Where the Proletariat Rebels

The historical crisis of the capitalist mode of production inevitably gives rise to explosions of class struggle: proletarians motivated by insuppressible material factors courageously move to direct action, challenging the forces of repression of the bourgeois states, powerful bastions of social conservatism.

In recent weeks we have had exemplary proof of a rediscovered inclination of proletarians to struggle in some Arab countries and in the Middle East.

In Tunisia and in Sudan

Most recently, it was Tunisia, where masses of young proletarians without prospects for the future, took part in many cities to violent protest, motivated by too low wages, by a high cost of living, by unemployment, by misery: “bread, water, and no Nidaa and Ennahda”, they yelled. The demonstrations targeted those two governmental parties, one secular, the other Islamic, that approved a financial law, in accordance with the IMF, that imposes large increases in prices of up to 300% on many goods as well as on necessities. For the moment we do not know what the development will be of this wave of protest in the southern shore of the Mediterranean. Meanwhile it has had to deal with the hard repression on the part of the democratic Tunisian state, which has not hesitated to send the army to the aid of the police to try to dissolve the demonstrations in the squares, provoking a death, one hundred wounded, and many hundreds arrested. For now, the Tunisian government asserts that it has restored order, but the continuation of protests and their extension cannot be ruled out.

Also in Sudan demonstrations since the second week of January against the high cost of living were repressed with gunfire and there are already at least three dead. The government has removed subsidies for certain necessary goods, driving up prices including that of bread, which tripled in price overnight.

In Iran

In addition to Tunisia and Sudan, in the past weeks the struggle of the working masses found a scenario in Iran that is maybe even more explosive for the bourgeois social order. For roughly one week, between the end of December and the beginning of January, in dozens of cities in the country the crowds confronted the police and the militias of the Islamic Republic. The demonstrations, in which tens of thousands of proletarians took part, for the most part very young, had to contend with ferocious repression. The government declared 22 dead, hundreds of wounded and over 1,000 arrested, while non-official sources claim about 50 dead and 3,700 arrested. The same official press speaks of five “suicides” in prison among the arrested.

To quell the revolt the government has appealed to the Iraqi Shi’a militias and to the Pasdaran deployed in Iraq and in Syria, who recruit their own forces among the Afghani Shi’a, promising them Iranian citizenship.

The explosion of social discontent in Iran revealed unprecedented characteristics compared to other movements that opposed the obscurantist and theocratic regime of the Islamic Republic in the past. For the first time in almost 40 years, i.e. since 1979, when a mass movement, quickly brought under the control of a bourgeois leadership, brought about the overthrow of the regime of the Shah Reza Pahlavi, the struggle in the streets and in the factories (piecemeal news reports also speak of many spontaneous strikes across the country) sees a great number of proletarians as protagonists who can no longer endure the suffering provoked by capitalism and who can no longer be soothed by the patriotic rhetoric and sermons of the priests.

Unlike what happened in 2009, when protests against the suspected vote rigging in presidential elections saw the mobilizing of middle classes, of the intelligentsia and so-called “civil society”, this time yesterday’s players have been mere spectators. Even the bourgeois press stressed without shame the arrogance, and sometimes the disdain, with which the middle class viewed the crowds demanding “bread, work and freedom” and protesting against the sudden rise in the prices of necessities, such as poultry, the main source of protein for the Iranian proletarian masses, which now costs an extra 40%.

In the West the bourgeois press, when it understood the class nature of the revolt, drew a veil on the savage repressions, and overlooked the fact that insurgents in many cases have clearly identified the targets: they attacked the seats of Pasdaran and Basiji Islamic militias, and the banks of Islamic foundations. These, in Persian “bonyad”, control sizeable shares of many sectors of the Iranian economy, according to estimates 20 to 30% of the country’s GDP.

When we consider the political ideology of the Islamic Republic of Iran, we should not be deceived by the constant reference to religion in the theocratic system, as if it were the result of the inertial force of ancient pre-bourgeois traditions. The obscurantism of the State, which manifests itself, among other things, with gender-based oppression (adulterers and homosexuals are still subject to the death penalty!) and the humiliation of women, is a consequence of the perpetuation of bourgeois social domination. This hateful superstructure was the ideological weapon by which the Iranian bourgeoisie kept the proletariat at bay during the long process that has transported the country into full capitalist maturity.

In fact, it was not ideological or religious reasons that drove these proletarian protests, but economic ones. In the outskirts of the big and small cities, masses of mostazafan, i.e., disinherited, have been pushed into action in just a few decades, driven from the countryside into an impetuous process of urbanization and transformed into a gigantic industrial reserve army. In Iran, 73% of the population lives in cities today!

Iran, in addition to being the fourth largest oil producing country in the world, has developed a robust industrial apparatus and has seen a considerable increase in the number of the working class. Today, 32.5% of the Iranian workforce is employed in industry. This is a considerable proportion compared to that of the industrial powers of Europe: in Germany and Italy, industry workers are respectively 30 and 26.6% of the working population.

In the almost four decades of continuity of the current regime, Iran has become the most important political power in the Middle East, capable of expansionist projection and active military interventionism. The developments in the last months of the war in Iraq and Syria have seen the triumph of the coalition of which Iran is an integral part. Important territorial conquests on the field have opened the “Shia corridor” that allows the deployment of the troops of the Islamic Republic and affiliated militias along an axis that, through Iraq and Syria, reaches the Mediterranean and the borders with Israel in the Golan region. This territorial continuity also allows the shifting in the opposite direction of the Lebanese allied militias of Hezbollah, which played a major role in the war in Syria.

In Yemen too, the Houthi Shiites, allies of the Teheran regime, have in recent months resisted the military engagement of Saudi Arabia, irreducible enemy of Iran, and heavy bombing, also obtaining significant successes, not least the elimination at the beginning of December, of the Yemeni president Ali Abd Allah Saleh, guilty of having defected from the anti-Saudi front.

But these military successes have had a heavy cost for the Iranian state budget and it is inevitable that, as always under any bourgeois regime, it was above all up to the proletariat to pay for it. Wages for many categories of workers have been stagnant for many years while inflation has been galloping due to the withdrawal of political support for holding down the prices of basic necessities and the imposition of new taxes and excise duties.

This explains why slogans were chanted during the demonstrations that, under the appearance of a nationalist orientation, “neither for Gaza nor for Lebanon, but I sacrifice my life for Iran”, have expressed impatience towards the country’s war effort. In the demonstrations they shouted “we do not want the Islamic Republic” and “marg bar Rouhani” that is “death to Rouhani”, who is the president of the Republic. This rejection by the proletariat of military engagement abroad is a sign of how, for a bourgeois power, military successes do not always translate into a strengthening of the so-called “internal front” in the balance of power between the classes.

Once again the bourgeoisie has shown that the flag of the homeland is always a rag to deceive the proletarians, while the latter must become more and more aware that the workers do not have a fatherland.

In Iraqi Kurdistan

Strong disruptions of social peace are all the more likely to occur when a country at war has to face an unfavorable course of military operations, or even when the ambitions of territorial conquest, long fueled by bourgeois propaganda, meet burning frustrations. This is indeed what happened in December in Iraqi Kurdistan which, after the referendum on independence last September, suffered heavy territorial losses in the violent tug of war with the government of Baghdad, which has regained control of the Kirkuk region, rich in oil fields. In this case too, thousands of workers, outraged by unemployment and cuts in the wages of public administration employees, attacked and burnt state buildings and the headquarters of the two main Kurdish parties.

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These signs of the resumption of the class struggle in Iran, Sudan, Tunisia and Kurdistan should be greeted with enthusiasm. But so long as the international proletariat, for objective historical reasons, is not yet able to offer its support to the courageous struggles of proletarians of these countries, the bourgeoisie will not spare any means of crushing its mortal enemy.

The repression and the momentary defeat of proletarian struggles certainly do not extinguish the fire of the class struggle which, in Iran, in Tunisia, in Kurdistan as everywhere, smolders under the ashes. If, as Marxism states, capitalism cannot exist without economic crises and without wars, it follows that this mode of production is condemned to deal with the interminable series of eruptions of the class struggle determined by the intertwining of the different economic, political and military levels, of rampant social chaos.