/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

Religion is only a medium through which class ideas are expressed. It was the same in the English bourgeois revolution in the 1600s. It was expressed in religious terms of god-given rights, "natural" freedoms and distrust of the church, because that is how people primitively understood the world, but it really represented class conflict and the overthrow of feudalism.

Not really the way I'd look at it. Class conflict is the motor force of history. It would be better to answer this question by looking at the class character of the revolution, wouldn't it? It was working-class people and small shopkeepers from the bazaars. They wanted to nationalize the resources. They opposed imperialism and Zionism while overthrowing a monarchy. In some ways, the Islamists shared goals with socialists. So when you ask "why did Iran have an Islamic revolution," a historical materialist analysis is going to attempt to discover the means by which that question arose in the first place. Answering that is only the first step and is never a complete analysis.

>Shah doing the virgin walk

As others have said in similar threads, read Abrahamian on this subject. He outlines the developments in Iranian class society that lead to this quite well.

its class masked by religion

>>384602
>doesn't it disprove historical materialism due to being motivated by religion and not CLASS CONFLICT?
you don't even know what hismat is

>>384612
This.

Unfortunately, Khomeini used leftists to help him gain power but just shot them after the revolution. He combined the anti-imperialism of the left with the anti-westernism that justified a religious regime.

"We make our history ourselves, but, in the first place, under very definite assumptions and conditions. Among these the economic ones are ultimately decisive. But the political ones, etc., and indeed *even the traditions which haunt human minds also play a part,* although not the decisive one. The Prussian state also arose and developed from historical, ultimately economic, causes. But it could scarcely be maintained without pedantry that among the many small states of North Germany, Brandenburg was specifically determined by economic necessity to become the great power embodying the economic, linguistic and, after the Reformation, also the *religious difference* between North and South, and not by other elements as well (above all by its entanglement with Poland, owing to the possession of Prussia, and hence with international political relations — which were indeed also decisive in the formation of the Austrian dynastic power). Without making oneself ridiculous it would be a difficult thing to explain in terms of economics the existence of every small state in Germany, past and present, or the origin of the High German consonant permutations, which widened the geographic partition wall formed by the mountains from the Sudetic range to the Taunus to form a regular fissure across all Germany."

- Friedrich Engels, Letter to J. Bloch, September 21 1890

In other words, there's more to historical materialism than just the economic part represented through class conflict, even if it usually plays a determining role. The base shapes the superstructure but then the superstructure can react back onto the base and become determining in a given instance.

>>410485
>Unfortunately, Khomeini used leftists to help him gain power but just shot them after the revolution. He combined the anti-imperialism of the left with the anti-westernism that justified a religious regime.
So many people here would naively fall victim to this lmao.