What began in late December as resistance by Tehran market workers to soaring prices and a collapsing currency has rapidly transformed into a wave of mass dissent across Iran. The demonstrations quickly spread from economic grievances to a broad rejection of the government, drawing in people from multiple provinces and class backgrounds.
We side with the working class rising in the streets against the Iranian government. The Islamic Republic has built and maintained power through exploitation of the workers and oppression of their struggles since the very moment of its consolidation as a state power. Yet, we also oppose the cynical posturing of Western imperialist states that now cloak themselves in a guise of ‘support’ for protestors while seeking to exploit this crisis for their bourgeois interests. We therefore say ‘hands off Iran’ in the same sense with which we say ‘hands off Venezuela’: not as political endorsement of the existing government, but as a refusal of imperialist intervention disguised as democracy.
It is not enough to express support for the protests while rejecting their manipulation by external forces, as many leftists and communists have recently done. This fosters dangerous illusions about the protests, obscuring a far more contradictory reality. Above all, it conceals the concrete and well-documented presence of external interference, openly acknowledged even in mainstream Western outlets and plainly evident in coordinated media campaigns, exile-led political fronts, and the rapid mobilisation of hostile state apparatuses.
To understand these mobilisations, we must look at their material composition. What we see is a defensive reaction by workers and layers of the petty bourgeoisie, united less by a shared political project than by immediate economic desperation.Therefore, it is no accident that the dominant language of the protests is not revolutionary but economic – centred on prices, wages and survival. Rather, It reflects a crisis shaped above all by two structural forces: the crushing weight of sanctions and the increasing breakdowns of Iranian capitalism itself.
As communists, we should also be wary of exploiting anti-sanctions discontent. Any genuine socialist rupture would in fact be unlikely to face the same siege, but an intensified one, not only from US imperialism, but also from so-called ‘multipolar’ powers through sanctions and blockades. Aligning with anti-sanction sentiment without confronting this reality leads to opportunism. The masses, on the contrary, grasp this contradiction instinctively, which is precisely why, despite everything, sections of them remain tethered to the existing government.
What is missing from much of the debate is a material explanation of power in Iran. The violence and repression exercised by the ‘Islamic state’ are not the products of religion but the outcome of trying to assert an ‘anti-imperialist’ posture while remaining fully embedded in a world system of monopoly capitalism. Unable to genuinely escape this framework, what is proclaimed as resistance to imperialism becomes, in practice, another form of imperialism, an inevitableoutcome of the country’s capitalist mode of production.
The Islamic Republic is not an alternative to capitalism but one of its national forms. Iran’s economy combines state capital, private capital, and international capital, fully integrated into national and global accumulation. At the centre of accumulation stands oil: Iran holds the world’s 4th-largest proven oil reserves and 2nd-largest gas reserves, with hydrocarbons accounting for around 60% of export revenues and a major share of state income. Oil rent also sustains a vast private economy tied to subcontracting, finance, logistics, construction, and speculative activities, through which capital accumulation is generalised well beyond the formal public sector.
Between 2000-2012 Iran’s economy grew at around 4.4% annually; between 2013-2025 growth slowed to below 2%. Even under sanctions, Iran remains the 19th largest economy by GDP as Iran ranks among the top 15 countries worldwide by number of dollar millionaires, with estimates suggesting 1% controls over 70% of national wealth. Simultaneously, food inflation has risen above 40%, and an estimated 65m million people out of 92m live below the poverty line. Meat consumption has nearly halved, power cuts and water shortages are routine, while independent trade unions are banned. Sanctions have not broken Iranian capitalism; they have reshaped it in favour of a protected ruling class, enriching capital while immiserating labour.
In the context of the ongoing regional war and the current balance of forces in the Middle East, the proposed interventions of the US, Israel, and the EU amount to empty posturing. Even the political figure they promote as a substitute, the heir of the Pahlavi dynasty, functions almost entirely as a media construct: visible for the protests of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois circles abroad, weightless inside Iran, where he remains inseparable from a historical legacy of working-class repression and the subordination of national resources to Western imperialism. In general, no Iranian can fail to perceive the risk of a Libyan or Syrian scenario, while leftists – and at times even communists -continue to hail the beauty of people in revolt. Unfortunately, this is precisely the impasse that strengthens the Iranian ruling class and the government supporting it.
In this regard, we see ourselves as very distant from declarations such as that of the Tudeh Party, which described Iranian foreign policy as ‘adventurous’. Not because we fail to see see the imperialist character within that policy, but even with all its limits – which have been massively exposed in recent months – Iran has nevertheless had the merit of supporting the right side of the struggle in Palestine and other areas of the Middle East. Of course, national defence and regional resistance against imperialist aggression are the only banners under which the government can rally some residual support. Communists, however,should claim those tactical positions, while attacking the overall strategic frameworks in which they take place.
Calls for transitional national-popular authority through electoralism maintain the fiction that bourgeois democracy can function neutrally under conditions of imperialist pressure. It is a mere fantasy that a genuinely autonomous electoral process could unfold in a state openly targeted by US and Zionist power. Furthermore, these proposals leave the door open for the old illusion of a popular front, a formula historically used to stabilise capitalism, discipline proletarian struggle, and provide institutional entry points for external domination in the moments of working class uprising.
Just like other countries, Iran has no special path either. The only future that corresponds to the demands and interests of the exploited is the overthrow of capitalism on the path to socialism-communism. This path doesn’t occur through shortcuts, institutional reformism or protest fetishism, but through the autonomous organisation of the working class and its open struggle against capitalism and imperialism, both domestically and internationally.
This is a true for communists in Britain also. Our task is not to speculate outcomes, but to ground ourselves to material reality: to analyse concrete economic structures at stake, and to locate the interests of our own bourgeoisie within the imperialist system, with the aim of confronting its role in exploitation at home and abroad. Internationalism begins here, not in slogans or alignments, but in the uncompromising struggle against our ruling class, as part of a single, unique fight for socialism-communism.