In the following analysis, Somayeh Rostampour shows how the repression that the Iranian government has carried out to crush protests, the monarchist attempt to co-opt opposition movements and push them to the right, and the military assault that the US and Israel are currently carrying out against Iran are all different fronts within a single counterrevolution, reinforcing each other and combining to suppress the possibility of real liberation.
Somayeh Rostampour is a Kurdish feminist activist from Iran who participates in an internationalist network and a feminist, anti-imperialist, leftist collective in Paris, founded in 2022 by exiled activists from Iran, Afghanistan, and Kurdistan after the Jin, Jiyan, Azadî uprising. The collective supports subaltern struggles in Iran.
The connected society links together everything it can. It thereby aims to dematerialise social existence—that is its project. Consequently, there is no class struggle, even during election periods. A number of us are concerned about this.
I. Isolated and Relays
Contemporary society is a society of connection. Based on the annihilation of the most spontaneous bonds, it constructs links in every direction. Thus, it establishes links of security and economic performance, of course, but also links of conviviality, friendship, and love—even kinship. These links are created in its image: they are portable and digital, encoded links whose code is precious. These links relegate to the background the materials from which they are woven and serve the dematerialisation of social existence.
But what light does our difference here throw upon the problem before us? What connection is there between the sartorial splendours of the educated man and the photograph of ruined houses and dead bodies? Obviously the connection between dress and war is not far to seek; your finest clothes are those that you wear as soldiers. Since the red and the gold, the brass and the feathers are discarded upon active service, it is plain that their expensive and not, one might suppose, hygienic splendour is invented partly in order to impress the beholder with the majesty of the military office, partly in order through their vanity to induce young men to become soldiers. Here, then, our influence and our difference might have some effect; we, who are forbidden to wear such clothes ourselves, can express the opinion that the wearer is not to us a pleasing or an impressive spectacle. He is on the contrary a ridiculous, a barbarous, a displeasing spectacle. But as the daughters of educated men we can use our influence more effectively in another direction, upon our own class—the class of educated men. For there, in courts and universities, we find the same love of dress. There, too, are velvet and silk, fur and ermine. We can say that for educated men to emphasize their superiority over other people, either in birth or intellect, by dressing differently, or by adding titles before, or letters after their names are acts that rouse competition and jealousy—emotions which, as we need scarcely draw upon biography to prove, nor ask psychology to show, have their share in encouraging a disposition towards war. If then we express the opinion that such distinctions make those who possess them ridiculous and learning contemptible we should do something, indirectly, to discourage the feelings that lead to war. Happily we can now do more than express an opinion; we can refuse all such distinctions and all such uniforms for ourselves. This would be a slight but definite contribution to the problem before us—how to prevent war …
Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas (1938)
Shooting an Elephant
In Moulmein, in lower Burma, I was hated by large numbers of people – the only time in my life that I have been important enough for this to happen to me. I was sub-divisional police officer of the town, and in an aimless, petty kind of way anti-European feeling was very bitter. No one had the guts to raise a riot, but if a European woman went through the bazaars alone somebody would probably spit betel juice over her dress. As a police officer I was an obvious target and was baited whenever it seemed safe to do so. When a nimble Burman tripped me up on the football field and the referee (another Burman) looked the other way, the crowd yelled with hideous laughter. This happened more than once. In the end the sneering yellow faces of young men that met me everywhere, the insults hooted after me when I was at a safe distance, got badly on my nerves. The young Buddhist priests were the worst of all. There were several thousands of them in the town and none of them seemed to have anything to do except stand on street corners and jeer at Europeans.
Bound copies of The Anarchist Plot To Steal The Mona Lisa can be found here.
INTRODUCTION
Few people know that the French anarchists of the 1890s funded their movement through burglary, and even fewer know that anarchists stole the Mona Lisa from the Louvre in 1911. However, fans of the hit Netflix show Lupin have already ingested the legacy of those anarchist burglars, for the titular Lupin was based on the legendary anarchist burglar Alexandre Marius Jacob, head of the infamous gang of Nightworkers, whose daring thefts resonate even today in 2026.
A Lebanese Perspective on the War on Palestine, Lebanon, and Iran
The war that the United States and Israel are waging in the Middle East is not solely directed at Iran. In addition to occupying the entirety of Palestine as well as the Golan Heights and other parts of Syria, Israeli troops are currently occupying parts of Lebanon while Israeli airstrikes pummel the country from above. At least 800,000 people have been forced to flee their homes in Lebanon since the beginning of March. Left unchecked, the Israeli government will reduce Lebanon to uninhabitable wreckage, just as it has Gaza.
To understand the consequences for people in Lebanon, we reached out to Elia Ayoub, who previously spoke to us about the uprising that took place in Lebanon in October 2019 against the sectarian rule of warlord oligarchs. How should we understand the latest round of hostilities in the context of the last several decades? How does this assault shape the prospects for Lebanese movements for liberation?
Elia Ayoub is an anti-authoritarian historian and researcher from Lebanon. He hosts The Fire These Times podcast, runs the Hauntologies newsletter, and hosts online classes on modern Lebanese history. You can donate to support people displaced by Israeli attacks on Lebanon here.
In this article, sociologist Michalis Lianos analyses both the conditions and the deployment of this new form of authoritarianism that is spreading across the world. On the one hand, representative democracy is dying, and on the other, extreme individualisation allows everyone a degree of freedom, provided that its framework is never challenged. And this is the paradox of our time: that fascism is accompanied by the highest level of normalisation of our existences.
In Nazi terminology, Gleichschaltung, meaning “synchronization” or “coordination”, was the process of Nazification by which Adolf Hitler—leader of the Nazi Party in Germany—established a system of totalitarian control and coordination over all aspects of German society. (Wikipedia)
Authoritarianism generates regimes that are expansive in nature, both socially and geopolitically.
This is not the direct consequence of an ambition to dominate, but of a set of values that considers the ordering of the world to be the essential prerequisite for a healthy society. The tragic situation, in which we find ourselves, with the three major world powers under authoritarian regimes and several European societies also tempted by authoritarian culture, is evidence of a socio-political isomorphism initially caused by the lower classes’ loss of control over social space. Between those who manage to establish their discursive influence in the public sphere and those who feel marginalised as a conservative rearguard, rivalry is turning into a dichotomy of perspectives. To succeed in silencing or even humiliating, your opponent with your eloquence leads them to think of other means than speech.
Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Triumph of Death, circa 1562
What is a state that, ignoring all forms of law, methodically murders or kidnaps the leaders of states it arbitrarily declares to be its enemies? Nevertheless, this is what is happening with the approval or embarrassed silence of European countries. This means that we are living in a time when the state has thrown off its legal masks and is now acting according to its true nature, which is ultimately terror. It is likely, however, that this extreme situation is literally just that, namely, that the removal of the masks coincides with the end of the state form, without which a new politics will not be possible.
The US and Israeli attack on Iran is morally repugnant. It is calculated only to benefit an elite of racist, Islamophobic warmongers. It will not benefit Iranians or ordinary people anywhere on earth.
The themes which monastic discipline assigned to friars for meditation were designed to turn them away from the world and its affairs. The thoughts which we are developing here originate from similar considerations. At a moment when the politicians in whom the opponents of Fascism had placed their hopes are prostrate and confirm their defeat by betraying their own cause, these observations are intended to disintangle the political worldlings from the snares in which the traitors have entrapped them. Our consideration proceeds from the insight that the politicians’ stubborn faith in progress, their confidence in their ‘mass basis’, and, finally, their servile integration in an uncontrollable apparatus have been three aspects of the same thing. It seeks to convey an idea of the high price our accustomed thinking will have to pay for a conception of history that avoids any complicity with the thinking to which these politicians continue to adhere.
Walter Benjamin, On the concept of history, thesis 10
Killing of neo-Nazi in Lyon: “Antifascism is now being exploited”
The death of Quentin Deranque is being used as a pretext for equating fascism and antifascism
It is a tragedy that has taken on a highly political dimension. On Saturday, February 14, Quentin Deranque, a 23-year-old far-right activist, died after being brutally beaten on the sidelines of a conference given by MEP Rima Hassan of La France Insoumise (LFI), which was taking place at Sciences Po Lyon university. The young man had reportedly been recruited to provide security for activists from the identitarian collective Némésis, who had planned a demonstration in front of the university building. While an investigation for voluntary homicide has been opened, the hypothesis of a street clash between militant groups – far-right on one side and anti-fascists on the other – appears to be confirmed.
Iran between Repression, Co-optation, and War: Three Waves of Counterrevolution
From the CrimethInc. collective (19/03/2026)
In the following analysis, Somayeh Rostampour shows how the repression that the Iranian government has carried out to crush protests, the monarchist attempt to co-opt opposition movements and push them to the right, and the military assault that the US and Israel are currently carrying out against Iran are all different fronts within a single counterrevolution, reinforcing each other and combining to suppress the possibility of real liberation.
Somayeh Rostampour is a Kurdish feminist activist from Iran who participates in an internationalist network and a feminist, anti-imperialist, leftist collective in Paris, founded in 2022 by exiled activists from Iran, Afghanistan, and Kurdistan after the Jin, Jiyan, Azadî uprising. The collective supports subaltern struggles in Iran.
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