Specter of revolution stalks Iran's theocratic rulers

A woman is clubbed to the ground by riot police, then stands up again to berate them as they walk away. A group of young women link arms to block a street against Basij militia thugs. A lone woman raises her fist against the approaching police--a moment reminiscent of Tiananmen Square's "Tank Man." These are scenes which have been repeated countless thousands of times in the mass demonstrations following Iran's disputed June 12 election. 

Tehran has seen massive outpourings, perhaps as many as three million June 15. Other cities, Isfahan, the Azeri city of Tabriz, Shiraz, and villages across Iran have also seen demonstrations and street fighting. In the wake of these demonstrations, the regime has blocked web and mobile phone services, and placed opposition political figures and journalists under arrest. Dozens have been killed, including students pulled from their dormitories after midnight. These youth are attacked because they are in the forefront of the mass movement. In spite of all, mass unrest has reached levels not seen since the Revolution of 1979. 

The claim that current president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad won re-election with 62.6% of the vote to challenger Mir Hossein Mousavi's 33.7% was thoroughly rejected. It is just as likely that the real numbers could be the reverse, considering the massive level of discontent with the regime, the unprecedented mass demonstrations that broke out in the week before the election, and the massive voter turnout, on an order that was last seen when the "reformer" Khatami was elected.

WORKERS, WOMEN, YOUTH DISPUTE VOTE

Significantly, an Iranian Labor Union association poll taken in the week before the election showed Mousavi with 52% support among workers to Ahmadinejad's 36%, with 57.3% agreeing that labor's conditions have worsened under the current administration. One Iranian worker said after the results were announced, "Almost everybody I know voted for Mousavi but Ahmadinejad is being declared the winner. The government announcement is nothing but widespread fraud."

Mousavi was hardly an ideal figure. He was a prime minister during the 1980s, an era of harsh repression of all opposition to Ayatollah Khomeini's regime. Mousavi made the decision to serve that master, and it haunted him during the election campaign. Asked by a student at Babol University about his role during the massacre of thousands of political prisoners in 1988, he was unable to answer the question. Finally he said, "I was the head of the executive branch and not the judiciary."

Nevertheless, as one voter put it, "The fact is, there are vote counters out there who know very well exactly how we and millions of other Iranians voted. They know, and it terrifies them. If we had not participated, we would not have been able to send that message at all."

Mousavi's campaign was conceived as a way to deal with divisions among the ruling circles. It wasn't planned to go farther than that. The situation has gone much farther now.

Divisions among the rulers were exposed when Ahmadinejad attacked senior regime figures and clerics during the televised presidential debate. They were as apparent with the maneuvers by former president Ayatollah Hashemi Rafsanjani and others to support Mousavi. (It is also significant that some members of the Revolutionary Guards have refused to attack demonstrators, and there have even been reports of police arresting violent members of the Basij.)

DIVISIONS AMONG RULERS

However, there was also enough content in Mousavi's criticisms of the Ahmadinejad administration that his campaign could be said to represent an "opening," not so much to "the West" as to the Iranian people themselves. While he rightly criticized Ahmadinejad's Holocaust denial and military threats, Mousavi also said at the televised debate, "Wherever I go there is protest; wherever I go they say we have been humiliated, we have been arrested, we have been expelled from university and so on." The regime searched for itself in the people's eyes, but was horrified to see in them a vision of its ending.

Of course, the elections aren't the ultimate ground being contested. Women's determination to tear up their oppression by its root has been continuous. The Iranian Revolution of 1979 held promise of becoming the most profound social revolution since 1917. Women's liberation was a vital part of that revolutionary ferment, and a primary target of the clerical counter-revolution that came from the very innards of the revolution.

Women protesting today, asserting their drive to freedom in the most practical ways, are giving their answer to 30 years of escalating attacks upon them, and millions of incidents of brutality and degrading assault that often occurred in obscurity. They are writing their reply into history, on the world's stage.

TWO WORLDS IN EVERY COUNTRY

It is a revolt that was prefigured by the Million Signature Campaign and other protests against the worsening conditions for women under Ahmadinejad. The struggle to establish independent labor unions, as well as the massive defiance of the regime's religious decrees and policing, also were signs of things now arrived. That the regime itself had some awareness of this was shown in the last year, when the Revolutionary Guard began focusing on what tactics it would use to crush a popular internal rebellion, as opposed to any foreign threat. 

Iran's workers have also made their voices heard in this crisis. The Tehran and Suburbs Vahed Bus Company Workers released this statement: "We condemn the suppression of civic institutions. In recent days we have been witness to the presence and passionate activity of millions of women, men, old and young, national and religious minorities in Iran who are demanding that the government recognize their basic rights...the fact that the demands of [the] overwhelming majority of Iranian society go far beyond trade union demands is clear to all. And we have always stressed that unless the principles of the freedom of organization and free elections have been made real, realization of social freedoms and union rights is not possible. Therefore, the Vahed Workers trade union is an integral part of the overall struggles for [the] establishment of free and independent social institutions...That's why we ask that June 26, which has been declared to be the day of support for jailed workers and union organizing in Iran, be elevated to the day of human rights in Iran. We ask our coworkers all around the world to actively support the extinguished rights of the Iranian people." 

Workers at Khodro automobile company, Iran's largest, said this: "We declare our solidarity with the movement of the people of Iran. Autoworkers, Fellow Laborers: What we witness today is an insult to the intelligence of the people and disregard for their votes, the trampling of the principles of the Constitution by the government. It is our duty to join this people's movement. We the workers of Iran Khodro, Thursday [June 18], in each working shift will stop working for half an hour to protest the suppression of students, workers, women, and the Constitution and declare our solidarity with the movement of the people of Iran. The morning and afternoon shifts from 10 to 10:30. The night shift from 3 to 3:30."

With scenes reminiscent of the 1979 Revolution--and with many in the opposition trying to follow the forms of that era, as in the nightly rooftop chants of "Allahu Akbar!" and commemorations of martyrs--it is time to address the contradictory meaning of the 1979 Revolution as well. It has direct bearing for today.

As Raya Dunayevskaya pointed out at the time, the question of the ambivalent role of Shi'a clerics in the Iranian revolution goes back to Iran's Constitutional Revolution of 1906-11. They did support the first stage of that Revolution, but "...once a democratic Constitution was created, the clergy began burdening it with the type of amendments that restored most powers to the Shah once the foreign enemy was thrown out...The second chapter of that first revolution, as the second chapter of this era's 1979 Revolution, was begun by women liberationists" ("What Has Happened to the Iranian Revolution...?").

The 1979 Revolution was the first great social revolution to take place after Women's Liberation had moved from an idea whose time has come to a mass movement. For Marxist-Humanism it became an indispensable category of revolution, as seen in Dunayevskaya's Rosa Luxemburg, Women's Liberation, and Marx's Philosophy of Revolution. There for the first time Marx's Marxism stood clear, including the gulf between Marx and Engels on the "Woman Question." It was a question of total liberation for all.

RESPONSIBILITY FOR PHILOSOPHY

The great need of revolutionaries in Iran and elsewhere was to take responsibility for a philosophy of liberation that would brook no compromises with the clerics, or with any others who would limit the striving for full freedom. What was needed was that philosophy of revolution that would initiate the road to a classless society on truly new humanist beginnings. This is not merely an abstract question.

Today's mass movement is raising demands, from the end of the religious police and of "forced veiling," to even ending the position of Supreme Guide which Ayatollah Khamenei inherited from Ayatollah Khomeini. The kind of constitutional questions being raised by this new movement directly address central historic problems of the Iranian revolution. Just as the tendency of the masses has been to go beyond the issue of a stolen election among regime insiders, so it would be wrong to fetter our thought to the maneuvers of these insiders.

As much as any crisis of our time, today's events in Iran show the need for a return to the fullness of Marx's Marxism. History has brought Marx's philosophy of revolution together with Women's Liberation here. It is necessary to take responsibility for articulating this. To take any other ground would be to fall into the trap pointed to by the great Irish revolutionary James Connolly: "Don't be 'practical' in politics. To be practical in that sense means that you have schooled yourself to think along the lines, and in the grooves those who rob you would desire you to think."

LIBERATORY VISION OF THE FUTURE NEEDED

As of this moment, Iran's rulers will be likely to prefer Ahmadinejad. He represents all that they have left: the whip arm of the institutionalized counter-revolution. Ayatollah Khamenei affirmed this at Friday prayers June 19, threatening anti-Ahmadinejad demonstrators with more "blood and chaos" to come. The regime that can't deliver jobs, dignity, or peace can deliver oppression and murder well enough. Some demonstrators are now chanting "Death to Khamenei" in response. 

Ahmadinejad was also favored, in the early hours after his "re-election," by some hawkish elements in the U.S. and Israel who were using him as an excuse to prepare for possible military intervention in Iran.

At least some of that talk has been silenced, shamed by the heroism and creativity of the Iranian people. More than ever it will be necessary for revolutionaries to present a vision that is the absolute opposite of all this reaction which feeds upon reaction.

--June 21, 2009

As we go to press, many calls for a general strike have gone out on Twitter and Facebook, and Iran Focus reports that 80% of shops were closed in a bazaar strike in Iranian Kurdistan. The struggle continues and has our greatest solidarity.

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