The protests that began in Tehran’s bazaar and continued for a fourth day on Tuesday, January 9, have entered a new phase by spreading to cities such as Isfahan, Kermanshah, Shiraz, Yazd, and Mashhad. The strike at Tehran’s Grand Bazaar for the third consecutive day, the closure of shopping centers and businesses in Kermanshah, and the joining of students at universities including Tehran, Elm-o-Sanat, Allameh Tabataba’i, Khajeh Nasir, Beheshti, Elm-o-Farhang, as well as Isfahan University of Technology, show that this is not a short-term reaction to currency fluctuations, but rather a wave of popular protests rooted in decades of social uprisings in Iran, having learned from their ups and downs.
From the perspective of the interests of workers and the working people, the very existence of these protests up to this point deserves support and active participation not merely as a moment of anti-regime street excitement, but as a defense of the right to a dignified life. When the collapse of the national currency devours wages and savings, and when chronic inflation pushes housing, food, and healthcare beyond the reach of large segments of society, silence means accepting the transformation of poverty into people’s inevitable fate.
When the president, while presenting the budget bill, says, “They tell us to raise wages, but where should we get the money from?”, this statement is an admission of an economic deadlock whose costs have long been paid by the lower classes. For workers, retirees, nurses, drivers, low-level employees, and the unemployed, when the official state budget is set based on 52 percent inflation and the president brazenly says he cannot raise wages, it means that the state budget is to be financed from the meager tables of workers and laborers; it means that the majority of Iran’s people will be deprived of access to medicine, treatment, and medical services; it means more children will be forced out of education; it means more people will be compelled to live on the margins of cities; it means the dreams of more young people will be destroyed; it means more painful social harms will engulf families; it means the entire society will suffer psychological erosion.
For the middle class, small shopkeepers, and bazaar merchants, the moment-to-moment rise of foreign currency means transactions come to a halt and pricing becomes impossible. When this stagnation is combined with tax pressures, rising rents, and declining purchasing power, it is natural that bazaar merchants, too, find themselves sharing a common fate with workers and the poor in relation to the corrupt and repressive ruling regime.
The joining of students across Iran’s universities is highly significant. Today, Iranian society is in a situation where any movement, even a purely sectoral one, quickly takes on a political character. Universities usually articulate the political horizon of crises earlier than other spaces. The bazaar also has networked capacity and the potential for coordinated strikes, and repressing it is costly for the government. But real advancement occurs when these protests connect with the main body of working and laboring society that is, when they link with the movements and demands of workers in production and services, contract workers, drivers, municipal workers, teachers, retirees, the unemployed, and marginalized communities. This is because the main blow of the crisis falls precisely on them, and their social weight can transform isolated and scattered popular uprisings into decisive movements for fundamental social change. Therefore, it must be emphasized that the victory and advancement of these uprisings depend on the participation of the working masses and the poor and marginalized.
Naturally, as protests expand, a struggle over their direction begins. These days, whispers in favor of monarchist currents can be heard here and there, amplified by their media networks abroad. Leaving aside their practical coordination with regime policies, these movements at best seek to empty the people’s revolutionary uprising of its rightful content. They want, amid the existing political crisis, to raise a banner that Iranian society has already tested, instead of highlighting the demands of the majority and the necessity of grassroots organization. The Iranian people overthrew monarchical despotism through their revolution and will certainly not accept replacing religious despotism with royal despotism. The issue facing Iranian society today is not choosing between two forms of despotism; it is ending an order that reproduces poverty, inequality, and deprivation of rights.
Here it must be stated clearly that the Islamic Republic and monarchists, despite their apparent differences, can align in a shared objective: diverting protests away from the independent demands of workers and laborers and turning them into top-down power-change projects.
The monarchist current seeks to tie popular anger to nostalgia and a return to the past that is, instead of addressing inequality, the right to organize, wages, housing, and public services, it reduces everything to changing the face at the top of power.
If these protests are to become lasting, rooted, and victorious, it is necessary for their class and social axes to become clearer. This means placing the slogan “Bread, Work, Freedom” at the forefront of popular demands. It means emphasizing demands that represent the lives of the majority and prevent the people’s uprising from being suppressed or appropriated.
The formation of bonds of solidarity between universities, working-class neighborhoods, marginalized communities, and workplaces is the key to expanding this uprising. Through such connections, protest moves from defense to offense and becomes a social power, a power capable both of standing up to repression and of avoiding the traps that enemies place along its path.
The protests of the past four days are the cry of a society that, under the pressure of inflation, unemployment, and job insecurity, can no longer endure. From the standpoint of the short- and long-term interests of the working class, the essence of these protests must be defended, while remaining vigilant so that the Islamic Republic cannot contain them through limited concessions. The advance of this uprising depends on the participation of the working masses and the poor and marginalized, and on the formation of independent solidarity among different sectors of society, so that protests against high prices are transformed into a movement for the right to life and for ending the current unjust, exploitative, and unequal system.
