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	Workers Vanguard No. 950	15 January 2010

Iran in Turmoil

For a Leninist-Trotskyist Party to Fight for Workers Revolution!

Imperialist Hands Off!

JANUARY 11—Since last June’s re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, which was riddled with fraud, Iran has been gripped with protests and attendant government repression. Amid this turmoil, the Obama administration, while preparing a new round of sanctions aimed at strangling the Iranian economy, continues to ratchet up its threats of military action against Iran’s nuclear program. An article in the New York Times (6 January), based largely on information provided by Washington officials, reported that Iran has shielded “an increasingly large part of its atomic complex in networks of tunnels and bunkers” that, in the words of Israeli defense minister Ehud Barak, “cannot be destroyed through a conventional attack.”

The Times revealed that the Pentagon “is racing to develop a deadly tunnel weapon” scheduled for deployment next summer. The 20-foot-long bomb, called the Massive Ordnance Penetrator, will pack tons of explosives—ten times more than its predecessor—and be designed for launch from the B-2 stealth bomber. Against such threats, the international proletariat must defend the development of nuclear weapons by Iran and demand: Imperialist hands off!

Within Iran, protests, some mobilizing tens of thousands of people, have re-erupted since early December. Under a brutal crackdown by security forces, last summer’s wave of demonstrations was reduced during the fall to fewer than one major protest per month, often timed to coincide with religious occasions. Then, on December 7, tens of thousands of students rallied in Tehran and at universities around the country, clashing with riot police and Basij militias.

While the protest demonstrations have been politically subordinate to one side in what is essentially a falling-out between rival factions within the ruling clerical elite, the December 7 student demonstrations pointed to the politically heterogeneous nature of the opposition. Mir Hussein Moussavi, the main opposition candidate in the June presidential election, did not associate himself with the student demonstrations. Reportedly, few of the young protesters wore the signature green color of Moussavi’s campaign, and some even burned pictures of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, a taboo-defying act in a country where the “supreme leader” is considered to be answerable only to God.

The student demonstrations were followed by a series of mass protests coinciding with religious occasions. On December 27, at least eight people (including Moussavi’s nephew) were shot and killed by security forces at mass demonstrations in Tehran and other cities coinciding with the Shi’ite holy day of Ashura.

As many as 2,000 people have reportedly been arrested since the start of the latest wave of demonstrations. Five of those arrested are accused of being members of the Mujahedin Khalq, an Iranian opposition group that until recently operated out of bases in Iraq; they face charges of Moharebeh, or waging war against God, which carries an automatic death sentence. The international workers movement must demand: Free all anti-government protesters!

Those arrested include 12 members of the Baha’i religious minority, bringing to 48 the number of Baha’is currently imprisoned in Iran. Seven Baha’i leaders, due to face trial tomorrow, have been hit with new criminal charges that carry a possible death penalty. According to the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran, more than 200 Baha’is have died at the hands of the Islamic Republic of Iran, while thousands have been fired from their jobs, had their property confiscated or been arrested.

In another sign of the stepped-up repression, a Kurdish political prisoner, Fasih Yasamani, was executed by hanging on January 6. Previously, another Kurdish prisoner was executed in November, and at least 17 other activists remain on death row. Yasamani was accused, on the basis of a “confession” obtained under torture, of being a member of the Party for Free Life in Kurdistan (PJAK), which is closely associated with the nationalist Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) in Turkey. When Barack Obama took office last year, one of his first acts was to brand the PJAK a terrorist organization, underlining, yet again, that the imperialist rulers who threaten war against Iran are deadly enemies of those oppressed by the Iranian regime.

We print below, edited for publication, a 3 October 2009 forum given in Toronto by John Masters, member of the Central Committee of the Trotskyist League/Ligue Trotskyste, Canadian section of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist).

* * *

Since the re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in a blatantly fraudulent vote last June, Iran has been swept by wave after wave of protests. Hundreds of thousands of student youth, women and workers have taken to the streets. Despite severe repression including beatings, murders and mass imprisonments, the protests have continued, the most sustained social upheaval the country has seen in the 30 years since the “Islamic revolution” of 1978-79.

That “revolution,” which I’ll talk about in some depth tonight, marked a watershed not only for Iran but for the whole Near East and the historically Muslim world. Millions rose up against the bloody Shah, a savage despot who had been placed in power by the CIA 25 years earlier. But the aspirations for social liberation of Iran’s workers, women and oppressed minorities, like the Kurds, were cruelly dashed when the Islamic hierarchy under Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini placed itself at the head of the anti-Shah upsurge and ascended to power.

The huge clerical caste of mullahs and their allies among the traditional bourgeoisie in the bazaars were a backward-looking force opposed to all social progress. Immediately on taking power, the clerical regime viciously attacked the working class and oppressed. Women were forced back under the chador, the stifling head-to-foot black veil that symbolizes their subordination. Kurdish militants were massacred by firing squads. The workers councils that were thrown up in the course of the upheaval were replaced by Islamic councils subordinated to the regime. Soon, Iranian youth were sent to die by the hundreds of thousands in a years-long border war with neighboring Iraq that was reactionary on both sides.

The 1979 “revolution” was a defeat, and the Iranian masses are paying the price to this day. Yet, criminally, the rise to power of a movement based on the mosque and bazaar was directly aided by the then large and influential Iranian left and cheered on by pseudo-socialist groups abroad. These groups claimed you had to support the religious forces because they were “leading a mass movement.” No matter that Khomeini et al. made their aims clear from the very start: enslaving women, stoning homosexuals and “adulterers” to death, persecuting religious minorities like the Baha’i, reversing the partial land reforms that had weakened the power of the mosque. For the reformist left, questions of class and program were, and are, irrelevant because immersion in the “movement” of the day is the be-all and end-all of politics. And in this case the “movement” was one of black reaction.

Uniquely, our organization, then known as the international Spartacist tendency, warned that the triumph of Khomeini’s forces would lead to a regime no less bloody and despotic than the Shah’s. We said: “Down with the Shah—Don’t bow to Khomeini! For workers revolution!” We emphasized the fight for women’s liberation, a life-or-death question in this part of the world, where women have long been treated as human chattel, and said: “No to the veil! For women’s liberation through socialist revolution!” We called for the right of self-determination—to national independence—for the minority nationalities in Iran’s “prison house of peoples.” For our principled revolutionary stance, our comrades around the world were vilified and physically attacked not only by clerical thugs but by reformist leftists acting at their behest.

Here are some examples of what the reformists said at the time. The Canadian International Socialists ran a headline in their press saying: “The Form—Religion, The Spirit—Revolution” (Workers Action, February 1979). The Militant (27 February 1979), published by the U.S. Socialist Workers Party, gushed: “Victory in Iran: Iranian Masses Show the Way for Workers Around the World.” The British-based group around Alan Woods and the late Ted Grant—today represented by Fightback in Canada—even claimed in their theoretical journal that the mullah movement could smash capitalist class rule and establish a workers state. I lived in England at this time and recall a public meeting organized by the British affiliate of the fake-Trotskyist United Secretariat (USec). One of their leaders, who had visited Tehran, boasted that he joined in chants of “Allah Akbar” (“God is great”) during demonstrations in the city.

Iran had long had one of the strongest self-proclaimed communist movements in the Near East. The pro-Soviet Tudeh Party dominated in the working class. In the 1970s, tens of thousands of youth were won to other left-wing groups, from the Maoist Peykar to the guerrillaist Fedayeen and more. But without exception these groups acted to subordinate working-class struggles to the Muslim hierarchy. In the wake of the mullahs’ victory, these leftists were hunted down, jailed and executed. The remnants who made it into exile have overwhelmingly retreated from politics or been rendered cynical.

Now a new generation is taking to the streets against what they rightly call the “new dictator.” Fully 70 percent of Iran’s population is under 30. These youth have little knowledge of or identification with the political program and liberating ideals of Marxism, or how this program was perverted by the Stalinists and other reformists in 1978-79 in the name of collaboration with a wing of the capitalist class. The worldwide retrogression of consciousness that followed the destruction of the Soviet Union, the world’s first workers state, in the early 1990s means that young activists and workers in struggle do not generally identify their aspirations with the fight for workers revolution. This has a double impact in Iran, where the 1979 defeat is also widely, if wrongly, seen as a failure of the communist project.

Thus far, the Iranian upheaval has been under the sway of “reform” clerics centered on Hussein Moussavi and his “Green Movement of Hope.” (“Green” as in Islam, not environmentalism.) But Moussavi, one of the founders of the “Islamic Republic,” is no less a butcher than his rivals in the current regime. While he was prime minister from 1981 to 1989, untold thousands of leftists, Kurds and women’s rights activists were slaughtered in the prisons and buried in mass graves. A decade later, in 1999, militant student protests were drowned in blood by the “reform” government of then-president Mohammad Khatami, now a Moussavi ally. Also aligned with Moussavi is another former president, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. A notoriously corrupt capitalist, Rafsanjani may well be the richest man in Iran.

Abroad, the protests are being cheered by everyone from royalist supporters of the former Shah to bourgeois democrats and the remnants of the left. The workers and oppressed of Iran have no interest in supporting either of the cabals fighting over how best to pursue the mullahs’ bloody rule. We say: Down with the butcher Ahmadinejad and the whole Islamic Republic! No support to Moussavi’s “Green Movement,” a deadly trap for Iran’s youth, women and workers! We fight to win elements among the new generation of Iranians to the struggle to forge a Leninist-Trotskyist party armed with a program to liberate the masses through workers socialist revolution.

Down With Imperialist Threats Against Iran!

I want to turn now to the threats to Iran from U.S. imperialism and its allies, including Canada. A week ago, just after Iranian leader Ahmadinejad addressed the United Nations, U.S. president Barack Obama announced the supposed discovery of another Iranian nuclear development site near the mullahs’ holy city of Qom. Obama declared that Washington would not allow Iran’s nuclear development, calling it a grave threat to “world peace.” To call this hypocritical is a vast understatement. By orders of magnitude, the United States is the greatest purveyor of war in the world today. It is also the only country ever to use atomic weapons on a civilian population, killing 200,000 people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In contrast, Iran’s rulers are merely tinpot dictators.

It’s an open secret that the U.S. and other imperialist powers have staged numerous provocations in the hope that Iranian retaliation would serve as a pretext to attack the country. They’ve been steadily beefing up military forces in and around the Persian Gulf, including positioning U.S. aircraft carriers near the Iranian coast, as well as developing the so-called “missile defense program.” Last year, BBC news reported that the U.S. had readied plans for attacks on Iran, to be triggered either by “confirmation that Iran was developing a nuclear weapon” or “a high-casualty attack on US forces in neighbouring Iraq…if it were traced directly back to Tehran.”

As revolutionary opponents of U.S. and Canadian imperialism, we unequivocally condemn these provocations as well as the imperialist sanctions against Iran implemented through the United Nations. These are the opening shots in war, as the case of Iraq demonstrates. One and a half million Iraqis were killed and the country devastated by the UN sanctions that preceded the 2003 U.S. invasion. Since its creation at the end of World War II, the UN has always been a fig leaf for naked imperialist aggression against semicolonial countries.

The U.S. and Israel have repeatedly threatened military action against Iran’s nuclear program. In the face of such threats, we say that Iran needs nuclear weaponry and adequate delivery systems for deterrence. In today’s world, possession of nuclear arms has become a guarantee of national sovereignty. Neighboring Iraq’s lack of “weapons of mass destruction,” including nukes, emboldened the U.S. to invade and occupy the country, leading to the carnage of the last six years. In the event of a military attack on Iran by U.S. imperialism, or by Israel
—the only nuclear-armed country in the Near East—or any other force operating as proxy for the imperialists, our stand as Marxists would be revolutionary defensism. We would call for the military defense of Iran against imperialism while giving absolutely no political support to the reactionary Tehran regime, just as we did concerning Saddam Hussein’s Iraq at the time of the U.S. invasion.

Washington and its allies have naturally sought to intervene in the political turmoil within Iran. Obama declared that he was “appalled and outraged” by the regime’s crackdown. After 30 years of oppressive mullah rule, there are doubtless many in Iran who have illusions in Western bourgeois democracy. Some might even see the “democratic” imperialists as a potential ally—we’ve seen examples of this on protests called by Iranian exiles here and elsewhere. These illusions have been furthered by the facelift given to U.S. imperialism with the election of Obama in place of the war-crazed Bush gang.

Whether administered by Democrats or Republicans, U.S. imperialism is the deadliest enemy of working people around the globe; and Canada, far from being a “peacekeeper,” acts as Washington’s loyal junior partner-in-crime. It was the CIA, in collusion with the British, that organized the 1953 coup that overthrew then-prime minister Mohammad Mossadeq to reverse his nationalization of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. The imperialists then put the Shah back in power and backed his blood-drenched regime until the bitter end. We say: Down with the imperialist occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq! U.S. out of Pakistan and Central Asia! Imperialist hands off Iran!

For Permanent Revolution in Iran!

I now want to turn to the theoretical and programmatic underpinnings of our revolutionary perspective for Iran. Our model is the October 1917 Revolution in Russia. The program of permanent revolution, first developed by the Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky for the Russian Revolution, also points the road to national and social liberation in countries like Iran, where economic and social development has been stunted by the global domination of the imperialist powers.

The October Revolution showed that only the working class, leading the peasant and urban plebeian masses, can liberate the societies of countries of belated capitalist development. In the imperialist epoch of decaying capitalism that began more than a century ago, all wings of the bourgeoisie in such countries are too dependent on their ties to the imperialists, too fearful of independent working-class action to play any progressive role. They are incapable of solving the bourgeois-democratic tasks associated with the great European revolutions of the 17th and 18th centuries such as agrarian revolution, national independence, democratic freedoms and women’s rights.

As Trotsky explained, the working class must rally the oppressed masses including by raising democratic demands such as for a revolutionary constituent assembly, fighting for agrarian revolution to give land to the peasants, for the rights of women and national minorities. In seizing state power and establishing their own dictatorship, the workers will be compelled to institute socialist measures, such as expropriating the means of production and establishing a planned economy. But these revolutions will survive and flourish only if they are extended to the heartlands of world imperialism, the advanced capitalist countries of the West and Japan.

These considerations pertain with full force in the Near East. As Trotsky noted in the Third International After Lenin, “The further East we go, the lower and viler becomes the bourgeoisie, the greater are the tasks that fall upon the proletariat.”

Probably in no other country of the East has the prospect of proletarian revolution been more directly linked to the Russian Revolution than in Iran. As early as 1905, the first Russian Revolution—a “dress rehearsal” for 1917—stirred a massive response to the south in Iran. Though class relations were less developed in the Persian empire, with the proletariat still tiny, what became known as Iran’s “Constitutional Revolution” led to sweeping social struggle. While dominated by rich merchants and the high clergy (ulema), the revolution generated a plebeian uprising centered in Iranian Azerbaijan. But by 1909 the merchants and ulema formed a joint government with representatives of the Shah.

The 1917 Bolshevik Revolution again produced mass upheavals in Iran, which were initially suppressed by the occupying British army. This period saw the formation of the Adalat (Justice) Party, progenitor of the first Communist Party of Persia and again centered in Azerbaijan. Mass protests against the British spread across the country, especially in the northern province of Gilan. When the British were forced to withdraw in 1920, a pan-Turkish and pan-Islamic nationalist movement called Jangali welcomed the arrival of Soviet troops and set up a self-styled “Gilan Soviet Republic.” The nascent Persian Communists initially supported Jangali in a coalition government, but this soon led to debate and reconsideration.

The establishment of the “Gilan Soviet Republic” came on the eve of the Second Congress of the Communist International (Comintern), founded by Lenin and Trotsky’s Bolshevik Party in the wake of the October Revolution. Developments in Iran provided something of a laboratory condition for discussions on the national and colonial questions at the Congress, in particular on the relationship between bourgeois-nationalist movements and nascent Communist parties in underdeveloped countries.

In his “Draft Theses on the National and Colonial Questions,” Lenin demanded “a determined struggle against attempts to give a communist colouring to bourgeois-democratic liberation trends in the backward countries.” He continued: “The Communist International should support bourgeois-democratic national movements in the colonial and backward countries only on condition that, in these countries, the elements of future proletarian parties, which will be communist not only in name, are brought together and trained to understand their special tasks, i.e., those of the struggle against the bourgeois-democratic movements within their own nations.”

Lenin’s somewhat algebraic formula reflected the fact that the question of relations between Communist and bourgeois nationalist forces in semicolonial countries had yet to be subjected to a decisive historical test. (Russia, while economically backward, was itself an imperialist power.) Founding Iranian Communist Ahmed Sultanzadeh intervened at the Congress to add a cautionary warning that was to prove prescient, and not only for Iran. He said:

“It seems to me that the point in the theses that envisions supporting the bourgeois-democratic movement in the backward countries can apply only to countries where this movement is still embryonic. If we were to proceed in accordance with the theses in countries where we already have ten or more years of experience behind us or where bourgeois democracy is a prop and a foundation of the state, as in Persia, that would mean driving the masses into the arms of the counterrevolution. We must create and support a purely communist movement counterposed to the bourgeois-democratic movement.”

A few months later, the coalition between the nationalists and Communists in Gilan effectively disintegrated, and soon after a Russian Cossack adventurer, Reza Khan, encouraged by the British, staged a coup in Tehran. A few years later this counterrevolutionary Cossack proclaimed himself the Shah, founder of the new, “eternal” Pahlavi dynasty. The Gilan experience demonstrated the limitations in which Communists could work with bourgeois-democratic and nationalist movements. A military united front between the nascent Communist Party and Jangali against the British was certainly principled, helping to force a British withdrawal and establish a bridgehead for the Bolshevik Revolution into Iran. But the political alliance between the forces in a common government was disastrous, for once the British occupation forces were removed, the programs of the Communists and nationalists were shown to be completely incompatible.

Stalinism and Iranian Communism

The rise of Stalinism in the USSR had a direct and very negative impact on the communist movement in Iran. In 1923-24, amid a wave of demoralization that followed the defeat of revolutionary opportunities in West Europe, a nationalist bureaucratic caste under J.V. Stalin became dominant in the Soviet Union. Abandoning the revolutionary internationalism that animated the October Revolution, by late 1924 Stalin began propagating the anti-Marxist dogma that “socialism” could be built in one country. This led to a search for “peaceful coexistence” with the imperialists, and eventually to complete abandonment of the fight for socialist revolution. Trotsky and other Bolshevik cadres formed the Left Opposition to oppose this, remaining true to proletarian revolutionary Marxism.

During the 1920s and 30s, the Iranian Communists engaged in heroic underground work under the Shah, for example leading a general strike in the oil fields of southwestern Khuzistan in 1929. But the formation of the Tudeh Party in 1941 by left-wing intellectuals formerly associated with the Persian Communist Party took place under the anti-revolutionary, class-collaborationist perspective of the Stalinized Comintern. Tudeh insisted that, because of Iran’s economic backwardness, the proletariat could not take power in its own name. They argued that there must be a “two-stage revolution,” the first stage of which would be led by the “progressive” or “anti-imperialist” bourgeoisie and limited to solving democratic capitalist tasks. Socialist revolution, they claimed, would come in the distant, unspecified future. This “two-stage” line was repeatedly put to the test over the ensuing decades, with disastrous results for Iran’s toiling masses.

By 1946, Tudeh claimed tens of thousands of members and some 400,000 workers in affiliated unions. Its strength was concentrated in north Iran since it had consciously discouraged organization in the south, then controlled by Britain. This was in line with Stalin’s subordination and suppression of class struggle in the “democratic” imperialist countries and their colonies in World War II. Nonetheless, there is no question that by the end of the war Iran had entered a pre-revolutionary situation in which Tudeh could have taken power. The Tudeh-led unions effectively made up the government in north Iran—collecting taxes, providing security and judicial functions, issuing travel permits, etc. The presence of the Soviet Red Army, which entered this part of Iran in 1941, provided an enormous impetus to social upheaval. But this was not the revolutionary army of Lenin and Trotsky, and Tudeh was not a revolutionary party.

As a pressure tactic to wrest oil and gas concessions from the Iranian government, Stalin helped establish a “Democratic Republic of Azerbaijan” under the leadership of a bourgeois-nationalist figure, and Tudeh and its affiliated unions entered the governing party there. This was a class-collaborationist popular front par excellence, stretching all the way from mullahs and tribal leaders to Stalinist union organizers. While the Democratic Republic carried out some significant reforms in its one year of existence—for example, women got the right to vote for the first time—the regime kept agrarian reform very limited in order to maintain the alliance with bourgeois forces linked to the landlords.

The Soviet Stalinists did not want a social revolution in Azerbaijan on the USSR’s southern border, for this would pose pointblank the question of political power in Tehran and upset Stalin’s game plan for “coexistence” with Anglo-American imperialism. Azerbaijan was to be bartered for a supposedly friendly regime in Tehran. An agreement was signed for the withdrawal of Soviet troops in exchange for a joint Iran-Soviet oil company. An unwritten clause was that Tudeh would use its great authority in the proletariat to enforce class peace.

That clause was soon activated. On the heels of a successful strike by oil workers in Khuzistan, the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company tried to whip up antagonisms between Arab and Persian workers in order to break the pro-Tudeh unions. In self-defense, a general strike was called for July 1946. In the wake of bloody street fighting, Tudeh militias took over the key city of Abadan. At that point, Tudeh sent its general secretary and the secretary of the union federation to call off the strike, even though the workers’ demands had not been met.

As a reward, three Tudeh members were brought into the bourgeois cabinet. But they were purged only two months later, and the central government arrested hundreds of Tudeh activists, occupied its headquarters and banned its press. Having broken the back of the party in the capital, the government then launched an invasion of Azerbaijan, where the Soviet-allied government surrendered without a fight. The opportunity for an Iranian socialist revolution was sacrificed on the altar of Stalin’s search for “peaceful coexistence” with imperialism.

Even after this, Tudeh retained great authority among the masses. In 1950, the New York Herald Tribune reported that over a third of the Iranian population “either favor the local communist party or prefer it to the ruling oligarchy.” Soon, the oil nationalization crisis under the regime of Mossadeq would again create an opportunity to overthrow that oligarchy—but Tudeh again betrayed the aspirations of the masses.

Mossadeq and the 1953 CIA Coup

Mossadeq, a wealthy landowner and member of the Iranian aristocracy, rose to power in the same period as Nehru in India, Sukarno in Indonesia and Nasser in Egypt. The bloodletting of the imperialist adversaries in World War II provided an opening for the colonial masses to rise up and make a bid for national independence. But these nationalist movements frequently saw in the United States a potential ally against the older colonial powers like Britain, France and the Netherlands.

Mossadeq’s National Front was a thoroughly bourgeois party with both secular and religious wings—over a third of its first parliamentary delegation were mullahs. It was thus an unstable bloc of the traditional clerical-dominated bourgeoisie of the bazaar and the modern state-subsidized technocratic bourgeoisie, temporarily united by opposition to the British and the demand to nationalize the oil industry. And both wings assiduously courted American imperialism.

While the Stalinists were initially hostile to Mossadeq’s National Front, deriding it for “dancing to the tune of imperialistic America,” they also led mass demonstrations and strikes demanding oil nationalization. Faced with the wave of militancy, the Shah appointed Mossadeq prime minister in April 1951 and he nationalized the oil industry a month later. In response, the world oil cartel refused to buy Iranian oil, depriving the country of its main source of export earnings and strangling the economy.

Despite Mossadeq’s pro-American proclivities, it was the duty of revolutionaries to defend the oil nationalization against imperialist retaliation, just as Trotsky supported the more radical expropriation of British oil interests in Mexico in the 1930s. An independent proletarian class policy would have meant defending such anti-imperialist acts while giving absolutely no political support to the bourgeois-nationalist, anti-working-class regime that carried them out. Mossadeq sought to suppress the continuing wave of strikes and did not touch the barbaric feudal social relations in the countryside. But amid the social turmoil, by 1952 Tudeh decided to throw its lot in with Mossadeq’s party and backed his return to power. When the right-wing clerical forces split and went over to the royalist opposition, Tudeh called mass protests that outnumbered those of the National Front by a factor of 10 or 15 to one.

By August 1953, almost every observer commented that Tudeh could have taken power if they so desired. But the Stalinists looked to Mossadeq to carry through the “democratic revolution”—Mossadeq instead called on the army to suppress Tudeh. In the course of this, the army went over to the mullah-royalist bloc, which, working closely with the CIA, proceeded to overthrow the regime and reinstall the hated Shah.

The long-term effect of the August 1953 coup and the repression that followed was to deepen the party’s opportunism, paving its way to become shock troops for clerical reaction in the late 1970s. By then, with the Shah’s regime unraveling, Tudeh was painting the Islamic clergy in “anti-imperialist” colors. Thus they again blinded their working-class base to the grave dangers they faced in the event of a mullah victory, setting the workers up for brutal suppression. In fact, in the early years of the mullah regime, Tudeh cadre went so far as to fight shoulder to shoulder with the regime’s murderous pasdaran and fascistic hezbollahi thugs in killing other leftists.

The 1979 “Islamic Revolution”

By the 1970s, a kaleidoscope of new groups with stances at least nominally to the left of Tudeh began winning support among Iranian youth. But none of these groups transcended the “two-stage revolution” schema. The Fedayeen, for example, called for unity of all anti-Shah forces regardless of their class character or political program:

“We must use the intellectuals, the petit-bourgeoisie, together with any other anti-dictatorship elements, be they progressive or reactionary, for the mobilization of the toiling masses, namely, the main force for a people’s democratic revolution.”

—Bizhan Jazani, Iran…The Socio-Economic Analysis of a Dependent Capitalist State (1973)

For its part, the HKS (Socialist Workers Party), a pseudo-Trotskyist outfit associated with the USec, also portrayed Khomeini as an “anti-imperialist” and supported his rise to power. The HKS even tried to present its credentials as a loyal social-democratic adjunct to the mullah dictatorship by running in the August 1979 election for the regime’s “Assembly of Experts,” a body whose explicit purpose was to help institutionalize the Islamic Republic. One month later, the HKS along with all other left and secular organizations was declared illegal, its press banned and its leaders thrown in jail.

Everywhere, the dogma of “two-stage revolution” has produced only disaster for the working people. But Stalin and his cronies at least claimed they were giving support to modernizing bourgeois forces. For example, during the Chinese Revolution of 1925-27, Stalin and his henchmen directed the Chinese Communist Party to subordinate itself to the bourgeois-nationalist Guomindang of Chiang Kai-shek, arguing that this was a step toward consummating the supposed “first stage” of the revolution. This was justified by the fact that the Guomindang was seen as a bourgeois-nationalist modernizing party that, for example, decried the binding of women’s feet. The result of this Stalinist betrayal was the slaughter of tens of thousands of Communists and workers in Chiang’s Shanghai massacre of April 1927.

But what claim to modernism could the caste of mullahs in Iran possibly have had? The reactionary character of the Islamic opposition was manifest from the outset, above all by its position on the woman question.

During the 1978-79 events, we intervened wherever we could among the substantial Iranian exile left milieus, waging the necessary urgent and sharply polemical struggle for a proletarian perspective. I recall mass demonstrations of tens of thousands in London, where religious thugs and British fake-leftists united to try and exclude us because of our warnings against Islamic reaction. A comrade recently described to me how in France, which also had a large exile milieu, he and a companion used to distribute our press every week to mass Iranian leftist gatherings at the Cité Universitaire in Paris. As the weeks passed, religious forces steadily increased their presence, until finally they became dominant.

The hegemony of the mullahs over the anti-Shah upheaval was far from pre-ordained. The last few months of 1978 saw a major strike wave, most importantly by the strategic oil workers. Big wage settlements did nothing to stem the upsurge, which paralyzed the economy. Initially these strikes were not subordinated to the Islamic opposition and did not support the call for an Islamic Republic. From his exile in France, Khomeini sent a top aide to try and get the strikers to disband their independent strike committees and subordinate themselves to the “Islamic movement.” Criminally, the Iranian left did nothing to stop this—to the contrary, they also worked to amalgamate the left and right oppositions to the Shah in the name of “unity.”

As we warned in a major article titled “Down With the Shah! Down With the Mullahs!” (WV No. 219, 17 November 1978):

“There is no common denominator between the demands of the mullahs and those of the strikers…. The mullahs’ opposition to the shah is a reactionary one, no matter how it plays on the crimes of the shah’s dictatorship. The fanatical hatred of social advances since the time of the prophet Muhammed (the seventh century A.D.!) has its parallels in the military-based regimes of Pakistan or Libya and in the region-wide revival of religious obscurantism and its vicious oppression of women.”

In the end, it was the workers strikes that sounded the death knell for the Pahlavi dynasty, not the martyrs who claimed to die for Allah. But without an authoritative Leninist vanguard party to lead the working class, these struggles only ended up serving as a battering ram to bring to power the deeply anti-proletarian Shi’ite clergy.

What of the working class in the current protests? There have been a number of strikes and sit-ins in recent years, for example to demand unpaid wages, and individual workers have no doubt participated in the protests. But there is no sign that any section of the Iranian working class has intervened to assert its independent class interests against the Islamic regime. Two statements by workers groups in Iran, widely circulated on the Internet, are indicative. One, signed by “Laborers of Iran Khodro,” the largest automotive company in the Near East, called for a 30-minute protest strike in “solidarity with the movement of the people of Iran.” Another, by the Vahed Syndicate, representing Tehran bus workers, similarly expressed support for “the movement of Iranian people to build a free and independent civil society.”

For Women’s Liberation Through Socialist Revolution!

Iran remains a hellhole for women. After coming to power, the theocratic rulers reimposed the compulsory hijab (headscarf) for women in public. Those who flouted the edict were subjected to 74 lashes or a year’s imprisonment. A man’s testimony was deemed worth twice that of a woman. Lashings and amputations were applied by the courts, and women convicted of adultery could be subject to stoning. Child marriage was reintroduced, while laws encouraged polygamy and prevented women from leaving abusive husbands. The husband’s right of unilateral divorce was reinstated.

Nevertheless, modern practices have seeped into Iran. While child marriage was reintroduced, the average age of first marriages for women has continued to rise from about 19 before 1979 to 24 today. Literacy rates now exceed 95 percent for both sexes, and the majority of college students are women. But despite these trends, women constitute only 15 percent of the formal-sector paid labor force. The 2006 Iranian census revealed that only 3.5 million Iranian women were salaried workers, compared with 23.5 million men.

During an earlier wave of protests in Iran six years ago, we wrote an article laying out our perspective for women’s liberation through socialist revolution:

“In the countries of the East, the question of women’s oppression is one of the most powerful motor forces of socialist revolution. Indeed, when the Bolsheviks arrived in Central Asia in the years following the October Revolution, it was among women that they found the main point of support for their program and won their key cadres. The same holds true for Iran. A Leninist-Trotskyist party, championing women’s rights against the age-old stranglehold of religion and the family, will find its most loyal and courageous fighters among women.”

—“For Workers Revolution in Iran!” WV No. 807 (1 August 2003)

Those are some crucial elements of our proletarian revolutionary program for Iran. What about the reformist left? These forces are repeating the treacherous policies of 30 years ago by lining up behind one or another wing of the ruling clergy. The remnants of Tudeh openly called to vote for Moussavi, an individual whose hands are covered with the blood of their own comrades. The Iranian Revolutionary Marxists’ Tendency, associated with Alan Woods & Co., appealed in a June 16 open letter to Moussavi: “You must either side with the people who voted for you or with the vali-e faghih [the Supreme Leader] (and the repressive apparatus of the state). Being at the service of the people would mean that you should cut your links with the whole state apparatus.” The idea that Moussavi and his cohorts could be “at the service of the people” is a cruel hoax and illusion.

In North America, some left groups have sided with the pro-Ahmadinejad wing of the clerics, claiming that in this way they are opposing U.S. imperialism. The Vancouver-based MAWO [Mobilization Against War and Occupation] group, the political bandits who produce the World Socialist Web Site and the U.S. Workers World Party all have a pronounced pro-regime tilt, and in some cases give Ahmadinejad open support against his rivals. Thus a Workers World article (17 June 2009) claims that “The Iranian people have benefited enormously from their revolution and cannot easily be turned back” and that Ahmadinejad’s “side is more anti-imperialist.”

This is an utter crock. For all their demagogy (and vile anti-Semitism), Ahmadinejad and the other Iranian rulers worked alongside U.S. imperialism in supporting the repressive “war on terror” and in the early stages of the occupation of Iraq. At the same time, the regime has been busy privatizing whole sectors of the Iranian economy while presiding over mass unemployment and growing poverty.

The best known Iranian exile left group is probably the Worker-Communist Party of Iran (WCPI), which over the past few years has split into three competing “parties” with barely distinguishable differences. Unlike Tudeh, the WCPI denounces both wings of the clerical regime. But they also have a long history of appealing to the imperialist powers—far greater enemies of the world’s oppressed than the ayatollahs of neocolonial Iran—as potential allies against the Islamic rulers.

In a June 22 Web posting, the WCPI boasted that party leader Hamid Taqvaee “wrote to heads of states and the UN Secretary General on behalf of the people of Iran calling on governments ‘to immediately break all political ties with the Islamic Republic of Iran, shut down its embassies and consulates and ensure its expulsion from the United Nations and other international institutions’.” More recently, a WCPI protest outside the UN called upon the imperialist governments to arrest Ahmadinejad. The reactionary nature of such appeals to “democratic” imperialism played out in Iraq in 2003, when the WCPI supported the imperialist occupation of that country, calling only to replace U.S. troops with “the intervention of the United Nations.” This is the same UN whose starvation sanctions led to the death of one and a half million Iraqis.

The WCPI does prominently raise the key issue of women’s rights and opposes the veil. Yet following the Soviet Union’s intervention in Afghanistan in 1979 against a CIA-backed Islamic fundamentalist insurgency, the WCPI viewed the Red Army as just as reactionary as the mujahedin holy warriors. They joined most of the left in refusing to support the Soviet intervention, justifying this by the false claim that the Soviet Union became “state capitalist” by the mid 1920s.

We Trotskyists unconditionally defended the Soviet degenerated workers state against imperialism and internal counterrevolution, while calling for proletarian political revolution to oust the parasitic Stalinist bureaucracy. We said “Hail Red Army in Afghanistan!” and called for extending the social gains of the October Revolution to the Afghan peoples. We pointed out that the Red Army intervention was objectively in defense of the Soviet Union and a blow against the imperialist-backed Islamic fundamentalists who threatened to return women to virtual slavery. At the same time, we warned that the Kremlin bureaucracy could well end up selling out to the imperialists. Indeed, the Kremlin’s withdrawal from Afghanistan in the late 1980s paved the way for the victory of the CIA’s cutthroats, with hideous consequences for Afghan women, and gave a giant impulse to the forces of capitalist restoration that triumphed in the Soviet Union.

We wrote the following in our International Declaration of Principles, adopted in 1998 (reprinted in Spartacist [English-language edition] No. 54, Spring 1998):

“The 1979 ‘Iranian Revolution’ opened up a period of ascendant political Islam in the historically Muslim world, a development which contributed to and was powerfully reinforced by the counterrevolutionary destruction of the Soviet Union. Khomeini’s seizure and consolidation of power in Iran was a defeat akin to Hitler’s crushing of the German proletariat in 1933, albeit on a narrower, regional scale.”

It is necessary to learn the lessons of history and begin anew the struggle for Marxist clarity and leadership. The only road to genuine social and economic modernization, to liberating Iran from imperialist subjugation, freeing women from enslavement, winning the right of self-determination for the Kurds and the other oppressed nationalities, lies in the smashing of capitalist class rule. The Iranian masses urgently need an internationalist, working-class revolutionary party capable of leading this struggle. To forge such a party, leftist militants must understand the roots of the betrayals by those misleaders who helped prepare a historic defeat by embracing the forces of Islamic reaction as a “progressive” alternative to the Shah. Down with Ahmadinejad—No support to Moussavi! Imperialist hands off Iran! For workers revolution!