Critical Montages

MRZine at Twitter

2011-09-17T12:50:00.000-04:00

Follow MRZine at twitter.com/#!/mrzine_notes.

An Untold Marxist Story of Financial Crises: Japan, the United States, and the European Union

2011-07-30T10:48:00.002-04:00

This is the story that Marxists haven't told yet. In my view, though, this story is perfectly consistent with not only most Marxists' theories of capitalism but also their traditional (usually implicit) policy preferences.

Let's evaluate policy responses in the wake of the most recent financial crises of Japan, the United States, and Europe, beginning not in 2008 but in 1991, with the ranking based on policy impacts on the overall economy and more importantly on the working class.

Central Banks

1. The Fed: Could have been better, but it's clear Bernanke knew what he needed to do and was determined to do it
2. BOJ: Confused and feckless
3. ECB: OMG, WTF

Stimulus and Output

1. Japan: The sum total of public spending for this purpose is respectable, and so is per capita GDP (as opposed to total GDP) growth
2. US: Way too small, ending too soon, leaving the US infrastructural deficit intact, though it's not as if it did nothing to sustain GDP and consumption as the Right claims
3. EU: Terrible squeeze of the periphery from Day 1, disaster capitalism par excellence

Composition of Fiscal Policy + Labor Market Policy + Budget Financing Method

Here there is no ranking. It's a story of "every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." This is basically where the Japanese working class were done in: even as the government spent a great deal on contingent public works, structurally it made (by the standard of rich nations already small) social benefits smaller, especially for old people, while facilitating the rise of contingent labor without establishing a new social safety net for the precariat; and moreover taxes on corporations were cut while those on workers were raised. The same is now being done to American and European workers, though exactly how it's done politically varies.

Conclusion

Don't make it sound like a Great Depression is what the working class should fear facing a financial crisis; if you do, you are only defending a Maginot Line and motivating workers to turn to bastard Keynesians rather than Marxists. A modern state knows how to avoid a Great Depression, by breaking up a panicked financial crowd by a big monetary water cannon, except in cases where it wants to deliberately inflict a depression on workers for the purpose of effecting structural change, as the ECB is doing to the euro periphery.

Make sure the working class bark, and bark up the right tree. The right tree in the case where the state has its own money and controls its own monetary policy, with little to no pressure from foreign creditors, (as in the cases of Japan and the United States), is people determining the composition of fiscal policy, the labor market policy, and the budget financing method. To get the working class to bark up the right tree, Marxists must fight against right-wing populist mystification about "always uniformly bad and morally hazardous bailouts," (bailouts are not at all alike in their impacts on workers -- it all depends on how they are done and how they are financed; and, if workers are well organized, politically conscious, and militant, they can turn them into opportunities to assert social control over the bailed-out enterprises and/or sectors), without leaving that battle to Keynesians.

No Green Goddesses

2011-07-04T11:13:00.003-04:00

Here is an important intervention by Janet Biehl, published in the latest issue of Le Monde diplomatique: "No Green Goddesses: Ecofeminism Isn't Feminist or Eco Either." Unfortunately, the English version is for subscribers only, and the French version won't be available till next month. But the Portugese and Italian versions are already online. A funny thing is that people who wouldn't put up with the god of the Abrahamic religions often love Pachamama. One reason is that Pachamama is cast as female while the God of Jews, Christians, and Muslims is commonly cast as male. Goddesses can be useful for reactionary, patriarchal thought, though. Amaterasu is female and kind of cool in the original tellings of the myth about her, but Japan's ruling class at one time successfully built patriarchal capitalism and imperialism in part using an ideology based on the claimed kinship with her. Another reason is that there are two kinds of "otherness": one (e.g., Muslims, hijab) is cast as frightening; the other (e.g., indigenous peoples of the Americas, Indian saris) is cast as cute. A deeper reason, though, lies in what Janet Biehl touches on in her article: the Left's neglect of the questions of the gendered division of labor and social reproduction. Given that most struggles on the Left today are defensive rather than offensive, there is a tendency to employ the rhetoric of uncommodified = good versus commodified =bad and adopt the posture of defending the remaining space of the former against the encroachment of the latter. But a lot of oppression of women takes place in the sphere of uncommodified relations, which gets scant attention in the aforementioned rhetoric.

Kucinich to the Left of All Too Many Socialists

2011-06-04T00:31:00.003-04:00

Dennis Kucinich isn't a socialist and doesn't claim to be one, but his position on Libya is more sensible and also more in keeping with socialist activism than the kind of argument we have heard, and are still hearing sometimes, from all too many US and other socialists about the Libyan debacle ("revolution" in their lingo). The way the US government went to war against Libya was undemocratic and is now illegal too, and that's the point that Kucinich is focusing on, unlike those socialists who think that democracy begins with uncritical support for other people's rebellions far from home, regardless of the political character of their leadership.

Kucinich's resolution got voted down 148-265. It's noteworthy, though, that more Republicans (87) than Democrats (61) voted for his resolution, too, not just John Boehner's counter-resolution (presented to weaken support for Kucinich's) which only criticized the POTUS without committing the USG to withdrawing troops from the Libya war.

It all says a lot about the state of the left-of-center side of US politics, from Trotskyists to Democrats.

Embedding Environmentalism in Marxist Theory of Development

2011-05-27T12:14:00.002-04:00

Environmentalism should be embedded in a Marxist theory of socioeconomic development like Kalecki's, revisited by Jayati Ghosh in "Michal Kalecki and the Economics of Development." The main question underlying Kalecki's theory, as Ghosh sums up, was this: "which groups in society (or outside) would bear the burden of increasing capital formation through reductions in consumption"? This question can and should be supplemented by anthropocentric environmental concerns, i.e. quality of life questions: Which groups in society (or outside) would bear the burden of increasing capital formation through reductions in the environmental quality of life? Which groups in society (or outside) would bear the burden of increasing the environmental quality of life through reductions in consumption? Explicitly asked thus, the fact that it's all a matter of politically determined trade-offs becomes clear. Such an approach would be more useful to leftists actively involved in governments, political parties, and social movements than an approach that seeks to develop an enviro-Marxist crisis theory.

Not an Arab 1848

2011-05-13T16:41:00.003-04:00

The 2010-2011 Arab revolts have been compared to many historical events. One of the analogies brought up by pundits is the 1848 wave of revolutions in Europe. But it doesn't look like an Arab 1848 in one crucial respect. Not a single monarchy has been toppled, and, with the exception of Bahrain, monarchies have so far faced far less challenges than republics, allowing the former to regroup and work with the empire for counter-revolution.

What Youth Revolt?

2011-05-06T19:48:00.003-04:00

The 2010-2011 Arab revolts were billed as youth revolts, a kind of belated sixties for the Arab world so to speak, but the new leaders that they are likely to bring into power -- including in Tunisia and Egypt, the most successful cases -- will be all older than Bashar al-Assad. Very ironic.

How Secular Is Post-revolutionary Tunisia?

2011-05-01T03:18:00.003-04:00

Not very, according to Graham Usher's dispatch: "The Reawakening of Nahda in Tunisia" (MERIP, 30 April 2011). A few days before the publication of this article, moreover, the Financial Times reported: "Politicians . . . agree that the Islamist party [Nahda] could well emerge as the single largest in the assembly. Secular parties, both liberal and leftist, are fragmented while traditional parties are just learning how to run for genuine elections." Tunisia is said to be among the most secular countries in North Africa and West Asia. But even here the balance of ideological and organizational forces does not appear to favor secular leftists after the revolution.

"Overpaying the Poor"

2011-04-28T22:08:00.003-04:00

I submit what the empire likes the least about the Islamic Republic of Iran is not its nuclear program but its being prone to "overpaying [sic] . . . the poorer members of Iranian society." Cf. Najmeh Bozorgmehr, "Iran's Handouts Prove Costly" (Financial Times, 28 April 2011):

Iran's populist government is backing away from a plan to phase out subsidies on energy and other basic commodities, analysts say. Instead, it is overpaying cash compensation to the poorer members of Iranian society to maintain political support.

Official estimates admit that for decades Iran spent $100bn a year on subsidising basic commodities -- although the support was widely viewed as unsustainable and distorting supply and demand signals.

In December last year, Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad, the president, embarked on a parliament-approved plan under which subsidies on energy products and foodstuffs were to be phased out gradually over a five-year period.

The plan was backed by all Iranian political groups as well as the International Monetary Fund and was viewed as a much-needed reform to the country's state-dominated economy.

However, economic analysts believe the government's populist approach has ended up inflicting a heavier burden on the economy and say that the government is moving away from the initial goal of making prices more realistic.

Under the plan, half of the government's savings from the cuts in subsidies were to be redistributed to those who registered to receive financial assistance, regardless of means. Now every man, woman and child can receive IR445,000 ($42.30) a month.

The remainder of the savings were to go to the industrial, agricultural and services sectors as well as state-owned organisations to help them cope with higher costs.

But analysts say the only section of the scheme which has been implemented is the cash payment to people.

Now, about 70m out of Iran's 75m-strong population is in receipt, which is generally considered to cost more than the old subsidies.

"People now receive cash two times more than their consumption which means our goal of managing consumption of energy products is not being achieved," Jamshid Ansari, a reform-minded parliamentarian, tells the Financial Times.

The cash payments have so far been benefiting up to 30m mainly rural poor.

They and their counterparts in the cities are even net winners because the per capita consumption of their populous families is low.

"The government is buying political support through an uneconomic and illogical way of extra subsidies payments despite the budget deficit this policy has been creating," says an analyst, who asked not to be named.

Akbar, a janitor in an affluent neighbourhood in northern Tehran, says he has not yet spent his family's payments which are almost equal to half of his monthly salary. "We have saved it so far," he says.

However, the middle class who are estimated to be also about 30m in number usually live in apartments equipped with gas and electricity for heating and cooling systems. They may own at least one car and do not have many children.

Officially, the price of gas has risen fivefold, electricity and water by three times, flour by 40 times and petrol between four and seven times.

Deterrence

2011-04-27T09:25:00.003-04:00

Many critics of the Libya war, as was the case in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, are seeking to explain the empire's motive by looking at what the target country has (especially natural resources), which the empire might want to have, and what the target country does, which the empire might want to stop.

In my view, rather than trying to explain each case of the empire's military invasions with ad-hoc explanations, it's better to emphasize as a given the fact that within the power elites of the Western powers, especially the United States, there is an influential bloc that is constantly advocating military "solutions" to states that those power elites regard as "problems." Let's call them "militarists."

The rest of the power elites, sometimes called "realists," also generally share the same goal -- regime change -- as militarists but they prefer "soft power" (support for in-country and in-exile "civil society" opposition + propaganda), economic sanctions, covert actions, military coups, proxy wars, etc. to the direct use of their own armed forces (mainly due to concerns about political and financial costs).

Sometimes the militarists get their way as in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya; other times they don't, as in Cuba, Iran, Syria, North Korea, etc. so far in recent decades. The difference is that the latter are tougher nuts to crack, for various reasons (such as the strength of the spirit of independences, the extent of political cohesion and the depth of ideological commitment, the number and power of international allies and supporters . . . and the demonstrated possession of nuclear weapons in the case of North Korea in particular). In other words, the question to be asked is which state in the South enjoys the power of deterrence and which doesn't.

Pax Sinica for the Beijing Consensus

2011-04-23T07:06:00.003-04:00

Theoretically, China can pursue global Keynesian policy in addition to domestic Keynesian policy, which would go some way toward countering austerity in the US and Europe and be good for China as well as the rest of the world. China says that "By the end of 2009, China had provided a total of 256.29 billion yuan in aid to foreign countries, including 106.2 billion yuan in grants, 76.54 billion yuan in interest-free loans and 73.55 billion yuan in concessional loans" (the figures are cumulative -- unfortunately no annual figure is given). For such a global Keynesian purpose, China should give away 5% of its GDP in grants.

Then, China would also have to learn to veto all Western wars, so that what it helps build won't get bombed. Pax Sinica based on the Beijing Consensus would be welcomed by the axis of resistance in the Middle East, North Africa, and Latin America; the rest of BRIC, Turkey, and South Africa; and anyone else who prefers peace for profit to war for power.

Intelligence Failure Due to Wishful Thinking

2011-04-19T15:33:00.003-04:00

In an article posted on 19 April 2011, Simon Assaf of the SWP (UK) says that "accepting the deployment of Western ground forces remains a line that no [Libyan] rebels are yet prepared to cross." On Libya, this organization has so far distinguished itself among left-wing voices by being consistently at odds with the real world, due to a combination of intelligence failure and wishful thinking (the latter, imho, is the cause of the former). On the same day as Assaf's statement above, the Wall Street Journal reports: "Rebels in Misrata Call for Foreign Troops."

Leftists for Chaos?

2011-04-10T10:56:00.004-04:00

There is an opinion like this on the left side of the blogosphere:

Arab regimes (and Iran) often warn against change and revolutions: they try to scare us by warning of the potential for chaos. I say: we should work for the overthrow of all those regimes (Arab regimes and Iran) because chaos is far superior to those regime. At least, under chaos there is a stronger chance for change and sabotage (sabotage of oppression and injustice and occupation and conspiracies).

But I doubt that most leftists in the oppositions in Iran and the Arab world are looking for "chaos." In any case, they are too few in number and too unorganized to take advantage of it if that's the idea. Instead, such leftists as exist there are looking to establish better governments than they have and wish to lead organized mass action for that purpose, though in most cases they end up following rather than leading rebellious largely-non-left-wing crowds when such arise.

If you want chaos, you can find it in Somalia, for instance, and increasingly in Libya as well, but Libya and Somalia (unlike Egypt and Tunisia), if anything, are in all likelihood disincentives, not incentives, for would-be left-wing revolutionaries elsewhere.

Are the Libyan Rebels for Us or against Us?

2011-03-25T20:24:00.006-04:00

Here's a comic footnote to the Libya war: Neither side of the Libyan conflict was actually looking for any real solidarity with leftists (least of all Marxists), but somehow one side (the regime) got a lot of gratuitous, undeserved Latin American leftist support and the other side (the rebels) got a lot of gratuitous, undeserved Western leftist as well as (both secular and religious) Arab and Iranian support.

As a matter of fact, both the regime and the rebels were looking for Western imperialist support, and they didn't hide it either. The Western imperialists -- unlike the world Left, the Arabs, and the Iranians, who all jumped into the Libyan fray without examining what they were jumping into -- first took a good, hard look at both sides and then decided to back the rebels.

The rebels got what they wanted, and that's that.

In recent days, though, I have noticed that the propaganda machine of the Islamic Republic of Iran began to change tack. Maybe the IRI establishment finally realized that the Libyan rebels aren't pro-Iranian -- in fact, the rebels are as likely to be against Shia Muslims as against Africans, Marxists, and so on. Hezbollah and Trotskyists, perhaps more selflessly idealistic than IRI officials, apparently have yet to ask a crucial question of international solidarity, which unlike charity is a two-way street: Are the rebels for us or against us?

Japan

2011-03-15T00:58:00.005-04:00

I did what I could for my family and other people in Japan.

I managed to contact my brother on the 11th and persuaded my sister-in-law and nephew to leave for Kyushu (my brother, a Japanese Red Cross worker, refused to leave because he got "work to do"). I got through to my parents on the 12th and talked them into heading south, either to stay with my favorite aunt (my mother's sister) in Iwakuni, Yamaguchi, or to head further south. Those were the last phone calls, and since then I have not been able to get in touch with them. I hope by now they got where they needed to go, far away from Chiba (where they normally live, only about 150 miles from the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plants).

The clock is ticking, and there is little time left to do more.

Post-Vanguard

2011-02-11T17:05:00.004-05:00

First Ben Ali, and now Mubarak. The empire has failed to stop the momentum of the Arab revolt that started in Sidi Bouzid. It is a time of great transition in West Asia and North Africa. What kind of transition will it be?

Samir Amin fears that, in the case of Egypt and perhaps elsewhere if not in Tunisia, it may result in the ascent of religious obscurantists into power, bringing about a new alliance of religious forces with the military establishment, a kind of Pakistanization so to speak. Aijaz Ahmad, on the other hand, hails the revolutionary wave as an upsurge of "secularity" as well as of democracy. Both appear to miss the most striking feature of what is going on: the absence of any vanguard ideology or vanguard party, religious or secular.

Some have named this absence "post-ideological," but that does not quite capture the fluidity of the moment. Ideologies are at work in the intifadas in the region today -- what is clear is that none is in hegemony. No single ideology is in the vanguard, nor is any political party seeking to be the vanguard party of the kind that led 20th-century revolutions. Competing political currents all appear to sense that people are not looking for a charismatic leader, a new Lenin or a new Khomeini. There is a refreshing absence of the quintessential iconography of past revolutions: larger-than-life images of the leader of the revolution.

The question is if the leaderless revolts, without any vanguard party or ideology, can fully dismantle the ancien regimes, which are decapitated but are otherwise more or less intact, establish new ones, and defend and develop them.

The Tunisian Revolution: Views from Iran

2011-01-17T21:51:00.002-05:00

The biggest front page story of Kayhan on Monday, 17 January 2011 is headlined thus: "80% of People in the Middle East: Repeat of Tunisia Phenomenon in Store for Arab Governments."

By way of not-so-subtle contrast, Kayhan features a story of happy Iranian children right next to the Tunisian story: "Joyful Winter Day across Iran: Yesterday, Kids, Instead of Studying, Played with Snow."

Raja News,¹ for its part, notes five similarities between the deposed Shah of Iran and the deposed Tunisian president: promoting secularism with an iron hand; supporting and being supported by the West; looting national wealth during escape; attempting to impose lifelong rule; and getting driven out from home and getting discarded by the West.

A note of general satisfaction, in short, is unmistakable among the oficialistas in Iran. The revolution in Tunisia, in their eyes, confirms their strategic assessment that "a major shift in the regional balance of power" underway favors the axis of resistance:

In Tehran, there is a strong belief that the region is changing dramatically in favor of Hezbollah, the Palestinians, and the Resistance. The rise of an independent Turkey, whose government has a worldview very different from that of the U.S., German, British, and French governments, along with the relative decline of Saudi and Egyptian regional influence, signals a major shift in the regional balance of power. Saudi military incompetence during the fighting with Yemeni tribes along the border between the two countries, the general decline of the Egyptian regime in all respects, and the almost universal contempt among Arabs as a whole for the leaders of these two countries and other pro-western Arab regimes and their corrupt elites, are seen as signs that the center cannot hold. The fact that the Iranian president and the Turkish prime minister are so popular in Arab countries, while most Arab leaders are deeply unpopular, is a sign that the region is changing.

Meanwhile, the Web site of the embattled Green Path Movement features Nader Marzban's opinion reflecting on "Iran and Tunisia: Superficial Similarities and Substantial Differences between the Two Movements." What is the main difference? Marzban highlights the difference between the Iranian movement's reform strategy and the Tunisian movement's revolutionary strategy. What is more important, however, is that in Tunisia the movement first began with, and has organically grown from, a protest against unemployment,² a class battle, an aspect notable for its absence at the height of the Green Path Movement.³ As the tenth government of the Islamic Republic implements controversial subsidy reform⁴ in Iran, both defenders and opponents of the nezam of Iran today will have opportunities to revisit similarities and differences between Iran and Tunisia.

1 Raja News, by the way, is giving big play to the news of exiled Renaissance Party leader Rashid Ghannoushi's return to Tunisia. Its editor has apparently failed to canvass informed Arab sources such as this: "Aljazeera has [to] stop promoting Rashid Ghannushi and stop announcing his travel to Tunisia as if his impending arrival is analogous to that of Khumayni's return to Iran. No one cares about Ghannushi, from what I have seen, although I won't rule out the likelihood of the emergence of an Islamist current later on."

2 Rising youth unemployment, plus relative deprivation felt by educated youth, resulting from a combination of a youth bulge due to demographic transition, economic liberalization making decent jobs in the public sector scarcer, and slower growth of the world capitalist economy after the end of the post-WW2 boom, is a common story in the Middle East. What is peculiar to the Iranian case is both the rise and the fall of the youth bulge are sharper than in any other country: "As noted above, the current group of Iranian youth is the largest in the country's history. In 2005, the age group 20-24 was 62 percent larger than it was 10 years earlier, 9.1 million compared to 5.6 million, pushing the ratio of youth, which we define as ages 15-29, to total population to 35 percent, the highest recorded ratio in any country. Figure 1 shows that Syria has the second highest youth ratio (32 percent) while Turkey's is considerably lower, about 27 percent, having passed its peak of near 30 percent in the 1990s. By 2020, youth ratio will decline considerably, to less than 25 percent, the level observed in advanced countries. This is because the youth population is predicted to fall in absolute terms; for example, the 20-24 age group is expected to shrink by 75 percent in 2015, to 5.2 million. The reason for Iran's high youth ratio and its fluctuations is a baby boom in the early 1980s, when the revolutionary government was pro-natal, followed by a sharp decline in fertility in the 1990s, when it reversed this policy" (footnotes omitted, Djavad Salehi-Isfahani, "Iranian Youth in Times of Economic Crisis," September 2010).

3 E.g., "Iran has witnessed several spirited labor actions in recent years, well-known examples being the wildcat strikes of Tehran bus drivers and schoolteachers. But these actions have not crystallized into what can be called a coordinated, militant labor movement. Furthermore, militancy has not yet appeared in the most sensitive sectors of the economy, oil and transportation of freight. . . . These trends of diffusion of protest and relatively small-bore economic demands have held during the Ahmadinejad presidency. . . . [T]he core of the Green Movement leadership is devoted to an Iranian version of trickle-down economics, according to which the masses will eventually enjoy the good life but only if the elites prosper first and furiously. The Green Movement has offered little in terms of a redistributive vision that could motivate the working class to flex its muscles" (Mohammad Maljoo, "The Green Movement Awaits an Invisible Hand," Middle East Report, 26 June 2010).

4 Two contrasting views of the subsidy reform: Djavad Salehi-Isfahani, "Iran: Goodbye to Energy Subsidies, Hello to Price Controls?" (Tyranny of Numbers, 19 December 2010); Kevan Harris, "Iran's Subsidy Reductions: Upon Whom Will the Costs Fall?" (MRZine, 27 December 2010). It would be instructive to comparatively study Iran's subsidy reform juxtaposed with the aborted energy price reform in Bolivia and the ongoing economic reform in Cuba.

Dawn of the Dead Again in America

2010-11-03T13:32:00.002-04:00

It's dawn of the dead again in America. It's not, however, because hard-pressed Americans en masse rejected "socialism," voting for austerity, against bread and peace, as the Right would have us believe. As is usually the case with mid-term elections, the turnout was low: just "42 percent of registered voters" voted. Which means this re-run of the dawn of the dead is brought to you by a minority, upper-class America mobilized by corporate America, voting against the working-class American majority, just as capitalist democracy American-style is designed to work.

Which Democrats ended up becoming zombie meals? Not the bread and peace wing of the Democratic Party: progressives in progressive districts by and large survived. Take Dennis Kucinich and Marcy Kaptur of Ohio: they even voted against the 2008 bank bailout and lived to tell about it. Who got eaten up by zombies, then? "23 of the 46 Blue Dogs up for re-election went down." In other words, the very people who fed working-class meat to living dead capitalists to reanimate them in the aftermath of the financial crisis. The lesson is clear: Don't feed the zombies -- they'll come back for more and bite your ass.

This, however, is not a moment for Marxists to indulge in schadenfreude. The rest of America has not even noticed the existence of American socialists, who have been saying: "Obama Ain't No Socialist -- We Are!" Hard as it may be to admit, we have failed to build an organized Left, under Bush or Obama, despite two shooting wars and now a nearly 10% unemployment rate.

And hard luck for the Left in hard times isn't a story of "Only in America." Whether we look at a country whose working class is powerful (France) or a country whose ruling class is weak (Greece), 20th-century socialism (Cuba) or 21st-century socialism (Venezuela), the crisis has made left-wing lives more difficult, not less.

How can American socialists help build an organized Left here, in the decades of slow growth and high unemployment ahead of us? Can we at least help squash the most voracious zombies who would like nothing better than making Americans work till death while killing Iranians to boost the economy?

Monopoly Capital Blocks Rational Policy of Wage-led Growth

2010-07-25T11:19:00.006-04:00

What lesson might the working classes of the global North take from what's happening in China? Canadian journalist Paul Jay spells it out in plain English.

Paul Jay: So we've been talking about macroeconomic policy, the G-20, austerity. And there was one little line in the G-20 document I thought was interesting, and it's sort of buried in amongst everything. It said countries could facilitate wages going up proportional to productivity, which is rather interesting, 'cause it's the only time I've ever heard it even mentioned by these guys. There's quite a big section about how wages need to go up in China. There they understand the need for increasing demand. And we've heard President Obama say, we can't be the consumer engine of the world anymore, you guys have to do it, looking at China. And they talk about increasing the social safety net in China. They even talk about allowing strike struggles in China so wages can go up, but they sure don't talk about it when it comes to their own places. . . . So the problem is -- and this is where it becomes a political problem. I mean, it's not that difficult to sit down and kind of envision a rational solution to all of this -- you just can't pass it anywhere. The way that the politics is controlled and the small gang of people that actually own the commanding heights of the economy, starting with the banks, they don't allow any of this to actually get passed, so you get to an impasse. You can talk rational visions, but you can't execute on it.

The lesson given by Jay is a Kaleckian one, one of the most important lessons, especially today, as we struggle against the drive to austerity in the North. First of all, make clear what obstacle needs to be removed if the rational alternative is to be implemented.

To that Kaleckian lesson, however, we want to add a Gorzian one, especially in the United States: take productivity gains more in the form of gains in disposable time than in the form of more consumption. That's our socialist ticket out of crisis, economic and environmental.

Minimum transitional demands: retirement at 50 with full benefits; free education and social wages for students (all the way up to doctoral degrees for those who want them); paid parental leaves (six years for each new child); two months of paid vacations per year at minimum; indefinite unemployment benefits (to last till the ruling classes come up with worthy jobs at worthy wages for the unemployed).

Separation of Religion and Science: US behind Iran

2010-07-05T12:13:00.005-04:00

"Teach Evolution, Learn Science: We're ahead of Turkey, But behind Iran," according to Gerald Weissmann. Mollas are a dime a dozen in the world today, but Iran's mollas aren't just any mollas -- they are animal-cloning, robot-building, satellite-launching, stem-cell-researching, uranium-enriching mollas.

That is why there is no quick military solution for the empire comparable to Israel's attack on the Osirak reactor in Iraq and Israel's bombing of what is said to be a nuclear facility in Syria. Iran has succeeded in the tasks of both mass education and higher education, building a deeper and broader base of scientific and technological human capital than in any other country in the region except Israel. That means that Iran can rebuild what gets destroyed.

Given its rate of scientific production, as reported in NewScientist, Iran may eventually catch up with Israel, too:

Scientific output has grown 11 times faster in Iran than the world average, faster than any other country. A survey of the number of scientific publications listed in the Web of Science database shows that growth in the Middle East -- mostly in Turkey and Iran -- is nearly four times faster than the world average.

Science-Metrix, a data-analysis company in Montreal, Canada, has published a detailed report (PDF) on "geopolitical shifts in knowledge creation" since 1980.

Is that a "threat" to Israel or the United States? Not if these two countries aren't run by people who are given to seeing the world as if it were the stage for a zero-sum game of power struggle. The question is if they are.

Two, Three, Many 1960s

2010-06-15T13:06:00.003-04:00

Check out this beautiful article by an American woman: Chelsea Szendi Schieder, "Two, Three, Many 1960s" (MRZine, 15 June 2010). This is a very fair assessment, and moving commemoration, of the New Left in Japan and the global Sixties (maybe only a gaizin-san can be this fair to both the J New Left and the JCP -- the only thing missing in the article is a mention of Kanba Michiko's own writings, so I added links to those). This is 200% better than most of the articles about May 68 in France that came out in 2008. Anyhow, as you can see from the article, it's not easy establishing a republican state, is it, even -- or perhaps especially -- in the North? All sides of the Iranian nation and their leadership sometimes sound nutty, but, still and all, they are "people to be reckoned with," so very unlike the people running the show, and people who let them run it, in Japan, who are not even as interesting as the AKP!

Chickengate: The Left and Science and Technology

2010-04-23T13:37:00.005-04:00

By now you've probably heard of the Chickengate in Bolivia.

There is a chance that the president of Bolivia was joking about hormones in chickens causing premature baldness, reproductive developmental disorders, and other disorders due to sex hormone imbalances. ABI reports that the president was speaking "at times in a joking tone" ("a momentos en tono de guasa").

But if it was a joke, it in any case completely overshadowed what little coverage of the Summit on Climate Change in Bolivia there was in the corporate media. Seeking to counter the media coup, a gay indigenous man on the Left bravely put out a video statement: "I am a proud indigenous man, and I am a proud gay man, and I'd like to thank President Evo Morales for his leadership . . . in behalf of all humanity . . . in behalf of protection of our Mother Earth."

Evo can't be a homophobe -- especially given the new Bolivian constitution promulgated by his government specifically prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity for the first time in the history of Bolivia -- and the corporate media are wrong to try to pass him off as one.

However, the Chickengate in Bolivia does remind us that there is a tendency in considerable parts of the Left today to be too alarmist about science and technology, especially when it comes to food and energy. That basically leaves the people hanging in the scientific and political vacuum between the Apocalypticist Left and the Panglossian Right.

Fiscal Crisis of States

2010-04-22T09:32:00.000-04:00

In the wake of the financial crisis of 2008, what next? In the United States,¹ a "fiscal crisis" of states and municipalities, both real (masses of public-sector workers are getting laid off even now²) and imagined (bogus public pension liabilities stats used in right-wing propaganda to attack unions³).

Money is out there, though, if only we had a powerful coalition to tax the rich!

There's a very good pro-labor, anti-racist, Green rationale to prioritize this fight above all, since one of the sectors under attack is urban mass transportation, whose workers are often unionized and, as in many other sectors of civil service, are often non-white. Needless to say, state and municipal public service is the most feminist thing in the United States, in terms of profiles of both workers and beneficiaries.

Leftists can't win everywhere pursuing this battle to tax the rich, but we can win here and there,⁴ which would help build more durable bases for future actions than anything else. There's nothing like victories to build a Left!

Taxing the rich is also better financial reform than any "oversight" of finance that the Democrats come up with at the federal level. The less money the rich have, the less money for their gambles. The financial reform PR message here is to tax the rich and spend their money here, so they won't spend it to bid up, say, real estate prices in China or something like that.

1 In the eurozone, the fiscal crisis expresses itself as the euro core of Germany versus the euro periphery of PIIGS. See Jayati Ghosh, Heiner Flassbeck, Joseph Halevi, Costas Lapavitsas, and Mark Weisbrot.

2 Dean Baker, "State and Local Governments Have Shed 72,000 Jobs since December," MRZine, 2 April 2010).

3 Nathan Newman, "No Crisis in Public Retirement Systems: Debunking the Hype and the Attacks on Employee Benefits" (MRZine, 17 April 2010).

4 Rick Wolff, "Oregon Counters Massachusetts" (MRZine, 27 January 2010).

Taliban and the Rights of Women

2010-04-03T09:00:00.004-04:00

The dispute between Gita Sahgal and the "Human Rights for All" campaign on one hand and Moazzam Begg and Amnesty International on the other hand is a red herring, which is the reason why it has been "taken up with relish by Britain's self-styled 'decent left' of journalists and commentators, whose superior moral compasses led them to support the invasion of Iraq." All parties directly involved in the dispute profess that they are in favor of women's rights, though they may differ here and there on what exactly the said rights consist of.

But the thing is that women's rights, or lack thereof, in Afghanistan cannot decide the most important questions that Westerners have to ask themselves: will the NATO quit Afghanistan, and, if yes, when?

Under NATO, women's rights will be protected only to the extent that they don't conflict with the military logics of the parties in combat. After NATO's withdrawal, women's rights will be protected only to the extent that the parties governing post-NATO Afghan territories respect them. That probably means that Afghan women will enjoy only such rights as granted by allies of Iran-Russia-India in one part of Afghanistan and Taliban-Pakistan in another part of Afghanistan -- for decades to come.

In either case, with or without NATO, it is not possible for Sahgals, Beggs, or human rights organizations of the West to make the level of women's rights higher than it is given the prevailing objective and subjective conditions of Afghan society. It would help speed up the NATO departure once Western activists admit their inability to make a difference for Afghan women for such a realistic admission would help the Western public concentrate on the only questions on which they have at least some say.

Jacobinism with Islamic Characteristics

2010-03-27T10:31:00.004-04:00

The best way to understand the Islamic Republic of Iran is to see it not as "theocracy" but as "Jacobinism with Islamic Characteristics."

The power elite of Iran don't care about Islam as such (Islam, after all, is diverse, and some varieties of it, as conceived by Nader Hashemi, Mohsen Kadivar, Ahmad Sadri, and the like, are perfectly compatible with liberal democracy). What they care about is their revolution and their republic and their ideology (in which Islam does play a part but an increasingly smaller one). As IRGC General Mohammad Ali Jafari reportedly said:

حفظ نظام جمهوری اسلامی ایران از ادای نماز واجب‌تر است

They love their politico-economic order much more than prayers.

Unlike the USSR and the Eastern Bloc, whose legitimating ideology came from outside (Western Europe) and was instilled from above (the Marxist-Leninist Party), though, their ideology is one that has organically grown out of Iranian history, which is what is going for them.

My back-of-the-napkin calculation, however, says that about 20% of the Iranian population, largely of economically upper strata, are liberals who are tired of this politico-economic order and its legitimating ideology. Give Iran a couple of decades in which its social dialectic can unfold without foreign intervention, and liberals are likely to grow more numerous in the country as it undergoes its capitalist development; and liberals inside Iran might eventually transform the country in a way that liberals outside it would like, through passive revolution (much as the AKP has done in Turkey, which too was once ruled by men of the Jacobin mentalité).

Meanwhile, the duty of Iranian patriots, even liberals in exile, is not to let imperialists bomb Iran.

Sex, Drugs, Islam, Communism, and Terrorism

2010-03-24T10:17:00.005-04:00

How does the ruling class destroy liberty, often in the name of liberalism, today? By exploiting fear, especially specters of Sex, Drugs, Islam, Communism, and Terrorism. The ruling class defines each of these categories in such a way that each becomes a mixed bag of defensible and indefensible. To take just one example, in the category of terrorism, class justice and propaganda of the Western powers insidiously merges together national liberation movements such as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (defensible) and Al Qaeda (indefensible).

The Iranian Diaspora after the Green Wave

2010-03-09T13:36:00.003-05:00

So, what is the new preoccupation of the Iranian diaspora after the Green Wave? Having received 170 comments (and counting), this item posted on International Working Women's Day is the most popular thing today at Iranian.com.

IRIB in Japanese

2010-03-04T12:11:00.003-05:00

A funny thing about the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB) is that, of all its numerous foreign-language versions, it provides Iranian food recipes, tourist information, a detailed introduction to master musicians of Iran, elementary Persian-language lessons, etc. only on its Japanese-language site. They know my people, whose main interests generally run toward good food, sightseeing, and cultural sampling (usually in that order)!

Hassan Nasrallah: Israel Is at an Impasse

2010-02-17T21:16:00.002-05:00

Iran: The Islamic Revolution Defeats Western Hopes for Regime Change

2010-02-11T15:13:00.009-05:00

. . . and Hashemi's hopes for a palace coup.

Iran Celebrates the 31st Anniversary of
the Islamic Revolution

Green Wave^* Ebbs

Isfahan	Tehran

Having defeated the Western hopes for regime change and the endogenous upper-class hopes for a palace coup, Salomes of Iran will have a better chance to fight for freedom.

سبز شدیم در این خاک از سالومه

* For the social and political character of the Green Wave, consult Iran's Last Marxist Nasser Zarafshan: Setareh Derakhshesh, "Interview with Dr. Nasser Zarafshan and Farrokh Negahdar" (VOA Persian, 6 January 2010).

Alistair Hulett

2010-01-29T14:13:00.003-05:00

Scottish singer and socialist Alistair Hulett died yesterday. He was only 59 years old.

It's about Time

2009-12-19T10:14:00.003-05:00

Despite all the activism and writing about Copenhagen, few are putting shorter work hours (i.e., consuming productivity gains in the form of more leisure than commodified goods and services) on the environmental agenda. Why?

Peter W. Galbraith vs Hamid Karzai

2009-12-17T16:47:00.003-05:00

Apparently, Karzai didn't promise Galbraith as good a deal as the Iraqi Kurdish leaders: "Mr. Eide, who is set to leave his job as head of the United Nations mission in Afghanistan by early next year, said Mr. Galbraith's departure from Afghanistan in early September came immediately after he rejected what he described as Mr. Galbraith's proposal to replace Mr. Karzai and install a more Western-friendly figure" (James Glanz and Richard A. Oppel, Jr., "U.N. Officials Say American Offered Plan to Replace Karzai," New York Times, 17 December 2009).

A New John Brown?

2009-12-02T10:56:00.002-05:00

"If a new John Brown arose today -- fundamentalist, patriarchal, and yet devoted to the cause of racial equality, or anti-imperialism, environmentalism, or some other good cause -- and moreover employed "direct action" (which would be naturally called "terrorism") to advance the cause, how many leftists would hail him as a hero? Would he not be scorned on account of his less than enlightened views about women, homosexuals, and so on?" -- Suleman Sheikh

Looking for the Boss

2009-12-01T17:34:00.002-05:00

Ever since I began working for Monthly Review, I've had a number of opportunities to see leftists display an attitude that one wouldn't expect from those who profess to stand for freedom, democracy, and the socialist way. The attitude in question basically is one of "I'm gonna complain to the boss if I don't see an employee jump when I tell her to." Today I had it spelled out by one such self-identified leftist, who wrote me: "Please also provide me with the contact details of your supervisor / line manager."

What It Takes to Make Keynes Work

2009-10-28T20:15:00.003-04:00

John Ross wrote in the Guardian ("No Secrets to China's Success," 18 August 2009):

Keynes noted in the final chapter of his General Theory, in a point highly relevant to a situation where mass unemployment is again soaring, that "a somewhat comprehensive socialisation of investment will prove the only means of securing an approximation to full employment".

That "somewhat comprehensive socialisation of investment" is impossible in a private sector-dominated economy. The decisive advantage China has in the present crisis is that it does not have to rely only on indirect means (reduction of interest rates, budget deficits etc) to attempt to reverse the plunging investment that is the driving force of this as with every major recession. China can use its large state-owned company sector to increase investment and instruct its state-owned banks to lend. That is why its economy is growing, while Alistair Darling is still pleading ineffectually for UK banks to increase their lending and while UK investment in housing and transport is plunging by 30% and more.

A good point.

The thing about Keynes is that you can make Keynes work but not under a normal capitalist state in a normal capitalist market economy. It takes something like (1) China's one-party state or (2) war economy (of not capital-intensive wars like today's Afghanistan and Iraq wars but labor-intensive wars of total mobilization subordinating capital and labor alike to the state, like WW2) or (3) the working class so awesomely powerful that it might as well go ahead and do socialism instead of Keynes.

That's what typical Keynesians and typical anti-Keynesians (either of the Marxist or of the capitalist liquidationist kind) don't understand.

OutRage!ous Censorship of "Gay Imperialism"

2009-10-24T09:46:00.007-04:00

The reader of Critical Montages has long been familiar with the problem of Islamophobia in general and its unfortunate manifestations on the (broadly defined) Left in particular in the age of the "war on terror." The reader is also well acquainted with queer variants of it, such as attempts at gay-washing of Israel. Left-wing criticisms of these phenomena, especially by queers of color themselves, are indispensable to our struggle to displace the hegemony of liberal imperialism.

One such queer-of-color criticism of "gay imperialism," a collection of essays titled Out of Place: Interrogating Silences in Queerness/Raciality, however, is being censored in Britain, apparently by Peter Tatchell of OutRage!, who evidently felt his sensationalist brand of activism and rhetoric ought to be above critical scrutiny and got the publisher of the book to take the book out of circulation. For more information about this OutRage!ous censorship, see:

Johanna Rothe, "Out of Place, Out of Print: On the Censorship of the First Queerness/Raciality Collection in Britain" (MRZine, 15 October 2009)

Aren Aizura, "Racism and the Censorship of 'Gay Imperialism'" (MRZine, 23 October 2009).

Umut Erel and Christian Klesse, "Out of Place: Silencing Voices on Queerness/Raciality" (MRZine, 24 October 2009)

How can leftists beat this censorship? In addition to the actions recommended by Aren Aizura, I suggest a couple more, in the short term:

Hold public forums to discuss the censorship of queer-of-color criticism of "gay imperialism."

Open up your journals, classrooms, and so on (if you work in publishing, education, and related industries) to discussion of this problem.

In the long term, though, we need to work on creating a Queer Left, informed of Marxist Feminism, capable of discussing such questions as religion and sexuality in proper historical materialist fashion (i.e., supplying missing materialist foundations to Foucauldian critique of the dominant discourse on sexuality).

Notes on the Japanese Elections of 2009

2009-08-31T09:38:00.011-04:00

Decades of increasing poverty, inequality, and insecurity, which created a powerful backlash against the ruling coalition of the Liberal Democratic Party and Komeito, finally put an end to Japan's de facto one-party state on 30 August 2009. But the backlash only benefited the social liberal Democratic Party of Japan, which increased its seats from 115 to 308 (the DPJ block now enjoys 322 seats, more than a two-thirds majority). The Communist Party and the Social Democratic Party barely hanged onto the same numbers of seats that they had before the elections: 9 for the CP^* and 7 for the SDP. On the face of it, it is not a debacle for the Left like those suffered by Communists in India and Italy in the most recent elections. But, one of the items on the DPJ agenda is a plan to eliminate 80 proportional representation seats, and it just so happens that all the Communist representatives are elected to proportional representation seats.

Why did the Japanese Left fail to advance? Take a look at this video of the 21 August 2009 press conference of JCP Chaiman Shii Kazuo (which comes with English translation), and you'll get a clue.

JCP criticisms of the DPJ agenda are to the point more often than not (which you can see in more detail in 「国民が主人公」の新しい日本を -- 日本共産党の総選挙政策), but those criticisms don't amount to a compelling vision of a new socialist society that the party should be presenting.

The strongest point of the JCP criticisms of the DPJ is that the DPJ will pay for its promise to expand the social safety net, including the formerly excluded, by increasing the taxes on working-class incomes, leveling down the existing structures of entitlements such as pensions toward the new social minimums, decreasing public works and public-sector jobs, and so on, the trade-off that the DPJ will make inevitable given its refusal to tax big businesses and capitalists and to cut military spending.

But, in the process of making this point, the JCP ends up defending the old, such as tax exemptions for dependent spouses (usually housewives), which have discouraged many a woman from seeking full-time jobs since wives earning only part-time incomes (roughly up to 1,300,000 yen) are counted as dependents for the purpose of calculating taxes, insurance and pension contributions and benefits, etc. What's good for working-class families in material terms can be bad for working-class women looking to enhance their gender-bargaining power vis-a-vis men, and the structures of the Japanese welfare state that tacitly assume male family wages, lifetime monogamous marriages, female spousal dependency, etc. are textbook cases of the common class-gender contradiction under capitalism. This contradiction is intensifying as more and more Japanese women are clearly losing interest in marriage and childbearing, powerfully demonstrating their sharp rejection of the old gender settlement and silently erecting a strong demographic obstacle to the old methods of restoring economic growth. The JCP, or any other left-wing current in Japan, needs to offer women -- and young people in general -- a new socialist vision that addresses women as individuals in their own right and creates new networks of social solidarity other than biological families, rather than a maternalist Keynesian vision in which women are tacitly assumed to be, or become, or have been wives and mothers.

The same goes for the JCP's defense of the Peace Constitution. On one hand, any constitutional revision that the DPJ will put on the agenda will likely be one that pushes Japan onto the course that Germany took in the process of the dissolution of Yugoslavia, embarking on humanitarian imperialist adventures of its own, not just as a subordinate member of the US-led coalition of the willing. On the other hand, there is nothing democratic, let alone socialist, about defending the constitution that the occupier wrote for Japan, on which the Japanese people have not been allowed to vote. Socialists must present a new democratic vision for Japan. Why not a constitutional assembly in Japan, to write a new constitution as a step toward 21st century socialism?

* The proportion of the total vote for the Communists, however, registered a slight decline, from 7.25% to 7.03%.

"Saving the World's Women"

2009-08-23T17:56:00.002-04:00

The entire issue of the New York Times Sunday Magazine this weekend is dedicated to the idea of "Saving the World's Women," essentially prompting the reader to blame everything from poverty to terrorism on patriarchal men in the South and to regard aid and philanthropy from the North as the solution. Such an idea is fit only for satire, but the magazine presents it earnestly, as a new idea, as if the world hadn't been through centuries of tandem development of liberal feminism and imperialism.

What little sense of irony in the issue is found in a short piece on the phenomenon of feminist-hawk spam.

The idea of giving aid to "female deliverance" seems to give a lot of liberals of both sexes the same pleasure as the idea of buying aid for "male enhancement" gives to all too many men. The difference is that the former, unlike the latter, is not felt as a guilty pleasure but on the contrary as a righteous one, especially since it's entirely forgotten that, once upon a time, America paid the same type of fundamentalists -- now featured as dark villains in a new literary genre called R2P, which is part Gothic-novel, part captivity-narrative -- to fight a jihad, throwing acid on the faces of women and castrating men who were, or were seen to be, in favor of the Marxist Modern.

The Scandal of Privatization in Iran

2009-08-18T14:41:00.002-04:00

Probably the worst thing that the Islamic Republic of Iran has done for its working people is to educate its young economists at "the most prestigious Western economics departments." The horror, the horror! It's not the Western fashion in clothing but economics that the IRI should have kept out, but, as Sohrab Behdad has argued, the idea of Islamic economics met its demise soon after its rise -- much like the idea of socialist economics, I may add.

Despite the resurgence of gharbzadegi in its economics, though, hardly any privatization worth its name has been going on in Iran: "a main buyer of government assets over the last decade has been the para-governmental sector, which includes state banks, government-linked investment and holding companies, religious foundations, and pension funds" (Mohammad Khiabani, "The Great Tehran Expo Privatization Scandal You've Never Heard Of").

That is largely thanks to the Western sanctions, I suspect. It is probably also thanks to the political culture of Iran. Get ten Iranians to speak up, and you'll probably get twenty contradictory opinions about how thing are and why they are as they are in Iran, at least about fifteen of which are conspiracy theories. Nothing changes very fast in a country like that.

Ahmadinejad to Propose "at Least Three Female Ministers in His New Cabinet"

2009-08-17T23:13:00.002-04:00

Reuters reports: "President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said on Sunday he would propose at least three female ministers in his new cabinet following Iran's disputed election, an unprecedented move in the conservative Islamic state. . . . It would be the first time a woman would hold a ministerial position in Iran since its 1979 Islamic revolution" (Zahra Hosseinian, "Ahmadinejad Plans Female Ministers in Iran Cabinet," 16 August 2009).

Three female cabinet ministers would be more than Iran has ever gotten in its entire modern history, not just in the history of the Islamic Republic. Khatami had only Masoumeh Ebtekar (head of the Environment Protection Organization of Iran) and Zahra Shojaei (head of the Center for Women's Participation) in his cabinet, who were replaced by Fatemeh Javadi and Nasrin Soltankhah respectively in Ahmadinejad's first cabinet. It looks like it's easier to improve Ahmadi's cultural program than reform Khatami-Mousavi-Rafsanjani's economic and foreign policy programs.

Be Fire with Fire

2009-08-15T06:41:00.002-04:00

Imperialists are obviously not up to the task when it comes to fighting al Qaeda and its ilk. Nor are international leftists, no matter how many tracts against imperialism and Islamism they publish. I suggest that, more often than not, it takes a mass Islamist organization to liquidate terrorist Islamist cells and neutralize international Islamist jihads: Avi Issacharoff, "Hamas: We Killed Head of Al-Qaida Affiliate in Gaza" (Haaretz, 15 August 2009). "Be stirring as the time; be fire with fire." -- Shakespeare, The Life and Death of King John, Act 5, Scene 1

Mahmoud & Esfandiar's Excellent Adventure

2009-08-14T13:30:00.002-04:00

Khanome Yoshie finds Mahmoud & Esfandiar very trippy.

Mahmoud & Esfandiar's Excellent Adventure
MRZine Editor

Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei, whose daughter is married to a son of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is the President's Chief of Staff. Mr. Mashaei is known for actions that have appalled certain conservative quarters of the Iranian political establishment, such as attending a ceremony in Turkey where women danced and hosting a ceremony in Tehran where women drumming dafs brought out the Qur'an (don't ask me why this is controversial). He is also known for making such fascinating remarks as the following, according to Etemaad:

"The age of Islamism is over. It's not that Islamism doesn't exist or isn't growing. Islam exists but its time is up. The age of horseback riding is over now, though horses exist, and so do riders. . . . Of course, it isn't completely finished, but it's getting there."

"Iran today is a friend of the American and Israeli peoples. No nation in the world is an enemy of Iran, though, of course, we have enemies, in fact, faced with the most dastardly enemies in the world."

After the controversial 2009 presidential election, the first thing the President of Iran did was to appoint Mr. Mashaei as First Vice President, causing uproar in the aforementioned conservative quarters, which the president initially ignored. Ali Khamenei, the Leader of the Revolution, had to write a letter telling the president to cancel the appointment of Mr. Mashaei, characterizing it as "contrary to your interests as well the interests of the government." Eventually, Mr. Mashaei was compelled to resign from the post, after more than a week's resistance on the part of the president, who then defied the disapproval of the conservative establishment to appoint Mr. Mashaei to his present post.

Mr. Mashaei is apparently incorrigible, however. Here's his latest bombshell, according to Etemad-e Melli today: "Of the 24 million Ahmadinejad voters, 20 million are critical of the system. These 20 million people are even more critical of the system than the 13 million Mousavi voters, since those 13 million only question the Ahmadinejad administration, whereas these 20 million are saying No to all the past years before Ahmadinejad."

Whoa!

Iran's reformist media have assiduously followed Mr. Mashaei's excellent adventure, a few episodes of which have also been briefly carried by some of the Western media. Both the Western and Iranian-reformist media fail to ask an obvious question, though: is the man who has stood loyally by Mr. Mashaei throughout his wild ideological trip the kind of guy for whom the guardians of the system, lay and clerical, military and civilian, would work in disciplined cooperation to pull off a massive conspiracy for a massively rigged election?

Egypt!

2009-08-12T12:22:00.004-04:00

Not getting any play in the Western media, but the struggle in Egypt is incomparably more promising for the advancement of the Left than whatever is going on in Iran: Per Bjorklund, "Egypt's State-Controlled Unions Under Pressure" (10 August 2009); and Per Bjorklund, "Tax Collectors Repeat Historical Sit-in" (11 August 2009).

BTW, have I mentioned that Hossam el-Hamalawy, referenced in Bjorklund's notes above, is very hot (and about four decades younger than Mousavi who is even older than Ahmadi) in case any of you is looking for a cute Middle Eastern youth to back, the fashion in this political season? He's a revolutionary Marxist, too (unlike probably 99.99999% of the Green protesters in Iran, no matter how cute they are) if that means anything to you.

Japanese Lesson for the Iranian Left

2009-08-11T19:20:00.002-04:00

The wind of populism blows in Japan, in rhetoric if not in policy, raising the hope of finally putting an end to the world's longest-standing one-party state. Alas, the wind has not filled the sail of the Communist Party, but that of the social liberal party on the center left. Still and all, it ought to be an object lesson to leftists in Iran, the only leftists in the world to line up behind a loser upholding an anti-Keynesian banner in the midst of a global economic crisis.

Banks Make $38bn from Overdraft Fees

2009-08-10T18:50:00.002-04:00

From the middle of September 2008 till about the end of that year, I, as editor of MRZine, received a flood of submissions on the subject of the "Crisis of Capitalism" from assorted leftists. That genre of submissions has virtually disappeared, as it became clear to all, even leftists, that -- given the ruling-class alacrity in solving their collective action problem and the working-class difficulty in solving ours -- this is not a crisis of the capitalist class but a crisis of the working class, which is apparently not as exciting a topic for leftists as the idea of the Crisis of Capitalism.

The biggest international news this year so far has been the Israeli bombing of Gaza and the electoral dispute in Iran, which has even eclipsed the first successful military coup d'etat in South America since the end of the Cold War, let alone a little matter of bailed-out banks' ill-gotten gains: e.g., Saskia Scholtes and Francesco Guerrera, "Banks Make $38bn from Overdraft Fees" (Financial Times, 10 August 2009). I suspect a nefarious Zionist-Islamist conspiracy to try to hoodwink international leftists.

Imagining a New Political Majority in Iran

2009-08-04T09:41:00.005-04:00

The change that has come to Iran since the end of the Iran-Iraq War is more or less in line with the kind of change that has come to much of the rest of the world (though each nation's change is of course inflected with its own peculiar material and cultural conditions before the beginning of the neoliberal regime of accumulation): a package that combines economic liberalization, cultural liberalization, and political liberalization.

That is not a desirable package, from the point of view of historical materialism, though liberals are happy with it and social democrats adjust themselves to it.

In theory, it should not be impossible to construct a new political majority in Iran taking supporters from both the Ahmadinejad/Khamenei camp and the Rafsanjani/Mousavi/Khatami camp, under a program that puts premium on resistance to economic liberalization, creates space for "rooted cosmopolitan" culture, and develops a strategy to deepen democracy, empowering directly elected leaders (the presidency and the parliament) to eclipse indirectly elected leaders (the Leader and the Guardian Council) as well as promoting democratic participation and political education of the popular classes. But I have yet to see any social force in Iran proposing anything like that.

Truth and Reconciliation for Iran

2009-08-01T17:31:00.000-04:00

The following is an extremely good and timely statement, signed by Iranian patriots, some of whom have taken one side or the other regarding the presidential election and post-election conflicts, and others of whom have taken a neutral stand on them. I encourage non-Iranian leftists to support this attempt and others like it.

Truth and Reconciliation for Iran

We are a group of university educators and antiwar activists with diverse political views who are based in Europe and North America. During the past few years we have been active in defending Iran's national rights -- particularly those relating to the peaceful use of nuclear energy -- against the pervasive deception created by western and Israeli-influenced media and official statements. We have consistently taken a stand against the policies of the United States and its allies, including the improper submission of Iran's nuclear file to the United Nations security council, the imposition of sanction resolutions against Iran, covert destabilisation inside the country and repeated threats of military intervention and bombing of nuclear centres on the part of US and Israel.

At the same time, we have advocated the human rights of individuals and democratic rights for various groups and constituencies in Iran. We have emphasised that the guarantee of such rights is necessary not only for Iran's social and political advancement, but also for the vital unity of our people against foreign pressures.

In the current post-election crisis, we see it as our duty to share our views based on years of defending Iran's national rights, and to help develop realistic solutions for the benefit of all our compatriots of whatever political persuasion.

The background to the current situation is the longstanding belligerent policies of the US and its allies, encouraged by the neoconservatives and the Israeli lobby, which peaked during eight years of Republican rule in the White House. Despite President Khatami's conciliatory approach, exemplified by his promotion of "Dialogue Among Civilisations", and despite Iran's co-operation in the overthrow of the Taliban in neighbouring Afghanistan, the administration of George W Bush labelled the Islamic Republic a member of the "axis of evil". Following the illegal invasion of Iraq, Bush pushed for regime change in Iran. These provocative and confrontational policies played a key role in the defeat of Iranian reformists in the parliamentary elections of 2003 and the presidential election of 2005.

During the past four years, a whole series of policies have targeted Iran's right to produce nuclear fuel for peaceful energy, including illegitimate UN/US sanctions, repeated implicit and overt threats of military attack by the United States and Israel, overt and covert well-funded US destabilisation operations, and aid to terrorist forces seeking to overthrow the government of Iran. These policies have created fears of an externally-instigated "velvet revolution" in the leadership ranks of the Islamic Republic. These fears were used to justify restrictions of civil and political freedoms promoted by the reformist administration of Khatami and, as a result, civil society and non-governmental organisations suffered a setback.

According to critics, these social and political pressures, along with government mismanagement caused by the removal of competent technocrats, have negatively impacted the public interest and put enormous pressure on the middle class, the educated class, journalists and artists. These people must be allowed a more open and free environment in order to fulfil their instrumental roles in service of the country.

On the external front, the Obama administration, facing neoconservative pressure and keeping many of his predecessor's policies against Iran, has nevertheless declared its readiness for unconditional negotiations with Iran. He has for the first time referred to Iran as the "Islamic Republic" and indicated that he is not pursuing regime change in Iran. Furthermore, shortly before the Iranian elections, in a first for an American president, Obama admitted the role of his country in the 1953 coup that overthrew the democratically elected prime minister Muhammad Mossadegh. These changes in US politics have created room for active and constructive diplomacy for the purpose of solving conflicts and disagreements between Iran and the United States, and for creating a nuclear-free Middle East.

This year, there was in Iran a record level of participation in the elections, unprecedented television debates and, most important of all, widespread participation in election campaigns. Despite some restrictions, the elections took place in an overall constructive climate, perhaps making Iran a model democracy among Islamic nations of the region. A day before the elections, Senator John Kerry, a key US statesman, was so impressed that he dismissed as "ridiculous" Bush's policy of denying Iran peaceful nuclear energy, which in itself exposes the baseless nuclear accusations levelled against Iran and proves the illegitimacy of security council resolutions against Iran.

However, in the view of a considerable number of Iranians who are discontented and frustrated with the restrictions on civil and political freedoms, there were various irregularities in the elections, including the suspension of reformist newspapers and mobile telephone SMS service on election day. This caused mass public demonstrations in support of nullifying the election. The unrest has created a major rift between the supporters of Ahmadinejad, who deem Iran's national sovereignty to be of the highest priority, and the supporters of the two reform candidates Karroubi and Mousavi, who demand increased civil and political freedoms above all.

Each of these two major wings of the body politic includes millions of people and both play a vital role in Iran's progress. The rift between these two must heal in an environment of calm, without agitation and mudslinging, for the sake of Iran's future. This healing must be pursued through the path of constructive dialogue and reconciliation, so that the unity of our people for safeguarding national rights can be achieved.

Unfortunately, a large number of our protesting fellow countrymen have been attacked and injured and even more regrettably, a significant number of them have been killed. Also, a large group of reformist activists and leaders have been arrested and imprisoned after the elections.

Both Mousavi and Karroubi have stressed that all protests must remain within the law. Following the request of the reformist and Green leaders, almost all protesters rallied completely peacefully, and in the tradition of Mahatma Gandhi, condemned all types of violence, calling the Basijis and Revolutionary Guards their own brothers. Extremist elements who used the opportunity to create chaos and engaged in the destruction of public property were condemned by Mousavi.

The western media, by their one-sided coverage of the post-election developments, portrayed the street demonstrations protesting the election results as the start of a "velvet" revolution against the Islamic Republic. Regime-change advocates also tried to piggy-back on the protests outside Iran for their own purposes. The British government, which claims to follow a policy of non-interference in Iran's internal affairs, did its part by confiscating nearly £1bn of Iranian assets. To make matters worse, the neoconservatives demanded a re-evaluation of the Obama administration's policy of unconditional negotiations with Iran. The US state department also used this crisis to justify its continuation of Bush-era policies of financing anti-Iranian government organisations for the purposes of "spreading democracy, human rights and a government of law and order". For "security reasons" they refused to release the identities of the recipients of the funds. The Iranian government, for their part, deported two British diplomats, accusing them of interference in Iranian affairs and pointing to western governments as the root of the post-election unrest.

Whatever the role of the western media, governments, and regime change forces, it cannot detract from the legitimacy of the massively popular protests. In fact, Mousavi has emphasised his complete loyalty to the Islamic Republic and admonished his supporters abroad to stay away from the anti-Islamic Republic groups. To attribute the roots of the demonstrations by hundreds of thousands of Iranians to external interference or to regime-change groups amounts to questioning the independence of the country which has been gained and consolidated by the sacrifices of hundreds of thousands.

In the opinion of millions of Iranians, the current crisis has been caused by restrictions on political freedoms, particularly freedom of the press, economic discontent, and deficiencies in transparency and accountability on the part of government institutions. Although these issues have been aggravated by the US political, military and economic encirclement and the CIA's destabilisation programmes, in the view of this segment of society the problems are ultimately rooted in the government's own policies. After their unprecedented participation in the elections, millions of Iranians have lost their confidence in the system. Awareness of this reality was expressed by the speaker of the Iranian parliament Ali Larijani, who indicated on live national television that some members of the Guardian Council openly supported a certain candidate, instead of being neutral during the investigation of the election complaints. He also added that the large segments of society who distrust the declared election results should not be regarded in the same manner as the rioters.

On the basis of the above assessment, and in the interest of resolving the present crisis, we direct all officials and fellow countrymen to the following proposals:

1) Arrests and assaults of reformist and Green movement activists and any use of deadly weapons against the protesters are against the national interest and must be stopped and condemned by the authorities. Of the government of the Islamic Republic, we demand, in accordance with the constitution and for the preservation of national unity, that it release the reformist leaders from detention and observe freedom of the press and other civil rights. Iranian state television and radio must provide time to the protesters to express their views. Permits for nonviolent assembly must be given to the protesters. The government must guarantee the safety of the demonstrators against any violence and those responsible for battering and murdering students and demonstrators must be identified and prosecuted.

2) The current division among the people that separates government supporters and dissenters, under conditions of economic, military and political encirclement, must be reconciled with calm and patient negotiations and reasoning, by condemning any kind of violence and by renouncing name-calling and inflammatory rhetoric. We call on the political forces of both sides to move toward building such a constructive climate and toward creation of an economic, political, and cultural agenda that can respond to all social needs.

3) Of the government of the Islamic Republic, we request that in view of the distrust on the part of a great segment of the country's population, it form an independent truth and national reconciliation commission with representation from all candidates, such that it can gain the trust of the people of Iran and find a reasonable solution for the conflict. The votes of a great portion of the Iranian society for both Ahmadinejad and Mousavi show that the best solution is negotiations for reconciliation and creation of a government of national unity from the ranks of Principalists and the Green movement and reformists. With a comprehensive programme based on Iran's national rights and on people's civil rights, such a government of national unity must address the current challenges facing the country and mobilise in an effective way the totality of human resources and expertise for national development.

4) Of western governments, we request that they cease any and all interference in Iranian affairs and end all their illegitimate economic, political and military pressures aimed at the internal destabilisation of Iran. They need to cease any support for the anti-Islamic Republic opposition and lift the economic and scientific sanctions. The Obama administration should emphasise unconditional negotiations and take steps toward creating a nuclear weapons-free Middle East. Only under these conditions, without any foreign threats, can the Iranian people reach their aspirations of freedom and establish their unity in a framework of independence and national sovereignty.

5) To the leaders of the reformists and the Green movement, we suggest that in order to prevent exploitation of the current crisis by western propaganda and opportunist groups, they unambiguously oppose all sanctions and condemn regime change operations and any foreign support for the anti-Islamic Republic opposition.

Signed:

Dr Arshin Adib-Moghaddam, SOAS, University of London
Professor the Baroness Afshar, York University
Mojtaba Aghamohammadi, researcher, University of Arizona
Professor Mohammad Ala, Persian Gulf Task Force
Esfandiar Bakhtiar, Georgia Institute of Technology
Professor Abbas Edalat, Imperial College London
Javad Fakharzadeh, Iran Heritage
Dr Farideh Farhi, University of Hawaii at Manoa
Massy Homayouni, independent antiwar activist
Dr Mehri Honarbin-Holliday, Canterbury Christ Church University
Mojgan Janani, independent antiwar activist
Mohammad Kamaali, Campaign Against Sanctions and Military Intervention in Iran
Fareed Marjaee, writer and democracy activist
Masoud Modarres, independent activist
Professor Pirouz Mojtahedzadeh, Tarbiyat Modarres University
Daniel Pourkesali, Campaign Against Sanctions and Military Intervention in Iran
Rostam Pourzal, Campaign Against Sanctions and Military Intervention in Iran
Dr Mohammad Purqurian, LaaL.org
Manijeh Saba, independent human rights activist
Professor Mehdi Shariati, Kansas College
Professor Nader Sadeghi, George Washington University Hospital
Shirin Saeidi, University of Cambridge
Soraya Sepahpour-Ulrich, independent antiwar activist
Reza Shirazi, Goftogoo TV
Safa Shoaee, Imperial College London
Saeed Soltanpour, Iranian TV Canada
Dr Alireza Rabi, Middle-East Citizens Assembly
Dr Elaheh Rostami, SOAS, University of London
Professor Rahmat Tavakol, Rutgers University
Professor Farzin Vahdat, Harvard University
Leila Zand, Fellowship of Reconciliation

Mark Weisbrot: It's Time for Latin America to Take Charge

2009-08-01T11:04:00.003-04:00

Regrettably, so far there has been no large protest in the US to pressure the USG to reverse the coup in Honduras. Such protests as have happened in the US on this issue appear to have been even smaller than the Iranian Green protests in the US, which have largely consisted of Iranian immigrants of various political persuasions, from leftists to liberals to monarchists and the Iranian Mojahedin (from which most non-Iranian leftists, including vocal Green Movement supporters, have abstained). There is such an immense political vacuum on the US front in the struggle against the Honduran coup that Mark Weisbrot now suggests that the solution has to come from Latin America, without the US: Mark Weisbrot, "U.S.-Brokered Mediation Has Failed -- It's Time for Latin America to Take Charge" (MRZine, 31 July 2009). This shouldn't be impossible, as long as Argentina, Brazil, and Chile, the key powers, act forcefully, 100% united with El Salvador and Nicaragua, as well as Bolivia, Ecuador, and Venezuela.

Human Rights and National Sovereignty

2009-07-31T10:04:00.004-04:00

From the perspective of historical materialism, the end of politics is communist society: "an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all." The ruling ideas today elevate either "national sovereignty" or "human rights" (narrowly defined, devoid of socioeconomic and international dimensions¹) to the end in itself. However, for historical materialists, "national sovereignty" and "human rights" are means to the aforementioned end. This distinguishes historical materialists from simple-minded nationalists and from Amnesty Internationalists.

1 Article 28 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: "Everyone is entitled to a social and international order in which the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration can be fully realized" (emphasis added). Needless to say, there is no worse negation of Article 28 than imperialism, which is antithetical to human rights.

It Could Happen Here

2009-07-29T23:53:00.002-04:00

Normally, the Western mass media love the stories of any old conflicts -- from electoral disputes to ethnic conflicts to even workers' uprisings -- in Southern nations of interest to the West, but they don't appear to find this story so amusing, as is suggested by the terseness of the report.

The riot, at the Tonghua Iron and Steel Works in Jilin Province in northern China, broke out after a visiting steel executive from a related company threatened mass layoffs at the Tonghua steel mills as part of a major restructuring of the state-owned company, China Daily said.

The riot followed a pattern of massive demonstrations that have taken place in various parts of the country over the past few years, many involving citizens outraged over government corruption or threatened with layoffs or orders to relocate.

The China Daily report said Chen Guojun, the steel executive who was beaten to death, had threatened 3,000 Tonghua steelworkers with layoffs, which he had said could take place within three days. He also had signaled that larger jobs cuts were likely at the struggling steel mill.

The report said the rioters blocked the police, ambulances and government officials from reaching Mr. Chen before he died. (David Barboza, "China Steel Executive Killed as Workers and Police Clash," New York Times, 27 July 2009)

That is not surprising. Shortly before this incident in China, "Workers at collapsed French car parts maker New Fabris threatened on Sunday to blow up their factory if they did not receive payouts by July 31 from auto groups Renault and Peugeot to compensate for their lost jobs" ("French Workers Threaten to Blow Up Factory," Reuters, 12 July 2009). It could happen here.

Ahmadinejad to Face a Vote of Confidence?

2009-07-29T13:26:00.002-04:00

Now, finally good news for Greens in Iran ("Ahmadinejad Throws Resignation Out as Majlis Weighs In," Press TV, 27 July 2009):

As pressure piles up on the Iranian president to return to parliament and obtain a vote of confidence for his Cabinet, more than 200 Iranian lawmakers add voice to the matter by questioning his approach toward domestic politics.

The majority of the 290 lawmakers, riled up over what they see as the president having excessively delayed the reversal of his first deputy choice despite the direct intervention of Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei, required on Monday that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad "rectify his conduct".

Just as Mohammad Mossadegh had trouble lining up and maintaining the support of the right (e.g., Kashani) and the left (e.g., Tudeh) of Iranian republicanism, so does Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Some things never change in Iran. By the way, do you know that Parivash Fatemi, the widow of Hossein Fatemi, who served as Mossadegh's Foreign Minister and was the driving force behind his oil nationalization program, says that Hossein Fatemi's aspirations were fulfilled in the ninth government of the Islamic Republic of Iran, characterizing Ahmadinejad as a man of "obvious courage and daring," whose love of his country and people makes him the second coming of Fatemi?

Iran's Ahmadinejad Tells Judges to Free Protesters

2009-07-28T21:59:00.003-04:00

This just in from AFP today: "Iran's Ahmadinejad Tells Judges to Free Protesters." That doesn't mean, however, that the protesters will be actually freed within ten days as the president's letter to Shahroudi said they ought to be. Hossein Derakhsahn, an Iranian-Canadian blogger and supporter of Ahmadinejad, is still in prison, arrested by Rafsanjani's people shortly after his return home last year, even though Ahmadinejad has spoken up for him.

In Iran, the presidential power is very limited, especially in the matter of civil liberties, which has been demonstrated time and again, both during the Khatami and Ahmadinejad eras.

A Secret Conspiracy of International Leftists against Imperialism

2009-07-27T14:25:00.004-04:00

Khanome Yoshie wrote this yesterday for your entertainment:

How Many Leftists Are "United for Iran"?

So, how many leftists are United for Iran? "8,000 people at the event in Paris, 4,000 in Stockholm, 3,000 in Amsterdam, more than 2,500 in Washington DC, 2,500 in New York, 2,000 in London. . . ," says United4Iran.org, the sponsor of the global day of action on 25 July 2009. The low numbers¹ (in marked contrast to the high turnouts of protests against Israel's recent assault on Gaza) suggest that few non-Iranian leftists bothered to show up.

While a number of leftists have made impassioned pleas for solidarity with Iran's Green Movement, (throwing themselves into an obligatory intra-left battle royal that has, alas, eclipsed any battle against the illegitimate authority of unelected clerics in Iran), most leftists still appear to find it -- how shall we put it? -- on balance inadvisable to join such protests against the Iranian government as United4Iran's, devoid as they are of an anti-imperialist point of unity emphasizing "Hands Off Iran" as much as -- nay more than -- criticisms of the Iranian government.

It should be also noted that international leftists were evidently unmoved by an offer of free "Free Iran" t-shirts courtesy of American Apparel. We find that most meritorious. Let it never be said that international leftists fail to valiantly resist hipster capitalism.

By the way, it has also come to our attention that a notorious unrepentant Marxist and self-appointed scourge of "flunkies for Ahmadinejad" apparently refused to attend any of the United for Iran protests, curtly dismissing the whole Dutch-linked² enterprise as "Darfur-like crapola."

Well, that certainly settles it for us: shocking as it may seem to some, there still is a secret conspiracy³ of international leftists against imperialism, whether they are for, against, or just plain indifferent to the President of Iran.⁴ We hope that this little known conspiracy proves a dangerous one that will grow ever larger, someday putting the fear of the Twelfth Imam into the international capitalists.

1 The turnouts were so underwhelming that the Associated Press felt obliged to mention protests of 20 Iranians each in Brazil and Pakistan to make it sound as if it wasn't the Western Thing that the global South just didn't understand: "In the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, some 20 Iranians -- among them refugees and students -- gathered outside the local press club to protest the Iranian crackdown, yelling 'Death to the dictator!' . . . About 20 gathered in a small square in Sao Paulo, Brazil, to take part in a 30-minute rally" (Jill Lawless, "Protesters Call for End to Iranian Rights Abuses," 25 July 2009).

2 The primary sponsor of the United for Iran protests, the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran, is a project of the Dutch Foundation for Human Security in the Middle East. Note that "the Netherlands and the United States are the only countries in the world that openly budget funds to promote political changes" in Iran, e.g., the Hague contributing "630,000 euros" to Freedom House in 2003 for the purpose of establishing Gozaar, "a platform for Iranian opposition figures." That grant was "part of a larger Dutch project" aimed at "promoting media pluralism in Iran," for which "15 million euros" was budgeted thanks to a bill introduced by "Farah Karimi (Green) and Hans van Baalen (VVD) in the Lower House in 2004" (Thomas Erdbrink and Thalia Verkade, "Haagse subsidie tegen regime Iran," NRC Handelsblad, first published on 16 September 2006, updated on 22 August 2008, Trans. Yoshie Furuhashi). Ms. Karimi, a former member of the Iranian Mojahedin, just so happens to be a board member of the aforementioned Foundation for Human Security in the Middle East. For more information about the collaboration of Ms. Karimi with Mr. van Baalen of the People's Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD), "the most vocal supporter of private enterprise in the Netherlands," see Harm Ede Botje and Joël Broekaert, "Nederlandse steun mediaprojecten in Iran gaat door" (Vrij Nederland, 7 July 2007); and "Iran boos over hulp Den Haag aan radio oppositie" (NRC Handelsblad, 25 June 2009).

3 Objecting to the notion of an international left-wing conspiracy, some cavilers may dare suggest: Aren't most leftists just really too lazy to get up and protest against anything? Isn't it actually the case that most of them are lacking in sympathy for and solidarity with the oppressed, such as Iranians and Darfurians? We dismiss such baseless accusations out of hand, which can only originate in the ill wishers on the Right plotting the destruction of the Left.

4 For reasons unknown to us, the international media, across the political spectrum, have found Dr. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad really irresistible, as demonstrated by the fact that he has never been out of the spotlight since his 2005 election, no matter how many disasters -- such as the ongoing global economic crisis -- that ought to steal at least a little bit of media attention away from him befall the international proletariat. We suggest that, in addition to many other much-debated factors such as social classes, perhaps might have also put his rival Mr. Mir-Hossein Mousavi, a man of considerable charms himself, at electoral disadvantage, though we are also aware of the noted Iranshenas and Mousavi supporter Dr. Hamid Dabashi's observations on Mr. "Mousavi's poorly run presidential campaign": "ill-advised, ill-prepared, sentimental, full of necessary colour symbolism but lacking substance, a clearly articulated platform, economic detail, political programming or an attempt to reach out to a wider spectrum of his constituency. His campaign was too elitist, tied in its visual paraphernalia to a northern Tehran sensibility and lacking appeal across an oil-based economy. . . . [During the presidential debates, he] rambled along, read from written statements in a barely audible voice, ran out of things to say before his time was over."

For more information on the mixed bags of mixed nuts as well as unexpected beauties found on both sides of the current political divide in Iran, consult MRZine.org.

How Many Leftists Are "United for Iran"?

2009-07-26T01:06:00.009-04:00

"8,000 people at the [25 July 2009] event in Paris, 4,000 in Stockholm, 3,000 in Amsterdam, more than 2,500 in Washington DC, 2,500 in New York, 2,000 in London. . . ," says United4Iran.org, the sponsor of the global day of action. The numbers suggest that few non-Iranian leftists showed up (when leftists join and mobilize for protests en masse, Paris, for instance, sees hundreds of thousands -- sometimes millions -- of protesters easily). While a number of leftists have made impassioned pleas for solidarity with Iran's Green Movement, (throwing themselves into an obligatory intra-left battle royal that has eclipsed any battle against the power of unelected clerics in Iran), most leftists appear to find it inadvisable to join the protests against the Iranian government (such as United4Iran's) that don't have an anti-imperialist point of unity emphasizing "Hands Off Iran" as much as criticism of the Iranian government's conduct in handling the Green protests.

Economic Sanctions = Human Rights Violations

2009-07-25T02:34:00.002-04:00

The dominant ideology in the West tells us that human rights mean only civil and political rights and liberties, largely negative liberties of being free from arbitrary powers of the state. This ideology discounts or excludes the rights of individuals and nations to freely develop and enjoy material conditions that allow them to survive and flourish, even though the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a compromise document between the Western powers and the then still existent socialist states, includes some of such rights, e.g. "the right to rest and leisure, including reasonable limitation of working hours and periodic holidays with pay"; and "the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control."

This socioeconomic dimension of human rights is discounted by the dominant Western ideology because, first of all, the United States, the leading power in the West, refuses to grant them to its own citizens, and secondly, even those Western powers that are social democratic at home, such as the West European states and Japan, engage in economic imperialism -- ranging from exaction of odious debt payments to economic sanctions -- that denies such rights to the rest of the world.

In the recent airplane accidents, more than 180 Iranians perished -- nearly ten times the reported official casualties (some of whom were basiji and government supporters) in the post-election conflicts in Iran. Even the voice of the power elite New York Times suggests that their deaths may have in part come about due to the US embargo making it impossible for Iran to perform adequate maintenance of its fleet of US-made aircraft. And yet where are the protests against this economic human rights violation? Are the advocates of human rights who see human rights violations in the Iranian state's action but not in the US state's action (even though the latter has killed more Iranians than the former), as is the case with united4iran.org, true advocates of human rights?

25 July 2009

2009-07-24T16:49:00.003-04:00

Two protests on 25 July 2009. One is a grassroots protest against the US-backed coup in Honduras, spearheaded by SOA Watch South Florida. The other is a slickly packaged campaign to "to demand respect for the human rights of the Iranian people and to demonstrate worldwide solidarity with the civil rights movement in Iran" (a topic pleasing to Western powers), spearheaded by the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran, which is a project of the highly suspect Dutch Foundation for Human Security in the Middle East. You know which one gets more corporate media coverage.

Schizophrenia

2009-07-24T16:37:00.001-04:00

On one hand, the West wants to isolate Iran economically, which distances the Iranians from the West politically and culturally as well; on the other hand, the West wants to gain an ability to broadcast its propaganda into Iran. It's a little schizophrenic. It might be simpler if the West went ahead and ended economic sanctions on Iran. Then, a sizable number of Iranians, of their own free will, would probably import more of the junk that the West wants to dump on Iran, as has been shown by the popularity of many kinds of Western junk in such former official enemies of the capitalist West as China and Viet Nam.

Ayatollah Watch

2009-07-23T10:09:00.001-04:00

Liberals are trying very hard to read tea leaves, assiduously canvasing clerical opinions: Ayatollah Watch. Now their only hope is that enough unelected clerics would side with Rafsanjani to rein in the elected layman Ahmadinejad -- ironic.

"New Middle Classes" in India and Iran

2009-07-22T12:53:00.004-04:00

While it should be clear from a socialist point of view that, in the long term, the interests of the bulk of the Green Movement participants (who appear to be largely of the "new middle classes" whose income and status depend more on their education than their property) and those of the bulk of Ahmadinejad voters (the urban and rural poor, urban and rural petty producers, etc.) are in sync, it would take a great deal of effort to clarify their common interests to both sides in the short term.

That is because, in the short term, the "new middle classes" may actually benefit from the kind of restructuring of Iran's political economy and its relation to the rest of the world (liberalizing its economy and opening it up to the West, while moving away from the NAM) that Rafsanjani, et al. envision. This is not a problem unique to Iran, as Prabhat Patnaik notes below:

Since Left ideas typically get nourishment from the literati and the urban intellectual strata, even though these ideas reach their fruition in the struggles of the workers and peasants, who are the victims of globalization but are sociologically distant from the intellectual strata, the Left movement gathers momentum in situations where the urban middle class has also suffered from globalization and hence makes common cause with the workers and the peasants. But it faces problems in situations where the urban middle class is a beneficiary of globalization. In such cases, the resistance to imperialism and globalization often gets championed by forces other than the Left; or, if the Left remains committed to the interests of the "basic classes" and resists globalization, it often suffers through isolation from the intellectual strata and the urban youth and students. . . .

The current anti-imperialist upsurge in Latin America, which has brought Left or Left-oriented governments to power over much of that continent, is a consequence of the long years of crises that hurt, and hence radicalized, the urban youth, students and intellectuals. On the other hand, in much of central Asia, and now Iran, where the urban youth has not directly experienced the adversity inflicted by globalization, imperialism still retains the capacity to mobilize, or at least claim the sympathy of, vast numbers of the urban population in so-called "orange", "tulip" and "velvet" "revolutions" that are supposed to bring in modernity and democracy together with neo-liberalism. In India, since the adversity of workers, peasants, agricultural labourers and petty producers, under globalization, has been accompanied by high growth rates, and rapid increases in incomes and opportunities for the urban middle class, a degree of pro-imperialism among this class which includes intellectuals, media persons and professionals, and hence a degree of exasperation with the Left's continued adherence to old "anti-imperialist shibboleths", is hardly surprising.

Ahmadinejad Defies Ayatollah on Vice President

2009-07-21T21:35:00.003-04:00

It turns out that Ahmadinejad's first new cabinet nominee (for the post of first vice president) is Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei, who caused stir and anger among the "right wing" of Iran last year for his remark that the Iranians are friends with the Israelis: Borzou Daragahi, "Ahmadinejad Defies Ayatollah on Vice President" (Los Angeles Times, 22 July 2009).

In the Iranian diaspora as well as the Western media, Ahmadinejad is often characterized as "hard-line," "conservative," "anti-Western," etc. But I rather think that he is just his own man -- really one of a kind in Iran, very idiosyncratic, sometimes in good ways (as in this case), sometimes in bad ways (as in his statements on the Holocaust).

Hamid Dabashi vs. As'ad AbuKhalil!

2009-07-18T00:33:00.002-04:00

Watching Hamid Dabashi and As'ad AbuKhalil fight is not unlike watching Bette Davis and Joan Crawford fight. Such divas. BTW, as you may have noticed, by now there's more infighting among leftists than any fighting against mollahs. As for the main event -- the battle of mollahs, between Khamenei and Rafsanjani! -- they don't do any fighting themselves. Instead they let their followers do their fighting. Clever mollahs. I bet that's how mollahs defeated Marxists during the Iranian revolution.

Shark

2009-07-17T16:38:00.001-04:00

If the Green Movement doesn't have what it takes to deliver what its liberal and leftist supporters and participants in and out of Iran yearn for, it probably has just enough base to strengthen Rafsanjani's hands in Iran's domestic politics. But the Shark is not worth dying for, imho. He'll eat you up at the first opportunity after having used you to regain his power.

From Iran to China, Skipping Honduras

2009-07-09T09:25:00.002-04:00

As far as the Western mass media are concerned, they went from Iran (electoral conflict in an oil-rich country) to China (ethnic conflict in an oil-rich region), skipping Honduras (a coup d'état in an oil-poor country dependent on foreign aid and remittances where the USG has a military base).

Iran Jews in Israel Prefer Ahmadinejad

2009-07-07T00:11:00.002-04:00

Alas, Mr. Mousavi can't get any break. This just in from the Jerusalem Post:

Jul 6, 2009 23:58 | Updated Jul 7, 2009 2:34
Iran Jews in Israel prefer Ahmadinejad
By CARRIE SHEFFIELD

Despite unrest and violence following last month's presidential elections in Iran, some Jewish Iranians living in Israel and abroad say life in the Islamic republic is better under President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad than it would be under challenger Mir Hossein Mousavi.

At a conference of Iranian Jews in Jerusalem on Monday, leaders of the Mashadi Jewish community said that despite Ahmadinejad's blustery rhetoric against Israel, Iran is a safe place for Jews to practice their religion.

"Ahmadinejad speaks badly about Jews, but he is preferable to Mousavi," said Shlomo Zabihi, a Mashadi rabbi. The current government is relatively stable and provides a safe environment for Jews, he said.

Monday's event marked the first meeting of the Global Mashadi Jewish Federation, an umbrella organization of community and religious groups preserving the historical and cultural identity of Jews from Mashad, Iran's second largest city, with a population of about 2.5 million.

During the 1979 Islamic Revolution, many Mashadi Jews fled to the United States, primarily New York City - where some 6,000 Jews with ties to Mashad now live. There are almost no Jews in Mashad today, though an estimated 25,000 still live in Iran, concentrated in Teheran.

"They've found it very safe and pleasant, no problems," said Bahman Kamali, founder of the federation. "Actually, the regime during [the time of reformist president Mohammad] Khatami and the regime now have been very good with Jewish people. There has not been any problem."

Kamali said Ahmadinejad's calls for the destruction of Israel were not the same as condemnation or encouragement of violence against Jews in the Diaspora.

"There's a distinction between the two because Iranians, they respect the religions that have books, Christianity, Judaism," Kamali said. "They respect people freely going to the synagogues and praying there without any problems."

He doesn't think the Jewish community in Iran will face persecution stemming from political unrest following the disputed elections.

"I'm not concerned about that," said Kamali, who downplayed the political involvement of his group. "The purpose of this conference is not political. It's only our heritage, that we are proud of to be from Mashad, Iran, and we would like to preserve that."

Iran: Beyond Electoralism

2009-07-01T11:55:00.004-04:00

To get what they want, both Ahmadi and Mousavi voters need to develop an ideology that lets them go beyond electoralism. Winning elections in a class society doesn't mean being able to make major changes, whether voters are looking for more economic justice (Ahmadi voters) or more freedom (Mousavi voters). This is true in any class society, but it's especially so in Iran, with its complex system of checks and balances.

In Iran, you have to win not only the presidency and a majority of the parliament but also a majority of the Assembly of Experts, an elected institution charged with electing or recalling the Leader of the Revolution, who in turn has the power to decide the composition of the Guardian Council.

Beyond the aforementioned elected offices, you have to win over or neutralize the power of those in civil society and the bureaucracy who do not subscribe to your agenda, whether cultural or economic. This applies to all societies.

In Iran, the bourgeoisie do not own the state as in the case of most other class societies, rather they are subordinated to it, but they still wield considerable influence over politics, and they can also use their economic power directly through the market rather than the state, e.g., causing capital flight, withholding investment, and so on. How to counteract that is no easy question.

Cultural obstacles to changes of the sort that Mousavi voters want are more diffuse than economic obstacles, crossing class lines. One Zogby poll of Iranians, conducted in 2006, revealed that 36% "want the country to become more religious and conservative," a slightly larger group than those who want it to become more liberal and secular (31%). It takes a lot of cultural work to convert those fence-sitters in the middle into political actors who actively support change, rather than passively giving consent to the status quo, and to neutralize the veto power of the 36 percent.

Rafsanjani, Mousavi Vow Support to End Unrest

2009-06-27T12:34:00.003-04:00

See how they have sold out sincere reformers of Iran: "Rafsanjani, Mousavi Vow Support to End Unrest" (Press TV, 25 June 2009)?

The only freedom that men like Rafsanjani and Mousavi care about is investor freedom, so Iranian reformers had no business lining up behind them against the will of the poorer two thirds of Iran, but all too many did. That is anti-democratic. This kind of incoherent anti-democratic coalition happens in every country where economic neoliberals succeed in conning
politico-social-cultural liberals and occasionally some foolish leftists into backing them, from Nepal to Venezuela, Thailand to Yugoslavia, Moldova to the OPTs.

Iran: This Is Not a Revolution

2009-06-23T10:26:00.007-04:00

Let the Iranian people solve their conflict on their own. Defend Iran -- including both sides of the conflict -- from the Western powers. Then, one day, the Iranian people will perhaps choose a man -- or even a woman -- who is truly worthy of their fidelity, someone who thinks like Arshin Adib-Moghaddam and is capable of synthesizing the aspirations of those who voted for Mir-Hossein Mousavi (freedom) and those who voted for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (faith and democracy) and uniting people behind the new synthesis.

Iran: This Is Not a Revolution
by Arshin Adib-Moghaddam

Political power is never good or bad, never really just or unjust; political power is arbitrary, discriminatory, and most of the time violent. In Iran, the ongoing demonstrations sparked by the election results in favor of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad indicate that such power can never really be monopolized by the state. Iran's civil society is fighting; it is giving blood for a just cause. It is displaying its power, the power of the people. Today, Iran must be considered one of the most vibrant democracies in the world because it is the people who are speaking. The role of the supporters of the status quo has been reduced to reaction, which is why they are lashing out violently at those who question their legitimacy.

In all of this, the current civil unrest in Iran is historic, not only because it has already elicited compromises by the state, but also because it provides yet more evidence of the way societies can empower themselves against all odds. These brave men and women on the streets of Tehran, Shiraz, Isfahan, and other cities are moved by the same utopia that inspired their fathers and mothers three decades ago: the utopia of justice. They believe that change is possible, that protest is not futile. Confronting the arrogance of the establishment has been one of the main ideological planks of the Islamic revolution in 1979. It is now coming back to haunt those who have invented such slogans without necessarily adhering to them in the first place.

And yet the current situation in Iran is profoundly different from the situation in 1978 and 1979. First, the Islamic Republic has proven to be rather responsive to societal demands and rather flexible ideologically. I don't mean to argue that the Iranian state is entirely reflective of the will of the people. I am saying that is it is not a totalitarian monolith that is pitted against a politically unified society. The fissures of Iranian politics run through all levers of power in the country, which is why the whole situation appears scattered to us. Whereas in 1979 the bad guy (the Shah) was easily identifiable to all revolutionaries, in today's Iran such immediate identification is not entirely possible. Who is the villain in the unfolding drama? Ahmadinejad? Those who demonstrated in support of him would beg to differ. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei? I would argue that he commands even stronger loyalties within the country and beyond. The Revolutionary Guard or the Basij? Mohsen Rezai, one of the presidential candidates and an opponent of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad who is contesting the election results, used to be the head of the former institution.

The picture becomes even more complicated when we take into consideration that some institutions of the state such as the parliament -- via its speaker, Ali Larijani -- have called for a thorough investigation of the violence perpetrated by members of the Basij and the police forces in a raid of student dormitories of Tehran University earlier this week. "What does it mean that in the middle of the night students are attacked in their dormitory?" Larijani asked. The fact that he said that "the interior ministry . . . should answer for it" and that he stated that the "parliament is seriously following the issue" indicate that the good-vs-bad verdict in today's Iran is more blurred than in 1979.

There is a second major difference to 1979. Today, the opposition to Ahmadinejad is fighting the establishment with the establishment. Mir Hossein Mousavi himself was the prime minister of Iran during the first decade of the revolution, during a period when the current supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, was president. Mohammad Khatami, one of the main supporters of Mousavi, was president between 1997 and 2005. Ayatollah Hashemi Rafsanjani, another political ally, is the head of the Assembly of Experts and another former president. They are the engineers of the Islamic revolution and would never devour their project. When some commentators say that what we are witnessing is a revolution they are at best naive and at worst following their own destructive agenda. The dispute is about the future path of the Islamic Republic and the meaning of the revolution -- not about overthrowing the whole system. It is a game of politics and the people who are putting their lives at risk seem to be aware of that. They are aware, in other words, that they are the most important force in the hands of those who want to gain or retain power.

Thus far the Iranian establishment has shown itself to be cunningly adaptable to crisis situations. Those who have staged a revolution know how to sustain themselves. And this is exactly what is happening in Iran. The state is rescuing its political power through a mixture of incentives and pressure, compromise and detention, due process and systematic violence. Moreover, when push comes to shove, the oppositional leaders around Mousavi would never question the system they have built up. As Mousavi himself said in his fifth and most recent letter to the Iranian people: "We are not against our sacred regime and its legal structures; this structure guards our independence, freedom, and Islamic Republic."

Born in Istanbul and educated at the University of Hamburg, American Universtiy (Washington DC), and Cambridge, Arshin Adib-Moghaddam lectures on politics and international relations at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. The author of Iran in World Politics: The Question of the Islamic Republic (Hurst/ Columbia University Press, 2007/2008) and The International Politics of the Persian Gulf (Routledge, 2006), he was the first Jarvis Doctorow Fellow at St Edmund Hall, University of Oxford. He was also elected Honorary Fellow of the Cambridge European Trust Society at the University of Cambridge. His latest publication Iran in World Politics: The Question of the Islamic Republic is now available for worldwide distribution from Hurst & Co., Amazon.com, and Columbia University Press.

What Western Leftists Lost in the Iranian Elections

2009-06-22T00:12:00.004-04:00

. . . is a chance to gain the trust of Muslims, such as Al Musawwir, regarding Western leftists' commitment to truth, democracy, and class solidarity:

Wittingly (for the most part) and (a few) unwittingly, the "western" left is, in essence, siding with the elite, upper classes, against the working class. Now, why are they supporting these elites -- well, the twisted logic is that this has "politicized the Iranian people" and that civil strife of this kind is good, even if the cause they are supposedly fighting for is not real "fraud or no fraud". This is like saying, that running towards a mirage is good, hey, at least you are running, it'll get you energized. That is the kind of nonsense one would expect from those who engage in psyop destabilization, because their aim is to create a chaotic situation, and then swoop down and take the spoils.

Strange as it may seem to some, these days, Muslims are, probably on average, better at being historical materialist than Western leftists, who prefer fantasy to reality.

Be Like Rostam

2009-06-19T09:14:00.007-04:00

Had I lived in Iran at the time of the Iranian Revolution, the Islamic republicans running Iran today would have killed me at worst or put me under house arrest at best, like Iran's Red Princess Maryam Firuz in her last years, because I'm a socialist. But still and all, a majority of the masses supported, and still support, the Islamic republicans, because they are populist Muslims, not socialists.

In the history of social revolutions, it often happened that leftists helped to bring about social revolution (socialist or nationalist), and then, after the overthrow of the ancient regime, a faction of revolutionaries (usually centrists) liquidated left-wing and right-wing revolutionaries as well as defenders of the ancient regime.

That's what happened in Iran, too. The revolution did in its leftists, as well as rightists. But, over all, the Iranian Revolution has done more good than bad for a majority of Iranians, making Iran the best country -- the most democratic! -- in the Middle East today.

The fate of leftists in many countries (excepting Cuba) is often the fate of Rostam: serve the rulers who are unworthy of your support, because the nation ruled by the unworthy rulers still must be defended from its many enemies.

Ahmadinejad Won

2009-06-12T21:30:00.013-04:00

Iran's election commission still hasn't counted all the votes (roughly 32 million votes in total), but, according to the official results based on about 28 million votes counted so far, Ahmadinejad (18,302,924 votes) defeated Mousavi (8,929,232 votes).

Most of the Western media were predicting a close race, and some were even suggesting that a landslide for Mousavi might be possible. But the actual results were presaged by those of the telephone survey of Iranian voters conducted by Terror Free Tomorrow: The Center for Public Opinion, the New America Foundation, and KA Europe SPRL about a month before election day.

TFT/NAF/KA Survey

Official Results as Reported by BBC Persian

IMHO, it's a class vote again.

UPDATE

Based on the counting of nearly 31 million votes, the results are 19,761,433 votes for Ahmadinejad, 9,841,056 votes for Mousavi, 633,048 votes for Mohsen Rezaei, and 270,885 votes for Mehdi Karrubi.

Official Results as Reported by BBC Persian

Statement by a Group of Iranian Anti-war Activists about Iran's Presidential Elections

2009-06-10T08:37:00.002-04:00

Statement by a Group of Iranian Anti-war Activists about Iran's Presidential Elections

Monday 8 June 2009

We are a group of Iranian academic and antiwar activists in Europe and the United States who, in the past few years, have consistently defended Iran's national interests in all areas including its right to develop peaceful nuclear technology. Our varied activities in the face of anti-Iran propaganda by the neoconservatives in the West have included organizing press conferences, taking part in radio and TV debates, creating antiwar websites, publishing bulletins and newsletters, writing opinion pieces and letters to editors, attending national and international antiwar conferences and petitioning and lobbying Western politicians and parliamentarians.

We have campaigned against the policies of the United States and its Western allies which have unjustifiably targeted Iran -- including sending Iran's nuclear dossier to the United Nations Security Council, issuing UNSC resolutions against Iran, secret and public efforts to provoke strife in Iran and destabilize the country, and threats by the United States and Israel for military intervention and bombing of Iran's nuclear facilities. As we approach Iran's presidential elections, we are duty bound to share the lessons of our antiwar activities and highlight what national policies can defend Iran's interests effectively in the international arena without isolating it or enduring U.N. sanctions.

In order to safeguard Iran's national rights successfully, we think Iran's president elect must give priority to the following policies in his programs and plans:

(1) Questioning the Holocaust, which has greatly aided the hawks in the West, must be discarded and replaced with a constructive foreign policy devoid of any provocative rhetoric.

(2) Release of all political prisoners, freedom of press, organization and political parties, as well as peaceful meetings and gatherings. Recognizing the right of all citizens to run for election without any political vetting.

(3) Abolishing medieval punishments, such as stoning and cutting limbs, public executions and execution of minors.

(4) Recognizing full and unconditional equality in all areas for women and ethnic minorities. Recognizing the full citizenship and civic rights of official and unofficial religious minorities.

Disregarding these tasks will seriously hinder the social and political development of the country, and will divide the Iranian people in their resistance against the unwarranted neo-colonial pressure and double standards of the Western powers. It will also provide powerful propaganda tools to hawks and their allies in mainstream media for isolating Iran and denying its fundamental rights in international organizations.

Taking steps to carry out these measures, on the other hand, will put our country on a fast track to progress, will unite Iranians of all walks of life, and disarm the neoconservatives in their aggressive propaganda against Iran.

Signed

Professor Ervand Abrahamian, City University of New York
Dr Arshin Adib-Moghaddam, School of Oriental and African Studies
Professor Haleh Afshar, University of York
Professor Mohammad Ala, Persian Gulf Task Force
Professor Hamid Dabashi, Columbia University
Professor Abbas Edalat, Imperial College London
Ali Fathollah-Nejad, University of Muenster and School of Oriental and African Studies
Dr Mehri Honarbin, Canterbury Christ Church University
Dr Farhang Jahanpour, University of Oxford
Mohammad Kamaali, Campaign Against Sanctions and Military Intervention in Iran
Professor Mahmoud Karimi-Hakkak, Siena College, New York
Professor Fatemeh Keshavarz, Washington University in St. Louis.
Dr Ziba Mir-Hosseini, School of Oriental and African Studies
Professor Pirouz Mojtahedzadeh, Tarbiyat Modarres University
Professor Davood Nabi-Rahni, Pace University in New York
Professor Azam Niroomand-Rad, Georgetown University
Dr Ali Rastbeen, International Institute of Strategic Studies Paris
Dr Elaheh Rostami, School of Oriental and African Studies
Professor Nader Sadeghi, George Washington University Hospital
Shirin Saeidi, University of Cambridge
Professor Muhammad Sahimi, University of Southern California
Leila Zand, Fellowship of Reconciliation

Download the statement in PDF:
English, <mrzine.monthlyreview.org/iran-election-statement-en.pdf>;
Persian, <mrzine.monthlyreview.org/iran-election-statement-fa.pdf>.

Interview with Farian Sabahi

2009-05-28T08:04:00.000-04:00

Interview with Farian Sabahi
by LibrInTerra

Here we publish an interview with Farian Sabahi, an Italian-Iranian professor at Sapienza University of Rome and the University of Turin. A professional journalist, Sabahi has been writing for Corriere della Sera for several months. She was a guest of LibrInTerra on the 26th of March, presenting her two books Storia dell'Iran [A History of Iran] and Un'estate a Teheran [A Summer in Tehran] and showing her two documentary films "Out of Place" and "Che ne facciamo di Teheran?" [What Should We Do with Tehran?]. These days, Iran is again under the spotlight, especially due to its difficult relation with Israel, so this interview should be of greater interest to the public, given its timeliness.

Q: In recent months, Iran has been harshly criticized and continually commented on by the media, especially with regard to its nuclear program and difficult relation with the United States. Does Iran need to produce energy through nuclear power or is the fear about its nuclear program justified?

A: The biggest problem is the lack of trust in Iran on the part of the international community. That said, Iran's electricity demand amounts to 40,000 megawatts, so it would need forty nuclear power plants like Bushehr.

Q: To what extent can Obama's video message create a new channel of dialogue with Iran, especially in view of the upcoming elections, which will take place on the 12th of June? What will happen, politically, in Iran?

A: It's difficult to make a prediction ahead of the presidential elections on 12 June, especially since the predictions of analysts have regularly turned out to be mistaken. But I wouldn't directly link the Obama video to the elections because foreign policy is, like the nuclear program, the exclusive prerogative of the Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, not of the President of the Islamic Republic.

Q: The difficult relation between Iran and Israel is dealt with in your report "Che ne facciamo di Teheran?" But the Jewish presence in Iran is proportionally the largest in the Middle East outside Israel. What is the real relationship between the Jewish minority and the other Iranians?

A: The Jews living in Iran numbered 80,000 at the time of the creation of Israel in 1948, and now the number is estimated to be 25,000. They have a deputy in the parliament, and they are a recognized minority who have their own schools, hospitals, and nursing homes. There are families who have for generations -- we might say for millennia -- been living in Iran. Iranian Jews are considered to be Iranians first and of the Jewish faith second. And as Iranians they enjoy civil, political, and religious rights and thus have their synagogues and cemeteries.

Click here to watch an excerpt from the film "Out of Place."

Q: In "Out of Place," you tell the story of an Iranian-Jewish woman living in Israel since 1987, who would like to return to her country. What, conversely, are the relations between the other Israelis and the Iranian minority in Israeli territory?

A: According to a study by the Center for Iranian Studies in Tel Aviv, the Iranian Jews living in Israel would number 250,000. Some hold positions of prestige, even in politics and the armed forces, while others are simply merchants. Among them is Rachel, the protagonist of my short film "Out of Place," in which I deliberately left international politics in the background to foreground the issue of motherhood. And I believe that from the video it clearly comes across that Iran is, for Rachel, a metaphor for her own now faded youth. In any case on my Web site www.fariansabahi.com, you can find, in the "Journalism" section, my article "Essere e non essere israeliani" [To Be and Not To Be Israeli], published in Ventiquattro, the monthly supplement of Il Sole 24 Ore.

Q: You wrote that the color of Iran is black, the black color of women's chador. Iranian women play different roles in Iranian society, but since the elections of 2005 what has changed regarding the female part of society? Has the situation worsened in terms of personal freedom, for women?

A: Since the 2005 elections, a campaign against the bad-hejabi, the so-called "ill veiled," has been put into effect. But at the same time the One Million Signatures campaign was launched to repeal those rules within the legal system of the Islamic Republic that penalize women.

The original interview "Intervista a Farian Sabahi" was published by LibrInTerra on 21 April 2009. Translation by Yoshie Furuhashi.

Why Neoliberalism Is Alive and Kicking

2009-04-05T22:41:00.002-04:00

Neoliberalism is alive and kicking -- kicking the asses of American workers, hard. And it's no wonder. Read the "Kick Me" sign slapped on the backs of all US workers:

Leo Gerard, president of the United Steelworkers, said there were smarter things to do than demonstrating against layoffs -- for instance, pushing Congress and the states to make sure the stimulus plan creates the maximum number of jobs in the United States.

"I actually believe that Americans believe in their political system more than workers do in other parts of the world," Mr. Gerard said. He said large labor demonstrations are often warranted in Canada and European countries to pressure parliamentary leaders. Demonstrations are less needed in the United States, he said, because often all that is needed is some expert lobbying in Washington to line up the support of a half-dozen senators. (Steven Greenhouse, "In America, Labor Has an Unusually Long Fuse," New York Times, 5 April 2009)

Whose Crisis? Our Crisis!

2009-03-31T19:12:00.004-04:00

The crisis in which we find ourselves is not a crisis of the capitalist class, much less a crisis of the capitalist mode of production. Nor is it even a crisis of neoliberalism. It's a crisis of the working class, plain and simple.

What's in store for us, especially in the United States (where the working class has virtually ceased industrial action), is "a dramatic pro-capital redistribution" of the sort seen in Japan after the collapse of its asset bubbles -- only much more brutal.

As Rahm Emanuel said, "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste," and, sure enough, the Barack H. Obama administration is doing all it can to make it easy for the capitalist class to make the best of the opportunities presented by this crisis and to further cut back the wages and benefits of workers in the primary labor market. Above all, the United States government is leading by example: Mary Williams Walsh and Jonathan Glater, "Contracts Now Seen as Being Rewritable" (New York Times, 30 March 2009). The attack on autoworkers sets the tone.

Ervand Abrahamian: Why the Islamic Republic Has Survived

2009-03-16T12:55:00.003-04:00

This is the aspect of Iran that one does not learn from most corporate media or even left-wing media.

The real answer [to the question of why the Islamic Republic of Iran has survived] lies not in religion, but in economic and social populism. By the early 1970s, Iran had produced a generation of radical intelligentsia that was revolutionary not only in its politics -- wanting to replace the monarchy with a republic -- but in its economic and social outlook. It wanted to transform the class structure root and branch. The trailblazer was a young intellectual named Ali Shariati, who did not live to see the revolution but whose teachings fueled the revolutionary movement. Inspired by the Algerians, Che Guevara and Ho Chi Minh, Shariati spent his short life reinterpreting Shi'ism as a revolutionary ideology and synthesizing it with Marxism. He produced what can be termed a Shi'i version of Catholic liberation theology. His teachings struck a chord not just among college and high school students, but also among younger seminary students. These budding theologians could easily accept his teachings (except his occasional anti-clericalism). One theology student went so far as to describe Imam Husayn as an early Che Guevara and Karbala' as the Sierra Madre. Most of those who organized demonstrations and confrontations in the streets and bazaars during the turbulent months of 1978 were college and high school students inspired mainly by Shariati. His catch phrases -- which had more in common with Third World populism than with conventional Shi'ism -- found their way, sometimes via Khomeini, into slogans and banners displayed throughout the revolution. . . .

This populism helps explain not only the success of the revolution but also the continued survival of the Islamic Republic. The Republic's constitution -- with 175 clauses -- transformed these general aspirations into specific inscribed promises. It pledged to eliminate poverty, illiteracy, slums and unemployment. It also vowed to provide the population with free education, accessible medical care, decent housing, pensions, disability pay and unemployment insurance. "The government," the constitution declared, "has a legal obligation to provide the aforementioned services to every individual in the country." In short, the Islamic Republic promised to create a full-fledged welfare state -- in its proper European, rather than derogatory American, sense.

In the three decades since the revolution, the Islamic Republic -- despite its poor image abroad -- has taken significant steps toward fulfilling these promises. It has done so by giving priority to social rather than military expenditures, and thus dramatically expanding the Ministries of Education, Health, Agriculture, Labor, Housing, Welfare and Social Security. The military consumed as much as 18 percent of the gross domestic product in the last years of the shah. Now it takes up as little as 4 percent. The Ministry of Industries has also grown in most part because in 1979-1980 the state took over numerous large factories whose owners had absconded abroad. The alternative would have been to close them down and create mass unemployment. Since most of these factories had functioned only because of subsidies from the old regime, the new regime had no choice but to continue subsidizing them.

In three decades the regime has come close to eliminating illiteracy among the post-revolutionary generations, reducing the overall rate from 53 percent to 15 percent. The rate among women has fallen from 65 percent to 20 percent. The state has increased the number of students enrolled in primary schools from 4,768,000 to 5,700,000, in secondary schools from 2.1 million to over 7.6 million, in technical schools from 201,000 to 509,000, and in universities from 154,000 to over 1.5 million. The percentage of women in university student populations has gone up from 30 percent to 62 percent. Thanks to medical clinics, life expectancy at birth has increased from 56 to 70, and infant mortality has decreased from 104 to 25 per 1,000. Also thanks to medical clinics, the birth rate has fallen from an all-time high of 3.2 to 2.1, and the fertility rate -- the average number of children born to a woman in her lifetime -- from 7 to 3. It is expected to fall further to 2 by 2012 -- in other words, Iran in the near future will achieve near zero population growth.

The Islamic Republic has bridged the chasm between urban and rural life in part by raising the prices of agricultural goods relative to other commodities and in part by introducing schools, medical clinics, roads, electricity and piped water into the countryside. For the first time ever, villagers can afford consumer goods, even motorbikes and pickup trucks. According to one economist who, on the whole, is critical of the regime, 80 percent of rural households own refrigerators, 77 percent televisions and 76 percent gas stoves. Some 220,000 peasant families, moreover, have received 850,000 hectares of land confiscated from the old elite. They, together with the some 660,000 families who had obtained land under the earlier White Revolution, form a substantial rural class that has benefited not only from these new social services but also from state-subsidized cooperatives and protective tariff walls. This class provides the regime with a rural social base.

The regime has also tackled problems of the urban poor. It has replaced slums with low-income housing, beautified the worst districts and extended electricity, water and sewage lines to working-class districts. As an American journalist highly critical of the regime's economic policies admits, "Iran has become a modern country with few visible signs of squalor." What is more, it has supplemented the income of the underclass -- both rural and urban -- by generously subsidizing bread, fuel, gas, heat, electricity, medicines and public transport. The regime may not have eradicated poverty nor appreciatively narrowed the gap between rich and poor but it has provided the underclass with a safety net. In the words of the same independent-minded economist, "Poverty has declined to an enviable level for middle-income developing countries."

In addition to substantially expanding the central ministries, the Islamic Republic has also set up numerous semi-independent institutions, such as the Mostazafin (Oppressed), Martyrs', Housing, Alavi and Imam Khomeini Relief Foundations. Headed by clerics or other persons appointed by and loyal to the Supreme Leader, these foundations together account for as much as 15 percent of the national economy and control budgets that total as much as half that of the central government. Much of their assets are businesses confiscated from the former elite. The largest of them, the Mostazafin Foundation, administers 140 factories, 120 mines, 470 agribusinesses, 100 construction companies and innumerable rural cooperatives. It also owns the country's two leading newspapers, Ettelaat and Keyhan. According to the Guardian, in 1993 the foundation employed 65,000 and had an annual budget of over $10 billion.5 Some of these foundations also lobby effectively to protect university quotas for war veterans and together they provide hundreds of thousands with wages and benefits, including pensions, housing and health insurance. In other words, they are small welfare states within the larger welfare state. (endnotes omitted, Ervand Abrahamian, "Why the Islamic Republic Has Survived," Middle East Report 250, Spring 2009)

In some respects, left-wing media have more trouble foregrounding the gains of the revolution than even corporate media due to their own perceived socialist propaganda needs. Leftists tend to think that the way to win over workers of Iran is to hammer on only or mainly human rights violations or remaining socio-economic problems, though there is no evidence that their approach is doing any good to their own political prospect (as it doesn't help leftists speak to the experience of working people), let alone the working people of Iran (as it doesn't help working people take an objective look at their own country in comparison to others outside the core of the capitalist system and think strategically about how to make more social change to their benefit). Instead, why not properly recognize the gains of the revolution as such (as Ervand Abrahamian does above) and seek to defend and develop the remaining gains, win back the ones that have been eroded or taken back by the ruling class, and make new gains?

Do Communists Have Better Sex?

2009-03-11T04:50:00.003-04:00

In a word, yes, according to André Meier's 2006 documentary film comparing sex in East and West Germany. Just watch:

Now, that's an uplifting message as we face the prospect of the Greatest Depression!

But the film is only about heterosexuals. Among the 20th-century communists, only the Cubans have survived long enough to begin to get the question of sexual diversity right (after many trials and errors).

Obama, Your Package Is Too Small

2009-03-07T08:34:00.002-05:00

If you are a Keynesian, here's what you should put on your protest sign:

"Obama, Your Package Is Too Small."

"[T]he GDP gap will be as much as 12 percent of GDP, with no recovery in sight. This is shown in Figure One. This gap is compatible with unemployment rates near ten percent, indefinitely." -- James K. Galbraith

"The unemployment rate is likely to hit 8.5 percent by March and will almost certainly cross 9.0 percent by the early summer. Without substantial additional stimulus, it could cross 10.0 percent by year-end." -- Dean Baker

Islamophobia, Anti-Semitism, and Zionism

2009-02-15T13:45:00.004-05:00

One of the best illustrations of Empire, Inc.'s motto -- no permanent enemies, no permanent friends -- is its about-face on Afghanistan. Today's a good day to remember it:

Twenty years ago today, the commander of the Soviet Limited Contingent in Afghanistan Boris Gromov crossed the Termez Bridge out of Afghanistan, thus marking the end of the Soviet war which lasted almost ten years and cost tens of thousands of Soviet and Afghan lives. . . . The documents suggest that the Soviet decision to withdraw occurred as early as 1985, but the process of implementing that decision was excruciatingly slow, in part because the Soviet-backed Afghan regime was never able to achieve the necessary domestic support and legitimacy -- a key problem even today for the current U.S. and NATO-supported government in Kabul. ("Afghanistan and the Soviet Withdrawal 1989: 20 Years Later," National Security Archive)

Capitalism and imperialism has no structural necessity for Islamophobia. Islamophobia is ascendant today because Empire, Inc. is fighting wars against predominantly Muslim nations. When it was fighting against godless Communists, in contrast, it celebrated even the most reactionary Islamist extremists as "freedom fighters."

Similarly, capitalism and imperialism has no structural need for either Zionism or anti-Semitism. They can rise or fall depending on the perceived self-interests of the power elite of Empire, Inc. Classic anti-Semitism is already a residual ideology, and so will Zionism be, as it has already lost its original raison d'être (the inability of Jews to obtain equal rights in the West), and as it begins to lose, slowly but surely, Western elite support, with Israel starting to get in the way of Empire, Inc.'s ability to rule the Arab masses through its Arab clients.

Dead Man Walking?

2009-02-08T08:45:00.005-05:00

America does its imperialism as it does its capitalism: when a business fails, blame employees.

A White House favorite -- a celebrity in flowing cape and dark gray fez -- in each of the seven years that he has led this country since the fall of the Taliban, Mr. Karzai now finds himself not so favored at all. Not by Washington, and not by his own.

In the White House, President Obama said he regarded Mr. Karzai as unreliable and ineffective. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said he presided over a "narco-state." The Americans making Afghan policy, worried that the war is being lost, are vowing to bypass Mr. Karzai and deal directly with the governors in the countryside.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Meanwhile, the Obama administration will have to decide what it wants from Mr. Karzai as it tries to make good on its promise to reverse the course of the war. Or whether it wants him at all. (Dexter Filkins, "Afghan Leader Finds Himself Hero No More," New York Times, 8 February 2009)

Mr. Karzai may have sealed his fate by finally beginning to show signs of independent thinking last year and coming up with a sensible strategy to boot:

At a news conference in Kabul, the Afghan capital, Mr. Karzai coupled his offer of safe passage to Mr. Omar with a warning to the Western nations that support his government, saying that if they opposed an assurance of safety for Mr. Omar they would have to remove Mr. Karzai as president or withdraw their troops from Afghanistan.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Mr. Karzai has recently toughened his tone when speaking of the American-led coalition in ways that appear to have been aimed at gaining wider support at home. Among other things, he has demanded that the coalition make more measured use of air power to reduce civilian casualties from bomb and missile attacks. With his warning that he would guarantee Mr. Omar's safety, he appeared to have taken one step further in marking his distance from the coalition. (John F. Burns, "Karzai Offers Safe Passage to Taliban Leader If He Agrees to Talks" New York Times, 17 November 2008)

Israel: A State of Irresponsibility

2009-01-22T20:01:00.005-05:00

Look for "Gaza" and "collateral damage" in Google News now, and you'll get 640 results (as of 22 January 2009, 8:15 PM). Search for "Gaza" and "human shield," and you'll get 6,741 results. That does not bode well for Israel.

"Collateral damage" and "human shield" are, among other things, both terms employed by belligerents to excuse themselves of responsibility for civilian casualties they caused. But they are not the same excuse.

The idea of "collateral damage" says that we aimed to kill enemy combatants but have ended up accidentally killing hapless civilians, too, who happened to be in a wrong place at a wrong time. The deaths of civilians, for which no one can be held responsible, are to be regretted.

The idea of "human shield," on the other hand, says that it is enemy combatants who caused not only deaths of civilians on our side but those on their own side as well. In the case of Gaza, it goes like this:

Hamas uses despicable tactics -- such as targeting Israeli civilians while using Palestinian civilians as human shields. As a result, the Israeli Defense Forces are forced to combat the terror infrastructure in the midst of the civilian Palestinian population. This leads to pain and suffering not only on the Israeli side, but also to innocent Palestinians, who are forced by means of violence and dictatorship to collaborate with Hamas and its commanders. (Histadrut -- General Federation of Labour in Israel)

Israeli civilians killed by Hamas = Hamas's responsibility.
Palestinian civilians killed by Israel = Hamas's responsibility.

In short, Israel is proclaiming to the world: it is irresponsible, less by accident ("We are not responsible for accidental collateral damage") than by nature ("Hamas made us do it, whatever it is. We are helpless. Israel is a victim of Hamas, and so are Palestinian civilians"), and all responsibility belongs to its enemy.

Israel says it wants the world, including Arabs, to recognize its right to exist -- in other words, it wants legitimacy in the eyes of the world and normal relations with other states, especially Arab states. Arabs, however, must wonder: Israel takes no responsibility for the choices it has made -- the choice to occupy other people's territories, the choice to keep building settlements on them, the choice to blockade and impoverish people, the choice to make war to begin with and the choice to bomb schools and other civilian infrastructure in the course of it. Should a state that claims only rights and no responsibility enjoy legitimacy in the eyes of the world? Should the state of irresponsibility be normalized?

And it is not just Arabs who wonder about such questions. In one European Commission survey, taken a little over a year after Israel's "Operation Defensive Shield," during which it reduced Jenin to rubble, nearly 60% of the respondents said: "Israel is the greatest threat to world peace." Imagine how many more will say so after Gaza.

A Bailout in Exchange for Wage and Benefit Reductions

2008-12-20T16:24:00.004-05:00

A bailout in exchange for wage and benefit reductions, especially retirees' pensions and health care benefits -- that's the ruling-class program for auto workers . . . and all other workers, union or non-union, in the primary labor market in the United States.

Even while the ruling class deviates from the neoliberal orthodoxy in monetary and fiscal policies, lowering interest rates, monetizing debt, and creating temporary jobs and extending temporary benefits in an attempt to stimulate the economy, it continues to push to structurally transform labor in its neoliberal image (the strongest weapon of neoliberalism is its ability to pit the workers in the primary labor market -- the public sector and oligopolistic industries -- against workers who are excluded from it to begin with, weakening the former even while extending thin new benefits to the latter to maintain the neoliberal hegemonic bloc, at which Brazil's Lula and Turkey's AKP for instance are expert). That is what the ruling class did to workers in Japan, increasing poverty and aggravating inequality.

Needless to say, making labor more precarious is a recipe for prolonging rather than exiting deflationary stagnation, no matter how much fiscal and monetary stimuli the government applies at the same time. The crisis doesn't automatically bring an end to neoliberalism. It's up to the working class to end it, or else the economy won't even recover.

Right to Food, "180 in favour to 1 against (United States)"

2008-12-20T16:08:00.003-05:00

Why did the USG vote against the right to food at the United Nations, braving the embarrassment of standing literally alone against women and children? "After the vote, the representative of the United States said he was unable to support the text because he believed the attainment of the right to adequate food was a goal that should be realized progressively" (emphasis added, Sixty-third General Assembly, Third Committee, "Approves 8 Resolutions for General Assembly Adoption; Right to Food, Mercenaries, Combating Religious Defamation Among Issues," 24 November 2008)

Statement by Iranian Bloggers on Hossein Derakhshan

2008-12-19T12:26:00.003-05:00

Statement by Iranian Bloggers on Hossein Derakhshan

We, the undersigned, view the circumstances surrounding the Iranian authorities' arrest of Hossein Derakhshan aka Hoder, one of the most prominent Iranian bloggers, as extremely worrying. Derakhshan's disappearance, detention at an unknown location, lack of access to his family and attorneys, and the authorities' failure to provide clear information about his potential charges is a source of concern for us.

The Iranian blogging community is one of the largest and most vibrant in the world. From ordinary citizens to the President, a diverse and large number of Iranians are engaged in blogging. These bloggers encompass a wide spectrum of views and perspectives, and they play a vital role in open discussions of social, cultural and political affairs.

Unfortunately, in recent years, numerous websites and blogs have been routinely blocked by the authorities, and some bloggers have been harassed or detained. Derakhshan's detention is but the latest episode in this ongoing saga and is being viewed as an attempt to silence and intimidate the blogging community as a whole.

Derakhshan's own position regarding a number of prisoners of conscience in Iran has been a source of contention among the blogging community and has caused many to distance themselves from him. This, however, doesn't change the fact that the freedom of expression is sacred for all not just the ones with whom we agree.

We therefore categorically condemn the circumstances surrounding Derakhshan's arrest and detention and demand his immediate release.

Signed, in alphabetical order:

Arash Abadpour
Niki Akhavan
Hossein Bagher Zadeh
Sanam Dolatshahi
Mehdi Jami
Jahanshah Javid
Abdee Kalantari
Sheema Kalbasi
Nazli Kamvari
Nazy Kaviani
Peyvand Khorsandi
Nikahang Kowsar
Omid Memarian
Pedram Moallemian
Ali Moayedian
Ebrahim Nabavi
Masoome Naseri
Shahrnush Parsipur
Khodadad Rezakhani
Leva Zand

This statement first appeared in Pedram Moallemian's blog Eyeranian.net on 18 December 2008. The links to the text of the statement are added for informational purposes.

The Shoes Heard round the World

2008-12-16T13:43:00.002-05:00

Some commentators say that a defiant use of shoes is an Arab thing, and others say that it's a Muslim thing, but the idea has an undeniable universal appeal, and it might ecumenically catch on across cultures and religions.

As the POTUS spoke nonsense into the void,
His final insult to Iraqis unfurled,
There the embattled journalist stood,
And fired the shoes heard round the world.

Muntadar al-Zeidi's shoes are the Lexington and Concord of creative anti-imperialist resistance in the age of YouTube.

Azar 16

2008-12-07T11:09:00.002-05:00

۱۶ آذر ۱۳۳۲ / ۷ دسامبر ۱۹۵۳

"In fact, Azar 16 became a useful gauge for measuring the regime's unpopularity and, conversely, the opposition's strength among the young intelligentsia." -- Ervand Abrahamian, Iran between Two Revolutions

Psychiatry with Islamic Characteristics

2008-11-13T16:23:00.001-05:00

What would Foucault say about Psychiatry with Islamic Characteristics?

New Deal with Chinese Characteristics

2008-11-13T15:36:00.003-05:00

The "New Deal with Chinese Characteristics" is more ambitious than what Washington has come up with so far, and what Obama is likely to offer in the near future, but is it still too little too late, especially in light of "The Realities of China Today" explained by Martin Hart-Landsberg?

"One critical but often overlooked explanation for China's manufacturing competitiveness is that approximately 70% of manufacturing work is done by migrants. Over the last 25 years, some 150-200 million Chinese have moved from the countryside to urban areas in search of employment. Although the great majority of these migrant workers have moved legally, they suffer enormous discrimination. For example, because they remain classified as rural residents under the Chinese registration system, not only must they pay steep fees to register as temporary urban residents, they also have no rights to the public services available to urban born residents (including free or subsidized education, health care, housing and pensions). The same is true for their children, even if they are born in an urban area."

"Chinese wages as a share of GDP have fallen from approximately 53% of Gross Domestic Product in 1992 to less than 40% in 2006. Private consumption as a percent of GDP has also declined, falling from approximately 47% to 36% over the same period."

". . . [T]he region's export/GDP ratio grew from 24% in 1980 to 55% in 2005. By comparison, the world average in 2005 was only 28.5%."

Between 1992-3 and 2004-5, the East Asian share of China's final goods exports declined from 49.5% to 26.5%, while the OECD share (excluding Japan and Korea) increased from 29.3% to 50.1%.

According to various estimates cited by the Asian Development Bank, it appears that the percentage of Asian exports consumed within Asia ranges from a high of 22% to a low of only 11%.

Masters of the Universe

2008-11-06T04:09:00.002-05:00

"The focus now has become the nine US banks which are receiving $125bn of public money. They have spent or reserved $108bn for employee pay and bonuses in the first nine months of 2008, nearly the same as last year" (emphasis added, Aline van Duyn, "'Masters of the Universe' Need to Wake Up to the Real World" Financial Times, 31 October 2008).

The More Pro-American You Are, the Worse Off You Will Be

2008-10-28T10:59:00.004-04:00

The countries that are the first to dramatically go down (Iceland, Pakistan, Eastern Europe, etc.) in the financial crisis, and the ones that are soon to follow them (Turkey, South Africa, etc.), are the very ones where the Washington Consensus has had the strongest impact. The more pro-American you are, the worse off you will be.^* If the IMF doesn't want to send that message to the world, it can attach fewer anti-working-class (and dangerously pro-cyclical) conditions to its bailout packages, especially for the ones in the former Soviet sphere of influence, but, if this AP dispatch about the Ukraine deal is any indication, it looks as if the only country that gets a lot of special political considerations may be Georgia: Associated Press, "Yatsenyuk: Parliament Will Adopt Unpopular Conditions in Exchange for IMF Aid," Kyiv Post, 28 October 2008).

* In contrast, "Financial Crisis Leaves Iran Untouched" (Al Jazeera, 8 Oct 2008):

See, also, "Iran and the Financial Crisis" (Al Alam TV, 7 October 2008):

Marx on the National Debt

2008-10-17T16:11:00.003-04:00

The only part of the so-called national wealth that actually enters into the collective possessions of modern peoples is their national debt. Hence, as a necessary consequence, the modern doctrine that a nation becomes the richer the more deeply it is in debt. Public credit becomes the credo of capital. And with the rise of national debt-making, want of faith in the national debt takes the place of the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost, which may not be forgiven. -- Karl Marx, Capital

Multinational Investors' Vote of Confidence in Ultra-imperialism

2008-10-13T13:54:00.005-04:00

Check out multinational investors' major vote of confidence in ultra-imperialism today: John Willman, "Markets Cheer Bank Bail-outs" (Financial Times, 13 October 2008); Ralph Atkins, "European Banks Offer Unlimited Dollar Funding" (Financial Times, 13 October 2008); "Full Text: US Treasury Tarp Plans" (Financial Times, 13 October 2008); Louise Story and Andrew Ross Sorkin, "Morgan Agrees to Revise Terms of Mitsubishi Deal" (New York Times, 13 October 2008); "Gulf Shares Surge as UAE and Qatar Act (Financial Times, 12 October 2008); and Robin Wigglesworth and Simeon Kerr, "UAE Leads Drive to Stem Crisis" (Financial Times, 13 October 2008).

It's true that, if China, Japan, Germany, Saudi Arabia, and the United States functioned as one politically (if not legally) coherent establishment, Americans would be back in the black:

Global Balance of Payments ($bn, 2007)

SOURCE: Martin Wolf, "Asia's Revenge," Financial Times, 9 October 2008, p. 9.

That's the level at which the ruling classes have built their post-WW2 hegemony (cf. Kees van der Pijl, The Making of an Atlantic Ruling Class; and Gavan McCormack, Client State: Japan in the American Embrace; etc.).

Therefore, a radical shift in global class relations could come only if there were a radical shift in any one of the aforementioned countries, but these are the very ones where the Left has the least chance in the world.

Is China, though, a weak or strong link in this chain of empire (to which Latin socialists, Islamists from the Hindu Kush to the Persian Gulf to the Horn of Africa to the Niger Delta, Maoists in Nepal and India, the national security interests of Russia, etc. have provided a partial material -- if ideologically incoherent -- counterweight)?

Update

"[T]he needs of our economy require that our financial institutions not take this new capital to hoard it, but to deploy it" ("Text: Henry Paulson Remarks Tuesday," 15 October 2008).

"Investors are recognizing that the financial crisis is not the fundamental problem. It has merely amplified economic ailments that are now intensifying: vanishing paychecks, falling home prices and diminished spending. And there is no relief in sight" (Peter S. Goodman, "Markets Suffer as Investors Weigh Relentless Trouble," New York Times, 16 October 2008).

Toward the Highest Stage of Ultra-imperialism?

2008-10-12T18:55:00.011-04:00

A local friend of mine jokes: if worst comes to worst, the US can always annex Saudi Arabia. But why stop there on the way to the highest stage of ultra-imperialism: America, China, Japan, Germany, and Saudi Arabia together legally conglomerated into a new United States, bringing Americans -- thank Allah and Confucius -- back in the black?

Global Balance of Payments ($bn, 2007)

SOURCE: Martin Wolf, "Asia's Revenge," Financial Times, 9 October 2008, p. 9.

Jokes aside, Martin Wolf's article that I used as the source for the chart above is actually very useful (except its conclusion still in favor of "liberalized finance" that is unsupportable based on the logic and evidence of the article itself). It succinctly highlights the problem of global inequity and inefficiency -- poorer nations exporting surpluses to richer nations, only to see them wasted on an enormous debt-fueled real-estate Ponzi scheme -- as the cause of the financial crisis of the century.

What lay behind the savings glut? The first development was the shift of emerging economies into a large surplus of savings over investment. Within the emerging economies, the big shifts were in Asia and in the oil exporting countries (see chart). By 2007, according to the International Monetary Fund, the aggregate savings surpluses of these two groups of countries had reached around 2 per cent of world output.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Last year, the aggregate surpluses of the world's surplus countries reached $1,680bn, according to the IMF. The top 10 (China, Japan, Germany, Saudi Arabia, Russia, Switzerland, Norway, Kuwait, the Netherlands and the United Arab Emirates) generated more than 70 per cent of this total. The surpluses of the top 10 countries represented at least 8 per cent of their aggregate GDP and about one-quarter of their aggregate gross savings.

Meanwhile, the huge US deficit absorbed 44 per cent of this total. The US, UK, Spain and Australia -- four countries with housing bubbles -- absorbed 63 per cent of the world's current account surpluses.

That represented a vast shift of capital – but unlike in the 1970s and early 1980s, it went to some of the world's richest countries. (emphasis added, Wolf, p. 9)

There is no political or economic incentive on the part of the biggest deficit spenders, especially the US, to change this pattern. The change therefore has to come from surplus generators.

The Global Financial Crisis Has a Social Cause, Too: the World of Low Wages: An Interview with Emiliano Brancaccio

2008-10-09T00:27:00.003-04:00

The Global Financial Crisis Has a Social Cause, Too: the World of Low Wages:
An Interview with Emiliano Brancaccio
by Waldemar Bolze

Emiliano Brancaccio is a professor of labor economics at the University of Sannio, member of Rifondazione Comunista, and advisor to the largest union of Italian metalworkers FIOM-CGIL.

You maintain that the financial crisis is not purely a technical financial phenomenon but has a social cause. Why?

The starting point is the weakness of the labor movement, which has made a world of low wages possible. However, this world is structurally unstable, which we are now beginning to experience. Today every country tries to keep the wage level low, thereby diminishing the domestic demand, and must find foreign markets for its own products.

This mechanism has worked for the last ten years because the United States has functioned as a "vacuum cleaner" for surplus products of other countries. And not because the wages of American workers were so high, but because a huge private debt was accumulated in the United States. The system led to workers paying their mortgage debts with new loans and paying the interests on the loans with new credit cards.

Could such a fragile credit structure actually hold?

It was nothing other than a time bomb, which has now exploded. The consequences are once again passed onto workers and employees, while executives of Wall Street, who manufactured these explosives, could even profit from them.

Take, for example, the Paulson plan. It stipulates that the government is to buy the risky assets of investment banks and in return place fresh money at their disposal, leaving a possibility that the banks, once the storm has passed, can regain their titles. If the government pays high enough prices, the bankers can eventually pocket a nice profit at the expense of the state budget.

What obvious impact will the current crisis have?

Much will depend on its duration and depth. At the moment, the establishment is pursuing a strategy which Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa spelled out in his book The Leopard: "If we want everything to remain as it is, we must change everything." The Paulson plan is an example of this strategy, because it consists of a barter of cash for debts, designed to intervene as little as possible in the terms of ownership and control of bank capital. The same applies to the sales of preferred shares to the government because these restrict the voting right at the meetings of shareholders.

Has the ideology of neoliberalism failed and are the days of capitalism numbered?

The idea is amusing, but it would be naïve to assume an imminent end of capitalism. I cannot see how such a thing can materialize. The big absentee in this colossal state of emergency is precisely the labor movement. Rather, I see the possibility of a shift in relative power from finance lobbies to political pressure groups and also from Western and American political lobbies to Asian ones.

Can we then speak of the decline of the American empire?

The appearance and all temporary upsurges and short-term successes notwithstanding, the American decline has continued for at least a quarter century. For this decline is symptomatic of the long-term development of the dollar, whose price -- converted to today's currency -- has fallen from 1.50 euros to around 70 euro cents within 20 years. This decline ensures distrust toward the dollar and will likely prevent the USA from playing the role of the "vacuum cleaner" for surplus products of other countries again. Since there is no alternative international hegemon, there is a danger that the international monetary system will hit a dead end. In that event, the development of this crisis could take on really dark and unpredictable characteristics.

The original interview in German appeared in junge Welt on 9 October 2008. Translation by Yoshie Furuhashi.

History

2008-10-04T11:39:00.002-04:00

Once upon a time, the Left believed that history was on the march toward socialism. This belief has been shaken by various events, from the Moscow show trials, Hungary 1956, Czechoslovakia 1968, to the end of the USSR and restoration of capitalism in China.

Once upon a time, the Right believed, like Francis Fukuyama, that history had ended, with the culmination of history in capitalism + liberal democracy. This belief has been shaken by various events: Islamic resistance to the West's politico-military campaign to create a New Middle East, a resurgence of the Left in Latin America, the West's self-destruction of its own liberal and democratic facade through the "War on Terror," and finally the global financial crisis starting in the subprime states of America.

Now both sides have to approach history as an open-ended process of struggle.

Six Weeks

2008-10-04T03:56:00.001-04:00

After having threatened Americans with a great depression if their representatives don't vote for the $700 billion bailout NOW, it turns out that the Treasury won't be able to BEGIN to put it into action for SIX WEEKS. In normal course, the market reacts more negatively to a left-wing program than a right-wing one like this, but this financial crisis is probably an exception.

The Market Value of Islam Going Up?

2008-10-03T16:52:00.003-04:00

At any other time at least since 11 September 2001 (if not 4 November 1979), well-financed propaganda like Obsession ("a documentary [sic] about 'radical Islam’s war against the West'"), combined with general hatred of immigrants, would have become big news and a not insignificant factor in not just elections but politics in general in the USA.

But I take comfort in the thought that even the dimmest bulbs in the middle of Middle America must be too appalled by the financial crisis to obsess over Muslims.

As a matter of fact, the market value of Islam might even be going up just now among the financially insecure: Syed Zahid Ahmad, "Islamic Banking Restrains Bankruptcy" (RGE, 28 September 2008); Mohammed Al-Hamzani, "Islamic Banks Unaffected by Global Financial Crisis" (Asharq Al-Awsat, 30 September 2008); "Non-Muslims Turn to Islamic Bank as a Safe Option" (Birmingham Post, 3 October 2008).

New Dollar Bill

2008-10-03T13:49:00.002-04:00

Bird and Fortune on the Financial Crisis

2008-10-02T12:16:00.001-04:00

Poverty of Crisis Debate

2008-10-02T00:49:00.001-04:00

Leftists, especially Marxists, are fond of debates on crises. But our debates have often revolved around questions that are not exactly helpful to people in crisis. We tend to debate such questions as:

What are the underlying causes of crisis -- overaccumulation, overproduction, underconsumption, or what?

But the question that we should have been really debating, learning from historical examples, is: in case of a crisis, how do we counter a financial blackmail of capital (e.g., if you don't give us $700 billion, we'll commit suicide bombing and take you all down)? As long as we capitulate to this blackmail and seek a solution on capital's terms, we'll remain social democrats.