How the revolutions are going

[Drafted: October 26, 2011. Certain propositions in the draft have been overtaken by events.]

After a hiatus occasioned by family obligations, I am pleased to be able to return to my blog on the Arab Spring.

The progress of the revolutionary classes since summer is mixed. In no case can one say that the revolution has been won and secured, but neither can one say that in any case it has been irretrievably lost.

In chronological order, it was…

·         Tunisia

·         Egypt

·         Libya

·         Yemen

·         Syria

…roughly. Countries ruled by despots or strongmen with no lineage.

The Arab Spring has not touched Arab royalty or aristocracy – at least not with its heavy hand. So as it now appears…

·         Jordan

·         Bahrain

…are not part of the same calculus.

Don’t forget that Iraq is something very nearly resembling a democracy. And soon there will be no army of occupation whatever.

The prospects for democracy – well, let’s not make sweeping, vacuous, or overly optimistic generalizations. Let’s just say what we are looking for:

·         Political liberties. Even the Islamist parties will not settle for less. Not just the right to vote, but the other freedoms relating to the exercise of that right. Including – we’d like to say – that there be no litmus test for the legitimacy of a party or voter, including religious litmus tests. Which indicates…

·         Civil liberties. And in particular freedom of religion, of conscience; religious tolerance and the absence of state religion. And, again, the civil liberties the exercise of political liberties presupposes.

·         Freedom to do business. On something like the Western model: free entry and exit, property rights enforceable at law. With oversight of the big bourgeoisie, and, through independent agencies or checks and balances, of the government, executive and legislative, itself. Plus unions. Plus consumer and workplace protection.

That’s what would be on the list if it is to be, as I’ve assumed, petit bourgeois revolution, in which the leading elements are middle class.

There must be other agendas, and among them, counter-revolutionists will find levers to manipulate. For example, we know there are demands for accountings, in money or blood. I’ve already shown this to be such a lever.

More important, even to superficial observers, is the fundamentalist element in the opposition. This poses a difficulty to the class analysis because it is not easy to identify fundamental Islam with a consistent set of economic class interests. It shares in the overall conservatism of Arab society, a conservatism that still respects royalty and aristocracy even when it is able to overthrow mere despots. Even the middle class are, by and large, social conservatives, aren’t they?

It’s in the lowest classes that the strain is most keenly felt. For them, the revolution has been about economic justice. It’s in their interest to organize the economy around the creation of jobs – that is their freedom to do business. And to that extent they are aligned with middle class revolution, which would like nothing better than, by putting them to work, to profit.

But Islamic fundamentalism arose as a reaction to the influence and values of the West, and this happened before it took up the cries for economic justice and the accounting with the thieves. To make matters more difficult, the two attitudes are incommensurable. What happens when economic justice looks itself in the mirror and sees religious conservatism? Could the latter become a lever for counter-revolution?

Class analysis, on its own, cannot pretend to answer. And there’s another reason the matter escapes pure class analysis: the entities in question are not self-determining. The results will depend on still more powerful entities of the same order, i.e., other states, and in particular Western states. To be more precise, in Syria, as in Egypt, the revolution wants to win the state on its own merits, without outside help. But the state being won, as in Libya, other states have an interest in how the revolutionary state gets formulated, and their state interests, again as in Libya because if its oil, may become decisive. These kinds of interests, like religious “interests,” are not commensurable directly with class interests, and here too that analysis finds a limit.

So the answer is: that’s what elections are for….