Iranian Clericalist Regime: Shaken by Mass Protests

by Gerry Foley / July 2009

After a week of massive protests and street confrontations, the Iranian government appeared to gain firm control of the streets in Tehran and other large cities. To achieve control, the government appeared to rely mainly on the Basij, a large volunteer militia force. Reports from bloggers in Tehran claimed that the Basij who suppressed the protest demonstrations were largely unemployed youths from backward rural areas that had been highly paid to do their work.

There are reports that protests are continuing in non-confrontational ways—buyers’ strikes, workers’ stayaways from work, chanting from rooftops at night, turning on car lights, the releasing of balloons in the green color of the opposition. But such actions are invisible to the outside world given the tight censorship the regime has imposed on newspapers and even the new electronic media.

The main bourgeois opposition candi-date in the presidential elections, Mir Hossein Moussavi, has announced that he is applying for permits to hold any further demonstrations. That could reduce his protest to a formal one, since there is no indication that the authorities will issue any permits for street protests. He has also said that the struggle can no longer be carried on in the streets. That has shifted the attention of the commentators in the capitalist press toward rumors of a behind-the-scenes struggle among the ruling clerics.

It is likely that a layer of the rulers of the theocratic state have been frightened by the breadth and depth of the protests and fear that the Islamic Republic cannot be continued indefinitely in its present form. But it will be hard for the top leaders—in particular, Ayatollah Khamenei, the “Supreme leader”—to accept any compromises. So far, their response has been essentially stonewalling and threats of wider and more ruthless repression, even the execution of activists.

The newspaper that has been the ideological flagship of the regime, Jumhuri Eslami, has denounced Moussavi and the protesters as “anarchists” and “extremists.” The Basij are combing the city for opposition activists. Hundreds have been arrested. The regime is trying to brand the protesters as allies or dupes of foreign enemies.

However, even the conservative speaker of the Iranian parliament, Ali Larijani, has declared that the majority of Iranians are convinced that the results of the June 12 presidential elections were faked. Actually, the government’s response to the protests is evidence enough that it knows that two-thirds of the population (the announced majority of the government candidate, Ahmadinejad) do not support it. If the government had that kind of support it would not need the massive and ruthless repression it is mobilizing.

Furthermore, it would have nothing to lose in calling a run-off election, whereas it has a lot to lose by brutally repressing and demonizing the protests against election results that masses of Iranians are convinced were faked.

The two principal arguments advanced by the opposition that the election results were faked is the rapidity with which the results were announced and the fact that Ahmadinejad’s vote was the same everywhere, without any regional variation. That argument puts in question any attempt to try to assess what Ahmadinejad’s real base is.

Supporters and apologists of the regime claim that the popular layers voted for him, and only the middle class voted for Moussavi and the other opposition candidates. But the protest demonstrations in Tehran obviously brought out a broad spectrum of the population, and they were held in south Tehran, historically the poorer section of the city, as well as in the north, where the middle class is centered.

Some defenders of Ahmadinejad have argued that he was more popular than Moussavi among the poor because the opposition candidate favored privatization of the economy. However, the quotes from debates between Moussavi and Ahmadinejad cited on internet blogs focused on the question of inflation.

Moussavi did make some bows in the direction of an increased role for private enterprise. But Evrand Abraminian, a scholar who has written on recent Iranian history, said in an interview with the Israeli daily Haaretz of June 27: “Moussavi was able to reach the classes who supported Ahmadinejad for populist reasons. During the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, the gap between rich and poor in Iran actually narrowed, because Moussavi—who was prime minister at the time—initiated price controls and was responsible for nationalization. It’s no coincidence that many on the left supported him. The trade unions support him too.

“He cannot be called leftist or socialist, as several articles have described him, but rather a statist.”

In any case, it is unlikely that Moussavi’s nods in the direction of private enterprise discredited him in the eyes of the poor since the economy has deteriorated so disastrously under Ahmadinejad and the incumbent president has failed notoriously to improve the standard of living of the masses. Moreover, privatization has been going on rapidly already under Ahmadinejad. No components of the clericalist regime have ever had an anti-capitalist discourse.

The fact is that inflation is the curse of oil-based economies. The oil income provides a lot of money for subsidies, but unless it is used for productive projects it simply feeds inflation that undermines the development of the economy in general.

As long as Iran remains a capitalist state, without a planned economy or state monopoly of foreign trade, it is inevitable that populist subsidies will be abandoned and that the nationalized enterprises will eventually be reabsorbed into capitalist business.

It is true that the elite military corps of the government, the Revolutionary Guard, has extensive economic interests that it may consider better defended by Amadinejad. But it is unclear how much the Guard’s control of enterprises is actually public control or how it is viewed by the masses.

Growing disillusionment

The determination of the protesters in the face of an unyielding regime has indicated a deep disillusionment with the institutions of the Islamic Republic, despite the attempts of their nominal leader, Mir Hossein Moussavi, to keep his opposition within the framework of the established system. In fact, Moussavi in his time as prime minister presided over repression of opponents of the regime. He could only run for president after being approved by the Council of Guardians as loyal to the Islamic Republic.

But Moussavi’s candidacy offered a legal cover for all shades of discontent with the status quo, and as the protests continued despite the intransigence of the conservative majority in the ruling clerical institutions, they have tended to radicalize. The most obvious symptom of that is the chants of “down with the dictator” that became prevalent after the supreme authority of the theocratic state, Ayatollah Khamenei, had pronounced that the election results were “a divine victory” that it was treason to question.

An Iranian reporter, Azadeh Moaveni, wrote in the June 19 British Guardian that the recent revolt had been brewing for a long time. Ahmadinejad was originally popular because of his defiance of Western sanctions against Iran’s nuclear program. But his popularity faded with a catastrophic increase in inflation (now 26 percent) and the deepening of a repressive atmosphere: “The economic downturn began turning people against the president, but his fate was sealed when he reintroduced the molesting social controls....

“Late that summer [2007], authorities launched a full-scale campaign of intimidation against young people they accused of un-Islamic appearance. Within a few short weeks, police detained 150,000 people, and all the women in my life went out to buy the shapeless, long coats that we had worn back in the late 1990s.

“Though the campaign targeted young men as well, authorities singled out women with particular brutality. The government’s disdain for women increased by the day. Though Iranians fretted about the impact of Western sanctions, the government turned its attention to a bill that would facilitate polygamy. Soon after, it announced a plan that would supposedly solve Iran’s marriage crisis. It called the scheme ‘semi-independent marriage’, and it amounted to a hollow version of the institution that would secure men legal and piously sanctioned sex, while denying women the security and social respectability of conventional marriage.

“On internet news sites and newspapers, women reacted scathingly. A girlfriend of mine, whose English classes had recently been segregated by gender, complained the government was imposing seventh-century rules on modern women. To add to Iranians’ frustration, interminable queues accompanied the government’s petrol-rationing scheme, unveiled that summer. In the evenings it could take several hours to fill our car, and when our local petrol station was torched by rioters furious with the new plan, we stopped using the car.”

Pictures of the demonstrations that came out of Iran over the internet have showed women playing a prominent role, in some cases boldly confronting the repressive forces.

An upsurge of labor organizing that began in recent years has been brutally repressed but apparently not stamped out. The most important of the new independent unions, Vahed, the Tehran bus drivers, issued a statement June 18 in support of the protests:

“As previously expressed in a statement published on-line in May of this year, since Syndicate Vahed does not view any of the candidates support the activities of the workers’ organizations in Iran, it would not endorse any presidential candidate in the election. Vahed members nevertheless have the right to participate or not to participate in the elections and vote for their individually selected candidate.

“Moreover, the fact remains that demands of almost an absolute majority of the Iranians go far beyond the demands of a particular group. In the past, we have emphasized that until the freedom of choice and right to organize are recognized, talk of any social or particular right would be more of a mockery than a reality.

“The Syndicate of Workers of Tehran and Suburbs Vahed Bus Company fully supports this movement of Iranian people to build a free and independent civil society and condemns any violence and oppression.”

Vulnerability to imperialism

In the past, as Azadeh Moaveni described in the British Guardian, Ahmadinejad has been able to unite public opinion behind him as a spokesman of Iranian national pride. But it seems unlikely under the present circumstances that playing the nationalist, anti-imperialist card is going to have the same effect.

In fact, the brutal suppression of mass protests and the totalitarian-style intoxication of the state-controlled media weakens Iran as an anti-imperialist force and can make the country more vulnerable to imperialist attack. That is the possibility that socialists, democrats, and progressives have to be alert to, despite their revulsion at the brutality and undemocratic character of the Iranian regime.

The Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq was more brutal and repressive than the Iranian regime has yet been, but the imperialists were not welcomed as liberators but became the objects of almost universal hatred.

A columnist in the June 27 issue of Dawn warned: “The brutal nature of the Iranian leadership makes it easier for Israel to sell a pre-emptive attack to Washington, and for Obama to sell it to the American people. None of this can be good news for the Iranian people, who, while steeped in the lore of martyrdom, want to live normal, peaceful lives.”

But an attack on Iran by the U.S. government would also be bad news for the American people, as the Iraqi fiasco makes evident. A war with Iran could be a far greater disaster. The Western capitalist regimes in normal times like to identify themselves with democracy (although when their system is threatened they can turn to dictatorial or even totalitarian means). But a U.S. intervention in Iran would produce even less democracy than it has in Iraq, where the result has actually been clericalist rule.

In fact, any U.S. intervention would be designed to forestall democratization rather than promote it. The 1979 revolution released a deep-going dynamic of social radicalization. The imposition of a clericalist regime froze it. But the present upsurge indicates that these processes have continued under the surface.

There is no way that the United States would want a resumption of the Iranian workers, peasants, and popular revolution of 1979, and there is hardly any limit to what it would do to head it off.