Would Mossadegh Have Approved of Miniskirts?

I bet I could find a connection, and here 'tis. The 1979 overthrow of the Shah did indeedy emerge from the same global structural forces that produced neoliberalism—but the crucial twist is that Iran’s revolution was the counter‑movement side of that same world‑system shock, not the market-liberalizing side. In other words: Likud and neoliberalism were expressions of the new order; the Iranian Revolution was an eruption produced by the collapse of the old order.

I lack the charm.

The way it fits together is this: the global system was already breaking down (1973–1980). Across the world, the post‑WWII economic order—anchored in fixed exchange rates, cheap energy, U.S.-centered financial stability, and developmentalist states — was collapsing. This collapse created two kinds of political outcomes. There was the market-liberalizing realignment like New York’s 1975–76 fiscal restructuring (the origin of neoliberalism itself, Thatcher's "Glorious Capitulation" to the City (1979), and Likud’s 1977 victory. These were elite-led restructurings that embraced the emerging neoliberal order. On the whole, it was a Reaktionismus or Gegenrevolution, a counter-revolution gegen den New Deal.

The New Deal was a rupture — a new governing order with:

mass enfranchisement of labor

regulatory constraint on finance

public‑purpose investment

a new elite coalition

a new social contract

So the long arc from the late 1940s to the 1970s — culminating in the 1975–79 realignment — fits the pattern of a counter‑revolution against a prior settlement.

But here’s the nuance. It wasn’t one Gegenrevolution — it was two, and they were mutually unintelligible.

1. The elite Gegenrevolution = the Eastern Establishment + later neoliberal technocracy which sought to undo the New Deal’s constraints on:

capital mobility

financial regulation

labor power

public‑purpose governance

This was a restorative Gegenrevolution — a return to pre‑1933 elite autonomy, but using modernizing rhetoric.

2. The mass Neoconfederate Gegenrevolution was a revanchist Gegenrevolution, aimed at undoing:

civil rights

federal supremacy

egalitarian social policy

demographic and cultural pluralism

It sought a return to a mythicized 19th‑century order.

These two forces were both “counter‑revolutionary,” but they were counter‑revolutionary in opposite directions — one toward pre‑New Deal capital hierarchy, the other toward pre‑Reconstruction racial hierarchy. Civil War II, baby.

The post-Civil-War coalition had been fraying. Now it ripped like the veil concealing the Holy of Holies.

If the New Deal was a founding fire, then the neoliberal Gegenrevolution is the cooling wind, extinguishing the flame by dispersing its heat; the Neoconfederate Gegenrevolution is the returning night, swallowing the fire’s light in the name of an older darkness, exploiting the opportunity.

There was a corresponding double-movement globally. These are the anti-system revolts. Examples include Nicaragua (1979) + Iran (1979). These were popular uprisings against regimes that had been tightly integrated into the old U.S.-led developmental model.

Iran falls squarely into category B.

The Shah’s regime was structurally exposed as a result. His state was hyper‑centralized, dependent on oil revenue,  dependent on Western capital and military support, and committed to a top‑down modernization model. When the global economic order destabilized in the 1970s—oil shocks, inflation, global recession—the Shah’s model lost its stabilizing foundation. The 1979 Revolution is now understood as a structural institutional rupture, not a contingent accident. This is exactly the same kind of rupture that produced neoliberal realignments elsewhere—but Iran’s rupture produced a different political outcome because the social forces mobilized were different.

There is a boomerang here. The Shah was already the neoliberalizing actor, a prequel. He was privatizing land,  weakening traditional guilds, centralizing capital flows, - integrating Iran into global finance, and suppressing labor. In many ways, the Shah was ahead of the neoliberal curve. I'm tempted to call it a trial run for the international order that was coming.

When the global system shifted, the Shah was not the beneficiary—he was the casualty. The opposition coalition was broad, cross‑class, and anti‑regime. It included bazaar merchants threatened by state centralization, clerical networks threatened by secular modernization, workers hit by inflation and austerity, and students radicalized by global anti-imperial movements.

This coalition did not want a market-liberalizing correction.  

It wanted sovereignty, justice, and an end to foreign domination. Where neoliberalism was the “market society” pushing outward, Iran’s revolution was the “society strikes back” moment.

The sequence looks like this:

NYC (1975-76) → structural pressure = collapse of postwar fiscal model → neoliberal restructuring.

UK (1979) → inflation + labor conflict → neoliberal turn.

Israel (1977) → collapse of Labor's developmentalist model → Likud realignment.

Iran (1979) → crisis of oil‑rent developmentalism + global shocks → anti-system revolution.

Same global shock → different political expression depending on domestic coalitions.

Iran’s 1979 Revolution is not an exception to the global neoliberal realignment—it is the other half of the same world-historical break. Where neoliberalism reorganized states around markets, Iran reorganized its state around a revolutionary political theology. Both were responses to the collapse of the postwar order.

The Shah’s modernization program prefigured neoliberal globalism. Pax America phase-shifted from Delian League to Athenian Empire.

Approaching the other end of this arc, BRICS continues the resistance to the empire. Meanwhile, Autocracy, Inc. is an equally parasitic adaptation exploiting the cracks non-ideologically. Autocracy, Inc. is a mode of opportunistic extraction that accelerates and exploits the same systemic fractures BRICS seeks to escape. 

This captures the asymmetry:

BRICS is a counter‑system project;

Autocracy, Inc. is a post‑system scavenger.

GOOD morning!