The recent massive proletarian uprisings in Iran have surpassed the mark of being one of the largest uprisings for the last 20 years irrespective of their final result. They also have surpassed the mark of invoking the most broad and selflessly heroic direct action when unarmed demonstrators faced the “revolutionary guards’” with machine guns. Furthermore, they have achieved a breakneck pace of radicalisation when within the space of a few days the protesters’ demands made a leap from cancelling falsified elections to overthrowing the Islamic theocracy under the slogan “death to Khamenei!”
The emerging movement’s weakness is evident as well as its current incoherence with no clear direction. The Iranian working masses have only a clear antagonism without a clear ambition. But some pseudo-Marxists who refuse to acknowledge anything about the massive Iranian movement beyond this weakness while ascribing the movement itself to mere bourgeois faction manoeuvres are allying themselves to the Iranian ruling class as well as to the Russian nationalists, both of whom – the Iranian ruling class out of imperialist interests and the Russian nationalists out of interests in allying the Russian and Iranian imperialisms – claim a significant role of American money in the disturbances. The pseudo-Marxists only expose their ivory tower relationship to the reality of revolution and their inability to rationally approach practical situations. In 1916, the erudite practical revolutionary Lenin wrote that those who expect a purely socialist revolution will never see one, that there will never be two diametrically opposite camps as demonstrated by the Russian revolution of 1905 that began with a workers’ procession bearing icons and the tsar’s portraits led by the slightly deranged monk Gapon(1) and later escalated into a full-scale, all-Russian uprising against tsarism, and that was certainly was not a result of feudal faction manoeuvres.
There’s plenty of room for criticism of Lenin, but as a practical revolutionary, living and working in the age of revolution, for whom revolution was a permanent reality, it can be said that he knew what he was talking about quite well – unlike the Western lefties and the Russian pseudo-Marxists.
The working masses do not gain revolutionary consciousness by reading Marxist or Anarchist texts; they acquire class-consciousness and an understating of their collective interests from the very process of collective struggle. An understanding of the necessity of autonomous struggle emerges only after a total disillusionment with all bourgeois factions, and develops in the course of the revolution itself, not as a prerequisite to revolution.
In 1789, the Impoverished Parisians trusted both the “kind king” and the liberal Assembly; in 1905, the Russian workers adored Gapon and in the February of 1917 they followed Kerenskiy. Illusions and mistakes were exposed and eliminated along with revolutionary progress, along with unleashed class warfare, and as every political faction revealed its true colours the wisened revolutionary masses eventually came to realise that they can not rely on anyone but themselves.
Election fraud was merely the last drop in the cup of patience, which then spilled over into a social crisis, discrediting and crippling the Islamic republic. The far deeper structural roots of the social overspill are in the poverty of the Iranian working masses and their disenfranchisement by the corrupt an hypocritical Islamic regime that betrayed the 1979 revolution and spawned its ubiquitous hypocritical clericalism.
And so election fraud became a short fuse for proletarian revolt. Mousavi – the new self-styled guru of free markets and neoliberalism, the former prime minister and architect of the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980’s and Thermidorian butcher from the Council of the Islamic Revolution responsible for the deaths of thousands of true revolutionaries – was a disposable figure amidst unfolding demands.
The revolutionary protest of Iran’s working masses was swift to radicalise when upon erupting it inspired ever more radical methods of struggle as well as ever more far-reaching aims to the point whereby it was at the throat of the clerical Islamic regime, no doubt pushed to that point by the regime’s conspicuous brutality. Whether this movement leads to the overthrow of the clerical state or a brutal suppression of the working masses, any belief in the divine right of the mullahs to the throne has been shattered and the Islamic regime will continue to function only through naked terror and repression.
Modern Iran belongs to the group of regions of the world that possess the most potent agency for revolution, to the series of the weakest links in the hierarchy of globalisation. Iranian society has superimposed modern industry and commerce on a mostly intact communalistic and collectivist consciousness inherited from its recent peasant ancestors, thus bracing it for collective struggle and martyrdom. It remains a society with a consistent revolutionary tradition, rooted in vast millenarian upheavals of the Middle Ages and recently expressed in the momentous, alas betrayed, 1979 uprising. During this most progressive uprising to date, Iran’s working masses overthrew the Shah’s murderous dictatorship and established workers’ councils. However these spontaneous organisations were killed in their cradle by the newly ascended Thermidorian elite of mullahs, after the defeat of the most revolutionary factions on the revolutionary scene that succumbed to their own historical infancy and strategic mistakes committed by both the revolutionary democrats in the People’s Mujahedin of Iran and the Fedai Marxist-Leninists.
The extent to which the lessons of 1979 have been learned by Iran’s working masses is difficult to evaluate. It is also hard to evaluate the extent to which the Iranian émigré leftist milieu has assimilated previous practical revolutionary experience of the Fedai Marxist and Mujahedin revolutionary factions during 1979-1981 and their connections within Iran.
The primary lesson of 1979 is the inability of a religious Islamic revolution to emancipate the working masses and abolish exploitation, leaving the task only a international communist revolution. Bourgeois politicians and equally bourgeois mullahs will never lead humanity to emancipation, and only an independent uprising of the global working masses, establishing the power of collective assemblies can achieve this goal.
The betrayed and unfinished revolution of the Iranian working masses will succeed only once it sets on this course.
Glory to the Iranian revolution!
All power to the Workers’ Councils!
-The ARS collective.
