Rentier capitalism and the Iranian puzzle

Dariush M. Doust

The word ‘Iran’ usually signifies unpredictability, offering either raw material for the narratives of news agencies, or a fascinating enigma. Recent events have once again underlined the fact that the 1979 Iranian Revolution is still poorly conceptualized. To state the obvious: the outcome of the revolution, the figure of Khomeini and the Islamic republic, with its combination of misogyny, anti-imperialism and brutal repression, make up a puzzle. However, this puzzle is not some well-kept secret, hidden by the Iranians, which would become accessible to us if only if our narratives were sufficiently nuanced, or if religious or some other form of secret codification were more thoroughly explored. It is an objective puzzle. Reluctance to adopt a theoretical approach is generally just another instance of exoticism. Against this exoticism, the point of departure in this comment is the simple proposition that the Iranian puzzle – to paraphrase Hegel – is puzzling for the Iranians themselves.*

The recent uprising was not unpredictable; nor is it a new revolution. Its actors are not clear about its agenda or about its future direction. These events are above all parts of a new sequence of the Iranian Revolution. It is a renewed effort to redefine the revolutionary agenda of 1979. This revolution, like many others, is still in search of its own realization. The first sequence of the revolution involved a twofold inscription of a rupture. Its onset in 1978 was a sign of the closure of the emancipatory projects of the twentieth century, including the post-colonial projects of the period after the Second World War; but it was equally a leap from centuries of the absolute sovereign state form into the amplitude of historical possibilities, to construct the common cause of a res publica. Such a process could not be, and has not been, decided once and for all during its first brief sequence between 1978 and 1981. The street rallies since June 2009 openly refer to the revolution and its initial sequence thirty years ago, but at the same time and at each popular assembly, the reiteration of the old slogans releases words such as ‘Independence’ and ‘Freedom’ from the closed discourse of the official propaganda machine. By small shifts in the wording of slogans, even those that are patently religious, chanting people redefine the revolution. This means that the revolution has not got a proper name; it cannot be qualified (as it is in the official state discourse) as ‘Islamic’. The Iranian Revolution is not a closed history. The objective puzzle around which the terms of the social antagonism are organized resides in the way the material conditions of life are organized, the way value is produced and circulates in a distributive system.

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