Re: [Marxism] WWP: Iran: What Fraud? [retry]

[J Rothermel <jayroth6@xxxxxxx>]

This is the of the best ripostes
to the WWP type of line I have seen:

(excerpt):


http://mikeely.wordpress.com/2009/06/19/a-question-over-iran-serve-the-people-or-not/

The world is full of very reactionary governments and forces who are in 
sharp hostility — but there is certainly no reason to believe that we 
(or the people generally) always just have to pick to side with one 
reactionary force over another. Sometimes the clash of oppressive forces 
create great openings through which radical, secular and even 
revolutionary forces can emerge, learn, organize and act.

The politics of “lesser evil” is often a politics of lowered sights — a 
politics so desparing of the possibility of revolution, that real, 
living, hairy, complex revolution possibilities don’t even enter the 
thinking. They are there, but you don’t even see them.

In essense, this simplistic approach is an approach that pulls toward a 
cynical view of people, for their ability to learn and develop politics 
in complex situations, and which seems rooted in a rather strange 
attraction to any ugly force in the Third World that seems somehow “hard 
line.” What kind of a world will /that /create? What kind of evaluation 
is /that/ of the forces (who are /actually /in the field)?

Some have argued that supporting the people in Iran’s streets lack a 
certain “class understanding.”

Presumably that is because the demonstration in Iran have drawn in urban 
middle class (but not so many of Iran’s working class and even less of 
the peasantry). But is that how we understand class? If “the workers” 
support a U.S. war, and “privileged college students” oppose it — should 
we be confused by that? Is that kind of crude reductionist “class 
analysis” we want to uphold?

If Iranian students and urban middle classes are the first to strike out 
against a brutal and theocratic regime, even if they bring their 
prejudices and illusions with them — is that so bad or unusual?....

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