JERUSALEM (MarketWatch) -- It takes no Marxist to suspect that the mayhem in Iran is not entirely about conscience.

Sure, people want freedom. Opposition candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi's campaign promise, delivered through his wife, to abolish the Morality Police -- which arrests, flogs, and jails immodestly dressed women -- evidently fired the imaginations of millions who had long been dreaming of emancipation.

Yet this showdown is also about livelihood.

Understandably, analogies to the many revolts against communism are now in vogue.

The Iranian rioters braving bullets are reminiscent of the Hungarian rebels of 1956; the opposition's failure to openly challenge the original revolution's ideals is what the leaders of the Prague Spring did in 1968; and Ayatollah Khamenei's insistence Friday that it was the rioters, not him, who were challenging democracy sounded like Romanian dictator Nikolai Ceausescu's balcony address in 1989 to the crowds who hours later dethroned him.

Yet Iran is different, not only because its rebels face theocrats while Europe's faced atheists, and not just because the Iranian freedom movement still lacks an inspiration on the scale of Pope John Paul or playwright Vaclav Havel. The Iranian situation is different because unlike all the European analogies, it involves a demographic explosion and, within it, a class struggle of sorts.

Unemployment

All the countries that backtracked from communism, whether peacefully or violently, abruptly or gradually, were demographically stable. Some populations, including Russia's, were actually shrinking. Iran's population, by contrast, has doubled to more than 70 million people since the shah was overthrown, a direct result of Ayatollah Khomeini's opposition to family planning.

True, last decade, when his successors realized they had created a giant they could not feed, they changed course, handing out contraceptives and preaching the merits of family planning. The results were impressive: Iran's fertility rate plunged from an annual 4.4%, the world's highest, to hardly 1%.

But the pre-contraceptive era produced a baby boom, and now that generation is every month sending thousands of new people into Iran's parched labor markets, where even official figures concede that hardly one in five people finds a job, while unofficial estimates suggest even one in four Iranians is jobless. Among young adults, hardly two of every three have real jobs.

These are the people who in recent days were stoning cops in the streets of Tehran, Meshed and Isfahan, at great personal risk.

As argued here last year, the state of Iran's economy has been dire regardless of international sanctions and the global downturn. Basic parameters like growth, money supply, price stability and financial diversity all indicated that the Islamic Republic was not only stagnating economically, it was doing so by design. The mullahs rose to power partly by pitting the undereducated rural masses against the middle class that had constituted the previous regime's backbone. Read the earlier column on Iran.

Once in power, the ayatollahs set out to pamper the poorer population, giving a low-income person a vested interest in preserving the regime. Meanwhile, the regime contained the urban, educated and upwardly mobile population, lest it threaten its grip on power.

That was the rationale behind the elaborate system of price controls and subsidies that have sent inflation officially to 26% and unofficially well higher, while the educated were expected to adjust their ambitions to the limited opportunities offered by a private sector that was confined to a pitiful 25% of the economy.

Oil, gas, carpets and nuts still comprise Iranian exports much the way they did when the Islamists took over in 1979, while economies with which Iran was on par 30 years ago, from Malaysia to Poland, have since surpassed it in per-capita GDP.

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