for Joshua (1962-2025)

The scene has played out many times in the last few decades. A horrific event takes place—police murder yet another Black man, the state disappears migrants or political opponents, a financial crisis leaves millions without homes or jobs or both—and this time people take to the streets in protest of these immediate events and, perhaps, out of some deeper longing that the world ought not be the way that it is. Property is damaged. Police are called in. The crowd does not disperse but pushes back. Then tear gas. It stings the surface of your eyes and burns at the edges, dripping like acid down the nose and into the throat to pool in the lungs. Maybe this is your first time, maybe you were at the front of the line, maybe you just got unlucky. Regardless, you are overcome, gasping out desperate, burning breaths as your vision blurs. Suddenly, you feel arms around you and you are lifted from the heat of battle, dragged to the sidelines. Then those same arms depart, making quick motions that you can’t quite make out through the blur, rustling through something, and returning with that same gentle touch: pulling open each eye with care, dousing each with water that seems glacier cold. The moment seems almost ritualistic: an intimate baptism of the sight. Suddenly you are pulled back into the profane world. The person makes an awkward joke to ease the tension. Eventually, your vision clears enough for you to reenter the crowd, to blend into the sea of black and then into the night, free to return again tomorrow. Years later you will tell the story of that night: “The first time I met Joshua Clover he washed tear gas out of my eyes.”1

When Joshua passed away in late April, social media was filled with a cornucopia of similar stories from those lucky enough to see him in his element: at the riot, the occupation, the barricade. The flurry of places and dates invoked in these stories—Berkeley, Paris, Seattle, Davis, Mexico City, Ferguson, and Oakland, always Oakland—paint the picture of a man committed to being in the struggle wherever it arose, someone you could count on equally in the street and the quieter moments before and after. It was in the course of class conflict that his work as a teacher and poet achieved its practical truth, alive in the throes of history. Indeed, Joshua took knowledge seriously. Whether we were reading his work, arguing with him on some online forum, studying Capital together, or organizing alongside him, thinking with Joshua felt like nothing so much as being made to see clearly, the rapt vision of eyes blinking through tear gas just rinsed away. For so many young communists, this process of learning to see was our real introduction to Joshua and to the communist movement. The tools of siege are nothing if not instruments of sensory hijack. Amidst the smoke and chaos and pain of the present, he was there, not to show us the way, but to share the arts of clarity and to demonstrate how they could be wielded against the blinding powers of a social order that thrives in obscurity.

Most of the young communists emerging in the U.S. after the turn of the century found themselves unmoored from the history of the communist movement. Previous generations had learned to articulate politics through active mentorship within left-wing institutions built up through decades of struggle. Though such institutions could be stifling, they nonetheless endowed subsequent generations with the practical and theoretical proficiencies that would then allow them to distinguish their own politics from that of their predecessors, even framed as a revolt against this institutional inheritance itself and articulated as a new “revolutionary” position in contrast to the “reformist” remnants of an “old” left—even if that “old” left had, in its heyday, been new and revolutionary in contrast to its own predecessors.

After many decades of defeat, however, this generation was left with nothing but ruin. The institutions of both the old and new lefts were crushed, made historically obsolete by the shifting sands of capitalist production or ripped apart by their own sectarian decay. The brave were killed, the cowards returned to the fold as the romantics fled to the hills, and the swindlers built up their cults in the ashes. In the end, only a spare few remained, scattered and alone. Our communism was therefore not learned but salvaged. Wandering the wilderness of work, wage, and forever wars, we were left to rediscover the fragments of our own history, unearthing the rusted weapons of battles lost. And, lacking a meaningful institutional inheritance (whether “reformist” or “revolutionary”), we were forced to reinvent the basic axioms of the partisan project in our own fight against the status quo.

In these long decades of repression, at least some memory of the collective intelligence of revolutionary history was sequestered in subcultural insignia, in rank-and-file reform caucuses within the shrinking unions, and of course in the academy. Anti-communist purges across the unions, universities, and culture industries had ensured that communist thought could proliferate only at the seemingly harmless margins: in the punk subculture, the breakroom of a dying industry, or the underfunded English department, where it could be left to molder under the gnawing influence of “postmodernity.” And yet these repositories proved invaluable, preserving and even elaborating key aspects of the partisan project as much as possible in the exultant years of liberal victory once thought to be the “End of History” and which proved, in the end, to be merely an intermission.

The process was long and grueling, but new generations of partisans emerged at first slowly and then more quickly in the wake of the world-shaking crisis of 2008 which spawned, on the one hand, a minor renaissance of interest in Marx and, on the other, the sputtering struggles of the 2010s, where new waves of militants would come to see the practical limits of lofty theories tested on the ground. A rising generation of communist thinkers came to reengage with their own sequestered lineage and reappraised old texts in the light of fresh-lit fires burning across the world. In this context, figures like Joshua proved invaluable in first linking young militants to their own history (and encouraging an active, questioning engagement with it), and then linking them to one another, gathering what would otherwise have been scattered sparks.

It is difficult to exaggerate how crucial this work was in the moment. While there were other communists in art scenes, universities, and community centers, many carried with them the baggage of sectarian battles and a salient fear of repression. As a result, when sought out by young radicals, they were reticent, quietist, and sometimes outright hostile. Joshua was, in every respect, the opposite. Even in the vigor of debate, he showed a spirit of open engagement that tended to uplift all involved. At the same time, he was always willing to argue any topic down to the finest points, bluntly pointing out misunderstandings of Marx, rigorously shattering the false or oversimplified historic narratives that served as the ideological bedrock of “the left” for so many years, and always insisting that we return to the original texts, to the real complexities of revolutionary history, and to the world as it actually exists. He never used disagreement as a pretext to tear others down, nor did he accept partisan name calling as a substitute for articulating the real substance of disagreements.

Perhaps most importantly (and in distinction to many so-called Marxist academics), Joshua retained fidelity to both the popular and incendiary dimensions of the communist project. He was not only immensely skilled at interpreting popular sentiment but also demonstrated mastery in the forgotten art of translating high theory into accessible language without oversimplification. Meanwhile, whether in the classroom or a magazine column, he never quavered over the fact that the communist project is a revolutionary one and that revolutions are inherently violent affairs. In an era when many “radical” theorists were seeking out the peaceable expression of politics in “everyday utopias,” Joshua stressed that politics was always, at root, a fiery confrontation with the powers that be. To these ends, he not only helped bring together a new generation of young communists but also pushed them to engage directly with the rising tide of class conflict, understanding full well that the street and the shopfloor are the true classrooms of the partisan.

Heatwave is, in a sense, an attempt to embody this spirit at a larger scale. Like Joshua, we hope to serve as an engine of engagement, linking our readers to their own history and to one another. Like Joshua, we adopt a principle of ecumenicism, refusing the false dividing lines inherited from the long dissolution of the last global communist movement. At the same time, like Joshua, we also insist on a theoretically rigorous approach that invokes the real complexity of revolutionary theory and history, actively seeks evidence for its claims, and engages in good faith with opposing positions. And, like Joshua, we maintain that the partisan project is inherently incendiary, requiring confrontation with the rulers of the world, rather than gradualist compromise or secessionist retreat. Finally, communism requires an unambiguous commitment to internationalism. Although our project is currently anglophone, we recognize that elaborating a partisan politics requires learning from the self-activity of the dispossessed at the global scale.

For all these reasons, we work to ensure that every issue contains material from multiple countries and continents, that this work upholds a vision of revolutionary social transformation, and that it expresses an ecumenical spirit, putting diverse views into conversation with one another rather than elaborating our own editorial “line” by passing content through a sectarian sieve. We apply the same standards of rigor and accessibility that Joshua encouraged. Regardless of the argument, we ask: does this intervention make logical sense on its own? Can its analysis make sense of the real world? And, if so, could it also be explained to most people? In so doing, we hope to develop a collaborative, common language through which to express the partisan project: a vernacular for contemporary communist thought. This is perhaps the simplest summary of our editorial mission.

In this second issue, we bring together perspectives from Serbia, Jamaica, India, France, Iran, Chile, the United States, Palestine, Japan, and the Thailand / Myanmar border. The articles range widely in scope and subject matter, from longer explorations of the conditions surrounding contemporary struggles to reflections on historical movements and their legacies to accounts of the daily work of survival, organizing, and community defense. Many are works in translation, a practice we consider integral to our internationalist ethos, as it allows us to make global perspectives available to an anglophone audience and break through the siloed analysis that often prevails in the U.S., which is so habituated to seeing itself as the center and entirety of the world.

While many of the pieces in this issue think through the conditions in a particular place, others rove over issues of greater breadth. J. Caurine’s theoretical exploration of communism as a form of ecological partisanship will satisfy those looking for more sweeping analysis, while readers interested in larger movement dynamics will find an evaluation of the pressure campaign’s revitalization as a popular strategy. On the cultural front, this issue features poetry as well as multiple essays exploring popular culture, including meditations on country music, pop albums, and the porous boundaries between genres.

The pieces herein are not intended to be read in isolation, but rather shared and discussed. Taking inspiration from the case of the workers’ newspaper Abeng, explored in the contribution from Saul Molcho, we hope that you will take this issue to your comrades, that you will debate and argue and get caught up in the minutiae, as Joshua would have. We hope that you will test the validity of any conclusions in practice, in daily life and in the streets. And we hope that you will bring back your findings to us, so that we can all refine our understanding together.

“I cannot imagine what it must be like to be making one’s way through the current chaos with the knowledge that you will have to navigate its causes and its effects for a sustained time and figure out how to survive and how to act in the world. But it must be some amount of terrifying alongside the infuriating and obscene. I am very much hoping you can find a way to make it and not go mad, and will try to help as best I can.” This message from Joshua, sent to a younger comrade in despair, demonstrates a comradely tenderness, but pulls no punches. Desperation holds primacy. As the world grows ever darker, as the rubble of today’s catastrophes pile atop the last, we do not feign hope or deny the terrors and obscenities that face us. Navigating this chaos often feels impossible, and every departed comrade only adds to the burden. Lost in a dark forest, it often appears that our only guide is the very process of analysis itself, of trying to understand the terrain, and finding our bearings in the long night. In this task we have Joshua’s example, and the example of so many communists who came before us. And we have each other, the connections that Joshua and others helped to forge, those we continue to make for ourselves through correspondence, and those that only exist in brief moments of recognition at a distance, glances through clouds of tear gas. Maybe Joshua put it best: in the end, “it comes down / to comrades known and elsewhere.”

• 1This story was inspired by a comrade and is shared with permission, but there are many such stories.

The recent “12-day war” between Israel and Iran represents the latest manifestation of the rapid descent into generalized barbarism to which the capitalist system has condemned the world. While there is a supposed ceasefire at the moment, every peace under this system is only preparation for the next war. The war between Israel and Iran is not isolated to a conflict between two countries, nor the wider Middle East for that matter, but is part of the expanding wars that are an outcome of capital’s own dynamic.

While recent conflicts have brought to bear the old question of imperialism, many of the confusions and illusions of the past have returned with it. Generally speaking, much of the left takes an approach to anti-imperialism that is ideological, meaning they fail to critique how “common sense” shapes their own presuppositions. In so doing, ideology both disguises and performs the fundamental processes that give rise to it. “Anti-Imperialism” is ideological because it obscures social conflicts taking place within Iran, including but not limited to class struggles, and helps to mystify the place of the Islamic Republic within the broader order of global capitalist production and international trade. No sooner had the first Israeli bombs rained upon Iran than many of the larger left-wing organizations and media in the US-from the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) and Workers World, to Democratic Socialists of America, to Democracy Now!-wheeled out one regime apologist after another.

The conflicting tendencies of global capitalist production occur at a range of scales, but are driven fundamentally by the class relation. They take the form of borders, nation-states, and interstate competition for a variety of reasons, among them the need to maintain a system of international labor arbitrage or to maintain privileged access to raw materials and supply chains. Real national conflicts can take on a fetish character, the form of appearance of the uneven and tumultuous nature of capitalist reproduction. Indeed, the externalization of social conflict-using conflict with an external enemy to maintain social unity-has been a mainstay of the Republic’s domestic policy since the Revolution, critical to maintaining its existence over decades of turbulence. Today, in the aftermath of the recent war, the state is once again using external conflict to establish internal order and social unity. This is the core logic of geopolitics-national realpolitik uncoupled from the social relations that constrain and condition it. These issues are far from just analytical, as the ideological form of anti-imperialism is an incredible obstacle to building a renewed internationalism.

For many on the US left, Iranian history apparently stopped with the overthrow of the Shah in 1979. Closer inspection reveals that the ultimate victory of the Islamic Republic was the result of a counter-revolution, whose objective was to put back in the bottle the social movements that were released during the revolutionary upheaval. Some know better, but they are manipulators, giving partial truths to a naïve young audience. These charlatans have been around long enough, and love to discuss the Iranian communist movement to gain legitimacy, only to rally around their executioners.1 The Islamic Republic repressed the Iranian left as the Shah wished he could. Even before the fall of the Shah, the Khomeinists, as well as the liberal Islamists, were open about their disdain for Marxism and communism. In truth, anti-imperialism was used, and continues to be used, not only as a form of establishing political dominance, but also as a means to further exploit labor. By illuminating the internal relations of Iran and its relation to the imperialist system globally, we can better see how “anti-imperialism” functions as the ideological form of the very social relations that it obscures and therefore reproduces.

Revolution

The Iranian Revolution was one of the great mass revolutions of the twentieth century. Whereas most of the revolutions of the global south had taken place under conditions of underdevelopment, where feudal relations were still dominant, the forces behind the Iranian Revolution were the product of two decades of rapid and uneven capitalist development. Unlike these other revolutions, feudal relations had already been transformed into capitalist relations through the development enacted by the Shah’s regime.

In the early 1960s, under pressure from the US, the Shah began to adopt liberal economic reforms.2 This was the basis for what was titled the “White Revolution.”3 These reforms included the enfranchisement of women, creation of literacy corps, industrialization and development plans, profit-sharing in certain industries, and land reform. The “White Revolution” was also an attempt to build a popular base and advance an image of the regime as a kind of benevolent despot reformer. Yet the reforms didn’t include any check on state power and they solidified the dictatorship even further. The reforms were opposed by the clergy, and the main points of contention were votes for women, the removal of requirements for civil servants, and most importantly land reform. Much of the upper echelons of the clergy had vast land holdings given to them as religious endowments. The dictatorial aspects of the reforms were the target of the secular nationalist and left-wing opposition, whose slogan was “Reforms, yes! Dictatorship, no!” The religious opposition opposed the reforms as a whole.

This opposition broke out into the uprising of June 1963, which was suppressed with extreme violence and dispelled any hope of democratic reforms for a whole generation of activists.4 Until the eve of the revolution, Iran continued on the path of rapid development which superseded people’s needs or redistribution. Most importantly, land reform succeeded in transforming Iran from a semi-feudal agricultural society into a modern capitalist nation. While Iran had been undergoing a process of integration and peripheralization into the capitalist world system since the 19th century, it was really only after the early 1960s that capitalist relations became dominant within the Iranian economy, fully extending throughout the countryside. The biggest aristocrats were able to keep their land if they transformed into capitalist agriculture and hired wage-labor or if they leased their land to multinationals. While there was some limited resistance from the aristocracy, most eventually followed suit and saw that it served their interest. Many from the landed aristocracy were encouraged to invest in industry and given ministerial positions for going along with the program. While they had to surrender their political autonomy in the countryside to the state, they gained substantial social and economic power.

Many of the landless who remained worked as agricultural wage laborers, but the vast majority swelled the ranks of a semi-proletariat who migrated into the cities. Tehran’s population doubled from 1963-1973; many searched for employment within the vast and expanding construction industry. Industrialization begets an industrial proletariat, along with white-collar workers and the professional middle class, expanding the number of students going abroad for education. Migrants flooded the cities and found the alienation of modern urban life; unlike the older generations of peasants and workers, they lacked stable forms of community, institutions, and socialization. Their old forms of community in the countryside were disrupted, and there was no radical alternative in the cities, creating conditions that would play an important role in shaping the revolution and giving the clergy an advantage in the struggle for hegemony. The entire weight of state repression was carried by the left and secular-nationalist opposition. No trade unions, political parties, or other forms of working-class association were permitted. In this environment, the mosque offered a form of community and a space for dissent, one controlled carefully by the clergy. The Shah believed that religion could be used as a way to circumvent the communist movement, giving relative freedom to clerics and religious figures.

As long as the price of oil continued to rise, the state could maintain relative social peace. While there was widespread dissent and frustration, the growing middle-class, white-collar workers, and even many technically-skilled blue collar industrial workers in key industries could be kept in check through the expanding economy. But growth never lasts forever. Unemployment began to rise in the 1970s as the price of oil stabilized and then declined. Inflation spread simultaneously and, in 1977, the government of Premier Amuzegar responded by manufacturing a recession. This compounded growing unemployment, particularly among the new or semi-proletariat. As proletarianization continued to draw former agricultural workers into the cities, the construction industry was the only industry that could absorb these new wage laborers who did not yet have the technical skills for service work or highly-specialized industrial labor. The slowing economy hit the construction sector hard. Increasing stagflation and labor unrest followed.

After 1977, the year inflation more than doubled to a staggering 27.3%,5 demonstrations by various forms of opposition became more frequent and ubiquitous. While industrial workers had orchestrated wildcat strikes since around 1973, it wasn’t until 1978 that these strikes began to generalize, culminating in the mass strike of Fall 1978. The death knell of the regime sounded when oil workers joined the strike and shut off the most important economic resource of the state. The fall of the Shah’s regime would be unthinkable without this mass strike. Over a year of strikes, demonstrations, and riots finally culminated in the general insurrection of February 9-11, 1979. The final nail was pounded into the coffin.

In the course of the mass strike and insurrection, partisan conflict spread and competition for a revolutionary vanguard function intensified. Throughout industry, the proletariat had transformed strike committees into worker’s councils (shora in Persian). Councils, committees, and assemblies were not just limited to factories, but spread to schools, universities, farms, and even military barracks. But while the factory committees were shaped by the involvement of left-wing groups, the neighborhood committees were dominated by the Islamists, as many of them were organized through the mosques. These committees were controlled by a Khomeinist secret central committee. The Revolutionary Guards (Pasdaran) formed out of these committees, purging non-loyalists from their ranks. The RG were also a counterweight to the well-armed left-wing guerrilla groups who increased in numbers and popularity during the course of the revolution, particularly among younger non-religious people.

To firmly establish their hegemony over the revolution, the clergy and petit-bourgeoisie around Khomeini increasingly utilized the language of anti-imperialism and populism, co-opting terms and symbols from the left. In the ideological character of anti-imperialism, the Khomeinists found a ready-made tool of obfuscation and common-sense explanation of their appeal and eventual victory. Anti-imperialism was the midwife by which a new form of bourgeois dictatorship was established. It is not satisfactory to see the revolution in two, easily delineated moments, a heroic revolutionary period followed by a counter-revolution. Rather, the revolution and counter-revolution were, as they often are, intertwined.

The spectacle of anti-imperialism reached a climax with the US embassy hostage crisis. While it is often recalled as a great humbling of American imperialism, the reality had much more to do with domestic conflicts. Taking hostages allowed the Khomeinists to take the lead over their rivals as the vanguard of the anti-imperialist struggle. At a time when social conflicts were raging-with rebellions in the provinces, intensifying student movements, protests against new gender laws and dress codes, and ongoing conflicts in workplaces between management and the workers’ councils-and disappointments with the course of the revolution were becoming more apparent, the hostage crisis unified the nation around an international spectacle that was beamed into their homes daily. The embassy became a spot of constant rally and mobilization. It brought about the fall of the liberal nationalists of the provisional government, and more importantly, it was a way to gain an advantage over the left. It came at an opportune time for the Khomeinists. Frustration was growing among the population over economic issues, but also the increasingly repressive environment. Strikes were increasing, and this was to the benefit of the left-wing groups. All of this was snuffed with the spectacle of the embassy siege.6

While the embassy crisis helped to strengthen its hegemony, it was the war with Iraq that solidified the Islamic Republic, institutionalizing the Revolutionary Guard and ushering in a dark period for class struggle. Strikes were banned and workers who organized any disruptions were accused of being agents of imperialism. Ideological mobilization was accompanied by severe repression, with imprisonment and summary executions becoming the order of the day. Even the left-wing organizations that had firmly supported the regime such as the Tudeh Party and the Fediayan Majority were not spared.7 Three years into the war, Iraq was willing to sue for peace, but Khomeini rejected the offer. He and his supporters understood that, so long as the war continued, they could impose social unity.

The war finally came to an end in the fall of 1988, and along with it, one final bloodletting. Khomeini issued an edict instructing his supporters to purge the prisons of the left-wing opposition, with conservative estimates suggesting 5,000 executions in the summer of 1988 alone. The next year Khomeini died, and the charismatic leader that held together the ruling coalition was no longer there to mediate it.

Republic

The following decade witnessed an unfolding “economy first” policy. The remaining radical populist elements were tempered in favor of economic liberalization. The populist ideologies that valorized the poor and the oppressed were replaced with praise of the honest merchant, the consecration of private property, and the recommendations of the International Monetary Fund. During this period, privatization of Iranian enterprises and services rapidly increased, with struggles arising to protect subsidies for basic commodities such as cooking oil, flour, and gas. With the opposition defeated and the unchallenged rule of the state established, it was really the case that “Locke replaced Habakkuk.”8

The strain of economic liberalization throughout the 1990s came to a head with the student riots of 1999, which kicked off when right-wing thugs attacked students protesting the closure of a liberal newspaper. Despite being framed as a liberal reform movement of recently politicized students, this sequence was the largest demonstration against the government since the immediate post-revolutionary years. It wasn’t long until militant working-class activity returned to the scene.

Increased labor activism began in the mid-2000s and has continued since in many sectors. Beginning in this period, one major struggle has been to form independent unions separate from the state. As economic conditions worsened, populism regained strength and right-wing populist Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was elected in 2005. For all the rhetoric against elites, austerity continued for the working class. Ironically, austerity, in particular the removal of subsidies, was more successful under the populist Ahmadinejad than the liberal Khatami. Ahmadinejad increased repression as well as populist demagoguery. During this time, Ahmadinejad became the darling of the anti-imperialist left, particularly when Hugo Chavez embraced him and called him his “brother.” His second term began with what came to be known as the “Green Movement” claiming that the election was stolen against his reformist rival. While another sequence of protests ensued, this also represented an end for reformism. For Iranian workers and students, it was apparent that neither the reformists nor the conservatives offered any future.

Despite decades of privatization, the Iranian economy is today still heavily tied to the state via nationalized oil and natural gas industries. For example, the National Iranian Oil Company is the largest economic unit in the entire country. Essential to the economy of the Islamic Republic are the bonyads or foundations. Listed as “charitable” organizations, bonyads control about 20% of Iran’s GDP. After the revolution, the Pahlavi Foundation (Bonyad-e Pahlavi) which represented the economic interests and investments of the royal court, hidden from official scrutiny, was taken over and renamed as the Foundation of the Oppressed (Bonyad-e Mostazafin). In reality, Bonyad-e Mostazafin is functionally a holding company-the largest in the Middle East-involved in numerous sectors of the economy. Today, it is the country’s second-largest commercial enterprise after the National Iranian Oil Company. Bonyads are closely affiliated with the revolutionary guard, which in turn is under the control of the office of the Supreme Leader. While US firms may have been kicked out after the revolution, capital from other imperialist powers rushed in quickly to fill the gap. Foreign direct investment continues to flow from British, French, German, Japanese, and increasingly Chinese multinationals, attracted by “Free Economic Zones,” such as the South Pars Energy Zone. These massive complexes employ hundreds of thousands of precarious and poorly paid workers, crammed into dire living conditions to serve foreign capital in one of the hottest areas of the world.9

Over the past decade, austerity and police repression have become focal points of social conflict. Strikes and demonstrations have increased in frequency, periodically erupting into generalized uprisings or insurrections, as in the case of the 2018-2019 general strike or the 2019-2020 protests, which had economic hardship, corruption, or rising energy prices as their proximate causes. Each time, the state has responded with severe repression,10 which only feeds the anti-government sentiment that underwrites the next explosion. Indeed, the cycle of unrest has been characterized by a crescendo motion. The most recent apparent crest was the Jina Uprising of late 2022 and early 2023, sparked by the police murder of Jina Amini.11 While triggered by particular grievances or demands, these protest sequences demonstrate that the issues of class conflict, environmental destruction, state repression, ethnic racism, or gender oppression cannot be cleaved from each other. This becomes more manifest with every explosion. Yet it is precisely this incongruent composition and aspirational unity that exposes contemporary Iranian social movements to the same counterrevolutionary forces that defeated the Revolution of 1979. The specter of national unity creeps in the shadows cast by every failed insurrection. The slogans of the left again become appropriated and devoid of their political content.12

Remains

In recent years, no other sequence of events has done more than the “12 day war” to resurrect what seemed to be a moribund ideology, another “blessing” to the regime.13 Quite predictably, a large section of the populace has rallied around the flag. Today, the ultra-wealthy who make their profits through connections to the state can hide their exploitation behind the external threat of imperialism. While the working classes struggle to pay rent or afford basic commodities, the lavish lifestyles of the northern suburbs of Tehran remain hidden behind this conflict. The war gave the ruling class an opportunity to increase austerity in the name of national sacrifice. The Islamic Republic’s position as a central piece in the “Axis of Resistance”14 makes it even more difficult for many leftists in the west to get a clear picture of how it really operates. Iran maintains certain anti-imperial positions and at the same time facilitates fundamentally reactionary policies and developmental pathways-an anti-imperial imperialism.15 This is in fact the history of capitalist development. Taking these illusory forms at face value cost the Iranian left quite dearly during the Revolution.

Despite the anti-imperialist demagoguery, the Islamic Republic has always been willing to be integrated into the international bourgeois community. The idea that the United States is intransigent in its opposition to the Islamic Republic, and vice versa-that the current Iranian regime is intransigent in its “resistance”-is the stuff of comic books and bad spy movies. Iran has a bourgeoisie, and like all bourgeoisies, it is first and foremost concerned with preserving its interests; this supersedes ideological loyalty to any political power. There is certainly an element of the Iranian bourgeoisie, even those currently loyal to the regime, who would want to maintain the Islamic Republic but without some of the excesses and with a more “rational” administration of capital. Decades of IMF restructuring, liberalization, and austerity have demonstrated the current Iranian administration’s desire to join the global economic order. The capitalist class will work to preserve its interests, perhaps even jettison their fealty to the current regime if it suits them. To suggest otherwise is pure idealism.

With the recent resurgence in nationalism, the fissures within the working class are beginning to re-emerge, primarily along lines of fidelity to the Islamic Republic. The official and ossified organizations-the state-affiliated unions-have dawned the garb of the flag, while autonomous working-class organs continue the uphill battle of militant opposition. Under the cover of national security, Iran has deported over half a million Afghan migrants since the end of the “12 day war”.16 These latest attacks are but the most recent expressions of a well-worn strategy. The fact that both Iran and the United States are engaging in similar attacks against their most vulnerable migrant population is not a coincidence but reveals a general tendency shaping interstate competition and internal national reaction. Meanwhile, demonstrations and confrontations remain frequent occurrences in the face of the day-to-day indignities and miseries that accompany austerity, such as daily energy blackouts and water shut offs which frequently take place during the hottest times of the year. The war may have smothered the threat of revolution for now, but the material conditions that spurred masses of Iranian society to rebellion remain.

We must ask fundamental questions. Who are our comrades in the struggle against capitalism? Is it our fellow workers, teachers, child rights activists, undocumented migrants facing racism and deportation, or is it generals, merchants, clerics, and bureaucrats? What is the social composition of the so-called “resistance” forces that appear on the global stage? To whom or what do they answer? These questions can be asked of every national medium of capital accumulation, not just Iran. We must move beyond a facile allegiance to anti-imperialism, otherwise we risk abandoning our fellow workers and students to their exploiters and executioners.

• 1A prime example is someone like Vijay Prashad, who is knowledgeable about the communist movement in Iran, but uses this knowledge and history to somehow gain support for the very regime that crushed this movement.
• 2The Kennedy administration’s foreign policy plans targeted specific strategic regions which were to undergo certain capitalist reforms from above. Brazil was another nation chosen under the Kennedy plan.
• 3Also known as the “Shah-People Revolution” by the regime.
• 4It was this generation that formed the base of the two main guerrilla groups that would play a central role in the 1979 revolution, the left-Islamist Sazeman-e Mujahideen-e Khalq (The Organization of People’s Mujahideen Guerillas), commonly referred to as the Mujahideen and the Marxist-Leninist Sazeman-e Cherikha-ye Fedaiyan-e Khalq (The Organization of People’s Fedaiyan Geuriallas) more commonly referred to as the Fedaiyan. They were frustrated with the reformism of the older generation of the nationalist National Front and communist Tudeh Party.
• 5World Bank
• 6At the same time that the US embassy was being occupied, the “Labor House,” Khaneh-ye Kar, which served as the de facto ministry of labor, was occupied by unemployed workers. Needless to say, this was just one among many examples of militant worker activity that was lost in the spectacle of the hostage crisis.
• 7The Tudeh and Fedaiyan Majority were tolerated until 1983. After Khomeini rejected the ceasefire, the regime turned against these final remaining Marxist organizations. The central committee of the Tudeh were dragged in front of television cameras to denounce Marxism and confess to being Soviet spies. This was mainly to win the ideological war against Marxism.
• 8Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.
• 9Many of the workers here are on precarious temporary contracts. Indeed, the oil industry has a hierarchy between this floating surplus population and more stable skilled workers with permanent or long-term contracts and who receive much higher pay. The latter are even represented by government affiliated unions. The much larger pool of workers on temporary contracts who deal with poor conditions and precarity have been successful in organizing their own autonomous union and conducted a number of important strikes in recent years. In 2021-2022, they waged a large strike that spread to a number of other cities and even beyond the energy sector.
• 10The worst incident unfolded in late 2019 with “Bloody Aban,” resulting in an untold number of protesters killed or disappeared.
• 11For a balance sheet of the Jina Uprising, see Assareh Assa, “The Jina Rebellion: Elements of an Analysis of the Movement in Iran,” The Brooklyn Rail, May 2023,
• 12The slogan popularized during the Jina Uprising, “Woman, Life, Freedom,” has its origins in the radical feminist wing of the Kurdish movement. It was transformed into a general ideological slogan, an umbrella that includes workers and oppressed nationalities, while at the same time chanted by celebrities and the partisans of the deposed monarchy.
• 13When the war began, Iran was in the third week of a nationwide truckers strike. The strike was gaining momentum at the time and was becoming a concern. Then the bombs fell.
• 14The “Axis of Resistance” is an informal political coalition across the Middle East, formed by Iran and intended to undermine the influence of the US and Israel in the region. Member organizations include Hezbollah, Islamic Resistance in Iraq, the Popular Mobilization Forces (Iraq), Yemeni Houthis, and a range of Palestinian resistance groups, including Hamas.
• 15One thing that distinguishes the Khomenist movement from the Shah’s regime, especially in its early phase, is that it was anti-developmentalist and anti-productivist. It embodies a kind of petit-bourgeois utopian populism that appeals to both the newly arriving migrants, lumpen or semi-proletarians, and the merchants and artisans of the bazaar.
• 16Iran Forcibly Deports Nearly 600,000 Afghan Migrants Amid Post-War Crackdown

“[A]fter a rain mushrooms appear on the surface of the earth as if from nowhere. Many do so from a sometimes vast underground fungus that remains invisible and largely unknown. What we call mushrooms mycologists call the fruiting body of the larger, less visible fungus. Uprisings and revolutions are often considered to be spontaneous, but less visible long-term organizing and groundwork—or underground work—often laid the foundation.”

—Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark

On November 1, 2024, a recently renovated train station collapsed in Novi Sad, Serbia, killing 16 people. This was perhaps the clearest result of the state policies we have witnessed here in the past decade that prioritize capitalist profit over people’s wellbeing or even survival. The government’s obvious culpability in these deaths led to massive protests breaking out almost immediately.1 By the end of November, students all over the country began occupying their universities and instituting directly democratic student councils to organize the movement.

In the wake of this incident, we have seen massive protests against official corruption, the state, and its violence. The government’s response has been mass arrests and threats of university privatizations. The protests have spread throughout society, involving not only students, but also local citizens’ assemblies, school teachers, trade unions, war veterans, biker gangs, and many other groups organizing against the state. We have seen a proliferation of radically democratic counter-institutions inside the movement, as well as tactics of occupations and strikes—something we have never seen at this scale in Serbia before.

International observers have been following these events closely, inspired by the sight of hundreds of thousands of protestors challenging the right-wing authoritarianism that has been on the rise throughout the world in recent years. However, each has interpreted the movement through their own specific lens: liberal European politicians have seen it as a non-violent mass protest for European values; libertarian leftists as a people’s movement against “neoliberalism” and for radical democracy; far-right and authoritarian leftist groups as merely another “Color Revolution” instigated by the West. Strictly speaking, it hasn’t really been any of those things.

While elements of radical democracy have been present, as well as pro-(Western)-democracy attitudes and tendencies, the movement has also been highly diverse, full of contradictions and without a clearly defined goal. That is probably also why it has grown so popular: it tends to stay away from controversial topics and ideological debates. It does not clearly define its vision for societal change.

Of course, the movement did not emerge in a vacuum. Although the way the uprising has been organized differs considerably from movements we have seen in Serbia before, it still carries their DNA. Various elements of Serbian society and its recent history have come together in a confluence to produce the uprising. If we are to learn anything from these events, we need to understand all of these disparate elements and what their “spontaneous” explosion might be able to tell us about the terrain of future struggles.

While the movement seems to be dying down after being active non-stop for almost a year (as of August 2025), with many universities ending their blockades, and many citizens’ assemblies quietly dissipating, it is still highly unpredictable where things are going. Still, it is useful to reflect on the roots of the movement, current Serbian society, and where the events have led us so far.

Serbia at the End of the 20th Century

Contemporary Serbia is largely defined by the 1990s. It’s a country still reckoning with what remains of Yugoslavia. As Marxist-Leninist regimes across the world went through economic, social, and political crises during the 1980s, political-economic elites in those states looked for ways to retain their positions. In Yugoslavia, this manifested as a rise of nationalist and separatist fervor instigated by influential (current or former) Communist officials, who successfully outmaneuvered their rivals in the party, many of whom advocated more permissive and market-socialist-oriented roads similar to those advocated by Gorbachev or Deng Xiaoping. In Serbia this wave of nationalism was spearheaded by Slobodan Milošević, a man who would soon lead Serbia into war with the other republics. He led a brutally repressive regime, which, while holding nominally democratic elections, would in practice violently repress any attempts at dissent by opposition activists, students, workers, anti-war groups, and ethnic minorities.

It was this period that would come to define the Serbian political climate of today. On one side was a coalition of former hardline Communist officials, organized crime, the state security apparatus, and the far-right; on the other there was a big-tent anti-government movement of liberal democrats (led by the Democratic Party), moderate former Communists, progressive civil society activists, and a sizeable number of right-wing groups who viewed the government as insufficiently nationalistic. These opposing coalitions, formed out of convenience and the logic of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” would dominate Serbia’s politics. Even though some of the specific groupings have shifted, the broad strokes have remained the same, with large, “post-ideological” coalitions leading the charge against violent state and parastate repression.

The current president of Serbia, Aleksandar Vučić, along with large swaths of his current party (the Serbian Progressive Party or SNS), also started their careers in the 1990s as members of the neo-fascist Serbian Radical Party. While the Radical Party at the time presented a critical attitude towards the Milošević government, it represented a fundamentally controlled opposition, supporting and propping up many of the government’s repressive and genocidal policies while violently attacking all those who opposed it. This eventually resulted in the party forming a coalition government with the then-ruling Socialist Party of Serbia (SPS). However, while the SPS still maintained some vestiges of the old state, including some social benefits and state control over parts of the economy (though simultaneously privatizing many state-owned enterprises and abolishing the system of workers’ self-management), the Radicals wanted a clear break with the old system. They despised the Communists, identifying themselves with the collaborationist right-wing Chetnik forces of World War Two and advocating an aggressive process of complete privatization of the economy. Despite their populist rhetoric aimed at Serbia’s increasingly dispossessed population, their actual agenda favored large capital and massive cuts to social spending.

At the end of the decade, following years of war, sanctions, and other forms of international pressure, mass protests led by the broad social and political coalition against Milošević overthrew the government and ushered in an era of democratic reform. Cracks in this coalition quickly started to show in debates over how much the existing security apparatus (loyal to the previous government, with ties to organized crime and far-right groups) should be dismantled, what the attitude of the government should be towards the EU, and how to deal with war criminals hiding in Serbia from the ICC. This turbulent period also led to an even more aggressive and rapid privatization of state-owned enterprises, which were sold off to either their previous party-appointed “managers,” people close to the new governing parties, or—more often than not—multinational corporations. These processes were rarely transparent and left large swaths of the workforce unemployed. This led to a sizable but fragmented and defensive movement of workers fighting to keep their jobs, obtain unpaid wages, and resist privatization altogether. However, these movements, while successful in some of their goals, weren’t able to stop the processes of mass privatization and deindustrialization. Because post-communist trade unions have been weak and cozy with the state, contemporary worker organizing has generally been passive and unable to play as significant a role in Serbian politics as other groups like local movements, liberal-democratic parties, or even non-governmental organizations.

By the mid-2000s, after years of unstable governments, snap elections, economic slumps, and violence by organized crime and far-right groups (resulting in the murder of Serbia’s first democratically elected prime minister, Zoran Đinđić, in 2003), it seemed that a consensus was cautiously emerging. More and more people in Serbia supported EU accession and democratic reforms. Civil society groups and independent media outlets formed, and Serbia gradually re-integrated into the global capitalist economy, bringing optimism that the economic situation was starting to improve.

This was complicated, however, by two nearly simultaneous events. The first was the Great Recession following the 2008 economic crash. The second was Kosovo’s 2008 declaration of independence from Serbia (on the basis of its predominantly Albanian population). While the then-ruling Democratic Party managed to retain power by forming a coalition with their former nemesis, Milošević’s SPS, a shift was imminent. Then, the Radical Party’s popularity exploded after a fraction split off to form the SNS as a moderate, pro-European conservative party. This effort was led by Tomislav Nikolić, who had previously served as acting president of the Radicals while its founder and actual leader was on trial for war crimes in the Hague. Nikolić’s second-in-command was the much younger and more charismatic Aleksandar Vučić.

This shift in rhetoric was enough to siphon off much of the Democratic Party’s voting base, attracting conservative nationalists who nevertheless wanted the economic benefits of EU membership, as well as many anti-systemic voters hungry for a change from the status quo. The incumbent government rightly appeared to many voters as inefficient, corrupt, chaotic, and unfair towards the average, working person. The SNS moved to harness this dissatisfaction, and their strategy paid off. After moderate gains in the 2012 elections, which allowed it to form a minority government (in coalition with the SPS) and take over the presidency, the party won a sweeping parliamentary majority in 2014, gaining a grip on power that it has not let go of since.

The Vučić Years

The early years of SNS rule didn’t demonstrate much fundamental change. The new government, despite its far-right past, appeared to align with the direction in which the previous government had been moving. The SNS continued the path of EU accession, complying with the reforms that the EU required of Serbia. In this, the new government initially saw more success than their Democratic predecessors. They started accession talks in 2014 and opened the first chapters in the negotiation process the following year.

Not much appeared to change for civil society, either, though there were some indications of an opening up. The new government allowed the Belgrade Pride march to be held in 2014. Such marches had not taken place since 2010, when the previous government had banned Pride in response to widespread far-right violence. In 2014, no major incidents occurred and the march has been held annually ever since. At the level of media, right-wing and liberal outlets took turns criticizing and praising the government, depending on the issue.

Despite the previous hardline nationalist and expansionist rhetoric of its members, the SNS-led government appeared to be more moderate on the issue of Kosovo. The 2013 Brussels agreement normalized relations between the two de facto independent states of Serbia and Kosovo, yet selective terminology allowed the Serbian government plausible deniability regarding Kosovo’s statehood in order to save face among voters—for whom Kosovan independence has been extremely unpopular.

For Serbians, what we witnessed during the early SNS years was a continuation of the liberal capitalist, moderate nationalist, pro-EU consensus that had come to dominate the Serbian political landscape over the previous decade. This image soon began to crack.

One defining feature of the current government throughout its tenure has been a tendency for massive public–private joint ventures led by foreign firms. These are typically expensive, large-scale construction projects, through which companies close to the government skim money using opaque contracts that exclude citizen participation or consideration of working peoples’ needs. The foreign capital funding these projects comes from many countries including the UAE, Germany, China, the UK, and the US. The first of these major projects to gain notoriety was the Belgrade Waterfront, a massive Dubai-style project of gentrification, aimed at constructing a new neighborhood of skyscrapers for the ultra-rich while demolishing an older, largely proletarian part of town. A massive resistance movement to this arose under the name of Don’t Let Belgrade D(r)own!, which led diverse but largely symbolic protests and petitions against this and other similar projects. This was the first glimpse we caught of the methods of repression this government would be willing to deploy, with masked men (likely tied to organized crime networks) demolishing buildings in the middle of the night in 2016 so that citizens and activists wouldn’t have time to react.

In response, multiple local campaigns of mass resistance confronted these controversial projects funded by foreign capital. For example, there were massive protests, occupations, and acts of sabotage by villagers against a project to build a hydropower dam that would affect all local rivers in the Stara Planina mountain range. There was also a series of protests and occasional encampments in major cities against the demolition of remaining green spaces to make way for new construction. The largest of these campaigns opposed a lithium mine owned by Rio Tinto that would have devastated the livelihoods of local villagers. This movement saw both massive protests and encampments throughout the country, as well as decentralized blockades of major roads.

Many of the oppositional movements that have characterized the previous decade thus ended up being local and grassroots in character, with a focus on the idea that citizens should directly determine the built environment in their own communities. This led to a sizeable presence of local and municipalist political parties, as well as (sometimes successful) community attempts to take over institutions of neighborhood governance left over from the system of worker’s self-management, which are supposed to allow citizens to gather together and have their voices heard in the city government.

Throughout this period, the national government became increasingly repressive and gradually took control over all levels of society—from city councils and public enterprises down to schools, cultural institutions, student parliaments, and media outlets. It got to the point that almost all local governments are now controlled by the SNS or their coalition partners in ethnic minority areas. This trend provoked a new big-tent movement whose protests were generally large, all arising as a response to some form of repression: highly controlled presidential elections in 2017, brutal violence against opposition figures in 2019, manipulated covid statistics before the 2020 elections (in order to lift lockdowns—causing many people to get infected—with the measures restored immediately after the election), and the government’s lackadaisical response to two mass shootings in 2023.

Three features characterized all these protests. First was their top-down approach: they were often organized and controlled by mainstream opposition parties or groups close to them. Second, the protests were usually docile and shied away from civil disobedience, destruction of property, or disruption of economic infrastructure. Finally, they lacked ideological or programmatic coherence, with liberal and far-right groups organizing together, while left-wing groups and progressive civil society organizations would take part on the margins. While largely ineffective in their goals, these movements did lead to new waves of organizing and a restructuring of the political scene, with almost all the currently active major parties emerging from these waves. Many new civil society groups and networks arose as well, from the left-wing housing movement formed in the wake of the 2017 protests, to the youth and student-led pro-democracy activist groups formed in the wake of the 2023 protests. The latter in particular would end up playing an important role in the current movement, at least initially.

On this topic of student activism, one more historical point should be reviewed before we begin our examination of the ongoing wave of protests. Student-led movements played an important role in the opposition to the Milošević government in the 1990s, with many of the student leaders of the time ending up as important political figures after his overthrow. However, the character of such movements shifted after the democratic reforms of the 2000s. In the early 21st century, they usually organized only against capitalist restructuring of higher education, and so were broadly left-wing. Their methods of organizing differed from their predecessors and involved blockades of the universities. These blockades led to directly democratic student assemblies that attempted to give a voice to student grievances. While tactics and organizing strategies were certainly shared between the different generations of student activists (as well as between students from different countries, with the most important connection perhaps being with those from Croatia), what defined the new movements was their lack of continuity. Waves of protests and occupations would appear in response to new market-oriented measures by the universities, then they would explode and eventually die down without forming more permanent structures. Any student organizations that formed in this period tended to not last beyond a single generation, after which a new group would form from scratch.

While still partially dealing with student issues and using the tactics of blockades and building occupations that marked the previous two decades, the student-led groups that formed after the 2023 protests were different. Their primary focus has been resistance to the government and its authoritarian structures, rather than focusing on the commercialization of education or the advocacy of direct democracy and left-wing politics as their predecessors had. In this they more closely resembled the movements of the 1990s, organizing for all sorts of issues outside the universities. It should be noted that these groups were generally small and had limited influence both on the student body and the public at large. However, they were instrumental in organizing many actions against government policies, and this would place them in a key position to channel the public anger after the train station collapsed in 2024.

Train Station Collapse and Its Aftermath

In 2021, the SNS government awarded a sweetheart deal to a consortium of construction companies to rehabilitate a railway station in Novi Sad, Serbia’s second-largest city. Part of China’s Belt and Road Initiative aimed at building transportation infrastructure in Southeast Europe, this project involved all the elements present in the aforementioned cases that have become associated with the regime: inflated costs, lack of transparency, subservient2 cooperation with foreign capital that would allow it to profit massively while disregarding the needs of the community and the workers, and presenting the project as something of great national importance—which the government used as propaganda for its developmentalist image.

On November 1, 2024, in a tragically preventable accident, the canopy in front of the train station collapsed and killed 16 people. Sensing a major image problem, the government went on the defensive. After Vučić had taken personal credit for this project for years, posing for photo-ops and opening ceremonies, the government quickly tried to distance themselves by denying that the faulty portion of the station had even been rebuilt in the first place. This blatant attempt to cover up their role—even as survivors and dead bodies were still being pulled from the rubble—only served to cement the government’s guilt in the eyes of the public. They immediately started pulling all publicly available documentation related to the project, signaling further guilt.

Building on the anger with SNS rule that had been building through the preceding years of smaller protest movements, this event sparked an explosion of revolt on the streets. While initial demonstrations were called by activist groups led by students and other young people, in coordination with some local opposition parties, they immediately expanded beyond their control. These groups had called on people to gather without marking themselves any sort of leaders, but the atmosphere made this precaution seem unnecessary: the demos would probably have erupted even without being called by those particular groups. The marches over the next few days were some of the largest in recent years, involving property destruction and clashes with the police—especially in Novi Sad, where City Hall was breached and painted blood red. While this kind of rioting is rare in Serbian protests and often speculated to be instigated by government agents trying to discredit the movements (since they have rarely been the targets of subsequent police repression), this time many of the people participating saw this kind of response as entirely appropriate—even if it turned out that it had been orchestrated.

The riot in Novi Sad led to a brutal police response against demonstrators, with many people being beaten or arrested, including students. The repression initially led to a somewhat more radical response from the movement, with opposition members of parliament blocking the city’s courthouse to demand the release of arrested protesters. This second round of demonstrations was also somewhat decentralized, with activist groups calling on people to blockade roads every Friday wherever they happen to be for 14 minutes of silence (to signify the 14 people who had died by that point—two more would succumb to their wounds in the coming weeks). These actions were met with new repressive tactics: Thugs close to the government attacked these protests, driving cars into the crowds and using other forms of physical violence. This backfired as well. After students from the university drama school were attacked, they organized a blockade of their school, demanding that the attackers be arrested and that students held in custody be released. In the coming weeks, their fellow students from other campuses and universities would follow in their footsteps. Soon, all campuses of all the public universities throughout Serbia would be blockaded.

In the university blockades, students organized themselves in directly democratic assemblies, inspired by previous movements—although on a much larger scale this time. Many of the students were also supported by university staff (at least initially), with some schools even officially endorsing the demands. The movement would expand greatly over the coming months, with a massive, decentralized base of student activists launching all kinds of innovative actions against the government.

Part 2 will appear in Heatwave issue 3

• 1“Pump it!” (pumpaj) has been a slogan of the movement since its early days. Normally associated with rap music and working out, this term’s connection to protests is more nebulous, implying something like “don’t let the energy drop,” but perhaps also to pump the government full of air until it pops. A related slogan has also come into use, coined by sociologist and left-wing populist Jovo Bakić: “Stew it,” meaning we need to prepare for a long-term struggle.
• 2This subservience takes many forms, such as large subsidies granted to multinational corporations opening factories in Serbia. The government has signed bilateral treaties giving Chinese companies preferential treatment for exports and exempting them from following certain laws, specifying, for example, that Chinese citizens working in Serbia are to be treated according to Chinese laws, leading to terrible conditions for many guest workers. In this and the earlier construction projects, a common tendency has been a lack of public tenders, with backdoor deals predetermining which companies the state will cooperate with.