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Vol. 82/No. 6 February 12, 2018
(front page)
What’s behind working-class uprising, discontent in Iran
Two weeks of working-class protests began in Mashhad, Iran, above, and
spread to 90 other cities and towns, ignited by opposition to cleric-led
regime’s reactionary wars abroad.
BY TERRY EVANS
The mounting toll on working people from the wars being waged throughout
the Middle East by Iran’s capitalist class was the catalyst for the
working-class uprising that swept 90 cities and towns across the country
starting Dec. 28 for a couple weeks.
For years the country’s cleric-led capitalist regime has recruited
workers to fight and die alongside Tehran-trained Shiite militias in
Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and Yemen. They seek to extend their military power
and political influence from Iran’s eastern border with Afghanistan to
the Mediterranean Sea.
The roots of these wars lie in efforts by the clerics to extend the
counterrevolution they carried out in the 1980s.
“The Iranian Revolution of 1979 was a profound political and social
upheaval, not a religious jihad,” the Socialist Workers Party explained
in its 2005 political resolution “Their Transformation and Ours,”
reprinted in New International no. 12. “It became a deep-going, modern,
popular social revolution in city and countryside, a revolution against
the pro-imperialist monarchy of the shah and the brutal despotism of his
hated SAVAK police agents. It opened space for workers and landless
peasants, for women, for oppressed nationalities, for youth — for
communists. It made possible the flowering of political space, debate,
and culture that to this day are far from being taken away.
“The weight of religious figures and institutions grew stronger and more
repressive as part of a political counterrevolution,” the party
resolution said, “stifling in the name of Islam the rebellion of the
most intransigent workers in the oil fields and factories, peasants on
the land, Kurds and other oppressed nationalities, women fighting for
equality, revolutionary-minded soldiers, students and other youth, and
the boldest communists.”
The SWP had a sister party, then called the Socialist Workers Party,
that participated in the Iranian revolutionary upsurge.
“The power and depth of that revolution is registered in the fact that
the clerical-dominated bourgeois regime has never been able to come
close to imposing suffocating political and cultural conditions of the
kind the Taliban inflicted on Afghanistan or the Wahabi monarchists on
Saudi Arabia,” the resolution said.
The clerical forces in Iran pushed aside weaker capitalist political
figures not capable of taking on the workers and fought to ensure there
were no inroads on capitalist rule. They organized gangs of thugs called
Hezbollah — the party of God — to attack workers and others who opposed
their rule.
As the capitalist regime sought to corral the workers at home, it
simultaneously moved to advance its interests against rivals elsewhere,
extending its counterrevolutionary sway against toilers in the region.
The formation of the bourgeois party Hezbollah in the early 1980s in
Lebanon, was a direct extension of the group of the same name in Iran
that led assaults on workers’ organizations and political opponents.
Today the Iranian rulers utilize the Guards, its Quds special forces,
Hezbollah and militias it funds and trains across Syria and Iraq. They
have been at the forefront of propping up the hated Bashar al-Assad
dictatorship, which has retaken large parts of Syria from those fighting
to end his rule. Iranian-backed militias aided the Iraqi government’s
expulsion of the Kurdish peshmerga from Kirkuk in October, dealing a
blow to the struggle of Kurds for national rights. These armed units are
now a formal part of the Iraqi Security Forces, reinforcing Tehran’s
influence in that country.
Iranian rulers’ wars bred protests
The wars waged by the Iranian rulers today come decades after the
consolidation of their counterrevolutionary rule. As fighting increased
in Syria, and Assad’s dictatorship lost ground, the rulers in Tehran
buttressed Hezbollah fighters with growing numbers of Iranian troops. At
first the clerics said little about these moves in Iran’s press.
The carnage among the troops was deeply class-divided. As the number of
workers coming home in body bags rose, Iran’s rulers erected monuments
to those killed in working-class neighborhoods. Supreme leader Ali
Khamenei and military figures visited the homes of families of those
slain. The government broadcasts TV ads urging youth to “give their
lives” in an effort to recruit more cannon fodder. The former mayor of
Tehran was threatened with indictment last April when he spoke against
military intervention in Syria and Yemen.
But opposition to the rulers’ wars and their deadly effect on the
working class grew, and was widely expressed during the recent actions.
Working people in Iran view the government’s intervention in Iraq, Syria
and elsewhere very differently from the war they waged against the
U.S.-backed invasion of Iran by the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein in
1980. The Iraqi rulers then sought to crush the Iranian toilers and
prevent them from advancing on gains made during the 1979 revolution.
Workers in Iran saw this war as their own, demanded military training
and volunteered to fight in massive numbers. The country’s Arab and
Kurdish population took part in the war effort. Working-class
mobilizations gave a brief second wind to resistance to the clerics’
counterrevolution. An account of the political course and activity of
the then-named Workers Unity Party of Iran — including its participation
in the defense of the revolution against the Iraqi assaults — can be
found in articles by Samad Sharif in New International no. 7.
The impact of capitalism’s wars, political repression and revulsion at
the dog-eat-dog values advanced by the rulers has always been decisive
in driving working-class action.
As workers respond to political questions, including the rulers’ wars,
many become interested in how to overturn capitalist rule.
The capitalist rulers and their meritocratic promoters see themselves as
more cultured than the working class. They share the view of Tehran
cleric Kazem Sadighi that workers are “garbage.” But the working class
has demonstrated that it is the political class. With the leadership
necessary millions of working people engaged in revolutionary struggle
and took power during the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and the Cuban
Revolution of 1959.
It’s that capacity to take political action that lay behind the uprising
in Iran and will fuel working-class mobilizations to come.
Related articles:
Kurds fight Turkish rulers invasion of Afrin in Syria
Protests worldwide say: ‘Hands off Kurds in Afrin!’
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