The following letter was sent to the International Marxist Tendency (IMT).
Comrades,
In assessing the recent mass demonstrations in Iran against perceived
electoral fraud, Alan Woods observed:
“Like a heavy rock thrown into a still lake, [President Mahmoud]
Ahmadinejad’s coup has stirred up Iranian society to the depths. Nobody can say
where events will end. But one thing is certain: Iran will never be the same again. The
masses are starting to move, and the movement will not easily be halted. We are entitled
to say with confidence: the Iranian Revolution has begun!”
—www.marxist.com, 15 June 2009
Your website features as an accompanying article Fred Weston’s 11 February [2009]
piece marking the 30th anniversary of Ayatollah Khomeini’s Islamic Revolution:
“The truth is that the 1979 revolution in Iran was a workers’
revolution. Had it not been for the mobilisations of the working class, the Ayatollah and
his friends would have remained in exile in France waiting for better days. Instead on
February 1, 1979 Khomeini was able to return to Iran to be welcomed by a huge crowd of
millions. Are we really to believe that this one man provoked and led the
revolution?”
The article contains a link to a 9 February 1979 piece by Ted Grant that essentially
answers Weston’s question:
“Because of the failures of the Communist Party and radicals, even to
attempt to organise opposition within the ranks of the working class, discontent surfaced
at the mosques. Radical sermons were preached, which though cloudy and nebulous, were
interpreted by the masses in their own fashion.”
· · ·
“The masses interpreted the sermons of the mullahs as really standing
for a struggle against the totalitarian and authoritarian regime of the Shah.”
—“The Iranian Revolution”
Khomeini’s success was guaranteed when Iran’s powerful leftist
organizations backed him with the expectation that the ascension of the Shiite theocrats
would represent a brief “anti-imperialist” stage in an inevitably unfolding
process of socialist revolution. But in reality, as the then-Trotskyist international
Spartacist tendency noted, the mullahs’ movement posed a deadly danger to the
working class and all of the oppressed. This assessment was codified in the slogan
“Down with the Shah! No Support to the Mullahs!,” which virtually every other
ostensibly Trotskyist organization, including your own, considered wildly sectarian. In
the article cited above, Ted Grant endorsed the popular delusion that the victory of the
Islamic reactionaries would be short-lived:
“Support for Khomeini will melt away after he forms a government. The
failure of his programme of a Muslim theocratic republic to solve the problems of the
Iranian people will become apparent.”
What is apparent today is the failure of Grant et al to foresee the consequences of
political capitulation to the forces of Islamic reaction. The delusion that the victory of
the Khomeiniites was somehow part of an “objectively revolutionary” process
paved the way for the wholesale liquidation of the Iranian left. It is grotesque that, 30
years later, the IMT continues to insist that “the 1979 revolution in Iran was a
workers’ revolution.”
The IMT’s inclination to see a “revolution” whenever large numbers of
people take to the streets is not restricted to Iran. A decade of bourgeois-populist rule
is, for you, the “Venezuelan Revolution”—despite the fact that the
capitalist state remains intact and there is no sign of dual power. Your faith in the
“revolutionary process” leads you to fantasize about the day when
“comrade President Chávez,” the Bolivarian bonapartist who heads a
bourgeois state, will, through some “dialectical” process, lead the masses to
socialism (for our assessment, see “Venezuela & the Left,” 1917
No. 30).
We note that Chávez’s view of the “Iranian Revolution” today
is sharply counterposed to your own. The Venezuelan president, who promptly telephoned his
Iranian counterpart to congratulate him when his electoral victory was announced,
declared: “The victory of Dr. Ahmadinejad in the recent election is a win for all
people in the world and free nations against global arrogance.” Chávez lauded
Ahmadinejad as “a courageous fighter for the Islamic Revolution, the defense of the
Third World, and in the struggle against imperialism” (PressTV.ir, 13 June).
Alan Woods suggests that, “like the Russian Cadets [in 1917], the liberal
reformers in Iran are terrified of revolution” (op. cit.). But if
Iran’s defeated presidential candidate, Mir Hussein Moussavi, and his supporters are
analogous to the Cadets, then Ahmadinejad is playing the role of Prince Golytsin (the
Tsarist premier). IMT members should be asking themselves why their hero Chávez is
so enthusiastic about supporting the candidate of the status quo.
Leninist Greetings,
Josh Decker
for the International Bolshevik Tendency