Iran:
End the Regime and Imperialist Domination

January 14, 2026

The following article was translated from an article appearing in Lutte de Classe #253, February 2026, the political journal of Lutte Ouvrière, the French Trotskyist organization.

The uprising that began on December 28 with a strike by Tehran shopkeepers protesting hyperinflation quickly spread throughout the country, affecting multiple social categories. As they have done with every protest, the leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran responded with ruthless repression that has already claimed several thousand lives, perhaps more than ten thousand. As we write, we do not know if “order reigns in Tehran.” But sooner or later, this obscurantist and anti-worker dictatorship will fall. What regime will replace it? How can the oppressed of Iran, who are shedding their blood today, truly change their fate and secure a better future?

The current uprising is the fourth since the winter of 2017–2018. While each of the previous ones was ultimately crushed, at the cost of thousands of deaths, tens of thousands of arrests, multiyear prison sentences, and often the death penalty, the repression did not prevent new uprisings from erupting. Each time, new social groups, sometimes the same ones, driven to the brink by deprivation, hunger, unpaid wages, the threat of bankruptcy, or by the nepotism and arbitrary power of the authorities, by the absence of freedom or any future prospects, have finally risen up, ready to risk their lives or their liberty.

Between these movements, the struggles of the workers, whose every battle on the economic front becomes political because it opposes the regime’s dignitaries, have never ceased. In the oil sector, transport, sugar production, tractor factories, health, and education, employees fought to receive their wages, save their jobs or obtain permanent positions; small producers denounced water thieves who divert rivers until they dry up; small savers, ruined by the organized bankruptcies of local banks, demonstrated to recover their savings.

This fighting spirit and determination command respect. They prove that, however reactionary and repressive, a dictatorship can never indefinitely prevent the oppressed from rising up. And it always ends up falling. But while one can only hope that the Islamic Republic will be overthrown as soon as possible, its fall would not be enough to offer a better future to the working classes of Iran. For the oppressed, overthrowing a dictatorship is not enough to change their fate.

From Revolts against the Shah to Those against the Ayatollah

The Iranian people learned this lesson the hard way: the now-hated regime of the mullahs came to power in 1978–1979 by capitalizing on a popular uprising against the Shah’s pro-American dictatorship. Despite the sacrifices made, the thousands of demonstrators killed by the army, the immense resilience of the working class, and the crucial role of the laborers, particularly those in the oil sector, the popular revolt was channeled, hijacked, and disarmed by Khomeini’s Islamists. To seize power, Khomeini exploited the illusions sown among the workers and the poor by leftist organizations, which rallied behind this ayatollah in the name of unity against the monarchy, even going so far as to present him as the “beacon of the people.” He also benefitted from the explicit support of the imperialist leaders, embodied by Carter, Schmidt, Callaghan and Giscard d’Estaing, who, during a meeting in Guadeloupe on January 5 and 6, 1979, decided to abandon the Shah and facilitated Khomeini’s return from exile to allow him to take the helm of the state.

Born under the guise of defending the poor against the rich and exploiting the population’s anti-imperialist sentiments, the mullahs’ regime has become the ruthless defender of Iran’s privileged class while simultaneously becoming an element of the imperialist order. The regime’s two pillars, the religious establishment and the Revolutionary Guards—the mullahs and the Pasdaran—preach morality to the population, impose the veil on women, and repress those who refuse to submit, all while living in luxury and privately mimicking Western customs. They plunge the population into destitution and hardship while plundering the country’s resources and accumulating dollars in foreign accounts. They incite chants of “Death to America” at the rallies they organize, while sending their children to study in North America and collaborating with the United States to maintain order in Iraq.

Forty-seven years after the fall of the Shah, the regime founded by Khomeini is now threatened with suffering the same fate. Weakened by the mobilizations that have been taking place for ten years and which are increasingly shrinking its social base, it is also weakened by the embargo reactivated in September 2025 by American and European leaders, by the war waged by Israel against Iran’s allies in Lebanon and Yemen, by the fall of Bashar al-Assad in Syria, and by the twelve-day war waged in June 2025 by Israel and the United States.

These pressures and military interventions obviously have nothing to do with defending the Iranian people, the primary victims of the embargoes and bombings. It takes the cynicism of Trump, the head of imperialism and as such directly responsible for the suffering of peoples, especially in the Middle East, Palestine, Iraq, and Syria, to present himself as the savior of the Iranian people. What the leaders of imperialism hold against the leaders of the Islamic Republic is that they are not sufficiently subservient to the interests of Western oil companies and capitalists. Despite these strained relations, they share the same fear of popular uprisings. The Iranian leaders order their people to be shot, while the imperialists are, in reality, complicit. They maneuver behind the scenes to try to bring about an alternative to Khamenei’s power while simultaneously threatening military intervention.

Any solution imposed from above, whether by force of arms or such maneuvers, any providential man who might be propelled to the forefront, whether it be Reza Pahlavi, the son of the late Shah opportunely emerging from his gilded exile, a reformer like Hassan Rouhani breaking with Ayatollah Khamenei, or a senior Pasdaran officer staging a coup with U.S. support, will aim to bring the population back into line to perpetuate its exploitation and establish a regime far more subservient to imperialism.

This is also the harsh lesson of all the protest movements that have taken place around the world in the last fifteen or twenty years.

Numerous Revolts, but What Is the Outlook?

From the “Arab Spring” of 2011 to the so-called Gen Z uprisings in 2025 in Nepal, Madagascar, and Morocco, and including those of 2019 in Iraq, Sudan, Lebanon, Algeria, and then Bangladesh in 2024, people have consistently revolted against regimes that keep them in poverty and deprive them of a future and freedom. While determination and courage have never been lacking, each time these uprisings have led to decidedly disappointing outcomes. When they haven’t been brutally suppressed and transformed into civil wars in which various regional powers and their Western backers have fanned the flames, they have been hijacked by an opposition figure returning from exile, or by an officer or official of the regime presenting themselves as a savior, denouncing the dictator in power or the politicians discredited by their time in office. The heads of state have sometimes changed, but not the fate of the exploited.

The same scenario has repeated itself endlessly, because there are countless political forces ready to exploit these movements, to channel them, and ultimately lead them into a dead end.

To ensure that things are otherwise, to prevent the energy and sacrifices expended during these uprisings from being in vain, those who rise up must find genuine revolutionary political leadership. This has been lacking until now, and this is true in the current movement in Iran. And it is only from within the working class that such leadership can emerge, centered on the objective of consciously taking the lead in the revolt, with its own organization and its own political goals.

During the numerous protest movements of recent years, workers have always been present, but without truly emerging as a class. They have acted without awareness of the fundamental role they can play in rallying all the oppressed strata of society; without awareness that behind the regime that oppresses them stands the bourgeoisie, the capitalist system, and imperialism as a whole. For it is imperialism that dominates the planet, plundering everywhere the wealth produced by workers to ensure the profits of the most powerful capitalist groups, and maintaining dictatorial regimes everywhere to enslave peoples.

The basic aspiration to feed one’s family, to have a proper roof over one’s head, to no longer be subject to the rule of armed gangs, the aspiration for democratic freedoms, for the right to live as one pleases and to express oneself freely, runs up against a wall in every country plundered by imperialism. Satisfying this aspiration was already impossible during the anti-colonial revolutions of the 1950s and 60s, when the global capitalist economy was in a phase of relative development. It is even less so in this period of acute economic crisis, during which the rivalry between capitalists to divide up surplus value intensifies the class war against workers everywhere, leads to outright war, and brings authoritarian regimes to power, including in the old imperialist powers.

The fate of the exploited cannot fundamentally change as long as the bourgeoisie maintains its domination over the world. But this domination is not inevitable. It rests on the exploitation of hundreds of millions of workers worldwide. These workers have been concentrated to meet the needs of capital. They are linked together by the myriad connections of capitalist production and the capitalist economy. The workers of Iran, those of the neighboring Persian Gulf, the Middle East, Africa, and Central Asia, as well as the workers of the imperialist metropolises, constitute one and the same international working class.

In Iran and Elsewhere, the Strength of the Working Class

In Iran, due to its developed industry, the working class is large, often concentrated in major industrial complexes. It has repeatedly demonstrated its capacity for initiative. In 1978–1979, worker mobilization and strikes were decisive in bringing down the Shah. In many factories, particularly in the oil sector, workers had established shuras, or workers’ councils, to organize and defend themselves against the army. While organizations trusted by the workers presented Khomeini as one of their own, none advocated for these workers’ councils to become an alternative political leadership to the Islamist regime. In the following years, Khomeini dissolved them, after banning strikes and having labor activists assassinated.

Throughout recent years, in various major industrial sectors of the country such as sugar, oil, transport, and metallurgy, the working class has managed to bring forth from its ranks, despite the dictatorship, activists capable of helping it to fight exploitation and to organize itself by building clandestine unions, strike committees, or even workers’ councils in factories facing privatization and layoff plans, such as the Haft Tapeh sugar mill and the Ahvaz steel mill.

In the ongoing movement, a declaration signed by the workers’ councils of three factories in Arak, the capital of Markazia province, was published by a Turkish communist newspaper. While the reality of these Arak workers’ councils remains unknown, this appeal indicates that, at least locally, activists are seeking to organize workers along class lines. The text states: “Our factories are our home” and calls on residents to create neighborhood councils “to organize security and supplies” before concluding: “The reign of bosses and mullahs is over.” It also raises a crucial issue: the physical defense of the population against the army, addressing soldiers so that they “will not be the murderers of their fathers” and presenting the factories as places of safety for the residents of working-class neighborhoods.

Faced with a regime that fires on its own people with weapons of war, the question of arming the people inevitably arises. In January 1905, after the Tsar of Russia ordered his troops to fire on a peaceful demonstration of workers in Saint Petersburg, Lenin wrote: “The sooner the proletariat succeeds in arming itself, the longer it will maintain its fighting positions, its positions as revolutionary strikers, and the sooner the troops will be seen to falter, and the more men will be found among the soldiers who finally understand what they are doing, taking the side of the people against the villains, against the tyrant, against the murderers of defenseless workers, their wives, and their children.”

But while the question of weaponry is essential, it cannot be separated from that of the movement’s political leadership. In 2011 in Syria, faced with the regime’s violent repression of demonstrations, weapons quickly appeared, but they remained in the hands of militias of various persuasions, and the popular uprising led to a civil war in which the population was the primary victim. The most fundamental question is that of political leadership. If workers’ councils were to become widespread in Iran—as was the case in 1979, though we have no evidence of this today—the question would then be whether they would establish an organization capable of becoming a political leadership, of spearheading the revolt against all social forces and hostile tendencies, ranging from Islamists who have broken with the regime to agents of imperialism, not to mention the centrifugal forces emanating from organizations drawing on the various national minorities that make up Iran. This presupposes the existence of a communist, revolutionary, and internationalist organization capable of defending this policy at all costs.

The Russian Revolution of 1917 “shook the world” because the Bolshevik Party campaigned for nine months, against all other parties, for the workers’ councils, the soviets spontaneously established by workers and soldiers in February 1917, to seize all power and overthrow the old state apparatus. For popular uprisings not to end tragically one after another, but to lead to genuine revolutions, it is necessary for parties and a communist and revolutionary international to be reborn, drawing on the Bolshevik experience.