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Embracing death: the Western left and the Iranian revolution, 1978–83

2005; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 34; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/0308514042000329351

1469-5766

David Greason,

Religion and Society Interactions

Abstract The Iranian revolution of 1978–83 was a disaster for Iranian leftists, who, having worked for the overthrow of the Shah, soon found themselves being persecuted by the hard-line followers of the Ayatollah Khomeini. This paper looks at the response of Western leftists to the unfolding of the revolution, considering, first, to what extent Marxist and class-based analyses helped explain the revolution and, second, why so many Western leftist groups and individuals defended the Khomeini faction even as it moved against secular leftists and liberals. It concludes that an uncritical identification with Khomeini's declared ‘anti-imperialism’ distorted the views of those who would ordinarily have opposed his regime on class grounds, and that such a misreading was aided by an inadequate distinction between bourgeois democracy and dictatorship. Keywords: IranIranian RevolutionleftMarxistimperialismFoucault Notes The ‘elaborators’ listed by Keddie were Theda Skocpol, Charles Tilly, Eric Hobsbawm, George Rudé and Barrington Moore. This lumping together of the opposition was common; see de Groot (Citation1980: 19). For example, Chris Harman (Citation1994) of the British Socialist Workers Party wrote of an Iranian working class besieged by petit-bourgeois to its left (the IRP) and right (Bazargan and Bani-Sadr's forces). Any analysis of substance was abandoned. For the orthodox communist understanding of the anti-worker nature of ‘lumpenproletarian socialism’ see Nikolai Bukharin and Evgenii Preobrazhensky (Citation1970: 122–3). The category is, of course, contestable, as Tom Bottomore (Citation2001: 327) noted. Asef Bayat rejected its applicability to the poor of his study, arguing that Marx's term applied to ‘those nonbourgeois poor elements who did not produce their own livelihood and subsisted on the work of others. The agents that are the subject of this book, the urban disenfranchised, are not of this group’ (1997: 168). Nevertheless, as he himself acknowledged frequently, their insurgent and subaltern politics did not and could not challenge the state in the same way as those of the organized proletariat (1997: 14–15, 38–40, 56), and their politics of ‘quiet encroachment’ did fit generally accepted definitions of lumpenproletarian politics. Misagh Parsa (Citation1989: 3–4) also argued that the social breakdown model – as drawn on by Keddie (1981) – has similarities to Marxist tools insofar as it measures responses to disruptive economic and social developments along class lines. See, for example, Göran Therborn, who lamented what he believed to be the tendency of contemporary Marxists to bypass ‘in embarrassed silence’ (1980: viii) the questions raised by Marx about the material determination of ideologies. Therborn, however, mentioned Iran only in passing, giving it as an example of a revolutionary mobilization of ‘a fundamentally ambiguous character, involving both reactionary and revolutionary elements’ (Citation1980: 121). And yet Marx had revised such views (perhaps best seen in his writings on India) by the time he came to address the effects of British colonialism in Ireland, thus bringing his understanding of imperialism much closer to what later became Lenin's (Turner Citation1984: 156–7). The Iranian Socialist Workers Party (HKS) was founded in Teheran on 22 January 1979. Within two years it had split into three rival groupings – the HKS, the HKE and the HVK. All three were members of an international Trotskyist umbrella grouping, the United Secretariat of the Fourth International (known as the USFI or USec) (Alexander Citation1991: 558–9, 565). This singularity was challenged by one group of British/Irish ex-Marxists), which argued ‘the religious character of the Irish revolution was a more striking thing than the religious character of the Iranian revolution. The Iranian people only rejected the superficial liberalism of the Shah and the coteries supporting him. The liberal culture rejected by the Irish was the genuine article – British liberalism of the 19th century and the early 20th’ (Clifford Citation1991: 34). Representative was the unsigned editorial in the US scholarly Marxist journal Monthly Review: ‘It is natural that the people who… have come to be as determined as Khomeini to get rid of the shah should now enthusiastically accept his leadership and turn a deaf ear to anyone, religious or not, who shows sign of compromise. But there is another side to this coin. Khomeini's power is conjunctural, not structural or permanent. It can be expected to last until the shah has been definitively overthrown’ (Citation1979: 15). On Iranian Trotskyism during the revolution, see Alexander (Citation1991: 558–67). According to a theoretical journal published by British and Iranian Trotskyists in the late 1990s, a paper was prepared for the United Secretariat by USec International Executive Committee member Saber Nickbin (or Nikbeen), on behalf of the HKS in 1983, which heavily criticized the Khomeini regime and those leftists who had refused to break from it. ‘A resolution based on the recommendations of this document was passed by the IEC immediately following the world congress which called for the expulsion from the F[ourth] I[nternational] of the supporters of the American SWP in Iran who had collaborated with Khomeini's regime, public self-criticism by the USec of its mistaken positions on the Iranian revolution and support for the regroupment project initiated by the Iranian comrades. To this day, the USec has not yet published that resolution’ (Nikbeen Citation1997: 31). One account of the HKS, ‘Growing openness to socialist ideas’, wistfully noted ‘big new openings for socialist ideas in Iran…a group of sailors, a glass cutter, a General Motors auto worker, and a few nurses are among those who have expressed their support [for the HKS] and asked to join’ (Intercontinental Press, 17 December 1979: 1244). ‘You say that our comrades are in jail. So, some of our comrades are in jail – but our organisation is legal. Our paper is legal; it is sold in tens of thousands of copies like all other left-wing papers in Iran. Were they legal under the shah?…What you have is a step from a reactionary dictatorship which was bourgeois towards what you could call partial bourgeois democracy… . We said that it is the beginning of a process of permanent revolution’ (Spartacist League Citation1979d: 5). As Maxime Rodinson (Citation1979: 36–7) has noted, activist Marxists rarely consider such encounters as a meeting of equals with the possibility of synthesis. Even apparent sympathy is largely a case of biding one's time. Ultimately, one (Islam) has to surrender to the other (Marxism). See also Kertzer (Citation1980). Guardian (21 November 1979), cited in Frankel (Citation1979c: 1242). See also the responses of Peter M. Sussman (Citation1980), John F. Murphy (Citation1980), and Falk's (Citation1980b) responses to Sussman and Murphy. See also Hymans (Citation1979a, 1979b)Citation for critical coverage and Liberation (Citation1981) for supportive coverage. (Acknowledgements to Stan Newens for his kind assistance in locating this and other Iranian material from the British left and labour movements.) This split in the USec line could be detected as early as August 1979, following the regime's first anti-left crackdown (Spartacist League Citation1979e: 6). Tabari (real name Afsaneh Najmabadi) had been involved with the US Socialist Workers Party in the 1970s, before moving to Europe in 1974, as noted by Behrooz (Citation1999: 94). ‘Certainly many more Iranians are being killed for political opposition, often on the flimsiest of charges. There are more political prisoners and a tighter ideological straitjacket… . In short, Khomeini has established a rule that is as brutal and repressive as the Shah's.’ The latter statement was a 180-degree turnaround (unacknowledged) from his earlier insistence that ‘it is in my judgment a grave mistake to equate the Shah and Ayatollah Khomeini’ (Falk Citation1980b: 915). Perhaps the best example here would be Halliday (Citation1979), which, despite the inadequacies revealed in hindsight, introduced the politics of the Iranian opposition groups to a wider Western audience, and subjected them to thoughtful criticism. One émigré Iranian Marxist well known in British labour movement circles insisted, however, that foreign revolutionary socialists should ‘concentrate their energies on working class issues…the whole world is full of vulgar Marxists, petit-bourgeois intellectuals, and Western statesmen, who rally under the banner of “fight for all” and universalism, which looks very beautiful and very broadminded in theory, but have forgotten in practice the specific problems of the working class’ (Ghotbi Citation1978: 92–3.) Stan Newens (Citation2003) recalled a 1978 meeting in the House of Commons called by his Labour colleague Ernie Roberts at which Ghotbi was abused by ‘frenzied’ Islamists. Referring to the resolution on the Iranian situation as published by the Eleventh Congress of the USec in November 1979, Robert J. Alexander has noted that ‘as in the statements of the Iranian Trotskyists in the same period there was little reference to the Moslem clerical nature of the Iranian revolution’ (1991: 559). The Iranian left acted similarly (Mirsepassi-Ashtiani and Moghadam Citation1991: 40). This is reminiscent of the argument of the Christian-born Lebanese communist, Raif Khoury: ‘Do you remember…that Allaho akbar means, in plain language: punish the greedy usurers! Tax those who accumulate profits! Confiscate the possessions of the thieving monopolists! Guarantee bread to the people! Open the road of education and progress to women!’ (Rodinson Citation1979: 51). Shari‘ati's work was largely unknown to the West before the revolution: few of his works were in English translation, and their heavily theological content and flowery prose made them unlikely reads (for example, Shari‘ati Citation1977. The almost perfunctory account of Shari‘ati's death in the London-based socialist CARI Bulletin (Committee Against Repression in Iran, Citation1977: 12b) gave little impression of his standing in Iran. On Jalal Al-e Ahmad, see Mirsepassi-Ashtiani (Citation1994: 60–3). Daily World (6 April 1979), cited in Spartacist League (Citation1979c). ‘There is certainly no disgrace involved in changing one's opinion; but there is no reason to say that one's opinion is changing when one is against the punishments today, when one was against the tortures of the Savak yesterday’ (Foucault Citation1999: 133). See also Miller (Citation1994: 312). ‘Foucault's [Iranian] essays are his most extensive set of writings on any non-Western society, and they form one of the major political engagements of his life’ (Afary Citation2003: 8). Jeremy R. Carrette noted that ‘The Iranian question was…part of a whole series of issues related to the “problematic of government” and “spirituality”, which gripped [Foucault] in 1978 and which would eventually lead him to explore early Christianity’ (Citation2000: 137). In 1981, Miller wrote, Foucault ‘slipped a revealing comment into an otherwise pedestrian interview…“Each time I have attempted to do theoretical work… it has been on the basis of elements from my experience”’ (1994: 31). Two articles on Iran by Falk appeared after January 1982, ‘The threat of Moslem fundamentalism’ (Newsday 21 July 1982: 43) and ‘Interviews with Abol-Hassan Banisadr and Massoud Rajavi’ (Alternatives, 8(1) (Summer 1982: 91–107)). A 2001 footnote to his 1981 essay ‘Human rights and the Iranian revolution’, added little new (Allain Citation2003: 220–3). See Moghadam (Citation1987, 1989)Citation; Halliday (Citation1987); Abrahamian (Citation1991); Rahnema and Nomani (Citation1990). This, for example, was the conclusion drawn by Muhammad Ja‘far and Azar Tabari (Citation1984: 343–8), when outlining what they saw as a revolutionary Marxist or socialist programme for Iran. There was no mention of specific socialist demands. The KPD analogy was also drawn by the Spartacist League. ‘Although leftist support to Khomeini is an opportunist policy, there is a certain methodological similarity here to the ultra-left Third Period Stalinist position expressed as “After Hitler, us”’ (1979b: 10). See, for example, the Weekly Worker (paper of the Communist Party of Great Britain, a groupuscule not to be confused with the original CPGB) (27 September 2001, 18, 25 October 2001, 8, 15 November 2001). See, for example, the debate between Bob Pitt (pro-Taliban) and Ian Donovan (anti) in the pages of the Weekly Worker: Pitt, ‘Sectarian propagandism’ (18 October 2001: 8); Donovan, ‘Neither Taliban nor imperialism’ (25 October 2001: 6–7); Pitt, ‘Taliban bloc’ (8 November 2001: 6); and Pitt, Donovan and ‘orthodox’ Trotskyist Liz Hoskings (pro), ‘Should we defend the Taliban?’ (15 November 2001: 6–7). Cited in Rodinson (Citation1979: 95).