Your Party's Iran Debate: How "Anti-Imperialism" Became an Argument for Silence

Campism, Iranian self-determination, and the left's recurring failure to support workers under authoritarian regimes

The argument arrived in a Your Party WhatsApp group on January 12th, the day Zarah Sultana warned that Netanyahu “exploits Iranian protests as a pretext for military intervention.” A member reported from “the Gulf” that legitimate protests were being “hijacked” by Israeli agitators, that Mossad was “in the streets,” that mosques were being burned by Zionists. The violence, he insisted, was “not organic.”

I asked what “organic” violence would look like in a country where 57% face malnourishment and security forces had just raided a hospital with shotguns to drag wounded protesters from their beds. The response: “I’m not here to debate... all I can tell you is what I’m hearing here in the region.”

Within hours, the theoretical scaffolding followed. Another member: “A fall of the regime, under present conditions, would not bring anything positive for the country and the region, but only replace an anti-American dictatorship with a pro-American one.” And then, the line that makes the politics explicit: “Sadly, there are no prospects for emancipating the working classes of the Middle East until the US and Israel are kicked out of the region.”

When I pointed to the workers’ councils forming in Arak, to the slogans on the streets rejecting both Shah and Supreme Leader, to Iranian socialist organisations calling for international solidarity, the argument escalated. Another member dismissed my position as support for “CIA regime change”: “Deluded people backing CIA regime change in expectation of the establishment of a socialist paradise are not just harmlessly deranged. They are dangerous.”

That evening, someone shared Elina Xenophontos’s Substack post “as a contribution to debate.” Her conclusion: the protests “objectively serve imperialism” and “weakening the imperialist core is the prerequisite” for Iranian liberation.

The message to Your Party members is now clear: solidarity with the Iranian uprising aids Israel. Those who disagree are “deluded” and “dangerous.” Iranian workers forming councils in Arak? They must wait until we in the West have weakened the imperialist core. Only then will the “space” exist for their liberation.

Marx supported the Indian Revolt. He didn’t argue that Indians needed to wait for British workers to defeat imperialism first. This isn’t Marxism. This is campism functioning as active demobilisation. And the Fourth International has seen it before.

The Sophisticated Campist Case

Xenophontos’s argument deserves serious engagement because it represents a theoretically developed version of the campist position. She does not simply dismiss the protests as a CIA operation. She acknowledges their “class base.” She offers a structural analysis: Western sanctions “singlehandedly shaped Iran’s internal class dynamics,” creating a “reactionary class alliance between the Iranian bourgeoisie and the working class” that “diluted class consciousness.” The threat of imperialism “generated a highly militarised state apparatus.” The sanctions “facilitated illegality among the bourgeois class” and “stagnated economic growth,” depriving workers of the productive forces needed for revolution.

From this, she draws her political conclusion: the protests, lacking ideological coherency, “become vulnerable to external intelligence manipulation.” They “risk transforming a nationally bourgeois state, however repressive, into a fully-fledged client regime of Western capital.” Therefore, “weakening the imperialist core is the prerequisite” for Iranian liberation.

Every step in this argument is wrong, and the errors compound into a framework that offers Iranian workers nothing except the advice to wait.

Causality Reversed

The Islamic Republic was repressive from 1979 onward, long before the current sanctions regime. It crushed the shoras (workers’ councils) that emerged during the revolution. It executed thousands of leftists in the 1980s, including the systematic massacre of political prisoners in 1988. It subordinated women, smashed independent unions, and built its militarised apparatus while oil revenues flowed freely.

The claim that Western sanctions “created” the conditions for repression erases four decades of the regime’s own choices. When the Pezeshkian administration abolished the subsidised exchange rate in December 2025, triggering the current uprising, it had options about how to distribute the pain. It chose to increase military and security spending by 150% while adjusting public sector wages by only 20%: less than half the inflation rate. That choice was not forced by sanctions. It reflected the class character of the regime.

One commenter on Xenophontos’s own post put it precisely: “Repression in Iran also flows from: The class character of the Islamic Republic. The fusion of clerical power with sections of the bourgeoisie. The state’s fear of independent proletarian organisation, not only imperialism.”

The Revolutionary Guards are not simply a military apparatus defending against external threats. They own major industries. They constitute a faction of the Iranian capitalist class with material interests in maintaining their economic empire. Oakland Socialist made this point well this week: “The reason this has not happened yet in Iran is at least in part because the IRGC is not simply a military apparatus; it is part of the capitalist class and owns major industries.”

The regime’s repression of workers is not a tragic side-effect of resisting imperialism; it is the defence of a specific class configuration. This explains why, when the uprising began, the regime deployed approximately 800 members of Iraqi Shiite militias, including Kataib Hezbollah and the Badr Organization, to assist in suppression. A regime confident of popular support does not import foreign fighters to shoot its own people. It does so because it fears defections within its own security forces.

“Lacking Ideological Coherency”

Xenophontos asks: “What do these protests call for? A liberal democracy? A socialist revolution? What is the aim here?”

The slogans on the streets provide answers she has chosen not to hear.

“Neither Shah nor Supreme Leader: democracy and equality.”

“Death to the oppressor, be it the Shah or the Supreme Leader.”

And this one, which should give the campist left particular pause: “Not for Gaza, not for Lebanon, I give my life for Iran.”

Iranian workers are explicitly rejecting the regime’s expenditure on regional proxy wars. They understand, in ways the campist left refuses to acknowledge, that the “axis of resistance” posturing has come at the cost of their wages, their healthcare, their children’s futures. They are not confused about their interests. They are not waiting for Western leftists to explain geopolitics to them.

More significantly: workers’ councils are forming. Oakland Socialist reported this week that workers in Arak’s factories have declared the existence of a workers’ council, with a statement calling for “all power to the councils.” The shoras that Khomeini crushed in 1979 are re-emerging, forty-seven years later.

This is not ideological incoherency. This is the organisational form that represents the alternative to both theocracy and restoration. As Oakland Socialist notes: “This is a potentially huge development since in the end it was the workers councils who were the alternative path to the 1979 revolution which overthrew the Shah but brought the mullah’s to power.”

The movement synthesises the economic demands of 2017-2018 (the Haft Tappeh sugar workers, the Ahvaz steelworkers, the oil and gas strikes of 2020-21) with the democratic aspirations of the 2022 Woman, Life, Freedom uprising. There is traceable continuity. There is organisational memory. The claim that protesters don’t know what they want is a projection from observers who refuse to listen.

The Scale of What Is Happening

By January 11th, over 538 protesters had been killed and 10,600 arrested. The regime’s response has been what one analyst called a “tale of two crackdowns”: hesitation in major cities where a massacre might trigger military defections, and immediate lethal force in peripheral areas like Lorestan and Ilam.

On January 4th, Revolutionary Guards raided the Imam Khomeini Hospital in Ilam City, using shotguns and tear gas inside the hospital grounds, smashing glass doors to drag wounded protesters directly from their beds. This is what “nationally bourgeois state, however repressive” looks like in practice.

The protests have spread to over 110 cities across 27 of Iran’s 31 provinces. Unlike the 2022 Woman, Life, Freedom movement, which concentrated in major urban centres and Kurdish regions, this uprising is particularly strong in medium-sized towns and rural areas. The geographical spread indicates something the campist analysis cannot accommodate: a poly-crisis in which the regime’s capacity to impose control has fractured across the periphery.

Iranian refugee and analyst Siyâvash Shahabi, writing this week, notes: “For more than 60 hours now, the internet and almost all communication channels with Iran have been cut. The few videos that activists manage to publish from some cities do not really show the full scale of what is happening. There are reports describing the massacre of protesters in the streets.”

None of this appears in Xenophontos’s analysis. The protests remain an abstraction: “reactionary,” “disorganised,” lacking “ideological coherency.” The actual dying is elsewhere.

“Objectively Serves Imperialism”

This phrase does enormous analytical work while emptying the concept of meaning. By Xenophontos’s logic, any struggle occurring in a country targeted by imperialism “objectively serves” the imperialists if it destabilises the regime, regardless of who is fighting, what they demand, or what organisational forms they build.

The 1979 revolution “objectively served imperialism” by this standard: it destabilised a US ally, created regional instability, and was immediately exploited by various powers for their own ends. The Hungarian uprising of 1956 “objectively served imperialism” because it occurred during the Suez Crisis and was celebrated by Radio Free Europe. Solidarność “objectively served imperialism” because Reagan praised it and the Pope blessed it.

The phrase evacuates the agency of workers entirely. It treats them as objects whose actions must be assessed solely by their effects on great-power competition, never as subjects capable of building their own power for their own purposes.

Shahabi addresses this directly: “At the same time, Western media are flooded with different stories about Iran. It is hardly surprising that we are once again seeing a wave of racist and deeply stupid analyses that serve the far right and erase the agency of the Iranian people.”

The campists and the Western interventionists share this erasure. Both treat Iranians as pawns. Both deny them political subjectivity. They differ only on which great power should determine Iran’s future.

The Structure of Campist Reasoning

The Your Party chat illustrated the pattern with textbook clarity. The argument works through a series of moves, each appearing reasonable, accumulating into paralysis.

1. First: establish a hierarchy of crimes. US presidents are worse than the Ayatollah. Sanctions caused the crisis. This may even be partly true. But the political function is to suggest that crimes must be addressed in sequence, that opposing repression in Iran before defeating American imperialism is to jump the queue.

2. Second: the ground reports. Someone is “in the region” and hearing things. The protests are legitimate but the violence is manufactured. Mossad is burning mosques. The specifics are unverifiable, but they serve to cast doubt, to suggest that what we’re seeing isn’t what it appears to be.

3. Third: the geopolitical trap. Any change will only bring something worse. “No prospects for emancipating the working classes of the Middle East until the US and Israel are kicked out of the region.” Iranian workers must wait for conditions that may never arrive.

4. Fourth: the accusation. Those who disagree are not merely wrong but “deluded” and “dangerous,” backing “CIA regime change.” The conversation is no longer about analysis; it’s about loyalty.

5. Fifth: the theoretical cover. An article arrives “as a contribution to debate,” explaining why the protests “objectively serve imperialism.” The position is now intellectually respectable.

The result: paralysis. No solidarity actions. No international workers’ connections. Nothing offered to Iranian workers except the advice to wait.

What Karl Liebknecht Actually Meant

The campists invoke “The Main Enemy Is At Home” as though it settled the question. It does nothing of the sort. Karl Liebknecht’s 1915 leaflet argued that German workers should not be fooled by their rulers’ rhetoric about “Russian barbarism” into supporting an imperialist war. The main enemy is at home meant: do not let your own bourgeoisie use foreign threats to secure your loyalty. It never meant: ignore the crimes of other ruling classes. It never meant: silence solidarity with workers elsewhere until you have achieved domestic revolution.

The Fourth International understood this distinction with precision. When Hungarian workers formed councils in 1956, when they took control of factories and municipalities from Budapest to Miskolc, the Communist parties internationally denounced them as fascists, as CIA puppets, as a “counter-revolution” orchestrated by Radio Free Europe. The Stalinists argued exactly what today’s campists argue: the main enemy is Western imperialism; the Suez Crisis was unfolding simultaneously; any movement that weakened the Soviet Union objectively helped British and French colonialism in Egypt.

Peter Fryer, correspondent for the Communist Party of Great Britain’s Daily Worker, was sent to Budapest and saw workers’ councils, saw genuine proletarian self-organisation, saw the beginnings of a political revolution against bureaucratic rule. The party leadership suppressed his reports. They contradicted the “counter-revolution” narrative. Fryer resigned and wrote Hungarian Tragedy, which became foundational for the New Left precisely because it documented what the campists refused to see: that workers could revolt against a nominally “anti-imperialist” state, that their revolt could be genuinely proletarian in character, and that defending those workers was not a concession to imperialism but the elementary duty of revolutionary internationalism.

The Dual Task

The Fourth International maintained what it called a “dual task”: defend social gains against imperialism while supporting the working class against bureaucratic or bourgeois rule within those states. These were not competing priorities to be balanced. They were complementary aspects of a single revolutionary perspective. Supporting Hungarian workers against Soviet tanks did not mean supporting NATO. Supporting Solidarność in Poland did not mean supporting Reagan.

Ernest Mandel wrote extensively on Poland in 1980-81, as Solidarity grew to ten million members. The campist arguments were familiar. Reagan praised Solidarity. The Pope blessed it. Western intelligence services sought to exploit it. For those who assessed movements by their geopolitical alignment rather than their class character, this was disqualifying.

Mandel’s response was unambiguous: the working-class character of the movement was determinative, not the opportunistic cheerleading from Washington. The task was to strengthen Solidarity’s independent, self-organised elements, to push it toward a clearer anti-bureaucratic and anti-capitalist position, not to abandon it because imperialism saw temporary advantage.

The suppression of Solidarity by Jaruzelski’s martial law in December 1981 destroyed the one force capable of defending socialised property from a socialist perspective. The bureaucracy that crushed the workers’ movement in the name of defending socialism became, within a decade, the primary agent of capitalist restoration.

Iran Today

The parallels with Iran are not exact. The Islamic Republic is not a deformed workers’ state; it is a theocratic capitalist regime that consolidated power by crushing the Iranian left and independent workers’ organisations. But the campist reasoning deployed against solidarity with Iranian workers today is structurally identical to that deployed against Hungarian workers in 1956 and Polish workers in 1980.

Trump threatens intervention. Netanyahu tweets encouragement. Reza Pahlavi calls for city takeovers. Therefore: the protests are suspect. Therefore: solidarity must wait. Therefore: the appropriate response is to emphasise American crimes, to establish our anti-imperialist credentials by maintaining silence on Tehran’s repression.

Xenophontos makes this explicit: “Actions that strengthen imperialism, however sincerely motivated, ultimately betray the Iranian proletariat and the international working class.” The practical meaning is clear: solidarity with the uprising strengthens imperialism; therefore, solidarity betrays the Iranian proletariat. The logic is hermetically sealed against evidence.

This is the anti-imperialism that demobilises. It produces no solidarity actions. It builds no international workers’ connections. It offers Iranian workers nothing except the advice to wait until Western leftists have weakened the imperialist core. The practical effect is indistinguishable from indifference.

The Question Xenophontos Cannot Answer

What should Iranian socialists do right now?

Her framework offers no programme for them. Should they oppose the protests? Join them while somehow not “serving imperialism”? Wait for Western leftists to complete their revolution first? The analysis is paralysing precisely because it treats the Iranian working class as pawns in a geopolitical game rather than actors capable of building their own power.

Shahabi addresses this directly: “And then there is the fourth factor: The people, the progressive and left movements. The left has been brutally repressed at the organizational level, and many of its social roots have been cut. The Iranian left in exile has also failed so far to organize itself effectively. But the left still has deep social roots inside Iran, and society is very much alive: the women’s movement, the labor movement, the movement against executions, students, and political prisoners. These forces are currently standing in the doorway, blocking the return of a new form of authoritarianism.”

Meanwhile, workers in Arak are forming councils. The organisational form that could resolve the “what comes next” question from the left rather than from restoration or reformism is emerging in real time. This is what revolutionary potential looks like, and the campist response is to warn that it “objectively serves imperialism.”

What Solidarity Actually Means

The genuine internationalist position holds multiple things simultaneously, because reality is not simple and revolutionary politics requires the capacity to navigate complexity.

US imperialism remains a monstrous force. Israeli aggression against Iran, including the June 2025 strikes, was a crime that strengthened the regime by allowing it to wrap itself in nationalist legitimacy. Trump’s threats of intervention would, if carried out, produce catastrophe. The restoration of the Pahlavi monarchy would replace one form of class rule with another.

And: Iranian workers have the right to struggle for their own liberation on their own terms. The shopkeepers of the Grand Bazaar, the students of Kharazmi and Khajeh Nasir universities, the workers forming councils in Arak, the protesters facing live ammunition across all thirty-one provinces: they are not CIA assets. They are not naive about American intentions. They deserve solidarity, not lectures about the hierarchy of crimes.

The Socialist Party (CWI) got it right. Scott Hunter’s January 7th analysis characterised the protests as a “lightning rod for accumulated anger against the Islamic Republic regime: a deeply reactionary theocracy: and the dire state of Iranian capitalism.” They argue that while Western imperialists would prefer a “colour change” that preserves capitalism, there is no prospect of sustained improvement under capitalism in Iran. They call for the working class to enter the movement en masse to lead the overthrow of both the theocracy and “dead-end capitalism.”

The Fourth International got it right: the Iranian people “do not want to choose between two despotisms.” They identify the organised working class: teachers, nurses, truck drivers, oil and gas workers: as the “beating heart of Iran’s economy” with the unique power to topple the regime through independent struggle.

Hands Off the People of Iran got it right: Yassamine Mather calls this a “fusion of bread and freedom” and remains vocally critical of those on the left who “refuse to show solidarity” with internal struggles because they fear being labelled imperialist stooges.

Most damningly for the campist position, the Fourth International explicitly critiques “the segment of the left that supports the Iranian regime due to its hostility toward the US and Israel.” This campist position, they argue, “denies the right of Iranian workers and the oppressed to resist after decades of suffering under the boot of a capitalist dictatorship with Islamic colouring.”

The Lesson History Keeps Teaching

The Fourth International’s analysis of Hungary and Poland produced a critical insight that the campists systematically miss: bureaucratic and bourgeois repression is the primary catalyst for capitalist restoration and imperialist penetration. By crushing the Hungarian workers’ councils in 1956, by suppressing Solidarity in 1981, ruling classes destroyed the only forces capable of mounting genuine resistance from a working-class perspective. They created the vacuum that reaction filled.

The same logic applies to Iran. The Islamic Republic’s repression does not defend Iranian workers against imperialism. It destroys the independent organisations that could fight on both fronts. It creates the conditions in which the only alternatives appear to be theocracy or monarchy, internal despotism or external domination.

Shahabi concludes: “Power can be taken through a coup or with foreign backing. But without society, it cannot be held. That is a reality no scenario can escape.”

The way out of this trap is not to choose sides between ruling classes. It is to support the emergence of an independent workers’ movement capable of fighting on both fronts. That support begins with solidarity. With saying clearly: we oppose our own rulers’ threats against Iran, and we support Iranian workers’ struggle against their rulers. With rejecting the campist logic that makes these positions contradictory.

In that Your Party chat, I made a simple point: Marx supported the Indian Revolt. He didn’t argue that Indians needed to wait for British workers to defeat imperialism first. The response was silence, then a pivot to Syria, then accusations of naivety. The pattern is consistent. When confronted with the actual politics of solidarity, campism has no answer except to change the subject.

Iranian workers are dying in the streets this week, shot by their own government, dragged from hospital beds by Revolutionary Guards. They deserve our solidarity, and providing it does not make us “deluded” or “dangerous.” It makes us internationalists.

The tradition that got Hungary right, that got Poland right, that understands the dual task: that is the tradition we need now, as Tehran burns and the campists counsel silence.

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Red Mole has previously covered the Fourth International’s approach to Iran, including analysis of Intercontinental Press‘s coverage of the 1979 revolution. The lessons from that period, when revolutionaries navigated between opposing the Shah and refusing to endorse Khomeini’s theocratic project, remain relevant today.