An view by Sirantos Fotopoulos
The protests now convulsing Iran are the inevitable revolt of a working-class pushed beyond the limits of survival. Inflation has shredded wages, the rial’s collapse has turned food, fuel, and medicine into luxuries, and millions of people who once lived precariously now find themselves unable to make a living at all. Shopkeepers, bazaar merchants, transport workers, students, and casual laborers are protesting the daily violence of an economy organized to extract obedience through deprivation. When bread becomes unaffordable, dissent is the first step towards survival.
The Iranian state’s response has been brutally consistent — repression first, reform never. Security forces have met demonstrations with live ammunition, mass arrests, beatings, and intimidation. Internet blackouts attempt to sever workers from one another, isolating struggles city by city. The message is unmistakable: survival is conditional on silent obedience. To demand wages that keep pace with inflation, to protest corruption, or to refuse humiliation is treated not as a social grievance but as a crime against the state — and increasingly, a crime against God.
This fusion of economic domination and theological terror is not new. It is the political playbook of the Islamic Republic. In the summer of 1988, Iran carried out one of the most chilling atrocities of the late twentieth century: a systematic massacre of political prisoners that left roughly 30,000 leftists and other dissidents dead. Their bodies were dumped in unmarked graves. Their families were denied even the right to mourn. This was a calculated act of terror ordered from the top and carried out with bureaucratic precision. Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa sanctioned extermination, branding dissidents “enemies of God.” Prisoners — many of them young students — were dragged before so-called death committees, interrogated for minutes about their political beliefs, and hanged in batches. Some were so broken by torture they had to be carried to the gallows.
This was theocratic fascism in its purest form — a demonstration of what happens when religious fundamentalists wield absolute power, unbound by secular law, human rights, or basic morality. The crimes did not end in 1988; they established the governing logic of the state. The architects of the massacre were never punished. On the contrary, they were rewarded. Ebrahim Raeesi — president from 2021 to 2024 — was himself a key figure in those death committees and he was elevated rather than disgraced. Survivors and victims’ families who demanded accountability were harassed, silenced, or imprisoned. The message endured across generations: resistance will not merely be defeated — it will be erased.
Today’s repression of striking workers and protesting shopkeepers is the same project by different means. The regime’s economic policy immiserates, and its security apparatus disciplines the resulting desperation. The justification remains unchanged. Then, dissidents were labeled “hypocrites” and “apostates.” Now, protesters are labeled “rioters,” “foreign agents,” or threats to Islamic order. The logic is identical: once opponents are cast as enemies of God or the nation, any crime against them becomes holy. This is the same logic that animates ISIS, the Taliban, and every theocratic tyranny — a logic that reduces human life to theological collateral.
What makes the current moment especially dangerous for the regime is that the protests are unmistakably working-class. These are demands for material survival and human dignity. Wages must cover food. Work must not lead to starvation. Life must not require submission to clerical authority. When such basic demands are met with bullets and prisons, the regime exposes itself not as a flawed government but as an occupying force ruling against its own population.
The lesson of 1988 looms over the present moment. Fundamentalist theocracies cannot be reformed. They are not merely authoritarian — they are structurally brutal, because they sanctify violence as divine duty. Reform would require them to abandon the very theological claims that justify their power. That is why every economic crisis becomes a security crisis, and every strike becomes heresy.
There is no progressive theocracy. There is no benevolent inquisition. Too often, sections of the international left have treated regimes like Iran’s as anti-imperialist counterweights or cultural alternatives to Western liberalism. This is a catastrophic error. Anti-imperialism that excuses the mass murder of workers, socialists, and dissidents is not internationalism — it is betrayal. The Iranian working-class does not need clerical guardians or geopolitical apologists. It needs solidarity rooted in universal opposition to exploitation and repression, whether imposed by markets or by mullahs.
The victims of 1988 were not only killed; they were meant to be forgotten. Their graves remain hidden. Their names were scrubbed from official history. But memory survives repression. It survives in every protest chant, every shuttered shop, every worker who refuses to accept starvation as fate. That memory is a weapon — not of revenge, but of clarity. It reminds us what religious dictatorship does when threatened, and why the struggles of today’s Iranian working class are not merely economic disputes but part of a long fight against a system that answers to clerics instead of people.
To defend Iranian workers today is to say plainly: their demands are just, their resistance is legitimate, and the violence inflicted upon them is the continuation of a history that must be confronted, not obscured. The choice posed by the streets of Iran is not chaos versus order. It is human life versus a system that has shown, time and again, that it will destroy life to preserve power.
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