Ideological Formation of Stalinist Marxism in Iran and France

Abstract

French Marxism’s extensive involvement with political practice makes it the representative of Western Marxism of the past century. As French Marxism becomes more involved with philosophy through Lefebvre’s Dialectical Materialism in 1938, in which he analyzes concepts of alienation and fetishism within a dialectic of becoming, Iranians had to forget their immediate communist past. In the late 1920s, the intellectual circle that Lefebvre was a member of were pursuing their philosophical inquiries to strengthen the theoretical foundation of Marxism. Then and there, disconnected from the legacies of Iran’s first Communist Party and Sultanzade’s work, the young Iranian radical socialists, who became the vanguards of a new communist movement in Iran and founded Iran’s Tudeh-Party in 1941 had to rely on the Stalinist theoretical and practical presuppositions.