more on Iran
[I normally avoid meta-list commentary and importing issues from
other venues, but I’m going to make an exception for this because the
fundamental political points are interesting and important.]
To: Activists and scholars in Marxist tradition
marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu
Subject: Re: [Marxism] [Fwd: Socialist Men, Muslims, and the “Woman
Question”]
From: Louis Proyect lnp3@panix.com
Date: Mon, 24 Jul 2006 15:05:35 -0400
At 02:23 PM 7/24/2006, Carrol Cox wrote:
Where did Proyect’s misinterpretation come from?
It came from Yoshie’s repeated jibes about the “Western left”, a
refusal to heed my instructions about ending the thread on Saturday
but most of all it came from a profound disgust with her elevation of
a veteran of the revolutionary guards into an Islamic Hugo Chavez.
Right now I am burrowing through 25 year old articles on Iran from
proquest/NY Times using the keyword “revolutionary guards” as some
kind of check on my memory of those days. Article after article comes
up on what amounts to fascist attacks on Marxists. This stuff is a
bit of a chore to transcribe it without a scanner (it is not in text
format and I am obviously at work) but here’s a snippet from
“Khomeini’s Backers Raid Headquarters of Iranian Leftists” from
August, 1979:
“The Khomeini supporters struck again today, ransacking the offices
of leftist student groups at Teheran University, overturning
furniture and destroying literature. No one was reported injured
there, but another group of 1,000 later attacked the Teheran
headquarters of the People’s Fedayeen, a Marxist group. The Fedayeen
apparently anticipated the attack, but not all members got out in
time. A hospital official reported that four of the leftists were
badly beaten and hospitalized.”
When Yoshie is told that the clerics hijacked the revolution, she
shrugs her shoulders and says what amounts to “so what”. Since it is
obvious that she is only attracted to raw power, I suppose the
failure of the Fedayeen to prevail against these mob attacks is a
sign that it belonged to the dustbin of history like the left
opposition in Russia or something. At least when the Stalinists
demonstrated this kind of blind worship of naked power, it rested on
socialized property relations. Iran, on the other hand, is a
capitalist society whose dominant class is the ‘bazaari’. Here’s a
flavor of the social class that supplied the muscle for Ahmadinejad’s
revolutionary guards:
bazaaris as a social class in the first place. This is because
Marxists see classes only as they relate to the means of production,
not as they actually function. As Nikki R. Keddi has pointed out, in
Roots of Revolution, bazaaris don’t fall into any of the usual
categories.The worker in a hole-in-the-wall shop in the bazaar is
certainly in a position different from that of a big moneylender in
the bazaar. But both the laborer and the moneylender are bazaaris.
They are both involved in petty trade of a traditional, or nearly
traditional, kind, centered on the bazaar and its Islamic culture. At
least, that has been the usual definition of bazaari.
Bazaar is a Persian word that means “market.” Westerners often use it
interchangeably with the Arabic word souk for markets throughout
Muslim North Africa and the Near East. The bazaar is often the first
place tourists head for, in order to lose themselves in serpentine
alleys lined with shops, sometimes built under picturesque archways
as in Tunis or Jerusalem conjuring up the cliché of the “fabulous
East.” Although Western goods are sold in the bazaar, and bazaaris
sell souvenirs to Western tourists and smile before their cameras,
real Westernization supermarkets, department stores, machine-made
goods, large banksthreatens the bazaari’s livelihood. The smile
before the camera, therefore, is often a deceptive one.
But bazaaris are not simply the men behind the stalls in the
picturesque Oriental market. According to a relatively new definition
that has taken hold among academics and journalists in the past few
decades, bazaaris as a social class can exist only in places where
the society is in the midst of an awkward modernization; where the
bazaar is in some stage of transition between the world of A Thousand
and One Nights and that of the suburban shopping mall; where the
welder’s sparks singe the classic image of turbaned men inhaling
tobacco smoke from hubble-bubbles.
Bazaaris, therefore, though age-old in the historical sense, are
relatively new in the political sense. The Muslim Brotherhood - the
Ikhwan - in Egypt is heavily backed by bazaari types. Although that
organization, so dangerous to pro-Western regimes in the Near East,
consists largely of narrowly educated men of peasant background, it
is the better-educated sons of traditional bazaaris, like Rafiqdoost,
being a slight step up on the social ladder, who often lead the
narrowly educated men in trying to topple an established order.
In other words, bazaaris constitute a sort of newly established
Islamic petty bourgeoisie. They must compete with more-experienced
Christian and Jewish merchants, both in and outside the bazaar. This
competition quickens the bazaaris’ resentments, which are often
similar to those that were in evidence among the petty bourgeoisie in
Europe during the age of industrialization.
And this is the social class that comrade Furuhashi has an
orientation to rather than the working class.
Yoshie would not really answer the article written by Ardeshir
Mehrdad that was posted to the list the other day because the author
had signed Joanne Landy’s petition. When I first came across the open
letter to MRZine, the first thing I did was check how many had signed
Landy’s petition. It was fewer than 4 as I recall.
One of the signers of the open letter, who did not sign Landy’s
petition, was one Dr Morteza Mohit. I just learned that this is the
same man I knew from Monthly Review brown bag luncheons of yore. He
is a long time supporter of Monthly Review and an occasional
contributor to the magazine:
Rahnema and Haideh Moghissi titled “Clerical Oligarchy and the
Question of ‘Democracy’? that begins:
“For more than twenty years the Islamic regime in Iran, along with
its extensive repressive apparatuses, has created an impressive array
of ideological and economic mechanisms of control to construct an
Islamified civil society and build consensus for the establishment of
a theocratic state. Through massive propaganda and the manipulation
of religious beliefs the Islamic ruling bloc has succeeded in
maintaining its monopoly of power against all external and internal
odds. Political repression eliminated, jailed, and exiled the
progressive secular forces that had initiated the revolution in 1979.
Ideological indoctrination maintained a strong following for the
clerical regime.”
Both Rahnema and Moghissi signed the open letter to MRZine denouncing
Furuhashi’s elevation of the anti-Communist Ahmadeinejad.
One can only imagine poor Harry Magdoff and Paul Sweezy spinning in
their graves.
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