us pause, then, and listen to what the Iranian people have to say about what they want—be that in how they are to be governed or the society they are fighting for.

• A Statement of the Arak Workers’ Councils demands: “workplace control,” so that “the management of the…factories will be in the hands of elected workers’ councils. We no longer recognize government-appointed managers or the regime’s puppet unions.” They “call on the citizens of Arak to form neighborhood councils to manage security and supplies.” And they proclaim: “We are here to decide how this factory and this country should be run. The era of the bosses and the mullahs is over. All power to the councils!”
  
• The Active anti-capitalist workers of the movement for the abolition of wage labor insist that: “When workers can manage their daily lives, when a sense of support and companionship is formed, and when decision-making comes from the heart of the working class itself, then the street is no longer a place of erosion, but the point of concentration of a real power.” There demands include: “Food, clothing, housing…medicine, treatment, education, water, electricity, gas, internet, transportation, entertainment, travel…must be completely removed from the control of any type of commodity and monetary exchange and made available to everyone everywhere. Any kind of government interference in…human life—from clothing and communal life to social relations, belief, culture, ethics, tradition, customs, political activity…must be absolutely prohibited… [A]ll prisons [must be] dismantled. Any form of execution must be absolutely prohibited.”
  
• Siyavash Shahabi, speaking for  himself: “That’s exactly why we need a third path: not siding with state repression in the name of ‘security’ and ‘unity,’ and not excusing militarism and state terror in the name of ‘self-defense.’ A third path means standing firmly with ordinary people: women, workers, children, citizens, and refugees. It means politics from below, independent organizing, blunt truth-telling, and solidarity that doesn’t get trapped by propaganda or by states’ narrative wars.

”A third path means opposing occupation and mass killing in Palestine, while also opposing repression and mass killing in Iran. It means an anti-war position that can stand with Ukraine without hesitation, and defend Rojava against Islamic reaction. Against dehumanization in every costume.

”You can’t defeat fascism by choosing between two lies. You have to break the lying machine, and that takes independent social power, an awake conscience, and real organizations on the ground.

• On Feb. 23, 2023, in the wake of Woman Life Freedom, a whole array of workers—including workers organized into unions independent of phony regime-controlled unions—issued a “Statement on the current demands of independent trade union and civil organizations in Iran” which read in part: “Today, these massive protests, the flag of which has been raised by women, students, teachers, workers, those seeking justice, artists, queers, writers, and all oppressed people of Iran in every part of the country from Kurdistan to Sistan and Baluchistan and has received unprecedented international support, is a protest against misogyny, gender discrimination, endless economic insecurity, labour slavery, poverty, misery, class oppression, as well as national and religious oppression. It is a revolution against any form of religious or non-religious tyranny that has been imposed on the Iranian people throughout the last century.…Thus, this movement aims to permanently end the formation of any power from above and to be the beginning of a modern, humane social revolution that frees people from all forms of oppression, discrimination, exploitation, tyranny, and dictatorship.”

Their 12 demands, if met, would transform Iran into one of the freest, most humane countries in the world.

WHERE STANDS THE LEFT?

Many leftists stand with the revolutionary people of Iran, but let’s look at a few who don’t. Many who consider the U.S. as enemy number one cannot imagine there can be two or more enemies that must be fought simultaneously. The most vulgar is Workers World, which shouts: “Iran is not erupting. It’s being attacked.” They echo the regime’s excuses for its slaughter of thousands, proclaiming: “There are only two sides. You either stand with Iran as it defends its sovereignty, or you stand with U.S. imperialism and Zionism.”

On the contrary, Marxist-Humanism/News and Letters Committees recognizes the two worlds in every country, those of the oppressed and the oppressor. Workers World reveals the lack of thought that Shahabi was speaking to that can’t recognize that a country that they believe opposes the U.S.—like Russia, China, Iran—can and does oppress their own people.

You see this in the Progressive International. They tar Woman Life Freedom by asserting that “What emerged as a set of legitimate social grievances was rapidly appropriated and rearticulated—through overt Zionist endorsement, coordinated diasporic networks, and sustained media warfare—into a regime-change project.”

These are the words of Helyeh Doutaghi, who wrote “Iran’s Indigenous Labor Movement and Working Class Sovereignty,” published June 2025. There she introduces us to a large union at the South Pars Gas Refinery, which carried out “a direct action in front of the governor’s office in Asaluyeh,” and were not mowed down by security forces but mingled with them with their families.

While not as crude as Workers World, she has the same position: there is not a legitimate freedom movement in Iran, it’s all been coopted by “western powers and [their] regional allies [who] have funded and armed” what she calls “separatist movements and radical anti-state groups…”

All this is asserted with no proof by an apologist for those who machine-gunned unarmed protestors by the thousands. To her Iran’s many policing agencies differ from militaries in western countries because Iran is “a state born of popular revolution, subjected to decades of sanctions, assassinations, sabotage, and overt military threats. Crucially, it faces sustained attempts at regime change operations…” No mention of how that “popular revolution” of 1978-80 was transformed into its opposite, leaving a state that has oppressed its population for over 50 years! Or that it was state thugs who pulled Jina (Mahsa) Amini off the streets and beat her to death for supposedly wearing hijab “inappropriately,” touching off the Woman Life Freedom uprising.

But how can Doutaghi insult women who died fighting for life and for freedom; who today are risking beatings, jail and impoverishment by walking the streets without hijab? These women are not indulging in what she called “liberal feminist reduction of emancipation.” How threatened Iran’s Islamic regime is by women’s demand to dress as they please can be seen in how viciously they tried to obliterate that freedom movement.

The smidgen of truth in Doutaghi’s statement is that the Iranian people are the ones who suffered from U.S. and other countries’ sanctions; and there is no question that the U.S. and Israel want to destabilize Iran—that’s pretty obvious since they both have bombed it.

But to believe the lies of the Iran regime is akin to believing U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem when she blathers that those in the U.S. opposed to the wanna-be-Nazis of ICE and the savaging of immigrants and other people of color in the U.S. and the outright murder of Renee Good are “domestic terrorists.” The Iranian and U.S. regimes speak the same language of lies in their attempts to demonize unarmed protestors.

THE NECESSITY OF A PHILOSOPHY OF REVOLUTION

Never was the philosophy of Marxist-Humanism more necessary in both Iran and the U.S. The demand to listen to the masses in revolt; to recognize that the movement from practice—as seen today in the streets of Iran—is itself a form of theory that needs space to develop. That revolution does not need to stop with the overthrow of a tyrannical government but continue in permanence to freedom for all.

Philosophy tells us that those fighting and dying for freedom in Iran must have confidence in their own thoughts and actions and, most importantly, their vision of a freedom-filled future, and not depend on so-called leaders that want to limit a freedom movement, that demand it to be “practical.”

The survival, not only of the people of Iran, but the people of this earth, depends on a vision of the future not limited by capitalism. It is people’s own visions of what it must be like to be a free, self-determining individual living in communities dedicated to developing and deepening that freedom that is essential. Trump may use the word “freedom,” but it is ashes in his mouth. He cannot fathom what it can really mean.

We live in an age of counter-revolution coming from without, but also tragically from within the revolution itself. The Iranian masses have experienced both, which means their own history has warned them. Here philosophy is not something external to the discussion of what must happen “the day after” revolution. Marxist-Humanism is crucial because it takes as its ground the fact clearly expressed in Iran—that the masses in motion are vanguard, not some leader from outside. That the masses’ own organizations are a preview of what can happen the day after, and Marxist-Humanism makes that explicit.³

THE STRUGGLE CONTINUES

Tragically, the killing in Iran has not stopped. The IRGC and other police forces are breaking into people’s homes, stripping them, looking for the wounded, arresting and jailing them, including children. Those arrested are now in great danger of torture, rape, and execution. They need our solidarity and actions.

The regime may think their inhumanity has crushed the spirts, minds and actions of the people of Iran. Their actions only make their overthrow more certain. No one can predict how long it will be before the next uprising, but there is no question that it will arise.

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[1] Women’s Liberation and the Dialectics of Revolution, by Raya Dunayevskaya (Wayne State University Press, 1996) pp. 67-68.

[2] See articles from News & Letters: “Rulers’ fear of revolution won’t stop Iranian masses”; “Revolt is global” (section B: “Women’s revolution in Iran”); “The revolution in Iran continues to develop”; “El régimen iraní teme la revolución, las mujeres lideran el camino”; “Iranian regime fears revolution while women lead the way to total change”; “Solidarity with Iran: Woman, Life, Freedom”; “From the Writings of Raya Dunayevskaya: Iran: Unfoldment of, and contradictions in, Revolution, parts III and IV”; “From the Writings of Raya Dunayevskaya: Contradictions in Iranian Revolution.”

[3] Marxist-Humanists from both Iran and the U.S. were deeply involved in the 1979 Revolution against both the Shah and Khomeini. See Crossroads of History: Marxist-Humanist Writings on the Middle East by Raya Dunayevskaya for some of the writings, as well as front-page reports on the Iranian Revolution in the March 1979, June 1979, November 1979, December 1979, January-February 1980, April 1980, and July 1980 issues of News & Letters.

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Crossroads of History:

Marxist-Humanist Writings on the Middle East

Includes

• Iran: Unfoldment of, and Contradictions in, Revolution
• Letter on Organization to an Iranian Revolutionary
• What Is Philosophy? What Is Revolution? 1789-1793; 1848-1850; 1914-1919; 1979
• Religion in General and Jerusalem in Particular in This State-Capitalist Age
• Special Introduction for Iranian Edition of Marx’s Humanist Essays
• What Has Happened to the Iranian Revolution?
• The Struggle Continues: What Kind of Revolution Is Needed in the Battle against the Khomeini-IRP Counter-revolution?
• Lebanon: The Test Not Only of the PLO but the Whole Left
• Begin’s Israel Moves Further and Further Backward to His Reactionary, Terrorist Beginnings
• Need for a Total Uprooting: Down with the Perpetrators of the Palestinian Slaughter
• … and more!

Order here.