Jim Chrystie: Iran: Workers Battle for the Streets

[Militant, No. 441, 2 February 1979, p. 1]

Barricades on the streets of Tehran. Troops deserting, tearing off their uniforms and handing over their weapons to the youth. Workers taking over Tehran’s main hospital and posting an armed guard around it.

This was Iran this week as a revolutionary explosion moved against the Bakhtiar government – the Shah’s state without the Shah. Desperately the generals sent in their troops last Sunday to quell the explosion.

Hundreds were killed and wounded but when the smoke cleared it was the workers who controlled the streets.

Unarmed Iranian youth have risked death to face troops armed with automatic rifles and submachine guns. Now after the latest massacre they are calling for arms. Groups have attacked individual soldiers and taken their weapons.

Soldiers have mutinied as they recognise the power of the masses. The generals are scared to send conscript troops on to the streets of Tehran.

The workers have already defeated the Shah – now they are struggling to overthrow his nominee. In Sunday’s demonstration they marched against Western imperialism (USA), Communism (USSR), foreign interference and for an Islamic Republic. This is a search for revolutionary change.

Rightly the Iranian masses mistrust the Russian bureaucracy. Struggling to overthrow one dictatorship, they do not want to saddle themselves with another totalitarian regime, despite the advantages of a planned economy. This antagonism to „Communism“ is really against Stalinism. It is on the Marxist road of the creation of a revolutionary workers‘ democracy that all the oppression of the Iranian people can be ended.

An Islamic Republic is full of contradictions. Bakhtiar will fall. But a Khomeini government will not end the revolution that will continue as the Iranian workers and peasantry fight to rid their land of all exploitation.