Hands Off the People of Iran

Yassamine Mather celebrates the continuing mass protests, recognises their limitations, laments the parlous state of the left and urges unity around the basic principles upheld by Hopi

(This article is based on Yassamine’s talk in this video)

You would not know from the media that the protests are continuing – they are now entering a third month. They are widespread, militant and still large.

The ‘reformist’ faction of the Iranian government – and their allies in what I call sections of the ‘reformist left’ – have been saying that there is a slight dip, but I cannot see any sign of it. I can understand why they are saying this, because it fits their agenda of promoting a ‘peaceful resolution to this problem’. But I do not see any way in which the current crisis can be resolved peacefully, given the anger on the streets and among young people. On the contrary, we are witnessing a rise in some forms of protest that did not exist before. The actions on university campuses are quite remarkable and clearly there is now some level of coordination: there have been nationwide protests on the same day, for instance.

However, there is no doubt that the repression is continuing. A large number of teenagers – mostly school students – have been killed by state forces. In Tehran alone, there are 1,000 detained protestors – at least according to the government. Opposition figures are much higher – some of those arrested have been released, and some have been rearrested. But I have to stress that the government has not yet used its full might. A quote from Kiumars Heydari, commander of Iran’s ground army, is helpful, even though he might have said this for obvious propaganda purposes: he claimed the state has held back, because “Ayatollah Khamenei doesn’t want us to use the kind of force we want to deploy”. In one sense we can take this comment with a pinch of salt, since at least 300 protestors have been killed. However, maybe it is true that they could have done worse over the last 60 days and killed thousands.

Security forces are mainly using metal baton rounds which are different from live ammunition, in that, while they inflict horrible pain, incapacitate, cause internal injuries, they do not normally result in death. If Heydari’s claim is true, we have to say that supreme leader Ali Khamenei is more astute than the shah, who unleashed the army against protestors, leading to a huge number of casualties. But Iran’s current ruler is planning for the long term. Of course, he wants protestors to be punished and is prepared to see many killed, claiming that what they are doing is all the work of the US and its allies. At the same time, though, he is clever enough not to escalate the response to a stage where there would be general slaughter.

There is currently a debate about if and when the Islamic Revolutionary Guards will be fully deployed. Would it be worse for them or for the demonstrators? It can be worse for them because, a bit like Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky, who proudly announced that he had merged the far-right, volunteer Azov Brigade into the army, the Iranian government has also brought the Revolutionary Guards into its army. But using both the conscript army and Revolutionary Guards can lead to a situation, when it comes to shooting down protestors, where some soldiers will refuse to obey orders.

Throughout Iran, women are now being seen without headscarves on the streets, at work, in coffee shops, in banks, on the metro … So the regime’s attempts to enforce the wearing of the hijab have failed. A good number of Iranian sportswomen have also refused to wear the hijab during competitions or when receiving medals – even inside the country. There is a corresponding rebellion against sexual segregation. On university campuses students have torn down the partitions separating males from females in canteens and other social areas.

Power

All this shows how ordinary citizens are gaining confidence in their own power to oppose repression. Moreover, we are seeing novel forms of protest, for example, ‘amameh parani’. Teenagers approach a mullah from behind and push off his turban – some clerics are saying they no longer wear their religious garb when they walk the streets.

There are, given everything, all sorts of splits and divisions opening up above. For example, Molavi Abdolhamid, a senior Sunni cleric who leads Friday prayers in the Sistan and Baluchistan province, has openly challenged the propaganda of the Iranian rightwing press, which is insisting that there are no mass protests.

That said, I think we have to keep pointing out the limitations of the current protests – the absence of serious political organisation, the lack of programme, no authoritative leadership, etc. In these circumstances we are seeing clear attempts by the US state department to concoct, promote and insert its figureheads. The US was originally backing the son of the former shah, but that did not work. Student and youth protestors have been chanting anti-shah as well as anti-regime slogans. Then the US tried to promote a presenter on Voice of America, who supported former president Akbar Rafsanjani and then his successor, Mohammad Khatami. But that did not work out either. Then there is the Mojahedin-e-Khalq, which is promoted mainly by Saudi Arabia. But again there is a slight problem. You cannot successfully promote a religious cult whose leader wears a headscarf, whose Tirana-based members are mostly in their 60s and 70s, and whom no-one inside Iran takes at all seriously.

Last week the US representative at the United Nations, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, took Iranian-born Nazamin Boniadi to the general assembly. She lives in California, is a British citizen but supposedly represents the protestors in Iran. Her claim to fame is as a film and TV actor. She is also a former girlfriend of Tom Cruise (he sent her to the Church of Scientology for religious education). But people in Iran are not that stupid: as soon as her UN speech was broadcast, they Googled her and were astonished at the Biden administration’s strange choice! She has only ever visited Iran once – as a teenager.

The US is also promoting Hamed Esmaeilion, someone who, if I understand it correctly, lost his wife and daughter when Iran accidentally shot down Ukraine International’s flight number PS752 in January 2020. He spoke at the protest in Berlin, and he is now looking like a Zelensky double with the same kind of clothes and hairstyle. None of this would matter very much if the left was not tailing all these totally unconvincing Nato/US figureheads (in that sense one can detect the threat of a ‘colour revolution’).

The Saudi position is clear – as pushed ad infinitum on its Persian TV station. Saudi-Arabia wants to Balkanise Iran into any number of small ‘nations’ – it certainly does not want a powerful neighbour. If you listen to pro-Saudi commentators and analysts, as I did recently at a forum organised by the journal Foreign Affairs, you will find that their version of recent Middle Eastern history is truly bizarre. Iran should be blamed for every war and act of destruction in the region. Syria was the fault of Iran. Lebanon was the fault of Iran. The Palestinian-Israeli conflict is the fault of Iran. There was no mention of the Iraq war, of al Qa’eda and Islamic State, who were supported and financed by the Persian Gulf emirates, and no mention of Yemen, the US bombing of Libya and Syria, and so on.

Of course, Iran’s Islamic Republic is responsible for many of the atrocities in the region, but such a one-sided, false presentation of events is just nonsense. The amazing thing was that the politicians who were listening to this analysis seemed to accept this distorted version of history – I am not sure if it is historical illiteracy or just sheer opportunism. Lebanon’s Shia population long predates the coming to power of the Safavid dynasty in Iran who brought about the rule of Shia Islam – it did not all start with Hezbollah and Khomeini. The Saudi falsification of history is part of a narrative that tries to increase tension between Iran’s many nationalities. But so far, in the current protests, despite relentless efforts, their plan has not worked: on the contrary, there is unprecedented unity between the various nationalities. Leftwingers inside Iran talk of the ‘post-nationalist’ era.

Then we have Israel, once again under Binyamin Netanyahu, with its talk of ‘going to war’ with Iran, while in Iraq it is Muqtada al-Sadr who openly worries about the protests in Iran. As the senior Shia cleric in Basra, he is outraged by the ‘amameh parani’, as well as the defiance over the hijab – what if it spreads, he asked, to other countries? Here I assume he means Iraq, but, as far as I know, the government in Baghdad has not imposed the obligatory wearing of the hijab. However, thanks to the wonderful invasion that Bush and Blair managed in 2003, there are Shia strongholds policed by government forces where women cannot walk without a headscarf.

Working class

What about working class protests? So far workers’ actions have been sporadic and dispersed. As I keep reminding comrades who say the working class will ‘get there’, we have to be realistic. The Iranian working class is not in the same position as in February 1979. One important section – the oil workers – are no longer employed by a single entity, the National Iranian Oil Company – the neoliberal economic policies of the regime mean that we are now looking at hundreds of contract companies in the refinery section and even in the exploration of oil. Some of these privatised components of the oil industry are associated with and even owned by leaders of Revolutionary Guards. Therefore organising nationwide protests in the industry is much more difficult.

Having said that, we are seeing a number of oil workers’ protests, including the threat of a strike by those employed on permanent contracts – probably around 30% of this industry’s total workforce. We also have petrochemical workers who staged a short protest strike and Ahvaz steel-plant workers expressing their opposition to the regime. But we are not seeing major strikes – more the closure of shops and bazaars in Kurdish and other provincial cities. As you can imagine, the bazaar is not exactly a radical force.

The teachers union is very active and gaining support, while medics have also become involved – they are pointing to the horrific injuries people are getting from metal baton rounds. In addition 600 academics and lecturers in Iranian universities have been protesting against the presence of military forces on campuses and their mass arrest of students. They are calling for the release of all students.

Left

What about the left? Here I think there is there is a parallel to Ukraine in some ways. On the one hand, we have a section of the left which is saying that the US is in decline, while Iran did its best to accommodate the nuclear deal between 2015 and 2018 – it was Donald Trump who walked out. Iran has no choice but to ally itself with China and Russia, they say, justifying this by claiming China imposes a lower rate of exploitation! Such arguments are supported by sections of the press inside Iran. If you look at websites such as Tasnim and Fars News, the intelligentsia of the rightwing, conservative factions of the Islamic Republic are saying the same thing: ‘It wasn’t our choice. The west didn’t respect the deal signed by Obama, and we have to live with new allies, such as Russia and China.’ The supporters of this line include an outspoken ex-Maoist and his followers, as well as Rahe Tudeh (a split from the ‘official communist’ Tudeh party). Then there are student activists in Iran who call themselves the “axis of resistance”, which came into being on campuses during the Trump era. They are definitely not Muslim and consider themselves to be on the left.

It is very difficult to give percentages, but I would estimate that the pro-Russia, pro-China Iranian left accounts for less than 5% of the left as a whole. The majority of the left – possibly over 80% – are pro-US, pro-Nato. They might not admit to that, but decades of neoliberal capitalism have influenced their politics, whether they realise it or not. And here I include people who say they are opposed to any military intervention by the US, even though it is obvious from what they say and write, and indeed the ‘alternatives’ they propose, that they are siding with the US.

Among self-avowed Marxists, there is a whole swathe of people who at the end of the day believe that the working class in Iran is ‘backward’, that a period of US-sponsored bourgeois democracy, however imperfect, will bring enlightenment. All you can say to these deluded groups and individuals is: ‘Yes, this worked in Iraq, didn’t it? It worked in Libya. So let’s have it in Iran too!’ In this category I would include a very large chunk of the organisations that calls themselves ‘left’.

But there are significant differences between such groups. On the one hand, you have the Organisation of Iranian People’s Fadaian (Majority), who are actually close to the ‘reformists’ in the Islamic Republic. They say, ‘Let us not have any violence by the protestors.’ But where is the violence from protestors? More’s the pity, the protestors do not have weapons; they are beaten, gassed, arrested, imprisoned, killed.

The latest, most idiotic argument I have seen – which actually shows how contagious this type of stupidity is, as it moves from Fadaian (Majority) into sections of what claims to be ‘the radical left’ – can be found in an article on the Rahe Kargar website, which states that the demonstrations in Iran should be about ‘life’, not death – implying we should avoid slogans such as ‘Death to the dictator!’ (Khamenei) or ‘Death to the shah!’ and here I think the author has moved so far to the right that his main concern regarding the slogan is not Khamenei, but the shah.

In reality, when the slogan, ‘Death to …’, is used in Iran, it does not literally mean that those specified should actually be killed. It means ‘Down with’ a particular system and its regime – so what is wrong with that? Since it is actually the slogan widely heard inside the country, why should we self-censor and only talk about ‘life’? How can we say this, when ‘life’ is not exactly great for the great majority of the Iranian population, many of whom are suffering from inadequate food and lack of medicines. And, apparently, we ought not to talk about the overthrow of all the various factions of the Islamic regime. This is the kind of stupid, passive, rightward-moving sentiment that is gathering traction when you look at the Iranian left.

It seems to me that most of the various four or five factions of the Fadaian minority, together with a number of factions within the Worker Communist Party, as well as both factions of Rahe Kargar, are echoing the same pro-western, soft, liberal message: let us confine ourselves to the slogan ‘Women, life, freedom’.

Fortunately I am no longer the only one who has written about the limitations of this slogan and I must emphasise that the rightwing tendency I have described is often limited to the leadership, while most of the members are opposed to such views. However, their websites, TV interviews and articles reflect the leadership position – against which the majority must now rally, because, if the crunch comes, the purveyors of such views would support foreign intervention. They would support more sanctions. All this arises partly from despair after so many years of exile, partly from the triumph of western liberal propaganda and partly from sheer ignorance of the current global situation.

In Hands off the People of Iran, we have maintained two slogans: ‘No to imperialist interventions’ and ‘No to the Islamic Republic’. I am pleased to report that increasingly members of the groups I have mentioned above, who are angry at the rightwing turn of their own leadership, are getting in touch asking to join Hopi. We are in a unique position to intervene in terms of solidarity with the current protests, in that we support calls for the revolutionary overthrow of the Islamic Republic, while exposing endless attempts by the Biden administration and its allies in Europe to manufacture an alternative state in exile, along with its idiotic attempts to manufacture pro-US leaders for the Iranian protests.

When it comes to the Tehran regime, change from above will be very different from that in Iraq or, dare I say, Libya. With the exception of Israel, no-one is talking of war or even limited military action, such as air strikes. The so-called ‘targeted sanctions’ have had little effect – except to enrich those in power and impoverish ordinary Iranians – and it is the same with propaganda pumped out by the US, UK, Saudi, etc, media.

Postscript

Since my talk on November 12, upon which this article is based, we have witnessed an escalation of the demonstrations and protests on university campuses and in towns across the country. On November 15 a false claim that the Islamic Republic is planning to execute 15,000 protestors went viral on Instagram – major figures such as Justin Trudeau have helped spread this fake news.

Irrespective of the outcome of the current protests, over the coming months we in Hopi will need to organise solidarity from below, including from trade unions. We need to organise talks, seminars and debates that address the current global situation, including illusions about China’s economic relations with so-called developing countries. We need to explain also the shortcomings of liberal democracy, including the current state of women’s ‘equality’ in advanced capitalist countries. Iranian young people have many illusions about the ‘rule of law’ and western civil society, so we need to expose the profound shortcomings of such models, while at the same time stressing our opposition to the authoritarianism in Russia, China, etc.

We will have to deal with fake news – we can and should help comrades in Iran combat network limitations imposed by the regime, as well as helping them to hide their identity and encrypt their messages, so as to protect them from the prying eyes and ears of the regime’s security forces.

All this requires activist volunteers, and I hope that comrades who read this article will get in touch with Hopi at hopi.protests@gmail.com and let us know how they can help.

First published in the Weekly Worker.

بیانیه هایی برای تشکیل یک فروم چپ

Iran, Third Voice:

https://hopoi.org/farsi/farsi-statement-1.html

Call for a ‘leftist forum’:

https://hopoi.org/farsi/farsi-statement-2.html

Yassamine Mather celebrates the current wave of mass protests, the youth, the bravery. However, lack of serious organisation, coordination and a strategic plan is a real problem that must be addressed

The current wave of protests, which started almost two months ago, seem to be getting stronger with every day that passes.

They are by far the most widespread, important protests against the Islamic Republic – and, of course, those who remember the events that led to the February uprising in 1979 will know the significance of events that follow the traditional commemoration period for those who have died. Last week we saw the 40th day since the death of Mahsa Amini at the hands of the morality police. There were huge demonstrations in her hometown of Saghez, as well as in Mahabad in Iranian Kurdistan. Immediately afterwards we had the 40th day since the killing of a teenage girl who was amongst the first to join the new wave of anti-government protests.

The number being killed by security forces is rising daily – we are talking of at least 350 dead, thousands injured and, according to government figures, around 1,000 arrested and detained during the recent protests. We can say with some confidence that protests will continue, with further local and national 40-day commemorations for those killed. University and school students in particular show no sign of giving up – on the contrary, there are, if anything, angrier, more determined protests on university campuses. A senior ayatollah has been quoted in the Iranian press after complaining that clerics (mullahs) have had to leave their cloaks and turbans behind when they go out for fear of being attacked.

Most of the regime’s ‘reformist’ factions have distanced themselves from the line promulgated by president Ebrahim Raisi and supreme leader Ali Khamenei. They insist on women wearing the hijab in public at all times. Mohammad Javad Zarif, former foreign minister, expresses hope that the situation can be resolved, declaring: “We will continue the dialogue in the coming days.” However, as others have pointed out, no “dialogue” has even started. More importantly, dialogue with whom? Everyone agrees that the demonstrators do not recognise any particular leader – in fact there is no centralised organisation challenging the legitimacy of the regime.

A surprising conciliatory call for moderation has come from a number of senior figures from the ruling faction. Prominent conservative politician, Ali Larijani, former speaker of the Iranian majles (parliament) and someone who was supposed to be a close advisor of the supreme leader, has called for a re-assessment of the laws regarding the compulsory wearing of the hijab. Larijani was reported by the news website Ettelaat saying:

The hijab has a cultural solution: it does not need decrees and referendums. I appreciate the services of the police force and Basij [paramilitary militia], but this burden of encouraging the hijab should not be assigned to them … The people and young people who are coming out on the streets are our children. In a family, if a child commits a crime, they try to guide him to the right path – society needs more tolerance.¹

Larijani also distanced himself from claims made by the current president and sections of the conservative faction that the protests are all part of a western plot – the youth had genuine grievances, he said and “insistence on social values will elicit violent reactions on the part of the protestors”. In a sign of further cracks amongst the rulers, minister for tourism Ezzatollah Zarghami asked on his Twitter account: “What should the people do if they do not wish to be guided by the morality police?”²

This was followed by a comment from Gholamreza Montazeri, deputy chair of the majles cultural committee. He called for understanding of the new generation and expressed opposition to any violent crackdown on the protests.

Two weeks ago, Masih Mohajeri, editor of the important conservative daily newspaper, Jomhouri Eslami (Islamic Republic), together with senior cleric ayatollah Abdollah Javadi Amoli, urged the Raisi government to show a more tolerant attitude towards the protestors and to deal with the causes of dissent by bringing about the necessary changes to deal with the country’s problems.³

Taming the sheep

Last week, Mohammad Reza Rajabi Shakib, an academic in an Iranian university and social media activist, reminded us of a quote from ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic Republic, who in 1980 compared the relationship between the government and the people with that between a shepherd and a sheep: after all, “the shepherd likes these sheep to graze in a good place”.⁴

Referring to these words, Shakib wrote: “Basically, you don’t need any skills to manage sheep except for two things: the skill of scaring and the skill of slaughtering.” Rajabi Shakib added on his Telegram channel that “after Mr Khomeini, the skill of fooling a child and creating an imaginary enemy was added to the previous skills. Now the next generations must give blood, so that these shepherds understand that they are not on the side of the sheep.” Of course, the very title of the supreme leader – Vali Faghih (guardian) – conveys the metaphor.

The problem is that the Iranian people never accepted the regime’s priorities and only brutal repression allows the Islamic Republic to survive. However, the current protests leave no doubt: the young generation is no longer tolerating the situation and the cracks amongst rulers show that previous methods have failed.

The official position remains that of Khamenei, who told the nation that “these provocations are not spontaneous internal things”, but the work of “the enemy”. On October 28, an 8,000-word statement was issued, declaring that the protest movement had been created by the CIA and that the security forces would continue to use current methods to clamp down upon those taking part.

However, the continuing protests have shown that the government’s policy of intimidation and threats – combined with televised confessions, the humiliation and ridicule of prisoners, the dismissal of demands as stemming from nothing more than sexual and emotional frustration – have not been effective and the protests are actually more determined than before. The key slogans of the demonstrators are still aimed at the supreme leader and his government – they want to see the overthrow of the entire regime.

All attempts by both ‘reformists’ and conservatives for compromise have been ‘too little, too late’ and, even if the supreme leader makes a U-turn, relaxes regulations on the hijab, dismisses Raisi and asks the Council of Guardians to appoint a ‘reformist’ president, it is likely the protests will continue. The slogan, ‘Death to the dictator!’, and those such as “No to shah, no to rahbar!” (a reference to Khamenei), do not leave much doubt about their position regarding both the current ruler and the pretender to the Pahlavi throne.

As we approach the 50th day of protests, it is clear that by its own admission the regime is facing a serious danger, even compared to 2009. At that time former prime minister Mir Hossein Mousavi and presidential candidate Mehdi Kahroubi – both long-time supporters of the Islamic Republic – called on their followers to reverse the “rigged presidential elections”. However, they had no intention of challenging the legitimacy of the Islamic regime; nor did they support slogans against the supreme leader. But today the protests are far more widespread – there is not a town in the country where they are not taking place. While the protests do not, as already pointed out, have anything approaching a clear leadership, on the other hand, they are not checked and limited by ‘reformist’ leaders, as was the case in 2009.

Back then the majority of protestors were from the middle class, whereas in 2022 they are from the working class and lower sections of the middle class. This means that not only are we seeing much larger numbers, but the working class demonstrators are younger and braver than 2009 – they do not seem to be deterred by the security forces.

The Arab media seems to be obsessed by the fact that the protests have not got a single identifiable leader and they remind us that such decentralised protests in Lebanon and Sudan, not to mention the Arab Spring, failed to achieve their aims. They ask if movements always need a figurehead and in my opinion the absence of a single figurehead is definitely an advantage. We have seen so many self-appointed or largely manufactured ‘charismatic’ leaders betraying mass movements, spreading confusion and, all in all, leaving nothing behind except broken dreams.

It is excellent that the current protests are not led by some rightwing individual or organisation, which could replace the Islamic Republic with an even more reactionary and repressive regime – if there is one lesson to be learnt from 1979, it is that you can replace a dictatorship with an even worse dictatorship. However, the lack of serious organisation, coordination and a strategic plan is a real problem – especially as the protests escalate and repression mounts.

I do not believe that clear political leadership will spontaneously emerge from within the ranks of protestors, which means that the outcome of the uprising remains totally unclear. But we must support the movement, argue for better, more class-conscious slogans and at all times oppose military intervention and more sanctions by the US and its Nato and regional allies.

However, most of the left in exile is failing to do this. No one was surprised that Tudeh (Iran’s ‘official communist’ party) has repeated its 1979 call for “a united front against dictatorship”. Those who have read about the February uprising of that year will know that this was exactly the same expression used to urge an alliance against the shah’s dictatorship. Even the dimmest member of Tudeh must know by now that the ‘front’ was an utter failure. Under orders from Moscow, Tudeh supported the reactionary leadership of the Islamic Republic, even when it started to massacre leftwing militants.

If the Soviet bureaucracy could be blamed for the 1979-84 criminal policies of Tudeh, this time we can only blame leading members of Tudeh itself. Who will be in this “united front”? Anyone who opposes the Islamic Republic and we all know this includes liberals, monarchists, pro-imperialist cults, fake leftists and all manner of reactionary odds and sods. First time round, the “united front against dictatorship” slogan led to tragedy – not only for the radical left and for Tudeh itself. Repeating it a second time, while having the appearance of farce, could lead to a far worse tragedy.

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1. www.ettelaat.com/archives/647060#gsc.tab=0.↩︎
2. twitter.com/Zarghami_ez/status/1579819502950551553.↩︎
3. jepress.ir/?newsid=291463.↩︎
4. See www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJKYsUO5cO4.↩︎

1- The brutal murder of Mahsa Amini by the police of the Islamic Republic of Iran has led to nationwide protests lasting more than twenty days so far against this crime, against the Islamic Republic and against its mandatory hijab. Women, especially young women and students, have played a decisive role in this uprising.

2- The protests have created a very difficult situation for those in power in Iran. On the one hand they cannot easily back down from the imposition of the compulsory hijab, on the other they do not have the ability to end nationwide protests. It is therefore inevitable that they have chosen to suppress the population with increasing violence.

So far hundreds of protesters have been killed and thousands have been arrested: they face torture and possible death in the regime’s prisons.

3- When it comes to the issue of women’s rights, the Islamic Republic of Iran has always envisaged a regime of gender apartheid, although its imposition in practice has never been a complete success.

One of the pillars of this system is the country’s supreme religious leader Ayatollah Khamenei Vali al-Faqih, who has consistently emphasised that women, relative to men, are imperfect intellectual beings, and that their main function should be to bear children.

Despite this, more than 60 percent of university students in Iran are female. The problem, however, for Iranian young women is finding a job, whether with or without a degree: the official employment rate for women is only 13 percent. Yet currently, 80% of Iran’s population lives in cities and urban families cannot survive with only one breadwinner. Accordingly, many Iranian women are forced to work in temporary jobs on the black market or from home, with no job security or legal rights. Sanctions, endemic corruption and the chaotic neoliberal economic policies – pursued by all factions of the Iranian government – have meant rising prices (an inflation rate over 40%) and food shortages.

Women have faced the burden of feeding their families with increasingly meagre wages despite a rising cost of living. That is why the issue of poverty in Iran is particularly an issue for women, even compared to most other countries in the economic south.

The regime that came to power in 1979, vowing to support the disinherited, now presides over an economic system that has one of the highest Gini coefficients (the disparity in wealth between the bottom ten percent and the top ten) in the Middle East and North Africa.

4- In light of the above points, the fight for women’s equality with men should be wider and will go further than the fight against the compulsory hijab.

While fighting for freedom from ridiculous and oppressive clothing laws, the defence of women’s “right to life” (the slogan used in Iran) is in practice intricately linked to the material base of the current rebellion, class struggles in Iran.

Its success will require the realisation that full equality between men and women can only be achieved in a different kind of society where exploitation of human beings has ended. Thus women’s struggles in Iran today also herald the beginnings of a new era of class struggles in the Middle East. Solidarity with such a movement cannot come from above, from colonial states complicit with globalised low-wage female labour in developing countries. It must come from below: from trade unions, independent women’s organisations, student unions… We call on you to support Iran’s new uprising.

Bridget Fowler – Emeritus Professor – University of Glasgow

Christine Cooper – Professor – University of Edinburgh

Yassamine Mather – Editor, Critique – University of Oxford

Raquel Varela – Professor – University of Lisbon

Maud Anne Bracke – Professor – University of Glasgow

Silvia Federici – Professor Emerita – Hofstra University, USA

Anne McShane – Lawyer – Ireland

Patricia Arnold – Professor Emeritus – University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, USA

Iran Mansouri – Lecturer – University of Birmingham

Lesley Catchpowle – University of Greenwich

Daria Dyakonova – Faculty International University, Geneva

Velia Luparello – Professor – Universidad Nacional de Córdoba (UNC), Argentina

Susan Weissman – Professor of Politics, Saint Mary’s College of California

Mahsa Amini’s killing at the hands of the morality police sparked protests in every province. The young, in particular female students and school students, refuse to be ruled in the old way. However, the Islamic regime seems determined to keep on using mass repression, fear and the cloak of religion, says Yassamine Mather

The first question to ask is this: why are we witnessing such widespread, nationwide protests? My answer is that the religious state’s interventions in every aspect of people’s private lives has led to a situation where the overwhelming majority of the youth are refusing to be ruled in the old way.

Most contemporary dictatorships are quite cunning, in that they suppress their political opponents, and do not allow people to organise, to mobilise. Strikes are banned, political gatherings are forbidden and so on, but such regimes do not usually interfere in people’s private lives. Under the shah’s dictatorship, for example, you could not have a political party opposed to him, you could not even hold a small study group in your university, but you could do what you wanted in your personal life. You could dress the way you wanted, drink and eat what you wanted, get entertained in any manner you wanted. In fact the state’s aim was to divert attention from politics by allowing you to live your private life as you wished. In this respect Iran’s Islamic Republic is very different. It wants to dictate what people wear, what they eat, what they drink, how they socialise and so on. This is what has helped mobilise the youth in particular.

There can be no doubt that the current protests have created a very difficult situation for the regime. On the one hand, it cannot easily back down on the hijab, despite the fact that some ‘reformist’ factions are saying: ‘Let’s give up on this issue, it’s not that important, it wasn’t in the Koran’. But the supreme leader and the current president cannot do that, though they have reneged on just about every other promise of the 1979 revolution. This, remember, was a revolution calling for independence from the western powers and, of course, that did not happen. In reality Iran is economically dependent on global capital and the US-dominated world order. Nor is China a hegemon power which can take Iran under its wing. But let us also remember that the Islamic revolution happened during the Cold War era. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s slogan was ‘Neither east nor west – Islam is the only answer’.

The other issue raised by pro-Khomeini forces in 1979 was the claim that this was going to be the government of the disinherited, the poor. Well, that has become a joke nowadays. The rich are getting richer and they are mainly those associated with the government, those who are related to ayatollahs or those who have connections to ministers and top officials. Iran has a Gini factor of 42, one of the highest in the region.

So Islam is more or less the only aspect of the 1979 revolution they can use to claim legitimacy, to justify staying in power. I do not think even supporters of the Islamic Republic give any credence to its anti-US rhetoric – they know it is just empty sloganeering. Relatives of senior ayatollahs and officials are all busy applying for US green cards. So they are left with Islam and they try and maintain their ever-shrinking base with claims about ‘remaining faithful to the Islamic aspirations of the ’79 revolution’. That is why they cannot back down easily on the hijab.

It is interesting that the protest wave comes after two or three years when the Rouhani government was taking a more relaxed view regarding the hijab. Many women, of course, took advantage of this. Here we are not talking of well-to-do suburbs, but everywhere – many women felt able to go around without a headscarf. I recently spoke to a number of students who came back from Iran and they were telling me how many women do not wear a headscarf any more – all this until Ebrahim Raisi and the re-imposition of strict hijab rules, that in the midst of a period of high tension and widespread despair. The nuclear negotiations have failed, there is a serious economic crisis, leading inevitably to the escalation of protests and clashes with security forces.

The Islamic Republic imposed repressive measures on women as soon as it consolidated its power. However, as with many other issues, the regime’s attitude has been contradictory. Unlike the Taliban in Afghanistan, Iran’s rulers want to appear on the world stage claiming they believe in ‘gender equality’. Indeed, as some of their ‘left’ apologists in the Stop the War Coalition used to tell us, Iranian women have held important positions in the Islamic government – deputy president, leader of the Majles. While that is true, what they failed to tell us is that these were all women who were very close to the centres of power (often relatives of senior ayatollahs).

The reality of women’s life in Iran over the last 43 years has been one of gross inequality. The legal system – either based on Sharia law or retained from the shah’s era – is thoroughly misogynistic, especially when it comes to marriage, divorce, inheritance and labour rights. Supreme leader Ali Khamenei and president Ebrahim Raisi are keen to maintain the support of fundamentalists within the regime. That is why we have the strange obsession with what women do or don’t wear on their heads.

Meanwhile, although 60% of university students are female, most cannot find proper jobs – female employment, according to government figures, is a mere 13%. In fact, the total rate of unemployment is very high, because of the terrible economic situation – as a direct consequence of industrial shutdowns caused by sanctions, relentless privatisations and corruption.

Economy

In Iran 80% of the population is urbanised. Peasants have been forced to migrate to shanty towns as a direct result of the economic policies of the Islamic Republic. Two of the country’s staples – also produced for export – were rice and tea. In the last two decades, unscrupulous capitalists closely associated with senior ayatollahs and officials have flooded the market with cheap rice and tea imported from abroad (only to raise the prices later). This bankrupted domestic producers. People have been buying pasta to replace expensive rice and bread, but now there is a shortage of pasta too! Suffice to say, buying and preparing food for the family usually remains the responsibility of women.

Given the worsening economic situation (sanctions, 40% inflation, a currency continually falling in value, and now the war in Ukraine), many Iranians are forced to have two or three jobs just in order to survive. In most families women have to work, even though they end up in lower-paid, temporary and less secure jobs – at times accepting low-paid jobs working from home. So you could say that this female labour force is facing far higher degrees of exploitation.

Add to that the threat of the morality police punishing them for failing to cover their head properly! In some cases, as with Mahsa Amini, you get arrested for showing a couple of centimetres of hair – what the morality police call ‘poor hijab’. No wonder working class women are so angry.

But in fact students, youth as well as older working class men are supporting the women, because they too are fed up of with food shortages, rising prices, low and unpaid wages, mass unemployment, abolition of food and fuel subsidies. Of course, job losses were in no small part caused by massive privatisation, and the abolition of subsidies were amongst the conditions accepted by the Islamic Republic in return for loans from the International Monetary Fund. Iran, it should be noted, keeps trying to come top of the list of so-called emerging economies that adhere to the neoliberal dictates of global capitalism. All factions of the regime – ‘reformist’ as well as conservatives – have followed IMF and World Bank dictates as if they came straight from the Koran.

Alongside mass poverty, there is unbelievable wealth amassed by a tiny minority – sons and daughters of senior ayatollahs and leading figures in the regime. This group flaunts its extravagant levels of luxury consumption on social media, with Instagram pages such as #RichKidsofTehran including photos of themselves wearing flashy clothes and posing next to Ferraris and swimming pools. Such arrogant ostentation has fuelled anger amongst the majority of the country’s younger generation, who yearn for change. Of course this is the generation of mobile phones, apps and social media, so they are more than aware that young people globally do not face the kinds of crazy restrictions they have to endure over their private lives.

Workers

Then there are workers such as those of Vahed Bus Company and the Haft Tappeh sugarcane agro-industrial complex. They have regularly been striking over the last few years against privatisation, jobs losses and non-payment of wages – unsurprisingly they have joined the protests. So too have steel workers from the Ahvaz plant and petrochemical workers – workers in the oil industry who staged strikes throughout the summer, complaining about terrible working conditions, lack of safety and low wages. Now they are also shouting slogans against the dictatorship.

The Syndicate of Iran’s Teachers is another group taking part in the protests – many of its leaders have been arrested. Teachers have been in a dispute with the government for at least a year and this is not just about salaries: they are fed up with government intervention in the curriculum; ministry bureaucrats telling them what they can teach and what they cannot; how they should deal with students who are not ‘properly dressed’; and so on. Their semi-legal trade union has, in particular, supported pupils who have removed their headscarves. There is a short film on social media showing girls barracking and chasing a government official out of their school after he tried to tell them about the virtues of wearing a headscarf. Teachers did nothing to stop them.

Lawyers are also protesting … especially against corruption. They know that to get a successful judgement in Iran requires bribing the judge (often a cleric) or some other government official. They too were on the streets last week.

Such examples show the extent of these protests. Many of those taking part are young – some are school students – and they are not afraid. All this means that the old way the government deals with protests – sending in the police and security forces – has not worked so far. In rare cases members of the security forces have broken ranks. I have been sent a very touching video of an old woman who takes the hand of her son, a soldier, and tells him: “It is not worth your life” and they both walk away. However, I have to stress that at the moment such cases are very rare.

Mir-Hossein Moussavi – leader of the Green movement in 2009 – has called upon soldiers and the police to “stay with the people”. I do not know exactly what that means, but it surely implies opposing the government. He is not saying that explicitly, but, of course, he is still under some form of house arrest. The problem is, he should have made such comments in 2009, when much larger crowds were on the streets of Tehran and other major cities, after the disputed presidential elections. However, Moussavi, like other ‘reformists’, cannot break from the Islamic regime – he remains part and parcel of it.

In fact one of the advantages of the current protests is that they are not limited by the timidity of the likes of Moussavi. However, the lack of any real nationwide leadership and coordination is a major weakness of the current protests – worsened by the success of the authorities in curtailing internet communications. Contrary to what ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his supporters inside and outside Iran claim, the protests are spontaneous – they are certainly not “organised by CIA or MI5”. Ordinary people have taken to the streets because they are angry, because they want change.

Another positive aspect of these protests, compared to the 2018‑19 protests against the abolition of subsidies, is that the demonstrators distance themselves very clearly from the previous regime of the shah. As soon as the students got involved, one of their main slogans was “Death to the dictator, be it the leader or Shah!” ‘Leader’ is a reference to Khamenei, whose official title is ‘supreme leader’, and there are various versions of the same slogan repeated up and down the country, leaving no doubt about their attitude towards the shah’s regime. Exiled royalists can take no comfort from today’s protests.

Mahsa Amini was Kurdish and there have been a number of strikes and other protests in Kurdish cities such as Sanandaj and Sagghez. However, contrary to the wishes of Saudi Arabia and its well paid media pundits, this has not become a ‘nationalist’ Kurdish movement. From day one, protests in Azerbaijan, Balochistan, Khouzestan, Isfahan, Tehran and other provinces have been just as angry, frequent and determined as those in Kurdistan. As pointed out by a number of left writers inside Iran, these protests are indeed ‘post-nationalist’ and there is no way you can detect separatist nationalist sentiments in any of them.

Peculiarities

It has been a long-term aim of Saudi Arabia and neocon Republicans in the US to break-up Iran into various small states. That would solve the problem of having to deal with the enemy, ‘Iran’, as it exists today. The 50% Persian, Farsi-speaking core of Iran would be shorn of its national minority provinces, which would be made into an Azerbaijan Republic in the north-west, a Kurdish republic (probably as corrupt and pro-Israeli as the Kurdish authority in Iraq) and a pro-Saudi Arab Republic in Khouzestan. We know this is part and parcel of the Saudi plan, not least because the trashy, Persian-language, Iran International TV channel (dubbed ‘MBS TV’ or just ‘Saudi TV’) has done its best to promote this line and foment national divisions. However, inside Iran there is no sign of such divisions in the current protests.

Even more ridiculous is the promotion of the loony cult, Mojahedin e-Khalq, by Iran International TV. This is the Iranian organisation which sold itself to Saddam Hussein; then, after the 2003 invasion of Iraq, sold itself to the US occupation force – only to end up in a claustrophobic block of flats in Albania, paid for by the Saudis; and supported by Trump allies such as Rudy Giuliani. Its ‘leader’ is hijab-wearing Maryam Rajavi, who divorced her husband, Mehdi Abrishamchi, and married the then MEK leader, Massoud Rajavi, in 1985 (he subsequently disappeared). Female MEK members are fully hijabed. Many have had to go through an ‘ideological revolution’, divorcing their respective husbands and marrying other men – as determined by the cult’s leadership – often in mass wedding ceremonies. As far as we can tell, the group has few if any supporters inside Iran, and has certainly taken no part in organising protests.

Of course, in the absence of any coherent organisation, of any strategy, the protest movement faces severe dangers. Sections of the Iranian left share the illusion that, somehow by magic, spontaneous demonstrations will create a revolutionary, radical force that will defend the working class and promote a socialist alternative. Well, experience tells us that this will not be the case. Some sections of the Iranian left have been all over the place in the last few years – some of them supporting sanctions, some supporting US military interventions in the Middle East – and you cannot expect them to suddenly come to their senses.

The role of celebrities needs commenting upon. In the era of social media and influencers that should hardly be surprising. Every day over the last month Iranian actors, film directories, sports men and women – some of whom were working closely with the regime till recently – have used their social media platforms to express solidarity with the protestors. I am not saying this is entirely negative – there is a positive element to it – but at the same time it carries the danger of creating a diversion.

What about the slogans? I have already mentioned those against the dictatorship, and another very prominent one is ‘Woman, life, freedom’. I have previously written about my reservations regarding this slogan – coined originally by the PKK (Kurdistan Workers Party) in Turkey and taken up by its YPG co-thinkers of Syrian Kurdistan. It is devoid of any class character and vague enough to allow unprincipled alliances to be formed. Freedom for whom? Under what economic system? In fact it helps foster illusions that ‘freedom’ or women’s equality can be achieved under the capitalist system. If you are in a country like Iran, with its terrible economic conditions, the term ‘freedom’ excuses a popular, ie, cross class, front, including Islamic feminists, secular business people and regime ‘reformists’. Many on the left have adopted this as the only slogan, with no explanation, no attempt to give definite programmatic concreteness to the words.

Of course, it fits like a glove with the Tudeh Party – Iran’s ‘official communists’ – who are once again calling for a “united front against dictatorship”. (I say ‘once again’, because this was exactly their rallying call in February 1979, before the fall of the shah). We all know the terrible consequences of uniting with every reactionary who happens to oppose today’s dictators – reactionaries who want to impose their own brand of repression. You would have thought, after the disaster of supporting Khomeini in 1979 and their subsequent support for the Islamic Republic until 1983, when Tudeh and its allies began to face repression, arrest and imprisonment themselves, they would have leant the lesson. Clearly not, though.

Then there are the petrochemical workers of Vahed and Haft Tappeh. They are putting forward some of the old slogans of 1979 such as Nan, kar, azadi (‘Bread, work, freedom’), or other versions of it. Obviously much more advanced.

Meanwhile, there is the USA. Joe Biden’s secretary of state, Antony Blinken, said last week: “We are not talking any more about JCPOA” – the Iran nuclear deal. “We are only concerned about the protests.” Any US military intervention or additional sanctions would be a disaster. It would strengthen the regime, which at present is telling its supporters outside Iran that there are no major protests – it is all propaganda put out by the US, Israel, etc. Such outside intervention would ensure more brutal attacks by the security forces on demonstrators and weaken the protests. Clearly no‑one inside Iran is asking for any such intervention.

However, support from below is very welcome. Women in neighbouring countries – in Turkey, Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as European and North American countries – have shown solidarity with Iranian women. No doubt a weakening of political Islam in Iran will have major consequences in the Middle East – of course, we are still a long way away from the fall of the regime, but the Islamic Republic of Iran is now facing a major challenge, more serious than at any time during the last 44 years.

The current protests are less organised and numerically smaller than those in 2009 (prompted by what the ‘reformist’ factions of the regime called a ‘rigged’ presidential election). However, they are more important, partly because they mainly have working class and lower-middle class support, and the average age of the protestors is younger – meaning that many of those taking part are less scared of the security forces. More than a decade after 2009, and after the failure of the latest round of nuclear talks, there is no immediate hope for any economic improvement. As many Iranians have been saying in the last few weeks, they have nothing to lose – Kard be ostokhan ressidhe (‘The knife has reached the bone’). In 2009 the leadership of the movement was provided by two of the regime’s ‘reformist’ factions. At the end of the day they wanted the Islamic Republic to survive. The current protests are definitely not so timid.

What next?

It is very difficult to predict the future of these protests, but we can certainly speculate about various alternatives. We might see the US, Israel and Saudi Arabia trying to transform the current protests into a ‘colour revolution’, promoting so-called ‘leaders’ from above. As things stand, that is unlikely to work, as we have already witnessed failed attempts to produce such figureheads. However, even if such a regime change occurs, the new state would face so many social, political and economic challenges that it would inevitably resume repression – repression that would start by attacking the poorer sections of the population.

Another possibility is that the Islamic regime and its supreme leader might decide that their own interests would be better served by changing their current policies. We already have two ‘grand ayatollahs’ in the religious city of Qom calling for compromise, and the ‘reformists’ are taking a similar position. The supreme leader can dismiss the current president and appoint an interim replacement – under such circumstances all we can expect are very superficial changes. The dire economic situation will surely give rise to new protests.

As far as the Islamic Republic is concerned, the most likely scenario is an increase in repression – for instance, the deployment of the elite brigades of the Revolutionary Guards with the aim of crushing all protests. On October 16 we witnessed a fire in Evin prison, where many of those arrested in recent protests are detained. The authorities claim that the fire started in the “non-political section” of the prison, while another version has it that there was “a riot that led to a fire”. The opposition says fire bombs were shot at prisoners in Evin (there is precedence for this – the fire at the Rex cinema in 1978 was initiated by supporters of ayatollah Khomeini). We will probably not know the truth in the near future, but at some stage we will find out who was responsible for the eight officially counted deaths in Evin. Ultimately the blame lies with the supreme leader, as those who died were prisoners in an Iranian jail. All this demonstrates the kind of brutal attack the regime can organise.

For the left the best scenario will arise if these protests continue. Every day we are witnessing new groups of workers joining. After a series of privatisations we can no longer rely on a nationwide oil strike (as in 1979). But the conditions are coming into being where we can build a serious organisation, with a serious programme. The sooner that can be done, the nearer we will be to the revolutionary overthrow of the rule of the Islamic Republic – with unprecedented consequences not just for Iran, but for the entire Middle East.

This article is based on the talk given by Yassamine Mather to the October 16 Online Communist Forum, a recording of which is available on the CPGB YouTube channel