ABSTRACT
The Iranian parliament is deeply divided and in turmoil. Iranian economy is 85" oil-based, and an oil-based economy is not labor intensive, and the Iranian "middle class" has always, since the nineteenth century, been a feeble and shaky proposition. Highly educated, pro-western, and progressive Iranians are thus placed on the Mousavi's side, while backward villagers and the urban poor are on Ahmadinejad's. The fact is that given the structural limitations of a nascent democracy that is being crushed and buried in Iran under a Shi'i juridical citadel, opposition to Ahmadinejad is fractured into the followers of three candidates with deeply divided economic programs and political positions. The age of ideological warfare is over in Iran. If anything, this momentum is the closest event in Iran to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s in the United States, and precisely like that its economic foregrounding is couched in social demands.
