Five years of the Iranian revolution
Socialist Action1980sPhil HearseTranscribed or corrected by hand from the printed page.
By Phil Hearse
ALMOST EXACTLY five years ago the Shah of Iran was deposed in one of the most gigantic revolutionary upheavals since the Second World War. The Iranian revolution was greeted with tremendous enthusiasm by the left everywhere, which celebrated the downfall of the reactionary despot without qualification.
While the mass leadership of the anti-Shah movement was Islamic in inspiration, the left looked to the massive participation of the working class in the movement, and hoped that the Islamic leaderhip would be rapidly outflanked.
Five years later these hopes have been dashed. The Khomeini regime has ruthlessly carried through its objective of creating an 'Islamic Republic', crushing all opposition in its wake. But the course of the Iranian revolution was not merely an 'unfortunate' development, a 'disappointing' turn of events. Khomeini may have disappointed the hopes of large sections of the oppressed, but he has not betrayed the goals which he himself put forward. For the leadership of the movement which was at the heart of the anti-Shah forces was Islamic from the beginning. While the working class and poor peasantry often mobilised for anti-capitalist demands, nonetheless Khomeini's movement mobilised millions for explicitly reactionary objectives. The left's failure to understand that a movement which fights some aspects of imperialist oppression can also be a reactionary movement was the source of its hopelessly optimistic illusions.
The protest movement against the Shah, initiated mainly by the middle class and intellectuals in 1977, was joined by the working class and the poor in the summer of 1978. It was met with ferocious repression, leading to a series of massacres and new outbursts of protest, based on the 40-day cycle of mourning for the victims.
Between October and December 1978 huge sections of the working class, led by the oil workers, took strike action against the repression.
But by December the Islamic character of the movement was obvious. The marches on 10 and 11 December, which involved millions of people, confirmed beyond any doubt the immense popularity and the hegemony of Islam. The organisational backbone of the movement were the thousands of Islamic mullahs, tightly organised and controlling the movement. In fact, at the time of the December marches, Khomeini commanded an army of 90,000 mullahs and thousands of thelogical students and other clerics.
Behind the Khomeini leadership was a coalition of forces including not only the plebian masses and the mosque, but also a section of the bourgeoisie which had lost out under the Shah, together with the petty bourgeoisie based on the bazaar.
Order
The far left organisations, the Fedayeen and the Mujahadin, played a role in the final insurrection against the Shah, but were never mass forces. Politically they were ambiguous and confused vis-a-vis the Islamic leadership of the revolution, and in no position to provide an alternative.
During the insurrection at the beginning of 1979 the ruling class repressive apparatus — the army — almost completely collapsed. The only force of stability and 'order' which emerged was the Khomeini movement itself.
In January 1979 Khomeini set up the 'Council of the Revolution', a coalition of religious dignitaries and capitalist politicians, including Bani Sadr, Bazargan and Ghotzbadeh. Bakhtiar was nominated prime minister. The National Front, the main bourgeois political force, and the Stalinist Tudeh party supported the government. The inclusion of capitalist figures in the first Khomeini government was a sure sign of the direction in which Khomeini was going.
First he was going to establish a capitalist state, and tactically needed to court and neutralise that section of the bourgoisie which had supported the revolution. On the other hand, he intended to secure the establishment
of an Islamic capitalist state, with the ultimate power of the Shi'ite clergy, and thus behind the scenes was preparing for their eventual complete take over of the state.
But before dealing with his capitalist allies Khomeini had to deal with the elements in the revolution which had escaped the control of the clergy. The collapse of the old dictatorship had given rise to a multitude of political parties and associations. There was a flood of papers, organisations being formed and mass meetings. Workers strike committees, and then the factory shoras came into existence. Armed units of every political party kept their weapons. Trade unions revived in many industries. During 1979 and into 1980 strikes developed around demands for better wages and working conditions.
The various national minorities thrust forward their demands for autonomy. In hundreds of villages peasants occupied the land. And women began to organise for their demands.
In other words, from the fall of the Shah in Febuary 1979 through into 1980, sections of the workers and peasants began to make demands which went well beyond the programme of Khomeini. The anti-Shah struggle was beginning to show signs of growing over into a social struggle against the capitalist class.
Khomeini now moved to utilise the mass Islamic movement to crush this aspect of the struggle and to outmanoeuvre his capitalist 'allies'. In March 1979 the government organised an undemocratic 'referendum' on the establishment of an Islamic Republic. The referendum was won overwhelmingly by Khomeini, outflanking the call for a Constituent Assembly, and establishing instead an 'assembly of experts' dominated by the clergy.
As early as February 1979 Khomeini utilised Islamic thugs, the Hesbollahis, against the left and against the womens movement. A systematic attack on womens rights has been one of the most important features of the Islamic regime. The demonstration of International Womens Day in 1979 was viciously attacked. Thousands of women who defied the new regulations on wearing the veil were thrown out of their jobs or into prison.
One of the failures of the far left in Iran was to go along with the curtailment of womens rights, often on the grounds that Islamic dress etc represented an element of 'anti-imperialist' consciousness — rather than a central element of the deeply reactionary Islamic social code.
While crushing oppositional social and political movements Khomeini sought mechanisms to mobilise the masses around the objective of an Islamic Republic. The opportunity to pursue this project came with the occupation of the US embassy by students at the end of 1979, and the
taking of the US hostages. By supporting this side-show to identify anti-imperialist feelings with himself Khomeini whipped up support for the regime. By turning attention against the 'Great Satan' — the United States — attention was diverted from the social struggles at home and in particular the rising struggle of the Kurds and other oppressed nationalities.
The domination of the clergy was further consolidated by the launching of the Islamic Republic Party (IRP) which gave a powerful political framework for the clergy. The building of the pasdarans, the 'revolutionary' guards, as a parallel force of state repression helped to consolidate the clergy's grip. The regime thus established represented a specific form of capitalist dictatorship, one mediated through Islamic theocracy.
Conflict
Nominal sovereignty in Iran rests entirely with the faghih (Khomeini) — God's representative on earth. All institutions are subordinate to him. 'Upholding Islam' is the justification of any repression, any act of barbarity, in particular the oppression of women and the upholding of the Islamic social code.
To secure its own political domination the IRP was thrown into conflict with the sections of the bourgeoisie which has supported the anti-Shah movement. Thus in 1981 the IRP moved against Bani Sadr, by now president, removing him as commander-in-chief of the armed forces. Bani Sadr responded by denouncing clerical 'tyranny' and calling for mass resistance. He was backed by the Mujahdin, the 'Islamic-Marxist' organisation, which had thousands of supporters and now began a campaign of terror against the regime. The IRP responded with an even most random violent terror against all opposition.
The war launched against Iran by the Saddam Hussein dictatorship in Iraq in September 1980 was a war of one capitalist dictatorship against another. While the imperialist powers tended to welcome the attack, it was not organised by the United States or its allies. At the beginning of the war, there was in Iran an independent mobilisation of the working class against the Iraqi attack. In some of the Iranian border border towns elections to the shoras, in which the left were challenging the grip of the Islamic movement, took place on the very day of the Iraqi attack. Even Arab workers took up arms to defend themselves against the Iraqi attack.
At first most of the left organisations supported the line of an independent mobilisation against Iraq, with armed detachments fighting independently of the Khomeini regime, utilising this project both to fight Hussein's attempts to liquidate the gains of the revolution and to fight for the overthrow of Khomeini. But very soon the independent mobilisation was crushed by the Khomeini regime.
Huge pressure came on the left organisations to support the government. For example, the Mujahadin first supported an independent workers self-defence mobilisation, but then changed its line to supporting the regime. Once the independent mobilisation of the Iranian workers had been crushed the war became simply that of a struggle between two reactionary capitalist dictatorships, in which neither side could be supported. Moreover, the IRP and Khomein used the war effort to strengthen the army, militarise society and reimpose the domination of a reactionary state apparatus.
Sombre
Today there are no 'gains' of the revolution left to defend. The factory shoras have either been crushed or co-opted by the regime. The economic gains of the workers have largely been wiped out. The position of women has drastically deteriorated and the national minorities are under vicious attack. Khomeini has turned the war into one of Shi'ite expansionism. There is no reason whatever to support either side in this reactionary war which has caused over 250,000 deaths.
Five years after the overthrow of the Shah the balance sheet is a very sombre one. While the overthrow of the Shah was an immensely progressive and positive step, he has been replaced by a regime just as hostile to the working class, if less reliable for imperialism.
The course of the Iranian revolution was determined at a very early stage during the struggle to bring down the Shah in 1978-9. Whereas many sections of the working class and the oppressed mobilised for progressive and democratic objectives, given the weakness and virtual non-existence of an organised labour movement, these democratic and radical objectives never became the dominant or unifying themes of the revolution.
On the contrary, the only nationally organised mass movement which numbered millions and had explicitly reactionary objectives, was the Islamic Shi'ite movement of Khomeini. The left and the labour movement were never strong enough to promote really mass mobilisations against the Shah independent of the mosque.
The fate of the Iranian revolution shows that there can be no compromise with Islamic fundamentalism, even if fundamentalist movements struggle against capitalist dictatorships of a traditional bourgeois or petty-bourgeois character. For fundamentalist Islam merely prepares its own form of capitalist dictatorship — one decked out with an extreme reactionary social code derived from the seventh century.