Marxist Kun-Faya-Kun of 1979 in Iran
Sam Ghandchi
http://www.ghandchi.com/4507-kon-faya-kun-english.htm

کن فیکون مارکسیستی سال 57 در ایران

http://www.ghandchi.com/4507-kon-faya-kun.htm

P.S. 01/27/24: Today for the first time after many years the translation of this article from Persian to English, using Google Translate, is being published. BTW this translation is directly from google and has not been edited yet! SG

P.S. 04/07/22: If you are studying Marx's writing under the title 'Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right,' reading the following article can be interesting for you. The following article was first published 14 years ago under the title 'The Promise of Religious Fundamentalism: Heaven on Earth and in Heaven;' but, unfortunately, I never found the time to translate it into English, otherwise it could be used for English-speaking readers alongside the treatise 'Marxist Thought and Monism.' S.G.

P.S. 04/16/16: This article was also published in the third issue of the quarterly Giti Madari of the Secular Democratic Party of Iran and in the Secular Democracy Movement of Iran magazine, the links of which are given below:

http://www.ghandchi.com/GitimadariNo3.pdf#page=14

http://isdmovement.com/2017/0417/040717/040717.Sam-Ghandchi-Marxists-Armageddon.htm

TThe achievement of Islamic fundamentalists in Iran is an event that has been called by terms such as the 1957 revolution, uprising, riot, rebellion, and the like, but it can be boldly expressed with the phrase "Marxist fiction." Why "Marxist?" Because Marx's idea of ​​revolution, as he put forward in "Criticism of Hegel's Philosophy of Law", is very different from Kant's point of view (1), and it is like the term "Ken Fikon" in the Qur'an, during which everything seems to be turned upside down. be, That too according to what God of the Qur'an says. Apparently, it is surprising how the Islamic fundamentalists were able to push Iran, which was previously transformed by the constitutional revolution with modern demands, into a historical regression seventy years later, by bringing to power a government far more regressive than the Qajar monarchy. But to understand what happened, we should not be satisfied with what happened in the reactionary revolution of 1357 in Iran and why, which has been discussed in detail for years (2), but it is necessary to focus on the development of "Ken Fikon". In other words, a more fundamental question is raised, that is, what are the characteristics of fundamentalist religious movements in the modern world?
The religious fundamentalism movement of the last half century is nothing but a continuation of the Marxist movement, not necessarily the movement itself, but the way that movement views the world. This term does not mean a metaphor or cliché, nor the opinions of some anti-communist conservatives who talk about the union of black and red reaction because they are hostile to the justice-seeking goals of the communist movement. At all, this writing has nothing to do with the discussions that see Ando as connected due to the formal similarities between the two religious and Marxist movements. The discussion is another matter, I hope that narrow-minded readers, instead of assuming that they know what the discussion is about, read this article carefully despite its length.

Let's look at one of the first works of Karl Marx entitled "Criticism of Hegel's Philosophy of Law", which is where the historical movement criticized in this article begins. It is interesting that in the same work, Marx makes the strongest attack on religion and Marx's famous sentence that religion is the opium of the masses is quoted from his writings. It is as if he knew that what he puts forward there can also become the theoretical base of a kind of religious fundamentalism. And by announcing religion as the opium of the masses, he has already separated himself from religious fundamentalism. Maybe Marx never imagined that such an event with a religious flag could happen a century and a half after him, and that after a century of the rise and fall of Marxist communism; But despite this, he still separated himself from the religious "Ken Ficon" and in his later works, although rarely, when he refers to such movements against the development of bourgeois democracy, for example, in Britain, he calls them social feudalism. Basically, Marx does not talk about religion after the book "Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Rights" because he said the last word right there when he said that religion is the justification of all human hardships in the world of fantasy, and Marxist communism is his goal to eliminate all those hardships. In the material world, he declares. As a result, from his point of view, with the destruction of the base of those fantasies, there will be no need for religion to be a problem anymore. And even today, it should be said that in a century and a half after Marx, politics in the West was basically secular, no one goes to the priest of any religion for illness, although religions are still discussed in the realm of metaphysics (3).Even in the ethics of human society, in determining good and bad, modern societies have abandoned moral virtue as a criterion for human judgment and have accepted Hume and Kant's model, which sets the *rights* of humans and *not* their virtue as a criterion, which In the judicial system of advanced societies, the paradigm is dominant (4), meaning that what is called the durability of religion in the last 150 years, after Marx's era, is in the fields of metaphysics and to some extent ethics, and clearly the growth of religion was in charitable institutions. which is not the subject of Marx's thought and Rorty has explained it well (5). As far as Marx's view on religion is concerned, as mentioned, the issue of economic justice is of interest to him, who says that religion means the justification of all human hardships in the fantasy world. The reason for referring to Marx's opinion about the field of metaphysics and ethics here is just to emphasize that not addressing those issues does not change the discussion of this article, as a result of examining Marx's criticism of Hegel's philosophy of rights in the framework of his plan for the communist future. , We continue.

In "Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Rights," Marx declares the role of the modern state to fulfill the interests of the wealthy classes and sees all the philosophy of human rights as the justification for this oppression that is inflicted on the poor, although he separates himself from the religious and promises heaven on earth. The paradise promised by Marx is the communism that the poor will create, which Marx later in the book "The Holy Family" clearly declares the task of creating it as the task of the new working class, which by destroying its own class, will destroy the entire class society (6). It is surprising how Marx's physicalist thought was able to grow so much in the common world for a century and a half that at the height of the Soviet Union, half of the world was in its territory, while never in history did atheistic ideas grow among the general public. They haven't had much. The reason lies in the fact that Marx did two things in his critique of Hegel's philosophy of law. One is the complete support of materialism and the second is the assignment of a great mission to the working class, which promised the destruction of the domination of the wealthy classes and the promise of a classless society. The existing state was no longer the arbiter of the fledgling civil society, as Hegel's view, but the state representative of the bourgeois class was declared. As a result, the government that, following the current order, had the task of guiding humanity to the promised paradise of a classless society, it didn't matter what kind of government it was, because it was also going to disappear from the scene later. If for anarchists, the state should be destroyed immediately, for Marx, the state played the role of the midwife of the new classless society, which would later itself be destroyed in the new world, and for this reason, Marxists, unlike liberals, did not spend time on the development and progress of state structures. They limited themselves to announcing the characteristics of the modern state, which they consider to be a bourgeois dictatorship. In fact, 40 years after criticizing Hegel's philosophy of rights, Marx and Engels clearly defended the dictatorship of the proletariat in their critique of the Gotha program. That is, it is important that this captain of the ship of humanity brings us to the promised paradise of a classless society, and it is not important that this midwife is a full-fledged dictatorial system. As a result, they did not hesitate to use the term "dictatorship" of the proletariat to describe that transitional government. In other words, this captain needs to be a dictator so that the old bourgeois society cannot return this ship to the old society, that is, the role of our midwife is more important in bringing us into the new world than making this journey from the old world. In what way did the utopia achieve, democratic or autocratic! In this way, Marx laid the foundation of communist tyranny in criticizing Hegel's philosophy of rights. If Hume and Kant in modern philosophy separated the discussion of rights from the virtues of ancient philosophers such as Plato, and the structure of modern governments after the American and French revolutions based on the modern view, more and more related to codifying legislation, implementing laws, And judgment was defined around human rights (7), for the Hegelian movement, even these views were raised in relation to the nascent civil society, and the government performed the role of guardian of human rights through codified laws. And he played a role as an arbitrator in the dispute of economic interests in the civil society. But suddenly, the Marxist trend separated itself not only from that modern view of the state as an arbiter, but also from the whole philosophy and called Hegel's philosophy the justification of the state. In this way, Marxist communism was created with the promise of heaven on earth in "Criticism of Hegel's Philosophy of Rights" and after that, Marxism first looked for cases in history that had formed a utopia similar to this model for the promise of heaven on earth. For example, in the history of Germany in the 15th century, Engels found the short reign of Muenzer as an example of this type. Later, Marx and Engels talked for a long time about the experience of the Paris Commune in 1870. However, the communists' promise of heaven on earth was still more in the realm of imagination.

In the more democratic countries of Europe, to the extent that the demands of the labor movement were raised in economic, social and political fields, those rights were obtained in the same proportion, and basically, in these countries, the dream of utopia never became the focus of any movement for which Marxist communism was the panacea. It can be imagined. But in more backward countries it was a different story. Even to this day, the people of these countries are willing to sacrifice their lives, property, wealth, and everything for the goals promised by a utopia, but the cost, at least for the goals of civil and individual rights, is hardly met. As a result, it did not take long for the Marxist utopia to find its main platform in the more backward countries With his extraordinary organizational skill, Nin was able to succeed in implementing the communist programs that, due to the height of injustice, tyranny, and backwardness in Russia, more and more prepared the ground for trying to create a utopia, and thus the Bolshevik Revolution was formed. , and finally, in the Soviet Union, the first serious crystallization of these promises, the "Marxist Paradise" became a reality. With the victory of the Bolshevik revolution, those who believed in these promises of heaven on earth gained a lot of power. Every person who suffered from any injustice anywhere in the world, when he learned that such a paradise was built on earth in the Soviet Union, he became fascinated by it, and wanted to reach that paradise, and the owners of this paradise also said that we are on the way to reach it. We will show it to you.Marxist literature was spread all over the world by the Soviets. Lenin's works were translated into different languages. But with the first discouragement from communism after Stalin's party purges, the Trotskyists were among the first to break away from the ship, saying that the promises were misunderstood and that socialism in one country was meaningless, and they wanted to implement their true socialism. As a result, they were the first important stream that questioned the Soviet Union from the point of view of the purity of early Marxist ideas and declared the existing reality of Stalin's communism as a deviation.For this reason, Stalin tried to prove to them that he was the most orthodox and wrote the history of the Bolshevik Party, where he was portrayed as the hero of true orthodoxy alongside Lenin, and became the model that the Soviet leaders propagated. It established the pure Marxism of Marx, Engels and Lenin in half of the world.

In the 1960s, the Maoists became the most important current against Soviet communism. Many who had learned more about the reality of the Soviet hell after Khrushchev's famous speech about Stalin, made a new utopia from China's heaven, which became a great force in the world at that time. The extreme communist currents sided more and more with Maoism. After some time, like the Soviet Union, which had become more developed, China showed all the realities of modern societies. The world of party leaders who had wealth and villas and excellent educational facilities for their children did not resemble the promised paradise of communist justice. And both in the Soviet Union and in China, tyranny and suppression of human rights had no boundaries. A government that was capable of reaching heaven did not stop, both inside and outside, the mission of bringing humanity to heaven on earth, and it became more and more obvious that this ship did not reach the destination of heaven, but its captain, more and more than the people, It requires the passing of economic, political and social rights, even more than the countries that were supposed to be hell. As the realities of China became more apparent, after the internal conflicts in the Cultural Revolution and the crimes against humanity there, other extreme communist groups were looking for their ideals in the small islands of communism in Albania and Cuba, which also ended very soon. . Except for the small remnants of the Marxist movement in countries like Iran, who still think that they are going to implement Marx's original plan and build heaven on earth and not make the mistakes of the Russians, Chinese, etc. Basically, Marxism, as a flag on the way to justice, was no longer attractive several years before the Iranian revolution, and all the past 38 years are considered a side current that is limited to its survivors, who, because they do not have a clear vision today, identify themselves with their past and Terms with the former suffix define themselves. But rationalism and futurism beyond Marxism is gradually finding its rightful place among Iranian intellectuals (8).

In fact, it is easier for religious viewpoints to say that the way to heaven was not right and continue to pursue it, but it is very difficult for a materialistic viewpoint to know that not only has heaven not been created on earth, but hell has been created, and yet it can still use supernatural energy. Have a wonderful way to continue. For this reason, many who were accustomed to the Marxist point of view, when you talk to them about new social movements, they answer that you don't really have an alternative way for justice. What they mean is that they want a plan to reach heaven on earth, they want a utopia, and when they don't see such a plan, they don't see much strength and energy in themselves. The problem is not age, it is the perspective (9). The problem is that they have abandoned Marxism, they are still materialists, and their ideal is a plan to reach heaven. Anyway, these issues are not discussed here, and as far as heaven on earth is concerned, if a better world emerges after the singularity in 2045, the way to get there is not the same for every person and even every society (10). That is to say, if a person wants to reach an advanced country like America with an autocratic captain from ten backward countries in Africa, it is possible, but the entire African society cannot be brought to the level of America in this way. The false promise that Marxism made by discovering the formula of heaven on earth, even if we have the best existing plan, will not lead to a better society. Neither the programs of Western secularism in Turkey, which had the form of a nationalist utopia and were supposed to reach modern European societies without efforts for human rights and democratization of society, nor the programs of Marxist communism in Cambodia, did not reach heaven (11).

The growth of religious fundamentalists was actually the result of the last efforts of the Marxist movement, after Cambodia and Vietnam, it became clear that the path of China, the Soviet Union, and Cuba did not create a heaven on earth, and the refugees from the hell that was created everywhere found the reality of the communist hell. They called the seekers of a better world. In such a situation, religious fundamentalists took up the flag of an extreme solution for social justice. Other Marxist currents lost their attraction when the truths of two centuries of their paradise were told to the people, and thus the religious fundamentalists inherited the utopian plan that promised the people both heaven on earth and heaven above.And he declared all modern governments to be the tools of the capitalists for internal and global oppression, and the tools of oppressing poor nations. Other religious fundamentalists promised heaven not only above the sky but also on earth, and as a result, no one could criticize them for being the opium of the masses. Khomeini's rule of the oppressed was such a phenomenon and for nearly forty years it has shown that there is neither heaven on earth nor heaven above the sky, when even many Islamic clerics today describe it as against all their ideals.

Meanwhile, the encouraging news about the nascent democratic and secular movement of Iran is the fact that no one is looking for a utopia to pass through the Islamic Republic (12). The new movement of the Iranian people, even those who consider themselves socialists, like the movements of European countries in the past two centuries, are looking for civil rights, both political and social rights and economic rights, and they are not looking for any midwife who is supposed to be their to a utopia. This movement is not looking for a class as the savior of humanity, nor is it looking for a leader like Khomeini or Lenin who is supposed to lead people to the promised paradise. The leaders of the new Iranian movement are those who have focused on the acquisition of civil and political rights. Others know that human rights are not only limited to the rights that the government gives or does not give them, but also includes the rights that they themselves give to each other. Even secularism and democracy are not considered as a new form of a utopia, but in certain social, political, and economic programs and demands in the civil and political movement of Iran (13). Perhaps this is the biggest achievement of Iran's political movement not only in the last 38 years but in the last 100 years that no one is looking for a utopia anymore, whether they promise a paradise on earth or a paradise in the sky!

Hoping for a democratic and secular futurist republic in Iran,

Sam Ghandchi
IRANSCOPE
http://www.ghandchi.com/index2.html
February 1, 2017

* A part of this article was published eight years ago under the title "The Promise of Religious Fundamentalism: Heaven on Earth and in Heaven".

Footnotes:

1. Important Difference of Kant and Our Reformists (in Persian)
http://www.ghandchi.com/1164-kant-vs-eslahtalabi-maa.htm

2. FUTURIST IRAN: Futurism vs Terrorism
http://www.ghandchi.com/500-FuturistIranEng.htm 

ایران آینده نگر: آینده نگری در برابر تروریسم
http://www.ghandchi.com/500-FuturistIran.htm

3. Metaphysics and Religion (in Persian)
http://www.ghandchi.com/264-Metaphysics.htm 

4. Iran & Law: Virtue or Rights
http://www.ghandchi.com/295-Law.htm

قانون و ایران: فضیلت یا حقوق
http://www.ghandchi.com/295-ghAnoon.htm

5. Power, Religion, and IRI Reformists
http://www.ghandchi.com/412-PowerReligionEng.htm

قدرت، مذهب، و اصلاح طلبان ج.ا.
http://www.ghandchi.com/412-PowerReligion.htm

6. Marxist Thought & Monism
http://www.ghandchi.com/2055-MarxismEng.htm

اندیشه مارکسیستی و مونیسم -یکتا گرائی
http://www.ghandchi.com/2055-Marxism.htm

7. Iran-Futurist Republic-Third Edition
http://www.ghandchi.com/411-FuturistRepublicEng.htm

ایران-جمهوری آینده نگر-ویرایش سوم
http://www.ghandchi.com/411-FuturistRepublic.htm

8. Philosophical Reflection: Rationalism and Futurism, First English Edition
http://www.ghandchi.com/4304-falsafe-english.htm

تأملی فلسفی: خردگرائی و آینده نگری
http://www.ghandchi.com/4304-falsafe.htm
 

9. A Futurist Vision
http://www.ghandchi.com/401-FuturistVisionEng.htm

یک دیدگاه آینده نگر
http://www.ghandchi.com/401-FuturistVision.htm

10. Futurism and End of Death (Interview in Persian)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CW81mhrFbBo

11. Why Secularism Failed in Half of the World
http://www.ghandchi.com/639-WhySecularismFailedEng.htm

چرا سکولاریسم در نیمی از جهان شکست خورد
http://www.ghandchi.com/639-WhySecularismFailed.htm
 

12. Useless Discussions about Neo-Liberalism and the New Left (in Persian)
http://www.ghandchi.com/1294-neoliberalism-chapeno.htm
 

13. Why Secularism Will Shape the Future of Iran (in Persian)
http://ghandchi.com/491-SecularismFuturism.htm

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