Worker Communism and the Post-revolution Secular Left in Iran

Worker communism has been an influential yet little examined politicalcurrent in Iran’s post-revolution secular-left. With roots in the Islamic
Revolution of 1979, its emergence represented a paradigm shift in the I ranian left which at that time was losing ground to the ascendent Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s political Islam. At least three factors helped distinguish worker communism from the main trends of the Iranian left preceding it and facilitated its rise. First, while the Iranian left saw the struggle against imperialist forces as the primary mission, legitimizing an alliance with the national bourgeoisie, worker communism rejected this as a grave error and saw the struggle against all capitalist forces, including the national bourgeoisie, as being central. Second, the
worker communist current was able to utilize the ethnic- and geo-politics of Iranian Kurdistan to survive revolutionary violence and implement key aspects of its paradigm inside Iran and even export it abroad. Third, worker communism overcame the ideological crisis of the Iranian left brought on by the collapse of the Soviet Union relatively unscathed because it had been founded on a fundamental critique of Soviet communism. Despite being influential in the left inside and outside Iran, worker communism faced a crisis while formulating a response to the rise of the reform movement in the late-1990s. This response fell short as a result of doctrinal inconsistencies, which created internal fragmentation, and political radicalism, which was incompatible with the realities of post-1997 Iranian society."