The overthrow of the "Shah of Shahs, the Light of the Aryans" and his hated totalitarian regime in one of the most powerful and sustained mass mobilizations in history has deep significance for the workers and toiling masses the world over.
The shah's regime appeared to be impregnable. Washington had built up his army into the fifth strongest in the world. The CIA helped construct SAVAK into a massive secret police network and torture machine whose tentacles reached into every factory, office, university, and neighborhood, and among the oppressed nationalities. Right to the bitter end, every imperialist power supported the Peacock Throne against the Iranian people. Moscow and Beijing, each seeking "peaceful coexistence" with imperialism, added their support, with Moscow recognizing Khomeini only when it became apparent that the shah was finished. Finally, the shah had control of billions of dollars in oil money and was promising rapid economic and social progress.
The Iranian masses overcame all these obstacles by relying on the immense power of the millions when they mobilize in united action. The toiling people throughout the world can identify with the proletarian methods of struggle-mass demonstrations, formation of broad struggle committees, general strike, appeals to the soldiers who joined in the struggle, mass insurrection-that were vividly displayed on international television broadcasts. It was this power of the masses that disintegrated the apparently invulnerable power of the shah. If it can be done in Iran, it can be done anywhere.
Experiences with the dictatorship led wider and wider layers of the masses to come to the conclusion that the regime could not be reformed but had to be eliminated.
In the last analysis, the shah's tyranny rested not on its repressive apparatus but on the belief among the masses that they had to bow to the regime. Once the vast majority of society had shed that illusion through months of determined and selfsacrificing struggle, the armed repression could not stop them. Guns and tanks, no matter how sophisticated, are only as reliable as the hands that fire and run them. And these are the hands of workers and peasants in uniform. When the rankand-file soldiers came over to the revolution, the resistance of elite units was broken or neutralized, and the fate of the shah's regime was sealed.
In the course of the year-long mobilization that built up toward the February 9-12
insurrection, the working class came forward as the backbone of the broad mass struggle. This reflects a worldwide trend toward proletarian predominance in mass political struggles, including in semicolonial countries such as Iran. The workers began to organize committees to lead their struggle; that is, to build proletarian forms of organization, which can point toward the formation of soviets.
The overthrow of the shah's regime opened a process of permanent revolution in Iran-the Third Iranian Revolution. This revolution has demonstrated the key role of democratic and anti-imperialist demands in semicolonial countries. Whatever contraditions exist between imperialism and the native Iranian capitalist it is nevertheless dependent upon class, imperialism. There can be no "stage" of capitalist development in Iran independent from imperialism. Neither can the Iranian bourgeoisie carry through the democratic tasks of granting land to the peasants and the wherewithal to exploit it, freedom for the oppressed nationalities, or equality for women.
The mass mobilizations that toppled the monarchy occurred under the political hegemony of a petty-bourgeois nationalist movement led by the bourgeois leadership of the Shiite hierarchy headed by Kho meini. The prestige of that leadership is the key card which the ruling class in Iran can play in order to restore a stable state apparatus and a new bourgeois political leadership in order to crush the revolutionary process and relaunch a process of "rationalized" capitalist development in Iran. That is the course the ruling class has embarked upon with the support of imperialism.
The dynamic of the Iranian revolution continues to be one of upsurge. The magnitude of the mass mobilizations and the victory of the mass insurrection have created tremendous expectations among the workers, the urban poor, the poor peasants, the oppressed nationalities, and women. Neither the Khomeini-Bazargan regime or any other type of bourgeois rule can fulfill these expectations or rapidly crush the mass movement through repression.
To win their demands and to embark upon economic development free of the distortions imposed by imperialist domination, the working class and all the toilers will have to go forward to the establishment of a workers state, breaking the power of imperialism and its Iranian junior partner, expropriating the bourgeoisie, and opening the door to begin the construction of socialism.
In the long run there are only two possible outcomes: either the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat in alliance with the rural and city poor, which alone can guarantee the victory of the revolution, or the victory of counterrevolution. In the latter case, the bourgeoisie will once again brutally impose capitalist "law and order," and allow imperialism to reassert its direct control, as happened before with the crushing of the Constitutional Revolution of 1906-11, and the Second Revolution smashed by the CIA- sponsored coup of 1953.
Which of these two paths will predominate remains to be decided in the struggle between classes over the next months and years. In the course of the struggle the toilers can create a broad system of coun cils (soviets), and the political maturation of the proletariat can lead to cementing the bonds with all its allies. The workers and their allies can win if a mass revolutionary Marxist party can be built in time, in the heat of this struggle itself.
The Iranian revolution is occurring in the context of a shift in the international relationship of class forces to the detriment of imperialism and in favor of the working class, owing to the defeat of American imperialism in Indochina and to the first worldwide recession after the Second World War. While doing everything it could to prop up the shah, given the antiwar sentiment of the American workers Washington was not able to send troops against the Iranian people. No other imperialist power was in a position to substitute.
An additional element was the possibility of Soviet counteraction. Given the fact of the long common border with the USSR, an imperialist invasion would directly threaten the Soviet Union.
That the imperialists were not able to directly intervene with military force to save the shah can only encourage the toiling masses everywhere.
The Iranian revolution has dealt a new blow to imperialism, further shifting the relationship of class forces on a world scale. Imperialism counted on the shah's regime and army as a bulwark against the Arab revolution, as a protector of its interests in the oil-rich region, and as a bastion of capitalist stability in the "Northern Tier" of Turkey, Afghanistan, and Pakistan on the southern flank of the Soviet Union. The Iranian masses have shattered that bulwark and bastion. Revolutionary Iran is an example for the masses in the whole region. The ruling classes from
Morocco through Egypt to Saudi Arabia, from Turkey to Pakistan, tremble at the thought of that example spreading.
The breaking of the shah's yoke has resulted in renewed struggles by Iran's oppressed nationalities for their rights. Comprising 60 percent of the population, they include Kurds, Azerbaijanis, Baluchis, Turkmenis, and Arabs, among others. Many of these groups spill over the Iranian borders, and their renewed struggles will directly affect Iraq, Turkey, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. This is true for the Soviet Union, too, where the struggles of the oppressed nationalisties will be part of the political revolution against the Stalinist bureaucracy.
The Palestinian people have been given a powerful boost. From a staunch supporter of Israel and its major oil supplier, Iran has become an antagonist of the imperialist beachhead in the Middle East, cutting off oil supplies to it.
The Iranian revolution has already had a political impact on the struggle in southern Africa, with the cutting of oil supplies to the racist apartheid regime.
Imperialism has responded by attempting to shore up friendly regimes in the area, increasing its military presence, and seeking points of support in Iran to reverse the revolution's anti-imperialist dynamic. All the major imperialist powers have banded together to send emergency aid to the regime in Turkey, itself the scene of renewed struggle. U.S. Defense Secretary Brown toured the Arab countries and Israel during the insurrection in Iran, promising greater military aid. But as Begin pointed out, Iran has shown that no semicolonial country-including Egypt and Saudi Arabia-can play the role of stable outpost for imperialism in the area that Israel can, and Washington must rely
Shah, at height of powers, receiving more on Israel than every before. Carter put the squeeze harder on Sadat to come to an agreement with Israel under terms which guarantee an Israeli buildup in face of the new situation created by the Iranian revolution. Washington is also sending military advisers to North Yemen and increasing its naval presence in the Indian Ocean. At the same time, the imperialist powers have come to the defense of the new capitalist regime of Mehdi Bazargan, traditional agriculture of the country, not for the benefit of the peasantry, but for national and imperialist capital. Large agribusiness enterprises were established, producing for export and the needs of the imperialist-dominated world market. This resulted in a terrible destruction of productive forces caused by the elimination of the traditional modes of cultivation and irrigation (the qanats). Previously an exporter of food, Iran now must import 60 percent of the food required for its internal consumption.
The agrarian reform drove millions from the land. The massive exodus from the rural areas to the cities was not accompanied by the creation of sufficient industrial jobs. This led to a monstrous growth of shantytowns in the urban centers, and the creation of a huge industrial reserve army utilized by imperialist and native capital to impose a brutal exploitation of the working class.
Sixty-three percent of the population are illiterate in a country of 34 million inhabitants. Three and a half million are unemployed out of an active population of 1l million, 54 percent of households live below the "poverty level" by Iranian standards. This is the balance sheet after fifteen years of the shah's "modernization."
The international recession and its aftermath sharpened the crisis of the Iranian economy. Inflation soared to over 30 percent a year. The prices for capital goods imported from the imperialist powers rose faster than oil prices, which were also affected by the decline of the dollar. Iran began to build up debts to the imperialists.
The monarchy's much touted "liberation" of women was also a sham. While granting women certain legal concessions, lifting some of the barbaric laws codifying their oppression, that oppression remained basically untouched.
The oppressed nationalities were ruthlessly suppressed by the shah, denied all language and cultural rights whatsoever, and held in a second-class status compared to the Farsi-speaking Persians. Given the fact that much of the peasantry are from the oppressed nationalities, this national oppression is intertwined with the exploitation of the peasantry and the secondclass status of many of the workers and urban poor forced into the cities from the countryside.
The facts refute all theories that the oil income was transforming Iran into a "subimperialism." On the contrary, the oil income sharpened the contradictions of an economy that remains under imperialist domination.
From the First Cracks to the Insurrection
In 1976 scandals broke out concerning corruption involving high figures of the regime and some of the fifty families who profited from the White Revolution. The