Surviving Capitalism (Not) : Iran: The campaign for regime change in its last phase

We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Tuesday, January 26, 2010

Iran: The campaign for regime change in its last phase

by Takis Fotopoulos from Inclusive Democracy website. I normally try to limit my articles to 3000 words, but I think that this one (5800 words) is especially important. The author examines the confusion he see existing on the left that limit any real change in the New World Order.

The movements that emerged in the New World Order ―whether they are parodies of initially anti-systemic movements (e.g. feminist, green, etc.) currently fighting for rights or for single issues respectively (rights of women, movement for a “green capitalism” etc.), or new “anti-authoritarian” movements which fight for the rights of minorities (e.g. the rights of immigrants, ethnic minorities, gays, etc.)― have one common feature: the lack of anti-systemic universalist projects which they consider either “obsolete” or potentially “totalitarian”. For these movements, there is no need for an anti-systemic movement, but rather for a struggle against the power relations that turn up in various social practices.

…these movements are fully compatible with the New World Order, playing in practice the role of the left boot of the system. This is because the system does not need the active support of these movements, but only their fellow-traveling, which obscures the real goals and essentially disorients activists in struggles for rights and civil liberties, instead of anti-systemic struggles against the New World Order. Clearly, such struggles have no chance at all in creating anti-systemic consciousness, and, even more so, the conditions for the transition to a society of equal distribution of all forms of control/power among all citizens. In this sense, these movements and the “anti-authoritarians”, who support them, play the game of the transnational elite and its supporters.