Although the recent disqualification of two candidates Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei from the election, is very significant and further reveals the intense power struggles within the regime, more significant are the defining issues which continue to fuel the grassroots discontent inside Iran. These issues are the following:
Author: Frieda Afary
May 24, 2013
As we approach the June 2013 Iranian presidential election, the real frontrunners of the 2009 election, Mir-Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi as well as Mousavi’s wife, Zahra Rahnavard -- all of whom came to be known as the leaders of the reformist Green movement-- continue to languish under house arrest. Many young activists, feminists, and ethnic activists who participated in protests against election fraud in 2009 or any activities deemed “seditious” by the regime are also in prison.
Although the recent disqualification of two candidates Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei from the election, is very significant and further reveals the intense power struggles within the regime, more significant are the defining issues which continue to fuel the grassroots discontent inside Iran. These issues are the following:
• The demands for freedom of speech, press, religion as well as the separation of religion and state. (1)
• Deep class divisions, growing poverty and lack of labor rights, all of which have also been worsened by severe sanctions imposed by the U.S. and European nations.
• The demands of an increasingly educated female population for equality before the law. Some specific demands include an optional rather than a compulsory hijab, the right to divorce, custody of children and travel without the permission of a husband or male guardian.
• The demands of national minorities such as the Kurds, Azeris and Arabs for self-determination and federalism, including the use of their own language as the language of administration and instruction.(2)
Let’s look at how these issues are being discussed explicitly or implicitly by several Iranian intellectual analysts:
Philosopher and journalist Mohammad Reza Nikfar, who currently lives in exile in Germany, argues that questions such as capitalist alienation, lack of development of civil society in urban areas, ethnic and religious identity, patriarchy, and gender, ethnic and religious chauvinism have to be seen as the various layers of the problematic of division within Iran. He writes:
We can still not tell whether in case of the rise of a widespread movement, an individualism demanding liberation will be able to synthesize itself with solidarity and justice-seeking or not . . . Is there a chance for overcoming the tendency toward division? . . . What we can really say is that there is a “chance” that a movement will arise and will organize, move and motivate sectors of the people. Through them, the opposition will gain energy and this energy will create coalitions. A series of actions and reactions, will create centers for organizing the people and the political forces . Along with this trend, the divisions within the regime will be intensified. Part of it will be cut off and will leave its ability to integrate sectors of the people, in the service of the opposition. . . All depends on whether this ability will become the basis for establishing a progressive anti-chauvinist order or not. There is also a real danger that the movement will not be inclusive and that despite its validity, it will in fact play the role of setting off a civil war. . . (3)
In addressing the possibility of a progressive coalition of forces inside Iran, Mohammad Maljoo, economist and labor activists based in Tehran has been very critical of the leaders of the Green Movement for their failure to address the demands of workers and the poor at the time of the 2009 election and during the post-election protests. In a recent analysis he wrote the following about the creation of a new Green website (avayekar.org) aimed at reaching out to workers:
Up until 2009, so long as they had access to the political body of the ruling circle and so long as their discursive and organizational domination over the post-election protests gave them the mistaken impression that they could promote their demands with a civil and alleged non-class based movement, the Greens had not set their minds on asking for support from the working class. Their kindness to workers only expressed itself in a sense of sympathy for the poor among figures like Mir-Hossein Mousavi, and not in offering a program for defending the social, economic and and political interests of the working class.
Today however, the political defeat of the Green Movement and the danger of the complete elimination of the Greens from the economic and political scene in Iran has been the most important motivation for their late but not untimely kindness toward the forces of labor. Depending on the conditions of this coalition, the forces of labor may also be interested in such a bond. The disorganized nature of the labor forces and therefore the access to necessary resources for preparing the organization of workers with the support of such an alliance might be the most important motivation of the forces of labor.
Nevertheless, the needs of both sides-- each of which is under attack--only form the necessary condition for the creation of a coalition. In the absence of an effort to provide the sufficient conditions and so long as a neo-liberal discourse dominates such a coalition, the efforts of the Green websites for establishing a link with the labor movement will only be a velvet glove for an iron fist. (4)
While both Nikfar and Maljoo base their analyses on the inseparability of politics from economics, Fatemeh Sadeghi, a feminist political scientist in Tehran who was an outspoken critic of the fraud committed during the 2009 election (5), advocates a return to Hannah Arendt’s concept of politics. This concept is defined as collective action or free deliberation among equals in a public sphere. Sadeghi argues that in Iran, the spirit of martyrdom which permeated the Iranian Revolution in 1979 has been replaced by the equally pernicious spirit of selfish individualism which rejects meaning and ideals. Hence, she suggests that “by participating in the public sphere and thinking about the common interests of all with the goal of freedom and ending despotism and authoritarianism, individuals will create a different type of action and will change their fate.”(6)
Following Arendt’s privileging of the realm of political action over the realm of labor and economics, Sadeghi claims that “both neoliberal and Marxist theories which consider economics the foundation for politics and freedom are in fact anti-political and are means for creating governance and the state and not necessarily politics. . .”(7)
While Sadeghi’s fear of the subordination of political freedom to the state is justified, it is not clear how “a collective action that is achieved through participation in the public sphere and thinking about the common good”(8) can be realized without theorizing the relationship between labor, economic justice and political freedom.
The views expressed by Nikfar, Maljoo and Sadeghi reveal that the grassroots opposition movment inside Iran still faces many unresolved questions concerning how it can bring about a democratic alternative to the existing regime.
While in 2009 the leadership of the reformist opposition limited itself to slogans such as free elections and political democracy, today, any democratic opposition platform that hopes to be relevant needs to specifically and concomitantly address three burning questions: economic justice, women’s rights, and self-determination for Iran’s national minorities who want nothing short of federalism.
Frieda Afary
www.iranianprogressives.org
May 24, 2013
1. See the statement from a group of prominent Iranian religious reformists which was sent to the leaders of Egypt. “Learn from the Painful Experience of the Islamic Republic of Iran: A Message from Five Muslim Reformist Intellectuals to the Leaders of the Egyptian People.” December 21, 2013.
www.rahesabz.net/story/63692/
2. Hassan Shariatmadari, a well-known Azeri intellectual and political activist, who currently lives in exile in Germany, has recently published a proposal for a decentralized system of government which divides Iran into 13 ethnic states, 3 autonomous provinces and one autonomous region, all aimed at creating a federalist system based on democracy and human rights according to the standards of the United Nations. See
Shariatmadari, Hassan. “Saman yabi-ye aqvam dar Iran: Gami be suye tamarkoz zadayi democratic-e Iran” April 25, 2013.
http://cheshmandaz.org/2013/04/25/%D8%B3%D8%A7%D9%85%D8%A7%D9%86-%DB%8C%D8%A7%D8%A8%DB%8C-%D8%A7%D9%82%D9%88%D8%A7%D9%85-%D8%AF%D8%B1-%D8%A7%DB%8C%D8%B1%D8%A7%D9%86/
See also my translation of a joint statement issued by the Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan and the Komala Party of Iranian Kurdistan in August, 2012.
http://www.iranianprogressives.org/two-kurdish-parties-in-iran-issue-joint-statement-of-goals-and-principles/
3. “Tose’eh, tab’iz va chandparchegi: Dar goftegu ba Mohmmad Reza Nikfar.” Babak Mina. Radio Zamaneh. 10 Ordibehesh 1392 (April 30, 2013). http://www.radiozamaneh.com/64569
4. Maljoo, Mohammad. “Nayamukhtid hanuz.” Naqd-e Eqtesad-e Siasi. April 4, 2013.
http://pecritique.com/2013/04/24/%D9%86%DB%8C%D8%A7%D9%85%D9%88%D8%AE%D8%AA%DB%8C%D8%AF-%D9%87%D9%86%D9%88%D8%B2-%D9%85%D8%AD%D9%85%D8%AF-%D9%85%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%AC%D9%88/
5. See my translations of the following articles by Fatemeh Sadeghi:
http://www.iranianprogressives.org/why-we-say-no-to-the-compulsory-hijab/
http://www.iranianprogressives.org/feminist-political-scientist-analyzes-transformations-in-iranian-society-today/
http://www.iranianprogressives.org/feminist-political-scientist-fatemeh-sadeghi-condemns-temporary-marriage-as-exploitation/
6. Shirafkan, Ameneh. “Ostureh-e tabaqe-ye motevaset: Goftegu ba Fatemeh Sadeghi.” Shargh Newspaper. 15 Esfand 1391 (March 6, 2013)
http://sharghdaily.ir/?News_Id=5634
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid.
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Monday, June 11, 2012
New Persian Translation of Marx's Capital and the Iranian Economy
This paper examines the new features of Hassan Mortazavi’s new translation of Marx’s Capital Volume 1 and the responses which it has received inside Iran. I argue that what led to this translation was both a dissatisfaction with the failure of the Iranian left during the 1979 Iranian Revolution, and an interest on the part of a new generation of Iranian youth in philosophically based, non-dogmatic and constructive alternatives. Approaching this translation form the vantage point of current debates among leftist Iranian economists can also illuminate key concepts in Marx’s critique of capitalism. This paper was originally published by Iranian.com on May 31, 2012.
The New Persian Translation of Marx’s Capital and the Iranian Economy
by Frieda Afary
Abstract: This paper examines the new features of Hassan Mortazavi’s new translation of Marx’s Capital Volume 1 and the responses which it has received inside Iran. I argue that what led to this translation was both a dissatisfaction with the failure of the Iranian left during the 1979 Iranian Revolution, and an interest on the part of a new generation of Iranian youth in philosophically based, non-dogmatic and constructive alternatives. Approaching this translation form the vantage point of current debates among leftist Iranian economists can also illuminate key concepts in Marx’s critique of capitalism.
Introduction:
Although the mass protests that followed the fraudulent 2009 Iranian presidential election were violently suppressed in the course of six months, the democratic sentiments that gave birth to them are alive and searching for ways to express themselves. The dire state of the Iranian economy, the deep dissatisfaction of the Iranian masses with the existing regime and the continuing revolts in the Arab World are making it increasingly difficult for the regime to keep a lid on the boiling pot that is Iran.
The mass protests in 2009 did not raise questions about economic justice similar to the early stages of the Winter 2011 revolts in Tunisia and Egypt. However, the simultaneity of economic, political and social crises in Iran and the rise of a global anti-capitalist movement have put the question of economic justice on the agenda for the democratic opposition movement in Iran. The new Persian translation of Capital, Volume I can provide a basis for these movements by illuminating key aspects of Marx’s critique of capitalism.
I. What Gave Birth to this Translation?
The first translation of Capital which was published in 1974( and about which more details will be provided below) was marred by the Stalinist views of its translator, Iraj Eskandari, the chairman of the USSR affiliated Tudeh Party.
This was no surprise, given that the versions of Marxism that were dominant among the Iranian left before and during the 1979 Revolution were represented by the the works of Josef Stalin, Georges Politzer, Mao Zedong, Regis Debray, Paul Sweezy, Harry Magdoff, Oskar Lange, Maurice Dobb and Paul Baran. These works constituted the theoretical foundations of the majority of the Iranian adherents of Marxism.(1)
Since the 1979 Revolution however, a new generation of Iranian leftists has arisen which is critical of the former generation for its mostly Stalinist and Maoist views and the ways in which those views led the majority of the Iranian left to lend support to Ayatollah Khomeini as an “anti-imperialist” in the early stages of the revolution.
The new generation prefers more thoughtful and theoretically based action as well as constructive alternatives. Many young intellectuals who express an interest in Marxism today are inclined to humanist, Hegelian and non-dogmatic interpretations of Marxism.(2) Above all, the new generation’s experiences under a religious fundamentalist regime have made it detest any kind of dogmatism, be it Islamic or Marxist or otherwise.
Given these interests, a wave of new translations of works by Marx and independent Marxist thinkers began to appear mostly during what became known as the Reform Period(1997-2005). These translations included Marx’s 1844 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, Georg Lukacs’s History and Class Consciousness, Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, Istvan Meszaros’s Beyond Capital, Rosa Luxemburg’s Selected Writings, Isaak Illich Rubin’s Marx’s Theory of Value, Mikhail Lifshitz’s Marx’s Philosophy of Art, Raya Dunayevskaya’s Philosophy and Revolution, Stephen Eric Bronner’s Reclaiming the Enlightenment, Negri and Hardt’s Empire, Marc Poster’s Foucault, Marxism and History, Alex Callinicos’s Marxism and Philosophy, and David Schweickart et al’s Market Socialism: A Debate Among Socialists.
In addition to these translations, many websites, weblogs and online magazines devoted to discussing a variety of socialist ideas came into existence in this period. Most were banned or forced to cease publication after the suppression of the 2009 upheaval however.
Although the new translations of works by Marx and independent Marxists have greatly expanded the horizons of the Iranian Left, there is still a dearth of discussion on the actual content of Marx’s Capital and its significance for Iran today.
In the 1920s, the Iranian Armenian Marxist economist, Avetis Sultanzadeh (1890-1938) had advocated a non-capitalistic road of development through an alliance between the budding worker and peasant movements in Iran and the proletariat of industrially advanced lands. By 1931, his opposition to the Stalinist USSR leadership’s backing of the Iranian nationalist army leader and new king, Reza Shah, led to his imprisonment in the USSR. In 1938, he was executed.(3)
During the first year of the Iranian revolution, the Marxist thinker, Mansoor Hekmat (1951-2002) had published several essays which were based on a serious study of Marx’s Capital, Lenin’s Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, and economic facts concerning the mass migration of peasants from the rural areas to the cities after the introduction of a state-directed land reform program in the early 1960’s. Hekmat challenged those on the left who claimed that Iran had a semi-feudal economy. Instead he argued that Iran had a dependent capitalist economy which was part of the division of labor imposed by the global stage of monopoly capitalism or imperialism.(4)
More recently, some leftist Iranian economists have used certain interpretations of Marx’s Capital in their analyses of the Iranian economy. For instance, Farhad Nomani and Sohrab Behdad’s Class and Labor in Iran which is the most comprehensive analysis of the Iranian economy in the period after the 1979 Revolution, equates Marx’s concept of capitalist production relations with property relations and defines capitalism strictly as the private ownership of the means of production. Hence they argue that during the first ten years after the Iranian Revolution, which witnessed the consolidation of large landholdings and enterprises in the hands of the state and “parastatal” organizations known as Bonyad (Foundations), there was a “shriveling” of the capitalist relations of production, an expansion of “petty commodity production” and a decline in the accumulation or concentration of capital. They further argue that it was only in the period after the end of the Iran-Iraq War in 1988 that a policy of economic liberalization “reinvigorate[d] the capitalist relations of production” (p. 36) although “very slowly and timidly”(p.61). (5)
Another leftist Iranian economist, Mohammad Maljoo, however, argues that capitalist production relations are not limited to the private ownership of the means of production and can take place in an economy owned by the state. He has pointed to the fact that in Iran, an increase in the rate of accumulation of capital has gone hand in hand with greater state control and state ownership of the means of production. His research on labor in Iran’s state-controlled oil and petrochemical industry further points out the lowering of wages and benefits, the prevalent use of temporary workers and the elimination of safety equipment as the basis for the accumulation of capital. (6)
Clearly, leftist Iranian economists are not in agreement concerning the definition of capitalist production relations and the nature of the Iranian economy.
In this essay, I would like to argue that the new Persian translation of Capital, Volume I, can address the above questions in important ways by shedding illumination on key concepts in Marx’s critique of capitalism. First, I will enumerate this edition’s new features. Then I will discuss how it has been received inside Iran. Finally, I will address some ways in which this edition can illuminate current debates concerning the Iranian economy.
II. The Unique features of the new Persian translation of Capital, Volume 1
Marx’s Capital, Volume 1 was first translated into Persian during the years 1966-1970 by Iraj Eskandari, a leader of the Tudeh Party who had been educated in France as an economist. Eskandari published Volume I as a single book in 1974,(7) and Volume II in 1981.(8) He had begun his translation from the 1872-75 French edition of Capital, Volume 1, an edition translated by Joseph Roy and supervised by Marx. However, later he decided to base his translation on the 1890 German edition which was edited by Friedrich Engels. This choice was made despite the fact that Marx himself had considered the French edition to have “a scientific value independent of the [German] original.”(9)
In 2007, an Iranian activist in exile, Jamshid Hadian, published another translation of Capital, Volume 1, based on Ben Fowkes’s English translation which was almost entirely based on the 1890 German edition produced by Engels.(10) Hadian’s translation was published in Sweden.(11)
In the Spring of 2008, Hassan Mortazavi, a prominent Iranian translator who is known for his translation of Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts,(12) and other Marxist works, published a new translation of Capital, Volume 1.(13) It offered readers the opportunity to see the differences between the 1890 German edition,(14) and the 1872-75 French edition.(15)
Mortazavi first began by translating Ben Fowkes’s English translation into Persian. He also asked Kaveh Boveiri, a young Iranian scholar to compare his Persian translation with an old edition of the French translation by Joseph Roy.(16)
Mortazavi then compared his Persian translation with Jean-Pierre Lefebvre’s French translation of the 1890 German edition.(17) Next, he obtained two volumes of the Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe (MEGA) which greatly assisted him with his project. MEGA 2 II/7 (18) contains the full text of the French translation by Joseph Roy and an apparatus which compares the French text with the 1867 and the 1873 German editions. MEGA 2 II/10 (19) contains the full text of the 1890 German edition and an apparatus which singles out many passages that were in the French text but were not included in the1883 and the 1890 German editions.
He carefully compared his Persian translation with MEGA 2 II/10 and then with MEGA 2 II/7. Next, he translated all the passages that were added to or changed in the 1872-75 French edition but were not included in the 1890 German edition or Ben Fowkes’s English translation or Lefebvre’s French translation. He also received assistance from Kamal Khosravi, an Iranian scholar of philosophy in Germany, who translated “The Fetishism of the Commodity and Its Secret,” the last section of the first chapter of Capital, Volume 1, from the 1873 German edition into Persian.(20)
The final product contains the following: 1. The 1890 German edition as presented by Ben Fowkes and Jean-Pierre Lefebvre, 2. The changes and additions from the 1872-75 French edition provided in the margins of each page, 3. The translator’s preface, 4. A preface which contains the translation of two essays by Kevin Anderson on the differences between the 1872-75 French edition and the 1890 German edition,(21) 5. A name index, 6. A subject index, 7. A general index.
The work as a whole reflects a great deal of scholarship, and an ability to express complex subjects in beautiful Persian prose.
III. Translator’s Preface, Interviews and Reviews
Between its publication in March 2008 and the outbreak of the mass protest movement that exploded after the June 2009 election, this new translation was reprinted once. It also received reviews and discussions in important reformist daily newspapers, Kargozaran and Shargh as well as the Persian language BBC website. Over 3000 copies have been sold. However, since June 2009 censorship has prevented new reprints and further reviews inside Iran.
Mortazavi is greatly influenced by Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 and Marx’s Grundrisse, works which in his opinion “do away with the myth that there is a contradiction between the young Hegelian Marx who is not quite familiar with material and economic realities, and the old economist who has been emancipated from the Hegelian dialectic.”(22)
In an interview with Mortazavi which was published by the now banned Iranian daily Kargozaran, the questions centered on the philosophical foundations of Marx’s Capital, the differences between Marx and Engels, and whether there was a break between the young and the old Marx. Mortazavi’s responses further expanded themes from his preface:
"I believe that a single thread connects the Marx of the 1844 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts to the mature Marx of Capital. To me the significant issue is that we are facing both a continuity of thought and a discontinuity at various points. . . not two people who are separated from each other from an epistemological standpoint."(23)
An interest in a non-deterministic interpretation of Marx’s Capital is also evident in a review by Babak Ahmadi,(24)prominent writer, translator and author of The Philosophical Glossary of Marxian Terms.
Ahmadi urges Iranian readers to study Capital ,Volume 1 in conjunction with Marx’s Grundrisse(25) in order to learn about “the enormous research on which Capital stands and the deep roots which Marx had in the humus of Western philosophical thought.” He also expresses his appreciation for Antonio Negri’s view of the multi-dimensionality of Marx’s economic studies, of which Capital was only one dimension.
Mohsen Hakimi (26), labor activist and the translator of Georg Lukacs’s Young Hegel cites two passages from the French edition of Capital, Volume I which Kevin Anderson had singled out as manifestations of Marx’s openness to rethinking previously held positions.
The first passage concerns the relationship of industrialized to non-industrialized lands. In the preface to the 1867 German edition, Marx states: “The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future.”(27) In the French edition however, Marx changes this sentence: “ The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to those that follow it on the industrial path, the image of its own future.” (28)
Hakimi emphasizes that this passage reveals Marx’s opposition to the view that all societies inevitably have to follow one path of development.
The second passage singled out by Hakimi from Anderson’s preface, concerns the relationship of human beings to nature:
In the 1867 German edition, Marx writes: “Labor is first of all, a process between man and nature. . . She/He sets in motion the natural forces which belong to her/his own body. . . in order to appropriate the materials of nature in a form adapted to her/his own needs. Through this movement she/he acts upon external nature and changes it, and in this way she/he simultaneously changes her/his own nature. She/he develops the potentialities slumbering within nature, and subjects the play of its forces to her/his own sovereign power.”(29)
In the French edition, Marx alters part of this passage: “ While through this movement she/he acts upon external nature and modifies it, she/he also also modifies her/his own nature and develops the potentialities slumbering within it.”(30)
Hakimi comments: “This slight change reveals that in the French edition Marx emphasizes the interaction between humans and nature instead of the domination of human beings over nature (a view which has been correctly critiqued by environmental activists).”(31)
Although almost all the reviews(32) reflect an interest in a philosophical and non-deterministic Marx, none have specifically related the content of Marx’s Capital to the current debates on the Iranian economy. This new edition of Capital, however, can address current debates among leftist Iranian economists in some important ways.
IV. Approaching this Translation from the Vantage Point of Current Debates Among Leftist Iranian Economists
Although the most recent economic sanctions imposed by the U.S. and Europe have greatly damaged the Iranian economy and the lives of ordinary Iranian citizens, Iran’s economic problems preceded these sanctions. Hence, my focus here will be on the debates concerning the nature of the Iranian economy itself.
As we saw earlier, Farhad Nomani and Sohrab Behdad’s recent work, Class and Labor in Iran argues that post-revolutionary Iran saw a “shriveling” of the capitalist relations of production because the economy became state-owned. In their opinion, this trend was only partially reversed with a limited reintroduction of private enterprise in the period after the end of the Iran-Iraq War in 1988.
Maryam Panah’s The Islamic Republic and the World: Global Dimensions of the Iranian Revolution, has characterized the Iranian economy in the 1980s as a “managed war economy” which “sat uncomfortably between state ownership… and a capitalist market”(p. 121)
Mohammad Maljoo,(33) on the other hand argues that capitalist production relations can also exist in a state-owned economy such as the Iranian economy. In his opinion, the problem with Nomani and Behdad’s analysis is the following:
"[T]he form of ownership of the means of production plays the main role in determining the mode of production . . . On this basis, as a rule, the expansion of government ownership of the means of production is considered an impediment to the expansion of the capitalist system…The duality, 'state/market' also seems to be especially important in this school of thought. "(34)
Maljoo has specifically examined the ways in which Iran’s state-owned oil and petrochemical industry has increased the rate of accumulation of capital by firing its permanent employees and hiring them as well as others as temporary employees at much lower wages and without benefits through state owned “private”contractors.(35)
Another leftist economist, Ahmad Seyf, points to the weakness of Iran’s non-petroleum production, the destruction of its agricultural sector and its extreme reliance on imports.(36) Seyf, Nomani and Behdad argue that a capitalist economy with full protection for private property would be the first step toward encouraging investment in production and stopping the flight of capital.(37) Only then, they argue, will the conditions be created for a civil society and democratic openings that can allow for labor organizing and changing the balance of power in favor of the dispossessed.(38)
I would argue that the new Persian translation of Capital can shed illumination on these debates in three important ways. 1. It emphasizes the critical importance of Marx’s concept of abstract labor in his analysis of capitalist relations of production 2. It offers ground for analyzing monopoly capitalism 3. It anticipates aspects of what we now know as globalization.
1. In the first section of the first chapter, “The Commodity,” Marx claims that abstract labour is the substance of value. He writes: "If then we disregard the use-value of commodities, only one property remains, that of being products of labour. . . congealed quantities of homogeneous human labour i.e. of human labour-power expended without regard to the form of its expenditure. . . As crystals of this social substance, which is common to them all, they [products of labour] are values—commodity values."(39)
The German original for “congealed quantities of homogeneous human labour” is “Eine blosse Gallerte unterschiedsloser menschlicher Arbeit.”(40) The Persian translation can be rendered as “a plain lump of undifferentiated human labour.” Through this choice of words, Mortazavi has attempted to illustrate the way in which individual labor under capitalism is denuded of its particularity.
Furthermore, in chapter one, “The Commodity,” Marx’s additions on the concept of abstract labor can help illuminate what he meant by “the dual character of labor” under capitalism. In the last and most famous section, “The Fetishism of the Commodity and its Secret,” the translation based on the 1890 German edition states the following about the pre-capitalist modes of production in which labour did not have a dual character: “The natural form of labour, its particularity—and not, as in a society based on commodity production; its universality—is here its immediate social form.”(41)
The French translation states: “The natural form of labour, its particularity—and not, as in a society based on commodity production; its universality, its abstract character—is here its immediate social form.”(42)
Marx’s relating of the phrase “its abstract character” to “the form of labour” under capitalism is one among many instances in chapter one where commodity production is identified by the mode of labor and not merely by the act of exchange. This distinction is important, given that many Marxists attribute the abstract character of labour only to the abstraction that results from equating different kinds of labour in the process of exchange.(43) Marx however, seems to emphasize the abstraction that arises from how labour itself is performed. Marx’s critique of abstract or alienated labor is much further developed in the chapters on “Co-operation,” “Division of Labor and Manufacture” and “Machinery and Large-Scale Industry,” as well as in his earlier works, The Grundrisse , and the 1844 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts.
2. Some of the additions to the French edition of Volume I also reveal that Marx did not simply see capitalism as limited to one form, i.e. free market competition between individual private capitalists within each country. Rather, he laid the ground for analyzing monopoly capitalism and how it arose from within competitive capitalism.
In the chapter on “The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation,” Marx argues that competitive capitalism’s drive to increase the rate of accumulation of capital can lead to greater and greater centralization of the means of production. In a passage that was later addressed by Lenin’s Imperialism,(44) Marx writes:
"The battle of competition is fought by the cheapening of commodities. The cheapness of commodities depends… on the productivity of labour, and this depends in turn on the scale of production. Therefore the larger capitals beat the smaller. . . with the development of the capitalist mode of production, there is an increase in the minimum amount of individual capital necessary to carry on a business under its normal conditions."(45)
Marx adds the following to the French edition:
"In any given branch of industry centralization would reach its extreme limit if all the individual capitals invested there were fused into a single capital. In a given society this limit would be reached only when the entire social capital was united in the hands of either a single capitalist or a single capitalist company. . . Centralization intensifies and accelerates the effects of accumulation, it simultaneously extends and speeds up those revolutions in the technical composition of capital which raise its constant portion at the expense of its variable portion, thus diminishing the relative demand for labour."(46)
The above passage is one of the few additions which Engels did include in the 1890 German edition. This passage has also been cited by some Marxists as a basis for a theory of state capitalism. More discussion concerning its content is needed in relationship to analyzing the various forms of capitalism in our contemporary world.
3. In the chapter on “The transformation of Surplus-Value into Capital” where Marx has made an addition concerning “the many sided competition in which the development of capitalist production has involved workers from the entire world,” he writes:
“The issue is no longer the reduction of the wages of the English to the level of continental Europe. Rather, in the near future the wages of the Europeans will be reduced to the level of the Chinese. This is the perspective that Mr. Stapleton, a member of the British parliament, has shared with his constituency in a speech about the price of labor in the future. He says: ‘If China becomes a large producing nation, I do not know how the industrial population of Europe will be able to continue the struggle without reducing its wages to the level of its competitors.’"(48)
Clearly, Iran’s full integration into the global capitalist market requires a labor force that would compete with Chinese or Indian workers in lowering the cost of production. An effort to intensify this competition is already taking place with the current regime’s Plan for Targeted Monetary Subsidies which has removed state subsidies on basic food items and petroleum, and a recent agreement between the Iranian and the Chinese labor ministers which allows for the use of Chinese day laborers in the construction of a highway from Tehran to the Caspian Sea.
The passages which I have singled out are only a few of many thought-provoking alternate texts in the French edition which deserve study and discussion. They also pinpoint some of the concepts which Marx thought were particularly important and needed expansion and further exploration.
Conclusion:
I began this essay by discussing the environment in which a new translation of Capital, Volume 1 appeared in Iran: On the one hand, deep mass dissatisfaction with the economic, social and political crises that confront Iran. On the other hand, the rise of a new generation of youth which is interested in philosophical ideas and eschews dogmatism.
The issues and concerns which Iranians bring to Marx’s Capital can raise important questions not only for Iranians but for the global anti-capitalist movement.
It is very significant that, in his translation, Hassan Mortazavi chose to include the additions to the French edition which Marx thought had “a scientific value independent of the [German] original”.(49) Those additions can give readers a deeper understanding of Marx’s dialectical process of thinking.
Although the current repressive regime in Iran makes it extremely difficult to have open and free debates on the content of Marx’s Capital, this new edition has offered a critical foundation for those on the left who are aiming to develop a constructive alternative to capitalism.
May 2012
Endnotes:
1.Sohrab Behdad has provided a list of the translations of works by Sweezy, Lange, Baran, Dobb and others which were published by him and Farhad Nomani prior to the 1979 Revolution. He has also addressed how censorship under Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi’s regime led to a paucity of translations of Marxist works. See Behdad 1998.
2.The recently banned online youth journal, Sarpich, was an important forum for young socialist intellectuals who expressed the above interests.
3.Chaqueri 1983. Sultanzadeh had also developed an important critique of Rudolf Hilferding’s Finance Capital, by arguing that finance capital could not dominate industrial capital. Instead, industrial capital was the determinant. Sultanzadeh preferred Lenin’s analysis in Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism. See “Is There an Age of Finance Capital?” in Sultanzadeh, 1984.
4.See Hekmat 1979. Unfortunately, Hekmat had very strong Leninist views on organization.
5.Iranian economist Ahmad Seyf also argues that only an economy characterized by the private ownership of the means of production can be characterized as capitalist. He writes: “The outer shell of our economy is capitalist but when the outer shell is peeled, there appears a concoction that does not fit any previously known paradigm.” See Seyf 2009
6.See Mohammad Maljoo 2006 and 2011
7.Marx 1974
8.Marx 1981
9.Marx 2008, p. 45 and 1976, p. 105.
10. Marx 1991
11. Marx 2007
12. Marx 1999
13. Marx 2008
14. Marx 1991
15. Marx 1989
16. Marx 1971
17. Marx 1983
18. Marx 1989
19. Marx 1991
20. In his correspondence, Marx had stressed that chapters one through six should also be consulted in German, although he saw the 1872-75 French edition as the most definitive version. See Anderson 2010, pp. 175-76, n.21.
21. Anderson 1997, and 1983
22. Marx 2008, p. 10, Mortazavi 2009
23. Mortazavi 2008
24. Ahmadi, Babak 2008
25. Marx’s Grundrisse was translated by Baqer Parham and Ahmad Tadayyon, and published in Tehran in 1985.
26. Farhadi Babadi 2010
27. Marx 2008, p. 30, and Marx 1976, p. 91.
28. Marx 2008, p. 30, addition #17 and Marx 1989, p.12
29. Marx 2008, p. 209, Marx 1976, p. 283
30. Marx 2008, p. 209, addition #6, Marx 1989, p. 145
31. Farhadi Babadi 2010
32. Based on my research, so far only one review has attacked this translation. In his website, Iraj Farzad claims that any attempt to separate Marx’s contributions from those of Engels is “more aimed at questioning Marx’s Capital itself.” See Farzad 2009.
33.
34. Maljoo, 2007, pp. 3-4. Fariborz Mas’udi also critiques Nomani and Behdad’s Class and Labor in Iran by stating that “The problem begins when the authors equate production relations with property relations, despite the definition of production relations.” See Mas’udi 1390 [2011].
35. See Maljoo 2011
36. Seyf 2009 and 2012. Maryam Panah points out “the concentration of capital in the defense industry.”(pp. 123-124)
37. Seyf 2009
38. Nomani and Behdad 2011
39. Marx 2008, p. 68, Marx 1976, p. 128
40. Marx 1991, p. 40
41. Marx 2008, p. 106, Marx 1976, p. 170
42. Marx 2008, p. 106, addition #60, Marx 1989, p. 58
43. See Arthur 2004, pp. 13, 41-55
44. See Lenin 1961, pp.205-24
45. Marx 2008, p.673, Marx 1976, p.777
46. Marx 2008, pp.674-675, Marx 1976, pp.779-780, Marx 1989, p.548
47. See Dunayevskaya 1981, p. 148, Binns 2003, p. 80
48. Marx 2008, p. 647, Marx 1989, pp.522-523
49. Marx 2008, p. 45 and 1976, p. 105
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This essay was originally published by Iranian.com on May 31, 2012
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The New Persian Translation of Marx’s Capital and the Iranian Economy
by Frieda Afary
Abstract: This paper examines the new features of Hassan Mortazavi’s new translation of Marx’s Capital Volume 1 and the responses which it has received inside Iran. I argue that what led to this translation was both a dissatisfaction with the failure of the Iranian left during the 1979 Iranian Revolution, and an interest on the part of a new generation of Iranian youth in philosophically based, non-dogmatic and constructive alternatives. Approaching this translation form the vantage point of current debates among leftist Iranian economists can also illuminate key concepts in Marx’s critique of capitalism.
Introduction:
Although the mass protests that followed the fraudulent 2009 Iranian presidential election were violently suppressed in the course of six months, the democratic sentiments that gave birth to them are alive and searching for ways to express themselves. The dire state of the Iranian economy, the deep dissatisfaction of the Iranian masses with the existing regime and the continuing revolts in the Arab World are making it increasingly difficult for the regime to keep a lid on the boiling pot that is Iran.
The mass protests in 2009 did not raise questions about economic justice similar to the early stages of the Winter 2011 revolts in Tunisia and Egypt. However, the simultaneity of economic, political and social crises in Iran and the rise of a global anti-capitalist movement have put the question of economic justice on the agenda for the democratic opposition movement in Iran. The new Persian translation of Capital, Volume I can provide a basis for these movements by illuminating key aspects of Marx’s critique of capitalism.
I. What Gave Birth to this Translation?
The first translation of Capital which was published in 1974( and about which more details will be provided below) was marred by the Stalinist views of its translator, Iraj Eskandari, the chairman of the USSR affiliated Tudeh Party.
This was no surprise, given that the versions of Marxism that were dominant among the Iranian left before and during the 1979 Revolution were represented by the the works of Josef Stalin, Georges Politzer, Mao Zedong, Regis Debray, Paul Sweezy, Harry Magdoff, Oskar Lange, Maurice Dobb and Paul Baran. These works constituted the theoretical foundations of the majority of the Iranian adherents of Marxism.(1)
Since the 1979 Revolution however, a new generation of Iranian leftists has arisen which is critical of the former generation for its mostly Stalinist and Maoist views and the ways in which those views led the majority of the Iranian left to lend support to Ayatollah Khomeini as an “anti-imperialist” in the early stages of the revolution.
The new generation prefers more thoughtful and theoretically based action as well as constructive alternatives. Many young intellectuals who express an interest in Marxism today are inclined to humanist, Hegelian and non-dogmatic interpretations of Marxism.(2) Above all, the new generation’s experiences under a religious fundamentalist regime have made it detest any kind of dogmatism, be it Islamic or Marxist or otherwise.
Given these interests, a wave of new translations of works by Marx and independent Marxist thinkers began to appear mostly during what became known as the Reform Period(1997-2005). These translations included Marx’s 1844 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, Georg Lukacs’s History and Class Consciousness, Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, Istvan Meszaros’s Beyond Capital, Rosa Luxemburg’s Selected Writings, Isaak Illich Rubin’s Marx’s Theory of Value, Mikhail Lifshitz’s Marx’s Philosophy of Art, Raya Dunayevskaya’s Philosophy and Revolution, Stephen Eric Bronner’s Reclaiming the Enlightenment, Negri and Hardt’s Empire, Marc Poster’s Foucault, Marxism and History, Alex Callinicos’s Marxism and Philosophy, and David Schweickart et al’s Market Socialism: A Debate Among Socialists.
In addition to these translations, many websites, weblogs and online magazines devoted to discussing a variety of socialist ideas came into existence in this period. Most were banned or forced to cease publication after the suppression of the 2009 upheaval however.
Although the new translations of works by Marx and independent Marxists have greatly expanded the horizons of the Iranian Left, there is still a dearth of discussion on the actual content of Marx’s Capital and its significance for Iran today.
In the 1920s, the Iranian Armenian Marxist economist, Avetis Sultanzadeh (1890-1938) had advocated a non-capitalistic road of development through an alliance between the budding worker and peasant movements in Iran and the proletariat of industrially advanced lands. By 1931, his opposition to the Stalinist USSR leadership’s backing of the Iranian nationalist army leader and new king, Reza Shah, led to his imprisonment in the USSR. In 1938, he was executed.(3)
During the first year of the Iranian revolution, the Marxist thinker, Mansoor Hekmat (1951-2002) had published several essays which were based on a serious study of Marx’s Capital, Lenin’s Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, and economic facts concerning the mass migration of peasants from the rural areas to the cities after the introduction of a state-directed land reform program in the early 1960’s. Hekmat challenged those on the left who claimed that Iran had a semi-feudal economy. Instead he argued that Iran had a dependent capitalist economy which was part of the division of labor imposed by the global stage of monopoly capitalism or imperialism.(4)
More recently, some leftist Iranian economists have used certain interpretations of Marx’s Capital in their analyses of the Iranian economy. For instance, Farhad Nomani and Sohrab Behdad’s Class and Labor in Iran which is the most comprehensive analysis of the Iranian economy in the period after the 1979 Revolution, equates Marx’s concept of capitalist production relations with property relations and defines capitalism strictly as the private ownership of the means of production. Hence they argue that during the first ten years after the Iranian Revolution, which witnessed the consolidation of large landholdings and enterprises in the hands of the state and “parastatal” organizations known as Bonyad (Foundations), there was a “shriveling” of the capitalist relations of production, an expansion of “petty commodity production” and a decline in the accumulation or concentration of capital. They further argue that it was only in the period after the end of the Iran-Iraq War in 1988 that a policy of economic liberalization “reinvigorate[d] the capitalist relations of production” (p. 36) although “very slowly and timidly”(p.61). (5)
Another leftist Iranian economist, Mohammad Maljoo, however, argues that capitalist production relations are not limited to the private ownership of the means of production and can take place in an economy owned by the state. He has pointed to the fact that in Iran, an increase in the rate of accumulation of capital has gone hand in hand with greater state control and state ownership of the means of production. His research on labor in Iran’s state-controlled oil and petrochemical industry further points out the lowering of wages and benefits, the prevalent use of temporary workers and the elimination of safety equipment as the basis for the accumulation of capital. (6)
Clearly, leftist Iranian economists are not in agreement concerning the definition of capitalist production relations and the nature of the Iranian economy.
In this essay, I would like to argue that the new Persian translation of Capital, Volume I, can address the above questions in important ways by shedding illumination on key concepts in Marx’s critique of capitalism. First, I will enumerate this edition’s new features. Then I will discuss how it has been received inside Iran. Finally, I will address some ways in which this edition can illuminate current debates concerning the Iranian economy.
II. The Unique features of the new Persian translation of Capital, Volume 1
Marx’s Capital, Volume 1 was first translated into Persian during the years 1966-1970 by Iraj Eskandari, a leader of the Tudeh Party who had been educated in France as an economist. Eskandari published Volume I as a single book in 1974,(7) and Volume II in 1981.(8) He had begun his translation from the 1872-75 French edition of Capital, Volume 1, an edition translated by Joseph Roy and supervised by Marx. However, later he decided to base his translation on the 1890 German edition which was edited by Friedrich Engels. This choice was made despite the fact that Marx himself had considered the French edition to have “a scientific value independent of the [German] original.”(9)
In 2007, an Iranian activist in exile, Jamshid Hadian, published another translation of Capital, Volume 1, based on Ben Fowkes’s English translation which was almost entirely based on the 1890 German edition produced by Engels.(10) Hadian’s translation was published in Sweden.(11)
In the Spring of 2008, Hassan Mortazavi, a prominent Iranian translator who is known for his translation of Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts,(12) and other Marxist works, published a new translation of Capital, Volume 1.(13) It offered readers the opportunity to see the differences between the 1890 German edition,(14) and the 1872-75 French edition.(15)
Mortazavi first began by translating Ben Fowkes’s English translation into Persian. He also asked Kaveh Boveiri, a young Iranian scholar to compare his Persian translation with an old edition of the French translation by Joseph Roy.(16)
Mortazavi then compared his Persian translation with Jean-Pierre Lefebvre’s French translation of the 1890 German edition.(17) Next, he obtained two volumes of the Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe (MEGA) which greatly assisted him with his project. MEGA 2 II/7 (18) contains the full text of the French translation by Joseph Roy and an apparatus which compares the French text with the 1867 and the 1873 German editions. MEGA 2 II/10 (19) contains the full text of the 1890 German edition and an apparatus which singles out many passages that were in the French text but were not included in the1883 and the 1890 German editions.
He carefully compared his Persian translation with MEGA 2 II/10 and then with MEGA 2 II/7. Next, he translated all the passages that were added to or changed in the 1872-75 French edition but were not included in the 1890 German edition or Ben Fowkes’s English translation or Lefebvre’s French translation. He also received assistance from Kamal Khosravi, an Iranian scholar of philosophy in Germany, who translated “The Fetishism of the Commodity and Its Secret,” the last section of the first chapter of Capital, Volume 1, from the 1873 German edition into Persian.(20)
The final product contains the following: 1. The 1890 German edition as presented by Ben Fowkes and Jean-Pierre Lefebvre, 2. The changes and additions from the 1872-75 French edition provided in the margins of each page, 3. The translator’s preface, 4. A preface which contains the translation of two essays by Kevin Anderson on the differences between the 1872-75 French edition and the 1890 German edition,(21) 5. A name index, 6. A subject index, 7. A general index.
The work as a whole reflects a great deal of scholarship, and an ability to express complex subjects in beautiful Persian prose.
III. Translator’s Preface, Interviews and Reviews
Between its publication in March 2008 and the outbreak of the mass protest movement that exploded after the June 2009 election, this new translation was reprinted once. It also received reviews and discussions in important reformist daily newspapers, Kargozaran and Shargh as well as the Persian language BBC website. Over 3000 copies have been sold. However, since June 2009 censorship has prevented new reprints and further reviews inside Iran.
Mortazavi is greatly influenced by Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 and Marx’s Grundrisse, works which in his opinion “do away with the myth that there is a contradiction between the young Hegelian Marx who is not quite familiar with material and economic realities, and the old economist who has been emancipated from the Hegelian dialectic.”(22)
In an interview with Mortazavi which was published by the now banned Iranian daily Kargozaran, the questions centered on the philosophical foundations of Marx’s Capital, the differences between Marx and Engels, and whether there was a break between the young and the old Marx. Mortazavi’s responses further expanded themes from his preface:
"I believe that a single thread connects the Marx of the 1844 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts to the mature Marx of Capital. To me the significant issue is that we are facing both a continuity of thought and a discontinuity at various points. . . not two people who are separated from each other from an epistemological standpoint."(23)
An interest in a non-deterministic interpretation of Marx’s Capital is also evident in a review by Babak Ahmadi,(24)prominent writer, translator and author of The Philosophical Glossary of Marxian Terms.
Ahmadi urges Iranian readers to study Capital ,Volume 1 in conjunction with Marx’s Grundrisse(25) in order to learn about “the enormous research on which Capital stands and the deep roots which Marx had in the humus of Western philosophical thought.” He also expresses his appreciation for Antonio Negri’s view of the multi-dimensionality of Marx’s economic studies, of which Capital was only one dimension.
Mohsen Hakimi (26), labor activist and the translator of Georg Lukacs’s Young Hegel cites two passages from the French edition of Capital, Volume I which Kevin Anderson had singled out as manifestations of Marx’s openness to rethinking previously held positions.
The first passage concerns the relationship of industrialized to non-industrialized lands. In the preface to the 1867 German edition, Marx states: “The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future.”(27) In the French edition however, Marx changes this sentence: “ The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to those that follow it on the industrial path, the image of its own future.” (28)
Hakimi emphasizes that this passage reveals Marx’s opposition to the view that all societies inevitably have to follow one path of development.
The second passage singled out by Hakimi from Anderson’s preface, concerns the relationship of human beings to nature:
In the 1867 German edition, Marx writes: “Labor is first of all, a process between man and nature. . . She/He sets in motion the natural forces which belong to her/his own body. . . in order to appropriate the materials of nature in a form adapted to her/his own needs. Through this movement she/he acts upon external nature and changes it, and in this way she/he simultaneously changes her/his own nature. She/he develops the potentialities slumbering within nature, and subjects the play of its forces to her/his own sovereign power.”(29)
In the French edition, Marx alters part of this passage: “ While through this movement she/he acts upon external nature and modifies it, she/he also also modifies her/his own nature and develops the potentialities slumbering within it.”(30)
Hakimi comments: “This slight change reveals that in the French edition Marx emphasizes the interaction between humans and nature instead of the domination of human beings over nature (a view which has been correctly critiqued by environmental activists).”(31)
Although almost all the reviews(32) reflect an interest in a philosophical and non-deterministic Marx, none have specifically related the content of Marx’s Capital to the current debates on the Iranian economy. This new edition of Capital, however, can address current debates among leftist Iranian economists in some important ways.
IV. Approaching this Translation from the Vantage Point of Current Debates Among Leftist Iranian Economists
Although the most recent economic sanctions imposed by the U.S. and Europe have greatly damaged the Iranian economy and the lives of ordinary Iranian citizens, Iran’s economic problems preceded these sanctions. Hence, my focus here will be on the debates concerning the nature of the Iranian economy itself.
As we saw earlier, Farhad Nomani and Sohrab Behdad’s recent work, Class and Labor in Iran argues that post-revolutionary Iran saw a “shriveling” of the capitalist relations of production because the economy became state-owned. In their opinion, this trend was only partially reversed with a limited reintroduction of private enterprise in the period after the end of the Iran-Iraq War in 1988.
Maryam Panah’s The Islamic Republic and the World: Global Dimensions of the Iranian Revolution, has characterized the Iranian economy in the 1980s as a “managed war economy” which “sat uncomfortably between state ownership… and a capitalist market”(p. 121)
Mohammad Maljoo,(33) on the other hand argues that capitalist production relations can also exist in a state-owned economy such as the Iranian economy. In his opinion, the problem with Nomani and Behdad’s analysis is the following:
"[T]he form of ownership of the means of production plays the main role in determining the mode of production . . . On this basis, as a rule, the expansion of government ownership of the means of production is considered an impediment to the expansion of the capitalist system…The duality, 'state/market' also seems to be especially important in this school of thought. "(34)
Maljoo has specifically examined the ways in which Iran’s state-owned oil and petrochemical industry has increased the rate of accumulation of capital by firing its permanent employees and hiring them as well as others as temporary employees at much lower wages and without benefits through state owned “private”contractors.(35)
Another leftist economist, Ahmad Seyf, points to the weakness of Iran’s non-petroleum production, the destruction of its agricultural sector and its extreme reliance on imports.(36) Seyf, Nomani and Behdad argue that a capitalist economy with full protection for private property would be the first step toward encouraging investment in production and stopping the flight of capital.(37) Only then, they argue, will the conditions be created for a civil society and democratic openings that can allow for labor organizing and changing the balance of power in favor of the dispossessed.(38)
I would argue that the new Persian translation of Capital can shed illumination on these debates in three important ways. 1. It emphasizes the critical importance of Marx’s concept of abstract labor in his analysis of capitalist relations of production 2. It offers ground for analyzing monopoly capitalism 3. It anticipates aspects of what we now know as globalization.
1. In the first section of the first chapter, “The Commodity,” Marx claims that abstract labour is the substance of value. He writes: "If then we disregard the use-value of commodities, only one property remains, that of being products of labour. . . congealed quantities of homogeneous human labour i.e. of human labour-power expended without regard to the form of its expenditure. . . As crystals of this social substance, which is common to them all, they [products of labour] are values—commodity values."(39)
The German original for “congealed quantities of homogeneous human labour” is “Eine blosse Gallerte unterschiedsloser menschlicher Arbeit.”(40) The Persian translation can be rendered as “a plain lump of undifferentiated human labour.” Through this choice of words, Mortazavi has attempted to illustrate the way in which individual labor under capitalism is denuded of its particularity.
Furthermore, in chapter one, “The Commodity,” Marx’s additions on the concept of abstract labor can help illuminate what he meant by “the dual character of labor” under capitalism. In the last and most famous section, “The Fetishism of the Commodity and its Secret,” the translation based on the 1890 German edition states the following about the pre-capitalist modes of production in which labour did not have a dual character: “The natural form of labour, its particularity—and not, as in a society based on commodity production; its universality—is here its immediate social form.”(41)
The French translation states: “The natural form of labour, its particularity—and not, as in a society based on commodity production; its universality, its abstract character—is here its immediate social form.”(42)
Marx’s relating of the phrase “its abstract character” to “the form of labour” under capitalism is one among many instances in chapter one where commodity production is identified by the mode of labor and not merely by the act of exchange. This distinction is important, given that many Marxists attribute the abstract character of labour only to the abstraction that results from equating different kinds of labour in the process of exchange.(43) Marx however, seems to emphasize the abstraction that arises from how labour itself is performed. Marx’s critique of abstract or alienated labor is much further developed in the chapters on “Co-operation,” “Division of Labor and Manufacture” and “Machinery and Large-Scale Industry,” as well as in his earlier works, The Grundrisse , and the 1844 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts.
2. Some of the additions to the French edition of Volume I also reveal that Marx did not simply see capitalism as limited to one form, i.e. free market competition between individual private capitalists within each country. Rather, he laid the ground for analyzing monopoly capitalism and how it arose from within competitive capitalism.
In the chapter on “The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation,” Marx argues that competitive capitalism’s drive to increase the rate of accumulation of capital can lead to greater and greater centralization of the means of production. In a passage that was later addressed by Lenin’s Imperialism,(44) Marx writes:
"The battle of competition is fought by the cheapening of commodities. The cheapness of commodities depends… on the productivity of labour, and this depends in turn on the scale of production. Therefore the larger capitals beat the smaller. . . with the development of the capitalist mode of production, there is an increase in the minimum amount of individual capital necessary to carry on a business under its normal conditions."(45)
Marx adds the following to the French edition:
"In any given branch of industry centralization would reach its extreme limit if all the individual capitals invested there were fused into a single capital. In a given society this limit would be reached only when the entire social capital was united in the hands of either a single capitalist or a single capitalist company. . . Centralization intensifies and accelerates the effects of accumulation, it simultaneously extends and speeds up those revolutions in the technical composition of capital which raise its constant portion at the expense of its variable portion, thus diminishing the relative demand for labour."(46)
The above passage is one of the few additions which Engels did include in the 1890 German edition. This passage has also been cited by some Marxists as a basis for a theory of state capitalism. More discussion concerning its content is needed in relationship to analyzing the various forms of capitalism in our contemporary world.
3. In the chapter on “The transformation of Surplus-Value into Capital” where Marx has made an addition concerning “the many sided competition in which the development of capitalist production has involved workers from the entire world,” he writes:
“The issue is no longer the reduction of the wages of the English to the level of continental Europe. Rather, in the near future the wages of the Europeans will be reduced to the level of the Chinese. This is the perspective that Mr. Stapleton, a member of the British parliament, has shared with his constituency in a speech about the price of labor in the future. He says: ‘If China becomes a large producing nation, I do not know how the industrial population of Europe will be able to continue the struggle without reducing its wages to the level of its competitors.’"(48)
Clearly, Iran’s full integration into the global capitalist market requires a labor force that would compete with Chinese or Indian workers in lowering the cost of production. An effort to intensify this competition is already taking place with the current regime’s Plan for Targeted Monetary Subsidies which has removed state subsidies on basic food items and petroleum, and a recent agreement between the Iranian and the Chinese labor ministers which allows for the use of Chinese day laborers in the construction of a highway from Tehran to the Caspian Sea.
The passages which I have singled out are only a few of many thought-provoking alternate texts in the French edition which deserve study and discussion. They also pinpoint some of the concepts which Marx thought were particularly important and needed expansion and further exploration.
Conclusion:
I began this essay by discussing the environment in which a new translation of Capital, Volume 1 appeared in Iran: On the one hand, deep mass dissatisfaction with the economic, social and political crises that confront Iran. On the other hand, the rise of a new generation of youth which is interested in philosophical ideas and eschews dogmatism.
The issues and concerns which Iranians bring to Marx’s Capital can raise important questions not only for Iranians but for the global anti-capitalist movement.
It is very significant that, in his translation, Hassan Mortazavi chose to include the additions to the French edition which Marx thought had “a scientific value independent of the [German] original”.(49) Those additions can give readers a deeper understanding of Marx’s dialectical process of thinking.
Although the current repressive regime in Iran makes it extremely difficult to have open and free debates on the content of Marx’s Capital, this new edition has offered a critical foundation for those on the left who are aiming to develop a constructive alternative to capitalism.
May 2012
Endnotes:
1.Sohrab Behdad has provided a list of the translations of works by Sweezy, Lange, Baran, Dobb and others which were published by him and Farhad Nomani prior to the 1979 Revolution. He has also addressed how censorship under Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi’s regime led to a paucity of translations of Marxist works. See Behdad 1998.
2.The recently banned online youth journal, Sarpich, was an important forum for young socialist intellectuals who expressed the above interests.
3.Chaqueri 1983. Sultanzadeh had also developed an important critique of Rudolf Hilferding’s Finance Capital, by arguing that finance capital could not dominate industrial capital. Instead, industrial capital was the determinant. Sultanzadeh preferred Lenin’s analysis in Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism. See “Is There an Age of Finance Capital?” in Sultanzadeh, 1984.
4.See Hekmat 1979. Unfortunately, Hekmat had very strong Leninist views on organization.
5.Iranian economist Ahmad Seyf also argues that only an economy characterized by the private ownership of the means of production can be characterized as capitalist. He writes: “The outer shell of our economy is capitalist but when the outer shell is peeled, there appears a concoction that does not fit any previously known paradigm.” See Seyf 2009
6.See Mohammad Maljoo 2006 and 2011
7.Marx 1974
8.Marx 1981
9.Marx 2008, p. 45 and 1976, p. 105.
10. Marx 1991
11. Marx 2007
12. Marx 1999
13. Marx 2008
14. Marx 1991
15. Marx 1989
16. Marx 1971
17. Marx 1983
18. Marx 1989
19. Marx 1991
20. In his correspondence, Marx had stressed that chapters one through six should also be consulted in German, although he saw the 1872-75 French edition as the most definitive version. See Anderson 2010, pp. 175-76, n.21.
21. Anderson 1997, and 1983
22. Marx 2008, p. 10, Mortazavi 2009
23. Mortazavi 2008
24. Ahmadi, Babak 2008
25. Marx’s Grundrisse was translated by Baqer Parham and Ahmad Tadayyon, and published in Tehran in 1985.
26. Farhadi Babadi 2010
27. Marx 2008, p. 30, and Marx 1976, p. 91.
28. Marx 2008, p. 30, addition #17 and Marx 1989, p.12
29. Marx 2008, p. 209, Marx 1976, p. 283
30. Marx 2008, p. 209, addition #6, Marx 1989, p. 145
31. Farhadi Babadi 2010
32. Based on my research, so far only one review has attacked this translation. In his website, Iraj Farzad claims that any attempt to separate Marx’s contributions from those of Engels is “more aimed at questioning Marx’s Capital itself.” See Farzad 2009.
33.
34. Maljoo, 2007, pp. 3-4. Fariborz Mas’udi also critiques Nomani and Behdad’s Class and Labor in Iran by stating that “The problem begins when the authors equate production relations with property relations, despite the definition of production relations.” See Mas’udi 1390 [2011].
35. See Maljoo 2011
36. Seyf 2009 and 2012. Maryam Panah points out “the concentration of capital in the defense industry.”(pp. 123-124)
37. Seyf 2009
38. Nomani and Behdad 2011
39. Marx 2008, p. 68, Marx 1976, p. 128
40. Marx 1991, p. 40
41. Marx 2008, p. 106, Marx 1976, p. 170
42. Marx 2008, p. 106, addition #60, Marx 1989, p. 58
43. See Arthur 2004, pp. 13, 41-55
44. See Lenin 1961, pp.205-24
45. Marx 2008, p.673, Marx 1976, p.777
46. Marx 2008, pp.674-675, Marx 1976, pp.779-780, Marx 1989, p.548
47. See Dunayevskaya 1981, p. 148, Binns 2003, p. 80
48. Marx 2008, p. 647, Marx 1989, pp.522-523
49. Marx 2008, p. 45 and 1976, p. 105
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This essay was originally published by Iranian.com on May 31, 2012
http://www.iranian.com/main/2012/may/persian-capital
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Monday, February 20, 2012
Asghar Farhadi’s Films Raise Questions about Man-Woman Relationships & Class
The Oscar nomination of “A Separation” for best foreign-language film and best original screenplay, has drawn much attention to Asghar Farhadi as a writer and director. As The Hollywood Reporter wrote: “Just when it seemed impossible for Iranian filmmakers to express themselves meaningfully outside the bounds of censorship, Asghar Farhadi’s Nader and Simin, A Separation, comes along to prove the contrary.”
Why has this film drawn so much attention? Many Iranian and international film critics have pointed out that this film in particular and Farhadi’s films in general are preoccupied with ethical quandaries and the search for truth. Other critics have singled out Farhadi’s ability to present complex characters and the complexity of human relationships in general. No character is portrayed as entirely heroic or entirely evil.
What are some of the key themes that Farhadi has singled out in A Separation?
At a question and answer session following the screening of this film at the 2011 Berlin Film Festival, Farhadi stated the following: “…I think the end of a movie should not be an end but a beginning for finding answers to the questions which have been raised in the course of the film. . . When writing the screenplay for A Separation, I was constantly going to divorce courts to observe the proceedings. We live in a country with a high divorce rate, even though it seems that Iran is a country in which people are very traditional and divorce is not a traditional but a modern phenomenon. The reason for this contradiction is the fast pace with which the country is moving toward modernization. . . There is also a hidden feud in the country. . . There is a hidden war between social classes: A war between the class of the dispossessed and traditional, and a class which wants to live according to the rules of the new world…” (http://www.khabaronline.ir/detail/130702/)
At a press conference following the first screening of the film in Tehran, Farhadi stated: “This film is in a way the expansion and coming together of the contents and themes of my three previous films. However, this coming together was not in any way determined or planned. When I finished writing the story for this film, I felt that this film and this story could be the culmination of part of my filmmaking career. . . ”
(http://www.leila-hatami.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=536:1389-11-23-09-47-18&catid=1:latest-news&Itemid=50 )
If by “my three previous films” Farhadi means the films for which he was both writer and director, he would be referring to About Elly(2009), Fireworks Wednesday(2006) and Beautiful City(2004). Hence, in the remainder of this article, I would like to take up how Farhadi presents some of the above mentioned themes in these films.
Farhadi’s sensitivity to the man-woman relationship, can be seen from the very first scene of A Separation which opens in a divorce court. Simin, (Leila Hatami), who has obtained a visa for the family to emigrate, wants a divorce because her husband is not willing to emigrate. Nader(Peyman Moadi), wishes to stay in Iran to take care of his elderly father(Ali-Asghar Shahbazi) who has Alzheimer’s. Simin will not leave without her daughter, Termeh (Sarina Farhadi). By law, however, Nader has custody of their daughter who in this case also desires to stay with her father. The judge refuses to issue a divorce and encourages the couple to resolve their problems.
As the film proceeds, and Simin moves back to her parents’ home, we become aware of the fact that Simin has been the main caretaker for Nader’s father up to now.* We also realize that the conflict between Nader, a bank employee and Simin, an English teacher, is not limited to the conflict between a desire to emigrate and the obligation to care for one’s elderly father. Nader is capable of displaying behavior that can be characterized as stingy, abusive, mendacious, insensitive and unreasonable.
The issue of class inequality and its complex relationship with gender is depicted in the predicament of Razieh(Sareh Bayat), a pregnant working class woman who is hired by Nader as a housekeeper and caretaker for his father. Razieh who has hidden her new employment from her husband, has to travel with her small daughter for over two hours each way on bus to get to Nader’s house and work from early morning to the late afternoon. In exchange Razieh will receive $300 per month which is barely over the official minimum wage in Iran.
Razieh is married to an unemployed cobbler, Hojjat(Shahab Hosseini), and has to face frequent visits from her husband’s creditors and authorities who take him to prison for not having paid his debts. Without advanced skills or any funds, and with a small child and another one on the way, she has no option but to stay in this marriage.
In Fireworks Wednesday, the themes of gender and class are presented by focusing on one day in the life of an upper class couple in Tehran. The couple are constantly fighting because the wife, Mojedeh (Hedieh Tehrani) suspects that her husband (Hamid Farrokhnezhad) is having an affair with the next door neighbor(Pantea Bahram). Their fights are being viewed from the eyes of a young woman servant, Ruhangiz(Taraneh Alidoosti) who has been hired for the day from a temporary agency.
Without in any way belittling Mojdeh’s plight vis a vis her husband, Farhadi also reveals her insensitive attitude toward the servant, the wife of the building’s janitor, and a delivery man. Neverthess, the servant develops much sympathy for Mojdeh when she realizes how unhappy Mojdeh is in her marriage despite her financial comfort.
In About Elly, the man-woman relationship continues to remain central. Elly (Taraneh Alidoosti), a young preschool teacher, has been invited to join a few urban middle class couples, their children, and a young single male family friend (Shahab Hosseini) on a trip to the Caspian Sea. She is aware that the purpose of inviting her is to introduce her to this single man who is visiting from Germany and is looking for a wife.
All the interactions are friendly, warm and jovial until suddenly, Elly disappears. At that point each tries to blame the other for this unfortunate incident. However, the story becomes even more complicated when Elly’s mother is contacted, and it becomes known that Elly has a fiancé (Saber Abar) who will come to search for her.
Farhadi’s dialogues give voice not only to the views of those who rush to condemn Elly for being dishonest but also to the views of her friend, Sepideh (Golshifteh Farahani), the one person who has a great deal of sympathy for Elly and her possible motivations for hiding this trip from her fiancé. Although these motivations are not discussed, it is clear that for a preschool teacher who has to experience the daily hardships of gender oppression and poverty in Iran, the prospect of marrying a man who would take her to Germany is very seductive. Farhadi’s portrayal of Elly’s fiancé is also sensitive and leads the viewer to believe that he was in love with her.
In general, Farhadi is at his best in his portrayal of man-woman relationships and of class inequality in Iranian society today. Most of his female characters are outspoken and challenge conventional expectations. His poor and working class characters are articulate, expect a better life and are resentful of class inequalities.
Given his powerful portrayal of the above themes, I was surprised by part of Farhadi’s statement at last year’s Berlin Film Festival, in which he characterized Iran’s “war between social classes” as “a war between the class of the dispossessed and traditional, and a class which wants to live according to the rules of the new world…” This statement does not address the fact that an increasing portion of the urban poor and the working class in Iran is now literate and welcomes many aspects of modernity.
In fact, Farhadi’s film, Beautiful City portrays a young working class woman and shanty town dweller, Firoozeh (Taraneh Alidoosti) who lives with a man from whom she has had a child. In the course of the film, she falls in love with her brother’s former prison mate, A’la (Babak Ansari). Some of the scenes, follow these two characters as they travel around town and spend time together in their effort to free Firoozeh’s brother from a death sentence. Such a portrayal breaks with conventional views of traditional working class women shanty town dwellers.
Today, in Iran, the existence of a mostly literate urban poor and working class population, along with a young student population—women and men, many from working class families—who have been exposed to modern ideas in universities, remains a key threat to the Iranian regime.
Watching Farhadi’s films and pondering the intricacies of the rich dialogues which he has created, can lead to fascinating discussions on the critical issues that are animating Iranian society.
About Elly, Fireworks Wednesday and Beautiful City are available on DVD with English subtitles. About Elly and Fireworks Wednesday can also be checked out free of charge at some U.S. public libraries in major metropolitan areas.
*In his review of A Separation, Dan Geist, makes the following observation: “Any hint of callousness on her [Simin’s] part is offset by the fact that of the few words the old man can still utter, the one he speaks most often is ‘Simin.’ Judging by the way he enunciates the name, the care she has provided has surely been tender; unquestionably, and more relevant to the events of the tale, it has been tireless and precise. A Separation commences on the day the unerring execution of that care ends.” See “‘A Separation’: At Sea in the City of Ten Million Tears” in Tehran Bureau. October 5, 2011.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/tehranbureau/2011/10/cinema-a-separation-at-sea-in-the-city-of-ten-million-tears.html
Read more!
Why has this film drawn so much attention? Many Iranian and international film critics have pointed out that this film in particular and Farhadi’s films in general are preoccupied with ethical quandaries and the search for truth. Other critics have singled out Farhadi’s ability to present complex characters and the complexity of human relationships in general. No character is portrayed as entirely heroic or entirely evil.
What are some of the key themes that Farhadi has singled out in A Separation?
At a question and answer session following the screening of this film at the 2011 Berlin Film Festival, Farhadi stated the following: “…I think the end of a movie should not be an end but a beginning for finding answers to the questions which have been raised in the course of the film. . . When writing the screenplay for A Separation, I was constantly going to divorce courts to observe the proceedings. We live in a country with a high divorce rate, even though it seems that Iran is a country in which people are very traditional and divorce is not a traditional but a modern phenomenon. The reason for this contradiction is the fast pace with which the country is moving toward modernization. . . There is also a hidden feud in the country. . . There is a hidden war between social classes: A war between the class of the dispossessed and traditional, and a class which wants to live according to the rules of the new world…” (http://www.khabaronline.ir/detail/130702/)
At a press conference following the first screening of the film in Tehran, Farhadi stated: “This film is in a way the expansion and coming together of the contents and themes of my three previous films. However, this coming together was not in any way determined or planned. When I finished writing the story for this film, I felt that this film and this story could be the culmination of part of my filmmaking career. . . ”
(http://www.leila-hatami.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=536:1389-11-23-09-47-18&catid=1:latest-news&Itemid=50 )
If by “my three previous films” Farhadi means the films for which he was both writer and director, he would be referring to About Elly(2009), Fireworks Wednesday(2006) and Beautiful City(2004). Hence, in the remainder of this article, I would like to take up how Farhadi presents some of the above mentioned themes in these films.
Farhadi’s sensitivity to the man-woman relationship, can be seen from the very first scene of A Separation which opens in a divorce court. Simin, (Leila Hatami), who has obtained a visa for the family to emigrate, wants a divorce because her husband is not willing to emigrate. Nader(Peyman Moadi), wishes to stay in Iran to take care of his elderly father(Ali-Asghar Shahbazi) who has Alzheimer’s. Simin will not leave without her daughter, Termeh (Sarina Farhadi). By law, however, Nader has custody of their daughter who in this case also desires to stay with her father. The judge refuses to issue a divorce and encourages the couple to resolve their problems.
As the film proceeds, and Simin moves back to her parents’ home, we become aware of the fact that Simin has been the main caretaker for Nader’s father up to now.* We also realize that the conflict between Nader, a bank employee and Simin, an English teacher, is not limited to the conflict between a desire to emigrate and the obligation to care for one’s elderly father. Nader is capable of displaying behavior that can be characterized as stingy, abusive, mendacious, insensitive and unreasonable.
The issue of class inequality and its complex relationship with gender is depicted in the predicament of Razieh(Sareh Bayat), a pregnant working class woman who is hired by Nader as a housekeeper and caretaker for his father. Razieh who has hidden her new employment from her husband, has to travel with her small daughter for over two hours each way on bus to get to Nader’s house and work from early morning to the late afternoon. In exchange Razieh will receive $300 per month which is barely over the official minimum wage in Iran.
Razieh is married to an unemployed cobbler, Hojjat(Shahab Hosseini), and has to face frequent visits from her husband’s creditors and authorities who take him to prison for not having paid his debts. Without advanced skills or any funds, and with a small child and another one on the way, she has no option but to stay in this marriage.
In Fireworks Wednesday, the themes of gender and class are presented by focusing on one day in the life of an upper class couple in Tehran. The couple are constantly fighting because the wife, Mojedeh (Hedieh Tehrani) suspects that her husband (Hamid Farrokhnezhad) is having an affair with the next door neighbor(Pantea Bahram). Their fights are being viewed from the eyes of a young woman servant, Ruhangiz(Taraneh Alidoosti) who has been hired for the day from a temporary agency.
Without in any way belittling Mojdeh’s plight vis a vis her husband, Farhadi also reveals her insensitive attitude toward the servant, the wife of the building’s janitor, and a delivery man. Neverthess, the servant develops much sympathy for Mojdeh when she realizes how unhappy Mojdeh is in her marriage despite her financial comfort.
In About Elly, the man-woman relationship continues to remain central. Elly (Taraneh Alidoosti), a young preschool teacher, has been invited to join a few urban middle class couples, their children, and a young single male family friend (Shahab Hosseini) on a trip to the Caspian Sea. She is aware that the purpose of inviting her is to introduce her to this single man who is visiting from Germany and is looking for a wife.
All the interactions are friendly, warm and jovial until suddenly, Elly disappears. At that point each tries to blame the other for this unfortunate incident. However, the story becomes even more complicated when Elly’s mother is contacted, and it becomes known that Elly has a fiancé (Saber Abar) who will come to search for her.
Farhadi’s dialogues give voice not only to the views of those who rush to condemn Elly for being dishonest but also to the views of her friend, Sepideh (Golshifteh Farahani), the one person who has a great deal of sympathy for Elly and her possible motivations for hiding this trip from her fiancé. Although these motivations are not discussed, it is clear that for a preschool teacher who has to experience the daily hardships of gender oppression and poverty in Iran, the prospect of marrying a man who would take her to Germany is very seductive. Farhadi’s portrayal of Elly’s fiancé is also sensitive and leads the viewer to believe that he was in love with her.
In general, Farhadi is at his best in his portrayal of man-woman relationships and of class inequality in Iranian society today. Most of his female characters are outspoken and challenge conventional expectations. His poor and working class characters are articulate, expect a better life and are resentful of class inequalities.
Given his powerful portrayal of the above themes, I was surprised by part of Farhadi’s statement at last year’s Berlin Film Festival, in which he characterized Iran’s “war between social classes” as “a war between the class of the dispossessed and traditional, and a class which wants to live according to the rules of the new world…” This statement does not address the fact that an increasing portion of the urban poor and the working class in Iran is now literate and welcomes many aspects of modernity.
In fact, Farhadi’s film, Beautiful City portrays a young working class woman and shanty town dweller, Firoozeh (Taraneh Alidoosti) who lives with a man from whom she has had a child. In the course of the film, she falls in love with her brother’s former prison mate, A’la (Babak Ansari). Some of the scenes, follow these two characters as they travel around town and spend time together in their effort to free Firoozeh’s brother from a death sentence. Such a portrayal breaks with conventional views of traditional working class women shanty town dwellers.
Today, in Iran, the existence of a mostly literate urban poor and working class population, along with a young student population—women and men, many from working class families—who have been exposed to modern ideas in universities, remains a key threat to the Iranian regime.
Watching Farhadi’s films and pondering the intricacies of the rich dialogues which he has created, can lead to fascinating discussions on the critical issues that are animating Iranian society.
About Elly, Fireworks Wednesday and Beautiful City are available on DVD with English subtitles. About Elly and Fireworks Wednesday can also be checked out free of charge at some U.S. public libraries in major metropolitan areas.
*In his review of A Separation, Dan Geist, makes the following observation: “Any hint of callousness on her [Simin’s] part is offset by the fact that of the few words the old man can still utter, the one he speaks most often is ‘Simin.’ Judging by the way he enunciates the name, the care she has provided has surely been tender; unquestionably, and more relevant to the events of the tale, it has been tireless and precise. A Separation commences on the day the unerring execution of that care ends.” See “‘A Separation’: At Sea in the City of Ten Million Tears” in Tehran Bureau. October 5, 2011.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/tehranbureau/2011/10/cinema-a-separation-at-sea-in-the-city-of-ten-million-tears.html
Read more!
Monday, January 9, 2012
Progressives Inside Iran Respond to Occupy Wall Street Movement
Translator’s Note: During the past few months, progressives inside Iran have taken advantage of the Iranian government’s anti-Wall Street rhetoric to hold several forums to discuss the significance of the Occupy Wall Street Movement. Below are excerpts from two presentations which also offer different views of the nature of the current economic crisis. The first by Mohsen Hakimi, labor activist, writer and translator, was presented to the Iranian Sociological Association in Tehran. The second by Mohammad Maljoo, economist, was presented at a “Workshop on the Socio-Economic Analysis of the Occupy Wall Street Movement” at Tehran University’s School of Social Sciences. These translations were first published by Tehran Bureau on January 3, 2012. (http://to.pbs.org/yashCX)
The Occupy Wall Street Movement: Strengths and Weaknesses
Author: Mohsen Hakimi
Source: http://www.akhbar-rooz.com/article.jsp?essayId=42103
Date: December 2, 2011
Translated by Frieda Afary
…I would like to begin my presentation by citing the Occupy Wall Street Movement’s definition of itself. This description is posted on its website and acts as its manifesto:
Occupy Wall Street is a leaderless resistance movement with people of many colors, genders and political persuasions. The one thing we all have in common is that We Are The 99% that will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the 1%. We are using the revolutionary Arab Spring tactic to achieve our ends and encourage the use of nonviolence to maximize the safety of all participants. This movement empowers real people to create real change from the bottom up. We want to see a general assembly in every backyard, on every street corner because we don't need Wall Street and we don't need politicians to build a better society. The only solution is World Revolution. [See www.occupywallst.org]
The Strengths of the Occupy Wall Street Movement:
1. Based on the above statement, this movement can be called an anti-capitalist movement (and not merely anti-war or anti-imperialist or anti-globalization and the like) for the following reasons:
* Wall Street is the world’s most important financial trade center. Openly stating that 99% of the population do not need Wall Street or the politicians, signifies open opposition to capitalism.
* The active body of this movement mainly consists of the unemployed, women, college students and dissatisfied and protesting artists…Let me start with the unemployed. Unemployment is an effect of the capitalist system. A fundamental feature of this system is the effort to increase profit-making for the capitalist class in different ways. One of these methods which is mainly used in advanced capitalist countries such as the U.S. and Europe, is to increase the productivity of labor through the use of the latest technological and scientific achievements. However in the context of capitalism, the use of advanced technology and machinery leads to unemployment and the redundancy of workers…This system uses advanced technology to increase profit. However, in doing so, i.e. by making living workers redundant, it deprives capitalism of the real source of profit, i.e. those very same living workers. Hence, it creates a tendency in capitalism which is called “the tendential fall in the rate of profit.” The rise of crises in capitalism is the actual result of this very tendency. Whether this tendency is actualized or not, an inevitable outcome of capitalism is unemployment. In 2011, international capitalist institutions such as the International Labor Organization and the International Monetary Fund have declared that youth unemployment in the U.S. stands at 17.7%...
Women are another important pillar of this movement. Although women in the U.S. are legally equal to men, in reality they are subjected to prejudice and inequality. Women receive less pay for work equal to that of men…Another form of oppression of women in the U.S. and the West in general is violence against women…
Finally, college students are another sector of the population that has created the Occupy Wall Street Movement. One of the main reasons for the active participation of college students in this movement is their inability to pay student loans obtained from universities…
* …A unique feature of the Occupy Wall Street Movement is that it has further penetrated the depths of society. In addition to opposing finance capital and the politicians, it has turned the social problems of everyday life into another realm of the struggle against capitalism. Problems such as illness (for example AIDS or cancer), homelessness, and death resulting from illness and loneliness had been marginalized in previous movements under the leadership of parties and unions. By intervening on these issues, the Occupy Wall Street Movement seeks to challenge competition and prejudice in human relations and instead develop solidarity, cooperation and equality among people…
* …This movement has placed new sectors of the population within the ranks of the working class, sectors which were not seen as part of the working class before. This implies the acceptance of a new definition of the working class, a definition which has been buried under the debris of capitalist and specifically postmodernist or reformist or sectarian perspectives in the post-Marx period. For example, one of the perspectives propagated by postmodernist thinkers was that the industrial working class—which in their opinion constituted what Marx meant by “the proletariat”—had diminished and had been replaced by the expanded service sector. Thus, postmodernist thinkers removed non-production workers such as sales clerks, transportation workers, teachers, nurses and the like from the ranks of the working class, and gave the working class a very weak and ever diminishing identity. Rescuing Marx’s definition of workers from this debris, and confirming the fact that a worker is not only an industrial worker or a production worker but someone who has no other means of survival but selling her/his labor power to the owners of the means of production, distribution and exchange, was a turning point, a great achievement and a strong point against capitalism…
* Calling for “World Revolution” as the only solution to problems, can only be meaningful in opposition to capitalism, because capitalism is not only the problem of this or that country but a global problem…
2. …Another important strength of this movement is that it is not dominated by traditional parties and unions...For leftist parties, the main issue has not been to guide a social revolution of the working class for the abolition of the social relation of capital and through the establishment and rule of anti-capitalist councils. Rather [their goal] has been to use workers’ struggles in order to achieve political power and establish another form of capitalism i.e. state capitalism. Labor unions have not only failed to elevate workers struggles for reforms within the context of capitalism, to the level of the struggle against the system of wage labor. Labor unions themselves have turned into the main agent for the domination of reformism within the working class anti-capitalist struggle…
3. …Prior to the rise of the Occupy Wall Street Movement, the liberal opposition movement in Iran could present western liberal democracy as the promised land which Iranian workers should struggle to reach. Now this inversion of reality is hardly possible. Now even the uncritical supporters of liberal democracy have no option but to admit to the problems which capitalism has created for humanity…Now they will try to tell workers not to look for an alternative beyond capitalism and only seek the escape route within the confines of reformed capitalism…In order to prove their claim, they point to the collapse of the alternatives counterposed to capitalism up to now ( including state capitalism which has called itself “socialism” in countries such as the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, North Korea and the likes)… It will be a big mistake if labor activists in Iran counter liberal capitalism’s strategy of inversion by repeating a fatal experience of the past and presenting as an alternative to capitalism, that which has been put into practice in the name of “socialism” and “communism” and has failed disastrously…
The Weaknesses of the Occupy Wall Street Movement:
* This movement is still not organized, self-conscious and connected to a movement of employed workers …
* The Occupy Wall Street Movement still considers capital not as a social relation but as merely a financial power concentrated in banks…
* The Occupy Wall Street Movement lacks a charter, a minimal set of demands…
11 Azar 1390 (December 2, 2011)
The Deepening Crisis of Capitalism, the Intensification of Class Struggle and the Organization of an Alternative System
Author: Mohammad Maljoo
Source: http://kanoonmodafean1.blogspot.com/2011/12/blog-post_8832.html
Date: November 28, 2011
Translated by Frieda Afary
From the inception of the Occupy Wall Street Movement, three themes have found increasing resonance: The deepening crisis of capitalism, the intensification of class struggle, and the organization of an alternative system…
On the question of the transition from capitalism to communism, Orthodox Marxism had three claims concerning these very same themes:
Concerning the first theme, i.e. the deepening crisis of the capitalist system, orthodox Marxism spoke of the tendency in capitalism to sow the seeds of its own destruction. In other words, competition among individual capitalists would lead to the deskilling [of labor] and technological innovation, and therefore to laying off workers, an increase in the size of the reserve army of the unemployed, a decline in wages and ultimately moving toward the crises of overproduction on the one hand and the tendential fall in the rate of the profit on the other hand.
Concerning the second theme, i.e. the intensification of class struggle, orthodox Marxism claimed that alongside the deepening of the crises, there would be a concentration of wealth at one pole of society and a concentration of poverty at the other pole. The polarization of society would lead to the intensification of class contradictions…
Finally concerning the third theme, i.e. the organization of an alternative system, orthodox Marxism also claimed that the material conditions for the creation of communism were born in the womb of capitalism, and that the realization of a communist order would only require a final act for the takeover of power…
In addressing the first theme, i.e. the deepening crisis of capitalism, Lenin essentially did not believe in [the idea] of a final crisis of capitalism. He believed that on the verge of the twentieth century, competitive capitalism had been replaced by monopoly capitalism which had expanded itself in an uneven way around the world in the form of imperialism under the control of finance capital…
If [as Rosa Luxemburg claimed—tr.] the crisis of capitalism emanates from surplus capital or underconsumption, the capitalist system can overcome this problem in various ways through deepening the rule of the logic of capital in various geographical locations. An ever increasing commodification of social life in various societies and geographical location creates both profitable opportunities for investing the surplus capital and an effective demand for overcoming the problem of underconsumption.
David Harvey reaches this very conclusion by increasingly introducing the element of geography into the process of accumulation of capital. The capitalist system will only logically reach its final limit when everything in the exact sense of the word has been commodified. In this respect, the capitalist system has not yet reached its final limit and can logically exit the deepest crisis with pride. At the same time, any crisis, no matter how superficial, can logically be the final crisis of the capitalist system.
The key point is this: The determinant for the survival or destruction of the capitalist system is not the depth of the crisis. The determinant is to be found in the second theme, the intensification of class struggle. If the capitalist system has been able to traverse all the crises and remain unharmed up to now, the reason is to be found not in capitalism’s power but in the weakness of class struggles…
In following Lukacs, the Frankfurt School believed that instrumental reason essentially negated revolutionary subjectivity, even if the objectivity of revolution became ever more possible and urgent. Gramsci sought to develop the concept of hegemony in order to answer this question. In other words, he demonstrated how in bourgeois civil society, meanings and values are produced which lead to the spontaneous satisfaction of various sectors of society with the status quo.
Althusser spoke of ideological state apparatuses which actualized the process by which the exploited and the exploiters followed the dominant ideology. However, as Foucault says, wherever there is power, there is also resistance.
Although Gramsci and Althusser offered convincing theories concerning capitalism’s power to use ideology and politics to weaken class struggle, neither one offered a convincing theory concerning the counter-hegemonic project. It was up to Karl Polanyi to develop the counter-hegemonic project.
Polanyi showed how different classes and sectors in civil society spontaneously create a defensive counter-movement from below against the capitalist system, and defend themselves against the dangers inherent in this system. The point is the following: It is not the depth of the capitalist crisis which determines whether the final crisis of the capitalist system has arrived or not. The determinant is the balance of forces between the hegemonic and the counter-hegemonic projects. The stronger the counter-hegemonic side, the more likely the final crisis of capitalism, regardless of the depth and scope of the crisis itself. However, the moving force for strengthening the counter-hegemonic project and weakening the hegemonic project must be found in the third theme, i.e. questions about the organization of the alternative system.
Contrary to the predictions of orthodox Marxism, the material conditions for the organization of the alternative system have not yet been provided spontaneously in the womb of capitalism. If those conditions are not provided spontaneously, then two questions gain significance.
The first question concerns the nature of the alternative system. Is it the alternative of social democrats such as Joseph Stiglitz or Paul Krugman? Is it the alternative of environmentalists such as James Lovelock? Is it the alternative of anarchists such as James Scott or Noam Chomsky? Is it the alternative of autonomists such as Antonio Negri and Felix Guattari or Michael Hardt? Is it the alternative of post-developmentalists such as Arturo Escobar or Maji Rahnema? Is it the alternative of socialists such as David Harvey? Or is it the alternative of communists such as Michael Lebowitz or Michael Albert?
The second question concerns the appropriate political pathway for achieving the alternative system. Is the pathway for achieving a socialist alternative to be found in parliamentary struggles, as Eduard Bernstein claimed? Or should the capitalist state first be destroyed and a new form of state constructed, as Lenin claimed?... Reform or revolution? …The main point is the following: If the emergence of the final crisis of capitalism is not dependent on the depth of the crisis but on the strength of class struggle, the motivating force for class struggle also arises from a certain minimal level of agreement on the type of alternative system and the appropriate political method for achieving the alternative system.
7 Azar 1390 (November 28, 2011)
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The Occupy Wall Street Movement: Strengths and Weaknesses
Author: Mohsen Hakimi
Source: http://www.akhbar-rooz.com/article.jsp?essayId=42103
Date: December 2, 2011
Translated by Frieda Afary
…I would like to begin my presentation by citing the Occupy Wall Street Movement’s definition of itself. This description is posted on its website and acts as its manifesto:
Occupy Wall Street is a leaderless resistance movement with people of many colors, genders and political persuasions. The one thing we all have in common is that We Are The 99% that will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the 1%. We are using the revolutionary Arab Spring tactic to achieve our ends and encourage the use of nonviolence to maximize the safety of all participants. This movement empowers real people to create real change from the bottom up. We want to see a general assembly in every backyard, on every street corner because we don't need Wall Street and we don't need politicians to build a better society. The only solution is World Revolution. [See www.occupywallst.org]
The Strengths of the Occupy Wall Street Movement:
1. Based on the above statement, this movement can be called an anti-capitalist movement (and not merely anti-war or anti-imperialist or anti-globalization and the like) for the following reasons:
* Wall Street is the world’s most important financial trade center. Openly stating that 99% of the population do not need Wall Street or the politicians, signifies open opposition to capitalism.
* The active body of this movement mainly consists of the unemployed, women, college students and dissatisfied and protesting artists…Let me start with the unemployed. Unemployment is an effect of the capitalist system. A fundamental feature of this system is the effort to increase profit-making for the capitalist class in different ways. One of these methods which is mainly used in advanced capitalist countries such as the U.S. and Europe, is to increase the productivity of labor through the use of the latest technological and scientific achievements. However in the context of capitalism, the use of advanced technology and machinery leads to unemployment and the redundancy of workers…This system uses advanced technology to increase profit. However, in doing so, i.e. by making living workers redundant, it deprives capitalism of the real source of profit, i.e. those very same living workers. Hence, it creates a tendency in capitalism which is called “the tendential fall in the rate of profit.” The rise of crises in capitalism is the actual result of this very tendency. Whether this tendency is actualized or not, an inevitable outcome of capitalism is unemployment. In 2011, international capitalist institutions such as the International Labor Organization and the International Monetary Fund have declared that youth unemployment in the U.S. stands at 17.7%...
Women are another important pillar of this movement. Although women in the U.S. are legally equal to men, in reality they are subjected to prejudice and inequality. Women receive less pay for work equal to that of men…Another form of oppression of women in the U.S. and the West in general is violence against women…
Finally, college students are another sector of the population that has created the Occupy Wall Street Movement. One of the main reasons for the active participation of college students in this movement is their inability to pay student loans obtained from universities…
* …A unique feature of the Occupy Wall Street Movement is that it has further penetrated the depths of society. In addition to opposing finance capital and the politicians, it has turned the social problems of everyday life into another realm of the struggle against capitalism. Problems such as illness (for example AIDS or cancer), homelessness, and death resulting from illness and loneliness had been marginalized in previous movements under the leadership of parties and unions. By intervening on these issues, the Occupy Wall Street Movement seeks to challenge competition and prejudice in human relations and instead develop solidarity, cooperation and equality among people…
* …This movement has placed new sectors of the population within the ranks of the working class, sectors which were not seen as part of the working class before. This implies the acceptance of a new definition of the working class, a definition which has been buried under the debris of capitalist and specifically postmodernist or reformist or sectarian perspectives in the post-Marx period. For example, one of the perspectives propagated by postmodernist thinkers was that the industrial working class—which in their opinion constituted what Marx meant by “the proletariat”—had diminished and had been replaced by the expanded service sector. Thus, postmodernist thinkers removed non-production workers such as sales clerks, transportation workers, teachers, nurses and the like from the ranks of the working class, and gave the working class a very weak and ever diminishing identity. Rescuing Marx’s definition of workers from this debris, and confirming the fact that a worker is not only an industrial worker or a production worker but someone who has no other means of survival but selling her/his labor power to the owners of the means of production, distribution and exchange, was a turning point, a great achievement and a strong point against capitalism…
* Calling for “World Revolution” as the only solution to problems, can only be meaningful in opposition to capitalism, because capitalism is not only the problem of this or that country but a global problem…
2. …Another important strength of this movement is that it is not dominated by traditional parties and unions...For leftist parties, the main issue has not been to guide a social revolution of the working class for the abolition of the social relation of capital and through the establishment and rule of anti-capitalist councils. Rather [their goal] has been to use workers’ struggles in order to achieve political power and establish another form of capitalism i.e. state capitalism. Labor unions have not only failed to elevate workers struggles for reforms within the context of capitalism, to the level of the struggle against the system of wage labor. Labor unions themselves have turned into the main agent for the domination of reformism within the working class anti-capitalist struggle…
3. …Prior to the rise of the Occupy Wall Street Movement, the liberal opposition movement in Iran could present western liberal democracy as the promised land which Iranian workers should struggle to reach. Now this inversion of reality is hardly possible. Now even the uncritical supporters of liberal democracy have no option but to admit to the problems which capitalism has created for humanity…Now they will try to tell workers not to look for an alternative beyond capitalism and only seek the escape route within the confines of reformed capitalism…In order to prove their claim, they point to the collapse of the alternatives counterposed to capitalism up to now ( including state capitalism which has called itself “socialism” in countries such as the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, North Korea and the likes)… It will be a big mistake if labor activists in Iran counter liberal capitalism’s strategy of inversion by repeating a fatal experience of the past and presenting as an alternative to capitalism, that which has been put into practice in the name of “socialism” and “communism” and has failed disastrously…
The Weaknesses of the Occupy Wall Street Movement:
* This movement is still not organized, self-conscious and connected to a movement of employed workers …
* The Occupy Wall Street Movement still considers capital not as a social relation but as merely a financial power concentrated in banks…
* The Occupy Wall Street Movement lacks a charter, a minimal set of demands…
11 Azar 1390 (December 2, 2011)
The Deepening Crisis of Capitalism, the Intensification of Class Struggle and the Organization of an Alternative System
Author: Mohammad Maljoo
Source: http://kanoonmodafean1.blogspot.com/2011/12/blog-post_8832.html
Date: November 28, 2011
Translated by Frieda Afary
From the inception of the Occupy Wall Street Movement, three themes have found increasing resonance: The deepening crisis of capitalism, the intensification of class struggle, and the organization of an alternative system…
On the question of the transition from capitalism to communism, Orthodox Marxism had three claims concerning these very same themes:
Concerning the first theme, i.e. the deepening crisis of the capitalist system, orthodox Marxism spoke of the tendency in capitalism to sow the seeds of its own destruction. In other words, competition among individual capitalists would lead to the deskilling [of labor] and technological innovation, and therefore to laying off workers, an increase in the size of the reserve army of the unemployed, a decline in wages and ultimately moving toward the crises of overproduction on the one hand and the tendential fall in the rate of the profit on the other hand.
Concerning the second theme, i.e. the intensification of class struggle, orthodox Marxism claimed that alongside the deepening of the crises, there would be a concentration of wealth at one pole of society and a concentration of poverty at the other pole. The polarization of society would lead to the intensification of class contradictions…
Finally concerning the third theme, i.e. the organization of an alternative system, orthodox Marxism also claimed that the material conditions for the creation of communism were born in the womb of capitalism, and that the realization of a communist order would only require a final act for the takeover of power…
In addressing the first theme, i.e. the deepening crisis of capitalism, Lenin essentially did not believe in [the idea] of a final crisis of capitalism. He believed that on the verge of the twentieth century, competitive capitalism had been replaced by monopoly capitalism which had expanded itself in an uneven way around the world in the form of imperialism under the control of finance capital…
If [as Rosa Luxemburg claimed—tr.] the crisis of capitalism emanates from surplus capital or underconsumption, the capitalist system can overcome this problem in various ways through deepening the rule of the logic of capital in various geographical locations. An ever increasing commodification of social life in various societies and geographical location creates both profitable opportunities for investing the surplus capital and an effective demand for overcoming the problem of underconsumption.
David Harvey reaches this very conclusion by increasingly introducing the element of geography into the process of accumulation of capital. The capitalist system will only logically reach its final limit when everything in the exact sense of the word has been commodified. In this respect, the capitalist system has not yet reached its final limit and can logically exit the deepest crisis with pride. At the same time, any crisis, no matter how superficial, can logically be the final crisis of the capitalist system.
The key point is this: The determinant for the survival or destruction of the capitalist system is not the depth of the crisis. The determinant is to be found in the second theme, the intensification of class struggle. If the capitalist system has been able to traverse all the crises and remain unharmed up to now, the reason is to be found not in capitalism’s power but in the weakness of class struggles…
In following Lukacs, the Frankfurt School believed that instrumental reason essentially negated revolutionary subjectivity, even if the objectivity of revolution became ever more possible and urgent. Gramsci sought to develop the concept of hegemony in order to answer this question. In other words, he demonstrated how in bourgeois civil society, meanings and values are produced which lead to the spontaneous satisfaction of various sectors of society with the status quo.
Althusser spoke of ideological state apparatuses which actualized the process by which the exploited and the exploiters followed the dominant ideology. However, as Foucault says, wherever there is power, there is also resistance.
Although Gramsci and Althusser offered convincing theories concerning capitalism’s power to use ideology and politics to weaken class struggle, neither one offered a convincing theory concerning the counter-hegemonic project. It was up to Karl Polanyi to develop the counter-hegemonic project.
Polanyi showed how different classes and sectors in civil society spontaneously create a defensive counter-movement from below against the capitalist system, and defend themselves against the dangers inherent in this system. The point is the following: It is not the depth of the capitalist crisis which determines whether the final crisis of the capitalist system has arrived or not. The determinant is the balance of forces between the hegemonic and the counter-hegemonic projects. The stronger the counter-hegemonic side, the more likely the final crisis of capitalism, regardless of the depth and scope of the crisis itself. However, the moving force for strengthening the counter-hegemonic project and weakening the hegemonic project must be found in the third theme, i.e. questions about the organization of the alternative system.
Contrary to the predictions of orthodox Marxism, the material conditions for the organization of the alternative system have not yet been provided spontaneously in the womb of capitalism. If those conditions are not provided spontaneously, then two questions gain significance.
The first question concerns the nature of the alternative system. Is it the alternative of social democrats such as Joseph Stiglitz or Paul Krugman? Is it the alternative of environmentalists such as James Lovelock? Is it the alternative of anarchists such as James Scott or Noam Chomsky? Is it the alternative of autonomists such as Antonio Negri and Felix Guattari or Michael Hardt? Is it the alternative of post-developmentalists such as Arturo Escobar or Maji Rahnema? Is it the alternative of socialists such as David Harvey? Or is it the alternative of communists such as Michael Lebowitz or Michael Albert?
The second question concerns the appropriate political pathway for achieving the alternative system. Is the pathway for achieving a socialist alternative to be found in parliamentary struggles, as Eduard Bernstein claimed? Or should the capitalist state first be destroyed and a new form of state constructed, as Lenin claimed?... Reform or revolution? …The main point is the following: If the emergence of the final crisis of capitalism is not dependent on the depth of the crisis but on the strength of class struggle, the motivating force for class struggle also arises from a certain minimal level of agreement on the type of alternative system and the appropriate political method for achieving the alternative system.
7 Azar 1390 (November 28, 2011)
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Monday, September 12, 2011
Free Faranak Farid: Azeri Feminist Speaks of Plight of Azeri Women in Iran
On September 3, Faranak Farid, an Azeri feminist, writer, poet, translator and secretary of the First Azerbaijan Women’s Congress was arrested in Tabriz. Since then, she has been interrogated for long hours and severely beaten by agents of the Tabriz Ministry of Intelligence. Her condition is deteriorating and she needs urgent medical attention. Below are excerpts from the translation of a speech which Farid had presented to a gathering of feminists in New York City in March 2010. I have taken the liberty of revising and editing the translation.
Author: Faranak Farid
Title: Where Are You From?
Source: http://sign4change.info/spip.php?article5566 (Persian)
http://en.baybak.com/where-are-you-from-faranak-farid-azr (English Translation)
Translator: Anonymous
Translation revised and edited by Frieda Afary
“Where are you from?” Is ethnicity an important factor in women’s struggle for their rights? When I was studying English in Middle School, this question seemed to me an interesting one. I would imagine myself living abroad and answering the question proudly. But this innocent picture was blemished as I came to face different types of discrimination.
As a woman I grew up in an environment in which different types of discrimination existed. These forms of discrimination have a cumulative effect. They shape you, break you, reshape you, mold you, break that mold and create a new mold for you. Finally, you no longer know who you really are…
In order to reach a correct understanding of ethnic discrimination as a factor which holds women back in their struggle to achieve their rights, we need to look at the subject as a whole. Iran is a country with a population of over 70 million with a variety of cultures, languages, ethnicities and religions. It is said that ethnicities constitute 65% of this population. [This figure has been disputed. Other estimates range from 35% to 50%] All are dominated by the language and culture of a minority.
The enforcement of this policy began 85 years ago before and in conjunction with the rise of the Pahlavi Dynasty. It now continues. Azeris who constitute one third of the population [this figure has been disputed], as well as other ethnicities such as the Lurs, the Kurds, the Arabs, the Balulchis, the Gilakis, the Mazandaranis, the Turkmen and the Ashayer[formerly nomadic pastoralists] such as the Qashqai and the Bakhtiari, are the aforementioned majority who have been denied their economic, social, civil, cultural and political right and have been marginalized.
Ethnicities whose language is not Persian, do not even have the right to be educated in their mother tongue. There is only one official language for all the ethnic groups. As a result of not having this basic right, women who belong to these ethnic groups can only minimally express themselves in society. Or these women forgo using their mother tongue in order to free themselves from further discrimination.
Given these circumstances, it is clear that these women face more complex challenges in achieving their human rights both as women in a patriarchal society and as marginalized ethnic groups. In this environment, gender discrimination creates greater limitations for them in accessing economic, political-social, legal resources and the media.
For example, in my hometown Tabriz, gender inequalities such as not having the right to divorce, have led to an increase in the number of women who have killed their spouse and landed in prison.
In addition to sexual discrimination, other discriminatory factors such as poverty, living in rural areas, and being a member of an oppressed ethnic group etc., can help us comprehend the many barriers that these women face.
Consider the case of Raheleh, from one of Azerbaijan’s villages. She was forced to get married at age fourteen. Like many other women, she was subjected to various types of brutality such as beatings, rape by her husband, and other inhuman acts. These very brutal and disrespectful acts turned her into a murderer. Raheleh was subsequently executed. Her public defender had told her that she must “defend” herself. However, she really didn’t know the meaning of the word “defend” in Persian.
…Among religious groups, religion as a factor leads to greater inequality and deprivation for them. The tensions that are brought about in combating inequality, injustice and deep-rooted prejudices, result in women’s toleration of greater violence in conflict zones.
The suicide rate among women [who belong to ethnic groups] is now four and a half times the suicide rate among men…However, self-immolation which is the most horrible form of suicide is more common among the Kurds and the Lurs. Honor killings are also very common. However, its agents are often not prosecuted.
Female genital mutilation is one of the lesser known problems faced by women among some ethnic groups in some regions. Women’s rights activists in poor and backward areas such as Sistan and Baluchistan also report the following: Girls who are still considered children are forced to marry old men in exchange for money; Some marriages are not even officially registered; Drug addiction exists. Similar to the Arab regions of Khuzistan, the lack of basics such as hygiene and clean drinking water is one of the main problems which women face.
Emigration from ethnic regions has been prevalent and still continues especially among men who leave in search of work. The negative consequences have especially affected women and families. The deepening gap between the central areas of the country such as Tehran with a population of 15 million, and the rest of the country, has led to tensions and a lack of mutual understanding.
Race, ethnicity, gender, language and culture, social class, religion, place of residence, disability, etc. are factors which create inequality and discrimination. Often, women confront most of these forms of discrimination. Under complicated circumstances arising from these inequalities, women lose their self-confidence and feel overwhelmed.
It is not only the powers that be which suppress ethnic groups. Most intellectuals also do not pay attention to their problems. Hence, paying attention to ethnic discrimination both at the national and the regional level is an urgent need.
On the one hand, women’s rights activists in these areas are labeled “political activists” and “separatists.” On the other hand, women who belong to national consciousness movements that exist in these regions are kept away from decision-making roles, by some of the authoritarian men who are active in these movements.
However, given the above mentioned circumstances, women’s rights activists in Azerbaijan are just as determined as women activists in other parts of the country, to achieve their human rights. During the past fifteen years, and in continuity with the past, they have used every opportunity to promote the movement of women to achieve their rights and to create opportunities for activity. They have turned to writing to express themselves. They especially engage in reading and writing in their mother tongue. Their participation has increased in all aspects of social life and in social activities. They continue to insist on their rights, just as they insist on other basic human rights. They are not willing to forgo any of these rights.
Thank you.
Faranak Farid
March 12, 2010
Read more!
Author: Faranak Farid
Title: Where Are You From?
Source: http://sign4change.info/spip.php?article5566 (Persian)
http://en.baybak.com/where-are-you-from-faranak-farid-azr (English Translation)
Translator: Anonymous
Translation revised and edited by Frieda Afary
“Where are you from?” Is ethnicity an important factor in women’s struggle for their rights? When I was studying English in Middle School, this question seemed to me an interesting one. I would imagine myself living abroad and answering the question proudly. But this innocent picture was blemished as I came to face different types of discrimination.
As a woman I grew up in an environment in which different types of discrimination existed. These forms of discrimination have a cumulative effect. They shape you, break you, reshape you, mold you, break that mold and create a new mold for you. Finally, you no longer know who you really are…
In order to reach a correct understanding of ethnic discrimination as a factor which holds women back in their struggle to achieve their rights, we need to look at the subject as a whole. Iran is a country with a population of over 70 million with a variety of cultures, languages, ethnicities and religions. It is said that ethnicities constitute 65% of this population. [This figure has been disputed. Other estimates range from 35% to 50%] All are dominated by the language and culture of a minority.
The enforcement of this policy began 85 years ago before and in conjunction with the rise of the Pahlavi Dynasty. It now continues. Azeris who constitute one third of the population [this figure has been disputed], as well as other ethnicities such as the Lurs, the Kurds, the Arabs, the Balulchis, the Gilakis, the Mazandaranis, the Turkmen and the Ashayer[formerly nomadic pastoralists] such as the Qashqai and the Bakhtiari, are the aforementioned majority who have been denied their economic, social, civil, cultural and political right and have been marginalized.
Ethnicities whose language is not Persian, do not even have the right to be educated in their mother tongue. There is only one official language for all the ethnic groups. As a result of not having this basic right, women who belong to these ethnic groups can only minimally express themselves in society. Or these women forgo using their mother tongue in order to free themselves from further discrimination.
Given these circumstances, it is clear that these women face more complex challenges in achieving their human rights both as women in a patriarchal society and as marginalized ethnic groups. In this environment, gender discrimination creates greater limitations for them in accessing economic, political-social, legal resources and the media.
For example, in my hometown Tabriz, gender inequalities such as not having the right to divorce, have led to an increase in the number of women who have killed their spouse and landed in prison.
In addition to sexual discrimination, other discriminatory factors such as poverty, living in rural areas, and being a member of an oppressed ethnic group etc., can help us comprehend the many barriers that these women face.
Consider the case of Raheleh, from one of Azerbaijan’s villages. She was forced to get married at age fourteen. Like many other women, she was subjected to various types of brutality such as beatings, rape by her husband, and other inhuman acts. These very brutal and disrespectful acts turned her into a murderer. Raheleh was subsequently executed. Her public defender had told her that she must “defend” herself. However, she really didn’t know the meaning of the word “defend” in Persian.
…Among religious groups, religion as a factor leads to greater inequality and deprivation for them. The tensions that are brought about in combating inequality, injustice and deep-rooted prejudices, result in women’s toleration of greater violence in conflict zones.
The suicide rate among women [who belong to ethnic groups] is now four and a half times the suicide rate among men…However, self-immolation which is the most horrible form of suicide is more common among the Kurds and the Lurs. Honor killings are also very common. However, its agents are often not prosecuted.
Female genital mutilation is one of the lesser known problems faced by women among some ethnic groups in some regions. Women’s rights activists in poor and backward areas such as Sistan and Baluchistan also report the following: Girls who are still considered children are forced to marry old men in exchange for money; Some marriages are not even officially registered; Drug addiction exists. Similar to the Arab regions of Khuzistan, the lack of basics such as hygiene and clean drinking water is one of the main problems which women face.
Emigration from ethnic regions has been prevalent and still continues especially among men who leave in search of work. The negative consequences have especially affected women and families. The deepening gap between the central areas of the country such as Tehran with a population of 15 million, and the rest of the country, has led to tensions and a lack of mutual understanding.
Race, ethnicity, gender, language and culture, social class, religion, place of residence, disability, etc. are factors which create inequality and discrimination. Often, women confront most of these forms of discrimination. Under complicated circumstances arising from these inequalities, women lose their self-confidence and feel overwhelmed.
It is not only the powers that be which suppress ethnic groups. Most intellectuals also do not pay attention to their problems. Hence, paying attention to ethnic discrimination both at the national and the regional level is an urgent need.
On the one hand, women’s rights activists in these areas are labeled “political activists” and “separatists.” On the other hand, women who belong to national consciousness movements that exist in these regions are kept away from decision-making roles, by some of the authoritarian men who are active in these movements.
However, given the above mentioned circumstances, women’s rights activists in Azerbaijan are just as determined as women activists in other parts of the country, to achieve their human rights. During the past fifteen years, and in continuity with the past, they have used every opportunity to promote the movement of women to achieve their rights and to create opportunities for activity. They have turned to writing to express themselves. They especially engage in reading and writing in their mother tongue. Their participation has increased in all aspects of social life and in social activities. They continue to insist on their rights, just as they insist on other basic human rights. They are not willing to forgo any of these rights.
Thank you.
Faranak Farid
March 12, 2010
Read more!
Tuesday, June 7, 2011
The State of Labor in Iran’s Oil and Petrochemical Industry
Translator’s note: On May 24, a massive explosion and fire at a newly inaugurated oil refinery in Abadan led to the deaths and injuries of an unknown number of workers. The explosion, caused by technical problems, occurred during a facility inauguration ceremony that had prompted President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to boast of Iran's growing capacity to refine oil. According to Hamid Reza Katouzian, head of the Energy Commission of the Majles, Iran's parliament, "experts had forewarned that the Abadan refinery was not ready to be inaugurated."
The explosion underscored once again the lack of safe working conditions in Iran's oil and petrochemical industry. In addition, recent labor strikes have challenged the industry's reliance on temporary contracts for its labor force. In March, 1,800 contract workers at the Tabriz Petrochemical Complex demanded that they be hired directly in order to receive the benefits and job security provisions to which permanent employees are entitled. In April, 1,500 striking workers at the Imam Khomeini Port Petrochemical Complex located in Khuzestan near the Gulf made similar demands.
Most recently, factional conflicts within the Majles over control of the income generated from oil production have led to leadership changes in the Oil Ministry. First, Ahmadinejad dismissed the oil minister and appointed himself "caretaker for the Oil Ministry." When parliament deputies and the Guardian Council called this act illegal, he appointed one of his allies, Mohammad Ali Abadi, as the new temporary "caretaker." Below are excerpts from a recent interview with Iranian economist Mohammad Maljoo in which he addresses the state of labor in the oil industry. It was published in the May 2011 issue of the Tehran-based journal Mehrnameh. This translation was originally published by Tehran Bureau on June 5, 2011. http://to.pbs.org/iqcYcl
Author: Mohmmad Maljoo
Source: http://www.akhbar-rooz.com/article.jsp?essayId=37715
Date: May 2011
Translated by Frieda Afary
Mehrnameh: In the years after the Iran-Iraq War, how did the method used for resolving the problem of [the low rate of] accumulation of capital, affect the abilities of the labor force?
Maljoo: In order to be precise, I will focus solely on the labor force in the oil industry… In the period after the Iran-Iraq War, and under the administrations known as “Reconstruction and Reform” [those, respectively, of Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and Mohammad Khatami], one of the most important components of the effort to increase the rate of accumulation of capital was the cheapening of labor power. Within the oil industry, the realization of this goal was made possible in four phases.
The first phase consisted of the “clericalization” process, a plan to raise the wages and benefits of workers to the level of office workers. Hence, promotions for oil industry workers were facilitated under the presidency of Hashemi Rafsanjani. Workers were allowed to be promoted to office worker status without changing their job description. At the same time, a variety of cash and non-cash benefits for workers were cut. These benefits were kept for office workers. The majority of workers filled out the new employment forms and were turned into office workers while maintaining their old job description.
The workers who were aware and did not succumb to this arrangement were legally entitled to protest in face of the financial difficulties which had gripped them. However, they could not do so because they were now a minority. These workers either had to voluntarily resign in exchange for receiving their severance pay, or join the ranks of the office workers. The majority of them opted for the severance pay. Ultimately, the fate of the majority of the workers who had become office workers was the same [as those who had been terminated with severance pay]. However, this happened through a different route.
As a rule, office workers in the oil industry are in some ways considered managers. Unlike workers who follow the regulations of the Labor Ministry, office workers follow the regulations of the Oil Ministry. Hence they do not have the right to strike or the right to form labor unions. The “clericalization” project of the oil industry in fact legally deprived the workers who had now become office workers from any right to protest or complain to the Labor Ministry.
Although the workers who had now become office workers were many, they had no right to protest when their clerk classification benefits were gradually eliminated over the course of two years and when they faced financial pressures imposed by their managers. This sector of the labor force only had two choices: Early retirement or termination with severance pay.
The second phase [of the plan to increase the rate of accumulation of capital] was put on the agenda concomitant with the clericalization process. This phase consisted of throwing an avalanche of outsourcing projects on the oil industry. By creating contract- work agreements, the National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC) avoided its responsibility for defending the rights of office workers.
The method was as follows: NIOC would ask for bids from contractors. The contractor whose bid was accepted would sign a contract with NIOC and receive funds from it. NIOC would then introduce its personnel to the contractor. Ultimately, all services such as payment of wages, insurance, benefits, etc. were put in the hands of the contractor. NIOC had rid itself of its responsibility toward workers.
However, during the years after the Iran-Iraq War, the level of production in the oil and gas industry was more or less increasing, and required hiring a new cadre of skilled workers. The third phase addressed this need. The mushrooming of contractors which provided human resources was in fact responding to this need. However, it is interesting to note that the bulk of the labor force hired by these contractors, consisted of the personnel who had retired early or had been terminated with severance pay.
The distinguishing feature of the type of employment offered by contractors was the temporary character of the employment contracts. Whether the agreement was a contract which employed workers for a little less than one year, or a temporary agreement which employed workers for one to six months, the common feature of all these employment agreements was that they deprived workers of job protection.
The fourth phase consisted of preparing the legal basis for such contracts, a legal basis which the 1990 Labor Code had provided years ago. According to the second amendment of Article Seven of the Labor Code, “If the nature of the work is continuous, and if no length of time is stated in the contract, the contract shall be considered permanent.” Another way of stating the above is that if the nature of the work is continuous, the employer can determine a set amount of time in his/her contract with workers, and employ them on a temporary basis in types of work that are continuous. The Labor Code not only legitimized temporary contracts, but also legally facilitated the expulsion of workers who had temporary contracts.
It is difficult to estimate the absolute and relative size of the temporary labor force in the oil industry in the years after the Iran-Iraq War. Depending on the industry sector and the geographical location, the size fluctuates between 60 and 90 percent of the workforce.
Please note that the plan to turn the labor force into a temporary labor force, did not only lead to a lowering of all wages. It also gravely affected the other components which determine the conditions of labor and the subsistence level of the labor force. These components include housing, the employment process, the length of the working day, the annual vacation time, job security, workplace safety, the extent to which benefits authorized by the Labor Code were applied or excluded.
In the years after the Iran-Iraq war, the mushrooming of contractors which provided personnel, the extended outsourcing as well as the massive increase in temporary workers, and hence the cheapening of the labor force, have led to a decline in job security and a decline in the individual and collective bargaining power of the labor force. Hiring temporary contract workers allows employers to circumvent labor laws and pay workers the lowest salaries. The temporary character of labor and the lack of job security, decreases solidarity among workers, especially given the continuously high unemployment rate. . .
This translation was originally published by Tehran Bureau on June 5, 2011
http://to.pbs.org/iqcYcl
Read more!
The explosion underscored once again the lack of safe working conditions in Iran's oil and petrochemical industry. In addition, recent labor strikes have challenged the industry's reliance on temporary contracts for its labor force. In March, 1,800 contract workers at the Tabriz Petrochemical Complex demanded that they be hired directly in order to receive the benefits and job security provisions to which permanent employees are entitled. In April, 1,500 striking workers at the Imam Khomeini Port Petrochemical Complex located in Khuzestan near the Gulf made similar demands.
Most recently, factional conflicts within the Majles over control of the income generated from oil production have led to leadership changes in the Oil Ministry. First, Ahmadinejad dismissed the oil minister and appointed himself "caretaker for the Oil Ministry." When parliament deputies and the Guardian Council called this act illegal, he appointed one of his allies, Mohammad Ali Abadi, as the new temporary "caretaker." Below are excerpts from a recent interview with Iranian economist Mohammad Maljoo in which he addresses the state of labor in the oil industry. It was published in the May 2011 issue of the Tehran-based journal Mehrnameh. This translation was originally published by Tehran Bureau on June 5, 2011. http://to.pbs.org/iqcYcl
Author: Mohmmad Maljoo
Source: http://www.akhbar-rooz.com/article.jsp?essayId=37715
Date: May 2011
Translated by Frieda Afary
Mehrnameh: In the years after the Iran-Iraq War, how did the method used for resolving the problem of [the low rate of] accumulation of capital, affect the abilities of the labor force?
Maljoo: In order to be precise, I will focus solely on the labor force in the oil industry… In the period after the Iran-Iraq War, and under the administrations known as “Reconstruction and Reform” [those, respectively, of Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and Mohammad Khatami], one of the most important components of the effort to increase the rate of accumulation of capital was the cheapening of labor power. Within the oil industry, the realization of this goal was made possible in four phases.
The first phase consisted of the “clericalization” process, a plan to raise the wages and benefits of workers to the level of office workers. Hence, promotions for oil industry workers were facilitated under the presidency of Hashemi Rafsanjani. Workers were allowed to be promoted to office worker status without changing their job description. At the same time, a variety of cash and non-cash benefits for workers were cut. These benefits were kept for office workers. The majority of workers filled out the new employment forms and were turned into office workers while maintaining their old job description.
The workers who were aware and did not succumb to this arrangement were legally entitled to protest in face of the financial difficulties which had gripped them. However, they could not do so because they were now a minority. These workers either had to voluntarily resign in exchange for receiving their severance pay, or join the ranks of the office workers. The majority of them opted for the severance pay. Ultimately, the fate of the majority of the workers who had become office workers was the same [as those who had been terminated with severance pay]. However, this happened through a different route.
As a rule, office workers in the oil industry are in some ways considered managers. Unlike workers who follow the regulations of the Labor Ministry, office workers follow the regulations of the Oil Ministry. Hence they do not have the right to strike or the right to form labor unions. The “clericalization” project of the oil industry in fact legally deprived the workers who had now become office workers from any right to protest or complain to the Labor Ministry.
Although the workers who had now become office workers were many, they had no right to protest when their clerk classification benefits were gradually eliminated over the course of two years and when they faced financial pressures imposed by their managers. This sector of the labor force only had two choices: Early retirement or termination with severance pay.
The second phase [of the plan to increase the rate of accumulation of capital] was put on the agenda concomitant with the clericalization process. This phase consisted of throwing an avalanche of outsourcing projects on the oil industry. By creating contract- work agreements, the National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC) avoided its responsibility for defending the rights of office workers.
The method was as follows: NIOC would ask for bids from contractors. The contractor whose bid was accepted would sign a contract with NIOC and receive funds from it. NIOC would then introduce its personnel to the contractor. Ultimately, all services such as payment of wages, insurance, benefits, etc. were put in the hands of the contractor. NIOC had rid itself of its responsibility toward workers.
However, during the years after the Iran-Iraq War, the level of production in the oil and gas industry was more or less increasing, and required hiring a new cadre of skilled workers. The third phase addressed this need. The mushrooming of contractors which provided human resources was in fact responding to this need. However, it is interesting to note that the bulk of the labor force hired by these contractors, consisted of the personnel who had retired early or had been terminated with severance pay.
The distinguishing feature of the type of employment offered by contractors was the temporary character of the employment contracts. Whether the agreement was a contract which employed workers for a little less than one year, or a temporary agreement which employed workers for one to six months, the common feature of all these employment agreements was that they deprived workers of job protection.
The fourth phase consisted of preparing the legal basis for such contracts, a legal basis which the 1990 Labor Code had provided years ago. According to the second amendment of Article Seven of the Labor Code, “If the nature of the work is continuous, and if no length of time is stated in the contract, the contract shall be considered permanent.” Another way of stating the above is that if the nature of the work is continuous, the employer can determine a set amount of time in his/her contract with workers, and employ them on a temporary basis in types of work that are continuous. The Labor Code not only legitimized temporary contracts, but also legally facilitated the expulsion of workers who had temporary contracts.
It is difficult to estimate the absolute and relative size of the temporary labor force in the oil industry in the years after the Iran-Iraq War. Depending on the industry sector and the geographical location, the size fluctuates between 60 and 90 percent of the workforce.
Please note that the plan to turn the labor force into a temporary labor force, did not only lead to a lowering of all wages. It also gravely affected the other components which determine the conditions of labor and the subsistence level of the labor force. These components include housing, the employment process, the length of the working day, the annual vacation time, job security, workplace safety, the extent to which benefits authorized by the Labor Code were applied or excluded.
In the years after the Iran-Iraq war, the mushrooming of contractors which provided personnel, the extended outsourcing as well as the massive increase in temporary workers, and hence the cheapening of the labor force, have led to a decline in job security and a decline in the individual and collective bargaining power of the labor force. Hiring temporary contract workers allows employers to circumvent labor laws and pay workers the lowest salaries. The temporary character of labor and the lack of job security, decreases solidarity among workers, especially given the continuously high unemployment rate. . .
This translation was originally published by Tehran Bureau on June 5, 2011
http://to.pbs.org/iqcYcl
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