The fate of the Libyan revolution

The fate of the Libyan revolution has passed into the hands of the European powers. In fact, it’s probably safe to say it’s not a revolution at all any more – at best a case of state building. But even that seems doubtful in the midst of a civil war.

Deciding cases of Western state building in the Arab world is out-of-scope for this blog. But trying to discover how this all came about is not. Without speculating too much on the relative strengths and revolutionary proclivities of the economic classes in Libya, a few points can be made.

First, initially peaceful protests in favor of a revolutionary programme can, if not generally, at least sometimes, count on the forbearance of the governments in whose capitals they are held. This is true for several reasons, not least because the marchers are citizens, and also because of the impressions that are produced world-wide, in a world as hooked up as ours is today.

Of course the madman Gaddafi is brutally insensitive to the types of impressions he and his regime produce. And so the capital was lost to the revolution very early on.

But the brute Gaddafi was also clever with a despot’s wisdom in a number of decisive ways. For example…

…It’s also good for a revolution to have the regular army, or at least the bulk of it, on its side, and a few defections seem to have occurred at the beginning. I am thinking of the pilot who ejected from his fighter plane rather than use its ordinance against the revolution.

The defections stopped, suddenly and completely it seemed, and the regime’s armor and artillery were turned against the revolutionists in the neighborhood of the capital. At the same time, as poorly led and equipped as they were, more defections were the only hope of the rebels advancing from the east along the coastal road. What happened?

I offer a mere conjecture: the brute Gaddafi purged his officer corps of unreliable men, starting with the commanding officer of the pilot who abandoned his plane mid-flight, and maybe starting as soon as he saw which side the Egyptian army took….

...At any rate, the rebels never received any succor from that quarter. (In the latest news, Gaddafi has promised his officers an increase in rank and pay – which should work almost as well as an efficient purge.)

And now it possible to see other clever things the despot Gaddafi has done – as if he had actually read Marx himself.

Didn’t it seem silly, for example, for Gaddafi to dole out cash to his supporters, as if he were buying loyalty?

On my reading, it wasn’t silly at all – merely the next regular installment. Those people were already bought and paid for – shiftless lumpenproletarians dressed more for the streets of Milan than of Tripoli, with no other economic interest than the maintenance of the regime – indeed no other economic activity.

That makes the despot Gaddafi at least as clever as Louis Napoleon, who had all the drunks, petty criminals, and marginal workers of Paris in his pay when he made his coup.

And what about the proletarians of Tripoli? It doesn’t seem the despot Gaddafi ever allowed such a class to exist – at least not as citizens. Foreign labor did much of the proletarian work – and walked off to the borders, instead of massing in the streets, when the revolution broke out.

These two phenomena, three if you count the violence, would be enough to hold the capital in a revolution led by professional and other petit bourgeois classes apparently very small in number compared to the dependants of the regime.

Not having taken the capital, the revolution gained its first success in the provinces. Since this success did not immediately affect the state – it is the goal of all revolutions to “affect,” really to replace, the state – the revolutionists were reduced to a status of disobedience over against a state that was in the meantime able to maintain its existence, institutions, and powers. The state normally considers revolution in the provinces to be mere rebellion. Civil war is the usual result.

[Here follows a passage I wrote before my first post to this blog, on March 13^th, when the situation in Wisconsin seemed to me more volatile than the situation in Libya, and I posted that blog (Voters of Wisconsin!) instead:]

All civil wars involve killing one’s own fellow citizens, and that’s true on both sides. How much difference is there between a bloody tyrant and a bloody rebel?

And now we see…

…Europe has always known how to interfere in the civil broils of its neighbors and dependants. Recognizing the rebels won’t amount to much unless NATO takes concrete actions to ensure the continued existence of their state, such as it is. They’d have to destroy the Gaddafi regime’s armor and artillery.

Now the forces of the regime have retaken the oil port – apparently it’s at the base of the Gulf of Sidra. This is the strategic corner the British found so difficult to turn in WW II.

Lots of comments could be made about the military situation:

·         How difficult it will be for either side to push an offensive along a narrow strip of coastal highway at militarily extreme distances from their source of supplies. That’s why the rebels stalled and why the regime might stall too.

·         How little sense it makes to destroy the regime’s command and control resource to advantage an enemy that doesn’t have any themselves, and would therefore be unable to profit from the circumstance.

·         How the journalists seem finally to have noticed that the rebel army is not an army of veterans. It doesn’t appear to have any qualified general officers either.

I guess France and Italy really will determine to do this the old-fashioned way – it’s their oil after all.

[Which now seems, without modesty, prophetic. But there is no mystery about the dialectical interpretation of history, military or economic.]

For present purposes, “their oil” means in the first instance, the oil formerly belonging to the people of Libya by virtue of being citizens of the nation where it was found and exploited, in the second instance, the oil belonging to the capitalists of Europe by virtue of their deals with the Libyan regime, and in the last instance, the oil sold to the consumers of Europe by virtue of their everlasting desires.

And the result so far accords with these judgments. When the rebels regain the oil ports, NATO will draw the stalemate line thereabouts. At that point the revolution will definitely be over and the rebellion will also be functionally dead.

Whatever revolutionary values exist in Libya don’t seem to have a face. We know what the people are against – and of all the Arab despots, Gaddafi currently ranks as the worst – but we don’t know what they’re for…and maybe they don’t either. There is brave revolutionary spirit, but there’s no recognizable revolutionary idea. Without it, there’s nothing to remake the state around. And so it’s up to NATO to build the state, that is, to find a solution for their oil.

The revolutionary idea is something Egypt, on the other hand, actually has. And it has definite class content…

…as we’ll see in our next post.

The 1848

With revolutions spread across much of Arab world, and under the surface in the rest of it, the epoch resembles nothing more than it does the revolutions of 1848 across Europe – the continental revolution that prompted Marx & Engels to issue their Manifesto, and the history of which they later recounted in the pages of the New York Times under Marx’s by-line.

I’ve been reading and keeping notes on philosophical and Marxist-Leninist theories of revolutions, and on historical accounts, in my spare time for some years now. This research has not reached a stage of completion sufficient to permit a full and convincing articulation of the theory. (And anyhow who would publish a text that did not originate from a research university?) But events have forced my hand: they’ve given me a rare opportunity to apply and test my theory – in real time, so to speak.

Both the scope of the 1848 and the rapidity of its spread – scarcely less slow in an age of newspapers and the infancy of steam-powered rail than it was in our age of the internet and social media – offer fertile ground to draw parallels. Paris was revolutionized on February 24^th, Vienna on March 13^th, and Berlin on March 18^th – all capitals of large and organized regimes. More than two dozen capitals of petty German states followed suit, the repercussions were felt in Italy, Poland, and even in London, and the Hungarians took advantage of the situation to assert briefly their independence from the Austrian Empire.

The revolutions began in the cities, and held sway there as long as unanimity among the classes who raised them prevailed. The leading elements in Paris were proletarian, the French bourgeoisie having gained their revolution beginning in 1789. In Berlin and Vienna, and in the smaller German states, the leading elements were petit bourgeois, the “German shopocracy.” The German economy so far lagged the French and English in industry that there was no proletariat to speak of. Students played a prominent role, particularly in Vienna.

Of course the revolutions of 1848 did not succeed; those who made them, with but few exceptions, gained nothing by them.

The regimes temporarily evicted from their capitals exploited the passions – and the objective differences of interest – of the classes that had equally temporarily been allied with each other; they made concessions they were later able to withdraw; they gathered loyal, regular troops.

At the end of October, monarchist troops retook Vienna by force against an armed militia with the students in the front ranks. Berlin fell the next month – without a fight.

That left the National Assembly, convened in Frankfurt the previous spring to write a constitution that would unify Germany and secure political and civil rights to the classes who sent them there…

…to continue its debates. Marx speaks with contempt of their proceedings. And nothing came of this assembly, even though it had had support of regular troops (from the smaller German states) sufficient to attack Denmark over the Schleswig-Holstein the summer before. A feebly conducted insurrection was crushed by the Prussians, even while the invading Hungarians were camped at the gates of Vienna.

All was over by July of 1849. In France, matters were finally settled by the coup d’etat of Louis Bonaparte in December 1851.

What does this mean for today’s revolutions?

What about Libya? (Hint: The regime never lost control of the capital.)

What about Egypt? (Hint: it’s not enough to debate a constitution.)

My next posts will apply the lessons of 1848, and the class analysis of revolution generally, to the new revolutions and the revolutionaries who started them, one-by-one.

Voters of Wisconsin!

Voters of Wisconsin! has been moved to:

          http://marxspoliticaleconomy.blogspot.com/2011/07/voters-of-wisconsin.html