On Wednesday, January 22, 2025, Khamenei, in a meeting with private sector investors, reacted to Trump’s recent remarks about the regime, without naming him explicitly. This occurred on a day when freedom-seekers in revolutionary Kurdistan ranging from Shahabad to Kermanshah, Sanandaj, Saqqez, Bukan, Mahabad, and other major and minor cities in Kurdistan had shut down schools, workshops, shops, and offices, rendering government institutions ineffective. This was in protest against the foundation of the Islamic Republic, symbolized by the death penalty, and to strengthen the ongoing struggle to abolish it. Normally, any politician in such circumstances would sit behind closed doors to contemplate solutions for their regime if such a massive strike like the revolutionary uprising of Jina in 2022 sparked nationwide anger among the dissatisfied masses. However, Khamenei gathered private sector capitalists, ideological allies of Trump, to send a message of compromise to him. At the same time, he also sent a message to the people of Iran. What was that message?
Trump voiced truths about the Islamic Republic’s increasing weakness truths that the majority of dissatisfied and protesting citizens have experienced firsthand. This growing weakness is the result of their costly struggles against the regime, amplified by its internal contradictions and deepening crises.
Khamenei, like any cleric skilled in sophistry, fallacies, and deceit, claimed that his regime remains strong as ever. He said that during Saddam’s era, it was thought that the Islamic government was weak and vulnerable to attack, and the same belief prevailed during Reagan’s time when Saddam was supported. But all of them are gone, and the regime has endured. What is the reality? In 1980, when Saddam’s Ba’athist regime, backed by the U.S., attacked Iran, the Islamic Republic had not yet stabilized. Workers with their councils, unemployed workers with protests, women with their actions, and Arab, Kurdish, and Turkmen people with their struggles were all asserting their rights. The regime, through the war, achieved stability by means of horrific torture, mass executions of thousands in prisons, and sending young people to the battlefronts to die. Although that war was initiated with the U.S. government’s green light, it was orchestrated in such a way that the Islamic Republic would emerge intact. U.S. officials repeatedly emphasized that the war would have no winner and that there was no intention to overthrow the Islamic Republic. This was because the regime had not yet fulfilled two major tasks desired by both the bourgeoisie and the U.S. government: crushing the achievements of the 1979 freedom-seeking revolution and stripping workers of rights through the completion of repression mechanisms, dictatorship, and the reconstruction of conventional capitalism. The economic force to implement this conventional capitalism was intended to be the same individuals Khamenei addressed on the day of the general strike in Kurdistan.
All factions, either openly or behind the scenes, have acknowledged that the regime has never achieved its goals at any point in its history. Now Khamenei tells private sector capitalists and Trump-like figures that he is determined to accomplish those tasks with their help. In line with this, on Saturday, January 25, 2025, most prominent newspapers wrote about the necessity of negotiations with the U.S. and yielding to its demands to attract investment to Iran. On the same day, they published populist photos of a politician holding a dustpan to deceive the working class into hoping for improved lives through government benevolence. However, the suffering and experienced working class of Iran cannot be fooled by such populism. The truth is that every word from Trump, who is delusional and whose plans are often doomed to failure amidst the deepening crises of capitalism, is aimed at taming the Islamic Republic, not overthrowing it. Members of the right-wing opposition waiting for Trump or Israel to topple the regime so they can reclaim the throne of the outdated monarchy are wasting their time. The trajectory of struggles, with the glorious and victorious strike of January 22 in Kurdistan as one of its stages, promises that the regime will ultimately be overthrown by the people who led the uprisings of December 2017, November 2019, and the revolutionary uprising of Jina. It was through these experiences that they chanted: “We want neither a shah nor a leader, nor Akbar’s followers.” These are the very people whom Trump and his predecessors have always feared, and thus have supported the fascist methods of the Islamic Republic’s leaders against the people, aiding it with anti-protest weapons, torture devices, and surveillance tools.
