Much of what Paria Rahimi writes in “Why the Left Is Failing Iranians: Against Campism” (Jan. 15) resonates strongly with the experience of Ukrainians. And it points the way toward something that many Ukrainians I know have been wanting to work toward: a solidarity across struggles that has the potential to become genuinely global. (I write all this while acknowledging Rebecca Solnit’s point that liberal media critiques of “the Left’s deafening silence on Iran” has been a bit over-the-top.)
“This essay,” Rahimi writes, “does not seek to prescribe strategy or to speak on behalf of those engaged in struggle. Its intervention is diagnostic rather than programmatic. It is directed at left discursive formations” — those she calls “campist” — “that have repeatedly rendered mass uprisings unintelligible by subordinating them to geopolitical alignments or state-centred frameworks.” “Opposition to U.S. imperialism,” she writes, “is repeatedly mistaken for a politics of liberation.” And “when anti-Westernism becomes the measure of legitimacy, revolt itself becomes unintelligible.”
“The task posed here,” she continues, is “limited but precise: to reclaim internationalism not as alignment with foreign states, but as struggle wherever one stands, oriented toward a common emancipatory horizon, rather than outsourcing the fate of emancipatory politics to foreign states, geopolitical blocs, or so-called camps of resistance” [emphasis added].
Like Ukrainians, Iranians have risen up on multiple occasions over the last few decades. In Iran, these uprisings have seemingly become regular, more acute, and this time more bloody, its victims numbering in the thousands. What they rise up against is very specific: it is a hardline authoritarianism in an Islamist and anti-western guise — which doesn’t make it representative either of Islam or of anti-westernism (whatever that may mean). It is also an inept rule that has lost its ability to sustain a viable social contract. What they rise up for is also determined by their very specific circumstances. As Rahimi writes, “Revolutions do not arrive in the language we prefer; they arrive in the language people can speak under repression.” That language will not be identical to ours or anyone else’s.
Revolutions, it turns out, are not so few and far between these days. As historian of authoritarianism Ruth Ben-Ghiat writes on her Lucid substack (“Our Time of Resistance,” Jan. 15), “We are living through an astonishing global wave of protest, which is rarely given the headlines it deserves.” “Since 2017, Chile, the United States, Israel, China, Belarus, Tunisia, Kenya, Venezuela, Serbia, and Poland are among the countries that have experienced their biggest demonstrations in decades — or ever.” She includes in her account the so-called “Gen-Z” protests that “have upended entrenched political elites in Peru and Madagascar, and toppled governments in Nepal and elsewhere.”
Much more could be said about the latter. On its “Gen Z protests” page, Wikipedia lists 32 countries that have witnessed mass, youth-dominated protests since 2020. In five of those countries — Sri Lanka, Japan (!), Bangladesh, Nepal, and Madagascar — governments were overthrown. Another six resulted in “governmental changes,” and fully 15 are still ongoing.
If all of this is happening more or less at once — from Nepal to Tehran to Minneapolis (and to Maduro-ruled Venezuela not so long ago) — the question of whether and what might be its “common emancipatory horizon” is a crucial question for those concerned with the future of the world.
What is common amidst these struggles?
Rahimi is correct, I think, to point out that we cannot rely on the traditional Left for determining what is genuinely “emancipatory” and what is not. It is not just that “campism” intervenes to mislead the global Left into bedfellowships with unsavory characters and unemancipatory regimes. It is also that these are not all working-class struggles around which a global proletariat could possibly be cobbled together. The class composition of the mass protests in Iran (now), Ukraine (in 2013-14), or Venezuela (since 2013) clearly don’t flow from the manuals of marxist revolutionaries. I’ve argued elsewhere (here and here) that the world is undergoing a “class reconfiguration” in which ecological struggles and climate vulnerability will be playing a newly unifying role. But finding a clear ecological thread in the many protests mentioned is, if anything, even more difficult at this point in time.
In their newly co-authored piece “Why Gen-Z is Rising” (Journal of Democracy, Jan. 2026), political sociologists Erica Chenoweth and Matthew Cebul argue that while the Gen-Z protests demonstrate that “greed is a global grievance,” the democratic nature of most of the recent protest movements is more implicit than explicit, and if explicit, more strategic than visionary. Gen-Z protests, they write, “are not necessarily about democracy qua democracy.” Rather, they are “primarily motivated by socioeconomic inequality, corruption, and nepotism — grievances that are related to good governance, but not centered around democracy itself.” And given their frequently leaderless and decentralized structures, they are neither easy to pin down in traditional political terms nor necessarily lasting in their effects.
Others suggest that their commonalities are nevertheless substantial. They are against entrenched political elites, corruption, nepotism, oligarchy, and the mismanagement that results in more tangible deficiencies like high unemployment, inflation, and job discrimination. As a Bloomberg News analysis puts it, they are against a “dystopian future.” In that sense, it is not just “greed” that is the problem, but greed institutionalized in governance systems that fail to serve the masses and show no interest in reforming.
If “greed” might sound like a synonym for capitalism, it is more commonly not that at all, in that the protests carry little analysis of what underlies the greed. And the symbols they draw on — like the One Piece manga symbol popularized in some of the Gen-Z protests — remain vaguely utopian and untethered from a concrete vision that would replace the dystopianism of the present.
If what is at stake is primarily distributional — that some have clearly profited while the majority continues to lose — then the “emancipatory horizon” at least contains the ideal of fairness, of equal or at least greater access to the goods a given society is capable of producing. Questions about what those goods are, where they come from (whether globally traded or locally made), how they are made or with what ecological impacts, are set aside for the more immediate task of reorienting the structure of governance to be more accessible and accountable to the people.
The emancipatory horizon, in this sense, carries the hope of a more equitably shared world, a world in which governance structures (and the elites they serve) don’t get in the way of the things that make life worth living. As for what those things are, social media has made many of them much more visible to people: they are not just the basic (“working class”) needs of affordable housing, food, work, and medical care, but “middle class” desires of creative leisure and expressive freedom — which in Iran might be the freedom not to wear a hijab, and in Nepal the freedom to use social media — alongside human needs of love and community in their various forms, and some measure of institutional reliability and non-corruption.
The common message of these protests is that when governance structures do get in the way, they should be removed. This can easily take the form of populism, which has its left and right variants — at their extremes, we might equate these with “anti-capitalist” (egalitarian) and “anti-foreigner” (identitarian) variants. Populism’s risks include the capacity of self-interested political forces to appropriate the movements’ energy (as has obviously happened in the U.S. and elsewhere). And too often these revolutions become connected, whether through alliance or by circumvention, to militaries, whose influence in some situations has become substantial (e.g., Myanmar, Egypt, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh).
The missing ingredient
My leap of faith is to believe that every such populist uprising, no matter its sources or its immediate results, leaves behind a residue, a kind of muscle memory, of democratic agency. And that that memory comes associated with an “emancipatory horizon” that may be vaguely formulated but feels quite real. And, finally, that that horizon will prove useful once a new vision comes to be articulated alluringly enough to serve as its new “attractor.” The task — and the real terrain for the struggle over a future hegemony — lies in articulating such a vision.
Here is where we find an opening for those of us engaged in theorizing the eco-social problematic. What the common emancipatory horizon does not yet include is a sense of what’s at stake, globally, in all of these struggles. They are rooted not just in singular instances of oppressive political conditions: a corrupted democracy here, a ruling elite there. They are rooted in a historical process in which extractive productivism has led to unsustainable conditions worldwide, conditions that are resulting in an increasing precarity for more and more people, alongside many of the nonhumans those people depend on. To solve this globally requires a rearrangement and revaluation of the productive relations that lead to ostensible “growth” at the expense of the conditions — the forces of reproduction — that support it.
This brief post isn’t the place for debating how to bring about such a “rearrangement and revaluation.” But I’m quite sure it won’t happen from the top down. The hunch that it will need to be in large part bottom-up — literally, from the earth up, in a reinvigoration of the productive and reproductive capacities of the places, lands, and regions where we live — is the hunch that lies at the core of Terra Invicta.
In a world of tightening neo-imperial forces, bottom-up change requires global coordination around a common vision, a vision of “abundant enoughness” within a commonwealth of regenerative eco-socialities that takes Earth as a common project for diverse forms of flourishing. We can talk about it in terms of social ecology, ecological democracy, ecosocialism, eco-egalitarianism, ecological civilization, global bioregionalism, or some kind of integral, pluriversal, decolonial, or liberationist ecology, but most of those terms come with their own baggage, and the future we deserve will be created through its own articulation of interlinked socialities and ecologies.
For now, though, recognizing the commonalities of current struggles is a necessary first step. The blood of Iranian protestors, like that of the victims of Russia’s drone attacks or ICE’s home invasions in Minneapolis and elsewhere, connects all of us in a struggle against oppressive misrule. The details will be different, and the alliances that emerge in the victims’ defense will not be identical, but the general dynamic is the same: it is people standing up against an oppressive apparatus of power.
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