Since at least 2017, Iranian society has entered a cycle of nationwide protests and popular uprisings driven by multiple, overlapping political, economic, social, and cultural crises. The theocratic capitalist order that rules the country has long pursued accumulation-centered policies whose concrete outcome has been the deepening of poverty and deprivation for the majority, alongside the enrichment of a small ruling minority and its allied classes.
With each successive protest cycle, the accumulation of economic, social, and environmental crises has widened the social base of dissent. In parallel, the expanding scale and intensity of repression have pushed diverse segments of society toward exhaustion and social breakdown, deepening alienation from the state. As horizons of improvement have narrowed, each new wave of protest has become broader, more enraged, and more lethal than the last, measured in the numbers killed, injured, imprisoned, condemned, and executed, and in the scale of bereavement carried by families and communities.
Moreover, due to the position of the Islamic Republic within the international order, particularly Iran’s geopolitical weakening and that of the so-called “Axis of Resistance” after 7 October, as well as the Israeli and U.S. attacks on nuclear facilities and IRGC commanders in June 2025, social struggles in Iran are now, more than ever, exposed on the one hand to the brutal repression of the Islamic Republic and, on the other, to appropriation by imperialist forces and Iran’s far-right opposition, led by monarchist currents. It is under these conditions that the December 2025–January 2026 protests in Iran entered a new phase of confrontation with the Islamic Republic.
The policies of price liberalization, subsidy removal, and currency adjustment implemented in recent years have constituted the Iranian–Islamic version of austerity, repackaged under the rubric of “economic structural reforms.” In December 2025, these policies led to a sharp collapse in the value of the rial and a dramatic rise in the cost of living for millions of Iranians.
In response to currency fluctuations, Tehran’s bazaar merchants initially launched protests from the mobile phone arcades, which soon spread into street demonstrations in other parts of the city and subsequently to cities across Iran. It is important to note that although large segments of the bazaar joined the strike in the following days, the social force that transformed the bazaar strike into street protest consisted predominantly of shop assistants, precariously employed workers active within the bazaar such as porters, street vendors, and motorcycle couriers, as well as small-scale petty traders.
With the participation of universities and the country’s most impoverished cities, the protests assumed a nationwide character in the final days of December and the first days of January 2026. The class significance of this nationwide expansion lay in the mass entry into the streets of broad layers of the precarious proletariat, the urban poor, and the lower strata of the urban middle class, groups that had been rendered increasingly impoverished by the combined effects of imperialist sanctions and the Islamic Republic’s neoliberal policies.
In this context, a call issued by Reza Pahlavi, the son of Iran’s deposed shah, who in recent years has consistently sought to present himself as the principal alternative for a post–Islamic Republic era, significantly swelled the numbers of people in the streets on 8 and 9 January. This mobilization was facilitated by decades of propaganda from Persian-language mainstream opposition media. During this phase of the protests, the dominant street slogans, alongside the familiar “Death to the Dictator” and “Death to Khamenei,” included chants in support of the return of the Pahlavi dynasty to Iran.
A slogan such as “This is the final battle, Pahlavi will return” became the defining chant of this phase of the protests. In the days that followed, a group of journalists and independent researchers claimed that, after reviewing 4,500 videos, pro-Pahlavi slogans could be heard in only 17 percent of them. They argued that Persian-language mainstream media abroad had deliberately exaggerated the prevalence of these chants. The crucial point, however, was that beyond general protest slogans, almost no affirmative slogans were articulated that clearly distinguished themselves from the pro-Pahlavi current. Where such slogans did exist, they were so marginal that they did not alter the overall political equation.
The Islamic Republic government, which in the early days had retreated in response to the bazaar strike and, in a rare move, replaced the governor of the Central Bank of Iran, ultimately responded to the militancy of the lower classes shaped by earlier, abortive uprisings, and the massive presence of the population in the streets with a massacre. Security forces, led by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the Basij, and anti-riot police units, unleashed an unprecedented level of violence against the protesters.
With the nationwide shutdown of the internet and both landline and mobile telephone networks on 8 and 9 January, protesters in Iran were subjected to a level of systematic massacre for which there are few precedents in Iran’s contemporary history. The Islamic Republic has officially announced the death toll as 3,117, while HRANA, a human rights organization, reports that it has verified the identities of more than 6,900 killed. Other sources, without providing confirmed names, speak of figures reaching into the tens of thousands.
The justification offered by the regime’s executioners was the alleged presence of “terrorists” and “Mossad agents” among the protesters, claims that were not only echoed by certain Israeli and American social media accounts, but also reinforced when Mike Pompeo, the former U.S. Secretary of State, posted on X a New Year’s message congratulating “the people of Iran” and “every Mossad agent walking alongside them.” This allegation alone was sufficient for the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic to authorize the savage mass killing of protesters.
Images from the Kahrizak morgue in Tehran circulate widely. Footage shows unarmed civilians cut down by live ammunition. Hundreds of children have been killed. Executions are carried out at close range. Wounded protesters are abducted from hospitals and later executed. Skulls are shattered. Brains and body parts are torn apart.
Families are extorted for exorbitant “bullet fees,” sometimes amounting to hundreds of millions of tomans, in exchange for the return of their children’s bodies. They are coerced into forced interviews denouncing the protests and pressured to forgo mourning ceremonies. Mass arrests follow. Detainees are subjected to systematic sexual violence, particularly women. Torture and forced confessions are routine. Many arrested individuals simply disappear. Taken together, these facts point to a single, unavoidable conclusion: the Islamic Republic has waged a systematic war against its own protesting population, more openly and brutally than ever before.
As a result of this massacre, Iranian society has been plunged into profound mourning, terror, despair, and helplessness. Yet the question remains: were “Mossad agents” in fact present in Iran, and did they play any role in the protests of December 2025–January 2026? During the twelve-day war between Israel and Iran in June 2025 and in its aftermath, the Iranian government arrested nearly 2,500 individuals on charges of being “Mossad spies” or “Israeli collaborators.” Some of these individuals were executed in the months that followed, while the names and fate of many others remain unknown.
Examining the trajectories of some of these so-called “Iranian Mossad agents” clearly exposes the nature of the regime’s claims regarding these detainees, as well as the shared narrative advanced by the Islamic Republic, Israel, and Israel’s international supporters concerning the alleged presence of “Mossad agents” in Iran’s recent protests. Some of these individuals, even if one were to provisionally accept the regime’s typically exaggerated assertions, were people who, in exchange for a small sum of money, had transported a military component across unofficial border crossings or taken photographs of a location, without necessarily knowing that they were acting on behalf of Israel, or even caring who their employer was.
In reality, Iranian society is trapped in such extreme poverty that these low-cost operations are feasible not only for Israel but for almost any external actor. Widespread destitution makes infiltration cheap and easy. At the same time, the Iranian government arrested large numbers of Kurdish kolbars, impoverished Baluch citizens, Afghan migrant workers, and others on accusations of being “Mossad spies.” Some were executed. Yet the state has never explained how Israel obtained the intelligence that allowed it, on the very first night of the attack, to assassinate senior military commanders and nuclear scientists in their own bedrooms. This was highly sensitive information. None of those detained or executed could possibly have possessed it.
Therefore, while it is plausible to assume that during the most recent wave of protests Israel may have had certain channels for obtaining direct information or intervening in unfolding events, it must be emphasized that the claim, advanced jointly by the Islamic Republic and Israel regarding the effective presence of “Mossad agents” inside Iran is a grossly exaggerated one, promoted by both sides in accordance with their own criminal interests. This is evident from the hundreds of televised confessions broadcast by the Islamic Republic’s security agencies from detainees arrested during the January protests, in which only a very small number confess to having had contact with Israeli intelligence officers, confessions that are transparently extracted under severe and inhumane torture and that provide no meaningful account of how events actually unfolded.
There is no doubt that primary responsibility for the massacre of the people lies with the Islamic Republic, its Supreme Leader, and its repressive apparatus, including the IRGC and related forces. At the same time, however, the dominant force within the Islamic Republic’s opposition, namely the regime-change camp led by monarchist currents and Reza Pahlavi himself must be regarded as secondary perpetrators of the January killings, due to their overt collaboration with imperialist states.
Since at least the 2022 Woman, Life, Freedom uprising, Reza Pahlavi has successfully consolidated his name abroad primarily through American and Israeli propaganda, presenting himself as the sole alternative to the Islamic Republic. Sustained media campaigns have provided him with a veneer of legitimacy, reinforced by the publication of an “emergency handbook” for a supposed transitional period. He now claims leadership of what he calls the “Iranian National Revolution,” also branded the “Lion and Sun Revolution”, a reference to the pre-1979 national emblem.
Pahlavi’s call for mass street mobilization on 8 and 9 January 2026, followed by appeals to seize government buildings and confront the forces of repression, was issued to a society that may have been subjectively ready but objectively lacked the organizational capacity for a direct assault on the state. In practice, these calls achieved nothing except exposing an unarmed population to the bloodiest state massacre in Iran’s contemporary history.
Pahlavi’s propaganda, claiming that more than 50,000 military personnel and state employees had “defected” to the monarchist camp over the past two years, combined with his reliance on Donald Trump’s promises of military intervention if the Islamic Republic “massacred protesters,” fostered dangerous illusions among broad layers of society. These illusions included the belief that security forces would hesitate to repress (based on Pahlavi’s fabrications) and that external intervention was imminent, reinforced by Trump’s social-media statements and U.S. military posturing in the region and the Gulf of Oman. As a result, many people entered the streets with a false sense of security, in some cases even mobilizing entire families.
The insistence, amplified by Persian-language mainstream media and their social media affiliates that “this is the final battle” echoed earlier reactions during the September 2022 protests, when the same outlets proclaimed that “the Islamic Republic has fallen,” that “Iranian officials are fleeing the country,” and that “the security forces have refused orders to repress.” These were lies that the regime-change opposition led by the monarchists repeated on an even wider scale this time, lies for which they now refuse to take responsibility.
What lessons, then, should revolutionary left forces draw from the bloodshed of January 2026?
Until this latest uprising, Iran’s protest waves had largely taken the form of “leaderless movements.” Neither the working-class and subaltern mobilizations of December 2017 and November 2019, nor the Woman, Life, Freedom uprising of September 2022, despite the dominance of the middle classes, coalesced, except in limited local or regional cases, around a single political figure or current. The December 2025–January 2026 protests marked a decisive rupture with this pattern.
For the first time, a central political figure (Reza Pahlavi) was able, through direct calls for mobilization, to draw large protesters into the streets on 8 and 9 January under slogans largely aligned with his own political current. In the aftermath, the unprecedented massacre carried out by the Islamic Republic’s repressive apparatus was converted into symbolic capital for his movement. By appealing openly to imperialist powers and cultivating expectations of external intervention, this current recast popular resistance to the Islamic Republic into a form of “political leverage” for externally mediated regime change.
We are no longer confronting a “leaderless movement.” We are confronting a fascistic mode of political mobilization. Its leader is openly dependent on imperialist powers and now refers to himself as the “father of the Iranian nation.” Describing this trajectory as fascistic does not mean that protesters themselves are fascists. It means that the leadership driving the mobilization is. Reza Pahlavi and the current he represents draw on a monarchist social base inside and outside Iran. They are backed by war mongering and genocidal powers abroad and by mainstream Persian-language and international media. Together, they advance a political project aligned with imperialist interests.
This project aims to preserve existing economic policies in a post–Islamic Republic order, as stated explicitly in Pahlavi’s “emergency handbook.” It also poses a direct threat to any force that opposes monarchism or Pahlavi himself. This threat is openly articulated in monarchist slogans chanted abroad that call for the death of those deemed “corrupt,” explicitly targeting “mullahs, leftists, and Mojahedin” alike. The danger is no longer abstract. In recent weeks, monarchist groups have engaged in harassment, intimidation, and physical attacks against other anti–Islamic Republic currents at Iranian diaspora demonstrations.
It is for this reason that we previously wrote the following in another text:
“Today we are confronted with a qualitatively different situation, one in which the revived class ideology of the middle-class, which played a hegemonic role in the ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ uprising, has now come to serve right-wing and authoritarian horizons more directly. A discourse whose regime-change perspective has increasingly tied itself to a pro-Western project has, in practice, strengthened the ideological conditions for the fascistic emergence of the current protests.”
Under these conditions, the revolutionary left must be able to devise ways to rescue popular struggles from being encircled by internal executioners (the Islamic Republic) and by imperialist forces and their local proxies (the Iranian monarchists). Neither the sanctification of the street protests, an uncritical celebration of nationwide uprisings without regard to the qualitative balance of forces within the opposition, nor submission to analyses that reduce organic popular protests to conspiracies orchestrated by Mossad agents or foreign powers bears any real relation to the present conjuncture.
Revolutionary left forces must show how the people are caught between internal reaction and external imperialism. They must explain how the despair produced by the largest state massacre in Iran’s contemporary history, within the span of just two days, pushed sections of society toward the acceptance of imperialist agendas. Under conditions of collective mourning and grief, rebuilding the capacity for social confrontation has only one possible path. It requires opening, even in minimal form, spaces for collective resistance against the post-massacre order and against the looming threat of an external war.
At a moment when the Islamic Republic has closed off nearly all avenues of struggle inside the country, and when monarchists abroad brand every alternative to foreign military intervention as a “betrayal of the Lion and Sun Revolution”; when dominant common sense has turned openly hostile to leftist politics; and when a fascistic monarchist current already promises the future elimination of its political opponents in a “post–regime change” Iran, the urgency of building open and semi-clandestine forms of organization capable of advancing class struggle has never been greater.
As we have argued in earlier texts, the principal tasks of the revolutionary left, in our view, are as follows:
The first task is to reclaim the political horizon of the protests from fascistic and pro-capital currents. Confronting the far right cannot be achieved through antifascist discourse alone, since we are facing organized, on-the-ground political projects. An effective response is possible only through the organization of social resistance and by linking subsistence-based anger to a conscious struggle against the mechanisms of exploitation, privatization, and the devaluation of labor power, not through illusions of managerial reform or the mere replacement of the political regime.
The second task is the creation and strengthening of mediating structures and class-based forms of organization. In conditions where the left lacks direct links to the masses, social resistance can be organized only through nuclei, committees, local formations, and existing sectoral struggles. These struggles must be elevated from the corporatist level to the class level; otherwise, they remain vulnerable to infiltration and appropriation by the right and by fascism. Organizing the poor, the unemployed, and precarious workers within small and clandestine structures is a prerequisite for sustaining struggle and preventing post-uprising collapse.
The third task is a return to suspended and abandoned agendas. The experience of the popular uprisings in 2017 already pointed to the growing predominance of a class-based approach to politics in Iran. During those years, workers resisting privatization and unpaid wages managed, in some factories, to revive the idea of workers’ council management of production through their trade unions, shaking both the state and factory owners. Although these experiences ultimately ended with severe repression, arrests of protesting workers, and the detention of labor leaders, their memory has remained alive in the consciousness of sections of the Iranian working class. Today, under conditions in which hegemonic discourse in society, shaped by the repression of proletarian class politics, has effectively shifted toward a middle- and upper-class narrative centered on “political freedom through regime change and foreign intervention,” the organizational task of the revolutionary left is to actualize the latent potentials within the Iranian working class that understand agency for change as emerging from the organized struggles of workers themselves. To achieve this, returning to the language of class struggle and transforming that language into concrete organizational agendas among revolutionary left forces is only possible through a critical reassessment of past mistakes aimed at recovering a proletarian horizon. This brings us to the fourth task.
Under current conditions, following the massacre and brutal killing of protesters by the Islamic government in January, and at a time when grief and mourning have effectively suspended everyday life for many people in Iran, revolutionary left forces must seek to connect with and organize those segments of protesters who sympathize with the class content of the protests. This includes those who have grown hesitant in response to the fascistic turn, as well as radicalized poor whose anger sometimes takes the form of slogans that contradict their own class interests. This work cannot be postponed to some future moment. It must proceed now, recognizing class rage while confronting the danger of fascism through concrete forms of organization.
The material implication of these recommendations, under conditions in which protests have subsided following a massive massacre, is that the revolutionary left in Iran must either return to its own class or lose any political meaning in Iran for decades to come. The left must be able, through organized, organic, effective, and real forms of engagement, to establish living connections with all segments of the working class and the urban poor, and to be present within the everyday metabolism of their class lives.
We know this task is far from easy. Only weeks ago, large segments of this class were chanting the name of their own class enemy (Pahlavi) in the streets, amid a bloody confrontation with the forces of repression. Many may still see that same enemy as their only path to salvation. For this reason, the left must intervene directly in the everyday struggles of the class and help organize them. Only through this presence can anti-capitalist horizons emerge from within class struggle itself, horizons that leave no space for compromise with, or absorption into, right-wing and fascistic currents. This task is difficult, but there is no alternative.
In this context, our relationship with the internationalist left is complex and entails a shared, two-sided responsibility. On the one hand, we recognize the legitimacy of internationalist skepticism. It is shaped by the rise of fascistic currents in the Iranian diaspora; the display of Israeli and U.S. flags at many demonstrations; the reliance of large sections of both monarchist and non-monarchist opposition on imperialist states and institutions; and their calls for military intervention and the bombing of Iran. It is reinforced, moreover, by the marginal position of left and progressive forces within the diaspora itself. Under these conditions, it is understandable that many on the internationalist left keep their distance from events in Iran and approach them with suspicion. We share this skepticism.
At the same time, we know there is no alternative but to follow Antonio Gramsci’s injunction: pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will. For this reason, we expect internationalist left forces to ensure that their justified skepticism does not turn into a defense of the Islamic Republic.
This is not only because the Islamic Republic is a criminal regime that, over the past eight years alone, has massacred thousands of militant workers and members of other social strata in the streets and prisons. It is also because its rule rests on the suppression of an emancipatory revolution, during which thousands of communists and revolutionary Muslim leftists were executed, and all left parties, organizations, workers’ and popular councils, unions, and revolutionary collectives were destroyed.
It is further because the regime, through structures of national, sexual, and gender oppression, has stripped millions of the very possibility of life and pushed their existence toward ruin. Finally, despite its conflicts with Western imperialist powers, the Islamic Republic’s economic policies for at least three decades have closely followed the prescriptions of imperialist institutions such as the IMF, the World Bank, and the WTO, and have repeatedly been praised by them. The result has been the imposition of some of the most brutal neoliberal policies on the working class and the poor. This alone should be a decisive criterion for revolutionary leftists and communists.
Campist currents, some of which also exist in Iranian variants, habitually operate within geopolitical fault lines and, by abandoning class struggle, devolve into a “left without a class.” In practice, they become little more than an anti-class propaganda apparatus for capitalist states. They are enemies of the working class who wear red masks, yet show no concern for the daily massacre of millions of workers who can no longer afford even the most basic food and who are forced to accept death as an ordinary outcome when they fall ill. We therefore have nothing to say to this strand of the left. We regard it as part of the camp of the class enemy and as an accomplice of capitalism and imperialism.
Our address is instead to that part of the left that has not abandoned its class foundations, yet follows events in Iran with anxiety and skepticism. We, as the Iranian left, have a responsibility here. We must turn sporadic and accidental contacts with this current into systematic and organized relations. These must be comradely ties within a shared field of struggle, not hollow or performative gestures of solidarity.
At the same time, we expect the internationalist left to understand the stakes. Turning away from the struggles of Iran’s oppressed masses weakens the left inside Iran. Failing to build real solidarity, through political positions or material and logistical support, does real damage. It feeds fascist propaganda that brands the left as “allies” of the regime. And it ultimately clears the ground for deeper class oppression of the working class, whether by the Islamic Republic or by its possible successors.
This is a grave, two-sided, and urgent responsibility. It leads through a difficult and uneven terrain. Yet the work of opening these pathways cannot be postponed. It must be placed on the agenda today; here and now.
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