Following World War II, the U.S. supported the rise of Israel and the fascist Shah of Iran as two cops for a rising U.S. empire of oil, gas, and trade in the Middle East. Both the Tudeh communist party with its trade unions and Islamic fundamentalists led by the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini fought against the Shah. In 1979, Islamists, socialists, communists, guerilla groups, and liberals formed a national front that overthrew the Shah to the delight of the masses of workers throughout the world. Khomeini came to power with the mistaken support of the Tudeh party and declared that Iran would be an Islamic Republic that opposed U.S. imperialism, the “Great Satan.” Once Khomeini’s mullahs (islamic religious leaders or clerics) had consolidated power, they slaughtered thousands of communists and others who resisted their theocracy. Tudeh had made the tragic revisionist error of allying with class enemies.
The Islamic state under Khomeini seized most business firms and natural resources. The mullahs and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) became the core of the capitalist class. Today, they own and directly control at least 60 percent of the economy. The Supreme Leader and his Bonyads (Islamic foundations) today directly dominate Iran’s agriculture, manufacturing, and finance. The IRGC holds billions of dollars of contracts in the oil, gas, and infrastructure sectors and dominates Iran’s international oil trade. Traditional private sector capitalists are small in scale. The working class remains intensely exploited.
The communist movement in Iran: nationalism leads to defeat
The Communist Party of Persia (CPP) was formed in 1920 and joined the Comintern. It created and led early trade union organizations. British puppet Reza Shah banned the CPP in the 1930s because it led a mass strike at the Anglo-Persian Oil Company fields in 1929. By the end of World War II, the communists had regrouped as the Tudeh Party and gained a significant base in the industrial working class.
Its strategy for success, however, followed a multi-stage theory in the fight for communism. Tudeh supported Mohammad Mosaddegh, a social democratic/national bourgeois figure and prime minister under the Shah. The CIA and MI6 from Great Britain violently removed Mossadegh from office and shored up the power of the Shah. Workers continued to support Tudeh, but it reprised its error in the late 1970s by backing Khomeini as the leader of the “first stage”, the national independence stage. Such nationalist decisions are the death knell of revolution. By 1983, Khomeini had consolidated power and attacked the Tudeh party, executing thousands, including its leadership, using lists prepared by the CIA.
The historic destruction of the communist movement in Iran is a cautionary tale about what happens when a party follows the wrong line of march. The world communist movement (the Comintern) in 1935 wrongly decided, as fascism was sweeping across Europe, that allying with social democratic organizations was required to defeat fascism. This strategy reinforces the idea that many stages, including joining nationalist fronts, were required on the road to communist liberation.
Progressive Labor Party concluded in evaluating these lines that, to be successful, communists must win a major share of the working class to an internationalist communist vision of the future, without wages, racism, sexism, and with an economy organized collectively by workers to meet each other’s needs. Alliances with pro-capitalist forces, or concessions to capitalist institutions like the wage system and nationalism/national liberation strategies, would allow the capitalists and their ideology to enter our movement and block the path forward.
Some communists refused to follow Tudeh’s nationalist strategy. Peykar (Farsi for “Struggle” see image on page 7) was formed in 1975 and opposed Tudeh’s nationalism and reformism, but could not escape Khomeini’s repression, which killed over 250 of its members by 1985.
Economic background to revolts in Iran: austerity, war, allies, and drought
After the revolution of 1979, Khomeini made initial concessions to the working class, including union rights, a 40-hour work week, and lodging allowances. It was, after all, the oil workers’ leadership of a political general strike that overthrew the Shah and chased his successor Shapour Bakhtiar into exile. But the new regime steadily eroded these gains and economic progress flagged.
During Iran’s revolutionary chaos in 1980, Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein invaded Iran to seize oil-rich territory and overturn the 1975 Shatt al-Arab waterway border agreement. The Iran-Iraq war, lasting through 1988, enabled the capitalist regime in the name of national unity to outlaw independent unions and undo previous gains. The war severely damaged the economic base of Iran’s society, deepening the oppression of the working class for decades to come with a 40 percent reduction in real income.
After the war ended in 1988, Iran hastened further down the capitalist path by accepting IMF reconstruction loans. These agreements required “structural adjustment,” i.e. cutting subsidies and services to the working class further.
The sanctions against Iran by the U.S. devastated the working class. Five U.S. presidents have enforced increasingly severe sanctions since the 1979 revolution. In 2018, President Donald Trump imposed “maximum pressure” sanctions seeking to eliminate Iranian oil exports altogether and isolate its banking sector from international financial relations by blocking its access to SWIFT2.
In response to reduced trade, Iran’s rulers pursued agricultural self-sufficiency by building numerous irrigation dams, yet the country still imports about 25 percent of its food. The dams have worsened a severe drought that intensified in the 2020s, while temperatures in Iran are rising more than twice as fast as the global average. Water-intensive irrigation and rice cultivation have drained aquifers, causing widespread ground collapse, and rivers have shrunk further as Afghanistan’s upstream dams reduce water flowing into Iran.
Iran has also spent billions in weapons and subsidies over the past two decades to bolster allies in the region (Hezbollah, Hamas, Houthis, and Syria (during Assad’s leadership), again draining money and resources from the economy and making the working class pay.
The working class of Iran – many nationalities and genders
The working class in Iran is made up of many nationalities. Persians constitute the largest ethnic group (60 percent), while ethnic minorities, including the Kurds, Arabs, and Balochs, have often been in the forefront of working class struggles against the theocratic capitalist regime due to the more intense exploitation they experience.
Women’s lives under the Islamic Republic are harshly constricted by Islamic law, requiring head and body coverings. These laws are enforced by the Guardian Council (morality police), the IRGC, and other law enforcement bodies. Even traffic cameras are used to punish women in violation of dress requirements.
These economic trends have led to uprisings and broad resistance while the mullahs live lives of luxury and decadence.
Workers and class struggle: uprisings and rebellions since the 1990s
The January 2026 country-wide rebellions were built on a tradition of resistance, first against the Shah and now against the Islamic Republic’s clerical fascists. The working class and its organizations have almost always been central to these past struggles and have been central to the current rebellion.
Workers’ organizations in the 2025-26 uprising have been fighting both for their immediate survival demands and in opposition to the clerical capitalist class. Fighters include workers at multiple oil and gas companies, steel industry worker retirees in five provinces, telecommunication workers in dozens of cities, health workers including nurses, gold miners, and teachers. The uprising has terrified the regime, which has responded by killing thousands of protesters and jailing many more.
Uprisings since the 1979 revolution
In 1999, students at Tehran University revolted when the regime closed Salam, a popular reformist newspaper. The student movement spread nationwide and began to politically challenge the mullahs’ regime. The movement was violently repressed, with several students killed, a dozen more “disappeared,” and thousands arrested.
Workers, students, and others protested in 2009 against election fraud. Workers demanded a fourfold increase in the minimum wage and a decrease in inflation, while bus drivers, sugarcane workers, teachers’ organizations, and other labor organizers joined the struggle. Over 150 labor leaders were arrested on May 1, 2009, and other labor organizers were gunned down in the streets. The 2009 uprising was crushed, but another significant working-class revolt happened eight years later. Iran’s rulers had promised workers an improved economic life after the 2015 nuclear deal with the U.S. ended most sanctions. Mounting labor struggles fueled the 2017 uprising, with strikes and protests by nurses, bus drivers, truck drivers, tire and sugarcane workers, petrochemical workers, bakers, and tractor factory workers. An initial rally in Mashhad spread to 40–80 cities, with demonstrators chanting “People are begging and mullahs rule like gods!” and “Death to the Dictator,” targeting Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. Security forces killed 22 protesters and arrested about 2,000, while the regime shut down Telegram, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Ninety percent of those arrested were 25 or younger.
In 2019, the regime announced a 50% fuel price hike. The working class rose again, and the regime responded with bloody repression—but the rhythm of revolt was accelerating.
In 2022, The murder of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in the custody of Iran’s “morality police,” for not veiling triggered another uprising known as the “Woman, Life, Freedom” (WLF) movement. The protests quickly evolved from demanding justice for Amini into a challenge to the Islamic Republic’s rule. The WLF movement was an extension of the rebellions of 2017 and 2019.
The resounding call from the working class during the 2026 rebellion was for the overthrow of the corrupt religious fascist dictatorship, not the return of a Shah! Workers know that replacing the clerical fascists with U.S. servants would not represent progress. Now more than ever it is urgent for communist ideas to take flight and root themselves in the struggle from Brooklyn to Pakistan to Iran. This struggle must be international, uniting workers across borders. If the working class in Iran chooses nationalism, we are likely to see clerical fascists or U.S. stooges maintain power in Iran and wreak infinite misery for the working class. But if a revolutionary communist movement aligned with the PLP is rebuilt, the working class in Iran can emerge from the rubble of war to see a new communist horizon.
