Is
In
Many Iranians after 24 years of Islamic rule do
want a ‘regime change’.Some capitalist and petty
capitalist elements believe that the US can rescue them from the Islamic
Republic and reinstall a Western-aligned democratic regime. But the working
masses are strongly opposed to
Whatever is wrong with the Islamic Republic,
ultimately imperialism is to blame.So the
To understand why this is happening today, and why
the opposition in
[Much of the material in this article is drawn fromthe Worker-Communist Party of Iran’s webpage: http:///www.wpiran.org/ and “Khomeini’s
Capitalism: the imperialists close in”inRevolutionary
Communist Papers No 6 Theoretical Journal of the Revolutionary Communist Tendency
(
British
Imperialism’s semi-colony.
[Semi-colonies are oppressed countries whose
political independence does not mean that the national bourgeois has any
control over the economy which remains dominated by imperialism. They can
include neo-colonies like
After the Ottoman Empire collapsed during WW1,
British and French imperialism divided up the
Client regimes were delegated the task of managing
the dependent semi-colonial development of capitalism so that the imperialists
got the lion’s share of the oil and other wealth created by the workers in the region.While the local capitalists had an interest in
negotiating with imperialism for as big a slice of the profits as they could
get, they had to collaborate with imperialism for their class survival.
Whatever their differences, both imperialists and the national ruling classes
had a common interest in profiting from the super-exploitation of workers and
poor peasants.
The difficulty for imperialism was to find
semi-colonial regimes that could extract maximum super-profits without being
overthrown by the masses. Because the national bourgeoisies were weak, they had
to rely on regimes that formed alliances with the petty capitalists and to some
extent the working class under the guise of ‘populism’ or ‘patriotic
alliances’. Thus when the poor masses resisted their super-exploitation and
demanded independence from imperialism, these regimes pretended to be
anti-imperialist, and aided by reformist working class parties, made minor
concessions to the masses to try to keep them quiet. When the imperialists
applied too much pressure this strategy failed and workers threatened to break
through the controls of the reformists and overthrow the state.The
regimes then had to appeal to traditional petty capitalists as a class base for
radical nationalist regimes that posed as anti-imperialist, but whose interest
was ultimately to protect national capital by eliminating the threat posed by
the revolutionary masses. Not until the masses organised independently of both
the bourgeoisie and the petty capitalists would there be a class alliance
strong enough to win the poor masses, including the impoverished petty
capitalists, to a class alliance that could liberate these semi-colonies from
imperialism’s deathly grip.
The Shah attempted to negotiate a better share for
the weak Iranian bourgeoisie. Because Iran had little private capital, he used
the state to develop the domestic economy, imposing import controls and
creating public monopolies in sugar, tea, cotton, jute, rice and carpets.He then built large scale manufacturing plants for
textiles, food processing, forestry and mineral production. But inefficiencies
and low quality made these industries unprofitable.When
the Shah failed to get financial support from
The war and
its aftermath gave a boost to economic protectionism from another quarter. From
1941 to 1951 the wartime economy encouraged the petty bourgeoisie of
shopkeepers and small industry to expand to meet the domestic market,
particularly the small businesses supplying the occupying military. But there
was no large investment by imperialism to allow the economy to take off. This
drove sections of the bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie to adopt a more radical
‘economic nationalism’.[Most semi-colonies experienced this expansion of the
domestic economy under wartime conditions because they had to substitute
domestic production for imports and got good prices for their exports from
countries at war.]
At the same time the working class which had begun
to develop under the Shah’s protectionist policy in the 30s continued to expand
during and after World War Two and developed a strong anti-imperialist
sentiment. [At the turn of the century 90% of the labour force worked in
agriculture. By 1945 this hadfallen to 75%, in 1966
it was 47% and 1980 less than 40%. By 1920 there were at least 12 unions with a
total membership of over 20,000. Many of these were affiliated to the Red International
of Trade Unions. In the mid-1940s the Tide-controlled Central Council of
Unified Trades Unions (CCUTU) had more than half a million members who marched
under its banner on May Day 1946.]
The
rise of Tudeh
Now the
national bourgeoisie had once more to steer a course between imperialism and
the anti-imperialist sentiment of the masses. It tried to advance its national
class interests by riding the anti-imperialist wave but still keeping the
exploitative relationship between the bourgeoisie and working class intact. It
was helped in this task by the Stalinist organisations
that dominated the political leadership of the working class. Rather than mobilise workers and poor peasants to overthrow the
bourgeoisie, the Communist Party took the Stalinist view that
As we have seen, the working class grew rapidly in
The Tudeh joined the government of the bourgeois liberal Prime
Minister Qavam in January 1946. He promised oil
concessions to the Soviets if they would withdraw their troops. The Soviets did
so and the new republics were crushed. [The Azerbaijani republic was invaded in
December 1946 and its leaders imprisoned or executed. The Kurdish republic fell
soon after and its leader Qadi Muhammed
was executed.] Qavam later reneged on his promise.
The sell-out of the oppressed nationalities was hailed by the Tudeh as a victory.
Now Qavam could turn the screws on the Tudeh.
He formed the Iranian Democratic Party (IDP) representing the landed
aristocracy, the bourgeoisie, and a government-sponsored union. Tudeh joined an IDP-led government, providing three cabinet
ministers. When the oil workers of Khuzestan staged a general strike in July
1946 and several casualties occurred on both sides, and the British Labour
government threatened to invade Aberdan, the Tudeh general secretary Reza Rusta,
who was also secretary of the CCUTU, [See note above] went to Abadan and persuaded the workers to call off the general
strike without any of their demands being met. The betrayals of the national
minorities and workers led to a falling off of Tudeh
support at a time when the working class was still on the rise. Even so, its
next task was to direct the working class in behind the economic nationalist
policies of Mossadegh.
Nationalism
serves
Between 1949 and 1951 a series of strikes
culminating in a general strike hit
“Class tensions have reached such a point that they threaten the whole
fabric of society…The only way to save
Like the Shah before him, Mossadegh
was an economic nationalist, but he went further in his attempts to insulate
the Iranian economy. By 1949 he saw the need to harness petty bourgeois and
worker support and formed the National Front for a sweeping nationalisation
of industry. He calculated that
Mossadegh wasted no time in nationalising
foreign industries including the IAOC. This suited the
This alarmed the
“Most of the middle class and petit bourgeoisie
soon realised that mass mobilisations
against imperialism would eventually threaten their interests. They opted for a deal with imperialism rather than countenance any
radical threat to their class position; Imperialism was quick to oblige. As
soon as oil production was restarted massive American loans flowed into
The CIA and the army replaced Mossadegh
in 1953 and the workers organisations controlled by
the Tudeh then paid the price of the Stalinist
popular front with the national bourgeoisie, becoming the victims of the Shah’s
anti-worker policies.[The Shah banned trades unions
and imprisoned many militants. New labour laws in 1959 allowed state-run unions
but no right to strike combined with paternalist social insurance and profit
sharing schemes. The Shah’s secret police SAVAK had spies in workplaces and
employed thugs to break strikes.] They had learned the hard way that the
bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie were more afraid of a
insurgent working class and a poor peasantry, than of imperialism. The dominant
The Shah as
The Shah Pahlavi was
installed and ruled
State
investment in the economy grew rapidly in heavy industry notably the Esfahan steel mill,
Public spending on health, arms etc jumped from 27%
in 1971 to 45% in 1976.ehi The traditional bazaar moneylenders were replaced by
a state central bank and state banks in joint ventures with British, Dutch and
Japanese banks. This period of rapid growth and expansion was possible only on
the back of rising oil revenues to cover
The Shah opened up
While the Shah’s agricultural reforms failed to
convert the landlords and peasants to capitalist farming, they created millions
of displaced peasants.By 1977,
The classes that bore the brunt of this crisis were
the workers and poor peasants. The Iranian working class grew from 2.7 million
in 1956 to 4.7 million in 1976, and the greatest increase was in the public
sector. The failed agricultural reforms forced peasants off the land into the
shantytowns around the cities. At the same time a shortage of skilled workers
saw tens of thousands of foreign workers employed. Low productivity led
employers to force workers to increase their output. In the 1970s opposition
began to mount against the rising exploitation of the workers and peasants.
More and more illegal strikes and go-slows occurred despite the harsh
repression. The regime made concessions to skilled workers such as pay
increases and profit sharing, but failed to stem the rising militancy of the
working class. By 1978 the Shah was prepared to met
this militancy with state force which in turn only produced more strikes
culminating in mass demonstrations and the oil workers’ strike of October
1978.Here was a massive working class and poor peasantry, led by a section of
militant state workers, ripe for social revolution.
Meanwhile, what had happened to the petty
bourgeoisie, that backward class which the Shah tried to eliminate as a social
barrier to modern capitalism? As we have seen, the ‘white revolution’ failed to
modernise agriculture. The landlords retained their
dominance in the countryside. The bazaar which brought together small traders,
craftsmen and businessmen, survived and grew, but increasingly came under
threat from the Shah’s modernising policies.The petty bourgeoisie suffered at the hands of the
foreign banks and resented the Shah’s plans to replace the bazaars with supermarkets.The Islamic mullahs as a traditional petty
bourgeoisie were aligned to the bazaars. So the Shah’s attacks on the bazaars
challenged the whole social system of which the mosque was the centre. As the
economic crisis further undermined the economic existence of the bazaar, from
the early 1960s opposition to the Shah rallied behind the Ayatollah
Khomeini.
So along with the emerging working class and poor
peasantry, the petty bourgeoisie had became a force
for change. However, rather than follow the course charted by the workers’ interests,
the anti-Shah movement was taken over by a petty bourgeois radical Islam with
its popular appeal to class unity against the repressive regime.How
was it that the modern, expanding, and militantly led working class allowed
itself to be dragged backwards into the reactionary Islamic Republic?
The left and the
‘revolution’
The ‘Islamic revolution’ has long been a highly
contentious event for the revolutionary left. The basic sequence of events is
clear enough. The Shah was overthrown by a bloc of the national bourgeoisie,
the petty bourgeoisie, workers, landlords and poor peasants in which the masses
provided the troops, and the Islamic leadership, the officers.The
bourgeoisie wanted to take back more control over the economy from imperialism
but was too weak to do this alone. The petty bourgeoisie and the landlords were
desperate to prevent the Shah’s reforms from wiping them out. They rallied to
the Islamic opposition. The workers and poor peasants mobilised
in their millions to get rid of the repressive regime. They lent their support
to what they believed to be a genuine national revolution.
The first phase of the revolution between 1979-81 was dominated by the workers movement which
easily outweighed the petty bourgeois and bourgeois forces. The mass power of
the insurgent workers owed nothing to the Tudeh which
backed the Shah until September 1978! Khomeini had to make concessions and
posture as an anti-imperialist to keep the masses’ support. But the revolution
while it had the potential to be progressive and lead to socialism, rapidly
turned into a counter-revolution.Why? Its
‘anti-imperialism’ was more apparent that real.Its
real purpose was to subordinate the revolutionary masses to both the Iranian
bourgeoisie and the imperialists. But to do this it had to keep the only
revolutionary classes, the workers and poor peasants, on side. This required
the collaboration of the political parties that represented those classes.To achieve this the regime had to convince the mass
membership of these parties that it was genuinely ‘anti-imperialist’ and ready
to break with imperialism and establish an independent, democratic, Iran.
The main parties of the left subscribed to the
Stalinist or Menshevik position that the Shah’s pro-Imperialist dictatorship had
to be overthrown and an independent bourgeois democratic nation created before
the conditions for socialism could be built. As we have seen, this stagist view of history served the interests of the
national bourgeoisie, but also imperialism, because no semi-colonial nation can
become independent of imperialism unless it is lead by a workers and poor
peasant’s revolution. [Tudeh’s collaboration with the
Islamic regime was a total capitulation.It called
Khomeini and co ‘progressive clergy… struggling for freedom
and democracy’. Even after Khomeini turned on the workers, closing down party
offices and banning left newspapers,the
Tudeh was silent. It backed the reactionary Islamic
constitution of December 1979. So slavish was its backing of the clergy that
the Tudeh general secretary was contemptuously
referred to as ‘Ayatollah Kianouri’.]
The main parties of the left – the Tudeh, the Mujaheddin and Fedayeen all supported the Islamic leadership of the
revolution. [The two guerillaist groups the Mujahedin (Muslim Marxists) and Fedayeen
(Castroists) believed that guerilla action could
‘detonate mass action’, but that action was still limited to a bourgeois
democratic stage with an ‘anti-imperialist united front’ of all classes.]
They collaborated with the Islamic Revolution in
the belief that it was more progressive than the Shah’s regime. But this was
never the case.Khomeini’s forces were based on the
Mosque and the Bazaar, the two main institutions that represented the surviving
pre-capitalist social relations in Iran and whose adaptation to Iranian
capitalism was to foster petty capitalism or a protectionist national state-capitalism.Inevitably, because of its weak position, the
bourgeoisie had to rely upon the petty bourgeoisie Islamists to renegotiate a
deal with imperialism. Initially this relationship was indirect and mediated by
a ‘Bonapartist’ Islamic regime between 1979 and 1981.
Bonapartism is a form of bourgeois state named after the French Emperor Napoleon
Bonaparte where power is held temporarily by a strong leader or powerful clique
standing ‘above classes’ ruling indirectly on behalf of the bourgeoisie when
the bourgeoisie is weak and under challenge from below. [Trotsky wrote: “In the
industrially backward countries foreign capital plays a decisive role. Hence the relative weakness of the national bourgeoisie in relation
to the national proletariat. This creates special conditions of state
power. The government veers between foreign and domestic capital, between the
weak national bourgeoisie and the relatively powerful proletariat. This gives
the government a Bonapartist character. It raises itself so to speak, above
classes’. Actually it can govern either by making itself the instrument of
foreign capitalism and holding the p proletariat in the chains of a police
dictatorship, or by manoeuvring with the proletariat
and even going so far as to make concessions to it, thus gaining the
possibility of a certain freedom toward the foreign capitalists”. (Writings,
1938-39, Pathfinder, p. 326)]
The Bonapartist state cannot encourage the masses
too much without itself being overthrown. Nor can it balance between the two
main classes indefinitely so it must crack down on the masses sooner or later.
From 1980 the interests of the petty bourgeois class base of the regime forced
it to rapidly align itself with national capitalism and re-negotiate its
relation with imperialism. [Khomeini deliberately used a populist mixture of
radical Islam, Persian nationalism and the glorification of petty commodity
production to activate the petty bourgeoisie as the social base of his regime.
The mass base of the regime was the Committees for the Islamic Revolution, led
by local merchants and mullahs which formed the Pasdaran (Revolutionary Guards) that have played such a
reactionary role in attacking workers and women opponents of the regime.] The
outcome was the consolidation of an extremist clerical capitalism in which the
Islamic leadership became the dominant fraction of the national
bourgeoisie.
Khomeini’s
Capitalism
As we have seen the Shah was overthrown by a
workers’ revolution that had the potential to go on and become a permanent
revolution for socialism. Instead it became a reactionary capitalist
counter-revolution. At first Khomeini maneuvered towards the workers, the
oppressed nationalities and women because he was too weak to smash them. Once
he had contained them and consolidated his power he was able to establish a
police state to secure bourgeois rule. Khomeini’s anti-imperialist rhetoric and
his seizure of the US Embassy were ploys to deceive the workers and disarm them
while he rallied the petty bourgeois forces for the counter-revolution.
The
“Iranian workers seized six employees of a foreign company, locked them
in an office and then demanded to see the company’s books. They showed that the
company was bankrupt, but they also showed that the European parent company had
a bank account in
As insurance against a workers’ revolution
succeeding the
Rejecting the ‘white revolution’ of the Shah, the
regime embarked on a road to economic nationalisation
similar to that taken by Mossedegh in the early
1950s. But it was far too late for economic nationalism as a solution to
Over the 24 years of its existence the reactionary
class character of the Islamic Republic has become clearer. The mounting reform
movements and the militant student and workers’ oppositions of recent years
show that once again a mass mobilisation against a
repressive regime is building. This has given the
The lesson of permanent revolution
What are the lessons for today? A potentially
strong working class has existed in
Today these Stalinist and guerillaist
parties will again collaborate with the bosses and the clerics and play their
deadly treacherous role. They must be politically destroyed by healthy
revolutionary forces. The masses are impatient with the Islamist dictatorship
and are calling for democracy and human rights.Revolutionaries
must back this struggle for the basic democratic rights necessary for any
social progress. But we have to say that only a socialist revolution can win
and defend such democratic rights.
That’s why these basic demands should be
accompanied by a complete transitional program of demands that mobilises workers and poor peasants against not only the
threat of US imperialist intervention, but the backward national bourgeoisie,
the petty bourgeoisie and their reactionary Islamic leadership – for freedom of
expression, freedom from the veil, release of political prisoners, the rights
of the nationalities to self-determination, and the right of Iran to be armed
with nuclear weapons to defend itself from imperialism.These
demands must be accompanied by those calling on workers to organise
and to occupy the factories and form workers’ councils and militias capable of
taking power and creating a Workers and poor Peasants’ Socialist Republic as
part of a Federation of Socialist Republics of the Middle East.
To take this program to the workers and poor
peasants in
For a
Leninist-Trotskyist party in
For a
Workers’ and Peasants’ state!
For a
Federation of