Introduction to “Resolution on the Chinese Civil War”

This is an adopted document of the Chinese section of the Fourth International, carried by its Central Standing Committee five months before the Guomindang closed the organisation’s paper, twenty months before the organisation split, and just under six years before almost everyone who voted for it was arrested. We have not found it cited anywhere in the English-language literature, and so far as we can establish it has not appeared in English before. It is a key document in the defence of the Chinese Trotskyists against misleading criticism from the Spartacists.

We went looking for it because of a sentence in somebody else’s article. In August 2026 the International Communist League published an account of the Fourth International after the war which disposed of the Chinese Trotskyists in a single clause: that they advocated a ceasefire in the civil war and actually opposed the victory of the Communist forces. No date, no organisation named, no source. Chasing that claim through the Chinese archives led to a reference in Peng Shuzi’s political report to his party’s founding congress of September 1948, where he names this resolution as one of the two basic political documents of the postwar period and says it determined the organisation’s basic attitude to the civil war. It was sitting on the Chinese Marxists Internet Archive, in an old character encoding that defeats an ordinary search.

Read it and the sentence falls apart in a particular way, which is why the document is worth having in English rather than merely being reported on.

The first half of the charge is true. Section nine instructs the organisation’s members in Guomindang territory to raise the slogan of an unconditional ceasefire and to support every anti-war and peace movement of the masses. That is a ceasefire demand, adopted as policy, in February 1947, and this document is the evidence for it.

The same section says something the charge does not carry. It places the organisation’s sympathy in the civil war with the peasant forces led by the Communists. It declares publicly that however reactionary the Communist leadership, certain of its reform policies are progressive, and that peasants defending those gains act justly. And it instructs members in the liberated areas to stand with the peasants, without hesitation, and resist the Guomindang’s offensive.

The two instructions are in consecutive clauses, joined contrastively, and they are divided by territory. Take up arms beside the peasants where the Communists hold ground. Agitate for a ceasefire where Chiang Kai-shek does. That is a single policy with two faces, and which face a member saw depended on which side of the front line he was standing on. Reported without the territorial clause, it becomes the sentence in Spartacist.

Two further things are worth knowing before reading.

• The document was adopted by one of two Chinese Trotskyist organisations, and sections thirteen and fourteen are a sustained attack on the other. The two men named there by their pen names, Yiyin and Liangen, are Zheng Chaolin and Wang Fanxi, who between them wrote most of the Chinese Trotskyist record that survives. So this is a party line and a denunciation of the movement’s two most productive writers in the same document, twenty months before the formal split. Anyone reading it as the view of Chinese Trotskyism as such will be reading it wrongly. It is one faction’s view, and the faction it attacks had by the autumn of 1946 abandoned the peace framing entirely and was telling the Communists to make a deeper revolution and win.

• And its central forecast was wrong. The resolution treats the Communist military campaign as an adventure without a way out, degenerated by comparison with the Jiangxi period, and holds that no peasant struggle can succeed unless linked to a revival of the urban workers’ movement. Within two and a half years the peasant armies had taken the country. Whatever else this document is, it is not a prophecy that came true.

We publish it because it is evidence, not because we agree with it. Red Mole holds no brief for the ceasefire slogan, for the National Assembly as the road to peace, or for the tone taken here toward Zheng Chaolin and Wang Fanxi. What we object to is a movement being described in a sentence by people who have not read what it wrote.

On 22 December 1952 the party whose peasant war this resolution had extended its sympathy to arrested two or three hundred Chinese Trotskyists. Zheng Chaolin served twenty-seven years and came out in 1979, having spent thirty-four years of his life in prison under two governments. Wang Fanxi reached Macau and then Leeds, where he died in 2002. Peng Shuzi died in exile in 1983.

A note on the translation. The English began as a machine-assisted draft and is not the work of a professional translator. It was corrected by Gregor Benton, who has translated Zheng Chaolin and Wang Fanxi into English and who settled three disputed readings, and it was then read in full and approved by a native Chinese speaker. One term remains contested between them on how best to express in English: 政學系, given here as the Political Study Clique, a centre-right grouping of politicians and professionals dating from the 1920s which lobbied the Guomindang on the principle that experts should govern. Corrections are welcome and will be published. The Chinese original is at marxists.org, in the Fourth International’s Chinese documents section, dated 13 February 1947.

Resolution on the Chinese Civil War

(1) The present civil war in China reflects not only the contradiction between America and the Soviet Union, and the historic conflict between the Guomindang and the Communist Party, but chiefly the widespread and deep hatred of the ruling class among the people, created and accumulated by the Guomindang’s reactionary policies over the eight years of the war of resistance.

(2) The war against Japan had barely ended when the Guomindang rulers suddenly found that they had lost the people’s allegiance across “Free China”, and had rapidly drawn the people’s resentment even in the “recovered areas”. With the material base unprecedentedly weakened by the war, China’s rulers grew ever more rapacious, overbearing and lacking in confidence. They plundered the people’s wealth without restraint, seizing entirely into the hands of individual bureaucrats or of cliques what the people had won by eight years of bloodshed, such as the enemy property, with the greater part concentrated in a small upper layer of officials, so that the so-called monopoly capital of the five great bureaucratic families swelled up overnight. The result was that on a ruined and steadily shrinking material base, the Guomindang rulers’ policy of plunder produced not only unprecedented despair and discontent among an impoverished people longing for a settled life, but great and complicated conflicts of interest and centrifugal tendencies within the bourgeoisie and among the rulers themselves. Chiang Kai-shek’s rule had never faced a situation as isolated and as dangerous as it did after the war.

(3) From this we can understand why, during the war of resistance and especially soon after it ended, the vast mass of ruined and starving peasants preferred to support the Stalinist party’s feeble programme of rural reform, while the urban petty bourgeoisie, represented by the intellectuals, and the workers sympathised with its half-hearted democratic slogans. The growth of the Stalinist party’s armed forces and political influence is entirely a product of the Guomindang’s excessive rottenness, and at the same time of China’s lack of a powerful revolutionary party. There is no need to draw on past historical experience: its policy and leadership themselves prove sufficiently that it is a degenerate and hopeless petty-bourgeois party. More than once it has used the faith the Chinese masses place in it as political capital for bargaining with the bourgeoisie at critical historical moments. Its opposition to the bourgeoisie is not aimed at overthrowing it but at rescuing it by means of reform. This is Moscow’s philosophy, and it is equally the philosophy of Yan’an: the illusion that reform can ease the tension between the bourgeoisie and American imperialism on one side and the Chinese masses and the Soviet Union on the other. The class root of this philosophy is of course the petty bourgeoisie. Every inconstant vacillation, betrayal and shameless policy comes from there.

(4) China’s civil war situation over the past year has been produced chiefly by the complex social contradictions described above. When the war of resistance had just ended the situation had these features. The ruling class was unprecedentedly isolated, unstable and riven by internal feuding, and its state power was greatly weakened. On the other side, nearly half of China had fallen under the armed control of the Stalinist party, and the broad peasantry along with urban students and workers had conceived illusions in the Yan’an regime. Not only the student movement, of which Kunming was the representative, but workers’ economic strikes flourished for a time, winning in part the demand for wages indexed to the cost of living. Even in Guomindang-ruled territory there were continual scattered peasant disturbances against corruption, against grain requisitioning and against the press-ganging of conscripts. These conditions constituted a marked situation on the eve of revolution. Had the Stalinist party then been a genuinely revolutionary party, the only conclusion it could have drawn from that situation would have been to launch a broad political offensive and place the seizure of power on the order of the day, since history has never shown that dual power can coexist for long, being only the expression of class conflict at its highest tension.

(5) Unhappily this situation was thrown away, first through Mao Zedong’s compromise negotiations at Chongqing and the Kremlin’s shameful betrayal of the Chinese people by way of the Sino-Soviet Treaty, and then through the empty paper of the Political Consultative Conference, in which the so-called Democratic League and the other intermediate parties amply proved themselves mere instruments for luring the Stalinist party into surrender. Thereafter every round of compromise and negotiation demonstrated that the Guomindang was systematically exploiting the vacillation and betrayal of the Stalinist party’s upper layers, gradually converting a favourable pre-revolutionary situation into a reactionary one. The Guomindang moved from defence to offensive not only militarily but politically, and we are living through that shameful stage still.

(6) Today, a year on, the situation we face has become this. The Stalinist party has gone over entirely to hopeless struggling and military adventure, and politically has reached a dead end, hoping only that a policy of delay will bring on a greater crisis of Guomindang rule and international joint intervention, the Kremlin’s intervention naturally included. The Guomindang for its part has gained the decisive initiative militarily and politically, and its state power has become somewhat more stable. It has gained that advantage by two means: on one side by exploiting the dependence on the big bourgeoisie of the petty-bourgeois parties, the Stalinist party and its satellite the Democratic League, whose highest product was the Political Consultative Conference; and on the other by exploiting the Guomindang’s own dependence on American imperialism, whose highest product was the Sino-American Commercial Treaty and large-scale American material aid.

(7) This unhappy and hopeless deadlock has produced a marked and general change in the mood of the masses. They are not only increasingly repelled by and resentful of the Guomindang rulers; disappointment with the Stalinist party’s leadership, and a critical spirit toward it, have also gradually grown. This deep change of mood shows itself in the masses’ urgent search for a new way out, and many recent signs and facts demonstrate it. Even within the bourgeoisie, represented by the Political Study Clique’s Ta Kung Pao, the slogan of a political realignment has been raised half-consciously. Within the intermediate parties, in the Democratic League and represented by Shi Fuliang, proposals have been made to broaden the League’s lower ranks and to advance an independent programme. A revolutionary organisation must grasp this change in the objective situation and in the mood of the masses in good time, and put forward concrete tactical slogans.

(8) The main tendency of China’s postwar situation is that American imperialism has displaced the other imperialisms and become China’s master. Our general tactical slogan, as Chinese Trotskyists, therefore changes in good time to this: our main enemy is American imperialism and its instrument, the Guomindang. Around that slogan we apply our programme and construct a new tactical line. In every mass struggle that makes it easier to overthrow American imperialism and Guomindang rule we shall stand in the front rank and act jointly with all parties and groupings, and in the course of that joint action expose severely their deceptions, their vacillation and their betrayals.

(9) On this line we of course place our sympathy in the civil war with the peasant forces led by the Stalinist party, and firmly oppose the attempt of the Guomindang landlords to restore the old rural order by armed force. We declare publicly that however reactionary the Stalinist party’s leadership may be, certain reform policies it carries out do carry a progressive significance, and that the peasants’ defence of these meagre gains is of course a just act. Therefore the Trotskyists in the “liberated areas” will not hesitate to stand on the peasants’ side and resist the Guomindang’s reactionary offensive. In the course of that resistance they are to expose the Stalinist party’s compromises and betrayals and change its reactionary policy; while in Chiang Kai-shek’s rear, the Trotskyists raise the slogan of unconditional ceasefire and support every anti-war and peace movement of the masses.

(10) Today, when the civil war has reached a dead end, and when the general population, especially in the Guomindang rear, has grown cold and disappointed toward it and has developed a mood of dissatisfaction with both sides, the slogans of unconditional ceasefire and peace have become the most urgent of demands. This is demonstrated not only by the ruling class’s distorted use of the slogan, but by the systematic use of it by the Stalinist party and the other intermediate parties. But we must point out that when the Guomindang talks peace it is only trying to use this popular mood to justify its “pacification of the internal disorder”, and that when the Stalinist party and other petty-bourgeois parties talk peace they are only trying to disguise the dead end of their military opportunism and political betrayal. We Trotskyists mark ourselves off strictly from their purposes. We tell the masses that the only road to a real peace is the convening of a National Assembly elected by universal suffrage and holding full powers. Such an assembly could not only put an end to the civil war and protect the meagre reforms of the “liberated areas”, but thoroughly solve the land question, achieve genuine national independence with tariff autonomy, improve the people’s livelihood including the eight-hour day, give the people every freedom, withdraw all foreign garrisons from the country, abolish all the new unequal treaties, and bring down American imperialism and its instrument, the military dictatorship of the Guomindang.

(11) The armed peasant struggle led by the Stalinist party is one side of the Chinese people’s struggle against the Guomindang and American imperialism, and that struggle has already degenerated, for want of a correct leadership and of help from the urban workers, into a military adventure without a way out, arousing disappointment and discontent among the people across the wide Guomindang-ruled territory and even in the “liberated areas”. Seen in that light, the revival of the Chinese peasant movement and its way forward evidently still depend on the new condition we have pointed to continually: the revival of the urban workers’ movement. The Stalinist party’s several tragic defeats in the past were chiefly the result of deliberately ignoring that condition. We have therefore never exaggerated the role of the Stalinist party’s peasant forces, and should do so still less today. To place illusions in those forces and inflate their fighting into “the starting point of the revolution” would at best be a pitiful parody of the Stalinist party’s own past exaggeration of the Jiangxi peasant risings into the arrival of a high tide of Chinese revolution. We must replace every petty-bourgeois romantic illusion with Marxist realism, and concentrate all our forces on leading and organising the movement of the urban workers, the poor and the students. Therefore, alongside the armed struggle led by the Stalinist party, we must take part in and support every other spontaneous mass struggle, such as workers’ strikes and students’ anti-American demonstrations, and develop and deepen the class struggle of the Chinese masses.

(12) Recognising the change in the present mood of the masses described above, we must today point out to them, firmly and clearly, the third road in politics, which is to say the Trotskyist road; and organisationally we must do all we can to help the progressive tendencies of centrism among the masses to find organised expression, promoting a mass body capable of containing them, and by that means helping them toward the revolutionary road and toward the Trotskyist party. Whoever abandons this precious historical moment, whoever abandons this difficult task, is a criminal against the revolution.

(13) Two tendencies at present seriously obstruct our work of party-building. One is a sectarian tendency, satisfied simply with reciting socialist and revolutionary phrases, which regards every transitional means of reaching socialism, that is the democratic struggle, as “stageism” and “opportunism”; in practical work those who hold this tendency are always a stumbling block to us. The other is the opportunist tendency contained in centrism and eclecticism, which in every new struggle exaggerates its own role, conceives enormous illusions in it, and so repeatedly accommodates to bourgeois and petty-bourgeois opinion. These two tendencies are most clearly organised in the revisionist grouping of the Xin Qi faction, represented by Yiyin and Liangen. Yiyin holds that “China was socialist from the outset”, and abuses our theory of permanent revolution as “stageism”. Liangen exaggerates the role of the Stalinist party’s military opportunism and conceives illusions in it, and goes so far as to praise extravagantly such petty-bourgeois politicians on the Stalinist party’s periphery as Ma Xulun and Tao Xingzhi, whitewashing them and spreading illusions on their behalf. Liangen’s opportunist accommodation of course does not begin today; it is an organic political development running from the beginning of the war of resistance until now. These two harmful tendencies have undoubtedly already produced, and will go on producing, continual echoes inside our immature organisation. For that very reason we must redouble our vigilance and root them out attentively and resolutely, which is an unavoidable and painful part of building the new party.

(14) We note in particular that over the past year, within our organisations in every locality, those isolated individuals unable to influence or educate the masses have for the most part been organically linked in their thinking to the Xin Qi faction, and have been the most sensitive in reacting to criticism of them. What such elements have in common is this: incapacity in work, permanent enclosure in an isolated environment, an inability to educate comrades within or to influence the masses without, and, in political thought, a hopeless emptiness and confusion. Their temper is solitary and self-satisfied, consoling their own souls by looking down on everything. Out of this grows the sectarian spirit that dazzles others and drugs itself with fine revolutionary phrases, when in fact that sectarian spirit is merely the ornament of political incapacity. Such isolated elements can resist no alien class idea or pressure from outside. They never hold a stable political and class position, are forever wavering, forever lacking patience, forever sunk in a despairing discontent, and forever, out of that despair, unconsciously trusting to miracles and submitting to petty-bourgeois or bourgeois opinion.

From this in turn grows an opportunist tendency which strains to magnify the role of the Stalinist party’s peasant forces and the significance of its “reformism”, and which goes so far as to claim that the Stalinist party’s present military opportunism surpasses in historical role the land revolution of the Jiangxi period, and is the starting point of the third revolution, and so on. In fact this new armed peasant struggle, set against the land revolution of the past, is in the development of history only a degenerated and suppressed movement; and in political and social effect no peasant struggle, whatever its depth and breadth, has of itself any way out, unless it is linked in good time with the emancipating struggle of the urban working class. In a backward petty-bourgeois country such as China, modern history is full of petty-bourgeois struggles, those of the peasants, the urban poor and the students, but they have always failed for want of the leadership of the urban workers. The Stalinist party’s greatest crime is to have made a theory out of this defect, which necessarily invites defeat. Now there are actually people in our own ranks who have forgotten the tradition of decades of Trotskyist theoretical struggle and have become, quite openly, the echo of the Stalinist party, treating a degenerated Stalinist movement of rural reform and military adventure as the rise of a new revolution, under conditions of economic decay and of a working class lacking organisation and leadership. This is absurd self-deception. We should strike thoroughly at this spineless opportunist tendency and point out to the Chinese people, firmly and without minding repetition, that only the third road indicated by the Trotskyist programme is the way out; that only the revival of the working-class movement can open a new prospect; and that in the end only a new Marxist party can guarantee the victory of the Chinese revolution. Without an independent political road there is no basis for building a party, and without an independent Marxist party there is no successful revolution. Whoever does not recognise this, let him stand aside.

Adopted by the Central Standing Committee of the Chinese Communist League, 13 February 1947

Translated for Red Mole.

Names as they appear. The Stalinist party is the Chinese Communist Party. The liberated areas are the Communist-held territories, in the resolution’s own scare quotes. Yan’an was the Communist wartime capital. The Political Consultative Conference of January 1946 was the negotiating body set up under the American mediation of General Marshall. The Democratic League was the principal grouping of the intermediate parties. Yiyin and Liangen are pen names of Zheng Chaolin and Wang Fanxi, whose paper was Xin Qi, New Banner. The Jiangxi period refers to the Communist rural base areas of 1929 to 1934.

A piece here in July argued that the SWP and the Fourth International tradition have stopped differing about the theory of women's oppression, and that the live difference is autonomy: who organises separately, and through what. It rested on one editorial from Socialist Woman, spring 1974. One editorial is not much to rest on. So here is the longer document sitting behind it, Leonora Lloyd and Laurie White's 'Revolutionary Organisation and Women's Liberation', from the July–August 1973 issue of the same paper.

Socialist Woman was the paper of the International Marxist Group, British section of the Fourth International, the line that runs down through Anti-Capitalist Resistance to this publication, which borrowed its title from the IMG's other paper of those years. Lloyd co-edited it and compiled its booklist for women's liberation.

The copy we have worked from is a bad photocopy of a worse scan (many thanks to Keith W. for the copies and Rob M. for the scanning). A photograph of Helke Sander eats the inner column of the second page, and what the photograph doesn't eat the typeface does. Three or four passages are marked below as illegible because they are. We have left the gaps showing.

Summer 1973. The women's liberation movement is five years past its post-1968 rush, a socialist current is growing inside it, and Selma James's arguments against the trade unions have just been beaten at the National Women’s Liberation Conference (held in Manchester on 25–26 March 1972), a result the two authors record with visible relief. What is the revolutionary organisation's relationship to the WLM? They call the question overdue, and they are right about that.

One sentence in the article has been doing damage ever since. Faced with male chauvinism inside the revolutionary organisations, they write, the radical-feminist answer is to build an autonomous women's movement, and 'this is an incorrect solution'. Read cold, that is a refusal of women's separate organisation as such. It is nothing of the kind. The IMG ran Socialist Woman as a women's paper under women's control, and defended the right of women to caucus inside the organisation and across the movement. What Lloyd and White refuse is the counterposition: autonomy offered as the answer to male-dominated parties, an exit from the IMG rather than a lever inside it. Their prescription combines the two and puts the weight on a permanent struggle to turn the revolutionary organisation itself into an instrument against chauvinism in its own ranks, which is easier to write in a paper than to enforce in a branch. By the time I joined the Trotskyist movement in the 80s, the positive impact was already visible, and so was the burden of the struggle inside left organsations. 

The candour about that chauvinism is what still startles. Lloyd and White will not treat it as a matter of individual bad attitudes. It is structural, in the plain sense that the sexual division of labour outside the organisation gets reproduced inside it, with 'women's work' sealed off as the business of women alone. The article calls this, borrowing a phrase reported of Lenin, 'feminism à la rebours', feminism turned upside down. And then the example: the German Social Democracy, which built the most developed separate women's structures in the International and used them to file the woman question away, economic demands on one side, the socialist future on the other, and very little in between that might have disturbed how the party actually ran itself.

Two things about the text. The long passage given to Alexandra Kollontai, on the SPD's indifference to agitation among women, is not a quotation. It is Lloyd and White's paraphrase, broadly consistent with 'The Social Basis of the Woman Question' of 1909, though several of its sentences are not hers in any version I can find. The Lenin phrase has the same standing: it reaches us through the literature of his reported conversations rather than from anything he set down. Whether the two had these from the IMG's own education material or from something circulating in the movement that summer, the article does not say, and the part of the page where a source note might have sat is under Helke Sander's elbow.

Which is why the document belongs beside the argument about the SWP. The obvious reading is that 1973 contains the antidote to 2013: get the party's internal life right and no disputes committee ever has to fail two women. But that is not quite right either. Lloyd and White are describing an organisation that had not yet been tested deeply, and their answer, a party so transformed by the women's struggle that it can be trusted to police itself, is the answer the SWP leadership would have given about itself in 2012. Whether any party can be trusted that far is what 2013 leaves open. Lloyd and White close where the tradition kept closing, on the working class as the agent: women's liberation 'situated in the framework of the political activity of the proletariat'. Feminists to the IMG's left heard subordination in that sentence, arriving by a longer route at the same place. They said so at the time. They are still saying it in the conference halls this summer, and nobody in 1973 answered them.

Revolutionary Organisation and Women’s Liberation

Leonora Lloyd and Laurie White

Socialist Woman, July–August 1973, pp. 9–12

The continuing debate inside the Women’s Liberation Movement (WLM) about the relation between women’s liberation and the class struggle, the massive rejection of Selma James’s anti-trade-union positions at the last WLM conference, and the growth of a socialist current within the WLM, make an article on the relationship between the revolutionary organisation (the Leninist Party) and that layer of people identified around the question of women’s oppression and loosely grouped in the WLM timely, not to say overdue.

Discussion inside both the WLM and the revolutionary groups on the relation between capitalism and women’s oppression, the class struggle and women’s struggle, Marxism and feminism, has overshadowed and been sidelined by a failure to confront the key problem of defining the relationship between the WLM and the revolutionary organisation — which is a specific instance of a more general relationship between the revolutionary organisation on the one hand and on the other the ‘new vanguard’ constituted by all those who have become radicalised during the big upturn in the class struggle in the advanced capitalist countries since 1967–68. Nor has this problem been explicitly taken up either by those militants of the left groups who are also active in the WLM or by members of the WLM who reject the revolutionary groups as male-dominated. The preconditions for transforming the present WLM into a movement of mass proportions require that the revolutionary organisation become capable of playing a leading role in this process. The problem is urgent; in this article we can only make a preliminary attempt to define it.

WOMEN’S POLITICS v. LENINISM

Revolutionary Marxists active in the WLM find themselves confronted with a specific ideology which argues that the Leninist theory of organisation has no relevance — certainly no immediate relevance — to women’s struggle against their oppression. For some ex-comrades the question of party is a distant one; for others a distraction. Many feel that adherence to a socialist party demands a submission of their feminist politics to the political practice of the party. Unlike the organisations of the working class, which are seen as bureaucratic and male-dominated, the WLM is seen as totally democratic. This form of ‘community politics’ is not difficult to identify as a reflection of anti-Leninist politics — neither social-democratic nor Leninist but a species of socialist feminism accepted even by those who claim adherence to Marxism. Those who accept this ‘community politics’ position accept it as the belief that the WLM is women’s answer to Leninism.

There have been various attempts inside the WLM to provide a ‘scientific’ basis for the concept of women’s politics, a concept which leads to the view that women’s oppression has the same priority as class — or indeed a greater one — in contemporary society. This view stems from theorists of, for example, the mode of reproduction, who reject the terrain of historical materialism from the outset. They postulate an inverse relationship between the sphere of production and the mode of reproduction, or set up a model of capitalism in which the two compete for dominance. This argument is taken up elsewhere in this issue of SW¹; what is relevant here is that in these theories the fundamental category of Marxism — class — is replaced by the category of ‘sex’, and the Leninist theory of organisation is rejected as irrelevant to the specific oppression of women.

Revolutionary Marxists have dismissed the concept of women’s politics without trying to understand precisely why anti-Leninism is so strong in the WLM. The reasons are complex, but we can identify three broad factors.

• a) The origins of this politics are to be found in the historical and political characteristics of the rise of the WLM. The mass vanguard, of which the WLM is an important and integral part, arose first of all on the basis of solidarity with the people’s wars — Cuba, China, Vietnam — and was strengthened by a deep crisis of confidence in the imperialist metropolises. This radicalisation took place outside the traditional organisations of the working class and in reaction against the bureaucratic and personal attitudes of their male and female members.

• b) The continuing dominance of this politics inside the WLM cannot be reduced to the fact that the movement is young. It has continued to grow and produce a considerable literature and has not been overcome by its entry into political arenas. The WLM has survived all predictions of its imminent disappearance and has generally responded very positively to the upturn in struggle of the last two years. The fact that it continues to hold this layer of the mass vanguard is a direct consequence of the failure of the revolutionary groups to react sufficiently swiftly, or in an adequate fashion, to this layer in relation to the class struggle.

• c) At the level of theory, the revolutionary left has largely failed to understand the precise connection between the oppression of women and the class struggle, and how the basic contradiction of the system affects the family. While work on the woman question has been done, it has been approached in a sectional fashion and has been very much influenced by the theoretical production of the WLM itself. Ironically, instead of the revolutionary left hegemonising the ideological field, it has largely been hegemonised by the WLM on this question. This is a real crisis of the revolutionary vanguard.

A further factor concerns the history of Leninism. The anti-Leninism of the present WLM results from a superficial examination of women’s oppression that leads to the conclusion that it has nothing to do with the oppression of one class by another under capitalism. After all, what is the position of women in the non-capitalist countries? A great deal has been achieved there, but women’s liberation has not followed. The explanation can only be given in terms of the concrete history of women and of the degeneration of the first workers’ state and the international Communist movement.

The role of the WLM does not rest on these fundamentals. It does not rest on the claim that the working class is the only revolutionary force capable of completing the transition to the socialist order. What it does do is to undermine all workerist and economistic conceptions of the revolutionary left, and all opportunist theories of mass struggle. It is increasingly realised that the WLM cannot take on mass proportions without joining the working-class struggle and that the struggle for women’s liberation must be situated in the framework of the political activity of the proletariat.

MALE CHAUVINISM IN THE REVOLUTIONARY ORGANISATION

A major contribution of the WLM has been to document in great detail all aspects of women’s social inferiority. The social division of labour between men and women in capitalist society is reflected at all levels, including within the organisations of the working class. As long as women are oppressed in society at large, men will tend to have a majority over women in the revolutionary party. The social division of labour between men and women makes it hard for female comrades to be as active as male ones. The subordinate position of women in society at large means that women’s work has certain specific features due to the specificity of women’s social situation. The very fact of women’s oppression gives rise to special demands — labour protection of nursing mothers, crèches, struggle against prostitution, and so on.

The problem of male chauvinism inside the revolutionary organisation cannot be reduced to the personal attitudes of its male and female members. It affects the overall practice of these organisations. The number of women in positions of responsibility is invariably much smaller than would be expected from their numerical strength in the organisation as a whole. This means a massive under-utilisation of the talents and skills of the membership, a failure to realise its full political potential. Male chauvinism is also visible in the relative lack of importance given by organisations to work among the masses on the question of women’s oppression. Documents and platforms tend to treat the question of women’s oppression as something separate from the mainstream of the class struggle, as an area of work which is basically the responsibility of women. This results in the effective autonomy of this work from other activities of the organisation. Persistent organisational divisions which at each stage appear to be justified by purely tactical decisions in effect reproduce the sexual division of labour inside the organisation — what Lenin called ‘feminism à la rebours’.

Thus in a number of very concrete ways male chauvinism transcends the framework of personal attitudes and becomes an obstacle to the transformation of the organisation into a revolutionary party capable of leading the political struggle of the proletariat at all levels of society. A party under the sway of male chauvinism will be severely hampered in its efforts to bring the broad masses into revolutionary struggle. Moreover, once the political power of the bourgeoisie is overthrown, such a party will not be capable of leading the working masses in the construction of socialism.

It is instructive here to consider a historical example: the German Social-Democratic Party at the beginning of the century. As is well known, the SPD held that while it was absolutely necessary for the proletariat to conquer political power, it was not necessary that the existing state should be smashed. The parliamentary struggle was of paramount importance and provided the ground upon which it built its entire political strategy. The founding question of the SPD was the democratic equality of all, regardless of sex or race, and this was written into its programme.

But for a long time this was just so many words — until the question of electoral reform became an acute political problem. As Kollontai reports: ‘The Party’s indifference to the question of women’s oppression had deep and vital roots in the following: while women were deprived of political rights, the involvement of women in party politics had less significance for the immediate success of the Social Democrats than enlisting men among the male proletariat. Agitation among women workers was something which the social democratic party could pursue only for the remote future. The question of radical reform of the electoral system brought women less into the circle of the political fight. Getting women workers, these possible future voters, into the Party life acquired a topical interest.’

The main principle around which the SPD organised its work in this field was that of separation and autonomy of action among women. This was justified on the basis that, although the women’s struggle was inseparable from the general working-class struggle, it had certain specific features due to the specificity of women’s social situation. For women to become politicised required a far more radical break with traditional morals, concepts and customs than was the case for men. All these factors were seen as demanding a separate structure for agitation among women: a committee, bureaux, etc., staffed by women. The Central Committee of the party always had a woman comrade in charge of this area of work. The Party held separate meetings and conferences for women and formed intercessory organisations for them. At the same time it was held to be the responsibility of women comrades to draw the Party’s attention to the interests of women workers. In this way the sexual division of labour operating outside the party was reproduced within it, and what appeared at first sight to be purely technical decisions dictated by the realities of the social situation of women turned out to separate off ‘women’s work’ and leave it to women comrades. The question of women’s liberation became a matter of, on the one hand, a series of economic and bourgeois-democratic demands and, on the other, a vision for the distant future.

Faced with the persistence of male chauvinism inside the revolutionary organisations, the radical feminist solution is to build an ‘autonomous’ movement of women. As we tried to show elsewhere¹, this is an incorrect solution.

We have also argued that to expect the revolutionary organisation to be totally free of male chauvinism is to fail to understand the material roots of this ideology. But this does not mean that one simply accepts it. On the contrary, it is necessary to wage a perpetual struggle to make the revolutionary organisation of the working class into an effective instrument for combating male chauvinism — both within its own ranks and within the working class — through conscious effort and continuous education of its cadres.

The position of women in the countries where capitalism has been overthrown can be analysed within the theoretical framework we have tried to sketch above. WLM literature often addresses the reasons for the relatively limited political advance made by women in non-capitalist societies, and has identified at least two levels: the economic and cultural underdevelopment of the countries where the revolution has been successful (often coupled with severe imperialist interventionism) and the inadequacy of classical Marxism in relation to the complex nature of women’s oppression. However, while these factors have certainly played a fundamental role, they are not sufficient to explain the present position of women in these countries. In order to understand what went wrong one needs to understand not only the nature of the contradictions in societies in transition from capitalism to socialism but also the role of the subjective factor — the revolutionary party — in overcoming these contradictions. Thus the bureaucratisation and the subsequent degeneration of the Russian Communist Party was a determining factor in the progressive degeneration of the early Soviet state — a degeneration which was by no means inevitable.

The repeal in the thirties and forties of much of the Bolshevik legislation that had, after October, laid the foundation for the legal, social and political equality of women was an integral part of the Stalinist counter-revolution. Any scientific discussion of the role of women in transitional societies can only be carried out within this double theoretical framework: the contradictions of non-capitalist transitional societies and the historical origins and mechanisms of the degeneration of the workers’ state. One of the great contributions of Trotsky to revolutionary theory was to document and elaborate the theory of that degeneration, against which he fought from the beginning with the founding of the Left Opposition — thirty years ago.

The Fourth International of today bases itself on the analysis of the Left Opposition, whose essential charge against the Stalinist degeneration included the rehabilitation of the bourgeois family. It is increasingly realised that the struggle for women’s liberation can only mean the revolutionary movement joining the working-class struggle, and that the struggle for women’s liberation must be situated in the framework of the political activity of the proletariat.

¹ See Tessa van Gelderen’s article, p. 6.

TL;DR: Presented to the United Secretariat in January 1983 and published that March, Andre Duret’s report is the Fourth International’s four-year balance-sheet on Iran, and until this Archive Unlocked reprint its first half existed nowhere online, because International Viewpoint no. 27 is missing from every digital archive of the magazine. Duret dates the clerical counter-revolution to the very beginning. He records that the Khomeini leadership made clear its intention to structure the mass movement from top to bottom, places the first general assaults on democratic rights, on women, the press, the Kurds and the independent shoras, in 1979, reads the premier Bazargan as a discarded cabinet, and describes the clergy as an estate ruling a bourgeois state apparatus with Khomeini operating like a Bonaparte. His synthesis, that these facts added up to a victorious reactionary regime rather than the birth-pangs of a living revolution, was available at the time and bitterly contested, resisted hardest by the anti-imperialism of the American SWP. The concluding part, on the crisis of the Iranian revolution, appeared in International Viewpoint no. 28.

In our Archive Unlocked series we republish documents from the revolutionary socialist press that have fallen out of circulation, alongside a longer discussion of its significance. This one recovers a lost text: the first half of the Fourth International’s 1983 balance-sheet on Iran, which until now existed nowhere online.

Introduction

Presented to the United Secretariat in January 1983 and published that March, André Duret’s report already dates the clerical counter-revolution to “the very beginning.” It says the Khomeini leadership “made clear its intention to structure the mass movement from top to bottom”; it puts the “first general assaults on democratic rights” — on women, the press, the Kurds, the independent shoras — in 1979; it reads the premier Bazargan as a discarded cabinet and the clergy as an estate ruling “a bourgeois state apparatus,” with Khomeini operating “like a Bonaparte.” Four years on, in other words, the balance-sheet was substantially right, and substantially what a reader today would want it to say.

Duret’s synthesis — that these facts added up to a victorious reactionary regime and not the birth-pangs of a living revolution — was available but bitterly contested, resisted hardest by the “anti-imperialism” of the US SWP that swallowed the internal class struggle whole. And the sense that it was all somehow foreordained is the one part that was never obvious, because it was never true: the outcome was fought over, in the streets and in the fields, in the workplaces and universities, and the fighting is the reason the answer took as long as it did.

The report below is a piece of that fight, caught at the moment the argument turned. Read it against the women of 8 March, and judge for yourself how much of it could have been written in 1979 — and how much only the four years cost in blood had made sayable.

The Iranian Revolution Four Years After the February 1979 Insurrection

by André Duret · International Viewpoint no. 27, 31 March 1983

Editorial note. This is the first part of a report presented in January 1983 to the United Secretariat of the Fourth International, whose general line the United Secretariat approved; the concluding part appeared in International Viewpoint no. 28. IV27 is currently missing from every digital archive of the magazine — the online run jumps from 26 to 28 — and the text below is a fresh transcription from a paper copy, made for this reprint. One sentence from the original page 17, damaged by a crease, has been lightly reconstructed.

Four years ago the Iranian masses overthrew the Shah’s dictatorship. Washington lost one of its lynch-pins in the Middle East. Its system of control over a region of strategical importance for its interests was disrupted. Since then, American imperialism has constantly tried to re-establish and re-organise its positions in the area. The initial impact of the Iranian revolution on the masses throughout the region was considerable. The conservative regimes allied to the United States immediately started showing signs of worry. The revolutionary groundswell had rocked imperialism. But the later setbacks inflicted on the mass movement by the Khomeini leadership weakened the anti-imperialist thrust and undermined the anti-capitalist dynamic of the revolution that began in 1979.

From the crisis of the Pahlavi regime to the insurrection

The February 1979 insurrection was the culmination of a prolonged crisis, in which three forces were at work: 1) Pressure for “reforms” exerted by factions of the new bourgeoisie tied to the Pahlavi dynasty; 2) Opposition to the imperial regime by the traditional bourgeoisie, which linked itself to the Shi’ite clergy; 3) The upsurge of a powerful mass movement which began in 1976–77.

Firstly, in the mid-seventies sectors of the new bourgeoisie came out for reforms to adjust the system of political rule and state structures to the needs of a capitalist economy that was undergoing significant development. Such demands were taken up within the state apparatus itself and by a faction of the official “Rastakhiz” party. The Janshia Amouzegar government team represented an attempt by the Shah to respond to this “reformist movement”. Certain forces in the Mossadeghist National Front looked favourably on these developments.

Beginning in the early sixties, a current of opposition to the imperial regime had emerged and consolidated in and around broad layers of the traditional bourgeoisie, which had found themselves excluded from the new sectors of capitalist accumulation (in production, international trade, and commerce). Through their direct hold over the state apparatus and the resources at their disposal, the imperial regime and the bourgeoisie it nurtured had made these new sectors for investment their private preserve.

Bazargan (Movement for the Liberation of Iran) and other currents grouped in the National Front were the spokespersons for the bourgeois layers that were frozen out of the new profit possibilities. The petty bourgeoisie fell in behind these opposition elements. Bazargan’s party developed close ties with the Shi’ite clergy, since, from 1963 on, parts of the Shi’ite hierarchy entered into conflict with the regime. Finally, under the impact of the 1975–76 economic crisis, there was the beginning of the powerful upsurge of the oppressed and exploited masses. In the course of the revolutionary upsurge the Shi’ite hierarchy, in collaboration with Bazargan, took the political leadership of these diverse currents of the developing opposition. Inside the state apparatus itself, including the army, sections broke away to rally to this alternative leadership. This partially explains why certain parts of the Shah’s regime’s institutions remained intact after the insurrection.

Various social layers and classes came together in this anti-dictatorial battle. As early as summer 1976, clashes took place between the army and thousands of “shantytown” dwellers in south Tehran. This area was inhabited by hundreds of thousands of people forced out of the rural zones as a result of the Shah’s “White Revolution”. The army destroyed those make-shift homes which had been built outside the zones specifically reserved for these people uprooted by the Pahlavi dictatorship. At the same time the first strike movement was getting underway (1976–77). Repression was fierce. In the wake of these mobilisations, protest actions were launched by poets, writers and lawyers. These actions focused on the defence of democratic rights. Student struggles went into an upturn. A general strike developed in the universities in Autumn 1976. With the approval of Carter — who had just been elected president — the Shah ordered violent repression against this movement. The mobilisations became stalled.

It was at that moment that a new stage in the conflict between the Shi’ite hierarchy and the imperial regime began. After the campaign launched in 1977 against Khomeini by the government-controlled press, demonstrations were organised in Qom and then at Tabriz, where an uprising took place. The government tried to crush this movement with vicious repression. In fact it triggered off a cycle of commemorations (40 days mourning) for the victims of the repression, which was to set the “tempo” for the rise of the mass movement. The Shi’ite clergy offered its facilities and its powerful organisation to the demonstrators. It sought to win hegemony over the protest movement. Substantial sectors of the traditional bourgeoisie and petty-bourgeoisie rallied to this new leadership of the opposition to the Shah. The involvement of the plebeian masses in the struggle grew steadily. On September 8, (”Black Friday”), the Shah’s repressive forces killed hundreds of demonstrators. The antagonism between the regime and the masses rose to a higher level. Some factions of the clergy inclined towards compromise, and sought negotiations with the prime minister, Sharif Emami. However, the power of the movement and its convergence with strikes by the workers made a compromise virtually impossible. Economic demands and political demands were more and more becoming combined. Strike committees began to emerge in the factories. The entry of the working class into direct battle against the Shah lent a new force to this social and political confrontation. From October 1978, a general strike was on the agenda. This became a central element in relaunching the offensive against the Pahlavi regime.

However, mass street mobilisations remained under the organisation of the clergy and their allies in the Bazaar. Workers entered the conflict after the mass movement had already been structured under the aegis of the Shi’ite clergy. Furthermore, the weakness, not to say the non-existence of working-class organisations, which was the result of years of repression, left the field open for the clergy to structure the mobilisations (in this theology students played a significant role). Moscow and Peking’s diplomacy toward the Shah helped considerably to deepen the discredit of the Tudeh Party (the CP) and to increase the people’s reservations towards organisations claiming to be communist. This political factor worked to the advantage of the Khomeini leadership.

In November/December 1978, the confrontations became increasingly violent. The masses moved into a direct offensive against the regime. From exile, Ayatollah Khomeini called on demonstrators to win the soldiers to their side. Now it was the turn of the peasants, who flocked to the towns to join in the struggle against the dictatorship.

Under the pressure of the masses and Khomeini’s intransigence all the new attempts made by members of the clergy such as Shariat Madari to work out a compromise with figures like Amini or Bakhtiar (who was named prime minister in January) came to nought. Khomeini backed the general strike and rejected any compromise.

Behind the Khomeini leadership was a social bloc including the following components: the traditional bourgeoisie (with its various factions, the big and medium-sized Bazaar merchants, and the small manufacturers); a large petty-bourgeoisie (shopkeepers, small and middle artisans), which had a long tradition of organisation (in guilds and corporations); and the workers and the plebeian masses (who were called the mostazafin, “the disinherited”). Among these poor masses were hundreds of thousands of recently arrived migrants from the countryside, a semi-proletariat severely hit by the crisis of the building industry, whose previous growth had offered them opportunities for finding temporary jobs. A lumpen proletarian layer also took part in this struggle. For many of these uprooted people, the religious organisation that existed in the shantytowns offered a substitute for the village community structures and provided a network of social aid (charity). The clergy’s denunciation of the affluent living of the “nouveau riche” layers (taghootis) of the imperial regime found a ready audience among these layers of the popular mass, which were on the receiving end of repeated attacks by the repressive forces and were beset with all sorts of problems.

Rich merchants financed the mobilisations. Shopkeepers sold their goods at low prices to the impoverished masses. The mosques became the main organising centre for the fight against the dictatorship. In fact, the masses used the channels of expression that the Pahlavi dictatorship had not been able to destroy. This consolidated the hold of the Khomeini leadership over the mass movement, especially since he had become known as an opponent of the Shah from a long way back. Indeed, as early as 1963, he declared his hostility to measures associated with the “White Revolution”, which undermined the regional bases of the Shi’ite clergy and the traditional local power structures to which it was traditionally linked. Khomeini’s opposition was based on this conservative point of view. Nonetheless, the terrible consequences of the “White Revolution” for whole layers of the people built an audience for Khomeini’s positions. Finally, even though he supported the overthrow of Mossadegh in 1953, he unfailingly denounced imperialism’s influence and the Westernisation in Iran. These denunciations touched a deep chord in the popular classes.

Strikes by workers played an important role in destroying the monarchy. They helped to paralyse the nerve centres of the economy (i.e., oil). They gave an added thrust to the power of the people’s mobilisations. But the working class did not assume the role of the organisational and political vanguard of the anti-dictatorial struggle on a national scale. Organisations such as the Mojahedeen of the People or the Fedayeen of the People had been decimated by the repression. Moreover, given the weaknesses of their political line and programme, they were not really able to offer a political perspective of their own, and still less to serve as an organising force. Thus, it was to prove very difficult for a process of political differentiation to develop within the social bloc grouped behind Khomeini and thus for the proletariat to assert itself and bring its weight to bear.

In January 1979, a Council of the Revolution was set up. It included Bani Sadr, Bazargan, Yazdi, Ghotbzadeh, and religious dignitaries such as Beheshti, Motahari, Rafsanjani, and Bahonar (all former theology students of Khomeini) and Khomeini himself. Its composition remained secret for a long time.

During the general strikes, committees (komitehs) mushroomed in the neighbourhoods. After August 1978, fourteen komiteh “centres” (which later became known as Imam’s Committees) were set up in Tehran to try to control the movement. They were presided over by Madhavi Kani. Identical structures were set up in other towns. Madhavi Kani, freed from prison along with other mullahs by the Shah, made no secret of his intention of fighting the left’s influence in the mass movement. The komiteh centres set up under his direction were effective instruments for taking over the mass bodies in the neighbourhoods.

Under the body blows of the demonstrations, after the Shah’s departure and Khomeini’s triumphal arrival, the dynasty’s apparatus of domination (army, patronage system and state bureaucracy) began to break up. Khomeini nominated Bazargan as the “real” prime minister, and a situation of “dual power” between Bakhtiar and the representative of the Council of the Revolution was established. At the beginning of February, the Council of the Revolution opened negotiations with the high command of the imperial army — a fraction of which showed a willingness to collaborate with the emerging power. However, on February 9, a mass-based military response was organised against the attacks on a “Homofars” unit (air-force technicians) by the Imperial Guard. The Mojahedeen and Fedayeen, together with the Homofars, initiated the 10/11 February insurrection. The masses immediately took part in the military action. Prisons and barracks were attacked. Agents of the SAVAK (the Shah’s secret police, which had been set up with CIA aid) were hunted. The imperial army began to disintegrate.

At the beginning the Khomeini leadership was opposed to the insurrection. It backed it once the uprising was underway in order to avoid being out-flanked. The Army General Staff, notably General Gharabaghi, observed a sort of neutrality. Khomeini issued appeals designed to hold back attacks against the army and to preserve at least parts of it.

Confronted with this revolutionary explosion, the Khomeini leadership showed it had three main concerns. First of all it sought to avoid violent disintegration of the Shah’s state apparatus. Not that it wanted to maintain the army as such. But it feared the mass movement would get irretrievably out of hand if there were no structures able to control it. It immediately appointed a government from the top. The masses did not have the right to choose!

However, the Khomeini leadership was not yet ready to take power directly itself. The bodies and institutions on which it could base itself were not yet consolidated. Moreover, there were important differences within the Shi’ite hierarchy itself about the needs for clerical involvement in political life. Therefore, the Khomeini leadership set up the Bazargan government, over which it maintained close supervision. Then it moved ruthlessly to assume control of all the komitehs. Slowly the komitehs were centralised under its control. Uncontrollable komitehs were dissolved. The Central Military Council, a body parachuted in at the beginning of the insurrection, had the objective of disarming the masses. A good part of the militants who were to form the backbone of the future pasdar army were recruited from the komitehs.

Thus, from the very beginning the Khomeini leadership made clear its intention to structure the mass movement from top to bottom. One aspect of this political line was seen right away with the attacks on the press, which, as in all revolutions, reflected the ferment of ideas and all sorts of initiatives by every section of society. Finally, on February 18 the Khomeini leadership began putting heavy emphasis on the need to restore production and therefore to re-establish order in the factories.

Right from the beginning of the revolution, given the whole approach of the Khomeini leadership, it was the central task of revolutionaries to fight for the independence of the mass movement. That was essential to reinforce the anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist thrust of the revolution.

The upsurge of the mass struggle and Khomeini’s response (1979)

A) The working class in struggle

For the first time in decades the working class was able to freely develop its own instruments for struggle. Trade unions revived in the traditional industries (textiles, leather, printing). Many shoras (councils) emerged, developing out of the strike committees. The working class was relatively “new”. It was in a very great part the product of the rural exodus of the preceding fifteen years. The majority worked for small-scale firms or in the building industry. Its strongest and most militant contingents were in the big centres of oil and gas production, steel making, and in the car assembly plants. The repression of the Pahlavi regime prevented the workers from building their own organisations. Therefore, the trade-union experience of the working class was limited, and its political experience even more so. Nevertheless, during the insurrectionary upsurge, it gained an awareness of its power and organisational capacities.

During 1979 and the beginning of 1980, strikes developed, despite the threats of government representatives and religious leaders. Workers demands focussed on: the 40-hour week, equal working week for civil/public workers and other workers; re-opening of factories closed by their exiled owners and the takeover of abandoned factories; the election of the heads of nationalised companies and not their designation by the state; the re-instatement of workers sacked for their activity against the dictatorship; the repeal of Article 33 of the labour relations law; the payment of back pay, salary increases; demands associated with various workers control initiatives; the removal of former agents of the dictatorship.

The nationalisations in industry in June and July 1979 immediately posed the problem of the relationship between the directors nominated by the government and the shoras. The pre-eminent authority of the directors was confirmed by the regime. Various shora coordinating committees were set up: in the oil industry of Khuzistan, in the steel industry (among production workers at Ahwaz and administrative workers in Tehran), in small and medium-sized industries in Gilan, in the building industry of South Tehran. A coordinating committee of the Gostaresh workplace shoras (Organisation for the Development and Modernisation of Iranian Industry, grouping the modern companies developed with the aid of the imperial regime) was set up and organised demonstrations. A centre for the councils of East and West Tehran was established. The first signs appeared of the working class winning organisational independence.

There was (and is) large-scale unemployment. Its level rose remorselessly. At the beginning of 1980, the Central Bank estimated the number of unemployed at 3 million (a third of the economically active population in the modern sector of the economy). Consequently the unemployed began to mobilise in many industrial centres. In Tehran, Amol, Broojerd, Hamadan, Kerman and Masjed Soleiman they organised sit-in actions. Official buildings were occupied on many occasions. There were numerous clashes with the pasdars: at Isfahan in April 1979, in Masjed Soleiman in October 1979 and in Broojerd in January 1980. In the latter towns the population massively supported the unemployed, and the governor had to decamp.

In response to this upsurge, the government offered a loan of 1,000 tomans for six months to the unemployed (the minimum monthly salary was then 1,100 tomans). This “loan” had to be paid back when the unemployed worker found a job. About 350,000 jobless “benefited” from such aid. The weakness of the organised workers movement, the lack of a leadership, prevented a convergence between the unemployed movement and workers in jobs. Furthermore, in a large number of nationalised workplaces workers not only got wage increases but, despite economic stagnation, they got paid regularly at the end of each month (the Central Bank was keeping the nationalised companies afloat). These factors, along with the repressive action of the pasdars, explain the collapse of the unemployed movement in 1980.

In this period the Fedayeen, Peykar and Mojahedeen won a certain base in the working class. The Tudeh Party also had some influence, but less than it had in the state apparatus and above all in the administration of the nationalised sector. To counteract workers activity, the regime adopted legislation in May 1979 restricting trade-union action. The anti-working class laws from the Shah’s era continued to be used — including the one on “communist activity” in the workplaces. Khomeini announced: “Those who incite the workers to continue to strike are guilty of treason”.

The attack against the independent shoras was not long in coming. Coordinating committees of Islamic shoras linked to the Islamic Republic and the Islamic Republican Party (IRP) were organised to stop the coordination of independent shoras, which was the strategic key to winning working-class independence. Obviously this crackdown did not proceed without running into certain difficulties. Some Islamic shoras were members of the Polytechnic School Coordinating Committee (June 1979). IRP representatives, Doctor Peyman’s Movement of Muslim Fighters (which published the Ommat newspaper and held “socialistic” Islamic positions) and the Mojahedeen were included in the leadership of this Coordinating Committee. The pressure of the workers struggles meant that the shoras often tended to escape the authorities’ control. For the IRP it rapidly appeared that controlling the shoras required setting up a coordinating committee more directly under its command. This was done at the beginning of 1980, with the takeover of the Workers House. “Domesticating” the shoras was not a linear process. This is shown by conflicts that arose in Tabriz, Ahwaz and Tehran between workers and representatives of the new regime over the independent activity of the shoras.

The whole policy of the Khomeini leadership — corresponding to its overall ideological orientation — was designed to block the development of an independent workers movement with its own structures, press, freedom of discussion and debate and with an ideology of its own out of line with Khomeini’s doctrine of Velayete Faghih, the rule of the supreme expert in Islamic law.

B) The peasants and the revolution

In the months following the overthrow of the Pahlavi regime, peasant struggles developed. However, there was no overall, unified movement. One major reason for this is the diversity of the conditions in which the peasants live. They are scattered in 70,000 villages. There are different farming systems in different parts of the country. The importance of large estates varies considerably from place to place. The effects of the Shah’s agrarian reform were different in different areas. Some areas had a more militant tradition, such as the provinces of Gilan and Mazanderan along the Caspian coast. Moreover, in Gilan and Mazanderan, a considerable amount of land had been grabbed by the Imperial family and their cronies. In addition, peasant struggles were often interlinked with the struggles for national liberation, as in parts of Kurdistan. This was true also in the Turkoman region, where there were many absentee landlords and large estates.

In hundreds of villages, peasants occupied the land. The bulk of the police deserted their posts for fear of peasant reprisals. Lack of land was strongly felt by the great majority of peasants. The pressure on them to emigrate to the towns was a concrete demonstration of this. This peasant movement was not at all stimulated by the Shi’ite clergy. Furthermore the mullahs only had a permanent presence in some 5,000 villages. From a sociological point of view, they were closely linked to sectors of the medium and big landowners, who were the only ones able to finance religious activities and pay the religious tax (Khoms). In Fars province, the peasant mobilisations began at the start of 1980. The land occupation movement was largely spontaneous. To be sure young peasants, recent migrants to the towns and won over to the revolution, returned to their villages and initiated or supported such occupations. In certain cases, the pasdars called in to “rescue” the landowner sided with the peasants.

However, the Khomeini leadership and the government were opposed to land occupations. Pasdar units from the towns sided with the landowners, and, occasionally, helped local strongmen linked to the new regime to take over land. Peasants were expelled from the occupied lands, as was the case in the Kermanshah region. Clashes were particularly sharp in Kurdistan and the Turkoman region. In Ourumieh and Nagadeh (Kurdistan), the big landowners attacked the villages and took back the land. In May 1979, the government gave the Piranshar region landowners arms to carry out their battle against the poor peasants. In the Turkoman region, pasdar units, mainly Persians, attacked peasant committees and tried to chase them off occupied land. In these regions, the landowners and the new regime used two political arguments to justify their actions: 1) these movements challenged the unity of Iran, 2) went against “Islamic order” which guarantees private property rights.

In various regions, under the protection of the pasdars and the local clergy, a layer of “kulaks” formed, who had profited from the redistribution of the land. In other regions, according to “Islamic principles”, tenant farming was replaced by share cropping.

One of the paradoxical effects of the revolution was to accentuate the movement of the peasants to the towns. Not only were they now able to move more easily but above all they were attracted by the demagogic promises of the new regime (the massive aid that the “disinherited” were supposed to be receiving). Thus, during the first year of the revolution, more than a million and a half people from the rural zones flocked to Tehran. Repressive measures were taken against the street vendors — whose numbers had multiplied due to this influx of people.

To respond to the open crisis in the countryside, a land reform law was prepared at the end of 1979. The Council of the Revolution adopted this law. A sector of the mullahs opposed it (for example the Ayatollah Golpayegani). They focused their criticisms on two articles of the law concerning the division of the land of the big landowners. This showed the common interests of the latter and the landowning clergy. According to them, the land reform law was “contrary” to Islamic principles. The Council of the Revolution then suspended it. Its presentation to parliament was put off to 1981. Faced with the needs of the rural masses, the leading circles of the Islamic Republic opted for the following measures: setting up committees composed of mullahs, landowners, pasdars, and peasants, in opposition to the village councils, in whose formation the poor peasants had played the dominant role; and repression and legal constraints to combat the radicalisation of the struggle by the poor peasants against the landowners and the middle men.

C) The resistance of the national minorities

The struggle of the national minorities was a part of the impetuous revolutionary upsurge at the beginning of 1979. The Kurds of Iran — more than 5 million strong and mainly of the Sunnite branch of Islam — have been in the forefront of this struggle. They have a strong fighting tradition and experienced nationalist cadres forged in struggle. Neither the pasdar corps nor the komitehs could be set up in Kurdistan. The Islamic regime therefore had no instrument for structuring and controlling the masses.

Already on February 19, Kurdish nationalist movement representatives presented their demands to the provisional government. On March 1, Sheikh Sayed Ezzedin Housseini, Kurdish religious and national leader, declared that the demand for autonomy did not involve separation from Iran. He stressed the desire of the Kurdish people to participate in the revolution, but also its determination to struggle for the right of self-determination. The response of the Bazargan government — in concert with the Khomeini leadership — was clear: autonomy was rejected. This orientation was confirmed in the first draft of the Constitution which began to circulate in June 1979. The mobilisation of the Kurds broadened against this chauvinist policy of the central government. On June 26, the KDPI issued an open letter to Khomeini asking him why the government gave its support to the “aghas who had supported the Shah to the last”. In July and August 1979, military attacks on the Kurdish population and its fighters (peshmergas) greatly intensified. Khomeini on many occasions denounced the Kurds as “communists, supported by foreign countries and enemies of the revolution”. On August 18, the KDPI was banned. Khomeini made himself Commander in Chief of the army, and all-out war was declared against the Kurds in August/September 1979. Baneh and Sanandaj were bombed. The army occupied Mahabad.

This offensive coincided with the first general assaults on democratic rights: measures on the status of women, threats against revolutionary organisations and closure of their public offices, the press law, and the banning of the newspaper Ayandegan. Khalkhali ordered young Kurdish fighters (peshmergas) executed. There were mass protest demonstrations in Sanandaj and Mahabad. The capacity of the Kurdish people to stand up to the attacks of the central government was confirmed. Kurdistan became the Achilles heel of the new regime.

Bazargan gave the following reasons as an explanation for Khomeini’s war against the Kurds: 1. to teach a lesson to all the national minorities; 2. “to shore up the morale and restore the backbone of a demoralised army”; 3. to keep the left organisations from making Kurdistan their sanctuary. (The Guardian, September 10, 1979.) The Kurds mounted a very effective military resistance. The regime’s troops were gradually forced to pull back. The peshmergas had inflicted a defeat on the Tehran government.

A tendency for growing mobilisations of national minorities was seen everywhere. Political and cultural organisations emerged in Khuzistan. They came together in the “Arab Cultural and Political Organisation”, one of whose leaders was Sheikh Mohammed Taher Shobeir Khagani. The Arabs (more than 3 millions) demanded control over local government, the right to revive their national culture, the teaching of Arabic to their children in school, an end to job discrimination, and a more equal share out of the oil revenues. The pasdars were quickly sent in to repress this movement in Khorammshahr and Ahwaz. Arrests and executions followed. In stages, between May 30 and June 4, a state of emergency was declared in this region. Shi’ite leaders accused the People’s Front for the Liberation of Palestine led by George Habash of supporting this movement. The PLO, which had opened an office in Ahwaz, had to defend itself also against these accusations.

In the Turkoman region, where since 1963 the royal family had taken the big estates, the Turkoman peasants occupied the land. They burnt the big landowners’ mansions. Peasant trade unions grew rapidly. Peasant shoras were elected in many villages. The peasants were supported by the Fedayeen. From May to September in the Gombad region the pasdars and the army attacked the peasants. Several peasant shora leaders were executed. The central regime was not simply opposed to the land occupations (some of which, to be sure, were organised by local landowners who wanted to “take back” land from the royal family). It wanted to bring to heel a minority that was expressing its opposition to the Islamic Republican regime (shown by its boycott of the referendum). The Fedayeen, who did not have a correct understanding of the national question, were incapable of giving perspectives to this struggle or of consolidating it.

In the Azerbaijan region, in December 1979 and January 1980, a series of demonstrations occurred. One of their central slogans was autonomy for Azerbaijan. This movement became intertwined with the conflict between Ayatollah Shariat Madari and Khomeini. The Azerbaijani Ayatollah was strongly opposed to a constitution that gave all power to Khomeini. The Muslim People’s Republican Party led by Abdolhassan Rostamkhani backed Shariat Madari. The latter used this movement as a lever in negotiating with Khomeini and as a means of building up his base in the region, which is strategic for access to Kurdistan. There were violent clashes, particularly since each camp had its own armed forces. On December 10, Bani Sadr was obliged to recognise “the reality of the national problem.” He opened negotiations in order to disorient the protest movement. Finally, a combination of repression, promises, and the domination of a traditional bourgeois leadership led this movement for national rights into an impasse. But it remains a thorn in the side of the Islamic Republic.

From the beginning, repression was the only response of the new regime to the legitimate demands of the oppressed national minorities, because the regime had very little possibility for coopting such movements into the institutions it established (i.e., the komitehs and pasdaran).

D) Students

Students were often in the vanguard of the struggle against the Shah. After February 1979, the universities became centres of free ideological and political debate. The religious currents linked to Khomeini had an influence on the campuses. But the universities were the strongholds of organisations such as the Mojahedeen and the Fedayeen. The clergy reacted against this free flowering of ideas and against the growing strength of organisations that opposed the dominant ideology and in particular sought to link up with the social and economic struggles of the toiling masses in order to carry the revolution forward.

Across the spectrum of the regime, from Bazargan to Khomeini, agreement existed on the need for suppressing the left in the universities. But there was a difference over the future of higher education. Those sectors linked to the modern capitalist bourgeoisie were concerned that the universities continue to carry out their function of training the technical, scientific and administrative “specialists” needed to assure the proper operation of the state apparatus and the economy. The Shi’ite clergy, on the other hand, considered it necessary to “Islamise” the universities, to carry out a “cultural revolution”. This battle over the future of the universities was part and parcel of the struggle for control of the state apparatus between the bourgeois-clerical factions.

A brief analysis of the struggles of the main social forces shows that from the beginning of the revolution the Khomeini leadership followed a two-sided strategy in order to impose its domination on the mass movement. Where it was easier to establish its control, it used selective repression, tactical retreats, economic concessions, demagogy, and so on in order to structure the mass movement as a transmission belt. Where such methods were not effective, above all in the case of the national minorities, it resorted to repression on a massive scale. Thus, on August 30, 1979, Khomeini told the Kurds: “We are going to bury you if you do not get out of the way”. The strength of the mass movement and the profound crisis of the state apparatus, however, allowed the workers, peasants and national minorities in the early stages to win a series of gains (wages, land, cheap loans for house building etc.) and means for waging struggle (shoras, village committees, arming of the Kurds, possibilities of increased activity by the left organisations). The defence of these gains was to prove decisive for the future development of the revolution.

From the first referendum to the embassy occupation

From February 1979, the first objective of bourgeois factions who had supported (more or less) the struggle against the Pahlavi dynasty was to achieve a return to calm, “normalisation” and economic recovery. To block the popular movement, which was broader than that of previous revolutions, they were ready to make all sorts of alliances. But the difference from the past was that the traditional political forces representing the bourgeoisie (National Front, Liberation Movement) found themselves subordinated to the clergy. The relationship of forces that underlay the alliance between the mullahs, the Bazaar, the liberal professions and a part of the state bureaucracy inherited from the monarchy favoured the clergy, who benefited from Khomeini’s prestige. The majority faction of the clergy in the Council of the Revolution needed time to set up a powerful political party (IRP) and administrative, military and legal structures. These were to be used either to curb the old administrative apparatus, which Khomeini and his supporters basically mistrusted, or to replace it. But the essential thing was above all from the beginning to not leave an opening for the masses and their organisations.

From the first days of the revolution sharp antagonisms grew between Bazargan, his government personnel and the Shi’ite dignitaries. The alliance between Bazargan and Khomeini could only be temporary. Bazargan did not want the clergy in the state apparatus. Nor did he want to see a growth of “revolutionary bodies” (the komitehs, pasdars, Revolutionary Tribunals) closely controlled by the clergy, which tended to replace the normal mechanisms of the bourgeois state. These bodies were to facilitate the hegemony of the Shi’ite clergy and its allies. They were to become the focus of a continual struggle between the various clerical factions that were at one another’s throats.

Bazargan and his supporters were essentially seeking to rationalise Iranian capitalist development, to reinforce the positions of bourgeois sectors through enlarging the internal market. If Bazargan accepted the nationalisations of the banks (practically all bankrupt) and the insurance companies (in June/July 1979), he was not a keen supporter of the nationalisation of industry. Nevertheless this was decided by the Council of the Revolution. The majority of the factories had big debts to the banks, very much bigger than their assets. These measures were essentially aimed against the recently formed big bourgeoisie that grew up in association with the Shah’s regime, which had largely fled the country. However, the bourgeois sectors that identified with the Bazargan government were afraid of the dynamic that could be unleashed by these measures, coming in the context of a mass movement still in full upsurge. Furthermore the Bazaar feared foreign trade would pass under state control, and that one of its major sources of revenue would partially disappear. Finally, the prime minister of the provisional government set up by Khomeini made sure not to modify relations between Iran and the imperialist powers, which regarded him and what remained of the old state apparatus as their trump card.

Khomeini immediately proposed a referendum in March 1979. The choice offered to the masses was: the monarchy or the Islamic Republic. Abstentions were very high in Kurdistan and the Turkoman region. The vote in favour of the Islamic Republic certainly won a very large majority — for the masses it was in fact a way of confirming their rejection of the Shah’s dictatorship and their desire for change — but the Khomeini leadership proclaimed that 99% of the electorate had voted in favour of the new regime.

For Khomeini the referendum was a way to avoid calling a real constituent assembly, although he had formally promised one. In August an assembly of 75 experts started its sessions, while the first wave of repression was in full swing. The mullahs ruled the roost there, holding 90% of the seats. A sharp battle over the question of power broke out between the supporters of Khomeini and Bazargan. It focused on the proposed clause in the constitution making the faghih (Khomeini) the supreme authority. At the beginning of December 1979, the Constitution was approved by another referendum. The objective of all these measures was to legitimise the Islamic Republican regime, to consolidate a legal framework within which the new institutions of the Islamic revolution could develop.

But then many elements came into contradiction with these projects of stabilisation. First, the victory of the Kurdish fighters forced the regime to retreat, upsetting its plans for stabilisation and reorganisation. This marked the opening of a period in October/November 1979 in which the repressive campaign became stalled. The mass movement in the factories and the neighbourhoods surged forward again. Secondly, conflicts grew between the circles that were seeking to stabilise the situation by means of a formula, such as that represented by Bazargan, on the one hand, and factions of the Shi’ite clergy, on the other.

It is within this context that the occupation of the American Embassy in November 1979 has to be seen. It was organised by the pasdars along with a faction of the “Students following the Imam’s line”. As soon as the occupation started, Khomeini spoke of the “Second Revolution”. By that he did not mean a leap forward in the development of workers self-organisation or the carrying out of a series of concrete anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist measures. No. He wanted in fact to emphasise that the embassy occupation should lead to the consolidation of the Islamic Republican regime and a regaining of political authority by the leading circles of the Shi’ite hierarchy.

From the beginning, the embassy occupation was seen by a large sector of the toiling masses as the conclusion of the process of overthrowing of the Shah and a definitive break with American imperialism — which they correctly identified with the ferocious Pahlavi dictatorship. The resignation, two days after the occupation, by Bazargan, who appeared linked to imperialist interests, strengthened this political conviction among the masses. In addition, Bazargan could also be made a scapegoat for all of Khomeini’s policy.

The embassy occupation and the seizure of the hostages triggered off a popular mobilisation. But the masses involved were offered only very vague objectives. And, on occasions, this movement was even counterposed to the perspectives opened up by workers struggles that were taking place at that time. So it did not become focused around a concrete social and economic programme that could offer real prospects for breaking the Iranian economy’s subordination to imperialism. The demonstrations in front of the American embassy, which expressed deepgoing anti-imperialist feelings of the people, were channelled and they were kept from converging with the shoras movement in the factories (which was still on the upswing and raising more and more radical demands). Thus, this movement could not develop to the point of providing an alternative to Khomeini. In fact, the demonstrations ended up strengthening the political hold of the Khomeini leadership, which made use of an anti-imperialist demagogy — which, of course, is hardly a new phenomenon in the history of the colonial revolution.

Most of the left political forces fell into the trap laid by Khomeini. Some declared that the whole thing was simply a manoeuvre, and limited themselves to denouncing the operation. Thus, they failed to take advantage of the opportunity offered by the radicalisation and to seek to give it a different direction by offering perspectives linked to the workplaces, working-class demands, and organising the masses. Others separated the anti-imperialist struggle from the fight against the ruling class and the Islamic Republican regime. Thereby, they elevated the anti-imperialist struggle above the real course of the class struggle in Iran. It is also true that the forces of the IRP or those linked to Khomeini’s party made it rather difficult for the revolutionary organisations to operate. They progressively suppressed all independent propaganda directed at the masses. In this climate, in which an alarm was raised about the dangers of an imperialist attack, propaganda opposing the proposed constitution was banned during the referendum campaign period. This Constitution established the power of the faghih (the supreme expert in Islamic law). It placed ultimate authority in his hands, giving him a right of veto on all questions. He could, for example, replace the President of the Republic elected by universal suffrage. The 12-member Council of Guardians can suspend any parliamentary decision, if it judges that it does not conform to Islamic law.

Forces such as the Tudeh Party (a pro-Soviet Communist Party) argued that the “imperialist threat” was so great as to justify silence about a Constitution that was, to be sure, open to question. Furthermore, despite all the regime’s efforts, this second referendum was extensively boycotted among the national minorities. Figures came out much later — during one of the unnumerable conflicts within the leading circles of the Islamic Republic — confirming that not more than 9 million people voted in this election.

Bazargan’s resignation reinforced the IRP’s positions. Its five founders — Beheshti, Mossavi Ardebili, Hashemi Rafsanjani, Khamenei and Bahonar — then formed the majority that transformed itself de facto into the government. All this paved the way for future presidential and parliamentary elections. Khomeini himself unambiguously spelt this out to Bani Sadr in the following way: “The seizure of the hostages has today unified the people; opponents do not dare to act, and we can get the Constitution approved without difficulty. We can proceed to presidential and parliamentary elections. When all that is done, we can let the hostages go.”

In January 1980 Mojahedeen offices were again attacked. Their spokesperson Massud Rajavi was banned from standing for president. Khomeini and Bani Sadr recommended these measures against the Mojahedeen, who rejected the Constitution and were not in favour of repression against national minorities. At the same time, clashes resumed in Kurdistan. In April 1980 a new large-scale offensive was launched against the Kurdish people. Attacks on the democratic rights of the masses were stepped up at the end of the spring. In April the universities were closed down on the pretext of launching an “Islamic cultural revolution”.

American imperialism swiftly took advantage of the occupation to start an hysterical campaign against the Iranian revolution and to prepare an eventual military intervention in the region. It seized this pretext to freeze Iranian assets in the United States, a project which it had in fact envisaged since February 1979. Iranian oil imports to the USA were suspended. The EEC European powers came round — with some delay — to support the blockade decreed in April 1980. The effects on Iran were twofold: on the one side the cost of imports increased; on the other, the revenue from exports decreased. A secondary consequence was a diversification of Iran’s commercial partners — increased trade with Sweden, Austria, Italy, Switzerland, South Korea, Brazil, Pakistan, Turkey, India and East European countries.

In April 1980 Carter organised the unsuccessful Tabas mission. The regime saw this commando operation as directly linked to a much bigger counterrevolutionary plan for Iran. This plan supposedly involved sectors of the army and the opposition linked to Bakhtiar. As a response to this, the leadership of the Islamic Republic struck out against a layer of officers left over from the Shah’s regime and consolidated the pasdar army, which was destined to serve as the mailed fist of the new regime.

The Embassy occupation and seizure of hostages ended in January 1981. Caught in the vise of the Iraqi counterrevolutionary military offensive, which begun in September 1980, and the imperialist blockade, the leadership of the Islamic Republic came to an agreement with the United States. The result was to leave billions of dollars belonging to the Iranian people in the hands of the American imperialists — without getting anything in exchange (such as arms, spare parts). The agreement, signed in Algiers by Nabavi, was seen by broad sectors as a failure or a capitulation. Fred Halliday commented: “The terms of the agreement which resulted in the release of the hostages represents a considerable defeat for Iran: the immediate payment of the debts contracted with American banks represented an unprecedented concession in the history of modern revolution”. (Merip Reports, March/April 1982.)

The IRP consolidates its domination

A) The January 1980 presidential elections, the provisions for which were laid down in the newly adopted Constitution, resulted in a landslide victory for Bani Sadr. He got 78% of the vote. One of the reasons for this success was undeniably the image he tried to project of being the defender of certain democratic rights. The consciousness of the masses was developing toward a break with the clergy. Khomeini kept himself aloof from these elections, fearing to associate himself with a losing candidate, which also helped Bani Sadr. The IRP candidate was heavily defeated.

Bani Sadr’s election to the presidency of the Republic, however, rather rapidly caused growing friction inside the leading circles. This arose over the key question for the Shi’ite hierarchy: the problem of maintaining and controlling “power apparatuses”, one inherited from the old regime, the other represented by the “revolutionary organisations”. Apart from his differences on that, Bani Sadr consistently indicated his agreement with the IRP leaders’ calls for cracking down on the Kurds, leftists and workers.

The elections to the new parliament (Majlis) in March and May 1980 gave the Council of the Revolution leaders and the IRP the opportunity to counterbalance the results of the Presidential elections. The IRP won hands down. In both rounds, it mobilised the “revolutionary organisations” (the komitehs and pasdars) to back up its campaign. Under the direction of Rafsanjani, the departments of the Ministry of the Interior laid the groundwork for the IRP victory. Moreover, this time Khomeini lined up with the Islamic Republican Party. Fraud was very widespread. In whole regions, including Kurdistan, candidates opposed to, or independent of the IRP, had their registration invalidated. Only 28% of the electoral roll participated in the second round. The IRP established its grip on the parliament. It took over the Council of Guardians and the Supreme Council of the Judiciary, as well as the mass media. It consolidated its bases. All of this deepened the crisis with Bani Sadr and his allies. The situation blew up when the IRP parliament designated Ali Rajai prime minister. Bani Sadr opposed his candidacy. Members of parliament opposed to the IRP were ousted from the chamber.

This conflict was not merely one of government institutions. It reflected a deeper social conflict that had some similarity with the one that led to Bazargan’s resignation. A sector of the Bazaar and the bourgeoisie (essentially, the manufacturers and big merchants), which were not ready to link up with forces nostalgic for the previous regime, sought at any cost a political solution that would lead to stabilisation. They saw Bani Sadr as a possible representative of their interests, even if they did not have the same sort of links with him as they did with Bazargan. These capitalist sectors opposed the policies of the top clergy on three levels. Firstly, they baulked at a bigger role for the clergy in the government and in political and economic life in general. Secondly, they considered that the clergy’s lack of any coherent plan for the economy would result in an economic crisis that would deal direct blows to the interests of sectors of the Bazaar. Thirdly, they feared the approach of a section of the clergy that, in order to strengthen its own position, was propagating a populist, “hate the rich” ideology. Aligned behind the IRP, on the other hand, were the Bazaar traders, the middlemen between the market and the rural areas and the traditional petty bourgeoisie.

This antagonism between the IRP leadership and Bani Sadr, which ended in the defeat of the latter in June 1981, was not therefore between the camp of the workers and their allies on one side and the bourgeoisie on the other. The conflict was really over problems that had to do with how to reconsolidate a capitalist state. The interests of the toiling masses did not lie with one camp or the other, even though the Khomeini leadership identified itself with mass mobilisations and the “revolutionary organisations”. These considerations, however, do not justify revolutionary socialists refusing to recognise the legitimacy of the democratic demands raised by sections of the poor masses that backed Bani Sadr.

The new institutions of the regime

The “revolutionary institutions” (the nahads), a product of revolutionary upsurge and prop of the new regime, were rocked by surges of the mass movement. They became the target of drives by the regime to “purify” them and housebreak them. Occasionally, members of the komitehs, or the pasdars, would intervene in a workplace or in a rural region and not play the role expected of them by the bosses or landowners. They would take sides with the workers and the peasants or, more simply, impose their will on the contending camps. Initially the nahads were supposed to move against the agents of the old regime. But they rapidly began to carry out actions against new opponents of the Islamic Republic. They organised interventions against sectors that first rallied to Bazargan and then to Bani Sadr, against members of old bourgeois nationalist formations inside the state apparatus. Often they exceeded their authority and provoked reactions, even among the clergy.

These institutions have also had the task, as clearly pointed out by Khomeini, Beheshti and Rafsanjani, of “combating the influence of the left” (systematically equated to the counter-revolution) and “maintaining order in the workplaces”.

Initially, the komitehs were not a centralised and homogeneous force. Various positions were expressed within them. But they were subordinated to the basic decisions of the faghih. After various “reorganisations” by Madhavi Kani from March 1979 on, they became financially supported by the state. In addition to direct subsidies, they make money from the distribution of basic necessities in the neighbourhoods (after the imposition of rationing due to the war). Their links with the IRP regime were to grow steadily closer. They also had a police role. These activities were to strengthen the hand of those within the komitehs who wanted to use these bodies as a means for direct financial/material gain (that is, corruption).

The corps of pasdars was placed under the leadership of the Council of the Revolution. It was then still relatively small. Control of the pasdars was to be the object of fierce struggles inside the leading circles of the Islamic Republic. Numerous disagreements arose over defining their role and relationship to the regular army. For nearly three years, neither the government, nor even the Council of the Revolution, could get a firm grip on this institution, which was, however, vital for the power of the new regime. It was the pasdars that were encharged with the carrying out of the Islamic regime’s major repressive operations against the national minorities, the left organisations and workers struggles. In turn, Hashemi Rafsanjani, Mosavi-Ardabili, then Khamenei of the IRP were encharged with maintaining liaison between the IRP leadership and the pasdars commanders. Finally, a direct link was established between these commanders and Khomeini. This new military institution of the Islamic Republic was put under the command of a pasdar council. The pasdars are funded by the state, as well as having their own sources of finance. The pasdars corps has a command structure in each important town and province. Inside the pasdars, the Mojahedeen of the Islamic Revolution, a secret reactionary fundamentalist organisation, is in charge of the secret “police work”. A law was passed by parliament after the beginning of the war that gave recruitment to the pasdars a higher priority than recruitment to the army. The pasdars totally controlled the Baseej (mobilisation committees) set up after the war broke out with Iraq. They are also present in the main factories.

The revolutionary tribunals set up in the wake of February 1979 went after the representatives of the previous regime who opposed the IRP but the Shah’s repressive apparatus was not systematically dismantled. Many SAVAK personnel were spared. No few of these collaborated with the new regime to hunt out left-wing militants. Later these tribunals were centralised and placed under the authority of the central Tehran court and the public prosecutors office (based in Evin prison). Revolutionary tribunals exist in the main towns. They are responsible for ensuring the application of “Islamic law”. The judges are chosen by the religious hierarchy. There is no check on them. The tribunals have their own military units and closely collaborate with the komitehs and the pasdars. Like the pasdars and the komitehs, the revolutionary tribunals did not for very long limit themselves to going after collaborators of the Pahlavi dictatorship. They were to strike against advocates of socialism and Marxism, who supported the revolution but not the “Islamic revolution”. The tribunals applied the precepts of Khomeini: “Iran will try to bring religion to the savage beasts that have attacked it. If it does not manage to do this, it will imprison them; in other words it will purge them. That is what all the prophets have done since the creation”. (Keyhan, January 14, 1982.) There are no rights of legal defence. Interpretation of Islamic law is extremely “flexible”, and the most arbitrary sentences are handed out.

The Foundation for the Humble (Mostafazeen) is a key mechanism of the Islamic Republican regime. It confiscated the assets of the upper layers of the old regime. It, therefore, possesses a minor economic empire, both in goods and property (factories, restaurants, hotels and cinemas). It is under the strict control of the IRP. It holds very large funds that enable the IRP to dish out material advantages to its supporters. It has, thus, been able to build a substantial patronage network. The scandals and corruption connected with this institution have been decried on many occasions, including by official representatives of the Islamic regime. It has never published detailed financial accounts.

The Crusade for Reconstruction (Jehad Sazendegi) has its field of activity mainly in the countryside. Thousands of youth involved themselves in this campaign, and they really did want to help the poor rural regions and carry forward the revolution. Rather rapidly, the IRP took it over. Recruitment was carried out through the mosques or the Islamic Associations in the schools. It has been given a role in carrying out the schemes of the Ministry of Planning in the rural areas. Members of the Crusade receive wages. As an institution, it is also funded out of the state budget. It serves above all as an instrument for building the IRP’s influence in the countryside. For example, members of the Crusade collaborate with the police forces in Kurdistan.

The Islamic Associations (Anjomanhaye Eslami) were set up to counterbalance the weight of the shoras in the factories. The regime sought to take the shoras in hand. But the Islamic Associations represented a more direct transmission belt, one more firmly tied to the IRP. Their purpose was to serve as organs of the IRP in the workplaces and to combat all forces based on the workers movement, although in some cases they momentarily slipped out of the role that had been assigned to them. In fact, Islamic Associations have been formed in the army, government apparatus, schools, hospitals... They ensure an IRP presence in all layers of society. The Office of the Monkerat (literally, “Sin”, that which “Must Not Be Done”) is encharged with monitoring the good conduct of citizens, and serves to complement the role of the Islamic Associations. This Office of “Sin” has its own tribunals and police.

All these diverse Islamic and revolutionary institutions are not “ideological associations”. They are directly connected to the Shi’ite hierarchy and the faghih. They are designed to guarantee the domination of the IRP and a significant part of the clergy over a bourgeois state apparatus. This is what fundamentally determines their nature and functions. Their large budgets are made possible, among other things, by the state’s revenue from oil. The presence of radicalised and anti-imperialist youth in some of them does not change this reality. These institutions and organisations form a whole system that has provided the foundation for building and consolidating the Islamic regime, based on a combination of “public assistance” and repression.

The IRP — towards a one-party system

The IRP has an “association” of thugs, the hezbollahis. They call themselves members of the Party of God (Hezbollah). The IRP was not able to take the initiative for repression directly. So, in an underhanded way it organised the hezbollahis. Ayat, a former member of the Iranian Party of Toilers, a right-wing group that supported the 1953 coup, was given charge of organising these goons. Armed with clubs and other weapons, the hezbollahis were assigned the job of subduing the various oppositions to the official party. Because of its “plebeian” social composition (including a lot of lumpen), this group gave the appearance of “emerging from the people”. Thus, it had a certain cover of “popular legitimacy” for its exactions. After Bani Sadr was eliminated, the IRP extended official recognition to the “association”. It also became a battleground of factional struggles within the clergy.

The Islamic Republican Party holds all the strings that link the various “revolutionary organisations”. Khomeini operates like a Bonaparte, throwing his weight this way and that in the factional struggles within the IRP. He is the cornerstone of a system of political domination by a significant faction of the Shi’ite hierarchy. At the same time, the concentration of power in his hands and the preponderant role he plays are the expression of the precariousness of the IRP regime.

To justify an opportunist policy towards the new regime, organisations such as the Tudeh Party or the Fedayeen-Majority talk about “major” differences between the various factions of the IRP. Some of these they define as progressive, “revolutionary” and “anti-imperialist”. Others, they say, are reactionary and anti-communist. The first, according to them, represent the leadership of the so-called anti-imperialist phase of the revolution and of “non-capitalist road of development” and are therefore deserving of support.

Differences do, of course, exist. The Hojatieh group, for instance, is one of the most openly conservative. It is violently opposed to the land reform, as well as to nationalisation of foreign trade. It is virulently anti-socialist, anti-communist and anti-Marxist. It has a very strong influence in the legal apparatus and the new political police, the SAVAMA. One of the leaders of the Hojatieh group, Falsafi, who was involved in the August 1953 coup against Mossadegh, has said that it is necessary to collaborate with former Savakis in combating the left. Another faction, the “Imam’s Line”, tends to indulge in populist demagogy denouncing the “rich” (the mostakbars, the “high and mighty”), which has been a frequently recurring theme in the Islamic nationalist movement.

The Hojatieh faction in the clergy bases itself on, and favours, capitalist sectors, merchants and local strongmen who have been quick to take advantage of the openings created by the revolution to climb the social scale. It is, therefore, opposed to growing state intervention in the economy. It is not happy about Khomeini’s appealing to the people in order to resolve differences within the clergy and to maintain his direct relationship with the masses. As the Hojatieh group sees it, this only retards the necessary social and economic stabilisation. This group favours more direct links with imperialism. It is also hostile to Khomeini’s claim to be the representative of the Twelfth Imam (the “Hidden Imam”, the “Lord of Time”, that is the messiah). Although this opposition is formally based on religious orthodoxy, its practical importance is that it denies that Khomeini has a right to absolute power or that he has the divine authority to establish justice and happiness on the earth, and, therefore, to meet the demands of the masses for reforms.

The “Followers of the Imam’s Line”, on the other hand, stress organising the masses and building up a system of mass transmission belts. This involves some populist measures and a role for a public sector in reorganising the power system. However, they show no less zeal than the Hojatieh faction in repressing all sorts of opponents of the regime — the old monarchist circles; bourgeois sectors disappointed with the results of the Islamic revolution; forces identifying with socialism or the workers movement, or even the advocates of a petty-bourgeois “socialistic”, populist version of Islam (as represented by the leftish Islamic theologian Shariati, one of the sources of inspiration for the Mojahedeen of the People). The anti-imperialist professions of the Imam’s Line group have served above all as a means for manipulating the mass movement. Over and above all the differences between them, all the currents in the regime are firmly opposed to any serious attack on private property, the market economy, or the capitalist state. They have also all opposed the extension of democratic rights and development of a strong and independent workers movement.

The IRP includes the section of the religious hierarchy involved in political activity. (A large part of the clergy refuses to get involved directly in state affairs and politics.) The IRP also serves as a liaison with local dignitaries and representatives of the Bazaar, which is one of the social bases of the regime. And this is over and above the social and economic empire the Shi’ite sect itself possesses. Some elements in the Bazaar are enjoying monopolies granted them by the authorities and have stepped into the openings left by their exiled or “purged” competitors. In this unstable market economy, fortunes are being won and lost rapidly.

Indeed, about 10% of the working population — in large part, plebeian or impoverished petty bourgeoisie — are directly or indirectly linked to institutions on which the new regime is based. This represents a mass social base for the Khomeini regime, which can also rely on a not inconsiderable part of the personnel of the state apparatus, both the “renewed” and the not so renewed.

The present pre-eminent position of the clergy is the result of the weakness of both the bourgeoisie and the working class. The bourgeoisie has lost its modernist wing, linked to the Shah, which was amputated by the February 1979 revolution. The traditional bourgeoisie, for its part, has not had structured political parties. It played only a marginal role in the anti-dictatorial struggle. The economic stagnation since 1979, as well as the activity of the masses, did not help it any to revive after the fall of the Shah. The working class, savagely repressed by the Shah, and suffering from a long series of betrayals by the Tudeh Party, had no solid organisations or political traditions of its own. The workers movement did not get a long enough democratic interlude to organise itself and win the political and organisational independence necessary for it to step forward as a contender for power.

The clergy as an institution has real economic, social and organisational power that has been built up over the course of centuries. It has played a role in the history of Iran, and it has had numerous links with the state. For special historical reasons, it has now come to the front of the political stage for the first time.

Here the first part of André Duret’s report ends. The concluding part — “The Crisis of the Iranian Revolution” — appeared in International Viewpoint no. 28, and takes the story on from the crushing of Bani-Sadr and the Mojahedeen in June 1981, through the Iran–Iraq war, to the tasks it set revolutionaries in 1983.

TL;DR: On 5 August 1981, in issue 107 of Inprecor, the Fourth International’s French-language weekly, Michel Royere used a word that had not been used before, writing that the Tudeh Party of Iran and the majority of the Fedayin held campist positions in international politics. He put it in quotation marks. Four months later, on 21 December, he gave it a heading of its own, From anti-imperialism to campism, and a definition. The word was made in Tehran, to describe one precise operation: how a party that called itself communist talked itself into defending the men who were, that same summer, hanging its own class. By the middle of 1981 the Islamic Republic had prised open the factory shoras thrown up in the 1979 insurrection and refilled them with state-appointed Islamic councils, shut the universities under the name of a Cultural Revolution, run an assault on Kurdish autonomy since Khomeini’s war-fatwa of August 1979, beaten women off the streets since 8 March 1979, and after the fall of Bani Sadr on 21 June 1981 turned the executions into a daily list. The trick was to change the measure. Stop asking what the clerical state does to the workers of Iran, and ask instead where it stands between Washington and Moscow.

On 5 August 1981, in issue 107 of Inprecor, the Fourth International’s French-language weekly, Michel Royère used a word that had not been used before. The Tudeh Party of Iran and the majority of the Fedayin, he wrote, held “campist” positions in international politics. He put it in quotation marks, the way you handle a coin you have just struck and are not yet sure will pass. Four months later, on 21 December, in a long article on the Tudeh and the Mujahedin under Khomeini, he stopped treating it as a passing label and gave it a heading of its own — “From anti-imperialism to campism” — and a definition. Forty-five years later the word is thrown around freely, at Syria, at Ukraine, at every argument on the left about who deserves defending. It is worth remembering that it was made in Tehran, to describe one precise operation: how a party that called itself communist talked itself into defending the men who were, that same summer, hanging its own class.

The Tudeh’s problem was simple, and it was not stupidity. By the middle of 1981 the Islamic Republic had already done, to the Iranian working class and to everyone else the revolution had put in motion, more or less everything a counter-revolution does. The factory shoras — the workers’ councils thrown up in the insurrection of 1979, which for a moment ran production in the oil fields and the plants — had been prised open and refilled with state-appointed Islamic councils. The universities had been shut in the spring of 1980 under the name of a “Cultural Revolution” and the autonomous student organisations and the left driven out of them. The assault on Kurdish autonomy had been running since Khomeini’s war-fatwa of August 1979. Women had been beaten off the streets for refusing the veil since the demonstrations of 8 March 1979. And after the fall of Bani Sadr on 21 June 1981 the executions had become a daily list. Royère’s own headline that August named it exactly: the repressive offensive was aimed at the gains of the Iranian masses and workers.

On any measure the working class might actually use — what a state does to your councils, your unions, your press, your right to organise — this regime was an enemy. So how do you file it as an ally? You change the measure. This is the whole content of what Royère named. You stop asking what the clerical state does to the workers of Iran and start asking where it stands between Washington and Moscow, and having asked the second question instead of the first, you find your answer: it is anti-imperialist, therefore it is ours. The Tudeh’s general secretary Nurredine Kianouri put it without embarrassment in July 1981. The objective of every revolutionary force in Iran, he wrote, “as Imam Khomeini has indicated on several occasions,” was to prepare the masses for a prolonged struggle against imperialism led by the United States; the task was to unite behind “the anti-imperialist and popular line of Imam Khomeini.” The Fedayin majority said the same in plainer words: the Islamic Republic “is a national and anti-imperialist regime; our organisation supports the Islamic Republic against American imperialism and its allies.”

Read those sentences again and notice what has gone missing from them. There is no class in them. There are peoples, there is imperialism, there is a line and an Imam, and there is a camp; there is no bourgeoisie, no working class, no shora, no question of who owns the plants or who fills the prisons. That absence is not an oversight. It is the work the rhetoric is there to do. Royère saw the machinery for what it was — “nothing other than a new version of the Stalinist theory of the ‘bloc of four classes’ dressed up in Iranian colours” — and he traced its moving parts. The class nature of the state is “denied, erased.” The fight against the Iranian possessing classes shrinks into a quarrel inside the ruling party, a right Islamic Republican Party against a left one, exactly as the Stalinists of the Second Chinese Revolution had once sorted the Kuomintang into a right, a centre and a left. The only real test of who was progressive became the attitude taken towards the Tudeh, and sometimes towards the Soviet Union. And from there the road runs one way. A party that has decided the state is its anti-imperialist ally cannot then denounce that state’s repression without denouncing itself, so it does not. At most, Royère noted, the Fedayin majority would “regret” the executions. The Tudeh, in the Stalinist tradition, supported them and took part.

This is what “campism” was coined to name, and it is why the abstraction matters. Royère’s fourth element is the one that carries the word. The Tudeh’s whole orientation, he wrote, belonged to “a campist conception of the world,” a vision in which the development of the revolution is measured “by the evolution of the relationship of forces between states.” The world is cut into camps: the imperialist camp on one side, and on the other a socialist camp to which are added whatever regimes have chosen the “non-capitalist road” — Nasser’s Egypt once, Algeria. The task, in that vision, is an alliance between the socialist camp and the national-liberation movements; and — here is the hinge — that alliance “is not a convergence of interests among exploited and oppressed social classes on an international scale, but first and foremost an alliance between states and regimes.” Substitute the map of states for the line of classes, and every question answers itself. A clerical dictatorship busy shooting communists becomes a partner, because it sits on the correct side of a border you have drawn in place of a class line. The anti-imperialism is not a mistake laid over an otherwise sound analysis. It is the alibi the analysis was built to produce.

The Fourth International was not neutral about imperialism, and the point survives only if that is clear. Royère’s comrades defended the Iranian revolution against the United States and, from September 1980, against Iraq’s invasion; a year earlier the same paper had run the headline “Defend the Iranian revolution!” The argument was never that anti-imperialism is a trap. It was that anti-imperialism is not a permission slip — that a revolution reduced to its anti-imperialist face alone, with the class content boiled off, ends where the Tudeh ended.

It is worth asking, all the same, what kind of anti-imperialism the campists were invoking. Iran’s quarrel with Washington was real — the Shah had been America’s man, and the men who seized the embassy were not going to be anyone’s client — but it was a quarrel over who would command the oil rent and who would be sovereign over Iranian capital, not a break with imperialism as a system. It was bounded enough that the same regime bought its guns, right through the war, from Menachem Begin, a fact Royère records without needing to labour it. The “bloc of four classes” was not a slander but the regime’s own physiognomy: a national bourgeoisie with the clergy at its head, asserting itself against a rival and soon nursing sub-imperial appetites of its own — the anti-imperialism of a competitor, not of the exploited, which is why it could be waved at Washington in the morning and turned on the shoras and the Kurds by the afternoon. The campists did not misread a friendly regime. They lent a bourgeois one a virtue it never had.

The Mujahedin, when they attacked those Israeli deliveries, had the thread in their hands and let it drop. Taking guns from Begin was not a lapse the theocracy had to explain away; it was the project working as intended. What was being built in Tehran was a state — clergy welded to an army and a bureaucracy, the pasdars already its loyal core — and a state arming for a long war takes its weapons where it finds them. The anti-imperialism was the junior partner of that construction from the first day, to be spent or pocketed as the apparatus required; there was never a contradiction to resolve, only an interest to serve.

And the ending was already visible in Royère’s own footnotes. He quoted a small item from the International Herald Tribune of 23 November 1981: the revolution’s prosecutor, Hossein Moussavi, announcing that the “pro-Soviet leftists disguised as Muslims” who had worked their way into the revolutionary institutions must be “identified and executed,” and that it was the Revolutionary Guards in particular that the Tudeh and the Fedayin majority had infiltrated. The party that had spent two years insisting the regime was its ally was being told, in the state press, that it would be hunted down inside the very institutions it had joined out of loyalty.

It took another fourteen months. In February 1983 the Guards arrested the Tudeh leadership more or less entire; some five thousand members went to prison. Kianouri, who had defined the party’s task as unity behind the Imam’s line, was brought onto television to confess to espionage and to recant. The cadres who had been taught that the clerical state was the anti-imperialist camp in Iranian form were hanged by it, many of them, and more in the prison massacres of 1988. The camp they had chosen was never theirs to join. That is the thing the word was built to see coming, and the reason it is worth keeping sharp forty-five years on: campism did not save a single shora, or reopen a single university, or hold a foot of Kurdistan. It supplied a bourgeois counter-revolution with a left, and then watched the counter-revolution use the left for rope.

Postscript: What Inprecor got wrong

Our reader Gilbert Achcar (who wrote about Iran under the name Salah Jaber during the Iranian revolution and counter-revolution) suggests this might not be the earliest use of ‘campism’ in an FI periodical. I’d love it if any readers can point to one, obviously excluding the different error of “third campism”. Gilbert also raises another question: was Royère’s analysis correct? More than critical nuance, there was a sharp rebate in the FI in Iran. To find out more, read this article and that one. Was Inprecor mistaken in its early assessments? When Salah Jaber’s 1981 article “The resurgence of Islamic fundamentalism,” from Quatrième Internationale n° 6, was republished in English in the 1987 International Marxist Review the retrospective introduction says flatly that “the notions put forward … on issues like the essentially reactionary but contradictory nature of the Khomeini leadership have since been confirmed.” But by the time the FI debated the first four years of the revolution (see the United Secretariat report by Duret in IV 27 and 28, for example) it was also clear that:

• 1. It dated the counter-revolution too late, and kept “the Iranian revolution” alive as an object to defend.

• 2. It externalises “campism” onto the Stalinists and lets the Fourth International off too lightly, at a time when a campist and stagist view had been growing among the SWPs Iranian co-thinkers since the early 70s.

• 3. On the Tudeh, it treats an abstract “methodological error” where the later analysis supplies a material and concrete one.

We’ll return to this next week.

Sources. Michel Royère, “L’offensive répressive vise les acquis des masses et des travailleurs iraniens,” Inprecor (2ᵉ série) n° 107, 5 August 1981 — the first appearance of “campiste”; and “Le Tudeh et les Moudjahidin face au régime Khomeini,” Inprecor n° 115, 21 December 1981, from which the definition and all quotations of Kianouri and the Fedayin are taken (Royère cites Kianouri, “Pour la cohésion des forces patriotiques,” Nouvelle revue internationale, Moscow, July 1981, and the Moussavi item from the International Herald Tribune, 23 November 1981). The concept is generalised the following year in Inprecor n° 130 (12 July 1982) and in Quatrième Internationale 3ᵉ série n° 9 (1982) and n° 10 (1983). Translations from the French are my own.

From anti-imperialism to “campism”

Michel Royère, “The Tudeh and the Mujahedin faced with the Khomeini regime,” Inprecor (2ᵉ série) n° 115, 21 December 1981 (written 9 December 1981). This is the article in which “campism” is first defined — the middle section, “From anti-imperialism to campism,” is where the word is coined as a category. It is printed here entire so the diagnosis can be read in its own setting: a critique of both wings of the Iranian left — the Tudeh and the “majority” Fedayin for their campist capitulation to Khomeini, and the Mujahedin for a class-collaborationist, substitutionist course — against which Royère counterposes the independent self-organisation of the workers. Royère’s own section headings are retained; his footnotes follow. Translation mine.

The Khomeini regime’s present policy throws into particular relief the question of democratic liberties for the organisations that situate themselves on the terrain of the Iranian left. Two major political positions, both of them mistaken, predominate: that of the Tudeh and of the majority faction of the Fedayin, on the one hand, and that of the Mujahedin, on the other.

The Tudeh and the “majority” Fedayin start out from a characterisation of the Khomeini regime as anti-imperialist in order to define, in relation to it, their entire political orientation: “The objective of the Revolution, of the Islamic Republic and of all the revolutionary forces of our homeland — as Imam Khomeini, leader of the Iranian Revolution, has indicated on several occasions — is to prepare the masses for a prolonged and relentless struggle against imperialism led by the United States.

“The destiny of the Iranian Revolution, like that of all the destitute and oppressed peoples of our region, depends on this historic battle. To succeed in achieving the unity of the revolutionary forces inside the country, and to make use of the international support of all those who aid the Iranian revolution [implicitly, the socialist camp — editor’s note] in its struggle against imperialism and world reaction, is the sine qua non of victory in the coming confrontation,” [1] explained the general secretary of the Tudeh, Nurredine Kianouri, in July 1981.

The “majority” Fedayin take up broadly the same definition of the Islamic Republic and of its leaders: “After the overthrow of the puppet monarchist regime of the Shah, a national and anti-imperialist regime took power. (…) American imperialism is the principal enemy of all the peoples of the world, the greatest international plunderer and the greatest criminal in history. The principal cause of the privations and the misery imposed on our people is world imperialism led by American imperialism. The Organisation of the Fedayin of the People of Iran (OFPI-majority) recognises that the Islamic Republic of Iran, whose leadership is in the hands of anti-imperialist forces, is a national and anti-imperialist regime. Our organisation supports the Islamic Republic against American imperialism and its allies.” [2]

In the logic of this approach, described as “anti-imperialist,” the Tudeh and the “majority” Fedayin fight for the constitution of a “united anti-imperialist Front.” They confer on it a strategic character. Moreover, if one considers the spread of social classes (including the national bourgeoisie) and the political organisations that the Tudeh and Fedayin address in order to bring it about (the PRI), this “united anti-imperialist Front” is nothing other than a new version of the Stalinist theory of the “Bloc of four classes,” dressed up in Iranian colours.

From anti-imperialism to “campism”

Nurredine Kianouri, in the text cited above, explains: “From the very first days of the Revolution, the People’s Party (Tudeh) defined the key question: that of creating a single Popular Front, that of all the partisans of the Revolution. We defend this demand consistently. The cooperation of the revolutionary forces faithful to the anti-imperialist and popular line of Imam Khomeini with the partisans of socialism inside the country must form the basis of this Front. (…) The People’s Party of Iran seeks to attain such unity, such unanimity. It hopes that, sooner or later, the revolutionary forces of Iran will form a united Front and will bring to nothing the plots of the enemies of the Revolution.”

As for the “majority” Fedayin, they declare in the same vein: “All the forces, organisations, parties, individuals, groups and structures that take part in the anti-imperialist struggle must support one another. The OFPI (majority) supports all these forces in the anti-imperialist and democratic struggle, and fights to unite them in a united anti-imperialist Front.”

This Stalinist-type approach turns on four elements:

a) In conformity with the Stalino-Menshevik schema of revolution by stages, applied in a semi-colonial country, these organisations take up again the old division between a minimum programme (anti-imperialist and democratic demands) and a maximum programme. But, in order to preserve the alliance they envisage with the PRI, they quite naturally come to privilege, within the minimum programme, the anti-imperialist demands (which end in supporting the regime’s “non-alignment” foreign policy) against the other demands of a democratic character (radical agrarian reform, rights of the oppressed nationalities, freedom of organisation, of assembly, of the press…) that stand at the very centre of the clashes between the mass movement and the Iranian possessing classes.

b) The class nature of the state, of its institutions, and, within that framework, of the regime and its policy, is denied, erased. The struggle against the Iranian possessing classes and their political representatives is reduced to espousing the cause of the PRI and of the “anti-imperialist government” in its fight against the “liberals,” the partisans of a “moderate government.”

The whole approach to the PRI and to the regime’s leading circles is made solely from the angle of the various regroupments within them. The Tudeh and the “majority” Fedayin thus carve out a right-wing PRI and a left-wing PRI, just as, during the Second Chinese Revolution, the Stalinists once distinguished a right, a centre and a left Kuomintang… The sole “objective” criterion of these distinctions is the attitude adopted by these sectors towards the Tudeh or the “majority” Fedayin (and sometimes the Soviet Union).

c) This leads the Tudeh and the “majority” Fedayin to support, in varying degrees, the repressive course embarked upon by the regime. At times the “majority” Fedayin simply regret the executions. They confine themselves to pointing out how this repression, the regime’s attitude to the “Kurdish problem,” or again the regime’s policy, fail to advance the Revolution and the unity of the anti-imperialist struggle. But these criticisms never issue in any calling-into-question of their attitude towards the regime. As for the Tudeh, in the Stalinist tradition, it supports and takes an active part in the repression.

d) The last element is that this orientation of the Tudeh and the “majority” Fedayin is inscribed within a “campist” conception of the world.

This is a vision in which the development of the revolution is characterised — essentially — by the evolution of the relationship of forces between states. The world is carved up into “camps”: on one side the “imperialist camp,” on the other the “socialist camp,” to which are joined those regimes that have chosen the so-called “non-capitalist road of development” (for example, in earlier days, Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Egypt, or Algeria).

Faced with the “imperialist camp,” the task is to forge a durable alliance between the “socialist camp” and the national-liberation movement in the developing countries. This alliance is not a convergence of interests among exploited and oppressed social classes on an international scale, but first and foremost an alliance between states and regimes. On one side, the states of “really existing socialism”; on the other, the “anti-imperialist governments.” This is the traditional orientation of Soviet diplomacy over many years.

Curiously, it is not the Tudeh but the “majority” Fedayin who, with the zeal that marks neophytes, express this line most openly: “In confronting world imperialism, the working class of the capitalist countries and the national-liberation movements, which fight for peace, for national independence, democracy and socialism, form the world revolutionary Front. The forces of this world revolutionary Front — that is to say the socialist countries, all the democratic and national regimes, all the communist and workers’ parties, all the national-liberation movements — are the defenders and allies of our people and of our Revolution. The consolidation of solidarity and cooperation with these forces will ensure the victory of our people’s struggle for national independence, social progress and the defence of the gains of the Revolution” [3] — declares that same text of the “majority” Fedayin, which smacks of a literal translation from the Russian.

From the reduction of the Iranian revolutionary process — which is a process of permanent revolution — to its anti-imperialist character alone, through to the support given to the Khomeini regime, the circle is almost complete. Just one detail is missing, one that will recall how the support given by the local Communist Parties to the “anti-imperialist” Iraqi, Egyptian or Sudanese regimes came to an end. It is a small item of news, carried on 23 November 1981 in the International Herald Tribune, according to which the Prosecutor of the Revolution, Hossein Moussavi, declared that “the pro-Soviet leftists disguised as Muslims and working within the revolutionary institutions must be identified and executed.” In this interview with the newspaper Ettela’at, taken up by the International Herald Tribune, Hossein Moussavi asserts that it is the corps of pasdars in particular that has been infiltrated by the Tudeh or the “majority” Fedayin.

The alliance policy of the People’s Mujahedin

The condemnation we make of the Stalinist policy of the Tudeh or the “majority” Fedayin cannot, however, blur the deep divergences we have with the strategy developed by the organisation of the People’s Mujahedin. These divergences plainly do not put in question our denunciation of the repressive course embarked upon by the Khomeinist regime, which in fact targets the gains of all the labouring masses of Iran. Unfailing solidarity with the militants of the Mujahedin, with the Kurds and with the revolutionaries hunted, tracked, tortured [4] and executed is an integral part of our defence of the Iranian Revolution — including against the smear and slander campaigns of imperialism (on the theme of the revolution devouring its own children…). It is also one of the preconditions of any political debate on the orientation most appropriate to pursue today. The criticism we make of the Mujahedin organisation bears on three essential points:

• a) From the standpoint of the programme of action and the political alliances they propose, the Mujahedin’s orientation remains stamped with the mark of class collaboration.

• b) The analysis they make of the crisis of the Khomeini regime is largely triumphalist and consequently underestimates the political battles that remain to be fought in order to develop the consciousness and the independent organisation of the living forces of the Revolution.

• c) This leads, on the military plane, to a substitutionist line, to a form of “private war” waged between an organisation and the regime.

Let us examine first the Programme of the Provisional Government of the Democratic Islamic Republic of Iran. As its title indicates, it aims only to “democratise” the present Iranian regime. This programme, in its broad lines, is the political basis on which the National Council of Resistance (CNR) is founded.

It stands in continuity with the institutions of the Islamic Republic, if only through the recognition of Bani Sadr as President of the Republic (chapter 1, point 7), even though it is said that it will be a Constituent Assembly, issuing from free popular elections — in which neither the partisans of the Shah nor the forces that support Khomeini will be able to take part — that will have to draw up the new political system and the new Constitution (chapter 1, point 3). The Programme, moreover, defends the restoration of civil liberties. The Iranian revolution is defined as “national, democratic and anti-imperialist” (point 4).

On the economic plane, “the provisional government admits national capitalism and the national market economy, personal and private property and individual investment, on condition that they do not assume unlimited dimensions, that they do not engender comprador relations or dependence on foreign powers, and that they do not compromise the socio-economic development of society.” Alongside measures such as the nationalisation of foreign trade or a radical agrarian reform, the Programme multiplies its overtures towards small and medium entrepreneurs — for example by guaranteeing to the Bazaar Council or to the professional guilds a genuine right of veto over tax rates.

While the programme provides for the dissolution of the “committees” and the pasdars [5], where the army is concerned there is talk only of a “popular restructuring”: “Internal relations must be democratic, while respecting the hierarchy.” The soldiers would merely be “consulted” on the choice of officers.

As regards workers’ rights, the Programme remains very limited. It provides, to be sure, for the abolition of all anti-worker regulation and the satisfaction of a certain number of demands of an economic character, but it commits itself to recognising only the “peaceful forms of protest (including the strike) announced in advance.” On the new labour legislation, it is said that the workers will be consulted. Not a word on the workers’ shoras or on workers’ control. In the reformist tradition given to them, for example, by Ayatollah Taleghani, the shoras are regarded only as a form — particularly suited to Iranian conditions — of the administration of the state, that is, as municipal or regional councils.

In this context, the question of the Constituent Assembly is approached only from the angle of formal respect for the norms of bourgeois representative parliamentary democracy.

At the level of alliances, the Mujahedin, through Bani Sadr, in fact address themselves to those sectors of the Iranian national bourgeoisie and of the army that would be at once “anti-imperialist” and “anti-Khomeinist.” It would be disastrous to believe that the alliance with Bani Sadr is, in the end, no more than a neat little tactical manoeuvre that would make it possible to isolate the regime further and to increase the representativeness of the non-monarchist opposition. It is wrong to see in Bani Sadr merely an isolated man, dependent — for his programme as much as for his board and lodging — on the goodwill of the Mujahedin. Tomorrow, in the event of a power vacuum or of civil war, Bani Sadr may once again become the principal political card played by sectors of the Iranian bourgeoisie and of imperialism.

The divisions of the Iranian bourgeoisie, the weakness of its political apparatuses (which explain, among other things, the autonomy of a religious hierarchy that commands this material force) mean that it is always the Iranian army that will be, in the event of civil war, of open struggle for power, the principal and last blockhouse of the counter-revolution. It will fight tooth and nail to defend, against the mass movement, the bourgeois state and private property. The preservation of the ex-imperial army in the essentials of its structures will not have been the least of the crimes committed against the Iranian Revolution by the Khomeinist regime.

Finally, on the subject of Bani Sadr, it must be recalled that in politics the accounts are settled by the laws of algebra and not of simple arithmetic. That is to say, there are alliances that cost more than they bring in, alliances that, over the medium term, weaken more than they strengthen the struggle being waged. And such is the case of the alliance with Bani Sadr. The Mujahedin declare that, in order to fight the regime, the struggle of the nationalities must be linked to the struggle of the popular masses of the Persian provinces, that the hour has come to prepare a vast campaign of strikes in the factories, leading to a general strike against the regime.

Is it serving that struggle to ally oneself with a man who ordered and covered the military campaigns to crush the Kurdish resistance; a man who justified, at the time, the assaults on democratic liberties, notably the closure of the universities; a man who, finally, denounced the activity of the workers’ shoras and the strikes; a man who always opposed — even when the threat of imperialist intervention was at its height, or during the Iraqi aggression — the massive arming of the workers and peasants?

In this regard, the Mujahedin’s tactic towards the army, or the cover they give to Bani Sadr’s repeated appeals to the military hierarchy, are anything but innocent.

To be sure, the Mujahedin are wagering on the emergence, within the lower ranks of the military hierarchy and in the corps of non-commissioned officers, of nationalist currents that would refuse both a return to the old regime and submission to imperialism, while not recognising themselves in the present regime of the Islamic Republic. It is in this perspective, too, that their campaign of military actions is inscribed. This may lead, tomorrow, to the temptation of integrating certain sectors of that army into “progressive” coup projects against Khomeini, or of constituting — out of a liberated zone in which a provisional government would be installed — another army made up of the columns of the Mujahedin organisation and of the rallied sectors of the present Iranian army. These are nothing but deadly chimeras for the future of the Iranian Revolution. Not that such “nationalist” sectors do not exist in the army, notably among the junior cadres. It is true that the Mujahedin have support in some of these sectors. But they do not represent, and will never represent, the centre of gravity of the Iranian army.

In this regard, Massoud Rajavi and the Mujahedin leadership ought to follow their own reasoning to its conclusion when they denounce the (quite real) deliveries of Israeli military equipment to the Iranian army. Certainly, in doing so Israel is defending its own interests of state. Those interests run through the neutralisation of the Iraqi army, at a time when Baghdad was, together with Syria, the principal state in the region opposed to the Camp David accords. Menachem Begin does not wish to support the Khomeini regime, but the material aid supplied by Israel corresponds to one of the strategic designs of imperialism: to avoid at all costs a fatal collapse of the ex-imperial army.

A substitutionist orientation

The second mistaken aspect of the Mujahedin’s orientation is their triumphalist analysis of the political and social isolation of the Khomeini regime. No doubt the regime’s social base has largely narrowed. But it is wrong to deny the massive participation of several hundred thousand people in the funerals of Prime Minister Ali Rajai and of Bahonar, or to hold to the simplistic explanation that these are merely the clienteles of the mosques’ social-assistance networks. It is undeniable that the PRI has used the network of mosques and of institutions such as the “Foundation for the Dispossessed” to build for itself, notably among the plebeian layers of the towns, a clientele devoted to it. It is on this basis too that the hezbollah gangs [6] were formed, which have been regularly used against the left or the workers’ movement. But it would be disastrous to believe that one can dispense with a battle to win over those popular sectors that still follow the PRI but that above all place their trust in Khomeini for the role he played in the overthrow of the Shah and for his stances towards imperialism.

This triumphalist vision, combining with the populist and guerrilla tradition, issues in a line of military action that is substitutionist with respect to the development and the strengthening of the mass movement. Its first effects can already be seen. There is no doubt that spectacular blows have been struck against the Khomeinist regime through the assassinations. But this typically Narodnik [7] line of the mechanical destruction of the state, individual by individual, has not put in question the foundations of the Islamic Republic.

This campaign of attacks leaves the field open to the bloody provocations of the old Savak hands who continue to infest the Iranian state apparatus, and of the imperialist intelligence agencies, which doubtless see in it a good opportunity to pour a little more oil on the fire.

But the most serious thing is that, on the political plane, it leaves disoriented a mass movement that has no place to take in this “private war” waged between an organisation and a state apparatus. Moreover, in the substitutionist form it takes, this campaign of attacks allows the regime to weld back around itself those popular sectors that fear the fall of Khomeini would open the way to a return to power of the military and monarchist clan.

The overthrow of the “moderate,” “liberal” government of Mossadegh in 1953, and the installation of twenty-five years of ferocious dictatorship, still mark the collective memory of many Iranians. From this point of view too, the appeals to the army launched by the Mujahedin have the opposite effect to the one their authors seek in order to unmask the regime’s policy.

It is one thing to reject the dilemma advanced by the Tudeh or the “majority” Fedayin, who explain that the choice comes down to Khomeini or a military dictatorship. But it is political blindness not to understand that this argument still has, for hundreds of thousands of Iranians, resonances that reflect what their contemporary historical experience actually is.

It is not a matter of renouncing the defence of the threatened democratic liberties, of renouncing the calling-into-question of the regime, on the pretext that conditions would not be ripe for a qualitatively higher form of government, a workers’ and peasants’ government.

The battle for the defence of democratic liberties is essential in order to revive the mass movement and, for that, it must find concrete form at the central political level. For the policy of the PRI and the Khomeinist clergy is an overall policy that strives to be coherent on a national scale. It rests on the control of a series of institutions: the Constitution and the rule of the velayat-e faqih, a Majlis (Parliament) totally monopolised by the PRI through anti-democratic elections, control of the judicial apparatus, legislation (the so-called Law of Talion, or the legislation against women’s rights), and control of the repressive apparatus (pasdars, “committees,” but also the army). From this it follows that revolutionaries cannot content themselves with denouncing the assaults on democratic liberties without also calling into question the regime and the government that has made these assaults into a systematic policy.

In this context, the slogan of a Constituent Assembly (or National Assembly, or any other formula) takes on its full value. It is a bourgeois-democratic slogan, “the most democratic of the bourgeois revolution,” according to Lenin. The level of development of the self-organisation of the mass movement, and the still limited character of the political differentiations within the labouring masses, do not permit the slogan of a workers’ and peasants’ government — which would be the first form of, or a short stage towards, the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat — to be advanced as an agitational slogan. Yet, in the Iranian context, it is impossible for revolutionaries to approach the slogan of a Constituent Assembly as the Mujahedin do — that is, solely from the standpoint of respect for the norms of bourgeois representative democracy.

It must be approached also from the standpoint of the social and economic measures that ought to be on the agenda of that Assembly, at the same time as the discussion on the forms of political regime. It must be approached, too, without counterposing it to the development of the self-organisation of the masses (shoras, militias, etc.). On the political plane, the question of formal democracy overlaps with the problem of the attitude of the revolutionary vanguard towards the petty-bourgeois masses (notably the peasantry), the plebeian masses, and also those sectors of the working masses that have not yet acquired class consciousness.

On the economic and cultural plane, these petty-bourgeois and plebeian layers are extraordinarily weak. Their essential political strength lies in their numbers. The slogans of formal democracy, like that of the Constituent Assembly, are capable of winning over not only the petty-bourgeois and plebeian masses but also the great working masses, precisely because this last slogan offers them the possibility — at least in appearance — of setting their will against that of the dominant classes.

For that, one must first take account of their real motivations, of the fact that they threw themselves into the revolutionary fray not so much for more formal democracy as to change their concrete lives and become the subjects of history.

This is what gives its importance to the close link between the slogan of the Constituent Assembly and the implementation of economic and social measures against imperialism, the big capitalists and the landowners.

This is what gives its importance to the battle for the defence of democratic rights — for the workers, the poor peasants and the national minorities — for the development of self-organisation, so that they can make their voices heard and directly exercise their political rights without waiting for new saviours or a supreme Imam.

Hence the importance, within the general slogans on self-organisation — in order to guarantee the existence of a genuine sovereign Constituent Assembly capable of implementing these measures against the threats of the possessing classes, of reaction and of imperialism — of the slogan of the general arming of the workers. What is a Constituent Assembly worth if it is “protected” only by the present Iranian army, even “democratised” according to the programme of the CNR?

For to advance in Iran today the slogan of a Constituent Assembly does not mean renouncing or setting aside the battle for the reconstruction, the strengthening and the centralisation of the shoras, which is a central element in the building of an independent workers’ movement. The realisation of the conditions permitting the free election of such a sovereign Constituent Assembly — one taking up the great political, economic and social questions — would indeed be favourable to the revival of workers’ self-organisation and activity.

This struggle for the strengthening and the independence of the workers’ movement will doubtless pass through many mediations (a national congress of the shoras, trade-union organisation, the emergence of an independent workers’ party with a mass influence, etc.), and no one can arbitrarily define its forms and rhythms in advance. But Iranian revolutionaries must wage two battles at once:

— that for the satisfaction of the democratic demands (including as regards the forms of the state) that no sector of the Iranian bourgeoisie is in a position to wage, or even to begin to pose consistently;

— that for the strengthening of the workers’ movement with the perspective of issuing in a form of dual power.

On this double battle will depend the possibility for the working class to play its leading role in the process of permanent revolution opened by the outbreak of the Third Iranian Revolution — to weave the necessary alliances with the plebeian layers of the towns, the poor peasantry and the movement of the nationalities, an indispensable condition for the definitive triumph of the Iranian Revolution, indispensable to the liquidation of imperialist domination, of exploitation and of oppression.

— Michel Royère, 9 December 1981

Footnotes

1. Nurredine Kianouri, “For the cohesion of the patriotic forces,” Nouvelle revue internationale [New International Review], Moscow, July 1981.

2. The guerrilla organisation of the Fedayin of the People of Iran (OFPI) split between the end of 1979 and the beginning of 1980. The majority of the Central Committee — whence its name “majority” — decided to abandon the armed struggle alongside the Kurds and to adopt towards the regime a line analogous to that of the Tudeh. The “minority” Fedayin, for their part, have since maintained a line of resolute opposition to the regime. They were, together with the Peykar, the principal Marxist organisation struck by the latest wave of repression. It is worth noting that both these organisations condemn the Mujahedin’s alliance with Bani Sadr and that both are opposed to the launching, at the present time, of armed struggle against the regime.

3. All these quotations of the “majority” Fedayin are drawn from their May Day 1981 message, published in a special English-language issue of Kar International.

4. Khomeini recently issued a fatwa (religious decree) justifying the use of torture — Le Monde, 6–7 December 1981.

5. Pasdars, or Guardians of the Revolution: an army of volunteers rigorously selected for their loyalty to the regime. The pasdars, recruited mainly in the towns of the Persian provinces, are said to number several tens of thousands.

6. Hezbollah, or “partisans of God”: the thugs who attacked the demonstrations of the parties of the Iranian left, chanting “There is but one party, the party of God!” — whence their name. Their principal leader is a prominent figure of the regime, Ayatollah Ghaffouri.

7. Narodniki, after the Russian populist organisation Narodnaya Volya (People’s Will) of the 1880s, whose militants were to orient themselves, little by little, towards terrorism directed at the Tsar, his ministers and his generals.

Related Reading:

• Pierre Frank: European Communist Parties.... into Bourgeois Governments?: Pierre Frank in Inprecor on How Europe’s Communist Parties Became Pillars of a Crisis-Ridden Capitalism

• Building the Revolutionary Party: German Lessons for Today: Ernest Mandel on Mass Work and United Front Strategy

• Four true things about the Iranian revolution — and how long the Fourth International took to say them. : A companion to our Archive Unlocked reprint of André Duret’s lost 1983 report

• From War Credits to Armed Defeat: The German Revolution 1914-1919: Ernest Mandel on the Rise and Fall of Revolutionary Germany

• Before Your Party, There Was Podemos: Spain’s broad left party began very well, ended very badly, and was captured by the clique around its...

In 1970 the British section of the Fourth International, smaller then than the Revolutionary Communist Party is today, argued its way out of propaganda-group purity and into the movements. Its national secretary wrote the case. The IMG's nephews, the RCP, have spent 2026 arguing the opposite.

Two secretaries, the same tradition, fifty-six years apart, and the same question put to each: what is a small revolutionary group actually for? Rob Sewell, political secretary of the Revolutionary Communist Party, gave his answer at the party’s Central Committee this June, and we took it apart in ‘The Clean Banner’: the broad movements are class collaboration, the united front is a snare, and the task is to keep the flag clean and recruit the vanguard of the vanguard. Pat Jordan, national secretary of the International Marxist Group, gave the opposite answer in the document extracted below, and he gave it from the weaker position. The IMG in 1970 was a few hundred strong and a few months into being the British Section of the Fourth International, following the departure of ‘MIlitant’ from the FI at the 1969 world congress. The RCP, Militant’s descendant, claims thirteen hundred. The smaller group is the one that argued for going out into the movements; the larger is the one arguing for staying home.

The document is the IMG’s hinge. Both wings of the British section had been built out of the long years of ‘deep entry’, its people working inside the Labour Party as a propaganda ginger-group (in the case of Militant) and as the infrastructure for The Week, the Labour-left magazine, vibrant campaigns for Vietnam and workers’ control (in the case of the International Marxist Group), and this resolution is the new section, the IMG, talking itself out of that and into independent public work. Jordan even borrows his title. ‘From a Propaganda Group to a Party of Mass Action’ was James P. Cannon’s phrase for the American SWP’s own refounding turn in 1946, which is partly why the Americans reprinted the British text in their internal bulletin: two fraternal sections making the same argument, that the era of the small group defending a body of ideas was over, and the job now was to intervene.

Jordan names the trap first, and it is the RCP’s trap exactly.

However, we must be objective and assess our present stage as that of being essentially a propaganda group. Obviously from the situation described previously this is quite inadequate: what can a propaganda group do in the case of big industrial struggles (in particular a general strike)? If we are to play our role in the historic task of helping to bring into existence a revolutionary leadership we have to transcend being a propaganda group.

We are, in a sense, in a vicious circle just now: our ability to intervene in the many struggles and even explosions which are inevitable in the coming years is strictly limited by our small size; and yet unless we can intervene in this kind of struggle we will find it difficult to grow in size and influence. The example of the Northern Ireland struggle last summer, where we could not send someone over until two or three months after the main action and where we were incapable of taking the political initiative, is a warning. We will not automatically grow in size and influence in even the most militant struggles. Put another way we can say that unless in the coming years we can go from being a propaganda group to a league for revolutionary action the opportunity may be lost for a whole period.

His way out is not to accept the circle as a discipline, which is what Sewell has done. It is to break it, and he begins by saying what the organisation should become.

By a league for revolutionary action I mean an organisation capable of initiating campaigns in an increasing number of fields, able to intervene in most of the important political processes and able to take the initiative in the decisive struggles. It is not yet a revolutionary party: it is not substantial enough and has not yet got the support of a decisive section of the working class. However, because it is seen as a serious force by the whole left it can act as an important pole of attraction which militant workers will respect.

Note the modesty the RCP lacks: ‘not yet a revolutionary party’. The turn had a governing rule, and the rule is the whole quarrel with Sewell in a single clause.

It is for us to avoid the organisational sectarianism of IS (International Socialists) and the SLL (Socialist Labour League) and build our organisation not in competition with but for the labour movement.

And then the thesis, stated flat.

The era of the small group is now over; the main function of the Trotskyist movement is not any more that of preserving and defending a body of ideas against Stalinism and reformism. Today, the task is to rapidly set about the job of laying the basis for mass revolutionary parties.

Honesty about the document cuts the other way too. Jordan’s sense of tempo was fantasy. He has capitalism in its ‘final death agony’ and thinks a French May in Britain is possible inside a year, which is the same overheated clock the RCP runs at its World School, and if we hold Sewell to it we hold Jordan to it. The perspective was wrong. What was right was the orientation underneath it, and the two come apart.

Then, in an appendix on the dangers of the turn, Jordan does the thing no one at the RCP’s World School has done. He describes the party the RCP is becoming, and names it a disease.

a) Organisational sectarianism: This disease is one which has stricken many revolutionary movements, the SLL being an almost laboratory pure specimen of the phenomenon. It has its sources in the impact of bourgeois ideology on the movement and the consequences of competition between various groups in a period when they are not put to the real test of leading mass struggles. In the latter circumstances there is a built-in tendency for those groups to flourish which concentrate on building their own resources, putting great emphasis on organisational efficiency, regardless of how this relates to the class struggles. In this situation the yardstick for the ‘correctness’ of a tendency’s policies can become its success in selling papers rather than how well it can apply Marxism to a concrete situation. If a tendency can accumulate enough resources to have a print shop or a publishing house the process can be structuralised. For it the recruitment of some business efficiency experts will reap bigger dividends than leading a strike.

These trends are all the more intensified because in a situation where there is a low political level of activity and general lack of Marxist education recruitment will be easiest for those tendencies which have a very simple unsophisticated policy. All of this tends to become self-perpetuating: the more resources a group has the more propaganda it can make, the more propaganda it makes the more members it gains, the more members it has the more resources it has, and so on and so on. This circle will only be broken when the organisation is put to the test in a decisive struggle or if its internal structure fragments.

Jordan wrote that in 1970, about the SLL. Read it again with the RCP in mind, and the only thing that has changed is the letterhead.

There is a harder truth still, and it is the reason this is an unlock and not a fable. The IMG made the turn Jordan urged, and it did not become a mass party. It reached a thousand, then declined, and in 1982 it folded into Labour as the Socialist League. So the document is no recipe for victory; the right orientation guaranteed nothing, because the objective conditions Jordan misread were not there. What it proves is narrower and sharper. The question Sewell treats as long closed, whether a small group grows by entering the movements or by holding aloof with a clean banner, was posed and answered the other way by the RCP’s own tradition, at the RCP’s own size, by a man in the RCP secretary’s own job. The RCP has not merely chosen abstention. It has chosen the option its tradition tried, renounced in writing, and warned against, and it has done so as though the argument were never had.

Read it as the tradition arguing with itself. Jordan lost the perspective and won the orientation. The RCP has kept neither.

The document was proposed by the IMG Political Committee and was almost certainly drafted by Pat Jordan, the IMG’s national secretary, who defends it under the pen-name ‘Peter Peterson’ elsewhere in the same bulletin and whose Ireland writing in International the text cross-refers to in the first person. It appeared as ‘From a Propaganda Group to a League for Revolutionary Action’, prepared for the IMG’s March 1970 conference and reprinted in the US SWP Internal Information Bulletin*, no. 6, October 1970. Red Mole publishes it as part of the inheritor tradition of the section that wrote it. Some of the language, particularly in the appendices on Black and Irish work, is of its moment; we reproduce it as a historical document rather than edit it into the present.*

The full document, pages 31 to 45, main resolution and all appendices, is available to download here.

Related Reading:

• Against Abstract Propagandism: the Debate within the IMG: Integrating Theory and Practice

• The Clean Banner: 20 years after Ted Grant’s death, the RCP exemplifies Trotsky and Grant’s warnings about propaganda societies: The Vanguard in Retreat, Part Two

• Enduring Lessons from the IMG’s Early Journey: Lesson’s from Pat Jordan’s 1972 “Aspects of the History of the IMG”

• The RCP Interprets AI: The Point, However, Is to Change It: They say what the machine is, but cannot raise a demand. The Vanguard in Retreat, Part Four

• The Buses Have Gone Yellow: Manchesterism, the technocrat, and the terrain administered from above: Part 4 of “The Terrain of Survival”

TL;DR In February 1989, Livio Maitan published an analysis of the European single market that reads, in 2026, like a forensic account of everything that has since gone wrong. We are republishing it here. But it requires an introduction, because the debate Maitan was entering has not resolved itself. It has only deepened, and the terms have shifted in ways he would have recognised immediately.

The threat Maitan identified, of a European social space hollowed out by capitalist logic, is now being compounded by a second logic: the remilitarisation of the continent. The two processes are not in competition. They are structurally connected, and the left that cannot hold both in view at once will be defeated by both.

There is a particular form of historical embarrassment available only to the left. It arrives when you excavate an old text and discover that the argument was already made, clearly, before the disaster it was predicting had fully announced itself. The embarrassment comes not from the prediction being wrong, but from its having been right, and ignored, and then forgotten, and then wrong again in the same way, requiring the same argument to be made again from scratch, as though the previous instance had never existed.

Livio Maitan wrote ‘The Search for a Strategy’ in early 1989. Bandiera Rossa published it in February of that year. The Berlin Wall fell in November. Maitan could not have known, as he wrote, that the specific institutional form his article addressed, the EEC moving toward 1992, would shortly be operating in a radically transformed geopolitical environment. What he did know, and what the article demonstrates with uncomfortable precision, was that the European left was strategically unprepared for what the integration process would demand of it.

He was right. And here we are.

The context: deepening of austerity

The article that follows is not a historical curiosity. Read it carefully and you find something more unsettling: a diagnostic framework for the present, assembled from the materials of a conjuncture that has since been formally superseded but not, in its underlying logic, resolved. The OECD figures Maitan cites have changed. The institutions have changed. The political parties have changed names and changed again. But the structural argument, what happens when you build a European economic space on capitalist terms without a corresponding social counterweight organised from below, that argument has not dated.

What has changed is that the capitalist logic Maitan was tracking has acquired a new instrument. He identified it clearly enough: the tendency toward “downward homogenisation” driven by market competition; the use of “flexibility” as a mechanism for transferring the costs of restructuring onto workers; the capture of European institutions by “large industrial and financial conglomerates, national and multinational alike.” In 1989, this logic was operating primarily through economic policy. The privatisation drives, the fiscal constraints, the managed assault on collective bargaining that would become the grammar of EU membership for the next three decades.

In 2026 it has acquired a second front: the military budget. No, worse than a second front. The military budget has become the alibi that makes the economic assault politically invisible.

Working-class control to stop imperialist warmongers

The mechanism is not complicated, and Maitan’s analytical framework makes it legible without difficulty. European governments, responding to the shock of Russian aggression in Ukraine and the unreliability of American guarantees under a MAGA administration, have substantially increased defence spending. Britain, Germany, France, Poland: the announcements arrived like dominoes through 2024 and 2025. The EU’s own instruments, the European Peace Facility, the defence industrial incentives, the pressure on member states to hit NATO spending targets, have reinforced the trajectory. This is being presented, across the mainstream political spectrum, as a straightforward response to objective threat.

The threat from Russian imperialism is real. We have said this clearly, and we say it again here: the full-scale invasion of Ukraine is an act of imperialist aggression against an occupied people, and revolutionary socialists must say so without equivocation. The right of the Ukrainian people to resist occupation does not depend on our approval of the Zelensky government’s labour policies, its anti-corruption record, or its relationship to NATO’s strategic priorities. These are separate questions. Collapsing them has been the campist left’s central ideological operation, and we refuse it.

But refusing campism is not the same as endorsing the specific institutional form that European rearmament is taking. And this is where Maitan’s framework from 1989 becomes indispensable.

The European social space Maitan was arguing for, the “common social space” of enforced upward harmonisation of wages, conditions, and workers’ rights, was precisely what the capitalist integration project refused to deliver. The EEC gave capital a single market and gave labour a set of aspirational declarations. The gap between them was not a failure of the project; it was the project. And the gap was maintained, year by year, through the structural power of the institutions that capital had captured, combined with the strategic failure of reformist leaderships that, as Maitan put it with some precision, “found themselves captured by the logic of capitalism and led to adopt solutions that are, in the strictly economic sense, more destructive.”

The rearmament debate is reproducing this structure with only minor variations. European governments are now arguing that the defence emergency requires additional public spending, to which the answer should obviously be: yes, and fund it through expropriation of the frozen Russian assets currently sitting primarily in Belgian accounts, through progressive wealth taxation, through windfall levies on defence contractors whose share prices have been rising since the morning of 24 February 2022 and have not come down. That is the socialist argument. It was available on day one. The mainstream European left, with honourable exceptions, has not made it. It has instead accepted the terms of the debate as given, occasionally appending a note about social guarantees, exactly as Maitan described the reformist leaderships doing in 1989 in relation to the single market.

The Danish Social Democrats, Maitan noted approvingly, had made a strategic pivot on European integration when they judged that Community-level outcomes would be more favourable than what was achievable nationally. The logic was sound. The problem was the same logic, applied without class analysis, led directly to accepting whatever the Community was actually prepared to offer, rather than fighting for the Community it should be. Mette Frederiksen’s government, in 2025, was arguing that Danes might need to work longer hours to fund the necessary rearmament. SF’s spokesperson called this “completely indecent” and proposed wealth taxes instead. That is the correct response. It is also, in its basic structure, the response Maitan was calling for in 1989: organise the defence at the level of the attack.

Our strategy is workers’ control of society

The phrase is his, and it is worth pausing on. “Organising the defence at the level of the attack.” Maitan used it to describe the challenge facing European labour in the face of 1992: capital was reorganising at the continental scale, and the labour movement was still primarily organised nationally. The task was not to refuse European integration, which was a secondary question, but to build the continental-scale workers’ organisations, coordinating bodies, inter-enterprise committees, common trade-union platforms that could contest the terms of integration rather than simply submit to them.

The same formulation applies precisely to the rearmament debate. The attack is operating at two levels simultaneously. The first is the obvious one: Russian imperialism is attacking Ukraine and threatening the security architecture of a broad swathe of Eastern Europe and the Baltic states. The second is less often named: the military-industrial complex, in which BAE Systems and Rheinmetall and their equivalents across the continent are treating the invasion of Ukrainian territory as, in the most direct sense, a business opportunity. These are not the same attack. Responding effectively requires distinguishing between them.

The campist left, led in Britain by Stop the War and Counterfire and the Morning Star’s Stalinist editorial line, has done the easier thing: it has named the second attack while denying the first. This is not analysis. It is the substitution of geopolitical alignment for class analysis, which Maitan would have recognised instantly as a form of the same subordination to capitalist state logic that he was criticising in the European Commission’s social partners in 1989. The left that refuses to support Ukraine’s liberation because it objects to NATO’s strategic purposes has not escaped imperialist logic. It has accepted a different imperialism’s terms instead.

But the opposite error is equally available, and the pressure of the present conjuncture is pushing sections of the solidarity left directly toward it: treating every demand for democratic control of defence production, every insistence that rearmament be funded through expropriation rather than austerity, every call for workers’ control of military facilities and mandatory conversion planning, as somehow insufficiently committed to Ukraine’s cause. This is the logic of the wartime national union, and the Fourth International has seen where it leads. Solidarity with the occupied does not require surrendering the class analysis that is the only basis on which genuine, durable solidarity can be built.

Its sharpest form is conscription. Not whether an invaded people may be called to its own defence, which is not in question, but who is called and who buys their way out, who is rotated and who is left in the line, who commands the army the defence requires. That is an article of its own, and it is coming.

Strategic demands organise the working class

Maitan identified, in 1989, a “dismal balance sheet of the bureaucratic leaderships.” He did not write this as a sectarian provocation. He wrote it as a strategic assessment: the reformist organisations had accepted “the fundamental options of the bourgeoisie,” had hidden behind “the pretext of economic competitiveness,” had positioned themselves in practice as vehicles for what he called “a social offensive against workers” even when their stated intentions were different. The PCI, the PSI, the PS français: each could point to its formal commitment to workers’ rights, its stated opposition to the worst excesses of capital, its genuine base in the organised working class. None of this prevented the outcome he was describing.

The parallel is not hidden. The dominant European social democrats have, in 2025 and 2026, accepted the terms of the rearmament debate as given. They have argued, at best, for social side-conditions attached to increased defence spending, in exactly the spirit of the “social space” demands Maitan was analysing in 1989: genuine commitments, in some cases, but commitments that accept the primary logic of the project rather than contesting it. And the radical left, where it has not fallen into campism, has often been unable to articulate a coherent alternative beyond a vague hostility to military spending in general, which is neither principled nor strategically useful.

What Maitan was arguing for, and what the article being published here actually demonstrates rather than merely proposing, is something harder: a concrete set of “phase objectives” that could unite the broadest possible working-class forces while being in objective contradiction with the capitalist management of the project. Not the rejection of European integration. Not the rejection of Ukraine’s defence. The demand that integration serve workers, and that Ukraine’s defence be funded by those who have profited from the war rather than by those who have not.

Disarm the empires, not the oppressed

One word before the 1989 text reaches its own conclusion and calls for the arsenals destroyed, the member states disarmed, NATO abandoned, because set flat against Ukraine that can read as a contradiction. It is not. Maitan's disarmament is a demand on one's own ruling class and the imperialist bloc it serves, never a counsel of defencelessness for the nation under invasion. To strip the empire of its arsenal and to arm the people it would let be conquered are a single anti-imperialist politics: the first turned on the aggressor and the contractors who bank the war, the second on the survival of those who will die without the means to resist.

A 35-hour week at full pay rather than working longer hours to fund rearmament. Democratic control of arms production with mandatory conversion planning. Progressive wealth taxation and the expropriation of windfall profits. Immediate and unconditional cancellation of Ukraine’s external debt. Full rights for Ukrainian refugees. Workers’ control of facilities that produce weapons that will be used in the name of European workers’ security.

These are not Maitan’s exact demands, updated for 2026. They are, more precisely, the application of his method: identify the phase objectives that connect the immediate defensive struggle to the broader class interest; fight for them even in conditions of political retreat; refuse the binary choices that capitalism offers the left as the only available options.

Past defeats make strategic clarity essential today

There is one further point worth making before the translation speaks for itself. Maitan wrote this piece at a moment when the European left was in what he called a “drastic political and ideological battering.” He was clear-eyed about this. He did not pretend the situation was better than it was, and he did not indulge the illusion, common enough on the left, that a sudden recovery was imminent. “One should not harbour the illusion,” he wrote, “that this situation can be overcome quickly, through mere ‘immediate recoveries.’” What was needed was “a serious, deep-going transformation of the political situation.”

He was writing, he knew, into a long defeat. The piece was published in February 1989. By November the wall was down, and the political terms of European left debate were about to shift in ways that made his argument harder to hear, not easier. Within a decade the institutions he had been arguing needed to be captured from below had been captured from above more thoroughly than even the pessimistic reading of his article suggested. The social Europe he was arguing for was not built. The Darwinian homogenisation was.

We are, in 2026, in a comparable moment. The political and ideological battering of the left has been severe; the rearmament debate has arrived at the worst possible time, when the left is weakest and most prone to either capitulation or reflexive oppositionalism; and the window for the kind of strategic clarity Maitan was calling for is not wide.

But the argument was made. It can be made again. That is why we are republishing it.

The Search for a Strategy

by Livio Maitan Bandiera Rossa n. 2, February 1989

The 31 December 1992 deadline has become, in recent months, a genuine leitmotiv across the labour movement and trade unions. The British TUC congress, in a sharp break with its previous position, gave an enthusiastic reception to Jacques Delors, President of the European Commission — who made a point of arguing that it was necessary to “safeguard and improve levels of social protection for EEC members, not to hide behind social policy, to give workers and employees stronger guarantees and to introduce new European-level measures on collective contracts, workers’ rights and social services.” Until recently, British trade unionists had feared that their hard-won gains would be ground down in the European mill; now, after years of Thatcher’s battering, they are beginning to hope that Community-level outcomes will prove more favourable than what is achievable nationally. A parallel shift occurred at the Danish social-democratic congress, which had previously campaigned for a “no” in the Danish European referendum. In the run-up to the next European elections, the Danish social democrats are now campaigning for “yes to an open Europe” — one extending beyond current EEC membership, tackling unemployment, technological development, and the ECU as an alternative to dollar instability (Le Monde, 22 September 1988).

The 1992 deadline also dominated the German social-democratic congress, where the party leadership tabled a motion on the “restoration of a European social space” guaranteeing regional equilibrium and harmonisation of standards upward. Finally, at the Italian social-democratic congress, Prime Minister Craxi — probably the most ardently pro-European of Italian politicians — addressed the prospects and values of a European outlook toward 1992, with prominent figures from the French and other European parties endorsing his social-democratic vision of a “social Europe.”

These contradictions and difficulties will not be resolved quickly. Throughout the coming period the dominant tendency will be toward a deepening of economic unity and a further widening of the EEC — possibly to include some Eastern European countries, a prospect that now seems more likely than before. The debates and conflicts within the labour movement on these questions demonstrate, on the one hand, that a purely visceral anti-EEC position — one that never tackles the concrete substance of the problems — is no longer tenable; and on the other, that the real alternatives need to be faced with genuine seriousness.

Organising the Defence at the Level of the Attack

There is, in fact, every reason for concern. The new European debate is unfolding in an economic conjuncture radically different from the one that prevailed at the time of the Treaty of Rome. We face, simultaneously, a structural crisis and a vast pool of long-term unemployed workers. OECD figures — which no one can accuse of alarmism — show five million unemployed in the EEC in 1975, two million of them long-term; by 1986 the figure had risen to ten million, representing 11% of the active population.

Various studies project that “1992” will stimulate new growth and therefore new job creation (estimates range from 7.6 to 8.3 million). But these are the rosy forecasts of European integration’s most optimistic partisans. In their book Crisis, Krach, Boom, Michel Albert and Jean Boissonat devote an entire chapter to “1992: a Darwinian purge.” The Economist (12 March 1988) wrote that the single market would deliver a shock of “Darwinian” dimensions. The head of the French employers’ federation spoke openly of “a Darwinian struggle.” Le Monde (14 October 1988) noted that even the European Commission’s own Vice-President, Marin, acknowledged that many jobs would be lost in many sectors while being created in others — and that even if the overall balance proved positive in the medium term, the new jobs would not necessarily appear in the same sectors or regions as the old ones.

Several trends, not all of them new but sharply intensified in this decade, will carry still greater weight as the EEC integration process advances:

• The relentless introduction of new technologies, and the attendant productivity gains, make it improbable that new general industrial growth — even if it materialises — will by itself generate substantial new employment, above all in heavy industry. This tendency toward homogenisation of economic conditions (upward within Europe, downward relative to the broader capitalist economy) will only intensify, and its effects will be felt acutely at the community level. The institutions supposedly governing this process will increasingly be captured by the large industrial and financial conglomerates, national and multinational alike.

• New technologies and new forms of work organisation are penetrating the service sector; capital, pressing above all in the hospital and transport sectors, is using “flexibility” as a safety valve — imposing on workers the costs of restructuring and rationalisation, and shifting the terms of employment toward part-time and casual contracts in a manner that intensifies exploitation.

• The decline of traditional sectors such as steel and shipbuilding will not, in all likelihood, be offset by the growth of new ones. For banks, railways, ferries, and prospectively the utilities, new technologies mean rationalisation and job losses.

• Unforeseen and for the moment unpredictable structural shifts in economic orientation will compound these pressures: the agricultural labour force will face further reductions in most countries; governments burdened with the largest public deficits will seek to cut public service employment, whether through restructuring plans or blanket hiring freezes.

• The introduction of flexibility, part-time work, and the general intensification of employers’ power to impose individual wage differentials within the same firm and occupational group is creating growing objective difficulties for the labour movement. The workers most exposed are those in the private sector — particularly those most vulnerable to unemployment through restructuring and mergers — compared to workers in the public sector, who are in general, though with important exceptions, relatively less exposed.

On the political terrain, greater integration implies handing effective decision-making to ever more remote centres. Already the elected institutions answer an increasingly diminished role relative to governments, and in all the various apparatuses of the state, all the technocracies — not only in the narrow economic sense — of the large industrial and financial groups, national and multinational, are becoming more powerful. This tendency will inevitably intensify, and its effects at the community level will be to place ever greater power in the hands of the bodies designated by governments — the technocrats, who already dispose of vast powers; the ideological-generalising wing, in particular the neoliberal, adopted by the various bourgeois trade union bureaucracies; and a “sovereignty” of the European Parliament that is pure illusion. In all these important cases, the action of this body will be conditioned by the choices imposed by the multinationals, the great financial conglomerates, the banks of the governmental bodies, and the technocrats of Brussels.

The bureaucracy of trade unions and parties operating in various forms within the labour movement, and their representation in the community institutions, will have even deeper illusions in the coming years. Here the illusions will be even more entrenched than at the national level.

The Dismal Balance Sheet of the Bureaucratic Leaderships

European labour organisations and trade unions are ill-equipped to tackle the problems posed by the 1992 deadline in the genuine interests of workers. This is not, in the first instance, a question of individual bad faith: it suffices to consider what they have actually delivered for workers in recent decades, at the level of both theoretical elaboration and practical strategy.

To begin with, almost all trade-union and political organisations have strategically accepted the fundamental options of the bourgeoisie, sheltering behind the pretext of economic competitiveness while laying the groundwork for a social offensive against workers. This is blatant in countries where parties claiming to represent workers are in government; but it is equally true of those in opposition, who are no less favourable to the EEC’s agenda, limiting themselves to calling for a few more social guarantees. This is clearest in debates over “social space” and in demands for a “parliamentarisation” through granting greater powers to the European Parliament — for example in Italy the PCI, the PSI and the PS français all take this line. The PCF remains something of an exception through its refusal of European unification, invoking “national independence” and the need to “produce French” — but without offering any real alternative perspective, and in a way that, on one side, locks the PCF squarely within the logic of the system, and on the other, subordinates its struggle line to the reformist and neo-reformist organisations, more so than other organisations that formally pronounce themselves in favour of the EEC.

These are the results that reformist leaderships have delivered for workers in this last decade. In the absence of any serious effort to outline a comprehensive alternative to bourgeois economic policy, they have found themselves — sometimes individually, with sincere intentions — captured by the logic of capitalism and led to adopt solutions that are on the whole more destructive in the strictly economic sense: outcomes of the so-called “market economy” founded on profit, which these leaderships have so enthusiastically embraced. The alternative in the strictly economic field must take account of the failure of bureaucratic management, of the experiments in “market socialism” in Yugoslavia, Hungary and China over the past decades. It is becoming ever more necessary — and objectively possible — to radically reduce the working day by eliminating superfluous and socially useless labour. Such a change, which would constitute a genuine shift in the “quality of life,” is effectively conceivable only on an international scale. New technologies and the cultural level of the working class permit, to a greater degree than ever before, radical transformations of the structure and functioning of enterprises. These transformations are only possible through the formation of political institutions and social bodies grounded in direct democracy. In this domain, the means of mass communication now available to us permit doing far more than at any previous moment in history.

In this sense, revolutionaries must give concrete form to the argument that what needs to be set against the European capitalism of the EEC is the prospect of a European socialist federation. The battles of the current period in the labour movement are conditioned by national specificities and conjunctural circumstances. But it is not possible to point in a revolutionary or pre-revolutionary direction without a broader, more general framework — one that, even if it can only be conceived as transitional, must be grasped in its most general outlines.

Some exponents of the “reformed” wing already openly celebrate negotiations with employers as a virtue in themselves. Not only is the labour movement’s autonomy increasingly constrained politically and ideologically before these battles of retreat and retrenchment — in some cases, trade union organisations are openly associated with the political-ideological campaigns of governments and employers. For example in Italy, when the PCI launched the “historical compromise” policy supporting the DC government, some trade union bodies simultaneously abandoned strike action in transport and other services through a form of “co-management” (codeterminazione) that was entirely counter to the workers’ interests.

A Global Alternative and Phase Objectives

(...) One further essential point deserves emphasis: rarely in its entire history has the European labour movement endured so drastic a political and ideological battering. The dominant classes have scored spectacular successes — though not, it should be noted, on the socioeconomic plane, where they have generated problems of extraordinary gravity.

Nor should one harbour the illusion that this situation can be overcome quickly, through mere “immediate recoveries” — which, even in the best case, will be limited and temporary in character. What is needed is a serious, deep-going transformation of the political situation. Consider, on the other hand, the enormous defeats of the trade-union movement and the long period of working-class retreat. The European bourgeoisies, despite the economic crisis laying waste to the continent, dispose of enormous resources and were compelled — then even more than now — to take substantial social measures. Workers’ resistance has been far tougher, mass organisations and trade unions far more combative, than the dominant classes would have wished; and governments have generally preferred to hold back rather than push to the point where workers’ reactions could trigger genuine social explosions.

What conclusions follow? We believe it is necessary to begin from a concrete set of attainable “phase objectives” that revolutionary organisations must make their own and fight for even in conditions of political retreat:

• 1. A 35-hour week at full pay with no loss of jobs: the systematic resort to overtime cancels the employment effects of any hours reduction, and the rhetoric of “social flexibility” is in reality nothing more than a cover for building a growing low-wage, precarious labour force.

• 2. A radical increase in real wages: as a first element of the struggle against the “philosophy of flexibility” — not a refusal of improved training provisions or supplements, but an unconditional insistence that employment should not be founded on ever-cheaper and ever-more-precarious labour.

• 3. Exposing the anti-worker ideology of market competitiveness and shareholder primacy: the increasing complexity of productive processes and the greater vulnerability introduced by new technologies are compelling employers to involve workers in enterprise decisions. Where profits are rising, this must be seized as an opportunity to press for across-the-board wage increases; where profits are falling, workers are not responsible and should not bear the consequences — instead, the opportunity must be taken to advance genuine workers’ control over new technologies and the reorganisation of work.

• 4. Workers’ control, exercised by trade-union bodies elected by all workers, over all technological innovations and all reorganisation of work — not merely the narrowly defined questions of training and job familiarisation.

• 5. The right of veto over redundancies, and autonomous trade-union structures that guarantee: a minimum wage always above the poverty line; social benefits for the unemployed never below that minimum; employment for young people; a minimum guaranteed income for women that does not fall below the employment minimum; and permanent social services never subject to cuts.

• 6. The restoration of a sliding-scale mechanism for wages that at least partially compensates for the erosion of purchasing power by inflation, while simultaneously countering employers’ use of wage differentials as an instrument of division.

A “Social Europe”: Concrete Content

A common “social space” will not resolve the unemployment problem if treated as a matter of employment policy alone. The fight against the “philosophy of flexibility” is not a refusal of adaptability — it is a refusal to acquiesce in a system founded on a growing, low-wage, precarious workforce.

Partial solutions can be proposed in a given context — for example the French Socialists proposed the creation of 700,000 new jobs, specifying the sectors and the financing modalities needed. But it is clear that where such objectives are individually defined along similar bourgeois lines, they acquire a transitional character as demands, posing in concrete terms the problem of how to tackle the reallocation of resources in a way that workers find genuinely compelling. This question of the allocation and reallocation of resources is now the most pressing, since the European bourgeoisie’s promise of social benefits for workers within Europe itself implies a rearrangement question: one must fight to reverse course, making it a priority to attack privileged incomes and to reduce indirect taxes, which weigh above all on the lowest incomes.

The importance of a comprehensive alternative is further increased by the possibility of putting the environmental problem front and centre, driving an effective anti-capitalist campaign that confronts not only the devastation produced by the pursuit of profit, but also the need for new qualitative orientations and qualitatively new goods. Partial battles can be fought on this terrain too. The European framework constitutes the necessary common ground for coordinating environmental policies; any purely national initiative risks being limited in effect and open to exploitation as a pretext for bourgeois protectionism.

The “social space” question also means fighting for genuine equality for women in every domain: this requires, among other things, the right to abortion, guaranteed social services for childcare and elder care, the autonomous organisation of women, non-discriminatory criteria and positive action measures, and equal representation at every level of leadership. Campaigns must be organised across Europe against all forms of violence against women.

The most vocal partisans of European unification insist on building an autonomous European military power, while maintaining membership of NATO. No concession should be made to any such project. Revolutionaries must fight against their own ruling class, against the military bloc of European capitalism — whose nature would be no less imperialist than the present one. We must fight to demand the destruction of the arsenals, unilateral disarmament by the member states, and withdrawal from NATO.

The end of the twentieth century presents a peculiar paradox: at the very moment when European unification is advancing, national questions — in Ireland, the Basque Country, Scotland, Wales, Belgium and elsewhere — are reasserting themselves in more acute forms than in the recent past. Revolutionaries must fight for the right of self-determination up to and including separation for all national minorities; against every attack on regional autonomy; and for the elimination of the last remnants of colonialism (New Caledonia). In each specific case, revolutionary Marxists must take their position in the light of the concrete context — self-determination, regional autonomy, federation — as determined by the actual dynamic of the class struggle.

Instruments and Methods

(...) Whatever the concrete developments in the EEC framework, local committees and general bodies of European workers will always be at the centre of activity. We must always work with the aim of making our organisation effective at a European scale. A European campaign must be organised to make the CES an effective instrument of coordination — independent of union affiliation at the national level (as is the case for the CGT française and the Comisiones Obreras in the Spanish state), grounded in straightforward class analysis and the exchange of experience. It will be above all necessary to promote the development of instruments of inter-enterprise and inter-sector coordination, of common committees at the level of the workers in the multinationals.

The more that the heads of the labour movement formally commit to the European framework, the more they will be tempted to integrate further into the “compatibility” of the system — to become super-labourists in service of the market, accepting all its imperatives in homage to new waves of restructuring and rationalisation.

The bureaucrats of the movement have renounced any attempt to configure a comprehensive alternative to governments both bourgeois and paternalist, doing everything possible to forestall any unified movement of solidarity — in all situations in which we find ourselves, in all the adversary’s attacks; resorting to every expedient and manoeuvre to impede the democratic expression of workers’ will.

The conclusion is clear: those who genuinely want a rebuilding of united class action — which does not consist of hollow declarations, does not force itself to present a comprehensive political perspective, and which in any potential unification of struggles would not translate into attempts to recover or suppress the democratic structures of the movement — must, together with all other mass movements old and new, make this a condition indispensable for breaking the impasse and relaunching the workers’ movement and its struggles. This holds, evidently, at the national level as much as the European.

Translator’s note: The ellipses in the headings “A Global Alternative and Phase Objectives” and “Instruments and Methods” are present in the original, indicating that Bandiera Rossa was printing excerpts from a longer document. 

Key translation decisions: “conjuncture” is retained throughout as a term of art in Marxist political economy. “Recomposition” has been replaced by “rebuilding” in the concluding passage where the sense is less technical. “Revendicate” has been replaced throughout by “demand.” “Concretise” has been replaced by “give concrete form to” or “advance.” “Eventual/eventuale” has been rendered as “potential” or “possible” throughout. “Affrontare” has been rendered as “tackle” or “address” rather than “confront.”

TLDR

• In the spring of 1987 Davy Jones, writing in the Fourth Internationalist journal International, set out what a socialist council should do under Tory cuts: a budget built to community need, funded by more grant and the cancellation of councils’ debts to the City, drawn up with the workforce and community through open books and mass consultation. We are republishing it because 2026 anti-austerity pledge says almost exactly this.

• The line has not moved in forty years. Only the legal furniture has: the surcharge that disqualified Liverpool’s councillors is abolished, and the modern weapon is the section 114 notice and government commissioners.

• The same tradition defended Liverpool’s defiance, which won real concessions and protected jobs better than the dented shield, and damned Militant’s method: the cadre and the courts standing in for the self-activity of the class.

• What it has never resolved is race, and is power. Liverpool’s housing was racially unequal before Militant arrived, and Militant refused the Black community’s own remedies; and the method has never held a council long enough to be proved, because the working-class strength it assumes has not been rebuilt.

The article that could have run this week

Reading Davy Jones’s ‘Is there a future for town hall socialism?’ now, the disorientation is in how little of it needs translating. It ran in International, a journal of Marxism in the Labour Party, in the spring of 1987, with Nicholas Ridley glowering off the cover as the minister for rate-capping. Jones counts the damage in the figures of his day: central grant down from 61 per cent of planned council spending in 1980-81 to 46.4 by 1987-88, a cumulative £17 billion stripped out, the share carried by ratepayers climbing past 56 per cent. Change the minister and the numbers and you could file it on Monday.

What has not dated at all is the trap. Jones names the comfortable Labour position of his day through Margaret Hodge, who had by then abandoned even the language of the dented shield for the candour of saying that staying in office meant ‘services must take precedence over trade union interests or even jobs’. That is the Brighton script before Brighton, the Sheffield group’s ‘we can’t commit to always oppose any cuts’ a generation early. The dented shield is not a recent discovery. It is the permanent temptation of a Labour councillor with a balanced-budget duty and no stomach for the fight, and it has been answered, in the same terms, for forty years.

The same demand, forty years apart

Set the 1987 programme beside the 2026 pledge and the continuity is almost embarrassing. Jones argued that the demand for central government to foot the bill, and for the councils’ accumulated debts to the City to be cancelled, should be expressed locally through a budget drawn to the real social needs of the borough. That budget was to be built with the workforce and the community and not handed down: a real process of mass consultation, with all the financial information open to public scrutiny. Read the proposed Socialist Federation pledge and the same skeleton is there, the needs budget, the refinancing of debt, the open books, the assemblies, only with the accountancy updated and the unions named.

The one thing that has genuinely changed is the furniture of repression, and it changed in the council’s favour. The councillors who held Liverpool and Lambeth were surcharged and disqualified by the district auditor, ruined personally for a budget decision. That weapon is gone: the surcharge was abolished by the Local Government Act 2000 and the disqualification route went in 2011. The modern instrument is the section 114 notice and the commissioners it can summon, a political siege rather than a personal bankruptcy. A councillor who refuses to pass on cuts in 2027 risks losing control of the council. They do not risk losing their house. The tradition’s demand has outlived the law that was built to punish it.

Where the tradition broke with Militant

Here is the part that has to be said plainly, because the temptation is to flinch from it. Jones’s tradition, the IMG and its successors through Socialist Outlook to the current that writes this, was not Militant’s. It was Militant’s rival, and it judged Liverpool with its eyes open. Its judgement was double, which is the only honest kind.

The defiance was right. Jones is unambiguous that Liverpool and Lambeth, the only two councils that then actually argued for a deficit budget built on mobilising the community, were the only two prepared in the end to confront the government, and that they were isolated and attacked by the very allies who had promised to stand with them. The co-ordinated rate-capping refusal of 1985, led by Hodge, Blunkett and Livingstone, collapsed the moment the miners were beaten, because it had rested on agreements between council leaders and almost no mobilisation where it counted, in the workforce and on the estates. Livingstone’s capitulation at the GLC, the council with the most prestige, brought the rest down. Liverpool, left holding the line alone, still extracted more from the Tories over the 1984-85 budget than any other council managed in seven years, and even after the surcharge its jobs and services came through as well as or better than the creative accountants managed theirs. Defiance worked, where it was tried and backed.

What failed was the method. Jones’s standing principle is that local action must build ‘the strength, confidence and self-activity of the working class’, not lean on ‘the heroic role of individual socialists and councillors’, and it is exactly here that Militant fell down. The Liverpool leadership increasingly put its own cadre, and then the courts, in the place of the movement it should have been building. The ninety-day redundancy notices issued to all thirty thousand council workers in 1985, the device meant to buy time, were the perfect emblem: a manoeuvre done to the workforce over its head, which split the unions and handed Kinnock his conference weapon. Pete Firmin drew the conclusion in Socialist Outlook in 1990, watching Militant fight the witch-hunt the same way it had run the council. It refused to build a common campaign with the rest of the left and ran the defence ‘solely as a Militant promotion exercise’, then retreated into the courts to stop its own expulsions, a tactic Firmin called ‘futile in its results, and politically wrong’. A tendency that opposed the courts’ interference in the unions was inviting it into the Labour Party. The sectarianism and the legalism were the method showing through, not lapses in it.

The self-activity of the working class

The positive content of Jones’s argument is the part worth carrying into 2027 whole. A needs budget is an organising occasion, not a clever sum. Its purpose is to pull the workforce, the tenants and the community into drawing up what the borough actually needs and then into defending it, so that the confrontation with the centre, when it comes, is fought by a mobilised city and not by a brave caucus in the chamber. The financial devices, then and now, are worth something only if they buy the time for that. Strip the mobilisation out and the deficit budget is just a different accountancy.

The proof of the method arrived where Jones could not yet see it. The poll tax was beaten a few years later, not by councillors and not in any chamber, but by mass non-payment organised street by street, the connected front from below that Liverpool’s go-it-alone defiance had never built. That is the lesson the tradition has held onto: the no-cuts stand is won by the movement the budget mobilises and lost by the cadre that substitutes itself for it. It is the argument the Federation’s pledge is making again, with the union conference season as its proving ground.

The part the tradition has to own

None of this is usable as inspiration unless it carries its worst alongside its best, and Liverpool’s worst was race. The racism in the city’s council housing was not Militant’s invention. A Liverpool doctorate completed in 1985, before Militant took the council, had already shown with allocation data that white households were close to twice as likely as Black households to be given the best stock, and that the system was driving the Black community ever deeper into the worst of it. Militant inherited that machine and made it in some ways worse, imposing Sam Bond as its race adviser over the open objection of the Liverpool Black Caucus and treating Black, women’s and Irish self-organisation as a diversion from the class. The workerism that dismissed those struggles was the politics itself and not a blemish on it, the same narrowing that left the council isolated.

And yet Firmin’s other insistence in 1990 has to stand beside that one. Those real failings, on Black sections, women’s sections and Ireland, were used by much of the left as a spurious reason to let the bureaucracy pick Militant off, and that was a betrayal too. Defend the fight against the witch-hunt; indict the method without mercy; refuse to let either the liberal or the rival sect off the hook. That is the only register in which the left can tell the truth about its own past.

1987’s question, still open

Jones titled his piece with a question, and answered it, in the follow-up that autumn, with ‘not for much longer’. He was right about the era of town hall socialism: it was ending, and what came after was the housebroken party and the managed decline of the cities. But the strategy he set down was never refuted, only never given the conditions to work. The tradition has been right about the method for forty years and has not once held a council long enough, with a movement large enough behind it, to prove it at the scale that would matter. The thing the whole argument assumes, a working class organised enough to make a no-cuts budget stick, is the thing four decades of defeat have worn away.

So the pledge is not a programme with a guaranteed result. It is a bet that the rebuilding starts somewhere, and that a line drawn in every ward in 2027, backed by the union branches and the tenants and the open books, is as good a place to start as any. Whether it does is not settled by the wording, or by this article, or by anything that can be known before the budgets are set. Davy Jones’s question is still the question. We have just run out of decades in which to keep getting the answer right only on paper.

Is there a future for town hall socialism?

Davy Jones, in International: a journal of Marxism in the Labour Party*, no. 9, March/April 1987.*

Repeated Tory attacks are reducing the room for manoeuvre of Labour councils. Is there a role for socialists in local government, and can a belated fightback be organised? Davy Jones looks at the issues.

When the Tories came into office in 1979 their central goal was to restore the profitability of the British economy. This necessitated taking on and defeating the labour movement industrially, thereby weakening the trade unions; running down the welfare state through progressive reductions in social spending; and simultaneously shifting the terms of ideological debate markedly to the right. For their project to succeed the arena of local government was crucial since local councils account for about a quarter of all public spending. As a result the last seven years have seen a battery of new laws and changes to the rules of local government spending.

The net effect of these changes has been enormous. The percentage of central government grant as a proportion of planned council spending in England has fallen progressively from 61 per cent in 1980-81 to 46.4 per cent in 1987-88. Rate support grant has fallen, at 1986-87 prices, from £12,848m in 1978-79 to £8,988m in 1986-87. The cumulative loss to local government between 1978-79 and 1986-87 is a staggering £17,455m. As central government grant has been cut, so the proportion of expenditure born by the ratepayers has risen dramatically from 39 per cent in 1978-79 to over 56 per cent in 1986-87.

But there is a second major reason for the Tories to tackle the issue of local government: namely, the important role of local councils as potential centres of resistance to the Tories’ goals. The Tories’ aim was both to abolish the most powerful of their enemies — the Greater London Council (GLC) and metropolitan authorities — which in radical Labour hands had proved both electorally popular and capable of serious and damaging resistance to Tory rule; and to undermine the potential popularity and influence of local councils controlled by Labour by squeezing their economic autonomy and forcing them to take responsibility for unpopular reductions in services. The crunch is now rapidly approaching both at a local level, as all the tricks of financial resistance to the Tories run out, and nationally, as the likelihood of a majority Labour government committed to bailing out local councils seems daily less likely.

Labour’s response

While the Labour leadership and the party as a whole have attacked the government’s moves against local government, commitments to restoring adequate levels of local spending have been less forthcoming. And at key points in the campaign against the Tories, the party leadership has been part of the problem rather than part of the solution. They refused to co-ordinate national backing to Lambeth and Liverpool councils just as they refused to commit themselves to reverse the surcharges subsequently imposed. They have been only too keen to join in the media chorus attacking local councils rather than seeing the potential mileage in championing the cause of Labour councils facing up to the Tories’ attacks.

Locally some right wing Labour councils have limply capitulated to the Tories’ measures and made cuts in services and jobs, or raised rents to keep within the new financial limits. But for much of the Labour left such options have been unacceptable. Debate has centred instead on the role of rate rises and the myriad of creative accountancy schemes used to deflect the impact of government cash limits.

Raising the rates

For a number of local Labour councils, and metropolitan authorities such as the GLC, the tactic of raising the rates to finance the expansion of services was a deliberate and coherent strategy. The case was made that existing services were completely inadequate and that radical equal opportunity policies needed substantial funds to have any serious impact. In the absence of adequate government grant, and given opposition to rent rises or cuts in jobs and services, rates were seen as the only method of financing such expansion. It was also argued that rate rises had little impact on the working class — as those on supplementary benefit had rates paid by government — but rather hit local businessmen. Supporters of rate rises said that this lesser evil was justified in order to give the council(s) time to win popularity through the expansion of their services, as with the GLC for example.

There were a number of things wrong with this approach. It is simply untenable to claim that huge rate rises do not attack working class living standards. Undoubtedly they severely hit low income wage earners. (In some areas in inner London rates had reached almost the same level as rents by the mid-1980s.) If cuts in jobs and services are unacceptable, why not attacks on living standards? To sanction rate rises as a lesser evil is a slippery slope towards those cuts in jobs and services.

Second, making such huge rate rises at the same time as taking bold equality measures undoubtedly fuelled popular opposition to these initiatives. While the responsibility for this equation lay with the media, it is a fact that the belief that vast sums of money were being ‘squandered’ on these schemes while rates were going through the roof was firmly implanted into tens of thousands of Labour voters’ minds. Funding equal opportunity policies from huge rate rises was to irresponsibly jeopardise their public acceptance.

The most important thing to note about this strategy, however, is that it relied on resolving the problems of local government financing through the actions of councillors, rather than through mobilisation of the community and the workforce. Like all bureaucratic approaches it demobilised the potential for struggling against the Tories’ attacks. In retrospect, though of course it was not so clear at the time, the relationship of forces between the classes at the outset of the Tory government in 1979-80 was far more advantageous than the mid-1980s. The early years of the Tories, before the defeat of the miners, was a far more favourable time to struggle against their attacks on local government. The moment was lost as the left councils who might have led such a struggle opted for huge rate rises instead.

The rate rise argument is not an academic one. While the media’s ‘favourite’ Labour councils such as Islington, Lambeth, Liverpool, Brent, Haringey, Sheffield and others have been ratecapped, there are many more which have not. Some have recently fallen into Labour control, some have radical leaderships or members looking to follow the example of the GLC, Islington, Lambeth and others in financing expansion of services prior to the inevitable ratecap the following year. Such is the case with Ealing and Hammersmith and Fulham, planning rate rises of 65 per cent and 40 per cent respectively.

Proponents of rate rises distinguish rates from rents or cuts in services by making the analogy with income tax. Just as socialists have traditionally favoured income or direct taxation over purchase/VAT (indirect) taxes, so it is argued that rates are relatively progressive taxes based on property values, hitting business more than private tenants. Raising rates, like raising taxes, is therefore a tactical question. This analogy has some truth to it, but concretely with a Tory government attacking living standards across the board, how can socialists justify joining in? There is no ‘acceptable’ rates rise in this economic context. On the contrary, within the framework of a socialist strategy for local government finances and establishing local social needs, a strong case can and should be made for reducing the rates from their current unacceptably high level in some boroughs.

Socialists would oppose an incoming Labour government raising the standard rate of income tax, after Tory reductions, in order to expand social provision. They would argue for the funds to be made available from other sources, such as cutting the misnamed ‘defence’ budget. Equally socialists should not support local Labour councils raising the rates dramatically, after local Tory rule, in order to expand the services. They too should insist that the funds come from elsewhere, not from the pockets of the working class.

Creative accountancy

With the advent of ratecapping attention shifted to other methods of preventing the Tories from decimating local government. A new industry was born — creative accountancy. Essentially, four main devices have been used under this broad heading, each with varying results and with varying degrees of acceptability from a socialist viewpoint. Overall this was termed both by Kinnock and the ‘soft left’ as the ‘dented shield’ approach. First, running down reserves traditionally held to finance major schemes and/or for contingencies. The Inner London Education Authority (ILEA) has maintained itself this way for the past two years and its crisis this year stems from having no more reserves to play with. Second, leasing schemes where council property or equipment is sold to commercial or banking interests who lease it back to the council. This gives the council cash up front. The Tories are committed to closing this loophole. The local government finance act currently going through parliament is likely to outlaw forms of leaseback schemes.

Third, and most significantly, is ‘capitalising expenditure’. This entails the council transferring day to day or ‘revenue expenses’ into its longer term or ‘capital budget’ thereby avoiding various government overspending penalties on its revenue account. This has been particularly used for repairs and maintenance costs. Its serious side effect however is to begin to run down the council’s capital projects programme, which in many cases is central to the manifesto commitments for major growth in areas like housing.

The fourth device, which has arisen partly to compensate for the side effects of ‘capitalisation’, is deferred purchase. Here a private sector intermediary undertakes to finance various capital works, but repayment from the capital budget is deferred, usually for three years. This also has the disastrous consequence of choking off any future capital growth as the repayments come due in later years. The Tories announced last July their intention to introduce legislation, backdated from July 1986, to prevent any more such deferred purchase schemes, though existing schemes will continue.

There are major objections to ‘creative accountancy’ as a solution to the government’s attacks. First, it puts the onus on experts to elaborate ever more complex and secret deals, rather than relying on the capacity of the labour movement collectively to mobilise and confront the government. Second, as a result, it is divisive among those who could and should be united in fighting the Tories, as each borough seeks its own individual and specific solution based on its own capacity to be more ‘creative’. Third, it demobilises the potential for struggle not only by referring it to experts, but also by each year deferring the struggle ‘to next year’ when ‘there will be no option left’ but to struggle. Fourth, and most devastating, it has led to disbelief among the local communities and workforces as the council seems miraculously to bridge the ‘unbridgeable gap’ each year through these mechanisms. The result is that claims of huge deficits, imminent cuts and jobs losses, are no longer believed. The councils have cried wolf too often.

The first real opportunity for a counterattack came in the early 1980s when left councils opted instead for large rate rises. The second was the preparation for the 1985-86 budget and the debate over not setting a rate or setting a deficit budget. The co-ordinated campaign not to set a rate led by Hodge, Blunkett, Livingstone and others relied almost exclusively on agreement among council leaders with lukewarm backing from certain local government leaders. Little mobilisation was achieved where it really mattered — among the workforce and in the local community. With the defeat of the miners in March 1985 the resolve of the local government leaders to face breaking the law and possible surcharge and political disqualification rapidly collapsed. The capitulation of Livingstone at the GLC, which had the most prestige and popularity among the authorities, was instrumental in the collapse of all the other authorities ‘committed’ to not setting a rate.

The only two authorities which had argued for a deficit budget based on mobilising the community and workforce around a budget based on local social needs, in fact became the only two prepared to confront the government — Liverpool and Lambeth. Isolated, and even attacked by their erstwhile allies, they went down to inevitable defeat. Though there are many criticisms of the leadership of both councils, at least they emerged with some credibility from the debacle. Indeed, Liverpool remains the one council to have achieved serious concessions from the Tories in seven years during their mass campaign over the 1984-85 budget.

A socialist response

Any socialist response to the Tory attacks on local government has to start from a recognition of the limitations of fundamental change which socialists can bring about through using the local state machinery. There can be no socialism in one borough. The national (and international) political context of local government places real limits on the capacity of the most socialist-inclined council to effect radical change. At all times local decisions must be weighed closely against national considerations. In particular actions need always to promote the strength, confidence and self-activity of the working class and the oppressed locally and nationally, rather than relying on the heroic role of individual socialists and councillors.

There is still a useful role for socialists to play as councillors — to use that arena to ensure that the working class and the oppressed do not pay for the crisis of local government finances, and to organise others to fight for the same objectives. It is unacceptable for left councillors, under the guise of ‘realism’, to offer lesser evils as options — ‘better to have large rate rises than cuts in jobs’, ‘better a vacancy freeze than handing over to the Tories’. They should not vote for such budgets or measures in Labour group or council, but act as a minority caucus refusing to budge on defending working class interests, if necessary resigning positions of responsibility within the group to do so. At least such a stance prepares the ground for any future confrontation with the government. Whether there would remain even that role for socialists should the Tories be re-elected is open to question.

The demands for central government to foot the bill and for the enormous debts which local authorities have accumulated to the City to be cancelled should be expressed locally through the drawing up of a budget based on local social needs. This entails councils collaborating with the local labour movement, their own workforce, and community groups to establish the real levels of social need in the borough and to draw up a timetabled programme of implementation. Such a consultation process cannot and should not be restricted to council and union leaders. It must be a real process of mass consultation, stimulating the maximum local involvement and mobilisation which will prove vital in any subsequent showdown with central government. Such a process cannot be achieved by relying on financial experts. All the financial information should be made available and subject to rigorous public scrutiny and debate.

Within such debate on priorities and needs all questions must be up for discussion — from the hours and conditions of different sections of the workforce, the rent and rate levels, through to all aspects of service need and provision. Nothing should be exempt from debate and all information should be available. Any such process could only be successful insofar as the council worked hand-in-hand with its own workforce, the local labour movement and community sector.

The struggle over the next year

1987 is almost certainly election year. The pressure on Labour councils to avoid a confrontation and attempt to ‘muddle through’ this year’s budget has been immense. For the centre and soft left this has been a straightforward electoralist decision, avoiding the confrontation with the Tories so as not to embarrass Kinnock in election year. For others, on the hard left, it has been a realpolitik decision that mobilisation, just prior to an election, especially following the defeat of Lambeth and Liverpool, is too difficult to achieve.

However ‘realistic’ the latter assessment may be, it has led councils into all sorts of shady budget decisions ranging from the totally unacceptable to the less obnoxious. But endorsing such budgets rather than fighting for a deficit budget based on social need fails to prepare the labour movement for the inevitable struggle next year. All too often it leads to councils resorting to traditional high-handed managerial styles, an impatience with established procedures, and good socialist councillors of yesterday locking out their workforce today.

Over the next year there will be an increasing number of struggles between Labour authorities and their workforce as the ‘muddle budgets’ break down and the money runs out. Vacancy freezes, hidden cuts or deterioration in services and conditions, or even open reneging on commitments will be par for the course. However ‘difficult’ the position of left councils, socialists should stand fully behind the workforce and local tenants/community groups in such disputes. Every attack on the workforce this year in the name of realism and waiting for a new government is a nail in the coffin of any serious united struggle by councils and workforce next year.

After the election

Clearly the outcome of the general election will affect the possibilities of struggle around local government enormously. The re-election of the Tories would not only be a huge defeat for the labour movement, it would cause widespread demoralisation within local government. Paradoxically though, a convincing argument can be made for attempting to co-ordinate a national campaign of resistance and confrontation to defend jobs, services and living standards in local government against such a government in its first year. There will be little point in Labour staying in office locally to administer Tory cuts as the screw is tightened to stop any creative accountancy miracles.

With the Tories being the largest minority, or in a genuinely hung parliament with Labour and Tories roughly equal and the balance held by the Alliance, there would be pressure on Labour towards lobbying the Alliance for a common approach to defend local government. Nationally, however, the Alliance have made few commitments on local government, and locally its representatives are frequently indistinguishable from the Tories.

Again a strong case can be made for a co-ordinated campaign of confrontation by Labour councils to such a weak government, which would undoubtedly be susceptible to mass pressure.

An outright large Labour victory with a large majority seems excluded in any election this year. A slender majority or being the largest minority is possible and would present complex problems for those wishing to defend and extend local government services. The pressure not to rock the boat and give Labour a chance would be strong. Labour would attempt to alleviate the crisis of funding local government and repeal key aspects of Tory legislation, but it is doubtful whether it would release enough funds to do any more than prevent the most widespread cuts and redundancies. The accumulated debt and problems of the last few years requires a gigantic redirection of funds from other areas, way beyond Labour’s commitments.

Systematic preparation for a co-ordinated fight next year is the most sensible option, whatever the election outcome. The work has to start now. Serious local consultation on establishing a needs budget takes at least six months, and the stronger such local links and campaigns are early on the more difficult it will be for those councillors and union leaders at the top to derail the struggle.

Although needing national co-ordination, this campaign must be prepared in each locality. It is here that any such strategy will stand or fall. The key to local campaigns will be their ability to unite the council, the labour movement and local party, the council workforce, and the voluntary/community organisations.

Such a unity is fraught with difficulties. The workforce unions have to simultaneously defend their own members’ interests, in a period where even left councils are often attacking them, and campaign with those Labour councils against their common enemies in defence of jobs, services and living standards. This will not be easy. The unions will have to avoid the contradictory pressures of being ‘incorporated’ or of ultraleft refusal to build unity against the Tories. An effective local campaign will have to involve forms of mass democracy and involvement in decision-making of the workforce and local community.

Such a scenario may seem far-fetched as we approach a general election with a real chance of facing five more Tory years. But it is one which the left must fight for over the coming year. With the defeat of the miners, printworkers and other key industrial sections of labour, the public sector is next for the chop — local government, and the health and civil services. The left is relatively strong in local government, in councils, the Labour Party, and the unions. It must use that strength to prepare the best possible circumstances for the looming confrontation.