For more than a month, Iran has been the scene of a new wave of protests that have been developing for several years, in alternating phases, adding to those of the two-year period 2019-2020, 2022 (focused on civil rights issues) and the most recent ones between 2024 and 2025.

The Iranian economy has been in crisis for some time, with average GDP growth over the last 10 years of only 1%, worsened this year in June by the 12-day war against USA/Israel and, at the end of September, by the reintroduction of sanctions by the UN and the EU in response to Iran’s alleged non-compliance with nuclear agreements, with measures to freeze bank assets and restrict oil sales.

To date, Iran remains the third largest country in the world in terms of oil reserves (13.3% of global reserves) and the second largest in terms of gas reserves (16.2%). The country’s economy, although severely affected by previous international sanctions, had managed to sustain itself by circumventing them, with the help of China, which receives 90% of its oil and gas exports through the Strait of Hormuz. The resumption of sanctions, defeats on the external front, with the downsizing of Hezbollah in Lebanon, the fall of Assad in Syria, and the truce agreement in Gaza signed by the regional imperialist powers – Qatar and Turkey – which together with Iran support Hamas, have dealt a severe blow to the bourgeois regime in Ayatollah robes, discouraging foreign investment and forcing the devaluation of the rial, which had already closed 2024 at an all-time low of 821 to the dollar, rising to 915 in June and 1.4 million in the last month, with a devastating 20% collapse in December alone.

The exceptional weakening of the currency has led to increased inflation. The collapse of Ayandeh Bank, which the Iranian state acquired to prevent its bankruptcy, has exacerbated this process. Since Iran depends on imports for a significant portion of its food, raw materials, and other goods, the collapse of the currency has had a decisive impact on purchases from abroad, with increases in wholesale and retail prices. According to the country’s statistics institute, inflation rose by 42% in December compared to the previous year, while food inflation reached 70% and that of medicine and health product inflation reached 50%. The average wage – increasingly eroded by inflation – stands at around $200 per month, while trade union organisations, in a context where unions independent of the capitalist regime are illegal, estimate that a minimum of $550 is needed to support a family. The unemployment rate reached 7.2% in December.

The now uncontrollable discontent has exploded with shop closures in the bazaars and student demonstrations in universities in 31 regions and over 200 cities, some of which, such as Abadan, Ahvaz, and Malekshahi County, seem to have fallen into the hands of the demonstrators, with police forces forced to flee. However, there has been a rise in workers’ strikes for months, intensifying in December, mainly in the oil and mining sectors. In early December, thousands of employees at the South Pars gas complex in Asaluyeh, on the Persian Gulf coast, have protested at several refineries with strikes and demonstrations. During the same period, workers at the North Drilling Company have halted operations on several onshore and offshore platforms. These actions have followed previous strikes in the mines, including the Zareh Shuran gold mine in the north-west to south of Tabriz, as well as steelworkers in Hamadan (300 km south-east of Tehran) and in industries in the province of Fars. Pensioners and public sector workers have protested alongside industrial workers, demanding the payment of pensions and access to healthcare.

In this climate, the United States has threatened to intervene ’in favour of the demonstrators’, but it is not easy to understand whether they will opt for regime change, as happened, with the roles reversed, in 1979 against the pro-Western Shah Reza Pahlavi, or for a change within the framework of the theocratic regime, preserving it, as appears to have happened with regard to the so-called Bolivarian regime in Venezuela, as both are considered the best at playing the role of gendarme against the proletariat.

In the West, a certain "nationalist left" has from the outset downplayed the street clashes as the result of a conspiracy, a covert manoeuvre by the CIA and Mossad. In reality, today as yesterday, even without the incitement of any secret service, countless demonstrators, many of whom have been arrested and killed, are protesting for better living conditions and spontaneously hate a regime that starves them, represses them, and eliminates all forms of civil and trade union rights. Promoting the interests of a bourgeoisie that hides behind Islamic priests and uses its own working class as cannon fodder as ’popular resistance’ or ’anti-imperialist’ reveals the nature and position of parties that are entirely internal to the needs, conflicts, and wars of bourgeois States, Stalinist and ex-Stalinist parties and currents that not only have nothing to do with communism but are not even an expression of the working class, imprisoning and subjugating its immediate and historical interests in the lie of ’national reality’. Regional powers are linked to this or that imperialist superpower. They are also in competition among themselves, but in any case hostile to their respective working classes, starved, exploited, and massacred.

In Iran too, the working class, without the presence of a revolutionary communist party, will once again be forced to fight at the tail end of the interests of merchants and the petty bourgeoisie, deluding itself in a change of government, as has happened many times before in the country’s history. The workers’ struggle for better living conditions against their own governments is always objectively revolutionary. Only today it must fight to achieve its autonomy of programme and movement, as a social class, nationally and internationally, above all divisions and closures within categories and companies.