[Marxism] A Question Over Iran: Can the People Make History or Not?

[milongonsinga <milongonsinga@xxxxxxxxx>]

A Question Over Iran: Can the People Make History or Not?
Posted by Mike E on June 19, 2009
By Mike Ely
There is a self-deceptive politics (among some leftists) that seeks to prettify 
all kinds of reactionary forces that (for one reason or another) are in 
opposition to U.S. imperialism â including Islamic reactionaries, Kim Jung 
Il, âhardlineâ revisionists of the Li Peng and Eric Honecker type and so on.
And in the process they have a real, almost startling, hostility toward 
sections of the people who rise up in important if still-inarticulate ways.
My sense is that such politics arise from a despair over actually developing 
our own revolutionary forces â and a resigned assumption that we have no 
other alternative but to fall behind any forces (ugly, oppressive, reactionary 
or not) who (one way or another) who seem to be on Americaâs shit list.
This is not a uni-polar world with only one defining contradiction. Yes, we 
understand (and must understand) that the U.S. acts as a central pillar of 
world capitalismâ but it is hardly the only pillar or the only reactionary 
force.
As someone who remembers this Iranian regime murdering our comrades and 
drenching the people in blood, it is hard not have a far more nuanced sense of 
such events. I remember so vividly attended parties of celebration with  our 
Iranian communist comrades,  from the Iranian Student Association (ISA) at 
colleges  in  the U.S.,  as they went back to Iran (in 1979) to dive into the 
revolution â so full of hopes and energy.
And I know now, with real sadness that has never gone away, that many of them 
ended up in the prisons and torture cells of Khomenei, or wasted on the 
frontlines of the war with Iraq.
I suspect there is a whole generation of radical activists in the U.S. who 
donât know how Iranâs Islamic Republic murdered and tortured communists and 
leftists in large numbers after the 1979 revolution â to consolidate a very 
conservative-reactionary god-state. And these victims including many who had 
based their politics (naively) on forming a âunited front against 
imperialismâ with those bloody mullahs-in-power.
The importance of revisiting such history is the importance of not repeating it 
â and not misunderstanding who the theocrats are, and what they are capable 
of. And at a moment when they are exposed, hated, de-legitimized, targetted 
among the people themselves, overwhelmingly because of their own crimes, it 
would be terrible politics to rally to the Islamic theocrats defense simply 
because they are also being targetted by the United States and Israel 
externally. In some ways, those external pressures are part of that âperfect 
stormâ that may reawaken politics within Iran.
We have opposed (and must seek to oppose much more powerfully) the U.S. 
imperialist threats against Iran â and its whole long-term push to fully 
dominate the central oil fields of the Middle East. We know that the U.S. and 
Israel will pursue their geo-political strategies here. And we must understand 
and oppose those moves.
In many ways the only hope the U.S. has had for a âvictoryâ in Iraq 
involved (somehow) causing a âregime changeâ in Iran. In the media, all the 
talk is about Israelâs fear of nuclear weapons, but there is another 
more-unspoken issue: the Iraq war has long ago morphed into a U.S.-Iranian 
power struggle over the control of Iraq (and of this region). And so for the 
U.S. there are very high stakes in the eruptions in Iran.
But our brains are capable of grasping more than one thread and dynamic at a 
time â it is not just possible (but inevitable) that great events draw into 
them the attentions of MANY and DIFFERENT players with many different 
interests. The U.S. hopes to have a pro-U.S. government emerge from all of 
this. We all know that. They are intevening in countless ways â seen and 
unseen. This is undoubtedly true.
But who says that a pro-U.S. outcome is the only possibility? Who says this 
means that the current government should be supported? Who decided that the 
people of Iran have no agency, no hopes, no possibility of upsetting that whole 
table of âchoicesâ?
The world is full of very reactionary governments and forces who are in sharp 
hostility â but there is certainly no reason to believe that we (or the 
people generally) always just have to pick to side with one reactionary force 
over another. Sometimes the clash of oppressive forces create great openings 
through which radical, secular and even revolutionary forces can emerge, learn, 
organize and act.
The politics of âlesser evilâ is often a politics of lowered sights â a 
politics so desparing of the possibility of revolution, that real, living, 
hairy, complex revolution possibilities donât  even enter the thinking. They 
are there, but you donât even see them.
In essense, this simplistic approach is an approach that pulls toward a cynical 
view of  people, for their ability to learn and develop politics in complex 
situations, and which seems rooted in a rather strange attraction to any ugly 
force in the Third World that seems somehow âhard line.â What kind of a 
world will that create? What kind of evaluation is that of the forces (who are 
actually in the field)?
Some have argued that supporting the people in Iranâs streets lack a certain 
âclass understanding.â
Presumably that is because the demonstration in Iran have drawn in urban middle 
class (but not so many of Iranâs working class and even less of the 
peasantry). But is that how we understand class? If âthe workersâ support a 
U.S. war, and âprivileged college studentsâ oppose it â should we be 
confused by that? Is that kind of crude reductionist âclass analysisâ we 
want to uphold?
If Iranian students and urban middle classes are the first to strike out 
against a brutal and theocratic regime, even if they bring their prejudices and 
illusions with them â is that so bad or unusual?
History is packed with examples to discuss. (Is the Chinese revolution 
imaginable without the heavily-urban heavily-educated intellectual movement the 
1919 May Fourth Movement. Were the trade union aparatuses automatically right 
in the French may 1968 events?)
It is a good thing when college students take to the streets against a 
repressive government (with or without some workers). It is a good thing when 
secular, urban youth and women march against a theocratic regime that enforces 
medieval morality, and the veil, and much more (with or without some peasants). 
It is a good thing when people find their voice in a society that stifled them. 
And such openings are the path by which radical politics stirs even more widely 
â including precisely among the working people (who are sometimes slower to 
move).
A class analysis has many components: One is to approach the countless 
political questions of our world from the communist point of view of ending all 
oppression (a view that ultimately is in the interest of those most oppressed 
and stripped of property). It also looks at the actions of all class in terms 
of the revolutionary process.
And, finally, what is the âclass understandingâ in a view that seems to say 
we are limited to a choice between various capitalist and feudal forces. I.e. 
that the people of Iran are  forced to pick between U.S. or their own ugly, 
hated ruling class. Is that a âclass analysisâ?
Someone said to me:
âPeople opposing these demonstrations have no sense of how revolutions unfold 
in real life.â
I think there is a lot to this. Often revolution emerges from cracks like this. 
And revolutionary forces (that will have a role in the future) reach new 
audiences and forces in events like this. And the forces who drag the people 
into political life â the Rafsanjanis and Moussavis of history â arenât 
always the one who inherit the results.
Will forces within the Iranian establishment try to tame this movement with 
compromises? Yes. Will they order that demands remain within frameworks of the 
current system? Yes. Will they send marshals in green armbands into the mass 
marches to isolate and threaten the more radical, secular and revolutionary 
forces? Of course.
A great movement is not defined by those who âcalled it into being.â It is 
not limited by the forces who officially or temporarily claim to lead it. Its 
course is not set by those who try to control it. And in all of this, we look 
for, we popularize the most radical, secular, revolutionary and intransigent 
forces who ultimately represent the best interests of the people.
In many ways, the people churn up their own interests and programs in great 
upheavals. They congeal into organizations and trends that will influence a 
whole generation for decades. They will form the kinds of verdicts (in their 
own hearts and minds) that forge âa revolutionary peopleâ â for greater 
challenges and even more sophisticated actions in the future.
We have given up on that future if we were to adopt a narrow, shortsighted 
politics of always picking between this or that bourgeois player on the scene.
Kasama has just posted this from Reza Fiyouzat:
âThe Iranian people sensed a deep fracture within the ruling establishment 
â something that was clearly expressed in astonishing language and tone, in 
the televised-for-the-first time live debates between the candidates â and 
they have ceased their chance to use the divide between their rulers to their 
own advantage.
âThe people may have taken to the streets under the excuse of the elections, 
and may have been encouraged by the rhetoric of the âreformistâ camp in 
favor of some breathing room in the suffocating political and cultural 
atmosphere imposed on them, but they have forced the debate further. They are 
openly, and in millions across the country, questioning the legitimacy of the 
establishment, represented at the moment by Ahmadinejad. The people, in short, 
have moved beyond Mousavi and the reformists, but are still willing to go along 
with the tactics formulated by reformist leaders; for the moment.â
This jibes with both my impression of these events, and my hopes for these 
events â though we will all learn over time the details of what is happening 
far below the visible screen. But I do know this: If you look at Iran, any 
future hope for radical change lie among the people in the streets, not in the 
bloody military and religious forces running the government.
 
"When words cannot be better than silence, it's better to shut up." Eduardo 
Galeano

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