From anti-imperialism to “campism”: 45 years of the Mullahs' alibi

Forty-five years ago, Inprecor showed that Iran’s theocracy is neither anti-imperialist nor an ally.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.