No, I didn't say they were all Jacobin, for Jacobinism doesn't apply to Venezuela -- I do think of them all as republican and democratic, which you can be without necessarily being Jacobin: <http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/pipermail/lbo-talk/Week-of-Mon-20070108/000411.html>.
The Bolivarian Revolution is not a Jacobin revolution, and the Islamic Revolution most clearly was, both for better and worse.
> And Iran? To call their political traditions Jacobin, I think, is extreme
> wishful thinking and anachronistic misapplication. The middle east has
> never been the terrain of the ideologies of the french rev--- it was once a
> battleground of nationalist nasserist type pan-arab projects (which I think
> was their best shot at social justice and resistance to imperialism, if the
> douchebags who took over the nasser project and the baath project hadn't
> turned out to be such vile pieces of shit), and since then, a series of
> autocracies where populist islam leads the resistance to dictatorship and
> imperialism.
No other nation in the Middle East underwent social revolution worth its name, whereas Iran did so twice, the Constitutional Revolution of 1906-1911 and the Islamic Revolution that began in 1978, the first and last classic social revolutions in the South. (Perhaps it will be the last of its kind in history, too. If so, history, if nothing else, gave birth to a fascinating symmetry: the revolution led by a man who said "l'athéisme est aristocratique" and apotheosized Reason initiated an era that ended with the revolution made by men and women shouting, "God is great!") In contrast, Nasserism and Ba'athism, competing pan-Arabist ideologies, were more the ideologies of enlightened officers than anything else and put into practice as such -- hence their easy transformation into autocracies.
It is a tragedy that the Soviets couldn't see that. According to Alvin Z. Rubinstein, "Though Soviet journals described the Iranian revolution as a gain for progressive forces, the terms 'national-democratic revolution' and 'victory for socialism' are not used unreservedly as they are for the Afghan revolution that brought to power the communist party, 'the vanguard of progressive forces'. Whereas the fashioning and consolidation of the Afghan revolution was considered to have been swift and decisive, the 'crash of absolutism' in Iran was qualifiedly praised" ("The Soviet Union and Iran under Khomeini," International Affairs 57.4, Autumn 1981, p. 601). In truth, the Afghan communists, far from consolidating revolution swiftly and decisively, never even managed to fashion a nation out of tribes of Afghanistan, let alone establishing anything approaching democracy, to say nothing of social revolution, but Islamists in Iran did all of them, in part because they could build on one of the results of the Shah's "White Revolution," the land reform that had increased the proportion of independent farmers from less than 5% to 76% of the rural population (Ervand Abrahamian, Iran between Two Revolutions, Princeton University Press, 1982, p. 429), proletarianizing many Iranians in the countryside and driving them to cities.
After the overthrow of the Shah, the first foreign envoy that Khomeini met was the Soviet ambassador, Vladimir M. Vinogradov, on 25 February 1979 (Rubinstein, p. 602). Khomeinists took Iran out of alliance with the USA, nationalizing the oil and other major industries (to this day, the public and quasi-public sectors account for some 80 percent of Iran's economy [Bijan Khajehpour, "Domestic Political Reforms and Private Sector Activity in Iran," Social Research, Summer 2000, <http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2267/is_2_67/ai_63787344/print>]), shutting down the American intelligence stations, and withdrawing Iran from CENTO among other things. Washington lost the most important policeman of the Persian Gulf. But the Soviets, while doing several crucial things in Iran's favor, insisted upon "the validity of the Soviet-Iranian treaty of February 26, 1921" (Article 6 of which stipulated that "[i]f a third party . . . should desire to use Persian territory as a base of operations against Russia . . . Russia shall have the right to advance her troops into the Persian interior. . ."), "notwithstanding repeated repudiations by Iranian authorities" before and after the revolution, and reaffirmed it on "February 27, 1979, two days after Khomeini's meeting with the Soviet ambassador" (Rubinstein, pp. 603-4). Then came the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan on 25 December 1979, which aroused the fear and anger of Khomeinists (as well as probably most Muslims in the world), making communists in Iran more suspect than before in their eyes,* and the rest is history.
* Even before the revolution, the Soviets' oil proposals, interventions on behalf of Iran's minorities, overtures to the Shah, etc., undertaken without consulting or honoring the wishes of the communists in Iran, sometimes put them into a very difficult position.
On 5/3/07, Eric <rayrena at realtime.net> wrote:
> >It is true, as Alain Badiou says, that the only means of defense that
> >the poor have is "their capacity to act together," and one may call
> >that "a popular discipline," but Slavoj Zizek is wrong to see any
> >popular discipline at work in 300.
>
> I haven't seen the movie so I can't speak to that, but the rest of
> what you say is a step back even from Zizek/Badiou, as you seem to
> think of this "acting together" as a purely defensive maneuver,
No, I don't. I mentioned defense because that's what's at stake in the film, defending the freedom of a polis (and an alliance of poleis) from an empire.
That said, if people do not succeed in collective self defense, they go the way of the Paris Commune, the Second Spanish Republic, the Mossadegh government, the Arbenz government, the Allende government, and so on. Sometimes, conditions for successful self defense do not exist, as was the case with the Paris Commune. But sometimes they do.
Then what? Even the most elementary self defense sometimes cannot be accomplished without initiating and deepening social revolution. Those who respect property too much, liberal democrats (including those who call themselves socialists and communists but think and act like liberal democrats), therefore do not fare well in the South when push comes to shove.
On 5/3/07, Eric <rayrena at realtime.net> wrote:
> Organization preexists the
> group's actual actions, and deviations from the organizational model
> get called "infantile leftism" (Lenin) or "juvenile outbursts" (Zizek
> on the banlieu rioters).
A majority of voters who live in the banlieux probably have voted, and will vote again, for Ségolène Royal. Such is French politics today. The Socialist Party has little to offer those who are structurally unemployed, nor do the parties to its left, but rioters have not developed any practical alternative to either.
On 5/3/07, Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:
> It's odd how the only Lenin most people read is the Lenin refracted
> through the 3d international. The whole of Lenin's political thought
> presupposed spontaneous collective acts as the context for political
> organization. Organization is an emergent property of such activity,
> without which the activity itself dies out.
It looks like Zizek is discovering Lenin, Mao, and other thinkers whom his circumstances once made it impossible for him to consider seriously. Zizek came from a country whose power elite claimed to be against Stalinism and for self-management but ran it like any old bureaucrat of state socialism. It's rare for an intellectual who started his thinking struggling against the problem of "anti-Stalinist Stalinism" in the East and then have found a successful career in the West to come this way, even merely for the sake of performance.
On 5/2/07, Shane Mage <shmage at pipeline.com> wrote:
> Mathiez, Levebvre, and Soboul (I don't know about Rud´e) were all
> members of the Stalinist PCF, and so had an enormous ideological bias
> in favor of Robespierre, that forerunner of the Moscow trials.
Fred Halliday takes that line of reasoning farther and claims that Maxime Rodinson "admitted that his admiration for Muhammad derived, in part, from the similarities he saw between the prophet and Stalin" ("The Jihadism of Fools," Winter 2007, <http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=732>). That may or may not be true, but that doesn't lead me to dismiss Rodinson's interpretation. Besides, at one time in France, many intellectuals on the Left were probably either members of the Communist Party or fellow travelers.
That said, generally speaking, the dynamics of the French Revolution -- including how exactly it led to the Terror and the Thermidor -- is a lens through which many interpret subsequent social revolutions. Those who fear the possibility of the Terror and the Thermidor tend to champion the English and American, that is to say anti-Jacobin, ways of attaining modernity. The anti-Jacobin ways, however, have their costs, too, probably higher costs for the most oppressed. American racism, for instance, has much to do with the fact that the USA has never had a Jacobin revolution: the American Revolution did not emancipate the slaves in the South (though it began to do so in the North) and consolidated settler domination over the indigenous peoples; and white supremacist terror after the Civil War was not met by the terror of the Federal government, for it was not run by anti-racist Jacobins.
Then, there is the problem of "anti-Jacobin Jacobins" or "Jacobin anti-Jacobins": e.g., the Meiji Restoration, Kemalism, and fascism, combining the worst of both, creating the foundations for the nations that eventually make for the best allies of the empire. -- Yoshie