Revolution strips away the layers of falsehood that disguise the relations between classes; it reveals the real foundations of society. So it has been in Iran.
From February 9 to 12, the old regime crumbled under the blows of a popular insurrection. Ministers and generals fled into hiding. Discipline over the ranks of the army disintegrated. Governmental power had disappeared.
The workers, peasants, and soldiers were in an unparalleled position to organize their own government and begin reconstructing Iranian society.
Committees arose spontaneously and in many areas took over the direction of traffic, the evacuation of those wounded in the fighting, and the maintenance of public services in Tehran - a city of 5 million.
Popular defense guards, or "Islamic marshals," were also in control of the major cities of Isfahan, Mashad, Qum, Kermanshah, and Shiraz, as well as dozens of smaller towns and villages throughout the country.
Insurgent soldiers began to elect their own officers. They joined with workers to disarm the few elite military units loyal to the monarchy. Meanwhile, popular committees directed the process of arming the masses, cleaning out police stations, rounding up SAVAK agents, and breaking open the shah's prisons.
Workers in rifle assembly plants ended their strike to assemble weapons for the workers.
Workers took over some key installations and communications centers and used them to help organize the uprising.
Workers committees had already been running Iran's giant refineries and oil fields -the country's main industry - for weeks. They needed no help from executives of the imperialist oil cartel nor from bureaucrats appointed in Tehran.
The Iranian revolution demonstrated that the working masses do not need bosses or bankers, they do not need officers or cops, they do not need capitalists or landlords in order for society to function.
The overthrow of the shah's monarchy is a victory for the American workers no less than for the people of Iran.
It is a victory for working people all over the world, who will be encouraged in their struggles and heartened with the knowledge that what the Iranian people did, we can do as well.
Only one thing was lacking in Iran. Only one thing has prevented the working masses from completing their victory by taking power into their own hands.
Revolutionary Party
There was no revolutionary party, composed in its big
majority of workers, experienced in the struggles of the
oppressed and exploited, and enjoying the respect of the
masses.
Such a party would be the clearest voice explaining the need for the toilers to extend throughout the country their own independent organizations - in the factories, barracks, and villages - and to declare them to be the workers and peasants republic of Iran.
The Trotskyist forces, most of whom have recently returned to Iran from forced exile, are now unified in the Hezbe Karga rane Sosialist - the Socialist Workers Party of Iran - and have set out to build such a party.
The bourgeois forces - organized around Ayatollah Khomeini, and led by Mehdi Bazargan and Karim Sanjabi of the National Front - are now racing to establish a stable capitalist regime. They have declared - from above - a provisional gov ernment. They are desperately trying to get the workers to give up their arms, get off the streets and back to work. Their efforts are being backed by the Carter administration.
Explaining Washington's fears, New York Times reporter Nicholas Gage noted February 13 that "nearly every young man on the street is now armed.
"The possession of such weapons has given the people a sense of personal power that is the opposite of their earlier experience, and they seem unlikely to put down their weapons easily to return to the routine of daily life."
Furthermore, "Once these radicalized young people and workers do go back to their factories and schools, they will be ripe for overtures from the Communists, especially if they feel the new Government's many promises to them are not being fulfilled quickly and completely."...
Mohammed Ali Nowruzi, the deputy chief of police under the shah, has been appointed acting chief of police by Bazargan.
But the shah's executioners have not changed their spots, and the Iranian masses know it. That is why they have responded so reluctantly - and sometimes not at all -to repeated appeals to turn in their arms.
Orders from officials handpicked by Khomeini or anyone else will not help the masses to move forward in their struggle for freedom and a better life. What will be decisive is what the masses can do to organize politically in their own interests.
The strike committees and neighborhood committees that are already running many industries and some towns can take re sponsibility for distributing food and fuel as well as other consumer goods, and for organizing production.
If these tasks are left to the capitalists, they will make sure the result is shortages, unemployment, speculation in essential goods, and inflation.
In the countryside, committees of poor peasants can organize the distribution of agricultural equipment and land.
Elected Committees
Elected committees of the revolutionary masses are not new
to Iran. Known as anjomans, such committees sprang up during
the Constitutional Revolution of 1906 and again in the
revolutionary upsurge during and after World War II. Similar
committees were called soviets (councils) when they arose in
Russia in 1905 and 1917.
Joined together in federations on a regional and nationwide basis, such anjomans could become the government - democratic and responsive to the needs of the masses, unlike any government appointed from above.
Even on a local level, such committees can counter the appointment of new officials from above and fight for prompt and democratic elections for a constituent assembly -not an appointed or declared "constituent assembly" under the thumb of Bazargan.
Rank-and-file soldiers throughout the country will play a crucial role in this process. They can take advantage of being "confined to barracks" to hold discussions, form their own committees, and elect representatives to the workers, soldiers, and peasants anjomans.
The ranks of the armed forces themselves are in the best position to identify the nests of conspirators in the military staffs and to take action against them. To assure that the army is responsible to the anjomans, the soldiers will have to purge the entire officer corps and elect new officers from the ranks.
Alongside the soldiers, the workers who have fought so valiantly against the monarchy are sure to feel the need to hold onto their weapons and organize a militia to defend their gains and enforce the decisions made by their elected deputies.
The Iranian revolution has reached a crossroads. The struggle will go on, through numerous ups and downs. But with the successful insurrection against the monarchy, and the defeat of one of U.S. imperialism's major allies in the Mideast, the struggle of the Iranian people has already pointed to fundamental lessons about our own society.
Capitalists Not Needed
The first has already been mentioned, and it is no less
true in the United States than in Iran: the working people
keep the country running, and the working people can and
should run the country.
In Iran, the capitalist class didn't help society. Just the opposite. Under their rule, agriculture stagnated. A fertile country that had previously been self-sufficient in food has to import about half of its agricultural products.
Capitalism in Iran meant imported luxuries for a privileged minority, and lack of decent housing and even sewage systems for the vast majority.
Under capitalist rule, Iran's "one crop" oil-based economy was distorted and dominated by a handful of British and Ameri can monopolies.
And above all, capitalism in Iran meant the "American shah," with his CIA-trained torturers, and his U.S.-trained and U.S.-armed military machine. The shah who outlawed democratic trade unions, filled the jails with political prisoners, denied equality to women, and trampled on the rights of the oppressed nationalities....
A second lesson of the Iranian revolution also applies to the United States, no less than to Iran: the capitalist class is a lot weaker than it looks.
What Iranians Faced
Just look at what the Iranian people faced. The shah's
secret police operated in every factory, every college, and
every neighborhood. People were imprisoned and tortured
merely for reading "suspicious" books.
Behind the secret police stood a 430,000-strong military establishment armed with billions of dollars worth of the most modern weapons the Pentagon could provide.
Not only did the shah have the support of every imperialist government, he could also count on friendly relations with both Moscow and Peking.
Finally, the shah had control of billions of dollars in oil money and was promising rapid economic progress.
But all the things that looked to rulers around the world like the basis for stability in Iran turned into their opposite with a speed that took the shah and his supporters completely by surprise.
As one of the leading mouthpieces for U.S. imperialism, the New York Times declared in a February 13 editorial, "It ended up taking only three months for events in Iran to go from the unthinkable to the inevitable."
The shah's petrodollars and the economic expansion they fueled turned into a trap for the regime. Millions of peasants, driven out of the countryside and into the cities by economic pressure, swelled the ranks of the working class and the urban poor.
The giant arms budget and the shah's imperialist advisers became a point of resentment and anger instead of a prop for the peacock throne. In the last analysis, the shah's tyranny rested not on its repressive apparatus but on the illusion among the masses that they had to bow to the regime. Once the vast majority of society had shed that illusion -through months of determined and self-sacrificing struggle - no amount of arms could stop them.
Guns and tanks, after all, no matter how sophisticated, are only as reliable as the hands that fire them. And these are the hands of workers and peasants in uniform, not the employers or their cops. When the ranks of the army came over to the revolution, the fate of the shah's regime was sealed....
Through their revolution, the Iranian people have shown how quickly that illusion can crumble, how quickly the working class can sweep the exploiters aside. The same thing can happen here once the workers see a leadership that rejects collaboration and stands for struggle against the exploiters on every level.
The Iranian insurrection has once again shown the necessity of building a revolutionary socialist party here in the United States - a party composed of workers who have absorbed the lessons of previous struggles and can help lead our class to political power in the stronghold of world imperialism.