March 1 – February 16, 1917: Bread Rationing

Authorities issue cards for rationing bread in Petrograd. Food shortages were widespread in Russia during World War I. Not only had many agricultural workers been conscripted into the armies, but the armies themselves still had to be fed.

February 27 – February 14, 1917: Last State Duma

The last State Duma assembles. The Duma had first been convened in May 1906 as part of a program of civil and political reforms addressing the issues raised by the failed 1905 revolution. Tsar Nicholas II granted this elective body certain legislative and oversight functions. However, he retained all executive powers, including the power to appoint state ministers and to dismiss the Duma itself. The Russian state remained effectively an autocracy.

The workers were already aroused. Some 90,000 were on strike in Petrograd, and others had closed plants in Moscow.

What the Secretary-General Said…

…about “political clocks” not running backwards applies in spades when the times are revolutionary. In fact, in such times, this is a necessary law of historical dialectics. The law applies precisely to the counter-revolutionary moments (in the sense of turnings, as of a pendulum) that follow moments of revolutionary synthesis.

The Brotherhood’s revolution represented such a synthesis. It stood as an endpoint of the actions of all the revolutionary parties of the Arab Spring in Egypt when it achieved fundamental, thus revolutionary, change in the state. But the Brotherhood’s grasp of the state apparatus never grew strong, and at the same time, its basis as a revolution of the whole people grew narrower. The resulting contradictions – on the one side between the Brotherhood and the pre- or counter-revolutionary state apparatus, and on the other side between them and the secular/liberal revolutionists – created a new synthesis, and this was the lever El Sissi pulled.

The lever the Brotherhood pulled in the first place, the lever that came into existence in Tahrir Square, doesn’t exist anymore. Perforce it can’t be pulled again. That is, as the Secretary-General says, in politics you can’t go backwards.

The Brotherhood did not pause at disbelief before going over to anger, and they would do well to move on to acceptance equally quickly. Staying with anger will not restore the former situation. They need a new synthesis, and they can’t do it by holding onto old contradictions with elements that will only become more opposed the longer opposition is kept up. They’re already in danger of being outlawed again.  

Frankly, the longer the Brotherhood stays in the past and fails to seek a new revolutionary synthesis, the surer the success of the counter-revolution.

The Counter-Revolution Puts Forth Its Strength

One of the things you can say about counter-revolutions is that they are often bloodier than revolutions. A spike in the effusion of human blood is almost always a sign that the counter-revolution is putting forth its strength. And that’s just because the strength of the reaction normally consists in control over armed elements of the former, pre-revolutionary state.

When this sort of thing starts happening, any revolutionary elements the counter-revolution happens to be aligned with for the time being start to look like a front, a puppet, a dupe, a tool, or an accomplice. What they as individuals actually are depends on their own subjective relations with the forces of reaction, and on the kinds and degree of objective control the latter exercises over them. All this can play out in many ways, but for now, in Egypt, the police, the military, and the courts are the players, not the interim executive, nor the disbanded legislature.

Did I say they were dupes? The reaction didn’t dupe El Baradei for long. And now that they’ve entered on the path for freeing Mubarak altogether, nobody can be fooled any longer. Only the tools and accomplices are left.

Look for the counter-revolution to assume a face. It’s a little early yet, but if it does, it will already be too late for the revolution, because that will be the face of the next strongman.

Bashar has a dream…

I’m happy for the people of Egypt. They have another shot at democracy and maybe they can even pull it off themselves, without our help. Though $8 billion of Saudi money won’t hurt.

Syria, on the other hand, is in a mess that’s just getting worse. The pressure the regime has been able to put on the revolution with the help or Russian and Iranian arms and ordnance has begun to split it along the lines of its internal contradictions – contradictions I’ve been thinking about but didn’t blog about because, well, the situation has become too sad to contemplate.

What happened? The splits between the Islamist and secular parties in the Egyptian revolution do not appear to have hardened so much that they have no recourse other than physical confrontation. At least that’s true this week.

In Syria, the same set of contradictions is not between parties, but between seasoned combat units that do not really happen to effectively be under the same chain of command. On the one side, I imagine, the patriotic, liberal youth of Syria are pretty much all mobilized already, and, even though their general says there are sufficient of them to the task at hand, their numbers can only go down. The other side continues to recruit from jihadist fundamentalism across the whole Islamic world.

So not only is the Islamic side of the revolution in Syria more radical than the Brotherhood in Egypt, it is already fully armed and ready to fight whomever it is God’s will they should fight. Moreover they have an independent territorial basis and an ad hoc state apparatus in hand. To the extent they are non-Syrian jihadists, this resembles conquered territory. So if Bashar were to resign today, only force majeure could keep these splits from bursting wide open and could give the Syrian people something resembling a nation to dwell in.

In other words, the time for the self-determination of the Syrian revolution is over. That way lies oblivion. The alternative would be an army of occupation under the auspices of the U.N. maybe or even NATO. Something like this was, I believe, in planning under the previous Secretary of State. What’s still missing is some really compelling inducement for Bashar to step down. Sad that that’s not in the offing; the reverse is the case. But it’s just as hard to see what would induce the Russians to change their policy. Certainly the sufferings of the Syrian people have made no impression.

 

...Bashar’s dream? Oh, that he prevails against a “revolution” that really just consists of terrorists and the hirelings of foreigners.

Speculation, Mr. Marx?

How can one speculate about the outcomes of the military’s action in Egypt? Of course it’s irresponsible of the Brotherhood’s leadership to say the brothers ought to defend their revolution with their lives. It’s sufficient to defend it at the ballot box if they can’t find a way to do it peacefully on the street.

Having first placed its forces in the way of the Brotherhood’s demonstrators, the military can scarcely escape its share of the blame for what happened when they subsequently tried to cross those lines. The decision was not just to replace Morsi’s government, but also to limit the reaction. It was clever but ineffective to neutralize the Brotherhood’s leadership. So now they have blood and prisoners on their hands.

So far this is judgmental but not at all dialectically principled. Observers say Morsi’s government never did get entire control of the state apparatus, that much control remained with Mubarak appointees or at least with people who had no stake in the revolution. What they say is now pretty evident: the police and the courts got behind the military’s solution – at least for now but not, I’d guess, forever. That doesn’t mean these state elements are lined up permanently and out of principle with the parties of secular revolution either. The danger is they could just as easily decide to play their own hand. But since – the supposition runs – they never joined the revolution, but rather stayed where they were and continued to be who they are, any subsequent realignment is just as likely to be counter-revolutionary as not. Here, the dialectical role normally played by class interests is played by considerations of state.

 

One can be more precise. In the Marxist theory of history, the state is the instrument through which, when possible, class interests are adjusted and reconciled. We can also say that, since they consist of people, and people are political as well as economic animals, the political interests of the state elements are always at stake in a revolution. When the object of a revolution – control of the state – is, as here, imperfectly achieved, state elements can retain, more or less, their original pre-revolutionary character, which as a set of political interests governs their action.

But if we try to determine what is dialectically necessary about the working out of the revolution through the current coalition of state elements and bourgeois-liberal parties, we immediately run into the problem of the executive, a problem exacerbated by the circumstance that the military itself has an essentially independent executive. (More on this below.)

As mere subjectivity, or to the extent it is merely subjective, the executive is not subject to dialectical law, is free to determine itself. Just so, Nasser – or even Gaddafi himself – started as a revolutionary, but became as the holder of the state power over balancing economic interests merely the tool, or latterly a member, of the big bourgeoisie. Sadat and then Mubarak came in not as revolutionaries, but as preservers of the state, and were subject to the same transformation.

I would expect El Sissi to, let’s say, enjoy the same opportunities. Certainly the name of preserver still fits the role the military has been playing. But in revolutionary times, we might ask, preserver of what? There is no revolutionary state to preserve, because what there was is precisely what the military removed from power. The free-floating notions “Egyptian people” or “Egyptian nation” can be substituted for the notion of state in the logic of the dialectical moment, but as free-floating only give the executive subjectivity free play. In the end, the minister/general could decide to preserve whatever he thinks worthy to be preserved, and in that way follow in Sadat’s and Mubarak’s footsteps.

 

It would help matters to fill in the content of the interim state with something other than personality. The idea of using technocrats suggests that the current executive, including the interim president, would like the state to function. But the attempt to give it revolutionary content in the form of El Baradei’s appointment as prime minister has already cost the coalition one of its constituents, the Salafists. The subsequent appointment of the economist El Beblawi seems to be a compromise between the two approaches.

Another danger derives from the contradictions between the military and the revolution. The revolution blamed the military for deaths that happened while Mubarak was still in power but got little satisfaction from the courts. Now the courts, the military, and the police share in an interim state that has also involved itself in the deaths of civilians, and is at the same time aligned with the other set of revolutionaries. Thus another split could either separate the interim state from the revolution entirely, or force the Brotherhood out of the revolution entirely. The answer to this case is of course the same as the answer already given: fill in the content of the state with the revolution as a whole.

But this depends on what the Brotherhood are willing to do. Negotiating for participations involves abandoning the claim of legitimacy. Well…prisoners are not ordinarily permitted to negotiate at all. Bringing them to the table would already be a concession to legitimacy. Yet the mood is not conducive to accepting such a gesture as a concession. At least the violence has abated for now.

The State Department thinks Mr. Morsi ought to be let out of close confinement. But these are revolutionary times. They ought to wrap their heads around that. Mr. Morsi will be let out when the military deems the danger of civil war between armed political factions, with themselves as umpire, to have abated. What’s a little imprisonment, even if false, compared to that?

 

Which brings me around to another standpoint for viewing the question, the standpoint that applied the first time the military injected itself into the role of political executive for the Egyptian Arab Spring: that as preserver of the nation and people the Egyptian military does not consider itself subject to civilian control. So could it ever become part of a revolution that stands for that principle? Could it become an element of a revolutionary state that had adopted that principle? So to the extent the secular liberals advocate civilian control of the military, the coalition is, again, unstable, and at least in this particular could lend itself to counter-revolution.

My notes say, “That’s enough. I’m well ahead of the facts again.”

Revolution Against Revolution

For some time now the revolution in Egypt has been spinning like a top, on a narrower and narrower basis, until it belonged to the Brotherhood alone, and not really to the nation and its people. The pattern of reported incidents, not to mention the whole tendency of the merely partisan constitution, has been obvious. I drafted a post to that effect, but didn’t publish it, having a garden to put in, and thinking the crisis was not that near.

Mostly I thought the opposition was not strong enough to force a revolution against a revolution, especially given the Brotherhood’s demonstrated support in the electorate. Morsi could align his party more closely with the Salafists, with the seculars, or even with the military, broaden his base, and right the top. Maybe this is what he was trying to do, but perhaps he made the wrong choice.

Parochialism alone would not have made the seculars strong enough, against the well-organized and unitary Brotherhood, to make their revolution. Demonstration versus counter-demonstration might have continued in a stalemate.

Thus the action of the military on the side of one set of demonstrators, ostensibly to give it peace as against the other set, was a surprise to me. Perhaps it shouldn’t have been. After all, the military considers itself a secular institution, and found itself part of a state that, unlike Mubarak’s, was no longer secular. The situation was not quite too bad as to make martial law a social necessity. But the die is cast. The military moved as soon as it had colorable grounds to move against a colorably legitimate government. The courts seconded them by providing the interim president.

Meantime, under the threat that an Islamist party would actually enforce an Islamist constitution, the secular liberals seem to have found greater unity, and the Coptics to fear for their very existence. Given the present combination, and despite the threat that temporary military control over the public apparatus will become permanent, it’s possible to reopen the question whether a bourgeois revolution, as opposed to a revolution merely to legalize a formerly outlawed party and its mere beliefs, is possible in Egypt. So, good Moslems who happen to be in business, say in tourism, might have voted for Morsi last year, but now lean towards the seculars. Coptics who sat out the elections because nobody seemed to be courting their votes might now appreciate that tolerance is a plank in the secularist platform. And women are less likely to expect the Brotherhood to take note of, much less safeguard and expand, their political and civil liberties.

Dialectically, where’s the new liberal energy coming from? It’s one thing to confront a politically backward or timid people with repression. It’s another to substitute one form of repression for another over a people that is already revolutionized. The timidity is gone; the means for agitation are at hand. The Brotherhood’s voter may not have resented that Morsi let the economy stagnate. Not having any to begin with, the generality of them cannot be sensible of opportunities being lost. It’s different with the petit bourgeoisie: they can embrace the principles of liberal bourgeois revolution out of class interest. Moreover, the naturally liberal student movement is revitalized and sitting at the table with El Baradei and the rest.

 

The present liberal-democratic combination is formidable. It also may not last long. I can only hope that the United States government will know what to do this time and not just urge everybody to remain calm so that the price of oil can go back down. Why is it OK to spend blood and treasure in Iraq and Afghanistan to establish democracy, but do nothing, not even formulate and follow a consistent policy, when all of the Arab Middle East, from the Maghrib to the Levant, is going through revolution? The revolutions are trying to do the work of democracy in a way that costs us neither blood nor treasure, and that our blood and treasure couldn’t in principle have a better likelihood of doing well.

Egypt is the center of gravity. We ought to find a way to help them make their revolution against a revolution.