Mansoor Hekmat
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Mansoor Hekmat (original name Zhoobin Razani; 1951-July 2002) was an Iranian Marxist theorist and leader of the worker-communist movement. He led the Worker-Communist Party of Iran (WPI), which opposed both the Shah and the Islamic Republic.
[edit] Life
Born in Tehran, he founded the Union of Communist Fighters in 1978, then took part in the Iranian Revolution of 1979 — marked by the creation of workers' councils (shoras) — and, unlike the major part of the Iranian left-wing, refused to pay allegiance to Islamism and Supreme Leader Ruhollah Khomeini. He denounced the "myth of a progressive national bourgeoisie".
Hekmat's views made him seek refuge in Kurdistan (1981); because of mounting repression, Hekmat's Union fused with a Kurdish group of Maoist roots, Komalah - together, they formed the Communist Party of Iran (CPI). Hekmat and a group of other CPI members left the party and, in 1991, founded the WPI. He also helped establish the Worker-Communist Party of Iraq.
He died of cancer in his London refuge and was buried in Highgate Cemetery, a few meters away from Karl Marx's grave.
[edit] Views
Hekmat supported the "return to Marx", and theoretised that the working class is to rely only on itself - arguing that it had been the only class to impose benefic change in the 20th century. He denied that either the Soviet Union or the People's Republic of China would have been socialist countries, and presented them as nationalist-bourgeois systems that had not abolished either exploitation or wage slavery, and had not communized the means of production.
Partly inspired by Council communism, he emphasised propaganda and internal organization, arguing that "communism on the margin of society is not communism at all". Hekmat sought to combine the revolutionary effort with struggles such as that for women's rights. Impressed by the tragedies of the Rwandan Genocide and the Yugoslav wars, he defended a humanist vision.
