24.07.2002
Mansoor Hekmat
Amemorial ceremony for Mansoor Hekmat (Zhoobin Razani) will be held by Azar Majedi, Mansoor Hekmat's partner, and the Worker-communist Parties of Iraq and Iran on the afternoon of Sunday July 28 in London. Mansoor Hekmat (Zhoobin Razani), the great Marxist thinker and leader of the Worker-communist Party and worker-communist movement, died on Thursday July 4 in London after a year-long battle with cancer. An abrupt end to an immensely productive life. Zhoobin Razani was born in 1951. He completed his primary and secondary education in Tehran and his higher education, in economics, at the University of Shiraz. He arrived in London in 1973 to continue his postgraduate studies. It was at this time that he turned to reading Marx's Capital and other works. And it was in Marxism that his critical, vibrant and enquiring mind found the answers to fundamental questions on the truth of the existing unjust and inhuman world and the way to change it. Young Zhoobin's profound and uncompromising humanism and love for freedom blended with Marx's radical critique of capitalism. Thus 'Mansoor Hekmat' and Mansoor Hekmat's Marxism were born. This Marxism had no kinship with the existing Marxism. Russian and Chinese communism, the guerrilla warfare movement, social democracy and Trotskyism were all themselves the subject of criticism by Mansoor Hekmat's communism. Contrary to these distorted accounts of Marxism, he began directly from Marx, and brought back to Marxism its humanism and radicalism. Twenty-five years of untiring struggle in the theoretical field, and the political organisation and leadership of a movement that sprang up around these ideas, produced hundreds of theoretical articles and essays, political commentaries, tactical resolutions and organisational action plans; the programme of the Worker-communist Party, A better world; hundreds of speeches and seminars, numerous organisations, projects and publications in various fields; and, above all, the Worker-communist Parties of Iran and Iraq. The practical breadth and diversity, as well as the theoretical depth and clarity, of this great, organised struggle at the head of a movement which Hekmat called worker-communism - brilliantly characterised in one of his deepest and most comprehensive writings Our differences - is unprecedented in the history of the left in Iran and the contemporary world. In Iran today communism and the left are identified with worker-communism. The Worker-communist Party is a powerful and decisive force in Iranian politics and in the movement to overthrow the Islamic Republic regime in Iran. Mansoor Hekmat's works are the beginning of an elaborated, radical Marxism in Iran and the revival and development of Marx's humanist and radical communism in the contemporary world. But the growth and influence of Mansoor Hekmat's worker-communism will not be confined to our era and our generation. As long as there is injustice, inequality, poverty and exploitation in the world, Mansoor Hekmat and the worker-communist movement, whose banner he raised, will live on. For information on or to attend the ceremony, please contact 07730 107337; wpi.international.office@ukonline.co.uk or wpipr@ukonline.co.uk Comrades, It was with great regret that the Provisional Central Committee of the Communist Party of Great Britain learned of the death of comrade Mansoor Hekmat, leading figure in your organisation. It is always a great sadness when communists and partisans of the working class leave us. As materialists, we live in this world and no other. Alongside you, we feel the waste of a talented comrade, taken from us too soon. The tribute we pay to fallen comrades is to pledge ourselves once again to the struggle that was the content of their lives - for a truly human world, for communism. We will send a representative of the representative of the PCC to the commemoration meeting on July 28 With communist greetings, Mark Fischer For the Provisional Central Committee, CPGB
Worker