Note. Arguing with an imaginary vulgar Marxist, and other notes on the Iran war › Arguing with an imaginary vulgar Marxist [000F-imaginary]

A society for which I run various errands recently hosted a screening of BBC Persian’s Taraneh, a documentary on the eponymous actress and translator Alidoosti Taraneh.

Afterwards, we held an open and often moving discussion, presided over by the president of the Iranian society.

One person, whom I shan’t name, made a series of rather bemusing and ridiculous comments, which I shall reconstruct into a vulgar Marxist argument about which to complain, although the point is I think of more general interest.

The remark in which I am interested is the claim that the forced hijab is a ‘superficial’ issue. Somewhat surreally, she was put in her place by someone who voluntarily wears hijab in Britain, but detests the obligation in Iran, in addition to various other people who either were in protests attacked by régime forces or know people who were martyred by the régime; she herself did not wear hijab. Of course, nobody else (neither the régime, which has killed people both at protests and for not wearing hijab, nor the protesters, who have risked death) seem to agree with this assessment.

Given that she later suggested a petition to Khamenei (père) to ask him to step down (instead of protests), I take it that she wasn’t really making a serious point about political change. But this is where the point of interest lies.

The imaginary vulgar Marxist will say something like this: the Iranian opposition should focus on struggles that foment sustained collective action to overthrow the government, but fighting over clothing does not achieve that, and on its own terms, e.g. impending drought might materially be more important.

My point in this note is very simple: ignoring the intrinsic oppressiveness of compulsory hijab, Iranian women’s resistance has arguably been more successful than any recent struggle against the régime, and we ought to expect that in terms of the logic of collective action.

We can distinguish the initial difficulty of an action from the risks one runs in taking it. The Polish scientists who came up with a clever way to make pirate radio broadcasts in the 1980s did something very difficult, but they appear not to have run much of a risk, because Polish intelligence were not bright enough to locate them. (They were caught when they hijacked state television, but that is a story for anoither day.)

Defying mandatory hijab laws is very difficult in the sense that it involves doing something potentially fatal and therefore reserves of courage far beyond your pathetic correspondent’s, but it does not e.g. require one to construct a ‘fire extinguisher filled with hydrogen’ or having a French astrophysicist circumvent American embargoes.

Why is this important? We can crudely consider taking risks under an authoritarian régime as comporting with the following sort of reasoning: to do $X$ is dangerous, but if $n$ other people share the risk by also doing $X$, I shall also partake of this. When it is very easy for other people to do $X$, and there is some spontaneous reason for a large number of other people to start doing $X$, those who reason thus are much likelier to (reasonably) assess that there will in fact be ⩾$n$ people doing $X$, and so will themselves do it. If it is very difficult to start doing $X$, e.g. because it involves filling fire extinguishers with hydrogen, one is less likely to think that others will join in so doing, and so less likely to think that ⩾$n$ people will join in. (Political scientists have probably made the point more explicit and elaborately.)

An obvious point is that this sort of mobilisation is necessary (if not sufficient) for any more sophisticated or elaborate form of political mobilisation. It is no use yelling at people that they ought to be establishing trade unions if (a) they have forgot how to do so and (b) it is extremely difficult to e.g. hold meetings because the Basij will find out. The resistance of Iranian women, by contrast, actually worked, in the sense that the régime (partially) relented in major cities; it worked not only because of their enormous courage, but also because it was the right sort of mobilisation at the political conjuncture it confronted, i.e. it didn’t involve assuming a political organisation that didn’t exist. But such efforts develop the sort of mutual trust and confidence on which organisation that can extract other concessions or even overthrow the régime can be built.