04.02.2016

A lifelong internationalist

Yassamine Mather salutes a dedicated Marxist fighter

Comrade Torab Haghshenas, who died on January 27 2016, was a revolutionary Marxist, a genuine internationalist and a man of great principle.

He was born into a religious family in Jahrom in southern Iran, and his first political activities were as a member of Islamic societies. But he became a Marxist in the 1970s and was one of the founding members of the Mojahedin-e-Khalq (People’s Mojahedin of Iran). He and his wife, Pouran Bazargan, were amongst members who joined the Marxist split from Mojahedin-e-Khalq in 1975.

The group explained the reasons for the split in a short pamphlet entitled Manifesto on ideological issues, where the leadership of the new organisation declared that “after 10 years of secret existence, four years of armed struggle and two years of intense ideological rethinking” they had reached the conclusion that Marxism, not Islam, was the “true revolutionary philosophy”. Just weeks before the Iranian revolution, in December 1978, the group changed its name to Organisation of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class, after the St Petersburg League of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class, set up in 1895 by Lenin. The new Iranian group was known by leftwing activists as ‘Peykar’ (‘Battle’).

Torab and Pouran (who died in 2007) worked and fought alongside comrades from a number of Palestinian groups in the 1970s and he often commented on how they both learnt a lot about internationalism during that period. He decided to use the occasion of Pouran Bazargan’s funeral to give an oration in which he described those times as though she herself was relating the story:

In 1974 I married Torab Haghshenas, a comrade I had known for a long time. In this marriage … we had no priorities higher than the political struggle. Our involvement with the Palestine movement started during this time. I served in the Palestinian Red Crescent Hospital in Damascus. As such, during the 1970s civil war in Lebanon I moved to the Palestinian hospital in Sabra refugee camp near Beirut. One of the best times of my life was living with the oppressed but resisting people of these regions.

Later on, I was assigned to move to Turkey, where our organisation had established a communication and logistic base. I lived underground and worked in clothing sweat shops and as a hotel worker in order to earn my living; meanwhile I participated in carrying arms from one country to another towards Iran. These life experiences provided us with education and preparation for our future tasks. I learned about the lives of toilers of other nations, and it opened my eyes to the international, rather than national, dimensions of class oppression.

With the growth of our political and military experience and the evolution in the organisation and our society, we came to question our ideological foundations and eventually renounced our religious ideology (which was different from, and often in contradiction with, the traditional conceptions of the clergy, especially those of Khomeini) and shifted towards Marxism. We were all practically ready to accept the new ideology, but it was the leadership of the organisation that had officially declared the change. Of course, I was not at the forefront of this development, but I could understand it and I went along with it.

In this process wrongdoings happened that can never be compensated for, but they cannot camouflage the revolutionary essence of liberation from religious ideology. The methods of the change to Marxism would not have been endorsed by many of the activists of the organisation, if they knew the facts at the time. But in a guerrilla organisation in which the ruling relations strictly limit the exchange of information and ideas, there is no possibility of participation in collective decision-making. At the root of this limitation were the oppressive conditions and the necessity of struggle against the regime …¹

Like most other groups of the Iranian left, Peykar did not survive the terrible repression of the 1980s and many of its members and leaders faced torture and execution, having been singled out by the Islamic authorities as apostates for their conversion from Islam to Marxism.

So Pouran and Torab continued their political activities in exile, translating many works from French, English and Arabic (including a number of books by Palestinian poet and writer Mahmoud Darwish). They both concentrated on a theme that dominated the initial launch of Peykar: a critique of guerrilla movements and armed struggle, where activists were isolated from the workers’ movement, and they set up a publication website, Peykar Andisheh (‘Peykar Thought’).

Torab’s last contribution to the website is dated January 25 2016 - a translation of an article in French in support of the boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign against Israel.

Anti-imperialist

I knew Pouran because of her activities in support of the workers’ movement in Iran, and my conversations with Torab mainly centred around what I wrote about her before² and after³ her death. He was always modest about their work, and was an internationalist and anti-imperialist to the end. While devoted to the Palestinian cause, he remained a committed supporter of the Iranian working class and a knowledgeable opponent of political Islam and the Islamic Republic in Iran.

He had no time for those sections of the Iranian opposition which accepted US regime change funds and he signed this document, entitled ‘We say no to US aid’, in 2006:

We, the undersigned, feel compelled to take a clear position in response to the recent announcement by the US administration to allocate $85 million in aid to groups opposed to the Islamic regime.

1. The independent Iranian opposition deems it indecent and politically immoral to accept any aid (financial or otherwise) from the US or any other government and condemns such aid as a clear insult to the Iranian people.

2. The independent Iranian opposition has always waged its struggle without expecting financial aid from the interested foreign powers, both during the Pahlavi dictatorship, that enjoyed the direct and open support of the United States, and since the outset of the religious despotic regime of the Islamic Republic; and it will not stop its efforts until the emergence of a free, independent and democratic Iran.

3. The objectives of such aid are evident, as it is offered by profit-seekers who have always supported despotism at all important moments in Iranian history and have been - directly and openly or indirectly and secretly - involved in suppressing the patriotic and progressive movements. The Iranian people have not forgotten that the government crushed their efforts to achieve freedom and independence by the shameful coup d’etat against the patriotic government of Dr Mossaddeq in 1953 and pushed Iran into the abyss of the Pahlavi dictatorship.⁴

The Iranian left has lost a dedicated Marxist with valuable experience. A comrade who was a committed socialist and internationalist, whose principled positions ensured he stood out above many of his contemporaries in the exiled community.

yassamine.mather@weeklyworker.co.uk

Notes

1. http://peykarandeesh.org/noFarsi/pouran-BazarganFuneral-Oration.html.

2. www.iran-bulletin.org/IBMEF_1_word%206%20files/Pouran_bazargan.htm.

3. www.iran-bulletin.org/pouran%20bazargan-obit.htm.

4. http://iranian.com/News/2006/March/Images/WesaynotoUSaid.pdf.