“Chaos in his wake”

…at least that’s what some people would like to believe or make others believe the juvenile Bashar would leave behind if he felt compelled to give up his despotism. Certainly, at any rate, chaos runs before him.

How does this sound to the Syrian middle class? To whomsoever of the big bourgeoisie as are not connected to the regime by blood or marriage?

In his speech last week, the juvenile Bashar bragged that 64,000 “saboteurs” were known by name to the government, and that a third of them had already been apprehended. Not only did this give the lie to the journalists who thought only 10,000 perhaps were imprisoned, it ought to make anyone who isn’t yet nervous, oughtn’t it? – including those who might think they hadn’t even performed any acts of “sabotage.”

Of course the terms are at best undefined and at worst cruelly distorted. Strictly speaking, there aren’t 64,000 professionally trained “saboteurs” in the whole world. But if they are just people who would like to reform the government –and revolution entails dialectical negation – why then, yes, revolutionaries are saboteurs.

Really, Bashar, you make it sound like it’s a bad thing.

Then what of the “concessions” up to now? They render the current round of promises meaningless.

Item: One of the juvenile Bashar’s concessions is to change a preposition in the constitution, so that, instead of his party being given “leadership of state and society,” it would be given merely “leadership in state and society.”

But who would take the trouble to organize a political party – assuming that is what the new preposition authorizes – if one were assured in advance that the party could never come to power?

Meantime…

…the revolution is stronger numerically – by all observations it gains adherents faster than Bashar can kill or frighten them – but is it becoming broader-based?

Specifically, what would make the petit bourgeoisie flip to the opposition?

Or again, when does the momentum of the revolutionary opposition begin to look like a winning bet to those who have been sitting on the sidelines and probably feel like they have a lot to lose?

What they have to lose

I’ve been impressed by the consistent inability of this revolution, unlike others in the Arab Spring, to reach the streets of the capital. It’s always and only – but now more frequently – no further in than the suburbs.

There are reports of opposition action in Aleppo, by some measures the largest city in Syria. This wouldn’t threaten the operation of the government directly, but if continued would threaten the ability of the regime to run the economy – wouldn’t it?

The former U.S. ambassador too Morocco told the BBC that the Syrian economy was about as big as Pittsburgh’s. Though I’m not in a position to contradict him, I’m not sure what lesson he would like to draw from that fact. Also not sure whether that means the Syrian middle class is too small to make a middle class revolution.

His more interesting observation was that Damascus is to Aleppo as London is to Birmingham, or Washington to New York: the one the seat of government, the other a center of industry and commerce. It takes petit bourgeoisie to run both types of places; that is where they live. So it’s my impression that the relative size of the economy will not be decisive, but the final decision of the middle classes will. They perhaps have more to fear personally from arrest without charges or trial than from the actions of saboteurs, and Bashar’s concessions are as meaningless to them as they are to everyone else. Yet, if the revolution keeps going, the so far unmoved or perhaps just paralyzed petit bourgeoisie will begin wishing it would end. All they want is the comfort and convenience of making and enjoying their own money in peace. Even though the revolution is a threat to that, the bigger threat is having it go on indefinitely.

And so, the failure to offer concessions worth bargaining over may be perceived as a failure to do what the regime is supposed to be doing for its middle class allies: ensure stability and a chance to make money. Worse still for Bashar, the concessions it would take to restore calm to the situation are precisely those that would benefit, of all the classes, the petit bourgeoisie most.

What they have to gain

Surely the petit bourgeoisie have the most to gain from ordinary political freedoms like parties, votes, and elected officials. They have the education, leisure, and cash to make the most of these opportunities. It’s always been so. I suppose in Syria there are as many people like this – petit bourgeoisie properly speaking: professionals, middle managers, officials, small businessmen, small farmers, teachers, merchants, small investors – as there are anywhere else in the Arab world. That’s one of the reasons it’s considered the lynchpin of stability there, and not just because of the Assad family and the juvenile currently at its head.

And now it appears that the failure to make credible and substantial concessions – and really only fundamental ones would now be perceived to be substantial – is dialectically speaking a double-edged sword the juvenile Bashar is holding over his own head. Clinging to power is a nasty position to be in – not a position of strength. But that is the tendency of the despot’s current tactics. There’s no evidence he has a strategy.

Postscript: Why Bashar is a juvenile

…because he doesn’t know, as Prime Minister Putin observes, “In the modern world it is impossible to use political instruments of 40 years ago,” a sentence in which the term “political instruments” is a euphemism, and the validity of which Putin himself probably learned the hard way himself, rather less than 40 years ago.

“We are not afraid anymore”

Though speculative philosophy would not normally or properly concern itself with anecdotal evidence, much less take it as a starting point, I can say this statement of a Syrian who finds himself aligned with the revolution ought to be alarming to the despot. For it strikes at the foundation of a regime based on fear.

The negative moment during which using force makes one’s opponent initially stronger is dialectically linked to the corresponding positive moment of the movement in two ways.

·         The use of force is inevitably, if only in isolated instances, carried to excess, usually by people of low understanding – that is, those who are charged with carrying out the policy physically. Thus a 13-year-old boy is beaten to death and mutilated, and the revolution gains adherents through his martyrdom.

·         Any form of resistance, however futile or even brutal in itself, is automatically reflected in the light of courage when it overcomes fear to rise against superior, oppressive force. As courage is admirable, it too draws adherents.

These two corollaries may be summed up by saying, a revolution gains both by its opponents’ excess, and by its adherents’ success.

Numerous other facts – that townsmen are willing to snipe with rifles at armored vehicles, that soldiers and police are in mutiny, that the only “reliable” soldiers must be Alawite and commanded by the despot’s close relations – demonstrate that the regime has wielded strength too strongly. Soon it may appear, and later may actually be, relatively weak.

It’s clear at any rate that the juvenile Bashar still figures to make the revolution suffer for whatever it gains.

A Redaction

My post “So Long, Saleh!” requires a redaction. For one thing, the original news report indicated his injury was perhaps due to rocket fire, and I assumed this meant there had been combats between his forces and those of the armed  tribes. Not only was the report likely incorrect, but the assumption was too much.

Though fighting has continued, the tribes are nowhere near so close to controlling the situation as an injury to the opposition’s leading figure would have indicated. Instead the injury appears to have been inflicted by a hidden bomb, which any of the parties, or even a traitor, might have arranged to plant.

And so the situation is not so simple as I made it out to be – which is not to say it will not become or actually is becoming that simple. This is what has to be redacted.

The two parties, the tribes on the one hand and the students and their allies on the other, are not nearly “face-to-face” as I surmised. Saleh’s apparatus still stands between them as their common enemy. A sign that the parties are acting in concert to take advantage of Saleh’s absence would be favorable. Signs that they have begun to feel the lack of common interests that the class analysis indicates must exist would be unfavorable.

Similarly, the emergence of a strong man on the left would also be a favorable sign for the development of institutions based on revolutionary values. If a strong man emerged from the tribes, he would likely become to the nation what he is to his tribe: a strongman.

Answer: It’s Not That Different

The extent to which the Gulf States really are aristocracies, and whether and how they’ve co-opted the rest of the citizens. All is silent except in Bahrain. So why is Bahrain different?

You know a revolution if over when News Hour’s Margaret Warner interviews a country’s foreign minister about it, and he makes it a virtue that the revolutionists will, in the main, suffer only relatively modest, but still criminal penalties. I wasn’t paying terribly close attention, but it didn’t seem to me that Margaret asked, and certainly she didn’t force, the question about what the Bahraini regime intended to do about the revolutionary values that up to then had been at stake. At any rate, the answer, had it been honestly given, would have been “Nothing,” and that is how matters stand.

I looked very briefly into the demographics, and even more briefly into the dynastic history, of Bahrain, and found little enough to show that the revolution might have been successful, or have become strong enough to compel the regime to listen to its demands. The law against forming political parties belies the official claim that the form of government is constitutional monarchy. If it really were constitutional monarchy, a revolution would not be required to change political, social, and economic conditions, nor would the government be compelled to treat demonstrations as if they represented a revolution. The regime is really an oligarchy in which all the ministers (the ones I know of) have the same last name, but that just might happen to be, or at any rate pretend to be, on the way to constitutional monarchy.

For one thing, the proportion between foreign-born to native-born populations is roughly equivalent to that between the industrial and service economies in Bahrain: 40/60%. This indicates the proletarians there as elsewhere in the Arab world are not citizens, and thus they have no standing to revolt, nor would they be likely to gain adherents from the other (citizen) classes if they tried. It’s the functional equivalent of slave revolt, which historically has never been, and probably in principle can never be, directed toward the overthrow and reformation of the state.

As for the middle classes, it’s clear that, to run the Bahraini service economy, the skills of many professionals, including financial professionals, are required. The export agricultural economy has actually shrunk since they found oil, so there can be no petit bourgeois peasantry. Yet on the whole, the weight of numbers favors bourgeois revolution there.

So why did it fail? Or, it might be more pertinent to ask, how did it get a start, however feeble, in Bahrain, when nothing at all happened in any of the other, similarly situated, Gulf States?

I don’t have a principled answer.

Then last month, with the revolution well over, and King Khalifa having decided there was no more emergency, the people, permission restored, rallied again, proving there still is revolutionary, or at least democratic, energy in Bahrain.

And, by all applicable principles, there should be. It’s just that in a country that geographically small, these energies are easier to contain and control than to extinguish. Saudi troops and the Fifth Fleet, the one by their presence and the other by their absence, had something to do with the result so far. If the opposition who still want to rally can hold strictly to non-violent tactics, better to say, if the people who want to rally could form covert parties and formulate specific programs of demands, more can be looked for in Bahrain…

…and if in Bahrain, why not in the other Gulf States? They also must have numerous, if not politically self-aware, middle classes. Yet despotism, whether lodged in a monarch, in a family, or in a close oligarchy, is easier to maintain if it has a lot of money. As Baron de Montesquieu observed, the tendency of despotism, because it governs through fear, is to make the people poorer. Fear or not, that does not apply in the Gulf States now, nor will it in the foreseeable future.

It probably safe to say: the more oil, the less revolution, in states, particularly geographically small ones, where the oil economy pays the salaries of the middle classes. But seemingly Bahrain has the least oil of all.

So long, Saleh!

Seemingly, the tribes woke up and found they were strong – strong enough to strike a mortal blow, not as chance would have it to Saleh personally, but to his physical ability to maintain his regime. With Saleh in a Saudi hospital, is there anyone left to carry on the civil war in his name? That seems doubtful. The Vice President says he will, but I suppose he’s got a job and would like to keep it.

Power that is built on the weakness of and divisions between one’s enemies rather than the strength of one’s support tends to evaporate in one’s absence.

That leaves the tribes face-to-face with the students and their allies in the capital. We’ll see if they can find common revolutionary ground.

Of course, U.S. insistence on hunting down al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula would tend to resolve this conundrum in favor of another, new strongman in Yemen, someone capable of carrying on the hunt. The choice is between our fears for ourselves, and the bare possibility, slim in itself but scarcely able to resist outside pressure, that the revolution in Yemen might actually be able to gain something for the political and civil liberty of its people.

In the past, confronted with a similar choice, we’ve taken counsel of our fears – more than once in Vietnam, for example.

“the quitter former Governor Palin”

"the quitter former Governor Palin" has been moved to:

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The Outlaw is Disappointed

The Outlaw is Disappointed has been moved to:

http://marxspoliticaleconomy.blogspot.com/2011/07/outlaw-is-disappointed.html