Since December 28, after the Iranian rial plunged to a record low against the U.S. dollar, thousands of people have taken to the streets in dozens of cities across the country, including Tehran. They are demonstrating in their universities and workplaces, protesting deteriorating living conditions, political repression, and the absence of basic democratic rights.

The most immediate spark was a strike by bazaar merchants and shopkeepers, but the protests quickly widened to include university students and young people — who have been disproportionately targeted and killed in the repression — along with ethnic minorities, particularly from the Kurdish and Lur regions. The movement has also drawn in the feminist movement and significant sectors of the labor movement that have emerged in Iran in recent years, including oil workers, truck drivers, teachers, and even retirees.

These mobilizations have been met with brutal state violence: live ammunition, mass arrests, torture, internet blackouts, and death sentences aimed at terrorizing the population and breaking resistance from below.

Though ongoing internet blackouts and censorship make the data unreliable, conservative estimates indicate that at least 2,500 people have been killed and more than 19,000 people arrested, with 800 protesters facing the death sentence amid the regime’s violent crackdown. It’s clear the renewed wave of national protests in Iran — after previous waves starting in 2017-2018, 2019, and again in 2022 — mark a new episode in the deepening crisis of the Islamic Republic.

We affirm without ambiguity the Iranian people’s right to protest, organize, and rebel against state repression. We denounce the Islamic Republic as a bourgeois-clerical state, profoundly authoritarian and among the most undemocratic regimes in the world, enforcing social and political control through mass repression, including one of the highest execution rates globally. The responsibility for the deaths, mass imprisonments, and pending executions — including cases such as Erfan Soltani — lies squarely with the regime and its repressive apparatus, which exist to preserve clerical rule and capitalist domination.

Within Iran, even so-called “reformist” figures have proven incapable of breaking with repression. President Masoud Pezeshkian initially acknowledged that people have the right to protest against social misery and injustice, but has since closed ranks with the regime.

At the same time, these events cannot be understood in isolation from the imperialist offensive against Iran, which has sharply intensified over the past period under Donald Trump and in the midst of the ongoing genocide in Gaza. The 12-day war with Israel, the tightening of sanctions since September and again in recent days under both Trump and the EU, and the “maximum pressure” strategy pursued under both the Biden and Trump administrations have further devastated an already fragile economy, worsening inflation, unemployment, and social misery. Recent data shows around 26 to 32 million Iranians live below the poverty line, meaning roughly 30 percent of the population struggles to meet basic needs.

This offensive is not about “human rights” or “democracy,” but about imperialist interests rooted in Iran’s strategic weight as a resource-rich regional adversary within a period of U.S. decline and sharpening inter-imperialist rivalries. The Trump administration has made its contempt for the Iranian masses unmistakably clear. It has escalated sanctions to impose a level of economic strangulation that makes daily life increasingly unbearable, enforced racist visa bans that make it practically impossible for Iranians — and many other nationalities — to enter and live in the United States, and carried out direct military attacks, such as the most recent joint strike with Israel in June, which have resulted in civilian casualties. Even as it carries out these attacks, the administration openly threatens further aggression.

This offensive is not limited to Iran or the Middle East. Trump is simultaneously advancing a broader offensive against oppressed peoples elsewhere — from the kidnapping of Nicolás Maduro and Cilia Flores in Venezuela as part of an imperialist drive to recolonize Venezuela, to the expansion of state violence inside the United States where the very same repressive apparatus is being used to discipline immigrants and social movements, as shown by the recent killing of legal observer Renée Good by ICE agents in Minneapolis.

The European imperialist powers have aligned themselves with this strategy, expanding sanctions and political pressure while invoking “international law” as cover. The European Union, led by Ursula von der Leyen, has backed the escalation of sanctions and isolation in lockstep with the United States, subordinating the lives of ordinary Iranians to imperialist interests.

In the face of those who try to justify sanctions against Iran or greater imperialist intervention as part of a struggle for “democracy” against authoritarianism, it is crucial to make it clear that all imperialist interventions in the region have left peoples and nations devastated. The cases of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya demonstrate this. The imperialists never imposed even the slightest sanction on the State of Israel, but instead were complicit in genocide. They cynically speak of “democracy” while doing lucrative business with repressive Arab monarchies.

In the region, reactionary bourgeois forces actively collaborate with the imperialist offensive. Above all, the Israeli state under Benjamin Netanyahu pushes militarization and regional destabilization. At the same time, Arab ruling classes aligned with the United States — particularly in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates — while wary of the destabilizing consequences of open war, continue to uphold sanctions, security coordination, and normalization with Israel. They seek to preserve regional order, protect capital flows, and strengthen their own authoritarian rule within the U.S.-led imperialist framework.

Meanwhile, monarchist and liberal “regime change” currents, including Reza Pahlavi, seek to channel popular anger into a pro-imperialist project that would recycle old elites and suffocate independent struggle from below. The history of imposed transitions since the CIA-lead coup of 1953 offers a stark warning.

Only the Independent Self-Organization of the Working Class and Oppressed Can Pose an Alternative

Iran is a semicolonial capitalist country, subjected to the constant pressure of imperialism and governed by a reactionary clerical-bourgeois regime that represses its own working class and oppressed sectors. Neither imperialism nor the theocratic regime — nor the reformist, liberal, or monarchical solutions promoted from exile — have any interest in genuine democracy for the Iranian masses.

From this position, we unequivocally denounce all sanctions, threats, and military aggression by the United States and Israel, which cynically use the repression of the Iranian regime as a pretext to justify neocolonial policies, while sustaining genocide in Palestine and intensifying repression in their own countries. At the same time, we fully support the struggles of the workers, women, youth, and oppressed peoples of Iran, who have repeatedly risen up in recent years — in national protests, the feminist uprising following the assassination of Mahsa Amini, and strikes in strategic sectors of the working class like the oil workers — all in the face of brutal repression.

In this spirit it is important that sectors of the working class like bus drivers, have begun to pose the question of a working class leadership. In cities like Arak, they have put forward the need for workers’ and neighborhood councils, building on previous experiences with self-organization in Iran.

We believe that the emancipation of Iranian society cannot be achieved through liberal reforms or “regime change” imposed from the outside. It can only be the work of the independent self-organization of the working class, mass struggle, and the building of its own organizations from below, capable of confronting repression and contesting power. This is the foundation of a genuine democracy, inseparable from the socialist reorganization of society.

The struggle in Iran is inextricably linked to the fight against imperialism in the region, including the struggle for a free Palestine. Against the theocratic regime and against imperialism, we affirm a socialist perspective of the working class —  in Iran and throughout the Middle East.

No to Imperialist Intervention, No Sanctions on Iran! Hands off the Middle East!

Down with the Bloody Repression of the Khamenei Regime! Freedom for All Political Prisoners!

For an Independent Path Forward Led by the Working Class and Oppressed!

The post Iran: Against Repression and Imperialist Threats — for an Independent Path of the Working Class! appeared first on Left Voice.

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