No to any US intervention in Iran, or Western interventions of any kind. These are the forces that have presided over the genocide in Gaza. The US has a long history of imperialism in Iran, including more recent sanctions which we oppose, and western interference has nothing to offer ordinary Iranians other than misery and oppression.
Hundreds, if not thousands, of protesters have been shot in Iran, and its media also reports that security forces have died. The protests began over rising prices but quickly raised political demands. People Before Profit extends its full solidarity to those who have dared to challenge the regime.
People Before Profit unequivocally opposes the West's attempts to appropriate the protests for their own nefarious ends. We demand the Irish Government be a voice of opposition to the West's attempted interventions, especially to its sanctions.
The Iranian people cannot put any faith in Donald Trump. His armed militia, ICE, have murdered and shot those they consider ‘domestic terrorists.' This is the same type of language used by the Iranian regime about its protesters. From Minneapolis to Tehran, people want the fall of the regime.
Trump’s talk of democracy is entirely fake as his support for the Saudi regime of Mohammed Bin Salman testifies. His only interest is furthering the needs of US capitalism by grabbing as many resources as he can and re-ordering the Middle East to suit his ally Israel. The US bears a heavy responsibility for the economic suffering of the Iranian people through the increasingly severe sanctions it has imposed on the country. The Iranian masses fought hard to overthrow the monarchy in 1979 and so the efforts by the West and Israel to push a member of the once-ousted Pahlavi monarchy as a leader of the protests should be roundly rejected.
We refuse the temptation to view this movement solely through the lens of geopolitics. The protests are the latest in a cycle that began with the Green movement of 2009-10 and embraced, most recently, the Women, Life, Freedom demonstrations of 2022. However, the current wave of protesters has a poorer and more working-class character. Economic grievances and the political rejection of the Islamic Republican regime have fused. These protests are entirely justified by the denial of basic democratic freedoms and the growing material deprivation suffered by the mass of the population.
Sanctions have played a part in this, but so too has the regime. It has always sought to fight for the interests of Iranian capitalism in the Middle East, at the expense of ordinary Iranians, and the Iranian people have the right to a democratic say about their own society.
The Islamic Republican regime wears the mantle of the Revolution, but it betrayed it, hollowing out democratic forms, driving women back into a subordinate role, and crushing the workers’ self-organisation central to the overthrow of the Shah in ‘79-80. The protest movement can advance if it takes up the real agenda of the Revolution – the liberation of workers, women, and all the oppressed peoples in Iran, both from dictatorship at home and from the US and its Zionist watchdog abroad.
Working-class organisation in Iran is still to recover from how it was crushed after the Revolution. But it is present in the current movement. This is shown by the position taken by the Tehran busworkers and by the reported formation of a workers’ council in the industrial city of Arak. The development of the protests into a broad-based movement for real democracy will depend on workers beginning to exert their power through mass strikes. Through this action they can rebuild their own organisations and increasingly play a leading role in the struggle, as they did in the late 70s.