The New Left In Contemporary Iran

This book examines the structure and ideology of all the main leftist groups in Iran. It considers their role in the Revolution, and analyses their relations with Khomeini and his colleagues. It also explains why the majority of the leftist organisations had defected from the Islamic regime by the summer of 1981. A second important theme of the book is the way in which the Soviet Union responded to the treatment of the Left by the Islamic government. Based on extensive analysis of original source material in Farsi and other languages and numerous interviews with leftist leaders and participants, the book provides a detailed portrait of the Left in contemporary Iran.

The contributors of this book undertake a fundamental reexamination and reappraisal of the phenomenon of leftist activism in Iran.

Even though the left has never held power in Iran, its impact on the political, intellectual and cultural development of modern Iran has been profound. This book's authors undertake a fundamental re-examination and re-appraisal of the phenomenon of leftist activism in Iran, interpreted in the broadest sense, throughout the period of its existence up to and including the present.

Why were left-wing politics so ineffective in Iran while socialism and communism were making great strides in the rest of the world? Why did the Left not capitalise on Iran's brief fling with anti-western politics in the early 1950's before the CIA and MI6 inspired military coup which restored the Shah to his throne? And above all why was the Left so crushingly defeated after the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran?The author unearths new details and provides fresh insights into an enduring puzzle of modern Iranian political history, concluding that the Left's demise came from a combination of Iran's geopolitical setting, where both the Soviet and western worlds saw advantage in the stability of Iran during the Cold War, as well as internal factors such as splits and factionalism, and - not least - the Iranian Left's over-enthusiastic devotion to a barren Stalinism with its poverty of philosophy and ideas. Based on primary and secondary Persian-language sources never before published in English, this book is a crucial addition to the literature on modern Iranian history and the study of communist and socialist history in general.

This book examines the structure and ideology of all the main leftist groups in Iran. It considers their role in the Revolution, and analyses their relations with Khomeini and his colleagues. It also explains why the majority of the leftist organisations had defected from the Islamic regime by the summer of 1981. A second important theme of the book is the way in which the Soviet Union responded to the treatment of the Left by the Islamic government. Based on extensive analysis of original source material in Farsi and other languages and numerous interviews with leftist leaders and participants, the book provides a detailed portrait of the Left in contemporary Iran.

This book reveals aspects of the rise and fall of the European and Iranian Left, their conceptualization of Marxism and ideological formations. Questions regarding the Left and Marxism within two seemingly different economic, political and intellectual and cultural contexts require comprehensive comparative histories of the two settings. This project investigates the intellectual transformations, which the European and Iranian Left have experienced after the Russian Revolution to the present. It examines the impacts of these transformations on their conceptualizations of history and revolution, domination and ideology, emancipation and universality, democracy and equality. The monograph will appeal to researchers, scholars and graduate students in the fields of political science, Middle Eastern and European studies, political history and comparative politics.