Whither Iran?

Crisis, treason and hope in Iran

An Iranian socialist student 02 February 2010

On 28 December people in Tehran and around the country turned Ashura – a passive religious day of mourning – into a defiant confrontation with the Iranian establishment. The riot police threw tear gas, beat and battered demonstrators, even drove over them with vans, killing a few and arresting over 1,000. The protesters responded with a vigorous street battle, one of the most glorious acts of resistance in the Iranians’ living memory. A year ago it seemed unimaginable to criticise the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, in the public sphere without the risk of serious repercussions. Today the Iranians, marching in their hundreds of thousands, do not shy away from any opportunity to pair up his name with the word “death” in every chant and challenge the absolute shamelessness of his tyranny. Every day, students protest, occupy universities and boycott examinations. Many have been arrested, while predictably, the arrests of leftist students such as Mohammad-Yousef Rashidi and Muhammad Pour-Abdollah, as well as the recent execution of activists from the oppressed Kurdish minority, go largely unnoticed. Yet the self-appointed “leadership” of the Green Movement has demonstrated a case of political treason worthy of historical remembrance. The first act came from the main opposition figure Mir-Hossein Mousavi who granted legitimacy to Ahmadinejad’s coup government. Another figure, shamelessly and in the face of all the violent repression, equated any demand for the dismantling of the regime with “seeking violence”. Another, while calling himself the “think-tank” of the movement, expressed his disdain for unity with secular forces, while yet another uttered “there is no similarity between today and the 1979 revolution…today revolution is neither possible nor desirable”. One can only hope that this atrocious betrayal will be remembered on the streets of Tehran and hasten their political demise. The crisis at the top and among the ruling class of Iran becomes both deeper and more apparent everyday. However, the illegality of independent trade unions, the brutal repression of the 1980s, as well as the collapse of the Soviet Union, has resulted in the absence of an organised left-wing current in the movement. Rotten liberal and nationalist leftovers continue to hold ideological hegemony. Consequently the mood among Iranian workers can be described as contradictory: on the one hand they recognise themselves as members of a distinct class, the working class, with their interests running counter to those of their bosses and the political establishment. But on the other, this antagonism is yet to translate into self-organisation and the formation of an organic working class leadership, of workers seeing themselves not merely as a class of their own, but as a class for their own. Encouragingly, the embryo for such self-organisation has begun to form. Illegal independent trade unions, such as the Tehran Bus Drivers’ Union, continue to raise their heads around the country. Strikes and vicious industrial confrontations have become increasingly regular. In early January, workers at a power plant in western Iran forced agreement to their demands through a successful strike. In fact, now that the image of an invincible dictatorship is broken, rupture at the top and turmoil at the bottom of society has provided the workers with an unprecedented opportunity to organise, unite and throw themselves into struggle. By using their industrial muscle, they have the capacity to break the economic backbone of the regime and set about building society anew. Without the social and economic power of the working class there’s little hope that this movement will succeed even in championing its current and limited demands, let alone in putting an end to the violence and the misery that is everyday life for workers, women, students, minorities and the disenfranchised. What is clear today is an unspoken break with Mousavi’s ideas. With the lack of any real alternative he continues to play the role of a flagpole for all to unite around, but by no means does his affection toward the late Ayatollah Khomeini or his love affair with the “golden years of the Islamic Republic” ring true with the disenchanted youth of Iran. The workers and the students of Iran demand real change. They are pushing for the entirety of the establishment to go, and all signs point to their defiant determination to get it – peacefully if they can, forcibly if they must.