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From the Writings of Raya Dunayevskaya: Marxist-Humanist Archives
March 2001
Women and revolution in Iran
Editor's Note
March is International Women's History Month. March 2001 also marks the
22nd anniversary of the historic march in Tehran, Iran on International
Women's Day, March 8, 1979. On that day, women and male supporters braved
Islamic Guards and thugs allied with the new government headed by Ayatollah
Khomeini. The march demanded that the revolution, forged by the masses,
continue and include freedom for women. As a philosophic contribution to
furthering the revolution, Iranian Marxist-Humanists translated and
published several writings by Raya Dunayevskaya, listed below. Two of her
writings are excerpted here.
The first selection is taken from her 1980 pamphlet, 25 YEARS OF
MARXIST-HUMANISM IN THE U.S.: A HISTORY OF WORLDWIDE REVOLUTIONARY
DEVELOPMENTS.
The second is a letter to her colleagues in News and Letters Committees in
1979, reprinted in 1984 in her book, WOMEN'S LIBERATION AND THE DIALECTIC
OF REVOLUTION. Both are available from NEWS & LETTERS.
Sept. 5, 1980
Nothing short of a shift in global powers climaxed the period 1977-79, from
the reverberations of post-Mao China, through the Black Consciousness
Movement in South Africa and the Latin American revolts, to the struggles
of the Iranian masses against the Shah, which assumed such mass proportion
as to develop into outright revolution.
At its very beginning I had been working on a new book, the topic of which
has three subjects. One is Rosa Luxemburg; the second is the relationship
of Women's Liberation in her time and ours; and the third is Marx's
philosophy of revolution, which had gained a new dimension with the first
transcription of Marx's ETHNOLOGICAL NOTEBOOKS(1). I no sooner had reached
the first chapter on Rosa Luxemburg, which deals with the turning point in
her life--the 1905-07 Russian-Polish Revolution--than all sorts of new facts
about its extension into Persia illuminated the Iranian struggles of 1978.
At the same time, Marx's ETHNOLOGICAL NOTEBOOKS cast new illumination on
the philosophy of Woman's Liberation as it extended Marx's own 1844
analysis of the Man/Woman relationship to his 1881-82 analyses of the
possibility of revolutions occurring in backward countries.
The overthrow of the Shah, and with it the undermining of U.S.
imperialism's dominance of the Gulf region, not only opened a dramatic
shift in global power, but for the first time moved the question of the
Middle East from oil, to one of social revolution. What was most
outstanding was that the greatest, most powerful and sustained
mobilizations for months on end, including a general strike of oil workers,
preceded the three-day insurrection of Feb. 9-12, 1979, which did indeed
initiate a whole new epoch in world relations.
Every segment of the population had been totally involved in ridding Iran
of its twin nemeses--the Shah and U.S. imperialism--and it seemed to be the
eve of the greatest revolution since 1917. The workers who had been out on
general strike refused to turn over their guns even when the Ayatollah
commanded it. All sorts of spontaneous organizations arose, by no means
limited to former guerrilla groups. Quite the contrary. There were SHORAS
[women's organizations], there were workers' councils, there were ANJOMANIS
[soviets]. And in all of them youth was dominant.
There was no end to the freedom of the press and the great attraction for
the student youth of new Marxist translations. The most eagerly
sought-after of the Marxist groups were those who were independent of any
state power. The most persistent fighters for self-determination were also
the most organized, and were not only the Kurds but also the Arabs. Because
they were all part of the mass revolutionary outburst which overthrew the
Shah, they felt confident in continuing the fight for genuine
self-determination.
Finally, and no means least, the Women's Liberation Movement aimed at
opening up a new chapter for the revolution. They were involved for five
days, beginning on International Women's Day, March 8, 1979, in continuous
marches under the slogan, "We made the revolution for freedom and got
unfreedom."
Ayatollah Khomeini no sooner found himself in total power than
contradictions began tearing the newly liberated nation apart. The emergent
retrogression was analyzed in the March 1979 POLITICAL-PHILOSOPHIC LETTER,
"Iran: Unfoldment of, and Contradictions in, Revolution." This critique was
translated and published in Farsi, as were my writings on Women's
Liberation in a pamphlet entitled WOMAN AS REASON AND FORCE OF REVOLUTION,
which also included an article on women by Rosa Luxemburg and Ding Ling's
THOUGHTS ON THE EIGHTH OF MARCH. The introduction to the series of essays
was written by an Iranian Marxist-Humanist woman, Neda.
All through 1979 and indeed a good part of 1980 there was hardly an issue
of N&L which did not have either eyewitness reports on the Iranian
Revolution, letters from Iran, special articles on both the women's
revolution and the fundamentalist Islamic betrayal of it, as well as
serious articles on what type of organization, what type of SHORAS, what
kind of relationships of religion to revolution...
ROSA LUXEMBURG, WOMEN'S LIBERATION, AND MARX'S PHILOSOPHY OF REVOLUTION
greatly illuminated the events of 1979 and 1980. History had paid little
attention to the 1905 Russian Revolution's extension to Persia referred to
earlier, though especially the women's ANJOMAN was a true historic first.
Suddenly, however, another element of that revolution in Persia--its first
constitution--became a focal point for the 1979 Iranian Revolution. But what
the Islamic fundamentalists meant by it and what the young revolutionaries
related to, were absolute opposites.
The Left revolutionaries were studying and trying to practice the
dialectics of the 1905-07 Russian Revolution, Luxemburg's analysis of the
General Strike as both political and economic and thus bringing on the
revolution, the call for women's liberation included in Luxemburg's
manifestos, and above all, the focus on the spontaneity of the masses who
were actually more revolutionary than the leaders. What the study also
showed was the possibility of a revolution bursting out in a
technologically backward country ahead of one that was not only
technologically advanced, but one that had a great mass Social Democratic
party.(2) ...
NOTES
1. Lawrence Krader transcribed Marx's Notebooks, which were published in
1972 under the title, THE ETHNOLOGICAL NOTEBOOKS OF KARL MARX, by Van
Gorcum, Assen.
2. Interestingly enough, there was also a new interest in and new
translations of Luxemburg's writings. We published the first translation
ever by David Wolff of her THEORY AND PRACTICE [Available from NEWS &
LETTERS].
* * *
March 10, 1979
Dear Friends:
On my way to the talk in celebration of International Women's Day [March
8], that I was to give at Wayne State University on "Rosa Luxemburg and
Marx's Philosophy of Revolution," came the news of the most magnificent
international event: tens of thousands of Iranian women were demonstrating
against Khomeini, shouting "We fought for freedom and got unfreedom!"
Naturally, I began the talk with an homage to those Iranian women's
liberationists who had, with this act, initiated the second chapter of the
Iranian Revolution. Thus, my very first sentence stressed the TODAYNESS
that this mass outpouring had placed on our topic, though it was to begin
with rolling back the clock to 62 years ago, when the Russian working women
transformed International Women's Day into the first of the five days that
toppled the centuries-old Tsarist Empire.
The point was not only to single out great revolutionary acts, but to
demonstrate that even in the first Russian Revolution of 1905, a great
theoretician, Rosa Luxemburg, was as "shortchanged" about her thoughts as
were the Russian working women, en masse, who were later to be played down
as allegedly "unconscious" about their historic act which began the second
Russian Revolution. Toward that end, I read from the still-unpublished
speech of Rosa at the famous 1907 Congress of all Russian Marxist
tendencies, which pointed to the fact that 1905 was but the first of a
series of 20th century revolutions...*
I spent the following day, March 9, talking with an Iranian male
revolutionary, developing ideas not only of the revolution but how we must
be prepared for the COUNTERrevolution that is sure to arise in Iran as
Khomeini holds on to power and gathers not only men but some women to
consent to turning back the clock to Islam's reactionary viewpoint on
women--and by no means only on the question of dress; and I singled out the
historic points in the development of the Russian Revolution, which moved
from the February events through Lenin's April Thesis to Kornilov's July
counterrevolution, and only after many laborious and bloody months arrived
finally at October. In a word, we were discussing my next
POLITICAL-PHILOSOPHIC LETTER on the Iranian Revolution.**
March 10 was still a newer day when, but half an hour before the Iranian's
plane left, I came up with the idea of translating into Farsi Ding Ling's
THOUGHTS ON THE EIGHTH OF MARCH, which would carry also the following
message of solidarity with the Iranian women of today, stretching back to
1908 on native grounds:
"In Spring 1908--when the 1906 Constitutional Revolution everyone is talking
about today was still alive, and a women's ANJOMAN was still most active,
especially in Tehran--New York garment workers declared March 8 to be
Women's Day. The following year, in support of the locked-out Triangle
Shirtwaist makers, the mass outpouring became known as the "Uprising of the
20,000" that so inspired the German working women's movement that its
leader, Clara Zetkin, proposed to the Marxist International that March 8
become an International Women's Day. Today, you--the daring women of
Iran--have opened a new chapter in the Iranian Revolution of 1979. In homage
to you, and to express our solidarity with your ongoing revolution, we are
here translating the thoughts of still another opponent of the status quo,
this time in China--Ding Ling, who opposed both Stalin and Mao (who purged
the great writer), as she expressed herself creatively in THOUGHTS ON THE
EIGHTH OF MARCH."
The friend who volunteered to do the translation felt that, indeed, the
simple act of translation would thus express a totally new Man/Woman
relationship...
Yours, Raya
* Luxemburg's speech and a discussion of women in the 1905 Russian
Revolution can found in Dunayevskaya's ROSA LUXEMBURG, WOMEN'S LIBERATION,
AND MARX'S PHILOSOPHY OF REVOLUTION (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
1991).
--Editor
** The letter, "Iran: Unfoldment of, and Contradiction in, Revolution,"
can be found in THE RAYA DUNAYEVSKAYA COLLECTION, 6019 (English) and 6066
(Farsi).-Editor
PERSIAN TRANSLATIONS OF RAYA DUNAYEVSKAYA'S WORKS PUBLISHED BY ANJOMAN
AZADI, IRANIAN MARXIST-HUMANIST ORGANIZATION FROM 1979 TO TODAY
"Iran: Unfoldment of, and Contradictions in, Revolution." (1979)
"Worker and Intellectual at a Turning Point in History." From Chapter 4 of
MARXISM AND FREEDOM. On the 1848 Revolutions and Marx's critique of
Ferdinand Lassalle. (1979, 1989)
"The Two Russian Revolutions and Once Again, The Theory of Permanent
Revolution." (1979)
Woman as Reason and as Force of Revolution. From PHILOSOPHY AND REVOLUTION
and other works. Published on the first anniversary of the 1979
International Women's Day protests in Iran. (1980)
Special Introduction to the First Persian Translation of Marx's 1844
ECONOMIC AND PHILOSOPHY MANUSCRIPTS. (1980)
REVOLUTION AND COUNTER-REVOLUTION IN IRAN: POLITICAL AND PHILOSOPHIC
LETTERS. (1982)
"Intellectuals in the Age of State-Capitalism: A Critique of Herbert
Marcuse." (1982)
NATIONALISM, COMMUNISM, MARXIST-HUMANISM AND THE AFR0-ASIAN REVOLUTIONS.
Translated by Nahal. Preface to the Farsi edition by the author. (1983)
"The Paris Commune Illuminates and Deepens the Content of Capital." From
chapter 5 of MARXISM AND FREEDOM. Includes an unpublished essay by Karl
Marx on the Paris Commune. (1984)
"The Last Writings of Marx Point a Trail to the 1980s." From ROSA
LUXEMBURG, WOMEN'S LIBERATION, AND MARX'S PHILOSOPHY OF REVOLUTION. (1989)
"The Shock of Recognition and the Philosophic Ambivalence of Lenin."
Translation of essay in TELOS, Spring 1970. (1992)
ENGELAB VA AZADI (Revolution and Freedom). Newspaper includes
Dunayevskaya's lecture on the Marx Centenary in 1983 to Center for Iranian
Research and Analysis. (1981-1984)
SOKHAN AZADI (Freedom Forum). Journal includes Dunayevskaya on Hegel's
Absolutes and on Marx's CAPITAL. (1992-1994)
For more information, contact AnjomanAzadi@aol.com or News & Letters, 36
South Wabash, Room 1440, Chicago IL 60603.
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