In the final part of his article, taken from a speech made last summer to a meeting of Marxists from around the world, Alan
Woods highlights the significance of the Iranian revolution and the
impact it will have on the whole of the Middle East and beyond. He
explains how all the conditions emerged for a successful revolution,
bar one, that of the revolutionary leadership, which must be built.
World relations
Comrades
the whole world situation is now in uncharted waters. Now the Americans
are trying to get out of Iraq. Obama is “a Man of Peace”, so he wants
to get his troops out of Iraq and send them to Afghanistan. You know if
I was an American soldier in Baghdad, I think I’d prefer to stay where
I was! They cannot win the war in Afghanistan and they have
destabilized Pakistan.
We had a discussion about Honduras and it’s quite clear
that the American ruling class is split. It is clear that the CIA and
this reactionary mafia were involved in the coup in Honduras. But that
didn’t suit Obama. He’s got a different foreign policy, a more
“intelligent” foreign policy to that of his predecessor. George Bush
was a particularly stupid representative of American capitalism. I
don’t think he’s ever read a book, except maybe the Bible, and I don’t
think he got further than maybe the first chapter of Genesis. If you
could stand next to George Bush and examine his ear, you would be able
to see daylight coming through from the other side! He represents the
most stupid, the most reactionary section of the American ruling class,
the Texan mafia. And they’re still very influential.
Bush wanted to put nuclear missiles in the Czech Republic and in
Poland, which the Russian were not very happy about. For some reason
they thought that these missiles were directed at them! George Bush
said, no, no, no, they are not directed against Russia, don’t worry,
they are directed against Iran. So you put missiles in Poland directed
at Iran! That’s crazy, and the Russians were not amused. They said,
now, that is quite enough. And they made their point very eloquently
when they invaded Georgia. They said to the Americans: “so far and no
further”.
Obama went to see the Russian president Medvedev and he brought his
toothpaste smile with him. Of course, in reality, he was not dealing
with Medvedev at all, but with Putin. Medvedev is a puppet of Putin. So
he tried his smile and it didn’t have any affect. Putin said, never
mind about the smile Mr. President, get those missiles out of Poland.
And they’ll have to do that – all that’s finished. This shows the
limits of the power of US imperialism.
The Middle East shows the idiocy of Bush’s policy. All they
succeeded in doing was destabilizing the whole of the Middle East. All
the pro-western regimes there are hanging by a thread. Saudi Arabia is
hanging by a thread. Egypt is hanging by a thread. Lebanon is hanging
by a thread. So is Jordan, so is Morocco. These ruling elites were
terrified by the demonstrations that took place during the Gaza war.
In January I wrote an article about the war in Gaza. That was before
Obama was in office. I predicted in this article that Obama would
immediately try and reach a deal with Syria and Iran as soon as he was
elected in order to get out of Iraq. That is precisely what has
occurred. As I explained, part of the reason for the invasion of Gaza,
was a warning of the Israelis to Obama saying “don’t forget we’re here.
Don’t think you can do a deal behind our backs,” because Iran and Syria
would ask for certain things in exchange for collaborating with the
USA. “You can’t do anything in the Middle East without our permission”.
And that’s a fact.
Obama would like to do a deal with the Palestinians, it would help
his friends in the Middle East if he did that, and it would be very
useful to him. But the Israeli imperialists have got their own
interests and they’re not prepared to reach a deal. Netanyahu says:
“yes we accept a deal” but he puts conditions which the Palestinians
could never accept. They must be disarmed, in effect, they must accept
Israeli control.
What sort of state is that? What sort of independence is that? It reminds me of the famous phrase of Marlon Brando in the film The Godfather:
“I made him an offer he couldn’t refuse.” Except that this is the other
way around. Netanyahu says: “I made him an offer he couldn’t accept.”
They’re Mafiosi, all of them. But that’s what bourgeois diplomacy is
like. And I repeat what we have said many times: there can be no
solution to the Palestinian problem on the basis of capitalism.
Iran
What happened in Iran took most people by surprise. It appeared to
fall like a thunderbolt from a clear blue sky. But sudden and sharp
changes of this sort are implicit in the situation. As a matter of fact
these events were predicted in advance by this International, not now,
but ten years ago, at the time of the first movement of the students.
At that time I wrote an article called “The First Shots of the Iranian Revolution.”
And now we see the second chapter. Comrades, what a marvellous movement
this was! It was an inspiration. After thirty years of the most savage
and brutal dictatorship, a monstrous regime, based on a combination of
extreme reaction and religious fanaticism, using extreme repression,
murder, kidnapping, torture, we saw the explosive entry of the masses
on the scene of history.
This is the final answer to all the cowards and sceptics, the
cynics, the ex-Marxists, the ex-communists, and all the others who
questioned the possibility of revolutionary movements in the present
epoch. Despite all the terrible repression there were one million
people on the streets of Tehran, maybe two million. It was an
astounding revolutionary movement. And yet you have so-called left
wingers, so-called Marxists, like James Petras, who have just made a
very small error: they’re not capable of seeing the difference between
revolution and counterrevolution.
Lenin explained the four conditions for a revolution. We’ve
mentioned them before but we’ll mention them again. The first condition
is a split at the top, a split in the ruling class: that the ruling
class will not be able to rule with the methods they’ve used in the
past. For 30 years the people of Iran have languished under this
vicious rule, which is oppressive down to the smallest detail of
people’s lives. The Mullahs try to control how people think, how people
live, what people do, what people wear. Iran is a very young country,
and it’s a very big country and 70% of the population are under thirty
years of age, they have never known any other regime than this. And
after thirty years, the masses are fed up with the Mullahs.
The Ayatollah Khomeini presented the image of Mr. Clean, as against
the ghastly corruption of the Shah and his pro-imperialist gang. By the
way, what stinking, disgusting, hypocrites the so-called democrats of
the West are. In 1953, when there was a bourgeois democratic
government, the only time in the history of Iran when there was such a
government, led by a liberal called Mosaddeq, these imperialist
gangsters wanted to take control of the oil wealth of the country. The
British, the Americans, the CIA overthrew Mosaddeq and imposed a brutal
dictatorship of the Shah, which was one of the bloodiest dictatorships
known in the whole of the 20th century.
The regime of the Shah was disgustingly corrupt. People in this oil
rich country were hungry, and the Shah engaged in public spectacles of
the most obscene luxury. The Shah had a huge repressive apparatus, one
of the biggest armies of the world, the secret police was known as the
Savak, which had control over every aspect of life, they were very
efficient, like the Gestapo. They had very pleasant little customs like
roasting people to death with an electric fire. That was the regime
that was put into power by the British and the Americans and supported
until the end by the British and the Americans.
That ended in a revolution in 1979, in which the Iranian workers
played a key role. They confronted the repressive apparatus in the
streets. They armed themselves, because the soldiers deserted en masse,
handing their weapons over to the people. It is not generally know that
the Iranian workers set up soviets, known as the shoras. Power was
within the reach of the working class. Unfortunately the Iranian
Communist Party didn’t want to take power. They helped the gangster
Khomeini to take power. And Khomeini said, thank you very much and
illegalized the Communists and put them in jail.
The price paid by the Iranian people was this monstrous,
fundamentalist dictatorship for thirty years. But now this regime is
finished. The only thing that maintains it is fear, and as you see the
fear is disappearing. Now there’s always a comical side to politics,
politics has got an amusing side. And you see this here; it’s quite
amusing to see what happened. Khamenei, the Supreme Leader, was so
confident that he allowed a relatively free election campaign. He was
confident because he was going to rig the elections. The top Mullahs
vetted all the candidates, and they eliminated 400 candidates, and
since the four candidates who were left were all men of the regime,
there was not a problem. Or so it appeared…
But then a strange thing occurred. Hegel said, and Lenin often
repeated it, necessity expresses itself through accident. This Mousavi
was an accidental figure; he was part of the regime. He was the prime
minister during the war with Iraq. But then they had some debates on
television and the question of the economy was raised, and this is at
the basis of the situation of Iran, as oil prices have fallen. So there
was a lot of discontent and a lot of interest in these debates.
By the way, it is true that Ahmadinejad did give some reforms. He
could afford it, as he had the money from the oil. He gave subsidies,
particularly to the poor peasants in the villages, so he has a certain
support among these sections. But that support is increasingly being
eroded, the conditions of the masses are getting worse and there has
been a wave of strikes in Iran. Therefore, a strange thing happened in
this election campaign. In the past people were not interested in the
elections, mostly they didn’t bother to vote. But in these elections
there were huge rallies in Tehran. This fact already indicated a change
in the mood of the masses.
Although Mousavi didn’t represent any real opposition, he was seen
by the masses as the opposition candidate and therefore it was seen as
an opportunity to give the regime a kick. Most observers were convinced
that Mousavi was going to win the election. It is impossible to say
what the figures were, we will never know, but here the regime made a
mistake. Ahmadinejad immediately came on television and announced he’d
won by a huge majority. Even in an advanced capitalist country it takes
some time before the final results are announced. Iran is a very big
country with quite a primitive infrastructure in the rural areas. So
how could he make this announcement immediately?
If he had said, “I won by a small difference” maybe some people
would have believed it. But instead, they announced a huge victory, and
people didn’t believe it. There was an immediate reaction. People came
on the streets: students (it was mainly students in the beginning),
also middle class people, and teachers – people who in the past would
have supported the regime. The women played a huge role, since the
women are some of the main victims of this regime.
Let’s remind ourselves of the conditions Lenin put forth, the four conditions for revolution:
The regime is split; there is a crisis in the regime.
The middle class is wavering between the revolutionary forces and the ruling class.
The working class is ready to fight and make the greatest sacrifices.
The existence of a revolutionary party and leadership.
The regime in Iran is split from top to bottom. This always happens
at the beginning of any revolution all throughout history. It happened
in France in 1789 and in Russia in February 1917. When a regime enters
into an impasse, it is reflected in two factions at the top. One
faction says we must reform from the top to prevent a revolution from
below. And the other faction says no, if we start reforming from the
top there’ll be a revolution from below, keep things as they are. And
both of them are right.
As for the second point, the middle class was not wavering, but
actually took the side of the revolution. There was some participation
of the workers, like the Teheran bus drivers. There was even talk of a
general strike, but this failed to materialize, precisely because of
the absence of the last factor: a revolutionary party and leadership.
These were the biggest movements of the masses since 1979. They took
the regime by surprise. They took Mousavi by surprise. They took the
Americans by surprise. The argument that the CIA is responsible for
this movement is a monstrous invention. Mousavi did everything in his
power to block this movement. Every day he would say: “don’t go on the
streets, you’re going to be killed, I want to save your life.” Every
day he said this and every day more people came onto the streets. Not
just students and middle class people.
The Economist described the people that were on these
demonstrations: there was a mixture, students, middle class people,
women, a lot of women, but also poor people from the poor districts of
Tehran, women dressed in the head covering and poor people, and even
mullahs. This was a colossal movement. It’s the kind of movement you’d
expect at the beginning of every genuine revolution which stirs up
society to the depths. The authorities tried repression; people were
beaten up by the Basiji. They were beaten up, imprisoned, and some
people were killed. But nothing could stop it. At one point, there were
even indications that cracks were opening up within the police.
These demonstrators were extraordinary because nobody organized
them. I suppose if ever there was an argument for anarchism, this would
be it. It was spontaneous, by word of mouth. The youth used mobile
phones and all the other modern technology which is now available.
The regime tried to block the internet and block mobile phone
transmission, and still they found ways around it. How do you stop a
movement when there’s no leadership, there’s no one to arrest? That’s
why they couldn’t stop this movement. The anarchists are doubtless
delighted by all this. But we must point out to the anarchists that
while the lack of leadership was, in one sense, a strong point, it was
also a weak point.
In the end the movement failed in its objectives. We must ask why.
There were two fatal weaknesses in this movement. In the first place,
it was precisely the weakness of spontaneity. There was no leadership,
no plan, and no strategy. It is impossible to keep masses of people on
the streets without such a plan. Eventually, the movement will
dissipate, just as steam dissipates in the air unless it is
concentrated in a piston-box.
Above all there was no participation by the organized workers. That
was the second and decisive weakness. This again shows the limitations
of the workers’ leaders in Iran. There have been many strikes in Iran
in the last period, but in the decisive moment, where was the
leadership? Unfortunately, the so-called workers’ vanguard failed to
support the movement and did not call on the workers to join it.
I have the impression that these so-called vanguard workers are
either ex-Stalinists, or demoralized elements of the older generation
who are under the influence of Stalinist ideas. Whatever they are, they
behaved very badly. There’s a marvellous article by Trotsky written in
1930, which has got a direct reference to what is happening in Iran. It
is called The Spanish Revolution and the Tasks of the Communists.
At that time there were big student demonstrations, and Trotsky
insisted that the Spanish workers and the Spanish Communists must
support these demonstrations and put forth revolutionary democratic
demands.
Unfortunately in Iran the workers’ leaders boycotted the election
and boycotted this movement, which is a very bad way to behave. An
indefinite general strike would have finished this regime, especially
if it was accompanied by the setting up of soviets, or shoras, to use
the Farsi word. The idea of a general strike was floating in the air,
and even Mousavi made some vague references to it. All that was
required was to name a day, and that would have been enough. But this
demand never came forward.
We pointed out in the articles on the website, that you cannot have
a situation where you’re calling people out on the streets saying,
demonstrate, demonstrate, demonstrate, without any perspective. People
are going out on the streets every day and getting their heads cracked,
and there’s no perspective. And therefore what happened was inevitable.
I said in my first article: if it carries on like this it will go down.
And that is what happened.
On the surface it seems that the regime has regained control but
that is not the case. Nothing is solved and the splits in the regime
now are wide open. There have been splits on the left (if you can call
the reformists the left).and splits on the right also. Particularly
interesting is the conduct of Rafsanjani, who is one of the main
gangsters in the regime – a very rich gangster, and a very clever
gangster. Now he has gone over to the opposition.
Rafsanjani held a Friday prayer meeting about ten days ago, a Friday
prayer meeting in one of the main Mosques in Tehran. This is not a new
thing; the leaders do this quite often. Ahmadinejad did it quite
recently. But at the most in a big rally (for that is what it is), you
woud get no more than 50,000 people. How many went to this prayer
meeting with Rafsanjani? One million people! Now it may be that one
million people suddenly developed a burning interest in praying to
Allah. It’s possible, but I don’t think so. This was a mass political
demonstration. And this same gangster, this Rafsanjani, gave a very
militant speech in the Mosque.
I don’t think he said a lot about Allah, what he did say was to call
for democracy, he said that the elections were rigged, he said it was
impermissible to use violence against the people of Iran and he called
for the release of everyone who had been arrested. This is astonishing.
And even more interestingly he was supported by leading clerics from
the city of Qom which is the main religious centre in Iran. I think at
least four or five Grand Ayatollahs came out in support of Rafsanjani.
This means there is an open split and it seems Khamenei is losing
control.
Khamenei is the Supreme Leader, not only of the religious questions,
he’s the Supreme Leader of the state, he controls the army, the police,
the judiciary, and he’s been publicly challenged by Rafsanjani. Even
more significant, the night before that meeting, on Thursday night, 24
top army officers were arrested. Two of them were generals. Why were
they arrested? They went to this prayer meeting with their uniforms,
and this was a serious act of rebellion.
Therefore, all the conditions Lenin put forth for a revolution are
present in Iran except one, or to be more accurate, one and a half,
because the proletariat, again through the fault of the leadership, has
not played the leading role that it should play. Lenin wrote in 1905
that in a situation like that, the proletariat must put itself at the
head of the nation. The proletariat and its Party must fight for the
most advanced revolutionary democratic demands, which can appeal not
just to the workers but to the middle class, the students, the youth,
and the women.
These democratic demands must be summed up with one slogan, for a
nationwide general strike and soviets (shoras). If they did that, this
regime would be finished. Now just think what that means. Just imagine
the effect of a revolution in Iran. Imagine the effect it would have on
all the countries in that area, regimes like Egypt, Jordan, Saudi
Arabia, they would fall, one after the other. Why do you think the
imperialists have been so quiet around this business in Iran?
You ask me what form the new government would take. I answer: if
there was a Bolshevik Party (even a party of 8000, as the Bolsheviks
were in February 1917), you’d be talking about a classical proletarian
revolution in Iran. But there is no such party. Therefore it’s almost
certain that the Iranian revolution will have to pass through a phase
of a bourgeois parliamentary regime of some sort, as happened in Spain
after 1931. But under conditions of economic crisis, that will not be a
recipe for peace any more than it was in 1931 Spain.
The overthrow of the regime has only been postponed till the next
crisis, which may be in six months, twelve months or a couple of years.
But it is inevitable. And it will open up a very stormy period in Iran.
We can’t be precise about the nature of the regime that will emerge.
But I will tell you what it will not be: there cannot be
anther fundamentalist Islamic regime in Iran, not after the last 30
years. That’s finished. And therefore the Iranian revolution, for the
first time, will cut across all this madness of fundamentalism that
exists in the Middle East.
Perspectives and tasks
We are entering into a revolutionary period which will last for some
years, with ups and downs, as occurred in Spain from 1930 to 1937, but
under those conditions the masses will learn very fast. Our ideas are
already getting an important echo inside Iran itself and in the coming
period this is bound to grow.
It’s clear that the students are drawing conclusions. They can see
the limitations of Mousavi and the reformists. The fact that the
Iranian website of the IMT has received hundreds of visits of students
asking about Socialism and Marxism is of extreme significance. I
believe the International Marxist Tendency acted very quickly in
relation to the events in Iran. I can report to you that our articles
were immediately translated in Farsi the very same day; they were
immediately distributed in Iran and according to our reports, have had
an excellent response.
Anyway comrades, I’ve only had time to touch on the most explosive
points in world politics and I don’t have time to develop these points
any further. In conclusion, I would just like to say this: Lenin once
wrote an article with the title “Combustible Material in World
Politics.” Comrades there is combustible material now everywhere, and
the conditions for revolution are maturing.
Of course, we must not exaggerate: it’s still in the early days. As
Trotsky said, we need to be patient. But two things are clear here: we
can see at least the beginning of a change of consciousness of the
masses. Millions of people are wide open to the ideas of Marxism in a
way that was not the case before. I have been almost 50 years in the
tendency founded by Ted Grant, and I have seen big movements before.
But I have never seen a situation like this and I cannot think of any
parallel to what is now developing.
The second and final point is the role of this International. Our
forces are still very small, we’re struggling to build the first
nucleus of the IMT in many countries, but we are beginning to develop.
And we are now not just observers, but we’re an active part of the
movement in some very important countries. Therefore, we can be
supremely confident of the future, we have the correct ideas, the
marvellously profound ideas of Marxism. We have the correct tactics and
methods, and above all we are determined to link these ideas to the
mass organizations of the working class.
Comrades! We can go forward with absolute confidence in the ideas of
Marxism, absolute confidence in the revolutionary role of the working
class, absolute confidence in ourselves, and absolute confidence in the
victory of the International Marxist Tendency.
