When I have posted statements http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/2005/2005-July/014232.html
from the Worker-Communist Party of Iran aka Hezb-e Komunist-e Kargaran-e Iran, Yoshie has said they have little popular /mass base.
http://www.workersliberty.org/iran >...Submitted on 22 October, 2006 - 16:26 :: Iran | Solidarity 3/100, 20 October 2006 | Sweatshops | International unions
On 16 September Iranian riot police attacked a gathering of carpet makers in the northern coastal city of Babolsar. They arrested around 40 and injured a number of others.
Three cheers for the anti-neo-liberal Persian Prince!
'The capitalist fundamentalists in power in Tehran cannot be considered allies' Submitted on 9 September, 2006 - 22:40 :: Iran
By Yassamine Mather
On September 1, the day before Kofi Anan arrived in Tehran for discussions on Iran's nuclear programme, around a thousand people gathered in Khavaran graveyard to mark the 18th anniversary of the death of thousands of socialist and communist political prisoners who were executed by Iran's islamic regime in September 1988, at the end of the Iran-Iraq war.
See the list here of Iranian leftist parties. http://www.broadleft.org/ir.htm
Unlike the neo-con cat's paw, the ex-Marxist, People's Mojahedin Organization of Iran w/their front group, National Council of Resistance of Iran, which has close relations w/ a # of Congresspersons, from Bob Filner, a left-liberal who has authored pieces for In These Times, to horrid reactionary Tom Tancredo, at least the Worker-Communist Party has remained implanted in Iranian class struggles, under difficult conditions. And, they are forthrightly anti-clerical.
After the bitter history related by an Iranian-American academic who was active on the Iranian Left during the period and after the overthrow of the Shah, , Maziar Behrooz, Rebels with a Cause:The Failure of the Left in Iran: London, I.B. Taurus, 1999, any Iranian Leftist (cf. excerpts from a Mother Jones article from 1979 by Eqbal Ahmed, [a few paragraphs which were excerpted in a recent MoJo, their 30th anniversary issue] not reprinted in the big collection by him just published by Columbia Univ. Press, though they do reprint a piece by him arguing for military assistance to the Bosnian Muslims...which occurred via back channels w/the KSA arranged by Amb. Peter Galbraith when Amb. to Croatia...see also embarrassing articles from that era by Richard Falk, in Race and Class and the NYT op-ed pgs.expressing faith in Khomenei's democratic credentials), expressing any alignment w/ the forces of clerical reaction, would have killed decades ago.
http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/2005/2005-July/014024.html >...Last night read an article that said that a large prison in Iran, built by the Shah's SAVAK, with underground torture chambers had thousands of dissidents.
Fred Halliday in Open Democracy on Iran now, http://opendemocracy.net/content/iran.jsp http://opendemocracy.net/globalization-vision_reflections/iran_2642.jsp
Also worth a look there @Open Democracy , Mansour Farhang. Wrote a book for South End Press, yrs. ago on Iranian-US relations.
http://www.washington-report.org/backissues/0489/8904003.html
> ... The Left
The leftist organizations began going underground as early as 1980 and 1981 when the Islamic Republic decided that their activities would pose a major challenge to the existence of the regime. Since then, many leftist activists have been executed and many await trial in Khomeini's jails. As a result of harsh suppression by the regime, the ranks of the leftist organizations are depleted and their morale is extremely low.
Besides the suppression, the failure of the Iranian left can also be attributed to other factors. First, when the revolution began, the Iranian left consisted of small, secret, intellectual circles with no strong links to either the working class or the peasantry. Having become accustomed to life in underground teamhouses and having been trained politically in military confrontations with the shah's secret police, the left found itself faced with a completely new set of political conditions and ideological problems in 1978 and in 1979 after the revolution.
Leftist leaders, young and politically inexperienced, failed to utilize the relatively democratic conditions created by the revolutionary process in order to establish links with the working class, the urban poor, and the peasantry. Instead, leftist intellectual leaders expended their energies in sectarian infighting. Hence, no serious attempt was undertaken to create a united front to coordinate the actions of all leftist forces.
Second, the Khomeini regime used the so-called "hostage crisis" and the Iran-Iraq war to mobilize popular support, divert attention from real socioeconomic problems, and to crush the internal opposition. A section of the left disarmed itself voluntarily at the same time the regime was laying plans to destroy the opposition. With one section of the left supporting the regime, and another section opposing it, the rift within the left intensified. Hence, the leftist forces failed to defend themselves against the government's attacks.
The left in an era of division and transition ... At the very moment Khomeini began his greatest onslaught in ... intellectual models of the Iranian left could be grouped under "Soviet communism."
http://www.iran-bulletin.org/left_iran.html excerpt>Twenty years of rule by the Islamic Republic has deepened the long- standing structural crisis of the economy. The country, even by the measures of a peripheral country, is poverty-stricken. Class inequality has reached unbearable proportions. Official figures show that in 1996 the poorest tenth of the population possessed only 1.4% of the national income, while the richest tenth netted 39.8%, a ratio of over 28! The same source estimated that the bottom half took only 16.8% of the national income. Put another way, the top ten percent pocket twice as much as half the population [6]. Things have got worse since. Could the raison d'tre of the left have disappeared in such a society? <snip> Collapse of Soviet Union
This was a global event with global repercussions. The shock wave in Iran was particularly ferocious. First, it opened wounds that the "Islamic revolution" had created and were still fresh. Second, the intellectual models of the Iranian left could be grouped under "Soviet communism". The "new left" in Iran had had a brief and passing bloom in the form of the armed struggle movement in the decade preceding the revolution. With the crushing of the Fadai? movement the new left had in practice withered. Unlike its neighbours, Iran had no significant social democratic movement. With the closure of the dossier of Soviet communism, the theoretical structure of almost the entire left currents in Iran fell apart. The most important grounds for this blow were as follows:
a. The blind alley of "soviet communism" showed that socialism without democracy, whatever its achievements, creates a climate from which people want to escape. Furthermore, in such a system before everything, and more than anything, these very socialist values become discredited. The desire for equality and solidarity pale. Individualism and greed attain the attraction of forbidden fruit and reach epidemic proportions. Lying and deception become the main weapon for survival.
We witnessed how all attempts to deepen democracy or "go beyond bourgeois democracy" is doomed to failure if individual freedoms - or more accurately - negative freedoms are trampled. It ends in an all-embracing despotism. Indeed the seeds for the defeat of Bolshevism were sown at the moment the leaders of the October revolution, in their efforts to defend the young workers state ignored the main nature of modern democracy.
Modern democracy, which historically took shape with the rise of capitalism, unlike older models is based on the principle of "individual autonomy". In the older versions the individual in its modern sense did not exist. While it is true that liberalism emphasises "individual autonomy" because it mistrusts democracy and fears that a broad social will would normally interfere with the rich. Yet supporters of socialism must not ignore the vital role of negative freedoms as complementary to, and a decisive factor for, positive freedoms [2].
b. With the final bankruptcy of the "communist" party-states it became clear that no party could consider itself the representative of the working class through the silence of that class. This remains true regardless of what the party stands for, or what services it has performed for the working class, or continues to do so for that class.
In the ideological moulds of "Soviet communism", the proletariat appeared in practice as an allegorical being, or at least a rational totality independent of the sum total of mortal workers. This semi-mythical entity was manifested in the "communist party".
This was a party that knew what route the historic march of the workers towards liberation had to take. Therefore the historic will of the working class could only be expressed through this party. And since one of the conditions for liberation is the unity of the working class against capital, only one "single" party could be the "historic party of the working class".
Of course, in order to fulfil its mission, this "single historic party of the working class" has to get the real mass of workers to support it: through persuasion before attaining political power and through ensuring their obedience after power. It was thus that the "historic representative" of the working class was transformed into the guardian of that class [3]. The discrediting of such thinking imposes major modification on the way the left views the working class, with enormous consequences.
First, the simple truth that workers as a "class" can only be meaningful through the active participation of the entire work force and not through their silence or absence.
Second, the more the actual the presence of workers, the more the myth of their unanimity and rock-like unity loses its sheen. It is now evident that the class solidarity and unity of the working class is not achievable by melting down the various differences, and even some dissension, among workers but only in parallel to these differences and dissensions. The working "class", like the "people" are understood by the totality of their individuals and groups. Normally these do not forget their special identities and particular interests.
Third, the class solidarity of workers is not negated by a plurality political parties, labour organisations and associations. Indeed, under certain conditions, the organisational plurality of workers might give elbowroom to the varied tendencies in the labour movement and better ensure the class solidarity of workers against capital. It might even help reduce the risk of bureaucratisation of labour organisations - an affliction which turns labour representatives into their bosses. <SNIP>