THE IRANIAN PEOPLE WILL DETERMINE THEIR OWN FUTURE
The popular struggle in Iran has been going on for over two weeks. The Mullah regime, which has been in power for 47 years, responded to the popular uprising with intense violence, killing over 2,500 people, countless arrests, and internet and GPS signal disruptions.
The popular movement erupted in response to decades of oppression by the rentier-theocratic state oligarchy and its economic policies that deepen poverty. Faced with protests and strikes that began in Tehran with the slogan “Death to the dictator” and quickly spread to 31 provinces, the Iranian regime blames the people’s demands on provocations by “foreign powers” and accuses everyone of “terrorism”. Images shared from a Tehran mortuary reveal the extent of the violence and brutality.
The Iranian people’s anger towards the regime is not new. The Iranian working class and working people, who have repeatedly taken to the streets, gone on strike, and staged protests, have been subjected to heavy repression before. The actions initiated by Iranian women against the Mullah regime’s compulsory headscarf rule, symbolized by Mahsa Amini, were also violently suppressed.
The Iranian people’s struggle is now facing a serious threat of manipulation. US imperialism and Israel, its gendarmerie force in the Middle East, are trying to use the siege, blockade, and embargo they have imposed on Iran as a lever to settle scores with the regime, promoting Reza Pahlavi, heir to the monarchy overthrown in 1979, as the power behind and supposedly one of the demands of the protests. To this end, they are spreading false news and organizing social media trolls to direct the Iranian people’s struggle for democracy, attempting to prevent any revolutionary developments by presenting a corrupt monarchy as the only alternative.
This is because Iran is an extension of oil and trade routes in the Middle East. Furthermore, the US wants to encircle China, break the resistance of the Mullah regime against Israel and the US in the Middle East, and secure its trade and strategic positioning in the Strait of Hormuz and the Persian Gulf.
Trump’s threat to intervene militarily in Iran if the regime continues to kill protesters is a bargaining tactic to turn the Mullah regime into an obedient satellite by using the Iranian people, who have risen up, as a shield for the US, as well as a policy to keep the popular movement under control.
The US acts not in the interests of the people in Venezuela, Gaza, or Aleppo, but in its own imperialist interests. The situation in Greenland is no different. Everywhere it has conquered through subjugation so far, it has caused the deaths and displacement of countless people, while the interests of the people and their right to self-determination have never been a concern.
A US attack on Iran, supposedly to support the Iranian people but actually to achieve its own strategic goals, would mean an intervention that would once again plunge the peoples of the Middle East into a ring of fire, with dire consequences. Trump says international institutions and organisations, laws and rules have no meaning for him, and his “Make America Great Again” motto is actually an all-out war against the gains of the workers of the world.
The liberation of the Iranian people will come through the strength of the Iranian working class and labourers themselves. The workers who occupied the three large metal factories in Arak and called on the people of the region to fight to protect the factories are showing the way to liberation.
Neither the Mullah regime, nor the new colonial hegemony of imperialist America, nor the intervention of Russia and China, nor the renewed enthusiasm of the decrepit monarchy can be the response to the Iranian people’s demand for freedom. The Iranian people will determine the fate of their own country.
We, the Labour Party (EMEP, Turkey), support the Iranian people’s struggle for freedom and democracy and express our solidarity with them. One of the prerequisites for breaking the chains surrounding the world’s workers, imposed by US imperialism and financial capital, which mobilises its missiles, heavy weapons, mercenaries, and collaborators to exploit the wealth of the entire world from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from the Middle East to Far East, is to stand with the uprising Iranian people. And we call on workers and labourers from all nations to join the struggle and resistance against imperialist interventions.
Long live the brotherhood of the people, long live international solidarity!
LABOUR PARTY (EMEP, Turkey)
January 2026