Islam: sigh of the oppressed (1987)

From the June 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard

The bloody conflicts of the Middle East have complex causes — economic, strategic, religious and racial. But there has been little attempt by the western media to try to understand the whole picture. Instead there is a tendency to attach simplistic labels — "extremists", “fanatics”, "terrorists"— But those labels tell us very little. They offer nothing in the way of explanation. Instead we are given partial pictures of the bits of the Middle Eastern conflict that it is assumed are of interest to the west — the humanitarian efforts of medical workers in the Palestinian camps in Lebanon; the naive attempts by Terry Waite to get western hostages released; the covert attempts by the American government to do deals with the Iranians.

But we are given very little that enables us to understand why Palestinians were under siege in refugee camps; why Israel invaded southern Lebanon; why armed groups are holding westerners hostage; why Islam is such a potent force throughout the Middle East; why Iran and Iraq are still engaged in a bloody war.

The Sword of Islam

Islam is the world's fastest growing religion. Five times a day 900 million Moslems turn towards Mecca and kneel down to pray. It is a religion closely related to both Christianity and Judaism. Indeed Mohammed is seen as the last and greatest in a line of prophets that includes Moses and Jesus. Until the resurgence of fundamentalist Islam it was a religion of no more political importance than any other. As Islamic countries developed economically there was increasingly a separation between religion and politics. Religion, as was the case in most developed countries. was something separate from business, trade and politics, an anachronism that fitted uneasily with the demands of modern capitalism, to be paid lip service to only on high days and holidays.

The Islamic revolution in Iran in 1979 changed that. Ayatollah Khomeini took power in Iran by exploiting the thwarted aspirations of the poor who had seen Iran grow rich under the Shah but were excluded from a share in that wealth. The Shah's close ties with the west — especially America — meant that it was easy for the Ayatollah to shift the blame for the poverty of the Iranian people on to the effects of western involvement in Iran. According to Islam westerners are infidels; according to the Ayatollah America is the "great Satan". In place of the huge disparity between rich and poor and decadent western culture the Iranian people were offered a revolutionary Islamic programme that combined religion with politics, the establishment of an Islamic republic with the Ayatollah at the helm. All Iran's problems would be solved, it was claimed, if there was strict observance of Islamic law. The inevitable failure of the regime to deliver the social justice that had been promised could easily be blamed on the vestiges of American imperialism.

Iran-Iraq Bloodbath

In 1980, shortly after the Iranian revolution, President Saddam Hussein of Iraq took advantage of the turmoil in Iran to settle outstanding Iraqi territorial claims (as well as historic Arab grievances against Iraq's Persian neighbour). Iraq invaded Iran at a time when Iran was weakened by purges of the army, minority uprisings and internal chaos, with the aim of recovering land along the frontier as well as regaining control of the strategically important Shatt al-Arab waterway. But what is essentially a territorial conflict has been hugely complicated by longstanding racial and religious hostility between the two countries.

Iraq is controlled by the Ba'ath party under Saddam Hussein. Ba'athism is a secular pan-Arabist ideology which has very few supporters inside or outside Iraq. Hussein maintains his position through the activities of ruthless internal security services. And the opposition is hopelessly divided: Kurdish rebels pursuing their own nationalistic goals in the north; disaffected Shias who are more in sympathy with the Iranian "enemy" than with the Ba'athist regime but who nevertheless fear the consequences of an Iranian occupation.

Iraq's intention was to administer a swift, sharp blow to Iran. Almost seven years later it is now obvious that the Iraqi regime seriously miscalculated the strength of the Iranian resistance. For Iran has managed to turn it into a "holy war" and has made slow but inexorable advances into Iraqi territory.

Despite Iraqi weapons superiority, Iran has managed to fight back by sending thousands of young Iranian fighters to the front in wave after wave. And there seems to be no shortage of volunteers willing to die a martyr's death and thus be assured a place in heaven. Khomeini has successfully used the war and the revolution to justify each other. But he has also painted himself into a corner. Iran is now seriously weakened economically by the war. There is a strong case for ending it. However, the Iranian leadership has consistently sought to justify the bloodshed as being a necessary sacrifice in a fight to the death in a holy war. It would be difficult for the Ayatollah to now enter into negotiations to end the war without doing serious damage to his credibility as a religious and political leader.

The American Arms Connection

Another problem that the Iranian regime faces is access to weapons. Prior to the revolution America had been Iran's main arms supplier. Now Iran gets weapons from Israel (despite the regime's official anti-Israeli stance), South Korea and Taiwan. And, as has become apparent in recent months, there have also been covert arms deals between Iran and America in return for the release of western hostages held in Beirut.

For the American administration. Iran's need for weapons was a weakness which they hoped to exploit in order to open up a channel of communications with Hojatolislan Hashemi Rafsanjani, the speaker of the Iranian parliament and likely successor to the Ayatollah. He is seen by the west as a "moderate” with the potential to give the Americans a way back in to this economically and strategically important area. As we now know, American attempts to "normalise" relations with Iran went badly wrong. Not only has Reagan's credibility been badly damaged by the "Irangate" affair, but so too has that of the Iranian regime. If people in the west were scandalised at the hypocrisy of an American government which used emotional rhetoric about not doing deals with terrorists, then in Iran too there is a scandal in the making about the regime there doing deals with the "Great Satan". This has made it even less likely that the Iranians will risk further loss of face by negotiating a peace treaty with Iraq. In fact Khomeini has recently declared that his objective is to overthrow Hussein and the Ba'athist ruling party and also to capture Basra and the "holy" city of Karbala.

Flashpoint in the Lebanon

The seeds of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians are well known. The consequences of that conflict have been bitter and wide-ranging but in recent years have focussed increasingly on Lebanon. Many Palestinians, dispossessed of their land, entered the Lebanon as refugees. Their presence in the south of the country and Israel's allegations that they were using bases there to launch guerrilla attacks on Israeli settlements in northern Galilee provided the justification for the Israeli army to invade Lebanon in 1982 with the declared aim of forcing the Palestinians out of southern Lebanon.

When the Israeli army entered the region Shia Muslim villagers welcomed them as liberators. For when the Palestinians had arrived from Jordan, they had taken effective control of the area. PLO checkpoints had been set up, taxes imposed and land taken away from the local people. The Shias also feared that the presence of Palestinians would lead them into conflict with Israel — a conflict which they didn't want. At first Shia villages had taken the Palestinians in as refugees. But by the time the Israeli army arrived the Palestinians had alienated the villagers who felt as dispossessed as the Palestinians themselves.

The Israeli army drove the PLO north as far as Beirut where they were trapped and finally surrendered; 14,000 Palestinian fighters went into exile. The Israeli army stayed on with consequences for the whole region.

Shia Resistance

The presence of an Israeli army of occupation in southern Lebanon and the brutality that was meted out to Shia villagers quickly turned the initial welcome into hostility and hatred. The Israelis raided their villages and Shias were killed. For them occupation by the Palestinians had been replaced by occupation by the Israeli army who maintained order with an iron fist, fearful that if they left the Palestinians would move back in.

In Beirut too, the Shias were caught up in the war between Israel and the PLO. Before they went into exile the PLO was holed up in the western part of the city. The Israelis indiscriminately blew up apartment blocks, killing PLO fighters as well as Shia civilians who had stayed in the war-torn city for fear that if they did not their homes would be taken over by Palestinians displaced by the bombing of refugee camps.

Israel had hoped that by eliminating the PLO from Lebanon their allies, the Christian Phalangists, could be restored to power in Lebanon. In fact in September 1982 the Christian President-elect. Bashir Gemayel, was assassinated. The new pro-Phalangist government of Amin Gemayel could only hang on to power with the support of the American-led multi-national peace-keeping force. But it was too late for them to wield effective political power — by this time Lebanon had disintegrated into a series of armed factions battling it out for political control.

By the time that Israel was finally driven out of Lebanon at the beginning of 1985 Lebanon had become a disaster area. The Israeli ruling class had realised none of their objectives: Israel's northern border was, if anything, less secure than it had been prior to the invasion. The PLO had been driven into exile in Tunisia but the Israelis now had a new enemy in southern Lebanon — the Shias; the Christian Phalangists had only nominal power and Israel's alliance with them had been discredited as a result of the horrific massacre of Palestinians in the refugee camps of Sabra and Chatilla by Phalangist forces, which the Israelis had done nothing to prevent. But it has been the resistance by the Shia militia, Amal. which has had the most lasting effect.

In their fight against the Israeli army of occupation the Shias in Amal have shown the same willingness to sacrifice themselves as had the soldiers in the Iranian army. Their tenacity had driven back the Israelis, inflicting the most significant defeat they had ever known. Furthermore, by 1984 Amal had taken to the streets of Beirut and had entered the battle for power between the Moslems and the Christians. Amal won control of West Beirut.

The influence and example of Iran on the Shia resistance is obvious as teenage boys and young men throw themselves willingly into the bloody street fighting around the Green Line which separates Christian East Beirut from Moslem West Beirut.

But for some Amal was not religious enough. They joined Hizbollah, the 'Party of God", the most extreme of the Islamic sects, which is fighting for an Islamic republic along the lines of that in Iran. Not surprisingly Hizbollah receives massive funding from Iran. It consists of small semi-autonomous groups which use a variety of different names, each taking responsibility for their own kidnappings and murders. Their attitude towards the west and Israel is uncompromising. It was Hizbollah which was responsible for the suicide bomber who drove into the American marines base killing 240 Americans and prompting their withdrawal. Since then there has been no shortage of willing volunteers for similar missions — young men willing to die as martyrs for the Islamic cause, Hizbollah, unlike some of the other Islamic groups, is not nationalistic. Its aim is nothing short of the creation of a world Islamic republic.

Syrian involvement in Lebanon

Syria has for a long time been a key factor in the Middle East. The regime of President Hafez Assad has an interest in keeping Lebanon divided. That way, it is hoped, it can be turned into a Syrian puppet state. As a result the Syrian government has cynically exploited the divisions, offering support to first one side, then another. Syria first intervened in Lebanon in June 1976 to prevent a coalition between the Palestinians and left-wing Lebanese which would have enabled them to secure an outright victory in the civil war.

The PLO has been based in Beirut since the late 1960s and, for the last 20 years, Syria has tried to curb Palestinian aspirations for independence while at the same time giving them support in their war against Israel. The Assad regime fears a fully independent PLO for two reasons. Firstly, they are scared that such a development might provoke Israel into attacking Syria. Secondly, they fear that the PLO might make a separate peace with Israel that would leave the Syrians out in the cold. For the Syrian ruling class, the "Palestinian Question" is much too important to be left to the PLO alone.

Syria withdrew its forces from Beirut in June 1982 — after reaching a ceasefire agreement with the invading Israelis. From then until Syria's return to Lebanon this year Assad had tried to achieve Syrian objectives there by means of support for various of the armed groups. In particular Shia Muslim groups are given logistical support by Syrian intelligence and Amal was encouraged to subdue and take control of the Palestinian camps. It was their failure to achieve this objective which led to the return of the Syrian army this year.

The War of the Camps

The Palestinians in the refugee camps of south Lebanon were those who had been left behind when the PLO was forced into exile. They include many women, children and old people. As the Israelis withdrew and the civil war continued, they were caught in the crossfire between the rival militias fighting to secure control of the rubble that was once Beirut. Amal's control of the area around the camps and their long-standing resentment towards the Palestinians led to the camps being laid siege to. The inhabitants were forced to live in appalling conditions of squalor and starvation, risking being shot at if they left the camp in search of food. It was this worsening situation which led to the return of Syrian troops. The refugees in the camps had no option but to accept the protection of the Syrian army.

The Bloody Reality of the Middle East

It is necessary to describe the shifting alliances, political manoeuvrings and shady deals of the ruling class in the Middle Eastern countries for an understanding of the complex web of war and politics in that region. But to do so gives little insight into the millions of lives that have been blighted through war, poverty, insecurity and fear or into the future of children who are growing up in an atmosphere of racial and religious hatred and bloodlust. Each piece of the complex Middle East jigsaw represents millions of scarred lives.

• The Iran-Iraq War is still going on. Hundreds of thousands of lives have already been lost; millions of people have been maimed for the sake of a small stretch of strategically important water and the political credibility of the leaders of the two countries. For this, ordinary workers are being sent in wave after wave to the front as cannon fodder.
• The Israeli invasion of Lebanon achieved nothing even in terms of the objectives of the Israeli ruling class. As well as lives being lost on both sides, the experience of life under yet another army of occupation has driven still more people into the bloody arms of Islam. And Israel continues to launch raids on South Lebanese villages claiming they are "terrorist" strongholds. It is often civilians — women and children included — who are killed.
• The PLO, newly reunited under the leadership of Yasser Arafat, is likely to launch a new campaign in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Guerrilla attacks in those areas will be met by mass arrests, detentions and deportations of Palestinians and pre-emptive and retaliatory strikes by the Israeli air force across the Lebanese border.
• Lebanon continues to be torn apart by civil war. Palestinians in the refugee camps are protected for the moment by Syrian troops, but the Syrians have no control over Hizbollah which is not fighting for control of West Beirut but for a world Islamic republic.

It is tempting to see the Middle East as inhabited by religious fanatics willing to die for causes that we have no understanding of. let alone sympathy with. But fundamentalist Islam has grown out of the same roots as evangelical Christianity in the United States and similar reactionary religious movements elsewhere in the world — discontent and alienation. That so many young people are willing to die as martyrs in the hope that they will then have the key to paradise says something about the misery of their lives here on earth. For the very countries where militant Islam has the most adherents — Iran, Egypt. Lebanon — are the very same countries where the ostentatious wealth of the minority is on display in the cities while the vast majority live in grinding poverty. It is not difficult to understand the anger and resentment that is caused. Neither is it difficult to see how that wealth and opulence, and the decadence and corruption that often go with it. comes to be identified with "the west". It is often the multi-nationals who own and build the luxury hotels that the poverty-stricken workers who built them will never have the opportunity to enter; foreign companies that exploit them in factories, mines and oilfields. And the ruling class is quick to adopt western lifestyles. Little wonder then that the poor are attracted to a religion that portrays the west as "the Great Satan" — bleeding the workers of the Middle East, imposing "their" alien and decadent culture. Little wonder that the deceptively simple solution of the establishment of an Islamic republic which promises justice and a restoration of traditional values and codes of behaviour, should seem attractive. As Marx wrote:

Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the feeling of a heartless world and the soul of soulless circumstances. It is the opium of the people.

But Islam, unlike opium, will not numb the pain caused by years of bloodshed.

Janie Percy-Smith

Blogger's Note:

Janie Percy-Smith's article also included the following informational material reproduced below in separate, standalone boxes.

Egypt

Although the Islamic revolution in Iran was successful, there had been similar rumblings in Egypt in the 70s. Ever since then Islamic fundamentalism has been on the increase, especially among the young, who are disillusioned with a system that has failed them and who harbour a deep-seated resentment which goes back to Nasser's accession to power in Egypt. Moslem militants helped him to power but, in his bid to create a modern state, Nasser crushed Moslem militancy. That resentment was increased by Egypt's defeat in the 1967 war against Israel. Moslem leaders saw that defeat as a punishment for the country's desertion of Islam.

Nasser was succeeded by Anwar Sadat who trod a tight-rope between his aim of building a modern capitalist state with the help of western investment, and his image as a devout Moslem, largely put on to placate the Islamic militants. A few Egyptians got very rich, but at the same time people were leaving the countryside which was no longer able to support the rapidly expanding population. They entered the cities in search of waged work and were condemned to live in poverty and squalor alongside the wealth that their labour had created. Islam seemed to provide a means for understanding their situation.

In 1977 Sadat cut subsidies on basic foods in an attempt to deal with the country's worsening economic situation. There were riots and Sadat was forced to back down Instead he took a gamble — to sign the Camp David Agreement with Israel — the enemy of Islam and the cause of Egypt's humiliation in the 1967 war. Under the agreement Jerusalem, which contained the third most important Moslem shrine, was to remain in Israeli hands. In return for the agreement America promised increased aid. But this did little to appease the fundamentalists who protested at what they saw as a sellout. Sadat responded by cracking down on the Moslem Brotherhood — the main Islamic group. As a result Sadat was assassinated in 1981.

Since then there have been no concessions made to the fundamentalists by Sadat's successor, Mubarak. Their protests have been met by repression which has served only to harden their determination. Islamic self-rule as in Iran is increasingly seen as the solution to all their problems and some groups, at least, are willing to use any means at all to achieve that objective.

The PLO

In April this year, while the Palestinian refugees in Lebanon were still under siege in the camps in Lebanon, the Palestinian National Council (the highest policy-making body for the 4-5 million Palestinians scattered around the world) met in Algiers. In recent years the PLO has been divided by internal dissension and leadership battles. But Yasser Arafat, leader of the mainstream Fatah movement, and a shrewd political operator, successfully reunited the PLO under his leadership. However, in order to secure his position he had to make concessions to hardliners like George Habash, leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. These concessions include the distancing of the PLO from Egypt's President Mubarak, considered to be too soft on the Israelis, an escalation in the armed struggle against Israel and the demand that the PLO have the sole right to represent the Palestinian people at any future international peace conference.

These concessions will make the holding of such a conference unlikely. Israel will not agree to sit down at a negotiating table with the PLO. Relations with Jordan — one of the prime movers behind the proposed conference — are now strained because of the more militant stance adopted by the PLO. Both Jordan and Egypt have already agreed that the PLO will not be invited to an international conference unless it first endorses UN Security Council resolution 242 which implicitly recognises Israel's right to exist. The PLO is unlikely to do this.

Israel

The invasion of Lebanon by Israel was a disaster not only in military terms but also in political terms. The official justification for the invasion defence of Israel's northern borders was not considered sufficient by many Israelis. The national consensus on defence, which had existed since the founding of the state of Israel, was broken. For the first time there was a significant number of Israelis who were willing to accept the consequences of being conscientious objectors in a highly militaristic country. There were demonstrations against the war and some of the demonstrators were army officers appalled at what they had seen in Lebanon. The news of the barbaric massacre of Palestinians in the refugee camps and Israel's connivance in it increased the revulsion of some sections of the population against the war

But, while some Israelis are at last asking questions about whether "secure borders" are really worth the cost in human lives, there are others who are motivated by a religious fanaticism that bears an uncanny resemblance to that of the Islamic fundamentalists. It is these right wing Jewish militants who regard Jewish settlement on the West Bank as necessary — whatever the cost. The Kach movement, led by Rabbi Meir Kahane, is a racist political movement which wants to expel all Arabs from the Jewish state. The right wing are a minority — but a minority that is increasingly attractive to many young Israelis disillusioned with the failure of the political solutions so far offered. Just as Islam offers its adherents certainty in place of ambiguity, simplicity instead of complexity, and a morally superior cause for which to fight, so too does right wing Judaism offer its adherents absolutes as well as a "Promised Land" of milk and honey instead of poverty and insecurity.

And that insecurity looks set to continue. For the last 30 months Israel has been ruled by a coalition government made up of the Labour Party under Shimon Peres, currently Foreign Minister, and the right wing Likud Party, under Yitzhak Shamir, currently Prime Minister. That coalition looks more and more fragile and is likely to break up over the question of an international Middle East peace conference as proposed by the United Nations. Peres is broadly in favour of participation in such a conference. Shamir is opposed. Like the population as a whole the government is divided on the question of “land without peace" or "peace without land". Those who defend the idea of a "Greater Israel" — including the right — are opposed to the idea that any of the land captured in 1967 — the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and the Golan Heights — should be given back. The Palestinians are unlikely to agree to a solution which did not include at least this.

The Middle East Connection (2001)

From the October 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

“The first war of the 21st Century” was how Bush has described the events sparked off by the suicide –and murderous – attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington on 11 September. A chilling reminder that, under capitalism, things are going to be no different this century than they were in the last. But Bush’s claim was not entirely accurate, since the attack on America that Tuesday was the continuation of a conflict that has been going on for half-a-century, irrupting from time to time in open warfare: the struggle for the control of the oil resources of the Middle East.

America didn’t share in the carve-up of the Ottoman Empire after the First World War but managed to get a foothold in the Middle East with the establishment of the state of Israel in 1949 as a colonial outpost, a puppet state peopled and run mainly by European immigrants to serve as their proxy gendarme in the region. Rivalry between the Western powers continued – and still continues – throughout the period but fifty years ago they were joined by a new rival: a section of the local capitalist class. In 1951 the Mossadeq government in Iran nationalised the oil industry – and was overthrown in a Western-engineered coup. Then the Anglo-French-Israeli attack on Egypt in 1956 for nationalising the Suez canal, at the time the main trade route for bringing Middle East oil to western Europe. Then the Yon Kippur war of 1973 at a time the post-war boom was coming to an end and which helped accelerate this. Then the Gulf War, ten years ago, to take back the Kuwaiti oilfields which Iraq had grabbed from the West, a war which has continued ever since at a lower level of intensity with regular bombings of Iraq by US and British warplanes.

The conflict in Chechnya too had an oil dimension, since a planned pipeline to get Caspian Sea oil out westwards made control of Chechnya of strategic importance to Russia. In fact, the collapse of the Russian state capitalist empire re-opened the Caspian oilfields to Western penetration and control, bringing Afghanistan into the equation as a possible alternative route via Turkmenistan for a pipeline to get Caspian oil out without having to pass through Iran.

The West’s rivals for the control of the Middle East oilfields and the trade routes to get the oil out, as well as of the strategic areas and points to protect these, have been sections of the local capitalist class in the region. The ideology they used, to begin with, to get a mass following was an anti-imperialist nationalism which had a leftwing tinge and even employed a “socialist” terminology. This was the ideology of Mossadeq in Iran, Nasser in Egypt, of the Baathist regimes in Syria and Iraq and of the PLO in the 1970s.

It is still a significant political force but, since the 1980s, has more and more been challenged by Islamic fundamentalism as the ideology of those who want local capitalist, rather than Western imperialist, control of the oil resources of the Middle East. A key factor in this change was the triumph of the “Islamic revolution” in Iran in 1979. But not to be neglected is the influence of the long-established fundamentalist regime in Saudi Arabia which, while not anti-Western, used a part of its oil rents to wean Arab militants away from leftwing nationalism. This had been encouraged by America as part of its struggle with Russia for world hegemony. It is now a notorious fact that Osmana Bin Laden – a billionaire member of the extended Saudi royal family – was armed by America and sent into Afghanistan to fight against this country falling under Russian control.

That those who attacked America on 11 September should have been Islamic fundamentalists was therefore no surprise. This has become the ideology of many of those in the predominantly Muslim countries of the Middle East who want to wrest control of the oil resources of the region from the West for the benefit of local capitalists.

The West’s reaction has been revealing. A grand coalition is being organised to combat “terrorism”. But not terrorism in general. The Western powers are not concerned about the Tamil Tigers or ETA or the IRA or the various South American guerrilla groups. They are out to get Islamic fundamentalist terrorism because this is the rising ideology of their rivals for control of the Middle East oilfields. This, not terrorism in general, is the threat to the supply of this key resource. Russia has no problem in joining this coalition since its oil supplies too have been challenged by the same movement, as in Chechnya.

The one accurate thing Bush, Colin Powell and the US media have said about the attacks on the WTC and the Pentagon was that it was an “act of war”. It was. The latest act in the 50-year struggle for the control of Middle East oil. This of course is not how they see it, or rather, how they present it. For them it is an attack on “civilisation” and “freedom-loving people everywhere” and (Blair’s favourite) “democracy”. It is appalling, virtually unbelievable, that any human being would hi-jack an airliner full of people and deliberately fly it into a tower block where thousands more worked. It is also true that the establishment of Islamic States everywhere would undo the Enlightenment and plunge the world back a thousand years (and has done so in Afghanistan). But this is not the issue.

The Islamic fundamentalists who flew those planes would indeed completely suppress freedom of thought and speech and replace ruled by elected politicians by the rule of ignorant and obscurantist priests, but those who trained and sent them weren’t attacking America because it was “democratic”. They would still have attacked America even if it had been a fascist dictatorship or a Christian theocracy.

Socialists of course appreciate the existence of secular, political democratic forms, limited as we know they are, and wouldn’t want to see these replaced by an Islamic State. But “democracy” as an ideology is something different. It is based on the idea that everybody living under a democratic state (as a state allowing the election of certain state officials) share a common interest. This is a lie that socialists challenge.

Under capitalism, whatever the political form, society is divided into two classes with conflicting interests: those who own and control the means of production and the rest of us who have to work for them. This is not changed if the excluded majority are allowed to vote for those who run the political side of capitalism – and who define the “common interest”, inevitably since they are governing on behalf of the capitalist class, as in fact the interest of that class.

What Blair and the others call “democracy” is not genuine democracy, which can only exist in the classless context of a society based on the common ownership and democratic control of the means of production. Their democracy is the inevitably limited and narrowly political democracy that is the most that can exist under capitalism. But, in any event, it is not even this stunted, political democracy that is at stake. It is oil.

So, the line-up in the next – military – episode in the continuing struggle for control of the oil resources of the Middle East is, on the one side, a section of the local capitalist class using Islam to rally mass support and, on the other, the Western capitalist powers using “democracy” as their ideology to win mass support for war. But “Islamic State” versus “Democracy” is only the ideological smokescreen disguising the real issue at stake: control of oil resources and trade routes. It is not an issue worth the shedding of a single drop of working-class blood.

As Socialists we declare our opposition to both sides in this war and call on the working class of the world to unite to bring capitalism to a rapid end so that no more lives are sacrificed to further the economic interests of rival sections of the world capitalist class.

Adam Buick

The Ire Of The Irate Itinerant (2009)

From the September 2009 issue of the Socialist Standard

Bird’s Eye View: Neither God nor state (2022)

The Bird’s Eye View Column from the April 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard 

Neither God nor state

The 1st of this month is Iranian Islamic Republic Day. According to Ramin Mazaheri (greanvillepost.com, 6 February), ‘…after 43 years Iran’s revolution has become entrenched in global political history as the most successful political revolution of our contemporary era’ (bit.ly/356Z1Ka). Apparently the vast majority of the 99 percent (98.2 percent) of the electorate) voted for the establishment of an Islamic republic. Those who realise they were taken for April Fools include imprisoned trade unionists. Tragically, over 43 years many thousands of our class have been executed, including minors, under a theocratic dictatorship where those convicted of adultery, alcohol consumption, blasphemy, burglary, homosexuality, pornography and prostitution, along with, of course, political dissidence, as well as many other ‘crimes’, can pay the ultimate price. We must not forget the state-sanctioned use of juveniles as troops during the mass slaughter that was the Iran-Iraq war, or the oppression of women. Add chronic corruption, obvious class division and we can say that only assorted fundamentalists see the revolution as successful. And the suffering grows:

‘Iran has returned 820,000 doses of coronavirus vaccines donated by Poland because they were manufactured in the United States… TV quoted Mohammad Hashemi, an official in the country’s Health Ministry, as saying that Poland donated about a million doses of the British-Swedish AstraZeneca vaccine to Iran. ‘But when the vaccines arrived in Iran, we found out that 820,000 doses of them which were imported from Poland were from the United States,” he said. Hashemi said “after coordination with the Polish ambassador to Iran, it was decided that the vaccines would be returned.” Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has final say on all state matters, in 2020 rejected any possibility of American or British vaccines entering the country, calling them “forbidden”‘ (whdh.com, 21 February).

Toll: more than 270,000 coronavirus-related deaths since the pandemic began.

Strange bedfellows

Fundamentalists are not limited to book-burning fakirs issuing fatuous yet often fatal fatwas. ‘…Republicans aren’t going to stop with abortion bans…’ (Cue ‘Handmaid’s Tale’: Michigan Republicans say 1965 Supreme Court decision legalizing birth control was wrong, alternet.org, 21 February). According to Planned Parenthood,

‘In 2006, Nicaragua enacted a complete abortion ban, including in cases of rape, incest, and when the life of the woman is at risk. Access to sexual and reproductive health information and services is seriously lacking, and the country now has the highest rate of teen pregnancy in Latin America.’

Recall, Ortega was returned to power in 2007 as the Catholic president of Nicaragua. He named his wife as Vice President and stated: ’This revolution – in which women have participated shoulder to shoulder – has opened the doors to the full participation of women in all spheres: political, social and economic (theweek.co.uk, 4 August, 2016) – nonsense only matched by that of another President Ronald Reagan, calling Nicaragua a beachhead of communism. Nicaragua is one of 24 countries in the world where abortion is totally illegal under any circumstances, including when the woman’s life or health is at risk. Maternal mortality is 98 per 100,000, 118th in the world. And leftist/nationalist fundamentalists claim that the empowerment of women in Nicaragua has been achieved.

Cannot see the wood for the trees

‘Conflict, climate change, and COVID-19 are having a clear impact on the global poor, in many cases having joint incidence upon those living in poverty, the World Bank’s report concludes’ (‘Inequality Kills One Person Every Four Seconds,’ipsnews.net, 14 February). The article’s conclusion echoes that of Dr. King, who focused famously on the ‘Triple Evils’ of poverty, racism and militarism, ie, symptoms rather than the underlying disease and one reason why Taylor Branch, the Pulitzer winning historian, could say of MLK that ‘all the issues that he raised toward the end of his life are as contemporary now as they were then’ (nytimes.com, 4 April 2018). Fundamentally idealistic, reformists eschew revolution in favour of another spin on the misery-go-round. Consider, capitalism causes the rivalries that lead to war in the modern world. Conflicts between states and within states can result from competition over markets, sources of raw materials, energy supplies, trade routes, exploitable populations and areas of strategic importance. ‘Russia’s president knows exactly what he wants, and it’s not eastern Ukraine. His interests are all about oil and gas and supply routes. The rest is smoke and mirrors’ (thedailybeast.com, 1 March 2015).

With regard to climate change, all enterprises and states seek to minimise costs and releasing greenhouse gases into the environment is a way of reducing monetary costs. Human and environmental needs always come second, if at all, in the profit system. Capitalism’s primary imperative is always to produce more and accumulate capital or otherwise lurch into economic crisis. ‘…companies are continuing to invest vast sums in exploration and new fields, which the IEA said last year could not be brought to fruition if the world was to limit global heating to 1.5C’ (theguardian.com, 11 February). Nearly six million deaths, twelve times that of the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war, due to Covid-19 have been confirmed worldwide. Given that the knowledge and resources exist to reduce the number of epidemics and minimise the possibility of them becoming pandemics, the vast majority of these deaths can be considered premature. Capitalism has eradicated rinderpest and smallpox, yet the driving force of capitalism is the pursuit of profit not health. According to March’s Scientific American, ‘Global billionaire wealth grew by $4.4 trillion between 2020 and 2021, and at the same time more than 100 million people fell below the poverty line’ (bit.ly/3BTn7nk). And ‘The poor, no matter where they live, will suffer the greatest lasting toll’ – until, that is, we organise as a class for the conquest of the earth and all its resources.

The Change of Rulers in Iran (1979)

From the March 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

There is a story said to have circulated in Tehran recently about a meeting between the Shah and the Ayatollah Khomeini in 1963 after the riots which Khomeini had played a prominent part in stirring up. “I’ll pay you $25 million if you leave the country”, said the Shah. To which Khomeini is supposed to have replied, “I’ll give you $50 million if you leave”. In the event Khomeini was forced into exile for nothing. This time it’s the Shah who has left, though no doubt with a lot more than $50 million in his pockets. Of course no such conversation ever took place but the story does neatly illustrate that the social conflict in Iran was essentially between two sections of the propertied class there.

The Shah is the son of a jumped-up army officer who seized power in 1921 and had himself proclaimed Shah, or Emperor, a few years later. He came to the throne in 1941 when his father was deposed by the Allies for his pro-Axis sympathies but only acquired dictatorial powers in 1953 in a coup d’Etat which overthrew the nationalist Prime Minister, Mossadek, who in his day was the bugbear of the British press for having dared to nationalise the British-owned Persian oil industry.

Oil is of course the source of the immense wealth of the Shah and the section of the propertied class he represented. The payments which oil companies pay to the States where oil is produced are a form of ground-rent. The Iranian State receives this rent purely and simply because it happens to monopolise a part of the globe where oil is found. The Shah used this windfall, first, to build up the Iranian armed forces and, secondly, to introduce industrial capitalism into Iran. In doing so brought into being a new class of rich entrepreneurs independent on his State for the capital they invest.

But there already existed in Iran a class of wealthy people, the bazari, the merchants and traders of the bazaars which exist in all the big towns. The bazari existed long before oil was discovered and long before industrial capitalism was introduced. Their economic role in pre-capitalist Persia was to keep the towns supplied with food and other essentials, and this role still survives to a certain extent today although it has been severely reduced by the alternative commercial and banking network that has accompanied the coming of industrial capitalism.

The bazari have always been closely linked to the mullahs and ayatollahs, the priests of the Shi’ite sect of Islam to which most Persians formally belong. The mosque is generally situated in the bazaar area but, more important, the Shi’ite priests are financed by the various payments the merchants are required to make to them under Islamic law:

“The Shi’ite hierarchy, from the simple mullah to the ayatollah also collects a substantial tax, the khoms or ‘fifth’ which consists of taking one fifth of all commercial profits and, generally, on any capital gain as well as on the sale of lands belonging to Muslims to a person of  another religion . . . The amount of the ‘fifth’ is in principle divided in two, one part is normally reserved for the destitute, on condition that they are sayyeds, that is descendants of the prophet. The other part is distributed amongst the mullahs and ayatollahs. These also have the right to a hidden tax, the zahat, which consists in asking every believer to dispose of any ‘wheat, barley, dates, raisins’ but also of any ‘gold, silver, camels, sheep and cattle’ which he does not really need. This zahat is what now permits the church to help a large number of strikers.

“But the Iranian Shi’ite hierarchy has access above all to the immense wealth of the bazari of all the main towns of the country. For centuries, it has forged close links with this little business world, has given the blessing of Allah to certain transactions and has thrown all its weight against the secular power. When this latter became too demanding or when its desire to modernise the country became too restricting, the bazari knew that Shi’itism was behind them and were prepared to do anything for it” (Républicain Lorrain, 14/1/79).

Two Iranian economists writing in the December issue of the monthly Le Monde Diplomatique describe how the Shah’s policy of developing an industrial capitalism in Iran adversely affected the bazari:

“After the 1953 coup d’etat, the re-integration of the Iranian oil economy into the world market and the ‘open doors’ policy led to a change in the pattern of trade, exceeding more and more widely the organisational capabilities of the bazaar. The beginnings of an import-substitution industry afterwards aggravated the difficulties of the bazaar, which was excluded from the new circuit of exchange set up to serve the needs of the new industries. The traditional importing of consumer goods gave way to the importing of capital goods, and the quotas or duties adopted to protect the nascent industries heavily penalised the traditional activities of the bazaar.”

They go on to note how this also hit the finances of the Shi’ite priesthood:

“This economic marginalisation of the bazaar is directly connected with the simultaneous weakening of the network for financing the ‘clerical funds’; these, under the control of the religious leaders known for their moral integrity, receive and distribute various forms of Islamic taxes and alms . . . Today, the inflow of money into these funds controlled by the progressive or combative ayatollahs bears witness to the extent of the struggle of the traditional bourgeoisie against a new class linked to the interest of the multi-national firms. But, in the first phase of industrialisation, the weakening of the bazaar which has historically lived in symbiosis with the religious institutions (financing of clerical funds, legal-religious framework for contracts) considerably reduced the socio-economic effects of the redistribution which the latter assured.”

The Ayatollah Khomeini first came into prominence in 1963 as the instigator of riots centred on the bazaars in Tehran and some other cities, riots which were ruthlessly crushed by the Shah’s armed forces.

It can thus be seen that the conflict in Iran is not, as it is often pictured, between a Westernising ruler and a reactionary priesthood defending old-fashioned values. That particular conflict is only an ideological reflection of the more basic conflict of sectional interest within the Iranian propertied class, between the bazari and the new bourgeoisie brought into being by the Shah. Behind the condemnations on religious grounds of beer and mini-skirts (indeed of any kind of skirts) lies an earthly material interest.

For the time being, against the logic of history, the bazari seem to have come out on top. Through their links with the mullahs and ayatollahs they have been able to control the urban poor, including large sections of the working class, and to use their discontent as a battering ram to overthrow the Shah and his regime. The urban poor of course had plenty to be discontented about. Frequently recent migrants from the countryside, they have been forced to live in disgusting housing conditions, only finding employment, if at all, at starvation wages. Independent trade union activity has been banned and strikes crushed sometimes with loss of life. The notorious secret police, the SAVAK, with its omnipresent system of spies and its torture chambers, has been there to root out all opposition to the Shah’s dictatorship.

It is sad that this discontent should have been directed by the mullahs to defend the sectional class interest of the bazari and towards the chimera of an “Islamic Republic”. But there is a reason for this. The only opposition to the Shah that was able to survive the onslaughts of SAVAK was the bazaar, with its independent economic base, and the Shi’ite priesthood it financed. The mosques thus became the focus of opposition to the Shah, especially as the bulk of the urban poor are first-generation migrants from the countryside where religious sentiments are always stronger.

It now looks as if the people of Iran are to have an “Islamic Republic” inflicted on them. But whatever happens industrial capitalism has come to stay in Iran, whether or not the mullahs like it or what comes with it (consumption of alcohol, a certain freedom for women). The Koran, which originated in a pre-capitalist agricultural and trading society, may lay down rules as to how such a society should work – indeed its rules are merely the reflection of the way such a society did work—but capitalism cannot be run according to them.

What will probably happen is that after an initial attempt to put the clock back for the benefit of the bazari, religious thinkers will be found within the “Islamic Republic” to declare that industrial capitalism is not after all contrary to the Koran. This happened in Tunisia a few years after it got its independence from France, as reported by the old News Chronicle at the time (5/3/1960):

“Up to now, as in the rest of the Moslem world, Tunisia’s life came almost to a standstill during Ramadan because of the dawn to dusk fast. In some cases production dropped 70 per cent. 

Bourguiba has not banned the fast outright. But he has stated firmly that fasting will not be accepted as an excuse for less work” (quoted in the Socialist Standard, April 1960)

As for the workers and peasants of Iran, they will rapidly find that they have just changed one set of rulers for another.

Adam Buick

Diary of a Capitalist (1979)

The Diary of a Capitalist column from the March 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

Sunday

Lord and Lady Brownlow were telling me the other day of their family financial arrangements. Their four-year-old son, Peregrine, has just inherited £3 million. As they said, he will remain “a very normal little boy”.

Someone must have eavesdropped, because now the Daily Express columnist Jean Rook (29.11.78) has seized the chance to make a cheap sneer. How can any four-year-old with £3 million be “normal”, she says. She has missed the point entirely. He is a very normal little boy by capitalist standards. What’s so special about three millionnn? Nobody said anything about him being normal from a working-class point of view.

Journalists pretend to forget that the two classes in our society are completely different. What is normal for us in the capitalist class is not, of course, normal for the rest of the population. For example, you wouldn’t find a capitalist making a cheap sneer. An expensive one, possibly.

Monday

At the club this morning we all agreed what a splendid letter dear old John Wakeham, the Conservative MP, wrote to the Daily Telegraph the other day (15.11.78). He said, in a fine peroration. “Conservatives put their country first, their party second and themselves last.” Absolutely true, we told each other, if by Conservatives you mean the upper-class people who really run the party. Some of us at the club were Labour supporters, and we all accepted it was true of Labourites and Tories alike among the ruling class How different from the workers! Someone made an impromptu speech attacking these greedy union- members, always selfishly trying to grab more devalued money—the “Gadarene rush” as one industrialist called it recently. We all enjoyed the implication that these people perpetually worried about their wages and salaries are simply swine. We had a few rounds of drinks to toast our own self-sacrifice, and the noble unselfishness of all the moneyed people like us. heroically putting their country first and themselves last. We all tried not laugh.

Tuesday

Had a few people to dinner myself this evening. Among the trimmings were half a dozen edible dormice at £39 each (from a farmer near Stockport, Sunday People, 24.12.78). a few jars of caviar at £104 a pound (Observer, 24.12.78) and a small bottle of Hungarian Tokay wine probably dating from the 1680s. which I got recently at Sotheby's for £1300 (Daily Telegraph, 14.12.78). There isn’t much eating or drinking in any of them, but it’s these little things that show your guests you have made an effort.

Wednesday

The poor old Shah of Persia! So the Iranian capitalist class has decided to ditch him. 1 warned him last winter what might happen. I was staying on Kish Island, in the Persian Gulf, where (as the Daily Telegraph put it, 11.11.78) "a complex of villas, casinos, and a luxury hotel has been built and where bevies of imported French girls act as 'maids’. Further lavish development is planned.” It is only for the upper class —"the very rich of the Gulf area, influential Persians, and the aristocracy.” Others need not apply. "Strict security screening makes certain that only the favoured are allowed into the exclusive holiday club with its £800 membership fee. a compulsory £8000 credit card and villas at rentals running into thousands." The idea is an obvious money-spinner, given the number of people around with pots of money to spend on enjoying themselves, and the Pahlavi Foundation, the Shah’s family trust, apparently provided most of the finance for setting up this paradise of extravagant pleasure for the well-heeled (Observer, 7.1.79). "The Shah and his family have spent several winter holidays at a Royal residence on the island but not at the club where the French 'maids’ sunbathe topless" (Daily Telegraph, 11.11.78).

When I stayed there I had several talks with the King of Kings, as he is (or was) known to his friends. I told him that despotism, with its censorship, its vast armed forces, and its secret police (such as the Shah’s Savak), and all the expense of jails for political prisoners, was very expensive. In Britain, I said, the ruling class was firmly in power. and our system was much cheaper. I tried to persuade him to allow freedom of speech, political association, and so on. I pointed out that under our system only the very rich could run mass newspapers and magazines, or own TV and radio companies; and with the state radio and TV also pouring out pro-capitalist propaganda continuously, the people of Britain have so far been persuaded into almost total support of capitalism. The political parties that come to the top in our system (I said) all advocate various models of capitalism, whether mainly private enterprise, mainly State-controlled, or something between the two. So capitalism is safe whichever party is in power; no expenditure is usually necessary on secret police, military tribunals, expensive political jails, or a censorship apparatus; and you can boast of your democratic freedoms, which is very useful in drumming up support for the State, both in peacetime and (even more) in wartime.

The Shah, however, said it wouldn’t work at present in Iran. Practically everyone in Britain can read, and so is subject to written propaganda: not so, yet, in Iran. Nor are TV sets as common there as here. When universal education and hire purchase have put this right, said the Shah, he would think about it.

And now it’s too late! Perhaps I'll drop a line to the Ayatollah Khomeini, the new "strong man", giving him due warning. Despotism seems more stable than democracy; really, the opposite is true.

Thursday

Have made an agreement for the first day of the shooting next season. I’ve got some nice pheasant and partridge moors for £3500 for an eight-gun syndicate, including myself. Last year the first-day bag of these moors was 700 birds. It’s getting a bit on the expensive side—in lots of places a couple of good days after the pheasants will cost you well over £500 per gun (Daily Telegraph, 11.12.78). Last season I got up a little party and we took a 10,000-acre estate pheasants and partridges for £20,000.

I like imagining I'm knocking over some of these damned strikers or picketers when I’m after the game. Each pheasant I kill, I say to myself—that’s another of these idle trouble-makers accounted for! Shooting’s too good for some of them.

Friday

A lot of unnecessary fuss in Denmark. The Danish Minister of Education. Mrs. Ritt Bjerregard. went to Paris for a Unesco conference, and her expenses for a thirteen-day stay were £5,700 (Daily Telegraph, 23.12.78). The Danish PM told her to pay part herself, and when she refused, sacked her.

A storm in a teacup. £5700 is nothing out of the ordinary—I've spent much more than that in two weeks in Paris! If this Mrs. Bjerregard is a member of the capitalist class, she could easily pay it herself; if not. she shouldn't have enjoyed herself on that scale.

The truth is. the Minister seems to have been enjoying herself as if she were rich, when she wasn’t.

Saturday

Though democracy has many advantages for the ruling class in advanced Western societies, it is not without its drawbacks. Sometimes I wonder if the rival political parties don’t go too far in their battles to secure the fruits of office. There’s no denying that some awkward facts do leak out occasionally.

Mr. Callaghan and most of his ministers have committed themselves to the thesis that the working class causes inflation through pay-increases, which is their defence when they are criticized over the continuing rise in prices. Of course we in the ruling class know that this claim is nonsensical, but it is good propaganda and makes for exciting newspaper stories against the greedy proles. But in their haste to discredit Callaghan's lot and grab place and power for themselves, some Tories have been prepared to show up Callaghan's naive errors, even at the expense of abandoning a first class anti-worker argument. The Daily Telegraph published a middle-page article recently (15.11.78) in which the author pointed out that rising wages cannot push up the price of goods unless the Government validates increased prices by printing more money . . . That this is clearly true is suggested by the fact that many firms have been unable to recoup rising labour costs by increased prices: for if prices could always be raised by as much as costs rose, no firm need ever lose money.” A week later (22.11.78) another middle-page article recalled the real reason why Governments of all kinds have continuously and deliberately inflated the currency for the last forty years: "Keynes persuaded a whole generation that by expanding the money supply and generating mild inflation, thereby reducing real wages, it would be possible to circumvent union opposition to necessary wage-reductions.”

Now we all know that these are the facts of the case. The Telegraph writers have exposed Callaghan—either he has been deliberately doing one thing and saying another (whatever you call that kind of behaviour), or he is painfully ignorant of elementary economics. But supposing the workers get to know of this? Most trade union leaders who appear on the TV hasten to register their agreement with Callaghan’s claptrap. self-evidently fallacious though it is, and grovellingly apologize for their members who have gone on strike hoping to regain the standard of living they thought they had agreed to work for a year ago, is it wise to abandon such a splendid weapon, which the newspapers continually use to pillory the workers?

When Mrs. Thatcher gets to Number Ten she may probably want to use the same argument, blaming the unions for the inevitable results of the state’s Keynesian economics: I hope she won’t find the ground has been cut from under her feet.

Alwyn Edgar

Muslims at War (1984)

From the May 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

The war between the capitalist ruling minorities of Iran and Iraq is now in its fourth year. Both parties are able to buy as much military weaponry as they require — invariably from the same sellers. Neither side is prepared to compromise; both are determined to carry on fighting until the other accepts its terms and conditions of cease fire. The war could continue for years; so far it has cost the lives of more than a million workers -many of them youths — who have no interests at stake whatsoever. Poison gas has been used; civilian targets have been hit by long-range rockets and fighter planes are dropping napalm bombs. The war is now a testing laboratory for new means of destruction.

The origins of this conflict can be traced back to before the First World War, when Britain, France and Russia agreed secretly to divide the Ottoman Empire between themselves so as to expand the market for their commodities into the heart of the Middle East. After World War One Iraq became a part of the British overseas colonies. Then, in accordance with the principle of Divide and Rule, the whole political map of the Middle East was redrawn, with Iraq showing a majority of people of the Shiite faith. Shiite is an Islamic sect and the official religion of the Iranian ruling minority. Geographically, northern Iraq included a part of Kurdistan, as does Iran. The rich lands along the eastern side of Shatt Al-Arab fell within southern Iraq, but the Iranian ruling class objected to this and attempted to occupy all of the eastern side of the waterway. Iraqi territory was then under British protection, so the Iranian ruling class was impeded in its efforts.

When the map was redrawn Iraqi government fell into the hands of Arabs whose faith was, and still is, Sunni — another Islamic sect. Shiism and Sunnism are conflicting Arab faiths; only a minority of Iraqis are Sunnis. Iraq has never enjoyed political stability because it has constantly suffered from the territorial ambitions of the Iranian ruling class, who lost no opportunities to attack their Iraqi counterparts. Since the 1930s there have been groups existing within the mountains of Kurdistan in Iraq who have rejected the authority of the Iraqi government. As well as the Kurds, the Shiite majority in Iraq has resented Sunni government, feeling that they have been humiliated and discriminated against by the Iraqi ruling minority. In fact these divisions are rooted in economic and political interests and only take the form of religious conflicts. The Iraqi ruling minority was selected at the outset by the British government and have been used as a fist of iron to rule on behalf of capital, including the substantial overseas investments in Iraq. The Iraqi government has machine gunned demonstrators on the streets of Baghdad and other Iraqi towns. They sent the RAF on bombing raids against the villages of Kurdistan and Arab tribes saw no reason to give up their ways of living and submit to the central authority of Iraq.

As a result of the widespread unpopularity of the government Iraq became a paradise for political opportunists, whose policy was to establish a new government claiming to represent all Iraqi people (not just the Sunnis) and claiming to be committed to individual freedom. In reality, extreme nationalism was the common characteristic of all of them and in the long-term they helped to make the situation-in Iraq even worse. At the head of each of the opportunist parties was an individual or elite drawing support mainly on the basis of tribal loyalty or by bribery and pressure. Each party aimed to capture political power, often using unscrupulous and undemocratic methods such as the infiltration of the Iraqi army. As a result of these tactics, one military coup followed another; the one which brought the present Iraqi ruling elite, the Socialist Arab Baath party, occurred in 1963. Within twenty four hours of the Baath coup the new rulers eliminated their opportunist rivals, so establishing a dictatorship.

The Socialist Arab Baath Party took power with a policy of rigid nationalism and Arabism. They tolerated no opposition, although Baathist ideology was out of touch with the mainstream of Iraqi society. Firstly, more than one quarter of Iraqis are not Arabs and therefore opposed Baathist Arabism. Secondly, most Iraqi Arabs opposed Baathist ideology and openly opposed it as an alien idea. The Baathists responded in extreme terms: they started deporting people of Iranian origin to Iran; they attempted to "Arabise” Kurdish villages and towns; they organised an aggressive military campaign against anti-government forces. The Baathist policy gave the Iranian ruling class a chance to revive their old territorial claims east of Shatt AI-Arab, using the political situation in Iraq as a pre- text. The Baathists refused the Iranian demands, claiming that it was an insult to the Arab nation. Iran used military force to take over eastern Shatt AI-Arab and sent military supplies to anti-government forces in Kurdistan. The Iraqi government in- creased its pressure on the anti-government Iraqi Kurds and, after a hard military campaign, it seemed that the Iraqi government were losing. As a result, Saddam Hussain, the Iraqi dictator, went to Algeria in 1975 to meet the Shah of Iran in order to persuade the latter to stop supplying anti-government forces with military aid. In return the Shah, and the class which he represented, was officially granted eastern Shatt AI-Arab. After this the anti-government forces in Iraqi Kurdistan ceased to exist, but it was a deep humiliation for the Baathists. Another Iranian score needs to be mentioned at this point: in the 1960s the Iranian ruling class gained control of three small islands in the Arabian Gulf which had previously belonged to Britain. The Baathists were resentful about this, believing that these three islands should belong to “the Arab nation”.

The acceptance of Iran’s territorial claims left deep scars on the Iraqi Baathist regime, but they were saved by the fact that hard currency started to rain on them as a result of massively increased Iraqi oil revenue in the mid-1970s, caused by the increased demand by the world’s industrial capitalists. The Baathists devoted a substantial portion of this revenue to buying arms, which were only too readily supplied by the capitalist superpowers. Meanwhile, in Iran the old regime of the Shah collapsed as a result of popular discontent and was replaced by a dictatorship consisting of the followers of Ayatollah Khomeni. The new regime demoralised the Iranian army by executing its officers and dismantling many of its units in an attempt to prevent a counter revolution. This gave the Baathists the opportunity they had been waiting for to take military action against Iran and win back what they had lost. The Iran-Iraq war, which began in 1980, was started by the Baathists in the belief that it would be won within a few months. It is a continuation of an old struggle over control of territory and natural resources.

The war in Iran and Iraq is not in the interest of the working class, who are slaughtering each other so that their rulers can expand their spheres of ownership and control. Very few members of the Iranian or Iraqi ruling classes have been killed in the war over the past four years. It is workers — over half a million (more than Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki added together) — who have had to do the dying.

Rahman A. Ahmad

Mullahs and oil wells (1980)

From the June 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

Following China’s takeover by its so-called Communist Party in 1949, American politicians and commentators embarked on a spree of self-recrimination and examination. How could the enormous Nationalist army, with its American arms and advisers, have been defeated by ill-armed guerrillas? Who, in short, was responsible for “losing China”, and how could it have been “saved”?

A similar debate has been taking place over the last eighteen months concerning another country lost from America’s sphere of influence—Iran. A friendly dictator-emperor, reinforced by a massive army, was sent packing, and is now forced to scuttle from one country to another. Even worse, fifty American diplomats (of whom some no doubt were spies) were held hostage, and still are after an abortive marine attempt to rescue them. Could Iran too have been “saved”, given a little more competence and finesse on the part of President Carter?

One of the reasons for the intense interest that the rulers of other countries show in Iran is of course oil. But it is not the only factor involved. Vast though they are, Iran’s reserves are relatively small when compared with those of countries like Saudi Arabia, and (unless new reserves are discovered) Iran will not be a major exporter of oil much beyond 1990. Western capitalism wants Iranian oil but could certainly get along without it, as it will soon have to do.

The prospects of exports to Iran are also an important factor The massive revenues from oil sales go exclusively to the Iranian state, and a large part of this income is used to pay for imports. Iranian imports have risen spectacularly as a result of the country’s new-found wealth, from four hundred million US dollars in 1958-9 to $18.45 billion in 1975-6. A large part of this figure is made up of arms purchases—Iran under the Shah was for a time America’s best arms customer. Any capitalist class will want a piece of eighteen billion dollars' worth of action, and will inevitably have an interest in maintaining a friendly government in Tehran.

The third reason for Iran’s importance is its strategic value. It borders on Russia and commands the route to the Middle East oilfields. A pro-Moscow government (or, for that matter, a Russian invasion) could blockade the Persian Gulf and drastically reduce the amount of oil reaching Western capitalist nations. On the other hand, a pro-Western regime functions as a regional balance to both Russia and the Arab oil-producing states. In fact, the Shah acted as a kind of policeman for Western interests, supporting the royalists in North Yemen in the nineteenth-sixties, the Sultan of Oman in 1971, and Pakistan against the Baluchi guerrillas in 1973. There was no need for, say. direct American intervention in these cases; an army trained and armed by them was on the spot to defend the status quo.

Thus American policy since the beginning of the Shah's dictatorial rule in 1953 has been to keep in power a friendly ruler. This involved, as we have seen, massive arms sales, the weaponry being used for both internal repression and external intervention. The notorious secret police. SAVAK, was set up in 1957 with a permanent secret US mission attached to it (in light of the American government’s occasional hypocritical ramblings about “human rights", it is salutary to recall its role in establishing this vile SS-like organisation). Even the land reform of the early sixties was a response to American pressure on the Shah to carry out just enough by way of reformist policies to avoid too much rural opposition.

The opposition was restricted by press censorship and the lack of independent trade unions as well as by the ubiquitous agents of SAVAK. Agrarian reform failed to benefit those who actually worked the land (not that it was ever intended to), and the fruits of the oil industry reached only a tiny minority of Iranians. As elsewhere, nationalisation has been of no benefit to the ordinary workers. Apart from the fantastically wealthy and corrupt royal family, and a small capitalist class, Iranians lived lives of poverty and squalor. Their position was made even more unacceptable by knowledge of the rich resources beneath their feet and the manifest affluence of their rulers:

 “As early as 1971 a cautious observer of Iran remarked that, on walking through the streets of the southern, poorer part of Tehran, he encountered 'more expressed hatred than I have ever heard before’ from ’people who watch the cars of the people who are doing well’. The wealth in Iran was being distributed in a manner that was ‘ostentatious’ and 'grotesque’. (Fred Halliday: Iran: Dictatorship and Development, quoting Richard Cottam.)

In the absence of genuine political parties, opposition centred around religious movements (rather as the Catholic Church in Poland is a kind of symbol of anti-government forces).

There are additional reasons why opposition should have come from, and been centred on, the Islamic religion. Sunni Muslims recognise the temporal ruler as the successor of the prophet Mohammed, but this is not the case with the Shi’a branch to which most Iranians belong, The various land reforms of the Shah and his father have deprived the religious leaders or mullahs (of whom there are some 180,000 in Iran) of their lands. They have thereby been forced to rely economically on the “religious tax" paid by their followers, especially the bazaar merchants—and the sums paid over in this way were probably greater than the secular taxes paid to the government. The mullahs constituted a large, influential and financially secure grouping outside the formal state apparatus, and one moreover with a sizable grass roots organisation. The Shah’s new-style oil-based capitalism inevitably led to undermining of the merchants’ position and hence of the mullahs. The result was a clash of interests between the merchants and the Shah as spokesman for the new oil-financed bourgeoisie. The priests are but the ideologists of the merchants, and the seemingly religious dispute masks an economic conflict.

Opposition to the Shah’s regime gradually increased throughout 1977, and by the middle of the following year the Shah was promising “liberalisation" with “free elections”. These carrots failed to quieten things down and martial law had to be declared in September 1978. Opposition still seethed, however, and in January 1979 the Shall left Iran. It was a striking demonstration that even an apparently all-powerful dictator cannot survive for long without the support, or at least the acquiescence, of those he rules over.

The replacement has been the so-called “Islamic republic”, which is effectively run by religious leaders like the Ayatollah Khomeini. The Tehran workers are provided with a diet of “bread and circuses", parading outside the US embassy as if American imperialism were the cause of all their problems. Their new rulers are no better than the Shah and, like him, go in for executions and secret trials. Like the Shah, they wage bloody war against nationalist movements in the non-Persian speaking areas of Kurdistan and Khuzestan. And above all, the division of society into two classes remains.

Meanwhile opposition too continues. At the end of April, bomb explosions in Tehran killed four people, those being blamed for this including the Americans, the Iraqis, the Kurds and left-wing guerrillas. The position of Iran’s new rulers is by no means secure. It is unlikely that the Shah will return (other than to face trial), but the Islamic republic will be as unable to solve the country’s economic problems as he was. The dispute between different sections of the Iranian capitalist class will continue, with the new industrial bourgeoisie likely to come out on top eventually. As has happened so often elsewhere, an inter-capitalist dispute has been dressed up in other clothes (religious, nationalist, or whatever), and workers have been deluded into supporting one side or the other.

Our message to workers in Iran is the same as our message to workers everywhere: do not waste your lives and energy by supporting one group of your masters against another—instead, unite as a class against the system that sets up some human beings as masters over others.

Paul Bennett

Running Commentary: Waste Not (1980)

The Running Commentary Column from the January 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

WASTE NOT

There was much that was puzzling in the Tory election promises, not least their declared determination to hunt down and exterminate all waste and inefficiency.

To begin with, there was the puzzling implication that under the Labour government workers had had a marvellous time, being paid to be inefficient in jobs which were wasteful. Those thousands who were thrown out of work as a result of Labour government cuts and their other policies may be expected to give vent to an especially hollow laugh.

And then there was the appointment of a Waste and Inefficiency Watchdog. In some ways this was a shrewd move; Margaret Thatcher chose Derek Rayner, joint managing director of Marks and Spencer — a firm with a reputation among workers who buy their sweaters there for being highly efficient and non-wasteful.

Now Rayner is busily at work, and one of the areas he is hunting over is, of course, the Civil Service. Already some 20,000 jobs have been lost in a recruitment ban; now ministries like Industry, Trade, Employment — even the Foreign Office — are to be further cut. There may even be redundancies — something civil servants are accustomed to organising for other workers, on the comfortable assumption that it would not happen to them.

But the puzzle is — why does Rayner stop there? Why is his view so blinkered? Why does he try to get rid of waste and inefficiency by making capable workers idle in dole queues? Why, in other words, does he not realise that the only way to rid us of waste and inefficiency is to abolish the social system which operates on the profit motive?

In the name of commodity production and profit capitalism wastes an enormous amount of the world’s resources and its people’s abilities. Why doesn’t Rayner extend his hunt to include that? There are, as usual, no prizes for the correct answer to this puzzle. 

SCREAM, BABY, SCREAM

Does Rentamob live? In Tehran a forest of clenched fists pump up and down in the air, and from tens of thousands of throats comes the rhythmic, beating screech — “Aya-toll-ah Kho-mei-ni; Aya- toll-ah Kho-mei-ni”.

In America too there are clenched fists on high, and faces similarly contorted with passion. Only the screams are different, for those people are protesting against the Ayatollah’s followers capturing the American Embassy in Tehran, and they lust for the blood of the Iranian ruler.

Demonstrators have developed a style which is international. Whatever the matter of their protest, across the world the clenched fist denotes a proclaimed unity and strength. Political argument degenerates into shouting the same few words again and again, with the object not of making a point but of intimidating the audience.

The subject matter of demonstrations also has an international flavour. Workers swarm onto the street regularly to demonstrate their anger or to give voice to demands on issues which actually have nothing to do with their interests. Iranian people demonstrating for the Ayatollah and Americans doing the same thing in opposition to him are at one in their ignorance of their own class interests and of the solution to their problems.

The violent gestures and the empty slogans are a device which disguises this ignorance; a ranting mob is motivated by emotions inflamed to a point beyond rational argument. They can hardly see or think; their satisfaction is in the excitement of the marching, the piston fists, the syncopated, screaming slogans.

It might be more hopeful if they were Rentamob. At least then they would be doing it for money; at present they give their allegiance to their respective ruling classes gladly, for free, getting nothing in return except exploitation and contempt. 

COLD STEEL

Unrelieved gloom from the nationalised British Steel Corporation. Its chairman, Sir Charles Villiers, recently claimed that he could so manage things that the industry would break even by next March. Now he has had to give a different story; losses during the first half of 1979 were £145.6 million and are forecast to reach about £310 million for the whole year.

So will Sir Charles resign after this blinding mistake which suggests that he is not as in touch with the steel industry as he might be?

Well, actually no; instead he will continue with his plans to sack a lot more workers. The works at Corby and Shotton (12,000 workers ‘redundant’) are to be closed, and Villiers’ axe will swing at other plants, where thousands will lose their jobs. Since 1974 the total labour force in the industry has been cut from 228,000 to 182,000 — which has not reversed the industry’s decline.

The future for steel is also bleak. BSC have a capacity to produce some 34 million tonnes a year, but during 1980 they expect to turn out only about 16 million.

Another ‘economy’ measure will be to increase the importing of coking coal from Australia, America and Poland. This does not please that other nationalised concern, the Coal Board, who obviously would like British Steel to behave as if it did not operate under the capitalist social system, with all that that implies in terms of priorities. Those priorities are based on a simple proposition — no profit, no production. That law of capitalism, under which all wealth is produced to be sold at a profit, applies as remorselessly to a state-managed industry as to a private one.

Workers who voted — and who still vote — for nationalisation because they thought a state industry would put humane considerations before capitalism’s economic laws have had a series of nasty shocks. The current condition of the steel industry is the latest — and one of the nastiest. 

Global March of the Gurus (2005)

Book Review from the January 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World. By Francis Wheen, Fourth Estate, 2004.

A few years ago Wheen had a critically and commercially successful biography of Karl Marx. This survey – A Short History of Modern Delusions, as the book’s subtitle puts it – takes 1979 as the decisive year. In that year two key events occurred that shaped the modern world: Margaret Thatcher came to power in Britain and Ayatollah Khomeini returned to dominate Iran.

The link between the Iranian revolution of 1979 and the rise of Islamic fundamentalism is uncontroversial. The Shah of Iran was a stooge of western governments, there to guarantee oil supplies. The ideology used to remove him therefore took the form of an anti-western Islam. This ideology then spread through the Middle East and beyond. But Wheen’s interpretation of Thatcher’s rise and the global spread of free market fundamentalism is less convincing. In Wheen’s account, the old status quo (which he clearly favours) was overthrown by New Right zealots spouting mumbo-jumbo. Or put another way, the post-war consensus on the mixed economy, guided by government intervention and Keynesian economics, was supplanted by monetarism, privatisation and the worship of market forces. Of course these facts are not in dispute and Thatcherite/Blairite ideology is mumbo-jumbo dressed-up as common sense (“we are all ‘Thatcherite’ now,” said Peter Mandelson, Labour MP, in 2002). However, what Wheen fails to appreciate is why the post-war consensus was so easily swept away. In the 1970s the long post-war boom had come to an end and the Keynesian status quo was perceived to be a failure in dealing with recession and high unemployment. Hence the spread of free market mumbo-jumbo.

Wheen sets great store by the Enlightenment values of reason and progress. This book is far more wide ranging than space here permits us to discuss. Cults, gurus, irrational panics and post-modernists are all subject to a withering criticism very much in the style of George Orwell. Despite the reservations above, this is a superb piece of work and it will be an invaluable resource for socialists.

Lew Higgins