“The most recent protests were initially triggered by the dramatic collapse of Iran’s national currency and the severe deterioration of living conditions. The rapid devaluation of the rial, combined with soaring inflation and widespread poverty, has pushed large segments of the population beyond economic survival. These conditions have led many to conclude that the crisis is not temporary or reformable, but structural and inseparable from the existing system of power”
“the current situation in Iran represents far more than a spontaneous outbreak of unrest. It signals a profound crisis of legitimacy, the collapse of public trust in governing institutions, and a critical phase in the confrontation between society and the ruling order”
“The crisis of social reproduction is the focal point of the current protests, and their ultimate horizon is the reclaiming of life”
“This uprising is the fifth wave in a chain of protests that began in December 2017 with the uprising known as the “Bread Revolt.” This continued with the bloody uprising of November 2019, an explosion of public rage against the fuel price hike and injustice. The 2021 revolt was known as the “uprising of the thirsty,” initiated and led by Arab ethnic minorities. This wave peaked with the “Woman, Life, Freedom” uprising in 2022, which brought women’s liberation struggles and the anti-colonial struggles of oppressed nations such as Kurds and Baluchis to the fore, opening new horizons. Today’s uprising centers the crisis of social reproduction once again—this time, on a more radical, post-war terrain. Protests that begin with livelihood demands, but with striking speed, target the structures of power and the corrupt ruling oligarchy”
“Those who come into the streets are tired of abstract, simplistic, patronizing analyses. They fight from within contradictions: they live under sanctions while simultaneously experiencing the plunder of a domestic oligarchy. They fear war, and they fear internal dictatorship. But they do not freeze in fear. They insist on being active subjects of their own destiny—and their horizon, at least since December 2017, is no longer reform, but the fall of the Islamic Republic”
“the revolt is being carried forward above all by the poor and dispossessed: youth, the unemployed, surplus populations, precarious workers, and students”
“the circuits through which revolt spreads—Bazaar, university, street”
“To cover the deficit produced by falling revenues and blocked returns, the state turns to subsidy removals and austerity. In this framework, the rial’s sudden fall becomes a fiscal tool: it forces “hostage” currency back into circulation on state terms and rapidly expands the government’s rial resources—since the state itself is among the largest holders of dollars. The result is direct extraction from the incomes of the lower and middle classes, and the transfer of profits from sanctions circumvention and currency rent to a narrow minority—deepening class division, livelihood instability, and social rage. In other words, the costs of sanctions are paid directly by the lower classes and the shrinking middle strata”
“The collapse of the national currency must therefore be understood as organized state plunder in a war-scarred, sanction-strangled economy: deliberate exchange-rate manipulation in favor of brokerage networks tied to the ruling oligarchy, in the service of a state that has turned neoliberal price liberalization into a sacred doctrine”
“Campist pseudo-leftists reduce the crisis to US sanctions and dollar hegemony, erasing the role of the ruling class of the Islamic Republic as active agents of dispossession and financialized accumulation. Right-wing campists, generally aligned with Western imperialism, blame only the Islamic Republic and treat the sanctions as irrelevant”
“Against both of them, we insist on recognizing the entanglement of global and local plunder and exploitation. Yes, sanctions devastate people’s lives—through medicine shortages, missing industrial parts, unemployment, and psychological erosion—but the burden is socialized onto the people, not onto the military-security oligarchy that amasses enormous wealth by controlling the informal circuits of currency and oil”
“populist mobilization staged as a “national revolution,” aimed at producing a homogeneous mass of atomized individuals through satellite television networks. Backed by Israel and Saudi Arabia, this project seeks to assemble a body whose “head”—the son of the deposed Shah—can later be inserted from outside, through foreign-backed intervention, and grafted onto it”
“internationalism means holding together the right of peoples to self-determination and the obligation to fight all forms of domination—internal and external alike. A real internationalist bloc must be built from lived experience, concrete solidarities, and independent capacities”
“During Israel-Iran escalation in 2025, an interesting detail to notice were the statements of Netanyahu and Trump on the intentional destabilization of Iran with the goal of regime change. It is a pretty standard approach of the USA towards “inconvenient” governments in the regions of their interests: clearing the path for more co-operative politicians, as they tried to do in Afghanistan”
“a puppet government installed by the USA, Israel, or anyone else won’t address the Kurdish question in Iran. Furthermore, addressing the Kurdish question in a neoliberal imperialist framework can’t provide a true solution for a multi-ethnic and multi-religious Middle East”
“Democratic confederalism, already being implemented in northeastern Syria by the Democratic Union Party (Partiya Yekîtiya Demokrat, PYD) and advocated by PJAK in Rojhilat, offers a much more promising option to bring peace”