11.04.1996

Party deficit in Iran

Gerry Downing of Socialist Outlook debates the Iranian revolution following a meeting of the Brent Socialist Forum

It was clear at the Brent Socialist Forum debate that the Organisation of Revolutionary Workers of Iran (Rahe Kargar) has reassessed many fundamental issues of communism and drawn many positive conclusions. However, as against the platform, I would propose that:

1. A united front and not a bloc of classes is the correct orientation for establishing the political independence of the working class and creating the conditions for the construction of revolutionary leadership.
2. In Lenin’s April Theses the slogan ‘all power to the Soviets’ meant much more than was admitted at the meeting.

In the period between the early 1900s and 1917 three distinct positions on the nature of the coming revolution developed in Russia.

The Mensheviks said it would be bourgeois led by the liberal bourgeoisie. By their slogan: ‘For the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry’, the Bolsheviks agreed the revolution would be bourgeois but they were uncompromising that only the working class could successfully lead it. They believed an alliance with the peasantry was necessary to win the democratic revolution, allow the country to develop its industry and working class and prepare the second revolution. A variant of this version seems to be the one favoured by Orwi speaker, Arman Arani, at the meeting.

Trotsky’s permanent revolution theory developed out of the events around the failed 1905 revolution. Combined and uneven development (huge, modern factories combined with immense rural backwardness) in the imperialist epoch meant it would not be possible for the working class to capture power on a bourgeois democratic programme, because their own, socialist demands would come to the fore. Neither would it be possible to sustain the revolution within its own borders and survive.

Lenin’s April Theses were a direct attack on the leadership of Kamenev, Stalin and Zinoviev who had followed the logic of the previous Bolshevik line through to its conclusion of capitulation to the provisional government. ‘No, no’, said Lenin. ‘This has become a disastrous position. Those who still hold to it belong to the ‘museum of old Bolsheviks’. We must break with this line and declare “All power to the soviets” as our slogan.’

When Trotsky arrived back from exile he put the same line. Lenin was demanding the second revolution immediately because it was impossible to complete the first and remain within the confines of bourgeois property relations. He was elaborating the theory of permanent revolution, though there is no evidence he ever read Trotsky’s ideas on this.

Dual power existed: there was the democratic Duma, based on bourgeois democracy, and there was the All-Russian Congress of Soviets, based on workers’ democracy. Two powers existed in the land, hostile to each other and mutually exclusive. One must destroy the other. Because of Lenin’s struggle for the April Theses and the flood of revolutionary workers into the organisation the old line was changed in time to secure the revolution.

However, even the revolutionary Comintern (1919-24) still used the old Bolshevik theory that a two-stage revolution was necessary in the semi-colonial and colonial world, though of course asserting that the working class must lead it and rejecting vigorously the Menshevik orientation of assigning the leadership of this revolution to the liberal bourgeoisie.

In China in the early 1920s Zinoviev and Stalin began to adopt the Menshevik theory - led on, it is true, by the Comintern’s instruction to the Chinese CP to enter the Kuomintang without having a sophisticated united front orientation to protect their own and therefore the political independence of the class. Here Stalin’s disastrous theory of the ‘bloc of four classes’ led to the massacre of the Shanghai Soviet in 1927. Even then Stalin refused to learn and pursued a bloc with the left Kuomintang which resulted in further massacres.

Trotsky was forced to universalise his theory of permanent revolution, to reassert the April Theses on an international plane and say that the Chinese revolution had to be led by the working class carrying out the tasks of the bourgeois revolution and constructing socialism at the same time - the proletarian dictatorship. It was for this reason many of the leading intellectuals of the CCP became Trotskyists.

The Iranian revolution was very similar to the Russian revolution, except that the mobilisations were far broader and larger, reflecting the greater relative weight of the Iranian working class. In many ways the political appetite of the masses for communism, reflected in the enormous explosion in the sale of Lenin’s works in particular, was greater. The oil workers’ strike brought the regime of the Shah to its knees.

The shoras were the soviets but the Tudeh Party was not the Bolshevik Party. The Iranian workers lacked, in Trotsky’s words (referring to that other great mass politicisation of a working class, the Spanish revolution), three things: ‘A party, a party, and a party’.

I do not agree with the ideas of a ‘bloc for democracy’ or that Marxism is not an ideology or that it was not possible to ideologically defeat Khomeini’s fundamentalists in the shoras. Nor do I agree with the apparent conclusion that Lenin’s practices directly led to Stalinism because of his lack of democracy. The proletarian dictatorship was the most democratic system that ever evolved for the masses because it was they who actively controlled the whole of society. They had a delegate structure from the bottom up in the neighbourhoods and factories, and the delegates were subject to immediate recall by soviets which met every day when events demanded.

The ‘red terror’ by the Cheka (secret police), was correct in the beginning to defeat counter-revolution, although there are serious questions about how this operated. But it is not correct to conclude that this led inevitably to the suppression of party democracy and the horrendous purges of the 1930s and 1950s.

Likewise with the suppression of the Kronstadt uprising of 1921. There was no privileged bureaucracy as yet from whom the Kronstadt workers and sailors could demand a fairer redistribution of wealth. If Kronstadt succeeded, its demands could only have been met by taking from needy workers elsewhere. Anarchy would have toppled the Soviet regime. The imperialists were poised for just such an event at the strategically important Baltic port. The Workers’ Opposition of Kollontai and her allies suffered from precisely this workerist sectionalism which would have destroyed the revolution had it been allowed to develop.

However the manner of dealing with it was flawed and the revolution lost an important component of its vitality in its suppression. The women’s movement was lost and with it was much of the (relatively) progressive positions on gay oppression, etc. The top leadership of the Bolsheviks were not as advanced in these issues as were the German Social Democrats in their revolutionary era. I note that Orwi has big problems in this area also. Page six of the May-June 1992 Rahe Kargar supplement gives as its position on women, (point F): “The prohibition of marriage under the age of 18”; (point G): “The prohibition of prostitution”. And there is no demand for lesbian and gay liberation.

The same Orwi programme calls for a ‘constituent assembly’, but on minimum democratic demands (and some not so democratic!), and does not see this correct call as a transitional demand to take the masses through the experience of the fullest bourgeois democracy. All the agitation and propaganda of revolutionaries in such an assembly would have to be, ‘For a government of the shoras’, for carrying out the expropriation of the bourgeoisie.

The call on page 4 of the supplement (point A), “The transfer of all political power to the Supreme Council (Shora Aali) of deputies elected by the people”, sounds like the old ‘Supreme Soviet’ of the USSR which was a bogus entity following the destruction of the democratic soviets in neighbourhood and factory level in the middle 1920s.

Lenin was wrong to ban factions within the Bolsheviks in 1921 but it was only meant as a temporary measure and he did begin the struggle against Stalin’s bureaucratic degeneration before he died. He relied on Trotsky to carry this through for him. It has to be said in criticism of Trotsky that he was far too reticent in this struggle in the beginning. He wrongly agreed to the suppression of Lenin’s Testament. When he did begin he defended the heritage of 1917 with everything at his disposal until he was struck down by Stalin’s agent in 1940.

The withered soviets were easy targets for Stalin because the flower of the communist generation died in the civil war against the Whites (remember, the war against Iraq provided Khomeini with his opportunity for counter-revolution). The working class itself was devastated by the early 1920s and could not keep its structures intact without assistance from the German revolution in particular.

The acute disappointment felt by the masses at the failure of the revolutions in Germany, Italy and Hungary allowed Stalin to triumph. As Krupskaya observed, Lenin himself would have eventually fallen victim to the reaction had he lived. Not lack of bourgeois democracy but isolation strangled the revolution, with Stalin as the hangman.