An indictment of a soft violence that wears credentials, not uniforms. This essay maps how intellectual gatekeeping—what Bourdieu called the “racism of the intelligentsia”—polices who gets to speak and which suffering counts. It tracks a alliance with inverted Orientalism: the reflex to excuse non-Western authoritarianism as “authentic culture” or anti-imperialism, while disciplining dissidents as inauthentic or “Western.” Drawing on Said and Bourdieu, it names how petitions, panels, and performative solidarity reproduce hierarchies they claim to oppose. The result: silence marketed as care, respect weaponized as censorship, and a demand that the oppressed fit a script before their pain is admitted.

Between 2021-22, 3,826 workers in Iran were killed in so-called “workplace accidents.” These deaths are not isolated tragedies or unfortunate errors of management—they are the logical outcome of a social order in which the working class is systematically denied the right to organize, to supervise, and to intervene in the conditions of its own labor. This report, without providing any statistics, emphasizes that in the first half of 2024, the number of such incidents has increased significantly.

And this number only includes those who were insured and were on state lists. We know nothing about the thousands of other workers, especially migrant workers who had accidents and possibly died without a contract or insurance! What we are witnessing is not a series of accidents, but an indictment of a regime that has outlawed the collective power of workers in the name of security and order.

A recent report by the Islamic Regime’s parliamentary Research Center surveys workplace safety, with a particular focus on the mining sector. But this document, like the regime itself, is politically designed to obscure rather than to explain. It treats the deaths of thousands as technical failures—insufficient equipment, outdated methods—without a single word on the real mechanisms of death: the banning of trade unions, the persecution of worker militants, the dismantling of every democratic form of labor representation.

By narrowing the question of safety to technical administration, the regime avoids confronting the central contradiction: that under capitalism—particularly its authoritarian variant in Iran—profit demands the suppression of labor’s collective voice. The Parliament shifts blame to mine owners, yet refuses to name the state’s own policies of violent repression, which have made any form of independent worker organizing impossible. The legal framework is not “weak”; it is actively hostile to labor. Supervision is not “ineffective”; it is subordinated to class rule.

In such a system, the worker is condemned to silence. Deprived of unions, denied the right to strike, surveilled by intelligence agencies, and punished with prison for organizing, the Iranian workers is rendered politically naked before capital and its state protectors. In these conditions, to speak of “safety regulations” is an insult to those who die for lack of them. There can be no meaningful regulation where the working class is denied the basic right to defend its own life.

https://firenexttime.net/uknq

Toomaj Salehi, the most famous protest rapper in Iran, is a mechanical engineer and a lathe worker who has spent his salary and even his motorbike on creating his songs in protest against the regime. He says he is not afraid and wants to spread his courage to others. In the past years, he was imprisoned twice, turned 34 in prison, and faced charges of “corruption on earth.” Now, Toomaj’s lawyer says that the Islamic-Revolutionary Court has sentenced this protest singer to death on same charges.

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About The Fire Next Time:
My journey in creating this space was deeply inspired by James Baldwin’s powerful work, “The Fire Next Time”. Like Baldwin, who eloquently addressed themes of identity, race, and the human condition, this blog aims to be a beacon for open, honest, and sometimes uncomfortable discussions on similar issues.

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