Revolution #200, May 1, 2010
Uprising in Iran!
Last June, the prime minister, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad—seemed to steal the national election. This outraged millions of Iranian people, who had attached their hopes for change to a competing candidate, Mir-Hossein Mousavi. The people rebelled in the streets, and the section of rulers that had backed Mousavi also began to oppose the government. The government—headed by Ahmadinejad and the overall religious ruler Khamenei—reacted with fierce repression. The government beat and jailed people, and even murdered dozens of protesters, on the streets and in custody. Meanwhile, the rulers of the U.S. are attempting to use the crisis to further their own interests; they want to force Iran to conform more to U.S. aims in the region, and even totally change the regime.
Iran is an Islamic Republic—its laws are based on the Qur’an (Koran). One thing this means is that women are severely discriminated against—forced to dress in certain ways, unequal before the law, and constantly harassed by religious police. Mousavi wants to maintain this form of rule, while reforming some aspects of it. Ahmadinejad represents those who want to crack down harder.
As this struggle has developed, a section of masses have begun to get out of Mousavi’s control and break with his program. There has been sharp fighting in the streets and increasingly people are calling into question the Islamic Republic itself. But Mousavi wants to maintain the Islamic Republic—he just wants to reform some aspects of it in order to make it better able to contain people’s anger and to fit itself into the imperialist geostrategic order and economic structure in a way more advantageous for the clique he represents. As a result, Mousavi is now offering to compromise.
Revolutionary communist forces, the Communist Party of Iran (Marxist-Leninist-Maoist), are in the thick of all this, working to bring forward a real alternative and win masses to all-the-way revolution, one that would both overthrow the Islamic Republic and rupture with U.S. imperialism.
May 1, 2010—on this international revolutionary holiday we call on people to stand with the just struggle of the Iranian people for liberation.
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