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NEWS & LETTERS,
August-September 2002
Mansoor Hekmat--Iranian Marxist
Mansoor Hekmat (Zhoobin Razani) passed away at the age
of 51 in London on July 4. His was a strong and confidant voice for working
class liberation in Iran and throughout the Middle East. The constellation of
radical activist organizations he helped fashion spans from Pakistan, Turkey,
and Iraq to most of western Europe and North America. Hekmat first became well-known in the early 1980s for
his critiques of “populism” in the Iranian Left, for having tail-ended the
Islamists. Implicit in this was a theory of state capitalism. His theory of
state capitalism developed later in the mid-1980s was different than that of
Marxist-Humanism, in that he argued the origins of Russian state capitalism was
rooted in the 1921 NEP programs and sided more with Bukharin in those debates. After going underground in Iran Hekmat joined forces
with Kurdish revolutionaries to form a non-Stalinist Communist Party, distancing
from guerrilla foco theories of the New Left. Hekmat demanded that his
colleagues engage workers’, immigrants’, and civil rights struggles in
whatever country they lived. This was a breath of fresh air in the 1980s
compared to most of the rest of the Iranian Left who were isolated and
self-absorbed. The numerous publications Hekmat helped found and wrote
for, gave a boost to a lively debate on Marxism and socialism, while engaging in
support activities internationally for refugees and for dissidents in Iran. In the late 1980s I wrote an article in NEWS &
LETTERS about one of his colleagues, Gholam Keshavarz, who was assassinated in
Cyprus by Khomeini’s death squads. During that time I worked with several of
his colleagues in Los Angeles in numerous labor and immigrant activities. In the early 1990s with the collapse of Communism in
Russia and East Europe, a new split emerged among Hekmat’s colleagues. He
wrote a new series of articles calling for the establishment of “Workers’
Communism” as opposed to “bourgeois communism.” The split also involved
tensions with the Kurdish revolutionaries who did not want to be fully subsumed
under an Iranian organization. Unfortunately as a theoretician Hekmat never engaged
Marxist-Humanism, or Marx’s humanism, which could have illuminated many of the
dilemmas. Nevertheless he was a serious and worthy figure. His political stands
on the need for revolution, the need for an independent working class movement,
and the need to break from the fetishism of unity, were correct. He was the most
prolific Iranian Marxist revolutionary theoretician. After September 11 Hekmat
was among a handful to quickly single out the need to confront both
fundamentalist terrorism and Bush’s imperial moves. Hekmat was a strong voice for liberation that emerged
out of the contradictions of the 1979 Iranian Revolution. It is sad that he will
not be there when the new generation of Iranians confront the present oppressive
regime and overthrow it. But the legacy of his vision of a genuine socialism
will keep his memory alive. --Cyrus Noveen |
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