{"id":14496,"date":"2026-01-27T07:00:55","date_gmt":"2026-01-27T12:00:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/?p=14496"},"modified":"2026-01-31T05:26:00","modified_gmt":"2026-01-31T10:26:00","slug":"__trashed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/2026\/01\/__trashed\/","title":{"rendered":"Iran: The anatomy of Dey"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span class=\"dropcap\">W<\/span>When we speak of the \u201cDey uprising\u201d\u2014Dey in the Iranian calendar roughly corresponds to late December through mid-January\u2014it is tempting to compress the whole episode into two images: the street and repression. That shortcut serves two audiences at once: the state, and lazy analysis. The state prefers to claim it was merely \u201cunrest,\u201d stirred up by foreign actors and then contained through \u201cfirmness.\u201d A segment of the opposition, for its part, prefers to describe it as nothing more than a sudden flare of \u201cpopular anger\u201d that eventually burned out. But if we keep the story inside this narrow frame, we miss what actually mattered.<\/p>\n<p>Dey was the outcome of a process. The chain began at the start of autumn\u2014from Mehr (roughly late September)\u2014with a combination of economic decisions, political blockages, and an internal struggle over rentier privilege and access to resources. (A rentier is someone who lives off of unearned income\u2014\u201crents\u201d\u2014derived from investments or a powerful social position). By Dey, this accumulation reached its point of detonation, as price shocks collided with the collapse of people\u2019s basic capacity to live: the ability to buy necessities, to plan even a few weeks ahead, to maintain ordinary dignity under extraordinary pressure.<\/p>\n<aside class=\"pullquote\">Dey was not a neat, uniform coalition\u2014and that is precisely why it matters. Real movements are rarely orderly. They are noisy, multi-voiced, and cross-class.<\/aside>\n<p>Most importantly, the episode did not \u201cend\u201d simply because repression occurred. Repression was decisive, yes. But what followed repression was equally political: a reconfiguration of the regime\u2019s center of gravity and a blunt message delivered to society. The costs of the crisis would be paid from the pockets of ordinary people, not from the wealth, immunity, and institutional power of the ruling strata.<\/p>\n<p>To understand Dey, political economy must be moved from the margins back to the center of the analysis.<\/p>\n<h4>Why every economic crisis in Iran becomes political<\/h4>\n<p>Iran\u2019s economy can be explained very simply, without heavy jargon.<\/p>\n<p>On one side there is a society whose income is paid in rials and that has almost no effective tools of collective self-defense\u2014wage workers, teachers, nurses, junior civil servants, retirees, and a large share of the urban middle strata. These groups live under inflation, become poorer as the national currency loses value, and if they protest, they often face \u201csecuritized\u201d repression\u2014an \u201cintelligence case,\u201d charges framed as national security, and the machinery of punishment.<\/p>\n<p>On the other side there is a network that lives off privilege. Privilege here is not a vague moral accusation; it is a concrete set of access points: preferential access to hard currency (dollars and other foreign exchange), import and export licenses, state contracts, oil and construction projects, monopolies in transport and customs, and\u2014crucially\u2014judicial and security immunity. Within this network, sanctions are not only \u201cexternal pressure.\u201d They can also function as an internal opportunity: they push trade into the shadows, concentrate it in fewer hands, kill open competition, and enlarge the rents available to those with protected channels.<\/p>\n<aside class=\"pullquote\">Crisis itself becomes a mechanism of redistribution\u2014upward.\u2026 That is why an economic crisis in Iran rapidly turns into a legitimacy crisis.<\/aside>\n<p>The result is that crisis itself becomes a mechanism of redistribution\u2014upward.<\/p>\n<p>So when the rial collapses, it is not merely the dollar rate that rises. The prices of food, medicine, rent, transportation, and energy all surge. Ordinary people become poorer, while privileged networks either profit directly or, at minimum, survive the shock far better than everyone else. That is why an economic crisis in Iran rapidly turns into a legitimacy crisis: people do not experience the state as merely \u201cincompetent,\u201d but as <em>partial<\/em>\u2014structurally aligned with the beneficiaries of privilege, and willing to make society pay to preserve that order.<\/p>\n<h4>What exactly does \u201ceconomic surgery\u201d mean?<\/h4>\n<p>In Iran\u2019s official, technocratic vocabulary, \u201ceconomic surgery\u201d is a polite label for what is essentially shock therapy. What does that mean in concrete terms?<\/p>\n<p>It means the state is trying to do several things at once, and to do them fast:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Raise energy prices<\/strong>\u2014gasoline, gas, electricity\u2014in order to cut subsidies and lighten the budget deficit.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Move the exchange rate toward a single-rate system<\/strong>, or at least redefine foreign-exchange \u201cprivileges,\u201d because a multi-tier currency regime generates corruption and creates enormous rents for those who can access preferential rates.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Increase tax extraction<\/strong>, usually through taxes that are easiest to collect\u2014such as value-added tax\u2014and through intensified pressure on small businesses and the urban middle strata, because taxing the truly powerful centers of wealth is politically costly and often practically blocked.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Reduce social spending<\/strong>, or achieve the same outcome indirectly by keeping nominal wage increases below the inflation rate\u2014which effectively lowers real wages.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Even in a \u201cnormal\u201d state, this package is painful for lower-income groups. In Iran, it runs into a structural problem that turns pain into political combustion: the main beneficiaries of rent and privilege are not outside the state\u2014they sit inside the architecture of power.<\/p>\n<p>So \u201csurgery,\u201d in rhetoric, sounds like cutting away rent-seeking and restoring economic health. But in practice it tends to become something else: austerity for society, continuity for the rentier order. The blade is supposed to cut rent; instead it usually cuts into the social body.<\/p>\n<p>That contradiction\u2014reform spoken as rent-removal, executed as downward sacrifice\u2014is the core of Dey.<\/p>\n<h4>From autumn to Dey: The chain that produced an explosion<\/h4>\n<p>From the start of autumn\u2014from Mehr (roughly late September)\u2014a serious debate began to consolidate among segments of the technocratic bloc, market-oriented economists, and even parts of Iran\u2019s decision-making circles. The core claim was blunt: A shock was necessary. Energy prices had to rise. The exchange rate had to be pushed toward a single-rate regime. The economy had to be \u201cstabilized\u201d through a painful, concentrated intervention. Some even sold the fantasy\u2014borrowing from cases like Argentina\u2014that Iran could \u201cfix\u201d its economic disorder without any serious change in foreign policy and without opening political space, simply by administering a hard economic shock.<\/p>\n<p>But the project carried a ruthless question from the very beginning: <em>Who would pay the price?<\/em><\/p>\n<p>If the goal were genuinely to reduce rent-seeking, then the privileged networks would have to be cut back. The budgets and contracts of powerful institutions would have to come under the knife. Oil, customs, and contractor monopolies would have to be subjected to transparency and real oversight. In other words, it would require a direct confrontation with the ruling strata.<\/p>\n<p>What advanced in practice, however, moved in the opposite direction: The system prepared to ensure that the shock would land on society\u2014not on the rentiers.<\/p>\n<aside class=\"pullquote\">The spark may emerge from a central node of the traditional economy, but the fuel is drawn from the entire social landscape.<\/aside>\n<p>It is in this context that the suppression of voices capable of explaining the crisis in class terms becomes politically legible. If the public is prevented from understanding that the issue is not simply gasoline but the distribution of power and wealth, then responding to the crisis as a national security issue becomes far easier. Arrests, the closure of critical outlets, and the targeting of social and women\u2019s activists in the months leading into Dey can be read within precisely this logic: clearing the terrain of interpretation and organization before the storm breaks.<\/p>\n<p>Then the first stage of energy price increases was implemented. The state congratulated itself for \u201cavoiding a repeat of Aban 1398\u201d (November 2019). But it quickly became clear that Iran\u2019s sick economy could not be \u201cfixed\u201d by a single round of shock, because the problem was never only the price of gasoline. The deeper drivers were structural: chronic budget deficits, sanctions, networked corruption, and a privilege-based rentier economy. So the talk of a second, deeper shock returned\u2014and this was the point at which a technocratic project became a political crisis.<\/p>\n<p>Why? Because two things were happening at once.<\/p>\n<p>On the one hand, officials pushed the idea of creating at least the horizon of negotiations with the United States as a way to calm the foreign-exchange market. Even the mere possibility of talks can reduce psychological pressure on the rial, for a time. On the other hand, the state\u2019s confrontational foreign policy posture and its domestic political closures remained intact. In other words, the system wanted to intensify austerity without accepting even minimal institutional reform. \u201cSurgery\u201d had to be performed, but the blade was permitted to cut only into society\u2014never into the body of power.<\/p>\n<h4>The 1405 (2026-2027) budget, in detail: A document that said, \u201cYou will pay the price\u201d<\/h4>\n<p>On 23 December 2025 (2 Dey 1404 in the Iranian calendar), the government submitted the draft budget for 1405\u2014and many things that had previously circulated as \u201cspeculation\u201d suddenly hardened into an official document.<\/p>\n<p>To make sure the reader understands exactly what is being discussed, several key pillars\u2014and the logic behind them\u2014have to be spelled out plainly.<\/p>\n<p><strong>(a) Wages versus inflation: A Built-In Pay Cut<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>The budget assumed a nominal rise in wages and salaries at a level that does not match Iran\u2019s existing inflation. If inflation is above 40 percent while wages rise by 20 percent, the implication is straightforward: real purchasing power falls.<\/p>\n<p>Put simply: if this year your salary allowed you to buy 10 kilos of meat or 20 kilos of rice, next year\u2014despite the \u201craise\u201d\u2014you will be able to buy less. The state is effectively closing its fiscal gap by shrinking the real wage of employees and wage earners. (In technical terms, a 20 percent nominal increase against 40 percent inflation is roughly a 14 percent drop in real terms: 1.20 \u00f7 1.40 \u2248 0.86.)<\/p>\n<p><strong>(b) Minimum pay and the living basket: Working poverty as a policy outcome<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>The budget\u2019s projected minimum wage level was far below the real cost of living. When the estimated cost of a working-class household\u2019s basic living basket runs into tens of millions of tomans, but the minimum wage remains well below that threshold, the result is not mysterious: wage poverty. (Figures in Iran are typically discussed in tomans\u2014with the \u201cIranian type\u201d of everyday usage\u2014though any conversion to U.S. dollars depends on the volatile free-market rate.)<\/p>\n<p>That means poverty is no longer merely a condition of unemployment. It becomes something you can experience while fully employed\u2014a structural feature of the system, not a personal failure.<\/p>\n<p><strong>(c) Taxes: Raising revenue where it\u2019s easiest, not where it\u2019s fairest<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>The draft budget projected a sharp increase in tax revenues. In practice, the most \u201ccollectible\u201d taxes tend to be extracted from the middle and lower strata, because taxing the most powerful centers of wealth is either politically blocked or met with intense resistance.<\/p>\n<p>The increase of VAT (value-added tax) from 10 percent to 12 percent is a clear example. This is a tax that lands on everyday consumption\u2014on the receipts of ordinary life\u2014not on rentier windfalls. In effect, it is the population\u2019s daily purchases, not privileged profits, that are being asked to finance the state\u2019s crisis.<\/p>\n<p><strong>(d) The operating deficit: The state cannot fund itself by normal means<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>The budget also pointed to an operating deficit on the scale of hundreds of trillions of tomans\u2014a number that may sound abstract, so it should be translated into meaning:<\/p>\n<p>It means the state cannot cover its routine expenditures through routine revenues. To bridge that gap, it must do one (or several) of the following:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>print money or monetize the deficit, feeding inflation<\/li>\n<li>raise taxes further, intensifying pressure on society<\/li>\n<li>sell assets and issue debt, pushing the burden into the future<\/li>\n<li>draw on public funds and reserves, consuming what is left of collective resources<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>In other words: When the deficit reaches this magnitude, economic management becomes inseparable from political conflict\u2014because every \u201csolution\u201d has a social class that pays for it.<\/p>\n<p><strong>(e) The budgets of powerful institutions: Untouched, or minimally touched<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>At the same time, major allocations linked to military, security, and ideological institutions remained intact or relatively shielded. That is the budget\u2019s political message in its most condensed form:<\/p>\n<p><strong>(f) Austerity for the lower strata; stability for the core of power.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Once society sees that combination in black and white, the issue is no longer \u201cjust gasoline prices\u201d or \u201cjust inflation.\u201d The issue becomes something more fundamental: the state has formally announced that the costs of the crisis will be extracted from the market, the middle strata, and the poor\u2014not from the ruling network that holds wealth, immunity, and institutional leverage.<\/p>\n<p>This is how a budget stops being merely a financial document and becomes a legitimacy document\u2014or, more precisely, a document that accelerates the collapse of legitimacy.<\/p>\n<h4>The bazaar, trust networks, and holdings<\/h4>\n<p>In the classic narrative of modern Iran, the <strong>bazaar<\/strong> is often described as one of the pillars of the political order\u2014an institution with social weight, organizational capacity, and historical leverage. But the reality of the last two decades is different: the traditional bazaar has steadily lost much of its structural power in the face of <strong>giant holding companies, quasi-state economic headquarters, financial and credit institutions, major contractors, and sanctions-shaped semi-monopolistic networks.<\/strong> The bazaar still matters as a capillary system for distributing goods and as a social terrain, but the real centers of economic decision-making have, for a long time, been located elsewhere.<\/p>\n<p>When a foreign-exchange crisis intensifies, the traditional bazaar is typically the first part of the economy to freeze. It cannot price goods with confidence. It cannot buy inventory without fearing immediate loss. It cannot convert stock into reliable money. In contrast, <strong>trust (cartel-like)<\/strong> networks and larger connected actors\u2014those with protected channels and privileged access\u2014often have far more room to maneuver.<\/p>\n<p>This produces a contradiction inside the economic order itself: a segment of the traditional economy becomes paralyzed under the pressure of currency collapse, while powerful sanctions-era networks either <strong>profit from instability<\/strong> or at least <strong>manage it<\/strong> more effectively than everyone else. The crisis is not simply \u201cthe state versus society.\u201d It is also a struggle among different fractions of the system over who gets to survive the shock, and who gets crushed by it.<\/p>\n<p>So when protest begins in the bazaar and rapidly jumps to the university\u2014and then to smaller, poorer towns\u2014this is not evidence that the \u201cbazaar\u201d suddenly became revolutionary. It is evidence that society was already primed, and that a rupture inside the economic order opened a corridor. That is the qualitative difference that matters: The spark may emerge from a central node of the traditional economy, but the fuel is drawn from the entire social landscape.<\/p>\n<h4>The social composition and geography of the revolt: From the center to the periphery<\/h4>\n<p>Dey was not a neat, uniform coalition\u2014and that is precisely why it matters. Real movements are rarely orderly. They are noisy, multi-voiced, and cross-class. In this wave, several poles stood out:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Small business owners and the bazaar,<\/strong> being crushed by currency instability, heavier taxation, and recessionary conditions.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Students and younger people,<\/strong> carrying the memory of Woman, Life, Freedom and increasingly tying questions of dignity and freedom to the everyday crisis of livelihood.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Workers and wage earners\u2014teachers, nurses, retirees,<\/strong> and others who have been living inside continuous cycles of protest for years, not as a sudden awakening but as an accumulated experience of wage poverty and institutional contempt.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Smaller and poorer towns<\/strong>, which have repeatedly shown in previous waves that when they erupt, repression often becomes more naked\u2014more direct, less mediated, and more lethal.<\/li>\n<li><strong>National-minority regions and other marginalized peripheries,<\/strong> where informal economies and double repression are lived simultaneously: economic dispossession on one front, and on another, intensified repression in the name of national security.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>The crucial point is this: the linkage from bazaar to university, and then outward to smaller towns, demonstrated that the rupture was not only class-based. It was also generational and regional. Yet these fractures rotated around a single axis: the systematic removal of people from decision-making, and the consistent strategy of forcing the social costs of crisis downward\u2014onto those with the least power to refuse them.<\/p>\n<h4>Fractures within the power bloc<\/h4>\n<p>In the months leading into Dey, fractures inside the ruling bloc became more visible. Some technocrats and political figures openly pointed to the need for negotiations as a way to reduce pressure on the foreign-exchange market\u2014essentially, to create a stabilizing horizon for the rial. Meanwhile, parts of the economic oligarchy showed little willingness to sacrifice their interests: they resisted government demands to return offshore or hoarded currency to domestic circulation, or to alter the practices through which they protect their profits. The judiciary, in many cases, effectively reinforced this hierarchy of power\u2014speaking far more softly to major capital holders than to workers, protesters, or ordinary defendants swept into \u201cnational security\u201d cases.<\/p>\n<p>But these internal conflicts tend to converge at a single point: <strong>the street.<\/strong> Once mass protest breaks open public space, rival factions recognize a shared danger. The disagreements over how to manage the rentier order may continue, but repression becomes the common project. In other words: divisions over the distribution of rents remain; unity over coercion hardens.<\/p>\n<h4>External actors and the exiled right wing<\/h4>\n<p>In moments of crisis, external players inevitably move. Foreign states pursue their own interests, not the freedom of Iran\u2019s people. The exiled right, meanwhile, often revolves around one central idea: gaining power from the outside\u2014through deals, lobbying, and reliance on foreign pressure.<\/p>\n<p>That approach carries two major dangers:<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li><strong>It hands the state a narrative weapon.<\/strong> The regime can portray protest as \u201cdependent,\u201d paint dissent as a foreign plot, and use that framing to legitimize repression.<\/li>\n<li><strong>It diverts society away from internal organization<\/strong> and toward the fantasy of a savior\u2014an expectation that political change will arrive through a \u201crescuer,\u201d rather than through collective power built from below.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p>Dey showed how destructive this expectation can be. It fractures the movement, turns strategy into factional theater, and shifts the center of gravity away from concrete demands\u2014wages, the right to organize, women\u2019s freedom, social justice\u2014toward symbolic battles that are easier to manipulate, easier to co-opt, and easier to weaponize against the uprising itself.<\/p>\n<h4>Bonapartism against revolution<\/h4>\n<p>Here the concept of Bonapartism becomes analytically useful\u2014but only if it is stated in clear, accessible terms.<\/p>\n<p>In the Marxist tradition, Bonapartism names a situation in which social antagonisms and political crisis become so acute that the state\u2014above all its military and administrative apparatus\u2014presents itself as an \u201carbiter above classes.\u201d It claims that society is fragmenting, that forces are locked in destructive conflict, and therefore a concentrated authority is needed to restore \u201corder.\u201d But this arbitration is not neutral in practice. Its real function is to preserve property relations and the interests of the dominant strata, even if the external form of rule changes.<\/p>\n<p>Translated into the language of Iran today, Bonapartism looks like this scenario:<\/p>\n<p>First, the crisis is contained through mass violence and communications shutdowns\u2014killing, arrests, and the deliberate severing of society\u2019s ability to document, coordinate, and sustain collective action. Then, once the street is forced into retreat, the system pivots toward a political reconfiguration and elevates a figure\u2014or a structure\u2014marketed as a \u201csavior,\u201d designed to divert society away from the path of social revolution.<\/p>\n<p>That \u201csavior\u201d can wear different costumes. It can appear as a technocrat, calling the project \u201ceconomic reform.\u201d It can appear as a military strongman, branding it \u201cnational security.\u201d It can even appear in monarchist form, selling it as \u201chistorical salvation.\u201d The common denominator is always the same: none of these routes touch the real foundations of the rentier order\u2014property, privilege, and the networks of immunity. They merely change the management style and, once again, shift the costs onto society.<\/p>\n<p>If we read Dey through this framework, repression in the name of national security is not merely a reflexive response to protest. It is part of a broader strategy: weakening society, suspending the possibility of revolutionary transformation, and preparing the terrain for \u201corder from above\u201d\u2014an order that may stabilize the ruling network while leaving Iran structurally weaker and its social majority more exposed.<\/p>\n<hr class=\"half\">\n<small><em>Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Tempest Collective. For more information, see \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.tempestmag.org\/about\/\">About Tempest Collective<\/a>.\u201d<\/em><\/small><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Iranian exile <strong>Siyavash Shahabi<\/strong> explores the roots of the country\u2019s crisis and the currents that make up the recent wave of resistance.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":430,"featured_media":14513,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[121],"class_list":["post-14496","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-article","tag-iran"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/copy_of_tempest_feature_card_720.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14496","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/430"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14496"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14496\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14513"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14496"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14496"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14496"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}