Zizek's latest for the LRB is proof of that old adage that those who attack multiculturalism in the name of class instantly forfeit their probity on both subjects.  Actually, that isn't an old adage.  I just made it up.  But it is nonetheless true.  To explain: Zizek has expended a lot of polemical energy attacking a certain kind of poststructuralist and post-marxist politics for its abandonment of class.  But this critique was bound up with a simultaneous attack on 'political correctness', 'multiculturalism', and so forth, in the name of a 'leftist plea for Eurocentrism'. Of course, it was possible to appreciate the former critique without subscribing to the latter.  (And if you want a serious critique of post-marxist fashion, you must read Ellen Wood's The Retreat from Class.)  But it was never very clear what Zizek understood by 'class', apart from a structuring discursive principle: it was always invoked somewhat dogmatically.  If one doesn't expect from Zizek a scientific analysis of social classes, one would at least expect him to know what he thinks classes are.  It's quite clear from his latest piece, which re-states some of the theses earlier expounded in Living in the End Times, that he either has no idea, or has a novel theory of classes that he has yet to explain.

Zizek's main argument is that the current global upheavals comprise a "revolt of the salaried bourgeoisie" in danger of losing its privileges.  He begins by making an argument about the source of ruling class wealth in advanced capitalist formations.  Taking the example of Bill Gates, he asserts that the latter's wealth derives not from exploiting workers more successfully - "Microsoft pays its intellectual workers a relatively high salary" - but "because Microsoft has imposed itself as an almost universal standard, practically monopolising the field, as one embodiment of what Marx called the ‘general intellect’, by which he meant collective knowledge in all its forms".  In other words, Microsoft doesn't extract surplus value but rent, through its monopolistic control of information.  This is paradigmatic of "the gradual transformation of the profit generated by the exploitation of labour into rent appropriated through the privatisation of knowledge". The influence of post-operaismo in all this is clear: Zizek accepts and expounds the idea that intellectual labour is "immaterial" labour, which he maintains has a predominant or "hegemonic" role in late capitalism.  On this basis, he asserts that orthodox marxist value theory has become problematic, as "immaterial" labour simply cannot be appropriated in the way that "material" labour can.

Before going any further, just note that this whole line of argument is a red herring.  Even accepting the narrow focus on Microsoft's "intellectual workers" as a paradigm of 21st century work, their "relatively high salary" has no direct bearing on whether they are efficiently exploited. Or rather, if it indicates anything, it would tend to be that they are likely to be far more efficiently exploited than other workers. Globally, this is the trend: the higher the wages, the higher the rate of exploitation.  It is also the trend historically: the famous high wages offered by Ford were possible in part because the techniques of Taylorism allowed the more effective extraction of relative surplus value.  (The distinction between relative and absolute surplus value would be a fairly basic one for anyone claiming to operate within a marxisant radius.)  This is not to say that all of Microsoft's "intellectual workers" are therefore diamond proletarians.  Classes are formed in the context of class struggle, and the extent to which these workers are 'proletarianised' or 'embourgeoised' will depend on how successfully managers have subordinated the labour process, etc.  Nor does it strike me as a wholly unreasonable proposition that Gates' main source of added value is monopoly rent - it is arguable, at least.  But Zizek's argument in support of this idea is simply a non-sequitur.

Zizek goes on to explain how his approach differs from that of orthodox marxism, and much of his argument hinges on how he sets up Marx as a foil.  Thus: "The possibility of the privatisation of the general intellect was something Marx never envisaged in his writings about capitalism (largely because he overlooked its social dimension)."  Setting aside the curious claim that Marx "overlooked" the "social dimension" of capitalist productive relations, it is worth re-stating what Zizek undoubtedly already knows: the writings on the 'general intellect' are part of an exceptionally brief fragment in the Grundrisse, and would thus be hard pressed to 'envisage' anything; nonetheless, the description of the "general intellect" in the Grundrisse as a "direct force of production" manifest in the "development of fixed capital" assumes that the "general intellect" is already privatized.

What Zizek means, I assume, is that Marx did not anticipate the monopolization of "general social knowledge", and therefore did not anticipate that the major class struggles in an advanced capitalist formation might be over the share of rent rather than over the direct extraction of surplus value.  This is clear in the way that he treats the example of oil.  For, according to Zizek: "There is a permanent struggle over who gets this rent: citizens of the Third World or Western corporations. It’s ironic that in explaining the difference between labour (which in its use produces surplus value) and other commodities (which consume all their value in their use), Marx gives oil as an example of an ‘ordinary’ commodity. Any attempt now to link the rise and fall in the price of oil to the rise or fall in production costs or the price of exploited labour would be meaningless: production costs are negligible as a proportion of the price we pay for oil, a price which is really the rent the resource’s owners can command thanks to its limited supply."  So, this raises two questions: i) did Marx really not anticipate in his theory the possibility that rent extraction would be a source of major class struggles?; and ii) as a corollary, does the example of oil and its absurdly high prices undermine the labour theory of value?

This is fairly straightforward to establish.  First of all, the evidence of Marx's writings is that he understood that there could exist a class or fraction of people whose income depended on rent extraction.  Marx discussed two main types of rent.  These were, differential rent, and absolute ground rent.  To explain the first type of rent, it is necessary to specify some implications of the labour theory of value, which Zizek maintains is outmoded.  First of all, if the value of goods is determined by the socially necessary labour time invested in them, it would tend to follow that if less labour time is needed to make the goods then over time the exchange value of these goods would decline.  But the fact is that producers are in competition with one another for market share, so will tend to invest in labour saving devices so as to reduce their labour costs.  And even if, over time, the replication of this tendency throughout the economy - enforced by imperative of competition - the result is to reduce the total profit on the goods, the immediate effect is to enrich whoever temporarily has a more efficient firm as a result.  They obtain a differential rent because their investment enables them to obtain a larger share of a diminishing pool of surplus value.  The second type of rent, absolute rent, needs no lengthy exposition here, but can be said to be that type of rent that would most naturally arise in monopoly situations.  At any rate, it's reasonable to suppose that Bill Gates' wealth must embody some of both types of rent, alongside an unknown quantity of direct surplus labour.

Secondly, Marx's labour theory of value is not rebutted by the fluctuations of oil prices.  The theory is not supposed to explain price fluctuations, which respond to supply and demand.  The exchange value is an average across the productive chain; there is no mathematically fixed relation between the price of one particular commodity and the exchange value that exists as an average over the whole class of commodities which changes over time.  Nor is the theory endangered by the fact that the relation between supply and demand can be manipulated in monopoly situations to drastically increase the actual price of a good.  I am well aware that there are valid controversies regarding the labour theory of value.  Nor do I imagine that Kliman's heroic work will completely save the orthodox theory from its doubters, many of whom aren't even operating on the same theoretical terrain.  But Zizek's challenge is, purely on theoretical grounds, ineffectual.  It is a straw man that he dissects to such devastating rhetorical effect in this article.  For the sake of concision, I omit other instances in which he travesties Marx, both in this and other articles - we'd be here for a long, tedious time.

Zizek uses terms extraordinarily loosely.  Take the "salaried bourgeoisie", whose "revolt" apparently motivates this piece.  They are said to be leading most of the strikes taking place.  Zizek thus presumably includes in this groups like the public sector workers who have struck in most European countries.  Yet, he doesn't say what makes them a "salaried bourgeoisie".  His useage implies a novel class theory, but the closest he comes to defining this term is where he specifies that he means those who enjoy a 'privilege', being a surplus over the minimum wage.   Now, it's not at first clear what he means by the minimum wage.  There are, of course, legally enforced minimum wages in a number of advanced capitalist societies, but he doesn't mean that.  That would be arbitrary and would tell us nothing directly about productive relations.  But mark what he does mean by the 'minimum wage': "an often mythic point of reference whose only real example in today’s global economy is the wage of a sweatshop worker in China or Indonesia".  This no less arbitrary, as Zizek himself acknowledges.

Now, while the manner of his exposition implies a critical distance from such concepts, he nonetheless deploys them, arguing that they are themselves constitutive of a politically and discursively constructed division of labour: "The bourgeoisie in the classic sense thus tends to disappear: capitalists reappear as a subset of salaried workers, as managers who are qualified to earn more by virtue of their competence (which is why pseudo-scientific ‘evaluation’ is crucial: it legitimises disparities). Far from being limited to managers, the category of workers earning a surplus wage extends to all sorts of experts, administrators, public servants, doctors, lawyers, journalists, intellectuals and artists. The surplus takes two forms: more money (for managers etc), but also less work and more free time (for – some – intellectuals, but also for state administrators etc).  The evaluative procedure used to decide which workers receive a surplus wage is an arbitrary mechanism of power and ideology, with no serious link to actual competence; the surplus wage exists not for economic but for political reasons: to maintain a ‘middle class’ for the purpose of social stability."

In this sense, the "surplus wage" that characterises the exploitation of the proletariat by the "salaried bourgeoisie" is a discursive fiction, unanchored in real productive relations.  Still, having thus qualified his terms, it is nonetheless clear that it corresponds to some material processes.  After all, if the labour theory of value no longer adequately captures the workings of surplus extraction, and if the 'hegemonic' pattern of accumulation is the extraction of rent, then the 'surplus wage' has some material basis as that which is paid out of a share of the rent (largely extracted by Western corporations from the citizens of the Third World).  Further, Zizek goes on to maintain that the efficacy of such 'classes' is not the less real for their being political and discursive.  It explains current political behaviour, he says (and here I must quote at length):

"The notion of surplus wage also throws new light on the continuing ‘anti-capitalist’ protests. In times of crisis, the obvious candidates for ‘belt-tightening’ are the lower levels of the salaried bourgeoisie: political protest is their only recourse if they are to avoid joining the proletariat. Although their protests are nominally directed against the brutal logic of the market, they are in effect protesting about the gradual erosion of their (politically) privileged economic place. Ayn Rand has a fantasy in Atlas Shrugged of striking ‘creative’ capitalists, a fantasy that finds its perverted realisation in today’s strikes, most of which are held by a ‘salaried bourgeoisie’ driven by fear of losing their surplus wage. These are not proletarian protests, but protests against the threat of being reduced to proletarians. Who dares strike today, when having a permanent job is itself a privilege? Not low-paid workers in (what remains of) the textile industry etc, but those privileged workers who have guaranteed jobs (teachers, public transport workers, police). This also accounts for the wave of student protests: their main motivation is arguably the fear that higher education will no longer guarantee them a surplus wage in later life."

Zizek goes on to qualify this observation - each protest must be taken on its own merits, we can't dismiss them all, etc. - but is clearly arguing that the general thrust of the strikes and protests is in defense of relative privilege.  This is especially true of the "special case" of Greece, where "in the last decades, a new salaried bourgeoisie (especially in the over-extended state administration) was created thanks to EU financial help, and the protests were motivated in large part by the threat of an end to this".  So far the only evidence offered for the existence of this 'salaried bourgeoisie' is in its ostensibly discernible, concrete effects in the political behaviour of social layers affected by crisis.  Yet this behaviour can be explained far more efficiently by the class interests of fractions of the proletariat who, due in part to superior organisation vis-a-vis their employers, have obtained a degree of job security and in some cases relatively high wages.  In which case, the concept is useless.

As is typical with Zizek, each step in his argument is characterised by an astonishing lack of precision, a slipshod and loose useage of terms, straw man attacks, sock puppetry and so on.  There are lots of fireworks, but little real theoretical action: all show, no tell, an empty performance of emancipatory politics.  And I just thought I'd spell that out because so many people messaged, prodded and otherwise cajoled me into criticising this latest from Zizek.  I hope you're satisfied.

I. Hegemony. In normal conditions of bourgeois rule, the ruling class exerts its domination partly through moral and intellectual leadership. It purports to rule for the good of the whole, not merely its own particularistic interests. Under capitalism, the central good that the bourgeoisie promises to bring to the social whole is growth, from which we may all benefit, even if we do not benefit in equal proportion. The benefits would not exclusively take the form of gradually increasing income, but also peace, political stability, technological and informational advances, cultural development and so on. The bourgeoisie's promise is that its rule serves a wider developmental purpose, which no alternative adequately rivals.

But in fact, there's no necessary reason why anyone should consent to this social image, which attributes 'growth', the sign for accumulated, alienated human labour, to a reifed capitalist 'market'. There's no necessary reason why anyone should even believe that these benefits actually follow from capitalist 'growth', for they very often do not. Nor is there any necessary reason why people should accept this arrangement as just, or 'natural', or 'inevitable', and acquiesce in it. And, of course, many people do not. But the production of social images takes place within an antagonistic and asymmetrical power relation, and the bourgeoisie exerts strategic control over most of the means through which social images are produced and disseminated. So, for bourgeois hegemony to be operative, it has to have achieved decisive leverage over the production of ideology, through universities, the military, the church, media, the parliamentary state, and so on; and the interests and aspirations of subaltern classes have to be plausibly incorporated into the ruling ideology. This requires the production of "tendentially empty signifiers" (Laclau, 'Structure, History and the Political') through which particular interests can appear to represent universal interests. These tendentially empty signifiers - family, market, justice, nation, hard-working, consumer, tax-payer, decent*, etc etc. - permit a certain equivalence between particulars, linking them, and anchoring them in a discourse beyond particularism. (*It is actually an over-statement to consider any of these signifiers 'tendentially empty', which is why Vološinov's analysis of social multi-accentuality comes in handy).

Since ruling classes are nationally constituted, moreover, they tend to represent their particularist interests first as national interests, and then only secondarily as contributing to planetary embetterment, or at least not inhibiting it. If the ruling class in question stands in an imperialist relationship to other other societies, then that ruling class will represent the national interest in missionary language - manifest destiny, the civilizing mission, containment, democracy promotion, etc., - concerning the nation's extra-territorial role, but this is always subordinate to the national interest, represented in the international terrain as as 'enlightened self-interest'. So, bougeois hegemony in an imperialist state can operate by appearing to meet the needs of subaltern classes within the imperialist mission itself, through their participation in demonstrations of national/racial supremacy, and their apparent benefiting from the fruits of that supremacy.

II. 'War of Position'. In its zenith, the bourgeoisie is capable of delivering sustained social transformation without surrendering its hegemony with respect to subaltern classes; it can take initiative and dictate the pace and nature of social reform; thus, the period following the organic crisis of 1848 is one of sustained reform, and qualitative social transformation, often under pressure from the working classes, but never exactly at their bidding or to their requirements. Similarly, there emerged new national states whose creation was directed by bourgeois-aristocratic initiative, without a popular Jacobin element driving their construction. In these states, notably Italy and Germany, the bourgeoisie could create independent centres of capital accumulation with fully fledged bourgeois cultural and political institutions without the working class taking leadership. This process, Gramsci dubbed 'passive revolution'.

For as long as the bourgeoisie retains its hegemonic position, the prospect of an immediate revolutionary assault on its power bases remains distant, upheld only as an intellectual-moral horizon by revolutionary parties until such time as circumstances change. In these circumstances, what Gramsci calls the "Forty-Eightist" position (referring, of course, to 1848) calling for insurrection against the state is, he claims, historically superseded by the rigidification of state authority and civil society organisation. The 'war of movement' becomes a 'war of position': "The massive structure of the modern democracies, both as State organisations and as complexes of associations in civil society, are for the art of politics what ‘trenches’ and permanent fortifications of the front are for the war of position". (Gramsci, 'The State and Civil Society'). Gramsci was not heterodox in this position, as Peter Thomas has shown - Engels, Lenin and Trotsky had all employed this insight, the latter insisting that conditions unique to Tsarist Russia would not be replicated in stable capitalist societies, and so the class struggle would have to be waged with a view to the specific conditions inhering in those states. The 'war of position' is not a chosen strategy, but a mode of political struggle enforced by circumstance. A 'war of movement' is available where a society is held together by force, where its power is concentrated in the instruments of repression, rather than consent. In advanced capitalist social formations, the bourgeoisie has successfully confined the proletariat's struggles to the sphere of civil society, which dictates where and how the war must be fought. This war will be conducted by means of ideological campaigns, trade union mobilisations, legal-democratic protests, etc. All of this is intended to exploit 'contradictions' in ruling ideology; turn exploited against exploiter; amplify demands for attainable reforms (both for its own beneficial purposes, and to socialise cadres of workers in militant struggles); raise reasonable but unattainable demands to illustrate the limits of the system's ability to meet social aspirations; and in the process convoke new constellations of potentially counter-hegemonic political forces.

III. Organic crisis. Until one day... An 'organic crisis' is a complete crisis of society and state, not merely of the capitalist market, but of the bourgeoisie's political and cultural institutions, and its sources of hegemony. It constitutes a crisis in the authority of all affected bourgeois states, and stimulates subaltern movements on an international level. A crisis of authority "occurs either because the ruling class has failed in some major political undertaking for which it has requested, or forcibly extracted, the consent of the broad masses (war, for example), or because huge masses (especially of peasants and petit-bourgeois intellectuals) have passed suddenly from a state of political passivity to a certain activity” (Gramsci, 'State and Civil Society').

It is precisely such a generalised crisis that rescues the "Forty Eightist" position from a purely niche, antiquarian, or fetishistic interest, justifying the idea of a permanent revolution taking on the state directly. The ruling order suddenly seems brittle, the civil society no longer as robust, existing channels for popular expression no longer capable of deflating radical critique. Something like this could be said to have occurred in the Middle East. However, in the short-run, such crises are dangerous for the Left. Not all strata can reorient themselves at the same pace - traditional ruling classes have numerous trained cadres, and changes men and programmes with greater speed than opponents. For example, the Left was initially wrong-footed by the crisis of 2008, not helped by it.

One might argue that the revolutionary process in the Middle East reinforces the view that such scenarios only unfold in states with weak civil society organisations, frail or non-existent democratic legitimacy, overwhelmingly dependent on force. This, however, would overstate the extent to which the ancien regimes in the recent revolutionary states, Tunisia and Egypt, were dependent on consent. It was precisely because such consent broke down, and the social basis of their regimes narrowed, that they eventually fell. Mubarak's fall, for example, was precipitated by: a financial crisis; the weakening of state capacity; the defection of important class fractions (particularly the middle class and rural poor); the shattering of elite self-confidence; the transfer of loyalties of strategically significant intellectuals to opposition, which cultivates its own cadres of organic intellectuals; and finally a popular unwillingness to tolerate the old order, even at the cost of privation, injury and a number of deaths. These processes would have been accelerated by the regime's undemocratic nature, and its considerable cultural and socioeconomic distance from the ruled, but they are far from unique to such regimes. An organic crisis can afflict any regime. It would be historically short-sighted not to expect the features of such crises to recur not just in Third World autocracies, but in the Euro-American capitalist core in the near future.

Five years ago, a little noted article appeared in The International Political Science Review. By Adam Webb, the article entitled 'The Calm Before the Storm? Revolutionary Pressures and Global Governance' anticipated "a global revolutionary crisis". This would probably take place within a generation, he forecast, and would be prefaced by a systemic global economic crisis equivalent to the prolonged 'troughs' of the 1930s and 1970s. Such a crisis would intersect with an existing sense of injustice about the inequity of global wealth accumulation, and drive political radicalisation. But this would not result in revolution if the world system and the national regimes comprising it enjoyed sufficient legitimacy to weather the storm. The reason why such a crisis can become revolutionary is because the existing order is brittle, increasingly lacking democratic legitimacy even within the 'developed' capitalist core.

This is a feature of neoliberal governance, which saw "that ‘unstable equilibrium’ between coercion and consent which characterizes all democratic class politics" tilt "decisively towards the ‘authoritarian’ pole" (Stuart Hall). Limited democratic participation was replaced by market-driven decision-making. The fragile, antagonistic nature of this hegemonic project, which involved somehow suturing together a series of 'contradictory' subject-positions, meant that it could only survive through the weakness of its opponents. Indeed, it had derived its initial energy from exploiting unpopular aspects of the old social democratic centre, and of certain labour movement practises, in order to divide and weaken opponents. But given a sufficiently ecumenical crisis, and the revival of radical forces of opposition, the patent weakness of its civil society bases, the lack of popular participation in the regime (even in its limited corporatist forms), and its lack of ability to absorbe and 'transform' popular demands, all become abundantly plain.

On top of this, the national regimes founded on such social pacts are increasingly integrated into global transgovernmental institutions designed to reinforce their lack of responsiveness to popular pressure, to insulate their law-making and economic decision-making processes from popular majorities, while capital has sought to free itself somewhat from controls by national states. The Middle East revolutions show that those who expect 'globalization' in this sense to render the capture of national states irrelevant are mistaken. But if there is a scalar shift taking place in the operation of capitalist power, it is not as yet matched by a global civil society capable of buttressing this transnational power's legitimacy. This affects the level at which revolutionary struggles are pitched, as they increasingly have a regional dimension analogous to the regionalising tendencies within capitalism itself. It also means, however, that reactionary 'anti-capitalist' forces could emerge predicated on national, ethnic or religious revival, particularly if the contending forces reach an impasse, neither able to impose a solution, allowing a charismatic Bonapartist/Caesarist leadership to emerge and carry through a 'passive revolution' that preserves the basic class structure while introducing substantial social changes. Such a tendency is not restricted to, but is most dangerous in, the imperialist states.

There were those, some months back, who tried to characterise the Iranian reform movement as a flash-in-the-pan upsurge of the "Gucci crowd", a collective bed-wetting of the bourgoisie. They were deeply sceptical of a movement whose apparent stimulus was an allegedly rigged election, in which the losing candidate was supported by the 'Modern Right' neoliberal Rafsanjani, of Iran-Contra fame. They reminded people of the synthetic 'colour revolutions' that have taken place. And indeed, it was hard not to think of that spate of spectacles, in which often well-heeled masses turned out for big protests before either facilitating the assumption of power of a neoliberal faction, or dying out entirely. Think of the 'Cedar Revolution' - the Lebanese bourgeoisie, face-painted and out in force, towing their Syrian house servants behind them. That spectacle moistened a few crotches among Anglosphere liberals, but it was immediately outnumbered by more sizeable Hizbollah organised protests, and it didn't last as a mass movement.

The characterisation of the Iranian movement in those terms was false in several ways. For a start, notwithstanding the 'confessions' issuing from various protesters tortured by the basiji, there is no evidence of any US involvement in the 'Green' movement. Secondly, it can't be assumed that the revolt was simply a movement of the comprador bourgeoisie. Ahmadinejad had done relatively little for the working class. Moreover, far from the movement being restricted to some symbolic appearances in big metropolitan centres, the revolts spread to poor working class areas. Even if it had been a movement exclusively of the middle classes, I would have wanted it to win - to win more than it bargained for, in a sense. It was clear, though, that the revolt wasn't just about Mousavi or the sector of capital backing him, and the rebellion persisted even after the bloody state attacks on protests left several people dead and many wounded. Not long ago Al Qods day, Iran's national day of solidarity with the Palestinians, also became an opposition protest - quite appropriately, I might add. Palestine has better allies than Ahmadinejad.

Students in particular continued to speak out and protest, while the most politicised and advanced sectors of the working class were attacked. Some Anglophone readers equate 'students' with 'middle class' (wrongly as it happens), but one result of the Iranian revolution was an explosion in higher education so that it can no longer be considered a preserve of the privileged. Indeed, just as the radicalism of some students in Britain resulted in part from the matriculation of the working classes, so the radicalism of Iranian students could be said to result in part from their poor background and the miserable economic prospects that await them despite their labours.

At any rate, when Ayatollah Montazeri died a week before Christmas, it would have been reasonable to expect some upheaval. Montazeri was no leftist, though he was initially one of the Republic's 'permanent revolutionaries' working for its export internationally. At the same time, he opposed excessive vengeance against the old Shah ruling class, and helped humanise the Republic during the 1980s when it was undergoing some of its most vicious purges, notably the killing of thousands of prisoners in 1988. He opposed the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, and became an ally of the reform movement in the 1990s. Having criticised Ayatollah Khamenei, whose political instincts are usually reactionary, he was placed under house arrest. Most significantly, he issued a fatwa against Ahmadinejad's re-election this year. He instantly became a muse to the 'Green' movement. Upon his death, the protesters didn't mourn - they organised. Protests broke out not only in Tehran, where some reports apparently speak of protesters taking control of the streets, but also in Najafabad (Montazeri's birthplace), Isfahan, and Zanjan, where police allegedly tried to prevent memorial services from taking place. In the protests that followed, the state responded with its usual combination of tact and diplomacy. Yesterday, the day of Ashura, eight were killed and three hundred injured according to Le Monde. The dead reportedly include Mousavi's nephew. But if drowning the last protests in blood didn't work, how can the authorities assume that it will work this time? Look at these protesters:







If those writing the reform movement off as another 'colour revolution' were correct, we probably wouldn't be witnessing such scenes. There is no way that this is over. The old order in the Middle East, from the US-backed Mubarak dictatorship to the Islamic Republic, is breaking apart. A counsel of despair tells us that the only alternative to the current regime in Iran is some schlemiel maintained by Washington. However, this assumes that the current Iranian ruling class is the country's best vanguard against imperialism - an absurd proposition. The reformers are not Washington stooges, and their success would make attacks and sanctions emanating from Washington less plausible. It also assumes that no social class or coalition in Iran has the resources to build a better, more just state under the duress of pressure from the US. That has always been an excuse of developmentalist, and even 'socialist', despotisms. But there is no reason for us to accept this.