Caliban and the Witch [Part Three of Four]

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Caliban and the Witch
Women the Body and Primitive Accumulation
(Sylvia Federici, Autonomedia 2004)

reviewed by Karl Kersplebedeb

Here is the third part of my four-part review of Sylvia Federici's Caliban and the Witch - the best book i read in 2006.

Please note that a tidier and shorter version of this review is appearing in the journal Upping the Anti (#2) in December 2005.
(for information on Upping the Anti please visit the Autonomy and Solidarity website.)

If you are just joining us, you may prefer to start with the First Installment which you can view here.

(The second and fourth parts can be viewed here.)

Please also note that the entire review is now up on the Kersplebedeb website in html and pdf format!

Men Were the Key: A Tragedy in Three Acts

A careful reading of Caliban and the Witch allows us to see that the capitalist counter-revolution was built around male violence against women.


As noted above, class warfare repeatedly forced the Church and nobles to retreat, resorting to defensive maneuvers. It now must be added that all too often these maneuvers laid the basis for more advanced forms of exploitation and left the ruling class in a position to regain the upper hand. One way this happened was by manipulating differences within the working class, by intensifying the exploitation of some sections in order to reduce pressure on, or even buy off, other sections. This has been done time and time again within our own recent history, along the fault-lines of race, sex and nation. Federici describes this as being one part of primitive accumulation, which “was also an accumulation of differences and divisions within the working class, whereby hierarchies built upon gender, as well as ‘race’ and age, become constitutive of class rule, and the formation of the modern proletariat.”[20]

ACT ONE

The first example of this “accumulation of differences” that Federici gives is “commutation,” whereby serfdom was effectively ended in the 12th and 13th centuries, with rent and taxes replacing forced labour. This prefigured many contemporary reforms in that “like many workers’ ‘victories’ which only in part satisfy the original demands, commutation too co-opted the goals of the struggle, functioning as a means of social division and contributing to the disintegration of the feudal village.”[21]

Previously, land had been held by the serf family (not just the husband), and the terms of servitude had been hereditary; now the land was rented (generally just to the “free” man) and the relationship was regulated by money. A very small minority who were lucky enough to live on the best plots were able to pay and even hire other peasants to work for them, but the vast majority found it difficult to pay, sometimes falling into debt, sometimes even losing their land.

This new class division had gender, and women were now often barred from possessing or inheriting land in their own name. Little wonder that they formed a majority of those who migrated to the towns and cities, and that they would be so prominent within the heretical sects.

ACT TWO

Two hundred years later, when as a consequence of widespread class revolt and the aftereffects of the plague the ruling class was again pushed to the brink, opportunism and division amongst the oppressed once more proved key. Federici explains how the rebelliousness of male workers was channeled into sexual violence, women’s bodies providing a pleasant diversion and safety valve to relieve social pressure. Drawing on the Jacques Rossiaud’s research about prostitution in 15th century France[22], she describes a literal rape movement, whereby sexual assaults on any poor woman were now tolerated by the authorities, essentially decriminalized. At the same time, state-run brothels were established where the masses of poor landless women could earn the money necessary for their survival. (This helps to explain the “ascetism” and rejection of sex by certain medieval heretical sects – as we know from our own era, when sex is being used as a weapon, celibacy can be a liberating choice.)

Rossiaud interprets the mass raping of women as a form of class protest; the rapists often believed that their victims – often maids, servants, or washerwomen – had sex with their masters. This is one of the most intriguing parts of Caliban, even though only a page or so was spent discussing it. Neither the internet nor most standard works on medieval women discuss this, so considering that Federici describes this as a decriminalization of rape, and as a ruling class strategy, more information about the previous legal situation and supporting evidence that this was a thought-out plan would have been welcome.

It would be important to examine this in greater depth as the scapegoating of women for the crimes of the ruling class is still with us: the class resentment that is subsumed in hostility to the “rich bitch,” the loose woman who betrays her class (or nation), the JAP, the “daddy’s little princess”... remember how Eldridge Cleaver bragged that rape was an insurrectionary act?[23] Consider the following passage by Maria Mies:

“This dimension of the relationship of men of colonized countries to men of colonizing countries, I would like to call the BIG MEN-little men syndrome. The ‘little men’ imitate the BIG MEN. Those who have enough money can buy all those things the BIG MEN have, including women. Those who do not have enough money still have the same dreams.”[24]

What Federici is describing in 15th century Europe seems to have been an early example of the “BIG MEN-little men syndrome,” which has since been exported to societies around the world. This was (is) not only class envy, but also a class conflict in gendered drag: male workers are offered free sex at the expense of women, for whom it spells a constant threat to any meaningful freedom at all.

This rape movement was a win-win situation for the authorities: both a carrot for the male workers and a stick for the female working class. And it was a sign of the times, for simultaneous to this rape movement a similar dynamic was playing out in regards to women’s labour. In this, too, craftsmen played a key role – campaigning to exclude women from their workshops, claiming that they were working for lower wages (lower than whom?[25]). So back in the 15th century, when people depended more and more on money to acquire the necessities of life, women’s ability to earn this money was curtailed to the benefit of men of their class.

“It was from this alliance between the crafts and the urban authorities, along with the continuing privatization of land, that a new sexual division of labor […] was forged, defining women in terms – mothers, wives, daughters, widows – that hid their status as workers, while giving men free access to women’s bodies, their labor, and the bodies and labor of their children.”[26]

One is reminded of Mies’ observation that “The process of proletarianization of the men was, therefore, accompanied by a process of housewifization of women.”[27]

INTERMEZZO

It is here that a second question arises, one that lay hidden behind the question of violence against women: the nature of classes, and of class alliances. This is a question that Mies has tackled head on, but when Federici broaches it, her argument seems inconsistent. This does not detract from the wealth of information and insights that she does share with us, but it does leave room for misleading conclusions, so it is worth discussing.

These were cross-class alliances, whereby men separated themselves from working class women in order to ape the privileges and power of their “betters,” and yet Federici insists that male workers did not really benefit from their new position, that the “state-backed raping of poor women undermined the class solidarity that had been achieved in the anti-feudal struggle.”[28] Furthermore, “the devaluation and feminization of reproductive labor was a disaster also for male workers, for the devaluation of reproductive labor inevitably devalued its product: labor-power.”[29]

This is confusing, as it seems clear that some working class men most definitely did exploit women for their own gain. They enjoyed a formal economic gain in the form of higher wages. They benefited sexually by having increased access to women’s bodies. As women were warped through the process of housewifization, men eventually enjoyed a hidden economic bonus in that so much work that previously had to be paid for or done by the male worker himself was now done by the female houseworker. One is also reminded of what Mies wrote:

“Proletarian men do have an interest in the domestication of their female class companions. The material interest consists, on the one hand, in the man’s claim to monopolize available wage-work, on the other, in the claim to have control over all money income in the family.”[30]

Because there is no explicit discussion of the nature of class – beyond her promising observation that gender can be a specification of class relations – it is difficult to know Federici’s rationale for claiming that these opportunistic acts were against men’s interests. Perhaps she feels that as men’s alienation and exploitation can only be solved by revolution, any behaviour that works against this goal is not in their interest; in this sense it might be said that although this opportunism was in their personal interests it remained against their class interests, but this formulation becomes unwieldy when we insist on seeing gender as a “specification of class,”[31] and unconvincing when we are given no evidence of male resistance to women’s subjugation. Men seem to have “voted with their feet,” perhaps resisting some aspects of class rule but often collaborating in new mechanisms of exploitation and oppression, so that like “whiteness” today, “maleness” in these instances seems to be the most important specification of class.

Whether or not the mass of men (or white people) are acting “in their class interests” really becomes a matter of what one wants to believe about the working class. From a certain philosophical perspective even the ruling class has an “interest” in abolishing class rule: it is obvious that once one has accepted the desirability of a classless non-hierarchical society, that goal seems far more alluring than waking up in this cesspool but finding out that you’ve won the lotto. But this is not usually how “class interest” is understood…

Perhaps one way to untie this knot is to acknowledge that men also must also have been warped by this process – becoming more sexist, less respectful of the women in their community, more prone to dismiss, to degrade, to beat and to rape. We are not told of any significant resistance to this transformation by the men concerned. So while the abstract genderless worker may have suffered as a result of these attacks on women, the new male worker was served by the increasing subordination of women – which in no way lessens the fact that this was a historic human tragedy.

ACT THREE: Still Higher Levels of Violence

We cannot know what would have happened had the balance of forces remained at this level, for events conspired to once again push the ruling class to the brink. Just a few hundred years after the plague, the labour shortage that continued into the 16th century due to the widespread hostility to capitalist work was exacerbated by a new decrease in the population (probably due to the increase in poverty as the gains of the 14th and 15th centuries were undone).

This was the era of the capitalist counter-revolution, and yet the new capitalist class could not create the labour they needed like they could make cloth or steel. Both Mies and Federici agree on this point that two of the greatest crimes of that age were committed to find a way around this crisis: mandatory procreation for European women and the mass kidnapping and enslavement of Africans. In Mies’ words: “The counterpart of the slave raids in Africa was the witch hunt in Europe. The two seem to be connected through the same dilemma with which the capitalist version of man-the-hunter is faced: however much he may try to reduce women to a mere condition of production, to nature to be appropriated and exploited, he cannot produce living human labour power without women.”[32]

While Federici does not deal with the effects of the slave trade on gender relations within Africa, and only touches upon the way in which ideas of male and female power developed amongst African slaves in the “New World,” she does note that “capitalism may not even have taken off without Europe’s ‘annexation of America,’ and the ‘blood and sweat’ that for two centuries flowed to Europe from the plantation.”[33]

What Federici does concentrate on is the war against women in Europe, the hammer of housewifization which “degraded maternity to the status of forced labor.”[34]

European men had been burning witches since the 15th century, but this had originally just been one part of the campaigns against the heretics. In the 16th century the persecution of witches went from the margins to being the center of this campaign, and the accusations changed from being primarily about religious beliefs to concentrating on sexual perversion,infanticide and reproduction. By the 17th century as many as 100,000 women were killed, and just as many more had their lives ruined by the accusation.[35]

Whereas Mies emphasized the economic role of the Witch-Hunt, the way in which the theft of women’s property was part of primitive accumulation, Federici convincingly casts doubt on this, pointing out that the overwhelming majority of victims had no property or wealth to speak of. Rather, this was a politically motivated war against women: what had to be destroyed was “the female personality that had developed, especially among the peasantry, in the course of the struggle against feudal power, when women had been in the forefront of the heretical movements, often organizing in female associations, posing a growing challenge to male authority and the Church.”[36]

Federici does us the service of contextualizing this mass murder within a growing hostility to women. At the same time as “witches” were being publicly tortured and killed, governments across Europe were passing laws against contraception, abortion, adultery, and especially infanticide – all of which were punishable by death. Other changes registered at this time are also worth mentioning: prostitution was now criminalized in such a way as to harshly punish the woman but hardly touch the male customer, the word “gossip” (which had meant “female friend” previously) now took on disparaging meaning, and – like women in Iraq today – new levels of male hostility forced women indoors, for to be seen walking the streets without a male escort was to risk insult or attack.[37]

If it is tempting to see the Witch-Hunt as just one detail in this rise in misogyny, especially since historians are now saying that the number of dead was so much smaller than previously thought, one should remember what these trials and executions were like. These were public events, which normally involved new and incredibly sadistic forms of sexual torture approaching vivisection.[38] The way in which the “guilty” were executed was also harrowing – drowning, burning, etc. – and the entire village (including the woman’ children) was often forced toattend. So the 100,000 witches who were burnt during the Great Hunt (if this number stands future scrutiny) would have had a very different psychological effect than 100,000 deaths on a battle field. The murder of each woman thus became powerful propaganda.

Nevertheless, all of these changes, and not just the Witch-Hunt, did come together as pieces of a larger puzzle; men with big ideas were making their dreams come true, finally summoning the necessary violence to snuff out centuries of rebellion and resistance to class rule. The draconian “pro-life” legislation; making money male by driving women out of the formal economy; the Witch-Hunt – all of this was supported by the leading intellectuals of the day. A modern process - “the secular courts conducted most of the trials, while in the areas where the Inquisition operated (Italy and Spain)the number of executions remained comparatively low”[39] – aimed at completely rooting out “a whole world of female practices, collective relations, and systems of knowledge that had been the foundation of women’s power in pre-capitalist Europe, and the condition for their resistance in the struggle against feudalism.”[40]

You can view the First Installment of this review here and the Second Installment here and the Fourth Installment here - or you can view the whole thing on the Kersplebedeb site in html or pdf format.

Footnotes

20] Federici, p. 63. [back to text]

21] Federici, p. 29. [back to text]

22] Rossiaud, Jacques Medieval Prostitution (Oxford:
Basil Blackwell 1988) [back to text]

23] Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Ice [back to text]
24] Mies, p. 167 [back to text]
25] This complaint – still heard in anti-immigrant campaigns today, as well as in the right-wing of the anti-globalization movement –should be understood as one set of ambitious workers trying to increase the price of their skills (i.e. wage) by limiting the labour supply by excluding(and, incidentally, impoverishing) another set of workers. [back to text]

26] Federici, p. 97. [back to text]

27] Mies, p. 69. [back to text]

28] Federici, p. 48. [back to text]

29] Federici, p. 75. [back to text]

30] Mies, p. 109 [back to text]

31] Federici, p. 14. [back to text]

32] Mies, p. 69. [back to text]

33] Federici, p. 103. [back to text]

34] Federici, p. 92. [back to text]

35] Federici, p. 208. Previous estimates of the numbers of witches killed had run into the millions – German feminist Ingrid Strobl put it at “between 9 and 30 million” (in “Fear of the Shivers of Freedom”) – but more recent research which seems to be accepted by feminists puts the figure much lower. See “Recent Developments in the Study of the Great European Witch-Hunt” by Jenny Gibbons at http://www.cog.org/witch_hunt.html
[back to text]

36] Federici, p. 184. [back to text]

37] Federici, p. 99-100. [back to text]

38] According to Mies, “The torture chambers of the witch-hunters were the laboratories where the texture, the anatomy, the resistance of the human body – mainly the female body – was studied. One may say that modern medicine and the male hegemony over this vital field were established on the base of millions of crushed, maimed, torn, disfigured and finally burnt, female bodies.” (p. 83) [back to text]

39] Federici, p. 168. [back to text]

40] Federici, p.102. [back to text]


Categories: autonomous-marxism, book-review, caliban-and-the-witch, capitalism, feminism, heresies, history, repression, sexism, sexuality, violence-against-women, witches, women

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Caliban And The Witch [Part One of Four]

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Caliban and the Witch
Women the Body and Primitive Accumulation
(Sylvia Federici, Autonomedia 2004)

reviewed by Karl Kersplebedeb

Back in May, at the Montreal Anarchist Bookfair, i bought a copy of Silvia Federici's latest book, Caliban and he Witch: Women, The Body and Primitive Accumulation. Suffice to say, i was very impressed. A couple of months later, re-reading it for the second or third time, i decided to start writing notes, both about what i agreed with and what i disagreed with. Back in August i sent out an email saying i was now stocking the book, and that i would be writing more about it on my website. Friends from Upping the Anti, a revolutionary journal of theory and action, asked if i could whip my thoughts into a proper review and that's what i did...

Only thing is, i wrote about twice as much as they had hoped for. A tidier and trimmed down version of the review i wrote will thus be appearing in Upping the Anti #2 (coming out this month!), and as for the longer review, i have decided to post it here. Seeing as it's kinda big, it will be coining in a few installments...Please feel free and ecnouraged to comment on this, or else to email me separately if you prefer. I am especially interested in discussing this book with others who have read it (in fact, that was one of the factors behind my setting up this blog!).

Please note that you can view the Second Installment of this review here and the Third Installment here and the Fourth Installment here - or you can view the whole thing on the Kersplebedeb site in html or pdf format.

Women’s oppression is a subject at the center of our struggle forhuman liberation, but serious discussions as to why women suffer distinctforms of oppression, and why rape and other violence is so important in this,have generally been beyond the scope of most left analysis. What we get instead are platitudes about “culture,” “backwardness” and “personal attitudes,” occasionally slipping into plain old biological determinism in materialistdrag.

While there are no definitive answers yet, Silvia Federici’s Caliban and the Witch is a welcome addition to a growing list of works thattake these questions seriously from an anti-capitalist and anti-colonialist perspective. In so doing, previously “invisible”[1] forms of oppression and resistance are brought to light, and this “peripheral” question is shown to be central not only to capitalist history, but also to our unfinished quest to find a road out of it.

Antecedents

Karl Marx pointed out long ago that the transition from feudalism to capitalism required a special form of “accumulation” (or what some might call “wealth creation”) that differed from the “normal” exploitation of the wage worker. He referred to this as “primitive accumulation” (primitive as in “what came first”), noting that capital came to the world “dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt.”[2]

Marx was talking about the super-exploitation of indigenous people in the colonies and slaves in America, but “primitive accumulation” was supposed to stay “primitive,” i.e. it was meant to be specific to early capitalism, to the transition away from feudalism. It was fifty years later that one of his keenest students, Rosa Luxemburg, pointed out that “capitalism in
its full maturity also depends in all respects on non-capitalist strata and social organizations existing side by side with it.”[3] It is continually forced to suck in these “non-capitalist social strata,” and in the process “whole peoples are destroyed and ancient cultures flattened.”[4]

More recently, two different tendencies within the feminist movement have each developed ideas which, together, help throw added light on this ongoing process of accumulation. The first, centered around Selma James, Mariarosa Dalla Costa and the Wages for Housework Campaign, exposed the way in which women’s unpaid labour, especially housework, conforms to the Maxist definition of exploitation. Capitalism receives a real material benefit from this work, as it offloads the cost of maintaining and raising male wage workers on to the female proletariat.

The second tendency grew out of struggles in the Third World, where women first exposed the hidden relationship between capitalism, violence, and patriarchal oppression. These women pointed out that violence and sexism have always accompanied both the colonialism of the past and present-day neo-colonialism. It was German feminist Maria Mies’ book Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale (first published in English in 1986) that synthesized many of these ideas and first brought them to the attention of First World leftists.

Drawing on the experiences of the Indian feminist movement, Mies convincingly showed how accumulation continues to depend on the unwaged labour of women and the dispossession of peasants, especially (but not only) in the Third World. This process is often qualitatively different from how Marxists traditionally understand exploitation, as it is not surplus that is being extracted but the very necessities of life, so that capitalist violence often verges on genocide. Mies argued that this has always been a necessary (but hidden)part of capitalism, and that the first people to be victimized in this way were the women who were murdered in the Witch Hunt in 16th and 17th century Europe.

This body of knowledge forms the background to Caliban and the Witch, which is in many ways similar to Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale but focuses much more on Europe, while bringing the author’s own autonomous Marxist perspective to bear on the subject at hand. This book is very much a history of the making of the European working class, a re-telling of the birth of capitalism, with women at the center of the story. While there is some repetition from chapter to chapter (one suspects that some of them could stand on their own), the picture painted is moving and accessible, and Federici draws on an abundance of scholarly sources. Unfortunately, while the story tends to progress chronologically, there is a lot of going back and forth by hundreds of years at a time and jumping from one country to another, which sometimes makes it difficult to grasp in what actual order and fashion certain things occurred. However, this is a minor matter, and does not detract from the story as it is told.

Federici does not discuss distant human origins, antiquity, or indigenous civilizations before colonialism, but starts out in Europe’s “High” Middle Ages[5]. The ruling class at that time consisted of the Church and the various warlords who formed a continental military caste known as the nobility. Most people were serfs: peasants who were not allowed to move from “their” plot of land, whose property and persons were not their own, who were forced to labour and submit to the authority of the lord, who was often boss, policeman, judge and executioner rolled into one.

Yet contrary to popular belief, this was a world in revolt, where the poor were winning and the ruling class was on the defensive. Serfdom would eventually be abolished, not as a result of aristocratic benevolence, but in reaction to struggles by the serfs themselves. Not only the covert “weapons of the weak”[6] (such as sabotage, foot-dragging, theft, etc.), but also in organized armed religious-political movements that swept across the continent. These “heretical sects” attracted hundreds of thousands of people, and openly called for a classless society, often specifically rejecting gender hierarchies as well as hierarchies of wealth. Not surprisingly, there were a disproportionately large number of women among those who banded together and took up arms against the powers that be, in what Federici describes as the first proletarian international.

These women were not acting as sidekicks or girlfriends or wives, but in their own right, and for their own reasons. These are women, we are told, who “were less dependent on their male kin, less differentiated from them physically, socially, and psychologically, and were less subservient to men’s needs than ‘free’ women were to be later in capitalist society.”[7]


Women, however, were not in the same boat as men, and this division persists throughout our story, repeatedly determining the very course of European history. The fact is that with each offensive on the part of the ruling class, each advance in exploitation, women were particularly hard hit. If, as Walter Rodney wrote, “the increase in productive capacity was accompanied by increasing inequality at all stages,”[8] then Federici shows that this also implies inequality between men and women. So medieval “women’s struggles” were not separate from “class struggles” (any more than they are today), rather they were class struggles in their own right. Gender, we are told, “should be treated as a specification of class relations.”[9]

Other Marxists (and anarchists) have written about the heresies, and over the past fifty years many women have shown that these revolts “had gender.” Several authors have also uncovered the fact that there was a definite queer element to many of the sects concerned[10]. Almost one thousand years ago, these people were expressing a unity of struggle which survives in broken form even today, no matter how much assimilated queers, career women and left-wing defenders of heterosexuality may insist otherwise. So while this is not groundbreaking stuff, it all bears repeating.

These sects were the chief political alternative to feudal oppression, and the seriousness of their challenge kept on intensifying, until it took the form of actual warfare in the early 15th century. At the same time there was an acute labour shortage, an aftereffect of the plague that had killed off a third of the population one hundred years earlier. This fact in particular gave workers and peasants the upper hand in determining their labour’s worth, and so wages skyrocketed, doubling and even tripling, while prices, rents and the length of the work day all dropped.[11] As the feudal economy failed, self-sufficient communities began to form.

“‘Now is the time’ – the sentence that recurs in the letters of [peasant rebel] John Ball – well illustrates the spirit of the European proletariat at the close of the 14th century, a time when, in Florence, the wheel of fortune was beginning to appear on the walls of taverns and work-shops, to symbolize the imminent change of lot.” [12]

One gets the impression that class rule might have been overthrown, that a radically different world was within reach. If the ruling class had only stuck to its old ways...

You can view the Second Installment of this review here and the Third Installment here and the Fourth Installment here - or you can view the whole thing on the Kersplebedeb site in html or pdf format.

Footnotes

1] A problematic term, which begs the questions “invisible to whom?” [back to text]

2] Marx, Karl. Capital, Vol. I.. Library of Economics and Liberty.
[back to text]

3] Luxemburg, Rosa The Accumulation of Capital; Edited by Dr. W. Stark, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd; 1951. (Originally written and published in 1913.) [back to text]

4] Luxemburg, Rosa The Junius Pamphlet. Written while the author was in prison in 1915, it was published in 1916 in Zurich and distributed illegally in Germany. [back to text]

5] Historians consider the Middle Ages to be that period between 500 and 1500 AD. The High Middle Ages are normally dated between 1000 and 1300 AD. [back to text]

6] I borrow this term from he book of the same name by James Scott, Weapons of the Weak : Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (Yale University 1985). [back to text]

7] Federici, p. 25. [back to text]

8] Rodney, Walter How Europe Underdeveloped Africa p. 123. [back to text]

9] Federici, p. 14. [back to text]

10] While not a scholarly work, Arthur Evans’ Witchcraft and the Gay Counterculture: A Radical View of Western Civilization and Some of the People It Has Tried to Destroy (Fag Rag Books, 1978) is the earliest sympathetic formulation of this argument that I know of; more
recent and more scholarly works include John Boswell’s Christianity, social tolerance, and homosexuality : gay people in Western Europe from the beginning of the Christian era to the fourteenth century (University of Chicago Press, c1980) and Jeffrey Richards’ Sex, dissidence, and damnation : minority groups in the Middle Ages (Routledge 1991). [back to text]

11] Federici, p. 47. [back to text]

12] Federici, p. 45 [back to text]

Categories: autonomous-marxism, book-review, caliban-and-the-witch, capitalism, europe, feminism, heresies, history, middle-ages, revolution, women

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Thinking About Iran

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Revolutionary Islam in Iran: Popular Liberation or Religious Dictatorship? by Suroosh Irfani, Zed Books London 1983.

I’ve had Iran on my mind for the past few weeks. It’s beginning to bother me.

At first, it was because i was reading this book Revolutionary Islam in Iran: Popular Liberation or Religious Dictatorship? by Suroosh Irfani. Next, it was because i was trying to write a little summary of the book for you all. And then, doing some more reading about Iran on the internet, checking out a couple of old pamphlets from the OIPFG (aka the Fedayeen, the Marxist-Leninist guerilla which fought the Shah and was then massacred by the Islamic right), doing some more reading on the internet, i realized there were entire dimensions just glossed over by Irfani. And so now, finally, it’s because i’ve been trying to write up a larger summary/review for you all. (See how devoted i am?)



Now the problem is that i don’t know a whole lot about Iran or Islam, and so it’s difficult to be sure that i’ve understood all the implications and inferences in what i’ve read. Not that i’d mind if this ignorance was just between my, myself and i… but there’s nothing like writing on the internet to make one aware of one’s standards.

After having spent too much time in front of my computer trying to summarize all of this, i kind of feel like my brain has been boiled in a pot of veggies for several hours – stewed and not very sharp.

So… a new approach. This is not a review or a summary of Irfani’s book, rather just me demanding closure by letting you know what i’ve found of interest, what i think of what i’ve read, and why i think it matters.

Please be forewarned: i write from a position of (relative) ignorance!

First Off: The Book
Revolutionary Islam in Iran: Popular Liberation or Religious Dictatorship? was written by Suroosh Irfani and published by Zed Books in 1983. Just a few years had passed since the Islamic Revolution had kicked imperialism in the teeth, and even less time had passed since said same Revolution had kicked the Left in the teeth. (Or should i say massacred the Left, buried it, and pissed on its grave?)

Irfani’s is a fine book. I recommend it, but don’t leave your critical faculties at home. He was obviously close to the Islamic Left, and has nothing but good things to say about the Mujahedin, the progressive Moslem guerillas who helped to drive the Shah out of power. If you keep a sack of skepticism on hand as you read, and if you’re willing to read more in order to flesh out the picture, this is not a big problem.

The book deals with three related but separate subjects. The first is the history of Iran since the 1890s. Well actually, that’s not true: Irfani deals very specifically just with the history of rebellions against the monarchy – the Qusar dynasty and then the Pahlavi dynasty, both of which functioned as agents of imperialism (Russian and British, and then American).

Neither the Iranian people, nor the Iranian left, nor Islam, are presented as monolithic entities. There have been divisions based on ideology, on class, and also on plain old personal ambition and greed. Nevertheless, one could say that the monarchy consistently represented the interests of the imperialists, the clergy was overwhelmingly opposed to progressive reforms (i.e. equal rights for women and religious minorities, freedom of the press, etc.), the “Communists” were opportunistic and obsequiously tied to Soviet foreign policy, the “national bourgeoisie” (if that is how one wants to view people like Mosaddeq) was impotent. I’m painting with broad strokes here, but this is the impression Irfani gives.

The next strand of the book deals with progressive Islam, which emerges out of this unpromising situation, opposing both the “formalist clergy” and the imperialist modernizers. To be clear: this was not a watered down version of regular Islam, but was rather a militant and revolutionary kind of “liberation theology,” which (in theory at least) supported equal rights for women, national and religious minorities, freedom to organize, freedom of the press… all the while wrapping it up in a very militant anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist ideology.

A necessary personal admission: i have a kind of visceral attraction/fascination with religious revolutionaries. I concede that it may be a dead end, i acknowledge that they may even be “objectively reactionary”… but i also find the way in which struggle is conceptualized in terms of other-worldy absolutes and eternal truths to be attractive. Call it the sci-fi geek in me, blame the Roman Catholic school i went to as a kid, point the finger at Philip K. Dick… it’s just how i feel. (Not necessarily how i think!)

For this reason, i found the discussions of revolutionary Islamic thought, as elaborated most notably by Ali Shariati (radical left-wing Islam’s chief intellectual until he was murdered by the Shah’s secret police in 1977), to be very interesting. Discussion of the value of fighting for what’s right even if you know you’re going to lose, the way in which monotheism was interpreted as a rejection of earthly idols and authorities, the way in which revolution was conceived as an ongoing eternal struggle…

For instance: “Whenever and wherever a liberated person has refused to submit to despotism and its attempts for distorting supreme values, and has preferred death to a dehumanized, purposeless existence under a monstrous regime and inhuman social system, it is a response to Hosein’s call. Wherever there is struggle for liberation, Hosein is present on the battlefield.” (Ali Shariati, quoted on p.132) (Hosein was the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad)

Or else: “After every revolution, a group of opportunists stick themselves to the revolution. This causes the revolution to deviate from its path. However, this in itself is a factor in the evolution of the revolution, and the revolution becomes a continuous affair.” (Ayatollah Taleqani, quoted on p. 143)

i find a lot of this worthwhile, and i also find that it bears more than a passing similarity to some of the more appealing communist and anarchist ideas. You can come to similar conclusions without believing in God. (Shit, you can learn some of this just from watching a good spaghetti western…) So for me, the chapters about this Islamic liberation theology were well worth reading, though if you’re not interested in religious stuff it may be less interesting.

The final, climactic, section of Revolutionary Islam in Iran book deals with the Iranian Revolution. Irfani implies that it was largely through the guerilla attacks of the Mujahedin (which was based on Shariati’s ideas) and Marxist-Leninist OIPFG that the regime was pushed past the point of no return. He discusses the OIPFG briefly, and has nothing but nice things to say about them, but the book (and clearly his sympathies) is with the Mujahedin.

Attention is paid to how the brutal methods by which the Shah attempted to snuff out the guerillas. Both the Mujahedin and Fedayeen started small, and suffered incredible persecution and violence. Their family members were arrested and tortured before their eyes – even infants were abused in front of their parents. Women were gang-raped day after day, week after week, year after year, in the Shah’s interrogation dungeons. His secret police, SAVAK, earned such a reputation for their brutal interrogation techniques that they gave lessons to thugs from other imperialist outposts. They even invented their own tools, such as a gigantic human toaster which literally burnt the victim’s flesh off as they were questioned.

The regime reacted to popular demonstrations and protests with violence. A cycle was established, or so it seems, whereby protests would be met with bullets, and then this would lead to larger protests and greater repression… the situation continued to escalate, but in the people’s favour.

What was the relationship between “the people” – that amorphous mysterious mass – and then guerillas? Unfortunately, there’s not a lot of details given. I mean, “the people” are presented as being sympathetic to the guerillas and hostile to the regime, all the more so as word of the Shah’s brutal torture methods began to get out. But there is very little discussion of the mechanics of how (or if) the guerillas related to different sections of the population, and there is little discussion of revolutionary activity outside of the guerilla. Maybe that’s because there was none, but i find that hard to believe.

The Shah fled on February 5th, 1979, but the regime puttered on. The United States was eager to keep things under control, hoping to avoid a civil war. The army and secret police were loyal to the State, and were in the midst of negotiations with Khomeini about an “orderly transition” when suddenly Air Force cadets mutinied, using their weapons against the army. Within hours thousands of people had taken to the streets, and the Mujahedin and Fedayeen seized the moment, launching an all-out assault on the Shah’s army, completely destroying it within a matter of days.

So, to repeat the one of the most important factoids from this book: Khomeini did not make the Revolution, rather as the decisive insurrection broke out he was busy trying to negotiate with the imperialists.

Now, when describing what happened next, Irfani gives a play by play of how a small right-wing group – the Islamic Republic Party (IRP) – hijacked the Revolution. First off, Irfani seems to imply that Khomeini (who enjoyed great prestige amongst the masses, but had been living in exile for decades) might have gone to the left or to the right – “the IRP was created shortly after the monarchy was overthrown and had campaigned for projecting itself as the only Islamic group loyal to Khomeini and the Revolution.” (p.182) Irfani makes it sound as if the Ayatollah was up for grabs, or didn’t have his own intentions. Again, i know little about all of this, so it is possible – but i doubt it. Rather, this seems to be a way to avoid facing the fact that Khomeini had these fascistic proclivities beforehand, which would be awkward seeing as the Mujahedin (and OIPFG) had accepted (and praised) him for years as a symbol of the struggle against the Shah.

This point aside (remember, i told you to keep some skepticism on hand) Irfani gives an interesting account of how Khomeini and the Islamic right-wing basically allied themselves with those very same “formalist clergy” and even with remnants of the Shah’s regime, including the secret police. Reading the chapter “The Runaway Revolution” (just 16 pages long, but the best 16 pages in the book – someone should turn it into a pamphlet) one gets reminded of Orwell’s Animal Farm, or else what happened in the Soviet Union.

Irfani goes over the story, step by step, of how Khomeini and the IRP took over the State, eventually declaring war on the left. I must admit that it gets a bit confusing here, as the story collapses into what (at the time of publication) was the recent past, and so the details begin to overwhelm the narrative. But one gets the gist of it.

My criticism of how Irfani deals with these events is that he does so very much in a top-down manner, following organizations and leading political personalities but paying little attention to the broader population. After having read about “the people” demonstrating for the Fedayeen and Mujahedin, about how “the people” saw the guerillas as the true revolutionaries, one is left wondering where these “other people” came from, the ones who were suddenly forming gangs and street armies to attack the left. I mean, it wasn’t some aging theocrats out there swinging clubs over their heads, but masses (though maybe not the masses) of people.

This is not so dissimilar to his approach to the pre-revolutionary struggle, and it is unfortunate – although this is not a general history of Iran or even the Iranian revolution, but rather a focused account of left-wing Islam in Iran, i would guess that this could be discussed in terms of numbers beyond Ali Shariati, a few radical left-wing clerics and one guerilla organization. Or maybe not; again, i’m writing based on my hunches and guesses, not on any great knowledge…

Other Sources
As i mentioned above, i also made use of some other sources when trying to contextualize what Irfani was writing about.

I read a couple of old OIPFG pamphlets, but they were written in the early 70s, and can’t be blamed for not having crystal balls.

I did find a number of interesting Trotskyist analyses on the internet. Chris Harman –of Tony Cliff’s SWP/ISO tendency – wrote an essay The Prophet and the Proletariat; he does a nice job of fleshing out some details Irfani glossed over, about what “the Revolution” meant to the oppressed:

[I]n the months after the revolution Khomeini was no more able to impose a single authority over the revolutionary upheaval than anyone else. In the cities various local committees (Komitehs) exercised de facto power. The universities were in the hands of the left and the Mojahedin. In the factories shoras (factory councils) fought for control with management, often forcing out those associated with the Shah’s regime and taking over the organisation of production
themselves. In the regions inhabited by ethnic minorities – Kurdistan in the north west and Khuzistan in the Arab speaking south west – movements began to fight for self determination.

Or, to quote from an interview with former OIPFG member (and current anarchist) Payman Piedar:

every sector of the Iranian society was so thirsty for the so-called new founded "freedom" that they won through their own self-organization. Workers started the Shoura ("soviet" or "council") movement in many factories and even the peasants of the ethnic Turkaman minority (in the Northern region) organized themselves in the same fashion. Women held a major demonstration demanding the right to refuse wearing the religious attire (forceful covering of their body).
Students held lively debates and started organizing themselves into various leftwing groupings. The Kurds (the largest and most radical ethnic minority) immediately created their autonomous zone of control (either through the bourgeois Democratic Party of Kurdistan, or The Komole, a leftwing
petite-bourgeois organization with a strong pro-worker/peasant tendency), with their Armed Pishmarge (namely "self-sacrificing guerrilla") ready to shed their blood to defend their territory.

In other words, people trying to wrest some control over their own lives. Attempts at self-management. Popular anti-capitalism. Collective self-liberation. Good stuff!

But as Piedar explains, Khomeini and the IRP recuperated and neutralized this upsurge:

unfortunately none of the above mass organizations lasted more than a few months. The counter-revolution established their various reactionary armed organizations, namely the Pasdaran Enghelab (so-called "Guardian of the Revolution"), Basij (an armed youth formation), and worst of all The Hezbolaah Party (you could call them the fascist brigade, or "Falange"), and immediately started to smash, break up, and in the case of the Turkamans, carry out vicious executions. In Kurdistan a massive bombardment of their camps took away all the progressive gains that the masses had made for themselves. And, of course, the regime started to create its own "Islamic Shouras", "Islamic women associations" and "Islamic student associations" (which was the extension of the previous pro-Khomeni student organization that was already active prior to his return to Iran).

Harman presents some details about the social base behind this takeover:

What the group around Khomeini succeeded in doing was to unite behind it a wide section of the middle class – both the traditional petty bourgeoisie based in the bazaar and many of the first generation of the new middle class – in a struggle to control the hierarchies of power. The secret of its success was its ability to enable those who followed it at every level of society to combine religious enthusiasm with personal advance. Someone who had been an assistant manager in a foreign owned company could now run it under state control and feel he was fulfilling his religious duty to serve the community (umma); someone who had lived in deep poverty among the lumpen proletariat could now achieve both material security and a sense of self achievement by leading a hizbollah gang in its attempts to purify society of “indecency” and the “infidel Communists”.

The opportunities open to those who opted for the Khomeini line were enormous. The flight from the country of local and foreign managers and technicians during the early months of revolutionary upheaval had created 130,000 positions to be filled. The purging of “non-Islamic” managers, functionaries and army officers added enormously to the total.

Another Trotskyist group with some interesting things on their website is Workers Liberty, based in the UK (i know nothing else of this group, if anyone wants to fill me in). On their site they have this essay Islamism and the left in the Iranian revolution, by a member of Workers' Left Unity Iran and of the Organisation of Revolutionary Workers of Iran (again, i know nothing about these groups, though i am guessing they’re some kind of trots). While i don’t agree with him 100%, the author draws some excellent “lessons” from what happened in Iran. The most important (in my opinion) being that a regime can be anti-imperialist and reactionary at the same time:

The revolution threw out one of imperialism's most trusted allies, and gendarme, in the Persian Gulf and the Middle East. The counter-revolution that rode on the back of the revolution, even if its success was oiled by the scheming of Western governments, upset the carefully laid imperialist jigsaw in the region. The West, and in particular the USA lost a close ally. It took another decade and two wars to re-establish Pax Americana.

The Soviet bloc was openly ecstatic. The Iranian revolution had broken the chain of 'containing' states encircling the Soviet block at its most crucial link. The [Stalinist] Tudeh party, always a microphone for the Soviet Union's foreign ministry, had from the revolutionary days endorsed Khomeini. But the Tudeh Party had little support on the ground. It had to win the largest left organisation in Iran, the Organisation of People's Fadai' [OIPFG], if its policies were to be actualised. The Fadai', now a large nation-wide organisation, was suffering from theoretical paralysis. In the intellectual apparatus of the left 'reaction' and 'revolution' were opposites. To combine them was an absolute contradiction. The Fadai's deeply ingrained populism told it that a regime coming out of a popular revolution which had toppled the monarchical dictatorship, and was being opposed by every imperialist power, must be progressive. Its eyes, however, told it different.

Any lingering doubts were cast aside when the rulers of the Islamic Republic consummated their anti-imperialist rhetoric by the charade of the US embassy occupation. This and Iraq's invasion of Iran split the left right down the middle. The Tudeh Party used the authority of 'brother' parties to break the will of the Fadai'. The process was assisted by the fact that internationally the left in all its hues, all but a tiny faction, had hailed the Iranian revolution and counselled support for the counter-revolutionary regime that had defeated the revolution. The Fadai' split. A Majority fell into line behind Tudeh and Khomeini. The Minority became fodder for Khomeini's repressive machinery.

No Rose Coloured Glasses Please
As i mentioned above, Irfani is clearly sympathetic to the Mujahedin. His book provides a very useful overview of the group, its ideology, and how it related to the Revolution. However, there is another side to all of this.

The Mujahedin was insufficiently critical of Khomeini one might say, but that would be something of an understatement. The initial support that the Ayatollah enjoyed from the Left was what allowed him to consolidate his power.

For instance, Harman quotes Ervand Abrahamian’s book The Iranian Mojahedin:

[The Mujahedin s]crupulously adhered to a policy of avoiding confrontations with the clerical shadow government. In late February [1979] when the Fedayeen organised a demonstration of over 80,000 at Tehran university demanding land reform, the end of press censorship and the dissolution of the armed forces, the Mojahedin stayed away. And early in March, when Western educated women celebrated international women’s day by demonstrating against Khomeini’s decrees abrogating the Family Protection Law, enforcing the use of the veil in government offices, and pushing the “less impartial gender” from the judiciary, the Mojahedin warned that “imperialism was exploiting such divisive issues”. In late March when zealous club wielders attacked the offices of the anti-clerical paper Ayandegan, the Mojahedin said nothing. They opposed a boycott of the referendum over the Islamic republic and Kurdish struggle for autonomy. If the nation did not remain united behind Imam Khomeini, the Mojahedin emphasised, the imperialists would be tempted to repeat their 1953 performance [referring to the coup against Mosaddeq].

The importance of this passive support for Khomeini’s emerging regime is explained in Julius Leicht’s Who are the People's Mujahedin of Iran?:

Far from representing an alternative to their clerical opponents of today, they served them as a left-wing fig leaf— until the clerics felt strong enough to take action against the Mujahedin.

[…]

Following a secret meeting of Mujahedin leader Masud Rajavi with Khomeini in February 1979, the Mujahedin generally condemned any resistance to the clergy and its henchmen and thugs up until November of that year, justifying this by claiming that such resistance only played into the hands of imperialism. And they let their radical image be used by the clergy without raising any objection—something the mullahs urgently needed, since most of them had, at best, taken a cowardly, if not openly supportive stance towards the Shah.

Ayatollah Beheshti, for instance, the infamous supreme judge and close collaborator of Khomeini's, stated at this time: "The Islamic Revolution rested on three pillars: Imam Khomeini, Ali Shariati and the Mujahedin organization.” The media controlled by the clergy reported day in and day out on the heroic deeds and martyrs of the People's Mujahedin. Universities and high schools were named after them, governorships and other high-up government positions were given to their sympathizers. In return, the People's Mujahedin provided cover for "our Great Father Khomeini, the leader of the struggle against the monarchy", while Khomeini's people took over control of the army, the police, the judiciary, the state-run media and, not least of all, the extensive property of the Shah.

Although Khomeini's followers carried out the campaign for
a referendum on the constitution of the Islamic Republic in December 1979 and the presidential elections in January 1980 with the methods of terror and intimidation, the People's Mujahedin declared that they "would always support the progressive clergy and, in particular, His Highness, the Great Khomeini". They boycotted the referendum, but contested the presidential and subsequent parliamentary elections with their own candidates. Although the Hizbollah strong-arm squads attacked them with increasing brutality and Khomeini let loose tirades obviously aimed at the People's Mujahedin against "hypocrites" who "confused Islam with Marxism" and were "worse than infidels", the Mujahedin continued to refer to him as the "beloved father" who had "liberated Iran from the monarchy and US imperialism".

When the Mujahedin finally did break with Khomeini, and try and fight back, it was too late. In 1980 they staged a series of demonstrations, culminating in 500,000 people who marched against Khomeini on June 20th – but it was suppressed by the Khomeini’s new government – fifty people were killed, and the new regime survived as strong as ever.

It is also worth mentioning, although it is somewhat outside of the scope of “what went wrong in 1979”, that over the past 25 years the Mujahedin has formed a “National Resistance Council” and slid further to the right. Today, according to Leicht:

they echo imperialist propaganda against the existing Iranian regime—that it endangers Western interests through the construction of "weapons of mass destruction", the "exportation of fundamentalism and terrorism" and "opposition to the Israeli-Arab peace process". In the "platform of the National Resistance Council" (NRC) the following words are written: "The economic policy of the NRC is based on free market economy and the acknowledgement of national capitalism and the bazaar, private and personal property and investments .... The NRC considers the extension of relations to industrial nations to be essential for the reconstruction of the future Iran."

Again, not in a position to judge the honesty of any of these analyses, though i’ve found nothing that really contradicts any of them…

Revolution and Reaction and Women
Finally, i should point out that Revolutionary Islam in Iran: Popular Liberation or Religious Dictatorship? pays scarce attention to the role of “the woman question” within Iranian history, and the Islamic Revolution. When discussing clerical opposition to progressive reforms, Irfani does note that this was often because of their attachment to sexist social relations, but he doesn’t explain why.

This is unfortunate, but it’s so common it often passes unnoticed. Opposition to land reform, or relations with foreign powers, or new economic developments… these are all assumed to call for investigation, explanation, and analysis. But when it comes to keeping women in a subservient position, or increasing their exploitation, this is taken to be such an obvious and “natural” position that no explanation is necessary.

I am not saying that i have the answers to this– indeed, there are none to be found in Irfani’s book – but that doesn’t mean the question does not loom, whether spoken aloud or not: why is it on the question of women’s rights and freedoms that the “formalist clergy” repeatedly broke with the “progressive movements”. Today, why is the Islamic Republic mainly known for the restrictions it has placed no women, and the brutally violent way in which these restrictions are enforced?

Just to be clear, i don’t think that the answers to these questions would be the kind of cliché you get on CNN or Fox either. Women in Iran were actors too, not just passive victims. For instance, i was reading an interview with Mansureh Ettehadieh, a feminist academic in Tehran; she was asked about the Revolution’s effect on women, and she answered:

it was Imam Khomeini who specified that they didn't need their husbands permission to go to [Friday night] prayers. And another thing, you see, is that with this hedjab, we're supposed to live in a better society. We're supposed to be immune now, and protected. So those families who wouldn't permit their daughters to go to university now let them do their studies. Families are actually proud of their daughters going to university. This is important. I've always quoted Imam Khomeini as saying, 'the hedjab is your freedom'. And a lot of people would argue 'what kind of freedom is this? You know, you've got to wear that unbecoming veil' and so on. Many women who are emigrants would despise what I'm saying, but it's true. For a lot of girls, all this has meant freedom.

Do i buy this? Do i approve of uniforms as a way of claiming freedom? Of course not, but my point is that there are issues and dynamics here worth discussing. The State is an instrument of oppression, but so is the family, and at times your husband may be worst than the local government or religious official… so having the Ayatollah announce that (for the first time ever) you can go out to this important social event without your husband’s permission is not nothing. And i think it’s necessary to understand how so many men and women were won over to support Khomeini.

Lessons Learned
I have my reasons for being interested what went wrong in 1979, how the Revolution ended up so different from how most of the revolutionaries had expected. In fact, i think there are definite lessons to be learned, in terms of Third World struggles and religious liberation movements, but also in terms of the secular metropolitan left here in the First World.

But i’m not going to discuss these lessons today!

A teaser? Yes. You’ll just have to wait!

Categories: anti-imperialism, armed-struggle, book-review, fascism, iran, islam, liberation-theology, revolution

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