Below is an assessment of who is likely to replace the Iranian theocratic regime if it falls. It is by by Iranian refugee Siyâvash Shahabi, who also produces the excellent blog site The Fire Next Time. We reproduce it because the Iran revolution is the most important revolutionary development in the world today. What distinguishes it from every other mass movement in the region is that there is little chance for either religious/Islamacist groups nor Russian imperialism to influence this movement. Just the opposite, because the revolution is against a theocratic and Russian connected regime.

Maybe its start could be laid to 2017-18, when there were several important labor strikes. Those included workers at the the Haft Tappeh Sugarcane Company in Khuzestan Province and 4,000 steelworkers in the Natonal Steel Industrial Group in nearby Ahvaz.

Workers in struggle in Iran

That was a prelude to wider strikes in 2020-21 in the oil and natural gas industries, electric power plants and even automobile manufacturing. This then led to further strikes of healthcare workers and legal professional workers. These put the working class at the center of resistance to the regime. Then in 2022 the “Women, Life, Freedom” mass protests arose. These were drowned in blood. While that particular phase of the movement was defeated, now it has reared its head once again!
For the last several weeks the streets of Tehran and other cities are filled with protesters. According to PBS as of January 11, over 538 activists have been killed by the regime and 10,600 arrested. It is not entirely one way, though, and Iranfocus reported “The state-run Tasnim news agency, affiliated with the terrorist Quds Force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), reported on Friday, January 9, the death of seven forces affiliated with the Basij paramilitary organization and the intelligence apparatuses of the Iranian regime in Razavi Khorasan Province in northeastern Iran.”

In almost any other such situation the regime’s control over its own repressive apparatus (military, police, etc.) would have cracked and the regime would have collapsed. But the reason this has not happened yet in Iran is at least in part because the IRGC is not simply a military apparatus; it is part of the capitalist class and owns major industries. This enables it to both grant major priviliges to its members as well as wall them off from the rest of the population. Despite this, the days of the regime may be numbered. What will replace it? Here is Siyâvash Shahabi’s assessment of the situation:

The protests are continuing with large numbers of people on the streets. For more than 60 hours now, the internet and almost all communication channels with Iran have been cut. The few videos that activists manage to publish from some cities do not really show the full scale of what is happening. There are reports describing the massacre of protesters in the streets. Regime officials claim on state media that the situation is “under control,” but the ongoing internet shutdown clearly contradicts that narrative.

At the same time, Western media are flooded with different stories about Iran. It is hardly surprising that we are once again seeing a wave of racist and deeply stupid analyses that serve the far right and erase the agency of the Iranian people. This is not the first time, and it will not be the last. The West seems incapable of looking at countries like Iran without a racist lens.

Still, let’s talk about which forces actually have a chance at power in Iran.

The Mojahedin (MEK), despite all their international networks and even direct support from some US politicians, have a structural problem: they are religious. A society that burns hijabs, knocks turbans off clerics’ heads, and has risen up against political Islam is very unlikely to accept an alternative built around religious symbols. Even if the Mojahedin have behaved with less open aggression toward their critics than the monarchists, their social chances of taking power are close to zero. The real question about them is not “taking power,” but what happens to them if other alternatives take power. (Oaklandsocialist notes: In some countries in the “West” the MEK is known through its front, the National Council of Resistance in Iran or NCRI.)

The regime’s reformists? Their only real chance lies in crushing the revolution. If they manage to calm the streets and sacrifice a few figures to strike a deal with the West, they might survive for a while. But they have no real support in society. Three years after the Woman, Life, Freedom uprising, they proved that even at the height of crisis they lack the will to change anything. A so-called “Second Republic” without a coup and without removing the very top of the power structure is more of a bitter joke than a serious political project.

Supporters of Reza Pahlevi at a protest in San Francisco. They also support Israel and Trump.

Reza Pahlavi, realistically, has a better chance than the other two to take power, but not to keep it. His plan for the first 100 days is already built around repression: martial law, eliminating opponents, threatening national and minority movements, and ignoring political pluralism. In today’s diverse Iranian society, this path smells more like civil war than stability. Personal authoritarianism, the fantasy of “superior bloodlines,” and zero tolerance for criticism are the real Achilles’ heel of monarchism. A society that has risen up against lifetime rule will not accept a new version of it.

And then there is the fourth factor: The people, the progressive and left movements. The left has been brutally repressed at the organizational level, and many of its social roots have been cut. The Iranian left in exile has also failed so far to organize itself effectively. But the left still has deep social roots inside Iran, and society is very much alive: the women’s movement, the labor movement, the movement against executions, students, and political prisoners. These forces are currently standing in the doorway, blocking the return of a new form of authoritarianism. Without their pressure, all existing alternatives would drift even further to the right and become more reactionary.

Power can be taken through a coup or with foreign backing. But without society, it cannot be held. That is a reality no scenario can escape.

A genuinely progressive, anti-war movement today must take to the streets across the world: to defend the protests of the Iranian people and to oppose any form of foreign intervention or war.

Oaklandsocialist adds:

Recently, workers in Arak’s factories have declared the existence of a workers council. We urge readers to read their statement. This is a potentially huge development since in the end it was the workers councils who were the alternative path to the 1979 revolution which overthrew the Shah but brought the mullah’s to power. See the section on Iran in our article on Why Marxism opposes individual terrorism for more on this issue. That section relies heavily on the excellent book “Revolution and Counter Revolution in Iran” by Phil Marshall. Among other things, Marshall points to the disastrous role played by the communists in Iran – Tudeh. For that reason, we have to qualify this development of workers councils because it is not clear what role they are playing among those Arak workers.

There are also a couple of other issues to consider:

First is the role of the various Kurdish groups, including Kurdistan Democratic Party (Iran), the PDKI. As with other Kurdish groups, they have a long history. In the late 1980s, they tried to work out a deal with the Iranian regime. That attempte failed disastrously when a delegation of the PDKI arrived in Vienna to negotiate with representatives of the regime. When the Kurdish representatives arrived in the hall, the regime representatives took out machine guns and murdered the Kurdis delegation. The PDKI concluded that no deal was possible of course, and presently they support the movement to bring down the regime altogether. We also have gotten reports that they call for a workers struggle, and maybe even an end to capitalism, but in the abstract.

This is similar to another Kurdish party, the Kurdistan Free Life Party, PJAK, which is close to the Turkish-based Kurdistan Workers Party, the PKK. Similar to the PDKI, PJAK relies most heavily on the armed struggle rather than on a united working class as an independent force in history. Because we are not there and have no direct contacts there, it is impossible to make a clear assessment, but two questions seem to be critical:

• The first is How can the working class play a leading and independent role in the revolution? That is always key in any revolution and in all such situations the formation of revolutionary councils has been fundamental. Iran has a history of the formation of such councils in the shoras. It seems they may be returning as the statement from the workers at Arak shows.
• The second is what sort of international connections can the movement make? The Arab Spring was a regional movement but it seems there was no organized regional collaboration. We have been told about divisions between Iranians and Syrians in this case. How can the Iranian movement overcome such divisions?