Iran: Can the Green Movement Ally with Workers? (Maljoo)

Mohammad Maljoo writes for Middle East Report Online:

It is the custom of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran, to devise a name for each Persian new year when it arrives. On Nowruz of the Persian year 1388, which fell in March 2009 Gregorian time, he proclaimed “the year of rectifying consumption patterns”. But Iranians would not be content to mark 1388 simply with thrift. That year of the Persian calendar turned out to be the most politically tumultuous since the revolution that toppled the Shah, as the loosely constituted Green Movement mounted massive street protests against election fraud.

Undeterred, Khamenei has dubbed the year 1389 “the year of doubling ambition and doubling work”, telling Iranians that, having moderated how much they consume, they must now outdo themselves in how much they produce. On the eve of May Day 2010, however, a group calling itself the Iranian Celebration Council of International Workers’ Day posted an online statement heralding a work force “pregnant with strikes” soon to be born. The Celebration Council was not widely known before this statement, but its words spread like wildfire through the network of websites sympathetic to the Green Movement. Is it possible that the Supreme Leader has badly misnamed the annum for the second time in a row? Could the current year of the Persian calendar turn out not to double work but to halve it, as Iranian workers walk off the job in support of the last year’s political ferment?

To the Streets

The Green Movement has its origins in the deep splits within the Islamic Republic’s ruling elite at the juncture of the 30th anniversary of the revolution, the last occasion when the Iranian street reigned supreme. The undemocratic structures in the post-revolutionary state have since withstood numerous pushes, inside and outside parliament, for substantive change. Iran’s “reformist moment” of 1997-2004 was notable for the inability of parliamentary reformers to rally popular forces, whose demands were often too radical for the Islamist politicians. The 2009 upheavals were qualitatively different, as millions marched in support of one post-revolutionary state insider, Mir-Hossein Mousavi, against another, the hardline incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Not long before his death that December, Mousavi’s newfound ally, the key revolutionary leader Ayatollah Hossein-Ali Montazeri, made an unforgettable prognostication: “In the end the state will have no choice but to capitulate to the Green Movement.”

The intra-elite division is rooted in clashing political-economic interests, specifically the attempt of the narrow claque supporting Ahmadinejad to consolidate the levers of power in its own hands. Since Ahmadinejad won the presidency in 2005, his administration has largely ruled from behind closed doors, only rarely seeking to achieve its political goals through democratic procedure or even minimal consensus among other elements of the Islamic Republic. This move toward consolidation has been apparent in the economic domain as well, such as in the expansion of Revolutionary Guards business interests and the November 2009 statement by administration spokesman Gholam-Hossein Elham that “the Basij militia should do its best to take over the industrial sector in Iran.”

The deepest split of all may be in attitudes toward the very institution of elections. On one side, the reformists and others who value the republican traits of the Islamic Republic have tended to consider elections to be the best way for the elite to settle internal disagreements. Within the limits imposed by the Islamic Republic, the faction whose ideas the people like best will be in charge. On the other side, the hardliners have showed less and less respect for the concept of popular participation in politics, manipulating the voting in their own favor and then demanding that the official results be accepted. For them, elections are a rubber stamp. For the first faction, . The Green Movement -- demanding a credible system for determining “Where’s my vote?” -- feeds the antipathy between the two wings of the elite because it is focused on their main bone of contention.

Meanwhile, the hardliners’ shenanigans have brought their rivals within the state together with forces in the street. In the course of the mid-2000s, the reformist clerics and even moderate conservatives have lost the right to be elected, at least in practice, while Iranian citizens have been further divested of their already restricted choices in elections. There is an economic side to the partnership as well. The Green Movement is largely (though not entirely) made up of middle-class urbanites whose aspirations are tied to the greater liberalization that the reformists generally supported. They are technocrats where the hardliners’ backers are less-educated political loyalists; they want Iran to be more open to global commerce in goods and ideas; they are often pious, but they wish Iran could shed its puritan image and dispense with some of the more oppressively “Islamic” aspects of the post-revolutionary republic. In the late 1990s, it looked like such change could be achieved gradually through the ballot box, but no longer. With this alliance of interests forged, the institution of elections turned from a site of political struggle into a subject of political struggle.

The new site of struggle became the street. For eight months after June 12, 2009, date of the disputed presidential election, the confrontations in Tehran avenues went through numerous ups and downs, generating all manner of predictions of rapid political transformation. After a time, however, it appeared that a balance of street power had been struck. Neither side had achieved its goal and neither had retreated from its initial position: The Greens continued to demand that the state revisit the official election result and the state continued to refuse.

February 11, marked every year as “victory day” for the Islamic Revolution, was widely anticipated as the day when the Greens would reassert their dominance in the street. The state sponsors large rallies on this occasion, and the Greens believed they could humble the hardliners with enormous counter-demonstrations. Unexpectedly, however, it was the hardliners who stole the stage, sending hundreds of thousands into the streets to outnumber the Greens, whose ranks had been thinned by an intensive police crackdown. The stalemate endured on June 12, the first anniversary of the disputed election. Protesters lined major boulevards, but the sheer number of police and Basij paramilitaries deployed by the hardliners prevented the pro-Green forces from claiming the streets as their own.

Pinning Hopes on Labor

Since February 11, one reaction to this state of affairs has been to pin hopes on the Iranian working class. The idea is that workers, presumably the primary targets of Khamenei’s Nowruz pronouncement, will follow the middle class onto the scene of mass politics to create a new site of struggle at the point of production. This notion has been particularly attractive to those active in the labor and left movement before and during the 1979 revolution. Saeed Rahnema, for example, “The regime will be in serious trouble when workers and employees in the major industries and in social and government institutions start a strike as they did in the time of the Shah. Strikes are the most important aspect in my view. The regime will not change with street demonstrations alone.”

Iran has witnessed several spirited labor actions in recent years, well-known examples being the wildcat strikes of Tehran bus drivers and schoolteachers. But these actions have not crystallized into what can be called a coordinated, militant labor movement. Furthermore, militancy has not yet appeared in the most sensitive sectors of the economy, oil and transportation of freight. Hossein Bashiryeh, for example, has reported that in 2001 Iranian workers embarked on 303 labor actions across the country, less than six percent of which took place in the oil and transport sectors. Over 45 percent of these 303 strikes were called in protest of delays in pay, and most others also concerned bread-and-butter issues; . These trends of diffusion of protest and relatively small-bore economic demands have held during the Ahmadinejad presidency.

Having said that, the working class has certainly not been absent from the hurly-burly of politics nor from the Green Movement to date. In May, the Center to Defend the Families of Those Slain and Detained in Iran published the names of ten workers who have been killed in post-election street protests, and there is much other evidence that the post-election dissidents include many people without university educations. The hope of Rahnema and others, however, is that workers will go beyond joining the protests and paralyze factories and oilfields by refusing to work. , when a coalition of pro-revolutionary white-collar and blue-collar workers in the public sector emerged to facilitate the final steps on the path toward overthrowing the Pahlavi regime.

The expectation that the working class will save the Greens nevertheless seems to rely implicitly on an invisible-hand analysis, conveying the impression that the economically disenfranchised will join the struggle en masse as if by spontaneous combustion. More than anything else, Ahmadinejed’s plan to phase out price subsidies for such staples as gasoline, bread, water and electricity has lent this analysis its allure. Subsidy reform is predicted to have hyperinflationary consequences, combining with international economic sanctions to hit the working class especially hard. , “Iran is entering a severe economic crisis that increasingly will worsen the condition of the working class. [Ahmadinejad’s] coup d’état government is unable to manage this crisis. We will witness an expansion of working-class struggle that will ally itself with the Green camp.”

Hope Against Hope

But the invisible-hand analysis of Green Movement supporters suffers from at least two flaws. It is not so clear, firstly, that the working class is eager to join hands with the Greens despite the unprecedented level of worker dissatisfaction with the establishment. Mir-Hossein Mousavi refers broadly to social justice themes in his own remarks about the economy, but the core of the Green Movement leadership is devoted to an Iranian version of trickle-down economics, according to which the masses will eventually enjoy the good life but only if the elites prosper first and furiously.

The Green Movement has offered little in terms of a redistributive vision that could motivate the working class to flex its muscles. From the viewpoint of the working class, the current battle is one between one faction that wishes to spread the country’s wealth around the various precincts of the elite and another that aims to monopolize it. The working class would just as soon cast a pox on both houses.Secondly, there is reason to question a linear narrative whereby increasing economic pressures necessarily lead to the entrance of workers into the struggle and successful political action.

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