I Knew Khomeini documentary discussion Watch this YouTube documentary and write 4 pages following these 4 steps: 1) a detailed description of the movie/do

I Knew Khomeini documentary discussion Watch this YouTube documentary and write 4 pages following these 4 steps:

1) a detailed description of the movie/documentary film

2) fully detailed analysis and interpretation of the movie/documentary film (how accurate is the documentary film in depicting the subject according to the readings? Is the story told complete? Is the story convincing?)

3) evaluation of the documentary film (what messages did the movie/documentary film convey? How

was the message conveyed? How well are major parts connected to each other?

4) relating the movie/documentary film to these writings below:

Explaining Revolutions

State refers to “core administrative, policing and military organizations…coordinated by an executive authority that extract resources from and administer and rule… a territorial defined national society.

Regime refers to “the formal and informal organizations, relationships, and rules that determine who can employ state power for what ends as well as how those who are in power deal with those who are not

Bureaucratic State

Bureaucracy is staffed by merit-based appointments

Systematic enforcement of rules and regulations

Efficiency in service provision

Patrimonial State

Appointments are based on political loyalty, kinship, ethnicity

Ineffective and random enforcement of rules and regulations

Inefficiency in service provision

Inclusive/Liberal Regime

Popular participation in political process – election, political parties, civil society groups

Presence of civil and political liberties

Exclusive/Repressive Regime

Shutting-off possibility for political participation

Absence of civil and political liberties

Many factors influence revolution. Many analysts focus on one or two factors in explaining the occurrence of a revolution

Combination of regime type, type of state organization and state infrastructural power creates catalyst for probable revolution

State with exclusive political regime and patrimonial type of government institution and weak state infrastructural power is likely to experience revolution

No popular representation

Weak state capacity, limited resources, lack of enforcement of rule = social justice, inequality

Pushing and pulling factors

State with bureaucratic organization, inclusive political regime, and strong infrastructural power is less likely to experience revolution

Strong organizational capacity and resources result in better service delivery

Political representation means presence of social justice, equality

Formal mechanism for transfer of power

Socio-economic class is a second structure that could lead to revolution

Social classes “are clusters of people…who act together or against each other in the pursuit of particular interests”

Eric Wolf: peasant revolution followed the emergence of commercialization of agriculture and new social classes – intellectuals and workers

Absentee landlords engaged in excessive expropriation from farmers

Intellectuals – doctors, lawyers – see their social mobilization restricted

Workers are alienated from their labor

Modernization is a movement from traditional society to modern society

Imbalance between popular demands and a political system’s capacity to respond to these demands

Such imbalance generates alienation of farmers and middle class

Revolution depends on the extent of such alienation

International Flow of Ideas

Revolutionary leaders learned the concept of revolution and its potential in national development

Many revolutionary leaders saw the ability of communist revolution in economic development and industrialization

International Flow of Financial and Logistical Support

Revolutions during the Cold War supported by the Soviet Union

What is Inwegen’s conclusion about the causes of revolution?

He opts for a cluster of analysis that includes state, class, and international structures. This cluster creates necessary and sufficient conditions for successful revolution

Weak state: exclusive, patrimonial, and repressive

Class structure: parasitic and remote landed elites and alienated middle class

International system that is conducive to revolutionary movements – ideology and finance

How does Skocpol (in her “historical structural perspective”) define social revolutions?

“Rapid basic transformation of a society’s state and class structures; and they are accompanied and in part carried out through by class-based revolts from below” p.4 The Iranian Revolution
10
Rentier state and Shi’ a Islam in the Iranian
Revolution
The recent overthrow of the Shah of Iran, the launching of the Iranian Revolution between 1977 and 1979, came as a sudden surprise to outside observers from the American friends of the Shah, to journalists and political pundits, and
to social scientists including those, like me, who are supposed to be “experts”
on revolutions. All of us have watched the unfolding of current events with
fascination a~d, perhaps, consternation. A few of us have also been inspired to
probe the Iranian sociopolitical realities behind those events. For me, such
probing was irresistible – above all because the Iranian Revolution struck me in
some ways as quite anomalous. This revolution surely qualifies as a sort of
“social revolution.” Yet its unfolding – especially in the events leading to the
Shah’s overthrow – challenged expectations about revolutionary causation that
I developed through comparative-historical research on the French, Russian,
and Chinese Revolutions. 1
“Social revolutions” as I define them are rapid, basic transformations of a
country’s state and class structures, and of its dominant ideology. Moreover,
social revolutions are carried through, in part, by class-based upheavals from
below. The Iranian Revolution seems to fit this conception. Under the old
regime, the Shah ruled through an absolutist-monarchical military dictatorship,
styling himself a cosmopolitan Persian King in the 2,500-year-old image of
Cyrus the Great. Iran’s dominant class, ostentatiously pro-Western in its cultural
style, consisted of state bureaucrats, foreign capitalist investors, and domestic
capitalists closely tied by patronage and regulation to the state machine. The
Revolution itself involved revolts against this dominant class by urban workers,
unemployed people, and old and new middle classes. Finally, the removal of
the Shah was accompanied by the dispossession of many (especially politically
This article is an elaboration of remarks prepared for a plenary “Sorokin Lecture” at the Annual
Meeting of the Southern Sociological Society in Louisville, Kentucky on 9 April 1981. A still
earlier version of these ideas was presented to the 1980-81 Mellon Seminar of the Institute for
Advanced Study on 17 February 1981. I am grateful to Daniel Bell for comments on the first draft
of this article.
241
privileged) capitalists, by the removal of all top officials and the reorganization
of the administrative, judicial, and coercive state apparatuses, and by attacks on
the lifestyles and institutional supports of Westernized dominant groups in Iran.
As in most contemporary Third World countries, it is hard to distinguish
political and social revolution in any firm way, because the state and its incumbent elites are so central to the ownership and control of the economy. But
the Iranian Revolution has been so obviously mass-based and so thoroughly
transformative of basic sociocultural and socioeconomic relationships in Iran
that it surely fits more closely the pattern of the great historical social revolutions
than it does the rubric of simply a political revolution, where only governmental
institutions are transformed.
My previous work on social revolutions – not only my in-depth study of the
French, Russian, and Chinese cases, but also my more superficial investigations
of contemporary Third World cases -led to certain conclusions about the causes
of this class of events. Social revolutions, I have argued, are not simply
products of rapid modernization that lead to widespread social discontent and
disorientation. Many theorists have suggested that this sequence produces revolution. 2 But I have stressed, following Charles Tilly, that the mass, lower-class
participants in revolution cannot tum discontent into effective political action
without autonomous collective organization and resources to sustain their efforts. 3 Moreover, the repressive state organizations of the prerevolutionary
regime have to be weakened before mass revolutionary action can succeed, or
even emerge. Indeed, historically, mass rebellious action has not been able, in
itself, to overcome state repression. Instead, military pressures from abroad,
often accompanied by political splits between dominant classes and the state,
have been necessary to undermine repression and open the way for socialrevolutionary upheavals from below. In my view, social revolutions have not
been caused by avowedly revolutionary movements in which an ideological
leadership mobilizes mass support to overthrow an existing system in the name
of a new alternative. Avowedly revolutionary leaderships have often been absent
or politically marginal until after the collapse of prerevolutionary regimes.
And popular groups, especially peasants, have contributed to revolutionary
transformations by revolting for concrete ideals and goals separate from those
espoused by the revolutionary leaderships that end up consolidating revolutions
by building up new state organizations. In my book States and Social Revolutions, I was unremittingly critical of all theorists who have assumed that revolutions are “made” deliberately by revolutionary, mass-based social movements.
Instead, I insisted on a structural perspective to get at the historically unfolding
intersections of the efforts of differently situated and differently motivated
groups – groups not operating even under the shared rubric of a revolutionary
ideology. As I put it in the book, quoting the abolitionist Wendell Phillips:.
“Revolutions are not made. They come.”
The initial stages of the Iranian Revolution obviously challenged my pre-
242
Social revolutions in the modern world
The Iranian Revolution
viously worked-out notions about the causes of social revolutions. Three apparent difficulties come immediately to mind. First, the Iranian Revolution does
seem as if it might have been simply a product of excessively rapid modernization. Through the decade of the 1960s, and at an accelerating pace in the 1970s,
Iranian society underwent land reform, massive migrations from countryside to
cities and towns (above all to Teheran), unprecedentedly rapid industrialization,
and the sudden expansion of modem primary, secondary, and university education. When .the Revolution came, all sectors of Iranian society seemed discontented with the Shah and with their own situations. Perhaps, therefore, the
Revolution was straightforwardly the product of societal disruption, social disorientation, and universal frustration with the pace of change.
Second, in a striking departure from the regularities of revolutionary history,
the Shah’s army and police- modem coercive organizations over 300,000 men
strong – were rendered ineffective in the revolutionary process between 1977
and early 1979 without the occurrence of a military defeat in foreign war and
without pressures from abroad serving to undermine the Shah’s regime or to
provoke contradictory conflicts between the regime and the dominant classes. 4
Not only was the Shah himself ultimately left unprotected by the incapacitation
of his armed forces, but these forces themselves proved unable to replace the
Shah with a military regime (or a military-supported regime) that could preserve
the integrity of the existing state organizations. Instead, both the Shah and his
armed forces alike eventually succumbed to a domestic, mass-based revolutionary movement.
Indeed, third, if ever there has been a revolution deliberately “made” by a
mass-based social movement aiming to overthrow the old order, the Iranian
Revolution against the Shah surely is it. By the end of 1978, all sectors of urban
Iranian society were coalescing under the rubrics of Shi’a Islam and were
following the direction of a senior Shi’a cleric, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, in uncomproming opposition to the Shah and all who remained connected
to him. An extraordinary series of mass urban demonstrations and strikes, ever
growing in size and revolutionary fervor, even in the face of lethal military
repression, pitted the unemployed, workers, artisans, merchants, students, and
middle-ranking officials oflran against the Shah’s regime. What Western socialists have long dreamt of doing (without success except where war has intervened
to help), the people of urban Iran did accomplish as they mobilized in an allinclusive movement against a “corrupt,” “imperialist” monarchy. Their revolution did not just come; it was deliberately and coherently made – specifically in
its opening phase, the overthrow of the old regime.
There can be no question, therefore, about the sharp departure of the outbreak
of the Iranian Revolution from the causal configurations that occurred in the
outbreak of the French, Russian, and Chinese Revolutions. Fortunately, in
States and Social Revolutions I explicitly denied the possibility of fruitfulness of
a general causal theory of revolutions that would apply across all times and
places. I am not caught in the embarrassing position of having to argue that
the Iranian Revolution is “really just like the French, Russian and Chinese
Revolutions.” Nevertheless, I did suggest in the conclusion to my book that its
basic framework of analysis should be applicable to other revolutions, even in
different types of societies and different world-historical circumstances from the
“classical” cases I studied. Indeed, the Iranian Revolution, too, must be understood from a macroscopic and historically grounded structural perspective, one
that examines the interrelations of state, society, and organized politics in Iran,
and situates Iran in changing international political and economic contexts. Only
from this sort of perspective can we understand the vulnerabilities of the Shah’s
regime, the cross-nationally distinctive sociopolitical roots of the revolutionary
movement that brought it down, and the remarkable struggles since early 1979
over the creation of new state organizations in revolutionary Iran. The Iranian
Revolution can be interpreted in terms analytically consistent with the explanatory principles I used in States and Social Revolutions – this is what I shall
briefly try to show. However, this remarkable revolution also forces me to
deepen my understanding of the possible role of idea systems and cultural
understandings in the shaping of political action – in ways that I shall indicate
recurrently at appropriate points in this article.
243
THE VULNERABILITIES OF A RENTIER ABSOLUTIST STATE
Like the rulers of the Old Regimes in France, Russia, and China, the Shah of
Iran was an “absolute monarch.” And in an important sense, the Shah was much
more powerful than absolute monarchs of old, for he had at his disposal a
thoroughly modernized army and a ruthless, omnipresent secret police force.
Yet the S?ah’s state was much less rooted, less embedded in society- especially
rural. society – than the “agrarian bureaucracies” of prerevolutionary France,
Russia, and China.
Throughout the nineteenth century, Iran’s monarchs. were “Oriental despots”
w~o, de~p.it~ awesome trappings of personal authority, rei~ned only by manipulatmg diVISions among armed tribes, regional landlord potentates, and selfgovem~ng urban corporate groups. 5 A modem Iranian state, with a nationally
centralized army and administration, emerged only in the 1920s, after Reza
Kahn, the colonel of a tiny professional military force, seized power in a coup
d’etat and expanded his army to pacify and unify the country. Shah Reza Pahlavi
(as he ~rowned himself in 1925) constructed a kind of agrarian bureaucracy, a
centralized state coexisting with landed aristocrats. During his reign Iran gained
greater national unity and autonomy than ever before in modem times, yet still
did not escape its destiny at the geopolitical interstices of great power rivalries.
During World War II, Iran was occupied by Britain and the Soviet Union; Reza
~hah, ~ho had made the mistake of flirting with the Germans, was packed off
mto exile. After the war, Iran struggled for renewed national autonomy, first
244
Social revolutions in the modern world
against the Soviets and .then against the British and their oil interests. The
upshot, after the failure of Muhammed Mossadegh’s populist brand of nationalism, was American encouragement for a reassertion of royal power by Reza
Shah’s son, the (late) Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi. Helped by the US Central
Intelligence Agency to defeat his domestic adversaries in 1953, the second
Pahlavi Shah thereafter set his country on a course of cautious (though increasingly assertive) alliance with the newly hegemonic United States. Help from a
far-away imperialist power was used to give Iran’s state increased leverage in
relation to the older, nearby imperial powers, Britain and Russia, and eventually
to help it bid for regional military power in the Middle East.
Under the second Shah, the domestic underpinnings of the Iranian state also
changed as the state became increasingly addicted to revenues from exports of
oil and natural gas. Iran’s government became a “rentier state,” awash in
petrodollars, and closely linked to the rhythms of the world capitalist economy. 6
Especially after the mid-1960s, this state did not need to wrest taxes from its
own people, and the economic basis of its revenues was an industry oriented
primarily to exports, and employing only a tiny percentage of the domestic labor
force. The state’s main relationships to Iranian society were mediated through
its expenditures – on the military, on development projects, on modem construction, on consumption subsidies, and the like. Suspended above its own
people, the Iranian state bought them off, rearranged their lives, and repressed
any dissidents among them. The Shah did not rule through, or in alliance
with, any independent social class. During the 1960s, he launched a “White
Revolution” to buy out landlords, redistribute land to wealthier peasants, and
extend bureaucratic state control into the villages. Poor planriing left much of
the agrarian economy impoverished, however, forcing millions of poorer peasants to migrate to the towns and cities. Urban Iran grew to become almost 50%
of the population before the Revolution, and all urban strata relied heavily for
privileges, employment, and services on burgeoning state expenditures.
As a wealthy rentier state, the prerevolutionary Iranian regime was politically
unassailable in certain ways – and potentially vulnerable in others. Because of
ecological and sociopolitical arrangements in the countryside, Iranian peasants
lacked the capacity to revolt autonomously. 7 Yet even if they could have
revolted, it would hardly have mattered; for landlords were not a mainstay of
the Shah’s regime and agriculture was becoming ever more marginal in the
national economy. Industry, construction, and services were the foci of national
economic expansion fueled by the regime’s expenditures. In tum, these expenditures were closely linked to shifts in the price of oil and the international
demand for it. When the OPEC cartel raised oil prices in the early 1970s, the
Shah suddenly had huge revenues for crash programs in industrial and military
modernization. Along with windfall profits, rising wages, and new employment
opportunities, urban Iranians experienced escalating inflation and an influx of
privileged foreign skilled workers and technicians. Then, in 1975-77, world
The Iranian Revolution
245
demand for Iranian oil contracted, and many projects had to be cut and workers
thrown out of employment. All urban strata together could blame the state for
their troubles, and the Shah himself was universally understood to be the
autocratic embodiment of state authority. Indeed, the Shah was no figurehead
monar~~· but rather a practicing patrimonial absolutist. 8 He played bureaucrats
and military officers off against one another, never allowing stable coalitions or
line_s _of responsible authority to develop. The Shah personally made all major
decisions – about official appointments, about military procurement, about
major state economic investments. Once the Iranian state came under revolutionary pre_ssure i? 1977-78.’ the Shah’s absolutist role would become very
consequential. Umversal social resentment was focused upon his monarchical
person, yet without him the state could not function. Military officers, for
example, lac~ed the corporate solidarity to displace the Shah in a coup and save
the state at h1s expense. And once the United States prodded the Shah to leave
Iran in January 1979, top government officials found it hard to hold together in
the face of the revolutionary onslaught. (Remarkably, a leading military general
as well as SA YAK’s second-in-command secretly defected to the Ayatollah
Khomeini even before the end!)9
. Still, all of the foregoing vulnerabilities of the prerevolutionary Iranian regim~ could well have had little significance. The Shah, after all, had both
mumficent wealth and ominous repressive power at his disposal. Whatever the
ups and downs of oil prices and revenues, he should have been able to ride out
waves of urban social discontent, just as many other (less well endowed) Third
World rulers have been able to do. That he was unable to survive that both he
and his state succumbed to r~volution, can be explained only by reference to the
extraordinarily sustained efforts made by urban Iranians to wear down and
undercut the Shah’s regime. These efforts, in tum, were based in traditional
~enters of urban communal life and in networks of Islamic religious communica~Ion an~ leadership. A look at such supports for intense opposition to the Shah
IS now m order.
URBAN COMMUNITIES AS THE BASIS FOR POLITICAL
RESISTANCE
In many social revolutions, the most politically significant popular revolts have
been grounde~ ~n village communities, damaged by “modernizing” social
change, but still mtact as centers of autonomous, solidary opposition to dorninan_t classes and the state. Peasant village communities were not, however, the
basis for popular insurrections in the Iranian Revolution. Instead, opposition to
the Shah was centered in urban communal enclaves where autonomous and
solidary collective resistance was possible. Historically in Iran, the socioeco~ornic world of the bazaar was the center of urban life, and there were strong
hnks between the merchants and artisans of the bazaar and the agricultural
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Social revf?(utions in the modern world
The Iranian Revolution
producers in the countryside. Of course, as the Pahlavi Shahs used state power
to promote modem capitalist industrialization and new forms of urban life, the
bazaars of Teheran and other cities and towns were bypassed and squeezed,
both economically and spatially. Yet the dislocations of Iran’s hectic modernization also channeled new people and resources into the bazaar: rural migrants
sought employment and social services. Small artisanal-industrial enterprises,
employing less than ten workers, expanded in tandem with large modem factories (so that, as of 1977, 72% of all workers were employed in units of ten
employees or less). And bazaar merchants, from major wholesalers to tiny retail
shopkeepers, continued to handle much of the burgeoning import trade by which
urban Iranians, especially the nonwealthy, fed and clothed themselves. 1 Far
from being disorganized agglomerations of isolated, disoriented people, Iran’s
traditional urban communities remained buzzing centers of economic activity
and rich associational life. Islamic religious groups and occasions were especially important in tying merchants, artisans, and workers together. Mullahs
trained to interpret Islamic law adjudicated commercial disputes and taxed the
well-to-do to provide personalized welfare services for devout poorer followers.
Both clerical preachers and devout laymen orchestrated a never-ending succession of prayer-meetings and ritual …
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