Cosmopolitan Nationalism and the Tudeh Party during the 1946 Khuzestan General Strike

This paper attempts to move away from traditional topics of focus within Cold War studies on Iran – such as the Mossadegh premiership or the Azerbaijan crisis – by examining the 1946 Khuzestan general strike. Many important works on Operation Ajax fail to contextualise the oil nationalisation movement with reference to its origins outside the politics of Tehran in the 1940s. In fact, the movement can be traced to Khuzestan immediately after the Second World War, where both communism and popular anti-imperialism had emerged as aligned, powerful political forces. This paper also seeks to complement diplomatic approaches to the subject by providing a social history of Khuzestan at this time – especially Abadan – in order to bring the agency of workers and activists to the fore. I argue that the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company’s (AIOC) policies previously implemented to divide the workforce, such as segregated urban planning, had by now given way to shared living and labour conditions for the majority. Thus, by the time of the 1946 strike large sections of the AIOC’s Iranian, Arab and Indian workers had become united under a common banner of class solidarity, across ethnic lines. Arabs and Indians joined with the Iranian workforce in the strike and in its violence directed against senior AIOC officials and any who co-operated with them, regardless of ethnicity: for instance, Arab workers were involved in storming the Arab Club, which had accommodated Arab tribal leaders hired by AIOC as contractors to circumvent the Iranian Labour Law. This was in stark contrast to previous episodes of nationalist chauvinism, such as the 1929 Abadan strike and the 1942 Bahmanshir incident, when Iranians condemned and attacked Indian workers. Furthermore, I argue that, against the grain of policies emanating from Moscow, the Tudeh Party played an important role in agitating against the British with a nationalist, anti-imperialist, but, at the same time, cosmopolitan discourse that included Arabs and Indians in its struggle. The Tudeh’s cosmopolitan nationalism called for an end to British exploitation of all those living on Iranian soil, promoting the unity of class-consciousness and nationalism – something I show was influencing the national imagination, as expressed in the Tehran press. The Tudeh was able to have almost complete control in bringing AIOC’s operations to a halt, highlighting Britain’s vulnerability to the alliance of communism and Third World nationalism long before Mossadegh’s National Front.