Rise and Fall of a Tyranny

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The following paragraphs show how one of the most repressive dictators of modern times gained power -and how he lost it again.

It is a story of conspiracy and terror on the side of the Shah and his unscrupulous friends-of suffering and courage on the side of the masses of iran who were forced to live under the tyranny.

It is a story which exposes the treacherous nature of both imperialism and Stalinism.

It is a story which reveals the overwhelming strength of mass struggle while at the same time it emphasises the necessity for revolutionary leadership in the fight for socialism.

Finally it is a story which is not yet over. The Shah's absolute power can probably never return.

But his massive army still exists, and his vast secret police and the host of politicians who owe • their position to him remain. The struggle must now be redoubled in Iran to search out and destroy every remnant of the power not only of the Shah and his political dependents but of the capitalist system which they represent.

This historical moment which is opening up today in Iran is as significant as that which began in February 1917 in Russia, or in 1930 in Spain or in April 1974 in Portugal.

A closer parallel can be seen in the mass movement of workers, peasants and students which overthrew the tyranny of Haile Selassie in Ethiopia in 1974.

That revolutionary upsurge foundered through the absence of a revolutionary leadership, and the military dictatorship of the Derg stepped forward as the agent of counter-revolution.

The much bigger struggles in Iran will only be settled in favour of socialism as a result of the construction of a Trotskyist revolutionary party basing itself on the strategy of permanent revolution and a programme of democratic and transitional demands as set out in the Tuanidinnil Duraunman Thaao ¡ ransitiunai rruyrammit. ¡nust that today profess to lead iran's masses-the Islamic religious leaders or the bourgeois National Front-are the enemies of socialism.

The burning question of socialism or counter-revolution in Iran today will be decided in a struggle against these anti-socialist leaders-a struggle which will be fought out within what has already become one of the largest mass political movements in history.

Already in the turbulent events of the last year sections of the mass movement have spontaneously resisted the religious and bourgeois leaders when they have compromised in the fight for the removal of the Shah.

Only recently there have been reports of at least one large workers' demonstration under red banners which threw off religious banners and prevented Khomeini supporters from shouting their slogans.

Such events show not that an organised revolutionary leadership exists but that the potential for it to be built exists.

The spontaneous revolutionary actions of Iran's masses which have in one year destroyed a tyranny backed by nearly every power in the world must now be directed towards the building of a conscious, disciplined socialist party which can lead the fight of the masses to its complete victory and prevent what will otherwise be the inevitable counter-revolution.