By Prof. Sarah Raymundo
This article advances four interconnected arguments as a counterpoint to those who insist, on moral grounds, that Iran must be condemned rather than defended. It contends that genuine solidarity with the Iranian people demands, first, recognizing US imperialism as the primary contradiction—the geopolitical fact that animates every other dynamic in the region. Second, it examines how “protest discourse” is systematically weaponized for regime-change objectives, appropriating legitimate grievances to serve imperial ends. Third, it argues that anti-imperialism does not require romanticization of the Iranian state; one can acknowledge its internal contradictions while defending its sovereignty against those who seek its destruction. Finally, it presents the concept of working-class sovereignty, drawn from on-the-ground analysis of Iranian labor struggles, to show how class politics and national defense intertwine under imperial siege. These four points, taken together, form the basis for a principled moral stance advanced by peoples’ struggles around the globe. Their ideological clarity and political determination brings an urgent and important lesson: that standing with the Iranian people requires opposing the imperial power that seeks their subjugation.
Amidst a genocide in Palestine that the entire world witnesses—a genocide fully enabled and implemented by US imperialism through weaponry, diplomatic cover, and financial support—there are still, to this day, people who align with US intervention, illegal sanctions, and wars of aggression. This alignment is not merely a cerebral predilection but an ideological position that directly secures their economic stability and social standing. To put it plainly, people can be bought.
Those whose mental frameworks support a murderous imperialist system are rewarded directly: they are deemed “impartial” and “useful” sources of information. They are invited to podiums, published in “peer reviewed” journals, and celebrated as “safe” and “friendly” elements—not because they pose no threat to the truth, but because they pose no threat to power. They are not expected to, and indeed never do, dish out a comprehensible, compelling, and cohesive argument that challenges the fundamental premises of US global domination. They are, in short, minions hiding behind a veneer of intellectual sheen, their speciousness and cowardice recognized by those who actually know, but politely ignored due to the stultifying culture of spaces like the academy, where confrontation is suppressed for fear of disfavor.
One scholar has articulated precisely this distinction, arguing that there exists a fundamental difference “between an intellectual, one who challenges the status quo to create a more just world, and a functionary, whose scholarly contributions are guided by the precepts of foundation funding and the State Department” (Farnia, 2023). This framework illuminates exactly such functionaries disguised as intellectuals.
What unites these functionaries across the liberal and right-wing spectrum is not merely their material rewards but a shared discursive strategy: they invoke the “agency” of a nation’s people as a cudgel against any state that asserts sovereignty against US domination. Yet this invocation constructs a national subject in their own image—a subject whose desires mirror the imperial agenda of regime change. Agency becomes projection, a stand-in for the functionary’s own opposition to states that refuse subservience. The national subject thus conjured is granted an agency paradoxically weaponized against the sovereign state—precisely the terrain on which any genuine self-determination could be secured against US aggression. In the end, we encounter a pro-regime change phantom whose supposed agency is untethered from the material forces that could actually defend a people’s rights. The functionary’s discourse reproduces and legitimizes this phantom, all while systematically undermining the sovereign state under imperial assault.
Having dispensed with the necessary candor about such functionaries disguised as intellectuals, we can now turn to the substantive task of analyzing the object of their manufactured concern: Iran.
First, a correct analysis must begin by identifying the primary contradiction. Which government in West Asia is viewed by the US imperialist state as the principal bulwark against US-led western imperialism? The Islamic Republic of Iran. This is not a matter of opinion, but of geopolitical fact. What has the US state inflicted upon the peoples of this region to dismantle that bulwark? The catalogue of crimes is long and continuing: direct wars of aggression in Iraq and Libya, years-long backing of a genocidal war in Yemen, complicity in the ongoing genocide in Palestine, the arming of extremist groups to destroy the secular state in Syria, illegal sanctions that amount to economic warfare against the populations of Iran, and the constant threat of further military action. All of these crimes flow directly from the primary contradiction: US imperialism cannot tolerate a sovereign state in West Asia that refuses subservience and actively supports anti-colonial liberation.
Progressive legal and anti-imperialist scholars have argued that sanctions are not a diplomatic tool but a pillar of US imperialism—a form of economic warfare designed to strangle national economies and foment popular discontent (Shahrabi, 2025, Sevilla, 2025, Farnia & Farnia, 2026; Doutaghi, 2024). They systematically demonstrate how economic sanctions function as “slow and structural violence” constructed and deployed by the global North “to impose de-development and facilitate wealth drain from the periphery to the imperial core” (Doutaghi, 2024). This scholarship traces the origins of this coercive apparatus to the 1950s, “when Iran first asserted sovereignty over its natural resources” (Doutaghi, 2024). This assertion of sovereignty, embodied in Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh’s nationalization of the oil industry, represented the aspirations of Iran’s national bourgeoisie for an endogenous development path, a trajectory violently terminated by the CIA-MI6 orchestrated coup of 1953 (Abutalebi, 2025).
From this perspective, Iran’s crime is not any alleged misdeed but its sovereignty and its material support for anti-colonial liberation forces across the region, from Palestine to Lebanon to Yemen (Ajl, 2024, Farnia & Farnia, 2026; Doutaghi, 2026). The US aim is not to improve the lives of Iranians, but to destroy a state whose constitution enshrines solidarity with the oppressed peoples of the world (Farnia & Farnia, 2026). Iran’s regional role as “a cornerstone of resistance against Zionist genocide and its colonial expansion in West Asia” is precisely what makes it a target (Doutaghi, 2026).
Political economists have further demonstrated that the entire Arab-Iranian region is subject to a US-imposed regime of “de-development” that seeks to dismantle strategic obstacles through war and sanctions (Ajl, 2024). Iranian-linked regional forces constitute precisely such an obstacle, and must be understood by revisiting the role of political sovereignty in emancipatory transitions (Ajl, 2024). This analysis is informed by historical scholarship tracing the evolution of resistance in the region, particularly the turn to “people’s war” by Palestinian guerrillas after the 1967 defeat of Arab republicanism (Ajl, 2024, citing Higgins, 2023). The same imperial logic of de-development has been systematically applied to Syria, where US-sponsored regime change functions not to liberate populations but to dismantle sovereign state structures that obstruct imperial hegemony (Higgins, 2025, 2025). The fall of the Syrian government in late 2024, a key Iranian ally, stands as a stark warning of what this process delivers: not freedom, but a vacuum quickly filled by forces aligned with US and Israeli interests, leading to greater instability and suffering for the local population. This is the material outcome of the “de-development” that political economists describe—a fate that US imperialism has in store for Iran as well.
Scholars have diagnosed how hostility to Global South states reflects a deeper “coloniality of solidarity” within Western Marxism, which treats national liberation struggles as secondary and, in practice, mirrors the objectives of imperial powers seeking to destroy sovereign state structures (Rouabah & Mullin, 2025). This “selective solidarity” abstracts “oppressed peoples from the states and institutions that make their survival possible” F(Rouabah & Mullin, 2025, Ajl, 2025 ). They trace this failure to the material privileges of the imperialist core—”what Lenin identified as a bribed ‘upper stratum’ of the working class, made possible by ‘super profits’ from colonial exploitation” (Rouabah & Mullin, 2025). In Iran specifically, “patriotism… is not reactionary; it is a working-class ideology” (Ajl, 2025). This theoretical proposition—that under imperial siege, defense of national sovereignty can express working-class consciousness rather than negate it—is central to understanding what follows. To ignore this primary context of unrelenting US aggression is not an act of nuanced analysis; it is a political choice that serves the aggressor.
This analysis is not marginal; it reflects an understanding embedded in Iranian state policy and affirmed by an international coalition of leftist parties (Joint Statement, 2023). The Iranian state itself frames sanctions as a failed US policy of “maximum pressure” designed to dismantle the national economy, countered by a declared “strategy of active resistance,” while denouncing US “economic terrorism” and the accompanying “cognitive war” waged by hostile media (Iranian Foreign Ministry, 2026a). Crucially, the Foreign Ministry has formally acknowledged the constitutional right to peaceful protest while firmly rejecting “any attempt by external actors to exploit internal issues for political ends”—drawing precisely the distinction between organic grievance and imperial appropriation (Iranian Foreign Ministry, 2026).
This stance is not propaganda but the articulation of a material reality: the 1979 Revolution overthrew a US-backed dictatorship and established a state that, whatever its internal contradictions, has consistently positioned itself against US imperialism and in solidarity with anti-colonial liberation movements. This is geopolitical fact—a fact so substantial that it has survived four decades of sanctions, assassinations, sabotage, and overt military threats. The Iranian state’s survival and its continued material support for forces from Palestine to Lebanon to Yemen are empirical realities, not rhetorical fictions. They can be observed, analyzed, and understood through materialist inquiry.
The convergence between Iranian state discourse and anti-imperialist scholarship is not, therefore, evidence that these scholars function as mouthpieces for Tehran. Rather, it reflects a shared recognition of a concrete reality: under imperial siege, the working class finds its interests not in the dissolution of the sovereign state but in its defense, for the state that imperialism seeks to destroy remains the indispensable terrain on which any future working-class victory must be won.
Second, in the face of this sustained assault, we must critically examine the function of the “protest discourse” weaponized by the empire and its intellectual fellow travelers. When, amidst US threats of war and actual military aggression, some respond by focusing exclusively on the Iranian government’s internal policies, we must ask: what is the material effect of this argument? It serves as a nod of approval to US aggression, not just on Iran, but on every nation that stands up to US imperialism.
Doutaghi’s field-based analysis of the December 2025 South Pars Gas Refinery protest—one of the largest labor mobilizations in post-revolutionary Iranian history—provides ground-level evidence of how protests are systematically appropriated for regime-change objectives.When five thousand contract workers from one of Iran’s most strategic economic sites took to the streets with legitimate grievances over wages and conditions, Western-funded Persian-language media outlets, alongside official accounts affiliated with the United States government, launched coordinated efforts to hijack and reframe the movement (Doutaghi, 2025). These external actors attempted to convert an indigenous, disciplined labor action into yet another entry in the imperial catalog of “anti-regime” protests.
This appropriation of protest is not a marginal phenomenon but the central logic of elite imperial discourse. Leading US papers like the Washington Post and New York Times explicitly advocate for bombing Iran and intensifying sanctions by framing them as a means to “help” Iranian protesters and “free” them from “bondage” (Shupak, 2026). The Post approvingly quoted Trump’s threat to protesters that the US is “locked and loaded and ready to go,” while the Times declared Iran’s government “too depraved to be reformed” and called for more sanctions—sanctions that have “caused medical shortages that hit [Iran’s] most vulnerable citizens hardest” (Shupak, 2026). This is performative concern that masks a 70-year history of US efforts to dominate Iran, from the 1953 coup to the assassination of scientists and the current sanctions regime that starves ordinary Iranians (Shupak, 2026). The logical corollary of this discourse is that outrage over the Iranian government’s actions becomes justification for the US government to inflict more violence on Iran—a formula for destruction disguised as solidarity (Shupak, 2026).
This same imperial logic operates not only in the opinion pages of elite newspapers but on the ground in Iran itself, where genuine labor struggles become targets of appropriation. Doutaghi’s field-based analysis of the December 2025 South Pars Gas Refinery protest—one of the largest labor mobilizations in post-revolutionary Iranian history—provides ground-level evidence of how protests are systematically hijacked for regime-change objectives. When five thousand contract workers from one of Iran’s most strategic economic sites took to the streets with legitimate grievances over wages and conditions, Western-funded Persian-language media outlets, alongside official accounts affiliated with the United States government, launched coordinated efforts to hijack and reframe the movement (Doutaghi, 2025). These external actors attempted to convert an indigenous, disciplined labor action into yet another entry in the imperial catalog of “anti-regime” protests.
This research establishes a crucial distinction between organic protest and “imperial protest formations.” The latter operate through “the strategic separation of people from the state, through inciting violence, and by hollowing out national institutions in the name of abstract notions of liberation” (Doutaghi, 2025). This framework exposes how recent protest movements have been rapidly appropriated and rearticulated—through overt foreign endorsement, coordinated diasporic networks, and sustained media warfare—into regime-change projects (Doutaghi, 2026). When a former US secretary of state and CIA director publicly boasts of “Mossad agents walking beside” Iranian protesters, it is an act of profound self-deception for intellectuals to pretend otherwise (Doutaghi, 2026). Those who separate “the regime” from “the people” adopt precisely “the rhetoric used to justify their destruction” (Ajl, 2025). To dismiss this foreign engineering is to be willfully blind to the historical playbook of the CIA, from Guatemala in 1954 to Iran itself in 1953.
Third, the anti-imperialist position does not require a romanticization of the Iranian state, but it does demand a clear-sighted understanding of what is at stake. The Iranian state, despite four decades of the most severe sanctions regime in world history, has achieved demonstrable social gains for its population. Iranian scholars and activists have documented dramatic improvements in literacy, particularly among women, the development of a robust national healthcare system, and significant progress in human development indicators since the 1979 Revolution (Shahrabi, 2025, Sevilla, 2025, Farnia & Farnia, 2026,).
These gains are not incidental; they are the fruit of a nationalist economy built through resistance to imperial domination. And it is precisely this trajectory of sovereign development that US imperialism seeks to destroy—not to liberate Iranians, but to eliminate a strategic obstacle to its regional hegemony. As political economists have shown, weakening Iran through sanctions or internal subversion is not a path to liberation for Iranians; it is a path to strengthening the very imperial forces that seek to dominate the entire region (Ajl, 2024). The fall of the Syrian government in late 2024, a key Iranian ally, is a stark warning of what US-sponsored regime change delivers: not freedom, but a vacuum quickly filled by forces aligned with US and Israeli interests, leading to greater instability and suffering for the local population.
Fourth, and most critically, the theoretical framework established earlier—that under imperial siege, working-class consciousness and national sovereignty are not opposed but intertwined—finds its most powerful empirical confirmation in Doutaghi’s field analysis of the South Pars protest. Her work offers a concept that shatters the imperial narrative entirely: working-class sovereignty. The South Pars protest was not merely a labor strike but “a demonstration of working class sovereignty, anti-imperialist political agency under imperial siege; a collective articulation of rights that refused both submission and chaos” (Doutaghi, 2025).
This contemporary expression of working-class sovereignty has deep roots in the revolution itself. As analysis of the 1979 uprising shows, the revolution was forged by a multi-class coalition in which the working class functioned as the “battering ram” of revolutionary change (Abutalebi, 2025). The promise of that revolution, enshrined in the constitution, included free healthcare, education, and provisions for employment and housing as national rights—gains won through the immense energy of the dispossessed. However, in the decades following, a persistent internal class struggle has unfolded between justice-oriented forces, who sought to realize these gains through grassroots initiatives like the ‘Jihad of Construction,’ and a faction pushing to reintegrate Iran into the global capitalist system (Abutalebi, 2025). The South Pars workers’ action must be understood on this terrain: they are not merely protesting wage theft, but are continuing the revolution’s unfinished struggle for social justice, doing so by defending the very state institutions that, despite their internal contradictions, remain the product of that revolutionary victory and the only bulwark against imperial dissolution.
This sovereignty directly refutes the caricature of Iran propagated by imperial intellectuals. The workers did not view law enforcement as their class enemy, recognizing that in a nation subjected to decades of sanctions, assassinations, and foreign-backed efforts to destabilize the country, attacking the legitimacy of domestic security institutions plays directly into the hands of those seeking to justify external intervention (Doutaghi, 2025). The crowd expressed gratitude toward the police, and the union leader conveyed deep respect for the security forces, acknowledging their institutional role in preserving national sovereignty amid constant imperial threat. Yet this orientation toward the state asserting national sovereignty did not translate into passivity before capital. Their central slogan framed wage theft not merely as economic exploitation but as an assault on the nation itself, binding class consciousness to anti-imperialist awareness (Doutaghi, 2025). When the US government’s official Persian-language account attempted to appropriate the movement for its own propaganda purposes, the union leadership publicly repudiated the interference, understanding full well that the same Washington establishment feigning solidarity was the architect of the crippling sanctions responsible for their immiseration (Doutaghi, 2025).
The South Pars workers demonstrated that class struggle in a state asserting national sovereignty under imperial assault assumes forms fundamentally distinct from those familiar in the imperial core (Doutaghi, 2025). They required no salvation from corporate media pundits or NGOs funded by the very governments waging economic warfare against them. Their actions affirmed that genuine liberation advances not through alignment with forces seeking to dismantle the state, but through the defense and strengthening of sovereign institutions capable of resisting imperial domination.
The stance that prioritizes anti-imperialism above all else is not a dismissal of the Iranian people’s rights or well-being; it is the most profound expression of solidarity with them. It recognizes, as the progressive scholars cited here demonstrate, that the path to genuine Iranian liberation runs through the defeat of US imperialism, not through collaboration with it. The functionaries who insist on a “moral obligation” to condemn Iran while remaining silent on, or even supportive of, the genocidal policies of the US and Israel are not brave truth-tellers—their scholarship is “guided by the precepts of foundation funding and the State Department” (Farnia, 2023). They are ideologically captured and materially rewarded agents of an empire that has brought nothing but death and destruction to the people of West Asia. Their calls for “freedom” for Iranians are a smokescreen for a project of domination. True internationalism, by contrast, demands that we stand with the Iranian people by standing against the empire that seeks to enslave them, supporting their right to self-determination, sovereignty, and a future free from the threat of US bombs and sanctions.
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