That was sort of my point: Postel wants to villify "the Left" for not helping, but at the same time wants to make it clear that Iranian intellectuals don't want the help of "Leftists." And all this at the same time that he wants to say that the mainstream US discussion about bombing Iran is a separate issue altogether. It's fairly convoluted position to take when all he really needed to do was inform people more. I think Leninology's point about all the other places in the world that don't get highlighted for their human rights abuses. In this, Postel comes off as somewhat tunnel visioned himself, as if there aren't any other issues that could be distracting the attention US activists have to give.
But on the other hand, reading RJ between the lines below, it is obvious that he has some difficulty in parsing why this is the case--whether because Marx was wrong, because "Marxists" in Iran weren't really familiar with Marx, because Marxists eventually collaborated with the Islamic Republic, because Iran doesn't have a working class, because Marxism was tried in Iran and failed (what this means is beyond me--how was it tried? was there a breif moment when the division between classes was broken down and all the Iranian people had relatively equal access to the wealth and product of the country? I hadn't heard of this) or because Marx is more utopian than Habermas (Ha!) and the intellectual climate at the moment is only interested in "the extension of anti-utopian thinking on the one hand, and the urge for a non-imitative dialogical exchange with the modern West on the other." (Though I will point out that it is hard to count Chomsky as a "towering intellectual" and still claim that anything remotely approaching Marxism is inadequate. I know the anarchists on the list might not agree, but if we're talking about a continuum, I think Chomsky is definitely more on the that end.)
Still, the main point that Postel is trying to make--that his undefined "leftist" thought is untenable in any climate--is much more nuanced here and RJ, whether meaning to or not, leaves open several "what ifs" in the course of his description that could lead to a greater dialogue with a more radical set of Enlightenment ideas than just the mushy half measures of "non-imitative dialogue." As Yoshi and Leninology point out, there does seem to be a genuine reluctance here to build links with a wider swath of scholars in the West. though at this point I'm not sure who else they could ask to come speak that would be aligned with this perspective--they only really seem interested in (here's that word again) "intellectuals," so working with the SWP might seem a bit too messy for them (as it is for most US "intellectuals").
In this case, part of what I'm led to wonder is if there isn't a certain class element Postel is leaving out of his analysis. It certainly is an interesting development and is starkly different than some of the accounts I've heard of Iran. But it isn't entirely clear what this movement wants to accomplish. In reading RJ, it doesn't appear that he says anything at all about the wider Iranian society in terms of its intellectual or political aspirations or how the movement he is a part of fits into it. Postel does some of this in his pamphlet, but it is mostly in terms of giving a few accounts of police brutality--which are basically, as they were on Andrew Sullivan's website at the time, supposed to make "leftists" look bad for not supporting "democracy" and "human rights." After reading all of this, I don't come away with any better understanding of how widespread this movement is, if it is the only movement, how it relates to broader Iranian society, or even what social groups make up this movement. Moreover, the fact that they are able to bring in all these Western speakers to lecture makes Iran sound a lot more open than I thought it was so it would definitely be better for us to understand what exactly is the problem these movements are dealing with.
On the surface, it seems that they are less interested in anything fundamental changing in the way Iranian society functions or the political economy of the state is structured. This is not to say that there isn't something groundbreaking going on in the context, but that, to sound a little more Marxist about the whole thing, it all seems a bit bourgeois. Are the students involved in this movement basically content with the class structure in Iran and the economic distribution of oil wealth or do they not think about it because they basically have no complaints in that regard? The answer to this wouldn't, to be sure, make or break my support for these students to have their non-imitative dialogue with western scholars--and though he didn't have much time to describe it, I'd definitely be interested in hearing more about RJ's "soft" universalism and how it manages to deal with intransigence except through some "hard" form. But I do think understanding this, if one were at all interested in the question, which I don't think Postel is, would help to explain why the spectre of Marx does not haunt Iranian intellectuals. Even explaining what the difference is between liberal and leftist in the context would be convenient.
And as a final though, whatever Habermas's thought is now, he was certainly more materialist in his earlier works. It is something that Habermas does a lot of work on in the Structural Transformation of Public Sphere and, IIRC, Legitimation Crisis is written specifically in response to the inadequacies of various forms of systems theories (Parsons, Luhmann, etc.) to account for the material realities of the state and economy under capitalism (i.e. violence and hunger as tools of helping people believe in the legitimacy of the state). Why these elements of his thought would be less relevant today is beyond me.
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