[Marxism] US-Iraq alliance in Iran?

[Louis Proyect]

Fred Feldman wrote:
> Yet that did not prevent the Iran-Contra dealings in the 1985-6 period (arms
> to Iran in exchange for money that was used to finance the Nicaraguan
> contras), which took place while Washington and France were strongly backing
> the Iraqi war against Iran.

Let me repeat myself. The USA has always had a much better understanding 
of its class interests than any Arab or Islamic power in the Middle 
East. The PLO, the Islamic Republic of Iran, Saddam Hussein, et al have 
had conflicted relationships with imperialism. Despite being on a 
collison course on fundamental class basis, the leaderships of Iran, the 
Palestinians, the Iraqis et al have tried to strike deals with their 
adversaries. The item about a "moderate" Hamas from the LRB that I 
posted the other day is in line with this analysis.

The bazaari/mullah bourgeoisie in Iran no doubt sees itself as being in 
the front lines against imperialism, but so did Stalin no doubt when he 
was making deals to sell out the Vietnamese after WWII. It matters more 
what people do than what they say.

I understand that comrades might be looking for a silver lining in dark 
clouds, but it does little good to attach ourselves to Mahmoud 
Ahmadinejad because everybody in the US government and media hates him. 
In a way, this kind of elective affinity reminds me of how young 
radicals rediscovered how great Stalin was in the late 1960s. How could 
you not admire an historical figure who was so reviled by American 
politicians and journalists.

I would urge anybody who has a university account or the willingness to 
go to a well-stocked public library to check out Val Moghadam's article 
"Socialism or Anti-Imperialism? The Left and Revolution in Iran" that 
appeared in the November-December 1987 New Left Review. It is too long 
to post to the list, but is well worth tracking down since not much has 
changed in the past 20 years, especially given Ahmadinejad's declared 
intention to turn back the clock. Here are some excerpts:

The Left’s focus on dependency and anti-imperialism blinded it to the 
exploitative nature of the Bazaar, and the politicization of a clerical 
caste that was beginning to talk of Islamic government. [15] It also 
obscured the significance of the fact that an industrial proletariat had 
emerged, together with a salaried middle class and a radical 
intelligentsia. Women had achieved some rights and progress—the vote, 
growing literacy, education, employment, and increasing visibility in 
high-level government posts. Objective conditions thus existed for an 
alliance of progressive and modern strata against the dictatorship and 
for a democratic-socialist alternative. Yet even the more positive 
features of development—principally, land reform and women’s rights—were 
denounced tout court as a sham and a fraud. [16] In place of a social 
liberation model, the Left borrowed an analysis and strategy of national 
liberation that called for unity of ‘the people’ against the regime in 
one large anti-imperialist front—industrial workers, urban poor, radical 
students, the Left, the national bourgeoisie, the clergy. This rested 
upon a simple equation: capitalism 5 monopoly capitalism 5 Shah 1 big 
industrialists, agribusinesses and transnationals. Everyone else was the 
‘popular masses’, oppressed and exploited by foreign capital, us 
imperialism and its local puppets.

The shared language of opposition had a further negative effect in that 
it obfuscated very real differences between the socio-political projects 
of the Left and the Religious Right (‘national–popular government’ 
versus political Islam/theocratic rule). Moreover, most of the Left 
seemed unaware in the 1970s that the religious forces were weaving a 
radical–populist Islamic discourse that would prove very compelling—a 
discourse which appropriated some concepts from the Left (exploitation, 
imperialism, world capitalism), made use of Third Worldist categories 
(dependency, the people) and populist terms (the toiling masses), and 
imbued certain religious concepts with new and radical meaning. For 
instance, mostazafin—meaning the wretched or dispossessed—now connoted 
and privileged the urban poor in much the same way that liberation 
theology refers to the poor. But in an original departure, the authors 
of the revolutionary Islamic texts, and especially Ayatollah Khomeini, 
declaimed that the mostazafin would rise against their oppressors and, 
led by the ulama or religious leaders, would establish the ommat 
(community of believers) founded on towhid (the profession of divine 
unity) and Islamic justice. [17]

* * *

Throughout 1979 and 1980, the Left was faced with the difficulty of 
coming to grips with the nature of the new regime and formulating a 
policy of coexistence or confrontation. Most Left organizations adopted 
a position of either qualified support or total defence. Only two (the 
Maoist Peykar and the group led by Ashraf Dehghani, former Fedaii 
guerrilla and sister of the communist martyr Behrouz) were absolutely 
opposed to the new political authority, not so much because of its 
Islamic character or non-democratic tendencies as because of what they 
saw as a continuation of capitalist or comprador rule. Peykar, staunchly 
rejecting any alternative to a people’s democratic republic, regarded 
the Mojahedin and the Tudeh Party as hopelessly compromised with 
‘populist’ or ‘revisionist’ notions of popular sovereignty. It therefore 
reserved most of its criticisms and debates for the Fedaii, ridiculing 
their conceptualization of the new regime as ‘petty bourgeois’ and 
referring to the Bazargan administration as a ‘traitorous government’ 
that served the interests of ‘comprador capitalists’ and enjoyed a 
‘direct link with imperialism’. In contrast, ‘the clerical faction in 
power and the Revolutionary Council (even though it has clearly proved 
its counterrevolutionary role in these nine months) does not have a 
direct interest in ensuring us imperialist rule in Iran.’ [27]

In fact most of the Iranian Left at this time expended more energy 
attacking the liberals in government than the clerical wing. Of course 
it was easy to denounce Bazargan, who made such openly anti-Left 
statements as the following one from September 1979: ‘You Westerners 
don’t understand our Left. Our so-called leftists are the most dangerous 
enemies of the revolution. They did nothing in the struggle against the 
Shah. Now they incite workers to strike, gullible citizens to 
demonstrate, and provincial groups to rebel. They are savak agents.’ 
[28] Naturally the mutual antipathy between the Left and the liberals 
worked to the advantage of the clerics.

For its part, the Fedaii newspaper Kar (Labour) offered differing and 
contradictory analyses of the new regime. Thus it first called the 
Provisional Government ‘legitimate’ and ‘national’, contrasting 
Bazargan’s respect for democratic freedoms (particularly of assembly and 
the press) with the position of the ‘reactionary fundamentalists’; but 
shortly afterwards denounced individuals in Bazargan’s cabinet as 
‘comprador’, criticized Bazargan for opposing executions of the Shah’s 
ministers, and counterposed the ‘anti-imperialist Khomeini’ to the 
‘liberal bourgeoisie’. An article in Kar charged the National Front with 
‘conspiracy’ in relation to the fighting in Khorramshahr, a port city in 
the southern province of Khuzestan with an ethnically Arab population. 
[29] But there was no direct criticism of Ayatollah Khomeini, or the 
power he wielded, and the Fedaii’s attitude to the Islamic Republican 
Party, the Revolutionary Council and the Imam Committees was very mild 
in comparison with the invective hurled at the ‘liberals’, the 
government and the National Front.

The ocu, generally considered to be more advanced theoretically, was 
also caught up in the problem of whether the new order was thoroughly 
capitalist—and therefore indefensible—or petty-bourgeois, and 
consequently deserving of support. In an article entitled ‘Class Rule: 
Iran One Year after the Uprising’, it distinguished between the new 
‘Islamic regime’ and the ‘capitalist state’, which ‘cannot and does not 
differ fundamentally from the state of two or even ten years ago.’ But 
in countering the Tudeh Party position that a non-capitalist path and a 
non-aligned foreign policy were possible within the new state of the 
clergy and petty bourgeoisie, the ocu overstated its case. For how could 
it seriously be argued that the Islamic regime’s economic policies—some 
populist, some statist, some anachronistic (e.g., the ban on loan 
interest)—reflected ‘capitalist laws of accumulation’? And how could the 
ocu overlook the absence of a ‘capitalist programme’ within the regime—a 
situation that has persisted to this day? It was, quite simply, not a 
capitalist, and still less a bourgeois, government. It was indeed 
petty-bourgeois, but of a kind that would force the Left to attach new 
meaning to the term and to realize that a petty-bourgeois, 
anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist and anti-Zionist regime could also be 
wildly at odds with a socialist project. Nor, as women had already 
learned with the enforcement of hejab, was it necessarily progressive.

The fundamental problem, then, was not that the regime was capitalist 
but that it was incapable of organizing a viable and just political 
economy based upon democratic rights and the socio-economic needs of the 
population. This was so despite the fact that in summer 1979, following 
the provisions of the Islamic Constitution, the government began to 
nationalize all major industries, banks, insurance companies, and 
foreign trade. Other industries and services were to be run 
cooperatively, while a private sector, consisting principally of the 
Bazaar and peasant farms, was also recognized. The Left welcomed 
nationalization as part of the process of de-compradorization, although 
the Fedaii sought to instruct workers about how it differed from 
socialization and workers’ control. Unfortunately, the regime’s statist 
economic strategy stole the thunder from the Left’s platform, and 
undermined the factory councils and workers’ self-management by 
controlling and manipulating the finance system, the supply of inputs, 
and distribution. Moreover, nationalization without a development 
strategy did not lead to a healthy and growing economy: the major 
industries became a financial liability which, particularly as the state 
was also responsible for social services and the war, would eventually 
lead to calls for privatization. [30] As the economic situation 
unfolded, however, Left groups appeared unwilling or unable to do more 
than point to the obviously ad hoc nature of government planning and to 
offer some general propositions about crisis that were far from 
constituting an alternative economic strategy.
Undercutting the Left

The Islamic regime managed to undercut the Left in many more ways than 
through its populist–radical economic and social practices. One was the 
resort to anti-imperialist political actions such as the seizure of the 
American Embassy in November 1979, which met with the approval of 
Ayatollah Khomeini and was widely popular among Iranians in general. 
Another was sheer intimidation and brutality, which began fairly early 
on. Self-styled ‘partisans of God’ (hezbollahi) regularly harassed 
leftists, and in August 1979 eleven Fedaii were executed in Kurdestan by 
Revolutionary Guards. Early in 1980, in the northwestern region of 
Turkaman Sahra bordering the Caspian Sea, the regime ruthlessly put down 
a cultural–political movement of the ethnically Turkic population who 
were supportive of the Fedaii and had received assistance from them in 
the organization of numerous peasant cooperatives. Four Fedaii 
leaders—all Turkamans—were kidnapped and murdered. In April the 
‘liberal’ President Bani-Sadr endorsed the initiation of the ‘Islamic 
cultural revolution’—an invidious twist of the Maoist formulation. [31] 
This led to confrontations with university councils and especially with 
radical students affiliated to various Left groups. For the next two 
years, all the universities and some high schools were shut down while 
the curriculum was duly islamicized and left-wing faculties purged.

These developments took their toll on the Left movement. In June the 
Fedaii organization split over the nature of the regime into a Minority 
and a Majority, the latter also containing the so-called Left-Wing 
(Jenahe Chap). This was followed by the split and eventual dissolution 
of the large women’s organization affiliated to the Fedaii, and the 
gradual disintegration of the workers’ councils movement. In September, 
Iraqi troops invaded the southern province of Khuzestan, wreaking 
devastation on the area. Eventually it became clear that Saddam Hussein, 
who thought that the regime would collapse immediately, had made a 
monumental mistake. For the invasion raised patriotic fervour and 
millions of Iranians, including those who had become disaffected, now 
rallied around the regime in defence of the homeland. Again, the Left 
was faced with the problem of how to respond to yet another pressing 
development. Peykar advocated a Bolshevik-style policy of ‘turning the 
guns around’ on the regime. The Tudeh, Fedaii–Majority, Mojahedin, 
Trotskyists and Ranjabaran—who still supported the regime as essentially 
progressive, on account of its anti-imperialism—condemned the Iraqis and 
supported the defence of Iran. The Fedaii–Minority did the same, but 
also characterized the war as one between two reactionary regimes in 
which the people of both societies bore the costs. Like the other Left 
organizations, the Fedaii–Minority sent volunteers to the south at the 
beginning of the war, and many died.

The war proved to be a boon to the Islamicists in another important way, 
for it allowed the dominant Islamic Republican Party (irp) to eliminate 
its Liberal rival-collaborators (Bani-Sadr and his associates) and the 
Left. The spring of 1981 was particularly tense, and events were 
unfolding with such rapidity as constantly to overtake the Left. The 
following passage poignantly addresses the Fedaii’s dilemma: ‘Owing to 
the rapidity of daily events, we do not have sufficient time for periods 
of rigorous theoretical work and all-round ideological struggle to come 
up with thorough answers to each and every question. Today, while a pile 
of undone tasks weighs on our shoulders and new events face us every 
day, we are forced to find, in a short time, concrete, clear and 
explicit answers. Postponing these tasks for a long period of 
theoretical work and ideological struggle is equivalent to inaction, to 
falling behind the mass movement and to metamorphosis into an appendage 
of pettybourgeois crusaders.’

The Fedaii’s initial theoretical weakness was thus compounded by the 
compelling demands of the moment. Moreover, the ‘petty-bourgeois 
crusaders’, the Mojahedin, were behaving like cavaliers seuls and 
complicating the problem facing the Left as a whole. As tensions rose 
between the irp and Bani-Sadr, the Mojahedin decided to cast their lot 
in with the President—which was galling to those leftists who recalled 
his role in the Islamic cultural revolution. The secular Left and the 
Mojahedin began to move apart, as the latter were exhibiting commandist 
tendencies and a noticeable lack of interest in unity with the secular 
Left. Their alliance with Bani-Sadr and the formation of the National 
Resistance Council (nrc) reflected this. For the Left first learned 
about these developments through leaflets and newspapers, and the door 
was merely left ‘half-open’ if they wished to join a ‘government for the 
reconstruction of the Islamic Republic’. As the ocu paper Raha’i 
predicted: ‘No doubt some will still enter and only then realize that 
they must sit on the floor, by the door, as second-class citizens—their 
presence merely contributing to the legitimacy of the assembly and 
nothing more.’ Those who did join—well-known left intellectuals and the 
Kurdish Democratic Party—eventually distanced themselves from the nrc 
when it became clear that the Mojahedin were the virtual masters and 
Massoud Rajavi the authoritarian leader. By 1985 even Bani-Sadr had left 
the nrc, following Rajavi’s meeting in Paris with the Iraqi foreign 
minister. After all, whatever one thought of the Khomeini regime, it did 
not justify fraternization with those responsible for invading Iran, 
deploying chemical weapons, and bombing civilian sites.

Meanwhile, of course, in June 1981 the Islamic regime arrested leftists 
(including the much-loved Fedaii poet and playwright Saeed Soltanpour), 
denounced the Mojahedin as traitors and called for the impeachment of 
Bani-Sadr. Mojahedin cadres demonstrated in the streets—and the regime 
cracked down hard. When the Mojahedin planted a bomb in irp headquarters 
that took a hundred or so lives, including those of the entire 
leadership, the regime declared war. Soltanpour was executed, numerous 
Mojahedin were arrested, and Bani-Sadr and Massoud Rajavi fled to Paris. 
What followed was a two-year reign of terror characterized by Mojahedin 
bombings and regime reprisals. Scores of Mojahedin activists and 
sympathizers were rounded up and sent to prison, where many underwent 
torture and execution. Communist groups such as the Fedaii, Rah-e Kargar 
and ocu variously described the Mojahedin activities as putschist or 
Blanquist, whose effect was to provoke the regime into a battle that the 
opposition clearly could not win. Nonetheless, they felt that the 
solidaristic thing to do was to join the mini-civil war underway. In the 
process, numerous leftists lost their lives, their livelihoods, or their 
morale. Others fled Iran to escape the terror. Defeated and fragmented, 
many of the Left organizations underwent further splits, or dissolved. 
Ranjbaran (the pro-regime Maoists) and Peykar (the anti-regime Maoists) 
are no more; the Trotskyist organizations (which supported the regime as 
anti-imperialist for a long time) also disappeared; a faction within the 
Minority calling itself the Tendency for Socialist Revolution broke off 
and tried to form journal collectives in Europe and the United States, 
but eventually dissipated amid acrimony; the Fedaii–Minority split once 
again in 1986; the ocu is reduced to study groups although it does now 
produce intelligent analyses of developments in Iran.