What is truly new about the “new middle class" in Iran? The notion of a middle class in the Islamic Republic is usually discussed wherein middle-class habitus is assumed to be universal among society as well as deeply marginalized from the state. Yet it now seems clear that the 2009 protests were not an epistemic break in Iran’s political dynamics, but a preview of the social power that the new middle class would exert even more assertively from below in 2013.
What are we to make of Iran’s middle classes, and in what context are middle class politics forcefully relevant instead of quiescent, co-opted, or divided? In order to understand the structural power of Iran’s middle classes, I argue, we need to rearticulate class formation away from a reified notion of the middle class as a trans-historical subject. The structural power of Iran’s middle classes comes not from its own habitus or its universal ideology but from the contradictory positions of the Islamic Republic in the world economy and the changing state and class responses to this position.
In this paper I discuss the existing debates over class formation within Iranian social science, their inadequacies and the telos usually embedded within conceptions of the middle class. I put forward four ideal-type middling classes which have been present in some combination throughout the global South during the latter half of the 20th century and the early 21st century and describe their socioeconomic characteristics and social power vis-à-vis the state and market. Lastly, I put these concepts in play for Iran in the decades after the 1979 revolution up until the present day.
