A complex political, military, and social struggle is unfolding in the region between Israel, Iran, and Turkey. Alongside the menacing presence of the United States, which seeks to resolve this highly complex situation in accordance with its own interests.

Israel has conducted a brutal bombing campaign against Iran in an attempt to destroy the infrastructure needed to produce nuclear weapons, though it did not entirely succeed. In addition, a violent and popular uprising, centred mainly on Tehran, has gripped Iran and spread to other major industrial cities.

Tehran has been at the centre of many of Iran’s major upheavals. First came Mossadeq’s democratic uprising, then the rise of the Pahlavi dynasty. Later, a democratic uprising overthrew the imperial family, but it was then replaced by a theocratic government led by Shiite clerics. After the long war with Iraq led by Saddam Hussein, the religious establishment relaxed its control slightly, allowing for a limited democracy. However, current regional tensions have led religious fundamentalists to reinforce their control, bringing their political-military militias back to prominence.

Tehran and its social and political problems

Tehran, Iran’s capital, has almost 10 million residents, and the metropolitan area adds another 16 million, making it about 20% larger than New York City by population, although the areas are similar in size. This creates severe overpopulation and a high concentration of working-class people, a problem common in many developing and some developed countries. Globally, Tehran is among the least stable capitals, with a low standard of living. Environmental neglect by industry, poor infrastructure, terrible air quality, and growing conflict between workers and the wealthy are widespread.

This economic disparity is further highlighted by the meagre earnings of the average worker in Tehran. Many take home just $35–$150 a month. In some cases, workers are not paid at all. High inflation rates also make it difficult to gauge true purchasing power. 

Tehran’s working class deals with regular violations of legal workplace protections. Up to 15% of children nationwide survive through dangerous activities, such as prostitution or working in unsafe factories and on the streets. Most cannot attend school or receive healthcare, making escape from poverty nearly impossible. 

From May 2024 to May 2025, more than 2,000 people died countrywide due to dangerous working conditions, with Tehran among the worst affected. Laws protecting workers are often only formal and broad, and in practice, they are strictly enforced to protect the state and the upper middle class, not the workers. 

Another serious problem plaguing Iran is the water crisis. Tehran suffers from frequent, increasingly severe droughts due to several factors: geography, climate, and systemic issues. Located far from the main water basins, Tehran often faces severe water shortages. This year, rainfall has fallen by around 45%. The mountains around Tehran, once covered in snow, now lie bare, partly due to global warming.

Water management is hampered by outdated and inadequate techniques. Only about 12% of Iran’s territory is cultivated. Yet agriculture consumes over 93% of the country’s water resources, already mismanaged and largely neglected by the state. Only a small proportion reaches working-class households. In Tehran, the city’s five main reservoirs have fallen to just 1–13% of their capacity.

This urban strain is made worse by rural crises. Numerous environmental and economic hardships have led to a mass exodus from unusable and uncompetitive lands. Agricultural workers and smallholders move to Tehran, seeking work and a livelihood. This influx has worsened the city’s water and energy shortages, disease, thirst, hunger, and filth, afflicting Tehran’s workers with increasing frequency. In January 2025, the Iranian government closed schools and reduced working days and hours in offices and workplaces. Yet, it is the workers who bear the brunt. They freeze at night and go hungry the next day.

Since winter 2024, Iran has faced a severe energy and fuel crisis. This has caused major production disruptions nationwide. Tehran has been particularly hard hit due to its large industrial base. The critical energy situation is a glaring contradiction, given that Iran is one of the world’s largest fuel producers. Many causes underlie this crisis: conditions within the Iranian state and external political and military factors.

Iran’s economic and financial system is based on a structure in which official or semi-official organisations, centred on the Pasdaran, established after the revolution as a military force operating in parallel to the Iranian Armed Forces, have become a sort of conglomerate controlling around 30% of the economy through specific institutionalised agencies with holdings in the manufacturing, agricultural, oil, financial, construction and telecommunications sectors. The Organisation for the Enforcement of the Order (SETAD) was created after the revolution to manage confiscated property. It now answers directly to Supreme Leader Khamenei and operates without government oversight. SETAD’s control over much of the industry is marked by corruption and mafia-like management, and it manages an international oil smuggling network.

Furthermore, for years Iran has been embroiled in a state of constant conflict with Israel – at times a low-intensity conflict, at others open and violent – and is burdened by a system of sanctions imposed by the US. 

Against this complex backdrop, Iran has spent billions funding insurgent movements in the region. In the past, this included Bashar’s now-collapsed regime. Today, it means support for Lebanese Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis. Iran seeks to present itself as a local power, facing off against Turkey and Israel.

The suffering of the Iranian proletariat comes not only from the bourgeois and sectarian policies of the Islamic Republic. It is also caused by brutal sanctions, mainly imposed by the United States. These sanctions have hit the Iranian working class hard. Only the proletariat bears the brunt of this war-like situation, as its conditions worsen. The sanctions make jobs scarcer and expand the black labour market, where workers lose their minimal protections. This dynamic affects access to basic medical services and raises the prices of food and essential goods.

As proletarians and the petty bourgeoisie protest in large numbers, these groups remain disorganised and face violent repression. Western activities, either open or covert, undermine the internal front against the theocratic state, supporting supposed democratic reforms but really adding to Iran’s wartime difficulties. These calculated US actions to pressure the Iranian government confuse the real class direction, which is needed to guide the current movement.

The cross-class nature of this powerful movement is a tragedy within a tragedy. The Iranian petty bourgeoisie faces dire circumstances, leading to protests for democracy and basic rights. On the interclassist nature of the protests—including violent ones—that have shaken Iranian society for years, we noted in October 2022, in issue 418 of our newspaper *Il Partito Comunista*, in the article “A New Wave of Revolt in Iran”:

“The path forward for the Iranian working class is not to submit to non-proletarian movements, but to form a single class-based trade union front in which all workers’ organisations in Iran that refuse to submit to the regime can act together and independently of the other classes […] only by acting independently, without mixing with other classes, can the proletariat truly become the protagonist, to the point of taking the lead in an uprising such as the one currently underway in Iran.”

To quell the anger of demonstrators and the international media, the state made a few demagogic and insubstantial concessions. It promised to regulate the Virtue Guard. President Pezeshkian has declared that this police force “will no longer harass women” who do not wear the hijab. More women in Tehran now appear in public without it.

Compared to the previous situation, reformists might say that this is a ‘promising first step’. However, Iranian workers know full well that such a concession cannot be trusted. Especially given that Iranian women are still terribly oppressed by everything this bourgeois, theocratic state has to offer.

The reality is quite the opposite: Iranian women are systematically denied access to the labour market on the basis of their gender, and only 14% of them are economically active in society. Legally, they can be married off as young as 10–14 years old. In 2019 alone, women accounted for 30% of homicide victims in Iran, around 10% higher than the average, not to mention attacks that did not result in fatalities, such as the mass poisoning incident of 2023, which aimed to prevent women from attending school. Women’s lives are still largely tied to their husbands or families, remaining subjugated by traditionalist structures and conservative notions of femininity. Even the poor labourer, however oppressed, often finds himself in a higher social position than the average Iranian woman.

All attempts by Iranian workers to protest and demand reforms are met with the utmost violence. All forms of economic and political struggle are met with the brutal violence of the state’s special organs of power and control. Workers, already deprived of everything, are further condemned to languish in the notorious Evin Prison, which holds only political prisoners, or in other equally oppressive facilities, where torture is a daily occurrence. Those who emerge to lead the struggles for improved living conditions, for the defence of women’s rights, or who in any way oppose the state, are subjected to fierce repression, tortured and often forced to confess under pressure; they are sentenced to flogging and, in extreme cases, hanged by the Iranian justice system. This brutal coercion crushes the struggles and subdues the workers more effectively than was the case under the Shah, whose secret police, the SAVAK, failed where the ‘Revolutionary Guard’ of the Islamic Republic of Iran succeeds ruthlessly and efficiently.

At this stage, characterised as much by external military dynamics as by a powerful social movement, the bloody and indiscriminate repression has, for the time being, silenced the social uprisings, which could flare up again at any moment and which a likely new conflict with the US and Israel might well reignite. In the past, the Iranian proletariat has shown itself to be formidable, opposing the rulers of the day, and only the timely political theocracy of the ayatollahs prevented the fire from spreading beyond Iran’s borders. Those who have fought and will fight for humane living conditions, and against the state, even in its confessional form, must under no circumstances believe that their salvation can be achieved by emulating the bourgeois republics of the region. 

Meanwhile, the bourgeoisie and the parliamentarians who hold the highest positions of power in the country remain largely indifferent to the suffering of those beneath them, offering only minimal concessions, if any.

The following is taken from the aforementioned issue 418 of *Il Partito Comunista*, in “A New Wave of Revolt in Iran”:“… it is unlikely that the Iranian bourgeoisie will relinquish the powerful instrumentum regni of the theocratic regime, which, under the pretext of religion, imposes an omnipresent and extremely oppressive regime of police control over the working class. […] To oppress and keep the class subjugated, it is necessary to oppress and humiliate Iranian women, just as it is necessary to torment the country’s numerous ethnic minorities […] Any new bourgeois regime would soon have to reconcile itself with religious, conservative and nationalist ideologies. As in neighbouring Turkey”.

Iran is therefore subject to a dual crisis: an internal one, involving the popular strata, the petty bourgeoisie, bazaar merchants and the proletariat, as in the ‘revolution’ against Shah Reza Pahlavi; and an external one, caused by specific factors; the ‘local’ imperialist will in a theatre particularly critical to the global balance, disrupted by military and social clashes in the vast oil-producing region whose exploitation shapes states, alliances and alignments; the confrontation with local imperialism represented by Israel; and the United States’ hegemonic claim to control oil extraction and the oil market.

The interconnection of these momentous events has shaped the past, present and future of this great nation.

In the current historical cycle, the war that had been halted by hastily concluded agreements now seems to be flaring up once more. It is by no means certain what impact this will have on a resurgence of social struggle.

Militarily, following the recent bombings of nuclear sites and the missile response against the Israeli attacker, open conflict has once more been suspended in an armed truce, as if awaiting the United States to make the first move towards war or for a negotiated status quo to be found. It is, however, indicative of a highly uncertain situation regarding broader war alignments that, despite the many bases scattered across the Persian Gulf region, these cannot, at least for now, be utilised because the coastal states will not grant permission for a military attack on Iran, even though Iran certainly has neither allies nor sympathisers among the Arab states, having fomented nationalist and separatist movements. It seems clear that all the states in that area fear the outbreak of a conflict which, even if localised, could spread to the entire Middle East.

At present, a US naval force is stationed in the Gulf with the dual aim of increasing pressure in potential negotiations and laying the groundwork for a direct attack, should the negotiations fail to proceed in the manner and timeframe demanded by the US. This imposing fleet, however, also represents a position of weakness, given that Iranian missile systems, bolstered by supplies from China and neighbouring Russia, pose a real threat to the ships. At the time of writing, the negotiations appear to be facing serious difficulties, as the Iranian leadership is absolutely unwilling to abandon the development of nuclear weapons; the outcome cannot be predicted with certainty.

The current phase highlights a situation of dynamic equilibrium between the United States and Iran, which is certainly not a weak and disorganised state like Venezuela, where a commando operation captured the elected president, defended only by his Cuban bodyguards. Joint naval manoeuvres involving Iran, Russia and China are currently taking place in the Strait of Hormuz, whilst the US fleet is anchored in the Gulf off the Iranian coast.

Militarily, Iran is in a league of its own, and the active presence of Russia and China is a far cry from that in derelict Venezuela, where the only casualties were the Cubans of the presidential guard, whilst the rest of the army did not fire a single shot at the US helicopters and aircraft involved in the commando operation which, in defiance of all international law, captured the Venezuelan President.

For its part, Israel remains menacingly ready for military action, which it will not, however, carry out without American approval, in order to definitively eliminate, having already resolved the Palestinian issue with an inhuman and terrifying massacre, the threat posed by Iran, which has no intention of backing down from the development of nuclear weapons. This, too, is the subject of the ongoing negotiations. Another crucial issue is who will decide how much oil to extract and to whom to sell it, with the caveat that an excessive amount of oil on the markets – and the US already controls the Venezuelan market – could drive down the price to the point where extraction from oil shale becomes unprofitable, plunging a critical sector of the US economy into crisis.

But this entire complex and deadly mosaic lies solely within the realm of US capitalism and imperialism and is of no concern to the Iranian proletariat, which needs only the help of its brothers and sisters around the world, and the guidance of the revolutionary party, to put an end to the suffering and bereavement.