“The military government is about the last card the shah has to play,” one U.S. official told Washington Post reporter Jim Hoagland. “He doesn’t know what to do next, and neither do we. It will be a miracle if he is still around to hold the elections he has promised.”

Such doubts about the shah’s future are certainly warranted by the situation in Iran. “Despite official denials,” Washington Post correspondent William Claiborne reported November 4, “Iranian Finance Ministry officials concede privately that labor unrest permeated the country’s entire industrial base.”

Describing the atmosphere in the country, Claiborne noted that in the Finance Ministry itself, about half the employees were on strike and that demonstrators in the ministry headquarters had been “running up and down the corridors, shouting ‘Death to the Shah.’”

The strike by oil workers in particular, which has cut off petroleum exports valued at $21 billion a year—60 percent of the country’s gross national product—has the shah’s regime by the throat.

The oil workers, like other strikers, are raising political demands, not simply economic ones. Among them are an end to martial law, release of all political prisoners, punishment of the perpetrators of massacres carried out by the regime, and the dissolution of “security offices” maintained by the secret police in workplaces.  
 
November 16, 1953
The East German workers uprising last June against the Stalinist rulers continues to reverberate around the world. This magnificent struggle stands like a gigantic beacon of hope for the oppressed masses everywhere. It defies all attempts to cover it with mud and frame-up lies. The Stalinists have done everything in their power to represent the East German workers as “tools of capitalism,” and “fascist agents.” But they have failed, and failed dismally.

The Socialist Party of India published a resolution, “We Salute the Workers of Eastern Europe” in the September issue of their paper, Socialist Appeal. In answer to the Stalinist lies about the Eastern German workers, they say:

“The allegation that the general strike of these workers is an act of imperialist provocation is not the first slander against the working class that has come out of present-day Russia, nor will it be the last. The Socialist Party rejects the suggestion that mass movements of any considerable significance can be the work of provocateurs and spies. There would be some sense in these allegations if we were dealing with individual terrorist acts.

“Where, however, workers risk their lives against a tyrannical regime, fight with their traditional class weapon of the general strike and pay for their courageousness with hundreds of executions and thousands of arrests and imprisonments, to say that they have been the victims of agents and provocateurs representing the class enemy only shows that those who make these allegations possess neither understanding nor loyalty to the working class.  
 
 
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