Should Mostafa Sho‘aiyan (1935-1976) have been born to one of the major imperial European languages, his works would probably have stood in the ranks of global national-liberation thinkers. Born in one of Tehran’s traditional neighbourhoods, the self-taught intellectual and revolutionary with no knowledge of a foreign language was the author of over 2,000 pages of political analyses, revolutionary treatises, memoirs and poetry. A most-wanted militant by the Iranian state, Sho‘aiyan also published historical research and produced new editions of underground works by Iranian activists. Despite his significant contributions, paradoxically, no leftist organisation has associated itself with his thought. His work was unorthodox, his critique ruthless, his approach uncompromising. He remains a singular mind to this day. He offered an international-liberation theory that would materialise through frontal solidarity politics among anti-capitalist, anti-colonial movements, as well as the mobilisation of masses by the revolutionary intellectuals.
I came across Sho‘aiyan while researching the Marxist People’s Fadai Guerrillas (PFG), a leading group within Iran’s militant left generation of the 1960-70s. I discovered that he had placed his works in the care of the late Cosroe Chaqueri, an activist and professor of history. Chaqueri had in fact published major works of Sho‘aiyan through his publishing house, Edition Mazdak, in Florence in the mid-1970s. My research into his thought and life resulted in several journal articles, book chapters and a monograph. What I found fascinating and fruitful in his work was his commitment to the task of (re-)inventing a Marxism compatible with the neocolonial reality of Iran under the Shah’s dictatorship. While loyal to Marxism’s foundations, his theory was deeply influenced by the decolonial movements of his time, from Vietnam and Algeria to Mozambique and Latin America. The legacy of colonialism has left an uncrossable divide between the Global North and Global South, which reflects deeply in his thought. And he wished to contribute to the liberation of the latter.
Today we witness unilateral wars waged by US and Western powers, ecological destruction, endless regional conflicts, and widespread human suffering. In this context, we must ask: are liberation theorists like Sho‘aiyan voices from a by-gone past, or do their ideas speak to our present? A careful reading of Sho‘aiyan’s corpus works invites us to rethink alternatives for humanity’s future in this age of savage capitalism and neocolonial domination.
Mostafa came of age during the short-lived premiership of Dr. Mohammad Mosaddeq who led Iran’s oil nationalisation movement in the 1950s. After his youthful pan-Iranism, which he later reminisced with sarcasm, Sho‘aiyan gravitated toward Marxism. This shift took place in the repressive climate that followed the 1953 CIA/MI6-engineered coup in Iran against Mosaddeq. A young monarch, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi had first come to power in 1941 following the military occupation of Iran by Allied forces – the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union and the United States – and the forced abdication of his (Nazi sympathizing) father, Reza Shah Pahlavi. He consequently did not have a firm grip on power, which led to a 12-year period of relative freedoms in which political parties, labour unions and civil society associations flourished. But the 1953 coup overthrew the democratically-elected prime minister Mosaddeq, who nationalised Iran’s oil industry, and it gave the Shah absolute power. The Shah, aided by heavy-handed police and security apparatuses, remained in power until the 1979 Iranian Revolution.
Although precarious and far from effective, Mosaddeq’s National Front – a loose alliance of nationalist parties under his leadership – had a lasting impact on Mostafa’s thinking and the way he imagined his liberation theory in the early 1970s. After graduating with an engineering degree, he joined student and other activists in the short-lived relaxed period of political opening in 1960-1963. In the late 1950s, the Shah sought loans for his ambitious developmental plans from the US Kennedy administration. He was forced to hold (relatively free) parliamentary elections and relax the pressures on civil society beginning in 1960. For the next three years, student activism flourished, political parties came back to life, and the clerical opposition to the Shah grew. However, once the Shah found his economic plans secured, the state struck down on activists with a heavy hand, ending the semi-relaxed conditions of 1963. The crackdown convinced Sho‘aiyan and his generation of activists that open, legal political activities had no chance in Iran. Alongside a handful of trusted comrades, Mostafa turned to urban armed struggle, spending the rest of the 1960s organising and recruiting.
As a self-taught revolutionary thinker, one of Sho‘aiyan’s most impressive works is an extensive (over 500-page) analysis of the Jangali movement (1915-1921). This was a revolutionary movement led by Mirza Kuchek Khan in the Caspian region that culminated in the Gilan Republic (formally: the Soviet Socialist Republic of Iran; 1920-1921). With limited access to historical documents, Sho‘aiyan managed to show that the defeat of the movement by the Iranian military wasn’t only down to the assistance of British forces but, significantly, the young Bolshevik state’s withdrawing of support. This study conclusively distanced him from the almost-mandatory allegiance to Marxism-Leninism of his day, causing him to reconstruct his own version of revolutionary Marxism.
At the time, his abandonment of Leninism was deemed a blasphemy, and led to his isolation by the Iranian Left. Following his own path, he created two militant groups – the first one consisting of Marxist and Muslim revolutionaries. Both groups disintegrated following security raids which left his comrades imprisoned or dead. After a few months in the ranks of the PFG, he lived the last two years of his life underground without any organisational support but protected by his dedicated and loving friends. In an accidental street search in February 1976, Sho‘aiyan committed suicide by swallowing a cyanide capsule – a common practice among Iran’s urban guerrillas of the 1970s.
How might the ideas of a marginalised 1970s radical speak to the challenges of today? Initially titled Rebellion (Shuresh), Sho‘aiyan’s magnum opus is Revolution (Enqelab, 1976; orig. 1973). This 320-page treatise offers a synthesised theory of global liberation against the forces of capitalism and colonialism. His “third-worldist” approach shaped his understanding of the concept of communism. In the age of national liberation movements in Africa and Asia, many Marxist intellectuals concluded that the privileged European conditions Marx and Engels theorised as necessary for communist revolution did not exist in colonised societies. Without such conditions – capitalist production and a sufficiently developed bourgeoisie or working class – a communist revolution in colonised societies had to be merged with the struggle for decolonisation.
In classical Marxism, the working class, “the proletariat”, was considered the unique agent of social and political transformation. But in the Third World, the works of intellectuals-activists extended this role to “the people”. This is how intellectuals in the colonised world conceptually aligned decolonisation with the emancipatory spirit of Marxism. Sho‘aiyan’s Revolution, however, is essentially about the popular mobilisation of the oppressed and exploited classes of all nations. He perceives the liberation movement in Iran, spearheaded by the Marxist-Leninist PFG (est. 1971) – popular among university students and the secular middle-class – as a loop in the chain of global liberation movements around the world. This view was shaped by the PFG’s armed struggle that targeted the Shah’s dictatorship as the agent of imperialist domination. He praised the PFG for launching the anti-colonial struggle in Iran, despite his decidedly (and comradely) distance from, and criticisms of, them. And, despite the fact that the PFG had expelled Sho‘aiyan from its ranks due to his rejection of Leninism. Although the PFG regarded itself as a political party, Sho‘aiyan observed that it was actually a frontal or umbrella organisation for all leftist dissidents. This view was compatible with his “frontal politics” as the embodiment of what he called “rebellious action” that was intent to challenge the status quo. The PFG leadership, however, insisted that it was a Marxist-Leninist organisation, not a front.
The twentieth-century hallmark revolutions in Russia, China, and Cuba (and elsewhere) all ideologically unfurled the proletariat – the working class – as the single agent of revolutionary change. In reality, these revolutions were militant campaigns, led by revolutionary intellectuals and party cadres, with varying degrees of support from rural and urban sectors including workers. For Sho‘aiyan, though, the proletariat was only one group among others to fight in a pan-liberationist approach. He took a position similar to Che Guevara’s “Message to the Tricontinental” (1967) which called on the peoples of the Third World to launch united attacks against imperialism on all fronts. Instead, Sho‘aiyan transformed “national liberation” into “international liberation”. This reflected Sho‘aiyan’s way of applying the ideal of liberation often found in national or regional struggles to a unifying of global struggles, in the manner that was prevalent in the 1960s in the ideas of Pan-Africanism and the Bolivarian Revolution in Latin America.
Within this theory of international liberation, a close reading of Sho‘aiyan’s work suggests that his key concern is popular mobilisation. Here, the primary agent for social and political transformation was what he termed the “enlightener” (roshangar). In a unpublished note written in the last weeks of his life, he stated: “The question of the people (khalq) is the key question of the revolution. Where the people stand is where victory will appear”. But since the people remained unmobilised at the time of his writing, he drew on a key pillar of his theory: the vanguard that he called “the enlightener (roshangar)of the working class”. In a vigorous debate with the theorist of the PFG, Hamid Momeni, in 1972, Sho‘aiyan argued that because it was polysemic, the common Persian term for “intellectual” (roshanfekr) did not capture the “revolutionary intellectuals”. Instead, a new term “enlightener” (roshangar) captured this group of educated vanguard that would make up the initial core of future popular movement. Somewhat similar to the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci, he was theorising a place for the “organic intellectuals” of a revolutionary movement. The particular context of this debate was that Iran did not have a communist party proper. The Iranian Communist Party has been purged by Stalin in the 1930s. The communist Tudeh Party of Iran (est. 1941), founded as an anti-fascist united front, was active and popular until 1953, but it had left behind the fiasco of not resisting the coup – with its tremendous membership and its leaders fleeing the country following the coup. So leftist intellectuals had in the 1960s unwillingly inherited the task of re-founding the vanguard party in Iran.
Sho‘aiyan offers a vision of an internationalist and liberationist movement of anti-capitalist and decolonial forces of the Global South, unified through the mobilisation of revolutionary “enlighteners” (intellectuals). In his thinking, this constitutes a mode of praxis that we may call, following Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, “articulatory practices”. Frontal politics serves as the actual, political embodiment of such a praxis. Sho‘aiyan believed in the irreducible plurality of social constituents of a liberation project. As such, he could not have conceived of a single party or movement representing the entirety of the social. He leaves the question of leadership open in his concept of front. This attests to his idea that the front’s leadership is a practical and democratic matter. In short, the front’s leadership depends on the articulation of diverse demands of the people by each of the front’s political tendencies. He is right that the leadership of the front of liberation forces cannot be decided in advance, as it defeats the purpose. Still, the idea invites the potential for the corruption of the front by undemocratic forces within the front. Nevertheless, his idea of “rebellious action” as counter-hegemonic, transgressive, and transformative praxis within a frontal organisation capable of unifying the diversity of subaltern classes offers an alternative to the dominant assimilative and hegemonic politics in our age of ruthless capitalism and continued neocolonialism.