The Tragic Community

THE LOGIC OF REVOLUTION IN POPULAR FORM

As the movement continues, there will come a time when the spirits of the masses will change. It is inevitable that their desires and interests will evolve, transforming spontaneous actions into conscious endeavors.1

Mohammad Mokhtari, ‘A Study of the Slogans of the 1979 Uprising’ (1980).

The Birth of A New Cycle of Struggle

The onset of the 2017-2018 uprisings, which “represented a watershed moment in the history of the Islamic Republic, when millions of proletarians across the country in more than 100 cities rebelled against the ruling oligarchy, saying ‘enough is enough’ to a life governed by misery, precarity, dictatorship, Islamist autocracy, and authoritarian repression,” marked the beginning of a revolutionary period in the process of its realization; a process of realizing both the possibility of social transformation as well as attendant forms of collective subjectivity.3 That is to say, from 2017 and up through the Jina Revolution, Iran has seen a new cycle of struggle characterized by nationwide rebellions whose size and militancy increases with each successive year.4

In the spring of 2018, Iran’s southwest province of Khuzestan saw mass demonstrations and protests by the region’s majority ethnic Arab population against a water shortage whose severity was rivaled only by the region’s air pollution and the Islamic Republic’s continued prohibition on cultural and linguistic practices proper to Khuzestan’s Arab communities. In the months that followed, workers at the Haft-Tappeh Sugar Cane Factory in Shush (4500 employees) and workers from the National Steel factories in Ahvaz (4000 workers) would go on strike — with steel workers organizing solidarity strikes with the workers at the Haft-Tappeh factory while chanting “death to this demagogic government” — while truck drivers self-organized a series of coordinated strikes that would spread to all thirty-one of Iran’s provinces by the end of the year. Of equal, if not greater, significance is the composition of the strikes carried out by workers from the Haft-Tappeh Sugar Cane Factory and National Steel during the first two weeks of November of the same year. More than a simple demonstration of a degree of fidelity to struggle at the site of key productive sectors of the Iranian economy, these strikes were composed and sustained by the participation of family members of striking workers, mainly women and children. They thus involved the conjugation of reproductive and productive subject-positions vis-à-vis the accumulation of value.  

With each successive wave of protest and strike, and in tandem with struggles against economic immiseration, participation and demands were increasingly issued from groups whose social existence has been subjected to the vicissitudes of both privatization and corruption — e.g. university students, human rights activists, political prisoners, local shopkeepers, teachers, as well as the country’s marginalized ethnicities (Kurdish, Balochi, Arab, etc.). And of the various chants heard in the streets5 during 2017-2018 uprisings, ‘Bread, Work, Freedom’ is the slogan that retains the greatest significance despite the fact that its political content ultimately remained reformist in character (e.g. demands for improvements to working conditions, the increase in wages, and the deprivatization of the Iranian economy).6 If the uprisings of 2017-2018 can be characterized as a wave of national rebellion whose modalities of struggle were largely militant and based on practices of direct-action but whose political horizon still remained within the purview of a struggle for the recognition of one’s rights, the same cannot be said for the uprisings of 2019-2020 wherein the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI) was

encountering ever-increasing struggles and movements of workers, students, teachers, retirees, women, and ethnic and religious minorities. These two ‘levels’ of struggle — the spontaneous mass uprising and the more organized forms of resistance — are mutually interrelated. The former has radicalized the latter making it more political than before. For instance, the demands of some parts of the working class have moved away from the improvement of the conditions of work, wages, and de-privatization and towards the autonomous management of factories and radical alternatives.7 

It should come as no surprise, then, that with this notable increase in the specific determination of freedom at the heart of the concrete demands, the slogans from 2017-2018 would modify themselves in turn. In contrast with the previous years’ most popular slogan, ‘Bread, Work, Freedom,’ in 2019-2020 people took to the streets chanting, ‘Bread, Work, and Workers’ Councils!’ and ‘Bread, Work, and the Right To Wear Anything You Want!’8 And yet, as with every escalation of tactics on the part of protestors, the strategy of counterrevolutionary reaction followed in the shape of the 2020 February elections. Regarding the significance of the elections in light of the previous years of revolt, one comrade put it best:

Note that today, the so-called rivals in the previous presidential elections are the heads of the executive, judiciary, and legislative administrations. The February elections marked the ending point in this integration process — which does not mean that their internal conflict of interests is solved, of course. The heads of the three branches have already made extrajudicial decisions, one of which was the increase in petrol prices last November [2019] that resulted in an unprecedented national uprising and a bloodbath in which protesters were killed.9

In the year that followed (2021-2022) Iran’s provinces of Khuzestan and Isfahan would return to the streets in mass demonstrations against the lack of access to water as well as a series of strikes by project-workers at key oil refineries among whose demands were several months of wages they had yet to receive, thus giving rise to the popular slogans of this period: ‘The prices are in Dollars; our wages in Rials’; ‘No to forced displacement’ [کلا کلا للتهجیر];  ‘No to humiliation [«هیهات من الذله»].’ On the heels of this year of struggle waged within both processes of production and circulation, in April 2023, Iran’s growing teachers movement10 took to the streets; its demands pertained to both economic and extra-economic concerns, e.g., the right to teach specific curriculum, the right to teach in languages other than Farsi, the ability to create adequate learning environments for students, and teacher’s wages.

This annual wave of rebellion would culminate in the Jina Revolution11 after Iran’s “morality police” murdered Jina Amini while she was detained and held in police custody.12 To make matters worse, on September 30, “security forces in Zahedan, the capital of Sistan and Baluchistan Province and home to the long-oppressed Baluchi minority, cracked down on protesters. Security forces killed at least 94 people, including children, and wounded at least 350 in turn. This incident, which marked the deadliest day since the beginning of the  nationwide protests against the Islamic Republic, has been called ‘Bloody Friday.’”13 During these early days of the Jina Revolution, when streets were filled with slogans announcing solidarity among Iran’s historically marginalized ethnic and social groups — “Zahedan, Kurdistan, the eye and light of Iran”, “Kurd and Baluch brothers, rise [up] and overthrow the mullahs”, “Rise up Baluch your good days are coming”, and “Kurdistan is not alone; Balochistan is its supporter” — what became clear was that, with the Jina Revolution, the situation on the ground was one in which “the Islamic Republic [was] already dead in the minds of its people; now the people must kill it in reality.”14

Despite this all-too brief survey of political “unrest,” what is clear is that 2017 marks the beginning of a two-fold dynamic of resistance and mobilization against the processes of both production and circulation and their attendant mediations by an Iranian state that is more frequently managed rather than governed under the auspice of its Islamic Republic. This dynamic is characterized by strikes in key productive sectors of the Iranian economy (largely undertaken by the most precarious and marginalized workers such as project-workers in Khuzestan’s oil industry and Baloch miners); a generalized practice of dis-identification with the social-functions individuals have been compelled to assume, whose most recent and uncompromising figure has come in the form of the Jina Revolution (teachers’ movement, self-organized national strikes by truck drivers, women’s removal and burning of their hijabs in protest of the laws surrounding its compulsory use, and so on); and the mass withdrawal from participating in the reproduction of the established order, a refusal of complicity with a regime whose commitment to future prosperity can only take the form of a false promise. 

Put in the most general of terms, ever since 2017, Iran has become an exemplary laboratory of what becomes possible when both production and circulation struggles15 are coextensive, simultaneous, and guided by a militant sensibility toward a shared practical problem: how to reproduce one’s social existence without reproducing the accumulation of value in the hands of the suicidal state of Iran?16 By virtue of this question, those who have taken to the streets have effectuated the means of discerning the really-existing possibility of revolution that currently inheres within this still ongoing cycle of struggle. Precisely because those who have taken to the streets have discovered that to simply pose this question is  already to inquire into what one intuits every day on the streets and grasps with the certainty of feeling that “it is only in an order of things in which there are no more classes and class antagonisms that social evolutions will cease to be political revolutions.” Until that time comes, “on the eve of every general reshuffling of society, the last word of social science will always be: struggle or death; bloody war or nothing. It is thus that the question is inevitably posed.”17

And so, even from the most cursory of surveys regarding the forms of organization and modes of struggle employed by each respective social group over this six year period, the period between 2017 and 2023 marks a qualitative break with all prior cycles of struggle and protest ever since the 1979 Revolution, for both those in Iran and in diaspora. What is more, it is a period whose historical and material reality serves as the basis upon which revolutionary theory can orient itself in the direction of historical and nascent modes of struggle/forms of organization, allowing for (i) the collective articulation of a set of theoretical commitments and relations of solidarity across social differences; and (ii) the collective practice of theoretically grasping the salient determinants constitutive of the structuring dynamic specific to this cycle of struggle. And especially in light of the Jina Revolution, collective modalities of antagonism have grown increasingly uncompromising in their refusal, announcing themselves through a series of slogans that have since become household phrases the world over: ‘Bread, Work, Freedom!’, ‘Jin, Jiyan, Azadi!’. Conversely, when seen from the vantage point of the Islamic Republic, slogans such as these indicate a really existing, material threat to the very reproduction of the Iranian State — precisely because one of the ongoing concerns of the regime has been securing the “smooth” transition in selecting the next Supreme Leader. As one comrade put it in the wake of the February 2020 parliamentary elections: 

The unified conservative parliament is one of the pieces of the puzzle in the “transition period,” referring to the selection of the next Supreme Leader. And the puzzle is a unified conservative government, homogeneous enough to ensure that the transition to the new Supreme Leader goes smoothly. The parliament, all the institutions of the so-called “republic,” and its representation apparatus are all defunct. The crisis in the Islamic Republic is no longer about “legitimacy” — it is a crisis at the roots of governmentality itself.18

For both the protestors in the streets and the regime’s functionaries in the halls of parliament, the current conjuncture is one of “transition” such that the present, once more, becomes the temporal modality of the struggle to determine the shape of Iranian politics to come. It is to the credit of the IRI for openly confirming the public secret at the heart of their historic mission of statecraft: to be governed by the IRI is to be subject to a regime that can neither govern without the looming specter of civil war nor maintain any pretension to being a good faith interlocutor but to be subject to biopolitical management by the guardians and owners of repressive force. If there is anything governmental regarding the IRI it is the banal, but no less barbarous, fact that it is the government of the living by the (politically) dead.19

In the wake of Iran’s previous period of mass political mobilization in response to the 2009 stolen elections, Council appointed bureaucrats and functionaries who are known allies of Khamenei, and the regime’s brutal repression of the Jina Revolution and still ongoing executions of prisoners regardless of political affiliation — Iran is currently living through an Islamic Republic that is constituting itself into a political force “that appropriates the state and channels into it a flow of absolute war where the only outcome is the suicide of the state itself.”20 

The Logic of Revolution in Popular Form

Against this historical backdrop, the cardinal epistemic virtue of Shirin Mohammad’s Rebellion of the Slogans (2023) is its successful articulation of the following thesis: 2017-2023 is a period defined by the decomposition and recomposition of popular rebellions and state-sponsored immiseration, marking the emergence of a new cycle of struggle in Iran.21 It is a period of struggle narrated via the transformation of the 2017 slogan ‘Bread, Work, Freedom!’, into the 2019-20 chant ‘Bread, Work, and the Right To Wear Anything You Want,’ and then into the watchword, or “symbol,”22 of the eponymously named Jina Revolution and its attendant slogan now known across the globe: ‘Jin Jiyan Azadi’ (Woman, Life, Freedom). Neither exhibition nor archive, Rebellion is perhaps best understood as a kind of ‘prolegomena’ on the present and future of Iran’s current cycle of struggle.

Following from, and inspired by, Mohammad Mokhtari’s seminal taxonomy of political slogans in the wake of the 1979 Revolution, and by virtue of documenting slogans from the past six years of a nation in revolt, Rebellion features slogans — documented, organized, translated, and presented in a limited-run publication — that allow us to grasp the possibility of revolution in its most palpable manner: whether in the form of graffiti or protest chants, each slogan is indexed to a generalized refusal and a qualitative transformation in the political sensibilities of various forms of social protagonism. However, unlike Mokhtari’s work of classification and its aim of reconstructing the relationship between slogan and the subject of which it is the utterance, Rebellion maintains the anonymity of the author/speaker of any given slogan.23 The decision to proceed in this manner, however, is not primarily based on formal, curatorial, or aesthetic commitments. By retaining the anonymity of its subjects, Rebellion asserts that the political significance/content of a given slogan is not to be found in the character of its author, but by virtue of the fact of their circulation in public space. In making themselves public, a series of political (dis)positions are made readily visible and may be assumed by anyone who recognizes something of themselves in a bit of paint on a wall or a simple turn of phrase. For Rebellion, it is the fact that slogans “make movement” that remains of decisive importance:

[C]apable of finding, for moments, common vectors of meaning, effectively bringing together the movement’s action and, at the same time, understanding that this terrain on which we fight consists of the multiplication of dissimilar situations, of diverse landings…the slogans that make movement (here I am reformulating the idea of the Chilean feminist Julieta Kirckwood (2022) who speaks of questions that made a movement) is a decisive point. Slogans have a spatial and temporal validity, but their force lies precisely in connecting bodies and statements. When we read slogans that make sense across borders, they indicate dates (in which those words express a moment) and bring together theses that organize a way of understanding what happens and even orienting it […] In all of them we find a set of unique elements that express very specific conjunctures that, at the same time, are able to be almost immediately translated into others. They express, without a doubt, incorporeal transformations that are translated into ways of experiencing violence, self-defense, insecurity, collective force, the dispute over everything that makes up the perseverance of living in increasingly urgent contexts. These slogans imply transformations in bodies, they materialize thresholds in links, they propose a collective horizon. And they do not lose their relationship with that common plane of the reproduction of life.24

As with any given period defined by uncompromising insurrectionary fervor, to study the slogans of a given cycle of struggle is to study the extent to which its modes of collective antagonism encourage or restrain those collective forms of militant refusal as well as the very possibility of revolution itself. Anonymously authored, slogans register what has become a really existing, practical, political position one can assume vis-à-vis the Iranian State. To study revolutionary slogans, or slogans originating from a period of intense insurrectionary revolt, is, therefore, to investigate the modalities of collective action made possible in moments when a real, material, rupture is effectuated by a collective political subject in the process of its realization:

Tracts, posters, bulletins, words of the streets, infinite words — it is not through a concern for effectiveness that they become imperative. Effective or not, they belong to the decision of the instant. They appear, and they disappear. They do not say everything; on the contrary, they ruin everything; they are outside of everything. They act and reflect fragmentarily. They do not leave a trace: trait without trace. Like words on the wall, they are written in insecurity, received under threat; they carry the danger themselves and then pass with the passerby who transmits, loses, or forgets them.25

Put differently: to study revolutionary slogans is to embark upon a study of the possible since “the only mode of presence of revolution is its real possibility.”26

And as with every moment of upheaval where the character of the Revolution has yet to be determined, the Jina Revolution tempts historical comparison: in the immediate aftermath of the 1979 Islamic Revolution, “tens of thousands of women marched in the streets of Tehran against the imposition of compulsory Hijab, chanting ‘Neither headscarf nor beatings for wearing it [نه روسری نه نه توسری]’ and ‘We did not make a revolution to go back’ — referring to the reactionary aspect of compulsory Hijab that aims to “turn back” the wheels of history. At the time, the Islamist media and Khomeini labeled the feminists and other women on the streets as supporters of imperialism who subscribed to ‘Western culture.’ Tragically, no one heard the women’s voices or heeded their warnings, not even the leftists who — catastrophically — accorded an ontological priority to the struggle against imperialism, relativizing and downplaying all other forms of domination as ‘secondary.’ Today, when women burn scarves on the streets and the whole society emphatically rejects compulsory Hijab, this shakes the entire patriarchal and autocratic authority to the core, along with the pseudo-anti-imperialist legitimacy of the Islamic Republic.”27 Less than two years after the Jina Revolution, we appear to have entered a period comprised of “the most motley mixture of crying contradictions.”

But the 25th of Shahrivar was no 18th Brumaire. It is only with the former that a new cycle of struggle was realized as an actual, concrete, really-existing social phenomena whose first law is absolute refusal. It inaugurated a period of wild agitation—not in the name of civil peace but against the tranquility on whose behalf every reactionary campaign is waged—with truth alloyed to passion, and passion as the alloy for truth; replete with heroic deeds without the need for heroes; and historical-collective subject formations in the process of writing their respective histories and were first to declare that ‘we are still not living through the coronation of Pahlavi the younger.’ As for collective will, it can be found in those moments where both protestors and events no longer appear as shadows divorced from their bodies: this revolution does not paralyze its own bearers for it is that by which revolutionaries are made. Perhaps it was none other than “L” who put it best, offering her readers the one of the first formulations of the Jina Revolutions itself: “See this body, observe the entirety of this history.”28 Thus, it became fairly easy to spot these bodies in the midst of their becoming-revolutionary by virtue of a shared, identifying, characteristic: mobilizing in public with a certainty of purpose absent any guarantee of the revolution’s successful outcome.

By now, it would be redundant to emphasize this exigency of breaking with the past, for its unanimity was felt by every person who took to the streets regardless of the peaceful or militant nature of their protest. However, for the IRI, the threat of successfully breaking with the past has by now assumed so many forms that its possibility even appears in what were once conventionally neutral acts of ritual and tradition: a procession of funeral-goers, whose hope for emancipation now lies in a liberated Kurdistan and “dressed in dark clothes” appears to the regime as an “army of undertakers,” as “revolutionary undertakers”29 coming to celebrate the martyr’s second life within the heart of a people in the process of their own revolutionary-becoming. And in this night where all mourners are dressed in black, the really existing possibility of revolution no longer appears in the red ‘Phrygian caps of anarchy’ or the “White” of Pahlavi’s (counter-)Revolution, but in the thawb ḥaddād of Kurdish Pallbearers.30 Beginning with the Jina Revolution, this new cycle of struggle pronounces its judgment of the IRI and its slogans assert their own critical theory of Iranian society, engendering its logic in popular form.31

Counter-Memories Against the State

In light of Rebellion of the Slogan’s propaedeutic function, two sets of responses to the work are worth noting since each, in their own way, engage with the central methodological question that guides the work: is it possible to narrate history via slogans? If so, what form must such narratives assume in order to avoid both left-melancholia and the demobilizing affect of ressentiment?32 In her 2023 lecture at Künstlerhaus Bremen, ‘From Khavaran to Evin: Politics of Memory and the Slogans of the Jina Revolution,’ Yasmine Ansari proposed that the slogans from 2017-2023 initiated a process of constructing an archive of the history of rebellion, itself continuously threatened with erasure. And with respect to the politics of memory proper to the IRI, erasure is made permanent precisely because the conditions for historical remembrance are replaced by the institutional compulsion toward the memorization of an ‘official history’ whose function is the continued legitimation of the IRI. Or as Ansari put it, “mnemonic manipulation is a defining characteristic of the Islamic Republic’s politics of memory.”33 Rebellion unearths the very history that the IRI seeks to liquidate in revolutionary slogans themselves, as collective expressions of a life beyond economic and extra-economic domination. When protestors chant “40 years of crime, death to this leadership!” it is a call against the IRI’s politics of denial and enforced amnesia: “the slogans of the Jina Revolution” are themselves “counter-memories” against the State. The ‘narration’ of history via slogans becomes the narration of the tradition of all those oppressed by the Islamic Republic.

Just as Ansari underscores the revolution function of slogans as weapons of counter-memory during this current cycle of struggle, Mahdis Mohammadi’s presentation raised the issue as to whether or not the question of the relationship between historical narration and slogans can be similarly approached via images — i.e. can images, particularly images of resistance that repeat over time, serve as the pretext for the narration of the history of the oppressed?34 With a brief survey of various images and videos of women removing their hijabs in public in an act of protest against the IRI, between 2017 and the present, there emerges a collective figure specific to this cycle of struggle. And with the Jina Revolution, each iteration of a woman taking off her hijab in public reaches an intensity that belongs to a long history of the desire for liberation proper to the history of feminism in Iran. By surveying the archive of images of women’s resistance, one discovers that certain images and figures similarly function as the ground for the retelling of the history of the oppressed. Thus, the constant and systematic erasure of counter-memories of rebellion, whether as images or slogans, constitutes one of the founding acts of the IRI vis-à-vis its project of establishing and reinforcing a triumphalist narrative regarding the 1979 Islamic Revolution, the significance of which should not be underestimated.35

Kurdistan: The Graveyard of Fascists!

In a letter dated on 29 December 1978, from Khomeini and addressed to Mehdi Bazargan, the soon to be Supreme Leader placed Bazargan35 in charge of establishing an “Oil Strikes Coordinating Committee” (OSCC) since “Khomeini was worried the Shah would use the fuel shortage to legitimize the crackdown of the revolutionary movement.”36

In the first weeks of January 1979, the OSCC would publish their first communique, announcing that it has become “necessary to bring to the attention of the defiant nation of Iran that the blue-collar and white-collar workers responsible for effecting the Imam’s directives, are pious strikers who are working in the production units and the refineries for the welfare of the defiant nation and have no intention to gain anything for themselves.37 Thus, the establishment of the OSCC constituted a crucial turning point in the 1979 Revolution and “represented the attempt by the Islamist forces […] to take control of the oil strikes at the expense of the autonomy of oil workers.”38 More than forty years later, striking oil workers no longer lay claim to the virtue of piety and openly espoused the revolutionary content of their impious strike against the Islamic Republic. When oil workers organized a solidarity strike in light of the regime’s brutalization of young students across the country, one did not hear chants of piety but rather slogans such as ‘This is the year of blood!’ What could be more impious than demanding the blood of the Supreme Leader?

If, in 1979, the funeral was a site of the revolution’s co-optation by Khomeini and his supporters, today the IRI no longer finds any would-be supporters at these funeral processions transformed into sites of protest during the Jina Revolution. And if, in 1979, oil workers’ slogans “began to merge with those of Islamists” before and during those strikes by oil workers — which proved to be so crucial for the overthrow of the US-backed monarchy of Reza Shah Pahlavi, such that one could hear pro-Islamist slogans chanted by workers who marched “to the Behesht Zahra [in Tehran], where the martyrs of the revolution were taken to be buried”39 — it has become a rather common occurrence to hear funeral-goers chant the properly revolutionary slogan: Kurdistan is the graveyard of fascists!

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Acknowledgements: The writing of this essay would not have been possible without the criticism, conversation, and education I received from too many comrades to name here. Any errors found herein fall entirely on the shoulders of its author just as whatever herein remains true is entirely due to the feedback and guidance comrades offered during its writing. That said, I owe a special debt of gratitude to four comrades in particular, each of whom has always maintained the only “standard” worth speaking of (ruthless criticism) and without whose feedback this all too brief and incomplete survey would not have been possible. Momo, Shirin, Iman, Morteza: what is there to say except that I owe more than everything to each of you. May our steps be as great as our dead.

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ENDNOTES

  1.  [ Note: this text was first published by e-flux Notes and can be found here. ] Mohammad Mokhtari, ‘A Study of the Slogans of the 1979 Uprising’, Ketab-e Jom’e [کتاب جمعه] Magazine, vol. 20/24, (December/February 1980).
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  2.  Collective 98, ‘On the Anniversary of the 2019 November Uprising in Iran,’ Collective98.blogspot.com. Accessed on 1 June 2023.
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  3.  2017-18 saw mass protests in 160 sites; 2019 saw mass protests in 180 sites; Jina Uprising, protests occurred in more than 412 locations.
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  4.  Other slogans from this period that are worth noting here are, “Reformist, Principlist, your time is up!’, Don’t be afraid, don’t be afraid, we are all together,’ ‘Death to Rouhani,’ ‘Death to Khamieni,’ ‘Death to the dictator,’ and ‘This is the final word: the only target is the regime.’
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  5.  I use “reformist” here not as a pejorative or implicit criticism of the modes of struggle chosen by those on the ground. Rather, “reformist” here underscores how protestors viewed such demands as a viable avenue of transforming their material conditions where the dynamic that structured the relation of the Iranian government to protestors was left unchallenged, even if only in its abstract formulation via slogans.
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  6.  ‘On the Anniversary of the 2019 November Uprising in Iran,’ Crimethinc. Accessed on 2 June 2023.
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  7.  Several other slogans from this period also retain an equally importance significance insofar as they register the degree of the polarization of the possible political positions one may assume with respect to Iran society: ‘Be afraid, be afraid, we are all together,’ ‘We want neither Shah nor the Pasdar, death to these two hyenas!’, and ‘Capitalist mullahs, give us back our money.’
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  8.   Iran: “The Is an Infinite Amount of Hope… but Not For Us”, Crimethinc. Accessed on 1 June 2023. Emphasis added.
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  9.  “When we talk about the “teachers’ movement”, we do not only refer to the political-trade union activity of officially employed teachers. This movement also includes charter and contract teachers, preschool teachers, teaching assistants of the literacy movement, service forces such as janitors and, of course, retirees. Teachers’ protests have been the inspiration of many activists and organizations, both in terms of political content (demands and slogans that go beyond the “livelihood” of teachers), and in terms of organization (spreading and multiplying this movement throughout the country; the role of the council coordination in the democratic unification of trade unions of each city; political stability in the face of security threats and repressions, etc.). Labor, and especially student movements, as well as the recent large numbers of political and civic activists, have openly expressed their symbolic solidarity with this movement. Moreover, teachers’ demands revolve around a set of political-economic issues that are related to students’ rights, teachers’ rights, economic neoliberalism, and the ideological system of  repression and security. In a word, it is both union and political: free, “non-ideological” and high-quality education: educational justice, especially for children of working classes and oppressed nationalities; Afghan children’s right to education; decentralization of education and the right to education in the mother tongue (especially non-Persian languages ​​such as Baluch, Turkish, Kurdish, Gilaki, Arabic, etc.); increasing the job security of workers (term of contract, pensions, insurance premiums, etc.); recognition of the right to independent association, and of course the release of political prisoners. These two fields, namely economic “neoliberalism” and the politics of exclusion and repression, are two sides of the same coin, contrary to what it seems.” ‘The Bread of Freedom, The Education of Liberation: An interview with a comrade from the Teachers Movement.’ collective98.blogspot.com. Accessed on 30 May 2023. 
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  10.  For more on this, see Iman Ganji and Jose Rosales, “Tomorrow Was Shahrivar 1401: Notes on the Iranian Uprisings,” e-flux Notes, October 19, 2022 →. While “Jina Revolution” is the preferred descriptor used throughout this text, it is important to note that the mass of demonstrations and protests following Jina Amini’s extrajudicial murder remains a contested issue, even down to its name. Depending on one’s political sensibilities, intellectual training, and social background, the same political sequence is sometimes referred to as the “Women, Life, Freedom” movement, the “Jina Uprising,” or the “Jina Rebellions,” to name but a few.
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  11.  For more on this, see Iman Ganji and Jose Rosales, ‘Tomorrow was Shahrivar 1401,’ e-flux Notes. Accessed on 4 June 2023.
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  12.  Iran Human Rights Documentation Center, ‘Blood Friday in Zahdan: The Brutal Government Crackdown of September 30, 2022,’ IHRDC. Accessed on 3 June 2023.
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  13.  “Blood Friday in Zahdan: The Brutal Government Crackdown of September 30, 2022,” Iran Human Rights Documentation Center, October 19, 2022 →.
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  14.  Collective 98, ‘Revolt in Iran: The Feminist Resurrection and the Beginning of the End of the Regime,’ Crimethinc. Accessed on 29 March 2023. Emphasis added. ↩︎
  15.  Regarding the categories of ‘production struggle’ and ‘circulation struggle’, see Joshua Clover, Riot Strike Riot (Verso: 2016). As Clover writes, “Strike and riot are distinguished further as leading tactics within the generic categories of production and circulation struggles. We might now restate and elaborate these tactics as being each a set of practices used by people when their reproduction is threatened. Strike and riot are practical struggles over reproduction within production and circulation respectively. Their strengths are equally their weaknesses. They make structured and improvisational uses of the given terrain, but it is a terrain they have neither made nor chosen. The riot is a circulation struggle because both capital and its dispossessed have been driven to seek reproduction there.” (Riot Strike Riot, 46) ↩︎
  16.  For more on the notion of the ‘suicidal state’ vis-à-vis the Iranian state, see Iman Ganji and Jose Rosales, ‘Khuzestan: Riots Against the Suicidal State,’ LUMPEN: A Journal for Poor and Working-Class Writers, issue 11. (Summer/Autumn 2022). ↩︎
  17.  Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy (1847), trans. the Institute of Marxism Leninism (1955), Marxist Internet Archive. Accessed on 24 March 2022.   ↩︎
  18.  ‘Iran: The Is an Infinite Amount of Hope… but Not For Us,’ Crimethinc. Accessed on 27 May 2023. ↩︎
  19.  This notion of ‘political death’ is used, here, in the sense first given to it by Maurice Blanchot: “If today there is a politically dead man in this country, it is the one who carries…the title of President of the Republic, a Republic to which he is just as foreign as he is to any living political future. He is an actor, playing a role borrowed from the oldest story, just as his language is the language of a role, an imitated speech at times so anachronistic that it seems to have been always posthumous. Naturally, he does not know this. He believes his role, believing that he magnifies the present, whereas he parodies the past. And this dead man, unaware that he is dead, is impressive with the great stature of death…A strange, insulting presence, in whom we see an old world persevering and in which, let us not forget, we feel ourselves dying splendidly and laughably. For he himself is nothing, he is nothing but the delegate of our own political death; he is a victim too, a mask behind which there is nothing.” (Maurice Blanchot, ‘[Political death],’ Political Writings: 1953-1993, trans. Zakir Paul (Fordham University Press: 2010) 89-91, 90)
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  20.  Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi, (Minnesota University Press: 1987), 231.
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  21. Shirin Mohammad, Rebellion of the Slogans (Künstlerhaus Bremen: 2023). While the present essay largely deals with Rebellion in its printed booklet format, for an engagement with Rebellion’s corresponding exhibition see Niloufar Nematollahi, ‘Down with the Ordinary: Thinking Through “Rebellion of the Slogans”’, e-flux Notes, (August 18, 2023). Accessed on January 25, 2024.
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  22.  ژینا گیان تۆ نامری. ناوت ئەبێتە ڕەمز  serves as Jina Amini’s epitaph, which, translated into English, reads as follows: Beloved Žina, you will not die. Your name will become a code.
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  23.  As Mokhtari writes, “‘Every particular slogan must be deduced from the totality of specific features of a definite political situation’ (Lenin, Between the Two Revolutions: Articles and Speeches from 1917, 315). Consequently, only those possessing comprehensive knowledge of every moment and characteristic of this ‘political situation’ can make such deductions. However, the leadership of the Iranian people’s revolutionary movement did not systematically and consistently participate in proposing slogans from the movement’s inception. As a result, the social psychology of the people and their capacity to decide on the necessary slogans, as well as their reactions to every action taken by the enemy, assumed critical significance.”
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  24.  Verónica Gago, ‘Is Politics Still Possible Today?’, Crisis & Critique, vol.9.2. (November, 2022), 84-100, 97-98.
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  25.  Blanchot, Political Writings, 95. Emphasis added.
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  26. Ibid, 100. Emphasis added. ↩︎
  27.   ‘Revolt in Iran: The Feminist Resurrection and the Beginning of the End,’ Crimethinc. Accessed on 27 May 2023.
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  28.  “L”, ‘Figuring a Women’s Revolution: Bodies Interacting with their Images,’ Jadaliyya, (October 5, 2022); ‘Women Reflected in Their Own History,’ e-flux Notes (October 14, 2022). Accessed on January 25, 2024
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  29.  Claire Fontaine, ‘This is not the Black Block,’ The Human Strike Has Already Begun & Other Writings (MUTE: 2013), 15-24, 20.
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  30.  What is known as the “White Revolution” refers to a series of socio-economic reforms proposed and implemented by the Shah of Iran between the years of 1963-1979, the most notable policies of which dealt with land and agricultural reforms and whose color designation, ‘White,’ was intended to signal the ‘bloodless’ nature of this ‘revolution.’ Ali M. Ansari perfectly captures the context informing the choice of title (Revolution) and color (White) when he writes, “Asadollah Alam, the leader of the Mardom Party, was clear about the political imperative when he first suggested the concept of a ‘White Revolution’ as a vehicle for the Shah in discussions with a cautious Sir Roger Stevens in 1958. In the aftermath of the Iraqi coup d’état, Alam argued that a ‘White’ (i.e. bloodless) revolution was needed in Iran if the Iraqi coup was not to be repeated in Iran.” (‘The Myth of the White Revolution,’ p. 5) For more see: Ali M. Ansari, ‘The Myth of the White Revolution: Mohammad Reza Shah, “Modernization” and the Consolidation of Power,’ Middle Eastern Studies, vol. 37.3, July 2001, 1-24.
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  31. This final formulation, which is also the referent for the title of this essay, is a detournement of the original meaning given to it by Marx in his ‘Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction,’ wherein Marx writes, “Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopedic compendium, its logic in popular form…” (244). While the popular form of religious logic made the inverted forms of what Marx would call religious consciousness public and thus an entirely social phenomena, this original meaning is necessarily modified by the particular historical and political context with which this text concerns itself. Given the period between 2017-2023, to claim that slogans are the revolution’s “logic in popular form” no longer entails the “inverted consciousness” of religion and rather, indexes the ineluctability of the scale, scope, and aspiration of this revolutionary period and its corresponding revolution: the Jina Revolution. Moreover, just as Marx rightly noted that theory “becomes a material force once it has gripped the masses” and “is realized in a people only insofar as it is a realization of people’s needs,” so too was the “logic of revolution” given material force with the Jina Revolution’s theory and practice contra the Islamic Republic, and whose logic was “realized in a people” precisely because, as Marx writes in the later parts of the ‘Contribution’,  “it was the realization of the people’s needs.” For more see Karl Marx, ‘Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,’ Early Writings, trans. Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton (Penguin: 1975), 243-57, 244; 251-52. 
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  32.   Yasmine Ansari, ‘From Khavaran to Evin: Politics of Memory and the Slogans of the Jina Revolution,’ Public talk delivered at Künstlerhaus, Bremen (2023); Mahdis Mohammadi,  ‘Remembrance of Things to Come: Archiving Iranian Protest Movements,’ Public talk delivered at Künstlerhaus, Bremen (2023). Both Ansari’s and Mohammadi’s lectures were delivered as part of Künstlerhaus Bremen 2023 program organized around the exhibition of Rebellion of the Slogans and related themes.
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  33.  Yasmine Ansari, ‘From Khavaran to Evin: Politics of Memory and the Slogans of the Jina Revolution.’ ↩︎
  34.  Mahdis Mohammadi, ‘Remembrance of Things to Come: Archiving Iranian Protest Movements.’
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  35.  “[T]he Islamic Revolution of 1979 and its regional aftershocks brought to a close the anticolonial age of national liberation inaugurated by the Egyptian Free Officers in 1952, nearly thirty years earlier. What took place in Iran proved that Islam, to the chagrin of a couple of generations of modernization theorists, could be an endogenous revolutionary force. Why go to Marx, a nineteenth-century European thinker, when you could politically mobilize the masses through their own autochthonous tradition? […] From the 1980s onward, the stark secular/religious and modernity/authenticity binaries would come to replace the earlier multiplicity of ideological shades […] The fracturing of the Marxist ground of total emancipation from colonialism and imperialism, economic exploitation, and tradition split the inheritors into those…focusing on geopolitical analysis (game of nations), the balance of powers, and imperial intervention (external causes), and those emphasizing culture, sectarianism, and religion as the internal impediments to progress (internal causes). In the splitting of the Marxist inheritance between culture and geopolitics, the socioeconomic question found no heirs.” (Fadi Bardawil, Revolution and Disenchantment: Arab Marxism and the Binds of Emancipation (Duke University Press: 2020), 171-73)
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  36.  Mehdi Bazargan (1907-1995): liberal-religious leader of Freedom Movement of Iran (FMI) appointed by Khomeini to head Iran’s Provisional Government after the fall of the Pahlavi Monarchy, and collaborated with Khomeini supporters  and successfully managed to marginalize the left within the composition of pre-Revolutionary ‘Oil Strikes Coordinating Committee.’ As Peyman Jafari helpfully recounts, “In Ahwaz, 35% of the delegates of the strike committee that oil workers had elected in November 1978 were “Marxists.” However, after the fall of the monarchy, the supporters of Khomeini, in coalition with […] Mehdi Bazargan who headed the Provisional Government, maneuvered to marginalize the left and organized new elections, in which the left gained 15% […] It is important to note…that most of the Islamist members of the strike committees and, later, the Islamic shoras (councils) belonged to the ‘leftist’ faction that supported workers’ self-management. Soon after the revolution in 1979-1981, these strike committees clashed with the newly state-appointed managers, a conflict that led to the repression and dissolution of the shoras.” (Peyman Jafari, ‘Fluid Histories: Oil Workers and the Iranian Revolution,’ Working for Oil. Comparative Social Histories of Labor in the Global Oil Industry (Palgrave Macmillan: 2018), 69-98, 73)
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  37.  Peyman Jafari, ‘Fluid Histories: Oil Workers and the Iranian Revolution,’ Working for Oil. Comparative Social Histories of Labor in the Global Oil Industry (Palgrave Macmillan: 2018), 77.
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  38.  Quoted in ‘Fluid Histories,’ 79. The narrative here ignores, however, a crucial fact: how in its lifetime, OSCC was turned into a place for myriad forms of precarious workers and official employees of a company who are not anymore under labor law or considered workers but office employers so they can’t strike. Moreover, regarding the intra-class stratification of oil workers, it is important to note that project-workers are workers whose terms of employment are precarious, part time, and/or based on a “zero hours” contract. Project workers, moreover, are “blue collar” workers insofar as they are not directly employed by the National Iranian Oil Company, for whom the term “white collar” is reserved. For more on the differences between these kinds of workers, see “The Bitter Experience of Workers in Iran — On the Oil Workers Strike in Iran — A Letter from Comrades,” Angry Workers of the World. ( 9 July 2021). Accessed on 3 June 2023.
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  39.  Ibid.
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