Results and Prospects: Whither Iran?

Abstract

The People’s Revolution was fought against despotism and pseudo-modernism, much in the same way as the earlier, Mashrūṭeh, revolution had been fought against despotism and traditionalism. Therefore, it was a revolt of all the urban social classes and groups and political tendencies against the Shah, his army, his machinery of terror, and the hard-core of his privileged bureaucratic henchmen. It would be familiar and fashionable, but unoriginal and incorrect, to regard it as yet another French Revolution, in which for the time being the radical petty bourgeoisie, ‘the Jacobins’, have gained the upper hand, just as it should by now be clear that Mashrūṭeh was not a bourgeois revolution. In any case, how many bourgeois revolutions can there be in a given society? The Iranian society is not classless; but the total domination of all social classes by the powerful and functional state led to the revolt of most of them against it, with the acquiescence of the rest: the Shah and his henchmen simply had no social base on which to depend in their hour of despair.