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
Acknowledgements. 8
INTRODUCTION.. 12
PART 1. THE IRANIAN
REVOLUTION OF 1979. 20
Chapter One. The Rise
and Fall of the 1979 Iranian Revolution. 21
Achievements. 21
Who led the February revolution?. 22
The Shah’s regime and its opponents. 23
The bourgeois nationalist parties. 24
The working class and its leaderships. 26
The Islamic Republic as counterrevolution. 30
Lessons for today. 37
Chapter Two. A Brief
History of the Iranian Trotskyist Movement 1971–1982. 40
Becoming a Trotskyist 41
The Sattar League. 46
The United Socialist Workers Party (February
1979–August 1979) 62
The challenge of the revolution. 73
The White Revolution. 74
The social function of the Shia clergy. 77
How Khomeini established a clerical capitalist
state. 79
Why did the united HKS split 82
New parties emerge: Rahimian’s Socialist Workers
Party (HKS) and Zahraie’s Revolutionary Workers Party (HKE) 89
Zahraie expels Faction for Trotskyist Unification
from the HKE. 92
Zahraie expels the Marxist Faction from the HKE. 100
The Formation of Workers Unity Party (HVK) 107
The demise of the Iranian Trotskyist movement 122
Chapter Three.
Revolutionary Workers Party (HKE) 1979–83. 127
An outline of HKE’s opportunist adaptation course. 127
April 1980: HKE supported attacks on freedom of
association and assembly on college campuses and academic freedom.. 129
Summer of1980: HKE fails to defend the Kurdish
people. 132
July 1981: HKE critically supports the Islamic
Republic Party’s “labor” candidate. 134
Spring of1982: How the HKE’s goal of forging
“strategic collaboration with “grassroots anti-imperialist Islamic currents”
failed. 135
A balance sheet of the Zahraie-led HKE. 145
PART 2. THE CUBAN
REVOLUTIOON OF 1959. 150
Chapter Four. Between
Dream and Reality. 151
My first visit to Cuba. 151
Hotel Colina. 153
A conversation at the bar 154
A question of philosophy. 155
Bread and ideology. 157
Workers’ control and management 159
US embargo and socialism.. 159
Che Guevara or Deng Xiaoping?. 161
Looking back. 162
Chapter Five. The
Political Thoughts of Fidel Castro. 165
Childhood and Youth. 170
University years. 170
Moncada. 172
Castro and Stalinism.. 178
Castro on ecological disasters in the Soviet Union. 181
The Communist Party of Cuba adopts the Soviet
model 185
Fidel Castro’s Marxism-Leninism.. 188
Chapter Six. The Economic and Political Thoughts
of Ernesto Che Guevara. 194
On the law of value. 197
Marx’s conception of socialism.. 199
The Great Debate. 202
The question of socialist democracy. 207
On limits to the law of value. 210
Capitalist Technologies and Socialism.. 211
Volunteer labor and transition to socialism.. 214
Guevara’s critique of the Soviet Union and Eastern
European “socialism”. 216
The critique of the Soviet Manual of Political
Economy. 217
How the Bolsheviks lost the socialist revolution. 221
Socialism of Che Guevara. 231
Chapter Seven. Systematic Crisis of Cuban Economy
and Society. 234
Corruption in Cuba. 234
The context for and growth of corruption in Cuba. 237
Ideological oscillations in the Cuban revolution. 238
Pierre Bourdieu. 240
The spread of the private sector 246
Cuba today. 249
The Roots of the Crisis in Cuba. 254
Part III. Theories of
Socialism.. 259
Chapter Eight. A Theoretical Assessment of the US
Socialist Workers Party. 260
An overview.. 260
Lenin’s theory of the vanguard party. 265
Labor aristocracy. 274
The theory of Permanent Revolution. 278
Monopoly capital theory. 282
Stalinism and the class character of the Soviet
Union. 285
Workers’ and peasants’ government: from a
transitional demand to analytical lens. 289
Third Worldism.. 291
Jack Barnes’s SWP. 293
Concluding remarks. 305
Chapter Nine. Capitalism, Automation, and
Socialism:Karl Marx on the Labor Process. 309
Introduction. 309
Marx’s theory of capitalist automation. 311
Automation and Marx’s theory of socialism.. 323
The problem of alienation. 325
Origins of alienation. 327
Automation in the socialist theory and practice
after Marx. 331
Automation and the future of humanity. 335
Chapter Ten. The “Socialist” Revolutions of the
Twentieth Century. 337
Marx and the Twentieth-Century Revolutions. 339
The
Russian socialist revolution. 340
Other “socialist” revolutions of the twentieth
century. 342
The Class Nature of the Soviet Union. 345
Trotsky: degenerated workers’ state. 345
Collectivist bureaucracy. 347
Theories of state capitalism.. 348
The verdict of history. 355
Chapter Eleven. Socialism of the
Twenty-First Century. 359
Socialism of the nineteenth century. 359
Historical materialism.. 361
The theory of the proletariat as the universal
class. 364
The rise of Marxism as a “scientific” doctrine. 366
Socialism of the Twenty-First Century. 369
The Anthropocene. 369
Ecocentric Socialism.. 371
About the Author. 380
Bibliography. 382
Index. 394
Notes. 402
