Peoples and Regimes: Anti-Imperialism and the Islamic Republic of Iran

Max Ajl, Orinoco Tribune, July 4, 2025 —

The US-Israeli attack on the Islamic Republic of Iran marked the latest phase of Washington’s war on the region, and on Iran specifically. A war sometimes white-hot, waged with missiles and quadcopters, and at others quiet and cold, waged through the violence of sanctions, impoverishment, and siege.

These wars seek to accelerate de-development and state collapse. They work to destroy sovereign states that lie outside the US security umbrella. States that can incarnate a desire for dignity, serve as vehicles and protective shields for liberation movements, and extend solidarity through arms, technology, vetoes, or peaceful trade routes to circumvent asphyxiating embargoes.

And so, as the US-Israeli attack against the Islamic Republic proceeded with overt US involvement, those opposing this aggression were divided into two camps.

One camp argued in defense of Iran’s right to self-determination and self-defense against imperial powers. It insists on the Iranian people’s right to choose their government as they see fit, resist predatory aggression, and calls for the US and Israel to immediately cease all military operations. Some within this camp went further, recognizing that Iran’s material support for regional resistances forces and technological, logistical, and military support for the regional asymmetric militia, sovereign states, and popular movements is liberatory and just.

Meanwhile, another camp – the military term is the correct one – argued for solidarity with an abstract, seldom-defined people. But never with the regime, never with the state, never with the Islamic Republic. They took a radical distance from the IRI military, the apparatus of governance, and any other polluted residue or container for Iranian-style practices: repression, authoritarianism, Islamic governance, sub-imperialism.

This stance was misleading and even malicious.

History has burdened us with social scientific-historical examples of the uses and mis-uses of selective solidarity that fetishizes beatific “people,” often poorly represented or punishingly oppressed by one regime or another (Libya, Syria, Hamas in Gaza), and who need “saving” by Apaches, B-52s, and death squads masquerading as “revolutionaries.”

Indeed, the US-Israeli propaganda machine claims to always target “the regime” and not “the people.” Civilian casualties are dismissed as collateral damage. Hospitals are hit by “errant” strikes. Infrastructural damage is regrettable, but is the result of misfires or “government-run.” Casualty counts are deliberately manipulated using dazzlingly creative accounting techniques that turn “civilians” – armed men over 16 – into soldiers.

Who could forget Western human rights organizations and academics obediently echoing the false claim that Hamas rockets struck al-Ahli Baptist Hospital in Gaza, laying the ideological groundwork for Israel’s ongoing demolition of Gaza’s hospitals, routinely rebranded as Hamas command centers.

In the case of Iran, many are willing to condemn Israeli mayhem on civilian institutions, but not on the Iranian military. There is also a considerable reluctance to defend the Iranian right to self-defense through its military.

This brings us to a fundamental question: what is a military, and what is a state?

The illusion that the state is nothing but an engine of domestic repression; a carnival of hopeless evil inspired by fashionable US core abolitionism, has no relationship to reality. The state, as Philip Abrams made clear, is both an idea and a set of institutions. The two are interlocked: institutions enact the idea, and the idea legitimizes the institutions. The day-to-day machinations of those institutions secrete and incarnate the idea of the state in the minds of its people.

Somehow, for many, the concept of the state – social security, higher education, public hospitals – is permitted in Northern discourse and for Northern peoples. In reality, the state is central to social reproduction; it moves people around through publicly-owned transportation systems, treats people in public hospitals, supports national research sectors, and decides which economic sectors will grow faster than others. Successful modern economic planning is impossible without state apparatus. State management and intervention in the economy is central to accelerated growth.

In this context, hostility to the state aligns with imperial agendas that seeks to destroy state functions and echoes libertarians fantasies of “night-watchman state.” It also paves the way for a ballooning foreign-funded Southern civil society which assumes some state functions like small-scale decentralized development. But the funding always comes from the North.

In Iran, those rallying behind the military and its defense, perceive the idea of the state as a banner, a means to defend all those things the state provides. In this sense, patriotism in the South, particularly in Iran, is not reactionary; it is a working-class ideology.

A more charitable narrative allows for the state’s civilian functions, in the Global South and certainly in Iran. Attacks on hospitals, schools, power plants, and above all, “women and children,” are condemned – as though women do not have husbands, and children do not have fathers. But the practical mechanisms that would protect hospitals, schools, power plants, cannot be mentioned. Attacks are condemned, but self-defense is never defended.

Yet we know that the history of catch-up industrialization in the Communist giants of Eurasia, the USSR and the People’s Republic of China, is the history of seeking a balance between civilian-use industrial output and the need to direct surplus to self-defense. It was understood that to build an economy suitable for its people at a time of peace, one needed arms to protect the people from an enemy which would quickly and easily resort to violence. Self-defense meant, simply, an army.

In the context of Iranian militarization, the state has been crucial to developing sovereign industrial capacity, increasingly tied to China and Russia, recognizing that producing more and more of its needs domestically was the sole guarantor of its position as the regional force for political sovereignty. Iranian self-defense is not just local; it is regional.

The IRI provides the possibility of weapons to the poor and besieged, shares blueprints, and gifts arms to regional anti-symmetric militias or state forces like Ansar Allah. In this context, the role of the state is unavoidable, and the idea of the state is what allows people to assume their roles.

By separating “the regime” from “the people,” the US-Israeli propaganda justifies state collapse in the name of the people. You cannot defend a people by adopting the rhetoric used to justify their destruction.