contested terrain

Danny Postel on the Iranian Revolution and Anti-Imperialism

From the conference “30 Years of the Islamic Revolution: The Tragedy of the Left” organized by the The Platypus Affiliated Society in November of last year.

Danny Postel: The central question, which I will approach indirectly, is whether the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran was a tragedy for the Left.

In the conventional narrative of the Iranian Left the answer to our question has long been, “Yes.” The 1979 Revolution was a failure insofar as it was hijacked by one faction of a broader coalition that included the Iranian revolutionary Left. The faction in question was the Islamist or Khomeinite faction, which, once it gained control, proceeded to decimate, destroy, murder, imprison, and drive into exile its erstwhile comrades. There is a lot of truth to this leftist narrative, but it is only part of the story. It is largely self-exculpatory and elides the role the Iranian Left played in its own immolation. An account of this self-defeat can be found in Maziar Behrooz’s book, Rebels with a Cause: The Failure of the Left in Iran, a salutary and, indeed, definitive reconsideration of the history of the pre-revolutionary Iranian Left.

As Maziar explains, the Iranian Left, or at least certain key fractions of it, helped fashion the noose the Islamists ultimately hung them with. According to Behrooz, the Khomeinites were able to do this in large part because the Tudeh party, the Fadaiyan Majority, and many other Iranian Marxist parties, whatever their differences with the Islamists, shared with them a profound hostility toward liberalism. Like [Ruhollah al-Musavi] Khomeini’s followers, dominant trends on the Iranian Left viewed democratic rights, civil liberties, and women’s rights as no more than elements of what they described interchangeably as “western,” “colonial,” or “bourgeois” ideology.

On the basis of Behrooz’s analysis of the critical failings of the Iranian Left, I would say we must revise the Iranian Left’s usual answer to the question and answer it instead in the negative. No, the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran was not a tragedy for the Left, for tragedies befall innocence; they happen to people who have no idea of, and are not responsible for, the fate that awaits them.

This raises another question: Is it in fact a tragedy that the Stalinists and Maoists who made up the great majority of the left in Iran in the 1960s and 1970s did not take power? After all, virtually all Iranian leftists of the 1960s and 1970s were either Stalinist or Maoist. In light of this, I would argue that what followed in the wake of the 1979 Revolution was not so much a tragedy for the Iranian Marxist “Left” then in existence, as it was a tragedy for the project of the Left per se. For the genuinely leftist project of internationalism and human emancipation, the profoundly authoritarian, repressive, reactionary, and proto-fascist regime that emerged out of the Revolution and has ruled Iran ever since is certainly tragic but also, and more accurately, catastrophic. But what are the lessons to be learned?

There are both external and internal factors in the destruction of the Iranian Left. The external factors are obviously the brutality of the Islamists who took over and Iran’s strategic position in the Cold War rivalry between the U.S. and USSR. These factors are certainly important, but Behrooz’s book rightly zeroes in on the internal factors. Of these, he considers the Left’s tunnel-vision anti-imperialism most essential. Khomeini’s gang may have disdained professedly secular, rational socialists, but on the Left the argument went that, because they were anti-American and anti-imperialist, the Khomeinites were “objectively progressive.”

We now know that the Left’s was a demented, disfigured, ultimately catastrophic argument, one that had lethal consequences for those who propounded it. There was nothing progressive about Khomeini’s anti-imperialism. It was authoritarian and regressive, as is [Iranian President Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad’s anti-imperialism today. Whether Khomeini’s rhetoric was truly anti-imperialist is open to debate—but to the extent it was, it amounted to no more than an anti-imperialism of fools.

What were some of the consequences of the Iranian Marxist Left’s view that the anti-imperialist, anti-American rhetoric of the Khomeinites was “objectively progressive”? As mentioned earlier, it led to a rejection of the demands for human rights advanced by feminists, democratic liberals, and nationalists. Rather than sympathizing with and advancing their demands, many on the Left in Iran in 1979 regarded feminism as a bourgeois colonial ideology. Because of this many Iranian Marxists sided with extreme reactionary forces within the new Islamic government as they repressed feminism, beating women and suppressing their demands. Similarly, when newspapers were shut down, many Iranian Marxists defended not their right to publish their views, but the regime’s supposed responsibility to close them down! Here again the logic was the same: Liberal and nationalist newspapers were neo-colonial and bourgeois. Such actions, justified in the name of anti-imperialism, constituted a catastrophic turn down the dark ally of anti-liberalism. The Left mistakenly viewed liberalism as part of a toxic, global, colonial project rather than viewing it, as Marx himself did, as being necessary but insufficient—or, better, insufficient but bloody necessary — to the project of socialism and liberation.

The anti-liberal “radicalism” the Iranian Marxists shared with the Khomeinites was reactionary. But what can this teach us today, as we watch the protests in the streets of Tehran? After all, less than 24 hours ago, we witnessed the largest protests since the fall of the Shah. Clearly, we are again living in a historic moment, and so we should discuss some of the parallels and discontinuities between 1978–79 and today, the most obvious similarity being that, once again, hundreds of thousands, if not millions of Iranians have taken to the streets to voice their demands.

Where there has been some affinity between Platypus’s perspective and my own is in our shared critique of the authoritarian Left, the myopic anti-imperialism of those like MRzine, the online organ of Monthly Review magazine, or an organization like international ANSWER, which held a demonstration in solidarity with the Islamic Republic of Iran in June here in Chicago, defending Hugo Chavez and his position that the demonstrations in Iran are tools for imperial intervention, that the elections were wholly legitimate, and that Ahmadinejad is a revolutionary comrade that deserves the Left’s support.

Where my perspective diverges from Platypus’s is in our respective angles on what is happening in Iran today, particularly with respect to the Green or democratic movement that has developed in response to the June election results. As Chris Cutrone made clear already in his article in the August 2009 issue of the Platypus Review, he dismisses the Green Movement in Iran as still too…something. Actually I do not think Chris developed any definite criticism, but made only rhetorical gestures. So, I hope to hear an argument about where he stands now on the Green Movement in Iran. But from what I have heard so far from him, he shares the tunnel-vision anti-imperialism of the Left that supports Ahmadinejad and rejects the Green Movement. No doubt, be has reasons of his own for rejecting the Green Movement, but what he shares with the defenders of Ahmadinejad is a hostility to the pluralistic, democratic liberalism already articulated by the Green Movement. Though it is true that this movement remains somewhat inchoate, a work-in-progress, and is even now still forming its platform or agenda, the broad ideological outlines are clear.

I think there is a real danger in failing to recognize the emancipatory potential—not the fully articulated emancipatory program, granted, but the clear emancipatory promise and potential—in the Green Movement. It is a mistake to blind oneself to this promise or to reject it simply because it is articulated within the logic and framework of the Islamic Republic, or because it does not speak the anti-capitalist language of the Western Left and lacks a developed critique of neoliberalism. This latter point, which I take to be Platypus’s position, represents a species of left imperialism. To decline to sign on and support the Green Movement because they do not speak the language of socialist revolution is to cram the complex and fluctuating on-the-ground reality in Iran today into the preconceived categories of the Western Left. Such an attempt to fit that movement into our agenda constitutes a disfigured left imperialism that fundamentally misunderstands Iran today.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 10th, 2010 at 10:42 am and is filed under Iran, Left, anti-imperialism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.