The following two articles were written in late January 2025 prior to the U.S. and Israeli attack on Iran.

For more than a month, Iran has been the scene of a new wave of protests that have been developing for several years in alternating phases, adding to those of the two-year period between 2019 and 2020, the civil rights-focused uprisings of 2022, and the most recent clashes between 2024 and 2025.

The Iranian economy has been in crisis for well over a decade, with average GDP growth over the last 10 years of only 1%, worsened this year in June by the 12-day war against the U.S. and Israel and, at the end of September, by the reintroduction of sanctions by the UN and the EU in response to Iran’s alleged non-compliance with nuclear agreements, with measures to freeze bank assets and restrict oil sales.

To date, Iran remains the third largest country in the world in terms of oil reserves with 13.3% of the global amount and the second largest in terms of gas reserves at 16.2%. The country’s economy, although severely affected by previous international sanctions, had managed to sustain itself by circumventing them, with the help of China, which receives 90% of its oil and gas exports through the Strait of Hormuz. The resumption of sanctions, defeats on the external front, with the downsizing of Hezbollah in Lebanon, the fall of Assad in Syria, and the truce agreement in Gaza signed by the regional imperialist powers – Qatar and Turkey – which together with Iran support Hamas, have dealt a severe blow to the bourgeois regime in Ayatollah robes, discouraging foreign investment and forcing the devaluation of the rial, which had already closed 2024 at an all-time low of 821 thousand to the dollar, rising to 915 thousand in June and 1.4 million in the last month, with a devastating 20% collapse in December alone.

The exceptional weakening of the currency has led to increased inflation. The collapse of Ayandeh Bank, which the Iranian state acquired to prevent its bankruptcy, has exacerbated this process. Since Iran depends on imports for a significant portion of its food, raw materials, and other goods, the collapse of the currency has had a decisive impact on purchases from abroad, with increases in wholesale and retail prices. According to the country’s Statistics Center, inflation rose by 42% in December compared to the previous year, while food inflation reached 70% and that of medicine and health product inflation reached 50%. The average wage – increasingly eroded by inflation – stands at around $200 per month, while trade union organisations, in a context where unions independent of the capitalist regime are illegal, estimate that a minimum of $550 is needed to support a family. The unemployment rate reached 7.2% in December.

The now-uncontrollable discontent has exploded with shop closures in the bazaars and student demonstrations in universities in 31 regions and over 200 cities, some of which, such as Abadan, Ahvaz, and Malekshahi County, seem to have fallen into the hands of the demonstrators, with police forces forced to flee. However, there has been a rise in workers’ strikes for months, intensifying in December, mainly in the oil and mining sectors. In early December, thousands of employees at the South Pars gas complex in Asaluyeh, on the Persian Gulf coast, protested at several refineries with strikes and demonstrations. During the same period, workers at the North Drilling Company have halted operations on several onshore and offshore platforms. These actions have followed previous strikes in the mines, including the Zarshuran Gold Mine in the south-southest of Tabriz, as well as steelworkers in Hamadan (300 km west-southwest of Tehran) and in industries in the province of Fars. Pensioners and public sector workers have protested alongside industrial workers, demanding the payment of pensions and access to healthcare.

In this climate, the United States has threatened to intervene ’in favour of the demonstrators,’ but it is not easy to understand whether they will opt for regime change as happened, with the roles reversed, in 1979 against the pro-Western Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi; or for a change within the framework of the theocratic regime, preserving it, as appears to have happened with regard to the so-called Bolivarian regime in Venezuela, as both are considered the best at playing the role of gendarme against the proletariat.

In the West, a certain "nationalist left" has from the outset downplayed the street clashes as the result of a conspiracy, a covert manoeuvre by the CIA and Mossad. In reality, today as yesterday, even without the incitement of any secret service, countless demonstrators, many of whom have been arrested and killed, are protesting for better living conditions and spontaneously hate a regime that starves them, represses them, and eliminates all forms of civil and trade union rights. Promoting the interests of a bourgeoisie that hides behind Islamic priests and uses its own working class as cannon fodder as ’popular resistance’ or ’anti-imperialist’ reveals the nature and position of parties that are entirely internal to the needs, conflicts, and wars of bourgeois States, Stalinist and ex-Stalinist parties and currents that not only have nothing to do with communism but are not even an expression of the working class, imprisoning and subjugating its immediate and historical interests in the lie of ’national reality.’ Regional powers are linked to this or that imperialist superpower. They are also in competition among themselves, but in any case hostile to their respective working classes, starved, exploited, and massacred.

In Iran too, the working class, without the presence of a revolutionary communist party, will once again be forced to fight at the tail end of the interests of merchants and the petty bourgeoisie, deluding itself in a change of government, as has happened many times before in the country’s history. The workers’ struggle for better living conditions against their own governments is always objectively revolutionary. Today, it must fight to achieve its autonomy of programme and movement as a social class, nationally and internationally, above all divisions and closures within categories and companies.

In Iran too the working-class uprising—led by its party—will be anti‑capitalist, not anti‑imperialist or democratic

The uprising in Iran has been brutally crushed by the theocratic regime that the Iranian bourgeoisie has relied on for 47 years to protect its interests against the working class.

Demonstrations involving tens of thousands of young people, women, workers, students, and bazaar traders chanting for Khamenei’s death in dozens of cities and most of the country’s provinces – with fierce clashes in which the repressive forces were overwhelmed, and many of their henchmen killed in some cases – were not enough. However weakened, the regime maintains a social base sufficient to withstand the shocks of increasingly harsh revolts.

This social base is founded on the network of interests of the military and paramilitary forces fattened by oil revenues and other capitalist activities, supported by Chinese and Russian imperialism.

An increasingly-centralized state and military power, intertwined with economic power, is characteristic of capitalism in its senile, putrescent phase, which corresponds to the true nature of capitalist political regimes, fascism, covered by ideological cloaks worn according to opportunity: from the robes of the ayatollahs, to false Bolivarian socialism, to democracy, to false Chinese socialism.

In Iran too, until the working class mobilizes, organized in class unions, with a generalized strike movement that overcomes divisions between companies, categories, and localities and blocks the national capitalist economy to the bitter end, the revolts will continue to break like waves against the regime’s dam, nullifying the enormous sacrifice of the lives of young people, women, and proletarians.

The imperialist powers that support the Ayatollah regime and those that appear to oppose it are united by their interest in keeping the Iranian working class oppressed and preventing it from taking the lead in the struggle.

This is why the US and Israel support the monarchist opposition and make grand proclamations of support for the rioters: they know that in this way they weaken the uprising, because they reinforce the regime’s narrative that it is the result of a foreign conspiracy, not of worsening living conditions and the denial of all civil, trade union, and political freedoms! The more Trump makes proclamations in support of the rioters, the better the executioner can hang and the police can shoot in the streets.

US imperialism certainly has no interest in the overthrow of the regime if led by the working class, which would risk igniting class struggle throughout the Middle East. In fact, no regime in the area has expressed the slightest solidarity with the rioters: they tremble with fear that social revolt will break out against them!

For the US, on the other hand, it is desirable to achieve a “change” that preserves intact the repressive apparatus – of which the Shi’ite clergy is an essential part – charged with keeping the Iranian proletariat terrorized and oppressed, with a revolt movement bled dry and dominated by the most reactionary parties, and which only diverts oil, gas, and revenues away from China.

This is similar to what was done to the regime of false Bolivarian socialism in Venezuela, which surrendered its leader without resistance and made new agreements on oil, while the police and armed paramilitary gangs continue to patrol the streets of Caracas.

The working class, in Iran as in the rest of the world, has no allies in any regime regardless of their bourgeois “democratic” or “authoritarian” leanings because, above these masks, they are all capitalist regimes. Its only ally is the proletariat of all countries, in the international unity of the working class, and the only political outlet is not democracy – which, as the politics of all the European capitalist states and the US demonstrate, is only a perfidious mystification of their nature – but socialism, the communist program of overcoming capitalism.

As in the rest of the world, the Iranian working class needs to reconnect with the party of the international communist revolution, sweeping away the ideological confusion of a century of counter-revolution, with its falsifications of communism; it must start with the Stalinist one, which in Iran, in the name of a false anti-imperialism, led the Tudeh in 1979 to the suicidal tactic of a united front with Khomeini!

Today, the followers of that policy are the same people who throw mud at the Iranian uprising and absolve the executioner! Anti-imperialism without anti-capitalism – which points to only the alliance of states allied with the US as imperialist and not that of the opposing global and regional capitalist powers, led by China – is just misleading propaganda to push workers towards World War III.

The struggle of the working class in Iran is of crucial importance for workers around the world because its victory would deal a severe blow to the imperialist war machine that feeds on the conflict between Israel and Iran in the Middle East. The Israeli regime represses internal opposition with the specter of an external enemy and the Ayatollah regime, while crushing ethnic minorities within its borders, exploits the oppression of the Palestinians only to extend the claws of its imperialist policy to the Mediterranean.

For the struggle of the working class in Iran and its extension to the entire Middle East!

For the international unity of workers in all countries, including Iran, Israel, and Palestine!

Against all forms of nationalism, against imperialist war: the first enemy of workers is their own bourgeois regime!