Faced with the popular uprising, the Islamist regime massacres
On December 28, the majority of Tehran’s bazaar merchants closed their shops to protest runaway inflation (officially 52% in 2025) and the disappearance of customers. The Bank Markazi Iran (the central bank) devalued the national currency (the rial) on foreign exchange markets. Initially, the authorities tolerated the discontent, as the bazaar constitutes a social pillar of the regime. But their attitude changed when masses of students and workers poured into the breach, demonstrating across the country (Isfahan, Shiraz, Kermanshah, Yazd, etc.).
As early as December 31, the Basiji (Islamist militias recruited from the lumpenproletariat) and the official police opened fire in Kuhdasht. At the funeral of a victim, the crowd drove off the security forces by throwing stones. In Malekshahi, on January 2, demonstrators stormed the police station. Trump threatened to strike Iran. This strengthened the “Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic,” who accused the uprising of being manipulated from abroad: “the ‘rioters’… must be put back in their place” (Ali Khamenei, January 2).
On January 3, the last of three Shiite religious holidays, demonstrations were recorded in more than 30 cities. In Darehshahr, in the west, protesters threw Molotov cocktails. Despite gunfire, the demonstrations grew and openly defied the Islamic Republic with the cry “Death to Khamenei!”. From January 4 onward, opponents gathered in the evenings. In Ilam, regime mercenaries did not hesitate to pursue the wounded into hospitals, beating medical staff.
On January 5 and 6, more than 40 cities experienced demonstrations. But the revolutionary momentum became mixed with reactionary currents. Many participants demanded an end to all aid to Palestinians or to Shiite minorities in the region and called for the return of the Shah’s son. As in 2022, workers in Kurdistan were in the vanguard. The state deployed the Pasdaran (Revolutionary Guards, the regime’s elite troops) in this province. On January 7, several Iranian sources reported spontaneous strikes.
The PCI and bourgeois Kurdish nationalist parties (KDPI, PJAK, etc.) jointly called on all social classes to a one-day “strike.”
Thursday, January 8, was marked by the largest and most widespread demonstrations, with the participation of cities such as Tabriz, Urmia, and Ardabil. On the same day, at least 50 Kurdish cities took part in a general strike called by seven Kurdish political groups. At least 36 Iranian universities participated in demonstrations and used anti-government slogans over the previous thirteen days (Iranian Human Rights, iranhr.net, January 9).
This did not stop the massacre. The dead are in the thousands.
For the working class to organize and defend itself
Reza Pahlavi, son of the Iranian dictator from 1941 to 1979, is offering himself as a replacement for the Supreme Leader in order to ensure the continuity of the bourgeois state (as Ayatollah Khomeini had managed to do when the Shah was driven out by a revolution), with the help of Trump: “Please stand ready to intervene to help the Iranian people” (X, January 9).
Faced with the Pasdaran, the Basij, and the police, all organizations of workers and the oppressed must jointly organize the self-defense of demonstrators, the creation of workers’ and students’ militias, and their armament. Within the army, systematic agitation and propaganda work must be carried out to win over conscripts to the revolution, so that they turn their weapons against the generals and political leaders who are the executioners of women, workers, and national minorities.
Without delay, they must call for a general strike in order to create shoras in enterprises, administrations, universities, working-class neighborhoods, and villages, and to centralize them. This is the path to take the lead of all the exploited—poor peasants, the unemployed, youth, the urban petty bourgeoisie—and to offer an alternative solution to monarchist restoration.
Otherwise, the ground will be occupied by regime “reformers,” by royalists supported by Washington, by “democratic” bourgeois forces, or by bourgeois nationalists who want their own mini-state, which would divide the proletariat through new borders and remain dependent on regional and imperialist powers.
Internationalist solidarity of the workers’ movement of all countries with the Iranian masses!
In the United States and everywhere else, a campaign by trade unions and workers’ parties to ban any imperialist and Zionist bombing, and to lift the economic blockade!
For a revolutionary workers’ party
The Iranian bourgeoisie survived the 1978–1979 revolution. Faced with the threat of a social revolution, it relied on the clergy and its fascist gangs, and ultimately on dependence on Russian and Chinese imperialisms.
The currents stemming from Stalinism capitulated in 1978–79 to the mullahs in the name of “anti-imperialism”; today, in the name of “democracy,” opportunists place their hopes in “democratic” imperialist states, even forming blocs with anti-democratic royalists. No confidence in the United States or any other imperialist bourgeoisie! Break with all sectors of the local capitalists!
Without a Bolshevik-type party, the working class—let alone students—is without memory, without strategy. The lesson of all world and national history is that the working class must lead the movement of all the oppressed and all the exploited. That is why organs of self-defence and self-organization are necessary. That is why a strategy of permanent revolution is required. That is why a party is needed, linked to conscious workers in all countries.
- Down with the Islamist dictatorship! Dissolution of the repressive forces! Religion is a private matter! Separation of the state and the Shiite clergy!
- For the release of political prisoners! For all democratic freedoms (freedom of expression, freedom of organization, women’s rights, the right to strike, the right to demonstrate, etc.)! Right to self-determination of national minorities!
- Rent freezes! Immediate indexation of wages to the cost of living! Workers’ control over production and distribution! Expropriation of large companies and foundations! A single public bank!
- Expropriation of urban landlords living off rents, of large capitalist farms and religious foundations!
Collective management of water! Voluntary-based cooperatives! - Closure of all military bases (French, Chinese, Russian, British, American) in the Middle East and the Mediterranean! Withdrawal of the US fleet from the Arab-Persian Gulf, the Indian Ocean, and the Mediterranean Sea!
- General strike! Self-defence of demonstrations! Creation of shoras in workplaces, places of residence and study, and in barracks!
- Workers’ and peasants’ government based on the shoras! Socialist Federation of West Asia!