Originally posted at “I am 77-years-old. I have two children, eight grandchildren, and six great-grandchildren…My children are scared for me. It’s just that they love me. Everyone loves the little old granny, the mother hen of all those eggs. They say ‘They’re going to send someone to kill you. They’ll put a bullet through you.’ But I tell them, ‘I don’t care if it’s two bullets.’ I’ve become fearless like that. God gave me life and He will take it away when it is His will. If I get killed, I’ll be remembered as the old lady who fought the good fight, a heroine, even, who worked for peace…Hasta la victoria siempre. That’s what I believe,”says Marinita, a lifetime resident of Oaxaca, Mexico.”
Teaching Rebellion does just that: it teaches us why the 2006 rebellion in Oaxaca, Mexico was so impressive, and is something we can all learn from. Edited by Diana Denham and the CASA Collective, Teaching Rebellion provides an overview of the uprising in Oaxaca. It also gives numerous first-hand interviews from participants, including long-time organizers, teachers, students, housewives, religious leaders, union members, schoolchildren, indigenous community activists, artists and journalists. The diverse interviews allow some of those who led themselves in rebellion to also speak for themselves. Political art is featured throughout the book alongside excellent photographs from the uprising.
I would like to answer some of the key issues raised by this AQME commentary. I will excerpt pieces of AQME below and follow each with a brief response. To see the full text of AQME, read it on the Links site.
AQFME:
“The Iranian government is “reactionary”? What are the most reactionary governments in the Middle East? Israel, Saudi Arabia, Egypt. In fact, what country in the whole Middle East is more democratic and anti-imperialist than the Islamic Republic of Iran? Syria? Morocco? Turkey? Need I continue?”
Mike Ely:
My understanding is rather sharply different. All of the countries you mention, including Iran, are deeply emeshed in the imperialist system. I don’t see any of them as any “more anti-imperialist” than the other.
Oliver North -- the CIA's go-between in the intrigues connecting Israel, Reagan, the Contras and Iran's mullahs
by Mike Ely
First on Method
In the discussion of Maliah’s post, Caleb presses again for leftist support for Iran’s theocracy by demanding a distinctive methodological approach:
“I await responses to my allegory. I hope the responses will not be more blather about details. I hope the responses will actually engage with the ideological question at hand, that being “The National Question and Self-Determination”.”
Argument by allegory + ideology constructed from classics. i.e. deducing policy from “a priori principle.”
This is a dogmatic method i think we should decline to adopt. And one that we should in general work to undermine among revolutionary people.
I think we need a flowering of concrete and materialist analysis of both general dynamics and particularities — and much less assumption that policies and insights can be lifted (mechanically) from century-old classics (that were, in their time, correctly based on much scientific “blathering about details.”)
As much as I have studied and learned from the works of earlier Marxists — Ithink we render their contributions useless if we approach them as timeless “classics” and quasi-religious revealed truths.
“A major mistake by a lot of us on the left is that we take what governments are saying to be their actual policies. The islamic governemt of Iran is a case in point:
Screams at imperialist America, yet helps it in the occupation of Iraq and Afganistan…. Screams at Zionist Israel, yet it has a behind-the-scene relationship with it.”
Father Haggerty's Wheel -- an influential syndicalist schema for organizing society (click for full effect!)
Andy Carloff:
““Marxists believe that the workers are smart enough to know they’re being exploited, but not smart enough to organize society according to their needs? I do not understand this. Workers know their terms of work better than anyone else, and I can’t imagine a top-down form of Socialism ever liberating them.”
Nando Sims:
“To put it simply: Yes, there is a huge difference between knowing you are being exploited, and knowing how to reorganize society according to our needs. A huge, vast, mind-boggling difference. I have worked with many workers who grasped (deeply) that they were exploited, yet who could not reorganize their car trunks. I say that in love (for them), and with some exaggeration, to make the point. And that is because reorganizing society according to the needs of the oppressed is a very complex, difficult and often uncharted path. the questions it poses are difficult — and often have very little to do with the workers’ ‘terms of work.’”
Andy Carloff:
“You’re asking questions that have already been answered. Anarcho-Syndicalists have already reorganized societies without the need for law, representation, or militarization. The Anarcho-Syndicalists created a world where each syndicate, or workers’ union, was considered a free, autonomous commune of producers and consumers.”
“Proletarian internationalism, not this ‘anti-imperialism of fools’… The world is bigger than America. Learn this basic fact, deal with its implications. Our revolutionary duty isn’t some bonkers Oedipal rage against Daddy Yankee that ends us up supporting a murderous, capitalist theocracy.”
Yes yes yes.
Wake up people. If the left can’t come to terms with the reality that the world is more complex than the “us” vs “them” cold-war framework we perhaps memorized in our past indoctrination sessions…. if we can’t wake up and face the reality that people’s struggles are local, complex, powerful, real, and dynamic within the larger polarized international context, then we are doomed to be a crusty tired dogmatic non-movement that is so rigid it is unable to adapt to rapidly changing circumstances of todays world. If we can’t wake up to the fact that people could be BOTH rageful at the theocracy, tired of living in oppressive bullshit, AND anti-US, anti-imperialist, deeply aware of the violent role of the US in the world, than we don’t know the people of the world at all. Have ANY of you met people from the Middle East?!
The following is an interview with S. an Iranian woman who traveled to Los Angeles for the International Women’s Day action of March 8, 2008. The interview was conducted by Michael Slate of the Red Future radio show (on Tues. 5-6 pm on KPFK FM 90.7) This interview appeared in Revolution newspaper and on the revolutionary Iranian website, 8 Mars.
S’s revolutionary experience began as a student in Los Angeles during the days when the Shah was in power in Iran (the 1970s). As the Iranian Revolution drove the Shah from power, she joined thousands of Iranian students who returned to Iran to carry forward the aims of the 1979 revolution—a revolution which through twists and turns ended up being consolidated as the reactionary Islamic Republic of Iran.
* * * * * * M.S.: Let’s start by you telling me a little about your background, where you’re from, what your family was, what you did when you were in Iran.
S.: My life story is one of the stories of many women who have lived under the woman-hating Islamic regime. Despite my awareness of the essence of the fundamentalist system, which is united with the imperialist world, I have been under oppression, and gone through what one experiences under such regimes, and I have experienced this oppression along with other women who also have experienced oppression such as this.
About 32 years ago, I—with my family who have been a political family and have fought against the Shah’s regime, which was an ally with the U.S.—came to the U.S. and continued my education.
I was a high school student when I came and I started in Santa Monica High School. And after that I went to the major of aerospace, and I applied at college for aerospace. But because of my political activism and the amount of time I was able to put into it, I wasn’t able to continue college.
M.S.: How did you become politically active?
S.: In 1976 when I came here, we enrolled in language classes, English language classes. It was called ‘ISC,’ I believe. And there, a lot of representatives from the student confederation came into these classes and talked about their views, and that’s how we were introduced to them and to what they were doing, and that’s how we got involved with them.
The following post digs into the question of what and who is the backbone and agent of radical revolutionary change in modern society. As always, the publication of this document here on Kasama does not imply agreement — but is intended to promote exploration of the important related issues. (Thanks to Libcom.org and renegado for the suggestion.)
Multitude or working class?
by Antonio Negri
Negri explains his concept of ‘multitude’ in a response to the SWP’s Alex Callinicos at the European Social Forum in Paris, 2003.
We all agree to the fact that we want to fight capital and renew the world. But I think this ain’t conceivable as a poetical process. Because the name multitude is not a poetical notion, but a class concept. When I talk about multitude as a class concept, I talk about the fact that workers today work in the same and in different ways compared to those they worked some centuries ago. The working class and its class composition are quite different in the distinct periods that followed each other since the beginning of the industrial age.
The organisation of labour has indeed damned changed from the 18th century ‘til now, as well as the political and technical class composition; and also the way the class builds up its class consciousness is extremely different. If we use the concept of working class and the concept of organisation of labour homogeneously and uniquely we’ll be mistaken profoundly.
I think that after ’68 and with the beginning of the neo-liberal counterrevolution the structure of organising labour and in consequence the organisation, the making of class composition has changed profoundly.
The factory stays no longer in the centre of value production. The value is created by putting to work the whole of society. We call multitude all the workers who are put to work inside society to create profit. We consider all the workers in the whole of society to be exploited, men, women, people who work in services, people who work in nursing, people who work in linguistic relations, people who work in the cultural field, in all of the social relations, and in so far as they are exploited we consider them part of the multitude, inasmuch as they are singularities. We see the multitude as a multiplicity of exploited singularities. The singularities are singularities of labour; anyone is working in different ways, and the singularity is the singularity of exploited labour.
We were staying in a green flat valley in the northern Rockies. A steep snow-covered ridge of mountain started to rise abruptly just a short walk from the house. At about 2 am in the morning there was a knock on the door. “Come outside. Hear this.”
We stepped out onto the wide porch, into a slight chill, and listened — looking up at that wall of mountain in black silhouette against the stars.
We waited, and there it was.
A wolf howled loud, and held its note. And then, far to the right on a different part of mountain, came a reply, mournful, searching. And then another. Over and over they howled in longing.
A wolf pack must have gotten separated during their nighttime adventures. They were seeking each other out. Howling, and moving closer to connect, in the dense woods above the valley.
Kasama received a letter from Andy Carloff and we scheduled it for posting.
In the meanwhile a whole series of commentary have broken out around anarcho-synticalism. We have added some Andy’s subsequent remarks here to this post — giving his presentation a longer, but fuller expression.
* * * * *
Greetings,
While researching Maoist and Leninist ideology online, I found myself at your webpage and reading the delightful ideas of revolution. However, I don’t share your same type of thinking in Maoism.
The political party, in our century and those past, has either been the people’s greatest enemy, or our greatest traitor. Liberal governments prohibit torture in their constitutions, and then fly prisoners to other countries to expose them to burns, hot iron, and other inventions of the Inquisition. A shoplifter of a $2 loaf of bread serves more time in prison than a CEO responsible for stealing millions from the public. America and Europe engaging in wars that actually make the civilian populations less safe. And everywhere, there is the rule of Capitalism. At one point, the land beckoned humanity, told us to come to it, to pull wealth out of it, and to make it our own — but today, it simply says “No Trespassing. Violators will be prosecuted.” This is the situation of our factories, our mines, our farms, and our entire world. No longer do men and women work these lands, because someone who owns them doesn’t see enough profit in it. Instead, they starve in the street, waving a sign that says “Will Work For Food.” This is the language of our modern era: right next to empty fields, there are those begging to farm and create their own sustenance.
It’s interesting to hear a number of progressives who immediately jumped out the box telling people that they were being duped by supporting the protests in Tehran. Many arrogantly pointed out that we were somehow carrying the mainstream party line and what we were seeing in the streets was a CIA backed operation. In fact one person hit me up and told me I should be ashamed of myself and that I was somehow pushing the mainstream party line.
What was interesting about these progressive assertions was they were in stark opposition of people who we know on the ground. People who are ordinary folks and expressed a different tale. For starters there we many who never been politically involved but had grown tired of the oppression in Iran. There’s been a student movement that’s been in the works for years. I know for myself when I visited Beirut for a conference on censorship, I ran into a number of students from Iran who had been in and out of jail for refusing to stop expressing themselves musically and culturally. They felt like too many freedoms were restricted and so the push for change has been going on for a minute. So I could easily see how folks dissatisfied with the current state of affairs would be looking take advantage of any situation that could spark some change
A good friend of mine Cristina Veran, who co-wrote the ground breaking book Women in Hip Hop, has traveled extensively around the world and was immediately intouch with many of her friends living in Tehran. She too bristled at the notion that somehow her friends and activists who were out on those streets were doing so on behest of the CIA or US covert forces. She explained that was taken place was real. Sadly too many progressives kept pushing this line as if Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was what these hundreds of thousands of young people out on the streets really wanted.
The intial push back from progressives was to point out that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s main political opponent Mirhossein Mousavi’s was not this true reformer the way the mainstream media had depicted. If anything he had a shady background and was more on the oppressive side. However, what was not included in the conversation was the fact that the average person in Tehran is much more politically astute then the average person here in the US. Hence whatever was being unveiled here about Mousavi was already widely known and understood. The rebellion on the streets was not done in the same way they might take place here in the US where folks with no political understanding may jump into the fray and roll with the momentum. There people know whats up and they clearly understood that whatever fervor directed at Mousavi was a lotbigger then him. He was a catalyst and symbol for greater possibilities but not the sole personification.
The workers of the Khodro automobile company in Iran issued the following declaration. It first appeared on The Field and has been translated by Iraj Omidvar. (Thanks to TellNoLies).
Strike at Iran Khodro:
We declare our solidarity with the movement of the people of Iran.
Autoworkers, Fellow Workers: What we witness today is an insult to the intelligence of the people, and disregard for their votes, the trampling of the principles of the Constitution by the government.
It is our duty to join this people’s movement.
We the workers of Iran Khodro, Thursday 28/3/88 in each working shift will stop working for half an hour to protest the suppression of students, workers, women, and the Constitution and declare our solidarity with the movement of the people of Iran. The morning and afternoon shifts from 10 to 10:30. The night shift from 3 to 3:30.
There is a self-deceptive politics (among some leftists) that seeks to prettify all kinds of reactionary forces that (for one reason or another) are in opposition to U.S. imperialism — including Islamic reactionaries, Kim Jung Il, “hardline” revisionists of the Li Peng and Eric Honecker type and so on.
And in the process they have a real, almost startling, hostility toward sections of the people who rise up in important if still-inarticulate ways.
My sense is that such politics arise from a despair over actually developing our own revolutionary forces — and a resigned assumption that we have no other alternative but to fall behind any forces (ugly, oppressive, reactionary or not) who (one way or another) who seem to be on America’s shit list.
This is not a uni-polar world with only one defining contradiction. Yes, we understand (and must understand) that the U.S. acts as a central pillar of world capitalism… but it is hardly the only pillar or the only reactionary force.
Kasama received news of the new album by communist rapper Sun Rise Above — here are the tracks of the album plus a video.
The new album “48 Hours Towards A Better World” from Sun Rise Above is now available for free download on this site! The album is hosted by DJ Graffiti. Production is handled by X3M, 7Wounds and Sun Rise Above.
The title reflects the fact that the entire album was written and recorded in a period of 48 hours.
If you like what you hear, spread the world – and the tracks.
A few years ago, Eminem planted ugly homophobic lyrics in his songs — grabbing attention on his way up. It was one of those too-familiar faux controversies invented by someone fighting for notoriety, and it was, at the same time, a very real moment of anti-gay expression in the culture.
As a kind of comment on the current state of hip-hop’s infamous homophobia:
Eminem sat for it — as the centerpiece of a whole new campy faux-photo-op around the new Sacha Cohen movie. Cohen’s flamboyantly “gay” character Bruno does a crotch landing on eminem’s head. The rapper pretended to storm out in fury — a faux moment of orchestrated self-mockery, hyping a movie intended to mock homophobia (in Cohen-offensive ways). This new “controversy” is, as intended, much discussed, youtube style, including here on KasamaProject.org.
Jed argues that things are not what they seem: I.e. that Eminem may have agreed to have Cohen to “drop in” on him — but certainly not in that “smack to the crack” kinda way. The storm-out, Jed swears, must be real.
Leaving all that aside. My main thought was when this happened was “The tide has sooooo turned.”
And then I asked myself — is this the thinking of “inevitability” that is so debated among gay people? Does any assumption that “the cultural battle is being won” just serve those who are still fighting hard — on the side of fundamentalism and tradition? How and how much can the tide be turned — by state decree? By religious stormtroopers? By reversals triggered by some new 9/11?
* * * * * *
For a substantive background report (not new but still worthwhile) by the Advocate on Hip Hop and homophobia….
The following piece first appeared on Counterpunch.org — and deals with a number of controversies raised. Specifically it refutes the argument that the election represented the will of iran’s people and opposes a so-called “class analysis” that insist Iran’s poor like the fundamentalist regime so the worlds Left should somehow follow suit.
We will excerpt parts of the article — and then provide the whole thing.
You Can’t Keep a Good People Down: Iranians in the Streets
By REZA FIYOUZAT
Excerpts:
“One left-seeming analysis being presented about the election results in Iran is the ‘class analysis’, epitomized by a few articles that have appeared in recent days (no names necessary, since that makes things personal, and I’m trying to keep it political here). I even heard the ‘class analysis’ (sic.) used on BBC! BBC’s approach was actually not too different from those presented by some on the U.S. left.
“Real class analysis looks for and explains historical and materialist trends in a society (‘materialist’ meaning here, containing real-social substance); all else is superficial journalism.
“Not taking into account Iran’s complex social history at all, and amazingly enough not even considering the very context of a theocratic setup as relevant, superficial journalism’s entire argument is constructed on a presupposition never examined: that Iran is just another regular country, with a generally democratic-looking system, with its own peculiar way of holding elections, which we must respect, run as best as they can (of course, they have problems, but who doesn’t?); but, all in all, there’s regular opportunity for people to express their choices, just like in the U.S. (and God know they have deep problems of their own with democracy). So, no matter how disappointed the losers in the Iranian elections, they simply ‘should bite the bullet’, and move on. At least eight people (some reports from inside Iran, claim 32) have indeed taken bullets.”
“For the ‘class’ part of the analysis, it is stated that Ahmadinejad’s constituency, beyond the ideological armed forces of Revolutionary Guards and the Basiji’s, consists of the working class, the peasantry and the poor; in short, the way more numerous classes. In other words, in this highly simplistic picture, ALL the Iranian working classes, all the peasants, and all the poor were unanimously behind Ahmadinejad.
Kasama has received the following photos from the Wednesday June 17 marches.
The accompanying note says:
“Just a few photos from yesterday’s demo in Tehran and one from Tabriz. you will notice that it is not all the green squad. Here is another link for those who read Farsi. It is the blog site of a circle of worker activists with up to date news/reports and analysis.”
The reference to “green squad” here refers to the forces raising the green color of the Islamic opposition to the current government. In other words, the note is pointing out that the demostrations include forces not operating under that banner.
The Indian state is mobilizing its forces to crush the just struggle of the tribal people of Lalgarh, West Bengal. In the last 24 hours, West Bengal’s state police and 11 companies of Central paramilitary forces have started to move towards Lalgarh.
In November 2008, the tribal people (adivasis) of Lalgarh rose up against decades of abuse by the police and goons of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), the ruling party in West Bengal. This is the same phoney “communist” party that has tried to give away peasants’ lands in Nandigram and Singur, only to be beaten back and exposed by determined struggle.
In recent years, thousands of adivasis in the Lalgarh area have been imprisoned on false charges of having ties with the Maoist insurgency. They formed the People’s Committee against Police Atrocities, which has extended its influence to 1,100 villages in the region. Led by the People’s Committee, the adivasis have driven the police and CPM cadre out of the area, burning down police camps and digging up roads to prevent the state authorities from re-entering. Activists of the Communist Party of India (Maoist) have played a leading role in the People’s Committee and in extending the struggle into new areas.
