by MHI
Editor’s note: Below is a version of Raya Dunayevskaya’s March 25, 1979, “Political-Philosophical Letter” to News and Letters Committees, “Iran: Unfoldment of, and Contradictions in, Revolution.”
To preserve the original content of the letter, we have tried to reproduce the text as closely as possible to the photocopy that is linked on our archives page. Minor errors in the original text have been left as is. All footnotes at the end of the text are from Dunayevskaya’s original letter.
Dunayevskaya wrote this letter at the dawn of the Islamic Republic. We publish it right after International Women’s Day and perhaps the eve of the regime’s destruction because it emphasizes the role of women in the social revolution that Khomeini and his counter-revolutionary Islamic Republican Party crushed.
Although the letter was written 47 years ago, it remains shockingly relevant. Women’s liberationists in Iran today are still fighting against imperialism, theocratic and monarchic dictatorship, so-called” anti-imperialists” and campists, and men on the left who do not understand how “total the revolution must be if it is to uproot the exploitative, racist, sexist society.”
This International Women’s Day, we celebrate the women in Iran, who, since at least the 1906 Constitutional Revolution, have been fighting for a truly free and human society. They are an inspiration to women and LGBTQ+ people all over the world.
Students take off their hijabs in a classroom. Source: from__Iran Instagram page.
Iran: Unfoldment of, and Contradictions in, Revolution
A Whole Host of Spectres Haunting Khomeini’s ‘Islamic Revolution’
Dear Friends,
A whole host of specters is haunting Khomeini’s “Islamic Republic” before eve[n] it is officially established. There is the specter of a full social revolution in the very unfoldment of the Iranian Revolution which, after all, witnessed a series of the greatest, most powerful and sustained mass mobilizations for months on end before the three days of insurrection. Clearly, Feb. 9-12, 1979, had not only driven the Shah and his stooge, Shapour Bakhtiar, from the throne, but the manner in which the workers ended their general strike to return to work without returning their guns, as the Ayatollah Khomeini had commanded, showed that only Chapter 1 of the Revolution had ended. It put a special emphasis on the complaints of his appointed Prime Minister, Mehdi Bazargan, about lack of production. As the Deputy Prime Minister, Abbas Amir Entezan, put it: “Despite the Ayatollah’s commands, none of the major industries in the country are functioning because the workers spend all their time holding political meetings.”
As if Workers’ Councils, Neighborhood Committees, anjumeni, many new forms of spontaneous organization, and youth dominant in all, did not take on the apparition of a dual government, there came, with the celebration of International Women’s Day, a mass outpouring of women, bearing the banner, “We made the revolution for freedom, and got unfreedom,” which may very well have opened Chapter 2 of the Iranian Revolution. It is true there had been other outbursts of criticism of Khomeini from the fedayeen. But whereas Khomeini’s friend, Arafat of the PLO, persuaded them to call off the march to Khomeini ‘s headquarters[1] and, instead, hold a rally at Teheran University, the Women’s Liberationists took to the streets.
No doubt Khomeini was ignorant of the fact that March 8 was International Women’s Day and the Iranian women intended to make their celebration of the past a claim on the present and future when he issued the March 7 order for the women to wear the chador. But his mild retreat-the claim that it was a “duty, not an order” hardly succeeded in exorcising the new specter. Quite the contrary. Though the Ayatollah criticized the goons who attacked the march, tried to stone the women, and shot three, the women felt that those goons were in fact practicing what the Ayatollah preached as “Islamic law.”
For five straight days the women continued their marches, and not only against Khomeini, but against Prime Minister Bazargan, and on March 10 held a 3-hour sit-in at the Ministry of Justice. Nor did they tolerate the mass media’s autocratic choice of what they would photograph, who they would give voice to, whom they would focus on. Instead of letting their protests go unrecorded, the women marched upon the mass media, thus exposing the fact that the censorship there is now almost as total as it was during the Shah’s dictatorship. Think how quickly those bourgeois and petty-bourgeois opportunists changed sides. They waited two days after the insurrection started before they came to the radio to announce that they will not oppose the people but be “the voice of the revolution.” That was February 11. The very next day they snuck in an adjective; they now called themselves the “voice of the Islamic revolution.”
Nor was the Ayatollah calmed by the fact that the Women’s Liberationists produced a schism in the Fedayeen (and to a lesser extent also in the Moujahideen). For, while a good part condemned the actions of the women[2], others formed a human chain on both sides of the march to protect them from further harassment. That certainly was a great advance over the beginnings of the Portuguese Revolution in 1975[3] where the Left males attacked women’s demonstrations with impunity. 1979 in Iran showed, at one and the same time, that male revolutionaries would not permit attacks on women revolutionaries, and women were striking out on their own as a way of deepening the content of revolution.
Finally, the Women’s Liberationists focused on their internationalism, not limited to the invitations to Kate Millett from the U.S. and Claudine Moullard from France (who had come to express their solidarity with the Iranian women revolutionaries). The more crucial point is that the Iranian women felt that literally millions throughout the world were with them.
It is this that so frightened the Ayatollah that he dared call the Women’s Liberationists “agents of imperialism” (to which we’ll return later). The expulsion of Kate Millet is but a symbol of how he intends to roll the clock backward in his attempt to exorcise all these specters as he must first try to stop those fighting for self-determination with guns in hand—the Kurdish rebels.
Under these circumstances of ever new forces of revolution, for male revolutionaries to disregard how total the revolution must be if it is to uproot the exploitative, racist, sexist society, and once again try to subordinate women’s struggles as a “mere part of the whole” (as if the whole can be without its parts), is to play into the hands of the reactionaries, be that the “secular” Bazargan government, or Khomeini, who is trying to “institutionalize” his Islamic “revolution,” that is to say, confine it to where he can steal the fruit of the revolution—freedom—and leave the masses who made it at the bottom as in any and all class societies.
The schisms within the ruling class are not as irreconcilable as between labor and capital. Nor are they only a question of secular vs. theocratic rule. The fact that Khomeini nevertheless tried to keep some distance away from the planned March 5 celebration of the 12th anniversary of Mosasdegh, who was the first to nationalize the oil industry and shake up the Shah’s throne, throws a glaring light on what he intends to do with his so-called Islamic Revolution. Bazargan, who did sit on the platform was not recognized as any voice of the 1951-53 revolt and thus was in no position to serve as any bridge between the dissident bourgeois liberal factions. Instead, the person who spoke first was Mossadegh’s grandson, Hedayet Matine-Daftari, who criticized Bazargan’s attack on the extension of democratic rights.
More significant was the voice of the Ayatollah Teleghani who had broken with the Islamic Revolutionary Committee in late February, approving, instead, elected, not appointed, worker’s committees, thus making sure that the revolution does not stop at its very first step, the overthrow of the Shah.
There is no point in underestimating the power of the Ayatollah Khomeini the power of the Ayatollah Khomeini, whom many are now treating as an Iman even if he has not exorcised those specters haunting his revolution. That counter-revolution is right within the revolution. He knew how to hit at the women, mobilizing a few thousand to march with their chadors against the women who were protesting a great deal more than dress.[4] What the Women’s Liberationists learned here was that not all women are sisters. It is, after all, a slander to make it appear as if it were a mere question of women against men. “Sexual politics” is anything but that; the male chauvinism exposed, and that included of the Ayatollah Khomeini, was the limitation of the freedom of humanity, the abrogation of the civil rights—political, social, economic, intellectual, class.
In the latter case—the most worrisome for the Ayatollah—it was the way the workers, in this case the printers, united with the Youth on what seemed most abstract—works on philosophy of revolution, on politics, strategy, on internationalism, to satisfy their thirst for knowledge of all to do with revolution. Thus, in the very midst of revolution when the general strike was at its height, the printers decided to work double shifts so that they could satisfy that thirst. As one eyewitness report describes it:
Books are flowing at the people as fast as soldiers’ bullets…they read everything about revolution. All Marxian books that have been translated into Persian are being reprinted and spread hand to hand and house to house:
“Capital, The Civil War in France, Communist Manifesto, What Is to Be Done?, State and Revolution, Imperialism, Wretched of the Earth, Black Skin White Masks, A Dying Colonialism.”[5]
A further account reported a new translation of Marx’s 1844 Essay on Alienated Labor and innumerable leaflets.
How idiotic indeed is the bourgeois press that keeps repeating old official (SAVAK?) figures that Marxists number but 2 percent of the population![6]
The Main Enemy is Always at Home
The workers in revolution need no “vanguard parties” to tell them that the main enemy is at home, that the conflict between labor and capital is irreconcilable, and that native capital has such overwhelming tie-ins with imperialism that, if its life is threatened, the capitalists will certainly ask for imperialism to come to their aid in bringing on full counter-revolution. But under no circumstances does that mean any slackening of the workers’ own self-activity, self-organization, self-development, thus deepening the revolution. Thus, no sooner had Bazargan tried to reassert his full authority by a takeover of the oil industry than some of the workers’ leaders at once resigned from the workers’ committees in protest. Listen to Mohammad Javad K[h]atemi’s appeal[7] “To All Oil Workers and Those Who Fight for Freedom”:
After 90 days of our heroic strike, during which we have cut off all supplies of oil—the livelihood[d] of the reactionary regime and of its imperialist backers—and by the bloody struggle of the people we have succeeded in overthrowing the Shah…
As a representative of the oil workers—the heart of our industry—and as one of the initiators of the strikes in the oil fields….I am resigning because I can see that reactionary elements working under the banner of Islam are consciously suppressing the people’s freedom and rights…
It was you workers who fought and suffered from. sackings, imprisonment and the burnings of our homes and still we did not give up beçause we all felt a responsibility to the whole of the people of Iran. Myself and other representatives who were responsible for leading your struggle know better than anybody that it was woe tha you yourselves that made the victory—not anybody else…
We do not accept any dictatorship and will always support those who fight for freedom…We must remember and. understand the nature of imperialism which still has everything in its hands. We must remember what happened in Portugal, Argentina and especially Chile. Until imperialism is completely smashed such things can happen again.
This type of worker opposition, if it will once again develop a mass base, is the way to stop the attempted counter-revolution, provided that we, as revolutionaries, in turn, do not forget that to speak only of anti-imperialism as if imperialism alone was responsible for the counter-revolution in Chile, in Argentina, or anywhere else for that matter, is a deviation. It is a deviation very welcome to and indeed calculated by the indigenous capitalists. That is to say, native rulers will say anything, anything at all, so long as thereby the class struggle at home can be subordinated to fighting everything “foreign” as enemy no. 1. What World War II showed us was that, outside of Hitler himself, none were more adept at playing the nationalist game than Peron, and, contrary to Hitler,[8] he succeeded in so fooling the Left with his “anti-imperialism” that many hailed him as a “revolutionary.” To this day, Peronism has so brainwashed the trade union movement that it followed him to the end.
Or look at the Trotskyists this very moment in Iran who, while correctly fighting U.S. imperialism, are so blinded by their position that Russia is still a “workers’ state” rather than the other nuclear-armed power reaching for single world domination, that they only lay the ground for “The Vanguard Party”—Tudeh—who are even louder in their declamation against U.S. imperialism, as if it weren’t Stalin’s Russia that had occupied Iran at the end of World War II as U.S. imperialism and Great Britain helped keep Iran in tow during World War II.
Or look at how Khomeini is using the slogan of anti-imperialism to usher in his bourgeois Islamic republic, to keep Kurdistan within Iran rather than granting the Kurds, and the many other minorities hungering for self-determination, their freedom.
The first thing Khomeini declared on February 19, when the Kurds took up arms to fight for the autonomy they had been promised when they participated in the revolution against the Shah was: “I will not tolerate this uncultured behavior. I shall regard this as an uprising against the against the Islamic revolution.” Now that he has anointed himself as the “revolutionary” and all those who died for freedom and now live for it as “counter-revolutionaries”, he had his words given an old military voice. The Shah’s General Gharehnay, now aking as the Ayatollah’s General, tried yelling above the din of the Kurdish arms: “The military will never allow any part of the country to secede.” But the Kurds continued the struggle, claiming however, that it was not secession but only autonomy they were demanding. For the time being there is a truce.
As for the Iranian masses, they surely have no need of statistics[9] to attest to their miserable conditions of labor and life It is the urban poor, 70% of whose miserable wages—where they have them—go for rent, who were after all the ones to explode on Feb. 11, 1979, in Tabriz. What I am pointing to is that the Iranian Revolution started before the days of insurrection. The poor and the workers were also the very ones who were pivotal when the Army, too, folded and many rank-and-file soldiers joined the masses and gave them arms while Bazargan and Khomeini had the assurance of some Generals that they indeed would change sides if they had assurance they would once again command! The Revolution started long before the Ayatollah Khomeini emerged to lead and mislead.
Unfortunately, all those powerful mass mobilizations, and deaths of thousands, which culminated in ending the Shah’s and SAVAK’s (CIA-trained in torture) despotism and terrorism and exploitation, are but the merest beginnings of anything new, that is to say, worker- controlled. Unfortunately, Khomeini still remains very nearly unchallenged, that is seriously unchallenged, ged, asi if his intransigence in demanding “Death to the Shah!”, which had acted as a unifying force when the weak National Front was still bargaining with the Shah, was, in fact, what had begun and deepened the revolution. And, unfortunately, the Left, too, had unfurled no new banner of freedom, and some are willing to settle for much, much less, being part of State Administration, that is part of the new ruling bureaucracy while shouting “anti-imperialism.”
Of course, U. S. imperialism is the most gigantic, militaristic, nuclearly armed Titan in the world. Of course we, as American revolutionaries, must work to see that it never reestablishes itself in Iran or anywhere ‘else. And, of course, we must point to the fact that the rush to the present Middle East treaty was induced precisely by the fear “of the consequences of the Iranian Revolution.[10] Nevertheless, we must not permit the indigenous Iranian counter- revolution to hide under the slogan of anti-imperialism, as some in the Left are trying to do by branding not only U.S. imperialism but Kate Millet and, indeed, the whole women’s revolutionary movement as if they are “agents of imperialism.”[11] Nothing could assure the victory of the counter-revolution more than that kind of “anti-imperialism.”
Let us, instead, turn to the genuine indigenous roots of a most unique revolution, the very one that is now being so bandied about as if the only point involved in it, great though that was for- that year, was the Constitution of 1906. The Revolution lasted from 1906 to 1911. We turn to this period not only for nationalism but internationalism, and not only for the past but the present.
Two Iranian Revolutions, 1906-11 and Today’s
One look at the 1906 Revolution[12] will reveal its two greatest features that today’s Islamic celebrants keep quiet about. One is its inspiration in the Russian Revolution of 1905. Indeed, it was at the height, November-December 1905, that the first general strike broke out in Tehran. While today Iran means oil, in 1905 it was Baku, Russia, that meant oil, and because thousands of Iranian oil workers were in Russia and were inspired by the Russian workers fighting Tsarism, they learned also about a very new form of organization—Soviets. This, then, was what became the form of spontaneous organizations in Iran as well.
The uniqueness in Iran was that what had started out, indigenously enough, as a secret organization, became anjumani, a very nearly dual government—local units organized independently of the Shah and the Majlis by popular elections, defending their independence on the ground that there was too much bureaucratic corruption in the government. By 1907, these anjumani were by no means limited to Tehran but functioned also in Tabriz, Enzeli, and not only in the towns, but spread to rural areas. What is ironic is that W. Morgan Shuster—who was very far removed from any anjumani, much less that of women, revealed the historic role of the women by the mere description of what happened: “The Persian women since 1907 had become almost at a bound the most progressive, not to say radical, in the world. That this statement upsets the ideas of centuries makes no difference. It is the fact” (p. 191).
Shuster describes how “out from their walled courtyards and harems marched 300 of that weak sex; with the flush of undying determination in their cheeks, they were clad in their plain black robes with the white nets of their veils dropped over their faces. Many held pistols under their skirts or in the folds of their sleeves” (p. 198).
Shuster concludes: “During the five years following the successful but bloodless revolution in 1906 against the oppressions and cruelty of the Shah, a feverish and at times fierce light shone in the veiled eyes of Persia’s women, and in their struggles for liberty and its modern expressions, they broke through some of the most sacred customs which for centuries past had bound their sex in the land of Iran” (p. 192).
It is true—and this uniqueness exists unto today and must under no circumstances be disregarded in coping with the ulamas and ayatollahs—that the religious leaders sided with the revolution, or at least its first stages. As against Russia where, though Father Gapon had triggered the opening of the Revolution when his march to the Tsar’s Palace was transformed into Bloody Sunday in January 1905 by the Cossacks firing into the march, the Greek Orthodox Church sided with the Tsar, the religious leaders in Iran went with the Iranian masses both in opposing Russian domination and demanding the Shah grant a Constitution and allow them to establish a Majli (Parliament).
But even here we must see the negative features. For the first chapter, the one so celebrated now, the December 1906 Constitution, limited the Shah’s power and produced a Majlis. There then followed many spontaneous organizations that worked independently of it. Once the Majlis convened, the religious leaders began moving away from any class struggle. By October 1907, the Amendments the Majlis passed restored many powers to the Shah, especially the supreme command of the armed forces so that one could hardly call him just a figurehead. In any case, Tsarism, which had been too busy putting down the Russian Revolution to be overly involved in Iran, decided to move against it and by 1908 the Cossack Regiment bombarded the Majlis and put down the revolution. But here still another unique feature emerges. Whereas the Russian Revolution was totally crushed in 1908, in Iran it re-emerged, and the Shah was driven from his throne. It took more Cossack brigades and British imperialism as well as the Shah, after three more years, finally to destroy entirely that Revolution.
Now, it is the difference between the December 1906 Constitution and the October 1907 Amendments which point not just to the duality in the Shi’a leadership in various periods within an ongoing revolution. It points as well to today: the March 30 plebiscite staring us in the face. Khomeini-Bazargan must not succeed just because they will have won so fake an “election.” Yet we cannot entertain any illusions. It will be much, much harder for revolutionaries to function. The imminent counter-revolution is being institutionalized.
For that very reason we must stop another moment at the 1905 Russian Revolution, this time not either as it actually occurred or how it inspired the Iranian Revolution, but as it was discussed at the 1907 London Congress of the Russian Marxists—Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, Leon Trotsky who was in neither tendency then, and Rosa Luxemburg-Leo Jogiches, that is, the Polish Marxists who had in that Revolution joined the Russian party. This cannot be discussed here in any detail; that I will do elsewhere.[13] Here it is sufficient to single out from Rosa Luxemburg’s speech what is relevant for today. I am not referring to her famous theory of the General Strike, which is certainly applicable, and indeed we just saw it in Iran developing into the outright insurrection.
No, what we have to hold in mind for further development is her attack on the Mensheviks who, on the ground that Russia was a technologically backward land, wanted to confine the Revolution in the context of the very start of the 1848 German Revolution, rather than at the end of that revolution when Marx, in his March 1850 Address to the Communist League, called for the permanent revolution. Rosa insisted, instead, that not only was it right for the ground of the Russian Revolution to be the end, not the beginning of 1848, as Marx analyzed, but, above all, we had to start with what was new in the 1905 Revolution:
The Russian Revolution was not so much the last act in the series of bourgeois revolutions of the Nineteenth Century as the forerunner of a new series of future proletarian revolutions, in which the conscious proletariat and its vanguard, Social Democracy, are destined historically to play the leading role.[14]
Where to Now?
Each revolution discloses something new and unique and challenging. The new in the Iranian Revolution reveals both new strength and new weakness. Surely the sustained mass mobilizations in so despotic a land, armed to the teeth and primed by Nixon since 1972 to take over the U.S. policeman’s beat for the whole Middle East, was nothing short of a miracle, especially when you consider that the Shah extended that Great Illusion to believe he would be pivotal to the final confrontation between the two nuclear Titans: the U.S. and Russia. Moreover, they were so spontaneous that even the Left that always likes to take credit for vanguardism had to admit that not only were they not organized by any party, but they seemed to be organized by “nobody.”
Yet it would be wrong to think either that it was only spontaneity that was at work, or that “nobody” organized it. Were it so, Khomeini, whom one million poured out to welcome back, could not proceed so brazenly and so rapidly to try to saddle the Revolution with what he calls “Islamic Republic” and “Islamic moral code,” and we already saw it at work not only against the women but against the lifestyle of a whole new generation of revolutionary youth who are at the heart of this revolution.
Nor should we entertain any illusion about the “superiority” of the secular middle-class intellectuals who think that because they see Khomeini as “symbol, not philosopher of revolution,” that some “greater intellectual” than he will win in the end. There is but one grain of truth in that pretension, and it concerns not intellectuals, but theory. There is no doubt that the great weakness of the movement now, and not only in Iran, is the lack of theory, a theory stemming from a philosophy of total liberation such as is Marx’s Humanism, his whole new continent of thought from the moment he broke from bourgeois society in 1843 until his death, 1883, that is to say, from his Humanist Essays through Capital and the Paris Commune to his Ethnological Notebooks.
It took nothing short of the First World War and the collapse of the established Marxist (Second) International before V.I. Lenin recognized that, without philosophy, without the dialectics of liberation in thought as well as in fact, a Marxism reduced to economics was inadequate. In any case, what is most relevant for today, and not only for Iran, is to do away with elitism and such quick slogans as the need for an “April Theses” to “rearm the party,” as if that meant Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution with its built-in underestimation of the revolutionary role of the peasantry.[15]
Trotsky’s illusion that the April Theses meant Lenin’s “acceptance” of Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution notwithstanding, the real relevance of an “April Theses” for the transition period now in Iran is not the forced identity with that theory that Trotsky built up. Rather, the plain facts of how it came to be are what we hope will help the Iranian comrades work out on the basis of the indigenous and the new, their revolutionary national and international forces of revolution, their path to social revolution, their move from “February” not only to April but to “October.”
It was the shock of the simultaneity of the outbreak of World War I and the collapse of the Second International that compelled Lenin to return to Marx’s origins in the Hegelian dialectic and see that, without it, Marxism was reduced to vulgar materialism. He refused to stop with mere exposure of the betrayal. Rather, with Capital in hand as well as the political thesis of the need to “Turn the Imperialist War into Civil War,” Lenin delved into Hegel’s Science of Logic. Of all the revolutionary Marxists—Luxemburg, Trotsky, and many, many others—Lenin alone decided that first of all he must reorganize his own method of thinking and doing.
In a word, before the April Theses were and could have been written, there came, first, Lenin’s Philosophic Notebooks (precisely, his Abstract of Hegel’s Science of Logic). Then he worked out his theory of imperialism[16]—his confrontation with the new state of economy—monopoly capitalism on the way to state-monopoly capitalism, not outside of its relationship to the proletariat but as related to the transformation into opposite of a section of the proletariat that did gain from capitalism’s extension into imperialism. Thirdly, and above all, came a real live revolution—the Irish Easter Rebellion, 1916—which gave a new dimension to the “National Question” as self-determination, as the “bacillus” of proletarian revolution.
Finally the determinant emerges for that proletarian revolution—State and Revolution (originally called “Marxism and the State”)—and only after that could Lenin “rearm” the Party. Far from that producing any sort of debate about dictatorship of the proletariat or dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry, what resulted—and where we should begin—is “All Power to the Soviets,” that is to say, all power in the hands of the masses, their forms of organization, their control of production and the state, their smashing of the bourgeois state, and by working out a new relationship of theory to practice, and the movement from practice to theory, the establishment of new human relations. We have, after all, 62 additional years of experience, have seen Russia and China also become transformed into their opposite, with both vying for U.S. imperialism’s alliance! Surely we cannot behave as if nothing had happened in all those decades of maturation, aborted revolutions as well as revolutions transformed into opposite.
There is no way to extend and deepen the revolution if Bazargan is allowed to reduce to a consultative role the function of the committees organized by the workers to run the plants and offices. The fact that the Prime Minister feels impelled to take to the airwaves to declaim against what he calls “the dangerous logic of soviets” further exposed his capitalistic fear of the elemental passion for freedom released by the ongoing revolution. Ayatollah Khomeini’s stopping the revolutionary tribunals against the Shah’s most powerful and vicious henchmen in the SAVAK and in the government has focused on just how rapidly he is turning the clock back, and by no means only at the expense of the women’s freedom. Those acts of retrogression are not only dangerous logic. They are acts of outright counter-revolution. Let us extend our solidarity to the embattled revolutionaries—the new generation of revolutionary students as well as workers; Women’s Liberationists as well as national minorities fighting for self-determination. Let us extend the activities here to stop the interfering hand of U.S. imperialism hungering for oil and the strategic location for its nuclear global aim.
The struggle continues.
Raya Dunayevskaya,
Detroit, Michigan
Notes
[1] That this is not the first time Arafat helped stifle an ongoing revolution was seen clearest in Lebanon. See Political-Philosophic Letter No. No6, 6, August 1976, 1 “Lebanon: The Test Not Only of the PLO but the Whole Left.”
[2] Le Monde (3-14-79) prints an article, “Left Groups Advise Women Against Continuing Street Demonstration,” by its correspondent in Teheran, Jean Gueras, that quotes a leader of the Fedayeen condemning the women demonstrators for weakening the Bazargan government, thus letting “the country sink into a civil war which will profit nobody.” Evidently that part of the Fedayeen, Maoist-tinged and otherwise, is ready to settle for becoming part of the state!
[3] See “Under the Whip of the Counter-Revolution: Will the Revolution in Portugal Advance?”, News & Letters, Jan.- Feb. 1976.
[4] See The New York Times (3-11-79) which lists eight of the demands.
[5] See “Eyewitness report: Iran’s ongoing revolution” (News & Letters, March 1979) which further describes “the self-activity, self-organizing and creativity of the masses of the people. It has amazed both revolutionaries and reactionaries. In every city and village you can find all kinds of self-created committees, councils, associations and other forms of organizations, such as Kanoon (which means focus) or Anjomans (soviets). Every strata has its own organization: students, write[r]s, lawyers, teachers, bazaar merchants, bank and government staffs, and workers. Workers Committees have discharged all the government made unions and called for formation of a ‘Confederation of Iranian Workers’.” See also the eyewitness-account in Intercontinental Press (2-26-79).
[6] Peculiarly enough, this appears in one of the most serious articles in the Sunday Magazine of the New York Times (3-11- 79): “Iran: Heart of the Matter,” by R.W. Apple Jr., head of the NYT’s London Bureau. It illustrates how very “logical” the downfall of the Shah appears now, though a few months back no one among these spets would have seen “How could the Shah, a monarch who commanded more a monarch thanks than the British Army, more helicopters than the U.S. 1st Cavalry in Vietnam, be pressured so neatly out of power?” Very obviously the bourgeois journalists still have to learn both of the power of the masses and the power of
[7] We are using the translation that appeared in Socialist Review (March 1979).
[8] Some in the Arab world were so desperate about ever ridding themselves of Western imperialism that they couldn’t resist even Hitler’s blandishments. See U.S. and Russia Enter Middle-East Cockpit by Raya Dunayevskaya (News & Letters, Detroit). Lucien Rey, in “Persia in Perspective” (New Left Review, Summer 1963) rightly calls attention to the fact that there is a “counter-revolutionary anti-imperialism.”
[9] The Washington Post News Service (reprinted in the Detroit News, New 3-25-79) ran a quite informative article by Jonathan J C. Randall about those conditions of labor and problems of minorities, as well as testifying to the fact that inflation ran at a 50 percent clip, while the unemployed numbered 3.5 million.
[10] See the Editorial “Egypt-Israel: U.S. Imperialism’s Middle-East Outpost” (News& Letters, April 1979).
[11] Besides the Le Monde article cited above, which reported the slanders of the Fedayeen against Kate Millet, the women’s liberationists demonstrating in Detroit in solidarity with the Iranian women had their own experience of being heckled by Iranian students, mostly Maoists, combining their slogans against U.S. imperialism with “Long Live Khomeini.” The following week, they held a press conference in which, once again, they slandered Kate Millet and had the gall to claim that, though the Iranian women had invited her, she did not represent the Iranian women. Proof? No one stopped her expulsion. Did they ever try to stop a state power and its goons? See the Detroit Free Press (3-21-79).
[12] The most relevant book is The First Russian Revolution: Its Impact on Asia by Ivar Spector (NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1962). Far from being, as the other books listed, out of context of the Russian Revolution, it is directly related to it, and though the author is a bourgeois academic, he is objective. The book that is an in-person account is The Strangling of Persia (A Personal Narrative) by W. Morgan Shuster (NY: Greenwood Press, 1968; copyright 1912). Two other works on this period are The Persian Revolution of 1905-1909 by Edward G. Browne (London; Cambridge University Press, 1910) and The Shuster Mission and the Persian Constitutional Revolution by Robert A. McDaniel (Minneapolis: Bibliotheca Isłamica, 1974).
The most current books from the Left in English cannot compete with either daily reports or actual revolution. Still they should be consulted for background. See the following works by Fred Halliday: Arabia Without Sultans (Penguin, 1974) and Iran: Dictatorship and Development (Pelican, 1979).
[13] I will develop this in my book-in-progress, “Rosa Luxemburg, Today’s Women’s Liberation Movement, and Marx’s Philosophy of Revolution,” which will include the translation of the speeches by Rosa Luxemburg from the Congress.
[14] Minutes of the Fifth RSDRP Congress which includes the speech are unavailable in English.
[15] Trotsky’s own writings are more telling than any Stalinist slander about “underestimation of the peasantry” can be seen in “Leon Trotsky as Theoretician”, Ch. 4 (pp. 128-150) in my Philosophy and Revolution (Dell, 1973).
[16] More relevant than the book Imperialism (Collected Works, Vol. 39, Moscow, 1968, pp. 719-28, which show that Lenin referred to both Shuster’s and Browne’s books (cited above).
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