Iranian Revolution in Shahyad Square Photo: Wikipedia
Academic Yassamine Mather is a long-time Iranian Marxist and a former activist in the Fedayeen.
She is also the chair of the UK based group Hands Off the People of Iran (HOPI), it's a leftist anti-war group led mostly by exiled Iranian and British socialists.
The group is opposed to Western military intervention in Iran, which it considers imperialist.
It also criticises the government of Iran, while advocating radical anti-government secularist groups in that country.
Recently, sanctions that have crippled Iran's economy were lifted after it agreed to roll back the scope of its nuclear activities.
Elections held this year had Moderate and centrist allies of Iran's reformist President Hassan Rouhani winning a second round of parliamentary elections, taking more than 30 of the 68 seats up for grabs. The conservatives, on the other hand, were credited with just over 20.
Iran's Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif recently visited New Zealand perhaps indication a willingness by the Iranian government to normalise relationships in the wake of the nuclear agreement.
So where does this all leave leftists, socialist, secularists, women, resistors are thing changing for what we would probably describe as 'the better or is repression still prevalent in Iran?
She talks to Paul Brennan about what was it like to experience the revolution in 1979, and her take on the current situation in Iran.
