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zahir said:
A left communist take on the protests. I wouldn't necessarily agree with all of it.

www.leftcom.org

Iran: Imperialist Rivalries and the Protest Movement of "Woman, Life, Freedom"

After six weeks of bloody protests in Iran, which resulted in the death of more than 200 people, what is going on in the minds of the protesters on the streets of Iran? What is the next step? Will the Islamic Republic be overthrown as the saying goes: "dictators neither listen nor reform...
www.leftcom.org
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Seems like a decent enough article to me but at the same time I would never claim to be a know all about Iran and maybe I'm missing something?
 
AmateurAgitator said:
Seems like a decent enough article to me but at the same time I would never claim to be a know all about Iran and maybe I'm missing something?
Click to expand...

I wouldn't object to most of it. I did have doubts about the way it portrays Hamed Esmaeilion who was involved in organising the massive rallies in Toronto, Berlin and elsewhere and whose wife and daughter were killed when the IRGC shot down a Ukrainian airliner in 2020. I don't know much about his politics but I'm not sure that really matters much in the context of organising rallies that manage to bring the Iranian diaspora together across the ideological divides. Anyway my comment was more of a disclaimer - to read the article with a bit of scepticism rather than treating it like the party line.
 
Podcast episode 3

Iran, 1953-1979: From the Shah to Islamic Revolution

Featuring Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi and Golnar Nikpour on the history of modern Iran. This is the third episode in our four-part series. We pick up in the wake of the US-British 1953 coup against Mossadegh, assess the Shah’s repression and attempts to manufacture consent through passive...
thedigradio.com thedigradio.com
Featuring Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi and Golnar Nikpour on the history of modern Iran. This is the third episode in our four-part series. We pick up in the wake of the US-British 1953 coup against Mossadegh, assess the Shah’s repression and attempts to manufacture consent through passive revolution, and then close by laying out the 1979 Islamic Revolution in all of its wild complexity.
Click to expand...
 
Rimbaud said:
Good to see resistance against Islam Fundamentalism from people in Muslim Majority countries.

Makes me wonder to what extent the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq delayed this from happening by boosting the credibility of radical Islamic movements.
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These currents have existed in Iran for a few decades, and people were beginning to make gains before the Iraq war allowed leaders to rally people to the nationalist/theocratic cause and paint western or secular leanings as traitorous. Another loss down to the stupidity of the Iraq invasion.
 
Podcast with Borzou Daragahi focusing mainly on Ali Khameini and the workings of the Iranian establishment.

thehatedandthedead.buzzsprout.com

EP58: Ali Khamenei - The Hated and the Dead

Ali Khamenei has been the Supreme Leader of Iran since 1989, and previously served as President in the 1980s. This podcast is released at what appears to be a moment of mounting crisis for the Islamic regime, with protests across the country going...
thehatedandthedead.buzzsprout.com thehatedandthedead.buzzsprout.com
 
zahir said:
I wouldn't object to most of it. I did have doubts about the way it portrays Hamed Esmaeilion who was involved in organising the massive rallies in Toronto, Berlin and elsewhere and whose wife and daughter were killed when the IRGC shot down a Ukrainian airliner in 2020. I don't know much about his politics but I'm not sure that really matters much in the context of organising rallies that manage to bring the Iranian diaspora together across the ideological divides. Anyway my comment was more of a disclaimer - to read the article with a bit of scepticism rather than treating it like the party line.
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Something I think has been mentioned on this thread before, and I've noticed in the past, is that the CWO tend to translate shura/shorah as "soviet" - which is perhaps not entirely wrong, but I don't think I know enough about Iranian politics and language to say how accurate it is, and how far it might be misleading.
 
Another conversation with Peyman Jafari


"Iran in Revolt: What is Different Today?" The current protests in Iran that started in mid-September around the slogan ‘women, life, liberty’ have grown into a formidable challenge to the socio-political structures of the Islamic Republic. In this podcast, we explore the development and nature of these protests with Peyman Jafari. We ask him why these protests are different than in previous years, how the state is reacting, what role international forces play, how they compare to Iran’s 1979 revolution and the Arab revolutions of 2011, and where they might be heading to.
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hitmouse said:
Something I think has been mentioned on this thread before, and I've noticed in the past, is that the CWO tend to translate shura/shorah as "soviet" - which is perhaps not entirely wrong, but I don't think I know enough about Iranian politics and language to say how accurate it is, and how far it might be misleading.
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From what I've read about popular assemblies and workers councils in 1979 workers councils, called Shoras, were set up in Iran and many factories, offices, hospitals and universities taken over. Shoras also appeared in the rebellion against Saddam Hussein in Iraq in 1991 apparently.
 
Kurdish rapper Saman Yasin has been sentenced to death for "enmity against God and collusion with the intention of committing crimes against the country's security."

Hip hop artist (mentioned upthread) Toomaj Salehi is still in solitary confinement.
 
Over a month after a historic feminist revolt broke out in Iran, what is the significance of the these protests? What strategic lessons can we take from the experience of the Iranian Revolution to push this struggle toward a victory?
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Another example of growing ruling-class divisions can be seen among the clerics who make up Iran’s Shia clerical oligarchy. Grand Ayatollah Asadollah Bayat-Zanjani, a senior cleric, recently criticized the “morality police,” which he considers illegal and contrary to Islam. An anonymous cleric from the Shia holy city of Qom (which has also been the site of protests) told Middle East Eye in early October that “the majority in the Qom seminary, or at least a large percentage of clerics, are increasingly against the Islamic Republic, because it has both weakened Islam and clerics in the eyes of people,” he said. “This is while many clerics have no relations with the establishment and have been distancing themselves from its politics, as they don’t want to be seen as part of the Islamic Republic.”
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Another characteristic that can’t be ignored is the presence and activity of the working class, which has a strong presence in this movement but has so far organized only limited independent actions. Currently, the teachers’ unions and contract workers in the oil industry are among the most prominent sectors to organize in response to the protests. In recent years, Iran has seen a rise in labor militancy from sectors as diverse as petrochemicals, trucking, and heavy equipment. Importantly, the emergence of these protests have pushed many of these sectors to tie together democratic and political questions with economic ones. Alongside this dynamic, workers are also self-organizing in the tradition of the incipient bodies of self-organization that emerged during the revolution. These shoras exist not only in workplaces but also in universities and neighborhoods.
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One of the most important lessons we can draw is that the working class has decisive power and that organization must play a role, as we saw in the general strike that workers organized through the shoras to bring the shah’s regime to its knees. This idea runs counter to postmodern notions that have been borrowed heavily by neoliberal ideology, that is, that the working class irrelevant as a subject or is merely a cultural facet that makes up a broader subset of “citizenry” or “the people.” [...] The shoras, which also highlighted the importance of organization to coordinate between the sectors in struggle, also demonstrated what real democracy looks like and how society could be organized, based on this kind of democracy, in which workplaces, neighborhoods, schools, and even rural communities can democratically decide everything about how society runs.
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eta:
 
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How long until Russia steps in to back up the murderous regime, like they did in Syria? Given the growing alliance between the two states this has to be a possibility.
 
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