1. The February 9-11, 1979 insurrection that brought down the Pahlavi monarchy was a deepgoing defeat for imperialism. Imperialism has continually tried to smash the Third Iranian Revolution. Since the insurrection, the ruling classes have not been able to contain, much less roll hack, the overall movement of the exploited and oppressed.
Since November 1979 there has been a new wave of anti-imperialist and anticapitalist mobilizations. These have been sparked by the occupation of the U.S. embassy and the tests of strength with imperialism, the debacle of the U.S. raid at Tabas, and the failure of the plots that were organized in collaboration with the Western secret services.
Anti-imperialist demonstrations have involved millions of people. Struggles of various sectors of the population have deepened and become more closely interconnected: the struggles of workers for the right to organize and to control production; the struggles of the small peasants and agricultural workers for land; the struggles of the plebian masses (the mostazzafin) for satisfaction of their most basic social needs; the struggles of the oppressed nationalities for the recognition of their right to self-determination.
This new upturn in the mass movement dates from the period following the failure of the offensive against Kurdistan launched by the Bazargan government and Khomeini in August-September 1979, and the failure of the wave of attacks against democratic rights (press censorship, prohibition of political parties, restrictions on the right to demonstrate).
The deepening crisis of the bourgeois, nationalist leadership takes place against this backdrop. That crisis is most clearly seen in the bourgeois nationalist leadership's inability to control the mass movement and reorganize a state apparatus to confront it.
Since then, conflicts between the different factions in the regime have sharpened. All the limitations of this leadership are revealed in the course of the anti-imperial ist struggle, especially as that struggle becomes more closely connected with anti-capitalist struggles. As a result, the confidence of the exploited and oppressed masses in the leaders of the Islamic Republic is beginning to decline, which in turn increases centrifugal forces in the country as a whole.
In this context, imperialism is trying to deal blows to this revolution, which had united behind the figure of Khomeini to fight the shah's regime, installed and backed to the end by Washington.
Among the measures currently being employed by Carter against the Iranian Revolution are the imposition of the economic blockade, the freezing of Iranian assets, various kinds of aid given to supporters of the former regime and to conspirators (Bakhtiar, Oveissi, Palisban), in creased military presence in the region leading to the abortive April 25 Tabas raid (which was organized in connection with a planned conspiracy within the army), an international diplomatic offensive to isolate the new regime, and the press campaign to slander the revolution.
With the agreement of its Western allies and the aid of reactionary regimes in the region (Israel, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates), and using Iraq's policies, American imperialism is stepping up its maneuvers.
Nonetheless, there are still a number of obstacles along this path. These include the combativity of the Iranian masses and their firm commitment to anti-imperialist struggle, the difficulty of setting up a military and political alternative that could draw a solid social base around itself, the crisis of imperialist domination in the whole region, the danger that an abortive large-scale imperialist counterrevolutionary attempt could provoke a chain reaction, and the Carter administration's problems in overcoming opposition among American working masses to any largescale military intervention.
2. Three factors are pushing the Iranian workers in the cities and countryside, the plebian masses, and the oppressed masses forward.
a. The Iranian economy is going through a deep crisis provoked by the many deformations caused by imperialist domination and the measures of various imperialist powers to establish a blockade.
The new regime counted on using the oil revenues to get over the immediate difficulties it would have to face after the February victory, and to implement its decisions about priorities in state aid to revive capitalist accumulation.
But there has been a major decline in oil exports. This decline was caused by many factors: the drop in purchases by traditional customers for crude; the lack of technicians and technical backup; the refusal of the imperialists to deliver certain materials that are needed by the oil industry; the delays in shipments of spare parts and higher prices for those parts; the pricing and production policies of Saudi Arabia, Iraq and the Gulf countries in the context of the recession in the imperialist economies; wage struggles by the oil workers; and sabotage.
In 1980 the Iranian state is expected to receive only one-third of the projected $23 billion oil income. If this drastic fall in oil revenue is confirmed, it will be even more difficult for the government to make economic concessions to significant layers of the working class (including in the nationalized sector) and it will be impossible for it to set up social programs of sufficient scope to partially fulfill the expectations of the mostazzafin.
The continuing agricultural crisis, none of whose basic causes have been eliminated by the policies of the new regime, spells poverty for millions of poor peasants and agricultural workers, causes unemployment and underemployment in the countryside, encourages migration to the urban centers, and could lead to a crisis in food supply.
When these peasants come to the cities, they join the ranks of the unemployed, who total more than 30 percent of the active population. Nearly all of these unemployed receive no social benefits from the state.
The private sector's refusal to invest, the freeze in the construction industry, the layoffs in the traditional industries (textiles, rugs, etc.) and in the nonnationalized companies, the disorganization in public administration and the nationalized sector, and the absence of a plan for largescale public works projects all combine to increase unemployment.
At the same time, the inflation rate has reached 50 percent, and is even higher for basic necessities. The black market is growing.
Because of the social and economic situation, defense of economic and social interests play an increasingly important part in the mobilizations of the Iranian masses. As a result, their struggles increasingly come into conflict with capital-ist property relations, and therefore with the state that defends those relations.
b. The growth of mass actions has been aided by the breakdown of the old state apparatus. The disappearance of SAVAK and its agents in the factories has facilitated the activity and organization of the workers. In the countryside the rural police and local authorities established by the former regime have been partially paralyzed. The dismemberment of the obligatory cooperative system established during the shah's "White Revolution" has also spurred land occupations and struggles by poor peasants.
Some of the oppressed nationalities have also been able to take advantage of the breakup of the old repressive apparatus to massively assert their legitimate rights and to begin to arm.
Finally, because the entire military hierarchy supported the dictatorship to the end, the population feels an extremely high level of distrust toward the ex-imperial army, and toward the entire former state apparatus.
The repressive operations carried out by this army in the past year and the large number of plots by rebellious officers with ties to imperialism have only served to increase this distrust.
The Khomeini leadership and the Bazargan and Bani-Sadr governments, therefore, have not been able to build an effective instrument to confront these mobilizations. Each time the Iranian masses move forward, they punch a hole in the plans for reorganizing the state apparatus, causing a growth in tensions within it.
The leaders of the Islamic Republic are caught between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand they face the demands of the exploited and oppressed, demands that challenge the social and economic position of the bourgeoisie. On the other hand they must contend with the hostility of a large portion of the cadres in the army and state apparatus. The feuding factions within the regime react in different ways to these pressures and disagree over how to respond to them.
c. In the course of the year of street demonstrations against the shah, which were carried out in face of ferocious repression, as well as the several-months-long general strike and the final insurrection in February 1979, the exploited and oppressed in Iran gained enormous confidence in their own strength.
This self-confidence, and the experiences learned regarding proletarian methods of struggle, continue to mark the activity of the workers, the plebian layers, and the poor peasants.
3. In recent months the workers in the main industrial centers have played an increasingly important part in building demonstrations.
The revolutionary changes led to a number of gains for the workers, particularly those layers who work in the nationalized sector, which comprises about 70 percent of the modern factories. They won higher wages for the lowest paid and reductions in the workweek, a reduced workload, and new social services (transportation, canteens, etc.).
The process of organizing in the workplaces has accelerated. There is more political discussion in the factories, which in itself is a factor in building a workers movement.
At the same time we see the beginnings of a working-class press (newspapers of the organizations and the shoras). Independent organizations (the shoras) have spread and give the workers an initial instrument with which to respond to the immediate problems they face. These independent organizations are already one of the distinctive features of the Third Iranian Revolution.
There have been no major strikes in recent months. One reason is the gains won in the first months of the revolution. But a combination of other factors contribute to this. These include the prestige that Khomeini still has among certain layers of workers, the regime's use of the imperialist threat to launch the "battle for production," the weaknesses of the workers organizations, and the absence of guaranteed democratic rights (resulting in political firings and repression of strikes and demonstrations).
On the other hand, the workers have waged a number of struggles to take over the productive apparatus and institute workers control. These struggles have arisen in response to capitalist sabotage, or to preserve the machinery, or to reestablish production in situations where management and supervisory personnel in the factories have disorganized and obstructed it. The shoras have served to bring the workers together to accomplish these tasks, and they were established semispontaneously, factory by factory, in the very course of these activities.
The movement to set up shoras remains fragmented and uneven. It could not have been otherwise, given the previous lack of even minimal trade-union organizations and mass workers parties. There are big differences from shora to shora in terms of regular, democratic, and united methods of functioning, in terms of the employment categories that are represented (in some there is disproportionate representation for administrative personnel), in terms of the scope of the tasks they take on, and their degree of independence with regard to the factory managers, the institutions of the Islamic Republic, and the Islamic Republican Party.
The wave of anti-imperialist mobilizations after November 1979 has helped the shoras to spread to new regions and to the small- and medium-sized factories, which employ more than 70 percent of the workers.
For the first time the workers are participating as workers, with their own slogans and their own shora contingents in the demonstrations supporting the students who occupied the American embassy.
The demands contained in the manifestos of the shoras have an increasingly clear anticapitalist character: demands for the nationalization of imperialist property and national capital, for reconversion of industrial production to answer the imperialist blockade and respond to the needs of the people, for breaking the ties with imperialism, for the arming and military training of the masses, for a thoroughgoing purge of the state administration, and for publicizing all the links between American imperialism and the bourgeoisie.
Various declarations of the shoras have taken up the demand for a radical agrarian reform. This points out the tendency for what could become a worker-peasant alliance, within the context of the growing interaction of democratic, anti-imperialist, and anticapitalist slogans.
In parallel fashion, the first steps toward coordinating the shoras is taking place through the establishment of federations that include as many as several hundred shoras (for example the Center of Islamic Workers Shoras includes about 900 shoras nationally).
A layer of advanced workers who are not organized through the nationalist, reformist, or centrist political formations is being forged in the course of this whole process of the shoras' emergence and coordination. Leading the day-to-day activity of the workers, in practice they often oppose the aims of the bourgeois-nationalist leadership, its representatives, and the capitalists. However, the limits to the coordination of the shoras and their tasks reflect the absence of a vanguard revolutionary party with major influence in the working class, and more generally the lack of proletarian class independence on the political level.
As a result, the shoras have not concretely tried to put themselves forward as an alternative pole of attraction and pole of reference to the bourgeois-nationalist leadership. That contradiction will leave its mark on the whole situation to come and will increase the fluctuations in their development.
Khomeini, Bani-Sadr, and the Islamic Republican Party (IRP) are all conscious of the meaning and importance of the growth of the shoras. They are all trying to use the political authority that Khomeini still has among significant layers of the working class to begin a counteroffensive. That counteroffensive combines repression against worker militants and members of workers organizations with an attempt to control the shoras and integrate them into the institutions of the Islamic Republic, in order to empty them of their content and destroy any anticapitalist tendency.
Among the workers, whatever their illusions regarding Khomeini, there is strong resistance to this plan in practice.
4. For the first time in the history of revolutionary upsurges in Iran, millions of poor peasants and agricultural workers are involved in the struggle.
With the fall of the Pahlavi regime, peasant mobilizations began in the areas inhabited by the oppressed nationalities: Turkmenistan, Kurdistan, and in the territories of the pastoral tribal nomads (calling for a return of the pastureland and forests that came under state control at the beginning of the "White Revolution").
Since mid-1979 various protest move ments have arisen among settled peasants in the Persian provinces. These have included refusal to pay the annuities for lands distributed during the shah's agrarian reform, opposition to the usurous interest rates on private debts, conflicts with the Pahlavi-appointed administrators of the cooperatives and the big landlords who still control half the cultivated land.
In late 1979 and early 1980 there was arise in land occupations. Peasants took over the lands of absentee landlords, using to their own ends Khomeini's call after the embassy occupation for self-sufficiency in food production.
From January 1980 the peasants began organizing demonstrations in the cities (Tehran, Isfahan, and elsewhere) to popularize their demands and pressure the authorities. Because of the crisis of proletarian leadership, however, the ties between the working class and the disinherited peasant masses have still not been firmed up.
Social polarization begins to take place in the villages in the course of these movements. On one side are the poor peasants, the agricultural workers and rural youth—who have been politicized by the urban mobilizations in which they often took part as migrants—and the teachers.
On the other side are the landlords; the bazaar merchants, who play a role as moneylenders in the countryside; the Islamic courts and the mullahs, who are defenders of private property; the rural police; and, usually the Revolutionary Guards (Pasdaran).
Most of the time the village committees, which on orders of the religious figures have often included the former notables, have supported the landlords against those trying to take the land, in hopes of preventing the growth of a movement they could no longer control. In some cases this polarization has led to the establishment of peasant shoras.
On several occasions the new regime has moved to repress peasant protests, especially when they are combined with the national question and lead to a direct challenge to the regime's authority.
5. A wave of struggles by the oppressed nationalities, who constitute 60 percent of the Iranian population, has poured through the breech opened by the February 1979 insurrection.
The ongoing struggle of the Kurdish people for self-determination represents the most advanced point of this whole movement. Among the Kurds there has been massive arming of the population. establishment of militias, appearance of committees (baqueh) in various regions, land occupations, and broad mobilization of the population in the towns.
Since February 1979 the leaders of the Kurdish national movement have been proposing to the new government that there be an autonomy law, with the creation of a Kurdish government in charge of local affairs. Tehran has ignored those proposals.
In March, in an attempt to disarm the population and assert its authority, the central government sent the army and the militias of the "Imam's Committees"— which later provided the bulk of the forces for the Pasdaran corps—against the people of the Kurdish city of Sanandaj.
Since then there have been successive military confrontations, interrupted by resistance truces. In October 1979, the Kurdish resistance forces regained control of the towns, having broken the big military offensive launched in August under the direction of the new "commander-inchief of the armies," Khomeini.
The central government's intransigence led to the breakdown of all negotiations. It did not want a precedent that would encourage struggles by other nationalities.
Following Khomeini's March 21, 1980, Now Rouz (New Year) speech, when the number of land occupations in Kurdistan was increasing, there was another joint military offensive by the army and pasdaran against the cities of southern Kurdistan. Several hundred people were killed and thousands were wounded in the bombing, blockade, and siege of the cities. The Khomeini leadership used Iraqi military incursions as justification for increasing its own military strength in Kurdistan.
The Iraqi regime had been shaken by the impact of the Iranian revolution on the most disadvantaged layers of the Iraqi population (who are Shi'ite while the Baathist clique in power is Sunni), and by the revival of the Kurdish military struggle in Iraq.
In addition, there is a longstanding conflict in Iraq between the Shi'ite hierarchy and the regime. Moreover, the Iraqi regime is making adjustments in its diplomacy, with overtures to the Gulf states. Iraq's manuevers against the Iranian revolution—including the aid given to supporters of the former Iranian regime and the military pressures on Iran—are fed by the Baathist regime's internal difficulties.
In regard to this, on numerous occassions the Kurdish leaders have repeated that they would defend the regime that came out of the February insurrection against any intervention by imperialism and against any reactionary coup. They also supported the occupation of the U.S. embassy.
Nevertheless, the Tehran government has carried out bloody repression against the Kurdish people. It is trying to crush the political and military resistance organizations. In this, the regime showed that its priority was to reestablish its sovereignty and defend the existing social order.
By refusing to recognize the Kurdish people's right to self-determination the regime directly cuts across its appeals for unity in action against imperialism, Iraqi pressure, and the plotters. Here too, by denying the democratic rights of the oppressed nationalities and opposing the advance of the social revolution (the land question, arming the people, etc.), the leaders of the Islamic Republic show their intrinsic inability to wage a real anti-imperialist struggle.
The Kurdish resistance inspired struggles among other oppressed nationalities in Turkmenistan, Khuzistan, Azerbaijan, and Baluchistan. The movements of the oppressed nationalities provide the fi:ame-work for a convergence of social and economic demands (for example the agrarian question in Baluchistan and Turkmenistan, the discrimination against the Arab working class in Khuzistan, etc.), as well as defense of civil liberties, and the struggle for the recognition of the right to self-determination and national rights.
Refusal, in the face of the "external threat," to defend the right to self-determination would in fact lead to dividing the ranks of the exploited and oppressed in the face of the external enemy, would facilitate the repression being unleashed by the Khomeini regime, would increase the field of action of the bourgeois-nationalist currents (in Kurdistan as well as Azerbaijan), and would create conditions favoring the maneuvers of the plotters and their Iraqi allies.
But the Tudeh party, a large faction of the Fedayeen, and Maoist organizations have applied precisely that orientation in the name of national unity and the struggle against imperialism, the main enemy.
6. The political role that the members of the Council of the Revolution continue to play is derived from two things: the prestige that Khomeini and a section of the Shi'ite clergy won in the uncompromising struggle against the shah; and from the intrinsic weakness of the Iranian national bourgeoisie, which was stunted by imperialism and the Pahlavi dictatorship, as well as the bankruptcy of bourgeois political formations.
The influence among the masses of the religious movement, which has a vast organizational structure, is explained by:
a. The weakness of the workers movement after twenty-five years of dictatorial repression;
b. The betrayals by the Tudeh Party Stalinists during the second revolution (1945-1953), the support given the shah by the Moscow and Peking bureaucracies, and finally the Tudeh Party's total support for Khomeini for eighteen months;
c. The absence of a revolutionary party with a strong base in the working class and its allies;
d. The fact that the masses' adherence to Islam as a religion facilitates the political hold of this particular leadership.
The ruling classes and the highest levels of the Shi'ite clergy use Islam above all as an argument to defend the existing order and private property, to justify restrictions on civil liberties, to facilitate the restoration of the bourgeois state, to nip class struggles in the bud, and to carry out a vast anti-Marxist and anticommunist campaign.
The Islamic religious institutions function as basically conservative instruments of the social order and spread a reactionary ideology championed by the fundamentalist currents.
Nevertheless, large numbers of the Persian masses view Khomeini as a political and religious leader who symbolizes their hatred for the shah and his dictatorship, for those who supported the shah, especially U.S. imperialism, and for the poverty that the dictatorship caused. Through this, Shi'ite Islam became, and remains, the vehicle for the movements and struggles for all their social, economic, and political demands.
But in the course of their attempts to win these demands, they increasingly come into conflict with the leaders of the various factions of this political leadership of the Islamic Republic.
After the defeat of the Kurdistan offensive in November 1979, the occupation of the U.S. embassy allowed Khomeini to reestablish a portion of his lost authority. He accomplished this by backing the students and rejecting a series of compromises with imperialism proposed by the ruling circles of the Islamic Republic (Bazargan, Yazdi, Ghotbzadeh). In contrast, those figures paid the price for their policies, and began to be exposed before the anti-imperialist movement. From then on the crisis of political leadership in the country would deepen.
The Khomeini leadership fulfills the function of a bourgeois leadership, whatever the struggles it led against the shah, whatever its present positions in the conflicts with American imperialism, and whatever confrontations take place between factions of the Shi'ite hierarchy and sectors of the bourgeoisie. The Khomeini leadership fulfills a bourgeois function through its very longstanding links with factions of the national capitalists (the great bazaar), through the Shi'ite hierarchy's economic resources, which includes the waqf religious endowment properties, through its economic, social and political program, through the ties it maintained with one or another sector of imperialism (European, Japanese), and through its role in maintaining the state apparatus.
In June-July 1980 measures were taken to nationalize the banks and insurance companies (in which the great families who had profited from the oil revenues were heavily invested). Nationalization of the financial institutions brought with it control of much medium as well as largescale industry, which was closely tied to the banking system. These moves were taken as part of the struggle against the shah, to fight the danger of economic collapse, and also to respond to the expectations of the Iranian masses.
Changes were made in the agreements that had previously been signed with imperialism. Contracts that gave the lion's share to imperialism were cancelled. These moves expressed the new relationship with imperialism and responded to certain demands of the workers (for example regarding the oil industry, the nuclear power industry, and arms purchases). Beginning in July 1980 some imperialist assets were nationalized. For a time the government had to accept a number of measures imposed by the workers and their shoras, such as wage increases.
However, the new regime's desire to protect capitalist property relations was seen in its rejection of a real land reform, which would have to be accompanied by a thoroughgoing transformation of the systems of agricultural prices and credit, and social and technical assistance. The close relationship between the bazaar and the leading circles of the Islamic Republic was seen in the opposition to unleashing a fullscale battle, based on mobilization of the masses, against speculation, hoarding of goods, and the black market organized from the bazaar.
The same could be seen in the lack of any tight state control over foreign trade, at a time when imperialism was increasing its pressures on the commercial level.
Finally, the bourgeois state allocated priority low-interest loans to private enterprises and decided to institute a debt moratorium, while social aide programs were being reduced.
7. Since February 1979 a priority of the leaders of the Islamic Republic has been to reorganize the state apparatus in order to be able to confront the mass movement. They maintained the army with most of its military hierarchy intact, reestablished a high command, and prohibited the formation of soldiers' committees. They disarmed the militias and established the pasdaran corps, under the direct authority of the Revolutionary Council.
Within the army, the First and Second Infantry Regiments, which specialize in anti-insurrectionary tasks, were formed from the shah's notorious Javidan (Immortals) Guards. Initially, the leaders of the Islamic Republic left virtually the entire administrative apparatus of the Pahlavi state intact.
The great majority of the staff of this state machine remains hostile to the new regime and opposes the religious hierarchy's hold over the state apparatus. In this context, plots hatched by those who are nostalgic for the old regime cannot but proliferate.
Khomeini and most of the Revolutionary Council took a series of measures that aimed to set up more directly controllable instruments and involve the mass movement in the stablization of the regime and the reorganization of the state:
a. Rapid institutionalization of the Islamic Republic and its organs (referendum on the Islamic Republic, election of the Assembly of Experts, ratification of the Constitution, election of the President of the Republic and the Majlis [parliament]);
b. The establishment of institutions that partially duplicate state structures: the Imam's committees, Imam's "representatives," Islamic courts, pasdaran;
c. New purges of the ministries.
These plans, however, remain very precarious. Important sectors of the national bourgeoisie—who had either supported the movement against the shah or had remained neutral—have shown a growing mistrust of the politico-religious leaders and their orientation.
These forces do not like the religious hierarchy's desire to take more and more complete control of the state apparatus and social life in general. They note the gap between the religious hierarchy's initiatives and the need to reform both the economy and the state apparatus bequeathed by the shah. They are nervous about the paralysis of the administration and the regime. They disapprove of the appeals that various politico-religious factions direct at the masses to win support for their projects. They are alarmed about the Khomeini leadership's inability to effectively control the mass movement.
For the time being, despite the very widespread opposition to the Khomeini leadership, in the absence of a concrete alternative the bourgeoisie views that leadership as a lesser evil that can stand up to the mass movement. The bourgeoisie is therefore hesitant, divided, and involved in a variety of political solutions, all of which are carried out within the perspective of preparing for coming class confrontations.
Moreover, in a situation where the revolution is on the rise, the origins and composition of the organs established by the "Islamic Revolution" can sometimes lead them to waver, split, and be very directly affected by the pressure of the mass movement. For example, some groups of pasdaran have taken part in distributing land, which earned them a severe reprimand from the Islamic Revolutionary Party and the Revolutionary Council.
In the same way, differences and polarizations reflecting their social heterogeneity can also arise among the various groups and parties that claim to follow the "Imam's line" and within the Shi'ite clergy.
All these factors feed the crisis of political leadership that is shaking the regime and foster the growth of multiple "power centers." There are more and more conflicts between the various factions that claim to support the Imam. These conflicts involve relations with the old state apparatus, the bourgeoisie, and imperialism, as well as the place and role of the new institutions, and the relations with the mass movement.
In January 1980, for example, Bani-Sadr publicly came out for the dissolution of the pasdaran and the Islamic committees, and gave his support to the leaders of the army. Such confrontations, especially between Bani-Sadr and Beheshti, will increase.
8. The recollection of a century of anti-imperialist struggles, of the first and second Iranian revolutions in 1905-1907 and 1945-53, of the opposition to the plunder of the oil resources combines in the collective memory of the Iranian masses with hatred of the Pahlavi dynasty, which is seen as an agent of imperialist interests. That explains the strength of the movement that arose around the demand for the extradition of the shah and the return of his stolen wealth.
The masses viewed the occupation of the "spy nest" first and foremost as a logical extension of the victory of the people's uprising that had begun eighteen months earlier. It expressed the people's general feeling that the continued American presence—which was identified with the building of SAVAK and the army—left the struggle against the dictatorship unfinished.
For the Khomeini leadership, this resurgence of an anti-imperialist campaign became a means of strengthening "national unity" and covering over class antagonisms, as well as a way to organize the "battle for production" and prohibit strikes, using the economic blockade as justification. They also carried out the consolidation of the state apparatus (the repressive bodies) under this cover.
But very quickly the breadth, impact, and radicalization of the mobilizations went beyond the strict limits in which the leaders of the regime and the fundamentalist organizations wanted to confine them. Unable to openly confront this movement, but needing to respond to something that was challenging their authority, in March-April 1980 they began a new series of attacks against various sectors of the mass movement, trying to isolate them (such as the attacks against Kurdistan, the campaign for moral order, the obligatory wearing of the chador, the attacks against groups that called themselves Marxist or "Islamic leftists").
The attacks against the universities took place in this context. Organizations such as the Fedayeen, the Mujahedeen, the Paykar have strong influence in the universities and the campuses occasionally served as the site of meetings of coordinating committees of workers shoras.
Khomeini's Now Rouz speech resurrected the slogan of an "Islamic cultural revolution." The aim of the Revolutionary Council and the IRP was reactionary in two ways. First it involved a "counterreformation" in the area of ideas, aimed especially against Marxism, through Islamizing education. Second it was an offensive aimed at purging the universities of the various left political organizations.
The Islamic societies and the Muslim Student Organizations took this campaign into the heart of the university by focusing on the slogan of shutting down the universities. They seized upon a real problem and used it for their own ends: that problem being the contradiction between the university system left by the former regime and the social and cultural needs of the disinherited masses. In this campaign they mobilized students who were seeking a revolutionary solution to this social and political question, which the centrist groups had ignored.
The authorities seized that moment to organize the assault against the universities, prior to closing them for an unspecified period.
The blow struck against the student movement is an indication of the regime's policy of confronting the mass movement, through which it is trying to reorganize its apparatus. But that does not mean that there has been a stablization, much less an ebb, in the revolutionary process. None of the social forces driving the Iranian revolution forward—the working class, the peasants, the plebian masses, and the nationalities—have suffered a major defeat.
Whatever the temporary ebbs and flows, the perspective in Iran remains that of deepgoing instability, growing class struggles, greater interaction between the mobilizations and struggles of different layers of the exploited and oppressed, and a growing crisis of bourgeois political leadership, with the centrifugal effects that flow from that, perhaps even ending up in civil war.
9. The imperialist pressures and threats will not change the laws of the class struggle in Iran. On the contrary, they will push the class conflicts to their culmination.
Sectors of the national bourgeoisie and of the leadership of the new regime might come into conflict with imperialism and its direct allies. But in the event of decisive class battles, their confrontation with imperialism would take a back seat to the irreconcilable antagonism that sets them against the workers and poor peasants, the touchstone of which is defense of private property and the bourgeois state.
In the coming struggles over questions that relate to their direct interest, the laboring masses will on many occasions go beyond the Khomeini leadership, will oppose it more or less directly, and will develop their own instruments of battle (shoras, committees, militias, etc.).
In the course of just such developments and through the growing discontent among the people, forces like the Mudjahedeen and Fedayeen have seen their audience and their strength grow.
However, without the existence of an alternative proletarian leadership, the masses will, despite everything, remain politically trapped in solutions that in the final analysis do not break with class collaboration.
Basing themselves on the dual conclusions of the likelihood of new struggles and the need for an alternative proletarian leadership, revolutionary Marxists will work to build a workers combat party. Therefore, to strengthen the working masses' sense of belonging to an independent class, they will organize the struggles around all the democratic, national, and transitional (anticapitalist) demands. They will formulate these demands in such a way as to bring them into the very heart of the real mass movement. They understand the effects that the concrete experiences of mobilization have on the consciousness of the masses, as well as the impact of the contradictions between the activities of the masses, the regime's plans, and the ideology put foward by the Khomeini leadership.
That is the only possible way to draw the masses away from the influence of the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois leaders. That is the only way to accompany the mass movement, without abandoning a political and ideological offensive against the reactionary content of the "Islamization" campaigns.
a. In the event of the threat of a reactionary military coup or an imperialist military intervention, revolutionary Marxists in Iran will participate in the struggles of the workers, peasants, and oppressed masses to defend the present regime— through their own activity and organization.
This involves military defense, not political support. In a situation where the proletariat and its allies are not capable of replacing the present regime with a higher form of government—a workers and peasants government—military defense of the present regime is necessary. But that defense remains linked to the achievement of the overriding tasks (independent organization of the workers and class independence, anticapitalist measures, radical agrarian reform, self-determination for the oppressed nationalities, arming the people) that push the revolution forward and are the ultimate guarantee for smashing imperialism's plans.
b. Revolutionary Marxists support all the concrete anti-imperialist measures that the government might take. They initiate and participate in anti-imperialist demonstrations. They call for the return of the shah's fortune. Faced with the imperialist economic blackmail, only nationalization under the control of the workers shoras and a monopoly of foreign trade can make it possible to begin to break Iran's dependence on the world market.
In the face of military threats from imperialism and the former regime's generals, they call for the slogan of the "army of 20 million" to be carried out by establishing and arming workers and peasants militias. In the same vein, they defend the right of the "workers in uniform" in the army or the pasdaran to form their own committees, independent of the hierarchy and institutions of the Islamic Republic.
c. Defense of the workers' gains (wages, hours of work, etc.) against all attacks remains a basic task that revolutionary Marxists take part in.
To counteract the effects of the economic and social crises (the unemployment, inflation, lack of social services, housing shortage, problems in education), they put forward a working-class plan that includes among other things: extension of nationalizations, a plan of industrial reconversion under workers control, big public works projects to meet the basic needs of the masses, radical measures in distribution to fight speculation through workers control and price control committees, massive campaigns around health-care and literacy, etc.
d. In order to begin to apply some of these measures, it is absolutely essential that the shoras be strengthened and spread, and that coordinating bodies be built to provide them with a centralized focus. Unity of the workers ranks can only strengthen the independent organization of the workers. This will be accomplished more easily if there is democratic functioning of the shoras (elections, political pluralism, regularity in functioning, complete independence from the bosses and the institutions of the Islamic Republic).
In contrast to the Stalinists, the revolutionary Marxists do not counterpose building branches of independent unions to the growth of the shoras.
The shoras movement can facilitate the unity of the poor peasants and the city workers, especially if the shoras take up the demand for a radical agrarian reform and take into account the peasants needs in making proposals for industrial reconversion (fertilizer, farm equipment), for use of the unified and nationalized banking system (credit), and for establishing a state purchasing and distribution system for agricultural products.
This can contribute to helping the peasant mobilizations, which are slowly becoming part of the revolutionary scene.
e. The demand for agrarian reform plays a big part in the emancipation of the oppressed nationalities. The revolutionary Marxists throughout the Iranian state support the linguistic and cultural rights and the right to self-determination, including to independence, of the oppressed nationalities.
Full recognition of the rights of the oppressed nationalities can reduce the divisions provoked by national oppression, can forge a united front of the exploited and the oppressed against the owners and their representatives, and can utilize the national minorities' potential for struggle to help confront imperialism and the plotters under the best conditions.
f. The workers and their allies have no interest in the slightest restrictions on democratic rights. And limitations on the workers right to assembly, association, and to demonstrate, any imposition of censorship, any attacks on women's rights, any physical attacks against working-class, political, and student activists, any institutional restrictions on the exercise of political rights only serves reaction. Such moves serve reaction in two ways. They directly weaken the mass movement, and they become an obstacle to achieving the unity and independence of the workers.
They permit those who are nostalgic for the old regime, like Bakhtiar and Company, to fraudulently play the card of democracy to win the support of certain social layers for their counterrevolutionary aims.
The revolutionary Marxists carry out a constant struggle against the attacks on democratic rights, explaining and concretely showing that these rights strengthen the unity and activity of the masses. In the same vein, they expose the limitations on political democracy that the Khomeini leadership wants to impose through institutionalizing the "Islamic Revolution."
g. No capitalist government can satisfy all the needs of the exploited and oppressed masses. The revolutionary Marxists put forward the perspective of a workers and farmers government to replace the Khomeini regime. The aim of such a government, based on the shoras and the mobilizations of the workers and their allies, would be to break the power of the imperialists and their local allies, to arm the masses, to establish a planned economy, and to set up the dictatorship of the proletariat, opening the way to socialism.
h. All sections of the Fourth International must continue the campaign of support for the Iranian revolution, centering the campaign on the slogan:
"Imperialism, hands off the Iranian Revolution!"
July 28, 1980