The August 18 editions of the Tosee Irani and Ham-Mihan newspapers carried the headline: “The monthly livelihood basket has reached 900 million rials,” while “workers’ wages for the month of Tir were not enough to cover even 10 days of the month.”
Economic Crisis: The Real Face of a Regime That Portrays Itself as Powerful
Every day, society demands the right to live, and the ruling establishment cannot respond, even if it wanted to. This situation means the crisis between the regime and society has crossed a breaking point and moved beyond an intensely contradictory stage. It clearly indicates that there is no path back for the regime to repair this rapidly widening gap. Class inequality has reached its peak, and its trajectory continues to rise. How can the enormous gap between the “250 million-rial monthly wage (approximately $133) of minimum-wage workers” and the “900 million-rial livelihood basket (approximately $479)” be bridged?
When, from February to mid-June, “the cost of living rises by 211%, increasing by 476 million rials (approximately $253),” it means the regime and society are entrenching themselves for a class struggle.
In a society where “housing, quality education, and proper healthcare have long been out of reach, and even food has become inaccessible,” what description of governance remains, other than that of a thief breaking into a home?
When the basic necessities of life become inaccessible to a large segment of the population, the issue is no longer merely an economic or livelihood crisis. Livelihood reaches a point where human dignity, the future of children, and the possibility of continuing life itself are taken hostage. Under these conditions, it is natural for protests against rising prices and poverty to go beyond an economic demand and become a question about the very nature of governance.
The natural question arising from this trend is where this rapidly escalating cycle—one in which “workers struggle desperately in the whirlpool of astronomical living costs”—will ultimately lead the confrontation between the regime and society.
The answer cannot be found in economic tables, statistics, or the government’s piecemeal and reactive wage decisions. When the gap between living costs and income reaches the greatest dimensions of class inequality, the issue becomes a structural crisis within the regime itself—a crisis that produces new branches every day and expands to encompass every segment of society. The issue has now become existential for both the regime and the people: the regime seeks to use the people as a shield for its own survival, while the people seek to remove the regime from their natural lives and their political and social existence.
