[lbo-talk] Iran's once active campuses falling silent

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

On 11/11/06, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
>
> On Nov 11, 2006, at 9:37 AM, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
> > More generally, though, student and other protests during the Khatami
> > era were never simply about civil liberties, which are at or near the
> > bottom of people's concerns in Iran, the US, or any other country for
> > that matter (most people's top priority is economy, and only wars like
> > the Iraq War can rival that), and they were swelled by the Khatami
> > administration's liberal economic policy, including tuition hikes, as,
> > for instance, reported by the Asia Times in this story:
>
> After the 2004 elections, when it seemed like the American people
> wanted fundamentalism, holy imperial war, and domestic repression, we
> should have just shrugged and said that's what the people want? Is
> that your idea of politics? The masses are always right (leaving
> aside whether this would have been a correct reading of the masses'
> feelings, or whether your interpretation of what Iranians want is
> correct)? This would be a very odd position for the editor of a
> socialist webzine based in the U.S. to take, since Americans
> certainly have no interest in socialism. Why not turn MRZine into a
> center-left organ? It's what the American people want!

I support a center-left program in America (e.g., with a two-point
program of no war and single-payer universal health care), too, except
that in America there is no center-left mass party that won't sign on
to major commitments of the empire like the Israeli occupation, the
coup in Venezuela, and the sanctions on Iran and/or that will
establish social democratic basics like single-payer universal health
care.

It is probably impossible to build a center-left mass party with a
center-left program in America (the working people of the countries
that have such parties built them in the late 19th and early 20th
centuries, a window of opportunity that Americans missed).

No left in any former empire in history managed to bring its powers
that be down and turned it into a republic on its own either.

That raises a fundamental question of what a leftist can do in the
belly of the beast.
-- 
Yoshie
<http://montages.blogspot.com/>
<http://mrzine.org>
<http://monthlyreview.org/>