What follows is an analytical rewriting of our generation’s story: a generation that entered the arena with a dream of social justice, lived the 1979 Revolution up close, endured repression and exile, became disillusioned in the face of “actually existing socialism,” and ultimately, upon witnessing the prosperity of Western countries and the ascendancy of the neoliberal discourse, underwent a historical turn. This text seeks—out of the individual and collective experience of the Iranian left—to pursue some foundational questions:
What did the revolutionary left of the 1970s want? Why did it fail? How did it slide toward the center-right? How was the left’s “cultural brand” appropriated? And can a new left, drawing on its ethical and cultural legacy, once again become a social force in our country?

Perhaps it is best to begin with the period before the Revolution in Iran: who were the Iranian left? What did its various strands say? And how did the revolutionary left of the 1970s define justice, freedom, and capitalism? Where did the Iranian left stand on the global stage and what architecture did it intend to build? Where should we seek its lineage, and within what horizon did it pursue its world of aspirations? In reality, the Iranian left was the continuation of the same intellectual currents of the left on a global scale. In that historical period, two principal currents were present within the global left:

One was the so-called pro–Soviet left; in truth, those who supported the Soviet model of socialism. The other was a current that, after the rupture between the Chinese Communist Party and the Soviet Communist Party—especially after the rise of Khrushchev and the 20th Congress of the CPSU—declared that the Russian left had become “revisionist,” i.e., that it had revised Leninist and Stalinist doctrines and deviated from the main path.

Thereafter, a branch emerged worldwide that followed the thought of Mao Zedong; its slogan ran: “Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, the Thought of Mao Zedong.” They regarded Mao’s theory as the logical and revolutionary continuation of Marxism. The supporters of China even called the former Soviet Union “social-imperialist,” meaning that it wore a socialist face while reproducing imperial tendencies.

Alongside these, there was in Iran a current called the “independent left” which later saw the two dominant tendencies gain the upper hand within it. At its birth, this left neither counted itself as a supporter of Russian socialism—regarding the Tudeh Party, which represented that spectrum, as tailist, revisionist, and opportunist—nor did it align with the Chinese left; it argued the Chinese reading of Marxism was mistaken and Mao’s ideas were not truly compatible with Marxism-Leninism.

Part of these groups bore “Castrist” leanings: supporters of Castro or those influenced by the guerrilla movements then active in Latin America—such as the Tupamaros in Uruguay—and also by the ideas of Che Guevara in Bolivia, Cuba, Argentina, and Chile, as well as organizations like MIR in Chile and others. They were profoundly influenced by the idea of guerrilla warfare, and the Iranian representative of this tendency was the Organization of Iranian People’s Fedai Guerrillas—known in Iran at the end of the 1960s through names like Masoud Ahmadzadeh, Majid Ahmadzadeh, Amir-Parviz Pouyan, Saeed Arian, and a few other young figures.

Most of these youths were under thirty—some even twenty-two, twenty-three, or twenty-four. This generation was directly affected by those ideas and wrote within that same horizon: part translation—such as Régis Debray’s works on armed insurrection—and part original writing, such as Amir-Parviz Pouyan’s “The Necessity of Armed Struggle and the Refutation of the Theory of Survival” and Masoud Ahmadzadeh’s “Armed Struggle: Both Strategy and Tactics.” Gradually, a considerable number of youths and students joined them; and several figures still mentioned in the media as “the left”—such as Farrokh Negahdar, Mehdi Fattapour, and other survivors of that era—were supporters and prominent faces of that same guerrilla current. In the following years, differences emerged within this guerrilla group leading to multiple splits; groups broke away inside prisons and outside, before and after the Revolution—among them currents that rejected the guerrilla doctrine, from which new organizations emerged, like the Organization of Rah-e Kargar. Individuals such as Mohammad-Reza Shalgouni and others, while in prison, were critics of armed struggle; they opposed it yet also held serious critiques of the Soviet Union and the Tudeh Party.

Their angle of critique was to label the Soviet Union “revisionist,” i.e., to contend it had departed from Marxism-Leninism. In essence, their critique bore a more Stalinist character: a kind of return to the Stalin era and a preference for that period’s socialism over the socialisms of the Khrushchev and Brezhnev eras.

The Left on the Eve of the Great Revolution of February 1979

With such a configuration we entered the 1979 Revolution. In Iran, alongside these currents, other groups existed known as the “Third Line.” The most important among them was the Organization Peykar (Struggle) for the Emancipation of the Working Class. At the outset, this group split from the Mojahedin-e Khalq Organization (MEK)—following a very bloody and ugly internal coup staged by certain MEK elements like Vahid Afrokhteh and others. In that episode, they killed and even burned some of their own comrades within the MEK, then formed a group titled the “Marxist-Leninist Faction of the MEK.”

In 1975, they issued a statement that seemed influential but in practice was highly detrimental, because it deepened religious divides within the prisons and created rifts that, regrettably, later extended into bloody conflicts and bouts of revenge across the country. In truth, from the outset that organization planted the seeds of rancor, revenge, and physical elimination of opponents in the broader space of the country, among activists, and worst of all inside the prisons. After the Revolution, this mentality and method severely damaged the unity of Islamic and Marxist forces—both within the left and in relations between Marxists and militant Muslims in Iran. A chain of executions and score-settling after the Revolution had roots in that period—a matter I can elaborate on another time.

At any rate, they too were a current that became known as the “Third Line.” These groups accepted neither China nor the Soviet Union; neither Maoist nor pro-Soviet, they claimed distinct, independent theories—but what they offered was a mélange of Marxism and Maoism, and indeed the most backward discourses and models of the left then available, including support for Enver Hoxha in Albania or Kim Il-sung in North Korea. Smaller groups operated alongside them which went nowhere and were later absorbed into other currents—such as the Sahand group and a few others. For instance, Sahand was absorbed into Komala and, within that organization, helped to form a new party called the Communist Party of Iran. From those same currents later emerged the “Hekmatist” tendency, i.e., the supporters of Mansour Hekmat. After the broad crackdown on the left in the 1980s, these groups no longer had a serious presence in Iranian society, though it is said that during Ahmadinejad’s period Hekmatist currents—supporters of Mansour Hekmat and the Communist Party of Iran—became somewhat more active in certain spheres.

In that era, the core outlook of all left groups was defined by their analysis of capitalism and the capitalist economic system, and their shared goal was the establishment of a system in which society would enjoy an economically just order. Put simply, the left’s principal slogan and claim in Iran had always been social justice.

The Dream of Securing Social Justice

But by what path was social justice to be realized? Unlike certain religious outlooks and other intellectual schools, leftists believed economic justice would only be possible through structures and institutions themselves founded upon justice. By contrast, society under capitalism—because the means of production are concentrated in the hands of a small segment, namely the capitalists—results in the exploitation of workers. The outcome of this exploitation is what Marx called “surplus value”: value created in the production process that is accumulated by the capitalist. Capital accumulation, in effect, is the primary barrier to the realization of a just social order.

From the left’s perspective, to create a just society, capitalism in all its forms—private or state, even the moderated European versions like social democracy—must be abolished, because even the European welfare states, at their core, are capitalist and, in the eyes of the left, neither socialist nor just.

The Iranian left held that ultimately a socialist system must be realized: a system in which the ownership of the means of production is vested in workers or in the public. Under such conditions, exploitation disappears and the value produced through labor is distributed fairly among the people. Thus an egalitarian, classless society takes shape.

This was the shared, general definition of social justice across all left groups: the realization of a socialist order built on public ownership of the means of production and the abolition of the production of surplus value that fattened the capitalist daily while impoverishing the worker and widening class divides. All left forces ultimately regarded such a system as their economic ideal.

Politically, however, they differed.

The “Really Existing” Socialist Utopias

Some supported the Russian model (Soviet socialism), others preferred the Chinese model, and still others sought different templates. For example, some groups that later appeared—like the Party of Toilers of Iran (Hezb-e Ranjbaran) or smaller currents—looked to countries such as Enver Hoxha’s Albania. Abbas Milani, for instance—as he himself has said—was influenced by such groups in his youth when he returned to Iran and was arrested, and he regarded Albania’s system as a desirable model.

By contrast, we—supporters of the Tudeh Party—considered the Soviet Union the successful model and the “appropriate template” for realizing socialism in Iran. Some took China as their model, others Albania or even countries like Cambodia, and a number looked to Cuba as their preferred example. These were, in fact, the so-called socialist governments of that era—the actually existing socialist utopias—each of which some of us hoped to establish a version of.

Some of those countries no longer exist; others remain but with entirely different and novel faces. For example, today’s China is not the China of the 1970s nor the China of 1979 at the time of Iran’s Revolution. Therefore, someone who supported China then cannot claim the credit or legitimacy of today’s China for themselves; just as someone who supported the Soviet Union then is not necessarily today a supporter of Putin. Whatever political or economic order Russia has today—whether achievement or return—cannot be retroactively claimed by those who once supported the USSR.

But that era has passed. More than four decades separate us from those times, and those systems themselves have undergone profound internal transformations. Indeed, not only did those systems change fundamentally, but so too did their admirers, devotees, and enthusiasts.

A portion of those very figures of the former left now speak of market freedom, foreign investment, and cooperation with the West. Through what background and process did this change occur? Was it the result of reflection and intellectual transformation? Or the product of defeat, renunciation, and the effort to regain political position in a new global order?

The reality is that a significant share of the political and intellectual cadres of that era came from middle-class, upper-middle, and even sometimes affluent families in Iranian society. These very people founded the leftist organizations and groups of the time. One must note that those who sought to create institutions under the banner of socialism or to realize the socialist ideal themselves came out of social strata that had, in some cases, benefited from the economic and cultural advantages of pre-revolutionary society. Yet they pursued a kind of moral and social ideal for which, in truth, they had no concrete, lived experience. They pursued models they had never seen up close—neither the Soviet Union, nor Mao’s China, nor Castro’s Cuba. What they carried in mind was a mixture of readings, hear-say, and political-moral imaginings.

My Dream of Socialism

I wrote a book titled My Dream of Socialism—and I chose that name deliberately, because the socialism I had in mind was, in fact, more the product of my own dreams and desires. The socialism I sought perhaps matched none of the socialist systems of that era—neither the USSR, nor China, nor Albania, nor Cuba. What I held in mind was the construct of an impassioned, justice-seeking young Iranian’s imagination—someone who had heard things, held hopes, and built an ideal world in his mind—a world he called “socialism.”

To realize this very dream I entered political struggle, leaned toward a particular party, and imagined that vision of socialism had been realized in countries like the Soviet Union, China, or Albania. But in reality, what existed was a dream, not reality: a dream of justice, freedom, and equality that had taken shape in the minds of the young generation of that era—a generation with no concrete experience of the socialist world and no precise understanding of its actual mechanisms, yet in search of a human, ethical meaning of justice, which it named: socialism.

In any case, this young Iranian—armed with that hope and faith—participated in a revolution in 1979, a revolution that was undoubtedly one of the greatest in modern world history. In those days, millions filled the streets; people chanted, workers went on strike, oil valves were shut, factory sirens blared, and the very aspirations we held of a revolution—that the working class would rise, production would halt, and the political system would collapse—were, in practice, realized. A great social revolution occurred. In the early years after victory, there truly was a kind of hope and revolutionary fervor in society: land reform, nationalization of large industries, the creation of the Jihad-e Sazandegi and the Literacy Movement—initiatives that, in many eyes, resembled the ideals that communists and socialists elsewhere had sought to realize.

A Dream Soaked in Blood

But that fervor and hope did not last. After a few years, as internal political conflicts widened, leftist currents were suppressed one after another. First came the turn of the more radical currents—like Peykar, Rah-e Kargar, and similar groups. Then the repression reached into the Organization of Iranian People’s Fedai Guerrillas, which itself had undergone splits: Majority, Minority, the 16 Azar group, and other branches. Ultimately, the wave reached the father of all these political currents in Iran, the Tudeh Party—a party rooted decades before the Revolution in Iran’s intellectual and labor life. Initially tolerated in the post-revolutionary atmosphere, it was then severely crushed like the rest. Many of its activists went to prison, some were executed, and many were forced into migration—to the USSR, Eastern Europe, Germany, France, and elsewhere. In this way, the dream of that generation for an “Iranian socialism,” which had begun with such passion and conviction, was finally extinguished in the fires of repression, exile, and disillusionment.

The Socialist Shock

If we look at the post-crackdown diaspora, this wave mostly occurred in the 1980s (1360s): roughly from 1981 to 1986–87, a large wave of Iranian political activists—especially from the left and communist ranks—left the country. Those who were imprisoned or executed had a known fate; but many others—including former leaders of the Fedai guerrillas such as Farrokh Negahdar and their leadership cadres, and many former Tudehis—migrated, with the primary destination the Soviet Union, once the “Ka‘ba of aspiration” and a symbol of their socialist hopes.

Yet upon arrival many encountered a reality starkly different from the image of the “socialist paradise.” Doubt took root in their minds—doubt about the very picture they had for years constructed of that paradise. I myself never went to the Soviet Union because I was arrested at that time and imprisoned; but four or five members of my family did—among them my sister and her husband, who had been an advisory member to the Tudeh Party’s Central Committee. When they arrived, they faced scenes that were shocking. Their mentality of a “brother party” and “Soviet comrades” quickly collapsed. They found a powerful, bureaucratic state—not a fraternal society. It became clear that the USSR was a rigid political and hierarchical regime—with Brezhnev at the helm as leader of a superpower, and next to him figures such as Andropov, head of the KGB, one of the world’s largest intelligence and security apparatuses. In such a structure, a handful of Tudehi refugees from Iran had neither a real place nor a sense of communist fraternity and political equality. Many asked: “Why are we not treated like younger brothers? Why are we not considered equal citizens? Are we not leaders and cadres of a brother party?”

Life in the Land of Soviets

The main shock came with daily life. Homes, streets, shops, hospitals—everything diverged from their mental picture. My sister had given birth to her first child at Qaem Hospital in Mashhad—then one of the most modern medical centers in the Middle East, with hundreds of beds, advanced equipment, and a clean, organized environment. When she went to Baku for her second delivery, she wrote to my mother: “The needles they use for injections are like awls, driven like a nail into the body, leaving marks that last three months with unforgettable pain. The hospital ‘bed,’ as I described it, was a cemented slab with a stretched cover—more like the stone slab of a mortuary than the warm metal beds of Qaem.” She delivered her daughter on a tiled platform in a Baku hospital that had been our dreamlike “Azerbaijan.” For someone coming from a city like Mashhad—modern, with hospitals and amenities for the middle class—this was unbelievable. Iran, at least in its big cities—Tehran, Mashhad, Tabriz, Isfahan, Shiraz—had a relatively modern face in the 1970s; the urban middle class enjoyed a level of comfort unavailable in many Soviet republics. Thus many Iranian leftist émigrés, upon entering the USSR, felt they had come from a country more advanced than the one they had idealized. It was a bitter, awakening experience—the moment the “dream” lost its color forever and gave way to the cold, empty reality of “actually existing socialism.”

The USSR’s Most Difficult Years

In the 1980s, the Soviet Union was passing through one of the most crisis-ridden, exhausting phases in its history. It was embroiled in an arms race with the United States—Reagan’s “Star Wars” initiative dragged the USSR into an economically ruinous field. Military spending rose to levels that a half-worn Soviet economy could no longer bear. Had you entered the USSR in the 1960s, you might truly have seen cities like Moscow and Leningrad as more advanced and orderly than many in Western Europe. At that time, urban Soviet living standards—in infrastructure, education, public transport, even social services—were in some cases comparable to or higher than countries like Spain and Portugal, and in some respects to parts of Scandinavia. As a Swedish friend of mine—a senior World Bank official—once said: “In the 1960s, Sweden, Norway, and Denmark could not hold a candle to the USSR; in many industrial and social indicators, the USSR was ahead.” But from the 1970s onward, the trend reversed; the economy stagnated, the military competition and massive state bureaucracy exhausted society, and its gap with Europe and the West grew each year.

In such conditions, the idealistic young Iranian socialist arrived—not in Moscow or Leningrad, but often in peripheral, less-developed republics and cities like Tashkent, Ashgabat, Dushanbe, Bishkek, or Samarkand. Some even went, under harsh and tumultuous circumstances, to Afghanistan—precisely when that country was mired in a devastating war between the mujahideen and the Soviet army. What they experienced of “socialism” was not the paradise of justice and equality they had imagined, but a picture of poverty, inequality, shortages, and intense political control. In short order, the process of socialist collapse began: first Afghanistan, then Eastern Europe, and finally the USSR itself. Consequently, many of these activists and their families undertook a second migration—this time to the West: Germany, France, Britain, and especially Scandinavia—Sweden, Denmark, and Norway. There they entered societies at the zenith of economic and social flourishing: welfare states with civil liberties, advanced public services, and comfortable living standards. For many, the contrast between the “dreamt socialism” and the “real social democracy” produced a profound cultural and intellectual shock—because what they saw in Northern Europe was closer to justice, freedom, and human dignity than anything they had experienced in the East.

The Zenith of Western Capitalism

In the 1980s and into the 1990s, the world witnessed the economic apex and political ascendancy of Western capitalist countries. The USSR was collapsing, the socialist world was internally exhausted, and, by contrast, Europe and the United States advanced with steady growth, new technologies, and unprecedented social welfare.

During this very period, a great wave of Iranian political migrants—especially leftists—entered European countries. But they carried three heavy, conflicting experiences:

1. repression in Iran—prison, execution, censorship, torture, exile;
   
2. life in socialist or quasi-socialist systems—USSR, Afghanistan, or Central Asian republics—marked by scarcity, corruption, and party despotism;
   
3. fresh life in Europe—free, prosperous societies with dynamic economies and robust welfare.
   

This threefold contrast generated a deep intellectual-emotional shock. Someone who had lived a middle-class life in Mashhad, Shiraz, or Tehran, found life harsher and more rudimentary in the USSR and Afghanistan, and now entered Sweden, Germany, or France—societies superior and calmer in every respect.

Enchantment and a Shift in Political Mentality

Naturally, this comparative experience produced a kind of enchantment and transformation in political mentality—an admiration and respect for democratic systems, the market economy, and Western welfare. Many left-leaning intellectuals gradually shifted from criticizing capitalism to justifying and defending it—or at least saying, “If there is to be any socialism, it should look like these Scandinavian countries.”

At the same time, an important intellectual-discursive shift unfolded inside Iran. The 1990s (1370s) were the era of reformism, modernity, critique of tradition, dialogue among civilizations, democracy, and human rights. Through the relative political opening under President Mohammad Khatami, these concepts spread in society. As a result, that very generation—expelled from within and disillusioned by Eastern socialism—recast its discourse to survive in the new space and to compete with its political rivals inside the country.

The banner of “socialism” could no longer be raised; socialism had just collapsed, its legitimacy had evaporated, and no serious political force wished to identify with that label. In this context, a new banner was hoisted: neoliberalism and the free market.

Globally, Francis Fukuyama’s “End of History” proclaimed that humanity’s path henceforth would be one: liberal capitalism and the free market. In Iran too, many formerly left forces, to redefine themselves politically, began adjusting to the new global discourse.

Interestingly, this metamorphosis wasn’t confined to former leftists. Inside Iran, the so-called “Line of the Imam” currents—once standard-bearers of anti-imperialism and defenders of the downtrodden—gradually underwent the same discursive shift. Students who once scaled the walls of the U.S. embassy later took posts in the Ministry of Intelligence or the regime’s think tanks; some, like Saeed Hajjarian, became theorists of “religious democracy” and reformism.

In other words, just as the émigré left moved toward neoliberal-democratic discourse to re-establish itself in the West, a localized version of this turn took shape inside Iran in the form of reformism and religious democracy. On both sides, a common goal existed: political survival through adaptation to the new global order.

What occurred in this period was, in fact, the historical turning point by which the Iranian left shifted from left to right—not necessarily at the level of party organizations, but in intellectual, class, and discursive orientation. In the 1990s and early 2000s, many former leftist intellectuals and activists encountered a new Iranian arena—debates about modernity, development, civil society, human rights, democracy, reform. These concepts were undoubtedly significant; yet, politically, they also served as a theoretical cover for accepting the global neoliberal order.

From Left to Right with the Banner of Modernity and “The End of History”

The Iranian left, which had previously seen itself as bearer of socialist ideals, gradually entered an intellectual field in which neoliberalism and cultural Westernism were presented under the rubrics of “modernity” and “democracy-seeking.” Meanwhile, Fukuyama’s “End of History” became the dominant global discourse: liberal capitalism was presented as the end of humanity’s journey and every alternative as “pre-historical.”

Former leftists, now within this new framework—often with their old zeal but reversed in direction—began defending the free market, privatization, globalization, and integration into the global capitalist order. Instead of critiquing globalization, the defeated Iranian left began praising it—a shift from justice-seeking to accommodation with the prevailing discourse of privatization and globalization.

A Psychological and Class Shift

This change was not merely theoretical; it grew out of lived experience and the social class of that generation. They had come from middle or affluent families, found more orderly, comfortable lives in the West, and, almost unconsciously, experienced a return to their original class position.

That return was accompanied by three historical shocks: repression in Iran; the bitter experience of state socialism in the USSR and Afghanistan; and the observed prosperity and success of Western economies in the 1980s. Through these three major shocks—and a return to class origins—a transformation took shape in the minds of that émigré Iranian left: an attraction to advanced capitalist systems—systems no longer enemies but the very models of rationality, modernity, and efficiency.

From the Language of Justice to the Language of Competition

In this process, concepts like “working class,” “exploitation,” and “social justice” gave way to words such as “development,” “competition,” “investment,” and “free market.” The former left, to reconstitute itself, spoke the language and values of the global right. Thus, at best, it turned into a quasi-left variant of Iranian neoliberal reformism—a current fascinated by the West and neoliberalism in discourse and practice, for whom only a nostalgic memory of leftism remained.

Final Outcome: Forgetting the Ideal, Preserving the Label

It is fair to say that today a large segment of this generation—so as to preserve political credit and identity—still invokes its “leftist past,” yet in political behavior, economic outlook, and future aspirations, shows no trace of being left at all. They have neither a concern for equality nor class justice, nor a critique of private ownership of the means of production. Today they appear as moderate reformists, market-oriented technocrats, or theorists of religious democracy.

In other words, through migration, repression, and historical defeat, Iran’s left slipped from the ideal of justice to a discourse of accommodation and eventually returned to politics under the flag of neoliberalism and Western modernity—not as an alternative, justice-seeking force, but merely as an in-system critic.

1) Ideological Defeat and “Taking Refuge with the Victor”

What occurred among many émigré Iranian leftists was a syndrome of ideological defeat. After three decisive experiences—suppression and elimination at home; the failure and collapse of actually existing socialism; and observing the West’s economic and technological superiority—they concluded that, not only politically but civilizationally, they had stood in the wrong camp.

This sense of defeat, for many, led to a kind of mental and cultural submission—akin to what Japan experienced after its military defeat by the United States: a voluntary acceptance of the victor’s cultural, economic, and even linguistic models.

For Iran’s once left-leaning milieu, this submission meant embracing neoliberalism, cultural Westernism, and moral relativism. To survive in global conversation and find a new place, the former left redefined itself within the capitalist camp.

But why do these individuals and currents still call themselves “left”?

Are They Still “Left”?

The short answer is no—at least not in the political-philosophical sense. If we define the left by three principles—(1) critique of private ownership of the means of production; (2) defense of social equality and economic justice; (3) struggle against class and imperial domination—then most of these individuals no longer fit within that framework.

They may call themselves “cultural left” or “social liberals,” but in theoretical and ethical terms they have joined the center-right or neoliberal currents.

In Iran, the “left” label remains a kind of symbolic capital for part of the intelligentsia—a sign of a history of struggle, moral sincerity, and idealistic living. For that reason many who today, in practice, defend the market economy, privatization, and globalization still call themselves “left” or “social democrats,” while their content is wholly right-wing.

This kind of “surface leftism” is, in reality, a form of political marketing—not the ethical or philosophical continuance of the left tradition.

Ties with Reformism in Iran

Inside the country the same pattern recurred. The so-called “reformist” camp, for all its apparent diversity, is in fact composed of two opposed strands:

On one side, a technocratic–Kargozaran wing with figures like Mor‘ashi, Karbaschi, Mohajerani, or Tajzadeh, which in practice leans toward the free market, neoliberalism, and cooperation with global capital;
On the other side, a more justice-oriented, intellectual tendency like Alavitabar and Behzad Nabavi and the Bokharaei-type figures, who still maintain concerns for social justice—though within a reformist, not revolutionary, frame.

These two look like one camp but differ 180 degrees in foundation: the former is essentially center-right; the latter an “ethical left.” The result is that reformism in Iran, rather than a coherent intellectual project, has become a contradictory coalition, sometimes empty of ideals.

Hence when someone who believes in the free market, global neoliberalism, and Fukuyamian thinking still calls themselves “left” or “socialist,” it is no longer a political position—it is symbolic, opportunistic behavior.

To be left, if it means anything, must appear as a commitment to justice, equality, and critique of the structures of power and capital—not as a memory of the past or a flourish of intellectual prose.

We are faced with a phenomenon one might call the “neoliberal left” or the “harmless left”: a current that uses the words justice and freedom but in practice yields to market theories and the global order of capital.

In such circumstances, the claim to be left is not only a theoretical error; it is an ethical insincerity.

Politics as a Market Without Accountability

Unfortunately, unlike the commodity market, politics lacks a court of honesty. In markets, if someone sells a product under a false label, the law calls it forgery and punishes it; but in the political market there is no ethical or legal mechanism to adjudicate between claim and practice.

Politicians everywhere—from America to Iran—sell brands, not truth. And when their promises turn into their opposite, no institution tries them for “political fraud.” In politics, if a lie wins votes, it becomes legitimate.

Surface Left, Practical Right

This phenomenon fits the Iranian left exactly. Those who today defend privatization, foreign investment, and the neoliberal global order while calling themselves “justice-seeking” and “left” are that same counterfeit chocolate with a tempting label.

If honest, they should say: “We once were left, but today we believe in capitalism and the free market, because socialism failed and we now see this as the more rational path.” In that case, dialogue becomes possible; everyone knows where they stand. But when someone speaks of justice while defending competition and capital accumulation, the issue is no longer merely political—it is ethical.

A Crisis of Intellectual Candor

In democratic countries—even within capitalism—intellectual and class boundaries are clear: in Germany, Social Democrats and Christian Democrats differ fundamentally; in the U.S., though both parties operate within capitalism, their class bases and economic discourses are distinct.

In Iran, everything is blended: reformist, justice-seeker, liberal, religious reformist, technocrat—all in one arena, without intellectual candor. “Reformism,” from Mor‘ashi and Karbaschi to Tajzadeh, bears a single name yet spans neoliberalism to an ethical left. The result is that people do not know what force with what position they face. We genuinely cannot easily discern people’s true political stances because they do not state them plainly.

The Truth-Telling Politician: A Rare Commodity

If someone has truly changed position, let them say with intellectual courage and moral honesty: “I am no longer left.” Such an admission is not weakness; it is maturity.

But many Iranian politicians, rather than frankness, play language games—repeating words like justice, freedom, civil society—cashing in on their past to hide a contrary present.

In politics, only one test reveals the truth: economic behavior and practical stance. Whoever defends privatization and the market, by whatever color or title, stands in the right-wing camp; whoever fights for social justice and economic equality stands in the left-wing camp.

Though politics has no court, the public conscience must play judge. An informed society must distinguish between claim and practice and open every package of ideas, smell and taste it, to know whether inside lies chocolate or stone.

In the end, as I said, the Iranian left today is more brand-making than ideal-seeking—a left not out to change the existing order but to find a place within it.

Crony Capitalism

In post-revolutionary Iran, those who today call themselves “center-left” or “justice-minded reformists” are, in practice, backers and partners of an economic system that over three decades—through privatization, structural corruption, and rent-seeking monopolies—has deepened poverty.

If you defend a system that was laid down under Rafsanjani, institutionalized under Khatami, reached its peak under Rouhani, and continues today under Pezeshkian with the same logic—and this system has transferred billions of dollars of public resources into the pockets of power circles and quasi-state firms—and you still stand with these forces, then in no serious sense can you consider yourself on the left.

Figures such as Rouhani and Zarif, Mohammad-Reza Nematzadeh, Hossein Fereydoun, Eshaq Jahangiri, Gholamhossein Karbaschi, Mohammad Nahavandian, Ali Mirzakhani, Saeed Laylaz, Mor‘ashi, and Mohsen Nourbakhsh, and the economic networks around them (and the technocrats of earlier governments) attest to a reality: these currents have effectively operated in coalition with Iran’s state-capitalist, rent-seeking institutions. This is precisely the phenomenon known in political sociology as crony capitalism. If one is a political or intellectual partner of forces that have justified destructive privatizations, the transfer of national companies, the cheap sale of public assets, and structural corruption, that person is no longer left—even if they speak of justice. Justice without a critique of ownership is not justice; and the left without struggle against accumulation and rent is not left.

Regrettably, Iranian politics has no intellectual or ethical court to judge who tells the truth and who sells counterfeit goods; history, however, renders such judgments sooner or later.

Whoever proudly sits alongside those who defend rent-seeking privatization and unregulated capitalism and still calls themselves “left” is not merely lying; they betray the collective conscience of a generation.

To be left is not a label—it is a commitment: a commitment to justice, equality, the defense of workers and the dispossessed, and resistance to the unbridled accumulation of capital and power.

Whoever defends a system that tramples these commitments—even if an “old friend and comrade”—is, in intellectual and ethical terms, no longer left; to be precise, they have taken refuge in the opposing camp.

The West Question

Another salient marker of today’s political currents in Iran is the question of relations with the West. The issue, of course, is not “relations with the West” per se; it is the nature of that relationship. The difference between an equal, respectful relationship and a subordinate, one-sided one has, throughout modern history, separated the stance of an independent left from dependent and opportunist forces.

The independent left, as I said, emphasizes engagement without submission. Unfortunately, many former leftist intellectuals and activists in Iran, after historical defeat and disillusionment, have adopted a mindset of submission toward the West. In their discourse one hears that whatever comes from the West is “progress,” and whatever comes from the Global South or the East is “backwardness.” They claim to pursue development, but for them development has only one meaning: integration into the circuits of global capitalism.

Ignoring the Global South

Yet today the world has clearly entered a phase of geo-economic and ideological bifurcation: on one side, the pole of late capitalist powers (the U.S., EU, Japan); on the other, the bloc of the Global South—China, Brazil, India, South Africa, Indonesia, Mexico, Iran, Turkey, and many more.

Within this front, countries like Brazil (under Lula), Venezuela (under Chávez and Maduro), Bolivia (under Evo Morales) and other left-wing governments in Latin America are striving to fuse democratic socialism and economic independence with a justice-oriented globalization.

But much of Iran’s former left, instead of engaging with this global current, has placed itself alongside the neoliberal West and Fukuyama’s “End of History.”

For this group, closeness to China, Russia, India, or Latin America is a sign of backwardness; whereas for real leftists worldwide, these countries represent a historical bloc of resistance against Western economic domination.

The Neoliberalized Iranian Left and the Crisis of Intellectual Independence

This current, as noted, defends privatization and capitalism domestically and unconditional alignment with the West abroad. In other words: inside, it is pro-market; outside, pro-Western hegemony. All that remains of the left is the “word.”

Some former Fedai and Tudehi figures who today defend political liberalism, a market economy, and closeness to the West are, in truth, representatives of a disarmed left—a left that has lost its intellectual and class independence and, for survival, redefined itself within the dominant global order. Unlike the left elsewhere.

In Latin America, this did not happen. The left there—even after military and economic defeats—continued to insist on justice, anti-imperialism, and economic independence; in Iran, by contrast, much of the left, after exile and defeat, became followers of the global right rather than rebuilding the ideal of justice.

Without Independence, There Is No Left

To be left does not mean enmity with the West; but it does not mean dependence either. A real left must be both anti-despotism and anti-domination; it must stand against internal authoritarianism and global imperialism alike.

When someone defends relations in which Iran must only “yield and comply”; when they defend circles of domestic capitalism that have plundered the people; and while doing so still call themselves “left”—in truth, they are either lying or have lost themselves.

Precisely put: a left without independence is not left; it is the agent of the global capitalist order dressed in the garb of justice.

The Future of the Neoliberalized Left

This current—whether in Iran or globally—is no longer left; it is the “safe left” for capital: like Tony Blair in Britain or Gerhard Schröder in Germany, who turned Labour and the Social Democrats into the political arm of the free market. In Iran, this spectrum—a blend of former leftists and technocratic reformists—has, ultimately, become part of the regime’s managerial class and the new oil-rent bourgeoisie. Socially, it has lost its base: the working class does not trust it, nor justice-seeking intellectuals, nor even the young generation following politics via social media. In Iran’s political future, if these forces remain, they will mostly act as brokers of power transfer in periods of transition, not carriers of an alternative project. At best, their function is to preserve the status quo in the language of reformism.

Can a New Left Take Shape?

The historical left of Iran (party-centric, ideological, aligned with world blocs) has nearly vanished, but a social, ethical, justice-seeking left remains alive in society:

• in scattered labor movements;
  
• in protests by teachers, nurses, and retirees;
  
• in small intellectual and environmental circles;
  
• and among a new generation of thinkers equally repelled by political despotism and corrupt capitalism.
  

This generation may no longer quote Marx and Engels, but its concern is the same: justice, equality, human dignity, and national independence. If the future Iranian left is to endure, it must:

• distance itself from past ideologisms and model-building incompatible with our people’s culture and life, and return to a locally grounded, experience-based vision of social justice;
  
• avoid tailing global powers (West or East) and maintain intellectual independence;
  
• and, instead of slogans, be present in the real arenas of people’s lives—workplaces, education, neighborhoods, and media.
  

3) Final Synthesis

A large segment of the neoliberalized left is on a path of decline and full absorption into the center-right—just as Tony Blair dragged Labour to the right, these figures have reduced the left to an appendage of political reformism and economic conservatism. But a new left, if it is to be born, will arise from a young generation distrustful of power and capital—not from those older circles that have tied their future to political reformism and economic conservatism.

In Iran’s future, the only left that can carry meaning is a left that is independent, national, ethical, and anti-discrimination—one that stands simultaneously against rentier capitalism and political despotism. Simply put: if the future left survives, it will no longer be found in the cafés of Paris and London; it will be in workshops and factories, in schools and universities, in working-class neighborhoods and streets—where justice still has meaning.

A Jaded Left at Its Expiry Date

In my view, what today is called the “neoliberal left,” the “NATO left,” or the “capitulating left” has, in practice, reached the end of its historical life. This current is no longer a meaningful social force and is consuming the last of our generation’s historical credit. As time passes and the older generation leaves active life, this hollow left will naturally die out: it has neither class roots, nor intellectual depth, nor moral legitimacy.

Hence each time the official media place one of its faces in the shop window, they are using the “historical brand of Iran’s left” to decorate the visage of the neoliberal order—not to represent social justice.

The Need to Transfer Historical Credit to the Young

And yet, even now, a new left can be born in Iran. Inside the country there are still people—workers, teachers, nurses, students, writers, translators, artists—who sincerely seek a socially just order. If these young forces can connect themselves to the brilliant cultural and justice-seeking tradition of Iran’s left and to our proud history, they can fashion fresh ethical and intellectual capital out of that legacy.

They must be able to say:

We are the heirs and continuers of the struggles of Iranian workers, peasants, and women who, for the first time in the Middle East, raised the banner against old colonialism and succeeded in making the greatest political, social, and cultural impacts on our country’s modern history.
We are the heirs of Nima, Shamlu, Keyvan, Kessrā’i, Ebtahāj, and Dowlatabadi, Sa‘edi, Golshiri, and Shahriari.
We are the continuers of justice-seeking and humanism, rooted in the literature, art, and culture of this land.

If reconstructed properly, this link with the past will separate the new left from the jaded left and grant it public credibility, trust, and respect—the three capitals without which no political organization endures.

A New Historical Ground for the Left’s Emergence

Today Iran stands on the brink of economic crisis, erosion of political legitimacy, and the collapse of class cohesion. In such circumstances, Iranian society needs a coherent justice-seeking voice more than ever. Yet for now, the media and political space is dominated by a symphony of left-baiting—from official media to elite circles that equate any talk of equality with “totalitarianism” or “backwardness.”

Nevertheless, behind this intellectual repression, the seeds of a return of the ideas of justice and equality are sprouting.

After the Islamic Republic’s Crisis Recedes

So long as “the Islamic Republic” remains the sole focus of public attention, all political forces are defined around opposition to or support for it. But if this issue, in any form, recedes—whether through gradual transformation or structural change—then the real problems of Iranian society will surface: poverty, inequality, structural corruption, environmental crisis, unemployment, wages, ownership, and resource distribution.

At that moment, cultural and superficial slogans (such as dress codes) will cease to be decisive. Then the new left can—and must—place a platform of social justice on the table and build a social force from those who are genuinely stakeholders in these demands: workers, the toiling strata, the exhausted middle class, and the young, educated, and disillusioned generation.

Concluding Remarks

The neoliberal, jaded left has reached the end of the road and is used only in the shop window of the existing order. But a new left, if it can recover its ethical and historical roots and draw capital from the cultural and intellectual heritage of earlier generations, can once again become one of the principal actors in Iran’s future—not as a closed ideology, but as the voice of justice, dignity, and social rationality.

In the truest sense: the expiration date of the capitulating left has passed; the era of the need for justice has not yet begun. And that day will be the day of the new left in our land.

Reza Fani Yazdi
November 3, 2025