The main source of this series of articles is Bob Avakian's book Democracy: Can't We Do Better Than That? (1986) and his other works on democracy/dictatorship. 

One regularly hears the slogans “transition to democracy” and “practice democracy” from a wide range of forces, both from those in opposition to the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI) and from those within the regime. We hear that “democracy is not an end point but a process,” or that “a democracy requires people who have practiced democracy.” [In February 2024] the BBC Persian podcast Pargar produced “Transition to Democracy,”¹ a series of roundtables which focused on several countries, including Chile, Malaysia, Korea and Turkey. It seems that there is a widespread assumption that “our” problem in Iran is that we have not practiced democracy. So the question gets posed as: how can we transition to democracy or get to practice democracy?

In this article, we will show that “transition to democracy” is a notion intended for countries like Iran, which are dominated by the imperialist bourgeoisie. Asserting that the countries of the Global South are still in a “transition” or “practice” stage of democracy is, on the one hand, an attempt to justify the lopsidedness in the world and the great gulf between imperialist countries of the Global North and countries of the Global South. On the other hand, it portrays imperialist interventions and their installation of authoritarian governments as a part of this transition. In this article, we examine the economics and politics of these “transitions,” and then return to the [scientific] understanding of the fundamental nature of “democracy”: democracy/bourgeois dictatorship or democracy/proletarian dictatorship.

One of the emphasized features and factors of the transition to democracy is the reduction of state intervention in the economy or the development of a "free market" economy. For example, [professor] Mohsen Ranani says, “Turning control over to market forces is a democratic development. In most democratic countries we see that economic freedom was a necessary condition for political freedom, but the opposite is not true.”²  Similarly, [economist] Hassan Mansour says that in Chile, the neoliberal economic policies of Pinochet and his fascist military dictatorship paved the way for democracy! Even after Pinochet's departure [by means of] a referendum, the “Chicago Boys” (American-trained capitalist economists) continued the same economic program in Chile during three subsequent governments. On the one hand, this program brought significant economic growth to Chile for a while. On the other hand, the massive privatization produced an astonishing economic inequality, and had a long-term negative impact on health care, education and retirement, which ultimately produced economic crises. In South Korea, privatization [of public enterprises] and development of  the free market economy with American investment in the 1980s—after killing the communists and purging all dissidents under the guise of fighting communism—is said to have been the starting point for their transition to democracy! What is not said, though, is that South Korea was turned into a country of extreme class polarization.  The lives of a few affluent parasites are built upon the destruction of the lives of the many, as is portrayed so well in the film Parasite.³ 

The [BBC Pargar] program described Malaysia and Turkey as on the trajectory to democracy, despite the rise of Islamism there—because of the Islamists' adaptation to a market economy! This claim is made despite the brutal repression of the Gezi Park environmental movement [in Turkey], the arrest of journalists opposed to [Turkey’s president] Erdogan, the removal of opposition professors from universities, Erdogan's criminal military operations in Kurdistan and all of Erdogan’s Islamic and anti-women laws. These Islamist [regimes] are integrated within the [global] market economy.

The same is true of the IRI and the Islamist capitalist strata that came to power in 1979. Specifically, they began the process of capitalist globalization when they implemented the IMF [International Monetary Fund] and World Bank mandates on “structural adjustments” to the letter. 

So why do many people exclude Iran from their assessment of this democratization process?

To answer this question, we need to look beyond differences in this or that detail of legal and parliamentary systems. What occurred in all the countries cited as successful examples of democratic transition was not the wished-for development of a [free] market, but intensifying integration into the world capitalist system, particularly following World War II with the U.S. victory over the loser-imperialist countries, and [later] when the imperialist world was in contention with the Soviet Socialist Bloc (before the restoration of capitalism in the Soviet Union in the mid-1950s) and with China (from the mid-1950s until the restoration of capitalism in China in 1976).

Turkey practiced democracy by joining the NATO military alliance and by cracking down on Kurds, Armenians and LGBT people! South Korea became an independent and "democratic" state while occupied by the U.S. military! (About 30,000 U.S. troops are still in South Korea). Malaysia, according to Azadeh Pourzand [February 24 segment of Pargar], practices democracy with the help of U.S. imperialist policy due to its legacy of colonialism! And Chile [practiced democracy] by staging a bloody U.S. coup against an Allende government that had demanded independence from U.S. imperialism. Iran isn’t part of this “democratic” grouping—not because of the depth and extent of its crimes against the Iranian people—but because Iran is not an ally of U.S. imperialism.

Another reason the idea of a transition to democracy seems to have such wide appeal is the notion of “painless progress,” which is in sync with the ideological outlook of the petty bourgeoisie. [This class] likes to think it can progress toward the achievement of an “ideal” future without uprooting the ruling system, by making only gradual changes to the rules of the existing system which operates within the framework of capitalism. When reality proves otherwise, they become frustrated, [reject] the possibility of making change, and give up on revolution, because revolution requires sacrifice, including from them! Popular illusions about democracy are part of a phenomenon where people continually limit themselves to the narrow horizon of what is offered to them by the global ruling class. Because even though such solutions are obsolete and represent nothing positive in the final analysis, they are relatively politically safe, at least so far, because they rely on the world's “democratic” powers.

Moreover, what is called practicing democracy is, in fact, practicing tolerance and compromise between oppressed people and the oppressive ruling class. That is why Mohsen Renani says, “In country A, when people riot and the police beat them with batons, they flee and disperse. In country B, when people riot and are beaten by police, they take out knives or guns and attack the police.” Clearly, Country A is a more democratic country than Country B, because its people have learned the skill of retreat, because “the skill of retreat is the skill of stopping violence.” This argument is made not only by intellectual posers, who use this sleight-of-hand to reverse the essence of organized violence against the people at the hands of the ruling class by their police and military forces. Many democratic intellectuals are so entrapped in the framework of ideas produced by the capitalist system that compromising with the status quo seems acceptable to them and they reject the revolt of the people against their conditions of oppression and exploitation, and label it as undemocratic.  

Interestingly, a predecessor for this upside-down view of things exists in an important founding document of bourgeois democracy—the U.S. Declaration of Independence. There, too, [there is a reversal of] truth and lies, right and wrong, victim and criminal, the just and unjust war in the relations between indigenous people [in North America] and the Europeans who established the United States on a foundation of massacres, plunder and the theft of indigenous lands. It is in this sense that the strategy of “transitional justice” plays an important role in the transition to democracy, by facilitating a compromise between the survivors and the criminals. In Chile after Pinochet, despite instituting some fact-finding commissions, even Pinochet himself was not punished for his crimes, and so far neither the survivors nor historical memory has been studied to assess the scale of those crimes. 

This is the same “forgive and forget” of [crown prince] Reza Pahlavi,⁴  who constantly busies himself with giving the green light to the criminals of the IRI. This is a process that is integral to the project of “Transition to Democracy” that is being promoted—instead of a real revolution—by even people like Narges Mohammadi. Although revolution does not mean revenge, it [also] does not mean leaving the security-military structure of the state intact and integrating it into the new government. This is how the bourgeois form of democracy is practiced. Do we want such a democracy? Do we want to practice democracy by welcoming the criminals of previous regimes?

The creation of a strong and independent “civil society” that includes the media, social activists and intellectuals, and is separate from the state, is another feature of practicing democracy that generally originates in the  middle class. This is why it is argued that, in order to have a civil society, one must build up the middle class, and to build up the middle class one must develop capitalism. By this reasoning then, it is the growth of capitalism that will guarantee democracy, and the reason that Iran lacks a strong civil society is the underdevelopment of capitalism and its small middle class!  To the contrary, in the dominated countries of the Global South it is not separation from the world capitalist system and its structures—but the functioning and dynamics of capitalist growth that leads to the shrinking of the middle classes, which leads to restricting  political and civil liberties, and even leads to violating fundamental human rights. According to [Pargar series participants] however, calling any of these countries a “democracy” is not a mistake because, despite the violation of many fundamental human rights—from the repression of women and LGBTQ, to arrests, to the widespread purges of political opponents—this is the essence of bourgeois democracy/dictatorship. In other words, [democracy] is based on inequality and the oppression of a broad section of the people, on exploitative relations based in capitalism. What is wrong is to not speak about the nature of this democracy: for whom does it exist? What class system does it serve? Another error, when the ugliness of bourgeois democracy is revealed, is to resort to the futile argument that “this is not yet pure democracy,” and the “pure” is “yet to come.”

Bob Avakian writes that democracy

… is in itself a recurrent—and seemingly “infinite”—source of illusions about the “perfectibility” of the democratic system, or the "actual realization" of democratic ideals—in short, for democratic prejudice and delusion…. 

There is, of course, a powerful material basis for this in the objective world conditions in this era, particularly the basic division between a handful of imperialist states and the vast number of oppressed nations dominated by imperialism.⁵ 

For this exact reason, the bourgeoisie [of oppressed nations] beats the drum of “transition to democracy,” which implies that one cannot have a democracy in these colonies all at once, and therefore must have military dictatorships or autocratic governments for a while, with the illusion that they will one day achieve a real democracy like the imperialist countries. But that day will never come unless those countries themselves become imperialist states, as a result of wars and massive dislocations in global political, economic, and security structures. 

This kind of theorizing, like the concept of "developing countries," is based on the belief that there is a process of development or democratization in the world where some of the countries are merely ahead of others who are still behind! It does not recognize that the gap between imperialist countries and dominated countries is a necessary and logical consequence of the functioning of globalized capitalism, where a handful of countries with democracy and prosperity could only exist on the basis of the extreme oppression and exploitation of many [people] in other countries. Historically speaking, it is a fact that whenever the position of the ruling classes in Iran and the imperialists were weakened, democracy became semi-dominant and people's freedom increased, for example between the 1920s and the 1950s (before the U.S. 1953 coup)! The unfinished book Imperfect Democracy, written by the Organization of Communist Revolutionaries (later "Union of Communists of Iran"), deals with the main role of the imperialists in this backwardness and repression.

But if we look at Iran in terms of the characteristics of the bourgeois democracy we have addressed here, a certain basic democracy has been practiced in Iran. The formation of a modern nation-state in Iran created a bourgeois democracy/dictatorship that has a hundred years of history, with a constitution, a military and security institutions. Elections existed under the [Shah Mohammad] Pahlavi regime, and have become even more widespread in the Islamic Republic. Over this period, various “wings of the ruling class" have ruled with peaceful transitions [of power following elections], and at the same time the voice of workers and peasants, the masses in general, and particularly women and national minorities have been suppressed, humiliated and subjugated.

Indeed, what has not existed has been a real solution to break the cycle of these comings and goings of the governments of the exploiting classes in the various forms of the monarchy and the IRI, i.e., the New Socialist Republic and the establishment of the democracy/dictatorship of the proletariat, when the state itself will [exist only during] the process of transition to a communist world. But that transition can never be achieved under this system or by replicating the relations of production, the political superstructure, the social relations and values of this system. 

Does this mean that the communist view of democracy is an entirely negative one? Bob Avakian replies:

No, it is a dialectical materialist one. Concretely, this means that the communists recognize that democracy is not an end in itself but a means to an end; that it is part of the superstructure, and conforms to and serves a particular economic base; that it arises in certain historical conditions and is generally associated with the bourgeois epoch; that it never exists in abstract or “pure” form but always has a definite class character and is conditioned by the fundamental relation between classes; and that it has a distinctive character and role in the transition from capitalist society and the bourgeois epoch to the epoch of world communism, and will wither away with the achievement of communism.⁶ [italics added in Farsi original]  

Practicing for this socialist democracy, beginning today, means transforming the thinking of the people in the service of the revolution to overthrow the existing state and establishing a socialist democracy—not by practicing compromise with the exploiting class. 

The fundamental rights of the people in the New Socialist Republic will be discussed in future issues [of Atash/Fire Journal].