The multinational empire is appealing, and social liberals of all nations find it irresistible -- hence its hegemony. If it weren't appealing, it wouldn't be so powerful, would it?
Marx's diagnosis was correct, but Marx's prescription ("face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind") was based on wishful thinking. The form of resistance Marx criticized is the only one that exists today, and in hindsight, it is clear that state socialists' resistance, too, was resistance through "universal asceticism and social levelling." As soon as party bureaucrats abandoned that, they became capitalists, in China as well as Russia.
Social liberals did not, and do not, find communist resistance any more appealing than Islamist resistance: to take just two examples, social liberals have never supported communists in Nepal, and mere non-renewal of RCTV license upon its expiration has already sent many of them up in arms about the legalistic revolution in Venezuela.
Not all secular intellectuals on the broadly defined Left are quite sold on social liberalism as the end of history, however. Social liberals are as fundamentalist as the most dogmatic Islamists, so they are fighting Kulturkampf against those secular intellectuals who are as critical of social liberalism as Islamism, such as Hamid Dabashi.* Here's an instance of liberal fundamentalism: it's not enough to defend freedom of speech, freedom of association, and so forth -- you must support the ideological positions of liberal feminists and reformists without reservations, however complicit they are in the empire's project, or else we'll disparage you.
Struggle among secular intellectuals who more or less agree with one another on Islamism but cannot agree on social liberalism is likely to continue. Since intellectuals have little to no influence in American politics, it is unlikely to have any political consequence, but it is a fascinating spectacle.
* <http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070716/afary> The Iranian Impasse by JANET AFARY & KEVIN B. ANDERSON [from the July 16, 2007 issue]
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In his new book, Dabashi echoes some of these criticisms of the reform movement. He also reminds readers that many reformists played a role in the intellectual repression of the 1980s, especially at Tehran University. Yet Dabashi refuses to recognize the contribution that reformist theologians like Soroush, Kadivar and Shabestari have made to a more tolerant and democratic Iranian society. Dabashi also casts aspersions on Ganji's hunger strike outside the UN in 2006 in protest of repression inside Iran, arguing that "people like Ganji" are becoming "very natural bedfellows of the U.S. neocons."
In Dabashi's view, Ganji and other dissidents should have been "placing the Iranian situation within the larger geopolitics of the region," at a time when Israel had attacked Lebanon and the United States was threatening Iran. Never mind that Ganji denounced the invasion of Lebanon, or that he opposes strongly not only US military action against Iran but also its so-called democracy funding, or that Ganji enjoys considerable prestige among students and dissidents inside Iran because of his defiant behavior in the regime's courts and his hunger strikes at Evin Prison. Apparently, the timing of his protest was just wrong. That, unfortunately, has too often been the attitude of progressives toward Iranian oppositionists from the onset of the revolution, when the feminists were the first to come onto the streets against the new theocracy, in their demonstration of March 8, 1979.
Dabashi is staunchly critical of the Iranian state's racism, narrow nationalism and anti-Semitism. But while he styles himself as a feminist, he is surprisingly dismissive of contemporary Iranian feminists, who are often treated in his book as misguided at best and, at worst, fellow travelers of the Bush Administration. "Services" rendered to "the US imperial design" are attributed to Azar Nafisi, while the young Iranian-American feminist writer Roya Hakakian also comes under attack. Shirin Ebadi is accused of getting dangerously close to the neocons because she made the "unfortunate choice" of working with another liberal feminist, Azadeh Moaveni, the translator and co-author of the Nobel laureate's 2006 memoir, Iran Awakening. These are risible charges, since all of these feminists have opposed US intervention in Iran and have denounced US policies in the region. (For a feminist response to Dabashi, see Firoozeh Papan-Matin's forthcoming article in The Common Review, "Reading (and Misreading) Lolita in Tehran.") The main sin of the Iranian dissidents and feminists Dabashi assails seems to be their decision to devote more attention to human rights in Iran than to the critique of American imperialism.
Dabashi's discussion of Iranian studies is equally coarse. Take, for instance, his intemperate denunciations of the Columbia University-based Encyclopedia Iranica--an exemplary work of documentation that has paid special attention to Iran's religious and ethnic minorities and has substantial entries on feminists, homosexuality, slavery and numerous other subjects that cannot be discussed as openly inside Iran today--and of the flagship journal of the field, Iranian Studies--currently edited by Homa Katouzian, a leading historian of the Mossadegh era. The scholarship of the Encyclopedia Iranica and Iranian Studies, indeed of the entire field of Iranian studies, he opines, is "a direct descendent of old-fashioned Orientalism...now mostly inhabited by native scholars, a nativist disposition, and cast in entirely domesticated and (ultra) nationalistic terms." This kind of rhetorical overkill permeates Dabashi's book and is especially regrettable coming from the author of such nuanced studies as Theology of Discontent: The Ideological Foundations of the Islamic Revolution in Iran. -- Yoshie