Ayatollah Trump's Murderous Regime - Part 1 of 4

Over the last few weeks, Iran has experienced the latest round of mass protests against the reactionary regime of the Ayatollahs that have broken out, sporadically, ever since they seized power, in 1979, following the overthrow of the equally vicious regime of the Pahlavi's, installed by US imperialism, as it overthrew the elected government of Mossadegh in 1953. As in the past, those protests have been met by severe repression and violence by the regime. During the same period, the regime of Ayatollah Trump, in the US, has been similarly murdering and attacking innocent civilians on the streets of Democrat controlled cities.

The political regime of the Ayatollahs, in both cases, Iran and the US, is a regime resting upon a large petty-bourgeoisie. The same has been true in Britain, for the last 15 years, and in Russia, as well as in China. These political regimes, as with all political regimes that rest upon the petty-bourgeoisie/peasantry, are Bonapartist, taking advantage of the weakness of the ruling-class. Marx analysed these relations and phenomena in relation to Bonapartism in France, and Trotsky updated that analysis to respond to the particular form of Bonapartism that is fascism and Stalinism. Trotsky, also, made the point that, in terms of the political regime, as against the state itself, the political regime of Stalin was distinguished from that of Hitler, only by the greater brutality of the former.

Fascism, as Trotsky describes, is not a description of the class nature of the state, but is a description of the form of political regime/government, just as is bourgeois democracy, or proletarian democracy. The political regime is merely a superficial appearance, whereas it is the objective material reality of social relations, i.e. the dominant forms of property, themselves based upon the dominant forms of production, that determine the class nature of the state. Fascism is the ideology of the petty-bourgeoisie, and like the petty-bourgeoisie/peasantry itself, it is necessarily wracked by contradictions, because the petty-bourgeoisie/peasantry is far from being an heterogeneous class. It is why, as Marx explained, the petty-bourgeoisie/peasantry can never itself become the ruling-class.

To the extent it ever seizes control of the political regime, it does so as a result of the weakness of the main classes of modern society – bourgeoisie and proletariat – and, even then, can only do so by lining up behind a “strong man” who imposes some kind of order upon them. But, as I set out in relation to the Chinese Revolution of 1949, which was really a Peasant War, led by Mao Zedong, control of the political regime does not change the fundamental laws of society and history. Such regimes are forced, in the end, to choose between bourgeois property or proletarian property forms (even in grossly deformed manifestations), or else, as with Pol Pot, to become failed states, as with many across the globe, in poorly developed countries. As long ago, as Engels “The Peasant War in Germany”, Marxists understood this distinction, and reality.

The peasantry, in the past, when it rose up against its rulers, typically used acts of terrorism, sabotage and wanton destruction, burning buildings and so on. As Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky described, such methods go nowhere, despite what the Anarchists and Populists proclaim. It is only when a large-disciplined and clear sighted industrial proletariat acts as the vanguard that these disparate, heterogenous and disorganised forces of the peasantry and petty-bourgeoisie, can be drawn in behind it. The Bolshevik formula of Lenin and Trotsky of “The Dictatorship of the Proletariat Leading The Peasantry”, summed it up.