An view by Sirantos Fotopoulos The protests now convulsing Iran are the inevitable revolt of a working-class pushed beyond the limits of survival. Inflation has shredded wages, the rial’s collapse has turned food, fuel, and medicine into luxuries, and millions of people who once lived precariously now find themselves unable to make a living at all. Shopkeepers, bazaar merchants, transport workers, students, and casual laborers are protesting the daily violence of an economy organized to extract obedience through deprivation. When bread becomes unaffordable, dissent is the first step towards survival. The Iranian state’s response has been brutally consistent — repression first, reform never. Security forces have met demonstrations with live ammunition, mass arrests, beatings, and intimidation. Internet blackouts attempt to sever workers from one another, isolating struggles city by city. The message is unmistakable: survival is conditional on silent obedience. To demand wages that keep ...
“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.” —Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilisation and the Remaking of the World Order, 1996, p. 51