What Solidarity with Iranian Workers Actually Looks Like
Solidarity Infrastructure That Already Exists: Concrete Actions You Can Take Right Now
The internet blackout is now in its eighth day. Reportedly built with Russian technical assistance using Deep Packet Inspection to block VPNs and messaging apps, it masks what Iran Human Rights NGO estimates as over 3,400 killed by 14 January, with more than 2,000 in the first 48 hours of the crackdown alone. Activists risk arrest to reach border regions where they can relay casualty figures. Satellite dishes are being seized in home-to-home raids. The regime cannot crush what it cannot see; so it has made seeing impossible.
And in left WhatsApp groups across Britain, a familiar paralysis sets in. “There are no prospects for emancipating the working classes of the Middle East until the US and Israel are kicked out of the region,” one comrade insists. Another warns that any change “would not bring anything positive for the country and the region, but only replace an anti-American dictatorship with a pro-American one.” Stop the War Coalition declared on 14 January that “the West is engaged in a campaign of destabilisation.”
The Iranian masses, apparently, must wait.
For what? For whom? The workers building councils in Arak are not waiting. The oil workers striking at South Pars are not waiting. The nurses coordinating across Tehran, Shiraz, and Mashhad are not waiting. They have decided that their lives matter now, not after some future geopolitical rearrangement that exists only in the imagination of Western leftists who will never have to live under the theocracy they defend by omission.
What Iranian Workers Are Building
The 2026 uprising is not a replay of 2009. The Green Movement’s weakness was its narrow social base: urban middle classes without deep roots in the working class. That weakness has been overcome. The “factory-street link” that Iranian organisers describe has merged the grievances of the bazaar with the power of the industrial proletariat.
The rial hit record lows in early January. Hyperinflation exceeds 40 percent. The bazaaris who once formed the social base of the Islamic Republic are joining oil workers on strike. On 4 January, a coalition including the Retirees’ Union and the Oil Workers’ Coordination Council declared Iranian society at its “most decisive moment.”
The organisational backbone is the coordination councils that survived years of clandestine work:
The Coordination Council for Protests of Contract Oil Workers organises across South Pars, Abadan Refinery, and Assaluyeh. Their demands: reversal of privatisation, wages matching inflation, release of detained workers.
The Vahed Syndicate (Tehran bus workers) connects transport strikes to broader political demands: the right to independent organisation, human dignity, opposition to theocratic rule, solidarity with students.
The Coordination Council of Iranian Teachers’ Trade Associations calls for reallocating the security budget to public education and freedom for jailed teachers.
The Haft Tappeh sugarcane workers, veterans of years of struggle in Khuzestan, demand worker control over production and return of privatised units to the public sector under worker supervision.
And in Arak, workers’ councils issued a statement on 11 January with a slogan that echoes 1917: “All Power to the Councils.”
These are not people waiting to be rescued. The Vahed Syndicate’s statement is explicit: liberation must come through “conscious, organised leadership” of the working class, not “manufactured leaders” imposed from abroad. They reject both the theocracy and authoritarian monarchy. They are fighting for a socially just, equal, secular republic.
The Arguments That Excuse Abandonment
“The economic problems of Iran are in a vast majority of cases caused by 40+ years of US sanctions.”
This is true and irrelevant. The government that increased Iran’s military and security budget by 150 percent while adjusting public sector wages by only 20 percent made choices. The regime that ended preferential prices on basic goods made choices. The state that imports hundreds of fighters from Kata’ib Hezbollah because it fears its own security forces will defect is making choices right now. Sanctions create the terrain; the theocracy decides how to distribute the suffering.
“Any change will just be a pro-American dictatorship. Look at Syria. Look at Libya.”
The Syrian and Libyan uprisings began as genuine popular movements against brutal dictatorships. Assad’s decision to violently repress his own people militarised the conflict and invited intervention by regional powers. The lesson is not that people should accept dictatorship to avoid worse outcomes. The lesson is that without independent working-class organisation, revolutionary moments can be captured by better-organised forces: including Islamist militias, foreign powers, or domestic elites.
Iranian workers know this history. That is precisely why they are building shoras, coordination councils, independent unions. The 1979 revolution’s workers’ councils were crushed by the theocracy precisely because the left subordinated workers’ demands to “anti-imperialist unity” with Khomeini. They are not making that mistake again.
“Israel is agitating these protests. Mossad is in the streets.”
Israel will encourage anything that weakens its enemies. The Kaiser armed Irish republicans. The French monarchy bankrolled American independence. In a world of inter-imperialist rivalry, every struggle against one power will be opportunistically supported by its rivals. This does not determine whether the struggle is legitimate.
The question is simple: who is killing whom? The regime has imported foreign fighters. Security forces with shotguns raided Ilam Hospital to drag wounded protesters from their beds. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch describe “largely peaceful” crowds facing live ammunition. The dominant pattern in credible reporting is state forces using heavy weapons against unarmed or minimally equipped demonstrators. If Mossad has provided any arms, there is no confirmed independent evidence of protesters using them systematically. The violence is coming from the state.
When any regime insists on slaughtering civilians, those civilians have the right to armed self-defence. That is not a controversial position. It is elementary.
The Solidarity Infrastructure That Already Exists
British socialists do not need to invent solidarity mechanisms. They exist.
CODIR (Committee for Defence of Iranian Peoples Rights, at codir.net) has operated for decades, building direct links between British trade unions and Iranian labour organisations. Their 2026 work programme focuses on promoting motions within unions like UNISON and RMT, facilitating exchanges between British and Iranian youth movements, and amplifying voices of clandestine organisations while opposing foreign military intervention. Their position: “the future of Iran is for the people of Iran to decide.”
The ESSF Asia 2026 Solidarity Fund channels material support directly to activists facing hyperinflation and repression. Donations go through PayPal (contact@europe-solidaire.org) or HelloAsso. It is volunteer-run with no administrative overhead. Twenty euros covers a month’s transport for a community organiser. One hundred euros provides emergency relief for a displaced family.
The Fourth International Executive Bureau issued a resolution on 6 January: “Against the theocratic and authoritarian regime in Iran and imperialist interference.” It calls for solidarity that “concretely supports the power of self-emancipation” and the “autonomous organisation” of workers and national minorities. It rejects “regime change” plans from Trump and Netanyahu as attempts to impose “a solution from above” replacing one despotism with another.
People Not Profit’s Richard Boyd-Barrett TD, speaking at the Irish parliament, put it plainly: “The brutal repression of protests in Iran must be utterly condemned. Protesters are being killed in the thousands, detained, and silenced as the regime responds with extreme violence to anger driven by worsening material conditions and deep, long-standing grievances. The Iranian working class, women, and oppressed minorities are suffering profoundly under a repressive state.”
Concrete Actions You Can Take Right Now
Go to the Iranian Embassy or Consulate. Demonstrations at the London embassy have become daily. On 10 January, a protester climbed the balcony to replace the regime’s flag with the pre-1979 lion-and-sun emblem. On 11 January, thousands marched from the embassy to Downing Street. Physical solidarity matters: it signals the world is watching.
Pass a union motion. Model resolutions exist through CODIR and Labour Start. A branch motion costs nothing but time; it commits your union to solidarity, creates pressure on national bodies, and signals to Iranian workers they are not alone.
Donate to the ESSF fund. PayPal to contact@europe-solidaire.org. Specify “Iran.” Even small amounts matter when the rial has collapsed and activists cannot access international banking.
Join the Tuesdays against Execution campaign. For 102 consecutive weeks, prisoners across 55 Iranian institutions have conducted weekly hunger strikes protesting capital punishment. A five-day sit-in at the UN in Geneva (10-14 January) received messages smuggled from death row. Tuesday is the day preceding transfers to solitary confinement for execution. The campaign makes the regime’s killing visible.
Demand humane asylum policy and oppose sanctions. Early Day Motions in the Commons have expressed support for the Iranian people's struggle. Push your MP to sign. Demand safe legal routes for activists fleeing repression rather than treating them as security threats. And while supporting the uprising, oppose the Western sanctions regime that punishes ordinary Iranians for their rulers' actions: genuine solidarity means rejecting both the theocracy's repression and the imperial economic warfare that compounds the suffering.
IRGC proscription is a distraction
Some voices in Parliament and the liberal press are demanding the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps be designated a terrorist organisation. This is a distraction. The IRGC is already subject to extensive sanctions; proscription would add little practical pressure while placing unwarranted confidence in the British state as an instrument of liberation. More fundamentally, no Iranian workers' organisation is raising this demand. The Coordination Councils, the Vahed Syndicate, Haft Tappeh: none of them are asking Western governments to add legal designations. They are asking for material solidarity, for their strikes to be supported, for their prisoners to be remembered. We should be listening to them. The emancipation of Iranian workers will come through their own organisation and struggle, not through the Home Office.
The Stakes
Marx supported the Indian Revolt. He did not argue that Indians needed to wait for British workers to defeat imperialism for them. The idea that Iranian workers must tolerate their oppression until some external force “weakens the imperialist core” is substitutionism dressed in anti-imperialist clothing. It treats the Iranian working class as pawns in a geopolitical game rather than actors capable of building their own power.
The “liberation by stages” argument: that struggle against imperialism must come first, that domestic democratic demands are secondary: is a betrayal with theoretical footnotes. It answers the question “What should Iranian socialists do right now?” with paralysis. Oppose the protests? Join them while somehow not “serving imperialism”? Wait? The analysis offers no programme because it has no faith in the working class.
The Islamic Republic is brittle. The 12-day war with Israel, the economic collapse, the defection of the bazaar: the regime faces pressure on every front. The blackout’s eighth day indicates their fear. They cannot crush decentralised, floating tactics: blocked dispatch routes, defended hospitals, coordinated strikes. So they kill in darkness and hope the world forgets.
The over 3,400 confirmed dead are not a statistic. They are workers, students, nurses, teachers. They died because they believed a better Iran was possible and acted on that belief.
The Fourth International’s 6 January resolution gets it right: solidarity means “concretely supporting the power of self-emancipation.” Not defending the theocracy against Western criticism. Not waiting for favourable geopolitics. Not treating Iranian workers as extras in someone else’s drama.
The infrastructure exists. The demands are clear. The workers are fighting and dying. The only question is whether the British left will act: or whether it will, once again, discover that opposing imperialism required abandoning the people imperialism claims to help.
[The Indian section of the Fourth International has published this statement.] Solidarity with the Iranian Protesters
Resist Regime Change Attempts in Iran by US-EU-Israel
Radical Socialist stands in solidarity with the mass uprising in Iran against brutal state repression, and deteriorating national economic conditions triggered by the collapse of Iran’s official currency and skyrocketing inflation. The ongoing wave of protests began on 28th December 2025 in the Grand Bazaar within Tehran, and soon spread outside the national capital to all the total 31 provinces across Iran. Contrary to the disinformation propagated by Western media and Iranian state agencies, the protesters primarily comprise of ordinary Iranian citizens who are left battered by the soaring costs of basic necessities like food and medicines, unemployment, rampant corruption, and glaring economic inequality.
It is beyond any shade of doubt that the current turmoil in Iran is predominantly fuelled by prolonged economic sanctions imposed by the West, and is exploited by opportunist forces such as the CIA and Mossad with the express aim of toppling the ruling Iranian government. However, it would be a mistake to characterize the popular unrest as wholly manufactured through foreign intervention. Such dismissals vastly undermine the genuine grievances of the Iranian people, as well as provide justification for the Islamic Republic’s violent crackdown on the protests which have now entered in their third week.
The current protests come in the wake of the series of nationwide uprisings that have gripped Iran since 2017, with the last major revolt occurring in 2022 after the execution of 22 year old Kurdish woman Mahsa Amini which triggered massive public backlash and gave rise to the ‘Woman, Life, Liberation’ movement, one of the largest social movements in Iran’s recent history. These periodic eruptions reflect deeper crises stemming from Western sanctions as well as the Iranian government’s corrupt and repressive policies, including the imposition of austerity measures, reductions in workers’ wages, and crackdowns on dissent, while nearly one-third of the country’s total wealth remains concentrated in the hands of wealthy oil tycoons and oligarchs. Iran also has the lowest minimum wage in the MENA region, and nearly 70% of the population lives below poverty line.
The depreciation of the Rial, Iran’s official currency, by approximately 84% in the aftermath of the 12-day war with Israel in June 2025 has further weakened Iran’s fledging economy, and accelerated the pauperization of the middle classes. As of December 2025, inflation had reached an alarming 42.2%, with food prices increasing by 72% and medicine costs rising by 50% over the previous year. The recent economic reforms introduced by Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian have done little to curb corruption such as the manipulation of the multiple exchange rate system by its privileged clients, and signal general unwillingness by the government to deviate from the status quo. The erosion of popular support for the Islamic Republic is indicated by the fact that the ongoing protests were initiated by the merchant classes or the bazaaris that historically formed the support base of the clerical regime.
As the mass protests enter third week, the mobilization is no longer confined to small traders and merchants. Similar to the 2022 uprising, large numbers of women, youth, students, trade unions, and members of the working class have joined the protests, demanding an end to their prolonged economic misery and oppression. The Iranian regime has responded with violent crackdowns on the demonstrations, involving indiscriminate firing, arbitrary arrests, shutting down of offices and universities, an indefinite internet and communication blackout, threats of execution, and judicial reprisals. Although official figures remain unverified, the U.S.-based watchdog Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA) estimates that more than 2,500 people were killed during the protests, with approximately 18,000 detained by Iranian security forces. The Iranian State Media has also begun broadcasting the pictures of those killed in the protests to deter ordinary citizens from joining the demonstrations.
The Islamic Republic justified its excesses by labelling the protesters as terrorists or CIA-Mossad agents instigating regime change. Provocative statements by Trump, and several other US and Israeli politicians have also given credence to the claims of foreign involvement in fueling the unrest. Diasporic elites and monarchists in Iran’s opposition are openly calling for US intervention to overthrow the theocracy and reinstate Pahlavi dynasty, a prospect that has been rejected even by Trump. On the other hand, many on the Left view Iran as an anti-imperialist force that is ravaged by years of economic isolation imposed by the West. This has led them to either support the Iranian state narrative or downplay the genuine public anger against the government. Reticence towards Iranian resistance by sections of Left has only sharpened in the aftermath of the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza by Israel, the US attack on Venezuela, and Trump’s threats of regime changes in Latin America and annexation of Greenland. Some commentators now argue that Iran should revise its defence doctrine, and pursue nuclear weapons as a deterrent against possible U.S. and Israeli bombing. The right of the Iranians to choose their own government appears mostly as a postscript or is entirely dismissed because ‘the time is not right’. This is the same logic used by the Iranian state to routinely suppress the labour movement, which involves amplifying external threats, and forging a spurious narrative of national unity between the workers and the ruling classes.
We would like to reiterate that the democratic aspirations of the Iranian people cannot be dismissed as secondary to geopolitical considerations. The economic hardships of ordinary Iranians are only going to increase with Trump’s imposition of 25% tariff on countries with commercial ties with Iran. India has immediately kowtowed to the US, and has stalled the exports of rice to Iran. India is Iran’s biggest exporter of rice, and this latest move will surely exacerbate food inflation in Iran. In such a scenario, public resentment toward the Iranian government is unlikely to abate anytime soon, notwithstanding the Islamic Republic’s attempts to crush the uprising through brutal repression. Ordinary Iranians have vehemently rejected foreign intervention and any top-down regime change, while simultaneously opposing the rule of the Islamic Republic as articulated in the now popular slogan “Death to the Dictator.” This sentiment is also reflected in recent statement released by the ‘Workers’ Union of Tehran and Suburbs Company’ which states;
‘…the path to the liberation of workers and toilers does not lie in the path of a leader carved from above the people, nor in reliance on foreign powers, nor through factions within the government. Rather, it lies in the path of unity, solidarity, and the creation of independent organizations in the workplace and on a national level.’
Only the Iranian people have the right to choose their government. Supporting their rights does not amount to endorsing the imperialist project of destabilizing Iran. We urge progressive and democratic-leaning people everywhere to fight the unjust economic sanctions imposed by the West on Iran and to extend their solidarity to the Iranian masses in their struggle for freedom and change.
Radical Socialist 16/01/2026