NM's blog

An view by Sirantos Fotopoulos The protests now convulsing Iran are the inevitable revolt of a working-class pushed beyond the limits of survival. Inflation has shredded wages, the rial’s collapse has turned food, fuel, and medicine into luxuries, and millions of people who once lived precariously now find themselves unable to make a living at all. Shopkeepers, bazaar merchants, transport workers, students, and casual laborers are protesting the daily violence of an economy organized to extract obedience through deprivation. When bread becomes unaffordable, dissent is the first step towards survival. The Iranian state’s response has been brutally consistent — repression first, reform never. Security forces have met demonstrations with live ammunition, mass arrests, beatings, and intimidation. Internet blackouts attempt to sever workers from one another, isolating struggles city by city. The message is unmistakable: survival is conditional on silent obedience. To demand wages that keep ...

“Sanctions are  instruments of power  in the world market. They do not fall on states as such; they are transmitted through  prices, access to credit, logistics, and insurance , ending up as  lower real wages  and  higher reproduction costs  for the popular classes. In this sense, snapback is a  coercive economic act  that subordinates a semi-peripheral economy to the security priorities of the core. It invites us to ask: who pays, who decides, and who benefits? “Iran’s claim to  sovereign control  over peaceful nuclear technology is legitimate. The selective use of international law by powerful states is obvious: their allies’ arsenals are tolerated; their adversaries face blockade. The E3’s language of “non-performance” and the U.S. call for compliance reflect this  asymmetry of force —and this is why many inside and outside Iran see the move as  imperial overreach , not neutral rule-enforcement. “ Sanctions are  cl...

From Kolbar to 'terrorist'

“The problem of the Reformists was—and is—that they want to create a series of changes with little danger while also preserving and boosting the system. But the hope-giving movement of today is free from the shrapnel of political Islam, and this is clear from its slogans. In order to explain what it wants and does not want, this generation of protestors has not resorted to any concept that has a religious or even quasi-religious pedigree, and this is a great accomplishment. This method and path were completely intuitive and arose out of the protestor’s collective wisdom.” And that is not an exception. Whether in Tunisia and Egypt or Libya and Syria, the 2011 uprisings, and later the 2019 uprisings in Sudan and Algeria, did not resort to religious slogans and concepts. “ One of the reasons for this accomplishment is that the current movement, in a completely self-motivated fashion, did not seek any coalition with the present political structure, because fundamentally, it had no relation...

A must read account with historical background and focus on the women’s movement