On 9/2/06, Doyle Saylor <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
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 not so much Islam per se as Iran itself that is a homosocial society anyhow, like many other parts of Asia, including generally irreligious Japan. Iran, too, has gotten secularized, due to increasing development, urbanization, proletarianization, and so on, so, in the near future, it will probably either drop Islamism or reform Islam to end de jure gender segregation where it still exists, but the basic homosocial organization of society will probably outlive that change. Homosocial societies have their charm.
In other words what is irreversible in Socialism? What is it that prevents reversion to Capitalism?
Very difficult but important questions. Historically, the vanguard for restoration of capitalism in socialist society have been either the bureaucratic power elite themselves or dissident intellectuals (who compared their station in socialist life with that of their counterpart in capitalist life and found the former wanting) or both. Yiching Wu's "Rethinking 'Capitalist Restoration' in China" (Monthly Review 57.6, November 2005, <http://www.monthlyreview.org/1105wu.htm>) may be of interest to you: <blockquote>Invoking the historical experience of the Chinese Revolution, William Hinton conveyed the Maoist thesis of "bourgeois restoration" in the vivid metaphor of revolutionary prairie fire: A single spark can start a prairie fire. And so it...ignited a prairie fire that carried all before it, bringing more change to China in a few decades than two millennia had previously brought forth. But now the fire has burned itself out, and, as the flames die down, it becomes apparent that change has not been deep. Fire burned the foliage off, but the roots of the old civilization survived and are now sending up vigorous sprouts that push aside and overwhelm, in one sphere after another, all revolutionary innovations.33 Hinton's colorful metaphor, however, is premised on a problematic conception of historical determination, namely, the determination of the present by the residual forces of the past. Revolutions certainly do not eliminate the past, they write on top of it. Yet the revolution also produces its own contradictions. Socialism is not just built on top of the surviving deposits of capitalism, feudalism, or whatever. The remnants of the past enter into the new society and are necessarily conditioned by its newly created antagonisms and contradictions. The dead weight of past history cannot be easily restored backwards. Or it will perhaps take much longer—certainly longer than the two or so decades taken by the very speedy "restoration" in China. The extraordinary development of capitalism in China today is fueled by a more powerful logic of social recomposition—it has been aided by far more efficient and expeditious means, driven by class forces that operate more from above than from below, more within than without. The ideological significance of bourgeois restoration—and the Maoist theory of class struggle that formed its nucleus—lay in their function of _diversion_ and _mystification_. By concentrating on remnants from past traditions, spontaneous petty tendencies from below, and insidious capitalist roaders and their line from within, the Maoist discourse of capitalist restoration distorted and obscured the central contradiction of post-revolutionary Chinese society.</blockquote> That -- 'By concentrating on remnants from past traditions, spontaneous petty tendencies from below, and insidious capitalist roaders and their line from within, the Maoist discourse of capitalist restoration distorted and obscured the central contradiction of post-revolutionary Chinese society" -- is an important insight. That is why I've been saying that history does not repeat itself, not even as a farce, and that believing, without evidence, that the same constellation of social forces of the past still obtained in the present makes us unable to see what's what. -- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>
