I increasingly find Al

I increasingly find Al Jazeera despite its faults for a Mainstream News Media to be a well worth source of information compared to the others and I recommend we all have it on our favourites. In relation to this debate and the OWS and Iran comparisons this article is pertinent. I am not sure which thread to post it upon “One way of assessing what the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement is capable of is to examine whether its adversaries have a chance of being defeated. OWS has generated a great deal of debate since its inception as a movement that has sought to push back against “politics as usual”, to “change the dominant order”, etc. Yet this debate has rarely touched on the political framework within which the movement assembles and reassembles itself…” “…The fact that both conservatives and reformists had always been faced with the possibility of real defeat – permanent elimination from official politics and economic integration – characterises Iran’s domestic politics…Republicans and Democrats in the US system share the same discursive practices and the same patrons…Moreover, neither side has it, as its fundamental goal, to permanently eliminate the other from politics, economic integration etc, as they are indeed both part of the same network.”[BTW, I touched on this in a SOYMB blog where I quoted Lloyd George ‘Is it not a real advantage to the country that there should be two great parties, each capable in turn of providing responsible administration for the service of the Crown? How much better our system of government, as worked upon this balance, than in those countries where there is a permanent governing class, with all those interests of wealth and privilege massed around them, keeping the rest of their fellow-countrymen in sullen subjection by force of arms’] http://socialismoryourmoneyback.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/may-farce-be-with-you-old-fraud-with.html”…US political parties try to distinguish their position from one-another by rallying around, and highlighting, specific issues such as abortion, gay rights, or even taxation arrangements. But even these differences between the two groups are firmly situated within “politics as usual”, and unlike the situation in Iran, there is no contest over the doctrinal foundation of the state in the US. The result is that, while people go to the polls every four years in the US, substantive political discussions are generally absent from everyday life.Conversely, substantive debates are prevalent in Iran within each movement’s plethora of public spheres (in taxis, bread lines, coffee houses, private gatherings, religious sermons, hayats, etc). Yet these debates often lead to a mediated criticism of the state that creates a crisis of legitimacy – as a result of real competition between, and the possibility of permanent elimination of, each side.In short, reformists created a political crisis in Iran because conservatives had a chance of losing. OWS, on the other hand, cannot create a crisis of political legitimacy in the US, because its adversaries dominate completely and are not faced with the possibility of defeat…This sober perspective on where OWS stands points to the enormous task that lays ahead of the movement…” “…a word of caution for OWS activists whose involvement with the movement stems from their lived-experience of dealing with poverty, police brutality, etc, along with the lower middle class that is now being pushed down to the ranks of the proletariat. Be wary of those whose activism stems from their abstract understanding of your problems. We have seen many of these activists (such as Marxist millionaires and privileged ideologues) join the movement and become, in many instances, its de facto spokespersons…While their hearts are in the right place and they can articulate your problems brilliantly…That maybe [they are] not as radical as [they] think [they are]… the same top elementary/middle/high schools, the same Ivy leagues, and the very same sources that bankrolled it all have produced some of our most firebrand activists… Never relinquishing their credit cards, never refusing to deploy their enormous cultural capital, their sympathy for your problems, while real, stems from an abstract world, a world that could never produce an alternative discourse…”taken fromhttp://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/04/2012411152431103541.html That last statement reminds me of Marx and Engels constant refrain to the workers’ movement  to be cautious of intellectual leaders.