The IRI and Das Kapital have nothing to do with each other. Moreover, Das Kapital is a treatise on economics, and says almost nothing on how a government should be structured, except that power should be held by the majority class. If you're going to make an argument for some other text Marx worte, AFAIK the only endorsement he ever made of a mode of political organization was that of the Paris Commune, which is, to put it mildly, completely unrelated to Iran's.
As for Iran having a similar structure to the USSR, you couldn't be further from the truth. To begin with, all parties are legal in Iran de jure, and are not obligated to hold internal elections. Whereas the Soviet system is that you have one party, which is legally required to hold multiple primaries, with the concept being that the party should be changed by the people (obviously this doesn't happen). The most powerful person in the USSR, the General Secretary of the CPSU, is not appointed for life, and is elected by successive representative bodies culminating ultimately in the Soviet, which has no equivalent in Iran. The principle of social control in Iran is the IRGC, whereas in the USSR it is admittance to the Communist Party. All in all, nothing in common.
I have a feeling that you have read neither the Iranian Constitution, nor Das Kapital. I'm not making an argument about whether either are moral, but they really have nothing to do with each other.
I read carefully. Das Kapital has nothing to do with the Iranian government of today or at any time, neither do the Soviets. The structure of the governments are incomparable, and that book talks almost exclusively about economics. It's completely devoid of sense.
By the way, Plato's Republic is in large part a critique of Democracy, just FYI. Its central thesis is that a just absolute monarch that is well-versed in philosophy and justness is the highest form of governance. If anything, I'd say in philosophy Plato's republic advocates most strongly for something you would call a Leninist/Stalinist state, and there is actually a direct lineage from Plato to Hegel to Lenin/Stalin, in that Plato essentially argued for totalitarianism by the right people. It's basically the only thing a Stalinist state has in common with the Iranian state, and is also directly delineated from Plato's Republic, ironically. It's even more ironic in that Marx's central thesis in this respect was to flip dialectical government on its head into a democratic "perversion" of Hegel and of Plato at the base.
In fact, the technocratic aristocratic meritocracy proposed by Plato in Republic is stunningly similar to what Lenin was advocating for in the Vanguard party, and not only that, but it failed exactly for the reasons for which Marx critiqued Hegel's version of the same concept! The history of philosophy is full of interesting plot twists.
> Das Kapital has nothing to do with the Iranian government of today or at any time
I wonder if repeated beating of a strawman constitutes a form of battery? Go easy on the poor guy!
The "the absolute wilayat al-'amr" [Article 57] [see note] is Plato's philospher king. It has no basis whatsoever in Shia Islam.
Khomeini was an ambitious and worldly mullah, and on entirely different plane than all the other actors in the revolution and IRI. He was definitively -not- a Marxists, and his evaluation of "economics" was "donkey science". He was a Muslim cleric with mystical [Aaref] tendencies/conceits/delusions.
"Be sure that Islam can provide justice, independence, freedom, economic equality without relying on the teachings of other schools of thought.” [Ruhollah Khomeini - Sahifa Nur]
He was (apparently, as I don't personally see it) a charismatic man. Or something. But whatever he was, you would not know the name of Ruhollah Khomeini were it not that that nationalist center and left, including no holds barred extreme left, chose to throw their weight behind him with the intention of riding on the robe of the Ayatollah to affect their intended goals. What a tragic error they made. (Communists were apparently treated far more leniently than groups that were Islamics. Put that your in your analytical pipe..)
Left never managed to gain the same foothold in Iran as it did in say East Asian nations. Marx was never gonna fly in Iran. Ever. They certainly tried. So the crypto-soviet of Islamic Republic of Iran is a means of addressing this substantial stumbling block. A few more generations of IRI and in my opinion Islam is likely finished in Iran.
Besides the actual left, the scions of the "aristocracy" [lol] of Mullah Families in Iran were all having rather substantial crisis of faith. The honest amongst them, examplar here is the heroic Kasravi [1] (RIP), who got his western education beyond his Muslim education, and then took off the robe and put on a suit. This is what he said about Islam (and they killed him for it):
One is the religion that that honorable Arab man brought one thousand, three hundred and fifty years ago and was established for centuries. The other is the Islam that there is today and has turned into many colors from Sunnism, Shi'ism, Esmaili, Aliollahi, Sheikhi, and Karimkhani, and the like. They call both Islam, but they are not one. They are completely different and are opposite of one another.... Nothing is left of that Islam. This establishment that the mullas are running not only does not have any benefits but it also causes many harms and results in wretchedness.
This scion of the "aristocracy of clerics" [2], Ali Shariati, who was a sensitive and intelligent sort, but obviously lacking in the intellectual integrity department [according to moi], was the piped-piper of psuedo-intellectuals, left wing wannabes, and conflicted Muslims who failed to grok how to square scientific and technological advancement with the (claimed) eternal guidance of Almighty. So they decided to politicize Islam and mix their intellectual, political, and economic notions [mostly left] with religion.
These are the people who are in power (minus comrades that met the bullet of the "saint", of course).
[p.s.]: Yes, that is the title of the awaited Mahdi ("Guided One", think Dune :)] but the entire doctrine of Khomeini Velayateh Faqih, means "the Supreme Leader" is the mullah-council annointed proxy.
p.s.s. I am personally convinced Shariati could have been Iran's Foucault IFF he had the integrity of Kasravi.
I agree with most of what you said, but that still doesn't adress my original criticism of the comment. It's just that I just can't see the parallel between the structure of the IRI and that of the Soviet Union. They're only really similar in that they are dictatorships by a ruling class, but the Soviet system is seriously much more flexible, capable of reform, and unlike the Iranian system in theory and in a world free of corruption, would actually be fully reformable by the people, and indeed was in the end - see Gorbachev, much to the willingness of the people. Whereas the Iranian system fundamentally is unreformable and has little pretense of democracy.
Actually, did the Iranian Revolutionaries really copy the structure of Iran, I'd bet Iran would be in a much better position right now - either similar to China, or much more democratic.
And yes, a big criticism I have of the Arab left too is their almost delusional characterization of Islam, but I digress.
Also, I was unsure which way the substitution was going, which is why I also made the other criticism, but now I can see clearly that you meant that the IRI is based on Plato's idea in the Republic, which I can see is defensible.
