{"id":10491,"date":"2020-12-07T22:24:59","date_gmt":"2020-12-07T22:24:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lavozlit.com\/?p=10491"},"modified":"2020-12-07T22:24:59","modified_gmt":"2020-12-07T22:24:59","slug":"a-call-for-solidarity-working-class-struggles-in-iran-and-the-united-states","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/workersvoiceus.org\/es\/2020\/12\/07\/a-call-for-solidarity-working-class-struggles-in-iran-and-the-united-states\/","title":{"rendered":"A Call for Solidarity: Working-Class Struggles in Iran and the United States"},"content":{"rendered":"
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This article first appeared on Jadaliyya on October 20, 2020<\/a><\/span><\/header>\n
By : Alborz Ghandehari<\/a> <\/span><\/strong><\/em><\/em>\u00a0<\/header>\n
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\nThe 22 September\u00a0marked the fortieth\u00a0anniversary of the start of the Iran-Iraq War. When my mother tells me how a blast from a missile claimed her uncle\u2019s life in Khuzestan, I know the war is still with her. She still remembers how her family\u2019s home in Tehran became a refuge to dozens of our relatives who had fled aerial bombardment in the country\u2019s southwest, how my grandmother suddenly became responsible to shelter and feed forty people, beleaguered loved ones uprooted and displaced as a result of a war that claimed five hundred thousand lives. This year, the United States came the closest it has ever been to\u00a0launching an all-out war<\/span><\/a>\u00a0on Iran. As in most wars, primarily working-class people on both sides would pay the heaviest price, sent to the frontlines to fight each other.
\nBut contrary to what proponents of a US invasion of Iran would have us believe, working-class Iranians and Americans are actually not each other\u2019s enemy. In fact, they have more in common with each other than they do with their respective political leaders. Mass uprisings have erupted in both countries over the last year. Both US and Iranian government leaders hope to crush these rebellions. Iranians\u2019\u00a0November 2019 uprising<\/a><\/span>\u00a0against the high cost of living was met with brutal and deadly repression. While US sanctions against Iran and the threat of war have brought devastating hardship and must be opposed, Iranians are angered that domestic oligarchs grow richer in spite of sanctions while the majority\u2019s situation worsens. In the words of\u00a0students at Amir Kabir University<\/span><\/a>, they are fighting both US \u201cimperial arrogance\u201d and their own country\u2019s \u201cdomestic despotism.\u201d In the United States, on the other hand, interlocking struggles for economic and racial justice have laid bare the empty promises of US political leaders. Yet some of these leaders would have working-class people in the United States believe that what they need right now, at a time when\u00a0millions are unemployed<\/a><\/span>\u00a0due to the covid-19 pandemic, is a costly war with Iran.\u00a0I argue, however, that movements in both countries have everything to gain, not from war, but from each other\u2019s solidarity. These two groups of people have yet to truly recognize their struggles as one. This is due most prominently to the rhetoric of nationalism and militarism that so often frustrates class solidarity. In order to peer beyond these obstacles, this essay shows that there are important commonalities between working-class people and movements in both countries, in spite of vastly different political systems. I also argue that there are concrete ways in which these movements can support one another.<\/p>\n

Parallels<\/h2>\n

On 19 May, six days before the murder of George Floyd led to an uprising in the United States against systemic racism and police violence,\u00a0Asieh Panahi<\/a><\/span>\u00a0was killed in Kermanshah, Iran protecting her home from demolition. Officials pepper-sprayed the residents of Panahi\u2019s poor neighborhood, with orders to demolish their informal housing units. After getting into the bucket of the bulldozer to defend her family\u2019s home, the sixty-one-year-old Panahi was arrested. Shortly after, she died while in custody of the authorities from a stress-induced heart attack. Panahi and Floyd, as poor people marginalized by a system that shows callous disregard for their lives, had more in common with each other than with the officials who held power over them. Why should the families of Panahi and Floyd go to war with each other when the local authorities make war on them every day?
\nBlack Lives Matter protests continued in the United States in September in anguish at a grand jury\u2019s refusal to indict police officers for murdering medical worker\u00a0Breonna Taylor<\/span><\/a>. Police had raided her home on the mistaken idea that it was connected to drugs. This comes at a time when a\u00a0minority of Americans<\/span><\/a>\u00a0trust the police. A few weeks before that ruling, Iranian police shot and killed Alireza Goodarzi and Alireza Jafarloo in Shahriar, a working-class district in Tehran, for failing to show a driver\u2019s license as they drove away on a motorcycle. Goodarzi, a young electrician, had been working in Jafarloo\u2019s home. At the funeral,\u00a0mourners<\/a><\/span>\u00a0condemned the police and chanted anti-government slogans.\u00a0Shahriar<\/span><\/a>\u00a0also suffered one of the largest death tolls during the deadly government crackdown on the nationwide uprising in November 2019 against the high cost of living.
\nSome will argue that we should not compare so-called liberal democracies in the West with repressive governments elsewhere in the world. But what did the United States\u2019 status as a liberal democracy do for George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and working-class Black America? For that matter, what did Iran\u2019s status as a revolutionary society for the\u00a0mostazafin<\/em>\u2014the dispossessed\u2014do for Asieh Panahi and the residents of her neighborhood as they confronted the bulldozers?
\nIran and the United States have quite different positions in the global order. The United States is a global superpower. Iran is a regional powerhouse that the United States hopes to undermine to serve the interests of the US business class.[1] And yet neither the US nor Iranian political systems have delivered on their promises to working-class and historically excluded communities in these societies. Can we find the space, then, to speak to each other? Is there not something to be gained by recognizing our commonalities, and even communicating, as the first step in the long fight for a more just and peaceful world order?<\/p>\n

Rising Labor Militancy<\/h2>\n

In recent years, both countries have witnessed rising labor militancy. Both Iranian and US workers express frustration at the drastic chasm between rich and poor within their respective societies and across the world, which has grown severely over the last decades.[2] At the moment, US billionaires have gotten\u00a0637 billion dollars richer<\/span><\/a>\u00a0during a pandemic that has claimed lives and devastated livelihoods, while\u00a0domestic elites in Iran<\/span><\/a>\u00a0tied to government circles live in comfort as many Iranians see their pensions disappear and wages plummet. In the midst of these global conditions, workers in the United States have gone on\u00a0strike more in the last few years<\/a><\/span>\u00a0than at any other time since the 1980s. Similarly in Iran, workers across several industries have gone on strike\u00a0numerous times<\/a><\/span>\u00a0during the\u00a0last few years<\/span><\/a>, with the BBC counting seventeen workers\u2019 actions a day from May 2017 to May 2018 alone.
\nThis year, Amazon and Instacart workers in the United States\u00a0walked off their jobs<\/a><\/span>\u00a0in May demanding personal protective equipment and hazard pay for working under dangerous conditions during the pandemic. Since September, both\u00a0Chicago<\/a><\/span>\u00a0and\u00a0Northern California healthcare workers<\/span><\/a>\u00a0have gone on strike, demanding higher wages and safe working conditions. Their struggles occur as US\u00a0nurses die from COVID-19<\/span><\/a>\u00a0due to inadequate personal protective equipment. In Iran,\u00a0oil<\/span><\/a>,\u00a0gas, and petrochemical workers<\/span><\/a>\u00a0went on strike in August against months of unpaid wages. At least two oil workers have committed suicide. Thousands of\u00a0Iranian teachers<\/a><\/span>\u00a0have also struck in recent years against\u00a0low wages, the commodification of education<\/span>,<\/a>\u00a0and the right to form\u00a0independent unions<\/a><\/span>. US teachers who have taken part in a\u00a0strike wave<\/span><\/a>\u00a0since 2018 due to the systematic gutting of public education and wages well under the cost of living, share common struggles with these Iranian teachers such as the prominent unionist\u00a0Jafar Ebrahimi<\/a><\/span>. Ebrahimi has been arrested multiple times for organizing independent teachers\u2019 unions, and for condemning the recent surge in for-profit education which will exacerbate education inequity for poor and working-class kids.
\nSugarcane workers at the Haft Tappeh mill in Shush, Iran have also gone on strike multiple times over the last three years against the privatization of their company and unpaid wages. Due to these strikes, a state court was forced in September to annul the privatization plan, though the workers continue to organize for the radical demand of\u00a0worker control of the factory<\/span><\/a>\u00a0under an independent workers\u2019 council. In August, the\u00a0International Union of Food and Agricultural Workers<\/span><\/a>\u00a0(IUF) threw its weight behind their most recent strike. Another affiliate of the IUF is the Farm Labor Organizing Committee in North Carolina. These mostly immigrant farmworkers have\u00a0demanded union recognition<\/a><\/span>\u00a0while\u00a0facing abuse and extremely low wages<\/span><\/a>\u00a0from their employer. The Haft Tappeh Sugarcane Workers Syndicate and the North Carolina Farm Labor Organizing Committee can grow stronger from amplifying one another\u2019s struggles.
\nSome US and Iranian workers have already made such links. Erek Slater, for example, is a Chicago bus driver who was recently fired due to his opposition to transporting police to Black Lives Matter protests. He is now\u00a0fighting to get his job back<\/span><\/a>. Slater worked with Iranians in 2015 to start a\u00a0dialogue with Iranian bus drivers<\/span><\/a>\u00a0on how transit workers in both countries can support one another. He has supported Iranian bus drivers since the mid-2000s when he raised awareness among his co-workers about the struggles of the Tehran Bus Workers Syndicate, a militant union in Iran whose members have faced arrest, imprisonment, and torture. Organizers are encouraging people around the world to support\u00a0Slater\u2019s reinstatement campaign<\/a><\/span>.\u00a0 Connections like these allow workers to build strategies of support.<\/p>\n

Linking Popular Struggles<\/h2>\n

In addition to labor struggles, other popular movements share important parallels as well. In recent months,\u00a0thousands of Iranians<\/a><\/span>\u00a0have used twitter to come forward about rape and sexual assault. They share this struggle with the countless survivors of sexual violence in the United States in the #MeToo movement, which as\u00a0Tarana Burke reminds us<\/span><\/a>\u00a0must center women on the margins of US society including Black, Indigenous, and working-class women. People in the United States and Iran are inspiring one another to come forward about sexual assault and violence, a major issue in both societies and across the globe.
\nIranians have also amplified the\u00a0Movement for Black Lives<\/a><\/span>. The Iranian feminist group Bidarzani hailed the protests in the wake of George Floyd\u2019s murder and\u00a0shared analysis<\/a><\/span>\u00a0that situated the uprising as part of a centuries-long fight for Black freedom. The photojournalist Hossein Fatemi was\u00a0tear gassed in Minneapolis<\/a><\/span>\u00a0covering the protests. A new\u00a0Collective for Black Iranians<\/span><\/a>\u00a0has also emerged in the wake of the uprising. During the 2014 rebellion in Ferguson, the labor scholar Peyman Jafari wrote a call for solidarity with Black Lives Matter in Persian titled\u00a0From Ferguson to Tehran<\/span><\/a>, in which he also connected Iranian struggles with the movement.
\nStriking commonalities also appear in parallel struggles for environmental justice. In 2018, people in Isfahan and Khuzestan, Iran protested a\u00a0water crisis<\/span><\/a>\u00a0partly related to\u00a0climate change-induced droughts<\/span><\/a>. In Chaharmahal and Bakhtiari province, people have\u00a0organized for years<\/span><\/a>\u00a0against a water transfer project which would divert water to industrial factories, while exacerbating drought, water shortages, loss of farmers\u2019 livelihoods, and poverty for the local population.[3] These water protesters have much in common with the Indigenous water protectors of\u00a0Standing Rock<\/span><\/a>\u00a0who have fought since 2016 to protect their land and water from pollution by the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL). DAPL represents the latest attack on their community in a centuries-long struggle against colonization. The oil that runs through it will worsen climate change, a global crisis which requires us to coordinate environmental struggles across borders.<\/p>\n

Towards a Socialist Strategy<\/h2>\n

International solidarity is a necessity. Our fates are interlinked in a global capitalist system. US and Iranian superrich sectors attained their wealth at the expense of the majority of people in both countries, despite the fact that Iranian and US capitalists often compete in the global order. It was with this understanding that\u00a0Iranian students<\/a><\/span>\u00a0during the November 2019 revolt expressed common cause with simultaneous uprisings in France, Lebanon, Iraq, and Chile against \u201crepression and plunder [of wealth]\u201d worldwide. It was in this spirit that\u00a0eighty workers\u2019 organizations<\/span><\/a>, across Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas, published a statement in August standing behind striking Iranian workers.<\/p>\n

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“<\/i>If we look at the conditions of people\u2019s lives and their uprisings for justice, rather than relations between states, we find that working class people in Iran and the United States share common interests and global challenges, and indeed, common enemies.”<\/i><\/div>\n
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\nAmong the organizations who joined this expression of support was Brazil\u2019s CSP-Conlutas, a labor federation that organizes two million workers from metal workers to teachers. It played a pivotal role in\u00a0Brazil\u2019s 2017 general strike<\/span><\/a>\u00a0against labor reforms and the cutting of pensions. Conlutas has supported Iranian workers\u00a0before<\/span><\/a>. It is led by Brazil\u2019s United Socialist Workers\u2019 Party (PSTU). Its members have blended different revolutionary traditions among socialist, Indigenous, and quilombo (Afro-Brazilian) movements, bringing them under one banner. Labor unions are not the only groups that get to vote in Conlutas\u2019 affairs. Indigenous and Afro-Brazilian caucuses vote and hold decision-making power, as do women\u2019s and LGBTQ caucuses. Conlutas joined eighty labor organizations in the broader\u00a0International Labour Network for Solidarity and Struggles<\/a><\/span>\u00a0because many of its workers believe in building an international organization to fight for working-class interests worldwide. For them, the international must reflect the different faces and facets of the working class. Conlutas paves the way.
\nIn the United States and Iran, the types of socialist movements that gave birth to the PSTU and by extension Conlutas are not as strong. Yet in both countries, long-discredited socialist ideas are making a resurgence. Iranian journalists close to the political establishment\u00a0time<\/a><\/span>\u00a0and\u00a0again<\/span><\/a>\u00a0express anxiety that leftist groups are gaining power in Iran\u2019s student movement, while the most militant Iranian labor leaders express that\u00a0independent labor councils are the only way out<\/span><\/a>\u00a0of their misery. In the United States, the Democratic party leadership and the structures of the US political system stood in the way of Bernie Sanders\u2019 run for president. His campaign nevertheless demonstration growing enthusiasm for socialist ideas among millions of people across the country.
\nIf we look at the conditions of people\u2019s lives and their uprisings for justice, rather than relations between states, we find that working-class people in Iran and the United States share common interests and global challenges, and indeed, common enemies.\u00a0International solidarity between them is not merely symbolic, but rather has a concrete impact. Over time we can build on acts of solidarity to coordinate our movements across borders.
\nThe sociologist Asef Bayat argues that the Arab revolutions of 2011 were waged by an \u201cactive citizenry\u201d who found creative ways\u2014in online spaces and public squares\u2014to make themselves heard among each other before Arab states realized the extent to which they had lost legitimacy in the eyes of their people.[4] Intense hope powered those revolutions, and equally intense despair followed their defeats and the flare of civil war. Yet Bayat does not draw hopelessness from this lesson. He argues that upheavals will continue to occur across countries as mass discontent lingers. What matters is that people deepen their vision for change following failure. Bayat\u2019s quotation of Rosa Luxembourg in this regard is apt: \u201cRevolution is the only form of \u2018war\u2019 in which the ultimate victory can be prepared only by a series of defeats.\u201d[5] The next step, then, is to offer our communities concrete political alternatives to the current social order. The resurgence of socialist ideas in both Iran and the United States\u2014while not something to be overstated or romanticized\u2014does provide an alternative, a set of enduring values to build movements that espouse the strength and longevity needed to ultimately survive repression, and the leadership needed to weather what Luxembourg reminds us is a long and difficult road to freedom.
\nClick here<\/a><\/span> for a Persian-language translation of this piece.<\/p>\n

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\n<\/a>[1] When Trump brought the United States to the brink of war in January, a majority of Americans disapproved of his actions<\/a><\/span>, having learned the lesson of the devastating 2003 US invasion of Iraq, which resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths, while the corporate executives<\/a><\/span> of Exxon Mobil, Chevron<\/a><\/span>, and other US multinationals profited handsomely. The United States is now pursuing sanctions against Iran with a similar goal in mind. While US officials state that the purpose of sanctions is to stop Iran\u2019s nuclear program, the United States has not seriously pursued global nuclear disarmament through decreasing its own and its allies\u2019 stockpiles. On the contrary, the purpose is to support the economic interests of its business class as was the case in Iraq. Those who support sanctions and war on Iran in the name of freedom, including some Iranian diasporic activists, support an agenda that will lead to more destruction, ill health, and exploitation for those people, not their freedom.\n<\/div>\n
\n[2] David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism<\/em> (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).\n<\/div>\n
\n[3] E. Hoominfar, \u201cEnvironmental Social Movements: A Comparative Study Across Two Political Economies,\u201d PhD thesis, Sociology Department, Utah State University, Logan, UT, USA, 2020. Available online: https:\/\/digitalcommons.usu.edu\/etd\/7752<\/a> (accessed on 2 October 2020).\n<\/div>\n
\n[4] Asef Bayat, Revolution Without Revolutionaries: Making Sense of the Arab Spring<\/em> (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2017), 224.\n<\/div>\n
\n[v] Rosa Luxembourg, quoted in Bayat, Revolution Without Revolutionaries<\/em>, 222\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This article first appeared on Jadaliyya on October 20, 2020 By : Alborz Ghandehari \u00a0 The 22 September\u00a0marked the fortieth\u00a0anniversary of the start of the Iran-Iraq War. When my mother tells me how a blast from a missile claimed her uncle\u2019s life in Khuzestan, I know the war is still with her. She still remembers […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13882120,"featured_media":10492,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crdt_document":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_wpas_customize_per_network":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[27806],"tags":[30314,28197,11898,27627,27839,27903],"class_list":["post-10491","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-internacionalinternational","tag-internationalism","tag-iran","tag-labor","tag-socialism","tag-solidarity","tag-usa"],"translation":{"provider":"WPGlobus","version":"3.0.2","language":"es","enabled_languages":["en","es"],"languages":{"en":{"title":true,"content":true,"excerpt":false},"es":{"title":false,"content":false,"excerpt":false}}},"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pdQxqk-2Jd","amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/workersvoiceus.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10491","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/workersvoiceus.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/workersvoiceus.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/workersvoiceus.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13882120"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/workersvoiceus.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10491"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/workersvoiceus.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10491\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/workersvoiceus.org\/es\/wp-json\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/workersvoiceus.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10491"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/workersvoiceus.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10491"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/workersvoiceus.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10491"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}