[The following appeared in the January 11 issue of Socialist Challenge, the weekly newspaper sponsored by the International Marxist Group, British section of the Fourth International.]
Dear friends:
Last November you distributed a twopage leaflet after a Socialist Challenge meeting I had spoken at in Birmingham.
The leaflet was headed: "On the Question of the Iranian Struggle: Islamic Revolution or Materialist Hypocrisy?" It presented a critique of the Marxist position on Iran and devoted itself to answering the points I had made in my speech.
You argue that:
(a) the Iranian revolution is due to the love of the Iranian people for Islam;
(b) "the teachings of Lenin and Trotsky are based on class-hatred and materialist belief and thus alien to the Iranian people";
(c) it is in the teachings of the ayatollahs and mullahs that the Iranian people's aspirations for an Islamic revolution and Islamic state will be fulfilled.
You speak in the name of "Islamic revolution" and declare your open hostility to socialists who are also involved in the Iranian struggle. You claim, somewhat arrogantly, that socialists are "'misled people' who are not interested in what the people desire. The people of Iran desire Islam."
Before dealing with your points in detail, it is worth restating what, in our opinion, the Iranian struggle is all about. What is its dynamic and its ultimate goal?
Over the last twenty years the social weight of the urban working class has increased dramatically in comparison with neighbouring states. Class divisions and class contradictions have become more acute.
How can you doubt that Iran is a society divided by class? How do you explain the existence of parasites who live in unbelievably luxurious conditions in Tehran while a few hundreds yards away there are people who live in the most abject poverty?
They are all Iranians. They are mainly Muslims. Many capitalists regularly prostrate themselves before Mecca in the hope that their god will protect their privileges.
You could say that this latter breed are not true Muslims, they are imposters. But on what basis will you decide? The teachings of Islam itself (especially the Shi'ite version) are full of ambiguities which can be interpreted to justify both resistance and collaboration with authority.
The poverty-stricken masses retain their religious beliefs to escape from the horrors and miseries of everyday life. The rich remain religious the better to safeguard their material interests.
Religion performed a different function hundreds of years ago, but in our century it has become the backbone of reaction. Today we have before us many examples of "Islamic states."
We have the Wahabbi fundamentalists who govern Saudi Arabia in the name of Islam. Is that barbarism to be reborn in Iran? Or there is the "enlightened despotism" of Libya.
The struggle in Iran began as a struggle for democratic rights. This united the overwhelming majority of the people.
In this struggle we all fight together to bring down the Shah. You shout "Death to the Shah" holding the banners of Islam. We chant the same slogan with the red flag in our hands.
But ask yourselves why it is that U.S. imperialism supports the Shah. Is it because he is "anti-Islamic"? Is it because they fear the rise of Islam? If that were so, how do you explain that Saudi Arabia is one of the oldest allies of the United States in the Middle East?
No, the reason the Americans fear the fall of the Shah is because they are aware that establishing political structures to keep Iran safe for capitalism is not going to be an easy process.
The awakening and radicalisation of the working masses has created tremendous expectations. If the government that follows the Shah cannot satisfy the people then there will be more upheavals.
The ayatollahs do not represent a coherent political alternative. The discredited bourgeois politicians have failed in the past. It was precisely the lack of an alternative opposition that made the religious leaders the only major focus of dissent.
The struggle in Iran is thus motivated not so much by a "love of Islam" (even though the majority of Iranians are Muslims) as by a hatred of the Shah and all that he represents.
In that sense the teachings of Lenin and Trotsky are very relevant. For their followers say to the working masses: only you and your class are capable of liberating Iran from the stranglehold of capitalism and imperialism. Only the victory of your class will ensure the real independence of Iran.
That is why the construction of a revolutionary workers party is an important priority.
The teachings of the ayatollahs and mullahs, which you claim are the real answer, offer no practical solutions in fact to the real needs of the masses.
What is an "Islamic" state? What would be its class character? Who would own the means of production and especially the oil wells? Who would decide, and on what basis, the international alliances which Iran would need?
Let us take one question to illustrate your dilemma. Islam eschews interest on loans. So are Iranian banks going to charge interest?
If they are, then they cannot function as the financial institutions of capital. Our answer would be to nationalise them immediately. You would call that "communism."
There are, in reality, no consistent political or theoretical positions that can be derived from Islam. The logic of capital will force even the most ardent Islamic nationalists to take sides in the struggle that will develop after the fall of the Shah.
The Islamic movement itself will suffer further political rifts and divisions, precisely because a belief in Islam does not lead automatically to the same political conclusions.
You are quite correct to point out the disgusting role of China and the Soviet Union in supporting the Shah over the last decade. You then use this to discredit the very idea of socialism.
It is true that these states and their had antagonised cynical manoeuvres and disillusioned millions of people. But we are Trotskyists. Our political current has fought against these policies now for more than fifty years.
So throwing Brezhnev and Mao at us is the equivalent of us saying "Well, the Shah is a Muslim," and hurling him at you!
We stand for proletarian internationalism. We believe that the interests of workers throughout the world are one and indivisible. We argue that unless the workers seize state power over the next decades, capitalism will become more and more barbaric.
You claim that capitalism and socialism are "Western ideologies." This is false. They are both international ideologies, but with a crucial difference. One represents the interests of the ruling classes and the other the oppressed masses.
Islam, no more than Christianity or Judaism or Hinduism or Buddhism, offers no solution.
We do not deny for a single moment the role of the Islamic opposition, and Khomeini in particular, in fuelling the mass upsurge against the Shah and refusing to accept any compromise which retains the monarchy. It is what follows this which will decide the immediate future of Iran.
And as we are approaching the 21st century, it would be somewhat foolish to attempt to derive our future from a distant past whose echoes continue to fade.
To summarise:
1. We believe that the struggle in Iran, despite the predominance of democratic slogans, has a clear class character. The recent strike wave has made this abundantly clear.
2. We believe that the future of the Iranian masses does rest on the ability of their most advanced sections to construct a party that will be based on the teachings of Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky. We are trying to construct such a party at this very moment: the Iranian section of the Fourth International.
3. The ayatollahs and mullahs have been able to play an important role because the repression, the collapse of the bourgeois oppositions, and the bankruptcy of pro-Moscow and pro-Peking groups made them and their mosques the only centres of opposition.
But already this is beginning to change. The fall of the Shah will shift politics further away from the mosques. This is not just desirable. It is virtually inevitable.
In conclusion we can do little more than paraphrase Lenin's remarks to Indonesian communists in 1919. The latter had explained that the peasants were loyal to Sarekat-i-Islam, a progressive Muslim organisation. They were loyal to God.
Lenin advised Indonesian communists to work with Sarekat, but said: "Tell them that when they go to heaven they should be loyal to God. But here on earth the International Executive Committee of the Communist International is more powerful."