Four independent workers' organizations have issued a communique honoring the thirty-first anniversary of the 1979 revolution in Iran. A translation is provided below:

Thirty-one years have passed since the February 1979 revolution. At that time millions of Iranian people, full of hope for a better life, took to the streets in order to break the yoke of despotism and repression. A nationwide strike lead by workers at the National Oil Company, the vanguard of the Iranian working class, shut down oil pipelines, ultimately tearing the despotic regime asunder. Masses of people chanted, "Our oil workers! Our resolute leader!" Power fell to the people‎...

The head of the Bus Drivers Union, Mansour Osanloo was assaulted on Monday by an inmate in Karaj’s Rajai-Shahr Prison.‎‎‎‎‎.‎.

In this essay, Cyrus Bina intends to focus on the origin of the trigger-point that led to Iran’s post-election uprising in the summer of 2009, and lays bare the consequences on the diametrical, yet scrambled, expression of political standings that have so far been exhibited by the right and the left vis-à-vis the Ahmadinejad government in Iran ...

Fellow workers and friends, During the last few days tens of workers, students and grieving mothers [a reference to mothers of young people killed following protest gatherings on December 4] have been arrested and sent to jail. Many of our colleagues and fellow workers are in prison. Tens of students, who are our children and our allies, are incarcerated. Mothers have been held. The government is closing its eyes to reality and arresting anyone they want. The country is under the grip of security forces and people do not even have the right to gather in a public park...

In contrast to some analysis that one section is representing the workers and lower casts and the other section represents the middle class or neo-liberals, it must be said that none of the above sections have such a followers or representations. The Iranian People’s social movement which is at one of its critical junctures has faced many ups and downs in the past thirty years. This recent uprising cannot be considered separate from the struggles of the past thirty years, as it follows the same path and makes similar ...

Monsieur l’Ambassadeur,‎L’Union syndicale Solidaires a été informée de l’arrestation, de l’incarcération et de la condamnation à des peines des prison et des amendes de plusieurs militants et responsables du « Syndicat des‎travailleurs de la sucrerie Haft Tape », notamment Ali Nejati, JalilAhmadi, Feridoun Nikoufard, Ghorban, Mohamad Alipour Mehr.‎..

Monsieur l’Ambassadeur,‎ Une fois de plus les violations des libertés syndicales et les tentatives du gouvernement iranien de réprimer ‎le syndicalisme indépendant constituent un élément inquiétant du paysage des droits fondamentaux en Iran‎...

We, workers of Haft Tapeh Sugar Cane Company, have faced continuing violation of our rights and ‎demands, including non-payments of our wages for several months, in addition to the concerted efforts by ‎the employer to cease sugar cane plantation and eventually closing down the factory and privatizing the ‎company. We workers of Haft Tapeh are foreseeing mass layoffs. They have already stopped paying us for ‎our over-time work.‎.‎.

It is now four months since the coup in Iran, thinly disguised as presidential elections. Even though the victors of the coup appear to have succeeded in consolidating themselves and the opposition forces have apparently been pushed back into defensive positions, the massive anti-government demonstrations on September 18 - the last Friday of the month of Ramadan, Quds day, which is traditionally given over to anti-Israel demonstrations - show that there is much life left in the opposition ...

The sham presidential election of June 2009 has unleashed a rainbow of political forces, writes Yassamine Mather, including an increasingly strong red component. The task of the left is to support and strengthen the red component of this rainbow, the Iranian working class, as the only force capable of bringing about democracy, and the only movement conscious of the international complexities of the current situation...

What is happening in Iran is a spontaneous, ingenious and independent revolt by a people frustrated by thirty years of tyranny by an obscurantist, religious regime, a revolt that was unleashed by electoral fraud. The present situation is only the result of a long and complex process which has been taking place inside the regime, a deep crisis, located on the one hand at the summit of the governing circles and within the ruling class, and on the other hand within Iranian society...

When I returned from covering the Iranian elections recently, I was surprised to find my email box filled with progressive authors, academics and bloggers bending themselves into knots about the current crisis in Iran. They cite the long history of U.S. interference in Iran and conclude that the current unrest there must be sponsored or manipulated by the Empire. That comes as quite a shock to those risking their lives daily on the streets of major Iranian cities fighting for political, social and economic justice...

Thanks to a huge, planned electoral fraud, Iran’s outgoing president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was declared victor in the first round of the country’s presidential elections, with an unlikely score. As the height of irony, the regime itself recognised irregularities concerning 3 million votes. In 170 electoral districts the official figures gave a rate of participation going from 95% to 140%...

The electoral coup and the subsequent uprising and suppression of the revolting voters in Iran have prompted all sorts of analyses in Western media from both the Right and the Left. The Right, mostly inspired by the neo-con ideology and reactionary perspectives, dreams of the re-creation of the Shah’s Iran, looks for pro-American/pro-Israeli allies among the disgruntled Iranian public, and seeks an Eastern European type velvet revolution...

The current Iranian regime, which has been in power in the Islamic Republic of Iran since the 1979 revolution against the Shah, continues to confuse many observers as to its true nature. The intrinsic confusion lies precisely in the fact that it is indeed a post-revolutionary regime. The usual common sense of the 'stagists', from which we suffer a great deal within the anti-imperialist left, leads them to make the great discovery that anything that is post-Shah must be a step in the right direction...

Five days before the UN Security Council’s deadline for the cessation of Iran’s nuclear activities ran out, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad inaugurated a factory for the production of heavy water in the centre of Iran with great pomp. This was a new thumbing of the nose by Teheran to the West, in the context of a campaign of propaganda around economic sanctions and possible military attacks beginning more than two years ago...

In June 2005, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad unexpectedly won the presidency of the Islamic Republic of Iran, after an intense campaign in which he exerted great effort to present himself as the defender of the poor and the working class. These classes, badly hurt by neo-liberal economic policies in the period following the 1980–1988 Iran-Iraq war, had staged a number of organized and noisy protests in the years preceding Ahmadinejad’s campaign, and they responded in significant numbers to his appeal for votes....

After more than a quarter of a century of the Islamic regime the Iranian economy is in deep trouble. Nearly 16 years of economic reform, led by the “moderate” and “reformist” wings of the regime incarnated by the two ex-presidents, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and Sayyed Mohammad Khatami, responding to the demands of international finance and organisations like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, have not improved the situation...

The Islamic Republic of Iran is a political construction without parallel. For sure, a certain number of states in the Muslim world, for example Pakistan, the Comoros or Mauritania, also employ the label of “Islamic Republic”, but from the viewpoint of the power structures, the nature of the constitutional regime, the specificity of the ruling elites and even the state ideology, these republics have next to nothing in common with the Iranian model. In the Muslim world no country has ever had...