Weird Economies X The Chaoid Group present Iran Financescape’s conference “Missed Dialogues”, taking place April 18-19th on Zoom. Registration is now open to public.
From the mobilization of Eastern peoples during the 1917 October Revolution and the presence of Muslim Communists at the Comintern’s ‘Congress of the Peoples of the East’ (1920) in Baku, Azerbaijan to the wave of national liberation movements and regional revolutionary convergence in the mid-20th century; the cyclical resurgence of Kemalism, Nasserism, Khomeinism, etc., and the spread of revolutionary fervour during the Arab Spring up to the ongoing genocide in Gaza — the MENA region has been a battleground of unfinished revolutions, foreclosed dreams, relentless imperialist interventions, dramas of oil and blood, fractured uprisings and pacifications, punctuated by coups and counter-coups. On the other hand, there has been a break in communication — a mis-dialogue of sorts, or perhaps a missed history — between revolutionaries in Iran and revolutionaries across the wider region. This conference seeks to collectively revisit this militant line of inquiry, to rekindle a shared revolutionary consciousness and bridge the divide that “history” has imposed. What remains to be said about our “history” far exceeds what has been said.
On April 18-19, Weird Economies will be hosting Missed Dialogues, an online conference (via Zoom) organised in light of the interruptions in the dialogue between the MENA region’s shared revolutionary histories, featuring the following invited speakers: Islam al-Khatib, Marwa Arsanios, Nadia Bou Ali, Sara Dehkordi, Nihal El Aasar, Mohammed Elnaiem, Şermin Güven, Adam HajYahia, Amir Kianpoor, Nilüfer Koç, Samaneh Moafi, Omid Montazeri, Hicham Safieddine, Setareh Shohadaei, Kayhan Valadbeygi.
The first panel features Islam al-Khatib, Omid Montazeri, and Nihal El Aasar speaking on Left Melancholy and the fragmentation of solidarities in the wake of October 7th and related themes. The second panel brings together Nadia Bou Ali, Samaneh Moafi, Şermin Güven, Kayhan Valadbeygi under the theme of Ecologies of Disaster, where ‘ecologies’ is understood in its expanded sense to include environment, psychosocial, and colonial dynamics. The third panel features Setareh Shohadaei, Adam HajYahia, Nilüfer Koç, and Marwa Arsanios on the issue of political subjectivity and the dialectics of representation as it pertains to questions of class struggle, feminism, and national liberation in Palestine, Kurdistan, Lebanon, and Iran. Lastly, the fourth panel brings together Hicham Safieddine, Amir Kianpoor, Mohammed Elnaiem, Sara Dehkordi on the topic of economic sanctions and the political economy of war in MENA and the contemporary MENA left as it confronts the persisting spectres of anti-imperialism and campism.
Panel 1 - April 18th, 12 PM CET
Title: MENA’s Left Melancholy and Post-October 7 Fragmentations and Solidarities
Panelists: Islam al-Khatib, Omid Montazeri, Nihal El Aasar
Abstract:
Historically, Palestine has been a point of both division and convergence among anti-colonial and anti-imperialist movements in the MENA region. In 1947, the Soviet Union’s shift in policy on the partition of Palestine and its recognition of a Zionist state led to the fragmentation of communist parties across the region, particularly among Arab communists. In the words of Mohammad Shafi Agwani, “the Communists emerged from this final act of the Palestinian tragedy severely bruised and battered, morally as well as politically. There was acute confusion in the Communist ranks.” After the Soviet-Israeli alliance reached its peak in the late 1940s, the anti-colonial and anti-imperialist struggle in Palestine became a unifying rallying point for the MENA Left. In the 1960s and 1970s, global left-wing militancy even defined itself by its support for the Palestinian resistance, with Marxist and Islamic movements across the Middle East cooperating in fighting against Zionism’s settler-colonial project. But now, once again — after the defeat of communist and Marxist militancy in the region and the establishment of new geopolitical realities following the 1979 Iranian Revolution — we are at a historical juncture where the genocide in Gaza has fractured the Left severing friendships, relationships, and solidarities alike.
How did the current fragmentation occur? What factors have contributed to the breakdown in communication among different anti-colonial and anti-imperialist movements in the MENA region over recent decades? After October 7th, how do solidarity actions with Palestine inform us of the potential revival of an internationalist Left shorn of its melancholy in defeat? In order to revive an internationalist MENA Left — at a time when the anti-colonial and anti-imperialist struggle faces a global crisis — we must examine the history of MENA alliances and misdialogues, the experience of defeat and its impact on revolutionary subjects in the region, the infrastructures of knowledge production surrounding this history, as well as the new lines of alliance that have emerged within global solidarity actions protesting the genocide in Gaza. To launch a conversation centered on these themes, we have invited Islam al-Khatib, Omid Montazeri, and Nihal El Aasar to this panel: MENA: Left Melancholy, and Post-October 7 Fragmentations and Solidarities
Panel 2 - April 18th, 3 PM CET
Title: The Political Subject: Dialectical-Images of Class Struggle, Feminism, and National Liberation Against Imperial Capture in Palestine, Kurdistan, Lebanon, and Iran
Panelists: Setareh Shohadaei, Adam HajYahia, Nilüfer Koç, Marwa Arsanios
Abstract:
The problem of “identity politics” is one of several mis-dialogues that arise whenever national liberation movements, feminism, and class struggle are discussed in the MENA region.
“Identity politics” has, at times, functioned as a tool to suppress liberation movements in Palestine, Kurdistan, Balochistan, and elsewhere. Even when these movements are rooted in indigenous understandings of identity transcending fixed and stable essences, while transforming themselves into a revolutionary becoming. As Fanon wrote, “When a people support an armed or even political struggle against a merciless colonialism, tradition changes meaning” — including the allegedly “fixed” ethnic identity that becomes the focal point of decolonial struggle. It is useful to recall Guillermo Bonfil Batalla’s observation: “Ethnic identity is not an abstract, ahistorical entelechy. It is not a dimension that is foreign to social becoming nor an eternal and immutable principle.” Similarly, gender identity can underpin a revolutionary transformation, drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of “becoming-woman” as the initial form of revolutionary becomings.
By contrast, identity can serve as a tool for both reappropriation and the stifling of emancipatory struggles. Femonationalism and pinkwashing — as seen in the case of Israel/Palestine and the Iranian Jina’s Uprising, which was swiftly reappropriated by Western powers and wielded against the resistance in Gaza — offer a recent example. Similarly, as Negri and Hardt argue, “according to the ideology of liberal multiculturalism common to settler societies, indigenous subjects are called on or even obliged to perform an authentic identity,” resulting in images conducive to imperial or state capture. Thus, “minoritarian” subjects are expected to affirm their status as victims, and neoliberal progressive discourses on the intersectionality serve to individualize subjectification while privatizing struggle and resistance alike. It is in this context of the complex issues surrounding “identity” — its (mis)representations, co-optations, and radical becomings — that we invite Setareh Shohadaei, Adam HajYahia, Nilüfer Koç, and Marwa Arsanios to join our panel discussion, “The Political Subject: Dialectical-Images of Class Struggle, Feminism, and National Liberation Against Imperial Capture in Palestine, Kurdistan, Lebanon, and Iran.”
Panel 3 - April 19th, 12 PM CET
Title: After Gaza: The Political Economy of War and Sanctions in MENA & the Double-Binds of Anti-Imperialism and Campism
Panelists: Hicham Safieddine, Amir Kianpoor, Mohammed Elnaiem, Sara Dehkordi
Abstract:
In the wake of 7 October, anti-imperialism and campism have, once again, emerged as the double-bind proper to MENA’s leftist milieus, constituting yet another foundational element of “mis-dialogues” between the Iranian left and its counterparts in the wider Arab region and within each of its local movements. The current conjuncture, however, is neither that of Cecil Rhodes who, in 1895, identified imperialism as the means to resolve threats of unrest led by surplus populations in Europe nor of George Padmore for whom, in 1938, “colonial peoples are the potential allies of the workers against a common enemy.” How are we to explain anti-imperialism and campism’s re-appearance when uprisings and movements across the MENA region usher in a period of revolutionary potential with respect to their cycle of struggle? And how might we situate the re-appearance of anti-imperialism and campism within the political economy of wars and sanctions regimes?
While European imperialism aimed at resolving the threat posed by a surplus population of unemployed workers in Great Britain and on the European continent, the “international community” has shown that, today, there is no people more superfluous than Palestinians. Hence, it does not seem likely that we will see the return of UNRWA sponsored resettlement camps or a simple repetition of a ‘war of the camps’ in the event of the so-called Axis of Resistance’s dissolution under the weight of its internal contradictions. While we could debate whether imperialism may be defined as “inherently eliminatory but not invariably genocidal,” it is clear that imperial expansion has only exacerbated the problem it claimed to have solved: surplus rebellions.
In an attempt to investigate today’s re-emergence of the historical anti-imperialism/campism double-bind in the MENA region, particularly in Iran, and to examine its corresponding political-economic implications in regimes of war and sanctions, we have invited Hicham Safieddine, Sara Dehkordi, Amir Kianpoor, and Mohammed Elnaiem to the panel “After Gaza: The Political Economy of War and Sanctions in MENA & the Double-Binds of Anti-Imperialism and Campism.”
Panel 4 - April 19th, 3:30 PM CET
Title: Ecologies of Disaster in MENA: Intersections of Neoliberalism and Colonial Legacies
Panelists: Nadia Bou Ali, Samaneh Moafi, Şermin Güven, Kayhan Valadbeygi
Abstract:
One instance that epitomizes MENA mis-dialogues is the profound confusion surrounding the understanding of contemporary state formations in the region, both within leftist milieus in the MENA region as well as for the broader, global, left. In addressing this confusion, we can identify several, analytical, fault-lines: (i) neglecting the colonial and imperial histories that have shaped the arts of governmentality in MENA; (ii) yielding to exceptionalist views that portray the region as inherently backward vis-à-vis Western capitalist systems; and (iii) disregarding the historically formal integration of West Asian and North African economies within the globalized regimes of extractivist neoliberalism. These theoretical blind spots inhibit us from fully investigating the landscapes of past and present disasters in the region, as well as from engaging in “untimely” — i.e. contemporary — meditations on the disasters yet to come. Iran is one such striking case of analytical confusion. For decades, theorists from both the left and the right have contested the nature of its political economy: some describing it as state capitalism, others as neoliberal capitalism, while still others reject the notion that it qualifies as any form of capitalism at all. Among these perspectives, certain critics portray Iran’s economy as one defined by predation, hoarding, or as operating under a confiscatory regime. However, as Kayhan Valadbaygy has shown, the imperative of capital accumulation is inseparable from the formation of even those states that scholars have typically viewed as exceptional, rentierist, or largely organized to facilitate corruption. What is the role of this imperative of accumulation – via extraction – in the context of genocide and so-called natural disasters?
What is more, the conjunction of colonial violence and “natural” disasters has even been reflected in the very names of localized, mass, protests such as the 2021 “Protest of the Thirsty” in Iran’s Khuzestan province. The average life span of a people under conditions of genocide is always approaching zero, and the same can be said for non-human life (organic and inorganic): in less than six months, Israeli forces destroyed roughly 40% of Gaza’s agricultural landscape. And the reason for why ecocides following in lock-step with genocides are nothing if not political given their structuring logic of coloniality. As Fanon reminds us: “The Algerians, the women, dressed in haiks, the palm groves, and the camels form a landscape, the natural backdrop for the French presence. A hostile, ungovernable, and fundamentally rebellious Nature is in fact synonymous in the colonies with the bush, the mosquitoes, the natives, and disease.” While ecocide typically circumscribes the non-human, Felix Guattari’s Three Ecologies provides an expanded definition of ecology to encompass the organic composition of capital’s subsumption of social, psychic, and inorganic existence, integrating spatio-temporal relations of class, subjectification, in their metabolic relation with non-human beings. We have invited Nadia Bou Ali, Samaneh Moafi, Kayhan Valadbaygi, and Şermin Güven for this panel — “Ecologies of Disaster in MENA: Intersections of Neoliberalism and Colonial Legacies” — to examine instances of the current landscapes of ecological disasters in MENA, tracing their historical roots, the shadows they cast on the future, and their impact on the collective formation of subjectivities as evidenced by the emergence of neofascist and xenophobic tendencies vis-à-vis various social clinical symptoms.