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Danny Postel criticises Matthew Cassel’s article “An American in Tehran.” Scroll down for Matthew Cassel’s response.

Contrary to Danny Postel’s claims, I did not intend to portray the Basij or Ahmadinejad government in a sympathetic light. Rather, my aim was to lend nuance to a complex reality in Iran that has been oversimplified by nearly all media outlets in the United States, from Fox News to commentators like Postel.

Unlike Postel, I do not attempt to make sweeping generalizations about the ideology of a diverse opposition movement that includes Iranians from all walks of life. Nor would I ever attempt to make such generalizations from the other side of the globe. I traveled to Iran to gain a better understanding of what was happening there.

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Tom Engelhardt
27 April 2010

[Note for TomDispatch Readers: I’m away on vacation this week and largely off the grid, so don’t expect answers to emails or requests until the first week of May.  In the meantime, here’s an excerpt adapted — with a new TomDispatch beginning by the author — from Noam Chomsky’s latest work, his must-read Hopes and Prospects, which can be preordered today, even as it wings its way toward local bookstores and Amazon.  The book is a deep dive into the bone-chilling waters of the first years of the twenty-first century, including the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.  In such phenomena as the democratic wave that has swept Latin America, however, Chomsky does see hope for our collective future — and even on the subject of Gaza and the Palestinians, he sees possibilities, long blocked unfortunately by Washington and Tel Aviv.  He is, as always, a man to contend with.  And be sure to check out Timothy MacBain’s latest TomCast audio interview in which Chomsky discusses the prospect of an Israeli attack on Iran, the feasibility of an Israel-Palestine two-state solution, and the concept of international law, by clicking here or, if you prefer to download it to your iPod, here. Tom]

A Middle East Peace That Could Happen (But Won’t)
In Washington-Speak, “Palestinian State” Means “Fried Chicken”
By Noam Chomsky

The fact that the Israel-Palestine conflict grinds on without resolution might appear to be rather strange.  For many of the world’s conflicts, it is difficult even to conjure up a feasible settlement.  In this case, it is not only possible, but there is near universal agreement on its basic contours: a two-state settlement along the internationally recognized (pre-June 1967) borders — with “minor and mutual modifications,” to adopt official U.S. terminology before Washington departed from the international community in the mid-1970s.

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The Ecology of Socialism
John Bellamy Foster Interviewed by Solidair/Solidaire

Solidair/Solidaire, the weekly journal of the Workers Party of Belgium (PVDA-PTB), interviewed John Bellamy Foster, editor of Monthly Review, 26 April 2010

Solidair/Solidaire: Many green thinkers reject a Marxist analysis because they think that the Marxist approach to the economy is a very productivist one, focused on growth and seeing nature as “a free gift” to mankind.  You contradict that idea.

John Bellamy Foster: Productivism has of course been the dominant perspective for the last two centuries or more, cutting across the ideological spectrum.  In many ways, though, Marx, who was hands down the most sophisticated social analyst of the environmental predicament in the nineteenth century, constituted an exception.  He argued that what was needed was the rational regulation by the associated producers of the metabolic relation between human beings and nature in such a way as to promote the highest levels of individual and collective human fulfillment at the lowest cost in terms of the expenditure of energy.  This was the end point of his critique of capitalism and at the same time a crucial part of his definition of communism.  He pointed to the “irreparable rift” in the metabolism between humanity and nature caused by the capitalist production.  Marx presented the most radical vision conceivable of sustainable human development, arguing that individuals didn’t own the earth, that all the countries and peoples on the planet did not own the earth, that it was our responsibility to maintain and if possible improve the earth for succeeding generations (as good heads of the household).  Some later Marxists (e.g. William Morris) followed Marx in these ecological views.  Others adopted a narrow productivism reminiscent of capitalist society, reinforcing a tragic legacy in the Soviet Union from the late 1930s on.  Nevertheless, Marxists, and socialists more generally, played pioneering roles in the development of the modern ecological critique.  All of this is explained in Marx’s Ecology and in my more recent book The Ecological Revolution.

The claim that Marx believed that nature was a “free gift” to humanity is a statement that one hears over and over, but is based on a fundamental misunderstanding.  All the classical economists — Smith, Malthus, Ricardo, Say, J.S. Mill, Marx — referred explicitly to nature as a “free gift.”  It was part of classical economics and was inherited by neoclassical economics.  Neoclassical economists, even mainstream environmental economists, still include this same notion in their textbooks.  Marx, however, was distinctive in that he was writing not about economic laws in general but about the laws of motion of capitalism as a historically specific system, and from a critical standpoint.  He therefore argued, quite correctly, that nature was treated as a “free gift” for capital.  Its non-valuation was built into capitalism’s law of value.  He argued that while under capitalism only labor produced (exchange) value, that this merely reflected the distorted character of the system, since nature, he insisted, was just as much a source of real wealth (use values) as was labor.  Indeed, labor was itself at bottom a natural agent.  This was not a minor matter for Marx.  He started off the Critique of the Gotha Programme with this very point, criticizing those socialists who failed to recognize that nature and labor together constituted the sources of wealth, with nature as its ultimate source.  Marx argued that capitalism promoted private profits in part by destroying public (natural) wealth.  I have written repeatedly on this, most recently in “The Paradox of Wealth: Capitalism and Ecological Destruction” (coauthored with Brett Clark) in the November 2009 issue of Monthly Review.

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International Solidarity Movement
28 April 2010

Ahmad Sliman Salem Dib, 19, died of blood loss at 4:30 pm today, following emergency surgery.

Dib was shot in the leg by an Israeli sniper at a non-violent demonstration, with more than 200 participants, which marched towards the Israeli imposed buffer zone near Nahal Oz crossing with Israel east of Gaza City. Dib was urgently transferred by an ambulance to Shifaa Hospital in the Gaza City, bleeding heavily. The injury proved fatal because the bullet severed the femoral artery, shattered the femur bone, and damaged the surrounding muscle and other tissues.

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