I'd also like to find out...

I’d also like to find out…

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?

          It seems the president of Yemen has tribal connections; maybe the tribes will turn out to be decisive. Certainly they can outvote the middle classes, which makes democracy ill-advised for the latter. I’d like to know the form of land-ownership in the countryside – I’m guessing it’s comparatively primitive and that none of the farmers could ever be considered petit bourgeoisie.

Answer: Bloody Hands

The circumstances surrounding the establishment of the Saudi monarchy. Since 1937 is not a long time for an hereditary monarch, but I bet being installed as a despot was not an option. It seems to be a case, like the ancient German kings, of the aristocracy choosing a first among equals – which would suggest that the aristocracy is still really the governing class except to the extent co-opted by the monarchy.

I mentioned the Hashemite dynasty (post of April 20) not because I thought it was one of the better examples of revolution in the Arab world, but really only to make a contrast with that of the Saudis.

This family has not hesitated to draw one another’s blood, or usurp one another’s powers, in its relatively short time as a royal dynasty. The Saudi princes, and their British allies, also liquidated the Ikhwan (the camel-riding army that brought them into power) when it became necessary to the consolidation of that power – Hitler stole a page from their book on the Night of the Long Knives. Next it seems the emirs of those families who weren’t liquidated were suffered to have their sisters and daughters marry into the now royal family. The resulting monarchy, which incidentally claims descent from an 18^th century dynasty in the Hejaz without – at least in my opinion – gaining any prestige thereby, appears to be absolute, as no other political institutions have been permitted to exist, but really it governs like an aristocracy, a formulation rendered only somewhat less dangerous to the monarch by the circumstance that all the nobility are also of his family.

The Arab world displays a truly fascinating variety of despotisms!

Fact is, the middle classes have on frequent historical occasion proven to be surer supports of a monarch’s throne than the nobility. We’d like it to be the case that Saudi Arabia is stable, which for good or ill entails that the throne be secure. To all appearances this is the case: an accommodation has been reached with conservative Islam regarding religious “liberty,” demands for political and civil liberty are voiced, if at all, inaudibly. The monarchy can afford to buy as much economic “justice” as it deems necessary, and still keep the eighth part of the nation’s wealth and income for itself.

What’s happened to the voices, not of discontent, but of the people who by rights ought to be discontented? Clearly the observation that a modern economy requires professionals to run it applies in spades to the Saudi oil economy and the proliferation of sophisticated financial arrangements that spring from it. So there are petit bourgeois professional classes that ought to have, and express, petit bourgeois interests.

But they don’t. I think there might be two explanations, or rather, two sides of the same explanation: first, they’re co-opted in cash – petty cash to the monarchy; second, they’re bosses, or their bosses’ bosses, are princes of the blood. That is, this whole class of potential revolutionaries is directly under the eyes of the state. The middle class thus disappears into the aristocracy as its creatures and dependants, making bourgeois revolution – even bourgeois class consciousness – impossible.

This phenomenon is not unique in the Arab world to Saudi Arabia, and will bear further investigation, and discussion in another post.

The Mass Murderer bin Laden

The impact of the assassination of the mass murderer bin Laden on the likelihood of the success of the Arab revolutions is out of scope for this blog because we are not dealing with personalities.

I can say that insofar as these revolutions are by and for the middle classes, they have not lost an ally, but instead are free of an enemy, by his death.

And moreover, that anyone seeking to reform their state along Western – or explicitly American – lines, has one fewer symbol to overcome.

And finally, that revolutions are always in favor of something, not just against something that has to be annihilated. Bin Laden on the contrary was a radical counter-revolutionary for the “restoration” of a state that never existed, anywhere, but in his own malignant imagination.

So, just as it's a good thing on general principles, it’s a good thing on revolutionary principles.

Who Is Standard & Poor's Anyway?

Who is Standard & Poor’s anyway? has been moved to:

http://marxspoliticaleconomy.blogspot.com/2011/07/who-is-standard-poors-anyway.html

 

Answer: Prestige

How old the Hashemite dynasty of Jordan really is, and whether that had any different effect on the organization of the state than in Saudi Arabia.

Compared to civil war, all is rather quiet in the lands of the Hashemite dynasty. Though established in Jordan scarcely any longer than the Saudi monarchy has been in Arabia, their royal lineage is infinitely longer – so long, and with such distinguished forebears at its head, that the Hashemities might govern by prestige alone if necessary.

King Hussein and his American wife made a very good impression on the West. Perhaps that also means the dynasty has acknowledged the legitimate expectations of the people for the  political and civil liberty that is now a tradition there.

I haven’t found out how far they have gotten on the road to constitutional monarchy; I do know the papers contain no news about acts of revolution in Jordan, and little enough in the way of protests and demonstrations.

·    The actions of some dozens or scores of men in stabbing unarmed police officers bear no relation or resemblance to those of an entire class rising spontaneously from a renewed consciousness of its interest in economic, political, or civil reforms. Provocation is a dangerous, difficult, and left-handed way to start a revolution. On the contrary, the Salafis have tried to use a circumstance not of their making to advance their warped and irreligious agenda.

·    If physicians and other workers at hospitals demonstrate because they want a raise, it’s not revolution. They’re asking the State to take a course of action (which grants that the State has the right to act in the matter), but not demanding changes in the nature of the State (which only a revolution could make). We do that here in Wisconsin.

·    The March 24^th movement of students bears the same relation to the petit bourgeoisie as the unemployed of Daraa to the proletariat. They’re in training to become part of the middle cases, but they’re not there yet, and so their agenda can be free-floating, not determined by real interests arising out of concrete economic activity. Consequently, they can advocate a revolution, or try to start one, but they’re hard-pressed to carry it out – at least not on their own.

All the despots in the region are notorious. Notoriety is the antithesis of prestige. So, when the Hashemite king makes a promise, it is likely to be sincere on his part, and credible to his subjects.

On the other hand, the demand that the king give up his right to nominate the prime minister is intended to change the state itself, and hence is revolutionary to that extent. There are at least two paths to follow: that of constitutional monarchy, in which the parliament selects and the monarch approves the minister, and the path of direct election, in which the person elected ceases to be a minister of the monarch and becomes instead an official of the people.

Yet it’s possible for the King of Jordan to accede without sacrificing the foundation of his monarchy…

…or his residence in the nation.

Answer: Daraa

The name and nature of the town where the protests in Syria started. Is it by any chance an industrial town? The protests have been slow to spread to the capital. Maybe the despot Assad is too efficient for the middle classes there.

It proved impossible to verify the existence of any economic activity in Daraa that could at the same time form the ground for an organized proletariat. Even though it’s an old fortress town at the Syrian Gate to Palestine, there doesn’t seem even to be any commerce through the gate, which after all, now leads to Israel. Perhaps Israel’s long occupation of the Golan Heights stalled – really thwarted – development by the state-run economy there.

Hence the region is poor and its people unemployed. And so the revolution in Daraa, and in Syria, was started by these would-be proletarians. Though such classes have an economic interest in the outcomes of revolutions, they are better able to start them than to finish them successfully.

Syria “enjoys” a Soviet-style economy. This is the kind in which the state has become the dictatorship of the proletariat, but then finds it impossible to wither away, as Marx and Engels – in one of their comparatively few outbursts of what proved to be naïve idealism – thought it might. At any rate, it didn’t in Syria, a Soviet client state and make-weight against Israel in the ‘70’s. A substantial investment appears to have then been made.

Instead, the Assad family has joined the Stalinist model of state-run economy to their personal despotism. They’re not just thieves – I should say they’re not thieves de jure – like the Mubarek and Gaddafi families, and Ben Ali of Tunisia. As heads of this kind of state, the economy is theirs to dispose of – you can’t steal what you already own. (At the same time, concessions appear to have been made to the petit bourgeois merchant and agricultural classes from ancient times associated with the Syrian economy.)

And still, or maybe and so, the revolution cannot penetrate the capital. This is its problem. Daraa by itself, as I’ve said, is not enough. The activist port of Latakia must have stevedores, professional administrators, and movers of commerce: in other words, classes that should have an interest in the outcome of the revolution. Homs, a home of state-run industry, has also been agitated. The main thrust comes from the (middle class) suburbs of Damascus.

But extraordinary steps are being taken by the regime.

The practice of Friday demonstrations right after Friday prayers must be particularly unnerving to a secular despot like Assad. You can’t, after all, stop the praying any more than you can stop the conspiratorial whispering during prayers. How clever of the Israelis to organize the demonstrations in this way – hidden in the open!

But of course the Israelis have nothing to do with it. This lie is among the many that have held the doubly co-opted professional and administrative petit bourgeoisie of the capital – co-opted first by the debt they owe for personal favors from the despot, and second by their parasitical attachment to the state economy that the despot owns – in check.

No doubt their loyalty is sincere. It accords with their economic interests, and their political and civil interests may appear as nothing beside them. There is also real fear, not just the fake kind of fear made up to induce middle class Americans to vote against their interests, working on the side of the despot. If Assad can turn the matter into a conflict within the middle classes, he will defeat the Syrian revolution. This is how the Prussian and Austrian emperors regained their capitals in 1848…

… and Assad has not even lost his capital to the revolution – yet!

I’d like to find out...

I’d like to find out...

         The name and nature of the town where the protests in Syria started. Is it by any chance an industrial town? The protests have been slow to spread to the capital. Maybe the despot Assad is too efficient for the middle classes there.

         The circumstances surrounding the establishment of the Saudi monarchy. Since 1937 is not a long time for an hereditary monarch, but I bet being installed as a despot was not an option. It seems to be a case, like the ancient German kings, of the aristocracy choosing a first among equals. Which would suggest that the aristocracy is still really the governing class except to the extent co-opted by the monarchy.

          How old the Hashemite dynasty of Jordan really is, and whether that had any different effect on the organization of the state than in Saudi Arabia.