Iranian oil workers on strike, October 2022
Masses Need Communist Revolution, Not “Regime Change”
October 23—Iranian schoolgirls are bravely protesting the fascist Islamic Republic regime. Viral videos show classrooms of them waving hijabs in the air, taking down pictures of Iran’s supreme leaders, and shouting anti-regime slogans.
When security forces raided one school on October 13, a group of girls refused orders to sing a pro-regime song. They were brutally beaten, and 16-year-old Asra Panahi died.
Courage is stronger than fear. The deaths of Panahi and two other schoolgirls have inspired more to join the protests. “We never knew we were so united,” one said, “across the Baloch regions as well as the Kurdish regions. This is no longer a protest – we are calling for a revolution.”
Generations have suffered from repression. They see the working masses struggling for survival, while things improve only for a handful of rulers.
The capitalist theocracy mandates the oppression of women. Its racism targets ethnic groups like the Kurds and Baluch.
Like all capitalist countries, it maintains wage slavery at all costs. The rulers’ attacks come from their fear of the masses who produce all the wealth that they steal.
Covid and the Ukraine war, along with the US-led sanctions, have made life miserable for the masses. College students especially face chronic unemployment. Mahsa Amini’s murder triggered a bomb waiting to explode.
The Iranian masses are fed up with the intense factional fight within the Iranian ruling class. This fight plays out in Iran’s relations to Syria, Turkey, the European Union, the UK, China, Russia, and the US. In Iran’s interior, it pits Islamic conservatives like Khamenei against liberal reformists like Khatami who proclaim political and social freedom to coopt the youth and prevent revolution. None of these capitalist rulers, including the liberal capitalists, represent the workers’ interests.
US imperialism sees this as another opportunity for regime change after two previous attempts failed. The CIA and British intelligence, alongside Soros and his Open Society, are working to divert genuine discontent into a force to install a pro-US regime.
“The Iranian masses need to reject factional fights as well as the imperialists (US, China, Russia),” says M, a Red Flag reader in Iran.
The masses need communist revolution, not a new set of capitalist exploiters.
D, another Red Flag reader in Iran, has not seen any oil workers at all the demonstrations he attends. However, many refinery workers have gone on strike. D says the movement will not go far unless the Iranian workers join it massively. He needs Red Flag in Farsi for oil workers he knows.
September 21, 2022. Protests rock the streets of every city in Iran.
An ICWP comrade in the US attended a Zoom forum supporting the Iran protests, posting Red Flag in the “chat.”
Someone denounced the Iranian mullahs as terrorists (which they are). The comrade commented that US imperialism is the biggest terrorist. That in Iran and everywhere what’s needed is not “regime change” but social revolution. Several people agreed that the US created the situation that allowed the mullahs to take power.
The US CIA and UK MI6 launched “Operation Ajax” in 1953 to overthrow the government of Iranian Prime Minister Mossadegh, restore the pro-Western Shah Reza Pahlavi to power, and stop the nationalization of Iran’s oil.
In 1979, oil and gas refinery strikes played a vital role in the overthrow of the hated Shah, which opened the doors to Khomeini’s Islamic Republic regime. This oil-rich region remains an area of struggle among imperialists (US, Russia, China, UK) for control of the petroleum wealth,
October 26, 2022 Protests on the 40th day after the death of Mahsa Amini
The pro-Soviet Tudeh party backed Khomeini, and today’ protesters are still angry. It followed the cynical Cold War calculations of the Soviet Union, which had already been capitalist for decades. The fight against Soviet and Chinese revisionism isn’t some obscure political quarrel. We can’t win communism without defeating it.
A friend in Iran reports that there are numerous clandestine organizations, all revisionist. The intense fascism will make it hard to build ICWP there. But comrades in India and elsewhere are learning and teaching how to do communist work in similar conditions.
A Red Flag reader from Tehran, now in Germany, attended a huge demonstration in Berlin supporting the Iranian protests. He thinks he can distribute Red Flag to Iranians and Germans. “Germany is ripe for revolution,” he says, “and without ICWP it will become fascist.”
Iranian Masses: Nothing in Common with Their Exploiters, Everything in Common with Workers Around the World
Real communists fight for real communism: A world where we labor to meet the needs of the masses without wages or markets. Where the workers will decide how to organize society. Where we erase all borders and the poisonous ideologies that divide us.
We can run society without any capitalist bosses. But they are organized. We must be organized.
We need a mass communist party, the ICWP, that knows no borders and fights for communism and nothing less.
Berlin, Germany: Protesters support uprising in Iran
For more information, read our article:
Iran: Global Protests Against Sexist Fascism
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