Two SWP Zoom meetings, eight weeks apart, both on Iran. The first, in the middle of the uprising, was Anne Alexander alone, on imperialism and revolution in Iran, past and present. The second, after Israel and the US started their attacks, was Alexander again with Simon Assaf, on Trump’s war on Iran and resistance from below. Watch them back to back and the same tradition speaks twice and does not quite say the same thing. The gap between the two nights is the argument.
Take January first, because it is the SWP doing the thing Red Mole has spent a good deal of time saying the SWP no longer does, and doing it well. Alexander’s subject was the uprising, and she treated it as what it is: a stage in a long revolutionary crisis of the regime that took power in 1979 and then strangled the revolution that made it. The hopes of 1979, the anti-imperialist demands, the reaching towards a more equal and democratic Iran, were, in her words, crushed by the consolidation of the regime Khomeini set up. She walked the sequence of it: the Green Movement and its ‘Where is my vote?’ in 2009, the fuel revolt of 2019, and then in 2022 the Woman Life Freedom rising after the police murdered Jina Mahsa Amini. The slogan the streets had found for the whole predicament she quoted back: down with the oppressor, whether the dictator or the king. And she named the thing most of the anti-war left will not, that Iran’s regional alliances, with Assad in Syria, with Hezbollah and Hamas, were built not to push the region towards liberation from Washington but to serve the interests of the Iranian regime itself.
‘The only regime change that matters is the regime change that we do ourselves.’
There was no campism in the room. Ask Stop the War about Iran and you get the regime laundered into an anti-imperialist bastion, its opponents recast as assets of the CIA, the Woman Life Freedom rising quietly folded away as a colour revolution. Alexander did the reverse. She credited the Iranian activists she had spoken to, insisted the movement was no puppet of Washington or of the exiled Reza Pahlavi, warned that his calls from exile put people into the street to die without offering them anything, and drew the line that the whole tradition of socialism from below exists to draw: ‘the only regime change that matters is the regime change that we do ourselves.’ The difference between the SWP and the Morning Star on Iran is the difference between that sentence and its absence.
And the analysis had grain to it, the kind that comes from actually reading the thing rather than the wire. She went back and re-read the 1978 to 1979 revolution and pulled out the detail that matters: the crackdown began in January 1978, the protests ran for the best part of a year, and the movement only became unstoppable in the autumn, when the oil workers struck and broke the state’s grip on production. She reached for the Iranian historian Peyman Jafari on why Woman Life Freedom stalled, that it never got the organised working class at its heart, that a generational gap opened between the young in the streets and the older workers rooted in the workplaces. She had the Syrian comparison ready, the way the Assad regime filled the squares of Damascus with workers dragooned by their bosses because no organised working class had moved early enough to stop it, set against Egypt in 2011, where the state-run unions were called out to defend Mubarak and simply refused to come. Call it what it is: a serious, class-first reading of a live revolution, and the opposite of the anti-imperialism of fools. Red Mole should say so plainly before it says anything else.
Then came March, and the bombs, and the framework tilted.
‘If the regime survives, then the US and Israel lose.’
The March meeting was not about the Iranian people rising against their regime. It was about the United States and Israel making war on Iran, and the change of subject changed everything. Alexander held her line: the Iranian regime serves Iranian capital, she said, played a directly counter-revolutionary role in Syria, and none of the states of the region offer any alternative to imperialism; Trump runs a regime too, and none of them are legitimate. But Assaf, opening, reached for a formula Alexander in January had not needed and did not use: ‘if the regime survives, then the US and Israel lose.’ He called the regime unprogressive in the same breath. Both things at once. The theocracy is our enemy, and its survival is our victory.
Hold that sentence up to the January light and the fault shows. In January the subject was the Iranian masses, and the regime was the thing they were fighting. In March the subject became the American war, and the regime slid into a new part, the vessel of anti-imperialism by default, its survival standing in for a defeat that was really the empire’s and not the people’s. Nobody defended the regime. But the measure of the war had quietly moved from what the Iranian working class might win to whether the regime outlasted the bombing, and those are not the same measure, and the second one has the regime doing the resisting.
It is a small wobble on Iran, and small for a reason: Iran is the easy case for this framework. The aggressor is unambiguously Western and the Iranian masses are themselves in revolt, so ‘defeat the American war, and the revolution from below does the rest’ more or less holds together. The trouble is that the same framework does not stay on Iran. Set the March meeting against the SWP on Ukraine and the wobble becomes a fall. There the anti-Western state is the aggressor, the nation resisting invasion is cast as a NATO proxy, its demand for weapons to defend itself becomes a provocation, and ‘neither Washington nor Moscow’ resolves, in practice, into neither Washington nor Kyiv. The same instinct in both: defeat the main enemy in the West, subordinate the concrete struggle to it. On Iran it lands near the truth, by luck of the geometry. Turn to Ukraine and the same instinct lands on the wrong side of an invasion.
In Iran and Ukraine: Stand with the oppressed and their own capacity to resist
The Fourth International answer is not a splitting of the difference and it is not more anti-imperialist heat. It is the thing Alexander herself supplied in January and the framework could not keep hold of in March: that imperialism is real and asymmetric, that you stand with the oppressed and their own capacity to resist, the oil workers, the strikers, the women in the streets, against both the empire and the regime, and that you never let the survival of a state stand in for the liberation of its people. Defend Iran against the bombing without defending the theocracy; defend Ukraine against the invasion without defending Zelensky. The asymmetry is the whole point, and it is exactly what the symmetry of ‘all states are imperialist, main enemy at home’ keeps dissolving.
None of which should be pushed too hard, and here is the honest limit of it. On Iran under American attack, Red Mole and the SWP would very likely march down the same street, sign the same statement, try to block the same arms shipment. The divergence is latent, not operational; it surfaces only when you set the two Iran meetings side by side, or set Iran beside Ukraine, and watch what the framework does with its subject once the aggressor changes flag. Perhaps that is too fine a distinction to build a faction fight on. It is not too fine to notice, because it is the same distinction that has put some of the most careful readers on the British left, people who read a revolution as closely as Alexander reads one, on the wrong side of Kyiv.
Alexander closed the January meeting with a British consul in Tehran in 1907, writing home in a panic about the Constitutional Revolution: a spirit of resistance to oppression, and even to all authority, is spreading throughout the country; the leaders are unknown. She read it as the fear every empire and every dictator feels when ordinary people begin to organise themselves, and she is right that the spirit is still alive in Iran. The question she left hanging, the one the March meeting reopened without meaning to, is whether a politics built above all to name the empire can always keep the people in focus when the empire is the one doing the shooting.