[Marxism] why are the iranians dreaming again?

[Thomas Campbell <avvakum@xxxxxxxxx>]

www.cinestatic.com/infinitethought/2009/06/why-are-iranians-dreaming-again.asp

why are the iranians dreaming again?*

[The following is a guest post from Ali Alizadeh, Researcher at the
Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, Middlesex
University]

This piece is copyright-free. Please distrbute widely.

Iran is currently in the grip of a new and strong political movement.
While this movement proves that Ahmadinejad’s populist techniques of
deception no longer work inside Iran, it seems they are still
effective outside the country. This is mainly due to thirty years of
isolation and mutual mistrust between Iran and the West which has
turned my country into a mysterious phenomenon for outsiders. In this
piece I will try to confront some of the mystifications and
misunderstandings produced by the international media in the last
week.

In the first scenario the international media, claiming impartiality,
insisted that the reformists provide hard objective evidence in
support of their claim that the June 12 election has been rigged. But
despite their empiricist attitude, the media missed obvious facts due
to their lack of familiarity with the socio-historical context.
Although the reformists could not possibly offer any figures or
documents, because the whole show was single-handedly run by
Ahmadinejad’s ministry of interior, anyone familiar with Iran’s recent
history could easily see what was wrong with this picture.

It was the government who reversed the conventional and logical
procedure by announcing a fictitious total figure first – in four
stages – and then fabricating figures for each polling station,
something that is still going on. This led to many absurdities: Musavi
got less votes in his hometown (Tabriz) than Ahmadinejad; Karroubi’s
total vote was less than the number of people active in his campaign;
Rezaee’s votes were reduced by a hundred thousand between the third
and fourth stages of announcement; blank votes were totally forgotten
and only hastily added to the count when reformists pointed this out;
and finally the ratio between all candidates’ votes remained almost
constant in all these four stages of announcement (63, 33, 2 and 1
percent respectively).

Moreover, as in any other country, the increase in turnout in Iran’s
elections has always benefitted the opposition and not the incumbent,
because it is rational to assume that those who usually don’t vote,
i.e. the silent majority, only come out when they want to change the
status quo. Yet in this election Ahmadinejad, the representative of
the status quo, allegedly received 10 million votes more than what he
got in the previous election.

Finally, Ahmadinejad’s nervous reaction after his so-called victory is
the best proof for rigging: closing down SMS network and the whole of
country’s mobile phone network, arresting more than 100 leading
political activists, blocking access to Musavi’s and many other
reformists’ websites and unleashing violence in the streets...But if
all this is not enough, the bodies of more than 17 people who were
shot dead and immediately buried in unknown graves should persuade all
those “objective-minded” observers.

In the second scenario, gradually unfolding in the last few days, the
international media implicitly shifted its attention to the role of
internet and its social networking (twitter, facebook, youtube, etc).
This implied that millions of illiterate conservative villagers have
voted for Ahmadinejad and the political movement is mostly limited to
educated middle classes in North Tehran. While this simplified image
is more compatible with media’s comfortable position towards Iran in
the last 30 years, it is far from reality. The recent political
history of Iran does not confirm this image. For example, Khatami’s
victory in 1997, despite his absolute lack of any economic promises
and his focus instead on liberal civic demands, was made possible by
the polarization of society into people and state. Khatami could win
only by embracing people from all different classes and groups,
villagers and urban people alike.

There is no doubt that new media and technologies have been playing an
important role in the movement, but it seems that the cause and the
effect are being reversed in the picture painted by the media. First
of all, it is the existence of a strong political determination,
combined with people becoming deprived of basic means of
communication, which has led the movement to creatively test every
other channel and method. Musavi’s paper was shut down on the night of
election, his frequent request to talk to people on the state TV has
been rejected, his official website is often blocked and his physical
contact with his supporters has been kept minimum by keeping him in
house arrest (with the exception of his appearance on the over a
million march on June 15).

Second, due to the heavy pressure on foreign journalists inside Iran,
these technological tools have come to play a significant role in
sending the messages and images of the movement to the outside world.
However, the creative self-organization of the movement is using a
manifold of methods and channels, many of them simple and traditional,
depending on their availability: shouting ‘death to dictator’ from
rooftops, calling landlines, at the end of one rally chanting the time
and place of the next one, and by jeopardizing oneself by physically
standing on streets and distributing news to every passing car. The
appearance of the movement which is being sold by the media to the
western gaze – the cyber-fantasy of the western societies which has
already labelled our movement a twitter revolution, seems to have
completely missed the reality of those bodies which are shot dead,
injured or ready to be endangered by non-virtual bullets.

What is more surprising in the midst of this media frenzy is the
blindness of the western left to the political dynamism and energy of
our movement. The causes of this blindness oscillate between the
misgivings about Islam (or the Islamophobia of hyper-secular left) and
the confusion made by Ahmadinjead’s fake anti-imperialist rhetoric
(his alliance with Chavez perhaps, who after all was the first to
congratulate him). It needs to be emphasized that Ahmadinejad’s
economic policies are to the right of the IMF: cutting subsidies in a
radical way, more privatization than any other post-79 government (by
selling the country to the Revolutionary Guards) and an inflation and
unemployment rate which have brought the low-income sections of the
society to their knees. It is in this regard that Musavi’s politics
needs to be understood in contradistinction from both Ahmadinejad and
also the other reformist candidate, i.e. Karroubi.

While Karroubi went for the liberal option of differentiating people
into identity groups with different demands (women, students,
intellectuals, ethnicities, religious minorities, etc), Musavi
emphasized the universal demands of ‘people’ who wanted to be heard
and counted as political subjects. This subjectivity, emphasized by
Musavi during his campaign and fully incarnated in the rallies of the
past few days, is constituted by political intuition, creativity and
recollection of the ‘79 revolution (no wonder that people so quickly
reached an unexpected maturity, best manifested in the abstention from
violence in their silent demonstrations). Musavi’s ‘people’ is also
easily, but strongly, distinguished from Ahmadinejad’s anonymous
masses dependent on state charity. Musavi’s people, as the collective
appearing in the rallies, is made of religious women covered in chador
walking hand in hand with westernized young women who are usually
prosecuted for their appearance; veterans of war in wheelchairs next
to young boys for whom the Iran-Iraq war is only an anecdote; and
working class who have sacrificed their daily salary to participate in
the rally next to the middle classes. This story is not limited to
Tehran. Shiraz (two confirmed dead), Isfahan (one confirmed dead),
Tabriz, Oroomiye are also part of this movement and other cities are
joining with a predictable delay (as it was the case in 79
revolution).

History will prove who the real participants of this movement are but
once again we are faced with a new, non-classical and unfamiliar
radical politics. Will the Western left get it right this time?

* The title is a reference to Michel Foucault’s 1978 writing on Iran’s
revolution: “What are the Iranians dreaming about”

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