The collapse of the rial, Iran’s currency, has triggered perhaps the biggest uprising since the 1979 revolution. In the capital, Tehran, the grand bazaar, one of the world’s oldest markets, erupted on 28 December. Merchants closed their shops and took to the streets, chanting, “Shut it down!” Within 72 hours, protests had spread to at least 21 of Iran’s 31 provinces. From the Mashhad metro to the tiny town of Farsan, demonstrators converged on street corners and squares. “Death to the dictator!”—a reference to the 46-year-old Islamic theocracy—featured prominently as a chant.
Rebellion on the streets soon reached the universities. From Tehran to Tabriz, students joined rallies demanding an end to poverty and corruption. Activists at the Khajeh Nasir University warned, “We will go on until the overthrow and death of the dictator”. Echoes of the 2022 “women, life, freedom” uprising were everywhere, such as women with headscarves in their hands declaring, “no headscarf, no veil, freedom and equality” and “women, life, freedom”.
The stakes were raised again when oil workers at two South Pars refineries in Asaluyeh, Bushehr, initiated strike action. In a joint statement with other independent unions, the coordinating committee for organising protests of contract oil workers warned the regime: “We unite our ranks with slogans against poverty and corruption ... now is the time for revolution”.
The rebellion in Iran has continued for almost three weeks despite severe state repression. The government imposed an internet and telecommunications blackout on 8 January and unleashed a wave of terror, massacring thousands of civilians. The few reports that have surfaced reveal harrowing scenes of bodies piled up at hospitals, young men and women with gunshot wounds to the eyes and others shot in the head at close range.
Roots of the rebellion
This is the latest in a series of uprisings that have rocked Iran over the past decade. In 2017, workers went on strike across the country to demand bread, jobs and freedom. They burned down police stations and attacked banks. The sugarcane workers in Khuzestan established workers’ councils to fight for control over production. In 2019, there was a November uprising, sparked by a 200 percent increase in the price of fuel. Students rioted under the slogan “strike and revolution”. The strike committees active in 2017 re-emerged, and new sections of workers joined the struggle. The regime drowned the rebellion in blood but could not crush the will of the people for long.
Strikes continued to ebb and flow in the first year of the pandemic. Then, in 2021, protests erupted in Khuzestan in response to severe water shortages and soon spread to other cities and towns. A few months later, oil workers went on strike to protest the sham election of Ebrahim Raisi as president. Protests and strikes continued through 2022, from the smallest province, Khorasan, to the capital. This cycle of revolt reached its climax in the 2022 women, life, freedom uprising, triggered by the police murder of 22-year-old Kurdish woman Gina Mahsa Amini. This was the largest uprising since the 1979 Iranian revolution, which overthrew the US-backed shah’s dictatorship.
The successive rebellions in Iran have deep economic and political roots. Runaway inflation and a collapsing national currency have been compounded by decades of government corruption and Western sanctions. Despite Iran having the world’s second-largest gas reserves and third-largest oil reserves, nearly 70 percent of the population lives below the poverty line, according to a report by the Iran Human Rights Monitor.
The minimum wage for Iranian workers is the worst in the region, behind even Afghanistan and Yemen, and the labour force participation rate has fallen to 41 percent, according to the Middle East Forum Observer. The collapse of the rial, the value of which has declined by at least 40 percent since June, has further eroded people’s purchasing power, making it even harder to buy already hyper-inflated goods like food and medicine.
Meanwhile, the cabal of criminals ruling Iran lives in luxury. Oil tycoons, steel magnates, politicians and the elite military and police make billions in profit from exploiting and oppressing the working class. According to an Iranian-based economist, Ali Heidari, nearly one-third of the country’s wealth is now concentrated in the hands of just 1 percent of the population. The regime has responded to the crisis by doubling down on austerity measures: gutting health care and infrastructure, and attacking workers’ wages and conditions.
A regime in crisis
All this has further fuelled the regime’s longstanding legitimacy crisis. It has little popular support, instead maintaining its rule through sheer force, backed by at least sixteen intelligence agencies and one of the largest civil militia organisations in the world.
But Iran’s rulers know that they can’t completely crush dissent. The election of the Reformers’ Party candidate Masoud Pezeshkian to the presidency in July 2024 was the state’s attempt to soften its image. But the hopes that some Iranians had in his presidency were quickly dashed as it became clear he’d continue the policies of his predecessors.
The regime also suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of Israel and America, which last June launched a twelve-day war that largely destroyed Iran’s most important nuclear sites, destroyed or damaged crucial oil, gas and water resources and targeted civilian infrastructure, killing more than 1,000 people.
The fallout from the war contributed to the collapse of the rial. Israel’s all-out assault on the region—its Gaza genocide, war on Lebanon and bombing campaigns in Yemen, Iraq and Syria, weakened Iran’s regional allies. Added to that, the overthrow of the dictatorship of Iranian ally Bashar al-Assad in Syria left the regime a sitting duck.
The dynamics of the current movement
The dynamics of the current protests can’t be understood without this context. The crisis is so deep that it has started to break one of the regime’s historically loyal support bases—the bazaaris, the traditional merchant class. The alliance between the merchants and the regime has deep roots going back to before the 1979 revolution. They formed an alliance against the US-backed shah dictatorship in 1963, establishing the Islamic Coalition Party. During the 1979 revolution, the bazaaris provided important financial support to the clergy, who, under the leadership of Ayatollah Khomeini, eventually defeated the revolution and established the Islamic Republic.
The clergy relied on the bazaaris to secure their power and, for many years, maintained a strong, albeit at times unstable, alliance. But the worsening economic situation and the growing financial dominance of Iran’s repressive state forces gradually weakened the influence of the bazaaris, who no longer enjoy the relative privileges they once had.
In response, they have organised increasingly frequent protests, including participation in the 2018 general strike, during which they raised slogans that, for the first time, transcended their own commercial interests. The bazaaris’ initiation of the current protests is not unprecedented but represents a significant breakdown in the relations between the traditional middle class and the Iranian regime.
Meanwhile, students and the youth have swung back into action after being the centre of the women, life, freedom uprising. Through their Telegram channels, students circulated footage of protests on university campuses in Tehran, Isfahan and Yazd. They gathered in their hundreds, chanting, “Freedom! freedom! freedom!” and “Don’t be afraid! We are all together!”
At night, when security forces came to kidnap students from their dormitories at Tehran University, they bravely fought back, inspiring more students to rise up. At Ferdowsi University in Mashhad, students declared: “Protest is our right, sit-ins are our tool, and resistance is our path. The young generation will not accept injustice and will not surrender the future at the cost of fear”.
Many student groups, including independent student unions, that were active in the women, life, freedom uprising, have re-emerged. The memory of this rebellion is fresh in their minds—they turned the universities into hubs of resistance, defying gender segregation rules, burning their hijabs and occupying buildings. Students joined forces nationally and compelled teachers to go on strike in solidarity with their struggle. Their participation in this moment can inspire broader layers of society to act. In the words of the students at Khajeh Nasir University, their protest “is a warning from students to the rulers who have become comfortable with corruption; we remind them that the normalisation of misery has failed, and the student is still standing”.
Much of the mainstream media reporting focuses on the bazaaris and the students. While it’s true that they’ve been at the centre of the current protests, workers have been on the battlefield for many months. They feel the economic crisis most acutely. Teachers, nurses, truck drivers, goldminers, steel, oil and gas workers have been striking and protesting to demand wage increases, health and safety measures and the abolition of the predatory contract labour system. Workers are the beating heart of Iran’s economy and have the power to topple the regime.
In the two days prior to the nationwide rebellion, goldminers, sugarcane and petrol refinery workers initiated smaller protests outside Tehran. Before that, in early December, 5,000 contract oil and gas workers went on strike in the biggest industry-wide mobilisation since the 1979 revolution. These workers are stationed in Asaluyeh, at the world’s largest natural gas field. They provide more than half of the country’s income. It’s why they were targeted by Israeli airstrikes back in June.
In the aftermath of the Israeli attack, politician Hassan Nowruzi tried to deter workers from protesting, arguing that bosses and workers are “in the same boat”. But this attempt to build national unity failed miserably—the oil and gas workers continued to strike. Their independent union pushed back, replying: “No sir! We workers and you plunderers are not in the same boat. You and your government have punctured the boat that carries our livelihood, and through these holes you are looting everything we have”.
Western imperialism and debates on the left
America and Israel are cynically trying to exploit this popular uprising to further their imperial domination over the Middle East. Trump last week signalled that he was considering a direct attack on Iran, warning Iranian leaders that the US military was “locked and loaded and ready to go” if they continued to kill protesters.
This is from the man who has unleashed federal agents to systematically hunt down and lock up migrants and execute those who defy government terror.
Meanwhile, some Israeli leaders, still high from bombing Iran last June, urge America to Make Iran Great Again by conducting a Maduro 2.0 to take out Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. They want a re-run of the oppressive Pahlavi monarchy, under the rule of Reza Pahlavi, as a pliant ally for Western imperialism. Butcher-in-chief Benjamin Netanyahu, with no sense of irony, said that he hoped Iranians would be free from the “yoke of tyranny”.
But animosity from the US and Israel does not mean socialists should support Iran, an authoritarian capitalist state that brutalises its own population and which has been a key counter-revolutionary force in the Middle East. During the Arab revolutions in 2011, Iran ordered its Revolutionary Guards, with the support of Lebanon’s reactionary Hezbollah, to drown the Syrian revolution in blood to prop up the Bashar al-Assad dictatorship. Iran’s rhetorical support for Palestine is one of the ways that its brutal dictatorship tries to win popular legitimacy at home and abroad. But while Iran might aid certain factions, it has never and will never lift a finger to help the Palestinians. Like all capitalist states, Iran’s only principle is self-interest.
Those who champion the Iranian regime betray the heroic workers and students who have paid with their lives fighting for liberation. It is impossible to fight for working-class solidarity across borders if you are backing the dictatorship that Iranian workers are fighting to overthrow.
Socialists should stand unequivocally with the resistance in Iran, while also rejecting attempts by the Western imperialists to exploit the movement for their own gain. In the words of the Tehran Bus Workers Union in a recent statement:
The path to the liberation of workers and toilers does not lie in the path of a leader carved from above the people, nor in reliance on foreign powers, nor through factions within the government ... we must not allow ourselves to be victims of the power games and interests of the ruling classes once again.
Challenges and prospects
The hope for the rebellion in Iran rests on the deepening of the working-class struggle. Workers have shown in recent years how they can lead the whole of society in battle against their rulers. During the women, life, freedom uprising, the sugarcane workers of the Haft Tappeh union forged solidarity with student protesters, recognising that freedom from oppression is bound up with the class struggle. They declared: “This great uprising should be linked with the strike of workers everywhere ... to have bread and freedom, let us not leave the women of the revolution alone”.
More fundamentally, it is only through working-class struggle that the forces of capitalist reaction and imperialist oppression can be defeated—whether that be the ayatollah of Iran or Trump in the US. The rebellion in Iran is a glimmer of hope in a dark world. Even if this struggle ends, the fire will continue to burn as long as the Islamic Republic stands. The regime is caught in a perpetual crisis with no clear solution. The decade of crisis and class struggle has made clear that its days are numbered.
