I’d like to thank the USN for hosting this panel.

There is a Persian poem by a famous Iranian poet of the 13th century, Saadi Shirazi, named “BANI ADAM“ (This poem is displayed in the hall of the United Nations and the Chicago Cultural Center):

Human beings are members of a whole, in creation of one essence and soul

If one member is afflicted with pain other members uneasy will remain

If you have no sympathy for human pain the name of human you cannot retain

In a way, it expresses solidarity and sympathy with human expression and existence

Now the $64,000 question: What has to be done? Stop the war, stop the executions.

The US/ Israeli war of aggression, and surprise attack in Feb. 2026 decapitated over 40 Iranian leaders, including supreme leader Ali Khomeini and his family. On the same day, an attack on the Minab girls’ school killed 168 students, with the bombardment of residential and commercial buildings, bridges, schools, universities, hospitals, medical research center, water plant, energy depot, industrial sites, such as steel mills and petrochemical plants, and military installations—all in an effort to create a failed state, especially after a failed regime change.

Over 1.7 million people have been displaced, over 1.3 million lost their jobs, 4,000 people lost their lives, and over 38,000 were injured— not to mention the continuation of anxiety and trauma, especially for young children, which could last for years and for some may last a lifetime. Statistics are used to quantify the horrific destruction, but numbers cannot capture the absence.

The illegal war in Iran has affected the global population due to shortages of oil and gas, higher prices/ inflation, new austerity policies, increasing unemployment, and attacks on democracy on so many levels.

The war is having a devastating impact on revolutionary forces and civil society at large.

We can say the most important task today is to STOP THE WAR and STOP EXECUTIONS.

The war has only strengthened the repressive regime, with its police and thugs roaming Bazaar markets in the daytime and the streets late at night in a show of defiance and instilling fear in people that “we are here to kill.”

We need principled international solidarity in support of people struggling against authoritarianism, gender apartheid, an anti-worker regime, and ethnic discrimination, who have experienced the heaviest state violence over the past four decades.

Economic Terrorism

The new sanctions and blockades, with their devastating effect on the Iranian people, will produce a deeper humanitarian crisis, and the region will be pushed closer to prolonged instability.

The regime will respond to the sanctions by crackdowns on the slightest form of opposition voiced by workers, women, and national minorities.

And a harsher, more militarized political economy means more control in the hands of the IRGC.

But this will not end in a collapse of the state; sanctions will only raise the poverty level.

The 3,500 US sanctions narrowed Iran’s “trade partnership” and raised transaction costs but did not lead to a collapse. If welfare support and patriotic mobilization fails, the state will go back to repression.

Importance of Lenin’s Writings on the National Question for Today’s Struggles

Lenin’s writings on imperialism and the national question, which were influenced by his study of Hegel in his Philosophical Notebooks in 1914-15, critiqued ultra-left tendencies in the party that downplayed support for national self-determination (like Bukharin), on the ground that their position was non-dialectical. He held that the new stage of imperialism would be countered by new movements for national liberation that could transform society.

A movement that ignores the national oppression in favor of an empty internationalism cannot unite workers across national boundaries because it leaves intact one of the central mechanisms through which capitalism divides and oppresses. Lenin writes in Imperialism that the domination of finance capital is the highest stage of capitalism.

Anti-Marxist Stance of Campists

Today we are witnessing some on the left siding with oppressive regimes, even religious fundamentalist ones. In the case of Iran, it is based on the assumption that such states are anti-imperialist. But in doing so, they align themselves with the most reactionary forces of the 21st century. They recognize anti-imperialism through the lens of the state. The lived experiences of the masses are denied or are treated as “false consciousness.”

The key to combating imperialism is to do so from the vantage point of the oppressed masses.

The campists view the world from the vantage point of geopolitics, the terrain of bourgeois politics.

What is missing in the campist view is the class character of the state and the agency of the revolutionary subject—the class struggle of millions of workers, women, LGBTQ, and ethnic minorities in civil society. Those workers are fighting against capitalist neoliberal policy, privatization, deregulation, and for the right to unionize, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, assembly, and gender equality.

We have a staggering number of political prisoners in Iran, and it has the second-highest number of executions in the world—even executions during wartime, which is against its own Constitution.

We have been witnessing “anti-execution protests and NO to execution Tuesday campaigns” from inside 60 prisons in Iran, with hunger strikes, demanding an end to all executions. This has been going on for the past five months; how can we deny their struggle?

How about the courageous woman, life, freedom movement? They fight against gender apartheid and Islamist reactionary policies; the movement is opposed to the class-first approach. They fight for their dignity and freedom.

And these struggles have been going on for a long time before the US /Israel fascistic war started.

Yes, you can be against state oppression and against US imperialism or Russian imperialism at the same time; this is the Internationalist humanist principle. The struggle against foreign domination and domestic domination should not be treated as two separate or competing projects.

I remember years before the 1979 Revolution, when much of the Iranian Left viewed the shah as a “chained dog of imperialism,” understanding domestic authoritarianism as an expression of the structural dependence on US imperial power. Today part of the left regards the Islamic Republic’s authoritarianism as a defensive reaction to imperialist pressure and intervention. In both cases, the practical result of these premises is to prioritize the struggle against foreign domination over the struggle against domestic repression, but they cannot be treated separately.

As we have seen in the past 47 years, ending dependence on the US did not produce political freedom. People are demanding changes to an interconnected system of crisis, repression, corruption and economic deprivation. They chant: Forget the nuclear program, do something about us; instead of enriching uranium enrichment, how about enriching our lives.

Blame Game        

Then we have the right-wing, which openly defends the US/Israeli stance that blames the entire problem on the Islamic Republic.

We also have a right-wing current within the Iranian diaspora, especially the Monarchist circle around Reza Pahlavi, with their extensive media network such as “Iran International,” with financial support from the Israelis and Saudis that have contributed to the killing of thousands of innocent people in Iran during the recent massacres in January and February 2026.

Then we have people who are staunch supporters of the Islamic Republic position, like Mohammed Marandani (unofficial spokesperson for the Islamic Republic and member of the negotiating team of Iran during the Obama Administration; his father was the personal physician of the late Ali Khamenei), Trita Parsi (from the Quincy Institute), John Mearsheimer (from the University of Chicago, and a West Point graduate), and Jeffery Sacks (from Columbia University and a promoter of economic shock doctrine in the 1970s in South and Central America). All are well-known, with extensive knowledge, and rightly address the US/ Israeli aggression, but do not criticize the Islamic Republic’s destructive policies, the daily imprisonment and execution of workers, artists, the oppression of millions of women, ethnic minorities, gender apartheid, and policies that have pushed 70% of the population below the poverty line—not to mention the corrupt role of the IRGC (the IRGC operates as a government within the government).

But I would like to focus on the left socialist campists who address only one side of the conflict, American imperialism, like some of Monthly Review’s writers, including Gary Wilson’s article entitled, “Iran today, China tomorrow: The strategy behind the war.”

He writes the war was an outcome of “the drive of monopoly capital to maintain control over the world resources market and labor at any cost.” While he mentions the killing of the Minab girls’ school, the role of finance capital, and the role of the Strait of Hormuz, there is no mention of the Islamic Republic’s role in enacting repressive policies, neoliberal policies, deregulation, massive privatization at the hands of government insiders and oligarchs, nor the misery of oil and petrochemical workers (the majority of them work on a short-term contract basis with no protections; there have been over 4,000 strikes in Iran in recent years.

Gary Wilson concludes in the article: “The war was planned. The suffering was predictable. Which side are you on?” So, are we forced to surrender or stand on the side of the Islamic Republic?

For years, the policy that the state has pursued in the name of resistance has not led to liberation but to war, sanctions, and economic crisis. One thing is clear: the people of Iran do not see this as a patriotic or liberatory war. Some mistakenly attribute the absence of large anti-regime movements during the war to some kind of patriotism and popular support for the regime, forgetting that this regime killed thousands of its people and terrorized communities to prevent another mass uprising.

In summary, the lived experiences of people should be the point of departure for our analysis. Our theory should be grounded in the praxis of workers and the oppressed and not some pre-determined top/down notion that we know better than those who are living and feeling it through their bones or thinking that the protesters are geopolitically naïve.

The majority of the Iranian people see this as a devastating blow to their own authentic movement that started in the 2009, 2019, 2023, and 2026 protests and will continue their search for a path to overthrow the regime, but not by outside forces. Any regime change has to be done by the Iranian people from below.

With Solidarity!