HISTORICAL AND STRUCTURAL DEVELOPMENT OF THE POLITICS OF PRODUCTION IN MODERN IRAN, 1926-1978

The following dissertation is an analysis of the historical and structural formation and development of Iranian labor organizations during the years 1926 - 1978. It analyses Iranian labor history in the context of capitalist transformations in modern Iran. It studies the development of various forms of labor organizations (e.g., guild systems, craft trade unions, and industrial trade unions), and their relevance to the actual organization of the labor process in pre-capitalist as well as in capitalist production relations in contemporary Iran. Different modes of the organization of labor processes (traditional and modern) coexist and develop simultaneously, a fact which has direct implications for the problem of "underdevelopment" in Iran. This study, through a comparative analysis of the historical periods of the politics of Iranian labor organizations, reveals that there has been a lack of correspondence between the structural economic development of the work process and the development of political labor organizations in twentieth century Iran. It shows how social and political factors (e.g., the urban origins of workers and the contact of Iranian migrant workers with the Russian labor movement) more than economic ones, have played a greater role in determining the development of workers' organizations and their politics. This also reveals the historical experiences of the labor movement as an important element of the politics of the labor process. In this regard it argues that a premature discontinuity in the historical experience of the workers' movement in Iran after the 1953 coup contributed to the process of disorganization and the submission of the working class to the populist ideology of the urban poor in later years. Iranian "underdevelopment" is structured in terms of the coexistence of different forms of labor processes that reinforce each other. Traditional petty commodity production is not only surviving but also growing alongside more developed capitalist production. In other words, contemporary Iran has experienced a simultaneous process of development and growth of both modern social and economic relations (e.g., industrialization, urbanization, secularization) and traditional structures and relations (e.g., petty commodity production, religious ideas and institutions).