The powerful protests that have erupted can and must proceed until final victory, namely, bring down the criminal Islamic Republic. However, street protests on their own are not enough. This time we must not let the ruling criminals stop our uprising by suppressing the street protests. We can and must strengthen the ongoing rising on the streets by workers’ and service sector strikes. The time for stopping work and strikes has come. We can deprive the regime of the power to suppress the protests and we can paralyse the regime by combining the protests with strikes by teachers and students, by workers in key sectors of the economy, such as the oil and petrochemical industries, and in the service sectors, such as the city metro, the bus services, railways and transport. The strikes can be called against what have inflamed the people’s anger and triggered the street protests, namely compulsory hijab and the discrimination, oppression and murderous violence against women.
Today, the courageous women of Iran are taking off their hijabs in street protests, burning them or waving them in the air as banners of victory. Strikes over demands such as the abolition of compulsory hijab, the dissolution of the ‘morality police’, withdrawal of the security forces from the streets and release of those detained in recent protests and all political prisoners are a most effective way of strengthening and sustaining the street protests. This is also the best commemoration for Mahsa and redress for her murder.
The Islamic Republic, as always, is aiming to drive our movement back by attacking the protests by its armed thugs. The start of strikes will open up a new front against the regime, which its repressive thugs won’t be able to stop. With strikes, the regime’s armed forces will be much weakened in the street battles. Strikes and their development into a general strike are the most effective and practical ways to thwart the regime’s repression and paralyse its entire murder machinery. It is our urgent task as workers’ organisations and activists, the women’s liberation movement, the student movement, the teachers’ movement, the justice movement for those murdered by the regime and all the other protest movements to prepare and organise for strikes so as not only to deprive the regime of the ability to suppress the street protests, but also to pressurise it from all sides and bring it to its knees. Our declared aim, as we shout on the streets, is the overthrow of the Islamic Republic; the general strike is an effective way towards that goal. Let us support and expand the mass protests by strikes, and go forward unitedly till the overthrow of the Islamic Republic.
Down with the misogynistic Islamic Republic!
Long live the revolution!
Worker-communist Party of Iran
23 September 2022
https://wpiran.org/english/ international.office@wpiran.org
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