Statement by the Communist Party of Iran (MLM) on the occasion of May First, International Working Class Day

14 May 2018. A World to Win News Service. The Farsi original of the following statement by the Communist Party of Iran (Marxist-Leninist-Maoist) is available on www.cpimlm.com.

May First this year comes at a time when Iran and the world are on the threshold of unprecedented events and upheavals. A situation is developing that holds great dangers for the majority of the people in Iran and globally. But within this same situation reside important opportunities to be seized for radical change in Iran, the Middle East and around the world, opportunities to advance, through tremendous sacrifice and struggles by the masses of people, under the leadership of communists, towards emancipation, to beat back the reactionary states and imperialist powers in many countries, dealing blows and defeating them, advancing by leaps and bounds, thus bringing into being a new day in the world when new communist revolutions would prevail and new socialist states be established in different corners of the globe. Only by recognizing these opportunities and actualizing them can we confront the massive dangers ahead.

Through its everyday functioning the capitalist-imperialist system hurls more people into misery and terror. The number of people afflicted by hunger and war is rising, global warming continues, and the world constantly faces the terrible threat of the outbreak of new wars and new rounds of mass slaughter. In the United States, the Trump /Pence regime is upending bourgeois democracy and establishing a Christian fascist regime instead. If this regime manages to consolidate itself, it will impose a world on people that is more racist, more misogynist and poorer, and it will intensify destructive wars and the destruction of the environment. Even before the ascent of the Trump/Pence regime, the workings of the global capitalist system and the policies of various imperialist powers, including U.S. imperialism, had already turned the Middle East into a battlefield between Islamist warlords, the reactionary states of the region and imperialist armies. But under the rule of the Trump regime, the situation in the Middle East will become even more intense. Economic and political rivalries among the imperialist powers (the United States, Russia, China and the European Union) are intensifying. These rivalries have fanned the flames of proxy wars in places like Syria and made the situation there even more complex, with no end in sight. In the wars in Syria and Yemen, in addition to the imperialist powers, reactionary regional powers such as Iran, Turkey, Israel and Saudi Arabia, and various Shiite and Sunni Islamist groups, are relentlessly slaughtering people and scorching their lands. The rise of a fascist regime in the United States has encouraged the growth of fascist political forces in Europe. In several European countries, including Germany, France, Poland and Hungary, extreme right parties are expanding their power and influence.

The situation in Iran is not isolated from the international scene and in fact is principally shaped by international trends. The Islamic Republic's political power has lost its coherence. Meanwhile, the regime is still feeling the aftershocks of the uprising of the poor in December 2017. Moreover, wave upon wave of protests, strikes and demonstrations – by the workers' movement, teachers and pensioners, the Women of Revolution Square (as the young women who stood in Revolution Square and took off and waved their hijabs are called), Isfahan farmers (protesting water shortages) and people in Khuzestan (protesting against air pollution as well as the regime's outrages against the Arab people in that province) – have confronted the regime with the real possibility of economic and social collapse and large mass movements and uprisings. The situation is so critical that a number of Islamic Republic high-ranking officials and security executives have openly expressed their fear that the regime may collapse or be overthrown, and their alarm at the lack of any clear view of what will happen in the course of this year. The Islamic Republic tried to remedy its economic and political crisis by entering into a nuclear deal with the imperialist powers. But this has failed to produce stability for the regime. John Bolton's instalment as the Trump/Pence regime's National Security Adviser has not only opened a new chapter in efforts to squeeze the Islamic Republic, but also aims to further pull Iran into the quagmire of wars in the Middle East and even spread these wars to Iran itself.

The reactionary Islamic Republic of Iran regime claims that through its war crimes and criminal involvement in the Syrian war and its defence of the reactionary regime of Bashar al-Assad it has protected Iran from the conflicts in the Middle East. But what put Iran at risk of becoming "Syrianized" is exactly the regime itself and the very system of the Islamic Republic. Its various military and security factions compete with each other over monopolizing territory, natural resources and high executive posts. At the same time, U.S. imperialism, by relying on its affiliated forces, is preparing "regime change" in Iran. Within the framework of this kind of tense situation, any eventful development – such as a direct military confrontation between the Islamic Republic and the United States, Israel or Saudi Arabia, or a coup attempt by any of the various factions in the Islamic Republic against the others, accompanied by the violent suppression of the people, with the aim of reconstituting a new hard core of power within the Islamic Republic – could open the door to a process similar to what has been going on in Syria and Libya in the past several years.

Let us prepare for big battles 

In this kind of charged situation, illusions and political ambiguity, inability to make a scientific analysis and failure to rise to the challenges of the time with a revolutionary line based on reality could lead to the destruction of the progressive forces and the erasing of previous revolutionary hard work. We have to analyse the situation as deeply as possible, grasp its exceptional character and recognize the possibility of dangerous shifts in the situation. The real disaster, the real meaning of the "Syrianization" of Iran, would be if the masses of people were to come into the streets and rise up against their conditions of oppression and exploitation, but the effective actors on the scene were various reactionary forces coming from inside and outside the Islamic Republic regime. 

The latter aspect of the situation has to be changed immediately. This is the political necessity the current situation presents. To be in a position to deal with the great dangers looming, our task is to open a radically different path in front of the masses – a path whose economic, political, social and cultural objectives and framework are determined by an actual communist revolution, and attract significant numbers of masses to this path from amongst those who have joined different sites of struggle and resistance against the Islamic Republic. 

In 2017, hundreds of outbreaks of protests, strikes, rallies and labour demonstrations (900 according to some estimates) took place in various Iranian cities and regions. This shows both the severity of the state of affairs faced by the regime and the people's potential for protest and struggle. But the scope and number of these struggles, their persistence, their courage, their initiative and their insistence on achieving their economic and other demands and rights are still far from what workers actually need.

The dire political and economic conditions in Iran, the Middle East region and around the world are not going to improve through mere economic improvement and job creation in this or that branch of industry or by the victory of some people in recovering their bank deposits. The crisis of poverty and unemployment will continue in various forms, and every day more and more people worldwide will be dragged into hunger and misery, even if "me" or "my family" and "my country" might be temporarily secured against the system's direct and indirect assaults. The struggle against the upcoming devastating storms cannot be won with a short-sighted vision of the interests involved or the identity politics of a section of society (like the women's movement or the movements of oppressed nations, etc., each separately fighting for their rights). The exploitation and oppression dished out by the capitalist system is a universal and global phenomenon, and the solution is a single solution that has to be fought for on various battlefronts, all serving that single real, comprehensive solution.

One important battlefront in our struggle to overthrow the Islamic Republic regime and open the road to communist revolution in Iran is the anti-imperialist struggle. Today, this anti-imperialist struggle should be focused in particular on supporting the widespread anti-fascist movement in the United States initiated by the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA (revcom.us) with the slogan "In the Name of Humanity, We Refuse to Accept a Fascist America" (refusefascism.org).

What kind of revolution? What kind of leadership?

The situation is very fluid and unpredictable, but a scientific understanding of "what is the problem" would tell us with great certainty that "communist revolution is the only way out." We communists represent the interests of all humanity, and this is what we fight for. We will wage our battle to radically change the world on the basis of the science of communism and not on the basis of some bourgeois-democratic notions and illusions. By communist revolution and the science of communism we mean what has been put forward and forged by Bob Avakian in the New Communism, and not different narratives of communism or notions under the name of communism. 

Today, in order to prepare for such a revolution in Iran, nothing is more important than to bring this emancipatory science of the New Communism and our party's road map for making this a real revolution in Iran to large sections of militant workers, rebellious women, people of the oppressed nations (Kurds, Arabs, Balochs, Turks, Afghans, Turkmen, etc.). Without this and without continuously increasing the number of communists, we will not be able to build the leadership of the communist revolution and its backbone.

The most important mass campaign on the agenda for revolutionary communists is the campaign to raise widespread awareness of the New Communism and communist revolution in Iran. In order to carry this out, we should carry out society-wide agitation and propaganda around the New Synthesis of Communism and the works of Bob Avakian (in particular the book The New Communism) as well as the basic documents of our party, such as the Manifesto and Programme for Communist Revolution in Iran (published in February 2018) and also the Draft Constitution of The New Socialist Republic of Iran (forthcoming).. We need the advanced people and a new generation of communists to commit themselves to this science so as to understand the situation and change the conditions through hard work and efforts based on the strategic goal of communist revolution.

We should put these questions to the conscious activists and those in the forefront of the workers' movement today: what is the place of "Workers of the world unite!" in your current struggles? And would the problem of the working class be solved with anything less than this kind of revolution and this kind of internationalist vision? What is the meaning of proletarian internationalism regarding the Afghan workers who are trapped in the lowest and most oppressed rungs of the working class in Iran, and where is proletarian internationalism in this regard in the current struggles of the workers? What position should workers in struggle take regarding the oppression of women under this regime generally as well as the conditions of women proletarians and their super-exploitation? How do they see the relationship between the lack of rights and the starvation of workers and their families in Iran and the crimes that the Iranian regime is committing in Iraq and Syria? How are all these related to the rapidly accelerating water shortage and environmental destruction and the suppression of political dissent by the regime? 

Here the point is not to underline the fact that this kind of awareness and discussion must be taken to different social movements such as the labour movement and the women's movement or other areas of struggle in the society. It is obvious that we should do that. The fundamental point here is that in order to face the extraordinary situation arising out of the intensification of the internal and international contradictions, we must strengthen and develop the communist leadership and backbone for leading the revolution before the situation reaches the point of exploding. Even to those who are not communist and are fighting against the capitalist system with a goal short of communist revolution, we should say that the only way out of the upcoming storms and maelstrom is to fight for the kind of society that our party has envisioned and take up the road map that the party has put forward.

More than a hundred years ago, on the eve of the First World War, Lenin wrote:

"An oppressed class which does not strive to learn to use arms, to acquire arms, only deserves to be treated like slaves… in every class society, whether based on slavery, serfdom, or, as at present, on wage-labour, the oppressor class is always armed… Our slogan must be: arming of the proletariat to defeat, expropriate and disarm the bourgeoisie."

To give any other meaning to May First is to elude the reality and run away from the necessity of the revolutionary transformation of the current circumstances. The following statement by Bob Avakian is a basic principle of the proletarian revolution:

"We need a revolution. Anything else, in the final analysis, is bullshit. Now, that doesn't mean we don't unite with people in all sorts of struggles short of a revolution. We definitely need to do that. But the proffering of any other solution to these monumental and monstrous problems and outrages is ridiculous, frankly."

The future belongs to those who dare to take big leaps forward for emancipation!
Long live revolution, long live communism!
Fight to overthrow the Islamic Republic of Iran and establish the New Socialist Republic in Iran!