Islamic Fascism, or Zionist Fascism?

The label ‘Islamic fascism’ has been thrown around by the far right for a long time. Now Bush has labelled Hizbollah ‘Islamic Fascists. Why has Bush gone all the way to demonise Islam? This can only be to deflect attention from the sheer barbarism of the US and Israel exporting democracy via missile launches onto the poor people of Gaza and Lebanon. Who really deserves the label ‘fascist’ today?

Bush wants to upgrade the crusade against Islam into a new war against fascism

How convenient when the US is suffering setbacks in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the Israeli’s cannot destroy Hizbollah despite 10,000 troops, drones in the air and spies on the ground. Labelling Hizbollah fascist also serves to split Hizbollah from the rest of Lebanon in the UN ‘ceasefire’ deal that will see Lebanese troops replace the Israeli’s and Hizbollah between the Israeli border and the Litani River.

But there are obvious objections to Bush’s label as well as less obvious ones that need to be understood. Here is Juan Cole’s view of Bush attempt to invoke the label fascism to give new lift to the war on terror.

Cole shows that fascism cannot apply to Islam in even a superficial way. He says that Islam is inconsistent with fascist ideology. Hizbollah has no state to terrorise people and it has entered the Lebanese parliament to take advantage of democracy. Moqtada al Sadr in Iraq is participating in the Iraqi puppet regime that Bush would not possibly describe as fascist. Both are minorities in their national parliaments.

Cole doesn’t attempt to go into the underlying fallacies. Fascism arose out of deep crises in modern imperialist states in Europe in the 1920s where proletarian revolution was on the agenda. Fascism mobilised the declining middle class in a movement to smash the proletarian vanguard. In wars against fascist powers, workers in imperialist ‘democracies’ try to take control of the armed forces so that instead of shooting workers conscripted to fight for ‘fascist’ countries, they collaborate to turn their guns on all the ruling classes.

In Lebanon, it’s clear that Hizbollah has massive popular support despite Israeli attempts to split Christian and Sunni Lebanese from it. Hizbollah is a popular, democratic militia that is based in the Shia and Palestinian working class rather than trying to destroy it. It does not kill Israeli conscripts in the IDF except in defence of its military positions. Not does it kill prisoners of war or target civilians except in reprisal to Israeli bombs and missiles. It is the success of the ‘democratic’ struggle of Hizbollah to defend Lebanon from Israel’s invasions that Bush and Olmert find so threatening. Their response is to demonise it as fascist and insist that it be disarmed by UN forces.

Perhaps Hizbollah can be labelled ‘fascist’ by association with Iran?

The Shia theocratic regime in Iran is based on the small bourgeoisie of the bazaar and has some of the features of European fascism. There is a reactionary theocratic state and the ‘revolutionary’ guards are like fascist gangs used to attack any democratic opposition. To apply the term ‘fascist’ to characterise such a regime is imply that the main purpose of the capitalist state is to smash the proletarian revolution.Yet this regime is a reaction to a history of imperialist coups, puppet regimes and proxy wars and is not first and foremost a movement to smash the revolutionary threat of workers to overturn the semi-colonial capitalist state. However, in so far as such regimes do engage in the destruction of the revolutionary leadership of the labour movement by mobilising paramilitaries based on the middle class, they can be considered ‘semi-fascist’.

In wars between such semi-colonial authoritarian regimes (even when they are fascist) and imperialism, we must take the side of the semi-colonies, despite their reactionary rulers. Trotsky backed Haile Selassie against fascist Italy in the 1930s even though Haile Selassie appeared to be more reactionary than Mussolini. Trotsky was even prepared to support a form of the semi-fascism in Brazil against US imperialism. Nevertheless we know that only the workers have the class interest to fight imperialism to the death, and that sooner or later the national bourgeoise will resort to semi-fascism to smash the revolutionary proletarian movement. That is why in such wars we fight for the masses to overthrow their capitalist leaders or all political colours as a necessary condition of defeating imperialism.

Clearly, even if Bush’s label ‘fascism’ did apply to Hizbollah, Hamas, the Iraqi Shia resistance, as an extension of a ‘semi-fascist’ regime in Iran (which they are not) they are a reaction to imperialist oppression and are based on the anti-imperialist working class. They are not directed principally at smashing a revolutionary leadership but rather harnessing it to nationalist movement. Rather than condemning such Islamic movements or regimes, we have an obligation to defend them from imperialism while at the same time working to overthrow them by means of popular workers and peasants revolutions.

Why doesn’t Bush call the Zionist state Fascist?

All the features of European fascism, or semi-fascism, are much more obvious in Israel. But to recognise this would not only destroy the attempt to demonise Islam as fascist, it would expose and destroy the pretentions of lsrael to any democracy and furthermore to any right to exist on Palestinian land. Let us see how Bush’s arguments can be easily turned around in the case of Hizbollah, Hamas and the Iraqi Shia.

So George Bush thinks Hizbollah are now Islamic Fascists. What is it about them that makes them fascists? They are a liberation movement that arose out of the 18 year Israeli occupation of Southern Lebanon between 1982 and 2000. They contest the parliamentary elections and have 12 seats in the Lebanese parliament. They are a popular, democratic militia that does not engage in political assasinations. They are more popular and democratic than the militia that fought Britain for US independence over 200 years ago.

On the other hand, the Israeli occupying force Hizbollah drove out of Lebanon in 2000 was founded in blood and terror in 1948 causing the diaspora of millions of Palestinians, over 500,000 to Lebanon. The Zionists objective in invading Lebanon in 1982 was to smash the Palestinian resistance. Israel allied with the Christian Falange fascist militia and under the leadership of General Sharon slaughered up to 3000 innocent civilians, women and children in the refugee camps of Sabla and Shakira.

So George Bush thinks Hamas are Islamic fascists. Why is that? Hamas won the elections in what today passes for ‘Palestine’, that is, the ‘bantustans’ on the West Bank and Gaza where several million Palestinians are concentrated into refugee camps. No sooner had Hamas won the election, Israel supported by the US, blocked payment of funds necessary to keep the Palestinian National Authority running. Then, when the Hamas Members of Parliament voted to recognise Israel’s right to exist, Israel arrested the leadership, and bombed and invaded Gaza and parts of the West Bank.

So George Bush thinks that the Shia resistance in Iraq is Islamic fascist. Would this be the same Shia that was repressed by the US backed dictator Saddam Hussein for decades? The same Shia that live across the Iranian border and who were brutally killed in their 100s of thousands during Saddam’s 8-year war again backed by the US? The same Shia that rose up against Saddam after the 1991 Gulf war only to be betrayed by the US (UN) forces to Saddam’s murder squads? Now the same Shia who have formed a militia very similar to Hezbollah, with a broad social base in the South of Iraq, and which has joined the new Iraqi government? One doubts that George Bush would call his stooge government a puppet or fascist government.

Then of course George Bush thinks that the Nazi general staff behind the Islamic terror everywhere are the Iranian mullahs, Ahmadinejad in particular. The Iranian regime is a right-wing clerical regime that represses democratic opposition, but it is nationalist and anti-imperialist and even voted into power periodically. It originated in 1979 as a national revolution against the tyranny of the US backed Shah, himself put in power by the US when it overthrew the popular government of Mossadegh in 1953. It represents the backward national bourgeoisie of the bazzar against imperialist plundering and oppression. Whatever its rightwing reactionary clerical interests, it is nationalist and anti-imperialist and is only interested in suppressing democracy to retain the lead of the nationalist movement, not in smashing a non-existent working class socialist vanguard.

Zionist Fascism ‘sui generis’

George Bush throws the label fascism around to attempt to demonise and de-legitimise the Islamic resistance to Israel and imperialism in the Middle East. But in his ignorance he overlooks the one candidate for fascism in the Middle East, the US gendarme, the Zionist state of Israel.

If George Bush knew his history and geography he would know that Zionism was an extreme nationalist movement for the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine that did deals with both the Allies and the Ottomans in the first war, and both the Allies and the Axis in the second world war. Worse, the Zionists sacrificed the lives of many Jews to the Nazi’s in return for the Nazi recognition of a Jewish state in Palestine.

By the scientific criteria used by revolutionary Trotskyists to characterise fascist regimes in Europe between the wars, Zionist Israel can be considered a form of fascism ‘sui generis’ (fascism with special characteristics).


(1) First, like Fascism, Zionism was a reactionary response to extreme capitalist crisis in the epoch of imperialism.

The Zionist movement collaborated with the imperialist powers to found a national state for Jewish capital facing a crisis of profitability in the capitalist economies of Europe. It was an extreme reaction to capitalist crisis in the epoch of imperialism. Israel was intended to be the geographic territory for the recolation of surplus Jewish capital and labour. In this regard the special characteristic of Israel is that it was a new capitalist state founded in an epoch when no national capital could stand alone and so was necessarily forced into a semi-colonial dependence on imperialism. Clealy this marks Israeli fascism as ‘semi-colonial’.


(2) Second, like Fascism, Zionism abandoned democracy for repression of the vanguard of the working class.

The repatriation of Jewish labour to Israel in the 1930s contributed to the defeat of the European working class, particularly Jewish socialist workers. The collaboration with the imperialists forced many Jews to adopt Zionism against socialism. The founding of Israel by acts of war supported by imperialism in 1948 were at the expense of the existing Palestinian people who were terrorised, disppossessed, displaced and used as a reserve army of labour. In other words, Israel was founded on the suppression of the most democratic right of Palestinians, that of national self-determination. In this regard the special characteristics of Israel were that first, it was an indirect agent in the smashing of the revolutionary socialist movement in Europe, and second, as a new state its existence required the forced dispossession and enslavement of the Palestinian working class.


(3) Third, like Fascism, Zionism provided an extreme nationalist and racist ideology to justify its occupation of Palestine.

Zionism is a reactionary nationalism which holds that Jews are ‘different’ and cannot be assimilated. This made it a natural ally of the fascists who wanted Jews to be eliminated, and the enemy of the workers who when rejecting Zionism for socialism had much more success in evading the Nazi genocide. However, Zionism elevated Jews to a similar racial ‘superiority’ as the Nazis did to the ‘Ayrian’ race. In the occupation of Palestine, almost all land is reserved for Jews. Arabs who live inside the 1967 ceasefire line are denied land ownership and other basic rights. In the so-called ‘occupied territories’ the constant terror used against Palestinians reveals a Zionist racism towards peoples other than Jews. Those who consider this to be merely ‘apartheid’, even if worse than that of South Africa, are merely treating a symptom of the disease which is, in the final analysis, Zionism. This is more than a racist settler ideology, but a fundamental racist myth that Jews are ‘different’ and ‘superior’.

US Fascist? 

Those who argue that Zionism is fascism, without any attempt to justify this scientifically, fall into the same trap as George Bush. They label any reactionary regime as ‘fascist’. Ironically, some are now beginning to use this term to describe the USA of George Bush. Some may think that appropriate, yet in the USA today, unlike Israel, there is as yet no revolutionary threat to a regime in terminal crisis. The Minutemen are probably the precursor of fascist bands organised in response to undocumented migrant workers, but they are far from being a social force capable of repressing the millions of such workers. Until the labour movement begins to rise up and rejects ‘democracy’, we cannot talk about fascism in the USA.

From Class Struggle 68 August/September 2006

Why nuke Iran?

The reformist left is alarmed at Bush and his threat to nuke Iran. They think that Bush is crazy and the alternative is a return to ‘sanity’. Juan Cole says a war with Iran might “alarm” the US public and “could cost the Republican Party its majority in Congress”. Wow, maybe good old US democracy in the form of the Democrats will come to the rescue at home. This would be an interesting twist to Bush's logic, “You envy our democracy, OK we can drop it on you”.

The theme is that the neo-Cons represented by Bush, and by default, the whole Republican Party, are the problem here. After all how else to explain something as 'crazy' as nuking Iran's nuclear installations? Must be the neo-cons. No-one else wants to nuke Iran. The Russians and Chinese have too much at stake. The EU and even poodle Blair are reluctant. Even the Israelis cannot be so stupid (but they might do it if the price was right).

So why go to such lengths to destabilise the 'international community’? Because the neo-cons are crazy (most commentators) wrong (Fukayama) irresponsible (Tony Negri) arrogant elites (Chomsky) or oily Texans (Eisenhower). So wake up US public kick out the Republicans and elect the Democrats.

Are these people blind to what has driven US foreign policy for nearly 200 years? The US has gone to war, overthrown governments, used nukes on Japan, threatened to use them against Vietnam, Cuba and the USSR for years (it was called the Cold War).

What is doing in Iraq and threatens to do in Iran is par for the course. Are we saying that the US was led by crazy, stupid, ignorant Republican Presidents and ruling parties for its whole history? We can easily disprove this. Look at the record of Democrats Roosevelt, Johnson, Carter and Clinton. None of them reneged on wars, sanctions, blockades etc to pursue US imperial interests.

Imperialism is the root cause

Instead of looking for some 'aberrant' cause in the George W. Bush’s personality, new right ideology, cabals of crooks, etc to explain US actions in any particular case, let’s be parsimonious. Let’s try for a one size fits all explanation.

What about imperialism? This accounts for a lot. The US was the ‘first new nation’ to become a super-power able to rival and then dominate its competitors. In the post-WW2 period the US became the dominant global capitalist power occupying its rivals and quarantining the USSR and China.

Globalisation is really about US finance capital taking over the world economy. While no-one else can challenge it, it can do what it likes. There is no UN, or ‘international community’ except as a cover for the US policy of unilateral, pre-emptive assaults. Now it’s so powerful it no longer needs this cover and simply asserts its ‘rights’.

For the US the opportunity cost of running the world is greatest gain for least cost. Having ‘rogue’ states bucking the US is a potential cost in terms of resources and military enforcement. The US ruling class knows that its long term requirement for resources will meet resistance. It must neutralise that resistance in advance.

In the post-Cold War period it has shifted the target from the ‘reds’ who have conveniently opened up their countries to US corporate exploitation. It is not a priority to pursue North Korea as an minor irritant which might risk the investment in a dynamic capitalist East Asia. But they can still pull out the ‘red card’ when former Stalinist politicians like Putin get in the way of US corporate interests in what remains of the old USSR.

The main parts of the world that the US still needs to dominate are in Central Asia. Here client regimes are being established and pepper potted with US military bases. Resistance to US dominance in Asia is demonised as ‘radical Islam’. And the new military target is the potential WMDs of radical Islam. The US does not need another 9-11 to mount a nuclear strike on Iran – it is a continuation of 9-11 and the ‘war on terror’. Iran is already set up as an irresistible target.

Defend Iran’s right to nukes!

This demand is the one that most of the left find hard to swallow. Most people agree that it is wrong for the US or Israel to threaten to use nukes, but they can’t make the step from their to accepting Iran’s right to nukes. For us the issue has nothing to do with nukes as such. Nukes are merely weapons. True they are dangerous and potentially calamitous. But they are weapons essentially. The important distinction is nukes in the hands of imperialism, and nukes in the hands of oppressed countries.

We argue that oppressed countries have the right to defend themselves from imperialist military invasions with whatever weapons necessary. It seems only nuclear weapons are capable of deterring the use of nuclear weapons – e.g. Cuba 1960, Vietnam 1968, North Korea today. The problem therefore is imperialist nukes, not the nukes of oppressed semi-colonial countries. The more the workers in the imperialist countries are able to disarm the military machines of nuclear weapons at home, the less will it be necessary for oppressed countries to resort to the use of nuclear weapons to defend themselves from imperialism.

And just as we expect that the working classes in the imperialist countries will not sit idly by and allow their ruling classes to use nukes, we also expect that the worker, peasant and student masses in the oppressed countries will want to take the control of nuclear weapons out of the hands of the nationalist regimes that share in the exploitation and oppression of the working people. With nukes in the hands of popular militias their use will be determined not by ruling class military adventures but by the defensive needs of the working people alone.

From Class Struggle 66 April/May 2006

Defend the Iranian people! Support Iran’s right to a nuclear deterrent

On March the 18th, protesters will gather in towns and cities around the world to mark the third anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq, and the beginning of a war that still kills thousands of Iraqis every month.

This year the anti-war movement faces the threat of a new imperialist war, against Iraq’s eastern neighbour.

The United States is leading a campaign against Iran’s nuclear programme, and threatening the country with military action if it does not dismantle the uranium enrichment technology in its nuclear facilities.

Bush’s government used aggressive diplomacy to make sure that the International Atomic Energy Agency voted to send the issue of Iran’s nuclear programme to the United Nations Security Council, where the US has a permanent seat and immense influence. Bush has repeatedly said that is prepared to use violence to stop Iran’s nuclear programme even if he can’t get his way on the Security Council.

Iran’s government maintains that its nuclear programme is for peaceful purposes, and after the lies they told about Iraq’s phantom ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’ the US and other Western governments can’t be trusted when they say they are certain Iran is trying to make nuclear weapons.

But even if Iran is seeking nukes, what right do the US and its allies have to complain?

The US is a country with many thousands of nukes aimed at targets around the globe and a history of aggressive action against scores of other states. The Middle East’s neighbourhood bully and US ally Israel sits on an arsenal of several hundred warheads.

Both the US and Israel continue to build new nuclear weapons – what right do they have to condemn Iran if it wants to do the same?

Poll after poll shows that Iranians support their country’s nuclear programme, and believe that they have a right to nuclear weapons.

Even the pro-Bush media admits the popularity of Iran’s nuclear programme. Karl Vick, the Iranian correspondent for the pro-Bush, pro-war Washington Post, recently admitted that ‘Ordinary Iranians overwhelmingly favour their country’s nuclear ambitions, interviews and surveys show’.

Why are the Iranian people so keen on nukes?

Some racist commentators in the Western media have suggested that it is because they are a fanatical, bloodthirsty people, who long to fight a holy war against the US and Israel. But the Iranians know better than almost any other people the bloody reality of war. In the 1980s a million of them died defending their homeland against an invasion by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. At the time Saddam was an ally of the US, and the US had encouraged him to invade Iran because it wanted to topple the government there. More recently, Iranians have watched the US fight two bloody wars against Iraq. The war that began in March 2003 is estimated to have killed 150,000 Iraqis already. Now the Iranians hear Bush threatening attacks on their own country.

It is because they don’t want another war that the Iranians want nukes. Iranians realise that nukes would be a powerful deterrent against an attack by the US. They can see that the US invaded Iraq knowing that it had no Weapons of Mass Destruction, but backed away from attacking North Korea because that country had developed nukes.

A look at the whole history of the nuclear era bears out the Iranian point of view. The US says that nuclear proliferation is a threat to world peace, but the only time nukes have been used was before nuclear proliferation began, in the days when the US had a monopoly on the weapons. US President Harry Truman bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki not to defeat Japan, which was already about to surrender, but to intimidate the rest of the world, and especially the Soviet Union and Red China. The US wanted to use nukes to make sure it controlled the post-war world.

In 1950 the US was bogged down in a war against Korea, and General Douglas MacArthur, the commander of their army, drew up plans to explode thirty nukes inside territory held by the North Korean army. Millions of Koreans were saved from death only because the Soviet Union had recently developed its own nukes as a deterrent to US aggression. The US was forced to shelve MacArthur’s plan after the Soviets threatened to retaliate for any nuclear strikes in Korea. Again and again in later years, the Soviet nuclear deterrent saved vulnerable Third World countries from US aggression. Who can blame the Iranians for wanting the same deterrent?

Most Kiwis dislike George Bush and oppose the wars he has started

At the same time, though, many of us are uneasy about the prospect of another country developing nuclear weapons. If a poll were taken today it is likely that only a fraction of us would support Iran’s right to nukes. But we only think like this because we haven’t stood in the shoes of Iranians and other peoples threatened by US imperialism. We live on islands at the bottom of the world, far away from hotspots like the Middle East. We’ve never been invaded, and we don’t have the hostile army of a nuclear superpower camped on our doorstep. The Iranians don’t have the luxury of rejecting nuclear weapons, and we need to understand that. If we don’t, we risk taking the side of the US and Israel in a new war.

The Green Party has already fallen into the trap of supporting the US campaign against Iran, by urging that the UN be used to ‘restrain Iran’.

Others are in danger of going down the same path. In a debate on the Indy media website, one activist said that he wanted to show ‘solidarity with anti-nuclear sentiments among the Iranian and wider Middle Eastern population’. If he looks, he will soon find that the only people in the Middle East interested in campaigning against Iran’s nuclear programme are Israelis and the US armed forces. Anti-war activists should show solidarity with the Iranian people by supporting Iran’s right to nukes.

But solidarity with Iran doesn’t mean political support for the country’s government

Iran is run by a gang of Islamic fundamentalists who hijacked the 1979 revolution against the US-backed Shah. The fundamentalists took power by killing their secularist rivals on the left, and they use violence to stay in power. In the last few months, for instance, the Iranian police and pro-government paramilitary organisations have been attacking and detaining the bus drivers of Tehran. The bus drivers have been campaigning and striking for better conditions and union rights, and three hundred of them have been detained for this ‘crime’.

It’s not only trade unionists that the Iranian government attacks

Iranian women are regularly stoned to death for ‘crimes’ like adultery and pre-marital sex, and gay men are often hung if they are caught having sex.

We should support the Iranian nuclear programme, but we should also support trade unionists and other groups fighting against government repression.

Some Westerners argue that there is a contradiction between these two types of support. They say you can’t support Iran’s right to nukes without giving political support to the country’s government. What they ignore is the fact that Iranian people themselves support their country’s nuclear programme, at the same time as many of them oppose their country’s government. As Karl Vick notes, “Support [for the nuclear programme] runs deep in the population of 68 million, cutting across differences of education, age and, most significantly, attitudes toward the fundamentalist government”.

When we gather next month to mark the third anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, we should also protest against the aggression of the US and the UN against Iran. But we can only oppose Bush’s new war drive by taking the side of the Iranian people by supporting Iran’s right to a nuclear deterrent.

Leaflet issued by Workers Against the War Of Terror (WAWOT) February 2006

From Class Struggle 65 Feb/March 2006

For Permanent Revolution in Iraq

As the US-led occupation faces increasing problems the international left is debating how to help free Iraq from imperialism. The position of the CWG and its allies overseas is that the international labour movement should give aid to workers’ organisations resisting the US, because it is the Iraqi working class which alone has the ability to defeat the occupation. Many on the left disagree, and are developing political illusions in the Islamist and ex-Baathist forces which represent the Iraqi capitalist classes. The argument for aid to working class Iraqi organisations is complicated by the fact that the most important Iraqi revolutionary group, the Worker Communist Party of Iraq, is pursuing some very bad policies. In this exchange from an international e-list, a CWG member answers an attack on the WCPI, and puts the argument for critical support for this group, and for permanent revolution in Iraq.
 
Dear Comrade S,

This is the part of the debate where I bow out, mainly owing to my utter contempt for the Worker Communist Party of Iraq. I remember well, a few years ago, when I was introduced to them. I was newer (obviously) at the practice and theory of Marxism and revolution and
extremely eager to get my hands on, as you say, genuine non first world socialist thinking. I discovered that Mansoor Hekmat (the recently deceased icon of the WCPI) was actually a Londoner; the WCPI (which "I" must always be qualified; Iran been used by these folks as
well), despite what your friend says, have no real base in these countries. This is not entirely their fault, under both Saddam and the Mullahs respectively there has been no opening to function. (PS the CPI have been refused membership in the ruling council, so they aren't part of it, though they applied and were rejected).

Nonetheless, they operate in a fantasy world. They also are among the worst sort of sectarians and exemplify why we must discard the notion of a central command somewhere in an 'international' party or amalgam of parties. In Canada, just before the bombing of Iraq, they took to the streets with slogans calling for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. On International Women’s Day, they took to the streets with calls for the overthrow of the Islamic republic. The Canadian and North American states do not need such encouragement—who the Hell is that demand targeting? It only means that yet more 'revolutionaries' in this county are doing the bidding of the imperialists, sorry to say.

After the 9-11 attacks, both WCPI's demanded that they wanted to join the anti-war coalitions. Their price was that we elevate denunciations of Islam and call for secular socialist state formations to the top of our demands, along with our calls for peaceful solutions based on international law, and this was in a coalition that included religious groups, moderate Muslim forces and the like.

Considering many of them as individuals have been tortured at the hands of the Mullahs or at the hands of Saddam, I accept their human disposition to have a visceral contempt for anything that smacks of going easy on Saddam Hussein. However, they also are currently more
concerned with making certain Baathists are 'removed from their influence' over all spheres of Iraqi life, schools, police, etc.

Fighting the imperialist occupation to them is secondary, or at least not clearly primary. However, as Trotsky said (since you like him) if 'democratic Britain attacked 'fascist' Brazil, we would side with Brazil'. Ironically, though I'm no Trot, I'm upholding that basic principle
and the Hekmatian bunch are simply opportunistically doing whatever the flavour of the month is. I'm not interested in anything they have to say, their political experience has been one that makes the Islamists in Iraq currently look far more principled-- not an easy task at all… They are not the genuine voice of anything but themselves.

Dear Comrade M,

I think your comments on the Worker Communist Party and the situation in Iraq contain some serious factual errors. I'm not for a moment suggesting that these inaccuracies are deliberate, but I think they are worth challenging, partly because they reflect what I think are problems with your general political perspective.

You say that I was wrong to claim that the Iraqi Communist Party went into the Governing Council, but the party itself has confirmed joining the Council. Here is an excerpt from an interview an Iraqi Communist Party central committee member gave in July, and which the party has posted on its official website:
"After properly and carefully evaluating the grave situation in the aftermath of war, which is truly a national catastrophe, the Party leadership decided to accept the invitation to join the Governing Council....It must be emphasised that the party's aim has not changed: to ensure that the Iraqi people exercise their right to determine their political future with their own free will, and to bring about a speedy end to occupation, restoring Iraq's national sovereignty and independence, and building a free and democratic federal Iraq. This will be the main criterion for evaluating and judging the Governing Council." 
[full text at http://www.iraqcp.org/framse1/0030721Interviewsalam.htm

I think your claim that the Worker Communist Party does not have a 'real base' in Iraq is also untrue. A Communist Workers Group of New Zealand member recently traveled to the Middle East to meet some members of the WCPI. Unfortunately he couldn't get into Iraq, but he did have a chance to talk to Iraqi communists (most of them pro-Governing Council and thus hostile to the WCPI) who had recently spent time in the country. He got the strong impression that the WCPI was a force to be reckoned with on the ground in Iraq.

When I put this comrade's information together with the wealth of information on the WCPI's website and the reports that have made it to left news sites like indymedia and in some cases even into the bourgeois media, then I find it hard not to believe that the WCPI as well as the Organisation for Women's Freedom in Iraq and the Unemployed Workers' Union are not organisations of some size playing a significant role in the Iraqi left and workers' movement.

Consider some of these reports: "A Forum Organized by the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq at General Railway Company in Baghdad. On September 9, 2003, the OWFI organized a forum at the General Railway Company in Baghdad, which has over 11,000 employees all over Iraq. Two hundred employees attended the forum, which was chaired by Yanar Muhammad, the head of the OWFI, and Layla Muhammad, the activist who returned from Australia to join the struggle of women in Iraq..."

"Hundreds of toilers from al-Huda suburb in Baghdad join the Worker-communist Party of Iraq. Al-Huda is a residential suburb in the center of Baghdad where hundreds of homeless families live. The inhabitants of this area are deprived of the basic requirements of making a living. On top of that they are pressured by the USA administration and local police to evict the area. Two weeks ago, the police forces attacked people in this area and arrested 8 of them.

They went to all parties and institutions seeking their release, with no yield. When the Organisation of Baghdad of the Worker- communist Party of Iraq learned about their situation, it decided to involve and solve their problem. The CWP Iraq was able to release the
arrestees..."

"The Worker-communist Party of Iraq’s Forces Clash with a Crime Gang in Baghdad. On September 19, 2003, while patrolling the neighborhood where the office of the Worker Communist Party of Iraq is located on Al-Rashid Street in Baghdad, the Party’s forces clashed with an armed gang. While shooting at the security guards protecting the governmental buildings in the area and injuring one man, the gang intended to loot shops and governmental buildings. Under heavy fire, the gang was forced to escape the area..."

"The Workers’ Council of the North Oil Company Leads a Protest against Police misconduct. On September 21, 2003, the workers of the North Oil Company in Kirkuk organised a protest demonstration against the abusive conduct of the Police toward the company’s employees.

.Muhammad Raadi Oraybi, an activist from the Northern Oil Company’s workers council, was detained for 6 hours for standing against the despotic practices of the police. Raadi’s arrest sparked off a protest action in which more 400 workers took part..." From the English-language section of the WCPI's site (http://www.wpiraq.org/english/)

More recently the WCPI has been involved in an important strike by armed workers at the Brickworks at Nahrawhan near Baghdad.

You try to use Trotsky's hypothetical war between Brazil and Britain to criticise the WCPI's call for the overthrow of the Iranian theocracy and (in the lead up to the invasion of Iraq) the regime of Saddam, but nothing Trotsky said can be used to justify political support for either regime.

Using a hypothetical extreme example to challenge his audience, Trotsky said that in the event of a war between near-fascist Brazil and bourgeois democratic Britain workers around the world should prefer the military victory of Brazil, because Brazil was a semi-colonial country whose government was ultimately a product of imperialism, Britain was the world's number one imperialist power, and a victory for Brazil would weaken imperialism.

But Trotsky never for a moment suggested that workers anywhere should give a modicum of political support to the government of Brazil, or to any other national bourgeois government or party anywhere in the semi-colonial world. Trotsky said that workers should aim their guns
in the same direction as the Brazilian bourgeoisie so that they could defeat this bourgeoisie in the process of defeating imperialism. Defeating the imperialists and defeating the local capitalists were not two distinct 'stages' - they were telescoped into a single task.

Trotsky's whole politics was built on his theory of combined and uneven development, which had as one of its corollaries the argument that capitalist classes in the colonial and semi-colonial world were too weak to stand up to imperialism. Colonies and semi-colonies could only be broken out of the circuit of global capitalism by socialist revolution. Brazil vs Britain was a hypothetical case, but Trotsky and his followers put his argument into practice during both the Russian and Spanish revolutions.

In 1917, for instance, Trotsky refused to give any political support to the national bourgeois Kerensky government established after the February revolution (before the war Russia was regarded by the Bolsheviks as an imperialist country, but by 1917 it was surely effectively a semi-colony of the West).

When White Russians in the service of imperialism attempted a coup to get rid of Kerensky's government the Bolsheviks gave Kerensky military support -pointed their guns in the same direction as the Kerensky government's - without abandoning their call for the overthrow of this government by the workers. Only months after crushing the White coup they crushed Kerensky's government and put the soviets into power.

I'm sorry to go on at such length about Trotsky and 1917, but I think it's important that Trotsky's strategy of permanent revolution is distinguished from the strategy which you appear to support and which he rejected, which is that of political support for and a political alliance with national bourgeois parties and governments.

The WCPI is right to call for the overthrow of the Islamic regime in Iran by the workers of Iran. The WCPI is talking, after all, about a brutal dictatorship that condemns half its population to a medieval existence as third-class citizens, and has locked up or simply executed tens of thousands of leftists and trade unionists. Who would want to support the continued existence of such a regime? Even the Stalinist left, which was deeply implicated in the coming to power of the Islamists, now calls for the overthrow of the regime.

Third Worldist politics have led you to adopt a position which no leftist organisation inside the real Third World country of Iran would today touch with a barge pole. The situation is no different when we turn to Iraq. In my experience, the Iraqis living in Auckland simultaneously wanted to overthrow Saddam and opposed the US invasion. There was no contradiction here – it was well-understood that US imperialism had put Saddam into power in the first place, and had kept him in power by collaborating with him to defeat the workers' uprisings that believe it or not saw soviets established in parts of Iraq after the First Gulf War. It was also understood that Saddam's rotting regime was completely incapable of stopping the US - only the mobilisation of the people who despised Saddam could defeat the US.

Where the WCPI goes wrong is in refusing to give any support at all to Third World capitalists resisting imperialism militarily. I quote from a recent CWG leaflet:
"The Worker-Communist Party condemns Islamist and Baathist fighters against the US as no better than the US itself. But by taking this attitude, the Party turns its back on tens of thousands of young workers who fight under the leadership of local capitalists. If US troops are shooting into a crowd, the people in the crowd have the right to shoot back, even if they happen to be Muslims. If a US chopper is shooting up an Iraqi village, an Iraqi has the right to
shoot it down, even if he belongs to the Baath Party. The rank and file of the resistance has to be won from its rotten leadership, not condemned for the policies of that leadership.

The bankruptcy of the Worker Communist Party’s position was shown after the US invasion in March – the Party refused to support the resistance to invasion and, desperate for some sort of ‘solution’, ended up calling on the UN to intervene to save Iraq."

I agree with you that the WCPI has a too-extreme attitude to Muslim groups in the anti-war movement, but I think you are quite wrong when you argue that the flaws in the WCPI's position 'exemplify why we must discard the notion of a central command somewhere in an 'international' party or amalgam of parties'. On the contrary, the WCPI is a screaming example of the need for an international party which can bring comrades from different regions
together to analyse and criticise each other's positions.

The WCPI is a prisoner of Iraqi history: it was formed as a reaction to the stagist politics of the Stalinist Iraqi Communist Party, but its founders never got a handle on the reasons for the political degeneracy of the ICP. In the 1970s they saw the ICP (encouraged by Moscow, Castro etc) go into government with Saddam, and were rightly disgusted. But they wrongly concluded that the ICP's Stalinist politics of political alliances with the national bourgeoisie was the
logical consequence of Leninism and 1917, and so they threw Bolshevism out with the bathwater and went for ultra-leftism instead.

Because of the isolation of Iraq and the immense power of the ICP-Moscow propaganda machine, the WCPI's founders never had access to the original rejection of stagism which Lenin and Trotsky made in 1917. They equated Stalinism and Bolshevism. The WCPI went into exile in Western countries where the self-described Trotskyist groups had mostly long since abandoned the theory of permanent revolution (it's no coincidence the WCPI is polemicising against a Cliffite group). It's not surprising the exiles didn't see much to alter their impression of Bolshevism.

But the WCPI's mistakes could potentially have been avoided by the criticism of groups that were still loyal to the politics of 1917. Now the WCPI's membership in the global anti-war movement provides the ideal opportunity for us to simultaneously work with them and criticise them in an effort to improve their politics. That's the idea behind our attempt to get international solidarity with the WCPI and the organisations it has founded going.

At the end of the day, the WCPI and the work it is doing in Iraq are surely important enough to deserve solidarity and assistance, even if the arguments get nowhere. It is surely perverse for a socialist of your obvious sincerity to have friendly words for Mugabe and Mahathir but 'utter contempt' for a socialist organisation on the frontline of the resistance to US imperialism.


From Class Struggle 53 November 03/January 04

Is Iran next on Bush's Hit List?

From Class Struggle 51 July-August 2003

Iran is now a prime target of Bush’s administration. The Islamic Republic is facing mounting domestic opposition. The US is openly supporting the opposition. But will it become the next item in Bush’s ‘evil axis’ hit list? We examine the historical causes of the current crisis in Iran, and put forward our view on how workers can defeat the US plans for ‘regime change’, and at the same time overcome all the barriers to the formation of a secular, socialist republic in Iran. 
 

In Iran today the situation is very unstable. Since 1999 there has been a gradual build up of opposition to the Islamic Republic headed by Ayatollah Khamenei. In the last weeks tens of thousands of students have taken to the streets in opposition to the privatisation of the universities. In Tehran, Shiraz, Mashhad, Esfahan, and many other cities, they have been joined by workers protesting the shortages of water, electricity, prices rises, unpaid wages and poverty. Both students and workers are calling for the end of the Islamic Republic. The mounting unrest is being used by the US to demand a “regime change” from within. Not only has Bush named Iran as one of the rogue states in the ‘axis of evil’, after the victory in Iraq he has made direct threats of unilateral US intervention to stop the development of nuclear weapons in Iran. Not to be outdone, France is arresting and jailing exiled members of the Mujahadeen, a radical militant Iranian organisation. 

Many Iranians after 24 years of Islamic rule do want a ‘regime change’.Some capitalist and petty capitalist elements believe that the US can rescue them from the Islamic Republic and reinstall a Western-aligned democratic regime. But the working masses are strongly opposed to US intervention.Others want the Islamic regime to become more moderate and democratic without reorienting itself to the West. What do we make of these positions?

Whatever is wrong with the Islamic Republic, ultimately imperialism is to blame.So the US cannot be the solution whether it intervenes directly or not. Nor has the crisis of the regime be solved by the politics of religious fanaticism. As we shall see, the very nature of the Islamic Republic as a clerical regime prevents it from reforming itself.We shall show that the unpopularity of the government flows directly from its origins in 1979 as a counter-revolutionary regime that rode to power on the backs of an insurgent working class and poor peasantry, only to turn on the masses and smash its leading organisations. That is why the demand “Down with the Islamic Republic” is becoming the catch cry on the streets with the students and workers. There can be no compromise between the interests of the emerging mass movement and the repressive Islamic regime. 

To understand why this is happening today, and why the opposition in Iran poses a potential threat not only to the regime, but also to the US and the other imperialists, we have to go back to the 20^th century history of Iran.

[Much of the material in this article is drawn fromthe Worker-Communist Party of Iran’s webpage: http:///www.wpiran.org/ and “Khomeini’s Capitalism: the imperialists close in”inRevolutionary Communist Papers No 6 Theoretical Journal of the Revolutionary Communist Tendency (Britain) June, 1980.]

British Imperialism’s semi-colony.

[Semi-colonies are oppressed countries whose political independence does not mean that the national bourgeois has any control over the economy which remains dominated by imperialism. They can include neo-colonies like India, but in some cases because they emerged out of existing non-capitalist empires like Turkey and Iran, do not originate as capitalist colonies.]

After the Ottoman Empire collapsed during WW1, British and French imperialism divided up the Middle East and created artificial semi-colonies or client regimes with puppet rulers. Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Syria, Saudi Arabia etc were all born as the stunted children of imperialism who were destined to remain dependent and could never grow up so long as imperialism ruled. (We must not leave out Israel – in the Balfour Declaration of 1917 the British gave the Jewish capitalist class the green light to settle in Palestine.)The children were stunted because they were trapped in an international division of labour dominated by the imperialist powers, a division which made them exporters of cheap raw materials and importers of manufactured goods. Thus the semi-colonial capitalist ruling classes of the Middle East remained dependent on imperialism and could not follow the path of the US or Japan to economic independence. 

Client regimes were delegated the task of managing the dependent semi-colonial development of capitalism so that the imperialists got the lion’s share of the oil and other wealth created by the workers in the region.While the local capitalists had an interest in negotiating with imperialism for as big a slice of the profits as they could get, they had to collaborate with imperialism for their class survival. Whatever their differences, both imperialists and the national ruling classes had a common interest in profiting from the super-exploitation of workers and poor peasants. 

The difficulty for imperialism was to find semi-colonial regimes that could extract maximum super-profits without being overthrown by the masses. Because the national bourgeoisies were weak, they had to rely on regimes that formed alliances with the petty capitalists and to some extent the working class under the guise of ‘populism’ or ‘patriotic alliances’. Thus when the poor masses resisted their super-exploitation and demanded independence from imperialism, these regimes pretended to be anti-imperialist, and aided by reformist working class parties, made minor concessions to the masses to try to keep them quiet. When the imperialists applied too much pressure this strategy failed and workers threatened to break through the controls of the reformists and overthrow the state.The regimes then had to appeal to traditional petty capitalists as a class base for radical nationalist regimes that posed as anti-imperialist, but whose interest was ultimately to protect national capital by eliminating the threat posed by the revolutionary masses. Not until the masses organised independently of both the bourgeoisie and the petty capitalists would there be a class alliance strong enough to win the poor masses, including the impoverished petty capitalists, to a class alliance that could liberate these semi-colonies from imperialism’s deathly grip.

Iran’s 20^th century history followed this pattern. Under Reza Shah in the 1920’s and 1930’s Iran’s economy was dominated by Britain and the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (ADIOS). [AIOC later became British Petroleum, now selling itself as Beyond Petroleum, and soon to be Beautiful People.]
 

The Shah attempted to negotiate a better share for the weak Iranian bourgeoisie. Because Iran had little private capital, he used the state to develop the domestic economy, imposing import controls and creating public monopolies in sugar, tea, cotton, jute, rice and carpets.He then built large scale manufacturing plants for textiles, food processing, forestry and mineral production. But inefficiencies and low quality made these industries unprofitable.When the Shah failed to get financial support from Britain in the 1930’s to prop up the stagnating economy he turned to an alliance with Hitler. To secure the oil fields and a supply line to the Soviet Union the British and the US invaded Iran in the south, and the USSR in the north. This invasion brought to an end this first phase of Iran’s attempt at insulated economic development. 
 

The war and its aftermath gave a boost to economic protectionism from another quarter. From 1941 to 1951 the wartime economy encouraged the petty bourgeoisie of shopkeepers and small industry to expand to meet the domestic market, particularly the small businesses supplying the occupying military. But there was no large investment by imperialism to allow the economy to take off. This drove sections of the bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie to adopt a more radical ‘economic nationalism’.[Most semi-colonies experienced this expansion of the domestic economy under wartime conditions because they had to substitute domestic production for imports and got good prices for their exports from countries at war.] 
 

At the same time the working class which had begun to develop under the Shah’s protectionist policy in the 30s continued to expand during and after World War Two and developed a strong anti-imperialist sentiment. [At the turn of the century 90% of the labour force worked in agriculture. By 1945 this hadfallen to 75%, in 1966 it was 47% and 1980 less than 40%. By 1920 there were at least 12 unions with a total membership of over 20,000. Many of these were affiliated to the Red International of Trade Unions. In the mid-1940s the Tide-controlled Central Council of Unified Trades Unions (CCUTU) had more than half a million members who marched under its banner on May Day 1946.]
 

The rise of Tudeh

Now the national bourgeoisie had once more to steer a course between imperialism and the anti-imperialist sentiment of the masses. It tried to advance its national class interests by riding the anti-imperialist wave but still keeping the exploitative relationship between the bourgeoisie and working class intact. It was helped in this task by the Stalinist organisations that dominated the political leadership of the working class. Rather than mobilise workers and poor peasants to overthrow the bourgeoisie, the Communist Party took the Stalinist view that Iran had to first develop as an independent capitalist country before it could become socialist. This was a convenient theory that allowed it to ally itself with the national bourgeoisie against imperialism to create a ‘democratic’ Iran as a ‘friend’ of the Soviet Union. But the price of this policy was subordination of the working masses and the nation minorities to the bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie and to the inevitable counter-revolution. 
[Trotsky condemned such patriotic popular fronts as leading to the destruction of the working masses at the hands of the national bourgeoisie and imperialists. He called for workers united fronts independent of the bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie that could take the lead in the fight against imperialism and carry on to overthrow the national bourgeoisie as a ‘permanent revolution’. This was what happened in Russia, and had been prevented in China in 1927 by the Stalinist leadership’s popular front with Chiang Kai Chek (see Class Struggle # 46)]

As we have seen, the working class grew rapidly in Iran along with capitalist industry.It was mainly under the influence of the Stalinist Tudeh party. The Tudeh party was formed in 1941 by the survivors of the Communist Party of Iran. It quickly became the strongest force in the working class. But its policies were always tied to the USSR and to the Iranian bourgeoisie. While the USSR occupied the north of Iran, Tudeh supported the national independence movements of the Azerbaijanis and the Kurds as a means of prolonging Soviet influence and gaining oil concessions. By 1945 both Azerbaijani and Kurdish republics had been formed with the support of the Soviet troops and Iraqi Kurds. But once the interests of the USSR had been served the Tudeh was prepared to sacrifice the national rights of the minorities and the interests of the working class.

The Tudeh joined the government of the bourgeois liberal Prime Minister Qavam in January 1946. He promised oil concessions to the Soviets if they would withdraw their troops. The Soviets did so and the new republics were crushed. [The Azerbaijani republic was invaded in December 1946 and its leaders imprisoned or executed. The Kurdish republic fell soon after and its leader Qadi Muhammed was executed.] Qavam later reneged on his promise. The sell-out of the oppressed nationalities was hailed by the Tudeh as a victory. 

Now Qavam could turn the screws on the Tudeh. He formed the Iranian Democratic Party (IDP) representing the landed aristocracy, the bourgeoisie, and a government-sponsored union. Tudeh joined an IDP-led government, providing three cabinet ministers. When the oil workers of Khuzestan staged a general strike in July 1946 and several casualties occurred on both sides, and the British Labour government threatened to invade Aberdan, the Tudeh general secretary Reza Rusta, who was also secretary of the CCUTU, [See note above] went to Abadan and persuaded the workers to call off the general strike without any of their demands being met. The betrayals of the national minorities and workers led to a falling off of Tudeh support at a time when the working class was still on the rise. Even so, its next task was to direct the working class in behind the economic nationalist policies of Mossadegh.

Nationalism serves US imperialism

Between 1949 and 1951 a series of strikes culminating in a general strike hit Iran. The Shah appointed Mossadegh to ‘re-establish social order’. As one Senator at the time observed:

“Class tensions have reached such a point that they threaten the whole fabric of society…The only way to save Iran is to unite all classes against the foreign enemy”. (RCP p 12).

Like the Shah before him, Mossadegh was an economic nationalist, but he went further in his attempts to insulate the Iranian economy. By 1949 he saw the need to harness petty bourgeois and worker support and formed the National Front for a sweeping nationalisation of industry. He calculated that Britain would even tolerate the nationalisation of the IAOC so long as it needed Iranian oil and could make a profit.

Mossadegh wasted no time in nationalising foreign industries including the IAOC. This suited the US which welcomed the loss of its rival’s oil assets.However, the IAOC called Mossadegh’s bluff, boycotted Iranian oil and shifted its operations to Iraq and Kuwait. Iran did not own a single oil tanker and its oil production fell to near zero. This crisis forced Mossadegh to retreat to his core support in the national bourgeoisie and working class against the Shah and the landed aristocracy.He took on more powers and sought to transfer control of the army from the Shah to the Prime Minister – i.e. himself. 

This alarmed the US which saw the mobilisation of the poor working masses and the USSR gaining influence in Iran as a threat to its interests. When the Tudeh joined the National Front in 1951 in support of Mossadegh’s nationalisation plans, this was too much for the US. It started to move against him. The petty bourgeois were already opposed to Mossadegh’s radical plans for land reform and modern education. So the US cut off his loans and isolated him further by offering bribes to the petty bourgeois parties in the National Front. 

“Most of the middle class and petit bourgeoisie soon realised that mass mobilisations against imperialism would eventually threaten their interests. They opted for a deal with imperialism rather than countenance any radical threat to their class position; Imperialism was quick to oblige. As soon as oil production was restarted massive American loans flowed into Iran. Economic policy once again fell into line with the requirements of imperialism” (RCP p 8). 
 

The CIA and the army replaced Mossadegh in 1953 and the workers organisations controlled by the Tudeh then paid the price of the Stalinist popular front with the national bourgeoisie, becoming the victims of the Shah’s anti-worker policies.[The Shah banned trades unions and imprisoned many militants. New labour laws in 1959 allowed state-run unions but no right to strike combined with paternalist social insurance and profit sharing schemes. The Shah’s secret police SAVAK had spies in workplaces and employed thugs to break strikes.] They had learned the hard way that the bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie were more afraid of a insurgent working class and a poor peasantry, than of imperialism. The dominant US imperialism moved to bring the national regime back into line with its economic interests, and under the Shah, the bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie also fell into line. Thus ended of the second phase of economic nationalism. 
 

The Shah as US imperialist puppet

The Shah Pahlavi was installed and ruled Iran for 26 years as one of the many US–friendly dictators in the region. He instituted the ‘white revolution’ designed to eliminate the social barriers of pre-capitalist classes, such as the landlords and the petty bourgeoisie, to modern capital accumulation. His aim was to reorganise the state along efficient lines to allow the free flow of capital. This was not to be another phase of economic nationalism but rather state-assisted capitalist industrialisation dominated by imperialism.The state would invest in new ventures and then privatise them once they were profitable. 

State investment in the economy grew rapidly in heavy industry notably the Esfahan steel mill, Arak heavy metals factory, Tabriz tractor plant, Ahwaz Aluminium works and the Khuzestan petrochemicals complex. [RCP page 8]

Public spending on health, arms etc jumped from 27% in 1971 to 45% in 1976.ehi The traditional bazaar moneylenders were replaced by a state central bank and state banks in joint ventures with British, Dutch and Japanese banks. This period of rapid growth and expansion was possible only on the back of rising oil revenues to cover Iran’s balance of payments deficits. 

The Shah opened up Iran to direct foreign investment and super-exploitation. Rising oil revenues fuelled economic development until the mid-1970’s. Growth rates went from 9% in the 1960s to over 35% in the early 1970s. National capital expanded into the production of consumer goods such as radios, refrigerators and cars for the domestic market. Foreign capital leaped over the import controls and invested heavily in rubber, chemicals, drugs, mining and aluminum.

While the Shah’s agricultural reforms failed to convert the landlords and peasants to capitalist farming, they created millions of displaced peasants.By 1977, Iran, which had been self-sufficient in food production in the 1950s, had to import 16% of its rice, 20% of its wheat and 25% of its meat. By the mid 1970s the increasing dependency on oil revenues left Iraq’s economy heavily indebted to foreign investors and unable to meet its debt repayments. Iran’s inability to escape the trap of imperialist super-exploitation by state-aided foreign investment in industry and agriculture was now obvious in its ballooning debt crisis.

The classes that bore the brunt of this crisis were the workers and poor peasants. The Iranian working class grew from 2.7 million in 1956 to 4.7 million in 1976, and the greatest increase was in the public sector. The failed agricultural reforms forced peasants off the land into the shantytowns around the cities. At the same time a shortage of skilled workers saw tens of thousands of foreign workers employed. Low productivity led employers to force workers to increase their output. In the 1970s opposition began to mount against the rising exploitation of the workers and peasants. More and more illegal strikes and go-slows occurred despite the harsh repression. The regime made concessions to skilled workers such as pay increases and profit sharing, but failed to stem the rising militancy of the working class. By 1978 the Shah was prepared to met this militancy with state force which in turn only produced more strikes culminating in mass demonstrations and the oil workers’ strike of October 1978.Here was a massive working class and poor peasantry, led by a section of militant state workers, ripe for social revolution. 
 

Meanwhile, what had happened to the petty bourgeoisie, that backward class which the Shah tried to eliminate as a social barrier to modern capitalism? As we have seen, the ‘white revolution’ failed to modernise agriculture. The landlords retained their dominance in the countryside. The bazaar which brought together small traders, craftsmen and businessmen, survived and grew, but increasingly came under threat from the Shah’s modernising policies.The petty bourgeoisie suffered at the hands of the foreign banks and resented the Shah’s plans to replace the bazaars with supermarkets.The Islamic mullahs as a traditional petty bourgeoisie were aligned to the bazaars. So the Shah’s attacks on the bazaars challenged the whole social system of which the mosque was the centre. As the economic crisis further undermined the economic existence of the bazaar, from the early 1960s opposition to the Shah rallied behind the Ayatollah Khomeini. 
 

So along with the emerging working class and poor peasantry, the petty bourgeoisie had became a force for change. However, rather than follow the course charted by the workers’ interests, the anti-Shah movement was taken over by a petty bourgeois radical Islam with its popular appeal to class unity against the repressive regime.How was it that the modern, expanding, and militantly led working class allowed itself to be dragged backwards into the reactionary Islamic Republic?
 

The left and the ‘revolution’
 

The ‘Islamic revolution’ has long been a highly contentious event for the revolutionary left. The basic sequence of events is clear enough. The Shah was overthrown by a bloc of the national bourgeoisie, the petty bourgeoisie, workers, landlords and poor peasants in which the masses provided the troops, and the Islamic leadership, the officers.The bourgeoisie wanted to take back more control over the economy from imperialism but was too weak to do this alone. The petty bourgeoisie and the landlords were desperate to prevent the Shah’s reforms from wiping them out. They rallied to the Islamic opposition. The workers and poor peasants mobilised in their millions to get rid of the repressive regime. They lent their support to what they believed to be a genuine national revolution. 
 

The first phase of the revolution between 1979-81 was dominated by the workers movement which easily outweighed the petty bourgeois and bourgeois forces. The mass power of the insurgent workers owed nothing to the Tudeh which backed the Shah until September 1978! 

Khomeini had to make concessions and posture as an anti-imperialist to keep the masses’ support. But the revolution while it had the potential to be progressive and lead to socialism, rapidly turned into a counter-revolution.Why? Its ‘anti-imperialism’ was more apparent that real.Its real purpose was to subordinate the revolutionary masses to both the Iranian bourgeoisie and the imperialists. But to do this it had to keep the only revolutionary classes, the workers and poor peasants, on side. This required the collaboration of the political parties that represented those classes.To achieve this the regime had to convince the mass membership of these parties that it was genuinely ‘anti-imperialist’ and ready to break with imperialism and establish an independent, democratic, Iran.

The main parties of the left subscribed to the Stalinist or Menshevik position that the Shah’s pro-Imperialist dictatorship had to be overthrown and an independent bourgeois democratic nation created before the conditions for socialism could be built. As we have seen, this stagist view of history served the interests of the national bourgeoisie, but also imperialism, because no semi-colonial nation can become independent of imperialism unless it is lead by a workers and poor peasant’s revolution. 

[Tudeh’s collaboration with the Islamic regime was a total capitulation.It called Khomeini and co ‘progressive clergy… struggling for freedom and democracy’. Even after Khomeini turned on the workers, closing down party offices and banning left newspapers,the Tudeh was silent. It backed the reactionary Islamic constitution of December 1979. So slavish was its backing of the clergy that the Tudeh general secretary was contemptuously referred to as ‘Ayatollah Kianouri’.]
 

The main parties of the left – the Tudeh, the Mujaheddin and Fedayeen all supported the Islamic leadership of the revolution. [The two guerillaist groups the Mujahedin (Muslim Marxists) and Fedayeen (Castroists) believed that guerilla action could ‘detonate mass action’, but that action was still limited to a bourgeois democratic stage with an ‘anti-imperialist united front’ of all classes.]
 

They collaborated with the Islamic Revolution in the belief that it was more progressive than the Shah’s regime. But this was never the case.Khomeini’s forces were based on the Mosque and the Bazaar, the two main institutions that represented the surviving pre-capitalist social relations in Iran and whose adaptation to Iranian capitalism was to foster petty capitalism or a protectionist national state-capitalism.Inevitably, because of its weak position, the bourgeoisie had to rely upon the petty bourgeoisie Islamists to renegotiate a deal with imperialism. Initially this relationship was indirect and mediated by a ‘Bonapartist’ Islamic regime between 1979 and 1981. 
 

Bonapartism is a form of bourgeois state named after the French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte where power is held temporarily by a strong leader or powerful clique standing ‘above classes’ ruling indirectly on behalf of the bourgeoisie when the bourgeoisie is weak and under challenge from below. [Trotsky wrote: “In the industrially backward countries foreign capital plays a decisive role. Hence the relative weakness of the national bourgeoisie in relation to the national proletariat. This creates special conditions of state power. The government veers between foreign and domestic capital, between the weak national bourgeoisie and the relatively powerful proletariat. This gives the government a Bonapartist character. It raises itself so to speak, above classes’. Actually it can govern either by making itself the instrument of foreign capitalism and holding the p proletariat in the chains of a police dictatorship, or by manoeuvring with the proletariat and even going so far as to make concessions to it, thus gaining the possibility of a certain freedom toward the foreign capitalists”. (Writings, 1938-39, Pathfinder, p. 326)] 
 

The Bonapartist state cannot encourage the masses too much without itself being overthrown. Nor can it balance between the two main classes indefinitely so it must crack down on the masses sooner or later. From 1980 the interests of the petty bourgeois class base of the regime forced it to rapidly align itself with national capitalism and re-negotiate its relation with imperialism. [Khomeini deliberately used a populist mixture of radical Islam, Persian nationalism and the glorification of petty commodity production to activate the petty bourgeoisie as the social base of his regime. The mass base of the regime was the Committees for the Islamic Revolution, led by local merchants and mullahs which formed the Pasdaran (Revolutionary Guards) that have played such a reactionary role in attacking workers and women opponents of the regime.] The outcome was the consolidation of an extremist clerical capitalism in which the Islamic leadership became the dominant fraction of the national bourgeoisie. 
 

Khomeini’s Capitalism
 

As we have seen the Shah was overthrown by a workers’ revolution that had the potential to go on and become a permanent revolution for socialism. Instead it became a reactionary capitalist counter-revolution. At first Khomeini maneuvered towards the workers, the oppressed nationalities and women because he was too weak to smash them. Once he had contained them and consolidated his power he was able to establish a police state to secure bourgeois rule. Khomeini’s anti-imperialist rhetoric and his seizure of the US Embassy were ploys to deceive the workers and disarm them while he rallied the petty bourgeois forces for the counter-revolution. 
 

The US was prepared to pay the price of an Islamic Regime because it forestalled a socialist revolution in Iran. Like the Iranian bourgeoisie, the first consideration of the imperialists was to back a regime that could restore order. Besides it was impossible for the bourgeois government of a semi-colony to break all ties with imperialism. The most it could do was re-open negotiations with imperialism.It sought new contracts with the EEC and Japan to lessen its dependence on the US. Yet the US contracts that were cancelled received full compensation out of oil revenue. The only real worry for the imperialists was the Islamic regime’s ability to contain the workers’ revolution from below. A German businessman expressed this concern:
 

“Iranian workers seized six employees of a foreign company, locked them in an office and then demanded to see the company’s books. They showed that the company was bankrupt, but they also showed that the European parent company had a bank account in Switzerland. The workers refused to release their European hostages until the parent company dispatched funds to settle all wage claims at the plant.” (RCP, p 23)

As insurance against a workers’ revolution succeeding the US tried to win support in the Iranian army.This failed when Khomeini purged the army in 1984. The US also backed Iraq in an 8-year war with Iran that wasted the lives of millions of workers and peasants and allowed Khomeini to consolidate the counter-revolution. 
 

Rejecting the ‘white revolution’ of the Shah, the regime embarked on a road to economic nationalisation similar to that taken by Mossedegh in the early 1950s. But it was far too late for economic nationalism as a solution to Iran’s dependence. Under the Shah the Iranian economy had been integrated into the world economy. Cutting off important trade, finance and technical links to imperialism meant that the economy was doomed to stagnate. As a result the Islamic state managers became the most powerful section of the national bourgeoisie overseeing this decline. Stagnating state-owned industries became increasingly the property of ‘millionaire mullahs’ whose cronies benefited while the masses suffered increasing economic hardship. Mounting opposition was met by open repression. 
 

Over the 24 years of its existence the reactionary class character of the Islamic Republic has become clearer. The mounting reform movements and the militant student and workers’ oppositions of recent years show that once again a mass mobilisation against a repressive regime is building. This has given the US under its current neo-conservative leadership the opportunity to strike a pose as liberators once more in the never-ending war against the evil axis of terror. This time it is Iran’s nuclear arms program that is the pretext for targeting a ‘rogue’ state. But in reality, after 24 years, the Islamic regime has become expendable. Today US imperialism is embarking on military smash and grab raids to try to patch up its crisis-ridden economy. Iran’s oil reserve is nearly as big as Iraq’s, and US imperialism is desperate to make sure that its imperialist rivals, the EU and Japan, do not get access to this reserve of black gold.
 

The lesson of permanent revolution

What are the lessons for today? A potentially strong working class has existed in Iran since the onset of capitalist development after World War 1. It became a class capable of revolution by 1979 as we have seen. But in 1953 and 1979 workers were betrayed by the Stalinists (and the other left tendencies) who made deals with the national bourgeoisie and the petty bourgeois Islamists that led to the defeat and destruction of the most advanced layers of the workers’ movement. 

Today these Stalinist and guerillaist parties will again collaborate with the bosses and the clerics and play their deadly treacherous role. They must be politically destroyed by healthy revolutionary forces. The masses are impatient with the Islamist dictatorship and are calling for democracy and human rights.Revolutionaries must back this struggle for the basic democratic rights necessary for any social progress. But we have to say that only a socialist revolution can win and defend such democratic rights. 

That’s why these basic demands should be accompanied by a complete transitional program of demands that mobilises workers and poor peasants against not only the threat of US imperialist intervention, but the backward national bourgeoisie, the petty bourgeoisie and their reactionary Islamic leadership – for freedom of expression, freedom from the veil, release of political prisoners, the rights of the nationalities to self-determination, and the right of Iran to be armed with nuclear weapons to defend itself from imperialism.These demands must be accompanied by those calling on workers to organise and to occupy the factories and form workers’ councils and militias capable of taking power and creating a Workers and poor Peasants’ Socialist Republic as part of a Federation of Socialist Republics of the Middle East. 

To take this program to the workers and poor peasants in Iran the urgent need is for and armed independent working class movement led by a Leninist/Trotskyist party as part of a revolutionary International.

For a Leninist-Trotskyist party in Iran!

For a Workers’ and Peasants’ state!

For a Federation of Socialist Republics of the Middle East!