Revolutionary hope and those who mortify it

Recognizing the emergence of a multipolar world does not mean justifying every authoritarian regime as long as it presents itself as anti-Western.

Francesco Strazzari • January 18, 2026
IL MANIFESTO

ITALY

Dozens of deaths turned to hundreds; hundreds turned to thousands. The theocratic regime faces a convergence of unprecedented challenges to its rule: a younger population with no ties to revolutionary mythology, which increasingly detests the moral pedestal on which the rulers place themselves, a caste dedicated to enriching itself while producing only impoverishment – all in an increasingly hostile international context.

The regime is showing itself incapable of eradicating the waves of protest with coercion alone. It sees mass mobilization not as political dissent but as a threat to national security, a pawn on the geopolitical chessboard, to be taken down with surveillance, digital censorship, live fire into the crowds and hundreds of executions. At the same time, the anti-regime are becoming ever more frequent and intense.

The regime still has a conservative electoral base and a coercive apparatus (IRGC, Basij) which so far has kept rank. In the coming days, one must keep an eye on the behavior of the elite and the army – all the more so if the massacres should intensify further – to see if any fault lines emerge: resignations, defections or conspicuous absences.

Meanwhile, the Reactionary International is trying to cast the mobilizations into a unifying mold via a narrative focused on the Pahlavi dynasty, the puppet dictators of pre-1979 Iran. Trump is threatening military action (“Help is on the way”), the impact of which would be extremely uncertain, and is calling on the protesters to seize power. Nevertheless, even though one must always be wary of the right’s intended narrative, it would be a grave error to hesitate in giving full support to the Iranian students for fear of “legitimizing CIA intervention.”

Those risking their lives are not Mossad agents. Anyone making such arguments is forgetting the lesson of the Enqelab-e Farhangi (“Iranian Cultural Revolution”) – that is, the mass murder of communists, socialists, Marxists and other opponents of the regime who, like today’s protesters, were accused of moharebeh (“war against God”) after having fought against the Shah. It would also be a betrayal of Jin, Jiyan, Azadî (Woman, Life, Freedom) and of the other waves of protest that preceded it. It would be a terrible political surrender, fruit of the geopolitical reductionism criticized many times in this newspaper.

The paradox of sovereignism (which sometimes finds echoes even on the left) amounts to a pretend anti-imperialism that reproduces the mental and cognitive structures of imperialism itself. This inconsistency becomes even more acute when one realizes that a large part of the “anti-system” imaginary actually lives inside platform capitalism, depending at its core on those same billionaires (Musk, Thiel) who embody the most reactionary aspect of the techno-financial oligarchy. This sovereignism is manufactured by Silicon Valley: as Aradau and Blanke have laid bare, algorithmic reality is often based on a dependency masked as rebellion.

We would do well to ask what the Serbian students – who after more than a year of anti-regime mobilization constitute to all effects one of the main political forces of the country – think of the young Iranians. With them, the harshest condemnation of the Iranian regime and support for the revolutionaries stands together with criticisms of the manipulative actions of the U.S. and Israel. In the same way, the fact that the Kurdish cause is getting indirect support from Israel does not make it any less important.

Recognizing the emergence of a multipolar world does not mean justifying every authoritarian regime as long as it presents itself as anti-Western. As underscored by Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson, the new forms of globalization do not correspond to the simple scheme of the “decline of the West,” but represent rather a mesh-like recomposition of global capitalism. Imagining the world as either a patchwork of impulses devoid of orientation or as a simple dichotomy between the West and the rest of the world means losing sight of the field of forces in which capital is producing differences and forms of resistance at the same time. Questioning the structures of global power – be it China or the U.S. – means refusing simplified narratives or binary geopolitics. It also means rejecting the allure of authoritarian regimes.

Thus, it is possible to condemn the kidnapping of Maduro, understand the implications of American colonial impositions, and not be blind to the destructive aspects of the Venezuelan system of power – all the more so since there is a whole field of literature on the subject, adhering to the full standards of proof of the social sciences.

At the height of the Cold War, when the contraposition between “liberal West” and “socialist East” tended to occupy all the space of political thought, Theodor Adorno said that freedom begins when one stops having to choose between two lies. The idea that freedom should be understood not as the conquest of power, but as the capacity to not let oneself be reduced to the latter’s group logic, has disruptive implications in today’s multipolar and centrifugal world, dominated by new empires, propaganda and algorithms. Reality is a historical process, not a game of Risk.

Authoritarian regimes usually collapse because they wear out the narratives that once sustained their legitimacy, giving rise to opposition faster than they can tame or contain it. The regime of the Ayatollahs is going down this road at high speed. We owe the Iranian students much more than contemptuous judgments coming from afar.

Originally published at https://ilmanifesto.it/la-speranza-rivoluzionaria-e-chi-la-mortifica on 2026-01-14