On 10/7/06, Jim Devine <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
I can't claim to be an expert on Foucault, or on the post-modern approach in general, but it seems to me that this school has a lot in common with "romanticism." The latter school can be very critical of capitalism, but instead of trying to look forward to try to build socialism, it looks backward to the "good old days" before capitalism. Socialism tries to combine the benefits of industrialization with those of community and democracy, while romanticism wants to scuttle industrialization in the name of community, often forgetting democracy. If this is an accurate analysis, it fits with the fact that Foucault didn't see the authoritarianism of Khomeini's movement.
1. Whatever Foucault saw in the Iranian revolution, neither Khomeini nor his supporters nor any other segment of Iranian revolutionaries were interested in a romantic vision of pre-industrial Iran. Far from it, what they pursued was nationalization and modernization, just like many other revolutions. As a matter of fact, the Iranian Revolution was more of an urban revolution than any of the socialist revolutions before it. On this point, see Farideh Farhi, "State Disintegration and Urban-Based Revolutionary Crisis: A Comparative Analysis of Iran and Nicaragua," Comparative Political Studies 21.2, 1988, pp. 231-256, <http://cps.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/21/2/231>. Here's the abstract: "The purpose of this article is to assess the usefulness of the theoretical insights generated by Theda Skocpol's theory of revolution in explaining the Iranian and Nicaraguan revolutions. The major contention of this study is that she has formulated a useful framework for understanding social revolutions. However, given the manner in which she links her analysis to specific historical context, her propositions need to be modified in order to be applied to more recent revolutionary cases. Her analysis can become more applicable to the contemporary world by (1) locating it in the changing balance of class forces occasioned by combined and uneven development of capitalism on a world scale, (2) developing an understanding of the internal dynamics of states in peripheral formations, and (3) introducing a broader understanding of ideology. These modifications will enable us to explain the changing coalescence of oppositional groupings as manifested in the changing importance of intermediate classes, and to single out a particular type of state as distinctively susceptible to revolution." 2. In Europe, post-modernists were generally leftists critical of state socialism, esp. of the Soviet variety, some of whom were sympathetic to autonomist Marxism, anarchism, Maosim, etc. In the USA, post-modernists are largely liberal Democrats in practical politics, whatever philosophy they might espouse in their scholarship, though exceptions exist. 3. With the exception of people like James Heartfiled, very few leftists today express the kind of optimistic faith in industrialization untempered by environmentalism that socialists before Chernobyl could entertain. -- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>
