On Comrade Shalguni's "The Iranian left in an era of breaks and transitions"

iran bulletin No. 21-22/1999, p.7-11

While in the past I was always intrigued by what Comrade. Shalguni had to say, I found his recent analysis somewhat wanting. As so often after the collapse of Stalinism and with it of most parts of the left, the problem is less with what is explicitly said than with what is - sometimes conspicuously - lacking.

Cde. Shalguni rightly puts the problem of the Iranian left within the framework of the international left. Therefore it seems to me to be the particular duty of the internationalist left to try and fill the empty spots in Cde. Shalguni's analysis, since almost nothing of what he says goes for the Iranian left alone.

Let me start by quoting a paragraph of Cde. Shalguni's piece which is crucial for the future of the left and which I wholeheartedly subscribe to. He says: "The raison d'etre of the left is to confront capital and fight for socialism. To shut this down, or postpone it to a future date, leaves the left without identity. The struggle for socialism cannot be put on file, waiting for the victory in the struggle for democracy. The two are inseparable: a struggle for a free and equal citizen. The large majority in society usually discover the vital significance of democracy and basic freedoms through their struggle against capital and not vice versa."

By this he breaks with a pillar of the Stalinist legacy to which almost the entire Iranian (and not only Iranian) left adhered - the stagist model as a basis for the submission of the working class to one or another faction of the bourgeoisie, a strategy of the "popular front". Endorsed at the 7th Comintern Congress in 1935, it led to catastrophes in France, Spain, China and many other countries like Iran later on.

Unfortunately, while this position of Cde. Shalguni *outlines the authentic Leninist position and as such totally breaks with Stalinism's counterrevolutionary legacy, much of the rest of the article seems akin to a bourgeois liberal critique of Stalinism.

This is not so obvious at first glance, since Cde. Shalguni says correct things, like "Today all the opponents of the Islamic Republic claim to defend democracy. Most, however prefer to remain silent on the political economy of the democracy of their choice. ... But a democracy that cannot defend even the mere right to live of the vast majority of the population will quickly collapse." However, some of these good positions are invalidated by other parts of his article.

While it is absolutely necessary to stress the need for democracy both in society as a whole and for workers' organisations in particular, this cannot be a substitute for a strategy which I would like to term Leninist. By Leninist I mean particularly his teachings about the nature and mission of the proletarian vanguard party, a position which had in fact developed further beyond what Lenin wrote in "What Is to Be Done?".

As I see it, Cde. Shalguni wants to go back exclusively to Marx/Engels on this issue. But I think that it would be un-Marxist to ignore the fact that Marx's thoughts developed as a result both of his scientific studies and of the development of society itself. Likewise it would be un-Leninist to take his words on each and every matter spoken or written at a certain moment as a Bible. But one point is crucial. Contrary to Marx, Lenin lived in the epoch of modern imperialism and therefore was able to offer insights into the strategy of modern proletarian revolution which Marx could not give. I don't see that any major step beyond Lenin in this respect has occurred. Nor do I foresee any. To expect otherwise would be tantamount to rejecting historical materialism, because it would deny the continued existence of the epoch of imperialism and the lack of successful socialist revolutions after 1917.

I think that Cde. Shalguni's thinking on these matters is limited by the fact that he has not yet been able to definitively breaking with the idea held by neo-Stalinists, anarchists, social democrats and outright bourgeois ideologists that Stalinism is only a more or less badly implemented development of Leninism - while in fact Stalinism is the negation of Leninism.

Another correct point that Cde. Shalguni correctly makes is his criticism of the Iranian left of the period for its belief that the revolution must have been victorious because it was a mass uprising - completely ignoring the question of leadership.

Unfortunately he doesn't follow this up. Here again the main error of the Iranian (and other) left was not merely their insufficient commitment to democracy but their insufficient (to say the least) commitment to the self-liberation of the working class. Since it is mainly of petty-bourgeois origin and nationalist by ideology (whether simply bourgeois nationalist or Menshevik-Stalinist nationalist adhering to the Stalin-Bukharinist idea of "socialism in one country"), this populist left often unconsciously regarded itself as the natural leader of the working class. It regarded the class itself as the battering ram for its "anti-imperialist state capitalist" designs. So the worship of the working-class as a class as such was only the reverse side of the coin of scepticism about or outright denial of the proletariat's capacity to lead its own revolution, which -- as Cde. Shalguni said - was to be bourgeois in its first stage. The second stage never ever happened anywhere, of course.

What Cde. Shalguni - if I get him right - offers as an alternative is a working-class movement centred around the notion of democracy. But I feel that while correctly criticising the undemocratic ways of the left in the past, he is throwing the baby away with the bath water. While he correctly stresses that the party cannot assume political authority by assertion alone and that it is necessary to accept pluralism of thought and organisation, he forgets to tell us what a revolutionary party is. That is, he seems to discard the necessity of a vanguard party - he doesn't use the term but I feel that this is what he implicitly refers to when he talks about the "guardianship of the working class." He replaces the revolutionary party by a gathering of all kinds of sectoral organisations and by pointing to the merits of the class as such.

On this point let me quote Trotsky, who not only had the merit of having been a leader of the Russian revolution but also - unlike Lenin - he witnessed the revolution's degeneration at the hand of the Stalinists. In "What Next? - Vital Questions for the German Proletariat" (Prinkipo 1932) he wrote: "Whenever reaction demands that the interests of 'the nation' be placed before class interests, we Marxists take the pains to explain that under the guise of 'the whole', the reaction defends the interests of the exploiting class. The interests of the nation cannot be formulated otherwise than from the point of view of the ruling class, or of the class aiming to take state power. The interests of the class cannot be formulated otherwise than in the form of a program; the program cannot be defended otherwise than by creating the party.

The class taken by itself, is only material for exploitation. The proletariat assumes an independent role only at the moment when from a social class 'in itself' it becomes a political class 'for itself'. This cannot take place otherwise than through the medium of a party. The party is the historical organ by means of which the class becomes class-conscious. To say 'the class stands higher than the party' is to assert that the class in the raw stands higher than the class which is on the road to class consciousness. Not only is this incorrect; it is reactionary."

The essential role of the vanguard party stems from the fact that parties reflect social strata and their interests, and that the working class under capitalism is not a homogeneous class. So in order to unite it as much as possible in order to give it the strength to smash the bourgeois order, its most conscious workers need to lead the rest. They will form what can be called the revolutionary vanguard party, or else they - along with the rest of the class and humanity at large - will be defeated. The vanguard party has nothing to do with its anti-democratic Stalinist caricature, of course.

Let me finally add two other points where I think Cde. Shalguni has somewhat lost his way.

1. From the Russian experience he draws the conclusion that state ownership and central planning were not necessarily so good and that therefore the market should play a role. While it is undeniable that the market cannot voluntaristically be done away with immediately after the revolution, three things should be clear however: a) the quality of state ownership depends on the class nature of the state in question. State ownership is not socialist, therefore, if the state is not a workers' state (a transitional state) let alone a truly socialist state; b) Soviet planning was not socialist planning at all (for details see Walter Daum: The Life and Death of Stalinism, New York 1990); c) the market and socialist planning cannot coexist forever. Socialism means the transition from the reign of necessity to the reign of freedom; the market, however, is ruled by blind laws which exclude freedom based on consciousness. could it be that Cde. Shalguni while defending `the mere right to live of the vast majority', in fact only opposes the neo-liberal prescriptions of Friedman and Hayek and not capitalism as such? I think not, but his position on markets opens dangerous doors.

2. Cde. Shalguni `forgot' to mention the necessity of a proletarian-revolutionary `International' as a reflection of the international character of capitalism and the necessity to formulate a program accordingly. `Socialism in one country' has not failed because of this or that shortcoming like the lack of democracy. These `shortcomings' have mainly been the results of the national narrowness in which `socialism' was forced both by western imperialism and by its Stalinist companions.

A. Holberg