Your opinion on Worker-Communism?

[Tim Cornelis]

For those familiar with worker-communism, what's your opinion on it?

[Viktor]

Can you be a little more specific? Are you talking about the Hekmatists? I don't know too much about them and what I did read was a while, so take what I am about to say with a grain of salt.

If I recall correctly, the Iraqi Hekmatists took a sympathetic line to NATO intervention in Iraq. I am not sure this position is representative of the Hekmatists as a whole since there seem to be a variety of Hekmatist sects.

Monsoor Hekmat's ideology seemed relatively incoherent. He praised many figures on the Communist Left, but that never seemed to figure too much into his political program. It seems like some of the Hekmatists today are proponents of a "mass party", but without being able to actually put this in the context of their political program, which is unknown to me, I think it would be jumping to conclusiosn to call them Kautskyists.

I would post a link to an archive of his works, but unless you can read Arabic or Farsi, there's not much to go through. Hopefully Devrim can weign in more on this since he seems to be fairly knowledgeable about the affairs of such things.

[Zoroaster]

Could you define what you mean by "Worker-Communism"?

If you mean workerism and Operaismo, then I'm all for it.

[bricolage]

Could you define what you mean by "Worker-Communism"?

If you mean workerism and Operaismo, then I'm all for it.
Nah it's not that, it's a very specific movement in Iran and Iraq that I know very little about. My assumption was that it's pretty hard to grasp unless you are well versed in the regional situations and left-histories.

[Zoroaster]

Nah it's not that, it's a very specific movement in Iran and Iraq that I know very little about. My assumption was that it's pretty hard to grasp unless you are well versed in the regional situations and left-histories.

Ok, thanks.

Edit: From what I've seen, it refers to a set of workerist parties in Iran, such as the Worker-Communist party of Iran. They descend from the theories of Mansoor Hekmat, and Iranian Marxist.

[Zukunftsmusik]

Is this ‘the crisis of communism’ or ‘the end of communism’? [This interview is from 1989] The truth is I don’t see the world as the battleground of doctrines. Real history is the history of social and class movements. Obviously ‘something’ here has collapsed and ended. These developments signify the defeat of the state-capitalist bourgeois movement. The bourgeoisie called it communist and introduced it as such to millions of people. Historically, too, this movement arose alongside the communist movement proper, establishing itself through specific stages as the official mainstream of communism. Workers’ socialist movement, i.e. a communism which epitomizes the worker’s anti-capitalist struggle in contemporary society, has continued to exist alongside this official communism, and naturally with the supremacy of this state-capitalist trend, has suffered great setbacks and ups and downs. This is another movement to which, following The Communist Manifesto, I refer as worker-communism. The failure of bourgeois socialism in the Soviet Union and, consequently, the decline of every other non-worker socialism – from left national-reformism to populism, etc. – has fuelled the bourgeoisie’s anti-Marxist bluster. This naturally puts worker-communism, too, under greater ideological pressure. But the crisis of bourgeois socialism neither undermines worker- communism nor throws it into crisis. Quite the contrary, as I also wrote in the Congress report and explained in the first seminar on worker- communism a few months ago, a new period of workers’ communist struggle is ahead of us. Today the bedrock of what officially is called communism is once again shifting to within the working class. Worker- communism, as a social movement, is once again finding its real place in society. This movement has an immense strength. Contrary to those who have declared the supposed end of Marx and Marxism, I see the coming decade as the period of the resurgence of Marxism, for the social movement which Marxism epitomizes, i.e. the worker’s anti-capitalist protest movement, is now straightening its back from the defeat after the October Revolution and after decades of supremacy of the bourgeoisie’s false socialist movements. We don’t need to go very far in time. I believe the ‘90s will be a decade of rising radical working-class struggles in the industrial centres of Western Europe and of the emergence of a new generation of communist parties – working-class communist parties. [Could he be more wrong here though?] I believe Marxism as a profound criticism of capitalist society and as a theory is not susceptible to crisis. Even the current developments vindicate Marxism. The theory of workers’ revolution can only be proved by workers’ movement and workers’ practice itself. The collapse of the non-worker forces that had clung to Marxism for the cause of nationalism, democracy, reform and industrialization, is but a confirmation of this fact.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/hekmat-mansoor/1989/08/differences.htm