Abolitionists Parrot US Imperialism in Open Letter to Iran’s Political Prisoners

Editorial Board

The open letter addressed to Iran’s political prisoners published in the Guardian on August 20 is pro-imperialist propaganda dressed up as anti-imperialism, embodying the reactionary petty-bourgeois trend of abolitionism espoused by its signatories.

The letter argues that Iranian political prisoners are caught between US-Zionist invasion on one hand and the repressive Islamic Republic of Iran on the other, claiming that the methods used by the Iranian government are the same as the US and Israel, and demanding the freedom of all political prisoners in Iran.

The signatories include a number of well-known postmodern academics aligned with the Democratic mafia (Angela Davis, Bernardine Dohrn, Bill Ayers, Judith Butler) along with a handful of Trotskyists—natural allies in equating friends and enemies to undermine resistance to US imperialism with a “progressive” posture.

The letter comes nearly six months into the war started by the US and Israel after they invaded Iran in an unprovoked attack and assassinated top political and military leaders of the country and massacred school children. US and Israeli military operations have floundered in the face of a successful national resistance by Iran and its allies, and US imperialism is forced to increasingly rely on economic and covert operations to find a way out of the quagmire.

It is within this context that the letter is published, swinging from the “left” to revamp anti-government protests in Iran and misdirect international solidarity at a time most needed by US imperialism.

US Foreign Policy from the “Left”

The abolitionists write, “On one side, you face the Islamic Republic that, from its inception, enforced absolute social and political control based on an exclusionary ideology. It is a system that claims to counter imperial power while using its very logic of domination and systems of carcerality, torture and execution. On the other side, you face the aggression and violence of the very imperialist and Zionist forces the Islamic Republic purports to stand against.”

First, is the Islamic Republic only purporting to stand against US-Zionism, or is it actively making the slogan “Yankee Go Home” a reality? When retired four-star US Army General Barry McCaffrey said in late August that US imperialism has “probably permanently lost access to 15 Persian Gulf bases,” and top Pentagon officials are actively in discussion around scaling back US military presence in the region, are these simply false appearances? Or are the signatories the ones purporting to counter imperialism while regurgitating its same demands?

Second, neither the Islamic Republic—nor any government for that matter—has enforced “absolute social and political control”; to do so would mean there is no rebellion. It is a rhetorical flourish to justify their call to support US imperialism. It is likewise with labeling their ideology as “exclusionary”—can there be an ideology that does not exclude, an affirmation without a negation? It is quite telling that these political prostitutes are opposed to being exclusionary (itself a contradiction in terms), as they are all too willing to include support for the Mossad! Postmodernism is degenerative liberalism; while liberalism casts bourgeois dictatorship as being inclusive of all people through its sham democracy, postmodernism promotes this farce in the final years of imperialism to provide cover for its extreme decadence with fake-progressivism.

The utter bankruptcy of their analysis is found in their comparison of the Iranian government, the leadership of an oppressed nation resisting imperialist aggression, with the government of the United States, the sole hegemonic imperialist superpower, and its genocidal military outpost Israel. According to the abolitionists, because these three governments have prisons and carry out executions, they are identical. It is then only a matter of time that they issue an open letter in solidarity with Cuban political prisoners and exiles by that same logic!

The principal contradiction in the world today is between imperialism and nations oppressed by imperialism. This means that social development in the world today is mainly dictated by this unfolding process, with imperialist powers aiming to maximize their domination of the oppressed nations and the oppressed masses resisting and fighting for liberation. US imperialism in particular is the number one enemy of the people because of its role as the sole hegemonic imperialist superpower, and all honest people have a duty to support the oppressed nations combating and resisting US imperialism.

The postmodern opposition to hierarchy, its refusal to differentiate what is primary from what is secondary, leads its worshipers to see all oppression as the same, equating imperialism with those oppressed by imperialism to ultimately take a social-chauvinist stand.

The sham activists are unable to grasp the two aspects of the situation. For all of their talk of “Yes, and”, they discard their own “nuance” when inconvenient to their pro-imperialist analysis. Yes the Iranian government has repressed those protesting its rule, but to insinuate that Iran is not objectively standing against and weakening US imperialism and Zionism is a hallucination of the likes promoted by Trump and his sycophants, and to confuse which of the two is primary is even worse.

The letter says, “The Iranian authorities must stop their inhumane practice of death and incarceration now. And the US and Israel must end their barbaric wars and brutal sanctions that knowingly devastate our communities.”

What would it mean for Iran to stop its “inhumane practice of death and incarceration”? It would mean a return to the domestic attacks in Iran carried out on behalf of the US and Israel during the previous invasion in June 2025, releasing those killers and encouraging more. It would allow agents a free hand to give the US and Israel coordinates for more Minab massacres. It would mean opening the door for full invasion. Resistance cannot be separated from security operations, which preserve the ability to continue fighting.

It is the national resistance led by the Iranian government that has been limiting the US’s ability to wage such wars that the letter professes to oppose, not the intellectuals filling the top posts of imperialist institutions. Just as the US invaded Iran in the immediate aftermath of the capitulation of the Venezuelan government, the US has so far refrained from invading Cuba because of the resistance of the Iranian government and people. To separate one from the other is to sow confusion, to equate friends with enemies and detract solidarity work into the flattening discourse of abolitionism.

US imperialism, Israel, and all sorts of reactionaries have justified US-Zionist aggression against Iran under the guise of saving Iranians from the cruel despotism of the Islamic Republic, and specifically making calls for the release of political prisoners—i.e., their own agents. To raise the same call and repeat the same talking points serves the same goal but directed to a different audience.

Abolitionists Uplift the Voices of Trump and Mossad

The letter argues against “the false binary of imperialism and hollow anti-imperialism” and calls for “unconditional support and solidarity to all incarcerated kin fighting for our collective liberation, to build relationships with Iranian political prisoners and uplift their voices, to put pressure on the Islamic Republic by challenging its narrative, and to call upon that government to immediately stop all the executions and free all political prisoners.”

Remove the postmodern garb and you get basically the same demand from the Trump administration: “The Trump Administration is deeply concerned by reports that the Iranian regime has imprisoned thousands of ‎Iranian citizens in the past week for engaging in peaceful protests… We will not remain silent as the Iranian dictatorship represses the basic rights of its citizens and will hold Iran’s leaders accountable for any violations. The protesters in Iran are expressing legitimate grievances, including demanding an end to their government’s oppression, corruption, and waste of national resources on military adventurism. Iran’s regime claims to support democracy, but when its own people express their aspirations for better lives and an end to injustice, it once again shows its true brutal nature. ‎The United States calls for the immediate release of all political prisoners in Iran, including the victims of the most recent crackdown.”

Political prisoners are those who are imprisoned for political opposition to the government. Iran is a bureaucrat capitalist, semi-feudal and semi-colonial country led by a theocratic government, whose principal aspect today is combating and resisting US imperialism and its lackeys in the region. Given the above, political prisoners in Iran comprise a wide range of ideologies, and it is for this reason that postmodernism’s rejection of class analysis results in objectively supporting enemies.

Israeli and US officials have on numerous occasions stated openly that there are Mossad operatives on the ground in Iran and specifically integrated into the anti-government protests, including this past January. Intelligence agencies will not admit that their operatives have been captured, but instead use the capture of their agents as further pretense to argue that the enemy government is acting oppressively and should be overthrown.

There are also many monarchist activists in Iran pushing for the return of the US-backed monarchy and Pahlavi fascism. Just because protests are anti-government does not make them progressive, and just because someone is imprisoned for their political actions does not mean they should be supported. It would be ridiculous to call for the release of, say, the reactionary January 6 rioters on the grounds that they were opposing the US government (no wonder the abolitionists are parroting Trump—he is the preeminent abolitionist, releasing over a thousand “political prisoners” in his first day in office!). It is all the worse to issue such a call for those hostile to the Iranian government to be released in the midst of a war—with the calls coming from inside the invading country no less.

To call for the freedom of “all political prisoners” in Iran is to call for the freedom of CIA spies, monarchists, and other such agents of reaction that find themselves in contradiction with the Islamic Republic of Iran. The authors of the open letter have escaped from the oppressive “binary” between outright support for imperialism and anti-imperialism to find themselves shoulder to shoulder with the Mossad.

In their opposition to “hollow” anti-imperialism—that is, support for the government leading the resistance of an oppressed nation against the world’s sole hegemonic imperialist superpower—the degenerates’ lofty ideals lead them to instead demand the disarmament of the resistance under attack by US imperialism. This is the result of real, not hollow, abolitionism: to disarm the people, to drop support for those on the front lines fighting imperialism and instead rally behind the demands of imperialism in the name of anti-imperialism.

The Bankruptcy of Abolitionism

The signatories claim they are “committed to the global project of abolition, anti-authoritarianism and anti-imperialism”.

Abolitionism argues for the end of prisons as the main task of activists. It is a reformist trend derivative of anarchism. While anarchism sees the state as inherently reactionary and therefore calls for the overthrow of the ruling class and the immediate abolition of class society and the state, abolitionists take an even narrower approach and focus their attention on ending “carcerality”. By drawing parallels to the revolutionary struggle for the abolition of slavery in the 19^th century, they replace the struggle for the abolition of private property with the abolition of a specific superstructure of the mode of production.

Such a view is ludicrous, not only because these types are the same ones worshiping charity work under the banner of “mutual aid” and have no regard for mobilizing the masses in the use of revolutionary violence to win demands, with the main demand being power, but also because capitalism is not a buffet of separate institutions one can simply abolish one after another. Prison abolitionism is a demand far removed from the masses and even further from reality.

The negation of class analysis by anarchists and abolitionists means that they oppose all states and all prisons, treating them as absolutes regardless of their context. For example, the letter states, “Whether it is a border wall or a prison gate, the goal is the same: to silence people through fear, domination, and isolation.” It is true that all states and all prisons are oppressive—that is their function. But it is also true that, once the working class seizes power, it faces many enemies both internally and externally; to rob it of its ability to defend itself, i.e., to oppress class enemies, means surrender. This is just as true during the process of the conquest of power, and it is also true over the course of any anti-imperialist struggle.

That the authors are counter-revolutionary is all the more apparent in their self-description as anti-authoritarian, a corollary of abolitionism. Nothing could be more authoritarian than revolution; it is imposing the will of one class on another at gunpoint. They negate the national liberation struggles the letter claims to uphold. Are Hamas and the Palestinian resistance not authoritarian when they dictate their will on the Israeli occupiers? “Authoritarianism”, which is better called class dictatorship, is precisely how liberation is won and defended.

The natural conclusion of replacing class analysis with a postmodern orientation toward who they consider to be most oppressed is, at best, inept reformist organizing that does nothing to threaten the ruling class, and at worst, aligning with imperialism under a desperate equivalency of the oppressor and the oppressed. The signatories do the latter.

Who Benefits from the Open Letter?

To answer this question, we can start by understanding who is the audience of this letter. First, it is activists in imperialist countries, mainly the US where most of the signatories live. Second, it is anti-government activists in Iran.

Objectively, the aim of the letter is to oppose solidarity with Iran’s war of resistance against US imperialism inside the US and other imperialists countries. It makes an opening for more rightist and centrist elements in the solidarity movement, who, like those within the Palestine solidarity movement, opposed both those carrying out genocide and those leading the resistance to genocide. It is identical to the position adopted by the Democrats, particularly its social democratic wing, and rallies support for them. It takes aim at those forces that are not only against imperialist war but also pro-resistance, who not only oppose unjust wars but uphold the justified armed resistance to them (“hollow” anti-imperialism!). Ultimately, it promotes a bankrupt pacifism that “both sides” are wrong, spreading pessimism and confusion that only aids the oppressing force.

Secondly, it revives Trump’s promise that the US will help Iranians if they rise up against their government. It promises international solidarity from the highest levels of the US intelligentsia and promotes rebellion in the midst of invasion. It serves to foment dissent against the government at a time that the US is toying with the idea of a ground invasion and ramping up sanctions. It strengthens a fifth column objectively aligned with the interests of US imperialism and Israel. To split the ranks of the people and dive into civil war is the only way for US imperialism to save itself from its quagmire.

Conclusion

It is not surprising that postmodernists and Trotskyists would become the useful tools of US imperialism and Zionism in their time of crisis; that is their genesis. The flattening of contradictions, viewing all issues as equal while ignoring their context, is an ideological method of postmodernism to hide their subservience to imperialism and demobilize any resistance to it. All honest elements must proceed from a concrete analysis of concrete conditions, basing themselves in class analysis to discern primary and secondary contradictions, upholding and applying the principle that it is right to rebel against reactionaries, and understanding friends and enemies in accordance with the stage and tasks of revolution on a national and world scale.

US imperialism is the number one enemy of the world’s people. Those in the US in particular have a duty to unapologetically show solidarity with the oppressed nations of the world resisting their enslavement and starvation, and support the defeat of US imperialism by making revolution at home.

Image: Ali Khamenei’s funeral procession in Najaf, July 8. Credit: Khamenei.ir.

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