Young Iranian women shop in Tehran before the forthcoming Iranian New Year of Norouz, in 2004. Despite the control of Iran’s parliament and key levels of government by conservatives, who have tried to clamp down on what they see as a corrosion of strict social rules, young Iranians, disillusioned with politics, continue to flout rules on head covering, traditional clothing, and holding hands in public.
If you consider countries in the world that have had violent political and cultural swings over the past several decades, you probably have Iran on your shortlist.
But Sorhrab Behdad, Denison’s John E. Harris Chair in Economics and a native of Iran, looks beyond those vicissitudes to find the same dynamics of Iranian social class that operate in other countries—the United States included. Changes in the Iranian economy over the past three decades, Behdad contends, reflect “people expressing a desire to have some control over their life.” That drive “brought Khomeini to power [in 1979]. It’s the same thing that brought back Ahmadinejad [in 2005]. And it’s the same thing that brought Bush to power [in 2000].”
Behdad investigates the relationships between social classes and the economy in Iran during the past 30 years in his new book, Class and Labor in Iran: Did the Revolution Matter? (Syracuse University Press), co-authored with Farhad Nomani, who chairs the economics department at the American University of Paris. The study—which the authors began when they taught together at Tehran University in the 1970s—carefully analyzes the data of the Iranian decennial censuses, starting in 1976, to determine trends in that country’s social structure. Erik Olin Wright, a leading sociologist of social class, states about Class and Labor in Iran, “There are surprisingly few books, on any society, which attempt to do what this book does: chart the trajectory of changes in class structures over time.”
The study concludes that, “For many, it is a struggle for survival in the midst of social turmoil; for others, as the Persian saying goes, it is ‘catching fish in the muddied water,’ or taking advantage of the opportune moments.” In other words, disorder and instability can benefit some while it makes others suffer. Specifically, the authors note the most dramatic change has been expansion of the petty bourgeoisie, drawing from both the middle class (a downward shift) and the working class (an upward step). “Iran,” they write, “has 40 percent of its employed workforce engaged in traditional petty commodity activities. The rest are almost equally divided between a frail and highly fragmented capitalist private sector and a state with overextended apparatuses of administration and coercion, social services, and economic activities.”
Behdad acknowledges that the book is controversial in positing social movements and social unrest as producing political change. “The Achilles heel of Iran,” he says, “is its youth—particularly its women,” a consequence of educational advances. Because both young people and many women of all ages regard their lives as unjustly restricted, they are exerting pressure for change. That pressure, Behdad predicts, will seriously affect the political and economic future of Iran.