2790. Iranian Protests: A Report From Karaj

By Narges Bajgholi, Jacobin, January 4, 2018

December 31 protest in Karaj, Iran

“I’m in university now, but I know it’s a waste of time. I won’t have a job after this. I wouldn’t have a job if I didn’t go to university. I’m just waiting out four years. But there’s no future for me . . . for any of us.”

Mohsen is a twenty-year-old protester in the city of Karaj, about twenty-six miles to the west of Tehran. His mother is a homemaker and his father a small business owner. His older brother, Ali, a twenty-five-year-old mechanical engineer, is unemployed. “Ali has a girlfriend and they want to get married. But where are they going to live? At my parents’ house with all of us there? His girlfriend’s family is also a big one and they live in an apartment, so Ali can’t move in there. Ali is much smarter than me, and if he can’t get a job, then I definitely can’t. That’s why I’m protesting. What future do I have to live for?”

Mohsen’s father, Hossein, a veteran of the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq War, receives a pension and owns a small business with his brother. They live in a three-bedroom apartment in Karaj that Hossein bought before his sons were born. They’re not poor, but “we are living month-to-month. Everything is so expensive now. Especially groceries. We’re lucky that we don’t pay rent. I don’t know how those who pay rent live in this economic environment.”

Hossein took part in the 2009 Green Movement protests and had taken his eldest son, Ali, with him. But his youngest son, Mohsen, had never shown any inclinations toward politics. He didn’t even join his brother and parents in the May 2017 elections, when they cast their votes for Hasan Rouhani, who won reelection with over 70 percent of the vote. “Mohsen spends all his days memorizing the latest scores in the European League games. He knows the lives of those famous soccer stars as if they were his own cousins,” Hossein says laughing. “So when he told me that he was going to join the protesters a couple of days ago, I thought he was joking.”

Fatemeh, Mohsen’s mother, jumps in: “Mohsen and my nephew, Meysam, go to the protests every evening. As a mother I’m worried about them and don’t want them going. But I know they are frustrated. Things have to change. But I don’t want my son and nephew to pay a price for it when the government cracks down.”

Across town, a thirty-five-year-old dentist, Ahmad, drove excitedly in his car, looking for protests. He didn’t want to join them in the streets, he said, but he would honk in unison with their slogans and support them from his car. “It’s unclear what they want. They’re angry, and I get that. But it all seems a bit too chaotic for me. Of course I’m tired of the system too. But I’m not going to join the protests on the streets until it’s a bit clearer what’s being demanded.”

Ahmad continued, “I work at a dental clinic where a lot of our patients are working-class folks. Today I talked with all of my patients about the protests. Some of the families really rely on the cash transfers (yaraneh) the state has given them, and they’re worried Rouhani will take the cash transfers away. The cash transfers aren’t much anymore with the inflation. But still, how will they make ends meet? I feel the weight of the high food prices, and I’m a dentist who drives around in an expensive SUV and owns an apartment. I cannot fathom how my patients live with the prices of everything being so expensive.”

The Wages of Austerity

Six months after Hasan Rouhani won his reelection in a landslide victory, dealing a blow to the hard-line elements of the political establishment, the nationwide protests in Iran that began on December 28, 2017 have spread like wildfire around the country. At the moment, the protests are leaderless, and the slogans vary from demands for economic equity to the freedom of political prisoners to the overthrow of the supreme leader to the downfall of the entire regime.

They are different from the large-scale protests of the 2009 Green Movement. These protests are by and large taking place in cities, towns, and villages that have been on the margins of Iranian politics. Thus far, dozens have been killed and hundreds detained.

The main driving factor of the nationwide protests in Iran is the economy. International sanctions and economic mismanagement have resulted in a dire situation in which the cost of living is extremely high, unemployment remains rampant, and economic inequality is not only widening, but also being flaunted by the rich. Rouhani’s neoliberal economic policies have had a negative effect on the working class. As Djavad Salehi, a prominent Iranian economist points out: “This is the ‘Rouhani effect,’ the result of austerity that brought down inflation but cost job growth, regressive policies such as raising energy prices while letting the value of cash transfers decline, and other policies favoring businesses and the middle class who predominantly reside in the capital.”

Iran’s rate of inflation has fluctuated immensely in the past decade, and now stands at 17 percent. Scandals involving corrupt politicians and businessmen embezzling millions of dollars have erupted over and over again, angering citizens who are living month to month. Although Iran has a generally low rate of poverty, 4.7 percent in 2016-17, unemployment, particularly for youth and women, is above 30 percent. This, coupled with unfulfilled economic expectations — especially regarding the foreign investments that were supposed to flow after the signing of the Iran nuclear deal — were a powder keg. Rouhani and his administration hinged their strategy to improve the economy on sanctions relief and European investment in the country. Given Donald Trump’s promise to “rip up the nuclear deal,” foreign banks are now reticent to fund investment in Iran, and European companies are wary of entering a market that may be sanctioned further by the US Treasury.

And, as Ahmad mentioned, Rouhani’s neoliberal economic policies, which include austerity measures such as limiting cash transfers, have caused anxiety. According to UCLA sociologist Kevan Harris, an extensive national survey in 2016 found that nearly all poor households were linked up with the cash transfers / yaraneh system started by former president Ahmadinejad in 2011, retrieving their funds from ATMs every two months., Rouhani and his economic team have now signaled they will cut back on the program. The new budget promises to cut off even more households from the program, creating further grievances.

Indeed, President Hasan Rouhani’s new proposed budget bill, which he presented to parliament in mid-December, just weeks before the protests broke out, not only targeted cash transfers, but for the first time named a series of conservative clerical and cultural institutions that receive large endowments with little to no oversight. In a speech to parliament, Rouhani attacked these institutions, saying they were ruining the lives of millions of Iranians with their hefty budgets, and that the “financial mafia” in the country would wreak havoc on the country if it was not confronted.

It seems that in the weeks following this speech, hard-liners — especially in the city of Mashhad, one of Iran’s largest cities and also the home to Rouhani’s rivals in the presidential election — triggered protests that they hoped would culminate in the pre-planned annual regime rally of 9 Dey, which celebrates the suppression of the Green Movement. The protests were supposed to be anti-Rouhani — a reaction to the rising cost of eggs, and to rumors that gasoline prices would be doubled in the coming Iranian year.

Yet, the protesters soon turned against the system as a whole. As Rouhani’s first vice-president, Eshaq Jahangiri, stated after the protests began: “The people behind what is taking place think they will be able to harm the government, but when social movements and protests start in the street, those who have ignited them are not always able to control them.”

It’s hard to overstate the factionalism of Iranian politics. Long a feature of the Islamic Republic, differing factions within the Islamic Republic have often publicly fought and debated one another on policies and directions for the country. During Rouhani’s terms as president, the hard-line elements in the regime have attempted to create obstacles for him and his administration at every turn. Especially since their embarrassing loss in the May presidential elections, hard-liners have attacked Rouhani at every opportunity. For his part, Rouhani has attempted to curtail the economic power of hard-line institutions and has sought to push the Revolutionary Guards out of politics, with little success.

In the middle of this fight, former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has made a surprise comeback. In November 2017, Ahmadinejad started issuing provocative statements against corruption and began to ask why, if the country’s money belonged to the people, the government was targeting funding for the people’s welfare. Using social media as his main tool of communication, Ahmadinejad issued threats against Iran’s judiciary, challenged Iran’s supreme leader by not backing down when asked to, and revived the populist message of his presidency, attacking the rich and corrupt. On Wednesday, the commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps announced that “a former leader of the country” had provoked people to protest. Some in Iran are now reporting that Ahmadinejad is being investigated.

In a move typical of the Islamic Republic, once the protests began to gain steam and spread from one location to the next, the regime slowed down internet speeds to disrupt communication and specifically targeted two social media sites that are popular in Iran, Telegram and Instagram. Telegram, in particular, has been heavily targeted, as it’s the largest messaging app in use in Iran today. Unlike the 2009 protests, however, state television — which is mainly in the hands of the hard-liners, and thus against Rouhani — has featured news about the protests and in some cases has even attempted to focus the conversation solely on Rouhani’s economic policies, without mentioning the protest slogans against the supreme leader or the regime as a whole.

Meanwhile, there’s the problem of doctored images and videos taken from earlier protests being passed off as the current Iranian demonstrations. For example, images of Bahranian protests from 2011 have gone viral on social media as footage of protests in Tehran, while photos of wounded or dead protesters from Egypt’s revolution are being passed off as images from Iran.

Fears of Foreign Meddling

Iran has a long history of foreign involvement in its internal affairs. In this increasingly volatile time in Iran’s politics — and an increasingly fraught and bloody period in the modern Middle East — the role of outside forces can’t be ignored. Iran’s supreme leader has predictably fallen back on his favored accusations of outside meddling in Iran’s internal affairs. He has blamed outside money and weapons for these protests, completely ignoring their very real grassroots origins and the grievances of the participants. Nonetheless, it would be naive to think that parties such as Saudi Arabia, Israel, and the United States, and the opposition groups they support, aren’t either involved on the ground or pining to be, in order to swing events in their favor.

“That’s the main reason I’m not participating,” Mohsen’s cousin, Shayda, a thirty-two-year-old architect, said. She partook in the Green Movement protests in 2009, “but this time, something is fishy to me.”

“It’s not fishy,” Mohsen shot back, annoyed. “We’re tired of waiting for the situation to get better. It’s not getting better.”

“But what if foreign parties are involved? Do you want to turn Iran into Syria?!” Shayda asked angrily.

“It’s never the right time. I’m tired of waiting for the right time,” Mohsen responded, as he turned his attention to his cell phone — coordinating with Meysam about when they would go out into the streets tomorrow.

2789. Why Iran Is Protesting?

By Amir Ahmadi Arian, The New York Times, January 2, 2018

Mashhad protest. Photo: Al-Alrabyia

This is the third mass uprising in Iran in my lifetime. In July 1999, the peaceful protest of students over freedom of speech spread into a considerable uprising. In June 2009, people took to streets to demand a recount of disputed votes in the presidential election, which began the Green Movement. Those were both pushes for civil rights, demanding more flexibility and accountability from the government. They took place largely in Tehran, and attracted the middle class and the university educated. Both were peaceful and persistently nonviolent.

The current unrest looks different. So far, the middle class and the highly educated have been more witnesses than participants. Nonviolence is not a sacred principle. The protests first intensified in small religious towns all over the country, where the government used to take its support for granted. Metropolitan areas have so far lagged behind.

Demands like freedom of speech and the rights of women and religious minorities have, for the most part, been either absent or vaguely implied. In one of the rare videos of protesters talking to the news media, they all mention unemployment, inflation and the looting of national wealth: A woman asks President Hassan Rouhani to live on only her salary of $300 a month; a veteran of the Iran-Iraq war says he considers himself among “the forgotten”; an elderly woman talks about her 75-year-old husband, who works long hours to make ends meet. The chants are also different this time. “Where is my vote?” and “Free political prisoners!” dominated in 2009. Today they have been replaced with “No to inflation!” and “Down with embezzlers!” and “Leave the country alone, mullahs.”

Protests over economic grievances are hardly new in Iran: riots over inflation in Islamshahr and Mashad in the 1990s, frequent strikes by the bus drivers union in the 2000s, protests by schoolteachers over unpaid wages. Those voices were barely heard. They came from the bottom of society and were either stifled halfway through by the government or drowned out by civil rights activists with better access to the international media. They have now forced their way to the surface and emerged as a resonant, nationwide cry for justice and equality.

Since the 1979 revolution, Iranian politics has been defined by a split between reformists and principlists, conservatives who say they are devoted to the principles of the revolution. During the 1999 and 2009 uprisings, the protesters enjoyed support from powerful reformists. This time, the dichotomy has been transcended. The demonstrators don’t want support from anyone associated with the status quo, including Mr. Rouhani, the reformist president. No wonder prominent reformist figures, even Ebrahim Nabavi, a dissident journalist living in exile, disparaged the protesters as “the potato-eating mob.”

Iranian economists and intellectuals have long warned that something like this could happen. Even the figures relatively close to the government set off the alarm. In early 2015, Mohsen Renani, professor of economy at the University of Isfahan, wrote an open letter to the Guardian Council, Iran’s highest clerical body and one of the country’s most powerful institutions, expressing deep concern over rising inflation and government incompetence. Mr. Renani predicted that if issues like growing unemployment were not addressed within two years, Iran would face turmoil. Parviz Sedaghat, another prominent political economist, published an article just before the protests broke out discussing how Iran’s economic system has produced first-class and second-class citizens, and warning that some government institutions have become economic conglomerates more powerful than the state. A detailed study published last month by the BBC’s Farsi-language service demonstrated the alarming decline of household income over the past decade. Mr. Rouhani’s austerity budget, submitted to Parliamen

Unlike during the first decades of the post-revolutionary Iran, the rich now heedlessly flaunt their wealth. Until the mid-2000s, the gentlemen’s agreement among the embezzlers held that they keep a modest appearance at home and launder their money in Dubai and Toronto. In the most famous case, Mahmoud Reza Khavari, the former managing director of Bank Melli, made off with hundreds of millions of dollars and became a real estate mogul in Toronto. That generation cared about appearances and never dropped the veneer of fealty to the ideals of the 1979 revolution. Their millennial offspring, on the other hand, hardly care. Wealthy young Iranians act like a new aristocratic class unaware of the sources of their wealth. They brazenly drive Porsches and Maseratis through the streets of Tehran before the eyes of the poor and post about their wealth on Instagram. The photos travel across apps and social media and enrage the hardworking people in other cities. Iranians see pictures of the family members of the authorities drinking and hanging out on beaches around the world, while their daughters are arrested over a fallen head scarf and their sons are jailed for buying alcohol. The double standard has cultivated an enormous public humiliation.

The people today at the top of power pyramid in Iran were involved in the 1979 revolution and witnessed firsthand how, when the shah decided he had “heard the voice of the revolution,” he marked the beginning of his end. That impression has been reinforced by the Arab Spring: Zine el-Abedine Bin Ali of Tunisia and Hosni Mubarak of Egypt tried to appease protesters and were forced from power. Bashar al-Assad of Syria never even recognized the existence of opposition and he remains in office.

Iran has lived through multiple convulsions. The government has mastered the art of survival through crises. They may well survive this round as well but something has fundamentally changed: The unquestioning support of the rural people they relied on against the discontent of the metropolitan elite is no more. Now everyone seems unhappy.

Amir Ahmadi Arian is an Iranian novelist and journalist.

2788. Iran's Streets Again

By Mina Khanlarzadeh, Z-blog, January 4, 2018

In May 2017, President Hassan Rouhani of Iran faced an unusual public confrontation from miners angered by a deadly explosion. Photo: Office of the Iranian Presidency.

Those of us who have followed the news of workers’ strikes in Iran don’t need various kinds of conspiracy theories to interpret the recent protests. An example of such workers’ strikes is this speech by Khadijeh Nissi during the strike of Haft Tapeh Sugar Cane Plantation and Mill Complex about 2 months ago. There Nissi protests against several months of unpaid incomes and she demands that there be structural changes to how their workplace is managed. The conspiracy theories used to interpret the recent protests are typically built on a conservative official Raeisi plotting against the administration of Rouhani, and imperialistic interventions to create chaos in Iran. There has also been a tendency to condescendingly emphasize the increase of the price of eggs as the main trigger of the protests. Thus the protesters are considered to be manipulated against their own political interests while fighting for their rights to reasonably priced eggs.  The conflict between the conservative and the reformist factions of power in Iran is true, and the proxy wars in the region are also factual, and the price of eggs has increased—but the compound of politics and the economy is much more complex than such essays suggest.

A recent earthquake in Kermanshah devastated the local population.  Images of victims of the earthquake exposed to the cold without homes and without access to the basic necessities of life demonstrated the government’s incompetence and corruption to the entire nation; it resulted in the crisis of authority or the crisis of the state as a whole, as Gramsci would have put it. Because of the economic sanctions, it was considered a crime to send aid from the US to the victims of the earthquake in Iran. That’s why any message of solidarity (with the recent protests) from US officials (and other advocates of the sanctions against Iran) are hardly to be taken seriously.  The helplessness of the victims of the earthquake are to be considered amongst the causes that fomented the collective urgency to protest against political-economic corruption, and the collective sense of closeness and mutual compassion.  In addition, the recent earthquakes in several cities brought people into the streets for safety measures. In Iran, taking over public spaces for a particular event often creates a place for protesting against the corrupt sociopolitical conditions.

In a comprehensive essay in Persian, Parviz Sedaghat has explained that structural inflation and structural economic corruption are inherent to Iran’s economic system, and that changing them would require structural reforms that neither of the political factions, reformists or conservatives, show a willingness to conduct while  in power. The accumulation of wealth that has been taking place through the limitation of labour wages and the exploitation of nature, along with the intensification of deregulation policies, have had devastating consequences for the working and underclass sections of the society.  Para-governmental foundations, as actors above the laws of the state, along with budgets dedicated to ideological and geopolitical gains of the government, are part of the structural corruption.  Protesters have targeted the Iranian government’s “humanitarian” interventions in the region in their slogans such as “leave Syria alone, give Iran some compassion,” (soorieh ro raha kon, fekri be haal-e maa kon).  While nationalist views (which happen to echo Iran’s governmental discourses) explain geopolitical expenditures through discussions about national security and Iran’s self defense in a war-torn region (and the importance of war against terror)—the practical experience of marginalized people as a result of these expenditures is poverty and the inaccessibility of resources. As if it is the height of luxury for people of a war-torn region to call for anything other than security.

For many of us the current protests began with a video of a girl who removed her headscarf in a solo-protest against forced hijab, while at Enqelab (Revolution) square in Tehran. Several Iranian social media commentators called her Iran’s statue of freedom.  It is important to consider all the components of inflation, economic corruption, social-political repression as the important factors against which people have recently protested.  This is the reason why one slogan keeps being repeated in various cities:  “employment, bread, freedom,” (kaar, naan, aazaadi).  It is ironic, therefore, that many commentators only emphasize inflation as the cause of the recent protests, while the president of Iran Ayatollah Hasan Rouhani has stated: “People aren’t in the streets merely for financial issues. They are not there only for bread, water, and money.  They also want us to open up the space for them.”

The statement of several independent workers’ organizations in support of the street protests explains the reason for the recent demonstrations as follows:

“Today, we see the eruption of the accumulation of working class people’s rage due to, on the one hand, looting and defalcation of milliards by highest officials, people, and financial institutions that are related to the government and, on the other hand, poverty and misery of millions of people, unemployment of millions of workers and youths, the beatings of street vendors and the killings of Kurdish koolbars [porters who carry commodities on their backs commuting between Iran and Iraq border], the imposition of wages several times below poverty level on workers, and the  imprisonment and torture in response to any demands of social justice and freedom.”

Reformist discourses consider electoral politics as the only venue to relatively liberalize the state’s domestic policies and to pave the road for negotiations with the US for removing or lessening the economic sanctions against Iran.  While the reformists’ claims as being the only faction of the government in favor of nuclear negotiations is not entirely true, their more liberal sociopolitical policies (compared to the more conservative section of the government) is considered legitimate in Iran. Siding with the reformists is to favor the strengthening of liberal values. People legitimately find the space created by rupture between reformists and conservatives as a safer place for a critical stance towards the status quo.  Their demands, however, soon surpass what reformists are willing to undertake both ideologically and pragmatically.  Nevertheless, reformist discourses similar to conservative factions of the government are dedicated to full deregulation (neoliberalization) of the economy regardless of the impoverishing repercussions of such policies.  Furthermore, the redistributive demands and policies are considered to belong to a bygone era and such demands are relegated to society’s false consciousness.

The reformist thinker Abbas Abdi has demanded that the Iranian government implements harsh tactics against the protesters, suggesting that the protesters are similar to the MKO armed activists of the early 80s and that they are organized by the revenge sensibilities of the governments of the region.  Abdi has asked why the Iranian government was harsh on the MKO armed activists in the 80s but is not harsh on the current protesters.  Another reformist thinker Mohammadreza Jalaeipour has suggested that political expression must be articulated through the ballots and not the streets.  He has suggested further that there cannot possibly be a space for politics now given that it is not time for elections.  Ebrahim Nabavi, a reformist satirist, tweeted:  “the movement of potato eaters is about to join the masses’ lines , […] bring your red baskets […].”  The term potato eaters refer to the impoverished neighborhoods that Ahmadinejad had tried to manipulate by distributing potatoes among them.  He calls protesters potato eaters given that the protesters have economic concerns, and he considers them manipulated perhaps because they’re not in the streets for the political benefits of the reformers.     

The current protests do not enunciate their politics through the language of one of the factions of government. One of the slogans has been: “reformists, conservatives, the story is over,” (eslaahtalab, osoulgara, dige tamoome maajera).  The social class contrast that is made between the current protests (as working class) and the 2009 Green movement (as middle class) is groundless. The most active areas in the recent protests however, have been cities and villages long treated as peripheral. The prospect of a movement demanding transformation towards social justice, not expressing their demands in a state-oriented language nor through the discourses of the reformists, has horrified commentators who were formerly proponents of reform in Iran.

There is a joke in Persian that goes as follows:  a man, mourning the death of his friend, is crying at his friend’s grave, when the dead friend suddenly emerges from the grave alive and well and and asks for a drink.  The mourning man is horrified by the return of his dead friend, hits him on his head with a shovel, and sends him back to the world of the dead.  The reaction to the recent protests in Iran by many progressive activists, who cry at the grave of meaningful change and transformation, has been similar to that of the mourning friend. Horrified by the class consciousness of the slogans shouted in the streets, and by the unfamiliarity of the political expressions which are not articulated in the language of the reformist faction in power in Iran, some political commentators have tried to hit these latest aspirations for change on the head in an attempt to keep the status quo intact in fears of dangers.

The statement of several independent workers’ organizations states: “this time around it is us, the workers and people of Iran, who, with solidarity and coalition and continuation of our protests, will set our own destiny.” It remains to be seen how these protests continue, but it is plausible to think that we are watching the beginning of a collective movement for meaningful structural transformations in Iran.

2787. The Iranian People’s Uprising

By Reza Fiyouzat, The North Star, January 3, 2018

Unemployment among younger Iranians is estimated to be as high as 40%. 

Starting on Thursday, December 28, spontaneous demonstrations broke out in different towns and cities across Iran. The protests broke out over economic issues such as high inflation and high youth unemployment, with the trigger being the sudden hike in the price of eggs and chicken. The protesters, however, soon took up more politically oriented slogans, attacking the leaders of the regime with slogans such as, “People are begging and Mullahs rule like they’re gods!”

Regardless of how long these protests last and what the outcomes may be, these protests have proven once again that the Iranian regime is fundamentally incapable of addressing people’s most basic social and economic needs, and that is why for forty years it has depended on brute force to control the population. But, rule by brute force alone cannot last forever.

Deep-structure poverty has once again pushed the population over the edge. This uprising did not just happen out of the blue, though; it is the culmination of many smaller and more localized protests over a variety of social issues that have sent people to the streets in the past year.

But, first let’s see what has pushed people in Iran to take to the street once again, on a mass scale, across the country, in big cities just as in small towns; towns that most western readers have never heard of, nor will ever remember.

From a World Bank study for 2016:

“The Iranian government has implemented a major reform of its subsidy program on key staples such as petroleum products, water, electricity and bread, which has resulted in a moderate improvement in the efficiency of expenditures and economic activities.” In plain English, “efficiency of expenditures” means the Iranian government is cutting down on how much its social welfare programs actually provide social welfare. 

The report continues, “The overall indirect subsidies, which were estimated to be equivalent to 27 percent of GDP in 2007/2008 (approximately US$77.2 billion), have been replaced by a direct cash transfer program to Iranian households. The second phase of the subsidy reform plan began in Spring 2014 which involves a more gradual fuel price adjustment than previously envisaged and the greater targeting of cash transfers to low-income households. Around 3 million high-income households have already been removed from the cash transfer recipient list. As a result, the expenditures of the Targeted Subsidies Organization (TSO) is estimated to have declined to 3.4 percent of GDP in 2016 from 4.2 percent in 2014.”

International finance is clearly only too happy to see Iranian government impoverish its own population, to the benefit of international financiers. An A-plus for Iranian government’s efforts to cut the helping hand it gives to the most needy Iranians, reducing such help from 27% of GDP in 2008 all the way down to 3% by 2016.

In other words, Iran follows an extreme neoliberal, shock-and-awe kind of capitalism.

Official figures for poverty in Iran are not reliable, but occasionally some reports are produced that can shed some light on the extreme levels of poverty suffered by the people. One report puts the figures for urban poverty at between 44% and 55%. The report “was published at a conference organized by Tehran University and the United Nations Population Fund and made public by the Islamic Students News Agency shortly thereafter,” according to Borgen magazine.

Things are so bleak that even regime’s top figures occasionally let slip the depth of the problem. In September of 2017, the head of Imam Khomeini Relief Foundation, Parviz Fattah, said (link in Farsi) that between 10 to 12 million Iranians live in absolute poverty. The numbers of those who live around the poverty level is obviously a lot higher, reaching 40% of households according to some reports.

A telling figure is the following: Iranian government’s own estimate for a minimum necessary income is about $1,000 per month for a family of three. Despite this figure, the government’s announced minimum monthly wage for workers has been set at about a third of that figure!

Coupled with increases in austerity measures are high unemployment levels as well as inflation figures in double digits (at least 15% inflation on average, according to most conservative figures, and in some months or years, or in product-specific markets by as much as 30-40%). Youth unemployment is also at high levels, with some reports estimating that in 2017 youth unemployment reached just above 30%. With such high unemployment rates and high inflation, and in view of the fact that for the past ten years government assistance to the needy has steadily dropped, it is not shocking that the initial trigger for the protests in Mashhad was over a 40% rise in the price (in just a few days) of eggs and chicken. That was on top of an inflation and poverty trend that has been ceaseless for the past four decades. “Enough is enough!” people are saying.

The reader must understand that most of the non-state part of the economy in Iran is based in the bazaar, the merchant class. Not industrial-productive capital, but merchant capital has been dominating the non-state and non-oil sector since the onset of the rule of theocracy. When the merchant class is the hegemonic economic bloc, that means most capital accumulation occurs through buying and selling, not through producing commodities. As a result of this, more and more products are imported (under full state monopoly) for as cheaply as possible and sold at profits that can come faster than if the production process were to take place internally with all its related costs and complications; including, most importantly, labor conflicts and class struggle at the point of production that such capitalist ventures would have to deal with.

The reader must also consider the population growth in Iran. In 1979, at the time of the revolution, Iran’s population was about 35 million. Today’s population is nearly 80 million. Simultaneously, the proportion of rural-to-urban population has reversed. In 1979, almost two-thirds of the population lived in rural areas, whereas now three-quarters of the population live in urban areas. This huge mass movement to the cities is partly responsible for the urban poverty levels. Other factors include the mercantile nature of the dominant capitalist class, which is incapable of creating enough employment; state policies that prioritize spending on security forces and military expenditures abroad; and corruption. 

In a country with such a highly oppressive state formation as in Iran, class struggle is too intense to render dependence on industrial production the main source of capital accumulation. Hence, the international capital’s reluctance to invest in industrial production in Iran, even after the lifting of the sanctions in the wake of the nuclear deal reached between Iran and the western powers. So, not only are the local capitalists unwilling to invest in productive capacities in any meaningful magnitude, Rouhani government’s nuclear deal with the western powers has not succeeded in attracting any direct foreign investments either.

A basic feature of a rentier state, such as the one in Iran, is that, depending on the character of the state, different layers and echelons of the economically powerful attach themselves to the state. During the Pahlavi dynasty, the state attracted the industrial capitalists, at the expense of the mercantile classes, who were more attached to the clerical classes. The founding father of the Pahlavi dynasty, Reza Shah, is known in Iranian history as being particularly harsh on the religious establishment. (His most egregious sin against the religious establishment was the forceful banning of hijab for women.)

So, the fact that here and there we have heard slogans in support of Reza Shah does not shock me. People go by what they know from their own history. If people see that the ruling mullahs are the most corrupt, the most thuggish, the most brutal, the most miserly when it comes to helping the neediest, and the most lascivious when it comes to sexual matters while prescribing piousness to others — in short, when you are ruled by the most oppressive and violently corrupt bunch of people, and you know from your history that back a hundred years ago, Reza Shah was showing the clerical classes the door, well, you can’t be blamed for thinking that that guy, Reza Shah, had figured out something about the mullahs that Iranians should have paid more attention to.

All these historical and economic conditions are framed by a state formation that allows for no dissent, no independent labor unions, no criticism from the people of anybody in the officialdom, a state formation that considers women as half worth men, a state formation that insists it is indeed ruling on behalf of an absent Imam, the Twelfth Imam of a particular Shiite sect, Imam Mehdi the Absent, and by virtue of that, this regime claims to be ruling over Iran on behalf of God. Any criticism of the religious leaders is an affront to God, and is an actual crime in our country’s criminal code: any protest against the government can be labeled, “Mohaarebeh baa Khoda”, literally meaning, battling against God.

So, if the system is so oppressive that it does not allow for any legal way of petitioning the state for grievances, what are you supposed to do? Commit suicide so as not to inconvenience the state? Would any western reader do that? Then why does it seem so outrageous that the people in Iran would take to the streets?

All the varied social pressures listed above have produced almost constant social unrest and protests throughout the past year alone. In 2017, we saw the mass hunger strike of political prisoners, protests over extreme environmental pollution, intensified labor protests, and Kurdish protests over the killing of border porters who carry goods across the border on their back.

As has been its folly, the “anti-imperialists” of the western left wasted no time siding with the theocracy; once again.

Some have pointed to particular slogans raised by the people to tarnish the Iranian people’s intentions.

One slogan they single out is: “Not Gaza, Not Lebanon; I give my life for Iran!” The “anti-imperialists” point to this slogan as proof of Iranian people’s lack of “internationalism”. In their haste to reach already-cooked up conclusions, they miss deeper insights packed in that slogan. This slogan is a negation and a street critique of the regime’s rhetoric about its supposed support for the Palestinian and the Lebanese masses, whereas in reality all the Iranian regime has ever done is to use the miserable social conditions in Palestine and Lebanon to advance its own expansionist designs in the region.

In that slogan people are saying to the regime: “We see through your deceit and we are not fooled! You want us to go fight your foreign wars, but we will bring the fight to you here at home.” This is similar to what anti-war activists in the U.S. would say back during the U.S. invasion of Vietnam for example. So, in fact, this slogan is a shout of solidarity with Palestinian and Lebanese masses. People in Iran are sending a message to the Palestinian and Lebanese masses that they, the Iranian people, are working to remove one layer of oppression from the backs of Palestinian and Lebanese people, who are being used by the opportunistic and expansionist designs of the Iranian regime: a regime that has done nothing for the Arab masses other than to slaughter their Sunni brothers and sisters en masse, in tens of thousands at a time, using its sectarian Shiite militia forces, which the Iranian regime has unleashed on the peoples of Iraq and Syria.

It is incredible how quick and easy it is for some in the western left, as soon as a movement arises in some forsaken third world country, to display the knee-jerk reaction of playing judge and jury, or worse, playing self-assigned professors grading freshman essays, with the red pen at the ready to mark the slightest instance of a comma splice, word choice error or any slips in the use of transitions; all the while, completely ignoring the communicative content of the paper.

The communicative content of the uprising of the Iranian people is very simple: People want basic rights, and they want the state to stop incinerating national riches to mass slaughter people in Syria and Iraq and elsewhere; instead, Iranians want their national resources to be spent on providing for the people in Iran who live in abject poverty. Is that not something people in the U.S. would also protest for?

People in Iran are taking the matters into their own hands. Can western leftists criticizing our people do the same for their societies, instead of giving pass/fail grades on how Iranian people determine their history? Can these western false socialists even organize a few hundred people to clear the trash from empty neighborhood lots to start community gardens, so that the communities that are struggling would have food security so that they are better able to put up a struggle? Can they organize a soup kitchen in a needy neighborhood in their town?

But, when people in Iran take to the streets, knowing that the consequences of their protest actions could include arrest, torture and death, these same so-called socialists, instead of expressing solidarity, look for any and all manner of shortcomings exhibited by the newly born movement, just so they can relieve themselves of any responsibility of performing any action in support of people rising up. Shame! Shame! Shame!

The Iranian youth who have risen up to say “Enough is enough!” are the children of a revolution that was hanged, drawn and quartered by a most violent yet well-organized counterrevolution. This younger generation is seeing their lives and prospects for a decent future and their integrity stolen, and they are standing up to this historical theft by the most parasitic layer of our society: the mullahs. The clergy is the most unproductive leeches of our society, yet their sons, in upper-class neighborhoods of Tehran and other big cities, own more Bugatti’s and Lamborghini’s per capita than you’d see in the streets Monaco. Where did all that wealth come from? It was all stolen from our national coffers, and the youth of our country have risen up to stop the thievery.

2786. How the Iranian Protests Began

By Thomas Erdbrink, The New York Times, January 2, 2018

The Mashhad protest on december 28, 2017

TEHRAN — Antigovernment protests roiled Iran on Tuesday, as the death toll rose to 21 and the nation’s supreme leader blamed foreign enemies for the unrest. But the protests that have spread to dozens of Iranian cities in the past six days were set off by miscalculations in a long-simmering power struggle between hard-liners and reformers.

By Tuesday, Iran’s leaders could no longer ignore the demonstrations and felt compelled to respond publicly. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader, blamed outside “enemies” but did not specify whom. President Hassan Rouhani, a moderate, appealed for calm while saying the protesters had a right to be heard.

But the anger behind the protests was directed against the entire political establishment.

While the protests that swept Iran in 2009 were led by the urban middle class, these protests have been largely driven by disaffected young people in rural areas, towns and small cities who have seized an opening to vent their frustrations with a political elite they say has hijacked the economy to serve its own interests.

Unemployment for young people — half the population — runs at 40 percent, analysts believe. Meanwhile, Iran has spent billions of dollars abroad in recent years to extend its influence in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon.

The initial catalyst for the anger appears to have been the leak by President Rouhani last month of a proposed government budget. For the first time, secret parts of the budget, including details of the country’s religious institutes, were exposed.

Iranians discovered that billions of dollars were going to hard-line organizations, the military, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, and religious foundations that enrich the clerical elite. At the same time, the budget proposed to end cash subsidies for millions of citizens, increase fuel prices and privatize public schools.

The leak appeared to be intended to tap popular resentment, and it worked. Telegram, a social media messaging app used by over 40 million Iranians, blew up with angry comments.

“It made me angry,” said Mehdi, 33, from Izeh, a town in Iran’s poor Khuzestan Province, who asked that his family name not be used out of fear of retaliation. “There were all these religious organs that received high budgets, while we struggle with constant unemployment.”

Last Thursday, hard-liners tried to take back the initiative and embarrass the president, staging a demonstration in the holy city Mashhad, where hundreds chanted slogans against the weak economy and shouted “death to the dictator” and “death to Rouhani.”

An Iranian security official confirmed that the Friday prayer leader of the city, Ahmad Alamolhoda, a prominent hard-liner, had been summoned by Iran’s National Security Council to explain his role in the demonstration.

Videos of the gathering then went viral on social media, where people had for weeks been heatedly discussing the proposed budget. Frustrated Iranians elsewhere were emboldened.

In reaction to the protest in Mashhad, Hesamodin Ashna, a trusted adviser to President Rouhani, sent out a Twitter message on Friday, highlighting “the unbalanced distribution of the budget.”

Iran’s military forces, active in several countries in the Middle East, saw their budget increase to $11 billion, a nearly 20 percent rise, he said. The budget for representatives of the supreme leader in universities was increased. An institute run by the hard-line cleric Mohammad Taghi Meshbah-Yazdi was to receive eight times as much as a decade ago.

Online anger reached a boiling point.

For decades, those living in Iran’s provincial towns and villages were regarded as the backbone of the country’s Islamic regime. They tended to be conservative, averse to change and pious followers of the sober Islamic lifestyle promoted by the state.

In less than a decade, all that has changed. A 14-year drought has emptied villages, with residents moving to nearby cities where they often struggle to find jobs. Access to satellite television and, more important, the mobile internet has widened their world.

“On Instagram, I saw a picture of a woman in Tehran with her S.U.V., who wrote she spends $3,000 on her pets each month,” Mehdi said. “A person can live here with that money for a year. I got angry.”

His city, Izeh, was famous for being home to many who had been exiled by the hard-line judiciary. “Izeh has changed a lot over the years — more people, but no entertainment, not even a cinema,” he said. “Many people use drugs.”

On Friday, protests broke out in Izeh. The government news agency said two protesters were killed there by security forces.

In Tehran, the capital, Mohammad Alinejad had been sitting behind the wheel of his dilapidated Peugeot when he heard of the protests in Mashhad. “I was cheering,” he said. “I want these clerics to go. They have destroyed my life.”

He had been hit by shrapnel during the eight-year Iran-Iraq war, and a piece had remained stuck in his head. His status as a handicapped veteran exempts his son from the mandatory 24-month military service, but when he tried to get the exemption papers he got stuck in a bureaucratic merry-go-round that is all too common for Iranians.

“I had to pay bribes, or else no one would help me, and in the end we didn’t get anywhere,” he said.

He blamed the clerics for everything: privatization, corruption, inequality and long days with low pay.

“I don’t care if our country becomes the next Iraq or Syria,” he said, “but I’m so frustrated with them, that I just want them gone and we can think about the consequences tomorrow.”

In Qom, the center of Iran’s theological educational institutes, one cleric said he was worried about the level of anger.

“People are angry when they see how much money some clerical institutions and Friday prayer leaders are being paid in the budget,” the cleric, Fazel Meybodi, said. “Many of them are old and have no appeal to the youths. They must be changed.”

As protests took off in about 40 cities across the country, Tehran remained largely quiet. In 2009, over three million people took to the streets disputing the elections.

But this time, many said they feared the raging, leaderless protests.

“They are angry, and have a right to be, but there is just nothing more, no plan for the day after,” said Hamidreza Faraji, a cosmetic and honey salesman who struggles to live a decent life.

“We can’t keep on going on to change our leaders,” he said, standing in his shop, which like others nearby was empty of customers. No one he knew wanted Iran to become the next Syria or Iraq in the chaos that might follow, he explained.

“Many of the protesters shout, “Neither Gaza nor Lebanon, I will give my life for Iran,” Mr. Faraji said. “But we have entered this bad game in the region, so now we have to finish it. Just like we have no other option but to live with our leaders. Unless there is a better alternative.”