Hands Off the People of Iran

Khomeini and the clergy completely outmanoeuvred the left. But it need not have been that way. In his second and concluding article on the role of oil workers in the 1979 revolution, Peyman Jafari stresses the complex nature of ideology and class consciousness

On January 12 1979, two weeks after the Oil Strikes Coordinating Committee (OSCC) started its activities, ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini ordered the establishment of the Council of the Islamic Revolution. He declared that it “included competent and committed Muslims” who had to “study and explore the conditions for a transitional government and take the first preparations for its establishment, form a constitutive assembly and hold elections.”¹

Without the OSCC taking over one of the state’s key functions – oil production – the Council of the Islamic Revolution would have lacked the authority to function as an alternative pole of power. This was made quite explicit by the liberal Islamist, Mehdi Bazargan, when he advised Khomeini to call on the management of the oil company to cooperate with the OSCC, so that Khomeini, “despite the shah and his government, would seize control over the state apparatus and state employees”.²

The management of the oil strikes played a much more organic role in the emergence of the third institution of revolutionary power: ie, the neighbourhood committees that were later transformed into the Committees of the Islamic Revolution. Given a shortage of kerosene, which was widely used for heating and cooking, the need to organise the distribution of fuel among the population was an urgent task that gave rise to the neighbourhood committees.

Following a week of intense negotiations between the OSCC and the strikers, oil started to flow from the depots of the Abadan refinery to Tehran on January 6 1979. The shortages continued, however, and the engineer, Abolfazl Hakimi, was sent to the distribution organisation of the National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC) to take care of fuel distribution. In mid-January, the “employees of the distribution organisation of NIOC” called on “clerics” and “patriotic groups” to help organise “fuel distribution committees”.³

Initiatives

This was another missed opportunity to establish – through the existing infrastructure of the oil industry – a national organisation that could have linked the oil strikes and working class communities. At the time of the revolution, the oil industry had over 2,000 fuel outlets in the cities and more than 10,000 in rural areas. These were strategic points, around which the distribution of fuel and other activities, particularly in Tehran, could have been organised by the workers of the NIOC.

But in the absence of an independent national organisation and strategy, the NIOC’s distribution organisation played a subordinated role, taking their orders from the OSCC. Hakimi asked the local clerics to come up with a list of “active and trustworthy young people”, who were subsequently gathered in a mosque and instructed. Within two weeks, almost all neighbourhoods in Tehran had established their “distribution committees”, which distributed the available fuel.

During the winter, the distribution of oil became the central point around which everyday forms of solidarity were formed, as locals helped the needy and the youth queued for the elderly. Others took the initiative to coordinate the oil distribution, but this quickly gravitated towards the mosques, as there were no alternative centres of coordination. On January 3, for instance, a telegraph from Savak, the shah’s secret police, reported that the head of NIOC in Hamedan was refusing to provide oil to Savak.⁴ But, as Farhad Khosrokhavar wrote at the time, the Hamedan committee was from its inception directed by clerics, while in Tehran and most other places the committees expressed “a popular will” and were not initially dominated by Islamists.⁵

A young man told a Kayhan reporter in Tehran:

From the day that the fuel shortages started, we, the youth of the neighbourhood, got together to do something about it, so this problem wouldn’t be added to those we already had. We made some carts and went to the houses and asked for their containers and we also convinced the fuel seller that it was better to delegate the distribution to us rather than have long queues.⁶

On January 4, a stunned Savak agent in Tehran telephoned the following report to his commander:

A number of Khomeini supporters have taken initiatives to distribute fuel among needy people of the neighbourhood. A number of these distribution [teams] have been observed and they claim that the distribution of fuel has been ordered by Khomeini.⁷

Similar reports poured in from other cities. In Isfahan, a Savak agent reported that ordinary people were protecting the gas stations and distributing fuel.⁸ In his memoirs, Emadaldin Baqi provides another example, when describing his reaction to the tensions that arose among people queuing for fuel: “I went to the mosque, thought a bit and concluded that we should gather the kids in the mosque and create an organisation to take the distribution of fuel into our own hands.”⁹ The neighbourhood youth organised, with the guidance of the local clerics, the door-to-door distribution of fuel, giving it away for free to those who had been identified as low-income families. As an offshoot of fuel distribution, some local youth developed other activities, such as the control of prices, the provision of urgent healthcare and armed defence in a neighbourhood committee.¹⁰

Another report explicitly mentions the Islamic neighbourhood committees and “cooperatives” that started distributing fuel in eight poor neighbourhoods, from where they spread to other places.¹¹ The youth in Narmak, for instance, divided the town into districts around a fuel distribution centre. Each district issued to every household a coupon that had the stamp of the district, and mentioned the number of times and the dates on which they could collect their share. In other places, the fuel was taken door to door.¹²

For many Islamist activists, the neighbourhood committees that were organised around fuel distribution had an explicit aim: to counter the left influence in the oil industry. Saeed Jalili – now a leading politician among Iran’s Islamist hardliners – recalls:

At the height of the revolution and also afterwards, the neighbourhood committees played an important role in serving the people’s needs … Revolutionaries gathered in mosques and created coupons … At that time, Marxism had many followers and, just as liberalism is defined by civil society, the slogan of Marxism was based on the shoras [councils]. This slogan was everywhere; there were student shoras, workers’ shoras, etc … In this situation, the neighbourhood committee, with at its centre the mosque, came as a ‘slap in the face’ and a harsh reply to [the Marxists].”¹³

The Committees of the Islamic Revolution that were established after February 1979 drew their members from the pool of volunteers who coalesced around the fuel distributing neighbourhood committees.¹⁴ Bringing together Islamist activists at neighbourhood level, these committees were an essential step in consolidating the political power of the supporters of Khomeini.

However, while political control over the production and distribution of oil was increasingly taken over by Khomeini and his allies, practical control over oil production was still in the hands of the oil workers. Confronted with the attempts of Khomeini and Bazargan to take control of the strikes, the oil strike leaders continued publishing statements and tried to gain a stronger position. On January 16, they announced: “Oil workers are a part of Iranian working class and the greatest ally of progressive, anti-despotic and anti-imperialistic strata.” They added: “Considering the decisive role of workers – especially workers in the oil industry – throughout the anti-despotic struggles, the future government is obligated to consider the interests of the working class.” Less than two weeks before the fall of the regime, a group of oil workers declared that a workers’ representative should be included on the Council of the Islamic Revolution, whose membership had not yet been disclosed by Khomeini. They stated:

Just as workers have played a crucial role in the current revolutionary situation, they should participate the day after the revolution when it is time for genuine construction; this is only possible by workers’ participation in the political affairs of the country. The first step would be taken by participation of a workers’ representative on the revolutionary council.¹⁵

Without an independent national organisation, however, the oil workers lacked the political weight to put pressure behind their demand. As the pro-Khomeini forces gradually took over the oil strikes, the tensions with the left increased. In Ahwaz, a number of clerics intervened to restrict the independence of the strike committee and the role of secular oil workers’ representatives, prompting the resignation of Mohammad Javad Khatami, the leading representative of the production units.

In an open letter (January 21), he accused “reactionary” clerics of making death threats against him and other representatives who did not agree with their “reactionary ideology”. He also criticised the OSCC for acting beyond its duties of “inspection and supervision” of the oil strikes and sidelining the strike committee, leaving local affairs to a number of “not progressive” clerics instead of appointing a group to mediate between the oil strikers and the OSCC, as was originally called for.¹⁶

The fact that, despite the increasing repression after February 1979, the committees in the oil industry remained functioning is testimony to the organisation and class consciousness that oil workers developed during their strikes. A few months after the fall of the shah, the journalist and future Pulitzer Prize winner, Kai Bird, who had interviewed oil workers, wrote:

The oil industry is virtually controlled by dozens of independent worker komitehs, which, though loyal to the central government, are nevertheless participating in all the decisions related to the production and marketing of Iranian oil to the western industrial world. Perhaps even more significant, the worker komitehs have unquestionably demonstrated that they can run the oilfields and refineries without their top-rank Iranian managers and without the expertise of some 800 foreign technicians …¹⁷

This situation was not tolerated by the post-revolutionary leaders, as they consolidated power. The committees in the oil industry and elsewhere were repressed and weakened after Iraq invaded south-western Iran in August 1980, and were officially banned early in 1982.

Class consciousness

The fate of the oil strikes poses an important question: why didn’t oil workers create a network with political autonomy and the organisational capacity to coordinate at the national level in order to project their power beyond the workplace, instead of accepting a subordinate role to that of Khomeini and the OSCC? This question can best be answered by looking at the development of class consciousness within the triangular relationship between the oil workers, the wider labour struggles and the revolutionary movement.

To begin with labour struggles in general, it should be noted that these were seriously hindered by the dominance of small-sized enterprises in an economy with a workforce of 8.8 million. In 1976, 43% of the 719,000 wage earners and unpaid family workers in the manufacturing sector were employed in small establishments (under 10 workers) and these were mostly unskilled.¹⁸ While taking part in demonstrations, most of these workers did not participate in the revolution as a distinct collective. But “at the same time there was a significant portion of the working class that was skilled and concentrated in large enterprises of the private sector and particularly the state sector”, which did have a great capacity for collective action.¹⁹

In 1976, only 11% of private manufacturing units employed more than 100 workers. Moreover, the majority of the 566,000 workers employed by the state were concentrated in a few major cities and in a number of large enterprises. Thus, as in many other developing countries, on one end of the working class there were a large number of workers merging into the petty bourgeoisie, who were mainly active in retail and small-scale production, while at the other end there was a concentration of industrial workers.

The oil workers in particular exhibited a significant capacity for collective action, as we have seen, and hence they took a leading position within the strike movement that developed in the fall of 1978.²⁰ Although no significant solidarity networks existed among the workers of the oil industry and other sectors, these started to develop during the strikes. In Ahwaz and Abadan, oil workers’ organised in solidarity with striking teachers – solidarity that was reciprocated.²¹ The Society of the Employees of the Planning and Budget Organisation issued solidarity statements thanking the oil workers for “blocking the exit of the nation’s wealth towards imperialism and for achieving freedom for us”.²² Particularly in Tehran, striking workers looked to oil workers for leadership, shouting “our oil worker, our determined leader” at various demonstrations.

But it was not until a week before the fall of the monarchy that striking workers started to meet in order to “strengthen their organisation, increase solidarity and promote workers’ consciousness in order to serve their class interests”. More than 100 representing auto, oil and electrical unions gathered on February 3 in Tehran, denouncing the dismissal of factory workers, demanding the inclusion of a workers’ representative in the Council of the Islamic Revolution, and discussing the formation of a workers’ solidarity council.²³

Thus oil workers were well positioned to play a more independent – and leading – role within the labour struggles and the wider revolutionary movement, but the question is, why did this possibility not materialise? Pointing to ‘objective’ conditions is not sufficient, as both the oil workers’ position within the class structure and the physical characteristics of the oil industry enabled them to launch mass strikes and develop organisations of their own. The real issue was the lack of political independence, which leads us to look at the oil workers’ subjectivity. As EP Thompson argued, “class consciousness” is shaped by “class experience” – a process that is culturally mediated. Moreover, working class formation is an “active process, which owes as much to agency as to conditioning”.²⁴

From this perspective, there is no teleological development from working class experience to a specific form of class consciousness, which is contingent on the mediating role of culture and human agency. For the same reason, the expectation that oil workers would develop a (secular or socialist) class consciousness that led them to challenge both the monarchy and remain independent from the clerical and bazaari opposition is based on a flawed premise. What I argue instead is the possibility of this trajectory. My strategy for developing this argument is a critical dialogue with Asef Bayat’s ‘Historiography, class and Iranian workers’, which provides the most sophisticated account of the development of class consciousness in Iran before and during the revolution.

Bayat argues that “we must start not from the structure and ‘objective interests’ to arrive at class consciousness, but from the language of the class to characterise its political movement”.²⁵ From this perspective, he analyses the Iranian revolution: “Islam serves as a central element in articulating working class consciousness in Iran” by spreading a “populist ideology … that works against the development of class consciousness and the idea of class division in society”. This could happen because “the ruling clergy shared an Islamic language with the workers, albeit with a populist content”.²⁶

Although this is a welcome corrective to the Eurocentric and structuralist analyses of class, it bends too much towards the reified notion of language advocated by Gareth Stedman Jones and other critics of EP Thompson, and privileges too much the Islamic discourse in the revolution. Acknowledging the importance of language, Marc Steinberg argues that class consciousness is not a discourse, but emerges “through the friction of discourses produced in struggle”.²⁷ From this perspective, the populist discourse in the Iranian revolution was not simply present in Islamic culture or texts, but was crafted within the context of concrete struggles, and in competition with other discourses. These discourses do not simply reflect different “class experiences”: they are constitutive to the formation of class consciousness.

“Working class formation is,” as Zachary Lockman summarises, “as much a discursive as a material process.”²⁸ Applying this approach, and focusing on the process of representation and recognition in class formation, Touraj Atabaki has shown how a distinct class identity took form among oil workers in the aftermath of World War I.²⁹ The formation of a working class consciousness, with the oil workers at its core, matured during the 1940s. In the following two decades, however, shifts in the economy, politics and culture led to a significant class reformation. As Bayat argues, the massive rural-urban migration of the 1960s created a new generation of workers who lacked industrial and urban experience:

Yet from the 1970s things started to change. By this time, the new workers of the 1960s had acquired a fair amount of experience in industrial work and urbanism … The result was the development of an ‘industrial consciousness’ that derived its elements from an industrial setting, an urban lifestyle and industrial work. This industrial consciousness manifested itself in a series of demands and covert strikes in the mid-1970s … Beyond industrial awareness, the workers also developed a more general form of class consciousness in terms of the expression of identity and differentiation.³⁰

A few pages further, however, Bayat argues that the diversity of workers did not lead to “common non-work experiences among them”. But, “whatever their differences,” he continues, they “do share a common religion: Islam”. Even if we discard the fact that the experience of religious practices varied among Iranian workers, it remains a fact that both their industrial and urban experiences and the Islamic culture shaped workers’ consciousness. The dominance of the populist Islamic discourse, however, must be explained through an approach that sees language both as a constitutive element and an outcome of class struggle in and outside the workplace.

Ideology

“Islam,” Bayat correctly argues, “was reinterpreted by the industrial workers to express their own immediate and class interests.” But this statement underestimates the importance of the distinction between individuals’ immediate awareness of action and their more general world views.

The role of ideology, its intellectual producers and organisational expression are essential in the formation of class consciousness. Islamic populism was crafted by figures such as Ali Shariati, who articulated grievances against social inequality, repressive domestic politics and foreign domination through a language that mixed Islamic and Marxist vocabulary. Many of the oil workers I have interviewed referred to the influence of his ideas, which they knew through publications or the talks he gave at the Abadan Technical Institute in the late 1960s and early 1970s. While Shariati was anti-clerical, Khomeini formulated a populist version of Islam that assigned a revolutionary role to the clerics. Both men formulated their populist discourse in reaction and competition with leftist discourses.

While anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist, the dominant left discourse of this period, however, was not geared towards the articulation and political translation of “class experience”, but rather focused on notions of individual sacrifice and courage connected to guerrilla warfare. This discourse, therefore, did not help workers to articulate a world view and a practice that linked their day-to-day conditions and struggles with those in society at large. Guerrillaism was a strategic choice rather than an inevitable response to repression and surveillance. This is illustrated, for instance, by the alternative path taken by the Revolutionary Workers’ Organisation of Iran, which managed to organise a few hundred members and sympathizers and create a few chapters in a number of important workplaces in the late 1960s, until it was rounded up by Savak in 1971.³¹

When the oil strikes developed, one could find these different discourses among workers. Interviewing Abadan oil workers, one journalist observed:

Most of the oil workers are devout, practising Muslims, but of the anti-clerical kind that believe that a religious movement which began with the uncompromising demand for the removal of the shah will not end until the religion itself undergoes radical change. “We give Khomeini due respect for so stubbornly refusing to compromise with the shah,” said a boilermaker in the Abadan refinery. “But after all, Dr Shariati wrote this revolution. Khomeini only led it” … “We are not going to be slaves to these machines,” says a young welder. “… in an Islamic Republic, the community and not consumption is the goal.”³²

Most oil workers who supported Khomeini were not so much attracted to his theology, but to his uncompromising political strategy. Khomeini’s establishment of the OSCC gave him even more credit in this respect.

Thus, for many oil workers sympathising with Shariati’s or Khomeini’s Islamic populism, political independence did not seem necessary at first, although some clashed with the post-revolutionary state when it started attacking the workers’ committees. Among these groups “a minority of workers who embraced some form of socialism emerged in the final stage of the revolutionary struggles and played a leading role”.³³ This was particularly the case in the oil industry, where more than a third of the members of the elected Ahwaz strike committee were leftwingers, and nine of the 14 members of the council of the Common Syndicate of the Employees of the Oil Industry were secular leftwingers (the four others were Islamic leftwingers). But, even among them, the idea of independent organisation and strategy was not a priority for ideological reasons.

Though both populist and the industrial consciousness were present among oil workers, their specific combination was in flux during the revolution, but the former became increasingly dominant. The dialectics between the struggles outside and inside the workplace was decisive here. Before and during the strikes, many oil workers participated or were influenced by the street demonstrations, dominated by the slogans of Islamic populism, but its influence did not only come from the outside. In the Tehran refinery, many of the workers were recent migrants from rural areas and had worked and lived in the areas closely linked to the Tehran bazaar and its mosques. But it is important to note that the mosque-bazaar network was not an organisational resource in the hands of Khomeini and his supporters from the outset. As Charles Kurzman has argued, the pro-Khomeini forces fought a political battle for hegemony within this network, and only after they had achieved it could they use it as a gear wheel to mobilise mass demonstrations.³⁴

To use the same analogy, the oil industry provided a potentially valuable resource for mass mobilisations that could have given direction to the whole revolutionary movement, as the establishment of the OSCC demonstrated. If before the revolution the left had developed a discourse that articulated workers’ experiences in terms of class and if it had created a stronger organisational presence that could have steered the oil strikes towards political autonomy, the oil workers might have influenced the outcome of the Iranian revolution.

Despite weak organisation, the secular left had a good potential of playing a much bigger role in the coordination of the oil strikes, given its historical ties to the oil workers (Tudeh Party), the guerrilla movement resurrecting the left’s popularity and prestige (Fedayeen), and the left-leaning university graduates joining the ranks of white-collar workers – a potential that failed to become a reality mainly for ideological reasons.

Far from speculative, such an approach acknowledges the “inadequacy of confining our inquiry to the immediate and present world of the people interacting”:

Otherwise, we would be bound to deterministic explanations of interaction relying on initial resources and game-theoretic algorithms that rob interaction of its specific content. If, however, we accept that interactions are contingent, that how they turn out is not the only way they could have turned out, or that their effects might spill over the boundaries of people obviously interacting, we need a way to understand the real potential of interactions. Further, the space of interactions is itself shaped by larger, historical institutional developments, which cannot, in turn, be understood without reference to political projects and attempts to form hegemonic coherence.³⁵

Conclusion

The salient role of oil workers in the Iranian revolution invites us to revise a number of dominant interpretations of the relationship between oil and politics, and of the outcome of the Iranian revolution. Our understanding of the former was enormously advanced with the publication of Timothy Mitchell’s Carbon democracy, which focuses on the mediating role of labour between oil and politics and argues that the oil industry’s material characteristics deprive oil workers of the potential for large-scale mobilisations that can successfully challenge authoritarian rule. The general applicability of this claim, I believe, should be nuanced in light of the experience of the Iranian revolution.³⁶

A second revision concerns the influential reading of the Iranian revolution itself, which stressed the role of Shia Islam among the subaltern classes as an important factor explaining the ability of Khomeini and his supporters to become hegemonic within the revolutionary movement. Without ignoring the role of religion, my account of this process demonstrates the role of political strategising and organising as a key factor. The creation of the OSCC had little to do with religion: rather it was a political and strategic intervention in the oil strikes that enabled Khomeini and his allies to get hold of a key link in the chain of developments, with which they could steer the entire revolutionary movement into their desired direction. In contrast to Khomeini’s bold initiative, the oil workers failed to create a strong national organisation that could coordinate the local strikes and represent them effectively in negotiations.

As a result, Khomeini and the liberal religious groups took advantage of this vacuum and launched the OSCC to direct the oil strikes, which helped them to establish the Council of the Islamic Revolution as an authoritative alternative to the old state. Without a national organisation through which they could coordinate with other strikers, the oil workers did not have the leverage to demand a bigger role in the emerging political structures, let alone vie for political power.

Finally, the popular committees that emerged in the neighbourhoods were not linked to the workplace struggles, but instead became incorporated by the mosques and clerics. Here again, oil workers were well positioned to initiate, direct or influence the neighbourhood committees, because of the role of fuel in everyday life. The physical structures of oil production, distribution and consumption could function as the veins and capillaries that reached deep into society, allowing the oil workers to exert organisational and ideological influence well beyond their numbers.

Thus the history of the relationship between oil and politics, and its role in the Iranian revolution, appears to be more contingent or fluid than we might expect. The Islamist forces around Khomeini might have failed to take full control of the oil strikes if their ideological discourse and political organisation had been challenged more effectively by alternative discourses and organisations that stressed the autonomy of workers. As Eric Selbin observes,

… what was so revolutionary about the Iranian revolution … was the palpable sense of possibility, the opportunity to create a new world or perhaps a return to a Gold one, regardless of whether there had ever been just such an age before.³⁷

He rightly stresses: “… revolutions, as with history, are made by people”, but, “as Karl Marx suggests, not necessarily under the circumstances of their own choosing.” The Iranian revolution was made by what its protagonists deemed possible, but also by the choices they did not make.

p.jafari@uva.nl

Peyman Jafari is a historian and a contributor to the International Socialism journal

First published in the Weekly Worker

1. Ettela’at January 13 1979.↩︎
2. ‘Transcript of an interview with Mehdi Bazargan (April-May 1982)’ Asnad-e Nehzat-e Azadi Vol 9, part 3: www.mizankhabar.net/asnad/archive/archive.htm.↩︎
3. Ayandegan January 18 1979.↩︎
4. The Islamic revolution according to Savak documents Vol 23, p122.↩︎
5. F Khosrokhavar, ‘Le comité dans la révolution Iranienne: le cas d’une ville moyenne, Hamadan’ Peuples Méditerranéens No9, October-December 1979, p89.↩︎
6. Kayhan January 11 1979.↩︎
7. The Islamic revolution according to Savak documents Vol 23, p200.↩︎
8. Ibid Vol 24, p146.↩︎
9. E Baqi Rulers and the subaltern: oral history of the revolution Tehran 2000), p7.↩︎
10. Ayandegan January 14 1979, p3.↩︎
11. ‘Islamic cooperatives’ were set up, often by bazaaris – shop-owners, office workers and students – to provide low-priced necessary products to the poor.↩︎
12. Ayandegan January 15 1979.↩︎
13. Mehrnews August 23 2013: www.mehrnews.com/news/2036830.↩︎
14. ‘Interview with engineer Abolfazl Hakimi’.↩︎
15. M Parsa Social origins of the Iranian revolution: studies in political economy London 1989, pp161-62.↩︎
16. Ayandegan February 1 1979.↩︎
17. K Bird, ‘Iranian oil workers and revolution’ in R Engler (ed) America’s engery: reports from the nation on 100 years of struggle for the democratic control of our resources New York 1980, p235.↩︎
18. F Nomani and S Behdad, Class and labor in Iran: did the revolution matter? New York 2006, p218.↩︎
19. Ibid p101.↩︎
20. A discussion of the reasons for the oil workers’ capacity to strike requires another article, but useful insights can be found in A Ashraf, ‘Anatomy of the revolution: the role of industrial workers in the Iranian revolution’ Goftogu 2010 and P Jafari, ‘Reasons to revolt: Iranian oil workers in the 1970s’ International Labor and Working Class History special issue, 2013.↩︎
21. Ettela’at October 22 1978.↩︎
22. Society of the Employees of the Planning and Budget Organisation, ‘Hail to the dear workers and employees of the oil industry’, IRDC archives, Tehran, December 6 1978.↩︎
23. M Parsa op cit p163.↩︎
24. EP Thompson The making of the English working class London 1980, p8.↩︎
25. A Bayat, ‘Historiography, class and Iranian workers’ in Z Lockman (ed) Workers and working classes in the Middle East: struggles, histories, historiographies New York 1994, p186.↩︎
26. Ibid pp202-03.↩︎
27. MW Steinberg Fighting words: working class formation, collective action and discourse in early 19th century England New York 1999, p230.↩︎
28. Z Lockman, ‘Imagining the working class: culture, nationalism and class formation in Egypt, 1899-1914’ Poetics Today Vol 15, No2 (1994), p158.↩︎
29. T Atabaki, ‘From amaleh to kargar: recruitment, work discipline and making of the working class in the Persian/Iranian oil industry’ International Labor and Working Class History Vol 84, special issue, 2013.↩︎
30. A Bayat op cit pp198-99.↩︎
31. P Vahabzadeh, ‘Saka: Iran’s grassroots revolutionary workers’ organisation’ Revolutionary History Vol 10, No3 (2011).↩︎
32. K Bird op cit pp235-38.↩︎
33. M Parsa States, ideologies and social revolutions: a comparative analysis of Iran, Nicaragua and the Philippines Cambridge 2000, p172.↩︎
34. C Kurzman, The Unthinkable Revolution in Iran Cambridge, Mass 2004, pp44-49.↩︎
35. J Krinsky, ‘Marxism and the politics of possibility: beyond academic boundaries’ in C Barker et al (eds) Marxism and Social Movements Leiden 2013, p120.↩︎
36. For a more elaborate discussion of this point see P Jafari, ‘Linkages of oil and politics: oil strikes and dual power in the Iranian revolution’ Labor History Volume 60, Issue 1 (2019).↩︎
37. E Selbin, ‘What was revolutionary about the Iranian revolution? The power of possibility’ Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East Vol 29, No1 (2009), p36.↩︎

There are rich lessons for today in the experiences of the oil strikes of 1978. In the first of two articles Peyman Jafari charts the incredibly difficult struggle for organisation, hegemony and strategy

“We are melting away,” lamented the shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, on December 26 1978 in a phone tap of a conversation with his advisor and former prime minister, Ali Amini.¹ Although mass demonstrations were creating havoc at the time, his desperation was caused by the strikes in the oil industry. Less than seven weeks later, the monarchy was gone.

Although there are other historical examples of mass mobilisations among oil workers, the oil strikes from September 1978 to February 1979 in Iran are, to my knowledge, the only case that heavily determined the outcome of a revolution. Therefore, this episode provides a particularly interesting opportunity to explore the politics of labour in the oil industry in two ways. One puts politics back into the study of labour in general, and in the oil industry in particular, since it has been often left out following the ‘cultural turn’ in labour studies. The second refers to the importance of putting labour back into politics, as most political science studies have tended to attribute the mediation between oil and national politics solely to the nexus between finance and elites, thus ignoring the agency of labour.

The first part of this article provides a brief summary of the development of the oil strikes prior to the 1979 revolution and demonstrates their paralysing impact on the state apparatus. The second part argues that the oil strikes were a key link in the developments that created revolutionary centres of power that emerged in parallel to the existing state in early 1979 – a situation known as dual power. A detailed history of this episode is provided in order to explain the mechanisms through which the forces around ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini took control of the oil strikes – a strategic move that allowed them to steer the revolutionary movement and determine its outcome.

This latter aspect has received much less attention in the historiography of the Iranian revolution, which has focused more on its causes. Moreover, the outcome of the revolution is often discussed in mere ideological terms – the resonance of Khomeini’s discourse through Shia symbolism² – and focuses on the ‘consolidation’ period following the fall of the monarchy in February 1979. Arguing that the political strategies of the preceding months and the role of the oil strikes in the emergence of dual power were crucial, this article makes a new contribution to the historiography of the Iranian revolution.

Fuelling revolution

On the eve of the revolution, the oil industry was organised around the National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC) and its subsidiaries, plus the Oil Services Company of Iran (Osco), owned by foreign companies, and a number of private subcontractors. The oil industry employed relatively few workers, compared to its production of five to six million barrels a day, but their numbers were still considerable. Around 2.3% of the 3.54 million Iranian workers – 4.5% when those employed by subcontractors are included – worked in the oil industry.³

When the first oil strikes took place in September 1978, a revolutionary movement had already been developing since January, mainly in the form of mass demonstrations. By June, however, the demonstrations had receded and, when they resurfaced in late August during the holy month of Ramadan, they were violently repressed on Bloody Friday (September 8). By then, it looked as if the regime would survive the political crisis, as it had on other occasions. As late as September 28, the prognosis of the US Defence Intelligence Agency was that the shah “is expected to remain actively in power over the next 10 years”.⁴ In the next two months, however, the revolutionary movement acquired a qualitatively different character, as protests spread to workplaces and mass strikes erupted in the major economic sectors.

In the oil industry, the strikes developed in four phases. The first strikes started on September 8 in the Tehran refinery and spread to other refineries and the oilfields of Ahwaz, Gachsaran and Aqajari. This prompted Savak, the shah’s secret police, to report that the oil strikes “have no precedent in recent years; the strikes must have developed among workers in the national oil company very quickly”.⁵ By early October 1978, however, they had subsided after officials made concessions. But a second wave started when oil workers in Abadan staged a sit-in on October 16. These strikes faded in the last two weeks of November, but in the meantime oil workers had become better organised.

At Abadan refinery, the blue-collar workers formed a 13-member strike committee (komiteh-ye hamahangi va nezarat) in late October.⁶ They were in contact with the strike committee of the white-collar workers in Ahwaz, the Association of Oil Industry Staff Employees, consisting of 60 representatives elected from the different offices of the oil company in Ahwaz. A founding member explained the process:

The representatives were not elected by secret ballot. The vote took place in front of everyone. We put up a list on the wall. People came and signed their names next to the name of their preferred candidate. There were usually five or six candidates per position. The first duty of these representatives was to organise the association of professional and office workers. So we called this body the Organising Committee of Oil Industry Employees.⁷

The association was further formalised in the last week of November, with the election of a coordinating committee. In the Tehran refinery, a secret strike committee of blue-collar workers had been active since September, but a new committee including white-collar workers was established in the second week of November. Its 12 representatives were elected from the various refinery departments.⁸ In late November, the Common Syndicate of the Employees of the Iranian Oil Industry was established to represent the blue-collar and white-collar workers in the oil, gas and petrochemical industry, but despite its name it mainly operated in Tehran.

The composition of the strike committees differed from place to place, but often the leading members belonged to or sympathised with the organisations of the left, including the Fedayeen and to a lesser degree the Tudeh Party, or the Islamist leftist People’s Mojahedin. Others were followers of Khomeini or independents. It is notable, however, that when the strikes erupted the presence of the organised left was very weak among the oil workers – state repression had diminished the space for open political activities, which was reinforced and exacerbated by the guerrilla strategy of the main currents of the left.

During the strikes, however, the left recruited new members and increased its influence. In Ahwaz, 35% of the delegates of the strike committee that oil workers had elected in November 1978 were “Marxists”. But, after the fall of the monarchy, the supporters of Khomeini – in coalition with liberal Islamic figures like Mehdi Bazargan, who headed the Provisional Government – manoeuvred to marginalise the left and organised new elections, in which the left gained 15%. According to the same report, only five of the 40 members of the Abadan refinery strike committee were leftwingers at this stage.⁹ It is important to note, however, that most of the Islamist members of the strike committees and later the Islamic shoras (councils) belonged to the ‘left’ faction that supported a form of self-management and thus clashed with the new managers in 1979-81 – a conflict that led to the repression and dissolution of the shoras.

Having established a stronger organisational structure, the oil workers resumed their strike in early December – this time with explicitly political demands that focused on the departure of the shah. Following Khomeini’s call for a general strike on December 2, to coincide with the beginning of the holy month of Moharram, the Common Syndicate issued a call for a general strike in the oil industry. The Abadan refinery took the lead once again, but the strikes spread to the offshore oil platforms and the Ahwaz and Marun oilfields in the following days.¹⁰ In Gachsaran and Aghajari workers were forced to work at bayonet point, but they went on strike at the end of the second week of December. The government’s increased repression in December backfired, as over 6,000 oil workers quit their jobs when officials threatened to dismiss striking workers.¹¹

Demands

The fourth and final phase of the oil strikes that started in the last days of 1978 was not marked by an interlude, but by a qualitative change. While the strike committees of the oil workers had taken control of oil production at the local level, Khomeini set up a committee that took over national coordination of the oil strikes. I will return to discuss this phase, which lasted until the strikes officially ended on February 17 1979, but let us first look at the oil workers’ demands during the strike.

The oil strikes, like any other class-based protest, involved an uneven and complex process of social mobilisation and articulation of demands that depended on various factors, such as one’s position within the labour process, traditions of activism, as well as political, ethnic and religious factors. Oil workers’ propensity to strike differed, of course, but the resulting tensions were usually overcome by persuasion or social pressure.¹² As far as violence was involved, the targets were foreign and Iranian managers and the perpetrators were political activists.¹³

Oil workers had different demands, which shifted from economic to political ones in the context of the revolution and due to the fact that the oil workers’ employer was the state. The claim that oil workers in Iran, as in the rest of the developing world, constituted a “labour aristocracy” ignored the great differences among white-collar and blue-collar workers, the permanent and the contract workers, their harsh working conditions, and their connections to the wider working class communities. The oil workers did not have many acute socioeconomic grievances except rising house prices, but the blue-collar workers intensely resented the structural differences they experienced with white-collar workers.

The latter felt the same about foreign workers, the proportion of which in the total white-collar staff increased from 4% in 1968 to 13% in 1977. Opposition to political repression in the workplace and in wider society, as well as the foreign domination of Iran, also motivated oil workers.¹⁴ By late October 1978, they were demanding among other things an end to martial law, the release of all political prisoners, the Iranianisation of the oil industry, an end to discrimination against female employees, and the dissolution of Savak.¹⁵

Although a full account of the oil strikes still needs to be written, there is no doubt about their crucial role in toppling the monarchy by damaging its revenues and boosting the morale of the opposition. As a journalist predicted at the time, “The survival of the government may well depend on the shah’s ability to put an end to the oil strike before the loss of export oil revenue combines with the effect of other labour disruption to put Iran’s economy in total disarray.”¹⁶ As the strikes continued, both the military and ministries faced fuel shortages.

The oil strikes severely undermined the state’s administrative, financial and repressive capacity, but they had the opposite impact on the revolutionary movement. While the media were strictly censored until November 1978 and did not report on the demonstrations, the oil strikes created fuel shortages that could not remain unnoticed. Most importantly, after the strike of workers in the oil depots near Tehran was announced on national radio on October 21, thousands rushed to petrol stations. “The shortage of fuel creates havoc in Tehran traffic,” read the front page of the widely read daily Ettela’at the next day. For the first time, the official media gave broad coverage to the oil strikes, which helped them take centre stage in the revolutionary discourse and increased the self-confidence of the oil workers.

The fuel shortages intensified in the last weeks of 1978 and in early 1979, creating an acute awareness of the gravity of the crisis that engulfed the state, because an increasing number of Iranians were directly experiencing the consequences – for instance, when queuing for fuel. Thus by targeting a commodity that everyone in Iran considered to be the life-blood of the monarchy and something they depended on in their own everyday life, the oil workers helped to create the sense of what Charles Kurzman has called a “viable” movement – a movement that was perceived as a challenger of the status quo in the consciousness of a broad layer of the population.¹⁷ Given its place in Iranian everyday life, oil was a key transmitter of revolutionary consciousness, which flowed from the sites of production and refining into the households.

Dual power

As we saw earlier, the oil strikes had become more organized and effective by December 1978, causing a massive shortage of fuel by early January 1979. On January 6 1979 Ettela’at reported:

Tehran and most of the provinces are confronted with a shortage of petroleum, gasoline and diesel. More than half of the cars are not used, most houses can’t be warmed while the weather is cold, and there are long queues for petrol and gasoline in the streets.

It added that domestic consumption of fuel in the winter was estimated to be around 960,000 barrels per day – almost four times higher than oil production at that time.¹⁸

At this crucial stage of the revolution, the oil strikes became a launching pad for the establishment of revolutionary institutions: the Oil Strikes Coordinating Committee (OSCC), the neighbourhood committees (later the Committees of the Islamic Revolution) and the secret Council of the Islamic Revolution. All three, I argue, are closely linked to the dynamic of the oil strikes – a connection that has received little attention in the historiography of the Iranian revolution.¹⁹

The nucleus of an alternative political pole had already emerged in September 1978, when Khomeini appointed a small number of clerical leaders to act on his behalf in Tehran. Khomeini then asked Mehdi Bazargan, leader of the religious-liberal Freedom Movement of Iran (FMI), to propose the inclusion of new members who could lead the transition of power in the post-shah era. This group of 18 people regularly met to discuss strategies and advised Khomeini, forming the core of the future Council of the Islamic Revolution that was established in January 1979.²⁰ The transfer of power into the hands of the Council of the Islamic Revolution was aided by the establishment of the Oil Strikes Coordinating Committee, which was created to prevent the autonomy of the strike committees in the oil industry.

As the oil strikes were becoming more organised and effective in December 1978, the idea of establishing a committee for their supervision was floated in the group of 18. Bazargan then asked Ebrahim Yazdi, another prominent FMI member, to propose the creation of this committee to Khomeini.²¹ On December 29 1978, Khomeini wrote a letter to Bazargan (the text of which was mainly written by Bazargan himself), requesting him to lead a committee, to which I will refer as the Oil Strikes Coordinating Committee (OSCC).²² As the letter made clear, Khomeini was worried that the shah would use the fuel shortage to legitimise the crackdown on the revolutionary movement, and at the same time he tried to win the oil workers’ support by demanding that the military leave the oilfields and installations.²³

In the letter, Khomeini asked Bazargan to lead a committee of five people, which should include Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and the engineer, Mostafa Katira’i. The remaining two members were to be selected by Bazargan, who then appointed two more engineers, Kazem Hasibi, a veteran of the oil nationalisation movement and a leading figure in the National Front and the FMI, and Hashem Sabaghian, another prominent member of the FMI. Other engineers played an important role in organising the practical activities of the committee – highlighting the essential role university-trained religious members of the new middle class would come to play in building the post-revolutionary institutions.

After praising the oil workers, Khomeini describes the main task of the OSCC, which was to visit the oilfields and installations in order to convince the workers to send some of their colleagues back to work to guarantee production for domestic consumption. This was not an easy task, as oil workers blamed the fuel shortages on the military government. The Common Syndicate, for instance, issued this statement on December 31:

Compatriots, there is a variety of fuel present in depots to serve domestic consumption for a year, but the regime, which is installed by foreigners, is not distributing it in order to change the direction of the holy struggle of the people and to sow discord in the rows of the militants.²⁴

Following Khomeini’s letter, on December 29 Bazargan started his activities as head of the OSCC, meeting with the new director of NIOC, Abdollah Entezam, who agreed to the following measures:

• the departure of the military from all oilfields and installations;
• the departure of all military personnel who had been assigned to work in the oil industry;
• the reinstatement of the strikers who had been sacked and the right of return for those workers who had been thrown out of their company houses;
• the release of all arrested oil workers;
• the payment to oil employees of wages and salaries not received since November.

Having won these concessions, Bazargan and Rafsanjani travelled to the oil workers in the south, calling on them to resume work.²⁵ Khomeini and more than 200 clerics threw their weight in as well, urging oil workers to negotiate with Bazargan and NIOC head Entezam.²⁶

In the following weeks, the OSCC issued a number of internal reports, public communiqués and decrees that provide an overview of its activities and decisions, establishing its authority as an administrative organ. The decrees illustrate how the OSCC was gradually taking over the organisation of the oil strikes and related activities. The first, on January 5 1979, for instance, called on the security guards to guarantee the safety of the oil installation,²⁷ while the second called on the pipeline workers to resume work and conduct the necessary maintenance work in order to enable the transport of oil products from the Abadan refinery to Tehran.²⁸ Further statements called on the workers in the refineries of Tabriz, Shiraz, Kermanshah and Tehran to resume production.²⁹

Islamist hegemony

Following the negotiations with Bazargan during the first week of January, the “striking employees of the oil industry in the south” issued their first communiqué, stating their “willingness to implement the edict of Imam Khomeini”, because it served “the welfare of the defiant nation of Iran and the consolidation of his holy struggle for the overthrow of the illegal government”. They also announced the distribution of gas to the entire city of Ahwaz from January 4;

• the selection of a group of blue-collar and white-collar workers for Ahwaz, so that crude oil could be delivered to the refineries in Abadan and Tehran;
• the appointment of a number of workers to continue work in the telecommunication office in order to guarantee communication between oilfields and other places in case of an emergency;
• the establishment of a number of committees for the practical and technical implementation of the production of oil and gas;
• the return of the security personnel of the oil industry to their positions, which had been taken over by the military;
• contact between representatives of the oil workers in the south with those in other places: eg, the refineries, was to run through the Committee for the Coordination of the Oil Strikes.

The final point, of course, seriously limited the oil workers’ ability to collectively and independently coordinate, take decisions and implement them. The communiqué also stated:

It is necessary to bring to the attention of the defiant nation of Iran that the blue-collar and white-collar workers who are responsible for effecting the Imam’s directive are pious strikers, who are working in the production units and the refineries for the welfare of the defiant nation and have no intention to gain anything for themselves.

Hence, the statement continued, the workers will stop production whenever the government violates the points mentioned in the Imam’s directive.³⁰ On January 18, Bazargan’s committee issued its 14th decree, calling on the Abadan refinery employees to return to work in order to increase production.³¹ By late January, the committee was overseeing almost the entire activities of the oil industry, including issuing permits for exports.³²

As these developments illustrate, the establishment of the OSCC signified a crucial turning point in the revolution, as it involved two power struggles. First, it represented the attempt by the Islamist forces – both the radicals around Khomeini and the liberals around Bazargan – to take control of the oil strikes at the expense of the autonomy of oil workers. Bazargan was very clear that his objective was to do just that and the OSCC realised it had to bypass and marginalise the leftwing oil workers, who, despite their small numbers, played a leading role in the strikes. As Hakimi explained.

The main issue confronting us was that we had to deal with different groups of oil workers… We treated them well, but we also tried to find out the level of their influence and popularity among the oil workers and in discussions we tried to understand whether they were committed and Islamic or leftist … The labour troubles in Tehran were mostly in the pipelines and depots of Rey …, but the Tehran refinery was in our total control, especially [because] there was a very faithful and intelligent brother among the refinery workers, called [Assadollah] Amininian, who was enormously popular and influential … The committee of the Tehran refinery travelled a number of times to Abadan, Tabriz and Shiraz and had various talks with them … through the workers of the Tehran refinery we could discipline them as well.³³

The methods by which the pro-Khomeini forces became hegemonic in the oil strikes need more scrutiny, but an important factor was the lack of a strong, independent, national organisation among oil workers. Every workplace had one or more strike committees, but there was no single organisation capable of representing the strikers and coordinating their activities at the national level. The Common Syndicate of the Employees of the Oil Industry had been established in November 1978, but it was mainly rooted among the workers of the Tehran refinery. A closer look at the reasons behind this lack of national coordination is beyond the scope of this article, but it is instructive to summarise the most important ones.

The material and social conditions of the oil industry certainly did not pose an obstacle to national coordination. The internal telephone network of the industry enabled communication between different locations and oil workers’ delegates could also travel to these locations. There were also social networks in existence between oil workers. Some oil workers, particularly the experienced ones, had come to know each other through the official trade union activities before the revolution – and more importantly through the overhaul procedures in the refineries and training schools.

But there were a number of obstacles too. First, the developments unfolded very rapidly, leaving little time for oil workers to strategise and react to the new situation. Second, the militant oil workers were not politically prepared for this situation. Some had a background in the Tudeh Party, which steered them away from any move that could challenge the leadership of Khomeini within the revolutionary movement. The younger generation of left oil workers, who often sympathised with the guerrilla organisations, lacked the network, experience and the strategic outlook that could help them to unite the struggles in the working class communities around the strikes in the oil industry. Third, generational and regional divisions among oil workers exacerbated the political differences. In the Tehran Refinery, for instance, there was an active group around the left trade unionist, Yadollah Khosroshahi, mostly from Abadan, but they lacked organic links to the younger workers, who had been recruited from the small workshops of Tehran and had stronger religious dispositions. None of these obstacles, however, were insurmountable if the required political and organisational steps had been taken prior to and during the revolution in order to increase the coordination among oil workers.

More concretely, the existence of a leadership among oil workers was indispensable for the independent coordination of the oil strikes.³⁴ Surveillance and repression in large workplaces made this task daunting, but not impossible. If it was possible to print banned leftwing publications in the Tehran refinery and smuggle them out, for instance, or to distribute pro-guerrilla pamphlets in the Abadan refinery before the revolution,³⁵ then it also must have been possible to organise a network of militants around industrial issues. The strikes in the 1970s in the oil industry provided an opportunity to do this, but at that time the new organisations of the left, with which some oil workers were sympathising, were engaged in underground guerrilla warfare rather than workplace and community activism.

In my next article I will look in more detail at the failures of the left.

p.jafari@uva.nl

Peyman Jafari is a historian and a contributor to the International Socialism journal

First published in the Weekly Worker

1. Published on the Tarikh-e Irani website on December 26 2014: tarikhirani.ir/fa/news/4/bodyView/4877. I am grateful to Kaveh Ehsani for drawing my attention to this document, and to Touraj Atabaki and Maziar Behrooz for commenting on an earlier version of this article.↩︎
2. M Moaddel, Class, politics and ideology in the Iranian Revolution New York 1992, p206.↩︎
3. Calculated from the figures in F Nomani and S Behdad Class and labor in Iran: did the revolution matter? New York 2006, p89.↩︎
4. Quoted in D Yergin The prize: the epic quest for oil, money and power New York 1991, p677.↩︎
5. Savak, ‘Report on workers’ strikes’, IICHS archives, Tehran.↩︎
6. ‘What can we learn from the striking oil workers? A report of the big and united strikes of the workers of the Abadan refinery’.↩︎
7. ‘How we organized strike that paralyzed shah’s regime. First-hand account by Iranian oil worker’ in P Nore and T Turner (eds) Oil and class struggle London 1980, p293.↩︎
8. H Pelaschi, interview with Ali Pichgah Manjaniq No2 December 2011-January 2012.↩︎
9. J Randal, ‘Khomeini followers struggle for control in oil fields’ The Washington Post February 26 1979.↩︎
10. ‘Spreading protest: strike cuts output of Iranian oil’ The Washington Post December 4 1978.↩︎
11. M Parsa Social origins of the Iranian Revolution: studies in political economy London 1989, p160.↩︎
12. For a number of examples, see Y Khosrowshahi, ‘Bar ma cheh gozasht?’ (‘What happened to us?’) in M Roosta et al (eds) Goriz-e Nagozir. Si Ravayat-e Goriz az Jomhuri-ye Islami 2008.↩︎
13. On December 23 1979, for instance, three gunmen from the Islamist guerrilla organisation Movahedin ambushed and killed the American director of Osco in Ahwaz. Malek Borujerdi, an Iranian oil official was assassinated on the same day by Mansurun, another Islamist guerrilla organisation.↩︎
14. P Jafari, ‘Reasons to revolt: Iranian oil workers in the 1970s’ International Labor and Working-Class History special issue 2013.↩︎
15. A Bayat Workers and revolution in Iran: a third world experience of workers’ control London 1987, pp80-81.↩︎
16. W Claibourne, ‘Ending of oil strike viewed as pivotal in Iranian crisis’ The Washington Post November 3 1978.↩︎
17. C Kurzman The unthinkable revolution in Iran Cambridge, Mass 2004.↩︎
18. ‘Shortage of petroleum, gasoline and diesel’ Ettela’at January 6 1979.↩︎
19. Although Misagh Parsa notes that “these classes [blue and white-collar workers] brought about a situation of dual power”, he does not explain its concrete mechanisms and manifestations. See M Parsa Social origins of the Iranian Revolution p166.↩︎
20. S Bakhash The reign of the ayatollahs London 1985, p51.↩︎
21. Interview with Mostafa Katira’i Iran-e Farda No18.↩︎
22. In its own communication, the committee called itself the ‘Delegation Appointed by the Imam’. Ayatollah Khomeini took a similar initiative to gain control over the strikes in the transport and the customs sector, appointing a committee headed by Ezzatollah Sahabi.↩︎
23. R Khomeini, ‘Appointment of the five-person committee in the oil regions’ in Sahifeh-ye Imam December 29 1978.↩︎
24. Ministry of Information The Islamic Revolution based on Savak documents Vol 22, 2006, p519.↩︎
25. ‘Bazargan’s communiqué’ Ettela’at January 6 1979.↩︎
26. M Parsa op cit p161.↩︎
27. Hey’at-e E’zami-ye Imam Khomeini statement No2, January 1 1978, Islamic Revolution Document Centre archives, Tehran.↩︎
28. Hey’at-e E’zami-ye Imam Khomeini statement No4.↩︎
29. ‘Refineries have been ordered to resume production’ Ettela’at January 8 1979.↩︎
30. ‘Communiqué No1 of the strikers in the oil industry’ Ettela’at January 7 1978.↩︎
31. ‘The oil production of the Abadan refinery will increase to 360,000 b/d’ Ettela’at January 18 1979.↩︎
32. ‘Minutes of the 41st session of the Committee for the Coordination of the Oil Strikes, January 30 1979’ Documents of the freedom movement Vol 9, part 3: www.mizankhabar.net/asnad/archive/archive.htm.↩︎
33. ‘Interview with engineer Abolfazl Hakimi’ Asnad-e Nehzat-e Azadi Vol 9, part 3: www.mizankhabar.net/asnad/archive/archive.htm.↩︎
34. See M Lavalette, C Barker and A Johnson Leadership and social movements Manchester 2001.↩︎
35. Interview with a leftwing former oil worker in Abadan refinery Delft July 25 2013.↩︎