• Over a month after the momentous outpouring of the masses into the streets in response to the June 12 fraudulent elections, the struggle continues. The Iranian people have not yet said their final word. Let’s keep our eyes and ears attuned to their struggles, and have our solidarity at the ready.
• As the events of this Thursday, commemorating the 10 anniversary of the assault on student dormitories, displayed so vividly, the next phase in their quest for freedom has begun in earnest.
• This past week, once again the world became witness to the bravery and creativity of the embattled people of Iran. This at a time when the reign of terror unleashed against the freedom fighters had cast doubt, among some, about the possibility that the mass movement could re-emerge in full force in face of a veritable martial law.
But after a brief interlude, and despite great odds, people took to the streets of Tehran and many other cities to reassert themselves; leaderless, and without any central organizational structure; risking death, beatings, arrest and torture. To avoid the concentrated assault of the Guards and the Para-military forces, and in order to spread them out, they assembled, through the word of mouth, instant messaging and the Internet, in dozens of locations in groups ranging from hundreds to thousands.
• Whether in the streets, in metro stations, on the roof tops, or by jamming the traffic with cars and honking horns, or silent vigils and gathering in front of prisons en mass, they send a message that is loud and clear: we will not bow, and will not recognize your legitimacy. As the July 10 NY Times reported, one 26-year-old engineering student exclaimed: “This is our revolution. We will not give up.” “We don’t want war, we just want freedom.”
• There is no limit to the energy and creativity of masses in motion. What is also striking is the mass solidarity, from protecting a fellow demonstrator from getting beaten or arrested, to opening their houses and their stores to those escaping the attack.
• Many street publications have emerged; dozens of organization, both underground and open, have been formed. The Mourning Mothers, the Mothers for Peace, Mothers to free political prisoners, thousands of weblogs, web sites, and on-line papers have appeared. People have changed the need for a “public sphere” from a debate among intellectuals into a virtual reality!
• What is also so amazing is how the experience, methods of resistance and the tactics of the Civil Rights Movement here in the US is being printed and practiced by the new revolutionaries in Iran. Overnight, everyone has learned civil disobedience! People also are keen to how the rest of the world sees them. Political analysis from all major publications and commentators such as Zizek’s ‘the Precipice’ are instantly translated and circulated.
• As Marx would say, Revolutions are necessary not only because they change the established order of things, but also because they change men. Thus, weeks of solidarity, mass mobilization, self-development, both before and after the elections, has changed everything, especially the people.
• This mass mobilization caught the entire world by surprise. Absolutely no one anticipated or appreciated the depth and the breath of the mass discontent, and their readiness to take matters in their own hands.
• The political engineers and planners both in and out of power, always miscalculate the human element. They miscalculated the mood of the masses when they allowed Khatami to run in 1997, and again, what at the time appeared to be safe, when they allowed Mousavi to run.
• The advocates of open public space; a legitimate desire in a closed repressive society, however, need to now appreciate that the masses of people by reclaiming the streets, do indeed create genuine forms of ‘public space.’
• The self-development of the people during this short time are well illustrated by the memoir of one young woman from an impoverished family, published just prior to the election. "These nights are the only nights we are not ridiculed because we are poor. These nights, no one asks which part of the city we are from. It is not important for anybody to see how expensive our shoes are. The only important thing for them is that we wear green... Why should I not wear a green band and join a green chain of people? In this chain I see a rich boy holding my hand and not caring about my father's job. Our hands are pulled but he does not stare at me, just gives me a humble smile... These nights are the last of these golden opportunities to be at one with everyone." (The archaeology of Iran’s regime by Mahmood Delkhasteh , 2 - 07 – 2009 http://www.opendemocracy.net/article/the-archaeology-of-iran-s-regime)
• As Robert Dreyfuss, who spend ten days in Iran, has to admit in this week’s issue of The Nation, this is ‘Enghelab,’ meaning Revolution. “It’s a word I hear over and over again from students, office workers, taxi driver and the passerby – before, during and after the election.” True, this is the revolution of a whole new generation, but older revolutionaries appreciate how these newfound forms of human solidarity are reminiscent of 1979 Revolution. They want their children to know that at its heart the revolution of 1979 was - like today's movement - a humanist one; and that Khomeini’s rise to power from within the revolution represented not its fulfillment, but its betrayal, a counter-revolution.
• Suddenly, past history has come to life in the present as integral to the history in the making. Though the youth did not experience the 1979 revolution, they are the true inheritors of the highest points achieved by that revolution. Not only they have reclaimed the forms of mass mobilization of the previous generation against the Shah, but have become aware of its unfinished nature. They are fully cognizant that the greatest enemy is always at home. Moreover, they have learned that gaining freedom from under a totalitarian regime would demand a total answer. And in that sense they also exemplify a discontinuity with the past.
• Now the ruling Islamist ideology can no longer claim legitimacy simply because it has lost the battle for the minds of the people. Instead, what has been simmering below the surface for long and has now come to the surface is a deep passion for freedom. It has now reached a new height and has cast off the faith based justifications to keep the masses in perpetual subjugation. Once the masses gain such self-knowledge, and the corresponding judgment, the whole system is doomed; it will no longer be tenable. It can only maintain itself by brute force.
• As Marx said long ago, “with the slaves awareness that he cannot be the property of another, with his consciousness of himself as a person, the existence of slavery becomes artificial, vegetative existence, and ceases to be able to prevail…” (Grundrisse, p. 463)
• Thus what we are witnessing today is a clear break from the illusions of the reformers of the past who had made the state itself the locus of social change. The movements of the last decade that climaxed in the election of Khatami and even gave him a majority in the House (Majlis), had clearly failed to bent the system. Earlier reformers who had a foot within and one outside the established order, with some vowing that we are not going for a revolution within the revolution. Contrast this with Zahra Rahnavrd, who is both an activist and a thinker, and is the wife of the candidate Mousavi. She proclaimed in a massive rally in down town Tehran that: “We are going to make a revolution in the revolution.” Rahnavrd also did not mince words when she called for equal rights for women, and an end to women’s harassments by the cultural police.
• What ought to be singled out is that when it comes women’s freedom, there is no generational break between the young and older liberationists who fought the counter-revolution from the very start. They were the first who attempted to open a second chapter of the 79 revolution by pouring into the streets on March 8, 1980, directly challenging Khomeini, saying we did not make the revolution to go backward. They have truly declared the revolution to be permanent. What is new today is that the women in traditional Islamic hijab, march hand in hand with the young activists. They are at the forefront of the struggle, and have displayed unimaginable bravery and courage in the face of brutality and terror.
• What has not been singled out but is so critical for the forward march of the movement is that women have not only been the force but the reason. Indeed, the intellectual fermentation among women activists, writers, lawyers, have been ceaseless for the past thirty years. Both at home and in exile, they have been the most prolific writers since 1979, from journalism to novels, stories, memoirs, and works of art as well as theory. Perhaps one can capture a glimpse of this hunger for ideas by pointing to Azar Nafisi’s “Reading Lolita in Tehran.” She tells the story of a group of her female students who gathered in her living room weekly to discuss works of Western literature. For over two years they snuck into her home, removed the veils and immersed themselves in Nabokov, Fitzgerald, Henry James and others. These encounters with the books were about the struggle to carve out a space for self-development and imagination under the crushing weight of a regime that administers every aspect of public as well as private life. What is so critical to appreciate is that women’s liberation movement is far more than a struggle for civil rights. Their demands go to the very core of new human relations.
• Moreover, by being merged with a Subject, Women as Reason, clears the theoretic ground by concretizing the prevalent discourse on ‘public reason’ as a counter weight to a theocratic system whose ideologues are not shy to claim their grip on society as the rule of ‘the philosopher kings.’
• What the women, the youth as well as the Kurds and the workers have created in the past few weeks is a whole new sense of the actual, a dual power within Iran. Their presence on the historic scene has borne out anew Hegel’s idea that there is not as big a divide between thought and reality as is commonly imagined. Once again the release of the vast untapped energies of millions has brought us to the realm of subjectivity and the epochal challenge to our times: Will their breakdown of the separation between the possible and the real, between the actuality and thought, be able to sustain itself, to undergo continuous self-development until the day after? Will it find comprehensive philosophic articulation? Will the theoreticians now be able to meet the challenge posed by movement from practice?
• As Hegel said: “All revolutions in sciences no less than general history, originate only in this, that the spirit of man, for the understanding and comprehension of himself, for possessing of himself, has now altered his categories, uniting himself in a truer, more intrinsic relation with himself.” (Introduction to Philosophy of Nature)
July 12, 2009
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