[Reader-list] False prophet of the Bangla left

[Naeem Mohaiemen]

Iranian president has already privatized the postal service, sold
shares in two state-owned banks and a sale of 5 percent of shares in a
state-owned steel company. According to the Iran Privatization
Organization, a state ministry, some 247 state enterprises been partly
or fully privatized since Ahmadinejad took office in 2005.

Ahmadinejad has tried to camouflage the privatization process by
doling out "justice shares" of stock in privatized state companies to
the poor. These assets, distributed to about 6 million people, were
worth $2.5 billion in the first two years of Ahmadinejad's term.

The model here is the privatization process in Russia and Eastern
Europe, where crooked entrepreneurs were able to buy up the stocks for
cheap to create huge new private monopolies based on former state
assets. In any case, stocks thinly scattered among the poor won't
provide much help for the 8 million people (out of a population of 76
million) who live in extreme poverty.

Indeed, if Ahmadinejad succeeds in handing the benefits of
privatization to his allies in the basij and the security apparatus,
it could reconfigure Iranian capitalism. The Islamist right and the
war veteran generation could make the transition from their careers in
the national security apparatus and sanctions-busting smuggling
operations into entrepreneurs, much as the Stalinist bureaucrats did
in Russia during the 1990s.

http://socialistworker.org/2009/07/01/roots-of-irans-revolt