Re: [Marxism] MRZine finally open to anti-Ahmadinejad perspectives

[Eli Stephens <elishastephens@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

"Despite his image in the West, this is the primary role that President 
Ahmadinejad is playing inside Iran: he is using the autocratic and repressive 
state apparatus to privatize public industries, weaken labor laws, and take 
away 
government subsidies.  He is, of course, doing so with an eye on building a 
stronger base for the regime and for his own re-election campaign next year."

I sure would have liked to see a SINGLE concrete example of the claims made in 
this paragraph, since the last sentence in particular (but the rest as well) 
seems to contradict this from later in the article:

"The social repercussion of this process within Iran is the marginalization of 
the class that prioritizes the Western consumerist culture.  "Ahmadinejad is 
[in 
fact] actively destroying that class," laments Alireza Alavitabar, a liberal 
journalist and editor of numerous newspapers all of which were eventually 
banned.  "And in order to do this, he has relied on the support of the rural 
and 
urban poor and the large sector of government employees."  Ahmadinejad is in 
effect re-animating and re-strengthening a social base which had been 
marginalized in the aftermath of the Iran-Iraq war.  In the name of "Islamic 
banking" the Ahmadinejad administration has been giving away no-interest loans 
(Sandogh Mehr-e Reza and Qarz ol-Hassaneh) which are giving promises and perks 
to the poor and the marginalized, alongside short-term opportunities that they 
have been denied since the end of the Iran-Iraq war.  This social base is, in 
many ways, in opposition to the classes that were benefiting from the 
Rafsanjani-Khatami period and who were seen as too unbeholden to the regime and 
its ideology."


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