Who Is Standard & Poor's Anyway?

Who is Standard & Poor’s anyway? has been moved to:

http://marxspoliticaleconomy.blogspot.com/2011/07/who-is-standard-poors-anyway.html

 

Answer: Prestige

How old the Hashemite dynasty of Jordan really is, and whether that had any different effect on the organization of the state than in Saudi Arabia.

Compared to civil war, all is rather quiet in the lands of the Hashemite dynasty. Though established in Jordan scarcely any longer than the Saudi monarchy has been in Arabia, their royal lineage is infinitely longer – so long, and with such distinguished forebears at its head, that the Hashemities might govern by prestige alone if necessary.

King Hussein and his American wife made a very good impression on the West. Perhaps that also means the dynasty has acknowledged the legitimate expectations of the people for the  political and civil liberty that is now a tradition there.

I haven’t found out how far they have gotten on the road to constitutional monarchy; I do know the papers contain no news about acts of revolution in Jordan, and little enough in the way of protests and demonstrations.

·    The actions of some dozens or scores of men in stabbing unarmed police officers bear no relation or resemblance to those of an entire class rising spontaneously from a renewed consciousness of its interest in economic, political, or civil reforms. Provocation is a dangerous, difficult, and left-handed way to start a revolution. On the contrary, the Salafis have tried to use a circumstance not of their making to advance their warped and irreligious agenda.

·    If physicians and other workers at hospitals demonstrate because they want a raise, it’s not revolution. They’re asking the State to take a course of action (which grants that the State has the right to act in the matter), but not demanding changes in the nature of the State (which only a revolution could make). We do that here in Wisconsin.

·    The March 24^th movement of students bears the same relation to the petit bourgeoisie as the unemployed of Daraa to the proletariat. They’re in training to become part of the middle cases, but they’re not there yet, and so their agenda can be free-floating, not determined by real interests arising out of concrete economic activity. Consequently, they can advocate a revolution, or try to start one, but they’re hard-pressed to carry it out – at least not on their own.

All the despots in the region are notorious. Notoriety is the antithesis of prestige. So, when the Hashemite king makes a promise, it is likely to be sincere on his part, and credible to his subjects.

On the other hand, the demand that the king give up his right to nominate the prime minister is intended to change the state itself, and hence is revolutionary to that extent. There are at least two paths to follow: that of constitutional monarchy, in which the parliament selects and the monarch approves the minister, and the path of direct election, in which the person elected ceases to be a minister of the monarch and becomes instead an official of the people.

Yet it’s possible for the King of Jordan to accede without sacrificing the foundation of his monarchy…

…or his residence in the nation.

Answer: Daraa

The name and nature of the town where the protests in Syria started. Is it by any chance an industrial town? The protests have been slow to spread to the capital. Maybe the despot Assad is too efficient for the middle classes there.

It proved impossible to verify the existence of any economic activity in Daraa that could at the same time form the ground for an organized proletariat. Even though it’s an old fortress town at the Syrian Gate to Palestine, there doesn’t seem even to be any commerce through the gate, which after all, now leads to Israel. Perhaps Israel’s long occupation of the Golan Heights stalled – really thwarted – development by the state-run economy there.

Hence the region is poor and its people unemployed. And so the revolution in Daraa, and in Syria, was started by these would-be proletarians. Though such classes have an economic interest in the outcomes of revolutions, they are better able to start them than to finish them successfully.

Syria “enjoys” a Soviet-style economy. This is the kind in which the state has become the dictatorship of the proletariat, but then finds it impossible to wither away, as Marx and Engels – in one of their comparatively few outbursts of what proved to be naïve idealism – thought it might. At any rate, it didn’t in Syria, a Soviet client state and make-weight against Israel in the ‘70’s. A substantial investment appears to have then been made.

Instead, the Assad family has joined the Stalinist model of state-run economy to their personal despotism. They’re not just thieves – I should say they’re not thieves de jure – like the Mubarek and Gaddafi families, and Ben Ali of Tunisia. As heads of this kind of state, the economy is theirs to dispose of – you can’t steal what you already own. (At the same time, concessions appear to have been made to the petit bourgeois merchant and agricultural classes from ancient times associated with the Syrian economy.)

And still, or maybe and so, the revolution cannot penetrate the capital. This is its problem. Daraa by itself, as I’ve said, is not enough. The activist port of Latakia must have stevedores, professional administrators, and movers of commerce: in other words, classes that should have an interest in the outcome of the revolution. Homs, a home of state-run industry, has also been agitated. The main thrust comes from the (middle class) suburbs of Damascus.

But extraordinary steps are being taken by the regime.

The practice of Friday demonstrations right after Friday prayers must be particularly unnerving to a secular despot like Assad. You can’t, after all, stop the praying any more than you can stop the conspiratorial whispering during prayers. How clever of the Israelis to organize the demonstrations in this way – hidden in the open!

But of course the Israelis have nothing to do with it. This lie is among the many that have held the doubly co-opted professional and administrative petit bourgeoisie of the capital – co-opted first by the debt they owe for personal favors from the despot, and second by their parasitical attachment to the state economy that the despot owns – in check.

No doubt their loyalty is sincere. It accords with their economic interests, and their political and civil interests may appear as nothing beside them. There is also real fear, not just the fake kind of fear made up to induce middle class Americans to vote against their interests, working on the side of the despot. If Assad can turn the matter into a conflict within the middle classes, he will defeat the Syrian revolution. This is how the Prussian and Austrian emperors regained their capitals in 1848…

… and Assad has not even lost his capital to the revolution – yet!

I’d like to find out...

I’d like to find out...

         The name and nature of the town where the protests in Syria started. Is it by any chance an industrial town? The protests have been slow to spread to the capital. Maybe the despot Assad is too efficient for the middle classes there.

         The circumstances surrounding the establishment of the Saudi monarchy. Since 1937 is not a long time for an hereditary monarch, but I bet being installed as a despot was not an option. It seems to be a case, like the ancient German kings, of the aristocracy choosing a first among equals. Which would suggest that the aristocracy is still really the governing class except to the extent co-opted by the monarchy.

          How old the Hashemite dynasty of Jordan really is, and whether that had any different effect on the organization of the state than in Saudi Arabia.

About this Blog

Mr. Marx and I are calling it the Theory of Revolutions as if everything in it was a statement of our theory. Really, it’s all the application of a theory that hasn’t been laid out as a theory yet – at least not in this blog.

Here, as an interim guide to the reader, are the cornerstones of the theory.

·         It’s Speculative Philosophy.

Being nether free-floating interpretation nor an empirical study, the theory applies philosophical principles to a relatively small set of objective facts that do not have to be quantified empirically in order to serve as valid premises.

In other words, it’s neither criticism nor science, but really and only philosophy.

·         It uses Dialectical Logic.

This is difficult to explain very simply and yet clearly. The logic of history is dialectical; since revolutions only occur in and through history, their logic is dialectical too. The movement between conditions that are determined objectively, and the subjectivity of the human person – which takes those conditions as merely the possibilities for their own negation – is dialectical; its logic lays bare the principled basis for the movement.

It’s pretty clear, anyway, that a revolution seeks the negation of the objective conditions (some or all) formerly in existence.

·         Finally, it is Class Analysis.

Being neither idle speculation on the merely subjective propensities of certain personalities, nor free-floating interpretation of theoretically objective but scientifically undetermined elements of mere culture, the theory looks for revolutionary movement when the objective conditions of an economic class are in contradiction with the interests that class subjectively takes, or should take and advance, as its own.

In other words, when people as economic beings find themselves in certain conditions, sometimes they vote, and sometimes they revolt.

Revolt of the Middle Classes

If my thesis that the Arab revolutions are being driven by middle, or petit bourgeois, classes for ends not primarily of economic but rather of political and civil justice – that is, for petit bourgeois ends – is valid, then the prospects of each such revolution must depend to a significant degree on the relative strength and readiness of those classes in the nation under analysis.

Even where petit bourgeois merchant and landholding classes are not well developed, any state or economy with any particles of modernity requires managerial and professional classes to run those particles. These classes, in turn, require other professional services evolving other professional classes, and have other consumer demands evolving other petit bourgeois classes. Not least of these is academe, because people have to be taught how to run a modern state or economy. If nowhere else in the nation, this class and its economic activity, and the economic activity that depends on and results from the operation of the state, is focused in the capital.

Marx and Engels believed that revolution was inevitable because of the contradictions within a capitalist economy in which the big bourgeoisie own the proletariat. They also understood that bourgeois political revolution over against aristocratic classes must necessarily precede and prepare the ground for even the possibility of proletarian economic revolution.

Reportage on the Arab revolutions has provided very little evidence even of the existence of an Arab proletariat, much less a proletariat organized to assert its rights in any form, still less in the form of revolution. On the contrary, as I’ve already observed of Libya, proletarians are imported – people have actually to work in oilfields, to produce cotton and cloth, and to maintain an export economy – by for example the Gulf States and by Saudi Arabia.

In fine, not only are Arab proletarians unready for revolution on grounds both of organization and consciousness, but such numbers as they have are diluted, and their energy for struggles diverted, by the presence of non-citizen proletarians.

Several other reasons for this circumstance could be adduced, including religious antipathy for, and police statism working against, those socialist and Marxist ideologies most favorable to the development of workers as a class. (Note that this is not true of all religions, for Catholicism in Latin America has a long history of supporting Marxist notions of economic justice.)

Since the proletarian classes therefore represent a nullity, or at most merely an incremental factor, in the Arab revolutions, one wouldn’t look for them to begin in such industrial centers as there are.

Instead, and I revert to my thesis, one would look to the petit bourgeoisie, and in the capitals: for example, Cairo. Long before these events were set in motion, I made notes on a species of revolution I dubbed the “street fighting man” revolution. This is just the sort of fight, put up by just the sort of people, that I had in mind – then thinking of China and Iran as failed examples.

When I saw how readily the Egyptian revolutionists conversed with American reporters in English, I inferred they were of the professional classes – the educated classes. The professionals who spoke English brought along their children – who also spoke English – good for them! And they have professional ambitions too! Even the girls! It’s so middle class to have dreams for one’s children!

The other face of the crowd was the under-employed – the lumpenproletarian element, here in harmony with the educated petit bourgeoisie. The real proletarians seemed in small proportion.

The counter-revolution was pictured by another petit bourgeois element, a small merchant or entrepreneur just rich enough to own a camel or horse and live in the suburbs rather than the slums– seems some of them were involved in the interrupted tourist trade. Some people seem to think this revolution was non-violent. This is to confuse being unarmed with being non-violent. The revolution had to defend the square from mounted “troops” with its fists and feet. The army was really a shield that prevented the low level of violence from escalating in weaponry or geographic scope. Mubarak’s police state seems to have suppressed weapons – so none were used.

A street-fighting revolution depends for its success on the forbearance of the government to use force under circumstances that will telegraph to the world its barbarity in doing so. It worked in Egypt, which proves that Mubarak is not Gaddafi. But now there are two, very different, examples for the rest of the Arab despots.

Mubarak fell as the representative and a ranking member of the big bourgeoisie. His offer to write the new constitution was transparently a blunder – as even he realized less than 24 hours later. What revolution would give the right to reformulate the state to the very individual or institution it had just beaten?

It’s remarkable historically, in many ways, for this people to have thrown off a despotism of one form or another dating without interruption since…

…since civilization itself? (Didn't despots order the pyramids built?) At any rate: one doesn’t make a revolution in order to give the state back to its former owner. Now all they have to do is figure out how to deal with the rest of the big bourgeoisie. The army is with the people; they have to rely on that without giving the state over to the army.

As a state institution, the army should theoretically go, along with the rest of the state, to the winner of the revolution. This is a constitutional principle. Countries that have lived with standing armies for a long time have also made those armies servants rather than masters of the state. That Mubarak succeeded Sadat is in principle no more a sign of military dictatorship than that Eisenhower succeeded Truman.

The army’s agenda is sympathetic, but politically wooden. What is needed is a constitutional convention. Have they any idea how to call one? Elections by themselves won’t do the trick. Have they noticed the American model? Will the big bourgeoisie strike back?

The sequel in Egypt is crucial to the success or failure of the other middle class revolutions in the Arab world.

The Outlaw

The Outlaw has been moved to:

http://marxspoliticaleconomy.blogspot.com/2011/07/outlaw.html