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Red Flag: Defend Iran, but Don’t Support the Theocracy!

In his weekly column, Nathaniel Flakin calls for anti-imperialism but not campism.


03/03/2026

As the United States military and its Zionist proxy bombard Iran, murdering hundreds of civilians, we revolutionary socialists are neither pacifists nor neutral. We stand on the side of the country under attack by imperialism. A defeat of the U.S. and Israeli aggressors would give courage to oppressed and exploited people around the world.

Thomas Friedman’s claim that Iran is “the biggest imperialist power in the region since 1979” is absurd. Friedman, an advocate of the Iraq War and a friend of the House of Saud, has been responsible for far more carnage in the Middle East than any Iranian leader.

Yet while we support the resistance against imperialist attacks, as socialists we also fight for the political independence of the working class. This means we never give political support to capitalist governments — even those in the Pentagon’s crosshairs.

A handful of socialist groups in imperialist countries, such as the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) in the United States or the Kommunistische Organisation (KO) in Germany, go beyond the elementary need to stand with Iran’s resistance — they say the working class should give political support the Islamic Republic. This spreads illusions in a semi-colonial bourgeoisie and ultimately weakens the struggle against imperialism.

A Capitalist Theocracy

Iran, a dependent capitalist country, is not, as Western propaganda would put it, uniquely “evil.” Iran executes thousands of citizens each year and oppresses women with myriad patriarchal rules — but in this, the Islamic Republic is no different than Saudi Arabia. The latter is an ally of the self-proclaimed “free world” while the other must be “liberated” with cruise missiles. Imperialist policies have nothing to do with human rights.

As the Financial Times acknowledges, Ali Khamenei was more cultured than the illiterate buffoon Trump or the corrupt cynic Netanyahu, who do not seem to believe in anything. These two did not even pause their genocide in Gaza while accusing Khamenei of mass murder.

Yet even while we recognize that Khamenei was no more evil than his imperialist counterparts — and a lot less dangerous — we cannot ignore the fact that he headed a repressive state apparatus that banned unions and shot at protestors. This government draws its legitimacy from god, even though Iranians do not appear to be very religious.

Despite its rhetoric, the Islamic Republic is not an anti-imperialist force — it does not represent “a taking back of natural resources and a restoration of rights and dignity,” as the PSL puts it. Iran is a capitalist country in which the means of production are owned by billionaires. Iran’s government, like those of some other semi-colonial countries, does not question a world order based on plunder by the Great Powers — it simply wants a slightly larger piece of the pie. Even Iran’s support for anti-Zionist forces in the region has more to do with geopolitical calculation than anti-imperialist conviction.

It’s absolutely wrong to say that the Islamic Republic is the “product of the people’s revolution of 1979,” as the KO puts it. The truth is the opposite: there was a genuine people’s revolution, with the working class organizing itself in shoras (councils), showing the possibility of a socialist transformation. The clergy led a counterrevolution and massacred thousands of communists so that the bourgeoisie could remain in power. The Islamic Republic was reestablished to ensure that Iran’s workers could be exploted.

Back in 2009, the PSL did acknowledge that the Islamic Republic is “staunchly anti-communist” and had carried out a “bloody campaign of repression … against leftist forces.” They went so far as to recognize that the “Islamic Republic represents the capitalist class” — but they claim it represents the “nationalist sector” of the capitalist class, which workers should support against the “comprador sector” of their exploiters. This Stalinist class collaboration can only lead to defeat — support for “nationalist” capitalists does not lead to liberation.

PSL, KO, and other “campist” groups call for support for the Islamic Republic without being able to point to a single socialist group in Iran that shares their position. This is obvious: communists in Iran are subject to arrest and torture. PSL and KO are supporting a government that would throw them in jail if they tried to set up shop in Teheran. 

A Working-Class Perspective

Modern campism is based on a terrible lack of imagination. While campism historically offered uncritical support to Stalinist states (where, at the very least, capital had been expropriated), today’s campists tend to serve as cheerleaders for any capitalist government in conflict with U.S. imperialism. This is based on a vision of the world where the dividing lines are between states and nations. If U.S. imperialism is the dominant power, then the only force that can oppose it are weaker states.

Yet the world’s real dividing lines are between classes. It is the working class, if it constitutes itself as an independent political force, that can lead all oppressed people in the struggle for liberation.

When the PSL, the KO, and other campists support the Islamic Republic, this logically implies that Iran’s working class should obey the authorities and cease all efforts to organize for a better life. Campists believe this powerful proletariat, which toppled a dictatorship in 1979 and shook the foundations of imperialist domination in the Middle East, has no role to play today. 

A bourgeois government’s “resistance” to imperialism will always be partial. By defending private property, all capitalist states defend the economic foundations of imperialism. The only way to break with imperialism would be for a workers’ government to nationalize the means of production and the natural resources in Iran — but the Islamic Republic suppresses all unions and organizations with this perspective.

This is just one example of how an “anti-imperialist” bourgeois government represses and weakens the working class — holding down the one force that could actually defeat U.S. imperialism.

Permanent Revolution

Iran’s self-defense against U.S. and Israeli aggression is progressive — a U.S. victory would further subjugate the people of the region. Workers and leftists need to be part of that defense. But as part of an anti-imperialist struggle, we must question the strict limits placed by the Islamic Republic. This means, for example, mobilizing women, in spite of Khamenei’s obscurantist ideas about women’s role. It means calling for strikes in both the region and in the imperialist centers to stop the war machine.

The working class must aim to lead the struggle against imperialism. This is how an anti-imperialist defensive war can be transformed into a socialist revolution — this is the perspective of permanent revolution, a perspective that was becoming visible in 1979-80. It was the mullahs who crushed workers’ self-organization back then — and there is no reason that workers should trust them today.

Some left-wing supporters of Iran see themselves as “Marxist-Leninists.” But speaking at a congress of the Communist International, Lenin emphasized the “the need to combat Pan-Islamism and similar trends, which strive to combine the liberation movement against European and American imperialism with an attempt to strengthen the positions of the khans, landowners, mullahs, etc.” Instead, he thought communists should remain an independent force in the anti-imperialist struggle:

“The Communist International must enter into a temporary alliance with bourgeois democracy in the colonial and backward countries, but should not merge with it, and should under all circumstances uphold the independence of the proletarian movement even if it is in its most embryonic form.”

That’s the Marxist and Leninist policy today — and it’s defended by Trotskyists.

Red Flag is a weekly opinion column on Berlin politics that Nathaniel has been writing since 2020. After moving through different homes, it now appears at The Left Berlin.

Reminder: Join the school strike against military service this Thursday at 11:00 at Potsdamer Platz!

8 March – Women*’s Day History

This week in working class history


Poster for Women's Day, March 8, 1914, demanding voting rights for women

8 March was not always on 8 March, but it was always from the working class: in 28 February 1909, the first unofficial “Women’s Day” took place in different US cities (drawing inspiration from the previous year’s March in New York), with large demonstrations organised by socialist women of the Socialist Party of America across the country, demanding the right to vote. 

A year later, in 1910, Clara Zetkin, Luise Zietz, and other comrades were at the Second International Conference of Working Women in Copenhagen, proposing an International Working Women’s Day. The conference approved it, although with no fixed date, under the slogan “The vote for women will unite our strength in the struggle for socialism”. The vision came to life, and on 19 March 1911, the day was officially marked in Europe for the first time – Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and Denmark saw over one million demonstrators take to the streets demanding the right to vote and for the end of gender discrimination in the workplace. 

The year 1917 is particularly important for Women*’s Day history: in Petrograd, Russia, tens of thousands of women working in textile factories led a strike starting on 8 March (23 February in the Julian calendar) and lasting several days. They demanded “bread for our children and the return of our husbands from the trenches” – or bread and peace for short, as it became known. It was the beginning of the February Revolution. 

In 1975, the United Nations celebrated International Women’s Day for the first time, formally recognising 8 March as an annual date through a resolution later on, in 1977. As the UN itself says on its website, “It is a day when women are recognised for their achievements” – dropping the “Working” from its name, and successfully co-opting the date to be globally welcomed by the feminist bourgeoisie with flowers and celebrations of femininity. 

However, not all is lost when it comes to grassroots transnational processes: since 2017, feminist groups, first in Argentina, then expanding elsewhere (with highlights to other Latin American countries, Poland and the Spanish State), organised around the idea of an International Women’s Strike (IWS), with clear anti-capitalist demands and achieving impressive global coordination, under the slogan “if women stop, the world stops”. Besides recentering the strike as a tool, it also reappropriated it and went beyond the classic sense of strike, to connect productive and reproductive labour. Because a large number of women work in precarious conditions, unable to exercise the right to strike, and because a lot of the work carried by women doesn’t stop at the labour market, but extends to the home, the feminist strike proposed four axes: labour strike, student strike, consumer strike, and care strike. 

Even if, in recent years, the concept of a feminist strike has lost some of its steam, reproductive labour and care work have been on the feminist agenda, highlighting the need for a feminism for the 99%. This year and all years, 8 March shouldn’t be about gifting roses to the women* in your life — even if they’re for Clara Zetkin — but rather about fighting for the end of exploitation of everyone involved in the supply chain for those roses to reach you, as well as those cleaning the petals off the dining table the next day.

Court case against Baki ends

Repression in Berlin – report #4


This is the fourth of our series of weekly court reports. You can read all the Repression in Berlin articles here.

This week’s column features the case of Baki Devrimkaya, an activist organized with Klasse gegen Klasse, who stood trial on February 10th for his pro-Palestine solidarity.

Baki served as a steward during a lecture hall occupation at the Freie Universität Berlin in December 2023. A group of right-wing agitators tried to derail the gathering by physically assaulting stewards, calling student protesters “Nazis,” and destroying photos of murdered Palestinian children. Baki was thereafter charged with assault, ”insult,” and “coercion” for allegedly preventing these disruptors from entering the occupied lecture hall.

After the protest, Baki became “the subject of a right-wing smear campaign, leading to death threats in social media and even intimidation on the street,” Nathaniel Flakin writes.

On February 10th, all three charges against Baki were dropped in exchange for a €450 donation to NGO medico international. Klasse gegen Klasse organized a rally in front of the courthouse, joined by over 70 comrades from different groups, which soon turned into a celebration after the verdict was announced.

Baki’s attorney Timo Winter remarked on the length of the proceedings, stating (translated from German): “We do not know for certain, but it can be assumed that the state of Berlin, the Ministry of Justice, has issued an instruction to pursue the repression of Palestine to the very end. This is something we are observing more and more, and we are concerned about the rights of freedom of assembly and freedom of expression, especially when it comes to Palestine.”

One of many, the case against Baki raises increasing concerns about the repression of pro-Palestinian activism and solidarity.

When language fails

The program “Goethe-Institut in Exile” was abruptly canceled. A reading scheduled for Berlin was therefore held elsewhere


02/03/2026

The voice of author and translator Alaa al-Qaisi falters as she recalls the Palestinian photojournalist Fatima Hassouna from Gaza. “She was still alive when I translated her text,” she says, sobbing. Hassouna was the central figure in the multi-award-winning documentary “Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk,” which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2025. Shortly after learning that the film would be screened there, the photographer was killed in an Israeli airstrike; six of her family members died with her. All that remains of her are her photographs and her writings.

“We have lost many people who constituted our cultural memory,” adds Ahmed Saleh, a poet and writer from Gaza who has applied for political asylum in Brussels. “I have lost my memory.” He explains that Israel has bombed and destroyed the archives and universities in the Gaza Strip during the current war. The 28-year-old belongs to a generation that has experienced five wars since 2008, “suffocating sieges” and “ongoing genocide”. His nephew was born in a tent, like his grandmother. “He doesn’t know what a home is, what a television is, what a house with walls is.”

The reading was scheduled for Wednesday evening at the Acud cultural center on Veteranenstrasse in Berlin’s Mitte district. In recent years, the center has hosted “Goethe-Institut in Exile” festivals featuring artists from Ukraine, Belarus, Afghanistan, and Iran. However, less than 48 hours beforehand, the event was canceled at short notice.

And not only that: the Goethe-Institut’s board of directors decided to discontinue the entire “Goethe-Institut in Exile” program “with immediate effect”, its press office announced on Wednesday. The “acute strain” and “limited funding” made it impossible to continue the program “under the current circumstances”, the statement explained.

Abrupt end without real explanation

The program was scheduled to end in a few months anyway, but around 20 events were still planned until then. The Goethe-Institut declined to comment on whether and how the sudden cancellation was related to the planned reading. However, the abrupt termination of a long-running series of events is highly unusual and gives the impression that someone pulled the emergency brake.

The curator and his friends therefore moved the reading at short notice to a cultural venue in Schöneberg, where over a hundred people crowded in that evening. Among them were the former director of the German Federal Cultural Foundation, Hortensia Völckers, and Bernd Scherer, former director of the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (House of World Cultures).

“We are authors, we are poets, we are artists,” said the writer Abdalrahman Alqalaq in English at the beginning of the event. He had curated the reading. But every text is inherently political—especially against the backdrop of genocide and oppression. The author, born in the Yarmouk refugee camp near Damascus, whose poetry collection “Transition Rite” was published in 2024 by Wallstein Verlag in Göttingen, had been compiling the program for the reading since December 2025 when the Goethe-Institut pulled the plug.

Because the funding was withdrawn, they couldn’t afford to pay a translator, explains literary scholar Maha El-Hissy, who is moderating the evening. Palestinian suffering has existed for decades, she says. But texts about it are perceived as disturbing in Germany. History, however, is inherently disturbing.

“We are all children of the Nakba,” says poet Asmaa Azaizeh, thus drawing a parallel to her two colleagues from Gaza. The 41-year-old is from Haifa, in Israel. The atmosphere of censorship and self-censorship is familiar to her. Until 1967, the Palestinian minority that remained in Israel lived under military censorship. Theaters were closed, and artists were imprisoned. The parents had taught the children to be silent, and in schools, they learned nothing about their own history, but a great deal about Auschwitz and the Cold War. She only learned later that before the Nakba, there had been over 30 Arab publishing houses and over 50 weekly newspapers in Haifa. The memory of urban Palestine had been suppressed.

Language has become functional

Like most people, she followed the events in Gaza on her smartphone. She’s still searching for a way to process them. “I don’t want to put the catastrophe into words,” she says, reading a poem she wrote for her son on the plane from Frankfurt to Tel Aviv. The poem is about her feelings and revolves around the cartoon character Peppa Pig. “I have nothing left. Everything was stolen from me, including my right to a normal life.”

Language has become functional, Alaa al-Qaisi says, referring to the people in Gaza. “Do you have water? Do you have gas?” These are the kinds of questions people in the Gaza Strip ask themselves. There’s no room for poetry. When she calls there, she can’t simply wish someone a happy birthday. The children there talk about tanks and fighter jets, not about happiness or joy. The slender author and translator, who wears a headscarf, will soon be moving to Dublin.

Maha El-Hissy says it is difficult for her to say that the “Goethe-Institut in Exile” program no longer exists. But the program is now history.

This article was translated by Ana Ferreira and originally appeared in German at taz.de.

Of Elites, Imperial Nostalgia, and Denialism

Europe Boards the Bandwagon of (Self)-Destruction


01/03/2026

It is difficult not to feel a sense of vertigo—tinged with a certain disgust—at the speed with which grim news multiplies week after week. Especially regarding international policies emanating from the West. Once again, a brief chronicle of imperial USA decline unfolds amid preparations for a potential war against Iran, with European allies. The empire will die while it destroys other people’s lives, and it is not short of loyal followers.

Recent events show how old colonialism reinvents itself. Remarks delivered by U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio at the Munich Security Conference to the upper ranks of Europe’s Atlanticist elite illustrated this.. I Rubio blamed immigrants for Europe’s decline and called for joint reindustrialization between Europe and the United States. He also evoked, with unmistakable imperial nostalgia, the colonial era when the West expanded across the globe, bringing “prosperity” and “civilization” to the so-called barbarian world. After 1945, he argued, a weakened postwar Europe was struck by atheistic communists and decolonial movements. Now, Rubio concluded, this decline must be confronted “together.” In his speech, Rubio said: „This is the path that President Trump and the United States has embarked upon. It is the path we ask you here in Europe to join us on. It is a path we have walked together before and hope to walk together again. For five centuries, before the end of the Second World War, the West had been expanding — its missionaries, its pilgrims, its soldiers, its explorers pouring out from its shores to cross oceans, settle new continents, build vast empires extending out across the globe“

His message amounted to a call for the regroupment of former postcolonial powers and a declaration of confrontation against those unwilling to align with imperial policy/ This was a pointed signal to the Global South and to blocs such as the BRICS. The speech was saturated with imperial longing, and it was met with applause from an audience of compliant European elites.

Geopolitical commentator Ben Norton wrote on “X”:

“What the US empire is doing now with Gaza, Venezuela, and Cuba is what awaits most of humanity, and European elites applaud enthusiastically.”

With such leaders at the helm, and with an indifferent, intimidated, and complacent population, little can be expected from Europe. In Germany, shameless political support for the genocide in Gaza continues, even as politicians tour a territory reduced to ruins. Meanwhile, prominent artists. prefer silence. This was the case with the German director Wim Wenders, who, during a press conference at the Berlin International Film Festival, was confronted with a question about the genocide in Gaza. Wenders replied that the festival was „not political,” contradicting himself from years earlier. His response provoked the Indian writer Arundhati Roy to cancel her visit to the festival in protest at his remarks.

Meanwhile, Germany deepens its ties with Israel.Inside Germany the repression of pro-Palestinian protest persists, through repressive measures that have been declared unconstitutional in both Germany and England. At the same time, the political class  has sought to deny the genocide in Gaza, as noted by the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention. This is particularly troubling in a country where Holocaust denial is punishable by law.

Added to this is the pressure exerted by governments allied with Israel(France, the United Kingdom, and Germany)which call for the resignation of the courageous UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese. She is a leading voice documenting the genocide in Gaza, but has been slandered by the circulation of a manipulated video. These governments attacked Albanese with a troubling hypocrisy and a lack of intellectual honesty, as they did not attempt to verify the material’s authenticity. In this climate, truth itself has been discarded. What we are witnessing is, quite simply, a war.As Yanis Varoufakis recently wrote:

“Today, Francesca Albanese’s detractors, those who seek to shield Israel from her well-documented, factual, legitimate criticism by getting her fired or by forcing her resignation from her position of UN Special Rapporteur – these people do not understand one thing:

Francesca will NEVER stop! She will continue to expose Israel’s crimes whether she is the UN’s Special Rapporteur or not. My message to them is simple: Francesca Albanese may be even more successful in shining light on Israel’s genocide if you strip her of her UN role. Beware what you wish for!”

As the genocide in Gaza continues and Israel prepares the de facto annexation of the West Bank in violation of international law once again, yet another spectacle of horror arises from the Epstein files. It turned out that the much-maligned “conspiracy theorists” were right to  point out the profound moral decay of global capitalist elites. Beyond the moral outrage provoked by the actions of this bunch of unscrupulous torturers, murderers, and pedophiles, I suspect that the exposure of these cruelty-laden archives also contributes to the normalization of violence against the vulnerable. Is this not one of the central messages of Trump and his supremacist allies? Hatred and contempt for the weak—be they immigrants, Latinos, Black people, homosexuals, or anyone who does not fit into the racist imaginary of MAGA politics.

Thus, I invite readers to interpret this “scandal” differently: Epstein and his vast network of Zionist pedophiles are not merely another sign of elite corruption and impunity. Rather they expose the staggering violence that underlies this economic and political system, its structural foundation. Given the level of dehumanization and destruction of human lives in Gaza, this should not come as a surprise. Cruelty advances. The Epstein files simply reaffirm what we already know—that power and money go hand in hand. The relationship between the system and these figures is not incidental. These are neither the system’s “black sheep” nor exceptions to the rule; they are expressions of the system itself. Indeed, the system is a machine for producing such monsters. Epstein, Trump, politicians, aristocrats, scientists, and Mossad intelligence agents—all those who appear within that network—embodied the violence of this order; they are its defenders, its products, and its guardians. Should we really be surprised by imperial violence against Venezuela, attempts to starve Cuba, renewed aggression against Iran, or the near-total destruction of the Gaza Strip?

It seems that the so‑called “culture war,” as the far right likes to call it, has now reached the boundaries of geopolitics and international relations. What now prevails is raw, unadulterated imperial violence, with the clear complicity of its European lackeys. Munich provided us with another example of this will to death and nihilism at the heart of the European elites.

Meanwhile, those annoying elements who dare to denounce this violence—the genocide in Gaza, the criminal blockade of Cuba, the kidnapping of Nicolás Maduro, the imminent war against Iran—are declared the new enemies. Enemies of the wonderful Western civilization, the so‑called “cradle” of democracy and the free market. Because of the wickedness of those Others—whether Arabs, Chinese, critics, communists, anti‑imperialists, decolonialists, etc.—the empire and its lackeys will be forced to resort to violence for their own preservation, both inwardly and outwardly.This is not only an expression of imperial nostalgia but also a desire to restore an old colonial order in which the West rules again. We on the other side cannot expect to be treated well by people with great power and few scruples. Rubio’s speech shows us with striking clarity that the coloniality of power—as a particular system of domination characterized by Aníbal Quijano—is more alive than ever. Europe is nostalgic for its dissipated imperial power, far from resisting this decadent narrative. Indeed Europe seems willing to climb aboard the wagon of (self‑)destruction that these riders of the apocalypse are prepared to inflict on the world.