News and Letters Committees invites you to a discussion:

“We made the revolution for freedom and got unfreedom”

Iranian Women’s Struggle for Freedom, the Iranian Left, and Philosophy of Revolution

Iranian women’s struggle for freedom has many dimensions. They include the struggle itself against Iranian government repression and a double-edged relationship to the Left. The struggle has been expressed in a dialogue encompassing ideas—the theory of liberation and struggle—ever since Iranian women burst forth during the 1979 Revolution, when they had to fight not only the U.S.-backed Shah but Ayatollah Khomeini’s Islamic counter-revolution.

Through 30 years of struggle, Iranian women have raised crucial questions:
• the need to oppose both capitalist imperialism and religious fundamentalism
• the emergence of counter-revolution from within the revolution
• the fatal problem of accepting culture as a universal

How can we get from first negation to the second negation that is needed to reach a new society, based on new human relations? How can philosophy help move forward the self-development of masses fighting for freedom unseparated from the imperative of the dialectic?

Speaker: Terry Moon, “Woman as Reason” columnist and Managing Editor of News & Letters

Date: Monday, November 30
Time: 6:30 p.m.
Place: News & Letters Library
228 S. Wabash Ave., Room 230
Chicago, IL 60604