Statement on the occasion of May Day, International Workers’ Day
Workers of all countries, support the Woman, Life, Freedom revolution in Iran!
The current war and the critical situation in the region and the world require that the urgent task of Iran’s workers — freeing themselves from the Islamic bourgeois regime — receive ever greater active support from workers across the globe. The overthrow of the Islamic Republic and the establishment of the direct power of the organised people in Iran has now become an immediate necessity and an urgent global demand. The victory of the Woman, Life, Freedom revolution over the Islamic Republic is not only the first step toward the liberation of the workers and society of Iran, but also the real and lasting solution to the current war and crisis, and a precondition for progress toward peace, freedom, and prosperity.
At the centre of the war between the United States and Israel and the Islamic Republic lies the regime’s crisis of survival. The Islamic Republic came to power with the help of the West and the global bourgeoisie in order to suppress and contain the 1979 revolution — a revolution with a strong working-class, freedom- and equality-seeking, and anti-capitalist character. Over the past 47 years, the Islamic Republic has used slogans such as “Death to America” and “Death to Israel,” alongside their counterparts — execution, imprisonment, torture, compulsory veiling, retributive punishment, nuclear threats, Islamist terrorism, and repeated massacres of citizens — as tools of its survival, fundamentally directed against workers and the people in Iran and parts of the region.
Throughout these years, the Islamic Republic has not only been directly supported by states such as Russia and China, but has also consistently been tolerated and appeased by Western governments, whose maximum efforts have been aimed at containing, moderating, or bargaining with it. In the current war as well, the aim of the United States is to force the Islamic Republic into submission and behavioural change. However, as long as the Islamic Republic remains in power, it will continue — in order to survive — to rely on execution, torture, repression, political Islam, anti-Westernism, and all the policies that have led to the present war and crisis; and war is the continuation of the politics.
The Islamic Republic has no solution from within. It must be completely overthrown and consigned to the museum of history. This is a regime that has opened fire on more than 30,000 people within the span of two days across dozens of cities and has turned Iran into a vast prison for its inhabitants. It survives only through massacre or the threat of massacre and has no legitimacy as the government of Iran. The overthrow of this regime is the task of the people of Iran, led by the working class. But Iranian workers need the active solidarity and support of workers around the world.
Support from workers internationally has two inseparable aspects. First, clear, decisive, and active support for all efforts by the working class, women, and protesting people of Iran to organise and liberate themselves — and in the current situation, especially material and moral support for the Woman, Life, Freedom revolution. Second, pressure on their own governments to stop recognising the Islamic Republic as the government of Iran and instead impose a comprehensive boycott, rather than pursuing war, negotiations, or compromise. The Islamic Republic must be expelled from all international institutions, and its leaders must be brought before international courts as perpetrators of crimes against humanity and as killers of the people of Iran. The same approach must be taken toward the Islamic Republic as was once taken toward the apartheid regime in South Africa.
This year’s May Day is an opportunity to use gatherings across all countries to support the struggle of Iran’s working class and people against the Islamic Republic — and especially to actively support the victory of the Woman, Life, Freedom revolution.
May Day is also a day for the workers and rising people of Iran to use this opportunity to organise gatherings, large and small, across the country, to ensure a strong presence of families in these assemblies, to present their indictment against the Islamic Republic as the source of killings, war, poverty, and all the suffering imposed over the past 47 years, and to raise the banner of the Woman, Life, Freedom revolution and the just demands of society as a whole.
Worker-communist Party of Iran
26 April 2026
AI-assisted translation, from the original Farsi
