Iran: State, Civil Society, and Social Emancipation

I - The Present Historic Moment

“our epoch is a birth-time, and a period of transition…the spirit of the time,

growing slowly and quietly for the new form it is to assume, disintegrates

one fragment after another of the structure of its previous world…”

                                                                                                                                           1

·       Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, Preface, p.75

Long before the mass discontent took the phenomenal form of a popular political uprising in recent months, the Iranian ruling powers had sensed the awakening of the repressed yet un-conforming population as the foreboding of an approaching storm.  In this, they were ahead of, and more perceptive than, the leaders of opposition who had turned inward after the failed attempts of 1990’s, under the reformist President Khatami.

The ‘silent revolution’ simmering in the depths of the collective consciousness of the critical mass, was fast reaching the surface and turning outward. A whole new movement has emerged which has educed a new reality from the old conditions in which it was present potentially. As Hegel put it succinctly, “The beginning of the new spirit is the outcome of a widespread revolution in the manifold forms of spiritual culture.” (Ph of M, p.76)

Iran Erupts, Yet Again

Nov. 4 – Today hundreds of thousands of people staged a nationwide protest on the 30th anniversary of the seizure of the US Embassy. This year, however, the tables were turned, as the mass opposition took aim, not so much against the US, as against the ruling power at home. Chanting ‘Khamenei is a murderer, his rule is null and void,’ or ‘Down with tyranny, whether that of Shah or the Leader,’ the marchers throughout Iran made it clear that despite unprecedented security measures and all the threats, they will continue to press their demands. Ironically, the marchers did voice judgment against the US, challenging Obama to take sides; ‘Obama, Obama, either with them or with us,’ because as they chanted ‘A Free Green Iran doesn’t need Nuclear Bomb.’

MARX’S ‘REQUIEIM’ FOR SCIENCE!

“The fear that there will one day be established a despotism

based on science is a ridiculous and absurd fantasy. Such a

thing could only arise in minds wholly alien to the positivist idea”

·      Claude Henry Saint Simon, L’Organisateur

“All our inventions and progress seem to result in endowing

material forces with intellectual life, and in stultifying human

life into a material force”

·      Kar Marx, Speech at the Anniversary of the ‘People’s Paper’

In his own time, Positivist circles of Comte-ist orientation had accused Marx of having advanced ‘metaphysical’ ideas that are ‘anti-science.’ In fact he himself seems to have intimated the ‘end of science.’ In face of growing conflicts within capitalism, Marx critiques Ricardo – the best classical political economist – for “naively taking this antagonism for social law of nature. But with this contribution the bourgeois science of economics reached the limits beyond which it could not pass.” (Postface to Capital, I) What social antagonisms had revealed in practice and in theory were that the scientific claim to objectivity is a sham. “It was thenceforth no longer the question whether this or that theorem was true, but whether it was useful to capital.” This then “sounded the knell of scientific bourgeois economics.” (Ibid)

'THE CASTLES IN THE AIR'

“How do you suppose to name our city?

I’ve got it! Listen – CLOUDCUKOOLAND

Imagination’s happy home,

Where Theogenes builds castles in the air”

·      Aristaphanese, The Birds

“To have one basis for life and one for science is a priori a lie”

·      Marx, 1844 Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts

What has happened to the ‘dream’ of the abolition of intellectual elites and of participatory democracy as the offspring of technological progress envisioned by the likes of John Dewey?  Isn’t it the time to finally de-throne the prophets of the techno-scientific society and the presuppositions of an ‘automatic’ age? We learned where the ‘technically sweet pursuit of nuclear science’ a la Oppenheimer has lead the to and not just with regard to his fate under McCarthy-ism but the whole genre of scientists in the first half of the 20^th century. Once the first ‘Big Bomb’ was exploded, it became obvious that they, the scientists, were last to be the consulted about its use. The myth of neutrality, therefore, turned out to have served a political concept. But when are we going to reach a universal ‘consensus’ that it isn’t just ‘Hitler’s science’ or North Korea’s or Pakistani Quadeer Khan’s science, but sciences as such that has gone to the ‘devil’?

Aspects of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Morality and Evil

“Faust: Who are you then?

Mephistopheles: Part of that force which would

Do ever evil, and does ever good.

Faust: And that conundrum of a phrase implies?

Mephistopheles: The spirit which eternally denies!

And justly so; for all that which is wrought

Deserves that it should come to naught.”

·                                                         Faust, ‘Study,’ Lines 1334-1338

“It is a great service of Hegel to have assigned to modern morality its true position.”

·                                                      Karl Marx, ‘Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right’

While the entire body of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right has much to say to the contemporary world, and while, as a totality, it remains largely unexplored, the present focus is rather narrow. The concern here is exclusively on the transition from morality to Ethical Life, specifically the subsection ‘Good and Conscience,’ paragraphs 129 to 141.

Hegel defines ethical life as “the concept of freedom developed into the existing world.” (Par. 142) The ethical is the realization of “the good” as well as “the end” of self-consciousness, and what actuates its efforts. But this ethical life is more than the subjective form and the self-determination of the will. The Ethical Life is the “absolute good,” when both the objective and the subjective moments are present. (Addition, Par. 144) By contrast, “morality” is the form of the will in general on its subjective side. The moral point of view is “defective” because it is purely abstract (Addition, Par. 138) with the End reduced to an “empty good.”

Climbing ‘the Tower of Babel’

“‘Come,’ people said, ‘let us build ourselves a City and a Tower

 with its top reaching the heaven.’ ‘This is only the start of their

 undertaking,’ said Yahweh. ‘Now nothing they plan to do will be

 beyond them.’”

·                                                                  Genesis; 11: 1-9

“They still dream of experimental realization of their social Utopias,

of founding isolated ‘phalansteries,’ of establishing ‘Home Colonies,’

 of setting up a ‘Little Icaria’ – duodecimo editions of a New Jerusalem.”

·                                                                  Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto; MECW 6: 515-516

Max Stirner, a Hegel epigone of ‘the Society of Free Men,’ was perhaps the ultimate personification of what Hegel characterized as the ‘beautiful soul.’ To Stirner, everything outside the singularity of the bare personality, dubbed ‘the Unique,’ deserved to perish. While upholding the self-certainty of the Ego, he rejected all mediations, all universals, and everything that connects the Individual to a Whole. Thus he wrote: “My concern is neither the divine nor the human, not the true, good, just, free, etc., but solely what is mine, and it is not a general one, but is ‘Unique,’ as I am unique. Nothing is more to me than myself.” (The Ego and His Own, p.41)

When Stirner chose, as the heading of a ‘Preface’ to is 1845 book the expression, “I have built my cause on nothing,” he meant to declare war not only on theology but also on philosophy. Stirner certainly knew that this expression was from Goethe’s poem ‘Vanitas, Vanitatum, Vanitas,’ but perhaps he didn’t know that this rebel without a cause exemplified precisely the type of subjectivity described by Hegel as “the son of civil society.” While passing judgment on the world, this kind of personality proclaims “all is vanity.” (Phil. of Right, Par. 140)

The Needed Revolution in Israel

"Everybody is somebody's Jew. And today Palestinians are the Jews of Israelis." These are the words of the renowned Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi when he broke with Zionism after Begin-Sharon’s complicity in the massacre of Palestinians in Sabra and Shatilla in 1982. It was also Levi who wrote in his masterpiece -- If This is a Man -- that "In Auschwitz it was not just Man but the Idea of Man that died."

Levi’s account of Holocaust found philosophic expression in Theodore Adorno’s Negative Dialectics where he poses a “New Categorical Imperative’: ‘Never Again.’ With him the Absolute comes crashing down as it is deemed to be but the equivalent of burning human flesh in the Crematoria! How could that burning Hell ever disclose a positive in the movement of the dialectics?

Heidegger, Humanism, WWII Terror, & Jewish Liberation

Dear Friend,

I always find it very difficult to check the ‘passion of the head’ at the door when running into a barrier. To find my way out and transition to the ‘head of the passion’ instead, causes much agony and consternation. In the abolition of the pain as the presence of a contradiction, there are two movements at work.

First is the ‘Ego’s’ struggle with the external source of tension. At this moment, it is mere repulsion and rejection which, however, does not reconcile the Ego with self. Second is the absorption of cleavage. Here the Ego has taken in the contradiction. The source is now wholly within. Now, at a cross road, the existential compulsion as Ego’s refuge may lead to the disgust with it all –the hell with it. Or, you suffer through and rid yourself from infestation with the ‘other,’ with what you are against, by rooting the Ego in the element of Universality! This, I believe, is also what you are yearning for when you call for a country or a world that is ‘for all of us.’

‘At the Mind’s Limit’: Gaza in Despair and Anguish!

“Those who invented neither gunpowder nor the compass
Those who never learned steam and electricity
Those who never explored the seas or the skies
But they knew the farthest corners of the land of anguish”
Aime Cesaire, Notebook of a Return to My Native Land

Gaza in Despair and Anguish!

Gaza appears to have drowned in silence for now. It has all but vanished from the headlines. The dead are accounted for, and the corpses recovered from under the rubble. Amid the devastation and mass graves, with orphans still roaming the streets for food, the Palestinians, in shock and disbelief, continue to ask: “Why?” and “How can we explain this to children?” This, they cry was “a war of extermination.” 1

The gruesome scenes and the heinous crimes of IDF soldiers have begun to generate outrage even within Israel. Testimonies, partially revealed and printed in Haarats, confirm the accounts given by Palestinians. Not only the bulldozing of homes with live civilians inside waving white flags, but certain unspeakable and obscene acts committed by IDF troops, point to an ominous development. Here is how the Guardian reporter in Zeitoun, Roy McCarthy described it:

Mass mobilization on Quds Day

September 18, 2009 – Once again the determination of Iranian people to shape their history was in display when hundreds of thousand took over the streets throughout Iran thereby transforming the officially sanctioned ‘Quds’ (Palestine) day into a day of protest against the enemy at home.

In addition to the chants of “down with the dictator,” the most popular slogan was “dictator, dictator, this is our last message: the green nation of Iran is ready for uprising.” Thus challenging the government that unless it resigns, their patience will soon come to end.

A Post Election Talk

• Over a month after the momentous outpouring of the masses into the streets in response to the June 12 fraudulent elections, the struggle continues. The Iranian people have not yet said their final word. Let’s keep our eyes and ears attuned to their struggles, and have our solidarity at the ready.

• As the events of this Thursday, commemorating the 10 anniversary of the assault on student dormitories, displayed so vividly, the next phase in their quest for freedom has begun in earnest.

• This past week, once again the world became witness to the bravery and creativity of the embattled people of Iran. This at a time when the reign of terror unleashed against the freedom fighters had cast doubt, among some, about the possibility that the mass movement could re-emerge in full force in face of a veritable martial law.

40th of Neda Agha Soltan

TEHRAN- JULY 30, 2009 -- On the 40th day marking the murder of Neda Agha Soltan and other slain, tens of thousands came out to mourn and to protest in a bold and creative display of peoples’ power. In scorching 100F heat, the ban on public gatherings and road closures set up by the police leading to Beheshteh Zahra mega cemetery, people were determined to get there. They came early, by metro, taxi on foot and even on wheelchair for a 4PM event. Many were turned away. The security forces too were present in full gear and ready to battle, prompting the gathering crowd to chant “We are children of war, fight and we’ll fight back.” While Neda’s mother was barred from attending, the mother of another slain youth had this to say: “Our children died in the name of freedom. Those who killed them were cowards.” They were chanting: “Neda is not dead, government is dead,” or “Referendum, Referendum, this is our demand.” Then they started chanting against the ‘supreme leader’ and his overthrow. Basiji forces using tear gas, batons and even live ammunition, attacked the demonstrators, wounding and arresting many. All this captured on video. You can see them on: (http://www.youtube.com/user/onlymehdi#play/uploads/70/Spft7nJhT94)

This event was to be followed by a 6PM rally at Tehran’s Grand Mosalla Center. Government denied permit for it but people came regardless. The area resembled an occupied military zone. Streets were closed, helicopters overhead, and tear gas in the air. And yet this turned out to be the most successful display of public opposition lasting late into the night, and even then, only moved to the roof tops. As one eyewitness report says: “I saw a look in many people’s faces that I had not seen since the week after the election; a look that said ‘we can win this’.” Amidst the beatings, people were holding their ground and chanting “Down with this hypocritical government” or “the government of the coup, resign, resign.”

The movement is constantly evolving, and adapting to both find an open venue to protest and to thwart the security apparatus. Thus instead of a single location, demonstrations were wide spread throughout the city. They had stretched the security forces thin from the cemetery, an hour’s drive south to the center of the city. In a slogan, reminiscent of 79 Revolution, but adapted for today, they were calling for “Independence, Freedom, Iranian Republic.” Moreover, protests are nationwide and held simultaneously in Shiraz, Esphahan, Mashad, Rasht, Ahwaz, Arak and others. As the LA Times Borzou Dargahi reported, among the demonstrators, the spirit seems to be rising. He quotes a young participant as saying: “We cannot foresee any reconciliation between the two camps. So, we go for the collapse of the entire system in the long run.”