By Kamran Nayeri, August 8, 2019
Mahmoud Sayrafizadeh (L) with his son Said Sayrafizadeh
Preamble
This long critical tribute to Mahmoud Sayrafizadeh is also my response to a key
question: why the Iranian Trotskyists adapted to the Islamic Republic to such an extent
that we did not recognize the counter-revolution unfolding before our eyes. Both the
Revolutionary Workers Party (HKE) that gave political support to the Islamic Republic
and the Workers Unity Party (HVK) that materially supported it against imperialism
and Saddam Hussein's counter-revolutionary invasion of Iran adapted to the clerical
capitalist regime and continued to insist that "the revolution was advancing" until they
were both forced to dissolve. The same can be said of the U.S. Socialist Workers Party
which remained blind to the counter-revolution. In fact, the first time the SWP publicly
spoke of the Islamic Republic counter-revolution was in 2006. It took another 12 year
before it dated it to 1983.
In the initial years of the Iranian Trotskyist movement, Mahmoud Sayrafizadeh was the
key figure for reasons that I will explain below. At two critical periods in the
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development of the Iranian Trotskyist movement, Mahmoud and I collaborated closely
—from the late spring to November 1977 in Brooklyn, New York, and from September
1980 to July 1982, in Tehran, Iran. In the earlier period, three of us, Mahmoud, Nasser
Khoshnevis, and I, collaborated daily as part of the Steering Committee of the
Permanent Revolution Faction (PRF) of the Sattar League (SL), the Iranian section of
the Fourth International (FI). We operated out of the apartments of Mahmoud and
Nasser who put me up for the duration because I had been called in from Oakland,
California, and had no financial means to have support myself. Thus, we also spent our
limited rest time befriending each other.
I also collaborated with Mahmoud in the late 1980s and early 1990s when we were both
in the U.S. SWP. Upon returning to New York in August 1982, I had joined the New
York branch of the SWP. When Mahmoud arrived in New York in the early part of 1986,
he too immediately joined the SWP. In his case, however, it must have been part of a
decision making process between Mahmoud and the SWP leadership, as he was quickly
co-opted onto it. Soon an Iran Committee was formed that operated under the direct
oversight of the SWP Political Committee. Although nothing was ever disclosed to me
about its mission, composition, and decision making process, I was asked, like other
Iranian members of the SWP, to undertake assignments for it. Thus, my political
relationship with Mahmoud during this period was limited to occasions when our work
for the Iran Committee coincided. Although, Mahmoud was a member of the New York
branch, like many others in the branch who were on national assignment he was not a
branch activist. Our social relations were also infrequent. During this period, I
increasingly felt uncomfortable with Mahmoud’s and the SWP’s approach to the Islamic
Republic regime which at times was clearly adaptationist as I will discuss below. When I
raised these concerns, the SWP leadership initially ignored me (and other Iranian
members who raised similar issues) and in 1992 it became openly hostile to me which
resulted in their fantastic charge that I was collaborating with Babak Zahraie, the former
leader of the long defunct Revolutionary Workers Party (HKE), who was living in Iran.
Anyone familiar with the history of the Iranian Trotskyist movement would know that
Zahraie and I were on opposite side on every key political junctures and that he had
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expelled me from the HKE. I figured if the SWP Political Committee can literary
fabricate such lies against me, it can do so again at any time. I lost any trust in them and
I resigned within a week in October 1992. Some months later, I learned that the SWP
leadership had black listed me as “an enemy of the party” barring the membership from
any contact with me unless those allowed by the Political Committee. Therefore, I have
not seen Mahmoud or heard from him since October 1992.
Thus, this essay covers in some detail three distinct periods in Mahmoud’s political life
and my relationship to him.
This essay is part of an ongoing critical reflection on my/our political history. I already
have written two long essays for this purpose. The first is an outline of the Iranian
Trotskyist movement that I included in my critical review of Barry Sheppard’s two-book
volume about the history of the SWP (Nayeri, August 2012). The second (Nayeri,
November 2012) is a critical review of one of the three parties affiliated with the Fourth
International in Iran, Hezb-e Kargaran-e Enghelabi (HKE, Revolutionary Workers
Party. In this essay, I will provide a critical assessment of Hezb-e Vahdat-e Kargaran
(HVK, Workers Unity Party) that Mahmoud and I both helped co-found in January 1981
and was dissolved due to severe repression by December 1982. I have also written other
long and short topical essays dealing with the history of Iranian labor and socialist
movement and the 1979 revolution. Thus, there is a cumulative quality in my writing. I
sometimes feel necessary to include some of my already published passages but more
frequently make references to my already published writings. Thus, the reader will find
a large number of references to my earlier work.
Thus, the essay will be a chronological account that weaves together an outline of
Mahmoud’s political and, to a much lesser extent, personal life, with key historical
events, and, with discussion of socialist theories.
Of course, my account is neither complete nor “objective.” I have been an active part of
it in crucial junctures. However, I have tried to keep to the facts when I know them and
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set aside aspects that I do not know about. Whatever criticism the reader will find is
political and directed at our movement in which Mahmoud sometimes played a
significant part. In my view, Mahmoud has dedicated his life to what he believed would
be building a Leninist party. Alas, it has never worked out that way. None of the parties
Mahmoud joined or helped found were ever anything more than a prototype of the party
of Lenin. We must also recall that even the party of Lenin did not last more than two
decades before being transformed into the party of the rising bureaucracy in the state
and society of the young Soviet Russia that oversaw a counter-revolution of its own; that
is, it turned into its opposite. Never again in history we find another party like the
Bolshevik Party and all micro-Leninist parties have been consumed with crises and
failures despite the best intention of their ranks and leaders. I will try to suggest why
this has been the case.
This critical conclusion should not be construed as giving up on “the revolution.” As
some of my readers are well aware, for the better part of the last two decades I have
developed an argument that the we need to redefine the statement of the problem Marx
and Engels faced in the nineteenth century. Today, humanity is facing three existential
crisis that lay outside the scope of their materialist conception of history: Catastrophic
climate change, the Sixth Extinction, and the threat of a nuclear holocaust. Today’s
radical youth and working people need to develop our own methodology, theory of
history, program, and strategy. (see, Nayeri, 2018, for an outline of my own view) Marx
and Engels considered the socialist revolution to be on the horizon. Accordingly, they
did not factor time in their calculations. Unfortunately, we cannot share a similar
optimism about the future ecological socialist revolution. In the present historical
conjuncture the choices before us are ecological socialism or extinction.
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The Formative Years
The Father of Iranian Trotskyism
A generation older than the rest of the Trotskyists who were organized in the Sattar
League, Mahmoud influenced us in three important ways. As part of the Socialist
Workers Party (SWP) and its youth organization, the Young Socialist Association (YSA),
in the 1960s, for a time he became a link to the Trotskyist movement in the United
States. We had learned to view the SWP as an institutional link to the Bolshevik
program, strategy, and norms, and the heritage of the Russian revolutions of 1917. The
question of what happened to the Bolshevik party of Lenin and the Russian revolution
were key to my generation of Iranian socialist youth. There were broadly speaking two
narratives available. The currents that supported Moscow or Beijing as the center of the
world socialist movement held that the Russian revolution continued under Stalin that
adopted an orientation or “theory” of “socialism in one country” and class
collaborationist policies that flowed from it such as popular front, peaceful coexistence
(between the Soviet Union and Western imperialism), and the two-stage of revolution in
the colonial and semi-colonial countries (in this essay, I will call them “latecomers” to
the capitalist world economy) which entailed political support for the “national
bourgeoisie” in the coming revolution.
After Stalin’s death in 1953, the extent of his criminal rule became public and the
leadership of the Communist Party of U.S.S.R. repudiated “Stalin’s cult of personality”
as responsible for such massive crimes. However, the same leaders who were part of the
Stalin’s inner circles did not repudiate the Stalinist political course and still claimed that
socialism was well and advancing in the Soviet Union. The Chinese Communist Party
leadership did not follow this narrative t because the old one served Mao’s policies well.
They called the Communist Party of U.S.S.R. “revisionist” and the Soviet Union “social
imperialist” while essentially following similar domestic and international policies.
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The Trotskyist movement offered us a refreshing alternative. We learned about the
world-historic significance of the Russian revolutions of 1917 through Trotsky’s The
History of the Russian Revolution (1930). Trotsky offered a Marxist explanation of how
this massive revolution degenerated under the conditions of economic and cultural
backwardness and the isolation of the revolution giving rise to a conservative
bureaucratic cast in the party and the state in his The Revolution Betrayed: What Is the
Soviet Union and Where Is It Going? (1936). Moreover, Trotsky developed incisive
criticism of Stalin’s “theory of socialism in one country” and its disastrous application in
the Chinese revolution of 1925-27, as published in The Third International After Lenin
(1928). Trotsky also founded the Fourth International in 1938 on the basis of a
program that he drew up using the experience of the Russian revolutions and the
program and strategy of the Bolshevik Party as well as the lessons drawn by the first
four congresses of the revolutionary Communist International, widely know as
published in The Transitional Program (Trotsky, 1938), that urged the formation of
Fourth Internationalist parties following the model of the Bolshevik party.
The SWP/YSA and Mahmoud brought this insight to the growing layer of radicalizing
Iranian students in the late 1960s and early 1970s who were willing to consider Leon
Trotsky who was shunned and slandered by both Moscow and Beijing that between
them held sway over a third of humanity at the time.
Second, Mahmoud was part of the early generation of radicalized Iranian students in the
U.S. who formed the Iranian Student Associations in the United States (ISA-U.S.),
Sazmaneh Amrika) in 1960, the same year that in Europe the Confederation of the
Iranian Students (CIS) was formed. The leadership of these two organizations came
from the Tudeh Party and the National Front. These organizations were, respectively,
the pro-Moscow Stalinist party and the bourgeois nationalist party, that shared the
responsibility for not mobilizing and organizing the Iranian working people against the
August 1953 CIA coup. However, as the split in the world Stalinist movement caused a
crisis in the Tudeh party, three Maoist factions split from it, and in 1968 the Maoist
currents in the CIS and ISA-US with support from the National Front expelled the
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Tudeh Party from these organizations. It was Mahmoud who provided the early Sattar
League with the revolutionary socialist orientation towards the student movement as a
national democratic movement that can thrive only as a democratic, that is multicurrent, movement. This analysis jibed with the experience of the early wave of Iranian
students who were attracted to Trotskyism as we were also expelled by the ISA-US for
our political views.
Finally, it was Mahmoud who provided the Sattar League and the Fourth International
with a novel rendering of the modern history of Iran with his Nationality and
Revolution in Iran (1973) that used Trotsky’s theories of uneven and combined
development, Permanent Revolution, and Stalinism to make sense of the Constitutional
Revolution of 1906-11 and what some have called the Second Revolution (1941-53) (see,
endnote 2). This narrative deeply influenced our movement and became the subject of
the disagreement that emerged in the Sattar League in 1976.
Thus, it would not be inaccurate to call Mahmoud the Father of Iranian Trotskyism. It
was in recognition of these unique contributions that he was elected and re-elected to
the leadership of the Fourth International (FI), the International Executive Committee
(IEC).
Early Life
Mahmoud was born in Tabriz, the seat of the province of Azerbaijan in northwestern
Iran, in 1935. He was 11 years old when the autonomous People’s Government in
Azerbaijan came to power and a year later was overthrown and he was 18 years old
when the CIA overthrew the nationalist government of Mohammad Mossadegh. As his
future political life demonstrated, the adolescent Mahmoud was deeply affected by these
historic events. Yet, he did not seem to show it at the time as he excelled in his studies.
Before the CIA coup in August of 1953, the young Mahmoud left for the U.S. with a
scholarship to study mathematics at the Colgate University, a private college in the small
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town of Hamilton, New York. He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts (B. A.) degree in
1957 and enrolled in the graduate program in mathematics at the University of
Minnesota-Minneapolis. He received his doctoral degree in 1969 with a dissertation in
convex and discrete geometry entitled “Compactness Properties of Families of Convex
Sets.”
The relatively long time for Mahmoud’s graduate education was probably due to his
decision to start a family and to his political radicalization. In 1957, Mahmoud met
Martha Harris, an undergraduate in English literature, on campus. The two fell in love
and married and eventually had three children: Jacob, Jamileh, and Said. I do not know
when the couple moved to Brooklyn where they lived together until 1968 when they
separated. In 1976, Martha moved with Said to Pittsburgh. Mahmoud and Diane Feeley,
a feminist and labor activist and a leader of the SWP, lived with Jacob and Jamileh in a
two bedroom apartment on the fifth floor of 95 Eastern Parkway, in the Flatbush
neighborhood of Brooklyn.
Mahmoud found a teaching job at Rutgers University in New Jersey. However, his
political preoccupations conflicted with the demands of a professorial job in a research
university. Eventually, he relocated to a teaching job at Medgar Evers College in
Brooklyn, part of City University of New York (CUNY), which did not require research of
its faculty. The college is named after Medgar Wiley Evers (1925-1963), the AfroAmerican civil rights leader who was assassinated on June 12, 1963 . Mahmoud told me
how much he preferred teaching there. Another major benefit of his new job was that he
did not have to commute to New Jersey for which he relied on a rusty Volkswagen
Squareback. Mahmoud was liked by his colleagues and students at Medgar Evers
College. When he returned to the U.S. in 1986 after being away in Iran for seven years,
the department welcomed him back. He continued teaching there until he was too old to
teach.
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“Nationality and Revolution in Iran”
For key theoretical and political reasons to which I will return, Mahmoud’s 98-page
historical account, “Nationality and Revolution in Iran,” (see, endnote 3) deserves a
central place in any political assessment of him as well as any history of the Iranian
Trotskyism. The book draws on a relatively few secondary scholarly sources that deal
with some key historical events in modern Iranian history to offer a reinterpretation of
“stylized historical facts.” (see, endnote 4) Through the lens of socialist theories, in
particular Trotsky’s theory of Stalinism, the law of uneven and combined development,
and the theory of Permanent Revolution, Mahmoud constructs a narrative in which
imperialism has been the decisive counter-revolutionary force, and the national
democratic revolution is betrayed by the Iranian bourgeoisie and Stalinism, that is, the
Tudeh party and the Kremlin.
Front cover of Nationality and Revolution in Iran (1973)
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The narrative covers the Constitutional Revolution of 1906-11 and the Second
Revolution, that is, the wave of mass movements that began after the occupation of Iran
by the Allied forces in August 1941, who exiled the pro-fascist dictator Reza Shah
Pahlavi to Madagascar where he died. The youthful prince, Mohammad Reza Shah, was
crowned. Thus, the weakened central government provided an opening for the mass
movement. This revolutionary period ended with the CIA coup of August 1953 that
overthrew the nationalist government of Mohammad Mossadegh and reinstated
Mohammad Reza Shah in power.
The two key historical events in the 1941-53 period were the establishment of short-lived
autonomous governments in Azerbaijan and in Kurdistan (roughly November 1945November 1946) and the movement to nationalize the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company that
began in 1951 and forced the Shah to offer prime ministership to the nationalist leader
Mohammad Mossadegh, that in turn set off a power struggle between monarchists and
nationalists.
The rise and fall of the Azerbaijan People’s government that was centered in Tabriz must
have had a vague but lifelong influence on Mahmoud, who was eleven year old at the
time. The rise in the Iranian nationalist movement when he was 17 years old and the
CIA coup a year later must have had a similar impact on him. Aside from its political
function, Nationality and Revolution in Iran must also have been a way for Mahmoud
to revisit the adolescent emotions that were stirred by these momentous events. The
narrative includes emotionally charged vocabulary absent from scholarly history books.
The reader cannot help but notice that the author of Nationality and Revolution in Iran
identifies with the oppressed nationalities, in particular, Azerbaijanis, and not without
justification. In the Constitutional Revolution, it fell to Tabriz and the plebeian
Azerbaijani movement led by Sattar Khan (hence, the name Sattar League) and Bagher
Khan, to revive the revolution when it was almost suppressed. However, Mahmoud
identifies most with the Firqah-i Dimukrat (Azerbaijani Democratic Party—ADP) and
its central leader Ja’far Pishevari. Taking advantage of the occupation of Azerbaijan by
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the Red Army, a group of veteran socialists headed by Ja'far Pishevari, established
Firqah-i Dimukrat on September 3. On November 21, 1945, Firqah-i Dimukrat captured
without significant resistance all government institutions and declared a People’s
Government. Three weeks later, on December 15, Qazi Muhammad, the Kurdish
nationalist leader, led a campaign to establish a Kurdish People's Government, and on
January 22, 1946, he announced the formation of the Mahabad Republic, as the town
became the seat of the People’s government.
Mahmoud does not entertain the possibility of the influence of the people’s governments
that came to power in Eastern Europe in the aftermath of World War II, particularly
where the Red Army was in control and with encouragement from the Kremlin, on
events in Azerbaijan. But he does cite information from Firqah-i Dimukrat sources in
the Nationality and Revolution in Iran that he later used in classes he gave at the SWP
conferences in the late 1980s and early 1990s (I cannot remember the exact dates) to
argue that the people’s government in Azerbaijan was a workers and peasants
government, at the time a politically expedient conclusion from old "facts." However, he
still was unable to explain why this government collapsed after a year in power when the
Red Army pulled out and the Shah’s army advanced into Azerbaijan facing no
resistance. As far as I know, Mahmoud did not attempt, as historians of the period have,
to use sources that became available to researchers after the collapse of the Soviet
Union. Historians are still divided about the degree of autonomy of the Azerbaijan
people’s government from the Kremlin.
The rise of the people’s governments in the Iranian Azerbaijan and Kurdistan coincided
with the start of the Cold War. The United States exerted intense pressure on the
Kremlin to withdraw the Red Army from Iran. The conservative Ahamd Qavam, who
became prime minster in January 1946 to deal with the crisis, filed a complaint with the
Security Council while opening a diplomatic channel with the Kremlin. Qavam himself
went to Moscow to meet with Stalin where he promised to ask the parliament for an oil
concession in northern Iran to the Soviet Union after the Red Army was withdrawn.
Stalin ordered the Red Army to withdraw. In the wake of Soviet withdrawal, the Shah’s
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army retook Azerbaijan without a fight. The leaders of the Firqah-i Dimukrat sought
refuge in Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic. However, the leaders of the Kurdish
Republic were captured, tried and sentenced to death. They were hanged in Chwarchira
Square in the center of Mahabad in 1947. Some of the leaders of the Firqah-i Dimukrat
did not fare well in the Soviet Union. Pishevari was reported killed in a traffic accident,
which Mahmoud suggests in his book was a Kremlin ordered assassination.
As for Qavam’s promise of oil concession to Stalin, he did as promised, knowing full well
that the parliament promptly would reject it, which it did. Thus, in bourgeois political
circles in Iran Qavam won the title of the Old Fox.
The Iran-wide nationalist movement revived after a bill to nationalize the Anglo-Iranian
Oil Company (AIOC) was proposed on March 7, 1951 and was ratified by the Majles
(parliament) on March 17. Under immense pressure from the Majles, the Shah asked
Mossadegh to become the prime minister. A power struggle ensued between the Shah
and Mossadegh who favored a constitutional monarchy. Mass mobilizations ensued in
support of nationalization and Mossadegh and the Shah left Iran. Soon, however, the
CIA and MI6 plotted the August 1953 coups. The first coup attempt on August 15 failed
but Mossadegh refused to mobilize the Iranian masses against the follow-up coup. The
Tudeh party also did not mobilize against it. On August 19, the second coup attempt
succeeded. The price Iranian people paid was 25 years of an increasingly brutal
dictatorial regime which enforced the interests of imperialism, including by supporting
the colonial-settler Zionist State and the South African Apartheid.
Theoretical Errors
To those of us who radicalized as young Iranian Trotskyists, Nationality and Revolution
in Iran was a feat as it seemed to have demonstrated both the analytical power of
Trotsky’s theories as well as providing a path towards a solution of the burning
questions of the program and strategy for the coming Iranian revolution. Nobody
among us questioned its methodological and theoretical underpinnings. But with the
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benefit of hindsight, these are considerable and key to the understanding of the
adaptationist course Mahmoud and the part of the Iranian Trotskyism that was
educated in Nationality and Revolution in Iran followed. As I will discuss below,
Nationality and Revolution in Iran replaces the materialist conception of history, that
focuses attention of the mode of production and class struggle in explaining history,
with a Third Worldist view that focuses attention of imperialism and stalinism while
relegating internal class and state actors to a secondary role. The Iranian revolution of
1979 and the Islamic Republic counter-revolution proved this methodology wrong.
Aside from drawing on Trotsky’s theoretical contributions, Nationality and Revolution
in Iran also is heavily influenced by the Dependency School, itself an intellectual
response to the anti-colonial and anti-imperialist movements after World War II.
Mahmoud opens the first chapter of his book with this challenge: “[W] e must
understand the revolutionary history of Iran and the epoch in which these movements
occur.” (p. 1, my emphasis) He then provides a very familiar narrative drawing on the
Dependency School, albeit in an awkward language (see, endnote 5) that stresses the
role of imperialism in the backwardness of latecomers to the capitalist world market.
Dependency School refers to the cluster of explanations for the “development and
underdevelopment” of what used to be called the Third World and became prominent
after the collapse of the British, French, Dutch, Japanese,
Portuguese, Belgian and Italian colonial empires and the rise of post-Wold War II anticolonial revolutions that ebbed by the 1970s. However, it is still prominent in the Old
Left groups, including those from the Trotskyist tradition.
Lenin’s theory of imperialism
The gist of the theoretical framework Mahmoud utilizes is as follows. He divides the
history of capitalism into two epochs: competitive capitalism and monopoly capitalism
(imperialism). In his narrative, the bourgeoisie played a historically progressive role in
the competitive phase as it completed the transition from feudalism to capitalism and
undertook industrialization resulting in rapid and vast development of productive
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forces. However by the late nineteenth century, it claims, capitalism enters its
monopolistic phase signified by the export of capital. This is the epoch of monopoly
capitalism. In Mahmoud’s own words
“Now, not only the capitalist system of the West is unable to industrialize the
backward regions, it also is blocking their internal growth and is a barrier to the
formation of capitalist nation-states in the East and elsewhere. This uneven
process of development has brought about the national movements of Asia,
including Iran, at the end of last [nineteenth] century. The oppressed masses
who are condemned to low levels of economic and cultural life have moved into
the road of freedom.” (p. 2)
There are multiple problems with this narrative. First, it directly contradicts Lenin’s
own view on the effect of export of capital on the recipient countries. Contrary to
Mahmoud claim, Lenin clearly states the opposite:
“The export of capital influences and greatly accelerates the development of
capitalism in those countries to which it is exported. While, therefore, the export
of capital may tend to a certain extent to arrest development in the capitalexporting countries, it can only do so by expanding and deepening the further
development of capitalism throughout the world.” (Lenin, 1916, my emphasis)
The Dependency School
Second, Dependency School theories are methodologically different from Marxist
theories as they focus their analysis on the sphere of circulation not the sphere of
production. Elizabeth Dore summarizes a Marxist critique of them:
“While the theory encompasses a large body of literature which incorporates
many concepts and methods, the distinguishing feature of all dependency writers
is that they treat social and economic development as being conditioned by
external forces: namely domination of these countries by other, more powerful
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countries. This leads dependency theorists to adopt a circulationist approach.
They posit that underdevelopment can be explained in terms of relations of
domination in exchange, almost to the exclusion of an analysis of forces of
production and relations of production.” (Dore, 1983, p. 183, my emphasis)
In fact, a major shortcoming of Nationality and Revolution in Iran is its lack of
attention to the existing modes of production in Iran and to the role of Shiite clergy in
the process of class and state formation in Iran. That proved to be a costly weakness of
the book and our movement.
Shiism and the process of class and state formation in Iran
The ascendance of Shi’ism as the official religion of Iran originated in the Safavid
dynasty (1501-1722) which also inaugurated the modern Iranian nation-state. Thus,
Shiism became the state-sponsored religion and had remained so until the rise of the
Islamic Republic which has reversed the relationship, it is now the state that is
sponsored by the Shi’ite hierarchy.
For over 2,000 years, Iran was an agrarian economy based on the village (deh). Under
the Safavids, there were three primary forms of private landholdings (amlāk) that
include at least one but typically many villages. These were (1) private estates of large
landlords; (2) the private estates of the reigning Shah considered separately from the
estates owned by the crown and called amlāk-e ḵāṣṣa or amlāk-e ḵāleṣa; and (3) private
estates set aside in special trusts by owners for the permanent benefit of heirs and
descendants in accordance with Shi'ite legal principles and known as waqf-e ḵāṣṣ.
Thus, the Shi'ite clergy has been tied to land ownership and the royal court for
centuries. However, in the late nineteenth century, European ideas of Enlightenment
and modernity penetrated Iran which laid the intellectual basis for the Constitutional
Revolution (1906-11). In the twentieth century, this landownership system became an
impediment to the development of capitalism in Iran and increasingly questionable
politically. To facilitate the former and to undermine his enemies on the right and the
left, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi carried out a program of land reform.
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"By 1962 a land reform law was enacted. This law, which was implemented in
stages over a decade, effectively abolished amlāk by making it unlawful for a
single landowner to possess agricultural property in excess of one village.
Landlords were required to sell all surplus villages to the government, which in
turn arranged for their resale to the peasants who held cultivating rights. A byproduct of this program was the virtual disappearance of all the traditional dues
and servitude the peasants had rendered to landlords. As a consequence of the
land reform program, amlāk, which had been a characteristic feature of Iranian
land tenure patterns for more than two thousand years, virtually ceased to exist."
(Hooglund, 1989).
The Shi’ite clergy also has been closely tied with the bazaar merchants who in turn were
linked with their suppliers both artisans and agricultural producers in Iran and those
abroad.
“The bāzār was and is a social institution, comprising religious, commercial,
political, and social elements. The bāzār is the center par excellence of personal
transactions, commerce, and communication in urban life; thus one needs to
understand the bāzār’s function within its context, the city. In Iran, the city
forms a political, commercial, cultural, and religious center for its hinterland.
The bāzār has played a very important role in this relationship, reflecting the
character of the Muslim city.” (Floor, 1989)
The bazaar also had a political function:
“The Friday mosque—the main religious and political center of the city—and
the bāzār are always found together. In the mosque the population prayed in
congregation, came to hear proclamations of its rulers, and gave vent to feelings about
the ruler’s policies.” (ibid.)
The merchant class had had a tense relationship with the royal court and some
prominent merchant have supported mass protests in the 20th century, yet they have
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consistently served as a conservative force. Thus, while the bazaar merchants
participated in the Constitution Revolution, they did so in sit-in at the British embassy.
It was not unusual for big merchants to have dual Russian citizenship as it helped with
their overseas trading practices and offered them a measure of protection against the
royal court.
Thus, the Shah’s modernization programs, which included the extension of the right to
vote to women and land reform, directly threatened the interests of the Shi’ite hierarchy
and its landowning and merchant allies resulting in the June 1963 revolt organized by
Khomeini and other clerics. The revolt was crushed and Khomeini imprisoned. His life
was spared and he was exiled to Iraq only after key Shi’ite clerics conferred him the title
of Ayatollah raising the risk of any harm to him by the government. Ayatollah Khomeini
who had already positioned himself as an anti-American and anti-Israeli politician who
wanted to “protect” society from “decadence” went on to become the leader of a section
of Shi’ite clergy that opposed the Shah and played a key role in the mass movement that
overthrew him in the 1979 revolution.
There is nothing in Nationality and Revolution in Iran about any of this, nor is
anything in any political resolution our movement ever adopted. We were not prepared
for the 1979 revolution that brought Khomeini to power and established the Islamic
Republic.
Marx’s law of value or monopoly capitalism?
Third, Mahmoud’s adoption of the prevalent narrative of two stages of capitalism—
competitive and monopolistic—is based on Lenin’s pamphlet Imperialism: The Highest
Stage of Capitalism (1916). While Lenin himself modestly called it “A Popular Outline,”
it has become the bible of the socialist movement to explain modern capitalism. But is it
a tested theory and how does it square with Marx’s law of value as analyzed in his
critique of political economy, in particular, the three volume book, Capital?
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As it is well known, Lenin extensively drew on the work of the British liberal economist
John Atkinson Hobson, Imperialism: A Study (1902). Lenin was also was heavily
influenced by the foundational work of Rudolf Hilferding, Finance Capital (1910).
Hilferding is the Marxist originator of the periodization of the history of capitalism into
competitive and monopolistic stages.
However, Hobson’s work has been discredited by Michael Edelstein’s highly regarded
research Overseas Investment in the Age of High Imperialism: The United Kingdom,
1850-1914 (1982). And, as I have discussed elsewhere (Nayeri, August 2018),
Hilferding’s theory is based on a crucially mistaken view of Marx’s theory of free
competition which he assumed to be the same as the neoclassical theory of perfect
competition. The neoclassical theory of perfect competition idealizes the capitalist
market whereas Marx’s theory deals with real processes of competition. In fact, modern
day capitalism can be best understood by Marx’s theory (Shaikh, 2016)
Working on the basis of the neoclassical theory of perfect competition (not Marx’s free
competition), Hilferding, argued that the dynamics of capitalist development has
undermined capitalist competition for two reasons. First, capital concentration created
larger firms and the sparse number of large firms in some industries seemed to make
collusion and cooperation among them possible. Second, centralization of capital
through the merger movement tended to produce cartels and trusts. The capitalist
competition also seemed unstable due to barriers to entry and exit that hampered
capital mobility across industries. Concentration and centralization of capital led to
barriers to equalization of profit rates. For Hilferding, differential profits rates implied a
two-sector economy: one competitive and the other monopolistic. He expected the
monopolistic sector eventually to take over the entire economy: “The ultimate outcome
of this process would be the formation of a general cartel.” (Hilferding, 1910, p.
234). Taking his argument to its logical conclusion, Hilferding admitted that Marx’s
labor theory of value would cease to operate:
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“Classical economics conceives price as the expression of the anarchic character
of social production, and the price level as depending upon the social
productivity of labour. But the objective law of price can operate only through
competition. If monopolistic combinations abolish competition, they eliminate
at the same time the only means through which an objective law of price can
actually prevail. Price ceases to be an objectively determined magnitude and
becomes an accounting exercise for those who decide what it shall be by fiat, a
presupposition instead of a result, subjective rather than objective, something
arbitrary and accidental rather than a necessity which is independent of the
will and consciousness of the parties concerned. It seems that the monopolistic
combine, while it confirms Marx's theory of concentration, at the same time
tends to undermine his theory of value.” (ibid., p. 228; my emphasis)
Thus, if Mahmoud holds that capitalism has entered a stage where monopolies
dominate the economic activities then he cannot hold that the labor theory of value still
operates.
But if the law of value cease to operate then what would replace Marx’s laws of motion of
the capitalist system in finance (monopoly) capital theory? Hilferding believed there
would be a fusion of the general cartel with the capitalist state which would result in
“organized capitalism” and argued for a reformist course for Social Democracy:
“Organized capitalism means replacing free competition by the social principle of
planned production. The task of the present Social Democratic generation is to invoke
state aid in translating this economy, organized and directed by the capitalists, into an
economy directed by the democratic state. (Hilferding quoted in Green, 1990, p. 203)
Zoninsein (1990) who has systematically analyzed Hilferding’s theory argues that the
misunderstanding of Marx’s theory of competition is fundamental to it.
Politically, those who accepted this key argument in Finance Capital have in turn been
divided between reformists and revolutionary socialists. The former include Hildferding
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and Kautsky (Ultra-imperialism, 1914) have argued for a tendency for organized
capitalism that can then be utilized by socialists through some form of democratization
of the capitalist state. The revolutionaries, who include Lenin and Bukharin, have
stressed “monopolistic competition” without clarifying what will replace Marx’s labor
theory of value as the law of motion in monopoly capitalism. Like Hilferding and
Kautsky, they replaced Marx’s focus on the processes of capitalist accumulation and
competition that is governed by the labor theory of value (law of value) with power
relations between monopolies and monopoly capitalist states (imperialist conflicts).
While this interpretation served their political purpose in their struggle with the
dominant reformist current in the Second International, it still begged theoretical and
methodological questions about how the capitalist world economy functions.
Moreover, their position led to methodological indeterminism. Lenin opposed Kautsky’s
vision of a world trust (ultra-imperialism) that would replace the national rivalry of
finance capital with an internationally united finance capital, as “abstract, simplified,
and incorrect.” (Lenin, 1915, p. 11) Still, as an honest writer he added:
“Can one, however, deny that in the abstract a new phase of imperialism,
namely, a phase of ultra-imperialism, is ‘unthinkable’? No…There is no doubt
that the development is going in the direction of a single world trust that will
swallow up all enterprises and all states without exception.” (Lenin, 1915, p.
13-14, my emphasis)
Thus, Lenin opposed Kautsky’s ultra-imperialism and reformism only on extraeconomic grounds, not on the basis of the operation of the law of value or any other
economic law. He pointed to “stress…tempo…contradictions, conflicts, and convulsions
—not only economical, but also political, national, etc. ” in the world economy (ibid, p.
14) However, all these are part of Marx’s theory of capitalist competition or compatible
with it, hence consistent with his labor theory of value. There is no need for monopoly
capital theory to explain them to explain the history of capitalism since the nineteenth
century.
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To sum up, Lenin’s imperialism lacks empirical verification and it, as well as all
monopoly capitalism theories, in effect deny the operation of Marx’s law of value since
the end of nineteenth century. What follows is the single-minded focus on imperialism
as explanation for economic and cultural backwardness of latecomers as in Nationality
and Revolution in Iran. This has opened the door to varieties of Third Worldism.
Prevalent among nationalist and socialist currents, Third Worldism focuses on relations
and conflicts among states and leads to political support for national bourgeois regimes
in latecomers when they come into conflict with the early industrializers (imperialism).
While the theoretical basis of Third Worldism is different from the Stalinist “theory” of
two-stage revolution, which was formulated to justify Stalin’s alliances with bourgeois
currents and states, the resulting policies are similar. The Workers World Party in the
United States is a good example of Third Worldism. But the Fourth International (see,
endnote 6) has not been immune to it: Barnes’s SWP, and, more recently Social Action
(Baker, July 2019) have taken Third Worldist positions (see, endnote 7).
These unacknowledged methodological and theoretical problems in Nationality and
Revolution in Iran influenced the political course of the Iranian Trotskyist movement in
the 1979 revolution.
Anjoman-e Sattar
(Sattar League)
Beetween 1972 and 1976, the Sattar League grew rapidly by establishing three highly
successful projects. Fanus, our publishing house, quickly put out two books and two
pamphlets: Nationality and Revolution in Iran, a Farsi translation of Trotsky’s The
Permanent Revolution (1929) and Results and Prospects (1906), a translation of the
Fourth International’s “Dynamic of the World Revolution Today (1963),” and “On the
Oppression of Women in Iran,” which in addition to the translation of an essay by
Evelyn Reed, the American feminist socialist and anthropologist, included an article by
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two of the early female Iranian Trotskyists on the anti-woman Islamic influenced civil
code in Iran.
The Committee for Artistic and Intellectual Freedom in Iran (CAIFI) was established
which quickly won the freedom of Reza Baraheni, a well-known literary critic and poet
who was jailed and tortured. Baraheni was an Azerbaijani. Subsequently Baraheni was
invited to the U.S. for a teaching job and became a keynote speaker at CAIFI events.
Payam-e Daneshjoo (Student’s Message), which began as the voice of students for a
democratic Iranian Student Association at University of Texas at Austin who were
resisting the eventually successful Maoists takeover, became the voice of the Sattar
League after its original publishers were won to the Sattar League. Initially published
quarterly, Payam-e Daneshjoo became monthly and for a brief period just before the
February 1979 revolution, weekly.
But, then unexpectedly the Sattar League sank into a deep crisis. In early June 1976,
four out of the five Political Committee (PC) members, Babak and Siamak Zahraie,
Hassan Sabba and Hussein Taghavi, submitted a document to the National Committee
plenum entitled “Our Tasks in the Present Situation.” The document included some new
theoretical views that appeared to relegate the resolution of national democratic tasks to
the socialist revolution. In some respect it seemed to represent a diminishing of the
weight assigned to the oppressed nationalities in the Nationality and Revolution in Iran
without acknowledging it. It also included an orientation away from the Sattar League’s
focus on accumulation of cadre to establishing “illegal nuclei” inside Iran. With
repression at its height, this reorientation seemed unjustified and counter-productive.
Subsequently, this document was circulated in the Sattar League. On September 28,
1976, Mahmoud wrote a critique of it entitled “Points of Disagreement in the Sattar
League.” However, the Babak Zahraie-led PC majority refused to circulate it and began a
slander campaign against Mahmoud. An informal campaign was underway that claimed
Mahmoud had a clique and was preparing to split to form the SL to form a competing
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group together with Reza Baraheni. To confront this slander campaign and to promote
a healthy discussion of the points of political disagreements, Mahmoud decided to
organize the Permanent Revolution Tendency (PRT). The PRT declared its goals as
follow: “(1) to correct theoretical and programmatic errors of the ‘Our Tasks in the
Present Situation,’ (2) to draft the program of the Sattar League, (3) to assess and
determine our tasks and perspective in the present situation, and, (4) to ensure a calm
and democratic atmosphere for the internal discussion and a democratic
convention.” The PRT declaration was signed by Sattar League members in branches in
Berkeley, California; Portland, Oregon; New York; Los Angeles; Boston; Austin, Texas;
and Philadelphia.
In 1976, the SL had fewer than 50 members with no founding convention, program or
constitution. Yet, it already had a National Committee and a Political Committee, and
Babak Zahraie as its National Secretary. Excluding Mahmoud, the average member of
the SL was probably less than 25 years old with a political tenure of less than 3 years.
The SL was entirely composed of former or current students in the U.S., mostly from
rich or well-to-do families, who had never worked in their lives.
When I met Mahmoud in Berkeley in late November 1976, he discussed in detail the
political crisis in the Political Committee. He was a larger than average middle-age man
with long arms and legs and long pointy fingers that he moved like a conductor’s baton,
with a softening middle and receding hairline and prescription glasses. He spoke Farsi
in a formal style with a carefully chosen vocabulary that often was from a generation or
two ago with a slight Azerbaijani accent. At first glance, Mahmoud looked awkward and
almost shy. Unlike the rest of us impatient younger revolutionaries, he was more
measured and refreshingly interested in a conversation rather than pushing his own
ideas and beliefs in a monologue. As I learned later, he tried to practice a Socratic
method in his substantive communication which served him well as a college professor
but would be priceless in building a socialist movement.
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By contrast, Babak Zahraie was a dynamic, stylish skinny young man with an intense
gaze and big dark eyes that were framed by heavy set black eyebrows that sat above his
rimless young-Trotsky style thick prescription glasses. He was a fast talker, a good
improvisor and popularizer, and a very good public speaker. The only other person in
our movement who came close to Zahraie’s public speaking abilities was Bahram Attai
whom I thought was equally as charismatic. But somehow soon, Attai faded in stature as
Zahraie became the undisputed dominant leader of the Sattar League, a role he
unabashedly cherished.
And that became a big part of our problems. Zahraie not only had had helpful talents, he
also had a huge ego, a lust for the limelight, and a desire to control every aspect of Sattar
League's life. While he had a “nose for power,” it was ultimately all about his own
personal power, not the power of the working class. In Marx, power relations are
alienated relations, and working class power is the means to end all power relations in
human affairs. In these, Zahraie’s personality negated this central aspect of Marx’s
theory that had attracted me to socialism. Unfortunately, this aspect of Marx’s theory
has been lost to almost all socialist currents I have come to know in my life.
While the PRT was organized in the hope of clarifying political differences, in retrospect,
the crisis of 1976 was in reality caused by Zahraie’s attempt to consolidate his personal
leadership, that is, his cult of personality, if necessary by getting rid of Mahmoud and
cutting loose anyone else who stood in his way. As such, the “political differences” were
secondary to Zahraie as he easily and sharply changed his views (I have detailed these
in Nayeri, August 2012; and Nayeri, November 2012. In this essay, I will draw on these
earlier writings without giving references for the specific cases I discuss here).
I got a taste of such conduct in November 1976 when I was part of the Berkeley branch
of the Sattar League. Having learned that Mahmoud was in town, I naively proposed to
our branch of four people that we organize a public meeting for him. That night, I
received a phone call from Zahraie from New York who asked me to withdraw my
proposal. When I asked why he responded that Mahmoud “has no political assignment
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to be there” …“we have documents that show they have a secret faction” … that they are
“collecting money for their work” and are “constantly in communication with each
other”… and “preparing for a cold split.” He concluded that Mahmoud “wants to split
from the Sattar League with his group and Baraheni.”
While doubtful about these allegations, I deferred to him by agreeing to withdraw my
proposal—he was the National Secretary after all! Needless to say, Zahraie never
documented these charges against Mahmoud. As I learned later, there was no “secret
faction” except his own and if anybody was preparing for a split it was Zahraie himself.
On January 22, 1977, two members of the Austin, Texas, branch who had joined the
PRT, Hassan Hakimi and Heydar Gillani, were expelled on charges they denied. Babak
Zahraie was present as the PC observer at the branch meeting that expelled them.
Before the vote, he took the floor to speak for the branch leadership: “The leadership of
the Austin branch has a specific proposal, a specific solution, for dealing with this
problem by getting the goddamn ax out and chopping a few people.” He also tried to get
rid of the pro-PRT branch in Portland, Oregon, by sending in Sattar League members
loyal to him to start a new, separate branch. Zahraie traveled to direct the split
operation. In a public meeting that his advance team had organized for him, Zahraie
attacked the leadership of the existing branch demanding: "You go your way, I'll go
mine.”
However, the disciplined work of the PRF and SWP’s intervention forced Zahraie to
back down and eventually hold the first and only convention of the Sattar League in
Brooklyn, New York, on Oct. 29-Nov. 2, 1977.
The Steering Committee of the Permanent Revolution Faction
Sometimes in early spring of 1977, Mahmoud called to propose to me to join him and
Nasser Khoshnevis in Brooklyn, New York, to work on the tasks of the Steering
Committee of the PRF. Like Mahmoud, Nasser was a cofounder of the Sattar League .
He was also the only one in the Sattar League who had worked in the Pathfinder shop.
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He was fluent in Azerbaijani, Farsi, and English and our best translator and editor. He
typed in Farsi and in English, a great asset for preparing discussion and information
bulletin articles.
I accepted immediately and moved there soon.
Both Mahmoud and Nasser lived in a large apartment complex at 95 Eastern Parkway in
the Flatbush neighborhood of Brooklyn, just a short walk from the Brooklyn Museum
and Prospect Park. Mahmoud lived with Diane Feeley and his teenaged son and
daughter, Jacob and Jamileh, in a two bedrooms apartment on the third floor, and
Nasser with Marsha Gallo, who worked in the SWP’s print shop, in a small one bedroom
on the fifth floor facing Eastern Parkway. Marilyn Vogt, another SWPer, lived with her
teenaged daughter on the same floor. At the time, Marilyn was working on translation
from Russian for Pathfinder and she had collaborated with George Saunders who had
translated the material for the Pathfinder book Samizdat: Voices of Soviet Opposition
(1974). Blanca, a middle-aged Argentinian anarchist and SWP sympathizer, lived with
her daughter Selva, who was in the SWP/YSA, on the second floor. I became friends
with Blanca whose choice of bright colors in her paintings I liked. Gerry Foley who was
a staff writer for Intercontinental Press lived in another building a few doors down.
Two Sattar League PC members, Babak Zahraie and Hassan Sabba, lived in a more upscale apartment complex at 135 Eastern Parkway. Towards the end of my work on the
Steering Committee, the SWP National Office provided me with an almost empty
basement apartment except for an old mattress and an old spring box that provided two
beds which I shared with a young leader of the small Puerto Rican Trotskyist movement
named Alexis. Alexis and I quickly became friend. A wonderful, small framed, and kind
young man, Alexis was gay and an early victim of the AIDS epidemic.
The Steering Committee had no office space and only Nasser was a “full-timer” receiving
SWP-scale subsistence. We used Mahmoud’s and Nasser’s living room and kitchen
tables to work. Mahmoud and Nasser were in touch with the PRF organizers and atlarge members. We were responsible for editing and publishing PRF discussion
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material, circulating them in the SL as best as we could given the highly tense factional
atmosphere. We also translated all such material into English to share with the SWP
and FI leaderships. We also occasionally held formal meetings to discuss an unfolding
crisis or to organize the work flow or discuss priorities and assignments. Soon after I
arrived, we began to collect material to draft a program for the Iranian revolution which
Mahmoud undertook and a tasks and perspectives document. I was assigned to draft a
critique of the tasks and perspective section of the aforementioned PC-majority
document “Our Tasks in the Present Situation” that centered on building “illegal nuclei”
inside Iran. I argued that the proposal was of voluntaristic, thus, idealist in nature, as I
characterized it as a “Where there is a will, there is a way” proposal. I counterposed it to
the current reality of the Sattar League and the central task of developing a program
and to accumulation of cadre on the basis of that program so we would be ready
politically and organizationally for the coming revolution.
After I wrote a draft I gave it to Mahmoud for comment. He was most encouraging but
suggested I tone it down and make some rigid statements more flexible. I understood
and appreciated his comments and have benefited from the general spirit of his advice
since.
However, the center piece of the PRF documents submitted for pre-convention
discussion was the draft Political Resolution which Mahmoud drafted with considerable
input by others. Most significant was Ghazanfar’s summary of the agrarian situation in
Iran after Shah’s land reform in the 1960s which he drafted using existing research as
was available to us. He was another Iranian Azerbaijani turned mathematician who was
also from a peasant background from Zanjan. Mahmoud had organized the Political
Resolution around the question of how the Iranian proletariat could lead the coming
revolution by championing the fight for democracy and for the resolution of the
historical national democratic tasks. Key among them were national independence, land
reform, and self-determination for the oppressed nationalities.
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Being a small, isolated group in exile at a time when repression stifled all forms of public
protests in Iran, Mahmoud’s methodology was to rely on the historical lessons drawn in
his book and on socialist theories discussed earlier, and his own imagination. Thus, the
most novel part of the Draft Political Resolution was the section on oppressed
nationalities that supported their self-determination while advocating a United
Independent Socialist Azerbaijan, a United Independent Kurdistan (encompassing the
Kurdish regions in Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey,) and a United Independent Baluchistan
(joining Iranian and Pakistani Baluchistan) and the more distant vision of a United
Socialist the Middle East. Surprisingly, there was no questioning of these grand
formulations in the PRF or even by the Zahraie-led PC majority.
The key problem was that these demands had never been raised by any of these
oppressed nationalities in the past. Mahmoud’s formulations were at best a prognosis of
the future course of the dynamics of the struggle for self-determination gleaned from a
rear mirror methodology framed by theories that he had barely seriously examined. The
rest of us, not only in the Sattar League but also in the Fourth International, were not
any more enlightened to question these.
Unsurprisingly, the 1979 revolution did not confirm this vision. Most importantly the
role that the Azerbaijanis played in the revolution was far from what Mahmoud
expected. It is true that the demonstration of one million Azerbaijanis in Tabriz in
February 1978 was the opening gun for the mass movement that overthrew the Shah’s
regime a year later in February 1979. However, Azerbaijan sat outside of the waves of
struggle for self-determination waged by the Kurds, Turkmens by the Caspian Sea,
Arabs in Khuzestan, and Baluchis. The Kurdish struggle which became a burning issue
of the revolution well into the 1980s never raised the demand for independence from
Tehran, not to mention a demand for a United Independent Kurdistan. The Baluchi
struggle came about much later after the Islamic Republic counter-revolution had
consolidated and was dominated by a rightist, pro-imperialist leadership. Similarly,
Arab nationalist sentiment fell victim to the Saddam Hussein’s occupation of the oil-rich
Khuzestan.
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Another key problem exposed in Mahmoud’s call for a United Independent Socialist
Azerbaijan was the theory of “degenerated workers state.” The Fourth International as a
whole still hung on to this theory, which Trotsky formulated in The Revolution Betrayed
(1936). While there was some basis for his argument that the Soviet Union was a
workers state in 1936, albeit a degenerated one, it was a mistake to detach this
characterization from any form of working class power, especially over the state. In
1936, there were still millions of working people in the Soviet Union who had a memory
of the October 1917 revolution. But Trotsky himself detailed how and why the working
class had been driven out of politics and had become again a class-in-itself, a class that
had given up its power to its exploiters and oppressors. However one would
characterize the remaining economy and society if the state is not controlled by the
working class it cannot be a workers state, even a “degenerated” or a “deformed” one. I
think the history of the collapse of the Soviet Union and Eastern European states as well
as the strategic decision to take the capitalist road in China and Vietnam—all without
any significant working class resistance—supports this view.
Still, the SWP and FI parties continued to hold on to the idea that Russia, China, and
Vietnam remained workers states, long time after they actually carried capitalist
restorationist policies. Mahmoud’s call for a United Independent Socialist Azerbaijan
assumed that the Azeri proletariat on the Soviet side was socialist and inspiring for its
own workers state; it was not.
Another theoretical deficiency in Mahmouds’ Nationality and Revolution is a lack of
any theory of the formation of national identity and its subsequent development as it,
like all social categories, is subject to historical development and change. The
development of capitalism in Iran which assumed a feverish pace in the 1960s and 1970s
because of the agrarian reform, rapid urbanization and industrialization, and in the
early 1970s, the quadrupling of oil prices, integrated the more urbanized sections of the
oppressed nationalities into “Iranian nationhood” as their historical heritage became a
secondary cultural identity issue. Many have come to identify themselves as Iranian as
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well as Azeri or Kurd, etc. After the 1979 revolution, the use of their languages also
became acceptable while Farsi continued to be the language used in the general
discourse of Iranians of all nationalities and religious background without any evidence
of resentment.
Becoming friends with Mahmoud
Mahmoud and I became friends during those months that we collaborated on the
Steering Committee of the PRF (as Nasser and I did as well). We found common
interests as we freely talked when we found time to talk. Once I saw Mahmoud reading a
tripled-spaced typed English document and writing on it with a blue editing pencil. He
volunteered that he had been asked by the “comrades,” that is, some leadership body of
the SWP, to comment on Dick Roberts’ critical article about Ernest Mandel’s newly
minted theory of sub-imperialism, which was his characterization of the “petrodollar”
states like Iran in the mid-1970s. Knowing about my interest in political economy, he
asked me if I wanted to read it and gave me a copy. I began reading it but found my own
knowledge of the subject matter insufficient to express an opinion. Mahmoud did not
like Mandel much and was critical of his characterization of Iran as sub-imperialist. (As
I will discuss at the end of this article, today’s SWP characterizes the Islamic Republic is
something of a regional imperialism but without any theoretical justification).
We also shared an interest in psychoanalysis. We talked about Freud and Mahmoud
who had also read some Jung told me about his theory. When we were talking about
Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams (1899), Mahmoud told me he was undergoing
psychoanalysis and that suffered from a recurrent nightmare of being beaten by Babak
Zahraie.
To me, this at least in part might have been occasioned by the depth of the repression in
the Sattat League imposed by Zahraie on his critics. I felt sorry for Mahmoud who had
been the sole dissenter in the Political Committee of five dominated by Zahraie. If
Zahraie had unleashed all that slander against Mahmoud in his phone call to me, how, I
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asked myself, would he and others treat him in the Political Committee meetings held in
their private apartments?
When in Tehran in 1981, I also learned that Mahmoud was seeing a psychoanalyst. It
appeared that he was in therapy off and on for the long term.
Mahmoud also liked T. S. Eliot and Shakespeare and recited some of Eliot’s poetry for
me. He loved Alice in Wonderland, and once read to me Alice’s dialogue with the
Cheshire-Cat, perhaps alluding to the situation in the Sattar League.
It was during this period of forging our friendship that Mahmoud cooked up a nickname
for me—he began calling me “ullama," Arabic for “the learned ones.” In Iran ullama
referred to the higher levels of the Shiite clergy (such as ayatollahs). I do not think
Mahmoud realized or cared that he was using the plural to name an individual. He kept
calling me ullama until our personal and political relations ended in 1992.
The Sattar League convention
In his political memoir (2005, 2012), Barry Sheppard, a long time SWP leader, has
asserted that it did not intervene in internal affairs of sister organizations before its
degeneration in the 1980s. That is certainly not true in the case of the Iranian Trotskyist
movement as the reader can verify from my outline of the history of our movement or
from the rest of this essay.
As noted earlier, the PRF was formed in the face of imminent threat of a split in the
Sattar League by the Zahraie-led PC majority. It was only due to the intervention of the
SWP leadership that this outcome was averted. Whether this was a good or a bad thing
will become evident in the course of this essay.
On March 17, 1977, Barry Sheppard who was an SWP Political Committee member, met
with the Political Committee of the Sattar League. The immediate purpose of the
meeting was for Sheppard to prepare a report on the crisis in the Sattar League for the
Leninist-Trotskyist Faction Steering Committee (LTF). The LTF was formed to correct
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the International Majority Tendency’s (IMT) “strategic line” of guerrilla warfare in Latin
America. Mahmoud wrote the following report for the PRF about the meeting:
“Barry said that in his report to the LTF leadership he will say the [SL] PC has
not yet made a decision about the expulsion of comrades Hakimi and Gillani [in
the Austin branch] and that beside comrade Sayrafizadeh, two other PC
members agree that the expelled comrades should be brought back in. … Barry
also emphasized the importance of the internal discussion [of the SL] and
translation of its documents for the entire International…. He said the objective
conditions of exile and also the youthfulness of the organization are part of the
reasons for the crisis of our organization. And that political differences exist but
are not clearly stated. He said that without being familiar with specific facts it
seems to him that the expulsion of the comrades [in Austin] was wrong because
the SL as a whole is unclear about what happened and this organizational
measure sacrifices political clarity. He said it is the duty of the entire PC to
reverse this process and it is necessary that political views be discussed openly
and clearly and to advice branches to return to a calm atmosphere. He said that
split based on organizational issues is justified in two cases. First, if there is no
democracy in the organization. Second, when [some] comrades are not loyal to
the organization. Barry said it is possible that the SL will split. In that case, the
SWP would have to take a position. Would the split be justified? Would the SWP
work with both groups? Which group would SWP work with?”
Clearly, there was an implicit threat in Sheppard’s remark that if the Zahraie-led PC
majority did not reverse the Austin branch expulsions or continued with more
expulsions, the SWP leadership would be forced to take a position that may not be
favorable to them.
Consequently, the Zahraie-led PC-majority changed course. The expulsions in Austin
were reversed. The campaign against the Portland branch subsided. Zahraie backed off
of immediate measures to undermine CAIFI’s work with Baraheni, the PRF documents
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began to circulate in branches, a date for the convention was set, and the PC majority
announced that it would provide its key documents for the convention to be held in
Brooklyn, New York, on Oct. 29-Nov. 2, 1977.
The agenda for SL convention was 1) The Theory of Permanent Revolution, 2) Political
Report, 3) The Nationalities Question, 4) The Women Question, 5) Tasks and
Perspective, 6) The Organization Report, 7) Nomination Commission Report and
Election of the National Committee.
The entire process of the organization of the convention was undemocratic, setting aside
the damage done already with over a year-long slandering of Mahmoud and then the
PRF. The PC majority resolutions were submitted so late that there was no time for the
membership and the PRF to read and discuss them in writing or in branches! Notably,
the Draft Political Resolution of the PC majority bears the date October 27, 1977, two
days before the convention! By contrast the PRF draft political resolution was submitted
six months earlier, on May 1, 1977. The Presiding Committee was composed of Babak
and Siamak Zahraie and Hassan Sabba (three out of four PC-majority members) and
excluded Mahmoud or anyone else from the PRF. Mahmoud’s proposal to include him
was rejected. There was no serious engagement with contributions by the PRF and its
members, including its political resolution. The Zahraie-led PC majority did submit a
multi-volume discussion article but it was not about addressing the issues of contention
but to attack Mahmoud and the PRF—he was labeled the “fifth wheel” of the Political
Committee belittling his contributions to the Sattar League. All these would have met
Barry Sheppard’s criteria for a justifiable split by the PRF.
The SWP intervenes again
At the convention, the SWP leadership changed course to avert a possible principled
split by the PRF that had faced a year-long repression and an undemocratic convention
that resulted in a three to one vote along factional lines in support of the Zahraie
majority.
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On the last day of the convention, November 1, Mahmoud reported to the PRF caucus
that the SWP representatives, Doug Jenness and Gus Horowitz, saw no fundamental
differences and perceived a desire for unity. They considered a split as unprincipled
because it could not be explained and found responsibilities for both the majority and
minority to heal the organizational rift. They urged the PRF to dissolve itself and written
discussion to be closed but oral discussion to continue in the coming National
Committee.
The reader might immediately notice that Jenness’ and Horowitz’s assessment is quite
different from those stated by Barry Sheppard six month earlier. Sheppard had stated
there were political difference but not clear ones. He also believed that a split would be
justified on purely organizational basis if there was no democracy in the organization.
The Sattar League convention was a sham. It was undemocratically organized. If
Jenness and Horowitz saw “no fundamental differences,” how could they as Marxists
explain the year long crisis of the Sattar League that threatened the expulsion of the PRF
by the PC-majority averted only by the earlier SWP intervention?
No doubt this proposal was the result of Jenness’ and Horowitz’ mediation between
Mahmoud and Babak Zahrie. When I was working as part of the Steering Committee,
Mahmoud met a couple of times with Doug Jenness to report on the situation in the
Sattar League. Once he asked me to accompany him. Thus, Mahmoud kept an open
channel with the SWP leadership and he deliberated how to proceed with the factional
struggle. A problem with Mahmoud’s “open channel” to the SWP leadership was that the
PRF leadership was not a party to such mediation and deliberations. When I
accompanied Mahmoud to meet Jenness over dinner, it was Mahmoud and Jenness
who did the talking. As the reader will find, Mahmoud’s “open channel” to the SWP
Political Committee was a constant feature of his political life and how he conducted
himself in various parties he was a leader.
After his report, Mahmoud placed a motion before the caucus to dissolve the PRF. Those
present at the PRF caucus meeting voted to dissolve the faction (I was not present due to
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work as I had just landed a job to pay off the debt I had accumulated during my time on
the Steering Committee).
Mahmoud and the PRF had characterized Zahraie’s majority in the Sattar League as a
“secret faction” because it acted as an organized group without having a political
platform. The group was organized around the cult of personality of Zahraie and
gradually on the basis of an intense dislike of the leaders and members of the PRF. Of
course, it is futile to demand a cult of personality to dissolve itself. Thus, the SWP
leadership’s intervention dissolved the minority faction but left Zahraie’s cult of
personality in a consolidated state. What followed was an extended period of siloing off
of former PRF members in the Sattar League and later in Iran in the Zahraie’s HKE
(Revolutionary Workers Party). By the end of 1980, he had expelled all of us and
anyone we had recruited in Iran who happened to agree with us on this or that political
issue of contention. I will detail these later. The point I like to stress here is that the
SWP’s and later the FI’s interventions to forge organizational unity of the Iranian
Trotskyist movement never worked as intended and in fact set back our movement.
While it was true that the PRF forced a limited discussion of theory, program, tasks and
perspective and norms in the Sattar League, it failed to win over the big majority of the
organization on any of the issues in contention. (see, endnote 8) It is also true that PRF
members became more experienced and homogeneous in our political outlook after an
intensive period of studying, consulting, collaborating, and writing theoretical,
programmatic and political documents. Still, neither the PRF nor the convention,
prepared us nearly enough for the coming Iranian revolution.
Hezb-e Kargaran-e Sosialist (HKS)
(united HKS, Socialist Workers Party)
The Jenness' and Horowitz's assertion of a desire for unity at the SL convention was
perhaps more motivate by the presence at the convention of Hormuz Rahimian and
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Azar Tabbari, two key leaders of the Iranian Supporters of the Fourth International in
Europe and the Near East. The founders of the group were politically close to Ernest
Mandel and other leaders of the IMT. When in late 1976 the IMT issued a self-criticism
of its “strategic line” of guerrilla warfare in Latin America, it reduced factional tensions
in the Fourth International and once again set in motion a desire for the unity of its
supporters.
Accordingly, after the Sattar League convention there was some collaborative effort by
the leadership of both Iranian Trotskyist groups. However, the real impetus for unity
came with the February 1979 revolution. Both organizations moved their membership
to Iran. Perhaps thanks to the recent convention, the Sattar League Political Committee
agreed on “The Manifesto of the Rights of Workers and Toilers of Iran,” a very good
programmatic document that outlined a series of democratic, immediate, and
transitional demands capped with a call for a workers and peasants government. Many
thousands copies of it were printed and distributed in Iran (my suitcase was full of it
when I relocated from New York to Tehran).
The FI sent its representatives, Barry Sheppard and Brian Grogan (of the British
Internationalist Marxist Group), to hammer out a united organization. However, like the
SWP intervention at the Sattar League convention, their desire for organizational unity
sacrificed the larger questions of political cohesion that only the Iranian movement itself
could have tackled and perhaps achieved. History has shown the futility of the SWP/FI
methods at least in the Iranian case as I will elaborate further.
I do not know anything about the negotiations of Sheppard and Grogan with the key
players—Zahraie and Rahimian. I suppose Mahmoud perhaps played a role as the
member of the Sattar League Political Committee or as the member of the International
Executive Committee, and almost certainly in informal communications with Sheppard
and the SWP leadership. But the agreement they reached was essentially organizational,
designed to merge the two groups through a mutually agreed upon division of
leadership positions in the new organization. (see, endnote 9) This was underscore by
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the method the “ranks” were included in the process of the merger of the two groups.
One night, I received a call at my parents house where I was staying since my arrival to
attend a meeting at the Industrial University. The meeting was set up in an auditorium.
When I arrived I noticed that I did not know some of the attendees and when the
meeting was called to order I noticed Zahraie and Rahimian among those sitting along
the large table facing the audience. It was there that the merger was announced with
rosy motivations for it. We were told the new organization would be called Hezb-e
Kargaran-e Sosialist (HKS, Socialist Workers Party) and Hormuz Rahimian would be its
National Secretary. The National Committee and the Political Committee were similarly
decided. The incoming leadership had decided that the organ of the new party would
be Kargar (Worker; Sheppard says it was his suggestion) and Babak Zahraie as its
editor. We were also told that a geographical structure for the new party has been
decided, including branch leaderships. We were told we would be contacted for our first
branch meeting by our branch organizer. There was a discussion period but it was brief.
What could anyone ask or say? We were all happy about pulling our forces together. The
revolution united millions of Iranians as displayed in a year long mass mobilization and
self-organized and self-mobilized committees around the country. The ranks of the
Trotskyist movement were similarly felt we must work together to make it succeed. Alas,
the sharpening class struggle divide the working people in Iran and it did divide the
ranks of the united HKS within six month by a split on the top among the leaders of the
two groups.
At the time of the merger, the united HKS could not have had more than 200 members
in a country with 35 million people and an industrial working class of 3 million.
However, the newly awakened working people and youth seemed to provide us with
endless opportunity for party building. At the same times, the Khomeini-Bazargan
government began attacking the newly won political and democratic rights the day after
it came to power.
Still, our movement moved quickly to the center stage. We were the first political party
to publish its paper and sell it in the streets. The attention we drew created an effect
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much larger than our size (we had no roots in any section of the Iranian society). On
April 10, Abolhassan Banisadr, an aide to Ayatollah Khoemini who later became the first
President of the Islamic Republic, debated Babak Zahraie on how to resolve the
problems facing the revolution. The debate was televised live and watched by millions.
As a sign of the repression to come, subsequent scheduled debate between them in
Tabriz was cancelled due to a gang attack by the semi-fascist Hezbollah. When the
Islamic Republic’s hold on power was more secure, it was disclosed that these semifascist gangs were organized by certain factions in the government, including by Sadegh
Ghotbzadeh, who served as an aid to Khomeini, imposed Islamic censorship on the state
television and radio stations (there were and there are no private ones), and later served
as the foreign minister, and by Hadi Ghafari, a cleric who became a member of
parliament (the Islamic Consultive Assembly, Majles). Ghotbzadeh was eventually
executed on the charge of participation in a Saudi sponsored coup plot, and Ghafari
eventually retired from politics. However, the use of the semi-fascist Hezbollah gangs
continued against dissent.
The united KHS and Kargar were the first to characterize the Bazargan-Khomeini
government as capitalist and to oppose its repressive measures at every turn. Stalinist
and centrist currents, most importantly, the Tudeh Party and the Fedayeen, as well as
the Mujaheddin, either supported the Khomeini-backed government politically or
politically supported opposition factions within the Islamic Republic such as Banisadr.
The Stalinist theory of two-stage revolution was generally accepted in one version or
another among the left, which required supporting a nationalist/anti-imperialist
bourgeois leadership. No other socialist current offered an independent political
program leading to a workers and peasants government.
At the same time, workers, peasants, oppressed nationalities, and students were
organizing. The strike committees formed during the struggle against the monarchy
transformed into shoras (employees councils) in larger workplaces. The shora
movement spread, without any organized leadership to the peasantry, the oppressed
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nationalities, and the student movement, and briefly to the soldiers. The outlines of a
country-wide dual power were emerging despite illusions in the Khomeini leadership.
Meanwhile, U.S. imperialism and the monarchist forces as well as reactionary regional
powers (e.,g., Saudi Arabia) were hatching counter-revolutionary plots.
The problem was how to chart a course for the working people to educate, organize, and
mobilize ourselves against the counter revolutionary plots of imperialism and the power
of capitalists and landowners and their clerical capitalist government while moving
forward towards a workers and peasants government.
The United HKS splits
The organizational merger Sheppard and Grogan helped to forge in late February 1979
unraveled by August along the old party lines. The former Sattar League members were
on one side and the former members of the Supporters of the Fourth International in
Europe and the Near East were on the other. Of those who we recruited in this period
some left in confusion and those that remained stayed with those whom they happened
to know and trust in the united HKS.
The immediate cause for the split was a tactical question: whether to participate in the
elections for the Islamic Constitutional Assembly. I have discussed this split elsewhere
(Nayeri, August 2012). What I would like to stress for the purpose of this essay is the
futility of the organizational measures used by the SWP and FI leaderships, which
Mahmoud also supported, to help build sections of the FI, in this case, in the midst of a
deep going revolution in Iran. The real cause of the split was much deeper political
differences that were never mentioned, let alone, discussed. The Rahimian group was
formed under the influence of the IMT and was educated in the IMT’s orientation to the
“New Mass Vanguard.” This orientation was first articulated by the Portuguese section
of the FI to characterize its turn towards toward the “far left” milieu of the centrist and
Maoist groups in the Carnation Revolution of 1974. As members of the united HKS, the
pressure of this milieu was upon us and the Rahimian wing was influenced by it. The
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political groups that made up this milieu had a long line of makeshift book stalls on the
south sidewalk of Enghelab (Revolution) Avenue that cuts across northern and
southern Tehran, and runs on the southern side of Tehran University. Across from the
campus, there has always been a number of bookstores carrying textbooks and other
books but also, sometimes clandestine leftwing literature. Supporters of various leftist
parties gathered there from the early morning until late in the day in the early months of
the revolution to debate issues of contention among their respective currents. The wave
of repression of the summer of 1979 that targeted freedom of the press and political
parties destroyed this venue for the distribution of the leftist press and the lively
ongoing debate they were having. This led some of these groups to conclude that
fascism had triumphed in Iran. It happened that some members and leaders of the
united HKS from the Rahmanian wing reached the same conclusion. Perhaps under
their influence, two National Committee member from the Rahimian wing, Azar
Tabbari, Babak A. (not Zahraie), reached the same conclusion, and quit the party. Tabari
promptly left Iran to become a highly successful feminist scholar in the United States.
Babak A. became a well regarded translator of socialist literature and wrote a book on
Marx and modern politics.
Rahimian who was the National Secretary of the united HKS, took the name HKS for his
reconstituted old group and began republishing Kargar Sosialist (Socialist Worker) as
an illegal paper to differentiate it from new Kargar which became the organ of Babak
Zahraie’s reconstituted Sattar League and whoever came along with us from the united
HKS as Hezb-e Kargaran-e Enghlabi (HKE, Revolutionary Workers Party).
The Rahimian’s HKS soon claimed that there was a “dictatorship of the
mullateria” (dictatorship of the mullas) in Iran. They gave up on an orientation towards
the mass movement that betrayed any degree of illusion in the Khomeini leadership
including the workers shoras and instead increasingly saw the Kurdish struggle as the
last surviving flame of the February 1979 revolution. Unsurprisingly, so did the centrist
and Maoist groups they oriented towards. Soon, they all moved most of their forces to
Kurdistan as the last hold out against the Islamic Republic dictatorship.
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Zahraie’s HKE of which Mahmoud was a Political Committee member went in the
opposite direction as it began public activity after the takeover of the U.S. embassy and
Kargar receiving a permit to legally publish. The HKE gradually followed an
adaptationist course towards the “Islamic grassroots currents,” and their leader,
Ayatollah Khomeini. It began at first with viewing the Muslim Students Followers of
Imam’s Line, who took over the U.S. embassy, as an anti-imperialist revolutionary
current, but soon included the Islamic Student Associations, Muslim Student
Organizations (sometimes translated as Islamic Student Organizations), the Jihad for
Reconstruction, the Guards of the Islamic Revolution Corp. (commonly mistranslated as
the “Revolutionary Guards”), and the Mobilization of the Poor (Bassij-e Mostazafan).
As Zahraie’s HKE increasingly viewed the revolution in terms of the struggle between
the Iranian people led by Ayatollah Khomeini and the Islamic Republic, and
imperialism, the HKS of Rahimian increasingly saw the imperialist and later the Iraqi
attacks as excuses for Khomeini and the Islamic Republic to attack the Kurds, the “far
left,” and more generally the working people.
During this period of crisis, which saw the united HKS split into the HKE and HKS, I
saw Mahmoud only occasionally and I am not aware of what role he played as a leader of
our movement. It was not a remarkable period in his political life as he wielded no
influence on either Zahraie or Rahimian, the two key players. One thing I know for sure.
Both Zahraie and Rahimian wanted a divorce. Although the leadership of the united
HKS did open the internal discussion bulletin at the onset of the crisis, it was short lived
as the split followed quickly and from the top. Only Azar Tabbari wrote a contribution
against participation in the election to the Islamic Constituent Assembly. I wrote a
scholastic critique of her contribution that relied on a quotation from Trotsky about
elections in China under undemocratic circumstances. But there was no much else that I
can recall. Mahmoud also was kept silent. The split occurred at the top by the same
actors who six month earlier had agreed to a merger of the two groups. The ranks were
surprised both with the merger and then with the split.
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Hezb-e Kargaran-e Enghelabi (HKE)
(Revolutionary Workers Party)
In the winter of 1980, Farhad Nouri, one of the early Trotskyists in Austin, Texas, and a
former Permanent Revolution Faction member, returned from a North American
speaking tour organized by the SWP to defend the 14 jailed socialists in Ahwaz. The 14
were members of the united HKS who were arrested because of their socialist
propaganda activity among the oil workers. Ayatollah Janati had secretly sentenced the
12 men to death and the two women to life imprisonment falsely accusing them of
planning to sabotage oil pipelines. They were finally release after an international
campaign in the fall of 1979.
Nouri was expelled from his cell after questioning the HKE’s foot-dragging in defense of
democratic rights. After the Islamic Republic’s summer wave of repression, political
parties had lost their ability to have headquarters and the HKE organized its members
in small cells of 6-8 members who met in residences pretending to be visiting friends or
family. Nouri wrote to the HKE Political Committee asking for a reversal of this
decision and to the United Secretariat of the Fourth International for its
support. Neither responded.
A while later when I questioned the new adaptationist course of the HKE I received a
surprising offer from Babak Zahraie to debate the issue in a special Tehran citywide
gathering. About 50 people attended the meeting. In my presentation, I expressed my
agreement that (1) the revolution was still unfolding, (2) that anti-imperialist struggle
was the context in which other struggles were taking place, (3) that we needed to use
defensive formulations in our press and in public statements (something we learned
from James P. Cannon and the SWP). However, I insisted that the clerical capitalist
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Islamic Republic was the enemy of the Iranian working people and the unfolding
revolution. I then outlined our common transitional program for the Iranian revolution
that was the basis of our approach to these questions in the united HKS with its
perspective of a workers and peasants government based on the shoras and other
grassroots organizations of the working people and the oppressed. My aim was to
discover how Zahraie differed from this perspective which we all seemed to share and
why.
Zahraie’s presentation was more agitational than expositional and educational.
However, he did hint at some new ideas. For the first time, he compared the Iranian
revolution to the French revolution of 1789 by labeling the Islamic currents as Jacobian,
that is revolutionary currents within the unfolding revolution. He tried to paint my
concerns about drifting away from our program and strategy as resistance to the party
getting more deeply inside the Iranian revolution, as being something like the
orientation of the Rahimian’s HKS.
At the end of the meeting, Zahraie moved to take a vote, something I did not expect. I
had envisioned this meeting to be the first step toward a written discussion period
leading to a democratic convention. After the split in the united HKS we had no
convention organized around political documents, a period of written discussion, or an
election of the leadership of the new party. Although a majority voted for Zahraie’s
report and against mine, some in attendance who had worked closely with me in the
East Tehran Branch voted for my report and against his. However, it came as a shock to
me that Mahmoud, Nasser Khoshnevis, and Nader Javadi (a leader of the former PRF
and one of the 14 socialists who was recently freed) voting for Zahraie's report and
against mine. Mahmoud’s intervention was a particularly strong support of Zahraie’s
views. (see, endnote 10)
Soon after that meeting, the difference between my view and Zahraie’s was in sharp
contrast. On April 18, 1980, in a sermon Khomeini attacked the universities as corrupt
and unIslamic. Historically, the Iranian universities had been the strongholds of secular
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and leftist forces opposing the monarchy and imperialism. The next day Islamic Student
Associations supported by semi-fascist Hezbollah gangs ransacked the offices of all
other student organizations and took over campuses in Tehran and
elsewhere. Kargar (number 22, April 23, 1980) ran a full-page statement by the HKE
and Young Socialists HKE's youth group) supporting this action and calling those who
opposed it, including the groups that were attacked, counter-revolutionary. They
proclaimed: “The action of the Islamic Student Associations is revolutionary. Opposing
it is counter-revolutionary.” The statement itself was a combination of wishful thinking
(that the Islamic Student Associations had taken this action to turn the universities into
the centers of anti-imperialist struggle), unjustified attack on political organizations
whose offices were ransacked (stating that they stood outside the “anti-imperialist
barricades”), and calling for action against the unspecified “500 capitalist and
landowner families.” After the 1979 revolution much of the economy was nationalized
and was in the hands of the Islamic Republic regime which was by far the largest
employer. Blaming the victims of repression, supporting the grassroots Islamic
currents, and pointing a finger away from the Islamic Republic at the vague “500
capitalist and landowner families” became the standard HKE propaganda until its
dissolution after it came under blows of the Islamic Republic.
What actually followed the occupation of the universities was the exact opposite of what
a Marxist would call anti-imperialist measure. Khomeini formed an Islamic Cultural
Revolution Council that closed down all universities for three years while purging them
of students, faculty and staff who were identified by the Islamic Student Associations or
the Islamic Employees Associations on campus as belonging to the Mujaheddin or
various socialist groups, and revised the curriculum to make it Islamic, that is, purged of
anything the authorities did not like. Years later, some of the leaders of the Islamic
Student Associations and even those on the Cultural Revolution Council renounced their
own action as a reactionary. But one did not have to wait years to learn why this was
reactionary anti-working class action. I was selling the same issue of Kargar supporting
the takeover of the universities in the streets of Tehran (even though I opposed its
position) and it was clear to me that those who I talked with did not think that it had
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anything to do either with anti-imperialist struggle or deepening of the revolution--quite
the contrary!
A couple of days later, Parvin Najafi, a lieutenant of Zahraie, delivered a typed notice of
my expulsion from the HKE to the door of Azar Gillak’s apartment where I lived at the
time. When I got back upstairs, she rang the doorbell again. She had a similar note for
Gillak. Within a week, 25 people were expelled from HKE including all of the East
Tehran branch members of the former united HKS who were now in the HKE and had
voted for my report at the conference! The entire Tabriz branch and its Young Socialists
group and Hassan Hakimi in Isfahan who Zahraie had expelled once before from the
Austin branch in 1976 were also expelled. Most of these members were expelled because
they endorsed the platform of the Faction for Trotskyist Unification (FTU). Anticipating
my expulsion, I spearheaded the formation of this faction. The FTU platform focused on
the lack of party democracy in the HKE in the context of sharpening political
disagreements and the need to convene a united convention of all Iranian Trotskyists. In
this, we simply reiterated what the HKE leadership itself had publicly announced in the
first issue of the new Kargar announcing the new party—that the united HKS split was
not justified and they would do whatever they could to overcome it. Except they did not
mean what they said and we did. Although some of the FTU members had voted for my
oral report in the debate with Zahraie and all except one opposed the takeover of the
universities, there was no time to democratically prepare a common document that
included those political issues.
Hezb-e Vahdateh Kargarn (HVK)
Workers Unity Party
Within 10 days, the FTU held its first assembly in Tehran. After a day long discussion a
Steering Committee of five persons was elected and I was elected as its organizer
responsible for the daily work of the faction. We soon bought a typewriter and a stencil
machine from the black market as the government required a permit for these to stifle
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opposition and we rented a spacious office space and set up our headquarters (as a
detergent distribution company). We established an informational bulletin,
Sazmandeh (The Organizer), and opened a written discussion bulletin. We carried
political work in factories where some of us worked.
The FTU assembly decided to include in the Steering Committee Ali Irvani, organizer of
the Tabriz branch, and, quite consciously, Hassan Hakimi, the lone member from
Isfahan, to ensure geographical representation. I noticed that whenever we had a
Steering Committee meeting, Hakimi arrived in Mahmoud’s apartment the day before.
There was no doubt the two politically collaborating. Soon, Hakimi wrote a short
discussion article that put forward his view that the occupation of the universities was
revolutionary, that is, he supported Mahmoud and the HKE’s position in the FTU. I
wrote a short response entitled “Why Occupation of Universities Was Not
Revolutionary.” Hakimi remained the only one in the FTU who supported HKE’s view
on this question. As it happened, Hakimi became Mahmoud’s collaborator when he
moved to the United States and became part of the SWP leadership in 1986, that is, part
of international current led by Jack Barnes. I will return to this later.
In the summer of 1980, there was another offensive against Kurdistan. Kargar did not
write a single article reporting on it or a short editorial opposing it as we had done
before in the united HKS. I wrote a short contribution in the discussion bulletin of the
FTU entitled “Why Kargar Is Silent on the War in Kurdistan?”
We translated and mailed all our documents with cover letters to the United Secretariat
(USec) of the Fourth International. In July 1980, I was tasked by the FTU to represent
it at the USec meeting in Brussels. Three other Iranians were present. Siamak Zahraie
represented the HKE; Mahmoud participated as a member of the International
Executive Committee and the minority of one in the HKE Political Committee; a leader
of the HKS named Fariborz also participated. The USec heard my report as well as
Siamak Zahraie’s. Mahmoud told the USec meeting that as an HKE PC member he
opposed the expulsions of the FTU and Farhad Nouri. After some discussion, the USec
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voted unanimously that the expulsions were unjustified and urged the HKE leadership
to take us back and work towards a convention. Doug Jenness represented the SWP.
It was clear to me that while Mahmoud politically was in broad agreement with Babak
Zahrie his adaptationist course, he felt that Zahraie had gone too far (e.g. Kurdish
question) and he was against the expulsions, presumably because there was not a
democratic discussion of our differences but perhaps under pressure from former
Permanent Revolution Faction leaders such as Nader Javadi and Nasser Khoshnevis.
Mahmoud asked me to have lunch with him and Doug Jenness before the Usec’s vote in
the afternoon. Jenness asked me a number of questions to see whether we had been a
loyal expelled faction of the HKE. After the Usec meeting was over, Mahmoud and I had
a long discussion about the political situation in Iran and the crisis of the HKE. In broad
outline, he was assured that I did not oppose reaching out to the Islamic grassroots
currents and I was assured that he is breaking with Zahraie’s adaptionist course as
evidenced by Kargar’s silence in the face of the Islamic Republic attack on Kurdistan.
Mahmoud, he told me he had expressed his concern about about Kargar’s silence in the
face of war in Kurdistan to the HKE Political Committee.
This was our first long political discussion since we returned to Iran a year and a half
earlier. Mahmoud had been busy with his PC meetings. I was working as the de facto
organizer for the united HKS branch in East Tehran. (see, endnote 11) After the
formation of the HKE, I was assigned to work full time (without a subsistence) as a
translator in a small cluttered office with no window with two of Zahraie’s close
associates. They largely ignored me and took breaks together without inviting me.
We agreed to continue meeting in Tehran. With his vote against our expulsion from the
HKE at the Usec meeting, Mahmoud himself was now a target of Zahraie’s wrath and his
future was uncertain.
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Upon his return, with some prodding by Nader Javadi and Nasser Khoshnevis (that is,
at least this what Javadi latter disclosed in one of his back-and-forth arguments with
Mahmoud in the HVK Political Committee) Mahmoud helped organize the Marxist
Faction (MF) in the HKE based on the criticism of the unexplained HKE’s silence in the
face of the war against Kurdistan and the demand to reverse Nouri’s and the FTU’s
expulsions, and to work towards a democratic convention to decide on key documents
for the HKE.
When I returned to Tehran, Nouri and Gillak, who I had worked with closely and were
informed of the events in Brussels, organized a grueling meeting of the FTU to remove
me from my function as the FTU Steering Committee organizer based on the charge that
I had overstepped my authority by holding political discussion with Mahmoud and
suggesting to him that we could work together in Tehran. There was deep resentment
among in the FTU about Mahmoud’s apparent silence in the face of Zahraie’s
mistreatment of us.
Nouri became the new organizer of the Steering Committee and he and I held a couple
of meetings with Mahmoud. When Nouri was won over to the perspective of working
with the Marxist Faction (MF), he gave a report to an FTU assembly that unanimously
supported the proposal to collaborate with the MF to prepare for a united convention. I
was assigned to collaborate with Mahmoud to prepare a draft political resolution, which
we called the “Theses on the Iranian Revolution.” The leaderships of both factions
agreed with the general line of that document and it was submitted to the preconvention discussion bulletin. Mahmoud gave a copy of it to the HKE PC on September
9, 1980. Nouri then collaborated with Mahmoud to draft the task and perspective
document entitled “War and the New Stage in the Iranian Revolution.” Saddam
Hussein’s invasion of Iran had just begun.
Meanwhile, Maryam and Roya from the HKS contacted me for a meeting. They had
learned about the situation in the HKE and the FTU’s fight for a united democratic
convention. Maryam explained how a small group of HKS leaders and members who
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had been critical of Rahimian’s leadership and HKS’s direction has decided to join in the
pre-convention discussion for the united convention. Together with Mehran, a leader of
HKS, they organized the Trotskyist Faction (TF) in the HKS with 6 members (five
women and one man). They joined the pre-convention discussion that had been opened
with the publication of the "Theses on the Iranian Revolution" in early September.
On December 5, 1980, Babak Zahraie organized an HKE conference that expelled the
Marxist Faction, three months after it had been declared.
Among the twenty-five MF members expelled were two of the Sattar League founders,
one of the 14 socialists, half the membership of the newly formed Young Socialists and
most of its founders. Together with the FTU members, about 50 persons were expelled
from the HKE, about 40% of its total membership (including the expellees). What is
remarkable is that all former Permanent Revolution Faction members were part of the
FTU or the MF and by expelling these, Babak Zahraie had finally achieved what he
began to do in the 1976 factional struggle in the Sattar League but was stopped due to
the SWP’s intervention.
Thus, both the SWP’s and FI leadership’s methods in trying to glue together an Iranian
Trotskyist movement rife with factionalism proved futile. The social composition,
conditions of exile, and lack of any connection with the working class or roots in the
Iranian society, as well as intense pressure of class struggle certainly contributed to this
failure. But the SWP’s and FI’s methods of pressuring us to maintain organizational
unity where there was no valid political basis for it also contributed to the unfolding
crisis.
“Theses on the Iranian Revolution”
During January 22-24, 1981, some 60 enthusiastic Trotskyists from three factions (two
from HKE and one from HKS) participated in the founding convention of the Hezb-e
Vahdat Kargaran (Workers Unity Party), the first and only truly democratic convention
of our movement (The Sattar League’s convention was undemocratic and there were no
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others). The convention adopted the general line of “Theses on the Iranian Revolution,”
and “War and the New Stage in the Iranian Revolution.” (see, endnote 12) One delegate,
Davoud Moraadi, a young critical thinker who read Gramsci, did not agree with the
potential for winning over young activists in the Islamic grassroots currents such as the
Jihad Sazandegi (Construction Crusade) and Bassij-e Mostazefin (Mobilization of the
Poor) to our program. He looked at these as consolidated reactionary organizations of
the Islamic Republic regime. While the two documents of the convention did not have
an orientation towards these currents, we saw them as young Muslim working people
with illusions in Khomeini and the Islamic Republic that were active in struggle against
imperialism and the defensive war effort with whom we needed to collaborate. We did
not want to preclude the possibility of winning them over to our program and
perspective. Davoudi wrote about his views, spoke at the convention, and proposed
amendments to the relevant sections of the draft resolutions. They were voted on and
were not adopted. He remained a valuable member of the HVK for the duration of its
short life. The HKE and HKS were invited to send their representatives to speak to the
convention. Siamak Zahraie (HKE) attended and took the opportunity to address the
convention by denouncing it and the new party.
After the January 1981 convention, we immediately began to organize the institutions of
the party. The convention elected a National Committee and it elected a Political
Committee of five persons: Mehran (former Trotskyist Faction), Nader Javadi and
Mahmoud (former Marxist Faction) and Nouri and myself (former Faction for
Trotskyist Unification). After some discussion, the PC voted for Nouri as its
organizer. For the first time, we did not have an outsized “National Secretary” that
formally or in fact wielded power over the entire party. The bulk of the HVK
membership was in Tehran, but we had a branch of 12 people in Tabriz, two people in
Isfahan (Hakimi had recruited an army Sergeant) and a few at-large members elsewhere
in Iran. About half of our membership was in industry, and we immediately organized
an effort to get more leaders and members into industry and I was tasked to lead that
effort by the PC by getting an industrial job myself. We rented an office near Vali-e
Assar Square in central Tehran for our headquarters under the cover of being an
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educational institution, tutoring college students. A five-person editorial staff, with
Javadi as the editor, worked on our paper, Hemmat (Effort). When we applied for a
permit for Hemmat to the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance that asked for three
names. We identified, in addition to Mahmoud whose name was indicated as the
Managing Director (Modir-e Massoal) on Hemmat's masthead, Javadi and myself (I was
also on the editorial staff). Mahmoud was a public figure of our movement as he was
the low key HKE candidate for president of the Islamic Republic in spring of 1980 (he
was interviewed on the Tabriz TV station) and was the HVK’s very low key candidate for
the parliament (repression was so severe that his only campaign activity was an
interview with Hemmat).
Still, by December 1982 the Political Committee of the HVK decided on its dissolution.
In fact, for all practical purposes all political parties outside of Kurdistan except the
ruling Islamic Republic Party and its public factions either were forced to disband or
operated clandestinely at a great risk to their membership.
Another wave of repression
Here are some key events that led to this situation. The stalemate at the war fronts
finally broke in favor of Iran after a wave of offensives liberated Khorramshahr, a major
city in oil-rich Khuzestan province, on May 24, 1982. The city had been under Iraqi
occupation since October 26, 1980. By June 1982, the Iranians retook almost all the lost
territories. This forced Saddam Hussein to go on a diplomatic offensive offering to
withdraw to the internationally recognized borders. Despite some support for
negotiation within the Islamic Republic regime, Khomeini rejected this offer. Instead, he
decided that the war should continue until Saddam Hussein was overthrown and an
Islamic Republic was established in Iraq. Thus began the Islamic Republic slogans:
“The road to Quds (Jerusalem) is through Karbala (the shiite holy city in Iraq)” and
“War, War, Until Victory!”
This was also a period of intense factional struggle within the Islamic Republic regime
and severe repression of all political parties, especially those that came into sharp
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(sometimes armed) conflict with the regime, the Mujahedin Khalgh, Fedayeen Minority,
and Peykar. All non-clerical allies of Khomeini were purged or sidelined, including
Abolhasan Bani-Sadr who was elected the first president of the Islamic Republic with
84% of the vote on February 4, 1980. He was impeached by the Islamic Consultative
Majles (parliament) on June 24, 1981 and had to flee to France. Sadegh Ghotbzadeh,
another aid to Khomeini, was executed during this period accused of hatching a coup
plot with the Saudis. In the spring of 1981, repression against Mujahedin Khalgh,
intensified as their sympathizers were systematically harassed, physically attacked,
jailed or sometimes killed. On June 20 the Mujahedin organized a mass demonstration
of 200,000 in Tehran that was attacked by Islamic Republic armed forces injuring some
and arresting many. The Mujahedin leadership concluded that peaceful protest was no
longer possible and decided to resume “armed struggle” (It was a anti-imperialist, antiShah guerrilla movement in the 1970s). Armed street clashes occurred between the
Mujahedin fighters and the government forces. Some leaders of the Mujahedin died in
gun battles when their homes came under attack. The Islamic Republic regime
unleashed a massive wave of repression that went beyond the Mujahedin to include
socialist groups that had declared the regime their enemy, including Fedayeen Minority
and Peykar.
On June 28, 1981, the Mujahedin bombed the offices of the Islamic Republic Party (IRP)
killing 70 high-ranking officials, including the Chief Justice Ayatollah Mohammad
Beheshti who was its leader. Two months later, on August 30, another Mujahedin bomb
killed President Mohammad Ali Rajai and Prime Minister Hojatoleslam Mohammad
Javad Bahonar. Thousands were arrested and many hundreds were executed, mostly
young sympathizers of these groups.
Meanwhile, the regime used the war as an excuse to move against all independent labor
and peasant struggles. In particular, the oil workers movement was decimated and their
leaders arrested, tortured, or executed. Yadullah Khosroshahi a central leader of the oil
workers union and Shora who had been imprisoned for five years and tortured by the
Shah’s regime, was arrested in the summer of 1982, tortured and jailed for close to five
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years and when released but had to seek exile in London. Khosroshahi who continued
organizing and defending Iranian labor movement in exile and in Iran had compiled a
list of 500 oil workers who were killed by the Islamic Republic.
Grand Ayatollahs Golpaigani and Marashi declared at the onset of the war that it is
unIslamic to take landowners private property and threatened to march in the streets to
oppose any land reform. Khomeini ordered a halt to further action on the
implementation of Article C (band-e jim), a legal provision to distribute uncultivated
land that Jihad for Construction activists and peasant shoras were
demanding. Capitalists and big landowners used the pretext of the war to press against
workers and peasants and their supporters in towns and the countryside. A new military
offensive against the Kurds took place under the guise of the need to move armed forces
to the fronts. The universities remained closed while the Cultural Revolution Council
purged students, faculty, and staff, and transformed curricula and eliminated anything
from the campuses it deemed as unIslamic.
The crisis of HVK
The HVK responded to these events as best as we could and in many ways in an
exemplary manner. In the early months, we even recruited a few people. However, the
repression was intense undermining our progress and wearing us out. When in the fall
of 1981, we decide to run Mahmoud as our parliamentary candidate our election
platform did not include a demand for the end of the war against the Kurds—it was
silent on this question. When I questioned this, the PC agreed to give a report to the
membership on our opposition to the war and our support for the unconditional right of
the Kurdish people to self-determination but also to inform the membership that the PC
deemed it as too dangerous to include it in the election platform (which has a very
limited circulation because of intense repression). I deferred, knowing that they were
right but thinking that a reassessment of the political situation was needed. Soon the
Ministry of Islamic Guidance (the censor) that was supposedly reviewing our application
for a permit to publish Hemmat told Mahmoud, who dutifully hand delivered every new
issue of Hemmat, to stop publication. We held a discussion and decided to comply.
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What choice did we have? A group of some 60 people without any influence in the
society?
From then on, we provided only occasional political analysis of the key political issues
facing the revolution in the form of a long “letter to the editor” to this or that mass
circulation government run daily a way to communicate with the membership and our
sympathizers without endangering them as people on foot or in cars were subject to spot
check by the Islamic Revolution Committees and anyone with any critical literature
could have risked landing in the notorious Evin prison.
Despite these developments we in the HVK leadership continued to maintain that “the
revolution is advancing.” (Enghlab be pish miravad). Sometimes, it was hard to hold
onto this dogma and report on the reality of what was going on. For example, when I
was assigned to cover the May Day 1982 activities in Tehran for Hemmat (before it
ceased publication) my report was in “the revolution is advancing.” It accurately
accurately noted that the leadership of these mobilizations was in the hands of the
Workers House (Khaneh Kargar), an IRP affiliated group that was responsible for
dismantling workers shoras, and that they had turned the march and the rally in Tehran
University into an anti-communist event. Azar Gillak who was the acting editor (as
Javadi , the editor, was on leave to prepare a draft report on Afghanistan which never
happened) in consultation with Farhad Nouri, edited my reporting to make it sound as if
it was largely a militant action in support of the war effort. I learned about this change
after Hemmat had already been published and distributed. Clearly, we were on a
slippery slope of adaptation to the Islamic Republic in our reporting and analysis in
Hemmat before it ceased to exist. Why?
Problems with the “Theses on the Iranian Revolution”
Theoretical problems I outlined earlier in my discussion of Nationality and Revolution
in Iran were repeated in the "Theses on the Iranian Revolution." As Mahmoud and I
met in his apartment on Kargar Street, near Laleh (Tulips) Park in central Tehran, to
draft what we called "Theses on the Iranian Revolution," we still shared a common
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theoretical/political framework in which imperialism was the real cause of the economic
and cultural backwardness of Iran, hence the central enemy of the revolution. We also
shared the perspective of Permanent Revolution as outlined both in the PRF’s Political
Resolution and in the "Manifesto of the Rights of Workers and Toilers."
However, we did have different assessments of the Islamic Republic and the Islamic
grassroots currents that supported it, as was in display in my “debate” with Babak
Zahraie and the occupation of the universities just several months earlier. Neither
Zahraie nor Mahmoud ever explained what they meant when they said that these
currents were the “Jacobins” of the Iranian revolution, either in the theoretical/
analytical sense or in practical terms. It was clear that this represented a shift in focus
away from the secular, that is, non-exclusive, grassroots movements that arose out of
the struggle against the Shah’s regime and in the months after the February 1979
revolution towards the Islamic currents rallying round Khomeini. To my mind, those
secular grassroots movements, especially the workers shoras, were the heart of the
revolution. This difference was deep going as it had put Mahmoud and I on the opposite
sides during the occupation of the universities by the Islamic Student Associations.
Mahmoud supported the occupation as an anti-imperialist act of great importance (like
May 1968 students occupation of universities in France?) and I opposed it as the
takeover of the universities by forces supportive of Ayatollah Khomeini and an attack on
academic freedom and freedom of association and political activity.
Still, Mahmoud and I were both eager to heal the political rift and reunite our movement
as much as possible by finding a principled common ground. A bridge to such a
common ground was provided when Mahmoud agreed to include in some detail in the
"Theses on the Iranian Revolution" the Islamic Republic’s counter-revolutionary frontal
attacks against the working people and political gains of the February 1979 revolution in
the context of the “centrality of imperialism” as the enemy of the revolution.
A reading of the "Theses on the Iranian Revolution" today easily reveals the back-andforth formulations in which Mahmoud’s and my own views were reconciled. The
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workers shoras are called “the heart of the revolution” and it is declares that “[t]he
central danger threatening the Iranian revolution is world imperialism…” (emphasis in
original) And it is added that: “The fundamental conflict in this revolution is between
the Iranian working class and U.S. imperialism acting directly or through its social bases
within the country.” Meanwhile the "Theses" details how the Islamic Republic has been
attacking the working class and toilers and the gains of the February 1979 revolution.
How is it that the "Theses" holds imperialism to be the central danger threatening the
revolution but in reality it received its death blow by the Islamic Republic which is still
locked in a four-decades-long conflict with imperialism? The theoretical framework of
Nationality and Revolution in Iran (1973) and the "Theses on the Iranian
Revolution" (1980) cannot provide us with an answer. From a Marxian perspective, of
course, the answer is clear: a deep going revolution is intense struggle of social classes,
not just within the boundaries of nation-states but worldwide. The domestic exploiting
classes aim to destroy the independent organization and mobilization of the working
people just as much as the international capitalist classes (regional powers and
imperialism). A social revolution is not about struggle among states, between the
latecomer (Iran) and early industrializers (imperialism), but between social classes both
within the country and across the world. Thus, from a Marxist point of view it was easy
to see that the clerical capitalist Islamic Republic and its chief architect, Ayatollah
Khomeini, was more immediately a threat to the revolution than imperialism which
would be a more lasting threat to any revolution that overthrow the domestic exploiting
ruling classes, as in Russia in 1917 and in Cuba in 1959-61. For Marx capital is selfexpanding value and in the history of the rise and expansion of the capitalist mode of
production, capital has always exceeded national boundaries giving it an international
scope. Colonialism and internationalization of primitive accumulation is part of he
process of internationalization of the circuits of capital (ongoing accumulation). Thus,
the process of expansion of the capitalist mode of production on the global scale
combines the process of primitive accumulation (which uses naked force) with the
process of capital accumulation especially after the rise of the first industrialized
capitalist economies in the latter part of the nineteenth century, which wrongly was
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theorized as a qualitatively different capitalism, as in theories of monopoly capitalism
(imperialism) (Nayeri, 1991, Chapter IX)
Adaptation to the Islamic Republic as internalization of repression
Uncritical acceptance of the theories of imperialism and the Dependency School (see,
endnote, 13) can explain why the HKE and Mahmoud misidentified the revolution with
the anti-imperialist struggle. But they do not explain how they began to adapt to the
Islamic grassroots currents around Khomeini and through them to the Islamic
Republic. The explanation for that lies in the internalization of the ongoing repression
which intensified in waves. This process impacted the entire society, including those of
us in the HVK. But it went much further with the HKE and Mahmoud even after he
became a leader of the HVK. After all, the appeal of the Islamic grassroots currents as
an increasingly central “anti-imperialist” force itself was a byproduct of the growing
repression of the secular (non-exclusive) grassroots movements by the regime. As the
secular grassroots movements were destroyed or weakened and sidelined by these
attacks, the Islamic grassroots currents, protected and promoted by the Islamic
Republic, moved onto center stage.
Let's recall what happened to the labor movement. On May Day 1979, 500,000 working
people marched in two separate groups in Tehran: one march was secular, nonexclusive, and organized by the socialist currents, and the other was Islamic organized
by supporters of Ayatollah Khomeini and his as yet to be defined Islamic Republic. By
May Day 1982, three years later, only thousands marched and there was a rally of only
5,000 at Tehran University. The events were organized by the Worker House, taken
over by the Islamic Republic Party supporters in the first year of the revolution, and
used to destroy secular workers shoras. The slogans at the march and the speeches at
the rally were predominantly anticommunist.
As we know, there was a massive wave of repression in the summer of 1979 against
freedom of the press (40 newspapers were banned), liberal and socialist parties (their
headquarters ransacked), and the Kurds (a new military offensive) before the election to
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the Islamic Experts Assembly (Islamic Constituent Assembly) to draft the constitution
of the Islamic Republic. The goal was to essentially drive the secular, socialist, and
dissident Islamic movements out of the political arena. It was this wave of repression
that drove some activists, including two leaders of the united HKS, to conclude that
fascism had triumphed and resign.
However, on November 4, 1979, a group of university student who subsequently called
themselves Muslim Student Followers of the Imam's Line took over the U.S. embassy in
Tehran and for the next 444 days became the focus of the anti-imperialist fervor of the
Iranian working people. Khomeini and the Islamic Republic regime benefitted in two
ways. First, they consolidated the repression of the liberal and socialist currents which
they had attacked in the summer of 1979. Some of these disbanded. Others, like
Rahimian’s HKS, became illegal and in conflict with the anti-imperialist sentiment a
large section of the working people. Most importantly, it forced the remaining liberal
and socialist groups, and even the existing secular shora movement, to begin accepting
the hegemony of Islamic Republic in the anti-imperialist struggle and more broadly in
the revolution.
To understand the significance of this stifling of the political space won by the February
1979 revolution let us remember that one of the first acts of the newly empowered
Khomeini regime (soon to be called the Islamic Republic) was to bring the liberated
national radio and TV stations under its control. In his memoir, Hojatollah Rafsanjani,
a long time lieutenant of Khomeini, recalls how he intervened in the television station to
bring it under the control of forces loyal to Ayatollah Khomeini because he wanted it to
speak of the “Islamic Revolution” instead of the Iranian revolution (Nayeri, January 15,
2017)
Thus, the new Kargar published by the HKE that initially used what supposed to be
“defensive formulations” soon began to speak of the Islamic revolution and came to
unconditionally support the anti-imperialist movement as identified with the Islamic
grassroots currents beginning with the Muslim Student Followers of the Imam’s Line. A
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few months later, the HKE extended its political support to the Islamic currents that
occupied the universities on a cue from Khomeini. Somewhat, later, in July 1981, the
HKE critically supported the candidacy of Hussein Kamali, the leader of the antiworkers shora Worker House which was controlled by the Islamic Republic party!
It is important to note that the HKE’s and Mahmoud’s adaptation to the Islamic
Republic was different from that of the Stalinists currents like the Tudeh Party and
Fedayeen Majority who were following Moscow’s “non-capitalist road to development”
policy. Also, the HKE leadership did not go as far as a complete surrender to the Islamic
Republic regime (that is the step Simak Zahraie took when his brother was taken
political prisoner and the HKE fizzled out. See, Nayeri, November 2012) Still, before
the banning of Kargar and the imprisonment of Babak Zahraie, the HKE had gone quite
a political distance towards capitulation to the Islamic Republic (ibid.) The pressure
exerted on Mahmoud with the formation the Faction for Trotskyist Unification (FTU) in
April 1980 and then inside the HKE by former Sattar League Permanent Revolution
Faction leaders like Nader Javadi and Nasser Khoshnevis resulted in his decision to
form the Marxist Faction. His expulsion from the HKE and his subsequent work to forge
the HVK saved his from the tragedy that the HKE faced.
The last act for the HKE came with the arrest of Bahram Attai, a Political Committee
member, while distributing an appeal to the Tehran Friday Prayer crowd on behalf of an
HKE member who had been fired from his industrial job after being expelled for his
socialist views from the war front. For some time, the HKE had focused on the Friday
Prayers as an arena for its activities including by writing an occasional column
in Kargar entitled “Friday Prayer Tribune.” This was simply another case of "reaching
out" to the “grassroots Islamic currents.” Attai was taken to the notorious Evin prison
held for 82 days, interrogated about the internal life of the HKE, and tortured.
Upon his release, Kargar published a multi-page “interview” with Attai that has an
amazing schizophrenic quality. He refers to his interrogators, jailers, and tortures as
“brothers” and speaks of “our Islamic Revolution.” He related in this interview that
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when asked in prison why he did not become a Khomeini disciple, he had responded
that he had no access to his ideas. He tells his jailers in his own recollection:
“[As] the Islamic Revolution drew closer our collaboration with Islamic militants
and Islamic Student Associations abroad that had just formed increased and
after the revolution it has become widespread. Today, we want strategic
collaboration with Islamic institutions like the Islamic Revolution Guards Corp
[aka. Revolutionary Guards Corp.] and Jihad for Construction, and
others.” (Kargar, March 8, 1982)
It is news to me that the Sattar League had anything to do with "Islamic militants and
Islamic Student Associations abroad." It never happened. He made it up. Still, after this
interview, the authorities confiscated the next issue of Kargar from the news stands,
banned the paper, and jailed its editor, Babak Zahraie, until 1988. In the same year,
thousands of political prisoners were massacred across Iran. Zahraie was spared his life.
Mahmoud’s adaptation to Khomeini
Even as a leader of the HVK Mahmoud continued to take an adapationist position
towards the Islamic Republic. At the end of May 1982, when the Political Committee
discussed the new stage in the war after the Iraqi army had been driven out of the
country almost completely, the majority's thinking was that while the war was still just
because it continued to be a defense against counter-revolutionary assault backed by
imperialism, it was time to sue for peace as the Iraqi regime was forced to negotiate
from a position of weakness. Mahmoud disagreed arguing that Khomeini’s “The Road
to Jerusalem Is Through Karbala” and “War, War, Until Victory!” policy reflected the
fervor of the Iranian working people and that the prospect of overthrowing Saddam
Hussein’s regime was real and desirable because the oppressed Shiite majority in Iraq
would welcome an Iranian victory, which would in turn spread the revolution to the rest
of the Middle East!
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It is easy to see now how wrong Mahmoud’s argument was. But the argument was
fallacious even as at it was made. On the basis of what evidence did Mahmoud believe
Khomeini’s intransigency reflected the fervor of the Iranian working people? On what
basis did he believe that the Iraqi Shiite majority would welcome an invasion of Iraq by
the Islamic Republic? How about the large population of Arab Sunnis and Kurdish
Iraqis? And on what basis did he think that an Islamic Republic in Iraq modeled after
the one in Iran could have been attractive to the working people of Iraq and the rest of
the Middle East?
Mahmoud had no evidence to back up his position. His argument simply reflected his
own illusions in the revolutionary potential of the Islamic grassroots currents and in this
case, their leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, and certainly entailed viewing the Islamic
Republic locked in war with Arab reactionary regimes and imperialism as progressive in
some undefined sense. Furthermore, the clerical capitalist Islamic Republic had been
using the excuse of the war to attack the revolution. In fact, the oil workers shoras, the
crown jewel of the workers shora movement, had been largely destroyed by the time of
our May 1982 PC meeting, and its central leader, Yadullah Khosroshahi, was arrested in
the same summer, tortured and given a five year prison term. The Islamic Republic had
used the excuse of the war to destroy the workers shora movement, “the heart of the
revolution,” according to the "Theses on the Iranian Revolution." The counterrevolution was completed by the end of the year!
Of course, the HVK or the HKE were not aware of these developments due to the fact
that we had no organic connection to the Iranian working class and there was no press
coverage of such assaults in the government controlled media. The Stalinist press of the
Tudeh Party and Fedayeen Majority did not report them either because both groups
were collaborating with the authorities by identifying labor and socialist activists. Thse
resulted in their arrest as “counter-revolutionaries" and subseuent torture and
executions! In 1994, when I met the leader of the Tudeh Party in the U.S. and Canada in
New York, I asked him about their shameful role as the informers for the Islamic
Republic. His answer was disarmingly simple. To paraphrase, he said: “We simply
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followed with our political position that the Islamic Republic was leading the revolution
and these activists were fighting it. We felt it was our duty to inform on them with the
authorities.” Such is the logic of adaptation to the class enemy.
Where did the SWP stand?
During this period, the SWP’s policy was to give some coverage to all the three
Trotskyist parties in Iran. But a review of The Militant and the Intercontinental Press
shows that the SWP leadership favored the Zahraie’s HKE over the Rahimian’s HKS,
and after the founding of the HVK, the SWP gave increasing coverage to it. After 1982
and the dissolution of the three parties, and at least up the end of the 1992, the SWP and
its press continued to view developments in Iran through what might be called
“Mahmoud’s lens.” (see, endnote 14) Let me illustrate, beginning with the SWP’s
position on the occupation of the universities in April 1980.
Fred Feldman, writing in The Militant of May 23, 1980, provides a convoluted account
of the occupation of the universities without citing any sources. He portrayed the
widespread reactionary armed assault on the universities that began on April 19, 1980,
as the work of “ultra-rightist gangs” encouraged by President Banisadr. Feldman writes:
“The attackers waned to block and disrupt moves by Islamic Students
Organizations (ISO, often called the Students Following [sic.] Imam’s Line) to
transform the universities into a base for arming the masses, spreading literacy,
and deepening the revolution. The ISOs are linked to the students occupying the
U.S. embassy.”
Everything in this account is factually wrong. In reality, those attacks were directed
against the socialist groups and the Mujahedin. They were not encouraged by Banisadr
but by Khomeini. It was not some unnamed “ultra-rightist gangs’ that attacked the
universities but the semi-fascist Hezbollah goons organized by factions in the Islamic
republic regime that served as shock troopers backing up the occupation of the
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universities by the Islamic student Associations and Muslim Student Organizations who
were fired up by Khomeini’s call to deal with the “corrupt and unIslamic” universities.
Feldman’s account suggests that it must have been reported by someone in the HKE as
it follows the narrative in the HKE statement published in Kargar. Could it have been
Mahmoud, either on assignment from the HKE Political Committee or simply in his
usual capacity as the confidant of the SWP leadership in the Iranian movement? What
Feldman reports was an important event with significant consequences for class
struggle in Iran: Feldman portrays it as an advance in the anti-imperialist movement.
But it was really an attack on college students, oppositionist political parties, academic
freedom, as well as the Iranian working class.
Why do I suspect a role for Mahmoud in the SWP's position on the occupation of the
universities? Consider this: Two years later, in the same May 1982 HVK Political
Committee meeting in Tehran that Mahmoud supported Khomeini’s decision to drive
into Iraq to overthrow Saddam Hussein’s regime, he also proposed that the HVK begin a
class series reading Lenin.
The proposal came out of the blue, was not motivated, and did not jibe with anything
that was happening in the country or what we were doing at the time. None of us
thought much about this proposal, except to raise our eyebrows! Who could object to
reading Lenin in general? But why now? The proposal went no where. A couple of years
later, when I was sitting in the SWP’s Lenin classes in the New York branch, I realized
where that proposal might have come from. It was part of Barnes’s effort to fashion a
new SWP and his “international tendency.” The SWP’s attitude towards the war and the
Islamic Republic in the years that followed made me suspect—although I have no direct
proof—that Mahmoud’s position in support of Khomeini’s war drive was also made in
consultation with the Barnes leadership. More on the SWP’s political approach to the
Islamic Republic in a moment.
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The dissolution of the HVK
Meanwhile, demoralization had set in among some members of the HVK. I knew some
of our members, including a National Committee member, who no longer read
Hemmat. In 1982, PC meetings sometimes became chaotic as Mehran’s mental health
deteriorated and frictions increased between Nader Javadi and Mahmoud resulting in a
shouting match initiated by the Javadi who was the louder of the two.
On July 23, 1982, I submitted my resignation from the HVK to the National Committee.
The next day, I left for Vienna on my way to New York. In August, I applied to and
became a member of the SWP’s New York branch. My decision to leave Iran was
personal and planned. My close political associates, including Mahmoud, knew for a
long time that I was contemplating leaving Iran and why. A year earlier, I had formally
discussed this with Nouri and others on the Political Committee and kept them abreast
of how my application for an exit visa was proceeding. They were understanding and
supportive. (see, endnote 15)
By the end of 1982, a new wave of repression commenced, this time against the socialist
parties that had supported the Islamic Republic, unconditionally, like the Tudeh party
and Fedayeen Majority, or critically, like the HKE, or materially against imperialism and
Iraqi war of aggression only, like the HVK.
Mahmoud was called in by the authorities and was held at the notorious Evin prison for
a short time. I do not know what transpired there, although there can be little doubt that
they mistreated him. It seems like Mahmoud did not relate what happened at Evin to
the Political Committee either. However, he did report about their threat that there
would be severe consequences for not dissolving the HVK. The Political Committee of
HVK unanimously decided to dissolve the organization. I understand that there were
different interpretations of what that meant and different views on how it was supposed
to be carried out. However, the crisis was so deep and the shock so sharp that after the
HVK dissolved none of the Political Committee members were on friendly terms. They
all went their own separate ways.
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The Socialist Workers Party (United States)
Mahmoud relocated to New York from Tehran in early 1986 followed by his recently
wedded wife, Fatemeh, joined the SWP, and was incorporated into its leadership.
The ease by which Mahmoud, who founded the Permanent Revolution Faction in the
Sattar League, was integrated into Jack Barnes’s SWP soon after longtime SWP leaders
and members who had resisted his campaign against the theory of Permanent
Revolution (for a discussion of these issues, see, Henderson, 2012) should be taken as
further evidence that Mahmoud must have been informed of the internal struggle in the
SWP even when he was a leader of the HVK. Yet, he never brought up the subject in the
HVK Political Committee even when he proposed in May 1982 that the HVK should
start a Lenin class series.
To Mahmoud, Barnes’ claim of sectarianism on the part of his opponents may have been
an easy claim to accept. As we know, he himself had gone a fair distance to
accommodate himself to the Islamic grassroots currents and the Islamic Republic and
viewed his critics as sectarian. On a personal basis, he also identified with Barnes’s
group of younger leaders who increasingly took control of the SWP after the leadership
change in 1972. They are of the same generation and joined the YSA and SWP at about
the same time. As Barnes quickly established his star leadership and began to remake
the party in his own image, Mahmoud fell in line, as did most of his cohort in the SWP
National Committee.
Over the course of my decade in the SWP, I came to the conclusion that Barnes’s
decision to discard the theory of Permanent Revolution and diminish Trotsky’s political
standing in his “Their Trotsky and Ours” was more a political maneuver than a
recalibration of the class alliance in the course of the coming revolution, or a thoughtful
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revision of socialist history and theory. It was a way to get rid of the “political baggage”
he felt stood between the SWP and the leadership of the mass anti-imperialist
movements and revolutionary currents, especially in relation to the “three giants,” the
Cuban, Nicaraguan, and Grenadian revolutions, which he hoped would be critical in
building a “New Leninist International” as the SWP cut its relations with the Fourth
International. The task of demonstrating this claim is outside of the scope of this essay.
However, in the course of the rest of this essay, I will demonstrate how Barnes’
leadership’s approach to the Iranian revolution and the Islamic Republic changed due to
political expediency.
The SWP and the 1979 Iranian Revolution
Mahmoud found a receptive audience in Barnes’s SWP for his long-held view that
imperialism was the central danger facing the Iranian revolution, and in this context,
the view that the revolution was ongoing despite the increasingly bloody waves of
repression that practically wiped out all independent political activities in Iran. In some
162 articles about Iran that The Militant published between January 1982 and
December 1992 (approximately the period I was in the SWP), this view is maintained
while some instances of capitalist attacks and repression are reported as well. Most of
these articles are short news reports or principled articulation of the right to selfdetermination of Iranians against imperialist attacks and Saddam Hussein’s initiated
war, and terrorist attacks. However, despite articles that documented bloody repression
of the working people and socialist parties, The Militant continued to identify the
revolution with anti-imperialist struggle, including the mobilizations for the war front,
and therefore, continued to hold that the revolution is alive if not advancing.
The SWP’s attitude towards the Iranian revolution was similar to its attitude towards
other anti-imperialist movements around the world and uncritical embracing of the
policies of the leadership of the Cuban revolution and political currents around it in
Nicaragua, Granada, El Salvador, as well as of the ANC in South Africa. To be clear, I
also favored and still favor embracing movements against imperialism and non-Stalinist
leaderships of revolutionary movements and governments, but not unconditionally, that
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is, at the expense of giving up the Marxian policy of promoting self-organization and
self-mobilization of the working people, as without them no social revolution is
possible. The fallacy of the Barnes’s leadership approach has been proven in practice in
almost 40 years of historical experience. Let me continue to show it in the case of Iran.
Part of the problem with the SWP’s attitude towards the Iranian revolution originated
with its reliance on the Iranian Trotskyists’ reports as I noted earlier. Despite our best
effort, our view of the Iranian revolution was distorted because of our faulty theoretical
lens, our small size, class composition, meager political experience, lack of any roots in
any section of the working people's struggle. These made us especially vulnerable to the
pressure of alien classes.
To give you a sense of how our mistaken political position might have influenced the
SWP let me use my own contribution to the international discussion about the Iranian
revolution. In the fall of 1980 as we were preparing for the founding convention of the
HVK, on Mahmoud’s initiative I was asked to write a critique of an early “Draft
Resolution on Iran” of the United Secretariat of the Fourth International entitled “The
Evolution of the Iranian Revolution” (the final version, approved by a majority vote of
the Usec, was published in Intercontinental Press, December 1, 1980). The result was
“The Third Iranian Revolution and the Fourth International” submitted in November of
1980 but published in the FI Discussion Bulletin two years later in December of 1982.
While I still stand by the general thrust of my argument in that critical essay, in
retrospect I find the following assertion about the Islamic Republic shocking wrong:
“This is not a puppet government brought to power by imperialism. Under the
pressure of the masses, and in self-defense, it does take anti-imperialist steps.
However reactionary its intentions and deeds are, this government is incapable
of imposing a bloody defeat on the working class. This regime cannot stop the
workers from moving forward and it is unable to roll back the revolution. This
regime is an obstacle— although an unstable and shaky one—to imperialism. All
these are reason enough for imperialists antagonism towards this government.”
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(Nayeri, November 18, 1980, published in the International Internal Discussion
Bulletin, Vol. XVIII, No. 7, December 1982, italics are added for emphasis)
When this bulletin was distributed in the SWP, I was complimented by some of the SWP
leaders such as Cindy Jaquith with who I collaborated on issues related to Iran during
the first year of my arrival from Iran. But no one ever questioned the above passage in
my critique. Let us recall that the timing of the distribution of my essay coincided with
the last wave of repression that shut down all three FI parties in Iran and coincided
with the final blow to the revolution by the Islamic Republic! This “soft attitude”
towards the clerical capitalist Islamic Republic continued until at least 1992 when I was
forced out of the SWP. In the interim I had become aware of my own mistake and tried
to correct the SWP’s position regarding the revolution and the government that
destroyed it to no avail. (see, endnote 16)
The Islamic Republic and counter-revolution in Iran
In the "Theses on the Iranian Revolution" we wrote that the shora movement was the
heart of the revolution. That heart stopped beating by the end of 1982 because of the
Islamic Republic bloody repression. Yet Mahmoud and The Militant continued to hold
that the Iranian revolution was ongoing. The difference between my view and
Mahmoud’s and Barnes’s leadership was that I truly identified the revolution with the
all-inclusive secular grassroots movements, especially the shora movement, and when
these movements were weakened or destroyed, Mahmoud and Barnes’s leadership
identified the revolution with the Islamic grassroots movements that looked to
Khomeini who was locked into a struggle with imperialism and the Iraqi-initiated war.
That is, in essence, what you find in The Militant at least until December 1992, well after
the Iraq-Iran war had ended and President Rafsanjani had initiated his structural
adjustment programs and embraced neoliberal policies. That is why I and other
Iranians (all but one wer former HVKers) in the SWP became critical of its “line” on Iran
and were alienated from Mahmoud and the Barnes leadership. Not only they ignored
our questioning of various political manifestation of their adaptationist approach, they
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began to frame me up as a way to silence such criticism. Like Zahraie before him, Barnes
wanted to cut loose anyone who stood in path of his impulsive political course.
While Mahmoud made peace with the clash of his own theoretical framework and the
reality of the Islamic counter-revolution unfolding before his very eyes, from 1983-1992
I scrutinized these same theories and analysis by going back to Marx and our theoretical
heritage. In this, I had an advantage over Mahmoud. While Mahmoud spent his
political life, especially in the Iranian revolution, in meetings of this or that Political
Committee, I (and other activists) had the opportunity to be where the action was,
during the revolution on the streets of Tehran and directly touched by the unfolding
historic events. Therefore, I was able to feel and touch the Islamic Republic counterrevolution as it unfolded the day after Khomeini came to power. Let me explain an early
experience of mine that showcases what Khomeini did to the grassroots organization of
the working people who were the Iranian revolution in body and soul.
Upon my return to Tehran on February 1, 1979, when Bakhtiar caretaker government
was still in power, I settled in my parents house in Tehran Pars, a 1960s development in
northeast of Tehran. Within a day or two, I was part of the neighborhood committee
composed of two or three dozen young men—mostly younger than me (I was 28 years
old at the time). Neighborhood committees were an important part of the secular
grassroots movements that originated in the struggle against the Shah’s dictatorship.
During various strikes, especially the oil workers strike that began on October 21, 1978,
there was a need to acquire and distribute goods and services in neighborhoods. While
stopping oil exports and oil flow to the Shah’s regime, oil workers delivered gasoline and
cooking and heating oil and gas to the population to ensure they did not suffer in the
cold fall/winter months. Neighborhood committees rationed and distributed these and
other needed supplies equitably. The need for the neighborhood committees became
acute when the martial law was declared on November 6, 1978.
After the Shah fled and with him some of those too close to his rule to feel safe any
longer, our neighborhood committee “expropriated” a house on the street where my
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parents lived. The owner with close ties to the Shah’s repressive apparatus had gone into
hiding or fled the country. The house provided a rent-free headquarters for the group
where an assembly of up to a few dozens was held daily to discuss various issues, define
tasks, get volunteers to carry them out, and so on. After the February 11 insurrection,
the committee had in its possession 30 J3 battle rifles and a lot of ammunition. I wrote
a one-page manifesto that defined the political function of the neighborhood committee,
and gave it a name, Defense Committee of Southwestern Tehran Pars. With help from
Kaveh, a young Trotskyist who had recently arrived from England and lived nearby, we
found a young woman in the neighborhood who typed it up. The assembly discussed and
approved this initiative and we distributed copies to each household. Kaveh who had
been in military service, and a few others, took up the task of training volunteers to
guard barricades that the committee had erected on the main road to ensure that former
SAVAK (secret police) and other counter revolutionary agents would not drive through
the neighborhood shooting at random to terrorize the population.
One of the first public appeals of Khomeini was to return the arms confiscated in the
insurrections across Iran to the mosques. The youth and working people had armed
themselves after decades of being ruled by arms. Khomeini feared an armed population.
In our neighborhood, the cleric from the nearby mosque came to one of our assembly
meetings, spoke highly of our effort, but reiterated Khomeini’s call to turn all arms to
the mosques. He invited us to function from the mosque under his supervision, and then
left. We did not follow. A few days later a uniformed military man came to our assembly
and urged us to do obey Khomeini’s appeal. After he left we had a discussion. The
assembly was divided by these interventions. Those who harbored religious feelings felt
compelled to honor Khomeini’s orders and decided to continue their volunteer defense
work from the mosque under the cleric’s supervision. Those who were secular or had a
leftist political orientation remained. But we all knew that the future of the Defense
Committee of the Southwestern Terhran Pars was in question. We did not think two
defense committees in the same neighborhood vying for authority was in anyone’s
interest. The committee operating from the mosque had the advantage of support from
Khomeini and the new government. We had no source of support. Soon, our all70 of 100
inclusive democratically run grassroots neighborhood committee was dissolved. Those
who joined the mosque were quickly reorganized as the Islamic Revolution Committee
with their allegiance to Ayatollah Khomeini and the Islamic Republic he demanded and
instituted. It did not take a long for these committees to begin stopping and detaining
their former friends who led a secular way of life or held socialist aspirations.
As soon as Kargar began publishing, I was one its street salespersons who was
repeatedly harassed and then detained by the Islamic Revolution Committee in Imam
Hossein square in east Tehran, a busy crossroad to the south, east, and west of Tehran.
In the beginning, I was politely asked by individuals whose affiliation was not clear to
stop selling Kargar. When I engaged them in conversation and asked why, the young
men offered various excuses and went away. Soon however, others who identified
themselves as the Islamic Revolution Committee members asked me to accompany
them to the mosque. There I had to wait for the cleric to show up and politely tell me:
“We made this revolution in the name of Islam, not communism. Please don’t distribute
communist literature.” He was entirely friendly and even asked me to stay to have lunch
with him which I politely declined.
When I persisted in selling Kargar, they kept detaining and keeping me for longer
periods. Their hope was to keep me in the mosque long enough to make my effort to
sells the paper a waste of time. When I chose a new location some blocks away from the
square to sell Kargar, a large man who looked like a street hustler from the time of the
old regime started an argument with me with anti-communist slurs. When I stood my
ground he pulled out a handgun and put it to my temple yelling out loud that the blood
of a communist is halal (that is, it is no sin to kill a communist). It was thanks to
Ensieh, a lioness of a young woman whom I had recently helped recruit, that a small
crowd assembled that took the goon aside and let us leave with our papers. This way I
became one of the two members of the united HKS whose harassment while selling
Kargar was reported in Kargar.
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Given such personal experiences, it was easier for me than it was for Mahmoud to
understand that the Islamic Republic regime was the counter revolution threatening the
revolution. Still, it took me years to shed the theoretical mindset that made me consider
the Islamic Republic as merely an “obstacle” to the working class and the revolution.
The Iran Committee
Let me provide a little detail about how I was forced out of the by the Barnes’ leadership
that included Mahmoud. For several years, I was asked to help the newly
established Iran Committee that worked under the direction of the Political Committee.
Part of what I did for the Iran Committee was in collaboration with Amir Jamali, a
former HVK member who was also part of the New York branch. We carried systematic
work in the Iranian community. This was a smaller and more focused part of the branch
activity carried in Farsi especially among socialist minded Iranians in New York. For
instance, we organized a showing of the Cuban documentary about the Battle of Cuito
Cuanavale. I was also asked to take on national projects such as editing the Farsi
translation of Ernesto Che Guevara’s Socialism and Man in Cuba (which was
subsequently published with Mahmoud listed as its editor).
Oddly enough, we were never given any insight into the mandate of the Iran Committee,
who its members were, or even who was organizing it. I guessed it was probably
Mahmoud leading it because he was the person who would contact me about such
national assignments. And from what eventually transpired it was easy to assume that
Mahmoud was working with one or two former members of the HVK in Iran. Two
persons came to my mind, Hassan Hakimi, who in April 1980 had joined the expelled
Faction for Trotskyist Unification (FTU) of the HKE but was in political agreement with
the HKE and Mahmoud in their support for the occupation of the universities by
Muslim students. At the time, Hakimi was married to another HVK member. This team
of two probably constituted the Barnes’ current in Iran (subsequently, the couple
separated and only Hakimi remained in Iran. Whether he recruited others, I do not
know).
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In this context, the Third Worldist coverage of Iran in The Militant became a problem
for me and other Iranians in the SWP. It appeared to us that the SWP was moving from
material support for the Islamic Republic in the war and against imperialism to
manifestations of political support for it by leaving out class analysis of the
developments inside Iran. It also meant that The Militant did not cover widespread
repression, including the mass execution of thousands of political prisoners in the
summer and fall 1988. There is only a “World News in Brief” report in the December
30, 1988, issue that includes this sentence: “More than 300 political activists have been
executed by the Iranian government since July, according to a report released December
12 by Amnesty International.” There was no follow up. However, Amnesty International
later published a list the names of 4,482 political prisoners who “disappeared” from July
to December 1988. There is still no accounting of how many other political prisoners
were executed in this period as the Amnesty International list was constructed from
family and friends reports. Political prisoners whose families did not report or were not
contacted are not included. But this massacre of thousands of political activists was left
out of The Militant.
Part of this political slide was manifested in the Pathfinder’s participation in the annual
Tehran International Book Fair. Each year, Mahmoud went to the book fair and
returned to give a rosy presentation at the New York Militant Labor Forum. In his 1992
report in the New York Militant Labor Forum, he reported a thirst for communist
literature, that so many Pathfinder books were sold, and he credited the Islamic
Republic for the 60% subsidy that made Pathfinder books affordable! He did not tell his
audience that the 60% book subsidy was part of a general policy of the book fair to
encourage the purchase of technical, scientific, and medical books deemed necessary for
the development of capitalism in Iran, not to encourage reading of socialist literature!
The regime simply tolerated Pathfinder and a few small domestic publishers that offered
a few translated socialist titles (I cannot prove it but it was not beyond reason to suspect
that tolerating the sale of socialist literature was in part to identify the few who still
showed an interest in socialism). At any rate, the regime’s policy was and still is: “Let
them publish a few books but never let them organize even a tiny group.” Also,
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Mahmoud did not tell his audience that while Pathfinder was allowed in the book fair
and its books subsidized, all independent labor and socialist currents in Iran, including
the Trotskyist parties, had been suppressed, and thousands of political prisoners had
been tortured and executed and the clerical capitalist repression of the youth and
working people continued. When I did take these issues up with him, Mahmoud
maintained a grim silence. Meanwhile, Amir Jamali, Ali Irvani (Sammad), (both former
HVKers) and another Iranian immigrant in L.A. branch, Albert, raised similar concerns.
Apparently, my critical views irritated the SWP leadership and somehow they saw me as
hatching a dissent around the Iran question. When I informed the Political Committee
about my planned trip to Tehran on June 26, 1992 to visit my family and asked if they
wanted me to do anything for the Iran Committee, they sent Greg McCarten, the New
York branch organizer and a PC member and Mahmoud to meet with me over dinner on
June 23 to persuade me that it was not safe and I should not go. I knew enough about
the Iranian political situation that I did not consider it a particularly unsafe time to go. I
also explained to them that my family was distressed because my younger brother's
imprisonment on non-political charges (he eventually died at age 39 of thyroid cancer at
that went undiagnosed in prison. When he could not longer swallow, they let him go
home to die. The tumor had become impossible to remove safely). I wanted to visit them
and see my brother.
McCarten got to the real reason for the meeting. He said that the Political Committee
knows that the Iranian members of the party (except Mahmoud, of course) are critical of
the party’s Iran work, in particular participation in the Tehran International Book Fair.
The discussion that followed went long and wide. But the major point of contention in
this discussion was whether the SWP leadership should involve Iranian members of the
party in discussions of forging an Iranian socialist current or not. McCarten and
Mahmoud insisted that there was no difference between any member of the SWP and
the Iranians who had participated in the revolution. It was up to the party leadership to
decide who it saw fit to carry out its Iran work. Of course, this was a formal and false
assertion. Why then were only the Iranian members of the SWP asked to carry out the
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work of the Iran Committee either in New York or LA among Iranians or develop
Pathfinder literature in Farsi? Should we not be a part of the discussion and, as
appropriate, decisions making, in carrying out this work as was the case with any other
party fraction? Also, some of us (not me) left Iran because of political repression and
hoped to return to Iran. Amir Jamali actually went back to Iran in the mid-1990s.
Would it not be better to have these individuals contribute to this work?
In this context, I argued, the inclusion of Mahmoud in the Iran Committee while
positive was one-sided and limited. I pointed out political differences we had in more
recent conversations including his account of the history of Iranian Trotskyist
movement during the revolution and his characterization of the bourgeois-democratic
tasks of the Iranian revolution as having been accomplished by the 1979 revolution.
McCarten forcefully pointed out that these were not Mahmoud’s views but those of the
SWP leadership. Of course, this was a leadership deliberation and assessment that I had
not been not aware of before. If the SWP leadership had discussed these and taken a
position on them, they never wrote it up either as an internal information bulletin, or
internal discussion document, or a public article. Furthermore, this was a highly
suspect position. How could the peasant/land/agrarian question have been resolved if
the amount of land distributed was significantly less than the Shah's land reform? When
did this “resolution” of bourgeois democratic tasks happen and how? How had the
oppressed nationalities won their right to self-determination when they were constantly
under pressure and from time to time under military attack? If the Islamic Republic
regime, in fact, had "solved" the historical democratic tasks of the Iranian revolution
then was it not revolutionary as Siamak Zahraie had argued earlier following up on the
logic of the adaptationist course of Babak Zahraie and the HKE (see Nayeri, August
2012, Part 2)? And if so, did not the regime deserve political support at least during the
"democratic phase" of a two-stage Iranian revolution with the socialist revolution being
relegated to some future time?
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I asked if it was correct for the SWP leadership to have an official view of the history of
the Iranian Trotskyist movement. McCarten responded in the affirmative. He
contended that I should have written in the discussion bulletins about my views on these
issues. It did not occur to him that the SWP leadership should have written about its
evolving political views on the Iranian revolution and the history of the Iranian
Trotskyist movement. When I pointed out to McCarten that I had written to The
Militant about its questionable coverage, including a recent article by Fred Feldman,
and never received a response, he said: "we get a lot of these." So, much for the
invitation to write in the discussion bulletin!
Mahmoud’s reaction was worse. Instead of responding to my political arguments he
resorted to character assassination: “Did you not resign from the National Committee of
HVK because you said you hated the Iranian culture?” Of course, I did not resign from
the HVK because of my “hatred for the Iranian culture” and Mahmoud who was a
confidant of mine knew that quite well. As friends, we spoke freely and I had shared
with him my criticisms of the Iranian cultural mores which I continue to hold today. Is
it odd for someone who thinks about culture in a Marxian way to be critical of cultures
in class societies? Is not the dominant culture in every society the culture of its ruling
class? In my brief resignation note to the HVK National Committee I had written: “I
always have been part of the solution. I do not wish to be part of our problems now.” I
left Iran because I had to sort out my own personal life and Mahmoud, as well as
everyone else on the HVK Political Committee and some outside of it, knew this for a
considerable length of time and were supportive of me.
At the close of the meeting, McCarten instructed me that I should refrain from doing
“anything political” while in Iran. When I asked if making political observation of the
situation in Iran would fall within his directive, McCarten was evasive.
When I returned from Iran, I wrote a brief political report of my visit that I gave to the
Political Committee member Norton Sandler during the SWP conference at Oberlin
college. Aside from the general and specific aspects of the political situation in Iran that
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I had observed and were in sharp variance to the rosy reports in The Militant and
Militant Labor Forums, I noted I had run into a few former Iranian Trotskyists,
including Babak Zahraie.
Sometime later, I was called to the National Office for a meeting. Norton Sandler, Doug
Jenness, and Steve Clark, all Political Committee members, were waiting. Sandler, who
ran the meeting, accused me of having an ongoing political relationship with Zahraie.
When I asked where they got their information from, Sandler showed me my own Iran
trip report! He then gave me a “cease and desist order,” that is, a threat of expulsion. I
could not believe my ears! I figured that if they can accuse me of hatching plots behind
their backs with Babak Zahraie solely because I reported to them that I ran into him in
Tehran they can fabricate anything they wished against me and there is no reason to
believe they would not accuse me of breaching their “cease and desist” order at any
time!
I told Sandler and others that they had no evidence of any wrongdoing on my part.
There is political disagreement, however. Clark told me that it was always possible to
write in the pre-convention discussion bulletin. That did sound like McCarten’s
suggestion, not entirely sincere. A leadership that sees no reason to explain itself to the
membership would not engage in a good faith discussion with them either. The very
experience of recent months had made it clear to me that the Barnes’s leadership likes to
get rid of me as it had gotten rid of all dissent over the past decade through
administrative means in the names of Leninist democratic centralism.
By the next branch meeting, I had submitted my resignation as a member in good
standing to the Executive Committee with an attachment that explained the political
reasons for my resignation at some length. I learned later that my very brief resignation
letter had read to the branch meeting but no mention was made of my lengthy
explanation for that decision. Thus, the branch leadership became complicit in the
Political Committee’s plan to drive out a twenty-year veteran of the movement who had
served the New York branch as a consistent activist for a decade without telling the
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membership about its real reasons. After my resignation, I continued volunteering on
Red Sunday mobilizations at the Pathfinder building and took up other tasks for the
SWP. Meanwhile, I refrained from engaging any party member in a discussion of my
resignation. This did not stop the Political Committee from continuing its campaign
against me. A few months later, after the New York branch had been divided into two, a
report was given to the Brooklyn branch (I lived in Brooklyn) that characterized me as
an enemy of the party and required that all contacts with me be carried through the
Political Committee. I have no idea why the Barnes’ leadership took this step months
after my resignation and despite my continued voluntary work.
Over the next two years, all other Iranians in the SWP except Mahmoud resigned citing
political disagreements on Iran. Mahmoud as part of the SWP leadership participated in
the campaign to drive me out of the SWP. I was deeply saddened to see my former
mentor, collaborator, and friend, who had himself been victimized by slander and smear
campaigns, now using these same tactics to drive out his critic. I was also deeply
saddened to leave many individuals with whom I had collaborated for a decade and
came to the realization that the SWP that I once admired was no more.
Mahmoud and the rightward drift of the SWP
In his 47-year career so far as the National Secretary of the SWP, Jack Banes has turned
a vibrant party of about two thousand with a similarly sized youth group, the Young
Socialist Alliance, into a tiny sect of Barnes-idolizing old men and women without any
influence in the labor movement or the larger society, traveling along a torturous path
that increasingly veers in a rightist direction. As part of this rightward drift that has
accommodated Zionism and imperialism, the Barnes leadership’s view of the Islamic
Republic has also changed from adaptation to it to seeing it today as a central counterrevolutionary power in the Middle East. These are highlighted in two “correction”
articles in The Militant.
Jack Barnes corrects Mahmoud
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In a letter to Mahmoud dated August 17, 2006, that was published in The Militant
(September 4, 2006), Barnes makes a welcome correction to Mahmoud’s longstanding
favorable view of the "Islamic grassroots currents." As the speaker at The Militant
Labor Forum in Washington D. C. on August 12, 2006, Mahmoud apparently had
spoken favorably of the Lebanese Hezbollah. In his letter, Barnes correctly states:
“Hezbollah's goal is to establish an ‘Islamic Republic’ in Lebanon, that is, a capitalist
regime modeled on the one that emerged from the bourgeois and bonapartist
counterrevolution in Iran.” (My emphasis) There is no evidence for Barnes’s
characterization of the Islamic Republic as “Bonapartist.” But let’s set that aside. What
is much more important is his admission that the Iranian revolution was destroyed, not
by imperialism, but by the Islamic Republic.
But then Barnes follows with a number of assertions that admit a truth but fudge the
facts: “(1) that communist workers in Iran, and our world movement, gave no political
support to the capitalist government in Tehran; and (2) that the bourgeois political and
military course of the reactionary Iranian regime resulted in untold needless deaths of
soldiers and civilians, both Iranian and Iraqi.”
Thus, Barnes correctly but belatedly condemns Khomeini’s war policy to drive into Iraq
to overthrow Saddam Hussein’s regime as reactionary.
Here is how Barnes fudges the facts. First, it is not true, as I have shown earlier, that
“communist workers” in Iran gave no political supports to the Islamic Republic. Setting
aside Barnes’s self-serving phraseology, he must be referring to the Iranian Trotskyist
parties that had no organic connection to the Iranian working class that the SWP
leadership agreed with politically. It is true that the united HKS during its short life
never politically supported the Islamic Republic and, in fact, criticized it for its waves of
anti-working class repression. But that party ceased to exist in August 1979. Of the two
parties that emerged from the split in the united HKS, the SWP leadership was
supportive of Zahraie’s HKE from the last quarter of 1979 to the end of 1980. But that
party and the SWP both gave political support to the Islamic Republic during this period
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as I detailed already (remember HKE’s and SWP’s support for the Islamic students’
occupation of the universities?) From the founding of the HVK in January 1981 to its
dissolution at the end of 1982, the Barnes leadership seemed to favor it. As I
demonstrated above, it was Mahmoud whom they kept in touch with as part of their
effort to build Barnes’s international current during this two year period. Mahmoud
supported the occupation of the universities and Khomeini’s continuation of the war
that Barnes now criticizes as reactionary. The SWP leadership and Mahmoud saw eyeto-eye throughout the 1980s and in early 1990s as reflected in The Militant and
Intercontinental Press articles that view the Iranian revolution as alive because of the
ongoing anti-imperialist struggle and mobilization for the war with Iraq. Even more, did
not Greg McCarten, a Political Committee member who together with Mahmoud met
with me in 1992, tell me that the SWP leadership considered the historical democratic
tasks in Iran accomplished, presumably by the Islamic Republic? This was also
Mahmoud’s position in our private talks. How else would you characterize such a
regime except as revolutionary? Of course, I know of no written document by the SWP
leadership that supported Mahmoud’s and later McCarten’s assertion. But both
Mahmoud and MacCarten were Political Committee members when they told me this
was the leadership’s view. Whether Mahmoud was initiating these assessments and
characterization of the Islamic Republic or Barnes, I do not know. But it is preposterous
for Barnes to claim “communist workers” (that is, those he favored) in Iran never
supported the Islamic Republic. In fact, Barnes and the SWP did as well, and if
Mahmoud and MacCarten were correct, they supported the Islamic Republic as the
political force that carried out the “democratic revolution” in Iran!
It is also preposterous for Barnes to blame it all on Mahmoud. While he criticizes
Mahmoud for lacking a concrete analysis, Barnes himself fails to speak clearly and take
responsibility for the SWP’s adaptationist line towards the Islamic republic as the
National Secretary of the party. But that is how cult leaders operate.
Finally, Barnes is silent on the timing of Islamic Republic’s counter-revolution.
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Steve Clark dates the "completion" of the counter-revolution
It took another 12 years until a date for the counter-revolution Barnes had referred to
appeared in an article in The Militant in an article by Steve Clark (April 2018). This
article also is written as a correction to an earlier article by Terry Williams about the
widespread protests in some 80 towns and villages across Iran (for my take on these
protests, see, Nayeri , January 2018). Clark sets the date for “the completion” of the
Islamic Republic’s counter-revolution in mid-1983, essentially the same as what I have
indicated in various writings for a long time (see, for example, Nayeri and Nassab,
2006). As we know, in 1988 the Islamic Republic massacred thousands of political
prisoners across Iran in cold blood starting on July 19 and presumably ending after five
months. Amnesty International published the names of 4,482 political prisoners who
“disappeared” during this period. Why did the Barnes leadership keep silent about this
colossal humanitarian and anti-working class horror when it happened, by writing an
editorial to condemn it, and consider its implications for the dogma that the revolution
was ongoing? Why admit to the counter-revolution a quarter of century later? The
answer appears at the concluding section of the Clark’s long article:
“The programmatic and strategic course of the Socialist Workers Party in
response to the tumultuous and shifting political situation in Iran and across the
Gulf region is presented in the closing paragraphs of the Dec. 11, 2017, SWP
statement, ‘For Recognition of a Palestinian State and of Israel.’" (Clark, April
2018)
The answer is the SWP’s accommodation to Zionism and the Trump administration that
see the Islamic Republic as their “number one enemy” in the Middle East. The
rightward drift of the SWP in the intervening 12 years since Barnes’s letter to Mahmoud
is evidenced by The Militant editor’s preface to Barnes’ letter to Mahmoud in 2006. The
editor wrote: “Shirvani [Mahmoud], along with others attending the forum, had taken
part in a march of 10,000 in Washington to oppose the U.S.-backed Israeli assault on
Lebanon and the Gaza Strip.” In 2006, the SWP still supported protests against the
terrors of the colonial-settlers Israeli state and still supported a democratic secular
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Palestine to replace the Jewish State, where Jews, Palestinians, and others could live
together as co-equals, including the right to return of Palestinians refugees and others
who were forced out of their homeland. By the end of 2017, the SWP is calling for the
recognition of Israel and a Palestinian “homeland,” which Clark insists has to be a
continuous territory no matter how small! The SWP’s position is now no different from
what liberal Zionists have been calling for a long time and what the Obama
administration was working towards. While the SWP is silent on the Palestinians right
of return to their home land, it is quite vocal about the “right of return of Jew” to “their
homeland!,” a fundamental Zionist position. (see, endnote 17)
In brief, Marxist and communist phraseology aside, the SWP has adapted to Zionism
and imperialism. (for the full text of the SWP statement, see, Clark, December 2017).
On this burning issue of world politics as on others, today’s SWP bears no relation to the
SWP of the 1970s, and in important ways is its polar opposite. The SWP today is a tiny
insular sect of old men and women that have accommodated to imperialism, Zionism,
and Trumpism (for more discussion of these issues, see, Young, 2014; Leslie, 2016;
Nayeri, February 2017). Because it has embraced the colonial-settler Jewish State, the
SWP now is hostile to the Boycott, Divest, Sanction Movement against Israel (Young,
2010).
Today’s SWP shuns mass movements because by their very nature they start with
illusions of all kinds. Thus, the SWP criticized the historic women marches of early 2017
as “bourgeois” (Nayeri, March 2017) . It boycotted the mass antiwar movement when
there was one (e.g., the 2003 march of 300,000 in San Francisco against the impending
threat of G. W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq). When these days it does shows up for much
smaller ones, like it did last February in Oakland, California, to protest Washington’s
unfolding coup plot against the government of Venezuela, it remained on the sidelines
to sell “the communist press.” The SWP today pay no attention to the ecological crisis,
including the unfolding climate catastrophe and the ongoing Six Extinction that
threaten much of life on Earth. When it does pay attention to ecological concerns, like
the movement against the widespread use of genetically modified organisms, including
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in food, the SWP position is consistent with that of the agribusiness industry. It attacks
those in the climate justice movement who support the Green New Deal instead of
joining in conversation with them because it has no viable alternative of its own. (for my
own approach see, Nayeri, March 2019; Nayeri, January 2019; Nayeri, July 2017).
Farewell to Mahmoud
Through each twist and turn in his political life, a constant feature has been Mahmoud’s
goal of building a Leninist party. That is how I came to know him. The theory, program,
and history he viewed as means to one end: To overcome “a historical crisis of the
leadership of the proletariat,” as Trotsky put it.
The tragedy of Mahmoud’s life, as it has been for untold number of other
revolutionaries, is that he has confused various prototypes with of the actual party of
Lenin. The Russian Social Democratic Labor Party originated with a coming together of
Marxist intellectuals of unequaled quality with the rapidly growing industrial working
class freshly driven off the land therefore not yet settled in a particular way of life that
organized itself in the soviets in the 1905 revolution. How else would a young Marxist
intellectual like Trotsky could become a working class leader of the 1905 soviets?
Trotsky estimated that when Lenin proposed his theory of the vanguard party, the
Bolsheviks had 10,000 proletarian members, and, with the Mensheviks, the Russian
Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP) had about 20,000 to 22,00 members who were
workers. (Discussions with Trotsky on the Transitional Program, June 7, 1938). With
the defeat of the 1905 revolution, some members of the RSDLP left. Paul Le Blanc
(1990, pp. 190-198) suggests that the intelligentsia were highly represented among
those who left the party, leaving the smaller party more proletarian in composition in
the 1907-1912 period.
It is true that the workers in the Bolshevik party were schooled in revolutionary
socialism thanks to Lenin’s strategic view of the coming Russian revolution and his
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advocacy for a “democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry” to carry
forward the historical democratic tasks while the Mensheviks and the Social
Revolutionaries (SRs) preached an alliance with the Russian bourgeoisie who they saw
as the natural leader of the comping bourgeois democratic revolution. Between February
and October, Bolshevik party’s influence in the working class and among soldiers
increased while those of the Mensheviks and SRs declined. By the end of 1917, the
Bolsheviks had 300,000 members, heavily working class (Service, in Acton, et.al., 1997,
p. 235). This was a significant portion of the Russian working class which numbered
between 4.2 to 4.4 million. The Bolshevik party also exerted much influence among
soldiers and had some influence even among the peasantry. How did this happen?
It happened through a process of convergence of the soviets and the Bolshevik party. It
is almost routine to focus attention on the Bolshevik party in any discussion of the
Russian revolutions of 1917. When discussing the February revolution, Trotsky wrote:
“In the party of the Bolsheviks the insurrection had its nearest organization, but
a headless organization with a scattered staff and with weak illegal nuclei. And
nevertheless the revolution, which nobody in those days was expecting,
unfolded, and just when it seemed from above as though the movement was
already dying down, with an abrupt revival, a mighty convulsion, it seized the
victory.” (Trotsky, 1930, chapter 8, “Who Led the February Insurrection”)
Trotsky’s narrative rests on the proposition that the vanguard of the Russian working
class was trained in the school of Bolshevism. Elsewhere (Nayeri, December 2017), I
have argued that there are reasons to doubt crediting the workers-Bolsheviks as the
decisive force in the leadership of the February revolution and instead in the February
revolution we can find confirmation of the revolutionary potentials of the working class
itself. Did not the Russian working class organized the soviets in the 1905 revolution?
Why not credit the same working class to revive the soviets 12 year later in the February
1917 revolution? The difference is the weight we can assign to the revolutionary
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potential of the working class to self-organize and self-mobilize and its role in the
revolutionary transfer of power.
The Iranian revolution of 1979 confirms the revolutionary potential of the working class
(and working people more generally) as evidenced in their self-organization and selfmobilization from the neighborhood committees to the strike committees and after the
overthrow of monarchy in the emergence and development of the shora (councils)
movement.
Could the October revolution have been possible without the soviets or the rising
influence of the Bolsheviks in them and the in broader masses of working people? It was
the dialectic of the emerging, developing, and maturing of the revolutionary proletariat
and the Bolshevik party that made the October revolution possible. Thus, there the
"party of Lenin" would not have been possible without a rapid and massive wave of
radicalization of the working class and woring people more generally.
It has been a perversion of Lenin’s concept of the vanguard party to reduce it to a
prototype regardless of program, class composition, degree influence in the woking class
(hence size), to mimic “democratic centralism” as a set of rules but not an interplay
between the revolutionary section of the working class and the leadership that emanates
from it. That is what Marx and Engels mean by the “communist movement” in The
Manifesto of the Communist Party (which Jack Barnes had basterdized). Let recall
“That the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the
working classes themselves, that the struggle for the emancipation of the
working classes means not a struggle for class privileges and monopolies, but for
equal rights and duties, and the abolition of all class rule.” (Marx, 1864).
This opening proclamation in the “General Rules of the International Workingmen’s
Association" was realized between February and October 1917 and in the subsequent few
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years when the power of the Bolshevik party directly emanated from the power of the
self-organized and self-mobilized working people.
Marx’s theory of socialism identifies it with human emancipation from alienation to
allow for self-development and self-realization. But Marx understood that like the state
and the market, politics is also an expression of social alienation. In fact, politics is
struggle for power and the central goal of Marxian politics is the elimination of all power
relation in society. Marx’s theory of the proletariat as the universal class and the agency
for socialist revolution relies on the assumption that the conquest of power by the
working class will lead to an end to social classes and all power relations. Like the
market and the state, all forms of power must wither away in the process of transition to
communism. Thus, the very concept of democratic centralism if interpreted as some
form of lasting hierarchal relations among socialist workers is anti-Marxian.
Why Mahmoud and the rest of us submit to prototype micro-Leninist parties even those
ruled by an egomaniac and those that follow an adaptationist course?
Detour of the world revolution and vanguardism
The answer lies in the detour of the world revolution caused by the rise of aristocracy of
labor in the early capitalist industrializers—the imperialist countries. Marx and Engles
noticed this phenomenon and the problem it posed for their theory of the proletariat
and socialist revolution. But the “Marxists” after them by and large set aside the
problem and its dire implication for socialism.
By the end of the nineteenth century, Eduard Bernstein (1899) had formulated a
reformist theory of socialism suitable for the aristocracy of labor, a gradualist theory of
arriving at socialism by reforming the capitalist state through parliamentarism.
The rise and prominence of the reformist wing of Social Democracy resulted in
accommodation to colonialism by some (Stuttgart conference, 1907), and with the onset
of the World War I, a majority sided with “their own bourgeoisie.” As part of the
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internationalist current in the Second International, the Bolshevik leaders tied the rise
of labor aristocracy to the rise of imperialism, the war, and rise of reformism in the
Second International. (Bukharin 1915; Lenin, 1916; Zinoviev 1916).
The detour of the world revolution originated with the Russian socialist revolution as
the "weakest link” of imperialism, that was quickly destroyed (not degenerated),
precisely because the European proletariat did not rise up, or when it did, proved unable
to take and hold power. Despite the focus on “a lack of the subjective condition,” the
Marxian method requires us also to examine the objective conditions for the lack of a
revolutionary proletarian leadership in the imperialist countries for well over a century.
While in some European countries mass working class parties were organized these
have been reformist Social Democratic and Stalinist parties primarily based on the
aristocracy and bureaucracy of labor. In these countries, the working classes have never
formed lasting revolutionary parties of their own (e.g., the pre-World War I Socialist
Party of Eugene Debs was a short term exception) and micro-Leninist parties with a
program for a workers government and socialism never found a base in the working
class. The rise of Stalinism in the Soviet Russia, itself caused by the economic and
cultural backwardness of the great majority of the Russian population and the political
isolation of the socialist revolution, and its subsequent spread across the world through
what used to be the revolutionary Communist International, was also occasioned by the
pressure of better off sections of the working class and non-proletarian sectors of the
population in the host countries. Thus, Stalinism also was a break on the world
revolution, not only through its class collaborationist policy but perhaps more
importantly by presenting itself as a model of socialism.
With the end of the post-World War II long-cycle of capitalist prosperity, signaled by the
1973-75 world recession, revolutionary socialists beleived that the the long detour of the
world revolution will come to an end, a promise that has not yet been realized. The
working class in the imperialist countries has remained largely passive and contained
within the framework of bourgeois politics. Revolutions that broke out in Iran,
Nicaragua, Grenada, South Africa, and more recently, the Pink Tide in Latin America
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which has been a revolt against neoliberal policies, all have failed to go beyond
capitalism because of the failure of a working class alternative to materialize.
Thus, the long detour for over a century has fanned various vanguardist theories. Of
particular interest to us is the micro-Leninist parties of the Fourth International. These
have never become proletarian party of a significant size (The largest ever, Argentinian
Partido Socialista de los Trabajadores, PST, had about 10,000 members in the 1970s)
The U.S. Socialist Workers Party, which claimed a direct political continuity with the
Bolsheviks through Trotsky, began as a small proletarian party but as it grew, also
suffered splits that kept it small and mostly isolated. When the wave of radicalization
arrived in the 1960s and early 1970s it was not a working class radicalization (except for
the black and Chicano liberation movements from which the SWP did recruit). The
growth of the SWP was largely from the radicalized student milieu as reflected in the
leadership around Jack Barnes that took the SWP’s helm in 1972.
Oddly enough, the Barnes SWP and other groups that were formed in opposition to it
have not paid any attention to this well-over a century old central problem: why the
industrial working class in the advanced capitalist countries has not come to the center
stage of politics and what does it mean for them?
Learning from our mistakes
Steve Clark who now dates the “completion” of the Islamic Republic’s counterrevolution in mid-1983 does not discuss his criteria. But the HVK’s "Theses on the
Iranian Revolution" is quite clear about it: the shora movement was the heart of the
revolution. The oil workers movement and their nationally organized Shora was the
most prominent in the revolution’s shora movement.
After I was forced out of the SWP, I began to explore some of the questions I could have
not explored working as a rank-and-filer in the New York branch for a decade. One was
to visit Cuba and learn about the revolution first hand. Another was to get to know
more about the shora movement in Iran. Oddly enough, none of the Trotskyist parties in
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Iran ever tried to meet, interview, get know, and learn from the leaders of workers
shoras!
I had the good fortune to get know Yadullah Khosroshahi in 1995 through a common
friend and forge a friendship with him that led to our collaboration that lasted until his
death from a massive stroke in exile in London on February 4, 2010. He was 67 years
old. Yadullah’s life differed from all of us in the Iranian Trotskyist movement. He was
born in 1942 in Shahr-e Kurd, a small town at the time and the seat of Chaharmahal and
Bakhtiari Province. Yadullah’s family moved to Abadan in search of work. Because of
his family’s poverty, Yadullah was forced to quit school after the sixth grade in order to
work. When in exile in Britain, Yadullah wrote about his life as a child in Abadan where
the major employer was the London-based Anglo-Iranian Oil Company that paid a flat
royalty to the Iranian government for its exploitation of Iranian oil. Yaddulah
characterized the conditions in Abadan as a form of apartheid. Workers could not go to
neighborhoods where the British employees of the oil company lived. Violators were
arrested and jailed. While the British had air-conditioning, swimming pools, and golf
courses, Iranian workers lived in shacks with no running water or swage system and
children had to bathe in the water collected in gutters. At work there was a similar
hierarchy with Iranian employees being ranked below the Indian employees. Thus,
Yadullah learned about imperialism in an empirical way.
At age 14, Yadullah took an unpaid apprenticeship position at the oil refinery in Abadan
in 1956. After two years, he was hired as a maintenance worker. He became a labor
activist by helping to establish a mutual assistance labor fund in the refinery. In 1968, he
was elected as a workers’ representative (there were no unions). That same year, the
Tehran refinery became operational and Yadullah was part of the work force that was
relocated there. In 1970, he was elected as a delegate of Tehran refinery workers and in
1971 they were able to establish the Oil Workers Union of the North (of Iran). Yadullah
was elected as its first Secretary. In 1973, he helped lead a two-week strike during a
major repair of the refinery. After the SAVAK found some socialist literature in the
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refinery and traced it to Yadullah, he was arrested for the third time, tortured, and
sentenced to 10 years in jail.
Yadullah Khosroshahi (facing camera) at a rally in support of the Iranian labor movement in London that he helped
organize. (date unknown)
However, Yadullah was freed after four and half years because of the international
campaign to free political prisoners and the mounting mass movement of millions that
led to the February 1979 revolution. Immediately after his release, Yadullah joined the
underground strike committee that helped prepare the October 21, 1978, oil workers
general strike that served as the backbone of the national general strike that paralyzed
the Shah's regime, paving the way to the February 11, 1979 revolution. As the monarchist
managers fled, workers councils spread in the oil industry, and the National Shora
(Council) of the Oil Industry was organized. Yadullah was elected to it. The Shora
developed and enforced policies for health and safety in the workplace, workers medical
care, transportation, cafeterias, home mortgages without interest, college scholarships
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for workers with high school diploma and for oil workers' children, increased vacation
time, subsidies for travel, annual bonuses, establishing credit cooperatives, etc. But like
other national workers shoras in major industries it also had to take on national and
international questions.
As part of its counter-revolutionary assault, the Islamic Republic Party that had taken
over the Worker House, created under the old regime for its own purpose but was taken
over by Paykar, a Maoist guerrilla group after the February revolution, organized the
Islamic Associations in workplaces to undermine and destroy the workers shoras by
pitting Muslim workers who supported Ayatollah Khomeini against non-Muslim,
secular, and sometimes socialist workers. In the Tehran refinery where Yadullah worked
and elsewhere in the oil industry, Islamic Associations helped the government to harass,
intimidate and arrest labor and socialist activists. The Islamic Republic regime followed
the same tactic to undermine and destroy all independent grassroots movements.
The critical blow to the workers council movement in the oil industry came
when Saddam Hussein's army invaded Iran on September 22, 1980. The Iraqi forces
destroyed or seriously damaged oil industry instillations in Khuzestan. A large section of
oil workers were forced out of their jobs almost overnight. Those who did not lose their
life fighting Iraqi invaders were scattered around the country by the Islamic Republic
regime and when they were able to take a job it was in other economic sectors. Khomeini
who had called the Iraqi invasion a "gift from God" supported repressive policies in
workplaces in the name of increasing production for the war effort. Independent
workers organizations were forced to suspend activity and many were dissolved.
Yadullah was arrested in the summer of 1982 and tortured. He spent four years and
three months in jail. Soon after his release from prison in 1987, he was targeted for
arrest again because he had contacted a group of oil workers who were under
surveillance. He had to flee to Pakistan. Yadullah became an asylee living in London
where his family eventually joined him. Until his death on February 4, 2010, Yadullah
remained a tireless organizer of the Iranian workers in exile and inside Iran and helped
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direct their resistance to the anti-labor policies of the Islamic Republic. While the
Iranian working class was crushed, pockets of resistance have remained, including the
Syndicate of Workers of Tehran and Suburbs Bus Company and the workers of Haft
Tappeh Sugarcane Company, who have been fighting for the right to an independent
workers organization for years despite management’s harassment and government
repression.
Yadullah Khosroshai and dozens of others worker shoras leaders like him will be part of
the history of the Iranian labor movement. If and when this movement revives, and
certainly, if and when the next revolution comes, the Iranian working people in all
likelihood will revive the shora movement and follow in the footsteps of leaders like
Yadullah.
Sadly, the same cannot be said of Mahmoud and the Iranian Trotskyist movement. We
did not leave any mark on the course of the Iranian revolution and some of us adapted
to the Islamic Republic’s counter-revolutionary course while others adapted to
imperialism. Although, in the 1970s the Iranian Trotskyist movement was notable
among the Iranian socialist currents for being better educated in Marxist theory, as I
have demonstrated in this essay even "The Father of Iranian Trotskyism" was not versed
in socialist theory. Mahmoud and the rest of us did not critically study theories of
imperialism and the Dependency School theories that we simply adopted and that left
the door open to Third Worldist adaptations. As a small study I carried out about the
reception of the Farsi translation Marx’s Grundrisse that was published in two volumes
in Iran in 1985 and 1987 (Nayeri, 2008) showed although 11,000 copies of the book
were sold in Iran and abroad, I found no evidence of any study groups formed either in
the academia or in socialist quarters even outside of Iran. Moreover, even the 1970s
SWP and the Fourth International suffered from the same problems.
In his last decade of life, Yadullah who made the struggle for the workers in the oil
industry the center piece of his life was increasingly cognizant of the dangers posed by
the fossil fuel emissions to humanity, although he never became an active
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environmentalist. Still, the vanguard of the world working class today, Marx’s universal
class that would help lead the struggle to emancipate humanity, cannot exist without the
recognition of three existential threats of climate catastrophe, the Sixth Extinction, and
the danger of a nuclear holocaust. There is no “national” solution to any of them. The
only solution is a world ecological socialist revolution. The enemy is not “capitalism” but
the anthropocentric industrial capitalist civilization that has spawned the ecosocial
crisis. Nineteenth century and early 20th century theories are insufficient to deal with
the existential ecosocial crisis of the twenty-first century. The radicalized youth and
working people need to critically re-examine and re-develop the materialist conception
of history in light of what we know about our past and the new problems the world faces
today. (for my own thinking on these issues, see, Nayeri, 2018). Marx and Engels did
not consider time as a factor in their theory of socialism as they believed socialism was
on the horizon. Today, if we are to believe the scientific consensus, humanity may not
last into the 22nd century unless radical ecosocial change happen soon.
Dedication: I would like to decidate this essay to Samad Asari Eskandari (1961-1981),
the young HVK militant from Tabriz who wore a beautiful smile who died defending the
revolution at the war front, and to Saeedeh and Ensieh, two wonderful militant young
women, who I had the good forune to introduce to soocialism, who became leading
members of the united HKS in the East Tehran branch, and later of the Faction for
Trotskyist Unification of the HKE, and the HVK. I would also like to dedicate the essay
to the leaders and leading member of Iranian labor movement in the 1979 revolution,
including Albert Sohrabian (1928-2004) socialist and union organizer in the shoemakers trade; Mostafa Aabkaashk (death 1989), plumber and cofounder of the syndicate
of 14,000 contract workers in the oil industry in Khuszestan in 1979; Mohammad Safavi,
leading activist of the syndicate of contractract workers and labor journalist and activist
in Canada; Morteza Afshari, printers union activist and co-organizer of workers strike in
Tehran in 1979; and, to Mohammad Shams, printshop worker and autoworker in Iran
National auto factory (now Iran Khodro), and labor activist.
Acknowledgement: I am much grateful to John Beadle who carefully read the entire
first draft and patiently corrected it for grammar and style as well as suggesting
improvements to the text. Without him the text would have included many more errors.
I am also grateful to Andrew Pollack for reading the first draft and suggesting ideas to
improve it that required me to rewrite the entire preamble. A reader of my essays on the
Iranian revolution and our participation in it, Andrew has been a constant source of
encouragement. Thank you, Andrew! John Beadle also helped me find the “correction”
articles by Jack Barnes and Steve Clark referred to in the essay. David Walters kindly
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located and shared with me a PDF copy of the International Discussion Bulletin that
included my contribution referred to in the essay. Thank you David! Needless to say, I
alone bear responsible for the essay and any remaining errors.
A note about names used in this essay: Except for those publicaly known
individuals, all names of Iranian socialists that appear in this essay are "movement
names" or "pen names" or I use only their first name, etc.
Endnotes:
1. The terminology of Third Worldism originated as nationalist and later Maoist campist
view of the world politics that aim to stake a political position separate from the United
States or the Soviet Union during the Cold War. However, in socialist politics it also
refers to currents that politically have supported bourgeois regimes of the Global South
(Third World) against imperialism. The U.S. Workers World Party that originated from
a split from the SWP in 1958 over a series of difference, that included support for the
Soviet Union's invasion of Hungry in 1956, charted a course that can best be described
as Third Worldist.
2. On the eve of the February 1979 revolution, Intercontinental Press published a
section of a longer article that the editorial note said first appeared in the SWP Internal
Discussion Bulletins of 1973, with the title “Nationalism and Revolution in Iran.” The
article is co-authored by Ahmad Heydari and Cyrus Paydar, pen names for Mahmoud
and Babak Zahraie. I was unable to locate the longer version of the article in the SWP
Discussion Bulletin. But the reader may want to read the IP article to get a better sense
of the original book by Mahmoud that I discuss in this essay. See, Sayrafizadeh and
Zahraie, 1979.
3. The book is actually 124 pages. But the last 28 pages is a polemical appendix against
the idea that there is no other nationality in Iran besides the Persian (Fars) nationality.
4. Not all the historical “facts” he cites are agreed upon by scholars of Iranian history. A
case in point is the short history of the People’s Government in Azerbaijan.
5. In Mahmoud’s telling, the rise of national movements coincided with the rise of
bourgeoisie that “struggled against feudalism and other decaying social systems that
were barriers to the development of forces of production.” Then paraphrasing Lenin he
writes that in the West the bourgeoisie created “national bourgeois governments on the
basis of a common language and seized the internal market to expand commodity
production and to develop their languages.” He goes on: “Language, this most
fundamental means of human interaction, facilitated the development of productive
forces and this is how the Western countries industrialized.” (ibid.). Of course, reducing
the problem of industrialization to the language question is quite far fetched and the
bourgeoisie did not seize “ the internal market,” but as Lenin explained created it. Then
Mahmoud contrasts the historical record of the East to his idealized view of the
development of Western capitalism. “At the beginning, Western capitalists worked to
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accumulate and centralize capital and then to export [commodities] and opening new
markets, especially in the imperialist epoch to export capital, turned to the backward
regions of the world and thus began the colonization of the masses in these regions
which day by day took various more intensive forms. Therefore, economic growth of
these regions was blocked, their economies were disrupted and traditional forces of
production were subordinated to Western capitalism or were entirely destroyed or
became subservient to foreign masters of capital. Capitalism which played a decisive
role in the advancement of the West had reached a dead end in its development. The
framework of nation-states that had created the best conditions for the development of
forces of production had turned into iron bars to contain the development of forces of
production. Capitalism has passed its epoch of growth and has entered the epoch of its
demise. Now, not only the capitalist system of the West in unable to industrialize the
backward regions, it also is blocking the their internal growth and is a barrier to the
formation of capitalist nation-states in the East and elsewhere. This uneven process of
development has brought about the national movements of Asia, including Iran, at the
end of last [nineteenth] century. The oppressed masses who are condemned to low
levels of economic and cultural life have moved into the road of freedom.” (pp. 1-2)
6. The monopoly capital theory and the Dependency Theory have been influential in the
Fourth International and the SWP. The SWP economics writer Dick Roberts in the
bibliography section of his book “Capitalism in Crisis’ (1975) respond to the question he
is often asked: “What should I read to understand Marxist economics.” He responds that
the answer is “Capital, by Karl Marx, especially, the first volume.” But then he suggests
that because of “its deep complexities…It is necessary to read towards this book.” He
then offers a list of over two dozen books to read before tackling Marx’s Capital.
Included in his list are authors who subscribe to the monopoly capital theory which as
we know undermines Marx’s labor theory of value which is the basis of Capital. Thus,
Roberts displays an astonishing lack of awareness of the difference between such
authors as Baran and Sweezy and their influential Monopoly Capital (1966) and Marx’s
Capital. Ernest Mandel who was far more knowledgeable about “Marxist economics”
also held a monopoly capital theory and the labor theory of value at the same time,
apparently unaware of their essential contradiction—you can have either one but not
both (see, Nayeri, 1991, chapter VIII)
7. The front page article of the just published July 2019 issue of Socialist Action “U.S.
Takes Aim At Iran, Threatens Military Action,” takes a clear Third Worldist position.
While I salute the “Hand-Off Iran” spirit of the article, there is little else in it that I can
support, in particular, its interpretation of the Leninist right of self-determination: “Of
course, Iran has every right to build a nuclear weapon as a matter of self-determination
in a world in which it is constantly threatened by imperialist powers with nuclear
weapons…” But this is not a revolutionary socialist stand point. First, standing up to
imperialism armed with nuclear weapons does not require nuclear weapons, it requires
a socialist revolution. Consider how revolutionary Cuba, a far smaller country 90 miles
away from the United States and with far fewer resources than Iran, has stood up to
imperialism since 1959. Second, the right to self-determination does not mean support
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for the policies of the ruling classes and regimes of the latecomers (such as the Islamic
Republic of Iran) in their conflict with imperialism. In fact, Iranian revolutionary
socialists stood up firmly for the right to self-determination of the Kurdish oppressed
nationality when they were under armed attack by the Islamic Republic while materially
supporting the latter against imperialist and Saddam Hussein’s army. An central issue
of contention between the HVK which I belonged to and Zahraie’s HKE was the latter’s
support for the Islamic Republic reactionary policies such as closing down on the
universities for Islamic Cultural Revolution allegedly to fight imperialism. That was
because the right to self-determination of the Iranian people does not extend to support
for bourgeois policies of the Islamic Republic even when it still enjoyed considerable
popular support as it was attacking the Kurds. Nuclear power and nuclear arms threaten
life on Earth. It is simply not anti-working class (who is supposed to represent universal
values such as protection of life on Earth) to support any regime’s “right” to have
nuclear weapons, including those under attack by imperialist powers. To possess
nuclear weapons entailed their potential use. Would any sane socialist support, for the
sake of argument, possession and use of nuclear weapons by the government of Cuba in
the name of socialism? We must, as Socialist Action has been, play a leading role to
build the broadest possible anti-war movement to stop the U.S. war machine and its
economic warfare including the use of sanction as a way to work to disarm the
imperialists by the only way they can be disarmed, a world wide (eco)socialist
revolution. For more discussion of these issue see, Nayeri, August, 2015)
8. All who were Sattar League members by June 1976 were delegates at the convention
with decisive vote and large majority of them, 49 persons, attended it. Of these only 13
persons voted for the PRF and 36 voted for the PC majority resolutions and reports, a
ration of one to three. Nine people who had joined after June 1977 and had consultative
votes, voted for the PC majority resolutions and reports. Several recent members of the
Portland branch who adhered to the PRF were not seated at the convention for factional
reasons and could not vote.
9. Formally, there were two other groups. A son of a landowning family in Shiraz,
named Farid, somehow had a small group of a half a dozen teenage followers in Nezam
Abad working class neighborhood in East Tehran. This “group” was affiliated with the
Rahimian wing. And there was a young woman, Ellahe, who had arrived from France
and was a follower of the Lutte Ouvrière. She also disappeared soon.
10. Most surprising was Nader Javadi’s vote. Javadi was one of the 14 socialists
imprisoned in Ahvaz. Upon his release in the fall of 1979, he used to visit Azar Gilak’s
apartment where Farhad Nouri and I also lived (Farhad and Azar were a couple at the
time and married in January 1980). Of course, we talked politics all the time and what I
presented in the debate with Zahraie was no news to Javadi who seemed to hold and
argue the same perspective. Somehow, he changed his mind at that assembly.
11. The person who was assigned to be the organizer, Babak of London as we called him,
a very gentle young man with little organizing experience who simply pulled back as he
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and I collaborated for an initial period of organizing the branch of over 100 members.
He returned to Britain after the summer split in the united HKS.
12. The English translation of the “New Stage in the Iran-Iraq War” that appeared in
Intercontinental Press pp. 747-52. October 4, 1982, include references to the “Islamic
revolution” instead of the “revolution.” This was not the language we used at that time.
I do not have a copy of the original Farsi text to verify this. But it appears that there
must have been an error by the translator. The editor of Intercontinental Press notes
that the translation was done by the HVK. I do not recall who translated it--perhaps one
of the two authors: Mahmoud or Farhad Nouri. Regardless, it is true that gradually the
HVK under intense repression began to adapt to some degree to the Islamic Republic’s
hegemony and such change in our language as well as our analysis began to happen as I
have discussed in the essay.
13. There is no evidence that this was an outcome of any serious study, rather these
"theories" were probably absorption as they were widely in currency in the socialist
movement including the SWP and the Fourth International. Even Mandel subscribed to
these theories in his Late Capitalism, see, Nayeri, 1991, chapter VIII).
14. For the SWP assessment of the Iranian revolution at the time Steve Clark now says
the counter-revolution was "complete," see, Ernest Harsch, March 28, 1983. For longer
analytical articles from the same period, see, Fred Murphy, March 5, 1982; Ernest
Hasch, April 1, April 8, and April 15, 1982.
15. After the HVK convention, I fell into a deep depression. It was Mahmoud, who as
my friend and confidant suggested that I see a cousin of his who was a Freudian
psychoanalyst in Tehran. Later, he told me to also see a Jungian psychoanalyst whom
he was seeing himself. I saw both men for talk therapy and within four months the fog
of depression lifted just as it had arrived. It was also a result of this psychoanalytical
treatment that I made the decision to return to the United States, which I had been
debating for some time. I still had an affair of the heart with Mary whom I had known
since 1970, when we were both students at UT Austin, and whom I had left behind in
New York when I returned to Iran. Mary had joined the SWP when we lived in Berkeley
in 1976 after hearing Peter Camejo’s speech as the SWP presidential candidate. After I
left for Iran, she became the Brooklyn branch organizer. She remained in the SWP until
1983. I informed Farhad Nouri and the Political Committee of my decision as I filed
papers for an exit visa. They were supportive of my decision.
16. For this essay, I limited my review of The Militant coverage of Iran to the 1982-1992
period because these coincided with my own tenure in the party. I was forced out of the
SWP by its Political Committee in the October of 1992 precisely because I had changed
my mind on the counter-revolutionary potential of bourgeois nationalist regimes,
inclduing the Islamic Republic, based on an almost decade long study of the underlying
theories as I have explained in this essay and my earlier writings.
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17. Is this a coincidence that the SWP's rightward drift to accommodate imperialism
and Zionism is also mirrored in Babak Zahraie June 12, 2019 blogpost entitled “Iran:
1979-2019." (in Farsi) Only a decade earlier, in the contentious 2009 presidential
elections in Iran where factional struggle in the Islamic Republic regime had heated up
with tens of thousands in daily protests in streets of Tehran, Zahraie wrote another
blogpost calling upon both factions of the Islamic Republic to unite against
imperialism. He has gone from political support for the Islamic Republic to viewing it
as a cancer in the Middle East!
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