People’s Resistance in Iran: Against National Tyranny and Regional Expansionism

TRANSLATED FROM FRENCH BY CHANELLE ADAMS

Ways of reading the role of the Islamic Republic of Iran within the internationalist Left often lead to strongly opposed perspectives, and the recent intensification of Israeli attacks may not help with this. The crucial question remains: who gets sacrificed from any opportunistic compromising with the Iranian regime? In this text, Somayeh Rostampour provides a few answers to this question: Syrians, Balochs, Kurds, as well as Iranian women, queer people, and the country’s working class.

Iran’s history is set in a particular context of anti-imperialist struggle, culminating in the 1979 Islamic Revolution. However, the leaders of this revolution emptied the struggle of popular and emancipatory content, transforming it into an instrument for the imposition of a policy which is semi-imperialist, capitalist, militarized, and bloody. I use the term “semi-imperialist” in this text to designate a strategy through which Iran seeks to extend influence and control over other countries, without, however, reaching levels of more classical imperialism practiced by historical colonial powers such as the United States and France.