In January 1979, the Iranian masses brought down Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, America’s favorite Middle Eastern dictator. The movement of the Iranian people—the blue- and white-collar workers, peasants, slum-dwellers, students, and shopkeepers—astonished the world and shook the foundations of American imperialism in the region. Though it ended in counterrevolution, the early phases of the Iranian Revolution are an inspiring example of the power of the working class.

Trump’s war on Iran is bringing memories of these times back for millions of Iranians. The proud traditions of anti-imperialism are once again coming to the fore. While the US imperialists would love nothing more than for American workers to remain ignorant of this momentous event, we have much to learn from the class-struggle traditions of our so-called “enemy,” the Iranian people.

A proxy of the West

The Shah was hated by the Iranian masses for a reason. He came to power in a 1953 coup orchestrated by the CIA and MI6 against Mohammad Mossadegh, the country’s first democratically-elected prime minister.

Mossadegh had nationalized Iran’s oil to benefit the people, but the Shah handed the country’s most valuable natural resource back to the West. The Consortium Agreement of 1954 gave 50% ownership of Iranian oil production to a group of Western companies, including five American monopolies, which engorged themselves on tens of millions of dollars every year from the Iranian people’s patrimony.

The other half of the oil, left in the hands of the government, was primarily sold to the West. Corrupt local compradors pocketed most of the proceeds; only a small fraction filtered down to the general population. Iran was the fourth-largest oil producer in the world in 1978, yet millions lived in poverty. Through this venal arrangement, the Iranian bourgeoisie was joined at the hip to Western imperialism.

Throughout his reign, the Shah embarked on a program of industrialization. However, this so-called “White Revolution” strengthened the social weight of the working class, which grew into a substantial percentage of the population, crucial for the functioning of the economy.

While labor organizing and strikes were illegal, these economic changes set the stage for the revolution. If workers organized at key choke points, such as the oil industry, they could halt the flow of profits to the capitalists and revenues to the state.

Despite the threat posed by the strengthening working class, the Shah felt supremely secure in his position. After all, US imperialism backed him to the hilt; his military officers were trained by the US, and Iran became the world’s largest importer of American-made weapons. As the protectors of US-imperialist interests in the oil-rich Persian Gulf, Iran spent billions on F-5E, F-14, and F-16 fighter aircraft, communications equipment, tanks, helicopters, flying command posts, and much more.

From 1973 to 1978, Iran spent an average of $2.7 billion per year on US weapons, ammunition, and military equipment. While masses of ruined peasants were forced to move into urban shanty towns in the hopes of finding work, the Shah spent nearly half the country’s oil revenue on the military.

On top of that, the Shah amassed a personal fortune for himself and his family. As an example, he set up the Pahlavi Foundation, ostensibly a charitable organization. In reality, it was a profit-making enterprise doubling as a tax shelter. The foundation wormed its way into many sectors of the economy. Such was the level of corruption that, during the early phase of the revolution, the Shah was forced to investigate his own foundation. On the whole, corruption cost the country at least a billion dollars in the 1970s.

This parasitic behavior naturally evoked the disgust of the workers and poor of Iran. Any hint of dissent, however, was brutally punished.

The Shah’s secret police, SAVAK, was established in 1957 with the aid of the CIA, Mossad, and the French SDECE. At its peak, SAVAK employed 5,000 agents engaged in sabotage, arrests, assassinations, and torture of dissidents. They repressed communists, nationalist democrats, socialists, labor organizers, Maoists, Islamists, and anyone else who opposed the Shah. SAVAK torturers were notoriously “creative” in their methods—from beatings to electric shocks and even more grisly techniques. The gruesome crimes of SAVAK are the real legacy of US imperialism in Iran.

In addition to the violent repression, the regime censored newspapers, banned political organizations, and built an extensive network of informants. In factories throughout the country, SAVAK spies would report on potential labor unrest, in order to quickly “neutralize” working-class militants.

Resistance to the Shah

In the midst of this repression, communist groups continued to organize underground. Despite its Stalinist deformations, the Tudeh Party had played an important role in the class struggles of the 1940s and early 1950s. At the time of the 1953 coup, it had grown into one of the strongest communist parties in the Middle East.

In the face of mass arrests and executions of its leaders, Tudeh reorganized itself and launched an underground newspaper called Nuyid (Harbinger), in January 1976. It began with a modest print run of 1,000 copies. When the party finally emerged from the underground, circulation exploded, reaching nearly a quarter million by February 1979.

Other groups were influenced by Maoism and believed an armed guerilla organization could take on the Shah’s state. Organizations like Fedayan-e-Khalgh (“People’s Devotees”), Peykar (“Struggle”), and Mojahedin-e-Khalgh (“People’s Fighters”) took up arms and engaged in assassinations and bombings of government officials and capitalists. Overwhelmingly, these groups were made up of students and members of the middle class, who were inspired by the anti-capitalist and anti-colonial revolutions raging around the world at the time. However, due to their incorrect perspectives, they failed to build any serious links with the working class.

The only legal organizations playing a political role were the Shi’a Muslim institutions. To a certain degree, the clerics had interests separate and antagonistic to the Shah and the capitalist class. They felt their influence slipping to the “Westernized” bourgeoisie in the cities and resented the loss of their landholdings in the countryside.

The clerics defended the rule of private property, and their main social base were the bazaaris, the merchant traders of Iran’s traditional marketplaces. They also enjoyed heavy support among the unemployed in the slums, who depended upon the clergy for their daily bread.

In the mid-1970s, the bazaaris saw inflation eat into their incomes. At the same time, the Shah launched a campaign against them, blaming the inflation problem on bazaari “profiteers.”

Historian Ervand Abrahamian writes: “The so-called Guild Courts set up hastily by SAVAK gave out some 250,000 fines, banned 23,000 traders from their home towns, handed out to some 8,000 shopkeepers prison sentences ranging from two months to three years, and brought charges against another 180,000 small businessmen.” Thus, the bazaaris and clergy were pushed into opposition to the regime, and acted as the most organized force at the outset of the revolution.

The outbreak of revolution

Divisions among the ruling class is the harbinger of revolution. By the mid-1970s, the US imperialists were having doubts about the Shah’s rule. According to Abrahamian, a “subcommittee on arms sales, after receiving information from the State Department, the CIA, and the Defense Department, concluded that it was potentially dangerous to sell so many weapons to such a repressive regime.”

The most farsighted of the imperialists realized such weapons could potentially become a liability, especially if they fell into the hands of communists. Even President Jimmy Carter, who backed the Shah right up until he was deposed, started criticizing some of the Iranian government’s human rights violations.

The Shah reacted by relaxing some police controls. A section of the intelligentsia took the opportunity of this small opening and pressed it further. Starting in May 1977, groups of lawyers, nationalists, and authors issued public letters condemning the government’s abuses.

Political organizers saw this as a moment to revive their dormant parties. Tudeh emerged from its underground existence, refounding cells in cities across the country. Likewise, the liberals revived the National Front, originally founded by Mossadegh, who had died under house arrest in 1967.

Mass protests and radicalization

On November 19, 1977, the police attacked 10,000 students at a poetry-reading organized by the Writers’ Association. One student was killed and seventy were injured, sparking demonstrations. Protests and student strikes against the police murder and repression continued for 10 days, prompting the closure of Tehran’s main universities.

In January 1978, a prominent regime newspaper accused an exiled cleric, Ayatollah Khomeini, of being a British spy. The clergy and bazaaris were enraged, leading to protests in the “holy city” of Qom, which the regime brutally suppressed, killing two protestors.

Khomeini, now in the spotlight, responded by calling for more anti-regime protests. He accused the Shah of collaborating with American imperialists and “undermining Islam.” Meanwhile, more “moderate” clerics who favored a constitutional monarchy were radicalized by the regime’s brazen brutality. Clergymen called on the population to refuse work on the 40th day after the Qom massacre, and attend religious services instead.

The 40th day, February 18, 1978, saw mass protests across the country. In the city of Tabriz, a student protester was killed by state forces. In response, the masses attacked police stations, offices of the Shah’s Resurgence Party, banks, and luxury hotels.

The government responded by sending in tanks, helicopter gunships, and troops. The opposition estimated that the military murdered 300 people in the streets. Once again, the clergy and National Front called on the people to protest these murders 40 days later.

Over the following months, two more cycles of mass demonstrations occurred in reaction to the murders perpetrated during previous protests. For his part, the Shah refused to apologize for the murders by the police and army. But he was astute enough to realize the need to assuage the masses. He called off the anti-profiteering campaign that targeted the bazaaris, ordered his family to end all business activities, and replaced the head of SAVAK.

Enter the working class

In an attempt to stop spiraling inflation, the government cut civilian expenditures, particularly the state-driven development plan, but this sparked an economic recession. According to Abrahamian: “The GNP, which had been rising at the rate of 15% to 20% per annum in the previous years, increased only 2% in the first half of 1978.” The Shah went on national TV, accusing workers of being pampered and lazy and mandating that they work harder.

Workers took action in response to the economic malaise and the Shah’s outrageous speech. In the summer of 1978, workers across the country struck for wage increases, preservation of bonuses, and better housing. Protests grew even larger over the next few months. Chants of “Death to the Shah” and “Throw out the Americans” became commonplace.

On Friday, September 8, helicopter gunships rained bullets on protestors, who set up barricades and fought pitched battles with regime forces. The government murdered more than 4,000 protestors that day, forever known as “Black Friday.”

After the massacre, the heavy battalions of the Iranian working class—the oil workers—flew headlong into the revolutionary struggle. They coordinated a political general strike across the whole country, which lasted four months, bringing the flow of profits to a grinding halt.

The strike cost the regime $50 million a day. But more than money, the ruling class was losing control. Workers’ committees, known in Farsi as shuras, took control of the oil industry. One oil worker summed up the situation: “We will export oil only after we have exported the Shah and his generals.”

Shuras sprung up in all major industries across the country. Workers elected management from their own ranks, as the old managers refused to work or fled abroad. In many cases, workers set new minimum-wage rates, drastically cut the ceiling of management’s pay, inspected the accounting books, issued checks to employees, and were responsible for the buying and selling of industrial equipment. As the shura constitution in one Tehran metal factory stated, “It is the duty of the shura to intervene in the whole affairs of the factory, e.g., in purchase, sale, pricing, and orders for raw materials.”

Crisis of the regime

Commenting on these dramatic developments from London, Ted Grant wrote in Militant:

A totalitarian system can only maintain itself by means of terror and a system of informers while the masses are inert. But once the masses move into action against the regime, it is the beginning of the end. The monstrous secret police are shown to be impotent in the face of the movement of the masses.

Indeed, the militant actions of oil and industrial workers inspired the rest of the working class to join the struggle. Office workers, bank employees, and professionals went on strike. Bank workers released lists of the multi-million dollar foreign money transfers of regime officials who were planning to flee the country.

The Shah reacted by declaring martial law, ordering the army to take over newspapers and arrest strike committees. At the same time, he amnestied political prisoners and promised he would soon hold free elections. Needless to say, this erratic response of both beating the movement with a shovel and extending an olive branch did not gain him any support.

The regime’s institutions began splitting along class lines. Lower ranks of the army fraternized with the protestors, refusing to fire on their own friends, family members, and neighbors. All of the US fighter jets, helicopters, and tanks counted for nothing once the troops operating them stopped fighting the people and turned their guns the other way.

Vivid accounts quoted by Abrahamian describe how “troops in Qom refused to fire on demonstrators, five hundred soldiers and twelve tanks in Tabriz joined the opposition, and three Imperial Guards fired a hail of bullets into their officers’ mess hall … soldiers in many towns were joining the demonstrators and … garrison troops in Hamadan, Kermanshah, and other provincial cities were secretly distributing weapons to the local population.”

The US imperialists watched these events with anxiety. They realized it was only a matter of time before the Shah would be swept away.

Fearing the downfall of capitalism if the Tudeh Party took power, they turned to Khomeini to save capitalism. For his part, Khomeini promised that a post-Shah Iran under his leadership would be a reliable oil supplier to the West, have friendly relations with the US, and not ally with the Soviet Union.

Indeed, the Tudeh Party certainly could have taken power and built a workers’ state based on the shuras. By late 1978, it had a mass base of members and sympathizers, including many worker-militants in the strategically crucial oil sector.

Instead, the party chose class collaboration and backed Khomeini. Clinging to discredited Menshevik-Stalinist dogma, Tudeh argued that socialist revolution was impossible in a country like Iran. According to the “theory of stages,” underdeveloped countries had to pass through “national revolutions” led by “progressive capitalists.” The real reason is that they did not trust the working class to take power, so they pushed socialism into the distant future.

According to the Tudeh Party program:

At this stage, the necessary condition for revolutionary development in Iran is the overthrow the old monarchist regime, to break down the reactionary machinery of the government, to end the rule of the big capitalists and landowners and transfer power from these classes to the national and democratic classes and strata, to the workers, peasants, petty bourgeoisie, patriotic intellectuals and also the national bourgeoisie strata, in other words the establishment of the national and democratic republic.

Based on this false doctrine, the party leadership advocated for a “democratic” capitalist regime. They believed “progressive” elements of the petty and “national” bourgeoisie—not workers—should lead the revolutionary struggle against the Shah. Tudeh leaders identified the clerical establishment as this “progressive” bourgeois element, given its history of conflicts with the Shah. As a result, Khomeini’s influence swelled to massive proportions.

In January 1979, the Shah realized the game was up. He fled the country on January 16, a day that will live forever in the hearts of the Iranian people—and revolutionaries all over the world.

The regime crumbles

Days before fleeing, the Shah appointed Shapour Bakhtiar as prime minister. But the ground was crumbling beneath Bakhtiar’s feet. Eight million people were on the streets when Khomeini arrived back in Iran. Soon after, his representatives met with army officers from the regime, to facilitate a transfer of power.

In February 1979, air force technicians and cadets in Tehran mutinied against the government. The Imperial Guard attempted to crush them. Guerilla groups like the Fedayan-e-Khalgh and Mojahedin-e-Khalgh came to the aid of the mutineers and successfully defeated the Imperial Guard. Their combined forces then raided military barracks and distributed weapons to the masses.

The armed masses stormed even more barracks in search of weapons. The New York Times reported, “Thousands of civilians appeared in the streets with machine guns and other weapons.” In a few days, the masses controlled all the main government buildings, communications infrastructure, and military bases. SAVAK melted away, and Bakhtiar was also forced to flee the country. The Iranian people had triumphed over the last vestiges of the monarchy.

The following months were a springtime for the Iranian people. With political parties and trade unions now legalized, the masses put their newfound freedom to use. There were an astounding 50,000 strikes in the month after the February revolution. In the countryside, peasants took land from the landlords. In the universities, socialist student circles mushroomed.

The shuras grew stronger in factories and working-class neighborhoods. Shuras even took over the administration of some cities in the north of Iran. The revolution had revealed the massive power of the working class. A situation of dual power existed, but there was no party capable of recognizing this, linking up and centralizing rule through the shuras, and completing the revolution by establishing a workers’ state.

At the same time, Iran suffered from large-scale capital flight. Members of the so-called “patriotic bourgeoisie” were, in reality, mere lackeys of the West, and fled with their tails between their legs, taking as much of their wealth as they could manage with them. The expat Iranians promoted in the US media today, who cheer for US bombs and the return of monarchy, are the progeny of these cowards.

Meanwhile, workers took control of abandoned factories. To prevent further capital flight, and under the pressure of the workers, Khomeini’s new Islamic government was forced to nationalize the major industries and banks, end all contracts with the imperialist oil consortium, and institute a state monopoly on foreign trade.

The legacy and lessons of the revolution

A counterrevolutionary takeover by Khomeini’s Islamists soon followed. The Islamists, using the cover provided by the left parties, shut down the shuras and wiped out every left-wing organization in the country. The US-backed invasion by Saddam Hussein in 1980 further solidified their power. All of this could have been avoided had the communist organizations adopted a class independent stance during the revolution.

Despite the failure of workers’ to take power, American imperialism and world capitalism were weakened by the 1978–9 revolution. The US imperialists lost their puppet regime and control over Iran’s oil.

The Iranian masses remember the price they had to pay to throw off a US-backed dictator. This explains the mass nationalist rallies breaking out throughout the country today. Millions of Iranians are ready to do anything to defend the country’s sovereignty.

Communists can use this history to answer the relentless propaganda promoting “regime change” in Iran. The Shah’s brutal rule shows the kind of “freedom” Iranians can expect if the US succeeds in installing a friendly regime. The US imperialists are the real terrorists, and the anti-imperialist response of ordinary Iranians is completely rational.

Our enemy is at home. The capitalist class that exploits and oppresses workers at home is the same class bombing schools and hospitals abroad. Workers gain nothing from this war, which leads only to the murder of our class brothers and sisters in Iran, and may yet lead to mass casualties of American “workers in uniform.”

Just like the Shah’s regime, US capitalism is heading towards revolution, and we are preparing for it. We must learn from the heroic efforts of the Iranian communists. They came so close, yet failed to achieve socialism. The missing factor was a party with a Marxist program and strategy linking the anti-Shah struggle to the need for socialist revolution. To ensure the victory of the working class, which will end US imperialism once and for all time, the Revolutionary Communists of America are building just such a party.