Time To Revisit `A People's History of Iran' Again: Part 5

(All the 2012 GOP and Democratic presidential candidates in the USA—except for Ron Paul—apparently support the U.S. government’s current policy of waging economic warfare and covert war against people in Iran and threatening people in Iran with an overt US/Israeli military attack in 2012. Yet most people in the United States know little about the history of people in Iran since foreign imperialist powers began undemocratically and illegally intervening in its internal political and economic affairs in the late 1800s. But here's part 5 of "A People's History of Iran," from a few years ago--bf).

In 1927 a second congress of the repressed Persian Communist Party [PCP] was held and PCP activists decided to work underground for the following aims in Iran:

1. elimination of Iranian monarchy and rejection of an Iranian “bourgeois” parliamentary republic;
2. national rights for all nationalities within Iran;
3. a new army of workers and peasants for Iran;
4. confiscation of all installations of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company in Iran;
5. abolition of foreign concessions in Iran;
6. establishment of agricultural lending banks;
7. surrender of all Iranian religious endowments and Iranian big estates to Iranian peasants;
8. confiscate the property of the Shah of Iran, the Iranian aristocracy and Iranian tribal chieftains; and
9. abolish all debts owned by the Iranian peasants.

The following specific political demands were also made by the Second Congress of the PCP in 1927:

1. full freedom for Iranian labor unions and Iranian political organizations;
2. Iranian government recognition of labor unions;
3. free speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of the press and the right to strike be established in Iran;
4. collective bargaining and contract rights for labor unions in Iran;
5. establishment of a minimum wage in Iran; and
6. housing be provided for Iranian workers in the oil and fishing industries.

Two years after this 1927 PCP Congress, oil industry workers in the Khuzistan area of Iran went on strike. But by 1931, Reza Shah Pahlavi’s regime had formally outlawed even more extensively the PCP and the PCP’s front groups under the June 1931 Anti-Communist Act. So by the end of 1931, around 150 Iranian communist activists were being held in the Reza Shah Pahlavi regime’s prisons. Yet between 1933 and 1937 a discussion group of left intellectuals in Iran, led by Dr. Taghi Erani, was still able to start and publish abroad, in Europe, a theoretical journal, titled Donya (‘Universe”), to promote the democratization of Iranian society. (end of part 5)