This was discussed in Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's follow up to EMPIRE called MULTITUDE.
boddi satva <lbo.boddi at gmail.com> wrote:
The support of Islamism among some Marxist-Leninists is an important signal. It really signals that the "revolutionary" model has failed - or we should hope so. 1917 is no longer a viably model.
The underlying idea is of a military revolution which creates an essentially military government informed by a quite strict code of ethics. The thought is that the code of ethics and the act of revolution are enough to justify the insult to Democratic values. The energy of the revolution comes from an essentially conservative rejection of the alienation and profit-motive of capitalism and a nostalgia for local - but hierarchical - social structures.
The transition to capitalism creates the worst possible situation: pre-capitalist, pre-liberal-democracy hierarchies combine with the anarchic ideology of capitalism to create rapacious and utterly irresponsible power elites. These elites need to be brought under the control of state power. Populist military revolutions are one answer. The other answer is a kind of neo-colonization by capitalist powers.
I think Islamism shows the problem with the populist military revolutions - they do not create sustainable states. The problem is that the ethical code the military revolutions seek to enforce are generally incomplete and inflexible. The power to enforce the code - absent mechanisms for popular decision-making to alter the code - become corrupt. Because the revolution essentially always justifies itself with a quite radical ethics, those who question the revolution are eventually branded unethical and become victims of the revolution.
Islamism has the very worst aspects of the revolutionary model. There is no room for popular modification of an Islamist group's ethical code. This code is, by its nature, fundamentalist and enforced by a hierarchy. It is also openly and violently hostile to any opponents, dismissing them as apostates and unbelievers. The Iranian state is not only unstable, it's stability is not even desirable. Thus the great success of the Islamist revolutionary model is a tragedy. The potential for the Iranian revolution's using religion to popularize popular government seems to be falling away as radical religionists like Ahmadinejad rise through the ranks and Iran tries to export the 1979 revolution to all Shiites through its system of mini-Khomeinis like Nasrallah.
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