World events are shocking; the pace of international change is astounding, and the future of humanity hangs in the balance. While the daily functioning of the capitalist system routinely crushes lives all over the world, its wars keep on spreading and the criminal agents of the global system of capitalism-imperialism take the lives of tens of thousands of people in the blink of an eye, with a push of a button. The war in Ukraine, which is a proxy war between the major imperialist powers, and Israel/U.S. genocide in Gaza, the danger of a war between nuclear powers and climate warming, are signs of an increasingly deadly situation for billions of working people who are in captivity to this system of oppression and exploitation, and ultimately for  humanity as a whole. Iran’s 85 million people, out of the billions of the [world’s] people, are under the cruel rule of the religious-fascist government of the Islamic Republic of Iran [IRI]. This regime is not just a criminal theocracy, and we are not just dealing with a few rulers who have a certain way of thinking. This is a regime whose existence depends on the global capitalist-imperialist system. The role that this regime plays is mainly to manage Iran—its labor force and resources—in the service of the world imperialist system and to ensure its [own] survival by doing so.

Rivalries and wars of imperialists with each other are ultimately aimed to grab a greater share of the exploitation of the world's people and resources. The same process that creates the dispossessed proletariat of the world necessitates destructive rivalries between imperialists. In the “Third World,” the nations of Asia, Africa and Latin America that have long been dominated by U.S. and European imperialism, are today under the ruthless exploitation of the imperialists of China and Russia as well, adding to the brutal exploitation of the people of these countries and the looting of their environment and natural resources. Local reactionaries are being armed to the teeth and strengthened. 

Around the world including in Iran, Afghanistan, Turkey, Egypt, Pakistan, etc., the previously dizzying number of child laborers is increasing wildly. They live next to sewers in the slums of big cities, and are dying of hunger and curable diseases, if they are not bought and sold like slaves by criminal gangs before they die. Five-year-old children in Congo’s cobalt mines dig rare metals for digital devices and die in childhood, in order to provide the inventors and engineers in capitalist countries with sufficient wealth and leisure to develop amazing technologies that can take human beings to other planets.

This system not only suffocates people as a result of its normal functioning, but has prisons and gallows to suppress them. Last year alone, more than 800 people were executed in Iran. The prisons of the IRI are the slaughterhouses of captured freedom fighters and rebellious youths—if they were not [outright] murdered in the streets by police forces.

This system oppresses and exploits [people] directly, but also produces hierarchical and oppressive relations among the oppressed themselves: it treats women as inferior to men and one nationality as inferior to another. What we see happening in Iran to women, to oppressed nationalities, and to those with LGBTQ sexual orientations, is common worldwide. The oppression of women is a cornerstone of the world capitalist-imperialist system, and the spokesperson for this oppression is not only [Supreme Leader] Khamenei and his minions. Imperialist regimes in the U.S., China and Russia, to the owners of digital media and artificial intelligence industries, etc., all have a loud voice in this reactionary, fascist chorus that  “the family is the nucleus of  society.” In Iran, women are legally considered inferior to men, as less than human, and must be veiled in the Islamic hijab that reinforces patriarchy/male supremacy. Iran enforces these oppressive, supremacist relations of Sharia law with its legal system, using repressive [police and paramilitary] forces, imprisonment and even employing chemical gas against school girls to force them to submit to this subordinate status.

This system condemns people to slow deaths with its normal functioning. It also forces people to kill and be killed in destructive wars to maintain the oppressive regimes. The IRI has been involved in all the dirty wars in the Middle East in the past 45 years. Its cross-border security apparatus competes with the security apparatus of Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Israel by forming Islamist criminal gangs in the Middle East. This is the landscape of the Middle East and the world that directly shapes the situation in Iran.

This situation must not be tolerated even for a second. This system of capitalism-imperialism must be overthrown, along with all its parasitic regimes. It is a global system rooted in exploitative economic and oppressive social and political relations, domination over nations, genders, and people in general. It produces outmoded ideologies and ethics corresponding to those relations.

This system cannot be reformed. We have seen the passionate desire to abolish these horrific conditions in the repeated uprisings in Iran and around the world. We saw this desire in the bloody marshes of Mahshahr¹  in the storm of the 2022 Jina uprising. It is this same desire that animated the [2020] beautiful uprising of  “Black Lives Matter,” and today fuels a movement against Israel and its genocide in Gaza supporting the people of Palestine, that reaches from the U.S. to Britain to Spain.

Nonetheless the question remains: how can we overthrow the regimes under such a system and establish socialist societies to replace them? And specifically in Iran, how do we overthrow the IRI, which represents and implements this vicious system of capitalist oppression and exploitation—while simultaneously preventing another gang of parasites from replacing it with their own version of the very same system?

This is where the question of the proletariat comes in: the class that must be the destroyer of this system and the builder of a new system that is a million times better. This is the class that Marx and Engels declared: has nothing to lose but its chains, but has a world to win. This is where the science for doing this and its organization comes in: communism and the Communist Party, and the urgent task of building a movement for revolution to prepare for and act on the need for radical change to end the suffering, misery, constant death, oppression, ignorance, and war. The masses of people who are oppressed and exploited—not only the workers but all those subjected to any of the oppressions imposed on them by the system’s functions and its ruling regimes—are the decisive factor.

But the very objective factors and actual source required for the oppressed and exploited masses to make revolution also create obstacles to their revolutionary development, and prevent them from becoming a conscious part of a revolution under the leadership of the Communist Party. The big problem is that, despite the widespread resistance and rebellion of the masses, it will not spontaneously lead them to the path of emancipation, namely the communist revolution. And, as we have repeatedly seen, they wander and get worn out in a maze of thousands of illusions and detours. Thus, faith in the power of the proletariat and other oppressed masses in society cannot be religious. Rather, this power can only be realized on the basis of a scientific understanding of the nature and function of the system and how to overthrow it. This reality is at the heart of our Party's strategic approach to making revolution.

Domestic and International Enemies Are Engulfed in a Whirlpool: It’s an Opportunity for Revolution Not to be Squandered

Numerous crises have gripped the whole global capitalist system. In Iran, the IRI is engulfed in a sea of widespread rage and hatred, especially by women in society, who are pounding at the regime’s prison-and-torture gates. It is not just the pillars of this fascist theocratic regime that are shaky. The old order that dominated the world under the great capitalist-imperialist powers is being divided and torn apart. It is not just in Iran that, with every political upheaval and explosion, millions of people are waking up and raising their heads. This is something that is growing and spreading even in the U.S.—the citadel of the greatest empire of capitalist oppression and exploitation. According to [revolutionary leader] Bob Avakian's analysis, the global situation interacting with the specific conditions in the U.S. has created a “rare time” that has made communist revolution in the U.S. more possible than ever before. He emphasizes that,

... This possibility may not be, and generally is not, immediately apparent, and on the contrary what is often more readily seen on the surface is the way in which, in the short term, the situation is worsening. 

The point is that all this can only be correctly grasped, and acted on, with a consistently scientific method and approach.”
(Avakian, “Revolution: Major Turning Points and Rare Opportunities”) 

Bob Avakian has made that point that if the communist movement grows and thrives in the U.S., it will have a huge impact around the world; that everything we do today is for revolution and to serve revolution around the world. Precisely in relation to Iran which is the base of reactionary theocratic fundamentalism, it can also be said that any significant progress in launching a movement for communist revolution based on Bob Avakian's new communism will have tremendous impact on the people around the world, especially people in the Middle East.

Communist Theory and a Communist Party Are Decisive for the Revolution

Revolution means eradicating the economic and political foundations, the social relations and culture of the past, and building a new one. The proletariat must play a leading role in the struggle against all class divisions and all oppressive social relations in every country and worldwide. To play such a role requires the science of revolution. It’s a science. No one, not even proletarians, can come to a full understanding of the dynamics of society and their own historical role as emancipators of humanity just by relying on the [experience of the] material conditions of  the class. Without communist theory, their instinctive hatred for oppression will sooner or later get diverted and turned against itself. But communist theory can transform the [spontaneous] ideas and sentiments of the oppressed masses into a creative and disciplined force against the source of their oppression and exploitation.

Besides, in a revolutionary struggle against a powerful and organized enemy that controls a state apparatus, military forces, etc., victory is only possible if there is a high degree of [revolutionary] organization. No spontaneous organization can provide what is necessary for an [actual] revolution. These factors create the necessity for a vanguard communist party throughout the entire process of the revolution. In the words of Bob Avakian, a vanguard communist party is like the “Rosetta Stone” that unlocks the meaning of hieroglyphics, making it accessible to what humanity had learned over millennia. When we create this vanguard party and people develop as its leaders, it becomes a precious resource for the oppressed, as well as a serious responsibility for those leaders.

Whenever we talk about the need for a party to lead a communist revolution, we must not forget that our party (the Communist Party of Iran MLM), has had a history of ups and downs, much like the history of communist revolution itself. It has had great victories, [as well as] errors and defeats. The formation of this party came at the cost of great effort and dedicated lives. Its reconstitution, on the basis of the new communism developed by Bob Avakian, is a great victory. On this tortuous path, many stopped part way, or even turned their backs on the people and on revolution. This has caused despair among the oppressed masses for whom revolutionaries that persevere have always been a source of hope that the system’s oppression and exploitation is not eternal, and that change is possible.

To escape the nightmare of this oppressive and exploitative world, the people need a party and a leader who will stand by them and stand by the goal it has declared. For as Comrade Avakian says, 

[T]he people really do have nothing if they don't have a party based on the science that can lead them to emancipate themselves and emancipate all of humanity. This is true whether, at any given time, the people know it or not. 
(Avakian. The New Communism, Introduction, p. 3)

Another key fact is that the two [successful] communist revolutions of the 20th century—in the Soviet Union (1917) and China (1949)—were reversed, leaving many people despairing and heartbroken. In the wake of their defeat, the sewage of anti-communist campaigns spewed from imperialist power centers and reactionary governments to billions of people worldwide in order to banish any thought of repeating those revolutions. And today China and Russia are portrayed as examples of “communism,” but that's a big lie, because they are not the same as the USSR and socialist China. They have become capitalist-imperialist, no more and no less than older imperialists of the U.S. and Europe.

In the 20th century, after the triumph of socialist revolutions in the Soviet Union and China, a war against communism became the central concern of the capitalist [imperialist] states. An example was the bloody war in Indonesia by the military regime [installed by] U.S. imperialism, which included the massacre of nearly a million communists and their supporters.  In Iran, the suppression and murder of communists was a core objective of the [Pahlavi] Shah's security apparatus. This continued [post Shah’s overthrow in 1979] under the IRI, and led to the murder of an entire generation of Iranian communists by the Islamic Republic.

This full-scale war had, and still has, a very important political and ideological aspect or component that has been and still is, as effective as the [outright] murders by political and security forces. One of the central aims of this political and ideological war has been to poison the ground among the intelligentsia so that the communist movement could not have [intellectuals] irrigate the project of communist revolution.

Thus the path to communist revolution is not easy. Yes, if we struggle, and more importantly if we become part of the Communist vanguard, we will certainly experience many sacrifices and hardships. Many of our comrades are now in captivity and under torture. Many of them were hanged, or their precious lives were lost in front of the firing squads of the IRI. At the same time, many sat on the sidelines and even put obstacles in the wheel of the revolution. All of these are challenges. Without accepting and rising to these challenges, we cannot bring a fundamentally different world into being. As Mao said, “Many deeds cry out to be done.” But the bigger challenge is: for whom and for what shall this revolution be made, and how to advance it.

To those who say, communism may be “a good idea on paper, but it has only been a nightmare in practice,” Bob Avakian offered a response in his 2012 talk “BA Speaks: Revolution Nothing Less”: 

First, capitalism-imperialism is the real nightmare for humanity, and it's not even a good idea on paper. Second, where does this idea come from that communism is a nightmare? It comes from the politicians who run this capitalist-imperialist system, from the people who decide and control what is and is not taught in the schools, from the media mouthpieces of this system and this system's intellectual hit men, in other words, from the very people who rule over and enforce this capitalist-imperialist system and who have told lie after lie after lie to defend this system. These are the people you are going to trust to tell you about communism?... I thought of… the contrast between the 10 million children who die every year under this system from starvation and preventable disease, and the fact that in socialist China they had solved the food problem so that everyone had enough to eat within 20 years. So remind me, which system is the nightmare for humanity? Or how about the contrast between the situation for women under this system, the millions who are raped and beaten every year, the extreme degradation and enslavement concentrated in pornography and sex trafficking, up against the unprecedented, emancipatory advances for women during the first wave of communist revolution in Russia and China. Remind me again, which system is a nightmare for humanity? Or let’s contrast the dominant art and culture of this society, “Real Housewives” of this or that, and the all too putrid culture that comes through in way too much of hip hop and so-called stand-up comedy today up against the revolutionary art and culture that was brought forward through the Cultural Revolution in China, and the prominent role of women and overcoming women’s oppression in that art and culture. Remind me once more, which system is a nightmare for humanity? Or contrast the staggering mass incarceration, especially of oppressed nationalities in this country, up against the steps that were taken in Russia to overcome the oppression of minority nationalities. One more time, remind me which system is the nightmare for humanity? 

The above is drawn from a chapter in Bob Avakian Speaks: Revolution, Nothing Less: “Remind Me: Which System, Capitalism or Communism, Is the Nightmare for Humanity?”