When Hidden Enemies Serve the Reaction and Reveal Themselves

“Either the anti-authoritarians don’t know what they’re talking about, in which case they are creating nothing but confusion; or they do know, and in that case, they … serve the reaction.” — Friedrich Engels

24 August 2026

By Stephen Gowans

The question of whether the nature of the Islamic Republic of Iran and the conduct of its government in the country’s internal affairs is acceptable is hardly germane at this moment, when a single question has been made immediately relevant by current circumstances: Is the war of the United States and Israel on Iran acceptable and is the resistance of Iran against the imperial marauding of Washington and its Zionist proxy-state, admirable, desirable, and worthy of support?

In an open letter that appeared in The Guardian on August 20, 2026, a group of mainly US intellectuals denounced Iran under cover of rejecting “the false binary of imperialism and hollow anti-imperialism.” It was a transparent effort to change the channel. The signatories—Angela Davis, Judith Butler, Mumia Abu-Jamal, Rashid Khalidi, and Walden Bello, among others—addressed themselves to Iran’s political prisoners, writing that “On one side, you face the domination of the Islamic Republic; on the other, the imperialist forces that republic claims to stand against.” The word “claims” insinuated that the republic doesn’t really stand against US-Israel imperial forces. Furthermore, the qualification slyly intimated that real anti-imperialists should stand against Iran and its “false” anti-imperialism.

 “We invite global civil society and anti-imperialist activists and organizations to extend their 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.”

Why broach this subject now?

We can speculate about the motives of the signatories. A pusillanimous desire to be held in high esteem in polite society? The inability of the beautiful soul to navigate the dilemmas of the real world? Who really knows?

Is the open letter any different in its intended effects from denouncing the ideology of Hamas and the conduct of its internal affairs in Gaza in the middle of a stepped-up US-backed Israeli genocide of the Palestinians? However deplorable the attempt to change the channel might be, one should never lament occasions when those who would throw one to the wolves identify themselves in advance.

Yet to say the signatories are hidden enemies, is hyperbole. They’ve hardly concealed their political orientation as anti-authoritarians.  They described themselves as “former and current political prisoners, activists, and scholars committed to the global project of abolition, anti-authoritarianism and anti-imperialism,” (though, given their suggestion that Iran’s fighting back against US-Israeli aggression is faux anti-imperialism, it’s not clear what their understanding of anti-imperialism really is.)

Anti-authoritarians are always opposed to the state as an instrument of repression, and will, therefore, only ever support revolutions and resistance movements that fail and never the ones that succeed, since those that do succeed must of necessity repress their enemies, including taking political prisoners. Anti-authoritarians are utopian luftmenschen (quixotic characters with their heads in the clouds) who should not, and generally aren’t, taken very seriously by anyone concerned with the way the world really works. The world of politics, especially when it involves war and revolution, is not a world of graduate seminars. The important questions of the day, observed Bismarck, are decided, not by words, but by blood and iron. And as Saint Just once cautioned, those who carry out revolutions by half measures do nothing but dig their own graves. The same can be said of wars. Kill or be killed. Imprison or be imprisoned.

Perhaps the signatories are not at all unlike those Friedrich Engels had in mind when he wrote of the socialists of his day who had “launched a regular crusade against what they call the principle of authority,” and for whom it sufficed “to tell them that this or that act is authoritarian for it to be condemned.”

“Have these gentlemen ever seen a revolution? A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon — authoritarian means, if such there be at all; and if the victorious party does not want to have fought in vain, it must maintain this rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionists. Would the Paris Commune have lasted a single day if it had not made use of this authority of the armed people against the bourgeois? Should we not, on the contrary, reproach it for not having used it freely enough?”

Replace “the movement of the proletariat” with “the movement against the muscular imperialism of the United States and its tool, Israel,” and Engels’ concluding paragraph to his reflection “On Authority” places the open letter of the US anti-authoritarian intellectuals in perspective. Either “one of two things must be true,” Engels wrote.

“[E]ither the anti-authoritarians don’t know what they’re talking about, in which case they are creating nothing but confusion; or they do know, and in that case, they are betraying the movement of the proletariat. In either case they serve the reaction.”

None of this is to endorse the repression of all of those the Iranian state counts as its enemies, or to draw an equals sign between the Islamic Republic of Iran and the proletarian movement; they are clearly two entirely different things. But it is to say that, which of Iran’s repressions are justifiable and which are not (a matter which will depend on one’s political goals) is a question for another time and hardly relevant when Iran is under attack and the priority of those who seek to fight, rather than serve, the reaction, is to do what one can to bring about an end to yet another eruption of US-Israeli imperial aggression. That means remaining focused on the immediate aim, not changing the channel to issue quixotic anti-authoritarian proclamations.