“The workers attach so much importance to citizenship, i.e. to active citizenship, that, where they have it, for instance in America, they ‘make good use’ of it, and where they do not have it, they strive to obtain it.”
-Karl Marx, German Ideology, CW: 5:217
The unprecedented turn out of millions throughout Iran on the 31st anniversary of 1979 Revolution revealed something new that has not yet been brought to light. While there has been much exposes about the costly endeavor to bus Ahmadinejad supporters to the scene and to bring Tehran under military occupation, hardly any mention is made of the deep desire to reclaim that Revolution as one that belongs to the people as its true creators. Thereby undermining its instrumental use by the Islamic Republic as a way to terrorize people into submission.
The great divide, the historic divide is about continuity or discontinuity with that great revolution, and its unfulfilled goals. It is high time for those within the opposition who confine revolution to the past alone, and tremble even at the thought of ‘another revolution’, to now take full notice. At the same time those within the Left who are serious about revolution should never again be content with the overthrow of the old without the projection of the new, i.e. what they are for.
However, the intellectuals the world over, are yet to grasp the full implications of these 9 months of sustained mass mobilization, both in fact and in thought. The continuous upsurge of revolts that reappears in newer forms has shown that no might on earth can keep the masses in subjugation. It not only demonstrates that they cannot be brainwashed by Islamic ideology but, leaderless as they are, they think their own thoughts. In a word, they are not just ‘countless’ bodies but have heads too, and it belongs to the same bodies that are being suppressed.
Undoubtedly Women and the Youth have been in the vanguard from the beginning, and have made their unmistakable presence known. But the pivotal role of Labor has largely been ignored or undervalued. Just because Labor has not marched under its own independent banner, inference has been made, by some in the Left, that ‘therefore’ Labor has been on the sidelines.
Whether or not such dubious extrapolations are made to justify their characterization of the movement as ‘middle class’ or to evade responsibility in the historic mirror for having counter posed ‘social justice’ to ‘social freedom’, and thereby inadvertently helping that monstrosity, Ahmadinejad, sustain his praetorian state-capitalism, the undeniable fact is that in the absence of powerful Labor organizations under a repressive state, Labor simply could not openly march under its own banner. And yet, as the 1979 Revolution is proof, Labor was also ‘invisible’ in the march of the millions back then until they suddenly emerged, as if out of ‘nowhere’, and formed a sustained mass political general strike that became the determinant in overthrowing the Shah.
However in the past two years, and especially in the last few weeks, Iran has also been the scene of widespread Labor actions. The workers have formed many underground unions, the very latest the Provisional Council of Isfahan Steel Factory that employs up to 20,000 workers. ‘Kaveh’ is one of their leaders. In a recent interview he says that “given the high level of activism among other social classes at present, social ground was ripe for us to take action…In our view, independent working class organizations are one of the bedrocks of any democracy, since it is only the workers that through their power to strike and paralyze the country’s economy, are a bulwark of opposition against the states’ assaults on civil liberties… without organizing the workers, we can’t hope to achieve a full-blown democracy.” (http://www.radiofarda.com/articleprintview/1950388.html)
Lately, workers’ demands have taken a decidedly political tone and a more militant form. Four independent workers organizations issued a communiqué on the 31st anniversary of the 1979 revolution where they put forth their 10-point ‘minimum demands.’ (See http://newsandletters.org/Announce/IranWorkers2010.asp) It states that: “thirty one years have passed since those glorious days full of enchantment and rebirth…the Iranian people still have a burning desire for change. They have not lost their hope for life, their yearning for happiness, freedom, dignity… We have at our back the historical experience of the united and grand strike of the oil workers during the February revolution. Relying on this experience and the power of our millions we inspire the best and most humanistic aspirations of the 1979 revolution.”
Both as a response to the crushing economic crisis, growing pauperism, runaway inflation, and high unemployment, as well as workers participation in the ongoing mass protests, the objective-subjective conditions have ripened for the Labor movement to assert itself. Thus on:
· Feb. 9 - 700 workers at Alborz tire factory staged a sit-in and set tires ablaze on factory grounds to protest unpaid wages.
· Jan. 24 - 180 Kerman Bafteha Textile workers closed several roads to protest shareholders’ decision to end operations. The roads stayed blocked from 12:30 p.m. to 4 p.m. on Sunday.
· Jan. 19 - On the fourth day of a transportation workers’ strike at Ehya Gostaran Espadan of Isfahan Steel , workers win demands for unpaid wages.
· Jan. 17 - About 400 Sasan Beverage workers staged a sit-in at the factory grounds for job security hinges and to protest temporary contracts.
· Jan. 10 - Some 150 municipality workers in the city of Andimeshk in southwest Iran staged a three-day sit-in in front of the municipality and governor’s office. One placard read: “Thirteen months of hunger! Enough promises?”
· Dec. 22 - 50 spouses of the workers at Arak Industries have staged a protest at the governor’s mansion to demand back wages.
· Oct. 25 - Over 300 workers of Ahvas Pipe factory marched in the streets for two days to protest unpaid wages.
· Oct. 7 – Workers at Arak Pars Wagon staged a sit-in and a hunger strike for unpaid wages. This is their ninth strike in 6 months.
Reports from southern Iran also point to heavy security presence in the oil fields to crush any work stoppage by the oil workers. According to Homayoun Pourzad, a union activist from the Network of Iranian Labor Unions, “the nucleus of the movement is in place and once the situation allows for it, there will be huge mushrooming of independent labor unions…But rather than these riot-like urban uprisings, we are focusing on organizing labor to bring the country to a halt if need be…The labor force is ready for independent assertion…We think labor is poised to play a strategic role.” When asked about labor’s relationship with the popular movement, he said: “We fully support their goals and will participate in all demonstrations. We even support Mousavi himself because he has remained steadfast at least up until now in defending the people.” (http://platypus1917.org/)
Labor’s critical support for Mousavi and active participation in the liberatory movement began during the election campaign. In May of last year, the prominent Tehran and Suburbs Vahed Bus Company Workers’ Syndicate, presented a list of demands, including the right to organize, job security, housing, unemployment and medical insurance, and asked the position of the candidates on these issues. “But unfortunately until now the presidential candidates have not expressed any views about workers, the unemployed and their demands.” (http://www.iwsn.org/labour/vahed-election2009.htm)
Yet, the moment mass outrage broke out against the election results, labor unions joined in. The autoworkers immediately issued a statement saying: “It is our duty to join the people’s movement. We the workers of Iran Khodroo will stop work on 6/18/2009 during all three shifts for ½ hour to protest the repression of students, workers, women, and the constitution and declare our solidarity with people’s movement.” Whereupon, the Mechanical Metal Workers too issued a statement in support of the autoworkers. Then came the powerful statement from the Vahed bus drivers of Tehran on June 19 condemning the election results and the violent suppression of the protests. This kind of labor solidarity, if continued and deepened, will surely have a great impact on Iran’s revolution in the making.
What needs to be singled out now is that Mousavi may have come to the conclusion that without the power of labor, street protests alone are insufficient. Here is what he had to say right before Feb. 11: “In my opinion, we should all have in mind the support of the working-class. This is not for the purpose of using them as instruments, but with the idea that the destiny of the movement will be tied to the destiny of the whole nation and, specifically with the two classes that are productive in economy and science: the workers, the teachers and the academics. It’s regrettable that severe political problems have resulted in decreased attention to the rights of the working-class.” (http://khordaad88.com/?p=1097)
Whether or not, as some claim, Mousavi is moving to the left under the impact of the movement as a whole, one thing is clear that during presidential debates he hardly said a word about labor. Even as ‘economics’ dominated the headlines, it was mostly centered on how to privatize parts of the state run enterprises. While this ‘tilt’ towards labor is a welcome move, does it signify a break with his 5-point minimum demands? (http://khordaad88.com/?p=925) Do those demands even come close to the richness of the concrete 10-point demands of the workers mentioned above? The gap between the two cannot be bridged by mere inclusion of labor as a Force.
The same is true of other forces, especially women’s liberation movement. Surprisingly, Zahra Rahnavard’s latest interview, while insisting on women’s rights, courageous and uncompromising, states that just as in 1979, women need to subsume their demands under the general needs of the movement at this moment. Have we not learned from the experience of 1979 that if anything, the ‘general’ cannot float in mid air outside the particulars, that the ‘whole’ cannot be without the ‘parts’ lest it be an abstract whole? Will the Iranian women who have fought valiantly for so long once again allow their demands to be postponed until after ‘victory’ is achieved?
Unfortunately this kind of attitude has made inroads into the labor movement as well. Thus, when asked about the Green movement, Homayoun Pourzad, the labor activist whom I quoted earlier, states that “The movement supporting Mousavi is a broad national-democratic front: we are all working with a sort of minimum program… We do not have any illusions that anyone in the leadership of the Green Movement is 100% on board with workers’ rights, but this is not the time to discuss that.” Why not?
Didn’t we witness an epochal revolution 31 years ago get aborted when all the concrete and manifold demands for a new way of life got completely submerged under ‘anti-imperialism’ without a thought as to what happens the day after? We certainly cannot afford, yet again, to seize upon an overriding general plan to box in the present moment. What is needed, instead, is to fill that abstract generality with human content and a fuller response that does not depart from the concrete.
Specifically, as far as labor is concerned, the challenge in this new stage is not just the recognition of Labor as a ‘force’, but the working out of a new unity of Force and Reason. So that ‘the day after’, a Khomeini cannot dare tell the workers that while strikes were good under the Shah, it is now against the revolution! Workers don’t need a ‘vanguard party’ to tell them about their condition of life and labor, that the fissures within the ruling classes are not as irreconcilable as that between labor and capital. And yet, some there are who claim that what the movement needs the most is not a new perspective on ‘what is revolution?’ ‘what is freedom?’ but the formation, by Mousavi, of a unified political party. This is reminiscent of the same calls 30 years ago when Khomeini removed Bani Sadr as president.
At the time Raya Dunayevskaya wrote a comprehensive political-philosophic analysis called ‘What Has Happened to the Iranian Revolution?...’ What is so relevant for today is that after capturing and articulating the voices of all the diverse forces of revolution, from workers to the Kurds and from women to the youth, Dunayevskaya asked: Did Bani Sadr listen to any of these voices? Did he see them not only as Force but also as Reason? “Therein – and not in what both the bourgeois, Communist and Trotskyist press now talk about: failure to build ‘a party structure’ – lies the beginning of the end of the petty-bourgeois, revolutionary intellectual, who does want more democracy, more freedom, but who has no total philosophy of liberation. Bani-Sadr couldn’t have taken organizational responsibility for a philosophy of liberation he did not have.” (See ‘Marxist-Humanist Writings on the Middle-East’, a News & Letters Publication)
The 1979 Revolution completely shattered the prevalent notion of the relationship of the spontaneity with the revolutionary ‘Party’. The dominant view, at least in Iran, was that without a unified party structure, the self-consciousness of the masses would not go beyond economic demands. The objective reality of the sustained mass general strikes clearly disclosed that the workers, on their own, not only reach political demands, but also humanize politics through self-organization. Not only they create the power to overthrow the existing reality, but aspire to establish and maintain worker control.
The historic challenge was how these self-mediating forms of mass self-organizations can develop and achieve continuity? In other words, how can this self-created objective power become a new beginning for a whole new human society, how can this new power produced during the revolutionary process become determinant in positively extending the revolution beyond its negative act as it overthrows the old? In a word, how can this newly created consciousness become certain of itself, i.e. become in-and-for itself? Rather than absolving the revolutionary theoretician from historic responsibility, it put the question of the relationship of theory to practice on a whole new ground. It did not eliminate it!
If that was the case, a certain religious idea propounded by Khomeini could not become dominant. This idea, though alien to the Idea of Freedom, did not come from the outside but emerged from within the revolution. In other words, the 1979 Revolution brought on to the historic stage the need for the organization of thought, even as it transcended the archaic notion of ‘the vanguard party’ to lead. It is precisely when we reach the threshold of a new transition period that we are most in need of a new way of thinking, one that is rooted in the living, developing concrete aspirations of women, youth and the workers of Iran who have created today’s new reality.
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