[lbo-talk] On Islamic radicalism and the left by Don Hamerquist

Yoshie Furuhashi critical.montages at gmail.com
Thu Aug 17 11:07:23 PDT 2006


On 8/17/06, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
>
> On Aug 17, 2006, at 11:51 AM, Michael Hoover wrote:
>
> >> That's true of a lot of the left's reaction to the Iranian revolution
> >> in 1979 (both the Iranian and Western left) - Val Moghadam's 1987
> >> article in New Left Review goes into this in detail.
> >> Doug
> > <<<<<>>>>>
> >
> > widespread iranian opposition to the shah produced a broad-based
> > coalition of social forces whose political and religious differences
> > were blurred in the heady days of revolutionary victory (such blurring
> > is common in almost all such instances)...
>
> One of Moghadam's points is that the blurring was greatly promoted by
> a rigid anti-imperialism - i.e., anyone who was anti-American had to
> be good. Consequently, both the Iranian and Western left were blinded
> to the dangers of the clerics. You see that error being repeated in
> certain quarters today.

Let's imagine, for the sake of argument, that all Iranian leftists on the eve of the Iranian Revolution had the benefit of learning from Valentine M. Moghadam's insight and acted accordingly. Would the Iranian Revolution have then resulted in a secular socialist government? I doubt it.

Take a look at Maziar Behrooz's "Rebels With a Cause: The Failure of the Left in Iran": <http://bss.sfsu.edu/behrooz/m-keddie.pdf>. It looks like the Marxist Left in Iran, multiply fragmented, were too few in number and came to the revolution too late, which had already been initiated by other revolutionaries; and the Marxist Left, if Behrooz is to be believed, mainly came from relatively elite backgrounds (by the standards of Iran at that time), which he believes may have been one of the main reasons they did not enjoy enough support among workers and peasants to defeat Islamists.

Sometimes, masses of ordinary people, themselves religious and conservative, prefer Islamists to Marxists and look on the former's repression of the latter with equanimity.

I suppose that, had all Iranian leftists enjoyed the insight of Moghadam, they might have just gotten out of Iran in time and avoided getting involved in the revolution whose supporters did not favor them. -- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>



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