WI: Socialist revolution in Iran

E. Burke

Banned
The Iranian revolution began contained a great many factions and tendencies, one of the largest was its socialist wing. The revolutionary left was ultimately defeated by the Islamist faction. What would it take to create the Iranian Socialist Republic. It would probably require a unity that they didn't have ITTL.
 
The Iranian revolution began contained a great many factions and tendencies, one of the largest was its socialist wing. The revolutionary left was ultimately defeated by the Islamist faction. What would it take to create the Iranian Socialist Republic. It would probably require a unity that they didn't have ITTL.

The Mojahedin-el-Khalq was (is) a left-wing Islamic group in Iran that IOTL sided wth Khomeini during the revolution, but ultimately got purged just as badly as the Tudeh. Maybe if they had instead allied with the Tudeh, the revolution could've produced a "People's Islamic Republic".

As for the effects on the rest of the Middle East and the broader Cold War situation: oh wow, there are so many butterflies to discuss. Would Saddam's Iraq be friendly towards a leftist Iran, or still choose to instigate a war? That depends on how the Iranian Soviets address the Shi'ite and Kurdish questions, and whether or not the Ba'athists wish to switch their great power patrons so quickly. Despite the infamous video of Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam, Iraq continued to get much of its weaponry from the Warsaw Pact.

Beyond Iraq, the Middle Eastern butterflies are quite numerous. Syria was already pro-Russian (but nonetheless still Ba'athist rather than Marxist-Leninist) by this point, and may remain so. The Shi'ites in Lebanon may opt for a leftist analogue to Hezbollah, depending on how Iranian influence plays out. And the pro-Soviet South Yemen earns a new source of support. Meanwhile the Gulf monarchies will be on high alert and likely double down on their oppression of Shi'ites.

The effects a leftist Iran may have on the rest of the Second World are interesting to think about. Would the USSR still decide to fully commit to the Afghanistan quagmire with a new and much larger ally on the southern flank? Maybe not, since Iran has much more geostrategic value. Within Iran itself, there might also be an active insurgency against the leftist government, but the CIA et al may have a harder time supporting such efforts.

Assuming that a leftist Iran is aligned with the Soviets in the first place: eh, I'm not sure about how it's affect the longevity of the Warsaw Pact. The extra supplies of oil and natural gas provided by Iran can help relieve the Warsaw Pact's reliance on harder-to-extract Soviet reserves. And maybe any attempts at this time to boost consumer goods production can get a lift from all the fancy Western stuff left behind in Iran. But considering how stagnant the Soviet sphere's economy and leadership was getting by this point, such prospects are a long stretch. Maybe the pro-capitalist segments of Eastern Bloc bureaucracy and party cadres will be marginalized by the events in Iran - assuming that the Red Army doesn't do a costly intervention there instead of (or in addition to) Afghanistan.

China will follow the events in the Middle East as well, since 1979 was the time that Deng Xiaoping started pro-capitalist reforms in the country. The Sino-Soviet Split remained an active part of PRC foreign policy under Deng, including their border conflict with pro-Soviet Vietnam. I'm not sure how much things may change with Beijing.

In the US and its allies? This'll be just as much, if not more, of a boost for Reagan and the Neo-Cons as the OTL Islamic Revolution. There'll probably be even more hawkish adventures in Reaganland, including possible full-fledged military intervention in Latin America besides OTL's Grenada. Can't let those pesky Sandinistas and their allies get emboldened by other brown lefty people elsewhere. Attempting to directly invade Iran itself is a no-go since it borders the USSR, but they may still try and convince Saddam to fully switch patrons and fight Tehran.
 
The Mojahedin-el-Khalq was (is) a left-wing Islamic group in Iran that IOTL sided wth Khomeini during the revolution, but ultimately got purged just as badly as the Tudeh. Maybe if they had instead allied with the Tudeh, the revolution could've produced a "People's Islamic Republic".

As for the effects on the rest of the Middle East and the broader Cold War situation: oh wow, there are so many butterflies to discuss. Would Saddam's Iraq be friendly towards a leftist Iran, or still choose to instigate a war? That depends on how the Iranian Soviets address the Shi'ite and Kurdish questions, and whether or not the Ba'athists wish to switch their great power patrons so quickly. Despite the infamous video of Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam, Iraq continued to get much of its weaponry from the Warsaw Pact.

Beyond Iraq, the Middle Eastern butterflies are quite numerous. Syria was already pro-Russian (but nonetheless still Ba'athist rather than Marxist-Leninist) by this point, and may remain so. The Shi'ites in Lebanon may opt for a leftist analogue to Hezbollah, depending on how Iranian influence plays out. And the pro-Soviet South Yemen earns a new source of support. Meanwhile the Gulf monarchies will be on high alert and likely double down on their oppression of Shi'ites.

The effects a leftist Iran may have on the rest of the Second World are interesting to think about. Would the USSR still decide to fully commit to the Afghanistan quagmire with a new and much larger ally on the southern flank? Maybe not, since Iran has much more geostrategic value. Within Iran itself, there might also be an active insurgency against the leftist government, but the CIA et al may have a harder time supporting such efforts.

Assuming that a leftist Iran is aligned with the Soviets in the first place: eh, I'm not sure about how it's affect the longevity of the Warsaw Pact. The extra supplies of oil and natural gas provided by Iran can help relieve the Warsaw Pact's reliance on harder-to-extract Soviet reserves. And maybe any attempts at this time to boost consumer goods production can get a lift from all the fancy Western stuff left behind in Iran. But considering how stagnant the Soviet sphere's economy and leadership was getting by this point, such prospects are a long stretch. Maybe the pro-capitalist segments of Eastern Bloc bureaucracy and party cadres will be marginalized by the events in Iran - assuming that the Red Army doesn't do a costly intervention there instead of (or in addition to) Afghanistan.

China will follow the events in the Middle East as well, since 1979 was the time that Deng Xiaoping started pro-capitalist reforms in the country. The Sino-Soviet Split remained an active part of PRC foreign policy under Deng, including their border conflict with pro-Soviet Vietnam. I'm not sure how much things may change with Beijing.

In the US and its allies? This'll be just as much, if not more, of a boost for Reagan and the Neo-Cons as the OTL Islamic Revolution. There'll probably be even more hawkish adventures in Reaganland, including possible full-fledged military intervention in Latin America besides OTL's Grenada. Can't let those pesky Sandinistas and their allies get emboldened by other brown lefty people elsewhere. Attempting to directly invade Iran itself is a no-go since it borders the USSR, but they may still try and convince Saddam to fully switch patrons and fight Tehran.

There are still refugee camps in Iraq, where people of that political fraction live. They did fight alongside Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war.
 

E. Burke

Banned
If this article is correct, then the first step is the socialists not aligning with the Islamists for anti imperialism, as it got them killed

Women's organisations flourished, peasants started seizing the land and in some places, established communal cultivation councils, strikes were rampant and workers seized control of their workplaces, arranging raw materials, sourcing and sales themselves, even setting prices in the oil industry. A system of grassroots soviets - called "shoras" in Iranian and based on the old factory council idea - sprang up in fields, factories, neighbourhoods, educational institutions and the armed forces. Armed neighbourhood committees - called "komitehs" - based on the old Muslim scholar networks - patrolled residential areas, arrested collaborators, ran people's courts and prisons, and organised demonstrations. It was a true workers' revolution with secular revolutionaries and Muslim workers overthrowing the capitalist state side by side. A May Day march in Tehran drew 1.5 million demonstrators.
(...)

But the religious fundamentalist clerics lead by Khomeini were terrified of the power of the working class and haunted by the spectre of the imminent collapse of Iranian capitalism. If it collapsed, they could not reconstitute themselves as the ruling elite in place of the shah and there would be no profits for them to steal from the workers. Three days after the insurrection, the provisional government ordered workers back to work, but the strike, shora and komiteh movements just spread.

A month later, the government declared the shoras to be "counter-revolutionary", claiming that their minority bourgeois regime was "the genuine Islamic Revolution". Still the shoras spread, so the regime introduced a law aimed at undermining worker self-management by banning shora involvement in management affairs - while at the same time trying to force class collaboration by insisting that management must be allowed to participate in the shoras. The shora movement peaked in July but then the government offensive, combined with the inexperience of the left, began to take its toll. The National Front, Masses, Fedayeen and both the leftist and Muslim wings of the Mujahedeen all backed the provisional government, mistakenly believing that an Iranian clerical-dominated bourgeoisie was better than the imperialist-backed Pahlavi dynasty.

Khomeini founded the fundamentalist Iranian Republican Party (IRP) to squeeze opposition parties out of the provisional government and at the same time established the Revolutionary Guards (Pasdaran), a political police force to marginalise the secular left within the komitehs, which it wanted to mobilise as a supporter bloc. The Pasdaran were soon forcibly liquidating shoras, purging komitehs and repressing ethnic Kurdish separatists and women's organisations, while the Party of God (Hezbollah) was created as a strike-breaking force of thugs. The IRP also created a public works project to divert the energies of the most militant shoras - replacing them with fundamentalist shoras and Islamic Societies - and to rebuild the exploitative capitalist economy (all the while spouting populist and anti-capitalist slogans in the manner of all fascist dictatorships). The true workers' revolution was destroyed and for the Iranian working class, whether secular or Muslim, a long night of living under a new autocratic regime had begun.
 
Another factor that could play a role is having a left-wing faction pre-empt the IRP (Islamic Republican Party) in seizing the US Embassy, as this was, at least according to Chris Harman, the event that gave them national prominence and established them as a major anti-Imperialist force. If the People's Mujahadeen or a Communist faction beat them to the punch things could have gone very differently.
 
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