“A riot of democracy”: the Iranian Revolution of 1979 from triumph to tragedy

The Iranian revolution of 1979 is surrounded by myths, distortions and falsehoods. It is widely assumed in academic histories and in contemporary media to be an “Islamic” revolution, its outcomes said to be testimony to the negative influence of Islam as a religion and evidence of the threatening character of Muslim activists and their role in the Middle East and in global affairs. The revolutionary upheaval was in fact an assertion of anti-imperialist energies among the mass of the Iranian population, of workers’ collective power, and of aspirations for a radical alternative to the United States-backed regime of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. This article addresses developments in Iran in the 1970s, the triumphs and tragedies of the mass movement, and its implications for imperialist strategies and growing hostility to Islam in the West.

In 2026, the 1979 revolution came into focus as Donald Trump directed attacks on Iranian leaders he called “deranged scumbags”.1 He said that they were members of a regime that had been killing innocent people all over the world for 47 years, adding: “Now…I am killing them. What a great honour it is to do so”.2 Following the suppression of mass demonstrations by the Iranian state, Trump promised the Iranian people: “Help is on its way”.3 Iran’s leaders were Nazis, he said, “evil people” who would be eliminated by US forces.4 Help came in the form of US-Israeli bombardments, which began in February 2026 and claimed 3,600 lives within two months.5 Meanwhile, Trump’s Israeli allies also invoked the threat of fascism, attacking Iran and invading Lebanon at a cost of 2,000 deaths.6 Trump and his backers had long prepared for these assaults. In 2019, on the 40th anniversary of the revolution, then US national security adviser John Bolton told Iranian leaders they would not have many more anniversaries to enjoy—“a comment immediately perceived as a direct threat of war”.7 For much of the foreign policy establishment, and for politicians such as Bolton and Trump, Iran is unfinished business. The revolution of 1979 had been a disaster for the US—a humiliation heaped on defeat and retreat from Vietnam a few years earlier. The fall of the shah, its ally, after months of mass strikes, followed by the “hostage crisis”—when scores of US diplomats in Tehran were seized by student activists—left the CIA and American political leaders in despair. Generations of US politicians have since sought revenge and the restoration of American influence in a state they still view as integral to their interests in the Middle East. In February 2026, after decades of isolating Iran by use of sanctions, by targeting its leaders with assassinations, and by periodically using ariel attacks, they turned to open warfare. The Times commented: “For America, the Iran war has been 50 years in the making. Donald Trump is of a generation still scarred by the embassy hostage crisis in 1979 that defined US-Iranian enmity. It was a humiliation he has never forgotten”.8

“Unthinkable” insurrection

The events of 1979 were a nightmare for US strategists. They had poured resources into the Pahlavi regime, which they saw as a base from which to secure energy resources in the Gulf region and to pursue Cold War initiatives in what they called an “arc of crisis” extending from South Asia to the Horn of Africa, with states of the Middle East as its “central core”.9 The US faced an “unthinkable” insurrection, writes Charles Kurzman:

A seemingly stable regime, led by a monarch with decades of experience, buoyed by billions of dollars in oil exports, girded with a fearsome security apparatus and the largest military in the region, and favoured by the support of the world’s most powerful countries­­—how could such a regime fall?10

The answer lay in sustained action against the regime: the revolution was a mass popular movement with, at its heart, strikes of industrial workers that paralysed the Pahlavi state. It also engaged millions of people among Iran’s national minorities, notably the Kurds, Turkoman and Baluch, and stimulated “spillover” effects across the Gulf region. The revolution was contagious, inspiring activists in Iraq to challenge the Baathist regime and in Saudi Arabia to launch an uprising in the eastern province, the heart of the oil industry.11 US strategy for the Gulf was in disarray. One outcome was bitter wrangling among CIA officials and in the American foreign policy establishment about who “lost” Iran.12

Expulsion of the shah in January 1979 and collapse of his apparatus of repression were triumphs for the mass movement, facilitating what Shaul Bakhash calls a “riot of participatory democracy” as workplace committees and neighbourhood groups mushroomed—developments that echoed historic revolutionary upheavals worldwide.13 But the movement also faced profound problems as clerical networks projected Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to leadership of a new political order that suppressed the strikes and targeted secular activists. Organisations of the left, which had drawn wide support, were “effectively and comprehensively defeated”, says Maziar Behrooz.14 The magnitude of the defeat was so great, he observes, that many survivors of Khomeini’s repression abandoned active political life or were confined to scattered groups in exile.15 The left has since been forced to the margins of Iranian politics. What are the conclusions for a new generation of activists and for revolutionary socialists worldwide as the people of Iran come under renewed assault from both the regime in Tehran and US imperialism?

Workers and revolution

Many accounts of the 1979 revolution focus on the role of the ulema (the “learned”)—the Shia clergy—often to the extent that the agency of the Iranian masses is merely incidental. Typical is the proposition of French orientalist Gilles Kepel that the success of the revolution in deposing the shah was an outcome of “Khomeini’s extraordinary ability [to fuse] the revolutionary clerics with the young Islamist intellectuals”.16 So too in assessments by Olivier Roy, who argues that “the originality of the Iranian revolution lies in alliance between the Islamist intelligentsia and a part of the clergy”.17 The revolutionary movement, however, was a mass phenomenon, one of the great participatory movements of the 20th century. Behrooz writes: “What was unique about the coalition [against the Pahlavi regime] was that it included almost all social classes and political forces, whether tied to Islamists or not”.18 This was a popular movement—a “people’s” movement—ranged against the despotism. But different components of the movement played radically different roles. What brought the Pahlavi autocracy to an end were strikes of industrial workers. In a unique account of workers’ struggles during the revolution, Assef Bayat observes, referencing Lenin, that from September 1978 to February 1979, mass strikes had the effect that “all wheels stood still”.19 During 1977 and the early months of 1978, street protests had ended in pitched battles against riot police and the army. In October 1978, when the government declared martial law, “the revolutionary movement assumed a new momentum…and the dynamism of the revolutionary process changed radically”.20 The initiative came from 40,000 oil workers, 40,000 steel workers and 30,000 railworkers. Subsequently, hundreds of thousands in manufacturing plants, printworks, transport hubs, banks and government offices across the country stopped work: “With every day there were new strikes”.21 Eli Rostami-Povey recalls: “Banks, schools, railways, internal flights, post offices, newspapers, universities, offices, oil refineries, car factories and petrochemical plants—all ground to a halt. The strikes—especially the participation of 30,000 oil workers, 100,000 government employees and 5,000 bank clerks—inspired the rest of the population”.22

Strikes combined economic and political demands: the oil workers, for example, demanded improved conditions for offshore crews, nationalisation of the energy industry, an end to martial law, an end to discrimination against women workers and the freeing of all political prisoners. Their increasing confidence grew from—and stimulated—the mass movement: “The organisation of strikes by the oil workers could continue only in the context of a total revolutionary movement. And, in turn, such a movement could defeat the regime only with the support of the oil workers”.23

When fuel shortages intensified as a result of the strikes, writes Peyman Jafari, ordinary people began to experience the impact of the stoppages and “oil became a key transmitter of revolutionary consciousness”.24 When the shah fell, oil workers’ action groups became a launch pad for the establishment of workplace and neighbourhood committees.25 Maryam Poya notes that they provided the core of the leadership of new workers’ organisations, the shoras (councils), which “began to exercise power at every level of factory life”.26

In January 1979, the shah was forced to leave Iran. Shoras proliferated: “The working class, having gone so far, did not want to stop”, writes Poya.27 A process of permanent revolution was unfolding, as workers across the country challenged the power of capital.28 In March 1979, the revolution reached its high point. The Founding Council of the Iranian National Workers Union established links between workplace shoras, declaring: “We, the workers of Iran, through our strikes, sit-ins and demonstrations, overthrew the shah… We did all this to create an Iran free from repression, free of exploitation”.29 The Council agreed a series of economic and political demands that challenged Iranian capitalism and its imperialist backers. Meanwhile, in the countryside, peasants began seizing the land: in Iran’s northern provinces, peasant councils were formed to organise cultivation on a communal basis. Among the national minorities—together more than half the population—there were concerted moves for autonomy.

But already the revolutionary movement faced an immense difficulty: in February 1979, the leading cleric Ayatollah Khomeini returned from exile and appointed a Provisional Government that promptly began an assault on the centres of activism, ordering an end to strikes. For eight months, the mass movement struggled to defend its gains against forces of counter-revolution committed to the formation of an “Islamic Republic” in which power would rest with senior clergy committed to consolidation of the state. Why were they ultimately successful and what were the implications for those who wished to take the movement forward?

Oil, imperialism and the Pahlavi state

The revolutionary scenario that emerged in the late 1970s developed in the context of contradictions embedded in the imperialist agenda for control of Iran and the Gulf region.

From the early years of the 20th century, access to Iran’s oil was a preoccupation for Western capitalist states. Volume exports from Iran began in 1913: they were so significant that British minister George Curzon (“Lord Curzon”) commented after the First World War that “the Allied cause had floated to victory upon a wave of [Iranian] oil”.30 Winston Churchill later declared that the oilfields were “a prize from fairyland beyond our wildest dreams”.31 Oil was discovered in neighbouring Iraq in 1927 and in Saudi Arabia in 1938: when the full extent of energy resources in the Arabian Peninsula was established a few years later, they were described by American oil magnate Everett DeGolyer as “the greatest single prize in all history”.32 In 1943, US President Franklin D Roosevelt declared: “Defence of Saudi Arabia is vital to the defence of the United States”.33 Iran appeared relatively stable and a solid base from which the West could secure Gulf resources, but in 1951, an independent government led by Mohamed Mossadeq came to power with mass support and announced that it would nationalise the oil industry. US media invoked the threat of fascism—Mossadeq was said to be a dictator whose policy “smacks of Hitler’s technique”.34 In 1953, together with British agents, the CIA organised a coup, bringing down the Mossadeq government and reinstating a monarchical regime—the shah had earlier been sidelined by the nationalists.35

Now the US claimed preferential terms for access to Iranian oil and unprecedented influence over the country’s economic and political development. Between 1955 and 1971, the US bolstered the shah’s regime with $1.4 billion (£8.4 billion today) of military equipment.36 US officers provided military training and, in 1957, the CIA and Israel’s Mossad played a key role in establishing the Bureau for Intelligence and Security of the State (Sâzmân-e Ettelâ’ât va Amniyyat-e Kešvar, Savak), the secret police that became a byword for savage repression of all forms of dissent.

The US National Security Council argued that it was “critically important to the United States that Iran’s friendship, independence and territorial integrity be maintained”.37 It was not until a decisive victory over Arab states in the 1967 war that the US turned to Israel as an ally of equal standing in the Middle East: even then, Iran remained “of enormous geopolitical significance to the United States…a formidable barrier between the Soviet Union and the Persian Gulf”.38 Iran was also of critical economic importance to America’s global allies. By 1973, it was exporting over 6 million barrels of oil a day, with Japan as the key destination: it was the second top producer in the Middle East, exporting 25 percent of all the region’s energy exports.39

The US was confident that its support of the shah would guarantee his security and American interests: as late as January 1977, when Iran was moving into revolution, the State Department asserted: “Iran is likely to remain stable under the shah’s leadership over the next several years… The prospects are good that Iran will have relatively clear sailing until at least the mid-1980s”.40 Confidence had become complacency: as the revolutionary movement gathered strength, it was clear that the shah’s intimate relations with the US were among key drivers of the movement. Opposition to the autocracy was combined with hostility to the US presence in Iran, especially as US strategists intervened more and more assertively in economic affairs.

White Revolution

In 1963, the shah announced a “White Revolution” aimed, he said, at reforming Iranian society. Key measures reflected US priorities, most importantly “liberalisation” of the economy, including a modest land reform, sale of state factories to private capitalists, extension of the vote to women and establishment of a rural literacy corps. This reflected both the interests of corporate capital in gaining wider access to the Iranian economy and the idea of “modernisation” in the Global South pursued by US academics and foreign policy strategists. Iran, like other states, was to embrace “American” values as part of a transition from “traditional” to “modern” society.41 “‘Modernism’ and ‘Pahlavism’ were to merge,” writes Ali Ansari, “and become both synonymous and mutually dependant”.42 In a referendum in January 1963, 99.9 percent of voters were said to have endorsed the programme.43 Pressure from the US, especially during the John F Kennedy administration of the early 1960s, played a key role in shaping the project. Iran was more than a client state, however, and the shah not an American “puppet”, as depicted by some opponents on the Iranian left.44 Ansari comments:

The “White Revolution” was intended to be a bloodless revolution from above…fundamentally a political programme conceived by members of the political elite in order to sustain as much of the established relations of domination as realistically possible…a status quo centred upon the institution of the monarchy as the lynchpin of Iranian state and society.45

The reform programme was accompanied by continuous rises in income from energy resources. Between 1963 and 1972, average annual rates of growth of oil and gas receipts were 14.5 percent and 25 percent respectively.46 When world oil prices quadrupled in 1973, the regime enjoyed a windfall. In 1969, oil revenues had totalled $938 million (£6.3 billion today), by 1974, they were a staggering $22 billion (£106 billion today).47 Industry expanded: between 1963 and 1977, the manufacturing sector grew at an annual average of 14.1 percent—twice as fast as average growth in comparable states of the Global South.48 Imports of advanced equipment poured into favoured sectors, but investment plans raced ahead of implementation—much equipment stood idle for lack of infrastructure and skilled labour, and there were huge bottlenecks at Iranian ports. Foreign technicians streamed in to enjoy pay and privileges denied to most of the population, although the number of Iranian workers grew steadily, so that by 1972, there were 1.9 million employed in oil, mining and manufacturing, and a further 965,000 in construction and transport.49

In the countryside, the shah’s reforms aimed in principle to reduce the influence of landowners on the large estates and to create “a pro-Pahlavi class of capitalist farmers”.50 A series of revisions to the original land reform advantaged large landowners, however, and promoted an important underlying aim of the regime: to advance agricultural corporations focused on cash crops and extensive cultivation at the expense of subsistence-based peasant communities.51 Many rural migrants were in effect Internally Displaced Persons—people dispossessed in the countryside and compelled to move to urban areas. These changes were accompanied by the shah’s promise of prosperity for all and commitments to provide jobs, housing, health and welfare services that, he said, would soon offer the Iranian people standards of living consistent with Iran’s status as a first-rank world power. He declared: “[Our] country is well on its way to prosperity…our progress in the future will still be greater so that our country becomes, as is our aim, a model of spiritual and material progress”.52

“Aspirations are [being] heightened and expectations sharpened”, warned an American academic who observed the impact of this rhetoric, warning of “unintended consequences” and “destructive and shattering encounters”.53 As wages stagnated and food prices and rents rose relentlessly, more and more Iranians experienced insecurity: “the ground is indeed constantly shifting under everyone’s feet”.54 The shah meanwhile used state resources freely to pursue extremes of conspicuous consumption, receiving vast sums in pay-offs and kickbacks from international corporations as part of a blatant “carnival of corruption”.55 He poured resources into the armed forces: between 1967 and 1975, military personnel increased from 207,000 to 436,000 as “defence” expenditure rose to over 40 percent of the national budget.56 He also displayed a mania for buying Western weaponry, mainly from the US, encouraging arms manufacturers to reward him with payments directly to the palace or to his Pahlavi Foundation, a charitable front for royal investments.

The US underwrote the shah as policeman of the Gulf. In 1972, President Richard Nixon travelled to Tehran and signed a deal that allowed the Iranian monarch to purchase any US weapons systems he desired in any quantity, short of nuclear weapons, giving the shah “a blank check”.57 Arms manufacturers such as Grumman, Lockheed and Westinghouse exported their most advanced systems, treating Iran as “an economic goldmine”.58 US corporations provided huge teams of technicians, not only to operate industrial plant and weaponry but also to build military bases and civilian compounds for their expatriate employees. These provided luxury accommodation in enclaves of privilege. At the same time, most Iranians struggled at the margins of survival.

Rise and fall of the Tudeh

In 1978, as Iran moved into revolutionary crisis, its US backers expressed disbelief and confusion. American policy in Iran was not in question. Rather, they believed that the failures of the shah had led to a situation in which “we [the US] need to think the unthinkable”: that the Pahlavis might be gone and American strategists would face Iran under unknown leadership.59 CIA officials reported on the bewildering appearance of Ayatollah Khomeini—a “symbolic leader of the revolution”—proposing that his followers “are for the most part crypto-Communists or leftists of Marxist stripe”.60 This assumption was not surprising. The last time the Pahlavis faced mass opposition, 30 years earlier, organisations of the left had played a leading role. They had been effectively suppressed, and religious leaders, it seemed, had since remained passive, without a role in national politics. US officials, in Cold War mode, saw the hand of Moscow everywhere. The Iranian insurgency, they believed, must surely be a Communist initiative. In fact, the strategies of the Iranian left had long since led to its marginalisation and opened opportunities for religious networks to enter the political arena as the Pahlavi state fell into crisis.

During the 1940s, the left led the largest mass movement in the Middle East. The first Communist organisation in Iran had been founded in 1921, making progress in Iran’s northern cities but soon faced sustained repression. From 1941, it revived in the form of the Tudeh (masses) Party, which grew at an extraordinary pace: according to British officials, within two years, it was the only party with clear policies, a formal structure and effective national organisation.61 Trade unions that had earlier been banned re-emerged under leadership of the new party, which established a Central Council of Federated Trade Unions of Iranian Workers and Toilers (CCFTU). This soon claimed 100,000 members, recording victories in key workplaces using “strikes, collective bargaining, public demonstrations, picketing and similar tactics”.62 By 1946, the CCFTU claimed 355,000 members, of which the majority were urban workers, with branches in all 346 modern industrial plants operating at the time.63 At its core, the Tudeh, with 100,000 members nationally, led increasingly important struggles in the oil industry. A strike of over 65,000 workers in Khuzistan was said to be the largest work stoppage in Middle East history.64 According to an American report, the party exercised “effective control over labour in general”.65

In further developments that anticipated the upheavals of 1979, activists in the provinces of Azerbaijan and Kurdistan sought independence from the central state.66 In Azerbaijan, the Tudeh was particularly effective:

The CCFTU enrolled bazaar workers, road sweepers, cart drivers, garage mechanics, tailors, office clerks, and teachers, and by early 1945 claimed over 50,000 members. They set up an effective shop steward system, held union elections, and in late 1944 forced the Tabriz industrialists to raise wages by an additional 25 percent… The unions also organised unarmed militias, guarded the plants, and formed workers’ co-operatives to run plants that had gone bankrupt.67

A peasant union made progress in the countryside as “the Tudeh became the de facto government of Azerbaijan”.68 The Democratic Party of Azerbaijan, supported by the Tudeh, organised an armed uprising and announced an Autonomous Government; in the adjacent Kurdish region, the Democratic Party of Kurdistan proclaimed an independent republic. Soviet forces soon occupied both regions, ostensibly to support the local movements.69 The Tudeh supported the Azeris of Azerbaijan and the Kurds, and it endorsed Soviet military intervention. At the same time, it attempted to promote unity at the national level, including by briefly securing ministerial positions. Furious debates began over the party’s independence from Moscow and the degree to which it could support the “national bourgeoisie”.70 Soviet troops stationed in Azerbaijan and Kurdistan were soon withdrawn under pressure from Britain and the US.71 The central state intervened, sending troops to both regions, seizing leaders of the insurrections and executing key figures. Hundreds of Tudeh members were arrested as the government suppressed strikes and established state-backed unions to contest the CCFTU. The Tudeh was disoriented: the state had turned upon the Kurds and the Azeris, while the Soviet Union abandoned them and exposed the party to wider attacks. At the same time, the party supported “national” interests only to face intense repression. The outcome was “a severe ideological crisis” from which, Sepehr Zabih suggests, the party never recovered.72

Popular Front

In the US, the CIA believed that the Tudeh was preparing to make a bid for power, reporting: “it is steadily going ahead with the task of building up its strength to the point where it will be able to take over Iran”.73 But the party had no intention of challenging state power; rather, it sought alliances in the form of “popular” or “democratic” fronts. These were to focus on “progressive” capitalists and state officials with whom the Tudeh sought to ally in a common struggle against imperialism, including the “comprador” bourgeoisie, feudal landlords, wealthy industrialists, and royalist generals.74 Factional differences in the party over relations with Moscow did not inhibit its members’ commitment to the central proposition advanced by Communist organisations worldwide: as Rahbar (Leader), the central organ of the party, proclaimed: “Our aim is to unite all the classes against the oligarchy”.75 The Soviet regime, what Behrooz calls “the stagnant and terror-ridden party of Stalin”, had for 20 years directed organisations such as the Tudeh to seek alliances with the “progressive bourgeoisie”. The Tudeh handbook What Does the Tudeh Party of Iran Say and Want? declared: “There are no fundamental contradictions between the small capitalists and the proletariat”.76 As elsewhere, this Stalinist formula embraced forces alien to the interests of the working class.77 The outcome in Iran was confusion, retreat and ultimately defeat.

The Tudeh slowly recovered, but internal disputes intensified until there was further conflict over whether to back Mossadeq against the US-British coup in 1953. His National Front was composed of dissident aristocrats and liberal capitalists who hoped to persuade the shah of the need for free elections and basic rights. Confusion reigned: some members of the Tudeh leadership wished to support the Front because it represented “the national bourgeoisie fighting British imperialism and working for a national democratic revolution”.78 Others advocated direct confrontation with Mossadeq as a “puppet of the comprador bourgeoisie attached to American imperialism”.79 When the CIA and British intelligence enacted a coup, the party failed to act—a signal to the shah and his supporters, now reinstated by the imperialists—to begin a new campaign of repression. Thousands of Tudeh members were arrested and scores executed. Within a few years, the mass party of the 1940s had been dismantled. In 1981, a veteran member lamented the paralysis that had overcome the organisation. The Tudeh could have mounted massive demonstrations against the imperialist intervention [the coup]”, he said, “but we did nothing.”80

Islamic opposition

According to Ali Mirsepassi, during the early 1940s, “political parties mushroomed throughout the country, and almost every form of political organisation was represented”.81 There was an exception to these developments, however: “the relative invisibility of religious politics”.82 Over the next 20 years, the crisis of the left provided opportunities for religious networks to play a role that eventually prepared the ground for Khomeini’s intervention during the 1979 revolution.

The key figure among the clergy, Ruhollah Khomeini, had enjoyed high status in the Shia hierarchy since being acclaimed as an ayatollah (“sign” or “mark” of God) in the 1930s. Like other clerics, he was politically conservative. In his first significant political tract, Kashf al-Asrar (Secrets Revealed), published in 1941 as mass struggles were engulfing Iran, he noted that leading clerics had never challenged the authority of the state, even when governments had issued “anti-Islamic” orders. They believed, he said, that “bad order was better than no order at all”.83 He viewed the shah’s government as a bad government, but in default “of the practical possibility of better government”, it was necessary for the ulema to seek accommodation with the existing state.84 Khomeini retained these attitudes for the next 20 years, consistent with centuries of “quietism”—passivity or withdrawal from political activity, as practised by Shia clerics aligned with the state. Their support for successive regimes reflected the privileged status of high-ranking clerics. Haleh Afshar describes “an affluent, semi-closed elite…among the wealthiest classes in Iran”.85 The ulema were linked to merchant capital and to the institution of the bazaar—a network of traditional traders, financiers, and artisans that was of special importance in Iranian cities. In 1949, the most eminent of the ayatollahs, Mohamed Hassan Burujerdi, forbade the ulema from joining parties or even participating in politics.86 After Burujerdi’s death, Khomeini was the first among his peers to enter the modern political arena. His rise to prominence, together with a network of junior clerics, was part of the process of economic and political change that accelerated in the years of the shah’s White Revolution as Iranian society polarised rapidly.

Since the collapse of the Tudeh, the regime had targeted every manifestation of dissidence. In the 1970s, however, Savak and the security agencies faced new and effective forms of opposition. Mirsepassi observes:

If, in the pre-coup period, the oppositional groups and voices were located in such secular and democratic institutions as unions, parties and the media, under the new autocratic state of the post-coup era…new political spaces for dissent emerged in the mosques, seminary schools, bazaars, universities, underground organisations, and groups formed outside of the country.87

Jafari comments that “there were all shades of Islamic-inspired ideologies at work”.88 In a significant development, former activists of the left attempted to reconcile secular radicalism with Islamic traditions. Jamal Al-e Ahmad was an activist and novelist who popularised the term gharbzadegi (“Occidentosis” or “Westoxification”).89 Once an enthusiastic member of the Tudeh, he left the party in 1946 in protest against its submission to the agendas of the Soviet Union, later supporting Mossadeq against US-British intervention in Iran. He argued: “Now is the era of de-Stalinisation”.90 He continued:

What Marx said is true today, that we have two worlds in conflict. But these two worlds stretch far vaster than in his time, and the conflict has grown far more complex than the one of worker and employer. In our world, poor confront rich, and the vast earth is the arena.91

What was to be done? Al-e Ahmad argued that embrace of Islam as a rich cultural tradition must be “the ultimate defence against the encroachments of occidentosis”.92 He influenced many young activists, leading “an evolution from communism to secular progressivism to reform religion”.93 Others who moved in a similar direction included the academic Hamid Enayat, also once a member of the Tudeh, and
Ali Shariati, a key figure who made a sustained attempt to syncretise Islamic traditions with Marxism. Shariati argued for Islam as “a change-oriented and revolutionary social force” separate from the “religious aristocracy”—the clergy—that could challenge “colonisation, exploitation, enslavement, deception, injustice, aggression and war”.94 Mobilising Islamic texts and traditions, he argued for revolution, declaring that those who revolt against unjust regimes would be guided by god.95 His biographer claims him as “an Islamic utopian” whose legacy was a movement of young activists that would later play a key role in the revolution of 1979.96

These developments reflected both a climate of intense hostility to the regime and the absence of secular organisations capable of expressing the interests of the masses.97 By the early 1970s, shanty areas had grown around the major cities as peasants left the countryside, creating “a huge class of urban paupers”.98 For the first time, the urban poor encountered clerical agitation based on ideas of “Islamic justice” and a challenge to state power. Now Khomeini proposed a new agenda for change: abandoning his lifelong posture of passivity, he produced a book, Velayet-e Faqih (Guardianship of the Jurist), calling for “a programme of struggle for establishment of an Islamic government”.99 During the 1960s, he had opposed some aspects of the shah’s reform programme. Consistent with the historic conservatism of the ulema, he criticised proposals for land reform, telling the shah: “It is a capital sin to dispossess people of their property through forcible seizure or decrees”.100 He also stridently opposed the women’s franchise, saying: “this will involve women in corruption”.101 After speaking at protest meetings at which he did not call for removal of the shah, Khomeini was exiled to Turkey and later moved to Iraq. In subsequent speeches, he railed against corruption and foreign influence on the Pahlavi regime but withheld criticism of the monarchy.102 When protests were attacked by riot police, Khomeini finally confronted the shah:

The crimes of the kings of Iran have blackened the pages of history… Even those that were reputed to be “good” were vile and cruel… I consider it my duty to call out with all the strength at my command…let this plundering and squandering be brought to an end.103

The conjuncture was important: Khomeini’s move to challenge the shah demonstrated an awareness of growing mass opposition to the regime and of radicalisation within the religious hierarchy, especially among young clerics. It also expressed a new strategic flexibility soon to be revealed as opportunism.

Revolutionary rhetoric

In the mid-1970s, the shah modified his triumphalist rhetoric of prosperity for all. Oil revenues fell, inflation soared and the regime sought means to displace growing public anger. In 1976, he declared war on “profiteers”, announcing an investigation into corruption within the bazaar networks, new plans for state corporations to import and distribute basic foods, and demolition of old urban markets. Earlier, he had dissolved two loyalist parties and announced the formation of the Rastakhiz (“Resurgence”) Party as a sole national political organisation, tasked to celebrate himself as the great leader—aryamehr (“Light of the Aryans”). The party mobilised thousands of students in vigilante gangs sent into the bazaars to wage “a merciless crusade against profiteers, cheaters, hoarders and unscrupulous capitalists”.104 In the spring of 1977, when there were protests of urban poor over conditions in the shanty towns and of students and writers over basic rights, opposition generalised. Merchants, artisans and small businessman of the bazaar, together with young clerics from seminaries and local mosques, students, and large numbers of urban poor, joined demonstrations that were attacked by police, resulting in many deaths. A long cycle of protests began, strongly encouraged by Khomeini from his Iraqi exile. For months, protestors were locked in conflict with the state as demonstrations took place across the country. It seemed that the regime might survive until a breakthrough came when workers joined in vast numbers. Urban wage earners, writes Abrahamian, had been conspicuous by their absence, but the dynamic of revolution changed in June 1979, as the entry of the working class “made possible the eventual triumph” of the movement.105

Khomeini, for decades aligned with the state, now championed the mass movement, invoking further industrial action. As the shah attempted to cling on to power he declared, “the honourable people of Iran…must continue their strikes”:106

Advance together, with a single voice and a single purpose, to the sacred aim of Islam—the abolition of the cruel Pahlavi dynasty, the destruction of the abominable monarchical regime, and the establishment of the Islamic republic based on the progressive dictates of Islam. Victory is yours, nation risen in revolt!107

For several years, Khomeini had been developing a political discourse that complemented the analyses of young activists attracted by Shariati and his co-thinkers, and it had spread widely in universities and among the urban poor. Now he projected this to full effect, using “highly radical, populist catchphrases”, such as: Islam belongs to the oppressed, not the oppressors; Islam is for equality and social justice; Islam will eliminate class differences; Islam originates from the masses, not the rich; Oppressed of the world, unite.108 The destination of the revolutionary movement, he declared, was “an Islamic Republic”, which he described in utopian terms as free of want, hunger, inequality, illiteracy, unemployment: “a society based on equality, fraternity and social justice”.109 When he arrived in Iran in February 1979, it was as a leader with mass support across Iran and, crucially, with no rivals of comparable standing.

Liberal nationalists appointed by the shah in desperate efforts to save the regime were soon swept away and secular radical currents among students and workers were paralysed by political perspectives that inhibited independent action. Ali Mirsepassi, then a young activist, describes his bewilderment at discovering that the Fedaiyan-e Khalq (The Organisation of Iranian People’s Fedai Guerrillas), the largest organisation of the secular left, was unable to challenge Khomeini’s project.110 Like the Mojahidin-e Khalq (The People’s Mojahedin Organisation of Iran), the Fedaiyan had pursued strategies that placed them alongside the religious networks without an independent agenda for the movement. These organisations had been growing fast during the 1970s, despite repression. As the Pahlavi state entered terminal crisis, they had opportunities to engage openly with the revolutionary movement. But “a coherent and organised left never materialised,” recalls Mirsepassi: “Now the Khomeinists expected us [the Left] to follow their lead, mistreated our sister activists and…marginalised the left’s discourse, symbols and history from the rituals of the revolution”. 111

Counter-revolution

For months after the return of Khomeini and declaration of an Islamic Republic, the mass movement continued with full force. This was the “riot of democracy” described by Shaul Bakhash: “Security had collapsed… The citizenry was in control of barracks and police stations, palaces and ministries…governors found their way to their offices barred by revolutionary youths”.112 There was a flood of publishing: free of censorship, newspapers and magazines appeared, leaflets and posters were everywhere; women’s and peasants’ organisations emerged, and workers’ shoras proliferated. “Cleansing” of local management by factory councils and control over production in enterprises abandoned by their owners was common. Bayat observes that the most successful shoras “were independent of the state and of the official managers and were based upon the interests of the rank-and-file workers”.113 Some communities formed neighbourhood shoras, but neither workplace councils nor local groups moved towards co-ordinating bodies on the soviet model. “The revolutionary crisis had furnished the material basis for such organisations,” Bayat suggests, “and their organisational and functional forms were present in embryo”.114 They did not develop, however. Instead, the workers’ movement came under assault from the new regime.

Promising equality and social justice, Khomeini delivered counter-revolution. A key means of enforcing his agenda were the komitehs, local bodies formed after the fall of the shah. Initially, these included workers, radical youth and activists of the left, but they were increasingly replaced by Khomeini loyalists who aimed to bring the revolutionary movement to a standstill and to consolidate a new, repressive state apparatus. Khomeini and his supporters proved to be “Janus-faced”, suggests Abrahamian: “revolutionary against the old regimes and conservative once the new order was set up”.115 Khomeinism, he argues, developed as a populism that mobilised the masses with radical rhetoric but soon turned to protection of private property, championing small capitalists and the bazaar—the traditional constituency of the Shia ulema—while calling for communal solidarity and national unity.116

Bayat observes that “the seizure of power by the clergy was a reflection of a power vacuum in the post-revolutionary state. Neither the proletariat nor the bourgeoisie [represented by ‘liberal capitalists’] was able to exert their political hegemony”.117 Religious networks consolidated around a petty bourgeois core of bazaaris and middle-class professionals, extending into the urban poor and the ranks of managers and technicians who replaced non-Iranians as they fled the country. Organised as the Islamic Republican Party and using the regime’s new enforcers, the Revolutionary Guards, the Khomeinists undermined the shoras, banned most leftist organisations and carried out mass arrests among their activists. Behrooz describes a “dance of death” involving the left and state agencies, which by 1983 brought radical activism to an end.118 However, the defeat was not only an outcome of repression: the left had been in crisis for over three decades. When Iran accelerated towards revolution, the left was paralysed by strategies that had already failed but which its leaders were unable to discard. Hamstrung by “a poverty of philosophy”, the left suffered a grievous defeat from which it was unable to recover.119

Writing as the left struggled for survival, Azar Tabari (the pen name of Afsaneh Najmabadi) observed that its initial support for the Khomeini regime had been “shortsighted and politically disastrous”.120 The Tudeh supported Khomeini as an anti-imperialist, joined by the majority faction of the Fedaiyan. The large Mojahidin organisation backed liberal nationalists, whereas the Fedaiyan minority eventually saw a reactionary capitalist order. Across the left, there were critical failures to challenge Khomeinist offensives. In February 1979, when the Ayatollah began an attack on women, suspending their legal rights in marriage and enforcing wearing of the headscarf, the left did little to rally support, conceding on a key issue and providing a symbolic victory for the new regime.

Organisations of the left had grown fast and were capable of mobilising in large numbers. In February 1979, the Fedaiyan mobilised 80,000 supporters at Tehran University; as late as June 1981, the Mojahidin called demonstrations in major cities across the country to oppose repression, drawing some 500,000 participants.121 All the major organisations of the left, however, clung to ideas that had failed the mass movement in the 1940s. Most important was the Stalinist strategic principle that the left should seek alliances with “progressive” capitalists with the aim of promoting a national democratic revolution as a necessary stage on the path to further change. This was prioritised over building independent organisation in the working class, which was seen as unprepared for major struggles with the regime and “not ready” for revolution. Yet, “the key to genuinely undercutting the Khomeiniites,” writes Chris Harman, “lay in mobilising workers to fight on their own behalf”.122 But activists of the left had directed their energies away from the working class. The key ideologue of the Fadaiyan, Bizan Jazanai, wrote of “the socio-economic weakness of the working class” and its lack of “proletarian culture”.123 Inspired by events in Algeria, Cuba and Vietnam, the Fedaiyan had for years organised for armed struggle in the countryside. Here, they aimed to confront the shah’s forces, arguing that armed actions would “shatter” the atmosphere of repression and lead to establishment of a “vanguard” (of revolutionary activists) and an historic victory.124 The Mojahidin had long since committed to armed action, arguing that: “Armed struggle is a historic necessity”.125 Behrooz observes that “this was the time [in the 1970s] of guerrilla groups, of bold offensives against the regime, of romantic heroism and of a rationalisation of violence”.126

Testimony of worker activists confirms that rank-and-file organisation in industry had been well under way in the years before the insurrection.127 The workplaces were not, however, a focus for the left, which had retreated from the practice of the Tudeh in the 1940s, when—notwithstanding its chronic strategic failures—the party had played a leading role in industrial struggles. By the 1970s, writes Behrooz, the Tudeh believed in “a crossover to socialism achievable by a non-proletarian force with close Soviet collaboration”, while guerrilla organisations substituted their own initiatives for the working class as the agency of change.128 Convinced that “all other avenues of political change were closed”, they were fascinated by Maoist and Guevarist thought and “the Maoist belief that political power grows out of the barrel of a gun”.129 In 1979, some members of the Fedaiyan finally turned towards the working class, but the counter-revolution was already under way.

After the revolution

During the 1980s, the Islamic Republic consolidated as a highly repressive conservative nationalism. The regime took key sectors of the economy under state control and introduced welfare policies that benefited some of the most deprived sectors of society, notably the urban poor, by means of price controls, subsidies, rationing and provision of free or cheap housing. Khomeini decreed that all assets of the Pahlavis, and their networks were to be confiscated and placed in the hands of para-statal organisations, the foundations or bonyads. Together with nationalised industries and banks, these were part of a semi-autarkic state-capitalist structure providing opportunities for middle-class/professional supporters of the Islamic Republic to secure positions of privilege in a new state bureaucracy and industries in which managers of the Pahlavi era had been purged by the workers’ movement. Invasion by Iraqi forces in September 1980, launching an eight-year conflict, concentrated power at the centre, reinforcing these developments. But under acute pressure from the long war and isolation from international networks, the state capitalist model fell into crisis. By the 1990s, the conservative wing of the religious establishment, together with merchant capital, sought reintegration with the world economy, favouring “a capitalist mode of production with an Islamic flavour”.130 International loans financed widespread privatisation as the regime complied with neoliberal orthodoxy, and Iran’s private capitalists, forced on to the retreat during the years of revolution, were rehabilitated. Tara Povey observes that neoliberal economic policies did not lead to the lessening of state power, but strengthened bureaucratic and military elites: “In particular, the Revolutionary Guard (IRGC) has become [a] major beneficiary of privatisation and the selling off of billions of dollars of state assets”.131

Islamophobia

Removal of the shah in 1979 was an historic victory for the people of Iran. However, it also marked a key development in hostile approaches to Islam and Muslims in Europe and North America. Deepa Kumar comments:

The Iranian Revolution of 1979 was the pivotal movement that shifted US attitudes against what the West soon labelled “Islamic fundamentalism”…the United States ratcheted up the negative “Islam” frame. “Bad” Muslims had overthrown the “good” secular Shah… This began a period of contradiction when “Islam” was both a positive and a negative construct depending upon whether actors supported or militated against US imperial aims.132

The US defeat in Iran prompted an ideological offensive in Europe and North America in which Islam and Muslims in general were not merely depicted as “bad” but as perverse, irrational, violent and threatening. A spate of popular publications—including Holy Terror, Sacred Rage, Militant Islam, The Fire of Islam,The Dagger of Islam, and Holy War—generalised images of Islam as hostile and menacing. The influential Cold War propagandist Samuel Huntington wrote: “[It] is hardly surprising that following the 1979 Iranian Revolution an inter-civilisational quasi war developed between Islam and the West”.133 He continued: “The underlying problem for the West is not Islamic fundamentalism. It is Islam, a different civilisation whose people are convinced of the superiority of their culture and are obsessed with the inferiority of their power”.134

In the US, Islamophobia became a key element of the neoconservative worldview, informed by Huntington’s “Clash of Civilisations” thesis, in which the collapse of the Soviet Union and the perceived defeat of communism meant that a new enemy was required to give meaning to the US as a national society and an international actor. “Who are we?” Huntington asked, adding, “We know who we are only when we know who we are not and often only when we know whom we are against”.135 Islam and Muslims provided a new global “other”.

In 2001, US President George W Bush declared war on “a radical network of Islamists” who, he said, were “heirs of all the murderous ideologies of the 20th century”, following in the path of “fascism, Nazism and totalitarianism”.136 His invasions of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003 were, he argued, part of a “crusade” against “Islamo-fascism”.137 Iran featured centrally in US visions of global threat. For prominent neoconservatives such as Daniel Pipes and Norman Podhoretz, Iranian leaders from Khomeini to Ali Khamenei and Mahmoud Ahmedinejad were “Hitlers” committed to “the religio-political culture of Islamofascism”.138 Writing in 2007 on “The Case for Bombing Iran”, Podhoretz urged all-out war against “another mutation of the totalitarian disease we defeated first in the shape of Nazism and fascism and then in the shape of communism”.139 The theme was taken up enthusiastically by leaders of the political right in Israel, who had long used the “Holocaust-Hitler analogy” in relation to critics of the Zionist movement.140 In 2009, Israeli prime minister Benyamin Netanyahu invoked the Holocaust in calling for a campaign to “roll back the forces of terror led by Iran”, continuing to urge assaults on Iran as a “Nazi” state.141 In 2026, justifying joint US and Israeli attacks on targets across Iran, Netanyahu drew parallels between the Iranian state and Nazi Germany. It was “a cheap and hollow comparison”, wrote the liberal Israeli newspaper Haaretz, but one in which Netanyahu trod “a well-worn path of Western musings as to the true nature of Iran”.142

These characterisations of the Iranian state serve above all as rationales for imperialist intervention in the Gulf, where the US and its allies seek to secure their influence.143 They have not been restricted to imperialist leaders and their allies, however. As early as 1979, when the revolution was still unfolding, British left-wing writer Fred Halliday identified “Islam with a fascist face”, later arguing that Khomeini was “a clerical fascist”.144 As author of the first sustained analysis of the Pahlavi dictatorship, which had attracted a large readership, Halliday influenced many on the left in Europe and North America (although he later appeared to retreat from this approach).145 At the same time, some Iranian activists appalled by Khomeini’s repression had also embraced the “fascist” label. Chahla Chafiq describes the shock of many young Iranians at the outcome of the revolution and consolidation of what she calls a “fascist system”.146 In a detailed analysis, former leftist academic Mansoor Moaddel also sees a “substantial identification of fascism with the Islamic Republic”.147 But the Khomeinist movement was not “fascist”. Rather, it was one among a series of nationalisms that emerged in the context of imperialism to seize power and subsequently suppress mass movements for change. In 1952, the Free Officers Movement in Egypt enacted a successful coup and established a highly repressive regime that targeted the anti-colonial movement and the left. In the 1960s, the Ba’athists of Iraq assaulted a revolutionary movement that had deposed the pro-British monarchy, going on to take power and install an authoritarian regime. In Indonesia, the Suharto coup inflicted grievous damage on the communist movement following the coup of 1965. In each case, organisations of the left identified “fascist” initiatives.148 There has been a similar approach in Latin America, where populist movements, such as Peronism in Argentina, have been depicted as both “socialist” and “fascist”.149

These characterisations move dangerously close to the rhetoric of warmongers in the US, Israel and among their allies. In 2010, the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute attacked “Iran’s Nazi-Fascism”, calling for wide public support against the regime. In February 2026, as US and Israeli bombers launched missiles on Iranian cities, Republican senator Lindsey Graham applauded Donald Trump for his view that “the Ayatollah [Khamenei] is Hitler in a Robe wearing a turban…He is a religious Nazi”.150 Meanwhile, Reza Pahlavi, son of the monarch deposed in 1979, also sees Nazis in power in Iran, calling for trials of Iranian leaders “like those of Nazi leaders in Nuremberg”.151 Pahlavi wants to restore the monarchy and to reinstate Western imperialist interests in Iran.152

The regime in Tehran has maintained “vehement repression”, attacking all expressions of dissent, especially protests of woman and the national minorities.153 But Iran is not the “fascist” order identified by Trump, Netanyahu, Pahlavi and the rest. The regime has much in common with some of their closest allies—states viewed by the US as integral to its own interests in the region. There are parallels in particular with Egypt, a recipient of military aid only exceeded in volume by Washington’s supplies to Israel. Here, the counter-revolution launched by Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi in 2013 has been at least as brutal as Khomeini’s repression, wreaking vengeance on the workers’ movement and, significantly, on the Islamists of the Muslim Brotherhood. Sisi, too, has pursued neoliberal priorities and secured the interests of the military in the private sector, all the while professing commitment to Islamic values, instrumentalising religion and mobilising the authority of key Islamic institutions. His mukhabarat (intelligence services) and riot police attack dissenters with the same relish that Iran’s Revolutionary Guards assault women and democracy activists.154 But no American or Israeli bombs fall on the presidential palace in Cairo as Trump and Netanyahu deliver “help” to the people of Egypt.

Revolutionary socialists worldwide have backed the mass of people engaged in the Iranian revolution of 1979 and in subsequent protests, such as the 2009 Green Movement, the 2022 Women, Life, Freedom movement and the 2025-6 mass demonstrations.155 Although we strongly oppose imperialist intervention, we do not endorse the regime in Iran—we look forward to further revolutionary upheavals. Above all, their success will depend on workers’ independent action as agents of self-emancipation.

Philip Marfleet is Emeritus Professor of Social Science at the University of East London. He is the author of Palestine, Imperrialism and the Struggle for Freedom (Bookmarks, 2025). He is a member of the International Socialism editorial board.

Notes