Class Composition and Horizon of the December 2025 Protests
1- With the intensification of the rial’s collapse and the unprecedented surge in the dollar rate, a wave of economic anxiety and rage formed among merchants and shopkeepers. From December 28, 2025, various markets in the capital from central passages and bazaars to the iron and furniture markets witnessed shop closures and protest gatherings by tradespeople. Their demands centered on stabilizing exchange rates, controlling inflation, ensuring economic predictability, and preventing losses from market fluctuations.
On December 7, the protests began in the Aladdin Shopping Center and Charsou Mall, immediately signaling that the urban petty bourgeoisie, alongside a contradictory mix of class forces framed under the title “bazaar merchant protests,” had entered the scene to express deep economic and political discontent.
Even from the very first moments of the protests, what was labeled “bazaar merchant protests” contained an internal contradictory composition. The participation of the lowest layers of shopkeepers, itself a clear sign that we are not dealing with a homogeneous entity called “the bazaar” was accompanied from the outset by the presence of other groups: formal and informal waged workers whose continuously declining purchasing power and lack of job security had driven them to protest; street vendors, porters, and service workers whose daily lives are below the poverty line; and sections of the small merchant middle class whose economic capacity has been severely eroded.
Thus, identifying the bazaar and urban petty bourgeoisie as the origin of the protests may seem immediately correct but is distant from the truth. In fact, even shop closures in many cases were imposed on merchants, and in some instances, breaking shop windows and threatening strike-breakers ensured compliance.
Tehran’s fruit and vegetable wholesale market, which on the morning of Thursday, January 1 2026, became a site of protests, is one such market. Spanning 270 hectares, with daily traffic of about 60,000 people and 20,000 vehicles, it by no means has a uniform class composition. In addition to merchants, workers, and employees present in this market, people unable to afford fruit from retailers flock here due to lower prices for fruits and vegetables.
Markets are now, for the working class, a direct confrontation with the value of their labor power commodity, a value that has been increasingly plundered through escalating exploitation. The market is an immediate, concrete measure for the working class to gauge and confront their misfortune.
Moreover, it must be emphasized that streets and commercially used spaces, due to their greater social role, were even focal points of protest during the November 2019 uprising, which bears the stamp of the destitution.
Is the class potential of these protests surprising? Not to us. The current crisis of the working class is a crisis of social reproduction and livelihood, which we can call a wage crisis. From a left perspective, fighting the shrinking livelihood basket is the fight against the reduction in the value of the labor power commodity or wages. In this way, protests against price hikes and inflation turn into wage and proletarian protests and should naturally open the horizon of negating exploitation to the class. A horizon that, given the weight of existing political forces and the absence of an organized revolutionary left, appears dim and dark.
The initial heterogeneity in the composition of protesters under the general label of bazaar tradespeople did not remain unchanged as the geography of protests expanded; rather, it converged in a specific direction. As protests spread from central Tehran Bazaar to other cities and social spaces, the weight of urban poor, the unemployed, and the precariat increased, and the initial contradictory composition gradually became more uniform around a clearer origin specifically, a proletarian one. In this sense, what initially appeared as an “urban petty bourgeois” or “bazaar tradespeople” protest revealed its class nature more clearly in the process of expansion, transcending its initial limited framing. The reality is that in the initial scene of the protests, multiple actual class identities were present, each carrying the potential capacity for independent orientation. This multiplicity, from the outset, placed different even contradictory possibilities before the protests. As the geography of protest expanded, the class origins of the protests became clearer. They were rooted in the urban poor, the unemployed, the precariat, and specific sections of the proletariat. They did not necessarily include the entire working class, especially its more stable segments. At the same time, the level of organization of political forces, rather than that of the protesters themselves, became evident. This showed that neither the urban petty bourgeoisie, despite its internal contradictions, nor even the protesters, were the key organized actors. Instead, it was certain factions of capital in Iran that possessed the readiness to project their own horizons of reproduction and revival into the protests and to advance them. Thus, the class potential of the December 2025 protests in itself tells us nothing about the class and political horizon ahead of the protesters; rather, based on the available evidence, it reveals a deadly contradiction between the class origin of the protesters and their political orientation.
Amid this, there was also an illusory hope, largely reproduced by leftists detached from class analysis. This perspective treated the orientation of the protests not as the outcome of conscious organization and planning, but as the product of the horizontal movement of forces and an assumed equivalence of contradictions. On this basis, it was believed that the subsequent expansion of the protests toward the urban poor, the marginalized, and the underclass, as well as the shift of protest geography toward smaller cities, what can be described as a geography of poverty, would automatically steer “potential independent orientations” in a progressive direction. As if the political orientation of the movement were a direct function of its geographical displacement.
In such a horizon, the assumption was strengthened that the multiplicity of forces and demands could be preserved without tension, and political rivalries and contradictions among opponents could be deferred to the vague “post-overthrow” future. As if the issue of political orientation is not a matter of the protests’ present but something postponable to an unknown future.
However, the orientation of protests is neither deferrable, spontaneous, nor a direct function of geographical shifts. No social movement even if carried on the shoulders of the urban poor and workers arrives at a progressive or emancipatory horizon by predetermination; political orientation requires conscious, organized, and mediatory intervention.
This is where we must candidly speak of the absence of essential political mediators, namely organized and militant revolutionary leftists and class-trade union struggles. In the current alignment of political forces, these forces have no effective presence as organizers, bearers of a program, or leading poles. Thus, not only can no organized left presence be found, but we are faced with the organized absence of the revolutionary left. As if all these years, especially after the slap that December 2017 uprising dealt with us all, the revolutionary left has above all been busy organizing its own absence. The conscious suspension of the issue of orientation and leaving the working class in a horizonless state has, of course, had specific prerequisites and consequences, which this section of the left has accepted and reproduced: on one hand, reliance on virtual alliances with forces lacking real organization; on the other, creating a democratic illusion of the revolutionary process and promoting an “everyone-together” logic that gathers a spectrum from left to far-right under a vague horizon. Within this framework, the abstract equation of gender-sexual and national oppressions with class antagonism without articulating their material and historical relation to the relations of production and reproduction of capital led to the class antagonism being emptied of its analytical and political position and practically sidelined. (The issue is not denying or downplaying these oppressions or prioritizing them, but the absence of that articulation that could frame struggles against gender-sexual and national oppressions as necessary and intrinsic moments of the class struggle, not as its abstract alternative or equivalent.)
This tendency was simultaneously strengthened by a conscious avoidance of vertical organization and submission to various horizontalist gatherings, and by promoting the idea of spontaneous transformations which was in fact the theoretical framing of the organizational vacuum and justification for not engaging in it, it solidified the existing political impasse. Meanwhile, forces that are now celebrating the paving of the way to fascism have been doing the work that the left has delicately handed over. As a result, the field has been ceded, at least for now, to forces seeking to bind the horizon of the protests to projects of capital revival and the reproduction of the dominant order. This has come at a bloody cost, one that the working class and the urban poor are now paying. Here, the revival of capitalism does not mean that capitalist tendencies within the Islamic Republic regime have been halted and are now being restarted by overthrowist right-wing factions. Rather, it refers to the intensification of internal crises within a capitalist order to the point where a change in the political regime becomes necessary to remove obstacles to its development and expansion.
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What confronts us is the necessity of moving from situational analysis and the reading of protests toward the articulation of a political line and the preparation of a program of action. Endless analysis, when it fails to move beyond description and culminate in political decision, itself becomes a form of suspension and passivity. At the same time, it must be stated explicitly that calls for “intervention” which do not clarify material possibilities, the balance of forces, and their concrete mediations amount, at best, to empty moral injunctions. In their more dangerous form when coupled with naïve optimism about the self-orientation of the protests, they effectively become recommendations to dissolve into dominant dynamics and to serve as foot soldiers for fascist and overthrowist projects. On this basis, several fundamental points must be stated explicitly and without equivocation:
1- The rage of the masses is legitimate, yet the threat of fascist ascendancy is both concrete and imminent. The rage stemming from livelihood collapse, wage crisis, job instability, and the masses’ inability to reproduce their individual and social life is the real, material rage of the working class and the urban poor. At the same time, however, it must be emphasized that the fear of fascism’s rise and capitalist revival projects is real. The distinction of the December 2025 protests from December 2017 and November 2019 uprisings lies precisely here: the indeterminacy of those uprisings, which held potential possibilities for organized political intervention to create a horizon and provide direction, in the absence of the revolutionary left, was consumed by various factions defending capital, and that horizon and direction took shape to an undeniable extent in the direction of fascism’s ascendancy, to the point where clear signs of a fascist emergence from within the protests can now be discerned. Ignoring this reality means ceding the field even more to forces seeking to channel the masses’ legitimate rage into the service of reproducing the existing order in new forms, above all a monarchical order.
In addition to the positive indeterminacy of the December 2017 and November 2019 uprisings, attention must be paid to the fact that that period coincided with the “fascist” current’s unreadiness for effective organization and intervention in the situation in its particular way. In other words, although the absence of an organized revolutionary left prevented framing a progressive horizon in those moments, the fascist current around Reza Pahlavi also lacked the necessary ideological cohesion, social networks, and hegemonic capacity for active seizure of the protests. Regarding the distinction of the December 2025 protests from the December 2017 and November 2019 uprisings, we must address their different social and political backgrounds. One key background for December 2017 was the ideological isolation of the middle class after disillusionment with Hassan Rouhani’s election. A class that, after the 2009 [Green Movement] suppression, pinned its hopes on a faction within the regime to achieve economic and political openings through integration with Western capital. This hope quickly collapsed, weakening the “gradual change” horizon of the middle class and tying it with the same integrationist orientation into Western capital to “overthrowism.” In that period, we witnessed a rise in workers’ struggles especially in Haft Tapeh and Ahvaz Steel which, despite all limitations, imposed elements of class politics on the public space, further weakening the middle-class model of change and finding echoes in other sections of society and the working class.
Today, we face a qualitatively different situation; one in which the revived class ideology of the middle class in the “Woman, Life, Freedom” uprising has gained a more hegemonic role and now directly serves right-wing and authoritarian horizons. A discourse that has increasingly tied its overthrowist horizon to a pro-Western project and, in practice, has strengthened the ideological ground necessary for the emergence of fascist tendencies within the current protests. The totality of these transformations explains why the December 2025 protests, unlike December 2017 and November 2019 uprisings, have not only formed in a politically indeterminate situation but in conditions where the fascist right has at its disposal an accumulation of experience, ideology, and organization, enabling it to actively enter the field to seize the protests’ horizon.
2– Initially, there was the assumption that signs of centrist fascism’s readiness to orient the current protests might hinder their expansion to peripheral regions. This assumption rested on the premise that the rise of centrist fascism as manifested in recent days through specific slogans and political maneuvers by right-wing forces lacks the capacity for hegemony in the periphery due to deep historical and social rifts, especially the lived experience and concrete understanding of national oppression among the masses. In other words, the intensity and reality of national oppression in such areas become a serious barrier to the masses’ direct linkage with centrist fascism.
However, signs indicate that the expansion of protests to these regions is not only likely but occurring. The issue, however, is that the centrist fascism’s inability to achieve hegemony in the periphery does not mean immunity from reactionary orientation. In conditions of severe weakness or absence of revolutionary left organization in these areas, the vacuum of political orientation can lead to the reproduction of local and peripheral reactionary forms; forms that rely on real oppressions and the lived experience of national discrimination but ultimately, by inverting the logic of the problem, serve to stabilize and reproduce capitalist relations instead of negating them. More precisely, the issue is not the “infiltration of centrist fascism” into the periphery, but the possibility of reactionary alternatives emerging that present themselves as responses to national oppression. In these regions, the historical experience of repression, discrimination, and national denial is a real barrier to centrist fascist hegemony; but this same reality, in the absence of class articulation and revolutionary left organization, can become the point of departure for reactionary politics that detach national oppression from its material base in capitalist relations and reduce it to an identity-based, authoritarian horizon ultimately compatible with capital reproduction. From this perspective, the danger ahead is the strengthening of tendencies in the periphery that, relying on real wounds, block the path to emancipation and sterilize the possibility of linking the struggle against national oppression with the class struggle.
3– Revolutionary organization must be commensurate with capital’s preparation for assault on the working class. Revolutionary organization is not an optional choice or theoretical preference but an essential response to the level of organized capital assault. Capital has been preparing for some time: from systematic propaganda against class struggle and the communist idea, to promoting neoliberal and fascist models like Javier Milei in Iran’s public space; from individualizing the causes of poverty and unemployment, to legitimizing the elimination of social supports, class repression, rampant privatization, and above all, widespread precarization in workplaces and living spaces that acts as a structural barrier to organizing the working class and the urban poor at work and their place of residence. Confronting this assault without conscious and revolutionary organization means certain retreat. The goal of this organization must be to shape a broad and militant social resistance that directly targets the mechanisms of exploitation, plunder, and capital reproduction.
4– Immediate social resistance does not form spontaneously and requires specific mediators. Social resistance is not the spontaneous product of rage but the result of organization and class-political mediation. One such mediator is trade-union struggle; a struggle that, if it remains merely trade-unionist, is easily contained, but if elevated to class struggle, can become the backbone of social resistance. Another mediator is organizing the urban poor, the unemployed, and the precariat into committees, secret cells, and other open and semi-clandestine organizational forms. Forms of organization that may emerge in the context of uprisings and mass protests but are not limited to those moments and must persist as durable structures of resistance.
Without such a political line and practical preparation for organization, the masses’ legitimate rage not only leads to nowhere emancipatory but can easily become raw material for projects whose horizon is nothing but capital revival and paving the way for fascism.
Urgent Tasks
Since December 2017, the question “What is to be done?” has persistently confronted us without us arriving in practice at answers commensurate with its weight. This time, without surrendering to the point of defeat, we must step the question back one notch and ask: “What should we have done?” Only through this critical rereading of our record can we seek real possibilities for the future. On this basis, we believe that at this particular moment, a set of urgent tasks confronts us; tasks that both recall our undone work and whose necessity today imposes itself more than ever. Tasks that can be framed as minimal possible interventions in the existing balance of forces. In four simultaneous but distinct levels, these tasks are: political-theoretical tasks, organizational tasks, practical-field tasks, and tasks related to the current protests.
1- Reclaiming the political horizon of the protests from fascist and pro-capital currents
Above all, we must debunk and dispel the pervasive myth that breaking the right’s hegemony can be achieved merely through producing anti-fascist discourses. In right-wing currents, we are not merely facing ideology to counter with ideological confrontation, dialogue, and democratic illusions like “let them be now because they represent part of society.” Rather, we specifically face targeted and organized projects on the ground aimed at dragging politics and society backward, a war against which is never achieved merely through media or discursive confrontation. Countering this organized current is only effective when linked to practical and field organization. That is, as previously stated, a broad, militant, and field-present “social resistance” must be formed against the right current. Rage against price hikes, inflation, and collapsing purchasing power must be linked to conscious struggle against the devaluation of labor power, elimination of contracting systems, and rollback of other exploitation and plunder mechanisms like privatization precisely the mechanisms causing this economic and social misery. This is done by highlighting the fact that the issue is not merely mismanagement or corruption, and that changing the political regime, without touching the foundational mechanisms of capital accumulation and exploitation, will never solve it. Rather, it is the logic of capital accumulation that, if left intact, will generate its political regime in any case. More precisely, a practical project must confront a practical project, and thus the issue is by no means merely an ideological confrontation and media dispute.
2- Creating and strengthening mediators, cells, and trade-union/class struggles for organizing social resistance
In the current situation, the revolutionary left lacks direct address to the masses, and organic, continuous connection with them is impossible for revolutionary left political forces for numerous reasons. Thus, shaping social resistance is only possible through mediators. Mediators can include organized cells and committees, trade-union struggles, and informal local formations capable of transforming the language of protests into tangible and effective political action, while making livelihood, wages, unemployment, precarity, and gender-sexual and national oppressions axes of working-class action. In conditions of absent nationwide organization, existing trade-union struggles, though scattered and limited are among the few real points of leverage. The urgent task of the revolutionary left is to elevate these struggles to the class level: linking trade-union demands to struggle against exploitation relations, creating connections among various labor sections, and preventing the isolation of any trade-union protest. At the same time, we must warn that these struggles face a serious danger if existing left tendencies fail to intervene in an organized manner and to raise them from the level of trade-union demands to that of class politics. Under such conditions, they risk right-wing and fascist infiltration and orientation, and may unwittingly be transformed into the “working-class and trade-union wing” of right-wing and fascist projects.
Simultaneously, organizing the urban poor, the unemployed, and the precariat into small, secret cells and committees in neighborhoods, workplaces, and shared living spaces is the minimal yet most essential form of organization. Although in moments of mass uprisings and protests, with temporary openings and intensified collective action, the possibility of forming these structures increases, their function is not limited to those protest moments; on the contrary, sustaining social resistance, preventing force dissipation after protest waves subside, and accumulating experience and class ties is practically impossible without such structures.
3- Returning to sidelined and silenced agendas
Part of the current situation is not merely the result of external repression or objective weakness in the balance of forces, but the consequence of the conscious suspension of agendas that act as knots of class politics but never became subjects of public discussion, organization, and action programs. A clear example is the production of texts that could have become tools for explaining the situation, political polarization, and orienting the struggle, but remained at the theoretical production level and did not enter the social field. This suspension, in the general sense, is the product of tendencies prevailing in the revolutionary left that avoid any class prioritization, polarization, and political decision-making; and in the specific sense, it stems from lack of programming, negligence, lethargy, and lack of an organizational approach to such texts. Texts that should have led to pursuing their organizational consequences through direct and targeted promotion and propaganda. We, as the revolutionary left in general and in the specific form of each organization, must accept responsibility for this situation.
In this regard, a noteworthy historical parallel with the revolutionary left’s experience in the 1979 Revolution exists: they too, despite recognizing the practical necessities of class struggle, did not pay sufficient necessary attention and action to the strategic issue of the councils and direct mass organization, and did not convert their theoretical assumptions into organizational strategies. This historical experience can be instructive for us, showing that neglect of key struggle knots even when theoretically clear has irreparable results. Likewise, after the “Jina” [2022] uprising, examining the conditions and actual/potential possibilities showed that many opportunities we could have preserved after December 2017 and November 2019 for creating organization, horizon, and political orientation have largely been lost. This reality reveals the necessity of returning from the period of revolutionary preparation to a period of revival and critical rereading of the revolutionary left’s record. We must not merely theoretically but in practice revive sidelined agendas and actual/potential capacities to enable regaining an effective role in the social and political scene and prevent repeating fatal errors; otherwise, the field will undoubtedly be ceded to fascist dominance.
4– Therefore, returning to the moment of the current protests, the most urgent current agenda is striving to connect and organize forces that empathize with the class content of the ongoing protests but, due to the fascist emergence within them, remain indecisive or avoid them; as well as the destitute who have nothing to lose and manifest in their radical protest form and uncompromising militancy against repressive forces, but due to the existing fascist emergence voice slogans contradictory to their class interests. These connection-makings must not be deferred to the day after the protests from an organizational outlook, but placed on the agenda today, with practical provisions provided for them. Practical provisions that both recognize this legitimate class rage and align with it, and embed the real fear of fascism’s ascendancy as an organizational operational agenda within those provisions, and in this sense do not succumb to the street. This, of course, is an agenda whose minutes and subtleties must be discussed within any organization, not in front of the eyes of strangers including security institutions and class enemies.
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