> In his interview with me (which I'll be posting later today), Hamid Dabashi
> said that Mousavi is a "socialist through and through" - not a neoliberal at
> all.
Given that he compared Mousavi to Martin Luther King jr, it is surely obvious that Dabashi is far too excited about this guy. Mousavi's Rafsanjani family backers would surely be extremely displeased to hear of any covert socialist agenda on his part. True, he was in his early years on the left of the Islamic Republican Party, favoured redistribution of wealth and nationalisation of key enterprises, and so on. Even then, however, he was instrumental to the government's purging of the left from all governmental institutions. He went even further than most of his allies in attacking the Tudeh, eg, and finally contributed a great deal to achieving its ban. And he is now a supporter of privatization and of austerity measures to counter inflation. He wants to substantially revise Article 44 of the 1979 constitution to allow further privatization to happen, and has said he thinks the private sector has to play a much greater role in the direction of the economy. The idea that he is a socialist is frankly silly.