Notes from the Post-War Days
Mass layoffs, factory and workshop closures, and company shutdowns are no longer issues limited to the lower strata of the working class. Even that segment of the labor force which insists it does not belong to the working class, imagining itself above it and believing its working conditions to be different, is now subject to the very conditions it once assumed applied only to workers: mass dismissals, lack of employment contracts, no insurance, declarations of “no longer needed,” “termination of cooperation,” and so on.
Since the beginning of the twelve-day war, in just one case, the company Alibaba which has self-ascribed the meaningless title of “the largest travel agency in Iran”, fired more than 500 people, amounting to 45% of its workforce, in a single day. Alibaba is a company with ten years of experience and, according to its CEO, boasts $200 million in capital. It also has a long history of layoffs. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the company dismissed over 180 employees overnight, and shortly after the ceasefire on the June 24, it laid off more than 500 people without prior notice. When we contacted the dismissed employees, one of them couldn’t believe how a company with such financial backing and a positive annual balance sheet, still advertising numerous job openings on its website, could have run into such severe financial difficulties in just twelve days to justify such mass layoffs.
Another person, however, began their account by saying: “They treated us like workers”, and believed that this so-called “downsizing” was carried out solely to replace staff with cheaper labor. According to them, this is a well-established practice embedded in the company’s management structure. Some Alibaba employees had anticipated layoffs when the war began, as firing staff is the first and only solution that comes to mind for Alibaba’s managers in times of crisis. The company’s managers have shamelessly stated in internal meetings that employees are merely tools for making money. Even the act of laying off staff is, for them, just another tool to increase profits. On that same day of ceasefire (June 24), while the HR team was delivering termination notices to employees, the senior managers and company owners were in meetings with government bodies, presenting a bleak picture in order to secure financial aid and loans.
And Alibaba is not the only company that laid off a large portion of its workforce during and after the war. In another case, a company called Parto Pars, active in the information technology sector in Shiraz, dismissed all of its employees without prior notice, citing only that the war had brought monthly profits close to zero and that the company could no longer remain resilient. This was a company with 20 years of experience, at the peak of its profitability. The same company, after the ceasefire, shamelessly reached out to its former employees to offer them part-time work. Following the same repetitive pattern of mass layoffs aimed at rehiring at lower wages, on June 22, Digiland and Digiservice dismissed large numbers of their employees. The company Karnameh laid off 16% of its workforce, and Pishtaaz Simorgh fired 75 workers, and these figures represent only the portion of the reality that has come to our attention. In the coming days, the full scale of these layoffs will become more apparent. They are being fired only to be immediately rehired, if they agree to play by the rules of the market, act “professionally,” and refrain from protesting.
During the twelve-day war and in its aftermath, Iran’s socio-political atmosphere became saturated with lofty calls for national unity, national reconciliation, the need to return to the people, and all things that carried the scent of “nation,” “people,” and “homeland.” But beyond this rhetoric, the wartime situation materially prepared the ground for particular forms of unity, the most significant of which is unity with a ruling power that commands the military arsenal, the army, and the Revolutionary Guards, and issues the order to defend against foreign military aggression. Thus, the issue is not merely the ideological management of the war turned inward, but a concrete material situation, however temporary, that places the oppressed side by side with those who have built and maintained the very structure of repression.
What is offered under the name of “national unity” is more than just a general sentiment, a moral imperative, or an unavoidable choice in moments of crisis; this form of unity, in its historical and material shape, is an ideological structure grounded in the interests of the ruling class. In practice, national unity only becomes possible when the working class and the toiling masses are excluded, both symbolically and materially, from the image of the “nation.” The “nation,” as represented in official discourse, is a fictional construct encompassing capitalists, the state, the middle class, and military institutions. It acknowledges the working class only when it is obedient, silent, and in service of the so-called “national interest.”
In this sense, what is portrayed as “national unity” is not even a temporary alliance between opposing forces in a time of war (although it can, in fact, create not just temporary but lasting alliances between rival forces that are not necessarily antagonistic). At its core, national unity is a formation that suspends real conflicts, or the possibility of their emergence, in order to enable the continuation of class repression.
The wartime state of emergency, by acting as a kind of artificial equalizer, temporarily gathers contradictory subjects under the banner of an abstract “nation”; but this gathering is, in fact, the moment of exclusion for those forces that are in conflict with the existing order. In such a situation, not only is class conflict denied, it is framed as “untimely” or “disruptive to unity,” and it is precisely for this reason that it becomes a tool for consolidating the power of the ruling class, not a temporary suspension of it or a moment of return to “the people.”
It is within this framework that the mass worker dismissals during and after the twelve-day war must be understood, not merely as a reaction to economic pressures or the “exceptional situation of the country,” but as the concrete embodiment of the very structural logic discussed above: the class nature of national unity.
From this perspective, the dismissal or unemployment of labor is not merely a reaction to crisis or economic pressure, but part of the permanent mechanisms of class repression and disciplining. In all capitalist systems, this process is a core component of the apparatus for reproducing class domination; and the Islamic Republic, like other capitalist states, legitimizes it under the guise of “emergency necessities” such as war or sanctions. Yet long before such crises, it had already paved the way for the most precarious and violent forms of exploitation through laws that grant employers full freedom and through the systematic weakening of labor protections.
In this light, unemployment, prearranged through short-term contracts, is not an unavoidable response but a component of an ongoing project of class control. It is in this sense that we say the Islamic Republic has never shirked its historical duty as a state devoted to the reproduction of capitalist relations and the waging of class war against the working class and the toiling masses, neither in times of foreign war, nor in periods of peace, nor even during ceasefires.
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