Anti-war protest outside the White House, Washington, DC, June 18, 2025. Photo by Diane Krauthamer/Flickr.

When we look at the treatment of the Iranian uprising by some left-wing commentators, imperialism appears as an all-purpose explanatory solvent, the all-encompassing force that shapes our world. Geopolitics becomes the main plot, while Iranian society is reduced to scenery. In this overly simplified view, history’s primary drivers become camps, blocs, states, and empires, while the role of classes or autonomous action recedes and genuine social agency is obscured. Complex historical dynamics are replaced with a mere dance of opposing blocs, with the United States and its vassals, such as Israel, holding all the cards. Once this move is made, analysis stalls. Popular revolt is no longer approached as the product of social contradictions, class antagonisms, or political closure, but filtered almost entirely through the question of who might benefit from it internationally. The lived reality of repression, exploitation, and resistance is displaced by a single geopolitical test: does this uprising embarrass the right enemy?

In the case of Iran, instead of urging solidarity with ordinary people risking their lives against an entrenched state, news of crowds risking prison, torture, or death is met not with inquiry—what compels such courage?—but with suspicion, calculation, and the cold detachment typical of the geopolitical gaze. The Islamic Republic’s violence is subtly displaced by a forensic hunt for foreign fingerprints, until Tehran’s own executioners disappear and the ‘true’ authors of disorder are found in Washington or Jerusalem—a reversal rehearsed so often it now writes itself.

But Iran is neither a blank canvas for Western projection nor a passive tableau for foreign intervention. The recent sequence of uprisings did not originate only from external influence or the arbitrary actions of a foreign entity. The insistent return of mass turbulence, animated by the uneven, antagonistic energies proper to politics, means the street is reasserting its central role as a detonator. Since 2009, protests in Iran have become less an event than a language—improvised, recursive, stitched from memory and necessity. It is true that autonomy remains a wager and not a guarantee; but to deny it is to foreclose the very possibility of politics. The expression of widespread discontent always risks blurring events, mainly because it fundamentally shakes the existing power structure.

For some leftists these eruptions get recoded as the tantrums of an alienated bourgeoisie: students, ‘compradors,’ or rootless cosmopolitans, severed from the life of the masses and essentialized as potential traitors. But this reading does not hold up to a reality check. This latest unrest is the convulsion of a society in which social reproduction itself is collapsing. Chronic inflation, currency free-fall, precarious labor, and the fraying of survival have driven millions past the threshold of endurance. In this landscape, the regime’s foundational compromise—an exchange of redistribution, informal protection, and the promise of stability among religious lower classes, bazaar interests, and state organs—begins to unravel. The withdrawal of consent in religious or conservative quarters, the emergence of strikes in the bazaars, are not marginal events. They are symptomatic of rupture at the regime’s core. And that should remind us that crisis never produces a single, legible response. It provokes, in turn, liberation, reaction, contradiction—sometimes all at once. This ‘messiness’ is not a defect of revolt but its condition of possibility. It is the raw, unprocessed substance of politics, and those who refuse to confront it are condemned to irrelevance.

Economic strangulation, diplomatic isolation, covert operations, regional militarism, and the perpetual threat of escalation saturate the Iranian field. The result is a labyrinth in which every node—monetary, political, existential—is under stress. To acknowledge this is not to surrender to the narcotic of total explanation, in which all roads lead, inevitably, to Washington or Jerusalem. Of course, sanctions amplify crisis, deplete state revenue, increase inflation, and make survival itself precarious. But attributing revolt solely to external forces confuses contributing factors with causality. When you look at a complex situation from top to bottom what takes shape is a mesh: imperial pressure and domestic domination, mutually imbricated, producing a crisis whose logic cannot be mapped by a single vector. Under pressure, currency dualism, informal trade, and rent-seeking proliferate, realigning the regime’s inner circuitry. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), far from being a mere repressive appendage, functions as a governing bloc, its tentacles sunk deep into the tissue of the........

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