Our tasks – let's call them responsibilities – are not all that complicated.
We have to keep informed. This may require a bit more work than it has in the past. There has never been a political upsurge of this scope in which the new media has been so central, whether organizing on the ground in Iran or spreading the word in the rest of the world. Newspapers are almost beside the point.
We need to avoid looking at everything through U.S.-based lenses. Some women are protesting in jeans and frosted blonde highlights. More are protesting in hijab. It's not our business to decide that one group or another is a model – or a distraction.
We have to educate our friends, family, coworkers, fellow students who are following this with interest and sympathy. As part of this, there needs to be exposure of the motives and assumptions behind the media coverage and posturing by politicians and elected officials. (Where were these passionate advocates of free and fair elections when the Lavalas party was banned from Haiti's elections mere months ago, in April?)
In particular, pundits' discussion offering insider praise of Obama's caution in making speeches about Iran's internal business provides a great opportunity to explain that there are some very good reasons why the people of Iran hate the U.S. government and distrust its motives. Like the presence of huge occupying U.S. armies on their western border, in Iraq, and their Eastern border, in Afghanistan, to say nothing of aircraft carrier groups just outside of Iranian waters in the Persian Gulf and Arabian Sea.
In practical terms, this means exposing and struggling against U.S. intervention in the internal affairs of Iran, including preventing the use of the current struggles as a pretext for military strikes, covert operations, etc.
Folks with technical skills and web 2.0 chops can help folks in Iran with mirror sites and other workarounds to breach the increasingly tight telecom censorship the regime is engaged in.
We need to find ways to reach out to the people of Iran, and to Iranian progressives here. We have to take part in solidarity demonstrations and to have a revolutionary voice within those protests.
A cautionary word: We also cannot afford to lose interest when the current struggle is past its peak or moves to a new, less videogenic stage. Iranian workers, for instance, have been facing considerable repression when they have unionized for some time, but it has been largely ignored except in the international union movement. We in the U.S. ought to be calling attention to all forms of repression that are taking place in Iran and all the political and social demands the movement is raising.
Finally, with the situation changing with lightning speed we have to use theoretical tools, as this statement has attempted to do, from the Marxist tool caddy, but we must beware of mechanically applying preconceived notions or drawing definitive lessons while history is unfolding. There will be plenty of time to sum up later. We will be looking to the Iranians who took part in this great upsurge for much of that work, but if we take up our responsibilities now, we too will have something to add to the mix. </quote>
I know. I know. The whole thing is so taxing to contemplate!
http://www.socialistproject.ca/bullet/245.php