on the free-spirited revolt of women and youth that is shaking the foundations of
Iran's theocracy ---- When 22-year-old Mahsa (also known as Jina) Amini fromKurdistan died on September 16, 2022, following the torture she received inTehran after being arrested by repressive forces, it triggered a new andsignificant wave of demonstrations in Iran. A young woman was arrested and thenmurdered for allegedly wearing the hijab, an Islamist headscarf, incorrectly.---- The current rebellions are directed against the patriarchal power justifiedin the name of Islam. The streets of big cities are full of women who throw awaytheir headscarves, set them on fire, stop submitting to ruthless state violence.They also cut their hair, which is a symbolically powerful gesture, because hairis for Islam, and for all known religions, an expression of the supposed sexualpower and immorality of women. It is a gesture that is absolutely forbidden tothose who are supposed to be trapped inside their reproductive roles and subjectto male domination.Women lead men in the fight against patriarchy and theocracyWe saw a previous response to headscarves in Tehran in December 2017, during atime of unrest against the high cost of living and unemployment. At the time,thirty-one-year-old Vida Movahed climbed onto an electrical transformer and wavedher scarf on the pole. Dozens of other women followed her rebellious example in2017 and 2018, and they paid for it by imprisonment.In contrast to these individual acts of disobedience, the women tearing apartthat oppressive rag today are no longer isolated. The police who try to arrestthe women are abused by passers-by. Every night, protesters in dozens of citiesof all sizes attack the offices of repressive forces and set fire to symbols ofpower. The protests confront the repressive forces, who respond with live fire,constant baton beating, arrests and torture, with exemplary courage and tenacity.Women of all ages are clearly at the forefront of the struggles. And they leadhim in great numbers. Educated wage-earning women from menial jobs are also partof the movement. Having broken free from house arrest to some extent, theyexperience a contradiction between the conditions imposed on women by the mullahs- and their actual participation in the running of society.Around them are many young men, sons and grandsons of women who suffered underthe Islamic Republic for forty years. Those young people are not shy aboutattacking the police. The offensive led by this movement has already cleared thestreets of big cities from patrols to ensure the proper wearing of headscarves.Universities became the nerve centers of the movement. Despite repression by theBasij, the regime's militia, students at the elite Sharif University have won thesolidarity of professors, who have gone on strike to release all arrestedstudents. Students of several other colleges are protesting against the crackdownat Sharif University.High school students also participate in the movement. Many videos show themprotesting without headscarves, with uncovered hair, chanting slogans against theSupreme Leader, swearing at administration officials or members of the Pasdarán(Revolutionary Guards, the military and political support of the regime) andexpelling them. Again, we must underline the undeniable courage, because the scumhired by the authorities does not hesitate to torture, rape, even kill thoseyoung women.Pasdarán is trying to start an internal war to suffocate the movementThe first demonstration of the collective removal of headscarves was sparked bythe funeral of Jina Amini in Kurdistan's Saqqez. The Kurds, like all ethnic,cultural and linguistic groups in Iran, suffer from specific oppression by thecentral government. In Iran, the Kurds are the preferred target of the IslamicRepublic, which never fails to punish them for their uprisings, which they havebeen repeating since 1979. After mass protests in Iranian Kurdistan, the regimevery quickly deployed military and Pasdaran units in the area, de facto imposinga state of emergency. Since September 23, the Iranian military has been bombingvillages in Iraq that it believes are harboring Kurdish militants. In cities,villages, as well as in the capital of Iranian Kurdistan, Sanandaji, the Pasdaranshoots sharp.On the other side of Iranian territory in Baluchistan, one of the poorest regionswith the largest Sunni population, a similar situation is emerging. After therape of a fifteen-year-old girl by a police officer in the city of Cáhbahár onSeptember 30, a protest demonstration was held in front of the police station inZáhedán. Repressive forces opened fire. Provisional score? A hundred dead. Thekillings did not go completely unpunished, with the armed group shooting dead sixmembers of the security forces, including the regional commander of the Pasdaránsecret service.This military escalation by the Tehran regime in areas inhabited by nationalminorities may seem disproportionate, disproportionate to the demonstrations inthe rest of the country. But not by chance, it's just a superficial appearance.In peripheral areas, the state applies a "strategy of tension" to provoke violentreactions from national minorities, which it could use to encourage xenophobicreactions from Persians. The government hopes that this will create demand for areturn to order. By creating an "enemy within", the state seeks to rally theranks of civil society behind itself and dissuade the undecided from joining thecurrent movement.The obligation to wear a headscarf is an integral part of the patriarchalguardianship of civil societyThe women's issue lies at the center of the Islamic Republic and has been sosince the beginning of its power. After the first failed attempt to impose theveil on March 8, 1979, which was defeated by six days of protests, veiling becamemandatory in 1983, when the Iranian counter-revolution got rid of its politicalopponents and consolidated its power.The revolution of 1979 was born out of a movement of national liberation from theWest, culminating in the ousting of the Shah. The mullahs' counter-revolution wasdirected against women and their liberation movement inspired by the globalsexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. At that time, for the mullahs and the"bazaari", the traditional petty-bourgeois merchants, it was a question ofprotecting the reactionary mode of cohesion and class reproduction, based on thesubjugation of women and mediated by arranged marriages. In exchange for supportfrom the male-dominated classes, in this traditional functioning, all women wererelegated to the family sphere, under the authority of the heads of families,those lower heads of the patriarchy. Even today, Iran's ruling classes, whetherthey are mullahs, members of repressive apparatuses, or political and businessclans at the center of state power,"Every time a woman's body rubs against a man's on a bus, it is a blow thatweakens the great structure of our revolution," Ruhollah Khomeini whispered atthe time. But it was no different in 2016, when the decree of the Supreme Leaderforbade women to ride bicycles in order to preserve their chastity, and orderedthe Basij organization to enforce that dictate.Today, the headscarf is a visible expression of patriarchal power. Backing downat this point is unthinkable for the state, as it means giving up one of the lastremaining founding elements of the regime. For the lower classes, the 1979compromise is a survivor. Economic conditions have made marriage in itstraditional form intolerable for a growing part of the population.For women, the situation is unsustainable. Although 71 percent of women haveaccess to higher education (compared to 76 percent of men) and although the labormarket is theoretically open to them, in practice the path remains blocked:according to the World Bank, only 14 percent of women over the age of fifteen areemployed. Despite women's education rates being comparable to men's, the vastmajority of women from the lower classes face the prospect of either confinementto their parents' home or marriage, or prostitution.The struggle of Iranian women shows the way to the internationalization of thestruggle against patriarchyWhile the reproductive and sexual freedom of women is openly challenged in theWestern world (the right to abortion is being challenged in the United States,Poland, Hungary, and soon perhaps in Italy), the women's liberation movement inIran provides a determined example of the struggle that the direction of women'sstruggles in strengthens the above-mentioned countries. It is an example thatstands next to the radical democratic movements in Algeria (2019) or Belarus(2020). This sexual revolution was born out of a determined desire expressed byrebellious youth (female and male) to live their sexuality and their emotionallives freely without being trapped in the cage of marriage.Five years after the beginning of the #meetoo movement, which was, with manydifficulties, pitfalls, limits, an expression of a renewed interest in thewomen's issue in North America and Europe, the struggle of Iranian women gives amuch-needed impetus to the debates about wearing the headscarf (which areappalling from all sides, participating in them, especially in France) andstrengthens the prospects of women's movements to become international.The events in Iran go beyond the classical framework of the democratic movement,which has made itself known intermittently since 2009. It speaks clearly andradically of a revolt for the liberation of women, and therefore, by its verynature, against the family. The independent movement of women against theirspecific oppression is a strategic ally of the working class in the revolutionaryprocess. It calls for the destruction of the institution of the family, thepillar of class-divided societies, and for the destruction of the part of theprocess of reproduction of labor power that rests on the subjugation of femalesexuality to the dictatorship of men. The importance of the independent women'smovement flows precisely from here."The oppression of women is closely related to the natural division of labor inthe reproduction of species. Childbirth is its objective basis. That division isone of the prerequisites for the social division of labor into physical andmental, i.e. social hierarchy.The natural division of labor in species reproduction is written, sealed into theelementary social structure of reproduction (and then production) which is thefamily, clan, tribe, etc. The means of reproduction of the family are the same asthe means of reproduction of any other social structure: violence. Violenceagainst women, the first "property" of man, the first manifestation of thereification of the human being. Violence sanctified by the Church.'Free-thinking and labor movementsIran's civil society has been on the boil for a number of years, as a result ofmultiple crises plaguing the country: a chronic economic crisis exacerbated byWestern sanctions and the pandemic, followed by an environmental crisis after thehealth crisis. The eruption of anger in the winter of 2019/2020, caused by theend of state fuel subsidies and drowned in the blood of more than 1,500 victimsin just a few days, was a turning point. Demonstrations against the regimecontinued continuously, whether they were strikes (at oil subcontractingcompanies, June 2021), protests due to water shortages (Khuzestan, summer 2021and Isfahan, November 2021), or looting in response to skyrocketing food prices(in summer 2022 it exceeded annual inflation of 50 percent).The current movement has managed to connect all those who disagree with theregime. In a country of 85 million people (of which 65 percent are young), where80 percent of the population lives in cities, they are educated, oftenconservative, but increasingly less religious, often even atheist, but above all,they have no prospects. However, unlike the defensive struggles mentioned above,which were about wages, inflation or access to water, the current movement isimmediately political: the obligation to wear the headscarf is, among otherfounding symbols of the regime, one of the last that has never been challenged.The contemporary family in Iran is a combination of traditional patriarchy andthe modern monogamous family. The unbearable weight of archaism explains therevulsion, anger and hatred expressed by women, especially urban and educated ones.In contrast to the so-called "Green Movement" of 2009, during which the goal wasalso political but remained limited to the internal reform of the IslamicRepublic, today the demonstrations that started the rejection of the obligatoryveil do not aim at anything less than the fall of the regime of the SupremeLeader, the mullahs , Basij and Pasdaran. Today's young fighters know nothing butthe oppressive regime of the mullahs and, unlike their parents, are notfascinated by the myth of the struggle against the dictatorial regime of the Shah.The desire for individual and collective freedoms, the dream of sexual liberationled the Iranian youth quite naturally to organize themselves to win a space forself-expression without demanding anything from the source of their oppression,the state and the economic and social bloc it represents . The democratic demandclears the way for an alternative practice, sometimes antagonistic, thereforepolitical. This movement, which is in many ways cross-class, nevertheless createdthe conditions for class polarization - assuming that the proletariat takes onits own terms the anger and aspirations of young people, to connect with women'sstruggle against the family and patriarchy. Only under this condition, however,can the working class take on its historical task: free itself from wage laborand class-divided societies,Workers in Iran are in no hurry to take a rightful, central place in the struggleagainst theocracy. However, the first signs of mobilization are already appearinghere and there, see strikes and blockades at the port and refinery in thesouthern city of Asaluyeh. From October 10 and 11, work was suspended at theBushehr, Borzovieh and Hemgan refineries, and then at the Abadan refinery due toa strike by subcontractors, where workers receive the lowest wages and the mostprecarious conditions.Independent trade unions, which were tolerated in the 1990s and the first decadeof the current century, were gradually eliminated by the regime after 2009. Towhat extent they retained the initiative needed to launch a major shura movement, grassroots workers' committees modeled after the 1979 revolution, during the2019 oil sector strike is difficult to know. At the time of writing, onlyprofessors are collectively fighting on the side of the insurgents, first fromhigh schools, then from universities.Brussels, Paris, Prague, 15 October 2022https://www.afed.cz/text/7774/iran-proti-patriarchatu-a-teokracii_________________________________________A - I N F O S N E W S S E R V I C EBy, For, and About AnarchistsSend news reports to A-infos-en mailing listA-infos-en@ainfos.ca
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