The State Precedes the Revolution

Why the end of Iran is more likely than a new Pahlavi state

As is the pattern every few years, Iran is locked in a domestic insurrection.¹ While accurate information is hard to find, the current round of protests has some novel attributes. Firstly, the Islamic Republic recently experienced a major military defeat. Secondly, the state is poorer, less legitimate, and has less capacity than even a few years ago. Last and most interesting was the initial absence of the Islamist pillar, the roughly ~20% of the population that can be considered the Islamic Republic’s social base.² Taken together, these factors have led to a real sense of finality in the air, and a perception that some kind of major break is possible.

Key to this sense of finality is a surprisingly widespread acquiescence and submission to the prospect of a Pahlavi restoration among anti-IRI Iranians. Even beyond the regular roster of online grifters, serious people are genuinely considering and are, in some cases, excited by the prospect of Reza Pahlavi coming to power.

However, this idea is a fantasy. Without a massive foreign occupation, Reza Pahlavi will not rule Iran. Key to understanding this is the insight that states precede revolutions. In more detailed terms: the organized hierarchy that becomes the state must be formed prior to a change in a political regime.

Commentators casually cycle through names like Pahlavi, Ahmadinejad, Tajzadeh, and Rouhani as putative post-Khamenei leaders, as though drafting a fantasy football lineup. Others busily sketch the contours of a future Pahlavist constitution, debating policies and ideal personnel. Politics, in this view, is reduced to a linear machine: articulate preferences, aggregate them, feed them in, and out comes the preferred outcome.³

Political personalities and policy platforms are not consequential in themselves. Their significance is conditional on the existence of a functioning state capable of giving them force. What is largely absent from the current debate is any serious engagement with the mechanics of replacing the Islamic Republic of Iran as a state, with a new Pahlavist state. This omission is not merely theoretical; it is a practical trap. It opens the possibility that Iranians may succeed in dismantling the existing state without possessing any viable means of constructing its successor. To see why, a brief detour into the nature of states is necessary.

I. A Bildungsroman of States

While the mythical frontiersman can live independently from others, history has moved steadily toward social arrangements in which individuals are increasingly dependent on one another’s labor – thereby necessitating some kind of coordination with others. In this process, individuals form organized hierarchies. These hierarchies are needed because they generate collective decision-making and collective action. A hierarchy functions like a constitution, or an algorithm; a higher-order structure creating command flows which allow groups of people to do big things quickly. Setting up the proto-constitutional structure for collective action is costly; too costly to re-create for every collective endeavor. Instead, the social group bears the formation costs one time, and wields the social technology of an organized hierarchy moving forward. The actual composition of a hierarchy (as in person A at the top, then person B below her) is not particularly relevant. Individuals can rotate or switch positions over time (i.e. a hierarchy can be democratic); what is needed for efficiency is merely that the structure of the hierarchy coheres.

In a community, individuals can form various and overlapping organized hierarchies. However, each organized hierarchy bears a high formation cost. As a result, it is easier to simply re-use an existing organized hierarchy in more and more domains. Often, the organized hierarchy that has its basis in collective security will, due to its advantage in deploying violence (the ultimate resolution to any coordination problem), come to be the dominant vehicle for collective action. Once that hierarchy achieves a monopoly in the legitimate use of violence, we witness the birth of the Leviathan; the crowning of the sovereign; the creation of the state.

In an earlier essay, I called the forces that produce a sovereign state the stateforge. These forces appear to be quite strong, as states independently emerged as a powerful social technology across the world – a strong example of convergent evolution. The purpose of this theoretical detour is to emphasize the human micro-foundations of state power. The colossal scale of modern bureaucratic states obscures their basis in social groups trying to coordinate collective endeavors through organized hierarchies. This scale obscures the reality that states are human-made, fraught and deeply contingent. The state is not just ‘representative’ or ‘embedded’ in society, it is how society constitutes itself at scale – in which individuals need to coordinate with people they will never meet, through large and recursive hierarchies.⁴

Of course, states are not immortal. Revolutions can happen, and states can be replaced. But the state has to emerge from within the shell of the old; from within the attempts of individuals in that society to resolve some set of coordination problems. The insurgent organized hierarchy can certainly start small (think of the 82 souls aboard the Granma), and it can be focused on coordination to resolve smaller-scale problems. For example, it can be focused on the group’s goal of waging guerrilla war successfully, winning over new members, avoiding suppression, accumulating resources, etc. As the insurgent organized hierarchy expands and weaves itself in more and more communities in a country, it becomes a state-in-waiting, a force capable of contesting and wielding sovereignty.

Certain processes and conditions can accelerate the growth of the insurgent state-in-waiting. Most revolutionary states smash and metabolize elements and individuals from the ancien régime, but the process generally does not start after the collapse of the previous state. A century ago, the process of state formation was much simpler. The social division of labor was smaller and more local; with most individuals locked into their pre-existing local hierarchies. To win over a town like Arak, an insurgent hierarchy likely needed to win over a handful of notables, who in turn could steer the local hierarchies under their command. This is no longer the case. Modern society is comprised of hierarchies which are flatter⁵ but wider – requiring buy-in and coordination from a much larger set of individuals.

II. A Crown Without a Head

How does any of the above relate to the current political crisis in Iran? The connection is that the Pahlavist movement is not a state-in-waiting. It is not an organized hierarchy chasing the crown of sovereignty. It is a loose milieu of individuals, vaguely connected to each other in an informal hierarchy, centered on a man with an unclear ideological vision for the future. This, obviously, is not the social technology for resolving the collective action problems of ninety million Iranians. The Pahlavists lack the nucleus of a state and therefore cannot form a state – popularity, platforms or personnel are irrelevant to this basic reality.

The decaying Islamic Republic, as weak as it is, is an organized hierarchy from within Iranian society. Although getting less capable day by day, it still manages the millions of zero-sum conflicts inside the country. These basic elemental conflicts function as powerful centrifugal forces, tearing apart the basic function of society if unmanaged. And the current governance of these conflicts is deeply tied to the Islamic Republic’s organized hierarchy, not some background neutral bureaucracies.

The great irony is that the Pahlavists probably could field a serious state-in-waiting, but have not opted to do so. With their access to immense funding and patronage, they have the means to form a genuine party, an organized hierarchy capable of wielding state power. Rather than a vague mob with permeable definitions of who is in-group and out-group, a formal organized hierarchy could achieve much. For example, a Pahlavist party could provide political and organizational training, transforming its most competent supporters into capable and disciplined cadres. It could build community centers, spaces, schools and cafes in diaspora cities, serving as hubs for socialization, recruitment, and world-building for its supporters. It could organize summer camps, professional organizations, sports leagues, and so on.⁶ If it were serious, the Pahlavists could have even fielded an armed organization! There certainly is no shortage of potential volunteers, resources, and foreign patrons that would sponsor such an endeavor.

It is worthwhile to play around with this thought experiment; to consider what a diasporic state-in-waiting would look like, and to compare it with the status quo of Pahlavist ‘organization.’ It should put into focus the improbability of a successful Pahlavist revolution.

Likely, the Pahlavist milieu is subject to some epistemic confusion about the nature of politics, caused by their long sojourn in the West. As written before, political life in advanced Western democracies is defined by complex background infrastructure which allows for hundreds of political conflicts to be narrowed into ticking a ballot for the blue or red party every four years. But ‘politics’ most of the time, and increasingly so even in the West, is about the construction and operation of that infrastructure.

To the extent that Pahlavists have considered organizational questions, their focus has been on ‘leadership,’ reflecting ongoing chronological confusion. Leadership is simply the question of who gets placed where in your organized hierarchy, a meaningless debate if you have no organized hierarchy to begin with. In this worldview, politics is the big version of electing a student council president – when it is actually more like the big version of organizing a road trip with friends or figuring out the trash collection schedule with your roommates.

III. Deux Ex Machina

Among sharper commentators, there is an understanding that the Pahlavist theory of change is not actually a revolution, but some kind of quirky coup. Although not framed in the theoretical terms above, there is a sense that, clearly, a Pahlavist government would not be able to rebuild the institutions and bureaucracies of the state overnight. Instead, the idea seems to be that external pressure (US airstrikes, sanctions, etc.) coupled with internal pressure (protests, strikes, etc.) can convince pretty much the entirety of the Iranian state to defect. This is the opposition’s IKEA model of regime change, obtaining a whole new state all at once – with minimal assembly required.

There are, needless to say, some problems with this approach. For those keeping track, the plan is to chop off the head of the current organized hierarchy running Iran (the Islamic Republic), replace the head with a core group that is zealously hostile to the ideology, interests and even existence of the rest of this hierarchy that forms the state, then have this hierarchy run the country and keep the disappointed Pahlavist masses in line. OK. For a group whose membership is disproportionately comprised of the idle wealthy and professional intellectuals, it is rather remarkable just how little time seems to have been spent fleshing out the theory of change here.

Once the moment of crisis is over, why would the rest of the state remain loyal to a group it has no ideological or material affinity to? Why would the Pahlavist insurgents accept the continuation of the status quo under a new flag, while they remain locked out of power?

The only way to square this circle, the only plausible path to a durable Pahlavi state is if outside forces are willing to create and protect this state, from its embryonic stages to full maturity, through an actual full-scale military occupation. In this scenario, the sustained presence of US/Western forces would incentivize loyalty from the leftover IRI hierarchy, while creating space for the Pahlavi hierarchy to build itself up and out. Unfortunately for Pahlavists, this does not appear to be in the cards.⁷

So, what are we left with? The sober conclusion is that the Pahlavist movement is not a centripetal force; a state-in-waiting with the capacity to displace and replace the Islamic Republic. Instead, it functions as yet another centrifugal force tearing the country apart. It will help motivate protests and riots which by their nature can never win. Their consequence will be to engender more reactive violence and social breakdown.⁸

Under Khamenei’s reign, the Islamic-Republican project has been completely and unredeemably wrecked; a world-historical failure not only immiserating tens of millions of Iranians but whose internal failures have allowed the imperial shatterzone to expand in West Asia. It is reasonable to daydream about overcoming this – but the point is to overcome it with something better – not state collapse.⁹ Despite the sense that some finality is in the air, it should be clear that we’ve collectively made zero progress towards this goal.

It is understandable, after decades of decay, to long for a clean rupture, a moment when history resets and justice arrives already assembled. But politics does not work that way. States are not wished into existence, nor imported intact from memory or exile; they are forged slowly, painfully, from within society itself. Revolutions do not crown kings; they midwife states. Where no organized hierarchy is struggling to be born, no sovereign can rule – only ruins can accumulate. Iran’s tragedy today is not only that its ruling order is failing, but that no emergent alternative order is cohering in its place. Until that changes, the fall of the Islamic Republic would not mark an end, but a beginning of a far darker and more uncertain chapter.

1. At the time of publication, the protests seem to have been successfully suppressed.

2. In response to prior protest cycles, mobilization and reaction within the Islamist pillar was fairly energetic. Their relative absence today is maybe the most interesting aspect of these protests. To speculate, it may be a consequence of widespread dissatisfaction with the status quo, a crisis of confidence in response to the IRI’s failure to protect its military leaders from Israel, or a complication in that the IRI’s President is a reformist (or all of the above). However, if protesters continue to burn down mosques, shrines and generally act liquidationist towards the Islamist pillar, it will organize and activate itself regardless of the IRI’s official posture.

3. For a long time, I was confounded by the obsessiveness by which Iranian political commentators would debate the popularity of different government or opposition personalities. I finally realized that they likely believe in some kind of simple linear relationship between ‘popularity’ and who actually gets to rule Iran. Therefore, their debates about the popularity of Pahlavi inside Iran were actually a proxy debate about who will rule Iran. In reality, collective desires do not produce collective outcomes. Ninety million Iranians may want Iran to win the World Cup, but reality consists of the interaction between desires and material constraints.

4. An orthogonal point, but this is also why recent-ish attempts at left-wing governance (ex. Syriza in Greece) fail. They may have, temporarily, won executive-legislative power through an election – but the underlying organized hierarchy that undergirds and forms the state is unchanged. This is a major difference between contemporary left-wing movements (whether the DSA in New York, Podemos in Spain, or the NDP in Canada) and classical Communist and Socialist parties, who attempted to forge alternative sub-societies, organized hierarchies within a social pillar that could function as states-in-waiting.

5. ‘Flatter’ in that each level of a hierarchy can direct a larger number of individuals in the level below. If the vertical axis measures power, then modern hierarchies are not flat – but are more vertical than ever.

6. The Pahlavists could even organize their own mosques (or at least atashgahs).

7. But even a US military occupation wouldn’t be a royal flush. There is a convincing literature from the Iraq and Afghanistan occupations (by scholars like Kilcullen and Kalyvas) that occupations are bound to fail (unless – and Kilcullen and Kalyvas don’t discuss this – the occupier is willing to exterminate the occupied). Even if the occupation is massively popular, there will be dissident insurgents. The unavoidable frictions to counterinsurgency (arresting and killing the wrong people, language/cultural barriers, corruption in the new elite, etc.) generate more and more insurgents, eventually rendering the occupation unsustainable.

8. The footage from the destruction in Rasht is revealing. The bazaaris who had their businesses burned down will likely take precautionary steps in advance of the next protest movement. Even if they do not cooperate with the security services, they may outsource self-defense to non-state groups and individuals capable of violence. This is not a good cycle, as sovereignty devolves downwards and eventually shatters.

9. Earlier essays explain why state collapse in Iran, in this historical moment, will likely prove to be terminal.