The ‘Resistance’ That Is a Business

Postscript: A Victory. For Whom? The IRGC's deal with Trump turns the ‘axis of resistance’ into a commercial prospectus.

TL;DR

The US–Iran ceasefire of June 2026 was not a defeat for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. It was a commercial outcome: sanctions relief flowing directly to the oil, gas, construction, banking, and automotive sectors the IRGC controls through Treasury-designated subsidiaries. War, here, was the continuation of state capture by other means. The campist left, which spent the conflict dismissing evidence of Iranian regime repression as CIA-Mossad fabrication, has ended up having defended a military-theocratic conglomerate’s negotiating position. This piece traces how that political bankruptcy was assembled, and how the epistemological method developed on Ukraine made it possible.

On 14 June 2026, UN Secretary-General Guterres welcomed a peace deal between the United States and Iran as a ‘critical step toward ending the conflict.’ The agreement provides for a permanent ceasefire, the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, and a framework for further negotiations. Behind those diplomatic formulae lies a sequence of events that the campist left, which spent the duration of this conflict insisting that opposition to the Iranian regime was a form of imperialist collusion, has conspicuously failed to account for.

The conflict began on 28 February 2026 when US and Israeli strikes killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, along with his wife and several family members. Within a week, the Assembly of Experts had named his son Mojtaba, 56, a hardline cleric with deep roots in the Basij and the IRGC intelligence apparatus, as the third Supreme Leader. Mojtaba Khamenei’s first public statement called for keeping the Strait of Hormuz closed and attacking US bases across the region. Three and a half months later, his government signed a ceasefire. The IRGC backed the negotiating team throughout.

Clausewitz’s formula runs: war is the continuation of politics by other means. What the US–Iran conflict reveals is something more specific. War, here, was the continuation of state capture by other means. The IRGC did not enter negotiations despite the conflict. It entered them because of it: the war created the conditions under which Washington would accept the rehabilitation of the IRGC’s commercial empire as a legitimate interlocutor in the global economy, and under which Tehran’s new leadership could consolidate internal power behind the shield of national resistance. Both parties got what they came for. The ceasefire is not the end of a confrontation between irreconcilable forces. It is the signature page of a negotiation that was always going to end here.

The specific sectors where sanctions relief lands, oil and gas, petrochemicals, construction, banking, shipping, telecommunications, are precisely the sectors where IRGC-affiliated companies are structurally dominant. The US Treasury’s own Office of Foreign Assets Control designated Bahman Group, Iran’s third-largest vehicle producer, to its Specially Designated Nationals list in October 2018, linked to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps; Iran Tractor Manufacturing Company carries the same designation through its ownership by IRGC-linked investment intermediaries; Iran’s Zinc Mines Development Company, which holds a monopoly on the country’s zinc exports, is owned by the IRGC through the Basij Cooperative Foundation. These are not marginal assets. They are the commanding heights of specific industrial sectors, and their rehabilitation into the global economy is not a side effect of the deal. It is among its purposes.

The terms Iran’s state-affiliated Mehr News published on the eve of signing make the logic explicit. Mehdi Mohammadi, strategic advisor to the head of Iran’s negotiating team and to Parliament Speaker Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf, briefed on the 14-point draft in detail. The nuclear concessions are minimal and explicitly reversible: Iran’s enriched uranium stockpile would be diluted, but, as Mohammadi put it, ‘when the material is diluted, it remains inside the country and, if necessary, can be restored to higher enrichment levels within a short period of time.’ The missile programme and the regional proxy network, Hezbollah, the Houthis, the Popular Mobilisation Forces, do not appear in the agreement at all: they have been, in the 14-point draft as published by Mehr, ‘definitively removed from the agenda.’ What does appear is a US commitment Mohammadi describes as historically unprecedented: to lift not only secondary but primary sanctions in a final deal, with half of Iran’s frozen assets released before final negotiations even begin.

This is worth pausing on. In April, during the ceasefire extension standoff, Mohammadi was posting on X that ‘the losing side cannot dictate terms’ and that continuing the blockade ‘must be met with a military response.’ The same figure is now briefing on a deal in which the enriched uranium stays in Iran, the missile programme is off the table, and primary sanctions are lifted. That is not inconsistency. It is the negotiating performance working as designed: maximalist public positioning in the pressure phase, transactional consolidation at the close. The ‘resistance’ was always also a business.

Ali Khamenei declared 2011 the ‘Year of Economic Jihad’, jihad-e eqtesadi (جهاد اقتصادی), on Iranian state television, announcing that the correct response to sanctions was all-out economic mobilisation. The concept recurred in his speeches for fifteen years. His son Mojtaba, marking Nowruz 1405 as supreme leader, declared the slogan of the new year ‘Resistance Economy in the Shadow of National Unity and National Security.’ The rhetoric had not changed. Only the commercial beneficiaries of its resolution had become, with the sanctions relief schedule, explicitly visible. Washington disputes the Iranian account of the deal’s terms. But Tehran chose to publish this framing, through its own state news agency, on the day of signing. It is the regime telling its domestic audience, and anyone paying attention, what the war was for. State capture, confirmed in the victory bulletin.

This is not a pattern unique to Iran. Red Mole analysed the same structure in Venezuela in January: a bureaucratic caste whose anti-imperialism was, in the PCV’s phrase, performative, a rhetorical shield behind which accommodation with capital was quietly negotiated. When the moment of confrontation arrived, the Maduro apparatus discovered that its real interests aligned not with the Venezuelan working class but with the forces on the other side of the table. The campist left, which had spent years attacking the PCV as ‘splitters’ and ‘useful idiots’ for refusing unconditional solidarity with Caracas, had no answer except to blame the people who had warned them. The IRGC’s trajectory from ‘Year of Economic Jihad’ to sanctions relief framework is the same logic, differently dressed: resistance as branding; accumulation as the substance beneath it. War, in both cases, as the continuation of state capture by other means.

The hardliners understood this, in their way. Mahmoud Nabavian, a hardline member of parliament’s national security committee, said in May that any agreement without sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz, war reparations, the lifting of all sanctions, the collection of tolls, the release of blocked funds, the enemy’s withdrawal from the region, and acceptance of enrichment would be ‘pure damage and will turn the Iranian nation’s victory into defeat.’ Hardliners running the city of Tehran put up a gigantic banner at one of the capital’s busiest intersections: ‘The Strait of Hormuz will remain closed.’ Hossein Shariatmadari, editor-in-chief of the Kayhan newspaper, wrote in an open letter asking whether closing the Strait had not been ‘one of our country’s main levers in the Ramadan war.’ Meysam Nili, managing director of Rajanews and brother-in-law of former President Raisi, called the deal a ‘catastrophic capitulation’ and urged Iranians not to sit quietly. The Paydari Front, which the Guardian identifies as the faction coalescing opposition to the agreement, opposed any deal on principle.

But notice what the hardliner critique does not contain: nobody in that camp accused the IRGC of prioritising its commercial empire over the national resistance. The class argument, the one that actually explains the deal’s logic, belonged to the Iranian secular left; and the campist Western left, which presented itself as more radical than liberal anti-imperialism, adopted a position indistinguishable from the hardliners. Defend the ‘resistance.’ Dismiss the evidence. Treat the deal as a surprise rather than the outcome the IRGC’s commercial logic made inevitable from the opening hour.

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Which brings us to a WhatsApp group, and to how the epistemological method that produced this bankruptcy was assembled.

Spotlight is a socialist online newspaper that has hosted, among other things, a political debating group on WhatsApp (P.S. The group closed on July 1st, 2026). Last Friday morning the group was running hot. The exchange began as a denunciation of the Fourth International and Anti-Capitalist Resistance as fraudulent outfits, petit-bourgeois cliques, holders of a stolen banner. From there it moved, in the way these things do, to Ukraine, then to Iran, then to a map of NATO bases that turned out to include installations in the middle of the Arctic Ocean and what appeared to be a base in Moscow itself. Someone shared it confidently. Someone else debunked it within the hour via Agence France-Presse’s fact-checking service. The map’s originator conceded he had downloaded it without checking.

That small episode is worth sitting with. A fabricated map, circulated as evidence in a debate about Western propaganda. The irony went unremarked. It didn’t need to be. But it names something structural in how campist epistemology operates, and it is worth following that structure carefully; because the method that produced the Spotlight map exchange is the same method that produced the morning’s exchange on Iran, and both of them follow directly from the method campism has been applying to Ukraine since February 2022.

The logic is not complicated. A fact arrives that is uncomfortable for the position. Casualty figures. Documented missile strikes on civilian infrastructure. Economic statistics. Protest footage. The fact is not contested on its merits: no counter-evidence is produced, no alternative figure offered, no source examined. Instead the provenance of the fact is interrogated. Who compiled these statistics? The EU’s consultants, which is to say European imperialists assembling anti-Russian propaganda. What about the uprisings in Iran? A ‘so-called uprising instigated by Mossad and the CIA in conjunction with the Royalists.’ The documented economic devastation: a very simplistic view of the reality largely influenced by western narrative. And then, before any counter-evidence could be produced: can we compare it to countries devastated by the US and their European allies?

That last move is the tell. It is not a request for more evidence. It is a change of subject dressed as a methodological challenge. The question ‘why focus on Iran?’ does not engage the Iranian working class on its own terms. It smuggles in, as premise, the conclusion it is supposed to establish: that no regime targeted by Washington can be the primary oppressor of its own people, because the axis of analysis runs from Washington outward and everything else is derivative.

This is not scepticism. Scepticism is a discipline: it requires proportioning doubt to evidence, applying consistent standards, following an argument where it leads even when the destination is inconvenient. What campism offers instead is a sociology of knowledge with a single application. Only one side’s facts are interrogated for their provenance. The IRGC’s documented suppression of Kurdish, Baluchi, and Azerbaijani national minorities; the regime’s own admissions of killing protesters; the economic strangulation of Iranian workers by an apparatus that controls vast swathes of the national economy while claiming to defend it: none of this is engaged empirically. It is re-framed, deflected, or absorbed into the counter-question. And because the counter-question always returns to Western imperialism, it cannot lose. It is not designed to be falsified.

What is striking about the Spotlight exchange is how clearly the two theatres connected. The same interlocutor who described Ukrainian casualty figures as EU anti-Russian propaganda went on, within the same morning, to treat Iranian protest data as a CIA-Mossad production. This is not coincidence. It is the same instrument applied twice. Once the epistemological method has been assembled on Ukraine, once you have established that facts hostile to the Russian position are ipso facto suspect because of who finds them convenient, the method is available. It travels. It applies to Iran, to Syria, to Venezuela, to wherever the United States has an interest in the outcome. The instrument does not stay in its lane. It cannot: it was built to be portable.

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The campist side in the Spotlight exchange reached for Trotsky’s 1937 analysis of colonial and semi-colonial nations, and it is worth following that text carefully, because it does not say what it is being recruited to say.

Trotsky’s argument is specific. In countries where imperialism has subordinated the national economy to foreign capital, the national bourgeoisie ‘only partly reaches the height of a ruling class’: it is simultaneously exploiter and exploited, simultaneously oppressor and oppressed. His examples are Mexico, India, China under Chiang. The structural condition he describes is one of genuine dependency: an economy whose commanding heights are controlled from outside, a bourgeoisie that cannot complete its own revolution because the imperialist powers will not allow it. In that condition, a conflict between the national state and an imperialist power has a dual character, and socialists must support the national resistance while maintaining complete political independence from its bourgeois leadership.

Apply that framework to the Islamic Republic and it collapses on contact with the facts. The IRGC does not control a substantial portion of the Iranian economy because imperialism has distorted its development: it controls that economy because it seized it. Oil, gas, petrochemicals, construction, banking, automotive production: the Treasury Department’s own Office of Foreign Assets Control has designated company after company in these sectors as IRGC-owned or IRGC-controlled through subsidiary structures. This is not the profile of a semi-colonial bourgeoisie struggling against foreign domination. It is a military-theocratic conglomerate that has used the language of resistance to foreclose domestic competition and accumulate capital on a regional scale. The IRGC funds proxy operations across Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen. It suppresses Kurdish, Baluchi, and Azerbaijani national minorities whose claims to self-determination are, under Trotsky’s own framework, as valid as Ukrainian claims to self-determination. That is not a semi-colony. It is a regional power running its own sub-imperial project, and describing it in the language of 1937 is not an application of Trotsky’s method. It is that method’s precise inversion.

Trotsky is also explicit, in the very passage being invoked, that support for an oppressed nation against imperialism does not mean dissolving socialist politics into the national bourgeoisie’s programme. The Iranian working class has been fighting its own ruling class continuously: in 2019, in 2022, in 2025. The correct response is to support that struggle unconditionally while opposing any imperialist intervention that would exploit it for different ends. That is what the text actually demands. Applying it instead as a reason to dismiss Iranian workers’ resistance as a CIA production is not Trotskyism. It is Trotskyism’s vocabulary recruited to defeat Trotskyism’s politics.

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There is a line in the Spotlight thread, offered by a measured participant, that cuts to the heart of it: there are thousands of people on the left who have spent decades in socialist circles without ever doing much that is concretely useful, endlessly debating and rarely organising. The observation was meant in a different context. But it names something real about what the campist method produces in practice. A politics organised around interrogating the provenance of inconvenient facts, rather than engaging them, is a politics permanently insulated from correction. It cannot be falsified by events because events are always already contaminated by the interests of those reporting them. It cannot be held accountable to material reality because material reality is always already a construction of the dominant narrative. What remains is a closed system: internally consistent, politically inert, capable of surviving indefinitely in a WhatsApp debating group while the workers of Ukraine and Iran continue to fight and die without it.

A formulation associated with Gramsci from 1919 is worth recovering here, even if the attribution, like so many on the left, is imperfectly sourced: ‘To tell the truth, to arrive together at the truth, is a communist and revolutionary act.’ The version that circulates online, usually attributed to Orwell without primary evidence, loses the word that matters. Together. Truth is not a possession of the side with the correct geopolitical alignment. It is arrived at: by engagement, by evidence, by the willingness to let uncomfortable facts remain facts regardless of who finds them convenient. That willingness is a political commitment, not merely an epistemic virtue. Without it, solidarity is not solidarity. It is brand loyalty.

The campist tradition has spent four years dismantling the conditions under which that kind of truth-telling is possible. The US–Iran deal has now demonstrated, in concrete and documented terms, what that tradition was actually defending. Not resistance. A negotiating position. Not the oppressed. A military-theocratic conglomerate seeking the rehabilitation of its business empire in the global economy. The IRGC backed the negotiating team. The sanctions relief flows to the sectors the IRGC controls. Mojtaba Khamenei, whose mother and wife were killed in the strikes that opened this war, signed the framework. And the campist left finds itself having defended, with considerable passion, a state capture project that has now come to terms with Washington.

The workers of Iran were not at the table. They are not in the framework. They do not appear in the further negotiations. That too is a fact. And it is not one whose provenance can be blamed on the EU.

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A Victory. For Whom?

Postscript, 18 June 2026: The Official Text

CNN has now published the official 14-point text of the Islamabad Memorandum of Understanding, released after what the report describes as ‘outcry that its text hadn’t been released publicly.’ The document confirms and in several respects strengthens the argument made above.

The MOU commits the United States to immediate oil export waivers from the Treasury Department, full release of Iran’s frozen assets, and a reconstruction and economic development plan of at least $300 billion from the US and regional partners. It commits Iran to down-blending its enriched uranium stockpile on Iranian soil under IAEA supervision: the material stays in the country, reversible at short notice. Iran’s missile programme and its support for regional proxy forces do not appear anywhere in the 14-point text. Their absence is not an oversight. It is the agreement.

The document was signed digitally, before publication, by Trump, Vance, and Iranian parliamentary speaker Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf: the same figure to whom Mehdi Mohammadi, who briefed the Iranian public on what had been achieved, serves as strategic advisor. The negotiating outcome was settled before the public framing began.

So: is this a victory for Iran?

It depends entirely on which Iran you mean. For the IRGC and its commercial empire, it is a structural vindication. The sanctions that constrained its oil revenues, its construction contracts, its automotive subsidiaries, its banking access: gone, on a schedule to be agreed, with waivers operational immediately. The proxy network that projects its regional power is untouched. The enrichment capacity that gives it strategic leverage is preserved on Iranian soil. The $300 billion reconstruction plan will flow through the sectors it controls. Ghalibaf, the parliamentary speaker who signed, has his own deep roots in the IRGC. The institution negotiated with itself, in effect, and won.

For Iran’s workers, the 14-point text offers nothing. No clause addresses the suppression of independent trade unions, which has been continuous since 1979. No clause addresses the right to strike, which workers at the Haft Tappeh sugar cane complex and the National Steel Group have been imprisoned for exercising. No clause addresses the women who have been fighting the compulsory hijab, the wage arrears running across entire industrial sectors, the Kurdish and Baluchi national minorities whose political prisoners remain in Evin. The reconstruction billions will not reach them through any mechanism the MOU establishes, because no such mechanism exists. The Central Bank of the Islamic Republic of Iran will determine the ultimate beneficiaries of the released funds. That is clause 11. Read it carefully.

A victory for Iran, then: yes, unambiguously, for the Iran that signed the document. For the Iran that has been fighting that Iran in the streets and on the picket lines for decades: not a line, not a clause, not a word.

There is a final irony the official text makes visible. The regime's internal hardline critics, the Paydari Front, Rajanews, Shariatmadari at Kayhan, warned that any deal falling short of full sovereignty over Hormuz, guaranteed enrichment rights, and binding reconstruction commitments would represent capitulation. Read the official text against those demands and the hardliners' case is not without force. Hormuz reopens on a 60-day toll-free basis, with its future administration subject to negotiation with Oman. Enrichment is preserved as a status quo pending a final deal, not guaranteed as a right. The $300 billion reconstruction plan is a commitment to negotiate a mechanism within 60 days: a promissory note, not a settlement. The hardliners called it a catastrophic capitulation. For the Iranian working class, the question is more precise: not whether the regime surrendered too much, but whether the regime negotiated for them at all. The answer is in the text. They are not in it.

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Afterword: The hardliners were not merely outargued; they were excluded.

19 June 2026 - The reactions inside Iran’s regime

The question of whether this is a victory for Washington is more complicated than either side’s public position suggests, and the complication matters for the left’s analysis. Trump entered negotiations in May demanding Iran surrender 400kg of enriched uranium to the United States, maintain only one operational nuclear facility, and accept no upfront asset releases. None of those preconditions appear in the signed MOU. Bloomberg’s headline put it plainly: Trump blew through his Iran red lines. Having insisted on zero enrichment, Trump now says Iran should have the right to enrich uranium, access billions in frozen funds, and develop ballistic missiles: positions his administration had previously described as non-negotiable. His critics on the American right are saying he was outmanoeuvred. His critics on the American left are saying the same thing for different reasons.

Both miss the structural logic. Trump’s advisers describe a reset of relations with Iran and the opportunity for Iran to pursue its ‘full economic potential,’ which Trump considers ‘huge.’ That framing is the tell. Washington’s interest was never the destruction of the Iranian state: it was market access, regional stability, and the removal of a disruptive variable from the global oil supply. A commercially rehabilitated Iran, integrated into the global economy, its IRGC-affiliated companies trading with Western counterparts, its oil flowing freely through Hormuz, serves that interest precisely. The 60-day window is not a deadline for Iranian capitulation. It is a negotiating period in which two states with compatible commercial interests will work out the terms of their accommodation.

Israel wanted to end Iran’s nuclear weapons programme. The agreement allows Iran to continue enriching uranium at some level, even with a temporary moratorium. Netanyahu’s government is not celebrating. But Netanyahu’s government is not a party to the MOU. The deal was made over its head, between Washington and Tehran, at a G7 summit in France, brokered through Pakistan and Qatar. That is itself a geopolitical signal: the US-Iran accommodation does not require Israeli consent, and does not depend on it. Founders Online

For the Iranian working class, Washington’s strategic interests are as remote as Tehran’s. The 60-day window will produce a final deal or it will not. Either way, no clause in any version of the text addresses the right to organise, the right to strike, the wage arrears, the political prisoners, the national minorities. The market that Washington wants access to and the commercial empire that Tehran has spent three decades building are the same market, the same empire. The workers who built it, and who have been fighting it, are the surplus that neither side’s accounting requires.

A sharper question lurks beneath the postscript’s argument, and it deserves a direct answer. Was the war itself a useful spectacle, allowing the IRGC to pressure the hardliners and extract a more favourable economic reset than it could have achieved through diplomacy alone? The conspiracy version of that argument fails immediately: according to Iran International’s own analysis, the closure of the Strait of Hormuz was as much a surprise to Tehran as it was to the world. The deterrence they had not counted on much became their most valuable card, with the deputy speaker of parliament declaring the Strait Iran’s ‘nuclear weapon.’ The IRGC did not engineer the assassination of the supreme leader as an opening gambit in a commercial negotiation. Nobody planned this.

But structural opportunism is not the same as conspiracy. What the evidence shows is a narrowly constituted negotiating circle, Ghalibaf, Araghchi, Mohammadi, operating in near-total secrecy. The Telegraph reported that most Iranian officials were learning what was happening from television: ‘No one knows what is really happening,’ one Iranian official said. ‘Most officials hear only from TV what’s happening. They do not know what we are giving up and what we are actually gaining.’ The hardliners were not merely outargued; they were excluded. Former IRGC commander Mohammad Ali Jafari, in an interview with the IRGC-affiliated Tasnim news agency, stated that until the war ended on all fronts, sanctions were lifted, frozen assets released, war damages compensated, and Iran’s sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz officially recognised, ‘there will be no further negotiations.’ He got none of those preconditions. The deal went ahead without him.

The IRGC as a commercial empire and the IRGC as a revolutionary military organisation are not the same thing, and the deal serves the former at the expense of the latter’s ideological commitments. What the war produced, then, was not a planned outcome but a structural one: a crisis that accidentally revealed the Strait as Iran’s most powerful economic lever, which a specific faction then used with considerable discipline to secure a commercial reset that fifteen years of sanctions had prevented. The hardliners who wanted to hold the Strait permanently lost to the faction that understood it was worth more as a bargaining chip than as a permanent closure. The workers of Iran, whose labour built the economy both sides are now negotiating over, were not consulted on the terms of the trade.