As debates intensify inside contemporary Iran around growing material inequality, ‘neoliberalism’ and corruption, new political movements and groupings, both loyal to the nezam such as the Edatlat khahan (Justice seekers), as well as those antagonistic toward it exemplified by the labor organizer and activist Esma’il Bakhsi, have sought to make their voices heard. In light of the growing salience and public awareness of economic inequality and class cleavages afflicting Iranian society, this paper will revisit the political and economic thought of Ayatollah Mahmoud Taleqani (d. 1979), a founding member of the Liberation Movement of Iran (Nehzat-e azadi-ye Iran), whose contributions to Islamic and normative political theory prefigure many of the challenges present-day critics of Iranian capitalism have sought to bring to the forefront. While Taleqani’s thought has been previously explored by scholars, this paper seeks to bring together in systematic fashion two integral components of his analysis which latter-day critics either hold to be mutually exclusive or miss altogether. These are 1) Taleqani’s powerful moral critique of capitalism in view of its reification of human social relations and the manner in which capitalism disaggregates the economic and political spheres through processes of marketization and commodification. Taleqani is also attentive to the ways in which human beings are inclined to forge new forms of protection and resilience against the depredations of the market strongly redolent of Karl Polanyi’s famous notion of the “double movement” as laid out in The Great Transformation, and 2) Taleqani’s arguments for an economic social order geared around human needs and realized through the principles of economic and political self-organization and democratic self-rule. The paper will place Taleqani’s thought in critical dialogue with the traditions of guild socialism and socialist communitarianism, which resonate with forms and norms of socio-economic organization possessing a longstanding history within Iran itself. Taleqani’s own vision would go on to have a tremendous influence in the political climate and constitutional debates following the Iranian Revolution of 1979 and outspoken demands for council democracy. Even if ultimately stunted, the core elements of Taleqani’s normative critique and vision have continued to capture the political imagination of Iranians striving for a more humane economic order in which democratic and economic self-organization are held to be central.