On September 16, Iranian “morality police” detained Mahsa Amini, a Kurdish woman of 22, for wearing her hijab (the required headscarf) “improperly.” She was mercilessly beaten in jail and went into a coma. She died two days later.
Immediately, protesters took to the streets in a mass uprising throughout Iran, especially in the Kurdish regions but cutting across all ethnic divisions.
Night after night, youth, students, workers, and teachers have turned the streets of over eighty cities into open battlefields. Masses are defying police attacks, arrests, and murder. They call for the end of the forced hijab, overthrow of the Islamic regime, death to Khamenei (the head of state) and an end to sexist and all oppression. Women are taking a key role, as they have done during the 1979 revolution and since. Some young women have defiantly cut their hair and burned their headscarves.
Police of the fascist Khamenei government have killed over fifty protestors without regard for age or gender. They have wounded many more and arrested hundreds. The government has shut down social media sites and some cities have no cell phone service.
Yet the masses continue to hurl rocks, torch police cars, and set ablaze state buildings ablaze.
This is the largest protest in Iran since 1979. Outrage at Mahsa Amini’s death has snowballed amidst economic crisis and political repression. A growing military budget drains resources to finance the second-largest army (after Israel) in the Middle East. Masses suffer from rising inflation and unemployment, worsened by US sanctions and government corruption. Some workers have not gotten paychecks for months.
Young people are increasingly desperate as the Iranian government has failed to make energy deals that might have strengthened the capitalist economy. Masses are enraged by the growing economic divide: the Iranian ruling class lives even more lavishly than the hated Shah they kicked out in 1979.
The US and other imperialists want to misdirect the masses into fighting for a pro-US government. The Biden administration hypocritically cheers Iranian women while supporting oppressively anti-women regimes in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and elsewhere.
Down with the Islamic Republic and All Capitalists!
The masses want fundamental change, but that wouldn’t come from the nationalist demand for an independent Kurdistan. Nor from replacing the Islamic Republic with secular capitalist democracy – which still oppresses women, as we see in the US today.
Capitalist democracy is the dictatorship of capital. Capitalism in any form cannot provide for workers’ needs or end exploitation. Capitalist exploitation dehumanizes us. This wage slavery is the material basis of all the poisonous capitalist ideologies that keep us divided, exploited, enslaved.
The courageous masses need communist revolution to break our chains. Communism’s guiding principle is “from each according to commitment and ability, to each according to need.” In a communist society without money or exchange, all will work and share what we produce to meet the masses’ needs. Communism can end imperialist wars and start to reverse environmental catastrophe. It can overcome the divisions within the working class. No borders, no nations, no sexism or racism or religious hate.
When the courageous masses – especially workers and soldiers – embrace communism, nothing can stop them.
Learning from Revolutionary History
But here is the contradiction: Many people in this movement, especially the youth, overwhelmingly feel that they don’t want to be under anybody’s banners. They, like many young activists in the US and elsewhere, are skeptical of the old revolutionaries like their parents. They see the 20th century movements as having screwed up.
They have a point. Throughout the 1970s, Iranian Marxists struggled to find their path. The People’s Mujahidin Organization of Iran (PMOI) split when a Marxist faction renounced Islam, eventually forming Peykar.
Ironically, just a year before the revolution, PMOI leaders renounced armed struggle in favor of reform agitation. The minority who split from this weren’t prepared to play a role in the growing storm.
PMOI negotiated secretly with the Ayatollah Khomeini and his Islamic-fascist faction of Iranian capitalists. They formed a “united front” against the pro-US Shah. This unprincipled (but not unprecedented) strategy mobilized masses of workers and youth to overthrow the Shah in 1979.
Immediately the new Islamic Republic began arresting and killing leftists and restricting women. It smashed Peykar, one of the world’s most left-wing movements. Tudeh, a thoroughly reformist pro-Soviet party, supported the new regime.
But it’s a huge mistake to conclude that communist parties must always betray the masses. The capitalists everywhere are few, weak, and – as in Iran today – terrified of the masses. They continue to rule over the biggest, most powerful revolutionary working class in history, because they are organized, and we are not. And because, without an organized mass struggle for communism, they control us ideologically.
The International Communist Workers’ Party (ICWP) has learned huge lessons from the tremendous past workers’ struggles. We now understand we must fight directly for communism, not for reforms or “stages” like national liberation or socialism. That there are no “lesser-evil” capitalists: united fronts with any capitalists are a betrayal.
Instead of the old parties composed of relatively small numbers of professional revolutionaries, ICWP aims to build a mass party. We welcome everyone who agrees with communism and is willing to help. Millions can become mass leaders.
Amidst capitalist crisis and expanding wars, the road forward is to join and build communist ICWP collectives to mobilize the masses for revolution and communist society. We invite you to join or build an ICWP collective. Read, write for, and distribute our Red Flag newspaper!
