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.
No comments:
Post a Comment