U.S. Imperialism and the Iranian Revolution

1953, Western intelligence services overthrow the leftist Iranian Prime Minister Mossadegh because he wanted to nationalize Iranian oil. His replacement, the pro-capitalist Shah, bans the hijab, persecutes opposition figures, and makes Iran a semi-colony of the USA and Israel. The contradictions of his rule eventually lead to the Iranian Revolution under Ayatollah Khomeini –

Reminder: The words marked in red are links leading to corresponding critique articles.

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„It is a plausible argument that Iran would have become a stable democracy without the coup. The consequences of the coup were so traumatic that many Iranians feared a repetition of 1953 when the Shah left Iran in 1979 – one of the motivations for the occupation of the U.S. embassy by students. (…) The 1953 coup and its aftermath set the stage for the political dynamics in today’s Middle East and Inner Asia. Was the Islamic Revolution of 1979 inevitable in retrospect? Or did it only become so because the hopes of the Iranian people were temporarily dashed in 1953?“[1]

British Capitalists and the Shah

Since the Constitutional Revolution of 1906 and especially after the end of World War I, Iran became an exemplary site of imperialist resource exploitation by Western monopol capitalist interests.

The center of this development was the 1909 Berlin-founded (later British) Anglo-Persian Oil Company (APOC), which was the first company in the Middle East to begin industrial oil extraction, laying the foundation for systematic appropriation of Iranian raw materials by British capital. The APOC, later renamed Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC) and finally British Petroleum (BP, parent company of Aral, Castrol, Gasolin, etc.), evolved into one of the world’s leading oil corporations.

The founding of APOC resulted from the so-called D’Arcy concession of 1901, which granted British entrepreneur William Knox D’Arcy extensive rights to extract Persian oil under highly favorable conditions.

„At that time, the heavily indebted Shah of Persia, Mozzafar al-Din, granted British William Knox D’Arcy ‘a special and exclusive privilege’ to search for, extract, exploit, process for trade, export, and sell natural gas, asphalt, and petroleum in the entire Persian Empire for a period of 60 years.“[2]

The British government already took a majority stake in APOC in 1914 to secure supplies for the Royal Navy and thereby strengthen the military and economic dominance of the empire.

The profits from oil extraction flowed overwhelmingly to Britain, while the Iranian state and population were only marginally involved in the earnings.

In the Iranian parliament, the Majles (“Assembly”), resistance against the continued plundering of the country’s resources by the predominantly British company grew from 1906 onward. Dissatisfaction with low revenues from the concessions and systematic disadvantages for Iranian workers led to increasing opposition against APOC and its privileged position:

„The repeated protests in the Majles against British dominance in the oil industry reflected growing nationalism and the desire for economic independence. The demand for revision of the concessions became a central theme in political debate.“[3]

The British interests responded to the growing opposition by actively intervening in Iranian domestic politics and supporting a dynastic change.

Reza Khan, the Shah

The young military commander Reza Khan was chosen to enforce this dynastic change. Before his rise, he had forced the resignation of the then Prime Minister Sepahdar in a largely bloodless coup in February 1921.

Subsequently, Reza Khan quickly rose to Minister of Defense and consolidated his power within the Iranian state apparatus. Support from APOC and thus indirectly from the British government played a central role — APOC not only provided financial resources but also acted as political backing for Khan, whose rise must be understood in the context of British imperialist interests.

With massive British support, Reza Khan launched a comprehensive modernization and reorganization of Iran’s armed forces. The aim was to strengthen central state control over the provinces and suppress separatist movements that threatened imperialist exploitation of Iranian resources.

Particularly notable was the suppression of the “Socialist Soviet Republic of Iran” in Gilan in the north, proclaimed in 1920/21 with Soviet support. This short-lived socialist republic posed a direct challenge to APOC and British interests — not only did it successfully resist the Russian White Army, which aimed to seize the Baku oil fields with British support, but it also received broad societal support.
It fell only because the Soviet Union, by signing the Anglo-Soviet Trade Agreement (1921), committed to cease supporting Iranian socialists — a step necessary to safeguard the October Revolution.[4]

In the west of the country, Reza Khan also used military force against separatist movements, such as the declaration of an independent Kurdish state in Mahabad.

The suppression of these movements not only enhanced Reza Khan’s internal political prestige but also secured Iran’s territorial integrity and thus the undisturbed exploitation of oil resources by APOC.

„Fearing losing Iran to the Russians, British officials in the country concluded that a military coup was necessary to protect their interests. General Edmund Ironside, the highest-ranking British officer in Iran, ordered Reza Khan, commander of the Persian Cossack Brigade, to march into Tehran and overthrow the government at the time. It is likely that Ironside provided Reza and his men with equipment and pay in exchange for their participation in the coup.“ [5]

The British support for Reza Khan was thus not an act of altruistic modernization but served imperialist interests and stabilizing a regime willing to guarantee capitalist order and profits of Western corporations.

Chomeini later said: „The British appointed Reza Khan as a puppet to obey their orders. This is not deniable; it is not my claim; it is an evident part of history, both depicted by reporters and proved by documents that were published thirty, forty years later. […] Reza Khan had said: ‘I am not keen on politics; whatever you order, I obey the command!’“[6]

The political capital Reza Khan gained from suppressing separatist and socialist movements allowed him to rise to Prime Minister in 1923.

As Prime Minister, Reza Khan aimed to transform Persia into a secular, centrally organized national state modeled after Kemalist Turkey. These modernization efforts, which aimed mainly at weakening the traditional power of the clergy and suppressing religious institutions, faced strong resistance in the Majles — the parliament — where religious figures, representing a significant part of the political elite and serving as the source of religious legitimacy, opposed Khan’s secularization policies.

The APOC, whose economic interests were closely linked to the political stability and predictability of the Iranian state, viewed Khan’s potential loss of power with great concern. From the capitalist perspective, Khan was seen as a strong, authoritarian ruler who secured foreign monopolies’ interests and suppressed opposition forces, whether religious or economic, making him much preferred over an unstable, conflict-ridden parliamentary system. In this context, APOC intensified its financial and logistical support for Khan to consolidate his political position and marginalize his opponents.

With backing from APOC and the British government, Reza Khan succeeded in deposing the Qajar dynasty, which had been officially in power since late 1789 — part of this campaign involved repressive suppression of opposition, including mass arrests, torture, and political disenfranchisement.

In 1925, Khan was proclaimed the new Shah (Persian for ruler) by a nearly unanimous parliament and took the name “Reza Shah Pahlavi.”

Keep it in the Family

After several years of a state leadership deemed “successful” in restoring reactionary order, during which Reza Shah Pahlavi advanced the transformation of Persia into a centralized nation-state under the new name “Iran,” a sudden power shift occurred during World War II. Under pressure from the Allied occupation forces, particularly Britain and the Soviet Union, Reza Shah was forced to abdicate in 1941. His youngest son, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, was appointed as his successor as Shah.

This forced succession reflected the geopolitical interests of imperialist powers, which considered Iran a strategically important transit country for supply routes and a bulwark against the influence of the Axis powers and the Soviet Union:

„In August 1941, British and Soviet troops invaded Iran, citing the presence of German nationals and the need to secure supply lines to the Soviet Union. Reza Shah, who had tried to maintain neutrality and resist the demands of the Allies, was forced to abdicate in favor of his son Mohammad Reza. The Allies regarded Iran as a crucial transit route for delivering war material to the USSR and were determined to prevent Axis influence. Reza Shah’s forced abdication was less a matter of internal Iranian politics and more a reflection of the strategic calculations of the great powers.“

By the end of the war, Britain and the US grew increasingly concerned about Soviet presence in Iran.
As in many places, the tactical alliance against Hitler’s fascism served its purpose and now posed a risk to their continued control over colonies or semi-colonies — especially given the tense situation in India and the strategic importance of Iran.

Britain therefore intensified efforts to influence Iran’s political course and gain a stronger role in government.
The British strategy aimed to reform Iran’s political institutions to secure control over economic resources, especially oil, and to create a buffer against socialist and anti-imperialist movements.

As part of this political reorganization, the electoral system of the Iranian Majles was formally liberalized. The introduction and expansion of bourgeois-democratic voting rights — such as extending suffrage to larger parts of the male population and establishing multi-party systems — aimed to give the appearance of participation and legitimacy.

At the same time, the Shah’s power was partly restricted through constitutional reforms, though without fundamentally shaking the dominance of the monarchy and its class interests, especially the landed aristocracy, bureaucracy, and the capitalist class supported by Western capital.

Mossadegh

The political opening of the Iranian parliament after WWII marked a phase of intense social mobilization and polarization, where for the first time in decades, various classes and political camps openly competed over the country’s orientation. The Tudeh Party, founded in 1941 on Stalin’s orders amid the Allied occupation of Iran and the weakening of the authoritarian state, quickly established itself as the most important Marxist-Leninist force in Iran. It organized strikes, political education, and fought for workers’, peasants’, and urban lower classes’ rights.

After 1945, its influence grew especially in industrial centers, the education sector, and within unions. The Tudeh saw itself as part of the international communist movement and maintained close contacts with the Soviet Union, which gave it political backing but also suspicion from nationalist forces.

Simultaneously, a broad alliance called the “National Front” (Dschebhe Melli), inspired by the German Democratic Republic’s National Front, was formed under the leadership of Mohammad Mossadegh. It united bourgeois-democratic, nationalist, anti-imperialist forces, and communists. The National Front included intellectuals, parts of the urban middle class, progressive large landowners, and patriotic military figures. Its common goal was to restore national sovereignty, especially by controlling resources and reducing foreign influence, notably British control of the oil industry.

The period between 1949 and 1953 was marked by relative political openness: parties could operate, the press and unions gained importance, and the parliament became a central forum for societal conflicts. The Tudeh Party and the National Front sometimes cooperated tactically, for example supporting the nationalization of the oil industry. However, significant differences remained: while the Tudeh aimed for socialist transformation and saw the working class as the revolutionary subject, the National Front pursued a bourgeois democratic, anti-imperialist development path.

This constellation led to a dynamic in which class interests became more apparent — the Tudeh, rooted in the workers’ movement and committed to anti-imperialism, was able to mobilize broad sections of the population. At the same time, it remained vulnerable to state repression, anti-communist propaganda, and rivalry with nationalist forces. The National Front relied on mass support but had to constantly balance between radical demands and maintaining bourgeois order.

Between 1949 and 1951, the political situation further intensified: demands for nationalization of the oil industry grew through mass protests, strikes, and political mobilization. The Tudeh supported these demands, even though it diverged from the National Front on key issues. Political pressure on the parliament and the Shah increased as the population demanded an anti-imperialist stance.

„The years 1948-1959 were characterized by an increasingly strong anti-dictatorial and nationalist movement for the nationalization of oil reserves and their extraction, reaching a peak in October 1950 with the passage of the Oil Nationalization Act. The early 1950s were shaped by this movement, the implementation of the oil law, and Mossadegh’s tenure as Prime Minister. As the people’s movement grew and deepened, the ranks of various social forces became clearer.“[7]

Within the context of societal polarization and massive protests against British dominance in Iran’s oil industry, the parliament was compelled to respond to public pressure. Mossadegh was appointed Prime Minister on April 29, 1951, by the Shah and gained the confidence of the parliament with 99 votes to 3 shortly thereafter. Even before taking office, parliament had decided to nationalize Iran’s oil industry, ending the nearly 50-year British monopoly and fulfilling a central demand of the protest movement.

Under Mossadegh, the Iranian parliament openly challenged the profit interests of British capital: Mossadegh implemented the already decided nationalization of the oil industry, ending decades of British monopoly over Iranian resources. The goal was not only economic independence but also weakening the monarchy supported by the West and asserting national sovereignty:

„During Mossadegh’s tenure, Iranian peasants were freed from forced labor on the estates of large landowners, factory owners were required to pay social benefits to sick and injured workers, and unemployment insurance was introduced. A law also allocated 20 % of the rent income of large landowners into a fund used for development projects like pest control, rural housing, and public baths. Mossadegh supported women’s rights, defended religious freedom, and allowed courts and universities to operate freely.“[8]

Britain responded with a worldwide boycott of Iranian oil, economic sanctions, and covert political operations to destabilize Mossadegh’s government. Military options were considered but ultimately rejected; instead, Britain relied on close cooperation with the US to effect a regime change.

Mossadegh also exposed that numerous parliamentarians were on British payrolls, revealing the deep infiltration of imperialist interests into the Iranian state. Facing the blockade and sabotage attempts against the Iranian economy, Mossadegh decided to dissolve parliament with a referendum and to secure broad powers to continue his anti-imperialist policies.

Operation Ajax

„Above all, Mossadegh was independent. Too independent. He had expelled the British, nationalized Iran’s oil industry, and planned further social reforms. And so, in 1953 — at a time when the US still enjoyed high regard in Iran — the US government decided that Mossadegh could no longer stay in power. And it schemed and plotted and planned its moves.“[9]

Together with the British MI6, the CIA developed a detailed plan under the code name “Operation Ajax” (or “Operation Boot” for the British) to remove Mossadegh.

The goal was to regain control over Iran’s oil and prevent a “domino effect” of nationalization in other countries (especially considering the fall of King Farouk in Egypt and the threat of nationalizing the Suez Canal).

The CIA relied on a broad arsenal of means: bribing politicians, officers, and clerics; hiring thugs and provocateurs; organizing riots and demonstrations; and running a targeted propaganda campaign in media and mosques.
Roosevelt later said; “We really had the Tudeh [communists] under control. We had the press under control. We had the streets under control. (…) We had newspapers, we had mobs, we had clerics, all on our side.”[10]

In August 1953, the operation reached its climax: The CIA and MI6 mobilized Islamist groups and criminal gangs to sow chaos in Tehran and stage pro-Shah demonstrations. The Shah, who had hesitated at first, finally supported the coup and fled abroad after an initial failure.

After a few days, he returned as the coup supporters under General Fazlollah Zahedi, supported by parts of the military, overthrew Mossadegh’s government. Street fighting resulted in between 200 and 300 deaths. Mossadegh was arrested, tried for treason, sentenced to three years in prison, and placed under house arrest until his death in 1967. Many Mossadegh supporters were also imprisoned, some receiving long sentences or death sentences.

„Where the US government saw a ‘glorious day,’ the exiled Iranian intellectual Sasan Fayazmanesh wrote fifty years later: ‘We saw a day of shame.’ Where US officials ‘wished the day would never end,’ we wished it had never begun. Where the US saw ‘a shining image of His Majesty restored to power,’ we saw grotesque images of a brutal dictatorship, spies, dungeons, torture, and executions.“[11]

The successful coup reinstalled the Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, as an authoritarian ruler.

„In order to prevent the reemergence of organized opposition, the Shah, with assistance from US and Israeli advisers, established an internal security organization, SAVAK, that became notorious for its pervasive surveillance operations and its brutal treatment of the political prisoners who packed Iran’s jails“[12]

It would be wrong to portray Mossadegh as a perfect revolutionary figure — Ervand Abrahamian, the foremost historian of modern Iran, precisely describes that the fact that Mossadegh could even be appointed Prime Minister by the Shah alone did not make him an uncompromising anti-imperialist.

Abrahamian argues that Mossadegh’s refusal to use dictatorial methods during his tenure ultimately enabled imperialist intervention:

„Some people argue that if he had killed some people, the coup wouldn’t have occurred. In fact, after the first failed coup, there were people in his entourage who said ‘you should execute these guys since they are obviously trying to overthrow you’ and he said, ‘you are crazy, we are not in the business of killing people.’“[13]

Mossadegh’s greatest mistake, one often made under anti-imperialist rule in the face of imperialist intervention, was rejecting a broad united front between the communists of the Tudeh and Mossadegh’s National Front.
According to Abrahamian, with a broad, organized, and armed front, it would have been very possible to prevent the imperialist coup — why Mossadegh specifically rejected such a front remains speculation.

The most plausible explanation is that Mossadegh feared losing support within the broad, but heterogeneous National Front, especially among religious and bourgeois forces, through an alliance with the Tudeh. The National Front, which Mossadegh led, was at the time a coalition of cross-class anti-imperialists; including nationalists, liberals, social democrats, and the clergy under Ayatollah Kaschani.

„Mossadegh wrote in his memoirs: ‘They have talked us out of communism to exploit our oil sources for another forty years and to deprive us of our freedom and independence.’ The arrest, torture, and executions of people, especially members and sympathizers of the (People’s Front), followed. They sent the Tudeh to the slaughterhouse so that imperialists could share our riches with a clear conscience. The names of all these heroes, especially members of the underground military corps of the party within the Iranian armed forces, will forever be associated with the anti-imperialist struggle of the Iranian peoples.“[14]

Mossadegh’s Blueprint

The overthrow of Mossadegh is probably one of the most consequential coups of the 20th century and marks a turning point in the history of imperialist interventions. Operation Ajax was not only a precedent for the violent removal of a democratically legitimated, anti-imperialist government but also served Western monopol capitalist interests, especially the US, as a strategic blueprint for dealing with capitalist opposition governments worldwide.

After Mossadegh’s overthrow, the nationalization of Iran’s oil industry was reversed. Control over the oil resources was divided among a new consortium: 40% went to five US companies, 40% to British Petroleum (or AIOC), 14% to Royal Dutch Shell, and 6% to the French CFP.

This secured not only access to Iran’s wealth for Western capital but also political loyalty of the Shah, who then established an authoritarian dictatorship with massive US and British support. Over 10,000 US advisers were active in Iran in the following years, and the country became a key base for Western interests in the Middle East.

Crucially, the Mossadegh coup sent a global signal: Western capital learned that economic sanctions, embargoes, political destabilization, and ultimately open coups — supported by local elites, military figures, and paid provocateurs — are effective means of securing profit interests.

The “Mossadegh blueprint” was applied repeatedly in the following decades against anti-imperialist and socialist governments: Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala (1954), Patrice Lumumba in Congo (1961), Sukarno in Indonesia (1965–67), Salvador Allende in Chile (1973), Thomas Sankara in Burkina Faso (1987) — to name just a few prominent examples. In all these cases, democratically elected governments were overthrown through covert operations, economic pressure, and open violence, to secure the control of Western corporations over strategic resources and markets.

The consequences for Iran were severe: The second phase of Shah’s rule was characterized by massive repression, torture, censorship, and the systematic suppression of all opposition — particularly leftist and anti-imperialist forces. The Tudeh Party was shattered, its leaders executed or imprisoned, and Iran’s political landscape remained marked by authoritarian rule and social inequality until the 1979 revolution.

“White Revolution”

As early as 1963, Shah Pahlavi launched the “White Revolution,” an extensive top-down modernization program explicitly aligned with Western development models and to be understood as a preemptive revolution against socialist and anti-imperialist movements.

The “White Revolution” included measures such as land reform, which reversed Mossadegh’s redistribution of land, privatization of industry, an educational offensive, women’s suffrage, and reform of divorce laws.

The land reform aimed to break the feudal system of the Qajar era and grant land to peasants, but in practice, it mainly benefited large landowners who were compensated with shares in expanding industries, while many peasants received inadequate plots and were burdened with high loans.

This second rule of the Shah is associated with the idea that Iran was a progressive state under him.
This idea stems from the fact that women in Iran, under the Shah, could dress more freely than under Islamic law — a notion based on a liberal-feminist view rooted in Western patriarchal images of women.

In reality, women under the Shah were not liberated but pushed into another, equally narrow image of femininity, similar to what exists today in the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Since 1936, Iranian women were prohibited from wearing any form of religious cover, from Niqab and Burqa to ordinary hijabs and Shaylas.
95% of Iranian women were Muslim even under the Shah, often wearing hats and caps to maintain their religious practice despite repression.
The radical contradiction between Iranian-Persian culture and the Shah’s “Western-worship” led, among other things, to the emergence of today’s “morality police,” where “armed police stormed into (women’s) spaces and tore their headscarves off.”

„By decree, on January 7, 1936, women and girls were no longer allowed to appear in public with headscarves. Police with bayonets lurked, and if they saw a woman with a head covering, they would tear her scarf or cloak from her head with their bayonets.“[15]

The cultural and economic “modernization” occurred against the backdrop of rapidly intensifying material contradictions: capitalist expansion led to a boom in urban centers, but the creation of productive jobs did not keep pace with education and urbanization.

By the mid-1970s, the number of university graduates in Iran exceeded the capacity of the labor market significantly, leading to growing frustration and unemployment among the young, educated population in Tehran. The concentration of capital in the hands of a few Shah-connected families, the enrichment of international oil corporations, and continued dependence on Western capital sharply contrasted with the impoverishment of broad sections of the population.

In this context, Ulrike Meinhof, then a journalist at Konkret, wrote an open letter to Farah Diba and her husband, the Shah:

„19 million dollars alone cost the CIA the overthrow of Mossadegh. The fate of development aid remains a matter of speculation, because with the little jewelry he (the Shah, KP) gave you — a diadem for 1.2 million DM, a brooch for 1.1 million DM, diamond earrings for 210,000 DM, a diamond bracelet, a gold handbag — 2 billion is not yet spent. But do not worry, the Western foreign countries will not be stingy in discrediting the Shah for a few billion embezzlements, opium trafficking, bribes for businessmen, relatives, and secret service agents, or for the little jewelry for you. After all, he guarantees that no Persian oil will ever be nationalized again, as under Mossadegh, not before the sources are exhausted, around the end of the century, when the contracts signed by the Shah expire. He guarantees no dollars will flow into schools that could teach the Persian people to take their destiny into their own hands; to use oil for industrial development and to spend foreign exchange on agricultural machinery, to irrigate the land, and to end hunger. He guarantees that rebellious students and pupils will be shot at any time, and parliamentary deputies who have the country’s welfare in mind will be arrested, tortured, and murdered. He guarantees that a 200,000-strong army, 60,000 secret service agents, and 33,000 police officers, well-armed and well-fed with US funds and guided by 12,000 American military advisers, will keep the country in check. So that what is the only salvation of the country — the nationalization of oil, like in 1951 by Mossadegh — never happens again.”[16]

Ayatollah Khomeini

The societal dissatisfaction was further exacerbated by rampant corruption and the perceived neo-colonial role of the Shah as a puppet of Western interests.
His authoritarian modernization from above, combined with repression against leftist, nationalist, and religious opposition, led to a massive wave of protests starting in 1978 involving hundreds of thousands.

One of the most prominent critics of the “White Revolution” was the Shiite cleric Ruhollah Khomeini, who publicly opposed the reform program as early as 1963, branding it as an attack on Islam and national sovereignty — over the 1960s, he developed into an unparalleled figure in Iran.

Khomeini criticized not only secularization and women’s suffrage but especially the structural inequality, corruption, and dictatorial rule of the Shah, which further centralized as social contradictions intensified.

He distinguished himself from other critics by the fact that his notoriety and esteem among the broad parts of the Iranian population made it difficult for the Shah to repress him with widespread repression — he spoke in 1963:

„This government is against Islam. Israel opposes the application of Koranic laws in Iran. (…) the Koran, the clergy. Oh Herr Shah, oh exalted Shah, I give you the good advice to give in and abandon the reforms of the White Revolution. I do not want to see the joyful dances of the population on the day you leave the country on your command, just as everyone cheered when your father left the country once.“[17]

It should be noted that Israeli capital and its secret services did play a significant role in maintaining the Shah’s regime — whether Khomeini’s frequent mention of Israel also rests on some anti-Semitic view, we doubt.
However, it is important to understand that in the 1960s, Israel was the only and most loyal partner of the United States in the region — a fact linked to the role of Mossad during the Shah’s regime, which is crucial for understanding today’s Islamic Republic of Iran.
Mossad trained the Shah’s repression apparatus, SAVAK, in Israel and introduced modern surveillance and interrogation methods, which were also used against religious women in Iran.

After Khomeini’s speech, tens of thousands of people gathered on the streets of Tehran to protest against the Shah’s reforms and repression.
The protests ended in brutal suppression by the regime across the country:
“The number of dead is still controversial. Pro-government sources spoke of about 80 dead, while opposition groups reported several thousand victims.”

The brutal suppression of the 1963 protests, during which numerous demonstrators were killed and Khomeini was arrested and exiled, marked a turning point: Today, these events are seen as the birth of the Islamic Revolution, rooted in the regime’s inability to reconcile the antagonistic class interests within the framework of capitalist modernization.

Khomeini became a symbol of resistance against the Shah’s regime through his arrest. His imprisonment gave him martyrdom status in public, making him well known far beyond religious circles — supported by many clerics, he was appointed the highest religious authority, the “Marja,” which gave him political immunity.

From exile in northern Iraq and later France, Khomeini maintained close relations with his supporters in Iran.
In Najaf, he gave lectures on his vision of a Shiite state, which were later written down and gained wide attention in Iran.
In his writings and lectures, Khomeini expressed a liberation theology of Islam “as a religion of militant individuals committed to truth and justice. Islam is the religion of those who seek freedom and independence.”

The Iranian Revolution

With increasing repression against demonstrations, especially those close to Khomeini, social mobilization in Iran intensified significantly from 1977/78. Every state measure further radicalized and expanded the protest movement. The mass protests drew on a multitude of contradictions: the memory of the 1953 coup against Mossadegh, which was commemorated annually, was as present among protesters as their everyday experiences with the modernization policies of the “White Revolution” — perceived as “Americanization” by many — and the widespread perception that the Shah was a puppet of Western interests, systematically undermining national sovereignty.

On “Black Friday,” September 5, 1978, clergy and the National Front called for a nationwide general strike:
About 200,000 Iranians gathered in Tehran, with the Shah, now facing a looming civil war, declared martial law and sent a quarter of the army (about 100,000 soldiers, 200 tanks, etc.) onto Tehran’s streets — on the night of Saturday, the military indiscriminately shot into the crowd — the exact number of casualties remains unknown, but estimates go up to 14,000 dead.[18]

Religion was only one aspect of the broad opposition movement during this revolutionary period.

The Iranian Marxist Sy Landu analyzed this as follows:

„Given the revolutionary and anti-imperialist sentiment of the masses, the Iranian bourgeoisie had to turn to Khomeini, and Khomeini had to often turn away from openly bourgeois figures like Bazargan and Bani-Sadr to the religious ‘fanatics.’ He uses religious ideas as an opium to pacify and discipline the masses. In fact, the fanatic thugs were even used against bourgeois elements themselves to prevent them from demanding an overt bourgeois rule, risking the survival of their own system.“[19]

The material foundation of the revolution was formed by workers’ strikes, especially in the oil industry. Starting in summer 1978, workers in key industries went on strike, often organized through networks tracing back to Mossadegh’s “National Front.”

The oil workers demanded not only better working conditions and higher wages but explicitly political demands such as the release of political prisoners and the end of the state of emergency.

The strikes largely paralyzed the country’s economy and deprived the regime of its main source of income, which significantly contributed to international capital — especially Western oil companies — withdrawing support for the Shah:

„Oil workers — much to the regime’s dismay — cut production, both to protect Iran’s most valuable resource and to prevent its export to especially hated reactionary states like South Africa and Israel.“[20]

In response, the Shah tried to placate the rising contradictions with promises of extensive democratic and religious reforms, attempting to position himself as part of the revolutionary movement — but without success:

„With a mixture of gestures of humility and appeasement, the Shah tried to steer the course. But the masses in the streets no longer wanted reforms — they wanted his end.“[21]

Michel Foucault, who was an observer in Iran in 1978, described the workers’ strike movement as an expression of a “perfect collective will.” The labor struggles represented the class-struggle core of the revolution and revealed the antagonistic contradictions between labor and capital that had been further sharpened by the Shah’s modernization policies. In the final phase of the revolution, anti-imperialist, social, and religious protest forms merged into a mass movement that ultimately brought down the regime.

While the moderate Marxist and social-democratic “National Front” led the workers’ struggles and strikes, the banned Tudeh Party, increasingly adopting Maoist positions in the 1970s, played a significant role in armed resistance against the Shah’s regime. Notably, the People’s Mujahedin (Mojahedin-e Khalq), composed of Maoist and Islamic-influenced factions, waged an ambitious guerrilla war against the state repression organs.

Historical analyses and scholarly literature largely agree that the armed resistance of these guerrilla movements contributed significantly to destabilizing and ultimately overthrowing the Shah’s regime. The totality of the guerrilla forces, far beyond the Maoists of the People’s Mujahedin and including other leftist, nationalist, and Islamic-socialist groups, played a crucial role in the internal erosion of the ruling structures.

At the Guadalupe Conference, representatives of Western capital, including US President Jimmy Carter and German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, decided to cease all support for the Shah and sought contact with Khomeini to secure their capital interests in the future — shortly thereafter, the Shah left Iran with the words “I am tired and need a break,” and two weeks later, Khomeini, who had gained immense popularity among the Iranian population, returned from exile.

Before nearly two million “students, intellectuals, communists, workers, professors, women in miniskirts, women in chadors” gathered in front of Tehran’s Central Cemetery, Khomeini delivered his de facto state-creating speech:

„Mohammad Reza (the Shah) made the land reform to create a market for America. That we remain dependent on America, importing wheat and rice from America, and eggs from Israel, America’s colony. What he did under the guise of reform was bad. (…) We oppose losing our labor power. When did we oppose modernization? The modernization, the symbols of modernity, have today set foot from Europe into the East, especially into the Islamic Republic of Iran. But the tools of civilization should have been used, instead, they brought us into barbarism. (…) They betrayed the country with all means. We say, this person, the government of this person, and the parliament of this person are all illegal. If they continue like this, they are all criminals. All must be brought to court.”[22]

Contradiction and Consequences

The Iranian Revolution must be understood as the result of a fairly straightforward constellation of structural contradictions, whose roots lie primarily in the imperialist exploitation of Iran’s oil resources and the resulting social transformations.

The main contradiction — the contradiction between capital and labor — was massively intensified by the Shah’s modernization policy. The top-down modernization led to growing social inequality, precarity, and marginalization of broad segments of the population, which manifested in nationwide labor struggles and the de facto paralysis of oil exports.
The strikes by oil workers deprived the regime of its economic base and forced the international oil companies as well as the Western backers to withdraw their support for the Shah.

A second essential contradiction was the religious opposition, which especially emerged as a result of the “White Revolution” and the associated Americanization and secularization of the country. The modernization measures deeply interfered with social structures and traditions and were perceived by large parts of the Shiite clergy as an attack on Islam and religious order. This contradiction was closely tied to the opening of the country to foreign capital and the accompanying cultural alienation.
The people of Iran, whose culture and superstructure are closely linked to Shiite Islam, were subjected to an attempt to impose a Western cultural ideal in all areas of social life — not least through bans on veiling and massive repression of those maintaining culturally religious customs.
This contradiction, made omnipresent by street gangs and the tearing off of headscarves, would become the foundation for the later Islamic course of the Iranian Revolution and served to legitimize hostility against the de facto colonial power America and its allies (especially Israel) also in a religious context.

The third central contradiction existed between the people and the ruling power: The autocratic development of the Shah during his second reign after the overthrow of Mossadegh led to increasing alienation and rejection among broad parts of the population. The Shah’s role as a proxy of Western capital interests, exposed by the imperialist, illegal coup against Mossadegh, led to deep disillusionment and the normalization of anti-American sentiments in the collective consciousness.
In the last month before the Iranian Revolution alone, approximately 20,000 protesters and opposition figures were killed by the Shah’s troops.

These three core contradictions — capital and labor, religious tradition and modernization, people and autocratic rule — were not isolated but interconnected in a dialectical way and mutually reinforced each other. Their intensification formed the structural foundation of the revolutionary dynamic that culminated in the 1979 overthrow of the Shah regime and the establishment of the Islamic Republic.

However, it is clear that the imperialist overthrow of Mossadegh must be seen as the primary cause of the development leading to the Iranian Revolution — with all the mechanisms that brought it about.

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[1] https://www.lander.odessa.ua/doc/Overthrow%20Kinzer.pdf, p. 228

[2] https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/der-geist-ist-aus-der-flasche-a-851f862a-0002-0001-0000-000042645486

[3] Ervand Abrahamian: A History of Modern Iran, p. 76.

[4] “We must, if we want to save the revolution, make compromises with imperialism as long as we do not have the strength to defeat it. This is not a question of principle, but a question of necessity.”
— Lenin, On Compromises

[5] https://www.foreignexchanges.news/p/today-in-middle-eastern-history-reza

[6] https://english.khamenei.ir/news/6388/Why-did-the-British-choose-Reza-Khan-for-ruling-the-Iranian-monarchy

[7] https://www.tudehpartyiran.org/wp-content/uploads/2001/03/60JahreTudehParteiIran.pdf

[8] https://web.archive.org/web/20040915080838/http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/FI15Ak03.html

[9] https://web.archive.org/web/20040915080838/http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/FI15Ak03.html

[10] https://iranwire.com/en/features/64796/

[11] https://web.archive.org/web/20040915080838/http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/FI15Ak03.html

[12] William L Cleveland: A History of the Modern Middle East, S´p.195

[13] https://iranwire.com/en/features/64796/

[14] https://www.tudehpartyiran.org/wp-content/uploads/2001/03/60JahreTudehParteiIran.pdf

[15] https://iranjournal.org/gesellschaft/iranische-frauen-vor-der-revolution/2

[16] https://socialhistoryportal.org/sites/default/files/raf/0019670602_0.pdf

[17] Gholam Reza Afkhami: The life and times of the Shah, p. 234

[18] https://www.zeit.de/1978/38/die-revolte-der-mullahs-und-massen/seite-3

[19] https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/socialistvoice/iran11.html

[20] https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/socialistvoice/iran11.html

[21] Der Spiegel (Nr. 46/1978, 13. November 1978)

[22] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamische_Revolution#Die_R%C3%BCckkehr_Chomeinis