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Capitalism as a Social System
I often say this to capitalist advocates; ‘there’s nothing wrong with capitalism except that everything in it is upside down’: the economics, the politics, the artistic and the cultural, the intellectual and the scientific life of this organism called Capitalism is irrational, is warped, is wrong. Economically, it is more than capable of producing beyond all the needs of humanity yet most of humanity is kept in dire straits, troubled, broken and driven into the abyss. And above all, under capitalism, human labour— the most vital, the most creative ability of human beings— has in large turned into uncreative, unsatisfying and meaningless activities. Politically, the affairs of society and the…
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Philosophical Antagonism between Marxism and Religion
(With a look at The Organization of the Iranian People’s Mojahedin and its ideological developments in the first half of the 1970s) The founders of the Organization of the Iranian People’s Mojahedin (OIPM), as a symbol of the revolutionary petite-bourgeoisie in the democratic and anti-imperialist movement of our country, acknowledged the scientific-philosophical superiority of Marxism and its indisputable role in revolutionary practice in the contemporary world. And with that acknowledgement, they tried to amalgamate and arrange petite-bourgeois revolutionism with proletariat themes. The result was an eclectic philosophical doctrine that was committed to Islam while also interested in some aspects of Marxism. This, however, was neither coincidental nor was it limited…
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Thought and Reality and Revolution in the Mirror of Poetry
Thought and Reality The ability to think and to form conceptual thoughts marked a point where the mind began to translate the real into the abstract. In its departure from this point, however, the mind flew from the ground of reality where it perceived itself independent of it, as if standing in its own right— thus began metaphysics. It took millennia before the mind was finally able to break away from the world of metaphysics and its kingdom, and to return to its own origin upon which it was formed, i.e., the material world. And it was right at this historic juncture that the two realms— the realm of the…
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A Look At Dialectics
Dialectics facilitates the understanding of the complex issues of the universe. What is difficult, however, is to comprehend dialectics(1) itself. It is difficult to comprehend dialectics because in order to understand it, one has to go beyond the realm of formal logic — the logic to which we have been accustomed for thousands of years. The relationship between formal logic and dialectical logic can be compared from one perspective and to some extent to the relationship between picture and motion-picture; between photo and film(2). Formal logic shows us disconnected, frozen, and static moments of reality, just like a photograph. Conversely, in dialectical logic, moments appear in their continuum and in…
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Four Days And Four Nights With Pari Roshani
Note: what you are about to read is part of Louise Baghramian’s prison memoir. Louise was a young leftist activist arrested by the Islamic Republic regime in Iran in the summer of 1981 as the regime unleashed its reactionary forces and waged an outright war on all social and political organizations in its way. This part of Louise’s memoir depicts her account of meeting Pari Roshani, a supporter of The Iranian People’s Fadaee Guerrillas, who was also arrested by the regime. Louise Baghramian spent a few days with Pari Roshani before she was executed. This writing chronicles those few days. Reading Baghramian’s memoir, one may vividly see and sense the…
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War in Ukrain
The crushing weight of pain and human suffering involved in each and every war created for and by capitalism is unspeakable. It is backbreaking in fact for every nation and every community that is directly faced with it. One day, Iraq is bombed to smithereens, another day Afganistan, one day it falls upon Syria, another day upon Libya. And now, the ominous clouds of that ugly reality is forced upon the people of Ukraine. Ukraine is the latest episode of Capitalism At Work. This is the true and actual face of the profiteering system of capitalism by which the masses are being bamboozled into or injured by a war that…
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Stalinism and the Problem of Bureaucracy in Soviet Society
Note: The essay “Stalinism and the Problem of Bureaucracy in Soviet Society” was written in 1974 in response to the questions posed by a group of political activists abroad who were in contact with The Organization of the Iranian People’s Fadaee Guerrillas (OIPFG). These activists at that time were operating as “the Iranian National Front Organizations Abroad (Middle East Branch) (INF-ME)”. The incongruity between this group and the OIPFG in 1976, and particularly after the regime’s major assaults against the OIPFG, heightened which led to the complete disaffiliation between the two. The Iranian People’s Fadaee Guerrillas Stalin is the primary target of both the right-wing socialists as well as bourgeois…
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They Are Still Young
“They Are Still Young” is a heart wrenching narrative which sheds light on one of the most bitter and gruesome acts of inhumanity committed by the the Islamic Republic regime in the summer of 1988: the genocide of the dissidents. Through the medium of Magical Realism, Ali-Ashraf Darvishian, the author, creates an incredibly powerful scene where the dead come to life and converse with one another and with their survivors. Although Darvishian is mostly known for his Social Realist style which depicts the cold hard facts of life in class society, here he utilizes the marvels of Magical Realism to bridge between the dead and the living, between the past…
