🚩 Mud on the Head; From Forced Individualism to Organized Struggle

▫️These days, a few videos are circulating on social media (Iran) that are not easy to watch. We see people smearing mud on their heads and faces; a man has placed large bowls of mud in front of him, smashes it on his head, and speaks of the high cost of living, poverty, youth addiction, empty tables, ashamed fathers, and mothers who are helpless in providing for their family's most basic needs. In other videos, the same act is repeated, with variations in expression and setting. Our first reaction might be one of pity, or anger at a situation that has brought a person to such a point; but if we want to grasp the deeper meaning of these images, we must step back from our emotional reaction for a moment and look at the act itself. Why does a person pour mud on their own head? Why is something that should fall upon power, falling upon humanity itself?

▫️In this inversion, a part of our social condition is revealed. The individual experiences a social problem as a personal suffering. A father ashamed of his inability to provide for his family, a young person who considers unemployment, addiction, and a lack of future a personal failure, A mother who blames her own inadequacy for her inability to provide for the household, and a worker who works harder every day and grows poorer every day, are both confronted with a situation whose source lies in social life, but the cost of which is placed on the individual as a personal failure. This is what we called "compulsory individuality": Not individuality in the sense of human independence and self-activity, but a situation in which social relations compel a person to experience what is the product of a social relationship as a personal misfortune and failure. Inflation becomes a private matter, unemployment, debt, and the inability to provide for one's family become private, and even shame itself becomes private. Society is social, but its failure is attributed to the individual.

▫️From here, individual protest arises. One person pours gasoline on their head, another screams, another speaks of an empty plate, rent, and debt. These are not just scattered and meaningless reactions; they are signs of a real pressure that can no longer remain silent. But there is a distance between these individual protests and their transformation into social power.

The fact that millions of people live in similar situations does not, in itself, make them a social force. A shared experience can remain as millions of private experiences; people may share a common pain, but each may carry their own misery separately. The issue lies in this gap: between shared suffering and shared power.

🔵 This is where the historically necessary work begins: transforming what has been experienced as individual compulsion into a social understanding of the situation. The issue is not to scream the suffering louder, but to make it possible for people to realize that what has befallen them is not their private fate. A father who is unable to provide for his family is not merely a failed father; he is part of a class that sells its labor power under specific relations to earn a living and, despite participating in social production, has less and less access to the means of life each day. A young person who sees their future as lost is not just a victim of a personal failure; their life has been shaped by specific social conditions. Unemployment is not merely the absence of a job, but part of a system that commodifies labor power and ties the possibility of life to purchasing power. This shift in perspective, from "I am trapped" to "we are trapped in a specific social relationship," is a decisive point; because what was experienced individually here becomes a common matter.

▫️But the common is not built only by recognizing a shared pain. If people only know they have a similar suffering, they have not yet moved beyond compulsory individuality. The common becomes a social force when it is realized in common work; in connection, trust, cooperation, and organization. Collective work in this sense is not something imposed from the outside on people's suffering; it is a way to break the very separation created by the existing relations between individuals. Organizing, likewise, is not just about creating an organization or following a political line; it is about building the collective capacity to intervene in the relations that shape life. Isolated experiences must be able to become collective knowledge, collective knowledge must become cooperation, and cooperation must become the real ability to act.

Therefore, an absolute wall should not be drawn between individual protest and organized struggle. Individual protest can be a sign of something that has not yet found its collective form.

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