Marxism and Left-Wing Politics in Europe and Iran by Yadullah Shahibzadeh

Author:Yadullah Shahibzadeh
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783319925226
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Foucault and the Global Revolution

At the end of 1978, in the last stages of the Iranian Revolution, Foucault gives a long interview to Duccio Trombadori, a journalist from L’ Unita, the Italian Communist Party newspaper . Foucault explains the reason for his absence from political debates of the 1960s in France and discusses his political experience in the student movement in Tunisia, from which he learned to situate every political movement within a global perspective, with an eye on what is happening in other parts of the world.53 He learned from the Tunisian Marxist students in the late 1960s the possibility of a different Marxism, a Marxism that is different not only from the French academic Marxism and the PCF but also from the official Marxism of the socialist countries . The Marxism of the young Tunisians teaches him that Marxism is not only a means of analyzing reality but “a kind of moral force, an existential act that left one stupefied.”54 Foucault claims that the Marxism of young Tunisians as a way of being forced him to take an interest in the political debate again. “It wasn’t May of ’68 in France that changed me; it was March of ’68, in a third-world country.”55 A few months before this interview, Foucault had described the revolutionary movement in Iran as the sign of the return of “political spirituality” that once existed in Europe.56 The interview with Trombadori took place at a time when Foucault’s vocabulary on “micro-physics of power,” as the language of liberation from different forms of domination, had replaced the Marxist “language” which had dominated the European academic and public discourses.57 What does the term “experience” mean for Foucault in his Tunisian experience? Foucault describes experience as something which changes and transforms the individual or collectivities. He considers writing a book an experience, provided the author has no intention of communicating what he already knows but aims to learn something new which leads him to think in a new direction.58 Reading a book can also have transformative effects. In this regard, Foucault refers to his reading of Ernst Bloch’s The Principle of Hope. Bloch discusses, in this book, the religious origin of the idea of revolution promoted by the religious dissidents whose faith in the possibility of this worldly revolution, at the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of Renaissance, changes Europe completely. Foucault claims that since the religious posture of the Iranian Revolution reminds him of his reading of Bloch he decides to observe the revolution closely and test the connection between Bloch’s arguments and the events in Iran. What he observes in this political revolution is the relationship between hope and the Iranian religious eschatology.59 In The Principle of Hope, Bloch argues as well that Marxism does not distinguish between the cold stream of analysis and the warm stream of revolutionary expectations.60 Bloch argues that the warm stream of Marxism connects all “the debased, enslaved, abandoned, belittled human being” to the proletariat toward their universal emancipation.

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