Anti-government protests in Karaj, 31 December 2017. voanews.com. Public DomainIran’s recent protests have done more than bloodying the regimes’ nose. Most significantly, the protests stripped another layer of the regime’s already thin legitimacy, particularly amongst a constituency traditionally presumed to be the Islamic Republic’s backbone: low-income social strata and rural regions. But the protesters’ motivations are not exclusively economic and class-based.
Despite the Islamic Republic’s longstanding resilience in surviving political crisis, the recent mass protests were a bad omen for the regime. It’s leadership, characteristically, blamed the protests on foreign agents. Security forces rounded up thousands of protesters, presumed ringleaders and potential agent provocateurs. There have been about 30 confirmed fatalities with the suspicious deaths of some detainees. However, the announcement of General Jafari, commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corp (I.R.G.C) about “the end of the new sedition” was as hollow as George Bush’s “mission accomplished”. Few believe that this will be the end of the affaire, but rather the beginning of a new phase in the conflict between nation and state in Iran.
The common wisdom, currently dominating mass media, perceives the recent protests as a working class phenomenon. This is similar to the analysis, which described the Green Movement as a middle class spectacle. Both perceptions have a significant element of truth in them but minimize other significant factors in their attempt to pigeonhole multifaceted, multi-angled developments of a complex and vibrant country. There have been some thoughtful and constructive writings on “the working class protests” hypothesis, but generalizations such as the Guardian’s “it’s the economy stupid” oversimplifies a very complex situation without enough empirical data. To put it bluntly, it is a presumption based on speculative perception.
