Ramifications of Geneva
Deal on Iranian Working Class
Wilhelm Wolff
December 14, 2013 (updated December 20, 2013)
In
as recent a headline as December 8, 2013, even Israel, headed by Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu has began softening its harsh position against the interim
nuclear agreement signed in Geneva between Iran and the U.S. The government of the settlers in Israel has
realized that the Obama Administration, through the P5+1 Geneva Agreement, has kept
the bigger share of the pie and constricted Iran to a space only worthy of
nations with limited sovereignty. Secondly,
Secretary of State, John Kerry speaking to a conference run by the Saban Center
for Middle East Policy, assured the Israeli skeptics that should the U.S.
conclude that Iran still continues supporting the demands of Palestine, for
example, it will toss the interim document like a scrap of paper, into the dust
bin.
And
if we hear that U.S. Senators talk about adding more sanctions to the stack of
those already existing, as reported in the Financial Times of Dec. 9,
2013, their chatter should not be taken seriously. The main acts of these Congressmen and women
are posturing not only for U.S. people but also for the international
community. Through such theatrics, they
intend to send two messages: 1) assuring their constituency "We're still
awake and working to defend your safety and security from the Dangerous Foreign
Boogieman as defined by U.S. foreign policy, and 2) sending a message to the
Iranian government that it should not dare to retreat from the agreement whose
lion share is captured by the U.S.
In
order to assure the pro-Israel representatives in Congress and for Obama to
show how tightly he is drawing the noose around Iran's neck, the White
House Punishes More Firms Over Iran Sanctions, according to the New York
Times of Dec. 12, the Obama Administration announced an expanded list of
additional companies and individuals placed on its sanctions list, to
"demonstrate that it is not easing up on sanctions on Iran's oil sector or
its nuclear program…" in preparation for a Senate Banking Committee
hearing on the Iran nuclear talks.
In the U.S. Congress, to talk tough against Iran, like passing new and more onerous sanctions, is a profitable business because, given the cynicism of the American public against other nations, especially the third world countries, it is profitable business - they get elected for the next term. This was almost the opinion of President Obama in his end of the year news conference, December 20, 2013.
When the French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius on December 19, 2013 questioned "whether Tehran is willing to abandon the ability to build an atomic bomb" Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius Questions Whether Tehran Is Willing to Abandon the Ability to Build an Atomic Bomb he in fact plays into the hand of the conservative classes in the U.S., Europe and beyond, and should not be taken seriously. Just as the reactionaries in the U.S. pinnacles of power, the French, Germans, and Israelites, to mention a few, are the members of the world capitalist club who see themselves obliged to raise dust and engage in a symphony of howling.
In the U.S. Congress, to talk tough against Iran, like passing new and more onerous sanctions, is a profitable business because, given the cynicism of the American public against other nations, especially the third world countries, it is profitable business - they get elected for the next term. This was almost the opinion of President Obama in his end of the year news conference, December 20, 2013.
When the French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius on December 19, 2013 questioned "whether Tehran is willing to abandon the ability to build an atomic bomb" Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius Questions Whether Tehran Is Willing to Abandon the Ability to Build an Atomic Bomb he in fact plays into the hand of the conservative classes in the U.S., Europe and beyond, and should not be taken seriously. Just as the reactionaries in the U.S. pinnacles of power, the French, Germans, and Israelites, to mention a few, are the members of the world capitalist club who see themselves obliged to raise dust and engage in a symphony of howling.
Only
two weeks have passed since the signing of the "agreement", the
Israeli government began joining the groups in and around the Congress and the
U.S. administration to boost and shape Washington's negotiating position. This phenomena speaks loudly and clearly as
to the nature of the negotiation process that took place in an absolute
secrecy, concealed from the Iranian people, between Tehran and Washington,
months before Mr. Hassan Rouhani the current president of Iran, declared
himself as a presidential candidate toward the end of May 2013. Rouhani was subsequently endorsed by Iran's
Council of Guardians, a powerful office headed by the cleric Hojatolislam Hashemi
Rafsanjani, who was in the forefront of privatization of the country's national
wealth and capital.
According
to the Financial Times of Dec. 8, 2013, a team of senior Israeli
officials led by the country's national security advisor, Yossi Cohen, is going
to hold a meeting with high-ranking U.S. State Department officials to
"harmonize" their combined efforts to narrow down the claims by Iran
to the right of nuclear enrichment for use in civilian nuclear energy, a
principle clearly pronounced in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT),
which Iran has signed.
The
reasons that the warmongers in Washington and the settlers' regime in Tel Aviv
are whetting their appetite to extract the last drop of blood out of the body
of Iranian polity is the decrepit state of Iran's economy maligned by nepotism,
absence of plans for national economic development, along with a series of haphazard privatization of banking, mining and energy systems, lack of long-term
investment on research and innovation, and dearth of programs for high quality
job creation for all those tens of thousands who paid for college education
with the high hopes of employment in professional careers. In return this university-educated
population, along with other strata of the labor force, living in their
parents' homes is becoming a part of the lost generation. A strata of this unemployed population has
joined the army of idle labor force, engaged in the shadow economy of drug
trafficking and prostitution while financial theft among the upper strata of
the country's banking system is daily taking place.
Under
the most rosy projection of the U.S.-Iran thaw, the agreement in foreign
relations must be complemented with a social contract, allowing the great
majority of the Iranian people, i.e., the working class of Iran to have the
civil rights to form its own independent labor unions and political
parties. In the absence of such a social
contract, the great majority of the people of Iran will be excluded from
expressing and participating peacefully in the future capitalist development
with foreign corporations waiting to take control of Iran's economy and polity,
capitalizing on the cheap labor pool of unemployed.
For
the laboring classes of Iran to attain the right of participation in planning
and running the economy and in political endeavors is for the U.S. to halt
threatening Iran with acts of aggression and imposition of the current and
future sanctions. It goes without saying
that war-and-sanctions talks that give rise to insecurity in Iran and the
region amounts to social designs which restrict the freedom of the working
classes in shaping their own destiny.
In
the last two decades, the U.S. and its western European cohorts, along with
Israel and dysfunctional undemocratic states in the Persian Gulf and the
Arabian Sea have done everything in their power to blow the wind of insecurity,
manufacture pseudo-civil wars using free oil money, collection of personal data by the
intelligence services ala National Security Agency (NSA), censorship and
administration of governments in the Middle East by a small social group,
mainly the commercial bourgeoisie flanked by military trusts and black
marketeers. All this is at the service
of greater degrees of capitalist exploitation and greater denials of the labor
rights in Iran and across the region.
In light of all of the above, the question remains "Why Iran in its
negotiating process had to give away the entire shop – lock, stock and barrel – in
return for some minute concessions? The simplistic
and everyday answer to this question from the American and Iranian political
class has been that without the income from Iran's oil sales and foreign
investment, Iran's economy will remain in the doldrums. The reasoning of Iran's neo-liberal
commentators and opinion-makers has been that the country's acute and endless recession, high rates of unemployment, misallocations of resources, low level of labor and capital efficiencies, lack of application of advanced sciences and technologies, are the direct and indisputable results of sanctions by the United States.
If the above assertions were true, then the essential question to be asked is whether these disorders and economic infirmities did not exist before the sanctions began being implemented less than ten years ago. The answer to this question rests on a search through the chapters on
the economic history of Iran in the period before and after the 1979
Revolution.
In
his authoritative and valuable book entitled The Economy of Iran by Dr. Abrahim
Razaghi, using the country's Annual Statistical Data of 1981 and 1984 built
solid tables for active and unemployed workforce. On Table 26 of the book, the rates of
unemployment for the years 1976, 1982, and 1983 on the national scale as
indicated to be 10.2 percent, 14.9 percent and 12.9 percent consecutively. As we see the rates of unemployment in Iran
were excessively high two decades before the U.S. decided to impose stringent
sanctions on the Iranian economy and its financial sources
internationally. The data shows that the
high rates of unemployment in Iran have been endemic to the national economy
and not solely nor necessarily the function of the U.S. sanctions regime. Furthermore, the rates of unemployment in
rural Iran reached 19.6 percent in 1982, three years after the Revolution.
As
to the trend of prices of consumer goods and services are concerned, Dr.
Razaghi's book provides an exhaustive table depicting the rates of inflation
for the period between 1972 and 1984. In
this span of time, the cost of such essential items as food, housing, clothing,
home appliances, transportation, and health care (holding 1974 as a base, i.e.,
1974=100) shot up by 564.5%, 364% 496%, 488.2%, 594.8% and 247.6% respectively. In other words, the cost
of the necessities for survival of the working class rose by almost 500 percent
during that period. During this period
that partly coincided with the 8-year war with Iraq (1980-1988, the merchant
class taking advantage of scarcity and monopolization of domestic trade and
import-export immensely profited from artificially-kept higher prices of
consumer goods.
The conclusion could be drawn that even before the imposition of the severe sanctions Iran has been suffering from lack of national economic planning, diversification of its products and industry and low levels of economic investment in the most strategic and growth-oriented industries that integrate labor, capital, advanced science and technology in a new social contract that could be capable of invigorating social productive forces looking ahead.
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About the Author:
AIFC received this analysis
from one of our contacts in Germany, who apparently has studied economics. We apologize for its late posting, but it is still relevant to today's events. We have asked Mr. Wolff to send us additional articles on Iran-U.S. relations. Eleanor Ommani, Moderator
