The article below was first published by World-Outlook on May 6, 2024, as the second of the two-part news analysis Iran-Israel Shadow War: Its Role in Mideast Conflict. We are re-publishing it now to bring it to the attention of all our readers — including more than 100 who have subscribed since it first appeared — because it provides valuable background information relevant to understanding current events in the Middle East.

— World-Outlook editors

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(This is the second of two parts. The first can be found here.)

By Argiris Malapanis and Geoff Mirelowitz

Iran’s clerical regime is one of the main forces of reaction operating in the Mideast and Central Asia. Many on the left, in the United States and elsewhere, as well as some supporters of Palestinian self-determination, see only its conflict with U.S. imperialism without critically thinking about its origins or its current role. To understand its current trajectory, it is helpful to trace its roots in the counter-revolution during the 1980s that betrayed the promise of the 1979 Iranian revolution.

Throughout most of 1978, Iranian workers, peasants, and youth challenged the brutal U.S.-backed monarchy of the shah. Until then, Tehran and Tel Aviv, along with the Saudi monarchy, were the backbone of reaction in the region, advancing the interests of local capitalists and landlords and their imperialist backers, primarily in Washington.

Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi ascended to the throne in 1941, inheriting it from his father and ruling in a dictatorial fashion. His secret police and intelligence service, the notorious SAVAK (Organization of National Security and Information), protected the shah’s rule by arresting, torturing, and executing his opponents.

In 1951, bourgeois nationalist forces promising greater democracy won parliamentary elections and Mohammad Mosaddegh became prime minister. Under Mosaddegh, the country’s parliament nationalized the Iranian oil industry controlled until then by the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, a pillar of British imperialism. Mosaddegh’s government was overthrown in 1953 through a military coup. The shah, who had fled the country during the coup’s initial failure, returned to his throne after pro-royalist forces backed by the CIA and the British Secret Intelligence Service succeeded in toppling the democratically elected government.

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Iran’s working people hated the shah’s regime for its decades of despotic rule. By 1978 they had had enough.

One incident in the summer of that year revealed the brutality of Iran’s autocracy and the mood of the masses.

A crowded movie theater in the working-class district of Abadan, a southern Iranian port city, was set on fire on August 19. In one of the worst disasters of its kind in the country’s history, an estimated 600 people died and many more were injured, some critically. The shah, his supporters and big-business media around the world, pointed the finger at “Muslim extremists.” But all the evidence pointed to the shah’s bloodthirsty regime as the culprit.

Funeral processions for the victims of the fire quickly turned into massive antigovernment protests.

The feeling against the shah and his government “is open, virulent, and overwhelmingly widespread,” Washington Post correspondent William Branigan reported from Abadan on August 26.

“Seemingly to a man, residents of this hot, humid town at the head of the Persian Gulf accuse the local police and fire department of responsibility for the magnitude of the disaster by locking the cinema doors, preventing rescue attempts, and displaying sheer incompetence,” Branigan wrote.

Workers’ eyewitness knowledge, combined with the authorities’ unabashed attempts to cover up their crime, sparked the outpouring of working-class outrage.

‘End 50 years of Pahlavi tyranny’

“Swarming into the streets last night, the demonstrators in Abadan shouted, ‘Death to the shah’ and ‘Burn him.’ As the people course through the city there were cries of ‘We want an end to 50 years of Pahlavi tyranny,’ a reference to the shah’s father,” the Post reported.

Mass actions to protest this and other indignities spread in following weeks to Abadan, Shiraz, and other cities. In early September, more than 3 million people turned out in protests across the country demanding an end to the shah’s tyrannical rule.

The monarchy declared martial law and made it clear it would not tolerate more anti-shah actions. When tens of thousands braved curfew restrictions and took to the streets in Tehran and other cities on December 1, 1978, the army opened fire for more than three hours, killing thousands.

This massacre provoked an even more powerful wave of mass mobilizations. At 9 p.m. each evening, when the curfew began, light and power workers shut off electricity, making it impossible for the army to enforce the curfew.  Then almost the entire population of the cities went to the rooftops and began shouting “Death to the shah!” At the same time, smaller demonstrations continued in the streets at night.

The Iranian proletariat responded to ongoing attacks by the military government with a new wave of strikes. The oil workers took the lead, announcing on December 4, 1978, that they had formed a nationwide union, the National Union of the Oil Workers of the Oil Industry of Iran. According to the BBC’s Farsi-language news broadcast at the time, the new union called for a general strike in all oil production facilities — Iran’s main industry — to back up the demand for the overthrow of the Pahlavi dynasty. The strike was 100% effective, the BBC reported.

‘Better darker days now for brighter tomorrows’

Striking power workers explained in a statement to the Iranian people that power outages would not affect vital services such as hospitals, since those facilities had their own emergency generators. They added, “Better to have darker days now for brighter tomorrows.”

Another walkout by workers of the central bank of Iran created a severe shortage of cash and banknotes.

On December 10, 1978, millions poured into the streets of Iran’s major cities in the largest and most powerful demonstrations that year.

In Tehran alone, as many as 2 million people turned out to press for the overthrow of the monarchy. Massive demonstrations took place in other cities. They included 800,000 in Mashad, 700,000 in Tabriz, 300,000 in Isfahan, and thousands more elsewhere, according to wire reports at the time.

Chants and banners captured the mood of the crowd in Tehran. “Help us get rid of the butcher,” multitudes chanted, referring to the shah. “The Shah must be executed!” “Tell Jimmy Carter we want democracy, not a royal tyrant!” This referred to Democrat Jimmy Carter, then U.S. president.

Many of the slogans were printed in English and directed against Washington’s support for the shah. “Criminal Americans get lost!” said one. “U.S. imperialism pull out of Iran!” said numerous others. Perhaps most expressive of all was one that read: “The American president must understand from this demonstration that he is the most hated of all!”

The ascending working-class movement culminated in the February 1979 revolutionary overthrow of the shah’s tyrannical regime. This upheaval was a deep-going social revolution in city and countryside. It reverberated across the Middle East and around the world.

1979 revolution is victorious

From February 9 to 12, 1979, the old regime crumbled under the blows of a popular insurrection. Ministers and generals fled into hiding. Discipline over the ranks of the army disintegrated. Governmental power disappeared.

Committees arose spontaneously and, in many areas, took over the direction of traffic, the evacuation of those wounded in the fighting, and the maintenance of public services in Tehran — then a city of 5 million.

Popular defense guards, or “Islamic marshals,” took control of the major cities of Isfahan, Mashad, Qum, Kermanshah, and Shiraz, as well as dozens of smaller towns and villages throughout the country.

Insurgent soldiers began to elect their own officers. They joined with workers to disarm the few elite military units remaining loyal to the monarchy. Meanwhile, popular committees directed the process of arming the masses, cleaning out police stations, rounding up SAVAK agents, and breaking open the monarchy’s prisons.

Workers in rifle assembly plants ended a strike they had launched as part of the movement to overthrow the monarchy. They restarted production to assemble weapons for the workers.

Working people took over some key installations and communications centers and used them to help organize the uprising.

Workers councils, or shoras, had already been running the country’s giant refineries and oil fields for weeks. Working people needed no help from executives of the oil cartel or from bureaucrats appointed in Tehran.

One thing lacked in Iran: A mass revolutionary working-class party

One thing was lacking in Iran, however, that prevented working people from completing their victory by taking power into their own hands. There was no revolutionary party, composed in its majority of workers and peasants, experienced in the struggles of the oppressed and exploited, and enjoying the respect of the masses.

This allowed the bourgeois forces organized around Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to establish a stable capitalist regime.

Khomeini was an Islamic cleric who became popular due to his uncompromising opposition to the shah’s monarchy, in contrast to most other prominent bourgeois politicians and Islamic clergy who pushed for accommodation with the shah during the mass mobilizations of 1978.

Forced into exile, first in Iraq in the early 1960s and then in France, Khomeini returned to Iran on February 1, 1979, as working people were toppling the monarchy. He was greeted by many as the religious leader of Iran’s revolution. Four days later he announced the formation of a new provisional government. Within a week, the shah’s old army crumbled, declaring its neutrality.

Working people shape political developments

The new regime, led by clerics, maintained capitalist property relations. Its goal was to quell popular unrest, to end the mass movement, and replace the monarchy with a government that would defend the interests of native capitalists and large landowners, even as it came into conflict with Washington and other imperialist powers.

In the first years of the revolution, however, working people were able to continue to shape political developments.

Industrial and other workers who had led the mobilizations to topple shah’s regime organized more factory committees and demanded workers’ control of production. Peasants demanded land reform. Women made gains fighting for equal rights.

Most working people and youth who made the 1979 revolution opposed the royal decree the crown had imposed in the 1930s, in the name of capitalist “modernization,” denying women the right to decide for themselves how to dress in public. The shah’s police who ripped veils off women’s heads and faces were the same cops who dragged workers, peasants, and youth to torture centers and prisons across Iran.

But in March 1979, when Khomeini declared that female employees of government ministries must not go to work “naked” but be “clothed according to Islamic standards,” students, workers and other women and men took to the streets by the tens of thousands across the country. It was the largest International Women’s Day outpouring anywhere in the world that year. Demonstrators fought off organized thugs and forced Khomeini to back down.

The government’s labor ministry later that month announced that women in factories and other workplaces were entitled to equal rights on the job, including the right to participate in elections to the workers councils and to hold office.

Washington had stood behind the shah’s brutal dictatorship. After the overthrow of its client regime, the U.S. government confronted the Iranian people with a campaign of political and economic sabotage. To defend themselves, working people began taking bold measures to free their country from imperialist exploitation, end capitalist profiteering and sabotage, and reconstruct the country on the basis of their needs.

Role of the shoras

To do this, working people organized themselves. This was most evident in the factories, where elected committees of workers, which had sprung up on a wide scale during and immediately after the toppling of the shah, begun to join together for common action.

A powerful example of this was a demonstration by tens of thousands of workers on December 23, 1979, in Tehran.

The Islamic Workers Shora called the action to support the occupation of the U.S. embassy by students in Iran’s capital. The students, who referred to themselves as “Followers of the Imam’s line,” had launched the occupation about two months earlier to demand the extradition of the shah to Iran from Panama — where the deposed monarch had fled — to face justice for his regime’s crimes. The multitudes that turned out, mostly industrial workers from auto plants and other factories, expressed support for the students occupying the embassy and opposition to any compromise with U.S. imperialism.

Spokespeople of the Islamic Workers Shora, which represented 128 factory committees in the Tehran area, read a resolution that solidarized with the “oppressed of the world.” It called on the Iranian government to “cut off the hands of the capitalists who are sabotaging production” by taking control of “all factories in collaboration with the shoras in each plant.”

As Washington and its allies implemented sanctions against the country and promoted sabotage by industrialists and landlords inside Iran, class polarization deepened.

Capitalists and big landowners spoke more openly for compromise with the United States. Many hoarded raw materials to create shortages and jack up prices, sabotaging the economy to protect their own wealth.

The same pressures, however, were met with a different reaction by working people in cities and the countryside.

Peasants demonstrated in Tehran, Qum, and other cities, riding their tractors with their shovels and other farm tools, vowing to increase production in the face of a U.S.-led economic blockade. Small farmers seized many of the big landlords’ estates and called on the government to carry out land reform.

Workers gained self-confidence and experience. They fought for workers’ control of the plants through their shoras and established links with other factories.

Faced with such mass mobilizations, the Iranian government promised to carry out land reform, initiate extensive housing programs, and provide jobs for the unemployed.

The revolutionary upheaval, however, soon faced new challenges when neighboring Iraq invaded Iran on September 22, 1980.

Iran-Iraq war

An article by Samad Sharif in the magazine New International no. 7 provides a succinct explanation of how the Khomeini government’s course during the Iran-Iraq war played a major role in the eventual overthrow of the Iranian revolution.

“Iraq’s capitalist rulers had seen the overturn of the shah’s regime and weakening of the old Iranian armed forces as an opportunity to seize [the] oil-rich Khuzistan Province and the Shatt-al-Arab waterway and nearby port facilities just across Iraq’s long eastern border with Iran,” Sharif explained. “At the same time, they feared the political example of the Iranian revolution on workers and peasants in Iraq and its destabilizing impact on capitalist-landlord regimes throughout the region.

“In October 1978, as the mobilizations in Iran to bring down the shah reached massive proportions, Baghdad had expelled Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini from Iraq, where this opponent of the Iranian monarchy had been living since his forced exile from Iran in 1964. Following the revolution, the Iraqi regime opened its doors to top officials of the shah’s regime and members of the officer corps of the SAVAK and Iranian army; it helped them establish base camps from which to organize armed operations and coup attempts against the new government in Tehran.

“While welcoming these counterrevolutionary forces from Iran, in the spring and summer of 1980 the Iraqi regime uprooted and expelled tens of thousands of Iraqis, alleging they were of Iranian origin. Those forced into exile were mostly from southern Iraq and were followers of the Shiite branch of Islam.”

Shiites constitute a majority of Iraq’s population. But they had historically faced systematic discrimination by the majority Sunni Muslim ruling capitalists and landlords in Iraq. In Iran, the majority of both the population and the ruling class are Shiite.

Washington and its imperialist allies claimed neutrality. In fact, they encouraged the Iraqi aggression, hoping the assault would deal a deathblow to the Iranian revolution and facilitate the imposition of a regime subservient to U.S. interests.

“With revolutionary Iran creating so much tension in the Middle East, Washington would clearly welcome any role the Iraqis might play in stabilizing the Persian Gulf,” declared the Wall Street Journal months before the Iraqi invasion of Iran, pointing to the U.S. machinations underway.

Several imperialist governments — especially Paris, Rome, and London — armed Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq throughout the war. The monarchies in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and other Gulf states, as well as most members of the Arab League, backed Baghdad’s war efforts.

The invading Iraqi forces rapidly occupied 4,000 square miles of Iranian territory.

By the end of 1980, however, Baghdad’s advance ground to a halt. Iranian workers, peasants, and youth volunteered in their hundreds of thousands to resist this imperialist-backed effort to crush the Iranian revolution. Within a little more than a year, Iran’s defending forces recaptured lost territory and drove the Iraqi army across the border. Iranian troops themselves crossed into Iraq in May 1982.

Counter-revolution takes hold by end of 1980s

The war ground on for six years following the initial Iranian victory. Hundreds of thousands lost their lives on both sides. The Iraqi regime launched air and missile attacks on Iranian cities, used chemical weapons, including against Kurdish civilians living in Iraq, and tried to strangle Iran economically.

“The Iranian regime for its part, retaliated by launching attacks on population centers in Iraq and relying on military tactics that resulted in the needless slaughter of tens of thousands of young Iranian workers and peasants who selflessly volunteered to go to the front to defend the revolution,” Sharif’s article explained.

“On the home front, the pressures on working people increased as a result of the military, economic, and social policies of the capitalist regime. The government crackdown on the right to political expression and organization intensified, with mounting numbers of jailings and executions of political activists. The factory shoras were pushed back and dismantled. Attacks accelerated against women fighting for greater social and economic equality. The government rejected implementing an agrarian reform to meet the peasants’ demands for land and the wherewithal to till it.”

Official and government-sponsored thug terror included imprisonment, torture, and executions of members of the Workers Unity Party (HVK), a revolutionary working-class party, and of Tudeh, the Stalinist Communist Party. Both of these groups, as well as many other working-class organizations, were banned during the 1980s.

By 1988, when the war with Iraq ended, the clerics running Tehran had consolidated a theocratic regime on the corpse of the 1979 revolution. They have ruled dictatorially ever since.

In stark contrast to the voluntary mobilizations of Iranian workers and peasants to the battlefront in 1980, in recent years most veterans of the Iran-Iraq war and their offspring have urged young men not to sign up for Quds Force operations in Iraq and Syria. Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps has had to rely on financial coaxing to recruit and hold the forces it needs for wars abroad. Such payments sometimes reach as high as $600-$700 a month, well above the norm for workers and farmers in contemporary Iran. Afghan and other refugees living in Iran are promised citizenship for themselves and their families if they serve.

Mounting deaths and injuries in these wars over the past decade, however, have taken a bitter toll that can’t be compensated with Iranian rials. The carnage falls disproportionately along class lines. It has affected university districts or middle-class areas much less than working-class neighborhoods in major cities and smaller towns, as well as farming villages, across Iran. It is in these working-class areas where many of the 2017-18 protests were centered.

The clerical regime’s Jew hatred vs. Cuba’s revolutionary response

A defining mark of Iran’s theocracy has been its overt Jew hatred. An incident that brought this to the fore was a September 2009 public statement by Iran’s then President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. He called the Nazi Holocaust a “lie and mythical claim,” stirring controversy worldwide.

Cuba’s president Fidel Castro invited Jeffery Goldberg, a reporter for the Atlantic, a U.S.-based magazine, to travel to Havana to interview him on a wide range of topics, including Fidel’s response to the dispute sparked by Ahmadinejad’s remarks.

The Atlantic published Castro’s interview with Goldberg in the fall of 2010.

Fidel made his views about antisemitism crystal clear.

“Castro’s message to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the President of Iran, was not… abstract,” said Goldberg reporting on the interview with Fidel. “Castro repeatedly returned to his excoriation of anti-Semitism. He criticized Ahmadinejad for denying the Holocaust and explained why the Iranian government would better serve the cause of peace by acknowledging the ‘unique’ history of anti-Semitism and trying to understand why Israelis fear for their existence.

“He said the Iranian government should understand the consequences of theological anti-Semitism. ‘This went on for maybe two thousand years,’ he said. ‘I don’t think anyone has been slandered more than the Jews. I would say much more than the Muslims…because they are blamed and slandered for everything…’ The Iranian government should understand that the Jews ‘were expelled from their land, persecuted and mistreated all over the world, as the ones who killed God.’”

Cuba’s leadership — an ardent supporter of the Palestinian liberation struggle to this day — thus offered a revolutionary working-class perspective to those fighting for national self-determination. A perspective clearly counterposed to the reactionary course of Iran’s clerical regime and its allies.

(This was the second of two parts. The first can be found here.)

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