IWG online meeting on state capitalism in the USSR.
DATE
April 22nd, 7 PM EST
WHERE
Online
CONTACT INFO
IG: @iwg.official | Twitter: @IWGOfficial | FB: @iwgusa | Email: us@leftcom.org
06-19-2009
Comrades: The following content was posted by me over on the International Communist Current's website on 06-18-2009, and gives a flavor of the approach I think revolutionaries ought to take in the current Iranian situation.
Comradely,
Al Greene
Submitted by Allan (not verified) on June 18, 2009 - 21:10.
june 18, 2009
thursday
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IWG online meeting on state capitalism in the USSR.
DATE
April 22nd, 7 PM EST
WHERE
Online
CONTACT INFO
IG: @iwg.official | Twitter: @IWGOfficial | FB: @iwgusa | Email: us@leftcom.org
IWG online meeting on state capitalism in the USSR.
DATE
April 22nd, 7 PM EST
WHERE
Online
CONTACT INFO
IG: @iwg.official | Twitter: @IWGOfficial | FB: @iwgusa | Email: us@leftcom.org
March 2024
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Our statement
Our statement
We have today got some evidence that Iranian workers are beginning to mobilise (car workers and bus drivers) but we have to be careful here. Your "prgramme" is not actually related to the situation on the ground and the Iranian workers were misled in 1979 by the Tudeh, Fedayees and various leftists (mainly Maoist groups) into supporting the return of Khomeini with the schematic view in their heads that he would be a Kerensky figure who would pave the way for a workers revolution.
At the moment the biggest danger is that we have something like a rerun of thirty years ago with workers getting involved in a bourgeois faction fight and suffering the consequences. And back then there was a lot more independent class action than today (but the shoras/shuras were not workers' councils as we understand them and certainly the form hid a lack of consciousness. Moussavi was Prime Minister during one of the most repressive periods in the history of the Iranian Islamic Republic Republic (during the Iran Iraq War) and is certainly not even the focus for independent action by those members of Iranian society who have had enough of repression and economic stagnation. It seems as though we have saplit inthe ruling clas without any of the preparations needed on our side to benefit from it. As elsewhere even if this political crisis mixes with a social crisis the Iranian workers will have to look to their own independent interests first in order to build up their unity and solidarity. After that we will see how far they can go in developing the nuceli of class cosncious workers who will join with the rest of the world proletariat...
However we would likke to hear what you think of OUR initial statement
I agree with Cleisbotham; the
I agree with Cleisbotham; the situation now is not - unluckly - the one You prefigure into such fighting statement. It's not by now a kind of February revolution.
That's doesn't mean that the situation couldn't change suddendly and into not foreseen ways.
Process
Process
But it will have to be through a long process and will only come about through a general international movement of the working class. At the moment we are in favour of Irnaian workers forming their own organisations to fight for their own interests but the last thing we want is another generation of Iranian workers to get massacred by taking one side or other of a bourgeois faction fight. Historically when the ruling class splits when faced with a combative working class the situation allows us to see the possibility of immediate progress but when the ruling class is split and attempts to draw the workign class behind its programme (freedom - largely for the middle class of North Tehran and the bazaaris to make more money) then we are faced with a different situation.
It Is Objectively Necessary to Put Forth a Bolshevik Program
It is objectively necessary to put forth a Bolshevik program. "Without revolutionary theory, there can be no revolutionary practice." -- Lenin. "The crisis of mankind reduces itself to the crisis of revolutionary proletarian leadership." -- Trotsky.
Sitting back and letting things unfold is not a Bolshevik approach.
I put forth the semblance of a Bolshevik program.
I suggested to the workers to form workers councils.
The crying need in Iran is for a revolutionary socialist -- a revolutionary communist -- workers' party, a revolutionary leadership, to particularly intersect the oil workers and develop a revolutionary proletarian leadership of the exploited and toiling and oppressed masses.
Sitting back on one's hind quarters and saying, let things unfold before we say anything, is Menshevism, two-stagism, liberalism, Stalinism, but it is not communism and not Bolshevism.
I am particularly surprised that the best you can think of as what might develop is a February Revolution leading to a Kerensky, too.
What is objectively posed is the objective need for an Iranian proletarian dictatorship comprised of elected workers' councils -- oil workers' councils, farm workers' councils, workers' councils as simultaneously both the organs of revolutionary proletarian class struggle against the regime -- every faction of it -- and also as the embryonic organs of a dictatorship of the proletariat, a revolutionary communist proletarian democracy for the toilers and a revolutionary communist proletarian dictatorship against all the old exploiters and oppressors, including against the old theocratic Islamic parastic clergy, every faction of it.
Letting things unfold was not and is not the purpose of what I wrote. Rather, what I wrote was intended as putting forth the rudiments of a communist program to intersect the unfolding events in Iran. It is objectively necessary to do that.
Does that mean that on the ground, it will be easy? No. I expect it will be dangerous and very hard, and that the work, or a lot of it, may have to be clandestine at the start, among some.
But I put forth what I saw as the basis and rudiments of a communist program, and that is the role of a communist leadership, to suggest to the working classes the tasks of the hour.
Sitting back and waiting is not the way a revolutionary leadership ought to act.
I would here add several other provisions to what I put forth.
The main provision is this: under any and all circumstances, U.S. IMPERIALISM: HANDS OFF IRAN!, and in the eventuality of WHICHEVER faction heads up Iran, FOR THE MILITARY DEFEAT OF U.S. IMPERIALISM IF IT INTERVENES IN IRAN! I am an American communist, and Lenin argued for revolutionary defeatism, that in imperialist wars, the defeat of "one's own" bourgeoisie and "one's own" bourgeois government, is the "lesser evil," and that is ESPECIALLY the case in a tumultuous and unfolding situation of the Iranian sort when American imperialism's invasion or intervention COULD ONLY HAVE THE EFFECT OF CEMENTING SUPPORT OF THE POPULAR MASSES TO THE RULING CLASSES OF IRAN.
I suggested the liberation of women and homosexuals for the reason that the INTERSECTION of the bourgeois-democratic tasks with the FIGHT FOR PROLETARIAN POWER is the PERSPECTIVE OF THE PERMANENT REVOLUTION, and THAT IS THE ONLY WAY FORWARD for Iran. The permanent revolution is the perspective of the DICTATORSHIP OF THE PROLETARIAT COMPRISED OF ELECTED COUNCILS OF THE WORKERS to SIMULTANEOUSLY TRANSCEND BOURGEOIS RULE and ACHIEVE PROLETARIAN RULE -- to achieve the final end of all oppression of women, homosexuals, VIA THE ROAD OF THE SOCIALIST REVOLUTION AGAINST CAPITALISM.
The MESHING of the fight for democratic tasks with the fight for socialist revolution -- for a communist Iran, a Red Iran of Workers' Councils -- is the road forward. That is the Marxist perspective of the permanent revolution as embodied in Marx's 1850 point about the revolution in permanence having been the only road forward and Trotsky's 1906 point in his book, Results and Prospects, as the point of the permanent revolution being the only road forward, and in Trotsky's 1929 book, Permanent Revolution, making the same point.
FIGHT FOR THE DICTATORSHIP OF THE PROLETARIAT IN IRAN, and in so doing, FOR A TOILERS' COMMUNIST DEMOCRACY COMPRISED OF ELECTED WORKERS COUNCILS COMPRISING AN IRANIAN REVOLUTIONARY WORKERS' GOVERNMENT WITH A FOREIGN POLICY OF REVOLUTIONARY PROLETARIAN COMMUNIST INTERNATIONALISM ENCOURAGING WORLD SOCIALIST REVOLUTION EVERYWHERE IN THE WORLD as the road forward.
THAT is the road forward.
And the ROLE of REVOLUTIONARIES is to SAY WHAT IS TO THE MASSES, NOT sit back and simply "let things unfold."
Tactically taking account of individual situations on the ground is, of course, objectively necessary, and if it requires clandestinity, or taking account of the presence of the old Islamic paramilitary scum, that is what it requires.
But that is NOT the same thing as "letting things unfold," which OBJECTIVELY aids in HOLDING BACK the MASSES OF THE TOILERS FROM ENTERING INTO THE FIGHT IN THEIR OWN INDEPENDENT COMMUNIST PROLETARIAN CLASS INTERESTS.
You can SAY that is the necessity, but IF YOU DON'T PUT FLESH AND BLOOD ON THE BONES OF SAYING THAT, you will be OBJECTIVELY aiding the counter-revolution in Iran, the Islamic theocracy and the bourgeois capitalist system it oversees.
Allan GreeneWho are you talking to?
Who are you talking to?
Alan
You are not addressing the Iranian working class (since you write in english) nor does putting an abstract "programme" as you call it count as giving leadership in this situation. The first thing that we are calling for is an independent mass movement of the class, independent of all borugeois fctions and certainly not to fight for one faction or another. This then begins the process and once that is arrived at we can see what next is practicable (and the isolation of one sector of the international working class is somehting else we need to consider). When we invoked the Kerensky analogy it was to criticise those leftists (including Trots) who used this in 1979 and supported Khomeini sa the "Kerensky" solution. They thus aided and abetted their own massacres as well as thousands of the most class conscious of the Iranian working class at the time. A bloodbath is being prepared in iran (it has alrady started) and the mainthing is for the working class to preserve its autonomy and capacity for class action beyond the immediate bourgeois faction fight.
You wrote The main provision
You wrote
The main provision is this: under any and all circumstances, U.S. IMPERIALISM: HANDS OFF IRAN!, and in the eventuality of WHICHEVER faction heads up Iran, FOR THE MILITARY DEFEAT OF U.S. IMPERIALISM IF IT INTERVENES IN IRAN! I am an American communist, and Lenin argued for revolutionary defeatism, that in imperialist wars, the defeat of “one’s own” bourgeoisie and “one’s own” bourgeois government, is the “lesser evil,” and that is ESPECIALLY the case in a tumultuous and unfolding situation of the Iranian sort when American imperialism’s invasion or intervention COULD ONLY HAVE THE EFFECT OF CEMENTING SUPPORT OF THE POPULAR MASSES TO THE RULING CLASSES OF IRAN.
++++++++
This sounds somewhat "off" to me.
firstly, it picks out one imperialism as being the worst, yet the communist position s that all factions of the ruling class are equally reactionary. Iran is currently part of an imperialist formation involving Russia, China and others, a formation which has the potential to rival the USA.
You seem to be saying that should one faction of the Iranian bourgeoisie come out on top, (and logic dictates you are talking about Ahmedinejad because he is suported by the Russian/Chinese bloc ,however loose that may be at the moment) then the Iranian population should join in an anti imperialist war against possible US intervention.
I think Lenin's slogan of revolutionary defeatism has to be handled with care, even if it has a kernel of truth. the working class cannot advocate class collaboration, nowhere can the working class join forces with the bourgeoisie to fight fascism, to fight the imperialist enemy or any other motive. the defeat of US imperialism will only be the gain of another rising imperialist formation.
the original 8 point plan you put forward suffers from the problems we have the world over. How do we address a working class that has been on the losing end of class struggle for years, that has been mentally disarmed by the Stalinist experience and yet faces a material situation crying out for revolution?
However, let us hope the situation in Iran develops to the point where such a programme becomes a real weapon.
For now, the call for total proletarian independence has to be made.