IWAC – Contributed Essay
Authors and Translators, the Victims of the “Cannibal Capitalism”[1] of the Islamic Republic; On What Happened to Keyvan Mohtadi and His Like
In her famous treaty, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” Hélène Cixous writes about “the imbecilic Capitalist Machinery in which publishing houses are the crafty, obsequious relayers of imperatives handed down by an economy that works against us and off our backs;”[2] and recognizes it as the key factor in the suppression of any given writing that is brave enough to disrupt the directives of literary domination and its favored market order. And yet, in Iran, we are faced with a regime that despite having chewed the entire world’s ears off with such hollowed out slogans, has actually made such a machinery the very foundation of its survival for many years.
A clear example of such a “cannibalistic” suppression, is the fate of the translations created by Muhammad Ja’far Pouyandeh, a leftist activist, author, translator, and member of Iranian Writers Association, one among many who got murdered in the course of the notorious state-driven chain assassinations of the intellectuals and writers of note in 1998; such books as the “History of Philosophical Struggles in Soviet Union,” “The Sociology of Novel,” [initially published in Farsi in 1997, as a translation of Georg Lukács’ Balzak et le realisme francais], “Struggle against Gender Discrimination,” “An Introduction to Hegel,” “The Contemporary Soviet Union Philosophical Question” and the like which, as testified by a report[3] published on Meydan Website, have not been given an opportunity to be republished, many years after the translator was murdered by the state mercenaries and in the course of 1990’s chain state assassinations of the dissident intellectuals and authors in Iran, and this lack of republishing is not merely caused by the state censorship, but also because it would potentially disrupt the dominant market order and thus naturally deemed unfavorable by the yuppie publishers.
And this hardly can amount to any surprise in a country where the state-groomed economic theorists and experts, following the models of the “cannibal capitalism,” take advantage of a delusion called “eradicating inflation” for trampling the workers’ rights[4]; a country in which the act of privatizing public institutions, including the educational ones from schools to universities, originally of national properties, is played out with such coined terms as “state assets generation,” as if such public institutes were state’s personal belongings so that, now, it would put them on sale as “excess assets” or sign them off to the private sector as rentals, all for even further shakedown of people and, more than anyone else, the working class whose only access to receive some “relatively” free education has been within the territory of these very schools and universities still left “non-private;” in a country where the state double-crosses its own rules and regulations (!), for trampling workers’ rights steadily more, and thus issues a circular letter, according to which, “the implementation of the legal annual rise for “other wage levels” is not obligatory and the employer can simply pay off the contract he has with a worker with ten to even fifteen years of work experience and renew a contract with the same worker the next year in which the wage is not increased even a cent.”[5]
During this time, and in the absence of regulations for the workers to rely upon as reference for seeking justice, it is quite natural that the voice of the author and translator who produces any text in line with the aim of restoring the rights of the working class would be nipped in the bud. Thus, hand in hand with the market, the state took action months and even years before the outbreak of Iran’s recent mass protests, itself a perfect excuse used to send a huge chunk of the literary community to prisons, to suffocate those authors and translators who were a thorn in the side of its favorable economic order; from Said Soltanpour, Muhammad Mokhtari, Muhammad Ja’far Pouyandeh, who sacrificed their lives over this cause, to Arash Ganji, Keyvan Mohtadi and Anisha Assdollahi who were put to prison for it…
In face of all this, since that afternoon of May, 9, 2022, when all of a sudden he went live on his Instagram, shortly but horrendously, and cried out “they’re here to arrest us,” to this date, Keyvan Mohtadi is still kept in prison. That afternoon, state security agents raided this young spouses’ house (that is, Anisha Assadollahi and Keyvan Mohtadi) and took them both with themselves to the no man’s lands raised by the Ministry of Intelligence. And, of course, the couple both had records of former arrests for the unpardonable sin (!) of participating in demonstrations held in solidarity with the workers. Why would any author or translator stand in solidarity with workers and sympathize with them to begin with? Is it not the case that, thanks to the author-grooming of this “cultrovorous” state, their accounts are so saturated that residing anywhere but in their ivory towers, would be considered such a gesture of ingratitude against the favors granted by such a literary-minded and intellectually and textually enriched state? Perhaps, the kinds of Pouyandeh, Mokhtari, Miralayi, Davani, Ghaffar Husseini, Saidi Sirjani, Abtin, and many more as such, had died a natural death or kicked the bucket out of the excruciating joy they felt before such an affluence of all favors (!).
Keyvan Mohtadi has translated such works of note as “An Unfinished Revolution: Karl Marx and Abraham Lincoln,” “New Lines of Alliance, New Spaces of Liberty” [by Félix Guattari and Antonio Negri], “The Author as a Producer” [Walter Benjamin], “Do You Remember the Revolution?” [on Italy’s contemporary leftist movements] (The last three co-translated with Iman Ganji), and certain brilliant essays such as “Precaria, a New Dangerous Class,” “The Times and Life of Occupy Wall Street,” “The Uniform-Wearing Employers,” and “In the Horizon Before Us, there is the Canibal Capitalism” (the last two essays co-authored with his wife, Anisha Assadollahi), and the author and/or translator of many more books and essays.
The arrest of him and his wife, Anisha Assadollahi, took place contemporaneously with the mass incarcerations of the teachers and labor activists under the pretext of their presence as interpreters in the course of a meeting between the labor activists of the Tehran Province Bus Driver’s Syndicate and two French syndicalists. This is while, based on the regime’s international commitments, including the endorsement of ILO’s Treaties, the meeting between labor activists and syndicalists should be completely free and not criminalized.
Later, at court, Keyvan Mohtadi was charged with “propaganda against the regime” and sentenced to six years of imprisonment as a punishment for certain parts of his writings and translations published. While it has been over ten months since his detention, that he has spent without even one day of prison break, Anisha Assadollahi recently, on Mar. 9, 2023, announced on her Tweeter account that since the last Tuesday, her husband had been denied family visits as well. Before that, on mid-June, like other teachers and labor activists imprisoned, he was denied both prison call and family visit. As was the case in previous times, it is not clear for what crime, but his wife has announced that his prison visit denial has happened following labor activists being summoned and threatened in the past week.
On Mar. 8 (the International Woman Day), Keyvan Mohtadi and Reza Shahabi (a worker and labor activist imprisoned), released a joint statement from prison in which they called this year, 2022-2023, the “defamiliarizing times” and honored the “most persistent and profound contemporary uprising of the masses” that “carries the flag imprinted by the name of a woman [Mahsa or Zhina Amini] which is also the name of all women: all those women who have been in augmented suffering in all these years, from the generic inequalities of the society, and the doubled down discriminations against them for simply being women; from legal and wage inequalities, from inequalities of both occupational and educational opportunities; from structural and individual violence and excessive exploitation, whether in the public dominion or in the private space (and usually in the muffled complicity of the two with each other).” There, they also state that, for this reason, the International Woman Day, this year, has found an entirely new meaning. They write: “the slogan of Woman, Life, Freedom reminds us that even in wage-related demands (bread, work, freedom), out principal demand and our area of dispute is human dignity, and it teaches us that we cannot let women’s demands be divided into main and margin and that, independent from whatever future awaiting our society, we need to stand by women’s equality in all individual, social, political, economic areas and the like, since it is a factor of necessity for a steady move towards restoring all violated rights of women and, eventually, a society which is more humane and just.”
In addition, in an intro written by him while in Evin Prison on his translation of the essay, “Precaria, a New Dangerous Class,” published recently on an Iranian leftist website, he recalls a number of points that now seem prophetically enlightening amidst the disillusionments and disenchantments coming after the crackdown of Woman, Life, Freedom Movement. There, he mentions the sense of “helplessness and suspension that have turned into the permanent state,” and points at “living the present, with no idea of the future,” and “constantly changing jobs,” “making ends meet by blood and sweat,” “escapades to survive in an indifferent society,” which turns our lives into “the state of the character, in Amir Naderi’s film “The Runner;” “a child endeavoring in all seriousness to earn his right, a means of livelihood (a block of ice), and even though this piece of ice is fully melted in his little hands by the end of this marathon, he does not quit trying come what may.”
He then poses two important questions: “first, does our experience today hold a quality other than that of the time-honored historical problems of ours? In other words, how does it stand out against the inveterate history of spoilage, exploitation, and discrimination of this country? The other question be: if we are faced with a different situation, which conceptual constellation can present an image of the totality of this situation? Which lexical treasury is needed to explicate this changing structure and, at the same time, to recognize the agency of the social forces at work in it?” He, then, emphasizes “any project that sets its goal to radically change the present social relations in favor of those who inherit all the labor and bruise from the status quo, cannot but engage with the questions mentioned above.” “Here, we are not just faced with a generational gap, the same way that many members of the previous generations, had inadvertently joined these unstable relations, and even many retirees had to return to the labor market against their will. Also, this situation does not remain confined to the conditions of women or ethnic minorities in Iran, and has prevailed in all labor markets with variations of intensity. And, in the end, that such developments are as much resulted from the inner workings of the society, as they are dependent upon global changes, known by the name of globalization or neoliberalism.” He then proceeds with reminding us that “the political discourse of our society, went through radical changes since 2017” and then makes the most significant conclusion in his intro: “in the absence of a class-based program, these forces will at best lead to dominance over the privileged, but it would not amount to any change in the privileging system or the roots that produce discrimination, exploitation, and oppression.”
This is why imprisoning an author, teacher, and translator like Keyvan Mohtadi cannot and must not be placed anywhere but as a subset of the silencing and suppressing machinery that works to quiet the dissident voices against the “cannibal capitalism.”
[1] Nancy Fraser: “Cannibal Capitalism” Is on Our Horizon, AN INTERVIEW WITH NANCY FRASER, INTERVIEW BY MARTÍN MOSQUERA, Jacobin, 09.10.2021, translated into Persian by Keyvan Mohtadi and Anisha Asadollahi, Pecritique website, 04.12.2021,
Author: Helene Cixous, Translators: Keith Cohen, Paula Cohen
Source: Signs, Vol. 1, No. 4 (Summer, 1976), pp. 875-893
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
[3] To kill Mohammad Jafar Pouyandeh’s books in the book market, Hamidreza Yousefi, Meidaan website, 30.09.2014,
[4] From a collective statement by independent labor unions in Iran on the minimum wage in 2021,
[5] From a report by ILNA news agency on the execution of “negotiable salary” through a circular letter issued by the Legal Assistant to the President, 07.02.2021,