A People’s History of Iran: Between Empire, Capital and Class

Abstract

ABSTRACT For centuries, Western imperialism has established a set of strict hierarchical, exploitative, and repressive relations with Iran through capitalist apparatuses such as unequal trade, military domination, and structures of accumulation, thereby ensured and perpetuated the country’s underdevelopment. Underpinning these apparatuses is a set of Eurocentric-Orientalist discourses, which reify Iranian society as an amorphous blob of backward, apolitical, stagnant, and archaic peoples, who have historically subjected themselves to totalitarian, “Oriental despots.” The corollary of this doxa is that the working masses are unable to mobilise and conduct a rational, egalitarian, secular, and humanist project that addresses their needs. Against this ideological and epistemological fallacy, this article conducts a dialectical and materialist analysis which examines Iranian history and politics through a multi-layered framework: internal class dynamics (meso-level) and their relations as a single geo-political site and circuit of the global capitalist system. Following the three waves of industrialisation, from 1848 to the present, the article demonstrates that Iran politics is shaped by a complex interplay of three social antagonistic forces: nationalist bourgeois, comprador bourgeois, and their antithesis, the working class. Moreover, the article argues that this internal interplay is an understudied site of conflict influenced and determined by global capitalist dynamics.