First Published in PlanC
By Collective98[1]
“We are protesting against problems in the whole
system in general. We reached a crisis where we noticed that the system cannot
handle it anymore.”
- A
Chilean Protester[2]
In mid-November last year, tens of thousands of people in
over 100 cities across Iran took to the streets for five straight days. The
uprising was in response to the overnight, three-fold increase of fuel prices,
a policy recommended by the IMF and implemented through wanton state violence.
The Revolutionary Guard, Basij[3],
and the police killed 304 to 1500 people under the cover of an internet
blackout[4].
Thousands of militants, activists, and ‘ordinary’ people were arrested either
during or in the aftermath of the uprising, some of whom have been tortured,
condemned to long sentences, and even executed. Yet, the dispossessed
spontaneously staged occupations of local areas, built barricades, burned down
several banks, and defended themselves the best they could against a state
apparatus designed to systematically repress its ‘citizens’. In order to
commemorate the first anniversary of the November Uprising, we attempt in the
following to reflect on this political event while drawing out some lessons for
the ongoing struggles in Iran and the Middle East.
Crisis and Violence
Those who rose up from the infernal depths of the social
hell in Iran were fed up with the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI) as a whole.
Like the proletarians who shaped the global wave of struggles in 2018-2019, the
participants of the November Uprising came to the conclusion that “their
future depends upon putting an end to a system that reproduces itself through
exploitation, mass poverty, and the ever increasing commodification of the very
basic means of life”[5].
That said, the crisis the IRI is now grappling with cannot be simply put down
to the ‘crisis of legitimacy’. Nor are the US sanctions the sole cause.
Rather, it is the question of a crisis of ‘governmentality’[6],
that is, a socio-economic-political-ideological crisis aggravated by
consequences of global warming and now compounded with the epidemiological
crisis of COVID-19. The IRI can only resort to violence in order to silence
millions of people are deprived of basic democratic rights and of the very
basic means of social reproduction (housing, healthcare, education, employment,
breathable air, and drinkable water…). Thus, the brutal repression of the
November Uprising brought to light both the depth of the
crisis and the degree of radicalization among the youth whose
social existence has become increasingly unbearable. In some cities, and
especially those inhabited by the racialized ethnic ‘minorities’ such as Arabs
or Kurds, government tanks rolled through the streets while affiliated
governmental forces employed heavy machine guns like the Dushka (DShK)[7].
Now, although the IRIhas its origins in the violence that inheres in every
project of statecraft and continues to structurally depend on the violence
proper to an authoritarian regime, the repression of the November Uprising was
both shocking and unprecedented – the likes of which Iran’s domestic population
has not seen since 1989, with the IRI’s consolidation of power in the wake of
the Iran-Iraq War.
Given the unprecedented nature of state violence, the
current situation in Iran is becoming more and more like the original phase of
the IRI(1979-1989) when systematic state-violence was employed as a means of
establishing the regime. Put in other terms, the power of the Islamist
‘revolutionaries’ could not have been consolidated without the
ethno-nationalist war declared by Khomeini on the ethnic ‘minorities’ like
Kurds, Arabs, and Turkmens; without the patriarchal war launched on women and
their bodies (most obviously, the compulsory hijab); and of course without the
massacre of thousands of political dissidents in prisons during the first
decade of the post-revolutionary era. The current ‘return’ of this earlier era
expresses itself best in the images and videos showing the police directly
shooting demonstrators in the chest and the head during the November uprising,
as well as in the regime’s executions of ‘ordinary’ people in the months that
followed. And this in the context of its vastly shrinking support base compared
to its earlier days.
The revolution will not be televised
The Islamic Republic is suffering from mass uprisings at a
chronic rate, with every subsequent mobilization being more confrontational
than the last. The November uprising in 2019 was much more widespread and
‘militant’ than that of 2017-2018, when leftist students in Tehran expressed
for the first time the negation of the system as a whole: “reformists,
hardliners, the game is over!”. More importantly, the IRI is encountering ever-increasing
struggles and movements of workers, students, teachers, retirees, women, and
ethnic and religious minorities. These two ‘levels’ of struggle – the
spontaneous mass uprising and the more organized forms of resistance – are
mutually interrelated. The former has radicalized the latter, making it more
political than before. For instance, the demands of some parts of the working
class have moved away from the improvement of the conditions of work, wages,
and de-privatization and towards the autonomous management of factories and
radical alternatives.
Unfortunately, both the crushing effects of the crisis and
the political subjectivity of the oppressed are under- or misrepresented in the
news media. Insofar as political agency is concerned, it is only via the figure
of the human rights activist that narratives of political subjectivity find
their way into the media. Meanwhile, the mainstream media often misrepresents
the crisis as a product of the US sanctions, while in reality neoliberalism in
Iran is structured by the systematic corruption of its ‘rentier’ ruling
oligarchy as well as the integration of its economy within global capitalism.
However, this is not to say that the imposed economic sanctions were
insignificant, thereby underestimating its extremely destructive and negative
impacts on the millions of lives in Iran. To the contrary, the current set of
economic sanctions have not only deprived people of access to basic medicines
for chronic illnesses, they have also effectively contributed to the spiralling
depression of the Rial on the world-market. Economic sanctions have
definitely intensified the crisis, yet they cannot be
considered as its fundamental condition and ultimate
cause. In spite of this fact, the IRI’s ideological strategy for justifying
the economic crisis is to project all ‘domestic’ problems as ‘geo-political’,
thus as problems originating outside of Iran and resulting from the actions
undertaken by its imperialist enemies.
Pseudo-anti-imperialism
Despite the very real and reactionary threat posed by the
imperialist powers, what needs to be properly addressed within the
internationalist left is the IRI’s claim of being an ‘anti-imperialist’ state.
Ever since the 1979 Revolution, the ruling classes in Iran have gained legitimacy
through a manipulative ‘anti-imperialist’ discourse whereby the geopolitical
interventions of the Revolutionary Guard (IRGC) in the region is justified as a
deterrent to the US imperialism and its allies (particularly Israel and Saudi
Arabia). This discourse gained a new momentum after the US imperialist
atrocities in Iraq and Afghanistan and the consequent intensification of
geopolitical rivalries in the region. It is this long-standing propaganda that
has fooled certain fractions within the global left, essentially turning them
into supporters of the IRI[8].
The ‘pseudo-anti-imperialists’ on the left either turn a blind
eye to political repression and dispossession of people inside Iran or they
acknowledge the ‘internal’ problems but effectively minimize them by
maintaining that the ‘axis of resistance’ has a ‘priority’ over the ‘internal’
antagonisms within Iran, as if the IRI were a genuine anti-imperialist force…
These pseudo-anti-imperialists formulate the problem as a
false binary: either we have to choose the camp of Iran,
Assad, Hezbollah, and Russia/China or we are faced with the
global empire of the US and its allies. They gloss over the IRI’s interventions
in Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine, Syria, and Yemen, be it direct or indirect,
through its military, economic, and ideological-political support of
reactionary forces such as al-Ḥashd ash-Shaʿbī, Hezbollah, Hamas,
Assad, and the Houthis. Pseudo-anti-imperialists oppose the US imperialism by
uncritically defending the regional interventions of the IRI. The point,
however, is not to ‘choose’ between the two monsters but rather find a ‘third
way’ that goes beyond this false dualism. The October Revolution in Iraq[9] and
the ongoing struggles in Iran paves the way for such an alternative by refuting
both the IRI and its mercenaries on the one hand and the United States on the
other. If the left believes in internationalism, then the ‘anti-imperialist’
mask needs to be taken off from the IRI’s persona. This can be done by lending
voice to the struggles inside Iran and exposing the atrocities of the regime in
the region, whilst simultaneously opposing the global empire of the US, China
and Russia.
Footnotes and links
[1] We
would like to give our special thanks to Jose Rosales who, comradely and
generously, edited the text and made precious and insightful comments.
To contact the collective, drop an email to collective98@riseup.net.
For further details on Collective98, see:
https://collective98.blogspot.com/2020/11/collective-98-is-independent_25.html
[2] See
the statement written by the Iranian diaspora and signed by more than 170
leftist militants and academics across the world:
https://roarmag.org/2019/11/25/leftists-worldwide-stand-by-the-protesters-in-iran/
[3] Militia
organization of the IRGC
[4] The
real number of the victims is not clear. The Amnesty has announced 304 but
Reuters 1500 people. See the following links:
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-iran-protests-specialreport-idUSKBN1YR0QR
[5] See
the ‘About Us’ of Collective98:
https://collective98.blogspot.com/2020/11/about-us.html
[6] See
the interview with the two Iranian, anonymous comrades by one anonymous American
comrade:
[7] This
happened in Mahshar, a majority-Arab city in the province of Khuzestan in
the South of Iran which has a key strategically economic petroleum site. The
protesters blocked the main road to this site. Another example is the video published
on social media showing the Basij militia directly shooting
the Kurdish protestors in Javaanrud, a Kurdish city in Kermanshah province.
[8] See
the catastrophic article published in the ‘radical-left’ French platform in
which General Soleimani was presented as a ‘hero’ who fought against the ISIS
and the imperialist forces in the region:
https://acta.zone/mort-de-soleimani-et-realites-de-laxe-de-la-resistance/
[9] See: https://roarmag.org/essays/one-year-on-iraqs-revolutionary-spirit-is-still-alive/
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