To: Activists and scholars in Marxist tradition <marxism at lists.econ.utah.edu> Subject: Re: [Marxism] [Fwd: Socialist Men, Muslims, and the "Woman Question"] From: Louis Proyect <lnp3 at 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:
<startquote> Ironically, the Marxist probably never would have identified the 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. <endquote>
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: <http://www.monthlyreview.org/ mar2001.htm>. In that issue, there's also an article by titled Saeed 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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