https://themilitant.com/2018/05/18/revolution-counterrevolution-and-war-in-iran-social-and-political-roots-of-workers-protests-that-swept-90-cities-and-small-towns/
Revolution, counterrevolution and war in Iran: Social and political
roots of workers’ protests that swept 90 cities and small towns
Militant Supplement on Iran
Vol. 82/No. 20
May 21, 2018
Revolution, counterrevolution and war in IranClick here to download PDF
The article below corrects the initial weeks of Militant coverage of the
large working-class protests that began in Mashhad, Iran, on Dec. 28 and
swept some 90 cities and towns across the length and breadth of that
country in early January. The article is based on reports by Socialist
Workers Party National Secretary Jack Barnes discussed and adopted by
the party’s National Committee.
The Militant, echoing bourgeois media coverage, inaccurately presented
those actions as largely a response to economic grievances and Tehran’s
cutbacks of subsidies and social expenditures. This was captured by
headlines in the Jan. 15 and Jan. 22 issues: “Economic Crisis Behind
Protests in Iran Cities” and “Working-Class Discontent Continues to
Spread in Iran.” While improved coverage appeared in subsequent
articles, the failure to publish an explicit correction denies readers
the facts and analysis they need to understand the political roots of
these events and their significance in the ongoing class struggle and
wars in the Middle East and today’s world.
BY STEVE CLARK
A political crisis is shaking Iran, as the bourgeois clerical regime
presses workers and farmers there, as well as working people from
Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Lebanon and elsewhere, into military
service across the Middle East. The Iranian bourgeoisie’s aim is to
increase its regional power and influence by force of arms, extending
beyond Iran’s borders the nearly four-decade-long political,
cleric-dominated counterrevolution that pushed back the workers,
farmers, women and oppressed nationalities who carried out the historic
Iranian Revolution of 1979.
That upheaval was a deep-going, modern, popular social revolution in
city and countryside, not a religious jihad as it is falsely portrayed
by bourgeois voices. The revolution reverberated across the Middle East
and the world.
Two centuries of experience have taught politically conscious workers
that neither popular revolutions, nor resistance by working people to
the consequences of defeated revolutions, are fueled primarily by
“economic discontent.” Much deeper social and political questions of
class, sex, sect and race push working people into action in our tens
and hundreds of thousands (and, at decisive points, in our millions).
Above all, it is the class and social inequities and indignities of
capitalist exploitation and oppression that erode the moral legitimacy
of the rulers and their state. And nothing propels mounting resistance
more than the privileged classes’ military adventures and wars, as the
rulers’ nationalist and religious rationalizations (Persian and Shiite,
in the case of Iran) begin dissolving in blood.
“We were charged with conspiracy to overthrow the government by armed
revolution,” wrote Farrell Dobbs in Teamster Bureaucracy about the
indictments handed down by Washington in July 1941 against 29 leaders of
the Socialist Workers Party and Local 544-CIO. The true goal of those
frame-up charges was to undercut the political campaign led by
Minneapolis Teamsters to organize working-class and union opposition to
the U.S. rulers’ imperialist aims in World War II, Dobbs wrote, but “the
word war appeared nowhere in the federal indictment … because it would
have been unpopular at that juncture to persecute us as opponents of
imperialist foreign policy.”
The cover of the new edition of Teamster Bureaucracy — the final of
Dobbs’ four-volume account of the Minneapolis-based class-struggle
leadership that transformed the U.S. labor movement during the Great
Depression — reproduces the banner headline from the Militant in June
1941: “Why We Have Been Indicted: SOCIALIST WORKERS PARTY IS THE
ANTI-WAR PARTY.”
It’s not just in imperialist countries such as the United States that an
accelerated drive toward militarization and war becomes inevitable at a
certain stage for the propertied classes. In Iran today, faced with
rising unrest among working people and the oppressed, the only way for
the capitalist rulers to try to defend and preserve their
counterrevolutionary regime at home is to continue extending political
reaction throughout Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen and divided Kurdistan.
The bourgeois clerical regime rationalizes its bloody course under the
banner of rectifying the historical oppression of Shiites in Iraq and
across the Arab world, a divide-and-rule oppression manipulated and
amplified by more than a century of French, British and U.S. imperialist
domination.
From left to right in bourgeois politics in the United States and
across the imperialist world, however, this political counterrevolution
in Iran is presented as if it were the 1979 revolution itself; the two
are identified as the same thing. Those the capitalist media hold up as
“leaders of the revolution” are, in fact, leaders of the
counterrevolution — a “through-the-looking-glass” vindication of false
claims by these bourgeois Iranian figures and their political apologists.
Women and revolution in Iran
An article in the Feb. 4 issue of the New York Times, for example, was
headlined: “Compulsory Veils? Half of Iranians Say ‘No’ to Pillar of
Revolution.” Thomas Erdbrink, Tehran bureau chief for America’s
“newspaper of record,” reported the release of an Iranian government
survey showing widespread opposition to women “being forced to wear the
veil, a symbol of Iran’s revolution” [emphasis added]. The article
describes recent protests in Iran against obligatory head cover and adds
that the “law regarding the scarf has been enforced since the 1979
Islamic Revolution.”
But the compulsory hijab — a headscarf covering the hair and neck — is
not “a symbol of Iran’s revolution.” To the contrary.
Yes, most working people and youth who made the 1979 revolution opposed
the royal decree imposed in the 1930s by the imperialist-backed shah of
Iran, in the name of capitalist “modernization,” denying women the right
to decide for themselves how to dress in public. The shah’s cops who
ripped veils off women’s heads and faces were the same ones who dragged
workers and youth to torture centers and prisons across Iran.
But in March 1979, when Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini declared that female
employees of government ministries must not go to work “naked” but be
“clothed according to Islamic standards,” students, workers and other
women and men took to the streets by the tens of thousands across Iran —
the largest International Women’s Day outpouring anywhere in the world
that year. Demonstrators fought off organized thugs and forced Khomeini
to back down.
What’s more, the government’s labor ministry later that month announced
that women in factories and other workplaces were entitled to equal
rights on the job, including the right to participate in elections to
the workers councils (shoras) and to hold office.
It was not until mid-1983, as the counterrevolution consolidated its
stranglehold, that the Iranian regime was finally able to impose
legislation barring women from “appear[ing] in public without religious
hijab.” Over the next couple of years, the government increasingly
unleashed special “anti-vice” squads to confront women on the streets
and compel observance.
The acts of public defiance of this law since December, as well as
longer-term resistance to enforcement the regime has met in recent
years, are a manifestation of mounting consciousness about and struggles
against the indignities, abuse and discrimination faced by women the
world over. Far from being a hobby horse of wealthy and middle-class
women in Iran (as often caricatured in the bourgeois press), demands for
women’s rights — in word and deed — were central to struggles by
millions, including working women and men, during the 1979 revolution.
They are among the revolution’s eroded conquests. Prospects for defense
and advance of such gains have been renewed by the recent working-class
protests and others to come.
There will be no end to Tehran’s counterrevolutionary wars, expansionism
and reactionary social policies without an end to the
counterrevolutionary bourgeois clerical regime. The factional divisions
within the bourgeois government and ruling layers are creating greater
political space for workers and farmers, who acted on these openings in
late December and early January.
Fake ‘axis of resistance’
“Today, throughout the region, Islam and the Islamic Republic of Iran
are greater than ever,” said President Hassan Rouhani, the leading
figure among those labeled “reformists” today, in an October 2017 speech
in Iran.
“Can anyone take any action in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, North Africa and
the Persian Gulf without considering Iran’s viewpoint?” — Iran’s
“viewpoint” is hardly the issue! Rouhani continued: “This is due to the
nation’s consciousness and unity, and the vigilance of the Leader,” that
is, of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
The President Rouhani who signed the 2015 nuclear pact with Washington
(along with London, Moscow, Paris, Beijing and Berlin) is the same
President Rouhani who has presided over the military operations in Iraq,
Syria, Lebanon and elsewhere by Iran’s Quds Force (the “foreign legion”
of its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps), along with other
Tehran-backed, Shiite-based militias. Deploying forces from what Iran’s
bourgeois clerical regime cynically calls the “axis of resistance,” it
has opened a corridor of military power, political influence and
economic exploitation all the way to the Mediterranean Sea and Turkish
border, as well as in Yemen and pockets elsewhere in the Middle East.
The Iraqi regime is the first Shiite-dominated Arab government in
history, with large Sunni Arab, Kurdish, Turkic and other non-Shiite
minority populations. Baghdad is dependent for its military defense on
Revolutionary Guard-organized Shiite militias of Iraqi, Iranian,
Lebanese, Afghan and other combatants, sometimes with Iranian or
Hezbollah officers.
A similar situation exists in Syria, where such forces stepped into the
vacuum created by Bashar al-Assad’s collapsing army and — with Russian
air, naval, and some ground support — salvaged that tyrannical regime at
a horrific toll of more than 10 million Syrian toilers displaced, killed
or maimed.
Hezbollah, after taking blows at the hands of Israeli forces in the 2006
war, has bolstered its position politically and militarily vis-à-vis
Sunni- and Christian-led bourgeois forces in Lebanon.
Rival ruling classes throughout the region know that, despite the 2015
agreement, Tehran is close to being able to produce nuclear weapons and
delivery systems. Such arms, however, would provide no defense for Iran
against military threats from U.S. imperialism and other nuclear powers,
nor any relief from the inhumane and unconscionable sanctions Washington
and other imperialist governments have imposed on the Iranian people. To
the contrary, weapons of mass destruction would merely provide a
rationalization for the Saudi Arabian and other regimes in the region to
enter the nuclear arms race, as well as for the Israeli government to
maintain and bolster its existing nuclear arsenal.
The Socialist Workers Party demands Washington’s immediate unilateral
nuclear disarmament. We call on the eight other regimes in the world
that currently have these catastrophic weapons to get rid of them, and
we oppose their development and deployment by any government. In this
regard, as in many others, the SWP points to the proletarian
internationalist example set by the leadership of Cuba’s socialist
revolution.
Counterrevolution takes hold
In 1980 workers and small farmers volunteered by the hundreds of
thousands to fight the invading forces of the Iraqi regime of Saddam
Hussein, tacitly backed, armed and financed by Washington, Paris and
other imperialist powers. Working people in Iran recognized that
invasion as an attempt to deal a deathblow to their revolution. Their
mobilizations gave a brief second wind to popular resistance to the
counterrevolution at home. These bourgeois clerical forces targeted
political rights; workers’ shoras (councils) in the factories,
refineries and other workplaces; farmers’ demands for land; the rights
of Kurds and other oppressed nationalities; and women’s rights.
Members of the communist party in Iran at that time — the Socialist
Workers Party (HKS), later renamed the Workers Unity Party (HVK) — were
in the thick of the revolutionary class struggle. They were workers in
factories, refineries and other industrial workplaces, as well as
volunteer soldiers combating the Iraqi invasion. Many of that party’s
cadres and leaders had been recruited and trained by the Socialist
Workers Party in the United States while studying or working here during
the tyrannical reign of the shah. Other workers, soldiers and students
were won to the party in Iran during the opening years of the revolution.
The HVK advocated “extension and unification of factory shoras”; “land
distribution under the control of peasant shoras”; “the right of
self-determination [and] autonomy” of Kurds and other oppressed
nationalities; and equal rights for women, including “the right to work
and equal pay for equal work,” “child care,” and “against compulsory
veiling and any kind of discrimination and humiliation of women.” The
HVK demanded full political liberties and the release of “all
anti-imperialist and working-class political prisoners,” and called for
“the extension and unification of workers, peasants, soldiers and
Pasdaran [Revolution Guard] shoras. For a workers and peasants government.”
In the United States and around the world, it was only in the pages of
the Militant (and its sister international news magazine,
Intercontinental Press) that working people could find accurate,
firsthand accounts of the Iranian Revolution and efforts by working
people and the oppressed to defend and advance it in face of assaults by
U.S. imperialism, by hostile regimes in the region, and by bourgeois
forces in Iran itself. Members of Socialist Workers Party branches and
trade union fractions in the United States took the truth about the
revolution and our defense of it to co-workers in factories, mines and
other workplaces, as well as into the streets.
By the early 1980s, however, the bourgeoisie and Islamic Republic were
employing increasingly brutal repression to turn back and defeat
struggles by working people and the oppressed, consolidating the rulers’
counterrevolutionary clutch at home.
After Iranian military forces pushed Saddam Hussein’s invading army back
across the border in mid-1982, Tehran sent its own troops into Iraq in
large numbers. Whatever defensive purpose this initially served, the
Tehran regime over the next several years sent wave after wave of
teenage and other young Iranian working people to needless slaughter as
it assaulted population centers in Iraq. During that same period, the
Sunni-based bourgeois rulers in Baghdad were conducting poison-gas
attacks and other atrocities against the Kurds (the murderous “Anfal”
campaign commanded by Saddam’s cousin, “Chemical Ali”) and against the
majority Shiite population within Iraq’s own borders.
By the end of 1982, a combination of official and government-sponsored
thug terror made it impossible for communists to any longer carry out
political activity in Iran. The record of the proletarian
internationalist course and unbroken continuity of that communist party,
however, exists to be studied by new generations and put into practice
as conditions permit. A good starting point can be found in issue no. 7
of New International, which includes “The Opening Guns of World War III”
by Jack Barnes and “Communism, the Working Class, and the
Anti-Imperialist Struggle: Lessons from the Iran-Iraq War,” two HVK
documents with an introduction by Samad Sharif.
Workers oppose Tehran’s wars
In stark contrast to the voluntary mobilizations by Iranian toilers to
the battlefront in 1980, in recent years most veterans of the Iran-Iraq
war and their children and grandchildren have urged young men not to
sign up for Quds Force operations in Iraq and Syria. The Revolutionary
Guard have had to rely on financial inducements to recruit and hold the
forces they need for those wars. Payment sometimes as high as $600-$700
a month is well above the norm for workers and farmers in Iran, and
Afghan and other refugees living in Iran are promised citizenship for
themselves and their families if they serve.
Mounting war deaths and disfigurement over the past half decade,
however, have taken a more bitter toll than can be tallied in Iranian
rials. The carnage falls with class-divided disproportion, shattering
disproportion, not on university districts or professional and
middle-class neighborhoods, but on workers’ quarters in major cities and
smaller towns and farming villages across Iran. That is where the
December and January protests were centered, unlike the 2009
mobilizations protesting the results of that year’s presidential election.
Iran’s bourgeois government and rulers initially said little publicly
about their wars in Iraq, Syria and Yemen, but that became unsustainable
as body bags returned in larger numbers to working-class and farm
families. The regime then sought to encourage monuments and memorials to
the dead and wounded in workers’ districts and towns, hoping to use the
“martyrs” to rekindle patriotism and mobilize popular support for their
counterrevolutionary military operations. But as the recent protests
showed, these ruling-class efforts backfired.
It is in light of these rising class tensions that divisions within the
government and ruling layers have widened in recent years, including
fractures within older factional alignments.
It’s only in recent years, for example, that the Shiite cleric Hassan
Rouhani has been seen, or has presented himself, as a “reformist.” He
was Ayatollah Khamenei’s hand-picked representative to Iran’s Supreme
National Security Council for 16 years beginning in 1989. He is
notorious for having led the brutal suppression of widespread student
protests against repressive new press laws in 1999. Similarly, while
Rouhani supported statements by Tehran police authorities in late 2017
that they would no longer arrest women for “bad hijab” — “One cannot
force one’s lifestyle on the future generations,” the president said —
he was directly involved in introducing the 1983 legislation imposing
compulsory clothing.
These rifts in Iran’s bourgeoisie are not cosmetic. They’re not a “hard
cop/soft cop” charade to hoodwink imperialist governments and Iran’s
rival bourgeois regimes in the region. They’re real and volatile, rooted
in Iran’s current social relations.
When President Rouhani in December 2017 made the Islamic Republic’s
budget public for the first time, his goal was to advance factional
political ends against bourgeois opponents in the leadership of the
Revolutionary Guard. It’s as if Rouhani were saying, “I don’t even
control most of the government budget” — demagogically hoping to deflect
fire from his administration for cuts in needed subsidies, social
payments, wages, and earthquake relief.
In releasing the budget, however, Rouhani ended up fueling the protests,
since it revealed huge government expenditures on religious institutions
linked to the Revolutionary Guard, which has been central to recruiting
and organizing the militias fighting in Iraq and Syria.
Meanwhile, as recently as mid-2017, Rouhani boasted that Iran’s military
budget has more than doubled since his election in 2013. Those war
expenditures are set to increase this year by another 90 percent over 2017.
What’s more, once workers’ protests wound down in early January, Supreme
Leader Ayatollah Khamenei announced that he had approved withdrawing an
additional $2.5 billion from the National Development Fund of the
Islamic Republic of Iran — which supposedly sets aside oil and gas
revenues to meet infrastructure and welfare needs — to boost Iran’s war
chest (already some $13 billion in 2017).
Why? Because no section of the Iranian bourgeoisie or government has any
intention of pulling back from deployments and military operations in
Iraq, Syria, Lebanon or Yemen.
Smearing workers as ‘garbage’
In early January, when a well-known Islamic cleric smeared working-class
protesters as “garbage” during Friday prayers in Tehran, Rouhani sharply
rebuked him for those remarks on state television. “We cannot call
everybody who takes to the streets dirt and dust, cow, sheep or trash,”
Rouhani said. “What manner of talking is this? Why do we insult? Why do
we treat our society impolitely?”
Rouhani’s public response was popular among working people in Iran, as
well as among many students and layers of the middle classes. It
strengthened his hand against the Revolutionary Guard hierarchy.
The president is also acting on behalf of influential capitalist
families by demanding that the Revolutionary Guard divest itself of
major assets in Iran’s construction industry, oil and gas companies,
banking and insurance, telecommunications — as well as the country’s
thriving black market.
As working people take advantage of conflicts among these dominant
factions in the government to open political space, other
bourgeois-oriented currents are seeking to put their foot in the door as
well. Already former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad — barred by
the Supreme Leader early last year from again running for president, and
then blamed by Khamenei for the recent protests — is beating the drums
of “economic discontent” in Iran. Ahmadinejad’s base, separate either
from Rouhani’s “reformist” current or the Revolutionary Guard, is
concentrated among the petty bourgeoisie and layers of working people in
smaller cities and rural areas where many of the recent mobilizations
took place.
The Stalinist Tudeh Party leadership, banned and harshly repressed
during the height of the counterrevolution in the 1980s, issued three
statements from exile between late December and early January. Focusing
on the “economic bankruptcy” and “corruption” of the government, the
Stalinist misleaders uttered not a word about Tehran’s wars and military
adventures, since they share the regime’s support for Assad in Syria,
its opposition to Kurdish national aspirations and its Persian nationalism.
In line with their Popular Frontist, procapitalist course, Tudeh leaders
called on “progressive and freedom-loving forces” to “increase their
presence in the protest movement”; to avoid “divisive slogans”; “to wage
a joint and organized struggle of all social layers”; and “to establish
the rule of the people,” “a national, popular, and democratic republic.”
In short, to replace the Islamic Republic with another capitalist
government based on opposition currents, in Iran and in exile, within
the officer corps (of Iran’s standing army, not the Islamic
Revolutionary Guard Corps), propertied families and their middle-class
political representatives.
Shifts in Saudi Arabia
In face of the shifting relationship of class forces in the Gulf region
in recent years, an increasingly dominant wing of Saudi Arabia’s
capitalist rulers (a bourgeoisie forged over the past century from an
extended tribal-based family) has recognized that it is being bested in
its regional rivalry with Tehran.
In response, a decisive section of the Saudi regime, headed by Crown
Prince Mohammed bin Salman, has decided they must sharply reverse
engines on many fronts — and they are doing so. These include:
• efforts to accelerate industrial development and trade, instead of
ongoing reliance on oil rents;
• steps to stem the drain on capital accumulation from subsidies to the
sprawling, privileged ruling family;
• moves to halt the regime’s deference (in reaction to the 1979 jihadist
assault on the Grand Mosque) to the Islamist Wahhabi Sunni hierarchy by
bringing to heel the “religious police,” secularizing school curriculum
and relaxing oppressive social and cultural norms for women in
employment, driving, sports and entertainment; and
• mending the blowback for the Saudi regime from their collusion with
U.S. imperialism in the 1980s to organize, finance, and train Islamist
military squads in Afghanistan, which came a cropper for both Washington
and Riyadh with the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist assaults.
The Saudi rulers are now pressing this course, with open support from
Washington and thinly veiled backing from the Israeli ruling class and
government. Riyadh has now released most of the hundreds of wealthy
Saudis arrested in November 2017, after reaching financial “settlements”
with them netting the government some $106 billion for its capitalist
modernization projects. The regime plans to raise another $100 billion
in 2018 by placing for sale on world stock markets 5 percent of the
giant Saudi oil and natural gas company, Aramco.
In late January, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu traveled to
Russia to inform President Vladimir Putin that the Israeli government
will not back off from its determination that Tehran must neither
establish a permanent military presence in Syria, nor collaborate with
Hezbollah to turn Lebanon into a base for the manufacture and launching
of missiles targeting Israel. The Israel Defense Forces report that in
recent years they’ve conducted airstrikes and missile attacks on more
than 100 Hezbollah convoys and other targets in Syria, and will continue
doing so whenever Tehran-organized forces are deployed anywhere near
Israel’s borders.
Way forward for working people
The programmatic and strategic course of the Socialist Workers Party in
response to the tumultuous and shifting political situation in Iran and
across the Gulf region is presented in the closing paragraphs of the
Dec. 11, 2017, SWP statement, “For Recognition of a Palestinian State
and of Israel”:
“In opposition to Washington, to bourgeois governments and political
organizations across the Middle East, and to the middle class left here
in the United States, the Socialist Workers Party has a different
starting point: the class interests and solidarity of workers and
toiling farmers across the Middle East — be they Palestinian, Jewish,
Arab, Kurdish, Turkish, Persian or otherwise, and whatever their
religious or other beliefs — as well as working people in the United
States and around the world.
“We are for whatever helps working people organize and act together to
advance our demands and struggles against the capitalist governments and
ruling classes that exploit and oppress us and their petty bourgeois
political servants and media apologists.
“We are for whatever renews our class solidarity and self-confidence,
advancing us along a revolutionary course toward a united struggle for
workers power.
“This is the proletarian internationalist course of action, part of our
communist program, that members and supporters of the Socialist Workers
Party are discussing with workers as we campaign door to door in their
neighborhoods, with co-workers on the job and their friends and family
members, and with those we join in protests against Washington’s
anti-working-class policies at home and abroad.”
Click here to download PDF.
In This Issue
Front Page Articles •Join teachers for May 16 protest in North Carolina!
•US rulers, Tehran fight over sway in Middle East
•Back teachers, join Socialist Workers Party campaign!
•SWP, books, ‘Militant’ spark interest among working people
•Rulers’ disdain, anti-working-class attacks fuel protests in Puerto Rico
•‘Join fight against Iowa attack on women’s right to choose abortion’
Feature Articles •US class struggle a feature at Havana conference
•Revolution, counterrevolution and war in Iran: Social and political
roots of workers’ protests that swept 90 cities and small towns
Also In This Issue •Grenfell Tower fire survivors demand housing, fire
safety
•Volunteers expand reach of revolutionary books
•Teachers, school workers walk out in Pueblo contract struggle
•Education under capitalism is a class question
•Campaign to expand reach of 'Militant,' books, fund
On the Picket Line •Ukraine workers rally May Day in fight for wages,
work safety
•University of California workers strike three days for contract
•School workers in New Zealand rally for equal pay for women
Books of the Month •Unions lead fight against racism, for working-class
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