3670. You Are Contaminated

By David Wallace-Wells, The New York Times, August 4, 2025

Everywhere they look, they find particles of pollution, like infinite spores in an endless contagion field. Scientists call that field the “exposome”: the sum of all external exposures encountered by each of us over a lifetime, which portion and shape our fate alongside genes and behavior. Humans are permeable creatures, and we navigate the world like cleaner fish, filtering the waste of civilization partly by absorbing it.

There is plastic in salty sea foam freshly sprayed by crashing waves, in dreamy Japanese mountaintop clouds and in the breath of dolphins. When scientists test Antarctic snow, or the ice upon Mount Everest, plastics are there. When, in 2019, an explorer reached the ocean’s greatest depths in the otherworldly Mariana Trench, he found that plastics had beaten him there, too, miles past the reach of natural light.

Plastic is now threaded through the flesh of fish, where it is interfering with reproduction, and the stalks of plants, where it is interfering with photosynthesis, and in much else we place upon our dinner plates and set about eating. There might be plastic in your saliva, and almost certainly in your blood. Plastic has been found in human hearts and kidneys and other organs, in the breast milk expressed by new mothers and on both sides of their placentas. And because plastic has been found in ovarian follicular fluid and testicular tissue and in the majority of sampled human sperm, it is already embedded in not just the yet-to-be-born but the yet-to-be-conceived.

The penetration appears so complete that some researchers have begun to worry that their methods, too, are compromised by ambient contamination and plastic materials in the lab. Some have called for whole new protocols to systematically stress-test the findings of their colleagues, which seem on first blush simply impossible. But to trust their findings is to believe, for instance, that the buildup inside brain tissue has grown 50 percent in just eight years, and that, as of last year, there might be inside your skull the equivalent of a full plastic spoon — by weight perhaps one-fifth as much polymer as there is brainstem in there.

It isn’t just plastics. Centuries after we began using the term “nature” to describe what it was that modern civilization was despoiling — and several decades since the environmental writer and activist Bill McKibben warned of the end of nature — there is no longer really such a thing, or such a place, as pristine. There is now some kind of contamination in much of what we eat, and breathe, and touch, which is how it gets inside us: by digestion, in the gut; via respiration, in the lungs; and through our pores, the smallest particles delicate enough to slip through the skin when they aren’t being carried, practically weightless, thousands of miles through the air. This essay is the first in a series on the subject — the way our lives are embedded in ecological context, and vice versa, each of us inescapably linked to one another and to the external world, now woven through with waste.

A more poetic phrase is “second body,” which comes from the essayist and novelist Daisy Hildyard, whose beautiful 2017 book of the same name sketches a twinned experience — alongside your fleshly body is another kind, distended through overlapping and external ecosystems. If memory is a butterfly net, collecting some magical fluttering treasures and letting others fly free, so too are those second bodies, trawling for poisons alongside other morsels to eat and breathe and otherwise shape into the stuff of personal fate.

“Your first body could be sitting alone in a church in the center of Marseille,” Hildyard writes, “but your second body is floating above a pharmaceutical plant on the outskirts of the city, it is inside a freight container in the docks, and it is also thousands of miles away, on a flood plain in Bangladesh, in another man’s lungs.”

Beyond plastics, there is PFAS, that category of long-lasting industrial compounds often called “forever chemicals,” pervasive enough that the better branding might be “everywhere chemicals”: found in sea foam and sewage sludge used as fertilizer; in our eggs, in our seafood, in our food wrappers and nonstick pans; in fields of artificial turf, in groundwater serving up to 95 million Americans and in almost half of all sampled tap water in the country. “There’s a new acid in our rain,” the journal Nature recently declared, referring to the forever chemical TFA that has, in two decades, grown six times more prevalent in American surface waters.

Endocrine-disrupting chemicals called phthalates have been found in cosmetics and perfumes and shampoo. And because of the presence of what are called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, cancer risk for children has been estimated to be 10 times higher in playgrounds with poured rubber surfaces introduced to cushion children when they fall.

River deltas are flowing full with nitrogen and phosphorous fertilizer runoff, producing when flushed into larger bodies of water some of the oceans’ most notorious anoxic “dead zones.” Increasingly, waterways are suffused with pharmacological runoff, too: antidepressants and anti-anxiety medications, cocaine and methamphetamine, heart medicine and painkillers. Up to 80 percent of studied American streams are positive for some kind of chemical or drug contamination; researchers estimate that more than 8,000 tons of antibiotics are now discharged into the world’s river systems each year, with 750 million people living within 10 kilometers (six miles) of rivers in which antibiotics exceed accepted standards.

Over the last couple of decades, geologists and like-minded ecologists began to popularize the term “Anthropocene” to describe the new world we all now inhabit — in which, for instance, 96 percent of all mammal life by mass is humans and their livestock. Others tracked the many measures of what they called the “great acceleration” — global explosions of not just carbon dioxide emissions but methane and nitrous oxide, among other forms of pollution and ecosystem degradation. “Maybe this has been our fate all along,” Mark O’Connell wrote in 2023: “to achieve final communion with our own garbage.”

From above comes smoke, with wildfires now routinely blanketing even the Great Plains and dense urban areas with thickly toxic clouds. And even when clear, the air is alive, as The Times’s Carl Zimmer has written, with each of us breathing in more than two thousand gallons of it daily — full of spores and microbes and the industrial detritus known as particulate matter, too. Air pollution, produced primarily by the burning of fossil fuels, kills millions of people each year, globally, and though the number is steadily declining, more than 90 percent of the world still breathes technically unhealthy air.

You may wonder, then, what we mean by “unhealthy.” But the list of medical consequences associated with particulate exposure is long and growing: respiratory disease and cardiac conditions, developmental disorders and various cancers, dementia and Alzheimer’s and premature birth and low birth weight. Studies suggest a link between exposure to air pollution and damaged cognitive performance and economic performance and increased rates of violent crime and hospitalization for mental-health disorders.

Recent research has found a connection between such pollution and genomic changes in the tumors of lung cancer patients who had never smoked, and the chemical contamination produced by wildfire smoke can be detected in local waterways as many as eight years later. And because trees absorb some particulate matter, cutting them down to clear land for roads and agriculture can be powerfully consequential for human health, with one recent paper suggesting Brazilian deforestation was responsible for over 700,000 premature deaths through its effects on air pollution.

The all-over-everywhere penetration of waste is a marvel of industrial civilization, in its way, a sign that a certain kind of human conquest over the planet may be approaching its apex. But it is also not exactly new.

Scientists began taking note of plastic in the ocean in the 1960s and ’70s, around the same time the E.P.A. was established to fight dozens of other forms of environmental contamination, often more visible. And growing recent alarm illustrates one perversely reassuring paradox of some pollution research: With particulate matter, for instance, the findings have gotten grimmer just as the menace itself has begun to subside. In some cases, you can even see the tally of pollution effects as a sign of broader progress, since in previous generations people didn’t live long enough, or healthily enough, for the damage to really register. Nevertheless, there was harm.

There were those who knew that lead was toxic nearly 2,000 years ago, before anyone even tried to leaven gasoline with it; Pliny the Elder called lead a “deadly poison.” Yet half of all Americans alive today were exposed to dangerous levels of lead as children, and half of all children in the developing world have lead poisoning today; one estimate suggests lead was responsible for more than five million cardiovascular disease deaths in a given year, in addition to impeding neurological development and in ways that have been linked to increased criminal behavior.

Some have suggested lead explains the sudden rise of serial killers in the United States during the 1970s and ’80s, and others that you can write the whole history of postwar American politics in lead: an inner-city crime wave, supercharged by leaded gas and paint, powering white flight and suburbanization and the racialized politics that followed. This is not to mention the thesis that lead exposure uniquely deformed the brain development of Generation X, or recent research suggesting such poisoning could have brought down Ancient Rome — which, other historians now say, was felled in part by the contagion of plague.

Viruses and bacteria form a contagion field, as well, shaping some lives long after an initial illness subsides. We learned this pattern during the pandemic emergency, and fearfully called it “long Covid” before devolving into debates about whether it was real. A better term might be “long everything,” since infections of all kinds have knock-on effects, many of them hard to believe at first: that Epstein-Barr, which also causes mononucleosis, may elevate your risk of M.S. 32 times over, that the parasite Toxoplasma gondii, common in house cats, can potentially nearly double your risk of schizophrenia, and that “sleeping” cancer cells in the lungs can be reactivated in patients in remission by infection with flu or Covid-19. Perhaps this seems a bit eerie, but we might want to apply the same frame to many more aspects of the exposome: that much of what we chalk up to chance or bad luck may prove, in time and in part, explicable.

In the aftermath of the pandemic emergency, MAHA has proselytized about the infiltration of our agriculture by chemical contaminants, and though the current risks to human health from pesticides and foods that MAHA has singled out appear somewhere between modest and trivial, the fact of environmental contagion through farming is real.

Some studies suggest exposure to multiple pesticides might raise the risk of pregnancy complications, and could potentially increase the risk of childhood brain cancer by more than a third. Iowa reports the country’s second-highest cancer rates, which some researchers and residents suspect is the result of pesticides and insecticides and fertilizer. Simply living near a golf course, one study recently documented, can more than double your risk of Parkinson’s, likely through exposure to pesticides sprayed on the grass and seeping into local waterways. The effect is sometimes called “pesticide drift,” which suggests another way of imagining the exposome is through the evocative phrase “drift harms.”

If this all triggers expansive, even mythic reveries in you — well, it does in me, too. Americans have been so raised on stories of self-reliance and self-ownership, the principles of personal responsibility and personal agency and personal autonomy, that it is hard to make room for any ecological influence without drawing on analogies that seem squishy, conspiratorial, New Age-y, naïve.

But I think of the immanent, capricious spirits of our polytheistic past, or of the shadow stitched back onto the stockinged leg of Peter Pan. I think of the way that environmental conditions have so shaped the lives of humans that we know them now, from elementary school, as a species-scale evolutionary force — even while we tell ourselves, seemingly every day, that we are the masters of our own destinies.

I think of environmental forces helping bring about the collapse of whole empires, from the Akkadian to the Ming. I think of everything we’ve learned about the gut microbiome, in recent years — its potential to regulate mood and body mass and the progress of disease and mental health — and what it would mean to expand the horizon of that understanding so that it lassoes much more of the external world into its conceptual reach. I think of smoke escaping from a point source, then dissipating and descending, seeding the surrounding community with just a few more cases of cancer or C.O.P.D. Inside those homes — whether they lie within what are called “sacrifice zones” or beyond them — do those grieving the dead think to ask what killed them?

Humans are porous beings, in ways more fluid than fortress. And though environmental contamination is not new it increasingly plays like a grievous violation: In an age of social atomization we are growing ever more enamored with the ideal of the independent self and the fantasy of the body as autonomy incarnate. In its maximalist form, at least, each is an illusion. Every time we pant, or press, or swallow, we welcome into not just our delicate biology but into those cherished fables, too, the ecological influence of the exposome.

As ever, the news sounds hysterical, so many hair-raising headlines about environmental contamination it can be hard to judge what is new or newly alarming. And perhaps it is a bit hysterical. The precise effects remain broadly mysterious, partly because the science of the exposome is young, and when it comes to matters of what MAHA calls “bodily autonomy,” we tend to fill in blanks with panic.

You may read about a connection between microplastics and diabetes, or come across the phrase “Teflon flu.” You may hear warnings from influencers and government health officials, too, about a chronic illness epidemic, or even the universal poisoning of our children. But the signs we can recognize today point toward something more like unsettling degradation than an onrushing medical apocalypse. Look out over the horizon at the shape of human health and the effects do not exactly stand out like lighthouses. You’ve got to look a bit more closely.

Eighty percent of people’s blood samples may contain microplastics, after all, but 80 percent of us aren’t yet dying of blood cancers. Colorectal cancer does not dominate health outcomes for those under 50, but environmental contamination may play a role in its recent rise among the young. Overall, cancer death rates have been dropping, and survival rates have been rising, for the many decades of pollution’s Great Acceleration. And though we encounter reports now daily, it seems, about toxic substances in our baby food and our tampons, our air fresheners and our yoga pants, we rarely ask, how toxic? At what dose? To how many? And compared to what?

The dose matters, which is why it might be safer to eat food from an industrial farm than to live next door to it. But each element of the contagion field, growing or shrinking, is also governed by what I call the rule of little numbers in a big world, which explains how even small effects quickly add up.

Perhaps a novel disease kills fewer than 1 percent of those infected, but when billions fall sick, the death toll grows world-historical. Perhaps you are breathing air tainted with wildfire smoke only several weeks each year, and perhaps the risks to your health are only on the margins, but when the same is true for tens of millions across the West — or Midwest, or Eastern Seaboard — the damage mounts. For anybody in particular, the additional danger can seem trivial. But no accounting at the individual level truly tells the story of ecological risk, which is held collectively, however unequal its distribution. And no individual action is sufficient to eliminate it. This is, of course, a fundamental principle of public health, though in the aftermath of our most recent public health emergency the country appears to have turned away from it.

Whole environmental movements of the past have been built on fears of incipient contamination. But what are the lessons when pollution is seemingly everywhere, and in everyone, already?

Today, it is no longer entirely rational to imagine an escape, though, reflexively, we do so anyway — entertaining fantasies of purification and paying for novel detox treatments. Perhaps we will soon be cultivating gut microbes to chew through PFAS collecting in our digestive tracts; perhaps we will unleash microscopic G.M.O. sanitation teams on 27 million metric tons of nanoplastics in the oceans. Already, there are those undertaking a kind of boutique dialysis treatment claiming to rid the blood of microplastics. But for most of us, this doesn’t seem like the kind of problem you can so easily solve — say, by discarding a worn plastic spatula or restricting your child to wood-chip playgrounds.

Progress through public policy isn’t easy, either, though improvements over decades past suggest it is, nevertheless, possible. Internationally, final negotiations to produce a global plastics treaty begin this week — but in the absence of policy, production is expected to double or triple over the next decades, and global plastic manufacturing has grown more than 400-fold since World War II. The author Assaad Razzouk calls it “the mother of all oil spills,” and, because plastics are made from fossil fuels, it was put there by some pretty familiar environmental villains. For decades, we were told that the problem of plastic could be solved by recycling, though those in the industry knew it wasn’t true and probably would never be.

Domestically, the Clean Air Act counts as probably the most beneficent piece of environmental legislation in American history, saving still more than 200,000 lives each year. But the E.P.A. is looking not to extend those gains or the kinds of standards and regulations which produced them. Instead, the agency is moving backward, as rollbacks to environmental policy threaten to unleash mercury and dioxins and even lead into our mouths and lungs. Last month, it proposed bringing back the herbicide dicamba, banned twice by federal courts since just 2020, and Donald Trump granted 12 petrochemical facilities in Louisiana’s “cancer alley” two-year exemptions from regulations to reduce cancer risk. As MAHA promises less food dye, MAGA gives us more pollution, as though anyone anywhere was clamoring for it.

If anything, we are clamoring for the opposite: a cleaner and less polluted world, as MAHA, in all its confusion, reminds us. In many cases, in many places, Americans are fighting for piecemeal progress too — with lawsuits, in state legislatures, with local ordinances — because another lesson of universal-seeming contamination is that, while true purification of the world may be a naïve goal, reductions do matter, particularly at the point of production.

Those little numbers add up, too, and also instruct us: Environmental contagion is important not because it is possible to keep everything at bay, but precisely because we cannot. The world is inside us, now. What are we going to do about it?

3669. A Brief History of the Iranian Trotskyist Movement

 By Kamran Nayeri, July 17, 2025

Author's note: The following is a chapter of my upcoming book Between Dreams and Reality: Essays on Revolution and Socialism (2025). This chapter draws on earlier accounts in ""Can the Vanguard Party Emancipate Humanity? A Review of the Party: Socialist Workers Party: 1960-1988" (2012), a review of Barry Sheppard's two-volume book, in which I argued micro-Leninist parties are prone to crisis, and a recent essay "A Review of the Emergence and Decline of Iranian Trotskyism" in Farsi published in Critique of Political Economy, socialist website (نقد اقتصاد سیاسی) in Iran, in June 2025.  In this chapter I do not deal with other socialist currents and their role in the revolution. I have discussed this in "The Rise and Fall of the 1979 Iranian Revolution and Its Lessons for Today" (Nayeri and Nassab 2006).  I used the actual names of Iranian Trotskyists who were publicly known or I had reason to beleive they would not object (for example, if they have deceased). Otherwise, I have used their party names.

                                                                         *       *        *

In this chapter, I will outline the significant junctures in the history of the Iranian Trotskyist movement (1971-1982) to achieve two goals simultaneously: to examine the actual functioning of our movement and how the theory of the vanguard party was carried out in the case of Iran, especially during the Iranian Revolution.  I present this history intertwined with my role in it as I happened to play a role in significant junctures in this history. At the same time, I want the reader to know that while I have ensured my account is supported by documentary evidence it is my account of our history.  Perhaps others would tell a somewhat different story depending on the role they played in it.

As I will explain below, the Iranian Trotskyist movement originated in the U.S. to form the Sattar League in 1971, and with a few years' delay in England in the formation of Supporters of Fourth International in Europe and the Middle East, which I will denote as the Kand-o-Kav group (the name of their magazine) for brevity. My account for the early years focuses on the Sattar League. The two groups fused in the aftermath of the February 1979 revolution. Thus, my decision to recount the history of our movement often through my own direct experiences, which of necessity lack details about the early years of the Kand-o-Kav group. I hope others will write about our shared history, shedding light on aspects I did not consider myself knowledgeable enough to write about.    

1. Becoming a Trotskyist

In the fall of 1971, when I was a sophomore at the University of Texas at Austin (UT-Austin), I considered myself a socialist after reading Erich Fromm's book The Concept of Man in Marx (1961).  Marx's focus on alienation as the root cause of social problems in capitalist society, along with his view of socialism as an unalienated society, appealed to me. Fromm, a psychoanalyst, was affiliated with the Institute for Social Research in Germany. Inspired by Marx's writings, these thinkers critiqued capitalism and examined social, cultural, and philosophical issues in pursuit of human liberation. They became known as Frankfurt School.

Although the Frankfurt School project was more in line with my temperament, I was soon drawn into daily political activity against the dictatorship of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and for the development of the Iranian socialist movement. Thus, I postponed a systematic study of Marx's theories for decades. 

As an activist in the Iranian Student Association (ISA) at UT-Austin, I was soon forced to side with either Trotskyist or Maoist currents. 

On October 22, 1972, twelve writers, poets, and filmmakers, including Khosrow Golsorkh (  خسرو گلسرخی, January 23, 1944 – February 18, 1974) and Keramat Daneshian (کرامت دانشیان , 1974–1944-February 18, 1974) were arrested on charges of plotting to kidnap and assassinate the Shah and his family at the Shiraz Film Festival.

At a meeting of the ISA, I called for the formation of a committee to fight for the freedom of the 12. Ali Shakeri, a Maoist who was the ISA Organizational Secretary, deferred any activity in this regard to the "guidance" of the U.S. Organization of the Confederation of Iranian Students abroad.  

The Confederation was organized by Iranian students in Europe and the U.S. to oppose the dictatorship of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah, who was reinstated to power after a CIA/MI6 coup d'état in August 1953 that overthrew the nationalist government of Mohammad Mossadegh. Pro-Beijing and pro-Moscow Stalinists, as well as the nationalists of the National Front, took its leadership. However, the pro-Moscow Tudeh Party members and supporters were expelled by the Maoists as the split between Mao and Khruschev widened. The Maoist groups dominated the Confederation, and each tried to use ISAs they dominated as front organization for their party. Before the 1979 Iranian revolution, the Confederation split into competing sections, each under the control of a Maoist group. 

Eventually, Shakeri reported to the ISA meeting that the U.S. Organization of the Iranian Students Association opposed defending all 12 because some of them were liberals, and the government might have arrested them along with the revolutionaries so that they could testify against the revolutionaries in court. Although I was not familiar with the revolutionary defense policy at that time, I believed that the ISA had a duty to defend the rights of all victims of the Shah's regime, regardless of their political beliefs. The Trotskyists and some independent students also agreed with this principle, and soon we formed a temporary committee to fight for the freedom of the 12. 

The Maoist leadership of the ISA expelled all those who were actively involved in the defense committee. Those expelled formed a Democratic ISA and began publishing a stenciled magazine named Payam-e Daneshjoo (پیام دانشجو, Student's Message). 

As a result, independent students became more open to Trotskyism, and some began reading Trotsky's books, such as The Revolution Betrayed: What Is the Soviet Union and Where Is It Going? (1936) and The Third International After Lenin (1928).

After reading Trotsky, I was drawn to his internationalist conception of socialism and commitment to world revolution, as opposed to Stalin's Russian nationalist notion of "socialism in one country." I admired Trotsky for his fight against the Stalinist counter-revolution. 

At the same time, I gravitated to the U.S. Socialist Workers Party (SWP). I began to read about its history and attended its conferences and conventions. The SWP traced its history back to its founder, James P. Cannon, and the Bolsheviks and the Russian socialist revolution. A son of Irish immigrants, Cannon joined the Socialist Party of America in 1908 and the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in 1911. He was a leader of the Communist Party, which was founded under the influence of the Russian socialist revolution in November 1917. Cannon was a member of the Executive Committee of the Communist International. When attending the Sixth Congress of the Communist International in Moscow in 1928, Cannon obtained a copy of Trotsky's critique of the draft political program, which was based on Stalin's theory of socialism in one country and his policy of class collaboration with the "national bourgeoisie" during the 1927 Chinese Revolution. Cannon was expelled from the Communist Party for his agreement with Trotsky's views. Together with Max Shachtman and Martin Abern, Cannon founded the Communist League of America as a Left Opposition party in late 1928, alongside Max Shachtman and Martin Abern. He became its National Secretary. Canon served in that position until 1953. In 1923, Trotsky organized the Left Opposition within the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, which Stalin disbanded, and Trotsky was sent into internal exile. 

In 1938, on Trotsky's initiative, Left Opposition parties established the Fourth international based on the programmatic document Trotsky (1938) drafted: The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International: The Mobilization of the Masses around Transitional Demands to Prepare the Conquest of Power, better known as The Transitional Program. 

James P. Cannon and the Vanguard Party

In the article “The Revolutionary Party & Its Role in the Struggle for Socialism” (1967

Cannon wrote: “The greatest contribution to the arsenal of Marxism since the death of Engels in 1895 was Lenin’s conception of the vanguard party as the organizer and director of the proletarian revolution.” He added: “It is deep-rooted in two of the weightiest realities of the 20th century: the actuality of the workers’ struggle for the conquest of power, and the necessity of creating a leadership capable of carrying it through to the end.” (Cannon 1967; my emphasis). Perhaps Cannon did not know, and I certainly did not know at the time, that the phrases in italic in the quotation above represent a radical break with Marx’s theory of the proletariat and socialist revolution, as I have discussed thoroughly in this book. It was not until the 1990s that I realized this fact. However, it has been before the eyes of anyone who has read The Communist Manifesto (1848). Marx and Engels wrote, “The Communists do not form a separate party opposed to the other working-class parties.” The Communists, they wrote, distinguish themselves (1) by pointing “out and bringing to the front the common interests of the entire proletariat, independently of all nationality,” and (2) “they always and everywhere represent the interests of the movement as a whole.” In General Rules of the International Workingmen’s Association (First International), Marx (1867) wrote: “the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves.” 

For Marx, socialism required self-organization and self-mobilization of the working class. 

However, in What Is to Be Done? Lenin wrote:  

“There could not have been Social-Democratic [socialist] consciousness among the workers. It would have to be brought to them from without.” Thus, he placed the vanguard party (Leninist party) ahead of the working class in the fight for socialism. Trotsky, who embraced Lenin’s theory of the vanguard party in 1917 when he joined the Bolshevik Party as one of its top leaders, devoted the Fourth International to this conception of the proletariat and socialist revolution. Its programmatic document opens with this assertion: “The world political situation as a whole is chiefly characterized by a historical crisis of the leadership of the proletariat (Lenin, 1902).” 

Moreover, in the 1960s when Cannon wrote his essay, there had been no “actual” workers’ struggle for the conquest of power anywhere in the world for decades. The October 1917 revolution in Russia was perhaps the closest situation to what Cannon imagined; However, the Bolshevik Party played a key role through its agitation for “all powers to the soviets” and in organizing the takeover of the state apparatus in October. The revolutions of the twentieth century that we thought of as socialist were led by Stalinist parties, which were mainly supported by the peasantry. There was little industrialization and a relatively small industrial working class in China, Vietnam, North Korea, Yugoslavia, and Cuba. Today, not a single country claims to be building socialism (see Chapter 12).

The difference between the vanguardist theory of the socialist revolution and Marx’s theory is substantial. Not only does Marx consider the proletariat as the social agency for socialism, but he also deeply believed it had the potential to emancipate itself. In contrast, by denying this potential, Lenin gave a historical role to the socialist intelligentsia and made the vanguard party essential to “organize and direct” the proletariat to carry through the socialist revolution. In Marx’s theory of socialism, the goal is to eliminate all forms of alienation, thereby eliminating mediations such as the state and the market, and we may add the party. What socialism has become has been variously defined and differs among various vanguardist currents. For practitioners of vanguard parties, socialism has been identified with a “workers’ state” dominated by the party, aimed at creating a “just society.” 

It took me years to arrive at this conclusion. In the interim, I spent 18 years of my life trying to help build a Leninist party. 

2. The Sattar League

Mahmoud Sayrafizadeh was the first Iranian Trotskyist who joined the SWP in the early 1960s.  He came to the U.S. on a college scholarship just before the CIA 1953 coup that overthrew the democratically elected nationalist government of Mohammad Mossadegh.  An Azerbaijani, he grew up in Tabriz during the revolutionary period that opened up with the occupation of Iran by the Allied armies in 1941 and closed with the CIA coup in 1953. The Red Army occupied Azerbaijan. In September 1946, the Democratic Party of Azerbaijan (DPA) (فرقه دموکرات) established the autonomous Azerbaijan People’s Government that carried out important reforms. However, after the withdrawal of the Red Army, the central government forces overthrew the People’s Government in November 1947.[xiii] The leaders of the DPA who escaped to the Soviet Union faced harassment, and some were executed. These events left their mark on Sayrafizadeh.  He joined the emerging nationalist student movement in the U.S. and Europe that opposed the coup and the Shah’s regime in the late 1950s.  By 1960-61, they established the Confederation of Iranian Students that was based in Europe.  Soon, the National Front (a bourgeois nationalist formation) and the Maoists took over the Confederation by expelling the pro-Moscow Tudeh Party and its followers. Despite its progressive function—thousands of radicalized Iranian students joined its campaigns throughout its history--the sectarian nature of the Confederation’s leadership resulted in its perpetual crisis. By the 1979 revolution, it had fractured into several competing organizations, each claiming to represent the Confederation 

The first Iranian Trotskyist organization was the Sattar League, named after the plebeian revolutionary Sattar Khan, who participated in the 1906 Constitutional Revolution.   There is no written history of the formation of the Sattar League. From conversations with the “old timers,” I learned that several people, including Mahmoud Sayrafizadeh, Babak Zahraie, Siamak Zahraie, and Fariborz Khasha, were among the founders of what was first known as the Nucleus (هسته). The last three were a generation younger and had radicalized as students in Northern California, becoming Trotskyists through contact with the Young Socialist Alliance (YSA) during the successful campaign in Seattle to stop the deportation of Babak Zahraie, who was a student anti-Vietnam War activist.

In the early 1970s, three geographic regions were the sources of early recruits to this movement. Sayrafizadeh recruited a few in the Northeast (Boston region and New York-New Jersey region).  The West Coast — North California, and subsequently Seattle, where Zahraie’s defense campaign was based—was another region. Here, Babak Zahraie played a leading role due to his defense campaign, as well as his personal qualities. The third location, and with a time lag of a year or two, was the University of Texas at Austin, where a few radicalized Iranian students were won over to Trotskyism through individual efforts and encounters with the YSA, or by meeting Iranian Trotskyists from the East or West Coast. They were then able to recruit a significant number of others. Among these early Trotskyists were Nader Javadi, Farhad Nouri, and Faheem Panah. 

Rapid early gains

Between 1972 and 1974, the Sattar League took shape through the establishment of three highly successful projects: a publishing house, an ongoing committee to defend political prisoners in Iran, and a quarterly magazine, later published monthly and, briefly, weekly, just before the February 1979 revolution. A brief description of these follows.

Fanus Publishers (انتشارات فانوس) was established with the publication of the pamphlet "Oppression of Women in Iran" in 1972. With a stunning cover page photo of an older woman in a scarf, the pamphlet included articles by the SWP feminist anthropologist Evelyn Reed, translated into Farsi by Azar Tabari (Afsaneh Najmabadi), the first female Iranian Trotskyist, and an article criticizing anti-women Islamic laws under the Shah that Tabari co-authored with Forugh Rad (Nasrin Pakizegi), another early feminist Trotskyist. Soon, Fanus also published a Farsi translation of "Dynamics of the World Revolution," the 1963 reunification document of the Fourth International; a translation of Trotsky's theory of Permanent Revolution"; and Sayrafizadeh’s book, Nationality and Revolution in Iran. The book became an important recruitment and educational tool, as it provided an account of the social movements, revolutions, and counter-revolutions in modern Iranian history, using the theory of Permanent Revolution as its organizing principle. However, the book also was theoretically seriously flawed as I will explain later in this chapter. Fanus published several key writings of Trotsky and SWP leaders, such as Cannon and George Novack, in Farsi. 

Iranian Trotskyists were the prominent leaders and activists of the Committee for Artistic and Intellectual Freedom in Iran (CAIFI). Formed in 1973 to defend Reza Baraheni, a well-known Iranian author, poet, and literary critic of Azeri origin, and a founder of the Writers Association of Iran. CAIFI challenged the ultra-left sectarian defense policy of the Confederation of Iranian Students by defending prominent political prisoners regardless of their ideological views while drawing attention to the plight of all political prisoners through building the broadest possible coalition using democratic organizational methods. CAIFI won over the support of some prominent liberal Americans, including Kay Boyle, Daniel Ellsberg, and Ramsey Clark.  CAIFI received a boost when, under international pressure, Baraheni was released and was able to travel to the U.S. to agree to be a keynote speaker for CAIFI-sponsored events, attracting even more support for its campaigns.  In just a few years, CAIFI became the most successful defender of the Shah's political prisoners.  CAIFI's mission was finally accomplished when the February 1979 revolution freed all the Shah's political prisoners. In the process, Sattar League activists gained a great deal of knowledge about conducting defense campaigns. This skill proved invaluable under the Islamic Republic regime that came to power after the February 1979 revolution.

In 1973, the Sattar League began publishing a magazine named Payam-e Danshjoo (Student's Message), پیام دانشجو.  It originated as the organ of the Students for an Open and Democratic Iranian Student Association at the University of Texas at Austin.  In 1971, radicalized Iranian students took over the leadership of the Iranian Student Association at UT-Austin from a monarchist clique. However, it soon became clear that the new leadership was dominated by the Maoists, who answered only to the U.S. Organization of the Iranian Students Associations (OISA or Saazmaan-e Amrika), an affiliate of the Confederation of Iranian Students, which they controlled. A conflict arose between the Maoist-dominated ISA leadership and the Trotskyists, as well as many independents who sought to initiate their activities. The latter formed Students for an Open and Democratic ISA and began to publish Payam-e Daneshjoo as a newsletter.  On March 17, 1974, the conflict came to a head; the Maoists expelled more than 30 ISA members who supported the Students for an Open and Democratic ISA. In June 1974, Payam-e Daneshjoo was published in a new, more professional format as issue 1 of volume 2.  Soon, Payam-e Daneshjoo began to publish in New York and was recognized as the national magazine associated with the Iranian Trotskyists in the U.S. Over time, its editorial and technical staff improved, as did its content, form, frequency of publication, and circulation. It ceased publication in January 1979 when the Sattar League members returned to Iran to participate in the revolution.

The Kand-o-Kav group

Despite these impressive gains, the SL suffered a split in early 1974. Political differences emerged in a written internal discussion that centered on a document Sayrafizadeh had written (dated May 23, 1973) about the nature of the Confederation of Iranian Students and the SL tasks.  The political attitude towards the national question was the central issue of contention. Still, two other issues were also raised: the construction of Leninist parties in countries under dictatorship, particularly in Iran, and how to organize defense campaigns. Those who left generally believed that in the "imperialist epoch," all nationalist movements were reactionary. Arash, who in January 1974 declared a tendency based on these three points, argued that in the Third World, that are usually under dictatorial regimes, those who wanted to build Leninist parties should receive military training as a means of self-defense. He also argued that defense campaigns should reflect "our program," disagreeing with the CAIFI's strategy explained above. Some of these ideas gained popularity in the Iranian student movement of the 1970s. In numerical terms, this was a small split of a few people. However, those who left eventually joined radicalized Iranian students who supported the Fourth International's International Majority Tendency (IMT) while the SL remained in agreement with the Leninist Trotskyist Faction (LTF). I will discuss this episode in the life of the Fourth International soon. The most significant among those who left was Afsaneh Najmabadi (آبادی افسانه نجم), a self-confident, cerebral young feminist who quit graduate studies in nuclear physics for revolutionary work. Najmabadi moved to England, where a group of Iranian Trotskyists had formed. In the fall of 1974, they established the Iranian Supporters of the Fourth International in Europe and the Near East. They published the first issue of the magazine Kand-o-Kav (henceforth referred to as the Kand-o-Kav group). 

This group launched the Talli'a Publishers (Vanguard Publishers انتشارات طلیعه), Kand-o-Kav (Search کندوکاو) magazine, and Committee Against Repression in Iran (CARI).  For simplicity, I will refer to them as the Kand-o-Kav group.  Talli'a published Farsi translations of pamphlet-sized works by Trotsky, as well as those by Ernest Mandel. Compared to Payam-e Daneshjoo, Kand-o-Kav had more analytical, reflective articles dealing with Iran. Rahimian began writing a series on the Iranian political economy and industrialization, which was left incomplete due to the 1979 revolution. Only eight issues of Kand-o-Kav were published between the fall of 1974 and the fall of 1978.  CARI differed from CAIFI in that it did not focus on prominent political prisoners and did not build broad-based campaigns; instead, it exposed broader forms of repression under the Shah's regime. Following the IMT position, the Portuguese Revolution of 1974, the Kand-o-Kav group was more focused on the "mass vanguard," that is, mostly centrist groups, which at that time were supporters or former supporters of the guerrilla movement in Iran. 

The crisis of the Sattar League (1976-77)

On December 7, 1976, ten members of the Sattar League declared the Permanent Revolution Tendency (PRT).  In early June 1976, the majority of the Political Committee (Babak and Siamak Zahraie, Bahram Oliaee, and Ali Mostafavi) submitted a document to the National Committee plenum entitled "Our Tasks in the Present Situation." The document included some new theoretical views that appeared to relegate the resolution of national democratic tasks to the socialist revolution, as well as some new ideas regarding functions, including a proposal to train and send SL members to establish "illegal nuclei" within Iran. Subsequently, the document was circulated in the SL. On September 28, 1976, Sayrafizadeh, the sole member of the PC who had voted against that document, wrote a critique of it entitled "Points of Disagreement in the Sattar League." However, the Babak Zahraie-led PC majority refused to circulate it among the membership. It began a slander campaign against Sayrafizadeh, claiming that he had a clique and was preparing to form a competing group with Reza Baraheni.  Sayafizadeh decided to organize the PRT to ward off this slander campaign. The PRT declared its goals as follow: "(1) to correct theoretical and programmatic errors of the 'Our Tasks in the Present Situation,' (2) to draft the program of the Sattar League, (3) to assess and determine our tasks and perspective in the present situation, and, (4) to ensure a calm and democratic atmosphere for the internal discussion and a democratic convention."  The initial singers were from SL branches in Berkeley, California; Portland, Oregon; New York; Los Angeles; Boston; Austin, Texas; and Philadelphia.  

It is now necessary to give a picture of the SL in 1976. It had fewer than 50 members with no founding convention, program, or constitution. Yet, it already had a National Committee and a Political Committee (five members), with Babak Zahraie serving as its National Secretary. Excluding Sayrafizadeh, who was a generation older, the median age of a member was less than 25 years, and their time in SL was no more than 3 years. The SL was composed of former or current students, mostly from families who had sent them to the U.S. for higher education, many of whom had never worked in their lives.

Given our youthfulness and lack of experience, it would seem evident that our movement needs maximum democracy to encourage maximum exchange of views and learning from one another in a calm and supportive atmosphere. Instead, SL was a hyper-centralized organization with Babak Zahraie controlling all its institutions and functions. To preserve his position, Zahraie feared a democratic political discussion that would lead to a convention where the membership would determine its leadership. 

 Just a few examples of how he reacted to Sayrafizadeh criticism and the PRT. On the evening of November 20, 1976, Zahraie called me at home in Oakland, California, where I was part of a branch of four people (soon Zahraie sent in a loyalist to ensure he held the majority of three in a branch of five people). Zahraie wanted me to withdraw my proposal to the branch to hold a public meeting for Sayrafizadeh. He told me Sayrafizadeh "has no political assignment to be there," that "we have documents that show they have a secret faction," that they are "collecting money for their work" and that they are "constantly in communication with each other" and "are preparing for a cold split." Sayrafizadeh "wants to split from the Sattar League with his group and Baraheni as soon as possible."  Of course, Zahraie never documented his allegations as they were untrue. 

Another example: On January 22, 1977, two members of the Austin, Texas branch who had joined the PRT, Amir Maleki and Ebrahim Rahimi Khamenei, were expelled on charges they had denied without due process. Zahraie was present at the branch meeting that led to their expulsion. Before the vote, he took the floor to motivate the meeting for the expulsion: "The leadership of the Austin branch has a specific proposal, a specific solution, for dealing with this problem by getting the goddamn ax out and chopping a few people.  Zahraie's intervention followed an appeal by the accused, who requested time to document their defense. After these expulsions, the Permanent Revolution Tendency organized itself as the Permanent Revolution Faction (PRF).  

Example 3: The PC majority sent a team of three SL members loyal to Zahraie to Portland to organize a branch of the SL in Portland, Oregon even though it already had a thriving SL branch except it organizer was Nader Javadi, a signer of the PRT declaration, and its membership tended to agreement with the PRF. Zahraie traveled to Portland soon after his trusted team arrived to initiate the split of the branch into those loyal to the PC majority and Javadi and others who might have supported the PRT. Zahraie and his advance team publicly attacked Javadi and other members of the Portland branch, notably Azar Gilak, and demanded: "You go your way, I'll go mine." 

The U.S. SWP leadership intervenes

When I was in Brooklyn, New York, to collaborate with Sayrafizadeh and Fariborz Khasha as part of the Coordinating Committee of the PRF, I had the opportunity to accompany Sayrafizadeh to meet Doug Jenness of the SWP Political Committee over dinner to report on the SL factional struggle. Jenness did not take sides, but clearly, he felt that by talking to us, he could get a reasonably fair picture of how things were going and that we would be more likely to listen to his advice.

In a report written for the PRF, Sayrafizadeh summarized a meeting of the Political Committee of SL held with Barry Sheppard, another member of the SWP Political Committee. The immediate purpose of the meeting was for Sheppard to prepare a report on the factional situation in the SL for the LTF Steering Committee.

The meeting turned out to be a negotiating session between Sayrafizadeh and the PC majority. At the beginning of the meeting, Bahram Oliaee spoke of a "de facto" split in the SL, and Babak Zahraie declared he would not be opposed to two public factions each having its paper. Eventually, some in the PC majority began to soften some of their earlier stances. 

Sayrafizadeh wrote: 

"Barry [Sheppard] said that in his report to the LTF leadership, he will say the [SL] PC has not yet made a decision about the expulsion of comrades Maleki and Rahimi Khamenei and that besides comrade Sayrafizadeh, two other PC members agree that the expelled comrades should be brought back in. Barry also emphasized the importance of the internal discussion [of the SL] and translation of its documents for the entire International…. He said that the objective conditions of exile, as well as the youthfulness of the organization, are part of the reasons for the crisis within our organization.  And that political differences exist, but are not clearly stated. He said that, without being familiar with specific facts, it seems to him that the expulsion of the comrades [in Austin] was wrong because the SL is unclear about what happened, and this organizational measure sacrifices political clarity.  He said the entire PC must reverse this process, and that allowing the expression of different political views to be discussed openly and clearly, and advise branches to return to a calm atmosphere. He said that splitting based on organizational issues is justified in two cases: first, if there is no democracy in the organization. Second, when some comrades are not loyal to the organization, Barry said the SL may split. In that case, the SWP would have to take a position. Would the split be justified? Would the SWP work with both groups? Which group would SWP work with?" 

Sattar League holds an undemocratic convention

A combination of PRF resilience, persistence, and intervention by the SWP leadership convinced the PC majority to reverse its unprincipled split course. June 10-13, 1977, plenum of the SL reversed the expulsion of Maleki and Rahimi Khamenei from the Austin branch. The PC majority agreed to hold a convention and distribute the PRF political resolution submitted on May 1, 1977. Still, Sayrafizadeh reported to the PRF that the political differences had widened and spread to new issues, most notably the idea of establishing "illegal nuclei" inside Iran, which was part of Zahraie's report to the plenum. Existing differences ranged from the importance of the historical democratic tasks of the Iranian revolution to our defense policy at CAIFI. The Political Committee had imposed a ban on inviting Baraheni to speak at CAIFI events. This was partly due to the reluctance of some American liberal supporters, like Kay Boyle and Daniel Ellsberg, who complained about Maoist attacks on CAIFI events targeting Baraheni. 

The first and only SL convention was held in Brooklyn, New York, on Oct. 29-Nov. 2, 1977.  The PC majority set the agenda as follows: 1) The Theory of Permanent Revolution, 2) Political Report, 3) The Nationalities Question, 4) The Women's Question, 5) Tasks and Perspective, 6) The Organization Report, 7) Nomination Commission Report and Election of the National Committee.  Although the PRF was given equal time to present under each report, the convention was not entirely democratic.  The PC majority resolutions were submitted late so there was little time for the membership and the PRF to read and discuss them in writing (the Draft Political Resolution of the PC majority bears the date October 27, 1977, two days before the convention. By contrast the PRF submitted its draft political resolution on May 1, 1977).  The PC majority also held a tight grip over the convention proceedings. The PRF was excluded from the Presiding Committee, which was composed of Babak, Siamak Zahraie, and Bahram Oliaee. Sayrafizadeh's proposal to add him to it was rejected. Under the point of organization of the convention, Ebad Mahmoudian, a PRF member from Philadelphia, asked for a two-minute extension to discuss this issue but was opposed by Babak Zahraie without offering any reason, and the request was denied. When Nader Javadi, the Portland branch organizer and PRF member, requested speaking time to discuss the voting status of his branch's members, he was ruled out of order.

The guests included Hormoz Rahimian and Afsaneh Najmabadi from the Kand-o-Kav group, as well as Doug Jenness and Gus Horowitz from the SWP. The IMT self-criticism of its "strategic line" in Latin America in late 1976 had reduced tensions in the FI and the SL internal political discussion, as factional and convoluted as it was, proved attractive to the Kand-o-Kav leaders who had received some of these documents (the PRF produced most of the documents, including its political resolution and tasks a perspective document). As noted above, SL had impressive early gains, and the Kand-o-Kav group knew it could not bypass it. 

When Rahimian spoke at the convention, his view on the theory of Permanent Revolution was similar to the SL PC majority's report, as they both emphasized the socialist aspect of the process, disagreeing with the PRF's emphasis on historical democratic tasks, such as the peasant/land question and the oppressed nationalities. The reports and discussion under the agenda item, Political Report, showed no convergence in the SL. They did not clarify much except that the PC majority still insisted on working for establishing "illegal nuclei" inside Iran. However, there was convergence on the women's question, and the RPF voted for the PC majority document, subject to amendments that they accepted. The PC majority showed no interest in the peasant question but left the door open to work based on the PRF document that Mahmoudian of Philadelphia had written. The PC majority's view on self-determination for Iranians was like the PRF. Still, for the oppressed nationalities, the PC majority seemed to support cultural autonomy (falling short of the right to self-determination). 

On November 1, 1977, Sayrafizadeh reported to the PRF's caucus meeting that the SWP representatives Doug Jenness and Gus Horowitz see no fundamental differences, see a desire for unity, think a split would be unprincipled and cannot be explained, saw responsibilities for both the majority and minority in healing the organizational rift, thought the PRF should dissolve itself and the written discussion be closed but oral debate to continue in the incoming National Committee, and that attention should now be focused on turning outwards.  After his report, Sayrafizadeh made a motion to dissolve the PRF. While it was true that the PRF promoted a discussion of theory, program, tasks and perspective, as well as norms in the SL, it did not win over most of the organization. All who were SL members by June 1976 were delegates at the convention, with a decisive vote, and a large majority of them, 49 persons, attended.  Of these, 13 members voted for the PRF, and 36 voted for the PC majority resolutions and reports. Nine people who joined after June 1977 and had consultative votes voted for the PC majority resolutions and reports. Several recent members of the Portland branch who adhered to the PRF were not seated at the convention for factional reasons. At the same time, PRF members became more experienced and homogeneous in their political outlook after an intensive period of studying, consulting, debating, and writing theoretical, programmatic, and political documents. Those present at the PRF caucus meeting voted to dissolve the faction. 

On the other hand, Zahraie used the factional struggle to consolidate his control over the SL. He had managed to maintain a solid majority in the SL leadership and membership without providing a well-discussed political program and perspective, and by slandering Sayrafizadeh and anyone who agreed with him. While almost all PRF members contributed to the written discussion, all criticism of the PRF and its draft resolutions came from Zahraie and his PC majority. As I explained later, Zahraie's entire political career was defined by his desire to maintain personal power over the organization and to remain its singular public face. 

It is also worth stating that the PRF was predominantly made up of members of the oppressed nationalities. It included almost all Azerbaijanis in the Sattar League, as well as most of its female members. Zahraie's PC majority was all male and all Persian.

3. The United Socialist Workers Party (حزب کارگران سوسیالیست متحد February 1979-August 1979)

The Sattar League began relocating its members to Iran in January 1979 and announced the establishment of the Socialist Workers Party (کارگران سوسیالیست حزب HKS) at a press conference in the Intercontinental Hotel on Monday, February 2, 1979. That is nine days before the insurrection that toppled the monarchy. The party's program, known as "The Manifesto of Rights of the Workers and Toilers of Iran" (February 5, 1979), had been printed in a four-page newspaper format in New York in early January. It called for the convocation of a Constitutional Assembly. It also served as the transitional program for HKS. Its banner headlines proclaimed: "U.S. imperialism's Hands off Iran!"  "No government appointed from the top will bring freedom to Iran," a reference to Shahpour Bakhtiar's caretaker government appointed by the Shah's regime, and "Long live the Constituent Assembly." The Manifesto concluded with the demand for the formation of a workers' and peasants' government based on radical land reform to initiate the process of transition to socialism. 

Although the demand for the establishment of a workers' and peasants' government was not prominent in the Manifesto, it may have been due to negligence, as it briefly called for a socialist united state of the Middle East. It included demands amounting to the destruction of the capitalist state, including the dissolution of SAVAK, the police, the gendarmerie, and it called for political rights for the soldiers, and arming of the people. The May Day special issue of Kargar featured an Action Program that prominently called for a workers' and peasants' government. The Manifesto called for the unconditional right of oppressed nationalities to self-determination, the liberation of women, as well as political freedoms and civil rights. It included a transitional program to nationalize key sectors of the capitalist economy under workers' control, the abolition of trade secrets, the monopoly of foreign trade, and the breaking of the imperialist yoke. 

Soon after, the HKS and the Kand-o-Kav group, along with a small number of high school students from Nezam Abad (نظام‌آباد), a working-class neighborhood in eastern Tehran that had been recruited to Trotskyism by a man named Farid, were united under the HKS. 

Although the merger of the Sattar Leage and the Kand-o-kav group was welcomed by activists from both groups and was encouraged by Barry Sheppard from the U.S. SWP and Brian Grogan of the British Internationalist Marxist Group (IMG) representing the leadership of the Fourth International, it was not based on a political discussion between those who made up the ranks and leadership of the new party. That was a fatal flaw as the Sattar League, and the Kand-o-Kav group were formed out of different political experiences; the fusion came apart in six months during an intense wave of repression. The fusion was based on an agreement between the leaders of both groups regarding a specific division of power within the new party. Hormoz Rahimian, from the Kand-o-Kav group, became the National Secretary, and Babak Zahraie was appointed the editor of Kargar. The party organized three branches in Tehran: East, Center, and West. Party branches were also established in Ahvaz, the capital city of the oil-rich Khuzestan Province, which borders Iraq and the Persian Gulf. Another branch was established in Tabriz, the capital of Azerbaijan. The organizers and members of these branches were also divided between the two groups. I was assigned to the East branch because I lived at the time in my parents' house in Tehran-Pars, located in East Tehran. 

 The relocation of Sattar League members to Iran was not well-planned. There was no political preparation by the SL leadership, except drafting and printing The Manifesto of the Rights of the Workers and Toilers of Iran" (بیانیه حقوق کارگران و زحمتکشان), which was a very good programmatic statement. We were simply told when to leave and with whom we should leave the U.S. for Iran. I flew back with three others and never saw them during the revolution. Several SL leaders and members chose not to go to Iran. Some went to Iran and quickly returned. Ali Fakhr, who was the presenter of the majority report on the theory of permanent revolution at the 1976 convention and had traveled with me to Iran, briefly served as a staff writer for Kargar before returning to the U.S. soon afterward. When I went to apply for exemption from military duty, I encountered Bahram Oliaee, a member of the Political Committee of the SL, who was also there to obtain his exemption. Later, I learned he also returned to the U.S.

Once we arrived in Tehran, we dispersed with no way to contact each other. We were asked to provide a phone number so that, when appropriate, someone could contact us individually with instructions on what to do next. We were entirely unaware of the announcement of the HKS's formation, and the first contact with us was made after the leadership of the two groups agreed to a merger. Only then did we receive a phone call to attend a meeting at the Industrial University auditorium. There, we learned about the fusion, and each individual was instructed on where to meet with a local group to begin our party work. Even at that stage, the organizational chart of the united-HKS in terms of branches was not ready. However, within a week or two, I discovered that I had been assigned to the Tehran East branch.

 The Neighborhood Committee in Tehran Pars

However, revolutionaries cannot wait weeks or even days for the leadership to tell them to take action in the ongoing revolution.  As soon as I arrived in Tehran, ten days before the February insurrection, at my parents' house in the northeast corner of Tehran, I became active in the local neighborhood committee. This was a brief yet valuable experience (Nayeri, 2017). Young men formed the committee during the oil industry strike to distribute heating and cooking fuel fairly. After the Shah fled Iran on January 16, the committee set up barricades on the main street of Tehran-Pars to control the movement of cars, as SAVAK agents sometimes drove by shooting at people to create panic. The committee members had taken over a house one block away from where I lived. The house belonged to a colonel who fled with his family. The committee members used the yard for meetings and left the furniture and the rooms in the house untouched. 

During the uprising, the committee, which had approximately 60 members, acquired 30 G-3 automatic rifles—with the help of members who had completed their military service —enabling volunteers to learn how to use the rifles and improve the neighborhood's protection against counterrevolutionaries. Ayatollah Khomeini gave a speech in which he asked everyone to hand over such weapons to the mosques. A few days later, a military officer attended the committee meeting and, by reciting Khomeini's order, urged us to hand over all weapons to the mosque and, if interested in helping with security, join the committee formed by the mosque. Nearly half of the members reported to the mosque; however, our neighborhood committee was effectively dissolved. The security committees organized by the mosques were later named Islamic Revolution Committees (کمیته های انقلاب اسلامی). They became a repressive apparatus of the Islamic Republic in cities.  On April 21, 1979, on orders from Khomeini, the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (سپاه انقلاب اسلامی) was formed expressly to defend the Islamic Republic.

Meanwhile, Khomeini also maintained the Shah's repressive apparatus by purging its monarchist leadership.  On November 22, 1979, on Khomeini's order, the Mobilization Corps (سازمان بسیج مستضعفین), a semi-military organization under the command of the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps, was established. They assisted the Committees of the Islamic Revolution in suppressing any dissident movements.  

The Tehran East branch of the united-HKS

After the formation of the Tehran East branch, we rented a subbasement apartment with a large meeting room as our headquarters at the end of an alley north of the Pol Choubi (پل چوبی) neighborhood. The membership increased rapidly to approximately 100 people as we continued to recruit. My younger sister, who has just graduated from high school, joined the United HKS, although it was perhaps because she wanted to follow in the footsteps of her older brother. However, the revolution had given many people, especially the younger generation, the hope and desire to make a difference in the future. The next day, she introduced two sisters, Ensieh and Saeedeh, who were also high school graduates. After a brief conversation about socialism and our program for Iran's future, they joined. They proved to be among the best people I had the privilege of convincing of socialism in Iran or in the U.S.  A member of the party who I had recruited to socialism in Cambridge, Massachusetts, through a close join reading of Bukharin's ABC of Communism, asked me to meet with her younger sister and her friends who were college students majoring in English literature. All three immediately decided to join the party after an hour of conversation. I was informed that some construction workers were interested in socialism. They lived in a tent on the construction site west of Tehran. They were Kurds and had come to Tehran to find employment. After a brief discussion, one of them, who looked older than I did (I was 28 years old), joined the party. When the government began its summer offensive against the Kurdish people, he asked for a meeting with me at the headquarters. He told me that he was also a member of the Kurdish Democratic Party and a Pêşmerge (پیشمرگه), a Kurdish guerrilla fighter. He asked me to relieve him of his membership so he can return to Kurdistan to defend his people against the government military attack. I never saw him again.

Two or three times a week, I borrowed my brother's car to drive with one or two others to sell Kargar at the plant gates on Abali Road (آبعلی (جاده, the throughway out of Tehran to the northern and eastern parts of the country. We did not sell many papers. This contrasted sharply with my experience of selling Kargar at Tehran University. One day, on my way back to headquarters, I noticed a car following me at high speed to catch up. I thought they might be a mob and sped up faster. However, the driver behind me turned on his emergency lights, urging me to stop. I was surprised to find him very friendly, buying an issue and thanking us for selling Kargar. He was probably an office worker in the factory. He went on to let us know that many workers in his factory were functionally illiterate. I realized another practical problem facing our vision of establishing a government of workers and peasants. How can an illiterate working class become the leader of a socialist revolution? 

There were also problems with the lumpen proletariat. Ramezan (رمضان) was a worker in a toothbrush factory who began expressing interest in our politics. It was clear to me that Ramezan did not understand anything about socialism; instead, he seemed to be more interested in the women in the party. One day, I accidentally saw him hanging out with a Hezbollah gang. We discussed the problem of having a Hezbollah sympathizer hanging out around us and cut off our contacts with him.

 Nezam Abad Trotskyists

I worked closely with about half a dozen young men and one young woman who lived in Nezam Abad (نظام آباد), a working-class neighborhood on the way from Fawzia Square to Tehran Pars. They were all high school students, and some also had part-time jobs in crafts to help their parents. Just before the revolution, a man named Farid recruited them to Trotskyism. However, they had not read the basic texts. Farid was a mysterious figure whom I met only once at the meeting to announce the fusion. He was introduced as representing one of the "four currents" that comprised the united-HKS. Originally from Shiraz in the south-central part of Iran, and judging from his clothing, from a well-to-do background. After the fusion, he and Elahe, an attractive young woman who had been recruited to Trotskyism by Lutte Ouvrière in France, also one of the four "four currents" that fused, disappeared.  I developed a close political relationship with the Trotskyists of Nezam Abad. Alas, when the united-HKS split, they decided to follow Rahimian's lead. 

Becoming the de facto organizer of the East Tehran branch

When the East branch was organized, an affable young man named Babak, from the Kand-o-Kav group, was assigned as its organizer. We called him Babak of London (to distinguish him from Babak Zahraie). However, Babak did not show much enthusiasm as the organizer of a large branch, perhaps because he had little experience in organizing a branch with more members than the Kand-o-Kav group had at its peak. Since I was at the headquarters almost daily and often organized sales of Kargar, I increasingly took on the actual day-to-day leadership role of the branch. When the split occurred, Babak left Iran for Britain. As the some of the East branch members were from the former Permanent Revolution Faction of the Sattar League and recruits close to us, I became the de facto organizer. Siamak Zahraie, who was the overall organizer of the Tehran branches, proved too busy to play such a role in the East branch.  By default, I became the de facto organizer. However, the summer (of 1979) wave of repression forced us to give up the Tehran headquarters as it became impossible to hold public headquarters for left political groups.   

Until then, the party continued to grow rapidly. The period after the February 1979 insurrection was known by many as the Spring of Freedom (بهار آزادی). Not only was it due to the arrival of Noruz, the Iranian New Year, but mostly because it was the first spring since the 1953 coup that mass optimism for the future, fueled by newly won freedoms, prevailed. This sense of general optimism about the future continued well into the summer as grassroots participation by workers, peasants, students, and youth spread and deepened. Kargar's uncompromising stance against imperialist and pro-imperialist actions, as well as the counterrevolutionary policies and actions of the Khomeini regime, made the united-HKS an attractive organization to join. By my estimates, at the time of the unprincipled split in the leadership of the united-HKS we had about 500 members and many sympathizers.   

During this brief period of about six months, we employed revolutionary socialist politics learned abroad in the context of a deep-going revolution, and new members and our sympathizers were getting acquainted with it. The party helped to organize resistance to Khomeini's edict of compulsory hijab including by a rally at the gates of Tehran University and the spontaneous march of 20,000 after the rally toward from Tehran University to Azadi (Freedom) Square (میدان آزادی) despite attacks by Hezbollah mobs armed with clubs and chains who eventually disrupted the march. We also held a public meeting of several hundred featuring Kate Millet as the keynote speaker to celebrate International Women's Day at Anushirvan High School (Kargar March 21, and March 30, 1979). We also opposed Khomeini's undemocratic referendum for an Islamic Republic and called for its boycott. Kargar also wrote in support of the movement of oppressed nationalities who were under attack by the government in Khuzestan, militarily in Turkmen Sahra, and Kurdistan. Kargar defended freedom of the press and political parties and condemned the government's attacks on them. As a result, the circulation of Kargar reached 30,000 copies per issue. 

The popularity of the united-HKS program and policies provided us with an opportunity to organize a debate between Abolhassan Banisadr, who was an Islamic intellectual at the time and an aide to Khomeini, who was the first president of the Islamic Republic, and Babak Zahraie, who represented the united-HKS in public view. Many thousands of Iranians watched the rebate with interest, and the publicity increased the sale of Kargar and interest in the party. 

Still, Khomeini's forces mobilized to disrupt our activities from the outset, especially the sale of Kargar. In its fourth issue, Kargar (April 1, 1979) carried an article entitled "Hands off the Socialist Workers' Party [united HKS]! For freedom of all political parties." It reported on the mob attack on our public meeting at the Polytechnic College and harassment and assaults on activists selling Kargar. 

Let me share my own experience selling Kargar at Fawzia Square (renamed Imam Hussein Square). This is a major roundabout that connects other parts of Tehran to its eastern side and a gateway to provinces to the north and east of the country. Thousands of working people pass through it daily. Every time I began to hawk Kargat to the passersby in a short period, one or two people tried to harass me by shouting, "We did not spill our blood so that you can campaign for communism!" Soon, I learned that these are members of the semi-fascist gangs organized by a specific group of the clergy. They quickly became known as Hezbollah because of their chant, "The only party is the Party of God!" Hezbollah means the party of god.  A while later, the Islamic Revolution Committee members armed with G3 automatic rifles would show up. However, instead of dealing with the Hezbollah gang, they would take me to the mosque on the second floor of a building next to the abandoned movie theater in Fawzia  Square "to avoid an incident." This was their way of preventing me from selling Kargar. Only weeks earlier, the February insurrection had toppled the Shah's dictatorial anticommunist regime. So, Hezbollah could not harm me in broad daylight. 

They kept me in the mosque for an extended time until the clergy in charge would show up. He would then advise me to stop selling the paper that was offensive to the people. He "advised" me against possible danger, an obvious threat. 

The last time I tried to sell Kargar at Fawzia Square I got a sense of the danger I had been warned against. A middle-aged, beefy man with a messy beard tried to stop me by putting a pistol to my temple. Fortunately, Ensieh, a young woman whom I had recently recruited and was accompanying me, was so offended that she started shouting at the man for trying to turn us back to the Shah's time. The commotion attracted the attention of the passersby, who gathered around us. They took the thug aside, giving us a chance to leave the scene. This forced us to stop selling Kargar in Fawzia Square.

Things got more serious in the city of Ahvaz, the capital of oil-rich Khuzestan Province in the southwest corner of Iran, bordering Iraq and the Persian Gulf, in June 1979. Over a few days, the Islamic Revolution Committee arrested and imprisoned 14 members of the united-HKS. At that time, Khuzestan was witnessing a wave of demonstrations by Arab people and strikes by workers in the oil and steel industries. A few days earlier, the united-HKS branch in Ahvaz put out a flyer in support of the Arab people of Khuzestan who were demanding cultural rights.  Sometime later, we learned that Ayatollah Jannati, who oversaw Ahvaz prison, had accused the 14 socialists of conspiracy to blow up oil pipelines and had issued death sentences for the 12 male socialists and life imprisonment for two female socialists.

The united-KHE immediately organized a broad defense campaign. A picket line in front of the Prime Minister's Office demanded the immediate release of the socialists. The Fourth International sections, especially in America and Canada, published articles in defense of the Iranian revolution and demanded freedom for the 14 socialists. Some organized public meetings and sent letters of protest to Ayatollah Khomeini and Prime Minister Mehdi Bazargan. In the fall of that year, they were released. 

4. The challenge of the revolution 

Iranian Trotskyists, like the rest of the left, were not prepared for the challenge of the national democratic revolution that began in February 1978 and overthrew the monarchy a year later. Not only were we inexperienced and isolated from the working people, but we also had no idea about the reactionary Khomeini's movement that quickly managed to dominate other socialist forces as the alternative to the U.S.-installed dictatorship of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. 

To understand how Khomeini was able to organize a large following, we must recall the cultural-political landscape of Iran in the 1970s, shaped by the backlash among many Iranians to the White Revolution, which the Shah launched on January 26, 1963. 

The White Revolution

The White Revolution was a major state-sponsored undertaking aimed at accelerating and deepening the process of primitive accumulation of capital, thereby breaking free from the existing precapitalist socioeconomic and cultural structures. It included a land reform where landlords were compensated for their land by shares of privatized state-owned factories, expanded road, rail, and air network, dam and irrigation projects, work to eradicate diseases such as malaria, promotion of profit-sharing schemes for workers to speed up industrial growth, enfranchisement of women, nationalization of forests and pastures, literacy and health corps for isolated rural areas. 

The institution of the Shia religion and the power of the Ulama (علما), the Shia hierarchy, were threatened by the Shah's reform.  

The role of Shia Islam in class and state formations (see endnote 1)

The ascendancy of Shi'ism to the official religion of Iran occurred during the Safavid dynasty (1501-1722), which adopted it as the official religion as it inaugurated the modern Iranian nation-state, supported by the Shia hierarchy.  This relationship between the Iranian state and the Shia hierarchy was reversed by Khomeini, who inaugurated the Islamic Republic, and the Shia hierarchy itself became the sponsors of the Islamic state. 

For over 2,000 years, Iran was an agrarian economy based on the village (ده). Under the Safavids, three primary forms of private landholdings (املاک) included at least one but typically many villages. These were (1) private estates of large landlords; (2) the private estates of the reigning Shah considered separately from the estates owned by the crown (املاک خالصه); and (3) private estates set aside in special trusts by owners for the permanent benefit of heirs and descendants by Shia legal principles and known as waqf-e ḵāṣṣ (وقف خاص).  Thus, the Shi'ite clergy has been tied to land ownership and the royal court for centuries.  However, in the late nineteenth century, European Enlightenment and modernist ideas penetrated Iran, laying the intellectual basis for the Constitutional Revolution (1906-11). In the twentieth century, this landownership system became an impediment to the development of capitalism in Iran and increasingly became politically questionable.  To facilitate the former and undermine his enemies on both the right and the left, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi implemented a program of land reform. 

"By 1962, a land reform law was enacted. This law, which was implemented in stages over a decade, effectively abolished amlāk by making it unlawful for a single landowner to possess agricultural property in more than one village. Landlords were required to sell all surplus villages to the government, which in turn arranged for their resale to the peasants who held cultivating rights. A by-product of this program was the virtual disappearance of all the traditional dues and servitudes the peasants had rendered to landlords. As a consequence of the land reform program, amlāk (املاک), which had been a characteristic feature of Iranian land tenure patterns for more than two thousand years, virtually ceased to exist (Hooglund, 1982)." 

The Shi'ite clergy has been closely tied to the bazaar merchants, who in turn were linked with their suppliers, including artisans and agricultural producers in Iran and abroad.

"The bazaar was and is a social institution, comprising religious, commercial, political, and social elements. The bazaar is the center par excellence of personal transactions, commerce, and communication in urban life; thus, one needs to under­stand the bazaar's function within its context, the city. In Iran, the city forms a political, commercial, cultural, and religious center for its hinterland. The bazaar has played a very important role in this relationship, reflecting the character of the Muslim city (Floor, 1989)."

The bazaar also had a political function:

"The Friday mosque—the main religious and political center of the city—and the bazaar are always found together. In the mosque, the population prayed in congregation, came to hear proclamations of its rulers, and gave vent to feelings about the ruler's policies (ibid.)."

The merchant class has had a tense relationship with the royal court, and some prominent merchants supported mass protests in the 20th century, yet they have consistently served as a conservative force.  Thus, while the bazaar merchants participated in the Constitution Revolution, they did so in sit-in at the British embassy. It was not unusual for big merchants to have dual Russian citizenship, as it helped with their overseas trading practices and offered them a measure of protection against the royal court." 

Thus, the Shah's modernization programs, which included the extension of the right to vote to women and land reform, directly threatened the interests of the Shia hierarchy and its landowning and merchant allies, resulting in the June 1963 revolt organized by Khomeini and other clerics. The rebellion was crushed, and Khomeini was imprisoned. His life being spared, he was exiled to Iraq only after key Shi'ite clerics conferred him the title of Ayatollah, raising the risk of any harm to him by the government.  Ayatollah Khomeini, who had already positioned himself as an anti-American and anti-Israeli politician who wanted to "protect" society from "decadence," went on to become the leader of a section of Shia clergy that opposed the Shah and played a key role in the mass movement that overthrew him in the 1979 revolution. 

The social function of the Shia clergy

It is also essential to understand the organizational form of the Shia clergy and its social function. The current organizational form of Shi’ite clergy and its social function is through Marja or the system of emulation of a religious authority.  This was founded in the 1830s when Mohammed Hassan Najafi became the first transnational Shia religious authority (مرجع) in Najaf, Iraq. Najafi created a universal patronage network through which he received religious taxes and endowment incomes and appointed religious representatives from Shi’ite cities from Iraq to India.  

“In the 16th Century, Shi’ite jurists [mujtahids] had established a new conceptual theory describing the relationship between Shi’ite community leaders and Shi’ite worshipers. According to the theory, each worshiper should either reach the highest educational level in Shi’ite jurisprudence (ijtihad) or follow a living person who has attained such a level. The theory of ‘following’ (taqlid) was intertwined with another significant theory, which permitted Shi’ite jurists to receive religious taxes on behalf of the infallible and hidden twelfth Shi’ite Imam. It is believed that this Imam will return at the end of time to establish a just global government. Thereafter, a new form of Shi’ite leadership emerged that both provided the monarchy with legitimacy and was protected by it, but was also financially independent from it (Khalaji, no date).”

Thus, in addition to their waqf landholding (described above), the Shi’ite mujtahids also benefited from taxes they collected. There are two forms of such taxes. Khums (Arabic for a fifth) is a tax paid equal to a fifth of the surplus from the income left after annual expenses of a Muslim’s that is paid to a mujtahid.  Zakat is a tax on income-generating property or assets paid to a mujtahid.  The mujtahid is supposed to allocate this revenue for the welfare of the Shi’ite community, including orphaned children, and for religious purposes, such as scholarships for a new crop of talabeh (seminary students طلبه) recruited from adolescent boys, usually from villages.

The Islamic Republic supplemented these sources of revenue for the Shia clergy by allocating portions of the state’s revenue to religious institutions as part of the secret annual government budgets.

On June 5, 1963, in response to Ruhollah Khomeini’s arrest due to his open opposition to the Shah’s reform, a riot by his supporters ensued and was suppressed. Khomeini was exiled and eventually placed in the holy city of Najaf in Iraq. It was there that he wrote his religious pamphlet in which he argued for establishing an Islamic government for Muslim people. 

The opposition to the Shah’s modernization program was widespread. In a series of opinion surveys and interviews done in 23 cities and 52 villages four years before the revolution, the researchers Majid Tehranian and Ali Assadi (1357/1979) found that only 34% of families had televisions, 45% were literate, and 75% of men were opposed to women to work outside of the house and 74% believed the father, grandfather should make family decisions, and then grandmother, but not the mother. 23% considered movie theaters religiously forbidden. Only 9% regularly read books, and 32% never read a book or had any books at home. 94% prayed daily, 79% fasted during Ramadan—an alternative to the despised regime of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. 

Thus, when the 1978-79 revolution got underway, millions of Iranian willingly supported Ayatollah Khomeini as an alternative to Mohammad Reza Pahlavi’s rule and subsequently favored his call for the establishment of an Islamic Republic. 

Thus, the 1979 Iranian revolution was a contradictory movement. It mobilized millions of Iranians who sought freedom, independence, and social justice, as well as those who wanted to preserve traditional ways of life alongside independence and social justice. Khomeini mobilized the latter against the former to realize his vision of an Islamic government.  

Thus, the 1979 Iranian revolution was a contradictory movement. It mobilized millions of Iranians who sought freedom, independence, and social justice, as well as those who wanted to preserve traditional ways of life alongside independence and social justice. Khomeini mobilized the latter against the former to realize his vision of an Islamic government. 

How Khomeini established a clerical capitalist state 

The period between February 11, 1979, when the old regime was overthrown, and August 18, 1979, when the Islamic Assembly of Experts began its work on the draft constitution, was characterized by three interacting processes: imperialist-backed counter-revolution regrouped and attempted coups, Ayatollah Khomeini forces began establishing the foundation of their Islamic state beginning with its repressive apparatuses the Islamic Revolution Committees, the Islamic Revolution Guards Corp (mistakenly translated into English as "Revolutionary Guards Corp.), and Islamic Revolution Courts. These were combined with an ideological offensive to claim the national democratic revolution as an Islamic revolution to establish an Islamic government. Hojatoleslam Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, one of Khomeini's close aides, writes in his memoir that he was tasked with ensuring that Iranian national TV and radio propagated the idea of the Islamic Revolution, hence the Islamic Republic. 

In the early 1970s, Ayatollah Khomeini, who was in exile in Najaf, Iraq, wrote a religious pamphlet that became known as Velayat-e Faghih (The Rule of Islamic Jurisprudence (ولایت فقیه. He argued that everywhere Muslims are ruled by a non-Muslim government. He claimed in the absence of Imam Mahdi, the Shia Ulama should pick one or a group of Shia Ayatollahs to constitute and expand an Islamic government to rule the Muslims according to Islamic jurisprudence. Muhammad al-Mahdi is the prophesied savior figure believed to be the last of the Shia Twelve Imams. While currently alive, Mahdi is in a state of occultation, awaiting divine command to reappear and establish justice and peace on earth. Ayatollah Khomeini's followers believed he was the learned ayatollah to fulfill the role of the Rule of Islamic jurisprudence in the absence of Imam Mahdi. Khomeini and his followers saw the 1979 revolution as the divine opportunity to install their envisioned Islamic government in Iran. 

Still, the pro-Khomeini movement was just a part of the much larger national democratic revolution of 1979, driven by the emergence of grassroots movements among the working people. In workplaces, especially in key industries and large enterprises, the formation of strike committees led to the organization of workers' shoras (workplace councils) as the management structure collapsed. Peasants, who had previously organized shoras, were also mobilized to fight for land. Shoras also developed in colleges and universities. As I explained earlier, there was a need and considerable interest, similar to that in the case of neighborhood committees, to organize from below, thereby validating the concept of radical democracy as opposed to bourgeois democracy. 

Thus, the united-HKS and its paper, Kargar, were received well due to their opposition to imperialist and monarchist interventions, their defense of newly won political rights, and their support for the right of self-determination of the oppressed nationalities and women's right to choose, as well as their opposition to attacks on grassroots movements.  

At the same time, our movement was small, with no roots in the working class or the broader society. In February 1979, we had approximately 200 members in a country with a population of 36 million and an industrial working class of around 3 million. 

The majority of the united HKS was composed of men and women in their twenties, mostly from well-to-do families. Most of our members in Tehran lived in well-to-do or middle-class neighborhoods. We were mostly full-time revolutionaries without jobs, as the economy was not functioning anywhere near its full capacity after a year of mass mobilizations, strikes, and the fleeing of some capitalists, executives, and managerial staff. Many factories were short of raw materials and spare parts. 

Our branches were just being established, and most of our public activity was selling Kargar. Thus, the recruitment often came through family, friends, and neighborhood contacts. There was no centralized socialist education effort. At the East branch, we organized classes, whenever possible, around a few essential texts. However, it wasn't easy to focus on reading and learning from texts while facing daily new challenges that required our response. 

At the time of the split in August, we had a membership of about 500. The 300 recruits were mainly from the youth and the middle class, reflecting our lack of any organic relationship with the working class. 

Why did the united HKS split

Houshang Sepehr, a member of the Kan-o-Kav group, has collected and digitized the Kan-o-Kav group's documents, including publications, in his blog. He has also written a brief history of the group, including an article entitled "The Record of the Socialist Workers Party," in which he blames the former Satter League for the August 1979 split of the united-HKS. 

However, Sepehr's account would not stand scrutiny. First, he claims that the SL had a mistaken interpretation of Trotsky's theory of Permanent Revolution, believing that the future revolution would be democratic and that the continuous pursuit of the democratic revolution would lead to the socialist revolution.  This explanation for the split has several flaws. First, as I have explained above, the Sattar League's 1976-77 factional fight was precisely centered on the "correct" interpretation of Permanent Revolution. Both sides agreed that the next Iranian revolution would center on national democratic issues, a notion confirmed by the 1979 revolution. However, Zahraie's leadership deemphasized the importance of historical democratic tasks such as the right to self-determination of oppressed nationalities and land reform. The Permanent Revolution Faction, led by Sayrafizadeh, considered these tasks of vital importance for the working class and its party if they were to lead the revolution to the establishment of a workers' and peasants' government, that is, an anti-capitalist government. Without the transfer of state power to the workers supported by the peasants, it would be impossible to initiate the socialist revolution in Iran. There is nothing mechanical in this conception of the Permanent Revolution in the way Sepehr attributes it to the Sattar League as a whole!  

Second, Sepehr overlooks the fact that it was the Sattar League that published the Manifesto of the Rights of Workers and Toilers of Iran in January 1979, and that this document became the program basis of the HKS. The fusion with the Kand-o-Kav group led to the formation of the United HKS. The leadership of the Kan-o-Kav group was in agreement with this programmatic document, indicating that there were no significant disagreements on the interpretation of the theory of Permanent Revolution between the leaderships of the two groups in February 1979. 

Third, the split occurred among the top leaders of the united HKS without any prior warning or discussion within the party ranks. When it did happen, it was generally known that it was over the tactical question of whether the slate of united-HKS candidates for participation in the elections for the Assembly of Experts (Majlis-e Khobregan مجلس خبرگان) to draft the constitution should campaign.  The split took the form of three of the eighteen declared united-HKS candidates for the election to the Islamic Assembly of Experts, who were aligned with Rahimian, withdrew their candidacy and declared a "boycott" of the elections.

I know this well because, in a desperate act, the leadership agreed to open the internal discussion bulletin to a debate on this question. Afsaneh Najmabadi wrote the first contribution opposing participation in the elections on the grounds of repression underway, calling for a boycott. In retrospect, she was correct. However, basing myself on Trotsky's position on what appeared to me to be an analogous situation in the Chinese Revolution of 1925-27, I responded to her that we are too small a group to meaningfully launch a boycott campaign, especially if she was correct about the heavy wave of repression. 

Unfortunately, the internal written discussion ended after my response was published. The unprincipled split at the top occurred. 

 In retrospect, it is clear to me that I was correct on the question of the boycott but entirely wrong on the possibility of using this election under the heavy wave of repression to advance our program. 

Heavy repression and a small, inexperienced propaganda group

To appreciate the political situation in August 1979, let me outline the sequence of events that led up to it.  On March 30-31, a month and a half after the February 9-11 insurrection in which the Iranian people toppled the monarchy, Khomeini held an undemocratic referendum that demanded: "Islamic Republic, yes or no," while publicizing that a "no" vote meant support for the old regime! The united-HKS abstained from the referendum, calling for the formation of the constituent assembly to decide what kind of government Iranian working people want. On June 15, Khomeini gave a speech attacking liberal and socialist groups as being against Islam and counterrevolutionary for their criticism of a draft constitution of the Islamic Republic that Hassan Habibi and others had prepared for the government. Habibi was a trained lawyer whom Khomeini tasked with drafting an Islamic constitution for Iran while he was in exile in Paris. When Khomeini returned to Iran and established the Islamic Revolution Council (شورای انقلاب اسلامی), he appointed Habibi as its spokesperson. In his June 15 speech, Khomeini declared that there was no need for "Westernized jurists" to write the constitution and that the Islamic clergy should write it instead.  It was clear that non-Islamic parties would be barred from such an election.

Meanwhile, the Khomeini-Bazargan government launched a summer military offensive against Kurdistan, to follow their inconclusive spring offensive. The fighting was intense. 

The elections to the Islamic Assembly of Experts, tasked with drafting the constitution of the Islamic Republic, were held on August 3, 1979. 

On August 7, Ayandegan (آیندگان), the daily paper with the highest circulation at the time, was banned because it had "agitated against Velayat-e faqih" (Islamic Jurisprudence which Khomeini advocated).

On August 10, Khomeini denounced the opponents of the Assembly of Experts and defenders of Ayandegan, calling them "wild animals," stating: "We will not tolerate them anymore…After every revolution, several thousand of these corrupt elements are executed in public and burned. We will close all parties except one, or a few, which act in a proper manner." (Moin, 2000, p. 217).

The National Democratic Front, a left-liberal formation headed by Hedayatollah Matin Daftari, a grandson of Mohammad Mossadegh, the prime minister who was deposed in a CIA-backed coup in 1953, called for a demonstration on August 12 to defend Ayandegan.  I was at that demonstration selling Kargar.  Hundreds of Hezbollah thugs with clubs, chains, and knives attacked the unprepared crowd. The next day, 40 newspapers, including Kargar, were banned, and the headquarters of all opposition parties, including the HKS, were ransacked.  When I visited our East Tehran headquarters with Siamak Zahraie, who was the Tehran city organizer, pieces of Kargar were scattered some distance away from it. We could no longer maintain public headquarters.

Thus, the split in the united-HKS, which was unprincipled, was the result of several factors. First, the two groups were formed in two different political traditions. Sattar League took shape under the influence of the U.S. Socialist Workers Party. The Kand-o-Kav group leaders and members were influenced by the International Marxist Group (1968-1982) in Britain which had at its peak about 1,000 members and supporters in the late 1970s and the Revolutionary Communist League (Ligue communiste révolutionnaire) founded in 1974 after its forerunner the Communist League was banned in 1973 and became the largest far left organization in France in the early 2000. It dissolved itself in 2009 to merge with several smaller leftist groups, forming the Anti-Capitalist Alliance. The European sections of the Fourth International were influenced by the International Majority Tendency (IMT) of the Fourth International, organized by Ernest Mandel (Belgium), Pierre Frank (France), and Livio Maitan (Italy). Thus, there was little organizational cohesion and political continuity in these parties led by a new generation of revolutionary socialists. 

The Sattar League, on the other hand, is influenced by the U.S. Socialist Workers Party, which lacks an unbroken revolutionary socialist tradition dating back to the Russian socialist revolution and the U.S. socialist tradition.  While the European sections of the Fourth International supported the IMT, which under the influence of the Cuban revolution advocated guerrilla warfare as a strategy in Latin America, the U.S. SWP and LTF opposed it, insisting on the strategy of building mass Leninist parties through orientation to the working class employing the transition program. By 1977, the IMT leadership had offered a self-criticism and dissolved the faction. However, in 1974, they had adopted an orientation toward the "mass vanguard," that is, the centrist and Maoist parties, during the 1974 Portuguese Revolution. The U.S. SWP and LTF again insisted on an orientation to the mass organization of the working class. 

Thus, the Kand-o-Kav group, established in the fall of 1974, developed under the influence of a patchwork of policies adopted by the European sections of the Fourth International and the IMT leadership. 

Second, the fusion in February 1979 between these two groups was an organization based on a division of power between their leaders, not a deep-going political discussion among the ranks leading to a convention to elect a new leadership.

Third, the United HKS was a small revolutionary socialist propaganda group, with approximately 200 members when it was formed, which grew to around 500 members when the split occurred. The Iranian industrial working class was estimated to be approximately 3 million in the late 1970s, half of whom had become newly proletarianized since the early 1960s. Many were still functionally illiterate, and much of it was still unorganized due to the anti-communist and anti-working-class policies of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi's dictatorial regime. 

Fourth, Iran in 1979 had approximately 36 million people, and Tehran, where much of the united-HKS activities were organized, had a population of around 6 million. Many Iranians were practicing Muslims who supported Ayatollah Khomeini.  On December 10-11, Shiah Muslim holy days of Tasu'a and Ashura, millions of Iranians, mainly organized through the mosques by the clergy, call for "Death to the Shah," and the return of Ayatollah Khomeini.  

As I outlined earlier, Khomeini and his supporters have for a better part of a decade worked to bring about an Islamic government to power in Iran.  Of the millions who participated in the undemocratic referendum of March 30-31, organized by Khoemini forces, 98 percent chose the formation of an Islamic Republic, even though nothing about the policies of such a regime was discussed.  

As we know, from the day one after the February 9-11 victorious insurrection that toppled the monarchy, forces loyal to Ayatollah Khomeini began to undo the political space won by the masses of Iranians and attacked independent grassroots movements everywhere. 

As I have recounted in a few examples, divisions and polarization among the many millions who wanted an end to the Shah's dictatorship began. On May Day, two separate demonstrations were organized in Tehran. One by the leftists and the other by the Workers House, which was taken over by the pro-Khomeini forces. This division within the working class persisted until the summer of 1982, between the Shoras, which were inclusive workplace councils, and the Islamic Associations and Islamic Shoras, which collaborated with the government. The conflict was settled by the forced suppression of the independent shoras and arrest, imprisonment, and in some cases, execution of their leaders and activists in the summer of 1982. By that time, the Islamic Republic had effectively sidelined, suppressed, or crushed all independent grassroots movements and rival political forces.  

How should a tiny revolutionary socialist party respond to this revolutionary process? The split occurred because the leadership of the former Sattar League, led by Babak Zahraie, and the Kand-o-Kav group, led by Hormoz Rahimian, took entirely different approaches. 

4. New parties emerge: Rahimian's HKS and Zahraie's HKE

The former leadership of the Kan-o-Kav group focused its attention on the effort to establish the Islamic Republic by Khomeini and his supporters. Afsaneh Najmabadi and at least two other leaders of the former Kand-o-Kav concluded that fascism had triumphed in Iran by August 1979. To many in the liberal and some in the socialist milieu, it seemed that the revolution was dead. Subsequently, Najmabadi and a few others like her left and pursued other goals (see endnote 2). 

The Rahimian group, identifying itself as the Militant Faction of the HKS, and later as the HKS, went on to publish Che Bayad Kard (What's to Be Done? چه باید کرد ) on August 16, 1979. The new and central idea that framed their political analysis was that Khomeini presented the imperialist chosen counterrevolution in Iran. This argument, of course, showed their ignorance of the social base of Shia Islam in Iran. Thus, Rahimian's HKS set itself up in confrontation with millions of working people who harbored religious beliefs, supported Khomeini, and opposed Israel and the United States as they still do. What was essential to understand, which the left did not analyze deeply, is that the Islamic Republic's opposition to Israel and the U.S. differed from the revolutionary socialist opposition to Zionism and imperialism. The Khomeini forces did not oppose Israel because they supported the right to self-determination of Palestinians, but because Israel had occupied land that belonged to the Muslim people. Thus, they supported Islamic and, where possible, Shia opposition to Israel among Palestinians and Lebanese, in Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East. Their opposition to the U.S. has not been because of imperialism but due to its complicity in imposing non-Islamic governments on Muslims in Iran and elsewhere. As I discussed earlier, Khomeini's opposition to the Shah's White Revolution was because of land reform and the extension of the right to vote to women to achieve universal suffrage (as meaningless as it was under a dictatorship), hence its modernization effort that undermined tradition. 

Thus, Rahimian's HKS oriented itself to the "mass vanguard," that is, the centrist currents that also focused their fire on the Islamic Republic. This enabled it to converge with the "Revolutionary Socialist" current in Fedayeen Minority (گرایش سوسیالیسم انقلابی در فدائیان اقلیت). Still, it also effectively sat aside the mobilizations against U.S. imperialism or in the mobilizations to defend Iran against Saddam Hussein's invasion, as the mass organizations of the working class, the shoras, participated in these mobilizations.

Later, the Rahimian’s HKS published Kagran Socialist (کارگران سوسیالیست  Socialist Workers) and later Nazm-e Kargar (Workers' Organization), with its last issue date of June 1983.

While Rahimian HKS attempted to maintain and educate its membership and its "mass vanguard" orientation to the centrist groups.

Babak Zahraie took an opposite approach. As we discuss below, he decided to establish himself and his party, which he named Revolutionary Workers Party (HKE حزب کارگان انقلابی), as a legal and friendly opposition to the Islamic Republic. 

Zahraie filed for a license for Kargar, which was banned by the Ministry of Islamic Guidance (government censorship organization), and received a temporary permit to publish. The first issue of Volume Two of Kargar was published after a 90-day ban on November 17, 1979, and consisted of 96 pages, primarily covering the Nicaraguan revolution.  In its issue number 4, a brief note declared that to avoid misunderstanding, the party is changing its name to the Revolutionary Workers Party (HKE حزب کارگران انقلابی).  At the same time, it said: "As Kargar issue number 11 (last issue of the first Volume) declared, the party considers this split as unprincipled because political differences do not justify it. The struggle against this unprincipled split would be part of the tasks of the HKE." 

5. Zahraie expels Faction for Trotskyist Unification from the HKE

Zahraie was most disingenuous in declaring that he was against the unprincipled split of the united-HKS.  Just as Rahimian's HKS oriented itself to oppose the Khomeini leadership as the counterrevolution, Zahraie and the leadership of the HKE were heading in the direction of adaptation to the "grassroots anti-imperialist Islamic currents" and eventually the Islamic Republic regime. 

Within a year, two factions comprised of leaders and members of the HKE, numbering over 50 persons (more than 40% of the organization), including two of the founders of the Sattar League, all former Permanent Revolution Faction members, the entire Tabriz branch and the HKE Young Socialist group, and a layer of recruits from a proletarian background were expelled over objection to this new course imposed from the top without any democratic discussion. 

This period opened with the derailment of the summer offensive against the Kurds, the emergence of workers' shoras in large workplaces and major industries, and the organization of peasants in shoras engaged in a struggle for land. As a protest to the Shah's admission to the United States, the Muslim Student Followers of Imam's Line دانشجویان مسلمان پیروی خط امام) took over the U.S. embassy, resulting in a rift over foreign policy between the Islamic liberal forces around Bazargan and Khomeini and the Islamic Republic Party, effectively ending Bazargan's and his tiny Liberation Movement's political life.  

The embassy takeover in November 1979 resulted in large street demonstrations in which the shoras participated. Workers and peasants organized conferences demanding economic and political rights. Workers' shoras began to centralize by geographic location (e.g., shoras of west Tehran and shoras of east Tehran), by industry, and by groups of factories and industries that formed an economic unit. Khomeini and the Islamic Republic Party continued to develop and create institutions that served their interests, including the Islamic Associations in workplaces to co-opt or drive out the workers' shoras (councils), as well as the Islamic Student Associations on college campuses. The 14 jailed socialists who were threatened with execution won their freedom after a sustained international campaign.

Indeed, some of these Islamic groups were grassroots. However, even in such cases, they were co-opted mainly by the Islamic Republic hierarchy. For example, the small group of Muslim students who took over the U.S. embassy acted on their own.  However, within 24 hours, they were represented by a mid-level cleric, Hojatoleslam Muhammad Mousavi-Khoeiniha (حجت الاسلام  محمد ها موسوی خوینی ), who directly reported to Khomeini.

This period ended with Saddam Hussein's invasion of Iran on September 22, 1980. The war initiated new mobilizations, but at the same time, the clerical capitalist regime used it as a pretext to attack grassroots movements, its political opposition, and reduce the political space won in the struggle against the monarchy.

During this period, HKE evolved to act as a socialist advisor to the Islamic Republic. Kargar, as a newspaper, began to publish articles very different from its first Volume as the publication in the United HKS.  Instead of holding the Islamic Republic regime responsible for the crises in the country, it blamed them on the "500 capitalist and landlord families." It increasingly used selective phrases from Khomeini to advocate what Zahraie believed was the revolutionary policy by beginning with "As the Imam said." Increasingly, it adapted to the Islamic currents from the Muslim Students Followers of the Imam's Line to the Islamic Associations in workplaces, to the Islamic Student Associations in colleges and universities with its campaign to make Iranian higher education "Islamic," resulting closing of the universities for three years (1980-1983) to carry out the Islamic Cultural Revolution to purge leftist and liberal student students, faculty, and staff.

Not only did not Zahraie hold an open and democratic discussion of these policy changes, but it also began to suppress and expel its critics.

In the winter of 1980, Farhad Nouri, one of the early Trotskyists in Austin, Texas, and a former Permanent Revolution Faction member, who had recently returned from a North American speaking tour organized by the SWP to defend the 14 jailed socialists in Ahvaz, was expelled from his cell after questioning the party's new orientation. Due to repression, HKE organized its members into small cells of half a dozen members, who met in a member's home, dressed up as visiting friends or family. Nouri appealed to the Political Committee for a reversal of this decision and wrote to the United Secretariat of the Fourth International for its support.  Neither responded.

A while later, when I raised similar concerns, Zahraie proposed that we have a debate in a special citywide gathering. I accepted. 

About 50 people attended the meeting. We agreed to have two presentations with a discussion to follow and a summary for each presentation. In my presentation, I expressed my agreement that (1) the revolution is still unfolding, (2) that anti-imperialist struggle is the context in which other struggles were taking place, (3) that we need to use defensive formulations in presenting our analysis and program (something we learned from Cannon's Socialism on Trial book and the SWP).  However, I insisted that the Islamic Republic regime was the clerical capitalist enemy of the Iranian working people and the unfolding revolution.  I then outlined what our common transitional program for the Iranian revolution was, the Manifesto of the Rights of Workers and Toilers, the programmatic basis of the United HKS with its perspective of a workers and peasants government based on the shoras and other grassroots organizations of the working people and the oppressed. I aimed to discover how Zahraie differs from this perspective and understand the reasons behind it. 

Zahraie's presentation, however, was more agitational than expositional and educational. However, he still hinted at some new ideas. For the first time, he compared the Iranian revolution to the French Revolution of 1789 by calling the Islamic currents Jacobian. He tried to portray my concerns about drifting away from our program and strategy as resistance to the party's deeper involvement in the Iranian revolution, likening it to the orientation of Rahimian's HKS. 

However, Marx's understanding of the Jacobins in the French revolution was quite different. 

"When we think about this conjuring up of the dead of world history, a salient difference reveals itself. Camille Desmoulins, Danton, Robespierre, St. Just, Napoleon, the heroes as well as the parties and the masses of the old French Revolution, performed the task of their time – that of unchaining and establishing modern bourgeois society – in Roman costumes and with Roman phrases (Marx, 1852, my emphasis).” 

 

As explained earlier, the Khomeini movement had nothing to do with "unchaining and establishing modern bourgeois society;" quite the opposite. 

There was no discussion of Zahraie's new interpretation of the 1979 revolution and the role played by the Khomeini movement, as I am certain the bulk of those in attendance had not read Marx on the French revolution and the Jacobins.

At the end of the meeting, Zahraie moved to take a vote, something I did not expect. I had envisioned this meeting as the first step toward a written discussion period leading to a democratic convention. Although a majority voted for Zahraie's report and against mine, some attendees who had worked closely with me in the East Tehran Branch voted for my report and against Zahraie's. However, it came as a shock to me to find that Mahmoud Sayrafizadeh (PC member), Fariborz Khasha, and Nader Javadi, who were present at the meeting, voted for Zahraie's report and against mine. I recall Sayrafizadeh's intervention as a firm support of Zahraie's views. As I will discuss below, it is entirely possible that Sayrafizadeh was at least a collaborator with Zahraie to turn the HKE towards the "Islamic anti-imperialist grassroots movements." 

Soon after that meeting, the difference between my view and Zahraie's was in sharp display. On April 18, 1980, Khomeini, in a sermon, attacked the universities as corrupt and un-Islamic.  Historically, Iranian universities had been the strongholds of secular and leftist forces. 

Following Ayatollah Khomeini's speech, Abolhassan Banisadr, who was also the first president of the Islamic Republic, and Hojatoleslam Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who was the speaker of the Islamic Consultive Assembly (مجلس شورای اسلامی) supported Khomeini.  On April 15, 1980,  Muslim students following the Imam's line clashed with dissident students at the University of Tabriz. Similar clashes followed in other universities and higher education colleges throughout the country. Islamic Student Associations occupied the universities and, accompanied by Hezbollah groups, attacked the offices of leftist groups and the Mujahideen. They demanded the dismissal of professors and staff and the students who were secular, leftist, or liberal. On April 22, 1980, the government declared an Islamic Cultural Revolution, which was accomplished by closing universities for a long time and ideologically cleansing them.

The next day Islamic Student Associations supported by semi-fascist Hezbollah gangs ransacked the offices of all other student organizations and took over campuses in Tehran and elsewhere.  Kargar (number 22, April 23, 1980) ran a full-page statement by the HKE and Young Socialists supporting this action and calling those who opposed it, including groups that were attacked, counterrevolutionary. They proclaimed: "The action of the Islamic Student Association is revolutionary. Opposing it is counterrevolutionary."  The statement itself was a combination of wishful thinking (that the Islamic Student Associations have taken this action to turn the universities into the centers of anti-imperialist struggle), unjustified attack on political organizations whose offices were ransacked (stating that they stand outside the "anti-imperialist barricades") and calling for action against the "500 capitalist and landowner families."

What followed was that Khomeini formed a Cultural Revolution Council that closed all universities for three years (1980-18983). They purged students, faculty, and staff who were identified by Islamic Student Associations or their fellow workers as belonging to the Mujahideen and socialist groups and revised the curriculum to make it Islamic. Years later, some of the leaders of the Islamic Student Associations and even those on the Cultural Revolution Council renounced their actions as reactionary. But one did not have to wait years to learn why this was a reactionary anti-working-class action. I was selling the same issue of Kargar, which supported the takeover of the universities in the streets of Tehran, and it was clear to me that ordinary Iranians did not think it had anything to do with either the anti-imperialist struggle or the deepening of the revolution—quite the contrary.  

A couple of days later, Shohreh Amin, who Zahraie groomed as his close associate in the leadership of Sattar League and played a destructive role in the factional fight in 1976-77 by asserting women who were in the Permanent Revolution Faction formed a click delivered a typed notice of my expulsion from the HKE to me with a nasty smile at the street door to the building where Azar Gilak had an apartment and where I lived as her guest at the time. When I got back to the apartment, she rang the doorbell again. She had a similar expulsion note for Gilak. Within a week, 25 people were expelled from HKE, including all the old East Tehran branch members who were now in HKE and had voted for my report at the conference, the entire Tabriz branch and its Young Socialists group, and Amir Maleki in Isfahan (Zahraie expelled him once before from the Austin branch in 1976).  Most of these members were expelled because they endorsed the platform of the Faction for Trotskyist Unification (FTU). Anticipating my expulsion, I spearheaded the formation of this faction (see endnote 3). The FTU platform focused on the lack of party democracy in the HKE in the context of sharpening political disagreements and the need to organize a democratic convention of all Iranian Trotskyists. In this, we reiterated what Zahraie himself had publicly said when he announced the formation of HKE—that the split in the united HKS was not justified —and that they would do whatever they could to overcome it. Except they did not mean what they said, and we did.  Although most FTU members had voted for my oral report in the debate with Zahraie, and the majority opposed the takeover of the universities, there was no time to prepare a standard document that democratically addressed those political issues.

Zahraie expels the Marxist Faction from the HKE

Within 10 days, the FTU held its first general assembly in Tehran. After a daylong discussion, a Steering Committee was elected that included Ali Irvani, the Tabriz organizer, and Amir Maleki, who lived in Isfahan to ensure their representation. I was elected as the organizer for the Steering Committee to oversee the daily work of the FTU.  We purchased a typewriter and a stencil machine on the black market, as the government required a permit for printing equipment, printed matter, and media to stifle opposition. I rented an office space on the third floor of a building in a residential neighborhood, which I set up as a detergent wholesale company.  We established a discussion bulletin named Sazmandeh (The Organizer سازمانده) and opened it up for contributions. 

The FTU gave us a new source of energy. Zahraie certainly hoped that we would get demoralized and disappear. Those of us who worked in factories continued carrying on political work. We continued to analyze and discuss the unfolding political situation. 

The Organizer flourished, and FTU members fully expressed themselves. For example, Amir Maleki, who was well aware that almost all of us did not agree with the HKE's position on the occupation of the universities, wrote a document in support of the HKE's position, entitled "Why the Occupation of the Universities Was Revolutionary." I wrote a response, "Why the Occupation of the Universities Was Not Revolutionary," explaining the reactionary nature of the Islamic Cultural Revolution. Today, it may seem strange that some revolutionary socialists could support any ideological purging of higher education in an entire country as a step toward socialism. However, the HKE position that Maleki supported showed how small propaganda groups can cave into the clerical capitalist regime that mobilized masses in the streets to advance its reactionary policies.

In the summer of 1980, the government launched another offensive against the Kurdish resistance. Kargar did not write even a single article or an editorial opposing it, as it had done before. I wrote a contribution in the Organizer entitled "Why Is Kargar Silent on the War in Kurdistan."   

We translated and mailed all our documents, along with cover letters, to the United Secretariat (Usec) of Fourth International.  I was delegated to represent the FTU at the Usec meeting in Brussels in July 1980. 

 At the USec meeting, three other Iranians were present.  Siamak Zahraie was there as the HKE representative. Mahmoud Sayrafizadeh was present as a member of the International Executive Committee and, as it turned out, as the HKE PC minority. A leader of the HKS named Fariborz was also present. The Usec heard my report as well as Siamak Zahraie's.  Sayrafizadeh told the Usec meeting that, as an HKE PC member, he was opposed to the expulsions of FTU and Farhad Nouri.  After some discussion, the Usec voted unanimously that those expulsions were unjustified and urged the HKE leadership to take us back and organize a convention. Doug Jenness represented the SWP.  At that meeting, I realized that the USEC majority, led by Mandel, favored Rahimian's HKS, while the SWP favored HKE but not Zahraie's leadership of it. 

I had discussions with Sayrafizadeh and with Fariborz. Siamak Zahraie was too factional to approach for conversation and left early. Fariborz was friendly but did not seem interested in our proposal to hold a united convention, although he did not rule it out.  Sayrafizadeh and I had our first long political discussion since we returned to Iran a year and a half earlier. We worked together daily in the Steering Committee of the PRF in 1977.  During that fight, we had become friends. 

Although Sayrafizadeh had voted against my political report and in favor of Zahraie's only a couple of months earlier, I now found that there were some common grounds in our political assessment of the revolution and how we should respond.  In particular, he expressed alarm about Kargar's silence on the war in Kurdistan. We agreed to continue meeting in Tehran.

Upon his return, Sayrafizadeh, with Khasha and Javadi, organized the Marxist Faction in the HKE. It was organized in response to the unexplained silence of the HKE in the face of the government's war against them and the demand to reverse the expulsions of Nouri and FTU, as well as to work towards a democratic convention to decide on key documents for the HKE.

When I returned to Tehran, I reported to the FTU assembly about the Usec decisions of the expulsions and my meetings with Sayrafizadeh and with Fariborz. To my surprise, Nouri and Gilak, with whom I had worked closely, launched an attack on me for exceeding my authority in meeting with Sayrafizadeh and Fariborz to discuss possible future collaboration. Others at the meeting, including my sister, seemed upset as well, mainly because I had met with Sayrafizadeh. There was a lot of resentment towards Sayrafizadeh among members of FTU, as he had remained silent about the expulsions and had voted for Zahraie's report during the debate. Nouri proposed that I should be removed as the Organizer of the FTU Steering Committee. 

Nouri was elected to the Steering Committee and as its Organizer.  He and I held a couple of meetings with Sayrafizadeh. When Nouri was won over to the idea of working with the MF, he presented a report to an FTU assembly that unanimously supported the proposal to collaborate with the MF in preparing the United Convention. I was assigned to collaborate with Sayrafizadeh to prepare a draft political resolution, which we referred to as "Theses on the Iranian Revolution."  The Theses, as it was called, was a compromise document. A couple of months earlier, Sayrafizadeh, Khasha, and Javadi, all leaders of the MF, had voted for Zahraie's report that compared the 1979 revolution with the French revolution of 1789 and the "anti-imperialist Islamic grassroots currents" as Jacobins, and against my report that defended the Manifesto of the Rights of Workers and Toilers of Iran, the programmatic basis of the United-HKS. The compromise we reached was that some in the ranks of the Islamic grassroots movements could be persuaded to adopt socialism. Still, we generally reiterated the programmatic ideas of the Manifesto in the Theses, culminating in the vision of a workers' and peasants' government, which required the overthrow of the Islamic Republic. 

The leadership of both factions agreed with the general line of that document. Sayrafizadeh gave a copy of it to the HKE PC on September 9, 1980.  Nouri then collaborated with Sayrafizadeh to write the task and perspective document entitled "Tasks of the Proletariat in the War and Revolution."  On September 22, 1980, Saddam Hussein's army invaded parts of Khuzestan; the Iran-Iraq war, which lasted eight years, had just begun.

Meanwhile, Maryam and Roya from HKS contacted me for a meeting. They had learned about the situation in HKE and our fight for a united democratic convention. Maryam explained how a small group of HKS leaders and members has been critical of Rahimian's leadership and HKS's direction. They decided to join in the pre-convention discussion for the United Convention. Together with Mehran, a leader of HKS, they organized the Trotskyist Faction within HKS, comprising nine members. Three of them left soon after, leaving five women and one man who joined the pre-convention discussion that the FTU and MF had opened with the publication of the Theses on the Iranian Revolution in early September.

On December 5, 1980, Babak Zahraie organized an HKE conference that expelled the Marxist Faction, three months after it was declared. The day before that conference, FTU and MF prepared for distribution a two-page joint statement entitled "To All Party Members: A Call for Convening the HKE Convention."  It summarized the opportunities and challenges facing the HKE and the crisis that was imposed on it by the Zahraie leadership.  It read: "Political differences that are presented, in the leadership and the party, regarding the fratricide war in Kurdistan and the proletarian strategy to defend the revolution against imperialist attacks have expanded to the character of the present government and how to realize the perspective of workers' and peasants' government."  It went on to explain how the Zahraie leadership has used organizational measures to obstruct political discussion and clarification: 

"It is necessary to remind you that the unprincipled decision to expel the Faction for Trotskyist Unification (FTU) that followed expression of political differences has not been reversed despite these comrades' loyalty to the party during the past eight months and despite the unanimous decision of the leadership of the Fourth International that these expulsions were not justified."

The statement argued that given the failure of the HKE PC majority to organize the convention, FTU and MF are organizing it for January 22-24, 1981, to discuss and vote on two documents: "Theses on the Iranian Revolution" and 'Tasks of the Proletariat in the War and Revolution' (both drafted in September 1980)." 

Two members of the Marxist Faction Steering Committee, Khasha and Javadi, were not allowed to participate in the conference under the false pretext that they had been inactive in the preceding few weeks. They were both on the staff of Kargar before they were dismissed and asked to find industrial jobs. The day before the conference, Khasha had given the PC an employment notice he had received from Arj factory, one of the two large manufacturers of air conditioning and heating systems in Iran. At the conference itself, Sayrafizadeh was not given equal time to present his counter-report.  While 20 people spoke at the conference, only two members of the MF were allowed to speak. Zahraie and others took the floor to allege false charges against the MF and its leaders and members.  Rank-and-file supporters of Zahraie took the floor to give glowing accounts of their political work in the industry and outside, that everything was just fine.  The opposition was portrayed as nagging, inactive, and good-for-nothings. At the end of the conference, Zahraie declared that HKE will hold its convention in 45 to 60 days and moved a motion to expel that MF from HKE.  His wish was carried out. (Source: "What Happened in the December 5th Conference: Expulsion of the Marxist Faction from the Revolutionary Workers Party (HKE)," by Fariborz Khash, no-date as the cover page is missing).

Among the twenty-five MF members expelled, two were Sattar League founders, several of whom were former political prisoners of our movement, including one of the 14 socialists. Additionally, half of the membership of the newly formed Young Socialists and most of its founders were also expelled. Together with the FTU members, approximately 50 people were expelled from the HKE, accounting for about 40% of HKE’s membership. 

5. Workers’ Unity Party (HVK حزب وحدت کارگران)

January 22-24, 1981, some 60 enthusiastic Trotskyists from three factions (two from HKE and one from HKS) participated as voting delegates in the founding convention of the Hezb-e Vahdat-e Kargaran (HVK, Workers Unity Party حزب وحدت کارگران), the first and only truly democratic convention of our movement. The conference adopted the general line of the "Theses on the Iranian Revolution" and "The War and the New Stage in the Revolution." One delegate, Davoud Moradi, a young critical thinker who appreciated Gramsci and cinema as an art form, disagreed with the perspective of incorporating young activists into our program, as seen in the Jihand Sazandegi (Reconstruction Jihad جهاد سازندگی) and Basij-e Mostaz'afin (Mobilization of the Oppressed بسیج مستضعفین).  He looked at these as consolidated organizations of the Islamic Republic regime, hence thoroughly reactionary. Most of us saw them more as a grassroots movement of Muslim youth who held illusions in Khomeini and were being channeled into a military organization of the Islamic Republic. Davoudi wrote about his views, spoke at the convention, and proposed amendments to the relevant sections of the draft resolutions. HKE and HKS were invited to send their representatives to speak at the convention. Siamak Zahraie (HKE) attended and took up the opportunity to denounce the formation of the new party.  

Following the January 1981 convention, we immediately began organizing the party's institutions. The convention elected a fifteen-member National Committee, which in turn elected a Political Committee of five persons: Mehran (Trotskyist Faction), Javadi and Sayrafizadeh (Marxist Faction), and Nouri and I (Faction for Trotskyist Unification). After some discussion, the PC voted for Nouri as its organizer. The bulk of HVK membership was based in Tehran, but we had a branch of 12 people in Tabriz, two members in Isfahan (Hakimi had recruited a soldier), and a few at-large members who lived elsewhere in Iran. About half of our membership was from the industry, and we immediately organized an effort to recruit more leaders and members. The PC assigned me to help with this effort by getting an industrial job. We rented an office on the first floor of an apartment building in an alleyway near Vali-e Asr Square in central Tehran as our headquarters, under the guise of a tutoring business for those seeking to pass the university entrance examination. A five-person editorial staff, with Javadi as editor, worked on our paper, Hemmat (Effort).  Hemmat was the name of the first Iranian socialist group organized in the Baku oil fields before the Russian Revolution of 1917. When we applied for a permit for Hemmat, the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance asked for the names of those responsible. We provided them with the names of Sayrafizadeh as the Managing Director (مدیر مسئول), Hemmat's masthead, Javadi, and me (I was also on the editorial staff).    

Despite our optimistic outlook reflected in our documents, the convention discussions, and the initial energy to launch the party and establish its institutions, within two years, the leadership of the HVK decided to dissolve it under the pressure of yet another wave of unleashed repression starting in the summer of 1982. The HKE was also effectively dissolved as Babak Zahraie was imprisoned in January 1983. The HKS's last issue of Nazm-e Kargar (Worker's Organization) was published in June 1982.  

The period from the founding of HVK in December 1980 to its dissolution in December 1982 was marked by a stalemate in the war, until the Iranian forces began a wave of offensives that on May 24, 1982, that liberated Khorramshahr, a significant city in Khuzestan province that was in Iraqi hands since early in the war, on October 26, 1980. The liberation of Khorramshahr was a turning point in the war.  By June 1982, the Iranians retook almost all lost territories.  For the next six years, Iran was on the offensive with the stated goal of "liberating Quds (Jerusalem بیت المقدس)" through the "liberation of Karbala," the Shia's holy site in Iraq, that is, through overthrowing the Saddam Hussein regime.  

This was also a period of intense factional struggle within the Islamic Republic regime and severe repression of all political parties, especially those that came into sharp and often armed conflict with the regime, the Mujahideen Khalgh (مجاهدین خلق), Fedayeen Minority (فدائیان خلق- اقلیت), and Peykar (پیکار).  Sadegh Ghotbzadeh (صادق قطب زاده), who Khomeini had appointed as the director of the Iranian national TV and radio to impose Islamic censorship and was the foreign minister after the Bazargan cabinet resigned, was executed during this period, accused of hatching a coup with the Saudis' help.  As it turned out, Ghotbzadeh’s office was on the floor under the office space I had rented for FTU. When his office was raided, we were still there and luckily were not affected by the raid! 

Another Khomeini aid, Abolhassan Banisadr (ابولقاسم بنی صدر), who was elected the first president of the Islamic Republic with 84% of the vote on February 4, 1980, was impeached by the Islamic Consultative Majles (parliament) on June 21, 1981, as factional struggle with the Islamic Republic Party that enjoyed Khomeini's support came to a head. On July 29, 1981, Banisadr and Rajavi were smuggled out of Iran on an Iran Air flight to Paris. These happened as the repression against Mujahideen Khalq, which had a tense relationship with Khomeini from his time in exile in Najaf, Iraq, increased as their sympathizers were systematically harassed, physically attacked, jailed, or sometimes executed. On June 20, the Mujahideen organized a mass demonstration in Tehran, attended by some 200,000 people.  The government attacked the demonstration, wounding some and arresting many. The Mujahideen leadership concluded that peaceful protest is no longer possible and decided to resume armed struggle. Some of its leaders died in these clashes. Masoud Rajavi, the key remaining leader, took up terrorism.

 On June 28, 1981, the Mujahideen bombed the offices of the Islamic Republic Party, killing 70 high-ranking officials, including Chief Justice Ayatollah Mohammad Beheshti, who was the IRP leader. Two months later, on August 30, another Mujahideen bomb killed President Mohammad Ali Rajai and Prime Minister Hojatoleslam Mohammad Javad Bahonar.

Thousands were arrested, and many hundreds were executed, mostly young sympathizers of these groups.  Rajavi and other Mujahideen leaders fled to Iraq to join forces with Saddam Hussein to fight the Islamic Republic. Eventually, the Mujahideen became an exile group working with U.S. imperialism. 

The Islamic Republic regime unleashed a massive wave of repression that went well beyond the Mujahideen to include socialist groups that viewed the regime as the enemy, including Fedayeen Minority and Peykar (Organization of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class, a 1975 Maoist splinter group from the People's Mujahedin of Iran).

Meanwhile, the regime, using the war with Iraq as an excuse, moved against all independent labor and peasant struggles. In particular, the oil workers' movement was decimated, and their leaders were imprisoned, tortured, and some were executed. Yadullah Khosroshahi, a central leader of the oil workers' union and shoras who was imprisoned and tortured for five years under the Shah regime, and spent five years in the Islamic Republic's prisons and tortued, had compiled a list of 500 oil workers whom the Islamic Republic executed.

Grand Ayatollahs Golpaigani ( گلپایگانی ) and Marashi ( مرعشی) declared at the onset of the war that taking private property of the landowners was un-Islamic and threatened to march in the streets to oppose any land reform. Khomeini ordered a halt to further action on implementing Article C (بند "ج"), a provision to distribute land not under cultivation that Jihad for Reconstruction activists and peasant shoras had been demanding.  Capitalists and large landowners used the pretext of the war to press against workers, peasants, and their supporters in towns and the countryside.

A new military offensive against the Kurds took place under the guise of the need to move armed forces to the front.

 The universities remained closed while the Cultural Revolution Council purged students, faculty, staff, and curriculum of anything it deemed as un-Islamic.

The HVK responded to these events as best as possible and in many ways, in an exemplary manner. In the early months, we even recruited a few people. However, the pressures of intense and multifaceted conflict, as well as governmental attacks, took a toll on our small organization, wearing us out.  When we decided to run Sayrafizadeh as the candidate for the parliamentary elections on October 2, 1981, the Political Committee agreed that we should leave out any mention of the government's war against the Kurds. When I raised my concern about this, the PC decided to report our opposition to the war to the membership verbally and explained that it would have been too dangerous to take a public position. I deferred, knowing that they were right, but sensing that a reassessment of the political situation might be needed. 

The problem we faced was that in our convention, we had argued that the revolution was advancing. It became almost an act of self-assurance to proclaim, "The revolution is advancing." To justify that we increasingly identified the revolution with Islamic Republic mass mobilizations of its base that opposed the U.S., Isreal, and Saddam Hussein and although opposed governmental repression in Hemmat, we did not acknowledge that increasingly there are no longer independent organization and practically no class struggle in Marxian sense, that is, the working people fight for the working class rights and interests. 

For example, I was assigned to cover the May Day 1982 activities in Tehran for Hemmat.  The article I wrote accurately reported that the leadership of these mobilizations was in the hands of the Workers House (خانه کارگر), controlled by the Islamic Republic Party. I also noted they turned the marches to Tehran University and the rally there into an anti-communist event.  Gilak, who was the acting editor (Javadi was on leave to draft a document on events in Afghanistan), in consultation with Nouri, edited out this characterization of the May Day events to make it sound as if it was essentially a militant action in support of the war effort.  I learned about this change after Hemmat was distributed.

In the next issue of Hemmat, an article signed by Maryam Davoudi reports on Iraqi prisoners of war in Khuzestan joining residents of Ahvaz in chanting "Victory to Islam, Death to Saddam Hussein!" The article is based on a report from the Iranian daily Keyhan, which was a government-run publication. Now, it is no surprise that Keyhan makes that slogan prominent. However, there was no reason for Hemmat to repeat this as a sign of the revolution's progress. Of course, I was not the only person who felt ill at ease. 

The Political Committee meetings became tense and personality incompatibilities took the better part of some, resulting in shouting matches a number of times, putting the headquarters' safety at risk.  Amir Maleki, who was the organizer of the Isfahan branch that had two members, refused to "recognize" Nouri, the PC organizer, when he was on a visiting tour of the party branches in other cities. Meanwhile, we lost Sammad Assari-Eskandari, a young man from Tabriz, who was drafted and went to the front soon after he joined the party. 

In March 1982, Kargar was declared illegal. We wrote an editorial in Hemmat defending its right to publish and noted the anti-working-class character of this decision. In June, Sayrafizadeh was called in to the Ministry of Islamic Guidance and ordered to cease publishing Hemmat. After a PC discussion, we decided to comply. In its place, the PC prepared a written analysis of the political situation for the party in the form of a "letter to the editor" to be submitted to one of the mass-circulation dailies. We hoped to maintain the political cohesion of HVK while minimizing the risk of being caught with something considered illegal. We also relinquished the HVK headquarters, which we had used for the Hemmat editorial staff, our technical department, and PC meetings.  Gilak and Nouri housed the technical apparatus in their rented apartment, located close to the occupied U.S. embassy, and PC meetings were held there in an extra-large room. 

Meanwhile, crucial political differences began to creep into the PC discussion. Two examples. After the liberation of Khorramshahr on May 24, 1982, Saddam Hussein sued for peace. After meeting with the Arab League, he offered Iran $70 billion in damages. Despite some support for negotiation within the Islamic Republic regime, Khomeini rejected this offer. Instead, he decided that the war should continue until Saddam Hussein is overthrown and an Islamic Republic is established in Iraq.  The prevalent slogan was "The road to Quds (Jerusalem) is through Karbala [a holy city in Iraq]." 

When we held a PC discussion of this question, the majority's sympathy was with the position that while the war was just as the defense of the revolution against counter-revolutionary Iraqi invasion backed by imperialism, it was time to sue for peace now that the Iraqi army has been pushed out of Iranian territory. The Iraqi regime is forced to sue for peace. Yet Sayrafizadeh disagreed, arguing that Khomeini's intransigence reflected the fervor of the Iranian working people and that the prospect of overthrowing Saddam Hussein's regime was real because the oppressed Shia majority in Iraq would welcome the Iranian army. The revolution would spread to the rest of the Middle East.

 At the same PC meeting, Sayrafizadeh proposed that we begin a class series reading Lenin. The proposal came out of the blue, was not motivated, and did not jive with anything else we were saying and doing at the time.  A couple of years later, when I was attending the SWP's Lenin classes in New York, I realized where that proposal might have originated. It was part of Barnes's effort to refashion the SWP and expand his "international tendency."

Meanwhile, demoralization had spread among some members of the HVK. Before we give up, Hemmat, I realized that several of our members and one of the National Committee members have stopped reading it. 

On July 2, 1982, I submitted my resignation from the HVK to the National Committee just before its July 3 NC meeting. On July 4, I left for New York with a stop in Vienna. I arrived in New York on July 24. In early August, I became a member of the SWP's New York branch.  My decision to leave Iran was a personal and deliberate choice.  My close political associates were aware for a long time that I was contemplating leaving Iran and the reasons behind it.  A year earlier, I had formally discussed this with Nouri and others on the Political Committee, keeping them informed about the progress of my application for an exit visa.  They were understanding and supportive.

 By the end of 1982, the wave of repression that had destroyed the Shora movement had reached the socialist parties that had supported the Islamic Republic politically, such as the Tudeh Party and Fedayeen Majority, or critically, like the HKE, or materially only, like the HVK.

Sayrafizadeh was summoned to Evin Prison and detained for a short period. I do not know what might have transpired there, although there can be little doubt that they mistreated him. They released him after he promised to dissolve the HVK. The Political Committee of HVK approved the motion. The political cohesion was gone, and I understand that there were different interpretations of what the decision to dissolve the HVK meant and how it was carried out. Everyone went their own separate way.  

Babak Zahraie was arrested on January 17, 1983.  He was held as a political prisoner until 1988. t is notable that the year 1988 when Zahraie was released was also the year when the hideous massacre of thousands of political prisoners happened across Iran.  Beginning on July 19, 1988, for about four months thousands of political prisoners, many supporters of the Mujahedin but also supporters of various socialist groups, were executed.  The prisoners were asked if they still held to their political belief. Those who responded in the affirmative were executed. 

The immediate reason for Zahraie's arrest was that in the last issue of Kargar there was a featured interview with Bahram Attataie, a Political Committee member of the HKE who was arrested on December 11, 1981.  He was held in Evin prison for 82 days, intrrogated abd tortured.  Attaie was arrested by the Islamic Revolution Public Prosecutors Central Office arrested Attaie after the Friday Prayers. while he was passing out flyers to the Tehran Friday prayer crowd that appealed to them about the case of an HKE member who was ousted from the war fronts for being a socialist and fired from his job in a factory for the same reason. 

There is an amazing schizophrenic quality to Attaie’s interview. Kargar introduces him as “brother Attaie.” He refers to his interrogators, jailers and tortures as “brothers” and speaks of “our Islamic Revolution.” He volunteers that when his interrogator asked him why he became a socialist he responded by saying that there were no Islamic groups in the U.S. when he radicalized except one in Houston that supported the Freedom Front—the Bazargan’s group—which was now disfavored by the IRP dominated regime and presumably his jailers.  When he was asked why he did not become a Khomeini disciple he responds that he had no access to his ideas and offered the following: 

“[As] the Islamic Revolution drew closer our collaboration with Islamic militants and Islamic Student Associations abroad that had just formed increased and after the revolution it has become widespread. Today, we want strategic collaboration with Islamic institutions like the Islamic Revolution Guards Corp and Jihad for Construction, and others (My emphasis).”  

 Similarly, Attaie’s interview tries to suggest that the conditions at Evin as bad as they were were still superior to those under the Shah’s regime, that those directly responsible for his arrest and torment and the horrific conditions at Evin were acting without the knowledge of Khomeini and other top Islamic Republic leaders.  For example, he reports conversation among his cellmates who were political prisoners of both regimes with some arguing that conditions were far worse under the Shah. He argues that earlier HKE political prisoners never observed torture. But he concedes that they reported Hadd-eh Sharee (Islamic punishment) in the form of flogging.  This is significant because the HKE leadership was taking a legalist approach to the conditions in prison as they did not condemn Islamic punishment sanctioned by Islamic law as torture. Let’s recall Attie’s own description of how it felt to be flogged.

Clearly, the HKE had gone off the path of socialism in trying to appeal to the "anti-imperialist grassroots movement." In chapter 3 where I detail the course of HKE adaptation to the Islamic Republic. 

Siamak Zahraie reports that HKE became dysfunctional after Babak Zahraie's arrest. It had already lost its paper, and some of its leaders and members had left. Siamak Zahraie describes the problems the HKE faced even before his brother's arrest:

"[D]ay by day fewer and fewer were listening to us, and the government had a freer hand in suppressing the RWP [Revolutionary Workers Party or HKE in my abbreviation, KN].  Members were expelled from their jobs, imprisoned, and membership was shrinking.  The circle of sympathizers, the source of the party's growth, was shrinking even faster.  On March 15, 1982, the last issue of Kargar was published, but before it hit the streets, government agents removed it from the newsstands.  This was the informal and total ban on Kargar.  The second-to-last issue carried an interview with one of the newly freed members of the party.  This interview detailed the grim situation and treatment of the political prisoners in the infamous Evin prison and was quoted broadly in news media abroad.  The party saw no other option but to tell the truth, knowing well that the regime would retaliate; and indeed, this infuriated the regime.  Without a public paper, for all practical purposes, HKE’s status was reduced to that of an underground organization.  However, the party refused to operate as an underground organization, maintaining its offices and continuing to attempt to regain the legal status of its paper.  At the same time, we could not attract the slightest degree of support from the Islamic organizations that were the focus of our activities, let alone the society at large." (Siamak Zahraie, "Our Background," October 16, 2005).

 

A few months after Babak Zahraie’s imprisonment, what was left of HKE experienced a split.  A group published a pamphlet entitled “In Defense of the Revolution and In Response to the Imperialist Military Threats, Let’s Build ‘Say Yes to Khomeini’ Campaign.” On its cover, the pamphlet also raised a demand: “Free Babak Zahraie.”  Siamak Zahraie communicated to the authorities that HKE did not issue this pamphlet. He also published a pamphlet rebutting it entitled “The Leadership of the Revolution and the Islamic Republic: Critique of the HKE program” (رهبری انقلاب و جمهوری اسلامی The Leadership of the Revolution and the Islamic Republic, July 1983).  In this pamphlet, he put forward a reassessment that he claims was based on discussions with Babak Zahraie that took place two years earlier.  The reassessment began with this critical statement.

“[T]he longstanding position of the HKE on the unconditional defense of the Islamic Republic in the face of Iraqi aggression, U.S. imperialist threats, and counter-revolution is no longer sufficient. The class-conscious workers should work to strengthen the Islamic Republic to fight imperialism. Therefore, our position should not be just an unconditional defense but a strengthening of the Islamic Republic. Therefore, in light of these facts and their political implications, the slogan of ‘workers and peasants government’ has no independent basis and should be dropped (ibid. p. 29).” 

He continued:

“Facts show that after the February insurrection, there have been advances in all fundamental points of the HKE program and, at least after the occupation of the Spy Den, these advances have not been independent of the Islamic Republic government, but have more and more taken place under the leadership of Imam Khomeini. This issue becomes clear to us when the conflicts and fundamental contradictions between institutions (such as Islamic shoras, Islamic Associations, the Revolution Guards, the Bassij, and Jihad for Reconstruction, etc.) and the Islamic Republic government have not materialized.  Thus, in continuity with previous assessments, there is no more place for the slogan of ‘workers’ and peasants’ government’ as our principal axis (ibid.).”

 

In the second essay in the same pamphlet that offers a reassessment of HKE’s 1981 draft political resolution (which was never completed), Siamak Zahraie returns to the same issue:

“The Ministry of Revolution Guards and the Ministry of Jihad for Reconstruction were organized, and these institutions joined the cabinet. The crisis that we predicted did not happen, and this did not create obstacles to the advances on the war fronts or the expansion of the rural shoras.

“It is natural to ask: where was our error? Either our positive assessment of these institutions was wrong and their class character, like the government, was ‘bourgeois,’ which is certainly is not consistent with rational thought, given the role they have played in the advancement of the revolution and war or our assessment of the [class character] of the government that it is a government under ‘domination of capitalist politicians’ is wrong so our position of the origin of the government is wrong.

“A review of the revolution will show that our view of the [class] nature of the government as a capitalist government that is fundamentally built on the remains of the bureaucracy of the old regime is wrong and was the origin of our political mistakes (ibid. p. 42).”

Sometime later, Siamak Zahraie went further to renounce Trotskyism and the Fourth International.

Siamak Zahraie’s overt political support for the Islamic Republic coincided not just with the recent arrest of his “brother and comrade” but also with the arrest of thousands of socialists who were almost routinely tortured, some of whom were forced to recant their ideology and politics on TV, and hundreds of whom were executed. While some former HKE leaders and members did not go as far as Siamak Zahraie, they simply shirked from drawing the obvious conclusion from the political trajectory of the HKE.

6. Some lessons

The Iranian Trotskyist movement lived a short but eventful life, spanning approximately eleven years, from the inception of the Sattar League in the U.S. in 1971, and in the Kand-o-Kav group in Britian in 1974, to the demise of three small organizations, Workers’ Unity Party (HVK), Revolutionary Workers Party (HKE), and Socialist Workers Party (HKS), each comprising roughly 60 people, in Iran by the end of 1982. 

What started as essentially a revolutionary socialist youth movement made up of Iranian students abroad, was faced with a massive national democratic revolution complicated with an politically charged Shia movement organized by Ayatollah Khomeini to establish an Islamic government to in Iran to replace the U.S. back regime of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. Their success came at the expense of a vicious three-and half-year campaign to crush all independent grassroots movements and political parties.  As a small propaganda movement, the Iranian Trotskyists were powerless to stop the Islamic Republic counter-revolution. Not only we were politically inexperienced with no deep knowledge of the Iranian society and the labor movement which we were supposed to lead, we had no ties to either one. Our knowledge of socialist theory and history were limited. In fact, I was able to ascertain that even those of us who took leadership wrote had not studied Marx, Engels, Lenin main works, let alone the wide socialist literature or studies the “socialist” revolutions of the twentieth century. These include critical study of theories of proletariat and socialism, including Lenin’s theory of vanguard party which the Fourth International was founded to build into revolutionary mass parties of the proletariat to carry through the socialist revolution. It also included critical study of the theory of Permanent Revolution, monopoly capital theory, including Lenin’s theory of imperialism, Trotsky’s theory of the Soviet Union as the degenerated workers’ state, the theory of workers’ and peasants’ government as developed by the SWP and Fourth International, and the non-Marxist Dependency theory (Chapter 8; Nayeri 2018) that emerged in the aftermath of World War II that was adopted by the socialists including the U.S. Socialist Workers Party and the Fourth International.

To those of us who radicalized as young Iranian Trotskyists, Mahmoud Sayrafizadeh's Nationality and Revolution in Iran (1972) was a feat as it seemed to have demonstrated both the analytical power of Trotsky’s theories as well as providing a path towards a solution of the burning questions of the program and strategy for the coming Iranian revolution.  Nobody among us questioned its methodological and theoretical underpinnings. But with the benefit of hindsight, there are considerable methodological and theoretical errors in the book that help to understand the adaptationist course Mahmoud and the part of the Iranian Trotskyism that was educated in Nationality and Revolution in Iran followed.  The book replaced materialist conception of history with its focus on the modes of production, class formation, and class struggle in explaining history, with the Dependency School attention on imperialism as the cause of Iran's problems while relegating class and state actors to a secondary role.  Nationality and Revolution in Iran deals  superficially with Shia heirarchy and never consider its relationship to class and state formation in Iran as discussed above (for a detailed critique of it see Nayeri 2019). 

Thus, Mahmoud Sayrafizadeh’s influential book Nationality and Revolution in Iran (1972) ignored historical materialism to retell the Iranian revolutionary history in the first half of the twentieth century through the lens of Trotsky’s theory of Permanent Revolution and Stalinism and non-Marxist Dependency as the struggle of Iranians against imperialism and of the oppressed nationalities, in particular the Azerbaijanis, against the Fars dominated central government and betrayal of these struggles by the “national bourgeoisie” and Stalinism. There is nothing about modes of production in Iran, the formation and evolution of the working class and the labor movement, or the emergence and changes in the character of the socialist movement (for a more detailed discussion of its theretical errors see Nayeri 2020).

Thus, it was easy for Sayrafizadeh to view the revolution as the historical fight against U.S. imperialism and find certain affinity with the Khomeini movement as it mobilized the masses against the United States and Israel. Zahraie used this framework for his own end, to find a path of least resistance to power as a anti-imperialist socialist. Sayrafizadeh even considered the Khomeini movement as a revolutionary force to spread the revolution to the entire Middle East and while Siamak Zahraie even considered the Islamic Republic as a form of workers’ and peasants’ government.

In 1986, when Sayrafizadeh returned to New York and was immediately coopted into the SWP National Committee, his view of the Islamic Republic as an anti-imperialist force dovetailed with Jack Barnes plan to remake the SWP as a partner in the formation of a New International with the Cuban Communist Party as its center.

Sayrafizadeh also was tasked to form a group in Iran in line with the Jack Barnes’ SWP. To do p from Amir Maleki established Talieh-ye Porso Publications (نشر طلیعه پرسو Bright Vanguard Publishers) largely to translate and publish Jack Barnes writings.

In 2009, the SWP embarked on the path to become a Zionist socialist cult. Sayrafizadeh’s group of three former members of the HVK in Iran followed. 

Endnotes:

1. The following historical account of Shi’ism in Iran is taken from Encyclopædia Iranica.

2.  Initially, Afsaneh Najmabadi contributed to the launching of Nimeh Digar (نیمه دیگر  The Other Half), a Farsi language feminist journal. However, as shebecame an accomplished academic at Harvard University, she also moved signficantly to the right politically. From her Wikipedia entry: “In 1991, she supported the U.S. invasion of Iraq and harshly attacked Edward Said for criticizing the attack, describing his view as the ‘rhetorical equivalent of political murder’.”

3. Soon after the citywide meeting when Zahraie and I exchanged views on the political situation, our program and strategy, and tactics, Siamak Zahraie called me for a meeting in his office—he was still the Tehran city organizer and a PC member.  During this brief and tense meeting, he said that “they know” that “our group” is gathering at Azar Gillak’s apartment. He instructed me to move out of Azar Gilak 's and Farhad Nouri's apartment in central Tehran. The two had just married and I had no money and no place of my own.

References:

Floor, Willem. BĀZĀR ii. Organization and Function. Encylopedia Iranica. 1989.

Fourth International. Dynamics ofthe World Situation Today. 1963.

Hooglund, Eric. Land and Revolution in Iran, 1960-1980. 1982. 

Marx, Karl. The EighteenthBrumaire of Louis Bonaparte. 1852.

Moin, Bagher. Khomeini: The Life of the Ayatollah, 2000.

Nayeri, Kamran. “Can the VanguardPrty Emancipate Humanity? A Review of The Party: Socialist Workers Party:1960-1988.” Our Place in the World: A Journal of Ecosocialism. August 19, 2012.

__________. "Learning From Our Mistakes: More on Barry Sheppard's Misrepresentation of the History of the Iranian Trotskyist Movement," Our Place in the World: A Journal of Ecosocialism. November 20, 2012. 

__________. "On Dependency School and Monopoly Capitalism Theory." Our Place in the World: A Journal of Ecosocialism. November 20, 2012.  August 19, 2018. 

__________. "Mahmoud Sayrafizadeh: The Father of Iranian Trotskyism." Our Place in the World: A Journal of Ecosocialism.  August 8, 2019. 

__________. “A Critical TheoreticalAssessment of the U.S. Socialist Workers Party: Past and Present.” Our Place in the World: A Journal of Ecosocialism. October 20, 2020.

علی اسدی و مجید تهرانیان.   صدایی که شنیده نشد: نگرش های فرهنگی و اجتماعی و توسعه نامتوازن. نشر نی 1357.

سیامک زهرائی. رهبری انقلاب و جمهوری اسلامی: نقد و بررسی برنامه حزب کارگران انقلابی. انتشارات فانوسا. 1363.

محمود صیرفی زاده. ملیت و انقلاب دز ایران. انتشارات فانوس، نیویورک، 1972.