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.
This is the companion piece to our Archive Unlocked reprint of André Duret’s 1983 report.
On 8 March 1979, five weeks after Ayatollah Khomeini came home to a welcome of millions, tens of thousands of women marched through Tehran against his instruction that they cover their hair. It was International Women’s Day, and it was snowing. They had helped bring down the Shah; now the man they had helped install was telling them what to wear, and Hezbollahi toughs were meeting them with knives and broken glass. The revolution was six weeks old. The counter-revolution was already in the street. The women who marched did not need the theory of permanent revolution to tell them what was being done to them. They could see it.
Hold that date. Everything difficult about the argument that follows sits inside the gap between what those women saw in March 1979 and what the far left was prepared to write down about it — in some cases only years later.
Set out four propositions about the Iranian process, the kind a reader today might reach for. First, that Mehdi Bazargan never held real power, so any reading of Iran built on his premiership is built on sand. Second, that the reactionary clerical capture of the revolution happened early — that Khomeini’s return confirmed it. Third, that from that point the assault on the left, on women, on the secular and national-minority forces began, and ran on as the new power consolidated. Fourth, that the war with Iraq was seized by the Khomeinist leadership to drive that assault deeper and clamp its grip on the whole society. With the benefit of nearly half a century, all four are essentially right. The interesting question is not whether they are true. It is how obvious they were at the time, and to whom — because the answer indicts a good deal of the left, and the document we reprint on 12 August is the evidence for both the indictment and its limits.
Bazargan was a cipher, and that is the point
Take him first, because he is the easiest. Bazargan headed the Provisional Government from February 1979 and resigned on 6 November, two days after students seized the American embassy and made his authority a joke he could no longer tell. He himself said he had been handed “a knife without a blade.” Real power sat elsewhere from the first week — in the Revolutionary Council, the neighbourhood komitehs, and the clerical network that would become the Islamic Republican Party. So yes: to explain Iran through Bazargan’s cabinet is to explain a shadow by describing the shape it throws.
But the proposition overreaches when it says any analysis “based on” him is therefore worthless. Bazargan matters precisely as a cipher. He is the form in which the liberal, national-bourgeois option was tried in public and visibly failed, and his failure is a fact worth having. Read how Duret handles him in the reprint: not as a ruler but as “the Bazargan government, over which” the Khomeini leadership presided and then discarded — a cabinet the clergy set up to reassure the bourgeoisie and dropped the moment the embassy seizure made it useless. The mistake to guard against is not mentioning Bazargan. It is mistaking office for power — and that mistake was catchable in real time, because he told everyone, loudly, that he had none.
The reaction came for its victims in order
The harder proposition is the second, and it needs handling with care, because it is the one most easily corrupted by hindsight. That Khomeini’s programme was reactionary was not a secret waiting to be discovered in 1981. He had published it. The Najaf lectures on velayat-e faqih — government by the jurist — were in print from 1970. The theocratic design was on the record before the revolution had a date. In that sense the raw material of the second proposition was available to anyone who read.
And yet “his return confirmed it” is too clean. February 1979 did not feel confirmed to the people living in it, and not only to fools. Khomeini had spent his months at Neauphle-le-Château promising that the clergy would not govern directly, that there would be pluralism, that the left would be free. The revolution was a genuine front — workers building shoras in the oil fields, the women of 8 March, the Kurdish and Turkoman movements, the Fedayeen and the Mojahedeen — and fronts do not announce their internal winner on day one. The theocratic outcome was sealed in stages, each of which could be argued about while it happened: the rigged referendum of March 1979, the velayat-e faqih constitution ratified that December, the embassy seizure that finished Bazargan, and above all the June 1981 destruction of Bani-Sadr and the Mojahedeen, after which the executions ran in the thousands. To say the return “confirmed” the ending is to read the ending backwards into the opening. The reactionary danger was knowable in February 1979. The reactionary victory was not yet obvious, and pretending otherwise flatters us at the expense of the record.
What was obvious — and this is the third proposition — was the assault, to each group as its turn came. The women knew on 8 March 1979. The Kurds knew that August, when Khomeini declared holy war on Kurdistan and Khalkhali’s firing squads followed the army in. The universities knew in the spring of 1980, when the “Cultural Revolution” cleared them of the left. The point about the onslaught is not that it was hidden but that it was distributed, and that obviousness was distributed with it. You saw the counter-revolution early in exact proportion to how early it came for you. That is why so much of the argument on the left was not about the facts — the closures, the shootings, the hezbollah raids were all reported — but about what the facts were allowed to mean. The Tudeh and the Fedayeen-Majority saw everything and subordinated all of it to unity with an “anti-imperialist” regime.
What the Fourth International could, and could not, see
The document we publish by Duret is the Fourth International’s own answer, and it is more honest than the caricature — its own and others’ — would lead you to expect. Presented to the United Secretariat in January 1983 and published that spring, 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 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 reaching for those four propositions today would want it to say.
Which only sharpens the charge, because the practical line had trailed even this analysis. When Iraq invaded in September 1980 the United Secretariat called to “defend Iran against Iraq and imperialist attacks” — a statement its own minute records as passing by majority vote, so the International was divided over it from the start. That defencism was reaffirmed as late as May 1982, in an IEC statement still headed “Defend the Iranian Revolution!“ and still hailing the recapture of Khorramshahr — even as Iranian armour prepared to cross into Iraq.
And the sharpest sign that the turn was overdue came not from the centre but from a section. On 22 July 1982 — nine days after Iranian troops crossed into Iraq — the Political Bureau of the Japanese Revolutionary Communist League issued a document under the flat title “Against the War by the Khomeini-IRP Regime Against Iraq.” It defended Iran against the 1980 invasion and condemned Khomeini’s offensive war in the same breath, named the regime a “colonial bourgeois nationalist bonapartism,” read the war as a means “to tighten its bourgeois nationalist control over the masses,” and called for “the anti-imperialist unity of Arab and Iranian workers and peasants” across the front. That was the whole of the corrected position, reached by a section within days of the invasion — six months before the International’s own report caught up.1
The report reprinted here, eight months later, is where the analysis and the line finally met: reject the Khomeini government’s war, call for a ceasefire, the masses “must not win the war and lose the revolution.” By 1984 International Viewpoint was printing “Khomeini’s counter-revolution” as a section-heading; by December 1987 it was calling for “the fraternization of the soldiers of both armies against their rulers.”
None of that last step is a formula, and it is worth being exact about why, because the temptation is to hear “fraternise the soldiers of both armies” as the answer to every war. It is not. Marxists do not meet each war between capitalist states with a plague on both houses; in a war of an oppressed nation against an oppressor — Ukraine against Russia’s invasion, to take the case in front of us — we are for the defeat of the aggressor, and neutrality there is a betrayal wearing internationalist clothes. The 1980 call to defend Iran against an imperialist-backed Iraqi invasion drew on exactly that principle, and on its own terms it was defensible. The error was never defencism as such. It was what the defencism was chained to: a revolution already being strangled from within, so that “defend the Iranian revolution” curdled into defending the regime that was strangling it — and then, when Iran’s conscripts were dying outside Basra, into cheering an invader. The war line was always downstream of the dating question. Get the death of the revolution wrong, and you will get the war wrong for years.
That was the achievement of the American SWP, whose Intercontinental Press and Militant never turned at all: they kept the defencist line past the point where Iran was the invader, cheered the 1984 seizure of the Majnoon Islands, and told their readers an “Iranian victory in the war would be an inspiration.” Cindy Jaquith boasted that the Militant was “virtually the only paper in the U.S. workers movement that defends Iran and the Iranian revolution” — a sentence meant as pride. Jack Barnes’s people had backed Babak Zahraie’s HKE, the Iranian group that adapted hardest to the regime and split from the International over it. The best demolition of that course came from inside the SWP itself and from Ernest Mandel’s The Anatomy of a Split; Kamran Nayeri’s account, from within the Iranian movement, is the fullest reckoning. The people who got Iran right early were not, on the whole, the ones with the largest press. They were the Iranian comrades who paid for the analysis.
So: were the four propositions obvious? The facts were, to whoever the regime reached first. The synthesis — that these facts added up to a finished reactionary regime and not the birth-pangs of a living revolution — was available but bitterly contested, resisted hardest by the “anti-imperialism” 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 congresses, and the fighting is the reason the answer took as long as it did.
The report we publish by Duret 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.
Further reading. André Duret, “The Iranian Revolution Four Years After the February 1979 Insurrection“ — the lost first part of the 1983 report, reprinted here for the first time online. On the war line, the founding defencist texts and their reversal run through the International Viewpoint archive (the May 1982 IEC statement, IV 9; Salah Jaber on the Gulf war, IV 132, Dec 1987; and the 1989 retrospective on Khomeinism, IV 166). On the American SWP’s break: Ernest Mandel, “The Anatomy of a Split“ (1986), and Kamran Nayeri, “Learning From Our Mistakes.”
Footnotes
Political Bureau of the Central Committee, Japan Revolutionary Communist League, “Against the War by the Khomeini-IRP Regime Against Iraq — For the Anti-Imperialist Unity of Arab and Iranian Workers and Peasants,” 22 July 1982, in International Internal Discussion Bulletin (SWP), Vol. XIX, No. 3, June 1983. Coming soon in our Archive Unlocked series — “The Japanese Section’s Case Against Khomeini’s War.”