A year ago the murder of Jina (Mahsa) Amini at the hands of the hated morality police in Tehran triggered a beautiful uprising of the people in Iran against the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI). Women’s daring acts of burning the hijab and their resounding cry of “Down with the Islamic Republic” unleashed an unprecedented uprising throughout the country, calling forth struggle against national oppression, discrimination against LGBTQ+ people and far more. The uprising electrified the world.

Despite the vicious repression that followed and the temporary ebb in the struggle, this uprising that shook the Iranian regime to its foundations illustrates a critical fact about today’s world—humanity is living through unprecedented times. The existing world order is being ripped apart—millions of migrants are being driven across borders everywhere, environmental catastrophe looms over the planet, the spectre of nuclear war is rising in Ukraine, and the Western democracies are increasingly giving rise to fascist forces that are tearing at the normal ways society is being run, threatening a more naked and far more repressive form of rule.

The cry for freedom has been on the lips of millions in Iran—but the burning question is, will this be freedom for the oppressed to seize on the turmoil that is tearing apart the old order to make revolution, overthrow the regime along with all relations of oppression and exploitation and replace it with something much better? Or will exploiters and oppressors be free in one form or another, either to continue the old regime or continue the same conditions of oppression and exploitations with new faces at the top?

The Islamic Republic is a dictatorship in the form of a theocratic Shia regime, and looks somewhat different than the more “familiar” reactionary regimes in many other countries dominated by imperialism. In response to this, many have been lulled by the promises of Western secular democracy and the relative prosperity that is based on their parasitic global network of sweatshop labour and exploitation. Let us be crystal clear: these devout mullahs preside over the same system of oppressive relations as exist throughout the world. This is why they invariably wind up taking shelter under the wings of profane imperialists like Russia’s Putin or China’s Xi Jinping, if not their Western counterparts. The very rise of Islamic fundamentalism is indeed itself in large part a product of the scorched earth policy of imperialism, especially in the Middle East. In the name of democracy, the US-led Western imperialists have for generations committed atrocious crimes to hold down the people of Iran and the Middle East, carrying out bloody coups and imposing feudal sheikhs and shahs on the region’s countries, training secret police to search and hunt and kill secular nationalists and communist revolutionaries, arresting and torturing students and other radical intellectuals… all to ensure their prosperity and global domination. This was the political vacuum that the mullahs stepped into, themselves promising an alternative to all this, and misleading the people into another matrix of horror. Today, powerful forces are fighting to exploit illusions about democracy and people’s lack of understanding of what capitalist-imperialism really means for the people of the world in order to mislead them into accepting minor adjustments to the system that oppresses them. It is noteworthy that the mummies of the old, overthrown regime of the Shah have crawled out of their graves, modernised their look, waving their reactionary tricolour flag stained with blood of several generations of Iranian freedom fighters. These mummies dream of restoring the regime that came to power through the British-US imperialist coup in 1953 and ruled through the killing, torture and imprisonment of its opponents. Another major group is the Mujahedeen, an Islamic organization closely allied with and supported by the fascist Republican Party in the US. Despite some sharp animosity towards each other, these forces simply propose different versions of an oppressive regime that would take over and keep intact the whole system of capitalist oppression and exploitation in Iran, which inevitably produces and enforces patriarchy, religious bigotry, super-exploitation, hunger, wars and destruction of the environment. The Pahlavi strategy for "regime change" is to arrive at a unity with major parts of the security-military establishment of the IRI, and the Mujahedeen are hoping for outright military intervention by the US and/or Israel in order to pave the way for a kind of "regime change". Both of these versions would keep Iran a subordinate part of the world capitalist-imperialist system, with little more than a change of brand.

The Iranian regime is trapped amidst the intensifying contradictions of this world capitalist-imperialist system, and is enmeshed in the rising rivalry between the US-led Western imperialists on one side and Russian and Chinese imperialists on the other. This has driven the EU and the US governments to pose in "solidarity" with the uprising even while they carry out dirty deals with the criminal IRI in order to lure it back from siding with the Russian and Chinese imperialists. The result for the people: while European-made guns and bullets were mowing people down on the streets of Iran, the Chinese and Russian imperialists were also providing the IRI with abusive instruments and tools of repression. All these are glaring signs that what is happening in Iran and to its future is not an "Iranian” but a world affair. it is critical to recognise the international dimension of this fight and to act accordingly.

Under the rule of IRI, Iran has remained an integral but subordinate part of the world system of capitalist imperialism, which works on the basis of viciously exploiting billions of people throughout the world. Capitalism can only live with wars of plunder and destruction. Capitalism drives female enslavement, and child labour is an ever increasing part of its global supply chain and profitable accumulation of capital. Capitalism treats nature as if it was an endless source of private gain and plunder and is destroying the environment to the point of no return. And through all this it is promoting anti-science and religious bigotry and most vicious national oppression and patriarchy.

All this means that the revolution we need in Iran can only be a communist revolution. The first step in this revolution is to overthrow the IRI and establish a New Socialist Republic in order to start uprooting this capitalist exploitation and oppression. But this revolution is an integral part of a world revolution, because we are all woven together by this world capitalist system. Either we are all emancipated or nobody will be.

To make this revolution we need the most advanced scientific understanding of the realities of this system, the situation we are in, and how the oppressed and exploited peoples of different countries and ultimately humanity can get rid of capitalism-imperialism and replace it with a system that is oriented to and capable of eliminating all oppression and exploitation, meeting the most fundamental needs of humanity, including the need for creative flourishing, and enabling humanity to become fit caretakers of the earth.

This understanding has been developed by the revolutionary leader and communist thinker Bob Avakian—the architect of a radically new understanding of the science of communism, the new communism, which fundamentally builds on but in some important ways ruptures with and goes beyond the breakthrough in understanding developed by Marx and the leaders of the previous wave of communist revolution. While many in Iran have felt discouraged in the face of the regime’s mass repression, this science shows the potential to advance in the face of repression, how to deal with the brutality of the regime and turn it into fuel for making big leaps in building a movement for a real revolution.

Go to the website of our party, the Communist Party of Iran Marxist-Leninist-Maoist, for Farsi materials and to revcom.us for English and Spanish materials on what a real revolution is, and how the potential for a genuine revolution can be seized upon and turned into reality by building a powerful movement for revolution through leading the people to rely on and wield the whole new framework of human emancipation forged by Bob Avakian in the new communism.

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