Venezuela & Iran: Diplomacy,
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Venezuela & Iran: Diplomacy,
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http://www.marxist.com - 21 July 2006
Venezuela and Iran:
Diplomatic Relations, Trade Deals and Revolutionary Foreign Policy
By the International Marxist Tendency
We are on the eve of the fifth official visit to by Venezuelan
president Hugo Chavez to Iran. The closer relationship of Venezuela
with the Iranian regime raises a number of important issues for
revolutionaries in both countries and indeed internationally about the
relationship between revolutionary foreign policy and diplomacy.
The International Marxist Tendency has defended the Bolivarian
revolution from the beginning, supporting all its progressive aspects
while pointing out that in order for the revolution to be completed it
needs to put an end to capitalism in Venezuela, and at the same time
it needs to spread to other countries if it is to survive. Our defence
of the Venezuelan revolution is known to all. At the same time it is
also our duty as revolutionaries to point out those aspects of the
policies of the Venezuelan government that in our opinion do not help
the cause of the Bolivarian revolution.
Over the past few years we have welcomed how the revolutionary process
in Venezuela has brought ever more benefits to a greater section of
society. There have been many clear and unequivocally pro-working
class moves in Venezuela. The various missions like Mision Robinson,
Mision Barrio Adentro, Mision Habitat, Mision Zamora and others have
made a significant impact on the lives of the poor and the
marginalised in Venezuelan society. At the same time President Hugo
Chavez has reversed the trend towards privatisation of public
services, companies and services, and firmly established in the
Constitution the nationalised character of the oil industry.
Legislation has also been introduced to recognise the rights of
indigenous peoples, and the rights of women are enshrined in the
Bolivarian Constitution.
Above all, the revolution in Venezuela derives its strength from the
revolutionary movement of millions of ordinary working people, who are
organising to change their lives and are participating directly in
deciding over their own future. This situation has led to the
organisation of democratic class struggle trade unions, to a new mood
of confidence in the workers' movement, to factory occupations, etc.
President Hugo Chavez has accompanied and encouraged this process, and
has taken concrete measures to support it. In January 2005 he signed
the decree of expropriation of Venepal, a paper mill that had been
occupied by its workers for months in a bitter struggle against the
owners. The factory was put under a form of workers' management. After
this, other factories followed and Chavez made a public appeal for
workers to take over factories that had been left idle by its owners.
In March 2005, Carlos Lanz was appointed as a director of the
state-owned aluminium smelter ALCASA in Guayana, with the aim of
starting an experience of workers' control, where the workers elect
and have the right to recall all managerial layers in the company.
It is obvious that the Venezuelan government needs to maintain quite
close relations with all fellow OPEC members, including Iran. It is a
basic requirement for an oil producing country to try to strengthen
OPEC, against the attempts of imperialism and the oil multinationals
to divide the oil producing countries and drive down the price of this
precious raw material, which is one of the main sources of income for
these countries. It is also obvious that the Iranian government is
willing and able to provide Venezuela with technology, investment and
expertise that are crucial in developing its infrastructure and
agriculture, which Venezuela needs. Venezuela is also trying to widen
its scope of alternative markets, particularly in Asia, to reduce the
impact of any future problems with the Americans, and reduce its
historical dependency on the United States.
Diplomacy and trade relations are a necessary part of the foreign
policy of any country, even one where there is a revolution taking
place. Lenin for example considered offering the western capitalists
concessions in Siberia, as the weak, young workers' state did not have
the means to develop the region. Lenin insisted that the only way of
getting the investment, the technology that was needed to develop the
productive forces, was to grant concessions to foreign capital. The
idea was that by guaranteeing the capitalists profits, they could
develop the region, obtain the new means of production, the technique
and so on, and this would be to the benefit of the revolution.
In 1918 in his "Left-wing" Childishness and the Petty-Bourgeois
Mentality Lenin points out that, "We, the party of the proletariat,
have no other way of acquiring the ability to organise large-scale
production on trust lines, as trusts are organised, except by
acquiring it from first-class capitalist experts." The following year
on February 4, he presented a resolution to the Council of People's
Commissars in which he stated that, "The CPC... considers a concession
to representatives of foreign capital generally, as a matter of
principle, permissible in the interests of developing the country's
productive forces..."
However, one must be fully aware of the real character of the regimes
with which these deals and agreements are made. Lenin had no doubt
about the nature of the capitalists he was dealing with and understood
that in the last analysis he could only really count on the working
class of all countries for genuine support.
Iran today is certainly not a revolutionary regime and although
currently might be under pressure from imperialism, it is clearly not
an ally of the revolutionary workers and peasants in Venezuela in the
struggle against imperialist aggression. To present it in any way as a
progressive or even revolutionary regime would be to mislead the
masses in Venezuela and to undermine the basis of support for the
Venezuelan revolution amongst the workers and youth in Iran, the real
genuine allies of the Venezuelan revolutionary masses.
Our appraisal of the Iranian regime has nothing to do with the
currently prevailing "axis of evil" propaganda and threats emanating
from Washington and its apologists throughout the world. Venezuela is
right in standing up in international forums against the imperialist
bullying of Iran. Our reservations regarding the relations between
Venezuela and Iran rest on our analysis of the genuine long-term
interests of the Iranian and Venezuelan working people.
In the recent period we have witnessed a massive growth in the
struggle of workers and youth in Iran. As the economic problems have
mounted, 90% of the population have been pushed below the poverty line
(including, over 16,000 doctors). The great upsurge in workers'
struggles during the past two or three years has been caused by the
ever deteriorating economic and social situation together with the
workers having no access to any official or even legal bodies or
procedures for solving/addressing these problems.
The most important of the hundreds of strikes and workers' protests
has been the struggle of the drivers and other workers of the Vahed
Bus Company in Tehran. These are genuine trade unionists attempting to
set up a trade union to address issues such as low wages (which result
in the need to hold down two or three jobs), bad working conditions
and so on. Their very basic and just demands have been met with heavy
repression on the part of the regime. They have been branded as
criminals, tortured, put in solitary confinement and sacked. Mansour
Ossanlou, the Vahed bus workers' leader, has been jailed for over
seven months, held in solitary confinement and denied medical
treatment and hired thugs of the pro-regime Labour House and Islamic
Labour Councils tried to cut out his tongue and smashed the office of
the Vahed trade union and beat up its leaders.
We are sure that the latest privatisation edict by Ayatollah Khamenei,
which basically opens up the whole of the country's assets for
privatisation will exacerbate the harsh living and working conditions
of millions in Iran.
In addition to workers, other sections of society also have their just
grievances:
- - The youth of Iran, who represent two-thirds of the population,
demand basic democratic rights such as freedom of speech and assembly.
Whether they are young unemployed workers or students they see this is
an aloof and repressive regime.
- - Women and girls face discrimination at home, at school, when dealing
with any official or government bodies - especially the Islamic courts
where a woman's evidence is worth half that of a man - and wherever
they are in society.
- - National minorities, which make up over half of the population,
especially the Kurds, Azeris, Arabs and Baluchis face daily
discrimination and denial of basic linguistic and cultural rights. And
the Jews of Iran are constantly afraid of being tainted as Israeli
collaborators and have been under tremendous pressure due to Dr
Ahmadinejad's anti-Semitic remarks and consistent denial of the Holocaust.
All these sections of society, particularly the workers, are
struggling for the most basic rights - rights which they briefly had
after they overthrew the Shah, in 1979. That was a genuine revolution,
but one that was hijacked by the Islamic clerics in order to impose a
brutal dictatorship in which the movement of the workers was brutally
suppressed.
The contradiction with the situation in Venezuela could not be more
striking. The Islamic Republic of Iran is a regime that is
fundamentally different from the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela:
instead of 'cogestion' and encouragement of factory occupations
Iranian workers are arrested and even shot for demanding their unpaid
wages.
If the Bolivarian revolution is to survive it needs to take decisive
action to wrest economic power from the ruling class and move in the
direction of democratic planning of the economy under workers'
control. In that struggle the only allies of the Bolivarian revolution
will be the workers and peasants of other countries who are already
being inspired by it. Not the reactionary mullahs in Teheran, but the
Vahed bus workers.
But if President Chavez and other leading figures of the Venezuelan
revolution go beyond the necessary politeness of diplomacy and trade
deals, and in some way give "revolutionary" credentials to the Islamic
clerics, then Iranian workers will see this as an endorsement of the
hated regime they are fighting against and a dismissal of their
yearnings for justice and a decent standard of living. This would only
serve to undermine the support for the Venezuelan revolution inside
Iran, support which as the Bolivarian revolution advances will become
more and more necessary.
*
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