How the British Left Dismisses Iran's Uprising: The Campist Playbook

New eBook: The Dialectics of Rebellion: A Trotskyist Analysis of the 2025–2026 Iranian Uprising

The message arrived in a left WhatsApp group on January 6th, 2026. A member asked if anyone had “a source for what’s actually happening in Iran,” having seen reports of mass protests on Instagram. Within minutes, the replies crystallised a worldview:

“There are legitimate protests against Iran’s government but to my understanding they are vastly less than is being reported. The common belief is that there are foreign agitators organising some of the anti-government protests in the interests of the usual suspects USA and Israel.”

Craig Murray, the former diplomat turned left commentator, weighed in: “I don’t buy it. Exactly the same narrative as we got over the toppling of Assad. And what has been the result? Israel occupying southern Syria and Southern Lebanon and the new Zionist leader of Syria feted in the White House.”

Another participant agreed: “Bears very little resemblance from what I’m hearing from back home and follows the same old narrative which should now be very clearly recognized as propaganda.”

This is the campist reflex in its grassroots form. Before any serious examination of what is happening in Iran, before any engagement with the demands of Iranian workers and students, the left-wing instinct is to ask: who benefits? And if the answer might be Washington or Tel Aviv, to dismiss the entire phenomenon as manufactured.

The problem is that people are dying. The receipts exist. And the British left’s refusal to read them constitutes a political betrayal.

Ten Days that Shook Iran

The protests that erupted across Iran on December 28th, 2025 were triggered by the Pezeshkian administration’s abolition of the 28,500-toman preferential exchange rate: a subsidised system used for importing basic goods.¹ The immediate effect was a tarifazo, a shock price hike that sent bread and fuel costs through the roof in a country where annualised inflation had already reached 52%.²

This was not a colour revolution manufactured in Langley. It was a bread riot with political characteristics, emerging from material conditions that no amount of “foreign agitator” rhetoric can explain away.

The numbers tell the story. By late 2024, over 57% of the Iranian population experienced malnourishment.³ By early January 2026, the rial had collapsed to 1.46 million against the dollar. Capital flight since 2018 totalled $116 billion.⁴ The military and security budget increased by 150% while public sector wages were adjusted by only 20%: less than half the inflation rate.⁵ When meat becomes a luxury and medicine prices double, people take to the streets. They do not require instructions from the CIA.

By January 6th, the tenth day of the uprising, protests had spread to over 110 cities across 27 of Iran’s 31 provinces.⁶ Unlike the 2022 “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement, which concentrated in major urban centres and Kurdish regions, this uprising is particularly strong in medium-sized towns and rural areas. The geographical spread indicates something the campist analysis cannot accommodate: a poly-crisis in which the regime’s capacity to impose control has fractured across the periphery.

The regime’s response tells its own story. At least 36 people have been killed, including four minors, and over 2,000 arrested.⁷ On January 4th, Revolutionary Guards raided the Imam Khomeini Hospital in Ilam City, using shotguns and tear gas inside the hospital grounds, smashing glass doors to drag wounded protesters directly from their beds.⁸ Reports indicate that approximately 800 members of Iranian-backed Iraqi Shiite militias, including Kataib Hezbollah and the Badr Organization, have been deployed to assist in suppression: evidence that the regime fears defections within its own security forces.⁹

The dominant slogans are not “Bring Back the Shah.” They are: “Neither Shah nor Supreme Leader: democracy and equality” and “Death to the oppressor, be it the Shah or the Supreme Leader.”¹⁰ And this one, which should give the campist left pause: “Not for Gaza, not for Lebanon, I give my life for Iran.”¹¹ The Iranian masses are explicitly rejecting the regime’s expenditure on regional proxy wars. They are not asking for permission from the “axis of resistance.”

The Monarchist Trap

The campist left has seized on the figure of Reza Pahlavi II, the Shah’s son, as evidence that the protests serve imperialist interests. One WhatsApp participant noted seeing “photos of the Shah’s son at the Wailing Wall a couple of days ago with quotes about his love for Israel. Nothing like it to make one assume CIA/Mossad at work.”

The assumption is understandable. It is also wrong.

Trotskyist researchers have documented that much of the “pro-monarchy” element in current protests is manufactured: not by Western intelligence, but by the Islamic Republic itself. Reports indicate that plainclothes IRGC and Basij agents have been sent into crowds to chant pro-Pahlavi slogans as a divide-and-rule strategy, designed to hijack the anti-regime narrative and suggest that the only alternative to the mullahs is restoration of the old dictatorship.¹² Iranians have exposed deepfake videos and recycled footage from 2022 using voice-overs to falsely suggest protesters are calling for the Shah.¹³

The Fourth International’s French section warns against “attempts at recuperation” by monarchist currents, describing Pahlavi’s programme as “authoritarian and ultraliberal” and noting that his supporters have manipulated protest videos.¹⁴ The regime and the monarchists share an interest in erasing the third option: independent working-class power.

The British Campist Response

How has the British left responded to this uprising? The pattern is now familiar from Ukraine, from Syria, from every case where genuine popular resistance inconveniently targets a regime that opposes Western imperialism.

Stop the War Coalition has framed the uprising primarily as a precursor to Western intervention. On January 5th, 2026, National Convenor Lindsey German published “Trump’s Return to Colonial Conquest,” which subordinates the Iranian protests entirely to the threat of American military action.

German acknowledges, in passing, that the regime is “repressive and authoritarian.” But her analytical energy is directed elsewhere: “It is up to the Iranian people to decide how to deal with that, not the discredited monarchists and their friends the imperialists.”¹⁵

Note the grammar. The Iranian people are granted agency in the abstract, then immediately disappeared. The only concrete actors in German’s framing are “monarchists” and “imperialists.” The workers facing 52% inflation, the women demanding freedom, the students with “nothing left to lose”: they exist only as a passive mass at risk of being “hijacked” by foreign powers. The possibility that they might be political subjects with their own demands and capacities does not register.

Craig Murray has been more explicit. In a December 2024 interview with The National, following the collapse of the Assad regime, Murray described the Syrian government as “flawed but pluralist.”¹⁶

Let that phrase settle. A regime that barrel-bombed Aleppo, used chemical weapons on Ghouta, and operated an industrial torture apparatus at Saydnaya prison was, in Murray’s telling, “pluralist.” The word has been evacuated of meaning; it now signifies nothing more than “opposed to Israel.”

Murray applies the same framework to Iran. The 2026 protests represent “exactly the same narrative” used to topple Assad, he argues: a “fraudulent” pretext for “Greater Israel” and US regional dominance.¹⁷ The material conditions, the economic triggers, the documented scale of mobilisation: none of this penetrates the analysis. If Western media reports it, it must be propaganda.

George Galloway has used his platform to host Prof. Seyed Mohammad Marandi, a prominent defender of the Islamic Republic, to discuss whether Washington is “preparing for confrontation.”¹⁸ His commentary focuses on the “collapse of international law” and frames the protests within the regime’s own narrative: an external attempt to “strike at the axis of resistance.”

David Miller and Chris Williamson, co-hosting Palestine Declassified on Iranian state broadcaster Press TV, have described the protests as part of a “Zionist and imperialist propaganda” effort intended to destroy the “multi-polar world.”¹⁹ Miller characterises internal dissent within the “axis of resistance” as an “epistemic alliance” against the liberal order: academic jargon deployed to dismiss hunger and repression as Western fabrication.

When Ali Khamenei claimed that “rioters” were being “incited or hired by the enemy,” Miller echoed the framing.²⁰ The Supreme Leader’s word, apparently, requires no verification.

The More Defensible Positions

Not all British left coverage has been equally bankrupt.

The Morning Star has provided reporting that at least acknowledges the class dynamics. The paper cites the Committee for the Defence of the Iranian People’s Rights (CODIR) and the Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA), platforming Iranian trade unionists and students and framing the crisis as “budgetary apartheid.”²¹ This represents a more critical stance toward the “corrupt theocracy” than the paper adopted during the Syrian collapse.

Socialist Worker has published more detailed analysis of the economic triggers, explicitly citing the subsidy abolition and hyperinflation. The paper interviewed an activist using the pseudonym “Sahar” from Iranians for Palestine UK, who emphasised that the revolt represents a “root-level demand” from a generation with “nothing left to lose.”²²

Sahar’s framing deserves attention: “Any Western intervention and posturing that they’re on the side of Iranians undermines the sovereignty of Iranians.”²³ This is the correct position. It opposes intervention while defending the uprising’s legitimacy. Socialist Worker uses Sahar to bridge support for the “right to revolt” with opposition to “imperialist hijacking,” platforming an Iranian voice that validates the class struggle while condemning Trump’s “rescue” rhetoric.

The Socialist Party (CWI) has been sharper still. In a January 7th analysis, Scott Hunter characterised the protests as a “lightning rod for accumulated anger against the Islamic Republic regime: a deeply reactionary theocracy: and the dire state of Iranian capitalism.”²⁴ The Socialist Party argues that while Western imperialists would prefer a “colour change” that preserves capitalism, there is no prospect of sustained improvement under capitalism in Iran. They call for the working class to enter the movement en masse to lead the overthrow of both the theocracy and “dead-end capitalism.”

The International Socialist Alternative (ISA) has called for “democratic committees of action” to be formed in communities to resist state attacks, emphasising continuity with the 2022 “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement.²⁵

The Revolutionary Communist International has been notably quiet on Iran, prioritising the Venezuela crisis. Their January 3rd statement clarified that opposition to imperialist attacks “no more expressed support for the corrupt and reactionary regime of the mullahs in Tehran” than their Venezuela position expressed confidence in Maduro.²⁶ The framing is correct but the emphasis is revealing: Venezuela gets the mobilisation; Iran gets the footnote.

The Internationalist Alternative

What does genuine solidarity look like?

Hands Off the People of Iran (HOPI), led by Yassamine Mather, provides the sharpest contrast to the campist bloc. On January 2nd, 2026, Mather and the Cooperation Council of Iranian Left and Communist Forces issued a statement titled “Forward to the revolution!” calling for the “revolutionary overthrow of the Islamic Republic.”²⁷

In the Weekly Worker, Mather argues that the regime is in “survival mode” and that the uprising represents a “fusion of bread and freedom” that cannot be managed through social concessions.²⁸ She remains vocally critical of those on the left who “refuse to show solidarity” with internal struggles because they fear being labelled “terrorist supporters” or aiding imperialism.

Anti-Capitalist Resistance, part of the British section of the Fourth International, has critiqued the campist position directly, arguing that reducing “global struggle” to “only the crimes of US imperialism” ignores “the agency of real people.”²⁹

The Fourth International itself characterises the 2026 uprising as a “new phase” synthesising the socio-economic demands of 2018-2019 with the aspirations for equality and freedom from 2022’s “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement.³⁰ Their analysis centres a crucial point: the Iranian people “do not want to choose between two despotisms.” They reject Trump and Netanyahu’s plans to impose solutions “from above” while equally rejecting the theocratic regime’s claim to anti-imperialist credentials.

The FI identifies the organised working class: teachers, nurses, truck drivers, oil and gas workers: as the “beating heart of Iran’s economy” with the unique power to topple the regime through independent struggle.³¹ This is the perspective the campist left cannot articulate, because it requires recognising Iranian workers as subjects rather than objects of history.

Most damningly, the FI explicitly critiques the segment of the left that supports the Iranian regime due to its hostility toward the US and Israel. This campist position, they argue, “denies the right of Iranian workers and the oppressed to resist after decades of suffering under the boot of a capitalist dictatorship with Islamic colouring.”³²

The Pattern

We have seen this before. On Ukraine, the campist left dismissed the Maidan movement as a fascist coup, then struggled to explain why millions of Ukrainians were resisting Russian invasion. On Syria, they dismissed the revolution as a jihadist conspiracy, then had nothing to say when Assad’s regime collapsed from internal rot. Now Iran.

The analytical method is consistent. When confronted with a popular uprising against a regime that opposes Western imperialism, the campist reflex is to:

1. Question the scale (”vastly less than is being reported”)

2. Attribute agency to foreign powers (”foreign agitators,” “usual suspects”)

3. Identify any reactionary element within the opposition and treat it as representative (”discredited monarchists”)

4. Frame solidarity with the uprising as support for intervention

5. Platform regime voices as authoritative sources

The result is a left that cannot recognise working-class struggle when it occurs in the wrong geopolitical configuration. Iranian workers facing 57% malnourishment are not subjects with demands; they are pawns in a great-power chess game, their agency dissolved into the machinations of Washington and Tel Aviv.

Craig Murray’s description of Assad’s Syria as “flawed but pluralist” reveals where this logic terminates. Any regime, however brutal, can be rehabilitated if it stands opposed to the correct enemies. The torture chambers at Saydnaya become “flaws.” The hunger in Tehran becomes “propaganda.”

The Task

The Fourth International’s position remains what it has always been: unconditional opposition to imperialist intervention, complete political independence from the regime, solidarity with the workers’ own organisations.

This means opposing any US or Israeli military action against Iran. It means rejecting sanctions that immiserate the population while strengthening the regime’s grip. It means refusing to platform monarchist grifters or their imperialist backers.

But it also means recognising that Iranian workers have the right to resist “decades of suffering under the boot of a capitalist dictatorship with Islamic colouring.” It means taking seriously the slogans on the streets: “Neither Shah nor Supreme Leader.” It means understanding that the main enemy of the Iranian working class is, first and foremost, the regime that arrests trade unionists, disappears activists, and shoots protesters.

The campist left has made its choice. When confronted with a genuine popular uprising, they reached for the playbook: foreign agitators, Zionist propaganda, colour revolution. They chose geopolitical alignment over working-class solidarity.

The rest of us have a different choice to make. We can stand with the Iranian workers, students, and women who are risking their lives for bread and freedom. Or we can stand with Craig Murray’s “flawed but pluralist” despotisms, waiting for a revolution that meets our geopolitical approval.

The receipts are in. The uprising is real. The only question is which side we are on.

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To find out more, read the latest Red Mole Guide: The Dialectics of Rebellion in Iran: A Trotskyist Analysis of the 2025–2026 Iranian Uprising.

Available at https://books2read.com/u/381Xlw

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References

1. “Iran to try risky economic concessions as it attempts to quell protesters’ anger,” The Guardian, January 5, 2026. ↩

2. Ibid. ↩

3. Economic data compiled from multiple sources including HRANA and international monitoring organisations. ↩

4. “Tehran adjusts its public tone as protests return,” Iran International, January 2026. ↩

5. HRANA economic analysis, January 2026. ↩

6. “2025-2026 Iranian protests,” Wikipedia, accessed January 7, 2026; corroborated by Stimson Center, “In Iran Protests, Information Spreads Faster than Organization,” January 2026. ↩

7. HRANA and Amnesty International reports, January 6, 2026. ↩

8. Eyewitness reports from Ilam City, January 4, 2026, cited in internationalist left coverage. ↩

9. Reports of Iraqi militia deployment, January 2026. ↩

10. Documented popular slogans from protest footage. ↩

11. Ibid. ↩

12. Reports of IRGC infiltration tactics documented by Iranian activists. ↩

13. Exposed deepfake videos documented by Iranian activists. ↩

14. “Iran on fire: rebellion returns to the streets,” International Viewpoint, January 2026. ↩

15. Lindsey German, “Trump’s Return to Colonial Conquest,” Stop the War Coalition, January 5, 2026. ↩

16. Craig Murray, interview with The National, December 9, 2024. ↩

17. Craig Murray, social media posts and public statements, January 2026. ↩

18. George Galloway, The Mother of All Talk Shows (MOATS), January 2026, featuring Prof. Seyed Mohammad Marandi. ↩

19. David Miller and Chris Williamson, Palestine Declassified, Press TV, January 2026. ↩

20. Ali Khamenei statement, January 2026. ↩

21. Steve Bishop, Morning Star, January 2026, citing CODIR and HRANA. ↩

22. “Sahar” (pseudonym), interview in Socialist Worker, January 2026. ↩

23. Ibid. ↩

24. Scott Hunter, “Iran: Mass protests shake regime,” The Socialist, January 7, 2026. ↩

25. International Socialist Alternative statement, January 2026. ↩

26. Revolutionary Communist International statement, January 3, 2026. ↩

27. Yassamine Mather and the Cooperation Council of Iranian Left and Communist Forces, “Forward to the revolution!” January 2, 2026. ↩

28. Yassamine Mather, editorial in Weekly Worker, January 2026. ↩

29. Anti-Capitalist Resistance statement on Iran, January 2026. ↩

30. “Iran on fire: rebellion returns to the streets,” International Viewpoint, January 2026. ↩

31. Ibid. ↩

32. Ibid. ↩Red Mole is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.