Read more coverage of the Communist Party USA’s 32nd National Convention.
CHICAGO —An official of the Iranian Tudeh Party predicted here this weekend that “it won’t take very long” to oust the theocratic government that has run the Islamic Republic since its 1979 revolution. The Tudeh Party is the party of Iranian communists.
And Mostafa said that when Iranians do so, the CPUSA will have had a hand in that achievement. He uses that name because his party is banned by the theocrats in Iran and is operating in exile. Members, then, need to protect their identity.
Mostafa was one of a line-up of speakers from overseas communist parties who addressed the CPUSA’s 32nd National Convention, meeting in Chicago. They included leaders from Canada, Chile, Cuba, Israel, Vietnam, and others.
Mostafa told the hundreds of convention delegates and their supporters gathered there that there have already been two mass uprisings and a mobilization of “the freedom movement, the labor movement, women and the student movement in the last four or five decades.”
Though Mostafa did not say so, the women’s movement in particular has been energized by Iranian Revolutionary Guard arrests, and at least one killing, of young women for alleged minor infractions of Iran’s mandated dress code.
Mostafa admitted the opposition has yet to win, because “we need a unified opposition” to Iran’s government, run by theocratic imams in the service of powerful national capitalist interests.
He made it clear that in no way is the left opposition trying to side with the U.S. and its allies who “have never had the interests of our people in mind” with their attacks on Iran. “This movement is strong enough to oppose outside interference in Iran,” which, he said is engineered by U.S. lawmakers in service of big multi-national corporations.
Once the opposition unites and ends the theocracy, the Iranian people will have an independent government and a democratic government,” Mostafa predicted. “We are going to get that and it won’t take very long.”
An independent and democratic government in Iran would be a marked step forward from the nation’s past, marked by monarchy, theocracy, and U.S. interference on behalf of corporate interests, particularly Big Oil.
The 1979 Iranian revolution overthrew the Pahlavi monarchy. British Petroleum and British imperial interests first installed the Shah’s predecessors in the 1930s. When the Shah had to flee in the early 1950s, because the Iranian people were conducting a socialist revolution, the CIA engineered the coup which reinstalled him and deposed democratically elected socialist Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh.
Mossadegh planned to nationalize Iran’s oil fields. The imperialist coup, run by CIA operative Kermit Roosevelt, ended that.
What had been a legitimate revolution, Mostafa said, was co-opted by “clergy and reactionary leaders,” who “started attacking the left, particularly Tudeh.”
The party has had to operate underground ever since. He particularly praised the CPUSA’s opposition to wars “and particularly to the genocide in Palestine” and its “struggles for unions” in the U.S.
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