The Iranian new year ended with the budding of Spring, yet some of the most momentous events in the twenty years after the revolution are barely beginning. After two decades of being on the sideline, the people of the country have entered centre stage. Last year they showed the will and the capacity to change things. And of having the last word, regardless of which direction events in the country was heading.

A swelling multitude of people have come to understand that, in the intolerable political and economic conditions of the country, the existing regime is the greatest obstacle to any serious change. More and more people have confronted the regime of the ayatollahs head on. More and more have placed the resolution to the question of power on top of their agenda.

The clash last year between people and rulers became especially sharp in two areas: the foundations of the political order, and cultural values and the standards of individual and collective behaviour.

When attacking the governing political order the people focused their blows on the backbone of the power apparatus: leadership [1] and the organs of ideological and police repression that are concentrated in his hands. No opportunity was lost to openly, and courageously, show their hatred of a system that treats them as a minor in need of a ward and guardian. They made it clear that they will no longer tolerate the rule of the clergy over their destinies. That they will no longer suffer religious despotism. Nothing less than the head of the regime will satisfy them.

They targeted, amongst others, the clergy in the Council of Guardians [2], the religious judges, the commanders of the Pasdaran Corps and the police-security apparatus, the Friday Prayer priests and other mouthpieces of the regime’s propaganda machine. A huge majority boycotted the elections to the Assembly of Experts [3] and in this way ridiculed both the regime’s legitimacy and its authority. Had they not been urged, bribed and threatened, to vote by all the main factions of the regime? They were neither going to be duped into swearing allegiance, cowed into submission nor prepared to submit to deals over coupons for tea and sugar.

The same logic ruled the voting behaviour of the majority in the recent elections to the municipal councils. This time, however, they voted in an inverse relationship to the degree of support shown by the various candidates to the concept of the velayate motlaqeh faqih [see footnote 1], and specifically to the person of the incumbent religious ruler, Ali Khamenei’. They also took the opportunity to upset the balance of power above to favour the spread of the movement below.

With this backdrop, more and more people last year joined those who demanded their individual and social rights and protested at the repression. Large numbers of students, writers, lawyers, journalists, and artists openly declared that they would no longer accept the oppressive climate, nor fear threats and intimidation. They were determined to defend freedom of expression and thought. They will go beyond the "legitimate and approved". They will persist in setting up independent associations even at the cost of losing their lives [4]. Knife-wielding Sarollahi and Hezbollahi attacks will not deter them from organising and attending protest meetings, which they saw as a right.

The ruling cultural values and regulations came under open attack also. In previous years opposition to the so-called Islamic values and morals was mainly confined to within the private realm, away from the eyes of the morality police. Resistance was expressed in a double cultural standards – at home and outside.

Last year opposition to a culture which glorifies women being cloaked from head to toe in the black chador [5], beards, prayer beads, fountain of blood [6], mourning, and funeral processions took on a mass character. The people lost few opportunities to express their rejection of them en mass and in open political action. They repeatedly challenged to a fight a culture which abhors joy and worships death, and gave social life to all that had been banned behaviour. Welcoming back their national football team from the World Games they danced in the streets in their hundreds of thousands, throwing scarves to the wind. Thousands of women invaded the football stadium, previously out of bounds to them. In March they turned the pagan fire festival of Chahar-Shanbeh Suri into a bonfire for all the beliefs and values of the system [7]. Twenty years’ efforts to impose a warped psychology on society, where life’s meaning was encapsulated in martyrdom, mourning and chastity was turned to ashes.

Popular assault on the regime’s political institutions and cultural values has had a number of valuable achievements. The owners of power were left in no doubt that they could not continue ruling as before. The system is massively paralysed and is rapidly becoming futureless. Unless it can restructure itself its very survival is in doubt.

Many of the key figures of the regime have been forced to join the present discourse around the crisis of power. Some even admit the impossibility of marrying the rule of religion and the rights of people. Their discords, which have focused over the way to escape this crisis, wrench the divisions even wider. The balance of power between above and below has been upset. Holders of power have had to concede that such notions as "self" and "non-self" or "enemy" and "non-enemy" need redefining. They are under pressure to redraw the boundaries of what is permissible and where to draw the red line.

Some try to confine despotism and autocratic rule to within "legal" limits, and to replace totalitarianism and the policy of elimination of anyone who thinks differently with one of limited participation in politics and some social amalgamation. These concessions will in turn open up the political climate of the country, and allow for greater presence and movement from the people below – especially the more deprived masses.

In their cultural confrontation too the people have had significant gains. The regime in its totality, and the various factions depending on their flexibility, have retreated from previous positions. They have been forced into redefining such concepts as "legitimate" and "illegitimate", "value" and "counter-value" or "moral corruption" and "cultural banality". World Cup matches are seemingly no less important than Qur’an reading contests. Now Ruz (new year) celebrations can apparently be excused under the religious clause of "cleanliness", since they provide an opportunity for house cleaning! Pop music, provided it alludes to mysticism, is no longer banal. Compromises can be found to draw "national" and "religious" identities closer. Even pagan celebrations can now be tolerated. Gun and prison have lost their clout – and indeed provoke further aggravation.

Yet the reforms and retreats are nowhere near the needs, or expectations, of the Iranian people who cannot confine their demands within the reforming capacity of the governing order. Nor to what the logic of the balance of power above permits. Twenty years after the revolution, people cannot be contend merely with choosing between one or other "insider", to limit their freedom of expression to writing in the columns of "Allo Salam!" [8], to be happy with being allowed to celebrate this or that national festival, or to listen to the voice of some old (male) pop-idol.

It is true that people have severely defeated the regime in its bid to impose values the latter judged vital for its existence. At the cost of hundreds of thousands punished [9] women have turned the regime’s dress code into an counter-value. The Iranian people have denied totalitarian monopoly control over political power, refused to submit to their will, and even given them a slap or two in the face.

But these gains do not mean that the rights and demands for which they rebelled some twenty years ago are any less trampled upon today.

The mass of the people can have little optimism that their demands can be met within the framework of reforms from above. The capacity of the supporters of the ruling order to evolve politically and intellectually is far too limited. The platform of even the most radical reformer from above, goes no further than to marry the interests of the ruling clergy with the rights and demands of some sections of society. At their best these are:

An open political climate that is restricted to what existing laws allow – and these do not allow much. A civil society that cannot be established unless it can be absorbed by the system. The revival of individual and social identity acceptable only to the extent that it is "religiously legitimate" and accords with the existing religious, gender and political hierarchy.

To take a step beyond this, you need to brush the regime aside as the main dam blocking this route. And indeed it is precisely here that the opening up of the political climate and reforms from above become meaningful, and their enlargement vital.

For popular discontent to become verbalised as a collective will, and appear as action with millions of participants, a favourable political climate is needed. This climate must provide a degree of legitimacy, limit the risks of repression to acceptable levels and allow political mobilisation and organisation on a mass scale. People need to barricade themselves behind what is allowed and legitimate, in order to reach for what is forbidden and illegitimate.

The opening up of the political climate does not in itself guarantee fundamental changes in the relations between the people and the governing system. It can, however, help people increase their political weight in the current balance and thereby create the necessary conditions to achieve such a change. The events of last year have to some extent opened up the political space. But this opening will neither spontaneously spread, nor even necessarily be entrenched.

The faction holding the main reigns of power regards any opening of the political climate as a serious threat to its political and economic power. It is determined not to let it happen. For this faction the "political order" is synonymous with the interests and privileges that it has gained for itself through repression, and by shoving its internal rivals aside. The chains that linked the mass of the destitute and the governing power has long vanished. A deep gulf now separates the two. They would have to be mad to give free rein to people who are no longer prepared to swear allegiance (beiat) or walk on mine-fields.

The ruling faction, however, would find it an intolerable development if the contradictions of the system are used, in the name of "the people’s conditional rights" to open up the political space. It would mean that people might challenge the owners of real power, or God forbid, even remove them through the ballot box. To put an end to these developments, what has come to be known as the "the rights of the people" have to be demolished. An absolute caliphate, defended by the naked sword has to be set up. The opening climate has to be choked by whatever means.

The agenda of the faction gathered round the religious ruler Ali Khamenei’ is to create a united will at the top. The regime is to speak with one voice, and if the rival faction cannot be cajoled into compromise, it has to be eliminated. Every act of the ultra-right faction over the last year, from murder of dissenting thinkers, attacks on gatherings and newspapers, threats to impeach the government and to investigate its financial plans can be understood in this light. There is no reason to believe that this process has come to an end. Unless, of course, the people are alert, and boldly face up to these schemes and turn them into their opposite. That is unless they curb the present conditions, which are so ripe for a coup d’etat, through revolutionary transformations.

In the year that went by people showed their hatred for the present political order by torching all its values. By melting the ice of previous years they showed that the necessity to overthrow the regime is not an abstract concept but a practical question on the political agenda of the day.

We now enter a spring where the blossoms of self-confidence, solidarity and hope could flower. Such a spring must fortify the previous gains by creating the class base for more fundamental developments. For this it would need to link what it achieved in the streets in, for example, last Chahar-Shanbeh Suri with the women’s movement and both with the budding labour movement.