[Editorial, The Militant No 435, 8 December 1978, p. 2]
The new wave of strikes and huge demonstrations now sweeping Iran once again may prove to be the knock-out blow to an already punch-drunk Shah.
The slavish support given to this ruthless autocrat by Foreign Secretary David Owen, under the blinkered advice of the Tory mandarins running the Foreign Office, has now been shown to be a reactionary blunder. For that once apparently most stable of institutions, the Peacock Throne, is now falling apart.
Whilst members of the British labour movement instinctively backed the calls for freedom of speech and assembly, the right to form free trade unions, to strike and for democratic elections, the Labour government has shamefully helped to prop up the present military dictatorship with guns, planes and tanks … in the interests of “western democracy“!
But the workers of Iran have delivered their verdict through mass action. It is little wonder that those demonstrating for democratic rights recently burned down the British Embassy – the chief supplier of the guns used to shoot them down in the streets.
This week a new general strike has brought down crucial oil production, blacked out much of Tehran and other cities and halted the flow of natural gas. Demonstrations numbering tens of thousands have defied army curfews and bans.
Hundreds have been shot down. Last week in the town of Gorgan a virtual civil war took place between workers and the army.
The methods of the workers are not those of individual terrorism but mass political and industrial action. It is the strike weapon – the withdrawal of labour – which has brought the Shah to his knees.
Our fellow workers in Iran have the right to ask: “Which are the Labour government to support, the strikers or the armed strikebreakers?“
Capitalism itself is threatened by the revolutionary situation that undoubtedly exists in Iran. All the objective conditions for revolution have matured and require only a decisive leadership for the working class to lead all of Iran’s oppressed millions in a socialist transformation of this backward and contradictory society.
The ruling class has lost its nerve. It has no perspective, no strategy for the future, only a megalomaniacal instinct to hold off the advancing masses.
Many capitalists, state officials, generals and even members of the royal family have grabbed their loot and fled the country. Now a debate rages within their ranks as to how best to force the abdication of the monarch whose universal hatred hangs like a millstone round their necks, threatening to drag them all down.
The disaffected middle classes have joined with the workers in their struggle against the Shah. Students tear down statues of the Shah. Professionals close their businesses in solidarity with strikers. Bank officials publish the secret transfers of the millionaires‘ wealth to foreign banks.
The industrial workers have once again come forward as the leading force for social change and democratic rights. They have proved time and again their willingness to sacrifice, their determination to fight.
The western press deliberately cloud the issues by claiming that the opposition to the Shah is led by religious fanatics who want to return Iran to the middle ages. Certainly portraits of the religious leader Ayatollah Khomeini feature prominently in the demonstrations.
But the 1905 revolution in Russia opened with a demonstration of workers and peasants carrying icons led by the priest Father Gapon. It ended with the formation of the Petrograd soviet led by Trotsky. In the absence of a conscious Marxist leadership the masses flooding onto the stage of history for the first time and lacking years of experience of trade union and political struggle, have at this stage turned to this particular opponent of the regime as a focus for their struggle.
The western capitalist governments are not afraid of an Islamic regime as such. But they understand that such a regime would be utterly incapable of satisfying the economic needs which are the material forces relentlessly driving forward the masses, whatever the religious colouration they may give to their demands.
An Islamic government of the National Front seeking to impose the austerity measures which they intend, could not hold onto mass support but could be swiftly succeeded by another regime more suited to the revolutionary masses. Seeing no way forward for Iran under the tiny, isolated capitalist class dominated by foreign capital, such a regime could be forced by the pressure from below to break with capitalism and landlordism.
Without a doubt the establishment of a planned economy and the distribution of land to the peasants would mean a great step forward for the pestilence-ridden millions of Iran. The emergence of a mass workers‘ party based on a Marxist perspective, leading the important industrial working class to consciously take over the running of society would guarantee genuine workers‘ democracy and an internationalist appeal which could lead to a Socialist Federation of the Middle East.
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