The ‘Independent Democratic Left’: A Project Stillborn in Armed Struggle

*From the Setareh Group to the Communist Unity Organisation* is a 412-page book published in Sweden by Baran and signed collectively by ‘a number of activists’ who founded the group. Its subtitle promises a ‘reappraisal of an experience within Iran’s armed movement’ between 1970 and 1979. The authors seek to reconstruct a current that, in their account, became one of the radical, independent and intellectually open tendencies of the Iranian left and influenced it for more than half a century (pp. 11-12).

The book mainly recounts one part of that history: Setareh’s activities in the Middle East, its relations with the Organisation of Iranian People’s Fadaiyan Guerrillas, and the rise and collapse of the ‘homogenisation process’ intended to bring the two groups together. Its failure led first to the Communist Union Group and then, amid the 1979 revolution, to the Communist Unity Organisation (p. 16). Six chapters are followed by ten appendices—almost a quarter of the volume—containing documents and positions from the three successive formations.

The authors give two reasons for remaining anonymous. Some activists, never publicly known by their real names, do not want their past to interfere with their present lives. Others invoke an internal tradition of refusing to personalise collective history. The book even treats this restraint as evidence of a culture free of personal ambition, individual leadership and charisma (pp. 11-12). The first concern is humanly understandable. It becomes problematic when an anonymous account seeks to write the history of hundreds of activists and assign responsibility and credit without identifying its witnesses.

Two legacies of the National Front

Setareh claims two legacies from Iran’s National Front. The first is the priority of politics over ideology, together with independence and democracy. It supposedly led the group towards democratic, libertarian and non-aligned socialism, while practical and political radicalism distinguished it from social democracy (p. 17). The authors therefore describe Setareh, the Communist Union Group and the Communist Unity Organisation as the only radical current of the Iranian left opposed to Stalinism, Maoism and Trotskyism alike (pp. 24-25).

The second legacy is the National Front’s coalition tradition. In place of the ‘democratic centralism’ of Leninist parties, the Communist Unity Organisation is said to have practised ‘centralised democracy’. It had neither an executive board nor a central committee; senior members exercised moral rather than institutional influence (pp. 18 and 30). The book asserts the difference but says little about how it worked: who made decisions, how minorities were protected, and how leaders were held accountable.

Baghdad: alliances, broadcasting and cooperation with clerics

The book also traces Setareh’s cooperation with exiled Shiite clerics in Iraq, including Ruhollah Khomeini, to this coalition culture. It argues that the group then understood such cooperation as part of a democratic front and that the judgement was justified by the information available (p. 19). That conclusion goes to the heart of a political current’s ability to read its allies, their doctrines and their projects for power.

Setareh’s work in Baghdad began in 1968-69, amid tension between the Shah’s Iran and Baathist Iraq. After the coup of 17 July 1968, the Iraqi authorities sought ways to pressure Tehran. Group members spoke on Radio Baghdad’s Persian service, met Ruhollah and Mostafa Khomeini and other clerics in Najaf, and in 1972-73 launched the short-wave Voice of the Revolutionaries with Iraqi approval. It broadcast for roughly nine months (pp. 33-55).

The group believed it could exploit conflict between the two states for political struggle in Iran. Its paper *Bakhtar-e Emruz*, issued in Baghdad in the name of the National Front of Iran—Middle East Section, ran from September 1970 until December 1976 or January 1977. Since Iraqi support seemed temporary and unreliable, Setareh extended its work to Beirut and then Damascus in 1973 (pp. 34, 57 and 61). Its Baghdad house hosted figures close to Khomeini, including Mahmoud Doaei, Hamid Rouhani, Hassan Karroubi and Mohammad Montazeri; some used the group’s contacts to train in Palestinian camps. *Bakhtar-e Emruz* published Khomeini’s declarations and, in July 1971, an article entitled ‘The Progressive Clergy’ (pp. 43-44).

The same network connected Setareh to the Baath and Fatah. Baathist officials supplied passes facilitating movement inside Iraq; the group later issued similar documents in the name of the National Front—Middle East Section (p. 39). Abbas Aghazamani, known as Abu Sharif and later the first commander of the Revolutionary Guards, trained in Fatah camps alongside Setareh members and assisted them as an Arabic speaker (p. 43). These episodes do not establish political identity between Setareh, the Baath, the clerics and Palestinian organisations. They do show how a ‘front against the principal enemy’ could suspend scrutiny of each ally’s separate project.

Armed action as proof of political commitment

The military orientation became explicit during the Arab-Israeli war of October 1973. Setareh activists volunteered with Fatah on the Syrian and Lebanese fronts. According to the book, they took part in several operations, and the experience strengthened their confidence as members of the regional armed movement (p. 20). Even then, some asked what a small Iranian group could achieve in a war directed by states, whether its role was merely symbolic, and whether it risked becoming a tool of Arab powers (p. 66).

Half a century later, the authors reproduce those questions but retain their earlier answer: volunteering with Fatah was the only way to honour anti-imperialist and anti-Zionist convictions in practice (p. 66). This retrospective fidelity exposes a central weakness. Reappraisal requires more than restating a decision’s motives; it must examine consequences, dependencies and rejected alternatives.

Setareh also played, in the book’s account, a logistical role for Iranian Fadaiyan: money, false documents, clandestine routes, training and weapons supplied through Fatah and Abu Jihad. It even sought to equip every safe house with an assault rifle and surveillance devices. Yet the authors say armed struggle was meant to remain propaganda subordinate to politics, not a permanent strategy: weapons were to serve politics, while socialism aimed at human emancipation.

That proclaimed hierarchy must be tested against practice. From 1973 to 1977, the ‘homogenisation process’ rested less on shared theory than mutual need. Setareh offered resources and wider knowledge of debates within the international left; the underground organisation in Iran provided domestic roots and the prestige of action. Disagreement sharpened around internal executions within the Fadaiyan and their attempts to establish links with the Soviet Union.

The book condemns those executions as Stalinist violations of individual rights and the right to life. Setareh nevertheless chose silence in order to preserve the rapprochement. An organisation does not become democratic merely because it privately condemns violence that it publicly conceals. A similar inconsistency appears in the Soviet contact. Setareh treated it as incompatible with independence while maintaining that its own relations with the regimes of Saddam Hussein, Hafez al-Assad and Muammar Gaddafi, and with Fatah, created no dependency.

A history whose central part remains unwritten

The title promises a history from Setareh to the Communist Unity Organisation. Most of the book, however, concerns a small group formed abroad from the National Front and its unsuccessful attempt, between 1973 and 1977, to merge with the Fadaiyan. The decisive years of the Communist Unity Organisation—from 1979 to the arrests of 1990-91 and its effective dissolution—remain largely outside the frame. This is not yet a history of the organisation as a whole, nor can more than three decades of inactivity be folded into ‘half a century of struggle’ without turning chronology into legend.

The omission also weakens the promise of ‘reappraisal’. At the end, the authors say they wanted to narrate one generation’s defence of the revolutionary ideal through its perceptions at the time, not today’s perspective; comprehensive criticism, they claim, still requires conditions that do not exist (p. 270). Yet if the participants refuse such an assessment after half a century, who is to undertake it, and from which archives? The hope that Setareh’s legacy will help future generations cannot substitute for an account of its failures.

Three questions the book leaves unanswered

Three questions should organise that assessment. What was the principal political outcome of the armed movement initiated by the Fadaiyan and the Mojahedin in the late 1960s? Did it open a path towards freedom and democracy? Did it help create an independent, radical and democratic left, or weaken that possibility to the advantage of the most authoritarian religious and secular currents?

The book indirectly answers that guerrilla actions destabilised the monarchy and were among the forces leading to the February 1979 revolution. It scarcely asks what that destabilisation made possible: the Islamist seizure of power, the destruction of liberties, the institutional subordination of women, and the persecution of religious minorities, non-believers, workers and opponents. Nor does it assess whether armed action narrowed the space for non-violent organisations, offered the monarchy an additional pretext for repression, and helped place the Islamists at the centre of opposition politics.

Monarchical repression explains the attraction of violence for very young activists; it does not turn violence’s consequences into democratic achievements. A clandestine vanguard convinced that sacrifice will awaken the masses rewards obedience, secrecy and ideological certainty. It narrows rational disagreement and subordinates human life to the cause. Part of the Iranian left later supported the religious order in the name of anti-imperialism and the principal enemy. Guerrilla politics did not mechanically determine that choice, but it had helped form a culture in which individual liberty, pluralism and democratic institutions remained secondary.

The book itself supplies material for this criticism: internal executions, allies’ silence, opaque relations with authoritarian states, and cooperation with religious actors whose political project was not seriously examined. The history of the Fadaiyan also shows that disillusionment with armed struggle and undemocratic methods produced internal breakaways before 1979. Contemporary objections existed; every error cannot be attributed to the limited knowledge of the period.

Torab Haghshenas, a former member of the People’s Mojahedin and later Peykar, argued that armed struggle ultimately benefited Islamic fundamentalism. The claim requires qualification, but it identifies a real problem: different traditions could share a cult of sacrifice, martyrdom and purification through violence. The Fada’iyan-e Islam had practised political assassination before the guerrilla left took up arms. In 1979, the religious current possessed networks, a language of martyrdom and a capacity for mobilisation on a scale its rivals could not match.

An ‘independent democratic left’ cannot emerge merely by revising old ideological lines. It requires an explicit break with salvation through violence, protection for dissent, acceptance of electoral uncertainty, equal citizenship and priority for human life. Without those commitments, independence remains a title and democracy a promise attached after the fact. In the Iran of the 1960s and 1970s, the project of a free and democratic left was, in this sense, stillborn in armed struggle. The Communist Unity Organisation and its activists were not solely responsible for that failure, but neither can they exempt themselves from it.