Long Live the Women’s Uprising in Iran!
Death to the Patriarchy! Death to capitalism!
For Women’s Liberation through the World Socialist Revolution!
We are witnessing an indisputable pre-revolutionary and in places a revolutionary situation developing in Iran. Led by young women, youth have taken to the streets and are fighting and dying in pitched battles chanting easily understood slogans: “Death to the dictators”, “Down with the Islamic Republic” and “Women, Life, Freedom”! The reactionary Mullah capitalist theocracy’s morals police’s arrest, beating and the subsequent death of Mahsa Amini in their custody ignited an anti-patriarchal powder keg which may soon bring down the regime. Imperialism is trembling as this movement has potential to upset the capitalist apple cart by inspiring workers revolutions across the region. The ultra-patriarchy and mosque control of the state and oppression of women, terminally unbearable, has boiled over.
The powerful and historically militant Iranian working class has now entered the fray against the Islamic theocracy, notably the strategic oil and petrochemical workers. No sooner had Khamenei declared that henceforth those arrested will not be released than defiant oilfield workers walked off the job en masse! Waging refinery strikes, oil workers have been seen shouting “death to the dictator”. The entry of the working class in the defense of women is an important development in the struggle. Spread the strikes region-wide to all sectors of the economy! What is lacking is a revolutionary workers party, a tribune of the workers and all the oppressed, to lead and direct the struggle.
Iran is a multi ethnic nation. The women and protesters are showing inter-ethnic solidarity chanting “Turks, Kurds, Arabs, Lors, are together”. The protests have spread to Sistan-Baluchistan, the Kurdish regions and the Arab Khuzestan provincial capital Ahvaz.
As reported in the Wall Street Journal, “The protest movement sweeping Iran spread to a Tehran prison known as a symbol of political repression in a new challenge to the Islamic Republic, with detained dissidents chanting anti-government slogans before violence erupted and a deadly fire engulfed the facility, activists said.”
Women’s Oppression, the Theocracy and Imperialism
The oppression of women is directly tied to the exploitation of the working classes and poor in the cycle of social reproduction of the laboring classes. The question of women’s liberation has been brought to the forefront as an urgent democratic question in Iran. Internationally, the woman question is a strategic question for the International working class and the fight for socialist revolution. Women, internationally half the working class, have never achieved full social, political or economic equality under capitalism even in the imperialist nations, as demonstrated by the gutting of abortion rights and the prevalence of domestic violence in the United States. In the semi-colonies and colonies, the conditions for women are far worse.
In Iran as in the U.S.A. and other quasi-theocratic states the church is used to reinforce patriarchy and prevent women from experiencing the benefits of modernity. Women are locked into the kitchen and kinder for fear that they will rise up the permanent revolution in the streets. The patriarchy enslaves women by restrictions on the right to abortion. 300-600,000 illegal abortions are conducted under back room conditions in Iran today (Iran:Repeal “crippling” new anti-abortion law – UN experts | OHCHR).
We say unequivocally that all state restrictions and control over women’s bodily agency and reproductive rights enslaves women to the patriarchy. With reproductive rights under attack around the world, the history of bourgeois democracy warns women that their rights can only be won and retained by a workers’ government wherein working class women play a leading role. Will Iran find its path to permanent revolution or will patriarchy defeat the uprising? Will the worker and women militants be able to build their revolutionary party before the counter-revolution defeats the struggle?
In addition to capitalist super-exploitation women workers face horrible gender oppression based on their sex. The enforced veil in Iran and other nations, female genital mutilation, child brides, family ‘honor killings’ and other femicides, violence and rape worldwide are the brutal terrors meted out upon women who at most remain second-class citizens, effectively reduced to chattels.
In developing nations subject to the laws of combined and uneven development, traditions and practices of pre-capitalist social backwardness are carried over into the modern period. The theocracy is an effective means to keep the working class and the poorer strata of the peasantry divided and blind to their objective class interests, which is the fight for workers’ revolution to break the imperialist yoke. This social backwardness reinforces the conservative bourgeois institution of the family, forces women into domestic servitude and subjects families to the necessity of selling their labor power and the task of social reproduction of labor..
Maintaining social customs, traditions and ideology from a pre-capitalist era ensures social control and profit flows that maintain the class rule of the comprador bourgeoisie, thus feeding imperialist super-profits and countering the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall (TRPTF). The extreme Sharia law and dreams of a new theocratic caliphate are carried into the modern world as a result of the temporary victory of the permanent counter revolution via the agency of the Mullahs against the permanent revolution which in 1979 deposed the Shah. Iran is trapped in this double bind – without victorious workers’ revolution nationally and spreading regionally the 1979 defeat – opened the road to the theocratic reaction.
In Iran, women workers are a “last hired, first fired”, highly exploited reserve pool of labor. Of some 20 million employed persons only 3 million are women.
“In Iran, the labor market is generally male. In 2019, the official total number of employed women was 3 million, of whom 1 million were out of work by the end of 2020 due to Coronavirus-related conditions.
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Despite their many talents, efforts to remain independent, and ability to help their families, Iranian women are considered cheap labor. They receive lower wages and fewer benefits than their male counterparts. Moreover, women are the first to be fired or laid off.
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The situation of female workers in Iran cannot be compared to that of other groups. Women in Iran work under harsh, substandard conditions in exchange for meager salaries with no benefits or insurance. About 80% of uninsured employees are women (The report of the Social Security Organization, 2017).
Nobody oversees the work of underground female workers in Iran. Most of these workers earn 700,000 or 800,000 Tomans per month ($27.3 -$31.2), which is less than the minimum wage set by the regime’s labor laws (The state-run ROKNA News Agency – August 1, 2021).
Labor laws do not apply to female workers in Iran. Laws against women working in difficult and dangerous jobs, staffing night shifts, and carrying heavy loads are routinely ignored.” – The deplorable conditions of female workers in Iran (ncr-iran.org)
What will the masses need to do to defeat the theocracy? What needs to happen to stop its replacement with a ‘color revolution’ by a wing of the divided capitalist class seeking accomodation with one or the other imperialist bloc? How can women, exploited workers and all oppressed people and nationalities in Iran liberate themselves?
It was the Russian Revolution of 1917, that despite the Stalinist bureaucratic degeneration of the Soviet Workers state, raised the status, equality and rights of women by centuries across the old defeated Tsarist Russian Empire. Those gains were won by a revolution which was pushed forward in its crucial moments by factory women initiating strikes and demonstrations. Those gains then exerted pressure on the ‘enlightened West’ and across the working class to raise women’s demands for Bread and Roses in the forms of work, suffrage, sexual freedom/bodily autonomy inculding free abortion on demand and childcare. Such remain among the unfinished tasks of women’s liberation across the globe. Imperialism and patriarchy are very concerned that women across the world will take inspiration from the women of Iran.
Iran torn between two imperialist blocs
The on again off again nuclear negotiations and ever increasing sanctions squeeze the masses while the Mullahs are split over which imperialist camp to lean toward. Lean toward the West and it may go easier on the sanctions for cutting a nuclear deal; lean toward Russia and China on a well-placed bet that the Chinese behemoth currently eclipsing the West–is the future world power hegemon.
The regime leans on the anti-imperialism of the masses towards the West’s history and current wave of sanctions attempting to rally to national defense against western feminist influence. However the anti-western sentiment is deep among the besieged masses. It is unlikely to dissuade the women from their goals.
The regime is condemning the uprising as a product of the influence of the West and present themselves as the people’s only defense against the western imperialist bloc. Will the masses buy this? The masses no longer buy the regime’s excuse that repression is necessary to protect Iran from imperialism. The workers and poor have been in the streets year after year with economic demands, proof in fact that the regime does not protect them from the crisis of imperialism. Rather it mediates on behalf of the ruling class and theocracy, between imperialism and the condition of the workers. Women can no longer tolerate having to pay the price for the regime’s faux anti-imperialism. Today the question is of winning and defending women’s most fundamental democratic rights. The struggle unites women across the country against being blacked out as nobodies on the streets, against being reduced to nothing! Where it comes to freedom and equal rights, the women’s revolution has proved capable of winning the support of the masses.
Western imperialism is not just standing in the wings watching the uprising, it is hoping to save capitalism. Some support a ‘color revolution’ for regime change that wins Iran for the West. To succeed the revolution must assert its working class character in order to defeat imperialism both east and west and win an independent workers Iran.
Despite the turf war with Saudi Arabia over Syria, Occupied Palestine, and Yemen, the Mullahs have to navigate the new power bloc of the OPEC Plus. Russia is bucking the West as the security guarantor for the the Gulf Cooperation Council states. Russia and Saudi Arabia came together in October in an agreement to cut oil production, kicking the West right in their petro dollar subsidized kiester. Mid October Crown Prince (PM) Salman told South Africa’s Ramaphosa that Saudi Arabia is interested in joining the BRICS. With tumbling stock markets, the sabotaged NordStream pipelines, unrestrained inflation, hollowed out industrial capacity in the U.S. and winter coming in northern Europe, Russia has played the OPEC card mightily showing that it is far from a weak powerless dependent semi-colony, sub-imperialist, or solely a regional power. No, it is a full blown imperialist power capable of navigating and seducing combatant national leaderships (Saudi Arabia vs Iran) into its alliances.
The question of defeating the color revolution becomes one of rejecting the regime’s appeal to the Russia/China bloc. Iran today has moved decisively toward the Russia/China bloc by joining the SCO. The world situation is rapidly changing. As a result of the war in Ukraine, the rivalry between the two blocs west and east is escalating rapidly to envelop the whole of Eurasia. The completion of the national democratic revolution in Iran confronts the threat of widening war. In this context the national question in Iran becomes subordinated to the class question.The women’s revolution can only succeed if it becomes part of the permanent revolution not just in Iran but globally. For the permanent revolution to advance it is necessary to oppose both the attempts by the U.S. to impose its ‘color revolution’ regime change, and Iran acting as a semi-colony of Russia and China in expanding its imperialist bloc in Asia and the Middle East.
Vacuum of Proletarian Leadership in the Face of Terminal Capitalism
As regards how the Mullah regime in a bloc with Russia and China can be anti-imperialist, our opponents, self-professed revolutionary tendencies, practically say ‘don’t ask!’ There are reasons we see and hear them act this way. Let’s look at some reasons.
There are defenders of the regime of the Mullahs, ostensibly celebrants of the 1979 Republic that drove out the Shah. The real basis of their support for the Khamenei dictatorship is their characteristic “anti-imperialism,” where their monopolar world view sees the U.S.-led imperialist bloc as the world’s sole perpetrator of the oppression and super-exploitation of peoples and continents. Though this is the usual world view of post-Stalinist parties, it is what we see from “Socialist Action” in the U.S.A. Under cover of the calls for mass actions (flops across America!) against all U.S. wars, their project United National Antiwar Coalition (UNAC) holds sub rosa celebrations of the Khamenei dictatorship’s ascension to full membership in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), the China/Russia alliance, and make no mention of the women’s uprising at their anti-war actions. Internal eruptions in the Workers World Party (WWP) have left Socialist Action the big dogs in UNAC. With WWP thus demoted, War Resisters League has just adhered to UNAC, even calling the Syrian revolution a “U.S. war.”.
There are also unconscious defenders of the patriarchy, the ideology the “Islamic Republic” defends. Left outfits such as the Workers World Party (WWP) ignore the predicament of women in Iran today. They are silent on the role of Iran’s repression of women so as to avoid putting the regime in a bad light for sending drones to Russia to use against Ukraine. While they rallied against the U.S. role in the war in Ukraine they ignored the equally important uprising of women in Iran for the world revolution.
Women are not stopping at the removal of the hijab. All their freedoms and democratic rights for education, work, bodily autonomy right up to executing the dictator are on the agenda and being raised by the masses. The moment is now that the vanguard workers and women must come together and build their revolutionary party. When they consider their program what will they find? Will they find their revolutionary program and party in time?
The revolutionary moment must be advanced by victories or it will stall and retreat. To navigate what starts as spontaneous, the masses need coordinated revolutionary leadership.The revolutionary moment which raises up all the contradictions of society will be resolved by the women’s revolution sparking the workers revolution, or by the mullahs or by other forces of capitalist reaction crushing the struggle.
Against Reaction in All Its Forms
As a challenge to the institution of the bourgeois family, the rights of LGBTQ persons are intrinsically bound up with the fight for women’s liberation. As we have written in the past, as the Revolutionary Trotskyist League in 1993:
“It is thus within the nuclear family that the oppression of children and youth, and of lesbians and gay men, is firmly rooted.…The stark fact that lesbian and gay sex is openly non-reproductive directly challenges the bourgeois “norm” of the heterosexual, monogamous, child-bearing family. This provides some insight into exactly why the nuclear family is so vital to the capitalist class. Put bluntly, without this social unit, capitalism would not be able to sustain itself profitably; it would not be able to endure” (The Struggle Against Women’s Oppression In The 9O’s: A Working Class Perspective)
This fight includes liberation from transactivism, internationally, a bourgeois/petty-bourgeois movement, promoted by the post-modern ideology of neoliberalism, which places the individual above the collective. It is a major attack on women, on homosexuals, especially lesbians, which most of the left supports, erasing women from the map and their historical oppression as a gender based on the reproductive and productive capacity of their sex, dividing the class unity between working men and women. In Iran, homosexuality is a crime punishable by death. Not just as dogma of the faith but as the reactionary cultural terror policy of the state.
And in a particularly brutal, disgusting practice, gay people in Iran have reportedly been intimidated into undergoing gender reassignment surgeries (in essence, forced mutilation) in order to avoid being punished or executed. The Islamic regime takes a more “tolerant” view of transgender persons, but not by much as they face the loss of family support, loss of employment, face discrimination and are targets of physical violence.
Everywhere in Iran there is super exploitation of the female right to work, where this right is not denied. This super-exploitation prevents women and their families from living full-fledged lives of developed selves, as it exerts a crushing downward pressure on securing the means of life. But tendencies who took identity politics overboard in pushing aside the crucial fight for women’s liberation by adaptation to the anti-materialist “trans ideology” now have to figure out how to support revolutionary female leaders without reference to gender oppression from birth or the material facts of womanhood and social class. Being determines consciousness is the Marxist byword, and in Iran we are watching it operate.
So we would not be tempted for a moment to go for the Descartian “I think therefore I am” proposition like the ‘left’ union officials of the UE-COGS or the post-Morenoists of “Left Voice” who arrange pronouns and delete nouns to suit thought fashion in academia in the imperialist center. Consciously or otherwise, opposition to women’s liberation is anti worker and patriarchy supportive, advancing the chaos of a non-material identity at the expense of real women and a wholesale rejection of materialism. This is opportunism run amok and a methodological departure from Marxism.
Competing for the Most Objectivist Prize
Then we come across historically sectarian abstentionist outfits who predictably held up the absence of the big battalions of labor (ILLEGAL ORGANIZATIONS IN IRAN!!!) as proof that this is little more than a democratic rights struggle. Now with the entry of the strategically important oil workers into the struggle which leads to mass actions exceeding the anti-regime struggles and illegal strikes of the last 5 years, fighting the regime’s police and law, this is still, for them, only a “democratic revolution” movement. These Menshevik stagists span “International Viewpoint” with its reportage and cheerleading opinion which concludes without any programmatic contribution, across to a bashful Fraccion Leninista Trotskista Internacional (FLTI) who, in a wide departure from their habit, have a minimal program for Iranian fighters. They have joined the ranks of the stagists who abandon the fight for permanent revolution. The FLTI’s program leaves the workers organizing for dual power but they do not raise the ultimate transitional demand: the workers’ government based on workers’ councils and workers’ militias. Nor do they call for the formation of the revolutionary party to popularize this program or for the new workers’ International, necessary to spread the revolution across western Asia.
You see, the objectively revolutionary working class will or will not know what to do and at some later opportune moment these groupings will offer more particular advice. Of course the historical record, where every mass struggle begins to mobilize and spontaneously elaborates democratic demands, is not deviated from at all in this case. The fact that women’s liberation demands are leading the masses onto the revolutionary road is a gauge of the movement’s power, not a stagist limitation as actual counterrevolutionary forces wish. The fight for bourgeois democratic rights in Iran is completely bound up with the fight for workers revolution. This is the theory of the Permanent Revolution that Trotsky elaborated over 100 years ago and that became a historical reality with the Russian Revolution of 1917.
Forms of organization matter. The masses will self-organize, first in familiar ways and with forms proven in previous struggles. What the new situation calls for are forms of organization that are up to the tasks of seizing power from the capitalist class and mobilizing the great masses to wield it for their own class ends. These forms, and just as importantly the revolutionary internal logic of escalating transitional demands, are the guts of a transitional program the many bashful objectivists just can’t seem to mention. Thanks to the Mullah’s regime and the Pahlavis before them, British colonialism and Rockefeller imperialism, modern Iran strains to hatch from its shell as a petrostate. That Khamenei’s government looks to Chinese oil demand and wholesale repressions of the masses (that he calls “flies”) occurs exactly at the moment when world mass sentiment wants to eclipse oil consumption and reject theocratic laws, that tells us how weak his dictatorship’s grip on power is!
We look across ‘the West’ and ask where’s the revolutionary optimism? The firm conviction that the socialist revolution is required and that its program is species and planet rescue itself is the program of the International Leninist-Trotskyist Tendency (ILTT)!
The Constituent Assembly: A Halfway House to Defeat
Forms matter and some who know better, or ought to, fetishize Constituent Assemblies. These are almost always a bad idea. Let’s see who wants them and why.
It is no accident that the Saudi royals want the elevation to the throne of the son of the Shah. The guy himself is less than convinced, posing with his weight on his modernist foot. Does he want to be a “constitutional monarch” instead? He makes those noises. We know he’ll find some western imperialist support for that idea if he makes more than a private effort to gather it. One way to gather it is to get the ‘color revolution’ and regime change forces lined up to promote a Constituent Assembly. This is so far not the preferred course of the Biden government or the “strategic stability” majority thought at the State Department, however much of the Stalinist-led left internationally yells otherwise. But as if to make Stalinist lies about Trotskyism come true, the ex-Workers Power, ex-Cliffite RCIT, a small international current with a big Viennese publishing operation jumps onto the platform calling for a “revolutionary” constituent assembly. We see this as backdoor stagism and not just their habitual opportunist adaptation to mass consciousness we have seen from them on too many occasions. Certainly Lenin called on revolutionaries to be tribunes of all the people. But it is no good to popularize an obstacle to proletarian power when no one but the class enemy calls for it. In the 21st century their “RCA” has worse than no utility for proletarian victory.
To win, the movement must attract and trigger labor to step forward and put the weight of the working class and its historic program into the equation at the head of the masses. The working class must assert organizational independence from the state, use class struggle methods, manifestations, factory occupations, popular assemblies, and form up workers councils and a workers militia with authority to lead political general strikes that smash the capitalist theocratic patriarchal state to win a workers’ government. And most importantly, build a revolutionary Leninist workers party so that the workers’ victory is not fragile or ephemeral.
Independent labor organizations are banned in Iran. All legal organizations of workers are mediated by the state despite Iran signing on to the International Labor Organization (ILO). The government runs a tight ship to extract maximum surplus value from the laboring class. Labor needs to break the confines of Sharia domination and use workers’ democracy to elevate new leadership independent of the state and dedicated to the historic interests of the oppressed and exploited. As in Egypt in 2011, the time to organize fighting unions and struggle organizations of every kind is NOW!
The Military Must Be Broken From the Regime
Iran has a regular army, a political army, a paramilitary plain clothes militia (Basij) and regular police. The Islamic Republic of Iran Army has the typical four branches tasked with territorial defense and war. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corp (IGRC-Pasdaran) and the Basij were organized after the defeat of the democratic anti-Shah revolution by the theocracy. Founded in 1979 by order of Ayatollah Khomeini they are political enforcers out of which the “morality police” emerged.
Military service is compulsory for males at the age of eighteen who are denied passports until they serve. With an average monthly salary of $200.00 per month the rich were allowed to buy their way out of service for between $10-20,000 until January of 2022 when public pressure forced the regime to formally abolish that option. Thus every working class male has basic military training. The ruling class, on the other hand, after evading service for decades, depends on the loyalty of workers in uniform under the watchful eye of the Ayatollah’s political police.
Soldiers conscripted into every capitalist army are workers in uniform. We distinguish conscripts from the professional volunteer corps and mercenaries who are contract killers of workers in uniform. The job of the officer corps is to keep the soldiers from thinking outside the official ideology lest they realize and fight for their class interests! But during times of revolution conscript soldiers are torn between the interests of their social class and those of the capitalist state and the regime. This is a truism that every military strategist understands and every capitalist class fears. Every military expert knows how the Russian revolution was won by workers and soldiers councils which elected their own officers. Every historian knows that during the crucial moments of indignant revolutionary upsurge the soldiers waiver when facing off against their own class in the streets. Soldiers are even more vulnerable to awakening class consciousness when asked to fight in the meat grinder of imperialist wars. The news of ten dead IRGC trainers in areas of Russian occupied Ukraine must weigh heavily on the conscripts who surely want to just do their two years and get out!
The class struggle and success of the revolution demands the masses break the soldiers from the regime and in turn open the arsenals to the workers. The soldiers, the 18- 20 year olds-all with mothers and sisters, need to see a new authority assert its power in order to be persuaded to arrest their officers and the political police. Don’t think for a minute that the conscripts are not watching how bravely their sisters and the youth are standing up to the political police. Don’t think they are not watching their fathers and older brothers going on strike in the oil and gas fields, the refineries, the sugarcane industry. The arrest of 100 strikers and their replacement with Chinese scabs at the Asalouyeh complex will not inspire the conscripts to either support the regime or its dependence on Chinese imperialism to break the strike. The masses have signaled to the conscripts with their defiance, blood and determination. To win them to act on behalf of the revolution the working class and women must create their own assemblies and councils, defend them and use that power to break the army from the regime.
A lesson in Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution was written for just this occasion:
“The critical hour of contact between the pushing crowd and the soldiers who bar their way has its critical minute. That is when the gray barrier has not yet given way, still holds together shoulder to shoulder, but already wavers, and the officer, gathering his last strength of will, gives the command: “Fire!” The cry of the crowd, the yell of terror and threat, drowns the command, but not wholly. The rifles waver. The crowd pushes. Then the officer points the barrel of his revolver at the most suspicious soldier. From the decisive minute now stands out the decisive second. The death of the boldest soldier, to whom the others have involuntarily looked for guidance, a shot into the crowd by a corporal from the dead man’s rifle, and the barrier closes, the guns go off of themselves, scattering the crowd into the alleys and backyards. But how many times since 1905 it has happened otherwise! At the critical moment, when the officer is ready to pull the trigger, a shot from the crowd – which has its Kayurovs and Chugurins – forestalls him. This decides not only the fate of the street skirmish, but perhaps the whole day, or the whole insurrection.
The task which Shliapnikov set himself of protecting the workers from hostile clashes with the troops by not giving firearms to the insurrectionists, could not in any case be carried out. Before it came to these clashes with the troops, innumerable clashes had occurred with the police. The street fighting began with the disarming of the hated Pharaohs, their revolvers passing into the hands of the rebels. The revolver by itself is a weak, almost toy-like weapon against the muskets, rifles, machine guns and cannon of the enemy. But are these weapons genuinely in the hands of the enemy? To settle this question the workers demanded arms. It was a psychological question. But even in an insurrection psychic processes are inseparable from material ones. The way to the soldier’s rifle leads through the revolver taken from the Pharaoh.”
For Permanent Revolution in Iran and All Western Asia!
The ‘Revolutionary Guard Corps’ has demonstrated its role in the state to brutally suppress the masses. The workers organizations must take the lead and organize workers armed self defense militias. In order to win, the working class needs to be committed to expropriation of the means of production from the national bourgeoisie and imperialist holdings and to initiate a centrally planned economy run under workers control which asserts its monopoly of foriegn trade. History demonstrates that the masses’ victory is dependent on the workers’ own vanguard party committed to these ends. The alternative is defeat, the dungeon, the whip and the hangman’s noose of the Mullah or the next comprador capitalist regime.
Generation after generation of the Iranian working class have fought for their economic and democratic demands only to be beaten and killed in the streets, workplaces and universities. In this period of the terminal multi-crises of capitalism, with inter-imperialist wars and proxy wars exploding in Syria, Yeman, Myanmar and Ukraine, the ruling class offers nothing but more poverty, more oppression and more wars. It is no surprise this generation of young women are throwing off the hijab with their anger aimed directly at the regime. Clearly these youth are their own agents, not proxies of the U.S. and Israel as the regime claims.
The regime of the Mullahs has always been caught by the contradictions of running a medieval theocracy in the age of imperialism in its terminal crisis. Indeed, the rule of the monarchy was western imperialism’s way to stall the national democratic revolution which exploded in the 1890’s tobacco protests and the 1905-11 constitutional uprising. The monarch stymied the tendency of national revolutions to go permanent and international.
In 1963 the last Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, initiated a “White Revolution” to win the peasantry to his side at the expense of the landlord class to forestall a “red revolution” with land reform and economic liberalizations. This period saw the growth of the working class and urban intelligentsia against which the secret police, the blood drenched SAVAK, were employed to prevent the workers’ vanguard from consolidating a revolutionary party. All the while the Shah administered a dependent nation subordinated to imperialism creating the economic and political pre-conditions for the revolutionary moment in 1979.
The Mullahs based their rule ideologically on the clerics, economically on the power of the Bazaar merchant middle class capitalists. They rallied the lower classes and urban poor against both international capitalism and Soviet ‘communism’ with promises of a third way, the Islamic Republic – a chimera that for 43 years has failed to deliver. In a manner reminiscent of Peron (Argentina) and Vargas (Brazil), Khomeini carved a Bonapartist path to unite the masses in a cultural and political reconstruction of an Islamic Republic, despite lacking the economic and social base upon which to raise Iran up from its condition of a dependent capitalist rentier welfare state.
Today is not the first time women have demanded an end to the veil. “In March 1979, tens of thousands of women marched in Tehran against the then-new law of compulsory hijab, among other laws which attacked women’s rights instituted by the new Islamic Republic.”Those women revolutionaries, assistant professor Alborz Ghandehari reminds us, chanted, We did not carry out the revolution in order to go backwards. ” What few understood then and many observers and participants misunderstand today is that, both in the advanced imperialist countries and the dependent semi-colonies women can only win liberation by socialist revolution that sweeps away “all the old crap!”
Far from completing the tasks of the national democratic revolution, the aborted 1979 revolution removed the Pahlavi monarchy and the Peacock throne, becoming an autarchic oil rentier state subject to the deepening crises of imperialism and the aggression of the western hegemony. U.S. imperialism has ever since been licking its wounds at the loss of primary dibs on the oil and the geo-strategic access to the Straits of Hormuz, the Caspian Sea and a land mass on the Russian southern border.
The national democratic revolution of 1979 did not ‘grow over’ into a permanent revolution necessary to liberate itself from the grip of imperialism but was hijacked by the Ayatollahs, with the assistance of much of the fake Socialist left who abandoned the workers and courted the new leaders. The masses who died by the thousands in ‘78-’79 and the aftermath did not put Iran on its path to liberation from the status of a semi-colonial dependent nation navigating its way in the imperialist world system.
For Women’s Liberation through Socialist Revolution!
No to the enforced hijab! Down with France’s racist anti-veil laws!
Spread the struggle! For labor political strikes across Iran! For a general strike against the brutal theocratic regime!
Immediately free all protesters! Free all political prisoners and prisoners of the morality police!
Build a multi-ethnic workers and women’s self-defense militia to disarm and disband the police, security forces and all forces of state repression!
Abolish the death penalty!
For full political, social and economic rights for Iranian women! For guaranteed employment for all women! 30 hours work for 40 hours pay and a sliding scale of prices and wages under workers control!
For free quality education, housing, healthcare and childcare!
For free abortion on demand! For bodily autonomy! For the right to divorce!
Organize all women workers in the workplaces and the homes!
Build genuine, class independent unions today! Invalidate, break all state labor “contracts!” Unionize foreign and precarious workers! Full time living wage jobs for all!
Down with the Islamic Republic! For the strict separation of Church and State! For the democratic right for the Bahai and all others to practice their religion!
Down with the death sentence for gays and lesbians! Down with forced gay and lesbian conversion by the regime! For full democratic rights for LGBTQ persons including the right to employment, education, housing and healthcare! For the right of all to marry whomever they please and express themselves as they wish! For organized self-defense against attacks on LGBTQ persons!
For the right to language of choice! For the right of self-determination for the Azeris, the Kurds, and all the oppressed nationalities in Iran!
U.S. hands off Iran! Down with U.S. imperialist sanctions! For the right of Iran to defend itself against imperialist powers by any means necessary!
Rebuild the worker shoras! Build factory committees, neighborhood committees and workers councils to challenge the power of the Islamic Republic! If not you’ll open the door for counter revolution through the constituent assembly – don’t pretend you can have both! Build soldier and sailor councils! Split the military and turn the guns against the regime!
For a revolutionary workers party in Iran! Iranian workers to power at the head of the masses! For workers revolution in Iran! For a workers government based on workers councils and a workers militia!
Break the chains of imperialist subordination and exploitation! Expropriate the commanding heights of the economy under workers control without indemnification! Build a centrally planned economy for social needs, not imperialist profits!
For Permanent Revolution across Western Asia! For a Socialist Federation of Western Asia!
For a new revolutionary Workers International, the World Party of Socialist Revolution!
International Leninist Trotskyist Tendency (ILTT), October 24, 2022
