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!