Joseph Catron wrote: Perhaps we should focus our attention on the crimes of our own government. Those are, after all, our concern, in a way the internal affairs of the Iranian state are not. Crazy talk, I know ...
This is heading in the right direction, but "crimes" tebds ti reaffirm the implicit premise in the positions you are questioning: The premise is that the goal of leftists is to have correct thoughts and feelings, which are defined as having the right MORAL posture in respect to whatever topic has been raised - in the present instance, the Iranian regime. That is no doubt an entertaining activity, and I approve of leftists having fun. [1] But it is literally inconsequential - that is, no consequence flows from it. And neither do any consequences necessarily flow from focusing on the _crimes_ of the u.s. regime. Not that those 'crimes' do not dwarf, in comparison, the worst offenses of Iran or Libya or North Korea, but that simply attending to them is as much an exercise in mere moralism as have been the posts attacking the Iranian regime.
If anyone, avoiding kneejerk response, has followed Yoshie's course from the beginning of her attention to Iran,you will find that her point of departure was an empirical judggment of the U.s. anti-war effort, which she then raised to a level of theory in respect to the global struggle against imperialism. The theory (never expressed by her in these words), and the theory in which Nestor Gorojovsky tends to support also, is that only resistance on the "periphery" could defeat u.s. imperailism. (Angelus Novusdescribed this perspective as revolutionary defeatism.) Moreover, Yoshie had come to feel from her experience in the anti-war movement, this external attack on the empire (whether or not anti-capitalist) can expect no or little aid from a left movement within the core capitalist cpre. They are on their own. Hence, for example, her bracketing Chavez and Ahmadinejad. It follows that the most we can do in the U.S. is give what individual support (ideologically) that we can to those regimes. (Referencews to her as a mullah, etc. are merely clumsy slanders.)
Now I have come to disagree with this theory, and have no particular opinions on the regime in Iran (or Venezuela for that matter) for essentially the same reason I reject the maunderings about "the developmental state" by the Pollyanna of the LBO list. I don't believe that capitalism _or_ capitalist aggression around the world _can_ be defeated by external opposition. That is why, for example, I insist that Capitalism is Capitalism is a sensible taugology. (The proposition "feudalism is feudalism" would be nonsense.) It can only be defeated by movements within the capitalist core: The U.S. and the European Union (along with their junior partners, England and Japan, and the camp-followers Australia and Canada). It is similarly fruitless to hope for signifcant opposition to imperailism from peripheral capitalist powers, China, Russia, Brazil, or India. It's up to us, and our priority is to build a movement at home, not hope for salvation from the resistance at the periphery.
The anti-war movement was, is and will be as weak as Yoshie concluded it to be. That was not her error. Her error (and mine at the time) was to think it could be otherwise, to expect of it what no anti-war movement in isolation can achieve. Moreover, in what might be called "normal" periods" [2] leftists must accept the fact that they cannot directly, in the present, affects u.s. policy, at home or abroad, for the reason I have been hammering on for ten years: there is no left (in any coherent sense) in the U.S., and it is silly to make demands on or tp criticise that which does not exist. But there do exist, I believe, thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of radical leftists, and millions of potential leftists[3]. Now, one one cannot will such a coherent left into existence - that is the trap of volunteerism. Nor can one create it in small incremental steps, moving from the present in a "progressive" manner. Actions _and thought_ dominated by present empirical actuality is wasted action, wasted thoughrt.
Mass movements, from which a left can emerge, occur under conditions which cannot be known in advanced, which in fact are contingent upon events and actions which do not, in the present, point clearly to any such future. (This is simple summary of _all_ capitalist history. No one ahs, ever, predicted in advance the coming of mass movements. No one predicted the CIO; no one predicted that a bus boycott and the feeble invisible anti-wqr movement of the ealry '50s would prove to be the seedbeds of one of the greatest explosions in u.s. history. So all of this is leading to what will seem like a rather anti-climactic conclusion.
Someone wrote a poem which goes something like, "They cannot see out far, they cannot see in deep / But when was that ever a bar to any wathc they keep." That sort of, in an analogjous way, points towards where I want to go with this argument.
We keep trying to jumpsart mass movements. MASS MOVEMENTS, not elecotroal movements. Just as the CP & its followers kept trying to build an anti-war movement in the early '50s; just as various radicals, some associated with the CP, some with the SWP, some pacifists, some civil-rights workers, some just individual radicals, et etc etc keept sponsoring political training schools, kept talking to anyone they could buttonhole, kept trying to jumpstart this or that movement of reistance (to the Korean War, to nuclear testing, to the blockade of Cuba), drove from Stanford to San Francisco to attend little groups made up of the equivalent of today's greay-haired hippies (complaining all the time but not letting that keep them back), kept working rather pointlessly to keep this or that local NAACP chapter alive, went to demos of six lonely people against an execution.
None of that had the least effect on current policy in the u.s. It never got anywhee - except for the fact that wityhhout it there would have been no Montgomery bus boycott, no March on Washington, no sprouting of local groups all over the u.s. demanding local open-housing ordinances, not Panthers, no Mobe, to Moratorums like that in Novemb er 1969 which stopped the nuking of North Vietnam.
Don't' focus attention on _anyone's_ crimes; focus attention on how to build resistance to the continued crimes, at home and abroad, of the U.S. state. We won't succeed, but in that way, and only in that way, will we contribute to some future (and now not visible) mass struggle(s) which will make a difference.
Incidentally, Rosa Luxemburg's "socialism or barbarianism" was not an empty slogan She saw that barbarianism was a very reall outcome of capitalism, perhaps even the most likely outcome. It's up to leftists in the u.s. and Euope to battle to prevent that likely outcome. There is energizing as well as debilitating despair. We need more of the energizing kind.
Carrol
[1] One qualification, for there is always the potential for unintended consquences. Criticism of the current Iran regime by Americans may, as argued above, be fluff, mere entertainment, OR, regardless of the critic's own intentions, a contribution to preparing the way for a future attempt by the u..s. to overthrow that regime. No matter how often the critics _say_ that they are against such intervention, no matter how deeply they would oppose it, the material effect remains the same: support for u.s. subversion or military overthrow of 'hostile' governments. And probably overthrow of the regime from within, by Iranian patriots, can occur only when Iran in material fact AND in the consciousness of its populace is truly independent, that is secure from any threat from outside. The goal at present has to be independence, not liberty. I'm trying to work out a post differentiating & relating these concepts of independence, liberty, freedom, and equality. I don't know if I can get it written or not.
[2] Periods of relative inaction, of poor to worse turnout at left demonstrations or forums, are precisely _normal_, and failure to realize this, to realize how infrequent & dependent upon unpredictable contingency, "active" periods are is the source of much of the mindless criticism of the left, such as the posts early in the history of this list wwhich would contain the phrase, "No wonder the leftis so weak ." For much of the last 200 years, in all nations and localities, _nothing_ leftists might have done would have transfromed the normal into a period of high activity and growing strength.
[3] By "passive leftists" I refer to those whose attitudes and much of their thinking are already left but who have not realized (a) the anti-capitalist nature of those attitudes and (b) that such purposes can be realized only in extra-legal activity. (Demonstrations are extra-legal but not illegal. Sometimes the line is a fine one.) Such movements grow by existinng rather than by persuading people with arguments: that is, their visible existence and dynamic of the movement makes its goals visible in action, thereby providing a focus for otherwise scattered responses. Only after joining the movement in action will many begin to seek more abstract and precise formulation of the informing ideas ("values") of the movement.