The Iran Protests: A Third Path to Political Change?
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A Socialist Project e-bulletin ... No. 1543 ... January 18, 2018
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The Iran Protests: A Third Path to Political Change?
Fouad Oveisy and Behnam Amini
An Alternative to the Politics of "National Security" Emerges
Days of protests in Iran have caught statesmen, analysts and observers by surprise, even though the anti-austerity and anti-establishment sentiments behind this primarily working-class revolt have been brewing for years. All the same, surprise is not a common reaction across the media. An early analysis offered in a tweet by the popular and self-styled Marxist pundit, Ali Alizadeh, captures a sentiment which is common across an array of responses to these events from individuals and groups as disparate, in both aim and ideas, as the Iranian reformists, the Iranian postcolonial left, and middle class Iranians both inside and outside Iran. Alizadeh... asks: "Do you realize that it is because [the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI)] is secured and external threats [to Iran’s national security] have been minimized [by the policies of the IRI], that the right to protest [inside Iran] is now recognized [by the IRI government]?…[This is why I] insist that [regional] security is the prerequisite to everything else, including [civil, political and personal] freedoms."
Here, Alizadeh suggests that the long term stability of the IRI state is the prerequisite for the growth of democracy inside Iran, given that the many international and civil wars plaguing the region have imperilled the prospects of long term security and democracy in countries such as Iraq, Syria and Libya. Over the years, reformist, postcolonial and conservative commentators have employed narratives similar to Alizadeh’s as a key reason for supporting the Iranian reformist movement. Offering itself as the only viable alternative for political change in Iran that does not jeopardize the safety and stability of the Iranian people and state, the Iranian reformist movement has largely deployed Alizadeh’s narrative toward establishing hegemony over articulations and mobilizations of dissent inside Iran. The reformists claim that concrete political change inside Iran, and any transfer of power from the conservative faction of power spearheaded by Ayatollah Khamenei to the Iranian people, is possible only via their gradualist and revisionist agenda.