From Socialism Today, magazine of the Socialist Party (CWI England & Wales).
What Iranians Want: Women, Life, Freedom is described as the first major book on the 2022-23 uprising in Iran. Protests were sparked in September 2022 after the murder of Masha Amini, a 21-year-old woman from a Kurdish background, who was brutally beaten by the ‘moral security’ division of the Iranian police, dying from her injuries. She had been arrested in Tehran for the “inappropriate wearing of the headscarf”. Thousands came to her funeral, with slogans including “death to the dictator”, and the epitaph on her gravestone was “your name will become a symbol”.
In the days and weeks after, thousands of women, many of them young, including school students, participated in a wave of protests. They refused to wear the headscarf and even publicly burnt them. School students staged walkouts and swore at pictures of the supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei. Protesters started chanting, “don’t call this a revolt, this is a revolution”.
Over the course of 2022 and 2023 these initial protests “morphed into an all-out cry for change”, with people across Iranian society participating in a wave of street protests at first, and then a wave of strikes. The book documents the coming together of diverse struggles, across different sections of Iranian society into one ‘mass uprising’. This movement is now commonly referred to by the popularised slogan and title of the book ‘Women, Life, Freedom’, originally a slogan of the Kurdish women’s movement, but becoming a universal rallying cry that symbolised resistance to the regime.
The book’s writer, Arash Azizi, describes himself as an “Iranian born in 1988”, part of “a generation whose life has been defined by dashed hopes for reform and progress”. He states that the book is an attempt to answer, “what do Iranians want?” and explain “why they are fighting for it”.
It goes on to depict the courageous determination of the Iranian masses to fight, even in the face of horrendous and brutal state repression. As well as the strikes, protests, online campaigns and rallies, Azizi cites countless examples of Iranians from all walks of life and social backgrounds defying the regime in various forms: women posting unveiled photos of themselves on social media; writers and translators agreeing to defy state censorship; women activists organising a secret rally from inside Evin prison to celebrate International Women’s Day (a banned event in Iran); and weekly mass protests in Zahedan after the massacre by state security forces killed 96 primarily Balochi protesters. He achieves his aim “to make the voices of Iranians heard loud and clear throughout a world that so often ignores them”.
Fragmenting Struggles
Taken as a whole, the book paints a picture of the revolutionary process unfolding in Iran as women, workers, and young people collectively came together to express a deep desire for change and a determination to fight for it. But nevertheless, this picture Azizi paints is a fragmented one.
Like many Iranians of his generation, Azizi left Iran in his youth and so has followed developments from afar. He is now a historian and journalist, which has also inevitably influenced his approach. He structures the book into nine separate ‘fights’ including the “fight against the compulsory hijab”, as well as fights for refugee rights, freedom of religion, freedom of expression, for the environment, and for peace. While there is a sense of convergence of these struggles in the 2022-23 Women, Life, Freedom movement, the campaigns nonetheless remain separated as nine different campaigns, albeit with a common experience of state repression.
For each fight, he focuses on “painting a portrait of this movement and paying tribute to its predecessors”. He does this by providing a condensed history of each fight since the Iranian revolution in 1978-1979.
Then, a mighty movement of workers and youth successfully overthrew the Shah’s totalitarian, Western-backed regime. But without a party at its head with a programme and strategy for taking power the reactionary clerics were able to step into the vacuum, suppressing democratic rights and freedoms, initially under the cover of ‘defending the revolution’. Ultimately, these theocratic leaders established control, developing into a privileged caste ruling the country along with a section of the traditional capitalist class on an extremely repressive basis.
By covering key developments in each ‘fight’ since the revolution, including some of the key leading activists and figures in each movement, Azizi challenges some of the reductive coverage in the Western capitalist media that often presents events as a simple clash between “traditional and modern, or between hard-line Islamic and Western ideals”.
As an example of this, he describes how initially few on the Iranian left saw the fight against the compulsory wearing of the hijab as a priority – though he mentions a small Trotskyist organisation that organised against it. This was not out of support for Islamism but because of a desire to break with the old regime and Western imperialism. These activists made the wrong assumption that the struggle for women’s rights could wait, is the suggestion, rather than understanding it to be a vital feature of a programme to unite all sections of the working class in Iran.
Shallow Analysis
Yet, this and other lessons are lost in Azizi’s book, partly because he focuses on describing to a Western audience the history of social, political and environmental struggles taking place in Iran. He therefore falls short of offering a serious analysis of these movements or the lessons that arise from them, or engaging directly with debates taking place within Iran about the way forward.
Consequently, while providing an interesting and inspiring description of and background to the movement, the necessary analysis of why struggles so far have been defeated is not touched on in any depth. The burning questions left unanswered are what does this history tell us about the kind of movement needed and what will lead to a victory?
By sidelining those questions, the conclusions of the book are shallow. Every chapter finishes by honouring the struggles already forged while asserting that those living in Iran will continue the fight. Of course, it is right to have confidence that even under the most repressive of regimes the masses will fight back, and we should remain optimistic about prospects for further struggle, even in the face of setbacks, ebbs or heavy defeats. However, for socialists, it is a huge error to merely act as a cheerleader for struggle without engaging in a serious discussion about the way forward.
At times, Azizi is even in danger of offering nothing but martyrdom as the answer. For example, in his foreword he writes that
…the visionaries fighting for change today may not see change in their lifetimes; there may be many more martyrs under the banner of Women, Life, Freedom, but the movement will pass the torch and the flame will not die… a better Iran remains the ultimate goal, for which every generation will fight.
He even finishes his chapter on the feminist movement in Iran by quoting from Rosa Luxemburg, stating:
Yes, the whole road as Rosa Luxemburg puts it, is paved with ‘nothing but thunderous defeats’. But the upsurge in feminist activism left indelible marks on Iranian society: it gave millions of women the courage and political ideals to act.
This is a misrepresentation of Rosa’s position and approach. History – including the history Azizi documents in the book – demonstrates that, though important, courage and ideas are not enough. Unless lessons from previous struggles are learnt, and the tactical, organisational and programmatic conclusions that flow from these lessons are applied, future struggles are in danger of going down the same road. This was exactly the point Rosa Luxemburg makes in the full quote that Azizi cites an extract from.
Rosa was writing in 1919, just after the so-called Spartacist uprising, which she had participated in, was crushed by the German state forces. She penned it in the hours before her arrest and murder. However, her tone is optimistic even in the face of defeat. She asks, “where would we be today without those ‘defeats’, from which we draw historical experience, understanding, power and idealism?”. She continues, “unavoidable defeats pile up guarantee upon guarantee of the future final victory”. But she specifies that there is one very important condition: “the question of why each defeat occurred must be answered”.
Unfortunately, answering this question is something Azizi skirts around, even though there is huge potential within the text to draw out important lessons from previous struggles within Iran.
Need for a Programme
The question of what the correct programme is to take a movement forward is critical in any struggle. According to Azizi, the book’s title Women, Life, Freedom “unifies all these issues [the nine fights he describes] – transforming demands into a programme”. But in and of itself, the slogan of Women, Life, Freedom is not a programme to transform Iranian society.
The slogan resonated because, as Azizi describes, it captures the numerous separate struggles and fights into one “battle cry”. Whether that be the freedom of teenagers to live a ‘normal’ life – to be able to listen to music and record videos of themselves singing and dancing – or the freedom for religious minorities to practice their religion without discrimination.
Azizi rightly recognises that the slogan must be for all, and his chapters on religious freedom and rights for migrants give a taste of how the struggles of 2022-23 began to erode some of the existing divisions in Iranian society, including the anti-immigrant sentiment aimed particularly at Afghans. The fact that the 2022-23 protests are now collectively referred to as the Women, Life, Freedom movement attests to the power the slogan had in unifying the protesters at that time.
However, slogans evolve and develop in the course of a revolutionary process, as activists, workers and young people conclude from their experiences of struggle about what is needed. New slogans thrown up or adopted by the movement reflect these shifts in consciousness. Socialists can play an important role in speeding up the process by which the working class develops an understanding of the next steps, including the ultimate need to take power out of the hands of the ruling class, by putting forward a socialist programme for transforming society.
The formulating of a programme is more than simply reflecting back to the masses their own demands – which is the route that Azizi goes down. But neither is it to, as Marx wrote, “say to the world: cease your struggles, they are foolish, we will give you the true slogan of struggle”.
As Leon Trotsky writes in his preface to the History of the Russian Revolution:
The masses go into a revolution not with a prepared plan of social reconstruction, but with a sharp feeling that they cannot endure the old regime. Only the guiding layers of a class have a political programme, and even this still requires the test of events, and the approval of the masses.
Russian Revolution
The Russian revolution is rich in lessons of this process. For example, there is a certain similarity between the slogan of ‘Women, Life, Freedom’ and of ‘Bread, Peace, Land’ which at a certain stage played an important role in expressing the needs and interests of the Russian workers and peasants. But as the revolutionary process unfolded, the emphasis shifted from what the masses wanted and needed, to the steps and measures needed to achieve them.
Months later, it was the slogan ‘All power to the Soviets’ that the Bolshevik Party advanced. Ultimately, it was winning popular support for this demand that meant the Bolsheviks could lead the working class to seize power.
Azizi actually quotes from Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution when he argues that revolutions are not conducted by ideologues but the mass breaking onto the scene of history. This is absolutely correct. However, one of the central lessons from the Russian revolution, that Trotsky discusses mere paragraphs below the quote Azizi uses, is that the revolutionary party, acting as a guiding organisation, can play a decisive role in whether mass dissent and revolt translates into taking power. As Trotsky writes,
…without a guiding organisation, the energy of the masses would dissipate like steam not enclosed in a piston box. But nevertheless, what moves things is not the piston or the box but the steam.
The Bolshevik Party leadership, primarily Lenin and Trotsky, had a clear perspective of how the revolution was likely to develop, presenting the working class with the opportunity to take power. The existence of the party, and its cadres building among the working class, meant that mass popular support could be won for the party’s programme for socialist revolution.
Steps have been taken in Iran toward developing a programme through the “charter of minimum demands of independent trade union and civil organisations of Iran”, which is also titled Women, Life, Freedom.
Demands include the immediate release of political prisoners, the abolition of capital punishment, for “the proclamation of the complete equality between men and women”, and the “removal and abolition of laws and conventions which discriminate against gender and sexual orientations”.
This is a positive step, though Azizi only makes fleeting reference to the charter in the book. The charter opened up a discussion on what the Iranian working class should demand, and what the role of the organised workers’ movement is within the revolutionary process taking place. However, there are important limitations to the demands.
Crucially, the charter does not address the strategy needed to win its demands and, importantly, whether the signatories believe they can be achieved under capitalism. The charter is also vague about what comes after the minimum demands are met. But, in reality, it is artificial to draw a distinction between demands for now and what comes after; there is agreement about the need to send the Iranian regime to the rubbish heap of history, but the question is what replaces it? Neither the charter, nor Azizi in his book answer this.
Role of the Working Class
Azizi does mention in his chapter on the labour movement that the various factions of the regime all oppose independent trade union organisation and struggle, offering “no economic philosophy with room for workers’ demands” – in other words, even the reforming wing of the regime, with more socially liberal policies, retains a firm commitment to capitalism. Capitalism cannot offer a long-term solution to any of the issues confronting the Iranian people.
But Azizi makes the mistake of seeing “the fight for the labour movement” as just one of many fights, with it organised as one chapter among the eight others. To relegate the workers’ movement as one among many misunderstands the critical role that the Iranian working class has as the vehicle for transforming society.
There is a tendency to limit organised workers’ struggle to the immediate demands in the workplace over pay, against attacks on union rights and similar issues, but like the charter itself began to do, there is a role for the workers’ movement to fight on the political terrain.
That said, Azizi rightfully does recognise that the participation of the organised working class through mass strike action was a step forward for the Women, Life, Freedom movement. He touches upon the division within the movement between a layer of middle-class revolutionaries who see “street fighting as more radical than downing tools”, because they associate the working class with the rural and urban poor and see them as a base for conservativism. However, Azizi emphasises that “serious strategists of the regime knew that strike action by the Iranian working class would escalate matters to another level”.
Azizi describes the strike wave in Iran during November and December 2022, during which strikes spread from one of Iran’s largest industrial corporations – the Isfahan steelworks – to 45 cities across Iran. Through this process, he describes how “a new demand was on many lips: etesaab-e-omoomi – a general strike.”
However, Azizi does not seem to grasp the potential power of the general strike. He goes on to explain that though impressive, the wave was “far from a general strike that could truly shut down society”, explaining it would take much more to bring a serious blow to the regime. While true that the strike wave did not succeed in overthrowing the regime, if it were to do so it would not only be because of the disruption caused. Rather, when strike action is carried out at the scale of a general strike, and society is ground to a halt, it poses the question of who really runs society.
Through mass strikes and general strikes, workers’ understanding of their own power can develop very rapidly. So too do organisational forms which may provide potential foundations for the working class taking power. For example, it was in the 1905 general strike in Russia that the Petrograd Soviet was created for the first time, an organisation which later played a key role in the working class taking power in 1917.
But, even without a general strike at this stage, the scale of the strike action has succeeded in developing consciousness, with more layers in society looking toward the organised working class as offering a way forward. Azizi recognises this at the end of his chapter when he states that more people now understood “why trade unions matter”, with Tehran bus workers and Haft sugar cane workers becoming “household names”.
This experience can lay the basis for the building of an organised workers’ movement that can challenge both the regime and capitalism. Important steps have been made through the co-ordination of strike dates and the bringing together of unions and activist organisations to work out the demands of the charter. Utilising all opportunities to organise – legal and otherwise – can bring together workers, the poor and youth to further discuss experiences, demands and plans for the next steps.
Where next?
Writing in July 2023, Azizi is honest that he is not sure how what he has written about will turn out. Does it offer “a flash of hope – a revolt against the ongoing catastrophe of the regime – extinguished too soon to secure lasting change”? Or “it could testify to the inaugural scene of a new revolution, the beginnings of a thorough transformation”. He recognised that the uprising had reached a lull, but rightly understands that the “fundamental contradictions of Iranian society organised under the regime – the clash of ideals and power between opposed social forces – rumble on threatening to break out into open social conflict”.
Those opposed social forces are class forces. But, in considering potential developments in Iran, Azizi only speculates on one side of the equation: developments among the ruling class. Grasping at what might bring a change, he looks to the death of Iran’s aging Supreme Ruler as the potential key turning point, predicting that this might end some of Iran’s most repressive policies, even if the regime remains in the hands of the ‘Iranian Revolutionary Guard’. For example, by allowing a different wing access to political power.
He believes potential reforms would allow the Iranian people to “dress how they like, eat and drink what they like, and enjoy the films, books and songs that they want” but “as long as they don’t cross certain red lines politically”. Such developments, Azizi suggests, would satisfy protesters for a period, but “only a few years” he thinks, as Iran’s mass movement will continue to fight for “Women, Life, Freedom: the fullest democracy and social, economic, environmental and gender justice”.
Azizi is correct that social reforms will not be sufficient to meet the needs of the masses of Iranian society. Iranian people are confronted by economic instability, which has seen extremely high inflation erode the living standards of millions. Extensions to some social rights will not change these material realities. But a wave of reform would potentially give the working class the confidence to go beyond the limited reforms of the regime and a greater understanding of the potential of the unified working class to challenge for power.
In arguing that the Supreme Leader’s death will likely be a catalyst for change, Azizi recognises there are splits among the Iranian ruling class – including within the capitalist class, some of whom want closer ties to the US and other imperialist powers. The world situation and the class responses to international economic and geopolitical processes are also likely to have an effect on the trajectory of struggle within Iran.
Just months after Azizi finished his book the war on Gaza broke out, throwing Iran right into the spotlight as a regional power, with its proxy support for Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the Houthis in Yemen. Given Iran’s geopolitical status in the Middle East, any wider regional war or further developments toward one, would have a destabilising effect within Iran – affecting the ruling class but also having a radicalising effect among layers of workers and young people. Azizi concludes his chapter on the struggle for peace by writing “Iranians are tired of funding wars while their own nation crumbles around them”.
Given the extremely volatile world situation, the deep crisis of capitalism and its inability to offer any future for the mass of society, the prospects are for further mass social movements, uprisings and revolutionary processes unfolding in Iran and elsewhere in the world. In some cases, they will succeed in overthrowing dictators and repressive regimes – as the Iranian masses did in 1979. But to break with capitalism and establish a socialist society – the only guarantee of ending poverty and oppression – will require the building of mass organisations, based on the working class and poor, with a programme for a revolutionary change in society. This is the lesson to be drawn from past struggles in order to successfully prepare for those to come.
