Student grouping moves towards Trotskyism Left wing draws a balance sheet on Iranian revolution

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Demonstrations for women's rights were set on by men with knives ...

Stalinism came to dominate the left under the Shah THIS paper provides only a brief introduction to the recent split in the OIPFG and among its supporters abroad. In the future, we hope to pubtish more articles on these and related questions. We urge you to contact us with your comments, criticisms and questions, We are members of the student organisation, Iranian Students Association, Socialist Tendency (ISA, ST). We are former members of the ISA, Supporters of OIPFG, known as the minority in some circles, a term which emerged from an earlier split in the OIPFG/ISA, over the nature of the Islamic Republic.

The Iranian revolution of February 1979, put a swift end to 50 years of a strong central state run by the Pahlavis. The Shah and his father governed in true Persian fashion - allowing no other arena for the exercise of power, whether in the bazaar, whose hold on commerce the Shah always sought to undermine, or for the ethnic minorities whose languages were forsidden, or even in the mosque. All governing bodies had to unswer to the Shah himself. Censorship was universal. The Shah's dictatorship was a prison and the long years of it had unforseen and fatal effects on the ability of its former inmates to sustain a forward motion once he was gone.

No experience No-one in Iran had any experience with democracy. No free press, 90% illiteracy among the women and 40% among the men, schools but straitjackets for the mind, a prison sentence for owning a book by Marx or Rosa Luxembourg. No one had any experience in the marketplace of ideas. Trained to wait for orders, never having learned the give-and-take of debate, self-management came hard to both the left and the workers, once the opportunity arrived.

The active left was small. Some sank from view in clandestine work, prison and martyrdom. Most emerged from the universities, from the tens of Trade union solidarity conference for Namibia - Sunday July 17, 10am at Oxford House, Derbyshire St, E2. Details 01267 1941-2.

AS THE Khomeini regime in Iran has tightened its grip on the left and the working class, debate has sharpened in the ranks of the divided Fedayeen opposition over the nature of the regime and the tactics necessary in the next period.

While the Majority of the Fedayeen has been drawn towards the Stalinist politics of the Tudeh Party, a minority, the Organisation of Iranian People's Fedayeen Guerillas, has fought in opposition to Khomeini.

We reprint here a statement from the Socialist Tendency of the Iranian Students Association in the USA, an overtly socialist split from the OIPFG. The Socialist Tendency has moved towards Trotskyist positions, and publishes a paper called 'Socialism and Revolution'. (Reprinted from Workers Review)

thousands of students at home and the hundred thousand abroad, who poured back into the country on the eve of the February uprising.

Throughout 1978, sector after another became mobilised, for one reason or another. Earlier, the international drop in the price of oil - the Shah's black gold - had weakened the foundations of the monarchy. In September 1978, the oil workers went on strike, demanding political reforms and, finally, an end to the dictatorship. They stayed on strike until the Shah fled the country, deciding among themselves how much oil to pump for domestic consumption. They revealed the vulnerability at the heart of Iran's economic miracle and brought down the Pahlavi state.

It was the demonstrations and strikes, not military action or parliamentary manoeuvre, that brought down the Shah. The street demonstrations in December, January and February were among the largest in contemporary history. Thousands of women participated; whole families went out on the streets, day after day, unarmed, braving tear gas and bullets. A general strike was proclaimed in January; all transport ceased; and the bank workers published the details of the ruling circle's financial affairs. Nobody could live through such a tempest without having their social relations tested and changed. It was an intensive lesson in new political possibilities, on a truly mass level, increasing daily as the Shah's power broke down.

Moment

For a brief moment, the left had an enormous mass following. All things were possible. The prisons were opened, neighbourhood committees kept order and distributed food, soldiers went over to the rebellion, workers kicked out their managers and took over. Tehran University became a centre for the revitalised left and the left itself expanded beyond its gates. More books were published in the first. months of 1979 than in 50 years of darkness. Arguments about the proper management of society broke out on street corners.

The power vacuum left by the disintegrating state was filled in a variety of ways, revealing both the soaring of the newly freed imagination and all the limitations hardens in years of obscurity.

The left neither values nor understood the popular nature of those spontaneous new attempts by the movement's rank and file. They plunged into the fray with all the ferocious energy of the young. They confused the slogan "Down with the Shah" with a conscious understanding of the nature of his government and its backers. They underestimated the variety of viewpoints united under that banner. Flush with their own secular educations, they underestimated the depth of Khomeini's appeal, a call to a simpler, preindustrialised time, when women knew their proper place.

Those of the left who avoided the euphoria of optimism fell into an equally dangerous pessimism. They gave up on the masses as hopelessly backward and incapable of groping their own way into the light. so they substituted themselves, with their half-digested sophisticated educations, for the untrained rank and file leadership redirecting them, gutting their usefulness as schools for the masses, and unwittingly destroying the only genuine alternative to Khomeini's own popular mobilisation.

Accepted

Another factor in Khomeini's favour was the decision of the major capitalist powers - then facing problems of their own -to make the best of a bad situation and accept Khomeini.

The fluid situation did not last long. The new ruling bloc, backed by the liberals, wasted no time. They shot up and dispersed demonstrating workers and gradually replaced the embryonic organs of popular power - the shuras - with their own hand-picked Islamic" councils. The prison gates were lowering once again.

Demonstrations for women's rights, numbering tens of thousands were organised to protest the imposition of Islamic dress, behaviour and morality. They were set on by men with knives, insulted and fired upon. Kurds, Turks and every other national minority demanded recognition of their autonomy and were denied; all-out war was launched against the Kurds: Censorship was reimposed; the universities were shut down; the civil service was purged of all non-Islamic elements. The jails began to overflow. Every left group, every organisation that was not wholly in agreement with the Islamic Republic Party, was driven underground, its members dispersed, imprisoned, tortured, murdered and sent into exile. Such is the record of counterrevolution in Khomeini's Only the working people; only the same force that overthrew the Shah, can reverse this heart-breaking defeat.

Our task is not to dwell on history in an academic way, but to examine the present predicament so that we can, as Marx said, change it. What should not be done? What were the main errors of the left during the crucial period?

The Shah and his father had absolute power for nearly half a century, except for the brief nationalist uprising in the early '50s. The left has never had an opportunity to practice the freeranging discussion and open debate that were so criticial to its healthy development.

They were fruther burdened by the model of left organisation they had inherited from previous generations, where heroism was exalted over common sense, centralism valued more than democracy, and the ability to think critically and creatively -with all the stops and starts that this entails - were sacrificed in the interests of organisation. So it is not surprising that Stalinism came to dominate the left during the Shah's period and has continued through today. Ultimately, the carelessness of the leftists where their own democratic rights were concerned paved the way for the success of Khomeini's wholesale attacks on everyone's democratic rights.

This last is particularly poignant given the depth of the longing for freedom that united the movement against the Shah.

Most of the left suffers from sectarianism and self-centredness. Unable to engage in: sincere criticism/self-criticism, intellectually stifled, it lacks a realistic analysis of both the state and society. It has had to function day-by-day, flying by the seat of its pants.

We believe that Marxism is again in crisis, mired in the accumulated weight of unadmitted defeats and unanswered questions. Only open struggle will save us, only a thorough Te-eranmanon enare orientation will determine what can be kept and what can be discarded.

Split

This organisation, which enjoyed enormous popularity during the uprising, has shared in the general defeat. Soon after the uprising, the OIPFG split into two organistions, OIPF which supports the Khomeini government, and OIPFG which opposes it.

As Khomeini's campaign against the left increased, some people in the OIPFG began to realise how bad the situation was and to criticise their own past errors and take responsibility for them. New ideas grew up inside the organisation. These new ideas, however rudimentary, came into conflict with the economist views of the leadership, for whom the revolutionary agents - the proletariat - and situation -economic crisis - were fixed for all time.

As the new tendency matured it became obvious • that the majority faction would split the organisation to safeguard its dominant position. So they did, and there are now two distinct organisations. The new organisation in Iran is called Revolutionary Socialist Tendency.

Parallel events took place in the student organisations abroad, surprisingly without any correspondence between the people inside and outside Iran.

Internationalist s

As internationalists, we will participate in anti-imperialist struggles wherever we are. Inside the US, we look forward to friendship and cooperation with all interested progressive movements.

We want to initate dialogue, both with other progressive Iranian groups and with progressive movements from other countries. We also want to participate in the ideological struggle in Iran and to asist as much as possible the revolutionary left which is operating under such difficult circumstances.

We plan to study critical social-political issues from a new perspective to advance the growth of new revolutionary theory. Some topics of interest to us are: the current situation of world capitalism, the relationship between imperialism and the state in various social systems, and different national liberatíon movements. We also want to learn about the United States and various progressive movements here, such as the anti-nuke. ecologist, anti-militarist, feminist, lesbian, gay, black and minority movements.

We would like to better understand the nature of these movements and their impact on imperialism. We will of course share what, we learn with our comrades in Iran, as well as sharing the experience of the Iranian revolution with our international friends. We realise that we have been less than thorough in the past about developing these ties and hope to catch up in the near future.

April 1983

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