[Marxism] A review of Malm-Esmailian "Iran on the Brink"

[Louis Proyect]

(This was written 2 years ago)

If light of the hostility of the United States toward the governments of 
Venezuela and Iran, should the left draw the conclusion that the social 
systems are equally progressive? There have been many articles in the 
bourgeois press about a growing affinity between socialism and political 
Islam, such as the December 9, 2006 Wall Street Journal’s 
“Anti-Americans on the March”:

“In deeply Roman Catholic Latin America, Hugo Chávez of Venezuela has 
become the exemplar of a new populism that sees common cause with Iran 
and Hezbollah. Mr. Chávez, re-elected in a landslide last Sunday, has 
met Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad several times and this summer 
was given the Islamic Republic Medal, Iran’s highest honor.”

Meanwhile, Chavez has paid tribute to the Iranian president in terms 
that would indicate some kind of convergence. In a tour of Latin America 
last year, Ahmadinejad said that Tehran and Caracas had the task of 
“promoting revolutionary thought in the world” and has referred to 
Chavez as a “brother” and a “brave revolutionary”. Meanwhile, Chavez 
Chavez said that Iran and Venezuela are “two heroic nations” with “two 
revolutions that are giving each other a hand.”

Also militating in favor of a pro-Ahmadinejad outlook is the widespread 
hostility against him on the “decent left”, from Harry’s Place to Norm 
Geras. Who would want to have anything in common with these 
pro-imperialist stooges? If this means attacking the striking Tehran bus 
drivers because Norm Geras supports them, what’s wrong with that? After 
all, we’ve had experience with trade unionists acting as cat’s paws for 
imperialism in the past starting with Lech Walesa. There might be merit 
to such logic, as long as one maintains an indifference to the facts.

Unfortunately politics does not consist of automatically putting a plus 
where the bourgeoisie puts a minus, as Trotsky pointed out in his aptly 
named 1938 article “Learn to Think“:

“In ninety cases out of a hundred the workers actually place a minus 
sign where the bourgeoisie places a plus sign. In ten cases however they 
are forced to fix the same sign as the bourgeoisie but with their own 
seal, in which is expressed their mistrust of the bourgeoisie. The 
policy of the proletariat is not at all automatically derived from the 
policy of the bourgeoisie, bearing only the opposite sign – this would 
make every sectarian a master strategist; no, the revolutionary party 
must each time orient itself independently in the internal as well as 
the external situation, arriving at those decisions which correspond 
best to the interests of the proletariat. This rule applies just as much 
to the war period as to the period of peace.”

Of course, there are those who will be satisfied to cherry pick the 
newspapers looking for any item that supports their own preconceived 
notions about the revolutionary character of the Islamic republic. For 
such people, it would be about as daunting a prospect to convince them 
otherwise as it would have been to convince a CP’er in 1938 that the 
Moscow Trials were an injustice. One might understand the reluctance of 
those zealous CP’ers to criticize “actually existing socialism” as they 
perceived it, but placing the same kind of faith in the Islamic Republic 
is another question altogether. One might attribute that to the 
diminished expectations of a radical movement in the aftermath of a 
collapsed Soviet Union. For those of us who will not settle for anything 
less than the vision laid out by Marx and Engels, another approach is 
necessary. As Karl Marx put it in a letter to Ruge in 1843:

“If we have no business with the construction of the future or with 
organizing it for all time, there can still be no doubt about the task 
confronting us at present: the ruthless criticism of the existing order, 
ruthless in that it will shrink neither from its own discoveries, nor 
from conflict with the powers that be.”

For many leftists, it has not been easy to construct an accurate picture 
of Iranian society. Notwithstanding the excellent information contained 
in websites such as the Iran Bulletin, there is no single book that 
contains the kind of well-documented analysis that the Islamic Republic 
demands. That is, until now. With the publication of Andreas Malm and 
Shora Esmailian’s “Iran on the Brink: Rising Workers and Threats of War” 
by Pluto Books, you get a full picture of the oppressive class relations 
in the Islamic Republic, as well as some indications of how they may be 
changed.

Since “Iran on the Brink” is divided into two parts–”Workers in Iran” 
and “Iran in the World”– I will post separately on each one. I will try 
to communicate some of the eye-opening information found in the book, 
but strongly urge everybody to purchase the book. It is simply the most 
important Marxist analysis I have encountered in several years as well 
as being urgently needed.

“Iran on the Brink” provides historical background on revolutionary 
movements in Iran, starting in the early 20th century. Attempts to break 
with colonial domination and the native comprador bourgeoisie kept being 
thwarted, the most notable example being the coup against Mossadegh in 
1953 that led to the Reza Shah dictatorship that was finally overthrown 
in 1979.

The authors focus on the emergence of shoras that arose spontaneously in 
factories and oil refineries around the country shortly after the Shah’s 
cronies fled the country. The shoras started out as strike committees 
but were then transformed into workers control bodies. They very much 
reflected the kind of aspirations seen in Venezuela today and target 
number one of Khomeini and his followers, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad included. 
A worker at a shoe factory spoke for all Iranian workers when he said:

“Nowadays you don’t need to tell a worker to go and work. He works 
himself. Why? The reason why he didn’t work [under the Shah] was because 
he was under the boss’s thumb. He couldn’t speak out. Now, he’ll say: 
‘the work is my own. I’ll work.’”

Unfortunately, the shoras failed to become the new state power, just as 
Soviets had become in 1917. Unlike Russia, the Iranians lacked a 
revolutionary party that could coordinate the shoras nationwide and 
press the struggle forward. This is not to say, however, that there 
weren’t groups in Iran that aspired to Lenin’s mantle. There were more 
than eighty of them, in fact. Unfortunately, they only thing that united 
them was sectarianism mixed with an eagerness to adapt to political 
Islam. In 1979, the Iranian left was still stuck in the same mode that 
would destroy the left in so many countries, namely a dogmatic 
understanding of what it meant to be a “vanguard”. The particular irony 
is that Iranian workers would have been more receptive to the leadership 
of a revolutionary party than anywhere else in the world.

Among the most prestigious of the revolutionary organizations was the 
Fediyan that had conducted a guerrilla struggle against the Shah since 
1971. Its main rival was the Tudeh, the official Communist Party. Both 
groups were heavily influenced by Stalinist top-down methods and were 
hardly in a position to engage with so profoundly a bottom-up phenomenon 
like the shoras. It should be added that the Tudeh did have an interest 
in the shoras, but it could be described as the kind of interest that 
the Democrats had in Ralph Nader. The Tudeh’s goal was to replace the 
shoras with conventional trade unions of the sort that they had operated 
in historically. Eventually, the Tudeh made a bloc with the Majority 
faction of the Fediyan that shared its hostility to the shoras and its 
belief that political Islam was progressive. With the two most powerful 
groups on the left holding such beliefs, one might conclude that the 
rise of Khomeini-ism had more to do with the bankruptcy of the left than 
its own dubious merits.

Khomeini soon developed a substitute for the shoras that was called the 
shora-ye eslami, or “Islamic council”. Rather than operating on the 
basis of class struggle, the new bodies would stress Muslim brotherhood. 
This was a brotherhood that first and foremost would put a ban on 
strikes, effective in March 1980. Strikes were now considered haram, or 
sinful. Just to make sure that nobody lapsed into sinful behavior, the 
government set up Revolutionary Guards (Pasdaran) that would break 
strikes and enforce discipline within the workplace. One metal factory 
worker described the kind of punishment Pasdaran meted out to the unruly:

“They flogged one of my colleagues to death. They accused him of having 
cursed Imam Ali. First they brought him to prison, but then they dragged 
him to the factory and bound him to a machine. All production was 
stopped and we were ordered to appear in front of the scene. I could 
only stand to have my eyes on him for two lashes. Then blood was gushing 
from his wounds. He died after 50, 60 lashes. He was about 50 years old.”

The Iranian revolution of 1979 represented a bloc of different classes 
and social layers, all united against the Shah and a comprador 
bourgeoisie. While the workers had their own class interests at heart, 
they basically assumed that they could be furthered by uniting with the 
‘bazaari’ and the clerics, who agreed with each other on the need to 
rein in the workers.

The bazaaris were merchants who had been conducting business under the 
Shah in the same way that their parents and grandparents had done. They 
resented the Shah’s fostering of multinational retail business in Iran 
that would eventually crush them, if left unchallenged. In some cases, 
the crushing was literal as bulldozers were sent in to demolish the 
stalls and small shops. In the bazaar districts of every city in Iran, 
there are mosques that serve as assembly places where grievances against 
the state could be mounted. It was natural for the clerics and the 
bazaaris to find common ground there.

When the comprador bourgeoisie fled the country, the bazaari and the 
clerics became the new ruling class. But such social layers lacked the 
muscle to police the country, so it became necessary to create a shock 
troop from poorer layers from the shantytowns in Tehran and elsewhere. 
Deeply religious, unemployed former peasants were recruited into the 
Pasdaran to keep the workers, women and oppressed minorities in line. If 
religious fervor and muscle were not sufficient, the Tudeh could be 
relied upon to keep the workers in line. Stating that “Islam is the 
ideology of the anti-imperialist revolution,” the Communists supported a 
ban on strikes, arguing that they were in the service of the 
counter-revolution.

Once the workers were bullied into submission, the new ruling class 
could go full speed ahead with capitalist development along new lines. 
Primarily, this took the form of using petrodollars to fund national 
industrial or infrastructure projects through something called the Oil 
Stabilization Fund. The fund is also used to keep the Pasdaran going and 
to provide for charitable outlays in keeping with Shiite beliefs. The 
general goal is to make Iran self-sufficient, using “import 
substitution” techniques associated with the UN economists of the 
Prebisch mold. Within this framework, the needs of the workers matters 
little. Despite rapid growth in the recent period, the workers’ share of 
the pie has diminished.

Class formation in Iran emerges through state-owned enterprises, just as 
was the case in Mugabe’s Zimbabwe and FLN-ruled Algeria. In countries 
whose economies have been heavily distorted by imperialism, the only 
recourse for capitalist growth is through public ownership–a 
contradiction that eventually resolves itself in favor of greater and 
greater doses of old-fashioned capitalism, just as recent privatizations 
in Iran attest to.

Malm and Esmailian describe Iranian capitalism as a kind of “family affair”:

“One particular millionaire mullah stands above the others: Hashemi 
Rafsanjani, generally believed to be the richest man in Iran. His 
family’s list of connections would delight a bazaari-ulama family of the 
1970s. Rafsanjani’s cousin is managing director of the company that 
dominates the lucrative pistachio export market, a brother is governor 
of Qom, a nephew is a member of the Majles energy commission overseeing 
oil and gas policies. Rafsanjani’s oldest son manages the company 
building Tehran’s subway – one of the country’s major ongoing 
infrastructure projects – while his youngest son has devoted his life to 
a stud farm in one of the must luxurious areas of northern Tehran. A 
nephew has a key position in the Ministry of Oil, a brother-in-law is a 
governor of Kerman province, home of the clan, where Rafsanjani himself 
has stakes in a factory assembling cars in a joint venture with Daewoo. 
Another son resigned from his post as a director of National Iranian Gas 
Company to run a unit linking the natural gas suppliers with the auto 
industry. And so the list goes on – according to Iranian street gossip, 
all the way to bank accounts in Switzerland, resorts in Goa and 
smuggling rings. Rafsanjani is a true millionaire mullah: one who 
epitomises the fusion of bazaari and ulama, of Iranian capital and Shia 
Islam, that has taken place over the last 25 years.”

The conditions of the working class in Iran are terrible. An estimated 
40 percent live under the international poverty line and according to 
the Iranian Central Bank itself, more than 50 percent live beneath the 
government’s designated poverty line. In May 2005, the state-run Iran 
Daily published some statistics that dramatize the growing poverty:

“Figures collected during the past 30 years indicate that per capita 
income in Iran has declined 120 per cent [!] based on fixed prices. The 
income-expense deficit for the urban family during March 2003-04 stood 
at a 3,300,000-million-rials deficit, up from 2,500,000 between March 
2002-03 and 2,300,000 rials in 1997. The gap between the rich and the 
poor has also been rising, increasing by a minimum and maximum of 1.2 
and 3 times during March 2003-04.”

Unemployment (estimated by some to be at 30 percent), job insecurity, 
forced unpaid overtime and low wages are prevalent throughout the 
country. Through the use of temporary contracts, an Iranian boss is free 
to ignore previously enacted labor legislation, including the right to a 
minimum wage. Emboldened by the mullah’s decades long assault on the 
working class, the bosses have recently begun to refuse to pay workers 
back wages. Frequently it takes workers anywhere from 9 months to 2 
years to collect what is owed them. One commentator believes that at 
least one million construction workers, a traditionally super-exploited 
sector, have engaged in physical confrontations with the boss in order 
to get paid.

Given the widespread discontent that must arise from such conditions, it 
is no surprise that Iranian workers are beginning to fight back.

In January 2004, a state-owned copper-production company in a joint 
venture with a Chinese corporation fired 1250 out of the original 1500 
workers who had just completed a new copper-smelting plant in the 
province of Kerman, despite being promised that they would have 
permanent jobs at the plant once it was completed.

After 8 days of strikes and sit-ins, the Islamic Republic sent in the 
cops who fired their weapons at the workers. Between 7 and 15 were 
killed, and up to 300 were wounded. At least 80 were arrested and later 
released, showing clear signs of torture.

The carnage outraged the Iranian working class and inspired a new mood 
of resistance. Enough was enough. Just as the bazaari used the mosques 
as a place to agitate against the shah, workers began to organize 
“hiking clubs” and other recreational clubs to discuss their grievances 
and to gather money for a strike fund. A welder describes how they operate:

“It is a pretence for meeting. Workers gather in an assembly and decide 
to start a fund. They agree upon the mandatory deposit and the sum 
everyone is eligible to withdraw in cases of need. The point is to spare 
workers from having to beg the foremen for some extra money if, for 
instance, a child is sick and needs to see a doctor. Instead, he can go 
straight to his mate currently handling the fund and demand due payment 
– it’s a form of independence, and it’s the mutual trust that makes it 
work.”

New shoras are springing up everywhere in Iran with the goals of 
defending the economic interests of the workers as well as challenging 
state policies that affect the workers. Since 2004, strikes are becoming 
more and more frequent despite being illegal. The textile workers at the 
Asia Wool Spinning plant in Kerman walked out in July 2005, after not 
having been paid for 14 months. When they blocked a nearby highway, 
security forces attacked them. One woman was hit by a car and suffered a 
broken leg, while another pregnant woman was kicked and dragged along 
the road.

According to one estimate, there were 140 strikes in October, 2005 and 
followed by 120 the next month. Ground down by economic privation, the 
workers only recourse is to use their collective power to fight back.

Workers have begun to communicate with each other through “workers 
bulletins” that are produced clandestinely and distributed by hand at 
the workplace and in working class neighborhoods. They include Karegar-e 
Pishro (Progressive Worker), Karegar-e Andishe (Worker’s Intellect), 
Laghv-e Kar-e Mozdi (Abolish Wage Labor) and Shora.

In keeping with working class traditions, the Iranian proletariat has 
opted to use May Day to raise its demands. When a new and entirely 
inadequate minimum wage was announced in Spring, 2005, workers raised 
the demand for a $550 monthly minimum wage. This demand developed into a 
national campaign that culminated in job actions at the massive auto 
plant Iran Khodro. Some 10,000 factory workers downed their tools in 
Golestan and 17,000 rallied in Ilam. Even in the holy city of Qom, chaos 
ensued after transport workers joined in.

When the workers of Saqqez gathered in support of a May Day resolution 
for a minimum wage, they were attacked by the cops. Seven were held in 
solitary confinement and charged with the felony of “illicit gathering”. 
Mohsen Hakimi, an Iranian intellectual, and Mahmoud Salehi, a baker and 
leader of labor groups in Saqqez, described the reaction of the workers’ 
friends and co-workers:

“Families in Saqqez decided to mortgage their houses to obtain the sums 
for our bail-out. The total value of their houses was enough, so they 
had to let us go. People came to meet us at the prison with flowers in 
their hands, and they drove us in a procession through the town, 
honking, singing, celebrating. It was a show of defiance against the 
regime.”

These are the kinds of actions that are taking place at an ever 
quickening pace in Iran today and we owe a debt of gratitude to Andreas 
Malm and Shora Esmailian for bringing them to our attention.

Eventually, the workers will find a way to unite and complete the 
revolution of 1979 that was interrupted by the bazaari and their mullah 
allies. It is incumbent on the left to reach out to such forces and not 
line up behind their enemies in the Islamic Republic.



Part two of Andreas Malm and Shora Esmailian’s “Iran on the Brink: 
Rising Workers and Threats of War” is titled “Iran in the World.” It 
takes up the issues that have put Iran on the front page of the 
newspapers for the past several years, including nuclear power and 
nuclear weapons, the “war on terror”, holocaust denial and the strategic 
importance of oil. Their approach is a model for the left. While 
maintaining the necessary distance from the Iranian government, they 
display rock-solid solidarity with the Iranian people. Furthermore, one 
can only conclude that one of the greatest obstacles to the defense of 
the Iranian nation is the government itself, which is pursuing policies 
that are self-defeating in the final analysis.

“Iran on the Brink” puts the drive to build nuclear power plants into 
historical context. Under the Shah, American companies including General 
Electric and Westinghouse invested heavily in nuclear power in Iran, 
with the solid support of the American government.

What might not be so well known is Ayatollah Khomeini’s views on the 
matter. In contrast to the Shah and to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Khomeini 
viewed atomic weapons as the work of the infidels and suspended all work 
on nuclear power. After he died, the program was revived since it was 
understood that nuclear energy was necessary for capital accumulation in 
Iran. Since Iran is virtually floating in oil and natural gas, it might 
seem like a paradox that nuclear power is necessary. The authors supply 
an explanation that is grounded in Marxist economics and common sense.

Based on its import substitution/self-sufficiency development model, it 
is imperative that Iran export oil–every drop of it. This is the only 
commodity that can generate foreign currency, such as Euros, that can be 
used to buy desperately needed capital equipment. However, the 
government is caught in a bind. Oil is also used for subsidized domestic 
consumption, such as home heating fuel and gas for automobiles. Given 
the acute social tensions that already exist in the country, it would be 
very risky to reduce the subsidies for petroleum products, hence the 
need for nuclear power.

While Iran very likely has no immediate plans for nuclear arms, the 
authors make the case that it would make sense for them to acquire the 
technology to produce them. Given the open hostility of the U.S. and 
Israel, Iran needs such weapons to avoid the same fate as Saddam 
Hussein’s Iraq. Malm and Esmailian state:

“It is up to encircled Iran to defend itself. No other power will come 
to its protection.31 Thus the rationality of the pursuit for a 
“break-out” option – a nuclear infrastructure with latent military 
potential – is not a product of the paranoid fantasies on the part of 
the millionaire mullahs. Other rulers of Iran finding themselves in the 
same situation might well come to similar conclusions. As the US State 
Department declared in a rare moment of insight in October 2003: ‘any 
government – even a secular Western-oriented one – would probably 
continue the quest for nuclear weapons.’”

“Iran on the Brink” presents a compelling case for the inevitable clash 
between the West and Iran that has already occurred in the country on 
its Eastern border. That clash can be summarized in the words, “It’s the 
oil stupid”. While there have been some fairly credible cases made that 
the invasion of Iraq and the one that threatens Iran today might have 
other causes (the Zionist lobby, the profits of munitions companies, the 
need to intimidate Muslims, etc.), it is difficult to take them quite so 
seriously after reading chapter 13, titled “Who Commands the 
Waterfall”–a reference to V. 3 of Capital, where Marx describes the 
waterfall as being less expensive than the steam engine:

“It is by no means within the power of capital to call into existence 
this natural premise for a greater productivity of labour in the same 
manner as any capital may transform water into steam. It is found only 
locally in Nature and, wherever it does not exist, it cannot be 
established by a definite investment of capital. It is not bound to 
goods which labour can produce, such as machines and coal, but to 
specific natural conditions prevailing in certain portions of the land. 
Those manufacturers who own waterfalls exclude those who do not from 
using this natural force, because land, and particularly land endowed 
with water-power, is scarce.”

Those “who own waterfalls” today are obviously the countries in OPEC 
that through the accident of natural history sit upon vast oil reserves. 
Marx points out that the owners of waterfalls (and oil reserves) can 
prevent their exploitation by capital but, by the same token, “a 
waterfall cannot be created by capital out of itself.”

The fact that these modern equivalents of waterfalls are in countries 
ruled by anti-imperialists, or threatened by local anti-imperialist 
movements, supports the interpretation offered by “peak oil” theorists. 
Peak oil is not so much about the absolute disappearance of oil, but 
that it is increasingly limited to countries deemed as “unstable”–in 
other words, countries that refuse to be picked apart by vultures like 
Exxon or British Petroleum. This tendency has been described by The 
Economist as “resource nationalism.”

While the imperialists are in desperate need of Iranian oil, the country 
cannot fully exploit the resource because the infrastructure is 
dilapidated. In order to modernize, Iran must gain access to foreign 
investments. But the West makes it difficult for Iran to sell oil as 
long as the government is considered inimical to its interests. This is 
what Marxists call a contradiction. In the fevered imaginations of the 
neoconservatives (and the liberals like John Kerry and Hillary Clinton 
who insist that Iran is the world’s greatest threat to peace), a 
lightning strike into the country would result in the toppling of the 
regime. Looking at the resentful mood of Iran’s secular-minded students 
and intellectuals, they assume once again that they would be greeted 
with flowers. There is about as much basis for this in fact as there was 
in Iraq, probably less so.

This is not to say that imperialism has not already begun to cultivate a 
fifth column in Iran that would operate against the government. Two 
areas have been singled out as potential allies for an invasion, 
Kurdistan and Khuzestan. These are where two oppressed nationalities 
have resisted the Islamic Republic for decades now. One of the 
unfulfilled expectations of the 1979 revolution was that the Kurds and 
the Arab nationality in Khuzestan would be given full rights in an 
autonomous region. That was too much to expect from the mullah 
millionaires who simply view such peoples as an obstacle to their own 
plans for capital accumulation–alongside the burgeoning labor movement. 
The antagonism of Tehran to the oppressed nationalities endangers the 
Iranian nation in the long run. That is one of the reasons the country 
needs to have a revolution that will fulfill such promises, just as the 
October 1917 revolution in Russia did.

In the summer of 2005, a previously unknown Kurdish guerrilla group 
called Pejak (Kurdistan Free Life Party) began to launch attacks against 
army and Pasdaran outposts. Unlike the KDPI and Komele, Kurdish 
revolutionary groups that emerged from the Iranian left, this new group 
emerged out of PKK camps in Iraq, where western intelligence has a heavy 
presence. At the time of the writing of “Iran on the Brink,” there was 
no evidence that Pejak was actually collaborating with the CIA, but a 
communiqué that appeared on its website amounted to a thinly-veiled threat:

“As you know, the US and the West have begun to connect with the Iranian 
opposition, and as everyone knows, oppressed people will use any road to 
reach freedom. So ask yourself why the opposition is searching for 
solutions in the US and the West … Sirs, use your reason and start 
giving us our rights before others do it … If you want to evade the 
destiny of Yugoslavia and Iraq, and show that you really do care about 
the country, then give the minorities their rights and gather them 
behind you, without any trickery.”

The same kind of ominous developments were taking place in Khuzestan. In 
2005 and 2006, bomb attacks took place against state banks and 
governmental headquarters for natural resources. The government assumed 
that the attacks were related to the conflict in Iraq, since they had 
all the earmarks of Sunni Jihadist attacks on Shiites.

However, the Iranian government was partly to blame for this development 
since it had adopted a collaborationist relationship in with the very 
forces bent on destroying it. In both Afghanistan and Iraq, the Islamic 
Republic has concluded alliances with imperialism despite the torrent of 
anti-imperialist rhetoric coming out of Tehran.

“For the US, however, the autonomy of the Iranian state is part of a 
malaise that stretches far beyond the borders of historic Palestine. In 
the two countries under US occupation, that is, Iraq and Afghanistan, 
Tehran has emerged as the prime alternative locus of power. This has not 
been achieved through anti-imperialism, or any other principled policy: 
the Islamic Republic has reached its position through insidious 
Machiavellian plots, immolating the local populations whenever it served 
its interests. In Afghanistan, Iran was instrumental in the US campaign 
against the Taliban. Deeply provoked by the Wahhabi madrasa-students’ 
hatred of Shia Muslims, Iran had been a foe of the Taliban regime all 
through its existence, financing, equipping and training its would-be 
gravediggers in the Northern Alliance. As the US opted for invasion, 
Tehran recommended that the Alliance coordinate its operations with the 
US troops, even assisting it on the ground through special forces. Were 
it not for Iran, the ground component of Operation Enduring Freedom 
would not have existed. Ten days after the flight of the Taliban from 
Kabul, Iran became the first country to reopen its embassy. But for 
this, in a first change of tune, the US was not happy.”

The same pattern occurred in Iraq:

“In Iraq, a much longer story not to be told in detail here, Iran has 
similarly supplied crucial sponsorship to the US occupation and 
undermined the Americans’ hold over the country.29 The backbone of the 
“Iraqi forces” deployed by the US against the Sunni insurgency is the 
Badr Corps, the armed wing of the Supreme Council of the Islamic 
Revolution in Iraq, or SCIRI. Founded by Iraqi Khomeinists in Iranian 
exile, having battled in the war against Saddam, Sciri reentered Iraq 
under the wings of the US occupation with discipline, combat experience, 
and absolute allegiance to Tehran. This is the force responsible for the 
mass mutilations of Sunni civilians uncovered in innumerable ditches, 
backyards and river banks in central Iraq in 2005 and 2006.”

Against such dismal, opportunist policies, the only hope for Iran is the 
growth of class politics and radical democracy. With the emergence of a 
new working class movement in Iran, as documented in part one of “Iran 
on the Brink,” we see hope for a genuine anti-imperialism as opposed to 
what exists now, the anti-imperialism of fools.

Let me conclude by stating that “Iran on the Brink” is must reading for 
anybody trying to understand Iran today and who hopes to prevent a 
terrible war from taking place. Although the White House is on the 
defensive today, there is little assurance that George W. Bush will not 
risk everything on an insane “double or nothing” gamble. There are 
increased dangers from a Democratic Party that has been even more 
bellicose on Iran than the Republican Party. To be effective opponents 
of a new war, it is imperative to be armed with the truth. That would 
begin with a reading of “Iran on the Brink,” an instant classic.

Order the book at: 
http://www.amazon.com/Iran-Brink-Rising-Workers-Threats/dp/074532603X