It took another 25 years for the Iranian people to recover from that counterrevolution and mount a new struggle to topple the shah. That battle exploded into the open with the Tabriz uprising in February 1978. In the Islamic tradition of mourning, demonstrations began to take place around the country every 40 days afterward. Each time the army was called in to shoot at demonstrators, more people came forward to join the struggle.

During one of the protests in the industrial city of Isfahan, demonstrators took over parts of the city for two days until the regime declared martial law for the first time since 1953. A march of a million people, the largest ever held in Iran, took place in Tehran Sept. 7, 1978. "Say death to the shah," "Throw out America," "Khomeini is our leader," and "We want an Islamic Republic" were the main demands. The last slogan was being raised for the first time.

Because of the Stalinist betrayals and defeats suffered by the working class during the second Iranian revolution (see first article in this series), and due to the intensity of political repression under the shah, especially against toilers, there were no mass working-class organizations that could take the lead in this third revolution. The Islamic clerical hierarchy, and increasingly those around Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, were looked to by the masses as a new leadership. From exile, Khomeini urged protesters to remain in the streets until the shah was gone. Mosques became centers of organization.  
 
Bloody Friday spurs workers to action
The shah declared martial law in Tehran and 11 other cities September 7. He appointed General Gholam Oveisi military governor of the capital. Oveisi had been known as the "butcher of Iran" for his murderous assault on demonstrators in 1963 that left thousands dead.

When protesters gathered in Jaleh Square in Tehran on Friday, September 8, they were attacked with tanks and machine guns. A reporter for the Guardian, a London daily, wrote that the scene resembled a firing squad, with troops shooting at a mass of stationary protesters. More than 4,000 demonstrators were killed around the country that day, with as many as 500 in Tehran alone. Sept. 8, 1978, came to be known as "Bloody Friday."

This massacre by the army was not followed by mass outbursts or demonstrations around the country. The rulers hoped they had turned the tide. U.S. president James Carter called the shah to reiterate his backing. Carter said he hoped the "disturbances" would end, while "expressing regret" over the bloodshed.

That hope was premature. A mighty force, the industrial working class, entered the scene. The day after Bloody Friday--Saturday, September 9--was the first day of the workweek in Iran. Some 700 workers at the Tehran oil refinery went on strike demanding higher wages and an end to martial law.

Workers had been part of the demonstrations up to then. Now, for the first time, they acted in their capacity as a class. The strike was not called by any union--no independent unions were allowed under the shah--nor by any of the figures in the clerical leadership. It was the work of rank-and-file leaders who had emerged prior to and in the process of the mass movement against the monarchy.

Two days later, workers in oil refineries of Abadan--by far the largest--as well as Isfahan, Shiraz, and Tabriz joined the strike. This was followed by cement workers in Tehran, who added a call for freedom of all political prisoners to their demands. Oil workers in Ahwaz demanded an end to the discrimination against women workers.

Waves of political walkouts continued into October, involving 40,000 oil workers, 150,000 textile workers, 40,000 steel workers, and 100,000 government employees. Eventually the strike crippled almost all industry, banks, post offices, railways, customs and port facilities, internal air flights, radio and television stations, state-run hospitals, bazaars, and universities.

By early November sugar beets were rotting in the southern fields because 7,000 agricultural workers of the giant agribusiness complex of Haft-Tapeh had struck for more than a month.

Many in the ruling class were losing confidence in their ability to hold onto power.

Workers in the Central Bank opened the books and published the names of 180 government figures who had recently transferred $4.2 billion out of the country. The list included capitalists and the shah’s ranking cabinet members and generals.

The strikes kept the regime unbalanced and provided time for the mass movement to revive with heightened vigor. The middle class for the most part joined the movement. National demonstrations were called for Dec. 10–11, the two major religious mourning days of Tasua and Ashura. Millions came out into the streets across the country. In Tehran alone the demonstration attracted nearly two million. "Hang the American puppet!" and "U.S. imperialism out of Iran!" were among the demands.

By now peasants from the nearby villages were joining the demonstrations in the cities in large numbers. Then, young worker-peasants who commuted to the cities began organizing meetings and marches back in their villages. And as the mass movement grew, agitation started in the villages for peasants to take over land belonging to the large absentee landowners and the royal family.

Because workers controlled the electricity flow it was possible for people in cities and towns to participate in a new form of anti-shah protest at night. Its effect on the Iranian rulers, and those Washington had dispatched to prop them up, is best described in the memoirs of Gen. Robert Huyser, Supreme Allied Commander in Europe. Huyser had been assigned by U.S. president James Carter to go to Iran and organize the shah’s generals to carry out a counterrevolutionary military coup. His memoirs are published in the book Mission to Tehran.  
 
‘Nerve-shattering sounds’
After entering Iran illegally and incognito, Huyser described his first night in the country--on Jan. 4, 1979--this way: "Nerve-shattering sounds filled the night air as I began my first night in Tehran. People shouted ‘Allah akbar!’ (God is great) from nearby rooftops, and every call was echoed from another area. Automatic weapon fire ripped through the darkness, reminding me of the front line in Korea. The electricity was cut off for a couple of hours every night, starting about 8:30 p.m., as a form of harassment by the opposition forces.... The house soon felt the winter’s chill, and blackness filled the rooms."

The general and his host walked "on the verandah to listen to the sounds of the human jungle.... The chanting and gunfire continued until well into curfew, which ran from 9 p.m. to 5 a.m. It was not till midnight that the crowds finally dispersed and an uneasy peace descended. I spent a sleepless night."

Strikes helped revive the mass demonstrations. The street protests, in turn, boosted workers’ morale in face of repeated assaults by SAVAK, the secret police, and the military to break the walkouts. When the regime was able to break a strike, workers went back to the plant to organize another one.

A leader of the Ahwaz oil workers in Khuzistan said that their first strike started October 18, lasted 33 days, and was finally broken by the regime. The military would go door to door searching for the striking workers, he added, and arrest whoever they found and force them to work.

"At this point, we decided to go back to work along with other workers and prepare for a new strike," he noted. "We did not consider ourselves defeated, since it was obvious that there was a continuing movement of the entire Iranian people." The first day they went back, he said, they held a general meeting, elected a coordinating committee of 15, and began contacting workers of other factories on strike.

As walkouts spread throughout the southern oil-producing region, Iranian oil exports dropped to zero. Later, after much debate, workers decided to produce enough oil to meet the needs of the population, but first they made sure that the military would not be able to lay their hands on it.

Without oil exports and the consequent revenues, the regime headed for fiscal collapse. Strikes by bank workers prevented capital allocation and the payment of wages and salaries. Walkouts by customs workers halted the delivery of spare parts and raw materials. Strikes caused most government ministries to shut down. Students took over the universities and turned them into centers of political discussion and activity, where all pro-revolution political tendencies could participate.

By early January 1979, democratically elected strike committees had occupied many large factories, government ministries, and communication centers. Leaderships of the different strike committees began contacting each other on issues relating to strikes and the revolution. An agreement was reached between the strike committees of oil workers and railway employees for trains to carry the fuel necessary for domestic consumption. The strike committees also organized to safeguard the factories, which to a large extent were state-owned, from accidents and sabotage. The strike committee at the Isfahan steel mill negotiated with the strike committee of railway workers requesting them to carry the coal they required from Kerman to keep the plant boilers warm.  
 
Workers aimed at regime’s overthrow
To the government’s insistent offers of high wage increases if workers dropped their political demands, the unanimous answer was no. This came as a surprise to Washington Post correspondent Jonathan Randall, who interviewed two young leaders of the coordinating committee leading the oil workers strike at the Abadan refinery. He wrote October 10 that their comments "suggested a devotion to utopian ideals rather than the give-and-take of labor-management struggle."

The leaderships of the strike committees were often a nuclei of workers who had known one another for some time, had discussed politics, and had gone through common experiences. A strike leader in a Caterpillar plant, for example, said, "We were a group of workers and employees who knew each other well through our participation in various revolutionary activities for at least seven to eight years. Because we were also of similar mind about the social problems...we managed to form a secret nucleus.... This nucleus would engage in all sorts of political activity here, as far as it could, and would also intervene in other work places."

The rank-and-file working-class leaderships that were emerging in these battles, however, were not able to link up politically on a national level. Without a proletarian party that could unite them, they were pushed back by the existing bourgeois leadership of the mass movement every time they tried to chart an independent, working-class course.

No revolutionary working-class leadership existed on a national scale, experienced in the struggle and known and trusted by the masses to lead the workers and farmers, who were already making gigantic strides forward, to take political power and establish a workers and peasants republic.

Next week we will see how the working class, in alliance with the peasants and many from the middle classes, thwarted Washington’s efforts to stage a counterrevolutionary coup, like the one in 1953, and went on to carry out an insurrection that toppled the monarchy.

(To be continued next week)

Last week’s article: Decades of struggle to topple shah  
 
 
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