[lbo-talk] Ramin Jahanbegloo on Marxism

[Sean Andrews]

On 2/14/07, Yoshie Furuhashi <critical.montages at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 2/14/07, www.leninology. blogspot.com <leninology at hotmail.com> wrote:
> > My point, for what it is worth (and it is worth a
> > great deal in my view) is that left-wing intellectuals are by no means
> > automatically reticent on the issue.  It is a simple matter of asking.
>
> What do Iranian reformers think of making links with, say, the British
> SWP or political currents like it?  The Iranian reformers whom Danny
> Postel favors do not appear to desire any such links, and maybe that's
> why they haven't asked.  :->
>

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.

s