The Farsi edition of ‘The Shock Doctrine’ has just picked up a literary award in Iran, reportedly on the basis of the quality of translation. Obviously I cannot judge how elegantly Naomi Klein’s prose was rendered into that language, but I can’t help noticing that the content of the volume is timely in that country right now.
Indeed, it almost seems like the government there has read the work, and drawn conclusions precisely the reverse of those Ms Klein would have wished them to draw. Don’t take my word for it; have a look at what the International Monetary Fund has to say about the place following a recent visit to Tehran.
OK, so the 3.5% estimated growth rate last year is no great shakes, although George Osborn wouldn’t turn his nose up at it. Inflation has been halved, but it’s still in double figures, as is unemployment.
But the kleptocrats could not help but praise the theocrats on one thing, and that’s the determined way in which the Ahmadinejad regime is applying some of the basic tenets of neoliberalism. Check out the press release:
The mission commended the authorities for the early success in the implementation of their ambitious subsidy reform program. The increases in prices of energy products, public transport, wheat, and bread adopted on December 19, 2010, are estimated to have removed close to US$60 billion (about 15 percent of GDP) in annual implicit subsidies to products.”
The Economist is agreed that this is good stuff indeed. ‘Iran has undertaken reforms that other governments in the region should envy,’ it writes enthusiastically. As it points out, the state was spending $60-100m a year on such handouts, equivalent to a quarter of GDP.
There have been some transfer payments towards the population, equivalent to about $45 per person per month. The free market right insists that this is the road towards the reduction of social inequalities. But sums on that scale are unlikely to offset the impact of quadrupling the price of bread and hiking the cost of diesel by 2000% for long.
Much of the UK left remains confused about the class nature of the post-1979 Iranian system. The chief theoretician of the largest Marxist grouping considers it ‘thermidorian’, and thus implicitly progressive; Britain’s best-read leftist blog has hailed Iran as ‘a mature democracy’ and praised it for pursuing what it considers redistributive and even welfare statist policies.
But however much Ahmadinejad falls out with Washington, his adherence to the Washington Consensus is beyond dispute. No wonder the IMF are happy.
