Workers World, Vol. 21, No. 4
January 24 – At last, at last, the first significant working-class demonstration has taken place against the Bakhtiar puppet regime of U.S. imperialism. The bourgeois press in the West variously estimates it as between five and ten thousand. Friends of the Iranian workers’ movement with ties in Iran estimate it as much larger.
The real importance of the demonstration cannot be judged solely by its size. In a revolutionary situation, such as that which Iran is experiencing today, the magnitude of the forces in motion can change very rapidly. What is of the greatest significance is that this is the first visible, open manifestation of working class interests as distinct from any and all other groups in the broad opposition front against the Bakhtiar regime and the military.
While some may scoff at the social composition of the demonstration (allegedly a substantial number were students), this does not detract from its being a programmatic expression of proletarian class interests.
A revolutionary situation exists in Iran primarily because the working class in its hundreds and thousands and millions has virtually paralyzed the country with its monumental strikes and political support to the opposition movement. Without working class participation, without working class support, without bold initiative and endurance, not to speak of self-sacrifice, devotion, contribution of skills, and inexhaustible revolutionary energy, the opposition movement would be reduced to skirmishes with the entrenched forces of the repressive state apparatus of the Shah and his supporters.
It is without question the general strikes of the workers and the support of the petty-bourgeoisie which has converted the giant protest movement against the Shah and his successors into a revolutionary situation. But the working class has not spoken in its own name. It has not advanced slogans and demands which clearly express the historical needs of the working class as against the bourgeoisie, whose interests are irreconcilable with the fundamental interests of the workers and the success of the revolution.
Throughout the long period in which the current of revolutionary struggle has run ever deeper, encompassing ever wider sections of the population, the proletariat has been merely the physical force which has enabled the representatives of the bourgeois opposition to climb higher and higher on the rungs of the revolutionary ladder. The bourgeois opposition acts and speaks as though it were at one with the workers, as though there was a complete identity of interests between them. This is because the bourgeois opposition leaders from Khomeini to Sanjabi all the way down to the lowest echelons of the bourgeois opposition, assume that the workers will accept the interests of the bourgeoisie as their own interests.
The demonstration on Sunday, however, demonstrates that this is not so. No matter how the bourgeoisie may minimize the significance of the demonstration, may counterpose the small numbers at the demonstration to the huge, giant outpouring of last Friday, for instance, it will not invalidate the fact that the Sunday demonstration has been an objective expression of working class interests, interests which are of fundamental historical significance and which are diametrically opposed to the predatory interests of the bourgeoisie.
It may also be pointed out that the demonstration was composed of a variety of Marxist groups with widely differing programs and deep political differences. However vital these differences may be, however paralyzing they may prove to be at a later date, it is of tremendous importance that all, or almost all, who are called Marxists and Communists (as the bourgeois press phrases it) came out in one demonstration immediately on the heels of the giant Friday demonstration which the bourgeoisie interpreted solely as a referendum on Khomeini and his program.
While it is maintained in some quarters that the Tudeh Party (the Iranian Communist Party), for understandable reasons, may have taken a more cautious position by not openly coming out in support of the demonstration, it would be erroneous to assume that their members and sympathizers did not participate in it.
The Jan. 22 Wall Street Journal, the organ of U.S. high finance and industry, triumphantly proclaimed that the Sunday working class demonstration indicated that the “broad opposition front was fragmenting.” But this was merely wishful thinking on the part of the Wall Street Journal. There are also others on the “left,” so-called, who are so solicitous of the bourgeois opposition and who immediately branded the demonstration as “disruptive” of the “unity of the movement.” Nothing could be further from the truth.
An assertion of working class identity, of proletarian independence, has nothing in common with fragmenting, disuniting, and disrupting the broad united front movement against the Bakhtiar regime and the military junta, the would-be legatees of the Shah.
A closer look at the broad opposition movement discloses that there are many discordant voices and disparate class interests in it, but this does not at all militate against united action of virtually the bulk of the population against the regime. Unity in action is the crying need of the hour and disruption of that would be a crime against the Revolution.
As an indispensable necessity for the success of the revolutionary struggle, the working class has the right to raise, separate and apart from the bourgeois opposition demands, its own general demands, such as for a workers’ and peasants’ government, and/or specific demands such as for the convocation of a Constituent Assembly, when the critical moment for it is appropriate. The question of timing is most important.
It would be incorrect to raise it, for instance, if the Bakhtiar regime should suddenly make a promise for an election to a Constituent Assembly under the aegis of the present regime and under the guns of its military supporters. That would be fraud.
The imperative need of the hour is unity and concerted action for the overthrow of the Bakhtiar regime. On that the working class and all its allies are completely in accord with the bourgeois opposition to the extent, of course, that the opposition is willing to go along with the working class on this crucial question.
There is wavering at the pinnacles of the opposition movement on how far to go with that. The workers, on the other hand, and the mass of the population generally have given no vocal expression to any wavering or any hesitation on that score. All the more is it necessary for the vanguard organizations of the working class, which means the various political groups in the movement, most of which were represented at the demonstration, to organize demonstrations independently, to convoke a congress of working class organizations for the purpose of implementing a program o concrete immediate demands of a fundamental character to meet the needs of the revolutionary movement of the workers and peasants.
For too long, workers’ political organizations have tended in the contemporary period to tail the bourgeois parties and find themselves completely submerged, their initiative sharply curtailed and their independent class program completely shelved.
In moments of revolutionary crisis such as the present in Iran, the working class vanguard elements face both a challenge and an opportunity to bring the inexhaustible revolutionary potential of the proletariat centerstage politically. The bourgeois parties, even the most extreme and radical, can only carry the revolution forward within the framework of existing bourgeois class relations, while fighting for more elbow room for themselves by changing the form of the state. The proletariat has an even greater stake in changing the present repressive form of fascist state, but the ultimate success of the revolution as a whole can only be carried forward to its ultimate and logical conclusion by overthrowing the oppressive class relationships between exploiter and exploited.
During all these weeks and months when the revolutionary storm was gathering and finally breaking out into the open, it appeared that the working class was like putty in the hands of the bourgeois politicians in the struggle against the Shah. Certainly that’s the way the bourgeois press reported it. It did not appear that any assertion of proletarian independence was possible.
The bourgeois leaders take it for granted that the proletariat will confine itself to narrow economic and trade union demands in the framework of the same old bourgeois system, minus the Shah. In other words, merely an alleviation of repression and some “basic democratic reforms.”
Of course, an end to political repression and basic democratic reforms are most welcome and absolutely indispensable. It is to be noted, however, that these are byproducts of the current revolutionary struggle and by and large have virtually been won by the workers. They can, however, only be guaranteed by workers’ power. Hence the need to widen and deepen the intervention of the working class and its vanguard organizations into the political process and not permit the bourgeois opposition to monopolize it.
Organizing the workers on an independent political basis, of which the Sunday demonstration was a vivid example, is not sowing disunity or separatism in the broad opposition movement. It is being true to one of Lenin’s principal teachings on successful strategy and tactics in the course of the revolution.
Now that the Bakhtiar government and the military camarilla, undoubtedly under the direction of the Pentagon, have brought the crisis to a head by closing the airports in Tehran and elsewhere so as to prevent Khomeini and his associates from landing in Iran, the stage has been set for a full-scale confrontation and the possible outbreak of civil war.
The vanguard organizations of the working class will not only have to learn to cooperate ever more closely to forge a common working class front. They will also have to demonstrate by their revolutionary determination, dedication, and skill that they can be and out to be in the very vanguard of the revolution itself.
Last updated: 11 May 2026