TEHRAN — Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei met with a number of workers.

He praised the laborers for their hard work in Iran’s fight against the foes’ conspiracies to upset the Iranian economy. 

“Since the first days of the Islamic Revolution, the enemy has sought to halt production in the country. All the sanctions were aimed at halting production in Iran. Our workers have stood on the front lines and have not let that happen,” he said, adding that workers have made impressive achievements in military, economic, and political spheres, and at least 14,000 laborers sacrificed their lives during Iraq’s war on Iran in the 1980s.

“Among the main policies of arrogant powers since the victory of the Islamic Revolution [in 1979] has been to grind the country’s production to a halt,” Ayatollah Khamenei said.

“Workers stood at the forefront of the fight against the enemies’ plots to disrupt the country’s production and did not allow the conspiracies to materialize. Workers played the pivotal role in this regard,” Ayatollah Khamenei said.

He added that Islam’s outlook toward workers is one of appreciation. 

“It is an outlook based on valuing, an outlook that values work and workers. This viewpoint is different from that of the system of capitalism and the disintegrated system of communism,” the Leader asserted.
 
Ayatollah Khamenei went on to say that the capitalist systems look how exploit workers. 

“Workers are viewed as a tool for gaining wealth. That’s how capitalism views workers, and they don’t even hide it. Look at their books on economics and you will reach this same conclusion,” he noted. 

Carefully observing the faults of the communism and capitalism, the Leader said, “Communism’s view of workers was a slogan. They said they had a workers’ system. For example, Russia under Stalin and Khrushchev was a so-called pro-workers system but the rulers lived like sultans. No trace of supporting workers existed, and pressure was on society and the working class.”

The Leader also stressed that laborers have aborted fiendish attempts to exploit their demands as a sign of popular protests and have definitively proven their allegiance to the Islamic Revolution and the Islamic establishment.

Earlier this year, Ayatollah Khamenei stated that the enemies are waging a war against Iran’s economy in order to bring it to collapse and pit the people against the establishment. 

“The goal of the enemies in this war has been the collapse of the Iranian economy; that was their intention. Now, the collapse of the economy was, of course, a prelude in order to set the people against the Islamic Republic by destroying the Iranian economy and to carry out their malicious political intentions in this way,” the Leader said in an address to a group of entrepreneurs in Tehran on January 30.