Revolution Redux?
I’m sitting here in a lower-middle class neighborhood in Tehran right now, listening to choral chants of Allah-u Akbar outside my window. It’s been the third night that I’ve had the pleasure of doing so.
There’s no need to recap here all of the events of the last 9 days. The June 9 election results were evidently manipulated to such a large degree that even supporters of Mr. Ahmadinejad were surprised. I’ve attended several opposition pro-Mousavi rallies over the last two days. These are mainly middle-class affairs, albeit cross-generational and somewhat spontaneously organized. Permit me not to go into particulars, but instead posit a question: what kind of social movement are we seeing here in Iran?
Many western journalists, some of whom cut their teeth on the last Iranian Revolution, have been quick to compare 2009 to 1979. They note the call to mourning by opposition leaders in memory of the recently killed, the clerical splits that herald weakened support for the regime, the possible switching of allegiances of the police and security forces, and the chants that I’m hearing right now out of my window. These journalists even point out (though they are now not allowed to go) that the opposition marches’ routes are along paths that were made famous by protestors in 1978-9.
But is also possible that the Iranian opposition is pursuing a different path, one similar to the so-called color revolutions that occurred in former Soviet satellite states over the last few years. These were organized within the middle classes, used mass media and nonviolent gatherings, and came after contested election results. They rallied behind liberal nationalist leaders who had been sidelined in the post-Soviet order, and also behind business interests who wanted more open channels to Western capital. They also all resulted in weakly democratic states and a new set of ineffective elites that, in Ukraine’s case, placed the government on permanent vacation, and in Georgia’s case, started a Quixote-esqe war to prevent collapse. In these cases, there was only superficial rupture with the old post-Soviet regime and its local nomenklatura after a few years.
As the eminent Iranian sociologist Ahmad Ashraf described, the 1979 Revolution’s initial participants were 1. intellectuals and students, 2. radical ulaama (clergy) associated with Ayatollah Khomeini and 3. bazaari merchants and craftspeople. The “new” middle classes of the 1970s in Iran – salaried workers in the public sector and the industrial working class including oil workers – were latecomers to the Revolution. Each cycle of revolutionary contention between the Shah and the opposition broadened the latter’s base with the entrance of new participants.
The current rallies and marches, as I can attest, are much larger than anything since 1979. Yet to make 1979 analogous to 2009 would be to reverse the order of which social groups participated first. The “new” middle classes in Iran – salaried professionals and public sector workers - have continued to expand since 1979. If their members who are marching daily in the streets are persistent and tenacious enough to continue doing so, perhaps others will join in. Journalists, however, should be careful when they throw around history. Whatever the outcome of the current moment in Iran, even in the slim chance that everything goes the opposition’s way, a rupture with the regime is very unlikely.
