Iran on the Brink

As the dust continues to settle on the row over the captured sailors, a much more interesting and potentially earth-shattering story is unfolding in Iran.

Here No Sweat talk to Shora Esmailian and Andreas Malm, activists and authors of the recently released book, Iran on the Brink, which sketches the history of workers rebellion in Iran and the new movement shaking the country. The book also deals with the international situation facing Iran – the stand off over the Iranian nuclear programme and the sabre-rattling of the US and how this is playing out at home. Here the authors expand on some of those themes.

Iran has a long history of class struggle. The key dates of this history are :
1906 – the Constitutional Revolution – the Shah was forced to accept the formation of the Majles (parliament) and “anjumans” (councils) took power all over the country.
1953 – a coup toppled the democratically elected prime minister, Muhammed Mossadeq, who had natonalised the oil industry and instituted a series of reforms. He was replaced by Mohammed Reza Shah, the son of the hated Reza Shah, who instituted a dictatorship and brutally attacked the left.
1979 – what became known as the Islamic Revolution. The revolution itself was one of the most massive popular revolutions in modern history. Its meaning has produced as much discord and divisions when it comes to interpreting the events as, say, 1917 in Russia or 1936 in Spain.

NS: But how did the 1953 Coup take place with such little opposition?
S&A: You will have hundreds of different answers depending on what Iranian faction you talk to: they will say this or that went wrong, the mistake was this or that - and everyone else is right-wing except for us.

But the failure in 1953 was basically that Tudeh (the Iranian Communist Party) was entirely following the orders of the Soviet Union and heeded every command from Stalin. Tudeh was, for example, more interested in handing over Iranian oil reserves to Stalin than supporting the nationalisation efforts. And Tudeh wouldn't mobilise the masses, or indeed their own military organisations and networks, against the coup - yet another failure of passivity at the crucial moment among the Left.

The Tudeh was huge. It was the biggest revolutionary left organisation in the Middle East. It had a strong trade union federation and a network penetrating the military and the armed forces. They could reach right into the state apparatus because they managed to recruit a large number of officers and state employees of different kinds. So they really had a strong organisation.

NS: The CIA funded the Shah to mount a coup and roll back the gains made under Mossadeq. Were Tudeh even concerned about what this would mean for workers?
S&A: Well, I guess there was a lot of concern but they were basically subservient to the Soviet Union and the interests Russia were to secure Iranian Oil. I don’t think this is a unique thing. There are many parallels – the Communist Party in Germany failed to fight the rise of the Nazis and again in Spain they put the interests of Russia above the interests of the Spanish revolution, so it is not that unusual. Of course they would also be repressed – their leaders imprisoned, murdered or exiled, along with everyone else.

NS:And in 1979 the left would fail the test again. Was it possible for things to have gone differently?
S&A: Yes. It was a massive democratic explosion. The Shoras (literally meaning councils or perhaps soviets – co-author Shora is named after these instruments of revolutionary democracy) ran vast areas of Iranian life – at both the factory and the community level. The workers, particularly the oil workers, arriving late on the scene, played a crucial part in the toppling of the Shah. But again the left did not know what to do. The Fedaiyan (guerrilla organisation influenced by Che Guevara) would eventually split in 1980, the radical minority seeing the Shoras as useful insofar as they might aid in the building of a communist party, the majority joining Tudeh in calling for the dissolution of the Shoras and the handing of all powers to the new Islamic state.

The left in the West also fell into the trap of failing to differentiate between the different factions in the Iranian revolution, preferring to see it in simple terms of a classic proletarian revolution. In the book we try to explain the different strata of Iranian society – the Bazaari (professions of the Bazaar – merchants, money-lenders and others); the Mostazafin (“oppressed” or “deprived”); the clergy, the middle class; the working class and so on. These sections of society had very different interests but the Tudeh in Iran and the left in Sweden and I believe in the UK failed to see this and ended up cheering for those who would be the main enemies of the working class in Iran.

NS: For the next 15 years or so the Mullahs would consolidate their power and the working class seemed to disappear from the radar. What happened then?
S&A: The movement for reform that brought Khatami to power came from the middle classes – from the students and the like. There were big demonstrations demanding more freedom and some reforms. Khatami did make some reforms and there was a brief thaw in the regime but he failed to change anything at the point of production. So the conditions for the workers, both their material living conditions and their position in relation to the Millionaire Mullahs who were getting richer and richer remained unchanged.

The reform movement failed and Ahmadinejad came to power on a platform of populist rhetoric. He promised to do something for the Mosatzafin. But in reality the oppressed and the workers have seen little change. That is where the workers movement has come from.

The reviving workers’ movement is a response to the failure of the reformist project which promised to make change but delivered very little for ordinary Iranians. And it is also a counter-response to the Millionaire Mullahs’ change in tactic from attempting to incorporate the growing movement of the middle class, women and students. It failed to satisfy those movements because the questions they raised ran deep into Iranian Society. So, the Mullah’s adopted a new tactic – to beat down these movements for reform. Ahmedinejad appealed to the workers and the poor, especially to the “Mostazafin” (the “oppressed”, or “downtrodden”), promising to listen to the concerns of ordinary Iranians and coupling this populist appeal with a hardline “anti-(US)imperialism” and an equally hardline, conservative social programme.

But Iranian Society is very disparate. There is a, mainly secular, middle class, a working class, the Bazaari, the Mostazafin, the Mullah’s… and the workers could see the oil fortunes flowing into the country and the Millionaire Mullahs getting richer and richer, and this combined with the failure of the reformists meant that the workers could see that they were not going to win anything out of this situation and they were going to have to do something on their own.

One interesting development now is that there is quite a radicalisation and a move to the left going on inside the student movement. The students are really trying to link up with the workers – the teachers and the bus drivers and so forth. In fact some of the students were involved in the bus drivers strike and were arrested along with the workers. There has been some kind of split in the main student movement, with one section a radical, leftist oriented faction. And this is really like a fresh start because these students are looking left, but they don’t really have a fixed viewpoint like the students did perhaps in the 1970s – they don’t have any established links to the Stalinist parties or to any other international tendency.

They are thinking for themselves to find a way but many of them have come to the conclusion already that you have to go beyond the discourse that says “we have to have a few more human rights” or “we need to make some small changes here”. They realise that they have to look to the working people and their ongoing process. And that is really good sign.

Juts the other week, on International Women’s Day, there were several major demonstrations in Tehran that were suppressed quite viciously. At the same time there were demonstrations going on in the universities. So things are happening.
When the students were demonstrating in the 1990s, many of them were attacked and even shot. They had the support of the people but no one would go out to join them because they were too afraid. But now the students can see that the masses are not in the universities, they are in the workplaces.

When all these movements converge – the women’s movement, the student movement and the different trade unions – that’s when things will get exciting. What we have seen so far is the bus drivers striking for their demands, the teachers striking for their demands, Iran Khodoro – the car workers – striking for their demands. The first strike that can transcend the factory gates and will include different workers collectives and sectors will be a crucial event. We hope it will come soon.

There are not yet strong links between these different struggles but we met some Iranians in London who are in contact with many different activists in Iran and they have been encouraging them to link up and to coordinate. There was a secret, illegal meeting of some people just the other week in fact to discuss how they can do this. But obviously it is hard for activists to do this and for us to encourage it. We just have to wait and see.

There is a very good website – www.iranianworkersbulletin.org - where you can see different groups of workers have posted messages of solidarity to each other, saying, “we support the teachers” and things like that. There were about 10 or 15 textile factories in Kurdistan that displayed banners saying “we support the teachers”. So at that level workers are starting to co-ordinate and of course there are the May Day demonstrations but nothing permanent and solid.

NS: Currently this workers movement is caught between the exploitation and brutality of the Millionaire Mullahs at home and a sabre-rattling threat form the Bush administration and its allies abroad (notably Blair). The book takes the threat from the US (and Israel) very seriously. The second part of the book deals with this threat, how it is affecting events in Iran and our attitude to it as activists in the West.

S&A: It sounds a bit vulgar but I think it comes down to the oil reserves because the oil market is in crisis. It is boiling and the US needs the Iranian oil fields to open up desperately. They cannot simply wait for change in Iran because the Millionaire Mullahs will guard the oil resources very jealously and will manage them in a way that suits their own needs – just as Saddam Hussein did.

The US does try to foment internal opposition. The US State Department’s website even claims that they support Iranian trade unions and make financial support available. So there is a combination of strategies, but particularly military and political threats combined with support form minority national groups in Iran.

But they have problems in making a “purple revolution” in Iran. No trade union for example will accept American money. It would just be perceived as beyond the pale. Some minority groups do though, unfortunately.

Also, the presence of Israel in the region is important. Israel ses itself as a small country, surrounded by enemies. That is why it needs nuclear weapons. If Iran gets nuclear weapons that will upset the balance of power.

There are deep lying, material reasons for this current hostility and you should remember that this is rooted in 1979 and before that even. So there is a long pattern here. Some analysts say that this antagonism is the defining hostility in the Middle East and has been for 20 years or more. In the Iran-Iraq war, the US played both sides for a bit to the mutual weakening of both countries but even within that policy the weight of support was heavily stacked against Iran.

Even today though, you can meet some Iranians who insist that there will never be any war because the US and the Mullahs are both bourgeois and there is no real difference between them – just as they insisted after 1979 that nothing had changed and the Mullahs were no different from the old regime of the Shah and the “comprador bourgeoisie”. This is plainly wrong. The US and the Mullahs are not friends.

NS: How do you see the prospects now for the workers movement?
S&A Because of all the threats from the US it is much harder for the workers movement to organise. For example, during the recent teachers strike the Mullahs were saying that, “we see every protest as a security threat, because we are under attack from America”. So they outlawed the demonstrations and arrested many of the teachers.

Workers in Iran see the US as the big enemy, so this carries a lot of weight. A bus driver told me once that, “yeah, we don’t care about the Mullahs and what they say but if America would attack us we would unite and fight the enemy”. And that would be really bad. If the US or Israel were to attack it would take Iran back 10 years and people would become very nationalistic and would not have the desire and the energy to fight the Islamists. Some Iranians say that we can fight them both at the same time and win but I don’t think that is possible.

NS: And what should we do as socialists in the West?

S&A: It is important also for trade unionists and others to make statements in support of these struggles that are taking place. When I read about the teachers strike, that despite the dictatorship and the threats they are still in the streets and demanding a pay rise – a very humbe demand really but a radical one in its context – I feel so proud. We must feel proud of what the workers are doing and it is so important for the workers’ morale and for them to be able to keep going on, to struggle, that we express that pride and support to them.

Iran is the cornerstone of the Middle East. What happens there and to the left there is crucial to the whole region. The left must do all it can to support left and workers currents there. What you see is the unions – the education international and the International Transport Federation have been really good in supporting the unions in Iran. The trade unions are more sensitive to the plight of the workers there than the parties of the left. They seem to be more concerned with supporting the Iraqi “resistance”. I read an interview with Mohammed Osanlou, the bus drivers leader. He said that when he was arrested they locked him up with some al Queda people who thought it would be nice to murder some Shia people and they would go to heaven. He found it a kind of torture to be imprisoned with these people who are part of the Iraqi resistance. I mean it is just so far from working class politics what major sections of the Iraqi resistance is doing

What we should see now is a major anti-war movement like we saw in 2003 but a movement that protests against the western policy towards Iran on the basis of solidarity with the Labour movement inside Iran. We should be saying to our governments, “stop preparing to go to war with Iran. Because even if you don’t actually do it you are already hurting the prospects for democracy there. You are already hurting our comrades there. The two issues are really one. To make solidarity with the Iranian workers we have to oppose the western aggression on Iran and vice versa.

For more details on Shora and Andreas' book or to order youself a copy, visit Pluto Books at http://www.plutobooks.com/cgi-local/nplutobrows.pl?chkisbn=9780745326030...

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MORE THOUGHTS ON IRAN - BY SHORA AND ANDREAS
From www.opendemocracy.net

The war in Iran has already begun. Its first victims are not laid to rest in the mournful martyrs’ cemeteries that dot the country, but locked up behind the concrete walls, barbed wire and steel gates of the Evin prison: the latest contingent of striking workers, imprisoned in the hundreds for serving the foreign enemy.
It is difficult not to feel a sense of déjà vu. 27 years ago, the Shatt al-Arab waterway between Iraq and Iran was the scene of tense stand-offs between armed forces rapidly augmented and fortified on both sides, mutual claims of border violations, violent incidents – pretty harmless initially – and, towards September 1980, regular exchanges of fire across the frontier. The Iraqi army eventually swept into Iran, allegedly to end Iranian support for Shiite rebels and interference in Iraqi affairs. It was a blatant war of aggression unleashed by the Baathist regime, with U.S. backing – and precisely therefore, paradoxically, it was a sheer gift to the Islamic Republic. For at that time, the nascent theocratic state was in the midst of a general showdown with the organised working class of Iran, and the foreign invasion proved the perfect weapon for dealing it a mortal blow.
After the general strike that brought down the Shah’s regime in 1979, jubilant workers seized factories, mines, oil refineries and workplaces in most other sectors of the economy, replacing l’ancien regime with their own direct rule. The shora councils, based on general assemblies of all employees, assumed control over the Iranian economy. They ensured continued production amidst the revolutionary chaos, initiated radical reforms in work organisation and, during the year of 1979, developed into the focal point of a democratic restructuring of Iranian society from the bottom up. The shora movement was, arguably, the most comprehensive experiment of workers’ control in a Third World country to this date. It was also – most definitely – an existential threat to the power of Ayatollah Khomeini and the sort of society he and his fellow Islamists were striving to establish.
As soon as they felt confident enough, the mullahs in charge of the state apparatus turned against the shora movement. It proved intransigent and difficult to subdue, however, as the promises of the revolution were taken all the more seriously by major segments of the population – until, that is, the war broke out. When the Iraqi troops crossed the border, all internal dissent could instantly be branded as treason. It didn’t even sound as a very unreasonable argument: why go on a strike in defence of shora power when the nation’s existence is at stake? That’s unpatriotic! Armed with this sort of reasoning, the state apparatus moved to crush the shora and regain control over the economy. Pasdaran, the very same Revolutionary Guards who now hold 15 British marines in custody, marched through the factories in the autumn of 1980, arresting thousands of unyielding workers and instituting “Islamic management” at gunpoint. That was the beginning of the end of working class organisations in Iran. A few years into the war, which Khomeini refused to let go of – even as Saddam Hussein offered to surrender – and rather escalated on Iraqi soil, the last generation of labour activists was soaked in blood: executed in Evin and buried as anonymous dead in the cemeteries.
Since 2004, a new labour movement has emerged in Iran. It is the first sign of the return from the dead of a working class that has endured decades of unmitigated tyranny in the workplaces. It is, however, very different from 1979. The autocratic state apparatus is not crumbling – to the contrary, it is perhaps stronger than ever – there is no revolutionary fervour in society at large, no bold agitation, socialist, Islamist or otherwise, is pouring out from the universities. This time, the labour unrest is a desperate outcry. The economic hardships, under the reign of ever more affluent millionaire mullahs, have simply become unliveable. Chains of fear and apprehension have been broken, not for ideological reasons, but because workers have found strikes and unions – though still considered illegal and haram – to be the only vehicles for enforcing bearable conditions.
The most dramatic battle to that date occurred in January 2006, when up to 17 000 bus drivers at the Vahed company in Tehran went on strike. Their demands were humble: collective bargaining, a modest wage hike, two pairs of shoes for driving, recognition of the bus drivers’ union, and, most importantly, the release of their leader Mansour Ossanlou. A few weeks earlier, he had been locked up in Evin. In the morning hours before the strike would commence, Pasdaran swooped down on workers’ districts throughout the capital, pulling hundreds of bus drivers and their family members out of their beds and throwing them into Evin, followed up by a massive military operation to break the pickets and keep the traffic going. At the end of the day, 1200 Vahed workers had been netted. They were roundly condemned as traitors in state media, accused of acting on behalf of the U.S. State Department, which had just announced its intention to sponsor trade unions to foment regime change in Iran. The majority of the prisoners soon trickled out of Evin, but Mansour Ossanlou remained. The charge against him: “maintaining relations with and receiving financial support from a foreign power”.
In the last two weeks, it has been the teachers’ turn to taste the iron fist of the Islamic Republic. Teachers have suffered no fewer calamities than other workers. Eighty per cent of them are women; highly educated but generally barred from employment opportunities in the private sector, women have thronged the schools in recent years. A massive degradation of the profession has ensued, with salaries falling far behind the public sector average, hourly payment and temporary contracts becoming the norm. 70 percent of teachers now find themselves living below the poverty line. Thus after class, a teacher will have to dig into the reality afflicting so many workers of today’s Iran: a second job, or even a third, to secure an income that covers the most basic expenses. The schools of Iran are severely dilapidated. Fire accidents due to unsafe heating systems have killed numerous children, an estimated 45 000 class rooms run the risk of ceilings caving in, schools for some 9 million students operate in two or three shifts – while at the same time, oil fortunes are amassed as never before. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s victorious promise in the presidential elections of 2005 was to “put the oil money on the people’s table”. One of the teacher’s leaders recently told Iranian newspaper Rooz: “We have not breathed the aroma of the oil wealth. Our income has decreased during [Ahmadinejad’s term].”
In 2004, in the birth year of the new labour movement, teachers were among the first to enter the fray. In March that year, a third of all teachers – or some 300 000 – participated in a nation-wide strike, the first female dominated labour protest on such a scale in the history of the Islamic Republic. The strike was defeated, its leaders arrested, but facing ever deteriorating conditions, teachers continued to organise. There is now an independent “Co-ordinating Council”, or Shora-ye Hamahangi, of 30 union branches covering virtually all of Iran.
On 19 February, they struck again. Four nation-wide strike actions followed, the demand being salaries equal to those of other public sector employees. A string of mass demonstrations, with up to 10 000 teachers denouncing the failed policies of Ahmadinejad, took place in front of the parliament building in Tehran. They were grudgingly tolerated by the police and armed forces, until on Tuesday 13 March union leaders were summoned to the Ministry of Education. Expecting negotiations, they were met by security and intelligence officers, who told the teachers that under the current climate of sanctions, military siege and threats of foreign invasion, all further action would be considered “security threats”. “The enemy”, the teachers were told, “seeks to create internal divisions”. When again some 10 000 teachers gathered in front of parliament the next day, riot police and military forces cordoned off the demonstration, attacked the crowd with batons, and hauled at least 1000 protesters into vans and buses, heading to various detention centres around the city. At the time of this writing, more than 100 are still held in Evin.
For the Islamic regime in general and Ahmadinejad in particular, confrontation with the West is the method of choice, tried and effective, for striking against alternative centres of power. The new labour movement has developed into the most serious such centre, threatening to undermine the status quo of the Islamic Republic since the early 1980s. Unlike the reform movement of the 1990:s, it is not a current within the state apparatus and cannot therefore be as easily controlled, and unlike the student movement, it has a potential for reaching out to the population of ordinary, working Iranians; it is de-centred, prevalent throughout the country, emerging in all forms and shapes. The labour movement is all the more dangerous to Ahmadinejad, as every union and strike that pops up is yet another proof of his inability to deliver. “Social justice” was his oath, but during his tenure, Iranians have only seen unemployment soaring even higher and inflation exploding, oil revenues as far from their pockets as ever. That is why Ahmadinejad has acted as if he was begging the West to whip him. Flaunting theatrical anti-semitism, forging alliances with enemies of the U.S., and stubbornly insisting on everything nuclear amount to a consistent policy of inviting confrontation, a brinkmanship serving a twofold purpose: rallying the Iranian public behind the regime, against the common enemy, and obtaining an excuse for cracking down on dissent.
Under Ahmadinejad’s presidency, Iran has undergone a process of profound militarization. Pasdaran, the organisation in which Ahamdinejad himself made his career, has assumed more and more direct control not only over the state apparatus, but over the economy as well, including, for example, the Vahed bus company. At the universities, Pasdaran make sure free-thinking professors and student activists are expelled; in the provinces, it regularly pierces the heart of Kurdish, Arab, and Baluchi land with massive military exercises; at the construction sites, some 600 000 Afghan workers are currently being arrested and banished from the country, to be replaced with Iranian workers, often employed by companies owned by Pasdaran. All of this is done in an atmosphere of war coming in from the West. In spite of this, labour unrest has continued unabated, attesting to the extreme deprivation and desperation; one might indeed wonder what levels the strikes would have reached by now had there been no threat of war.
And so Pasdaran arrested 15 British marines on Friday, and on Sunday, Iran declared it would scale down co-operation with IAEA in the wake of expanded sanctions. From this, however, one must not conclude that the Islamic Republic is contriving the tensions out of nowhere. Much to the contrary. The atmosphere of war wouldn’t have any use value for the Islamic Republic if it wasn’t for the fact that the Western aggression is totally illegitimate and Iranian national rights are constantly being infringed upon. There is circumstantial evidence that the British marines were in fact sailing in Iranian waters and, indeed, that American and British agents are using their positions next to the Iranian borders to infiltrate them, spy and sow internal strife, or even outright terror. When Pasdaran officials are being kidnapped in Iraq, Pasdaran has every reason – even some justification – for acquiring a bargaining chip to secure their release. Sanctions are being cast on Iran, without their being anything to substantiate the claims that Iran is building a bomb: and these sanctions hurt the Iranian economy. Last but not least, the highly visible preparations for war in the Persian Gulf, with new American vessels arriving virtually by the week, do give Pasdaran and the other military forces a good reason for being on guard. If conflict was not – as in the 1980:s – to a major degree imposed on Iran, its rulers would not be able to act as the righteous guardians of the nation, and the amount of popular acquiescence needed for implementing repression against dissenters could not be taken for granted.
It is precisely this logic that is crippling the labour movement and the other democratic forces of Iran. For every new agent that trespasses on Iranian territory, for every new restriction that is slapped on the country, for every thinly veiled threat of an American or Israeli air blitz another unionist is being apprehended, another strike suppressed, another demonstrator beaten to a pulp. Make no mistake: the atmosphere of war is primarily of Western making. It is the West that, through its aggression, serves the Islamic Republic with the ultimate pretext for persecution. The West has its own interests in encroaching upon Iran: they happen to converge with the interests of the Islamic Republic, the casualties being civilian, working, and Iranian, and the prospects of a democratic Iran becoming slimmer for every day this goes on.