Notes on documents of the Iranian Revolutionary Marxists' Tendency

Submitted by AWL on 31 August, 2012 - 4:03

Workers' Liberty has recently begun discussions with the Iranian Revolutionary Marxists' Tendency. The IRMT is a continuation of the Iranian Trotskyist group "Socialism and Revolution", with which our tendency had links in the 1980s. We lost contact with the IRMT after the exile group scattered and the IRMT comrades turned their energies to Iran, returning to Iran itself or to nearby countries; but have recently re-established links.

Political Islam

We in Workers' Liberty have learned a lot from the critique made by the IRMT and its predecessors of political Islam in general and the Iranian regime in particular.

We agree with your comment in IRMT document, "Modern imperialist domination and Islamic fundamentalism", that the nearest historical equivalent to the Pasdaran was the fascist militias of the 1930s. We agree with the clear condemnation of the Islamic regime in the 1983 S&R document "Revolution and Counter-revolution in Iran": "The present degree of the democratic rights actually practised or recognised by the state is only comparable to what existed before the beginnings of the 20th century... The only 'right' recognised by the clerical rulers is that of complete subjugation of everything to the arbitrary rule of the mullahs. The repressive form of the 'republican' state is such that now the new ruling bourgeois factions can intervene even in the private lives of citizens. What the masses are allowed to believe, wear, eat or drink are all decided by the state... the Islamic state is a lot more repressive than an ordinary capitalist dictatorship... In the last two years alone, the Islamic regime has executed 50 times more socialists than the Shah’s regime did in its 30 years of rule."

You also point out that the popular base of Khomeiny's movement was socially similar to that of fascism: "recruited from the huge layers of the urban poor (the unemployed peasant migrants) and the pauperised petty bourgeoisie".

"Third Camp" policy in predatory clashes between global imperialist powers and regional imperialist powers

We agree that taking Trotsky's comments from the 1930s about Italy and Ethiopia, or Britain and Brazil, out of context and applying them mechanically today, to justify siding with Iran in a clash between the US and Iran, is false. There, the context was a world in which most territories were colonies or semi-colonies of European powers, and where the question of self-determination for nations subjected or likely to be subjected to colonial rule or semi-colonial domination arose automatically with almost any clash between a big power and a poor country.

The chief change today is simple. "When comparing the general international situation vis-à-vis the national and colonial question during the early twentieth century with today's conditions there is one main difference: the Comintern was dealing with dependent countries as opposed to independent nations". Poorer countries still suffer economic disadvantage, but this is not the same as political independence, and can be remedied only by global working-class action to destroy the domination of capitalist market mechanisms, not by some elusive further measure of national (political) independence.

Today, Iran has a developed working class. It not only has political independence: it has its own regional-imperialist sway (over the minority nations under the Iranian state) and ambitions.

You comment that "many workers in the west are repelled by what these regimes [Saddam's Iraq, Islamic Iran, etc.] are doing to their own workers, women, students and so on - and they do not have 'the theory' to excuse these atrocities". To tell those workers that "the theory" demands that they nevertheless regard those regimes as somehow progressive when in conflict with states which concede much wider rights to workers is not to "break them from imperialism", but to convince them that what is called Marxism makes no sense.

We agree that: "In places like Iraq or Iran, therefore, the working class should lead the masses in forming an independent third camp - neither with its 'own' bourgeoisie in defence of a 'national interest', nor
with imperialism". The term "imperialism" here presumably means "the USA and its allies", and it would be better to put it that way. The world includes other imperialist or regional-imperialist powers which may clash with the USA.

We believe that in the Kuwait war of 1990-1, the IRMT's forerunners' position - "we did not side with the Baathist regime against US imperialism. We backed the Iraqi masses against both imperialism and its local stooge" - was correct. It was more correct than our position at the time, which contained half-thoughts about siding with Iraq (while opposing the Saddam regime) when US troops entered Iraqi territory. To describe Saddam's regime as "the local stooge" of imperialism seems misplaced here - the regime was acting in its own regional-imperialist interest in trying to seize Kuwait, not as a proxy for some other power - but the gist of the position was correct.

Israel-Palestine and democratic demands

IRMT has posted a document "Zionism declares 'all-out war' on Gaza" (6 April 2012, tagged as first published in January 2009)

The view of Workers' Liberty, in brief, is that in situation of national conflict working-class unity, democracy, and advance to socialism can be realised only by recognising the right of all nations to self-determination.

The Israeli-Jewish nation and the Palestinian-Arab nation are in conflict. Socialists should advocate the right to self-determination for both nations. In other words, two nations, two states.

Only when workers are armed with that democratic programme will progress towards a socialist federation in the region be possible.

In practice, this position means, mostly, campaigning for Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and for Israel to clear the way for a genuinely independent Palestinian state alongside Israel.

It also implies opposition to the forcible conquest and suppression of Israel by the Arab states. Since in this conflict - unlike almost any other national conflict - there is a large body of opinion on the left which does favour the forcible suppression of one of the nations in conflict (the Israeli-Jewish nation), i.e. the forcible suppression of its national self-determination, it is necessary to be explicit about this.

We are glad to see that the IRMT document strongly rejects any support for Hamas. That is a substantial point of agreement.

However, its positive proposal seems to us to dissolve the immediate democratic issues into a "maximalist" slogan.

"The only way forward for all workers and the exploited and oppressed masses of the region, be they Arab, Jewish, Kurdish, Turkish or other nationalities, is to fight a joint struggle against the imposed and artificial borders of imperialism which have separated and weakened them. The removal of these borders is bound up with the toppling of the stooges of imperialism, whether they are sheikhs, kings or 'hereditary presidents'. Smashing the imperialist yoke weighing down on the region and overthrowing capitalism are part of the same struggle. The 'road map' to true peace and the liberation of the workers and exploited masses starts with the establishment of a federation of workers' states in the region".

But the working class in the region must first organise itself independently and arm itself with a socialist and democratic programme. That "start" has to come before the struggle for the federation of workers' states can even begin.

We would be cautious about trying to judge precise slogans for use in Iran, for example, from faraway Britain. However, we agree with the general idea behind the IRMT article "Call for Constituent Assembly in Iran" that the programme of revolutionary socialists must include democratic demands as well as direct revolutionary-socialist demands. The same necessity for democratic demands holds for the Middle East region.

The programme for the working class in the Middle East region - like the Bolsheviks' programme for the working class in the old Tsarist Empire - must include as a main point the right of all the various nations to self-determination. A socialist and democratic federation cannot be a socialist and democratic federation unless it recognises the right of each nation to secede from the federation if it wishes.

Also, the oppressed nations of the region - primarily the Palestinians and the Kurds - need not and should not wait until conditions are ripe for workers' rule across the whole region in order to demand democratic redress. They can and should be supported in their democratic fight for self-determination now, long before those conditions are ripe. Although circumstances are currently unfavourable, it is not at all inconceivable that they could win self-determination even under capitalism.

To call for the removal of all borders, and then for a federation in the region, is contradictory. A federation, rather than a single unified state, implies internal borders.

We don't know whether the article's call for the removal of the existing borders implies a call for the creation of new ones. If so, it should say so, and which new ones it proposes. Otherwise the call says to every nation in the region: we, the socialists, could well want to transgress your national rights by imposing border changes against the will of the populations involved.

There are clear cases where the existing borders should be changed. For example, the Kurdish people, currently divided between Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey, should have the right to redraw borders to achieve a state of their own.

Other detailed changes could be discussed, on the principle outlined by Lenin: "divisions based on the requirements of present-day economic life and in accordance, as far as possible, with the national composition of the population".

In Israel/Palestine, the democratic demand is rather for the respect of existing borders as outlined by international law: i.e. Israel should withdraw to within the 1967 borders, and let the Palestinians establish the independent state also promised to them by international law.

Which other border changes do the comrades propose?

Many borders were drawn arbitrarily. However, units of population and territory demarcated that way may take on real "national" character over the decades. There is, after all, nothing "natural" about national demarcations anywhere. There is nothing "natural" about the border between Germany and Poland, but we oppose the revanchists who would want to redraw it. And the last nine years or so have shown, for example, that Arab Iraq has a real Iraqi national identity.

Despite strongly denouncing Hamas, the article also gives it undeserved credit.

"Hamas was born of the inevitable need of the Palestinian people to resist the Zionist occupation and the denial of basic national and human rights after Fatah surrendered itself to the needs of imperialism in the region".

Actually, Hamas was born of a drive by the Muslim Brotherhood to develop itself among the Palestinians. At first it grew mainly through campaigns to impose "modest dress" on Palestinian women and so on, and was passive on the national question, so much so that Israeli authorities covertly encouraged it as a preferable alternative to the secular nationalists.

As the strength and prestige of political Islam has risen in the region, so has the strength of Hamas, and its boldness about advancing its programme for an Islamic state in Palestine, suppressing both Jews and Christian Arabs.

Hamas was certainly helped to grow by the notorious corruptness of Fatah in its administration of the Palestinian Authority, and its failure to win concessions from Israel.

But what does the article mean by saying "Fatah surrendered itself to the needs of imperialism in the region"? Islamists and Arab chauvinists hold that Fatah "surrendered" by explicitly, in 1988, dropping the demand for the suppression of Israel and supporting a "two-states" solution.

But that move - prompted by the militancy and confidence of the first intifada, not by demoralisation and defeat - was a move forward, from a dead-end revanchist programme to a realisable democratic programme.

One further point in the article causes concern. It routinely refers to the Israeli state as "the Zionist state" or "the Zionists" or just "Zionism", and to "Zionism and imperialism", as if these were Siamese twins.

Historically, Zionism was the umbrella term for ideologies and political projects which proposed the creation of a homeland for the scattered Jewish people.

Revolutionary Marxists opposed Zionism (even the left-wing and would-be Marxist strands of Zionism, which existed) because they thought it utopian and in the name of arguing for Jewish workers to join the class struggle in the countries where they already lived. It was an difference of strategies within an assumed common framework of struggle against anti-semitism. The revolutionary USSR undertook to create a Jewish republic within its boundaries. Though this was eventually realised only as a caricature, under Stalin, Trotsky was rightly clear that he supported the principle. Trotsky in his last years declared: "During my youth I rather leaned toward the prognosis that the Jews of different countries would be assimilated and that the Jewish question would thus disappear in a quasi-automatic fashion. The historical development of the last quarter of a century has not confirmed this perspective". A world socialist federation would create a Jewish homeland: "The very same methods of solving the Jewish question which under decaying capitalism will have a utopian and reactionary character (Zionism) will, under the regime of a socialist federation take on real and salutary meaning".

In fact what Trotsky thought impossible happened after World War Two: a Jewish state was created (at great cost to the Palestinians). The Jewish state is no longer a project, but by now a long-established fact. What does Zionism mean now?

It is not clear. Sometimes the simple demand that the Israeli-Jews be allowed self-determination, i.e. to continue their national state, is damned as "Zionist" (though supporting that demand in no way implies supporting Israeli mistreatment of the Palestinians, or any version of Zionist ideology). Let us assume that by "Zionist" the article means "Israeli chauvinist" or something similar.

Why then use the term as the article does? More or less every national state and government is chauvinist in its pursuit of national interests, and Israel is no exception. Why write "the Zionists" in place of "Israel", with an apparent wish by doing so to add weight and venom to the denunciation of Israeli government misdeeds?

The use of the term "Zionism" as denoting a generic global force of evil, akin to and as bad and as potent as "imperialism", was historically an artefact of the Stalinists' anti-semitic campaign "against Zionism", especially at the end of the 1940s and in the early 1950s. Revolutionary Marxists should not take it up.

The Stalinist states

We agree with the view outlined in the 1993 IRMT document "The Crisis of World Capitalism and the Tasks of the Left", when it criticises the would-be revolutionary socialists who saw the collapse of the Stalinist states as a devastating setback. "Whereas in the current situation the tasks of revolutionaries have not diminished, but have actually increased. The barriers that prevented intervention in the workers' movement until now have disappeared with the collapse of the Soviet Union". Perhaps it would have been better to write, "some of the barriers have disappeared", but the basic thought is right. The collapse of the Stalinist bureaucracies, even when they were replaced by weakly bourgeois-democratic capitalism, as they were, was a collapse of reactionary and powerful ruling classes and of the evil grip they had on the workers' movement worldwide.

We agree with the criticism implied in the document of groups like the French LCR who said after 1991 that it was a "new epoch" needing a "new programme" and "new party". The passage you quote from Trotsky is apt: "The true vanguard, enriched by the experience of defeat, defends with tooth and nail the heritage of revolutionary thought and on this basis attempts to educate new cadres for the mass struggle to come. On the other hand the routinists, centrists, and dilettantes, frightened by defeat, do their best to destroy the authority of revolutionary tradition and go backward in their search for a 'New Word'."

It is not quite right to say, as the 1993 document does, that "Undoubtedly the collapse of the Soviet Union and the eastern European states has changed the international balance of forces in favour of imperialism - especially the United States". The collapse changed the balance of forces in favour of the US for a whole period until it overreached itself in Iraq. But that is not the same as "in favour of imperialism". It changed the balance of forces against Russian imperialism and in favour of US imperialism. Revolutionary socialists had no cause to mourn the old "bipolar" world, and no reason to suppose that the renewed US hegemony would not quickly develop its own contradictions.

It might have been better in the 1993 document to be more cautious about capitalist crisis. In fact the main capitalist powers recovered from the recession of the early 1990s, and there was a period of sizeable expansion of capitalism, especially in China and East Asia, though punctuated by crises like the "Asian crisis" of 1997-8 and the "dot.com crash" of 2001. But revolutionary Marxists do not mourn the expansion of capitalism: we know it also means the expansion of the working class and the expansion of the contradictions of capitalism (which we see coming to a head since 2007).

On the Stalinist states, the IRMT comrades have said that they still hold to the views advocated by the 1980s "Socialism and Revolution" group, expounded for example in a debate with AWL and other groups in 1989 which is recorded in Workers' Liberty 12-13.

There the S&R comrade said: "There was a workers' state [in the USSR] but it has degenerated so that it is no longer a workers' state. Fully fledged capitalism has not returned... Has the bureaucracy become a ruling class? I don't think so... We should not be too hasty to abandon Trotsky's framework, because one fundamental question in that approach was that capitalism has not yet returned..."

We had and have agreement that the Stalinist USSR was not a workers' state. We welcome also your comment in the 1993 IRMT document "The Crisis of World Capitalism and the Tasks of the Left" criticising those "tendencies that called the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua a 'workers’ state'". That indicate also that you reject the attitude of left-wingers who would admit that maybe the stodgy Stalinist USSR was no sort of workers' state, nevertheless to paint up as "workers' states" the fresher and more popular bureaucratic state-monopoly regimes like Cuba. (The theory that Sandinista Nicaragua was a "workers' state" was based on the claim that its regime was moving it towards the model of Cuba).

But there is an unmistakable implication in the view put forward in 1989 that the Stalinist USSR was not as good as a workers' state, yet not as bad as capitalism. The bureaucracy was bad, but not yet so weighty or so coherent as to be a ruling class.

In our view, the idea that fairly stable and self-reproducing systems like the Stalinist states, with fairly stable and self-reproducing ruling groups, could continue and expand for decades without those ruling groups being ruling classes makes a nonsense of Marxist theory.

In any case, however, the implication that the Stalinist states were somehow "in between" being workers' states and capitalist states gives them false credit. Those societies did not have a vestigial element of historic progress, not enough to make them workers' states, and yet enough to save them from being called capitalist. In the space and freedom they allowed to the working class, in their general standards of culture and civilisation, and even, on the whole, in their development of the productivity of human labour, they were behind, not even vestigially ahead of, routine capitalist states.

The question was put to the test a few months after that summer 1989 debate, with the quick collapse of the Stalinist states in Eastern Europe, followed two years later by the collapse of the USSR. There were bourgeois-democratic revolutions, followed by the installation of routine capitalism. Of course we argued for the working-class mobilisations which took place in those revolutions to gain political independence and strike out against capitalism and for workers' governments; we made links with and offered solidarity to groups in those societies which advocated those socialist aims; we denounced the vast suffering caused by the "shock treatment" privatisation and marketisation of the ex-Stalinist economies.

We supported the revolutions - the democratic changes were gains, and the change of economic regime was no regression. Whatever their theories, almost all would-be Trotskyists also supported the revolutions. Logically, however, why support overturns if what they are about is completing the as-yet-incomplete regression from workers' state to capitalism? Logically, it made no sense. Logically, the 1989-91 overturns oblige those who thought that the Stalinist systems were still in some vestigial way post-capitalist to revise their views.

The 2011 document "Some notes on the Concept of Socialism" describes Yugoslavia, China, Cuba and other systems which were basically modelled on the Stalinist USSR (though with local differences) as "transitional societies", presumably in transition from capitalism to socialism. "What we have experienced hitherto – from the USSR through Yugoslavia to China and Cuba in 20th century – are transitional societies in conditions of socio-economic underdevelopment (with an insufficient degree of development of the productive forces), which therefore show, in various ways, severe or extreme forms of bureaucratic deformation and degeneration..." We do not agree.

As the Turkish group Marksist Tutum (see link at bottom) has argued in its documents, a transition from capitalism to socialism can only be driven by the working class in power. The working class was never in power in Tito's Yugoslavia, Mao's China, or Castro's Cuba. It was deprived of all possibilities of independent self-organisation and independent intellectual life by a bureaucratic ruling class (even if that bureaucratic ruling class had at some times fairly wide popular support, in Cuba and in Yugoslavia and among Chinese peasants if not workers).

That same 2011 document talks of "an underdeveloped country, which has carried out its socialist revolution (like China)". In China in 1949, power was taken by a military-bureaucratic machine based on a peasant army which conquered the cities and then continued and increased the police repression of the working class. That is not a socialist revolution. Only a self-emancipating working class can make a socialist revolution.

The analysis of Stalinist systems is important for assessment of Cuba and North Korea today, and important also for understanding the entire shape of the 20th century. Marxism is not just a set of current political positions, but an overview of history and of where and how our activity fits into it. Understanding the shape of the 20th century no more becomes unimportant because we have passed the year 2000 than understanding the succession of modes of production in history becomes an irrelevance because we now live under capitalism.

Notes on documents from Marksist Tutum (Turkey)

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