Unremarkable volte-face

The SWP has raised more than a few eyebrows on the left with its coverage of the recent protests in Iran, writes Jim Grant

Allies, opponents and even some members (the editors of the infamous Lenin’s Tomb blog, for example) expected either grim silence or tacit backing for the supposed victor, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Yet it was not so – “People power rocks Iran,” screamed the front page of Socialist Worker (June 20), atop an article full of the kind of gushing enthusiasm usually reserved for stale anti-BNP protests whose success the SWP is desperately trying to talk up.

The session at last weekend’s Marxism 2009 school, however, made the switcheroo look rather more (depressingly) mundane. Speaking to the title ‘Iran in revolt – the possibility for change’, Peyman Jafari – Iranian exile and member of the SWP’s International Socialist Tendency in Holland – outlined its analysis of the situation. Much of this was uncontroversial – simmering tensions and a peculiarly fraught election campaign had led to serious doubts over the legitimacy of the results, and this had become the flashpoint for popular discontent in Iran.

Nevertheless, he seemed under the impression that the entire purpose of the protests was to get the elections annulled. And, as his speech drew on, all indicators were that he was perfectly comfortable with the view of the protests as basically pro-Moussavi, and loyal to the ideals of the 1979 revolution (by which, in turn, he meant its Islamic factors).

It was not our job to tell the Iranian masses what to do – instead we must be the “best fighters” for their demands. We should have “no illusions” in Moussavi, though precisely what the point of having no illusions is when we are forbidden from dispelling illusions is left to comrades’ imaginations.

In any case, it is plain that Jafari does have illusions in Moussavi – he painted him as a link to a kind of welfare-statist heritage of the 1980s, rather than mentioning his rather more troubling history as a mass butcher of Iranian communists during his tenure as prime minister in that decade (which put him, in practical terms, second only to supreme leader Khomeini).

Stuart King of Hands Off the People of Iran and Permanent Revolution craftily managed to get himself to the head of the queue for floor speakers, and questioned how it would be possible to get more sections of the working class on board the movement – surely it was necessary to raise socialist demands?

The rest of the ‘debate’ consisted mostly of SWP members criticising Hopi, generally on spurious grounds. A brief bit of colour was provided by a non-SWP comrade, who argued a neo-Stalinist defence of Ahmadinejad and opposed the protests. Alex Callinicos, the SWP’s leading thinker, spoke next and criticised very sharply the failure of the previous speaker to ‘pick the right side’, and his intervention was generally agreeable for that. He made a snide swipe at Hopi for insisting the regime was ‘completely’ dictatorial (not true), and argued against producing “a programme from our back pocket” (the SWP generally doesn’t overburden even its back pockets in this respect, anyway).

Another SWP speaker criticised Hopi for “imposing” slogans such as “Marg bar Ahmadinejad”, “Marg bar Khamenei” and “Marg bar Moussavi” (‘Death to Ahmadinejad’, etc). The first two are slogans from the student movement; the last we have not reported or used at all. That SW front page article, meanwhile, was quite happy to cry, “Marg bar diktator”.

To propose slogans and so forth is simple “patronising”, apparently – a characterisation which, to be frank, beggars belief. Hopi is in regular contact with militant workers, students and leftists in Iran. They are not troglodytes, and read the international press – including the left press – voraciously. If these militants, who have made ‘Marg bar …’ the best known bit of Farsi on the Anglophone left, read the SWP effectively saying that Moussavi is the leader they deserve, and they read the Weekly Worker and other left organs calling for the regime’s overthrow, general strikes and such, which are they truly likely to consider ‘patronising’, comrades?

In reality, of course, the SWP is perfectly happy to impose strategies (if that is even the right word) on the Iranian working class. It has all but told them to subordinate their activity to the right wing of the protest movements, and declared itself the ‘best fighters’ for a bourgeois candidate with a well known and deplorable history, to say the least. An improvement in some respects on open apologism, but not a substitute for principled internationalism.