Reviews and Views
Volume One
Nasser Paydar
The phrase in quotation marks is the title of a detailed article that “Ahmad Ashraf”, a sociology researcher and former professor at the University of Tehran, prepared and compiled a few years ago. The article ostensibly examines the role of industrial workers in the nationwide and revolutionary movement of 1978 and the years before and after the Bahman uprising, but it does not take much thought to realize that he has made the entire Iranian labour movement of those days the field of analysis and the subject of his judgment. The general conclusion of Ashraf’s statement in the aforementioned detailed research text is that the working class, and in particular industrial workers, had no role in the revolution until a few months before the uprising, and later only a part of them entered the field. The rest either did not join the struggle at all, or if they did join, they did not show solidarity with the political demands of the movement and were content with presenting their economic and trade union demands.
“The desperate cries of the vanguards of the working class from the scene of the revolution and in the heat of the struggle clarify two fundamental points about the role of the working class in the revolution. One is that the industrial working class had no role in the revolution until the end of the third stage, and the other is that in the fourth stage, only a part of this class entered the struggle, and the majority of it either remained indifferent and continued its work, or those who finally made a move only stopped within the framework of trade union-economic struggles and did not step into the arena of political struggle.”
Ashraf draws this conclusion by referring to the announcements issued by the two major left-wing political organizations of the day, “People’s Fedayee Guerrillas” and “The Struggle for the Freedom of the Working Class” and, of course, his academic research, he also takes evidence from the statements of “Tudeh Party”. Opinions against this conclusion are considered unrealistic inferences of foreign groups during the Shah’s regime!! He stands by the correctness of the verdict he issued. After all this, emphasizing the importance of finding the root of the above incident, he goes to the conditions of life and work and the exploitation and struggle of the labour masses during the two decades before the Bahman Uprising of 1957 in order to discover the reason for the reluctance of the workers to actively participate in the revolutionary movement and the Bahman Uprising. The author of “Autopsy” raises many points and makes many analyses in the maze of this research! Discussions and anatomies that do not clarify anything in the real world and only destroy the mountain of inversions on the thinking, mind and knowledge of the working masses. The present article examines these tolls and highlights the main points in this regard.
The strikes of the masses of workers in the centres of work and production from the 1970s onwards, which Ahmad Ashraf declares to be an average of 23 per year, and the actual number is many times this number, were a very brilliant chapter in the record of the struggle of the Iranian labour movement against the severity of capitalist exploitation. During these years, and before the start of the nationwide anti-regime movement in 1979, the working class, and in particular the industrial workers, fought on a very large scale in two separate but completely homogeneous and continuous territories against the pressure of capital exploitation and the injustices and injustices of the capitalist system. In the factories, they fought for an increase in wages, improved working conditions, and an increase in their minimum living and social standards, and in areas outside the boundaries of the big cities, especially Tehran, they fought against municipal agents and the armed forces of the regime with the aim of obtaining a humble shelter, escaping the high cost of housing, and saving family members from forced, life-threatening homelessness in the wilderness of shantytowns lacking any basic means of life. The workers’ struggle in none of these areas had a political appearance and, in the customs of political parties and forces or academic research, was considered a purely economic dispute. These struggles did not actually have any specific anti-regime orientation, nor did they seek to reform the political regime or make changes in the policies and institutions of political power of the day. They were a struggle in the field of livelihood, economic demands, and improvement of living conditions. The vast mass of workers who participated in these strikes or uprisings were at the lowest level in terms of class consciousness and were not very familiar with political issues. The workers’ movement had such a situation, but in addition to these, it also carried several other important components. First, these struggles and uprisings put a very heavy pressure on the cycle of reproduction of social capital in Iran during these years. The level of wages multiplied under the pressure of these strikes and uprisings only between 1974 and 1977 and rose from below 10 tomans to above 30 tomans. The official minimum wage, which was set by the Ministry of Labor, did not exceed 16 tomans until the day the regime fell, but the capitalists, under the crushing pressure of the protests and struggles of the working masses, raised the basic daily wage above 30 tomans. The number of workers who received this amount in Tehran and the Central Province or other industrial centres such as Tabriz, Isfahan, Khuzestan, Arak and other places did not constitute more than 40 percent of the working population. The other 60 percent, either because of their work history or because of their skills and specialization, obtained a higher price for the sale of their labour. The average wage for skilled workers was more than seventy tomans per day, and for semi-skilled workers it was around 50 tomans. The results of the struggles of these years were not only wage increases. The working masses imposed a number of other demands on the bourgeoisie in the area of disrupting the balance between excess and necessary work in their favour. A cheap daily meal, free transportation, allowances for spouses and children, health insurance, and retirement were among the achievements.
1. Movements, including the nationwide movement of 1979 in Iran, are, for bourgeois sociology in general and in the specific discussion at hand, for “Ashraf” events that are disconnected and unrelated to the fundamental contradictions of society. Bourgeois thinkers do not see the material basis or mode of production of class societies as the basis of their existence, pregnant with the violent struggle of classes. They do not accept the contradictory existence of capital and do not trace the roots of the ongoing revolts, wars and conflicts within capitalist society from here. If Ashraf does not see a connection between the storm of workers’ struggles from 1973 to 1978 in most of the country’s production and labour centres and the nationwide movement of 1979, his problem lies here, namely in his class view of society and, more specifically, capitalist society. A problem that is not specific to official bourgeois circles. The left outside the orbit of the working-class anti-wage labour movement has also been sufficiently immersed in it and continues to be immersed in it. The author of the dissection had the list of strikes of the above period before him when he was composing his article. The list is, of course, very incomplete and was most likely taken from the official newspapers of the Shah’s regime. Not only political and labour activists, but anyone with the slightest sensitivity to the course of social events of those days would surely remember that even the most important news of very large labour strikes did not make it to the newspapers. Not a word was reflected in these newspapers about the long and stormy labour uprisings, such as the nationwide movement of workers in the furnaces around the city of Varamin, known as the “Khanabad Workers’ Uprising.” Ashraf may have referred to the documents of the Shah’s regime’s statistical and information centres in addition to the newspapers, but these institutions were also no better off than the newspapers in this transition. The Ministry of Labour routinely registered protests that led to the intervention of the gendarmerie or SAVAK and continued for days on end. For all these reasons, it is very clear that a large number of labours strikes of that time did not fall within the scope of the research work of the author of “Dissection…”. But we are not talking about statistics. We are talking about the nature of analysis and root causes. When we speak of capitalist society, all movements, wars and conflicts, and every level of political events, whether peaceful or violent, ultimately, directly or indirectly, or even after long twists and turns, trace their true origin back to the relationship of buying and selling labour power. It is within this relationship that the two fundamental classes of society line up against each other and the class struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie asserts itself and rebels as the real driving force of social interactions within society. The main, unstoppable and irreconcilable war is here, but within each of the two warring classes, there are different and opposing approaches. The bourgeoisie is usually divided over how to plan the productive, political, civil, cultural and social order of capitalism, and this division may, under certain circumstances, lead to coups and the adoption of methods of subversion against each other. Approaches within the working class can also be syndicalist, dependent on bourgeois communism, anarchist or anti-wage labour. In the meantime, the important issue is that the starting point and return point of all conflicts, whether the war between the two basic classes, internal differences of the bourgeoisie or conflicting and contradictory orientations within the working class, is in any case capital. The war between the proletariat and the capitalist class over the existence or non-existence of capitalism, the disagreement between different factions and sections of the bourgeoisie over how to plan the capitalist order, the different approaches within the labour movement regarding how to confront the existence of the wage slavery system or the severity of exploitation, oppression, and injustice resulting from the existence of capitalism, all find their foundation here.
The second important component of the workers’ confrontation and struggle during this period was the specific way in which they exercised their power to achieve their demands. The discussion is not about the form of struggle, such as strikes or riots, or the like. A much more decisive and important issue is at stake. The working masses, or the very sector of industrial workers studied by the author of the dissection article, did not have any unions or syndicates and did not impose the above demands on the owners of capital and their government within the framework of the union movement or by resorting to conventional syndicate strategies. The workers relied on their collective power to achieve every rial of these demands, and they exercised this power not within the confines of the law and the legality of capital, but on the contrary, by kicking the bourgeoisie on the basis of this legality. This point has never been of any value not only to the likes of “Ashraf” but, unfortunately, to the spectrum of “radical” left forces. The left, whose time and space are devoted to securing the right to form unions for workers, not only does not consider the importance of these spontaneous and “extra-legal” collective acts of power but is also against it. It considers it an emergency, calling it by dozens of different names, and sees the way to free workers from this emergency state of struggle as being to rely on unionization!! Let’s not get into this discussion. What is urgently needed is to pay attention to this fundamental characteristic of the labour movement, and particularly of workers employed in private-sector industries, during this period: that the working masses imposed significant demands on the bourgeoisie and did so not within the scope of legal struggle and peaceful forms of struggle, but through the exercise of collective power and the “extra-legal” application of this united power.
A fundamental question arises here. In a society where every protest of every worker is answered with a bullet, what was the secret of the victory of these strikes and the retreat of the capitalists? The answer is simple. Iranian capitalism was going through a very prosperous economic period. The labour market was facing full employment. No worker seeking work, at least in Tehran and the major industrial cities, remained unemployed even for a few days. By forming special teams to hunt for labour, the capitalists were stealing job seekers from each other on two special roads and the old one in Karaj. This issue finally led to the Shah’s protest speech in 1975, when he asked the industrialists to put an end to this. The existence of such a situation gave the workers the opportunity to present their demands, to participate in strikes and protests in the workplaces without much fear of unemployment, to pursue the path of exercising power and blocking the channels of profit production to achieve their demands. To put pressure on the capitalists and to exercise self-control until they achieved the result of returning to work. Another factor also played a role in the victory of the strikes. From 1973 onwards, the methods of repression and the use of military force against labour struggles and uprisings changed slightly. I will talk about this below. I will turn to the third component. What the workers gained thanks to these strikes and wars and conflicts was still very small, even compared to the conventional minimum subsistence level. Their wages showed a multifield increase compared to a few years ago, but still no layer of the working class, and in particular these industrial workers, even those who earned the highest wages, enjoyed a semi-optimal level of social security and livelihood. Poverty and deprivation of the basic necessities of life were rampant among the broad masses of workers. This, along with the previous factors, presented an important warning to the bourgeoisie. This warning that the struggles would not only continue but would become more violent step by step. At least as long as full employment and economic prosperity remained, this possibility was sufficiently present. The record of the labour movement for many years also said the same. The Ashraf report, with all its statistical flaws, also confirms this claim. In his research, the number of strikes increased from 3 times in 1970 to 43 times during 1976. I will explain the decrease in this number in 1976 a little later. This decrease in no way calls into question the correctness of the above probability. Let us follow the course of events in these years, the eventual economic boom, and the effects and consequences of this period of workers’ struggle.
The growing expansion of workers’ struggles, especially since 1975, along with other current events of the day, forced not only the intellectual representatives of the dominant spectrum of the Iranian bourgeoisie, but also all the international partners of this class, especially the American statesmen, to prepare a solution very seriously. In these days, the struggle with the two-armed left guerrilla organizations determined a huge part of the preoccupation of the rulers of capital. Several factors combined to pile up a mountain of concern over the Shah’s regime and the shipwrights of the Western pole of power of world capital. The emergence of Iran as one of the largest capital advance areas with quasi-free labour, the decisive importance of the dynamics of the valorisation of Iran’s social capital for global capital, the geopolitical position of the country, Iran’s 1,400-kilometer border with the former Soviet Union, the special role of the Shah’s regime for Western imperialists and the place of this regime in the balance of power between the two poles of international capital power, the danger of the influence of two underground armed organizations of the left on the current working class movement and the turning of the masses of this movement to violent struggle, and some other factors, all together formed the elements and components of this huge mountain of concern for the Iranian bourgeoisie and its global partners. The fate of the labour movement in these years in the heart of this situation and in connection with all the above components determined the most fundamental axis of concern. The very movement that Ahmad Ashraf sees as lacking political value and vitality for higher wages or increased social welfare, secured such a place in the calculations of the ruling bourgeoisie. Why? The answer is not complicated at all. The starting point and reference point for all the issues that were mentioned was the future of the capitalist state of Iran and the survival of the monarchy of the bourgeoisie, and the Iranian labour movement, despite all its fatal Achilles’ heel, had the first say in this field. This movement suffered from the most fundamental weaknesses, it did not have any initial framework of class independence and anti-wage labour, it was in the worst possible situation in terms of organization. It had no clear prospects. The pressure of all the damage threatened it and it bore the enormous burden of all these shortcomings and defeats. Nevertheless, in the field of daily events, it determined the centre of gravity of the bourgeoisie’s calculations. What drove the Shah’s regime, the capitalist class, or the intellectual representatives of this class to this gravity point was not the ideological dimension or the abstract strategic calculations; the reality of the daily struggles of the workers played this role more than anything else. The working masses, with the expanding wave of the struggle of several years, forced the regime and the ruling spectrum of the bourgeoisie to ponder more and more the role and danger of their current movement, and the political and intellectual representatives of capital had no choice but to understand the importance of the issue. The bourgeoisie observed with open eyes that millions of wage slaves had gone to the cities in search of selling their labour power, along with tens of millions of their families. This vast mass had nothing but its labour power, it was striving for a minimum of a normal human life. It considered this life its right. At first glance, its labour power had a buyer, it understood the vital need of capital for this commodity, and it was determined to make this need of capital for its only commodity the platform of its power, to use this platform to attack the owners of capital and impose its demands on them. These were the real components of the situation of the labour movement, and the bourgeoisie placed these factors at the centre of its calculations.
The Shah’s regime and the ruling spectrum of the capitalist class saw themselves facing this movement and had two ways to deal with it. The first way was to submit to the demands of the workers, which would certainly seriously jeopardize the dynamics of profitability and self-expansion of the entire social capital. The place of Iranian capitalism in the international division of labour of capitalism was characterized by the cheapness of quasi-free labour, and the precondition for the continuation of reproduction and the ever-increasing expansion of the accumulation cycle was to maintain this low level of labour prices and to deprive the working masses of the minimum means of subsistence and welfare. Any appeasement with the continuation of the struggles of the working masses, and especially the response to the demands of these struggles, would undermine all of these preconditions and would cause the very foundations of capitalist existence to shake. The second way was the path of furious and unbridled suppression of every worker protest and strike. The path that capitalism was born with, lived with, and hung on to, and historically recognized and used as its only mechanism for survival. The ruling capitalists, the Shah’s regime and their global partners, at least in the conditions of that day, did not see any certainty for this solution either. Two-armed leftist organizations that called themselves the armed wing of the labour movement. For several years now, by sacrificing their lives and pouring their blood on the pavements of the city streets, they have been imprinting the harsh reality on the ceiling of the Iranian capitalist sky that resorting to force is the only way to impose any humane demand of the working masses on the Shah’s regime and the owners of capital.
Although the sacrifices and self-sacrifices of these two organizations had not had much effect on the current course of the workers’ struggle, the rulers of the capitalist era not only did not deny the risk of this effect, but they saw it as very high and almost certain. The extent of the Shah’s regime’s fear of the possibility of this effect can be easily determined from the general and brutal preparation of SAVAK or the readiness of the entire coercive forces of the capitalist state at this time to crush and eliminate the guerrilla forces. However, the regime’s problem in this area did not end there. The Shah of Capital and his global partners counted on the strength of armed organizations and could reassure themselves in this regard, but the mere idea of guaranteeing the stability of Iranian capitalism with a storm of brutality and a volcano of repression was not something that would give confidence to the occupants of the Western power pole of global capital or to all sections of the bourgeoisie. Assuming that this cemetery security was established, the risk of an explosion of workers’ protests would still be constantly ringing in the ears of the citadel guards of the capitalist rule. The result of the calculations was that both paths were facing a dead end in any case. A third path had to be sought, and the Shah’s regime began to struggle to find this third path. The planning of the effort was not only the will of the regime or the domestic capitalist class. The American bourgeoisie and the Washington state officials shared these concerns more than their Iranian counterparts. In these days, the Shah did not travel abroad without being surrounded by Western capitalist journalists. The pressure from the White House leaders on the Shah was everywhere. An important part of the regime’s political interactions with Western governments, especially the United States, was the expression of these governments’ concerns about the future of the stability of Iranian capitalism. Everyone wanted to be sure of the regime’s solutions to guarantee the security of capital accumulation and profitability. Everyone was raising and lowering the possibility of the situation becoming fragile, asking about the risk of the collapse of the existing foundations of stability. They were asking about the task of establishing democracy!! They warned of the dangers of continuing a mad dictatorship and of locks, shackles, and chains. The rejection of all the words from all circles was one thing. What will happen to the security of capital and the capitalist system of Iran? In the maze of these concerns, the regime and its American partners made the implementation of certain plans their agenda.
SAVAK tried to convince the private factory owners not to consider police repression and the killing of workers as the only way to deal with the escalating struggle. They should think of other ways and, above all, start organizing unions. Another task of SAVAK was to require employers to appoint a person under the name of “workers’ representative” in all factories and workshops that did not have a union. The situation was arranged in such a way that the workers considered the person appointed by the employer to be their representative. In addition to these, the implementation of projects such as a job classification plan, health insurance, a cheap meal in each work shift, free transportation between work and home, and the like, was accepted by the owners of large factories. For sections of the working class, such as oil and steel workers, access to facilities such as cheap housing or housing loans was also on the agenda. In addition to explaining the necessity of these reforms to the capitalists, SAVAK policed the interior of the factories to the greatest extent possible and took all necessary measures and planned to prevent the formation of uncontrollable protests.
Documents and evidence obtained, especially after the Bahman uprising, showed that the labour movement and the problem of containing the struggles of the working masses had determined the main focus of the preoccupations of SAVAK and the regime’s security planning institutions during these years. This evidence showed that even the massive and brutal campaign by SAVAK against both left-wing armed organizations during this period was not driven by fear of the organizations’ power, but rather, fundamentally and entirely, by fear of their impact on the labour movement and the risk of its explosion. The Shah’s regime’s policy towards the labour movement continued along these lines throughout the first half of the 1970s, and yet 1976 witnessed an unprecedented surge in labour strikes. In the same year, the struggles of the working masses in areas outside the city limits also broke records, and thus a large part of the labour movement, and in particular the workers employed in large industrial units, showed that if the current situation continued, they had no intention of surrendering and abandoning their offensive position or of giving up pursuing further demands.
The year 1977 began with important changes in the economic conditions of society. The wave of crisis put a crushing pressure on the cycle of reproduction of social capital in Iran. There is no doubt that the main source of the crisis in the situation of world capital was in the excessive production of capital, the rate of accumulation exceeding the rate of surplus value production, and the absolute tendency of the downward trend of the rate of profit at the international level. There is no doubt about this, but the current situation of the dynamics of capitalist reproduction in Iran, along with other sectors of world capital, played a sufficient role in the emergence, intensification, and crushing of the storm of crisis. In this specific circle, the rate of surplus value production also failed to respond adequately to the rate of capital accumulation. The dynamics of the decline in the rate of profit was accelerating towards absoluteness, and there is no doubt that the powerful strike movement of the working masses, and again in particular the industrial workers of large units, had played the greatest role in the emergence of this situation or the imposition of the crisis on capitalism. The participation of these workers three times a year in massive one-week, two-week, and multi-week strikes in industrial centres with several thousand workers and the imposition of certain setbacks on the bourgeoisie, including the imposition of a multiple increase in the price of labour on this class, was a completely decisive factor that put pressure on the balance between the rate of capital accumulation and the rate of production of surplus value, and for its part, the absolutization of the tendency for the rate of profit to fall intensified. The year 1977 began with a sharp and rapid turn of events, when, after several years of full employment, the vast majority of factories suddenly refused to hire workers. Some large industrial units even made it an agenda to lay off a number of their workers. The remaining army of job seekers who continued to flow from villages across the country to large cities were, unlike in previous years, deprived of finding work upon reaching their destination. A significant population of this reserve army of labour fell into the abyss of unemployment, and street vending became their only way of saving themselves from hunger and death from starvation. Unemployment became wider and wider, and the vast mass of workers who had been pushing back the owners of capital with a storm of strikes in these past few years and gaining even insignificant concessions now found themselves weak and crumbling under the weight of continuing this form of struggle. The workers had been on the offensive all this time, but the very act of attacking in this way and within this framework was not only not a cure for the pain, but it always remained a lamp in the wind. The offensive position of this period of the workers’ movement did not come from the trenches of an organized, conscious and clearly perspective anti-capitalist war, but only thanks to the vast need of the bourgeoisie for their labour force. The masses of this movement, as has been repeatedly said, were suffering enough from the pressure of all the shortcomings, confusions, and weaknesses, and now, with the onset of the crisis, they were losing their only weapon of war, namely, the need of capital for their labour force.
In other words, with the subsidence of this need of the bourgeoisie, the foundations of the workers’ long-standing aggressive strike movement in the factories were cracked and collapsed very quickly. The capitalists were not willing to make economic retreats and tolerate the workers’ demands in the previous way, for the obvious reason that the crisis deprived them of the ability to do so and the chance to use this lever to ensure the stability of the cycle of capital reproduction. At the same time, the workers were also unable to use the weapon of strike to impose their demands in the previous way because the huge queue of unemployed people at the level of society and behind the walls of all factories was constantly getting longer. This issue determined one of the most fundamental factors involved in determining the fate of the situation in society at that time. A huge population of several million workers who had been straightening out their living conditions through struggle inside factories and work canters and imposing their demands on the bourgeoisie, now, under the pressure of unemployment or the threat of unemployment and the pressure of a world of hunger, poverty and deprivation, had no choice but to rush towards explosion. The real centre of the 1979 movement was located here. This is not a cliché. It is not a weaving of school words. It has nothing to do with the Martian generalization of ideological precepts. It is a simple earthly reality. The vast mass of workers whom “Ashraf” or even leftist groups consider to be foreigners and vagrants who have no role in the widespread uprisings leading to the Bahman uprising, these were the real fuel for the fire of the movement, the uprising and the uprising.
The economic crisis, in parallel with creating high conditions and preparing the grounds for a general explosion in the depths of the lives of the working masses, also forced various sections of the bourgeoisie, whether domestic or international, the ruling or the opposition, to become more active, react and seek solutions. The problem of the Shah’s regime and its imperialist partners was how to free capitalism, as well as how to save the regime from the brink of economic crisis and the danger of a general uprising of the working and subordinate masses. The problem of the bourgeois opposition, however, was to find ways to exploit the current situation as much as possible to save capital, but by eliminating the regime and ascending to the throne of power and capitalist rule. In the midst of this situation, the workers had nothing and were deprived of the minimum awareness, organization and ability to exercise conscious power over the course of events, but the bourgeois opposition, and in particular the ultra-reactionary religious opposition of capital, had all the necessary facilities to ride the wave of events. The workers were defeated and became fuel for the furnace of power of their fiercest enemies. Interpreting this defeat and victimization as the absence of the working masses in the nationwide protest movement of 1978, which is what “Ashraf” and its ilk are doing, is a pure inversion and the worst distortion of reality.
2. Why does Ahmad Ashraf deny the existence of the Iranian labour movement as the driving force behind the nationwide explosion of society in 1978? This is an issue that is not only related to his approach of turning a blind eye to the relationship between social movements and the contradictory existence of class society. This is certainly one of the fundamental reasons for his dedication to this work. Another important reason is his type of understanding of the real existence of social classes and specifically the definition of the worker and the working class. He writes: “In this study, labour struggles have been examined in two distinct parts. First, the struggles of the industrial working class in the private sector, which is considered a perfect example of the industrial proletariat and entered the arena of struggle and showed itself in the 1970s. Second, the coalition of the employee-worker classes of the public services, which went on strike for two months, in October and November 1978, when the regime was smelling of the Merciful,
“Ashraf” recognizes the worker as working in a factory, a factory owned by private owners, and only on condition that he has the means of work in his hands!! Otherwise, he will be another being who is not a worker after all. For example, an employee, teacher, writer, translator, nurse, medical assistant, journalist, postman, and finally a new combination called “the coalition of the employee-worker classes”!! Or, to put it mildly, the deprived, the masses, the people, and the like. He does not consider more than 60 percent of the world’s working population to be workers at all, and he only recognizes the rest as workers behind the production machine and during exploitation by capital. It is in such a social and intellectual observatory that, no matter how much he examines the rows of street protesters and the tens of millions of demonstrators in cities and villages in 1979, he sees no sign of any of them being workers!! The author of the autopsy article could have asked himself that if this mass of protesters in the streets, numbering several million, are not workers, then who are they? Capitalist society is fundamentally and inevitably composed of two social classes. A class that sells labour and is necessarily separated from its work and the product of its work, its position in society is determined on this basis, and for this very reason, it is a class deprived of any interference and the right to interfere in determining the fate of its life, work and production. A class where everything in the existing society, from the foundation to the ceiling, from the relationship of buying and selling labour to the law, rights, culture, ethics, thoughts, tradition and values are all the iron chains of capital exploitation on his hands and feet and the whip of his forced fall from his human existence. Different parts of this class may be productive or unproductive workers according to the type of capital need for their labour force. Maybe their labour is exchanged with productive capital and maybe it is exchanged with unproductive capital, maybe it is not exchanged with capital at all. They may sell their only commodity to the private capitalist and may place it at the disposal of the capitalist state or state capitalists. The people of this huge social class, who actually make up more than 75% of the world’s population in the current state of the world, work in factories, farms, agriculture and industries, stores, schools, hospitals, transportation lines, ports, roads and buildings, along the streets, printing houses, and in other companies and work and production institutions in the world, in the form of industrial workers, agriculture, sales network, teachers, nurses and paramedics, drivers, construction workers, peddlers, cleaners, porters, waxers, Printing or any other field of employment are busy selling their labour. It is this huge population of 75% who start the biggest movements around the planet, organize the largest riots, raise uprisings, overthrow governments and replace them with governments. The material and human power of the entire movements of the day and the last few decades of the world are formed by these. The problem is not the lack of presence of this large mass of 75% in starting uprisings, riots and revolutions. The great tragedy of history and of this 75 percent itself and of humanity of the era is that this international class of 75 percent, even up to this very moment, does not walk anywhere, at any level and to any extent with its own independent class consciousness, wisdom, intelligence, knowledge, demands, expectations and perspective. Everywhere, it looks with the bourgeois head at life, society, history and the way to escape from exploitation, misery and the burdens of capitalism, and in the dark corners of the tunnel of death dug by its class enemies, it searches for the way to escape from hunger, poverty and achieving a miserable minimum of subsistence.
The real driving force of the nationwide movement of 1979 and the 22 Bahman uprising in Iran were also these workers. Workers in all the forms and areas of work that I mentioned above. A subject that Ahmad Ashraf and no other academic researcher of the bourgeoisie is willing to delve into. The human body of this rebellion and revolution was formed by the workers, but here too they were not walking, fighting and dying with their own heads, but with the heads of capital, with the heads of the reactionary Islamic oppositions of capital. Ashraf is wrong when he says that the workers joined the movement very late and when they joined, they only put forward their economic demands. They were the initiators of the movement and the main force of all stages of its development and offensive. But not in line with the fulfilment of their expectations and demands, nor with the horizon of the liberation of their class and humanity, which, according to what the bourgeoisie was writing against them and against humanity, was moving in line with replacing one capital state with another capital state or changing the form of planning of the capitalist economic, political and social order. Once again, the author of the autopsy must be asked: If workers did not fill the ranks of the multi-million-strong street demonstrations of 1979, then who would?!!
If the blood of wage slaves was not capital that flowed on the pavements of the streets, then whose blood was it? Were these capitalists, factory owners, devout marketers, high-ranking statesmen, great clerics, accomplished writers, and eschatological philosophers who wore shields and, with contempt for death, turned region after region and city after city into arenas of conflict and war?!!
3. “Ashraf” does not stop at telling stories about the movement of the working masses but also leaves no stone unturned and builds a case for their anti-worker movement and the workers’ complicity with the Shah’s SAVAK in suppressing the liberals, clerics, and marketers who were the enemies of the revolution!! He says: “Not only did the workers’ union and welfare struggles decline at the same time as the revolution reached its peak, but the regime also took advantage of the existence of workers in large factories to hold counter-revolutionary demonstrations. Such as the attack on the gathering of national and liberal elements in the Caravanserai on December 1, 1977, the demonstrations of workers in Tehran factories in Qom after the uprising of January 19, 1977, in that city, which was the beginning of the second stage and deepening of the revolution. The participation of workers in the machine-building and tractor-building factories and other large factories in Tabriz in the demonstrations of the Rastakhiz Party after the uprising of February 11, and other cases. This use of workers caused strong protests from working class organizations.”
All the cases that the author of the autopsy mentions as the militant front of the workers against the gatherings or street uprisings of 1977 are all taken from the reports compiled by SAVAK, which were published in the official state newspapers under the control of the security and police apparatus at that time. The completely familiar and common policy of the Shah’s regime, in line with the usual practice of the capitalist Islamic state, was to call the lashings of its thugs against the opposition gatherings as spontaneous popular forces. The first calls them “workers, martyrs and patriots”!! and the second uses the term “nation of Hezbollah” for them. The problem with this part of “Ashraf’s” words is not even of the type of problems in his entire work. Here, we are no longer discussing the usual inversion and distortion of a bourgeois scholar. Referring to the inhumane demagoguery of an institution like SAVAK to judge the labour movement and the role of the working masses is reprehensible in every way. He will certainly say that he extracted this news not from SAVAK sources, but from the pages of official newspapers. Making such a statement would be demagoguery enough. Ashraf knows better than most that the point, the point of these reports was formulated by SAVAK, and no newspaper had the right to copy any of it.
Here I must emphasize another fundamental issue. The basis of the entire criticism of the present article on the writings of “Ashraf” is absolutely not why he ignored or downplayed the revolutionary, influential, active, progressive and conscious role of the Iranian working class in the events of 1978 and the nationwide movement leading to the Bahman Uprising! It is clear that this is not the case. The entire discussion is about the class perspective and nature of the analysis or the view of the author of “Dissection” on the real and fundamental shortcomings and weaknesses of the labour movement in general, including in relation to the above events. He has presented something as a deficiency and problem of this movement that is not real, and instead he has not seen and is not expected to see what is not only the shortcomings, inferiority and weakness of the working class or, as he puts it, industrial workers, but also the catastrophe of the dilemma and inferiority of this class. All the talk is that the workers were the real mortar and materials of the nationwide movement of 1979, but they were at the lowest level in terms of class consciousness, anti-wage labour and Marxist understanding of capitalism, the clear perspective of abolishing wage labour, organizing the Soviets, and all other issues of the anti-capitalist struggle. The Iranian working class was under the pressure of these weaknesses, unable to play any effective role, and in the worst way became the tool of the reactionary oppositions of the bourgeoisie, defeated, and was not even able to consciously understand the real causes of its defeat. The reactionary oppositions of the bourgeoisie, which Ashraf considers to be the forces of the series of movers and initiators of the revolution!! It was precisely from here, from the dark tunnel of this fundamental Achilles heel of the labour movement, that they entered the field, rode the wave of anger of the working masses, saved capitalism, and instead of winning the revolution, they destroyed it in the most disastrous way possible on the workers and the lower classes.
4. Another important axis of Ashraf’s discussion is that industrial workers, apart from joining the nationwide “revolutionary movement” very late!! When they joined, they only raised their economic and welfare demands, and he considers this action of the workers to be an important and fundamental flaw of the labour movement, or at least the approach of the industrial workers. It is not a bad idea to ask what the alternative of Ahmad Ashraf and his ilk was to this orientation of the working masses in those specific days. No reference to this solution can be found in his writing, but the content of the words is quite clear. Instead of making these demands, the workers should have just been shouting about freedom of speech, opening up the political space, and the right to form a party! Here too, of course, it is not only Ashraf and the spectrum of intellectual representatives of the bourgeoisie who are like him who say this or who are making such prescriptions for the workers. Unfortunately, all the parties, organizations, and circles called the left, or in fact, militant leftist reformism, are also spreading these same recommendations to the working masses. The bourgeois oppositionists from every spectrum demand the same thing from the workers. That they should never say anything about their food, clothing, housing, health care, education, and social welfare, “These are all economics,” and “Economy is also the property of the donkey!” Instead, they should become the conveyor belt of power for this or that opposition group of the capitalist class, repeat their slogans, replace the current rulers of capital with the more youthful rulers of this system, make the greatest sacrifices to consolidate their power bases, and sacrifice their last means of livelihood and the immortal strength of several generations of workers in this transition. This is all that Ashraf means.
There is no doubt that the workers should have raised political goals and demands, they should have demanded their political freedoms and rights, but the fundamental issue is that the distance between Ashraf and his ilk’s narrative of freedom, human rights, and civilization and the working class’s narrative of the objectivity of these concepts is as great as the distance between capitalism and socialism, the abolition of wage labour. Freedom and social rights for the former, even in their clearest and deepest social manifestations, are the freedom of capital to exploit workers without restraint, the freedom of the capitalist class to impose all the miseries, warmongering, and savagery inherent in capital on the threshold of the working masses’ lives on the one hand, and the so-called “freedom” of the workers to express their opinions on how to tolerate this exploitation or the ways to tolerate the severity of exploitation and the atrocities of capitalism. What the capitalists call freedom, rights, law, and equality are iron chains that are supposed to lock the workers’ hands and feet in the perpetuation of wage slavery. The working class has only one way to achieve the most insignificant freedoms and the most elementary human rights. To fight as hard, as consciously, and as unitedly as possible against the very basis of capitalist existence. His attainment of any measure of freedom is certainly dependent on the victorious steps taken in advancing this struggle.
When Ashraf discusses the subordination of the labour movement, or at least the industrial workers, to the formulation of political demands, it is clear that he does not mean the anti-capitalist political demands of the working class, but the same political and legal stereotypes of the bourgeoisie to deceive the workers and perpetuate their wage slavery. His advice to the workers that they should abandon their most elementary, historically delayed welfare demands and hang them directly on the political sloganeering of this or that bourgeois opposition is nothing more than a prelude to the same words that Khomeini would deliver to the workers a little later in the days after the Bahman uprising. Contrary to Ashraf’s belief, the fact that the working masses insisted on their economic and welfare demands that day was not doing anything wrong. The fundamental flaw in their work here too was that neither these demands nor their political demands and expectations were formulated and pursued from the anti-wage labour trench. The workers did not start building and constructing this barricade, neither they nor to this day, neither in Iran nor anywhere else. It was their humiliation at the construction of this barricade that gave birth to the worst germs of bourgeois religious fascism, instead of freedom, prosperity, human rights, and digging the way to abolish wage slavery.
5. Ashraf suggests that it was a handful of marketers, clerics, and a few “liberal” factory owners who raised the banner of the 1979 revolution, demanding the overthrow of the Shah’s regime from the very first day!! And finally, they put their wish into practice. We briefly explained the process of the formation of the nationwide movement in these years above. We also talked about the role played by the reactionary bourgeois oppositions. I would just like to add that these movements, such as the National Front and the Freedom Movement, were gradually gathering their opposition to the Shah’s regime from the mid-1940s. The clergy and marketers of the Khomeini spectrum also saw their problem not in the Shah’s regime but in communism, especially with the beginning of underground armed organizations, especially with the observation of the seeds of a communist orientation within the Mojahedin organization and later the expression of the existence of the “Mojahedin M-L.” During these years, not only at the level of society but even in the humble circle of a few political prisoners, they were preparing to accompany the regime everywhere to exterminate the communists. The author of the autopsy completes the falsification of these facts with another distortion. He suggests that the aforementioned oppositionists entered the field by raising the flag of anti-regime and that it was the workers who were afraid of fighting the regime!! The course of events was the opposite. Leftist political activists of those years remember well that both the religious reactionary and “liberal” sections of the bourgeois opposition, in all the riots and demonstrations of 1977 and 1958 until three months before the Bahman uprising, opposed with complete ferocity and much worse than SAVAK and the Shah’s police any slogans that sought to overthrow and oppose the monarchy. They knew that such slogans were being proposed by leftist and labour forces, which is why they brutally beat up the people who proposed them.
6. Ashraf writes: “The regime’s main policy towards the industrial bourgeoisie and industrial workers, which it ultimately saw as its opponents, was to prevent their growth and development from the state of a class in itself to the state of a class for itself. That is, industrial development and the growth of capitalism and, as a result, the growth of the industrial bourgeoisie and industrial workers without political consciousness and class organization, yes! But an independent, conscious, and organized industrial bourgeoisie and industrial workers, no!”
It is not surprising to hear any distortion or distortion from the intellectual representatives of the bourgeoisie, but not all thinkers of this class have the audacity to engage in this level of fabrication. The concoction of phrases such as that the Shah’s regime did not represent the capitalist system!! As if this regime was opposed to the industrial bourgeoisie!! Or that it was a barrier to “becoming for itself” and the formation of this section of the bourgeoisie!! And the like is so disgusting that even criticizing them throws one into a whirlpool of disgust. Criticizing these words may mean that they are really worth criticizing and that they can be taken seriously!! But Ashraf goes to the extreme in this work, even bringing Marx into the mix, and finally resorts to weaving outright lies. He continues:
The Pahlavi regime applied the same policy towards the bourgeoisie that, according to Marx, the German government invented in the mid-19th century. That is, the bourgeoisie exchanged the right to make money and become rich for the right to interfere in politics and government. Then, the government provided all kinds of assistance and support to the bourgeoisie, while at the same time preventing it from forming and organizing as a class and adopting policies to control it. The effects of the fear of the growing power of the bourgeoisie were evident in the leaders of the regime at the end of the Pahlavi period. One of its effects was the Shah’s fierce and sharp attack on the capitalists. It was during the extensive campaigning of the capitalist candidates (Lajevardi and Rezaei) for the Senate elections that the Shah explicitly said: “We do not allow the rich people who do not know where they got their wealth from to participate in the elections.”
Marx’s words about Germany are from a time when the bourgeoisie as a class had no place in political power. In 1978, Iran was going through more than half a century of rapid capitalist development and two decades of comprehensive domination of this mode of production over all aspects of its existence. The bourgeoisie had been the dominant economic and political power here for decades. The comparison between the Iranian bourgeoisie of that period and Germany in the first half of the 19th century is completely different in every respect. As for the Shah’s opposition to Rezaei and Lajevardi becoming senators, “Ashraf” knows better than anyone that these two were among the most famous senators of the Shah’s regime. This statement that the Shah had refrained from providing sufficient facilities to private sector capitalists only indicates that Ashraf insists on being more Catholic than the Pope. It is unclear why this “Aryamehri” lack of love has only made the peak of the palace of the mountain of capital of these capitalists, people like Khosrowshahi, Ali Rezaei, Lajevardi, Khayami, Bahrukh, Hejbar Yazdani, Sabet Pasal, Khorram, Ibtehaj, Lajevardi, Iravani, Farmanfaraian, Rahimzadeh, Eskandari, Hamedanian and hundreds of other carrion-eating capitalists, more and more exalted and elevated by the minute!!
Isn’t it true that, apart from the horrific exploitation of the quasi-free labour of millions of Iranian workers, they also took a huge part of the massive surplus value of oil, the result of the exploitation of the working class of Iran and the world, under the tyrannical dictatorship of this regime. The world of roads, water, electricity, ports, railways, airports, and university canters that the Shah’s regime built from the place of the brutal and catastrophic exploitation of the working masses, if not for the profit of the most gigantic of their capitals, then what was it for?!! The big capitalists of the private sector, that’s easy. Even the “Engineer-in-Chief” of the Freedom Movement, “Haji Baba” of the National Front, “Ali Nasab” of charity and charity, and a large number of private capitalists of this type, thanks to all the conditions that the Shah’s regime provided for the uncontrolled appreciation of their capitals, increased the volume of their capital several times, sometimes tens, and perhaps hundreds of times, in a short period of time. Ashraf goes so far in falsifying the facts that he equates the Shah’s regime’s treatment of these capitalists and workers, the targets of catastrophic exploitation, and puts them on the same level!! And finally, the claim that the Shah was against the capitalist’s taking power is one of those very disgusting stories that it seems unlikely that anyone, even in the circle of people like Ashraf himself, would be interested in hearing.
June 2012