[lbo-talk] Hamid Dabashi on Iran

Dennis Claxton ddclaxton at earthlink.net
Tue Jun 16 13:11:38 PDT 2009


At 01:02 PM 6/16/2009, ravi wrote:


>Here are the next two sentences:
>
>>It is important to keep in mind that Ahmadinejad's supporters come
>>from the poorest and most disenfranchised segments of ...
>...snip...
>>... charlatanism. The supporters of Mir-Hossein Mousavi and the
>>Reformist movement come from a vast trajectory of Iranian society.
>
>Let us read it as one might a logical inference process. Here is how
>that turns out for me, and you tell me how you might break it down:
>
>1. A's supporters come from poorest and most disenfranchised segments

Let us read the sentence before the ones you quote:


>The following day, on 14 June, the government staged a major
>pro-Ahmadinejad rally in which his supporters were bussed in from
>surrounding villages.

So he's saying A's supporters come from the poorest and most disenfranchised segments that he bussed in.

Maybe this is an instance of Marx without quotation marks.

http://monthlyreview.org/nfte1003.htm

IDIOCY OF RURAL LIFE. This oft-quoted A.ET. [authorized English translation] expression is a mistranslation. The German word Idiotismus did not, and does not, mean "idiocy" (Idiotie); it usually means idiom, like its French cognate idiotisme. But here [in paragraph 28 of The Communist Manifesto] it means neither. In the nineteenth century, German still retained the original Greek meaning of forms based on the word idiotes: a private person, withdrawn from public (communal) concerns, apolitical in the original sense of isolation from the larger community. In the Manifesto, it was being used by a scholar who had recently written his doctoral dissertation on Greek philosophy and liked to read Aeschylus in the original. (For a more detailed account of the philological background and evidence, see [Hal Draper], KMTR [Karl Marxs Theory of Revolution, New York, Monthly Review Press, 1978] 2:344f.) What the rural population had to be saved from, then, was the privatized apartness of a life-style isolated from the larger society: the classic stasis of peasant life. To inject the English idiocy into this thought is to muddle everything. The original Greek meaning (which in the 19th century was still alive in German alongside the idiom meaning) had been lost in English centuries ago. Moore [the translator of the authorized English translation] was probably not aware of this problem; Engels had probably known it forty years before. He was certainly familiar with the thought behind it: in his Condition of the Working Class in England (1845), he had written about the rural weavers as a class "which had remained sunk in apathetic indifference to the universal interests of mankind." (MECW [Marx and Engels, Collected Works] 4:309.) In 1873 he made exactly the Manifesto's point without using the word "idiocy": the abolition of the town-country antithesis "will be able to deliver the rural population from the isolation and stupor in which it has vegetated almost unchanged for thousands of years" (Housing Question, Pt. III, Chapter 3).



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