Alan Woods wants Iran's military to win. The Iranian working class deserves better.

The Revolutionary Communist International has discovered the IRGC. The Iranian working class is less enthusiastic about the encounter.

TL;DR: Six weeks before the US struck Iran, the IRGC was killing protesters in the streets. The RCI documented every death. Then the bombs fell, and Alan Woods declared "unconditional defence" of the same apparatus — with no explanation, no self-criticism, and no mention of the thousands murdered. This is the organisation that spent three years telling Ukrainian workers their national defence was a NATO proxy operation. The contradiction is not accidental. It is opportunism: seizing the emotional force of a new war to paper over the failures of the last one. We oppose the US-Israeli assault unconditionally. We do not therefore support the IRGC's victory. The Iranian working class deserves better than to be the RCI's latest cause.

On the morning of 28 February 2026, as US and Israeli missiles struck Tehran, Alan Woods sat down and wrote. The result was a piece titled “The war on Iran: where do communists stand?” — and the answer, delivered with the certainty of a man who has never revised a position under pressure, was: with the Iranian state, unconditionally.

“The Revolutionary Communist International must make its position absolutely clear and unambiguous,” Woods wrote. “We stand for the unconditional defence of Iran against the aggressive acts of American imperialism and its Israeli proxies.”

Fine words. Six weeks earlier, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps had killed at least 544 protesters in the streets of Tehran, Mahabad, Fasa, and dozens of other cities. The RCI’s own website had published the body count.

Woods had written that piece too. He simply forgot it when the bombs started falling.

The Forty-Six Days

To understand the scale of what the RCI has suppressed, it is necessary to return to 29 December 2025. On that date, the Iranian rial collapsed to a record low, food inflation stood at 42%, and workers were buying bread on credit. A bazaar strike broke out in Tehran, historically the most reliable barometer of revolutionary sentiment in Iran since 1905. Within nine days, the uprising had spread to over 70 cities across 26 of Iran’s 31 provinces. In the Kurdish regions, communist parties with genuine mass roots called a general strike that paralysed the region. In Fasa, demonstrators stormed the governor’s palace. In Ilam, security forces were pushed out of the town centre. At universities across Tehran, students expelled both regime loyalists and security personnel from their campuses.

The uprising was not simply a response to external pressure. It was a response to the regime’s own choices: decades of diverting national resources towards military spending and regional proxy operations while the basic needs of the population went unmet; systematic corruption enriching a clerical-capitalist elite while workers bought bread on credit. The rial’s collapse was not an act of God. It was the consequence of a ruling class that had chosen the IRGC’s adventures over investment in its own people. By early January 2026, Iran ranked 14th globally for the number of dollar millionaires. A theocratic republic had produced, alongside mass food poverty and chronic power cuts, a parasitic ruling stratum of extraordinary wealth. The protesters who chanted “Death to the dictator!” and “This is the final message; the target is the entire regime!” understood this class reality with a clarity that Alan Woods, composing his 28 February article, managed to overlook entirely.

The IRGC’s response was methodical. In the first days, mid-level commanders hesitated: their soldiers were conscripts from the working class, and there were real fears of mutiny. That hesitation ended when the Supreme Leader intervened directly and demanded forcible containment. On 31 December, live ammunition was used. Funerals became rallies; rallies became new sites of confrontation. By 12 January, the regime had imposed a total internet blackout — connectivity dropped to 4% nationally — to conceal the scale of what was happening and prevent strike coordination. The IRGC’s practice of seizing bodies from hospitals to prevent them becoming focal points of mourning and dissent was documented in real time.

At least 544 dead by mid-January. The real figure, given the body-seizure policy, was thousands higher.

The RCI published all of this. Their January article, "Iran: for a nationwide uprising! Down with the Islamic Republic!", documented the IRGC's live fire, the dormitory raids, the mass arrests. Their coverage of the January 2026 movement identified the IRGC and the Basij as the primary instruments of massacre. Indeed, their own stated revolutionary programme for Iran included — and this is from the January 7 article itself — "the abolition of the police, the Basij and Revolutionary Guards' paramilitary groups, along with the intelligence agencies." They demanded “Death to tyrants”.

Then the US struck. It killed the tyrant Ali Khamenei on 28 February, and everything changed. Not the IRGC’s role. Not the reality of what it had done to Iranian workers forty-six days before. Just the RCI’s relationship to it.

The Ukraine Problem

Before examining the substance of the RCI’s Iran position, it is worth dwelling on a comparison that Woods himself raises, though he does not resolve it.

He asks, on behalf of the organisation, why they are more prepared to support Iranian military resistance than some other groups. A fair question. But the comparison that forces itself on any honest reader is not between the RCI and the ISA. It is between the RCI on Iran and the RCI on Ukraine.

On Ukraine, the organisation’s position, developed over three years and still on their website, was that a Ukrainian military victory would represent a victory for US imperialism: “absolutely not a gain for the working class in Ukraine, Russia, or anywhere else.” They characterised Ukraine’s war of national defence as a proxy conflict. They described Zelensky’s relationship to Washington through the metaphor of a monkey and an organ-grinder. They insisted that the Liebknecht principle — the main enemy is at home — applied with full force and that solidarity with Ukrainian workers meant opposing their government’s war effort, not supporting it.

Now they call for the “unconditional defence” of a theocratic capitalist state whose military arm had been executing protesters six weeks before the US attacked. The analytical framework that made Ukraine’s national defence illegitimate has vanished. No explanation is offered. No acknowledgement that a problem exists.

The comparison with Ukraine is sometimes made here, and it deserves a direct answer. The Ukrainian government has its authoritarian tendencies and its neoliberal economics. But it did not shoot thousands of its own citizens in the streets to stay in power. It emerged from a popular mandate, however imperfect. Independent working-class organisations in Ukraine exist and fight. The IRGC is not the instrument of a state that incidentally represses workers: it is the repression itself, structurally, historically, from the moment it crushed the shuras after 1979. That difference is not incidental. It is the entire question.

The RCIT, the last remnant of the now-defunct “League for the Fifth International“, at least applies its position consistently: it supported Ukrainian self-determination and supports Iranian defence on identical grounds. One can disagree with that framework, while recognising it as a coherent position. The RCI’s position is not coherent. It is opportunist; seizing the emotional force of a new conflict to paper over the contradictions of the last one.

The Algeria Test

The RCI think they know their Trotsky. On 2 March, two days after the strikes began, they published a piece by Jorge Martín: “Israel’s war on Iran — how would Trotsky have posed the question?” It walks through exactly the precedents one would reach for: Ethiopia 1935, the Fossa interview on Brazil. They are not ignorant of these texts. They have read them, applied them, and published their conclusions. The question is not whether the RCI have engaged with the tradition. It is whether they have engaged with it honestly.

Martín quotes Trotsky writing to the International Secretariat on 17 July 1935: “for us it is not a question of who is ‘better’, the Negus or Mussolini; rather, it is a question of the relationship of classes and the fight of an underdeveloped nation for independence against imperialism.” He quotes the Fossa interview: fascist Brazil, democratic England, Trotsky sides with Brazil. He concludes: revolutionary communists stand fully on the side of Iran, even though we have no sympathy for the political regime of the ayatollahs.

Fine. But notice what Martín’s article does not do. It does not mention the thousands dead in January. It does not address the Decentralised Mosaic Defence protocol. It does not acknowledge that six weeks before the US struck, the RCI’s own website was documenting the IRGC’s massacre of protesters in 70 cities. The article, it emerges, was not written in March 2026 at all. It was “first written after the 12-Day War in June 2025” — before the January uprising, before the massacre — and simply republished unchanged. The RCI’s Trotsky is a Trotsky frozen in June 2025, sealed in amber before the bodies were counted. Marxist analyses, to the RCI, are like cans of beans waiting to be added to any stew, regardless of context.

This matters because Trotsky’s criterion, applied rigorously rather than selectively, does not yield the conclusion Martín draws.

In the Fossa interview, Trotsky does not simply say: support the semi-colonial nation against the imperialist aggressor. He specifies why. If Brazil is victorious, “it will give a mighty impulse to national and democratic consciousness of the country and will lead to the overthrow of the Vargas dictatorship.” The external victory creates conditions for internal revolution. That is the test: not semi-colonial identity alone, but whether winning the war opens space for the working class to deal with its own ruling class.

Applied to Ethiopia: “The victory of the Negus would mean a mighty blow not only at Italian imperialism but at imperialism as a whole, and would lend a powerful impulsion to the rebellious forces of the oppressed peoples.” Trotsky’s Ethiopia argument rests on what a victory would produce for the movement of the oppressed. The question is material and political, not categorical.

Now ask that question of Iran in February 2026, with the RCI’s own January coverage in front of you. Would an IRGC military victory give a mighty impulse to national and democratic consciousness and lead to the overthrow of the theocratic regime? The apparatus that killed thousands in January — through the Decentralised Mosaic Defence protocol designed to suppress internal dissent autonomously even if central command is destroyed — would emerge with its prestige consolidated, draped in nationalist legitimacy, holding a warrant to name every independent organisation a fifth column. The Woman, Life, Freedom generation, the Haft Tappeh sugar workers, the teachers’ unions, the Kurdish communist parties: all would face the reckoning documented six weeks before the bombs fell. Trotsky’s criterion was designed to prevent precisely this outcome. The RCI, having read Trotsky, republished a June 2025 article and called it analysis.

The RCI’s own January 7 article acknowledged the danger obliquely: “There is also the possibility that the Iranian masses will rally to defend the nation against a foreign invasion. There is a powerful, deep-rooted hatred of western imperialism in Iran.” They saw the dynamic. They treated it as an argument for unconditional defence of the IRGC, rather than as the central problem their position had to address.

We are for driving out the aggressor. Unconditionally. We are not for an IRGC military victory and its domestic consequences. These are not the same position. Trotsky knew the difference. The RCI have read the texts that make this explicit. They chose, in June 2025 and again in March 2026, not to notice.

The Fiona Lali Question

The RCI’s British section’s most prominent public voice, Fiona Lali, published her position on social media within hours of the strikes: “Death to western imperialism, zionism, and its path of destruction!”

That slogan was reproduced with apparent approval inside the RCI’s own article. No caveat. No qualification about political independence from the clerical regime. No mention of the dead in January, of the women imprisoned for removing their hijabs, of the Baluch and Kurdish communities subjected to collective punishment. Just: death to western imperialism. The Iranian workers who spent December and January fighting to bring down the Islamic Republic were not addressed at all.

The RCA, the American section, at least managed to articulate a slightly more differentiated position, calling for “regime change in Washington, Tel Aviv, and across the Gulf States — by the working class.” But regime change in Tehran? That demand, explicit in their own revolutionary programme and in their own January coverage, disappeared from their war statements entirely.

The Contradiction the RCI Cannot Resolve

Here the article must address directly the question that puzzles many readers who are clear about opposing the US attack but uncertain about what follows from that clarity.

We oppose US-Israeli aggression unconditionally. Iran is a dependent capitalist nation subjected to an imperialist military assault. Every socialist tradition that takes the national question seriously demands opposition to that assault. There is no ambiguity here.

But “opposition to the aggressor” and “support for the IRGC’s military victory” are not the same demand, and the difference matters enormously for Iranian workers.

The IRGC is not a people’s army defending a nation. It is the coercive apparatus of the clerical-capitalist state, deployed with equal force against external enemies and internal ones. Months before Operation Epic Fury began, the regime had been quietly preparing for a potential decapitation strike by activating its Decentralised Mosaic Defence protocol: wide operational autonomy delegated to local military and security units, designed to ensure the IRGC and Basij could continue to operate — including to suppress internal dissent — even in the event of a “partial or total loss of command and control capabilities” at the national level. Emergency powers were simultaneously delegated to provincial government. The purpose was to ensure that social unrest could be suppressed autonomously across Iran’s 31 provinces even if Tehran’s central command was neutralised. This is documented in the RCI’s own pre-war coverage. The organisation that now calls for “unconditional defence” of this apparatus knew, before the bombs fell, exactly what it had been built to do.

A decisive IRGC military victory would consolidate that apparatus’s prestige and domestic power simultaneously. The regime would emerge having survived where Western intelligence said it would fall, draped in nationalist legitimacy, holding a warrant to suppress every independent organisation in the country as a potential fifth column. The Woman, Life, Freedom generation, the Haft Tappeh sugar workers, the teachers’ unions, the Kurdish communist parties: all of them would face a reckoning. The very class anger that drove thousands to die in the streets of January would be weaponised against them as evidence of foreign collaboration.

This assessment of the IRGC is not speculation. It is what happened in the ceasefire period after the June 2025 Twelve-Day War. Die Internationale documented the regime’s use of that period to “intensify domestic repression and create a political climate of graveyard silence.” Khamenei delayed the funerals of IRGC commanders for days after the ceasefire, until the security situation was fully controlled. The wartime accusation of “collaboration with the enemy” was deployed immediately against dissidents. The pattern is established.

So, Trotskyists support the defeat of the imperialist assault, and (excepting the RCIT and RCI) do not support the IRGC’s victory, because the IRGC’s victory is a victory against the Iranian working class as surely as it is a victory against the F-35.

Is there a contradiction? Yes. It is the same contradiction Trotsky identified in his 1938 discussions of the Proletarian Military Policy: the gap between what the working class needs and what the existing state can provide. It is not resolved by pretending the gap does not exist, as the RCI has done. It is addressed by insisting on the actual strategic task.

The Only Way to End This

An IRGC missile exchange with the US Navy does not end this war. Each Iranian counter-strike invites escalation. Each escalation deepens the regime’s internal grip. The conflict cannot be resolved militarily within its current framework; it can only be prolonged and intensified.

The contradiction can be broken from two directions simultaneously.

1. In the imperialist centres: strikes, blockades, refusals to handle war materiel. Not vigils. Not press releases. The Revolutionary Communists of America are correct that American workers have no national interests in this conflict, only class interests. But “class interests” means acting on them, not merely asserting them. The labour movement in Britain, in the United States, in Germany has the capacity to shut down logistics chains if it has the political will. The RKP in Germany, to their credit, has at least linked the anti-war struggle to Germany’s role as the second-largest arms supplier to Israel. That is the correct orientation for revolutionaries in the imperialist heartlands: material obstruction, not military endorsement of the IRGC.

2. In Iran: the uprising of January 2026 — over 70 cities, 26 provinces, elderly Iranians placing themselves between conscripts and students — demonstrated that the Iranian working class is the force capable of ending both the imperialist threat and the theocratic regime that provides its pretext. A revolutionary Iran that dismantled the IRGC’s regional proxy networks, ended support for theocratic movements across the Middle East, and offered the Kurdish and Baluch peoples genuine self-determination would remove the foundations of every justification the United States has ever offered for intervention. This is not a long-run abstraction to be gestured at while we get on with supporting the regime in the short run. It is the actual strategic orientation: the only outcome that is both a defeat for imperialism and a victory for the Iranian working class.

The RCI’s own revolutionary programme, when they still remembered it, said the same thing. It called for nationalisation under workers’ control, abolition of the IRGC and Basij, full equal rights regardless of gender and ethnicity. All of it vanished on 28 February, replaced by “unconditional defence.”

What the Test Actually Tests

The “Iran Test,” as the RCIT frames it and the RCI implicitly accepts, is supposed to identify who is genuinely anti-imperialist and who is a social-patriot in Washington's camp. What it actually does is eliminate the working class as a political subject. The test has two answers: side with the IRGC or side with the Pentagon. The Iranian workers who spent January dying in the streets to overthrow the Islamic Republic appear in neither option.

The Fourth International’s tradition is not one of abstention. Pierre Frank’s 1948 analysis of Palestine, the FI’s positions on Vietnam, on Algeria, on Nicaragua: all involved supporting the right of oppressed peoples to resist imperialist aggression while maintaining political independence from the class forces directing that resistance. No endorsement of the FLN’s internal repression was required to oppose French colonialism. No endorsement of Khomeini’s state was required to oppose the Shah’s relationship to Washington in 1979. The same logic applies now, and it is more urgent than ever because the Iranian working class, unlike the FLN leadership or the Nicaraguan Sandinistas, has demonstrated in the past four years that it has the capacity and the will to fight on its own terms.

Alan Woods has found his semi-colony. The Iranian working class, less impressively, was not consulted about the encounter. The left that supports it is raising other demands:

• Neither the turban nor the crown.

• Unconditional opposition to US-Israeli aggression.

• Solidarity with the Iranian working class, the Woman, Life, Freedom movement, and the Kurdish, Baluch, and Arab peoples fighting for self-determination.

• Build the anti-war movement in the imperialist centres through direct action: shut down the war machine from within.