Greetings Economists, Let's examine the differences. On Sep 1, 2006, at 10:23 AM, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
Ervand Abrahamian says that "Khomeini is to the Islamic Revolution what Lenin was to the Bolshevik, Mao to the Chinese, and Castro to the Cuban revolutions"
Doyle; The Communists were materialists, and Khomeini was not. One of the ways Lenin would have rejected this subject matter is to say Fideism. Or more recently I suppose Psychologizing. Over all Islam and Judaism are cousins of the book, and of a theory of mass mind that comes out of producing knowledge through text. Instead of rejecting Psychologizing as more or less speculating with no material basis for realistic action, Religions based upon Text based Knowledge production utilized 'rules of thumb' about knowledge production to advance community social organization to larger scales than were possible on the more restricted Pagan community structures dependent upon face to face knowledge production of say Thor, or Jupiter, or Athena and so on. So Khomeini and other religious leaders don't accept the limitations that say Lenin would put down as a materialist about idle metaphysical speculation of knowledge production. That said Yoshie makes the point that Khomeini led a profound social revolution in Iran on the level of Lenin in Russia. Now we know Lenin's revolution eventually evolved into the current Russia from the Soviets. And the Chinese as well have evolved from the Soviet model. So there is lacking in the 'theory of the mass mind' in Communist methods of some sort of materialist theory of knowledge production, or Khoneini's idle metaphysical Islamic speculation about god heaven and so on that still can parallel to Socialist methods seize State power. What is lacking is what produced a vast social 'cohesion' capable of pulling down the Shah and now defying the U.S. military power in a context of more developed worlds mass media and propaganda apparatus. At least part of that is how the state allows a non materialist social cohesion to function in the framework of the state roughly at least as well as George Bush does in the U.S, but that Socialist are barred from doing with the present tools. For example, the segregation of men from women in Iran via religious traditions is not Socialistic view of social equality. Where Marx sees the whole of the working class, Islam knowledge practice mostly sees men and women apart in terms of how knowledge is shared. It's the inability to realistically in an economic sense materially express what knowledge production does that makes it difficult for Marxist to create an irreversible Socialist or Communist culture. What I mean by irreversible, to not reverse back into Capitalism. While I'm not really interested in trying to get the 'spirit' into Marxist, I am interested in seeing what we can do with "knowledge" production to equalize knowledge for all workers. The segregation of women in Islam is not a Socialist goal. What knowledge are we talking about? Social cohesion knowledge. Not the knowledge of a member of the party gains by participating in party activity, but the larger issue of how all people connect via brain work. George Bush is pursuing a roughly similar goal of complete U.S. empiric control of the globe. A planetary super state demands forms not present in the current global division of power. I agree that idle speculation about theoretical social cohesion via say a religious dogma yields more or less rubbish. What can we say about the current state of humanity? Most mass media is not interactive, but we know enough about knowledge production to start building some sorts of interactive mass media like video games. Or more text based business tools like word processors, spreadsheets and so on. Most of class relations are built upon what I think of as the bottle neck of interactivity in humans of face to face knowledge sharing. The first level of face to face knowledge sharing is the family. Beyond that the much more nebulous group cohesion of racism and sexism or of party membership broadly function mostly because of the mass media spreading information about the knowledge of one or the other forms of social cohesion through the universal coverage of one-to-many media. And the mass media is not interactive, or in common technical terms the mass media is one-to-many knowledge production. Thus leaving out of the process how knowledge is shared in the whole group of people who get it. Thus making it impossible to get past the bottle neck to realistically construction face to face like social cohesion on the global scale. In other words what is irreversible in Socialism? What is it that prevents reversion to Capitalism? Social cohesion of Socialism depends upon precisely the primitive of what face to face produces in the family. Socialism posits the large scale cohesion of the whole working class, and the means to 'see' that is to understand what human cohesion does on a small scale writ global. In other words face to face knowledge needs to be produced on the global scale. Capitalism cannot do this for a variety of reasons. For example, the concept of intellectual property prevents them from building social cohesion. The rich must own intellectual property prevents them from constructing interactive information that coheres people. They are though forced to make big business with interactive tools to globally do business, so reality impinges on Capitalists as well. It is possible for them to envision profits in file sharing, but that clashes with their current system of business plans. For them it means revolution of the current arrangement to change intellectual property to interactive knowledge production. Whereas for Socialist the 'whole' working class is the primary knowledge production unit. But the practice founders upon the reality of how to share knowledge in the masses in a face to face way. Grid computing suggests breaking the barriers of human to human methods of interactivity. So does Google Search engine server farms with huge massively parallel processing of information so that all text based knowledge is being united by automation. Never the less, as Yoshie bravely has pointed out, for the time being Socialist are foundering upon the border of what social cohesion means in an automated knowledge production economy. The best single phrase that summarize the foundering is how sectarianism hobbles developed world leftist into impotent isolation. There is not a competent materialist theory of social cohesion for the whole working class. The apparent goals of Google have not arisen as yet in the developed world left. thanks, Doyle Saylor
