Hekmat, Mansoor

(Zhoobin Razani)

(1951–2002)

   One of the leading lights of Iranian Marxism, Mansoor Hekmat co-founded the Worker-Communist parties of Iran and Iraq in 1991. Hekmat was born Shoobin Razani in Tehran and did not develop his revolutionary politics until coming to London in 1973, having previously studied economics at Shiraz University. He studied in Britain at Kent, Bath and London before returning to Iran in 1979 when the revolution broke out. The coming to power of Ayatollah Khomeni put the Iranian Left into disarray and internal conflict. In 1982 Hekmat left Tehran for Kurdistan, where he helped to found the Communist Party of Iran. He returned to Britain in the mid-1980s where he continued to analyze and write on Marxism and Iran until his death from cancer in 2002. He rejected the Marxisms of the Soviet Union, China and Eastern Europe as well as Trotskyism and social democratic Marxism, advocating instead a more humanist, less sectarian approach.