The following is a model leaflet, produced by the International Marxist Tendency, to be distributed at events and demonstrations held in solidarity with the revolutionary youth movement in Iran. It presents our position on how this inspiring movement should advance. Down with the mullahs' regime! Down with imperialism! Down with capitalism!
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Full text:
The murder of a young Kurdish woman, Jina Mahsa Amini, has triggered a revolutionary mass movement of the youth in Iran. This movement is sweeping aside all the instruments of division fostered by the ruling class: among men and women; Persians, Kurds, Azeris, Baloch and Arabs. All of these are fighting side by side against the rotten regime of the mullahs.
But this movement has not come out of the blue: the past five years have been the most turbulent in the history of the Islamic Republic. Since 2018, we have seen a series of national and local struggles on a wide variety of questions, from water shortages to inflation, from privatisation to corruption, as well as huge protests against the shooting down of Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752. There have also been movements against the oppression of national minorities, alongside the regime's assault on other democratic rights, and their attacks on healthcare, education, pensions, wages and more. The recent period has also seen the biggest workers’ strikes since the time of the revolution of 1979. Back then it was precisely the general strike, and the strike of the oil workers in particular which brought down the Shah’s regime.
The current movement has the opportunity to unify all of these struggles into a revolutionary movement against the regime itself. The working class can unlock this potential by organising a revolutionary general strike. In this way, the workers of Iran lay the foundations for the ending of all exploitation and oppression once and for all: by organising themselves as a class and seizing power.
For one hundred years, capitalism, in all its shapes and through all its transformations, has proven itself incapable of taking Iranian society forward. The time has come to build a leadership that can decisively rally the working class and the poor to excise this malicious cancer and the ruling class that defends it.
This is the task not only in Iran, but internationally! While the crises behind this revolutionary movement express themselves particularly sharply and brutally in Iran, they exist all over the world: skyrocketing inflation and growing poverty among the working class and youth, as well as the sowing of reactionary division through racism and women's oppression.
For this reason, our program is as follows:
- Death to the dictator! Down with the Islamic Republic! For the revolutionary overthrow of the regime!
- Woman, Life, Freedom! Against division and racism! For the joint struggle of women and men, all ethnic groups and all oppressed peoples for full democratic rights and against every form of oppression and discrimination!
- Bread, Work, Freedom - Long live the working class of Iran! For the organisation of a general strike to overthrow the regime and end capitalist exploitation!
- For a living wage, fixed contracts for all workers and public employment measures for the unemployed. To finance this, the commanding heights of the economy must be nationalised and placed under the control and management of the workers themselves!
- For the revolutionary self-organisation of the masses: Resistance committees must be founded where there are none and expanded where they already exist. Councils (shoras) must be elected in all factories, districts, villages, universities and schools and linked up regionally and nationally to organise the struggle!
- For the convening of a Constituent Assembly by these organs of revolutionary self-organisation!
- No to sanctions! No to any interference by the imperialists who only wish to continue the exploitation and oppression of the Iranian working masses under a new banner!
- No to a return to the monarchy, no to the bourgeois, pro-imperialist opposition! Only the masses themselves hold the key to their own liberation!
- Down with all oppressors and exploiters, down with capitalism – in Iran, in the Middle East and around the world! The only true friends of the Iranian revolutionary masses are the workers, peasants, women and youth in other countries, in the region and internationally. Long live international solidarity!
- For the socialist revolution! For Communism!
The working class and youth need a revolutionary organisation to overthrow capitalism and throw every form of oppression and exploitation into the dustbin of history. The International Marxist Tendency (IMT) is working all around the world to build this international revolutionary organisation. If you agree with this program, join us!