Workers World, Vol. 20, No. 45
November 15 – The speed of revolutionary developments in Iran is absolutely breathtaking. Only a really profound and ongoing social and political revolution, such as the Iranian people are now experiencing, could have possibly brought on the stage of history so many millions of the oppressed and downtrodden, of the truly popular masses.
Of all the changes that the Revolution has brought forth, there is one that is the most significant, of most lasting importance. It is this one absolutely inescapable, stubborn and indisputable fact which is staring the imperialist bourgeoisie in the eye, but which it hides from the masses of the world by a thick fog of subtle propaganda in which the general is dissolved into a mass of particular, disconnected, and disparate details, obscuring the broad outlines of the course of the Revolution.
It is this: the Iranian working class, once a veritable sleeping giant, has now sprung into activity. It has without any doubt whatever become the key and central factor, the real driving force of the Revolution. This is what now stands out so clearly and unmistakably.
The nationwide strike movement verifies this up to the hilt. It brings out into bold relief that it is the working class which is the fundamental lever on which all the anti-Shah and anti-imperialist forces have to depend in the revolutionary struggle to topple the fascist regime. This is what is really and truly new.
What a change from previous revolutionary struggles in Iran! And what a change even from the September days of Bloody Friday in Martyr Square and the million-fold demonstrations that followed.
The fact that the working class may not have yet come out openly or consciously with its own independent, clear-cut class slogans and aims, as of this writing, does not at all vitiate its fundamental role as the central driving force of the Revolution.
Let the imperialist bourgeoisie rave, lie, and even deceive itself, let the kept press and the media lie from day to day and hour by hour and talk themselves sick with how many oil workers have been driven back to work at gunpoint by the Azhari military government. Such is the speed of developments that even the so-called daily “victories” on the number of oil workers herded back into the refineries turn out to be of a purely pyrrhic, hollow character.
“So many workers have been radicalized by the strike,” exclaims an American engineer who has safely exited out of the Iranian oil fields, “it won’t take much for them to do it again soon.” (New York Times, Nov. 15.) And therein lies the profoundest significance for the fate of the Revolution and for the death-rattle of imperialism and its servitors in that beleaguered country.
But it is not only the oil workers who have become radicalized. It is also the textile workers, the telecommunications workers, bus drivers, airline workers, workers in steel mills and in copper mines. The fact of the matter is that Iran has been in the grip of a general rising of the workers.
In almost every single case the political demands accompany economic demands and in no case have the workers abandoned the former for the latter. In almost every case the slogan has been: an end to martial law, release of all political prisoners, and the ouster of foreign technicians, who really serve as auxiliary civilian forces on behalf of the fascist regime.
The historical meaning of this is that the Iranian proletariat, a hitherto deeply subordinated class in the hierarchical social structure of Iranian society, “the lowest stratum” in the words of Marx’s famous classic, has come into its own by boldly raising political demands and even subordinating its economic demands. The Iranian workers have at one and the same time arisen and loudly proclaimed, “We are no longer the objects of history, we are no longer the raw material to be manipulated and fashioned to the needs of other hostile classes. We are now,” in the words of Marx, “the subjects of history!”
The raising of these elementary, but unquestionably indispensable, political demands at this crucial stage of the Revolution indicates that the working class movement at last is speaking for itself as the leader of the nation. Bourgeois economists and sociologists all over the world try to pass the proletariat over as a mere economic “category” along with such other artificial constructions as “commerce,” “finance,” “industry,” the mythical “public,” etc. But the awakening of the Iranian proletariat explodes this.
By making the political demands of the Revolution its own, the Iranian working class has made a leap in consciousness, a qualitative change, the kind of change which only the experience of a revolution can bring about so quickly. It has taken the first great step in independent political class consciousness – a giant step in the direction of political awareness, of consciousness of its own self-importance, which is a prerequisite not only for its own class liberation from exploitation and oppression but for ending all class oppression in Iranian society.
The long distance that the Iranian working class has travelled since the days of the CIA coup which overthrew the Mossadegh government is immense. And it is the imperialist bourgeoisie and its partners in crime, the comprador bourgeoisie, which have been the involuntary promoters of the growing strength of the working class.
Alongside all the social evils – poverty, dislocation, decay – produced by the so-called modernization so much touted by the Shah and his apologists at home and abroad, it has also strengthened the proletariat numerically and strategically in the present arrangement of the basic social classes in Iranian society. In a way the general strike of the Iranian workers which is convulsing the entire imperialist world could not have taken place had there not been that industrial development which has brought so much suffering to the mass of the population in Iran.
The paradox of it all was pointed out by Marx more than 130 years ago. “The weapons [industrialization] with which the bourgeoisie felled feudalism to the ground are now turned against the bourgeoisie itself. But not only has the bourgeoisie forged the weapons which bring death to itself, it has also called into existence the men [and now the women, too!] who are to wield those weapons, the modern working class, the proletarians.”
Nowhere in recent years has the proletariat given such a magnificent demonstration of its strength, courage, and audacity as in these crucial days in Iran. The fate of the Revolution, in the most literal sense of the word, depends on their endurance in the face of overwhelming force and violence bolstered by an imperialist colossus whose sheer might and ruthless cunning have few precedents in history.
But this colossus, as Viet Nam has shown, has clay feet.
The Iranian general strike, like every great strike, not only poses in embryonic form a challenge to the constituted state authority, but at the same time reveals the seeds of an imminent social overturn. It is not without interest that the governments of all capitalist states have always seen fit to enact so-called anti-insurrectionary legislation directed against strikes which threaten the “security of the nation.” No wonder. A general strike, more than any other partial struggle, poses the struggle for power and invariably is recognized as the greatest threat to the existence of the bourgeois state.
The general strike has certainly, boldly, and clearly posed the question of the overthrow of the Shah’s regime. In doing so the working class has not only put itself in the forefront of the revolutionary, anti-imperialist struggle, but has literally placed itself in the direct firing line of the counter-revolution, hopefully not without weapons. Its allies in the anti-Shah, anti-imperialist struggle must know that the fate of the strike will also determine their fate.
In these crucial days when the counter-revolution is seeking to muster all available help, most of all help from the possessing classes abroad and particularly from the ruling summits of American finance capital, it is the bounden duty of the American working class and all in the progressive movement to solidarize themselves with the Iranian Revolution and with the cause of the Iranian working class.
Last updated: 11 May 2026