P U L S E

Despite the previously blossoming rhetoric about “social facts,” “fraud,” and the Green Movement (only the third term refers to something that actually exists), news out of the Islamic Republic of Iran continues to suggest that the Iranian populace voted strongly for Ahmadinejad, despite true-but-meaningless affirmations that  “Millions of Iranians believe that the Interior Ministry, under Sadeq Mahsouli, and the clerical leadership have disenfranchized them,” as James Buchan writes at the New Left Review.

The Iranian lower and lower-middle class probably voted for Ahmadinejad for a pretty simple reason: Ahmadinejad stands for economic and cultural populism and populist nationalism, alongside political illiberal-ism. This accords with something socialists have known for a long time: freedom to assemble is a booby prize when you’re too hungry to go to a protest.

So it was fascinating to read Iranian economist Djavad Salehi-Isfahani’s account of one of the Ahmadinejad government’s moves towards economic populism, particularly its attempts at subsidy reform. According to Salehi-Isfahani, Ahmadinejad wants to sharply reduce the energy subsidies that currently total some 50 billion dollars a year. The bill under consideration will allow the government to raise an additional 10 to 20 billion dollars a year in revenue. The bill will then redistribute half of that money to low-income families; a family of five will be able to expect 1000-2000 dollars a year. Median spending in 2007 was about 3800 dollars a year. The current energy subsidies are, as Salehi-Isfahani adds, highly regressive: the majority go to families making over the median income.

There are myriad potential problems with this proposal, well-laid out by Salehi-Isfahani, but they are not here my primary concern. During the elections and their violent aftermath, a pissy cat-fight erupted on the left: between “supporters” of Ahmadinejad who didn’t support Ahmadinejad and “supporters” of the Green Movement whose actions had precisely zero impact on the Green Movement. In the latter camp, we had commentators noting that “Overall, there is little to suggest that workers or even the very poor have a deep material interest in electing Ahmadinejad, any more than his opponent.” This seemed like bullshit then, and smells like bullshit now, a post hoc touch of argumentation attempting to strengthen the fantastical thesis that the Green Movement had a shot at revolution. What they had was a shot at getting shot.

Some will object that direct cash transfers are not a sustainable development strategy (as though we know what that looks like, anyway). This type of populism will have some inflationary effects, less if the reform and redistribution is handled carefully. The question of “sustainability” is itself a chimera. Subsidies that contribute to carbon going into the atmosphere are unsustainable by definition. Still, the existence of such policies, scarcely mumbled about on the Marxist left during the upsurge’s more beguiling moments, helps explain why the working-class voted for Ahmadinejad, and why several months after the election, 81 percent of Iranians polled believed that Ahmadinejad was the legitimate president, according to a poll posted at a well-known Stalinist web-zine. Accurate polling in an autocracy is doubtless a problem, but as a rough hint at societal sentiment, the finding is quite significant.

Riotous Middle Easterners, like rojo rojito Latin Americans, are pleasant folk to project revolutionary fantasies upon. Sometimes such fantasies reflect reality. Sometimes not. In Iran, its social and political news now absent from the headlines, with the ridiculous exception of its nuclear program (and perhaps someone can present me the brief for why Iran shouldn’t have nuclear armaments, while a raging Israel has over 200 of them), the latter is transparently the case. Little tidbits like that which Salehi-Isfahani serves up give us a clue as to why events in Iran turned out the way they did. Worth paying attention to, even without the frisson of impending revolution.

[Cross-posted from Jewbonics]