[Midden-Oosten] Iranian Left views on Uprising

[Jeff]

Also see:

http://hopoi.org/2018/01/protests-by-impoverished-hungry-iranians/

https://communistanarchism.blogspot.nl/2018/01/iran-working-class-raises-its-head.html

-------------------------------------------------

Iran: Bread. Jobs. Freedom.

https://libcom.org/news/iran-bread-jobs-freedom-05012018

[We are publishing this dispatch direct from an activist in Iran, trying 
to make some sense of the current wave of protests. The situation is 
moving so quickly, and the protests sufficiently diffuse, that anyone 
claiming to know what will happen can be disregarded. The contribution 
we can make is to ask questions, to look at what has happened, is 
happening; and only from that speculate about what might happen in the 
future. We hope that more will contribute to this effort in the coming 
days and weeks.
We have lightly edited this piece for translation issues and to add 
footnotes.]

 From Armin Sadeghi, January 4th 2018.

Are we waging a revolution in Iran? Perhaps not. But if we perceive the 
essence of a revolution as “the abolition of fear”, then everyone has 
heard (and seen) the Iranian people shouting with no fear that “the 
emperor has no clothes”.

It is hard to anticipate beyond this, since the conflicting social 
forces have not yet fully unfolded; and it is almost impossible to grasp 
a revolution as it's being made. But, we can speculate on the situation, 
just as Marx wrote to Ruge [1]: "The internal difficulties seem to be 
almost greater than the external obstacles. For although no doubt exists 
on the question of 'Whence,' all the greater confusion prevails on the 
question of 'Whither.'" Here we restrict ourselves to the question of 
'whence', where the current wave of protests have come from, since there 
is certainly doubt on this outside Iran.

The course of events has been accelerating faster in Iran (as it has 
been in many other regions), and it has almost reached the point where 
no one can generate an cohesive narrative. Still, the political 
establishment was successful with yet another façade of an election – 
the same old trick of a false choice between bad and worse, while both 
parties serve the same class interests [2].

At the same time, Iran has the most workplace accidents and fatalities 
in the world. Just before the election more than forty miners were 
killed [3], and the the president was booed while he was trying to 
maintain a popular image by visiting the site. A few months back, the 
collapse of a commercial building in the center of Tehran (Plasco 
Building) demonstrated that sentiment is growing among people, and there 
is a general distrust with the political apparatus as a whole.

After Rouhani’s reelection, the situation got more twisted. Rouhani’s 
administration – the same people who had advocated the neoliberal 
project for decades - became too self-confident and waged an all-round 
war against the working class, precarious and contingent workers. Public 
healthcare is diminished to almost nothing, the same goes for job 
security and workplace security. The neoliberal project has been going 
on for more than 26 years. There was another revolt about two decades 
ago and it was brutally suppressed by the same people who hold the 
reformist front today [4].

Since then, despite the apparent political conflicts between sequential 
administrations, economic programs have been written by the same hand: 
pseudo-privatization, accumulation by dispossession, destroying all 
independent workers’ syndicates and councils [5], precarization of labor 
and so on. Over the last decade we have witnessed a free fall of the 
middle class into lower sectors of our society. The doctrine of a 
metropolitan country has left all the smaller cities and ethnic groups 
to struggle for survival, while the capital seemed to grow. The rest of 
the story is too familiar to get into the details; you just have to take 
a look at the per-capita consumption of fundamental commodities such as 
milk and dairies (which has fallen to less than a half), red meat which 
has fallen by more than 70% and many others.

So the background is clear: proletarianization has been going on for 
nearly three decades, there are no worker’s unions left that could 
pursue their class interests, there is a dramatic increase in 
unemployment due to financialization of capital.

The baby boom generation of the eighties cannot fit to any socially 
accepted paradigm; after graduation (and a considerable part of this 
generation has gone to college and university), there are no jobs that 
could fit their skills, and the jobs they could hold onto won't support 
any sort of decent life. Due to this the current generation can't 
maintain a nuclear family (which is so crucial to the ideological and 
economic structure of the political regime in Iran, note that all the 
official economic data is published per family not per person).

This has resulted in a year of diffuse but contiguous rallies, 
demonstrations, and sit-ins: The students opposing the privatization and 
commodification of education; the retired opposing the bankrupt 
retirement accounts; Teachers and nurses protesting against inhuman 
living conditions, the bus drivers supporting their syndicate members; 
and innumerable strikes in various sectors, from miners to sugarcane 
workers.

Within this context, Rouhani’s administration sought to push his war 
against the working class one step further after his re-election. He 
started a new project for unpaid internships which was strongly opposed 
by a student campaign against all kinds of unpaid or underpaid work. 
Reza Shahabi, the head of the bus drivers syndicate6 was unlawfully 
imprisoned, and after more than two months of hunger strike, when he had 
two brain strokes, the authorities refused to send him to a hospital. 
These acts were strongly opposed by union activists from various 
sectors. then along came the catastrophic earthquake.

The catastrophe of the earthquake was not just a natural phenomenon, but 
it pulled down the curtain hiding the poverty of the western region of 
the country. The officials couldn’t care less for the people in need of 
immediate help. They even treated them with a certain degree of 
contempt. And the people’s circles were created to help our fellow-human 
beings. This event disillusioned a major part of our society about who 
is going to stay on their side, and who is only thinking of how to take 
advantage of every situation. The earthquakes went on, and for months it 
was happening (with smaller degrees of course) in all parts of the 
country. Tehran was consumed by restlessness, since it has been 
anticipating a strong earthquake for decades.

The people were healing from the trauma, when the economic earthquake 
came: the annual budget engineered by Rouhani’s administration was an 
insult to everyone. All the damage done by the earthquake was six 
hundred million dollars, and the government found it impossible to 
provide a reconstruction budget, leaving it to donations from 
individuals. While, on the other hand, the budget of certain propaganda 
institutions was more than 15 billion dollars and it was fully paid for 
the current year. The price of fuel was to increase by more than 50 
percent. There was no budget left for state construction programs. News 
and infographics were being forwarded between people, and the 
dissatisfaction went beyond the government's anticipation.


How did it start? Who is on the streets? What do they want? And where to 
go next?

The Rouhani’s administration accused his so-called rival in the last 
election of igniting the revolt. But it can’t be ignored that the 
previous bread revolt (twenty-five years ago) started in the same 
region. Moreover, Mashhad has been a tax paradise for part of the 
regime’s economic elite for decades and it has one of the highest rates 
of growth of slums in the country. All the same, it is of no 
significance for us to check the conspiracy theories about the beginning 
of the revolt. The issue here, is its sudden outburst all around the 
country. Cities were joining the protest that middle class Tehraners 
hadn’t even heard of before. The body of protesters was mainly the 
disillusioned youth of 15 to 30 – the No-Future generation of Iran if 
you like to use familiar terms.

The first demonstrations started with a rage against economic 
conditions, and the government’s budget for the next year. But it took 
less than two days for the protest to aim the political apparatus as a 
whole. Slogans such as “down with high prices” was soon replaced with 
“down with the dictator”. Slogans against the supreme leader and the 
regime were cried out loud in the face of repressive forces for the 
first time.

Still it was clear that the horizontal movement couldn’t easily 
translate its rage into specific positive demands. Even the slogans 
against the whole regime had no idea of any alternative. The economic 
dissatisfaction couldn’t be translated into concrete measures. The 
reactionary forces within and outside the establishment (mainly 
including the son of the previous Shah of Iran and his supporters of 
monarchy! And the Mujahedin-e-Khalgh which is another religious 
reactionary armed organization) sought to take advantage of the 
situation. In some parts they tried to invest in the nostalgia of a good 
dictator who was Reza-Shah, the grandfather of the opposition leader 
today, in other parts they strived for the support of Trump 
administration. All this happened because of the systematic suppression 
of the left since the revolution of 1979. In fact, some argue that the 
cornerstone of this regime is founded on the suppression of the left and 
women.

The bright spot among all the confusion were the students. On the third 
day, they really shifted the paradigm of the revolt, mostly in Tehran, 
and it spread in many other parts of the country. They opposed the 
reactionary slogans with “even women has joined us, but you lazy men are 
just standing by”, they changed the pro-nationalist slogan of “neither 
Gaza, nor Lebanon, I will die only for Iran” with a much deeper slogan 
of “From Gaza to Iran, down with the exploiters”. They also added some 
class-conscious slogans promoting councils, or encouraging people to 
move beyond the fake dualism of reformists and fundamentalists. This was 
immediately recognized by authorities as a fracture point. Since then 
they have been arresting all the students and corresponding activists. 
The intelligence services saw this situation as the perfect opportunity 
to suppress the left for yet another decade.

This project is still going on, and all the left can hope for at the 
moment is to survive this situation and launch a counter attack in due 
time.

- Armin Sadeghi


1.     
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/letters/43_09.htm

2.     The May 2017 presidential and local elections resulted in the 
re-election of Rouhani for a second term on 57.14% against conservative 
Ebrahim Raisi on 38.28%, on a 73% turn out

3.    At the Zemestanyurt coal mine in Northern Iran

4.    See this article [http://www.merip.org/mer/mer191/squatters-state] 
on the Mashad food riots in 1991/2, student protests in 1999 are 
mentioned here

5.    For example our report 
[https://libcom.org/news/anti-labour-witchhunt-iran-continues-16082008] 
from 2008 on repression of labour activists

6.    
https://libcom.org/news/article.php/iran-bus-strike-update13-300106