Iran’s “political capitalism” fuses sovereignty and accumulation, fueling recurring revolts. Sanctions and repression create epistemic fog, while campism and “no-lever” activism mute Western-left solidarity and misrecognize uprising agency.

Iran’s recurring waves of revolt are often narrated as a sequence of disconnected “crises”: an economic shock here, a cultural flashpoint there, an outbreak of anger that then “subsides.” That framing misses continuity. Over decades, Iranians have lived inside a political-economic order in which power is not merely political but also a precondition of accumulation, security, and social survival. When a coercive-ideological state collides with rising precarity, the result is not a single uprising but a repeated pattern of protest, lethal repression, exhaustion, reorganization, and renewed protest. This essay treats political economy as necessary background but its main focus is a second puzzle: why some campist currents within the anglophone left have been cautious, muted, or ambivalent in the face of mass repression.

Power-first accumulation, rent, sanctions, and crisis as patronage

A useful starting point is the nature of Iran’s political economy. Iran is not simply a capitalist society with an authoritarian state, nor merely a “corrupt economy.” It is closer to what theorists describe as political capitalism: an accumulation regime in which access to wealth, investment security, and market privilege is structurally subordinate to proximity to sovereignty and coercion. In this kind of system, accumulation does not reliably generate power; power generates accumulation. Mehrdad Vahabi’s work is especially useful here because it treats coercion and protection not as external “distortions” of the economy but as constitutive mechanisms through which resources are appropriated and coordinated—what he frames as “Islamic political capitalism” in contemporary Iran (Vahabi, 2017, 2022).

Rentier dynamics are at the core of this system. Oil and other rents loosen the state’s dependence on society and make coercion a more viable substitute for consent than in tax-dependent states, even while everyday livelihoods deteriorate. In the current protest wave, Amnesty’s reporting situates the initial eruption on 28 December 2025 in a sharp currency collapse, inflation, and worsening living conditions, describing how quickly economic grievance can become direct anti-regime revolt (Amnesty International, 2026).

Sanctions then interact with this structure in ways that moralistic Western debates often flatten. Whatever one thinks of the stated foreign-policy rationale for sanctions, the political economy of sanctions tends to expand opacity, scarcity, and arbitrage. When formal trade and finance narrow, “bypass” channels become more valuable; actors with institutional cover, coercive protection, or intelligence access are structurally advantaged in exploiting them. Under those conditions, crisis management can become patronage. Scarcity is not only endured, it is administered—and administration becomes an opportunity for rent extraction by connected networks. A single, specific policy detail (“one-to-one” exchange rules, etc.) is not required for this logic to hold; what matters is that controlled access to hard currency, import permissions, and protected logistics becomes the terrain where political proximity converts into material advantage.

Finally, repression and information control are not add-ons; they are part of how the system survives legitimacy shocks. Human Rights Watch has documented how the current wave’s nationwide internet blackout has concealed the scale of killing and mass detention, precisely by degrading documentation and communication (Human Rights Watch, 2026a). UN briefings have similarly stressed the need for independent investigations into killings and warned about escalation dynamics around the protests (United Nations, 2026; United Nations Office at Geneva, 2026). The key point for what follows is that repression is not only violence; it is also epistemic control—a managed uncertainty environment.

That is the backdrop. The question is how this reality becomes selectively recognized—or not—by parts of the Western left.

What’s already “in circulation” about the left’s hesitation

A number of explanations have already been articulated by journalists and left writers.

One is campism: a form of anti-imperialism that collapses politics into a single axis where Western power is always the primary agent and non-Western regimes are treated mainly as reactive. In that template, popular struggles against non-Western authoritarian states can become suspect unless they can be re-coded as anti-Western resistance. Beckerman’s reporting describes how this can slide into insinuations that protests are essentially foreign-authored “regime change” operations rather than endogenous revolt (Beckerman, 2026).

A second is fear of war instrumentalization. Given Iraq and Libya, many left actors are wary of any discourse that might be folded into interventionist agendas. UN briefings during the current crisis—explicitly referencing escalation risk—make that concern intelligible (United Nations Office at Geneva, 2026; United Nations, 2026). But intelligible fear can still function as a rationale for non-engagement: a shift from “oppose intervention” (a coherent stance) to “avoid speaking about mass repression” (a consequential choice).

A third is issue-ecosystem competition, especially in the shadow of Gaza. Beckerman reports a rationale that functions like a practical shortcut. Here, activists mobilize where there is a clear domestic policy lever (e.g., arms transfers), whereas Iran is treated as already “covered” by sanctions, leaving “no lever” and therefore no campaign (Beckerman, 2026). This is where the critique can move beyond hypocrisy: it points to a structural change in what “internationalism” becomes in practice.

Lastly, a fourth is repression-induced organizational fragmentation, meaning that the uprising is often encountered abroad through disproportionately visible diaspora actors and geopolitically legible branding. This can make the revolt easier to misrecognize as “right-wing” or as “regime-change theater”—and therefore easier for some anti-imperialists to treat as “contaminated” and withdraw from (Beckerman, 2026).

These are real dynamics, and they explain a lot. But listed separately, they can miss how they reinforce one another—especially under conditions of epistemic fog and representational capture.

A synthesis mechanism

The effort in this essay is to synthesize how those reasons can become a system—how silence (or constrained speech) emerges as an output of interlocking political-economic and discursive conditions.

Representation rents: a political economy of narration

First, there is a political economy of attention and representation that parallels the political economy of accumulation inside Iran. Just as insiders can control economic access through coercive proximity, external narration can be dominated by those with media access, institutional networks, and recognizable geopolitical branding. When the default international “window” onto an uprising is produced through highly visible diaspora factions—especially factions that appear legible to Western media as hawkish, monarchist, or aligned with conservative geopolitical projects—the revolt becomes easier for outsiders to misrecognize as “right-wing,” or as “regime-change theater.”

What matters here is not only optics but structure. Some of the most visible diaspora projects do not merely oppose the existing political-capitalist order; they can end up mirroring its underlying disposition toward power and “order”—a preference for top-down solutions, elite brokerage, security-first governance, and a politics that treats society as an object to be managed rather than a collective agent to be organized. In that sense, the difference can look like a change of personnel or symbolism while the deeper logic—politics as access, protection, and gatekeeping—remains compatible with the very political-capitalist pattern the uprising is resisting (Vahabi, 2022). This is one reason the representational problem is not superficial: when external “representatives” reproduce familiar power habits, it becomes easier for outsiders to conflate the revolt itself with a mere rotation of elites rather than a rupture from the coercive accumulation regime that produced the revolt in the first place. (Beckerman, 2026).

Epistemic fog: when uncertainty rewards priors

Second, sanctions and repression create an epistemic environment that amplifies ideological filtering. Sanctions expand non-transparency and incentivize evasion channels; repression expands blackout conditions, fear, and documentary scarcity. Together, they degrade verification and increase the payoff to pre-existing priors. If one already interprets non-Western dissent through a foreign-orchestration script, a foggy information environment can make that prior easier to sustain because fewer credible signals penetrate the blackout.

Here the internal political-capitalist dynamics (scarcity, patronage, coercion) and the external discursive dynamics (conspiratorial framing, fear of war instrumentalization) are not separate tracks. They can be mutually enabling. Human Rights Watch’s reporting on the internet blackout emphasizes that communications restrictions have concealed the true scale of atrocities; that concealment is not only a human-rights emergency, it is also an epistemic condition that lets ideological templates do more work than evidence (Human Rights Watch, 2026a; Human Rights Watch, 2026b). The result is a politics of interpretation where “uncertainty” does not necessarily lead to careful solidarity; it can lead to suspicion and withdrawal.

A related (and under-discussed) element is the way institutional caution can unintentionally reinforce depoliticization. When international bodies emphasize verification constraints—and they must—they also shape the signal environment for activists who treat institutional language as the threshold of “what’s real.” UN briefings stressing independent investigation and warning against escalation are crucial, but in a polarized attention economy they can be received not as a call to solidarity under uncertainty, but as permission to postpone moral clarity until a perfect evidentiary moment arrives (United Nations, 2026; United Nations Office at Geneva, 2026). That postponement is itself one political effect of repression.

Domesticated internationalism: solidarity as domestic lobbying

Third, the “policy lever” logic is not only a pragmatic excuse; it signals a domestication of internationalism. In this mode, solidarity is treated less as a principled commitment to people facing repression and more as a form of domestic lobbying: you mobilize when your own state has an obvious, immediate role and when there is a clean demand that can be translated into pressure. Beckerman reports this rationale in the Iran case as well—an argument that because Western states already sanction Iran, there is no additional “ask,” and therefore no campaign (Beckerman, 2026). The shift here is clear. Attention is organized less by the question “who is being shot, jailed, disappeared?” and more by “what can I demand from my polity this week?”

The additional point is that this does not merely reduce mobilization; it can normalize silence by turning punitive state policy into a substitute for solidarity. If sanctions are treated as the default “action,” activists can retreat into the idea that “something is already being done,” even as sanctions and repression together deepen non-transparency and scarcity—and even as blackout conditions make accountability harder. In that sense, the “no lever” posture can fold into the broader misrecognition problem. Rather than amplifying an endogenous revolt against a coercive political-capitalist order, attention is redirected toward a pre-existing policy posture that is politically difficult to question and easily absorbed into an interventionist frame. The result is a paradox. The same sanctions posture that is supposed to be “doing something” can become a rationale for not doing the one thing solidarity can do under repression—publicly align with victims and amplify their agency.

The “color revolution” framing: beyond silence

Beyond silence, there is a more corrosive move: recoding Iranian revolt as a “color revolution.” This is not merely hesitation; it is active delegitimation. It turns mass dissent into an externally authored script and treats repression as a defensive reaction to foreign manipulation. Left Renewal’s critiques of campist responses to the current protests describe this move: the reflex to label revolt as “color revolution” rather than confront it as politics from below produced by material crisis and state violence (Chapel, 2026; Shahabi, 2026).

This framing matters because it can invert responsibility. It doesn’t only fail to speak; it speaks in a way that denies agency to the uprising and converges with the regime’s narrative of “foreign instigators.” Also, it is not an idiosyncratic idea confined to one subculture. Portraying protests as “color revolutions” orchestrated from abroad is a widely documented disinformation trope used to delegitimize popular movements. EUvsDisinfo has catalogued this recurring narrative across contexts—protests are framed as Western-provoked “color revolutions” in order to erase local grievances and pre-shape the information space against dissent (EUvsDisinfo, 2020).

The crucial logical point is that opportunistic endorsement by hawks does not imply authorship. The fact that external actors may try to instrumentalize an uprising does not make the uprising a puppet show. Treating opportunism as proof of orchestration is precisely how ideological templates override reality.

What the synthesis adds, and why it matters

Put together, the mechanism looks like this: representational capture makes the revolt look geopolitically “owned”; epistemic fog makes evidence harder to stabilize; domesticated internationalism deprioritizes struggles without clean domestic levers; and the “color revolution” trope offers a ready-made exit ramp that converts uncertainty into dismissal. Under those conditions, silence is not only hypocrisy. It is an emergent output of an attention economy operating under epistemic fog, where narrative loyalty substitutes for inquiry, and where reality is pressured to conform to the story the ecosystem already knows how to tell.

Here, the problem is not only “bad faith,” but a patterned misrecognition in which parts of the left adapt complex realities to pre-existing narratives because the alternative—holding two thoughts at once, opposing imperial intervention while recognizing revolt against non-Western tyranny—demands more analytical and political work than the template encourages. Under epistemic fog and representational noise, those templates become default settings. They don’t merely interpret events, they decide in advance what kinds of agency can be recognized as legitimate.

A practical implication follows: if representational capture, epistemic fog, and “no-lever” reasoning jointly weaken solidarity, then the most durable counter is not a better slogan but stronger rooted intermediary institutions—civil-society networks that can corroborate claims under blackout conditions, preserve evidence, and widen the range of credible voices shaping the international “window” onto events. That kind of infrastructure reduces fog, resists the slide into domestic-lobbying internationalism by giving solidarity a transnational organizational form and bargaining power, and dilutes representational rents by making it harder for any single diaspora branding project to stand in for a heterogeneous revolt (Human Rights Watch, 2026; Center for Human Rights in Iran, 2026; Sabet, 2026).

A principled alternative is not complicated, but it is demanding: oppose intervention and collective punishment while insisting on solidarity with revolt from below; refuse regime apologetics without feeding Islamophobic discourse; reject diaspora capture without letting diaspora visibility nullify the agency of millions. The ethical and analytical task is synthesis—precisely the thing campism tends to resist.

References:

Amnesty International. (2026, January 8). Iran: Deaths and injuries rise amid authorities’ renewed cycle of protest bloodshed. Amnesty International. https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2026/01/iran-deaths-injuries-authorities-protest-bloodshed/

Beckerman, G. (2026, January 16). The silence of the left on Iran. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/2026/01/the-iranians-who-feel-betrayed-by-the-left/685644/

Center for Human Rights in Iran. (2026, January 12). Exclusive interview: Physician treating protesters in Iran describes mass casualties, overwhelmed hospitals. Center for Human Rights in Iran. https://iranhumanrights.org/2026/01/exclusive-interview-physician-treating-protesters-in-iran-describes-mass-casualties-overwhelmed-hospitals/

Chapel, D. (2026, January 8). How the British left dismisses Iran’s uprising: The campist playbook. Left Renewal. https://leftrenewal.org/articles-en/chapel-campist-playbook/

EUvsDisinfo. (2020, August 20). Colour revolutions everywhere: Pro-Kremlin media covers popular protests. EUvsDisinfo. https://euvsdisinfo.eu/colour-revolutions-everywhere-pro-kremlin-media-covers-popular-protests/

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Human Rights Watch. (2026, January 16). Iran: Growing evidence of countrywide massacres. Human Rights Watch. https://www.hrw.org/news/2026/01/16/iran-growing-evidence-of-countrywide-massacres

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Shahabi, S. (2026, January). Iran’s uprisings: Social roots, not security fantasies. Left Renewal. https://leftrenewal.org/articles-en/shahabi-irans-uprisings-social-roots/

United Nations. (2026, January 15). Security Council LIVE: UN raises alarm over deadly Iran protests and “possible military strikes”. United Nations. https://www.un.org/en/security-council-live-ambassadors-due-meet-emergency-session-iran

United Nations Office at Geneva. (2026, January 15). Iran: UN urges “maximum restraint” to avert more death, wider escalation. United Nations Office at Geneva. https://www.ungeneva.org/en/news-media/news/2026/01/114887/iran-un-urges-maximum-restraint-avert-more-death-wider-escalation

Vahabi, M. (2017). Coercive state, resisting society, political and economic development in Iran (CEPN Working Paper No. 2017-17). Centre d’Économie de l’Université de Paris Nord. https://ideas.repec.org/p/upn/wpaper/2017-17.html

Vahabi, M. (2022). Destructive coordination, Anfal and Islamic political capitalism: A new reading of contemporary Iran. Springer.