Kayhan Valadbaygi in Phenomenal World:
The recent unrest in Iran marks the fourth major uprising since 2017.1 Sparked by merchants in Tehran who closed their stores in protest at a sharp drop in the currency, the ferment soon spread across the nation, drawing in a wide cross-section of people—from students to business owners to the urban poor—who clashed with the increasingly repressive state authorities. Over the next three weeks, the turmoil only seemed to escalate: an internet blackout, a mounting death toll, apparent penetration of the protests by Mossad, threats of bombing and regime change from Washington.
And then, in a matter of days, the momentum ebbed away. The government appeared to regain control, using what one analyst described as a “systematic strategy to encircle and fatigue the protest movement.” For now, it seems the clerical establishment will remain in place, since the domestic opposition is not strong enough to dislodge it and the US is unwilling to risk a major intervention.
Yet the crackdown has done nothing to address the origins of the upheaval, which lie in the country’s political economy and social structure. These have been reshaped, in recent decades, by two primary forces: the neoliberalization of the post-revolutionary state since the early 1990s, and the dramatic expansion of international sanctions since 2012. This has reconfigured Iran’s patterns of accumulation, allowing a narrow set of actors—primarily the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and the religious-revolutionary foundations—to consolidate power.
For everyone else, conditions have deteriorated. Inequality and poverty are on the rise. Casualization and wage repression are ubiquitous. Welfare has been eroded, the middle class has been hollowed out, and a growing stratum of educated youth are unemployed or underemployed. The result is a simmering crisis of legitimacy, which now routinely erupts into the open. In what follows, I will show how deep political-economic transformations created the context for the events of this month, and interrogate their meaning for the future of the Iranian regime. Roiled from within and menaced from without, what are its chances of survival?
More here.
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