Written by Rev Laskaris

“Marxists never tire of telling us we face a choice between socialism or barbarism. In fact, society made that choice 90 years ago. Society chose barbarism; we are living with the consequences of that choice.” [1] - Jehu

In left-wing discourse, the phrase “socialism or barbarism” is commonly used. For Luxemburg, “barbarism” is used in a specific, technical sense as part of the materialist conception of history. It means that at a certain stage in the development of capitalism, a period we can call “barbarism” would arise. For Luxemburg, however, this does not mark the end times as leftists commonly make it out to be, but to describe a technical transformation in the process of capital accumulation. Luxemburg witnessed the early stages of this process with the rise of imperialism, the onset of WW1, and the redivision of the world by international monopoly financial capitalists. What Luxemburg could not fully answer, having been murdered in 1919, was what a stable, institutionalized form of this barbarism might look like.

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Society forces the hand of the state

For nearly four years before 1933, society had been draining gold from the banking system through a massive, decentralized, and chronic bank run. Fearful depositors withdrew currency and demanded gold coin or bullion, while foreign holders accelerated outflows following Britain’s abandonment of the gold standard in September 1931. Domestic hoarding intensified dramatically in late 1932 and early 1933 as the crisis deepened. By the time Roosevelt took office in March 1933, the situation had reached the point of systemic collapse. The Federal Reserve’s “free gold” — the excess reserves above legal requirements — was disappearing at a dangerous rate.

As the Federal Reserve’s own historical record states:

”The Federal Reserve typically held more than enough gold to back the currency it had issued. Bankers called the excess “free gold.” The Federal Reserve needed a stock of free gold sufficient to satisfy redemption requests that might occur in the near future. The Federal Reserve could increase the stock of free gold by increasing interest rates, which encouraged Americans to deposit in banks and encouraged foreigners to invest in the United States, shifting gold from the pockets of the public (both here and abroad) to the vaults of Federal Reserve district and member banks. Conversely, when the Federal Reserve lowered interest rates, gold would flow from its coffers into the hands of the public both at home and overseas.

During the financial crisis of 1933 that culminated in the banking holiday in March 1933, large quantities of gold flowed out from the Federal Reserve. Some of this outflow went to individuals and firms in the United States. This domestic drain occurred because individuals and firms preferred holding metallic gold to bank deposits or paper currency. Some of the gold flowed to foreign nations. This external drain occurred because foreign investors feared a devaluation of the dollar. Together, the internal and external drains consumed the Federal Reserve’s free gold. In March 1933, when the Federal Reserve Bank of New York could no longer honor its commitment to convert currency to gold, President Franklin Roosevelt declared a national banking holiday.” [2]

As a result of these run on the banks, between 1930-1933, catastrophic consequences came:

“The Depression ravaged the nation’s banking industry. Between 1930 and 1933, more than 9,000 banks failed across the country, and this time many were large, urban, seemingly stable institutions. The few state deposit-guarantee funds were quickly overwhelmed. Overall, depositors in the failed institutions lost more than $1.3 billion (about $27.4 billion in today’s dollars), or 19.6% of total deposits.” [3]

It was the blind logic of capital asserting itself. Years of overaccumulation had produced a glut of commodities and falling profitability. When effective demand collapsed, the system responded with deflationary pressure and a flight to commodity money. Society, acting under the pressure of crisis, was already abandoning commodity money in practice by hoarding gold, withdrawing deposits, and refusing to keep its savings in a failing banking system. The state was not freely choosing to end the gold standard. Rather, it was compelled to intervene and ratify what society had already begun.

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The Breakdown of Commodity Money

On April 5, 1933, in the prime of the Great Depression, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 6102, formally titled “Requiring Gold Coin, Gold Bullion and Gold Certificates to Be Delivered to the Government.“ The order made it illegal for U.S. citizens to own or hoard significant amounts of gold, compelling them to exchange their bullion, coins, and certificates for U.S. paper currency at the official price of $20.67 per ounce. Willful violations were punishable by a fine of up to $10,000 and up to ten years in prison. FDR would also go onto sign Executive order 6814, which included the confiscation of silver and the artificially raising its price. However, this measure was not intended to be the same as 6102; It was only in force for four years, with the goal being of acquiring silver bullion to build government silver reserves and support increased silver coin production under the 1934 Act.

Executive Order 6102 represented a fundamental break with a monetary tradition that had persisted for millennia. Until the 20th century, the primary form of money was commodity money whose value was intrinsic to the material itself, derived from its substance and the abstract labor required to produce it. A quintessential example was the silver shekel, which for thousands of years functioned as money in the form of standardized weights. As anthropologist David Graeber observes, this system was highly developed even in ancient Mesopotamia:

“Even though ancient Sumer was usually divided into a large number of independent city-states, by the time the curtain goes up on Mesopotamian civilization around 3500 BC, temple administrators already appear to have developed a single, uniform system of accountancy—one that is in some ways still with us, actually, because it’s to the Sumerians that we owe such things as the dozen, 60-minute hour, or the 24-hour day. The basic monetary unit was the silver shekel. One shekel’s weight in silver was established as the equivalent of one gur, or bushel of barley. A shekel was subdivided into 60 minas, corresponding to one portion of barley—on the principle that there were 30 days in a month, and Temple workers received two rations of barley every day. It’s easy to see that “money” in this sense is in no way the product of commercial transactions. It was actually created by bureaucrats in order to keep track of resources and move things back and forth between departments. Temple bureaucrats used the system to calculate debts (rents, fees, loans, etc.) in silver. Silver was, effectively, money. And it did indeed circulate in the form of unworked chunks, “rude bars” as Smith had put it.” [4]

For Marx, commodity money was not merely a medium of circulation. Rather, it is the expression of socially necessary labor-time. In the Marxist view, money’s essential role is to serve as the “reification of universal labor-time” [5]. Since money serves as the reification of universal labor-time, it therefore serves as the only adequate form of exchange-value. Money is unique in the fact that it can measure the value of products precisely because it represents a purely quantitative measure—socially necessary labor-time—which is abstracted from all the qualitative aspects of the commodities and the concrete labor that produced them. Exchange-value is therefore quantitative and abstract, because it seeks a common measure for qualitatively completely different things.

For instance, the exchange-value implicit in “1 coat = 20 loaves of bread” finds its adequate form in “1 coat = 5 shekels” and “20 loaves = 5 shekels.” These 5 shekels materially represent the equivalent amount of abstract labor-time contained in both the coat and the bread. The shekel can serve this function because it, like all other commodities, possesses value, determined by the socially necessary labor-time required for its production—from mining and refining to minting. Marx explains this process:

“money does not serve as a circulating medium, as a mere transient agent in the interchange of products, but as the individual incarnation of social labour, as the independent form of existence of exchange-value, as the universal commodity.” [6]

With the passage of Executive Order 6102, the state supplanted commodity money—the universal equivalent for millennia—with its own non-convertible scrip, thereby replacing money itself and seizing the mantle of managing the national economy; for it now exclusively owns the very thing that capital requires to be set in motion, or as Marx explains:

“All new capital, to commence with, comes on the stage, that is, on the market, whether of commodities, labour, or money, even in our days, in the shape of money that by a definite process has to be transformed into capital.” [7]

However, this take over of the economy was something expected by Marx and Engels. In “Socialism: Utopia and Scientific”, Engels theorizes a highly advanced type of capitalism, described as the “national capitalist [8]” that continues the exploitation of the working class via wage slavery, directed not by private property owners but by the direction of the state. As we see, this process came to fruition via the removal of commodity money from circulation and set forward the devaluing of wages below their value through state policy to artificially raise the rate of surplus value. By raising the price of gold to $35 an ounce, the state had effectively devalued the value of labor-power by nearly half by devaluing the dollar.

For example, before Roosevelt’s action, the U.S. was on a gold standard where $20.67 was legally defined as the value of one troy ounce of gold. This means that $1 = 1/20.67 oz of gold, or approximately 0.0484 ounces of gold. Through the Gold Reserve Act of 1934, President Roosevelt changed this. He set a new official price: $35.00 for one troy ounce of gold. This meant that $1 was now redefined as 1/35 oz of gold, or approximately 0.0286 ounces of gold. This means that the government officially declared that a single dollar now represents 41% less gold than it did before. The dollar was literally made cheaper. In other words, the collective wages of the working class had been devalued by 41%~ overnight— this was a flat out major attack on our class.

Suppose a capitalist wanted to hire a worker for $4 a day (the general average in 1933). Previously, at $20.67 per ounce, that would have equaled around .193 ounces of gold ($4.00/$20.67). After the switch to $35 per ounce, that same $4 would now equal only .114 ounces of gold ($4.00/$35.00). Since this devaluation has occurred, a capitalist could now hire two workers for the price of about 1.5!

This represented a massive, state-engineered reduction in labor costs that directly boosted the rate of surplus value.

Marx had already explained why a change in the general price level (such as the devaluation of the dollar) has sharply different effects on constant capital and variable capital. In Capital Volume III, Chapter 1, he writes:

The difference between these various elements of the commodity-value, which together make up the cost-price, leaps to the eye whenever a change takes place in the size of the value of either the expended constant, or the expended variable, part of the capital. Let the price of the same means of production, or of the constant part of capital, rise from £400 to £600, or, conversely, let it fall to £200. In the first case it is not only the cost-price of the commodity which rises from £500 to 600_c + 100_v = £700, but also the value of the commodity which rises from £600 to 600_c + 100_v + 100_s = £800. In the second case, it is not only the cost-price which falls from £500 to 200_c+100_v = £300, but also the value of the commodity which falls from £600 to 200_c + 100_v + 100_s = £400. Since the expended constant capital transfers its own value to the product, the value of the product rises or falls with the absolute magnitude of that capital-value, other conditions remaining equal. Assume, on the other hand, that, other circumstances remaining unchanged, the price of the same amount of labour-power rises from £100 to £150, or, conversely, that it falls from £100 to £50. In the first case, the cost-price rises from £500 to 400_c + 150_v = £550, and falls in the second case from £500 to 400_c + 50_v = £450. But in either case the commodity-value remains unchanged = £600; one time it is 400_c + 150_v + 50_s, and the other time, 400_c + 50_v + 150_s. The advanced variable capital does not add its own value to the product. The place of its value is taken in the product rather by a new value created by labour. Therefore, a change in the absolute magnitude of the variable capital, so far as it expresses merely a change in the price of labour-power, does not in the least alter the absolute magnitude of the commodity-value, because it does not alter anything in the absolute magnitude of the new value created by living labour-power. Such a change rather affects only the relative proportion of the two component parts of the new value, of which one forms surplus-value and the other makes good the variable capital and therefore passes into the cost-price of the commodity. [9]

In plain terms, when the general price level rises (or the currency is devalued), the value of constant capital (raw materials, machinery, etc.) tends to increase because those inputs now cost more to replace. Variable capital (wages paid for labor-power), however, behaves differently. Since workers have no choice but to sell their labor-power daily simply to survive, a rise in prices can reduce the real purchasing power of wages, the actual “bundle of necessities” they can buy, without any change in the nominal wage. The new value created by living labor remains the same, but a larger share of it is now captured as surplus-value because the effective cost of reproducing labor-power has fallen. As Marx shows, the same amount of living labor still creates the same new value, but a larger portion of it becomes surplus-value for the capitalist. In contrast, changes in the cost of constant capital directly raise or lower both the cost-price and the total value of the commodity. The 1934 revaluation of gold from $20.67 to $35 per ounce was therefore a concealed mechanism that cheapened variable capital in real terms. It raised the rate of surplus-value and acted as a counteracting tendency to the falling rate of profit under conditions of absolute overaccumulation.

To prove mathematically how this raises the rate of surplus value (s’ = s / v, where s is surplus labor/surplus value and v is variable capital/labor power value paid), consider a simplified but rigorous model using Marx’s value categories and gold as the measure of value (the universal equivalent expressing socially necessary labor time).

Assume:

• The value of labor power (v) is fixed in real terms before the revaluation: it costs the capitalist a certain quantity of gold to reproduce the worker’s labor power daily (food, shelter, etc., expressed in gold-equivalent SNLT).

• Let v_gold = the gold-quantity required to buy labor power at value (pre-revaluation benchmark).

• Pre-revaluation: nominal wage w_pre = $4 buys exactly v_gold ≈ 0.1935 oz (so w_pre in gold = v_gold).

• Post-revaluation: the same nominal $4 now buys only 0.1143 oz of gold-equivalent value.

• Thus, the real wage (in value terms) falls to w_post_gold = 0.1143 oz, while the physical/necessary reproduction requirements of labor power remain unchanged (v_gold still ≈ 0.1935 oz worth of commodities needed).

The capitalist still pays the nominal $4, but that $4 now commands only ~59.06% of its former gold/value equivalent (1/1.693 ≈ 0.5906, or a ~40.94% devaluation in purchasing power over gold/value). [10]

In the most fundamental terms, this intervention by the state definitively marked the early stages of breakdown of production based on exchange-value. The core presupposition of the system—that wages will be exchanged at their value—was decisively violated to resuscitate the process of capital accumulation.

In short, commodity money itself has become a fetter on the accumulation of capital.

The United States did not simply choose to leave the gold standard. In a more terrifying reality, the historical laws governing the capitalist mode of production forced the United States off the gold standard, independent of its policymakers’ will. The alternative is a catastrophic deflationary spiral and the total collapse of a profit-driven economy. One could say the system’s own logic acted as a blind, cybernetic intelligence. It “refined” its own operating parameters as the automatic subject, jettisoning the constraint of commodity money to adapt to the inexorable, growing demands of capital accumulation. The gold standard was, in essence, amputated by the system to ensure its own survival. The state had carried out the early stages of what Polish Marxist economist, Henryk Grossman, predicted in his text “Law of the Accumulation and Breakdown”, published just a few years before the great depression:

“Beyond a definite point of time the system cannot survive at the postulated rate of surplus value of 100 per cent. There is a growing shortage of surplus value and, under the given conditions, a continuous overaccumulation. The only alternative is to violate the conditions postulated. Wages have to be cut in order to push the rate of surplus value even higher. This cut in wages would not be a purely temporary phenomenon that vanishes once equilibrium is re-established; it will have to be continuous. After year 36 either wages have to be cut continually and periodically or a reserve army must come into being.” [11]

Grossman, using careful arithmetic, continues where Marx left off in Capital Volume III, Chapter 14 (“Counteracting Influences”), where Marx identifies one of the most pivotal counteracting tendencies to the falling rate of profit: “the depression of wages below the value of labour-power. [12]”

This is not a minor adjustment. It’s a structural necessity once accumulation reaches a point of over-accumulation and surplus value becomes insufficient to valorize the swollen mass of capital at the required rate. Under conditions of absolute over-accumulation of capital, the commodity labor power must be sold below its value in order for capital to realize a profit. In other words, the commodities consumed by the working class must be sold at a “markup” over the prices of production, which, per Marx, is a definite violation of the assumptions made by Marx so long as a commodity money standard is in place.

“Suppose then, that by some inexplicable privilege, the seller is enabled to sell his commodities above their value, what is worth 100 for 110, in which case the price is nominally raised 10%. The seller therefore pockets a surplus-value of 10. But after he has sold he becomes a buyer. A third owner of commodities comes to him now as seller, who in this capacity also enjoys the privilege of selling his commodities 10% too dear. Our friend gained 10 as a seller only to lose it again as a buyer. The net result is, that all owners of commodities sell their goods to one another at 10% above their value, which comes precisely to the same as if they sold them at their true value. Such a general and nominal rise of prices has the same effect as if the values had been expressed in weight of silver instead of in weight of gold. The nominal prices of commodities would rise, but the real relation between their values would remain unchanged. Let us make the opposite assumption, that the buyer has the privilege of purchasing commodities under their value. In this case it is no longer necessary to bear in mind that he in his turn will become a seller. He was so before he became buyer; he had already lost 10% in selling before he gained 10% as buyer. Everything is just as it was. The creation of surplus-value, and therefore the conversion of money into capital, can consequently be explained neither on the assumption that commodities are sold above their value, nor that they are bought below their value.” [13]

Here, Marx is debunking the vulgar, circulation based explanation that capitalists generate profit and surplus-value simply by marking up prices — i.e., selling commodities above their value (or buying them below value) in the market. This was a common idea at the time, and still is commonly held by leftist commentators (commonly suggesting that profits are capitalist greed rather than a historical product under specific conditions). Marx essentially gives five reasons as to why, under ordinary circumstances, cannot happen:

1. It cancels out completely. If every seller gets to sell 10% above value, then every buyer (who is also a seller in the circuit) pays 10% above value. The +10 gained as seller is lost as buyer. Net result for the whole class of commodity owners is ~zero. No extra value is created.

2. It doesn’t explain where the surplus comes from. Any “extra” money the capitalists pocket would have had to come from somewhere else in the system because it can’t be conjured out of thin air by price tricks. Circulation is a zero-sum game for value. What one gains, another loses. Surplus value, on the other hand, requires net creation of value and a material transformation of nature, not redistribution.

3. Most importantly, it contradicts the premise of equivalent exchange and the law of exchange-value. Marx’s whole analysis starts from the assumption that commodities exchange at their values (determined by socially necessary labor-time). If price markups were the source of profit, capitalism would rest on systematic “cheating” or unequal exchange, but then the law of value itself would collapse. Capitalism as a mode of production would collapse.

4. Capitalism is defined by valorization of value (M-C-M’): money advanced to produce more money via exploitation of wage-labor. If surplus-value came from circulation markups instead of production, then the circuit would no longer depend on the unique use-value of labor-power.

5. The drive to accumulate is undermined. Why invest in machinery, intensify labor, or expand markets if you can just markup prices forever?

This is precisely why the removal of commodity money (i.e., the gold standard) is so explosive.

Under commodity money, the law of value enforces itself with brutal mechanical necessity. Gold cannot be conjured from nothing, because its supply is constrained by the actual expenditure of abstract labor in mining, refining, and minting. Though, as a general rule, gold itself hardly circulated. Rather, the paper money or currency in circulation acted as a representation of gold. Currency in circulation was “insured” by a proportionate amount of gold in a central bank’s reserves, which prevented banks from arbitrarily creating money. Any attempt at a general markup, such as selling everything at 10% above value, collapses back into equivalence because the money commodity itself has value and cannot be inflated at will. The system self corrects because, despite nominal price increases, real value relations remain untouched. Prices are anchored to value because they fluctuate around the labor-time required to produce commodities, with gold serving as the objective measure. Per Marx, Gold serves this function because…

“Gold confronts the other commodities as money only because it previously confronted them as a commodity. Like all other commodities it also functioned as an equivalent, either as a single equivalent in isolated exchanges or as a particular equivalent alongside other commodity-equivalents. Gradually it began to serve as universal equivalent in narrower or wider fields. [14]”

Once the state supplants commodity money with its own inconvertible token, which is a scrap of paper whose “value” is decreed by sovereign command rather than socially necessary labor-time, the mechanical enforcer of equivalence disappears. The currency in circulation, now mostly created electronically via a keyboard, becomes a piece of debt issued by the government and banks. It is no longer a commodity money because it no longer has a cost of production, meaning money becomes purely debt. As MMT professor Larry Randall Wray explains, “use of currency and value of M are based on the power of the issuing authority, not on intrinsic value. [15]”

Though, labor-power is uniquely affected by this, because labor-power is sold by living human beings who have no other means of subsistence, and can be forced below its value continuously. A worker cannot declare bankruptcy and withdraw from the market because the result would be even more immiseration than what devaluing of currency already does. The obvious information from this fact can’t be ignored. Workers are being paid, in terms of exchange-value, nothing for their labor power, because the currency itself is no longer pegged to any definite quantity of commodity money (it floats). Yet, the exchange between employers and workers is still occurring, since workers are still dependent on the exchange so they can enter the market as consumers and provide themselves with articles required for reproduction. Moving forward, nominal wages do not directly amount to much besides the amount of paper you own, because the real power of your wage is actively being devalued against commodity money. Marx foresaw precisely this mechanism when he analyzed the consequences of inconvertible paper money that exceeds its proper limit:

“There would no longer be any standard. If the paper money exceed its proper limit, which is the amount in gold coins of the like denomination that can actually be current, it would, apart from the danger of falling into general disrepute, represent only that quantity of gold, which, in accordance with the laws of the circulation of commodities, is required, and is alone capable of being represented by paper. If the quantity of paper money issued be double what it ought to be, then, as a matter of fact, £1 would be the money-name not of 1/4 of an ounce, but of 1/8 of an ounce of gold. The effect would be the same as if an alteration had taken place in the function of gold as a standard of prices. Those values that were previously expressed by the price of £1 would now be expressed by the price of £2.” [16]

When the state over-issues fiat beyond the gold-equivalent that would circulate under commodity money rules, each unit of currency names less gold (less socially necessary labor-time) than before. The effect is identical to formally redefining the standard of prices against gold. Values previously expressed by $1 are now expressed by $2, $5, $10. Nominal wages can rise indefinitely while the real content of those wages (the quantity of gold-equivalent socially necessary labor-time they command) collapses.

To demonstrate this, let’s compare the minimum wage in 1964 to the minimum wage of today (2026).

The US federal minimum wage in 1964 was $1.25 per hour. The current federal minimum wage (as of 2026) is $7.25 per hour.

Average gold price in 1964: approximately $35.10–$35.35 per troy ounce (fixed under the Bretton Woods system at $35/oz official rate, thus market price hovered very close to this).

Current gold price (as of 03/18/2026): $4,874.30 per troy ounce.

We’ll calculate purchasing power in gold ounces per hour, meaning we are directly focusing on exchange-value against the historical money commodity.

1964 minimum wage: $1.25 per hour ÷ $35.10/oz ≈ 0.03561 ounces of gold per hour

Current minimum wage: $7.25 per hour ÷ $4,874.30/oz ≈ 0.001487 ounces of gold per hour.

Ratio (1964 vs. 2026): 0.03561 / 0.001487 ≈ 23.95 times more gold-buying power in 1964
(Exact: 0.035610 / 0.001487 ≈ 23.95)

Percentage decline: The real (gold-denominated) minimum wage has fallen by ~95.8% since 1964 (1 - 0.001487 / 0.035610 ≈ 0.958 or 95.8% drop).

To match 1964 purchasing power today: The federal minimum wage would need to be ~$175.40 per hour in 2026 dollars. (0.03561 oz/hr × $4,874.30/oz ≈ $173.60–$175.40/hr depending on rounding)

In nominal dollars, the minimum wage rose ~5.8× ($1.25 → $7.25), but in gold terms (a proxy for real exchange-value against the historical money commodity), it collapsed by nearly 96%. By replacing commodity money with an inconvertible fiat, prices (nominal dollar amounts) and purchasing power (real exchange-value) decouple dramatically. Labor-power and workers can see their nominal price rise steadily, while their real purchasing power, in exchange-value terms, collapses.

The left will continue to argue that we must fight for higher wages, despite the fact that higher wages are nominally possible under the fascist state, since the state can devalue them at will. The leftist cope that we face wage stagnation is a complete myth. The reality is far more alarming: wages have collapsed.

The fascist state (the national capitalist in its mature form per Engels) can raise nominal wages at will, which it does, in fits and starts, through minimum-wage hikes, “living wage” campaigns, union deals, or electoral bribery, because it can devalue the currency at will. The DSA (Democratic Socialists of America), PSL (Party for Socialism and Liberation), and CPUSA (Communist Party USA) position themselves as radical or revolutionary organizations, but their core economic demands, such as higher minimum wages, Medicare for All/single-payer healthcare, living wages, job guarantees, and expanded social programs, are outmoded and even counterproductive in the barbaric phase of capitalism that emerged after the 1930s gold seizure and was sealed by the 1971 Nixon shock. These demands assume a monetary regime still regulated by commodity money, where nominal wage increases translate into real gains in purchasing power and value. It is why these parties all default away from revolutionary theory and tactics and into open support to fascists like Zohran, lying to us all and claiming that “Zohran shifts the overtone window” towards more “progressive” politics. Yet as we have seen, this so-called “progressivism” runs counter for the underlying fact that our wages are being destroyed by the state. Even if DSA/PSL/ CPUSA “won” $25–$30 /hour nationally, fiat devaluation would erode it almost immediately — just as $7.25 today buys ~4% of what $1.25 did in 1964 gold terms, but these social fascists will never recognize this fact. Most importantly, these demands, according to Lenin “try to divide and deceive the workers, to divert them from the class struggle by petty concessions [18]”. These demands exist to run cover for the barbaric state by pushing nominal reforms that stabilize the system by channeling discontent into winnable-but-meaningless gains. These demands exist to hide the underlying power that the state has over workers. These demands exist to conceal the fact that the left completely lacks revolutionary theory and therefore has no chance at a revolutionary movement!

Frankly, the fascists in D.C. laugh at the left. These mother fuckers really think they have the empire out flanked by “hitting the streets” to chant for higher taxes and more valueless tokens.

Even as disgusting, and a more recent development, we have leftists openly coming to the defense of fired federal “workers”— the pencil pushing bureaucrats who have managed the very system that has made the majority of people in this country's lives worse.

Does the left not know that with the introduction of a valueless debt based currency, the state can now debase the currency systematically by expanding credit, expanding money supply, target inflation, manipulate interest rates, run perpetual deficits, and dramatically increase superfluous labor time, typically in the form of federal employment?

In the era of absolute overaccumulation, when capital has swollen beyond the mass of surplus-value that can be extracted at the required rate, the breakdown of production based on exchange-value does not trigger immediate collapse. Instead, the state, as national capitalist, absorbs and manages the excess through deficit spending and debt issuance, turning what would otherwise be idle capital into the ongoing reproduction of the system. Countries, out of pure necessity, “lend” their excess to the United States and, in return, receive U.S. debt. This excess is lent because, under ordinary circumstances, it cannot find productive investment for surplus-value production. The result is a mass of idle capital and, by extension, a deflationary pressure that capital must constantly attend to in order to avoid falling prices.

According to Marx, profit falls sharply (deflation) under conditions of absolute over-accumulation because existing capital stock cannot be valorized at the required rate of profit. Production is over-accumulated relative to effective demand:

“It is evident, however, that this actual depreciation of the old capital could not occur without a struggle, and that the additional capital ΔC could not assume the functions of capital without a struggle. The rate of profit would not fall under the effect of competition due to over-production of capital. It would rather be the reverse; it would be the competitive struggle which would begin because the fallen rate of profit and over-production of capital originate from the same conditions. The part of ΔC in the hands of old functioning capitalists would be allowed to remain more or less idle to prevent a depreciation of their own original capital and not to narrow its place in the field of production. Or they would employ it, even at a momentary loss, to shift the need of keeping additional capital idle on newcomers and on their competitors in general.” [20]

To understand how the fascist regime offsets this, let’s think of it in terms of Georges Bataille:

“I will begin with a basic fact: The living organism, in a situation determined by the play of energy on the surface of the globe, ordinarily receives more energy than is necessary for maintaining life; the excess energy (wealth) can be used for the growth of a system (e.g., an organism); if the system can no longer grow, or if the excess cannot be completely absorbed in its growth, it must necessarily be lost without profit; it must be spent, willingly or not, gloriously or catastrophically.” [21]

Capitalism, in its drive for accumulation, constantly produces excess energy (overaccumulation), that it cannot productively absorb. Unlike archaic societies that expended surplus through festival, sacrifice, or luxury, capitalism tries to reinvest it endlessly in growth, but this growth has limits. When those limits are reached, the surplus can no longer be contained productively, thus it must be expended non-productively through crisis, war, financial bubbles, ecological breakdown, and state-managed waste. Bataille would argue that the capitalist crisis is the catastrophic release of this valve. The state becomes the central mechanism for managing this waste by channeling excess into military destruction, administrative bloat, debt-financed make-work, and fictitious valorization. Yet, if this waste is, in a sense, a cosmic reality—governed by the laws of thermodynamics and the inescapable production of surplus energy—then it could be channeled into excess creativity: free disposable time for individual and social development!

As we know, though, the state has been able to forcefully keep capitalism afloat, because excess capital itself is used to expand the state. The state artificially inserts itself into the economy not as a neutral regulator or occasional stabilizer, but as the active, structural driver of what passes for “growth” once private capital accumulation hits its historical limit. Chronic deficits are the primary fuel that enables and accelerates state growth because they are the mechanism through which the state continuously expands its command over labor, capital, and resources without being constrained by tax revenue, private profitability, or commodity-money discipline.

This spending often takes the form of:

• Direct federal employment (military, bureaucracy, civil service).

• Contracts to private firms (defense, infrastructure, R&D, subsidies).

• Transfer payments (social security, welfare, unemployment).

• Grants/loans to states, universities, NGOs, corporations.

• Direct lending through GSEs.

• Media and cultural subsidies.

• The Federal Reserve and other credit facilities.

In essence, a growing portion of society’s labor—when viewed from the perspective of social need and value creation—becomes superfluous; that is, it is no longer necessary for the production of surplus value, yet it continues to be expended under capitalism. The labor itself does not directly produce surplus value or valorize capital, but persists because the social relations of capitalism remain temporal—they are still organized around abstract labor time as the substance of value, even though labor itself is increasingly less a source of real material wealth. The material basis of wealth has shifted dramatically toward objectified, dead labor (machines, automation, science, general intellect), while the social form of capitalism (value as objectified labor time) continues to dominate and structure society as if nothing had changed. The result is a society that is hollowed out, rich in productive power and technological potential, yet increasingly empty of human meaning, purpose, and freedom because it is still forced to measure, organize, and valorize everything through the diminishing metric of living labor time.

Capitalism develops the productive forces to the point where immediate living labor (which is the direct, muscular, attentive expenditure of human effort in the production process) itself ceases to be the great well-spring of wealth. In other words, once labor itself is eclipsed by the “general intellect [22]”, production based on exchange-value must necessarily break down, because labor itself ceases to be the primary source of real material wealth.

As Marx writes in the Grundrisse:

“As soon as labour in the direct form has ceased to be the great well-spring of wealth, labour time ceases and must cease to be its measure, and hence exchange-value [must cease to be the measure] of use value. The surplus labour of the mass has ceased to be the condition for the development of general wealth, just as the non-labour of the few, for the development of the general powers of the human head. With that, production based on exchange-value breaks down, and the direct, material production process is stripped of the form of penury and antithesis.” [23]

Sadly, this eclipse of immediate living labor by the general intellect did not lead to the liberation of humanity from toil. Instead, the state intervened and evolved to resolve this contradiction in the only way still possible under capitalism, as a matter of “life or death” for the capital relation itself, by enabling and monetizing a mass of superfluous labor time.

Marx already foresaw this exact dynamic in the Grundrisse:

“Capital itself is the moving contradiction, [in] that it presses to reduce labour time to a minimum, while it posits labour time, on the other side, as sole measure and source of wealth. Hence it diminishes labour time in the necessary form so as to increase it in the superfluous form; hence posits the superfluous in growing measure as a condition — question of life or death — for the necessary.” [24]

Superfluous labor time, once exchange-value breaks down, becomes the new dominant temporal form of the entire barbaric phase of capitalism. It becomes the material expression of a society that has outgrown the need for mass human labor in production yet is compelled to keep expending it on pain of systemic collapse.

Though to understand it fully, we need to distinguish three interlocking historical categories of labor time that Marx implicitly traces:

1. Necessary labor time: The socially necessary labor time required to reproduce the worker’s labor-power (subsistence goods, historically determined needs). This is paid as variable capital (v) in the form of wages.

2. Surplus labor time: The excess labor time beyond necessary labor, which produces surplus-value (s) — the driving aim of capitalist production. This is the classical exploitation relation: the worker labors longer than needed to reproduce herself, and the capitalist appropriates the difference. The worker produces more value than that his labor itself is worth in terms of socially necessary labor time.

3. Superfluous labor time: The third, historically new category that only emerges when the productive forces have advanced to the point where direct human labor time is no longer the decisive source of material wealth. This is labor that is superfluous both to the reproduction of wealth, yet is enforced because the capital relation still requires that labor time remain the measure and condition of valorization.

Fiat comes into play in the age of breakdown of production based on exchange-value because commodity money is structurally constrained to only the first two categories of labor time, necessary labor time and surplus labor time, and cannot systematically sustain the third category, superfluous labor time, at scale. Only fiat money, aka, an inconvertible state-issued currency with no labor-value anchor, can make superfluous labor time a dominant, structural, and permanent feature of the mode of production, because it allows for the great expansion of credit is the central mechanism that enables and sustains this dominance. GDP disguises superfluous labor time by counting nominal spending as economic output, regardless of whether that spending corresponds to the creation of value, surplus-value, or even material wealth.

The Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) of 1933 serves as the paradigmatic, concrete historical example of how fiat money structurally enables and institutionalizes superfluous labor time once production based on exchange-value breaks, which occurs during the Great Depression. Before the passage of AAA, agricultural overproduction, due to technological/productivity advances, like the widespread introduction of the gasoline powered tractor, meant huge portions of farm labor time were superfluous because crops produced exceeded what the market (exchange-value) could absorb at prices covering costs + profit. In other words, as comrade Jehu explains:

“The labor is physically performed, but it produces no value in a Marxian sense because there is no buyer willing to exchange money for the excess commodity. This superfluous labor is wasted from the standpoint of value production, yet it still lingers in the system, and threatens the existence of the mode of production.” [25]

As historian Jean Edward Smith points out, not only did this occur, but the consequences were dire:

“Gross farm income had declined from $12 billion in 1929 to $5 billion in 1932. At the same time, agricultural surpluses—crops and livestock that farmers could not sell— rotted on farms or were plowed under. Wheat for December delivery dropped to twenty-three cents a bushel, the lowest since the reign of Queen Elizabeth I three hundred years earlier. In Iowa, a bushel of corn was worth less than a package of chewing gum. In the South, thousands of acres of fine, long-staple cotton stood in the field unpicked, the cost of ginning exceeding any possible return.” [26]

As a result, more than 10 million acres of already-planted cotton were removed from production (plowed under/destroyed), which meant labor time had already been expended to plant and grow the crop, but the output was superfluous (excess beyond what the market could absorb at profitable prices). For this reason, prices and income rose:

“Through the removal of more than 10,000,000 acres from production, the crop was reduced by about 4,000,000 bales. This reduction caused the price of American cotton to be materially higher than it otherwise would have been and substantially increased the total income received by cotton farmers, despite the smaller quantity of cotton they had to market.” [27]

Not only did farming notice a sharp decline in prices and profits, but so did cattle:

“Heavy cattle slaughter and supplies of beef available for consumption have been coming at a time when consumer purchasing power is still at a low level. As a result, the average price of cattle slaughtered under inspection from January to September 1933 was $4.27 per hundredweight, compared with $5.16 for the corresponding months in 1932 and with $6.48 in that period in 1931.” [28]

Thus, the government stepped in, bought and slaughtered 6.4 million pigs and sows that were already produced/raised. This was emergency action because hog prices had collapsed so low that farmers could not sell at a profit.

“The first step toward alleviating the immediate price situation was the emergency purchase of approximately 6,400,000 pigs and sows to effect prompt reduction in hog supplies. This emergency program reduced supplies of hogs for the 1933-34 season by from 1,000,000,000 to 1,200,000,000 pounds, an amount equivalent to about 10 percent of the annual federally inspected slaughter. It was a boon to corn and hog farmers, particularly in drought areas, because it returned on the sale of the pigs and sows at least $10,000,000 more than otherwise would have been obtained from sale at prevailing prices. It also meant that the gross return from the hog crop from which reduction was made eventually could amount to as much as $100,000,000 more than would otherwise have been obtained, and it provided a large quantity of cured hog products for distribution to unemployed families.” [29]

Other commodities would meet the same fate. As a result, the Agricultural Adjustment Act identified a host of commodities that would qualify for subsidies—hogs and cotton being major ones, as we already discussed—along with milk, rice, tobacco, corn, and wheat. These particular commodities were being overproduced and were exceeding demand in terms of exchange-value. Therefore, the government had to step in and effectively monetize superfluous labor time by converting this excess surplus into something that could be exchanged for money. Although the commodities had no demand, they were still assigned a price and purchased with debt by the government. In doing so, the government found a way to inject fiat currency into the system, offset the consequences of overproduction, and counter the tendency for the rate of profit to fall.

This logic does not stop at agriculture.

The state generalizes the same logic across the entire economy, transforming the reserve army of labor itself into a permanent, subsidized sink for superfluous labor time. The reserve army of labor—the mass of unemployed and underemployed workers that Marx identified as a structural necessity of capitalism—is supposed to serve two functions: exert downward pressure on wages and provide a flexible pool of labor for capital to draw on during expansion. However, once exchange-value no longer regulates production effectively and direct living labor is eclipsed by general intellect, the reserve army no longer functions as a mere “reserve.” It becomes excess population, superfluous to capital’s valorization needs on a chronic, systemic basis.

This excess becomes absolute.

As the working day becomes “hollowed out” and a growing population becomes more and more superfluous as workers, they themselves as people also become superfluous. The human being as a worker becomes more and more vestigial. Once the worker becomes vestigial in the circuit of valorization, the human biomass is revealed as redundant overhead, not merely economically redundant, but also ontologically redundant— a surplus of meat that the machine process no longer requires to reproduce its own conditions. The reserve army is not held in waiting, rather, it is held in abeyance. The state, now fused with finance capital as the terminal organ of the system, pumps fiat into the void to keep the bodies breathing, moving, consuming just enough to prevent the circuit from flatlining. If they had it their way, just as machines live solely on electricity, they would, as Marx suggests, maximize profits by making humans “live on air… [30]”

Finance capital accelerates the write-down. It strips real industrial output—living factories, living labor, living value, and reroutes the flows into pure liquidity games, rent-extraction loops, and asset price inflation. The physical plant rots or stands idle while the ledger grows tumors of fictitious capital. Real output is sacrificed to maintain nominal valuations. The human being, once the source of surplus value, is now the sink for surplus liquidity. A costly legacy system kept online at ever-lower utilization rates. The state becomes the department of legacy maintenance, by paying pensions to ghosts, wages to shadows, benefits to redundancies, all while the general intellect quietly deletes the need for bodies altogether. We could all be collectively working less, but they have us working for profits. We could all be living in abundance made possible by the general intellect, but they have us trapped in scarcity enforced by superfluous labor time.

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Conclusion

Capital has already made its choice, and it chose itself. The barbaric phase is the stable, institutionalized form of capitalism once exchange-value loses its regulatory power and the general intellect eclipses immediate living labor.

Ninety years ago, the historical laws of the mode of production forced the amputation of commodity money, the continuous devaluation of labor-power below its value, and the institutionalization of superfluous labor time as the condition for continued valorization.

The state, as national capitalist, became the terminal organ by absorbing excess capital, monetizing superfluity, subsidizing the absolute reserve army, and managing the slow depreciation of humanity.

The question is no longer socialism or barbarism.

Barbarism has already won.

With the historical developments laid out above, I urge all Communists to urgently reorient our entire strategy. The development of the capitalist mode of production has dramatically simplified the central problem facing the working class. It has done so by violently socializing world capital as a whole under the command of Washington D.C. and the almighty dollar. In this new barbaric phase, the fascist state stands as the concentrated expression of capital’s terminal power. Any and all forces that position themselves against the United States government must therefore unite. Communists must adopt the principle of full spectrum RESISTANCE and direct it ruthlessly against the fascist state itself. There can be no half-measures, no scattered reformist campaigns, and no illusions about “progressive” pressure within the system.

The enemy is centralized, global, and total.

Our response must be the same.

References

[1] Jehu, Society chose Barbarism and it has its own peculiar political economy, The Real Movement

[2] [3] Federal Reserve, history

[4] David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years.

[5] [6] [7] [13] [14] [16] Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I.

[8] Friedrich Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific.

[10] My Mathematical Proof of the Rise in the Rate of Surplus Value (s’):

Pre-revaluation equilibrium (wages at value):

v_paid = v ≈ 0.193517 oz
s = v (s’ = 100%) ≈ 0.193517 oz
Total value product = v + s ≈ 0.387034 oz
s’ = s / v = 100%

Post-revaluation (wages forced below value):

Devaluation factor d = 20.67 / 35 ≈ 0.590571
v_paid = d × v ≈ 0.590571 × 0.193517 ≈ 0.114286 oz
s_new = total value product − v_paid ≈ 0.387034 − 0.114286 ≈ 0.272748 oz
s’_new = s_new / v_paid ≈ 0.272748 / 0.114286 ≈ 2.3866 or 238.66%

Closed-form:

s’_new = [original s’ + (1 − d)] / d
With original s’ = 1 and d ≈ 0.590571:
s’_new = [1 + (1 − 0.590571)] / 0.590571 = 1.409429 / 0.590571 ≈ 2.3866 (238.66%)

Conclusion:

The rate of surplus value rises from 100% to ~239% through monetary devaluation alone. No change in working day length, labor intensity, or productivity. This demonstrates the state imposed super exploitation mechanism that sustains accumulation once the breakdown of exchange-value production occurs.

[11] Henryk Grossman, The Law of Accumulation and Breakdown.

[9] [12] [20] [30] Karl Marx, Capital, Volume III.

[15] Larry Randall Wray, Deficit Owls, MMT: What Is Money And What Gives It Value?

[17] Donald Parkinson, x.com

[18] Vladimir Lenin, Marxism and Reformism

[19] Party for Socialism and Liberation, x.com

[21] Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share, Volume 1

[22] [23] [24] Karl Marx, Grundrisse

(22) By “general intellect”, Marx refers to the socially accumulated knowledge, science, technology, and collective intelligence of humanity that becomes objectified in the productive forces and increasingly functions as a direct force of production, independent of, and overshadowing, the immediate, living labor of individual workers. This knowledge is general because it is social rather than a private skill of one worker, but the shared, historical achievement of humanity. With this, Marx theorizes that “the human being comes to relate more as watchman and regulator to the production process itself.”

[25] Jehu, rethinking Inflation: A Marxian Perspective on Overproduction and Superfluous Labor, substack

[26] Jean Edward Smith, FDR

[27] [28] [29] United States Department Of Agriculture, Agricultural Adjustment, A report of administration of the agricultural adjustment act May 1933 to February 1934.

Another thing we say about women, alas, is that they are always forgetful. We even call them birdbrains^[2] - T. Sankara

In 1871, as Marx penned the quoted portion of the title above, a torrent of working class blood washing over Paris streets had yet to fully exhaust itself. Subsequent generations of the world’s laboring women and men then continued to work and think and fight. In 1987, as Thomas Sankara criticized man’s tendency to misattribute absent-mindedness to women, he too was but a few months away from being shot in cold blood. Presumptions made in contemporary society about prehistoric ‘gender’ dynamics are not necessarily the reason for any of these failures, and the ‘forgetting’ wrought by these historical processes already took place long ago. Marx could look in immediate hindsight at a cataclysmic loss of “La Commune” already in the making. While Sankara, whose entire nation had known some measure of anti-imperialist victory, was still unable to foresee his own impending doom. What both Marx and Sankara share in common, despite being disjointed in time and space, is the perspective that ‘revolutionaries’ are always at risk. This hazard is in misinterpreting or mislaying events and fraying at the edges of historical oblivion. Where then does responsibility rest in holding together the threads of a recent and present with the distant past?

Whether the earliest human societal organization was Communistic and ‘matriarchal’ or not, cultural and political struggles inherited from long ago still linger. A persistent process of misremembering this exact sequence in anthropological time must be at least as important as the spinning of its yarns, archaeological retrievals and opposite-facing textualizations. Walter Benjamin asserts that for Marxists, articulating and intervening in history doesn’t actually mean portraying “’the way it really was.’ For historical materialism, it means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger, danger which threatens both the tradition and its recipients. The danger of allowing themselves to be the tools of the ruling class. The tradition must always be won anew from conformism. The Messiah will also come as the conqueror of the Antichrist, not only as a redeemer.”^[3] In the primitive, ancient, domestic and industrial spheres, workers have taken on immense burden and missed many victories. Though as of yet unable to attain ‘salvation’ in the West, the international working class socialist movement’s noble fighting lineage still insists upon collective struggle, and dutifully defies the howling nightmarish weight upon the individual.

“It is the same with the cult of the female as with the cult of nature.”^[4]

Class Coincidence

J.J. Bachofen writes during the 1860s that in bygone times,

“[t]he telluric-feminine principle extends further than the male-political one. It defines the [People] according to their material existence, in which the brotherhood originating from the mother is contained.”^[5]

Bachofen also wrote a message to Nietzsche in the mid-1870s urging him to, “stay away from everything that is outdated.”^[6] This academic obsession with ‘matriarchy’ and its relation to ‘feminism’ has itself oscillated or vacillated in and out of fashionable status for over 150 years. According to Darmangeat and Grosjean, since the period in which Bachofen’s book was released in 1861, for both

“[f]eminists or anti-feminists, no one has resisted the temptation to justify their present choices by assertions about a distant past that they did not hesitate to reconstitute at their convenience.”^[7]

Over the same time period, theorists and practitioners of scientific socialism also cooperated in constructing material bulwarks against what is alleged to be an evil and eternally immovable ‘patriarchy.’

In 1934, to celebrate the 50^th anniversary of Engels’ “Origin of the Family,” major figures in Soviet anthropology had collected and published archival material including letters sent by J.J. Bachofen to Lewis Morgan from the early 1880s. In one of these letters, Bachofen offers Morgan his view of why ‘mother-right’ became so controversial in academic and cultural discourse.

“[Mainstream scholars] propose to make antiquity intelligible by treating it from the point of view of the popular ideas of our day. They see only themselves in the works of the past. Hence their stupidity, which expresses itself in the rejection of all traditions that do not permit themselves to be treated in this way. To understand a cast of mind different from ours is a difficult task: to take barbarism in itself, forgetting everything that concerns our so-called civilization, is considered a sign of a reactionary tendency, both social and political. What is the final result of such vanity? Nothing else than a deplorable and distorted idea of ​​the beginning of human development.”^[8]

The Soviet Party Alexander Busygin warned of the rising fascist danger:

“[t]he class enemy is fighting fiercely on the theoretical front. All branches of knowledge studying primitive society have been mobilized in the service of fascist racial theory. It is a matter of honor for Soviet scientists to sharpen and expand the theoretical weapons of the proletariat and, together with it, utterly defeat the enemy in this area as well.”^[9]

Less than 10 years before the Soviets published Bachofen’s letters, Nazi academic Alfred Bäumler wrote of Bachofen’s relationship to Nietzsche stating that after Nietzsche declared himself an enemy of Christianity, Bachofen cut ties with him completely.^[10] Bäumler also asserts that Bachofen sees a matriarchal prehistory

“mixed with religion and sensuality… [where] the woman is able at times to soar higher than the man… [for Bachofen] [b]eginning and end, myth and history, are one.”^[11]

Whereas the late 20^th century ‘feminist’ writer Adrienne Rich characterizes this area of study as “a springboard into feminist desire,”^[12] Bachofen, importantly here, was seen to have “endowed the feminine with an independent religious and political authority separated from a western civil law.”^[13]

Marx in 1868 wrote to Engels stating that

“[i]t’s the same in human history as in paleontology. Things that are right under one’s nose are, in principle, unseen, even by the most distinguished minds, due to a certain judicial blindness. Later, when the time has dawned, one is surprised that what is unseen still shows its traces everywhere… [instead of looking to Romantic and Medieval periods, another tendency which] corresponds to the socialist trend, although [such] scholars have no idea that they are connected with it—is to look beyond the Middle Ages into the primeval times of every people. They are then surprised to find the newest in the oldest.”^[14]

This is however not so much of a surprise once such sources are consulted, since it was Bachofen who wrote that

“[t]he end of state development resembles the beginning of human existence. Primal equality ultimately returns. The maternal-material principle of existence opens and closes the cycle of human things. Birds are the oldest birth of the primordial egg, their avian freedom the original state, just as all self-born primal mothers are conceived of in bird form.”^[15]

‘Matriarchy’ as a historiographical loadbearing column caused the pederastic National Socialist movement to bristle. Other reactionary ‘intellectuals’ in Weimar Germany clumsily attempted to incorporate or skirt around it. Conservative elitist Berta Eckstein-Diener wrote “Amazons are not simply sporty, bob-haired feminists… Amazonentum is… a heroic means of forming the female world view and keeping it pure in the face of male assaults.”^[16] The openly gay anti-Jewish German mystic Alfred Schuler wrote in the 1920s,

“Women should be free; they are often more worthy of it than men... But as far as so-called education is concerned, I am very much against it. The less women learn, the more valuable they are; then they know everything from within themselves.”^[17]

In a notable Heidegger lecture from 1943, Heraclitus’ ‘primordial’ connection to the goddess worship in Ephesus is deftly highlighted. Heidegger refers to an anecdote in which Heraclitus is calling attention to divinities inside the “Backofen” (bread-baking oven). Heidegger asks

“is it concern for the monstrous and for one’s own goddess, one’s own [polis] when someone plays ‘dice’ with children in the goddess’s temple precinct?... Who is Artemis? It would be presumptuous to think we could answer this question through a few observations from mythology. The necessary and only possible answer here has the nature of a responsibility that contains the historical decision as to whether or not we are able to preserve the essence of this goddess...”^[18]

Heraclitus is said here to offer a “characteristically obscure affirmation of the feminine realm.... [since] the domestic-feminine sphere... [as] distinct from the public-masculine sphere [shows] that the feminine is also divine.”^[19] Heidegger’s veiled handling of Bachofen’s ‘prismatic’ but vastly ambiguous erudition also allows us to cut across and yet firmly delineate several antagonistic political, artistic and philosophical groupings. These antagonisms are, or may also be, emphasized and distinguished along economic, ideological and sensual lines regarding the property question. Nevertheless, David Pan argues against the “spurious view that fascist theories of myth advocated a return to mythic structures and the idea of myth is thus fascist ideological terrain.”^[20] The simple fact that “patriarchy never found its female Bachofen,”^[21] testifies to peculiarities within feminism and Marxism as separate concerns.

A few years after Marx had published The Civil War in France, and both he and Engels concluded their activity in the First International, Lewis Morgan published his now allegedly-surpassed anthropological work Ancient Society. Over this same period of the 1870s, labor movements acquired new proportions across the industrial world, and the seeds of what would become Bolshevik victory to bear fruit decades later were already being planted in the East. A particular tone of ‘radicalism’ in American reformist and ‘progressive’ politics also displayed many of the same features still apparent today. For Marxism in active theoretical becoming during the 1870s, it is Engels here who gives a description of its continuously edifying view of change standing on scientific legs, with Hegelianism,

“the history of mankind no longer appeared as a wild whirl of senseless deeds of violence, all equally condemnable at the judgment-seat of mature philosophic reason and which are best forgotten as quickly as possible, but as the process of evolution of man himself…”

Coupled with the most recent discoveries of scientific Materialism,

“new facts made imperative a new examination of all past history. Then it was seen that all past history, with the exception of its primitive stages, was the history of class struggles; that these warring classes of society are always the products of the modes of production and of exchange—in a word, of the economic conditions of their time. It was now the task of the intellect to follow the gradual march of this process through all its devious ways, and to trace out the inner law running through all its apparently accidental phenomena.”^[22]

Habits and histories therefore are often easier to forget about than they are to be completely rid of.

L. Morgan’s own insights, in a manner not unlike Bachofen, also contributed problematic assertions for the ‘practice’ of academic or radical ‘Feminism’ more than a century later. In a seminal ‘Marxist-Feminist’ writing from the 1960s, M. Benston claims in a footnote,

“[m]odern anthropology disputes this [matriarchal] dominance but provides evidence for a more nearly equal position of women in the matrilineal societies used by Engels as examples. The arguments in this work of Engels do not require the former dominance of women but merely their former equality, and so the conclusions remain unchanged.”^[23]

Which conclusions or changes are being proposed here? Today, there is both tentative movement and an apparently unshakable stagnation in cultural or gender theoretical discourse on the topic of historically dispelled ‘matriarchy.’ Different explanations since the 1960s have also been reached in archaeology and population studies investigating the Neolithic period. Moreover, Marx and Engels themselves had arrived at such topics from a still more considered approach. In addition to the unavoidable fact that many historically powerful working class fighters were born female, a predicted ‘restoration’ in history undertaken by the social revolution coheres as far more than logographic or quantitative signifier. Nevertheless, it was C. Fourier himself who observed as early as 1808 that “[i]n short, the extension of women’s privileges is the general principle of all social progress.”^[24] The term ‘Feminism’ as understood in contemporary political context does not predate Marx or Marxism, though its coining is erroneously attributed to Fourier.^[25] Could one at any time possibly become the other?

F. Engels in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884), in addition to exploring other questions, establishes a kind of core thesis: Women’s oppression arose with class society. Over more than 2,500 years, developing relations of production and property in the Western European world transformed ancient kinship structures, steadily replacing aspects of remaining matriarchal systems (”mother-right”) with a private property-bound ‘patriarchal’ control to secure and pass on inheritance along the male line. Much ink and spleen are spewed in contesting this assertion as well. In either case, Western European processes of capital accumulation intensified the ongoing historical dissolution of long-standing family and village life and relegated average women to either dull domestic drudgery or industrial wage slavery or both. Engels was so grateful to the vast groundwork that Bachofen had laid, that he wrote to Kautsky in 1884 asking if the

“Old Bachofen”^[26] would receive an inscribed copy of Engels’ new book. Second International Marxists such as C. Kelles-Krauz argued in the early 1900s that Bachofen’s research had been guided “by the ironic dialectic of history as if by a priestess of thought, [and] unearthed from beneath the layer of the bourgeois Renaissance the precious elements of a new, powerfully revolutionary Renaissance – the Renaissance of the communist spirit.”^[27]

Kelles-Krauz also indicated that the ‘matriarchal’ lens of Bachofen provides a historical allowance enabling Marxists to analyze the “feminist aspect,”^[28] at least from the perspective of development of the family and specific contemporary ‘survivals’ from that period. It has also been suggested that Walter Benjamin refers to Bachofen’s treatment of ‘matriarchy’ when drawing the reader to consider “mythical Mothers… a past that can be all the more spellbinding because it is not [one’s] own, not private,”^[29] yet both for ‘primal’ and later matriarchal images of the past, “the fact that it is now forgotten does not mean that it does not extend into the present.”^[30] Scholar Joseph Mali also argues that Benjamin attempted “to save Bachofen… from the clutches of German fascism,”^[31] while Fromm claims that Bachofen’s matriarchal conjectures are “a sweeping and profound philosophy of history, in many ways similar to those of Hegel and particularly Marx.”^[32] Benjamin adds however that this ‘myth’ becomes “blurred during those periods in which mothers themselves become agents of the class that risks the life of their sons for its commercial interests.”^[33]

Engels forwards the claim that the:

“first class antithesis which appears in history coincides with the development of the antagonism between man and woman in monogamian marriage, and the first class oppression with that of the female sex by the male.”^[34]

Compare this with Lewis Morgan, who writes that in ‘advancing’ from various stages of savagery to or beyond ‘barbarism’, these primitive “habits and modes of life divided the people socially into two great classes, male and female.”^[35] Nevertheless, for the historically necessary extimacy and presumable bareknuckle inequality of such a foundational social arrangement, Marx and Engels assert the primitive household formation as being “naturally evolved” and “communistic”^[36] rather than in all cases initially ‘antagonistic’ in essence. Importantly for all subsequent major debates in Western ‘radical’ discourse regarding ‘household labor,’ Marx also writes

“the evolution of products into commodities arises through exchange between different communities, not between the members of the same community. It holds not only for this primitive condition, but also for subsequent conditions, based on slavery and serfdom…”^[37]

What occurred then that caused such ‘coincidental’ antagonisms between sexes to unfold, and to what extent were these apparently senseless causes forgotten or stricken from the record? Two years after Morgan’s Ancient Society had explored ‘survivals’ within this historical existence of a ‘mother-right’, August Bebel also claimed,

“with increasing division of labor there resulted not only a diversity of occupations, but a diversity of possessions as well. Fishing, hunting, cattle-breeding and agriculture, and the manufacture of tools and implements, necessitated special knowledge, and these became the special province of the men. Man took the lead along these lines of development and accordingly became master and owner of these new sources of wealth.”^[38]

Bebel additionally tries to demonstrate that, “[a]s a result of this subjugation, woman came to be regarded as an inferior being and to be despised. The matriarchate implied communism and equality of all.”^[39] If a matriarchate for Bebel also implies ‘equality of all,’ what has been contested by Benston and overturned by ‘modern day anthropology’ since the 1870s?

In Mesoamerica, West Eurasia and the far East, archaeological traces and findings gathered up to the present day may point to some form of ‘matriarchate’ thousands of years ago. At Çatalhöyük, in present day Turkey, recently discovered matriarchal or matrilineal DNA patterns and woman-focused grave goods distribution suggest that

“7^th millennium B.C…. social organisation and symbolism stand in stark contrast with the predominantly male-focused societies that emerged in West Eurasia in subsequent millennia.”^[40]

The earliest known examples of woven textiles^[41] also come from Çatalhöyük. In ancient Persia,

“Women were in charge of cooking, making earthen ware, as well as looking after the fire, their children and their homes. They were also in charge of tribal affairs. Family relations followed the female line…. Not only women held positions of economic and social leadership, but were solely in charge of the spiritual affairs of their tribes.”^[42]

In each case, women’s relatively heavy labor burden in this respect undoubtedly was seen as being in direct connection with and a complement to their important social standing. In Neolithic China, a site at “Fujia” associated with the Dawenkou culture reveals a high probability of matrilineal descent which may “suggest that its social dynamics resemble those of modern matrilineal societies with a lower degree of heritable resources and private properties.”^[43] Mesoamerican recollections associated higher female social status directly to participation in the production of textiles. For instance, a young Nahua woman would be told: “It is not your destiny, it is not your fate, to offer [for sale] in people’s doorways, greens, firewood, strings of chiles, slabs of rock salt, for you are a noblewoman. [Thus], see to the spindle, the batten.”^[44]

Perhaps as an exception in the ancient non-Greek world, Abrahamic traditions highlight a development of class and inheritance alongside a higher labor-centered status for women. Bebel claims that in the ancient past,

“Mosaic law [was] framed in a manner destined to prevent the Jews from developing beyond the stage of an agricultural society, because their lawmakers feared that it might bring about the downfall of their democratic, communistic organization... For the same reasons, moreover, the Jews were kept at a distance from the sea, which is favorable to commerce, colonization and the acquirement of wealth.”^[45]

Elsewhere, Bebel states “The Jews are the sworn enemies of Malthusianism.”^[46] But for various distinctions between family or village and the development of individual property on this point, Lafargue argues “[a]mong the Jews and Semitic peoples there was no private property in land,”^[47] or else he and Bebel do not appear to disagree here.

Lafargue in 1886 wrote that

“[c]ivilization often works against nature, making pregnancy difficult, childbirth laborious and painful, and suckling dangerous, often impossible: thus, it weakens maternal love in women. The savage woman loves her child above all else; she nurses it for two years, never hitting it; the child, which the mother protects from the brutalities of men, clings to her, as chicks flee beneath the wings of a hen at the slightest danger. Woman, therefore, was destined by nature to carry the totem of the clan.”^[48]

So both the cult of woman and the cult of nature alternatively have taken on various meanings and been supplanted as a consequence of different modes of human economic practical development or development of the family rather than the other way around. Lafargue points out that still in the Basque culture, “[t]he husband… is his wife’s head servant.”^[49] Is this also the ‘equality’ implied later by Benston? Marx and Engels go into some detail on this development of woman’s subjugation having taken on a peculiar intensity in Western Europe, yet elsewhere:

[T]he unity can extend to the communality of labor itself, which can be a formal system, as in Mexico, Peru especially, among the ancient Celts, and some Indian tribes. Furthermore, the communality within the tribal system can appear more like the unity being represented by a head of the tribal family or as the relationship between the fathers of the family. This then leads to either a more despotic or democratic form of this community. The communal conditions of actual appropriation through labor, water pipes (very important among Asian peoples), means of communication, etc., then appear as the work of the higher unity.^[50]

Peoples whose women have to work much harder than we would consider proper often have far more real respect for women than our Europeans have for theirs. The social status of the lady of civilisation, surrounded by sham homage and estranged from all real work, is infinitely lower than that of the hard-working woman of barbarism, who was regarded among her people as a real lady (LADY, frowa, Frau=mistress) and was such by the nature of her position.^[51]

For Marxists then, the primitive communist household is said to have prevailed where the division of labor between sexes emerged out of a long and difficult “natural” process. Bachofen describes the transition from a “telluric” age of ‘hetaerism’ to a form of primeval Communism which “even seemed to him inseparable from gynecocracy.”^[52] Such a transition can be seen to have already taken place through a usefully abstract example given by Marx,

“the women of the family spinning and the men weaving, say for the requirements of the family – yarn and linen were social products, and spinning and weaving social labour within the framework of the family.”^[53]

To this extent, a ‘natural’ division of labor exists between, but not within, the sexes. Stalin himself wrote in 1906 of that time long ago “under the matriarchate, when women were regarded as the masters of production.”^[54] The WWII ‘Night Witch’ female aviator M. Raskova recounts once when

“Comrade Stalin took the floor. He spoke quietly, but so clearly that everyone could hear him. He spoke simply and with remarkable wit. He recalled the time of matriarchy, explained what matriarchy was, how it came about that women were more thrifty than men, that women began to cultivate crops while men only hunted, and that women turned out to be more important than men. Then he spoke of the plight of women throughout the centuries that followed. He talks about how women were oppressed, deprived of their rights to a simple human existence.”^[55]

The period being referred to here is not yet the period in which man has become ‘bourgeois’ and woman ‘proletarian.’

A view of ancient China as containing such a primeval communistic form in historical practice was pointed out by Marx himself where he notes, “this communism, based on natural growth (although itself formed through a long historical process), was also the original form in China can be seen, for example, in Abel, etc.”^[56] Alternatively, the rise of a Greek gens and forms of patriarchal private property saw an almost complete reversal of these once integrally wefted communal ‘circles’ of unity between manufacturing and agriculture. A glaring example of such historical rupture also appears in reconfigurations of the myth of Athena by which Lafargue shows these tropes being originally adapted to “a savage tribe, war loving and ferocious, who sent colonies from Africa to Greece and Asia Minor.”^[57] Lafargue argues that myths themselves both transmit and ‘forget’ the old, all while retaining suggestions of the obvious. In Roman myth too, “Jupiter carried off Metis to assimilate her cunning, her prudence and her wisdom, for her name in the Greek language has these diverse meanings.”^[58] He continues:

The epithet Tritogeneia meant that Athena was thrice-born – for she belonged originally to the group of antique self-born goddesses – but, in the course of time, when her savage adorers reached the stage of development in which the matriarchal family was constituted, she was endowed with a mother, who bore different names, according to the people who worshipped Athena; and at last, when on earth, and afterwards in heaven, man had become the ruling power in the family, she consented, to the great joy of the gods, to recognise the authority of Zeus, who went through the ludicrous ceremony of giving her birth^[59]

Lafargue’s treatment of the ‘myth’ of Adam and Eve also examines essentially economic questions, stating that moderns must first see that

“[m]yths are neither inventions of deceivers nor idle fantasies; they are rather one of the most naive and spontaneous forms of human existence. Only then will we come to know the childhood of humanity when we are able to unravel the meaning they had for primitive people.”^[60]

Bebel observes “the ancient cults continued to dominate the minds for centuries; only their deeper meaning was gradually lost.”^[61] For these late 19^th century able-bodied Western European cis-heterosexual males’ sake, if ‘matriarchal’ historical assumptions were passed down merely as a patchwork of myths, Pomeroy admits how “we are haunted by the question of whether women could have participated in their creation.”^[62] What about in the creation of class antagonism itself? These blatant degradations of ‘hetaerism,’ as Engels shows, later transformed “to monogamy… brought about essentially by the women.”^[63] Only after the shifting from a homogenizing polyamory and ‘group marriage’ to pairing, family “had been affected by the women could the men introduce strict monogamy.”^[64] Or rather, monogamous restrictions that only applied to women. Somewhere between asserting ‘goddess’ worship as grounds either for subjugation or ‘veneration’ and identifying a nearly forgotten labor-centered high status for women in the archaeological record, Paul Lafargue’s insights do resemble Thomas Sankara’s:

The superior position in the family and society, which man conquered by brute force, at the same time as it forced him into a cerebral activity to which he was little accustomed, placed at his disposal means of intellectual development, constantly increasing. The woman, tamed, according to the Greek expression, enclosed in the narrow circle of the family, from which direction was taken away, and having little or no contact with the outside world, saw on the contrary the means of development which she had enjoyed reduced to almost nothing and to complete her enslavement she was forbidden the intellectual culture given to man. If… the female brain continued to evolve, it is because the intelligence of the woman benefited from the progress made by the male brain; for one sex transmits to the other the qualities which it has acquired^[65]

What then were the immediate or more general causes of matriarchy’s overthrow in the materialist sense? Lafargue here gives two seemingly contradictory reasons:

Unquestionably it was the desire to shake off this feminine ascendancy and to satisfy this feeling of animosity which led man to wrest from woman the control of the family^[66]

Collective property, if not the sole cause, was, at all events, the pre-eminent cause of the overthrow of the matriarchate by the patriarchate^[67]

Is collective property therefore some hyper-masculine dissident ‘feeling of animosity?’ Is the socialist revolution, or ‘progress,’ merely a relict of man’s undifferentiated and unchanging or ineffably gender-based desire to ‘overthrow’ matriarchy? This is unlikely, although there is power in the assertion made that with the rise of slavery and animal husbandry, there would also develop both private property and a ‘royal’ womanhood. What was customarily household labor for household consumption became also a warped and senseless self in Western Europe, since “the ceaseless weaving acquires a magical quality, as though the women were designing the fate of men.”^[68] According to Lafargue, “Man… was thus obliged to begin deifying woman… ‘Zeus himself can not escape destiny,” but eventually, “the idea that woman had no soul became so rooted so firmly in the ancient world…”^[69] that a change to worship of a household patriarch and feeding of the dead also persisted into early Christianity. Although Lafargue asserts St. Augustine justified this saying “the faithful carried food to the tombs of the martyrs, but he adds that they ate it on the spot or distributed it to the poor.”^[70] To this extent, it is also argued by one ‘marxist’-Feminist that it’s no accident “Mary’s cult as Theotokos… was established at… Ephesus, the site of… the temple of Artemis… like Mary, both a virgin and a great mother.”^[71] Bachofen also claims “[v]irginity and motherhood are closely connected, while hetaerism denies both.”^[72]

Bebel puts forward several arguments suggesting that the development of “Iron tools”^[73] or fishing and domestication of animals also accelerated and multiplied this factor of force and overthrowing of ‘mother-right.’ Soviet anthropological studies suggested that in ‘barbaric’ societies beyond the historical frontier of Western and Greek societies such as

“[a]mong the Scythians, women participate in war on an equal basis with men, not inferior to them in courage, and in certain eras the bravest women stood at the head of government among this people. Among the Ethiopians, women bear arms and are obliged to serve in the army for a certain period. Finally, even among the Gauls, women compete in courage with men Pomponius Mela (1st century) reports that among the Ixamat women do the same as men, and are not even free from military service; the men of this people fight on foot and shoot from a bow, the women are on horseback, but do not use weapons, but lassos, with which they strangle enemies, and until they kill the enemy, they retain their virginity.”^[74]

Indispensable if easily forgotten, a “critical knowledge of the evolution of the idea of property,”^[75] and its resulting societal or communal questions must be posed over this or that specific perspective or individually traumatic manifestation. Soviet scholar Mark Kosven in the late 1940s wrote that while

“[h]umanity also has its own constant, organic, universal path of development. At the same time, we are far from affirming a unilinear, uniform evolutionary development of all peoples… [and matriarchy] turns out to be distinct and unique in each individual society.”^[76]

To what forces did these various kinds of ‘matriarchate’ ultimately succumb in history? In short, the movement from ‘hordes’ to clan and village life involved the movement into a technologically primitive form of Communism that itself at various times resulted in a geographical sprawl and perhaps to varying degrees the “slave trades facilitated the adoption of matrilineal kinship.”^[77] Kosven also mentions the many interweaving and overlapping processes whereby “[m]atriarchy, disintegrating and transitioning to patriarchy, leaves behind a number of relics, representing changing, dying elements of the forms and relationships that existed in full force under matriarchy.”^[78] This too eventually led to a paternal kinship alongside and then again to the exclusion of ‘mother-right.’ Marx here argues that,

“[i]t is impossible to overestimate the influence of property in the civilization of mankind. It was the power that brought the Aryan and Semitic nations out of barbarism into civilization.”^[79]

Woman’s pre-eminence in the ancient gens and clan or within these middle and ‘upper stages of barbarism’ must also have come with a proposition. The receding forests and transition to settled agriculture brought along vast changes in the division of labor. ‘Surplus production’ outside the family/village, though still miniscule in comparison to the age of industrial capitalism, led also to a ‘surplus’ of domesticity in each ‘ascending’ phase of civilization. Engels charges that we presently “know nothing as to how and when this revolution was effected among the civilised peoples. It falls entirely within prehistoric times.”^[80] Though it is obvious that to exchange ‘something’ for nothing then was among the listed prices of avoiding manual labor and winning the chance to become a “superintendent of female slaves”^[81] in the emerging changes to the prevailing order. In Ancient Greece, this reached ridiculous and debauched proportions, “that one had first to become a [‘reputable’ prostitute] in order to become a woman is the strongest indictment of the Athenian family.”^[82] Eventually, Marx claims, women’s inculcated inferiority “came to be accepted as a fact by the women themselves.”^[83] Olive Schreiner, at one-time a close friend of Marx’s daughter Eleanor, rather unceremoniously deems this kind of degradation as “sex-parasitism.”^[84] Arguing that, as use of metal tool-making, beasts of burden, settled agriculture and private property all expanded and lowered the socially-required labor time for certain strata,

“the need for [female] physical labor having gone, and mental industry not having taken its place, [woman] bedecked and scented her person, or had it bedecked and scented for her, she lay upon her sofa, or drove or was carried out in her vehicle, and, loaded with jewels, she sought by dissipations and amusements to fill up the inordinate blank left by the lack of productive activity.”^[85]

Marx insists that

“Struggle for… Possession of the most desirable territories, localization of tribes in fixed areas, vu. in fortified cities, with… increase the population. Advanced martial arts.... These changes indicate the approach of civilization.”^[86]

Idleness alongside ‘veneration’ may have been mythically consensual for one group or one generation, but the control of slaves, or control of alluvial plains and granaries, long-distance trading routes, waterworks and underdeveloped forms of manufacture themselves all break down and reassert themselves upon corresponding changes in relations of production and social dislocations in wealth’s movability/fixity. This also becomes the “control” and sale of women, just as much as it may have once involved women also participating in the maintenance of communal property for many generations prior. Expansion of production among the prehistoric Greeks and Roman gens must also, at some point, have produced a metal-working and highly disruptive contingent among the barbaric ‘outcasts’ as well. Morgan quotes a missionary’s description of the American Seneca’s tribal lifeways:

“[t]he stores were in common; but woe to the luckless husband or lover who was too shiftless to do his share of the providing… he might at any time be ordered to pick up his blanket, and budge… The house would be too hot for him… The original nomination of the chiefs always rested with [women].”^[87]

Woman was a slave, and woman controlled slaves. Man was a slave, and man controlled slaves. Iron smelting and domestication of large beasts of burden however are what those groups such as the Iroquois lacked. One may reasonably infer that among geographical areas where metal tool-making and animal husbandry, coupled with this expansion of a ‘kóryos’ of socially outcast youth roving the countryside, a growing risk of ‘barbarity’ outside, or ‘sex-parasitism’ within the polity, could only be kept at bay at the expense of ‘communal life.’ In Europe, this meant the end of locally maintained stores or pastures in common and the formation of patriarchal inheritance both of land and the labor needed to work it. Marx explains:

For now slavery too had been invented. The slave was of no value to the barbarian of the lower stage. It was for this reason that the American Indians treated their vanquished foes quite differently from the way they were treated in the upper stage. The men were either killed or adopted as brothers by the tribe of the victors. The women were either taken in marriage or likewise just adopted along with their surviving children. Human labour power at this stage yielded no noticeable surplus as yet over the cost of its maintenance. With the introduction of cattle breeding, of metalworking, of weaving and, finally, of field cultivation, this changed. Just as the once so easily obtainable wives had now acquired an exchange value and were bought, so it happened with labour power, especially after the herds had finally been converted into family possessions. The family did not multiply as rapidly as the cattle. More people were required to mind them; the captives taken in war were useful for just this purpose, and, furthermore, they could be bred like the cattle themselves^[88]

Lafargue continues to say that:

So it may be said that humanity, since it emerged from communism of the clan to live under the system of private property, has been developed by the efforts of one sex alone and that its evolution has been retarded through the obstacles interposed by the other sex. Man by systematically depriving woman of the means of development, material and intellectual, has made of her a force retarding human progress... this has been retarded ever since humanity entered into the period of civilization and private property, because then woman, constrained and confined in her development, cannot contribute to it in so effective a way^[89]

Bebel deems this more or less rapid change from different kinds of clan and communal property to patriarchal private property as the West’s “first great revolution.”^[90] Engels also explains this was the:

[F]irst form of the family to be based, not on natural, but on economic conditions – on the victory of private property over primitive, naturally developed common ownership… Monogamous marriage was a great historical advance; nevertheless, together with slavery and private wealth, it opens the period that has lasted until today in which every step forward is also relatively a step backward, in which prosperity and development for some is won through the misery and frustration of others^[91]

Engels further demonstrates that the mistreatment by Telemachus^[92] of his own mother exemplifies this close association between women and textile production/unraveling so central to the Odyssey’s plot, as well as the insistence in Greek civilization upon man’s domination over women. For present day anthropology and for Marxists looking back on ancient history, though evidence may often be seen that deigns

“to assert the presence of male dominance, it is always much more difficult to define its precise degree, and equally difficult to affirm its total absence. The point is not even that, for primitive societies, sex equality – in the rigorous sense of the term, that of the disappearance of gender – was an unachievable ideal: it could not be, and never was, an ideal at all. Pre-capitalist peoples did not necessarily establish an explicit hierarchy between the sexes; the idea of the superiority of one sex over the other… while it exists in most cultures, is by no means universal. In a number of societies, the sexes are not conceived in terms of different values, and this does not prevent men from having rights that women are denied.”^[93]

How then might a recovery of such history also assist us to throw on the habiliments needed to cover a hypermodern unadorned and unfilial shame? An obverse approach to these ‘survivals’ in the Russian context of communal agriculture was once highlighted by Engels when he said that the ‘Obschina’ must be looked at from a perspective “other than the Western one.”^[94] But whether from within or outside such bounds, a ‘forgetting’ has already filled this gap. Walter Benjamin, turns this part of the drama toward a more monistic object:

[T]he Penelope work of recollection. Or should one call it, rather, a Penelope work of forgetting? Is not the involuntary recollection, Proust’s memoire involontaire, much closer to forgetting than what is usually called memory? And is not this work of spontaneous recollection, in which remembrance is the woof and forgetting the warf, a counterpart to Penelope’s work rather than its likeness? For here the day unravels what the night was woven. When we awake each morning, we hold in our hands, usually weakly and loosely, but a few fringes of the tapestry of lived life, as loomed for us by forgetting. However, with our purposeful activity and, even more, our purposive remembering each day unravels the web and the ornaments of forgetting^[95]

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Proto-‘Feminism’ and the Woman’s Industrial Revolution

                                                                altho

                                        The air of Paradise did fan the house,

                                       And Angels offic’d all; I will be gone[96]

From Medieval ‘querrelle des femmes’ polemics to the many treatises written since the European Renaissance, we recall that educated, or non-working, women in the West also had an early hand in forwarding their particular class’ ‘noble’ views on Women’s Rights. Some men too, such as Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa in the early 1500s, tried to demonstrate that due to the fact Eve had been made within the walls of Paradise and after Adam, woman was the superior sex. This despite a “tyranny of men”^[97] placed upon her. Highly placed women therefore contributed early on to the cultural patterns of Women’s Rights movements to come. These women were not universally silenced, although many were made to forego the use of their husbands’ & fathers’ names in publishing things like:

That we are more witty [than men] which comes by nature, it connot better be proved, than that by our answers, men are often driven to Non plus^[98] – Jane Anger

This is our Case; for Men being sensible as well of the Abilities of Mind in our Sex… began to grow Jealous, that we, who in the Infancy of the World were their Equals and Partners in Dominion, might in process of Time, by Subtlety and Stratagem, become their Superiours; and therefore began in good time to make use of Force (the Origine of Power) to compell us to a Subjection, Nature never meant; and made use of Natures liberality to them to take the benefit of her kindness from us^[99] – a Lady

[W]ere the Men Philosophers in the strict sense of the term, they would be able to see that nature invincibly proves a perfect equality in our sex with their own^[100] – Sophia, a person of quality

These and similar questions in their abstract form persisted, with much of the immediate post-1789 movements around women’s equality, particularly in France, reflecting similarly bombastic notions. In 1793, the Marquis de Sade had commented harshly on the female assassin of Marat. Charlotte Corday had been incensed by what she saw as revolutionary ‘excesses’ and stabbed Marat to death while he was bathing. Sade excoriates her as “like those mixed beings to whom no sex can be assigned, vomited by hell for the despair of both, does not belong directly to any... a Tartar fury.”^[101] This dehumanized archetype of a ‘femme-homme’ would continue to inspire discomfort. A later example, though just as jarring, is that of the Saint-Simonians and Simon Ganneau, a mystic and charismatic rabble-rouser who tried to embody ‘androgyne’ characteristics. Saint-Simon’s successors claimed that a “Female Messiah”^[102] would be found in the ‘Orient’ and several followers set out to try and find her. As a direct influence upon people like Flora Tristan, charismatics such as Saint-Simon, Ganneau and their many followers attempted to combine this feminine fervor with utopian spiritualist constructions. One acolyte asserted:

MY TEMPLE IS A WOMAN^[103]

It is not for nothing then that the first recorded political usage of the term “feminists,” ^[104] as a pejorative referring to equal-rights activists, was by A. Dumas, a one-time follower of Ganneau. In 1840s America, middle-class women writers could see more Earth-bound ‘bread & butter’ issues of the day and reflect upon them, but to what political end?

[V]isions of the past crowded upon me… our merry-makings and our tragedies, my school-mates, the partners of my life, the partners of my hoped-for immortality… My binding tears fell thick and heavy… Lilly [a Freedwoman domestic worker, wiped the tears]… and rolling up the quilt thrust it back into the old cupboard… As I retraced my way to the village I marked the changes since this patchwork history was constructed. The Indians that figured in Queen Anne’s broadcloths… driven from their loved homes… into the shadowy West and are melted away. The wooded sides of our mountains have been cleared to feed yonder smoking furnace. Those huge fabrics for… chemical experiments indicate discoveries in science that have changed the aspect of the world… Houses have decayed and new ones have been built over the old hearthstone… Families have multiplied and sent forth members to join the grand procession… at this very moment the bell is ringing for a meeting of the town to extend the limits of our burying-ground, it being full! All these changes and the patch-work-quilt remains in its first gloss!^[105]

What is decisive in the stitching together and creation of history, as well as the creation of man, is “purposive activity” and not a theorized and reflexively sorrowful or mystified sense of resignation. It is labor and technological change which decisively intervene and disclose man’s relationship to Nature. Here, Lafargue gives credence to modern society that “until the epoch of the great mechanical industry, trades were mysteries, whose practices were professional secrets, jealousy hidden from the profane and revealed only to the initiated… crafts of artisan manufacturing, where manual skill and knowledge play a preponderant part, have contributed to reinforce… the human toward religious mysticism.”^[106] This must also apply to the textile industry. It is just this type of large-scale mechanized industrial labor offering and requiring that the workers be put under pressure and form new ways of communal being, as well as to discard the obscurant ‘craft’ esotericism. Though luminescent aspects of ancient ‘myths’ also linger, it was the inhumane rise of capital’s anarchic and disruptive rule that subjugated men and women in the working classes, not their specific belief systems or romantic failures interpersonally. Engels shows that it is the economic condition of modern society: “which unsexes the man and takes from the woman all womanliness without being able to bestow upon the man true womanliness, or the woman true manliness -- this condition which degrades, in the most shameful way, both sexes, and, through them, Humanity”^[107] Bebel offers encouragement here:

No movement of great importance has ever taken place in the world, in the past or present, in which women have not played a prominent part as combatants and martyrs^[108]

Marx and Engels showed^[109] that the year 1825 marks capitalism’s first great general crisis. Coincidentally, 1825 was also the first substantial U.S. women’s industrial labor organizing effort and rallying for wage increases.^[110] Were working men simply trying to silence these female working class fighters and prevent them from speaking for their class interests? In the year:

“1831, during the tailoresses’ strike, “A Mechanic” repeatedly urged the women on, suggesting that they open their own shop and receive work based on their own pricelist… [w]hen the women shoe binders organized in 1835, one union member offered a detailed exposé of the atrocious conditions in which the women labored and concluded that “it is high time, in this republic, that such slavery is done away with.” The all-male shoe binders’ union agreed and passed a strong resolution of support… [the New York Association of Journey Bookbinders] approved a public address expressing its deep interest in the women’s struggle and vowing to use ‘all honorable means’ to help them… the National Trades’ union went so far as to suggest that all trades affected by female labor add women’s auxiliaries to their unions”^[111]

For enslaved women in America at the same time, ‘family life’ was itself a cruel and torturous experience completely predicated on violently enforced property claims and involuntary lifelong domestic servitude. Harriet Jacobs was not only harassed and abused by her former master who threatened to sell off her children if she didn’t comply, but in her prolonged escape, she had to hide underneath the floorboards of a nearby house for almost a decade. Intentionally deforming herself to avoid what were the master’s constitutionally-upheld property claims against her life. In one incident, Jacobs swore she heard her former master coming to eject her from the crawlspace. But she remained hidden, “the key was turned in my door… and there stood my kind benefactress alone… ‘I thought you would hear your master’s voice’ she said… ‘I came to tell you there is nothing to fear. You may even indulge in a laugh at the old gentleman’s expense. He is so sure you are in New York… The doctor will merely lighten his pocket hunting after the bird he has left behind.’”^[112] Mary Livermore claimed to have spoken to a slave ‘Aunt Aggy’ who told Mary that before the Civil War she had prayed for the Lord to “hasten de day when de blows, an de’ bruises, an’ de aches, an ‘ de pains , shall come to de white folks , an’de buzzards shall eat’em as dey’s dead in de streets. Oh, Lor’ ! roll on de chariots , an ‘ gib de black people rest an ‘ peace.”^[113] Her prediction came true. Nevertheless, many ‘feminist’ leaders of the time in America such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton still could only exhibit fear of immigrants and laboring “lower orders of foreigners”^[114] like Irishmen or Black men or Germans or Asians, who after obtaining some measure of formal equality, would rule alongside Anglo-Saxon men and crowd ‘noblewomen’ such as Stanton out.

The labor organizer Sarah Bagley fought for a reduction in work hours, whereas more refined ‘thinking women’ like Harriet Farley pressed for upwardly mobile demands of ‘respectability’ in the 1830s and 1840s. Between the two of them, the feminine “mind among the spindles”^[115] being referred to in their heated debates apparently took on a different character. Textile mill owners themselves, who saw Farley’s positive portrayal of ‘emancipatory’ aspects of industrial working life for women as a valuable advertisement for employment in their mills “bought back subscriptions and supplemented the pay of the editors. The mill owners’ support undermined the paper’s reputation among mill women, and the paper folded in 1845.”^[116] On the other hand, Bagley’s working class fervor also failed “to gain respect from middle-class women,”^[117] who were themselves more well-placed in reformist social movements. Sarah Bagley also polemicized with the Abolitionist William Garrison, who had come out against the labor unions. Bagley asked “[d]o our anti-slavery friends over discuss the merits of the Labor question?… We discuss all of these, and Slavery, South and North… What say, friend, Garrison? …Affinities find each other, say you, and we shall understand each other in due time. Till then let us exercise charity for each other, and not claim for ourselves more of the genuine spirit of reform, than we are willing to award others, who are laboring as sincerely as ourselves, if not in the same department, in some other, to bring about the glorious era, when wrong and injustice shall cease, and universal rights shall be recognized from East to West, from North to South.”^[118] Lacking the scientific orientation and partisan spirit that subsequent decades would grant to the workers’ movement, zig-zags “(or the female line, as certain wits [call it]… not without reason)”^[119] in organizational methods were still being made, though perhaps not abstractly as regards ‘feminism.’ During the uproarious 1840s, Flora Tristan had also taken up the struggle of working people:

Workers, you are unhappy. Yes, no doubt; but where does the main cause of your ills come from?... If a bee and an ant, instead of working in concert with the other bees and ants to supply the home commune to live, they were advised to separate and want to work alone, they too would die of cold and hunger in their solitary corner. Why then do you remain in isolation?... —Isolated, you are weak and fall overwhelmed under the weight of miseries of all kinds! — Well then! Come out of your isolation: unite! — Union is strength^[120]

Tristan in Europe and in her travels, though still anti-slavery, was however not as racially^[121] enlightened as Bagley or others, and also did not forward class struggle as such. A year after Flora Tristan addressed these crowds of angry workers, the ‘anarchistic’ and anal-retentive radical set in Germany fired back at her, but Marx and Engels appear to defend Flora’s role, if only to highlight what she forgot:

The worker creates even man; the critic will never be anything but sub-human though on the other hand, of course, he has the satisfaction of being a Critical critic.

“Flora Tristan is an example of the feminine dogmatism which must have a formula and constructs it out of the categories of what exists.” Criticism does nothing but “construct formulae out of the categories of what exists”… Formulae, nothing but formulae. And despite all its invectives against dogmatism, it condemns itself to dogmatism and even to feminine dogmatism. It is and remains an old woman — faded, widowed Hegelian philosophy which paints and adorns its body, shrivelled into the most repulsive abstraction, and ogles all over Germany in search of a wooer^[122]

Marx and Engels are not rejecting women in the revolutionary and labor movements so much as feminist and ‘anti-feminist’ posturing at the level of ‘criticism’ from abstract moral principle, or the mere lack thereof. The individual’s memory is not the primary arena of class struggle, neither then is the emotionally individuated rehashing of such critically ‘lived experiences.’ Benjamin also writes that “what has been forgotten... is never solely individual… Everything forgotten mingles with what has been forgotten of the prehistoric.”^[123] The social metabolic process of material production is this primary arena of revolutionary undertaking, whether today or 15,000 years ago. Women and children ripped out of their homes in the endless search for wages not only disrupts domestic situations undergoing various states of ‘tranquility’ or ‘strife,’ it pits men already in competition among themselves as now competing for wages directly against their very own families:

Thus the social order makes family life almost impossible for the worker… The husband works the whole day through, perhaps the wife also and the elder children, all in different places; they meet night and morning only, all under perpetual temptation to drink; what family life is possible under such conditions? Yet the working-man cannot escape from the family, must live in the family, and the consequence is a perpetual succession of family troubles, domestic quarrels most demoralizing for parents and children alike^[124]

Engels extends this to say “[i]f the family of our present society is being thus dissolved, this dissolution merely shows that, at bottom, the binding tie of this family was not family affection, but private interest lurking under the cloak of a pretended community of possessions.”^[125] Some few decades later, with the major strife of the American Civil War behind them and a resulting rise of the organized industrial labor movements in the U.S., it was not lost on that generation at all that working class concerns would also have to take on a more partisan path for both sexes. William Sylvis did not silence women laborers either, comparing one’s misery to another:

As men struggling to maintain an equitable standard of wages and to dignify labor, we owe it to consistency, if not to humanity, to guard and protect the rights of female labor, as well as those of our own. How can we hope to reach that social elevation for which we all aim, without making woman the companion of our advancement as she has been of our depression? Are we to march on to the goal of our ambition and leave her behind to drink the dregs of misery?^[126]

Marx took note of this ‘sensitive’ approach and commended the “very great progress… demonstrated at the last congress of the American ‘Labor Union’, inter alia, by the fact that it treated the women workers with full parity; by contrast, the English, and to an even greater extent the gallant French, are displaying a marked narrowness of spirit in this respect.”^[127] In Russia during the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries too, the momentous wheels of change and the brutal processes of historical development lurched ever forward and people like V. Zasulich and K. Zetkin and A. Kollontai could not but observe a similar reality unfolding under brutal early capitalistic conditions in Russia:

However, the working class knows who is to blame for these unfortunate conditions. The woman worker, no less than her brother in suffering, loathes that insatiable monster with the gilded maw which falls upon man, woman and child with equal voracity in order to suck them dry and grow fat at the cost of millions of human lives. The woman worker is bound to her male comrade worker by a thousand invisible threads, whereas the aims of the bourgeois woman appear to her to be alien and incomprehensible, can bring no comfort to her suffering proletarian soul and do not offer women that bright future on which the whole of exploited humanity has fixed its hopes and aspirations. While the feminists, arguing the need for women’s unity, stretch out their hands to their younger working-class sisters, these ‘ungrateful creatures’ glance mistrustfully at their distant and alien female comrades and gather more closely around the purely proletarian organisations that are more comprehensible to them, and nearer and dearer to their hearts^[128]

It is against such a background that a political vanguard of working class revolutionary transformation takes shape in the early proletarian socialist movement. This too is stalked by the same nagging attempts to waylay that development in a series of counter-posed turns shouting for ‘unity.’

[C]an man or woman choose duties? No more than they can choose their birthplace or their father and mother^[129]
Heroines and Harpies

What is the aim of the feminists? Their aim is to achieve the same advantages, the same power, the same rights within capitalist society as those possessed now by their husbands, fathers and brothers. What is the aim of the women workers? Their aim is to abolish all privileges deriving from birth or wealth. For the woman worker it is a matter of indifference who is the ‘master –a man or a Woman. Together with the whole of her class, she can ease her position as a worker^[130]
The modern industrial system has changed the ‘little shop of the primitive patriarchal master into the large factory of the Bourgeois — capitalist. Masses of operatives are brought together in one establishment, and organised like a regiment of soldiers ; they are placed under the superintendence of a complete hierarchy of officers and subofficers. They are not only the slaves of the whole middle-class (as a body,) of the Bourgeois political regime, — they are the daily and hourly slaves of the machinery, of the foreman, of each individual manufacturing Bourgeois. This despotism is the more hateful, contemptible, and aggravating, because gain is openly proclaimed to be its only -object and aim. In proportion as labour requires less physical force and less dexterity — that is, in proportion to the development of the modern industrial system —-is the substitution of the labour of women and children for that of men. The distinctions of sex and age have no social meaning for the Proletarian class. Proletarians are merely so many instruments which cost more or less. When the using-up of the operative has been so far accomplished by the mill-owner that the former has got his wages, the rest of the Bourgeoisie, householders, shopkeepers, pawnbrokers, etc., fall upon him like so many harpies^[131]

Women in the 19^th century labor movement ran a double risk of being both silenced and forgotten, but did this keep them from contributing to early Marxist and proletarian socialist history? In the passage directly above, a quoted section of The Communist Manifesto is presented in its first English translation from 1850. Helen Macfarlane here includes this key line regarding women and children’s wage labor and the ‘social meaning’ of sex distinctions disappearing as a result. In Russia too, the developments of Western Europe were brought by both force and accident. By the late 1860s, Elisabeth Dmitrieva had read Chernyshevsky’s What is to be Done and was inspired to follow the novel’s main character Vera Pavlovna in pursuing a ‘marriage-of-convenience’ as her springboard into the general revolutionary ferment. Dmitrieva emigrated while still a teenager to Switzerland and then later met Karl Marx in England. After growing quite close to Marx’s daughters, Dmitrieva was tasked by Marx to travel to Paris as a representative of the First International and went on to achieve much in just a few months’ time. The fighting and losses in Paris gave some hope as “after the heroic struggle of women workers on the barricades, their international prestige had grown significantly. For the first time, the revolution brought to the arena of struggle not individuals, but masses of women.”^[132] So it was that “the very dream that Elizaveta Dmitrieva had begun to realize during the days of the Commune was realized: the women’s movement merged with the international movement of the proletariat.”^[133] Dmitrieva’s jointly published address written as one of the leaders in the “Women’s Union” during the Commune’s fiercest period of fighting attests to this determination:

[I]t is not peace, but all-out war that the workers of Paris have come to demand! The tree of liberty grows watered by the blood of its enemies... All united and resolute, grown and enlightened by the suffering that social crises always bring in their wake, profoundly convinced that the Commune, representative of the international and revolutionary principles of the peoples, carries within it the seeds of the social revolution, the women of Paris will prove to France and to the world that they too will know, at the moment of supreme danger, at the barricades, on the ramparts of Paris, if the reaction forces the gates, how to give like their brothers, their blood and their lives for the defense and triumph of the Commune, that is to say, of the people! Then, victorious, able to unite and agree on their common interests, workers, all in solidarity, will, by a final effort, forever annihilate every vestige of exploitation and exploiters!^[134]

So disruptive were these images and developments of the working women doing battle for the Paris Commune’s defense that tropes emerged caricaturing these women as ‘petroleuses’ [arsonist women] who by “forgetting their sex and their gentleness to commit assassination… to burn and to slay; little children converted into demons of destruction, and dropping petroleum into the areas of houses… all combine to enact on civilized ground… scenes which find a parallel only in the infernal regions imagined by prophets and poets.”^[135] Marx’s own daughters also underwent somewhat less harrowing experiences during the ‘Commune’ on the French border with Spain. Engels commented that when Lafargue and the Marx girls attempted to cross from France into Spain, they were arrested and nearly-incriminated as Jenny carried a letter from a commander of the Commune that she quickly stashed away in “a dusty old account book.”^[136] The Marx girls’ subsequent answers so frustrated the French police that they stormed out of the interrogation room muttering “in a fit of rage about ‘the energy that seems peculiar to the women of this family.’”^[137] Jenny later wrote in Victoria Woodhull’s magazine that her sister and Lafargue’s personal plight was not the focus, and from this the reader should “[t]hink only of the ‘petroleuses’ before the court-martial of Versailles, and of the women who, for the last three months, are being slowly done to death on the pontoons.”^[138]

At the same time in America, while women abroad like Dmitrieva actively and purposefully combined the women’s movement with the leading edge of proletarian socialist class warfare, Victoria Woodhull herself was involved in the overt and accelerated separation between working class mass organization and ‘feminism.’ Friedrich Sorge, a Marxist leader of the I.W.A. in America, pointed out how Woodhull’s social-reformist grab-bag of woo-woo investment banker lifestyle and elitist grandstanding “tried to force the workingmen to kill their time with idle talk about women’s rights and suffrage, universal language, social freedom‘-a euphemism for Free Love-’every possible kind of financial and civil reform and the like.”^[139] As a stark example of this endlessly circuitous ‘idle talk’ in the I.W.A.’s general councils, the Minutes of the First International Workingmen’s Association meetings gives some indication:

Citizen Engels then proceeded with the reading of the General Statutes.

Citizen Eccarius proposed and Citizen Hales seconded that the word “persons” should be substituted for “men” in the declaration, upon the ground that the word “men” was generally understood as being a limitation to one sex.

Citizen Engels thought it was generally understood “men” was a generic term including both sexes.

Citizen Jung supported the proposition. He thought that while we understood the word in that sense, many outside the Association understood it differently^[140]

Upon investigation, Eccarius^[141] among others later turned out to have likely been in the direct pay of Woodhull’s organization and had to resign from the I.W.A. after refusing to send Marx’s criticisms to the ‘reformist’ American Section 12. Sorge and the American Marxists were livid at these events but made clear that they were not disputing Woodhull’s or the Section’s “right to have their particular views on the women’s question, religion, free love, etc.,… what was disputed was the right to make the I.W.A. responsible for this”^[142] Marx himself grew more and more uncompromising with this turn of events, although he had celebrated the American movement’s forward-thinking position on sexual equality as compared to French workers’ movement prospects. Upon seeing the extent of Miss Woodhull’s opportunism, Marx expelled the first female American Presidential candidate from the I.W.A. on the grounds that her Section was “constantly at pains to inform the world that the International was not a workers’ organisation, but a bourgeois one.”^[143]

In the 1880s, Marx’s daughter Eleanor showed “it is necessary to remind [feminists] that with all these added civil rights English women, married and unmarried alike, are morally dependent on man, and are badly treated by him. The position is little better in other civilised lands, with the strange exception of Russia, where women are socially more free than in any other part of Europe.”^[144] And this exceptionality was itself to grow and manifest in time, especially as regards women’s involvement in revolutionary politics. Barbara Clements shows that Russia at the turn of the 20^th century was host to such divergent and extreme political circumstances that between taking on this immense historical risk or giving over to nihilistic victimhood and disgruntled ‘theoretical’ retreat, “[t]housands of young women made that choice in the period 1890-1910, with the consequence that Russia ended up with more female radicals than any other nation in Europe.”^[145]

In the early 1900s industrialized West however, this problem of ‘propriety’ and an emerging ‘New Woman’ had an even more flattening effect within middle class women’s ‘activism.’ Olive Schreiner passionately writes, not without some basis, that a rise of prostitution and dissolved families in modernity was a direct result of industrial mechanization: “Our spinning-wheels are all broken; in a thousand huge buildings steam-driven looms, guided by a few hundred thousands of hands ( often those of men ) produce the clothings of half the world; and we dare no longer say, proudly, as of old, that we and we alone clothe our people.”^[146] Schreiner attempts to emphasize the contradictory liberatory aspects of modern technological development by putting forward female control/proprietorship as a way out of the madding whorl of wage labor. While the American Marxist Daniel De Leon attacked^[147] Schreiner’s undialectical position referencing her misplaced emphasis on ‘Justice,’ the eugenicist elitist female doctor Arabella Kinealy rhetorically assailed Schreiner and others by outlining that “Feminist leaders… claim as jealously the undivided loyalty and subjection of their flock as ever Tyrant-Men demanded of the sex.”^[148] For Schreiner then, with or without ‘social reformist’ intentions and a self-convinced political interest, the ‘feminism’ of such writing moves often in a more masochistic direction here, “[i]t is not against man we have to fight but against ourselves within ourselves.”^[149] Masoch himself all but worshiped a heroic woman fighting on the police barricades in 1848, “an amazon with a pistol in her girdle, such as he loved to later depict.”^[150] Here in both places there is also to be seen a neglect of class struggle and its being overlooked in a self-obsessed manner.

Some of these Western European ‘radical’ socialist feminists were able to travel to the U.S.S.R. in the 1920s, but even the more pro-Soviet among them still retained a vastly alienating elitism. Magdeleine Paz, after giving a peasant woman uncharacteristically lavish gifts, complained that the woman threw herself at Magdeleine’s feet, “she groveled like a squaw!... Wasn’t this thing at my feet one of those cringing worms who reared themselves at their master’s whistle?... This woman abasing herself wasn’t [herself].”^[151] Saying ‘you’re welcome’ and moving on was too undignified for this high-minded Western radical. Despite such examples of psychological cleavage, part of one’s involvement in a working class movement does involve a necessary amount of ‘self-criticism’ that someone like Kollontai was able to show throughout her decades of involvement in the CPSU. She also recognized that, “[o]nly if [the fighting workers] are firmly united amongst themselves and, at the same time, one with their class party in the common class struggle, can women workers cease to appear as a brake on the proletarian movement and march confidently forward, arm in arm with their male worker comrades to the noble and cherished proletarian aim -towards a new, better and brighter future”^[152]

Yet Kollontai and other women involved in the real work of socialist construction after 1917 could also bring upon themselves their own undoing, and commit many of the same kinds of mistakes that also undermined men in revolutionary work. Some of these were peculiar to Kollontai’s own predicament. Lenin grilled Klara Zetkin on the Western Marxist tendency to divert practical organization with endless ‘idle talk’ once more. In constructively reproaching Zetkin, Lenin says “I was told that questions of sex and marriage are the main subjects dealt with in the reading and discussion of evenings of women comrades. They are the chief subject of interest, of political instruction and education. I could scarcely believe my ears… surrounded by counter-revolution of the whole world… [the situation] requires the greatest possible concentration of all proletarian, revolutionary forces to defeat… counter-revolution. But working women comrades discuss sexual problems… What a waste!”^[153] Kollontai apparently agreed in theory, though in practice, this involved other matters.

The above is something the feminists cannot and do not wish to understand… However, each such success, each new prerogative attained by the bourgeois woman, only puts into her hands yet another instrument with which to oppress her younger sister, and would merely deepen the gulf dividing the women from these two opposing social camps.
Their interests would clash more sharply, their aspirations become mutually exclusive. Where, then, is this universal ‘women’s question’?^[154]

Some years prior, Daniel De Leon wrote from America demonstrating just how much:

“machinery, together with concentrated capital, [stripped] man as well as woman of one household function after another… as fast as sewing, spinning, etc, was taken from the house-wife, carpentering, tinkering, etc. was also taken from the pater familias, production tended evermore to be carried on en masse, for sale, ever less for home use or consumption; and thus… depriving man as well as woman of the function of procreation… WOMAN, as well as MAN, figures among the pestiferous tyrants as the beneficiary of this family-destroying and race-unsexing system of capitalism.”[155]

Formerly enslaved revolutionary Black American women around this time period could also unmistakably recognize that a “woman question” was being asked and could also give an answer, though the ‘feminists’ of the time and many alive today might find it distasteful:

Still, I hold now, as I have ever held, that the economic is the first issue to be settled; that it is woman’s economical dependence which makes her enslavement to man possible... I have too much faith in the purity of my sex, to believe there are any considerable number of them, who would submit to men’s domination, if it were possible for them to make an independent living, without having to submit to the debasing factory rules of today?... These are in brief my views upon the sex question, for this reason I have never advocated it as a distinct question[156]

Recollecting Rabotnitsa and the end of Zhenotdel

I absolutely do not believe in happiness, but believe only that it is possible to forget about unhappiness, one’s own and others’ (and that only partly), by fulfilling one’s duty^[157] - Olga Ulyanova after the execution of her brother Alexander

Lenin himself gave warnings to several prominent Soviet women about major risks to be confronted. These groups had to first pass through some of those potential follies. The privileging of certain ‘emotional’ or ‘subjective’ questions over practical and revolutionary everyday habits has its expected outcomes. Stalin also gave a prescient warning in his statement published in the woman’s Party theoretical journal Kommunistka in 1923 about dangers that were ahead: “[Class-conscious Woman] can bring in this matter tremendous benefit if she frees herself from ignorance and darkness. And vice versa: she can slow down the whole matter if she continues to remain in captivity of ignorance.”^[158] This not only applies to ‘backward’ peasant women, but also to those who insisted upon an adventurist direct ‘intervention’ in those ‘backward’ women’s lives.

After the 1917 Revolution, the Bolshevik women continued to agitate and win over the working masses and peasantry throughout the Civil War period. One instance features “Bolshevik woman worker Kruglova… [and] workers of her factory [fighting] against the soldiers… and some Cossack troops. The Cossacks turned on the marchers ready to charge. Their officer cried: “Who are you following? You’re being led by a baba [old hag, a peasant woman]!”^[159] Firing back “Kruglova replied, ‘I am not a baba, but a rabotnitsa [an independent female factory worker], wife and sister of the soldier.’ This short interchange signified the transformative potential of revolutionary discourse. Kruglova demanded to be identified as a rabotnitsa, or an independent civic subject, but at the same time she used kinship metaphors to represent her affiliation with the soldiers.”^[160] The Revolution itself was what brought about this outpouring of class consciousness and militant attitude toward one’s duty to the proletarian struggle. “L. Ded, an apprentice who became a Bolshevik in 1917, wrote that after she heard a Bolshevik speech, ‘Everything became clear and understandable to me.’ An unnamed hospital employee echoed these sentiments in a letter to Pravda in 1919. ‘I am a worker,’ she wrote, ‘and only now do I see who buries our rights deep and does not want us to be free.’”^[161]

Much gender-reductionist acrimony in contemporary academic ‘Marxist-Feminism’ revolves around negative assertions made against the early USSR. Did Stalin ‘cancel’ Kollontai? Did collectivization ‘cancel’ women’s emancipation? Did the end of the magazine Kommunistka and reintegration of the women’s departments signify a silencing of women’s participation in socialist construction? Each of these can be answered in the negative. The magazine Rabotnitsa arrived years before publications like Kommunistka, and outlived it by nearly 100 years. Rabotnitsa was a widely celebrated and popular magazine that played an integral part in mass dissemination of Soviet women’s accomplishments. It also paid attention to practical everyday concerns such that:

[i]n the first year of publication Rabotnitsa claimed to have 10,000 subscribers, with the number rising to 165,000 in 1928. By 1941 the print-run was around 400,000, though it fell to less than 100,000 after the Nazi invasion. In the postwar era it picked

up once more, and by the Brezhnev era was counted in the millions rather than the thousands. The number of people actually reading it would have been much higher since magazines were passed from friend to friend, from one family member to another, and between the members of a work collective. Krest′yanka was produced in smaller numbers, probably reflecting the higher level of illiteracy in the countryside; in the early years it would be read out to illiterate village women at a meeting in the village reading hut by a local delegatka, or political activist. In the 1920s the print run ranged between 30,000 and 50,000, but this had risen to more than 200,000 by the late 1930s^[162]

Far from being a stilted theoretical exercise, or simply person-to-person propaganda agitation, Rabotnitsa also had a wide selection of reader-submitted, woman-created fiction and other broad-minded endeavors folded in. The magazine always sought to highlight working woman’s emancipation from domestic drudgery and poverty as its goal. In staking out and engaging with its less privileged readership, “it was emphasized that the goal was to reduce the cost of the publication in order to ‘promote the magazine to a wider female mass and give every working family the opportunity to have a magazine at an affordable price.’”^[163] After Lenin’s death in 1924, Ho Chi Minh (writing under the name Nguyen Ai-Quoc), contributed to Rabotnitsa while working under Borodin in China. Offering his condolences and heartfelt determination for the fight ahead, Ho Chi Minh writes “[s]ince the death of Comrade Lenin, political, literary and other student organizations in the countries of the East have been organizing meetings and gatherings… [t]he human race is awakening, but in order to achieve its final liberation, it still needs to fight… a great revolution has taken place in the countries of the East since the Red Banner with the hammer and sickle was raised over the former tsarist Russia.”^[164] Ho Chi Minh would also write under an assumed female pseudonym “Loo Shing Yan”^[165] in a different issue.

N. Tolstikova gives a clear assessment of this magazine’s importance and the real part it played in existing struggles on behalf of and among Soviet women stating, “Rabotnitsa was started by Nadezhda Krupskaia, Lenin’s wife and a revolutionary, together with a group of Bolshevik women. Gail Lapidus claimed that Rabotnitsa in 1914 was intended ‘as the theoretical organ and organizational center for the socialist women’s movement, a device that would link female party activists to women workers.’ Its first editorial insisted that women workers were the most backward and exploited part of the proletariat.” Thus, the magazine was designed to disseminate ideas of the Bolshevik revolution and to bring women into the proletarian struggle, because they made up more than half of the population and without them success in the revolutionary struggle would be in question. Although Rabotnitsa was organized and run by women and directed toward women, it called for women to join male organizations. An independent, autonomous women’s press would have contradicted many of the Bolshevik and, later, Soviet fundamentals. However, the importance and great potential of a women’s press as a cultural and political influence on the female masses was well recognized by the party. Nevertheless, some male Bolsheviks had doubts about a separate magazine for women and being associated with… feminism threatened the proponents of Rabotnitsa for a long time. However, Bolshevik women were careful to separate themselves from… feminists, whom they called “ravnopravki” [those for equal rights). The founders of the magazine believed that only a class struggle could eliminate gender problems. Thus, they exercised an ideological balance between being labeled a feminist organ and their desires to liberate proletarian women… According to the introductory article to the published archival documents on the history of Rabotnitsa, “[T]he publication of the magazine was assigned by the Central Committee [of the party] to the Bolshevik women,”1” therefore taking the initiative from the women and placing it within the party.”^[166] One issue of “Rabotnitsa” in 1928 shows how much average working women appreciated the magazine over the years:

Interest in the magazine has increased. And with it, subscriptions have begun to grow rapidly. The scribes themselves are campaigning for the magazine… A worker at B.D.M. recruited 60 subscribers for 6 months…

It must be said that the worker has a loving attitude towards her magazine. ‘You get used to reading, you are drawn to it. And if you don’t for a long time, then it’s as if something is missing. I had such a case,’ says worker Shelanova, ‘I sent a note, they didn’t put it in, and there was no answer in the mailbox. I stopped subscribing, I got angry. So I didn’t subscribe for two months, and then I couldn’t stand it and signed up for a year.’

The workers connect all their conversations with increasing the subscription. It is necessary to create a cadre of magazine distributors in factories and reward them for good work. Lively discussions about “Rabotnitsa” also contributed to the success of the conferences. Conferences were held in Rodniki, Shuya, Kineshma, Sereda, Yakovlevsky, Ivanovo-Voznesensk, In Sereda there were over 400 people at the conference, in Yakovlevsky - 200, in Kineshma - 300, in Shuya - 600 and in Ivanovo-Voznesensk - 250 people. In the V. Posadsky district committee 140 people gathered on New Year’s Eve, when no one expected that they would gather^[167]

The workers’ feedback was directly taken into account and their requests are not at all surprising, considering the ongoing issues with NEP and pressures on the family:

GIVE US SOME CHEERING STORIES
-say the workers… You want to rest when you read “Rabotnitsa”… [in fictional published stories in the magazine] Either the husband beats his wife, or the beautiful wife poisoned the child, or the girl froze to death in the attic, or the worker-social activist can’t find a way out. –Give us some cheerful stories, show us a good husband, so that I can say under my fool’s nose: look, what kind of real husbands there are. That’s what the workers say, and they’re right^[168]

But within this entire post-1917 development of the Zhenotdel, or women’s department, debates and pressures of reality next to an effervescent utopian stance among intellectuals took a noticeable toll. The formal equality granted to Soviet women in work and in society was a world-historical development. But an early debacle in the unfolding of the revolutionary period gives a brief glimpse into the type of absurdities that were to follow. Some time in early 1918, a document began to circulate in areas like Saratov that purported to be “Decree of the Saratov Provincial Council of People’s Commissars on the Abolition of Private Ownership of Women,”^[169] this later led to a trial and rumors circulating about a polyamorous “’Palace of Love of the Communards’ in Sokolniki”^[170] and lurid stories in the west about “Nationalization of Girls” and “Free Love Bureaus”^[171] being promoted as anti-communist propaganda slanderously against the Soviet Union.

Lenin himself not only had to weigh in on such off-the-wall speculations from a theoretical standpoint, both with regard to other leaders in the Party and the urban intelligentsia, he also contended with these ‘salacious rumors’ during a tense period of the Civil War then ongoing. In one notable instance, these similar kinds of ‘socialization of women’ accusations and rumors had spread to the point where Lenin “Received a complaint… that the committee of the poor of the village of Medyany, Chimbelevskaya volost, Kurmysh district, has introduced the nationalization of women. Immediately check most strictly, if confirmed, arrest the guilty,” Lenin left no doubt as to how ‘revolutionary expediency’ approached such matters, “the scoundrels must be punished severely and quickly and the entire population must be notified. Telegraph the execution.”^[172] It took a few weeks before the Cheka reported back saying, “an investigation has established that there was no nationalization of women in Mediny by the Committee on the Poor; the statement by Kumysnikov, Baimanov, and Rakhimova is a fabrication.”^[173]

The NEP policy also created a mass of formerly peasant and lower class women who, expecting to attain some immediate foothold in the productive urban economy after the Civil War, were in many cases drifting back into the largest cities’ streets and left unable to compete for a smaller number of industrial jobs after the War Communist drive wound down. Kollontai in 1922 writing in the pages of the more stilted party theoretical journal for women Kommunistka points out a form of ‘lumpenization’ among them, closely mirroring Schreiner’s terminology:

But it is not the only one that distinguishes between life and morals, threatening the decomposition of healthy habits in the field of relations between the sexes even in our party—an incomparably greater danger is the type of “doll-parasite” resurrected by the NEP. These parasite dolls are usually recruited not from the working class environment… The majority are “young ladies” from the former middle and even big bourgeoisie, daughters of manufacturers, landowners, former generals and officials of the tsarist era. But there is also a more democratic stratum among them, thrown into the cycle of NEP life, girls from the petty-bourgeois environment: daughters of artisans, former masters, petty employees. During the years of universal labor service, they constituted the most typical core of those very powdered “Soviet young ladies” who lost papers and confused relationships that caused the indomitable anger and hatred of the average person. But the labor force for them always served only as a springboard for making advantageous acquaintances^[174]

Such risks were reflective of the entire early Soviet period, and also impacted organizational leadership. Rightly or wrongly, accusations were made against Kollontai and the “glass of water” theory as well as other ‘sexually liberatory’ musings. Kollontai had also been associated with a well-known pre-1930s libertine attitude to marriage and gender relations. However, with such lax ‘sexual’ attitudes, coupled with unavoidably perverse incentives of the NEP and a ‘youth movement’ with easy access to divorce and abortions, the effects soon became obvious: “’they all begin to engage in promiscuous behavior: 50 per cent of female Komsomol members are screwing around and making abortions’… At the Nogin factory in Moscow, for example, the youth, including Komsomol members, ‘both male and female, swap “wives” and “husbands” as gloves. Sometimes girls turn into hooligans no more virtuous than the guys’... more than a hundred thousand—Komsomol members had to be expelled for drunkenness and hooliganism in 1926 alone… debunking of religion and attacks on courtship, the family, and the private sphere necessarily encouraged a “utilitarian” attitude to women.”^[175] A wave of sex ‘liberation’ attitude was accompanied by its excesses, criminal aspects and necessary curtailment. Despite such glaring obstacles, for these many ‘radically charged’ young people, “the liberation of women became synonymous with the imperatives of the Soviet state”^[176] as well. Nevertheless, a risk of overindulgence began to grow:

The life and psychology of the “doll” woman have just the opposite effect... Their distinctive feature is idleness. Motherhood repels them, they dump housekeeping and home care at the first opportunity on hired slaves - domestic servants. They do not want to participate in public life, in construction - they do not know how, they cannot. If they have to “serve” - they become the most typical bureaucrats, officials, dry formalists, deadening the business that is alien to them, not dear, not valuable ... Money, clothes and easy love experiences - such is their atmosphere, such is their spiritual baggage...^[177]

What was being searched for, apparently, was “the surest way to establish the everyday foundations under which the doll-like women will die out and wither away, and, on the contrary, the type of a new woman, a fighter for the ideals of the working class, a builder and defender of communism, will grow stronger.”^[178] But for Kollontai, after her reassignment to foreign service and diplomatic work in Norway and elsewhere, fellow Kommunistka editors and other Zhenotdel members also leveled savvy criticisms against her “Winged Eros” projections. Party theoretical arguments did not cease either, and Kollontai herself came under suspicions from other women comrades. Polina Vinogradskaya, a Zhenotdel member and Kommunistka editor who had also presided over a trial against the sexually libertine anarchist “Khvatov” in 1918-19, weighed in on Kollontai’s overstepping the norms and running ahead of the wishes of the masses here. In defiance of Kollontai’s “Winged Eros”, Vinogradskaya made clear that Soviet youth weren’t renunciate ‘ascetics’, although:

I repeat, this does not at all mean that sexual questions attract the increased attention of young people and distract them from the main thing. Often this speaks rather of the opposite, of the dominance of “wingless Eros”, the decoration of which with peacock feathers Comrade Kollontai proclaims the next task of Marxism and proletarian ideology… [Engels would hypothetically ask Kollontai] how can one, considering oneself a Marxist and a revolutionary, talk so much about love, eros and sexual morality?…

The strength of our party has always been and is in the fact that it was not afraid of the truth; it openly looked the truth in the face and did not hide it from the masses, no matter how bitter it was. But the strength of the party also lies in the fact that it never limited itself to a bare statement of the sores, but always revealed their causes and pointed out the ways to overcome them. However, it would be in vain for us to make such demands on Comrade Kollontai. Not only has she learned nothing in recent times, but she has even forgotten what she taught others. And indeed, how far behind life she is, how much she does not try to think about the environment and understand what is happening…

[Working women] still need support, instructions, but they can no longer put up with just loud phrases, and even more so they cannot be satisfied with a vinaigrette concocted from feminism and communism. They need leaders who, together with them, step by step will help them destroy the old ugly way of life and build a new one. But they no longer need a leader who is more suited to the role of an ideologist of the socialist bourgeoisie of the intelligentsia than to the spokesman for the thoughts and feelings of the Russian working woman and working youth in the 7th year of the revolution^[179]

Kollontai was sent abroad in Autumn 1922 as part of the Commissariat for Foreign Affairs, a sort of honorable reassignment. Yet still within the Zhenotdel:

Publicly, in September 1922, the 17th Petrograd Provincial Party Congress specified that a central reason the Petrograd Zhenotdel was made a sub-department of Agit-Prop was ‘to avert feminist work.’ The archival record reveals that reports conducted by the Petrograd Provincial Zhenotdel for the months of September and October 1922 indicated that ‘lately…petty-bourgeois, feminist organizations’ existed which were masquerading as ‘unions, artels and cooperatives’^[180]

In April 1923, the 12th Party Congress passed a formal resolution condemning the “feminism” inherent in the views of Golubeva and Kollontai: ‘These [feminist] deviations could facilitate the creation of such special societies, which under the banner of improving the day-to-day position of women, in fact could lead to the breaking away of the female part of the labouring population from the common class struggle.’ Similarly, in May 1923, Smidovich echoed similar anxieties when she called the proposals of Golubeva and Kollontai ‘highly dangerous’^[181]

The organ and party discussions leaders therefore “must make it known that zhenotdel is not a women’s organization to defend the rights of women, but a section of the party apparatus for work among backward women workers and peasant masses [my emphasis]” According to Pozdeeva, this article is infused with a “feminist bias” and that ‘it is clear that she completely does not understand Zhenotdel’s tasks, she considers that Zhenotdels are women’s organizations, organized to defend the rights of ‘women’ everywhere.’^[182]

After ousting K. Nikloaeva, Kollontai’s actual first replacement,^[183] Smidovich as head of the Zhenotdel would criticize Kollontai’s role in the Zhenotdel:

The delay in the construction of institutions that facilitate the actual implementation of the rights acquired by the woman worker in the October Revolution, in connection with her position in production, may create some ground for agitation of a feminist nature. This forces us to treat with particular caution any kind of currents that may lead to an organizational strengthening of feminist sentiments, in the form of impossible “societies” that would inevitably become a concentration of forces of hostile parties to the working class. The Conference decisively condemns attempts to organize such associations of a vague nature, trying to replace the work of Soviet, trade union and cooperative bodies under the leadership of the Party in the field of emancipation of the woman worker^[184]

This is not a reference to ‘bourgeois feminism’ either, since Kollontai in her “Communist Women’s Movement” pronouncements two years prior had purportedly made clear that “there can be no struggle against bourgeois feminism in Soviet Russia,”^[185] on account of the bourgeoisie being overthrown there. What women in the party were fighting against would also emerge decades later in the West as the fetishistic tendency of ‘marxist’-Feminism, though we might not accurately describe Kollontai using this term. The Zhenotdel kept on fighting this in order to uphold a ruthlessly self-critical position and sustain a serious working class revolutionary leadership. On a local level in the Zhenotdel, this early 1920s organizational shift had noticeable consequences.

In Pozdeeva’s words, Orlova was guilty of discussing the common bonds of ‘women everywhere,’ without differentiating between bourgeois women and proletarians’^[186]

It wasn’t only difficult leadership questions plaguing the organization, “The Zhenotdel’s tasks became more complex with the assimilation of the Moslem societies of Central Asia. According to Lapidus (1975b, p. 95) the failure of the regime to destroy or permeate traditional associational networks by a direct assault on local elites led to a new strategy in which sex replaced social class as the decisive lever for effecting social change. The task of the Zhenotdel was ... (a revolution) to launch by bringing to Moslem women a vision of the new possibilities open to them by the establishment of Soviet power. Early work amongst Moslem women involved the creation of women’s clubs as a focus for illiteracy elimination campaigns and the introduction of basic political education. Later the Zhenotdel moved to a broad attack on the structure of Moslem society encouraging women to make use of the new divorce laws, to join in mass public unveilings and to enter male roles in competition with men. The response to this ranged from selective accommodation to violent hostility. Uzbekistan recorded 203 cases of anti-feminist murder in 1928 (Lapidus, 1975b, p. 95). Hostility was not confined to Central Asia. During the 1920s there was increasing conflict between Zhenotdel and party and trade union leaders with party leaders regularly expressing worries about ‘feminist deviations’”^[187]

Rabotnitsa would cover more everyday developments and attempt to highlight the arduously achieved gains that could be pointed to directly because of industrialization and the ‘unequal right to unequal work’ that comes of necessity with building socialism in what were once vastly disconnected regions. Among the many areas in Soviet Central Asia undergoing these swift changes in daily productive life and legal and social codes, Turkmen Silk spinners’ own perspectives feature in the magazine. Incidents of abuses and ‘hooliganism’ suffered by women were set against a tenacious and persistent ability to carry out their duties as workers in direct defiance of such offenses:

The rhythmic noise of the machines, the rustling running of the drive belts, are woven into the multi-colored patterns of the silk-winders’ songs, sung in a half-voice

‘Brother, at least have pity on me, poor thing. There is no worse fate than a hard and miserable one. My husband beats me like a slave… the next one. He often beats me with a heavy stick’

These are the songs with which many came to the factory. But they already have other, more cheerful ones:

‘The iron bird flies high, Bathes in the sky, light as smoke... My brother Berdy has gone to study, Let a scientist come back’^[188]

Inspirational reading fare though this was, Central Asian society was still very much culturally conservative. Bride-price or ‘qalin’ and strict veiling of women was still the norm, and this was often enforced by older village women themselves on the youth. Upon these plans for the “Hujum,” or veil-tearing campaigns, to escalate, Stalin had another premonition and piece of advice that sadly would not be followed immediately, “What for? Why drag women of the veil here? We will have too many problems to deal with. The husbands would protest. It’s too early. Who wants their affairs to be examined?”^[189] The party itself could be equally infiltrated by both men and women looking to take advantage of changes in local and regional politics, and this proceeded in a manner involving the adventurist running far ahead of conditions, followed by setbacks:

Given this fact, it is not surprising to discover some women taking advantage of the resulting opportunities. Mothers as well as fathers had arranged marriages for their thirteen-, fourteen-, and fifteen-year-old daughters, for example, and while seeking good matches they also paid attention to the issue of how much qalin could be obtained. By the early 1930s some party activists wrote confidentially to their superiors to complain that indigenous women helped hide evidence of byt crimes and thus represented a noteworthy part of the byt problem^[190]

There are also cases when female workers tried to force Uzbek women to unveil with the aid of various material inducements, such as [promises] that in the city they can have gold teeth put in, they will be given a pretty dress, paid work will be found for them, places will be found for them in school, etc. When these Uzbek women arrived in the city, of course, they received nothing that was promised, and as a result they returned to the village, where some of the deceived women reveiled themselves, and some of them started to agitate against the later unveiling of other women^[191]

Yet female criminals in Central Asia specifically were amnestied en masse in 1928, a step meant as a celebratory commemoration of the Zhenotdel’s tenth anniversary. The adoption of gender liberation as shorthand for Soviet revolution helped bring about such an approach, despite the foreseeable consequences: the release of female byt offenders further undercut efforts to enforce the new laws^[192]

[I]n many places the courts do not serve us, nor [do they serve] the proletarian state, nor the proletariat, nor the party, nor the laboring masses, but rather the kulak, either openly or in a roundabout manner^[193]

Activists wanted to force modernity on their fellow Uzbeks by law… Even if the activist Uzbek women’s petitions found enough agreement in the Uzbekistan Communist Party—and they did not—Moscow made the decision that there would be no decree against veiling^[194]

Aleksandra Artiukhina… announced in July 1929… Moscow had decided not to ban the veil. Soviet policy in the hujum would henceforth stress economic and cultural work-bringing women into factories, cooperatives, and schools^[195]

Nadezhda Krupskaya admitted this was a consequence of prevailing conditions, not simply that Communist Party goals provided no amount of emancipation for Central Asian working women,

The question is, of course, complicated. Of course, we would like to get rid of both the burqa and the chador, but we cannot always implement by decree what we want.^[196]

Nevertheless, the prevailing reality was a Soviet Central Asian society that had not taken the same line of development as the more Western areas:

Sarymsakova, a delegate from Andijon, to an Uzbek Party Congress in 1929. According to her, local authorities were complicit in dodging the requirements of Soviet byt law, and local mahalla commissions often committed “criminal mistakes” in cases of underage marriage. The corrosive influence of such behavior on Soviet authority could be seen in the story of an unnamed twelve-year-old girl who was to be married in Andijon in 1929. As Sarymsakova told it, the local mahalla commission had provided this girl with a spravka attesting falsely that she was of legal age to marry. The commission then sent her to the ZAGS office, first dressing her in a heavy khalat to make her appear more solidly built and placing cotton wadding on her chest to make her appear more fully developed. Sarymsakova, a ZAGS employee, became suspicious and, surmising that the girl was younger and slighter than she appeared, sent her to a doctor for examination. When the doctor fixed the girl’s age at not more than eleven, her marriage application was denied-but the story did not end there. After this application had been denied, Sarymsakova herself endured repeated harassment from a local police officer, Sabirjon, who insisted that she had been wrong to request the doctor’s exam in the first place^[197]

Meanwhile “[s]pecial methods of work [would] continue to be used among women, especially in the East”, known as the Zhensektory, but would be “under the direct supervision of the Party apparatus.”161Indigenous women had to be transformed into a mass proletariat to fulfil the ambitious aims of the Plan. Nukrat had earlier declared war on the veil, the yasmak and any other form of indigenous dress that tied peasant women to their old lives^[198]

Its success in making such arguments enabled the Zhenotdel to survive in Central Asia after its official disbanding in Moscow in 1930. Under the name “Zhensektor“ (women’s section), these activists retained an organizational presence in Uzbekistan for several more years, at least through the mid-1930s, due to the special circumstances of women in Central Asia^[199]

Though there was a larger price to pay for this kind of adventurism as it also saw:

[B]y one estimate as many as 2,500 women were murdered during the first three years of the hujum^[200]

The “Zhenotdel” in the abstract of course could not be directly blamed for such poor outcomes, which were also predicted even by leading Soviet women. Anna Louise Strong in Red Star in Samarkand relates frightening detail about the NEP-era corruption in these local administrations and civil institutions:

The local courts condemned the three instigators to death, but the murderers had influence and their sentence was commuted to imprisonment. In one locality nine murders of women occurred before any were discovered. The local authorities took part in them and carefully concealed them from the central government. At last one summer there came to the district Gul Bazar, a woman medical student, giving her vacations to educate other women. She opened a school to teach women to read. When she found that the local officials refused to send their wives, she began to denounce them for their reactionary ideas. Infuriated at the thought that a woman dare criticize them, the local officials lost all caution. They aroused the town against her and lynched her. The woman student was known to the higher authorities; her death was investigated. Thus it was learned that the local officials had murdered nine women who had been agitators for freedom^[201]

[F]or abandoning khudzhum and turning to systematic work in Central Asia was made early in 1928 by Alexandra Artiukhina, the head of the central Zhenotdel. As we have seen, both the title and tone of her article (“From ‘assault’ to systematic work . . .”) in Kommunistka, the main journal of the Women’s Department, signaled a hard-headed preference — which must have been shared by at least some of Artiukhina’s colleagues in the party’s Secretariat and Orgburo — for cutting losses by admitting defeat, studying its causes, and retreating to more modest though also safer and more productive tasks^[202]

It is therefore not very surprising that A. Artiukhina as “head of the Zhenotdel from 1925” was also known as a pragmatist who could put class and Party ahead of sectionalism, though what is not often discussed is “her involvement in the dissolution of the Zhenotdel in 1930.”^[203] It is also complete slander to assert on her behalf that pointing out changes to the women’s department structure was an admission of failure by Communist men to subdue the ‘tyrants of the household.’ Artyukhina is clear here, “The structure of the apparatus is being streamlined. Work among women remains, party organizations will conduct it, and women’s activists are obliged to provide them with all possible assistance.”^[204] Not an admission of defeat nor a ‘sigh’ of surrender in any sense. For Lazar Kaganovich, the reasoning he offers was the necessity “to overcome conservatism on the woman question” and “make it a task for the [party] organisation as a whole.”^[205] Artyukhina also continued as an editor of Rabotnitsa magazine, which years after Zhenotdel had been reformulated, Stalin still directly supported and advocated on behalf of, writing here in 1933 on the front page of Pravda: “I warmly greet the Rabotnitsa [magazine]… I wish it success in the matter of educating the female proletarian masses in the spirit of struggle for the complete triumph of socialism, in the spirit of fulfilling the great precepts of our teacher - Lenin.”^[206] As no minor figure herself, Artyukhina was “one of the first to work on the editorial staff of Rabotnitsa… [and] belonged to that group of women who were aware of specifically female interests and supported the cause within the party. At the same time, she stressed the union of interests between men and women in the proletarian movement.”^[207]

But this determination and devotion to party discipline wasn’t something Artyukhina had been ‘inculcated’ with by Stalin nor is this reflective of any ‘tragedy’ associated with Stalin’s rise to prominence. Artyukhina’s Marxism was battle-tested and she had been a Bolshevik since before the Civil War. In 1924, while emphasizing the necessity of discipline in the factory, she wrote “our first slogan in the struggle to increase labor productivity should be a full 8 hours of work. There should not be a single minute of unnecessary downtime of the machine, unnecessary walking, talking, sloppiness. (The worker should set an example of how to work, remembering that the workers and the workers are the owners of production)”^[208] The Zhenotdel’s inconsistent approach had probably unavoidably contributed in undercutting many of its own goals, and “[d]espite the rhetoric in Western literature of Zhenotdel being a ‘genuine proletarian women’s movement,’ there were far fewer blue-collar worker delegates as a percentage of the total at the end of the [1920s] than at the beginning.”^[209]

It is compelling here also to utilize Kollontai’s more sober statements about work among Social Democrats less than 20 years prior, keeping in mind the emergence of Oppositional blocs and changes in party leadership also taking place in the late 1920s before collectivization. To see this resemblance, “[a]s women continued to argue the need for a women’s bloc, the actual facts of life were clearly and irrefutably revealing the illusory nature of such a plan... The age of the women’s political bloc came to an end shortly after the demise of the men’s liberal bloc. Yet feminists and suffragettes of every hue continue to shout about the need for women’s unity, the possibility of a broad-based women’s party pursuing its own specific goals.”^[210] For Patterson, the shortcomings and imbalances between its organizationally utopian intentions and the reality of industrialization and social needs during NEP, the manner in which “Zhenotdel functioned at the local level revealed that the organization as a whole was riven with multiple and conflicting tensions. Zhenotdel was unworkable.”^[211]

Aleksandra Kollontai was not a feminist. She was wrong as regards particular policies and theoretical approach among women workers as well as her stance on an immediately realizable utopian development in the sex relation. This alone does not disqualify her from being a Marxist-Leninist, though no amount of desperation arranging the terms Marxism and ‘feminism’ next to one another by means of hyphenation (or without) convincingly achieves the illusion. For Soviet leaders who happened to have been female, “rather than identify with the word ‘feminism’: both Clara Zetkin and Alexandra Kollontai spent a great deal of time and energy insisting that there was no separate “woman question” and should be no separate women’s movement. They argued that it was essential to bring women into politics and that special methods of work and special organisations for women necessary, but that politics meant proletarian politics.”^[212] Therefore, ‘feminism’ in this manner does not and functionally is unable to eject Lenin. Although Kollontai was reproached by female leaders in the Party for mishandling specific questions in a libertine manner, Stalin did not remove her from the Party, nor did he slight her. Kollontai herself was a Marxist, not a ‘marxist’-Feminist, and her own voluminous writings can be consulted on such questions:

Is a united women’s movement possible, and in particular in a society based on class antagonisms?... The world of women, as the world of men. has divided into two camps: one, in its aims, aspirations and interests, sides with the bourgeois classes, while the other is closely linked to the proletariat, whose aspiration to freedom also involves the solution of the women’s question in all its aspects. These two groups of fighting women differ in their aims, interests and methods of struggle, even though they are both acting on the basis of the common slogan ‘the emancipation of women’. Each of these militant groups unconsciously proceeds on the basis of the interests of its own class, which gives a specific class colouring to its aspirations and objectives. One individual woman may be capable of standing above the interests of her own class and of disregarding them in the name of the triumph of the aims of another class, but this is impossible for a united women’s organisation reflecting all the real needs and interests of the social group that had founded it. However radical the demands of the feminists may appear, it must not be forgotten that, by virtue of their class position, the feminists cannot struggle to achieve a fundamental restructuring of the present economic-social structure of society, and that without this the emancipation of women cannot be complete^[213]

Enormous Gains For Soviet Women and the rise of Marxism-Leninism Globally

There can be no real mass movement without women… [t]hat is not feminism, that is practical, revolutionary expediency^[214] - Lenin

In our Soviet Union, comrades, people are not born, organisms are born, and people are made - tractor drivers, motor mechanics, mechanics, academics, scientists, and so on, and so forth. And here is one of these made people, and not born, I - I was not born a person, I became a person.^[215] – T. Lysenko

Before the revolution, practically no women were employed in the economy; today about 47% of Central Asia’s workers and employees are female. Before the revolution, only about 2% of all women (aged 9-49 years old) in Central Asia were literate; in 1970, the figure was around 99%, and women accounted for about one-third of all students in higher and secondary specialist educational establishments^[216]

It was written even in the early 1930s in US publications that, “The Bolshevik revolution was nothing if not thorough in its handling of the problem of sex equality…Lenin once declared that ‘every cook must know how to manage the state;’… Mrs. Artyukhina, fulfills a multitude of functions… issues eighteen women’s magazines, with a circulation of 670,000… [women] organizers ride about in peripatetic tents, preaching to the Kirghiz nomadic women the new gospel of washing their children’s faces, and try to convince the Calmucks, who dwell in the Astrakhan steppes, that the custom of having the head of the family sleep in a bed while the women lie about his feet is not a proper domestic habit… [d]ivorce is probably more prevalent in Russia than in any other country… [i]t is plain that the revolution has produced a far reaching shakeup in the family… One of the most visibly beneficial social reforms which Russia has experienced under the soviet regime is the large scale provision of free nurseries… eight weeks’ vacation before and an equal amount of time after childbirth for factor workers… [a]ll this has helped to reduce infant mortality in Moscow from 26.3 percent in 1913 to 13.4 per cent in 1926.”^[217] A. Artyukhina here was adamant in asserting, “[w]e understood that the enslavement of women occurred together with the establishment of private ownership of the means of production and the beginning of the exploitation of man by man, and that real equality and real freedom for women would only be found in socialism where there would be no exploitation. Therefore, the most reliable path to the liberation of women was the path of political struggle against capitalism in the ranks of the proletariat.”^[218] Class struggle isn’t an ‘insensitive’ point of ‘reductionism,’ it is a continually radiating and vigorous current. An active and decisive motive force that propels and impels social history. Soviets in just a few decades of Party leadership by 1940 could say “woman is active in politics and government and at the same time is a mother,”^[219] as well as soldier and doctor.

‘Feminists,’ in opposition to working class women’s proletarian martyrdom and honorable struggle, are just as quick to attempt to sever this linkage, and Engels could see such a form of ‘parasitism’ across history, pointing out how “it is a curious fact that with every great revolutionary movement the question of ‘free love’ comes in to the foreground. With one set of people as a revolutionary progress, as a shaking off of old traditional fetters, no longer necessary; with others as a welcome doctrine, comfortably covering all sorts of free and easy practices between man and woman. The latter, the philistine sort, appear here soon to have got the upper hand; for the “fornication” is always associated with the eating of “things sacrificed to idols,” which Jews and Christians were strictly forbidden to do, but which it might be dangerous, or at least unpleasant, at times to refuse. This shows evidently that the free lovers mentioned here were generally inclined to be everybody’s friend, and anything but stuff for martyrs.”^[220] This is the irreducible chasm between the working women’s movement and feminism. The former, as articulated by Clara Zetkin, understands there to be a “woman question” only as part of the social question, the property question. Here too, Kollontai’s “doll-parasite,” in the form of the “Marxist-Feminist” undergraduate or women’s studies sophomoric blogpost and boutique publication, appears as the inclination to sacrifice material history and win nothing as concerns working class dictatorship:

For the feminists, the immediate enemy are men as such, who have arrogated to themselves all rights and privileges and left women only bondage and obligation. Each victory of the feminists means that men must concede their exclusive prerogatives in favour of the ‘fair sex’. The proletarian woman, however, has a completely different attitude to her position: in her eyes men are not her enemy and oppressor but, on the contrary, first and foremost a comrade in sharing a common, joyless lot, and a loyal comrade-in-arms in the struggle for a brighter future. The same social relations enslave both the woman and her comrade; one and the same hateful bonds of capitalism oppress their will and deprive them of the happiness and pleasures of life. It is indeed true that certain specific characteristics of the present system weigh doubly upon the woman, it is also true that the conditions of hired labour sometimes transform the woman friend and worker into a menacing rival of the man^[221]

A rarely remarked upon 1921 speech at the Second International Conference for the “Communist Womens’ Movement,” headquartered in Berlin, saw a Russian comrade Anna Kaligna confidently explain, “[o]ur working women have found their bearings at once, and they are marching not with the Mensheviks or the feminists, because these forces are not a help but a hindrance to them. Such forces do not believe in these active workers – all these feminists will go to the devil – but the working woman will not follow such leaders. She will follow those who will lead her to an open war, who will realise all the rights and achieve the liberation of women.”^[222] Retroactively but nonetheless lazily attempting to assert that Kaligna was a feminist despite explicitly distinguishing the two in her own articulation is simply a bourgeois individualist liquidation of Communist history. Woman under socialism could be dignified having attained social equality, and working to live up to this responsibility in Marxist-Leninist states. These Communist women themselves, “insist that they are not feminists... Feminism, to most of them, is the outlook of extremists, unhappy outsiders, trouble-makers or ethical nihilists. Emancipation - defined as the right to equal opportunity in education and employment - is considered to have been achieved.”^[223] Fighters on behalf of the working class such as K. Zetkin, A. Artyukhina, P. Vinogradskaya and others are all ‘gender traitors’ insofar as they did not become ‘menacing rivals’ to Marxists. To this extent, ‘critical theory’ since the late 20^th century in the West has also attempted to frantically ‘explain’ away or de-signify the material gains of Soviet and Marxist-Leninist history.

Communists in China could also predict this outcome. At the Sixth Party Congress in 1928, a particular motion was passed which established that, “The feminist women’s movement… divorced from politics and revolution, is completely illusory. However, it has a profound influence on the thinking of the average petty-bourgeois intellectual woman.”^[224] In its arduous and protracted struggle against colonialism and genocidal imperialism and the vestiges of a semi-feudal landlord oppression, the CPC and Mao could also flex the overwhelming might of party discipline in showing that the male members had to follow a strict code of conduct, and any acting out would be met harshly by proletarian justice. The CPC required that “those who have committed other serious crimes that have incurred the anger of the masses, such as in cases of raping… be executed.”^[225] Mao and the Chinese Communist movement always recognized that “[t]he thinking of “Leftists” outstrips a given stage of development of the objective process; some regard their fantasies as truth, while others strain to realize in the present an ideal which can only be realized in the future. They alienate themselves from the current practice of the majority of the people and from the realities of the day.”^[226] Working women’s equality and focus on women’s movement developments within the Chinese masses were always pushed to the fore. Mao was not afraid to truthfully represent realities that China faced either. Despite the Communist Party of China’s victory in 1949, Mao was able to point out:

This contemporary Chinese society is still filled with the influences of the exploiters, with selfishness and self-interest, hidden scheming, bureaucratism, and other evils. We have many good Party members who are not easily influenced by these things, but some Party members bring with them, or reflect, in our Party the evils of society. Is there anything strange about this? (It is) just like finding mud on the body of one who creeps out of the mire and who often has to stay in the mire. Is there anything strange about that? This is not strange, but unavoidable. On the contrary, it would be strange if these evils did not exist in the CCP. How could an evil society produce a CP completely devoid of evils?^[227]

Chinese Communists showed that “Without the successful transformation of society, without the completion of land reform, without a victorious defense of the Liberated Areas, it was impossible to talk of liberation of women”^[228] In those areas where Communists were most successful in winning over the masses during the Civil War, “classes were organized for literacy and for the study of politics, cotton loans were made to stimulate spinning and weaving, the women were brought together to make uniforms and shoes for the soldiers, and wives and mothers were urged to encourage their husbands, sons, and brothers to enlist in the army.”^[229] ‘Holding up half the sky,’ here is an objective and enormous social effort rather than an accusatory or subjectively considered slogan. Such practical proximity between slogans and social undertaking in reality mirrors changes in China over the course of socialist development. A more fondly remembered aspect of the Cultural Revolution were the ‘Iron Girls,’ a highly-celebrated movement of female Stakhanovite-type paragons of socialist labor most notably represented by Guo Fenglian. Recollecting their experiences from that time, many former ‘Iron Girls’ look back on “their ‘life of struggle’ during the ‘passionate years’ as the most wonderful time in their otherwise commonplace life. The period left them with a great sense of achievement and pride. ‘We often had meetings in the township’, Gu Yingzhen remembered, ‘there were many chances to go outside. We also enjoyed great political honour.”^[230] However, the mass momentum and involvement in socialist revival also carried a corresponding corruption within the upper bureaucratic echelons competing for who would be Mao’s replacement.

In the immediate aftermath of Mao’s passing in 1976, one intriguing episode shows the extent to which party leadership and the field of anthropology were contested ground regarding a Marxist view of ‘matriarchy’ in history. Jiang Qing, even before Mao’s health entirely declined, was moving in untoward ways behind the scenes. In the model socialist village of Dazhai, Jiang Qing tried to curry favor with the workers. Her domineering and presumptuous attitude hardly won wide support, “she enlarged her own photo and gave it away, hoping everyone would hang it. In September of this year, Jiang Qing visited Dazhai and, not seeing the large photo she had given her, questioned Comrade Guo Fenglian, “Why aren’t you hanging the photo I gave you?” Comrade Guo Fenglian coldly replied, “You’ve made your own photo larger than Chairman Mao’s. I’m afraid it’s inappropriate to hang it like that!” This single sentence left Jiang Qing speechless.”^[231] Jiang Qing “[i]n September 1976… visited Dazhai for the second time. She went to the supply and marketing cooperative to buy something. She first asked the salespersons their names and asked them to write down their family background, personal class status, political affiliation, and the names of their parents on a piece of paper. After they finished writing, Jiang Qing realized that no one had written their mother’s name. She asked, “Do you have a mother?” “If you do, why don’t you write it?” So the salespersons wrote the mother’s name below the father’s. Jiang Qing then said, “If you want to rebel against your father, write your mother’s name above your father’s.” She said, “[i]n a matriarchal society, women hold power. In a communist society, there will still be empresses, and women will also hold power.”^[232] The party had to clarify what Jiang Qing had muddled, “Manifestly [Jiang Qing] was an ignorant simpleton and silly ass.”^[233] Within these primitive ‘matrilineal’ societies, “[t]here was no surplus labor, and hence neither classes nor exploitation existed. Women shouldered an extremely heavy work load in the community and were highly respected. They could become the head of their clan just like men”^[234] One scholar wrote:

We know that matriarchal society is a crucial link in the development of human history, and all ethnic groups have experienced matriarchal societies throughout their history. In the late primitive period (the Middle and Late Paleolithic Age, as archaeologically described, approximately 100,000 to 50,000 years ago), the rapid rise in productivity inevitably led to corresponding changes in production relations. The previously unstable, loosely structured groups could no longer adapt to the new situation. These new circumstances required people to “children could not identify their fathers, but could undoubtedly identify their biological mothers. This is what ancient Chinese texts say: “People know their mothers, but not their fathers.” At this time, a clan’s lineage could only be calculated through the mother’s side. Many ethnic myths and legends often cite a single female ancestor as the origin of their ethnic group, reflecting this historical reality… The fact that women were respected did not mean they enjoyed privilege, nor did it mean they could arbitrarily command, drive, or oppress men”^[235]

Jiang Qing on the other hand exhibits a utopian and inhumane aberration in this view:

In her view, communism was a matriarchal society, the same as primitive communism, where people lived in caves and ate raw meat and drank blood. This shameless slander is a deadly counterpart to the reactionary rhetoric of the world’s most reactionary figures, who slander Communists as “murderers, arsonists, rapers, and looters; they disdain history, culture, and the motherland; they are unfilial to their parents, disrespectful to their teachers, unreasonable; they practice communal wives and use human wave tactics; in short, they are a group of unforgivable criminals.” Isn’t it clear which class Jiang Qing served?... History has mercilessly mocked this clown^[236]

This ferocious and vicious white-bone demon, holding the so-called “Seal of Empress Lu” discovered in recent years and donning out-landish garments of the Wu Tse-t’ien period, lorded it over the Party and the people and cherished her pipe dream of becoming the contemporary “empress.”^[237]

Chairman Mao declared that Jiang Qing “does not represent me” and yet still could look upon a more broad horizon and see the determination by the masses themselves, and from this an infinite well-spring of hope since, “If it can’t be solved in the first half of the year, we’ll solve it in the second half. If it can’t be solved this year, we’ll solve it next year. If it can’t be solved next year, we’ll solve it the year after.”^[238] Nevertheless, in the West, so far remaining unchanged, Caroline Ramazanoglu observed nearly 40 years ago that, “Marxism and feminism have not been integrated.”^[239] Whether such a proposed ‘integration’ has ever been desirable or necessary at all for workers’ emancipation and anti-imperialist victory is anyone’s guess.

Black Panther Party before 1970

Early issues of the The Black Panther publication offer a wide variety of insights and interpretations on the so-called “woman question” as it developed within the organization and required theoretical clarification for the BPP:

The bourgeois female, i.e., young, whorish... uses (and emasculates) her man as a social coat-hanger, a bill-payer, a dude, a vehicle to further her own confused self-image... The emasculation concept is not just thrown in as an aside. The Negro woman’s disrespect for and hatred of her man is an integral part of her functioning. She comes from a home in which the man is nothing more than an accessory to her mother (and as often as not, grandmother, aunt, and other dominant matriarchal figures). A house in which the male can’t function unless he’s drunk, it’s the first of the month, or he’s physically asserting himself, either by yelling, beating, or fucking^[240]

From another perspective, women in the Black Panther Party also looked to other comrades for support and wished for a better future for their families and communities.

These women will survive as they have in the past, but they need the support of their black men.... So black women, dry your eyes, the dawn is breaking and it is a new day. Our men are about to wake up and discover the treasures and wealth of these new days and most of all YOU^[241]

One entry in The Black Panther, apparently written from ‘a Male’s point of view’ says:

Revolutionaries are a small lot indeed. Yet revolutionary women are fewer. Black women are for the most part selfish and subjective. In past times Black men existed in a matriarchal society… This condition created a feeling of superiority in Black women. Black women have failed to see that this unbalanced economic condition helped to rob the men of their manhood… Black women today relate to the revolution only from the viewpoint of Culture Nationalism… they dig on courses in Swahili… But when the Black man starts to talk about getting some guns and offing some white pig who misuses or abuses him, his woman starts to fall apart… To a great extent, her attitude explains the high rate of divorce among Panthers and other revolutionaries^[242]

Panther Sisters apparently did not want “doll-parasites” lurking around and getting into trouble either:

You are not here as powder puff bitches. The pig is oppressing you too too! So don’t think you can Georgia your way out. The amount of suffering we have all been subjected to does not separate we females. The hog don’t care who he beats in the head so remove your false eyelashes so you can see that they will suppress you too. If you cannot remove your disguise then young hoe you don’t belong here! cause a fat ass and silk stocking don’t create a bullet proof shield And if a silk stud Daddy is your goal then you might as well watch a rat run in his hole. cause a punk decorated in diamonds and gators will leave you on your fat ass. You better get real slick, hop into some big bens and become a worker for the people. Become a revolutionary woman and have a revolutionary man. To be the other half, you must be strong and carry the love of your people instead of mascara. Because I know for a fact, mascara runs when you cry^[243]

One particularly egregious example of the disconnect between the Panther Party’s practice and the ‘New Left’ inspired ‘feminist’ shows:

[H]ow the general movement towards WOMEN’S LIBERATION can be… used to further the desires of some Individuals to gain attention and at the most a flash of notoriety. In essence, their actions are… theatrical…

The MOTOR CITY NINE Invaded a final exam session at Macomb College, and demanded! that the students listen undividedly to their rhetoric. When students (male) attempted to leave in disgust they attacked them using Karate (hardly a way to win them over). These pseudo FREEDOM FIGHTERS by using antagonastic methods to air their grievances against male chauvanism unfortunately heighten the contradictions between men and women in this society. Apparently they rapped about the Black Panther Party and it would be interesting to learn their specific references as their tactics certainly didn’t reflect any understanding of Party Program or Principles. If they had a minimal understanding behind the real issues of women’s liberation struggle, they would have been more responsible in dealing with the Problem. Instead, by abstractly talking about their actions could only have had a negative influence on the people they were trying to relate to… their practice was ‘anti-men’, Physical force and coercion is not the way to deal with contradictions among the people. They repeatedly mentioned the Vietnamese women’s participation in the struggle, but we hardly think that the Vietnamese women resorted to theatrics and gimmicks to gain their liberation. On the contrary, their serious struggle in life and death situations hardly allows for such disunifying tactics, Women in the Black Panther Party can only view such actions perpetrated by the MOTOR CITY NINE as reactionary and as a backward step in resolving very serious problems between men and women^[244]

One Comrade Candi Robinson, writing for the The Black Panther newspaper in 1969 called for

“Black Women, Black Women,” to “Hold your head up, and look ahead We too are needed in the revolution… We too are strong, We too are a threat to the oppressive enemy. We are revolutionaries, We are the other half of our revolutionary men, we are their equal halves, may it be with gun in hand, or battling in streets to make this country a socialist lead. Sisters, let’s educate our people Combat liberalism, and combat male chauvanism, Awaken our men to the fact that we are no more nor no less than they. We are as revolutionary as they. For too long, we have been alone. For far too long we have been women without men, for far too long we have been double oppressed, not only by the capitalist society, but also by our men.

Now we are no longer alone, our men are by our sides. We revolutionary men and women are the halves of each other. We must continue to educate our men, and bring their minds from a male chauvanistic level to a higher level. Our men need, want and will love the beautiful children, that come from our fruitful wombs. They need our trust and encouragement as well as we need theirs. They need us to educate, them, the people and our children as well as we need them to educate us. Sisters, we are being called by life itself. We are being called by the revolution, We are mothers of revolutionaries, with us is the future of our people. We my sisters, are mothers of revolution and within our wombs is the army of the people. Sisters! Revolution Is Here! Bring Forth The Army! Bring Forth The Guns! We my sisters are revolutionary women of revolutionary men! We are mothers of revolution!”^[245]

So tough love and discipline for fighters in the party, and scorn for ‘feminism.’ Yet, in the history of the Black Panthers’ rise and rapid dissolution, one woman’s story figures quite prominently amidst so many rank-and-file member women doing the real world work on the ground feeding children and caring for communal concerns. Elaine Brown, in contrast to those aforementioned women, was more focused on her own political prospects and driving wedges between leadership figures, “Newton said he first began to suspect that Brown was an agent when it came out during Pratt’s trial that Brown’s name was on a receipt from a paint shop that changed the color of Pratt’s car to implicate Pratt in a murder of which he was falsely accused. When the court overturned Pratt’s case twenty-seven years later, the government settled with Pratt for $4.5 million in a false imprisonment lawsuit.”^[246] These accusations were not a ‘one-off’ either, “Elaine Brown, [was] widely suspected among former party members of having been a police agent.”^[247] Kathleen Cleaver and “Geronimo” ji Jaga once accused Elaine Brown of snitching and said they “would never support Ms. Brown because she was an FBI informant.”^[248] ji Jaga claimed “[t]here is much much more irrefutable evidence that continues to expose this sad sally for the COINTEL conspirators? but do not lose sight of the fact that this girl Elaine was brought to ucla for psychiatric treatment which seems to be a pre-requisite for patsies of elaine’s type and that she was but one, tho a very important one, of so many others who were used, unwittingly, as moles, provocateurs.”^[249]

Relevant to these developments, a long-time New Orleans police officer gave an interview in which he showed that, in carrying out espionage on the Black Panthers through this period “’I could get more information from the groups if I infiltrated them with women rather than men. Men didn’t suspect women of being undercover agents. Women could form confidential relationships. Women always know things that the guys didn’t know, saw things that the guys didn’t know. They could go places where the guys would be suspicious. They could ask questions that wouldn’t arouse suspicion, whereas if a guy asked the same question, there would have been suspicions.’ Williams told me he had a female in the Panthers and one in the Klan, both of whom worked out well.”^[250]

Western ‘Feminism’ vs. Eastern Socialism since 1970

If the conclusion escapes from the beginning; is unaware of it or keeps it in indifference? Strange rhetoric! Strange way of invading the impossible! Denial, forgetting, existence with out form, ambiguous weapons . . . Laziness itself used as unbreakable energy^[251]

For former Black Panther women, even abroad in places like the UK, incongruous goals and combativeness among socialists caused Black ‘feminists’ to tire of the ‘laziness’ by a self-appointed ‘women’s lib’ set. OWAAD made clear:

We’re not feminists— we reject that label because we feel that it represents a white ideology… Our group is not anti-men at all… When we have study sessions on Black history and culture, men come along… We don’t alienate men because they put Black women down, because we recognize that the source of that is white imperialist culture… What’s the point of taking on male violence if you haven’t dealt with state violence? Or rape, when you can see Black people’s bodies and lands being raped everyday by the system?^[252]

But perhaps this hyperfocus on ‘discourse’ itself as a panoptic and omnipresent circular accusation is the entire gist? Cellestine Ware had said that despite the ‘radical feminists’’ seemingly subversive rhetoric and attempts to negate class politics, for the Black masses, “it is remarkable that feminists often cite the political strategy of the black movement and encourage themselves with black precedents while they are seemingly unable to attract black women to the female liberation cause… [f]eminists are perceived as whites before they are seen to be oppressed.”^[253] Here too, in attempting to lament just how much ‘class struggle’ replaces their own particular concerns, ‘radical’ and ‘Marx’-inspired feminists would just as soon eagerly take “the liberty of correcting the author[s], who [are] somehow charged with failing to live up to [their] own theory.”^[254] If for such ‘radicals’ and ‘gender-criticals,’ “[p]atriarchy’ would then possess a theoretical status within feminist theory similar to that enjoyed by the concept of ‘class’ within Marxism… [yet] this solution unintentionally places strict limits on the significance of history and, ironically, of patriarchy too… [its] tautology could only be resolved by contending that men are stained… if patriarchy’s existence has been used deduced from evidence showing women’s oppression by men then logically the concept cannot be used to explain that evidence.”^[255] For Chris Middleton, “man’s access to the control of female labour was conditional on his position in the class structure… [since] understanding the patriarchal organization of labour [is possible only] in relation to the matrix of… property relations.”^[256] For a large portion of ‘Marxist-feminists’ however, Marx and Engels become unworthy of, or even offensive to, their own contributions to human history and class struggle on this account.

Such an inane sense of ‘impropriety’ as a norm reaches ridiculous extremes in cases such as Susan Brownmiller, who said “Going further, I reserved my toughest comments for the story of Emmett Till, the fourteen-year-old youth lynched in Money, Mississippi, in 1955 for whistling at a white woman. I said that Till and the men who lynched him shared something in common: a perception of the white woman as the white man’s property… Angela Davis… devoted her radio program on KPFA one evening to my purported racism… extended her damning charge to Diana Russell… Shulamith Firestone… and recycled her views…”^[257] Then Brownmiller announces that Angela Davis, whose own misunderstanding regarding Marxism is well-known, is “[t]rapped by… intellectual dependence on Marx.” ^[258] This might be deemed the ‘height’ of such discursive controversy between socialist & ‘radical’ feminisms and their co-habiting attempts to negate history. Although this is far removed from the historical origin and discussions of the ‘matriarchy,’ so it is that even between ‘marxist’-Feminists and a larger portion of ‘feminist’ discourse generally, “there is no longer subject-object, but a “yawning gap” between the one and the other and, in the gap, the subject, the object are dissolved; there is passage, communication, but not from one to the other: the one and the other have lost their separate existence”^[259] What may have been fanciful ‘New Left’ distinctions between ‘radical’ and ‘materialist’ or ‘xeno-‘ or ‘socialist’ attempts to promote bourgeois feminist affectations all blur back together. Here, ‘marxist’-Feminism flits about, although a ‘divorce’ in such an ‘unhappy marriage’ could only reflect a long-interred fact, since Marx deemed that the “marriage in question is a dead marriage, the existence of which is mere semblance and deception.”^[260]

Yolande Cohen once reviewed Batya Weinbaum’s 1978 work in which Weinbaum repeated among other things the common ‘radical feminist’ trope that their especially ‘analytical’ or ‘methodological’ standpoint enables an “awareness of the initial patriarchal bias of Marx’s entire framework.”^[261] Cohen points out how the ‘Marxist/Feminist’

wants to distance herself from Marxist analysis, but she places her own approach within this revised framework. Hence the great ambivalence of the work. To give Marx and Engels their due, the author places the feminist movement of the 1970s in direct lineage with Marxism.... Although they distance themselves somewhat from him, they borrow “The Basic Framework” from him. But the fundamental difference, according to the author, between Marxism and feminism is the “patriarchal component” inherent in Marxism, which feminism must identify (chap. 4). It remains nonetheless true that Marxism, despite its flaws, remains the true strategy for change (chap. 5), or at least the starting point for women’s struggle (chap. 6). This concludes the first part of the book. In an uneven and contradictory exchange, these 56 pages contribute to making the debate completely confusing and inextricable^[262]

An incident^[263] in which white ‘feminists’ from the West attempted to insert themselves into the 1979 Iranian Revolution also calls to mind the insuperable gap between Western ‘feminism,’ unshakeable in its bourgeois origins, and the working women’s movement internationally, especially as it relates to anti-imperialism. Despite a historical and particular political dynamic in which during the 1930s, “Reza Shah banned the veil as parts of his modernizing crusade… Veiled women were arrested and had their veils forcibly removed,”^[264] Western ‘feminists’ asserted themselves in this overeager manner. Nawal El Saaddawi wrote in the 1980s that “leftist movements… [were] utilized in this ‘game of nations’ and… in the hands of reactionary forces posing under the guises of democracy, liberalism, humanism, modernism, and human rights… discovered that ‘human rights’ had to be defended in Iran. Progressive feminist movements intervened on behalf of Iranian women, not realizing that sometimes the form and even the content of their intervention was being used to discredit the Iranian people’s struggle against American intervention… [this led to] feminist movements to taking a stand that is against the interests of the liberation movements in the East, and therefore also harmful to the struggle for women’s emancipation.”^[265] A desperate insistence on there being a ‘universal’ sisterhood that accompanies such a disposition is clearly undermined, though only from the standpoint of ‘sisterhood’ abstractly, insofar as this does not reflect the fact of labor as species-being. One female interviewee in Pakistan after the ‘Aurat March’ in 2020 observed “You can’t have respect by disrespecting the opposite gender. Women’s rights doesn’t mean no boundaries at all… if this is what you call feminism then I’m anti feminist from now,”^[266] The subaltern was always able to speak, and they never needed to be marionetted or assumed to be silent by the Western ‘academics’ or ‘radically’ effeminate.

Caroline Ramazanoglu explains that because “different windows on ‘reality’ cannot simply be added together to make a coherent whole” one does not need to “impose a general theory of oppression of other women’s experiences,” since it is undeniable that “[w]omen can oppress and exploit other women.”^[267] Ramazanoglu includes here a quote from Maureen Cain who suggests that “knowing from a feminist standpoint… precludes knowing from a working-class”^[268] position. Does one need to take such a combative stance to show it isn’t ‘anti-feminism,’ nor anti-womanism, neither misogyny nor ‘patriarchy,’ that enframe Marxism and proletarian internationalism or how they’ve been sustained in history? In both instances, it is also not ‘pro-feminism’ nor a sentimentality regarding forgotten ideals in the past which animate Marxist practice and achievement today. Soviet party member A. Ryazanova wrote in the early 1920s that “any deviations on this question prepare the ground for ‘women’s’ actions, which further contribute to the obscuring of the class consciousness of the proletariat. To the extent that within the class, proletarian organization, groups are created that take “initiative” on all questions concerning women’s labor, to the extent that groups are created that “represent” the interests of working women, the class struggle is tinged with feminism and anti-feminism.”^[269] The Marxist therefore attacks neither of these per se, but rather emphasizes the thing many others are so eager to forget or have ‘tinged’ in this way.

“Feminism never flourished in Burkina Faso!”^[270]
[T]he fruit of my womb is Helios^[271]

Arriving here once again at the 1980s revolution in Burkina Faso, gaps in geographical distance and modes of existence separate various developments of each victorious Marxism-Leninist practice from almost every other. What they are united by is a kind of, “secret pact… and we cannot easily throw off the demand they make upon us if we wish to remain faithful to historical materialism... each generation possesses a small portion of messianic power, which it must strive to exert.”^[272] Thomas Sankara as an individual persisted in extreme danger. Burkina Faso had experienced several violent coups in the 20 years before Sankara took power. Even his surviving to adulthood had been against all odds as:

Out of 1,000 children born the same year I was, half died in the first three months. I had the great fortune to escape death, just as I had the great fortune not to die later from one of the diseases here in Africa that knocked out more of those born that same year. I am one of the 16 children out of 100 who went to school. This is another extraordinary piece of luck. I’m one of 18 out of a 100 who managed to obtain a high school degree and one of the 300 from the entire country who were able to go abroad and continue their education and who, on coming home, were assured of a job. I’m one of those 2 soldiers out of 100 who, on the social level, have a stable, well-paid position, because I’m an officer in an army where this rank represents something. The number of people who have been this lucky amount to only 30,000 in a country of seven million inhabitants^[273]

Years before 1987, the affectionately humorous but morbidly mindful Sankara referred to his wife as “La Veuve,” or “The Widow.”^[274] This danger was a lived part of the experience of being raised in a mixed Silmi-Mossi household and growing up in a rapidly changing ‘postcolonial’ West Africa. Thomas Sankara, in coming from both the Mossi and Fulani ethnic groups in what was then Upper Volta, could also speak on general shortcomings in the women’s situation throughout these overexploited areas. “We must pay the closest attention to women’s situation because it pushes the most conscious of them into waging a sex war when what we need is a war of classes or parties, waged together, side by side… It is men’s attitude that spawns the bold assertions made by feminism”^[275]

For three and a half years our revolution has worked to systematically eliminate all practices that demean women, such as prostitution and related activity, like vagrancy and female juvenile delinquency, forced marriages, female circumcision, and their particularly difficult living conditions.

By working to solve the water problem; by building windmills in the villages; by assuring the widespread use of the improved stove; by building public nurseries, carrying out daily vaccinations, and encouraging healthy, abundant, and varied eating habits, the revolution has no doubt greatly contributed to improving the quality of women’s lives^[276]

Regarding the fight against FGM, Sankara was no less uncompromising, “we can only see excision as a measure of inferiorization. In defending women and in appealing to them to fulfil themselves, we say that women should not rely on men and should not expect any condescension from them. The development and the liberation of the women of our country, the women of Africa, of women as a whole, will not come about as an act of charity. It will depend on their will and their determination to struggle and, therefore, their grasp (...) of the social contradictions that oppose women and men.”^[277] However, this struggle is both regarding culture and material development as during Sankara’s leadership, “rural peoples resisted the state efforts to end female circumcision, and much of the pushback came from women, as it was usually the aunts and mothers who led such rituals.”^[278] Sankara’s own Minister Josephine Ouedraogo stated that in approaching these cultural practices, “certain revolutionary policies and actions risked alienating the population, that “the danger exists of seeing a resistance movement take shape that will go against our aspirations.” She advocated for “proceeding gradually so as to not offend mentalities and customs.”^[279]

A major aspect of Sankara’s attempt to wed women’s household productive labor and material emphasis on national self-reliance, was this enormous campaign to promote locally made textiles. “Thus, in 1985, the name Faso dan fani, or literally “the woven loincloth of the homeland” in Dioula, was coined to designate the bands”^[280] For women in Burkina Faso since that time, “the cotton strips woven locally by women became the preferred illustration of its anti-imperialist economic policy of promoting local products, which was simultaneously based on a cultural policy of nation-building and revalorizing Burkinabe identity. The Faso dan fani movement, created in 1985 to designate the consumption of locally woven fabrics, contributed to the reinvention of a textile tradition, which thirty years later continues to embody the pride of Burkinabe identity”^[281]

Thomas Sankara, a critic of traditional chieftaincy and customs deemed feudal and enslaving, sought to promote not a centuries-old weaving craft, but rather a modern and productive one, relying on new technologies and innovation to develop a substantial market that would ensure the stability of the artisanal textile industry. He therefore focused on the modern practice of weaving carried out by women. The very strong cultural dimension infused into cotton fabric linked the fabric, at the same time, to the reconquest of an identity frustrated by colonization and to a return to pre-colonial roots. From this ambiguity between the advent of the modern and the rebirth of the past, a reinvented textile tradition was born in the collective imagination, making Faso dan fani and weaving practiced by women on horizontal looms symbols of Burkina Faso’s traditional artisanal heritage. Thirty years after the fall of the Sankarist revolution, history itself has been reclaimed. When I ask them about the country’s textile traditions, the majority of people I meet evoke a direct connection between the weaving of narrow bands carried out by men on hanging-hedged looms and the current weaving practiced by women on horizontal pedal looms. Some of them even consider the female practice of weaving to be pre-colonial, because they no longer view it in any other way than traditional^[282]

Textile crafts, made from locally grown and spun cotton, are particularly representative of Burkina Faso’s cultural and ethnic pluralism, as the vast majority of the country’s 66 ethnic groups practice them and dress in the woven fabrics. The cotton loincloth is an everyday object that accompanies individuals throughout their lives, serving as both clothing and shroud, and that excludes no one in its consumption. Finally, clothing embodies the primary image one projects of oneself to others and contributes to the dissemination and promotion of one’s culture abroad. Thus, hand-woven cotton strips were chosen by the regime to symbolize this economic development and to serve as a means of building identity through which the pride of the entire Burkinabe people would be embodied. Weaving, practiced by a growing number of women, also offered the government the opportunity to develop a profitable and rewarding activity for women, contributing to their emancipation^[283]

But none of this countenances the normal channels and approaches of ‘feminism’ due to the fact that “feminism in Africa fails to tackle issues affecting women and fails to engage men at the grassroots (Chidam’Modzi 1994/5)… Thus, Sankara… encouraged men towards cultural transformation, to recognise women as counterparts in the liberation struggle”^[284] Sankara also gave credit to the historical working class and world revolutionary tradition he had come to participate in:

We certainly owe to dialectical materialism the strongest light it has shed on the problems of women’s status, the light that allows us to grasp the problem of the exploitation of women within a generalized system of exploitation. […] In such a cycle of violence, inequality will only end with the advent of a new society, that is, when men and women enjoy equal social rights, resulting from upheavals in the means of production as well as in all social relations^[285]

Thomas Sankara spoke out as well against that fact that “women from the towns were concerned with the latest fad in feminist politics… demanded the right of the woman to be masculine.”^[286] This apparently is different from those who see ‘feminism’ in the West as something quite like the opposite. In practice, Sankara is questioning both, since he also sees ‘complementarity’ between sexes that can also be projected geographically and across other such lines, since Sankara asserts:

This war is one we can and will win—if we understand that we need one another and are complementary, that we share the same fate, and in fact, that we are condemned to interdependence^[287]

Since this time period, Burkina Faso spent decades piecing together its revolutionary history and maintaining a connection in this sense to their own revolutionary tradition, its rewards as well as its risks. However, in recollecting this history, the required approach of the present day also shows that Western ‘feminism’ cannot be applied to an anti-imperialist nation still beset by internal and external pressures. Such a weight requires revolutionaries to “break-away from certain universalised, narrowed, and polarising conceptualisation of patriarchy as the de facto problem for women.”^[288] Despite that recognition among today’s revolutionaries in Burkina Faso, other more urbanized and Western-educated social workers lament that “people are reluctant to hear anything about gender because they think that we NGO gender workers ‘are helping our affiliated development cooperation agencies to promote homosexuality. University students made this remark as well’ (D30, a female NGO worker).”^[289] So it is that “African women criticize their Western sisters for their ignorance and arrogance in wanting to speak on behalf of all women.”^[290] These popular masses are able to see right through Western ‘liberal’ universalism and “feminist foreign policy is argued to be yet another instrument that could help reproduce the unequal power relations, further gendered development coloniality through development cooperation, Western feminism, and neoliberal discourses”^[291]

In 2021, a former minister for the Advancement of Women, Nestorine Sangaré, stated that she rejected attempts by foreign NGO workers to introduce ‘outside’ cultural affectations, stating “[t]here are many homosexuals among foreign diplomats in Burkina Faso, and they encourage this practice… We should not make love everywhere, anytime, or with just anyone.”^[292] This reflects the desire among the masses in a largely traditional society like Burkina Faso to then move toward a “revival of ‘our true culture’ before colonisation that had certain checks and balances for both genders. This is not an idealisation or romanticisation of the past but an argument against certain mentalities that are quick to affirm ‘our culture’ does not allow women to do this or that.”^[293] The rise of Ibrahim Traore has inspired many to harken back to this 1980s period and attempt to revive and even to go beyond Sankara’s achievements. Thomas Sankara’s brother was interviewed in 2025, saying:

Absolutely. You can see the work being done throughout Burkina Faso today. That shows he [Traoré] is sincere. It’s not about promises, it’s real, concrete. There’s construction everywhere, we’re laying bricks, cobblestones, we couldn’t ask for more. If you can make it happen and prove it, people will support you without hesitation. That’s how it works. Today, people are ready to contribute to the country’s development. It’s visible. It’s not made up. It’s real.^[294]

In emphasizing labor and community-centered social development initiative, Sankara demonstrated, echoing Fourier, that “woman’s consciousness of herself is not only a product of her sexuality. It reflects her position as determined by the economic structure of society, which in turn expresses the level reached by humankind in technological development and relations between classes.”^[295] This road is arduous and challenges remain, though culture itself does not hurriedly ‘march’ to the demeaning orders barked by Westernizing ‘progress.’ Even today, it is surmised “approximatively two-thirds of rural women in Burkina Faso are in a polygynous union.”^[296]

It is forgotten that Marx’s thesis—that men become conscious of fundamental conflicts on the terrain of ideology—has an organic value; it is an epistemological rather than a psychological or moral thesis. This forgetting results in a frame of mind that looks on politics and all of history as a marche de dupes, a matter of conjuring tricks and sleight of hand. All cultural activity is thus reduced to ‘exposing’ tricks, provoking scandals, and prying into the private affairs of political figures^[297]

A few years after Sankara was killed, Balufu Bakupa-Kanyinda released a short documentary on the Captain’s life and political work. A poem is recited in short verses peppered throughout the film: “Let memory be our iron ring. Forget nothing on your way. The Sun never sets. It is man who moves away from the light.”^[298] Cheikh Anta Diop attempted to show “[m]atriarchy is a tribal institution, and, as such, should disappear with the decline of tribal authority and the appearance of the monarchy; but its deep-seated vestiges still remain in the whole society: this applies to Nubia, Egypt, and to all the other regions of Africa.”^[299] Regarding a Fulani heritage, Diop argues that for this widely spread ethnic group, “matriarchy is at the basis of their social organization, in spite of their nomadism.”^[300] For Ifi Amadiume, the long arc of African history shows that throughout the continent, “there was a matriarchal construct. This is not in the sense of queen rule (although the matriarchs sat like ‘queens’ in the marketplaces, monopolizing such space as women only and excluding anything male in some cases), but in the sense of a viable female-controlled autonomous system, both complementary and juxtaposed to the male or patriarchal system.”^[301]

Sankara once gave an interview with a Swiss journalist in 1985 telling him, “[o]f course, those who came before us were more or less obliged to act the way they did in order to show the way forward, even if sometimes they fell into acting like messiahs. But more and more, we are talking about universal civilization.”^[302] Let us not yet say that a ‘messiah’ has come forth, but we may still recognize that it was a veiled woman in Ouagadougou in 2017 who “asked President Macron about declassifying the French archives on the assassination of former revolutionary President Thomas Sankara of Burkina Faso, whose death is believed to have been orchestrated by France.”^[303] This was seen as a catalyzing moment that increased anti-French sentiment leading up to major political shifts in the country seen in recent years.

Therefore, it is also not surprising to see from Sankara a “dismissal of feminism as something that is contradictory to the core of the revolutionary transformation of gendered relationships within Burkinabè society, and the argument for complementary social relationships as an unavoidable inevitability.”^[304] In contradistinction to one aspect of Mayanja’s assertions, Sankara did in several places refer to countering ‘excessive’ self-indulgence, “Some forget by indulging in drink or drugs, others through the various kinds of perversity they engage in throughout life. Does anyone ever say that these men are forgetful?”^[305] What would they be forgetting?

Marx himself wrote to his wife asking rhetorically, “Who of my many calumniators and venomous-tongued enemies has ever reproached me with being called upon to play the romantic lead in a second-rate theatre? And yet it is true. Had the scoundrels possessed the wit, they would have depicted ‘the productive and social relations’ on one side and, on the other, myself at your feet. Beneath it they would have written: LOOK TO THIS PICTURE AND TO THAT. But stupid the scoundrels are and stupid they will remain, [forever and ever]”^[306] Marx shown as utterly subservient to the household Deity, this without prevaricating or clutching pearls at what he at one time referred to as a “spiritual essence of marriage.”^[307]

Once more here about the Veil. Kant wrote “[t]o see into the sun (the supersensible) without first being blinded by it is not possible; but to see it in the reflection (of reason that morally enlightens the soul), and even for practical purposes, is sufficient, as the elder Plato… since he cannot lift the “veil of Isis,” he nevertheless makes it so “thin” that one can sense the goddess beneath it.”^[308] Looking Eastward amidst so much failure in the Westerly direction, one also recognizes that “paradise is locked, and the cherub is behind us; we must make the journey around the world and see if perhaps it’s open again somewhere behind.”^[309] For Heidegger, poiesis refers to an “unveiling of the present,”^[310] and A-letheia etymologically refers to an absence of forgetting. By stepping into Heraclitus’ house, or being invited into this space, “it may be essential… to explain their ‘words’ to know the houses of their time, their heating appliances,“^[311] and in doing so, the ‘scandal’ of the East in relation to Westernizing private property’s seclusion of women in the household is revealed. The young Greeks relate to Heraclitus through the lens of women’s relegation, as in the ‘Backofen,’ “the workers… are being oppressed, forced to sit and be shaded, and some even to be exposed to the fire… the souls of those whose bodies are being feminized also become much sicker.”^[312] An opposite-facing revulsion was described by Wilhelm Liebknecht over 120 years ago as he recounted an incident where Richard Wolff’s distant relative, a comrade of Marx nicknamed “red Wolff”, had:

[A]dopted Parisian manners and was very shortsighted, noticed one evening on the street a graceful female figure that he followed. Although he encircled the veiled lady several times, she took no notice of him until he, becoming bolder, came so close to her face that he ‘could distinguish her features in spite of his ‘ shortsightedness and—“Hol’ mich der Deuwel (may the devil get me)—it was Mrs. Marx!” he ‘related to me excitedly next morning. “Well, what did she say to you?’ “Nothing at at all that is the devil of it!” “And what did you do? Did you apologize?’ “[may the devil get me ]—I ran away’… the red Wolff, who enjoyed a certain reputation on account of his imperturbable cynicism could not be induced for six months to enter the house of Marx, although I could tell him on the next day that Mrs. Marx, when I sounded her carefully, had broken out in merry laughter at the recollection of the inexpressibly bewildered and frightened face of the red Wolff thwarted in his role as Don Juan^[313]

The Cresting of the ‘marxist’-Feminist ‘Wave’ and History’s ‘Lethe’ of Redemption

Every woman is a human being—one cannot repeat that too often—and a human must have occupation, if he or she is not to become a nuisance to the world^[314]

Agrippa warned against the keeping of women “at home in idleness from her first years… as if incapable of a higher province… to conceive nothing but needle and thread.”^[315] In this case, the needle is ‘feminism’ abstrusely or idly thrust against Communism and the Marxist tradition. But no thread holds together what is being insinuated. This degeneration in historical accounting is also reflected as a breakdown in the relation to labor. For some time then, ’marxist’-Feminism has been bandied about and toyed with. Though to what actually existing political end remains unclear. A glaring problem “for Marxist Feminism is the question of its theoretical and practical approach…” and its inability to conceptualize about “sexual violence against women without constructing naturalised and essentialised dichotomies of masculinity versus femininity.”^[316] For others like M. Barrett, they see Foucault and critiques of ‘power’ as “a much more sophisticated methodology for providing an account of sexual identity than the traditional ‘social construction of gender.’”^[317]

According to Frigga Haug, the origin of ‘M-F’ can “only be vaguely delineated. A survey in 2014 asked 30 international Marxist Feminists already active in the 1970s about who coined the term [‘marxist’-Feminism.] Their responses generated only hesitant references to one another, but no clear results suitable for a historical account…”^[318] Its orientation and goals are even less certain. Roxanne Dunbar writes that ‘Marxist-Feminism’ “is a hybrid born in the late 1960s… not monolithic or even unified.”^[319] It is likely then, that those most ‘verbose’ among self-described radicalized or socialist feminists in this camp were never silenced by Marx or Marxist-Leninists. The ‘sub-field’ exists simply as an ‘illegible rage’ of ‘consciousness-raising’ amidst general so-called ‘neoliberal circularity’ and New Left stagnation. In a recently published ‘Symposium’ of these self-styled activists, “[t]he authors defined themselves as Marxist feminists” and the respondents “respected the diversity of their self-definitions as Marxist feminists.”^[320] Quite courteous. For others, “[t]he relationship between Marxism and Feminism has been a tenuous one… [many] have attempted to integrate feminism and Marxism and some have even given up the efforts.”^[321] Rosalind Petchesky, again writing in the late 1970s, showed that a supposed ‘risk’ here had apparently already been identified:

We have not worked out what this means, this hyphen. We think that a revolution which proceeds from the insights of Marxism and feminism is what we want; our own practice as a group leaves everything but the formalistic aspects of such a revolution to be delineated. All too often all this has meant is that we are Marxists to our feminist sisters and feminists to our Marxist brothers. The gravest danger . . . facing us right now is that we will settle for this hyphen, we will settle in with it comfortably as a self-explanation. It will become a counter, a cipher, instead of a project. It will be used as a way to get and insure our place in a declining economy, as a way of finding a comfortable berth that we try to curl into among the available niches in capitalist society, as a way of defining ourselves for the rest of our lives^[322]

Catharine Mackinnon would also comment blithely on this ‘hyphen’^[323] and its importance, or relativizing unimportance as the case may be. Mackinnon’s colleagues found that her arguments did “not even rise to the level of incoherence: [Mackinnon] is simply (undialectically) confused.”^[324] Simultaneously, Mackinnon would by the late 1980s drop any and all pretenses to ‘Marxist’ affinity and state, “no feminism worthy of the name is not methodologically post-marxist.”^[325] ‘Cyborg Feminist’ Donna Haraway would argue that “Catherine MacKinnon’s version of radical feminism is itself a caricature of the appropriating, incorporating, totalizing tendencies of Western theories of identity grounding action… [and] develops an even more authoritarian doctrine of experience.”^[326] That even earlier alleged allies such as Kollontai could not have foreseen such ‘great’ achievements by late 20^th century ‘Marxist feminists’ is its own indictment of the tendency. None among these contemporary career-oriented ‘theorists’ of Marxist-feminism can be identified within the real world as having contributed in any sense to proletarian internationalist victory. In place of women such as Sarah Bagley or Klara Zetkin or Guo Fenglian or even Lucy Parsons and millions of other working class fighters, there is only post-1960s ‘Marxist feminism’s’ attempt to glom onto and yet consequently dispose of the legacy of Marxism-Leninism. Some settle simply for this ‘radical’ thumbing of the nose and other gossip. One asks “in sticking out their tongues, have they literally blocked their ability to speak?”^[327] Although still very much obsessed with being perceived as ‘Marx’-linked, are the ‘marxist’-Feminists pretending to be this Other in order to deter working class responsibility toward something they themselves are at odds with? When there is ‘counter-revolution’ all around, should such posturing simply be taken as outbursts of pent-up frustration or ‘victim-centered engagement?’

It was Artyukhina herself who clearly indicated in 1930 that the end of the Zhenotdel was not the end of Soviet Party activity among working women. “There was a time when a separate department for work among women was necessary. As a result of this division of work the party was able to create a large group of women activists over the course of eleven years. Only thanks to the allocation of this work in the party has it become possible to grow a huge female asset in 11 years… [allowing the Party to] now carry out work among women with a general apparatus.”^[328] She did not see herself as a victim. She did not need to accost anyone to do ‘emotional labor’ on her behalf. It was also Stalin who made the observation at a moment of danger in his article “Light from the East” that “[a]t such a moment one “involuntarily” tends to lose sight of, to forget the far-off East, with its hundreds of millions of inhabitants enslaved by imperialism.... The imperialists have always looked upon the East as the basis of their prosperity. Have not the inestimable natural resources (cotton, oil, gold, coal, ores) of the East been an “apple of discord” between the imperialists of all countries? That, in fact, explains why, while fighting in Europe and prating about the West, the imperialists have never ceased to think of China, India, Persia, Egypt and Morocco, because the East was always the real point at issue. It is this that chiefly explains why they so zealously maintain “law and order” in the countries of the East—without this, imperialism’s far rear would not be secure… They need, furthermore, the “obedient” “young lads” of the countries of the East from whom they recruit the so-called “coloured” troops which they will not hesitate to hurl against “their own” revolutionary workers”… For the truth must be grasped once and for all that whoever desires the triumph of socialism must not forget the East”^[329]

It has been argued^[330], and argued by ‘marxist’-Feminists^[331] as well, that ‘primitive communism’ and an ‘Asiatic mode of production’ can be interwoven upon the basis of these transformations having taken place in a surmised or mythically-related past. What imperative does this place on Western attempts to grasp these intimations? W. Benjamin once quoted an early 1930s Adorno work on Kierkegaard stating, “in the interior, things do not remain foreign… [f]or the alienated, foreignness transforms itself into expression; the mute speak as ‘symbols’… [a]rchaic images emerge in the interior: that of the flower as organic life; that of the Orient as the nominal home of longing.”^[332] But if it’s universally accepted as a fact that couples quarrel, feminism’s long-stalled attempt to ‘marry’ Marxism shows at its basis that “[i]f Marx’s work (and the Marxist tradition, by implication) were indeed substantively afflicted by all the shortcomings that social scientists and feminists attribute to it, it would have been long forgotten.”^[333] From the vantage of the actually existing socialist sphere, two centuries of women working class fighters and Party leaders contribute immeasurably both to the construction and longevity of socialism. They have also known the dangers and risks associated with ‘diversions’ now called ‘marxist-’ or ‘materialist-‘ or ‘Socialist-Feminism.’ In fact, women in modern Party leadership in China recently indicated that:

Unfortunately, both Marxist feminism and feminist Marxism ultimately became mired in the quagmire of bourgeois ideology, from which they were unable to extricate themselves and increasingly lacked the capacity to explain and transform society. We attempt to clarify the distinction between Marxist women’s theory and the concept of Marxist feminism by tracing the development of Marxist feminist schools. From a developmental perspective, Marxist feminism refers to the second wave of the “women’s rights” movement that emerged in the West in the 1960s. This theoretical school, based on the integration of feminism and Marxism, has undergone three major stages of development. From the 1960s to the 1970s, Marxist feminism introduced political economic critique to the domestic sphere, focusing on the nature and value of housework and its relationship to women’s oppression. From the 1970s to the 1990s, it focused on how to integrate a gender perspective into classic Marxist concepts such as the division of labor, class, alienation, production relations, and the “two kinds of production,” as well as developing theoretical viewpoints and research perspectives on patriarchy and reproductive labor. After the 1980s, influenced by neoliberalism and postmodern thought, ideological critique replaced historical materialism and political economy as the primary theoretical weapon of Marxist feminists...

Marxist feminism is a theory conceived by white, middle-class women.... Their views, such as the wageisation of housework, are considered to be a ‘break with Marxism from within.’ Especially after being influenced by neoliberalism and postmodernism, Marxist feminist scholars have overly utilised theoretical categories such as ideology, discourse power, and identity politics, rarely discussing material factors and the overall state of society

Marxist feminism elevates gender struggle to an inappropriate level, advocating for female-centeredness to replace male-centeredness, and prioritizing opposition to patriarchy as the primary goal of women’s liberation, thus exaggerating gender differences and oppositions. It can be said that Marxist feminism is merely labeled “Marxism,” its theoretical perspectives and logic falling prey to bourgeois ideology. Therefore, Marxist feminism cannot provide a solid foundation for resolving women’s issues, nor can it achieve the grand goal of all human liberation, including women’s liberation. ^[334]

Alenka Zupančič writes that if the term ‘ethics’ is seen as “a method for the production of the impossible… we are necessarily led towards Sade’s position: since suffering and pain then become the mark of ethics, the rarity of ‘good’ becomes the omnipresence of ‘evil.’”^[335] Benjamin also highlights the ways in which fascination centered around “uncovering… mechanical aspects of the organism is a persistent tendency of the sadist.”^[336] While Andrea Dworkin’s own personally sadistic and ‘orgiastic’ travails are documented, her attacks against Bataille are not as often highlighted. Bataille’s shocking juxtapositions and flights of fancy may give the appearance of ‘bawdiness,’ yet Dworkin’s negative appraisal attempts to show him as an ”unproblematic representative of men in control. But the truth of the matter, to a significant degree, as a look at Bataille’s theory shows, is quite otherwise.”^[337] Who then could be said to be in control?

Carl Einstein too, a close collaborator with Georges Bataille on the journal Documents, recounts a Congolese tribe’s mask tradition in which once again the exact order of historical origin of the tradition is ‘forgotten’, although they still tell a “tale according to which the woman is the inventor of the mask and the men the usurpers is said to be a relic from the time when matriarchy was the rule in these societies. It is also possible that the two institutions of matriarchy and patriarchy coexist and share power haphazardly.”^[338] Here again a particular sequence is ‘forgotten,’ but not put totally out of mind. Conversely, the uncomradely criticism, empty vague accusations against no one in particular, and constant tacking back to breathless insistence on a grand historical narrative of personal victimization does not aid in organizing efforts. Instead, its aim is to pull a parodic emergency brake and needle them. There is an overall ‘decline’ in the ‘M-F’ tendency, as even in the late 1990s, it was admitted, “the intellectual project of reconciling a feminist and a Marxist understanding of the social world could be said to have been shelved - it was abandoned rather than resolved.”^[339] Only ‘hungry ghosts’ now stalk about, since “[t]here is, however, no way of being all things to all women within feminism.”^[340]

To go about revolution and to create this world which cannot be a priori described in complete arresting detail but only put into formation is “impossible without the female ferment” and due to this, for Marx, “[s]ocial progress can be measured only by the social position of women.”^[341] This impossible therefore is not labored or reared through ‘feminism,’ nor through ‘heartlessness’ seeking to one-sidedly negate such a thoroughly bourgeois disposition. For Marx, “all of this has no application to the original humans generated by generatio aequivoca; but this distinction only makes sense insofar as one considers humans as distinct from nature. Incidentally, this nature that precedes human history is… not the nature that exists anywhere today.”^[342] So locating the absolute and initial ‘origin’ of oppression perforce is not the ultimate focus for Marxists. Roland Boer says this is an initially “misplaced utopian drive [yet expresses the] desire not for a return to a better state that has been lost but the desire for a better society of the future.”^[343] For Benjamin, it is this ‘departure’ which arrives as much as an ‘origin’ running ahead, “[j]ust as the latter points us to a stranger who was on the premises, so there are words or pauses pointing us to that invisible stranger-the future-which forgot them at our place.”^[344]

Between Marxism historically and ‘marxist’ Feminism as it persists, there remains “an insurmountable parallax gap, the confrontation of two closely linked perspectives between which no neutral common ground is possible.”^[345] To reiterate, this gap is not traversed by means of hyphenation, nor does such a desired ‘possibility’ cut through all the historical exigencies that may have led to the removal of this hyphen symbolically. Household labor cannot be ‘waged’ precisely as long as the domestic sphere resists as a redoubt against monopoly finance and direct capitalist value extraction. If for Marx and Engels too, ‘communism in living,’ is associated with the earliest division of labor between sexes in the primitive household, it doesn’t matter how much one refutes “Bachofen’s glorification and mystification of sexuated community… [this] will still continue to exist until further notice.”^[346]

August Bebel thought “that the world has had quite enough male philosophers and can afford to dispense with their feminine counter-parts.”^[347] Radical feminists such as Louise C. Johnson averred that “theories of Marxism and patriarchy are ultimately incompatible… and Marxism itself may be thoroughly… unable to incorporate feminist concerns.”^[348] In law and modern liberal theories, the feminist ‘legal theorist’ Katherine Franke convincingly spoke of the “centrality and manipulation of sexuality and sexual rights in struggles for and against the civilizing mission that lies at the heart of key aspects of globalization.”^[349] Though inconvenient for some to fully grasp, ”U.S. feminists… looked forward to a spirit of global sisterhood, [they]… soon learned that most Third World women rejected “feminism” as hostile to men and believed that economic exploitation by the North, not patriarchy, was the major cause of women’s oppression.”^[350]

Lest we forget, women also originally wove the family together and provided a primary basis in the socially constitutive forms of household labor. Or they didn’t. In one or the other case, is it Woman or the “bitter cup” of historical necessity being overthrown by dallying and deception that diverts the present dissolution of bourgeois private property? ‘Wageisation’ of house work is also not a new debate, nor was it new in the early 1970s, though this has been revived to little practical avail several times in the last 125 years. Irene Leslie, writing as part of CPUSA leadership in the 1930s, responds to these attempts to ‘radically’ hand-wave Communists as insufficiently attentive to ‘feminist’ discourse:

Is it necessary to mention that not all women are oppressed? We should not, of course, discuss the question as one of the “weaker sex”; we do not speak of womankind as one homogeneous social mass. It would be nonsense to speak of the women of the ruling class as being “oppressed”, even when they are not allowed to be so active in the exploitation of the workers as are the men, even when they are only parasites upon parasites^[351]

Klara Zetkin is who anti-Marxists such as Maria Mies attempt to repossess their own personal academic claims to ‘radicalism’ from. Some early self-described ‘Marxist feminists’ in the late 1960s were able to admit that “[t]he class distinctions between women transcend their sex identity as women” or “[r]uling-class women have exactly the same interest in upholding capitalist society as their men have.”^[352] ‘Marxist feminism’ since the 1980s has merely further degraded and jettisoned any form of ‘Marxism’ it claimed to once adhere to. For instance, Mies asserts that Zetkin’s position as merely aping from “the rhetoric of class struggle, was not much different from the content of the bourgeois women’s movement, except that the radical feminists among the latter were much more anti-male.”^[353] This suggests Mies thought the bourgeois women’s movement at least had its ‘priorities’ straight. Although in practice, someone like Klara Zetkin had more success as a proletarian internationalist and leader in the working women’s movement than all ‘Marxist-Feminists’ in history combined. This despite the fact that Klara Zetkin too could highlight the imperative that revolutionary “male workers must stop viewing the female worker primarily as a woman to be courted if she is young, beautiful, pleasant and cheerful (or not). They must stop (depending on their degree of culture or lack of it) molesting them with crude and fresh sexual advances. The workers must rather get accustomed to treat female laborers primarily as female proletarians, as working-class comrades fighting class slavery and as equal and indispensable co-fighters in the class struggle.”^[354] This last sentence is what ‘anti-feminism’ and ‘feminism’ both seek to forget. Simply affixing the label ‘feminist’ post-hoc to a given female Marxist-Leninist fighter in history does not change that fact. The end of the Zhenotdel was not Stalin’s personally misogynistic cutting-short of women’s emancipation. It was not also not the end of women’s Party organization and activity in the Soviet Union. So it is ‘Marxist-Feminists’ who must reject or squawk about Klara Zetkin for demonstrating that:

Despite some points of contact and even identical demands in the struggle against the lack of rights of women, there is a fundamental opposition between [Marxism and feminism], as insurmountable as the antagonism between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. The class contradictions between exploiters and exploited are stronger than the feeling of female solidarity to which feminists appeal. Some manifestations of feminism may seem very radical. Let us recall the refusal of feminists in England to pay taxes, and the actions of suffragettes there. Nevertheless, feminism in its essence remains non-revolutionary, and often even counter-revolutionary…Working women can be seduced by feminism and distracted from the class struggle of the proletariat. But the proletarian women’s movement—such is its historical essence—even in its “peaceful” work remains revolutionary; in the spirit of revolutionary Marxism, it devotes all its thoughts directs further reforms, to the overthrow of the class rule of the bourgeoisie, to the overthrow of the bourgeois system^[355]

It may be said that we “are all dripping in the blood of previous readings,”^[356] or perhaps assigning individual blame for dislocations in history is not the task of Marxism. Here Benjamin’s ‘messianism’ and the traditions of Marxism-Leninism in practice both have instructive and corrective purposes for Marxists led astray by ‘feminism.’ It was Marx and Engels themselves who had to go back to pre-history and the cutting edge of scientific fields like anthropology and ethnology to show that a ‘matriarchate’ could also have a “powerfully subversive impact regarding the history of the family and male power.”^[357] The merit of such a discovery, as Engels explained, and “Bachofen argued, united the sensuous and the otherworldly, Orient and Occident. He hoped to revive a long-lost mythic world of immanent life, femininity, and sisterhood that predated Hellenism.”^[358] Despite Engels also pointing out shortcomings in Bachofen’s conclusions and methods, the “evolutionary strain in Bachofen, in which history can be seen as ‘a process of redemption,’ is overwhelmed by his Hegelian preference for ongoing struggle, for dualisms never resolved once for all time.”^[359] Catherine Liu from a more or less tangential angle addresses ways in which this obtains willingly or not in discourses of ‘virtue hoarding’ and ‘trauma disclosure.’ These professionals and media personalities then establish themselves “in a new matriarchal multiverse governed by unstable but transgressive subatomic particles, zigzagging through reality, ready to blow our minds and bend our genders and our taste cultures.”^[360]

In the process of a revolutionary ‘production,’ the necessarily impossible melding of elements in a complementary syzygy also reveals how “in that Divine and universal one, he comes to understand to such an extent that he becomes of necessity included, absorbed, united.”^[361]

In the idealistic or miscalculated attempts to marry Marxism and feminism, there has only been “in the same sense, plastic figurations… the expression of an intransigent materialism, of a recourse to everything that compromises the established powers in matters of form, ridiculing traditional entities, naively competing with scarecrows that strike one with stupor.”^[362] But here is also great frustration and revelation since movement from day into night shows how this eschatological object is “capable of attracting to itself with a force as compelling as that which directs simple organisms toward the sun.”^[363] Bachofen too wrote of a kind of ‘lamp,’ where “[b]y its light Psyche recognizes the divinely beautiful form of her nocturnal visitor, whom her sisters had described to her as a hideous dragon… [t]he flame flickers restlessly while Psyche gazes upon the forbidden sight.”^[364]

Marxism-Leninism and the actually existing socialist sphere never needed Western academics to grade their progress. Engels states “[o]ur ideologist may turn and twist as he likes, but the historical reality which he cast out at the door comes in again at the window, and while he thinks he is framing a doctrine of morals and law for all times and for all worlds, he is in fact only fashioning an image of the conservative or revolutionary tendencies of his day—an image which is distorted because it has been torn from its real basis and, like a reflection in a concave mirror, is standing on its head.”^[365] One reason is that while ‘marxist’-Feminist self-delusion misdirects into a stultified abyss, the rising Eastern light of the sun moves overhead to give sight rather than to blind.

[L]oosened from the knots of perturbation from the senses, free from the fleshly prison of matter, whence they no longer see their Diana as through a hole or window, but having thrown down the walls to the earth, the eye opens to a view of the whole horizon. So that he sees all as one^[366]

The lamp’s form reminds one of Eastern lands; the shade’s movement, of mild oriental breezes. The floor is concealed a carpet woven from a special kind of osier, which immediately betrays its foreign origin. For the moment, I let the lamp become the keynote of my landscape. I am sitting there with her outstretched on the floor, under the lamp’s flowering. At other times I let the osier rug evoke thoughts of a ship, of an officer’s cabin-we sail out into the middle of the great ocean. When we sit at a distance from the window, we gaze directly into heaven’s vast horizon.... no foreground, but the infinite immediacy of the horizon^[367]

Engels could not mince words in pointing out:

The determining factor in history is, in the last resort, the production and reproduction of immediate life . . . the production of the means of subsistence . . . and the production of human beings themselves, the propagation of the species^[368]

Lenin applied Marxism in the age of imperialism to show that:

[R]eal freedom for women is possible only through communism. The inseparable connection between the social and human position of the woman, and private property in the means of production, must be strongly brought out. That will draw a clear and ineradicable line of distinction between our policy and feminism^[369]

George Bataille in September 1933 says that for Western revolutionaries seeking to retain and maintain a real world ‘optimism’ amidst real world setbacks, “if a renewed conception no longer represents revolutionary demands, naively, as a due whose collection is implied, but, painfully, as a perishable force, this force, inscribing itself in a blind chaos, loses the mechanical character that it assumed in a fatalistic conception: just as in every anxious passion, it is liberated and enlarged by the awareness of possible death.”^[370] Could such an awareness of this danger be the reason Bataille was misrepresented by notable late 20^th century ‘feminists’ like A. Dworkin? This danger and what Engels contrasts to ‘free-love’ opportunism, or its dogmatic counterparts, is exactly what spurs the opportunist’s retreat from concerns regarding class and the state. For self-described ‘marxist’- and radical Feminists since the Cold War period, “[s]ome claimed patriarchal ideology as the underlying cause of women’s oppression, some biological differences between the sexes, and others the operation of the mode of production... We are still left with the problem that neither marxist nor radical feminism can stand alone as a solution to what is wrong with feminism.”^[371] Engels makes his own commentary on this ‘doll’ stereotype infiltrating and waylaying workers’ movements and trying to convince others of Marx’s ‘shortcomings.’ He too foresaw these ‘idle’ diversions in ‘critical theory’ as merely being “amusements while waiting for the working class to get moving and sweep away all these mannequins and femmequines.”^[372]

Furthermore, “marxist feminists drew on radical feminist notions of patriarchy (the generalized power of men over women) and on the notion of sexual politics (the general struggle of women against men’s power over them)… The concept of patriarchy then became one of the most central, but also one of the most confused terms in feminist use.”^[373] This confusion has never practically lent itself toward a ‘marriage,’ let alone a functional or coherent coupling, between Marxism and ‘feminism.’ “Marxist feminism was far from being a union of two compatible theories. Some early attempts to draw on marxist insights to address feminist problems were philosophically quite removed from classical Marxism.”^[374] Such a proposal as an “alliance [is] of course, blocked by the more fundamental anti-Marxism which feminism has not, or perhaps is not capable of transcending.”^[375] Therefore, no necessary distinction must be made between ‘feminism’ and ‘bourgeois feminism’ because, from a Marxist-Leninist standpoint, the former is the decontextualized & empty ideological drapery masking the latter’s material interests. ‘Feminism,’ as a historical and political identification, emerged from and is fundamentally shaped as part of bourgeois society. Coupled with ‘anti-feminism,’ the most commonly associated central tenets—individual rights, legal recognition within the existing property structure, and a politics of identity or personal grievance against vaguely personified ‘evils’— are entirely bourgeois idealist stances.

Conclusion

I looked at Paradise and found poor people forming the majority of its inhabitants; and I looked at Hell and saw that the majority of its inhabitants were women^[376]

Do you have a mother?... Then stay with her, for Paradise is beneath her feet^[377]

To claim a “proletarian feminism” or a “Marxist feminism” is to compose irreconcilably antagonistic terms, no less than claiming such a coupling meets its enemy in a much feared “Marxist-chauvinism” or “proletarian misogyny.” None of these terms link to any existing class formation. There can be no attempt to mask the odious posture of the oppressor class with the historical mission of the oppressed. The working women’s movement is not a branch of feminism; it is its dismantling and overcoming. One way or another, relations of material production and the state almost always get “overlooked in the works of… Marxist feminists who strive to go beyond the explanation of women’s oppression and who strive to propose radical changes in the way human society is today organized.”^[378] Simply accusing Marxism in general of ‘class reductionism’ and placing the blame for such offenses, and their vulgar reality, on ‘men’ in general does not endow ‘Marxist-Feminism’ with a revolutionary or coherent critique. It’s also not a workable political alternative. Here perhaps the adage that even the ‘radically’ effeminate are, “too suspicious of men in general, and not enough in particular,”^[379] loses or gains fashionable currency periodically. This is also ascribable to the fact that, especially in the West while, “the new cannot be born… a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”^[380]

Contemporary scholar Sophie Salvo argues that Bachofen’s Das Mutterrecht must be read “as a text concerned not only with the distribution of power between the sexes, or the trajectory of human culture, but also with the impossibility of absolute knowledge under patriarchy.”^[381] For Marx, a ‘midwife’ is necessary in this arduous labor, this midwife is ‘a state of siege’ for “it should not be forgotten that it was by bayonets, likewise—and the bayonets turned against the people, at that—that it had to be protected in its mother‘s womb, and that by bayonet it had to be planted on earth.”^[382] Such a process of ‘creation’ that is also producing these traumatic symptoms is itself tied with immense risk & an ‘immanentization’ with both primordial and eschatological scope. In either case, “marxist-feminism cannot be argued to offer a robust [Marxist] understanding”^[383] of history and reality, and due to the fact that it and “radical feminism [uphold] the definition of the feminine as marginal, [the] vision remains fundamentally apolitical.”^[384] Another major symptom is precisely this prevailing and overwhelming rejection of class struggle in Western countries that gives someone like Jodi Dean, though herself misled as concerns Marxism-Leninism in general, the reflexive sense to accurately describe “Marxist-Feminism” in the present day. This amounts to little more than frenetic idleness and salacious indiscipline. For the half-in and half-out American ‘left,’ past notions of class solidarity:

[M]ay seem outmoded today. In some organizations and movement spaces, there is a great deal of anxiety around sex. People are viewed as predators and victims rather than comrades. Nuanced calculations of privilege and hierarchy replace suppositions of equality… Suspicion supplies its own erotics of paranoia and punishment. Rather than strengthening solidarity and comradeship, “barbed eros” divides groups, sometimes from within but also from without as self-designated internet sex cops spread accusations and lies, getting off by feeling that they have the power to destroy^[385]

This is not a semantic game but a life-and-death political distinction. Here also, a convenient and counterrevolutionary insistence upon an all-pervasive ‘aporia’ between political necessity and personal trauma or navel-gazing is “in sight such an occurrence… [also] forgetting the revolutionary interests of [the working class] through temporary comfort.”^[386] In opposition to this, a historically indexed working women’s movement, as embodied in practice by the traditions of fighting and martyred Communist women of the past, the victorious Bolsheviks, and revolutionary parties still in power today, understands that:

I. Its enemy is capital and imperialism, not men. It recognizes that the working-class man is not the oppressor but under the same exploitative system, a potential comrade-in-arms. The aim is not to win a larger share of the spoils of exploitation and blame for women’s oppression (the feminist goal) but to overcome the system of exploitation itself.

II. Its struggle is collective, not individual. It does not seek the “empowerment” of individual women to become prison guards or critical critics. It seeks the collective liberation of the entire working class, without which women’s liberation is impossible. Its focus is on organizing the millions of women in factories, fields, and homes, not on the introspective dramas of the aspiring professional-managerial class.

III. Its method is class struggle, not moralistic accusation. It does not traffic in the vague, ahistorical language of “patriarchy” as a trans-historical demon haunting all men. Instead, it provides a concrete, scientific analysis of the patriarchal family as a historically specific economic unit that arose with private property and serves the ruling class by ensuring the unpaid reproduction of surplus value and the hereditary transmission of wealth. The fight is against this material institution and its development beyond that impasse at the economic base, not to shiver in a haunted house of gendered phantoms, accusing phantoms in turn.

Marxism-Leninism is not a self-involved utopian proposition but a living science of revolution. It does not deal in futuristic speculations about “post-gender” societies. The working class Party and traditions in practice therefore point to the actually existing historical movement and objectively developing conditions emerging as it acquires and consolidates proletarian state power: In the early USSR, it meant the immediate granting of full legal equality, the establishment of the Zhenotdel to politically organize the most backward masses of women, the collectivization of domestic labor through communal kitchens, child care and laundries, and the heroic, difficult, and often violent struggle to liberate women in Central Asia from oppressive bondage. It meant understanding that the limitations of the bourgeois family would not “wither away” overnight by decree or brow-beating the strawman domestic tyrant, but would be revolutionized through the material transformation of its economic foundations and resulting political movement. For ‘Marxist-Feminists’ of the present day, such bleary-eyed criticisms are more likely to attack actually existing socialism in a way that resembles Nanette Funk’s ‘A Very Tangled Knot’ writing from the 2010s. Although, Funk is quite right to point out that the ‘movement’ for them consists of “young self-identified Marxist feminists… resurrecting Marxist feminism and... [making] vague… critiques… talking yet one more time of ‘wages for housework’”^[387] This with zero (0) corresponding victories for ‘marxist’-Feminists in proletarian internationalist struggle or party building. Marxist-Leninists on the other hand never simply disregard labor or promise private property’s abstract abolition by decree. Nor is this based upon ‘idle talk’ concerning sex and marriage in smug and breathless terms. Instead, it is the removal of such exploitative economic functions (inheritance, the woman’s role as household servant etc.), allowing a ‘necessary’ to potentially become, for the first time, the union based on free association rather than bestial compulsion or class subjugation. This gritty, practical, and ongoing process of social transformation, full of really existing contradictions and setbacks—not the idealist fantasy of a ‘radical’ college seminar or public display of ‘subversive’ mannerism, attire and flaunting of mass society’s strictures or futurity.

The retrieval of real and revolutionary ‘fighting history’ may lead to the clearing away of so much rubbish cluttering forward momentum. When a ‘thrice-born’ mythology and fetishization around the word ‘feminism’ tries to displace, and attempts the assigning of blame to the tradition of Marxism-Leninism, this moves to active hostility. When the middle-class oversocialized Western feminist accuses Marx of smoothing over “patriarchal” shortcomings^[388], she reveals her own profound historical illiteracy and bourgeois subjectivity. This empty moralistic verdict is made against a movement that organized and helped facilitate the self-emancipation of millions of oppressed women, by the standards of even most ‘feminists’’ own individualistic and moralistic requirements. Casting such aspersions therefore is a blithe forgetting, or the admission of never having learned, that real struggle isn’t about reading the right theorists, perfecting one’s language, or self-flagellation for ‘gender essentialist’ claims while decrying sex reductionism; it is centered on the building of working class power to dismantle the oppressive state apparatus of capitalist class society. For instance, in self-described ‘critical theory’ developed in ‘Marxist-Feminism’ since the 1980s:

[Maria] Mies claims that the communists did not consider peasant women to be involved in productive work. However, Mao states clearly that this is the case (Mao 1965d, 44-46). Mies also states that the maoists did not talk of ‘patriarchy’ but conceptualized women’s oppression as being merely a remnant of feudalism. But again, in Mao (1965d), which was written in 1927, women’s oppression is both stressed and specifically called patriarchal. It is hard to not come to the conclusion that Mies’ understanding of China is limited^[389]

It is not for nothing then that “M-F” writers themselves have pointed out that Maria Mies and others “distanced themselves from Marxism,”^[390] as a label in order to try and drive further theoretical wedges between workers. This attempt to depict waged-work under capitalism, debt, rent, and alienating market discipline as mere self-concerned distractions while the ‘real world’ consists of anxiety-ridden furtive gossip and place-hunting parasitism. Pointing out an overemphasis on “household” labor as requiring exchange relations to the point of claiming that house-work should be “exploited” in Marx’s economic sense is to reverse the order of the development of productive forces and deny historical materialism. Housework and child-rearing have long been waged services provided from servile positions occupied by a mass of unproductive servants, who Marx deems ‘jenkinses.’ Household labor for workers under capitalism therefore is that which cannot dwell in the anarchistic deprivations of the exterior ‘oikos.’ Marx says that under capitalism, “truly productive workers would have to bear these consumption costs themselves and perform their own unproductive labor,”^[391] and this is what ‘marxist’-Feminism appears most readily to forget or turn away from. This is also why, in the interstices of some of the most lauded ‘marxist’-Feminist writers, a subtle and self-aware critique stands out since ‘M-F’ as a term “stands before the task of synthesis as if nothing essential to either theory fundamentally opposes their wedding.”^[392] As though the ‘hyphenation,’ whether present or not, could remove the confusion and lack of material results after 50+ years of ‘Marxist feminists’ (in)action. The ridiculousness of this self-convinced New Left breakdown most visibly manifests in the disorganization at the material foundations of Western nations’ Communist Party relevance and practice. This history is also at risk, and once sacrificed to an idealistic and insistent socially liberal ‘feminist’ or ‘environmentalist’ discursive posture, it eventually sees assertions such as “women, nature and the ‘Third World’ stood on the side of the exploited while all men stood on the side of the exploiters.”^[393] A totally mystifying liquidation of solidarity. This results in a retreat to dehumanized and savage caricatures and to a characteristically mute ‘subaltern’ propped up for Northern and Western ‘feminist’ idleness to hide behind. This too presents its own vain recursive immobilization. One need only read Marx in 1844 to arrive upright before the horizon:

The direct, natural, and necessary relation of person to person is the relation of man to woman. In this natural species-relationship man’s relation to nature is immediately his relation to man... In this relationship, therefore, is sensuously manifested, reduced to an observable fact, the extent to which the human essence has become nature to man, or to which nature to him has become the human essence of man… This relationship also reveals the extent to which man’s need has become a human need; the extent to which, therefore, the other person as a person has become for him a need—the extent to which he in his individual existence is at the same time a social being^[394]

The rise of capital in the West intensified the historical subjugation faced by women, but also paradoxically created the conditions necessary for the negation of that suffering. It “unsexed” men and women alike, as Engels noted, tearing them from the sluggishness of rural life and assembling them in factories, transforming the isolated drudgery of the household more and more into socialized, collective labor. This process, brutally dehumanizing, also created the objective basis for a new, proletarian development that could both accelerate ahead and return to the long-established relations of human community. The early organizing of women shoebinders and tailoresses, the heroic role of Elisabeth Dmitrieva and the pétroleuses of the Paris Commune, and the mass mobilization of rabotnitsii (female workers) in Russia demonstrated that the path to women’s liberation was not through an alliance with ‘feminists’ against ‘patriarchy’ in the abstract; seeking a place within some idealized structure of ‘post-patriarchy,’ but through the class struggle to do away with exploitative economic structures altogether. Subsequent development in China and Southeast Asia and Africa also showed these proletarian socialist movements around the globe further extended the fault line between Marxism and ‘feminism.’ Although 1940s Soviet anthropology could show that “the very idea of ​​matriarchy is organically alien to class ideology, and class science will always remain hostile to this idea. Perhaps no other topic in the history of bourgeois science so vividly reveals the class face of this science, its class bias and prejudice,”^[395] many bourgeois ‘radicals’ desperately attempt to obscure and mask bourgeois disposition on such questions by only emphasizing ‘patriarchy’ moralistically. Therefore, the fight for the women’s communist movement was never concerned with good or bad men or ‘masculinism,’ but in standing alongside other class-conscious workers against a capitalist system that savagely pitted them against one another as rivals and reduced both sexes to mere instruments of profit. This too accompanies a kind of forgetting, yet as Benjamin writes, “time not only extinguishes the traces of all misdeeds but also — by virtue of its duration, beyond all remembering or forgetting… helps to complete the process of forgiveness, though never of reconciliation.”^[396] Forgiveness here of a kind that only the potency and legitimacy of workers’ dictatorship may mete out, as for those whose only route is ‘critical critique,’ and to the extent this imperative “even when it commandeth itself… must it atone for its commanding. Of its own law must it be come the judge and avenger and victim.”^[397]

Considerable time has yet passed since most of the events described here took place. Skeptically passing over daily events is common, but disavowing them loses sight of the fact that this too is its own particular context for offensive maneuvers or holding actions within historiography. One can also see this flippant and untoward treatment of Marxism and Marxists by the academics and ‘not-so-academic’ commentators in their ‘marxist’-Feminist blogosphere posts or on their symposia ‘webinar’ calls. These insidious forms of forgetting are thus merely contemporary obsessions over such-and-such virtuous label in the abstract. Highly idealized institutional hybrids, born of the late 20^th century New Left’s march through indifference away from the working class’ fighting history. They are a theoretical and practical nullity. Dana Cloud wrote in the 1990s that “when the raising of consciousness is seen as an end in itself, feminist practice runs up against the wall of the therapeutic, as the working over of identity replaces politics.”^[398] As the Chinese Communist analysis correctly identifies, ‘marxist’-Feminism remains a bourgeois ideology that utilizes the ultra-impotent language of ‘discourse power, and identity politics’ while rarely discussing the material factors of class and state power. It is the needle without the thread, and a performative radicalism that critiques its own hysterically termed and ever-pressing brutish ‘toxic masculinity’ while unable to conceive of a revolutionary apparatus or class-equipped approach capable of smashing the state which materializes it.

Risks to the ‘tradition’ of Marxism do not merely stem from frontal assaults by open anti-Communists. As Marx himself wrote, the working class fighting women up to the present also take up and re-acquire a tradition that, if only in hindsight, includes all whose deeds amount to the “heroic, noble, and devoted, like the women of antiquity.”^[399] One doesn’t need ‘marxist’-Feminism, you need world historically proven working class revolutionary practice. One doesn’t need “false emancipation of women”^[400] as Marx described it, nor another digression into another ‘post-’ or ‘sur-’ or ‘xeno-‘ long-toothed pseudo-psychoanalytic misunderstanding. The working women’s movement therefore, armed and supported and sustained through the achievements of proletarian party leadership and Marxism-Leninist victories, does not seek an exalted or worshipful place in the pre-existing terror of history. It stirs working masses from inactivity or self-defeatism, suturing the present and previous struggles into one united red banner. This is the rallying point of that emerging future where identifiable categories of oppressor and oppressed become unrecallable.

Starting from ‘origins’ may therefore appear as a dizzying aside, but the “Origin is not only Entstehung, an emergence, a miraculous birth… [it’s] above all, Ursprung: an original moment that is always renewed… ‘The Origin is the goal.’”^[401] In reference to these primary developments between the primitive and undifferentiated ‘horde’ up to higher phases, Lenin says, “[i]n reality, it was not the idea of ​​God that curbed “zoological individualism”; it was both the primitive herd and the primitive commune.”^[402] These primitive communities thus were never “ahistorical phenomena that invariably everywhere and everywhere preserve their once-and-for-all properties and features.”^[403] They changed both with the development of property and family, but also with the position of women. Zupančič asserts that “what is included as something (as an entity) receives the very logical impossibility on which the alternative mother/not-mother is based… as included in reality, the impossible-real can only be a specter.”^[404] In examining ‘marxist’-Feminism as a fad as well as Communism as a ‘real movement,’ historiography since the 19^th century also demonstrates that everything, with only one sure concrete exception, abstracts to not-Mother.

Marx himself chided anthropologists with regard to the ‘Sumpfzeugung,’ or inhuman ‘primordial ooze,’ yet he observed as well that humanity emerged from “life in the horde.”^[405] Bachofen also shows that this movement through mother, or history, is the dynamic “in which all the others find their conclusion and foundation.”^[406] Today also, we do not necessarily have to invoke a caricature against the ‘dogmatic feminine’ in order to show that a dark looking-glass of clairvoyantly murky and wide-eyed myopia misleads in either case. If, as for Kristeva “the abject is edged with the sublime,”^[407] this ‘edge’ too is also that which is only diaphanously concealed. Inferences made in this regard, whether regarding paternity or the future, also stridulate against one another, engendering friction between total forgetting and grasping forward. For Simone de Beauvoir, though she believes that “[s]ociety has always been male,”^[408] she unintentionally points out for our purposes here regarding, “the fact that governs woman’s actual condition is the obstinate survival of extremely antique traditions into the new civilization that is just appearing in vague outline.”^[409] In attempting to rip away that which conceals this future, one threatens to also uncover what “no mortal has hitherto drawn aside;”^[410] and this vouchsafed obscurity in turn also shows “there must be Veil upon veil behind.”^[411]

Jogging the memory then becomes an act of reintegration with luminant and telluric or base material dignity. Rosa Luxemburg shows that investigating such apparently unreachable early forms of human society clarifies “noble survivals of the obscure past [which offer] a hand to the revolutionary efforts of the future; the circle of knowledge [is] closed harmoniously” and the era of capitalism and subjugation of man (or woman) by man appears “merely as a tiny temporary stage on the great cultural advance of mankind.” ^[412] Bachofen continues here in his own illustrious fashion, “the use of information that is widely separated in terms of ethnicity and time is often the only means of gaining light. Only by considering all clues can we succeed in properly organizing the fragmentary information.”^[413] Such an acknowledgement here references both the historical and historical materialist sources, as well as the everyday and practical, since a revolutionary without this scientific standpoint, as Marx argues, “will lead only to ultimate destruction, and not to the salvation of the suffering… tantamount to an empty and dishonest game of preachers… on the one hand… [and on the other] only asses…. [listening] with open mouths.”^[414] To avoid such pitfalls is to focus attention where so much muddle emerges among those whose mere “forgetting [has become] an antidote to the suffering, a relief from the harshness of her existence.”^[415] But what kinds of unconscious or ‘intellectual property’ and forms of discipline/self-discipline must Marxists leave behind to sustain and edify posterity? In the West, the memorials and traditions of proletarian internationalism and Marxism-Leninism must constantly be won anew from the ravages of parasitic boredom and excess.

In the early 20^th century, Austrian Catholic priest Martin Gusinde wrote on his ethnological contacts among the hunter-gatherer Yámana tribe in the Southern Cone. In his observations, Gusinde describes how tribal origin myths explained a narrativized ‘coup’ against the formerly all-female cult leadership that once controlled the tribe’s most important initiation rituals. The inquisitive ‘Sun-man’ became curious as to the ‘true nature’ of spirits and tall-tales used to ‘trick’ men into serving the aims of the women. Some women showed him that “[t]here are no others (spirits) there. It is the women themselves who scream and yell to frighten the men; Tänuwa doesn’t do these things.”^[416] In the story, the men find this out and react harshly, chasing these women down and killing many of them. This is why men now lead these rituals and ‘gained the upper hand,’ in the sex relation. Glimpses have also been given by anti-Marxist ‘socialist’ and ‘radical’ feminists themselves into their own mythologies, which are then used to remain in a frightened state as a result of counter-Promethean anxieties. On one hand, if a “privileged positioning and explanatory potential of gender difference as the origin of oppression”^[417] may be called into question, it is also observed that “while we theorize endlessly about the oppression of women, we all too frequently forget that the position of the one is maintained only through the exploitation of the other and that such a relationship leaves little concrete room for sisterhood.”^[418] Here, the working class Party in its struggle to attain international proletarian victory or redeem the past, provides either a frame upon which to further construct and preserve heirlooms of a working peoples’ history, or the constant and ignoble drilling in repeat failure which nevertheless “strives to turn toward that sun which is rising in the sky of history.”^[419] A sun disposed to making light work of the necessary, and casting its long shadows beyond the sacral and the omphalic.

This training made the working class forget both its hatred and its spirit of sacrifice, for both are nourished by the image of enslaved ancestors rather than that of liberated grandchildren.^[420]

We think that had the wall been still higher — had it encircled us yet more closely, there would still have been light above; and, unless Heaven itself is shut from our view, there will be bright starbeams, and calm moonlight, and blessed sunshine, coming down, and struggling towards us through the darkened window.^[421]

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Footnotes

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[2] Thomas Sankara, Women’s Liberation and the African Freedom Struggle, (Toronto: Pathfinder Press, 2005), 19.

[3] Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1968), 257.

[4] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Collected Works Volume 10 Marx and Engels 1849-51, (Lawrence & Wishart, 2010), 245.

[5] J.J. Bachofen, Das Mutterrecht, (Stuttgart: Verlag Von Krais & Hoffmann, 1861), 272.

[6] Juan Sebastián Gómez-Jeria, “About Alfred Baeumler’s Nietzsche. 3. ‘Bachofen and Nietzsche’,” Journal of Advances in Education and Philosophy, Vol. 7 Iss. 11, (Nov. 2023), 475.

[7] Christophe Darmangeat, Primitive Communism Is Not What It Used To Be, (Leiden | Boston: Brill, 2024), 11-12.

[8] Isaac N. Vinnikov, “Письма Бахофена к Моргану,” Советская этнография, № 6, 1934, 81.

[9] Alexandr A. Busygin, “50 лет „Происхождения семьи, частной соб-ственности и государства” Ф. Энгельса Советская этнография, № 6, 1934, 16.

[10] Alfred Bäumler, Bachofen und Nietzsche, (Zürich: Neuen Schweizer Rundschau, 1929), 16.

[11] Bäumler, Bachofen und Nietzsche, 28-30.

[12] Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution, (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1976), 93.

[13] Damian Valdez, “Bachofen’s Rome and the Fate of the Feminine Orient,” Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 70 Iss. 3, (July, 2009), 443.

[14] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, WERKE: Band 32, (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1974), 51.

[15] Bachofen, Das Mutterrecht, 136.

[16] Peter Davies, “Woman Warriors, Feminism, and National Socialism: The Reception of J.J. Bachofen’s View of Amazons among German and Austrian Right-Wing Women Writers,” in Women and Death 2 edited by Sarah Colvin and Helen Watanabe-O’Kelly, (Rochester NY: Camden House, 2009), 56.

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On September 16, 2022, a young Iranian woman named Mahsa Amini passed away after an incident that occurred under the custody of the Islamic Republic’s Guidance Patrol, a force tasked with enforcing and promoting Islamic values and cultural norms. What at first seemed like normal protests by young Iranians who had diverging cultural values from the Iranian state soon turned into a global media campaign advocating regime change and in many cases, war.

The Kurdish ethnic-minority background of Mahsa Amini was strongly emphasized as activists sought to use this event to achieve their dreams of splitting up Iran into several smaller states, just as was done with Yugoslavia, the USSR, and other multi-ethnic states over the last half-century. The slogan that the movement’s activists championed for their grand campaign was ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ (WLF), a mantra invented long before these events by Abdullah Öcalan, the founder of a militant Kurdish political organization called the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) [1]. 

Within a matter of days after Amini’s passing, the entirety of the vast foreign-based Iranian media network, as well as Iranian social media and large parts of the Western media, were mobilized to express their condemnation and to step by step, ramp up their rhetoric into advocation for an end to the 43-year-old Islamic Republic. Separatist groups joined a coalition of Communists, Monarchists, Liberals, and the infamous Mojahedin-e Khalq Organisation (MeK) as calls for a violent overthrow of the Iranian state spread like wildfire. 

Iran quickly fell into a heightened state of hybrid warfare. Even many of the normally cooler heads and analysts started to say that the revolutionary Islamic state founded in 1979 was finally coming to an end. Day after day, night after night, Iranian and international audiences were bombarded with stories of unparalleled atrocities allegedly committed by the Iranian state and its supporters.

Alas, the supposedly million-man protest movement ended, and a relative state of normalcy returned. But why did this all happen? What caused the ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ movement to become such a sensation? And who benefited from it all? This extensive and exclusive investigation will examine these questions, discuss what occurred, and analyze how everything fits into the broader context of Iranian and international politics.

Contents

• Section One: Timeline of Events

• Section Two: Atrocity Narratives

  • Martyrs

    • Mahsa Amini

    • Nika Shakrami

    • Hadis Najafi

    • Sarina Esmailzadeh

    • Khodanur Lojei

    • Asra Panahi

    • Aida Rostami

    • Armita Geravand

  • Shah Cheragh Terror Attack

  • Izeh Terror Attack and the Death of Kian Pirfalak

  • Schoolgirl Poisonings

  • The Curious Case of Hossein Ronaghi

• Section Three: The Scale of Protests and Strikes

  • Protest Numbers and Popularity

  • Strikes

    • University Strikes

    • Workers’ Strikes

    • Shopkeepers and Bazaar Strikes

    • General Strikes

• Section Four: Media

  • Social Media

    • Twitter

    • Instagram

    • Whatsapp

  • Satellite Television Channels

    • Iran International

    • BBC Persian

    • Manoto TV

    • Voice of America and Radio Farda

• Section Five: The Role of Foreign States

  • Saudi Arabia

    • Iran International

    • Funding of Terrorist and Separatist Groups

  • The United States and NATO

    • Sanctions

    • Terror Networks

    • Mojahedin-e Khalq Organization

    • Media and NGOs

  • Israel

    • Relationships with Opposition Leaders

    • The Republic of Azerbaijan

    • Support for Separatist Groups

• Section Six: The Power Struggle in Iran

• Section Seven: The Saudi Deal

• Conclusion

• Bibliography

Section One: Timeline of Events

9 August 2022

• Former Prime Minister and leader of the 2009 Green Movement, Mir-Hossein Mousavi, published an article questioning Iranian regional and military policy and speculating that Iran’s Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei wishes to establish a new monarchy in Iran and arrange the succession of his son Mojtaba Khamenei after his passing [1].

16 September

• Mahsa Amini was pronounced dead and protestors gathered at Kasra Hospital in Tehran [2].

• The New York Times published an article stating that the Leader of Iran, Ayatollah Khamenei, was gravely ill [3].

17 September

• Amini was buried in her hometown of Saqqez in Kordestan Province [4].

• Protests began in Kurdish-populated regions [4].

• The first use of the Kurdish slogan ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ (‘Jin, Jian, Azadi’ in Kurdish and ‘Zan, Zendegi, Azadi’ in Persian) occurred at Amini’s burial in Saqqez [5]. The slogan was created by PKK founder Abdullah Öcalan in his work on feminism [6].

18 September

• A rally was held by students at the University of Tehran [7].

19 September

• First reports of protestor deaths [8].

20 September

• Death of Nika Shakarami [see below].

21 September 

• A member of the Basij (pro-government student and societal groups) was stabbed to death in Mashhad [9].

• Death of Hadis Najafi [see below].

22 September

• Riots began as police stations and cars were set on fire [9].

24 September

• Diaspora rallies began outside Iran [10].

• Death of Sarina Esmailzadeh [see below].

28 September

• Iranian security forces conducted shelling and missile attacks against Kurdish separatist organizations in the area of the Kurdish Regional Government of Iraq [11].

• German CSU politician Dorothee Bär attended a diaspora event in Berlin, becoming the first foreign politician to do so [12].

29 September

• The song ‘Baraye’ by singer Shervin Hajipour went viral [13].

30 September

• In response to allegations about the rape of a minor by a police chief, protests and rioting started in the Baluchi regions of Sistan and Baluchestan province, led by religious leader Mowlavi Naqshbandi [14, 15].

• Armed clashes occurred between Iranian security forces and Baluchi protestors resulting in large casualty numbers, with some in the Iranian state claiming the presence of terrorist and separatist organizations among the protestors; the event has been referred to as “Bloody Friday” by many in the Baluchi community [93, 16].

1 October

• Diaspora rallies expanded [17].

• University rallies expanded [18].

• Sharif University incident [19].

2 October

• Continuation of Sharif University incident [18].

• Alleged killing of “Khodanur Lojei” [see below].

3 October

• Iran’s Leader Ayatollah Khamenei made his first statement on the events, referring to them as riots instigated by foreign powers and dispelling the narrative that Kurdish and Baluchi Iranians seek to separate from Iran [20].

4 October

• Iranian security forces again conducted shelling and missile attacks against Kurdish separatist organizations in the area of the Kurdish Regional Government of Iraq [21].

• Iran’s President Ebrahim Raisi gave a speech calling for unity [22].

5 October

• French actresses cut their hair in protest of the Iranian government [23].

7 October

• In an attempt to force shops at Tehran Bazaar to go on strike, rioters attacked and threatened shopkeepers causing temporary closures [24].

8 October

• A national television broadcast was hijacked for a few seconds showing an image of Ayatollah Khamenei being targeted by a set of superimposed crosshairs while being surrounded by flames, captioned with various agitative slogans directed at the television audience and the verse "The Blood of Our Youths Is on Your Hands" accompanied by audio recordings of the chant ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ [25].

12 October

• Shopkeepers were forced to close repeatedly throughout the week in Kurdish regions [26].

• Death of Asra Panahi [see below].

13 October

• A police officer is set on fire in Rasht, Gilan Province [27].

14 October

• EU Foreign Affairs Chief Josep Borell made a statement in support of the protests [28].

15 October

• A fire broke out at Evin Prison in Tehran [29].

• Iranian security forces conducted shelling and missile attacks against Kurdish separatist organizations in the area of the Kurdish Regional Government of Iraq [30].

17 October

• The EU sanctioned 11 individuals and 4 entities in Iran, including the Basij and the Guidance Patrol [31].

22 October

• A solidarity march was held in Berlin by members of the Iranian Diaspora that claimed an attendance of 80,000-100,000 [32].

• The son of former President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the founder and spiritual leader of the pro-Western Liberal ‘Moderate’ faction, Mohsen Hashemi Rafsanjani, made calls for changes to the constitution [33].

• Former Minister for Roads and Urban Development in the Moderate-led Rouhani government, Abbas Ahmad Akhoundi, called on religious clerics to support the protestors [33].

26 October

• In Shiraz, the Shah Cheragh shrine, a Shia pilgrimage site, was attacked by the Islamic State (ISIS) resulting in 15 deaths, including children, as well as over 40 injuries [34].

• The Islamic State - Khorasan Province, known as ISIS-K, declared support for the protestors [35].

• A member of the Basij called Arman Aliverdi was taken hostage by rioters in Tehran’s Ekbatan district and was repeatedly stabbed in an attempt to get him to denounce Iran’s Leader and government on camera. He was then left on the street until he was found and taken to the hospital, where he passed away two days later [36].

• A member of the IRGC was shot dead in Malayer, becoming the 33rd member of the security forces killed in the riots [35].

30 October

• A Tehran court held the first hearings for individuals accused of participating in riots [37].

3 November

• US President Joe Biden vowed to “free Iran” in a speech in California [38].

• Rioters attempted to stop traffic on a highway near Karaj and attack civilians using rocks, knives, and machetes. A police kiosk and a police van were burnt. A member of the Basij who was called up to provide security on the roadway was killed. [39].

• A cleric at a Shia Mosque in Zahedan was shot dead [40].

4 November

• Baluchi religious leader, Mowlavi Abdolhamid, called on the government to hold a national referendum [41].

11 November

• Petrol bombs were thrown at a Basij base in Babolsar [42].

12 November

• French President, Emmanuel Macron, met with diaspora activists in Paris [43].

13 November

• The first death sentence related to the riots is passed down by an Iranian court for a defendant accused of setting a government building on fire [44].

16 November

• Armed terrorists attacked civilians and security forces in the town of Izeh, Khuzestan Province, resulting in 7 dead and 15 injured; the death of Kian Pirfalak [45, see below].

18 November

• Security forces conducted a major crackdown in Kurdish-populated towns in Iran using armored vehicles and helicopters. Live ammunition was used and suspected buildings used by separatist organizations were raided. Barricades were set up by separatist organizations, which made reports about the imposition of martial law [46, 47, 48].

22 November

• 40 foreign nationals were arrested for participation in riots [49].

5 December

• Opposition plans for a 3-day strike of truckers and shopkeepers were unsuccessful as civilians continued their lives as usual [50, 51].

• Colonel Ebrahim Kuchakzayi, the police commander accused of raping a Baluchi minor and using excessive force on protestors during the “Bloody Friday” incident of September 30th was found guilty on a series of charges by a military court and was sentenced to 15 months in prison and barred from any further service in civilian or military government [94, 95].

8 December

• The first execution related to the riots occurred when Mohsen Shekari was executed after being found guilty of blocking traffic and severely injuring a police officer using a machete [52].

12 December

• Majidreza Rahnavard was executed after being found guilty of killing two Basij members [53].

• Death of Aida Rostami [see below].

15 December

• UN General Assembly voted to condemn Iran for human rights violations [54].

23 December

• Mowlavi Abdolhamid used his platform as a prominent cleric to denounce government actions [55].

1 January 2023

• Two French nationals and a Belgian national were indicted for espionage and fomenting unrest [56].

7 January

• Mohammad Mehdi Karami and Mohammad Hosseini were executed after being found guilty of the murder of a Basij member during the Karaj incident of November 3rd [57].

14 January

• Diaspora television channel ‘Manoto TV’ announced the start of the “You Are My Representative” campaign to gather signatures to name former Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi as the representative of anti-government Iranians. This caused a rift among opposition activists, some of whom started a counter-campaign called “You Are Not My Representative” [58].

16 January

• Diaspora Iranians held a rally near the European Parliament in Strasbourg to ask for more sanctions on Iran and greater aid for regime change [59].

23 January

• The US government issued more sanctions on Iranian entities and individuals deemed responsible for executions [60].

26 January

• The US House of Representatives voted to condemn the Iranian Government’s actions [61].

4 February

• Mir-Hossein Mousavi published a letter calling for a new constitution to be drawn up by a newly elected body [62].

5 February

• Former President, Mohammad Khatami, published a letter questioning the success of the 1979 Revolution and the Iranian constitution, stating that reforms within the Iranian system are no longer possible [63].

• Iranian singer, Shervin Hajipour, was awarded the newly-created 2023 Grammys Special Merit Award for Best Song For Social Change by US First Lady Jill Biden [64].

10 February

• Foreign-based dissidents from different factions agreed to unite to topple the Iranian government. These include former Crown Prince, Reza Pahlavi; former Reformist-turned-dissident, Masih Alinejad; Hollywood actress, Nazanin Boniadi; a relative of victims of flight Flight PS752, Hamed Esmailion; ex-judge, Shirin Ebadi; leader of the Kurdish separatist organization ‘Komala Party of Iranian Kurdistan’, Abdullah Mohtadi; actress, Golshifteh Farahani; and ex-footballer, Ali Karimi. [65].

11 February

• Armed clashes occurred between Iranian security forces and Kurdish separatists in Dehloran leaving two soldiers dead [66].

18 February

• American actress Kristen Stewart called for regime change in Iran at the Berlin International Film Festival [67].

6 March

• Iran’s Leader Ayatollah Khamenei addressed the slowly growing epidemic of schoolgirls reporting symptoms of poisoning throughout the country and demanded immediate investigation and punishment for culprits [68].

10 March

• 6 of the 8 dissident leaders that met on 10 February formed the Alliance for Democracy and Freedom in Iran and signed the ‘Mahsa Charter’ [69].

• Iran and Saudi Arabia signed a deal in Beijing to re-establish and normalize relations [70].

13 March

• Head of the Iranian Judiciary, Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Ejei, announced that 22,000 protesters were pardoned ahead of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan [71].

16 March

• France 24 reported that "protests have dwindled in many parts of Iran", but that hundreds continued to protest every week in the province of Sistan and Baluchestan [72].

21 April

• Hamed Esmailion left the Alliance for Democracy and Freedom in Iran over disagreements with monarchists [73].

• The Alliance for Democracy and Freedom in Iran disbands [74].

19 May

• Three men were executed after being found guilty of killing a police officer and a Basij member in Esfahan in November [75].

10 June

• Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi and French President Emmanuel Macron had a telephone conversation discussing ways to develop relations between the two countries with President Macron stating that Paris seeks to cooperate with the Islamic Republic [76].

11 June

• Pouya Molayi, an uncle of Kian Pirflak, runs over a police officer with his car on his nephew’s birthday and dies as a result of shots fired at him by police in their attempt to stop him [77].

20 June

• Albanian police raided the Mojahedin-e Khalq Organisation’s Ashraf-3 camp near Tirana, seizing their computers [78].

22 June

• Armed infighting breaks out between the Komala Party of Iranian Kurdistan and the Komala of the Toilers of Kurdistan [79].

8 July

• Baluchi Islamist and separatist terrorist organization, Jaish al-Adl, attacked a police station in Zahedan, killing two members of the police [80].

10 August

• The US and Iranian governments agreed to a prisoner exchange of 5 prisoners on each side (not necessarily related to protests) as well as the release of $6 billion of Iran’s frozen assets [81].

13 August

• ISIS carried out another terrorist attack at the Shah Cheragh shrine in Shiraz leaving 2 dead and 7 wounded [82].

28 August

• The governments of Iran and Iraq agreed to a deal according to which anti-Iran Kurdish separatist organizations will be disarmed and relocated away from the Iran-Iraq border by September 19, 2023 [83].

9 September

• An unknown individual set fire to the back door of the Iranian Embassy in Paris [84].

13 September

• The government of Iraq and the KRG began the relocation of anti-Iran Kurdish separatist organizations away from the Iranian border towards the west of Iraq, where they will be settled in new facilities and disarmed. These groups include PAK, PJAK, Komala, and the PDKI [85].

• The US House of Representatives passed the MAHSA Act, increasing sanctions on Iranian leaders [86].

16 September

• Anniversary of Mahsa Amini’s passing

• A plot by opposition activists to murder Mahsa Amini’s father, Amjad Amini, and then blame it on the Iranian government to spark outrage and protests was foiled by security forces [87].

5 October

• Armita Geravand incident [see below].

6 October

• Iranian opposition activist Narges Mohammadi is given the Nobel Peace Prize [88].

22 October

• Two journalists behind the sensationalization of the Mahsa Amini story, Elaheh Mohammadi and Nilourfar Hamedi, are sentenced to prison [89].

28 October

• The death of Armita Geravand [see below].

11 November

• Disgraced former Crown Prince of Iran, Reza Pahlavi, receives the 2023 Outspoken Award at the Spirit of Lincoln Gala, the most prominent Republican organization in the United States representing LGBT conservatives and their allies [90].

13 November

• Foreign-based pro-opposition TV channel, Manoto TV, announces its pending closure in January 2024 [91].

15 December

• Islamist and Baluchi terrorist organization Jaish al-Adl conducted a terrorist attack in Sistan and Baluchistan Province, killing 11 police officers [92].

Section Two: Atrocity Narratives

An important characteristic of the ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ (WLF) movement was that it found its fuel in various tragic stories of atrocities that were blamed, in one way or another, on the Iranian government. These colorful stories were generally based upon presuppositions made by the supporters of the movement about the nature of the Iranian state and its willingness to commit heinous acts. Assumptions were made with little to no sources of evidence deemed necessary to prove the government’s culpability. As these narratives were repeated consistently and amplified on a global scale, often with the aid of high-ranking foreign politicians and celebrities, they were, for many, cemented as facts. However, upon deeper examination, it seems that things are not as simple as the chronicles of an evil dictatorship mindlessly killing its civilians portray. In this section, the most influential of these narratives will be examined to conclude what truly occurred.

Martyrs

Mahsa Amini

The events of the 2022 protests began with the death of Mahsa Amini. Amini was a young Kurdish-Iranian woman who was arrested on September 13th by the Guidance Patrol in Tehran and taken to a seminar to be briefed on the benefits of Islamic attire [2]. At this seminar, Amini collapsed, as shown in CCTV footage, and was then taken to Kasra Hospital [3, 4]. At the hospital, she fell into a coma and eventually passed away on September 16th [5]. This part of the story is agreed upon by all parties. 

What is under contention, however, is what caused her collapse and ultimate death. Opposition activists and Western media claim that this was the result of blunt force trauma caused by blows to the head from members of the Guidance Patrol [4]. The evidence that is provided for this claim, however, fails to meet the standards generally required to come to such a conclusion. The first source for this claim is an interview with her cousin, Erfan Mortezai, a fighter for the Kurdish separatist organization Komala, who claims that the collapse of Amini was because of torture that occurred while she was under arrest [6, 7]. He, however, at no point in the interview provides any evidence for this claim [6]. Another source that opposition activists refer to is an unnamed hospital worker who is claimed to have said that her head was crushed by multiple blows [4]. 

Similarly, activists refer to an audio file that comes from a former IRGC commander in which he claims that Amini died from damage to her skull [9]. There is again no source provided for this claim by the former commander and nor is it discussed why a former commander who has long been an anti-government activist would have access to such information, especially considering that the IRGC is in no way in charge of the affairs of the Guidance Patrol [9]. Also, an interview in which Amini’s father states that he is certain his daughter died from blunt force trauma to the head is used to corroborate these claims [10]. Lastly, an alleged CT scan of Amini published by Iran International is claimed to show evidence of blunt force trauma to the skull [11].

The coroner in charge of her case, however, states that Amini died primarily due to an underlying illness that she had since she was a child [12]. The Iranian government stated that after fainting at the seminar facility, Amini suffered a heart rate interruption and lowered blood pressure, which her body could not respond to due to her having eruptions of disorders in the hypothalamus and hypophysis gland as a result of a craniopharyngioma surgery she had undergone at the age of eight [12]. Due to this illness and surgery, Amini took hydrocortisone, levothyroxine, and desmopressin as medication [12]. It is stated that ineffective cardiopulmonary resuscitation in the early minutes caused severe brain hypoxia resulting in multiple organ failure and her unfortunate death [12]. 

The hospital officially corroborated this, dismissing claims made about CT scans, by stating that her CT scans showed precisely that she did not die due to beatings on the head or body, but rather from the aforementioned circumstances [12]. A video was also released of her father before her death in the hospital stating that such surgery had occurred, that his daughter did indeed have the stated medical conditions, and that his daughter did not have signs of beatings on the head [13]. He would later deny these comments and state that the government’s explanation was a lie [13].

In September 2022, when these events were unfolding, the main source of physical evidence relied upon to prove that Amini was killed by a strike on the head was her CT scan which was heavily pubicized by the network Iran International [114]. Iran International brought on a series of medical specialists to analyze the CT scan and examine Amini’s cause of death [114]. The first two of these doctors did not have any specialty in the field of neurology and practiced in one case, Nuclear Medicine, and in the other, Social Medicine [114]. Both of these individuals claimed that the CT scan showed clearly that Amini was struck on the head with force [114].

Following this, in late September, an Iranian-American neurologist and opposition activist called Reza Behrouz was brought onto the program to discuss the CT scan [114, 115]. Behrouz stated that the CT scan did not show any signs of a strike to the head and seemed mostly normal [114]. He further stated the only abnormality was an area that seemed like the effect of a previous surgery [114]. Behrouz stated that since he had heard Amini’s father state that his daughter had no such surgery, this CT scan must not have belonged to Amini and was therefore sent to Iran International to back up the claims of the Iranian government [114].

A year later, Behrouz made a tweet expressing his regret for his comments on Iran International and stated that “when we believe that a tyrannical regime is taking its last breaths, seeing the truth is difficult” [116]. He said in this tweet that he would soon expose what occurred regarding Iran International’s examinations of Amini’s CT scan and his role in the matter [116]. He followed this up with another tweet explaining that the guests who appeared on Iran International before him were not qualified to read or analyze the CT scan and that his analysis was based on the fact that Amini’s father denied his daughter’s childhood surgery [114]. 

Another pro-WLF neurologist, Shahram Makoui, corroborated Behrouz’s analysis of the CT scan in a tweet replying to him and agreed that the only abnormality was what seemed like the signs of intrusion made during an earlier surgery [114, 117]. Reza Behrouz has since deleted his tweet exposing Iran International’s propagandistic work during the early days of the ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ movement, possibly due to pressure from the movement’s activists [114, 115, 117].

Another narrative regarding Mahsa Amini is that she was killed due to prejudice on behalf of the Iranian state against Iran’s Kurdish ethnic minority. However, no evidence has been provided for any premeditation of her arrest based on her ethnicity and neither has any evidence been provided to show that the Guidance Patrol systematically targets Kurdish-Iranian citizens [14]. Kurdish separatist activists claim that Amini’s real first name ‘Jina’, used by her close family, could not be registered in Iran due to anti-Kurdish laws that ban non-Persian or Perso-Arabic names, and therefore, she had to be officially registered as ‘Mahsa’ [15]. This claim is completely untrue since, as of November 2022, at least 6268 Iranians were registered with the Kurdish female name ‘Jina’ as their first name and no laws exist in Iran that restrict names to only Persian or Perso-Arabic ones [16]. Therefore, it is safe to assume that her official registration as ‘Mahsa’ was a choice made by her family and not one that was imposed on them.

Nika Shakarami

The next viral atrocity story that caught the eye of Western media was the story of another young girl called Nika Shakarami who was found dead on September 21, 2022 [17]. Opposition activists and Western media claim that Shakarami was chased down and kidnapped by Basij members due to her involvement in protests [17]. CNN and other outlets claim that they have videos of her being chased and hiding from Basij members, however, no videos have been released except ones of her protesting with others against Iran’s dress code laws [17]. Users on Twitter even claimed that Shakarami was raped, tortured, and had her organs harvested by members of the Basij and security forces [18, 19]. 

These claims are however not backed by any evidence and rely, as with other cases, on hearsay and presuppositions about the Iranian security forces. Her corpse was identified by her mother a week after her death and according to her autopsy report, no traces of bullets or evidence of rape and torture were found on the body [20]. Shakarami’s body was found in the courtyard of a building the morning after she attended protests with signs pointing to her dying due to a fall from height [20]. Her belongings such as a backpack were discovered on the roof of a nearby building [20]. Although CCTV footage shows her entering this building that night, her motives for entering the building and going to the roof are unknown, although some evidence suggests that she may have committed suicide [21].

The most despicable use of the unfortunate death of Nika Shakarami was made by a prominent opposition activist who emphasizes supposed LGBT oppression in her work [22]. The activist, Shadi Amin, claimed based on an alleged friendship that Shakarami had with a girl in Germany that Shakarami was a member of the “LGBT community” and presented her posthumously with an “Emergence of Lesbians” award [22, 23]. Shakarami’s family spoke out and denied these claims and Amin’s opportunistic use of their loved one’s death [23]. However, opposition activists did not listen, with BBC Persian publishing a maliciously worded article about the family’s rejection of these claims with a headline that makes it seem as though a quote from Shadi Amin about Shakarami’s alleged lesbianism is actually from Shakarami’s family [23, 24]. Only upon closer inspection of the article would one realize that the quote is actually from Amin and not her family, which effectively exemplifies the journalistic tactics that were used to push false narratives by opposition media [24].

Hadis Najafi

Hadis Najafi was a protester killed by gunfire in Karaj, Alborz Province on September 21, 2022 [26]. Opposition activists claim that Najafi was shot by government security forces that wanted to quell the protests [27]. Given the statements made by her family about how she had multiple small-shot bullets in her body in the same location, it is certain that she was killed by a shotgun [28]. Shotguns, however, are not a part of the standard equipment given to Iranian Police Forces [28]. Shotguns that fire the same kinds of bullets found in Najafi’s body were confiscated from groups of rioters who had used them to kill other civilians, as well as security forces [28]. Hence, it is more logical to conclude that Najafi was shot by rioters. It is important to note that Najafi was also from the Azeri ethnic minority, which given the separatist motives pursued by activists during these protests, may have been a reason why her death was highlighted in opposition media, in addition to the fact that she was a young woman [29].

Sarina Esmailzadeh

Sarina Esmailzadeh died on the 24th of September 2022 in Karaj, Alborz Province [31]. Opposition activists claim that she died because of beatings on the head by security forces at a protest [32]. They also changed the date of her death in their stories to make it align with protest dates in Karaj [31]. However, there is no proof that Esmailzadeh attended protests at all and her mother stated that she was at home that night [31]. Opposition activists claimed that her family was called by her friends to inform them of her death and the evidence provided for this is hearsay from an unnamed source [32]. 

Esmailzadeh’s mother and neighbors state that the cause of her death was a fall from height and a published recording of a phone call to the police by a neighbor at the time of the event corroborates these statements [31]. After the interview with her mother was released, activists claimed that her aunt was her mother and stated that Esmailzadeh’s mother had killed herself because of her daughter’s death [31]. This was, however, denied by her mother who stated that she had not killed herself in a television interview [31]. Esmailzadeh’s social media posts show that she suffered from suicidal ideations, a state of mind that may have been exacerbated by stories of atrocities regarding women and girls her age published by opposition activists in the days leading up to her death [31]. 

Khodanur Lojei

Opposition activists claim that a supposedly Baluchi-Iranian man named “Khodanur Lojei” was killed by Iranian Police in Sistan and Baluchestan Province on October 2nd, 2022 through a shot to the kidney [34]. They claim that a video that went viral on social media shows him arrested and being tortured as police taunt him with water when he is thirsty and handcuffed to a flagpole [35]. The man in the video, however, was not called Khodanur Lojei and was an Afghan migrant arrested for repeated counts of theft of mobile phones, whose real name was Sadegh Kebadani [36]. Also, no proof was provided for the cause of his supposed death except hearsay [34]. Later, a video surfaced of a dancing Baluchi man who was claimed to be Lojei before his death, however, the video was actually of a Baluchi-Iranian singer called Belal Nasroy [36, 37, 38].

Asra Panahi

Sixteen-year-old Asra Panahi passed away on the 12th of October, 2022 in Ardabil [40]. Opposition activists claim that Panahi was a schoolgirl who was ordered to sing a pro-government religious song called ‘Salam Farmandeh’ and was then beaten to death by security forces after refusing to do so [41]. Similarly to the case of Esmailzadeh, the date and time of her death were changed to match the early morning school hours [40]. Reporters within Iran state that Panahi died of a heart attack the night before this incident in a hospital that she was rushed to after she experienced symptoms of poisoning [40]. Doctors state that Panahi had underlying conditions that exacerbated the effects of this presumed poison, leading to her ultimate death [40]. It is also noted that not only did Panahi not attend the school that was stated in opposition reports, but that the picture used in opposition media was not even of her [40]. The news story was first reported by the so-called “Coordinating Council of Iranian Teachers’ Trade Associations” which has no proven relations to any teachers' organizations in Iran and had previously made confusing calls for teachers strikes during a period of the COVID-19 pandemic when schools in Iran were completely closed [41, 42]. 

Mehr News states that the video which activists claim to be of the Panahi’s arrest, showing police cars stationed outside of a school, was filmed after the supposed event occurred and that the day of the supposed event was an off-day for all schools in Ardabil [40]. Additionally, the song ‘Salam Farmandeh’ was released much earlier in the year, in March, and school sing-alongs, as well as a national sing-along, occurred in the holy month of Ramadan, over 5 months before the death of Panahi [43]. The Azeri ethnic minority background of Panahi must be highlighted as a possible cause for her alleged poisoning and the media coverage that was given to her death, as this would fuel the narrative that the Iranian government is a “Persian-chauvinist regime” oppressing non-Persian-speaking communities [44].

Aida Rostami

Aida Rostami, a general practitioner doctor, passed away on the 12th of December, 2022 [46]. Opposition activists claim that Rostami was secretly treating injured protestors in her home, when she ran out of supplies, went to a pharmacy to buy them, and then disappeared, reappearing the next day as a tortured corpse handed over to her family [47]. The primary source referred to as evidence for this colorful story is however never named nor is it discussed why this source had the aforementioned information [47]. Sources within Iran, such as Rostami’s family, as well as the Iranian judiciary, state that Rostami died after falling off or being thrown off a bridge in Tehran [46]. It is stated that Rostami had met up on the bridge with an ex-partner and was seen having an argument with him on this bridge before the incident [46]. The ex-partner was arrested and he stated in a televised interview that this was, in fact, the case and that the reason for their argument was Rostami’s new relationship and plans to marry another man and that she jumped off the bridge during this heated argument [46]. It is suspected, however, that the man himself may have pushed her off, although no conclusive statements have been released by judicial authorities [46].

Armita Geravand

Over a year after the death of Mahsa Amini, long after the ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ movement had died down, a 16-year-old girl named Armita Geravand suffered a brain injury while entering a cabin in a Tehran metro train on October 1st, 2023. [49]. Opposition activists immediately jumped on this story and claimed that this injury was caused by a beating that she received from Guidance Patrol officers inside the train cabin [50]. Suddenly, after months of infighting and hopelessness, opposition activists came together again to condemn this supposed act of violence and to renew their calls for war and regime change against the Iranian government [51, 52]. Many even prematurely named her a martyr and gave condolences to her family and to their movement for her death, which did not occur until weeks later [51, 52]. Yet again, Geravand’s Kurdish heritage, which she shares with many across the country and in Tehran, was pushed to the forefront to advance the narrative that the Iranian government was systematically attacking Kurdish women [51].

The Foreign Minister of Germany, Annalena Baerbock, corroborated opposition claims in a tweet stating “Once again a young woman in #Iran is fighting for her life. Just because she showed her hair in the subway.” [53]. Similar statements were made by US Deputy Special Envoy for Iran, Abram Paley, with Western media also reporting this narrative [53, 54]. It seemed as though a repeat of the events following Mahsa Amini’s death was about to occur with the same explanation being given by opposition activists for Geravand’s injury and the same Kurdish-separatist and feminist themes being employed. However, this time events played out differently.

Iranian national broadcasting soon released an explanation from the metro staff at the station, an interview with her friends who were with her at the time of the incident, and a nearly 18-minute long video of her recorded by the station’s CCTV cameras from the moment she entered the train station that morning till the moment that medical staff arrived [49, 55, 56]. The video of her entering the train clearly shows that less than a second had passed from when she entered the train to when she collapsed [56]. The video then shows her friends, as well as other women, some of whom were not wearing a head-covering, tending to her as she is taken out of the train cabin and informing medical staff [56]. It can clearly be seen that there was not enough time for Geravand to have been reprimanded and beaten by a Guidance Patrol officer for the way she was dressed and that plenty of other women who were not abiding by full Islamic dress codes were present around her [56]. It is also important to note that the cabin she entered was a woman’s only cabin, which generally never have Guidance Patrol officers in them, as opposed to mixed cabins which may [51]. 

In the interviews, her friends stated that they would take this route to school every day and that while they were waiting for their train, Armita had complained about feeling hungry [55]. They state that no conflict had occurred between Geravand and any individual on the train and that upon entering the train Geravand suddenly collapsed, with her head hitting the train door and the platform, resulting in bleeding [55]. It is therefore most likely that Geravand collapsed due to light-headedness brought about by hunger and that the impact of her head upon hitting the door and platform caused her injury. After the incident, she was taken to a hospital where she remained until her unfortunate death on October 28th [55, 58].

Shah Cheragh Terror Attack

On the 26th of October 2022, three gunmen entered the Shah Cheragh Holy Shrine in Shiraz and opened fire on worshippers, killing 15 and injuring over 40 civilians [60, 61]. This attack, which was condemned by the UN Security Council as a terrorist attack against Iran, was claimed by the Islamic State (ISIS) [62, 63]. This, however, did not satisfy opposition activists who claimed that ISIS was lying and that the government of the Islamic Republic had carried out the attack itself to portray the riots as negative and to disrupt supposedly large-scale Cyrus Day rallies that were planned for October 29 [64]. 

The activists’ alleged rationale was that first, the gunmen could not have entered the shrine with such large guns without the approval of the government, second, that police arrested the gunmen without being scared of any explosive vests or belts and third, the Islamic Republic had supposedly carried out false flags like this in the past [64]. The event that was primarily brought up as an example of a previous false flag was the burning of a cinema in Abadan during the 1979 Revolution which the government of the time blamed on the revolutionaries that later succeeded in establishing the Islamic Republic [65]. As can be seen, these arguments rely purely on speculation. 

The Iranian government and Leader Ayatollah Khamenei vowed to get revenge for this deadly terror attack and on July 8th, 2023, two of the gunmen were executed for their crimes [66, 67]. Opposition activists mourned these executed gunmen as martyrs of their cause and stated based on pure speculation that their interrogations and court cases had occurred under duress [68, 67].

A repeat of the terror attack occurred involving two new gunmen on August 13, 2023 [69].

Izeh Terror Attack and the Death of Kian Pirfalak

On the 17th of November 2022, an armed terrorist attack occurred in the town of Izeh in Khuzestan Province resulting in 7 deaths and over 10 wounded [71, 72]. Among the dead were elderly and, most notably, a 9-year-old boy named Kian Pirfalak [73]. Opposition activists claim that Pirfalak and other victims were killed by the government of Iran due to its brutality and thirst for blood [74, 75]. Pirfalak’s mother corroborated these claims and even defended those who were prosecuted for his death, labeling them martyrs [76]. This has given credence to opposition claims due to the Iranian cultural attitude of bestowing respect on those who are mourning. However, the true story of Pirfalak’s death and the occurrences in Izeh on the 27th is not what these activists claim. 

The attack in Izeh came on the second night in a three-night-long call-up for protestors on behalf of foreign-based media channels [77]. In the town of Izeh, both on the 16th and the 17th, armed rioters appeared, injuring two on the first night and carrying out the infamous attack on the second [77]. These gangs were filmed shooting at CCTV cameras to disable them and terrorizing civilians [77]. On both of these nights, opposition social media and satellite TV channels celebrated the armed gangs that conducted attacks for their supposed bravery in taking up arms and their killings of members of the security forces [77]. However, on the 17th, after news had reached these outlets that elderly civilians and a young child were among the victims of the terrorists, the story abruptly changed [77]. Now, it was stated that these terrorists were undercover security forces wearing plain clothing who were there to shoot at civilians, whether they were protesting or not [77].

The Pirfalak family had approached the scene of the shootings in their car on the 17th, where they were told to turn around by Basij forces acting as security [77]. They, however, continued on the path and were shot at by the armed rioter gangs [77]. After Kian, along with his wounded father, was rushed to the hospital by security forces, rioter gangs rushed to the hospital, attacking security personnel, disabling CCTV cameras, and attempting to kill witnesses of the shooting event [78].  Kian Pirfalak was turned into the second most important “martyr” of the ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ cause, after Mahsa Amini, with major Iranian celebrities, as well as foreign media outlets and organizations advertising the distorted narration of events [79, 80]. To this day it is unclear why Pirfalak’s family has sided with those who organized and partook in the terrorist attacks. 

On the 11th of June 2023, Kian Pirfalak’s uncle ran over a police officer on his nephew’s birthday anniversary resulting in both the death of the officer and his own death as police shot at his car to stop him [81].

Schoolgirl Poisonings

Beginning in November of 2022, Iranian schools began reporting that students, in particular schoolgirls, were experiencing symptoms of poisoning starting at the Noor Art School in Qom [83]. This resulted in accusations by opposition activists that elements within the Iranian government were poisoning these schoolgirls to punish them for their supposed participation and support of protests and prevent them from gaining an education, with allusions made to the Taliban in Afghanistan [84, 85, 86]. 

This claim is completely inconsistent with reality, as from the very start of the Islamic Republic, the religious authorities have greatly advocated for and supported women’s and girls’ education, with the gender literacy gap being diminished drastically since 1979, and with more Iranian women attending universities than men [87, 88]. By the early 2000s, a little over two decades after the revolution, enrollment rates for girls in primary and secondary schools became equal to boys [89]. Meanwhile, concerning university enrollment, women constitute 70% of medical/basic sciences students, and in other fields, they largely equalize proportionally to men [89]. By comparison, before the 1979 revolution, boys outnumbered girls ~2:1 in primary/secondary school enrollment, while in technical schools/university enrollment, men outnumbered women 81% vs. 19% [89]. The Islamic Republic has even criticized the Taliban in Afghanistan for their policies regarding women’s work and education and urged them to make changes [90].

In March 2023, the Iranian government began arresting suspects involved in these alleged poisonings, after the Leader Ayatollah Khamenei proclaimed it a priority to get to the bottom of the matter [91, 92]. Certain researchers and scholars from inside and outside Iran first proposed the theory that the poisoning symptoms were the result of mass psychogenic illness, which teenage girls are particularly susceptible to and many examples of which had previously occurred in other countries [93, 94].

One strikingly similar example can be seen in the US following Trump’s victory in the 2016 Presidential election. There were reports that many women in high school and college skipped classes en masse [96]. Many more mourned in despair due to Clinton’s loss, feeling that Trump was going to “take away” all their rights [97]. Lastly, vast amounts of high school and college women experienced stress, trauma, or even hospitalization with acute clinical symptoms due to Trump winning [98, 99, 100]. 

Sensationalist reporting and fear-mongering, as was employed against Donald Trump during the 2016 US Presidential elections, can have hazardous effects on the mental and physical well-being of audiences, especially the young and impressionable. This content spreads like wildfire through social media such as Instagram, Snapchat, and Twitter, in effect causing a chain reaction among the groups targeted by it. The result, in this case, was mass panic, hysteria, absenteeism, despair, stress, and psychologically induced hospitalizations.

With this context and example in mind, the theory regarding the Iranian schoolgirls and mass hysteria seems likely. This mass hysteria was a result of the emotional stress that young girls were put under by opposition activists who made consistent reports at the time  – broadcasted by the full might of Western media and social media – that the government was aimlessly killing and torturing young girls from their age group. This form of mass hysteria spreads quickly via social media or mainstream media and creates mass panic, which was why dozens of cases happened within a similar time frame.

Eventually, on the 28th of April, the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence published a statement conveying their findings that the causes of the symptoms, depending on location and circumstance, were:

1. Stink bombs, such as those bought at prank stores.

2. The spraying of pepper spray or similar substances by students who wished to cancel classes or to be playful.

3. Gas leaks or car exhaust issues in or near school buildings.

4. In a few cases, purposeful attacks using poison by rioters who would then film the events and send them to foreign-based opposition media to be reported on.

5. Most importantly and most commonly, mass hysteria or mass psychogenic illness. [101]

The Curious Case of Hossein Ronaghi

One story that perfectly exemplified the ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ movement and its media strategy was the story of Hossein Ronaghi. Hossein Ronaghi is an opposition and former Green Movement activist living in Iran. He had previously become famous for publishing a letter speaking on behalf of the Iranian people and stating that he welcomes sanctions from the USA and other Western countries as they will help Iran become a Liberal Democracy [102]. Ronaghi was arrested by Iranian police on the 22nd of September 2022 while interviewing with the Saudi-owned channel Iran International [103, 104]. 

It was quickly reported by opposition outlets that Ronaghi was beaten in jail and had both his legs broken by police [105, 104]. It was then reported that they refused to treat his broken legs as well as another illness and that Ronaghi’s life was in danger [106]. Then it was said that he was on a hunger strike, refusing all water, sugar, and salt, and that he was suffering from partial kidney failure as a result [104]. Renowned Reformist spokesman, Mostafa Tajzadeh, who was in prison with Ronaghi corroborated this story, stating that Ronaghi could die at any minute [104]. 

On the 14th of November, he was taken to a hospital in Tehran where activists held a vigil for him overnight, with his family claiming that even his release to the hospital was part of a plot by the Iranian government intended to kill him [107]. The United States government even stepped in with National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan stating that “The torture and mistreatment of political prisoners like Mr. Ronaghi must cease” [108]. Claims were even made that in the hospital, his heart had stopped working and a defibrillator machine was used to resuscitate him [109].

However, events outside of the simulated reality of the ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ movement yet again did not match the activists’ claims. Ronaghi was released as a result of amnesty given to certain political prisoners by the Head of the Judiciary after Iran’s victory over Wales in the 2022 World Cup, and it soon turned out that the stories about his ill health were untrue [109]. Firstly, it turned out that Ronaghi’s legs were never broken as images were released of him standing on his legs without the use of crutches or other aids [109]. The pictures additionally showed Ronaghi in good health with no signs of a 64-day hunger strike or physical torture seen on his body. The hospital stated that Ronaghi never confronted any heart issues and that therefore at no point was a defibrillator machine used on him [109]. After these pictures were released, his activist brother, who had been the source of most rumors, deleted his Twitter account [109]. 

Soon thereafter, a statement was released by a fellow prisoner and opposition activist who stated that from the day that Ronaghi entered the prison, he showed no signs of torture and did not have any broken legs [110]. He also revealed that although opposition media claimed that Ronaghi was on a months-long hunger strike, he was consuming high-sugar foods like honey and ground sesame and was put on vitamin and nutrient drips by prison staff [110]. This activist stated that he had tried to contact opposition media to tell them this, but they all refused to air the story and since he feared the backlash from the WLF movement that would ensue if he released the story himself, he abstained from doing so [110]. This prisoner complained that by lying, Ronaghi had cheapened the value of a hunger strike and effectively taken away one of the only tools his fellow prisoners would have had to combat any perceived injustices [110]. The claim of a 64-day hunger strike is made even more ridiculous when one considers that the famous IRA militant Bobby Sands only took 66 days to die while he was on hunger strike [111]. 

Section Three: The Scale of Protests and Strikes

Protest Numbers and Popularity

One of the major narratives pushed by the opposition regarding the ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ movement is the description of it being “popular” and a “mass movement”. Such narratives are pushed by figures like Masih Alinejad, who in her recent op-ed, described WLF as a “mass movement” [1]. Based on available data from Western sources and OSINT (open-source intelligence), we can see that this is far from the truth, especially regarding support inside Iran. One major OSINT source who publishes daily numbers updates with detailed breakdowns is Mark Pyruz, an independent analyst who has been cited by major Western mainstream and Iranian opposition press such as PBS [2], AFP/France 24 [3], and even Iran International [4]. He moreover co-ran a blog with Nader Uskowi titled Uskowi on Iran [5], which has been frequently cited by major Washington think tanks such as the Atlantic Council [6]. We can see that by no means is he a weak source or a pro-Iranian government “propagandist”.

Based on numbers that Mr. Pyruz has published, all total forms of dissidence peaked on October 26th, 2022 [7] with roughly 18,000 protesters or rioters nationwide, and these numbers completely fizzled out by December 2022 [8]. Meanwhile, according to the same figure, days with protests would generally see around 1000-3000 protestors turning up on average, nationwide. 

According to the breakdown of turnout given for days adjacent to the peak (there is no breakdown for the day of the peak itself), the majority of the protest turnout was from students [8]. There was very little to no working-class backing for the protests, with occasional strikes occurring for unrelated reasons such as wages, inflation, or prices, as discussed in the sections below. The protests by the diaspora dwarf that of the totals for Iran throughout the months of dissident activity. In Berlin for instance, according to official police estimates, somewhere around 30,000 protesters showed up on October 22, around the same time frame as the peak of the protests in Iran [9, 10]. It is important to note that many of the people who showed up to these diaspora protests were non-Iranian locals – e.g. city liberals – coming to “show solidarity” with their Iranian diaspora “comrades”.

Attitudes towards previous protests should also be investigated, as they provide insight into attitudes in Iran towards various movements and the tactics that they employ. For this, polls published by the University of Maryland’s Center for International and Security Studies – also known as IranPoll – will be examined. This is chosen due to the reputable methodology and more importantly, the neutrality of the source. It is frequently cited by Iranian media such as IRIB, IRNA, and Fars News; American media such as NewsWeek, ABC, and Forbes; and other international media such as Guardian, RT, Times of Israel, and others [11].

In a previous poll (shown below) conducted by IranPoll following the 2017-18 protests, around two-thirds of Iranians believed that most peaceful protestors chanting slogans against government policies should be released. However, attitudes towards protestors against Islam or Iran’s political system changed with a two-thirds majority favoring some degree of punishment (a plurality supporting moderate sentences). A majority of 80% or more support some degree of punishment for those who burn the Iranian flag, damage property, attack police, or injure bystanders, with a majority even supporting harsher sentences in some cases. [12]

Throughout WLF, a lot of violence and rioting was seen, a glimpse of this can be seen in some of the narratives discussed above such as the Izeh Terror Attack and the Pirfalak fiasco. Others less discussed in the article include reports of stabbings by anti-government civilians against pro-government security, civilians, and random bystanders [13, 14, 15]. The video compilation below also showcases some of the violent moments seen in WLF in which rioters set fire to apartment buildings, small businesses, a city bus, and personal vehicles; in addition to opening fire with shotguns and attacking truckers/trucks. The police response to such wanton violence is seen as appropriate and in line with the will of Iran’s majority as mentioned above [12].

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Moreover, as noted above, a majority of Iranians prefer to see the release of peaceful protesters on light charges [12]. Around 22,000 protesters who were arrested were pardoned by the government and judiciary ahead of Ramadan in 2023, with their protest-incurred records being cleared [16]. This, once again, is in line with the Iranian populace’s sentiments on what would be a proper response to such actions.

Lastly, it should be noted that WLF broke with previous recent protest events in Iran such as those in 2017 and 2019. These previous protests were, in large part, caused by former President Rouhani’s attempted policies to further liberalize the Iranian economy via ending fuel subsidies (which would have skyrocketed fuel prices) or dollarization that caused an increase in egg prices. According to polling in 2021, these two protests were seen by a majority of Iranians as bringing the attention of officials to problems in the economy [17]. That is not to say there were no regime change advocates and foreign-backed troublemakers attempting to incite riots and conduct violence. Such subversive agents were active, but they weren’t a focal point for these events and were seen as a minority, which makes sense when one considers that only a minority of Iranians believe that regime change was the main focus of these protests [17]. 

WLF was different due to the smaller yet highly violent nature of the opposition and the relatively high number of deaths involved (200+ for WLF; 30 for 2017), and due to the movement’s explicit goal of overthrowing the government over cultural complaints about hijab [18]. Following the 2017 protests, less than 16.4% of Iranians supported “fundamental change” to Iran’s government, with over 76.7% opposing such change [12]. Similarly, with regards to hijab or other religious laws, 57.7% of Iranians think that the government does the right amount of enforcement, while 17.6% believe the govt exerts too much control on personal lives and 17.9% believe the govt exerts too little [12]. WLF’s culture-war-oriented desire for regime change caused the movement’s activists to be more violent and ideologically motivated extremists. As seen in the video compilation, briefly mentioned above, and about to be detailed in sections below, WLF rioters attacked other civilians who did not support their views or cave to their demands of “strikes”. This in turn made the movement very out of touch with most Iranians, resulting in lower participation in dissidence and greater unpopularity.

It can be concluded with the abundant evidence presented that it is misconceived or false to describe ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ as a “mass movement” and to name the tactics of said “movement” as popular.

Strikes

In a similar case to lies published about protest numbers by WLF activists, there were also many misreportings regarding so-called strikes and mass strikes organized by the movement. These strike plans started three days after the passing of Mahsa Amini on the 19th of September with calls by Kurdish separatist organizations to have a mass strike in Kurdish-populated regions of Kordestan and West Azarbayjan Provinces [20]. Outlets such as ‘Euronews’ claimed that these strikes were expansive and also included the cities of Tehran, Rasht, and Esfahan as well as the aforementioned provinces [20]. 

However, no sources were cited regarding these strikes and their effectiveness, and no reports of strikes were made anywhere across internal Iranian media. The general trend for these supposed strikes was that either regular worker-employee disagreements that were ongoing for years would be reported as pro-WLF striking, groups of riots would force shops to close and then report this as striking, or videos of supposed strikes would be filmed outside working hours and reported as strikes aiming at regime change.

University Strikes

Perhaps the strike calls most heeded were the calls for the striking of university students. Radio Liberty reported on the 24th and 25th that university students across the country were refusing to take part in classes and Deutsche Welle reported that certain professors as well as celebrities and artists had also joined these strikes [21, 22, 23]. However, it remained unknown how strikes in these sectors would impede the functioning of the national economy or aid in overthrowing the government.

Workers’ Strikes

Throughout late 2022, opposition media consistently made reports of workers’ strikes taking place throughout the country [24]. Opposition activists claimed that the Iranian working class had joined the ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ (WLF) movement against hijab and ethnic oppression by conducting strikes to cripple the national economy and force regime change [24]. Reports were made in foreign-based media that oil, gas, and petrochemicals workers in Asaluyeh, Masjed-Soleyman, Abadan and Tehran, as well as workers at the Haft-Tapeh Sugar Factory and the Tabriz Tractor Factory (Tractor Sazi Tabriz), had joined the movement against the Guidance Patrol and the Islamic Republic as a whole [24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29]. 

With regards to oil workers, in some cities, no workers’ actions occurred altogether, and in others such as Asaluyeh and Tehran, strikes did not occur but rather sit-ins and gatherings were conducted by workers to make demands regarding their pay and contracts and were in no way related to the WLF ‘feminist revolution’ [28, 30, 31]. With regards to Haft-Tape and the Tabriz Tractor Factory, these were again, years-long disputes over pay and working conditions, wholly unrelated to the new WLF movement [32, 33].

Shopkeepers and Bazaar Strikes

Another opposition claim was that shopkeepers, most notably in bazaars, which play an important role in Iranian economic life, had joined their feminist revolution by closing down their shops and going on strike [34, 35]. However, these were also misreported as opposition journalists would report regular closures of shops (such as on holidays) as strikes, and when this tactic could not be used, groups of thugs would be sent into bazaars to force shopkeepers to close their businesses and forcibly participate in “strikes” [36, 37, 38, 39].

General Strikes

The WLF movement made two attempts at coordinating mass national strikes. The first of these attempts was from the 15th to the 17th of November and the second was from the 5th to the 7th of December [40, 41, 42]. Although in both cases these attempts were reported as successful, this was far from the truth [40, 41, 42]. In the case of the November strikes, video evidence and reports from Iranian news agencies show that the overwhelming majority of shops and businesses remained open [43]. The same was reported during the December call to strikes [44].Section Four: Media

Social Media

Twitter

On a related note to the previous discussion on protest numbers above, important questions should be raised regarding botting and inflated numbers when it comes to social media. One particular article from the Western liberal-leaning site Vox published on December 12th, 2022 offers a glimpse into the scale of botting that occurred with social media trends through the course of the ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ movement.

“I’ve not seen something of this scale before,” Marc Owen Jones, a professor and author of Digital Authoritarianism in the Middle East, told me. Some 330 million tweets on the Mahsa Amini hashtag in Persian were sent — in one month, he said. “By way of comparison, #BlackLivesMatter over eight years got about 83 million. And since February, the word #Ukraine has been mentioned 240 million times,” he added. It renders the hashtag useless for news consumers looking for real-time analysis of what’s happening. [2]

What’s interesting – and quite absurd – is that “Mahsa Amini” had over FOUR times more tweets than #BlackLivesMatter throughout its entire history. Meanwhile, #Ukraine was mentioned a little over half the number of Mahsa Amini, yet the Ukraine conflict had been occurring for a much longer time frame (11 months at the time) compared to the ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ protests (3 months at the time). This is even though the Ukraine conflict has much larger publicity, public knowledge, and relevance than the death of a woman in a faraway country [3]. 

The second point of contention that should draw suspicion is that the 330 million mentions of “Mahsa Amini” over the 3 months were in the Persian language. Twitter in Iran only has 3.4-4 million users according to an ISNA report published in June 2023 and isn’t even close to being a popular social media [4]. According to the report, it is instead Instagram and Telegram that have the most users in Iran. Meanwhile, as for the diaspora population, there are a total of 4,037,258 Iranians living outside of Iran according to a 2021 report from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs [5]. It can be assumed that only a fraction of this population would use Twitter. But even if we were to assume all four million in the diaspora use Twitter, that would only bring the total Twitter usage by all Iranians to eight million. Thus in other words, over three months, each user must have made 42 tweets about Mahsa Amini to reach 330 million mentions – and this is a generous estimate, considering that we highly overestimated the number of diaspora Twitter users in this hypothetical. It should be very clear that those 330 million mentions were not from inside Iran, nor organic, and were a result of botting and large-scale spamming.

Several opposition groups are known to have been using bot/troll farms in the media campaign that occurred following Mahsa Amini’s death. The infamous Mojahedin-e-Khalq Organization (MeK) is one major user of bot campaigns, and in fact, has been for quite a while even before the WLF movement. The first instance of the MeK using a “troll army” of bots was seen in 2018, when there were reports of mass spamming of regime-change hashtags by bots, while ironically many legitimate Iranian individuals’ accounts were suspended [6, 7]. This prompted the counter-hashtag “#YouAreBots” by some Iranian users on Twitter [6]. The MeK even conjured up a fake persona named “Heshmat Alavi” using several ghostwriters to publish over-the-top articles in Western mainstream press attacking Iran and praising the MeK’s leaders [8]. Articles were hosted on prominent sites such as Forbes, The Daily Caller, The Diplomat, Al Arabiya, and others [8]. Several sites such as Forbes have since cut off relations with the “author” and subsequently removed his articles due to the author’s unverifiable credentials [8], although Alavi’s Twitter page is still around and active [9].

In 2020, The New York Times published an article on the MeK, mentioning the extensive bot farms of the MeK after interviewing 8 former members [11]. Many members in the MeK are held against their will in the group [11, 12], hence why the MeK is often described as a “cult”. Another article published by The Intercept similarly mentions the mass bot farms and spamming done by the group, as corroborated by high-ranking MeK defectors such as Hassan Heyrani, Hassan Shahbaz, and Reza Sadeghi [7, 8]. According to Hassan Heyrani, some 1500 or more MeK members operated the bot army in 2018 in near slave-like conditions [7], analogous to Indian call centers or sweatshops. In the MeK’s computer rooms, individuals are given specific posting guidelines and are required to constantly churn out social media posts all day utilizing specific keywords and multiple accounts per person [7, 13, 17]. It is reported that many Twitter accounts suspected to be run by the MeK suddenly stopped posting following the Albanian government’s raid of the MeK’s compound in June 2023 [14]. 

A bombshell dropped on December 10th, 2023, in which the admin of the MeK’s official Twitter page came out and exposed that the MeK is holding most of the group hostage against their will, and they are threatened to work for the group or else harm will be done against their families [15, 16]. The admin-turned-whistleblower, “Mohsen”, dropped this bombshell on the MeK’s official Twitter account. He stated that he may face severe repercussions by the group for his actions but chooses to sacrifice himself “for the awareness of the Iranian people”. He finished by stating he would release information about the cult group’s network inside Iran and to “stay tuned for updates.” The MeK has since deleted the tweet and has not commented.  

Instagram

Instagram is by far the most popular social media platform in Iran, primarily since it was made exempt from government filtering of the internet before the protests [18]. Approximately 24 million, or 29%, of Iran’s population use Instagram and Iran is the 7th largest user of the application worldwide [18]. As such, the American-owned Instagram played an important role in spreading false information and calling for violence throughout the riots. Instagram became a place where various anti-Iranian media warfare tactics such as lies about pre-1979 Iranian history, stories of supposed atrocities, and even methods for making homemade weapons to use on the streets of Iran were spread [19, 20]. Instagram circumvented its own rules regarding the promotion of violence and actively took to promoting accounts advocating violence and terrorism within Iran through its algorithm while at the same time banning accounts that were not in support of the riots [21].

In addition to this, it played an important role for celebrities, who would often rent their accounts out for money to opposition activists, to spread messages enticing violence to their millions of followers [21, 22]. Previously benign accounts like sadaf_beauty that would share make-up tips and tutorials for women began to teach protestors how to make Molotov Cocktails and berate and insult those who refused to participate in the WLF movement [22, 23]. Another such example is mo.rasoulipour, a very large art account with around 100,000 followers that previously would post only about Iran’s ancient and medieval history as well as painting historical portraits [24]. Following the start of WLF, this account began to similarly circulate calls for overthrowing the government. From creating infographics spreading WLF’s atrocity narratives in the liberal Corporate Memphis style – aka the “Big Tech” style of art – to promoting violence and teaching people how to make Molotov Cocktails, the account was able to garner over a million total likes from all its WLF-related posts [24]. Furthermore, celebrities like ex-footballer Ali Karimi used their platforms to encourage their followers to take to the streets and engage in vandalism and destruction of property to achieve regime change and the installation of a liberal government in Iran [25].

WhatsApp

The messaging application WhatsApp also plays an important role in Iranian social life with approximately 71% of Iranians over the age of 18 using the platform [27]. In a speech on the use of platforms such as WhatsApp and Telegram within Iran, a spokesman for the government mentioned how these platforms were not only used to advertise the methods of construction for Molotov cocktails or the destruction of property but were even used by users to advertise how to buy and use weaponry such as guns during the protest period, with the platforms remaining unresponsive to Iranian requests to enforce their terms and conditions regarding illegal activities and the promotion of violence [28]. Alongside Instagram, WhatsApp acted as an important platform to organize and procure supplies and information to conduct violent acts that resulted in the losses of life that occurred during the WLF movement’s activities [29].

Satellite Television Channels

A phenomenon that plays a unique role in Iranian politics is the existence of foreign-based satellite television channels. These have adapted over history from their original form of foreign-based radios such as Radio Berlin, which belonged to Nazi Germany and had an influential role in Iran in the 1930s, and BBC Persian which was created in response [30, 31]. These later became television news channels that are watched in Iran through satellite receivers, which exist in around 30% of Iranian homes according to statistics from 2021 [32]. 

Iran International

By far the most influential satellite television news channel during the events of the ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ movement was the Saudi-owned channel ‘Iran International’ [34]. The channel launched in 2017, quickly became a hub for anti-government activists with impressive set designs and high-quality production [35]. It soon established itself as a forerunner in the promotion of separatist organizations, becoming famous in 2018 for having a congratulatory interview with the head of the Al-Ahvaziye separatist organization after its members carried out a terrorist attack in Khuzestan Province [36, 37]. It has also promoted other – often contradictory – opposition factions like the MeK, or the former Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi and his supporters [34]. 

Throughout the 2022-2023 riots, the channel became the main command center for the WLF movement, actively normalizing the killing of security forces and calls for civil war, even going so far as to organize strikes and protests, advertising locations and timings on air [38, 39, 40]. The Iranian government has designated the channel as a terrorist organization and even made an official complaint to the British broadcasting authorities as the channel was based in London, England, however, British authorities stated that they did not find anything wrong with the channel’s content [41, 42]. A few weeks before the Iran-Saudi rapprochement of early 2023, the channel peculiarly moved from London to Washington, D.C. in the United States after which its content temporarily became more focused on infighting within the Iranian opposition and less focused on leading protests within Iran [43, 44, 45]. Later, in September of 2023, it was exposed by the former director of BBC Persian that the control and funding of Iran International had been transferred from the government of Saudi Arabia to the government of Israel [46].

BBC Persian

The oldest and most sophisticated of the foreign Persian-language media channels still functioning is undoubtedly the BBC’s Persian broadcasting service. After opening in 1940, BBC Persian has had a very influential role in Iranian history, first as a radio station and then as a television channel [31]. During the early 1950s, it played an important role in publishing propaganda against Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh and his government who were attempting to nationalize Iranian oil [70]. It even aided in the 1953 coup against Mossadegh by sending coded messages to coup plotters during operations [71]. BBC Persian also played an important role in the lead-up to the 1979 Revolution [48]. Its most important role in the Islamic Republic era was as the leading broadcaster promoting and spreading anti-government news during the 2009 Green Movement protests [49]. During these much larger protests, the BBC played the role that Iran International did in 2022. During the 2022-3 events, however, although it provided pro-WLF coverage, it was overshadowed by other networks such as Iran Intl. and Manoto TV.

Manoto TV

The channel ‘Manoto’ is primarily a socio-cultural channel that also does news shows, with most of its content coming with a distinct political leaning. The channel is closely aligned with the Pahlavi-monarchist movement, producing countless documentaries and nostalgia-based programming about Iran under the era of the Anglo-American-backed Pahlavi dynasty [51, 52, 53, 54]. The primary financial backers of Manoto have been exposed as the US Pentagon and the Israeli government [55, 56]. Similar to other networks, Manoto’s studio is located in London, England, from where it strongly promoted the WLF movement in its broadcasting, acting as one of the main nodes of information for members of the movement and encouraging violence and regime change [57, 58, 59]. In November of 2023, it was announced that the channel will be closing by January 2024 as they no longer have the necessary funds to operate, indicating that the backers of the channel no longer see it as an effective tool against the Iranian government [60, 61].

Voice of America and Radio Farda

The government of the United States of America also plays a role in the Iranian media sphere through its outlets ‘Voice of America Persian News Network’ (VoA) and ‘Radio Farda’. VOA Persian is a child broadcaster of ‘Voice of America’, which by its own admission is owned and funded by the US government [64]. It is staffed by members of the large Iranian Diaspora in the United States and produces content aiming at regime change with a monarchist leaning [65]. It sparked outrage in 2007 when it brought on the former leader of the Baluchi Islamist and separatist terrorist organization, Jundallah, and referred to him as a “popular resistance movement” leader [66]. Although its role has diminished over the years, it still provided pro-WLF reporting during the movement’s brief period of relevance and relayed opposition narratives about events [67].

‘Radio Farda’ (Radio Tomorrow) is the Iranian branch of the US-government-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty [68]. This organization was formed by the CIA during the Cold War as an anti-communist propaganda outlet [72]. As can be seen in the citations of this article, during the 2022-3 protests it took a pro-protestor line and spread narratives regarding supposed atrocities and Iranian government actions that fueled the WLF movement and its participants.

Section Five: The Role of Foreign States

The role of foreign states in providing the necessary political, monetary, and logistical support to fan the flames of the opposition in Iran cannot be understated. These opposition movements would not get any spotlight on the media or the internet without the backing of these major players. Let us begin our investigation of the major foreign actors that fueled unrest in Iran.

Saudi Arabia

Iran International

Iran International or Iran Intl. is one of the main networks of the opposition that fueled unrest and broadcasted many false or inflammatory narratives, as described in detail in the above sections. Here, we shall discuss the role foreign states, particularly Saudi Arabia, played with regard to this media network. 

Saudi Arabian capital played a key role in establishing Iran Intl., with the network receiving over $250 million in funding directly from the Saudi court to set up operations in London, in 2017 [2]. The director of the company that runs Iran International, Volant Media, is a Saudi national named Adel Abdulkarim who is well-connected to other major figures in the Saudi Royal Family [2]. This includes Abdulrahman al-Rashed, who sat on the board of the Saudi Research and Marketing Group (SRMG), the largest publishing company in the Arab world [2]. He was also the former general manager of another Saudi-owned channel, Al Arabiya, and helped manage operations and funding for Iran International [2].

Another leading Saudi figure who served as an advisor to Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman regarding foreign, domestic, and media policy was Saud al-Qahtani, who was also involved in funding for Iran Intl [2, 3, 4]. Figures such as Nabeel Al-Khatib were also embedded into Iran Intl. as consultants or “representatives of investors” to help aggressively push the network into covering stories beneficial to Saudi foreign policy at the time [2]. The Saudis also hired staff from Vice News to help craft Iran Intl. as a “trendy” liberal outlet to better target the youth and reshape Saudi Arabia’s image among Iranians [5].

Iran Intl. effectively served as an arm of Saudi soft power to go in an offensive aimed at taking the fight between Saudi Arabia and Iran into Iran itself. This is why it gave positive coverage to various, contradictory opposition forces (as noted in the above sections) and was the most aggressive in its rhetoric against the Iranian state. Interestingly, a week before the Iran-Saudi deal in March 2023, Iran Intl closed its London headquarters – where most other opposition media are traditionally located such as BBC Persian and Manoto TV – and moved to Washington DC [6, 7, 8]. 

As per the new March 10th agreement, one of the clauses states that Saudi Arabia shall not foster or support militant groups or hostile media against Iran [9, 10]. As was mentioned earlier, in late September of 2023, it was exposed by the former director of BBC Persian that the control and funding of Iran International had been transferred from the government of Saudi Arabia to the government of Israel [11]. It can be assumed that outside funding is highly important for the network as the network doesn’t have advertisements [2]. Either way, the network had served as a powerful, primary outlet for the Iranian opposition via its Saudi Arabian and other financial backers, acting as a proxy to the benefit of Iran’s regional adversaries. 

Funding of Terrorist and Separatist Groups

As a part of its regional campaign against Iran, Saudi Arabia not only used its soft power and financial muscle to create media networks targeting Iran but also to support several terrorist and separatist groups.

One such group was Jundullah, a small Baluchi terrorist organization that was active in the 2000s and 2010s [13]. Jundullah was responsible for a string of suicide bombings and gunman attacks killing 296 and injuring several hundred civilians and security forces over many years [14, 15]. Some of the gross abuses of the terrorist group include hostage-taking and execution of bystanding civilians; attacks on mosques, schoolchildren, marketplaces, and other non-military targets; and also, setting civilians and cars on fire [14]. Al Arabiya, the state media of Saudi Arabia, managed to get a hold of the group’s leader, Abdolmalek Rigi, and his spokesmen for several interviews, praising them as heroic resistance fighters, in a similar manner to the previously mentioned incident with Voice of America in 2007 [13, 16, 17]. This raised suspicions about the possibility of Saudi and American clandestine support for these groups due to the ease of access they had to gain interviews, with this support finally being confirmed in 2009 [13, 17, 49]. 

Rigi himself was radicalized in a Saudi-sponsored mosque in Pakistan [18]. Shortly following Rigi’s capture and capital punishment by Iran, Jundullah went defunct and was succeeded by several smaller terrorist groups such as Jaish al-Adl and Ansar al-Furkan. These groups continue to conduct sporadic attacks and have likely inherited Jundullah’s clandestine ties to Saudi and US intelligence as they collaborate with other Saudi/US/Israel-backed networks such as the Al Nusra Front in Syria [18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23]. Recently on December 15, 2023, Jaish al-Adl militants crossed into Iran from the border with Pakistan and carried out an attack killing at least 6 policemen, with several militants being killed or apprehended by Iranian authorities [24]. All in all, these low-level terrorist insurgencies represent a pressure point utilized against Iran by its rivals such as the US and Saudi Arabia.

A second major set of groups supported by the Saudis are various separatist and terror networks in Khuzestan Province in the southwestern corner of Iran. The previously mentioned Ansar al-Furkan claims to operate and carry out attacks in Ahvaz, Khuzestan [26], while Jundullah/Jaish al-Adl has voiced support for Kurdish separatists [15, 27]. A former US State Department advisor and employee, Vali Nasr, implicated Saudi Arabia and the USA in funding several Sunni fundamentalist groups (Baluchi, Kurdish, and some Arab) to promote sectarianism and division inside Iran [29]. 

The “Arab Struggle Movement for the Liberation of Ahvaz” (ASMLA) is a fringe Sunni Arab ethno-nationalist/separatist terror group funded by Saudi Arabia that has carried out bombings in 2005-2006 and a gunman attack on civilians, children, and personnel during a 2018 parade in Ahvaz [30, 31]. The group’s political wings, which are based in exile in the Netherlands and Denmark, split into two factions in 2015, supposedly over how to handle Saudi funding and petty squabbles [30, 32]. The group has close ties to other, Sunni fundamentalist groups such as the aforementioned Jundullah, Ansar al-Furkan, and elements of the Free Syrian Army (FSA), having dedicated an attack in 2013 to the FSA [32]. This is despite the fact the majority (70%) of Ahvaz’s Arab population is Shia, and the majority of Khuzestan province itself is non-Arab (Persian and Lor) [32]. As mentioned earlier, the Saudi-funded news network Iran International held a congratulatory interview with the head of the ASMLA organization after its members carried out a terrorist attack in Khuzestan Province in 2018 [33, 34].

As per the recent March 10th agreement signed in Beijing, Saudi Arabia is to cease any kind of support to any such separatist groups and terrorist militants operating against Iran [9, 10]. It should be noted that these insurgents generally functioned at a low-level intensity and did not pose any real threat of overthrowing the government and establishing local power – they only sporadically carried out terror attacks over many decades. These groups also did not play any major or direct roles in the unrest following Mahsa Amini’s death. However, their origins and ideologies did help provide various opposition groups, media, and foreign states with talking points to promote separatism in Iran, as can be seen with the case of “Khodanur Lojei” discussed in previous sections.

The United States and NATO

Sanctions

One of the primary methods that the governments of the United States and its allies in the UK and EU use to foment unrest in Iran is through various unilateral sanctions regimes [28]. The United States, given its global economic power, is the primary force behind this strategy. US sanctions on Iran come in two forms: primary and secondary [37]. Primary sanctions block US entities and individuals from working with Iran and secondary sanctions target non-American entities and individuals, by essentially prohibiting anyone who works with Iran from conducting business in the United States or through American financial systems [37]. These sanctions mainly target Iran’s energy sector, financial sector, arms trade, government, and other important aspects of the economy [37].

Various sanctions packages have been enacted on Iran by the US since the 1979 Revolution, however, the most serious have been put in place after the 2009 Green Movement protests [37].

In 2012, the Obama administration put in place a series of intense sanctions which were referred to as “crippling sanctions” [38]. Later, in 2015, an agreement was reached in which certain sanctions would be lifted on Iran in exchange for Iran limiting its nuclear program (this will be discussed in detail in later sections) [39]. In 2018, the Trump administration exited this agreement and began a “maximum pressure campaign”, placing the most severe sanctions possible on Iran [40]. In the wake of the ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’, the US government placed even more sanctions on Iran and Iranian entities related to the Guidance Patrol, as well as Iran’s defense programs, however, the effectiveness of such new packages is doubtful as essentially all important sectors and actors in the Iranian economy and government have already been sanctioned years before [41, 42].

The United Kingdom and European Union have placed similar sanctions on Iran, most especially in the last decade and a half [43]. These sanctions are effectively the same as American sanctions however they prohibit Iranian economic activity in the territories of the UK and EU through primary mechanisms. The most important sanctions placed by the EU on Iran are the SWIFT sanctions enacted in March 2012, which cut off all Iranian banks from the primary global banking messaging system and in effect isolated Iran’s banking system from the rest of the world [44].

One of the major actors involved in designing these Western sanctions on Iran, Richard Nephew, wrote a book in 2017 detailing the nature of these mechanisms and their purpose [28, 46]. In the book, Nephew explains how the purpose of sanctions is to impoverish the Iranian population and therefore cause unrest and incite the Iranian people to partake in a regime change operation to overthrow the government of the Islamic Republic [28]. He explicitly mentions, for instance, the increase in the price of meats and other foodstuffs during key Iranian holiday periods as a sign of this policy’s success and states that this is in line with the US government’s overall goals [28]. Through these mechanisms, the United States and its NATO allies in the UK and EU place pressure on the Iranian people to further their project for regime change in Iran. The economic issues caused by the sanctions have led to increased dissatisfaction with the government among Iranians and thus provide fertile soil for any regime change movements such as ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ to be implemented [47].

Terror Networks

The CIA has been implicated in supporting separatist groups and terrorist militants in Iran for the last two decades. As previously mentioned, they have ties to Arab, Baluchi, and other terrorist/separatist networks – possibly using Saudi Arabian capital as a proxy to obfuscate clandestine ties [29, 49]. A report from The Telegraph corroborates this and states that the US has been clandestinely backing various hostile terror networks as a means to place pressure on Iran over its nuclear energy and missile programs [50]. Similar to the CIA's use of Saudi Arabia, the US intelligence agency is also known to delegate many of its operations to Israel’s Mossad, with many operations being effectively joint US-Israeli collaborations, the details of which are covered in the section below discussing Israel’s role in WLF [51].

Mojahedin-e Khalq Organization

The group given possibly the most prolific vocal support from major US officials in recent years is the MeK (Mojahedin-e Khalq) Organization. To provide a brief background history of the organization, the MeK was originally founded in the 1960s and sought to overthrow the Pahlavi monarchy and create a state that synthesized Marxism with Political Islam [52]. However, following an ideological split in the group, it was taken over by Massoud Rajavi and, later, his wife Mariam Rajavi.

Following the 1979 revolution, Rajavi lambasted the new revolutionary government for not including the creation of a “classless society” in the new constitution and subsequently boycotted the referendum for the new constitution. This led Ayatollah Khomeini to bar Massoud Rajavi from running for President in the 1980 elections, stating that “those who had failed to endorse the Constitution could not be trusted to abide by that Constitution”. After a few failed political alliances and foiled attempts to steer politics, Rajavi organized riots and protests on June 20, 1981, to overthrow the new revolutionary government. This was met with force by security forces, especially due to the tense state of the country following Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Iran in September of 1980. Due to the deaths of 16 protesters at this event, Rajavi responded by “declaring war” on the government, with the MeK carrying out the Hafte-Tir bombing on June 28, 1981, killing 72 people including several prominent government officials [14, 52]. 

The Hafte-Tir incident was the first in a long list of bombings carried out by the MeK that targeted everything from government offices and officials to civilians and public buildings such as mosques, residential blocks, and street corners [14, 52]. These terror bombings, along with the fact that the MeK also ended up siding with Saddam’s invasion of Iran (setting up their HQ “Camp Ashraf-1” in Iraq from 1986-2003) made the MeK extremely unpopular in Iran and gave them a reputation of being traitorous terrorists/cultists [52, 53]. Following the 2003 Iraq War, the group signed a ceasefire with the US after some armed clashes and standoffs [54], and eventually relocated its compound to Albania (Camp Ashraf-3) [52]. The future of the group remains uncertain following the aforementioned shutdown of the group’s compound by Albanian authorities in June 2023 [55].

As mentioned earlier, the MeK is frequently described as a cult. This is because the organization micromanages the lives of its members, who are barred from leaving once in the organization [57]. Members who go out of line or attempt to leave are subjected to various forms of physical and sexual abuse, torture, forced sterilizations, or even death [57]. While its ideology historically was a synthesis of Marxism and Islamism, the organization effectively became a cult surrounding the Rajavi family following their takeover of the organization. The MeK’s “ideology” is whatever the Rajavis proclaim today, often morphing to please different interests while denying their organization’s history [58]. The right wing of Western mainstream politics views the MeK as staunch defenders of Israel and Western values against Iran’s so-called “mad mullahs” [59]; among the liberal progressive left, the MeK are seen as advocates of liberal democracy, “women’s rights”, “human rights”, and other Liberal values [59].

The group has always been the most hardline in the Iranian opposition movement, not shying away from advocating a war with Iran. In this aspect, they can be seen as almost like a vanguard that other opposition groups eventually tailed. Positions such as sequestering support from the US government, advocating for violent terror attacks and armed uprisings, and supporting a US invasion of Iran were all originally MeK positions before being adopted by other opposition groups and leaders during WLF such as Masih Alinejad and others [58].

Starting in the 1990s but especially following the Iraq War, the MeK launched an intense, multi-million dollar lobbying campaign in the US to be delisted from the US State Department’s list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTOs) [61, 62]. In 2009, the EU removed the MeK from its FTO list [59]. By 2012, Hillary Clinton had also delisted the MeK from the US’s FTO list during her tenure as US Secretary of State under Barack Obama [52]. The MeK enjoys considerable support from Republican Party officials and other major neoconservative figures such as Mike Pompeo, John Bolton, Rudi Juliani, Mike Pence, Elaine Chao, Newt Gingrich, Mitch McConnell, and others [54, 63, 64]. The organization pays such figures hefty sums of cash to attend its rallies in Paris and elsewhere, with, for instance, John Bolton being paid upwards of $180,000 to speak at one such event [63]. 

Hilariously, the MeK is also known to “rent crowds” of random individuals and non-Iranians to attend its rallies and make their organization seem popular [66]. Other major political figures however support the group without such payment [54, 61]. Such intense lobbying is why US administrations and Congressmembers frequently promote the group despite its unpopularity in Iran [63]. However, their support is not restricted to just Republicans, as Democrats such as Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, Robert Torricelli, Bob Menendez, and others also support the group [61, 67]. In February 2023, following the events surrounding the ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ movement, over 160 members of the US Congress signed a bipartisan endorsement of Maryam Rajavi, the MeK, and officially announced their support for the organization’s activities [68]. Beyond just the US, the MeK also has close ties with EU officials and various Members of the European Parliament, Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu and his Likud government in Israel, and Saudi Arabian intelligence officials such as Prince Turki Al-Faisal [52, 59, 69].

The MeK seems to have a lot of funding given how much it spends on lobbying, although the sources of revenue for the group remain very murky and unclear [70]. Historically, Saddam Hussein supplied the group with all the necessary funding, weapons, intelligence, and other logistics required for their operations [71]. However, after 2003, one of the main sources of funding for the MeK is believed to be Saudi Arabia, along with several fake charities and fundraiser events across the US and EU [52, 62]. Those fundraisers and charity events may simply be fronts to obfuscate clandestine financial support from US, Israeli, or European intelligence agencies [70]. 

Following the Iran-Saudi normalization deal in 2023, it’s likely that the Saudis have cut all funding for the group. The US’s CIA, alongside Israeli and Saudi intelligence agencies, frequently collaborated with the MeK for the last two decades to conduct intelligence operations in Iran [72, 73]. The operations included intelligence sharing regarding Iran’s Nuclear Program, murder sprees against Iranian scientists, and various bombings and sabotage missions [63, 69, 57, 52, 72, 73]. The MeK serve as on-the-ground agents in Iran who physically carry out operations while intelligence agencies such as the CIA and Mossad provide the training, logistics, and debriefs that are necessary [73]. 

Other operations conducted by the MeK, as discussed in detail in earlier sections, include online psychological influence operations via the use of mass troll farms of bots [75]. Lastly, they also try to initiate agitation on the ground via graffiti or plastering leaflets with anti-government and pro-MeK messaging. They upload videos and pictures of these minor activities to social media, however, they seem to garner near zero attention as indicated by their low Twitter activity [76, 77]. These MeK operations are done with the tacit approval of –  if not direct collaboration with – foreign governments like those of the US, Israel, and Saudi Arabia and their intelligence agencies.

Media and NGOs

Before and throughout the ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ movement, the US government directly funded several Iran-related media projects. While there were overall many different clandestinely supported and openly supported media projects, this segment will briefly brush through some major relevant projects. These media projects in turn work with many NGO groups to aid regime change, with the main sponsor of many of these groups being the NED, as will be discussed below.

As previous sections mention, the Voice of America (VOA) Persian News Service is one major US government-owned and funded propaganda outlet, staffed by Iranian diaspora and reporting from a pro-monarchist bent [78, 79]. Another US-funded propaganda outlet is Radio Farda which is a Persian language subsidiary of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) [80]. Both of these outlets played major roles in distributing the atrocity narratives discussed earlier in this article. It is notable that Masih Alinejad, a major opposition figure, works at VOA’s Persian News Service, and is paid over $700,000 in grants directly from the US government for her regime-change-oriented propaganda campaigns and speeches, in addition to her sources of income [81]. Masih will be covered in detail under the Israel section of this article, as her role in WLF is heavily tied to the Israeli state.

In the years leading up to the WLF movement, the US State Department’s Global Engagement Center funded an NGO project called the ‘Iran Disinfo Project’. The project was founded by Mariam Memarsadeghi, and from around 2017 to 2019, they provided $10 million in funding to the media project to “counter Iranian propaganda” [82]. The Iran Disinfo Project was another parcel of the Trump administration’s media apparatus to apply “maximum pressure” on Iran, alongside other Western-aligned outlets such as Radio Farda and VOA Persian [82]. 

In 2019, the propaganda project received negative press and controversy when it was exposed that the majority of the activity of the project was dedicated to harassing those deemed not “sufficiently” anti-Iran or too “moderate” [82, 83]. Some of the people attacked by the Iran Disinfo Project were BBC journalists, Western Think Tank members, and members of Human Rights Watch [83]. These people and their organizations ironically are many of the same who were involved in conjuring or circulating some of the ridiculous narratives that formed the basis of WLF, which was discussed at the beginning of this article. Others who were attacked were those who were not specifically a part of the monarchist/Pahlavi wing of the Iranian opposition [82]. 

This infighting inside Iran’s diaspora opposition was commonplace before and now after WLF [84]. The MAHSA Charter alliance that effectively linked all major groups in the exiled opposition – including monarchists, separatists, leftists, ex-reformists, and MEK sympathizers – collapsed in less than six weeks, lasting from February to April 2023 [85]. Additionally, this debacle also demonstrates the earlier point made about the gradual radicalization of Iranian opposition groups, with this development being nudged into reality by the US government.

Following the 2019 debacle, despite “cutting” with the Iran Disinfo Project, the US State Department continued to fund new projects by Mariam Memarsadeghi. One such project was Tavaana, a hawkish opposition media outlet parallel and similar to others such as Iran International. Tavaana, founded in 2010, is led by the same personnel as the Iran Disinfo Project and is effectively a bait-and-switch parallel to the former project. Memarsadeghi is the project leader of Tavaana, with another figure Brittany Hamzy being the project manager for both Tavaana and the defunct Iran Disinfo Project [82]. Funding which was previously meant for the Iran Disinfo Project and was cut off following the 2019 debacle, was instead redirected to Tavaana.

In conjunction with the previous discussions about media and NGOs, it's important to also discuss the NED. According to publicly available data, the US via the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) gave at least ~$5,000,000 in grants to various Iran-related liberal NGOs (“non-governmental organizations”) in the leadup to WLF from 2016-2021 [86]. The NED is one of the US’s primary vehicles for regime change in the post-Cold War era. During the Cold War, the CIA clandestinely conducted coups, armed militant opposition groups, or funded counter-revolutions against target countries (typically Communist states) such as China, Chile, Vietnam, and the PDPA’s Afghanistan. The CIA indeed continues to conduct similar activities to this day, with notable examples such as Operation Timber Sycamore in Syria. However, it has often delegated the role of toppling governments deemed undesirable to the USA to groups such as the NED and the International Republican Institute (IRI; the Republican Party wing and subsidiary of the NED) [87]. 

The NED was established in 1983 at the behest of Tom Kahn, a Shachtmanite/neo-Trotskyist advisor and speechwriter for then-Senator Henry Jackson, and introduced to Congress by Congressman George Agree [89]. Congressman Agree and Kahn believed that the US needed a tool distinct from the CIA to support subversive movements against the USSR and the Eastern Bloc [89], resulting in the creation of the NED. The NED funds and organizes networks of liberal NGOs on the ground in target countries that coordinate with each other and with Western media, using soft power to topple governments unfavorable to US interests worldwide. Examples include the collapse of Communist Poland in the 1980s; the manipulation of Nicaraguan elections in 1990, which caused the collapse of the first Sandinista government; the manipulation of Mongolian elections in 1996 to elect pro-US free market libertarians; the manipulation of Russian elections in 1996 to reelect Yeltsin and his pro-US neoliberal government; the 2014 Euromaidan coup in Ukraine; and many more [87, 90, 91]. 

This strategy is largely the same as the one employed by liberal billionaire oligarch George Soros [89]. Soros’ group, the Open Societies Foundation (OSF), played a parallel role to that of the NED and helped conduct the 2000 Bulldozer coup in Serbia, the 2014 Maidan coup in Ukraine, and more, often collaborating with the NED in funding many of the same NGO groups such as recently in Kazakhstan 2022 [92, 93]. Given the large sums of money given by the NED to a plethora of different regime-change NGO groups, the NED most likely also played a role in the creation of the ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ movement.

The mobilization of Western celebrity influencers such as Dua Lipa, Justin Bieber, or Kanye to support the WLF regime change movement fits the modus operandi of US government-aligned groups like the NED or OSF, who specialize in the use of soft power to topple governments [94, 95, 96]. Exerting influence through agents and producers, as well as manipulation and other tactics are used to get celebrities to pressure their followers to join in on movements against targeted governments or entities. The US government has similarly used such influence operations before as evidenced by Joe Biden’s White House meeting with some of the largest TikTok influencers, which aimed to recruit them to help influence youth online [97]. 

But there is also direct evidence that at least some of the aforementioned celebrities were contacted to issue the statements they made on Iran and the WLF regime-change movement. Kanye West accidentally showed his DMs on a live stream or screen recording in which he was seen being fed what to say about Iran and WLF by Shervin Pishevar [99]. Shervin Pishevar is a big tech mogul who has many close connections to the US government. Shervin was a top fundraiser for Obama’s 2008 and 2012 Presidential campaigns and also hosted fundraisers for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign alongside George Clooney [100, 101]. He was appointed by Obama to be an entrepreneurial member of multiple US State Department delegations [102]. He was also appointed under Barack Obama to the Fulbright Scholarship Board in 2015 [103]. 

For context, the Fulbright Scholarship was established to create careers for university students in the State Department, intelligence and research, and related government agencies and departments [104, 105, 106, 107]. Moreover, many Fulbright scholars abroad (studying or alumni) have been caught and charged with spying for the US, such as in Bolivia, Russia, China, and others, and are kept closely under the wing of US embassies [108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114]. In effect, the program is another wing of the US’s soft power, working in conjunction with USAID, NED, OSF, NGOs, and media outlets. 

Shervin was also part of a 15-member big-tech consultation with President Obama, alongside other big names like Apple CEO Tim Cook, to discuss NSA surveillance, how to prevent“unauthorized intelligence disclosures” following the Edward Snowden leaks, and the US government’s internet technology [115]. Lastly, Shervin is known to have involvement in the 2011-2013 Arab Spring where he developed and provided internet technology to liberal NGOs on the ground to bypass government internet cuts or filtering [116]. Thus, the celebrity post can be seen as ultimately tying back to NGOs such as the US government’s NED and Soros’ OSF, exemplifying the use of soft power for the toppling of governments. These networks function like a big spider’s web, obfuscated by endless chains of connections, that aim to ensnare and devour targets while effectively hiding in plain sight. This specific case of a high-level operative like Shervin giving Kanye talking points about Iran is just one of many examples of this obfuscated spider web connecting Western governments to Western entertainment, attempting to use soft power to achieve geopolitical aims.

Overall, several NGOs are created with the aim of toppling certain governments such as Iran’s. George Soros’ Open Societies Foundation (OSF) also funds a significant number of similar or the same NGOs/projects and occupies the same niche as the NED. For reference, based on publicly available grant data published by OSF themselves, OSF provided little over $2.06 million in grants between 2016 and 2021 [117]. The listed recipients of these funds are various “pro-democracy”, “human rights advocacy”, and similar NGOs, as well as a related research project into the state of Iran’s economy and society under the pressure of US-led sanctions [117]. It is possible that much more funding was provided as data for 2022 were not published and these are only the numbers that the OSF chose to publish for public viewing. 

This represents only one of many different wings of the US’s labyrinthine byzantine bureaucracy working to overthrow Iran’s government. Another non-NED sponsor of “pro-democracy” regime change NGOs is the US State Department directly themselves. In 2020 alone, the US State Department was allocated over $55 million by Congress to overthrow Iran’s government [82, 118]. It has been documented that up to that point since 2004, the US State Department spent a whopping $515 million total to “promote democracy” and overthrow the Iranian government [82].

It is important to note that these regime change operations, often called “color revolutions”, are generally planned for several years. An example of this can be seen in the 2009 Iranian “Green Movement” which sought to topple the Iranian government of then-President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad over supposed electoral fraud. Discussions of a “Green Revolution” were openly made in US Congress as early as February 2005, where NED co-founder Mark Palmer stated before the House of Representatives International Relations Committee that “most importantly, the committee believes we must get behind the democrats and dissidents in Iran. We see that as the solution, that there needs to be a—we have had an orange revolution, perhaps a green revolution now in Iran” [119]. 

Within the time frame leading up to the 2009 Green Movement, NED grant spending for Iran skyrocketed from $56,000 in 2004 [120] to $545,000 in 2005 [121], with total spending from 2004-2009 being $6,206,000 [122]. While this may not seem much, it must be considered that the MI6 and CIA were able to overthrow Iran’s Mossadegh with only £700,000 in 1953 ($26 million today) [123]. Moreover, it should be kept in mind that these are only the figures which are publicly released, and only for one of many different regime change vehicles. Likely, much more clandestine funding and involvement by US government agencies such as the State Department or CIA remains classified and unreleased. The US State Department for instance does not publicize the activities, grantees, or beneficiaries of the previously mentioned $515 million spent to promote regime change [82]. With all this context in mind, likely, plans and preparations for regime change events such as those seen in WLF were made in advance, just as they were with the Green Movement.

It can be concluded that the US government was, without question, the biggest player leading the charge against Iran in the last two decades and it laid much of the groundwork for ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’. It is undeniable that the US spent hundreds of millions, or potentially over a billion dollars, to try to topple Iran’s government in the last two decades. This was done either directly through the State Department, the NED, CIA or indirectly via various NGO networks, media projects, and other forms of soft power. This does not even include extraterritorial proxy conflicts such as in Syria where the US sought to knock out Iran’s regional allies to further isolate and weaken Iran, an event which will be discussed in sections further down in this article.

Israel

Without a doubt, the principal backer of the events of late 2022 in Iran and the ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ movement as a whole was the government of the State of Israel [125]. As opposed to previous attempts at color revolutions in Iran, this attempt was not led directly by the USA, UK, or EU states but was primarily an Israeli operation [125]. This does not mean however, that the USA and other governments did not play a significant role since it is well known that the CIA delegates its operations regarding Iran to the Israeli Mossad and therefore, like all government efforts in Israel, it can be considered as a US-Israeli collaboration [126]. 

It would also be naive to assume that Mossad’s aim for this operation was regime change in Iran, as the institution is more than likely aware of its capabilities and the ability of the Iranian state to defend against such attacks [125]. The aims of this operation were threefold. Firstly, Israel aimed to cause chaos and insecurity within Iran and therefore cause damages for its enemy to deal with [125]. Secondly, the operation was supposed to cause a distraction for the new government of Iran and inhibit advancements toward the new foreign policy objectives undertaken by the government of President Ebrahim Raisi [125]. Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, the operation aimed to damage the new government's reputation and Iran’s population to distrust it [125, 127]. 

This event was, therefore, not necessarily supposed to be a full-blown regime change operation, but it did set the stage for a possible future operation, possible details of which were later released after the exchange of American and Iranian prisoners in late 2023 [126]. One of the American prisoners released was a woman named Fakhr al-Sadat Moeini who is believed to have been a CIA/Mossad operative who was sent to Iran to set the stage for a complex event that would trigger a civil war in Iran [126]. The plan seems to have been that a series of major terrorist attacks would be conducted in Iran’s capital after which a small region inhabited by an ethnic minority would declare independence and be provided weaponry and funding to establish a government and fighting force capable of challenging the Iranian state [126].

Relationships with Opposition Leaders

One field in which Israel’s influence over the WLF movement can easily be seen is the relations that the state maintained with the foreign-based leaders of the movement. The first of these leaders is the disgraced former Crown Prince of the Pahlavi dynasty, Reza Pahlavi. Pahlavi made a visit to Israel in April of 2023, in which he asked for Israeli help for the overthrow of Iran’s government and engaged in Jewish religious rituals to show his loyalty to the Israeli state [128, 129]. 

Reza Pahlavi maintains the same extreme position as the Israeli government concerning a possible military invasion of Iran and was quoted in the early 2000s stating that the United States should attack Iran instead of Iraq and Afghanistan as Iran was the “eye of the octopus”, using the same phrase that Israeli leaders use regularly in their media broadcasts [128]. Reza Pahlavi and his supporters were extremely supportive of such a possible invasion in the early 2000s and have helped normalize this outlook among the Iranian opposition groups [128]. The ideology of the Pahlavi monarchists also places a great emphasis on supposedly great historical relations between Iran and Israel with the story of Cyrus the Great’s freeing of the Jews in Babylon being a central tenet of their belief system that is used to express support both for Israel as a representative of the Jewish people and for the modern Liberal doctrine of ‘Human Rights’ [131].

Another leader of the WLF movement with close ties to Israel is Massoumeh Alinejad Qomi-Kolayi, better known as ‘Masih Alinejad’. Alinejad, who, as a WLF leader, started a campaign to boycott Iranian sports, especially the Iranian National Football Team during the 2022 FIFA World Cup, started her political career as a Reformist journalist and activist in Iran [132, 133]. Although she worked for countless important Reformist newspapers, after her exit from Iran she was left in a dire situation as a refugee in the United Kingdom [134]. However, suddenly, she burst onto the scene as an opposition activist leading campaigns against hijab policies inside Iran from afar [133, 134].

Her career took its most notable turn when she was propelled to fame after being given an award by ‘UN Watch’, an organization with allegedly close ties to Israel that monitors supposed anti-semitism occurring within the United Nations [134, 135, 136]. She previously worked as an employee of the United States government in the ‘U.S. Agency for Global Media’ and most recently appeared at the Halifax International Security Forum, calling for Israeli attacks on Iranian nuclear facilities [133, 137]. Notably, during the WLF movement’s peak she appeared on the podcast of American media figure, Jordan Peterson, to preach her message for regime change in Iran [138]. Peterson is an employee at ‘The Daily Wire’, a network co-founded by pro-Israeli commentator Ben Shapiro who some allege has ties to the Israeli state [139, 140].

Perhaps the most organized and motivated non-ethnic opposition grouping supported by Israel is the Mojahedin-e Khalq Organisation (MeK). Due to their militarized nature and rigid organizational structures, this political organization-turned-cult is a valuable asset for Iran’s enemies [142]. Previously Israel had teamed up with the MeK to assassinate Iranian nuclear scientists and the relationship between the two groups has flourished after the collapse of the MeK’s previous backer, Ba’athist Iraq [143]. The MeK played a major role in the simulated revolution of 2022-23, using their online presence, which consisted of bots as well as accounts claiming to represent so-called ‘Youth Neighbourhood Committees’ in Iran [142]. Given the group’s unpopularity among Iranians in both the diaspora and in Iran, an alternative face had to be used as their representative in the WLF movement.

Hamed Esmailon, a father and husband of victims of a passenger flight shot down by Iranian armed forces in the chaos after General Qasem Soleimani’s assassination in January 2020, was quickly catapulted to fame during the WLF movement, transforming from mourning father to regime change operation leader [144]. Overnight, Esmailion grew into a social media sensation, backed by thousands of Twitter and Instagram bots [146]. He led the large diaspora protests in Berlin and his image as a mourning father was mythologized, turning him into a saintly figure for the opposition [144]. 

What was left unsaid, however, was that Esmailion had long-standing ties to the MeK, whom he wrote novels about in the 1990s and 2000s [146]. His link to Western and Israeli politicians was a man named Kaveh Shahrooz, who had previously gained notoriety for writing a letter to G7 leaders asking for them to conduct regime change in Iran [147]. Shahrooz and Esmailion spoke at political events alongside Irwin Cotler, the head of the Israeli lobby in Canada, and named him as their mentor [147]. Cotler is a member of the Israeli Council on Foreign Relations and, in 2023, he was awarded Israel's Presidential Medal of Honour by Israeli President Isaac Herzog [148, 149]. Alongside another mentor of Shahrooz called Terry Glavin, Cotler was one of the forerunners in getting the MeK off of the US and Canadian terror lists [147]. All four of these men have ties to the MeK’s ‘National Council of Resistance of Iran’, with Cotler giving a speech in honor of dead MeK combatants and personally meeting with the cult leader Maryam Rajavi [147].

The Republic of Azerbaijan

Another prong of Israel’s strategy against Iran is the use of alliances with neighboring states to place pressure on Tehran. The most important of these states is perhaps the Republic of Azerbaijan. Baku and Tel Aviv have formed a strong relationship in recent decades, primarily aimed at challenging Iran, buying and selling arms, and controlling trade routes, most notably for energy [151]. In recent years, Israel has strongly backed Baku in its war against the Republic of Armenia by providing weaponry and military assistance [152].

 If Baku seizes Syunik province – if not the entirety of Armenia – it effectively gains a monopoly over North-South trade between Iran and Europe/Russia. Success for Baku in its plans to cut off Iran from Armenia would mean the potential disconnection of Iran from Europe and Russia through the only route not controlled by the NATO Alliance, and would therefore greatly limit Iran’s potential for trade and isolate Iran to the benefit of Israel [152]. 

Israel also benefits from the Republic of Azerbaijan’s participation in pan-Turkic projects and the connection of Turkey to Central Asia as this would provide Israel with greater access to energy corridors and resources from the Caspian region and aid it in its plan to establish itself as an energy hub for Europe [152]. Baku also harbors several Iranian Azeri separatist groups and figures exiled from Iran, while Baku’s media, officials, and other major figures often tout their jingoistic rhetoric about the need to “liberate” what they call “South Azerbaijan” (much of Northwestern Iran that is inhabited by ethnic Azeris) [152]. 

Around the time of the WLF movement, on the 28th of January 2023, a drone attack took place on a military site in the city of Esfahan [154]. Although it did no significant damage, the Iranian government blamed Israel for this attack, and later speculation arose that these quadcopters had taken off from the territory of the Republic of Azerbaijan [154, 155]. It would not be surprising to see future collaborations between Baku and Tel Aviv aimed at Iran given the strong alliance formed by these two states in recent times.

Support for Separatist Groups

Kurdish and Israeli flags being waved at a Kurdish rally in Iraq [156].

The most important groups that Israel used for their operations on the ground in Iran were separatist organizations and, most importantly Kurdish separatist organizations. Israel’s sponsorship of these groups has its roots in a doctrine developed by David Ben Gurion called ‘The Alliance of the Periphery’ [157, 152]. This doctrine states that Israel should use non-Arab states in West Asia to aid it against its enemies and it has been extended since the mid-20th century to include Kurdish organizations as well [152]. The importance of these groups grew especially after Iran’s 1979 Revolution which pitted the the new Islamic Republic against Israel and the United States and in recent decades, Israeli officials have written various articles and given many speeches calling for the balkanization of Iran [152, 158]. 

This can also be seen in the social media accounts of a suspected Mossad member and employee of the FTD (a US-based Israeli lobby with ties to the Likud Party) named Brenda Shaffer who works closely with the Baku government [152]. During the WLF riots, Shaffer consistently retweeted various separatist groups from a range of ethnicities including Kurds, Azeris, Turkmen, and Arabs [152]. This is in line with Israel’s doctrines as the balkanization of large states in the region would distract regional powers from Israel and provide it with new allies, a policy successfully implemented with regard to the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in Iraq [152]. Israel also pushes towards this goal by promoting an anti-Islamic and Persian-centric ideology, especially among Pahlavi monarchists, which sows divisions among Iranians and acts as a form of Persian separatism from Iran as a unified nation [131].

Israel’s relationships with Kurdish groups and leaders such as the Barzani family and the Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan (PDKI) are long-standing and deep with PDKI armed militias conducting their initial training in Israeli boot camps [152]. The relationship with the Barzani family especially has resulted in strong Israeli influence in the KRG, in both security and energy-related affairs [152]. Notably, the KRG leader, Masoud Barzani, gave condolences to Iranian Kurds for the death of Mahsa Amini, fueling the ethno-separatist narratives surrounding the riots [152]. Even many of the slogans of the WLF movement, including ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ originate in Kurdish groups and were used by Kurdish groups in Syria who aided the establishment of an American occupation force in the North-East of the country that allows the US to take control of and export Syrian oil and wheat [161]. 

During the WLF movement, the main active Kurdish separatist parties in Iran were the PDKI and the Komala parties [161]. The Komala parties also have long-standing ties with Israel and have cooperated with Israel in operations to sabotage Iranian military facilities, with the ‘Komala Party of Iranian Kurdistan’ attempting to conduct terrorist attacks in Iran with the aid of Mossad even before the start of the WLF riots [152, 162, 163]. The head of the PDKI, Mustafa Hijri, expressed the sentiments of many of these Kurdish separatist groups in an interview with Jerusalem Post where he stated that Iran is the common enemy of Israel and Kurds and explicitly asked for Israel’s help to overthrow the Iranian government [152]. The leader of the Komala Party of Iranian Kurdistan, Abdullah Mohtadi, as well as Mustafa Hijri and various other Kurdish separatist leaders, appeared frequently on opposition media channels during the WLF movement’s peak, encouraging viewers to kill security forces and any individuals related to the Iranian government [152, 164]. These leaders would be invited onto channels like the BBC to recount baseless stories about government atrocities, aiding in the radicalization of Iranian audiences [152]. 

During the WLF riots, Kurdish groups would conduct brief cross-border raids into border towns like Oshnavieh which resulted in celebrations across opposition media who interpreted these separatist actions as “liberation” [152]. To win favor with other opposition groups, these Kurdish separatists state that they support a doctrine of federalism, however, this can be interpreted as a first step towards balkanization as can be seen in the case of Iraq’s Kurdistan Regional Government, which acts as a US-Israeli puppet state in Iraq and functions separately to the Iraqi government [152].

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Section Six: The Power Struggle in Iran

To properly understand the events of late 2022, it is vital to analyze the role of different factions in Iran and their power struggles. Although many analysts in the West portray the political class of the Islamic Republic as a completely unified bloc under the control of a supreme dictator, this is far from the truth. Since the very early days of the Islamic Revolution, many factions have existed in the popular front bloc that formed the Islamic Republic. Although many of these factions, such as non-Islamic Liberal Democrats and Communists, were purged in the 1980s, strong disagreements persisted amongst the clerics and revolutionaries that ultimately consolidated their dominance in the revolutionary period [2]. 

The issue that most divided this new political class was foreign policy. As opposed to the “hardline” or “principlist” faction that saw sovereignty and opposition to Israel and American imperialism as one of the primary aims of the revolution, a faction also existed that sought to work with the West, and although they saw no harm in ousting the Shah, they still believed that Iran should follow a Liberal economic and political path, albeit under a more Islamic framework [3]. This faction came to be primarily led by Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and would even engage in negotiations with the US government in the 1980s known as the Iran-Contra Affair [4, 5]. 

After the death of Ayatollah Khomeini, Hashemi Rafsanjani, or Rafsanjani, as he now preferred to be called, became the first President of Iran under the new post-Khomeini constitution [6]. He and his party, the Executives of Construction, were known as the ‘Moderate’ faction and they began a process of liberalization in the economic and socio-cultural spheres [7]. Rafsanjani’s two terms as President were then followed up by the birth of the closely aligned ‘Reformist’ faction led by President Mohammad Khatami [8]. Khatami’s government pushed a policy of increasing liberalization and attempted a rapprochement with the USA under the framework of a “Dialogue of Civilisations” [9, 10]. In his time, Iran saw his supporters conduct the first attempt at major political change conducted through street protests during the 18 Tir movement [11].

Khatami’s Presidency was then followed up by Ahmadinejad, whose Presidency saw a patchwork of policies and political alignments as well as the largest protest movement in the Islamic Republic’s history as millions protested the outcome of the 2009 Presidential elections under the leadership of the Reformist candidate, former Prime Minister Mir-Hossein Mousavi [13, 14, 15]. In 2013, the Reformist-Moderate movement won back power as Hassan Rouhani won the presidential elections with the promise to negotiate with the USA and end Iran’s sanctions [16].

The Reformist-Moderate faction, more commonly referred to as just Reformists, generally aligns themselves with the interests of big business, major capitalists, and the Chamber of Commerce in Iran [17, 18]. The Rafsanjani family themselves are one of the richest in the country and hold large plots of land in Kerman Province [19]. From 1989 till today Iran has seen the implementation of strong neoliberal policies spearheaded by the Reformist movement, leading to the expansion of the power of oligarchs [17, 18]. After the Obama administration implemented so-called crippling sanctions on Iran in the early 2010s, the economic interests of this oligarchy were threatened [19]. 

To alleviate these sanctions, in 2013, Hassan Rouhani ran for the presidency, with an unprecedented level of advertisement and media excitement around his campaign, to negotiate with the West and get sanctions lifted [20, 21, 22]. Rouhani won and pushed negotiations with the USA into overdrive, resulting in the 2015 ‘Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action’ or JCPoA, according to which Iran would limit its nuclear program and in return would have certain sanctions lifted [23, 24]. This was supposed to be the first step in a series of negotiations that would then target Iran’s military capabilities and regional network of alliances, finally resulting in the Islamic Republic becoming a Western-aligned nation, aiming to follow the developmental model of nations such as Japan and Germany [22, 25, 26]. One such example was that in 2016, merely one day after US President Barack Obama’s executive order was signed lifting Iran nuclear sanctions as part of the JCPOA, Obama signed new sanctions targeting Iran’s missile/defense programs [67]. Not long after, Reformists such as Rafsanjani hinted at being willing to negotiate away Iran’s missile program, by issuing statements such as “the world of tomorrow is a world of dialogue, not missiles”, which sparked political feuding between Reformists and Principlists [68, 69]. 

In 2018, however, everything changed when US President Donald Trump pulled out of the JCPOA, started his “maximum pressure” sanctions campaign, and Iran’s economy fell into an unprecedented recession [27, 28]. The Reformists, who continued to be the ruling party at the time under Rouhani, did not aid the economic situation. In addition to passing hyper-neoliberal economic policies, they had delayed Iranian trade deals with China that would have alleviated and offset pressures caused by Western sanctions, all in the hopes of returning to an idealistic JCPOA with the West. For instance, Xi Jinping proposed Iranian cooperation/entry into China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) as early as 2015 and 2016 [64, 65]; Rouhani wouldn’t take him up on his offer until years later in 2021 when Iran finally joined BRI, after mounting pressure from Khamenei and the economic situation [25, 66]. Adding to this, Trump also assassinated Iran’s highest-ranking military commander, General Qasem Soleimani, in early 2020, and destroyed all hopes for the Reformist project within Iran [29].

Following the failure of the JCPOA and the terrible economic decline of Iran, caused by sanctions and the hyper-neoliberal policies of the Rouhani government, the Reformist movement lost all the wind in its sails [31]. By the time of the 2019 parliamentary and 2021 presidential elections, they had no popular candidates who could run in the elections as the grand promises of the last two administrations had proven fruitless. As a result, a Principlist parliament was formed in 2020, and “hardliner” Seyyed Ebrahim Raisi won the 2021 presidential elections [32, 33]. For the first time in decades, the Iranian government seemed unified from top to bottom. However, before things could settle and Raisi could begin to implement his policies, the ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ movement suspiciously sprung up, claiming to not only challenge Raisi but also to want an end to the Islamic Republic as a whole.

Although complete regime change was demanded by the movement, suspicions about the role of the Reformists shouldn’t be set aside. An interesting fact about the foreign-based media organizations that led the ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ movement is that they are to a large extent staffed by journalists who worked for Reformist-owned papers and networks inside Iran such as Sharq, Etemad, Entekhab, and Hammihan [34, 35]. In addition to this, these Reformist papers are often cited by foreign-based networks as primary sources for their stories [34, 35, 36]. The story of the death of Mahsa Amini as a possible result of Guidance Patrol brutality was first published by the Reformist paper Etemad [37]. Other Reformist newspapers also played important roles in the propagation of this narrative, the sensationalization of the story, and the fueling of protests. 

In a joint statement by Iran’s major intelligence agencies, the Ministry of Intelligence and IRGC Intelligence, it was revealed that two journalists, one working for Sharq, named Niloofar Hamedi, and the other working for Hammihan, named Elaheh Mohammadi, played pivotal roles in the creation of riots and the ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ movement [38]. In this statement, and in the later documentary film called ‘Khabarchin’ or ‘Informer’, which uses significant audio evidence, it was revealed how Hamedi was one of the first journalists to arrive at Kasra Hospital after Amini was taken there [38, 39]. It is shown in recordings how she attempted to provoke the Amini family, who did not believe that their daughter had died due to beatings from the Guidance Patrol, that this was indeed a case of government brutality, and that they should seek justice for this alleged physical violence [38, 39]. Elaheh Mohammadi similarly went to Mahsa Amini’s hometown in Saqqez, Kordestan Province to provoke Amini’s relatives into holding a similar stance and to provoke people around the family to view the matter as anti-Kurdish discrimination, thus helping to incite ethnic conflict in the region [38, 39]. 

In the documentary, it is shown how Mohammadi and Hamedi attended conferences and workshops, supposedly for journalism, held by agencies connected to the United States government and the US Central Intelligence Agency and that they maintained contacts with and took instructions from foreign-based handlers about how to provoke protests and steer them [39]. At the end of the documentary it is revealed using audio evidence from one of Mohammadi’s phone calls that she attended the first protest in Tehran at Keshavarz Square and purposefully incited the use of the “Woman, Life, Freedom” chant along with other chants that centered around Kurdish separatist and feminist themes [39].

The connection between Reformist media and the foreign-based opposition is less surprising when it is considered that some of the heads of the WLF movement and its media apparatuses were former Reformist politicians and activists within Iran. For instance, one of the self-proclaimed leaders of the movement, Massoumeh ‘Masih’ Alinejad, was a Reformist activist during the Khatami administration [41]. Also, the head of Iran International, Ali Asghar Ramezanpour, was a deputy Minister of Culture during the Khatami administration [42]. Additionally, foreign-based satellite TV networks like Iran International will often have famous Reformist analysts such as Sadegh Zibakalam on their programs [43]. 

Moreover, the same networks and celebrities that promoted the WLF movement were vital in backing Hassan Rouhani’s 2013 and 2017 election campaigns, as well as providing positive coverage of JCPOA negotiations [44]. This is not to mention the huge support that they gave for the 2009 Green Movement protests which, unlike the 2022 protests, involved millions of people, genuinely challenged the Iranian government, and laid the groundwork for a decade of liberal governments and policies throughout the 2010s [45, 46]. The Green Movement protests acted as the pilot for an internet-based protest movement, with the social media network Twitter throwing its full weight behind the movement and later served as a model for the Arab Spring and other regime change attempts [47, 48, 49].

It is also interesting to note the actions of major Reformist politicians during the WLF protests. Rather than calling for calm and an end to hostilities, many Reformists actively fanned the flames of the riots. An important precursor to the events starting in September was the letter by 2009 Green Movement leader Mousavi, who, writing under house arrest, baselessly stated that Ayatollah Khamenei wished for his son to replace him as Leader after his death, thus turning Iran into a monarchical state [50]. This was coupled with a New York Times article in mid-September that stated that Khamenei was deathly ill, causing protestors to think that they must save Iran from this upcoming tyranny of a possible Khamenei dynasty [51]. Mousavi again made similarly agitative statements in a February 2023 letter where he said that Iran needs to move beyond the Islamic Republic towards a new order [52]. Khatami followed this up a day later with a letter that seemed tamer but effectively spread the same message, questioning whether the 1979 Revolution had benefited Iran and declaring that the possibilities for reform within the Iranian system were dead [53].

The children of Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani made similar statements and comments, pushing their base towards a more radical position of opposition to the entire Iranian system of governance as opposed to just the Raisi administration, and as terrorist attacks took place in Iran, very little was heard in the form of condemnation from major Reformist figures [55]. A former Minister of the Rouhani government even asked the clergy of Iran to support the protest movement which by that time was clearly advocating for regime change [55]. Until recently, the head of the oligarch-led Chamber of Commerce was a strong advocate of the movement’s most radical tendency on his social media profiles but still retained his job for a long time due to Reformist support [56, 57, 34, 35]. Long after protests died down, leading Moderate and spokesperson for the Executives of Construction party, Hossein Marashi, stated on national television that the causes of the 2022 protests and previous ones were “disagreements within Iran’s political class”, hinting at the possibility of Reformist involvement in the stoking of riots and protests [34, 35].

This is not surprising when the economic interests of Iranian oligarchs, who are primarily aligned with the Reformist-Moderate faction, are considered. Prominent Reformist figures and thought-leaders such as former presidential advisor to President Rouhani, Mahmood Sariolghalam, regularly make appearances at Western think tanks and conferences such as Chatham House and the World Economic Forum to ask for more sanctions and pressure to be placed on their opponents inside Iran [58]. This is partially because increased economic pressure on Iran causes smaller and medium-sized businesses to fail and allows the oligarchs to further entrench their monopolies [58]. However, the main reason is that the oligarchy believes that the Islamic Republic’s foreign policy is detrimental to their businesses and they wish for the West to place pressure on their internal opponents so that they abandon their anti-American and anti-Israeli stance [58].

Generally speaking, the oligarchy in Iran has strong economic ties with the Western world and has over the years, starting in the late 2000s, succeeded at dollarizing the Iranian economy and getting rid of all price controls [60]. This allows them to set prices for goods, which they hold monopolies for, at prices similar to those in place in Europe and North America and to trade them in US dollars [60]. This means that the higher the price of the dollar, the more profits the oligarchy gains in Irania with a direct 1 to 1 ratio [60]. Hence, the WLF protests were highly beneficial for this oligarchy. Since they control most of the currency trade in Iran, they were able to use the excuse of the protests and the resulting anti-Iranian sentiment in the West to artificially increase the price of the dollar to nearly double its previous rate and therefore, greatly increase their profits [60]. This is while, at the same time, Iran ran a trade surplus, which would naturally strengthen the value of the Iranian Rial relative to the dollar barring any artificial interventions [61].

Now with the 2024 parliamentary elections looming, the Reformists are seeking to capitalize on the gains of the WLF movement. Although before these events, it seemed as though they had lost all social capital, they are now seeking to run on a ticket of increasing women’s rights and liberalizing the cultural sphere in the upcoming legislative elections, attempting to use women candidates as leaders of their campaign [62]. BBC Persian, the forerunner in the foreign-based media sphere, is now speaking of the failure of revolutionary mindsets and emphasizes the need to take a reform-minded approach to the liberalization of Iran [63]. At the same time, Iranian government broadcasting is allowing Reformist figures back on air to help deradicalize those who fell victim to the propaganda of the WLF movement [34, 35]. Ironically, the Iranian diaspora activists who so strongly advocated against any rapprochement with the Iranian government, have yet again become foot soldiers of the Moderate-Reformist faction, propelling them back into relevance after their disastrous collapse in the late 2010s.

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Section Seven: The Saudi Deal

An important event that completely changed the trajectory of the WLF movement was the Saudi-Iranian rapprochement in early 2023. In what came as a surprise to many, the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia signed a deal on March 10, 2023, to renormalize relations following nearly a decade of tensions. While many, especially in the alt-media sphere, have claimed this to be a result or success of “Chinese-brokered diplomacy”, nearly nobody has showcased the unsurprising reality of the matter: China had little to do with this deal other than serving as a neutral meeting point for negotiations. What this deal is contingent on were two fronts: geopolitical results of conflicts in the region, and political results of a near-decade of Saudi funding for Iran’s opposition and its media apparatus. While it is understandable why many think China “brought” this peace, it is a simple and ungrounded conclusion that doesn’t explain why these negotiations happened at all. It is important to understand the full context to comprehend why the Saudis even approached Iran to negotiate at all. This section will limit the scope to wider geopolitics and won't discuss Saudi backing for various media or groups operating inside Iran – this was discussed in depth in previous sections.

Regarding the first front, geopolitics, Saudi Arabia, which was backed by or collaborated with the United States through this endeavor,  engaged in a regional struggle against Iran in the arenas of Syria and Yemen. Before discussing the conflicts themselves, a brief recap of Iranian-Saudi relations should be discussed. Before 1979, the ruling Pahlavi monarchy of Iran and Saudi Arabia were allies and part of the US’s “two-pillar” security architecture in the region, acting as bulwarks against the Soviets and their regional allies. Iranian-Saudi relations soured in 1979, following Iran’s revolution, due to Saudi fears of possible Iranian attempts to “spread the revolution” to its borders, especially among the Shi’a minority in the eastern, oil-rich coast of Saudi Arabia.

The Saudis had a similar fear regarding the republican Arab Nationalist governments such as those of Nasserist Egypt, Colonel Gaddafi’s Libya, or Communist South Yemen since the 1950s. The Saudis filled the role of a “conservative power” that sought to quash Iran’s revolution in its infancy, almost in a similar fashion to what regional powers attempted after the French Revolution of 1789 or the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. This was why the Saudis and other GCC Arab monarchies stood behind Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi invasion of Iran, vitally financing him with upwards of $150 billion (1980 USD) in loans for Iraq’s war effort [3]. 

The Saudis furthermore hosted American troops and bases, which were used to target Iran’s navy in Operation Praying Mantis in 1988. This resulted in heavily strained relations between the countries until after the war and Ayatollah Khomeini’s death, after which there was a period of detente. Under the liberal reformist governments of Rafsanjani and Khatami, Iran-Saudi relations were normalized, with trade being conducted alongside collaboration regarding oil production via OPEC. This continued into the Ahmadinejad government until the latter half of his presidency when accusations of advancing a “nuclear weapons program” were leveled against Iran by the United States and other Western powers. Thereafter, Saudi Arabia partook in Western attempts to isolate Iran via sanctions, embargoes, and other means, such as a Western-backed trade war in the oil market, resulting in souring relations [4]. 

Tensions also flared when Saudi links to various militant groups such as Jundullah were unearthed, as described in previous sections. Relations continued to gradually worsen following a hajj pilgrim stampede that got many Iranians killed in Mecca, in which Iran blamed negligence by Saudi authorities, calling them “unfit” to be custodians of the holy cities [4]. The execution of prominent Shi’a cleric Nimr al-Nimr by Saudi Arabia resulted in an outcry from religious Iranians who subsequently torched the Saudi embassy in Tehran [5]. This was the final straw that completely broke relations between Saudi Arabia and Iran, with all diplomatic ties being cut from that point on. This context will now help us understand the roles of the two states in the Syrian and Yemeni conflicts.

Saudi involvement in the Syrian Civil War was caused by a multitude of reasons. The first reason has to do with Assad’s Syria being traditionally an Iranian ally since the 1980s. This led to Syria allowing Iran to transport weapons through its territory to various militias in Lebanon, most notably the Lebanese organization Hezbollah [7]. Iran also constructed several supply depots in Syria to facilitate this. Syria meanwhile had quashed several pro-Saudi factions in Lebanon since the 70s when Damascus intervened in Lebanon’s civil war. Relations between Saudi Arabia and Syria particularly soured following the assassination of key Saudi ally and Saudi-Lebanon dual citizen, Prime Minister Rafic Hariri. He was perceived to be under Syria’s protection as Syria was occupying much of Lebanon at the time, so the Saudis blamed Syria for the assassination, a charge that Syria denied [8]. At the same time, Syria politically backed and armed many different Lebanese militias over the decades, increasingly aligning with pro-Iranian factions in Lebanon following the conclusion of the Lebanese civil war, with Hezbollah becoming a major Syrian ally and recipient of support in the 2000s [9]. 

All of this was detrimental to the Saudis, as it caused them to lose influence, economic opportunities, and political allies. The Iranian-Syrian alliance became especially significant in 2011, due to the context of increasing Iranian isolation in the face of UN sanctions over its nuclear energy program, which were spearheaded by the US and its allies. Syria was one of the few state allies Iran could depend on, as otherwise, Iran was practically an international pariah state. Knocking out Syria and its political sovereignty by overthrowing Assad, would more broadly isolate Iran, therefore serving as a major goal for Saudi Arabia, as well as Israeli and American planners [10].

Another significant weight pushing Saudi Arabia to intervene in Syria was the fact that before the war, Iran had heavily invested in Syria including a $10 billion pipeline project between Iran, Iraq, and Syria signed in 2011 and set to be operational by 2016 [11, 12]. This pipeline project would have allowed Iran to export energy to the Mediterranean and Europe very easily, with Syria majorly benefitting from lowered energy costs due to increased supply, the collection of a commission on oil profits as a transit partner, as well as a new role a shipping hub to the broader Mediterranean through its ports that would most likely see major development. This was highly detrimental to Saudi and ARAMCO's plans to construct a rival pipeline that was rejected by Syria which would flow from Saudi Arabia, through Jordan, Syria, and Turkey, and finally arrive in Europe [12]. This alternative pipeline project was also a factor in causing Turkey to intervene in Syria as well [13]. Knocking out Syrian political sovereignty could also open the doors for more economically exploitative, one-sided deals beneficial for the Western bloc of the US and Saudi Arabia. Meanwhile, the erosion of Syria’s ability to protect its independence during the civil war would leave it vulnerable to the plundering of its resources by hostile foreign powers, as will be discussed further below. 

Other notable pre-war Iranian economic projects in Syria included a $500 million investment in the construction of several Syrian power plants and a $60 million investment in joint-automobile production, with Iran and Syria having a $545 million in total trade volume in 2010, marking a record in Syrian-Iranian trade as of 2019 [15]. The total of all pre-war Iranian investments in Syria (excluding the pipeline project) was $2.5 billion [16]. Halting these Iranian economic projects, kneecapping Damascus’s political sovereignty, and further isolating Iran, as mentioned above, were vital to Western and Saudi plans in the region.

The issue of Damascus’s sovereignty also had relevance in other matters as well, which helped draw in the main country sponsoring regime change in Syria: the United States of America. Damascus’s political sovereignty always posed a threat to Israel, who had fought several wars previously with Syria, most notably in 1967 and 1973 with Bashar al Assad’s father, Hafez al Assad. In the 2000s, Israel was alarmed by Syria’s nuclear energy program [17, 18]. The US had previously pressured Russia and Argentina to cease exports of supplies and machinery necessary for Syria’s nuclear energy program in 2006 [18], while Israel had struck Syrian nuclear facilities and killed its nuclear scientists in 2007 [18, 19]. 

Israel had also fought various resistance groups during its occupation of Southern Lebanon from the 1980s until its withdrawal, as well as a full-scale war with Hezbollah in 2006. Syria’s, alongside Iran’s,  support, supply of cash, arms, and even volunteers for Palestinian and Lebanese resistance groups fighting Israel in Lebanon and Palestine had drawn Israel’s ire, and by extension the US [8, 20, 21, 22, 23]. Israel has admitted to assassinating Syrian generals responsible for collaborating with Iran to support said groups [18]. 

After normalizing relations with Iraq in 1997, Syria is known to have helped the Iraqis get around UN sanctions and smuggle oil [24]. Syria strongly opposed the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 [25], while sheltering many former Iraqi officials and civilians fleeing the country [24]. Syria also was accused by American officials and the new Iraqi government of having provided finances, arms, or other support for various Sunni Iraqi militias fighting US forces, while additionally allowing volunteers to travel to Iraq to fight the Americans [24, 26, 27, 28]. Thus, it was strongly in the interest of the US, and its allies such as Israel, Saudi Arabia, and others to overthrow Bashar al Assad’s government to destroy Syria’s political sovereignty. The ultimate objective would be to install a weak, decentralized, friendly regime that couldn’t make its own sovereign decisions and wouldn’t stand in the way of Western plans for the region.

The Saudi adventure in Syria started with a condemnation of President al-Assad “due to his method to deal with the anti-government opposition” in August 2011 by King Abdullah al-Saud; this was followed by a withdrawal of ambassadors from Syria in February 2012 [29]. Within a few months, reports emerged in mid-2012 that the Saudis were financing and arming rebels in Syria, with some speculating that this may have begun even earlier [30]. Indeed, the Saudis partook in the CIA’s Operation Timber Sycamore which sought to topple Bashar al-Assad’s government. Leaked files from Hillary Clinton indicate vast Saudi support for Syrian rebels, including Al Qaeda in Syria, with the Saudis being the top financer and arms supplier for the rebels throughout most of the war, which undoubtedly delighted the United States [31, 32]. The US would come to heavily rely on Saudi capital to run Operation Timber Sycamore [31].

The list of Saudi-supplied rebel groups in Syria is fairly extensive, including but not limited to: Jaish al-Fatah (Army of Conquest; an Al Qaeda affiliate), Jaish al-Nusra (Al-Nusra Front; an Al Qaeda affiliate), Jaish-al Islam (Army of Islam), the Free Syrian Army (FSA), FSA Southern Front, the 13th Division FSA, the Free Idlib Army, the Syrian Revolutionaries Front (SRF), the Authenticity and Development Front, the Syrian Martyrs’ Brigades, and the Revolutionary Commando Army among others [13, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36].

Eventually, the Saudis would begin to distance themselves from most Syrian rebels as the Assad government’s eventual victory in the war became inevitable [38]. The intervention of Iran and Hezbollah in 2013, who deployed ground forces in Syria, was decisive in checking further rebel advances and taking back strongholds like Homs in 2014. Russia’s intervention in 2015, following Qasem Soleimani’s visit to convince President Putin of a plan to win the war, tipped the balance in favor of Syrian government forces [39, 40].

By 2018, most rebel and ISIS strongholds from Aleppo to Daraa had been recaptured by Syrian government forces. Also by 2018, the Saudis had unsurprisingly dropped ties to most of the above-mentioned rebel groups, instead shifting their focus towards developing ties with factions in the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) or “Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria” (AANES), which controls the northeast of Syria [41, 42, 43, 44]. Of particular interest to the Saudis were Arab factions in the SDF. 

Interestingly enough, around the same time, reports had emerged of the plundering of Syrian resources in SDF-held territory by Western corporations, with implications for Saudi Arabia’s participation [45, 46, 47, 48]. The region is oil-rich and produces the bulk of Syria’s agricultural products and food. There is also a US troop presence in Northeast Syria where, unsurprisingly, most of them are there solely to “secure” the oil fields, as former President Donald Trump stated, allowing for the aforementioned plunder. Upwards of $107 billion of losses have been incurred by Syria as of late 2022 due to the US-led plunder of the country’s northeastern region [45, 48, 49].

Nonetheless, it should be noted that the SDF/AANES is not a monolithic force, but rather a highly factionalized loose alliance of various militias and organizations with different political leanings, backgrounds, and ethnic/religious compositions. Some of these are Arab, others are Syriac Assyrians, while the predominant organizations leading the alliance are Kurdish. Some organizations are liberal democrats such as the ENKS and KDP-S and others are socialists such as the PYD which is the dominant party in AANES [50]. 

At times, these militias fight each other in armed clashes while political organizations also issue threats to one another [50, 51, 52, 53]. Several factions are in favor of separatism and collaboration with US troops or the KDP-led Kurdish Regional Government in Iraq, such as Mazloum Abdi and his supporters [50]. Meanwhile, others such as Aldar Khalil of the PYD want reintegration with the Syrian government and favor cooperation with Syria, Iran, and Russia, especially to counter Turkey [50, 54]. 

The liberal factions in AANES are currently in a weak position in the power struggle [50]. This has led to ongoing negotiations between Damascus and the SDF that could undermine the future of the US occupation and its allies in Northeast Syria [55, 56]. Currently, the Syrian government, Russians, and Iranians have forces deployed in some SDF-occupied territory to prevent and contain further Turkish advances into the region, cooperating with the SDF in certain localities [54]. For instance, the YPG, a PKK-affiliated militia in the SDF, has set up a joint operations command with Iran, Syria, and Russia north of Aleppo in Tel Rifat [57].

This brings us to the present status quo in Syria, with a semi-autonomous/ambiguous status in Syria’s Northeast along with pockets occupied by Turkey or pro-Turkish rebel groups in the North along the border and in the area of Idlib, while the situation in Golan Heights has remained unchanged for decades as Israel continues to occupy the region. However, with regard to the Syrian Civil War, the US and its allies, including Saudi Arabia, completely failed in their aforementioned primary objectives to overthrow the Assad government, break Iran’s supply routes and contact with Lebanon and Palestine, and establish the desired Saudi energy pipeline to Europe through Syria.

With Syria being discussed, the second main conflict point between the Saudis and Iran was in Yemen. To understand the context of the conflict, it has to be considered that Yemen during the Cold War was split in two, with a northern half that remained independent during the colonial era and a southern half that was colonized by Britain. Following decolonization, South Yemen eventually became an independent Marxist-Leninist state. Meanwhile, the North became an Arab Nationalist state after bloody internal conflicts. In 1978, Ali Abdullah Saleh took over North Yemen via a coup d’etat. Eventually, instability in South Yemen led to regime changes and an eventual reunification of North and South Yemen. However, despite unification, instability continued in the South with the government seeking Saudi assistance to put out Southern secessionists in 1994. This led to the growth of Saudi influence in Yemen and the spread of the Wahhabi sect, as a result of increased funding for new mosques and clergy, as well as the importation of Wahhabi militias to fight for the Saleh government [59].

One major opponent of Saleh was Badreddin al-Houthi, a former parliamentarian and major Zaydi Shia cleric from Northern Yemen. He became a vocal critic of Saleh on grounds of his massive financial corruption and criticized him for being backed by Saudi Arabia and the United States at the expense of the Yemeni people and Yemen's sovereignty [61]. In 2004, he and his political allies launched an insurgency against Ali Abdullah Saleh’s government after Saleh placed a $55,000 bounty on Badreddin al-Houthi [59]. Bardreddin’s political movement was thus formalized as “Ansarallah” (companions of God), more commonly known as “the Houthis”. The Ansarallah movement’s stated goals are establishing government accountability, ending corruption, providing utilities, ending discrimination towards Zaydi Shias, establishing fair fuel prices, creating job opportunities for ordinary Yemenis, and ending Western influence in the country [62].

In 2011, during the Arab Spring, Saleh stepped down following unrest across Yemen and handed power to his Vice President Hadi, as per a Saudi-brokered deal. Hadi won an uncontested election in 2012 as the sole candidate, but the situation did not get better. In 2014, Hadi cut fuel subsidies which led to the Houthis ousting him in a popular revolution following mass protests in 2015, and seizing Yemen’s capital Sanaa, while Hadi went into exile in Saudi Arabia [83]. This was immediately condemned as a “coup” by Saudi Arabia and its allies who used this pretext to launch a direct military intervention into Yemen in 2015 [63].

As opposed to Syria, in Yemen, the roles are reversed with Iran playing much less of a direct role, while the Saudis directly intervened in Yemen with their military. Direct Iranian shipments of weapons to Ansarallah seem relatively rare due to the difficulty of bypassing the naval blockade set up by the Saudis and their allies, though the US and Saudis have repeatedly claimed to intercept dhows smuggling Iranian arms to Yemen, a claim which Iran denies [64]. However, Iran and its Lebanese ally Hezbollah have found other ways to back Yemen’s Ansarallah. Iran has used military attachés from the Quds Force (QF), the extraterritorial wing of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), which specializes in irregular warfare, to great effect in Yemen at little cost.

The Quds Force is known to have transferred Iranian technical know-how to the Houthis on how to build and mass produce a plethora of different small arms, drones, naval mines, fast attack craft, land vehicles, and missiles [64]. Some examples include the Houthi Qasef family of UAVs derived from Iran’s Ababil family; the Houthi Waeed family of UAVs, derived from Iran’s Shahed family; Tankil anti-ship ballistic missile, derived from Iran’s Raad-500 SRBM; Hatem MRBMs cloned from Iran’s Kheybar-Shekan MRBMs; the Falaq MRBM, cloned from Iran’s Qiam-2 MRBM; and so on [64]. IRGC-QF and Hezbollah are known to have given military training to Houthi fighters and commanders on how to employ the aforementioned weapons in addition to general tactical and strategic advisory [64]. In some cases, the training was not done in Yemen, but in Iran itself.

Meanwhile, between 2015 and 2019 alone, Saudi Arabia spent nearly $340 billion purchasing arms and at least $265 billion in its military campaign against Yemen (nearly $200 million a day) [66]. There are no official disclosures of Saudi expenditure against Syria, although it is claimed in an estimate by The Economist that the kingdom spent over $1 billion a week in Syria during the height of the war between 2012 and 2018 [67]. This would put Saudi expenditure in Syria at over $312 billion over six years. The resulting total cost of these military adventures for Saudi Arabia surpasses nearly a trillion dollars. 

By comparison, the US spent at least 3 trillion dollars on the Iraq War if not more, over 2 trillion dollars in Afghanistan, $1.1 billion in Libya to overthrow Gaddafi, and at least around $1-10 billion in Syria between 2011-2017 [68, 69, 70, 71, 72]. Most US spending regarding Syria went to conducting airstrikes and Tomahawk missile strikes, including against Syrian government forces, while only $1 billion has been publicly disclosed as the cost of the CIA’s Operation Timber Sycamore aimed at overthrowing Assad [71]. It is possible that much more was spent than publicly disclosed. Regardless, Saudi Arabia’s ridiculous levels of spending on these wars are similar to some of the US's costliest forever wars, such as Afghanistan.

Around the same time frame, according to the US State Department and the US state-affiliated think tank CSIS, Iran spent a total of only $16 billion from 2012-2018 to support Syria, Hezbollah, Ansarallah (Houthis) in Yemen, and various Palestinian resistance organizations such as Hamas, PIJ, and PFLP [84]. Iran’s low-budget irregular/asymmetric warfare strategy prevailed in Syria where Western and Saudi-backed rebel groups were largely defeated throughout most of the country, save for Idlib. It also prevailed in Yemen where the Saudi intervention failed to dislodge the Houthis, all the while suffering major losses such as those incurred during the Houthi attack on Saudi ARAMCO’s oil facilities in Abqaiq.

As victory for the Saudis seemed more and more distant in these conflicts, with all efforts increasingly appearing to be futile, calls for negotiations began to increase. The Saudis began negotiations with the Syrian government around 2019 for the restoration of diplomatic ties, alongside Iran and the Houthi forces in Yemen, though the latter negotiations yielded little results. In 2020, Iranian General Qasem Soleimani was assassinated by a US drone strike at Baghdad International Airport in Iraq while en route to initiate unofficial negotiations in the Saudi embassy for restoration of ties between Iran and Saudi Arabia [73]. This resulted in continued strained relations, with closed-door contacts failing to establish any progress in negotiations.

The straw that finally broke the Saudi camel’s back was the failure of the WLF campaign, as almost a decade of media buildup and funding of the Iranian opposition proved futile. This event ultimately forced the Saudis to seriously pursue negotiations with Iran for normalization of relations in February 2023. Within a month, the now-famous peace deal was signed in Beijing. China’s role, as mentioned previously, was to simply serve as a neutral meeting ground for the two powers and facilitate talks. It would be far too diplomatically humiliating for Saudi representatives to effectively “beg” for the normalization of ties by traveling to Tehran itself. Thus, it can be summarized that Iran’s hard power regional overmatch and the failure of Saudi soft power finally prompted the formation of this deal.

The deal has many significant consequences for the time being. As per the March 10th agreement signed in Beijing, Saudi Arabia is to cease any kind of support to any separatist groups and terrorist militants operating against Iran [75, 76]. The two parties have agreed to not interfere in such internal affairs of each other [76]. The parties have also agreed to find some kind of resolution to the Yemen conflict, though no terms were agreed upon as Saudi-Houthi negotiations are currently progressing independently [76]. Meanwhile, normalization with Iran also led to Saudi normalization with Syria a little over a month later [77]. 

The cession of Saudi support for any Iranian opposition groups means that many of the previously mentioned groups from Liberals involved in WLF to separatists in Iran’s ethnic-minority regions will fizzle away to total irrelevance, as some already largely have. Other dependent groups such as Iran International have sought alternative sponsors, with it being exposed that the influential media network has now come under Israeli ownership [85]. The agreement continues to hold almost a year later despite Gaza’s October 7th surprise attack on Israel and Houthi Yemen’s involvement in the war. More importantly, the Saudis have refused to engage the Houthis in Yemen any longer in a bid to maintain the truce that has been in place since 2022 and to pursue further peace negotiations and detente with Iran [78, 79]. Most notably, Saudi Arabia has even gone as far as rejecting US invitations to join its failed Task Force against the Yemeni group in December of 2023 [80, 81, 82].

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Conclusion

Living through the days and months of the ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ movement as an Iranian can best be described as surreal. Every day, audiences were confronted with a consistent barrage of fake atrocity stories, each more outlandish than the last. Throughout this period, the slightest dissent against these narratives would result in calls for murder and torture by the WLF activists, who would intimidate and harass any Iranians and non-Iranians who disagreed with them [1]. 

What made the 2022 regime change movement unique from previous iterations was its simulated nature. As soon as a person put their phone down and turned off the television, no signs of a mass nationwide movement could be seen anywhere in Iran. Online, it seemed as though something truly extraordinary was occurring, something not seen since the 1979 revolution. But in real life, apart from sporadic riots in the early weeks and violence in Kurdish and Baluchi regions, people continued their normal lives uninterrupted. 

Regardless, opposition media figures consistently made claims every day that the “regime” was about to collapse [2, 3]. With every passing prediction proving untrue, new ones were made and the great victory of the movement was consistently postponed by a few days or weeks [2, 3]. Media channels pumped out story after story about the imminent collapse of the Islamic Republic with Iran International and Israel’s i24 News publishing a ludicrous story about how Iranian government officials were making arrangements and fleeing to Venezuela as they feared the overthrow of their state [4, 5]. 

Unfortunately many Iranians, especially in the diaspora, believed these stories and seemed to truly think that a government that had survived four decades of war and sanctions was now going to fall because of feminist youth who would soon replace them with a ragtag team of separatists and professional regime change TedTalkers. Each segment of the diaspora-based opposition clung to their particular leader as the movement played out its natural course and infighting began. Today, the only segment remaining with a significant online presence are the largely American-based Pahlavi monarchists, who in their complete unawareness of Iran’s conservative culture, believe that they can bring the disgraced Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi to power in Iran and reestablish a monarchical system. Meanwhile, the former Crown Prince has recently won an award for being a supporter of LGBT rights and his wife has openly had a long-standing affair with a French boyfriend [6, 7].

The failure of the ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ movement to bring about the imaginary events that opposition media were claiming as real was nonetheless very irritating for the activists who wished to see Iran in the same state of armageddon that they saw on their smartphones. This end-times scenario, however, only came to fruition during the brief lapses caused by terror attacks conducted by WLF’s supporters in Shahcheragh and Izeh. The narrativization around these terrorist attacks and violence, in general, was yet another major difference between this regime change movement and its previous iterations. Outlets like Iran International proudly aired programs calling for armed conflict and celebrating the murder of security forces. Celebrities took to social media to teach people how to make homemade bombs and advertisements were found on regular social media networks for the purchase of firearms.

The normalization of terrorism and advocacy for civil war had never before reached such heights in the anti-Islamic Republic movement, outside of fringe cults like the MeK. Hand in hand with this was the normalization of separatism. Previously, a highly taboo and frowned upon matter among the self-avowedly patriotic opposition movement, advocacy for the balkanization of Iran became more widespread as foreign-owned media outlets purposefully spread the message to their audience. For many Iranians, even those not particularly fond of the Islamic Republic government, it became clear that the current Iranian state was the only thing standing in the way of civil war and national tragedy.

The propaganda of the movement did, however, have lasting effects, especially on two groups of people. Firstly, inside Iran, upper-middle-class youth were especially affected as they were the primary targets of foreign-based media’s calls to turn into neo-guerilla fighters against the Iranian state. Given their relatively higher use of the internet and as a result, their more Westernized and non-traditional social and political views, middle-class high-school and university students who did not feel represented by the Iranian government were thrust into the center stage and given a new identity as revolutionary warriors. As the movement died down, many felt defeated, however still, some were left permanently radicalized by the constant propaganda.

The other group that was arguably even more affected was the Iranian diaspora. The millions of Iranians who live abroad, mostly in Western countries, were mobilized by the movement to become the supposed voice for those inside the country. Rallies and marches against the Islamic Republic soon became rites of passage for members of the diaspora who seemed to firmly believe that with the help of Western governments, they could overthrow the Iranian government from Berlin, Los Angeles, and Toronto. Today many are unwilling to ever return to Iran for fear of being recognised and arrested for their participation in rallies calling for sanctions and war on their homeland. The WLF movement significantly expanded the already wide rift between Iranians in Iran. Those abroad as many in the diaspora no longer have any understanding of realities inside Iran, choosing to instead believe the stories of a hellish wasteland in which people are brutally murdered every day for no reason other than to satisfy a cartoonishly evil dictator and his brainwashed supporters.

A WLF diaspora rally in Brussels, Belgium [10].

The events of late 2022 also had other effects on Iran. It has been estimated by the International Monetary Fund that, as a result of the WLF movement, Iran suffered a loss in GDP equal to 1% or approximately 3.5 billion dollars. This means that Iranian GDP growth for the Iranian calendar year 1401 (March 2021-March 2022), which was 4%, could have been as high as 5% had the movement not occurred [11]. These losses occurred for various reasons such as damage to public and private property by rioters, decreased tourism during the protests, and decreased foreign investment due to safety concerns [12]. 

In addition to economic losses, the protests also resulted in changes in norms regarding ‘Hijab’ or dress code in Iranian society. According to recently published statistics by the University of Tehran, after the protest movement, approximately 6.4% of women in Iran no longer abide by dress code laws and roam the streets without a head covering, with numbers reaching as high as 9.3% in the capital city, Tehran [13]. Approximately 10% of women in the survey reported that they have adopted a more relaxed attitude towards Hijab, for instance, wearing a less concealing form of head-covering or overall dress while still abiding by the mandate and 4.6% stated that they would not abide by the dress code if there were no laws mandating it [13]. It seems that the Iranian government now seeks primarily to enforce the dress code in state institutions, universities, and schools, similar to French laws limiting access to women with hijab [14].

Although opposition activists called for a renewal of protests on the anniversary of the passing of Mahsa Amini, nothing came to fruition, with even diaspora rallies being limited in numbers [15, 16]. This is most likely due to a combination of factors. Primarily, opposition networks inside Iran were thoroughly exposed during the 2022 movement and require time to be rebuilt, meaning that no serious efforts can be coordinated inside Iran. Secondly, as previously mentioned, Kurdish separatist groups based in Iraq, which put up the greatest challenge to the Iranian state in 2022, were forced to move away from the Iranian border in a deal struck by Iranian and Iraqi authorities. 

Furthermore, after the Iran-Saudi rapprochement, as well as the aforementioned deals and conversations between Iran and Western states, the anti-Islamic Republic movement now receives less outside support and funding for its project. This has been made even more significant in recent months as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in Gaza has drawn away the attention and resources of the United States and Israeli governments who were some of the primary backers of the movement. Lastly, it must be assumed that many of the young people who were mobilized in 2022 have lost enthusiasm since the movement failed to reach its goal of overthrowing the government and are no longer receptive to calls for protests by foreign-based media outlets.

In conclusion, from an opposition activist perspective, the ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ regime change movement can be labeled as a failure. However, it did serve a purpose. By mobilizing opposition to the government of Ebrahim Raisi and its policies the movement seems to have partially reinvigorated the Reformist-Moderate faction which had lost all social credibility after the failure of the JCPoA nuclear deal. This grouping now seeks to participate in the 2024 legislative and Assembly of Experts elections, and the 2025 Presidential elections, using the momentum of the protest movement to regain its lost power. Their allies in foreign-based media channels have begun to steer Iranian liberals towards this more reform-minded alternative to regime change, making the partial resurgence of the Reformist movement the only major outcome of the WLF movement. 

As of now, it seems as though the Guardian Council will allow the Reformists to retake their positions in the Iranian political system and run in the coming elections. The extent of their participation and their level of success in these elections are questions that will have major repercussions for Iranian politics and global geopolitics. If Reformists regain power and steer Iran’s foreign policy towards increased relations with the West and a renewal of the JCPoA negotiations, Iran will be left with a weakened military and more Western influence in its national economy. This would be a break from the ‘Look-East’ policy of the government of Ebrahim Raisi that seeks to work more closely with partners in the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, BRICS, and other emerging multilateral institutions; a project that is seeking to use Iran’s capacity for providing security and potential as a major transit hub to build an international trading system that is independent of the West and the United States [18]. 

This new foreign policy has thus far turned Iran into an important node in the new confrontation between Western powers and the non-Western world, with Iran acting as the third power in a triad that has formed with the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China [20]. The derailing of this new foreign policy and the damages it would incur for Iran would weaken the new emerging global system and damage the non-Western world in its confrontation with American unipolarity. This would leave allies such as Russia in a more fragile state and could destroy the new-found confidence of states such as Saudi Arabia in their pursuit of less Western-orientated policies.

For Iran itself, such an outcome could result in war, civil or external, and the possible destruction of the Iranian state as a whole. This would result in Iran suffering a similar fate to the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, Syria, Libya, or other destroyed and semi-destroyed countries and would be a defeat for the Iranian nation that could take centuries to recover from. Therefore, the next few years are a critical impasse. The ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ movement was most likely only the first step taken by the Islamic Republic’s adversaries in their pursuit to disrupt the foreign policies of the new Iranian government, and more events like it can be expected. If Iran is capable of withstanding them, it will emerge with an important role in a new global order, but if it fails, the world could again be plunged into the post-Cold War order in which one state rules and others follow.

Bibliography

Here is a link for the bibliography:

https://rtsg.org/women-life-fiction-bibliography/

Intro

On April 2nd, President Donald Trump signed an executive order imposing reciprocal tariffs against a range of nations, with the People’s Republic of China singled out for especially punitive treatment. As of this writing, the levy on Chinese goods has escalated to 145%.[1] [2] In the aftermath, a familiar chorus of Western media pundits and online commentators has proclaimed the impending collapse of China’s economy, predicated on the assertion that China remains fundamentally dependent on access to the American consumer market.

But does this assertion bear weight? This article will examine the economic rationale underpinning Trump’s tariff escalation and, more importantly, assess the capacity of the Chinese state to navigate and withstand such external pressures, sustaining economic growth through diversification, domestic demand and regional and geopolitical realignment.

How China can respond

“The Chinese economy is an ocean, not a small pond. A storm can overturn a small pond, but it cannot overturn the ocean.” — Xi Jinping, 2018/11/5 [3]

A common claim among advocates of American tariffs is that China, as an export-driven economy, relies heavily on access to the U.S. consumer market, and that cutting off this access will cripple its growth. But is this true, or is it a misreading of China's economic structure? On April 6th, an article from an anonymous contributor was published on People’s Daily, a state-owned media pundit. The article’s title was dubbed “Focus on doing your own thing and enhance confidence in effectively responding to the impact of US tariffs.”[4]

A substantial majority (85%) of Chinese firms engaged in export nevertheless conduct the bulk of their trade within national borders, deriving no less than 75% of their total revenues from domestic sales. Moreover, the centrality of the American market to China’s export apparatus has diminished: the United States accounted for 19.2% of Chinese exports in 2018, a figure that had fallen to 14.7% in subsequent years, signaling a gradual decoupling from what was once a hegemonic commercial relationship.[5]

China’s dependence on exports as a driver of economic growth has markedly declined over the past two decades, with the export share of its GDP falling from a peak of 36% in 2006 to merely 19.7% by 2023. This shift stands in stark contrast to global trends: the European Union, for instance, derives 51.9% of its GDP from exports; East Asia, 30.2%; Latin America and the Caribbean, 25.2%; Sub-Saharan Africa, 25.6%; and the Middle East and North Africa, 46.3%.[6] In sum, China’s contemporary economic architecture is far less contingent upon external demand than that of comparable regions, reflecting a deliberate and strategic reorientation toward domestic resilience and endogenous growth.

This relative insulation becomes even more evident when examined through the lens of bilateral trade with the United States. Chinese exports to America constitute a mere 2.5% of China’s GDP—an almost negligible fraction when juxtaposed with Vietnam, where exports to the US amount to a staggering 30% of GDP and comprise 30% of total export volume as of 2025.[7] As of 2023, Mexico’s figure stands at 27.4%, while Canada’s sits at 20.6%. Meanwhile, total US imports account for only 0.53% of China’s GDP.[8] Altogether, the sum total of Sino-American trade comprises approximately 3.03% of China’s GDP, underscoring how marginal the American market has become in the wider Chinese economic calculus.

The asymmetry is even more pronounced when viewed from the inverse: it is the United States, not China, that finds itself strategically dependent. A vast array of consumer goods, capital equipment, and intermediate inputs critical to American supply chains are sourced from the People’s Republic. In several categories, American reliance exceeds 50%, with few viable substitutes available in the global market in the short term—a vulnerability acknowledged even in official discourse.[9]

Notably, on April 12th, the Trump administration’s selective exemptions on tariffs, particularly on electronic goods such as smartphones, computers, and related components, serve as an inadvertent concession to this structural dependence.[10] The underlying rationale is not difficult to discern: China is the dominant supplier in these sectors, providing 79% of all U.S. PC monitor imports, 73% of smartphones, and 66% of laptops.[11] Given that consumer electronics constitute China’s foremost export to the American market [12], this represents not merely a tactical exemption but a strategic victory, one that exposes the limits of American decoupling rhetoric and reaffirms the enduring gravitational pull of Chinese industrial capacity.

Another common talking point within American policy circles is the supposed dependence of China on US soybean exports, particularly in sustaining its vast livestock sector, wherein soy serves as the primary feedstock. Nevertheless, this narrative, while rhetorically convenient, does not withstand scrutiny. Far from being an intractable dependency, China has both the capacity and geostrategic intent to curtail its reliance on American soybeans. As outlined by the China Academy [13], there are three principal reasons why this transformation is not only possible but already underway:

1. China is actively developing high protein strains of corn, which could replace soybean as a feed source for China’s livestock. Ordinary corn typically has a protein content of 8%, but China’s high-protein corn can reach up to 30%. Each percentage increase can reduce China’s soybean consumption by 8 million tons.

2. Brazil is emerging as an alternative soybean supplier. By 2025, China’s soy imports from America will account for 18% of its total, while imports from Brazil take up 74%. China already imports most of its soy from Brazil.

3. China is cultivating purple alfalfa which has a quick maturation frame of 25 days, can be planted and harvested relatively quickly despite the lower protein content relative to soy. Additionally, alfalfa has reproductive health benefits for pigs, further enhancing the feed’s viability as an alternative to soy.

In response to mounting external pressures and sustaining domestic growth, China has undertaken a series of countercyclical fiscal measures aimed at reinforcing its industrial foundation and preserving its sovereignty. Among these, the state has raised its fiscal deficit rate to 4% and issued treasury bonds to bolster investment in what are officially designated as the “two new” and “two heavy” policy initiatives.[14] The “two new” policies pertain to promoting a new round of large-scale industrial and infrastructure equipment upgrades and the replacement of old consumer goods with new ones, a clear signal of the state’s intent to stimulate both productive capacity and domestic consumption. Meanwhile, the “two heavy” policies are concerned with the execution of major national strategies and construction of security capabilities in key areas[15] underscoring the regime’s long-term commitment to sovereignty and infrastructural resilience in the face of a deepening geopolitical rivalry.

By steadfastly prioritizing the domestic market, China can target larger infrastructure and industrial initiatives and projects, thereby safeguarding its economy from external shocks. Chief among these priorities is the energy sector, long regarded as the “heart” of the economy, given that every stratum of production, from the primary to the tertiary, is inextricably dependent upon a stable and expanding supply of electricity. Notably, on April 2nd, the day the US unveiled its tariff escalation, Beijing responded with resolve, announcing a new slate of major low-carbon development projects for the year ahead. These initiatives span both the manufacturing and energy sectors, signaling a dual commitment to the construction of an “ecological civilization” and industrial modernization,[16] ranging from constructing large battery storage facilities, large wind farms, green hydrogen, zero carbon steel manufacturing, low carbon silicon manufacturing and underwater low carbon data centers.[17] Support for these large scale and capital intensive projects can drive economic growth, while simultaneously targeting green transition plans. In contrast, Trump believes that, rather than deepening environmental reform, the answer to AI’s large-scale energy demands is coal.[18]

In its ongoing efforts to recalibrate the economy towards domestic consumption, China has introduced measures aimed at reducing work hours and thereby stimulating consumer spending. On March 16, the State Council released a communique titled “The Special Action Plan to Boost Consumption,”[19] which emphasizes the importance of adhering to labor laws concerning work hours. The plan specifically calls for the prevention of illegal overtime, the guarantee of paid annual leave and the protection of workers’ rights to rest.

Local party organizations, unions, social security departments and human resource departments shall accordingly strengthen and increase supervision of the rest and leave system. An additional suggestion is that schools should actively seek to explore the establishment of spring and autumn holidays in light of actual conditions.[20] As such, several major Chinese companies have begun implementing reforms to reduce excessive work hours. For instance, Midea has enforced a 6:20 p.m. clock-off policy, Haier has adopted a five-day workweek, and DJI mandates office closures by 9 p.m. These changes represent a significant departure from the traditional "996" work culture (9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week) that has been prevalent in China's tech and manufacturing sectors. The employee response is said to have “definitely been… positive.”[21]

With the State Council enforcing stricter scrutiny on the enforcement of the 44-hour workweek, this reduction in work hours can boost consumption. This is achieved through changes in lifestyle patterns that result in additional free time. By fostering a healthier work environment, the Chinese government aims to incentivize individuals to spend this free time engaging in activities that lead to consumption, such as hobbies, travel, or leisure activities, thereby supporting economic growth.

In addition, China has leveraged its geopolitical position in the rare earth elements (REEs) sector to maintain economic supremacy amidst escalating trade tensions. On April 4, in direct response to heightened US tariffs, Beijing imposed stringent restrictions on seven heavy rare earth elements, including terbium and dysprosium, materials indispensable to the production of semiconductors, electric vehicles, and advanced military technologies.[22]

This move underscores China's near monopoly in the global REE market, where it accounts for approximately 90% of processing capacity. The restrictions have already led to significant disruptions, with US companies like MP Materials halting exports to China and accelerating domestic processing initiatives. However, the US faces substantial challenges in establishing a self-sufficient REE supply chain, given the long lead times and regulatory complexities involved in developing new mining and processing facilities.

The implications of China’s export controls are significant, particularly for the US defense sector, which relies heavily on REEs for the manufacturing of drones, robotics and other advanced military equipment necessary to achieve a global lead in warfare.[23] The sudden restriction of access to these critical materials poses a significant threat to the operational readiness and technological superiority to American military forces.[24]

Not only does China exercise near-total command over the global production of rare earth magnets, controlling an estimated 90% of global output, it also dominates the entire rare earth element value chain, accounting for between 85% and 90% of global capacity from initial extraction to final smelting.[25] This vertical integration grants the Chinese state unrivalled leverage over the supply of materials essential to high-technology and defense manufacturing. China also refines 68% of the world’s cobalt, 65% of its nickel, and 60% of its lithium—all processed to the exacting standards required for use in electric vehicle batteries.[26]

The Chinese government is cognizant of the US’ reliance on China’s rare earth elements industry, with a 2019 article elucidating that these resources are not merely export commodities but instruments of national interest, explicitly designed to serve domestic needs first. In the same commentary, it was noted that the US sought to utilize products manufactured with Chinese-supplied rare earths as tools to counter and suppress China’s development.[27]

As of April 15th, China has effectively barred Boeing from further sales to its domestic airline carriers, a decisive move that severs access to one of the American aerospace giant’s most lucrative markets.[28] This is likely to catalyze deeper cooperation with Airbus and accelerate state-led investment into domestically produced COMAC C919, thereby advancing China’s longstanding objective of cultivating a sovereign, globally competitive civil aviation industry.

As of April 25, China has also cancelled imports of pork from America. China cancelled orders for 12,030 metric tonnes of American pork, the largest cancellation since May 2020. China has also raised the effective tariff rate on American pork shipments to 172%.[29] American pork makes up only around 5.8% of Chinese pork imports, but China is the 3rd largest market for American pork exports. To replace the slight deficit of pork imports, China has strengthened trade deals with Spain.[30]

According to People’s Daily, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China anticipated the escalation of economic hostilities by the US, with a renewed round of tariffs, intensifying an incipient trade war under the guise of reciprocal economic policy. In preparation, the Central Committee’s Economic Work Conference undertook comprehensive planning to confront a new phase of containment by the US against China.[31] The conference emphasized the expansion and refinement of macroeconomic tools, stressing the necessity of improving the range of policies used, strengthening the capacity for extraordinary counter-cyclical adjustments and enhancing the forward-looking, targeted and effective nature of macroeconomic regulation in response to changing conditions.[32]

Indeed, as of this writing, it appears that Trump has begun to grasp the full magnitude of the geopolitical and economic consequences it has triggered. On April 23rd, the Trump administration is now considering a partial rollback of tariffs on Chinese imports, slashing the punitive 145% rate to a range of 50% to 65% in certain cases.[33] This follows an earlier concession in which all tariffs on consumer electronics were rescinded. That it is the US, not China, initiating a retreat on two separate occasions makes the balance of power abundantly clear. It is Washington buckling under the pressure, not Beijing.

In response to Trump’s goodwill however, China as of April 26th, allegedly has waived retaliatory tariffs on some US chip imports. The report said at least eight integrated circuit (IC)-related tariff codes were exempted from levies imposed earlier this month in response to US President Donald Trump’s tariffs on Chinese products. However, China has maintained tariffs on memory chips. The nature of this report is, however, unconfirmed, as the article was deleted shortly after it was posted and they merely cited “industry sources.”[34]

Chinese spokesperson He Yaodong, however, said that the only way for Trump to resolve the issue is if all unilateral tariff measures against China were removed. In addition, Chinese spokesperson Gao Jiakun denied that America and China were in contact regarding any consultations or negotiations on the tariff issue.[35]

Trump: America’s Hirohito

Among the clerisy of the American foreign policy establishment, few developments have inspired greater dread than the reintroduction of protective tariffs by the Trump administration. What appears as an archaic reversion to economic enclosure is, in fact, a vital rupture in the global financial system. For all their bluster and incoherence, Trump’s tariffs represent the expression of a deeper, structural shift in geoeconomic relations that indubitably portends to the decline of the Atlanticist world-system.

The return of tariffs adumbrated an instinctive grouping of a wounded empire toward self-preservation through confrontation. Far from a quixotic attempt to restore the vanished America of post-war Fordism, Trump’s embrace of economic nationalism strips bare the American project of its humanitarian cloak and reorients it towards its founding logic–violence, expansion and imperial control. Far from a random aberration, this reflects a “general law” inscribed in the very genetic makeup of capitalism, that being the tendency of Capital’s inevitable expansion by which capitalism solves its immediate problems and postpones its contradictions. Karl Marx shows that capitalism is structured as a “peculiar machine whose evolution is (dialectically at one with its breakdown, its expansion at one with its malfunction, its growth with its collapse.”[36]

In moments of crisis, such as domestic industries threatened by foreign competition, the state is forced to introduce tariffs to protect these sectors, shore up employment and stabilise its domestic economy. The strength of capitalism indeed resides in the fact that its axiomatic is never saturated, that it is always capable of adding a new axiom to the previous ones. The return to protection or militarisation illustrates the inevitable dialectic of a world-system past its zenith, forced to confront its own logic.

In the world that emerged from 1945 and accelerated after 1991, America dominated not merely through its military might but through its unprecedented ability to command global finance, define legal norms and coerce foreign states with the promises of the free market and modernisation through predatory institutions like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank.

This regime depends on the centrality of the US dollar, the ubiquity of American consumer culture, and the convergence of global elites toward Wall Street. With the concentration of monopoly finance capital to an unprecedented degree, capitalists from all over the world store their wealth in largely US dollar-denominated assets. The US hosts 60.5% of the total value of global stock markets and foreign investors own about 40% of US corporate equity in 2019.

Yet, this world is now decaying. The edifice of American finance, propped up by global consumption of American debt and undergirded by the illusion of consensus, is fracturing under the weight of its own contradictions. It is at this moment that the Trump tariffs acquire their true significance, not as mere economic instruments, but the embryonic organs of a new order. Trump imposed tariffs not because he individually wished to do so, but because historical actors are constrained by conditions that are not of their making and must therefore enact measures reflecting the inexorable logic of historical development.

As G.W.F. Hegel wrote,

“…such individuals had no consciousness of the general Idea they were unfolding, while prosecuting those aims of theirs; on the contrary, they were practical, political men. …For that Spirit which had taken this fresh step in history is the inmost soul of all individuals; but in a state of unconsciousness which the great men in question aroused.” [37]

For Hegel, the cunning of reason means precisely that historical progress unfolds not through the deliberate actions of individual figures, but rather through their seemingly arbitrary and self-interested decisions which inadvertently serve the unfolding of a higher, universal historical logic—what Hegel calls the “universal Idea”.

From the purview of accelerationism, these developments must be affirmed. Trump, although unwittingly, has set the US on a path of decline. By initiating the reindustrialisation of ‘upstream’ sectors, such as steel, microelectronics, rare earth refinement, munitions, and heavy manufacturing, he has begun the pivot toward militarisation.[38] The explicit rationale of these tariffs, namely the restoration of a hollowed-out military-industrial complex is an admission of vulnerability, exposing the fragility of a superpower that has for decades outsourced its industrial base and entrusted its supply chains to the whims of the global market.

In declaring the need to rebuild, Trump acknowledges the indeterminacy of a world where the present Weltgeist is blowing eastward, not retreating the empire, but purifying it, stripping it of its moral pretensions and reducing it to its bare essence: territorial expansion, resource capture and geoeconomic supremacy. The system cannot not expand; if it remains stable, it stagnates and dies; it must continue to absorb everything in its path, to interiorize everything that was hitherto exterior to it. Tariffs may redirect the flows of capital, but they do not arrest the system’s relentless expansion, nor the conflicts it inevitably generates. Instead, they re-emerge later, often more acutely, and, in this case, in a final military confrontation with China.