Author: A member of Plan C Manchester
I write this from an autonomist Marxist tradition, as someone who does not pray, during a month that belongs to others.
The month of Muharram, which opens the Islamic calender, begins as a change in the street: black cloth, gathered bodies, the rhythm of lament; the rising cries carrying a memory of martyrdom that is renewed every year. This is not merely spectacle. To commemorate Ashura, occurring on the tenth day of Muhurram, is to return to a foundational struggle, to grieve for those who sacrificed all but their dignity, and to know that to defy tyranny is a duty. This year, for those observing in the UK, Ashura falls on the 26th of June. In the cities where it is marked, the streets will already have been changing.
Much of the white secular left, by inherited reflex, too often reads Muslim life as conservative when it is principled, private when it is collective, passive when it is patient, detached when it is political. And in this moment it has been increasingly outpaced by the seriousness of organising within the Muslim community, for Palestine, Sudan, and beyond; organising that did not wait for the movement left’s permission to begin. This essay is in part an attempt at one small correction, in one specific corner: an attempt to meaningfully understand the tragedy of Karbala, and what an autonomist tradition of refusal has to recognise in it. Ashura is a day that carries significance for all Muslims, but marking the events of Karbala is principally a Shia inheritance. Every effort has been made to avoid collapsing the story of Karbala into autonomism, or Marxism into Islamic theology; instead the aim here is understand the tragedy of Karbala and autonomist refusal on their own terms before asking what they share.
The Refusal of Bay’ah
Power, when it cannot rest on its own legitimacy, asks for a pledge.
In 680 CE, Yazid ibn Muʿawiya inherited the Umayyad caliphate from his father, against the principle that succession should come through consultation. His reign was, even by the standards of his own court, an exercise in corruption, and open violation of other Islamic norms. In the crisis that followed, and in an effort to legitimise his rule, Yazid demanded that the Prophet Muhammad’s grandson, Imam Husayn ibn Ali, pledge him allegiance, on threat of his life. Husayn refused.
Imam Husayn left Medina with his family and a small group of companions, seventy two fighters amongst them, alongside women and children. He had been invited by the people of Kufa to come and lead them, but before he arrived the rising was crushed and his envoy was killed. When his caravan was intercepted on the plain of Karbala, in what is now central Iraq, by an Umayyad army numbering in the thousands, Imam Husayn told his men they were free to leave under cover of night, that their opponents wanted only him, and that they should take his family to safety. Almost none did. Access to water was cut off by Yazid’s army on the seventh day of the month of Muharram. On the tenth, Ashura, the men fought and were killed one by one, Imam Husayn last. The women and the surviving children, among them his sister Zaynab, were taken captive to the court of Yazid in Damascus, where Zaynab gave a sermon that turned the massacre into testimony and refused to mourn quietly: ‘you shall never be able to obliterate our mention’. Imam Husayn’s “No” survives the massacre.
Over a millennium later the event still lives for Shia as a question that returns every year, in this month, on the same day, of the Islamic calendar. Importantly, rather than admired from a distance, Imam Husayn’s refusal is a question to be answered now: Where is Yazid today? What does refusing him look like in this particular year?
The Autonomist ‘No’
From a different ground, far more recently, a Western political tradition arrived at something close to the same insight: that power depends on the cooperation of the people it rules, and that withholding it (what this tradition calls the strategy of refusal), is itself resistance, rather than its prelude.
It first found a name in the factories of northern Italy, where militant workers were already refusing in their own way: walking out without the unions’ approval, slowing the line, withholding the willingness their bosses depended on. Mario Tronti and thinkers around him drew from this a conclusion the Communist Party had missed; the workers were not a passive mass waiting to be organised and led, but instead, their refusal was already political and a form of power.
The insight went deeper than resistance, as Tronti argued that it is labour’s refusal that forces Capital to adapt, instead of the traditional understanding that it is Capital that develops while labour reacts. The “no” comes first and Capital is always responding to it. And since Capital had long spread beyond the factory, into the home, care work, culture and daily life (the social factory), refusal could happen anywhere Capital reached. Typically we think of the ‘working class’ as a group defined by income or job type or status. Instead, under Tronti, it is a collective ‘we’ made by its refusal of the role Capital assigns it.
But the factory was never the first site of refusal: Marxist-feminists like Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Silvia Federici showed that women had long refused the unwaged work of the home, that is, the care, the cooking, the holding-together that capital depends on and yet work that is unpaid. Antonio Negri argued that because Capital now touches every part of life, refusal had to become exodus, meaning the building of lives and institutions that Capital cannot fully capture, from the mosque and the mutual aid network, to the social centre, the autonomous workplace, and the community that sustains itself on its own terms. John Holloway began with something more elemental: the scream, the “no” that comes before argument, the refusal of indignity the body knows before any theory gives it a name.
Yazid and Capital
Yazid did not need Imam Husayn dead, he only needed Husayn’s pledge, because his rule could not produce its own legitimacy. Beyond your labour, Capital needs your willingness to give it, and depends on it just as Yazid depended on the pledge. Karbala poses its question again every year — where is Yazid today? — and it is here that an autonomist politics of refusal might offer a contemporary language for the same question, one that can be answered concretely, against state and Capital.
Both these refusals know their own risks of being neutralised. The autonomist tradition has watched refusal be absorbed back into demand and concession, the strike becoming the wage settlement, the militant becoming the negotiator. Ali Shariati, the Iranian sociologist who died two years before the revolution, called the parallel risk within Shi’ism the slide from Red Shi’ism into Black Shi’ism: the ritualistic, institutional, clericalised, statist form that turns Imam Husayn’s blood into pacifying tears. Hamid Dabashi, writing more recently in Shi’ism: A Religion of Protest, identifies the same diagnosis from within Shi’ism: that such a religion, once becoming an established power, settles into ritual without consequence, betraying its own structure. The mourning continues. The question stops being asked.
Where is Yazid Today?
This year once again, the demand for submission, is at its most bare in Gaza. The starving of a population, the bombing of hospitals, the killing of children; the order operating as intended, securing the flow of arms and investment. Empire arms it, and Capital profits from it. The Palestinians, refusing to leave their land and organising in the rubble, are answering Yazid’s demand the way Imam Husayn answered: by refusing the legitimacy the killers depend on, even at the cost of their lives. In Sudan the demand is just as ruthless and far less seen. The Rapid Support Forces, armed by the UAE and bankrolled through gold whose markets run through Dubai and London, continue to clear populations to extract what lies underneath them. Meanwhile, the Sudanese resistance committees in displacement do what the Kufan’s did not: keep organising as the killing reaches them under siege, displacement, and famine. But these are just flashpoints. The same operation runs through Congo, Kashmir, Yemen, and West Papua, wherever Capital needs land cleared, resources extracted, or people made compliant.
Here in Britain, the same demand reaches you. Capital that sells smartphones from stolen cobalt, extracts rent, suppresses wages, and disciplines labour into a willingness it then calls free. The demand is for consent to the state, while Prevent surveils the mosque, DWP sanctions the claimant, the Public Order Act criminalises the protester, the asylum regime drowns the migrant, and the climate regime burns the world for the same reasons Capital has always burned things. These are the same demand for the same legitimacy, asked of different bodies by the same actors. They are also the terrains in which refusal is already lived day to day, from tenants’ unions and rent strikes to claimant organising and disability resistance, unionised workplaces, abolitionist work, organising in and around the mosque, direct action against arms factories that the state now prosecutes as terrorism, and mutual aid networks holding together what the state has chosen to abandon.
This Muharram, Karbala’s question returns: what is being asked of you, your labour, your consent, and your willingness to legitimate what dominates, and what it would mean to refuse to give it?
Mourning and Refusal
Imam Husayn was, in worldly terms, defeated. The defeat became the foundation of a politics that has lasted fourteen hundred years and has not, despite every effort, been domesticated. Karbala’s memory long predates the work of Tronti, Federici, or Holloway; without quite knowing it, the autonomist tradition has been working alongside something older and more practised than itself.
Indeed, the secular left has pushed on without much of what Muharram carries. A movement that lives for the next campaign or election has little to fall back on when the campaign fails or the election is lost; it scatters, demoralised, and is built again from near scratch. Muharram does the reverse by gathering a community around a defeat, grieved in the body, with recognition that this is the same grief a person’s grandparents knew and their grandchildren will know. That is why the grief is not sentiment but strategy, since a “we” founded on a defeat cannot be undone by one, nor can it come apart the moment victory doesn’t come. The secular left is not unaware of this, producing what Walter Benjamin named the tradition of the oppressed, the idea of keeping alive the dead and the defeats that power seeks to bury, with its own commemorations and martyrs. But theory is not practice, and a commemoration observed is not grief lived; none of it has been held across the generations the way Karbala has, annually for fourteen hundred years.
Every day is Ashura, every land is Karbala. The question Imam Husayn refused to answer with a pledge is the question Capital and the state continue to ask of every body they can reach.
Two refusals, different in soil and orientation, learning each other’s names.
