"One thing must be clear. By 'Islamic government,' nobody in Iran means a political regime in which the clerics would have a role of supervision or control."
So, obviously he got it very wrong indeed.
One of the reasons for insane-seeming, terrorist-type behavior in the Third World, as I see it, is resistance to the creeping realization that the best opposition they can field to Empire is, factually and inevitably, worse than Empire itself. This tends to produce bombers who actually *prefer* to blow themselves up with their intended targets, rather than just hurl the bomb into the back of the bus and live to blow something else up. They are fighting to defend something futile, so the point is the act, not the result.
But what I think Yoshie's writing points out is that revolution and resistance are always as much or more a society in themselves as a way to change society. Revolutionary or complacent conservative, we are all members of a social species and act that way.
But the point of capitalism is not to impoverish and dominate people, per se. It is to grow the economy in a way which favors those who already have wealth. And it increasingly acts according to those lines. And so Europeans and Chinese in Singapore and even the French grow more agnostic as to culture and learn English and use dollars and euros. They're becoming the language and currency of capitalism, no matter where it is.
And people want to resist that, but is it revoluition? Resistance cannot always be revolution or revolution would be a meaningless tautology. And the Iranian Revolution was a revolution and it had a purpose: To install the "Guardianship of the Islamic Jurists", (Vilayat e-Faqih) and possibly a centralist state underneath that. It succeeded. So what?
We should expect the religious authorities and centralist authorities to do exactly what all other religious authorities and centralist authorities have done: become more reactionary and more violent. Iraq was nominally socialist, Syria, and Empire's biggest trading partner is the centralist, authoritarian regime known as the People's Communist Party of China.
The U.S. should not attack Iran. Obviously. But the Iranian regime is, almost literally, "yesterday's news".
boddi
On 9/13/07, Yoshie Furuhashi <critical.montages at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 9/13/07, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
> >
> > On Sep 13, 2007, at 6:49 PM, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
> >
> > > Modernists, moreover, blame post-modernism for the way Michel Foucault
> > > saw the Iranian Revolution
> >
> > Hamid Dabashi blames his guides.
>
> Have you actually read what Foucault wrote about Iran, aside from
> "What Are the Iranians Dreaming About?" which is available online at
> <http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/007863.html> and
> quotations included in Janet Afary and Kevin B. Anderson's New
> Politics essay (at
> <http://www.wpunj.edu/newpol/issue37/Afary37.htm>)?
>
> > > To conclude, post-modernism, especially of the Foucauldian sort, given
> > > its criticism of the ideology of Progress, is indeed likely to be a
> > > better philosophy than modernism for intellectual reconciliation of
> > > Islam and democracy.
> >
> > Yes, that's the first thing I look for when I'm out shopping for
> > philosophies - what will best reconcile Islam and democracy?
>
> What you are not interested in may be an important subject for many,
> due to many reasons (US foreign policy's increasing focus on the
> Middle East, emerging social forces in the Middle East, ideology of
> many immigrants in Europe, and so on), and as a matter of fact, there
> is a lot of intellectual production about it.
>
> > You'll like how Ervand Abrahamian says that Ahmadinejad has a lot in
> > common with Cheney. What we call neocons in the U.S. are "principled
> > conservatives" or "principalists" in Iran, says he.
>
> If there is one thing that Cheney and Ahmadinejad have in common, it's
> that they both know what they want, which we can't say about leftists.
> Other than that, their social bases are not the same, and neither are
> their goals. If they were, there would be no conflict.
> --
> Yoshie
> ___________________________________
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>