Oil, labour and revolution in Iran: a social history of labour in the Iranian oil industry, 1973-83

This thesis retrieves theworking and everyday life experiences of oil workers in 1973-83, and explorestheir cultural, religious and political ideas and activities during the socialtransformations of this period that ends with the the Iranian Revolution andthe Iran-Iraq War. It analyses the historical process of class formation in theIranian oil industry and argues that a number of developments such as theexpansion of the oil industry, internal migration and the changing ideologicallandscape of the 1960s re-formed the working class in the oil industry indramatic ways, which helps to understand the mass participation of oil workersin the revolution.Looking at the oil strikes, the thesis argues that they played not only acrucial role in the downfall of the monarchy but that they also made anessential contribution to the emergence of the institutions that underpinnedthe post-revolutionary state, which in turn was challenged by the oil workersshowras (councils) in 1979-82. It is argued that although the showras wereideologically diverse and had a great democratic potential, they wereeventually repressed and integrated into the corporatist arrangements of thepopulist post-revolutionary state that consolidated its power after the startof the Iran-Iraq War.Middle Eastern Studie