On Oct 8, 2007, at 4:18 PM, Yoshie Furuhashi quoted:
Some excerpts from Val Moghadam's "Socialism or Anti-Imperialism? The Left and Revolution in Iran," New Left Review I/166, November- December 19 <http://newleftreview.org/?view=1013>, including this:
> And for the Tudeh Party, the fundamental objective was a national
> democratic revolution based on anti-imperialism and the breaking of
> bonds of dependency.
Curiously, the very next sentence, which you do not quote, reads:
> Little did these groups know that a clerical regime, guided by a
> vague philosophy of Islamic populism, could accomplish all this and
> be profoundly anti-socialist and repressive as well.
There are a lot of other interesting passages you could have quoted in that fine essay as well, which provide historical evidence against getting carried away with treating "liberals" as the enemy, the risks of populist patriotism, the dangers of holding one's critical tongue in the interest of "anti-imperialism," and the false appeal of religious critiques of "materialism" - all prominent recent themes in Yoshie Thought. Moghadam:
> The Left never matched this level of discursive development. For
> the most part, the secular Left tended, when it wrote about Islam
> at all during this period, to point to the progressive aspects of
> Islam and its compatibility with socialism or Marxism. There was no
> discussion of the cultural realm; no analysis of the heterogeneity
> of Iranian society (national minorities, religious minorities,
> ethnic groups, social classes, Shiite, Sunni, gender differences)
> and what this might imply culturally. That capitalism and bourgeois
> culture might have some positive impact and features was
> inconceivable—and indeed, not even seriously consid- ered. Rather,
> capitalism and imperialism were excoriated for having distorted the
> economy, exploited the people, transferred the surplus, and
> supported a hateful monarchy. Of course, all of this was true—but
> only part of the story.
> The neglect by the secular Left of such issues as social
> psychology, cultural forms and religion allowed the Rightists and
> religious contributors to the journals Maktab-e Islam and Maktab-e
> Tashayo to dominate the cultural realm and imbue the anti-
> imperialist discourse with denunciations of the West, of Marxism,
> of Christianity, and of secularism. In a kind of populist
> patriotism that eventually proved their downfall, the secular Left
> did not maximize differences in order not to appear divisive or to
> splinter the opposition to the Shah. By contrast, the religious
> forces had only open disdain for the Marxists. In prison in the
> mid- 1970s, certain clerics who later took power in the Islamic
> Republic would refuse to eat with the communist prisoners.
> In fact most of the Iranian Left at this time expended more energy
> attacking the liberals in government than the clerical wing. Of
> course it was easy to denounce Bazargan, who made such openly anti-
> Left statements as the following one from September 1979: 'You
> Westerners don't understand our Left. Our so-called leftists are
> the most dangerous enemies of the revolution. They did nothing in
> the struggle against the Shah. Now they incite workers to strike,
> gullible citizens to demonstrate, and provincial groups to rebel.
> They are SAVAKagents.'28 Naturally the mutual antipathy between the
> Left and the liberals worked to the advantage of the clerics.
> The Islamic regime managed to undercut the Left in many more ways
> than through its populist–radical economic and social practices.
> One was the resort to anti-imperialist political actions such as
> the seizure of the American Embassy in November 1979,which met with
> the approval of Ayatollah Khomeini and was widely popular among
> Iranians in general. Another was sheer intimidation and brutality,
> which began fairly early on. Self-styled 'partisans of
> God' (hezbollahi) regularly harassed leftists, and in August 1979
> eleven Fedaii were executed in Kurdestan by Revolutionary Guards.
> Early in 1980, in the northwestern region of Turkaman Sahra
> bordering the Caspian Sea, the regime ruthlessly put down a
> cultural–political movement of the ethnically Turkic population who
> were supportive of the Fedaii and had received assistance from them
> in the organization of numerous peasant cooperatives. Four Fedaii
> leaders—all Turkamans—were kidnapped and murd- ered. In April the
> 'liberal' President Bani-Sadr endorsed the initiation of the
> 'Islamic cultural revolution'—an invidious twist of the Maoist
> formulation. This led to confrontations with university councils
> and especially with radical students affiliated to various Left
> groups. For the next two years, all the universities and some high
> schools were shut down while the curriculum was duly islamicized
> and left-wing faculties purged.
> And what of the Tudeh Party and Fedaii–Majority? From the beginning
> the Tudeh had tried to entrench itself within the new political
> elite, propagating the theory of the non-capitalist path of
> development and the role of the petty bourgeoisie in the national
> democratic revolution. Almost single-handedly, the Tudeh Party was
> responsible for the spread of the notions of a 'progressive clergy'
> and 'revolutionary Islam'; the prophets were dutifully invoked and
> sprinkled throughout Tudeh documents. The Party's main
> theoretician, the well-known writer Ehsan Tabari, wrote extensively
> on the subject and probably authored a widely circulated booklet
> The Progressive Clergy and Us. A brief quotation will suffice to
> give an idea of its argument: 'The programme of social development
> posed by scientific socialism has some affinities with social
> demands and principles of Islam and Shiism...and this fact makes
> cooperation between supporters of socialism and the progressive
> clergy and its supporters not only possible but imperative.' World
> Marxist Review carried an article by Tabari in 1982(after the
> repression of the militant Left had been launched!) entitled 'The
> Role of Religion in Our Revolution'. Here he claims that Islam 'is
> the ideology of the anti- imperialist revolution' and sings the
> praises of Imam Khomeini while attacking 'liberals' such as
> Bazargan and National Front members. He refers to anti-communism
> and 'fascist-type groups in Islamic guise' (hezbollahi) but does
> not link these to the Islamic state. He further draws a distinction
> between 'revolutionary Islam' and 'traditional Islam', and
> dissociates the Party from 'extreme leftist groupings' who are
> opposed to Islam and the Islamic Republic; unlike them, 'our Party
> supports the Revolution'. It must be said that, whatever its
> mistakes, the militant Left did at least make a political
> distinction between the Iranian Revolution and the Islamic regime;
> whereas the Tudeh Party proceeded to enact a new version of a
> trahison des clercs.
> On at least one occasion Ehsan Tabari engaged the 'progressive
> clergy' in a televised philosophical debate. Here he noted that the
> Islamic preoccupation with the problem of free will and
> determination was similar to the Marxist concern with social/human
> agency and lawfulness. He also sought to defend historical and
> dialectical materialism by finding parallels in Islamic
> philosophical and political thought. However, while Tudeh
> literature advocated a Marxist–Muslim dialogue and waxed eloquent
> on the virtues of Islam and the Shiite clergy, the Islamic
> ideologues themselves never wavered in their denunciation of
> materialism, secularism, Marxism and communism.
>
> In another article published in World Marxist Review in 1983, the
> Tudeh secretary of the time, Kianuri, motivated the Party's
> political stance by referring to the 'sustained struggle'
> proceeding on four main fronts: (1) against external plots, the
> political, economic and military pressure of world imperialism
> headed by theUSA, and regional reaction; (2) against the intrigues
> of domestic counter-revolutionaries, who wanted to stage a coup,
> and against political terrorism; (3) against the 'economic terror-
> ism' of the big capitalists and landowners and for social justice;
> and (4) for guaranteed civil rights and freedoms. The priorities
> are interesting, as is the deflection of criticism away from the
> regime to external contradictions and the role of USimperialism.
> Elsewhere in the article Washington is branded as the 'main
> initiator of the Iranian–Iraqi war'. Kianuri also denounces the
> conspiracy and plot that Bani-Sadr had supposedly attempted, and
> lambasts the 'divisive activity of "leftists", Maoist-type
> extremists and their like'. No reference is made to the numerous
> communists, socialists and other dissidents who were then being
> persecuted, jailed, tortured or killed by the regime. The only
> complaint concerns harassment of the Tudeh Party itself, and of its
> associate, the Fedaii–Majority.