It's far from the case that the choice is always either/or. In fact, in most societies, that is to say societies of business as usual under capitalism, social forces are not polarized. In the first round of the French presidential elections you have twelve choices (which are probably too many -- the anti-liberal Left should have worked harder to find a unity candidate, but unity doesn't come easily to leftists), though most likely it will be Royal vs. Sarkozy in the second round (the French elections are curiously dull, unlike French politics of the streets).
Even in the case of polarization, sometimes you get lucky and one side gets most major issues right or at least gets them better than the other side -- then, the choice is easier.
But even in the case of the Cuban Revolution, which in my opinion got many things right, there was a lot of homophobia, and other problems, that would have made it insupportable if one had said that a revolution had to get everything right at once. Do you think Cuban gay men and lesbians who made a decision to stay in the island and work within the revolution to make it better -- and did make it better, slowly but surely -- made a mistake, in comparison to those who said, "Fuck, I'm gonna head for Miami"?
On 4/20/07, Jim Straub <rustbeltjacobin at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Why is it either/or? I do not think leftists should ally with
> > those who support any kind of imperialism, sexual or otherwise.
>
> You resolve the either/or dichotomy by proposing a strategy of
> "neither/nor". While appealing to left theology and dogma, this strategy
> (which has been the main one used by all tendencies of the US left for
> decades) shrinks and isolates the left at all turns possible. Thanks to
> this way of thinking, we are the generation that has brought the left to its
> smallest state since the terms were first invented in the french revolution.
>
> The left in the US, by being unwilling to ally with or otherwise engage with
> any individual, organization or social grouping that already has the same
> position as the left on all forms of imperialism and other evils, ensures
> that it is only allowed to talk to, oh, say, .5% of our own population.
> Huzza for the united front.
Except some are all too ready to ally with "Cooler Elites." :-0 Whatever they call themselves, most leftists in the North are liberals at heart, just like Fred Halliday and Wojtek who have already taken their preference to its logical conclusion: the empire and its clients are better than governments and movements in the Third World.
Even those who refuse to follow Halliday, et al. in that direction have few structured forums where people who come from different political traditions, religious beliefs, sexual orientations, classes and strata, etc. try to work out a common platform (for the purpose beyond single-issue mobilization or Get Out the Vote), which compels us to try to persuade one another in good faith and, if no school of thought prevails, make compromises that all sides can live with.
On 4/20/07, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
>
> On Apr 20, 2007, at 3:16 PM, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
> > Doug probably agrees with Fred Halliday that leftists should line up
> > with liberals, even if they are imperialists ("Cooler Elites"),
> > against religious, anti-imperialist populists who are fundamentally or
> > may become illiberals:
> >
> > The events of 1979 bring out what was, in my view,
> > the central avoidable error of most of the Iranian Left --
> > its catastrophic stand on 'liberalism'.
>
> In retrospect, Halliday's position seems hard to argue with
Given the balance of forces, supporting liberals, who were even smaller in number than leftists, would probably have made no difference. What could have made a difference was the USSR: if the USSR had taken a different policy toward Iran, before and after the revolution, Tudeh, if not other groups, might have been able to develop space for itself inside the revolution, akin to what Egyptian communists had inside the framework of Nasserism.
On 4/20/07, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
> 28 years after the fact
28 years later, Iran is not what it used to be, both for better and worse.
Ervand Abrahamian says that "Khomeini is to the Islamic Revolution what Lenin was to the Bolshevik, Mao to the Chinese, and Castro to the Cuban revolutions" (Iran between Two Revolutions, Princeton University Press, 1982, p. 531), possessing an ability to "rally behind him a wide spectrum of political and social forces" (p. 532). I'd add that he was also the combined Stalin and Trotsky of the Islamic Revolution, presiding over the Reign of Terror and seeking to export revolutions. _That was then_. Today's Iran might be said to be like the Islamic version of Brezhnev's USSR, what with burgeoning consumerism, except Iran has an incomparably more active public sphere with demos and strikes, as well as intellectual debates, than the USSR after Lenin.
On 4/20/07, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
> Why is that necessary? Why can't you acknowledge that the regime is
> awful - a position many Iranians would agree with? It doesn't mean
> you endorse an invasion. Instead you end up defending legally
> sanctioned religious murder.
If leftists in the USA help Washington paint Iran (or any other country) as nothing but evil, we'll help the public accept whatever is done to it (including a ground invasion, except that's not in the cards now). Nowadays, some leftists even go so far as to say, "Things were better under Saddam Hussein," though Saddam Hussein's dictatorship was a lot more brutal than the Iranian government. Well, it's too late.
Some Iranians think that their government is awful, but many others don't, and the same can be said about most governments in the world. Many Iranians, including my Persian teacher who, as I said, is a vocal critic of the government but also visited his hometown for a month last year, argue that conditions of women in Iran today are far better than in most countries in the Middle East in particular and much of Asia and Africa in general. It's not just their patriotism* that makes them think that. Look around the countries in the South, taking murder motivated by religion and the like into full account, and in many ways things are a lot worse for many peoples in many other countries, both for men and women. Few Iranians would think that their country would be better off over all if they traded their government for, say, the government of Brazil, China, Egypt, India, Jordan, Pakistan, South Africa, Turkey, or another country in this league, all of which have their own problems.
* It's not just neo-conservatives who don't understand other peoples' feelings about their own countries. Leftists in the West don't quite grasp them either. -- Yoshie