When “left” and far-right join to delete workers and women

First published on Farah Mokhtareizadeh's Substack here.

In January 2026, as protests swept Iran and the Islamic Republic responded with mass killings, the international left faced a choice about whose voices to amplify and whose to render invisible. The choice it made is the subject of this essay.

On April 10, 2026, a Holocaust denier, a white nationalist theorist, the founder of the World Social Forum, and a former UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights all put their names on the same document. So did Vijay Prashad.

The document was “Six Non-Negotiable Terms from International Scholars and Former Officials from 30 Countries to End the US War on Iran,” published by CounterPunch [a historically-leftish website] with over 170 signatures. Richard Falk, Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton and former UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in Occupied Palestine, signed it. So did Denis Halliday, former UN Assistant Secretary-General who resigned in protest over the Iraq sanctions regime. So did Boaventura de Sousa Santos, one of the most cited sociologists in the world and founder of the World Social Forum. So did Jodie Evans, co-founder of CodePink.

So did James H. Fetzer, who wrote the book claiming Sandy Hook never happened and that the murdered children were fictions, and was ordered by a Wisconsin court to pay $450,000 to Leonard Pozner, the father of six-year-old Noah Pozner, for defaming him.

So did Kevin B. MacDonald, whose trilogy Culture of Critique provided the theoretical foundation for contemporary white nationalism and was cited by the Christchurch mosque shooter in his manifesto — work the shooter himself praised as the product of a “serious political thinker.” So did Alain de Benoist, the intellectual architect of the European New Right, whose life’s work has been making racial separatism sound like a philosophy... [British signatories include David Miller, Chris Williamson, but also Avi Shlaim].

The document presents all of them as a unified conscience of humanity, describes former Ayatollah Khamenei as “recognised globally as a voice against arrogance and terrorism,” calls for the “prosecution and extradition of operatives in anti-Iranian media”, meaning the exiled journalists through whom Iranian workers, feminists, and political prisoners communicate with the outside world.

The letter actually proposes handing those journalists back to a government that, according to Amnesty International and Iran Human Rights, executed at least 1,639 people in 2025 and killed more per capita than any country for which reliable data exists. They end by declaring that “if Iran falls, the hope of a better, enlightened future for the world dies with it”...

Campism

Campism is the position that political solidarity should be determined by which geopolitical bloc a state belongs to rather than by the class character of that state or the interests of the people living within it.

In Syria, the genuine popular uprising against Assad was reframed as an imperial project. In Ethiopia, Abiy Ahmed’s government conducted a war in Tigray that killed hundreds of thousands and was documented by the UN as involving mass atrocities, ethnic cleansing, and the systematic use of rape as a weapon of war. The Tricontinental, the institute [Vijay] Prashad [a leading signatory, who describes himself as Marxist] directs, maintained a notable silence. In each case, the political conclusion, that the state opposing or inconveniencing US power deserves solidarity, precedes rather than follows from analysis. On Prashad’s own Leninist terms, this is precisely the error Lenin identified as national-chauvinism: subordinating class analysis to geopolitical alignment while presenting that substitution as principle...

As Paria Rahimi argued (2026), campism is not only a Western analytical failure projected onto Iran from outside, it is also one of the IRI’s own core ideological operations. Through state media such as Press TV, through figures like Mohammad Marandi, who advises Iran’s nuclear negotiations team while presenting himself to Western outlets as an independent scholar, through advocacy organizations such as the National Iranian American Council, which has consistently argued positions serving IRI diplomatic objectives, and through Western commentators like Caitlin Johnstone and Richard Medhurst, who apply rigorous scepticism to US and Israeli government claims while reproducing IRI framing on Iranian protests and dissident movements without equivalent scrutiny. Through all of these, the regime presents itself as sovereign and morally legitimate primarily through comparison with US and Israeli power. When the Western left adopts and reproduces this framing, it reinforces the very narrative through which the state secures its legitimacy internationally...

The bazaar-mosque nexus that captured the 1979 revolution... redirected a genuine mass uprising toward the consolidation of its own class interests, deploying anti-imperialist rhetoric to suppress internal dissent while protecting private property under Islamic legal cover. State enterprises were privatized into IRGC-connected conglomerates. Iran’s minimum wage in 2025 stood at roughly 10.4 million tomans per month against a cost of living estimated at over 35 million. Over 2,000 workers died in unsafe conditions in 2025...

The feminist uprising of Women, Life, Freedom (WLF) in September 2022... emerging from the killing of Zhina Mahsa Amini by the IRI’s morality police, it rapidly expanded into a coordinated challenge to the IRI’s entire structure of power. The movement draws significantly from Kurdish political traditions that are explicitly anti-capitalist, feminist, and committed to forms of democratic autonomy, often theorized through jineology: a Kurdish feminist framework that locates gender domination at the centre of how social life is organized and controlled, and rejects the separation of women’s issues from political economy and state power. From this position, WLF refused the reduction of feminist struggle to the hijab and rejected any framework that isolates gender from class or national oppression. The movement’s force lay in naming these as a single structure...

Val Moghadam, writing in New Left Review (1987), identified the error the Iranian left made in 1979 with precision: “an inordinate emphasis on the anti-imperialist struggle and an almost mechanical application of the dependency paradigm left little scope for considering the highly uneven development of class and production relations, the power of the pre-capitalist classes, or the political-cultural project of the clerics”...

Distinction

What the campist framework does is collapse the distinction between the state and the people, such that independent working-class organization appears either irrelevant or suspect. That is not Leninism. That is precisely the subordination of class analysis to geopolitical alignment that Lenin warned against...

CounterPunch’s declaration praises Iran’s “ancient organisational genius fused with 21st-century scientific sovereignty” an (alarming) civilisationist formulation that could appear in an official IRI address without modification, and that functions to identify the Iranian state with Iranian civilization such that dissent from the former becomes betrayal of the latter...

The campist framework presents itself as protecting the Iranian people from imperial instrumentalisation. In practice it produces the opposite. The COOCWP [contract oil workers’ group] do not get covered on Fox News. The oil workers do not get invited to testify before the US Congress. By treating these movements as either nonexistent or imperial pawns, campism ensures that the only Iranian voices with international amplification are the ones that serve the imperial agenda most directly, Reza Pahlavi and the monarchist infrastructure that US and Israeli governments are actively cultivating.

The Iranian diaspora leftists, whose politics are precisely the dual refusal of opposing the US war on Iran and the IRI simultaneously, look to the international left for solidarity and find a framework that has no place for them. For people who have watched the IRI execute their comrades, imprison their family members, and destroy the organizations their parents built, the campist binary is not a political disagreement. Rather it feels like a demand for self-erasure as the price of admission to the left, and drives many directly into the arms of the imperial forces campism claims to oppose.

When people ask how Iranian diaspora leftists could possibly end up supporting a monarchist restoration, they are asking the wrong question. The question assumes a free political market in which people choose from available options. What campism produces is a managed scarcity of options. The international left, which should be the natural political home of Iranian leftists in diaspora, has made itself uninhabitable by demanding that opposition to US imperialism and opposition to the IRI be treated as incompatible positions. The monarchists make no such demand. Reza Pahlavi does not ask Iranian leftists to defend the Islamic Republic as the price of his solidarity. The campist left does. And then it expresses bewilderment when people, faced with that choice, walk out the door.

The epistemological double standard this framework produces is also visible in the international Palestine solidarity movement, and naming it honestly is not a betrayal of that movement, but a condition of the movement’s integrity.

The international Palestinian solidarity movement has spent years fighting a deliberate effort to conflate opposition to Israeli apartheid with antisemitism. The movement is against loading a specific and serious form of discrimination with enough definitional weight that it can be used to criminalise legitimate political speech, punish campus organizing, and expose activists to legal and professional jeopardy.

Palestinians and their allies have worked carefully and persistently to hold that distinction: opposing a state’s policies is not hatred of a people; solidarity with the oppressed is not bigotry against anyone. When prominent figures on the international left sign documents alongside Holocaust deniers, white nationalists, and convicted antisemites while claiming to speak in the name of that same solidarity, they collapse precisely the distinction the movement has been fighting to maintain.

Cost

The people who bear the cost of that collapse are not Vijay Prashad, not Jodie Evans, not any of the credentialed figures whose institutional positions insulate them from consequence. The people who bear the cost are Palestinian students facing disciplinary hearings, Palestinian organizers facing criminal charges, Palestinian academics losing their positions. The elite left gets to perform solidarity from safety. Palestinians pay for the performance with their exposure.

The people bearing the actual cost of this political moment are not asking the left to defend the Islamic Republic. Mahmoud Khalil, Leqaa Kordia, and the hundreds of students, organizers, and community members facing deportation, detention, and criminal charges under the Trump administration’s targeting of Palestinian solidarity activism did not end up in that position because they signed documents with Holocaust deniers. They ended up there because they organized against a genocide. The left that should be their most reliable defence has spent its credibility elsewhere. Palestinian organizers facing federal charges are not asking for campism. They are asking for solidarity, and those are not the same thing.

The Palestine solidarity movement and the Iranian workers’ movement are not the same movement. The diaspora politics are different, the organizational forms are different, and the relationship to the relevant states is different. Palestinian diaspora communities in the US have built decades of solidarity infrastructure, legal organizations, academic networks, cultural institutions, direct action formations, genuinely independent of state power.

Fractured

The Iranian diaspora is more fractured, with a significant monarchist component that US and Israeli governments are actively trying to amplify, and an independent left that is being systematically silenced precisely because campism has decided that all criticism of the IRI serves imperial interests. The Islamic Republic has spent decades positioning itself as Palestine’s defender precisely because that positioning purchases the international solidarity its domestic record cannot. When the Western left adopts that fusion as analysis, it does not arrive at it independently but is an ideological operation the IRI has been running for 47 years. These are not the same terrain. They require different analytical tools...

What it cannot say, what the friend-enemy binary structurally prevents, is what the international left’s actual position should be: not Hamas over Israel, not Israel over Hamas, but solidarity with Palestinian workers, Lebanese workers, Iranian workers against the states and the capital that exploit and kill them all. That is internationalism rather than mirror-image patriotism. That is also the only position from which you can build the coalitions — with American labour, with the broader antiwar movement, with communities directly affected by military spending — that could actually stop the weapons.

The International Longshore and Warehouse Union has refused to load weapons shipments before. During the apartheid era, ILWU Local 10 in San Francisco refused to handle South African cargo. That precedent exists in the US labour movement. The argument that Palestinian liberation, Iranian workers’ rights, and American labour conditions are connected and that the weapons going to Israel are manufactured by workers in American factories, loaded by workers in American ports, funded by a military budget that competes directly with the healthcare, housing, and wages those same workers are fighting for, is not a difficult argument to make. The tools to act on this exist. What is missing is the political will to treat international solidarity not as a fringe concern imported from somewhere else but as a direct expression of working-class interest. Political will is precisely what campism systematically prevents from developing, because campism has already decided which states deserve defending and which people deserve to be seen...

The position advanced here is not moral symmetry but a dual refusal grounded in the actual practice of Iranian workers, feminists, and left organizations: opposition to imperial war and sanctions alongside opposition to the domestic structures of exploitation and repression that shape their lives. The dual refusal is a political tradition with a long history in Iran itself. The strategic implication is straightforward: international solidarity should align with these social forces directly: opposing external intervention while amplifying and supporting the independent organizations through which they articulate their demands. Anything else substitutes states for the people in whose name politics is conducted...

This is what is happening with Iran. The words arrive already loaded: resistance, sovereignty, anti-imperialism, and they land in a frame built somewhere else, for a different political landscape entirely. The categories click into place before anyone has read the terrain. Nobody interrupts them. So what gets heard is not what is actually being said, and the people saying it - the oil workers, the feminists, the queer activists, the communists who paid with their lives for the last time someone made this mistake - become unintelligible inside a framework that was never built to read them.

Zan. Zendegi. Azadi. Woman, Life, Freedom.