Down with the Shah! for Socialism in Iran

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military regime still cling on to office they are rapidly losing power.

Their fear of last weekend's marches led them to withdraw their troops and police from the streets where the demonstrations were to take place.

From behind a shield of tanks, the Shah in his palace and the bourgeoisie in their wealthy suburbs could only look on fearfully as about two million in Tehran and huge crowds in other cities called for the death of the Shah and the downfall of the government.

These events, which continue as we go to press, are opening up the way to struggle for socialism in Iran.

Weakest link

This former fortress against communism is now the weakest political link in the imperialist chain.

In attacking the Shah's tyranny the Iranian masses are also attacking world capitalism of which he is a principal agent.

Workers are showing a consciousness of that connection by once again intensifying their industrial action against capitalist property in Iran.

Some private factories have been occupied by workers; the banking system is nearly paralysed by strike action; and last week once again the workers in the oilfields stepped up their strikes and go-slows which resulted in oil production falling to less than half its normal level.

New dangers As this great mass movement grows, it brings the end of the Shah's regime rapidly nearer.

But at the same time it is encountering new dangers-both from outside, and from those who claim to be its own leaders.

While many of the protest demonstrations are taking a religious form, it is totally wrong to interpret the movement as a whole as a religious movement.

The actions of the strikers and hundreds of thousands of demonstrators are expressing their hatred of the oppression of the dictatorship and the exploitative economic system.

These combine to keep the working masses of Iran in a state of permanent deprivation at the same time as it provides a small class of capitalists and aristocrats with staggering Iranian oil worker wealth-some of the dimensions of which are being revealed in figures uncovered by the striking workers of the Central Bank.

To begin to resolve the material problems of the masses which have fed the present mass uprising, it is necessary not only to overthrow the Shah's dictatorship but to go beyond that to expropriate all the parasites of the aristocracy, the landowners and the capitalists and start to build a socialist planned economy.

Workers committees Already sections of workers have spontaneously taken some steps in that direction by occupying factories and setting up workers' committees.

But those who at the present time claim to be the leaders of the movement against the Shah have no intention of attacking capitalism in Iran.

They are the priests (mullahs) or the national capitalists represented by the National Front.

These leaders cannot offer to the masses a way out of their problems, since for all their democratic rhetoric they want to maintain capitalist exploitation in Iran.

The mood of the workers and peasants has been so uncompromising that some of these leaders-especially those who have attempted to demobil-

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