Thoughts on the Iranian Protests

[Le Pere Duchesne]

Raziel Hotokashi

No, you convinced me. You're right, I should develop my opinions through more...intelligent means.

Since neither candidate is supportive of the workers' struggle, neither of them are the best candidate?

Kinda...
I guess it is like this:
Iranian capitaism is tied to both the clerical-feudal reactionary landlords and Mullahs, and to imperialism. The landlords borrow money off them nd rent them land to build factories, mines, whatever on, and the landlords even become capitalists themselves, just as the calitalists become landlords. Both borrow money and get/give favourable deals to the imperialists. One day they are dealing with Brittish imperialism, then next the shun it and turn to France. But in every case they are dealing with one imperiaist power or another.

The tasks of the democratic revolution (land to the peasants, cutting ties with minorities, making a decently democratic constitution, and setting the ground for a development of native capitalism) cannot be completed, because those same tasks hurt the capitalists who have economic dominance.

*The clerical-autocracy is used to hold workers down, and any loosening of that will threaten to blow the country up in a near revolutionary situation.
We see that democracy cannot be acheved by the Iranian capitalists.

*The minority populations are exploited economically, through lower wages and prices for their goods, and politically through inciting persian chauvinism to divide the persian proletariat from the rest of the working class.
Thus we see that the other nationalities (which make up almost half the population) cannot be freed

*Taking land from the landlords, and giving it to the peasants would deprive the capitalists of land, because in many cases they are landlords. This would also deprive them of the cheap labour to be had by paying peasants less because they already have a small plot they can live off.
Thus we see that the democratic demand of 'land to the peasants' is not going to happen.

All this shows us that the Iranian bourgeoisie (of whatever nationality) cannot achieve the takss of the bourgeois revolution. Only the working class is objectively capable of enforcing all these demands. Only through a workers revolution will the demands of the democratic revolution be met.
But such actions, because they break the boundaries of the currrent state of capitalism, cross over into socialism: land to the peasants requires not just the expropriation of the landlords, but of the rural bourgeosie as well., for example. (for further reading see 'Some Results and Prospects' be Trotsky)


Now you are wondering 'sure, but what does this have to do with my question?'
What this means is that both candidates are acting in the interests of imperialsm and the Mullahs, and as such cannot do anything for the working class, and cannot make Iran more democratic.

One might bring up Chaves and say that even though he is not communist, he at least seems to be seeting the ground for Venzuelan capitalism.
Sure, looks it. But like every other third world populist, he must appeal to one imperialist or another or face annihilation. Those that refused to become the lackey of imperialism... Their regimes were crushed in military reaction.

The same thing would happen in Iran.

By backing a candidate, what you are in effect saying is this: 'This person can do stuff that will benefit you." That is, well, wrong. By backing that candidate, the working class must not engage in revolutionary struggle, because that would compromise the candidate, or go past the bounds he considered reasonable, andthus trigger a reaction from him.

Hope the rant made some kind of sense.  

[Raziel Hotokashi]

Yes. It made a good deal of sense.  

[Le Pere Duchesne]

Quote:

Imperialists Hands Off Iran!

Down With the Clerical Regime! No Support to “Reform” Mullahs!

For a Leninist-Trotskyist Party in Iran to Fight for Workers Revolution!

JUNE 29—A few short months after celebrating the 30th anniversary of its bloody and oppressive rule, Iran’s Islamic Republic has been convulsed by the largest protests since the “Iranian revolution” of 1978-79. The massive demonstrations were sparked by the widespread belief that incumbent president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, supported by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, had stolen the June 12 presidential election from opposition candidate Mir Hussein Moussavi. After a week in which hundreds of thousands filled the streets of Tehran and other cities chanting “Death to the dictator” and “Allah Akbar” (“God is great”), the regime struck back. Scores of demonstrators were reportedly shot by the hated paramilitary Basij militias, linked to the elite Revolutionary Guard, as well as by police, while hundreds have been locked up in the notorious Evin Prison. The International Communist League, of which the Spartacist League is the U.S. section, calls on the international workers movement to demand: Free all anti-government protesters!

The fraud surrounding Ahmadinejad’s re-election became a focus for the broad discontents felt across Iranian society, from women compelled to wear the hijab (veil) and youth punished for public displays of affection to widespread poverty and growing unemployment. Hundreds of thousands have taken to the streets demanding new elections. Certainly, plenty of signs indicate voter fraud. But the elections—vote-rigging or not—were themselves a fraud, controlled by the mullahs, who approved all candidates in advance.

Part of the basis of support for Moussavi is his call for vague “reforms” on women’s rights and other social questions. But Moussavi, one of the founders of the Islamic Republic, is no less a butcher than his opponents in the current regime. Under Moussavi’s reign as prime minister from 1981 to 1989, untold thousands of leftists, Kurds and women’s rights activists were slaughtered in Iran’s prisons and buried in mass graves. Hundreds of thousands more died in the bloody war with Iraq in the 1980s. In 1999, militant student protests were drowned in blood by the “reform” government of then-president Mohammad Khatami, a current ally of Moussavi.

While the forces demonstrating in the streets of Iranian cities are heterogeneous, they are politically subordinate to one side of what is essentially a falling out between rival factions within the ruling clerical elite. A key ally of Moussavi is the notoriously corrupt former president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani; known as the “pistachio king,” he may well be the richest man in Iran. Moussavi and Rafsanjani have called to further “open up” the economy through privatizations and foreign investment. They have also sought to tone down the “anti-imperialist” demagogy associated with Ahmadinejad. Abroad, the protests are being cheered by a spectrum of Iranian political forces ranging from royalists to bourgeois democrats and the remnants of the left. The workers and oppressed of Iran have no interest in supporting either of the cabals fighting over how best to pursue the mullahs’ bloody rule.

The U.S. and British imperialists have sought to intervene in the political turmoil, beefing up their radio broadcasts into Iran. Obama declared that he was “appalled and outraged” by the crackdown in Iran. Meanwhile, nearly 200,000 U.S. troops continue to ravage Iraq and Afghanistan on Iran’s eastern and western borders, while U.S. special forces carry out clandestine operations within Iran itself. After 30 years of the oppressive rule of the mullahs, there are doubtless many in Iran who have illusions in Western bourgeois democracy or see the “democratic” imperialists as a potential ally. Such illusions may have been further fueled by the initial softer (than the war-crazed Bush gang) tone adopted by Obama toward Tehran upon taking office.

Whether administered by Democrats or Republicans, U.S. imperialism is the deadliest enemy of working people around the globe. It was the CIA, in collaboration with the British, that organized the 1953 coup that overthrew then-prime minister Mohammad Mossadeq to reverse his nationalization of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. The imperialists then reinstalled the Shah into power and backed the tyrannical, blood-drenched Pahlavi dynasty until its overthrow in 1979. Down with the imperialist occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq! U.S. out of Pakistan and Central Asia! Imperialists hands off Iran!

The U.S. imperialists and their nuclear-armed Israeli allies have repeatedly threatened military action against Iran’s nuclear program. In the face of such threats, we say that Iran needs nukes to deter such an attack. Neighboring Iraq’s lack of “weapons of mass destruction,” including nukes, emboldened the U.S. to invade and occupy the country, leading to the horrific carnage and occupation of the last six years. While calling for military defense of neocolonial countries like Iraq and Iran against imperialist attack, we do not give an iota of political support to their rulers, who lord it over their “own” oppressed masses. We say: Down with all the sheiks, colonels, mullahs and Zionist butchers! For a socialist federation of the Near East!

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