In Falaakhan issue 210 (in our Farsi publication of Slingers), in a piece defending teachers’ trade-union struggles, we spoke about the importance of these struggles. We explained that alongside the Islamic Republic’s relentless crackdown on these struggles, why and how the right-wing opposition also plays a role in discrediting trade-union struggles.
Today, in the conditions after December 2025- January 2026 protests, and in an atmosphere shaped by Israel and USA’s military aggression on Iran, we will once again stress in this text the strategic importance of trade-union struggles. We will look at the new tasks that this situation places on these struggles, and we will try to show the dangers that a new period of “regime-change” opposition poses to them.
To understand the new situation of trade-union struggles, we must first briefly look at the political and social conditions after December 2025- January 2026 protests. The war and its aftermath have largely delayed a clear assessment of the effects of the bloody crackdown on the December protests. They have also made it difficult to understand what sections of society opposed to the Islamic Republic have gone through since the killings. Still, accounts, reactions, and lived experiences in their aftermath point to a deepening sense of hopelessness and deadlock that had already existed for years. This is now mixed with shock, anger, and a profound sense of defeat. These feelings reflect the scale of the repression, the shock that such a massacre could take place, and the failure of promises of “regime change” to materialize.
Even, the results of the December killing have not pushed society down a single path. On one hand, the disappointment from the failure of the wide street protests, together with the failure of the military attack to bring about regime change, seems to have strengthened, in part of society, a tendency toward reformism and a wish to go back to the idea of limited, gradual change within the existing structure of government. (This tendency judges the costs of “regime change” to be heavy that it sees achieving it as practically impossible, or at least without any realistic prospect, and views gradual change as the only possible way forward.) On the other hand, the bloody event of December has, in a way, formed or greatly widened a stream of opponents of the government who reject any compromise. Although the growth of this current at the social level goes back years at least to December 2017, it has grown much sharper since December 2025.
Although within itself this current holds conflicting accounts, understandings, and even visions, it presents itself as uncompromising toward the ruling political system. However, this refusal to compromise does not necessarily apply to all parts of this current in the same way or at every level. Among the forces present in this current there are groups that, despite opposing the existing political structure, share notable common ground with certain features of the existing system on questions of political economy or their vision of an alternative order and in this sense, they are willing to compromise with it. But what turns these currents into a single stream is their refusal to compromise with the existing “political regime.” What places these different forces in one stream is not agreement about every aspect of the future order, but the rejection of any possibility of reconciliation with the existing political regime.
Part of this tendency reduces political irreconcilability to a rejection of the real mediating steps and processes by which social struggle forms. In this sense, it sees irreconcilability as a rejection of the real, necessary, and gradual forms in which social struggle takes shape, and as a result, it treats the different forms of struggle from below, including trade-union struggles, as, at best, ineffective and useless. One of the basic and irreconcilable disagreements the revolutionary left has with this tendency is this: while the revolutionary left holds that overthrowing the Islamic Republic is a necessary but not sufficient condition, it shows itself here, unlike this right-leaning understanding of irreconcilability, by holding that political irreconcilability does not mean rejecting the real, necessary, and gradual forms in which social struggle takes shape. In this sense, defending trade-union struggles means defending one of the necessary forms of building strength, organizing, and advancing revolutionary struggle.
For this reason, from the revolutionary left’s point of view, opposing reformism does not mean rejecting every kind of trade-union struggle or other form of organizing from below, many of which depend on taking gradual steps along the path of struggle. These other tendencies, however, ignore the difference between the political horizon of a struggle and the forms, stages, and rhythms by which it develops, and they reduce any gradual movement to reformism. Yet a revolutionary struggle must necessarily go through stages, build social bonds, and rely on concrete struggles and real demands. We will return to these points later.
But let us set that aside for now and turn to the trade-union struggles themselves: in the conditions after the December killing, and given the political irreconcilability of an effective part of society (which no doubt includes many people who take part in trade-union struggle), should trade-union struggles not offer a new definition of themselves and place themselves again within the new changes of the post-December period? We will come back to this question.
What did we say in Falaakhan 210?
To understand the tasks of trade-union struggle today, we need to go back once more to some of the points raised in Falaakhan issue 210. What we want to add to that text today is a review of some of its points in light of the new conditions. In other words, if December 2025 and the changes after it have shifted society’s political conditions toward irreconcilability, the question arises: has the necessity of trade-union struggles also changed? Our answer is not only “no”, but we think that, with the deepening of irreconcilability on one hand, and the ongoing political impasse and the spread of right-wing ideological hegemony on the other, the necessity of trade-union struggles has become clearer than before. What has changed is not the necessity of these struggles, but the conditions and dangers that these struggles face more than before.
In Falaakhan 210 we stressed several basic points:
First, trade-union struggle begins from a material and concrete issue. Unlike a struggle that starts out already built on an ideal or an ideology, trade-union struggle is rooted in the real needs of life, and this very feature gives it the capacity to last and to grow.
Second, trade-union struggle is not simply about winning everyday demands. The ongoing experience of this struggle leads working people to recognize the structural roots of the problems, and for this reason trade-union struggle is a school of political struggle. It is a struggle that, as it develops, moves beyond criticizing managers and demanding things from officials, and starts to question the dominant order itself.
Third, trade-union struggle is the ground on which class solidarity forms. During this struggle, working people come to recognize collectively not only their shared interests but also their social friends and enemies. Trade-union struggles are organized and built on accumulated experience, and it is through this that the shift from a “class in itself” to a “class for itself” becomes possible, not through voluntarist leaps, but through these very accumulated and organized experiences.
And finally, fourth, we stressed that criticizing the wrong tendencies within these struggles is part of defending them. In the name of solidarity, we should not turn a blind eye to theoretical limitations or irresponsible behaviour that harms the growth of trade-union struggles and their turning from a trade-union struggle into a class struggle.
In short, the basis of our approach to trade-union struggle rests on these four points: 1) trade-union struggle begins from the material. 2) trade-union struggle is a school of political struggle. 3) trade-union struggle is the ground where class subjectivity and solidarity form. 4) defending trade-union struggle requires criticizing the harmful tendencies within it.
What has changed, and what has remained unchanged, in the right-wing opposition’s approach to trade-union struggles since December 2025?
What we said in Falaakhan 210 about the place of trade-union struggles is still valid today. But the political situation after December 2025, the experience of the widespread killing, the calls for millions to take to the streets, and then Israel-America’s military aggression on Iran, raises a new question for us: has the right-wing opposition’s relationship with trade-union struggles changed?
Our answer has two sides. On one hand, something at the very foundation of this approach has not changed. This current still treats trade-union struggles as secondary, a waste of energy, a distraction from the “real” struggle, or even an obstacle to “regime change”. From this viewpoint, trade-union struggle is still presented, at best, as useless, and sometimes even as an accomplice in keeping the Islamic Republic alive.
But on the other hand, the conditions after December 2025 have also created an important change. If earlier the attack on trade-union struggles mainly came from a position of impatience, a rush to reach the “final uprising,” today this attack relies more and more on the claim of failure: the argument that December 2025 protests and then the war have shown that a gradual struggle of the trade-union type has reached a dead end and must therefore be abandoned.
In our view, what the right-wing opposition offers society about trade-union struggles, regardless of how much they themselves believe what they say, rests on a basic confusion between the political horizon of struggle and the forms in which that struggle develops. This current presents the failure of the project of “regime change” as the failure of every accumulative, gradual, and organized form of struggle, and from this it draws the conclusion that if “regime change” could not be achieved through tools such as mass protests, nationwide calls to action, or foreign support, then trade-union struggles, which are by nature gradual and accumulative, will be even less capable of succeeding. However, this conclusion comes from confusing two different things. The failure of a political strategy does not, by itself, mean that the forms of building and organizing struggle are worthless.
Even, instead of rethinking its own limits and strategic failures, the right-wing opposition insists on the same path, and tries to also discredit other forms of struggle, especially those forms that fall within the field of class struggle, organizing from below, and a vision of revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist state. The issue here is by no means that “the right-wingers are making a mistake” and that the attack on trade-union struggles comes from a theoretical disagreement; rather, the reality is that “the right-wingers are exactly who they are,” and attacking organized struggle from below is this current’s actual strategy.
What has not changed after December 2025 is the core of how the right-wing opposition looks at trade-union struggles. Because this current correctly sees trade-union struggles as an independent field for organizing and for building social strength, it puts all its effort into stripping trade-union struggles of anything that carries the colour and scent of class independence and a left-wing horizon. As we also stressed in Falaakhan 210, demands such as free education, workers’ council-based management of workplaces, workers’ control over the workplace, and other demands that tie the struggle to a critique of class relations, are, for this current, not part of the growth of the struggle, but rather an obstacle to its political project. The favourable trade-union struggle for the right-wingers is one emptied of any class content and any liberating meaning.
The second side of this approach is its disregard for the internal logic of how social struggles grow. The right-wing opposition tries to link every trade-union struggle directly to a nationwide strike and to the project of “regime change”, without organic intermediary steps forming within the class, without the accumulation of experience, without the building of lasting organizations, and without leadership growing out of the struggle itself. Yet a nationwide strike, not always and everywhere, is not the starting point of workers’ struggles; rather, it is the result of a process of organizing, trust, experience, and accumulated strength. Ignoring the internal process of growth in workers’ struggles and issuing calls for a nationwide strike from inside media outlets and political circles, has nothing to do with either real struggle or actual “regime change”; it only creates a confused understanding of workers’ struggle, increases disappointment, and intensifies organized attacks on trade-union struggles. Because any struggle that cannot, right here and now, launch a nationwide strike at the decision of political elites and immediately serve the project of “regime change”, gets accused of being either a sellout or useless.
The third side is this current’s relationship to class independence. Wherever workers’, teachers’, women, or other social movements’ struggles move toward independent organizing from below and toward strengthening their own social power, we see something happen that objectively and really clashes with the class interests of the right. For this reason, any advance built on class independence and self-organization from below is, from this current’s point of view, a real danger. At such points, as experience has shown repeatedly, the line between the Islamic Republic and the right-wing opposition, in their shared hostility to class independence, becomes blurred, and various forms of objective alignment or complicity appear in discrediting, isolating, or repressing these struggles.
In the end, what needs attention in this approach has three connected levels. At the ideological level: the attempt to empty trade-union struggles of class content. At the strategic level: turning trade-union struggles from an independent process of organizing and building social power into a tool serving the project of top-down “regime change”. And at the practical level: complicity in repressing every form of independent organizing from below.
Trade-Union Struggles in the New Period: What Needs to Change?
If up to here, we have shown how the right-wing opposition tries to discredit trade-union struggles or turn them into an appendage of its own political project, we must now answer this question: do trade-union struggles themselves need to change in the conditions after December 2025? Our answer is yes, but not in the sense that the right-wing opposition promotes.
Before anything else, we should say that by “new conditions” we do not mean simply the bloody December killing. Rather, we mean the fact that the class character and repressive nature of the Islamic Republic state have become clearer than ever. December 2025, and then the war and its aftermath, showed that in today’s unprecedented deadlock, the Islamic Republic has revealed its own inherent features including class repression, repression of unionizing, repression of political protest, and repression of every form of independent organizing with greater intensity.
But internalizing the historical experiences of repression from December 2017 to December 2025 does not mean trade-union struggles must rediscover the reality of repression or the securitized nature of the space in which they operate. Trade-union activists have lived this reality for years, through court rulings, prison, expulsion, deprivation, and direct repression. The real issue is that this experience should lead to a redefinition of the place of trade-union struggles within the whole of social struggle. In this sense, trade-union struggles should no longer present themselves as isolated, limited arenas confined to purely trade-union demands, but should reveal, strengthen, and organize their real, material links with other forms of oppression, exploitation, and social struggle.
But this does not mean that trade-union struggles should move away from their starting point, or that a political or anti-class horizon should be imposed on them from outside. Trade-union struggle still begins from material issues, from concrete demands, and from the real needs of life. What has changed is not the starting point of this struggle, but the historical conditions of its growth.
For this reason, the politicization of trade-union struggle does not mean replacing trade-union demands with political slogans. On the contrary, trade-union struggle can only become a political force when, by deepening those very material demands, it builds links with other parts of society. Industrial workers, teachers, nurses, retirees, housewives in working-class households, precarious workers, the poor, and other groups under class oppression each enter the struggle from a different point, but what turns these struggles into a social force is not simply their happening at the same time, it is their joining together within a shared framework of class relations.
From this point of view, a trade-union issue is not inherently political. Its move from the level of a limited demand to the level of a social and political force becomes possible only through a mediating step that places it in connection with the whole of social relations, and this mediating step is the process of the trade-union struggle becoming class-based.
By “becoming class-based” we mean the shift of a struggle from defending the interests of one trade-union group to confronting the relations that limit the lasting achievement of those interests, a shift through which the struggle of one group becomes connected to the interests and struggles of other social groups affected by those same relations.
In this sense, “becoming class-based” is not simply about the discourse of struggle becoming more radical; it is a process in which the specific demands of each section come to recognize themselves as tied to the shared experience of other oppressed groups and wageworkers, and thereby achieve wider organizing and solidarity.
In other words, “becoming class-based” is the mediating step through which trade-union struggle turns into social and political struggle. The political is not born from outside the struggle, but from within this very process from the point where trade-union struggle can build its real links with the whole of society, make them visible, and turn itself into an organized, nationwide force.
For this reason, one of the most important tasks of trade-union struggles today is to consciously build and strengthen links that are either potential or only realized here and there: between the workplace and the neighbourhood, between workers’ and women’s struggles, between teachers and impoverished students, between organized wage-earners and the urban poor and precarious workers who have no chance to organize by trade-unions. Only through such a process can trade-union struggles break out of their isolated, scattered position and become the material, social, and organizational basis for a broader struggle against the existing order.
The difference between this path and the approach of the right-wing opposition is exactly on this point. Without the formation of this class-based mediation, they try to directly use trade-union struggles for their own political project, and wherever such use is not possible, they discredit those same struggles. But what can produce a lasting, mass struggle is not political haste, nor pinning hope on outside factors, but the gradual accumulation of experience, organizing, class bonds, and the growth of social power from below.
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If we try to put everything said so far into a broader frame, we could say our conflict with the right-wing opposition is not only about how to judge trade-union struggles, or a tactical disagreement about methods of struggle: it is a disagreement about how revolution itself comes about. Our understanding is not that revolution is born from political calls to action, foreign support, or simply the presence of millions of people in the streets. In the same way, our understanding of trade-union struggle is not that it should either stay stuck at the trade-union level, or that it can turn into a class struggle by itself without the necessary mediating steps, or that it becomes political by having a political horizon imposed on it from outside. Rather, what connects these two levels, trade-union and political, is the existence of mediating steps that make the process of the struggle’s growth possible.
Struggle always begins with material conditions: with wages, livelihood, job security, education, health, discrimination, gender oppression, national oppression, or any other lived experience of people within social relations. At first, this material reality manifests itself in a concrete and localized struggle: in the workplace, school, university, neighbourhood, or any other sphere in which people develop a shared experience of oppression and exploitation. As we said, this starting point is, by itself, still neither a broad social matter nor a political one. It needs mediating steps and links to become social and political. The mediation that raises the struggle for a concrete material demand from the level of a limited demand to that of a social and political force is its transformation into class struggle. This does not simply mean that the language of the struggle becomes more radical, or that trade-union demands are replaced with political slogans. Becoming class-based is a process in which every struggle recognizes its own experience as connected to the experience of other oppressed parts of society, discovers a common enemy within the overall dominant relations, and through this recognition builds lasting bonds, solidarity, and organizing from below.
For this reason, becoming class-based is the mediating step through which trade-union struggle turns into social and political struggle. A struggle that does not go through this path, however large or even passionate it may be, will remain limited in scope. But when trade-union struggle, through becoming a class struggle, can connect with other workers’ struggles and with other oppressed groups, it goes beyond the boundary of a limited demand and turns into a social force. The political dimension is born from within this very process, not from replacing trade-union demands with political slogans.
In such a process, organizing also takes on a different meaning. Trade-union organizations, local cells, field committees, solidarity networks, and political forces are each mediating steps that make these social bonds lasting, nationwide, and concrete. Without these mediating steps, no struggle can rise above the level of scattered protests and turn into a social force for change.
From this same angle, the place of uprisings and mass revolts must also be understood anew. One of the most basic assumptions of the right-wing opposition is to treat mass uprisings as “regime change” itself, imagining that the mass presence of millions of people can be completed with elements such as foreign intervention or support, and that this can bring about “regime change”. This view sees the uprising as the starting point of change, whereas an uprising, if it is to lead to revolution, is itself the product of a long process of accumulated struggle, organizing, and the growth of social leadership.
A mass uprising is one of the strategic moments of revolution, but not every uprising is necessarily revolutionary, or will lead to revolution. What turns an uprising into a revolutionary uprising is not simply the mass presence of people in the streets, but the existence of people who, before that moment, within their own everyday struggles, have already organized, built their social and class bonds, gathered experience of cooperation and mutual trust, and nurtured various forms of leadership from below. Such people do not arrive on the streets now of uprising as a shapeless crowd; rather, they have already built themselves as a social force, and they enter the field at the moment of uprising with a different level of organization, experience, and collective capacity.
In this sense, trade-union struggles are not simply an arena for defending livelihood demands; they are one of the most important fields where this very social force is built. Their strategic importance lies not in directly overthrowing the regime, but in the fact that class consciousness, social solidarity, organizing, and forms of leadership from below grow out of them. These are the very mediating steps without which neither a revolutionary uprising can take shape, nor can a revolution succeed.
For this reason, defending trade-union struggles is not defending gradual processes as opposed to major political change; it is defending the real process by which revolution comes about, a process that has no shortcut. Revolution is born neither from pinning hope on outside factors, nor from political haste, nor from hijacking social struggles, but from the path of accumulating organic, class-based, mass struggles, expanding organizing from below, and building revolutionary leadership.
In other words, revolution is not the product of a sudden leap, but the result of an accumulative, mediated process. This process begins with material issues and the real demands of life, takes shape in the form of trade-union struggles and other forms of social struggle, reaches, through becoming class-based, wide social bonds and organizing from below, and only on the basis of such a process can a street uprising turn into a revolutionary moment. The uprising is neither the starting point of this process nor its end; it is one of the strategic moments in the making of revolution. It is exactly here that the difference between this concept of revolution and the right-wing opposition’s common idea of “regime change” becomes clear. In that view, general discontent, political calls to action, the presence of millions in the streets, and, in the end, pinning hope on foreign support and intervention form a chain that is supposed to lead to “regime change”. But none of these can replace the real process of building a social force, and what makes revolution possible is not removing mediating steps and searching for political shortcuts but building the mediating steps that organize social power from below.
If we want to state this difference in a condensed form, we could say: in the “regime change” outlook, the uprising is the starting point of change. In a revolutionary struggle, however, the uprising is one of the moments in the making of revolution. Or, put differently, the right’s understanding of change begins in the street, and becomes a futile effort to fill its necessary and unavoidable gaps with foreign intervention. Whereas the revolutionary process begins in the factory, the school, the hospital, the university, and the neighbourhood; grows through organizing and class bonds; and reaches one of its decisive moments in the street. This is exactly why trade-union struggles and other forms of organizing from below, with a class horizon, are necessary.
It is important to emphasize that the transformation of trade-union struggle into class struggle does not simply mean raising consciousness or adopting a position of solidarity with other wage earners and workers. Rather, it manifests itself in the substance and content of the struggle itself, as well as in the forms of organizational relations it develops. In this way, a struggle that begins over wages, job security, education, healthcare, or working conditions inevitably, as it advances, comes face to face with the class roots of these very issues. For this reason, themes such as free education, workers’ council-based management of workplaces and production, workers’ control over the workplace, struggle against privatization, ending subcontracting, and opposition to relations of exploitation and private ownership of the means of production, gradually appear along the path of workers’ struggles advancing. As these themes emerge, together with the forming of organizational relations, the struggle no longer stays simply within the interests of one workplace or one specific sector, but through connecting with the living and working conditions of other parts of society, takes on a social and class character. This is because these themes are directly tied to how work, production, and the reproduction of life are organized across the whole of society. It is exactly at this point that trade-union struggle, without leaving its starting point, goes beyond the boundary of a limited demand through becoming a class struggle, and gains the capacity to turn into a social and political force.
This is exactly why the right-wing opposition cannot get along with this process. Their fear is of the moment when trade-union struggle, through becoming a class struggle, produces its own independent and radical content, and opens up before society a horizon different from both the existing order and the order favoured by the forces of the right and gains the capacity for social and political leadership.
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