Workers World, Vol. 20, No. 44
November 8 – The installation of a military government by the Shah at the behest of Anglo-American imperialism signals the approach of a climax in the Iranian Revolution.
The new government headed by Gen. Gholam Riza Azhari, regarded by the Pentagon as a “very close friend of the U.S.,” is in reality a ramshackle cabinet composed of some civilians and generals whose authority in the military and social base in the ruling class at the moment remains to be tested.
Its outward gestures, taken together with the Shah’s so-called conciliatory speech earlier in the weeks, suggest a thinly disguised carrot-and-stick policy calculated to confuse the masses while both continuing the repression and feverishly maneuvering with the bourgeois democratic opposition, in particular with the exiled leaders in Paris which has now become the focal point to which world public attention has been drawn.
No change in the objective relationship of the basic classes in Iranian society has yet taken place. There has been no significant shift in the correlation of social and political forces in the country. The arrest of Gen. Nematollah Nasseri, the former head of the hated SAVAK, along with other discredited and discarded officials of the fascist regime, can be nothing more than a sop to the masses and possibly even an attempt to safeguard them by placing them in protective custody or secretly ushering them out of the country.
It nevertheless discloses growing rifts in the summits of the ruling fascist dictatorship and the inability of the regime to extricate itself from the onus of carrying on with the Shah’s rule.
Nevertheless, the most significant aspect of the installation of the Azhari military government is that the armed counter-revolution is now poised for attack against the basically unarmed revolutionary masses.
The central question of every revolution which aims at a transfer of power from one class to another – and that objectively is the orientation of the workers and the peasants in contemporary Iran – is the question of arms. Unquestionably elements in the working class movement are armed. The kept press hear has hidden the extent to which the sympathies of the rank-and-file soldiers are with the masses, and even more importantly how many are directly in contact with them, helping and ready to help in the impending crisis.
The military government, which has reportedly positioned a large number of tanks in many of the cities including Tehran, Isfahan, Tabriz, Abadan, and others, discloses a double motive. On the one hand it seeks to frighten and cow the masses. But at the same time, by not positioning massive numbers of regular infantry soldiers, it discloses its fear that the revolutionary cauldron of the masses, whose hot breath has already won over an untold number of rank-and-file soldiers, may reach such proportions as to dissolve and disintegrate the command structure of the military with the ranks failing to respond to orders to attack the masses. [Le Monde of Nov. 7 reports from Tehran that “Scenes of fraternization with the demonstrators have even taken place near the University, and word has gone around that several barracks have rallied to the ‘week of national solidarity’ of the students and professors. Iranian leftists have told Workers World that soldiers at the Jay and Esharat Abbad army bases, located in the poor districts of Tehran, have gone over to the Revolution and have distributed arms to the people after battling with their commanders.]
Such is the magnitude of the revolutionary situation in Iran. And such is the classical manner in which the arming of the masses is accomplished – in the course of the revolutionary struggle!
Nothing so much explains the much-publicized hesitation, vacillation, and Hamlet-like character of the Shah as this stubborn, intractable fact of Iranian life today. But it is not the Shah alone who is continually ambivalent, hesitant, and vacillating. The entire court camarilla and the ruling establishment are riddled with doubt as witness the exodus and desertion of so many erstwhile ardent supporters of his fascist dictatorial rule.
It is the social and political instability of the regime arising from its inability to resolve or ameliorate the acutest class contradictions that is the root cause of the overall present social and political crisis. That is why the Pentagon itself, through a spokesman, viewed the installation of the military regime with deep pessimism.
“The military can only suppress the symptoms,” the unnamed spokesman said in the Wall Street Journal of Nov. 7. “It cannot deal with the deeper strains and stresses of Iranian society.” How correct. What a valuable admission from the Pentagon itself. Except where he says “strains and stresses” there should be substituted instead, “the deepest and profoundest class antagonisms.”
The installation of the military as the governing group may have momentarily blunted the momentum of the Revolution. On the other hand, it has afforded the vanguard elements of the working class an opportunity to catch their breath, to more accurately asses the complicated political character of the struggle, and to perfect both the tactical and strategic approach to the Revolution.
Nothing is more important, aside from organizing and mobilizing the workers and the peasants, than to assess, and if need be reassess, the relationships to other political organizations representing other and socially antagonistic classes which are in the camp of opposition to the fascist dictatorship and which may currently be in the vanguard of the leadership of the mass anti-Shah movement.
All eyes are turned to Paris where Ayatollah Khomeini seemingly holds the reins of the overall anti-Shah opposition. His program is frequently summed up by his aides in the two-word phrase “Islamic republic.” It is often frequently preceded by the word “socialist.”
What can this programmatically signify in the contemporary anti-Shah, anti-imperialist struggle? It can only mean, if acted upon, the ouster of the Shah and the establishment of a bourgeois republic – at best a bourgeois democracy.
Any bourgeois republic which had rid itself of the Shah and his entourage would be a monumental improvement and would have worldwide significance for the oppressed everywhere. None but the Shah’s retainers can afford to say that this is not preferable to the status quo.
Marxists, of course, regard a bourgeois republic as superior to any form of monarchical or military rule. It must not be forgotten, however, that even the most democratic bourgeois regime, regime governed wholly by civilians and which affords the greatest opportunity for workers to organize and actively participate in the political, cultural, and social life of the country, is nevertheless still a dictatorship of the ruling class.
It is necessary to differentiate between the dynastic, monarchical, military, fascist, or democratic forms of rule of the bourgeoisie (which in the case of Iran is a servant of imperialism) and the class essence of that rule. This is absolutely indispensable in arriving at a strategical approach to the bourgeois democratic forces in the camp of the Revolution. These forces, which range all the way from disaffected rightists – sometimes under religious cover – to extreme radicals of the petty-bourgeoisie and of the bourgeois intelligentsia generally, are fighting together against the Shah. This is what unites the overwhelming bulk of the population.
But there are different and diametrically opposed class objectives in the camp of the Revolution. That is one absolutely indispensable element toward understanding the nature of the struggle.
The other one is that, even in the struggle against the Shah, not all in the camp of the Revolution are willing and able to fight to the end for the overthrow of the Shah, notwithstanding all protestations to the contrary. This, too, is what has to be kept very much in mind. Ambivalence, vacillation, hesitation characterize the bourgeois elements in the overall opposition as they do its diametrical opposite in the camp of the Shah.
This is very, very well understood in Washington and in London and this must be understood by all who are concerned with carrying the Revolution through to the end. The vacillations among the bourgeois groups and political organizations in the anti-Shah camp do not spring from psychological aberrations but are a response – it does not matter whether directly, indirectly, or even remotely – to the contradictory social character of the bourgeoisie in Iran.
On the one hand it seeks to free itself from the incubus of imperialist enslavement. But on the other hand the material interests of the bourgeoisie, or a large portion of it, as a possessing class are also inexorably tied to the fortunes of imperialism.
The needs of imperialist finance capital have imposed in not a few underdeveloped, oppressed countries a monocultural economy and subordinated all else to the need to maintain this one-sided economy. In the case of Iran, as with others who are subjected to a monocultural or duocultural (gas and oil) economy, this has managed not only to fatten segments of the bourgeoisie enormously and extravagantly, but has tied them to the chariot wheel of imperialism more securely than in underdeveloped countries where finance capital has a diversity of financial and economic interests of a more meager and dispersed character.
Hence the Iranian bourgeoisie is hampered in conducting a consistent, resolute, determined, and intransigent position against imperialism. Only the working class, which is a dispossessed class, can consistently fight imperialism and rally the peasants and the urban petty bourgeoisie behind its banner.
It is often assumed that because the Carter administration has so loudly proclaimed its support for the Shah’s regime that it is unalterably tied solely and exclusively to him. In reality this is not at all true. The real problem of the Carter administration is and has been for a considerable period and certainly since the September days beginning with Bloody Friday (Sept. 7-8) how “to separate out the man (the Shah) from the system” which finance capital has both strengthened and cultivated.
The fortunes of the Shah’s personal dynastic and fascist rule are so intertwined with imperialist interests as to make it an extreme hazard for American finance capital to attempt or permit him to be ousted. This is the political dilemma of U.S. imperialism in Iran.
The conciliators in the anti-Shah camp, among whom there are not a few bourgeois politicians, are scurrying back and forth carrying messages both overt and covert in Paris and god knows where else on how to effectuate what is referred to among bourgeois historians as a peaceful devolution of authority, which would rid Iran of the face of the fascist dictatorship with its ugliest and most repulsive features while retaining the infrastructure of bourgeois rule. In the concrete historical situation of Iran, this means inevitable dependence and reliance upon imperialism.
Seen in the light of Twentieth Century history, the problem of what goes under the name of devolution of authority is the preoccupation of the politicians of the bourgeoisie whenever an existing oppressive regime of the bourgeoisie is tottering under the revolutionary onslaught of the masses: how to effect a change of form while leaving the fundamental ingredients of class rule intact? This is the driving force behind the role of the “compromisers.” In juridical terms they are seeking under the name of the devolution of authority a peaceful transition and moreover secretive methods of blocking the revolutionary road of the masses.
How, then, explain the intransigence of Khomeini?
First of all, some bias prevalent in the West and in particular in the U.S. against the Islamic religion should be cast aside.
In the United States, and even more so in Western Europe and particularly Italy, some working class leaders have found it to be quite in accord with their version of Marxism not only to gingerly have collaborated with the bourgeois imperialist Christian Democrats for the last few years but to have created with ease and facility an accommodation with the Vatican in which they have all but fallen on all fours, to the delight and merriment of the entire world bourgeoisie. In condemning these tactics of the Italian CP, not an iota of religious bias should be involved but class and political relations which are at the core of the CPI’s policy.
It is precisely because of their conception of religion in the light of the class struggle that Marxists find themselves at polar opposites from all sorts of bourgeois iconoclastic ideologists, who regard religion from the point of view of bourgeois rationalism rather than the class struggle.
Marxist-Leninists have always supported even the most fanatically religious leader of an oppressed nation in the struggle against imperialism. Such a leader of an oppressed nation is to be supported if he is struggling against imperialism a hundred times more than an urbane, polished, educated bourgeois politician who is conciliating with imperialism.
There is all of Leninism involved in this contraposition between the religious leader of an oppressed country who fights imperialism as against one who no matter who lofty or advanced his bourgeois conceptions may be, conciliates with imperialism.
What we have said above by no means should serve as a thesis for the working class, which has its own independent class objectives, more than critically supporting Khomeini and/or the Islamic left, whose leadership is preponderant in the anti-Shah movement.
Our conception of critical support is based upon Leninist teaching. It calls in such cases as the present for the vanguard elements of the working class to organize, agitate, educate, and elevate the class consciousness of the workers independently of the interests of other classes. In doing so, it does not at all mean reckless, ultimatistic, and irresponsible attacks against bourgeois allies in the anti-Shah opposition.
It does encompass complete freedom of action and independent agitation, but no subordination of the class interests of the workers in the interests of hostile class forces. It is always necessary to diligently search for alliances within the permissible class limits in the interests of the Revolution. In every such case, the analysis of the concrete situation of the moment is of course of critical importance.
To the extent that Khomeini and elements of the National Front, which is also bourgeois democratic in character, fight consistently for the overthrow of the Shah, to that extent there is a common front between them and the working class. Whether this be validated in a form agreement or not is another matter.
Of course, it is important to bear in mind that even those in the bourgeois camp who are most sincerely devoted and dedicated to fighting consistently and intransigently against the Shah may on the morrow just as intransigently fight against a proletarian socialist revolution.
The relationship between the working class organizations and the bourgeois democratic opposition in the anti-Shah camp has now reached a critical turn because of the maneuver of U.S. imperialism in effectuating a change in the makeup of the fascist dictatorship by installing the military as a governing group. It poses a threat not only to the broad masses of the people but to the existing relationships between the Khomeini-National Front opposition and the popular masses, who until now have looked to them for leadership.
They have done so because the proletariat, although it is the main force in the struggle as evidenced by the spectacular success of the strikes and their political character, especially in the oil fields, and in the massive million-fold character of the demonstrations, is apparently weak as yet in projecting its own independent political leadership in the struggle for hegemony over the overall anti-Shah, anti-imperialist mass movement. Yet it is not as weak as the bourgeois press would make it out to be.
Even as these lines are written the emergency of the military regime has made it necessary for practically all working class organizations to once again go underground after a brief respite. Only a few of the leaders have had the opportunity to test themselves in the crucible of the mass movement while it is in motion.
This second phase of the Revolution is a testing stage. It is characterized by a momentary slowing down of its momentum and by a certain lull. Heretofore it was characterized by a continual widening and broadening of the attack against the fascist dictatorship which had been in progress until the appearance of the Azhari military rule.
Now there is a change in tempo. The Revolution and the counter-revolution are now facing off. Both are obliged to take each other’s measure. The working class through its vanguard organizations must now not only assess the character and the direction of the Shah’s junta, it must also probe to the depth anew its relationship to the conciliationist elements as well as to the intransigents in the anti-Shah camp.
The task is not easy. But the Iranian proletariat, one of the newest and strategically one of the most important detachments of the world proletariat in the Middle East, can rise to its great historic task.
Last updated: 11 May 2026