On 10/28/06, Jim Devine <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
To my mind, it's not for me to decide whether the people of Iran (or a
majority group such as women) need a revolution. That's their
decision.
However, talking about revolution _as a possibility_ as part of trying
to understand the situation seems much more reasonable in Iran than
for (say) the US. After all, Iran actually had a revolution in 1979.
On the other hand, the country I'm most familiar with, i.e., the US,
is very far from having a revolutionary situation. (Add a few more
"veries" to that sentence.)
Further, the line between reform (raising the minimum wage) and
revolution is not absolute. Reforms can slowly add up to revolution.
Looking at Nepal and Venezuela is instructive. Today, people on the
Left, even those who come from the classically Maoist tradition like
the CPN (Maoist), are not trying to change their countries in a
classic Marxist revolutionary fashion and establish a dictatorship of
the proletariat. They appear to think that today revolutionaries
should engage, and persuade as many of the rest of their country to
engage, in a slow process of transformation. Neither of the
revolutionaries have nationalized as much of the economy as the
Iranian Revolution, which was not even led by socialists, did in one
fell swoop. That says that we live in a different era of politics
than in the era of anti-colonial and anti-neo-colonial revolutions of
the 20th century.
The Nepalese and Venezuelan revolutionaries may change their minds
later and decide that it's now time to expropriate all the
expropriators at once, but they have not gotten to that point yet, nor
is it clear if they will. It's a war of position everywhere now, even
in the most revolutionary conditions like Nepal and Venezuela.
--
Yoshie
<http://montages.blogspot.com/>
<http://mrzine.org>
<http://monthlyreview.org/>
