This International Women’s Day comes amid renewed imperialist attacks on Iran by the United States and Israel that have returned us to the familiar theater of war in the Middle East. Over a week into the war, the United States has not only killed the top brass of Iran’s clerical leadership, including Ali Khamenei, but now mulls over a possible ground invasion. In the face of U.S. and Israeli aggression, Iran has retaliated by striking U.S. military bases in the region.
To justify this offensive, Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu have tried to sell this conflict in terms that are all too familiar: Iran lies at the center of the “axis of evil,” and is a state sponsor of terrorism. In the face of this grave threat, the U.S. and Israel cast themselves as defenders of democracy against growing authoritarianism. Indeed, they’ve are trying to instrumentalize the protests of working-class Iranians against their theocratic regime, invoking the population’s continued suffering — shaped both by decades of U.S. imperialism’s policy of isolating and economically strangling the country and by repression from Iran’s own government.
Part of this, often, is their weaponization of the violence and repression faced by women in particular. But if Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya are to be any lessons for our struggles today, it has to be that U.S. imperialism doesn’t care about women at all — our struggles serve only as a prop in their continued intervention and war.
A Regime Dripping in Blood Has Nothing to Do with Liberation
Despite all their posturing about the rights of Iranian people, the current offensive began with the heinous bombing of a girl’s elementary school in Minab that killed over 160 people, most of whom were children. In the days since, U.S. and Israel have also targeted three other schools as well as at least 13 hospitals and healthcare facilities.
For over two years, moreover, Israel has continued a brutal genocide in Gaza with the backing of U.S. imperialism, killing over 100,000 Palestinians, many of them women and children, displacing and starving millions, and destroying almost all of Gaza’s infrastructure. Now, Trump’s so-called “Board of Peace” plans an imperialist reorganization of the region that will all but guarantee the plunder of Palestinian lands and continued suffering of the Palestinian people. And while they decry the horrors of the authoritarian regime in Iran that they see it as their divined duty to tear down, the Trump administration finds allies in the autocratic monarchies of the region, like that of the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar — where queer people are brutally repressed, women are subject to guardianship laws and veiling, immigrant working-class women face slave-like conditions, and protests are often brutally crushed.
At home, the very administration waving the banner of freedom of Iranian people is the one dismantling abortion rights, gutting transgender healthcare, and running interference for the powerful men in the Epstein files, including the sitting president, who have preyed on young women and girls for decades. A regime dripping with in blood has no ground to stand on when it speaks in the name of women’s liberation. Beyond this hypocrisy, one thing is clear: the goal has never been liberation; it was, and remains, the restructuring of the region under U.S. control.
Indeed, if the United States and its regional proxy, Israel, were to win in this war with Iran, it would not result in the flowering of democracy and self-actualization of the Iranian masses as they promise. It would only result in the further destruction of the Iranian working class and the installation of a client regime, headed by Reza Pahlavi, that would facilitate the plunder of the country’s resources in the face of greater geopolitical conflict between the Unites States and China. It would put the Iranian people under the boot of those who have long treated Arabs and Persians with contempt, as evidenced by the current genocide and the decades of apartheid and violence inflicted upon Palestinians. Far from advancing it, such a “victory” would set back the struggle for women’s liberation, as the chaos of war and the imposition of adjustments overseen by U.S. imperialism always deepen the gears of patriarchy and violence.
Against Imperialism and Liberal Feminism, We Need a Feminism that Fights
In contrast, while liberal feminists are careful to distance themselves from Trump’s attacks, they’ve mounted almost no actual opposition and continue to give cover to regime change politics. They have little to say about the role of the United States and the decades of imperialist policy that created the conditions in which the Islamic Republic has thrived, that have starved Iranian people out and blocked any possibility of independent self-activity of the working class, especially as they envision a transition tied to the influence of the institutions of Western democracy.
Even in its more “humanitarian” guise, the project of “saving” Iranian women remains tethered to the expansion of U.S. influence and the reorganization of the region under Washington’s purview. As we have written before, liberal feminism’s reliance on the imperialist state does not make it an imperfect ally of working women. It makes it their adversary. We saw this with devastating clarity in Afghanistan where twenty years of occupation, of NGOs and gender advisors and women’s empowerment initiatives amounted to little emancipation for the vast majority of working-class Afghan women who were abandoned in the face of the United States’ retreat.
Rejecting imperialism’s weaponization of the struggle of Iranian people in general and women’s struggles in particular, however, does not mean offering an ounce of political support to the theocratic regime in Tehran. We have to refuse the false binary that forces us to choose between a murderous power and a repressive clerical state that thrives on the strengthening of patriarchy. The theocratic regime is an enemy of the working class; it has crushed unions, repressed national minorities, imprisoned feminists, and used the “morality police” to enforce social control. But the ability of Iranian women to fight and win their freedom will not come from foreign bombs or continued sanctions that starve them out and destroy their world. It will come from drawing on the storied history of their own resistance, one that draws on the legacy of the revolution of 1979, to the “Woman, Life, Freedom” protests, and sees the centrality of defeating U.S. imperialism toward the struggle against their own repressive regime.
During the 1960s and 70s, Iranian women were on the front lines of the struggle against U.S. intervention and the puppet regime of the Shah, just as they were also fighting against the implementation of repressive laws by the new theocratic state. They understood then, as we must understand now, that the struggle for social liberation is inseparable from the struggle for national self-determination. When U.S. imperialism intervenes, it actually strengthens the hand of the domestic oppressors, allowing the regime to dismiss all dissent as the work of “foreign agents” and to wrap its own reactionary policies in the flag of anti-imperialist defiance.
Once Again, Let’s Declare War on War
In the face of the continuation of war — one that will bring nothing but misery and destruction for the region — we need to fight for socialist feminism. We need a feminism that fights and stands in active solidarity with the Iranian people. We need a feminism that understands that the liberation of women in Iran and across the world is bound to the liberation of the Iranian working class as a whole, and that sees that as long as Iranian people are being ground down by imperial sanctions and war, no liberation is possible. A victory for U.S. imperialism here in Iran does not open a path toward women’s freedom; it closes it. Such a victory would only install client regimes and deepen the chaos, empowering the most reactionary forces, and foreclosing the possibility of the Iranian people determining their own future.
As socialists feminists, we have a long and storied history of fighting this fight. Following the outbreak of World War I, when the Second International collapsed — when German, French, and Belgian socialists betrayed their internationalism to side with their national bourgeoisies in the war — it was socialist feminists who stepped up. Clara Zetkin and socialist feminists of the Second International Women’s Conference in 1915 were one of the first to declare “war on war.” It was not pacifism, but a call to action: a recognition that the working class had no stake in an imperialist bloodbath, and that socialists had to fight to end it and turn the struggle against it into one for something greater. That tradition of internationalism, built in the heat of opposition to imperial war, is the one we must reclaim today.
On this International Women’s Day, we have to take up that legacy and denounce this war clearly and without qualification. As socialists feminists, we have to demand an end to the bombardment of Iran, an end to the genocide in Gaza, an end to the sanctions that have punished ordinary Iranians for decades. We have to stand in active solidarity with the Iranian working class and the Iranian feminist movement, not as their saviors, but as their comrades in the shared struggle against the system that oppresses us all. Only by defeating imperialism can we open the terrain for Iranian women and working people to chart their own path, on their own terms, toward a future that is genuinely free.
The post This International Women’s Day, We Need an Anti-Imperialist, Socialist Feminism Against War appeared first on Left Voice.
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