A socialist alternative is necessary and possible!
Iran is at the threshold of a crucial political development. Mass labour protests are growing everywhere and are pushing the country towards an all-out revolutionary crisis. The Islamic Republic, as the Islamic rule of capitalists, has put workers and toilers in a situation that they really think they have nothing to lose but their chains. February and January protests were the crux of political and class conflicts in Iran, and have re-emerged with the tide of mass and labour protests.
Today, all forces and antagonistic classes know that the present situation cannot last long. The Islamic Republic is over in the minds of a large part of the population, and an alternative to it is the order of the day. The ruling classes, including the legal opposition and representatives of the bourgeois opposition, are trying to direct the power handover with minimum intervention of workers and toilers. The entire failed Islamic reformism, referendum, national reconciliation and alternative-forging are aimed to keep the bourgeois state apparatus and its oppressive organs intact against the revolutionary action of the working class and the left/socialist camp.
We are fighting for a revolutionary overthrow of the Islamic Republic and smashing all organs and institutions within it that the power of the ruling classes rests on. We believe that the revolutionary overthrow of the Islamic Republic should lead to a social revolution and striping bourgeoisie of its political and economic power, and constructing a new worker and socialist order. The government coming out of this process will be of the type of the Paris Commune and soviets that ensure the rule of the majority of citizens, a government that will eliminate class differentiation, the conditions in which classes persist, and ultimately will remove itself as the rule of class and will replace the old bourgeois society and its class conflicts, with a society where individuals’ freedom and actualization of potentials would be a precondition for the freedom of all people and the actualization of their potentials.
While overthrowing the regime is the main theme in Iran’s politics today, the most essential question is how to put an end to the Islamic Republic and how to answer the question of political power. Different social classes and their campaigns and parties present depict this process and the alternative system differently. To bourgeois forces and the right camp – including monarchists and the People’s Mujahedin Organisation of Iran (MEK) as well as nationalist forces, which support a military intervention or a coup, and also centrists and republicans, which have always stuck to a wing of the regime and now, bankrupt and hopeless, support a “referendum” and “free elections” under this regime and in other words compromise and collaboration with the rulers. To them “overthrowing” means saving the apparatus of repression, compromise with the political Islam and religious and institutions and military and security organisation, cutting the hand of workers from political power, detaching mass protests from political demands, promising trivial changes and reforms, continuing the status quo, and reconstructing the capitalist state.
We, the parties and organisations in this conference, as part of the working class and socialist camp in Iran, declare that we resist any bourgeois compromise and any attempt to forge so-called alternatives in the absence of the working class and toilers, and we will not accept any bourgeois states, whose common essential mission is to continue exploitation, repression, and humiliation.
The conference announces that a socialist alternative is possible, necessary and urgent. We will do everything in our power to build such an alternative. This alternative embraces extensive forces; the workers and toilers who no longer tolerate exploitation, poverty, servitude and suppression; the women who challenge a sexual apartheid and patriarchal discrimination; the young people who are struggling with joblessness and despondency; the people who are combating environmental catastrophes and the regime’s indifference have launched vast campaigns; the freedom fighters who seek an end to despotism and long for unconditional liberties of conscience, expression and assembly; and all those who struggle for eliminating oppression and discrimination, and gaining freedom. This colossal mass must find its place in the socialist alternative camp.
We sincerely believe that the advancement of the working class, with its organisation in councils and independent labour organisations, in the course of growing strikes and protests and their solidarity with other social movements, with a socialist prospect and strategy, can ensure the revolutionary subversion of the Islamic Republic and class relations and open a future free from the miseries of the capitalist system. Hence, the government which raises from the revolution, a soviet worker government, should dissolve the army, the so-called revolutionary Guards, the police and all organs of suppression, bureaucratic apparatus, propaganda and ideological machine of the Islamic Republic and abolish sharia law and other inhuman laws of the regime. Such government should arm workers and revolutionary people in defence of their freedom against the resistance of the Islamic counter-revolution, and counter the aggression of any force to the people’s liberties and rights. This government will declare the overthrow of the Islamic Republic and will guarantee the advance of the revolution of workers and toilers by taking fundamental measures as follows:
- Enforcing the workers and toilers’ power through the organs of their direct rule, expanding soviets in the workplaces, communities, cities, regions and throughout the country in place of the Islamic Republic through implementing universal suffrage and secret balloting for all citizens, employing all forms of direct participation of masses. All people above 16 will have the right to be a candidate for all elective posts. The majority of electors will have the right to recall representatives at all levels
- Detaining, trying and punishing leaders of the Islamic Republic in open courts
- Releasing political prisoners, abolishing the “political crime”, eliminating political prisons, abolishing capital punishment and torture
- Separation of religion from education, freedom of accepting religion or being non-religious, abolishing all religious laws, dissolving religious foundations and institutions and confiscating property and endowments and spending their resources to meet the people’s urgent needs
- Enforcing worker control on production and distribution
- Providing livelihood and welfare for all citizens, according to today world’s standards, by soviets and elected organs of workers, providing unemployment allowance for all job seekers above 16 and all those who cannot work because of physical or mental problems, providing free education and health for citizens.
- Abolishing sexual discrimination and oppression by smashing sexual apartheid, revoking anti-woman discriminatory laws, declaring full unconditional equality of men and women in all aspects of personal and social life, creating equal opportunities for them.
- Prohibiting child work, providing and ensuring education, health and happy life for children, treating as a crime any type of child abuse and sexual offence against children, protecting children by the government.
- Rejecting all types of oppression, discrimination and inequality by declaring full equality of citizens irrespective of gender, religion, nationality, race; destroying national oppression and resolving national question by recognising the self-determination right and the right of separation by referring to the votes of nationalities. Meanwhile, we favour free and wilful unity of all inhabitants of Iran, and we believe this unity benefits the working class and masses of toilers.
- Unconditional freedom of conscience, expression, press, assembly, organisation, and strike. Prohibition of inquisition
- Abolishing commercial secrets and secret diplomacy
- Taking urgent and immediate measures to protect the environment, including vital water, soil and clean air
- Establishing social ownership of key industries, banks, services and trades in the transitional revolutionary period
To socialists and leftists, the implementation of above demands is the content and meaning of the revolutionary overthrow of the Islamic Republic. We call workers, toilers, communists, left and revolutionary forces, labour organisations, women’s equality movements and other political and socialist activists to endeavour for the defeat the Islamic Republic under the banner of socialism. For this camp, it is vital to propagate the prospect, meaning and the content of a revolutionary overthrow of the Islamic Republic and relying on it in every stage of the struggle and balance of power.
The Stockholm Conference calls on communists, workers, toiling masses and freedom fighters to join the Socialist Alternative and play a role in forming it and helping its triumph. We have entered a fateful period that will determine the destiny of next generations. Our today’s revolutionary decision, will and practice can forge this future. A socialist alternative is necessary and possible. This alternative should put an end to miseries of capitalism through fighting against the Islamic Republic and overthrowing it.
Down with the capitalist regime of the Islamic Republic!
Long live freedom, long live socialism!
Long live the unity of activists in the socialist alternative!
A spectre is haunting Iran, and the proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains…
Signatures:
Communist Party of Iran
Worker-communist Party of Iran (Hekmatist)
Fadaian Organisation (aghlaiyat)
Communist Fadaian Unity Organisation
Rahe Kargar (Workers’ Way) Organisation
Haste Aghaliyat (Minority Cell)
