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…”

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·       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’?