Demonstrators in Iran on December 30, 2017. Picture by SalamPix/ABACA/ABACA/PA Images. All rights reserved.On the 1st of January, and the fifth day of protests in Iran, President Rouhani decided to pursue a course that the security and military officials had pursued before him. While speaking of the importance of attention to economic and political realities and the people’s right to protest, Rouhani overlooked the true reality of the situation when he proclaimed: “There is a minority, a tiny group, who would come in and do something: to chant slogans against the law and the will of the people, to insult the sanctities and values of the revolution, and to destroy public property. Our country will round them up good.”
There is no doubt that government – any government - is in the business of “rounding up.” It is in the essential working of government to round up collective wealth, to gather subjects, and to stockpile power. At times, such an act takes on a harsher form. Banks and prisons, two important institutions in the modern Iranian order, are crystallizations of the ultimate form of this gathering up. These two entities may help us understand what took place in Iran in the last few months.
Iranian neoliberalism
Since the moment privatization and the economy of an “eastern” neoliberalism was rolled out in Iran during the administration of Hashemi Rafsanjani (1989-1997) through its ripening in the Rouhani years, they have, beside their other results, created a class of poor and destitute people who have viewed their own meager prospects as being bound to the very government which in fact saps their lifeblood. Owing to their dependence on government aid, these people have always been the greatest supporters of those in power. Because of economic challenges posed by various administrations' adjustment policies and international sanctions, this burgeoning class has widened to include the classical middle class and is now at the end of its rope, in just the fashion Fyodor Dostoevsky describes in his Notes from the Underground. It should come as no surprise that this class tends to see itself as opposed to all the factions of Iran’s two-party system (conservatives and reformists). In fact, it is the very thing the system in power has not been able to accomplish – unifying the government – that masses of protesters are doing now. This time around, protesters chant against all factions and cliques: reformists, conservatives, middle classes, and the whole governing class have been called into question.
