Political notes on the Iranian democratic revolution and Turkey.

Political note on the Iranian democratic revolution (1).

 

Watching carefully the bourgeois meeting that had as its symbolic center the would-be royal frog, "prince" of Iran, I began to understand a little better the difficult political chess that is played within the Iranian people.

This chess actually has three relatively distinct players.

The Iranian left, the theocratic regime, and the monarchists. For the sake of narrative convenience, I am removing other, perhaps equally important political factors.

In the first revolution all the non-pro-Shah were against the monarchy, but there was ruthless competition between them as well.

In this second revolution which is just beginning, all the non-theocrats are against the theocrats, but there is also ruthless competition between them.

It's not that simple, I'm simplifying it, maybe the leftists simplify it a little more than they should, forming in their minds (according to their ideological habit) a deeper dipole in which one pole is themselves, while the other pole is a twoheaded/right-wing capitalist monster, one head of which is the theocrats and the other head is the monarchists.

I tend to like the leftist interpretation of the game more, but my humble little knowledge of political theory (that's what I studied anyway), it prompts me to point out that the leftist interpretation fails somewhere.

It is a moralistic, sometimes useful, interpretation which underestimates the deep division within the Iranian bourgeoisie, a division that exists not only to "stop" the leftist and truly democratic movement in Iran.

I agree that this intra-bourgeois division is a "reactionary division" that probably leads to the total entrapment of the popular masses of Iran, if it is not revealed as a reactionary and largely apparent-shallow division, but on the other hand I disagree with the Iranian left as to its practical and critical significance for Iranian society itself in terms of Iran's international and politico-cultural orientation in the future.

The question of ''imperialist West or imperialist new east'' is not and at the same time it is a very important practical strategic question posed to Iranian society, which the left cannot overcome with a general and metaphysically structured ''transcendence'' of, of the ''neither-nor'' type.

In any case, even if the left puts the question like this, as ''neither-nor'', the fact that the bourgeois elite puts it as a whole and also in effect as an ''either-or'' creates the game as super-super-complicated.

The leftist leaders, the leftist intellectuals of Iran, must start thinking in terms of chess and not just "binary".

Like it them or not, they too play a game of chess with three players, triple tri-pole chess.

Political note on the Iranian democratic revolution (2).

Even we non-experts in modern Iranian history know that the overthrow of the monarchy was decisively related to the hard and uncompromising strike of the workers of the Iranian oil industry.

Why today, while a important libertarian and democratic movement is developing in Iran, the Iranian industrial working class has not shown the necessary strong positive response to this movement?

Possible explanations:

1. There is control and suppression.

2. The movement is bourgeois-democratic and does not deeply move the industrial proletariat.

3. There is no proper socialist leadership of the industrial working class.

4. The importance of the industrial working class has been overestimated in relation to the modern democratic or even socialist revolution.

5. As has been shown by other historical examples from advanced capitalist societies, an industrial working class can become alienatingly intertwined with "its" chauvinistic nation-state.

----

Democracy is sometimes a cold-blooded moral-political system of thought.

For the democratic way of thinking, there are no general and vague political ''victims'', but only politically responsible citizens.

Democracy (of any form) transfers responsibility to the people, and it does well.

Whoever does not like it should look for a state form that transfers the responsibility to the ''unbelievers'', or to the (non-existent) ''God'' himself.

Political Islam in Turkey has relied on migrant smuggling, support for jihadists, also on a corrupt system of constructors and public works mega-contractors, and now Turkey's Islamist government is launching prosecutions against some constructors to wash away its sins for the deplorable state of construction in Turkey, wich caused the collapse of buildings that collapsed due to the great earthquake.

Is the end of Erdogan coming?

I don't know.

If the Turkish people do not wake up, there will be no end to Erdogan. But if this end comes, who will follow?

The Kemalists and Aksener?

There is no hope in Turkey, except...the Kurds.

The people who freely elect their leadership have the leadership they deserve.

 

Ιωάννης Τζανάκος

 

What is really important, however, is the critical non-religious return to Marx's work and the critical positive and cool reconstruction of it.

All Marxist thematization of democratic revolutions after the Leninist Paradigm has been created in relation to the transition from a pre-capitalist to a capitalist society and in relation to the development of capitalism in (once) dependent non-Western countries under the rule of Western capitalism-imperialism.

But Marx himself examined in a contradictory, sometimes sectarian ideological way, often with a supergenius open-mindedness way (this "combination" was Marx) the democratic revolutions within a dominant and already developed (for his time, but also with general criteria) capitalism.

I think the time has come to leave Lenin, his theories of democratic revolution and "imperialism" are snare, for to the radical thinking of the working class and wage-earning semi-proletarian and petty-bourgeois social strata, despite the evidence of truth they contain.

Critical return to Marx, repudiation of Lenin, this is the way.

But let me clarify some things here:

There has been criticism of Leninism from the left and from anarchism (and neo-anarchism), emerging many times the distinction between Marx and Lenin, as we mentioned above.

We mention for example Pannekoek, Gorter, i.e. the left anti-Leninist communism that developed in central Europe and was treated in the well-known vulgar libel and misinterpretation way by this aggressive lawyer, I mean Lenin, in his unacceptable slanderous distorting pamphlet "Leftism, the childhood illness of communism''.

Our detachment from Lenin and the desired return to the Marxist Paradigm as it can be understood in complete distinction from the Leninist Paradigm, is not based on this way chosen by the "left communists", since according to our own opinion this way, which -in fact- heralds the late ultra-left and hybrid anarcho-Marxism (workers' autonomy, etc.), is indeed possessed by a dogmatism, sectarianism and not rational criticism of both Lenin and Marx himself.

Of course, Lenin's slanderous and misleading criticism of the "left communists" refers to these negative elements, but in a way that we don't want to have anything to do with the way we choose.

At the very least, we need to see what these people were really saying, beyond the vulgar insults and slanders of Lenin and his descendants against them.

What is really important, however, is the critical non-religious return to Marx's work and the critical positive and cool reconstruction of it, also in the points we mentioned.

--

Leninism (Trotskyism, Stalinism, Maoism, etc.) is a metaphysical and underdeveloped distortion of the Marxist dialectic, for which Marx himself was partly but not entirely responsible (if we look at things with a reasonable, moderate retrospect).

The Marxist work has no essential relationship with the Leninist tradition which in fact and also ideologically-theoretically is nothing more than the construction of a state-capitalist or state-exploitative society in the context of the emergence of non-western statism and capitalism.

--

The irony of history. Marxism was that theoretical and ideological current which, through its founder Karl Marx, highlighted the term and profound political phenomenon of capitalist modernity wich called ''Bonapartism'', but it itself was proved (through simplifications, exaggerations and conversions by its main representatives) to as one of the more suitable "political and ideological backgrounds" (not the only one) for the development of this phenomenon.

 

 

Ιωάννης Τζανάκος

 

 

 

For the Iranian royal frog and his (on the surface) pro-Western company.

Do not worry, comrades, I am close to the ideological center (or centrism?), a friend of mine calls me centrist-extreme leftist, and I can assure you that this bourgeois meeting is not pregnant with anything powerful.

It is a defensive and temporary "postmodern" group.

--

 

A revolution, in Iran, which may have - as we used to say - mainly a "bourgeois-democratic" content, may be on the shoulders of the left to take place.

A center, a real democratic or social democratic center does not seem to be emerging, yet, and the bourgeois summit presented a rather pathetic and incoherent picture, this thing is not bourgeois leadership that carries weight.

A postmodern would-be Shah trying not to become a monarchist elephant but he seems rather like a stillborn carp who will never become a frog*, although he has the qualifications to be a frog, a football player, a former pro-regime, good speaker, but with contacts in suspicious American far-right circles, a more centrist with heterodox religious views, but he is Islamic secularist (!), and a Kurdish leader with an unknown amount of influence in Kurdistan itself within Iran, who receives the fire of hatred from all other (or most) Kurdish nationalist and leftist trends within Kurdistan.

The ring of new power is lost from the fingers of these people, already.

[*Royal Frog: Symbolic, constitutional king in a bourgeois parliamentary democracy..]

--

 

Since my leftist Kurdish and Iranian friends may have been disturbed by my "pro-Western" positions and I want to give them pleasure, I promise that I will give them (one of the next days) a brief, hopefully entertaining, illustration of the would-be but never-will-be Royal Frog*.

[*Royal Frog: Symbolic, constitutional king in a bourgeois parliamentary democracy..]

--

 

Khomeini:

مهمترین چیزی که مغز جوانها را خراب می کند و به فساد و هرزگی می کشاند ، موسیقی است. موسیقی خیانت به مملکت است !!!

«The most important thing that corrupts the brains of the young and leads them to corruption and debauchery is music. Music is treason to the country!!!»

I will now tell you a curse about Khomeini.

Yes, you dark Imam, you got it right, music is revolution, music and the hammer of the worker, the in loving youth of Iran, the love of life, will bury you and wipe out religious fascism from Iran and the planet.

The time has come, dark Imam, to enter your grave forever.

--

 

I've been saying this for years, for the last two years I've been shouting it to as many Greek comrades and fellow citizens as I could (becoming weird and strange to their ears with my obsession):

Τhe center of the global revolutionary volcano is Iran combined with Kurdistan.

I have repeatedly analyzed why I am convinced of this.

The truly democratic forces and the left of Iran are tasked with a huge historical task to politically represent this huge lava wave that comes mainly from the Iranian and Kurdish youth and the Iranian working class, but also from the deeper Iranian and also the separate but equally important Kurdish culture.

 --

 

If I understood correctly, the bourgeois meeting laid the foundations for a supposedly smooth succession of the theocratic regime by a "liberal" pro-Western political system.

1st failure of the would-be new bourgeois leaders of the new Iran:

They did not make it clear that they wanted a normal bourgeois parliamentary democracy to replace the theocratic regime, someone only talked about perhaps a referendum that would determine the form of the state.

The way this framework has been put is completely unacceptable even from an exclusively bourgeois democratic point of view.

This is a wretched sophistical oligarchical authoritarian and subversive framing of the issue, since a real democratic referendum has always as its first position that it will not bring about an undemocratic (monarchical) state.

There is no constitutional democratic referendum which could pose as a possible alternative the birth of a non-democracy.

Even Khomeini did not dare to violate this principle quite openly, and he even created a hybrid system of representation under the total control of the supreme clergy and the "supreme leader", but which provided a faint presence of a representation, while the pro-West ''democrats'' around the would-be royal frog, they don't even clarify whether there will be a representative body, they only talk about a referendum, without even guaranteeing that there won't be absolute personal power of a ruler with even a coating of a representation.

It sounds like a prologue to a secular but fascist one-man dictatorship.

If the meeting of oligarchs wanted to talk about the more special form of bourgeois parliamentary democracy in relation to a symbolic, and with constitutionally limited powers, power of a king (as they are in some "reigning bourgeois parliamentary democracies" in Europe, e.g. Britain), then they would be more honest, even if they didn't really mean it.

On the contrary, they left open the possibility of a constitutional monarchy, in which it is not even clarified what the powers of the Monarch would be, but it is certainly not clarified whether the main body of power would be the national assembly, the parliament.

This is a contingency that raises the possibility that in the future there will be a hybrid Bonapartist semi-secular pro-Western regime, in which various "repentant" murderers from the theocratic regime will have been integrated, but who will not simply be "integrated" ''repentant'' and controlled, but they will continue to exist as long as a kind of paramilitary parastatal authoritarian machinery is maintained as they are now in the theocratic regime.

It seems to me that in the rigged discussion of the oligarchs and featured celebrities, the supposedly strict (pseudo-democratic) duty to not have a split of the "democratic forces" now, stemming from a premature discussion about the type of government, was placed not clearly because the goal is clear, no to a real bourgeois democracy.

I said it at the beginning, but let's look at this again in more detail:

Who will frame the question of this potential referendum?

What will be the alternatives that will be proposed through the referendum?

Nothing was said about it.

This unsaid means and stinks of a Bonapartist perversion of the democratic revolution, even in its narrowest bourgeois-democratic possible context.

The supposedly pro-Western Iranian oligarchs pretend they don't know, but they do know, they are not stupid, that a democratic revolution is radical institutional-constitutional praxis and not simply a revision of an existing state regime.

As candidate constitutional legislators, they are further behind in terms of the clarity of their goals than even the theocrats of Khomeini, while they do not even make it clear that there will be a strong directly representative "body" of elected representatives.

They only talk about a possible "referendum", and say nothing else, not because they don't want to break the unity of the bourgeois democratic forces, but because they want from now on to play with all the Bonapartist diversionary scenarios, using the fictitious garb of "critical transitional period" and even worse using the guise of the "free will" of the Iranian people as predetermine in a fake referendum.

Deviants from Democracy from the start, that is.

This thing is not a democratic opposition even in bourgeois democratic terms.

 

Ιωάννης Τζανάκος

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

About banned "leftist Ukrainian political parties"

 Dear Comrades.

Messages about banned "leftist Ukrainian political parties" have appeared here. The pro-Russian authors of these messages take advantage of your lack of information and try to mislead the participants of our maling list. Our comrades from the Ukrainian Socialist League have carefully analyzed the list of political parties banned in Ukraine during the war. As it turned out, this list, indeed, includes only parties that have a real uncontrolled and predominantly pro-Russian leadership that has left Ukraine and predominantly pursues a pro-Russian policy in Ukraine. Let us examine this in more detail.

All of the parties that are on the list and have the names "socialist" or "leftist" actually have nothing to do with leftism or socialism!!! They all have oligarchic owners who are now in Russia. In addition to the odious and openly pro-Russian Communist Party of Ukraine, this list also includes:

1. The Union of Left Forces party here can be seen as a partial exception, because its leader Maxim Goldarb is a person who is organizationally and financially connected to the Ukrainian oligarch Rinat Akhmetov. This party project was not initially oligarchic in nature, but Ukrainian oligarch Rinat Akhmetov exchanged the party leader Vasily Volga for Maxim Goldarb for big money and took this party completely under his control. Its ban in court should be seen as the Zelensky government's fight against oligarchic influence in Ukraine and aims to neutralize the political influence of oligarch Rinat Akhmetov.

2. "Party of the Socialists" is the property of the fugitive Ukrainian oligarch Andriy Kliuyev (now in Russia), head of the Presidential Administration during the reign of Vladimir Yanukovych. Oligarch Klyuev put his business partner Yevhen Onoprienko in charge of the party. Yevhen Onoprienko held a very influential position as head of the Main Directorate for Regional and Personnel Policy in the Presidential Administration of Yanukovych. To call this oligarchic party "leftist" is the height of stupidity or cynicism.

3. "The Derzhava ("State") party" is an openly pro-Russian oligarchic project of Donetsk oligarch Gennady Vasilyev (now in Russia). This is the former Prosecutor General of Ukraine during President Yanukovich's time.

4. "The Progressive Socialist Party" is generally a "Rascist" Black Hundreds party led by Natalya Vitrenko. This is the mother of the Ukrainian oligarch Yuriy Vitrenko, Chairman of the Board of the Joint Stock Company "National Joint Stock Company Naftogaz of Ukraine". This is the richest state-owned company in Ukraine. Yuri Vitrenko has publicly stated that he does not support his mother's pro-Russian views, but serious analysts believe that he has financially helped this party. So again, oligarchic influence.

5. "Left Opposition" is a party that was registered by the leadership of the Communist Party in the case of the prohibition of the CPU. It does not really exist, it is only an entry in the state register of political parties.

6. "Socialist Party of Ukraine". The history of this party is very old and it is associated with the name of the famous Ukrainian left-wing politician Alexander Moroz. But several years ago the Ministry of Justice of Ukraine during the time of President Poroshenko illegally recognized the odious pro-Russian politician Ilya Kiva as the head of the party. Kiva himself moved to the pro-Russian bourgeois parliamentary party OPZJ, and put his close friend and assistant at the head of the Socialist Party. Kiva is now in Moscow and conducts aggressive Russian propaganda every day on state Russian television.

Dear colleagues from the maling list. Any attempts to pass off all this oligarchic scum as "Ukrainian leftist forces" are absolutely vain and not entirely sincere attempts!!!

Not a single Ukrainian leftist party or organization that is not tainted by direct ties to Russian imperialism or direct work for the Russian occupier has NOTHING on this list of bans!!!

There are a large number of such leftist parties.

No militant Ukrainian trade union has been banned either!!!

Don't let the Russian agents in the leftist camp spread blatant lies!!!

Respectfully, Peter Marin

zahist.wordpress.com

If they don't take the wheel of this plane, others will..

So that the Iranian leftists never again talk about hijacking in the plane-revolution (which has begun with the engines on the maximum) are called by history to board the only plane-revolution that awaits them, which is the (bourgeois-or-socialist) democratic Western-oriented plane of independent democratic Iran .

If they don't take the wheel of this plane, others will, and then please to they don't talk about hijacking again, it will be funny, as Marx said.

--

 

The expansion of the Western influence in Ukraine (in equal political and economic terms), and a possible extension of the Western influence in Iran (in equal political and economic terms), will be the progressive scenario of the 21st century, and as a progressive scenario it will be realized with the free will of the civilized progressive and liberal peoples of these countries.

--

 

Ιωάννης Τζανάκος

 

 

The right historical narrative corrects mistakes, and safeguards the right future.

The right historical narrative corrects mistakes, and safeguards the right future.

Iranian leftists recount the Bonapartist Khomeinist diversion of the anti-monarchist revolution by using the word "hijacking".

This verbal expression of the Bonapartist diversion [made by Khomeini together with the theocratic-nationalist factor of the Iranian political life, of that time (also helped by the all-wise Tudeh, the stupid pro-Soviet party)] hides something that the Iranian leftists don΄t want to admit nor to themselves: no ideological or political faction at the time held the concept of "pluralist democracy" in high esteem, the left itself envisioned a revolutionary socialist anti-Westernimperialist regime, which might wear the already worn clothing of "socialist democracy" but it would be a left-wing dictatorship through perhaps popular workers' councils, for a time, until the Iranian version of the left-wing Bonaparte Stalin or Trotsky appeared. 

Known ending, in similar cases, repeated like the succession of day and night.

At that time there was no other, non-authoritarian, mass ideological trend in Iranian society, I don't know if it exists now, I hope it exists through the heroic Iranian youth inside Iran.

So who, with what ideological load, could beat Khomeini in an ideological-political struggle?

Khomeini didn't hijack the revolutionary plane, he just won the battle about which Bonapartism will prevail, the ultra-leftist or theocratic?

--

 

Stalinism takes its surreal revenge deep existing within the anti-Stalinist left & anarchism as a solipsistic cult of violence.

--

 

Don't look at the articles in the "serious" left magazines, look at the comments, under the articles, and you will understand how rotten the left people are, mainly in the west, but also in the non-western world.

They have become completely bogged down in an anti-Western grudge that brings them very close now, almost all of them, to a pseudo-neutral grey-red zone of moral-ideological twilight.

I'm not going to read an article in such a magazine before reading the comments, if I even read an article in a leftist magazine.

Some leftist intellectuals are trying to plug the holes in a sinking boat, but they are not going to do anything.

--

 

The 1% of the global left believes that the 1% of the Ukrainian people who are Nazis do not identify with the 99% who are not Nazis, and half of that 1% do not believe that the Ukrainian people are fighting as a proxy for NATO, and should Ι stay in left, because there is this 1%?

Those idealistic intellectual leftists some of whom are my friends here consider me more of an idiot than 99% of the majority.

I don't know how they feel, but I'm not fooled again.

--

 

You don't have to be 55 to realize you're an idiot because you think some other idiots are listening to you.

But if, nevertheless, you have succeeded in this way, then you must write your pseudo-epic of stupidity as a soap opera and not as if it were the Divine Comedy.

This is a difficult thing, especially when you leave a place where this thing is common, i.e. they narrate the stupidity of a soap opera life as if it were the divine-human drama of the purification from...alienation.

--

 

Intellectuals of the Western New Left! (except Pasolini only).

You made a monster worse than the old fashioned one, almost sympathetic, Stalinist monster.

You won't see it clearly appearing in the proper articles of Jacobin magazine (and in other magazines).

You'll see it pop up, below, in the comments, usually made by your crowd, by those people wich are always irritated by "western colonialism" etc.

You may think that it's all the fault of the old Stalinist tradition in the leftist populace (Stalinism as the perpetrator for all sins), you may think that the Russian disinformation machines, with many rubles, have done a great job, and you will thinking all right, in part. Because the other part of the responsibility lies with you.

Now, fend for yourself your movement, with "your people".

I'm going to the center.

--

 

So the old left had in its ideological arsenal a "must" to be moral, to be educated, not to burden the work and responsibility on someone else, not to justify your unjust actions towards other "simple" man, but the new left forgot this and created the saga of the always wronged always victims, always irresponsible because society is "to blame" capitalism and I don't know what other structure (maybe Althusser who drowned his wife, once, knows, since he could not be accused of femicide, so as a leftist of the new left he was saved from hell).

Let me tell you. From all this ideological havoc within the movement, only one contradictory person named PP Pasolini is saved as a moral subject. He alone is worth dealing with.

--

 

Ιωάννης Τζανάκος

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It is not only a matter of political/geopolitical cynicism..

It is not only a matter of political/geopolitical cynicism, which is a shitfood that you have to eat and turn it into delicious food, it is also a matter of political ethics that requires you to put the ''clean's'' positions under strict and thorough control, because the so called impeccable moral non oportunistic attitude maybe cause moralistic paralysis in your mind and action, to such an extent that you cannot serve your most important moral and political purposes.

After all, usually those who claim an impeccable political and moral stance, sprinkling this self-proclaimed stance with melodramatic sugar dust, turn out to be in the their direct reactions quite harsh and morally inconsistent.

Certainly within an ideological political factor, especially when we are talking about a global ideological factor, there are also some really impeccable moral and political attitudes towards an immediate international political event that "must" to be under positioning immediately.

But usually, these flawless attitudes are in the minority ''in relation to'' mainstream within that factor, so choosing one (factor) over the other or others (factors), cannot be made on the basis of the some perfectionist currents that may exist to the one or the other (factor) as some separate currents within it which would sanctify that factor as a "whole".

So you are obliged to do a general rough weighing.

In this weighing, in reference to the Ukrainian issue and the issue of the libertarian movement of the Iranian and Kurdish youth, the global left was weighed as a "small amount", the western center-right and the western liberal center were divided but generally weighed more from the left, and the western far right turned out to be simply non-existent in its democratism, mostly pro-Russian, certainly worse than the left, but very close to the vast majority of the left in their totalitarian anti-democratic pursuits.

 

---

Your first attitude and reaction to the Ukrainian issue pushes us out of the common ideological space.

When I saw a leading figure of the Hekmatists, adopting the attitude of a pro-Russian Italian trade union, which was sabotaged the shipment of weapons to the struggling Ukraine (this union participated in a conference of unions in Syria organized by the Assad regime), something began to worry me very much.

We're talking about the Hekmatists in Iran, the communist faction considered by their inner-left enemies in the Iranian left to be too neutral towards the West, perhaps pro-Western, even "pro-Zionist" (they're not, imagine what are they that they talk so).

The more objective, generally correct attitude of some Marxists like Michael K., the socialists of Oakland, some anarchists, the correct attitude of Boric (Chile), kept me in reserve for a long time, I postponed the ideological and political rupture again.

But I can't fool myself anymore.

The vast majority of the left and anarchism, kept and keeps a neutral (at best, or hypocritically) or a pro-Russian stance.

I cannot base my adherence to a global ideological faction on the positions of the correct stance of a small ideological minority within it.

I hand over my ideological ''police identity card'' to the competent left-wing authorities.

Now, the honest struggle is for the defense of freedom equality and democracy, but also for the defense of some well meaning Western political and ideological institutions, beyond their narrow leftist terms, and such a struggle it surely will be, too, in many aspects of also a dirty game.

 

Ιωάννης Τζανάκος