Abolition vs ‘Regime Change’, Autonomy vs ‘Reform’: Iran Popular Uprising Updates

Illustration by Han Le

As news of deaths and arrests continue to emerge  from different corners of Iran, developments on the ground offer up fresh interpretations and readings of the ongoing nationwide popular uprising. Three recent developments in particular highlight how the depth and diversity of the current movement has  forged new paths of struggle and emancipation in the country.

The Rise of Abolitionist Politics

On January  21, Mohammad Reza Khatami, one of the main reformist figures who was also Iran’s president between 1997-2005, gave a controversial speech addressing  members of Iran’s Association of University Professors in Tehran. During this speech he emphasised that the reformist movement should distance  itself from “anti establishment and abolitionist tendencies.” The angry demonstrating youth had been “overtaken by their emotions which then allowed Israel and the US to take advantage of the situation.” He continued “but this resulted in majority of the grieving people separating themselves from what was happening.”

The Islamic Republic is the result of our revolution and we'll defend the Islamic Republic from anything,” Khatami said Neither our society has the capacity to have chaos, abolition and revolution, nor is it in the country’s interest or nature ... the faith of our state, our society, our history and our material as well as spiritual situation demands from us to have an Islamic Republic.

Of all the things that Khatami said during his speech, the one word that provoked most debate online was ”Barandazi” which translates as  “abolitionism”. Of course this has nothing to do with the anti-slavery abolitionist movement (even though black enslavement did exist in Iran).  The concept of abolitionism, as a political ideology and terminology, does not have an established place in the  country’s history.

A new Twitter hashtag #IAmAnAbolitionist (#براندازم) surfaced immediately as a direct reaction. Thousands of users on social media reclaimed the word and introduced themselves as “proud abolitionists”. 
 
The instant social media rejection of Khatami’s speech indicates the gulf between the movement and the reformist within the Iranian establishment. It also indicates that the movement is improvisational in nature, shifting rhetoric in response to the establishment narratives seeking to belittle it.  
 
The movement has also rejected the attempts of diaspora groups like the Pahlavists (pro monarchists) and the Mujahedin (MEK) to position themselves as Iran’s formal “opposition front” from abroad. As I also wrote in my previous article, the biggest beneficiary of any notion of the MEK as an official opposition has been the Iranian state, which knows that clichèd  “enemies abroad” carry far less of a threat to its legitimacy than the idea of a genuine, popular and empowered opposition at home. 
 
Both these groups have shown themselves time and again incapable of thinking beyond the boundaries of centralized government and market capitalism. The national uprising in Iran is admittedly lost and leaderless, but it has indicated overwhelmingly who it does not want to be led by. 
 
As to what kind of Iran the movement wants to see, that is unclear for the moment. Adopting the language of “regime change” would make the movement even more vulnerable to the kind of accusations of foreign imperial involvement Khatami and other establishment figures voiced. For this reason, the popular movement has largely eschewed exhausted discourses and preconceptions. At the same time, the movement is clearly not abandoning the idea of removing the regime. Unwittingly, Khatami’s appeal against “abolitionism”’ gave dissidents a new, indigenous  discourse to flourish on. 

 In the US, one of the crucial battlegrounds of the anti-slavery abolitionist movement, the concept of abolitionism has gone far beyond the particular historic chapter and has continued to be a relevant political imagination for many systematically marginalized communities of color until today. After Trump's election in particular, many organizers from indigenous, black, latino, Muslim, and other communities of color, who are less focused on the politics of the two party system in the US, saw abolitionist ideology, ungovernability and autonomous self organization as the right course of action for self preservation and self determination. Dylan Rodriguez’s definition of abolitionism offers us a useful analytical window to look out from:

It is a willingness to be caught up in contradiction, not settling with it, understanding that the process may feel even dirtier and uglier than the easy sellout. It is talking, teaching, learning, arguing, refusing to just agree for the sake of agreeing. It is to confront the most morbid shit while holding onto a sense of humor. It is knowing that this thing, abolition, is a perpetual practice, not a definitive end.

The Arrest  of “ The Girl from the Revolution Street”

During the first days of the mass uprisings, on January 1st, the image of a girl standing on a utility box along Revolution Street (previously Pahlavi Street) holding up her headscarf with a stick, went viral on social media. For many people across the country this image of ‘The girl from Revolution Street” immediately became a  symbol for unapologetic opposition to the overall injustices of the establishment. Thousands of social media users changed their profile images on twitter and facebook and used the hashtag #WhereIsShe to show solidarity with her and demand proof of her safety. 
 
There have been  reports that the girl was arrested and taken to a hospital, released and then arrested again. Until very recently no one had any information about who she was. Only a few days ago, on January 25, it was revealed that her name is Vida Movahed. She also has a six-months old son who she hasn’t seen since her arrest. Her whereabouts were unknown until January 29 when (previously imprisoned) human rights lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh announced on her Facebook page that “the girl from the revolution street has been released.” On the same day, scores of images started coming out of Iran showing many women repeating Vida’s act and holding their headscarves on sticks across the country.

When meaningful reform and gender emancipation become impossible within the tight confines of existing patriarchal-legal structures, acts that disobey laws governing the public and private space are acts of abolition. Vida’s brave and determined act inspired millions by suspending the state’s patriarchal laws for a period of about 15 minutes. She and the women following her example are true abolitionists. 

Haft Tapeh Workers Strike: Towards Autonomous Anarcho-Syndicalism? 

The third recent development of importance for the movement’s future was the announcement of a long-term strike by the Haft Tapeh Sugarcane Factory workers on the Januray 5th. While the strike is against worsening work conditions, it is also a show of solidarity with nationwide popular protests. A video published on January 15 shows Esmail Bakhshi, One of the main organizers of the strike, addressing factory workers from atop a concrete block:

We’ve gathered here today to express that you, the current management, are incapable of running Haft Tapeh. We no longer believe your lies. If you don’t clarify the situation of our demands and our contracts until the end of this week, we will reclaim the management and will restore Haft Tapeh. We will run Haft Tapeh ourselves. We have all the production expertise in the factory, and we will also run it ourselves...the first thing we will do once we’re in power will be to remove from power all the uneducated and incapable managers that have dragged Haft Tapeh into this crisis.

Hours later, as he was heading home from the factory, Bakhshi was attacked and injured by a group of plain clothes thugs whose faces were covered to mask their identity. Community members from the surrounding neighborhood immediately came to his help and the group of thugs drove away from the scene. 
 
As Mehran Jangali Moghadam explains in his recent piece on Manjenigh (a prominent Berlin based Iranian leftist news and analysis platform), this is a new development in the context of Iranian workers’ movements after the 1979 revolution. Due to the severity of the labor oppression during the decades following the revolution, workers have had to be restrained in their bargaining for  better salaries and basic rights. In Haft Tapeh however, the demands have become much more radical and the workers have started to move directly towards self administration, seeking control of both the land and the means of production. This level of boldness was more common during the 78–79 pre-revolution years, when worker’s councils did take control of some factories and joined up with the nationwide revolution by means of a network of local strikes. One successful workers’ council was the Turkmen’s Cultural and Political Workers Council in Turkmen Sahra, a region in the northeast of Iran near the Caspian Sea predominantly populated by ethnic Turkmen, many of them farmers. 
 
The long-term oppression of  workers movements (particularly after 1979) means that grassroots leftist ideology and tradition is weakly established  in Iran. Even before the revolution the dominance of Stalinist and centrist parties composed of elitist leaderships greatly damaged the development of a genuinely worker-led socialist praxis. Even though in many places independent workers councils did offer new forms of political organizing, but as Kamran Nayer and Alireza Nassab write, party centric and elitist approaches to socialism and communism did severely limit the scope and possibilities of radical class consciousness in theory and practice. 
 
Haft Tapeh Workers’ new radicalism brings to surface the basic desire of the oppressed to reclaim the agency to shape, dictate and transform social, political and economic life. 

 
Conclusion  

The new non-binary and diverse characteristics of the ongoing popular uprising in Iran is opening new and unpredictable paths for radical political, social, gender and economic emancipation. As all state and power centric forces, from the IRI regime to it’s diaspora “opposition” and the foreign imperialist powers try to co opt the movement and derail it through interventions, oppression and conspiracies, the challenge for the grassroots organizers and activists on the ground is to hold on to the right to own their own image and voice and not allow anyone to represent or hijack their movements. Perhaps building grassroots connections and solidarities with other internationalist local global emancipations struggles is one way to achieve that goal.