Here’s something I’ve had to write at short notice for the issue of Socialist Resistance that’s out next week.
The theocratic regime which has ruled Iran since 1979 was created by a victorious counter-revolution. Ayatollah Khomeini’s “Islamic revolution” succeeded in defeating the real revolution by “joining it”, supporting a faction within the opposition to the Shah which would give it some authority among the masses. Some socialists at the time, such as the Tudeh interpreted the Khomeini leadership as middle class nationalists leading a popular anti-imperialist revolution. It was nothing of the sort. Its purpose was to defeat the working class and peasantry and ensure a stable bourgeois state. Those small groups on the Iranian left which did understand this at the time were hopelessly insufficient to make a real impact on events and the larger organisations were hopelessly unclear about what Khomeini represented.
Mir Hussein Mousavi and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad were both politically responsible for the murders of thousands of socialists and trade unionists during the counter-revolution. These were the people who had been occupying factories and oil fields under workers’ control. Neither candidate is progressive or politically supportable for socialists. They were the butchers of the Iranian labour movement thirty years ago.
Mousavi’s electoral programme was a more thoroughgoing neoliberal economic policy, a slight liberalization of the oppressive dress code the Iranian State imposes on women, a relaxation of the more draconian restraints on personal behaviour and a less confrontational attitude to the Obama administration. Ahmadinejad made his appeal to the poor and the religious. He made great play of his personal integrity and his anti-corruption campaigns. Ahmadinejad used some of the $250 billion in extra oil revenues since his election in 2005 to increase state employees’ pay, aid the poor and run local development schemes. At the same time he relies on a number of para-state organisations to repress decent and imposes countless petty limits on people’s freedom.
From afar it’s very difficult to say whether or not Mahmoud Ahmadinejad won the Iranian presidential election only as a result of ballot rigging. Ahmadinejad’s vote share of the vote was close to his winning percentage in 2005 The point of course is that whether or not this is the case the ruling clerics would have little hesitation in rigging any ballot, presidential or otherwise if it suited their interests to do so and they felt they could get away with it. Undoubtedly many people in Iran are aware of this.
In any event both Ahmadinejad and Mir Hussein Mousavi were bourgeois candidates and the differences between them merely reflected differences within both the ruling class and the clerical elite of Iran.
This was a bourgeois election in the most literal and meaningful sense of the term given that any form of left or working class candidate if even on the most minimal reformist basis was absent. This is not surprising given that any form of independent working class organisation has been subject to repression by the state. Despite such repression there is though an incipient workers movement in Iran. The statement on the election by the Vahed Busworkers syndicate which appeared on various websites during the days of the June demonstrations took an elementary working class position on the election saying “In recent days, we continue witnessing the magnificent demonstration of millions of people from all ages, genders, and national and religious minorities in Iran. They request that their basic human rights, particularly the right to freedom and to choose independently and without deception be recognised.”
It is not right to call the events which followed the Iranian election a revolution. The Shah was brought down by a genuine revolution which was able to destroy the old regime’s army, police and gangster organisations. By contrast the demonstrations against Ahmadinejad melted away at the first hint of serious repression and it had not spread significantly to other parts of the country. The hundreds of thousands of people who took to the streets to voice their frustration with Iranian society had not reached a point where they wanted to bring down the regime. Their figurehead Mousavi was a player in a power struggle between two factions which support the Islamic Republic as it presently exists.
As the masses demobilise there will be some switching of roles and positions inside Iran and Mousavi’s supporters are the losers. The unknown factors are the extent to which the organisations of Iran’s working class have learned the power of political organisation and whether a new generation of young workers and students is learning that to overthrow the repressive theocracy a new revolution is needed with an entirely new programme.
Liam redux 
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