Ayatollah Khomeini – and his successor Khameni – were not the products of the 1979 revolution, but the counter-revolution that followed.
 

The Shah ruled Iran on behalf of the Western imperialists. He acted as the USA’s gendarme in the Persian Gulf, and his vast army and bureaucracy were maintained at the masses’ expense.

He brutally repressed national minorities who make up half of Iran’s population. But the Shah’s social base was weak beyond the large caste of civil servants. In particular, the working class, created by his industrialisation programme, hated him.
 

In 1977 there were 2.5 million industrial workers in Iran, with about one-third concentrated in large plants. Price rises and growing poverty fuelled 60 major strikes between 1975 and 1977, which faced brutal repression.
 

In 1978 a rolling general strike took place, kicked off by Abadan’s oil workers. One and half million workers were on strike by late 1978 and stayed out until the Shah’s overthrow.
 

The workers formed strike committees. The key influence at this stage came not from Islamic clerics but the Stalinist Tudeh Party. The strike committees grew into workers’ councils – shoras – that could have formed the basis for working class power.
 

But alongside the organised workers another force was crucial to the revolution: the urban poor. Land reform had driven thousands of peasants into the cities, where they often lived as shanty-dwellers. The Shi’ite Muslim clerics had mass support among this layer because the mosques distributed aid to the poor and posed as their “defenders”.
 

As the strikes and mass demonstrations reached a climax, other forces appeared: two guerrilla movements, the Mojahedin and Fedayeen. The Mojahedin were middle-class nationalists, blending Islam with “socialist” measures – while the Fedayeen were left Stalinists.
 

The Stalinist stages theory – which says that an anti-imperialist revolution must include and be led by the “progressive” bourgeoisie – meant that the Tudeh, the Mojahedin and Fedayeen all harboured the fatal illusion that the workers’ advance could co-exist with Khomeini’s rule. None of them forewarned the workers of the dangers of Islamic reaction.
 

From March to August 1979, the left failed to develop the shoras into an independent workers’ government. They were themselves armed – but failed to arm the workers and build independent workers’ militias.
 

Khomeini seized the initiative. The first targets were the shoras, and then the Fedayeen.

Then Khomeini moved against the “liberal bourgeoisie”, represented by prime minister Bani Sadr, who eventually gained the Mojahedin’s support. The Tudeh clung to Khomeini until the bitter end, somehow hoping to “give a scientific framework to Khomeini’s

thoughts”, as Tudeh leader Sadegh told Marxism Today.
Between June 1981 and mid-1982 Khomeini launched a full-scale war on the left, the Mojahedin and Kurdish nationalists. Along with some 20,000 executions, show trials, and the rape and torture of prisoners became the norm.
 

The workers and urban poor made the 1979 revolution. The mullahs hijacked it because the left was politically disarmed by the “stages theory” and an elitist guerrilla strategy. It suffered from a fatal inability to recognise and resist the real project of the Islamic republic. By 1982 the counter-revolution was complete – but it had not been inevitable.