Protests in Iran come and go but there is a sudden deep thrill to the latest round due to their relationship with hyperinflation. It is very much the Iranian Rial that is the exiled Crown Prince at the top of this story. Last year the average taxi driver in Tehran was taking home a salary of over one-hundred-and-eighty million rials. This is only a problem when the lifestyle of a millionaire has to be additionally funded by bartering chance household possessions.

Water mismanagement could be another horseman of the regime’s apocalypse. It is an eerie and random but, at a structural level, perhaps not absolutely unsynchronised fact that Iran shares this deterioration of a public resource with the UK. In both systems, the assumption that ageing infrastructure would simply last forever is leading to a gloominess that is increasingly giving way to panic. Last year the President of Iran, Masoud Pezeshkian, suggested that it would be easier to move the nation’s capital and its population of ten million people nearer to some water than it would be to organise the necessary infrastructure investment. This is what state failure sounds like.

For the Islamic Republic of Iran to fall would be the Enlightenment’s dream come true. It is certainly the stereotypical class of the Enlightenment – merchants, doctors, engineers and students – who are populating the latest protests. There are ghostly whispers here of how the Enlightenment had begun in the UK, when a puritan regime was toppled and a liberal hereditary monarch had swanned in from overseas. Alas, it takes some strenuous squinting to perceive a King Charles the Second in Reza Pahlavi, a US citizen who has been unemployed for almost fifty years. Pahlavi’s widely-publicised “secret” talks with the White House’s Steve Witkoff put me more in mind of Ahmed Chalabi, who the CIA had once wanted to front Iraq. Today, though, Trump has sprinkled discouraging praise over Pahlavi and signalled his administration’s distance from him.

In 2026, there are many ugly scars across the hide of the Enlightenment and a wistfulness about committing emotionally to another lurch forward. Had Boris Yeltsin not been such a squalid disaster or had the protestors in Tiananmen not plummeted out of history then the character of the planet would be today greatly more beautiful. It would be wealthier, more rational, less mediocre and with a far more colourful future. But by the time that we reach Iran, it is hard to locate a realism that is not automatically faint-hearted and over-precautious. Optimism is a debt that never seems to be repaid anymore, with one particular steep loss being the effacing of the brief, shallow democracy that emerged in Tunisia after 2011.

On Tuesday the academic Tara McCormack condemned “the sheer bone headed stupidity of supporting Iranian state collapse in the fantasy that it will be Switzerland II rather than Iraq/Syria/Libya. It beggars belief that people are clamouring for this.” To me, this sounds a bit too aggressively wise. I am merely taking an uneducated glance at Iran rather than knowledgeably writing and lecturing about it as McCormack is. But I cannot see how the hyperinflation can continue, unless Iran breaks out of its accustomed creative tension between hardliners and “reformists” and uses state violence to bed down a permanent mass impoverishment.

One of the biggest challenges to remain unforeseen by traditional Marxism is how in nation after nation, from Chad to Egypt to Pakistan, a military will destabilise class politics and curb the growth of an authentic bourgeoisie. In such countries, the army is never “a tool” of the bourgeoisie and it instead swells into a rival and superior social force to it.

Although the current protests in Tehran clearly reflect the aspirations and frustrations of an identifiable middle class, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps numbers over a hundred-thousand personnel. There are tens of thousands in the Basij militia that is sent to cauterise protests. The Revolutionary Guard is a parasitic social group that will defend its wealth and privileges in much the same way that an aristocracy will fight for the survival of a monarch. It is incidentally also a sprawling conglomerate, whose hundreds of shell companies and government contracts are set above but not cleanly separated from Iran’s overall economic downturn.

This week the Basij militia has displayed its fearsome absence of embarrassment, flaunting open barbarism, shooting at the eyes and genitals of unarmed young protesters and drowning hospitals in the resulting injuries. The name of Iran’s president, Masoud Pezeshkian, shares an ancient root with the English word “physician” (i.e. Pezeshk as “doctor” and ian as “son of.”) As a “reformist” and a multiculturalist, he had an initial authority that is hardly shared around within his regime. In his healing, conciliatory tone there is a potential openness to “Islamic liberalism.” He could be also just the regime’s Good Cop and the failure of the protests could leave him, both practically and ideologically, as a Lame Duck.

The regime’s calculation is that the protestors will not turn up to confront state terror if all they can answer it with is decency and liberal sentiments. But can this freeze in the futurelessness?  

[Previously on Tychy: “On ‘THE 12 DAY WAR’ (and counting…).”]