The Thirsty Fish

1789, 1979, and all that…

The French revolution in 1789 not only set the template for what a revolution is supposed to look like, it also created most categories of understanding contemporary social change.  Our notions of left v. right come from it, as do our notions of reform/reaction/revolution.

A common interpretation of the Iranian revolution in 1979 is that it was the first revolution which was categorically different from all of the revolutions that had taken place after 1789.  If the French, Russian, Chinese, etc, revolutions moved history “forward,” the Iranian revolution was something else entirely.  The interpretive debate over the meaning of the 1979 revolution between Michel Foucault and his various critics is a good example of this.  Because the social outcomes of the French revolution of 1789 forged so many of the categories we still use to look at the world, the outcomes of the Iranian revolution of 1979 seem confusing, bizarre, or out of step with the patterns of global social change that the date of 1789 marks as the beginning of our “modern” world.

So it was with much surprise that I came across several curious passages concerning the outcome of the French revolution for women in Immanuel Wallerstein’s recent fourth volume of his reassessment of global history in The Modern World-System (2011).  In his third volume (1989), Wallerstein revisits the two great events of the “age of revolutions” of the late 18th century - the Industrial revolution and the French revolution - and submits them to a serious debunking.  That book remains deeply controversial (if not ignored) in the history field, but subsequent revisions to East Asian scholarship - specifically the extent of market relations in 16th-18th century China - suggest that we do exaggerate the importance of the “age of revolutions” on world history.  In Wallerstein’s new volume, he discusses the contradiction between the ideological claims of equality through citizenship in liberal thought and the actual implementation of unequal relations by excluding individuals from these promised rights throughout the 19th century.  And he begins with the French revolution (pp. 149-153):

In the case of women, the whole matter started out badly.  The royal decree summoning the Estates-General specified that women who held seigniorial fiefs had to choose male proxies to represent them in the Electoral College — nobles for laywomen, clergy for nuns.  …Nonetheless, women (religious communities, societies of tradeswomen) did write cahiers de doléance.  

It is well known that women played a major role in various popular demonstrations during the French Revolution, most crucially in the so-called October days in 1789, when the Parisian market women (along with national guardsmen) marched on Versailles and forced the royal couple to come to the capital to reside.  …[T]wo months after these riots, on December 22, 1789, the National Assembly formally excluded women from the right to vote.

The Constitution of 1791 renewed the exclusion, and this was reiterated in a vote of the Convention on July 24, 1793, specifying that women were excluded from all political rights, which actually was something that at least aristocratic women had had in the ancien régime.

Wallerstein quotes historian Steven House in a footnote here:

‘When Philip the Fair solemnly convened the First Estates-General … in 1302, he received an assembly chosen by both men and women.  For over five centuries, privileged women of all estates retained the vote, both local and national.  Then in the 1790s, the revolution that proclaimed the rights of man abolished the political rights of women.’

Did the French revolution actually make things worse for women?  Wallerstein contends the outcome was doubly edged.

Some improvements in women’s rights were instituted, it is true.  Marriage and divorce became civil processes.  Primogeniture was abolished, and the rights of illegitimate children and their mothers to financial support were promulgated.  A law was passed permitting women to be witnesses in documents related to the état civil, although this matter continued to be controversial.  And in the heated atmosphere of the Jacobin period, women began to organize.  They began to play a much larger role in the popular societies.  They stood outside the doors of the Convention, trying to control who would enter.  They packed the galleries and shouted their views.

The Committee on Public Safety appointed a committee, headed by André Amar, to consider whether women should exercise political rights and whether they should be allowed to take part in political clubs.  The answer to both would be no.  The committee deemed that women did not have the “moral and physical qualities” to exercise political rights, and furthermore that it was the aristocracy that wanted women to have these rights “in order to put women at odds with men.”

[B]ourgeois feminists fared no better.  Olympe de Gouges, author of the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and Citizen, was sent to the guillotine on November 3, 1793.  Whichever the explanation for the Jacobin attitude, the situation did not change after the downfall of the Jacobins.  In 1795, after the journée of 1er Prairial, the Convention excluded women from its hall entirely, even as listeners, unless accompanied by a man with a citizen’s card.  And in 1796, the Council of Five Hundred excluded women from senior teaching positions.  In 1804, the Napoleonic Code regressed over even the ancien régime. Previously, at least aristocratic women were allowed to handle property and legal matters. Now, in the more egalitarian mood of the French Revolution, all women were treated equally—all having no rights whatsoever.

As far as the texts of the new revolutionary codes went, the situation seemed quite bad for women.  But, as recorded by many historians, Wallerstein looks beyond the letter of the law to peer into the social reverberations of the mass mobilizations of the revolution:

I have called this a mixed picture.  One can emphasize the negative side.  Abray says that it “stands as striking proof of the essential social conservatism [of the Revolution].”  Knibiehler insists that it marks a “relative regression of the status of women,” one that, for George, was “more clearly inferior than that of the Catholic, feudal past, because now defined, cloaked and justified by the bourgeois deities of Reason and the laws of Nature.”  Cerati asserts that the claims of women for greater rights during the French Revolution met with “a glacial reception from the [otherwise] enthusiastic [masculine] partisans of equality.”

But one can also evaluate the experience more positively. Landes points out that, after the French Revolution, “gender became a socially relevant category … in a way that it would not have mattered formerly.”  Kelly compares the situation of the post-1789 feminists favorably with that of those involved in the famous querelle des femmes launched by Christine de Pisan and others in the fifteenth century.  The earlier feminists, she says, lacked “the vision of a social movement to change events,” whereas after 1789 they “were animated by a notion of progress and of intentional social change.”  And Moses insists that, whereas before 1789 feminism was an issue only for the upper classes, the French Revolution led to “the rise of a feminism more sweeping in its scope and more inclusive in its following.”

The negative evaluation lays emphasis on the changes actually achieved and the justifying ideas of the times.  The positive evaluation lays stress on the development of the feminist movement and its mobilization.

Apart from the “justifying ideas of the times,” this sounds familiar to the changes in Iran over the past three decades.  In fact, it is uncannily similar.  I could point to many analyses, but let’s quote a 2007 article by Shahra Razavi, a feminist economist who has conducted numerous research projects in Iran since the 1979 revolution:

The developments under the Islamic Republic have been highly contradictory.  The Islamist movement that captured state power in 1979 based its grievances against the monarchy and the United States, and its own system of government (the “governance of the jurisprudence” or velayat faqih) on a highly patriarchal, if not misogynous, interpretation of Islam. The transition to the Islamic Republic then led to the total moralisation of the “woman question” [le querelle des femmes] that went hand-in-hand with a powerful critique of modernist attempts at transforming society. Women who had been singled out by the opposition (both secular and Islamist) as symbols of decadence and crass consumerism under the monarchy were to bear the brunt of subsequent social and gender restructuring or “purification.”

Many regressive measures were put in place, such as the forced imposition of the veil, the expulsion of women from the judiciary and higher echelons of bureaucracy, the forced segregation of schools and universities, and heightened violence against women, both domestic and public. Under these repressive conditions it became extremely difficult for women activists with a secular orientation (like their male counterparts) to be openly engaged in any political activity inside the country.  Many went into exile, and those who remained were silenced.

However, both the Islamisation of the public sphere and the social mobilisations of the revolutionary era were powerful forces that propelled large numbers of low-income women from traditionalist backgrounds out of the confines of their homes and into the public arena - a development that was beyond the control of any one group or political force and with long-lasting social consequences, even if thus far their access to any form of lasting institutional power has been limited.

[T]he creation of separate male and female spaces and the donning of hejab (head cover) in educational establishments, offices, and indeed all public spaces allayed the fears of traditionalist families regarding women’s presence in public life.  Meanwhile, the revolution was experienced very differently by women who were secular upper and middle class compared to those who were from more traditionalist and working-class backgrounds.

A few simple statistics can help capture the contradictions unleashed by two decades of revolutionary Islamic rule.  The Islamic Republic lowered the minimum age for marriage of girls from 16 years to 9 years - a highly controversial move, which effectively sanctioned child marriage.  And yet, the mean age at first marriage for women before the Revolution was 19.7 years (1976); twenty years later it had gone up to 22.4 years (2003) [now it is 24 (2011)].  Female literacy, which was 35.6 percent in 1976, rose to 80 percent in 1999 (and for rural women it rose from 17.4 percent to 62.4 percent), and by 2001 more than 50 percent of university students were women.

Education has had a privileged position because it is viewed by the regime as a vehicle for disseminating its ideology, and school curricula were rapidly changed to beef up the Islamic content.  Nevertheless, the social implications of the mass entry of young women into universities across the country have been potentially enormous but remain under researched.

The widespread availability of contraception, falling fertility rates, and women’s increasing access to education (at all levels, including tertiary) are making it increasingly likely that women of different social classes will seek paid work and greater financial autonomy.

Two points are worth mentioning after this lengthy comparison.

First, dropping all the metaphysical connotations of modernity that the French revolution supposedly symbolizes, as well as the connotations of anti-modernity that the Iranian revolution is equally charged with, it turns out that a crucial fact for both countries is that they experienced revolutions - large-scale mass mobilizations of the population that challenged existing political and social powers.  Maybe 1789 and 1979 are not polar opposites after all. 

Second, these mobilizations had unintended consequences for both countries well beyond the new regimes’ intentions for their citizens.  Their populations believed the universalizing rhetoric of egalitarianism that their revolutions were based on, and the social transformations of the post-revolutionary period laid the groundwork for an empowered notion of women’s rights.  In other words, against the wishes of the male French revolutionaries, their own actions let the genie out of the bottle.  To anyone who visits Iran today, it is quite clear the same outcome is occurring in the Islamic Republic - not in spite of the 1979 revolution, but because of it.

Subsidy Payments in Iran: Too Much or Not Enough?

It is still less than a year since the targeted subsidy program went into effect in Iran, replacing cheap energy and low-price basic foodstuffs at the point of consumption with cash payments to nearly everyone.  In addition, the government is providing low-interest long-term loans to local industry, well below the rate of inflation, to upgrade their energy infrastructure so that they can produce their goods more efficiently.  I’ve written about the lack of vision in the country’s industrial policy elsewhere, but since my comments went up there have been more promises of action at least.  Some industries and provinces report that they are finally getting these loans, while others are still waiting. 

Predictions of success or failure are premature, however, because the point of the subsidy liberalization programs is not to garner revenue for the state, but to starkly restructure the incentives for both capital investment and individual household consumption.  A colleague in Venezuela, a country with its own subsidies for energy consumption, tells me the local elites there are very excited about Iran’s recent moves, which is probably the first time opponents of Chavez and the Ahmadinejad government shared a policy goal.  The IMF, eager to promote price liberalization across the Middle East, has also given high marks to the country’s efforts, though they are rather taciturn on how Iran can foster growth in the labor-intensive, high-skilled sectors that the country needs to promote to absorb the growing ranks of the educated yet unemployed youth.

Conversely, projections of total collapse and mass rebellion were also misplaced, even though few people ever got fired over the last 30 years for predicting the implosion of the Iranian economy (Maybe the Iran Nostradami should start a thinktank with the economists who thought the US housing bubble would go on forever).  I can’t remember anyone inside Iran I ever spoke to who predicted that people would start an uprising over such matters - in fact the famous “riots” that occurred in 2007 due to gasoline price hikes were not widespread at all.  I was in Iran during that time and the whole thing was over in 2 days, with less than ten petrol stations attacked.  Try being in Iran during Chaharshanbeh Suri if you actually want to see a large scale rebellion…

There is an ongoing debate inside the country about whether a nearly universal program that pays $40-45 a month per individual is sustainable.  Some majles MPs say the government is already pilfering from other parts of the budget to pay for ongoing transfers.  There are rumors, often suggested and then denied in the press, that the top income deciles will be cut out of future payments, perhaps in the 2nd year of the plan.  Of course the reason the payments are universal in the first place is that the government couldn’t actually figure out who was making what in a trustworthy manner, so they scrapped the idea of income “clusters” and just paid out to everyone!  As with a lot of the Iranian press, then (and the opposition and diaspora press to boot), we usually only hear the salacious or threatening rumor, and then we never see the follow-up article on page fourteen which often shows how such-and-such policy (or threat) was never actually implemented.

So, in the apocryphal words of Zhou Enlai, it is too soon to tell the overall impact of the newest market-friendly paradigm in Iran. Now is not a time to speculate, but to analyze.

Let’s try to go beyond the usual rumor-centered talk.  And let’s assume that, not only will these payments remain basically universal, but they will remain indexed to inflation, so that their value does not whittle away as prices go up further.  It’s an assumption, yes, but let’s hold our tongues for now.

One considerable transformation is that poor households in Iran are, for the most part, receiving a big income payment every month.  This is not completely unprecedented.  In fact, one of the points most Iran analysts forget to mention when they describe the new subsidy payments is that many poor families have already been getting cash payments for years.  Much of the elderly poor, families without a male breadwinner, and families with disabled members have been getting both cash and in-kind aid from one of the biggest welfare organizations in Iran - the Imam Khomeini Relief Committee.  Say what you want about this organization, but it has transformed a lot of communities in the country (a related organization is mentioned in the beloved Dariush Mehrjui movie, Mum’s Guest).  

So, for poor families already getting aid from the state, this simply adds onto the welfare system they already benefit from.  But, of course, many middle-class Iranians benefit from the country’s welfare system as well, whether from public education, generous state pensions, or low health care costs.  However, due to rising prices for almost everything else, it seems like everyone is losing their purchasing power in Iran, yet again.  But if subsidy payments remain inflation-indexed, then this will contribute to a major redistribution of wealth in the country.  According to Alef’s website, this is already happening:

If you don’t understand Persian, read the chart from left to right.  It shows the Gini index of income inequality over the past several years according to one particular Statistical Center of Iran survey of household expenditures (1390 began in March 2011 so the most recent number is obviously a projection).  Lower numbers mean less inequality.  While I am not certain of the accuracy of the exact number they are now reporting, I’m not surprised income inequality in Iran is generally lower, simply because poorer families are getting more cash income all of a sudden, and the survey is picking up on the fact they are spending the money.  Previously they may have been making ends meet with different means of non-income livelihood strategies, of which there are many across the global South.

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Iranian Sociology, Global Sociology, Peripheral Sociology

I just returned from a short trip to Tehran, where I attended the first day of a conference hosted by the Iranian Sociological Association.  The opening keynote was delivered by Professor Michael Burawoy from U of C Berkeley:

Burawoy and others spoke about a simple but often unmentioned fact in the global field of knowledge production.  Social science theories are typically produced in a few rich countries and then consumed by everyone else, no matter how useful or correct they tend to be.  Sociologists in the global South can usually gain prestige within their own educational institutions only by publishing in a few “international” journals in the global North, usually in English.  The accreditation and prestige rankings of journals tends to overlap onto the global hierarchy of wealth in the world economy.

For example, as Professor Tina Uys pointed out, the South African Journal of Sociology is not given the coveted ISI ranking as an international journal, even though it is peer-reviewed and rigorous, but the British Journal of Sociology is ranked highly by ISI.

Concepts tend to be produced in the elite centers of scholarship in the North, and then applied uncritically to countries in the South.  Take a concept like “social capital” - it emerged from very specific studies of French class structure by Pierre Bourdieu, or education institutions of the US by James Coleman.  It was meant to be a highly context-specific understanding of the relationships and networks that individuals are embedded in, and how they use these social relations to achieve coveted socio-economic positions or exclude others from those positions, often by participating in communal group activities.

Today, in Iran, many sociology students are obsessed with the idea of social capital, but not as a context-specific lubricant of social life.  Instead, social capital is what Iran “lacks,” because the concept has become so abstracted from its origins that it is used as a remainder to explain the absence of what countries in the global North supposedly possess: democracy, capitalism, women’s rights, happiness, etc.

This is not just in Iran.  Social science in much of the former Third World, because it is already in a precarious situation, uses the most mainstream concepts from social science and applies them towards their own areas.  Writing tends to remain in the abstract, presents “Western” social science as a monolithic entity devoid of controversy, and elides the use of local case studies and deep ethnography which may question the validity of such concepts.  Quantitative methods with a sheen of “science” are preferred over qualitative analysis.

Just for example, from a different viewpoint, it is almost impossible to look anywhere in Iranian society and not see “social capital” in operation.  Everyone’s livelihood depends, to a large extent, on their negotiation and maintenance of multiple social networks.  Mosque networks, women’s clubs, sports leagues, cultural centers, underground DJ nights, basiji volunteer groups  - what are all of these but avenues for different Iranians to cultivate and expand their access to certain exclusionary social positions?

Personally, I rarely use the term “social capital” at all, because it is a buzzword stolen from social science and used by management gurus and insta-pundits.  Yet I still have to deal with it because my own students in the US use the concept the same way as Iranians.

Two hopeful points to end on, though.  First, plenty of the best and most innovative social science of the 20th century came from the global South, not the North.  Much of radical development theory came from Latin America in the 1950s and 1960s.  World-systems analysis is Africanist in its origins (Immanuel Wallerstein, Samir Amin, and Giovanni Arrighi all studied in Africa in the 1950s and 1960s).  The post-colonial paradigm, while certainly full of abstruse French post-structuralism, comes from the Indian subcontinent’s re-thinking of their own history in the 1980s and 1990s.  Lastly, the Chinese experience of peasant revolution and market development presents a challenge to mainstream understandings of capitalism and modernity for the 19th century Western social thought which bore the core theories of contemporary sociology.  The current structure of global knowledge production, however, means that much of the insights that these areas hold for our understandings of the world first have to come to the North, get re-packaged, and then exported again to the global South.

Second, I met a few sociology students on this trip who, unlike their colleagues, were genuinely interested in local ethnography.  They discussed using detailed case studies to critically utilize the sociological toolkit to better understand Iranian social life.  This is quite different from the oft-heard Iranian dismissal of all social science as “western,” which is equally misguided as the uncritical use of sociology in an “one size fits all” version.  Those two positions do not actually understand the sociological project.  To wit, not a few sociologists in the Middle East hold that Ibn Khaldun’s political sociology of state formation and collapse is a precursor of later social science, which is correct.  But Khaldun’s theories of city vs. tribe are embedded in the politics of the Maghreb during the 14th century, and should not be universalized as a unique theory of “muslim societies,” as Ernest Gellner once argued.

Every time I travel back to Iran, I am always surprised by what is being translated into Persian.  On this trip, I noticed new and beautiful translations of Pierre Bourdieu’s Distinction and Perry Anderson’s Lineages of the Absolutist State.  Here’s to the translators, publishers, and scholars in Iran who exemplify the critical, reflexive, and innovative traditions in global sociology.

Thinking about Social Inequality and Waves of Unrest

This morning I published a short piece on the structure and politics of labor in Iran at the USIP blog.  There is a small section in the article about absolute vs relative poverty in Iran vis-a-vis Egypt.  I want to expand on that here, because while absolute poverty is something that economists take seriously, relative poverty, or, more aptly phrased, social inequality, is something that sociologists take seriously.  And so should you.

As a region in the global South, the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) is not the poorest in terms of absolute poverty - the percentage of a population under an absolute line of consumption expenditures.  East Asia (EA) and Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) contain larger segments of their population under the World Bank’s oft-used “$2 a day” line.  Of course the boundaries of the “Middle East” - a totally useless unit if you take geography seriously - can sometimes lump in poorer states and richer states that have very different political economies and relations to the outside world.  But I’ll let that slide here.  

According to the World Bank, for 2005,

• MENA states had 16.9% of their population living under $2 a day on average
• EA was at 38.9%
• SSA was at an alarming 72.9%
• India’s poverty level, 75.6%, is similar to Africa’s
• Latin America’s poverty level, 17.1%, is very close to the Middle East’s.  
• Iran’s absolute poverty level at $2/day in 2005 stood at 8% (if you use higher poverty lines, you get higher poverty rates in Iran, or anywhere - but I am trying to compare countries and regions here and the World Bank only gives us this line to use).

Since I tend to look at development issues in world-historical terms, I would wager that regional variations in poverty within the global South cannot just be explained by individual states either caring or not caring about poverty, or by class relations and capitalist development within individual countries.  Those two aspects matter, but what also matters is how regional political economies relate to and integrate with the world economy.  

Latin America has a long history of state formation because of its colonial and post-independence history, longer than the rest of the post-colonial global South, and that might play a role in its ability to expend resources on the poorest over the 20th century.  The Middle East, in many countries, does not have a long history of post-colonial state formation, but in the 20th century it did possess a history of high-capacity (powerful) states compared to other regions.  And, as in Eastern Europe and Russia in the 20th century, another distinct “region” that I would include in or near the global South, strong state capacity can be used to rapidly lower poverty levels through egalitarian social policies.  These sort of polices were implemented widely in the 1960s after formal independence in the MENA region, and that includes Iran once you take into account the Shah’s White Revolution (a milder form of egalitarianism, yes, but still a change in policy). The point is that each region did not proceed along the same path, nor were these paths irreversible.  One cannot explain the high poverty rates in Africa, for example, simply because of state failure, but also because the area’s comparative economic advantages in the 1960s in the world economy disappeared when East Asia rapidly industrialized.  

This is all a precursor to my actual point, which is: if MENA is relatively less poor than other regions, why is everyone reporting on high poverty levels as one of the cause of the grievances that is driving the ongoing wave of rebellion and unrest in MENA states? They are confusing absolute poverty, which is not the biggest problem in the MENA region, with relative poverty, or, as I prefer to call it, inequality.

Inequality is measured a lot of different ways, but the most common method is the Gini coefficient, which scales a country’s income inequality from 1 (totally equal) to 100 (totally unequal).  Gini levels of 60 are very unequal in the real world, only a few countries like South Africa or Brazil have been up there.  The United States is currently at a Gini level of 43, which is quite high for wealthy countries, and is a return to the high inequality of the US in the days of H.L. Mencken and Mark Twain.

Just as with absolute levels of poverty, world regions also exhibit clustering around particular levels of inequality that persist for long periods of history.  And, again, I would argue that this is because of particular differences in the ways and times that different regions were integrated into the world economy, as well as the subsequent changes in this “region <—> world” relationship.  So there is an under-theorized link between levels of inequality within countries, regional political economies and their average inequality, and global processes of economic expansion and geopolitical formation.

That’s just a caveat against the usual story where states and national economies are seen as totally enclosed social units and all their problems can be explained away by looking at government policies - sometimes called “methodological statism.”

Back to our story, though.  Looking at regional levels of inequality, a different variation emerges.  The Gini coefficients shown below is the index divided by 100, that’s why it has a decimal point.  (Note, I don’t agree with the methodology of this table from The Economist because it uses PPP data, but it suffices for this post):

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Upcoming Appearances - Bonus for German Readers

I’ll be speaking at two events in February related to the release of The Iran Primer:

• 2/10 in NYC at The Asia Society, 6 pm (tickets required, sorry)
• 2/18 in Washington DC at The Woodrow Wilson Center, noon (free and webcast)

I plan to talk about the political economy of Iran within a comparative framework, touching on issues of labor politics, the bazaar, the informal sector, and the privatization of state-owned enterprises.  If you have any specific questions you want answered, send em my way.  I’ll try to work them in and it will be our secret.

postscript: To all my German comrades, I am pleased that Prokla, a left-leaning journal in Germany, has published a short article of mine on the politics of the Green Movement in their most recent issue.  On newsstands now!  What, your local Wal-Mart doesn’t carry Prokla?  Well, I’m sure they will if you ask them nicely.

Iran’s Subsidy Reductions - Who Gets Targeted and Who Eats It?

The long awaited liberalization of energy commodities in Iran has finally begun.  Over the past weekend, President Ahmadinejad stated, “At this stage, we don’t want to free prices, rather we are going to regulate and reform them.”  How regulated will this new system be?

Iranians with private cars get a monthly ration of about one full Iranian tank of gas (in the newer stylish Peugeots) at around $1.50/gallon, then the price goes up to $2.60/gallon.  The price is not floating - it is still set.  Additionally, and what is not being covered in the Western media, is that all sorts of bonuses and extensions of monthly ration limits are being granted for now - essentially this is a way of cushioning the shift to higher prices.

For instance, licensed taxis get a monthly ration on their “smart card” of 130 gallons a month, and a bonus of more than 100 gallons has been announced - that’s a hefty increase and it may placate the perennially grumbling taxi drivers for now.  Private drivers (including many who moonlight as gypsy cabs) get a bonus of 13 gallons - not even a full tank of gas for Iranian cars, I am told (I never developed the fortitude to drive in Tehran, I must confess, and thus never owned a smartcard).

But let’s face the facts - Iranians who have long priced in cheap gasoline and other energy sources for their budgets are now confronted with a huge shift in costs.  Some will cope, others will be hurt.  The government is giving around $40 a month to every individual via personalized bank accounts, which can now be withdrawn by Iranians from the very handy ATMs that are available near most city streets.  It is stated that around 80% of the country is getting these payments - we will see how accurate that number is as time goes on.  Comments on the blogosphere are interesting - some Iranians writing, “this oil is the nation’s,” which they take to mean that subsidized gasoline is a citizenship right.  US citizens also expect cheap gas as a (god-given?) right - the question is not whether this is true or not but how particular citizenship rights are construed.  Rights are a matter of politics, not providence.

Will this lead to inflation?  Most certainly - the question is how much and where it is concentrated.  One worry I have is that the cash payments are not indexed to inflation currently, though the government could make changes to this in the future.  But at its present levels the purchasing power of $40 a month (in tomans) will be inflated away over the next 4-5 years.  The government has promised to spend a portion of its freed revenue in the health system - let’s hope some in the majles remember they promised that and holds them to it.

Because here’s the rub.  When the government pays the different between the actual cost of the good and the subsidized price, this is a de-commodification of a lot of the burdens of daily life in Iran.  What is happening now is a re-commodification of life, and as we know from Karl Polanyi, the attempt to embed daily life in the market can lead to a “double movement” - a reaction against the marketization of previously uncommodified social practices.  What Polanyi never analyzed very well is the share of burdens of commodification of daily life - upon whom will the costs fall?  The answer to that question is not a given - it depends on the distribution of power in society.

According to witness accounts, people are going about their business.  I would discount general or intermittent media reports of unrest, because 1. griping is an Iranian art form and 2. the outside media is operating in a particularly inane manner here.  Just today, for instance, a BBC reporter in London phoned in a report to NPR about Iranian woes on subsidy reductions, and got two of his major facts wrong.  One, he said that subsidies in Iran started in 1980, when in fact a subsidy of at least a few basic but important goods goes back to the Shah’s time.  The Shah was most likely emulating the more populist regimes of Egypt and Syria in the 1960s/70s, who had rather generous subsidies for bread  (ah, the good old days in the Arab world).  Second, the current subsidies regime was a policy implemented as a reform to the time of strict rations and black-market corollaries of the 1980s war era with Iraq.  So this is not a policy the government has wanted to enact since 1980, but rather since 1989 once the era of reconstruction commenced.  For a Brit whose welfare system is basically a legacy of World War II, I would have hoped that one might see the similarities between his country’s experiences under duress and the social policies that resulted in Iran as a result of the Iran-Iraq war and its legacies.

But, back to the present, I am concerned that the subsidy reductions as demarcated will lead to increased inequality in an already polarized middle-income country.  The bottom line is this: if the point of this plan is to get people to consume less of these goods, then they will achieve their goal.  Economist Said Laylaz is telling the Los Angeles Times that traffic will be less congested in Tehran - the silver lining for sure, and something that also occurred after summer of 2007 when gas rationing and price tiering was first introduced.  But if this point of this plan is to “get the prices right” and kindle economic growth, the government will be sorely disappointed.  Furthermore, the fact that everyone in Iran is together experiencing this seemingly arbitrary act by the state could form a powerful grievance if anything goes wrong in its implementation.  Unfortunately, our analysis on the state capacity of Iran is dominated by hearsay and axe-grinding, not sober empiricism, so don’t expect much from the experts.

5th Development Plan in Iran Further Privatizes Health and Education Sectors

I have not seen the 5th Development Plan proposed by the Ahmadinejad administration, but judging by the outbursts of a few MPs in the majles, the plan calls for privatizing large parts of the education and health sectors.  The resistance by doctors illustrates that opposition exists in the health field, and one can also take heart that none of the 5-year development plans in Iran have ever been implemented very thoroughly.

According to Khabar news, the 5th development plan proposes to set up a Health Insurance Organization to regulate non-governmental funds which would shift the burden of health costs out of the public sector.  “Non-governmental” in Iran does not necessarily mean the non-profit sector.  It refers to any organization which is not directly under the management of the state.  Much of the existing welfare system in Iran, such as the Social Security Organization, is included in the “NGO” sector.  So it is unclear what this proposal actually means (though it eerily sounds like someone in Iran is familiar with Obamacare and simply added a “public option”).  Whether this will push the onus of payment further onto employers or onto individuals is not stated.

Medicine and medical services, no matter who provides them (public or private sector) in Iran, are still highly subsidized.  Their costs are quite low relative to both middle-income countries as well as Iranians’ average income.  Notably, the subsidy liberalization plans that seem to finally be moving forward do not include reduction in these medicine and health subsidies.  But out-of-pocket costs for Iranians have continued to go up as the domestic health industry has lagged behind international trends.  This is not something unique to Iran, and any middle-income country who tries to provide near-universal health care runs up against such barriers.

The larger question from these debates is: why does the Ahmadinejad administration proffer privatization as its solution to all problems?  The conventional wisdom is that the economy is in shambles and thus the Iranian state is forced to sell off its assets to deal with a fiscal crisis.  Given that the government is still funding large projects in infrastructure, especially in remote provinces, the conventional wisdom seems to be wishful thinking, and it avoids a deeper issue of ideology.

Instead, it seems that Ahmadinejad, and whomever else he hired to write this plan and help devise his economic policy, are true believers in the magic of the market.  In a television speech to the country about the upcoming subsidy reductions on fuel and basic staple foods, the president affirmed that every individual would be receiving 40 dollars a month to help them compensate for higher prices.  He then told them to not go out and spend this money on new curtains or a refrigerator, but consider putting it in the Tehran stock market (I’m not joking here). 

This ominously reminds one of Latin American and Sub-Saharan African countries’ embrace of orthodox economists’ advice in the 1990s, when states were seen as the problem to every economic dilemma and liberalization as the solution.  The Iranian reformists cannot critique the government on this angle, because they are the ones who imported this sort of discourse to Iran in the 1990s.  Thus we instead hear all sorts of critiques about technocratic incompetence from the reformists, which again portentously sounds like Latin America in the 1990s.  Not a very galvanizing political strategy for the masses, by the way.

The irony is that, while Latin American and Africa countries were, in most cases, forced to engage in these sort of economic adjustments due to their balance of payments problems - the fiscal crisis leading to seeking of aid of last resort from the IMF - Iran is doing it to itself without any external coercion.  This comes at a time when the major push in development economics, not to mention the actual policies currently being carried out in states like Brazil, India and China, is to increase state capacity and re-intervene in many sectors which previously had been “off limits” according to the economic wisdom.

To be clear, Iran is not going full throttle into Hayek’s arms.  The subsidy liberalization that is supposed to finally commence this month is being supplemented with anti-hoarding measures by the state (basic commodities being stocked), the return of the coupon for cooking oil, rice, etc (reminiscent of the 1980s war years), and the assurances of a gradual price change for both industry and consumers.  But it does herald a larger shift in Iran’s political economy, even if all things go as smoothly as the President promises.

Three Easy Pieces

Why write on a blog when people will publish your work elsewhere?  That’s not the only driving force behind my quietude here, since I am immersed in academic mill grinding, but it is a factor.  Nevertheless, here are a few pieces that, while written at various times in the past year, all came out in the last several weeks.

First, a very condensed version of a paper I presented at Cambridge University this summer on pseudo-privatization in Iran’s economy is out in the new Muftah web magazine.  The nut of it: Iran has been shifting its state-owned economy to a host of economic players still linked to the state, but this is not the same thing as a takeover of the economy by any single actor (i.e. the Revolutionary Guards).  So far, feedback on the piece has been favorable.  The actual paper will be published in 2011 in an edited volume on Routledge.

Second, I was asked to write a policy “briefer” on the Iranian bazaars for journalist Robin Wright’s new Iran Primer.  The whole book is a repository of the accumulated common sense on Iran shared by the more vocal and well-placed US crew of experts that work on the country.  Whether that represents an accurate picture of the country or not, I reserve my judgment.  I immediately asked that Arang Keshavarzian write the briefer on the bazaar, since he is the actual expert on it (he did honest-to-god field work in the bazaar in the early 2000s).  But he was grinding his own academic mill, so the task was up to me.  Given the uninformed suppositions about the power of the bazaar, and the stale thesis of the “mosque-bazaar alliance” that still floats around the aforementioned crew of experts, I took on the job.  Most of the piece would not have been possible, however, without Arang’s excellent work.  Here is my piece via the USIP site and reprinted on Tehran Bureau.

Lastly, and hopefully not the least of these efforts, I have published a review of Mehran Kamrava’s 2008 book Iran’s Intellectual Revolution in the current issue of New Left Review.  I wrote this review in six hours sitting in a hotel lobby in the Iranian city of Ahvaz.  The original solicitor of the piece turned it down, and by luck it was circulated to the desk of the editors of NLR, who asked me to expand it for a non-Iranian audience.  It is not just a review of Kamrava’s book, but an initial attempt to critically analyze many of the social and political frames in which Iran is situated, in this case by the country’s own intellectual strata.  Unfortunately, the entire piece is available subscription only, but you can probably read it in about 20 minutes over a coffee at your local Borders.  Or at a library, if you still have one of those things in your town.

A lot has been happening in the Iranian economy recently - subsidy reform, currency moves, bullish stock market runs - and the current coverage in the news is pretty inadequate.  I’ll follow up with a post putting some of these events in context, but for now, back to the mill.

Iranian Sociology and its Discontents

I recently returned from Gothenburg, Sweden and the quadrennial International Sociology Association’s World Congress.  It’s kind of like the World Cup of sociology.  There I sat in on a session organized by the Iranian Sociology Association, where a few presenters, including its president Hossein Serajzadeh, discussed the state of social science in Iran.  I have visited many sociology departments in Iran, both in Tehran and elsewhere, over the past few years, and the comments I heard echoed my earlier experiences.  Sociologists feel that most of the problems of social science institutionalization in Iran stem from the state’s politicized relationship vis-a-vis the disciplines.

With the recent intensification of state pressure on Iranian social scientists, including “early retirements” for some of the professors in the most prestigious faculties in the country, no one should dismiss the constrained atmosphere in which Iranian social scientists and students operate.  But is that the only problem with Iranian sociology?

Two of the presentations focused almost exclusively on institutional aspects of Iranian social science - enrollments, programs, number of students, and its history.  This is par for the course - I often find that discussion of social relations in Iran takes the form of “just the facts,” usually with a comparison between Iran and wealthy countries thrown in for good measure.  This time, Iran’s undergraduate and Ph.D. enrollments in the social sciences were stacked next to OECD countries, like the US and France, as well as Turkey and South Korea - the perennial “model states” that Iranians compare themselves to.  Frankly, Iran didn’t look too bad.  But this type of comparison - deeply rooted in an exceptionalism that pervades both mass and elite society in Iran - displayed a lack of reflection itself.  Sociologists should try to question the standard frameworks and categories that others apply.  If you put Iran up against Brazil, Egypt, Indonesia, China, India, Mexico, etc, - in other words, the large Third World countries that are more reasonable to compare Iran with given their common histories - what would we find?  I wager that many of the “backward” statistics Iranians often point to - not just on social science institutionalization but also in almost every other category - would fall neatly in the middle of the range that is observable in the former Third World.

Better yet - Iranian sociologists should be asking a question one level removed: Why does this latter sort of comparison never occur?  Confronting - and theorizing - that conundrum would call into question some of the most deeply held myths present in Iran today, no matter where one stands on the political spectrum.  But that is the job of social scientists, because few other intellectuals are interested in myth-busting, especially when nationalism is involved.

To be fair, none of these characteristics are exceptional to Iranian intellectuals at all.  Exceptionalism is part of nationalist rhetoric from Poland to China to Madagascar, thus it is the least exceptional thing about Iran.  Intellectuals, historically, have been one of the main conduits for such exceptionalism, in as much as they see themselves agents of the nationalist cause.  This has produced some great work over the 20th century - Eric Williams’ Capitalism and Slavery comes to mind.  Part of the job of successive generations of intellectuals, of course, is to take apart the bundle of myths that previous scholars embed in their analyses.  In Iran, this can be seen in the critique (or, sometimes, wholesale dismissal) of Ali Shariati which became prevalent in the 1990s.  I rarely, however, see Iranian social scientists reflect on what myths or assumptions are the most prevalent ones among Iranian intellectuals today.

One refreshing exception to this was the last presentation at the panel, by Shirin Ahmad-Nia.  She and her colleagues hinted that Iranian social science cannot recognize a range of social problems in Iran because it still relies on frameworks of understanding Iranian society through the antiquated paradigm of modernization theory.  Indeed, the large majority of Iran’s reformist intellectuals in the 1990s portrayed Iran’s problems as stemming from its trapped position “between tradition and modernity.”  It still forms the basis of rhetoric among many Iranian elites (and has done so, on and off, for the past 150 years).  Yet this too, is nothing exceptional - China’s social scientists are obsessed with modernization theory, for example.  So, I would encourage Professor Ahmad-Nia and her colleagues to reflect further on why Iranian intellectuals utilize modernization theory so, well, religiously.  We need, in other words, a sociology of Iranian intellectuals of the kind that Pierre Bourdieu did so well on the subject of French intellectuals.

In sum, many of the problems that Iranian sociologists noted about the state of their discipline in the country - a reliance on quantification of basic indicators instead of qualitative and critical analysis, a faddish and uncritical importation of the Western social science of the day, and an under-institutionalized training system - are not Iranian problems per se.  They are large structural problems within knowledge production in the global South.  Iranian sociology would mature greatly if they took this context as a starting point for their considerations.

Lawrence on Collier and Mintz on Haiti

The field of economic development has more popular books in print than was the case ten or twenty years ago.  In fact, the last decade where such a volume of print existed on poorer countries and their prospects was the 1970s.  That previous era, however, generated a more critical perspective on the promises of “catching up” to the wealthy Northern states.  Now, within the popular debate between, say, Jeffrey Sachs and Bill Easterly, there are huge assumptions underpinning both “sides” that are left unspoken.

Peter Lawrence, a geographer, takes on such assumptions in the latest development fad to hit your airport bookshelves: Paul Collier and his solutions for the “Bottom Billion.”  This short piece from New Left Review is one of the most trenchant critiques of the current development field that I have read.  Obviously the methodological criticisms are the easy ones - the application of econometrics to problems of political sociology is economic imperialism of the highest order.  But more substantively, the unmasking of Collier’s theoretical assumptions is what makes this review great.  The task left wanting by Collier’s work is that we still need to explain the “independent” variables that Collier uses for his explanations of endemic poverty and war - GDP levels, “bad governance,” etc. 

What Lawrence does not touch on in this piece, and something I would add, is that using PPP-adjusted growth rates as a correlative measure for any social outcome is highly suspect, given that they are doubly distorted.  They are distorted the first time when the World Bank issues them (and continually changes the historical record of GDP levels without telling anyone or explaining why).  The second order of distortion comes from using PPP-adjusted income levels on top of that.  To say something like, “For every 1% increase in GDP growth rates, one would expect 0.5% better governance” is a ludicrous statement on so many levels.  If you don’t believe me on the World Bank’s changes in its historical GDP data, go take a look at how the GDP for large Southern states such as China and India for the year 1960, say, keeps changing over time.  This is their GDP at foreign exchange levels, before they are even adjusted for Purchasing Power Parity.

Lesson to Iranians who often use indexes of business freedom and transparency when discussing their country: these scales are not very useful in understanding why countries are richer or poorer.

On a different note, the anthropologist Sidney Mintz has a wonderful essay in the Boston Review on his field work in Haiti from the 1950s.  In it, we get a sense of the importance of markets to subsistence production by the rural sector in an impoverished country like Haiti.  Mintz recounts the strategies of income pooling by women market sellers and the sophistication of the networks that existed.  It reminded me of something Giovanni Arrighi once told me, which was that peasant/rural life requires far more “skills” than urban life.  Put any of us in their position and we would starve shortly thereafter.

Implications for Iran from this piece: rural-urban linkages and peasant production are a source of vibrant social activity, not a traditional backwater.  Individuals who take part in such economic activities are likely more savvy than anyone (including the state) gives them credit for.  Notions that the rural areas are bought off by the state, or duped, are therefore suspect.