Is it now? No - or at least not in the right direction.
On 9/14/07, boddi satva <lbo.boddi at gmail.com> wrote:
> Michel Foucault wrote this:
>
> "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
> >
>