Book review

Maziar Behrooz, Rebels with a Cause: The Failure of the Left in Iran

239 pages (including Illustrations, Appendix, Notes, Bibliography, Index)

London: I.B. Taurus, 1999

ISBN: 1 86064 381 7

Rebels with a Cause is a welcome addition to the small number of books – others include those by Sepehr Zabih and by Ervand Abrahamian – that offer a history of the communist movement in Iran. Abrahamian’s book, Iran Between Two Revolutions (published in 1988), was largely sympathetic to the Tudeh Party and to the left organizations that formed shortly before the 1978-79 Revolution, while Sepehr Zabih’s books, The Communist Movement in Iran (published in 1966) and The Left in Contemporary Iran (published in 1986) were not written from a perspective sympathetic to the Left. Although Maziar Behrooz’s new book is dedicated to Bizhan Jazani, the late founder of the Fadayian, its assessment of the Left is closer to Zabih’s than to Abrahamian’s.

The book consists of four chapters. In the first, the author examines the Tudeh Party and its offspring during the period 1953-1970. This chapter is entitled "Defeat and Revival: The Great Defeat of the Left (1953-70)." Here Behrooz is particularly keen to show the shortcomings of the Tudeh Party and its inability or unwillingness to act decisively against what he calls the "preventable" coup d’état of 1953. The second chapter, entitled "Offensive and Stalemate (1971-9): Violence and Suppression", describes the guerrilla movement of the period 1971-79. While offering a detailed account of the rise of the Fedaiyan, the Mojahedin, and Peykar, Behrooz labels these organizations "Stalinist" without defining the term. The accusation of "Stalinism" (like other labels, including "orientalist") has been used rather too indiscriminately to be of conceptual value. The focus of the third chapter is "the dance of death" during and after the revolution (1979-83). Here Behrooz describes the disunity and disorganization that plagued the Left and that led to their defeat. And in the final chapter, Behrooz offers a series of explanations for the failure of the left in Iran before and after the revolution. He focuses on such factors as factionalism and splits, dependence on the Soviet Union (especially on the part of the Tudeh Party), theoretical misreadings of Iranian society, errors in military and organizational strategy and tactics, political miscalculations, and the inability or unwillingness to understand and speak the language of the people. The book includes eight pages of photographs (of Bizhan Jazani, Hamid Ashraf, Mas’ud Ahmadzadeh, Amir Parviz Pouyan, Khosrow Rouzbeh, Mostafa Shoa’ian, and Nurreddin Kianuri, and of Jazani’s famous avantgarde painting "Siahkal"), and it ends with a useful chronology of major events under the period under consideration.

Maziar Behrooz has written an important book, but he also has penned a rather severe and perhaps unbalanced indictment of the Iranian left. Among his arguments is that the Tudeh Party "met its demise [in 1953] without putting up much resistance". He also argues that "Marxism in Iran was decisively defeated by the mid-1980s" mainly due to its "inability to understand and cope with the internal dynamics of the 1979 revolution in Iran". (All quotes from p. xiv.) Now, there is no doubt that some of the criticism is accurate, and that others – e.g. Mehrdad Mashayekhi, Ali Mirsepassi-Ashtiani, Val Moghadam – have offered similar criticisms. But whereas the above authors have placed the mistakes of the Left in historical, political, and social perspective – that is, combining an analysis of the internal organizational mistakes with an analysis of the extremely untoward external environment that the Left faced – Behrooz stresses internal dynamics almost exclusively. His analysis of the Shah-CIA-British coup d’état against Mossadegh reads almost as if he were blaming the Tudeh Party for the coup’s success. In light of the recent CIA "secret history" published by the New York Times that reveals the extent of dirty tricks used in 1953, this assessment is most unjustified. That history says that CIA officers orchestrating the coup worked directly with royalist Iranian military officers, handpicked the prime minister’s replacement, sent envoys to bolster the Shah’s courage, directed a campaign of bombings by Iranians posing as communists, and planted articles and cartoons in newspapers.

In my view, too, Behrooz’s critique of the problems of Left disunity and miscalculations during 1979-83 is not balanced by an analysis of the shock of a clerical movement appearing almost out of nowhere, of the brutality of the Islamists, and of an extremely difficult international situation involving U.S. machinations, the Soviet Union’s concern to have friendly regimes in Iran and Afghanistan, the embassy crisis, and the Iraqi invasion. An account of the "failure of the Left" surely must include the domestic and international context in which the Left struggled to define itself and integrate itself into the society and polity.

In stark contrast to the triumphalism that we (Iranian leftists) felt in 1979, the book offers a somber and sobering description and analysis of defeat after defeat. The rebels had a cause, but they failed utterly, and it was all their fault. But is that the end of the story? Not quite, for the Tudeh Party and its successors carried out cultural struggle as well as armed struggle, and they have left an intellectual and cultural legacy of modernist, secularist and feminist thought. Behrooz himself notes that there has been much self-reflection and a metamorphosis within the Left. He points out that following the defeat of the Iranian revolutionary left and the collapse of world communism under the direction of the Soviet Union, the word "left" (chap in Persian) now has a different meaning than it did in the past: to be a leftist today means to be a social democrat. Whether this reflects a rejection of Marxism-Leninism and a return to an original (and perhaps more feasible) socialist position, or both, is a matter of some debate. Meanwhile, Behrooz concludes that that the generation of the 1979 revolution probably will not "play a decisive role in the future development of Iran, [but] it will no doubt play a role in passing on the experiences of that time and defining some of the problems of the coming century" (p. 165). Given that both the capitalist world-system and the Islamic Republic are facing crises of legitimacy and major expressions of protest, this role is already being realized.

Word count 1050