ON 28 DECEMBER, protesters in the city of Mashhad in Iran took to the streets over soaring rents and food prices following the government’s withdrawal of food subsidies for the poor. This was the first of what have since become many mass protests across Iran, spreading to thirty cities in the course of a few days. Other issues behind the protests have included the loss of savings held by ordinary people in unlicensed banks that have since collapsed.
As with the “Green movement” protests following the rigging of the Presidential election in 2009, which were dominated by middle-class voters friendly towards the neoliberal “reformist” former President and millionaire Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, both men and women have been involved. However, in contrast with 2009, this movement is far more clearly drawn from Iran’s working class and urban poor, primarily raising issues of economic discontent and social justice.
This was precisely the same demographic that brought about the overthrow of the pro-US Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi in 1979. In part, it has also been the electoral base of Iran’s Islamic “conservative” factions, including that of former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the supposed “winner” of the 2009 elections. By contrast, the middle classes who came out onto the streets against Ahmadinejad in 2009 have thus far stayed at home, at best expressing hopes that the “reformist” politicians who they vote for might make some economic concessions to bring the protests to an end.
Qatar’s state-funded broadcaster Al Jazeera, which played such a prominent role in hailing and publicising the “Arab Spring” uprisings of 2011, has displayed a similar caution. In its case, however, it has advised the Iranian state to reform or abolish its unelected and conservative-dominated office of Supreme Leader. This would give the directly-elected President more power, and thus allow the “reformists” to continue their attacks on the living standards of the poorest under the cover of a semblance of more democracy.
A split within the ruling class
On this basis, various analysts have tried to present these protests as simply being a sign of faction-fighting between the “conservative” (or “principalist”) and “reformist” elements within the Islamic Republic’s ruling elites. It certainly appears that the initial protests in Mashhad were called by conservatives opposed to the current reformist President Hassan Rouhani; and the security forces have since arrested Ahmadinejad on a charge of “inciting unrest against the government”.
However, the protests very quickly spiralled out of the control of their conservative initiators, and protesters across the country have expressed opposition to conservatives and reformists alike. Like the early “Arab Spring” protests, which led to the overthrow of dictators in Egypt, Libya and Tunisia (and revolutionary movements against dictatorships in Syria, Bahrain and Yemen), this protest movement so far has no clear “leadership”. Certainly no prominent figures in either political camp so far have felt any need to take responsibility for it, or to claim leadership of it.
In fact, both wings of the regime have been divided in how to respond to this movement. Initial calls by reformists to “respect the right to protest” have evaporated as the protest movement’s opposition to Rouhani’s neoliberal economic programme has become clear; and an initial friendliness towards the protests on the part of some conservatives has quickly been replaced by denunciations of them.
Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Hosseini Khamenei, who in some ways straddles both camps, has described the protests as being “orchestrated” by “Iran’s enemies”. Rouhani’s Vice President for Women and Family Affairs, Masoumeh Ebtekar, tweeted that “protest is a right but protesters should know who is guiding them and who their leader is”.
And hedging his bets, Ahmad Alamolhoda, a leading conservative cleric in Mashhad, criticised the government by saying that “you shouldn’t make people so fed up that they take to the streets”, while warning that “One shouldn’t come out to the streets whenever anyone calls for it. The country’s security matters and our life problems shouldn’t become a tool for the enemy’s victory.”.
Alamolhoda and his son-in-law Ebrahim Raisi had apparently been behind the first protest in Mashhad, which Alamolhoda described as having been “rightful”. And one account of a speech by Ahmadinejad in Bushehr on the first day of protest has the former President saying that: “Everyone should be careful. Any tension, clash, wrongdoing and insult should be condemned and has nothing to do with us or the nation.”.
Alamolhoda specifically criticised protest slogans opposing Iran’s continued involvement in the war in Syria in support of dictator Bashar al-Assad. And it is in part the social end economic consequences of Iran’s effective occupation of Syria that have sparked these protests. This means that any attempt by the conservatives to capitalise on social discontent with the reformists’ poverty-inducing economic programme is effectively playing with fire, given the support of both wings of the regime for Iran’s war in Syria, as some conservatives appear to have discovered to their cost.
A pre-revolutionary situation
This phenomenon, of a split within the ruling elite, is a typical feature of every emerging revolutionary or pre-revolutionary situation. So too is another notable feature of the protest movement: its “leaderless” character, its heterogeneous ideological composition and the confusion apparent in the range of conflicting slogans raised by it.
The “anti-war” slogans raised by some protesters have occasionally struck a nationalist and even a racist tone; for example, “forget Syria and think of us”, “Neither Gaza nor Lebanon, I sacrifice my life for Iran” and even “we are an Aryan race, we don’t worship Arabs”. That said, if Iran’s “worship” of Arabs consists of enabling the Syrian regime’s continuing genocide of its own people, then many of the Arabs in question might prefer not to be so “worshipped”.
And some protesters – a small minority it would appear – have even raised slogans calling for the return of the Shah. These have been countered by slogans calling for an “Iranian republic” in place of the present “Islamic Republic”, and even by slogans saying “no kings, no Shahs, no Supreme Leaders”, “Khamenei you should be ashamed, leave the country alone”, “no longer should there be a choice between bad and worse” and “the poor are oppressed both in Gaza and Iran”.
Overall, however, the protest movement seems eminently progressive in character. It is opposed to poverty, unemployment, inflation, political repression, war and widespread corruption (on the part of both conservatives and reformists). Its main base is amongst the young, the poor and the working class. These protests have come after a year of almost daily strikes over unpaid wages and poor working conditions, and have included calls for the release of political prisoners. There are even reports of some women protesters taking off their veils, an item of clothing that is compulsory for women in the “Islamic Republic”.
The positive duty of solidarity
The first instinct of socialists and labour movement activists towards these protests should be one of solidarity. The labour movement and the organised left in Iran have a positive duty to support and take part in these protests, to fight for progressive demands within them, to counter the influence (where it exists) of monarchists and of the conservative “principalists”, and to try to come to the head of the movement. It is only in this way that the exploited and downtrodden that have come out onto the streets can be assured of any serious victories; and it is only in this way that malevolent forces inside or outside Iran can be prevented from exploiting this movement for their own ends.
And socialists and labour movement activists outside of Iran are under a positive duty to demonstrate and deliver effective solidarity with Iran’s re-emerging working class, whatever self-interested statements of “support” for the protests might have come from US President Donald Trump, from Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu or from the corrupt Saudi ruling dynasty.
This certainly seems to have been the approach of the Trades Union Congress (TUC), the head of whose European Union and International Relations Department Owen Tudor has published an article cataloging the Iranian regime’s numerous abuses against Iranian trade unionists, the crude state repression of protests against the non-payment of wages and the imprisonment of transport union treasurer Reza Shahabi.
Not so however Labour’s Shadow Foreign Secretary Emily Thornberry. In a social media statement quoted in the Communist Party of Britain’s Morning Star newspaper, Thornberry has warned against “rushing to conclusions” on Iran, saying that “the picture surrounding the protests in Iran remains highly uncertain and Western politicians should be cautious in claiming to understand their origins, organisation or objectives when many Iranian experts are still struggling to do so”.
This note of “caution” in responding to popular protests in other countries is a common habit of bourgeois politicians the world over, even when it involves countries whose governments their own states are rhetorically “hostile” to. Notwithstanding Trump’s and Netanyahu’s buffoonish triumphalism, which can only give the Iranian ruling class a stick to beat the protesters with, the normal instinct of ruling classes everywhere is to be careful in what they wish for, lest they get a lot more than they bargained for.
As a politician who might well find herself in government in the very near future – and one moreover who is often to the “right” of Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn on questions of war, intervention, Israel and the role of Britain in NATO – Thornberry might well feel under some obligation to share this official caution. But this attitude also dovetails neatly with the bankrupt politics of the dominant Stalinist and Stalinist-influenced wing of the British anti-war movement, and in particular of much of the Stop the War Coalition over the last seven years, most notoriously over Syria. And here, Jeremy Corbyn’s own politics are as much at fault as Emily Thornberry’s, if not even more so.
Counter-revolutionary “caution” and “regime change”
For this heterogeneous current, whose most notorious public figure is the former Respect MP George Galloway, their first instinct is not one of solidarity and comradely criticism, but of caution and suspicion. They fret in public about who is “really behind” the protests, about how much “instability” they could produce, and about the role of Iran’s regional rivals like Israel and Saudi Arabia. It is the regime rather than the protesters that is given the benefit of the doubt; and it is the protesters rather than regime who are expected to “prove” their credibility and their good intentions.
Part of the problem is that this wing of the anti-war movement has learned much the same lesson from the 2003 invasion of Iraq – and from the outcome of the “Arab Spring” revolutions – that the Western ruling classes have. In a nutshell, this is that “regime change” is a bad thing in and of itself, that it leads only to instability and that authoritarian regimes are best left in place, as a guarantee of “stability”. Its conclusion is that points of contention with authoritarian regimes should be pursued only through methods that fall short of supporting “regime change”, perhaps involving “dialogue” and calls for “reform”.
In this outlook, changes of regime are only ever brought about by outside intervention, and not by the actions of the ignorant unwashed masses. Amongst the most vocal opponents of “regime change” in the anti-war movement, this outlook is often given an “anti-imperialist” gloss. It is however merely the advocacy of a different imperialist policy, one shared in Britain by an “isolationist” wing of the Conservative party, and given a voice in the media by The Spectator and by The Daily Telegraph.
Another part of the problem is that Thornberry, as a reformist social democrat in an imperialist country (and not even an especially left-wing social democrat at that) might be genuinely incapable of imagining labour movement solidarity with the Iranian people taking any other form than the aggressive measures of capitalist states: of economic sanctions, diplomatic isolation, military intervention and threats of war. That we should oppose such measures if anyone tries to advocate them here should be obvious; but this hardly absolves us of the obligation to show solidarity.
Jeremy Corbyn however has no such excuse. As someone who protested against South Africa’s apartheid regime in the 1980s, he should be better placed than most to understand the vital role of the labour movement in showing solidarity with movements against injustice abroad, whatever the professed policy of one’s own government at home.
“Rushing to conclusions”
That Thornberry is influenced by this outlook becomes even clearer when one examines her statement in detail. She begins by welcoming the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, expressing the hope that it could be “the bridge to something better and broader”, including “a dialogue on other issues, from Iran’s regional influence to its approach to human rights, including full freedom for Iranian women”. She then laments a number of “setbacks”, including “Donald Trump’s attempts to undermine the nuclear deal and the escalation of Iran’s proxy wars with Saudi Arabia”.
Here Thornberry shares a strategic outlook with Trump’s predecessor Barack Obama, who had hoped to draw Iran back into its pre-1979 role as a partner of US imperialism in the region, complementing those of (and in competition with) Iran’s Saudi and Israeli regional rivals. Indeed Obama went some way towards accomplishing this goal with the joint US-Iranian military intervention against Islamic State in Iraq, complemented by an effective non-aggression pact with Iran in Syria.
Trump’s threats to tear up the nuclear deal by contrast have gone alongside a provocative rhetoric that has encouraged the bellicose appetites of the Saudi and Israeli ruling classes, even if his administration’s policy towards Iran in Syria and Iraq has changed little from Obama’s thus far. On the other hand, Trump’s support for Saudi Arabia’s proxy war with Iran in Yemen is in complete continuity with Obama’s, albeit from the opposite direction.
After calling on the Iranian authorities to show “restraint” and demanding that peaceful protesters should be treated “fairly”, Thornberry then counsels that there is “an extremely complex set of factors at work, and any attempt to impose a one size fits all understanding of the origins, organisation and objectives of these protests is frankly futile”. She also notes that the Iranian government has been able to call “well-orchestrated and well-attended demonstrations” of its own.
Her conclusion is that we should “avoid rushing to conclusions about what we are seeing and where it will lead”, criticising optimistic initial interpretations of the “Arab Spring” revolutions as “popular protests by ordinary people seeking to overthrow oppressive regimes and usher in a new era of liberal, secular democracies”. Continuing in this vein, she cites the 2013 military coup in Egypt, the “chaos of competing armed factions in Libya” and the civil war in Syria as evidence in favour of not “rushing to conclusions”.
The Egyptian revolution that overthrew the dictator Hosni Mubarak is thus presented not as having been the act of millions of Egyptians, but as the consequence of an error of judgment on the part of over-enthusiastic Western governments. In Libya, where Western military intervention failed to preserve the dictator Muammar Gaddafi’s repressive state apparatus following his overthrow, the lesson is apparently that progressives should not have sympathised with the Libyan people, despite Western interference in their revolution.
And in Syria, where the West’s direct military intervention (when it came) was not to bring about “regime change” but to stabilise the region in order to protect Western interests in Iraq, Thornberry dismisses the strength of the anti-Assad armed rebellion that arose out of the mass street movement against Assad’s dictatorship. She effectively blames this rebellion for the “instability” (that in fact resulted from Assad’s war against his own people) that led to “the creation of ungoverned spaces”, that in turn allowed Islamic State “to branch out from its base in Iraq and spread terror and training camps across the Middle East and North Africa”.
Describing it as being “totally reckless and irresponsible” to “throw our weight behind the Iranian protests”, she concludes that while in the sphere of foreign policy she “will always be on the side of peace, political dialogue, democracy, freedom, female empowerment and human rights”, nevertheless the best way to effect this is to “restore the promise and progress offered by the 2015 nuclear deal”.
The class character of “caution” and “scepticism”
It is not of course as if there are not reasons to be “cautious” or “sceptical” from the outlook of a working-class militant. For example, it is difficult from a distance to have an accurate picture of the scale of the protests or of their prospects; and various outside parties have an obvious interest in exaggerating both.
Anyone worried about this would be best advised to rely for their information, in the first instance, on Iranian socialists, progressives and trade unionists, and not on Russia’s television news channel RT or Iran’s Press TV. Still less should they rely on outlets for conspiracy theorists like Global Research, The Duran or Moon of Alabama, which routinely peddle propaganda for authoritarian right-wing regimes from Syria and Iran through to Myanmar and the Philippines.
There could be all sorts of things that we don’t know about. For example Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), strongly associated with the regime’s conservative wing, has so far avoided too visible a role in the repression of the protest movement. It also just happens that this near-unaccountable “state within a state” is the source of some of Iran’s worst public corruption, and the perpetrator of some of the regime’s bloodiest acts of repression.
Its motives in “keeping out” of the situation thus far could reflect its own factional struggles within the state apparatus; and it could always exploit the situation in the form of a coup, in the same way that the Egyptian military did when it forced Mubarak to stand down in February 2011. However, some protesters have also raised slogans against the “Revolutionary Guards”, and not without reason; and the IRGC’s website announced “the end of the sedition” and the arrest of “troublemakers” on the very first day of the protests.
There are exiled Iranian reactionaries who, like Trump and Netanyahu, have trumpeted their “support” for the protests. These include not only the former Shah’s heir presumptive Reza Pahlavi, but also the People’s Mujahedin of Iran (MEK) of Maryam Rajavi, an Islamist organisation that fought alongside Saddam Hussein’s Iraq during the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war. They have apparently been visible at protests by Iranian expatriates outside Iranian embassies in the last week, although their influence inside the country is negligible, and there is next to no evidence for their having had any influence on the domestic protest movement.
Israel or Saudi Arabia could use the distraction afforded to them by the protests to stage provocations or escalations against Iranian interests in Lebanon or Yemen. This will hardly be the protesters’ fault if it happens, but it could well derail the movement; and it will likely also provide the regime with a “stab in the back” legend to slander its opponents with, like the German military and its reactionary right-wing allies after 1918.
These are all perfectly legitimate concerns, from the standpoint of a socialist or working-class militant. Their starting point is one of solidarity with with Iran’s exploited and oppressed, and of hope for their victory. And these concerns are best addressed through solidarity and comradely advice.
Thornberry’s stated concerns however, with their emphasis on diplomatic agreements like the Iran nuclear deal and on the role of capitalist states, have a different class character altogether. This is the caution not of a working-class militant, but of a bourgeois politician keen on “stability” and the cementing of new state-to-state alliances. And it is one of the tragedies of the present anti-war movement that this is widely seen as in some way being a “left-wing” and “anti-war” position.
If Labour’s shift “to the left” in the sphere of foreign policy means an inability to show solidarity with the labour movement elsewhere, then this is not really a shift to the left at all. Worse still, it allows warmongers like Trump, Netanyahu and UK Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson to pose as “democrats” and “humanitarians” by comparison.
And worst of all, what it produces is a self-fulfilling prophecy. If the Western labour movement cannot show solidarity with the Iranian working class, and if the only “support” that is forthcoming comes from the Iranian regime’s own reactionary and self-interested internal and external adversaries, then this produces exactly the right set of conditions for the regime’s suppression of the protests, for the movement’s disintegration and for the intervention of outside parties. This has already been the outcome in Syria and Libya; and socialists in the Labour party should oppose that same course in Iran this time around also.
