Protests in Iran

Excerpt:

....The impact of the world capitalist crisis, exacerbated by years of sanctions imposed by Washington and its allies, has hit workers and farmers hard. Iranian President Hassan Rouhani negotiated a deal with Washington to slow down the development of Tehran’s nuclear program in exchange for lifting some sanctions. This raised hopes among working people of an easing of the economic crunch.

Rouhani was re-elected president last May on these hopes, on a pledge to expand Tehran’s economy and promises there would be no return to rampant inflation. In spite of some new trade — including with Boeing and Airbus — workers’ living standards have continued to decline.

These conditions have fueled discontent with both wings of the country’s ruling clerics, those led by Ayatollah Khamenei and by Rouhani. The clerics consolidated capitalist rule in a counterrevolution following the 1979 uprising by working people that overthrew the shah, a close ally of Washington.

Protests spread Dec. 29 to Kermanshah, a largely Kurdish city in western Iran. In November demonstrations there were organized to oppose the government’s paltry assistance to the victims of an earthquake that killed 436 people and destroyed 12,000 houses.

Rouhani said Dec. 31 that Iranians were “completely free” to protest. Protesters still faced cops’ tear gas, water cannons and arrests.

In Tehran and other cities, some demonstrators have reportedly raised demands for the removal of Supreme Leader Khamenei.

Tehran’s wars deepen economic crisis

In the course of wars in Syria and Iraq, Revolutionary Guard forces and Tehran-backed militias played a key role in pushing back the Syrian people’s attempts to overturn the Bashar al-Assad dictatorship, a Tehran ally, and helped expand Tehran’s sway across the region.

But Tehran’s rising regional clout — aimed at advancing the interests of the country’s counterrevolutionary leaders and its capitalist class — comes as conditions for millions of working people at home have deteriorated. Denunciation of the Iranian rulers’ foreign interventions marked a number of the protests. Some demonstrators chanted, “Forget about Syria, think about us” and “Forget Palestine.”

Tehran falsely claims it backs Palestinian national rights and attempts to blame all ills in Iran on conspiracies from the government in Israel. In fact, Tehran helps fund Hamas, the anti-working-class Islamist group that rules the Gaza Strip.

Tehran also extended $4.6 billion in credit to the Assad regime between 2013 and 2015. The death toll among Iranian-backed forces operating in Syria and Iraq rose sharply after 2015 and includes at least 500 Iranians.

On Jan. 2 Khamenei accused Washington, Tel Aviv and their allies of fomenting the protests. The next day pro-Khamenei marches took place in Tehran and some other cities with participants chanting, “We will not leave our leader alone,” Reuters reported.

Major Gen. Mohammad Ali Jafari, commander of the Revolutionary Guards, announced he was deploying the force into Isfahan, Lorestan and Hamadan provinces — where some of the largest protests have occurred — to confront “the new sedition.”

At the same time, Rouhani’s government took steps to try and defuse protesters’ demands for economic concessions by backing down on moves to raise fuel prices.

Full article:

http://www.themilitant.com/2018/8202/index.shtml

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.