Contextual Orientalism: Freedom for Some, Context for Others

Siyavash Shahabi

Iran as a Methodological Breaking Point

This essay is not only about Iran. It is about the limits of a political method that speaks the language of justice at home while invoking “context” to excuse different standards abroad. At a moment when workers, women, students, and pensioners in Iran face repression, impoverishment, and enforced silence, the central question is not about knowledge, but about justification: why is so much still explained away? In this sense, Iran becomes a breaking point—a place where the Western left must choose between genuine internationalism and the familiar habits of geopolitical evasion, where selective solidarity is often disguised as nuance.

The outbreak of war between the United States, Israel, and Iran makes the argument of this essay more urgent, not less, because war tends to obscure the very social struggles this essay seeks to bring into view. War intensifies every tendency examined here: the erasure of Iranian agency, the subordination of social struggle to geopolitical narratives, and the transformation of solidarity into caution. Under bombardment, the temptation grows to reduce Iran to a battlefield between states, as if workers, women, students, pensioners, and political prisoners must now wait their turn in history.

But war does not cancel repression. It often deepens it. War does not dissolve class antagonism. Instead, it militarizes and obscures it. If Iran is a methodological breaking point, then war makes that break impossible to ignore.

I. Unease as Method: Why Iran Cannot Be Discussed Cautiously

This essay begins from unease, not uncertainty. The facts of Iran’s crisis are not ambiguous. Between January and December 2025, labor-monitoring reports record several hundred protests, strikes, and demonstrations over wages, temporary contracts, health coverage, and workplace accidents. These incidents involve retirees, energy workers, healthcare staff, teachers, market traders, and municipal employees. They do not cluster around a single political moment. Instead, they recur month after month, often following regular sectoral rhythms. The scale, density, and continuity challenge any claim that Iran’s crisis stems from a lack of information.

What is ambiguous, and therefore politically revealing, is how these facts are processed, filtered, and often neutralized within significant segments of Western left discourse. The unease arises not from a shortage of information but from the dominance of explanatory narratives that appear largely devoid of solidarity.

Over the past months, repression in Iran has escalated. There is little room left for interpretive caution. Protesters have been shot in the streets. Summary executions have followed mass arrests. The internet has been shut down repeatedly to disrupt coordination and documentation. Women have been imprisoned and assaulted for defying compulsory veiling. Workers have been detained for striking over unpaid wages. Pensioners see their incomes eroded by inflation and corruption. They have marched weekly to protest for meaningful benefits. None of this is hidden. None of it is speculative.

Yet many on the Western left respond hesitantly, not with clarity. Statements are delayed and hedged. Condemnation is softened into vague concern. Political judgment yields to geopolitics. What appears is a pattern of avoidance, not disagreement.

This avoidance is often justified in the language of responsibility. Iran, we are told, is complicated. Any statement must avoid reinforcing imperial narratives. Any expression of solidarity must be weighed against the risk of instrumentalization. But caution becomes a problem when it detaches from material reality. It then becomes a method of non-commitment. Interpretive distance replaces political positioning.

The question is not whether Western actors should speak for Iranians, but whether they are willing to recognize Iranians' agency and their struggles as political struggles at all, struggles that call for alignment, not merely understanding. Iran forces this question because it resists comfortable abstraction. It presents a social conflict in which the lines of domination and resistance are stark, even if the outcome remains uncertain.

What is at stake is not simply Iran as a country, or even Iran as a crisis. Iran is a test of a political method. Does the Western left see freedom, agency, and repression as universal political categories? Or have these categories become territorialized? Are they asserted at home but endlessly contextualized abroad?

II. Silence as Alignment: How Non-Position Becomes a Political Position

Silence is called restraint, but it acts as alignment.

Throughout 2025, protests by pensioners occurred nearly every week in multiple Iranian cities. These protests were often coordinated in time, even though there are no legal trade unions or associations. The persistence of these protests suggests that the Western left's silence does not stem from uncertainty or isolated unrest. Instead, it responds to a visible and sustained pattern of social conflict. In this context, restraint looks less like neutrality and more like tacit accommodation to repression.

When repression unfolds on the scale witnessed in Iran, refusing to take a clear position does not suspend politics; it produces a specific political effect. It allows the existing balance of forces to proceed unchallenged. It isolates those who resist. And it communicates, intentionally or not, that their struggle does not merit the same urgency or clarity accorded to others.

This silence is not evenly distributed. Western left institutions, such as parties, journals, NGOs, and activist networks, respond differently to repression depending on where it occurs. When repression is within Western states or the perpetrators align with Western power, statements are rapid and unequivocal. Police violence, union-busting, authoritarian laws, or attacks on reproductive rights in Europe and North America are met with strong language and immediate mobilization.

By contrast, when repression is carried out by a non-Western state that presents itself rhetorically as opposed to the United States or Israel, the tempo changes. Statements are delayed. Language softens. Violence is reframed as instability. Protesters are scrutinized for their ideological alignment. Silence is justified in the name of complexity.

Iran is a clear example. The scale of state violence is undeniable. Repression of the working class is widespread. Economic policies have imposed severe poverty on large segments of society. Yet the main response is a mix of moral concern and political hesitation. This creates an environment where repression is normalized through over-contextualization and avoidance.

This silence is not accidental. It is produced by an ecosystem of discourse in which geopolitical framing takes precedence over social and class analysis. Within this framework, the central political question becomes not who is being oppressed and how solidarity might be expressed, but how a given event fits into the global struggle against Western imperialism. When the answer is unclear or inconvenient, the safest option is to say less.

But silence is never empty. It signals to Iranian, Syrian, Iraqi, Kurdish, and Afghan workers, women, students, and dissidents that their lives are secondary within a geopolitical narrative in which they appear only as variables. It also signals to authoritarian power that repression will not meaningfully disrupt its external legitimacy among those who claim to oppose domination.

In this sense, silence is not neutrality. It is a political position. Whether intentional or not, it favors the oppressor and marginalizes those who struggle against repression.

III. Rights at Home, Context Abroad: The Asymmetrical Universalism of the Western Left

The pattern underlying this silence becomes clearer when we examine how political rights are discussed across borders. In many ways, it mirrors the asymmetrical application of the so-called “rules-based order” that Canada’s Prime Minister, Mark Carney, acknowledged in Davos this year.

Within Western societies, rights are universal claims rooted in human dignity and collective struggle. The right to organize, strike, protest without fear, control one’s body, and speak freely are seen as non-negotiable. When these rights are violated, the response should be immediate. Context does not excuse repression. It intensifies calls for accountability.

Outside the West, conversations about rights shift: rights are viewed as cultural aspirations, and repression is often explained through context rather than directly condemned. Expressions of solidarity become conditional, shifting the focus from the legitimacy of rights to contextual factors such as timing or actors.

In Iran, labor and social protests during this period focus on concrete demands: unpaid wages, subsistence-level pensions, electricity cuts that halt production, and discriminatory contract regimes. Nurses’ strikes, energy-sector walkouts, and market shutdowns show rights not as abstract ideals but as immediate conditions of survival. These demands resist culturalization because they are stated in material and institutional terms.

This asymmetry is not merely rhetorical. It reflects a deeper division in how political agency is distributed. Western subjects are presumed to possess agency by default. Non-Western subjects must prove it under scrutiny. Their demands are filtered through concerns about authenticity, alignment, and unintended consequences.

Iranian women resisting compulsory veiling are often described as courageous, yet their struggle is rarely treated as politically decisive. Iranian workers striking over unpaid wages are acknowledged but seldom incorporated into broader analyses of class power. Iranian students challenging ideological surveillance are admired, but their demands are framed as generational rather than structural.

Strikes and demonstrations across energy, manufacturing, municipal services, and transportation show that labor is not a marginal backdrop to Iranian politics but a central arena of conflict. From project-based oil workers to urban sanitation staff, collective action often escalates precisely where ordinary channels of negotiation have collapsed. Ignoring these struggles removes class power from the analytical frame while leaving repression unexplained.

The appeal to “context” performs an important function here. It transforms political antagonism into cultural complexity. It shifts attention away from institutions and class relations toward abstractions. Context becomes a way of suspending judgment without appearing indifferent.

Yet this move contradicts the very Marxist tradition many of its practitioners claim. Karl Marx did not invoke context to excuse domination; he used it to expose the material relations that produced it, in order to clarify the grounds for class struggle and solidarity. To contextualize repression without identifying the class interests and institutional mechanisms behind it, and without asking what solidarity might require, is not analysis. It is an abdication of responsibility.

Iran exposes this contradiction with unusual clarity. The demand for basic political rights is not abstract. It is expressed through strikes, protests, and collective organization under conditions of extreme risk. To treat these demands as culturally contingent is to deny their political content.

IV. State Power Beyond Ideology: The Authoritarian Management of Social Contradictions

The Islamic Republic is not simply an ideological regime, nor merely a reaction to Western imperialism. It is a modern authoritarian state managing deep and intensifying social contradictions in pursuit of its regional and global ambitions: between labor and capital, women and patriarchal law, youth and an aging clerical elite, and peripheral regions and a centralized apparatus of extraction and control.

Repression, therefore, is not an aberration. In 2025, wage protests have frequently overlapped with judicial or security interventions. Activists are summoned, detained, or prosecuted not after moments of disorder but during sustained, organized demands. This pattern suggests that repression functions as a routine instrument of governance rather than an exceptional response to instability.

It is the mechanism through which the state compensates for its inability to secure consent. As the economic crisis deepens—wages collapse, pensions erode, and prospects for social mobility disappear—coercion increasingly becomes a central tool of rule. While this dynamic is not unique to Iran, its visibility there is particularly stark.

Sanctions, as interstate instruments designed to alter power relations, have undeniably intensified Iran’s economic crisis. Yet they did not produce its underlying structure. Long before the current sanctions regime, corruption, rent-seeking, chronic mismanagement, and the expansion of security-linked economic conglomerates had already hollowed out productive capacity and concentrated power outside accountable institutions. What sanctions have done is accelerate and expose these internal failures, turning repression into a substitute for governance rather than merely a response to external pressure.

Campist frameworks dissolve this reality into geopolitics. By framing Iranian politics primarily as a confrontation with the West, they erase internal class struggle. The state appears either as a victim of external aggression or as a symbol of resistance, rather than as an apparatus enforcing specific social relations.

This erasure is not politically neutral. It removes from view precisely those actors whose struggles most directly threaten the regime: organized workers, women asserting bodily autonomy, and networks of collective resistance. In their place, politics is reduced to spectacle and geopolitical alignment.

In extreme cases, this logic leads to open apologetics. A striking example is the visit of American activist Calla Walsh to Iran, where public praise for the Islamic Republic coincided with one of the most violent waves of repression against working-class protesters.

Iran thus exposes the limits of a method that refuses to see non-Western societies as sites of autonomous political struggle. It reveals how even oppositional discourse can reproduce a form of Eurocentrism in which history happens elsewhere, and local agency appears only as a reaction.

V. Class Struggle Without Metaphor: Wages, Pensions, and the Politics of Survival

Any attempt to understand Iran’s current upheaval without placing class struggle at its center remains analytically hollow.

Across multiple sectors, workers have protested unpaid or delayed wages that have been piling up for months. In manufacturing, municipal services, education, healthcare, and transportation, wage arrears have become routine. At the same time, inflation has rendered nominal pay increasingly meaningless, pushing large sections of the working population below the subsistence level. These are not demands for incremental reform; they are struggles over survival.

Protests by retirees, bakers, truck drivers, and municipal workers repeatedly invoke the erosion of basic living conditions rather than narrow sectoral grievances. Slogans and public statements focus on food, rent, access to energy, and medical costs, underscoring that these actions concern social reproduction rather than distributive bargaining alone. In this sense, class struggle appears not as ideology but as a fight over the conditions of daily life.

Pensioners have emerged as one of the most persistent protest forces in recent years. Their demonstrations are not episodic outbursts but regular, organized actions in response to the systematic depletion of pension funds. Decades of contributions have been drained through corruption, mismanagement, and state appropriation. Benefits that were once modest but livable have been hollowed out by inflation. For many retirees, protest has become the only means left to assert their rights—and, in some cases, their continued existence within the social order.

Young working-class women, in particular, have carried the banner of contemporary feminist struggle with remarkable force. Their movements place bodily autonomy at the center of resistance, not only against gendered oppression but also against authoritarian social systems sustained by unpaid and underpaid labor. Control over women’s bodies and reproductive lives becomes inseparable from the maintenance of economic inequality. By foregrounding lived material conditions rather than abstract legal equality alone, these movements redefine liberation as both a bodily and a class struggle. In this sense, the slogan “Woman, Life, Freedom” reframes the classical revolutionary triad—“Liberté, égalité, fraternité”—into a language that speaks more directly to contemporary struggles over life, autonomy, and dignity.

These conflicts are class struggles in the most literal sense. They concern the reproduction of life under conditions of economic collapse. They are neither symbolic nor reducible to ideological dissent. They challenge directly the state’s capacity to manage the social and economic foundations of everyday life.

Workplace accidents recorded during the same period include gas poisonings, falls from height, industrial explosions, traffic fatalities involving worker transport, and cases of self-harm linked to labor precarity. These incidents are not isolated anomalies but structurally recurring patterns, particularly in subcontracted and high-risk sectors. They demonstrate that the crisis of labor in Iran is inscribed directly onto workers’ bodies.

Western-left discourse sometimes acknowledges these protests, but rarely integrates them into its central analysis. Labor appears as background noise rather than as a primary political force. This omission is not accidental. Class struggle complicates narratives that rely primarily on cultural explanation or geopolitical alignment.

To foreground unpaid wages and pension theft is to foreground responsibility. It raises unavoidable questions: Who controls resources? Who benefits from corruption? How does repression function to protect existing structures of accumulation? These questions cannot be answered by reference to imperialism alone.

The refusal to center labor and class struggle is therefore not a neutral oversight but a methodological choice. It allows repression to be discussed in abstract terms while its material foundations remain untouched, and, in the end, risks sliding into complicity.

VI. Oil and the Discipline of Labor: Why Energy Workers Matter

Nowhere is this pattern of evasion clearer than in discussions of Iran’s oil and gas sector.

Historically, oil workers have occupied a strategic position in Iranian politics. Their labor underpins state revenue, regional influence, and geopolitical leverage. Strikes in this sector have the potential to disrupt not only domestic accumulation but also international power relations. For this reason, the state has consistently treated independent organizations among oil workers as an existential threat.

Throughout 2025, protests and strike actions in the energy sector intensified, with repeated concentrations in southern hubs such as Asaluyeh, Jam, Bushehr, and Khuzestan. Operational staff and subcontracted workers have organized actions over wage discrimination, precarious contracts, and delayed payments, often triggering rapid intervention by security forces. The geographic spread and recurring timing of these conflicts highlight why labor organizations in the energy sector are perceived as strategically destabilizing.

Workers’ demands have focused on wages, contracts, safety conditions, and job security. Many are employed through subcontracting arrangements that allow employers to evade responsibility. Delayed pay, unsafe conditions, and arbitrary dismissal have become common features of employment in the sector.

The state’s response has been swift and severe. Organizers are targeted. Surveillance intensifies. Protest is criminalized. The message is unmistakable: labor power must remain disciplined, especially where it possesses structural leverage.

Western-left discourse rarely engages this terrain in any sustained way. Discussions of Iran’s oil economy tend to focus on sanctions, exports, and state revenue rather than on labor relations. Energy workers appear as abstract inputs in an economic system rather than as political actors capable of shaping it.

This omission is revealing. To acknowledge oil workers as agents of struggle would disrupt geopolitical narratives that treat energy primarily as an instrument of state power. It would also raise uncomfortable questions about global supply chains and the ways multiple states, including Western ones, remain implicated in sustaining authoritarian systems through energy flows.

By ignoring oil-sector labor struggles, Western-left discourse sidesteps the material basis of power. It preserves a vision of politics in which states act while workers merely endure.

VII. Destroyed Organizations: The Moral Economy of Sacrifice

Perhaps the most troubling implication of this discourse is its implicit acceptance of sacrifice.

In Iran, independent organizations—unions, workers’ councils, student associations, and women’s groups—have been systematically dismantled. The organization itself is criminalized. Collective capacity is treated as a threat to national security. Criticism of the leadership is framed as hostility toward religion or the state. Systems of gender control reinforce this structure: strict enforcement of compulsory veiling and gender segregation functions not only as an ideological policy but also as a mechanism of labor discipline and social control. These measures are not incidental; they help prevent social struggles from coalescing into sustained collective power.

Despite the destruction of independent unions, evidence documented by labor-monitoring groups shows recurring coordination through informal networks, shared calendars, and synchronized actions across cities. Weekly demonstrations by pensioners and parallel strikes across dispersed sectors indicate the emergence of non-institutional forms of collective organization. Repression has altered the form of organization without eliminating it.

Western-left responses rarely treat the systematic destruction of organization as a central issue. Attention tends to focus on protest as spectacle rather than on the conditions that enable sustained collective action. Individual courage is praised, while the destruction of collective structures is normalized.

Where organizations are absent or destroyed, labor conflict increasingly appears through individualized forms of endurance and sacrifice: hunger strikes, acts of self-harm, and deadly workplace accidents linked to precarity. These events are often framed as tragic exceptions rather than as outcomes of structural conditions. The result is a moral economy that honors suffering while leaving the organization's destruction politically unaddressed.

The unspoken question becomes: how much are Iranian workers and protesters expected to endure in the name of opposing imperialism? How many must be imprisoned, tortured, or killed before solidarity moves beyond caution?

What emerges is a moral economy in which sacrifice is unevenly distributed. Western activists demand victories for themselves but often expect endurance from others. Martyrdom is romanticized when the organization proves inconvenient.

From a Marxist perspective, this position is untenable. Without organization, there is no power, and without power, there can be no emancipation. To accept the destruction of independent organizations while praising resistance is to empty solidarity of its meaning. 

VIII. Class Facts Against Orientalist Method

Once these material realities are placed at the center of analysis, the limits of the Orientalist method become unmistakable.

Unpaid wages cannot be explained as a cultural phenomenon. Across sectors and regions, wage arrears, pension theft, and unsafe working conditions recur with striking consistency. These patterns resist cultural or civilizational explanations and instead point to institutionalized forms of labor governance. The empirical density of these cases makes appeals to cultural context analytically untenable.

Pension theft cannot be explained as tradition. Repression in the oil sector, along with the privatization and casualization of labor, cannot be reduced to geopolitics. These realities demand political clarity. The failure of much Western-left discourse is therefore not a matter of missing information but of structural avoidance. The facts are widely documented; what is lacking is the willingness to confront their implications.

In this sense, Orientalism operates less as overt prejudice than as a form of selective blindness. It removes class struggle from view and replaces it with cultural or geopolitical explanation. Repression can then be described without requiring an opposing force.

Iran disrupts this method because it insists on being read materially. It demands analysis in terms of institutions, class relations, and power. It refuses to remain a metaphor. 

IX. Internationalism After Iran: Reclaiming Universality Without Empire

Iran today forces a choice. Either political rights are universal, or they are privileges distributed according to geography and narrative convenience. Either class struggle is central everywhere, or it is acknowledged only where it does not disrupt comfortable frameworks.

The arguments advanced here draw on documented labor protests, strikes, repression, and workplace fatalities throughout 2025. These materials do not describe isolated moments but reveal a sustained social condition. Taken together, they present Iran not as a special case but as a methodological test for the universality of freedom, rights, and class analysis.

A serious internationalism cannot accept this division. It must oppose imperial domination without excusing local tyranny. It must learn to confront multiple forms of power at once. And it must understand freedom not as an abstract principle but as a material condition, one fought for under unequal and often dangerous circumstances.

Anything less reduces solidarity to a mirror, reflecting Western virtue while others bleed in the name of context.

Freedom for some and explanation for others is not a nuance. It is hierarchy, and, ultimately, complicity.

Iran has made this contradiction impossible to ignore.

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