For Iranian people who imagine a democratic future, 2026 began with thrilling promise: the largest uprising in a series of uprisings since the turn of the millennium. It began on December 28, 2025, with a strike of shopkeepers in Tehran’s Grand Bazaar, a social stratum typically supportive of the regime, now fed up with a sharp decline in the national currency. As mass demonstrations spread nationwide, a work stoppage sparked by economic grievances reignited the smoldering political revolt against the Islamic Republic in its most significant eruption yet.

But just as suddenly, two atrocities put a halt to the protests. First, under the cover of an internet blackout, the Islamic Republic’s security forces carried out an indiscriminate slaughter, turning the largest uprising in decades into the largest massacre. Weeks later, the United States and Israel launched an illegal war, killing civilians and destroying their infrastructure, including schools and universities, roads and bridges, hospitals and heritage sites. What began as a hopeful moment has instead become one of the darkest in modern Iranian history: when not one, not two, but three governments took the lives of thousands of Iranians over the span of mere months.

The struggle to achieve democracy in Iran in the face of domestic repression and foreign intervention — dialectically interrelated forms of violence — stretches back for more than a century. Throughout Iranian workers and their labor movement have been central actors in that struggle.