By Kamran Nayeri, November 5, 2025
I would like to announce the publication of my new book, Between Dreams and Reality: Essays on Revolution and Socialism.
The book sums up my 54 years experience as a socialist activist including participation in the 1979 Iranian revolution.
The book will appear in paperback version in major online bookstores like Amazon and Barnes and Noble in three to four weeks. Amazon will have a presale period where you order it. If you wish to buy the book please consider doing so in the presale period Amazon will use such orders to determine how many copies to order from the publisher.
An ebook version will be also available soon.
The Table of Contents of the book is appended below. The book has three Parts: Iranian revolution of 1979, Cuban revolution of 1959, and Theories of socialism. These are crititcal assessments of these revolutions and theories of scialism.
In terms of my own political evolution, this book predates my becoming an ecosocialist around 2000 as I became aware of existential ecological crises of our time. In this period, I developed Ecocentric Socialism and published Whose Planet? Essays on Ecocentric Socialism (2023). The present book ends with a chapter explaining why the nineteenth century theory of socialism must be revised and why Ecocentric Socialism is my suggestion for a new theory of socialism that places hymanity in its natural as well socialis historical context.
Best wishes,
Kamran
Between
Dreams and Reality: Essays on Revolution and Socialism
Table of Contents
PART 1. THE IRANIAN
REVOLUTION OF 1979
Chapter One. The Rise
and Fall of the 1979 Iranian Revolution
Who led the February revolution?
The Shah’s regime and its opponents
The bourgeois nationalist parties
The working class and its leaderships
The Islamic Republic as counterrevolution
Chapter Two. A Brief
History of the Iranian Trotskyist Movement 1971–1982
The United Socialist Workers Party (February
1979–August 1979)
The challenge of the revolution
The social function of the Shia clergy
How Khomeini established a clerical capitalist
state
Zahraie expels Faction for Trotskyist Unification
from the HKE
Zahraie expels the Marxist Faction from the HKE
The Formation of Workers Unity Party (HVK)
The demise of the Iranian Trotskyist movement
Chapter Three.
Revolutionary Workers Party (HKE) 1979–83
An outline of HKE’s opportunist adaptation course
Summer of1980: HKE fails to defend the Kurdish
people
July 1981: HKE critically supports the Islamic
Republic Party’s “labor” candidate
A balance sheet of the Zahraie-led HKE
PART 2. THE CUBAN
REVOLUTIOON OF 1959
Chapter Four. Between
Dream and Reality
Workers’ control and management
Chapter Five. The
Political Thoughts of Fidel Castro
Castro on ecological disasters in the Soviet Union
The Communist Party of Cuba adopts the Soviet
model
Fidel Castro’s Marxism-Leninism
Chapter Six. The Economic and Political Thoughts
of Ernesto Che Guevara
Marx’s conception of socialism
The question of socialist democracy
Capitalist Technologies and Socialism
Volunteer labor and transition to socialism
Guevara’s critique of the Soviet Union and Eastern
European “socialism”
The critique of the Soviet Manual of Political
Economy
How the Bolsheviks lost the socialist revolution
Chapter Seven. Systematic Crisis of Cuban Economy
and Society
The context for and growth of corruption in Cuba
Ideological oscillations in the Cuban revolution
The spread of the private sector
The Roots of the Crisis in Cuba
Part III. Theories of
Socialism
Chapter Eight. A Theoretical Assessment of the US
Socialist Workers Party
Lenin’s theory of the vanguard party
The theory of Permanent Revolution
Stalinism and the class character of the Soviet
Union
Workers’ and peasants’ government: from a
transitional demand to analytical lens
Chapter Nine. Capitalism, Automation, and
Socialism:Karl Marx on the Labor Process
Marx’s theory of capitalist automation
Automation and Marx’s theory of socialism
Automation in the socialist theory and practice
after Marx
Automation and the future of humanity
Chapter Ten. The “Socialist” Revolutions of the
Twentieth Century
Marx and the Twentieth-Century Revolutions
The
Russian socialist revolution
Other “socialist” revolutions of the twentieth
century
The Class Nature of the Soviet Union
Trotsky: degenerated workers’ state
Chapter Eleven. Socialism of the
Twenty-First Century
Socialism of the nineteenth century
The theory of the proletariat as the universal
class
The rise of Marxism as a “scientific” doctrine
Socialism of the Twenty-First Century
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