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)
When the newly installed regime of Ahmadinajad characterized each and every manifestation of dissent as a plot, or an attempt at ‘velvet revolution,’ it clearly understood its mandate as the force that would counter the coming of revolution. But despite all repressive measures during his first 4-year term, it had become clear that his task had remained largely unfinished. Hence the need to ‘will,’ from up top, his ‘re-election’ in 2009. Nevertheless, to many even within the traditional conservative camp, it had become increasingly obvious that Ahmadinejad was constantly fomenting social unrest. This has also lead to new fissures within the conservative ranks.
The re-emergence of the popular uprising that coalesced into a formidable and multi-dimensional social force before and after the elections of June 12, is proof that what appeared to be a ‘quiescent’ decade was in fact a process of political maturation, re-thinking and re-collection that blossomed into a sudden explosion of ideas. As one 26-year-old engineering student exclaimed: “This is our revolution. We will not give up.”3 Robert Dreyfuss, who spend ten days in Iran during the elections, also confirms that this is ‘Enghelab’ (Revolution). “It’s a word I hear over and over again from students, office workers, taxi driver and the passerby – before, during and after the election.” True, this is the revolution of a whole new generation, but older revolutionaries appreciate how these newfound forms of human solidarity are reminiscent of 1979 Revolution. They want their children to know that at its heart the revolution of 1979 was - like today's movement - a humanist one; and that Khomeini’s rise to power from within the revolution represented not its fulfillment, but its betrayal, a counter-revolution. 4
Thus what we are witnessing today is a clear break from the illusions of the reformers of the past who had primarily focused on the state itself as the locus of social change. The movements of the last decade that climaxed in the election of Khatami and even gave him a majority in the House (Majles), had clearly failed to bent the system in any way. Some of the earlier reformers had even vowed that we are not going for a ‘revolution within the revolution.’ Contrast this with Zahra Rahnavrd, who is both an activist and a thinker, and is the wife of the presidential candidate Mousavi. She proclaimed in a massive rally in down town Tehran that: “We are going to make a revolution in the revolution.” Rahnavrd also did not mince words when she called for equal rights for women, and an end to women’s harassments by the cultural police. (Ibid)
What has not been singled out but is so critical to grasp is that women have not only been the force but the reason of the movement. Indeed, the intellectual fermentation among women activists, writers, lawyers, have been ceaseless for the past thirty years. Both at home and in exile, they have been the most prolific writers since 1979, from journalism to novels, stories, memoirs, and works of art as well as theory. Perhaps one can capture a glimpse of this hunger for ideas by pointing to Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran. She tells the story of a group of her female students who gathered in her living room weekly to discuss works of Western literature. For over two years they snuck into her home, removed the veils and immersed themselves in Nabokov, Fitzgerald, Henry James and others. These encounters with the books were about the struggle to carve out a space for self-development and imagination under the crushing weight of a regime that administers every aspect of life. What is so critical to appreciate is that women’s demands goes far deeper than civil rights; it goes to the very core of new human relations. (Postel, loc. cited)
This intellectual fermentation was manifest in part also in translations of works of Hegel, Marx, Lukacs, Luxemburg, Marcuse and Dunayevskaya, to name o few. It could also be seen in conferences celebrating the 200th anniversary of Hegel’s Phenomenology, and the unprecedented popular reception of lectures by such scholars as Antonio Negri and Jurgen Habermas, among others. One observer in the West calls this “an epoch-making renaissance in political and cultural discourse.” 5 This multi-faceted and rich discourse caused such discomfort in official circles that the director of Iranian Institute of Philosophy, Dr. Avani, had to exclaim, “Of the 15 doctoral candidates at the institute, 11 are working on western philosophy. Only 4 of them are writing PhD’s on Islamic philosophy.”
As a 23-member peace making delegation, coordinated by the Fellowship of Reconciliation observed after visiting Iran in 2007, “Iran’s love of philosophy can be found outside the corridors of academia as well.” The delegation had visited a long-term care facility for veterans where they met a wheel-chaired patient who had taught himself philosophy. Everywhere they went, they saw “a deep passion for ideas, a palpable craving for intellectual dialogue…” 6
At the same time this thirst for ideas is now combined with a new political maturity. While it is true that under the impact of the ongoing struggles, reform leaders have turned to the ideals of 1979 Revolution by highlighting its unfulfilled promises 7, it is not true that the Green Movement is either monolithic or is the full expression of the entirety of the still developing social consciousness of the masses. As one student activist keenly observed, the reform leaders “do not create breakthroughs. After all, they too are part of the thirty-year power structure in Iran… What is important is the impact that his presence at that position will have on the public sphere, and the activism that it will promote and advance… So the public sphere principle does not mean we should not take advantage of historic moments.” He concludes by saying that his support for a reform leader in an election “does not blur my identity with those reformers in the power structure.” 8
However, what is new in the present historic moment is the emergence of new and diverse forms of mass solidarity that gives new meaning to the concept of ‘pubic sphere.’ It is no longer confined to a debate among the intellectuals but has transitioned to life. Many street publications have been created. Innumerable organizations have been formed. Thousands of weblogs and on line journals have appeared. 6 Everywhere you turn, there is public debate and dialogue, whether in the Metro, in a Taxi, at the workplace or in informal gatherings at home. It seems like there is no end to the energy and creativity of the people. As one worker stated, the workplace is where “everybody does nothing except find ways to get around blocked web sites and read the day’s news.” 9
These new mediating social forms, born of self-activity, have generated a leap in self-consciousness. A whole new sense of what is possible has now evolved. Had anyone, reformist or revolutionary, anticipated this new objective reality? Is there something inherently deficient in emancipatory theory which perpetually condemns it to arrive on the scene only after the fact? Then how can theory and practice ever be united? Are these new social formations not reminiscent of 1979 Revolution? Has not the past history ‘suddenly’ come to life in the present as integral to history in the making? Instead, once its own idealism turned sour in face of counter-revolution, the radical intellectuals turned against the idealism of the movement from practice. Didn’t they once again return, in retreat, to a concept of theory as external to the consciousness of the masses, as if it can be derived, without mediation of historic subjects, directly from contemplation of ‘reality’?
Surely today’s movement has not quite reached the scope of 1979 at its high point. But that’s hardly an excuse to avoid self-critique in the historic mirror. It is high time to re-conceptualize theory as wholly immanent within the movement from practice. Thus making the movement relate itself to itself, and become fully aware of its own potential, goals and aspirations. Once the masses gain self-knowledge and the corresponding judgment, the entire old system is doomed; it will no longer be tenable. It can only be prolonged by brute force. To quote Hegel again: “This gradual crumbling to pieces, which did not alter the general look and aspect of the whole, is interrupted by the sunrise, which in a flash and at a single stroke, brings to view the form and the structure of the new world.” (Ph of M, p.75)
II – Islamic Republic’s Conflicted Self-Understanding
“With the slaves awareness that he cannot be the property
of another, with his consciousness of himself as a person,
the existence of slavery becomes artificial, vegetative
existence, and ceases to be able to prevail.”
· Marx, Gurndrisee, p.463
For 30 years the theocratic state in Iran has laid claim to legitimacy in the name of universal interests of society as a whole. This right by which this limited, particular regime has sought to justify its existence, has now been taken away from it by an unprecedented popular uprising –by those social forces that demand the regeneration of society on a new basis.
The 1979 Revolution for long served as the presupposition of the Islamic State. At the height of its self-confidence in the 1980’s, it devoured its own children, by turning against the very forces within civil society that had helped bring it to power. It unleashed a ruthless counter-revolutionary terror to suppress its own presupposition, and drove even its first ever-elected President, Bani Sadre, into exile.
It was during the 8-year war with Iraq, that the terror was perfected, while feeding society a heavy dose of religious nationalism. By thus consolidating their grip, the despotic State was elevated to be the equivalent of the system as a whole, and as such, an end in itself; therefore subordinating civil life to a degraded sphere presumably without the will of its own. The ‘citizen’, if at all conceived, was made to be the servant of the state, an abstract state-citizen, that is, a fictitious, allegorical being.
An absolutist regime of unrest was shaped that for 3 decades constantly politicized the population by perpetually fomenting discord and reinventing enemies. This has been a restless and revengeful political regime wholly self-absorbed in eternal warfare against ‘infidels.’ It tolerates no dissent. Every expression of opposition, or each appearance of disagreement, however mild, has always been immediately escalated and branded as Moharebe Khoda, ‘the Enemy of God,’ to justify its eradication.
Religion is clearly appropriated as means to a thoroughly secular aim. Here religion is nothing but the religion of expediency, an empirical religion, which fused with politics and nuclear science, has served as the ideological baptism of the State. But this theocratic edification of political power has brought the state–religion into a direct and permanent clash with the private consciousness of the people who have identified religion as the ‘the sigh of the oppressed and the soul of a soulless world.’10
Having resorted to violence, torture and even rape in face of an unarmed but deep and widespread grassroots movement, it is now at a crossroads. It has lost the battle for the minds of people. It is trapped in a deep hole and is unraveling as if in a self-destructive mode. With its ‘spiritualism’ fully exposed for what it is, a crass materialism, neither ‘Allah,’ nor the ‘Hidden Mahdi’ can come to its rescue now. Bereft of any ‘sacred’ or profane legitimacy, it is left with no other exit strategy but the savage unleashing of brute force as the guarantor of its secular survival. With its eyes turned away from heaven, it now resembles the worms that dwell in the dirt and the muck of the earthly. But when the so-called heavenly realm comes crashing down, and discloses itself as but the sheer instrument of secular domination, it looses its grip on the masses. Under such conditions, the people can no longer take refuge in a ‘beyond’ projected as a celestial domain allowing escape from the here and now. Thus the political and the religious alienations inter-merge as manifestation of one and the same entity. This is the moment when, as Marx would say, the critique of ‘heaven’ is transformed into a social critique of the contradictory reality on earth.
What’s now widely understood as political fissures in the ranks of the established ruling circles are also reflected in widespread theological divides. This internal contradiction within religious thought has assumed the shape of the ‘theology of doubt’ even among some of the clerics. Political religion, a religion that thinks politically, has come to a certain self-understanding that it is the religion of domination. Some within the religious camp who are in the opposition and no longer want to continue with self-deception, have now taken refuge in what they call ‘the pure Mohammdan Islam,’ Islam-eh nab-eh Mohammadi. (See Mosusavi) 11 Also many prominent theologians, among them the renowned Abdulkarim Soroush, now want to free civil society from state-religion by advocating the freedom of religion, an attempt at an ‘Islamic Reformation.’ 12 In a sense, they resemble the modern day Islamic Lutherans who recognize that theology itself has come to grief and, therefore, want to overcome the “faith in the authority by restoring the authority of faith.” (Critique, p.138)
Clearly then the religious consciousness has reached the moment of an internal combustion. All the more reason for the dominant clerical establishment, headed by the Supreme Leader, to relieve itself of this internal torment by safeguarding their power at all cost. Gone are the days of political play with the idea of ‘religious democracy.’ After the fiasco of the latest elections, their discourse on ‘legitimacy’ has now become just the claim of a direct link with ‘God’ as the sole source of political legitimacy!
What is a whole lot more tangible on the streets, however, is that the ‘idealism’ of this hypocritical state is manifest in most materialistic of ways – the material display of the force of arms. Those who have pretended to be at war with the materialism of the modern world can only sustain their power with the most sophisticated modern technologies. But what’s become wholly transparent in the public consciousness is this: The ‘Islamic Republic’ has been stripped bare of its ideological religious shell and its worldly, practical kernel revealed as it has evolved into a security-military-police state.
Therefore it is necessary to ask, as a theoretic question of the day, where does the new social critique start? Should the spectrum of forces that broadly identify themselves with ‘secularism’ start by a critique of religious consciousness in general or religion as such? Can we dissolve the secular problems into religious issues? How would those who don’t ascribe to religion any ‘heavenly’ origin, confront the earthly conflicts, and the discord pertaining to the content of Man’s life? Is the achievement of a secular society an end in itself?
III - Reaching for the Future: A Perspective
“At the level of material production, we find the same
situation that we find in religion at the ideological level,
namely the inversion of subject into object and vice versa.”
· Marx, Capital; I: 990
The despotic regime in Iran that denies its citizens freedom of conscience, freedom to think and even to worship, is not just the 21st century version of the inquisitors of the Middle Ages. It is far worse. It is more technologically advanced in its arsenal of torture, and in its use of modern media to deliver its message when it puts hundreds of political prisoners in front of the screens to abjure and recant. They ought to be reminded of the fate meted out to the Shah when, just a short while before his downfall, he too had dared to put poets, writers and journalists on public trial!
Thus, on Saturday August 1, the Iranian authorities opened a mass trial against more than 100 political activists and protesters, among them the prominent opposition figure, Saeed Hajarian. At the opening of the mass trial the prosecutor mentioned Jürgen Habermas's visit to Iran in 2002 in his opening statement as part of a plan to spread secularism in Iran. 13
This Behemoth that masqueraded under the guise of ‘justice, freedom and virtue,’ to gain significance during the long hard fought struggles against the Monarchy, once in power, not only proved to be every bit as despotic as the Shah, but combined politics with a total ideology that administers every aspect of people’s lives, public or private, while replacing the Monarch with the office of an unelected Absolute Leader whose command is Law. Under such tyranny, the desire for political emancipation from state-religion has gained a near universal appeal. While the leaders of the reform movement are yet to acknowledge the concrete nature of this demand, there is no doubt about the groundswell of popular opposition to politicalized Islam. Hence, of necessity the desire to be free from political religion has assumed a secular form. Undoubtedly, the call for de-Islamization of political and social relationships is being congealed into a demand for a secular society. Being a legitimate aspiration, it is certainly a great step forward. It may perhaps indicate the next phase of the immediate future.
Yet in the wake of this great ongoing upheaval, it is imperative not to limit our vision of the future and direct it into any narrow pathway; not only because despotism can also take a secular form now that it has been discredited in its religious garb, but also because we have witnessed how an epochal revolution 30 years ago got aborted when all the concrete and manifold demands for a new way of life after the overthrow of the Shah was completely submerged under what was at the time also a legitimate demand: ‘anti-imperialism.’ Instead of rushing to seize on to an overriding general concept to box in the present moment, let’s try to fill that abstract generality with human content; let us ask if we can meet the challenge of our time with a fuller response that does not depart from the concrete. It is precisely when we reach the threshold of a new transition period that we are most in need of a new way of thinking. As Hegel would say: “All revolutions in sciences no less than the general history, originate only in this, that the spirit of man, for the understanding and comprehension of himself, for possessing of himself, has now altered his categories, uniting himself in a truer, more intrinsic relation with himself.” 14
Let’s take ‘Secularism’ as both a historical movement and a theoretic category as the point of departure. At its birth it was certainly the outcome of a widespread revolution in manifold forms of science and culture, which then gathered all those shapes and forms into an ideal whole and culminated in the Great French Revolution. It was this revolution that ushered in the modern age and drove religion out of political power and into the private realm. When the victorious secular enlightenment dethroned religion, and brought “the goods and furnishings of the Here and Now,” (Hegel, Ph of M, p. 512) it was indeed a great leap forward. And yet over 200 years later, we are now witnessing not just the rise of political Islam in the ‘East’ but also the invasion of the ‘public sphere’ by Christian fundamentalism in the ‘West.’ At the very least, it should point to an unresolved contradiction within the secular lineage that seems to have brought the world to a crossroads.
The contradictory heritage of secularism is also apparent from the fact that its offspring, the modern world, has duplicated the religious alienation in an abstract community, which has turned Man into the servant and the plaything of external, material powers. Having once dissolved the religious world into its worldly foundation, it did not then explain or critique the cleavage within modernity by unmasking the human self-alienation in its material form. Moreover, the abstract antithesis of faith and knowledge leaves the human content of both faith and knowledge unexplained. In appealing to the ‘right of reason’ and rational thought15 against dogmatic faith, one cannot merely substitute the enlightened ‘I’ for the historic reason as it reaches to manifest itself at momentous historic turning points.
This would at best reach the moment of the Cartesian ‘I think,’ that is, the stand point of the Individual set free from the bondage of pre-capitalist social relations where Man was shackled by rigid structures and his relationship to the world appeared as given and preordained. Thought here discovers the world as its creation and property. However, in opposing the empty absolute of established religion, this critical ‘I’ finds an unmediated relation to ‘truth’ as the antithesis. Only that which I discover in my own head has substantial validity. This is the abstract self-certainty of a subject that regards itself as independent. This ‘I’, as ‘infinite self-relation’, thus erects an insurmountable duality between the subject and the object, between the ‘I’ and the world; it has subordinated all determinations to itself. When developed into a ‘Will,’ even if the ‘I’ intends to will ‘the good,’ it produces the abstract negativity of a destructive attitude towards ‘faith,’ and demands the ‘abolition’ of religion!
However, as Marx observed, religion was thereby banished from the spirit of the state and released as the spirit of civil society. “When man proclaims himself an atheist through the medium of the state, he is still captive to religion… Religion is merely the indirect recognition of man through a mediator. The state is the mediator between man and the freedom of man.” 16 In other words, the political state to can be free from religion without Man having become a free Man. What the French Revolution achieved was a political emancipation that “dissolved civil life into its constituent elements without revolutionizing those elements.” (Ibid) Henceforth, religion could no longer be considered to be the ground but only the manifestation of secular narrowness. That’s why Marx called atheism “the last stage of theism, the negative recognition of God.” 17
What is of the greatest relevance for today is to grasp that Enlightenment, with its purely negative relation towards faith, has a peculiar attitude to objectivity. It arrives at it through the medium of the object, but takes this object as an external other, not as the objectification of human subjectivity. For enlightenment, actuality is a ‘thing’ abandoned by ‘spirit,’ as if it was not a moment in Man’s self-creation. Thus in upholding the indeterminate objectivity of the inanimate ‘empire of things,’ it confirms what it merely condemns in faith; i.e. the presence of an unmediated being as the un-knowable ‘thing in itself.’ This then is the irrational moment in enlightenment when it becomes the philosophic expression of the commodity relations under modern capitalism, where the dead materiality dominates the living, reaching its apex in ‘Utilitarianism’, as Hegel aptly observed.
We are therefore compelled to ask: were the imaginary flowers plucked from the chain so that Man shall bear the chain without the hope, consolation or the promise of ‘salvation’? Why then the secular enlightenment’s rejection of religious faith has not resulted in casting off Man’s chains and gathering the living flowers? Abstract secularism has proved to be incapable of serving as the call to abandon the wretched earthly conditions that generate “the vale of tears of which religion is the halo.” Instead, having profaned ‘all that is holy,’ and transformed both the priest and the scientist into the paid wage earners of the modern capitalist world, secularism appears to have only accentuated the inverted world from which emanates deification as well as reification. This is the condition which Marx described as “Subjectification of objects, the reification of subjects, as reversal of cause and effect, the religious quid pro quo.” 18
The question becomes why “people place in a thing the faith which they don’t place in each other,” to which Marx responds: “obviously because that thing is an objectified relation between persons, because individuals have alienated their own social relationship from themselves so that it takes the form of a thing.” 19 Where the social relations between people is concealed beneath a material shell and takes on the fantastic relation between things, there, these things having been awakened from the dead through human labor, far from being under their control, in fact hold them captive. It is also in this upside down world that the true human wealth becomes transformed into a pure abstraction, and fixated as such, it then appears in a entirely material form – i.e. the money-form.
Money thus becomes the equivalent of a universal divine power that transcends all religious divides. “The human, social act by which man’s products mutually complement one another is estranged from man and becomes the attribute of money, a material thing outside man…this alien mediator now becomes a real God.” 20 Shouldn’t this analogy between religion and the alien character of the world of objects, make us rethink the concept of the ‘Secular’? This is especially critical in our age, when the vast empire of the Machines appear as if they are ‘automatons’ with ‘occult’ ability to self-generate in perpetuity, presumably without the intervention of Man. Is not the modern man under the theological spell of certain social relations that present themselves as ‘eternal’ as if imposed by the law of nature? What else is this other than the religion of modernity? “It is faith” wrote Marx, “that brings salvation. Faith in money value as the immanent spirit of commodities, faith in the mode of production and its predestined disposition, faith in the individual agents of production as mere personifications of self-valorizing capital.” (Capital, 3:727)
That’s why critique of religion as such, or even the call for the separation of religion and state, important as that may be, leaves the human content of religion undefined. This will, yet again, leave the movement unprepared for what happens after the existing theocratic regime is overthrown. Lets ask: are we now condemned to undergo the vicissitudes of a secular capitalistic development, a development which today has put a question mark over human survival on this planet? How can we make sure that the struggles for freedom do not stop at political form of state but self-develops into social emancipation?
IV-Marx Enters Iran’s ‘Civil Society Revolution’
“All emancipation is the restoration of human world
and the relationships of men themselves.”
· Marx 21
In the midst of Iran’s ‘storm and stress’, even as we are trying to avoid imposing any self-limiting view, such as a ‘Secular Republic’ or any other ‘Statist’ plan, on today’s mass movement, we see the emergence of a whole host of new theoretic tendencies born, in part, out of this new objective-subjective situation. In particular, what has found traction among many critical theologians as well as the secular Left is the notion of a ‘Post-Modern’ society purporting to close the divide between faith and reason.
When Jurgen Habermas visited Iran to present a series of lectures on ‘Post-Secular’ society, not only the turnout was massive, but among the participants were also a group of clergy who had traveled from the religious city of Qom. As Habermas himself recalls, 22 they engaged in a lively debate that lasted long after the lectures were over. While Habermas himself is careful to narrow the term “only be applied to the affluent societies of Europe or countries such as Canada, Australia and New Zealand, where people's religious ties have steadily or rather quite dramatically lapsed in the post-War period,” 23 the Iranian proponents of the concept see it as relevent also for Iran.
One such proponent is an exiled and defroked cleric Hasan Yousefi Eshkevari 24who spent 4 years in prison for his views. In a presentation given at SOAS, 12 May 2006, he delves into Habermas’ ‘Religion in the Public Sphere,’ 25which has been translated and widely distributed in Iran. His aim is “the realization of a society on the basis of interaction and understanding between the two strong and effective tendencies: secular and religious.” In his view the, “the biggest deficiency of the modern world is that it has been emptied of its spiritual element. For this reason, new religious thinkers such as Iqbal, and Shariati in Iran, tried to compensate for this lack by designing a modern worldview and anthropology that is also towhidi [monotheistic], spiritual and ethical (i.e. an Islamic humanism)… This type of critical Islam, which became known in Iran with Ali Shariati, is close to the critical theory that is known as the Frankfurt School.”
Unlike Eshkevari, prominent theologian Soroush, while subscribing to the Post-Modern view - “the secularization thesis has proved wrong. People expected a decline of religion in society, but now we see the reverse. We live in a post-modern era, one of the main blessings of which is that sharp dichotomies of the past, e.g. between secularism and religion, are getting blurred.” 26 – rejects, in principle, making religion ‘this-worldly.’ “I am of the view that religion is, basically, and fundamentally, for ameliorating our hereafter.” 27He is especially critical of Ali Shariati for attempting “to produce a revolutionary Islam.” “I arrived at the view that what Dr. Shariati was talking about was a bid to make Islam ideological. And I believe that the main point, when you make religion ideological, is not to search for truth, but to instigate movement.” (Ibid)
Soroush’s goal is the restoration of the religious man as a moral, pious being apart from the worldly realm. He separates faith from history and the historical religious consciousness. In this he resembles a ‘Luther’ who, after all, betrayed those who wanted to realize the human content of religion. Luther’s challenge to the religious hierarchy, once unleashed, became a revolutionary peasant movement led by religious leaders like Thomas Munzer. In Munzer’s revolutionary religious movement the human basis of religion 28 came to fore because each one became a participant in realizing principles objectively in the community, recognizing themselves in the live unfolding of those principles. They fought the aristocracy and the Church, which was actually a huge continent wide capitalist enterprise built on the backs of the peasants.
Munzer’s followers thought they were following Luther’s teaching about realizing principles in real life without the mediating hierarchy of the Church, but Luther betrayed them siding with the German princes in a great slaughter. Luther stopped with the abstraction of each individual’s relation to God without priestly mediator. This abstraction left the illusion of no mediating forms, that is, no human content, in the real world and truncated the movement toward concrete objective religion where each one is a part of the development of principles in the community.
Freedom under a secular state, says Marx, is only defined negatively. The ‘other’ is “not the realization of...freedom, but the barrier to it” (CW 3:163). The positive expression of freedom is not in the isolated individual, the ego, but in the human content of cooperative power realized by freely associated producers. This isolated individualism, which Marx calls Protestantism’s “cult of man in the abstract” is the “most fitting form of religion” for capitalism and its “religion of everyday life.” (Capital, 1:172) That religion is the capitalist reality of social relations between things, commodities and capital, as carriers of the social property of value, which dominates their creators. The direct producers are alienated from their own labor and are related to each other through things.
Soroush, however, appeals to the ‘right of reason,’ based on the enlightened ‘I’, against dogmatic faith. He attacks the idea of revolution as incompatible with reason because revolutionaries, defined by what they are against, are a “long way from knowing what they favor.” However, it is not the enlightened ‘I’ but rather the historic reason of Iranian masses who brought us this momentous historic turning point, including the challenge to dogmatic faith. Therefore, the positive within the negative, what Hegel called the ‘negation of the negation’, must be found within the revolution itself. The positive human content of both secular life and religion is a social endeavor, it can only be realized through social emancipation beyond the political form of the state.
Undoubtedly the ‘post-modern’ view is, in origin, a form of opposition to the travails of a technological world that appears to have assumed a life of its own, trampling under feet its own creators. It is a response to what’s perceived as modernity’s ‘spiritlessness.’ But what exactly does this post-modern idea denote? We are asked to believe that a supposedly pre-secular society such as Iran is poised for a leap into a ‘Post-Modern’ era.
But if civil society does not contain within itself any ‘spiritual’ element, then how are we supposed to bridge the gap between ‘what is’ and ‘what ought to be’? Given the ‘soulless’ nature of actuality, wouldn’t thought, on this account, come to the negation of the actual only from without? If ‘spirit’ or human ‘subject’ is not immanent within the present, if it is not something that the world possesses implicitly, wouldn’t thought, their thought, become wholly external to reality, and its attempt to overcome the actual take the form of a jolt from the outside? Wouldn’t objectivity, once more, assume a purely negative character? In a world emptied of Subjects as self-conscious thinkers, do we not once again require ‘Emancipators,’ men of ‘practical reason’ whose task it is to lift up the sunken humanity and bring about what ought to be?
Post-Modernism, of course, does contain critical elements but as an alienated, unhappy consciousness, it appears to be a flight from the world. It is a ‘pure insight’ that does not appear to see the movement from practice as disclosing a form of reason, and thereby creating its own, a new, actuality. The post-modern thought may also carry within itself the germ of a ‘Post-Humanist’ view that holds ‘Man’ responsible for disenchantment of ‘Nature.’ As such, it has the potential to turn into a new form of ‘transcendentalism’ reuniting with religion; an intuition that escapes from ‘here’ to the ‘yonder.’
What is urgent is to appreciate the maturity and the wealth of the concrete in today’s social movement that is still at the beginning stages of its self-development. This movement will stagnate if we dwell in a ‘beyond’ or if its primary demands at present are petrified in programmatic utterances that wants to establish a ‘lowest common denominator’ as a unifying principle. 29 Such calls are rooted in formal identity that does not see the ‘End’ in the ‘Beginning,’ that is, it fails to grasp that in itself, this movement, even in ‘embryo,’ contains the whole implicitly. Instead, under the compulsion of present reality, let us continue our struggles through open dialogue and public discourse, let us reach for an idea that could provide theoretic expression to the manifold shapes and the diversity of the spontaneous forms of the movement from practice.
Theory is a material force if it becomes concrete and total, if it is wholly internal, and develops to the point where it becomes the self-expression of the movement by making it objective to itself. Then theory itself becomes a mediating form that allows the movement to acquire explicit self-identity and become self-directed, even as it goes through all the challenging but necessary phases of its self-development. Theory is a hard taskmaster, it cannot be ‘intuited’ or be directly known. It too requires continuous self-development. It cannot lay hold of any fixed conceptions and acquire meaning through readymade postulates. Hence, it is in need of Method. Just as there is a dialectics of liberation in a self-reflective, self-producing historic movement, so too in a theory of liberation. Otherwise the tree of life will always be green while theory remains grey. So, with our mind gazed on the ground from which the present historic moment has emerged, let’s turn, once more, to Marx to see if it can help illuminate the present reality.
Marx conceived ‘Civil Society’ as ‘active force’ that does possess ‘its own mind,’ but is self-divided. Its ‘self-determination’ is a process, the movement of all the essential elements within its contradictory reality. His departure point is what he calls ‘the actual mind’ with ‘the universal end as its content,’ and various powers as its mode of self-actualization. With ‘real subjects’ as the foundation, or civil society’s ground, he then examines their objectification. Here, rationality “consists in the reason of the actual person achieving actuality,” (Critique, p.27) and objectification is “the actualization, the activity of subjective freedom.” (Ibid, p. 63)
Marx, of course, completely agrees with Hegel’s articulation of civil society as developed in the Phenomenology of Mind as well as the Philosophy of Right. Indeed, he argued, that such elaborations by Hegel contain “all elements of criticism” and are “already prepared and worked out in a manner far surpassing the Hegelian standpoint.” 30 In Hegel, wrote Marx, the process of self-creation is “the absolute and hence the final expression of human life which has itself as its goal.” (Ibid)
Specifically, Hegel understood civil society as the sphere of the ‘war of all against all.’ In it the general interest is the generality of self-seeking interests. Here, “the moment of liberation intrinsic to work” remains abstract – ‘formal freedom’ – because “the particularity of the ends remains their basic content.” (Ph. of R, p.128) In civil society, what Hegel calls the ‘system of ethical order’ is split into extremes and lost, it is outside of itself, it is ‘the material’ or ‘the external state.’ Thus the ‘commonwealth’ or the ‘social moment’ consists of a mass of antithetical particularities. It is still in the stage of division, and is based on necessity, or what Hegel calls ‘the system of needs.’
Both Hegel and Marx understood that with the advent of the Modern World, there emerged for the first time a differentiation between the ‘political state’ and civil society. In fact, civil society as such did not exist in the Middle Ages. Then, the private sphere was directly political. The French Revolution was the final act in transformation of the political classes into social classes. It made the class distinctions into a non-political division pertaining only to private life. With that, says Marx, “the separation of political life and civil society was completed.” (Critique, p.80) Here, “the individual members of a people are equal in the heaven of their political world yet unequal in the earthly existence of society.” Political life, therefore, is “life in the air, the ethereal region of civil society.” (Ibid)
As a result, the citizen of the state and the member of civil society are also separated. There is an essential schism within the individual between a political citizen and a private man. The perfected political state is man’s abstract existence as opposed to his material existence. In civil society, therefore, “individual existence is the final end, while activity, labor, content, etc., are merely means.” (Ibid, p.81) Individualism is its reigning principle. Where the political state has achieved its full development, “man leads a double life… In the political community he regards himself as a communal being; but in civil society he is active as a private individual.” 31 In this state of need, “the sole bond holding them together is natural necessity, need and private interest, the preservation of their property and their egotistic selves.” (Ibid, CW: 3:164)
Modern world separates man’s objective essence from him, taking it to be external and material. Man’s content is not taken to be his true actuality. It does not “regard the individual as a communal individual, as a communal being.” (Critique, p.81) Both Hegel and Marx perceive the two principles of the Particular and the Universal as ‘self-subsistent;’ they have “fallen apart, yet both are still reciprocally bound together and conditioned.” (Ph. of R, p.267) The end is the reconciliation of the particular and the universal. But in civil society, where individuals are ‘burghers or bourgeois,’ their end is “mediated through the universal which thus appears as means.” (Ibid, p.124) But when needs and means become abstract quality, abstraction is also the character of the reciprocal relation of individuals to one another. Here, the ‘social reason’ asserts itself in the form of an abstract universality behind the backs of the individual members of society.
What Marx calls a ‘rational state’ (Critique, p.117) or a ‘true state’ (Ibid, p.50) is ‘the whole of a peoples existence” (Ibid p.79) as opposed to their political existence. To be fair, Hegel’s ‘Ethical State’ too is irreducible to a merely political state. But with Marx, this ‘state’ is not an external unifier, for the duality between man as ‘citoyen’ and as ‘bourgeois’ cannot be mediated, because, as he put it “ the one does not carry in its womb the yearning, the need, the anticipation of the other.” To him, “man is more than the citizen and the human life more than political life.” 32 What the French Revolution accomplished was to break up civil society into its constituent parts without revolutionizing these components. That is, while it released the ‘political spirit’ it failed to set free the material and the spiritual elements constituting the civil society. Therefore, the political state is founded on “the organized antithesis between the universal idea and the individual existence.” (Ibid, p.357) Where this political organization assumes its highest strength, there, ‘the slavery of civil society’ becomes complete.
Thus while the ‘political emancipation’ is a big step forward, it cannot be regarded as the final form of human emancipation. In ‘political democracy’, man is the sovereign, but only as a man “who has lost himself, been alienated, and been handed over to the rule of inhuman conditions and elements – in short, man who is not yet a real species-being.” (CW: 3:159) What Marx refers to as ‘a true democracy,’ (Critique, p.31, my emphasis) is “the first true unity of the particular and the universal,” (Ibid, p.30) where the formal and the material principles coincide. The fundamental characteristic of ‘Democracy’ is one in which man has ‘a human existence, while in the other forms, he has only a legal existence. “ (Ibid) In democracy, the abstract state has ceased to be the governing moment; it is both content and form. Hence, concludes Marx, “In a true democracy, the political state disappears.” (Ibid) What is so new and unique with Marx is that by staying close to the concrete (“people alone is the concrete” Ibid. p.28), he can discover Man’s ‘communal spirit’ within civil society not as an abstraction over against the individual but with freedom of the individual as its precondition. “The individual is the social being,” 33 exclaimed Marx.
It is such a spirit that’s been released into new spontaneous forms of social solidarity in today’s libratory struggles in Iran. It never fails that during such times, civil society reaches a whole new moment of self-recognition, when suddenly it appears that the division within man between the public and the private individual has broken down in a new sense of community. At its high point, the emancipatory movement becomes a great force that has not yet alienated from itself its social content in the form of an abstract whole, either as a monolithic political Party or a State power. As we continue our struggles and deepen the dialogue on the idea of freedom, we must also recollect the liberating experience of the 1979 Revolution together with its monstrous aftermath. How can we help avoid yet another unfinished revolution? Will all the creative energies of people released today get hardened into a purely political force that would just aim at the overthrow of a particular form of state power or will it continue until we can finally achieve full freedom?
“Only when the actual, individual man has taken back into himself the abstract citizen… when he has recognized and organized his own powers as social powers so that social force is no longer separated from him as political power, only then is human emancipation complete.” 34
Footnotes:
1 – The Phenomenology of Mind, Baillie translation, hereafter: Ph of M
2 - Danny Postel, ‘Iran and the Future of Liberalism, http://www.theliberal.co.uk/issue_12/politics/iran_postel.1_12.html
3 – NY Times, June 10, 2009. The self-development of the people during this short time is well illustrated by the memoir of one young woman from a working class family, published during the election. "These nights are the only nights we are not ridiculed because we are poor. These nights, no one asks which part of the city we are from. It is not important for anybody to see how expensive our shoes are. The only important thing for them is that we wear green... Why should I not wear a green band and join a green chain of people? In this chain I see a rich boy holding my hand and not caring about my father's job. Our hands are pulled but he does not stare at me, just gives me a humble smile... These nights are the last of these golden opportunities to be at one with everyone." (The archaeology of Iran’s regime by Mahmood Delkhasteh , 2 /7/2009, http://www.opendemocracy.net/article/the-archaeology-of-iran-s-regime)
4 – See ‘Iran’s Green Wave,’ in The Nation, July 20/27, 2009
6 - See Mousavi’s Statement on 5 September 2009, announcing the formation of the Green Movement where he says: “We demand the revival of the forgotten goals that started this tremendous movement [the 1979 Revolution], the great slogans of the Revolution…One of them is freedom… as one of the most important goals of the Bahman 1357 [February 1979] revolution, so much so that the victory of the Revolution was called the spring of freedom.” http://english.mowjcamp.com/article/id/26763
8 -See Nasrin Alvari in http://thetyee.ca/Mediacheck/2005/12/13/WeAreIran/, where she includes the voices of many bloggers: “In a society where one is taken to history’s abattoir for mere crime of thinking, I write so that I feel I am somewhere where my calls for justice can be uttered…I write a weblog so that I can shout, cry and laugh, and do the things they have taken away from me …” Another blogger states: “I think… I live… therefore I …exist.” http://deltangestan.com/
10 - 9 - Marx, Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Introduction, p.131, Joseph O’malley translation, hareafter: Critique
11 - http://english.mowjcamp.com/article/id/26763
12 - http://www.drsoroush.com/English.htm, see also the article ‘An Islamic Reformation’ by Thomas L. Freidman in the NY Times, Monday, October 19, 2009, “What's going on in Iran today is, without question, the most promising trend in the Muslim world. It is a combination of Martin Luther and Tiananmen Square -- a drive for an Islamic reformation combined with a spontaneous student-led democracy movement.”
13 – See Muhammad Sahimi’s report in http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/tehranbureau. Among the accused were also two distinguished clerics and scholars who now live in exile - Dr. Mohsen Kadivar and Dr. Mohammad Mojtahed Shabastari. Here is how Kadivar responded to the charges: “I have met with many philosophers and will do so in the future. How can you stop our academic and scientific dialog? Go and read the prosecutor’s statements. It is filled with sentences like ‘meeting with Rorty, meetings with so and so, meeting with Habermas.’ They have come to change Iran. Exactly.”
14 – Hegel, Philosophy of Nature, Introduction, p.11
16 - ‘On the Jewish Question, Karl Marx Collected Works, Vol. 3, p.152. Hereafter: CW
17 - The Holy Family, CW: 4:110
18 – Theories of Surplus Value, 3:494
19 - Grundrisse, p. 160
20 - Marx, The 1844 Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts, CW; 3:212
21 - ‘On the Jewish Question,’ CW; 3: 168
23 - See Habermas’ ‘Notes on a Post-Secular Society,’ published in http://www.singandsight.com/, 6/18/2008
24- Hasan Yousefi Eshkevari, who studied in the Qom seminaries, became a political activist and an ardent disciple of Dr. Ali Shariati in the 1970s. He was elected as an independent member of the first post-revolutionary Majles, but after 1984, disillusioned with the course taken by the Islamic Republic, he devoted himself to academic, intellectual and cultural activities. Eshkevari has taught at Allameh Tabataba'i University and published 15 books and numerous articles in Iranian journals and newspapers. In 1996 he founded the 'Dr Ali Shariati Cultural Research Centre'. He has been a prolific contributor to the Great Encyclopedia of Islam, and an editor of the Encyclopedia of the Shia, both edited in Tehran.
25 – See European Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 14 no. 1 (April 2006) pp. 1-25
26 – ISIM Review 20. Autumn 2007, Free University Amsterdam.
27 - http://www.drsoroush.com/English/Interviews/E-INT-Shariati_June2008.html, “in his day, a religious intellectual sought to reconcile with revolution, and, in our day, a religious intellectual seeks to reconcile Islam with democracy.”
28 - “The state which still professes Christianity in the form of religion… is not the true implementation of the human basis of religion, because it still relies on the unreal, imaginary form of this human core…The democratic state… can disregard religion because in it the human basis of religion is realized in a secular manner… Not Christianity, but the human basis of Christianity is the basis of this state. The so-called Christian state, on the other hand, has a political attitude to religion and a religious attitude to politics. By degrading the forms of the state to mere semblance, it equally degrades religion to mere semblance.” Marx, ‘On the Jewish Question,’ CW; 3:156-157, my emphasis.
30 - ‘Critique of the Hegelian dialectics,’ CW; 3: 342. See also Writings of the young Marx on Philosophy and Society, Translated by Easton, p.332
31 - ‘On the Jewish Question’; CW: 3: 154
32 – ‘The King of Prussia and Social Reform,’ Writings of young Marx… Easton, p.356
33 – The 1844 Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts, CW; 3: 299
34 - Marx, ‘On the Jewish Question,’ CW: 3:168
PDF
No comments:
Post a Comment