We Must Distinguish Between the Iranian People and Imperialist Manipulation
Many on the left seem uneasy regarding the situation in Iran. They look to the north and see the empire promoting change; they look to the east and see Ahmadinejad firing verbal missiles against the united states; ergo, Ahmadinejad is a revolutionary and must be defended.
However, neither the Iranian president is a revolutionary nor is the Islamic republic a republic:
Women are oppressed by a patriarchy that is founded on a fundamentalist interpretation of religion ( and one should not forget that the majority of religions lend themselves to the patriarchy). The organization of independent workers’ unions is repressed and that repression seeks legitimacy in “divine” mandates. Since when do socialists become silent in the face of such mandates against workers’ organizations, mandates that destroyed the workers’ shuras by 1983 with the charge of atheism and espionage for the USSR*? Are Mansoor Osanloo and Ebrahim Madadi, labor leaders imprisoned in Iran in April of this year with prison terms of three and five years respectively for the crime of labor organizing, agents of imperialism? And regarding the flogging in February of this year at Sanandaj prison (northwest Iran) of Sussan Razani and Shiva Kheirabadi for the crime of participating in the May Day March of 2008–Did the whip lay bare the skin of the Empire?
Ahmadinejad organizes a so-called “scientific” conference on the holocaust against the Jews and invites “luminaries” like David Duke, former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan and notorious racist against Blacks, Jews and Hispanics, and many leftists sit back, shut their mouths and close their eyes because, after all, Iran is opposed to Zionism: Very logical indeed for some to assert without using their brains that if someone is anti-semitic, he must therefore be anti-zionist, and that “the socialism of fools” is socialism after all.
Neither Mousavi nor Ahmadinejad respond to the class interests of workers or the egalitarian interests of women. However, the promotion of Ahmadinejad because he upsets united statians is irresponsible. The Iranian Revolution of ’79 was led by workers and stolen by the fundamentalists. It had an egalitarian spirit which has been forced to hide in the privacy of thoughts by a gender not allowed to express itself fully in public. Its solidarity with the Palestinians has mutated into the imbecilities of a petit-bourgeois who believes in the myths that circulate with “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” and feels attraction for the barbarity of Holocaust revisionism regarding the crimes of the Nazis against the Jews.
It is surprising therefore that the left marginalizes feminist, anti-racist, and class analysis so that it can defend an Islamic regime because of its supposed anti-imperialism.
A left that does not ground its anti-imperialism on feminism, anti-racism, and the class interests of the exploited is neither anti-imperialist nor left.
* Nazanin Amirian, personal communication. See Amirian’s excellent website. The shuras were workers’ committees organized in the struggle against the Shah. The shuras became strike as well as neighborhood committees that helped in worker self-empowerement and were embryonic participatory-democratic mechanisms after the victory of the 1979 revolution. Neither the Islamists nor the Tudeh Party (pro Moscow) trusted the shuras. See Zayar’s Iran: Revolution in Resilience, with an Introduction by Alan Woods. This text argues for the anti-theocratic working-class origins of the 1979 revolution against the Shah.
June 18th, 2009 at 1:23 pm
Very good analysis. I look forward to reading more. Keep posting!