Absence of socialist critique

 Abbas Goya 

The title of this piece may appear absolutist. More precisely, I contend that a substantial majority of the current analyses and assessments produced by socialist organizations concerning the state of class struggle in Iran—at least those I have read—fall short in their application of the socialist method of critique.

Let's start with the very phrase “class struggle.” If, as stated in The Communist Manifesto, the history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggles, any critique that removes the position and even the name of the classes is not socialist, whatever it may be. Obscure expressions such as “the people,” “public opinion,” or “a third force” do not belong to the vocabulary of a class-based—and therefore necessarily socialist—critique. When referring to the working class, one might use terms such as workers, wage earners, toilers, or even, in a more diluted sense, the hungry or the destitute, as near equivalents. But “the people” is not part of the socialist terminology when speaking about classes. The term carries indeterminate class content. Precisely for this reason, it belongs to the populist lexicon—see, for example, Tudehism.

“Public opinion” is similarly obscure. It is an ambiguous expression that serves the purpose of class eclecticism. “Public opinion” never becomes unified; it never calls for the abolition of private property; it is never opposed to capitalism; it is not opposed to the Islamic Republic; it has no fundamental disagreement with Trump; it is not opposed to killing, and so on—because it is constituted by different classes with divergent and often conflicting interests. “Public opinion,” much like “third force,” “third front,” “third pole,” or any phrase in which “third” functions as a descriptor of a social force, is at best an imprecise reference to some form of trans-class coalition.

For a nationalist—regardless of the degree of extremism—the adjective “foreign” may appear to have a clear meaning. But for a socialist, and consequently for an internationalist, “foreign” is a meaningless descriptor, since “foreign” or “alien” derives its meaning in opposition to “domestic,” understood as compatriot or co-national. Internationalists do not share this nationalist framework. Interestingly, today we clearly observe how the global character of capital has transcended national boundaries of competition. The Chinese state, while being the principal rival of the United States, simultaneously hosts American corporate giants so that they exploit cheap labor in China and extract surplus value from Chinese workers. Where, then, is the “foreign” element to be found?

The spread of analyses and assessments built on artificial polarizations—such as “the Islamic Republic versus the United States,” “monarchists versus the Islamic Republic,” “a U.S.–Iran war,” “warmongers versus the Islamic Republic,” “‘foreign intervention’ in overthrowing the Islamic Republic versus the ‘war of the Iranian people’ against it,” and the “‘permanent revolution’ of Woman, Life, Freedom in opposition to the Islamic Republic”—stems from ignoring the role of classes in social struggles.

In all of the above cases, the element of shared class interests on both sides of the equation has been overlooked—and continues to be overlooked. None of the formulations above reflect a class-based polarization; rather, they embody the shared interests of both sides of the equation.

The lack of clarity in class alignments even prevents us from explaining the fundamental cause of the physical violence and lumpen culture that supporters of Reza Pahlavi display against socialists. This serious shortcoming in such assessments ultimately leads to conclusions aligned with the interests of capitalism, regardless of the internal factional divisions among capitalists.