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Agreed.
I've been following the events in Iran and tried to keep from coming to any advanced conclusions. This includes the complexly argued point that I may be a dupe for supporting the people in the street--that the US right is clammoring for such support--that proper leftists should take a neutral stand, or dubious view of it all, or hold back for the sake of some complicated anti-imperialist reason. I've certainly heard all that before.
So, I watched and read and listened. Then I realized something, before I watched Saturday's killing of Neda Soltan. There were many women buzzing around in the background of a lot of the fighting I watched. Men were in the street, but the women were on the sidewalk. The scene had changed from voter outrage at a stolen election, into a much broader front of a confrontation against the total power elite, across the board. Just the way the fights were going, reminded me, of the old riot days in the Peoples Republic of Berkeley. Over a few seasons of battle, there were no issues anymore, or rather any issue would do as a pretext to fight against the powers that be everywhere from the university, to the county, state, and federal government, and on to the military. That's the sort of sentiment I was looking at in the city streets of Iran. Even the weirdness of cops and street fighters standing around causally waiting for one side or the other to make a move, was a welcome old familiar scene. Everybody is asking themselves, how far are we going to take the next round.
Just the fact that so many women were involved was enough to show what was going on. When I saw the video of Neda Soltan, I watched her laid down by men in a panic surrounding her, she seemed to gaze up, when suddenly vsst amounts of blood ran out of her nose and mouth. Someone had tried to do chest compressions but blood came out, instead of air. They started screaming in horror. It was an icon of everything going on. Iran's ayatollahs can not undo it. They crossed a line and they can not get back.
The ruling elite actions are in even worse conflict in the moral sphere. Whether fundamentalists or even traditionalists approve or disapprove, shooting women is universally despised and condemned. The ayatollahs have a young woman's blood on their hands, and they can't wash it off.
What I hope and actually believe is this was a death knoll on the Iranian revolution to turn a modern state and society into a new form of theocracy.
If you consider the position of women in relation to a consumer based economic system (socialist or not), and an Islamic doctrine of state that depends on repression of women as public figures, you arrive at a car crash. It is impossible to resolve these conflicting goals. They seem to me to be completely incompatible. They pit the social sphere against the economic sphere. How can a political economy run under such an arrangement?
So, I see an abstract sort of parallel. Organizing a union around a leader and clique, and the fact that unions need to be as democratically run as possible so that the will of workers is turned into policy and action, is in conflict. You can't have both a union and a strong arm leader. It is hypocritical to claim such an arrangement is a necessary expedient to gain power to fight the bosses. What's the point of such a union, if you just reproduce the same power relation between workers and bosses?
CG