Nasser Paydar Part Two
Marx undertook these tasks. But our movement remained under constant bombardment from every direction and through every channel connecting us to society and the real world by the political, intellectual, ideological, and cultural forces of the bourgeoisie’s various strata and approaches. Capital did not merely exploit us in the most brutal manner known to history, nor did it simply sever us from our labour and the process of determining our own work and production. It did not merely strip us of the agency to shape our own work and lives, nor did it simply transform the fruits of our labour into an overpowering force that dominated our very existence. Beyond all this, it was constantly engineering and architecting how we thought and what we thought about our beliefs, ideals, expectations, and life perspectives, as well as our view of society, the world, ourselves, and the entire objective reality surrounding us. In our struggle against capitalism, we had to challenge this entire array of toxic, lethal ideological bombardments and influences exerted by capital. Our class struggle had to evolve into a conscious movement against every facet of capital’s existence and its impact on our lives. We had to pursue all our demands regarding livelihood and welfare, all our protests against inhumane gender and ethnic discrimination, and all our campaigns for political freedoms and social rights or indeed any other aspiration by sweeping away the effects of the bourgeoisie’s intellectual and ideological bombardments and by embracing a mature, anti-capitalist, working-class communist consciousness. We had to become a nationwide, conscious class force opposed to capital; we had to bring this power into the arena and wield it against capital. Marx’s ideas did not transform into a movement simply by virtue of being radical, constructive, curative, effective, realistic, practical, and vital; rather, these analyses, critiques, approaches, and visions had to find expression within a material, class-based, reflective, radical, and transformative movement of our own. We needed a nationwide, anti-capitalist council movement, yet the bourgeoisie deploying its entire arsenal of power, and above all its capacity to shape public opinion bombarded every step our class took toward establishing such a movement. From every direction, we were bombarded with lessons on reformism, legal struggle, parliamentarism, trade unionism, party-building, syndicalism, civil resistance, and the like. Unless we replaced all these strategies, solutions, models, and mechanisms with a radical, anti-capitalist council movement, we could not become the embodiment of a social class at war with capital, nor the true standard-bearer for the abolition of wage slavery.
Marx imparted to us the most profound teachings and the most valuable lessons; but our ongoing movement remained the target of the bourgeoisie’s most devastating intellectual, political, and ideological bombardments its schemes, strategies, and models. In 1871, in the city of Paris, we inscribed the most glorious event in the history of human existence onto the record of our struggle. United and with iron resolve, in an uprising of eternal historical significance, we wrested Paris from the grip of the capitalist system. For the first time, we shattered the state the state of capital, the state that stands above society and the individual under the blows of our anti-capitalist power, and we began, in earnest, to pave the way for abolishing the buying and selling of labour power and the relationship of surplus-value production. Through our uprising, we propelled history forward by leaps and bounds, introducing a new form of human existence into the historical record. We undertook actions and created scenes from which even the most conscious, far-sighted, radical, and astute figures of our class individuals like Marx learned and gained knowledge. For the first time, we discovered how to put an end to the existence of the state that stands over us. It is possible to involve all human beings equally and actively in production and production planning, in policymaking and implementation deciding what is produced and what is not and in all aspects of social life. For the first time in human history, we struck a blow against anti-human gender discrimination; men and women engaged in a council-based interaction, however rudimentary or unrefined set about planning the economic, political, and social order of their lives. We accomplished all of this during the glorious and proud uprising of the Paris Commune, yet we still met with defeat. The reason for this failure was not a lack of awareness, a deficiency of understanding, or ignorance. Those who think otherwise harbour a deeply metaphysical and distorted conception of consciousness, insight, awareness, and class knowledge. Class consciousness is not a matter of “divine revelation,” nor a debate over the “eternal” versus the “created”! It is not a manifesto, a charter, or a beacon of guidance; it is not a doctrine or an ideology; it is not a collection of codified and pre-packaged edicts; nor is it a law, a contract, a resolution, an act of divine illumination, or mystical intuition. It is not a prescription written by exalted scholars. It is not the unique product of the minds of history’s great saviours and revolutionaries. The class consciousness of the working masses is none of these things. Conversely, the task involves dissecting the relations of surplus-value production and the dimensions of the exploitation to which they are subjected; the organic and homogeneous link between the capital relation and bourgeois law, rights, parliament, civil society, culture, and ideology; the radical methods of pursuing their immediate demands; the integration and alignment of the struggle for these demands with the complex class campaign to abolish capitalism; the ways to elevate their existing movement into an organized, anti-capitalist, council-based movement; the process of expanding this movement into the backbone of an independent, anti-capitalist power within the hell of wage slavery; and the necessary preparations to acquire the capacity for socialist planning and societal management entailing the abolition of wage labour along with a multitude of other related issues. Such is the class consciousness of the workers. The Communards demonstrated that despite not being theoreticians, lacking fame, scholarly credentials, or status, holding no university chairs, and being neither party apparatchiks, politburo chiefs, nor union leaders they nonetheless “practice alchemy amidst destitution.” They possess a profound understanding of the secret to establishing a society free from a state standing over humanity; they are capable of paving the way to plan the abolition of wage labour and the dismantling of the surplus-value production relationship; they swiftly traverse the path toward dissolving the army and police and ending the physical and intellectual repression of mankind; indeed, they even teach lessons to a figure like Marx. The Communards showed that they understood all of this, yet mere knowledge is not the cure. Through the actual twists and turns of their revolutionary struggle, they demonstrated the validity of Marx’s insight: that consciousness is not merely a collection of abstracts, ideological beliefs, but rather a conscious existence a thinking, living, and transformative class movement. Through their actions, they proclaimed and demonstrated that proletarian class consciousness is not merely a repository of doctrinal or ideological knowledge, but rather a capacity for action an effective, competent, and conscious anti-capitalist force. Through their uprising and their deeds during it, the Communards showed that their problem was not a lack of knowledge, but a lack of the capacity to act; that knowledge finds material expression only in the ability to act; and that knowledge comes to light acquiring its true meaning and validity only within the process of class struggle, through the exercise of force and class power directed against wage slavery. The Communards told history and the vast masses of their fellow-oppressed worldwide that realizing their aspirations abolishing capitalism and establishing a society free from wage labour required a movement of far greater magnitude, substance, and organization, equipped with highly effective means and weaponry, and driven by a potent, dynamic leadership. It demanded a movement based on the council system and opposed to wage labour, comprising the broadest ranks of the working masses ranks whose members had grown and matured within the very heart of the movement, acquiring the capacity to administer a socialist, council-based society that had abolished wage labour. The Communards were defeated because they lacked such a position and had not undergone such preparation and equipping. Our fellow Communards fell; they fought to the very last person and created some of the greatest epics in human history. The revolutionaries died, yet our class struggle against capitalism marched on. Sometime later, our movement lost Marx as well. Marx’s death was a significant loss, but the fundamental problem facing our class, our movement, and our class struggle was not, in fact, the loss of Marx himself. Through his body of work, Marx could have remained alive, present, vocal, and influential among us forever as long as capitalism endured, and even beyond. The great historical tragedy, however, was that following Marx’s death, a vast legion of entirely counterfeit, caricatured, fake, and anti-Marx figures descended upon our movement. The clamour surrounding “Thus spoke Marx,” “This is how Marx thought,” “By such-and-such a phrase, Marx meant this,” “Marx understood the issue this way,” “Marx’s words must be interpreted thus,” “Marx’s interpretation of the law of value is not that, but this,” “Marx’s theory regarding the state is such,” “This is how Marx discovered the proletariat,” “The essence of Marx’s critique of Hegel was this,” “One must contemplate the core of Marx’s critique of Feuerbach in this manner,” “Marx and the crisis of capitalism,” “Marx’s account of the dictatorship of the proletariat,” “Communism in Marx’s account,” “Marx and human alienation,” “Marx and the theory of surplus value,” “Marx and historical materialism,” “Marx and dialectics,” “Marx and ideology,” “Marx and ecology,” “Marx and women,” “Marx and beyond capitalism,” “Marx and consciousness” and millions upon millions of such issues, the mere list of whose titles and published works would stretch for kilometres have saturated the entire space of human life and every corner of the contemporary world! It became a disaster; the anti-capitalist class struggle was supplanted by debates over what Marx did or did not say! Marx had barely been laid to rest when the true meaning of his entire body of work his analyses, dissections, findings, teachings, and illuminating insights regarding the critique of bourgeois political economy, the evolution of human societies, class struggle, the labour movement, communism, the role of the proletariat, and all other issues of the class struggle was buried beneath the edifice of “Marxism”!! The market for peddling “Marxism” became even more lucrative than the global capitalist market itself!! The very concept of class struggle the fight of the world’s working masses against capitalism faded from memory; the clamorous business of selling “Marxism” left no room for Marx’s actual ideas to inform the day-to-day events of the labour movement or for workers to hear one another’s voices raised in protest against the wage-labour system. In essence, the caricaturing of Marx, the manufacture of various brands of “Marxism,” and the squabbling among circles, parties, sects, and factions each touting the superior quality of its own “Marxism” while dismissing others as shoddy or worthless usurped the place of any genuine class struggle campaign, or even any dialogue about it. The nature and dynamics of the working masses’ struggle against capital ceased to matter; instead, the entire landscape was engulfed by the battles waged by individuals, pundits, scholars, and theorists over “Marxism”!! The construction of a new orthodoxy a veritable religion around Marx’s name evolved into a global movement, and this movement buried the very substance and existence of the workers’ class struggle!!!
Before Marx, we were subjected to brainwashing and the engineering of thought driven by the inherent nature of capital and various bourgeois circles from every conceivable direction. But capital and the bourgeoisie did not carry out this process under the banners of “communism,” “anti-capitalism,” or a war against the capitalist system. Diverse factions and parties within the global capitalist class openly and unabashedly sanctified the system of wage slavery; they hailed capitalism as the final destination of history and portrayed the capital relationship as the true soil in which the ideals and aspirations of all humanity could flourish. They rejected class struggle and utilized every platform to defend the laws, rights, politics, civility, culture, ideology, ethics, and social values that arose from and safeguarded the relationship of buying and selling labour power. They proclaimed the capitalist political order, state, civil society, legal system, and educational framework to be the vessels for the prosperity and emancipation of all mankind. Through these methods, strategies, ruses, and deceptions, the bourgeoisie brainwashed us and subjugated us to the machinery of thought-engineering; however, the saga of thought-engineering and the distortion and ossification of us, our class, and our movement took on a radically new form after Marx’s death. In this subsequent era, a vast array of bourgeois parties, circles, and cliques pursued the brainwashing and shaping of our minds by manufacturing “Marxism,” peddling “Marxism,” and engaging in the falsification and distortion of Marx’s actual ideas. Everywhere, the impression was created that the history of human societal evolution rather than being a history of class struggle, or in our era, the struggle of the global working class against wage slavery was merely a matter of what Marx did or did not say. It was suggested everywhere that the opposition of the world’s working masses to the capitalist system was the invention of a prophet named Marx; as if this prophet had codified the final word on this opposition dictating exactly what workers should and should not do within a mysterious, complex, and inscrutable doctrine laden with secrets known as “Marxism.” It was as though, instead of engaging in anti-capitalist struggle, one ought to speak of this doctrine day and night and circle around it in reverence. A segment of the global bourgeoisie treated Marx’s communism and the labour movement in this manner; by latching onto what it itself termed “Marxism,” it dealt the most devastating and crushing blows to the global working class’s anti-capitalist struggle. True to its inherent nature of distortion, the bourgeoisie fabricated “Marxism” and turned this self-crafted doctrine into a powerful internal bastion from which to launch assaults against the working class’s anti-capitalist movement. Under the banners of Marx, communism, and the worker, it set about creating parties and unions. It established parties to stand over the working masses and buried the labour movement in the graveyard of syndicalism the graveyard of the order, law, and reactionary civility of capitalism. It dubbed this assemblage of parties and unions the “International”!!! From this pulpit of deception, it proclaimed to the global working masses that they should pursue the path of parliamentary struggle, work to bring to power the capitalist and pseudo-socialist parties looming over them, and make these parties partners in governance with other factions of the bourgeoisie. It told workers that state capitalism was the ideal socialist society and claimed that “Marx himself said so”!!! It instilled in the workers’ consciousness the notion that by having parties and unions partners in the capitalist state machine, they were seating themselves upon the throne of power that they had formed a workers’ government and bestowed upon the capitalist system the honour of becoming socialist. It conveyed to the world’s working masses that revolution was a meaningless endeavour, and that a war against the very foundations of capitalism was utterly futile and destructive. It told them that everything could be achieved by latching onto civil society, the law, and parliament. The path to this alignment lay in establishing parties and unions, abandoning the struggle against wage labour, and adopting a social-democratic, Karl Kautsky’s understanding of capitalism, socialism, and the process of class struggle. The bourgeoisie acted upon us our class and our anti-capitalist movement using the name of Marx and his teachings on class struggle to achieve this. In a remarkably short time, parties sprang up everywhere; despite their various differences left or right regarding policies, orientations, analyses, and visions, they all became partners and harmonized their efforts. From right-wing figures like Rudolf Hilferding, Scheidemann, Karl Kautsky, and Plekhanov to the “left leaning” Luxemburg, Liebknecht, and Lenin, all followed the same path and adopted a unified approach in chanting these slogans, spreading these messages, carving out these misguided paths, and carrying out this brainwashing. The bourgeoisie channelled all these distortions and inversions stemming from the consciousness, understanding, theorizing, policymaking, strategy-building, and tactical planning of a specific stratum within our class and a particular current within our global movement directly into the ongoing struggles of the masses of our class. The architects, instigators, promoters, and propagandists of these distorted views and errant paths were, by and large, elements from within our own class the very vanguard and leaders of our movement. Even Engels the man who was for years Marx’s companion, comrade-in-arms, intimate confidant, and advisor; the one who laboured day and night to gather and publish Marx’s scattered writings; the one who regarded himself as a partner in their creation even he engaged in these very actions; he not only participated in promoting these misguided paths and driving the world’s working masses into the abyss of these barren wastelands and quagmires, but actually played the role of their founder and vanguard.
Yes, fellow captive! Such was our lot, and this was merely the beginning. A few years later, the havoc wreaked by the bourgeoisie within the depths of our international movement manifested as a sudden offensive to codify a rigid doctrine from Marx’s writings, aimed at transforming these dogmas into a strategy and mechanism to sever our class’s ongoing, militant struggle from the axis of radical confrontation with the very foundations of capitalism assumed far broader and deeper dimensions. In Russia, during those years when we were groping our way along the path of class struggle, the voices of “prophetic saviours” suddenly rose from every corner of the land, proclaiming: “The correct path for your campaign lies within our minds, our consciousness, our miraculous agency, and our strategic acumen. Now is not the time for anti-capitalist struggle; the time has come to replace the ‘Junker’ form of development with the European model of capitalism. Without this without a ‘bourgeois-democratic revolution,’ without fostering the unbridled expansion of the commodification of labour power, and without boundlessly extending the frontiers of capital accumulation within the country there is no prospect whatsoever for improving livelihoods, achieving liberty, or advancing toward final emancipation.” With the red flag of “Marxism” in their hands, the slogan of human liberation on their tongues, the demand for the leadership of the global working class under their armpits, the cry of preparation for the destruction of capitalism in the throat of everything, they “souled” capitalism, socialism, the nature of the labour movement, the maze of the anti-capitalist campaign of the working masses, the daily economic, welfare, political and social struggle of the workers, the link and homogeneity of these struggles with the strategy of the struggle to destroy wage slavery, the role of the movement They portrayed an anti-capitalist council as a real and radical alternative to capitalism, the organization of the labour movement, how to line up and align the forces of the working class in various social fields, the radical overthrow of the class, and everything from Bikh and Ben upside down, anti-Marxist and capitalist. This happened in Russia with our movement, and it is even more disastrous that here Bolshevism and Leninism made all these misguided creations and falsifications under the banner of criticism of the right wing of Russian social democracy and later under the name of radical criticism of the entire international peaceful social democracy, under the umbrella of Marxism, workers’ revolution, criticism of reformism, and the like, the agenda of the working class movement of the day.
Bolshevism and Leninism replaced the struggle against capitalism with a “democratic revolution” aimed at the massive expansion of capitalism; they substituted the fight to overthrow the Tsar for the struggle against wage slavery; and they replaced the organized, anti-capitalist council movement of the working masses with the construction of a party and the subordination of the worker masses to that party standing over them. They told workers that communism was not an immanent movement of capital’s wage slaves, but rather a prescription devised by upper-class thinkers, luminaries, and intellectuals. They instructed workers to abandon the struggle to seize political power through councils composed of individual workers councils serving as vehicles for their conscious, free, equal, and effective intervention and instead become the foot soldiers of a party standing above them, devoid of their own consciousness, understanding, or will. They taught workers that socialism was merely state-owned capitalism operating under the false banner of communism and the name of Marx. They instilled in the worker masses the notion that by bringing the party to power, they would elevate themselves to the pinnacle of political authority, economic planning, and the ordering of a socialist life beyond capitalism. In short, they shaped everything into something anti-worker, anti-communist, and rooted in capital.
In the wake of the burial of the October workers’ revolution, the Leninists armed with a bourgeois-reformist, nationalist, and non-Marx’s narrative regarding the imperialist conditions of capitalism, and by calling upon all the world’s workers to struggle against what they termed “imperialism” dealt a death blow to any anti-capitalist orientation within the working class. They spoke endlessly of predatory, usurious imperialism; of the world falling into the hands of a few financiers; of the end of the era of competition and the dawn of the age of monopoly; of the division of the entire globe among a handful of warmongering states; of imperialism as a barrier to the free growth of capitalism; and of an imperialist system enamoured with archaic forms of production and fiercely attached to the remnants of feudalism. They saturated the discourse with the concept of imperialism and the vital necessity of anti-imperialist struggle, all to bury any understanding, preparation, strategic approach, or mobilization of the global working class for a war against capitalism within the dark graveyard of nationalist and bourgeois anti-imperialism. Under the banner of the “era of imperialism” and anti-imperialist struggle, they proclaimed the vital need for the development of “independent, national capitalism” (?!), issuing decrees affirming the anti-imperialist nature and revolutionary character of the “national bourgeoisie.” They prescribed an alliance between the working class and the domestic petty and middle bourgeoisie alongside liberal landowners and “patriotic” capitalists as the remedy for the evil of imperialism, introducing the concept of a “line-up of the people versus the anti-people.” They sounded the clarion call for a democratic, anti-imperialist revolution one that would pave the way for the development of national capitalism! They fanned the flames. Through such actions, Leninists and Leninist parties led the history of class struggle astray and drove the international working class’s anti-capitalist campaign to a standstill. They dealt the most devastating blows to the labour movement. They did this to safeguard the nascent “camp-based” capitalist pole against the onslaught of the other pole of global capitalism. They accomplished this with the aid of a segment of the global bourgeoisie. They labelled this pole “communism” and sacrificed the international working class’s anti-capitalist class struggle for the sake of the survival and power of that pole.
Yes, that is how it unfolded. Such was our fate; in the wake of these events, our movement across the globe and on every battlefield was subdued by the bourgeoisie and fell into total captivity to capitalism. We suffered defeat on all fronts, were brought to our knees, and lost every rampart of both offensive and resistance. The bourgeoisie corrupted us from within and wore us down from without. Our war against the very foundations of capitalist existence was suspended. The banner of the struggle against the wage-labour system was lowered. Across vast regions of the world, we were in every aspect of our existence thoroughly riddled with the solutions, strategies, visions, and prescriptions of bourgeois syndicalism and social democracy. Elsewhere, the bourgeoisie nailed us to the cross of Leninism, “people’s socialism,” militant Leninist reformism, nationalist anti-imperialism, and Leninist bourgeois communism. Our movement became captive to this grim destiny. From that time onward, global capital did not merely target us with the most savage and intense forms of exploitation acting as a reactionary, anti-human mode of production wielding the lever of economic coercion. It did not wage war against our movement solely through state violence and colossal military, law-enforcement, nuclear, police, and security arsenals; nor did it rely merely on armies, police forces, and the machinery of repression to uphold an ever-more debilitating, crushing, and lethal intensification of our exploitation. It did not merely seek to brainwash us and bury us in the graveyard of the wage-slavery order using the weapons of politics, civil society, law, and culture. Indeed, from that time onward, capital did not rely solely on such weapons, institutions, reserves, and arsenals to cripple, destroy, and massacre our movement. From that date forward, capital also set upon us using social democracy, Leninism, “socialism”!!, “communism”!!, and the ever-multiplying branches and offshoots of these ideologies, schools of thought, and strategies including Trotskyism, Titoism, Maoism, the concept of “revolution”!!, and the dichotomy of “the people” versus “anti-people” forces. The bourgeoisie did not stop there; it even inscribed Marx’s name above the entrances to all these arsenals, barracks, and offensive headquarters directed against us!! Thus, the capitalist system—beyond all the tools it had possessed from the very beginning, and beyond its inherent, overwhelming coercive power (economic, political, state, legal, civil, cultural, military, police, security, and intelligence) rose up against us from within those very trenches and command centres: from the ramparts of Leninism, the “democratic revolution,” and the “anti-imperialist”!! struggle. It even stamped all these uprisings and offensives with the name of Marx!! It unleashed a war of “Marxism” against Marxism, and a war of all the various “Marxism” against our class’s anti-capitalist movement. Astonishing! An individual who emerged from the depths of our social existence from the very heart of our working conditions and class struggle who stood as the supreme symbol distinguishing the true path from the false, a radical thinker and strategist who defined the trajectory of our class’s communist struggle against the bourgeoisie’s reactionary communism; an individual who cast light upon every facet of capital’s existence to illuminate the path of our genuine war against capitalism yes, the very name, reputation, prestige, stature, and monumental historical role of this enlightened figure of our movement were now being turned by the bourgeoisie through its deceit, trickery, and mystification into a weapon against our anti-capitalist movement! Prefixes such as Leninism, Maoism, Trotskyism, and dozens of other “-isms” were being manufactured and propagated by the bourgeoisie. Throughout the twentieth century, capital assaulted us via all these avenues and from within all these headquarters, regiments, and camps. It added this entire arsenal to its existing weaponry and left us wandering in the deepest darkness. It blocked every avenue for a radical understanding of the twists and turns of class struggle. It averted the threat our global movement posed to its own survival and buried everything we stood for in a graveyard of distorted perceptions.
Yes, such was our fate bound in the same chains! Amidst it all, only one thing remained for us: our status as workers our social and class existence, our role as sellers of labour power, our exploitation, and our subjugation to rule. This was the very root, foundation, basis, and driving force behind the inception, persistence, and unceasing nature of our struggle against capital and the system of wage slavery. We had no choice but to struggle; yet, crushed by the weight of all that had transpired and buried beneath the rubble of the aforementioned catastrophes, the maximum return we reaped from this war and even then, only in the best of cases and in select locations was a meagre subsistence wage, barely enough to reproduce our labour power so we could sell it once more to the bourgeoisie. We no longer stood in the trenches of a radical anti-capitalist campaign; on the contrary, we found ourselves in the grim fortifications of our own enemies. We acted as the wretched, abject infantry for the armies of various factions within the global capitalist class serving alongside capitalists as they settled their own intra-class scores, embroiled in the conflicts between predatory bourgeois factions over profit shares, ownership, power, and capitalist hegemony, and fighting to ensure the victory of one capitalist pole over another. We embarked upon and persisted through a historical era steeped in humiliation, wretchedness, calamity, bankruptcy, and decay. Throughout this dark era, we once again instigated the most massive uprisings. Alongside various bourgeois parties, we steered the most tumultuous revolutions to victory. We toppled hundreds of governments and installed hundreds more in power. We carried out all these actions in the name of the working class, revolution, communism, Marx, and wars of liberation; yet the outcome of it all of these uprisings, revolutions, government overthrows, and the establishment of regimes was solely to fortify and further cement the foundations of bourgeois power, to guarantee the continued survival of the wage-slavery system, to pave the way for capital’s even more overwhelming domination over us, and to assist the international capitalist class in intensifying our exploitation with ever-greater savagery, crushing our struggles through increasingly horrific and widespread massacres, and ultimately extinguishing with catastrophic consequences the torch of our organized, council-based, anti-capitalist struggle. How can this dark period be described? It seems no pen is capable of the task.
Yes, fellow chained comrades! This is what befell us across the globe; we, too the working class and the labour movement of Iran bore the full brunt, the devastating impact, and the grievous consequences of this scourge upon our very selves. It was here that our first generation stepped onto the stage of history in the years preceding the twentieth century. From those early days, we embraced our true class nature. In the year 1906 at a time when the total number of our class members across Iran did not even reach half a million, we launched a spirited and brilliant campaign against capital at the northern fisheries along the Caspian coast. United and speaking with one voice without the backing of any syndicate or union we, 150 workers, declared in a spontaneous, collective, and anti-capitalist surge, declaring that our entire catch belonged to us. We asserted that the fruits of our labour and production were ours alone, and that we would yield no part of them to the owners of capital. We proclaimed this with unwavering resolve and vigilance, echoing the crimson call of our social existence a call that resonated powerfully through our lives and across the sphere of the relationship between labour and capital. It was a voice that embodied the true roar of communism the abolition of wage labour. It revealed the living, thriving, and blossoming embryo of anti-capitalist communism within the very womb of our class’s existence. It was a voice proclaiming that capital-defying communism resides here not in party politburos, not in the consciousness or insights of the learned from other classes, not in the intellectual archives of the propertied classes, nor in party programs, charters, or manifestos but rather in the innermost depths of our own class existence. This is how we began at the Anzali fisheries. We called upon all our fellow workers to join us. We took to the streets of the city. We rallied everyone to our cause and engaged in open conflict with the capitalists and the state that guards the process of capitalist development. Our strength in those days was meagre very meagre and so we were defeated. We did not advance all the way to the realization of our aspirations; yet, our defeat was not a defeat of our path, our demands, our movement, or our class struggle. Our path was unequivocally the right one. We had to act as we did. We had to demand the fruits of our own labour. We had to strike a blow against the property of capital owners rooted as it was in bourgeois private ownership; we had to assert our power and pit the might of anti-capitalism against the might of capital. We had to undertake all of this right then even from a position of weakness, in those early days of asserting our existence, when our movement was just taking its first tentative steps. We were doing the right thing. Our aim back then was not to construct a humble island of socialism amidst the waters of the Caspian; nor did we intend, through strikes, uprisings, and demands for control over the fruits of our labour, to conjure socialism out of the abysmal darkness of feudalism! Rather, we were laying stone upon stone to build our anti-capitalist movement. We were telling the capitalists: “We are at war with you a war over the entirety of our labour and its product. You are architecting the palace of capital’s power, while we are marshalling our own anti-capitalist strength. We stand not with you, but against your class and against capital itself; through these struggles, we are organizing and bringing into the arena the genuine movement of our class our own communism, the capital-defying communism of our class.” In light of this and drawing upon these understandings and insights our defeat in Anzali was not merely a failure of our objectives and our class struggle; it also opened up a world of lessons for us. The defeat told us that we lacked sufficient strength. We needed to enter the campaign more united, more council-oriented, and more fiercely opposed to capital. We ought to have and could have learned from this defeat and applied those lessons, yet that did not happen. Just as we sought to establish our bastion of anti-capitalist struggle, a chorus of voices from the intelligentsia of the propertied classes suddenly rose up from all sides, declaring: “Now is not the time for anti-capitalist struggle! You ‘trade-unionists’ understand nothing. You are ignorant of communism, socialism, revolution, revolutionary theory, the proletariat, Marxism, and above all Leninism! Ours is the age of imperialism, yet our society is feudal. It must become capitalist; imperialism stands as the barrier to this transformation to the process of becoming capitalist! We must with the aid of the glorious communist camp break this barrier, pave the way for the free and independent growth of capitalism, and put imperialism that adversary of capitalist development in its place. To achieve this, we must align ourselves with the national bourgeoisie, pin our hopes on liberal landowners, enter the fray of the ‘people versus anti-people’ divide, build a party, position that party at the forefront of this alignment, and launch a national, popular, and anti-imperialist democratic revolution. These are the tasks of the day; talk of opposing capital is entirely out of place right now.” It is also dangerous, for it alienates the patriotic, revolutionary bourgeoisie and deprives us of an iron, destiny-shaping alliance with the popular and revolutionary segments of the capitalist class. No, such actions are deeply misguided and fraught with disastrous consequences. Become the disciplined army of the anti-imperialist campaign; everything is in place to accomplish this vital task and fulfil this sacred historical and socialist duty. Programs have been drafted; the Party has been established; we have the Comintern and the “Internationale,” a mighty mother party, and numerous sister parties; we have intellectuals and scholars from the propertied classes and a codified revolutionary theory we lack nothing. Let us shelve the anti-capitalist struggle, sound the bugle of war against imperialism, rally behind our Communist Party, defeat imperialism, repel the enemy’s assault aimed at destroying the camp’s miracle-working shrine, and pave the way for the boundless growth of capitalism this is the path to our class’s liberation!
Yes, the same fate befell our movement in Iran. The very fabric of our lives our intellectual landscape, our understanding, and our consciousness became saturated with theories, analyses, proposed solutions, the formation of fronts, and the crafting of new horizons. The dust and haze of anti-imperialism and the struggle against old and new colonialism waged in alignment with the “camp” and for the sake of preserving the state born of the October Revolution engulfed this entire space. No opening remained anywhere to even recall the need for marshalling forces, organizing, and positioning ourselves against the capitalist system or for waging war on capital. We were told to form unions, yet within those unions, to negotiate livelihood issues with the owners of capital; to hand over the reins of the union to the Party; and to turn the union into a bastion of Party power a tool for the Party to extract concessions from its capitalist rivals and partners. We were told to subordinate even our daily struggles over basic necessities to the fluctuating interests of the Party as it competed with other bourgeois parties. Wherever the Party deemed it necessary, we were to submit to the full intensity of capitalist exploitation, barbarism, and criminality; to regard any faction of capitalists provided the Party viewed them as revolutionary allies as fully justified in destroying our children’s access to food, medicine, healthcare, and a livelihood. We were to engage in conflict only with capitalists who were British, hostile to the Party, and enemies of the “mother party” and the state born of the October Revolution. In short, even our daily struggles for a meagre wage increase and a bare-subsistence livelihood became subordinate to the party’s strategy of sharing in the capitalist power structure and settling scores with its rivals and class partners. Reza Khan’s dictatorship of terror and bloodshed sacrificed and slaughtered our class along with the entire mass of the exploited, the downtrodden, and the disenfranchised at the altar of feudal lords and landowners and at the foot of the capitalists’ palaces of profit and accumulation; it destroyed our very existence. But our Communist Party!!, our Communist and Workers’ International!! (the Comintern), and the embodied symbol of the victory of “communism” in our world!! (the Soviet state) shamelessly shouted at us to regard him Reza Khan as a national hero, a torchbearer of the progressive movement, and a standard-bearer for industrial advancement and the unfettered growth of capitalism, and to rise up in his support!!!
Yes, fellow captive! This is what befell our movement; all of this was imposed upon us under the banners of “communism,” “anti-imperialism,” the “ideal of workers’ emancipation,” and the like. But we fought; we organized the most magnificent strikes and ignited uprisings. Struggle halting the wheels of production, demonstrating our power, and clashing with capitalists was the very essence of our class nature and an utterly inseparable part of our lives and social existence. To survive, to sell our labour power to reproduce and sell this sole commodity of our lives and sustain our existence we battled capitalists’ day and night, in every season and setting. But the entirety of this struggle served only to guarantee and reproduce the very basis of our status as workers condemning us to remain workers. It kept alive the generation of capital’s wage-slaves, swelled the surging tide of the capitalist class’s profits and capital, and further fortified the foundations of the power held by capital and capitalists. Such became our lot: in every facet of our existence, we were buffeted left and right by capital. Capital exploited us with ever-deepening, corrosive, and destructive intensity; it ruled over us through the levers of the state, law, legal rights, civil institutions, and politics; and through the platforms of social democracy, the various branches of Leninism, “communism,” socialism, “communist parties,” labour unions, and a multitude of other institutions within its order and power structure it completely dissolved and disintegrated us. They turned us into a combat force for their own intra-class battles. From the Party, from the “International” from the living, embodied, and triumphant symbol of “Communism” came the order for us to head north and fight alongside the “Khan of the Jungle” that “Fatherland” figure, defender of feudal lords and landowners, iron-willed representative of capitalists, and embodiment of “radical Islam” all to preserve the integrity of Communism and pave the way for human liberation! There are limits to how far one can go in mocking humanity, history, and class struggle, or in fabricating reality and turning the world’s truths upside down. Yet the bourgeoisie masquerading under the banner of Leninism, the bourgeoisie posing as the standard-bearer of proletarian liberation recognized no boundaries in these endeavours. It charged ahead without restraint, brazenly trifling with human intelligence. Argument upon argument was marshalled: the Party, the “International,” and Lenin’s inner circle of advisors declared that while *Sardar Sepah* had once been our steadfast ally in the quest to communize the world, he had since colluded with the British. Therefore, a new, faithful ally had to be found, and the “Great Khan of the Jungle” was deemed the worthiest candidate. We were to fall in line behind him. If he stands alongside the feudal lords and against the peasants; if he spearheads the suppression of peasant uprisings against feudal exploitation; if he deems the slaughter of workers protesting against brutal capitalist exploitation a religious imperative and an unquestionable Islamic duty, then there is absolutely no fault to be found. On the contrary, he is ready to join us in eliminating the scourges brought about by the British presence. Thus, the struggle against capital is to be suspended, the campaign against feudal exploitation abandoned, and in order to defend the iron fortress of Communism and open the majestic highways for the communization of the entire world we must willingly place the yoke of his leadership around our necks!!!
Yes, such was our fate and what befell us, fellow comrades in chains! Throughout these eras amidst the twists and turns of these events and the unfolding of the crises that gripped our class the defining foundation, essence, and axis of it all was the complete, ever widening, and deepening estrangement of our movement from the actual trajectory of class struggle and the war against capitalism. Our immense, history-making class power destined to be the force that would abolish wage slavery, exploitation, class divisions, the state, the alienation of humanity from its labour and the products thereof, all forms of domination over human beings, and human self-alienation yes, this very force, this movement that bore the banner of human emancipation, was taken hostage by bourgeois reaction and held captive by its own enemies. It was dissolved into the power of capital; it was turned against itself to serve bourgeois power; it became the savage army of the bourgeoisie, fighting to perpetuate capitalism. We were reduced to this state; and once we had fallen into such a condition, in the blink of an eye swept away by the deluge of annihilation and the storm of Reza Khan’s barbarism we were devastatingly struck down. We were crushed and endured the most horrific onslaughts. But despite all this, we continued the struggle, for we could not do otherwise; the battle against exploitation, oppression, and the savagery of capitalism has been and remains inseparable from our very existence. Right in the jaws of one of the most ferocious dictatorships, we once again lit the torch of protest, staged strikes, and shattered the ceiling of the prevailing political order; between the years 1941 and 1953, we transformed the entire landscape of society into an arena of struggle, the exercise of force, and open combat.
We fought throughout these twelve years and the more we fought… At the Southern Oil Company, they piled up our dead doing so repeatedly and we were slaughtered in various cities and factories. On the 30th of Tir (21 July), we witnessed the most brutal massacre of the masses of our own class; in Baharestan Square, a stream of blood flowed from the mass killing of our people. We were fired upon at the Shahi Textile Mill; we lost a great number of comrades at the Vatan Factory in Isfahan; we were massacred at the Sangsar Mine in Semnan. We fought in Isfahan, Khuzestan, Azerbaijan, Tehran, Kermanshah, and Shiraz in every corner of the hell of capitalism, yet our share of this struggle was, at best, merely the ability to reproduce our labour power to sell to capital, thereby generating even more colossal capital for the capitalists. We fought with all our might and were killed everywhere; yet everywhere, we squandered that very strength in the service of one faction of the bourgeoisie against another against ourselves, against our class, our movement, and our very existence all to the benefit of the capitalist class as a whole and the system of wage slavery. We were taught to act this way; our consciousness had been engineered to believe that our sole task was to reinforce the power base of one reactionary bourgeois faction against another. It seems our fate is to serve as the foot soldiers for the various factions of the bourgeoisie toppling one capitalist government only to usher in another. It appears we are destined to remain, for all eternity, mere tools of capital and its rulers. Social democracy, Leninism, and the various Leninist offshoots have herded us through the dark corridors of these ideologies, blocking any path toward a struggle against the wage-labour system. Between 1941 and 1953, the Tudeh Party that festering, malformed, and convulsive product of these strategies and approaches buried us even deeper in the quagmire of these beliefs than any of its predecessors. When Iran’s liberal-nationalist bourgeoisie entered the fray against its own class kin to secure a larger share of the surplus value extracted from our labour, the leaders of the Tudeh Party branded this bid for a greater share as an “anti-colonial” struggle by the “national bourgeoisie,” and called upon us to support Mossadegh.
The reactionary “soviet camp” bourgeoisie while contending with the liberal-nationalist bourgeoisie for a share of political power masqueraded this pursuit as a socialist cause, marshalling the full force of our class struggle behind this sordid, anti-worker quest for power. For twelve years, from the shores of the Persian Gulf to the banks of the Caspian Sea, we remained in the thick of the fray; yet the only outcome of these struggles was a mere shifting of the scales regarding profit, property, and dominion among the various factions of the bourgeoisie. We bolstered the system of wage slavery; we rendered our own movement more abject, humiliated, and exhausted; we gave the reactionary bourgeoisie further opportunity to brainwash the masses; we drifted ever further from the goal of establishing an independent class front; instead of fighting against capital, we fought against ourselves; instead of driving the power of capital toward collapse, we dismantled our own class power. We acted in this manner under the pressure of reactionary “soviet camp” bourgeois ideologies, and the inescapable price we paid was the catastrophic, wholesale slaughter of our class, our movement, and everything we held dear during the bourgeoisie’s dark coup of August 19, 1953.