A ruthless struggle between bourgeois factions, with the proletariat as the first victim!

A horrific massacre! The repression unleashed on protesters in Iran knows no bounds; the mullahs' regime, the faction of the Iranian bourgeoisie in power, is fighting for its survival. It knows this and is responding like all bourgeois factions in such dire straits: it is shooting into the crowd! It is massacring as it did before, in sinister memory, during the 2019 protests against the sudden rise in petrol prices or during the protests triggered by the death of Mahsa Amini in 2022. But today, this particularly reactionary faction of the Iranian bourgeoisie is cornered by widespread protest and anger across the country, and is responding with unprecedented cruelty in an attempt to maintain its domination. At the time of writing, more than 16,000 dead are piled up in the country's morgues,1 not counting the wounded, particularly those with eye injuries, as the forces of repression favour shooting at the head. More than 26,000 people have been arrested2 and thousands of death sentences have been handed down, making this large-scale repression the biggest massacre since the mass executions of 1988.

However, this repression will only increase hatred of the regime and will do nothing to resolve the economic turmoil shaking the country. The Iranian economy is increasingly suffering from the burden of the war economy, with considerable military expenditure, and has thus seen the collapse of the national currency (which lost 30% of its value in 2025) and runaway inflation (officially 52%). Nothing will stop the impoverishment of a growing section of the population and the misery affecting various social strata. But this time, it was not the most disadvantaged and oppressed sections of society that initiated the protests; the explosion of anger came from sections of the bourgeoise and petty bourgeoisie that had previously supported the regime. It was these sections that immediately imposed their nationalist demands on the movement.

Starting in the Tehran bazaar, a political pillar of the current regime, the demonstrations quickly advanced slogans in favour of increased support for the national economy (“Neither Gaza nor Lebanon, may my life be sacrificed for Iran”), which expressed the grievances of shopkeepers and property owners. Despite the regime's attempts to stem social discontent by giving a little ground on ‘individual freedoms’, the movement initiated by various factions of the bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie gained momentum and was joined by masses of demonstrators from all walks of life. The anger that was expressed massively at the end of December by the majority of the population could no longer be appeased by a few superficial concessions and turned into confrontations with the forces of repression throughout the country.

A deadly impasse exploited by the bourgeoisie

The extent of the anger and despair (“we're already dead” was the rallying cry of the demonstrators) is a tragic manifestation of the decomposition of capitalism, which breeds indignation and revolt against corruption, poverty and repression. However, due to their bourgeois and petty-bourgeois origins and their nationalist orientation in favour of saving the Iranian economy, these demonstrations developed on a terrain that necessarily led to their instrumentalisation by different factions of the Iranian bourgeoisie for the benefit of the opposition, itself riddled with rivalries and deep-seated hatreds between different factions. All of them are incapable of presenting an alternative for the management of the country, with some factions calling for the ‘democratisation’ of Iran and others for the return of the son of the former Shah... Behind these rival cliques lurked imperialist vultures, each with their own agenda, such as Trump, who promised aid to the demonstrators and on whom some even called on to intervene militarily as a matter of urgency to support the movement.

Whatever the outcome of these internal confrontations and external interference, Iran is at serious risk of disintegration because it is composed of a mosaic of minorities, including Kurds, Azeris, Arabs and Baluchis, which are influenced by local factions and foreign powers. The centrifugal tendencies leading to the disintegration of the country can only increase and threaten to plunge not only the country but also the entire Middle East region into immense instability and barbarism. The protests in Iran are not taking place on a proletarian terrain. By getting involved, workers have everything to lose. And the risk is that an entire generation of workers will be wiped out for the sole benefit of bourgeois cliques that have no future and are just as barbaric and exploitative as the mullahs. As capitalism sinks inexorably into chaos, no faction of the bourgeoisie has any perspective to offer other than barbarism and misery.

The boundless hypocrisy of the world bourgeoisie

The hypocrisy of the world bourgeoisie knows no bounds when it comes to promoting its own national interests. Thus, Russia and China, allies of the bloody regime in Tehran, cynically express concern ‘over the spectre of chaos in the country’ and call for ‘peace and stability’ (sic). The various European states, for their part, have limited themselves to summoning the Iranian ambassadors to express their ‘disapproval’ of the situation. As for Trump, he led the demonstrators in Iran to believe that he was on their side, promised to come to their rescue and threatened the Mullahs' regime with terrifying reprisals... only to ultimately do an about-face and leave the field open to bloody repression, while cynically claiming to have received assurances from the Iranian authorities that the repression would cease. In reality, Trump couldn't care less about the Iranian population: his main concern is to settle scores with a regime that has been an enemy of the United States since 1979, to prevent it from developing its nuclear power and continuing to play the spoiler in the Middle East, and finally to demonstrate the unrivalled military power of the United States. At the same time the Trump regime is bowing to pressure from the Arab oil monarchies, which fear above all else an implosion of Iran that would lead to chaos throughout the Gulf region. Finally, Israel can’t hide its hypocrisy either. Is there any regime that has shown its cruelty more openly in the last two years? After massive bombings in Palestine, Lebanon, Syria and Iran, after the massacre of innocent Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and the relentless attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank, Netanyahu has the audacity to present himself as the defender of the Iranian people against the ‘yoke of tyranny’, calling on the population to take to the streets to be massacred. In reality, he is cynically calculating that these clashes will further weaken his main imperialist rival in the region.

As for the mullahs' regime, which unblinkingly invokes its ‘revolutionary’ and moral superiority and claims, with the support of a section of the ‘anti-imperialist’ far left, to be fighting against the imperialist domination of the United States and Israel, it clearly has nothing to envy the latter in terms of cynicism and barbarism, whether through the gigantic corruption that plagues the regime or the brutal repression it exercises over its own population, both during demonstrations and by massively executing members of the political opposition.

All the bourgeoisies of the world are cut from the same cloth as the mass murderers in Tehran. All of them have, in one way or another, shed the blood of populations and proletarians in their wars and other imperialist crusades, or simply in their numerous savage operations of repression. Far from being an isolated case, Iran is the caricatured expression of a fundamental trend in the period of capitalist decomposition that we are experiencing: the uncontrollable collapse of the world economy, the absolute impoverishment of increasingly large sections of humanity, including in the central countries, the all-out development of imperialist tensions leading to a general arms race, and the tendency of all regimes, whether democratic or not, towards an increasingly openly repressive, totalitarian mode of government. Faced with this situation, the working class must avoid being drawn into the bourgeois trap of revolts to ‘change the regime’ and must not allow itself to be drawn into the settling of scores between the different factions of the ruling class. On the contrary, it must wage the struggle on its own terms, based on the defence of its own class interests, as the Iranian proletariat has been able to do on a number of occasions since the late 1970s. This will be the only way for it to ultimately politicise its struggle, enabling it to assert its revolutionary perspective.

HG, 15 January 2026

 

1) According to Iran International and CBS News on 20 January 2026.

2) Figures provided by the US-based Human Rights Activists News Agency.