Details
When you look at the protest movement in Iran, the starting point of the movement is impossible to abstract because it lies not in discourse, political programmes, or retrospective interpretations, but instead in the question of how one can even live under the existing conditions.
Sanaz Azimipour is a writer, activist, and lecturer. Her academic and activist work focuses on social movements, transnationalism, and feminist philosophy.
A shockingly high exchange rate was the trigger for the recent uprising. Almost overnight, the exchange rate rose to almost 140,000 tomans per US dollar. This dramatic increase is no mere economic detail, but rather important evidence of the threat to people’s daily existence. Even basic foodstuffs like yoghurt can only be purchased in instalments in many places at present. What does that say about life in Iran?
The oft-quoted phrase that there is “nothing left to lose” is no empty saying in this situation: the moment when you must buy yoghurt in instalments is the moment when life itself becomes so cheap that there really is nothing left to lose. It is no longer just a matter of restrictions, but rather the existential question of whether and how life can be sustained. Existence here is not a metaphorical category — it is material, physical, time-limited, and increasingly threatened.
A War on Life Itself
This form of existential threat is in direct collaboration with a political regime that systematically devalues human life. What can be seen here is not collateral damage of political decision-making but a war on life itself. Needing to pay for yoghurt in instalments is exemplary of the concrete effects on everyday life caused by a political regime that is also often openly repressive: executions, torture, and imprisonment continue to be commonplace. In the Iranian regime, these two levels cannot be separated from one another. They are part of a logic in which human life is not protected but instead is strictly regulated and ultimately treated as expendable.
When life itself becomes precarious, forms of political action also shift.
The healthcare system is also subsumed into this war on life, with extremely high levels of air pollution responsible for thousands of deaths every year, as is the systematic destruction of the environment and natural resources. The complete destruction of Lake Urmia, the Zayanderud River, and the Hyrcanian forests are not unrelated issues, but rather part of the same organizational structure that reduces human life to a short-lived exploitable resource.
In this process of exploitation, it is not just material resources that are destroyed but also the requisite basic conditions of survival. Many have lost hope. A cursory look at the suicide epidemic of the last few years makes clear the state of society. When everything that makes life worth living is destroyed, life loses its meaning — and sometimes one even loses the reason to carry on.
This is the context of today’s uprising. Protest then arises not from hope for a better life, but from the collapse of all alternatives. Not from the promise of a better future, but from the impossibility of surviving the present moment.
When looking back on the protests of recent years, it may initially seem as if they had different origins — that “Woman, Life, Freedom” demanded individual freedoms for example and that the current protests appear to be about securing the necessities of survival. I consider this separation to be a huge analytical mistake. And it has a history: the division between freedom and existence, between self-determination and economic survival, has always been weaponized by the regime to delegitimize protest.
Since the 1979 revolution, the classic argument has been: first the economy, then freedom.
First overthrow the class system, then women’s liberation. The issue of hijab is a striking example of this. Although women fought against the headscarf for decades, the right to self-determination was repeatedly dismissed as a secondary contradiction. For this reason, the slogan “women are workers — workers must be liberated”, an attempt to postulate the inseparability of these spheres, emerged in 1979. The slogan was in response to left-wing reactions to the state’s mandatory headscarf decree which gave priority to the issue of working-class emancipation over that of women’s emancipation.
Images of Revolt
Images circulating at present can help here, not as illustrations of what is happening in Iran but as material for analysis. Take, for example, a picture from Abdanan where large numbers of people have taken to the streets and government buildings are occupied. For a few hours, the city appeared to be under the control of the people.
However, it is not only crucial that control is seized, but also the way this appropriation materializes is important. In one of the images, people storm a supermarket linked to the Revolutionary Guards. Rice sacks are ripped open and rice is thrown in the air. In one Instagram video an onlooker says “it’s raining rice.” In a context of absolute poverty, this image is not ambivalent — in this moment rice is liberated from a logic of scarcity and, for a moment, removed from the market and control. Other images follow the same logic, those of dismantled surveillance cameras or an office chair from a government agency.
What we see in these images is not a coherent programme but instead documentation of a practice. When life itself becomes precarious, forms of political action also shift.
This war intensified another increasingly popular contemporary discursive front that interprets the history of social movements in Iran as a history of failure, death, and repression, and concludes that external intervention is necessary.
The images are in relation with earlier uprisings, experiences of repression, and failure. These impressions from Abdanan evoke memories of Oshnavieh in 2022. Slogans including “Down with the dictator” are repeated. Images of those killed reappear, asking: do you still remember? But memory is contested. Which images remain, which disappear? Memory is not a common point of reference, but a field of conflict.
Political fronts are forming out of this contested field. They are not emerging outside the movement, but from both inside and outside of it.
The Anti-imperialist Rhetoric of the Regime
These positions were, in recent times, shaped primarily by a new remembering of the 12-Day War between Israel and Iran. With the recent Israeli attack and the destruction and death it left in its wake, a familiar pattern re-emerged: the presence of an external enemy shifted focus from an internal one. In this context, the Islamic Republic was able to reposition itself in the discourse — not as a source of violence, but as a protective power supposedly defending Iran from violent external forces and doing so visibly, watched by people all over the world.
This shift is not unfolding in isolation, but rather in a global context. Events since the genocide in Gaza have made it clear that extreme imperialist violence can be politically inconsequential, even when it takes place openly. In this war, it became apparent that protecting human life is not a priority, per se.
The violence, which is witnessed by the international community, has significantly strengthened the Axis of Resistance’s anti-imperialist discourse, thereby strengthening the Iranian regime. The regime implements rhetoric that shifts internal power relations to the outside world. However, this interpretation ignores both the Islamic Republic’s dependence on other imperial powers and its own imperial practices, such as in Syria and Lebanon.
Anti-imperialism functions here not as analysis, but as legitimation. In this context, authoritarian rule, existential hardship, repression, and social destruction appear to be unavoidable consequences of anti-imperialist struggle.
An Apparent Solution
At the same time, this war intensified another increasingly popular contemporary discursive front that interprets the history of social movements in Iran as a history of failure, death, and repression, and concludes that external intervention is necessary. This position imagines external military intervention as a solution to conflict as opposed to an escalation of it. Political power is removed from general society and delegated to actors who are perceived to have connections to international centres of power.
Reza Pahlavi, the son of the former dictator, appears to be such a figure in this context. Contrary to popular belief, Pahlavi’s popularity is not purely a diaspora phenomenon. Pahlavi has a social base in Iran because, in a context of general hopelessness, he has become a space for projection. Both the mobilizing narrative of an external enemy and the interventionist approach follow a similar logic. They present seemingly clear alternatives: loyalty to the regime in the name of anti-imperialism or subordination to external imperial powers. Against this backdrop, it is unsurprising that many Pahlavi slogans are chanted at current protests, or that part of the Left is boycotting the protests entirely.
The dominant interpretations respond to the openness of the movement by closing it off. However, analysis of the movement can only be productive if it follows the movement.
These two positions differ in their orientation, but not in their function. They respond to an existential crisis by creating meaning: hopelessness is mitigated either by the figure of Pahlavi or by a legitimization of imperial power in the name of the regime. Both deprive the current movement of its independence and thereby miss the core of what is happening right now: a practice that arises from a material devaluation of life that cannot be defused by predetermined alternatives.
This brings us back to my initial argument that the movement can only be understood in terms of the conditions from which it arises. What becomes visible is not a closed political formation, but a practice that emerges from existential necessity. The practice remains open and therefore vulnerable.
The dominant interpretations respond to the openness of the movement by closing it off. However, analysis of the movement can only be productive if it follows the movement. What remains is a tension: between life and its systematic devaluation, between practice and its translation, between memory and its instrumentalization. This tension is not a deficiency. It is the place from which the movement arises.
Translated by Eve Richens for Gegensatz Translation Collective.
