Workers World, Vol. 20, No. 43
Humpty-Dumpty sat on a wall,
Humpty-Dumpty had a great fall.
Not all the king’s horses nor all the king’s men
Could put Humpty-Dumpty back together again.
November 1 – No, the Shah of Iran has not yet been overthrown, but no monarch has ever been so completely a prisoner in his own palace and so thoroughly hated by the overwhelming bulk of the population as is Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi. He cannot even afford to say to himself, as did a much earlier French monarch, “After me, the deluge.” The deluge is already upon the Shah.
A classical revolutionary situation has virtually engulfed all of Iran. In literally dozens of cities – large and small – the popular masses have risen and only be virtue of sheer naked force, exercised through the medium of the military and through the imposition of martial law, does the brutal, fascist dictatorship still hang on.
It’s not only so in Tehran, in Tabriz, in Isfahan, in Abadan, but all over the country. The ferment grows daily and unremittingly. The latest development at this writing is the strike of the Iranian petroleum workers staged in five of the southern cities.
Here for the first time the workers have not confined themselves to mere economic demands of adjusting grievances regarding working conditions and compensation, but have raised political demands of a general character: an end to martial law and the release of political prisoners. These demands go to the very heart of the political struggle.
There are innumerable signs that attest to the existence of a revolutionary situation in the country – one that has the potential not merely of going beyond the existing legal and political framework of the dictatorship but one that transcends the existing property relations between the basic classes in Iranian society.
First, it should be noted that all the social classes in Iran today – not merely one, or the most oppressed, but all the classes – are in political motion. None of the classes can any longer openly champion the status quo. To one degree or another the bourgeoisie, the comprador bourgeoisie, the petty-bourgeoisie in the rural and urban centers, and needless to say the workers and the peasants, agree either expressly or by implication that the status quo, the present situation, is unendurable and that the consequent political crisis must be resolved now. None is for letting matters stand the way they are even if theoretically such were possible.
The isolation of the Shah become daily, hourly increasingly apparent to all. Only the military, only the security forces – the hated SAVAK – seemingly stand by his side.
The army, being a conscript army, has not yet been fully tested. Evidence grows daily that rank and file soldiers are increasingly susceptible to the revolutionary ferment raging throughout the country. Although, according to the terms of the martial law, gatherings of three or more people are prohibited, the world press is practically unanimous in indicating that the soldiers have not at all abided by this aspect of the Shah’s decree.
The army is a carbon copy of Iranian class society and urgent appeals to the soldiers against the general high command will ultimately find a ready ear, notwithstanding the murderous assaults by the high command under the instructions of the Shah.
The casualties inflicted on the peaceful demonstrations on “Black Friday,” Sept. 8, far exceeded the toll taken by the Czarist autocracy on “Bloody Sunday,” Jan. 9, 1905. The sheer magnitude of the September demonstrations, which by all accounts numbered in the millions, in itself further demonstrates that this is not just a protest movement but a popular upheaval encompassing the widest and broadest sections of the masses. The capitalist media in the West has more than once since the September days said the situation is “totally out of control.”
What this really means is not what the bourgeoisie would have us believe – that anarchy reigns supreme – but that the masses no longer abide by the legal norms imposed by the fascist dictatorship. The fires and destruction in various parts of the country are not the acts of vandalism nor of individual terror. The revolutionary momentum is of a mass character which gives these acts a qualitatively different political content. They do not have the demoralizing effect on the masses that individual terrorism or vandalism have; on the contrary, they have shaken the fascist dictatorship to its very foundations.
Nor should all acts of terrorism or destruction be attributed to the masses. Certainly the fire on Aug. 19 in a theater in Abadan, which took a death toll of almost 600 if not more, was suspect from the very beginning. Accumulating evidence points to the Shah and his eagerness to blame “Islamic fanatics” and “Marxist terrorists.”
Would that the struggle in Iran, which for the moment at least takes on the character of an all-encompassing anti-Shah opposition but containing within it sharply defined antagonistic classes based on divergent class interests, could reach its ultimate conclusion solely on the basis of the social forces inherent in Iranian society. The outcome ultimately would be a thoroughgoing cleansing of the Augean stables, not only of feudal rubbish left over from centuries of previous enslavement, but of the most modern and deadliest capitalist exploitation by international finance capital.
However, Iran is not an island unto itself. The real kind resides in Wall Street and Washington and the Pentagon is omnipresent in all the basic political institutions of the Shah’s fascist dictatorship.
But to get back to the revolutionary situation in the country.
Like the beginning of every great revolution, beginning with the French Revolution and all the way down to the most important revolutions of modern times, the instinctive urge of the broad masses at the outset in struggling against the central authority, or rather the central oppressor and exploiter at the head of the state, is to unite on the broadest possible basis. Antagonisms of the deepest and profoundest class character seem temporarily muffled in the interest of achieving unity for the most immediate task – the overthrow of the oppressor, which here, of course, is the Shah’s dictatorship.
It’s now more than 50 days since the historic Martyr Square demonstration and the brutal, murderous assault by the Shah. The relationship of forces in the country changes daily, if not hourly. For in such times, what it normally takes the masses to learn in years or months of abstract political education, they now learn in days and hours.
Political currents long dormant rise to the surface. Others decline and vanish. Groupings swiftly undergo changes in their entire political physiognomy. Names may not change but political colorations do so swiftly under the impact of events. In each and every case their changes are inevitably and inexorably a response to and an expression of the interests of this or that basic class in contemporary Iranian society.
Notwithstanding all that in the light of the momentous developments since Sept. 7-8, some tentative observations may be made.
Unless all signs are misleading, the leadership is in the hands of bourgeois democratic forces concentrated principally around Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, a religious leader, and not in the hands of a working class party.
This should not be surprising in the light of the catastrophic consequences following the imperialist-engineered overthrow of the Mossadegh regime. What followed was not the mere installation of a puppet in the person of the Shah, but the extermination of practically an entire generation of militants, revolutionaries, and progressives.
The Tudeh Party, which had been a tremendous factor, was virtually destroyed in the annihilation that followed, as were other progressives. A historic defeat of such magnitude as entailed by the overthow of the Mossadegh government not merely wipes out a generation of political leadership and activists in the anti-imperialist and working class movements, it also leaves a wide generation gap which a long period of repression has filled in with other social and political forces.
The train of historic events has also changed since the early 1950s.
On the favorable side is the decline of the fortunes of U.S. imperialism since the early 1950s and a shrinking of its military and political capabilities. The Middle East, too, has changed. In the early 1950s, Egypt was virtually the only country that had overthrown the colonial yoke and begun to make giant strides on the path of national liberation under Nasser.
Today, the hold of imperialism on the Middle East has been tremendously weakened. It faces a daily challenge from the Arab masses. The Carter administration is virtually obsessed day in and day out with what it regards as its preeminent interests in the Middle East, in which Iran plays such a tremendous role.
After weeks of what amounted to public silence, President Carter yesterday publicly assured the Shah of strong U.S. support. For a while after the September days the press and the media had shown a slight tendency to be ambivalent on the Shah in the light of this complete lack of any popular support and the existence of the broad, popular, bourgeois-democratic opposition headed by Khomeini, whom they had been trying to evaluate for a considerable period predating the September events.
Undoubtedly, the Carter administration had hoped to have a foot in both camps. For all Carter’s talk about upholding democracy and modernization, which is aimed against Khomeini, the U.S. administration was in reality searching in the Khomeini camp for an Iranian version of the reactionary developments in Pakistan which overthrew Bhutto and put in the Zia military dictatorship.
But the Carter administration has now made a choice. Carter did this demonstratively in a statement to the Shah’s son, Crown Prince Reza, who was visiting the White House. “Our friendship and our alliance with Iran is one of our important bases on which our entire foreign policy depends,” Carter told the prince. “We’re thankful for his [the Shah’s] move toward democracy.”
This was not meant as a joke. It is, however, a measure of the cynicism in the Carter administration in the light of the thousands of Iranians who have been murdered in the recent period. Carter’s re-endorsement of the Shah came some hours after Khomeini was quoted as urging the Iranian people to continue their opposition to the Shah and calling for his overthrow.
It was also noted that other leaders of the Iranian opposition movement who met last weekend swung their support behind Khomeini. Among them was Arim Sanjabi who heads the (bourgeois-democratic) National Front Party and who had earlier called for “an evolution, not a revolution.” (International Herald Tribune, Oct. 31, New York Times Service.) All this could not but have raised the prestige of Khomeini, who stands in very much the same political relationship to the Shah as Makarios did to the fascist Greek junta.
What should be the attitude of vanguard elements of the working class struggle in the light of the very fluid situation? Here again, unless all signs are to the contrary, vanguard elements in the working class and liberation struggle, taken all together, are decidedly in the minority – at the present juncture.
Unquestionably there are a host of working class organizations who adhere to Marxist-Leninist ideology as they see it. However, the leadership of the overall opposition movement is at the present time under bourgeois democratic auspices.
At the same time the strike struggles, particularly the oil strike going on right now, have demonstrated the key strategic position of the working class in relationship to all other classes of society. The Iranian working class is now much more numerous, although it is as yet without any formal trade union organization save for the government-sponsored organizations.
Even here, however, it is unlikely that those tutored in Leninist organization and strategy would not have found an opposition foothold, especially now when all of the government organizations are disintegrating and the more odious finks appointed to run them are deserting in droves and are no longer on the scene.
The bourgeoisie which has become fattened as a result of the so-called modernization, along with all the comprador bourgeois agents, has only widened the polarization that exists in Iran today. And it exists precisely because of the imperialist-sponsored modernization whose social and class consequences the bourgeoisie does not really oppose. It only seeks to curtail the political consequences, insofar as they affect the bourgeoisie. Of course the bourgeoisie is not a homogeneous class. Segments of its progressive and viable parts can under given circumstances throw their lot in with the working class struggle.
Therefore, there is a wide arena for working class leadership on behalf of the broad mass of the exploited in the all-encompassing, all-embracing democratic struggle against the Shah.
The problem is this: in the struggle against the fascist Shah dictatorship the bourgeois democratic leadership of the movement, be it Khomeini or somebody else along a similar political world outlook, aims at limiting the revolution to the political overthrow of the Shah, leaving the class structure – the relations between the exploited and exploiter classes – intact.
The organic tendency of the working class, as a class, in alliance with the peasantry, the rural poor, and the petty-bourgeois democratic elements in the urban centers, lies in carrying through the (bourgeois) democratic revolution to its ultimate conclusion by overthrowing the comprador bourgeoisie which is in solid alliance with imperialism and a captive of it.
What then are the tasks of the vanguard working class organizations in the present phase of the struggle when the leadership of the overall opposition is not in their hands? Their duty is first of all to support the movement will all the vigor, all the energy and devotion available to them.
It can be said, almost without any qualification, that this has been the case all along the line anyhow.
This by no means exhausts the strategic approach to the revolution. It is necessary to both support the movement but at the same time maintain class independence. This is not merely an urgent task of the politics of the current situation but also one of art, of knowing how to skillfully win the hegemony of the working class, and of course to organize it.
Only the hegemony of the working class can guarantee not only the overthrow of the Shah and all the other fundamental democratic tasks, but the destruction of the social, political, and class basis upon which imperialism depends to exploit, oppress, and hold in subjection all of Iran.
How the working class organizations relate to the Khomeini leadership of the movement at the present time is of key and central importance. On the one hand the working class, more than any other class, needs democracy, needs a release from the straitjacket of the fascist dictatorship to expand its organizational activities, to organize itself, to set up its own independent organs: trade unions, social organizations, political coalitions of like-minded working class organizations, alliances with the peasants and the urban petty-bourgeoisie, etc.
In effect the working class organically tends, given the opportunity and the leadership, to set up its own embryonic form of working class rule, while maintaining a firm anti-imperialist alliance with other classes. It must not, however, subordinate these urgent needs to a vague opposition program which does not envisage and may not permit an independent role of the working class.
On the other hand, blind opposition, in the current phase of the struggle, to the Khomeini leadership of the movement would be self-defeating and destructive.
In reality, which is called for is a period of critical support which rallies all the masses in the struggle against the Shah and at the same time continually enlarges the arena of independent working class struggle, thus not losing sight of its historic objective of a revolutionary, socialist transformation of Iran.
Last updated: 11 May 2026