Re: [Marxism] Iran's rural vote and election fraud

[Suresh <borhyaenid@xxxxxxxxx>]

Louis, it's hard to notice that the 'reforms' that are being vaguely alluded to 
here are inevitably of the "much-needed" neo-liberal variety. If we're now 
taking Kautsky's and Plekhanov's line, and are arguing on behalf of another 
period of capitalist development of the progressive forces in state-dominated 
dirigiste economies like Iran (or maybe Belarus, Zimbabwe, Myanmar etc.), let's 
just come out and say it. It's not such a bad argument to take, although Iran's 
social indicators (like maternal mortality and life expectancy) seem to be 
pretty typical for so-called middle income "semi-colonial" countries across the 
board, and are about the same as more neo-liberal Turkey.

As for the rural/urban divide, the pro-American propagandist George Friedman 
admits:

"In the global discussion last week outside Iran, there was a great
deal of confusion about basic facts. For example, it is said that the
urban-rural distinction in Iran is not critical any longer because
according to the United Nations, 68 percent of Iranians are urbanized.
This is an important point because it implies Iran is homogeneous and
the demonstrators representative of the country. The problem is the
Iranian definition of urban â and this is quite common around the world
â includes very small communities (some with only a few thousand
people) as âurban.â But the social difference between someone living in
a town with 10,000 people and someone living in Tehran is the
difference between someone living in Bastrop, Texas and someone living
in New York. We can assure you that that difference is not only vast,
but that most of the good people of Bastrop and the fine people of New
York would probably not see the world the same way. The failure to
understand the dramatic diversity of Iranian society led observers to
assume that students at Iranâs elite university somehow spoke for the
rest of the country.


Tehran proper has about 8 million inhabitants; its suburbs bring it
to about 13 million people out of Iranâs total population of 70.5
million. Tehran accounts for about 20 percent of Iran, but as we know,
the cab driver and the construction worker are not socially linked to
students at elite universities. There are six cities with populations
between 1 million and 2.4 million people and 11 with populations of
about 500,000. Including Tehran proper, 15.5 million people live in
cities with more than 1 million and 19.7 million in cities greater than
500,000. Iran has 80 cities with more than 100,000. But given that
Waco, Texas, has more than 100,000 people, inferences of social
similarities between cities with 100,000 and 5 million are tenuous. And
with metro Oklahoma City having more than a million people, it becomes
plain that urbanization has many faces."


      

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