zeitgeist

The focus on fighting on both fronts is disingenuous, in that it plays down the nuclear threat  to Iran and has untold global repercussions. Considering there is over a million Iraqis dead.It is sensible to highlight this by the slogan “Hands off Iran”.
To organize another campaign at the same time against the Islamic regime is playing into the hands of the enemy. Solidarity with Iranians as an oppressed people is all very well but should not be linked with the
utter insanity of US plans. Why not just demand international communism and show solidarity with more people .

A Hands Off Iran and international communism campaign would truly highlight the absurd nature of your dual campaign. Regime change begins at home.

What is frustrating the political naivety that cant see that US shock and awe tactics may kill millions of Iranians.
However,HOPI still makes regime change in Iran both an imperialist and communist goal open to the charge of neo-con puppetry as it augments the cold war role of
western propaganda whose main goal is to demonise Iran and its people. A people in need of help from the West. A west which should be highlighting its own torturers and war criminals and potential war crimes.
Indeed, solidarity with the people of Iran in the war mongering nations should focus mostly on the antics of the warmongerers.
Why demonise  Iran? That is
the job of the imperialist war machine.
What is solidarity? Getting your priorities right. At a time of war beating of ones own country and its allies. I think it its  is the highest duty of communists to defend the national sovereignty of the target nation and it is more courageous to do this that than to act as cheerleader to the imperialist propaganda machine, which plays the reactionary role of underplaying the actual US threat.

The Relevance of the Irrelevant. The return of the Utopians.

Posted by erasmus on 14 Sep 2007 | Tagged as: bees, cell phone masts, Bleak Thursday, iran

The Relevance of the Irrelevant=none.

Never before in the field of world history has the Marxist left(except perhaps armed Maoists [link to letter entitled “Irrelevance”]) been so isolated from mainstream events. Marx provided a theory of human evolution which culminated in the prediction of the development of capitalism into socialism. Compared to the utopianism of Moore and Owen’s views, Marx’s theory had appeal as it championed science over wish lists or voluntarism. This appeal to reason attracted brilliant minds to the ideas of socialism, most notable of these being Lenin, the most prominent leader of the Russian Revolution. Moreover than the Russian Revolution which turned out to be a disaster for the cause of socialism apart from the limited consolation that it showed a revolutionary insurrection to be possible. Lenin produced a theory of imperialism which at least recognised that capitalist dominance of the working class was at its acutest as super exploitation of colonies.

This is a backdrop to the decline of the British empire, which led to US hegemony of the world economy. The rising unipolar world was the primary contradiction, that the left tended to miss. The focus on the nature of the Soviet Union and its place as the world revolutionary centre, tended to push the perceived role US imperialism into the background. Only practical events brought the US into any sort of focus after World War II, Cuba, Vietnam, Yugoslavia, Iraq and Iran. All of these events have proven the left (trapped in the cold war) theoretically more backward than Lenin, who opposed the fetishizing of narrow trade union, or bread or butter issues and had no qualms in seeing all anti-imperialist forces as fundamentally progressive objectively despite supposed and actual reactionary subjective identities, by recognising the main enemy is at home.Not by saying ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’ but by noticing that two people firing at the same enemy are practically on the same side, and perhaps should not fire at one another .

Also in the same vein, that death squads against the people are objectively on the same side as the main enemy no matter what flag they carry. The refusal of the left in the “big imperialist” countries to recognise false flag terrorism has objectively sided it with imperialism as it defends the culprits from prosecution by ignoring the need for a new investigation.It sides with the war criminals. This has undoubtedly contributed to the growing irrelevance of left ”opposition”.

Lenin also respected national sovereignty, and wrote, “To imagine that social revolution is conceivable without revolts by small nations in the colonies and in Europe, without revolutionary outbursts by a section of the petty bourgeoisie WITHOUT ALL ITS PREJUDICES [italics in original], without a movement of the politically non-conscious proletarian and semi-proletarian masses against oppression by the landowners, the church, and the monarchy, against national oppression, etc.–to imagine all this is to REPUDIATE SOCIAL REVOLUTION. So one army lines up in one place and says, “We are for socialism”, and another, somewhere else and says, “We are for imperialism”, and that will be a social revolution! Only those who hold such a ridiculously pedantic view would vilify the Irish rebellion by calling it a “putsch”.

The ridiculously pedantic , puritanical views of the modern left have similar origins in economism which treats workers and their possible allies as blank slates, or tabla rasa, that can be shaped into the imaginary ready made socialist man . Here the left have returned to utopianism. Marxism as presently expoused has become its opposite, another irrationalism. It is no longer a coherent entity that can provide unity around a programme, based on the vanguard formula, or democratic forms which only disguise vanguardism(including anarchism).The crucial factor for revolution is the level of political culture. In an age where Reason itself is an endangered species, we have to look at the world from a more rudimentary point of view. Not because we prefer things to be this way or that education and culture should be denied or not indeed promoted but there is what sci-fi fans might call a ”disturbance in the force”. In Marxian terms, it might be put as a serious rupture from the schemata (or eschatology) of historical materialism as a theory of evolution of society as the movement of various modes of production, from the realm of ‘necessity’ to the realm of freedom. Quite simply this is the introduction of ecological crisis into the process of human survival.

Castro, alone, on the left, seems to recognise something of the severity of what is going on! He talks of the internationalisation of genocide. Not only do we have the, nuclear threat to Iran, but the threat to the bees from what looks ever to be influenced by electronic smog as alternatives are discounted, which could spark an ecological chain reaction of extinction level proportions. We have an ever increasing intensity of power of electromagnetic waves being emitted by electronic devices which have been shown in most studies to be injurious to human health . There is a hope that the slowly unravelling economic crisis can bring people out of their slumber and think about the world more deeply.The picture is bleak but the first step must be to look, (and for the left)beyond irrelevant utopias.