> On 10/8/07, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:That's a strange
> characterization, which would have looked even
>
>> stranger had you preserved the bit immediately following where I
>> praised the CPUSA. Or do you think the CP was a CIA front because
>> Langley bought so many subscriptions to the Daily Worker?
>
>
> The tactic of reducing your opponent to a cartoonish amalgam of Bad
> Things
> is a tactic refined by Cointelpro. I look forward to the Yoshie
> Colouring-in Book, in which she is depicted hanging with the
> Islamofascist
> hordes, plotting the annihilation of whitey and the imposition of
> the dread
> burqa on cosmopolitan New York females. I hate to be this harsh,
> but it's
> for your own good.
And of course nothing you say is a cartoonish amalgam.
> No one - not Yoshie nor myself - is arguing that it is better to go
> back to
> the 1950s. I leave it to Newt Gingrich to masturbate over the Norman
> Rockwell illustrations. The point is to have a critical
> relationship to the
> changes that have been achieved and to correctly perceive their
> limits.
That would be fine; I'm all for it. But that's not what I read in this passage. I see something that is way too much like a nostalgia for segregation and unchallenged male privilege:
> Elimination of de jure discrimination destroys civil rights
> movements through their success, so women, Blacks, queers, etc. of
> lower classes and strata now face a more powerful capitalism, better
> legitimated in multicultural fashion, without the material and
> ideological resources for resistance that their erstwhile organic
> intellectual leaders supplied.
What does this passage argue? There's no success like failure, but failure's no success at all? "Resistance" is to be preferred over victory because it provides leadership opportunities for organic intellectuals? This is way beyond a critique of partial victories. Ditto this:
> It's no secret that the seemingly more gender-egalitarian spirit of
> capitalism today has been achieved, in the case of the United
> States, by bringing men down as much as bringing women up.
If men have been enjoying unearned privileges of patriarchy, it's going to be hard to reverse that without bringing some of them down, isn't it?
> You compare Yoshie to Farrakhan, but his vague entrepreneurial,
> racially
> separatist and de-classed Tuskegeeite analysis is actually anathema
> to the
> argument that Yoshie is actually making.
The separatist ideology is very nostalgic for the organic leadership possibilities of segregation.
> I don't detect support for the retrograde social policies of the
> Islamic
> Republic in Yoshie's writings.
She repeatedly denies they exist, or minimizes them.
> The reason why Yoshie spends so much of her time trying to argue
> American
> left-wingers out of easy assumptions is that much of what passes for
> commentary on Iran in Western leftist discourse is organised around a
> prurient obsession with the regime's sumptuary laws.
You, like her, assert this without really offering any evidence. I don't see many American left-wingers obsessing over Iranian social policy. Most attention paid to Iran on the American left is about trying to stop the Bush administration from launching an attack on the country. We do have bloggers like Doug Ireland going on about Iranian persecution of same-sexers, but we also have people like my friend Richard Kim of The Nation criticizing Ireland's work. Here's Richard on the gay teens controversy:
<http://www.thenation.com/doc/20050815/kim> "What's worth exploring is how our perception of the case has been refracted through the prism of ideological debates over the nature and danger of radical Islam, and how assumptions about the 'clash of civilizations' that supposedly pits enlightened, secular, humane Western society against backward, theocratic, oppressive Islamic society seem to have impaired our ability to get the facts straight. The story also reveals much about the challenge of pursuing gay and human rights in a political climate infused by the US-led global 'war on terror,' anxiety over the recent election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as president of Iran and growing fears about Islamic fundamentalism, particularly in Europe, in the wake of the London bombings last month."
> I think Chris Harman's pamphlet on Political Islam is far more
> nuanced than
> you may realise, however I don't see how this impacts on the present
> argument, except indirectly.
I read the damn thing, and I'm aware of its "nuance." It offers a very interesting class analysis of the rise of political Islam, which neither you nor YF show much interest in.
Doug