AUFHEBEN: No. 15 - 2007: Lebanon, Iran..... and the 'Long War' in the Middle East

Lebanon, Iran and the 'Long War' in the Wider Middle East
Over the winter of 2006 there has been growing alarm that the Bush regime was planning an imminent attack on Iran, which many feared would involve the use of tactical nuclear weapons. Yet it was not the people of Iran that were to be subjected to war in the Middle East in the coming months, but those of Lebanon. In the summer, Israel, with the barely concealed supprt of the U.S., sought to inflict a decisive blow against Hizballah with a series of devastating attacks on Lebanese towns and cities, followed up by an invasion of south Lebanon. Yet despite Israel's awesome fire power, Hizballah, with the aide of Iranian weapons, was able to claim victory in the conflict.

In this article, we shall seek to place the Israeli-Lebanese conflict and the current stand-off between the Iran and US in the context of both the US imperialist project of re-ording of the oil-rich regions of what has become known as the Wider Middle East (i.e. the Middle East, together with Central Asia and the Caucasus), and the re-emergence of a militant Iranian proletariat.

Theoretical criticism and practical overthrow fifteen years on: A reflection
Theoretical criticism and practical overthrow are inseparable activities, not in any abstract sense but as a concrete and real alteration of the concrete and real world of bourgeois society. However, while theory and practice make sense of each other only as two parts of a whole, they (can) present themselves as opposites, particularly in times of retreat in the class struggle, when revolutionaries without their revolution in view are tempted either to retreat into abstract more-or-less radical ideas or into ritualistic practice. In the first part of this article, we identify various dead-end situations arising when either ideas or actions become crystallized through deprivation of any potential for development. In the second part of this article, we will look back at examples of practical experience and reflection, in particular two moments of struggle in Brighton which allowed this separation to be challenged: the movement against welfare benefits reform (the Job Seekers Allowance) and the anti-war movement.

Capital beyond class struggle? Review: Moishe Postone's Time, Labour and Social Domination
Generations have attempted to critique traditional Marxist productivism: their view of production as something to be 'freed' from capital, their reading of Marx's Capital as a positive science, their economic determinism, etc. Generations have tried to rediscover the 'true' Marx in his early writing such as the Grundrisse, or rediscover his Hegelian roots, or revalue his theory of commodity fetishism. Also, many have tried to explain how and why the USSR was state capitalism. Moishe Postone puts all these imperitives together in an interally coherent theory, where all those issues and pieces perfectly fit together! But the result is a theory in which classes, property relations and wage work appear to be 'inessential' for capital; a theory that sees capital as the 'One Subject' of history that determines a pattern for class struggle. Is this the ultimate truth about capitalism and ourselves as subjects? this article presents a structural survey of Postone's theoretical construction, starting from its foundations -- his ideological presuppositions and hidden assumptions.