History. So many lessons to be learned. So few Students.
Carl Jarvis
On 1/3/18, Roger Loran Bailey <dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
https://socialistaction.org/2018/01/01/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-1979-iranian-revolution-its-lessons-for-today/
The rise and fall of the 1979 Iranian Revolution: Its lessons for today
/ 2 days ago
Jan. 2018 Hijab protest Mar. 8, 1979
About 100,000 women and their supporters march in Tehran on
International Women’s Day, March 8, 1979, to protest the forced wearing
of the hijab (head scarf) by the newly installed government headed by
the Ayatolla Khomeini.
By KAMRAN NAYERI and ALIREZA NASSAB
The following paper was prepared for and presented at the III
Conferencia Internacional de La Obra de Carlos Marx y Los Desafios del
Siglo XXI (The Third Conference on the Work of Karl Marx and the
Challenges of the 21st Century) in Havana, Cuba, in May 2006. The
conference was organized by the Instituto de Filosofia de Cuba. Alireza
Nasab presented the paper to an afternoon session on the first day of
the conference. Alireza Ismaeli Nassab was an Iranian Trotskyist who
lived in exile in London and died there of meningitis on April 22, 2011.
He was 57 years old. Nassab (better known by his movement name as Behzad
Kazemi) was a leading socialist activist, well-respected among the
Iranian socialists and labor activists in Europe.
I have edited the paper, which was drafted in a rush for the conference,
and Nassab reviewed it, offering a few minor changes. Almost all changes
from the original draft are typographical, grammatical, or stylistic.
Informational hyperlinks to the Iranian political personalities,
parties, organizations, and places have been added. Some of these
sources may contain errors or omissions. The original draft is still
available at the Institute of Philosophy’s website. — K.N.
Achievements
The February 1979 Iranian revolution was the largest urban mass uprising
since the 1917 Russian revolutions. It changed the strategic relation of
forces in the Middle East to the detriment of imperialism. In 1953, the
Shah’s regime had been imposed by the CIA-MI6 coup that overthrew the
democratically elected nationalist government of Mohammad Mossadegh. It
overthrew imperialism’s regional gendarme, an ally of the
colonial-settler state of Israel, and a supporter of South African
Apartheid. It dissolved the Central Treaty Organization (CENTO), a
regional anti-Soviet Union military pact.
After the 1953 defeat of the mass movement, the Shah’s regime had
gradually consolidated an autocratic capitalist state, on the basis of
an imperial Fars (Persian) chauvinist ideology that denied the oppressed
nationalities any rights, and increasingly choked off the political
life. The February revolution destroyed the monarchy, the historical
form of the State in Iran, and badly damaged its repressive and
ideological props. Aside from those who were caught by the revolutionary
forces, with the royal court almost all the major industrialists and
bankers, the military brass and top bureaucrats fled the country,
mostly, for the United States.
Who led the February revolution?
No political party or individual led the February revolution. Instead,
grassroots organizations in the neighborhoods, workplaces, high schools
and universities, and among peasants and oppressed nationalities, and
eventually in the armed forces, were formed to challenge the Shah’s
power structure. Workers began to exert control over workplaces.
Peasants moved to take the land they had tiled for centuries; closely
tied to this oppressed nationalities began to revive their cultural
heritage and exercise autonomy. Universities became centers of political
discourse. Neighborhoods were organized through popular committees.
Political parties, including the banned communist groups, began to
function increasingly openly. Finally, as the discipline in the armed
forces began to break and some soldiers went to the side of the
revolution, the population armed itself and overthrew the monarchy.
It was entirely possible for Iranians to inaugurate the first workers
and peasants government in the Middle East and open the road to
socialism. Instead, Ayatollah Khomeini, who had opposed the Shah’s
capitalist modernization reform programs in 1963 and was subsequently
arrested and exiled to Iraq, captured the moment and established himself
as the spokesperson for the revolution. By 1983, he had used populist
demagogy and ruthless repression to suppress all independent mass
organizations and practically all political parties to consolidate a
theocratic capitalist regime. Thus, he offered a historically
reactionary response to imperialism in the Middle East.
The Shah’s regime and its opponents
In Iran the state has been the force behind capitalist
industrialization. The Pahlavi monarchy led this effort in the 1930s,
and it was resumed soon after the CIA-MI6 coup of 1953. The pace of
capitalist development picked up after the White Revolution in 1963 as
it reformed class relations especially in the countryside in order to
facilitated capitalist primitive accumulation and ongoing capital
accumulation.
The agrarian reform favored a shift of rural surplus funds to capitalist
accumulation and rural surplus population to towns where
industrialization was underway. The White Revolution contributed to the
weakening of the power of the Shiite hierarchy, itself a major landowner
and tax collector, and its traditional ally the Bazaar merchants, who
were also part of the traditional absentee landowners. The Shiite
hierarchy opposed key planks of the White Revolution, including the land
reform, Health and Knowledge Corps (army draftees whose mission was to
bring elementary health and literacy campaigns to the countryside), and
the extension of the right to vote to women (even though the right to
vote itself had little meaning under a dictatorship). Thus, an alliance
of Shiite hierarchy, bazaar merchants, and sectors of the old landowning
classes opposed the Shah’s regime.
The Shah’s regime was also opposed by social classes and sectors that
his own capitalist modernization program had created. Most importantly,
this included the proletariat; between 1963 and 1975 the size of the
Iranian working class doubled. Millions of the pauperized peasants had
become squatters in the large cities, especially Tehran, and came
increasingly into conflict with the State apparatus. Finally, the “new
middle class” and the intelligentsia became the most vocal critics of
the Shah’s regime. They also provided most of the cadre for the
nationalist, Islamic, and socialist forces opposed to the Shah.
The bourgeois nationalist parties
The Iranian capitalist class developed belatedly and dependent either on
the State or the imperialist powers, never cutting its ties to
pre-capitalist social relations. Thus, it was never willing or able to
carry a national democratic revolution. In the 19th century Iranian
merchants held Russian citizenship to safeguard their wealth against the
Qajar kings. During the course of the Constitutional Revolution of 1906,
they took refuge from the Qajar autocracy in the British Embassy.
The State-sponsored industrialization spurt under the Pahlavi dynasty
helped to develop a small layer of industrial and financial capitalists;
but they remained subservient to the royal court and the international
bourgeoisie.
The period of glory of bourgeois nationalism was limited to a brief
campaign for nationalization of the oil industry in the early 1950s that
was led by Dr. Mohammad Mossadegh, who became the prime minister on
popular demand. In a period of the climax of confrontation with the
royal court, Hossein Fatemi spoke of a republic while Mossadegh limited
himself to the notion that “[t]he Shah should rule but not govern.” In
his confrontation with Britain, Mossadegh sought the support of the
World Court and the U.S. administration. When Washington and London
joined forces to stage a coup in the summer of 1953, Mossadegh refused
to mobilize and arm the masses even after the first coup attempt failed.
Three days later, a second coup succeeded and a generation of Iranians
suffered the consequences.
The National Front, the umbrella organization of the bourgeois
nationalists formed around Mossadegh, never attained the same glory. The
combination of dictatorship and a lack of a genuine program and strategy
for a national democratic revolution fractured it into a half a dozen
small sects organized around various personalities. On the eve of the
February revolution, Shahpour Bakhtiar, one of the leading National
Front figures, accepted the Shah’s offer to become his caretaker prime
minister. After the triumph of the February revolution, Mehdi Bazargan,
another National Front leader who had merge nationalist and Islamic
sentiments, became Ayatollah Khomeini’s interim prime minister. His
cabinet was made of assortments of nationalist figures who merely served
as a transition belt for the establishment of the Islamic Republic.
Bazargan’s cabinet was forced out after it was discovered that he had
secretly met with the Americans in Algeria in the summer of 1979. A few
other Islamic nationalist characters, like Banisadr, Ghotbzadeh, and
Yazdi, served the Islamic Republic as non-clergy confidants before they
were also purged (Banisadr went into exile in France and Ghotbzadeh was
executed for a Saudi Arabia-backed coup plot. Yazdi was forced out of
politics). Thus, the Iranian bourgeoisie has proved unwilling and
incapable of leading a national democratic revolution.
The working class and its leaderships
Iran’s working-class origins include thousands of oil workers in Baku
(annexed in the late 19th century by Tsarist Russia) and the early
influence of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, especially the
Bolsheviks. In 1904, the first Iranian social democratic group (Hemmat)
was founded in Transcaucasia. Social Democrats participated in the
Constitutional Revolution, including, with help of their Russian Social
Democrats, in the defense of revolutionary Tabriz, when monarchist
forces staged a counter-revolution from Tehran. Iranian Social Democrats
established links with the leaders of the Second International and
helped the Bolsheviks smuggle Iskra into Transcaucasia. In June 1920,
after the Bolsheviks called for the formation of the Communist
International, Iranian communists held their first party congress and
founded the Communist Party of Iran.
During the same period, there were rank-and-file attempts to form trade
unions in the few industries that had emerged. Notable was the printers’
trade union. However, the political development of the Iranian working
class was largely influenced by the communists from the very beginning.
The communist world view entered Iran before it emerged from the
struggles of workers themselves. This process differed from much of the
historical development during Marx’s and Engels’ time and their
conception of the developmental trajectory of the working class,
beginning with trade-union formations. The existence of autocracy also
proved detrimental to the development of trade unions and economic
struggles as the pretext to class (political) struggle. Thus, the
Communist Party was established before any large-scale trade unions were
attempted. The formation of trade unions or any other workers’
organization became the task for communists.
This uneven development proved critical for the history of the Iranian
labor movement. By 1930, the Communist Party and most of its leadership
were destroyed by the combined blows from Reza Shah’s dictatorship and
the Stalinist terror in the Soviet Union. Many communists rotted in Reza
Shah’s jails, and some, including Otis Sultanzadeh, the party’s
principal leader and a leader of the Communist International in Lenin’s
time, were executed during Stalinist purges.
As elsewhere in the world, the degeneration of the Russian Revolution
and ascendancy of the Stalinist bureaucratic caste destroyed the
Bolshevik revolutionary program and strategy. Communist parties were
transformed into reformist bureaucratic organizations that blindly
followed Moscow’s policies.
After the occupation of Iran by the Allies in 1941, with the support of
Moscow and the initiative of the Stalinist members of the former
Communist Party, the Tudeh (masses) party was organized as a Popular
Front, anti-fascist organization. The Tudeh party became more similar to
the typical Stalinist parties after the Cold War began; that is, it
never developed a socialist program and strategy. Instead, like other
Stalinist parties in the semi-colonial and colonial world, it has
pursued a strategic alliance with the “national bourgeoisie” who it has
claimed will lead a national democratic revolution.
The Tudeh party’s influence on the Iranian working class has been
disastrous. The leadership of the Central Council of the United Trade
Unions of Iranian Workers and Toilers, which it came to control in 1946,
was entirely imposed by the party and made up of key party cadre who
were from the Iranian elite, not the working class. The Tudeh party used
its influence in the labor movement to bargain with the capitalist
regime. It put down militant labor strikes, including of oil workers in
Aghajari, when it believed it was possible to wrestle concessions from
the government. This is how Tudeh party was offered three ministerial
posts in the reactionary Qavam cabinet in 1946. These policies mirrored
Moscow’s own: to please Roosevelt and Churchill, Stalin pulled out the
Red Army from Azerbaijan. This made it possible for the Shah’s advancing
army to overthrow the pro-Soviet government of Pishevari.
The Tudeh party advocated oil concessions in the northern portions of
Iran for Moscow when the government was considering oil concessions in
the south for the West. The Tudeh party did not join the fight for
nationalization of the Iranian oil industry led by Mossadegh. It also
did not use its significant influence in the army to fight the CIA-MI6
coup of 1953. When the coup succeeded, its most committed militants were
given to the firing squads. Not surprisingly, the Tudeh party never
regained its standing with the Iranian workers again.
With the Sino-Soviet rift, the exiled Tudeh party leadership also
suffered a split. The various Maoist groups that emerged were not
essentially different in their program and strategy. Like the Tudeh,
they all hoped for a “national bourgeois” force to lead the national
democratic revolution. Meanwhile, after the White Revolution of 1963,
Moscow, and later Beijing, established good relations with the Shah that
lasted until his overthrow by the February 1979 revolution.
During the 1960s, a layer of the youth influenced by the Cuban and
Algerian revolutions split off from the National Front and from the
Tudeh party. They formed the Mujahedin-e Khalq (People’s Mujahedin) and
the Fedayeen-e Khalq (People’s Fedayeen) respectively. These were
anti-dictatorship and anti-imperialist urban guerrilla forces. Despite
the sincere self-sacrifice of its original leaders, these organizations
tried to substitute the reformism of bourgeois nationalists and the
Tudeh party with heroic armed actions and determination to struggle.
They lacked any mass-action program and strategy for radical social
change. Thus, they remained vulnerable to the more sophisticated
Stalinist forces.
The Mujahedin suffered a Maoist split in early the 1970s. The Fedayeen
were split by the pressure from the Tudeh party after 1979. The
guerrilla movement itself was quickly militarily defeated by the Shah’s
repressive apparatus and was soon politically superseded by the mass
movement of the working people who made the February 1979 revolution.
After the 1953 coup, Stalinist and centrist political forces had little
direct contact and influence in the labor movement. Meanwhile, the
quickening pace of industrialization doubled the size of the labor force
and gave it a measure of power in relationship to employers. At the same
time, intensification of dictatorship limited trade-union development
and institutionalized economic struggle. Combined, these factors
contributed to the development of the mass working-class movement in
1978-79 and after the February 1979 revolution.
The events of 1978-79 showed that in the relative absence of Stalinist
and centrist parties workers can display an amazing capacity for
organization and action even under a system of dictatorship. Thus,
Iranian workers with no prior strike experience formed formidable strike
committees. Iranian workers with no experience in workers’ control
developed workers’ councils and took charge of their work places. Even
during the counter-revolutionary offensive of the summer of 1979,
workers councils were being formed and organized into regional and
national networks.
These could have developed further and a class struggle working-class
leadership could have emerged in due time to pose the perspective for a
workers and peasants government. However, by 1983, all workers’ councils
were destroyed or substituted by corporatist Islamic Shoras (councils)
of Labor and the Workers’ House.
The Islamic Republic as counterrevolution
The historical weakness of the national bourgeoisie and crisis of the
working-class leadership provided a vacuum in 1978-79, which Ayatollah
Khomeini filled. A resolute opponent of the Shah, Khomeini and his
allies were negotiating a peaceful transfer of power to keep the
capitalist order intact. The behind the scenes negotiations, which
included Washington, settled on a government headed by National Front
figures to take over the power from the Shah. What motivated these
negotiations was the common fear of a proletarian revolution. However,
Shahpour Bakhtiar, the National Front figure chosen by the Shah as the
caretaker prime minister, decided to remain at the helm. Meanwhile, a
section of the army brass that was rooting for a bloodbath decided on a
military coup. The show down with the masses led to the Feb. 19-21 armed
insurrections.
Thus, in the actual reality, the power fell into the hands of the
grassroots organizations that had no common perspective for the future.
However, the bulk of bourgeois nationalist and petty bourgeois parties,
including the Tudeh party, most Maoist groups, Fedayeen, and Mujahedin
supported Khomeini’s bid for power. Khomeini’s secretive Revolution
Council that was set up to take the power from Shah-Bakhtiar proposed a
provisional government headed by Mehdi Bazargan and staffed with
National Front figures. The provisional government itself had no mass
base and drew its legitimacy from Ayatollah Khomeini. Thus, the
Khomeini-Bazargan government, on one hand, and the grassroots
organizations that sprang out of the revolutionary struggle, on the
other hand, produced a situation of de facto dual power.
From the first day after the February victory, Khomeini’s designated
government pursued policies to resolve this duality of power by
undermining the grassroots organizations that held the potential of for
a proletarian revolution.
A necessarily limited chronology has to suffice. Pro-Khomeini forces
arrived soon after the liberation of the State-run TV and radio stations
(there were and are no others) to take them over and impose a censorship
that excluded, among other things, socialist points of view. Soon all
news, information, and entrainment deemed “non-Islamic” were censored
and staff that did not cooperate were fired. Within a few days after the
insurrection, Khomeini issued a decree to disarm the neighborhood
defense committees and authorize top-down Islamic armed squads
(Committees of Islamic Revolution) that were based in mosques. When
these tightly controlled Islamic squads proved inadequate to control the
mass movement, some in the Shiite hierarchy recruited youth from the
urban poor into semi-fascist Hezbollah squads. These were used to attack
demonstrations and political or social groups.
Just before International Women’s Day, Khomeini issued a decree
requiring women to wear Islamic garb. Hezbollah goons attacked the
women’s March 8 march with chains, sticks, and knives. During the
Iranian New Year at the end of March, the air force bombed Turkmen
Sahra, where the oppressed nationality Turkmen live, on the southeastern
coast of the Caspian Sea where peasants were taking over the land and
the Turkmen had established a cultural center.
On March 30 and 31, Khomeini staged an undemocratic referendum in which
the population was given the choice of continuing with the monarchy
which they had just overthrown or the undefined Islamic Republic. The
voters rejected the monarchy by an over 98% majority; Khomeini and his
allies claimed that such huge majority actually wanted an Islamic
Republic— which at the time was just a slogan empty of content. He then
used the vote to exclude all non-Islamic groups from the legal political
discourse. In April, a mass circulation daily, Ayandegan, which was
critical of Khomeini, was shut down by force.
This was followed by a war waged against the Kurdish people, who have
been struggling for self-determination for decades. At the same time,
armed Hezbollah gangs were used to ransack headquarters of socialist
parties, and 40 newspapers were shut down. Meanwhile, Khomeini decided
that instead of a democratic constituent assembly based on grassroots
organizations that had issued from the revolution, an Islamic Assembly
of Experts should write a constitution for the Islamic Republic he had
rubber stamped in the April referendum.
By all appearances, the reactionary offensive of the summer of 1979 had
consolidated the Islamic Republic and all opposition parties were driven
underground. However, when a select group of pro-Khomeini students took
over the US embassy in October, streets of Tehran and other cities were
once again filled with millions of anti-imperialist demonstrators. Open
political activity revived. Once again, the workers showed the way
forward. United workers’ councils led several mass demonstrations in
Tehran and elsewhere. Workers’ councils that sprang up in individual
factories had learned that in order to manage their workplaces they need
to link up with other workers’ council within the same industry, region,
or industrial group. Peasant councils were also formed, and some linked
up with others, and land occupations were underway. This posed the
problem of working-class management of the economy and society and the
need for a workers and peasants government.
What was lacking was a working-class leadership to link up these
class-specific demands with the anti-imperialist movement and the
defense of democratic and political freedoms through the expansion of
the already existing grassroots organizations, in particular workers and
peasants councils; this would have created a workers and peasants
government. Only such a government, like the one that issued from the
October 1917 revolution, and subsequently in Cuba after 1959, could have
charted a consistent anti-imperialist, that is, anti-capitalist and
socialist, course. History has produced no other alternatives.
Such leadership did not exist. Instead, Stalinist and centrist parties
were essentially divided into two camps. A group best exemplified by the
Tudeh party and Fedayeen Majority argued that the conflict with
imperialism and monarchism required political support for the
“anti-imperialist” Khomeini regime. Others such as the Mujahedin and
Fedayeen Minority countered that Khomeini is the gravest danger facing
the revolution. Thus, they each looked for an alternative force within
the Islamic Republic and in the bourgeois political spectrum. President
Bani-Sadre temporarily provided such a bourgeois figure for the
Anti-Khomeini opposition. In practice, each of these two camps
subordinated actual class struggle to their perceived need to either
politically support or to militarily confront the Islamic Republic.
Take the case of the workers’ council movement. In the spring of 1980,
the Islamic Republic party begun to systematically organize and use
Islamic Associations in workplaces to divide the workforce into
“followers of Imam (Khomeini)” and those who were not prepared to pledge
allegiance to him. The same scheme was used to split workers’ councils
and establish the corporatist Islamic Councils of Labor. This scheme not
only split the working class according to workers’ religious or
ideological belief, it also created organizations of workers with the
explicit goal of supporting the clerical, capitalist regime and its
management in the State sector of the economy, which was extensive
thanks to the expropriations. Further, this policy created tensions and
conflicts among workers, which allowed management and State officials to
intervene. After the start of the Iran-Iraq war, workers’ resistance to
these and any other capitalist policies were labeled as
“counter-revolutionary.”
The Tudeh party and Fedayeen Majority asked their membership to identify
themselves as Muslims and “followers of Imam.” They even joined noon
time prayers at workplaces. The Mujahedin and Fedayeen Minority and
others who placed open struggle against Khomeini quickly came against a
still substantial section of the workforce that still harbored illusions
in Khomeini and the Islamic Republic. These groups were quickly isolated
given that they had no proposal for uniting workers as a revolutionary
class. Their followers in factories were quickly fired or were forced to
operate secretly.
In September 1980, Saddam Hussein invaded Iran. Khomeini called this “a
divine gift.” He and the Islamic Republic began an offensive to destroy
the grassroots organizations and political parties. Workplaces,
especially factories, were militarized. All workers’ protests against
the management or the State were called “counter-revolutionary.” Soon
after the war began, Khomeini heeded the demand by Ayatollah Golpaygani
and Ayatollah Mar’ashi, two archconservative Shiite leaders, to discard
a modest land reform bill in the Islamic parliament. Landowners went on
an offensive against peasants.
Socialists and others who did not agree with the Islamic Republic but
wanted to participate in the defense of the revolution against Saddam
Hussein’s army were expelled from the fronts. Meanwhile, the Iraqi army
destroyed the oil industry in the South, thereby undermining the
strongest section of the Iranian proletariat, the oil workers. In the
villages, the Iraqi army executed members of the peasant councils.
At the same time, imperialist and monarchist terrorism provided
additional opportunity for the regime to clamp down on political
freedoms. The failure of socialist currents to join the fight against
imperialist and monarchist terrorism and the increasingly systematic
State repression undermined independent working-class organization and
action.
In the summer of 1981, under blows from the Islamic Republic, the
Mujahedin leadership decided to stage an “armed insurrection.” This
putsch failed quickly. The government used it to justify a murderous
campaign to physically destroy the Mujahedin and the armed centrist
groups such as the Fedayeen Minority. The Tudeh party and Fedayeen
Majority helped the authorities in identifying and persecuting these
groups whose members and sympathizers were routinely imprisoned,
tortured and in the summer of 1981, executed. As a result, Mujahedin and
Fedayeen Minority and other centrist groups retreated to Kurdistan,
which still was not under the full control of the Islamic Republic. Most
these groups eventually splintered and no significant organization
remains today. The exception is the Mujahedin, who built a cult
organization in the service of imperialism (the French, and later,
American imperialism) and then organized an armed unit of several
thousand to attack Iran from Iraq at the pleasure of Saddam Hussein.
After dealing a decisive blow to the labor movement, the Mujahedin, and
centrist groups, all with the complicity of the Tudeh party and Fedayeen
Majority, the government turned against them. Late in 1982, the
government arrested the bulk of the Tudeh leadership and some of the
Fedayeen Majority leadership. Some were tortured and executed. Others
appeared on the State television to denounce Marxism, explain how they
spied for the Soviet Union, and praise Khomeini and the Islamic Republic.
The combination of these Stalinist betrayals and centrist policies
disoriented workers and the youth and facilitated capitalist attacks on
the labor and mass movements. These led to demoralization of a
generation of youth and working-class fighters well before the Soviet
bloc collapsed.
By 1983, all grassroots organizations and socialist political currents
were effectively destroyed in Iran. Khomeini pursued the fratricidal war
with Iraq even after the Iranian army and volunteers had effectively
driven the invading forces out in the spring of 1982. The war continued
until 1988 when both sided were exhausted and over a million were killed
or mimed. After 1988, the Islamic Republic began a massive economic
offensive against the working class that continues to this date.
Lessons for today
The 1979 Iranian revolution could be gainfully compared to the 1917
Russian revolutions. In both revolutions workers and peasants brought
down autocratic monarchies. Although the Bolsheviks’ influence had
indirectly prepared the workers, the February revolution in both
countries triumphed without the leadership of any individual or party.
In both revolutions, grassroots organizations of workers and peasants
were formed: The soviets in Russia and the workers, peasants, and other
popular councils in Iran. But here the similarities end.
In Russia, Lenin recognized that proletarian character of the
revolutionary process and educated and mobilized the Bolshevik party to
fight for a government of the commune-type based on the soviets of
workers, soldiers, and peasants deputies. In Iran, the Stalinist and
centrist parties, much like the Mensheviks in the Russian Revolution,
called for support to the capitalist Islamic Republic or other bourgeois
forces within or outside of it (or organized their own sectarian,
sometimes armed, campaigns). These class-collaborationist and sectarian
policies were decisive in the defeat of the working class and the
revolution.
Unfortunately, the experience of the Iranian Revolution is not unique.
As noted, similar policies defeated the mass upsurge in Iran from
1945-53. Dozens of revolutions in the industrial capitalist counties and
in the periphery have suffered a similar fate. With the demise of the
soviets’ power and the rise of the Stalinist bureaucratic caste, the
Bolshevik program, strategy, and tradition were buried in favor of a new
doctrine suitable to the conservative new elite. These polices were
imposed on the young Communist parties, and those communists who opposed
them were violently purged, sometimes murdered. Thus, the communist
movement was defeated as a mass movement by the end of the 1920s.
The Marxist theory of socialism seeks human emancipation through
self-organization and self-activity of the proletariat as the ruling
class. This is also what Lenin stresses in his State and Revolution. The
fundamental lesson of the Iranian revolution is to return to this long
lost treasure of working-class and socialist movements: to critically
re-appropriate the Bolshevik legacy (which includes Trotsky’s) in light
of what Marx and Engels left us from their critical appropriation of the
19th-century struggle for socialism.
Marx’s legacy is an open system, and the socialism of the 21st century
will have to tackle new problems, most importantly the fight to the
re-appropriation of nature in theory and practice as the basis of our
humanity and a fundamental plank of Marxian socialism. However, to
tackle new problems, it is imperative that we find the courage to learn
from previous defeats and to revise the theory and tradition that has
contributed to our victories.
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January 1, 2018 in International, Marxist Theory & History, Middle East,
Revolutions. Tags: Iran
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