Lessons from the people's great festival: to the Iranian people, women and youth protestors!

We received this from A World to Win News Service:

Following is a statement analysing the Ashura protests put out by the Communist Party of Iran (Marxist-Leninist-Maoist) on 31 December 2009. (www.sarbedaran.org, postfach 900211, 51112 koln, Germany, Haghighat@sarbedaran.org)

You rose once again in millions all over the country on December 26. You challenged a contemptible regime with your courageous struggles.

The uprising is the festival of the masses and you victoriously converted a day that was established to fool the people and strengthen superstition into its own opposite. For the first time in Iran's history, instead of the old stupefying religious traditions and methods and without the presence of deceitful and blood-sucker clerics, you turned Ashura into a festival of the oppressed masses against a reactionary religious system. This is the first lesson and achievement of your battle.

There is no doubt that the blood shed by the people will water the tree of revolution. Let the sadness and sorrow of losing comrades in street battles be turned into a big fury against the whole ruling system.

You showed that it is possible to shatter the barriers and obstacles one by one. You went on the offensive. And this is the second achievement and lesson from your struggle. You correctly targeted the heart of the system. Your message was clear and explicit. By chanting the slogan "'Down with Khamenei!", you targeted the totality of the criminal system and called for its overthrow. You showed that the main question is not the right to vote in the presidential election or removing Ahmadinejad and replacing him with Moussavi. Your upsurge has inspired the oppressed people of the world and has made them proud.

Your struggles have shown that seeking peaceful approaches in struggle with a sworn enemy is a fantasy. For months all the media, whether national or international, representing small and big powers, from the Voice of America to the voices belonging to former leaders who are removed from the power structure, such as the Green movement and the nationalist-religious forces, advocate non-violence in the face of bloody repression. But the truth is that freedom can only be achieved in the light of fearless sacrifice, in the shadow of a brave offensive against the palace of oppression and injustice and in the brightness of an uncompromising approach towards the Islamic Republic. The history of the class struggle is the history of bloody battles between the ruling reactionaries and the oppressed toilers. Your struggle once again shone a light on that fundamental truth.

Your struggle added to the contention and confrontations within the enemy camp. In the last few months many people thought that it was possible to widen the cracks within the Islamic Republic forces by supporting one faction against the other, but the main reason for these divisions among the heads of this system is that the system's main pillars are breaking down and different factions within the system are looking for a way to save it. The system is no longer capable of controlling you or the increasing discontent in the whole society. Your struggle proved to be the only way to tear apart the united and unified body of the enemy camp. And this is the fourth lesson and achievement of your struggle.

The leaders of the ruling clique wanted to gain control of your fury by removing a few secondary pawns (officials) such as the Judge murderer Saeed Mortazavi [the notorious judge said to be responsible for keeping the arrested protestors to Kahrizak prison. He is also accused of involvement in the death of Zahra Kazemi, the Iranian-Canadian journalist]. But it is too late now, and the Islamic Republic must go. It is time for the ruling power to sacrifice bigger pieces and such a move would seriously strain the relations between their various camps. Some of the clerics have already started to murmur about conciliation. But at the same time the ruling faction has launched a campaign to arrest Moussavi's advisers and supporters, killing those close to him and preventing the speech of Khatami (Mohammad Khatami, the reformist ex-president of Iran.) [Every year he speaks at Ashura in Jamaran, where Khomeini used to live. This year the ruling clique did not allow it. Also many of his speeches have been interrupted and ended by an attack of plainclothes forces.]

In the last few months the revolutionary upsurge has gone through twists and turns. Our struggle has developed to new stages, and serious and acute battles are developing that need more conscious preparations.

On the one hand the stage and the aims of the struggles are more clear: not only has the temporary nature of the government of Ahmadinejad and company become more obvious, but the existence of the Islamic Republic has been brought into question.

On the other hand the struggle has become more complicated: the different sections of the bourgeois political forces are struggling to seriously confront the deepening struggle and the clear and basic demands that it is putting forward. The religious-nationalists have become terrified. They ask for forgiveness because the people have chanted slogans against the murderer Khamenei and desperately want to go back to the earlier stages of the struggle, i.e. to remove Ahmadinejad, or as they put it the "coup government". They are asking the deceitful Rafsanjani [a central regime figure who was the first president of Iran after the Iran-Iraq war and an opponent of Ahmadinejad] to involve himself more seriously. In Iranian history the bourgeois opposition factions and discontented bourgeois-liberal intellectuals have always been terrified by the radical upsurge of the masses, and with cowardly contempt they have resorted to the defense of the rotten pillars of the rule of the reactionary class.

When the rule of a reactionary clique comes to an end, all the protectors of the old system on a national and international level will try to save the main structure of the system, i.e. protect the state machinery of suppression from the reach of the people's struggle and deck it out in new clothes.

It is not enough to prepare ourselves to resist the regime's repression. More importantly we should not let the aims and goals of our struggle be traded away and let one of the region's most reactionary regimes once again be amended, or allow another regime of the same nature to come to power and rule the oppressed and exploited people more effectively.

The most important question facing the revolution and revolutionary struggle is seizing political power—how to shatter the old state power and replace it with a new state power based on the realization of the basic needs of the majority of the people. The minimum is to get rid of the religious shops, to separate the state and religion, ensure freedom of opinion, outlook and expression and communities, the abolition of formal and informal discrimination against women and other citizens [based on sex, religion or nationality] and the defense of the rights of workers and toilers in the urban and rural areas. Only if the people become more conscious of the nature and characteristics of this new state power can the continuation of struggle to the end and final victory be ensured. The streets should not only be the scene of battle against the oppressor; they should also become a place for crucial discussions. This is how it will be possible to organize for deep social transformations and chart a new way for the future.

The more the regime resists the will and demands of the people, the more it will give rise to new fronts of struggle and in turn, the responsibilities of the revolutionaries and communists will increase. Because more than at any other time, the people need revolutionary and communists' consciousness and organization. Without consciousness and organization and a clear horizon it is not possible to achieve any stable victory.

Long live the memory of the martyrs of the recent revolutionary upsurge! Long live the people's bravery! Death to the Islamic Republic! Long live revolution!

A World to Win News Service is put out by A World to Win magazine (aworldtowin.org), a political and theoretical review inspired by the formation of the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement, the embryonic center of the world’s Marxist-Leninist-Maoist parties and organizations.

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