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When mass demonstrations erupted across Iran in December 2025, they represented the most profound challenge to the Islamic Republic since the revolutionary upheaval of 1979. This was no "e;economic riot"e; staged by foreign actors. It was a revolt against dictatorship in all its forms: a manifestation of the law of uneven and combined development, wherein the most advanced contradictions of global financial capital collide with the archaic, theocratic structures of a semi-colonial state.This analysis applies the theoretical tools of the Fourth International and the broader Trotskyist tradition to understand what is happening on the streets of Tehran, Isfahan, and 220 other locations across 27 provinces. The framework is permanent revolution: the recognition that in countries like Iran, the national bourgeoisie proves inherently incapable of resolving fundamental democratic and social tasks. The theocratic-capitalist regime that enforces 52% inflation and 57% malnourishment cannot reform itself. Neither can Western-backed monarchist restoration offer liberation.Part One examines the material basis of the uprising: the catastrophic collapse of the Iranian rial, the abolition of subsidised exchange rates, and the fiscal drain of the Twelve-Day War with Israel. It documents the unprecedented horizontal spread of protests into medium-sized towns and rural areas, analyses the regime's "e;foreign agitator"e; propaganda and its manufacture of pro-Pahlavi sentiment through IRGC infiltration and deepfake media, and argues for the revival of the Shoras—the workers' councils of 1979—as the only genuine alternative to both theocracy and imperialist-backed autocracy. The legacy of SAVAK brutality and the "e;modernising dictatorship"e; of the Pahlavis remains a primary barrier to any monarchist project. The masses will not rise again to reinstate a broken system that served as a pillar of US hegemony.Part Two maps the British left's fragmented response to these events, exposing the ideological fault lines that run through contemporary revolutionary socialism. From the Stop the War Coalition's warnings against Western intervention to the campist apologetics of Press TV commentators, from Socialist Worker's defence of popular agency to the Fourth International's call for independent working-class mobilisation, the 2026 uprising has forced a reckoning with questions the left has dodged for decades. How do anti-imperialists respond when an oppressed population rises against a regime that positions itself within the "e;axis of resistance"e;? What distinguishes principled internationalism from reflexive defence of states that challenge Western dominance?The analysis names names: Lindsey German, George Galloway, David Miller, Craig Murray. It traces the "e;Assad parallel"e; deployed to dismiss Iranian dissent and examines the strategic dilemmas facing solidarity activists who must oppose both Western imperialism and theocratic repression simultaneously. The taxonomy of the British left—anti-war coalitions, revolutionary internationalists, and campists—offers a framework for understanding similar debates across the international socialist movement.About Red Mole GuidesRed Mole Guides address organisations and issues in socialist politics that rarely attract mainstream academic or institutional research. Open source methods and reader correspondence form the core of these guides, prioritising accessible public data and community insights over proprietary sources. References appear where verifiable, but coverage relies on dispersed, non-traditional materials.Treat this guide as you would other open-source intelligence: valuable for orientation but requiring critical verification. Publishing as an eBook enables rapid updates from feedback. Readers' corrections are welcomed to enhance accuracy.

In 1979 British trade unions had 13.2 million members, and 29,474,000 working days were lost to strikes. A workplace survey the next year counted 328,000 shop stewards. By 2025, union density was 22.4 per cent, and nobody counts workplace representatives any more: the last survey was in 2011.What the revolutionary left did next is usually explained as a sequence. Rank-and-file organisation is what a rising level of struggle produces, so it cannot be built in a downturn, and revolutionaries must work instead through the structures that exist: the branch, the committee, the slate. This Guide calls that the downturn alibi, and shows it refuted inside the Socialist Workers Party's own founding documents. In autumn 1979 Tony Cliff described the Communist Party's Broad Left as a machine that won union elections by "e;placing the most minimal demand (the vote) on the stewards and branch committees"e;, and listed its orientation to left officials among the causes of the decline. In 1983 he called it a swamp. A quarter of a century on, the British far left's industrial work runs through that very form.Twenty-six documents, in extract, let the reader test that. The rank-and-file strategy in its own words, in Steve Jefferys' balance sheet of 1975 and the Fourth International's Turin industrial conference of 1969. The downturn thesis at length, beside a Manchester factory occupation that built rank-and-file organisation in its worst year. Two cases where the tradition split on how to vote: the Teamsters, whose reform caucus outlived the president it elected, and Comisiones Obreras, where power was concentrated without a penny going missing. Then Britain, from the Liverpool dockers to the strike wave of 2022, and the same argument from Morocco, Genoa and Lisbon.The conclusion is not that union elections do not matter. It is that the fixed point is never the ballot but the assembly, and that a strategy which asks a member for a vote will get a vote.Cliff, Jefferys, McIlroy, Conway, Tucker and Eidlin among others.

In 1973 the British International Marxist Group issued a forty-pence pamphlet that tried to do something unusually ambitious: not to retell the story of permanent revolution, but to prove it — to derive Trotsky's theory from Marx's own economics of the world market.The result is one of the boldest short statements the Trotskyist tradition produced. Across five tightly argued sections, "e;John Robens"e; grounds permanent revolution in the law of uneven and combined development, then follows it outward — into the colonial revolutions of China, Cuba, Vietnam and Bengal; into a forensic Marxist anatomy of the post-war "e;long boom"e; and the crisis of the dollar; and into the contradictions of the Soviet economy and the bureaucracy that rules it. Everywhere the same charge recurs: Stalinism and social democracy fail because they reason like empiricists, reading the world back-to-front, while only the theory of permanent revolution grasps the world economy as a single, living whole.Written on the eve of the 1973 oil shock — at the very hinge of the boom it dissects — the pamphlet is both a period document of remarkable confidence and a genuinely searching piece of theory. It is unusually candid, too: it concedes where Trotsky's forecasts failed, and keeps only what survives.This new edition restores the long-out-of-print text from the original scan and adds a critical introduction — weighing what is conventional, what is surprising, and what is missing in its account — together with a guide to further reading that runs from Trotsky's Results and Prospects through the expositions of Ernest Mandel, Pierre Frank and Livio Maitan, and back to the pamphlet's own hidden source, the French economist Jacques Valier.A rigorous, self-aware argument that history went on to test more severely than its author could have known — and a bracing introduction to why permanent revolution still asks the questions it does.

In the first six months of 2026, employers in the United States named artificial intelligence as the reason for more than a hundred thousand announced job cuts. Almost every argument about what that means takes the same shape, whether it comes from the technology companies, from governments, or from the left: establish what the machine can do, how fast it can do it, and how many jobs it will take, and the politics are supposed to follow.The Fourth International has made exactly that forecast four times.It made it in 1954, in the first sustained Marxist treatment of automation. It made it in 1962, when the office was identified as the cheapest place in the economy to automate and the arrival of the first computers was counted job by job. It made it in 1984, in a report from inside the West German car plants which concluded that the future belonged to factories empty of people. It is making it now.Every one of those forecasts was wrong, in both directions. And every time, what actually decided the outcome was not in the forecast at all.The Fourth Forecast gathers nineteen documents from ninety years of the Fourth International's press, with an argued introduction and a reader's headnote to each. At its centre is a survey from 1962 in which Ed Beecher followed three American unions meeting the same technology in the same decade. The Mine Workers and the Steelworkers did nothing and were hollowed out. The Transport Workers and the Longshoremen traded away their working rules for a guarantee. Local 3 of the Electrical Workers struck for a twenty-five-hour week and won it at the same pay. One technology, three outcomes, running from devastation at one end to a four-day week at the other. Nothing in the specification of the machine decided which. What decided it was whether workers were organised to take the time the machine saved as time.A fourth section puts the question every current Marxist account of artificial intelligence answers fastest and least carefully: what happens when the owner changes. Leon Sedov on the Stakhanov records of 1936, two Progress Publishers volumes from Moscow read against the case they were written to make, and Ernest Mandel on why the Soviet computerisation drive of the 1980s stalled. Change the ownership and you change what the productivity gain is for. You have not yet settled who commands the labour process, and that is where the gain is distributed.With extracts from Leon Sedov, Harold Robins, Robert Chester, the Fifth World Congress theses of 1957, Ed Beecher, Ernest Mandel, Mike Cooley, Andre Gorz, Winfried Wolf, the German metalworkers' campaign for the thirty-five-hour week, Kim Moody, Mark Bergfeld and Daniel Tanuro. Also included, and identified here, is the movement's first article on automation, written in 1954 under a pen name by the young American Trotskyist who later became Lyndon LaRouche.For readers of labour history, of Marxist political economy, and of the argument now running about technological unemployment, the shorter working week, and who gets to decide what a machine is for.A Red Mole Guide: an argued introduction with a casebook of primary sources. Number sixteen in the series.