Something Red

Note the Soviet poster cover art as if this would compensate for the political superficiality contained within

This is going to be one of those book/movie reviews that piss people off because it is based only on a partial examination of the piece of garbage in question. So, if you don’t like “unfair” critiques, don’t read any further. Are you still here? Okay now, go on with you.

I first learned of the novel Something Red in the generally very shrewd Bookforum, the print magazine whose website is host to the links aggregated Monday through Friday by Alfredo Perez. His Political Theory Daily Review was incorporated into Bookforum a couple of years ago and is must reading.

The “red” in the title is a reference to the Goldstein family, whose lives have been touched to one degree or another by radical politics. Sigmund, the grandfather, was in the CP. His son Dennis is an erstwhile 60s radical and now middle-aged bureaucrat in the Department of Agriculture with a wife named Sharon who is a fancy dinner caterer, a teenage bulimic daughter named Vanessa and a son Ben who is heavy into drugs, sports and sex. Eventually, Ben becomes some kind of activist after entering Brandeis University. Despite the title, the book is hardly interested in their beliefs, Indeed, from everything I’ve been able to glean about this stupid novel, the real subject is food not politics, as this quote from the Bookforum review would indicate:

They’d been lying in bed watching President Carter talk about the energy crisis, and she’d opened her night-table drawer, taken out an emery board, and begun to saw at her nails. The erosion of our confidence in the future is threatening to destroy the social and the political fabric of America, Carter had said, and Sharon had turned to her husband. “Let’s have a family dinner for Ben.”

As I thumbed through the book yesterday at Barnes and Noble, I found references to food and eating on what seemed to be every other page. The New York Times, which seems to love novels or memoirs that mine the left for comic possibilities (When Skateboards will be Free, the most recent instance), fell all over itself praising Something Red yesterday:

Throughout the novel, food is an almost constant preoccupation. While Dennis’s mother is famous for her terrible meringue cookies, Sharon is an artist in the kitchen. Vanessa, at once the most heartrending and exasperating character, secretly gorges on her mother’s crab cakes and blintzes, sometimes directly from the freezer. This domestic obsession with food turns out to be as dangerous as the grain embargo at Dennis’s office. During one elegant catering job, Sharon forces Vanessa to fill in as a waitress; looking out a window while she’s preparing a flaming dessert, Sharon spots the girl crouching in the bushes, gorging on hunks of lamb and potatoes, and is so distracted she sets herself on fire. As they rush to the hospital, Vanessa’s greatest anxiety is not about her mother but about where she’ll be able to empty her stomach.

When not writing about food, either being eaten or puked back up, Gilmore’s main interest appears to be providing some kind of nostalgia trip in the spirit of Ang Lee’s recent and atrocious movie “Taking Woodstock” or the 1983 “Big Chill”, the most egregious example of 1960s exploitation. The NY Times notes:

“Something Red” is a delectable time capsule, with plenty of references to events and products, especially odoriferous ones, that plant us squarely in the moment. Love’s Baby Soft makes an appearance, as well as K-Tel records and Gunne Sax shirts.

Not the kind of thing I want to plunk $25 down for, especially after reading this in the Bookforum review:

But missing from these meticulous political portraits is any trait that comes across as quirky or even passionate. Gilmore depicts political activism without the anger, utopian visions with no hint of the peculiarities of an Abbie Hoffman or, for that matter, a Jimmy Carter. For stretches of the book, this blinkered outlook is best summed up in Vanessa’s sulky prophecy of how an upcoming parents-weekend visit to Brandeis will unfold: “It’ll just be me and bitter Dad and burnt Mom heading up to my hippie brother’s dorm to be a family. Sounds amazing, doesn’t it?”

We learn this family’s every thought, every detail they see, every fold of their flesh. But not one of these people conjures a piercing observation or holds on to an emotion for long. Vanessa, abandoned by her brother, can wake up naked on a strange campus in broad daylight after having experienced “unmitigated fear” that she had sex with his friend while tripping; within a few hours, she’s canoodling with that friend and thinking her brother looks sweet leaning on his girlfriend’s shoulder. One wishes Gilmore had made at least one character a true skinhead or a rabid feminist.

Here’s Jennifer Gilmore explaining why she decided to write such a novel:

She was inspired apparently by the example of all the “radicals”, from draft card burners to people who go to Grateful Dead concerts. I guess I’ll have to wait a long time for someone like Jennifer Gilmore to write about a real red, like me. I doubt that the New York Times will give as much space to the comic book memoir I worked on with Harvey Pekar (or even mention it at all), but I’ll bet it will be more accurate and a lot more fun to read, especially with all the great artwork.

Now, as I said, I wouldn’t waste money on this piece of garbage novel but I did take the trouble to read an excerpt from chapter one on the publisher’s website. Her questionable prose is followed by my comments in italics.

As Sharon made her way around the kitchen, she pictured each one piling paper-thin sheets of prosciutto (well, not her father, whose newly kosher regime she refused to acknowledge) on melon wedges, and spreading runny Brie on the baguette she’d baked yesterday. Imagining her family eating in the yard bordered by the lit tiki lights pleased her. More, she had to admit, than actually sitting there with them.

Ms. Gilmore should have written a book about cooking, her true métier it would seem.

Sharon hadn’t been able to focus on the speech [Carter about the American malaise], perhaps because her son’s impending departure had caused alarm, or was it a symptom of the general malaise of the country that the president was speaking about? Apathy was not like her; once Sharon had been a woman who had cared about politics deeply. Too deeply, perhaps, and this had led her to flee conservative Los Angeles, her parents’ Los Angeles, the one with her father’s balding B-movie cronies chewing cigars on the back deck and discussing the HUAC hearings. I don’t give one goddamn who goes down, they’d said. Communists? Just ask me. They’d spit names up at the sky, toward the fuzzy line of the San Gabriels. That Los Angeles. Sharon had come east to George Washington University, even though Helen said no one smart went to GW, ever, and at the end of her junior year Sharon had found herself sitting at a Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee meeting planning the Freedom Riders’ trip from Washington to New Orleans, to register voters and fight Jim Crow in each city along the way.

I think the idea that this caterer ever found herself working with SNCC is about as plausible as me catering a fancy dinner for Donald Trump.

It was 1979; only a decade and a half previously, Sharon had been pregnant with Vanessa when Louise had come to D.C. to march for jobs and freedom. As they’d entered the Mall, she handed Sharon a fistful of marbles. So horses will slip and fall and the pigs will be crushed, Louise hissed. Things could get violent, she’d said. Dennis had looked askance as he held Ben high, so he could see just how many people were standing against inequality, and Sharon remembered fingering the marbles, the feel of them pinging against one another along her hips when she moved. They’d given her a sense of reckless power, but she did not let them fall. Sharon was no revolutionary, she knew that now, but she had tried and she had cared profoundly, and she had been so furious at her father that she had fled for the East Coast, but in the end she had not defied him. Yet, she had thought that glorious day, it was not every girl who could say she carried marbles.

This paragraph epitomizes Jennifer Gilmore’s grasp of what it meant to be a “radical”: carrying marbles to a demonstration that was about as mainstream as you can get, given its sponsorship by the AFL-CIO. I assume her research on K-Tel records was more exacting.

I will conclude with an exchange between Sigmund, the grandfather who was in the CP and his son Dennis, a Department of Agriculture bureaucrat. I could write better dialog on this after drinking a bottle of cheap wine, and I might some day.

“The spell of revolution is powerful.” Sigmund wiped his mouth with a napkin. “Right, Tatiana?”

“Well, yes, I suppose it is in this family, isn’t it?” she said.

Sharon nodded and Dennis bent his head and resumed eating.

“Hmmm,” Dennis said. “You didn’t seem to think that during Vietnam.”

“That’s simply not true,” Sigmund said. “You know I was as against the war as you were. Our methods of protest were different, absolutely. But what I’m saying here has nothing to do with Vietnam. Nothing at all. Clearly you don’t understand.”

Dennis nodded. “Well, to my generation, Vietnam defined us. But while we were rioting in the streets, your friends were inside, writing about it. It is a lot more relevant than the Bolsheviks, that’s for sure.”

“Every movement can be traced back to the Bolsheviks,” Sigmund said. “You cannot turn your back on history.”

“Well, I think I have a better understanding of Vietnam. And let me tell you something. You can’t turn away from the future either, Dad. It’s going to happen again. Because we’re giving the Soviets their Vietnam now, aren’t we? This is what will happen if—or I should say when—there’s an invasion in Afghanistan. The country will be ripped to bits. And it will never end! You know we’ve authorized funding for arming the mujahideen there, don’t you?”

“Of course this doesn’t surprise me.” Sigmund scratched his throat. “Because they are anti-communists. It doesn’t surprise me at all.”

“Well, it’s true,” Dennis said. “And I’m telling you, it will be just the same as Vietnam.”

“Dennis,” Sigmund said, leaning toward his son, “why is it always this way? We are on the same side.”

History of the Marxist Internationals (part 5, Trotskyist origins)

Except for the people still committed to the Fourth International project and to varying degrees, there is little doubt that the it has been relegated to the dustbin of history. Given its dialectical–joined at the hip–association with the USSR, it is no surprise that the decline of Stalinism globally has made its mission problematic at best. However, there were clear signs that the movement to build a Trotskyist international was doomed from the outset. In this article I want to focus on its origins and in the next on how and why it has led to so many splits and so little influence. I say this as someone who spent more than ten years in the American section of the Fourth International (or at least one of the multiple movements owing its legacy to Leon Trotsky) anxious to help people understand why a different approach is necessary. All this is building up to some parting thoughts on Hugo Chavez’s call for a fifth international in the final post in this series.

To start with, it is necessary to understand why Trotsky broke finally with Stalin and his Comintern. Just as the Second International’s failure to oppose WWI prompted Lenin to build the 3^rd international, the Communist failure to effectively challenge Hitler convinced Leon Trotsky that a new international was necessary. Up until Hitler’s triumph, Trotsky’s orientation was to the “left opposition”, a scattered band of people both inside and outside the USSR who supported Trotsky’s critique. Of course, Marxists who did not support his critique were condemned to fend for themselves. If you had agreed with Bukharin, for example, there would have been few compelling reasons to join a current you were ideologically at odds with. Leaving aside a myriad of other problems, the Trotskyist movement never questioned the wisdom of founding a world movement that grew out of a faction in Soviet Communism. The strongly doctrinal cast of the movement in its infancy would shape its trajectory in years to come—unfortunately.

Perhaps Trotsky had no other option except to create a new movement given the enormity of the disaster that Stalinism was responsible for. Needless to say, the Social Democracy was also at fault, but few people in the early 1930s had many illusions in the reformists’ ability to do much more than defend the immediate interests of trade union members.

In the late 1920′s, Stalin had embarked on an ultraleft course in the USSR and the C.P.’s tended to reflect this ultraleftism in their own strategy and tactics. In Germany, this meant attacking the Socialist Party as “social fascist”. The Socialist Party was not revolutionary, but it was not fascist. A united SP and CP could have defeated fascism and prevented WWII and the slaughter of millions. It was Stalin’s inability to size up fascism correctly that led to this horrible outcome.

In 1931 the Nazis utilized a clause in the Weimar constitution to oust a coalition government in the state legislature of Prussia. Prussia was a Social Democratic stronghold.  The Communists at first opposed the referendum, but their opposition took a peculiar form. They demanded that the Social Democrats form a bloc with them at once. When the Social Democratic leaders refused, the Communists put their support behind the Nazi referendum, giving it a left cover by calling it a “red referendum”. They instructed the working class to vote for a Nazi referendum.  The referendum was defeated, but it was demoralizing to the German working-class to see Communists lining up with Nazis to drive the Social Democrats out of office.

The first statement urging the formation of a Fourth International appeared in the Militant on September 23 September 1933. Signed by opponents of Stalin, The Declaration of Four on the Necessity and Principles of a New International made Germany into a litmus test:

The German events revealed with no less force the collapse of the Third International. Despite its fourteen-year existence, despite the experience gained in gigantic battles, despite the moral support of the Soviet state and the plentiful means for propaganda, the Communist Party of Germany revealed under conditions of a grave economic, social and political crisis, conditions exceptionally favorable for a revolutionary party, an absolute revolutionary incapacity. It thereby showed conclusively that despite the heroism of many of its members it had become totally incapable of fulfilling its historic role.

The position of world capitalism; the frightful crisis that plunged the working masses into unheard-of misery; the revolutionary movement of the oppressed colonial masses; the world danger of fascism; the perspective of a new cycle of wars which threatens to destroy the whole human culture – these are the conditions that imperatively demand the welding together of the proletarian vanguard into a new (Fourth) International. The undersigned obligate themselves to direct all their forces to the formation of this International in the shortest possible time on the firm foundation of the theoretical and strategic principles laid down by Marx and Lenin.

It was probably a harbinger of future developments that two of the four signatories would eventually drop out of the project to form a new international. Like Andres Nin and others who had initially gravitated to Leon Trotsky politically, they decided that a broader movement was necessary including ties with the Right Opposition in Russia made up of Bukharin’s supporters. The declaration, however, made it clear that it would not accept partial solutions of the “three and a half” variety:

No less energetically must be rejected the theory of the Austro-Marxists, centrists and left reformists who, under the pretext of the international character of the socialist revolution, advocate an expectant passivity with regard to their own country, thereby in reality delivering the proletariat into the hands of fascism. A proletarian party that evades the seizure of power under the present historic conditions commits the worst of betrayals.

The documents of the founding conference of the Fourth International in 1938 can be read here. There you will also find some useful commentary including a 1946 article by John G. Wright (the party name of Joseph Vanzler, an American Trotskyist born of Jewish parents in Russia in 1902). Wright died at the age of 54, about a decade before I joined the SWP and I always heard him referred to in reverential terms. This was the first time I ever looked at his article on the formation of the Fourth International and a passage sticks out like a sore thumb in a way that it wouldn’t have when I was a Trotskyist militant. He writes:

One of Trotsky’s favorite sayings was: “It is not the party that makes the program; it is the program that makes the party.”

Precisely because of this primary stress on program, Trotsky’s decade of struggle to reform the Third International became in the most direct sense the preparation for the Fourth International.

This approach—and it is the only correct one—obviously invests ideas with extraordinary importance. Indeed we can say without any fear of exaggeration than none attach greater significance or power to ideas than do the revolutionary Marxists. Like Marx, Engels and Lenin, Trotsky regarded ideas as the greatest power in the world.

Lenin’s Bolshevik Party valued its ideas as its most potent weapon. Bolshevism demonstrated in action, in 1917, that such ideas, once embraced by the masses, become convened into an insuperable material force.

Here is how Trotsky formulated this approach in a personal letter to James P. Cannon:

We work with the most correct and powerful ideas in the world, with inadequate numerical forces and material means. But correct ideas, in the long run, always conquer and make available for themselves the necessary material means and forces.

Trotsky’s ideas derive their power from the same source as Lenin’s: both are the correct expression of the struggle of living forces, first and foremost of the liberationist struggle of the proletariat. They represent not only the product of profound theoretical analysis (without which it is impossible to understand reality) but also the unassailable deductions from the march of history for the last hundred years (that is to say, from 1848 when Marx and Engels first expounded the laws governing the movement of capitalist society).

There are ideas and ideas. As against the correct ideas of Marxism, there is also the power of the false ideas. The former serve the interests of progress, of the world working class; the latter only play into the hands of reaction and deal untold injury to workers all the oppressed and to society as a whole. False ideas, like correct ones, do not fall from the sky. They, too, express one of the living forces engaged in struggle, namely: the camp of the counter-revolutionary bourgeoisie.

To start with, you will note that there is a much greater emphasis on ideas than you would expect normally from a revolutionary organization. You will also note that the program is practically synonymous with ideas. This is, of course, a formula for the launching of just about every “Marxist-Leninist” group, and Trotskyists in particular, ever since the 1930s. A set of ideas, or program, is identified and then you go out and recruit people to those ideas, in most instances through a newspaper like the Militant. Once you establish a nucleus of a vanguard party on those ideas, it will greatly enhance your changes for leading a revolution.

When I was having discussions with Peter Camejo in the early 1980s about a different way of thinking about these questions, he said something to me that I will always remember. He said that a program, or set of ideas, cannot exist in advance of a revolutionary struggle. It is the struggle itself that will help to shape the program. Activity (or praxis, to use a fancy word) is necessary to help clarify our ideas. There is a constant dialectical interaction between ideas and activity and to formulate a program based on “the march of history” in advance of such activity will inevitably lead to idealistic and sectarian problems. Of course, Peter said this with a lot more panache than I ever could but I think I am presenting them correctly. Here is another way to put it, something I heard from an old-timer who showed up for a talk by David Harvey to the Brecht Forum years ago. He said that the left should not get stuck in the position of the guy who once said that he planned to become a capitalist as soon as he could put together a couple of million dollars.

Probably the best thing—and the least idealistic—that came out of the founding conference was the Transitional Program, which had the merit of being grounded in the living struggles of the 1930s. This founding program was based on the need to avoid the minimalism of the Social Democracy and the kind of maximalism that the CP during its “third period” adhered to. Transitional meant that slogans would be based on the here and now but would have a logic that led to the question of which class would rule society. As Trotsky put it in his discussion of the sliding scale of wages, a demand very much in sync with conditions today, what might appear reasonable to the average worker is anathema to the bourgeoisie:

Under the menace of its own disintegration, the proletariat cannot permit the transformation of an increasing section of the workers into chronically unemployed paupers, living off the slops of a crumbling society. The right to employment is the only serious right left to the worker in a society based upon exploitation. This right today is left to the worker in a society based upon exploitation. This right today is being shorn from him at every step. Against unemployment, “structural” as well as “conjunctural,” the time is ripe to advance along with the slogan of public works, the slogan of a sliding scale of working hours. Trade unions and other mass organizations should bind the workers and the unemployed together in the solidarity of mutual responsibility. On this basis all the work on hand would then be divided among all existing workers in accordance with how the extent of the working week is defined. The average wage of every worker remains the same as it was under the old working week. Wages, under a strictly guaranteed minimum, would follow the movement of prices. It is impossible to accept any other program for the present catastrophic period.

Property owners and their lawyers will prove the “unrealizability” of these demands. Smaller, especially ruined capitalists, in addition will refer to their account ledgers. The workers categorically denounce such conclusions and references. The question is not one of a “normal” collision between opposing material interests. The question is one of guarding the proletariat from decay, demoralization and ruin. The question is one of life or death of the only creative and progressive class, and by that token of the future of mankind. If capitalism is incapable of satisfying the demands inevitably arising from the calamities generated by itself, then let it perish. “Realizability” or “unrealizability” is in the given instance a question of the relationship of forces, which can be decided only by the struggle. By means of this struggle, no matter what immediate practical successes may be, the workers will best come to understand the necessity of liquidating capitalist slavery.

The problem for the Trotskyist movement is that the Transitional Program, as dynamic as it first appears, can become idealized in the hands of a sectarian group. For example, during the 1960s when the U.S. was boiling over with discontent over the war in Vietnam, the Workers League, a small group connected to Gerry Healy’s International Committee for the Fourth International, decided that “for a labor party” was a transitional demand around which all struggles should be subordinated. While the demand for a labor party did not occur in the Transitional Program in 1938, it had raised to that level in discussions between Trotsky and James P. Cannon in Mexico City that year. For the Workers League, it had become a mantra. They would show up at antiwar conferences in 1968 composed mainly of college students who knew little about the trade union movement and shriek at them for not voting in favor of their resolution. Now, nobody would say that the Workers League was the most crazy group in the Trotskyist movement (a topic taken up in my next post) but they were clearly in the running, the “sweet sixteen” to put it in NCAA terms (go, Butler).

Not having read the Transitional Program for perhaps 35 years, I took a fresh look at it this morning in order to help me prepare this post. I was startled to see a section titled Against Sectarianism that must have missed my attention in the past. But it must have been on Peter Camejo’s mind when he wrote an article with the same title in the early 1980s analyzing the SWP’s problems. I was struck by Trotsky’s conclusion, made just after his dismissal of his “centrist” opponents, the worst offenders:

However, sectarian tendencies are to be found also in our own ranks and display a ruinous influence on the work of the individual sections. It is impossible to make any further compromise with them even for a single day. A correct policy regarding trade unions is a basic condition for adherence to the Fourth International. He who does not seek and does not find the road to the masses is not a fighter but a dead weight to the party. A program is formulated not for the editorial board or for the leaders of discussion clubs, but for the revolutionary action of millions. The cleansing of the ranks of the Fourth International of sectarianism and incurable sectarians is a primary condition for revolutionary success.

With those words in mind, I wonder what Trotsky would have made of the movement based on his ideas—the topic of my next post.

My youtube maiden voyage

Why I am getting into youtube:

Jeff Sommers talk on Latvia, part one:

Jeff Sommers talk on Latvia, part two:

My youtube channel

An Iranian socialist replies to Yoshie Furuhashi

Yoshie says in an article titled Jacobinism with Islamic Characteristics on her blog Critical Montages:

The power elite of Iran don’t care about Islam as such (Islam, after all, is diverse, and some varieties of it, as conceived by Nader Hashemi, Mohsen Kadivar, Ahmad Sadri, and the like, are perfectly compatible with liberal democracy). What they care about is their revolution and their republic and their ideology (in which Islam does play a part but an increasingly smaller one). As IRGC General Mohammad Ali Jafari reportedly said:

حفظ نظام جمهوری اسلامی ایران از ادای نماز واجب‌تر است

They love their politico-economic order much more than prayers.

Yoshie tells us that the Iranian ruling class doesn’t care that much about Islam but cares about their ideology, their 1979 revolution, and their republic. Yoshie tells us the ruling class loves their politico-economic order (you bet, especially the economic order).

Yoshie doesn’t know that revolution cannot be restricted to the ruling class. Would caring about the 1979 revolution require the Iranian government to kill those revolutionary citizens who stand up to guns for social justice? Would liking the politico-economic order require the government of Iran to imprison worker-activists such as Mansoor Osanloo or Farzad Kamangar? It’s as if the late Shah, who killed 1979 revolutionaries, had hypothetically claimed that he is restricting political activism and killing activists to take care of the Constitutional Revolution which occurred several decades before 1979 revolution.

The 1979 revolution took place thirty years ago and people from different sociopolitical backgrounds (leftists, secularists, Islamists, Islamonationalists, etc) participated in it and made it possible with their blood and sacrifices. Thus the revolution does not belong to the ruling class as Yoshie or Rafsanjani claim. Rafsanjani and many other political figures of Iran make such statements to justify their financial and political monopolies, and to justify why Iranians are divided to insiders (khodi-ha) and outsiders (gheire-khodiha). The insiders are those who, as Yoshie describes, supposedly care about the 1979 revolution and like the politico-economic monopoly while the outsiders are the second class citizens who are ironically in the streets of Iran trying to use the experiences of 1979 revolution to demand sociopolitical justice similar to what they demanded in 1979 revolution or even before that in the Constitutional revolution.

The revolution took place thirty years ago and was followed by the rise of a counter-revolutionary government. It’s simply fabricated propaganda to call the government of Iran revolutionary: a government that has used international crises such as the American hostage crisis, the Iran-Iraq war, and more recently the fuss around nuclear energy and the Holocaust slogans to confiscate power, imprison and kill political activists, to prevent workers from forming unions, etc. Yoshie naively finds the cause of independent workers like Masoor Osanloo illegitimate because Freedom House published a letter in their support. Mansoor Osanlo sought for his fellow coworkers an independent union and wages equal to the poverty level (instead of one third the poverty line) and as a result is now imprisoned in the notorious Gohardasht jail. Yoshie, could you explain for us why the ruling class of Iran, to protect the “revolution,” imprisons class conscious workers such as Farzad Kamgar and Mansoor Osanloo? Do the workers endanger government’s revolutionary ideals? Could you explain why, Yoshie?

In this video, Mansoor Osanloo, says “I participated in 1979 revolution to have independence, freedom and social justice”.

As we see, contrary to what Yoshie, Rafsanjani, or Shariatmadari tell us, Iranian people claim ownership of the 1979 revolution and often ask what happened to those goals for which they sacrificed their freedom and lives. The government tries to protect itself from the “danger” of workers, human rights and women’s rights activists, non-state journalists, etc. not for the sake of the 1979 revolution but for their financial interests and political power.

Yoshie says “What they care about is … their republic.” Whose republic? The Iranian government’s republic? To save the republic from the citizens of Iran? Is that why many people, such as worker activists, housewives and journalists, are imprisoned to save the republic for the elite? Which kind of republic belongs to the ruling elite and must be protected from people of all social classes? Which kind of republic murders hundred and imprisons thousands in response to peaceful protests against a fraudulent election?

Yoshie calculates from the back of her napkin that 20% of Iranian people are liberal—without providing the napkin or, hell, just a few of her equations. I am grateful that such a super confident person like Yoshie didn’t tell us 21.012% of Iranian people are liberals and she just gave us a rounder number from her back of the napkin calculation. Yoshie’s equations have nothing to do with the sociopolitical events of Iran. For instance, in 1997 almost 80% of the eligible voters participated in the presidential election and 70% of them voted for Mohammad Khatami although Khatami was censored in TV pre-election programs in favor of a principalist candidate named Ali Akbar Nategh Noori. Khatami’s main promises were the liberalization of the country’s political atmosphere, more freedom for the media and the arts, and more social freedom. In 2001, Khatami was again reelected although people lost their faith in the possibility of meaningful reform from within the establishment. The martyrs and imprisoned of the Green Movement are from different social classes and econo-political beliefs but they all meet each other when it comes to sociopolitical justice and freedom. Iranian leftists try to bring economic justice into the agenda of the Green Movement instead of following Yoshie’s suggestion which is asking everyone to be apolitical and wait a couple decades so that the passing of time takes care of the injustices in Iran.

It’s very orientalist of Yoshie to think that it takes the majority of Iranians a couple decades to discover the pain of having a dear one in jail, being tear gassed, being batoned, or knowing someone who has been brutally killed. Would it take a couple decades for Mansoor Osanloo’s wife to feel the pain and injustice of having her innocent husband imprisoned? Would it take a couple decades for the family of Ramin Ramezani, a Green movement protester and working class soldier who was killed during the election protests, to feel the pain of injustice? Would it take a couple decades for the mother of Farzad Kamangar, a teacher, to feel the injustice of having her innocent son in death row? I don’t think so. Yoshie’s mistake is underestimating the Iranian people and thinking only 20% of them have problems with human rights violations, economic disparities and government corruption.

Imposing harsher economic sanctions or invading Iran would be outrageous since it would cause huge human suffering for the people of Iran. Economic sanctions or military invasion of Iran by US-Israel would have a negative effect on the democratic movement of Iran, and would in fact empower the hardliners and destroy the justice and democracy movement of people. The economic sanctions on Iran is meant to remove the regional influence of the Iranian government. It seems that the suffering of the people of Iran has been considered unimportant by the imperialist states. The worst immorality of the “international” community is the transparent lie that harsher sanctions or an invasion would be meant to help Iranian people or members of the Green Movement. The imperialist states fail to explain how the economic hardships caused by the sanctions, or the deleterious results of an invasion (destruction of infrastructure, damaging of environment with hazardous chemicals and loss of human lives) would help Iranian people in their struggle for sociopolitical justice and democracy.

Thus the economic sanctions or invasion of Iran is morally outrageous and strategically disastrous since it ruins the Iranian people’s movement for justice and causes huge human suffering, and not because, as Yoshie says, in a couple decades the percentage of Iranian liberals will grow. The international aggression in the forms of economic sanctions or invasion is unrelated to the growth of liberals in Iran and is not aimed at helping Iranian people with their struggle for justice or liberalization of the politics in Iran. These aggressions are purely based on imperialist motives. Activists need to oppose international aggression against Iranian people without prettifying the domestic violence against the people.

Yoshie tells us that the Iranian government’s ideology is not instilled from above and has organically grown out of Iranian history. Yoshie again makes another hollow claim without showing us the supposed calculations on her napkin. If the ideology of the Iranian government has grown organically out of Iranian history and is not instilled from above, then why has the government needed all sorts of sociocultural restrictions on Iranian people? Why did the government, one year after the revolution, shut down the universities for three years (1980-1983) and exile, expel, and imprison many scholars and students whose ideology differed from the ruling elite? As Asef Bayat explains: “… Iran experienced an ‘Islamic revolution’ without developing a pervasive ‘Islamist movement’ – one that could ‘socialise’, and connect the expectations of the people to the visions of the Islamist leadership. In the absence of such an Islamist movement, ‘Islamisation’ was then inaugurated primarily after the revolution: by the Islamic state, from above, and often through coercion and compulsion. In consequence, from the very first days of the Islamic Republic the process provoked dissent. Today’s crisis is the legacy of that disjuncture over the very meaning of the revolution.”

It’s time to stand firmly behind Iranian people and support them in their struggle against both international and domestic aggression and atrocities, instead of portraying them either as powerless puppets of US-Israel or masochists/senseless ones who enjoy or are numb to the domestic human abuses. It’s time to stop taking away the history of the socio-political struggle of Iranian people and to stop portraying them as blank canvas on which the imperialist states can write their wishes.