“There be Dragons” …or not

[From the New York Times editorial, reprinted March 1, 2012, in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel]

Mr. Friedman of the Times has lost hope for the Arab Spring. He should have consulted with Mr. Shadid first, if he’d had the chance. Instead his attitude is more petulant than skeptical, and his judgments, if not superficial, at best partial.

I’ll make an example of just one matter on which speculative philosophy can draw the correct, but Mr. Friedman has drawn the wrong, conclusion: the waverings of the Egyptian courts. He took the charges against foreign nationals as a sign the counter-revolution was winning or had won. On the contrary, this was just another instance of waverings, a counter-revolutionary movement that has since reversed course.

I suppose there might be any number of specific causes, effects, and explanations to be made for these movements, but they are not directly material to speculative philosophy. I am interested only in the structure of the movements. This is not an isolated, out-of pattern event. I posted Waverings in Egypt in January. The arrest and then release is part and parcel of the same dialectical tale. Not evidence that the entire Egyptian people are tired of or unable to complete their revolution, nor that they have handed it over to some body of men who would like to dispose of it.

The revolution is still strong and at least part of it knows that friendship with America is in its favor. And the hostages, or whatever they were, have made their way home – all but one, who like the Free Syrian Army is also brave.

Other revolutions are not doing so well. Speculative philosophy can tell the difference; maybe Mr. Friedman can’t.

Egyptians in Parliament: The Seculars

If the Salafists only became revolutionaries in order to launch a counter-revolution, and the secular parties still want a revolution, but one based on their own economic and political class interests, whom do you suppose the Muslim Brotherhood is more likely to choose for their coalition partners?

I guess the answer really depends on whether they need a partner at all. But that’s for the next post in this series.

After the first success of a revolution, at least three paths are open to a party in the opposition. In the first, a revolutionary party enters into negotiations with what is left of the state. The party seeks to realize whatever portion of its agenda it can, and the state seeks to preserve its existence. Call this the strict form of right opportunism, because it seeks opportunity from the state, at the expense of the revolution.

In the second, there is already more than one revolutionary party, and, as in the present case, which party or parties get to form the state is in question. What is possible for any given party depends on the relative strength of the parties. What then? The answer in a bourgeois democratic revolution is political: negotiate, compromise, accommodate. The answer in a proletarian revolution is to sweep away any moderate, petit bourgeois elements in the revolutionary movement and establish…well, that is not where Egypt is going. For the left wing of the revolution, playing politics is going to look like opportunism, because part of their agenda might be realized, but the other part will have to be bargained away.

In the third situation, the point of negotiation is to split the other revolutionary parties along lines favorable to the agenda of one’s own. In such cases, negotiation is accompanied by agitation, the former with a view to advance the agenda, and latter in order to change the balance of power among the parties. The more negotiation, the more opportunism; the more agitation, the more adventurism.

There’s no question the seculars are not as one with the Brotherhood, whose cadres some weeks ago linked arms to prevent the liberals from, let’s say, disturbing a session of parliament. It seems they were agitating to influence, perhaps, the membership of the constitutional convention, or the committee structure of parliament. But they are also in the forefront of confrontation with what I have called the waverings of the military and the courts.

I’m not sure what role the Brotherhood played in these confrontations, but it’s not necessarily left adventurism to get beyond what they would like to do. Yet the question about the current role of the military in the transitional state, and the role they might expect to play in the revolutionary state, opens the possibility of splits within the Brotherhood over that role.

Likewise with civil and political liberties in general, and the civil liberties of women in particular. Any one such issue, properly framed and brought forward at the right moment, might split the Brotherhood. Their difficulty is to overcome the contradiction between being a revolutionary party and sharing a religious attitude. The attitude towards women is especially difficult in this respect. They may well split eventually along one of those lines, adding the one part to the seculars, and moving the remainder to the right, closer to the Salafists. At that point, who knows which would be in the majority?

The splits between adventurism and opportunism on the left are comparatively easy to reconcile; they’re not grounded in fundamental contradictions. Yet even the Salafists have recently split, over whether it’s alright for a party member to have a nose job and then lie about it. It’s part of their struggle with hypocrisy – an even worse contradiction and one of many things that might make them an unattractive coalition partner for the Brotherhood.

My confidence in the outcome of the Egyptian revolution is thus based in part on the strength of the secularist position, as opposed to that of the Salafists. It’s particularly strong in the event of – or for engineering – a split in the center. Meanwhile, good economic times favor the agitation of the secular parties, and bad times that of Salafists.

The Brotherhood for the present is in the cat bird seat…if they can stay there. More about their contradictions next.