Increasing working hours, raising the retirement age, daily layoffs of workers from permanent jobs and converting official contracts into temporary ones, greater exploitation of child laborers at much lower wages, the growing phenomenon of street children, reduction of state services and welfare and healthcare facilities, unprecedented intensification of environmental pollution and destruction, and increasing serious threats to the environment, all these clearly represent the current face of the Islamic capitalist system in Iran over the past 46 years.
It is no exaggeration to say that if these conditions have today been imposed in their most brutal and inhumane form on the working and toiling people in Iran under Islamic rule, the global capitalist world stands in stark contrast to the deeply human and profound perspective offered by Rosa Luxemburg, who wrote: “Socialism or Barbarism.” The barbarism we now witness is what the vast majority of people on this planet experience daily with their flesh, bones, and lived experience. However, workers’ socialism, the socialism that Marx envisioned, which is the organized power of a conscious working class to run the economic, political, and social affairs of society has yet to be realized. And humanity today needs it more than ever.
What was presented to the world as socialism in the former Soviet Union and its satellites from 1920 onward was not in line with scientific socialism, but wholly in opposition to it. It was a bitter experience, the costs and hardships of which the global working class continues to bear to this day. Formerly “socialist” leftists, now turned liberal, have more than anyone else become loudspeakers of liberal propaganda against communism and the working class. More than anyone else, they now write about the virtues of “liberal democracy,” shout about it, and tirelessly proclaim the sterility of communism and socialism.
In Iran, during the reformist era of the 2000s, they were euphoric over the “dialogue of civilizations,” only to abandon everything they had built over the years overnight. Not long after, they began fawning over the “Green Movement,” and after losing hope in U.S. policies for regime change in Iran, they pinned their false hopes to the sinking ship of the Greens and the disaffected ayatollahs of the religious seminaries, wrapping green scarves around their hands and foreheads.
Now more than ever, the burden of ending the barbarism of the capitalist system falls heavily on the shoulders of the working class. But fulfilling this mission is not spontaneous or unorganized, it requires conscious action, made possible only through the transformative practice of the working class and the efforts of communists and equality seekers.
Today, the working class in Iran finds itself in one of the most difficult moments of its political and social struggle. It is deprived of its effective organizational tools, independent labor unions, the right to assemble, protest, strike, and freedom of speech and belief. The absence of these means leaves workers disarmed in a fierce, face-to-face battle with a ruthless enemy, armed to the teeth, that demands nothing short of total submission and slavery.
What the Iranian working class is experiencing today is a slow, grinding death, for themselves and their families. The Iranian state and capitalists, fully aware of this painful reality, are still not content with the level of suffering imposed. On the contrary, they intensify their pressures day by day to extract greater profits. Because their wealth is rooted in the poverty of workers, and workers’ poverty is the source of their ever-increasing riches.
The policies of the state and capitalists to systematically strip Iranian workers of their rights manifest in daily firings, factory closures, delayed wages, cancellation of permanent contracts and replacement with temporary ones, even the non-enforcement of already anti-worker labor laws, the absence of unemployment insurance and job security, pitiful wage increases amid skyrocketing inflation, and the rise of other social crises such as addiction, poverty, prostitution, child labor, murder, and more all of which first and foremost affect the working class and the most oppressed sectors of society. These are among the many outcomes of today’s corrupt capitalist system and its Islamic government backers in Iran.
