“Burn All Structures”; A Reflection on the Ideological Revision of Ehsan Tabari

Ehsan Tabari (1917-1989) is known as one of the founders of Tudeh party and the theoretician of that party. This causes the contemporary Historians attribute him as a Marxist, often evaluate his behavior and thoughts in ideological and party frameworks and not pay attention to individual characteristics in shaping his personality. While if we examine him as a writer, poet or historian, we can find aspects of his personality that do not necessarily arise from party and organizational behavior, but shows the concerns arising from a truth-seeking thought, which inevitably emerged in the guise of a materialist intellectual during most of his life. The claim of this article is that the historical thinking of Ehsan Tabari never in his lifetime was not completely included in frameworks of historical materialism, and Tabari's ideological revision can be better evaluated when we know the distance of Tabari's thinking from Marxism and historical materialism during his intellectual life. In this article, by examining Tabari's works, neglected aspects of Tabari's historical thinking will be discussed before his ideological revision, and then by focusing on the works of the last years of his life, the themes and historical concerns in these works will be discussed. The title of the article is taken from one of Tabari's interpretations about his ideological revision.