“If you are a westerner your ONLY job is to oppose the abuses of the western empire. Not Iran. Not China. Not Russia, Cuba or North Korea.” That is Caitlin Johnstone, the Australian blogger whose posts circulate widely on the anti-war left, writing on 24 August. The capitals are hers. Nobody needs to defend the phrasing to hold the position, and the serious version of it had appeared two days earlier.

Ask what puts a country on that list. Saudi Arabia is absent, and the Saudi state jails labour organisers, or would if it permitted any to exist. Cuba and North Korea sit side by side, two states with nothing in common that a Marxist would recognise as a shared social form. The one property all five share is Washington’s hostility, so the list is drawn up in Washington and nothing done in Havana or Tehran has any bearing on it.

Open letter supporting Iran’s political prisoners

On 20 August the Guardian carried an open letter addressed to Iran’s political prisoners, signed by Judith Butler, Angela Davis, Michael Löwy and Yasin al-Haj Saleh, a former political prisoner in Syria, among others. It calls the Islamic Republic “a system that claims to counter imperial power while using its very logic of domination”. It demands that Iran free all political prisoners and stop the executions, and that “the US and Israel must end their barbaric wars and brutal sanctions”. Seems like common sense. But some on the left got very angry about it.

The second blade

The letter’s governing image is a pair of scissors. One blade is the Islamic Republic, the other is the United States and Israel, and the prisoners are between them. The image is the prisoners’ own. The letter quotes them saying they “feel stuck between the two blades of a scissors, the evil regime that imprisons and tortures [them] and a foreign force dropping bombs on [their] heads in the name of freedom”, and everything after that is built out of their sentence.

Vijay Prashad answered on 22 August for the International People’s Assembly, under the title “Against the False Symmetry of the Scissors”. The metaphor is “evocative but erroneous”, he writes. Then the correction. “The two blades are not equivalent. One is the blade of imperialist war. The other is the state and society being cut.”

Read the point about second blade again. In the prisoners’ sentence it is the regime that jails and tortures them. In Prashad’s it is the state and society being cut. The second blade has stopped being the thing doing the cutting and become the thing cut. The jailer and the victim have changed places, and the prisoners in Evin who supplied the image are left holding a metaphor with no room in it for them. One that does not register what they have suffered at the hands of a counter-revolutionary regime.

Prashad denounces letter

Prashad directs the Tricontinental Institute and turns up on platforms across the British left, which is why the rest of his argument is worth taking slowly. His objection to the letter is one of timing. He does not say its facts are wrong; he says that raising them now is wrong. So the thing to press is what “now” is being contrasted with, and when a socialist in London gets to say out loud that Iran should free its political prisoners.

He gives two answers and they do not fit together. The first is the war. “Neutrality or a third space does not exist in the midst of a war of aggression.” Neutrality perhaps, but the idea that socialists cannot take critical positions in favour of human freedom because a war is on is alien to the revolutionary socialist tradition. On that reading criticism resumes when the bombing stops, which is a real condition with a real date attached.

The second answer comes a few lines later, when he asks why anyone would “challenge Iran just when it has the United States and Israel on the back foot”. Prashad does not want the Iranian regime criticised while it is under attack and does not want it criticised when it is winning either. Between them, losing and gaining cover every position a state can occupy, so the rule never lapses, which would be a manageable objection if the argument were about sequencing.

The stronger form of his case is that the rule of a national bourgeoisie is preferable to imperialist rule, because lifting imperialist domination clears an enormous obstacle to mass struggle. Clearing an obstacle is supposed to open a road. A permanent obstacle opens none.

China’s situation

Solidarity with the oppressed in Iran or China, on this account, supplies the legitimation for bombing them. It is a good line and it does not survive contact with the record. Four decades of Western commentary on the Tiananmen Square massacre of 4 June 1989 have produced no strikes on Beijing. On 23 June 2025 an Israeli strike hit Evin during visiting hours, flattening the hospital ward and the visitor centre and killing around eighty people, so the empire reached the political prisoners with ordnance well before anybody reached them with a letter.

International solidarity is crucial

Now take the war out of it. On 21 August, a Hong Kong court convicted Lee Cheuk-yan, sixty-nine, and Chow Hang-tung, forty-one, of incitement to subversion, for organising the candlelit vigils for the dead of 4 June 1989. Both have been held since 2021 and face ten years. Lee was general secretary of the Hong Kong Confederation of Trade Unions, and the TUC called in April for the charges to be dropped. No carrier group stands off the Chinese coast. On what date does supporting Lee Cheuk-yan stop serving the empire?

Try naming a condition that would work. A ceasefire in the Gulf will not do it, since China is not in that war. It sells itself as a judgement about when. It turns out to be a rule about who.

Venezuela?

The obvious reading is that the list names whichever states are currently under attack. But that is not quite right either. Washington’s hostility runs on a gradient and the list does not. Venezuela has moved along it. Sanctioned for years, and with its president seized by US forces in January on narco-terrorism charges, it was securely on the list. Then Delcy Rodríguez’s government had its own sanctions lifted in April, handed Washington the proceeds of the oil sales, and hosted a US strike in June. The rule gets invoked there about half as often now. Nothing improved for the Communist Party, dispossessed of its own name and legal personality by a court order since 2023, which is the exit the doctrine turns out to offer: a country leaves the list by falling in behind Washington, and its workers are no better off on the other side.

Canada?

Push it the other way, to the treaty allies. Washington put 50 per cent tariffs on some Canadian goods on 22 August, on fentanyl grounds its own data does not support, after an Ontario advertisement quoting Reagan on tariffs had already been enough to suspend talks. That is a demand that an ally fall in behind US interests. By the criterion the rule actually runs on, Ottawa qualifies for the same protection as Tehran, which nobody has proposed, since it would mean that criticising the RCMP serves the empire. The five were on the list before the criterion was written, or the criterion was written to fit the five, and I am not certain the difference matters much to anyone inside Evin.

Spotlight is wrong on solidarity

On 25 August some socialists, including me, were removed from the Spotlight Socialist Network, a WhatsApp community the online paper Spotlight set up for survivors of Your Party, for raising the case of Lee Cheuk-yan and of victimised Iranian trade unionists whom the TUC and its member unions have supported. Standing with workers against capitalist Bonapartism was heard as support for US intervention, and then as white supremacy. The network is full of people with real compassion. What they hear from much of the left is that the Iranian people are under attack from the outside only, and that reports of repression are Zionist invention or the work of Zionist assassins inside the country. Press TV put the toll from the December protests over the currency and the cost of living at 3,117, quoting Iran’s own Martyrs Foundation. Activist counts run from 4,519 to more than 7,000, and Amnesty has documented the killings as protest massacres. Press TV also carried the campist reply to the Guardian letter on 24 August. Same outlet, eight months apart, and I have not worked out what to say in a room where pointing that out lands as a provocation.

So put it to Prashad, and hold him to a date. Name the condition under which a socialist in London may say the words “free Lee Cheuk-yan” without serving the empire. If the answer is a change in Chinese labour law, or anything that could happen on a Tuesday, the doctrine has an exit. If the answer is the end of the American empire, then the second blade was never the jailer, and the scissors everyone has spent this week arguing over are still closed.

Find out more

RedMole.org’s “Neither Turban nor Crown” feature is an article and accompanying podcast on the protests in Iran: https://redmole.org/p/neither-turban-nor-crown-against