Building Class Solidarity in Repressive Iraq

Strategies to unite workers beyond sectarian lines through shared struggle

Introduction

Every modern revolution begins in fragments: whispered conversations at market stalls, late-night repair work under kerosene light, a neighbour’s complaint about spoiled vegetables. In Iraq, these fragments gather under immense pressure. The legacies of war, occupation, sectarian engineering and economic extraction weigh heavily. Yet amid this repression, the possibility of genuine working-class solidarity continues to flicker. The question is how to nurture it into flame.

The repression that crushed earlier waves of proletarian organizing has left scars. Surveillance and informant networks, the omnipresent threat of detention, and chronic unemployment all serve to atomize communities. Sectarian rhetoric masks class interest; nationalist banners disguise elite theft. Despite this climate, moments of autonomous organisation have always reappeared: clandestine student cells, spontaneous oil protests, feminist cooperatives operating in silence, and flashes of street revolt in Basra and Baghdad. These moments prove that ordinary Iraqis can still sense the horizon of collective power.

What activists face today is not only material repression but psychic exhaustion. The post-war economy functions like a dependency machine, pulling every protest back into clientelist patterns. Breaking such repetition requires movements to do what the state cannot: rebuild trust horizontally, translate pain into mutual aid, and connect daily survival with international struggles that illuminate the structure of exploitation.

This essay examines how fragmented workers in Iraq can cultivate autonomous organisation immune to sectarian sabotage. It traces a path from listening to local grievances to constructing cross-sect trust, creating clandestine yet caring infrastructures, and linking them with global anti-capitalist currents. The thesis is simple: only when the struggle for bread also aims at sovereignty does solidarity become resilient enough to survive repression.

Listening as Revolutionary Praxis

The Art of Hearing Anger Before Ideology

Movements fail when they import grievances instead of discovering them. Every successful insurgency begins by hearing what people already mutter. In Iraq, complaints about unpaid wages, contaminated water, collapsing electricity grids and unaffordable rents recur regardless of sect. Listening strategically turns these complaints into data. Observing where discontent crosses boundaries reveals the hidden unity that reactionary politics obscures.

Deploy a reconnaissance of empathy. Spend hours in the shared taxis that traverse Basra’s industrial zones, or linger in Baghdad’s ration card queues. You are not recruiting; you are decoding the social temperature. When a complaint repeats across Sunni and Shia tongues, across the voices of returnees and migrants, it signals an entry point. The anger that still holds humor is combustible; the anger that sounds numb requires rekindling through shared action.

The Intelligence of Ordinary Spaces

Everyday environments shield activists from suspicion. Tea stalls, markets and mosques are not just neutral zones—they are the root system of public consciousness. A casual question about the week’s power cuts does more for inter-sect trust than any manifesto. If answers come freely, you know the system’s myth of division has cracked.

Once several people express the same grievance, document it quietly. Handwritten notes disguised as shopping lists, coded WhatsApp voice messages, or small folded papers slipped into bread bags can map the emotional geography of discontent. Treat each complaint as a dot on a clandestine map. When those dots start to cluster, the coordinates of rebellion emerge.

From Data to Embers

After gathering enough testimonies, test the findings through collective observation. During blackouts, create a “lights-out ledger”: each household records every minute without power. The act of counting turns frustration into agency. When the data are consolidated—perhaps by diaspora allies who can publish safely—they expose corruption and connect local pain to global systems of privatization. People begin to see that what burns in Basra also flickers in Beirut, Lagos and Santiago.

To listen deeply is to disarm fear. It invites those previously pitted against each other to recognize a shared opponent. The first phase of solidarity is therefore not mobilisation, but mutual recognition that misery is political, not divine.

Building Trust Under Repression

The Small Circle Principle

When repression is pervasive, scale is suicide. The ideal organisational unit under such conditions is the circle of trust: five to seven people linked by personal history rather than ideology. These small groupings meet irregularly, rotate hosts, and share simple but tangible goals—a mutual-aid fund, a clandestine education class, a joint tool library.

A network of such circles forms a lattice that cannot be decapitated. If the security services dismantle one, others persist. This cellular structure mirrors the self-healing capacity of underground movements from Poland’s Solidarity to South Africa’s anti-apartheid committees. Every circle’s independence creates systemic resilience.

Care as Camouflage

Acts of care double as political veils. A fund for arrested workers’ families, a cooperative child‑care rotation during protests, or a secret medical shuttle after curfew: all are humanitarian gestures that conceal radical intent. The state struggles to repress what publicly appears compassionate. Moreover, these acts teach activists to value protection as much as confrontation. Solidarity must feel safer than isolation; otherwise fear wins.

In Iraq’s context of trauma and suspicion, small proofs of reliability matter more than ideology. Delivering medicine on time, sharing fuel during shortages, or repairing a neighbour’s generator creates the lived evidence of unity. Trust built through material reliability outlasts slogans.

Diaspora as Strategic Exoskeleton

Those living abroad embody a form of external armor for domestic movements. They can archive documents digitally, raise funds, translate campaign materials, and amplify stories when censorship silences voices inside Iraq. The diaspora transforms exile from an emotional wound into logistical strength. During counterattack phases, they function as offshore loudspeakers pressing international institutions to acknowledge repression, buying time for local regrouping.

To coordinate this dual structure, divide roles clearly. The inside network focuses on survival and rituals of care; the diaspora manages exposure and resources. Successful synchronization of these two realms moderates risk and multiplies impact.

By uniting care, secrecy, and external reinforcement, activists forge a body that bends without breaking. Each small circle becomes both cell and sanctuary.

Transforming Shared Suffering into Collective Power

The Politics of Everyday Survival

Revolutionary momentum starts when immediate needs meet systemic understanding. In Iraq, water scarcity and power loss are not technical accidents but outcomes of global extractive economics and domestic corruption. Transforming these sufferings into political leverage requires narrative alchemy: converting personal inconvenience into collective accusation.

When you ask a mother how much bottled water she bought this week and she laughs bitterly, capture that laughter. It contains more truth than any press release. Invite a few such storytellers to sketch their neighborhood’s broken infrastructure on paper after prayers. Compile those fragments into maps that illustrate systemic neglect. Once visible, the pattern itself indicts power.

Connecting Local and Global Horizons

Every bottle of imported water and every blackout traces a line to global supply chains and financial contracts. Translating that line for participants breaks the illusion of isolated misfortune. Comparing Basra’s poisoned taps with Flint’s or Cape Town’s teaches comrades that capitalism’s failures rhyme across continents.

Diaspora allies can curate these parallels into visual materials—infographics printed on common items like flour sacks or grain bags so they circulate innocently through markets. Each image tells workers they share a planetary struggle against privatizing elites, not a parochial feud. Internationalism thus ceases to be rhetorical and becomes intuitive.

Ritualising Practical Resistance

Material repair work doubles as pedagogical practice. Organising community repair brigades to clean filters or hack solar panels demonstrates that autonomy can replace petitioning. When people fix what the state refuses to, they relearn competence. Confidence bred from reclaimed capability reshapes political psychology; citizens see themselves not as beggars of reform but as architects of survival. In this shift lies the embryo of revolutionary subjectivity.

To transform suffering into power is to narrate every wound as evidence of systemic design, then to answer that design with autonomous creation.

Innovation Against Pattern Decay

Escaping Predictable Protest Scripts

Power neutralises what it can predict. Iraq’s ruling blocs have already learned how to absorb customary demonstrations in Baghdad’s squares or to dismiss online outrage with symbolic concessions. To outmaneuver this pattern, organisers must constantly mutate ritual forms. A tactic loses voltage the moment it becomes expected.

Instead of traditional marches, experiment with distributed symbolic acts: synchronised moments of silence, collective repair sessions, market cleanups that double as meetings. Even temporary withdrawals can confuse authorities. Fasting, mutual‑aid feasts, or night vigils pivot energy inward while preserving organisational muscle. Every innovative form prolongs unpredictability and keeps surveillance guessing.

The “Learning Coup” Model

Periodic tactical renewal should be deliberate. A practical formula is the “learning coup”: a scheduled one-night session where each circle studies a foreign movement and extracts one replicable idea to test within a month. One month later, another circle presents its experiment’s outcome and a new tactic is chosen. This rhythm fuses discipline with creativity. It transforms global solidarity into continuous self‑education.

The key lies in turning learning itself into a clandestine ritual. Knowledge-sharing becomes the sacrament that sustains morale during repression. Over time, the movement evolves a living archive of tactics tailored to local terrain.

Psychological Safety and Renewal

Innovation is exhausting. Activists under pressure risk burnout or paranoia. To protect psychological stamina, introduce decompression rituals: poetry readings, prayer circles, communal meals, moments of shared silence after high-risk actions. These practices re‑humanize participants and signal that the movement values inner strength as much as external pressure.

By designing cycles of mutation and rest, Iraqi organisers preserve vitality while staying invisible. The revolution’s first victory is endurance.

Cultivating Autonomous Institutions

Parallel Authority as Antidote to Dependence

True liberation begins when communities perform functions once monopolised by the state or corporations. Creating autonomous councils for utilities, food distribution or education inoculates workers against manipulation. Each successful local project chips away at dependency on sectarian parties and external donors.

For instance, a neighbourhood water cooperative that manages filtration and distribution democratically can both alleviate shortages and model direct governance. Once citizens experience self‑management, returning to passive consumerism feels like humiliation. The illusion that authority requires hierarchy dissolves.

Economic Mutualism and Sabotaging Clientelism

In economies distorted by oil revenues and patronage, radical mutualism undermines clientelist logic. Small rotating credit pools, community agriculture and cooperative repair shops circulate resources horizontally. These material links convert ideological unity into tangible interdependence. When livelihoods intertwine across sects, sectarian hate loses financial oxygen.

Even under surveillance, disguised mutualism can thrive through cultural fronts—artisan guilds, religious charities, student clubs—that host the economic skeleton of resistance. Revolution grows muscles precisely where it pretends to dance.

From Autonomy to Sovereignty

Autonomous infrastructure is not an end but scaffolding for sovereignty. When a network supplies clean water, it implicitly governs that territory more effectively than the state. Sovereignty accumulates quietly until it becomes undeniable. Historical parallels abound: maroon societies in the Americas sustained hidden republics for decades before recognition; Palestinian cooperatives in the West Bank sustain livelihood under occupation; Rojava’s communes practice war‑time democracy amid siege.

For Iraq, sovereignty will mean reclaiming control over labor’s fruits from oil to agriculture while refusing sectarian mediation. Each well repaired, each child educated outside corrupt institutions, each wage strike coordinated across sects, registers as a quantum of sovereignty gained.

Transitioning from grievance management to governance-building demands patience but delivers durability. Movements that build real services outlive those that merely oppose.

Putting Theory Into Practice

To condense these strategies into practical steps, activists might pursue the following:

1. Conduct Listening Reconnaissance
   Dedicate one week to circulate through communal spaces—markets, mosques, taxi routes—and gather everyday complaints using coded notes or voice recordings. Identify the grievance common to all sects and job sectors. This forms your first shared cause.

2. Form Small Trust Circles
   Create groups of five to seven people bound by mutual reliability, not ideology. Assign each circle one achievable project—such as a repair workshop or fund for victims’ families—to reinforce solidarity through action rather than discourse.

3. Link with Diaspora Networks
   Coordinate with trusted immigrants and exiles to handle digital exposure, resource gathering and international liaison. Divide labor so that local teams focus on survival while diaspora allies handle publicity and analysis.

4. Transform Suffering into Visual Narratives
   Convert data collected locally—like blackout durations or contaminated-water maps—into infographics. Print them on everyday packaging materials to bypass censorship. Each image should connect Iraqi suffering to global capitalist patterns.

5. Launch Learning Coups
   Schedule monthly study nights where circles analyze a foreign struggle, extracting and adapting one tactic for local trial. Document outcomes discreetly for transmission to other circles. This habit turns global solidarity into continuous innovation.

6. Practice Care and Decompression
   After high-risk efforts, organise communal meals, storytelling or prayer sessions. Such rituals rebuild psychological safety, fortify morale and transmit ethics of accountability and compassion that sustain revolutionary life.

7. Scale Through Function, Not Size
   Expand only when a circle’s model of care or autonomy functions smoothly. Success should replicate by imitation, not command. Each replication is a cell of sovereignty quietly multiplying.

By cycling through these steps repeatedly, activists generate a dynamic process rather than a fixed organisation. Movement becomes metabolism.

Conclusion

Proletarian solidarity in Iraq cannot rely on borrowed symbols or historical nostalgia. It must rediscover itself through lived cooperation against daily indignities. Repression will remain a constant; so will attempts to divide by sect, tribe or donor affiliation. The antidote lies in the patient chemistry of listening, caring and experimenting within the cracks of crisis.

When households collectively measure blackout minutes, when families share solar repairs across sectarian lines, when diaspora voices echo domestic data into global media, a new legitimacy arises. That legitimacy is not begged from rulers but generated from below. It reveals a moral sovereignty already in practice.

Movements succeed when they create experiences that make the old world intolerable. In Iraq, that means proving every day that unity in survival is more powerful than division in despair. The first sovereign republic of the twenty‑first century might not declare independence through arms but through functioning taps, fair wages and fearless cooperation. Which shared necessity will you transform into the seed of autonomy this week?