What Next in Iran?

Irrespective of the reported vote totals, Iran’s elections were a farce, because the candidates are always hand-picked by the Guardian Council and the country is subject to a mind-numbing system of religious and political censorship. For their part, the demonstrators were careful not to transgress the rules which forbid any kind of “anti-Islamic” gathering. Initially, as Beirut-based journalist Robert Fisk reported in the London Independent (17 June), Iranian special forces police even prevented Ahmadinejad’s basiji from attacking the crowds of Mousavi supporters. But the loyalty of the “forces of order” will now be put to the test as Khamenei decrees what is “un-Islamic” and what is not (as Khomeini before him liquidated one rival ayatollah after another).

With Tehran poised on knife’s edge and information from outlying cities where there have been protests (including Shiraz, Isfahan and Tabriz) sketchy at best, it is impossible to say at this moment what the outcome will be. The regime’s thugs easily overwhelmed student protests in 1999 and 2003. The current protests have been much more broad-based, though still primarily middle-class, and sometimes demonstrators have fought back, torching basiji motorbikes. This means that it will take a much bloodier crackdown to squelch the mass unrest with repression. This prospect could induce various leading clerics in the theocratic “republic” to intervene, thus posing sharply the question of where the police and army stand.

But the one social force that has not entered the fray so far that has the power to upset the calculations of all wings of the rulers is the Iranian working class.

Over the last decade or so, thousands of Iran’s workers have lost their jobs, particularly in the large state-owned industries, as the government privatizes with a vengeance. In the early years of Islamic rule, after independent factory committees (shuras) were destroyed and worker militants jailed en masse, a corporatist “labor” apparatus of Islamic shuras and “labor” organizations was built up. In recent years, some independent unions have managed to establish themselves through tenacious struggle. They are subject to relentless persecution, as this past May Day when more than 150 labor activists (including 30 women) were arrested out of a demonstration of 2,000 in Tehran’s Laleh Park, as were another dozen in Sanandaj in Iranian Kurdistan. More than 90 are still in jail, and we demand their immediate freedom.

The independent unions have won some victories, most recently when workers at the giant Khodro auto and truck plant (workforce 30,000) successfully struck this May to win back wages and the conversion of several thousand temporary work contracts into permanent positions. (The government promised to do so before the election, seeking to defuse worker discontent.) During the election campaign, the militant Vahed Bus Company Union in Tehran and suburbs, while emphasizing that it didn’t support any candidate, posed a series of questions to each, beginning with where they stood on independent workers organizations. Naturally they got no response.

In the post-election turmoil, on June 18 it was reported that both shifts at the Khodro auto plant would strike for a half-hour against the repression. This was followed by a condemnation of the attacks on the protests by the Vahed union. At a rally, Mousavi called for a general strike in the event of his arrest, and the New York Times (22 June) reports that “opposition members were beginning to ask ... whether it was time to shift strategies, from street protests to some kind of national strike.” But would workers heed this call? The pro-free-market Mousavi and the other “reformers” have absolutely nothing to offer the working class, let alone the urban poor who largely remain loyal to Ahmadinejad.

In any case, a strike on behalf of one section of the mullah regime against its rivals should not be the goal. What is needed is independent class mobilization of the power of labor against all wings of the bourgeois rulers, whether they wear clerical robes or not.

The government of Ahmadinejad and Khamenei clearly intends to glue up the cracks in their regime with blood. The intense social pressure to which they are subject leads them to turn even on their own, threatening their rivals Mousavi and Rafsanjani by detaining the latter’s family members, albeit briefly. Protesters are now directly up against the “Supreme Leader” (velayat-e-faqih) who declares that he – and he alone – represents Islam. While up until now, various supporters of reform have become disillusioned with the Islamic system, even the rapid total suppression of the current protests would leave much wider sections of the population embittered. And there is no guarantee that a crackdown will work.

Attempts to reform the Islamic regime have led into a bloody dead-end. The most basic democratic demands – freedom of the press, of speech, of assembly – let alone genuine equality for women, are counterposed to the Islamic order. While the “reformers” call for new elections, so long as the present rulers are in power the result would likely be the same. The demand for a revolutionary, secular constituent assembly is on the order of the day. But this could only come about through an insurrection overthrowing the Islamic regime and its “Supreme Leader” and “Guardian Council.” The sole social force with the possibility of carrying this out is the working class, which must simultaneously create the organs of its own class power – workers councils.

Many Iranian protesters today talk of returning to the “ideals of the Islamic Revolution” of 1979-80. But those “ideals” meant the wholesale slaughter of leftists, national minorities, homosexuals and women who refused to wear the chador. What’s needed instead is to return to the socialist ideals of the 1917 Russian October Revolution led by V.I. Lenin and Leon Trotsky. Many self-proclaimed socialists and even communists won’t say this, not only out of congenital fear of doing anything that would make them unpopular, but also because like many erstwhile leftists as a result of the betrayals of Stalinism they no longer believe in proletarian revolution. They prefer to drape themselves in Islamic green rather than Bolshevik red.

Yet from the time of Iran’s 1905 Constitutional Revolution against the Qajar monarchy, coinciding with the first Russian Revolution against the Romanov dynasty, there has always been a close connection between revolution and counterrevolution in Iran and Russia. The short-lived 1920-21 Gilan Soviet Republic was established with the aid of the Soviet Red Army, and was crushed by Reza Khan who seized power in Tehran at the head of a White Russian Cossack brigade and then proclaimed himself shah. His son, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, was installed as shah in 1953 in a U.S. coup as part of the anti-Soviet Cold War.

Behind the Islamic Gang Warfare

Imperialist pundits consider it smart marketing that the Iranian opposition has insisted on identifying with the Islamic regime. But Mousavi and his backers – longtime pillars of the Islamic establishment – needed no U.S. coaching for this. In the campaign, Mousavi was confronted by students over his responsibility for the mass executions as prime minister of Iran from 1981 to 1989. At the University of Zanjan (in his home region of Azerbaijan), they disrupted his speech asking, “Where were you in 1988, and how many people did you kill?” One placard read “Khavaran's soil is still red,” referring to the Khavaran cemetery (now bulldozed), where thousands of victims were buried.

So let’s spell it out: the repression began almost from the minute the mullahs took power in February 1979. Women were attacked on the streets for not wearing the chador, the head-to-toe shroud “recommended” by the clerics. Kurdish leftists were shot. Homosexuals were stoned to death (as were women accused of adultery). But the bloodbath really began in earnest as the clerical regime consolidated in the wake of the Iraqi attack in 1980 and clashes with the Islamic Mujahedeen-e-Khalq (People’s Crusaders). Mousavi became foreign minister in August 1981 and prime minister that December. During that period almost 2,000 were executed, mainly Mujahedeen but also Guevarist leftists of the Fedayeen Minority, who broke with Khomeini, and Peykar, a Stalinist split from the Mujahedeen.

Meanwhile, tens of thousands of leftists were arrested along with militant workers as the clerics went all out to exterminate independent labor activity in the plants. The estimated number of executions totaled 5,000 by 1985 as the war with Iraq dragged on. Upwards of 300,000 Iranians died in this reactionary war, where the carnage resembled the imperialist World War I. Mousavi bears criminal responsibility for this senseless slaughter and insists to this day that it was right to continue the war after Iran retook Khorramshahr in May 1982 (Tehran Times, 24 May). Partly as a result of his role as head of government during the war, Mousavi has some support among the paramilitary pasdaran (Republican Guard) and even the basiji vigilantes.

With the end of the war in August 1988, a horrific new wave of killings took place as a result of a secret order, in which Rasfanjani reportedly played a key role. After the ceasefire with Iraq, which sealed a defeat for Iran, the mullah regime feared upheaval at home, so it decided to wipe out any possible leadership for the unrest. This time the victims went far beyond the Mujahedeen to include virtually every leftist group in the country. Prisoners who had been in jail for almost a decade had their cases retried and were sentenced to death. Even organizations that had loudly backed Khomeini were not spared, including Tudeh (pro-Moscow Stalinists) and the Fedayeen Majority. An estimated 12,000 were slaughtered, according to Ervand Abrahamian (Tortured Confessions: Prisons and Public Recantations in Modern Iran [1999]).

Then there is the issue of corruption among the clerics. Mousavi’s most powerful backer, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, is chairman of the Assembly of Experts, a body of Islamic jurists which is supposed to monitor Khamenei and theoretically could even depose him. Rafsanjani has been called “the mighty spider in the intricate web of the Islamic Republic” (Andreas Malm and Shora Esmailian, Iran on the Brink: Rising Workers and Threats of War [2007]). He is the key link between the Islamic regime and the commercial capitalists of the Iranian “bazaar,” and is reputed to be the richest man in Iran. The pistachio king’s family interests include a joint venture with Daewoo, one son manages the construction of the Tehran subway, another has been director of the National Iranian Gas Co., etc.

In one of the more notable events of the electoral campaign, Ahmadinejad slammed Rafsanjani by name for corruption during the televised candidates’ debate, which earned him a rap on the knuckles from Khamenei. Denouncing the illicit enrichment of leading clerics has won the incumbent president popularity for years, along with provision of subsidies for the poor. In the debate Mousavi attacked Ahmadinejad’s “charity economics.” But even Khamenei has declared that the sharp fall in oil revenue is going to mean drastic cutbacks. In a speech calling for austerity (March 22), he declared that this would be “Improved Consumption Patterns Year.” Since the Supreme Leader pointed to Iranians “squandering” both bread and water, it is clear whose “consumption patterns” are targeted!

Again, differences on economic policy between the candidates are quantitative rather than qualitative. The Khamenei/Ahmadinejad regime has pressed forward with privatization and lowering barriers to imperialist investment:

“Iran will no longer make a distinction between domestic and foreign firms that wish to purchase state-run companies as long as the combined foreign ownership in any particular industry does not exceed 35%....

“Among the new incentive measures announced, foreign firms may also transfer their annual profit from their Iranian company out of the country in any currency they wish.”

–Press TV, 30 June 2008

The list of firms which have been, are being or will be privatized includes power companies, metals, most airlines, auto, banks and even elements of the oil and gas industry. The potential spoils are immense, and the Pasdaran are a major player. This organization is not only a militia but a far-flung economic empire and machine for dispensing patronage. It has muscled into countless firms in true mafia style, and is also accused of using its mandate to bypass U.S. sanctions in order to dominate the black market in cigarettes as well as the alcohol, narcotics and pornography it is supposedly combating.

Of course, the policing of morals has been an invitation to extortion since the beginning of history. The accusations of corruption hit all of the contending factions among the Islamic rulers. If Rasfanjani is notorious as the billionaire mullah, Ahmadinejad’s third Interior Minister in four years, Sadegh Mahsouli, is known as the billionaire minister. But rapacious as they are, the spoils of privatization do not fully explain why the gangsters of the Islamic regime have broken the “code of silence” and started to turn on each other. They are seeking desperately to either head off a looming social and political explosion, or alternatively to try to crush it in the egg. The two factions are thus oriented to different social clienteles.

In many respects the question of women was at the center of the election campaign. Where Ahmadinejad stands was never in doubt. This is the man who introduced segregation by sex in elevators in municipal offices when he became mayor of Tehran, and who as president has intensified the enforcement of the mullahs’ dress code on women. Mousavi, on the other hand, even though he has the backing of a number of senior clerics, showcased his wife Zhara Rahnavard as a symbol of female emancipation. (Rhanavard, however, although she was known as a leftist in the early years of the Islamic Republic, has declared that “in Islam, women have always worn the veil.”)

The potential clash between Mousavi’s mealy mouthed promises and women’s aspirations was shown by an incident in which a crowd of 1,500 of his female supporters in a south Tehran sports complex chanted “Stop the hijab police!” Mousavi lamely replied that he would “review” laws unfair to women and would “work toward” reining in these regime thugs who harass, brutalize and blackmail women for even the most minor infringements of dress and behavior codes. In the photos of protests, there were many women, but none without the obligatory head covering. Nor were “un-Islamic” signs seen. Secular leftists and liberals, though undoubtedly present, were invisible, having accepted the discipline of an “Islamic opposition.”

In the last phase of the election campaign, various discontented sectors coalesced around Mousavi as the voice of the opposition, however muted, deformed and distorted, even though he actually promised them very little. Indicative of this was a message to the Tehran Bureau web site reporting a conversation with a contact in Sanandaj, the capital of Iranian Kurdistan, who said “that they all backed Mousavi because he had promised that in provinces where there was a second language it could be taught in schools. He said – we are so desperate we are not even bargaining for autonomy or anything, just for our language to be allowed at school… Which I think sums up a lot of Mousavi’s support, he’s not offering a lot but he is the only one offering certain groups anything at all that they can relate to.”

Lessons of 1978-79

In a country where even the most reactionary political forces call themselves revolutionary, it is not enough to call for a revolutionary party. In Iran where the Stalinist/Menshevik program of revolution in stages means binding the working class to a wing of the Islamic rulers, today led by Mir Hossein Mousavi, it is necessary to call explicitly for building the nucleus of a Leninist vanguard party of the working class, based on the Trotskyist program of permanent revolution. This is the policy of the League for the Fourth International. It is not, however, the program of various other groups that falsely call themselves Trotskyist while in practice making political blocs with the bourgeoisie. This is not splitting hairs but a matter of life and death for the Iranian workers revolution.

To understand this question clearly it is necessary to go back to the events of 1978-79. For months strikes had rocked the country, particularly that of the powerful oil workers union led by the Tudeh party, extending from Abadan in the south to refineries in Tehran, Isfahan, Shiraz and Tabriz. Joined by rail and steel workers, this became a de facto general strike. The possibility of a workers revolution was clear to all, and to head it off, bourgeois forces began turning to the Islamic clerics led by Ayatollah Khomeini. The February 1979 overthrow of the shah’s regime was in reality a transfer of power to Khomeini and his mullahs by the generals, designed to keep the bourgeois army intact. It was only marred by last-minute resistance by the shah’s Imperial Guard. The clerical-dominated mass marches were a means of pressure to this end.

The tragedy of 1978-79 was that the masses’ illusions in Khomeini and the other ayatollahs were reinforced by the shameful capitulation of the Iranian left to the clergy in the name of “anti-imperialism” and “unity” against the shah. The worst were the Moscow Stalinists of Tudeh, the only party with a working-class following, which came out in support of Khomeini at the behest of the Kremlin (Maziar Behrooz, Rebels with a Cause: The Failure of the Left in Iran [1999]). It’s not that they didn’t know what the mullahs were up to: three weeks before Khomeini’s takeover, the head of the oil strikers protested against the “dogmatic reactionary clergy” and “the new form of repression under the guise of revolution” (Assef Bayat, Workers and Revolution in Iran (1987). But instead of fighting it, he resigned!

Khomeini rejected the left’s “unity” offers with disdain. The day after taking power he ordered the workers back to work, and the leaders of the oil workers union were immediately arrested as “counterrevolutionaries.” The victorious Islamic rulers went on to massacre the left when the time was ripe. The factory committees which arose during the strike waves could have the basis for proletarian power, but since the left rejected the strategic perspective of socialist revolution, the committees were isolated and purged, either turned into or replaced by state organs for the Islamic regime.

At the time, genuine Trotskyists fought against both the shah and the rising Islamic clerical reaction. The international Spartacist tendency, from which the LFI originated, warned well before Khomeini took power that:

“The hundreds of thousands who are now marching behind the mullahs are by no means all Muslim fundamentalists. Many are primarily motivated by hostility to the real crimes of the shah. Many leftist workers have probably joined what they view as a potentially successful opposition to the hated regime. But the masses, particularly the workers, who are now supporting the Khomeinis and the Shariatmadaris can and must be won away from the present Islamic reactionary offensive in favor of a social revolutionary opposition to the shah.”
–“Iran in Turmoil,” Workers Vanguard No. 215, 22 September 1978

The Trotskyists warned that the alternative would be a catastrophic defeat, and raised the call: “Down With the Shah! Don’t Bow to Khomeini! For Workers Revolution in Iran!”

In taking this stand, we not only went up against the Stalinists and Guevarist Fedayeen, but also against those who falsely laid claim to the mantle of Trotskyism, notably Ernest Mandel’s United Secretariat of the Fourth International (USec), whose British followers excluded Spartacists from protest demos because of our opposition to Khomeini. The various pseudo-Trotskyist currents called for an “anti-imperialist united front” with Khomeini (as did the British Workers Power group), or argued that the clerical leadership of the movement would simply disappear, or that even if the mullahs took power their regime would rapidly simply collapse (echoing the disastrous Stalinist response to the Nazis’ rise in Germany, “After Hitler, us!”).¹

Many on the left today refer to 1978-79 as a “hijacked revolution,” as if there was first a healthy revolution against the shah that was some time later subverted by the mullahs. In fact, the ayatollahs seized control from the start as the “socialist” and “anti-imperialist” left abdicated. Why? Because their reformist program dictated a political alliance with a section of the bourgeoisie as the first “stage” of the revolution. As usual, it never went beyond that, and ended in a bloodbath of the left. What these opportunists are really doing is amnestying their own failure to oppose Islamic reaction when it could have been defeated. They bowed to their executioners.

With the outbreak of the reactionary war with Iraq, the Iranian groups affiliated with the USec (HKS and HKE) supported Iran. The HKE, aligned with the American Socialist Workers Party, even backed the mullah regime against the Mujahedeen guerrillas. British USec leader Brian Grogan traveled to Iran where he reported marching in a demonstration chanting allahu akbar. The American SWP grotesquely proclaimed the chador to be a symbol of “liberation.” But all this didn’t save their Iranian followers. Those who remained in Iran were arrested, and eventually several were executed. Today the United Secretariat is so discredited that it has no Iranian group. Meanwhile, formally codifying its left social democratic politics, its leading section, the French LCR, has now discarded any reference to Trotskyism, dissolving into a New Anticapitalist Party.

The one ostensibly Trotskyist current that maintains some semblance of activity concerning Iran is the International Marxist Tendency (IMT) founded by Ted Grant and currently led by Alan Woods, which includes a small group of Iranian supporters, the Revolutionary Marxists’ Tendency. Woods’ calling card is a cynical tailism that presents itself as starry-eyed objectivism, forever discovering that some bourgeois force is about to lead the revolution, from Benazir Bhutto in Pakistan to Hugo Chávez in Venezuela (the IMT’s current favorite). On June 15, Woods breathlessly declared: “The masses are starting to move, and the movement will not easily be halted. We are entitled to say with confidence: the Iranian Revolution has begun!”

To explain the fact that this capitalized “Revolution” is under the leadership of a bourgeois Islamic leader, Woods blithely writes of Mousavi “he does not control events. Rather, events are controlling him.” This ignores the fact that while some of the demonstrators may be more militant, the mass of protesters still had political confidence, if not in Mousavi, at least in the possibility of peacefully reforming the Islamic regime – and that slogans against the regime were in fact banned, if only in the vain hope of averting bloody repression. Woods began to dream out loud about how the “movement” would evolve into a revolutionary, socialist one under the force of circumstances.

But the IMT did not leave things totally to chance: its main Iranian spokesman, Maziar Razi, penned an Open Letter to Mousavi, dated June 18, which charged “you have submitted yourself to Ahmadinejad’s government,” as if the question were one of tactical militancy. Razi makes no reference to Mousavi’s free market capitalist program. Neither Woods nor Razi refer to the question of women’s oppression except in passing (as was the case for the opportunist left in 1978-1979), not even mentioning the hated hijab police. Nor have they said anything about the fact that their hero Chávez was won of the very first to congratulate Ahmadinejad on his election “victory.” Opportunists often have trouble keeping straight the forces they tail after, or explaining it when they come into conflict. Ultimately for the likes of Woods & Co., they don’t care – it’s all just one big maneuver. But for the Iranian masses knowing who your friends are and who are your enemies matters, a lot.

In a second article, “The Iranian Revolution: what does it mean and where is it going?” (June 16), Woods trots out a false analogy used by much of the left to dismiss Khomeini, comparing Mousavi to Father Gapon, a figure from the 1905 Russian Revolution. Unlike either Mousavi or Khomeini, Gapon was genuinely incidental, a merely temporary leader. Woods keeps raising the comparison of Iran today with the 1905 Russian Revolution (“Like the Russian Revolution before 1905, the Iranian Revolution is still in its infancy. It has a long way to run...”). Interestingly, the very same argument was raised by Woods’ mentor Grant in 1979, who wrote:

“Support for Khomeini will melt away after he forms a government. The failure of his programme of a Muslim theocratic republic to solve the problems of the Iranian people will become apparent.... Even in the worst resort, reaction would prepare the way for revenge on the part of the masses, at a not too distant date. It would be 1905 in Russia over again.”
–Ted Grant, “The Iranian Revolution” (9 February 1979)