In the following conversation, Jano Charbel, a labor journalist in Cairo who defines himself as anarcho-syndicalist, talks about the character of the revolution in Egypt, the recent history of workers’ struggles, the role of Islamists and unions, gender relations and the perspectives of struggles. The interview was conducted by two friends of the classless society in Cairo in spring 2011.
Courtesy: http://www.klassenlos.tk
Modern civilization began in the Middle East. Modern imperialism has blotted out much of what is valuable in a civilized society. Rather than being encumbered by the expense and responsibility of ruling such societies, the imperial powers have relied on corrupt and brutal dictators to enforce the needs of capital.
Bleeding the country to maintain the lavish lifestyles of their families and friends, these dictators left ordinary people to languish. A few months ago, the expectation of revolutionary activity in the Middle East would seem highly unlikely, yet the people rose up with great courage. The numbers of protesters were great enough that violent measures would be unacceptable around the world.
The danger is that their revolutionary courage will pave the way for a dictatorship with a more human face; not the direct dictatorship of a brutal and corrupt individual, but rather the more insidious dictatorship of capital managed by obedient bureaucrats.
The present opportunity is too precious to have people’s rights snatched away under the pretense of democracy. The courageous people in the streets today deserve whatever support we can offer.
Michael Perelman’s latest book: The Invisible Handcuffs of Capitalism: How Market Tyranny Stifles the Economy by Stunting Workers, Monthly Review, 2011
Ron Ridenour
Long time in the making! Long time suffering poverty, inequality, official murder-torture-imprisonment, despotism, fundamentalism, and governments lackeyed to US/Western powers.
I am no expert on Arabic/Middle East history or politics, other than knowing that US/Israel-led imperialism has had a grip on the entire area for decades, and before that there were other foreign oppressors. I know that in part of the Arab world—not currently involved in this uproar—the US-led “humanitarian” operation has cost upwards to two million Iraqi lives, millions of migrants fled and fleeing, tens of thousands tortured, and the destruction and thievery of much cultural wealth and history. European allies assist in this butchery. Something similar is occurring in Afghanistan, and extending into Pakistan.
Wikileaks’ dispersal of US Embassy cables from Tunisia—posted in the British Guardian, December 7, 2010 and January 28, 2011—show how duplicitous and corrupted all US governments are with the Ben Ali family government for the past two decades.
US ambassador to Tunisia, Robert F. Godec, wrote, on July 17, 2009, that the Ben Ali regime is: “sclerotic;” and that “Tunisia is a police state, with little freedom of expression or association, and serious human rights problems.”
On the other hand, Godec expressed the need to continue supporting this regime because, “The government is like-minded on Iran, is an ally in the fight against terrorism…the US Mission has, for the past three years, [responded] by offering greater cooperation…notably in the commercial and military assistance areas.”
The US government supports Egypt with $1.3 billion in military aid annually, second only to Israel.
Most shamefully, a number of Arabic governments aid and abet the US in its “war against terrorism”. Egypt, and Tunisia—where the courageous uproar began a month ago—are among them. In others—Yemen, Algeria, Lebanon—many thousands of people act supportively with the Tunisian people, and with their own similar demands.
Will this lead to revolution, to socialism, as a rejection of misery under capitalism? Marxist analysis of what is takes before a socialist revolution can break out and grow entails two aspects. First, objective conditions must be present: too much poverty, exploitation and oppression to ignore; plus sufficiently high level of technology (industrial or?), and acutely antagonistic productive relations.
The second condition is subjective, in which a significant number (majority or?) of the most productive and exploited of industrial workers (perhaps also or either a significant number of land proletariat and small peasants) are conscious enough of their position as exploited, and are angry enough to take up the call for revolt. Overthrowing oppressors—as is occurring now, or is in the process of occurring, in some Arabic nations—is a good indication that a huge percentage of folk (in many places the large majority) are ready subjectively. Many have been murdered, thousands more arrested, yet they persist, especially in Tunisia and Egypt.
(Iraq, also an Arabic nation, has not moved into supportive action. Most of its people are too brutalized by the US+ invasion and their accomplice national governments, supported by the Persian neighbor, Iran, to come into the streets. But, I suggest that many have their hearts beside their Arabic brothers and sisters in uproar, and time may bring them to fore. But this will probably not occur shortly in Saudi Arabia where the US-backed multi-billionaire government leaders rule with a fascist fist.)
The objective material factors for Tunisia and Egypt are, in large part, present as well. Does the high level of production relations necessary exist? I do not know. Are the workers antagonistic enough with the bosses and do they know that (condition two)? I’d say yes to both.
I do not seek to become an oracle. I wish merely to shed us of illusions. It takes more than what is occurring now to win over not only the national oligarchies and their armies and police forces well-equipped with US-French-British armaments, but also the very Empire itself awaiting in nearby skies and waters for the signal to move in if all else fails. The people are not armed well enough.
Nevertheless, I am encouraged by a sense of pan-Arabic unity, a sense that they are all one brethren no matter the name of the State. I do not see, however, in many of these areas, that the people are well organized, that they have their own parties or unions that lead with sagaciousness, or that they lead at all. There is great spontaneity and determination. All to the good! But people never win over the oppressors unless they have organizations that formulate policy and direction.
In Tunisia, however, I see a positive development with the January 14th Front, forces involved in the revolt. The eight organizations and political parties forming it, several illegal and operating underground, gathered into a united front on the day that the dictator fled the country. They propose 14 points to move forward, to form a people’s government and change the economic foundations.
Among the key points are anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist demands, coupled with democratic and social demands to raise the people out of poverty and exploitation.
Most of you who read this commentary are not in the Arabic region. To you I say: we are all brothers and sisters in our common struggle! Take up what arm you can and support these people today, and hope that, one day, we will all support one another to build a universe where we are all one free people living with essential needs!
For other articles by the author visit his website.
Cyrus Bina and Hamid Zangeneh
The sixteenth of Azar (December 7) marked the commemoration of the 56th anniversary of student protest against Richard M. Nixon, the then Vice-President of the United States, who visited the Shah’s government of the post-CIA coup d’état in the late 1953 in Tehran. This was also an occasion for the continuation of protests against June 2009 post-election bloody crack downs against the Ahmadinejad administration and its benefactor, Ayatollah Ali Khameni, which in large measure would have also brought to light the 30-year unpardonable conduct of the regime to the court of the public opinion again. The Islamic Republic has now turned into a paramilitary regime beyond the imagination of both the Shah’s regime and the founding fathers of the so-called Islamic Revolution. The irony of recent history that had positioned the Iranians between a premeditated tragedy and an impulsive comedy: the former — the CIA intervention that brought the Shah back; the latter — the pathetic post-election coup that metamorphosed the regime toward an all-encompassing paramilitary state. The context below is more pertinent to this year’s Student Day anniversary than ever.
As the universities in Iran have turned into the bastion of paramilitary “Revolutionary Guards” and “Basijis”, the present-day post-revolutionary Sha’abaan bi Mokhs (literally, Sha’abaan the Brainless), like Mr Kamran Daneshjoo and Mr Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, portray themselves as learned individuals worthy of respect. These individuals, whose numbers are skyrocketing and whose purpose has nothing to do with learning and scholarship, have been able to get phony degrees and titles that presumably give them respect and thus prop up their stature to sugarcoat their thuggish and unbecoming mission as the agents of repression in Iran. Mr. Ahmadinejad, of course, is a talented man who wore many hats in the past; he was a one-time assistant executioner in the notorious Evin Prison in which he was reportedly putting the final bullet (tir-e khalas) in a political prisoner’s head. Ahmadinejad and his cohorts in the “Revolutionary Guard” and Basij are thus desperately seeking such titles in order to do their dirty work in disguise — as a “respectable” make-belief academic authority. And this is but a horrifying parallel for some of us who know one or two things about Iran’s recent history that the senior interrogators under the Shah’s regime too used to call themselves “Doctor”, when they engaged in interrogation by means of torture leveled routinely against the tied-up political prisoners in the same prison in Tehran.
For instance, Mr Ahmadinejad, a formerly Pasdar (i.e., Revolutionary Guardsman), who was the Governor of Province of Ardebil (1372-1376 H.S. [1993-1997 A.D.]), and who himself once boasted that he had worked 18 hours a day during the entire four years of Governorship in that province, amazingly “earned” a doctorate degree, perhaps granted to him by “Mahdi” (Emam-e Zaman) himself during the same period. Someone should ask Ahmadinejad where he had found time in the same period to complete a doctorate degree. This is only the tip of the blunder, a telling story of almost all the Pasdar and Basij candidates who were planted as the watchful spies and agent provocateurs in the classroom and then rewarded with bogus degrees in universities in Iran. Yet the genuine students who were often incarcerated and abused for political activity are being marked as “starred” and routinely barred from further study for life.
On the top of this, many individuals — who were decidedly appointed as spies and sent abroad in order to identify the Iranian dissidents within the university circles in major western countries, have falsely claimed to have completed a degree programme or two in these universities, upon accomplishing their job and returning to the country. In this manner, Mr Daneshjoo — comrade-in-arms of Mr Ahmadinejad and his recently appointed “Minister of Sciences”— is a quintessential example. He does not only lie rather outrageously about a “doctorate degree” he has never earned but also continuously photocopies the work of others in broad daylight and publicises it as his own.
Mr Daneshjoo (and his alleged co-author) had literally carbon-copied the original paper (by Lee, Lee and Shin 2002) and in full public view turned it rather magically into a “brand new” paper under his name (Daneshjoo and Shahrawi 2009). Mr Daneshjoo also alleges (which upon ample investigation turned out to be a baseless, and perhaps, shameless claim) that he has earned a doctorate degree from an institution of higher learning in London, England. However, upon ample investigation by our colleagues it turned out that his claim is baseless. As the saying goes, we have seen this movie before in our beloved birthplace and elsewhere, but not in such an outrageous manner and in such a mass quantity that puts the original Ford assembly line to shame. This is only expected of the government of Munchhausen (1) and the community of con-artists under Ahmadinejad. And, aside from their real role as the agents of repression in the Islamic Republic of Iran, we are (in consultation with many of our distinguished academic colleagues) convinced that this tiny gesture — i.e., a formal academic sanction that follows in this piece — is necessary.
The academic community has no border. And the institutions of higher learning in Iran are no exception. We all have a standard to go by, and these outright cheatings and egregious acts of dishonesty have no place in the academic community at large. This also speaks both to one’s character and one’s qualification as a learned person, yet — in the case of Iran under the Islamic Republic — it has become an art form and a class by itself to paramilitarise the universities in order (1) to contain nearly all administrative and faculty functions that lend themselves to education of the most promising intellectual stratum of the population and (2) to control and reverse the atmosphere of tolerance for (universal) academic freedoms, critical thinking, and authentic curricula and genuine acquisition of knowledge, particularly in social and political sciences in Iran.
We need to watch the Iranian universities at the commencement of current academic year, particularly in the aftermath of the post-Election bloodshed that laid bare the paramilitarisation of the economy, polity, and the public space and that had metamorphosed the Islamic Republic since the election of Ahmadinejad in 2005. There are unconfirmed reports to the effect that the Ahmadinejad government is now planning to do away with all “western” social science disciplines in major universities. This is a cause for concern, as it is a reminder of the so-called earlier “cultural revolution” that made all the institutions of higher learning in Iran a target of “purification” and that led to a summary dismissal of “subversive” professors — under the authorisation by Abdolkarim Soroush and Mohammad Khatami (both of whom are now in the opposition) — in the early 1980s. And if this turns out to be true, it undoubtedly would be the largest attempt at obliteration of higher education in Iran, which is a major step toward wholesale Talibanisation of university education under Ahmadinejad. The cruel irony is that (since the 1906-1911 Constitutional Revolution) Iran without a doubt possesses the longest record of democratic movement, scientific endeavour, and advance toward modernisation than any other nation in the region.
The clerical regime is now transformed into a full-fledged paramilitary state. These paramilitary agents of repression are now in the driver’s seat in both the administrative leadership and the faculty committees, and thus set the academic agenda in major universities. Just a few days into the post-election upheaval, the plain cloth Basij picked up Dr Mohammad Maleki — a prominent scholar and former chancellor of Tehran University. These plain cloth Basijis are the member of the same unit that in the immediate aftermath of post-election upheaval suddenly (and unprovoked) stormed through the Tehran University dormitories, destroyed much of the structure, beat and arrested the residents, and tied up several students before throwing them down from the roof on to the concrete pavement below to their eventual death. Dr Maleki has been kept incommunicado in the notorious Evin Prison till the time of this writing. And no amount of appeal to the United Nation Secretary General has so far produced a tangible result. According to his spouse, Maleki — a 76-year old who suffers from advanced cancer of prostate, abnormal heartbeat and diabetes — did not even vote for any of the proposed presidential candidates and certainly had no involvement with Mir Hossein Mousavi’s camp. He is accused of “collaboration with the enemy”, a blanket charge that has been commonly conjured up, and nowadays is rather methodically leveled, against those who defy the arbitrary political arrests by this government and its ruthless and rent-a-cop paramilitary goons. Simply put, barrel of the gun emanates more “reason” than the wisdom of Aristotle, Plato, Socrates, Rumi, Hegel, Russell and Whitehead combined in today’s Iranian universities.
Thus, as Iran specialists and academic persons of international repute — who have approved granting of university degrees and safeguarded the universally recognised standard of qualification for thousands of candidates (American and non-American) for a combined period of nearly 60 years across several institutions of higher learning in the US —
We hereby revoke Mr Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s and Mr Kamran Daneshjoo’s alleged and proclaimed degrees (bachelor’s, master’s, and doctorate) by means of this electronic letter and based on the unimpeachable evidence concerning the lack of authenticity in performance, forgery of the academic credentials for political purposes, and simply the integrity of the said persons above on the 16th day of Azar of 1388 (Iranian calendar) equivalent of the 7th of December 2009.
(On the Seventh Day of December of Two-Thousand and Nine)
This action is the tip of the iceberg, as it is miniscule in comparison with the courageous student resistance, which involves risking lives (along with scores of silenced and jailed faculty) in the institutions of higher learning in Iran. Yet, we believe, this is a symbolic task that should speak to the wholesale annulment of all fictitious degrees received by all members of “Revolutionary Guard” and Basij paramilitary contingents — who were deliberately exempted from the entrance exams and other essential curricular requirements and who have deliberately obtained fictitious academic degrees from the institutions of higher learning — over the last 30 years under the Government of the Islamic Republic — in Iran. This also pertains, for instance, to Mohammad Reza Rahimi (Ahmadinejad’s first Vice-President appointee), who is reportedly claiming a doctorate degree from abroad and could not produce it, at the request of the inquisitive deputies —led by those who do not even belong to the “reformist camp” — during his very recent confirmation in the Iranian Majlis. It is important to realise that paramilitarisation of universities has already led to the displacement of the bulk of student body by either silencing or incarceration without cause, arbitrary jail sentences, and even plain torture at the hands of authorities in Iran.
Therefore, the question here — i.e., academic dishonesty and granting of fake degrees that in this case have already led to the destruction of academic environment — is not limited to our professional interest but it also open the Pandora’s box of why the best and brightest Iranian students must be dismissed so arbitrarily from the universities and, more importantly, why, for instance, Tehran University campus (once a Harvard of Iran’s higher education) should become the site the so-called Friday prayers by the government, as if this is the only place to be used as a makeshift freaking mosque in this godforsaken land! We ask our colleagues in Iran and abroad to support this symbolic gesture for it does not only concern our narrow professional responsibility but also our universal duty for unconditional defence and promotion of human rights in Iran and anywhere around the globe.
Note:
(1) Baron Munchausen (1720-1797), a German adventurer known for his compulsive lying.
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Cyrus Bina, Distinguished Research Professor of Economics at the University of Minnesota (Morris Campus), is an Associate Editor of the Journal of Iranian Research and Analysis, the author of The Economics of the Oil Crisis (1985), and co-editor of Modern Capitalism and Islamic Ideology in Iran (1991).
Hamid Zangeneh, Professor of Economics at Widener University in Pennsylvania, is the Editor of the Journal of Iranian Research & Analysis, co-editor of Modern Capitalism and Islamic Ideology in Iran (1991), and editor of Islam, Iran and World Stability (1994).
Radical Notes
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