“This is what we are dealing with now in Iran: Imperialist powers, led by the United States, are preparing the ground for an attack, portending bombardment, civil war, and immense destruction. At the same time, the Iranian state has sealed off the country, cut all lines of communication, and is killing those insid”
“How have these competing death cults come to encircle Iran from within and without?”
“Due to tensions with Washington, Iran was never admitted to the World Trade Organization despite repeated applications, and it has maintained no meaningful relationship with the International Monetary Fund. Nevertheless, beginning in the 1990s, Iran pursued its own domestic variant of neoliberalism, propagated in think tanks and universities and by economic experts, who largely repeated the IMF’s prescriptions”
“Today, more than 90 percent of Iran’s labor force is precariously employed under temporary contracts, while a labyrinth of contractor firms—entrenched by their proximity to state power—dominate infrastructural projects and strategic industries, including oil, petrochemicals, mining, road construction, and automobile manufacturing”
“Official annual inflation is reported at around 42 percent, while estimates suggest the real rate has exceeded 50 percent. Food price inflation has surpassed 70 percent, with costs of some basic goods up by 110 percent”
“Available data indicate that nearly 40 percent of the population has fallen below the poverty line”
“Undeniably, Western sanctions have further worsened the economic situation on multiple fronts. But while many accounts focus only on the direct effects of sanctions—depressed government revenues and resulting in chronic budget deficits—the worst damage is more indirect. In an effort to circumvent sanctions, the state fostered a new class of trusted middlemen, composed largely of relatives of officials who, operating through shadow companies, sold oil to Chinese buyers in exchange for dollars. Instead of remitting the proceeds to the state, these inside dealers have hoarded them in real estate across Dubai, Turkey, and Malaysia”
“The bulk of Iran’s exports—around 80 percent, or roughly $40 billion—are now controlled by oligarchs in the form of large state-linked enterprises in the petrochemical, oil, and mining sectors. According to official statements, $18 billion in export earnings failed to return to the country in the past year alone”
“para-statal military and religious foundations absorbed the assets of the previous regime, forming a parallel economic body”
“These foundations, including the IRGC’s extensive economic network, operate largely outside the legislative and administrative authority of the government, including the central bank, and are directly supervised by the Office of the Supreme Leader”
“This is the frame in which immiseration, impoverishment, and widening class divides in contemporary Iran must be understood”
“the Iranian state has mutated into an apparatus of authoritarian austerity: fiscally disciplined, physically coercive, and interventionist in the monetary and financial sphere, while retreating from universal welfare and redistribution”
“The structural reforms pursued by Ali Madani-Zadeh—the current minister of economy, a University of Chicago economics graduate and the latest heir to Chicago-style neoliberalism—are a class project aimed at reproducing the state and its dominant class fractions under crisis, even as they further undermine social reproduction in wartime conditions”
“Reza Pahlavi, the long-exiled son of the widely despised Shah deposed during the 1979 revolution, has emerged as the figurehead of the current uprising, while other opposition actors from republican and nationalist currents scramble to ride his political coattails—not out of genuine acceptance, but on the basis that his hegemony represents an “opportunity,” and with the promise to confront him after the fall of the current Iranian state”
“Hegemonic victories are fought and won in the symbolic order, and in that arena, the reactionary right coalesced around Reza Pahlavi has prevailed”
“The Pahlavists now claim these crowds as their source of legitimacy, the embodiment of a formless, undifferentiated “people” who wish to be subjugated to the One (the monarch, the Shah)”
“Of course, no such formless people exists. That supposedly homogeneous and whole is instead riddled with antagonisms, fractures, and contradictions”
“the Pahlavist fraction has already put forward its “day after” program, in a pamphlet titled Field Manual for the Emergency, which calls for a state headed by Pahlavi, with executive, judiciary, and legislative councils all selected by Pahlavi himself”
“Their guidebook for struggle, Guard-e-Javidan, or The Immortal Guard—named after Mohammad Reza Pahlavi’s personal guard force and elite combat branch of the defunct Imperial Army—is an homage to neo-Nazi theories of organizational destabilization and race war in Western democracies, which emphasize decentralized structures and action “in small cells,” as formulated by figures such as Louis Beam and Tom Metzger and groups like the White Aryan Resistance”
“For months, Iran has effectively been in a suspended state of war. On June 13, 2025, Israel carried out coordinated strikes on Iranian nuclear, military, and missile sites, to which Iran responded with ballistic missiles and drones. On June 22, the United States followed up with its own attacks on Iranian nuclear facilities, reportedly targeting sites at Natanz, Fordow, and Isfahan. The United Kingdom, France, and Germany also provide direct military assistance to the Zionist state. In other words, what Israel launched in Iran was a war of the united Western imperialist bloc against another country, with regime change as its explicit aim”
“Unlike earlier adventures in Iraq or Afghanistan, however, the model of regime change being pursued is closer to NATO’s in Libya in 2011: The goal is not necessarily to topple the Iranian state outright and install another in its place, but to ignite a permanent civil war that ensures no authority in Iran can rebuild itself for the foreseeable future”
“This alignment is the culmination of an imperialist project decades in the making”
“In 1996, reflecting on the aftermath of Hamas suicide bombings in an essay titled “The Campaign Against ‘Islamic Terror,’” Edward Said noted the “arrogan[ce]” of “the Israeli and American response, with its sanctimonious choruses against terrorism, Hamas, Islamic fundamentalism, and its equally odious hymns to peacemaking, the peace process, and the peace of the brave.” Said likewise saw through the emerging discourse around Iran, identifying its deeper structure: “Israel and the United States, deliberately using the weapons of mass media, psychological warfare, and political pressure, have . . . been leading a campaign against Islam (with Iran as its main agent) as the origin of terror and ‘fundamentalism.’” Said saw a cold war logic transposed to new ideological terrain, now “settled on ‘Islam’ as the manufactured opponent.””
“Iran today thus stands between the models of a Pinochet-style liberalized Chile and a NATO-style “liberated” Libya, entangled in what amounts to a political three-body problem. Where, in this dismal situation, should the left locate itself?”
“Attending equally to all these antagonisms—resisting the Pahlavist right and the state’s counterrevolutionary authoritarian project, while refusing imperialist solutions—leaves only a difficult and narrow space for any meaningful alternative”