Leadership proven through struggle, not slogans
In this detailed response, Hamid Taqvaee addresses the question of leadership head-on by pointing to four decades of concrete political practice. Rather than presenting leadership as a claim or a status, he traces how it is built through sustained intervention across the real fronts of struggle: Woman, Life, Freedom; the fight against gender apartheid and compulsory hijab; campaigns that saved people from execution; opposition to political Islam and Sharia courts; defence of refugees, LGBTQ people, and children; and the ongoing struggle against poverty, corruption, repression, and capitalist rule. The text argues that leadership is earned through presence, organisation, and results — and that the Worker-communist Party’s position is rooted in what it has actually done, not what it declares.
The question of leadership and the position of the Worker-communist Party
Part of an interview on the Clubhouse of Radio Free Tribune, under the title:
“The Worker-communist Party and Iran’s political outlook”
1 December 2026
Arman Roshan: You consider the Worker-communist Party to be a kind of practical and political alternative. Over these past four decades, what data and experiences show that this claim has gone beyond the level of a slogan? Why does Iranian society still not recognise you as the main alternative?
Hamid Taqvaee: You asked a good question. I will try to answer within the allotted time.
The first point is that our experience of struggle over the past four decades—which you referred to—covers an extensive list. Look, one characteristic of our party is practical work and active intervention in all arenas of struggle and protest, because we consider every form of discrimination to be something that must be risen against—something tied to communism, tied to the working class, and tied to the struggle for freedom.
In our view, the class struggle does not take place only in factories. The worker’s struggle against the capitalist is one axis of the class struggle, but this struggle has much broader dimensions. For example, the struggle of women—who constitute 50 per cent of society—to break down the walls of gender apartheid and against the blatant discrimination imposed on women in the Islamic Republic is, in our view, an important part of the class struggle. Or consider the struggle for unconditional freedoms, the struggle against repression, the justice-seeking movement, the struggle in defence of children’s rights, the struggle against poverty, corruption, and the deep gap between the mountain of wealth and the valley of poverty—a struggle that today workers are at the forefront of with the slogan “Unity, unity against poverty and corruption”—the struggle for the separation of religion from the state and for de-Islamising the government and its laws, the struggle in defence of the rights of homosexuals, the struggle against national oppression and discrimination imposed on people in Kurdistan, Baluchistan, and other border regions of Iran, the struggle of religious minorities such as the Baha’is in Iran to be recognised as citizens, and so on and so forth. The list is long.
All of these are dimensions and different branches of the class struggle that directly concern us—for two reasons. First, because these struggles are in themselves rightful and humane: from the human standpoint, from the standpoint of defending human dignity, respect, livelihood, and freedom, this is the business of us communists. Second, in a political sense, because politically and strategically, the root of all these afflictions is the capitalist system. From this standpoint too, it is entirely connected to the working class struggle and to the cause of socialism—to the overthrow of the domination and rule of the parasitic capitalist class that today is known as the “one per cent.”
In Iran, this parasitic minority includes the gangs of the economic mafia and the billionaire ayatollahs—from the Leader’s office to the IRGC and Basij, the Foundation of the Oppressed, Astan Quds Razavi, and so on and so forth. Politically and economically dispossessing these forces is a fundamental matter that strikes at the root of all these afflictions and discriminations.
This is our conviction and belief, and we have persistently fought in all these arenas since the founding of the party. About two decades before the rise of the Woman, Life, Freedom revolution, we were active against gender apartheid. The very term “gender apartheid” was raised by our party about 30 years ago; today, fortunately, it has become a common term and a vast movement has formed against it. This is a fundamental issue in Iranian society, and one of the axes of the Woman, Life, Freedom revolution is precisely this.
One manifestation of this gender apartheid is compulsory hijab. In this arena too, our party has long raised the banner of struggle. Long before, in the Woman, Life, Freedom revolution, the movement against hijab became mass-based and people began burning hijabs in the streets of Tehran, our party members in Europe were burning hijab. We repeatedly stressed that hijab is not only a women’s issue, it is not merely about freedom of dress; rather, it is about chaining women and intimidating society as a whole. But many opposition forces—even most left-wing forces—did not accept this. They believed hijab is not an issue for working women, and in the 8 March actions they would raise the slogan “equal pay for equal work” instead of protesting hijab as a wall of gender apartheid. And they criticised us for giving hijab so much importance.
Another example is the struggle against executions. We are the only opposition force that has saved people from execution. Our party activists organised many campaigns to save people from execution; in some cases we succeeded and were able to save condemned individuals such as Kobra Rahmanpour, Nazanin Fatehi, and Afsaneh Norouzi from the gallows. In other cases—such as Reyhaneh Jabbari—unfortunately we could not prevent the execution sentence.
Beyond confronting execution sentences, the struggle to abolish and ban the death penalty has also been an important aspect of our work. Three decades ago, our party declared that execution is premeditated state murder, and now this slogan has become part of the public discourse. Today everyone says that regardless of what the alleged crime is or is not, the very act of execution is a crime and must be banned. Today, inside and outside the country, important campaigns against the death penalty itself are underway, and we take pride in the fact that this has been a consistent arena of our activity.
Another example is the struggle against political Islam abroad. We are the party that 12 years ago in Canada, in the province of Ontario, stood up against Sharia courts. Here the government wanted to establish Islamic courts for issues related to the lives of immigrants from Islamised countries. We organised a global campaign against this and fought for more than two years, with many activists participating. Homa Arjomand, a cadre of our party, was the leader of this movement at the time. We ultimately won, and the Ontario Premier officially withdrew the plan and accepted that a country must have one law.
In defending refugees’ rights, we also have a rich record. We saved many asylum seekers from airports when authorities were trying to deport them. We have also been active in defending refugees’ citizenship rights, and today the Iranian Refugee Federation is a credible and recognised organisation worldwide.
In defending rainbow people’s rights, our party is also the only Iranian opposition party that participates in Pride marches, demonstrations, and gatherings of LGBTQ people in Europe and North America and is active against the blatant discrimination imposed on LGBTQ people in Iran and everywhere.
In defending children’s rights as well, our party is at the forefront. The first public manifestation of the movement defending children’s rights was the Sanandaj snowman festival about 24 years ago. Long before this social action, we had raised the banner of “Children first” or “Children come first.” In this way, we brought the defence of children’s rights into the arena of politics. The snowman festival of Kurdistan, as well as the “child labour and street children” campaign, were in fact a social response to the “children first” discourse. Today the movement defending children has become a vast social movement.
These are only a list and a compressed reference to the most important arenas of our work—not all the campaigns, organisations, institutions, and bodies that we have actively created and advanced inside and outside the country. I did not even mention the hundreds of case-specific campaigns abroad, which in themselves form a long list.
What I want to say is: when we claim that our party can advance this revolution, strengthen it, and bring it to victory, these are its objective and practical foundations. These political–social–practical–struggle realities are our party’s record. And this shows in what direction our party acts, where it wants to take society, how it sees the future, how it sees victory, and what understanding and vision it has of liberation, freedom, social justice, and equality—not only because of the programme A Better World, which is a comprehensive programme that explains all our goals in detail and is our party’s foundational document, but more importantly because of the activities we carried out and advanced to realise each point of that programme.
1 December 2025
AI-assisted translation, from the original Farsi
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