Vijay Prashad's Iran

A Response to CounterPunch's Declaration "Six Non-Negotiable Terms from International Scholars...to End the U.S. War on Iran," and to the Political Framework That Made It Possible

By Farah Mokhtareizadeh

In January 2026, as protests swept Iran and the Islamic Republic responded with mass killings, the international left faced a choice about whose voices to amplify and whose to render invisible. The choice it made is the subject of this essay.

On April 10, 2026, a Holocaust denier, a white nationalist theorist, the founder of the World Social Forum, and a former UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights all put their names on the same document. So did Vijay Prashad.

The document was“Six Non-Negotiable Terms from International Scholars and Former Officials from 30 Countries to End the U.S. War on Iran,” published by CounterPunch with over 170 signatures. Richard Falk, Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton and former UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in Occupied Palestine, signed it. So did Denis Halliday, former UN Assistant Secretary-General who resigned in protest over the Iraq sanctions regime. So did Boaventura de Sousa Santos, one of the most cited sociologists in the world and founder of the World Social Forum. So did Jodie Evans, co-founder of CodePink.

So did James H. Fetzer, who wrote the book claiming Sandy Hook never happened and that the murdered children were fictions, and was ordered by a Wisconsin court to pay $450,000 to Leonard Pozner, the father of six-year-old Noah Pozner, for defaming him.

So did Kevin B. MacDonald, whose trilogy Culture of Critique provided the theoretical foundation for contemporary white nationalism and was cited by the Christchurch mosque shooter in his manifesto — work the shooter himself praised as the product of a “serious political thinker.” So did Alain de Benoist, the intellectual architect of the European New Right, whose life’s work has been making racial separatism sound like a philosophy.

So did Dieudonné M’Bala M’Bala, convicted close to two dozen times in France, Belgium, and Switzerland for antisemitic hate speech and Holocaust denial, described by then-Interior Minister Manuel Valls as “an antisemite and a racist,” and permanently banned from YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram for the same. So did Claudio Mutti, a former Italian neo-fascist who has spent decades building networks between the European far right and Eurasianist authoritarian movements. And Vanessa Beeley, whose journalism on Syria has functioned as a systematic denial and reframing of documented Assad regime atrocities.

The document presents all of them as a unified conscience of humanity, describes former Ayatollah Khamenei as “recognised globally as a voice against arrogance and terrorism,” calls for the “prosecution and extradition of operatives in anti-Iranian media”, meaning the exiled journalists through whom Iranian workers, feminists, and political prisoners communicate with the outside world.

The letter actually proposes handing those journalists back to a government that, according to Amnesty International and Iran Human Rights, executed at least 1,639 people in 2025 and killed more per capita than any country for which reliable data exists. They end by declaring that “if Iran falls, the hope of a better, enlightened future for the world dies with it.”

The question is not why fascists signed it. That is easy enough to explain. The harder question is what it means that their signatures only work alongside Avi Shlaim’s, Norman Finkelstein’s, and Vijay Prashad’s, and that the reverse is also true.

De Benoist's racial separatism does not get published in CounterPunch on its own. MacDonald's white nationalism does not usually circulate under the banner of international scholarly conscience. Fetzer's Sandy Hook denialism does not travel with the imprimatur of former UN officials. But put them on the same page as Princeton professors and antiwar icons, and the document becomes something serious people share, cite, and defend. That is what the left names are doing here: not endorsing the far right's positions, but providing the conditions under which those positions become legible as part of a broader, respectable conversation.

What those positions are calling for, concretely, is the arrest and extradition of journalists to a government that executed four to five people every day in 2025. The document does not describe this as repression but as justice. That gap is not the product of bad faith but of a political framework organized so completely around a state's position in relation to U.S. power that it cannot see what else that state is.

The presence of de Benoist and MacDonald is disturbing but not surprising. What requires explanation is the presence of Vijay Prashad. Prashad does not share the politics of these racists and antisemites. He shares their conclusion. And because he is taken seriously across the international left as a rigorous Marxist scholar whose work on imperialism, the Third World project, and Global South solidarity has shaped how a generation of activists and intellectuals understand U.S. power, his presence on this document does something theirs cannot: it makes the document credible. Understanding how a scholar of his seriousness arrives at the same political conclusion as a white nationalist requires looking closely at what his framework actually does when it confronts Iran.

Prashad’s credibility rests on a substantial body of work. The Darker Nations (2007) and The Poorer Nations (2012) are serious contributions to the historiography of anti-colonialism and the political economy of imperialism. Darker Nations traces the Third World project from the Bandung Conference of 1955 through the Non-Aligned Movement, documenting how newly independent states attempted to transform the international economic order, and how that project was gradually destroyed from without by imperial pressure and from within by the class character of postcolonial leaderships that demobilized the mass movements that brought them to power.

He identifies what he calls the central failure of those leaderships: “The cultivation of cultural nationalism as the social cement in an otherwise-political wasteland is a cause and consequence of the collapse of the Third World. Racial and religious political organization is not prepared to confront capital along with its central role in the creation of planetary distress.”

Thus, the failure of the Third World project, in Prashad’s own analysis, is located in the class character of its leading formations, not in the malevolence of external powers. Poorer Nations extends this into the neoliberal period: state industries captured by connected elites, workers disciplined through precarity, independent unions destroyed, all conducted under the banner of national sovereignty.

Prashad is explicit about his theoretical commitments: “I’m a Marxist. I’m a communist.” He quotes Lenin on what he calls the living soul of Marxism: “the concrete analysis of concrete conditions.”

The gap between those commitments and his political conclusions is not accidental.

Campism is the position that political solidarity should be determined by which geopolitical bloc a state belongs to rather than by the class character of that state or the interests of the people living within it.

In Syria, the genuine popular uprising against Assad was reframed as an imperial project. In Ethiopia, Abiy Ahmed’s government conducted a war in Tigray that killed hundreds of thousands and was documented by the UN as involving mass atrocities, ethnic cleansing, and the systematic use of rape as a weapon of war. The Tricontinental, the institute Prashad directs, maintained a notable silence. In each case, the political conclusion, that the state opposing or inconveniencing U.S. power deserves solidarity, precedes rather than follows from analysis. On Prashad’s own Leninist terms, this is precisely the error Lenin identified as national-chauvinism: subordinating class analysis to geopolitical alignment while presenting that substitution as principle.

The U.S. antiwar left was shaped decisively by Vietnam and the Latin American dirty wars, contexts in which U.S. power was directed against popular movements with real mass support. From that experience came a way of reading the world that was not irrational: if U.S. intervention targets the left, then what it targets is worth defending. In its original context, this was not obviously wrong. Applied mechanically to Iran in 2026, it becomes a machine for producing the opposite of solidarity.

The left also spent the Cold War being red-baited, surveilled, and institutionally destroyed through McCarthyism, COINTELPRO, the repression of antiwar movements. That experience hardened into a deep suspicion of any critique that appears to align with imperial narratives, such that even the strongest evidence against states the U.S. opposes can be dismissed in advance as contaminated. What began as self-protection became a method for filtering out the very people solidarity claims to center.

For more context: In Iran, the European opposition between secularism and religion does not hold. Secularism is not a neutral or emancipatory baseline but a historically contingent formation shaped by monarchy, state-building, and uneven modernization. Religion likewise cannot be reduced to conservatism, but has produced both reactionary and radically egalitarian currents, including anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist traditions drawing on Shi’i histories of resistance and martyrdom.

At the same time, the Islamic Republic has fused religious authority with state power in ways that have systematically repressed independent labor organizing, feminist movements, and left opposition, both secular and religious. The question is not whether a movement is secular or religious but what kinds of social relations it seeks to reproduce or transform, and how it organizes power in practice.

The nationalism question is equally displaced. The Islamic Republic has attempted to fuse itself with the idea of the Iranian nation, such that opposition to the state appears as betrayal of the nation. The chant in Farsi, Na Ghaza, Na Lobnan, Janam fadaye Iran (Not Gaza, Not Lebanon, My life for Iran) expresses something more complex than patriotism. In fact, it is also a class claim: that the resources extracted from Iranian workers should be accountable to the Iranian people rather than directed toward the armed proxy network - Hezbollah, the Houthis, and the Iraqi militias - the IRI funds under the banner of the so-called Axis of Resistance. In this register, nationalism functions as an assertion of popular sovereignty against a state that has appropriated national identity for its own reproduction.

Likewise, in Western liberal political culture, reformism is broadly center-left. In Iran, this produces systematic misreading. The reformist faction, figures like Khatami in the 1990s and Pezeshkian now, operates entirely within the framework of velayat-e faqih. Reform means limited cultural liberalization and adjustments in enforcement, but does not alter the underlying class structure of the IRI’s political economy: IRGC-linked conglomerates, short-term contract labor regimes, and the suppression of independent unions. Iranian workers who built the independent Council for Organizing Protests of Contract Oil Workers (COOCWP) and rejected the Islamic Labor Councils were not rejecting reform in a liberal sense. They were rejecting a specific institutional mechanism of control that persists regardless of factional shifts within the state.

These coordinate inversions are not accidents of translation. As Paria Rahimi argued (2026), campism is not only a Western analytical failure projected onto Iran from outside, it is also one of the IRI’s own core ideological operations. Through state media such as Press TV, through figures like Mohammad Marandi, who advises Iran’s nuclear negotiations team while presenting himself to Western outlets as an independent scholar, through advocacy organizations such as the National Iranian American Council, which has consistently argued positions serving IRI diplomatic objectives, and through Western commentators like Caitlin Johnstone and Richard Medhurst, who apply rigorous skepticism to U.S. and Israeli government claims while reproducing IRI framing on Iranian protests and dissident movements without equivalent scrutiny. Through all of these, the regime presents itself as sovereign and morally legitimate primarily through comparison with U.S. and Israeli power. When the Western left adopts and reproduces this framing, it reinforces the very narrative through which the state secures its legitimacy internationally.

Apply the standard of Darker Nations to Iran. Iranian-American historian Ervand Abrahamian established (1982) that the Islamic Republic was not constituted as a revolutionary working-class formation that subsequently degenerated under imperial pressure. From its inception, the IRI was organized around the class interests of the traditional petty bourgeoisie of the bazaar, in alliance with the fundamentalist clergy who shared their physical space, economic networks, and hostility to both the secular working class and the modern salaried middle class.

The bazaar-mosque nexus that captured the 1979 revolution was precisely the kind of formation Prashad describes in Darker Nations: one that redirected a genuine mass uprising toward the consolidation of its own class interests, deploying anti-imperialist rhetoric to suppress internal dissent while protecting private property under Islamic legal cover. State enterprises were privatized into IRGC-connected conglomerates. Iran’s minimum wage in 2025 stood at roughly 10.4 million tomans per month against a cost of living estimated at over 35 million. Over 2,000 workers died in unsafe conditions in 2025. The same Haft Tappeh sugarcane workers whose situation Abrahamian’s class analysis anticipates were attacked by security forces in March 2026 for protesting mechanization-driven job losses.

From June 2021 onward, oil and petrochemical workers across Iran mounted a coordinated strike wave of unprecedented scale and duration, demanding higher wages, job security, the elimination of contractor exploitation, and regularized employment. The strike spread across refineries, petrochemical plants, and oil fields in southern and southwestern Iran, drawing solidarity from steelworkers in Ahvaz, teachers’ associations across multiple provinces, and trade unions in Sweden, Canada, and France. When they built the Council for Organizing Protests by Oil Contract Workers (COOCWP) to coordinate their action, they explicitly refused the Islamic Labor Councils as instruments of management control rather than worker representation: “We, the oil workers, like our colleagues in the Haft Tappeh Sugarcane Factory and Ahvaz Steel and other workplaces, firmly declare that we will not accept the establishment of the Islamic Council in Oil. The Protest Organizing Council is our own real and independent organisation.”

In his January 2026 Peoples Dispatch piece, Prashad acknowledges the South Pars strikes and notes that workers brought their demands to the majles. His framing is revealing: the “sincere protests,” he writes, were instrumentalized by Israel and the U.S., transforming legitimate struggle into “a potential regime change operation.” The working classes appear not as political subjects with their own analysis but as objects of potential manipulation by external forces. The COOCWP explicit refusal of the Islamic Labor Councils is not the voice of imperial manipulation but a working class that has analyzed its own situation with considerable sophistication and arrived at organizational conclusions the international left should be amplifying.

Prashad has already written the diagnosis. He simply refuses to apply it here.

A Marxism that stops at economic class cannot adequately grasp the IRI, because the IRI’s gender regime is not a separate ideological layer resting on top of an economic base. Consider what the state actually does: it deploys morality police to arrest women for removing their hijab in public; it hires oil workers on thirty-day renewable contracts so they cannot organize without losing their livelihood and criminalizes same-sex conduct with flogging and execution. These are not parallel policies with separate logics. They are the same project: controlling what bodies do, where, and under whose authority, expressed through different targets. The class analysis Prashad claims to be doing cannot be performed without the gender analysis. They are the same analysis.

The scholarship that demonstrates this does not come from Western liberal human rights discourse but from within the Iranian tradition itself.

Afsaneh Najmabadi’s (2005) work draws from visual and literary material of early Qajar Iran to show that beauty was largely undifferentiated by gender, and that pre-modern Persian literature largely considered gender insignificant to love. The Islamic Republic’s ideological claim that homosexuality is a Western imperialist imposition (remember Ahmadinejad? He is 69 years old this year, go on and wish him a very, very Happy Birthday) is not simply morally wrong. Historically, the claim is illiterate.

The Qajar-era encounter with European powers brought not only gunboats and trade concessions but a set of categorical assumptions about gender, sexuality, and civilization. Iranian elites seeking recognition as modern adopted European hetero-normativity as a marker of that modernity, including its classification of same-sex relations as deviant and incompatible with a properly ordered society. What had been unremarkable in Persian literary and social life became, through this encounter, a sign of backwardness. The Pahlavi modernization project carried this logic forward, disciplining sexuality in the name of national progress. The Islamic Republic inherited the classification while inverting its justification: what the Pahlavis suppressed in the name of Western modernity, the IRI suppresses in the name of Islamic authenticity. The condemnation is the same. Only the branding changed. The state that calls homosexuality a Western disease is itself practicing a Western import.

Najmabadi’s (2014) work opens a more unsettling problem. Since the mid-1980s, the Islamic Republic has permitted and partially subsidized sex reassignment surgery. This is not liberalism. The state drew a legal distinction between the tolerable “true” transsexual and the homosexual, who was rendered invisible in law and punishable in practice. Transgender recognition became the instrument through which homosexuality was more precisely defined and more aggressively suppressed. The state did not open a door, but built a gate, and then used that gate to make clearer who could never enter.

Sima Shakhsari’s work introduces a further complication. Western queer advocacy for Iranian LGBTQ+ people has often reproduced its own form of domination, arriving with ready-made identity categories: the stable, legible gay subject that asylum courts and human rights frameworks can process, and treating these as the only valid form of political expression.

Iranian queer activists have responded by building their own vocabulary. Hamjins-gara’i (same-sex love) is a deliberate move away from both the IRI’s blanket condemnation and the West’s blanket categorization. They are developing a politics adequate to their own conditions, in their own language, refusing both the state’s frame and the West’s frame at once. This is the same political intelligence the COOCWP showed when they rejected the Islamic Labor Councils. The refusal is the politics.

The feminist uprising of Women, Life, Freedom (WLF) in September 2022 gave this integrated analysis its clearest political form. Emerging from the killing of Zhina Mahsa Amini by the IRI’s morality police, it rapidly expanded into a coordinated challenge to the IRI’s entire structure of power. The movement draws significantly from Kurdish political traditions that are explicitly anti-capitalist, feminist, and committed to forms of democratic autonomy, often theorized through jineology: a Kurdish feminist framework that locates gender domination at the center of how social life is organized and controlled, and rejects the separation of women’s issues from political economy and state power. From this position, WLF refused the reduction of feminist struggle to the hijab and rejected any framework that isolates gender from class or national oppression. The movement’s force lay in naming these as a single structure.

A framework that positions gender liberation as downstream of the defeat of U.S. hegemony, deferring feminist demands to a post-imperialist future, reproduces the same logic of postponement that the Iranian left learned in 1979 could be fatal. That deferral was a predictable outcome of a politics that could not hold gender and class together. WLF refused that deferral with full knowledge of its historical cost. And sanctions and war fall hardest on women: on their labor, their bodies, their ability to organize. The dual refusal is not a position that sets feminism aside until imperialism is defeated. It is a feminist position, because it refuses both the state that controls women’s bodies and the imperial policy that destroys the terrain on which women organize.

Chandra Mohanty’s “Under Western Eyes” (1984) took the Third Worldist critique of Western universalism or the argument that Western frameworks present themselves as universal truths while encoding particular political assumptions - seriously enough to turn it into a rigorous analytical tool. Mohanty’s argument was that Western feminist frameworks erase Third World women as political subjects by treating them as objects of analysis rather than agents of their own liberation. The Western feminist looks at the Iranian woman and sees a victim of patriarchal religion who needs to be liberated by frameworks developed elsewhere, rather than a political subject with her own analysis of her own conditions, developing her own organizational forms, making her own demands in her own language.

What Prashad does to Iranian workers and feminists is structurally identical to what Mohanty critiques, except that the erasure runs in the opposite ideological direction. The Western feminist erases Iranian women’s agency by seeing only victimhood. Prashad erases Iranian people’s agency by seeing only imperial manipulation. In both cases, the Iranian political subject disappears. In both cases, the analytical framework of the observer is imported onto a terrain it was not built to read. Mohanty called this the production of the “Third World woman” as a monolithic category. What Prashad produces is the “Iranian resistance” as a monolithic category, in which the IRI and the Iranian people are fused such that dissent from the former becomes betrayal of the latter.

Val Moghadam, writing in New Left Review (1987), identified the error the Iranian left made in 1979 with precision: “an inordinate emphasis on the anti-imperialist struggle and an almost mechanical application of the dependency paradigm left little scope for considering the highly uneven development of class and production relations, the power of the pre-capitalist classes, or the political-cultural project of the clerics.”

The consequence was not abstract. The Tudeh Party, Iran’s historic Communist Party, made the strategic decision to align with Khomeini’s emerging Islamic Republic, interpreting it as an anti-imperialist force. By 1983, that same state moved systematically to eliminate them: mass arrests, torture, televised recantations, and executions dismantled the leftist organizations that had helped secure its position. And the Fadaiyan-e Khalq, who had once filled stadiums, followed a similar path. What was presented as strategic alignment revealed itself, in practice, as political disarmament.

The Tudeh Party, having paid for that judgment in blood, has been drawing the same conclusion ever since. In January 2026, as protests swept the country, they wrote: “Contrary to the claims of the ruling dictator, this popular protest movement is not a creation of U.S. imperialism or the genocidal Israeli regime, but rather the direct result of the disastrous economic policies of the ruling capitalist system and the widespread corruption, insecurity, and sweeping oppression imposed upon the nation by the leaders of the regime.”

In the same breath, they condemned U.S. intervention unequivocally and called for national sovereignty. In their March 2026 Central Committee resolution: “the struggle against dictatorship for freedom and social justice and the struggle to defend national sovereignty against capitalist and imperialist designs and foreign intervention go hand in hand as two sides of the same equation.”

This is Marxism applied to Iran by Iranian Marxists in Iran. Tudeh describes the IRI explicitly as a “ruling capitalist system” enforcing “a violent neoliberal economic agenda” — language that maps directly onto the framework of Poorer Nations and does so at considerable personal cost. The sequencing argument, defeat imperialism first, address internal repression later, assumes that dual refusal is a luxury available only in peacetime. The Tudeh held both positions simultaneously in January 2026, while the U.S. war on Iran was live and the IRI was killing protesters in the streets. The argument that the two struggles cannot be conducted at once is not a strategic observation. It is a political choice, and the Tudeh’s history shows what it costs.

Where Lenin supported national liberation movements that were not proletarian in composition, that support was not unconditional, nor did it require the erasure of internal class struggle. Lenin’s position was premised on the political independence of the working class within those movements, not its subordination to them. What the campist framework does is collapse the distinction between the state and the people, such that independent working-class organization appears either irrelevant or suspect. That is not Leninism. That is precisely the subordination of class analysis to geopolitical alignment that Lenin warned against.

CounterPunch’s declaration praises Iran’s “ancient organisational genius fused with 21st-century scientific sovereignty” an (alarming) civilizationist formulation that could appear in an official IRI address without modification, and that functions to identify the Iranian state with Iranian civilization such that dissent from the former becomes betrayal of the latter.

Mirza Kuchak Khan led the Jangal movement in the forests of northern Iran beginning in 1915: an armed anti-colonial struggle conducted simultaneously against the British forces occupying the south and the Czarist Russian forces occupying the north. In June 1920, in explicit alliance with the newly formed Communist Party of Iran, making it one of the first communist parties in Asia, the Jangali movement established the Socialist Republic of Gilan and instituted land redistribution, established workers’ councils, opened political space to the labour movement, and organized armed resistance to imperial power and domestic reaction simultaneously. The Republic lasted 15 months before being crushed by the forces of Reza Khan.

The Gilan Republic is significant not as a nostalgic reference but as a historical demonstration that the binary campism imposes on Iran has never been the only available political logic. That understanding runs from the Constitutional Revolution of 1906, which mobilized women, workers, and intellectuals in a movement for democratic accountability against both the Qajar monarchy and its foreign creditors, through the Jangalis and Gilan, through the Tudeh Party’s mass labor organizing in the 1940s, Mossadegh in 1953, through the oil workers’ strikes of 1978-79 that were decisive in paralyzing the Shah’s regime, and into the COOCWP of the contemporary oil and petrochemical workers who explicitly refuse the IRI’s Islamic Labor Councils. This is the Iranian tradition the CounterPunch declaration erases when it frames Iran as a civilizational pole rather than a terrain of class struggle.

The organizational consequences of campism are not abstract. They are visible in how political work is carried out, which alliances are built, and whose voices are amplified or dismissed. What appears at the level of theory as an analytical framework becomes, in practice, a set of organizing habits that shape how movements relate to states, to each other, and to the people in whose name they claim to act.

The Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), a U.S.-based Marxist-Leninist organization active in antiwar organizing, protest mobilization, and political education, emerged from the Workers World Party and its ANSWER Coalition infrastructure. This lineage matters. WWP developed, under Sam Marcy, a theory of “global class war” that called for uncritical political alignment with any state positioned against U.S. power, regardless of that state’s internal class structure or its treatment of its own working class.

When protests swept Iran in January 2026 and the state responded with mass repression, including the killing of thousands of protesters, PSL framed them primarily as instruments of U.S. and Israeli regime-change operations, dismissing the protesters as proxies of external intervention. The same organization that would be immediately repressed, surveilled, or imprisoned if it attempted to organize independently inside Iran defends that state from outside it in the name of anti-imperialism. What is being defended in this framework is not the working class but the geopolitical position of the state.

The pattern is not confined to the United States alone. In Ireland, Clare Daly and Mick Wallace, former leftist MEPs representing Irish constituencies with genuine records of opposing NATO militarism and U.S. foreign policy, became among the most prominent voices in European institutional politics applying the same logic. Both developed substantial followings on the left precisely because their opposition to Western military aggression was real and consistent. That credibility then functioned, as it does in Prashad’s case, as the condition under which a different set of conclusions became legible. Their commentary on Iran, Syria, and Ukraine reproduced campist framing with the added authority of elected officials who had genuinely stood against the grain of European consensus. Ireland’s particular historical relationship to anti-imperialism, shaped by colonial occupation, partition, and a tradition of neutrality that carries genuine moral weight, made their platform especially resonant, and especially effective as a vehicle for conclusions that Irish anti-imperialist history does not actually support.

CodePink is the most damaging case precisely because it is the most credible one. As a prominent U.S.-based antiwar feminist organization with longstanding relationships across labour unions, grassroots movements, and progressive electoral politics, CodePink carries organizational legitimacy that PSL, with its openly Leninist framework, cannot access.

In March 2019, a 28-member CodePink “American Peace Delegation” traveled to Iran, met with Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, and held a press conference with Fars News, the IRI state agency, at which members defended Iran’s right to missile defense. When Medea Benjamin returned, she described her hour-and-a-half meeting with Zarif as “amazing” to Democracy Now!, without mentioning whether she had asked to meet with any of the women political prisoners the IRI was holding at the time. No retraction or clarification followed.

Ann Wright, who co-led that delegation, is also a signatory on the CounterPunch letter. When WLF swept Iran in 2022, the largest feminist uprising in the country’s history, CodePink’s response centered U.S. sanctions as a primary analytical frame.

The Freedom Socialist Party, writing from the left, documented what followed: CodePink claimed the tens of thousands of Iranians who marched in the streets were being manipulated by imperialist agents. An organization that describes itself as feminist used its platform to dismiss the most significant feminist uprising in Iranian history as an instrument of empire. That credibility is precisely what makes the harm travel further.

This pattern becomes clearest when examined at the level of individual political judgment. Cynthia McKinney, a former U.S. congresswoman with a long and well-documented record of opposition to U.S. militarism, provides a revealing case. Her appearances on Iranian state media, her participation in political spaces organized around figures associated with Holocaust denialism, and her repetition of state-aligned narratives are not contradictions within this framework. They are its logical outcome. The friend-enemy distinction is established in advance, and political interpretation follows from that distinction rather than preceding it.

What appears across these cases - PSL, Daly and Wallace, CodePink, and McKinney - is not inconsistency but coherence. Different organizations, different political traditions, different countries, and different individuals arrive at similar conclusions not by coincidence but because they are operating within a shared logic. In that logic, a state’s position in relation to U.S. power determines its political meaning, and analysis is organized to support that conclusion. Independent working-class movements, feminist struggles, and dissident political formations that emerge within states designated as anti-imperialist cannot be recognized on their own terms. They are either ignored or reinterpreted as instruments of external intervention. Their demands are not engaged politically but neutralized analytically.

The campist framework presents itself as protecting the Iranian people from imperial instrumentalization. In practice it produces the opposite. The COOCWP do not get covered on Fox News. The oil workers do not get invited to testify before the U.S. Congress. By treating these movements as either nonexistent or imperial pawns, campism ensures that the only Iranian voices with international amplification are the ones that serve the imperial agenda most directly, Reza Pahlavi and the monarchist infrastructure that U.S. and Israeli governments are actively cultivating.

The Iranian diaspora leftists, whose politics are precisely the dual refusal of opposing the U.S. war on Iran and the IRI simultaneously, look to the international left for solidarity and find a framework that has no place for them. For people who have watched the IRI execute their comrades, imprison their family members, and destroy the organizations their parents built, the campist binary is not a political disagreement. Rather it feels like a demand for self-erasure as the price of admission to the left, and drives many directly into the arms of the imperial forces campism claims to oppose.

When people ask how Iranian diaspora leftists could possibly end up supporting a monarchist restoration, they are asking the wrong question. The question assumes a free political market in which people choose from available options. What campism produces is a managed scarcity of options. The international left, which should be the natural political home of Iranian leftists in diaspora, has made itself uninhabitable by demanding that opposition to U.S. imperialism and opposition to the IRI be treated as incompatible positions. The monarchists make no such demand. Reza Pahlavi does not ask Iranian leftists to defend the Islamic Republic as the price of his solidarity. The campist left does. And then it expresses bewilderment when people, faced with that choice, walk out the door.

The epistemological double standard this framework produces is also visible in the international Palestine solidarity movement, and naming it honestly is not a betrayal of that movement, but a condition of the movement’s integrity.

The international Palestinian solidarity movement has spent years fighting a deliberate effort to conflate opposition to Israeli apartheid with antisemitism. The movement is against loading a specific and serious form of discrimination with enough definitional weight that it can be used to criminalize legitimate political speech, punish campus organizing, and expose activists to legal and professional jeopardy.

Palestinians and their allies have worked carefully and persistently to hold that distinction: opposing a state’s policies is not hatred of a people; solidarity with the oppressed is not bigotry against anyone. When prominent figures on the international left sign documents alongside Holocaust deniers, white nationalists, and convicted antisemites while claiming to speak in the name of that same solidarity, they collapse precisely the distinction the movement has been fighting to maintain.

The people who bear the cost of that collapse are not Vijay Prashad, not Jodie Evans, not any of the credentialed figures whose institutional positions insulate them from consequence. The people who bear the cost are Palestinian students facing disciplinary hearings, Palestinian organizers facing criminal charges, Palestinian academics losing their positions. The elite left gets to perform solidarity from safety. Palestinians pay for the performance with their exposure.

The people bearing the actual cost of this political moment are not asking the left to defend the Islamic Republic. Mahmoud Khalil, Leqaa Kordia, and the hundreds of students, organizers, and community members facing deportation, detention, and criminal charges under the Trump administration’s targeting of Palestinian solidarity activism did not end up in that position because they signed documents with Holocaust deniers. They ended up there because they organized against a genocide. The left that should be their most reliable defense has spent its credibility elsewhere. Palestinian organizers facing federal charges are not asking for campism. They are asking for solidarity, and those are not the same thing.

The Palestine solidarity movement and the Iranian workers’ movement are not the same movement. The diaspora politics are different, the organizational forms are different, and the relationship to the relevant states is different. Palestinian diaspora communities in the U.S. have built decades of solidarity infrastructure, legal organizations, academic networks, cultural institutions, direct action formations, genuinely independent of state power.

The Iranian diaspora is more fractured, with a significant monarchist component that U.S. and Israeli governments are actively trying to amplify, and an independent left that is being systematically silenced precisely because campism has decided that all criticism of the IRI serves imperial interests. The Islamic Republic has spent decades positioning itself as Palestine’s defender precisely because that positioning purchases the international solidarity its domestic record cannot. When the Western left adopts that fusion as analysis, it does not arrive at it independently but is an ideological operation the IRI has been running for 47 years. These are not the same terrain. They require different analytical tools.

Susan Abulhawa is one of the most important Palestinian voices in the world. Mornings in Jenin (2006) is a landmark novel. Playgrounds for Palestine has built recreational spaces for children living under occupation. Her opposition to Israeli apartheid and U.S. imperial support for it is documented, principled, and has come at personal cost.

She also appeared on Press TV, the IRI’s state broadcaster, to describe Iran’s “dignity, steadfastness, honour, strategy, and defiance” as “the stuff of legends,” and published statistics about Iranian women sourced directly from the Islamic Republic News Agency, the IRI’s official state outlet, to argue that Western concern for Iranian women is imperialist propaganda. She did this while thousands of Iranian women were being killed in the streets for removing their hijabs and demanding the end of a regime that executes more people per capita than any other country for which reliable data exists.

This is not a reason to dismiss Abulhawa’s work on Palestine, but a reason to name the framework that produced this, because it is doing to Iranian political subjects exactly what it condemns Israel for doing to Palestinian political subjects: erasing their agency, substituting a state narrative for their own voices, and treating their demands as the product of external manipulation rather than their own analysis of their own conditions.

The epistemological tools Abulhawa applies with great precision to Israeli and U.S. government statements: rigorous skepticism, attention to who benefits, insistence on centering the voices of the people affected - are not applied to Iranian government statements. The IRI lies as systematically as the U.S. and Israeli governments do. The oil workers of the Protest Organizing Councils knew this. The feminists of WLF knew this. The Tudeh knew this at the cost of their comrades’ lives.

Mohammad Marandi is a different case and needs to be named as such. He is not a solidarity activist who has made an analytical error. He is an adviser to the Iranian nuclear negotiations team, the son of Ali Khamenei’s personal physician, and a figure described by IranWire as “one of the staunchest defenders of the Islamic Republic in English-language media.” When a British journalist asked about the tens of thousands of protesters killed by IRI security forces, Marandi told her their deaths were “your responsibility” because Western governments “sent terrorists and gave them weapons to slaughter hundreds of police officers.”

He is the IRI’s primary English-language voice for Western media, regularly platformed on Sky News, Channel 4, BBC, and Al Jazeera, and significant sections of the international left quote him as if he were an independent analyst of Iranian politics rather than a government spokesman without the title. The concrete analysis of concrete conditions requires knowing whose conditions you are analyzing and who is doing the analyzing. Marandi’s conditions are those of a man whose father was the supreme leader’s doctor. His analysis reflects those conditions faithfully.

The binary doesn’t only organize the systematic frameworks of PSL or the deliberate framing of Marandi, it also surfaces in the spontaneous political language of people whose rage is genuine and whose politics are not campist. Hassan Piker’s formulation saying he would vote “every time for Hamas over Israel” comes from genuine rage at a genuine genocide, and that rage is warranted. But the formulation reproduces the same binary that produces the problem because all it offers is a choice between two states, two national projects, and two flags.

What it cannot say, what the friend-enemy binary structurally prevents, is what the international left’s actual position should be: not Hamas over Israel, not Israel over Hamas, but solidarity with Palestinian workers, Lebanese workers, Iranian workers against the states and the capital that exploit and kill them all. That is internationalism rather than mirror-image patriotism. That is also the only position from which you can build the coalitions — with American labour, with the broader antiwar movement, with communities directly affected by military spending — that could actually stop the weapons.

The International Longshore and Warehouse Union has refused to load weapons shipments before. During the apartheid era, ILWU Local 10 in San Francisco refused to handle South African cargo. That precedent exists in the U.S. labour movement. The argument that Palestinian liberation, Iranian workers’ rights, and American labour conditions are connected and that the weapons going to Israel are manufactured by workers in American factories, loaded by workers in American ports, funded by a military budget that competes directly with the healthcare, housing, and wages those same workers are fighting for, is not a difficult argument to make. The tools to act on this exist. What is missing is the political will to treat international solidarity not as a fringe concern imported from somewhere else but as a direct expression of working-class interest. Political will is precisely what campism systematically prevents from developing, because campism has already decided which states deserve defending and which people deserve to be seen.

That decision is itself a product of sedimented memory. Gayatri Spivak identifies what is at stake when imperial foreign policy becomes narrativized into cultural memory: the Sykes-Picot carve-up, the Balfour Declaration, 1948, the passing of power from Ottoman to European to American, and that memory hardens over generations into what feels like an ideology of just war, a structure of collective hatred in which “they” want to harm “us” because “we” have wanted to harm “them.” The binary feels like history.

The point, however, Spivak insists, is not to adjudicate between competing memories but to “dislodge the polarization, unmake narrative, undo memory.” What the ILWU longshoremen did in 1984 was exactly that: they refused to let the apartheid state’s position in the Cold War binary determine whose cargo they would load. They read the terrain rather than the frame. The international solidarity movement’s task is not to choose a side in the binary but to amplify the voices in Iran that are already doing the same thing and have been for more than a century.

There is no ambiguity about the consequences of imperial war, sanctions, and destabilization: they are catastrophic, and they fall most heavily on the same working populations I’ve addressed. But recognizing that fact does not resolve the political question in the way campism assumes.

The destruction of Iraq or Libya does not demonstrate that all states targeted by imperialism must therefore be politically defended. Rather, it demonstrates that imperialism destroys the terrain on which independent social struggle takes place. The question, then, is not whether imperialism is the primary external threat — it is — but whether aligning politically with repressive states preserves or undermines the capacity of workers, feminists, and dissidents to organize within that terrain. There is no evidence that it does.

The concern that critique of repressive states can be appropriated by imperial narratives is real, but it cannot be resolved by silence or misrepresentation. Imperialism does not require accurate accounts of internal repression to justify intervention, conversely it has repeatedly fabricated them where necessary. The task is not to suppress analysis but to maintain political independence from both imperial agendas and state narratives. Opposing sanctions, war, and intervention does not depend on affirming the legitimacy of the targeted state. On the contrary, collapsing those positions weakens both: it allows anti-imperialism to be reduced to state defense and renders the struggles of workers and dissidents unintelligible to the very audiences who need to hear them.

The position advanced here is not moral symmetry but a dual refusal grounded in the actual practice of Iranian workers, feminists, and left organizations: opposition to imperial war and sanctions alongside opposition to the domestic structures of exploitation and repression that shape their lives. The dual refusal is a political tradition with a long history in Iran itself. The strategic implication is straightforward: international solidarity should align with these social forces directly: opposing external intervention while amplifying and supporting the independent organizations through which they articulate their demands. Anything else substitutes states for the people in whose name politics is conducted.

When I lived in Cork in Ireland, one of my closest friends described himself as an “ex-Republican turned anarchist” 🧞. Ex, in his case, meant he had arrived somewhere more interesting than patriotism 🧫.

When I came back to the U.S. and told stories about him (there are MANY), there would be these moments where people went quiet. You could see the click happen in real time: Republican? Wait… what?!? But nothing about what I had said changed: not the person, not the history, not the politics. Just the word - Republican - landing in a frame built for a different country’s political landscape, producing a meaning it was never meant to carry.

This is what is happening with Iran. The words arrive already loaded: resistance, sovereignty, anti-imperialism, and they land in a frame built somewhere else, for a different political landscape entirely. The categories click into place before anyone has read the terrain. Nobody interrupts them. So what gets heard is not what is actually being said, and the people saying it - the oil workers, the feminists, the queer activists, the communists who paid with their lives for the last time someone made this mistake - become unintelligible inside a framework that was never built to read them.

Bibliography

1. Vijay Prashad, “Six Points to Navigate the Turmoil in Iran,” Peoples Dispatch, January 13, 2026.

2. Paria Rahimi, “Why the Left Is Failing Iranians: Against Campism,” Left Renewal, January 15, 2026.

3. Chandra Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses,” Boundary 2 12.3/13.1 (1984).

4. Council for Organising Protests by Oil Contract Workers, Third Statement, July 5, 2021, via Libcom.

5. “Labor Organizing on the Rise Among Iranian Oil Workers,” Middle East Report Online, August 2021; “Iranian Oil and Petrochemical Workers’ Strikes Go On,” Libcom, July 2021.

6. Center for Human Rights in Iran (CHRI), “Iran’s Workers: Battered by Brutal Repression and Lethal Work Conditions,” April 30, 2025; Iran HRM, “The Dire Plight of Workers in Iran,” April 30, 2025.

7. CHRI, case updates, March–April 2026.

8. CHRI, May Day report, April 30, 2025.

9. Vijay Prashad, The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World (New Press, 2007).

10. Vijay Prashad, The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South (Verso, 2012).

11. Ervand Abrahamian, Iran Between Two Revolutions (Princeton University Press, 1982).; see also Ervand Abrahamian and Ahmad Ashraf, “Bazaar and Mosque in Iran’s Revolution,” MERIP Reports 113 (March–April 1983).

12. Val Moghadam, “Socialism or Anti-Imperialism? The Left and Revolution in Iran,” New Left Review I/166 (November–December 1987), 14.

13. Tudeh Party of Iran, “Threat of War, Theocratic Regime and ‘Anti-Imperialism,’” In Defense of Communism, April 2024; Statement of the Tudeh Party of Iran, January 11, 2026; Resolution of the Expanded Meeting of the Central Committee of the Tudeh Party of Iran, March 17, 2026.

14. Afsaneh Najmabadi, Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity (University of California Press, 2005).

15. Afsaneh Najmabadi, Professing Selves: Transsexuality and Same-Sex Desire in Contemporary Iran (Duke University Press, 2014).

16. Sima Shakhsari, “From Homoerotics of Exile to Homopolitics of Diaspora: Cyberspace, the War on Terror, and the Hypervisible Iranian Queer,” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 8.3 (2012).

17. On the Jangal movement and the Gilan Republic, see Cosroe Chaqueri, The Soviet Socialist Republic of Iran, 1920–1921: Birth of the Trauma (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995); Maziar Behrooz, Rebels with a Cause: The Failure of the Left in Iran (I.B. Tauris, 1999); and Janet Afary, The Iranian Constitutional Revolution, 1906–1911 (Columbia University Press, 1996).

18. CounterPunch News Service, “Six Non-Negotiable Terms from International Scholars and Former Officials from 30 Countries to End the U.S. War on Iran,” CounterPunch, April 10, 2026.

19. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “The Power of Memory,” Steal This Hijab, November 15, 2015.

20. Susan Abulhawa, interview with Press TV, March 29, 2026; Susan Abulhawa, “Status of Women in Iran,” International Action Center, June 24, 2025.

21. IranWire, “Who is Mohammad Marandi, Iran’s Chief Propagandist in English?” October 11, 2024.

22. Kevin B. MacDonald cited in Brenton Tarrant manifesto, “The Great Replacement,” March 2019.

23. James H. Fetzer defamation ruling: Pozner v. Fetzer, Dane County Circuit Court, Wisconsin, October 2019.

24. Dieudonné M’Bala M’Bala convictions: Wikipedia, “Dieudonné M’Bala M’Bala”; Interior Minister Manuel Valls statement, January 2014.