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/edu/ - Education

'The weapon of criticism cannot, of course, replace criticism of the weapon, material force must be overthrown by material force; but theory also becomes a material force as soon as it has gripped the masses.' - Karl Marx
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Not reporting is bourgeois


 

I'm looking for any books that will actually educate me on the Iranian revolution and why it resulted on the state that still exists to this day. I've heard many different stories that the Revolution was hijacked by Islamists and turned Iran into a theocratic dystopia but I really don't know if I can believe that fully. So I would love some good books that would give me a good explanation on everything that happened during the overthrow of the Pahlavi regime.

No, your summary is actually quite apt. Tl;dr Tudeh amass a sizeable following in Iranian industrial zones, fuck up by involving themselves too much in an oil nationalization campaign by a liberal PM and get aggressively repressed after the coup of that PM, slowly rebuild but are unable to recover completely from their 1953 setbacks, get banned by (capitalist) Islamists shortly after Iranian Revolution, which they were (wrongly) cautiously optimistic about. Good book attached

>>24161
>capitalist Islamists
As opposed to socialist Islamists?
The Ayatollah called Marxists homos who wanted to abolish the divine right to private property and free trade. While Islamo-socialists (MEK) who initially saw this and supported him later took part in the inter-imperialist war to seize power themselves. They're all liberals.

>>24158
I'd recommend Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi's books. He was Marxist activist during the revolution and a political prisoner under Khomeini's rule. He's very even handed, has a good insight into both leftists and Islamist activism in the 70s and 80s, he even shared a cell with Khamaeini once. He has a regular column in Counterpunch and his book Remembering Akbar is very good. I'd also recommend the book Critical Introduction to Khomeini edited by Adib-Moghaddam.

The problem with a lot of Iranian history is it was written by the losers, people who fled Iran during the 80s. There are all kinds of specious narratives about the Iranian revolution that diaspora Iranians (including academic historians) like to spread around. One common stereotype in Middle East history is a grand narrative that you have this traditional Islamic bad culture vs secular progressive forces trying to overcome that culture and the entire history of the region is just a culture war between these two factions and you'll see this pop up all the time. Tabrizi sees this as an example of secular fundamentalism and it appears in the books of many Iranian historians too.

>>24158
>the Revolution was hijacked by Islamists and turned Iran into a theocratic dystopia
This is a myth that was promoted by leftists who fled Iran in the 80s. Pretty much everyone in Iran in the 70s and in 1979 was 1. Pro-Khomeini 2. Believed in the importance of Islam or that Islam should have some role in government etc. What that role should be and what role Khomeini should play was where people disagreed. Even the avowedly atheist leftists in Iran had to bend to the overwhelming Islamic sentiment. They often had an attitude of "there is no God but unlike Christianity Islam is a revolutionary religion" etc. and then a good chunk of leftists were devout Muslims or at least sympathetic to Qutb and Shariati. A good chunk of Islamists also had leftist sympathies, especially Ayatollahs Taleghani and Behishti, Ali Shariati etc. there was a whole Islamic left that's been suppressed in Iran since the 80s. Mir Hossein Mousavi and the Green Movement fall into this Islamic left socialist camp.

A good amount of people assume that Islamists and leftists were at each others throats when there was a lot of overlap and cooperation between them and the line was often blurry.

>>24161
I've always found Abrahamian's focus on the Tudeh party strange, like he's trying to salvage the revolution by highlighting Tudeh's role. There's just one problem with this. Tudeh was a minor player in the actual revolution in 1979. The Soviets actually quit funding them because they thought they were a useless non-entity with little actual influence in Iran.

>>24204
Marxallah, we found a liberal I was just speaking of your kin.


>>24204
>Tudeh was a minor player in the actual revolution in 1979. The Soviets actually quit funding them because they thought they were a useless non-entity with little actual influence in Iran.
This misunderstands Abrahamian's perspective. By the time of the Iranian Revolution, the Tudeh had indeed become marginalized, but this wasn't always so. I find his focus on the Tudeh interesting precisely because it is important to analyze the historical developments that caused its demise, all while Iran continued and intensified its process of industrialization, modernization and, crucially, subordination to imperialist interests.

It was never a bad idea for a Marxist to ask oneself the question "what the fuck just happened?" after a religious national-bourgeois revolution when conditions were ripening for a communist one. In Iran, often considered the birthplace of modern Islamist politics as a mass movement, the question is yet more urgent.

>>24516
I feel like its possible the Tudeh party was never as popular as people like Abrahamian tell us it was and this is a result of historians like him focusing too much on Tudeh at the expense of other groups in Iran. Abrahamian is an old fashioned new left Marxist and for him the victory of a socialist faction is how history should have played out but didn't. So he goes looking for the biggest Marxist faction (Tudeh) and tries to ask "why did it fail?" and you do that you wind up developing tunnel vision.

>It was never a bad idea for a Marxist to ask oneself the question "what the fuck just happened?" after a religious national-bourgeois revolution when conditions were ripening for a communist one. In Iran, often considered the birthplace of modern Islamist politics as a mass movement, the question is yet more urgent.

The problem is the way in which Marxists approach this history. They are too teleological and misapply Marx's theories. Marx warned the Russian socialists not to take his history of capitalist development as a universal model that could be applied to Russia because his own work was based on studies of Germany, France, and Britain. But Marxists try to interpret Iranian history through Marx's history of Western Europe. "Well, socialist revolution is the next stage, so why didn't it happen? Maybe Iran was too feudal? was Khomeini a bourgeois nationalist or a fascist?" These are the wrong kinds of questions to be asking because Iran isn't Western Europe and stickers like "feudal" or "bourgeois nationalist" aren't something you can just paste onto every human society.

Iran also is a problem for Marxist historians because it defies their theories of revolution. Before 1979, the Iranian economy was growing, inequality was a serious issue but poverty was decreasing etc. The revolution wasn't motivated by socioeconomic grievances. Khomeini himself once declared that 'we didn't overthrow the Shah because of the price of bread.' Before 1978, US diplomats saw Iran as an island of stability. Nobody predicted the revolutionary outbreak between 1978 and 1979. I'd also say that Islamist mass politics really begun in the 1910s, anti-colonial movements based on Islam go all the way back to the 1900s. Foucault's writing on Iran have always been controversial because he pointed these things out. Islam was a driving force behind the revolution, the Marxist left were wrong about religion, and most ordinary Iranians during the revolution had no clear idea of what they wanted beyond being vaguely pro-Islam.


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