A pile of corpses has accumulated in the streets, in morgues, and in cemeteries. As expected, the Islamic Republic has gunned down people in the streets in the most criminal way possible. A deliberate and targeted massacre, not merely to stop the street protests, but to kill and to terrorize, to intimidate both today and especially the future. In the midst of this, while communication lines with the inside of the country are still cut and news about the high number of those who have lost their lives in this massacre is only gradually emerging, some opponents of the restoration of the monarchy in Iran and of the Pahlavi dynasty have criticized, and continue to criticize, Reza Pahlavi for calling on people to take to the streets (first for the 8th and 9th of January, and then, after assessing the success of that call, for the 10th and 11th of January), effectively sending them in front of the bullets and to their deaths.
At first glance, this criticism cannot really be coherently formulated. Many of those who now, from this angle and in these terms, criticize Reza Pahlavi are the very same people who, in previous periods, quite rightly raised criticisms about the dangers and dead ends of a so-called “leaderless movement” and the like. This time, Reza Pahlavi, relying on an organization that at least since the winter of 2022 had been placed on the agenda of his supporters, tried to take hold of the leadership of the protests, and it must be acknowledged that he was to some extent successful. Beyond the force that was mobilized around the fascistic slogans of support for the Pahlavi dynasty, refusing to accept the reality that even many opponents of Pahlavi responded positively to his call, that is, they decided, in reaction to his call, to come out into the streets, to stand with the “people of the street” in many cities, and where possible (that is, Kurdistan, Baluchestan, Azerbaijan, and so on) to represent an independent voice, does nothing to help us understand the situation. Therefore, those who used to refer merely to the question of leadership in any movement, without caring about that movement’s political orientation and direction, are today, by reproaching Reza Pahlavi for trying to establish himself as the leader of the protests, in fact defeating their own purpose.
The problem, contrary to what is imagined, is not Reza Pahlavi’s leadership. Rather, the problem lies precisely in Reza Pahlavi’s not leading, or more accurately, in his positioning himself as the leader of a phenomenon that he and his advisers know very well and are afraid of. In this sense, Pahlavi does not actually enter the position of leadership of a “revolution,” because what he and his circle of advisers clearly understand and seek to avoid is the revolutionary process and its logic itself. Therefore, from the very beginning, despite the mass base that the current surrounding Reza Pahlavi, which we refer to here as the “Pahlavi Organization” has organized for itself, we are confronted with a kind of counter-revolutionary leadership that seeks its continuity and consolidation not in creating, deepening, and expanding mass-based institutions, but in pushing them back and neutralizing them, and ultimately can only imagine the horizon of realizing its power through the path of foreign military intervention and attack.
To clarify this point, we must first note that underestimating the organized fascist current around Reza Pahlavi is a comic repetition of the same mistake that many forces made during the 1979 revolution in recognizing the existing relations of power, often remembered in the formulation: “the mullah cannot govern.” This kind of complacency in the face of an organized, fascist current with a mass base is either born of stupidity, or of the denial of the existence of a fascist current in order to justify abstract ideas formed around “pluralism” and “diversity,” which sometimes exclude Pahlavi from the circle of “pluralism” and sometimes invite him into it, but in any case, do not regard this current as an enemy.
In reality, these currents, if they are not ignorant, deliberately turn a blind eye to the capacity of the fascist current to block every emancipatory possibility and to brutally suppress all “others,” so that they can then explain why now “all” forces must be mobilized solely and exclusively against the Islamic Republic. The truth in many cases is that it is not the various kinds of naïve republicans who refuse cooperation with others, but rather the Pahlavi fascist current itself that refuses any kind of collaboration, otherwise these friends and “comrades” would by now have been sitting around the coalition table. As it was this “Pahlavist” current that broke up the Georgetown coalition, not the “anti-despotism” activists who were expelled from Georgetown.
Reza Pahlavi’s problem, however, is that he wants to be a leader, but not a “leader of a revolution.” And this simultaneous desire for leadership and avoidance of revolutionary leadership carries an internal contradiction. For this reason, his recommendations and interventions are mostly based on the Gene Sharp myths of velvet and color revolutions, and the agenda of the “Pahlavi Organization” is designed on the basis of the dreams of Ahmad al-Sharaa. In both models, the focus is not on the real dynamics of mass struggle, but on wishful, pre-designed scenarios that above all are compatible with restraining and controlling the protests of the masses. This fundamental contradiction, however, is not the result of ignorance or misunderstanding, but of full awareness of the dangers of “revolution.”
The “million-strong demonstrations,” which were the ultimate horizon that Reza Pahlavi dared to put forward in front of the cameras and before his supporters, are a pleasing myth left over from past decades, to which not only Reza Pahlavi but many other opponents of the Islamic Republic (astonishingly, even some tendencies on the left) still cling. The core content of this myth is that people appear in the streets in their millions and do not leave them. This million-strong presence and occupation of the streets, over the course of days, leads to the paralysis of the governing apparatus, an increase in the crowds, a rise in the level of discontent, and the cutting of the vital arteries of governance through the joining of workers from different sectors to the million-strong crowd, and finally the collapse of the regime. This whole set of instructions was almost word for word what Reza Pahlavi issued as a call to his supporters in January 8th and 9th. This myth, of course, has already tried its luck once in Iran and with the Islamic Republic. The result of several years of investment, institution-building inside and outside Iran, holding training workshops in Dubai, Germany, and several other countries, hiring the leaders of the Velvet Revolution from Poland and Serbia to train and organize Iranian forces (for example, Lech Wałęsa was an instructor at the workshops held in Dubai, and one of the Serbian student leaders was among the directors of the Transition Institute), the wide translation and publication of the works of Gene Sharp and other theorists of non-violent struggle and peaceful transition, and the translation and subtitling of a series of training films about the Velvet Revolution in Poland, Serbia, Czechoslovakia, Ukraine, and Georgia, all of this was put to a practical test in what became known as the “Green Movement.” (We of course do not endorse the regime’s narrative that the Green Movement was the result of prior planning for a Velvet Revolution, but rather believe that the conditions created by the protests to the election results, and the composition of forces that intervened in those protests and gained the upper hand, made it possible to practically test the doctrines of the Velvet Revolution.)
Alongside Reza Pahlavi’s Gene Sharp–style recommendations, however, the social reality after the uprising of December 2017 was something else entirely, something that did not accord with the worn-out manuals of non-violent struggle and peaceful transition. The subaltern masses who, in every uprising and revolt, confronted the blood-soaked machinery of the Islamic Republic and witnessed its brutality with their own eyes in the streets and in detention centers, gradually, and from within the uprisings themselves, learned that the dominant counter-revolutionary violence must be answered with revolutionary violence, not with million-strong demonstrations and whistling and clapping. Precarious workers and the urban poor, as the main force of the uprisings after December 2017, came from an entirely different place, a place where Gene Sharp’s middle-class teachings had no influence, and where they drew their methods of struggle from their everyday lives, from the level of violence imposed on them in daily life, violence that was structural and continuous, yet remained unspoken in human-rights statements and public positions. A class that had been excluded and humiliated, whose capacity to intervene in politics had for decades been denied by all the organic intellectuals of the right and left middle classes, and which experienced this denial, exclusion, and humiliation once again during and after the Jina uprising, and was once more removed and sidelined from the public sphere through structural violence.
Of course, the “Pahlavi Organization,” contrary to the public statements of its august leader, had the shrewdness to understand this situation and adapt itself to it. Thus, alongside the organization it began to build, it also fanned the flames of the necessity of employing coercion. We should note that many of the things that critics present as the weaknesses of Reza Pahlavi’s current are in fact its strengths. The “Pahlavi Organization,” unlike the prevailing democratic illusion in the opposition space (including a large part of the so-called revolutionary left, or forces that at any rate are called by that name), knows very well that political power is not obtained through politeness, coalition-building, and consensus. Let us not forget that Saeed Ghasseminejad, one of Pahlavi’s top advisers, in the 2000s wrote two articles in the journal of the Liberal Students of Iran’s Universities praising Lenin, and from early on had the question of seizing political power in his sights. A positive, political project that, with his and his associates’ (now Pahlavi’s advisers) ties to imperialist circles on the one hand and to Reza Pahlavi on the other, was placed on the agenda as a project from the late 2000s onward. A strategic quality that is rare not only in the Iranian left, but even among Iranian Leninists.
Their next act of shrewdness was that, precisely amid the din of the ebbing of the Jina uprising, they recognized that access to political power was more within reach than ever. On the one hand, the middle class activated in the Jina uprising had, since 2017, lost any political force capable of representing its horizon and class demands, because the reformists and reformism had become a completely exhausted project. At the same time, this pressured class, by virtue of its own class character, was not looking to imagine a future, but rather to revive the glory of the past, a glory that was itself ideological and infused with nostalgia for a nonexistent “good old days.” The “Pahlavi Organization” correctly understood that by appropriating and organizing this nostalgia it could become the new political representative of the middle class. On the other hand, the rising struggle of the proletariat between December 2017 and the autumn of 2022, during the Jina uprising, suffered defeat not only at the hands of the repressive state but also at the hands of the middle class, which had become defeated and horizonless. While right, left, and centrist middle-class intellectuals were busy explaining how the “Woman, Life, Freedom revolution” would continue and offering radical interpretations of this slogan, praising individual acts of bravery as signs of the movement’s continuation, worrying about the magnificent commemoration of the uprising’s anniversary, and tallying the achievements of an uprising that had already passed and subsided, the proletariat was being subjected to the most savage and violent class policies, about which no one any longer wished to speak. Malnutrition and this class’s systematic lack of access to education, healthcare, and adequate housing were the central content of no struggle, and the class hegemony that had imposed this class’s anger and rights on others had been shattered. Beyond all this, the guarantee of the interests of the various currents of capital (both “exiled” capital and the domestic oligarchies) is fundamentally embedded within this spectrum.
Thus, the restored monarchist hegemony within the middle class gradually spread into the proletariat as well, and was able to mobilize them around the demand for what appeared to be a fundamental change of everything. The Pahlavi Organization, with the help of media outlets, celebrities, vloggers and influencers, the mass of migrants living in the West, a middle class disillusioned with reformism and its political and cultural representatives, trusted local figures (such as Mehrdad Maher in Hamedan), and money splashing, managed to organize or hire nuclei inside and outside the country under the title of the “Guard-e Javidan,” (Imperial Guard of Iran) or to pay people to chant in favor of Pahlavi and his monarchy. (That part of the Pahlavi Organization’s method of organizing involves mercenary recruitment does not negate the fact of its organization. On the contrary, the fact that this current has been able to reach some small and remote towns in such a way as to hire people there is itself evidence of its organization.)
At this stage, the organizers of the Pahlavi Organization realized that His Majesty’s Gene Sharp–style recommendations had nothing to do with the level of anger among the subalterns. They defend and support the class violence that is structurally imposed on the subalterns. Yet, drawing on the dominant discourse in the Islamic Republic’s media and universities that explains and justifies the “advantages” of capitalism, they reframe this violence. They present ruling class policy not as a class project, but as the result of incompetent officials, failed economic management, international adventurism, financial aid to Palestine and Lebanon, the acceptance of Afghan migrants in Iran, and similar factors.
By recognizing this anger, the organizers of the “Pahlavi Organization,” while their leader continued to repeat Gene Sharp’s nonsense, turned toward Ahmad al-Sharaa’s model of change and defended the arming of the masses and their violence, but only within limits and in such a way that violence would not become revolutionary violence and the dream of revolution would in no way emerge from this violent confrontation. One could argue that this mirage of Ahmad al-Sharaa was also destroyed during the protests of December 2025-January 2026. The violence of the unorganized masses and the unorganized violence of the masses, whether the part that resulted from the arming and encouragement of the Pahlavi Organization and its foreign backers or the part that was spontaneous and born of a combination of justified anger and desperation, not only failed to push back the regime’s apparatus of repression even slightly, but instead fell upon the masses with several times greater repression and piled up corpses.
Over the past decades, the Islamic Republic has shown that, at least in the present situation, it will be neither overthrown by Gene Sharp’s methods nor by Ahmad al-Sharaa’s methods. Gene Sharp’s teachings never told their eager students that million-strong demonstrations and their accessories only succeed when the regime has already largely collapsed in terms of internal structure and external authority. And with Ahmad al-Sharaa’s methods, on the one hand we witnessed the maximum cohesion of the regime’s repressive forces, and on the other hand the lack of cohesion among those who imagined that with scattered “neutralizations” and burning state buildings, they could overthrow the Islamic Republic. This lack of cohesion exists in a particularly acute form within the Pahlavi Organization, which, by producing and promoting a fascist discourse, has destroyed any possibility of links between itself and other potential or actual armed forces (whether in the regions inhabited by nationally oppressed peoples or elsewhere), and it is unlikely that even the intervention of sometimes common employers will be able to create such links in the short term. The common point of both models, Gene Sharp’s and Ahmad al-Sharaa’s, is that neither relies on the revolutionary organization of the subaltern masses. For this reason, their internal deficiencies can only be compensated for through various forms of foreign intervention, international pressure, and ultimately foreign military attack.
What Reza Pahlavi and the high-ranking figures of his organization know, but do not speak of because of a counter-revolutionary fear, is that “revolution,” in no period and in no country, is won solely through million-strong demonstrations or through scattered armed struggle. “Revolution” is a continuous and escalating struggle in the course of which, in parallel, the governed seize the sphere of rule from the rulers, and the rulers are forced to retreat. It is clear that this does not happen through poetry and slogans. In short, it is a process in which society organizes itself, and on the basis of this social organization it conquers the domain of governance. Therefore, the formation of neighborhood committees, strike committees, and the like, and their transformation into forces that rule and disrupt the existing order in neighborhoods, regions, and workplaces, is an inseparable part of revolutionary struggle. This is precisely what the Pahlavi Organization fears, because under such conditions the possibility of intervention by other forces with a degree of organization would be created. This is the very phenomenon that Reza Pahlavi and his organization do not even dare to approach, whereas the Khomeinist counter-revolution in February 1979 had the foresight to align itself with it and to organize accordingly. The issue, of course, is not merely ignorance and amateurism. It is also that the Khomeini organization, by producing a discourse that claimed to defend “the downtrodden”, could adapt itself to such a situation, whereas the Pahlavi Organization, as a force defending the interests of capital, faces far greater difficulties in doing so and knows this well.
So, Reza Pahlavi is the leader of a “revolution,” but which revolution? Reza Pahlavi is the leader of a “national revolution,” in exactly the form we have witnessed: sending the masses into the streets against a machine armed to the teeth, not in the hope that they will defeat the Islamic Republic through million-strong demonstrations or scattered violence, but so that they will be slaughtered on the widest possible scale and their corpses will pave the way for “bargaining at the top.” Bargaining with Trump, Netanyahu, and others, because the only safe and viable path for the “national revolution” in the Pahlavi and his organization’s style is foreign military intervention. We now find ourselves in the situation we described as: “a pile of corpses has accumulated in the streets, in morgues, and in cemeteries.” And we know very well that the majority of those who came out into the streets and were killed during the protests of January 2026 belong to a class for whom continued existence, even with the most minimal resources, is literally impossible. People who, materially, do not even have the luxury of becoming depressed or afraid. Therefore, they will return again. On the other side, the Islamic Republic has no qualms about carrying out killings many times greater than these days. Pahlavi and his organization need more corpses in order to go begging before the masters of the world. And sadly, until we are equipped for such a situation, things will continue in this manner.
January 2026
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