The Slingers Collective is the international arm of Manjanigh (Catapult), a revolutionary communist organisation operating inside Iran. We publish their reporting on the recent uprisings, as well as their commentary on the previous Jina uprising, to help deepen the understanding of the revolutionary movement inside Iran on the Australian and Anglophone Left. – Edith Fischer, Editor

Editor’s Note: This text has received slight formatting and presentation edits; the original article can be accessed here:

Class Composition of the December 2025 Protests

Following a precipitous collapse of the Iranian rial and a corresponding surge in the dollar exchange rate, a wave of economic anxiety and anger arose among Tehran’s merchants and shopkeepers. From December 28, 2025, various markets in the capital, from central passages and bazaars to the iron and furniture markets, saw shop closures and protests by tradespeople. Their demands centred on stabilising the exchange rate, controlling inflation, ensuring economic predictability, and preventing further untold losses from financial markets.

On December 7, protests began in the Aladdin Shopping Centre and Charsou Mall, immediately signalling that the urban petty bourgeoisie, joined alongside by a contradictory mix of class forces loosely described as “bazaar merchants,” had entered the scene to express their deep economic and political discontent.

Even from the outset, what was labelled a “bazaar merchant protest” was amorphous and internally contradictory. That the lowest strata of urban shopkeepers — such stratification itself a clear sign that we are not dealing with a homogeneous signifier of “the bazaar” — was accompanied from the outset by the presence of both formal and informal waged workers; those street vendors, porters, and service workers eking out their existence below the poverty line; alongside sections of the small merchant middle class whose economic significance has severely eroded. Thus, identifying the bazaar and urban petty bourgeoisie as the origin of the protests may seem immediately plausible, but it is misleading.

Tehran’s fruit and vegetable wholesale market, which on the morning of Thursday, January 1, 2026, became a site of protests, is one such market. Spanning 270 hectares, with daily traffic of about 60,000 people and 20,000 vehicles, it by no means has a uniform class composition. In addition to merchants, workers, and employees in this market, people who cannot afford fruit from ordinary retailers flock here to enjoy comparatively lower prices on everyday fruits and vegetables.

For the working class, these markets are a direct, everyday confrontation with the real value of their labour power, a value subject to ever-increasing levels of exploitation and plunder. The market is an immediate, concrete measure by which the working class can gauge and confront its misfortune. These streets and commercial spaces were focal points of unrest during the November 2019 uprising, but now bear undeniable signs of destitution and fear.

Is the class composition of these protests surprising? Not to us. The current crisis of the working class is a crisis of social reproduction and livelihood. From a communist perspective, fighting an ever-shrinking basket of livelihoods is a concrete struggle against the eroding value of commodified labour power (wages). In this way, protests against price hikes and inflation may become proletarian uprisings over wages, and should naturally open the horizon for forces seeking to negate the present order and end social domination in toto. But given the balance of existing political forces, and, most importantly, the absence of an organised revolutionary left, the skies remain dark.

The heterogeneous background of the initial protesters in the bazaars of Tehran gradually shifted as the geography of protests expanded; rather, it converged in a specific direction. As protests spread from the central Tehran Bazaar to other cities and social spaces, the weight of the urban poor, the unemployed, and the precariat increased, and this new majority of protestors hailed from a much clearer origin: specifically, a proletarian one. In this sense, what initially appeared as a protest by the “urban petty bourgeois” or “bazaar tradespeople” expanded to reveal a clearer class dimension, transcending the initial limits of revolt.

In the initial protests, multiple actual class identities were present, each bearing the potential to organise as independent subjects. This multiplicity, from the outset, placed different, even contradictory, possibilities before the protests. The proletarian dimension did not necessarily include the entire working class, especially its more stable segments. At the same time, the organisational capacity of external political forces became increasingly evident. Neither the urban petty bourgeoisie nor even the protesters themselves could project their political organisation outwards. Indeed, certain factions of capital in Iran were ready to project their own political horizons onto the protests and advance them. Thus, the class potential of the December 2025 protests in itself tells us nothing about the class and political horizon ahead of the protesters; rather, based on the available evidence, it reveals a deadly contradiction between the class origin of the protesters and their political orientation.

Amid this, there was also an illusory hope, largely propagated by leftists detached from class analysis. This perspective regarded the political direction of the protests not as a question of conscious organisation and planning, but as the product of horizontal action and an assumed equivalence of identity. On this basis, it was believed that the expansion of the protests toward the urban poor, the marginalised, and the underclass, as well as the shift of protest geography toward smaller cities, which can be described as a geography of poverty, would automatically steer the protest’s “independent potentials” in a progressive direction. This illusion held that the movement’s political orientation was a direct function of its geographical displacement.

In such a horizon, their assumption was that the multiplicity of forces and demands could be preserved without tension, and that political rivalries and contradictions among opposing class interests could be deferred to some vague “post-overthrow” future rather than deliberated and confronted in the present.

However, the orientation of protests is neither deferrable, spontaneous, nor a direct function of geographical shifts. No social movement, even if carried on the shoulders of the urban poor and workers, arrives at a progressive or emancipatory horizon by predetermination; political orientation requires conscious, organised, and mediatory intervention.

This is where we must candidly speak of the absence of essential political mediators, namely, organised and militant revolutionary leftists and class-trade unionists. In the current alignment of political forces, these forces have no effective presence as organisers, bearers of a program, or as leading poles. Thus, not only is there no organised left presence, but we are also faced with the organised absence of the revolutionary left. As if all these years, especially after the slap that the December 2017 uprising dealt us all, the revolutionary left has, above all, been busy organising its own absence.

Consciously suspending the issue of orientation and leaving the working class in a horizonless state has, of course, had specific consequences, which this section of the left has accepted and reproduced: on one hand, relying on virtual alliances with forces lacking real organisation; on the other, creating a democratic illusion of the revolutionary process and promoting an “everyone-together” logic that gathers a spectrum from left to far-right under an unwieldy tent. Within this framework, the abstract equation of gender, sexual, and national oppressions with class antagonism, without articulating their material and historical relations to the relations of production and reproduction of capital, emptied class antagonisms of their analytical and political significance, effectively sidelining them altogether. (The issue is not denying or downplaying these oppressions or prioritising them, but the absence of that articulation that could frame struggles against gender-sexual and national oppressions as necessary and intrinsic moments of the class struggle, not as its abstract alternative or equivalent).

This tendency was simultaneously strengthened by a conscious avoidance of vertical organisation and submission to various horizontalist gatherings, and by the promotion of the idea of spontaneous transformations. This ad hoc reflexivity provided the theoretical justification for not engaging with the organisational vacuum, thereby further solidifying the existing political impasse. Meanwhile, forces that are now paving the way to fascism have been doing the work that the left has so delicately handed over. The field has been ceded, at least for now, to forces seeking to bind the horizon of the protests to the interests of capital and the reproduction of the dominant order. This has come at a bloody cost, one that the working class and the urban poor are now paying dearly. Here, the revival of capitalism does not mean that capitalist tendencies within the Islamic Republic regime have been halted and are now being restarted by overthrowist right-wing factions. Rather, it refers to the intensification of internal crises within a capitalist order to the point where a change in the political regime becomes necessary to remove obstacles to its development and expansion.

Political Horizons

What confronts us is the necessity of moving from situational analysis and the reading of protests toward articulating a political line and preparing a program of action. Endless analysis, when it fails to move beyond description and culminate in a political decision, itself becomes a form of political passivity. At the same time, it must be stated explicitly that calls for “intervention” that do not clarify material possibilities, the balance of forces, and their concrete mediations amount, at best, to empty moral injunctions. In their more dangerous form, when coupled with naïve optimism about the self-orientation of the protests, they effectively become recommendations to dissolve into dominant dynamics and to serve as foot soldiers for fascist and overthrowist projects. On this basis, several fundamental points must be stated explicitly and without equivocation:

• The rage of the masses is legitimate, yet the threat of fascist ascendancy is both concrete and imminent. The rage stemming from livelihood collapse, wage crisis, job instability, and the masses’ inability to reproduce their individual and social life is the real, material rage of the working class and the urban poor. At the same time, however, it must be emphasised that the fear of rising fascism and capitalist revival is real. The distinction of the December 2025 protests from the December 2017 and November 2019 uprisings lies precisely here: the indeterminacy of those uprisings, which held potential possibilities for organised political intervention to create a horizon and provide direction, in the absence of the revolutionary left, was consumed by various factions defending capital. Political horizons have undeniably shifted towards a fascist ascendancy, to the point where clear signs of a fascist emergence can now be discerned from within the protests. Ignoring this reality means ceding the field even further to forces seeking to channel the masses’ legitimate rage into reproducing the existing order in new forms, above all, a monarchical order.

• In addition to the positive indeterminacy of the December 2017 and November 2019 uprisings, attention must be paid to the fact that that period coincided with the “fascist” current’s inability to effectively organise and articulate its particular demands in the streets. In other words, although the absence of an organised revolutionary left prevented the framing of a progressive horizon at that time, the fascist current around Reza Pahlavi also lacked the necessary ideological cohesion, social networks, and hegemonic capacity to seize control of the protests. To distinguish the December 2025 protests from the December 2017 and November 2019 uprisings, we must address their distinct social and political backgrounds. One key background factor in December 2017 was the ideological isolation of the middle class following disillusionment with Hassan Rouhani’s election. A class that, after the 2009 [Green Movement] suppression, pinned its hopes on a faction within the regime to achieve economic and political openings through integration with Western capital. This hope quickly collapsed, weakening the “gradual change” horizon of the middle class and linking it to the same integrationist orientation toward Western capital, thereby tying it to “overthrowism.” During that period, we witnessed a rise in workers’ struggles, especially at Haft Tapeh and Ahvaz Steel, which, despite limitations, imposed elements of class politics on the public sphere, further weakening the middle-class model of change and finding echoes in other sections of society and the working class.

• Today, we face a qualitatively different situation, one in which the revived middle-class class ideology of the “Woman, Life, Freedom” uprising has assumed a more hegemonic role and now directly serves right-wing and authoritarian horizons. A discourse that has increasingly tied its overthrowist horizon to a pro-Western project and, in practice, has strengthened the ideological ground necessary for the emergence of fascist tendencies within the current protests. The totality of these transformations explains why the December 2025 protests, unlike December 2017 and November 2019 uprisings, have not only formed in a politically indeterminate situation but in conditions where the fascist right has at its disposal an accumulation of experience, ideology, and organisation, enabling it to actively enter the field to seize the protests’ horizon.

• Initially, it was assumed that signs of centrist fascism’s readiness to co-opt the current protests might hinder their expansion to peripheral regions. This assumption rested on the premise that the rise of centrist fascism, as manifested in recent days through specific slogans and political maneuvers by right-wing forces, lacks the capacity for hegemony in the periphery due to deep historical and social rifts, especially the lived experience and concrete understanding of national oppression among the masses. In other words, the intensity and reality of national oppression in such areas become a serious barrier to the masses’ direct linkage with centrist fascism.

• However, signs indicate that the expansion of protests to these regions is not only likely but actively underway. The issue, however, is that the inability of centrist fascism to achieve hegemony in the periphery does not guarantee said periphery’s immunity from reactionary orientation. In conditions of severe weakness or absence of revolutionary left organisation in these areas, the vacuum of political orientation can lead to the reproduction of local and peripheral reactionary forms; forms that rely on real oppressions and the lived experience of national discrimination, but ultimately, by inverting the logic of the problem, serve to stabilise and reproduce capitalist relations instead of negating them. More precisely, the issue is not the “infiltration of centrist fascism” into the periphery, but the possibility that reactionary alternatives may emerge and present themselves as responses to national oppression. In these regions, the historical experience of repression, discrimination, and national denial is a real barrier to centrist fascist hegemony; but this same reality, in the absence of class articulation and revolutionary left organization, can become the point of departure for reactionary politics that detach national oppression from its material base in capitalist relations and reduce it to an identity-based, authoritarian horizon ultimately compatible with capital reproduction. From this perspective, the danger ahead lies in the strengthening of tendencies in the periphery that, relying on real wounds, block the path to emancipation and sterilise the possibility of linking the struggle against national oppression to the class struggle.

• Revolutionary organisation must be commensurate with the scale of capital’s impending assault on the working class. Revolutionary organisation is not an optional choice or theoretical preference but an essential response to the level of organised capital assault. Capital has been preparing for some time: from systematic propaganda against class struggle and the communist idea, to promoting neoliberal and fascist models like Javier Milei in Iran’s public space; from individualising the causes of poverty and unemployment, to legitimising the elimination of social supports, class repression, rampant privatization, and above all, widespread precarity in workplaces and living spaces that act as a structural barrier to organizing the working class and the urban poor at work and their place of residence. Confronting this assault without conscious and revolutionary organisation means certain retreat. The goal of this organisation must be to shape a broad and militant social resistance that directly targets the mechanisms of exploitation, plunder, and capital reproduction.

• Immediate social resistance does not form spontaneously and requires specific mediators. Social resistance is not the spontaneous product of rage but the result of organisation and class-political mediation. One such mediator is trade-union struggle; a struggle that, if it remains merely trade-unionist, is easily contained, but if elevated to class struggle, can become the backbone of social resistance. Another mediator is organising the urban poor, the unemployed, and the precariat into committees, secret cells, and other open and semi-clandestine organisational forms. Forms of organisation that may emerge in the context of uprisings and mass protests, but are not limited to those moments, must persist as durable structures of resistance.

Without such a political line and practical preparation for organisation, the masses’ legitimate rage not only leads nowhere but can easily become raw material for projects whose horizon is nothing but capital revival and paving the way for fascism.

Urgent Tasks

Since December 2017, the question of “What is to be done?” has persistently confronted us, and time and again we have failed, through practice, to arrive at answers commensurate with the weight of this question. This time, without surrendering to the point of defeat, we must step back and ask: “What should we have done?” Only through this critical rereading of our record can we seek real possibilities for the future. On this basis, we believe that at this particular moment, a set of urgent tasks confronts us; tasks that both recall our undone work and whose necessity today imposes itself more than ever. Tasks that can be framed as minimal possible interventions in the existing balance of forces. In four simultaneous but distinct levels, these tasks are: political-theoretical tasks, organisational tasks, practical-field tasks, and tasks related to the current protests.

Reclaiming the political horizon of the protests from fascist and pro-capital currents

Above all, we must debunk and dispel the pervasive myth that breaking the right’s hegemony can be achieved merely through producing anti-fascist discourses. In right-wing currents, we are not merely facing an ideology that seeks to suppress all forms of confrontation, dialogue, and democratic illusions like “let them be now because they represent part of society.” Rather, we face targeted and organised projects on the ground aimed at dragging politics and society backward, a war our side can never hope to win through social media or discursive debate. Countering this organised current is only effective when linked to practical and field organisation. That is, as previously stated, a broad, militant, and field-present “social resistance” must be formed against the right current. Rage against price hikes, inflation, and collapsing purchasing power must be linked to conscious struggle against the devaluation of labour power, elimination of contracting systems, and rollback of other exploitation and plunder mechanisms like privatisation, the precise mechanisms causing this economic and social misery. This is done by highlighting that the issue is not merely mismanagement or corruption, and that changing the political regime without touching the foundational mechanisms of capital accumulation and exploitation will never solve it. Rather, it is the logic of capital accumulation that, if left intact, will generate its political regime in any case. More precisely, a practical project must confront a practical project; thus, the issue is by no means merely an ideological confrontation or a media dispute.

Creating and strengthening mediators, cells, and trade-union/class struggles for organising social resistance

In the current situation, the revolutionary left lacks direct address to the masses, and an organic, continuous connection with them is impossible for revolutionary left political forces for numerous reasons. Thus, shaping social resistance is only possible through mediators. Mediators can include organised cells and committees, trade-union struggles, and informal local formations capable of transforming the language of protests into tangible and effective political action, while making livelihood, wages, unemployment, precarity, and gender-sexual and national oppressions axes of working-class action. In conditions of an absent nationwide organisation, existing trade-union struggles, though scattered and limited, are among the few real points of leverage. The urgent task of the revolutionary left is to elevate these struggles to the class level: linking trade-union demands to struggle against exploitation relations, creating connections among various labour sections, and preventing the isolation of any trade-union protest. At the same time, we must warn that these struggles face a serious danger if existing left tendencies fail to intervene in an organised manner and to raise them from the level of trade-union demands to that of class politics. Under such conditions, they risk right-wing and fascist infiltration and orientation, and may unwittingly be transformed into the “working-class and trade-union wing” of right-wing and fascist projects.

Simultaneously, organising the urban poor, the unemployed, and the precariat into small, secret cells and committees in neighbourhoods, workplaces, and shared living spaces is the minimal yet most essential form of organisation. Although in moments of mass uprisings and protests, with temporary openings and intensified collective action, the possibility of forming these structures increases, their function is not limited to those protest moments; on the contrary, sustaining social resistance, preventing force dissipation after protest waves subside, and accumulating experience and class ties is practically impossible without such structures.

Returning to sidelined and silenced agendas

Part of the current situation is not merely the result of external repression or objective weakness in the balance of forces, but the consequence of the conscious suspension of agendas that act as knots of class politics but never became subjects of public discussion, organisation, and action programs. A clear example is the production of texts that could have become tools for explaining the situation, political polarisation, and orienting the struggle, but remained at the theoretical production level and did not enter the social field. This suspension, in the general sense, is the product of tendencies prevailing in the revolutionary left that avoid any class prioritisation, polarisation, and political decision-making; and in the specific sense, it stems from a lack of programming, negligence, lethargy, and a lack of an organisational approach to such texts. Texts that should have led to pursuing their organisational consequences through direct and targeted promotion and propaganda. We, as the revolutionary left in general and in the specific form of each organisation, must accept responsibility for this situation.

In this regard, a noteworthy historical parallel with the revolutionary left’s experience in the 1979 Revolution exists: they, too, despite recognising the practical necessities of class struggle, did not pay sufficient attention and action to the strategic issue of the councils and direct mass organisation, and did not convert their theoretical assumptions into organisational strategies. This historical experience can be instructive for us, showing that neglect of key struggle knots, even when theoretically clear, has irreparable results. Likewise, after the “Jina” [2022] uprising, examining the conditions and actual/potential possibilities showed that many opportunities we could have preserved after December 2017 and November 2019 for creating organisation, horizon, and political orientation have largely been lost. This reality reveals the necessity of returning from the period of revolutionary preparation to a period of revival and critical rereading of the revolutionary left’s record. We must not merely theoretically but in practice revive sidelined agendas and actual/potential capacities to enable regaining an effective role in the social and political scene and prevent repeating fatal errors; otherwise, the field will undoubtedly be ceded to fascist dominance.

Therefore, returning to the moment of the current protests, the most urgent current agenda is striving to connect and organize forces that empathize with the class content of the ongoing protests but, due to the fascist emergence within them, remain indecisive or avoid them; as well as the destitute who have nothing to lose and manifest in their radical protest form and uncompromising militancy against repressive forces, but due to the existing fascist emergence voice slogans contradictory to their class interests. This connection-making must not be deferred to the day after the protests from an organisational perspective; it must be placed on the agenda today, with practical provisions in place. Practical provisions that both recognise this legitimate class rage and align with it, and embed the real fear of fascism’s ascendancy as an organisational operational agenda within those provisions, and in this sense do not succumb to the street. This, of course, is an agenda whose minutes and subtleties must be discussed within any organisation, not in front of the eyes of strangers, including security institutions and class enemies.

Appendix: A Proletarian Summation of the Jina Uprising

by the Slinger’s Collective, 2024. Original article here.

Probably the easiest thing for a left force to do when summing up the Jina uprising is to stand somewhere in the middle of two spectrums of the left that had already taken shape.

The first spectrum is that of those who chose the most comfortable path: a complete and decisive rupture through the uprising. This spectrum, of course, does not usually refer to its current position as a “rupture”; instead, it pretends that it never participated in or accompanied anything to begin with, as if it had always been detached from the outset. The way they position themselves today bears a strange resemblance to the way a section of the Axis-of-Resistance left behaved toward the December 2017–January 2018 uprising and the November 2019 uprising, repeating, either covertly or openly, the vilest slanders produced by the Islamic Republic’s security apparatus only to suddenly, in the face of the Jina uprising, turn into defenders of the December 2017–January 2018 and November 2019 uprisings.

The second spectrum consists of a very broad range of left forces who not only believe that something called the “Jina/Woman, Life, Freedom revolution/uprising/movement” is still “alive,” but sometimes describe it as “the most important event in Iran’s history since the Constitutional Revolution,” “the most progressive revolution in the Middle East,” possessing unparalleled, profound, irreversible achievements, etc.

These two groups constitute two distinct “spectrums,” each containing different tendencies and analyses, but ultimately every tendency falls into one or the other.

Therefore, one of the questions this text asks is: how can we arrive at a summation of the Jina uprising that does not fall into either of these two spectrums? And before that, why must we not fall into either of them?

One of the cleavages in summing up the Jina uprising (and probably the most important one) occurs at the level of understanding the uprising itself. The question is: do we consider the Jina uprising/revolt as the beginning of a new historical era? Or do we analyse it in continuity with the uprisings and revolts of recent years, specifically starting from the December 2017–January 2018 uprising?

Probably some of those in the second spectrum (though not all) would reply that they do understand and analyse the Jina uprising in continuity and connection with the uprisings of recent years. Yet, astonishingly, this section inside the second spectrum is far smaller than one would expect. Even this small section does not go beyond mere rhetoric. If we truly believe that the Jina uprising is in continuity with previous uprisings, we must also accept the material and analytical consequences of that belief. Among other things, instead of starting from the achievements, wonders, and opened possibilities of the Jina uprising (and usually in an exaggerated manner), we must begin by critiquing its effects on the possibilities and horizons that were opened not in the Jina uprising, but in December 2017–January 2018. In what follows, we will show what it means, in class terms, for a text that wishes to remain faithful to the Jina uprising to begin by enumerating its achievements and wonders (often exaggeratedly), and what practical and material counterpart this has.

We therefore begin our summation of the Jina uprising with the assertion that the Jina uprising was, after December 2017–January 2018, the first moment in which the “middle class,” after many years, regained the possibility of political mobility and entered the field as an intervening subject. Earlier, in the text “The Wound of the 26 January Coup,” we wrote:

“The middle class, the main voting base of the reformists, lost its possibility of political and social mobility for a long time after the December 2017–January 2018 uprising. The explicit class content of that uprising and the subsequent struggles and revolts was such that this section of society fully understood that the story of the reformists, like that of the principlists, was finished, yet it was so enchanted by capitalist ideology that it could not align itself with the new coordinates of the situation. After the November 2019 uprising and during the criminal shooting down of the Ukrainian plane by the Revolutionary Guards in January 2020, this class, after several years, once again found the possibility of class mobility. They not only, unlike their stance toward the fighters of December 2017–January 2018 and November 2019, felt kinship with the victims of the Ukrainian plane (a kinship saturated with ideological-class presuppositions), but because those victims were “only” victims, one could approach them and “light a candle” for them. Thus, January 2020 became a point of departure for the middle-class orientation toward politics to also attack the past and turn November 2019, all those brilliant moments of resistance and assault on the repressive forces into ‘fifteen hundred killed’ and ‘Aban Tribunal.’”

This “middle class” did not only include those who still occupied a middle-class position; it also included the lower layers of the petty bourgeoisie who, as a result of the Islamic Republic’s neoliberal policies and the criminal imperialist sanctions against the Iranian people, had suffered downward class mobility and were now practically part of the “working class,” yet still ideologically regarded themselves as middle class. This ideology is by no means marginal; we will show how, in the Jina uprising, it became the very substance of events.

Therefore, the attempt to expand the concept of the working class so broadly that it encompasses huge sections of society may be theoretically useful, but it is practically and strategically ineffective and ultimately forced to resort to pseudo-moral exhortations that ask “workers” or “those called workers” to recognize themselves as workers, while warning the left to stop being stubborn and recognize these workers as workers. Unfortunately, however, ideology is far more stubborn than to simply evaporate with a change in material living conditions or with moral preaching. For example, beyond that expansive definition, the reality on the ground is that even a section of oil-industry workers, especially the permanent, official ones, do not consider themselves “working class” and prefer to call themselves “oil employees” so that their status and social capital is not conflated with that of contractual, subcontracted, “precarious underclass” project workers.

For the “left,” no matter how purist it may be in its understanding of the working class, there is no doubt that oil workers are part of the working class and indeed a part that, from the very formation of the oil industry in Iran and in Azerbaijan through Iranian migrant workers, has played a foundational role in every high point of the Iranian workers’ movement, class struggle, and socialist movement. Yet over the past four decades, simultaneously with the neoliberal assault on oil workers and the precarisation of a huge portion of them, a labor aristocracy has formed among the stable, “official” workers who not only do not regard themselves as “workers” in their material life, but in recent protests have demanded that neither the government nor any supervisory body has the right to impose a “wage ceiling” on them, in direct opposition to the majority of existing trade-union struggles that demand a higher wage floor. It is therefore clear that this section of the working class, despite whatever the left may believe, is at present not an ally of any part of the working class’s trade-union struggles, let alone class struggle and even considers associating with the working class beneath its dignity.

The question, then, is not simply whether the “working class” was present in the Jina uprising or in any other uprising, but what ideology different sections of that class carried and what their presence, via that ideology, strengthened.

When we come to sum up the Jina uprising, we cannot simply rest on its potential possibilities and then, ignoring the ideological and class quality of the uprising’s subjects, attribute its limitations and defeats to everything except the “sacred” subjects of the uprising, the ideology they carried, and the material consequences of that ideology.

But when we speak of the “subjects of the uprising” and the hegemony of middle-class ideology within it, are we talking about “the people” who appeared in the streets under this very vague label? In every uprising, different sections of different social classes may enter the arena. One of the particularities of the Jina uprising was that the middle class, which had been unable to enter the field as a class on a nationwide scale in December 2017–January 2018, August 2018, November 2019, July 2021 (Thirst Uprising), December 2021 (Isfahan Water Uprising), May 2022 (Hunger Uprising), and June 2022 (Metropol protests) in a way that could impose its own ideology on the movement, this time succeeded in entering as a class and imposing its ideology on other social classes in the symbolic sphere, more or less silencing and passivizing them. This was the same class whose last political mobilisation dated back to January 2020 and the protests following the Revolutionary Guards’ downing of the Ukrainian passenger plane.

Yet in this text we locate middle-class ideology precisely where it seems it should be entirely absent: among that section of left forces for whom history is now divided into two parts at the moment of the Jina uprising, and who locate the fundamental cleavage that must explain everything in the Jina uprising even if, at the level of rhetoric, they claim it is in continuity with December 2017–January 2018.

This section of the left constitutes two major currents in left discourse:

1. Those who, after the defeat of the 2009 Green Movement, suddenly concluded in the 2013 presidential election that they had to “take back” their vote at any cost and that the only “real” arena of intervention was electoral participation. Hence, from 2013 onward, they enthusiastically supported Hassan Rouhani, participated in every subsequent election (parliament, Assembly of Experts, city councils, 2017 presidential), produced and backed lists, etc. When the full stench of the affair finally became undeniable, and the real effects of the neoliberal policies pursued by Rouhani’s government (in continuation of the general economic policy of the Islamic Republic) became visible in the lives of the poor and the lower layers of the middle class (including some of themselves), they suddenly lapsed into passivity. Nothing remained of all that enthusiasm and hope except nostalgia, eulogies, and the periodic recirculation of photos of “Mir Hossein in house arrest.” For this current, December 2017–January 2018 itself marked the failure of the strategy they had supposedly adopted after summing up the lessons of 2009, a strategy that consisted of nothing other than articulating “left” concepts with the demands and desires of the class that had seized hegemony in 2009 and continued to exercise it between 2013 and 2017 in elections and events such as Hashemi Rafsanjani’s funeral. At that time, some revolutionary forces described this tendency as “organising ‘left’ against communism,” arguing that they had fully swallowed the myth of the liberating middle class, a myth fabricated during the reform era by the reformists themselves. With the rise of trade-union struggles in 2017–18, this current gradually became passive and, with the outbreak of the December 2017–January 2018 uprising, lost its social influence in a matter of months, turning from “enthusiastic hopefuls” into “depressed indifferent.”
2. The other section of this spectrum, whose will to power had not yet been fully extinguished, defended and accompanied every uprising of recent years. The problem probably begins here: throughout these years, they always saw themselves as “supporters” and “backers,” and even when they managed to break out of the closed circle of texts, statuses, and stories and do more practical work, they were unable, for whatever reason, to give that work meaning within a strategic horizon. Thus, for them too, the Jina uprising opened the possibility of their own return to politics. The “sacred subject” no longer had to stand at a distance, cheering on destitute masses whose struggles offered no real point of entry; now it could finally take the field itself, inside and outside the country, and place itself in the spotlight. As a result, it astonishingly merged with a section of the left that openly or secretly declared that the Jina uprising had freed us from “the shame of class,” or with those who, when speaking of the intersection of oppressions, meant not articulation but equivalence of contradictions, an equivalence that in practice meant belittling the class contradiction. The same people who declared after the Jina uprising: “One can question whether class contradiction is a necessary and sufficient condition for unity. So far, historically and intuitively, it has been women who played the unifying role in the Woman, Life, Freedom movement and managed to bring different oppressions together.” Even though that “history” and “intuition” was only one year old and had not produced any tangible political victory, it was enough for these comrades, because this time it was, they themselves who were present in that history and intuition, not the anonymous, mysterious destitute.

Thus, with one stroke of the pen, the “uprising/revolt/revolution” became a “movement” so that something unique could be declared to have begun, of which everything afterwards is merely a continuation and must be judged accordingly. This is why, as we said, the enumeration of the Jina uprising’s achievements and wonders almost always employs the industry of exaggeration.

For example, in countless texts, the Jina uprising is described as the origin of widespread public attention to the national question and the massive presence of oppressed nations in the struggle. There is no doubt that the Jina uprising did produce achievements and advances in this domain (we will come to them), but it is astonishing that such a perspective remains completely silent about a very recent history, the history of the actual presence of oppressed nations in previous uprisings. Lors, Kurds, and Arabs were prominently and seriously present in nearly all previous uprisings, and during those very struggles pointed in various ways to the colonial practices of the central government. Interestingly, during the Jina uprising, the presence of the Arab nation was noticeably weaker than in previous revolts, yet this kind of “uniqueness” is never subjected to analysis by the comrades, because only thrilling uniquenesses may be spoken of.

Or take the struggle against sexual-gender oppression: yes, the Jina uprising represented a major elevation in that struggle, but to claim that it was only thanks to the Jina uprising that sexual-gender oppression became a public issue is not only exaggerated; it is a negation of the struggles of the past several years struggles whose accumulated subjectivity draws a clear line of demarcation from the “everyday resistance” that preceded them. We are thinking here of the Girl(s) of Enghelab Street and March 8, 2018, gathering in front of the Ministry of Labour.

One can always quibble: if that is the case, why not push the timeline all the way back to the March 8, 1979, demonstrations against mandatory hijab, or even further, to the formation of the Secret Union of Women during the Constitutional Revolution? Naturally, both the tradition of the Secret Union of Women and the 1979 demonstrations contain vital lessons for us today. But the dividing line introduced by the December 2017–January 2018 uprising is clearly visible both in the interconnected actions of the Girl(s) of Enghelab Street and in the March 8, 2018 gathering in front of the Ministry of Labor, one of the first times after 2009 that women were able to hold International Women’s Day in the street again, and deliberately in front of the Ministry of Labor in order to revive a class orientation that had been pushed to the margins for years by the dominant discourse of liberal (and often neoliberal) feminism.

Another overlooked “uniqueness” of the Jina uprising is the force it mobilised inside and especially outside the country. Outside Iran, despite all the efforts of monarchist supporters, the prince’s money, and the tireless assistance of virtually every mainstream Persian-language media outlet and a large part of the opposition that controlled the platforms, that force had not been mobilised before the Jina uprising. These were the same people who, for years, had lost their capacity for political action and whose main media organ was Manoto TV, whose flagship programs were Googoosh Academy, Befarmaeed Sham (A cooking reality show), and Poetry You Remember. A significant portion of them were migrants who, over the previous decade, had left the country after the economic situation deteriorated and they faced downward mobility (whether as students, specialist workers, or refugees). Suddenly, through the Jina uprising, they saw the chance to take the field, and symbolically, their entertainment channel became the main centre of mobilisation. The monster unleashed from its cage in the Jina uprising was a horde of lumpens and fascists who made even the previous lumpens and fascists look pale. Inside the country, too, a similar force gained mobility. It is true that slogans explicitly supporting the Pahlavi family and the monarchy heard loudly in previous uprisings decreased dramatically during the Jina uprising, but it is neither forgettable nor deniable that the birthplace of the slogan “Neither this way nor that way / My dick in the Leader’s house” was none other than elite Sharif University, and that inside the country it was above all in universities that, alongside “Woman, Life, Freedom,” the semi-fascist “Man, Homeland, Prosperity” was chanted and all kinds of sexist and homophobic slogans met with applause in certain student gatherings. These people did not sprout from the ground. The student generation had not changed so profoundly during the two years of COVID closure that the university suddenly produced such reactionary outbursts. The same cultured elements existed in the universities during December 2017–January 2018, too, but precisely because they had no possibility of political mobility, they remained invisible. In the Jina uprising, however, they too gained that possibility.

Yet the section of the left that for years (rightly or wrongly) had been warning about the danger of fascism remained completely silent this time about the actual formation of a fascist mobilization from within the Jina uprising itself, preferring instead to keep writing poetry and essays using the industry of exaggeration about the uprising’s uniqueness’s and unparalleled possibilities spreading on the one hand the illusion that the Woman, Life, Freedom revolution has already won socially, while on the other hand remaining absolutely silent in the face of the recent wave of anti-Afghan racism that is by no means unrelated to that very fascist mobilization.

Another consequence of the middle class entering the arena of social struggle in the Jina uprising was the reinforcement of the fake duality of “bread” vs. “freedom.” We previously explained in the text “The Hunger Uprising: Struggle over the Name or Continuation of a Historical Battle” that this duality was born in the discourse produced during Mohammad Khatami’s reform era by reformist theorists and their affiliated publications and was later inherited wholesale by the “hashtag-overthrow” current. So it should come as no surprise that when the same class that until a few years ago constituted the reformists’ voting base takes the field, it brings its solidified ideological baggage with it, a baggage that had already revealed its reactionary and class character during the May 2022 Hunger Uprising by insisting that the label “hungry” was humiliating in contrast to the sanctity of the “struggle for freedom” as the basis of a supra-class alliance.

Thus in the middle of the Jina uprising the working class was repeatedly told to “join the nationwide uprising” and “finish the regime with nationwide strikes”, the worker in question, of course, being one from whom class had been surgically removed so that he could serve as cannon fodder in the overthrow army, paving the way for the capitalist-backed opposition to take power. It is obvious that precarious workers who formed the main body of all recent uprisings, including Jina, had no possibility of a “nationwide strike.” The sections of the working class that did have concentrated workplaces capable of striking did so, sometimes with trade-union demands, sometimes with explicit political ones. When the strike was political, it was first met with grotesque exaggeration and fake news in the right-wing opposition media apparatus; after the workers were brutally repressed, the subject simply vanished from public discourse, and the hashtag brigade moved on to the next hashtag without anyone even asking what happened to the workers who had risked everything.

At the same time, pure trade-union strikes that coincided with the Jina uprising received no reflection whatsoever in the dominant discourse of the movement. The fake bread/freedom duality had become so hegemonic that striking workers felt no social backing. In the months following the Jina uprising, we witnessed countless working-class strikes and protests, including at least three massive ones: project-based oil workers, Isfahan Steel, and Ahvaz National Steel. Two of those three ended only after arrests and naked repression by security forces and anti-riot units, yet none of them became moments of resistance for the supposed ongoing “movement.”

What we have witnessed after the Jina uprising, in historical and class complicity with the Islamic Republic’s repressive apparatus, is a retreat, indeed a forced retreat of trade-union and class struggle compared to the previous years. Let us not forget that after December 2017–January 2018 the frontiers of class struggle were pushed forward: the workers’ movement, whose most radical demand until then had been the right to independent unions or the release or rehiring of imprisoned/dismissed comrades, succeeded in Haft-Tappeh and Ahvaz Steel in turning workers’ control and council administration of the factory into a public demand.

This did not happen in a vacuum. The university trade union had largely preserved its strength despite massive repression in December 2017–January 2018, and the class discourse dominant within it had pushed right-wing, neoliberal, and reformist student currents to the margins. In the teachers’ and retirees’ movements, the idea that these struggles must unite (whether or not teachers and retirees were called “workers”) played an organising role. Class demands, such as free education, held the upper hand. Influenced by this material base, a broad and sometimes bizarre spectrum of the left in virtual space rallied around hashtags like “Our Alternative is Councils.” The middle class had lost its social status and symbolic capital. Even trade-union activists who later turned out to have privately believed all along that the middle class would be the agent of liberation kept tactically silent in public or, under the social hegemony of class struggle and the class content of successive uprisings, sought their fighting allies among the working class.

After the Jina uprising and the restoration of the middle class’s social status, we can look at the same scene again and compare it with a few years ago:

• Despite even more aggressive privatisation and commodification of education, and despite the practical destruction of student councils by the security apparatus, virtually no practical resistance has emerged except for a few statements.

• Currents such as “United Students,” which used to compete with the trade-union current using left rhetoric, have kept the rhetoric but no longer care about the privatisation of education.

• The teachers’ movement is seeing the return of the idea that teachers are not workers but middle class, and gradually the demand “no to ideological education” is drowning out “free education.”

• A large part of the left that had at least rhetorically aligned with council administration under the social hegemony of class struggle is now busy debating the hermeneutics of “Woman, Life, Freedom” with liberals and neoliberals.

• The reformist left that turned purple during Rouhani is back with a “transformative” republican-left posture; social-democratic left is forming organizations again; voices from within the formerly revolutionary left are calling for unity with liberals against fascism, armed with the fake thesis that the main problem in Iran is not even capitalism but “political Islam” or “Shiite-centric state,” and that we are therefore in the stage of “democratic revolution” in which the left must accept the leadership of the democratic bourgeoisie.

Are all these developments unrelated to the Jina uprising and its material and class content?

Another result of the middle class’s political mobilisation in the Jina uprising is the twin phenomenon of mass depression afterwards and the inflation of a completely fake hope whose most objective symptom is the transformation of “uprising/revolt/revolution” into “movement” so that a phenomenon with natural peaks and troughs becomes something that can allegedly continue indefinitely. The resemblance to the years after 2009 is astonishing. The middle class (even if only ideologically) has the material possibility of depression. Comparing the intensity of repression is neither correct nor useful, but the numbers are striking. In November 2019, in just eight days, at least 547 people were killed (according to the most reliable named lists); in the Jina uprising, over 106 days of street presence, at least 540 were killed. Yet the hypothesis must be raised that the repressed of the pre-Jina uprisings, because of the material conditions in which they lived, had no possibility of socially expressing depression, they had to go back to work the next day just to survive and their depression had no visible social echo because mainstream opposition media have neither access to nor interest in the living spaces of that class.

At the same time, the middle class does not easily relinquish the social status it has won. It refuses to share the Jina uprising with previous uprisings by placing it in a historical continuum, and it refuses to see it as an uprising that has now subsided and must be articulated with new forms of struggle. Thus, the “Jina movement” becomes a sacred object to which one can perpetually refer in a melancholic-nostalgic mood while insisting on its eternal continuation. The mixture of mass depression and fake hope arises from the fact that its proclaimers experience something completely different in their everyday lives from what they preach. The hope that should generate enthusiasm and determination for struggle ends up producing collective depression because it is a thoroughly nihilistic hope that never translates into concrete will for action, forever waiting for the spontaneous return of the glorious days.

Given all this, what is there in the Jina uprising that we must seize, and how?

To answer that, we must go back to December 2017–January 2018.

What is it about December 2017–January 2018 that forces us to return to it and place the Jina uprising in a continuum that begins there?

The December 2017–January 2018 uprising divided the political field into a before and an after. Only a few months earlier, in the May 2017 presidential election, the last episode had taken place of a form of politics that for at least two decades (since June 1997) had been considered the only possible form of “politics.” That form had survived even the massive crisis of the 2009 stolen election and the subsequent movement, and after crushing that movement. It seemed to have consolidated itself for the indefinite future by absorbing its subjects into the official structure. It was in that very last episode that a section of the left tried to enter official politics with the “Another City” campaign and its own candidate.

Although the December 2017–January 2018 uprising was itself the result of decades of intensifying class oppression, generalised misery, and the growth of class-oriented trade-union struggles in the preceding years and months, it was only on December 28, 2017, that the life of the dominant form of politics ended forever. After December 2017–January 2018, new possibilities for politics were both opened and recognised possibilities that had existed before but were either ignored or actively negated by the dominant discourse.

The most famous slogan of December 2017–January 2018 “Reformist, Principlist: the story is over!” was a negative declaration, but it quickly found its positive content in the months that followed: the multiplication of the Girl(s) of Enghelab Street actions, the March 8, 2018 gathering in front of the Ministry of Labor, the elevation of working-class trade-union struggles to the demand for workers’ control and council administration in Haft-Tappeh and Ahvaz Steel, the raising of council administration of the university by the student trade-union current, the same demand by sections of teacher activists, joint actions between university, worker, and teacher trade-unionists, the May 2019 gathering against the hijab-and-chastity plan at Tehran University, and so on.

All the subsequent revolts, August 2018, November 2019, July 2021 (Thirst), December 2021 (Isfahan Water), May 2022 (Hunger), June 2022 (Metropol), not only confirmed the historical rightness of the subalterns but each time added a new layer of the oppressed to those engaged in the historical struggle to build the future.

Understanding the Jina uprising inside this historical continuum is not merely an analytical preference; it imposes a specific strategic instruction that we call “proletarian orientation.”

If we place the Jina uprising in this continuum, we can precisely identify and intensify its points of elevation compared to previous uprisings, revise strategy where necessary, strengthen its liberating aspects, and devise practical ways, based on organised struggle, to combat the reactionary tendencies that surfaced through it.

• The axis of sexual-gender oppression became one of the main axes of the uprising from the very first days (September 16–19, 2022), and for the first time, queer people became street-visible with their own symbols and slogans. After the uprising, the accumulated subjectivity of women* and queer people has fundamentally transformed the quality of everyday resistance against compulsory hijab, the kind of defiant, body-liberating agency we have not seen since the first two years after the 1979 revolution.

• For the first time, the Baloch question and Balochistan became a nationwide symbol thanks to the admirable resistance of Zahedan Fridays.

• For the first time, we saw real solidarity between Azerbaijan and Kurdistan (Tabriz, September 20, 2022: “Azerbaijan is awake, supporting Kurdistan”; Sanandaj, November 2022: “Long live Kurdistan / Long live Azerbaijan”).

• For the first time after many years, a section of the working class managed to carry out an explicit political strike (South Pars project-based oil workers, October 10, 2022).

• Genuine resistance committees and nuclei emerged that functioned on the ground, coordinating medical aid, lawyers, supplies to besieged cities like Kurdistan, unlike the countless fake online “committees” set up by various opposition currents.

• Defensive armed resistance turned into organised offensive armed resistance in places like Izeh and the famous “Isfahan House.”

Nevertheless, extracting the Jina uprising from this historical continuum puts all these achievements in danger. Its abstraction and deterministic projection onto future strategy will only distance us further from a content capable of waging a genuinely liberating struggle against all forms of oppression and of forging creative, non-identitarian alliances among the oppressed.

The political mobilization of the middle class during the Jina uprising also gave credibility and room for maneuver to its trusted political representatives who now activated precisely on the cleavages the uprising had opened, turning the struggle against sexual-gender oppression into the private property of Masih Alinejad & Co., the struggle against national oppression into the playground of Abdullah Mohtadi, Molavi Abdulhamid, and assorted reactionary nationalists, and the demand for freedom into the monopoly of Reza Pahlavi and Hamed Esmaeilion’s referendum fairy tale.

Finally, the Jina uprising was a warning that exploded the myth (promoted by certain left currents) that “the street” is automatically and inherently left. The street can just as easily give rise to fascist mobilisation as it did in the Jina uprising. The real origin of fascism in today’s Iran is not the destitute and the working class, but precisely the middle class and middle-class ideology dreaming of a lost “golden age” that never existed.

Only a unity of the oppressed forged around class struggle and a perspective of future liberation, not moral appeals to “unity”, can prevent those possibilities from being swallowed by reaction.

What we need, therefore, is neither a non-historical rupture with the achievements opened by the Jina uprising, nor the illusion that history began in September 2022 and we must simply preserve that moment forever. Both paths separate the Jina uprising from the historical continuum in which it belongs.

A revolutionary strategy today must articulate the achievements and possibilities of the Jina uprising with those opened in December 2017–January 2018, and the revival and defence of proletarian orientation is an inseparable part of that task.