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NEWS & LETTERS, March 2004JOURNAL OF DEMOCRACYThis is the 25th anniversary of the 1979 Iranian Revolution. Some have clever analyses now, 25 years later. Yet what is still missing is a projection of the dialectic in real time that captures the unfolding of the freedom idea in revolution that also distinguishes itself from the counterrevolution. Counterrevolution is not only external to revolution. The counterrevolution also comes from within the revolution. Such was the counterrevolution of Khomeini’s IRP which has helped to shape today’s retrogressive world of permanent war and terror. If we don’t take another look at that, we will be stuck in the problematic that revolution faced: what is revolution, and what is counterrevolution. The 800-pound gorilla casting a pall over any discourse on the possibility for revolutionary change is the single party totalitarian state whether it be a Stalinist Ba’athist Party or the Party of God that has come from within the revolutionary process itself. Dunayevskaya’s articles, written as the revolution was unfolding, reveal how a philosophy of revolution, a philosophy of freedom that aims to break down all the alienating fragmentations of class, gender and race is projected in real time, in the revolutionary process. From the start Dunayevskaya was warning against Khomeini "using the slogan of anti-imperialism to usher in his bourgeois Islamic Republic” while branding the "whole women’s revolutionary movement as…'agents of imperialism.’” In other words, theory is a different concept, a living entity in the world, which cannot be separated from the unfolding of the idea of freedom. The loudest, most rhetorical, most vociferous shouts of anti-imperialism (Death to America, Death to the Great Satan) helped cement the counterrevolutionary regime with the taking of low level employees at the U.S. embassy hostage. That also signaled the all out attack on real revolutionary forces, whether workers, youth or women, who challenged Khomeini with their marches and slogan "at the dawn of freedom we have unfreedom.” The account by Ladan Boroumand and Roya Boroumand, "Terror, Islam and Democracy” (Journal of Democracy, April 2002) is a contrast to Dunayevskaya’s account. The Boroumands also point to the hostage taking as the turning point in the counterrevolution, which quelled all forms of opposition within Islam. They also show how that was a turning point for the whole global movement of politicized Islam with an affinity for the Western concept of terror and the single party state. Their perspective is from that of bourgeois democracy, but Dunayevskaya’s account also takes the measure of bourgeois democratic intellectuals like Bani-Sadr who ended by being eaten by the revolution because he didn’t challenge Islam with the self-determining forms that came from the masses. How can anyone in light of this history speak of being on the side of an undifferentiated opposition to U.S. imperialism in Iraq? There are all kinds of tendencies opposing the U.S., which covers over the real forces that are dimensions of a revolution. One such dimension is the continuing role of women who are challenging the occupation from the perspective of broadening freedom and self-determination. Look at the mostly ignored demonstration of women in Iraq on Jan. 14, which challenged the occupation for declaring the replacement of Iraqi Civil Status law in family matters with religious law: Islamic Shar’ia. Nadia Mahmood, of Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq, reports that "women representing over 80 organizations spontaneously gathered in the streets of Baghdad to protest the declaration. Protesters carried placards reading ‘No to discrimination! No to differentiating women and men in our new Iraq!’" --Ron Brokmeyer |
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