Parvin Ghorayshi: Fred Halliday has suggested in the chapter on agricultural development in the first edition of his book, Iran: Dictatorship and Development, that the Iranian state successfully imposed capitalist relations on the rural areas by means of a land reform. While I agree that rural Iran experienced a growth of capitalist relations as a result of land reform, I cannot agree that these relations became predominant, as Halliday claims: “In general, one can say that the Iranian countryside is now a capitalist one. Pre-capitalist features must certainly survive: Old cultivation methods, old attitudes and old unreformed ownership patterns do not disappear at once.
Edited text of Tehran Radio interview with Behzad Nabavi, minister of state for executive affairs and chief government spokesman, February 23, 1981:
What practical steps has the government taken to combat inflation?
What you mean in fact is the high cost of living. Incidentally, we have been following this very issue closely in the economic mobilization headquarters for a week now. We have discovered its roots and causes and we are trying to eliminate them.
Text of message by Ayatollah Khomeini on the occasion of Workers’ Day, May 1, 1981, as read by announcer on Tehran Radio:
In the name of God, the compassionate, the merciful. Blessed be Workers Day for the ranks of the valuable workers, for the nation in general and for the oppressed the world over, lt is a national, Islamic and universal duty to mark Workers Day, this backbone of the country’s independence, this [word indistinct] that determines destiny and promotes liberation from dependence and affiliations.
Edited text of lead article in Mojahed (February 12, 1981), the organ of the Mojahedin-e Khalq:
Having celebrated the second anniversary of the revolution, we are at the brink of the third year. The anniversary of the revolution and the days of Bahman remind us of…the days of great victories and finally the days of the magnificent armed uprising of the masses and the eventual overthrow of the mercenary and puppet regime of the Shah and the shameful and sinister system of monarchy…. But looking back to the events and changes of the past two years, present conditions bring a feeling of pity and show how great hopes have widely turned into hopelessness….
Barry Rubin, Paved with Good Intentions: The American Experience in Iran (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980).
Fereidun Keshavarz was elected to the Tudeh politburo at the Party’s first congress in 1942. He was elected to the Iranian parliament in 1944 and in 1946 served as minister of in the short-lived government of Prime Minister Qavam. In 1958 he resigned from the Tudeh politburo and central committee. He met with Fred Halliday in Geneva on March 14, 1980 for this interview.
How do you evaluate the strength of the Tudeh Party in the 1940s, and how do you account for its popularity at that time?
Abdulrahman Qassemlu is secretary-general of the Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP) in Iran. He is the author of Kurdistan and the Kurds (7965) and Problems of Economic Growth in the Developing Countries (1969). From 1960 to 1975 he taught at the Ecole Superieure d’Economie in Prague. He met with Fred Halliday in Europe in February 1981 for this interview.
The Islamic authorities now ruling Iran insist that they, and they alone, made the revolution which overthrew the Shah. What role, in your view, did the Kurdish people of Iran play in the revolution of 1978-1979?
Former President Jimmy Carter’s announcement of economic sanctions against Iran on April 7, 1980 aroused little enthusiasm except in Tehran, where crowds roared their approval of a formal break in ties with the “great Satan.” At home, hadn’t the freeze of Iranian assets, the longshoremen’s refusal to load Iran-bound goods, and the November ban on Iranian oil imports already reduced trade between the two countries to a trickle? In Europe, foreign ministers meeting in Lisbon on April 10 declined to heed Carter’s call. The Europeans, and the Japanese, had a stake in maintaining economic ties to the new regime. Western Europe as a whole was importing 650,000 barrels of Iranian oil a day.
Workers, bazaar merchants and artisans, farmers, salaried officials and professionals — all expected that the departure of the Shah would mean better economic conditions for themselves and the Iranian people. At the very least, funds that had been diverted into corruption or used to purchase expensive and extravagant weapons systems and showcase projects would be made available to meet real needs. As things now stand, the government of the Islamic Republic faces considerable popular dissatisfaction because these expectations have not been fulfilled, and the standard of living of many Iranians has, in fact, fallen since the revolution.
Shirin Tehrani is an independent Iranian socialist who has lived most of the post-revolutionary period inside Iran and spoke with Fred Halliday in Europe in late April 1981.
There has been much attention here on the dispute within the regime between the faction around President Bani-Sadr, and that around Prime Minister Raja’i and the Islamic Republican Party (IRP). lt is very difficult to gauge the course of this contest from the outside. How has it developed in recent months?
“Was it not your KGB which indirectly passed on to us the secret plan for the Iraqi offensive?” President Bani-Sadr’s point-blank question clearly embarrassed the Soviet ambassador. Vladimir Vinogradov lapsed into an embarrassed silence but his face was lit by a smile which was as broad as it was enigmatic. The Iranian head of state had pointed out that the invasion of the Islamic Republic, which had begun more than 36 hours before his conversation with the diplomat, followed a scenario described in detail in a report given to him weeks previously. Who but the Kremlin, he wondered, could have access to the plans of Baghdad’s general staff?
The Iranian revolution is well into its third year. It has been difficult from the outside to follow the complex course of recent political developments there, but it is clear that Iran’s future will be determined for years or decades ahead by the balance of political forces that comes out of the intensifying struggle. With this issue we have tried to provide several glimpses of the situation there, relying as much as possible on accounts of persons who have observed it close at hand.
Richard E. Morgan, Domestic Intelligence: Monitoring Dissent in America (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1980).
Enid Hill, Mahkama! Studies in the Egyptian Legal System (London: Ithaca Press, 1980).
Enid Hill has produced an unusual and important contribution to understanding the political economy of modern Egypt. Her book, clear and easy to follow, adopts an anthropological approach to the study of the Egyptian legal system. She shows how the poor, the lower middle class, and the rich get what they can out of this structure. Hill treats “the legal system of Egypt as a modern system in its own right,” what she calls the law of a periphery capitalist formation, following the earlier work of Hossam Issa and others dealing more generally with Egypt and the world market.
MEMORANDUM OF CONVERSATION
DATE AND TIME: June 15, 1975 12:15 to 2:35 pm
PLACE: Suite 311, Hotel Pierre, New York City
SUBJECT: Meeting with Jewish Leaders (Klutznik Group)
Kissinger: First of all, I want you to know how much I appreciate your taking off on the weekend to come here.
Saleh Baransi was born in 1929, finished elementary school in his village of Tayba, and went to Jerusalem in 1944 to continue his secondary studies. In 1952, he was appointed a teacher in a secondary school in Tayba. In 1957 he was one of the founders of the Popular Front, which was established in Israel to defend the human and civil rights of Arabs in Israel. In 1958 this Popular Front split, and some participants established a new national movement called al-Ard. In 1960 Saleh was dismissed from his job as a teacher, and from 1960 to 1969 was put under house arrest. During this period he was also put under administrative detention several times and exiled from his home to other places inside Israel.
Fred Halliday’s comments on the debate that constitutes the bulk of Towards a Socialist Republic of Palestine (1978) require a serious Palestinian response. Unwittingly, perhaps, Halliday’s comments tend to undermine this debate, and put a damper on Palestinian intellectual and passionate explorations of genuinely democratic options to their undemocratic, persistent and oppressive predicament.
The discussion of socialist strategy in Palestine recorded in Towards a Socialist Republic of Palestine has lost none of its pertinence despite the fact that it was recorded some time ago, in 1976. Sadat’s initiatives have not yet revised the basic terms in which the problem has been set since 1948. The refugees remain in the camps, and new bands of Jewish settlers are entrenching themselves on the West Bank.
The question of Palestine has consistently been of great importance to our work ever since the first issue of MERIP Reports was published ten years ago, in May 1971. More recently, in our introduction to “The PLO at the Crossroads” (July-August 1979), we wrote that MERIP is interested “in encouraging further efforts to evaluate specific conditions at any given time and appreciate their implications for Palestinian strategy.” Reports since then have discussed the impact of Camp David on Palestinians in the occupied territories ("Palestinians Confront the Treaty," December 1979) and examined aspects of the current crises in Israeli society (“Israel’s Uncertain Future,” November-December 1980).
A number of theorists have recently put forth the notion of a “new international division of labor” in which the old colonial division of labor involving Third World exports of raw materials and imports of finished goods has been transcended. [1] According to this thesis, Third World countries have been industrialized to produce cheap labor-intensive manufacturing goods for export to the core capitalist countries in exchange for more advanced capital-intensive imports. The proponents of the new division of labor argue that this process reflects the new world capitalist rationality and logic.
