Rise and fall of the 1979 Iranian Revolution: Lessons for today

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The following paper was prepared for and presented at the III Conferencia Internacional de La Obra de Car­ los Marx y Los Desafios del Siglo XXI (The Third Confer­ ence 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 after­ noon 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 origi­ nal draft are typographical, grammatical, or stylistic. Informational hyperlinks to the Iranian political per­ sonalities, parties, organizations, and places have been added. Some of these sources may contain errors or omissions. The original draft s still available at the In­ stitute of Philosophy’s website. — K.N. T est urban mass uprising since the 1917 Russian he February 1979 Iranian revolution was the larg­ 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 CIAMI6 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 au­ tocratic capitalist state, on the basis of an imperial Farsi (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 al­ most 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 6 SOCIALIST ACTION JANUARY 2018 David Burnett / National Geographic neighborhoods, workplaces, high schools and univer­ sities, and among peasants and oppressed nationali­ ties, 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 over­ threw 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, Ayatol­ lah 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 spokes­ person for the revolution. By 1983, he had used popu­ list 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 re­ sponse 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 ef­ fort in the 1930s, and it was resumed soon after the CIA-MI6 coup of 1953. The pace of capitalist develop­ ment picked up after the White Revolution in 1963 as it reformed class relations especially in the coun­ tryside in order to facilitated capitalist primitive ac­ cumulation 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 tradition­ al ally the Bazaar merchants, who were also part of the traditional absentee landowners. The Shiite hier­ archy opposed key planks of the White Revolution, in­ cluding the land reform, Health and Knowledge Corps (army draftees whose mission was to bring elemen­ tary health and literacy campaigns to the country­ side), 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 hier­ archy, bazaar merchants, and sectors of the old land­ (Left) Protesters carry wounded man to ambulance during 1979 Iranian Revolution.

Downing classes opposed the Shah’s regime. The Shah’s regime was also opposed by social classes and sectors that his own capi­ talist modernization program had created. Most importantly, this included the prole­ tariat; 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 Teh­ ran, 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 op­ posed to the Shah.

The bourgeois nationalist parties The Iranian capitalist class developed be­ latedly 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 Constitution­ al 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. Mo­ hammad Mossadegh, who became the prime minister on popular demand. In a period of the climax of con­ frontation 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. administra­ tion. When Washington and London joined forces to stage a coup in the summer of 1953, Mossadegh re­ fused 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 Mossade­ gh, never attained the same glory. The combination of dictatorship and a lack of a genuine program and strategy for a national democratic revolution frac­ tured it into a half a dozen small sects organized around various personalities. On the eve of the Feb­ ruary revolution, Shahpour Bakhtiar, one of the lead­ ing 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 na­ tionalist and Islamic sentiments, became Ayatollah Khomeini’s interim prime minister. His cabinet was made of assortments of nationalist figures who mere­ ly served as a transition belt for the establishment of the Islamic Republic.

Bazargan’s cabinet was forced out after it was dis­ covered 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 con­ fidants 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 Rus­ (continued on page 7)

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sian Social Democratic Labor Party, especially the Bolsheviks. In 1904, the first Iranian social demo­ cratic group (Hemmat) was founded in Trans­ caucasia. 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 lead­ ers of the Second International and helped the Bolsheviks smuggle Iskra into Transcaucasia. In June 1920, after the Bolsheviks called for the for­ mation 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 in­ dustries that had emerged. Notable was the print­ ers’ trade union. However, the political develop­ ment of the Iranian working class was largely influenced by the communists from the very be­ ginning. 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 develop­ mental trajectory of the working class, beginning with trade-union formations. The existence of autocracy also proved detrimental to the devel­ opment 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 for­ mation of trade unions or any other workers’ or­ ganization 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 Sultanza­ deh, the party’s principal leader and a leader of the Communist International in Lenin’s time, were ex­ ecuted during Stalinist purges.

As elsewhere in the world, the degeneration of the Russian Revolution and ascendancy of the Stalinist bureaucratic caste destroyed the Bolshevik revolu­ tionary program and strategy. Communist parties were transformed into reformist bureaucratic organi­ zations 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 be­ came more similar to the typical Stalinist parties after the Cold War began; that is, it never developed a so­ cialist program and strategy. Instead, like other Stalin­ ist 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 work­ ing 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 re­ gime. It put down militant labor strikes, including of oil workers in Aghajari, when it believed it was pos­ sible to wrestle concessions from the government. This is how Tudeh party was offered three ministe­ rial 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 gov­ ernment 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 Mos­ sadegh. 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 ur­ ban 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-ac­ tion program and strategy for radical social change. Thus, they remained vulnerable to the more sophisti­ cated 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 super­ seded 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 la­ bor movement. Meanwhile, the quickening pace of in­ dustrialization doubled the size of the labor force and gave it a measure of power in relationship to employ­ ers. At the same time, intensification of dictatorship limited trade-union development and institutional­ ized economic struggle. Combined, these factors con­ tributed to the development of the mass working-class movement in 1978-79 and after the February The Islamic Republic as counterrevolution 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 ac­ tion even under a system of dictatorship. Thus, Ira­ nian 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 historical weakness of the national bourgeoisie David Burnett / National Geographic (Above) The beginnings: Anti-Shah demonstrators protest killing of professor in 1978.

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 al­ lies 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 blood­ bath 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 par­ ties, 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, pro­ duced a situation of de facto dual power.

From the first day after the February victory, Kho­ meini’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. ProKhomeini 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 cen­ sorship that excluded, among other things, social­ ist 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 commit­ tees 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 move­ ment, 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 na­ tionality Turkmen live, on the southeastern coast of the Caspian Sea where peasants were taking over the land.

On March 30 and 31, Khomeini staged an undemo­ cratic referendum in which the population was given (continued on page 9, in “Poverty in Canada”)

SOCIALIST ACTION JANUARY 2018 7

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News and views from SA Canada website: http://socialistaction.ca legal tool to stop the project.

Premier Horgan argued that the $4 billion cost of halting the project, $2.2 billion already spent and $1.8 billion to re-mediate the affected area, would prompt an immediate 12 per cent increase in hydro pric­ es. This claim is either ignorant or dishonest. Such cancellation costs under government accounting rules Perhaps the worst is yet to come. Site C was launched by the previous BC Liberal government to provide mas­ sive power support for a prospective LNG industry in BC using fracking technology. Although one large project proposed by international hydrocarbon giant Petronas has folded, other big oil and gas companies have ex­ pressed passing interest. Horgan, as NDP Energy critic while in opposition, expressed his support for this wa­ ter polluting, environment wrecking, earthquake caus­ ing enterprise.

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The February 1979 Iranian Revolution was the largest mass urban uprising since the Russian Revolution 0f 1917. The event changed the relation of forces in the Middle East to the detriment of imperialism.