[Marxism] Iranian opposition leader: Vote should be annulled

[Mehmet Cagatay <mehmetcagatayaydin@xxxxxxxxx>]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090620/ap_on_re_mi_ea/ml_iran_election_326

TEHRAN, Iran â Opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi is repeating his demand 
that Iran's presidential vote must be annulled.

....

The worst thing that could happen to the revolutionary movement in Iran is 
annulment of the elections. This news item reminded me a short anecdote in 
Alain Badiou's latest book (The Meaning of Sarkozy) about how the movement of 
'68 was crushed with the aid of elections:

"In actual fact, what we sense here, without people really'
being able to articulate it, is that elections are at least as
much an instrument of repression as the instrument of
expression that they claim to be. Nothing produces greater
satisfaction on the part of the oppressors than to hold
elections everywhere, to impose them, by war if need be,
on people who did not ask for them. Our president has not
failed to say, about strikes for example, that we'd better
look out. Thanks to Sarkozy, strikes will be terribly electoral,
they'll need an absolute majority, with secret ballots, court
officials at the ballot box, and so on. Is this designed to
'democratize' strikes? Like hell it is! It is to make them as
difficult as possible, under the pretence that all this is to
protect the rights of the user," On this point, in any case,
we should remember May '68. There were millions of
strikers, demonstrations every day, an unprecedented
alliance between young people on different trajectories,
workers and students. The whole world was seized by the
tremendous novelty of the situation. Red flags could even
be seen in certain fashionable districts! Everywhere
enthusiasm, in other words, everywhere the hope for an
end to enslavement. And then, all that those in power needed,
in other words de Gaulle and particularly Pompidou, was to
organize elections, and we had the most massively reactionary
parliament since 1919, a real 'sky-blue chamber'. It
is beyond question that the election was the essential
recourse to dissolve and crush the movement. And it was
certainly not out of extremism, but in the fullest lucidity,
that the activists of the time cried out in the streets: 'Elections,
a con trick!' I am not saying that elections are repressive
in essence. Simply that they are incorporated into a form
of state, the capitalist-parliamentary state, appropriate for
the maintenance of the established order, and that they
consequently always have a conservative function, which
in case of troubles becomes a repressive one. All this,
which today is displayed in the clearest possible fashion,
provokes an increased feeling of impotence. If the space of
state decision only leaves us ordinary citizens with the vote,
then it is not easy to see, at least at the present time, what
routes are open for a politics of emancipation."

mÃ


      

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