Yoshie says:
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.
*********
Gee, that's sure an appealing thought. I'm sure it will be a big seller in Des Moines. Which is why, I guess, you like the ascetic Iranian forces that oppose the secular left and liberalism in Iran -- really quite a lot of the Iranian populace. Honestly Yoshie, if I thought you were right, I'd switch sides. Your socialism is not only not worth fighting for -- it's worth fighting against. Actually, worth extirpating root and branch. The real end of that line of thought is the killing fields of Democratic Kampuchea under Pol Pot.
I believe that, fortunately for the human race, Marx was right and you are wrong. We have not seen effective resistance under relatively advanced capitalist conditions for almost a century, true. But we did see it, and so did Marx, and interestingly enoughly the Paris Commune, the German Revolution, even the Spanish Revolution, were not animated by a spirit of ascetic leveling. Nor, even was the early Russian Revolution based in the factories of Petersburg and Moscow.
And to the extent that third world revolutions have been animated by the spirit of what the old Man called "crude communism," envy and leveling down, they haven't really been consistently inspiring or successful -- as the truth about them came out and their barbarism undermined their own support, they proved unsustainable and fragile for lots of reasons. One reason is that to the extent that they proved successful in improving living standard, many of the beneficiaries did want to put up with ascetic leveling. Maybe the wave of religious ascetic leveling we now will have more legs, worse luck for everyone if so.
I understand your choice and you position somewhat better. Frankly, I find it horrifying.
--- Yoshie Furuhashi <critical.montages at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 7/14/07, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
> >
> > On Jul 14, 2007, at 12:01 PM, Yoshie Furuhashi
> wrote:
> >
> > > Where is practical opposition to the
> multinational empire? Only
> > > Islamists, whose revolutionary doctrine and
> practice, like "[t]he
> > > revolutionary literature that accompanied . . .
> first movements of the
> > > proletariat," have "necessarily a reactionary
> character" and often
> > > inculcate "universal asceticism and social
> levelling in its crudest
> > > form"
>
(<http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-
> > > manifesto/ch03.htm#c>)
> > > .
> > >
> > > Social liberals cannot tolerate such leveling
> and asceticism.
> >
> > Every time you put it that way, you make the
> multinational empire
> > sound more appealing.
> >
> > I don't really get your point - are you endorsing
> Marx's critique of
> > the crude reaction of your Islamists, or are you
> embracing the crude
> > reaction because it's the only opposition around,
> or are you
> > embracing crude reaction itself? It's not like
> these guys don't have
> > a multinational empire of their own in mind,
> either.
>
> 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]
>
> . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
>
> 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
>
=== message truncated ===
____________________________________________________________________________________ Get the Yahoo! toolbar and be alerted to new email wherever you're surfing. http://new.toolbar.yahoo.com/toolbar/features/mail/index.php