On 10/24/07, Rakesh Bhandari <bhandari at berkeley.edu> wrote:
> Yes Alex but Iran is a sovereign state while your leftist movement is
> not a territorially bounded political society in which there is a
> central authority. So why does it deserve respect or defense? It is
> nothing, non historical just as Native American political society was
> non historical and nothing for Locke and thereby worthy of
> colonization (see Hegel on non historical peoples). An Iran defender
> does not play (or even dream)--as a realist the person defends one
> or another state in the system of inter-state competition, not any
> political movement or society. If I am understanding the politics of
> Iran defense correctly, there is no other politics. Just as for many
> French workers the Soviet Union was their homeland, their locus of
> loyalty, so Iran and Venezuela are the homeland for some Americans
> today. So they--though perhaps not their states--are
> internationalists. There are no other politics. Politics centers of
> defense of nation-states or it is nothing, marginal, howling in the
> wind, weak, pathetic, worse than pitiable. It's time to come out of
> the cold for them and bask in the warmth of an actual nation-state.
> So get real, get a state.
On 10/24/07, Angelus Novus <fuerdenkommunismus at yahoo.com> wrote:
> The issue here isn't Islam, or Ahmadinejad, or Iran.
> It is about the necessity of communists to recognize
> the truth spoken by Karl Liebknecht that the main
> enemy is at home. That should not proclude analysis
> of the Iranian state and Iranian capital, but such
> analysis should be conducted from the perspective of
> the critique of political economy and the state, and
> not from a perspective of moralist hand-wringing.
There exists an image of ideal-typical class struggle in the imagination of many a leftist: the working class, united across borders, fight against the capital-states. That has never happened, and that never will.
Jay Gould, who reportedly said, "I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half," understood class struggle much better than any Marxist.
Class struggle in the real world is a cross-class political faction fight. When class struggle becomes revolutionary, it tends to polarize, pitting one faction consisting of peasants, workers, the petit-bourgeoisie from whom revolutionary leaders usually arise, and even a section of the bourgeoisie, against the other faction made up of peasants, workers, the petit-bourgeoisie, and the bulk of the bourgeoisie.
Why is it that revolutionary leaders tend to come from the middling sort? Because they are better educated and more ambitious than those below them and yet those above them block their advancement in the existing order. Only by destroying the existing order and establishing a new one can they make full use of their education and fulfill their ambition.
Their objective circumstances are not unlike those of Julian Sorel and Jude Fawley, but they are temperamentally Anti-Julians and Anti-Judes: unlike Julian, they are not individualists; and unlike Jude, they are not defeated.
Intellectuals cannot become revolutionary leaders, however, unless the masses endow them with charisma. It is not intellectuals who choose the masses but the other way around. How the masses do so has been little studied by Marxists. For that, we must turn to Weber and Weberians, especially Pierre Bourdieu. -- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/>