The Iranian nation-state, presently under attack by both Israel and the United States, has a long history as an object of imperialist aggression. Although the degree to which western powers were able to influence and dominate Iran has varied, since approximately 1900 two major western capitalist powers have regularly intervened to either control or undermine Iran’s government and economy. This long history of imperialist intervention has shaped Iran’s political economy and society in a number of ways, including helping to bring to power the current widely hated regime while at the same time creating a hatred of imperialism and foreign intervention.
Oil + Britain
In 1901 the Shah (king) of Persia signed an agreement known as the D’Arcy Concession, giving an Australian born British prospector the right to extract oil from Persian soil for the next 60 years. Although the place called Persia would after 1935 be called Iran, and although the terms of the concession would be altered and reworked over the decades, this 1901 concession began a long and tortured relationship between Iran and Britain. After a major oil discovery in 1908, the Anglo-Persian Oil Company was formed. It would later change its name to become Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC), but its significance would remain for nearly 80 years – it would be controlled primarily by the British state, retain a profit-sharing agreement with Iran, in which it would entirely control oil extraction, refining and export, and share with Iran 50% of the profits. The Shah of Iran and Iranian elites obviously collaborated completely with the British to allow AIOC to profit from the concession for decades, and scholars agree that the AIOC never actually gave Iran anywhere near the agreed-upon 50% of revenues.
In these early decades of the 20th century, AIOC became like a state within the Iranian state. It owned land, managed refineries around the nation, was managed entirely by British engineers and administrators, and employed about 60,000 Iranians, not to mention tens of thousands of others whose work depended indirectly on the oil industry. Most of the profits went to the far away British state and the many investors in the company.
As has happened in many other colonial and imperialist relationships, Iranians began to resent not only the exploitation of natural resources under their soil by an imperialist power, but also the exploitation of the Iranian workers who extracted and produced the ever-more-profitable commodity. Thousands lived in barely developed tent camps, were poorly paid and sometimes not paid, and were segregated completely and racially abused by white company and British officials. By the 1920s workers had begun to organize, some into small labor organizations, others around an illegal Communist Party that would later become the Tudeh Party. In 1929 and again in 1946, major strikes rocked AIOC operations, and these strikes spilled over into larger general strikes that affected numerous workplaces and industries throughout Iran.
The development of a large and organizing Iranian working class combined with a growing resentment towards AIOC and British imperialism slowly led to the growth of political movements aimed at challenging British influence and regaining a measure of Iranian sovereignty.
Mossadeq and the British-U.S. Coup
In the late 1940s an intellectual reformer named Muhammad Mossadeq became the leader of a movement challenging the Shah’s constitutional monarchy, and calling for free elections and Iranian control of oil production and profits. Between 1945 and 1951, Mossadeq was a rising politician with support from a handful of leftist and nationalist political organizations, including at least partial support from the Tudeh Party. In 1949, these groups came together as a coalition called the National Front, and became the vehicle that would support Mossadeq and challenge British imperial interests and the Shah who helped maintain them.
In 1951 another strike by oil workers brought tensions between workers, the political system, and the British and AIOC to a head. After two weeks, the 50,000 or more strikers ended the strike with better pay and an agreement on housing and living conditions. But the conflict gave Mossadeq the political momentum he needed to be raised to the position of Premier in the government. Immediately and with wide popular support he put forward proposals for reforms of the electoral system and the nationalization of AIOC.
Immediately, oil lobbyists and government officials from both Britain and the United States sprang into action. Although AIOC was a British dominated company, U.S. officials were also keen to be sure that affordable oil would be available without interruption and that nations like Iran in no way interfered with the principles of private property and profit on which the entire global commercial system was based. For that reason, the British M-16 and the U.S. CIA worked hand in hand from 1951 to 1953 to try to stop the nationalization of AIOC. But it was an impossible task. They wanted to maintain complete British control of the oil industry in Iran, and Mossadeq and the vast majority of Iranians wanted the exact opposite – that the Iranian government should completely control their own oil industry. After one year of fruitless threats and negotiations, the British and U.S. spy organizations came to the conclusion that they would have to get rid of Mossadeq and his goals by other means. Britain and the United States placed severe economic sanctions on Iran, hurting its oil revenues and leading to deteriorating economic conditions. After months of nurturing an economic and political crisis, in late August 1953 the M-16 and CIA, in connivance with the Shah and other political and commercial elites of Iran, engineered a few days of street conflicts that culminated in the military removal of Mossadeq from power. The coup was accomplished.
The Shah, 1953 to 1979
Recognizing that the Shah had sided with British imperial interests to undermine the popular will for Iranian political and economic autonomy, millions of Iranians rightly felt betrayed, and that the Shah was a foreign puppet imposed from without. He thus had little popular legitimacy throughout his quarter century of rule.
During that period, the Shah first smashed his political opposition. Members of the Tudeh and other parties were arrested by the thousands, with hundreds executed and many more sentenced to decades in prison. He created a secret police force called SAVAK, which was loyal directly to the Shah and repressed all opposition. In this way, the coup and the Shah’s reign not only destroyed Mossadeq’s immediate initiatives, they also destroyed most of the secular opposition that could have opposed him and his supporters—British and U.S. capital.
The Shah gave primary control of the oil industry to a consortium of British, Dutch, French and U.S. oil companies, with Britain and British Petroleum (BP) in the lead. They profited enormously from the 1950s into the 1970s as oil prices skyrocketed, and the Shah sat atop a corrupt political regime based on his share of those profits. He and his family and the Iranian ruling class who both supported him and depended on him lived lavishly. He liberalized Iranian society, dropping Islamic restrictions on women’s dress and education, bringing western cultural trends and consumer goods into the country, and generally “westernizing” the nation.
The Shah joined the U.S. in opposing Soviet plans in the region. He bought billions in western weapons. Tens of thousands of CIA and other U.S. intelligence officials worked out of Tehran, and the Shah opposed Arab nationalist movements throughout the region. In the words of U.S. diplomat and war criminal Henry Kissinger, the Shah “was for the U.S. the rarest of leaders, an unconditional ally.”
Needless to say, in some ways his rule infuriated many Iranians. Although some layers of the urban middle class benefitted from the prosperity at the top and social and educational liberalization, millions in the working class and millions in the rural areas were more connected to traditional Islamic culture. It was a type of state-managed capitalist society, with a repressive police apparatus imposing order on the mass of the population.
1979 Islamic Revolution
Throughout this period and despite the significant repressive capabilities under the Shah, oppositional groups did develop. Some came out of the working class and peasantry and were leftist in orientation. These included groups like the Mojahedin and Fedayeen who were inspired by other movements of armed struggle such as the Chinese Revolution, the Cuban Revolution and the Vietnamese liberation movement. Tragically, because of this orientation they took the route of guerilla resistance and cut themselves off from the larger working class struggles that were to develop. Workers themselves did organize and undertake many strikes and other actions beginning in late 1978. They developed Shoras, workers’ councils that sometimes led factory takeovers and functioned as democratic workers’ organizations in individual workplaces and across industries.
Despite the workers’ radical activities, Islamist ideas and actors became the most visible leaders of the opposition to the Shah and imperialism. Their message was not just religious and social, it also had a political-economic component. They told Iranians, especially the poor and working class, that their Islam was not a conservative force that would keep conditions the same, but instead was a revolutionary faith that pushed towards justice and brotherhood for all Iranian Muslims. And they explicitly denounced British and U.S. imperialism.
The Islamists thus became the leaders of the 1979 revolutionary movement. It was they who claimed leadership of the mass workers movement and other upsurges that forced the Shah from power in early 1979 and it was they who instigated and benefitted from the takeover of the U.S. embassy and the nationalist sentiments that it stoked.
Only days after the Shah fled and the Islamists took power, they began to crack down on the workers’ movement that had helped bring them to power. Workers’ organizations and strikes were labeled “un-Islamic,” and oil workers in particular were told directly by the new leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, that they had to “serve your country, Islam and the Koran.” A force of Revolutionary Guards was created to protect the new Islamic Republic, and they became a new repressive force for the Islamists much like SAVAK had been for the Shah. Workers and the poor and unemployed were among its targets.
The new regime did nationalize the oil industry, effectively removing the British, U.S. and other foreign imperialists who had exploited and used Iran for nearly 80 years. But it maintained the capitalist mode of production as before, and repressed workers’ organizations and activity much like the Shah had done.
Today, Imperialist Aggression Remains
In today’s Iran, the economic situation appears to be worse than it has been in decades, with declining oil revenues, high rates of inflation, and high unemployment and poverty. Millions of Iranians remember the 2022 protests for women’s rights and the violent repression of that movement by the authorities. Clearly, the masses of Iranian people, especially the working and middle classes, are unhappy with the Islamist leadership on many levels, and many would be happy to see the regime end.
The Islamist regime in Iran also has complex relationships in Middle Eastern and global economics and politics. Iran stands to a greater or lesser degree with all Arab nations in its hostility to the Zionist and U.S.-agent state of Israel. It has provided material and political support to Hezbollah, the Islamist political and military group in Lebanon, against Israel. Despite a history of frequent conflicts, Iran is now Iraq’s main trading partner and ally against ISIS. Iran and Saudi Arabia have a complex history of conflict and détente, heavily influenced by differing interpretations of Islam in their populations. Until the recent political revolution in Syria, Iran was a major supporter of the government there. Globally, Iran generally aligns with Chinese and Russian imperialism against U.S. and European imperialism. It has dealt with U.S. sanctions, including the oil embargo, by expanding its oil trade with China.
But on June 13, Israel attacked Iran with strikes on Iranian nuclear and military facilities as well as targeted assassinations of Iranian military leadership and nuclear scientists. This attack began a round of open warfare that brought the United States into the conflict. Most likely, this was Israel’s intention, and the Trump regime eagerly used the conflict as an excuse to conduct strikes on some of Iran’s primary nuclear facilities.
The Islamic regime will try to use these attacks to muster nationalist feelings among the Iranian people. The aggressors in this case are part of a long line of imperialist interventions in Iran dating back at least 125 years. During that time, first Britain, and then the United States, and now the United States and Israel have been the faces of imperialism. The British and United States controlled and then demanded protection of oil production and profits for decades. They carried out a coup and then supported an unpopular dictator for more than 25 years. And when a political revolution overthrew that dictator, the United States and other imperialist powers did what they could to isolate and weaken Iran, including denying it the right to develop nuclear power.
The people of Iran are besieged by hostile imperialist powers using military might and Islamophobia to subjugate them. They have a right to stand against foreign forces of aggression. How this will affect their willingness to organize against and challenge the current Islamist leadership remains to be seen.
