EDITORIAL FOUNDING STATEMENT

A handful of people who take it upon themselves to produce, on a shoestring, a new journal of radical theory and practice, need to face certain questions. Does their effort have any real significance, apart from their own sectarianism or egoism? Are their ideas serious and distinctive, and relevant in time and place? Can they communicate those ideas to a widening circle of readers, in an interesting and accessible way? If a positive answer can be found to these questions, then (if things go well) the new journal may sooner or later emerge from its obscure origins to influence mass consciousness and play some part in shaping the future. Otherwise its fate will be to disappear without trace or remain ineffective on the outer fringes of political life.

The theme of our new journal Hobgoblin is revolution. We reject both the ruling ideological assumption that capitalism is a benign and rational system, synonymous with freedom and prosperity; and the fatalistic acceptance that capitalism is here to stay, whether we like it or not. We believe that revolution is desirable and possible. By revolution we mean a conscious movement of working people and the dispossessed poor all over the world, to end the power of the capitalist state and the capitalist business corporation; to replace these with their own forms of self-government; to establish control of the world's natural, agricultural, industrial and technological resources and to apply to these their own intelligence and creative energies in order to meet the needs of all humankind.

To us, revolution also means dissolving all forms of oppression, such as racism and sexism, until freedom becomes the universal human condition. We assert the real possibility of a future, established on the overturn of capitalism, that will bring to each person a more expansive freedom and a truer prosperity - in the sense of sustainable wellbeing, quality of life and self-fulfilment. Deepening and refining the meaning of revolution in today's world will be the task of the magazine as a whole, a project in which we invite our readers to join us. Now, to advocate the idea of social revolution in all seriousness, we need to have a sober awareness of the difficulties involved. Capitalism, as an ideology, is going strong, even though the system is shaken by crises. Worldwide, much of the opposition to the prevailing 'global market economy' looks not to the Left, but towards reactionary and authoritarian alternatives, from religious fundamentalism to narrow nationalism. The socialist vision has receded. The reasons for our current predicament lie in the history of the twentieth century. At many times, in many countries, movements of the Left (reformist or revolutionary) have come to power. States have been declared 'socialist', means of production taken into state ownership, economies subjected to state planning, yet everywhere the essential relations of capitalism have reappeared in a new form. The worker, the human being, has remained alienated, dominated, exploited - however much the form and degree of severity may have differed between places and times.

The historic experience of so many 'false socialisms' - in our view, so many forms of state-capitalism - followed by the fact that, when the 'collapse of Communism' did occur, nothing truly new was born, but Western capitalism rushed in to fill the vacuum, has put in doubt the very possibility of a genuinely classless society, such as was envisaged by Karl Marx, and inspired countless socialists over many decades. On the threshold of a new century, how can a new beginning be made? We think that future progress must depend on working out a philosophy of revolution. This cannot be any complete and finished set of answers. Rather, it is a continuing endeavour to comprehend the full potential of the human being, the ways in which this potential is blocked by existing social and ideological structures, the passions and forces that keep arising to seek revolutionary change, and the scope of the transformation required. It means comprehending the tragedies and failures of the past, so as not to be burdened by them, but to avoid repeating them. It involves a self-critical attitude to our own praxis, so that we do not reproduce the alienating features of capitalist society - the treatment of people as instruments and not subjects, the separation of mental and manual labour - within our own movement. It is a unifying vision of a new society, that can link together the unceasing struggles against the system, great and small.

We are Marxist-Humanists. We find the foundations of our outlook in the ideas of Karl Marx. Unlike many other Marxists, we do not regard Marx as only an economist and political theorist, however great. We see the whole of his life's work, from the Communist Manifesto through the classic study of Capital to the study of non-capitalist societies undertaken in his last years, as a continuation of the philosophy that he termed a 'new humanism' in his early manuscripts of 1844.

For many years (since 1955) there has been an organisation of Marxist-Humanists in the USA, the News and Letters Committees. We recommend our readers to discover their monthly paper, News and Letters, and range of publications, especially the writings of Raya Dunayevskaya (1910 - 1987), the remarkable revolutionary and philosopher who gave shape to Marxist-Humanism in the modern world. The editors of Hobgoblin are a group of people who have an affinity with the ideas of News & Letters and have contributed articles to the paper over the years. With Hobgoblin we hope to bring a Marxist-Humanist perspective to England, and an English perspective to Marxist-Humanism. An important aspect of our work will be to connect to the history of revolutionary subjectivity in our own country, its traditions of protest and rebellion, its labour (note the small 'l') and feminist movements, and the important role of its successive waves of immigrants: the Irish, the European Jews, Afro-Caribbean Black people and Asians. Of course, this does not prevent us from either writing about international issues, or welcoming contributions from comrades and co-thinkers in other countries.

The problem facing us is to find a mode of expression for Marxist-Humanist ideas that is appropriate to the English context, and also viable when there are so few of us to do the work. To start with, publication will be irregular - as and when we can manage it - and therefore we cannot respond directly to the flow of events, as a monthly can. We must have a content that is not likely to go out of date while the magazine is on sale (or even before), so there will be an emphasis on theory and on history. Inevitably, the subject matter will also reflect our individual areas of knowledge and interest. We have no wish to be merely a "theoretical journal" (and we regard the traditional left division of "the paper" and "the paper" as reflecting the division between mental and manual labour in class society). We regret the lack of diversity. We would want our journal to include representative voices from people in different kinds of employment - and unemployment; Black, white and Asian; men and women; gay and lesbian as well as heterosexual; all who feel the need to reach out to a future of human freedom. We hope that some of our readers will want to become contributors themselves, and help us put right this deficiency.

David Black 1999

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Hobgoblin Issue One Spring/Summer 1999

HAS CAPITAL AUTONOMIZED ITSELF FROM HUMANITY?

*Jacques Camatte, 'This World We Must Leave and Other Essays', published by Autonomedia, New York, 1995 *Loren Goldner, 'Communism is the Material Human Community - Amadeo Bordiga Today', Collective Action Notes POB 22962 Baltimore. MD 21203 USA

By David Black

Surprisingly, the collected translations of Jacques Camatte's writings (1969-1980) are today finding a readership amongst anarcho-greens in Britain such as Green Anarchist, Wildcat and the Primitivist Network. Surprising that is, because Camatte developed his ideas within the 'left communism' of Amadeo Bordiga, founding leader of the Italian Communist Party(PCI) from 1921-23.

THE LEGACY OF AMADEO BORDIGA

An executive member of the Communist International, Bordiga was attacked by Lenin in 'Left-Wing Communism: an infantile disorder' for his opposition to the tactic of building united fronts with reformist socialists, trade unionists and "non-proletarian" forces such as anti-colonial movements based in the peasantry. After Lenin's death, Bordiga fell out with the Comintern completely and was the last of its leaders to call Stalin a traitor to his face and live to tell the tale.

Antonio Gramsci, who succeeded Bordiga as PCI leader in 1924, later observed that his "fear of compromise" transformed itself in practice into "fear of dangers". Gramsci, in the 'Modern Prince', rooted Bordiga's "intransigence" in "economism": "the iron conviction that there exist objective laws of historical development similar in kind to laws of nature, together with a belief in a predetermined teleology like that of a religion", in which "favourable conditions are inevitably going to appear", and "in a rather mysterious way, will bring about palingenic events".

In Camatte's view however, it was precisely Bordiga's "prophetic" and optimistic certainty about world revolution which made him so "entrancing" as a revolutionary theorist. In words reminiscent of Saint Augustine's on "the torrential stream of history", Camatte enthuses over Bordiga's comparison of "all human history to a huge river bounded by dykes, on the right that of social conservatism... on the left that of reformism... But the immense flood of human history... floods over the dykes, drowning the miserable bands in the impulsive and irresistable inundation of the revolution which overthrows the old forms". [Quoted in J Camatte, Community and Communism in Russia, 1978 - not included in This World We Must Leave.]

Loren Goldner's pamphlet, the best available introduction to Bordiga's thought, explains that in the late 1940s, when the trotskyists were still expecting post-war slump and revolutionary upheaval, Bordiga predicted that the development of productive forces and the capitalization of agriculture would take until the 1970s to bring about a real capitalist crisis. And so it did! Bordiga, born in 1889, died in 1970, just a few years before the onset of the global structural crisis that has held capital in its grip even since. In the 1950s Bordiga, ignored and forgotten by all but a few supporters, pronounced that the mainstream 20th Century workers movements, which for millions had been a struggle for human emancipation, had turned out objectively to be a movement of capital.

In the case of Russia, Bordiga dismissed the trotkyist designation of the USSR as a degenerated workers state (or as bureaucratic collectivism or state-capitalism). He insisted it was simply capitalism run by party racketeers. Trotsky claimed, even at the height of the Terror in 1936, that despite the dictatorship of the "stalinist bureaucracy", the "socialism" of the "degenerated workers state" had "demonstrated its right to victory, not in the pages of Das Kapital… but in the languages of steel, concrete and electricity". Bordiga's analysis, as Goldner puts it, "turned the tables" on the stalinists by taking an entirely different approach. Bordiga argued that the development of the productive forces of capital, underwritten by the forced "collectivisation" of the peasantry, was precisely what demonstrated the bourgeois nature of the "Soviet" regime. And could it be any accident that in the West, stalinist parties only had influence in those relatively "underdeveloped" parts of Europe where capital was still in the business of turning peasants into workers? "In sum", Goldner writes of Bordiga's position, "capitalism means first of all the agrarian revolution".

After Bordigism failed to make any impact in the 1968 near-revolution in France (or on Bordiga's home ground in the Italian 'Hot Autumn' of 1969), Camatte broke with the Bordigist party and wrote a devastating critique of vanguardism (the essay 'On Organisation'). Whilst realising that all efforts to go "beyond Marx" were pointless until capital and its presuppositions could themselves be superceded, Camatte nevertheless decided that to grasp the nature of late-20th Century capitalism it was necessary to out-Marx Marx .

A key starting point for Camatte's contribution is the analysis of "anthropomorphized landed property" by the young Marx in 'Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Law' (1843). In this essay Marx describes how in the feudal ancestral estate, the different generations of humans represent the property-form, which is the "predicate of the human being" ('to the manor born' as the English used to say). Camatte combines the concept of anthropomorphosis with that of gemeinwesen (human community/essence) in Marx's 1844 Philosophic Notebooks as elements for his own theory of the modern world as a "community of capital". Camatte then takes Marx's later statement in 'Capital' on how living labour, by adding new value to dead labour, "at the same time maintains and eternizes" capital and suggests that it should be rephrased "to say that in the capitalist mode of production as we know it, all human activity 'eternizes' capital"

VALUE, ESSENCE AND FORM

Camatte, like Bordiga, places great importance on Marx's 1863 text: 'Results of the Immediate Process of Production', known as the "Unpublished Chapter Six of Capital Vol.I". In this Marx explains how the phase of "formal domination of capital" (and formal subordination of labour) passes into that of "real domination" (and real subordination of labour). In the formal phase, the worker is already subjugated to the means of production - a relationship which "enhances the personification of objects and the reification of people". This phase corresponds historically to the 1830-50 period of class struggle in England (and from the standpoint of the 20th Century, perhaps also to pre-1917 Russia):

"From the start, the worker is superior to the capitalist in that the capitalist is rooted in his 'process of alienation' and is completely content therein, whereas the worker who is its victim finds himself from the beginning in a state of rebellion against it and experiences the process as one of enslavement".

In the phase of real subordination, the worker is faced with the "collective unity" of the social forms of labour under social capital and its new forms of domination: the means by which natural resources are exploited; enormously powerful financial institutions; state bureaucracies; new service industries; ideologies for what we would now call "manufacturing consent"; and capital-serving technologies and forms of control in the workplace which fragment and divide the working class.

All forms of social capital are, in Marx's words, "opposed to the individual worker" as an "alien" force which sucks out value through the harnessing of his or her labour-power. One of the longstanding controversies over Marx's Capital, and one Camatte is much concerned with, is the relationship between value and its representation in the form of prices, money, profit etc. In Capital Vol III, money-dealing capital "appears as a concentrated, organized mass, which entirely unlike real production, is subject to the control of bankers representing social capital". In its interest-bearing form this becomes fictitious capital and Camatte notes that "fictitious capital is partly considered as the connective tissue joining the different capitals". Camatte then combines this with the "phenomenon of anthropomorphosis" and the negation of the human community of communism to support his theory of the "autonomization of capital".

Camatte however, all too often takes Marx's unfolding of the perversities of political economy as reality, and as a result he over-hastily unifies the self-moving forms of capital with what he sees as its essentiality. True, Marx writes that with fictitious capital "all connection with the actual process of capital's valorization is lost, right down to the last trace, confirming the notion that capital is automatically valorized by its own powers". But he makes it clear that, in the ideology of those who live off the interest on savings and are separated from the material mediations which expropriate the labour of others on their behalf, that is how it "appears". Andrew Kliman, defending Marx against arguments that he fails to "reconcile" values with their representation as prices, shows that Marx's enquiry into "value" is rather concerned with "the rise and fall of the historically specific economic relations and ideologies that correspond to enable the existence of values and value relations". [Andrew Kliman, 'The "Transformation Problem" and State-capitalist Theory in the 1990s, News and Letters Bulletin 1992]

Camatte does accept that the law of value "survives" as something "overcome" - in the dialectical, hegelian sense. However, to amplify the hegelian resonance of "overcoming" further, it seems that for Camatte the "being" of the "lost human community" is absorbed and overcome by what he sees as its own essential being - the material capital community; which he thinks can re-valorize itself through its internationalised money-forms and de-valorize labour with the accumulated dead labour incorporated in advanced technology.

To be sure, globalization, to the extent that it unifies capital further, might provide planners with further control mechanisms to alleviate the disaggregation of the production of means of consumption and the means of production. However, Camatte's argument that globalized high-tech capital can achieve a "runaway" of exchange-values from the law of value conflicts with Marx's insistence in Capital Vol. I that exchange-value "cannot be anything other than the mode of expression, the 'form of appearance', of a content distinguishable from it". [my emphasis] The "content" turns out to be the alienated labour of real human beings. As abstract labour, this "social substance" underlies the "relations" between commodities; all of which can be infinitely exchanged for each other through an "equivalence" measured by socially-necessary labour time. The categories Marx unfolds, such as surplus value/profit and value/price, are unified dialectically within the totality in transformation: the total of surplus values does equal the total of profits; and the total of values does equal the total of prices.

In Capital Vol. III Marx describes the transformation of surplus value into profit as "but a continued development of the perversion of subject and object taking place in the process of production". The appearance of the labourer as "materialised labour-power" necessarily produces "certain correspondingly perverted conceptions, which represent a transposition in consciousness, that is further developed." Raya Dunayevskaya, in relating Marx's Capital to the three sections of Hegel's 'Science of Logic' (being-essence-notion) was the first to interpret Marx's unravelling of this process in Capital Vol.III as "not merely returning to essence, but proceeding from essence to notion" . The unity between essence (value) and the fetishistic forms it assumes in its domination of humanity "can be transcended only in transcending the value-form and establishing its complete opposite: the co-operative form". [The Despotic Plan of Capital vs. Freely Associated Labour, 1950, republished in News and Letters Nov. 1998]

Camatte's jamming together of essence with "form", or rather forms by which he thinks capital can autonomize itself from the law of value, thus ignores the higher level of dialectical progression from "essence" to "notion" which Marx develops in Capital. Camatte's theory of capital autonomization and re-valorization as linked to de-valorization of labour by high-tech might appear to be supported by Marx's description in the 'Unpublished Sixth Chapter of Capital' of how new technologies are developed "to dominate labour at the same time as they replace it, suppress it, and make it superfluous in the forms where it is autonomous". But the problem remaining for capital is that whilst its "production for productions sake" depends on the increasing productivity of labour harnessed to technology, that is precisely what undermines it. Marx, arguing against Ricardo, points out that the general rate of profit has a tendency to fall not because labour becomes less productive, but because it becomes more productive. The enterpreneur who buys a machine to speed up output and decrease unit costs (including labour-power) will find in due course that competitors are buying an even faster one. Within the system as a whole, the devaluation of commodities through the diminishing of the socially necessary labour time for making them undermines the creation of the new value required for the new inputs of constant capital (machinery/materials) and variable capital (human labour-power).

As Dunayevskaya puts it, because constant technological revolutions make the time necessary to "reproduce" a product tomorrow less than it does today, "there comes a time when all commodities... have been 'overpaid'. The crisis follows." The crisis then, is not caused by underconsumption but by an over-accumulation of capital; and no amount of fictitious capital and dead labour incorporated in technology can forever remain in a world apart from the non-fictitious world of living labour which capital still has to pound into abstraction.

MARXISM AND PRODUCTIVISM

Camatte, in attempting to root the "productivist" negation of revolutionary subjectivity by "marxism" (which greens rightly find so objectionable), refers to 'The Critique of the Gotha Program' (1874), in which Marx counterposes the permanent revolutionary uprooting of capitalist relations to the reformist program of Lassallean proto-social democracy. Camatte however, accuses Marx of failing to describe "a real discontinuity between capitalism and communism" in his vision of post-revolutionary society; pointing out that in it "productive forces continue to grow". But although it is true that until the 1850s Marx did make some distinction between "productive", industrial capitalists and "parasitical" financiers and rentiers, he was then looking at a stage of capitalism in which elements of the rising bourgeoisie were still engaged in class struggle with older elements of the ruling classes (the period of formal domination). By the time Marx came to write the Grundrisse in 1858, he did not see any fraction of the bourgeoisie as "progressive"; capital had become "social capital". Certainly, for the classicists Smith and Ricardo, being "productive" meant engaging in production of surplus value;"unproductive" meant frivolously living off the revenue rather than using it "productively". Marx, contrastingly, in the 'Unpublished Chapter Six', employs the "power of abstraction" to show that from the classicists' point of view Milton, for example, must have been unproductive because he spent years writing 'Paradise Lost' only to sell the manuscript for five pounds; whereas a hack who turns out political economy manuals at the direction of his publisher is productive. The hack's product "is from the outset subsumed under capital, and comes into being only for the purpose of increasing that capital". The "unproductiveness" of Milton on the other hand, clearly better represents for Marx "the absolute unfolding of man's creative abilities", because "Milton produced his Paradise Lost for the same reason that a silk-worm produces silk. It was an activity of his nature."

Political economy tried to explain how society worked as expression of 'human nature', but couldn't explain why social relations were determined by relations between commodities. For Marx, value is a "purely social" reality and capital is "value in process" ("valorisation"). But value is not wealth. Against the Lassaleans, Marx insists in the Critique of the Gotha Program that "labour is not the source of all wealth"; because nature is also a source of wealth - though under the rule of capital wealth takes the form of capital.

The possibility of creating a society based on real wealth rather than the value-form is certainly presupposed by the development of the productive forces and the self-development of the people engaged in production, but technological progress and "productiveness" in themselves do not produce real wealth; for under "human control" wealth would express "the absolute unfolding of man's creative abilities" as "an end-in-itself". In the light of the Paris Commune, Marx deepened his analysis of the "social relations between things" in the Capitalist Mode of Production and wrote that the fetishism could only be exploded when the commodity-as-labourer - or rather the whole labouring class united - negates "the form itself" and inverts the reification by means of an "agreed and settled plan" set in motion by "freely associated labour", in which the "all-round development of the individual" requires the negation of the "enslaving subordination of the individual to the division... between mental and manual labour..."

Camatte insists that "What is invariant, is the desire to rediscover the lost community" - by which he means "primitive communities [in which] human beings rule technology" (as in the gemeinwesen of primitive communism); and he connects this to Marx's projection in 1844 of the "naturalization" of humanity and the "humanization of nature" as meaning a "new mode of being". In Camatte's view, capitalism exists in order to overcome barriers to itself and eventually finds its limit because, since its "other" is the human being; and since it is anthropomorphized, then "there is no longer any 'other'. Hence the potential death of capital." But the totalizing capitalism he describes "domesticates humanity" just as pre-capitalism once domesticated animals. The "despotism of capital" produces a "collection of slaves of capital", rather than contending classes. Camatte thus sees an all-embracing totality which without a countervailing force of subjectivity to oppose it can only bring about the end of humanity.

NEW FORCES

In the most recent essay (1980), Camatte looks at the potential of new movements as "opponents to capital" and evaluates environmentalism and feminism, cultural "microcommunities" and struggles by indigenous peoples in the Third World. Groups founded on "identity", he finds, tend to become "slaves of the community of capital" inasmuch as they "define themselves in their separateness from one or other microcommunities, which is something that can only aggravate the difficulties that humans have in communicating". Those who embrace Eastern mysticism often do so as the "complement to Western hyperrationalism" and end up ideologically as a "horrible melange of individualism and communitarian despotism". But still hoping that some of these forces may prefigure some new type of movement, Camatte calls for a "huge renunciation" of capital whilst insisting that this should not be done "in the name" of any class.

Camatte retains a Bordigist disregard for the Hegelian dialectic, whose "absolute" appears in Marx's Capital as the "disaggregation" in the totalization (or 'absolute') of capital. This "absolute" of capital, unlike Hegel's, splits rather than unifies; revealing at one pole accumulation and centralisation and the other the revolt of workers - including those reduced to the ranks of surplus labour. [Raya Dunayevskaya, 'The Philosophic Moment of Marxist-Humanism', 1989] Capital, as dead labour, whether in its materialised form as machines, or its 'virtual', illusory, fictitious form, only grows by expropriation of surplus value from living labourers, who, because they are living and thinking must also be considered as potential revolutionary subjects along with other "new passions, new forces" (to use Marx's terms) - such as women's movements, gay politics, Black liberation and a host of other revolutionary subjects - who share "the quest for universality" in the face of capital's ceaseless invasion of every area of human existence.

[Ends]

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Hobgoblin Issue One Spring/Summer 1999

Book Review

The Iranian Constitutional Revolution, 1906-1911 by Janet Afary.

Published by Columbia University Press, 1996.

The Iranian revolution of 1906 to 1911 attempted to introduce democratic freedoms and set the country on a path of independent development. It briefly established government by a Majlis or parliament and transformed a despotic monarchy, the tail end of the Qajar dynasty, into a constitutional one. The contradictions that emerged included the clash between secular demands for intellectual and personal liberty and the demands of the powerful clergy that Islamic law should prevail. It was eventually crushed with military force, by the Russia of Tsar Nicholas II, aided and abetted by Britain’s Liberal government. One of the important revolutions of the early twentieth century, it had much in common with events in Russia, China and Mexico around the same time, but is comparatively little known.

Janet Afary has written a comprehensive account of this crucial period in Iran’s history, based on copious original research. While giving due attention to the actions of governments and parties, political, military and religious leaders, foreign diplomats and financial advisers, her main emphasis is on the grassroots of the revolution, peasants, artisans and fishermen, and women revolutionaries. She explores the diversity of social groups, political tendencies, religious beliefs and ethnic and linguistic backgrounds that composed the revolutionary movement. Another major theme is the form of direct local democracy that the people created for themselves, the anjumans.

Shaped by imperialism, the economy of Iran was heavily dependent on cash crops (including opium) and the export of raw materials (not yet oil). The Qajar court favoured foreign companies by granting them monopolies. While indigenous merchants were hurt by foreign competition, the peasants suffered from high rents and taxes and the breakdown of traditional village institutions. The first successful popular protest occurred in 1891-2, a boycott of tobacco that prevented a monopoly in that commodity being granted to an English capitalist.

Discontent at despotic rule and foreign domination came to a head in the years 1905 and 1906. Adopting a traditional form of protest known as bast, many townspeople of Tehran gathered at religious shrines, and later at the British legation, and claimed sanctuary. At this time, Russia was the imperialist power with the strongest presence and was most resented; Britain was expected to be sympathetic to the call for constitutional government. Yielding to popular pressure, Muzaffar al-Din Shah agreed to the formation of a Majlis. This body was elected by a limited male franchise depending on property and professional status, but included some representatives from the craft guilds.

Assemblies, known as anjumans, were created everywhere. Initially formed to monitor elections to the Majlis, they quickly took on other functions including raising bodies of armed volunteers to defend the Majlis, and became the main form of political expression for the masses. Afary shows that the anjumans were very diverse in status, social composition and ideological direction. Some had official standing within the constitutional order; others were unofficial or even illegal. Some, especially in Azerbaijan and Gilan, were radical and welcomed the participation of ethnic and religious minorities. The important Tabriz anjuman was situated in the city’s Armenian quarter, and the Armenian community regularly visited the anjuman and supported it on many issues. Others were dominated by conservative ‘ulama (clergy) or governors, and hostile to non-Muslims.

In a society permeated by traditions of male domination and female subordination, women seized hold of the revolution as an opportunity to win their own freedom. Women formed their own anjumans, published journals attacking such practices as veiling and polygamy, and took the initiative in setting up schools for girls (sixty were founded in Tehran alone during the revolutionary period). At the same time as the militant campaign for women’s suffrage was underway in Britain, Iranian women demanded the right to vote and participate in political life. In his eyewitness account, The Strangling of Persia, Morgan Shuster wrote
`The Persian women since 1907 had become almost at a bound the most progressive, not to say radical, in the world. That this statement upsets the ideas of centuries makes no difference. It is the fact.’

Some of the revolution’s supporters were influenced by socialist ideas, in particular the orthodox Marxism of the Second International. The journal Iran-I-Naw provided a forum for such ideas. It denounced imperialism, especially Tsarism, and called for an anti-imperialist alliance of the peoples of the East. It spoke out against anti-Semitism and other forms of ethnic and religious chauvinism. It theorised that Iran was breaking with its feudal past and would have to pass through an era of capitalism (although this could be mitigated by unions and legislation in favour of workers’ rights) before achieving socialism. In line with this perspective, rather than forming their own party the Iranian social-democrats joined forces with the liberals to form the Democrat Party, which sought to establish a centralised and secular state in order to modernise the country.

The foes of the revolution included the new Shah, Muhammad ‘Ali, the reactionary cleric Shaikh Fazlullah Nuri, who declared that ‘freedom is heretical in Islam’ and called for a ‘theocratic government’, and the government of Imperial Russia. In June 1908, the Cossack Brigade, a unit organised on Russian lines and commanded by Russian officers, carried out a coup d’état in Teheran. Despite brave resistance by the volunteer militia, the Majlis was bombarded into submission. While the Shah’s autocracy was restored in Teheran, Tabriz held out for the constitutionalist cause. Civil war ensued. Revolutionary fighters from the Transcaucasian lands within the Russian Empire, Azerbaijan, Armenia and Georgia, came to the aid of their Iranian comrades. Eventually Russian forces occupied Tabriz, but revolutionary armies succeeded in re-conquering Teheran. This victory inaugurated the second constitutional period, which lasted for just over two years. Russian troops continued to occupy the north, and the constitutional government came under increasing pressure from the two great powers, Russia and Britain, who had agreed between themselves in 1907 to divide Iran into ‘spheres of influence’.

Partly to appease the imperialists and partly driven by the class interests of the wealthy landowners and merchants in the Majlis, the constitutional government did much to curtail the very revolutionary forces that had restored it to power. The mujahidin (revolutionary fighters) were forcibly disbanded and disarmed; while this decision was being enforced, thirty of them were killed and three hundred wounded in a shooting incident at Teheran’s Atabeg Park. As there was no scheme to offer them alternative employment, many became destitute and some took to banditry in desperation. Unpopular taxes, aimed at the lower classes, were imposed, and disillusionment with the constitutional government grew. This was a chaotic period marked by factional strife, assassinations, widespread tribal revolts and banditry, and anti-Semitic outbreaks stirred up by reactionary clerics.

The conservatism of the first and second Majlis was most apparent in their determined opposition to calls by the peasants and their supporters for a radical land reform. The character of the class struggle in the countryside, and the creativity of the peasants in developing their own institutions of self-government, were sympathetically described by the Russian social democrat Mikhail Pavlovitch, who wrote

‘The peasants of several villages expelled the overseers, refused to pay taxes, and proceeded to form local anjumans - local councils - in their villages. No government officer, landlord or overseer dared to enter such villages in order to collect taxes. The local anjumans, to cover the expenses of the state, collected one tenth of the crop and sent it to the town anjumans’.

The Majlis discouraged, and later banned, these village anjumans, often sending troops to close them down. When the constitutional government did abolish the tuyul (roughly, feudal) system of land holding, it transferred the revenues of the villages from individual landlords to the state, instead of giving the peasants themselves the right to the land and its harvest.

Afary identifies this failure to address the needs of the peasants as an important cause of the eventual failure of the Constitutional Revolution.
After an attempted comeback by the deposed Shah was thwarted, the balance of power swung to the left, to the Democrats, and their ally, the American financial adviser Morgan Shuster. A more democratic electoral law was ratified, providing for universal male suffrage and direct elections. One radical deputy, Vakil al Ru’ayu, made a speech in support of women’s suffrage.

At this point the Tsar’s forces intervened to stifle Iran’s fledgling democracy.

In an unconstitutional coup, the Regent and his Cabinet ordered the Majlis to disband, imposed martial law and banned all meetings of anjumans and publication of newspapers. Nicholas II ordered his troops to ‘act quickly and harshly’. Like Russia itself in the defeat of the 1905 Revolution, Iran now underwent a savage counter-revolutionary repression marked by purges and executions.

The author’s approach is dialectical and multi-dimensional, drawing critically on the ideas of a wide range of anti-determinist and humanist Marxist writers, theoreticians and historians.

Afary contests the common Western perception of predominantly Muslim Middle Eastern countries such as Iran as ‘inherently rigid, unbending and unreceptive to progress’. This view, she argues, ignores ‘decades of Russian, British and U.S. domination of Iranian politics and the impact of their imperialist policies on the democratic movements of twentieth-century Iran, when, in fact, two attempts to build a more democratic society in Iran, the Constitutional Revolution of 1906-1911, and the post-World War II nationalist government of Mohammad Musaddiq, were undermined through direct imperialist interventions’. She points out the contradictory nature of Iran’s relationship with the West. Within the imperialist world system, Iran’s economy and politics were distorted to serve the interests of Western capitalism, yet the West was also a source of progressive and liberatory ideas, democracy, socialism and feminism. Not all international contacts were with the West however: there were also significant exchanges with Turkey, India, Russia and the Transcaucasian countries.

The barriers to progress, Afary argues, were both external and internal. Her analysis looks at many strands within Iranian society, and the involvement of each in the revolutionary process, taking into account ‘ethnic complexities, class and gender divisions’ as well as ‘the problematic role of religion’. She recognises the importance of culture and ideology as active factors shaping historical development, and not mere ‘reflections’ of the economic base. In particular, she stresses the importance of ideas, and the dynamic interrelation of the theories of the intellectuals, as expressed in the books and newspapers of the time, and the consciousness of ordinary people. She proposes that an understanding of the 1906-1911 revolutionary period, its achievements and limitations, can help to guide today’s freedom movements in Iran.

A chronology of major events and a glossary of Farsi words are helpful features that support the text. Unfortunately, there isn’t a map (read it with an atlas to hand), and I also felt that the book could have done with a set of biographical notes on the major personalities, as Iranian names can get somewhat confusing to a Western reader (like me) who does not have a background in Iranian studies.

Richard Abernethy. 1999

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