Iranian Leftist Collectives Call for 'Internationalism from Below' Against Execution

On August 25th, a coalition of Iranian leftist collectives scattered across Europe, Canada, and beyond released an open letter responding to international activists who had publicly defended prisoners facing execution in Iran. The Iranian groups—nineteen organizations in total, ranging from the Roud Collective to the Transnational Iranian Anti-Fascist Collective—were writing to say thank you, but also to articulate something larger: a framework for solidarity that refuses to choose between competing state powers.

The backdrop is grim. Over the past two years, executions in Iranian prisons have accelerated sharply, running parallel to the intensification of regional conflict. Within this climate, a campaign called 'No to Execution Tuesdays' has organized weekly hunger strikes across 61 prisons in Iran. By the time this letter was published, the campaign had reached its 135th consecutive week of coordinated resistance. Some of the signatories had themselves been imprisoned in Iran; others had survived the mass executions of political prisoners in the summer of 1988. They were writing from lived experience.

What the Iranian collectives appreciated about the international open letter was not merely its defense of prisoners' lives, but the moral stance it took in doing so. The letter had been published at a moment when the political landscape—especially within leftist circles—had become deeply polarized. To speak against executions in Iran while also opposing U.S. and Israeli military aggression in the region was, in this environment, to invite accusations of false equivalence, of sitting safely between two stools, of being a 'pro-NATO left' or worse. The international signatories had done it anyway. They had refused the binary logic that demanded silence on state brutality in the name of anti-imperialism.

The Iranian collectives recognized this as an act of political courage. They had faced identical accusations themselves. When they criticized their own government's violence while simultaneously opposing imperialist intervention, they were told they were downplaying American and Israeli aggression, or that their stance was inherently contradictory. The weight of these accusations—the social and political cost of refusing to choose a side—was something they understood intimately. Yet the international letter had been published anyway, and the Iranian groups wanted to name what that meant.

At the heart of their response was a philosophical argument about what anti-imperialism actually requires. They invoked Frantz Fanon, the theorist of decolonization, but insisted on reading him completely rather than selectively. Fanon had warned that if the colonized adopt the logic of the colonizer during their struggle—if they begin to dehumanize, to categorize lives as more or less worthy of defense—then they have already lost. The Iranian collectives argued that this insight was not historical curiosity; it was strategically urgent. Too many movements against colonialism and imperialism had ended up reproducing the very hierarchies they claimed to oppose, because they had accepted the colonizer's framework: the idea that some lives matter more than others, that certain state murders can be ignored or justified in service of a larger cause.

What the international letter had done, in the Iranian groups' reading, was reject that hierarchy entirely. It had said: human life comes first. The right to exist is not negotiable. You cannot build liberation on a foundation of dehumanization, no matter how righteous your geopolitical position. This was what the Iranian collectives called 'internationalism from below'—a solidarity that did not flow from state interests or the logic of great powers, but from an unconditional commitment to opposing domination in all its forms.

The letter closed with a list of nineteen organizations, most based in diaspora communities across Germany, Italy, France, Canada, and elsewhere. They were not claiming to speak for all Iranian leftists, nor for all prisoners. They were offering solidarity to those who had refused to choose between imperialisms, and they were proposing that this refusal was not a weakness or a compromise, but the only honest ground on which to build a truly liberating politics.