Please note the following opinion piece has been written prior to the likely US military intervention in Iran. We must be absolutely clear that US military intervention has nothing to do with support for the oppressed masses in Iran. The US has been and is intent on making Iran a client state of US imperialism and of altering the regional balance of forces in the Middle East in ways that guarantee US and Israeli interests. All socialists and anti-imperialists are called on to do all they can to resist and oppose such intervention.
The following slogans sum up the position of ZASO:
No to US – Israeli Intervention in Iran!
No to the Monarchists!
Victory to the people and their uprising for democracy, justice and equality!
Iran, Imperialism and the Left: Why We Must Stand With Struggle From Below
A struggle is underway in Iran against a brutal and repressive theocratic regime. It is driven by deep social anger—against poverty, inequality, patriarchy, repression, and the systematic suffocation of democratic life. But it is also unfolding in a highly dangerous international context, where the world’s leading imperialist power in alliance with Zionist Israel is once again seeking to reduce Iran to the status of a client state, as it was before 1979.
The present situation in Iran cannot be understood without confronting the central role played by decades of US and Western sanctions and economic destabilisation. These measures have functioned as collective punishment, intensifying inflation, unemployment, and social precarity, hollowing out public provision, and placing the heaviest burdens on workers, women, and the poor. Far from weakening authoritarian rule, sanctions have entrenched elite power, narrowed political space, and contributed directly to the structural crisis now erupting in the streets. This pattern—familiar from Iraq and elsewhere—exposes the lie that imperial pressure promotes democracy.
Any serious left position must therefore hold two truths together. The struggle in Iran deserves active support and solidarity. At the same time, it is absolutely vital to oppose US and Israeli interference, destabilisation, and the constant threat of military intervention. Donald Trump’s renewed aggression toward Iran has nothing to do with human rights. It is about reasserting imperial dominance, reshaping the region in Washington’s interests, and restoring Iran to a subordinate role.
Yet sections of the left continue to argue that popular resistance and working-class struggle in Iran are geopolitically “inconvenient” and should therefore be disowned or denounced. This position—often cloaked in the language of anti-imperialism—treats oppressed people as objects of strategy rather than agents of change. In practice, it excuses repression while offering no credible path to resisting imperialism.
There is, however, real complexity that must be faced honestly. The threat posed by US imperialism is neither abstract nor exaggerated. Military attack is not just entirely possible, it is imminent. Western and Israeli intelligence agencies are actively seeking to influence events inside Iran. Reactionary forces—including monarchists and other right-wing currents—are attempting to manipulate the movement, redirect popular anger, and harness it to projects that would serve imperial interests rather than emancipatory ones. The left is fully aware of these dangers.
These external pressures intersect with severe internal constraints. The Iranian regime has constructed a repressive vice that restricts information flows, criminalises open organising, and has systematically crushed the left for decades. As a result, the forces capable of giving the movement clearer working-class leadership are weakened. Confusion, contradictions, and uneven political consciousness are therefore unavoidable.
Yet none of this negates the central fact: masses of people are once again taking to the streets, confronting economic hardship and demanding an end to tyranny. This is not a sudden revolt triggered by a technical economic shock, but the eruption of long-accumulated grievances rooted in a structural crisis of rule. The regime has been shaken before—and it is being shaken again.
No one can guarantee victory. Defeats are always possible. But the anger driving this movement is deep, legitimate, and durable. People who have lived for decades under repression are asserting their right to shape their own futures. The idea that socialists should seek to restrain or delegitimise such an outpouring, rather than engage with it, is both futile and reactionary.
More broadly, the Iranian uprising reflects the conditions of our time. We are living through a period of extreme volatility, in which the political parties and social movements capable of offering clear alternatives are far weaker than the crises they confront. In such conditions, struggles will emerge that fight for real and urgent objectives while also containing contradictions, illusions, and politically uneven elements.
Lenin understood this dynamic clearly. Reflecting on the Irish rebellion of 1916, he polemicised against those who dismissed it for failing to meet abstract revolutionary standards. Mass struggle, he insisted, is necessarily impure and contradictory; without it, no revolution is possible. The task of socialists is not to stand aloof and criticise, but to intervene with strategies capable of winning.
That lesson is decisive today. If the left responds to events in Iran by folding its arms and issuing cautious condemnations from a distance, it has abdicated its responsibilities. If the most effective opposition to imperialism we can imagine is a theocratic autocracy that fears its own people, then we have already lost.
The struggle in Iran must resist imperialist intervention—above all the US drive, now openly articulated by Trump, to once again subordinate the country to Western power. But resisting imperialism does not mean siding with repression. On the contrary, the only force capable of defeating both imperial domination and domestic tyranny is mass struggle from below.
