Egyptians in Parliament: The Moslem Brotherhood

The misperception that the Moslem Brotherhood is somehow not a revolutionary party has been addressed in these posts, but despite my best efforts, it persists in the American press. The Brotherhood’s new demonstrations in Tahrir Square have as their ultimate object the transfer of political power…to themselves. And this would complete their revolution, which began by legalizing the party and thus giving it political rights, with the transfer of the state itself.

People who think this somehow doesn’t count as revolution, just because the party has associated itself with a certain set of religious beliefs, don’t seem to have a working definition of revolution. Perhaps they are guided rather by prejudices peculiar to the West. In particular, they can’t tell the difference between the Brotherhood and the Salafists – I say, between revolutionaries and counter-revolutionaries – preferring to lump them together over against the seculars, who, to the extent they embrace the same set of values (or maybe prejudices) as the Westerners passing judgment, are considered the true revolutionaries.

This is not a balanced view. The Brotherhood occupies the center of the Egyptian revolution, and in great strength. Yet, like all historical entities, it is carrying contradictions within itself and as its own.

The problem (for these journalists and pundits) gets started because the Brotherhood is measurably right of center on civil liberties, and maybe on political liberties, as they are conceived (and sometimes realized) in the West.

Actually, it starts before that, maybe a generation before. What made militant Islam? Distrust tending toward hatred of the West. The rejection of Western values and along with them the liberties we are concerned with here. Then substituting for secular despotism, not liberty, but a throwback state. In some circles the rejection is so complete, the caliphate looks to them like a “revolutionary” state.

To reach that point, a point the Salafists have reached , objective class interests have to be overlooked, actively ignored, or in any event left unformulated – articulated, if at all, as religious sentiments. Mere belief supplants, can supplant, objective class interests just to the extent real economic life is absent. The former continues to move subjectivity because the latter can itself appear as merely a belief. Or again, one can be more certain of the existence of Allah than of the possibility of steady, well-paid work. Once you blink the latter as a possibility, mere belief, even as religious militancy, becomes a substitute for it, the more so because the values economic activity creates – surplus income, leisure, luxury – are simultaneously imagined as enemies of religion.

First, notice that the phenomenon Marx and Engels confronted was, perhaps fundamentally, different. For their proletariat, the interests in question were objectively real. Mere belief tended to suppress consciousness of them: hence religion as opiate, not as agitation. The religious “illusion” was seized upon, if not rebuilt, by the big bourgeoisie to serve their own narrow interests. In Egypt, the big bourgeoisie and their friends in the former regime had preferred instead a secular state in which the Brotherhood were proscribed. Correspondingly, religious militancy was also militancy against that state.

Am I mistaken to believe Islamic militancy is strongest among, say, day-laborers and peasants? Stronger than among the petit bourgeois elements who populate the secular parties? A heightened sensibility to the deprivation of certain liberties, especially civil liberties, is more generally found among people with education and leisure. For people who have to wonder about whether and how they and their children will be able to survive, faith easily supplants this sensibility. To be sure, in that case obtaining the means of survival is an objective class interest.

I submit that the Brotherhood has broken through this contradiction. Their presidential candidate is articulating an economic program, based in part on privatization of state industry. While it’s not clear how this might affect the casual laborer, if you’re making the structure of the economy a campaign issue, you have to have something in it for your voters en masse. Maybe a little land reform too, for the peasants. That is what this man, Mohamed Morsi, who made himself richer still while a prisoner of the former regime and in spite of contributing to the Brotherhood and its affiliates for their programs of political liberty, is all about.

What’s most important is not the individual, but that the dialectical movement he evidences aligns the Brotherhood more closely with the seculars. Just to the extent it adopts a class-oriented economic program, and takes objective class interests explicitly as an issue, it is a movement away from the militancy of mere religious belief.

It turned out the seculars do not have enough unity to generate splits in their favor within the Brotherhood. They did have enough dialectical gravity – the way of the many is the path of progress, after all – to become the pole of attraction toward a new synthesis, one that may yet negate the contradictions of the old Islamic militancy.

Tunisia got to that place too. It kept its secular constitution; it did not make Sharia explicitly civil as well as religious law. And its president, Moncef Marzouk, for an experienced revolutionary, seems like a mellow dude…

…meanwhile, the wavering Egyptian courts seem to think they can suspend the activity of the committee of parliament charged with formulating the new constitution. Stay tuned.

“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.

News from Syria

A number of items from Syria have been in the news lately, some but not all of which impinge more or less on the class analysis and speculative philosophy of the Arab Spring.

Mr. Shadid. I read the local paper, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, not the New York Times. I’m not studying the journalism of the Arab Spring the way Marx studied that of the 1848 revolution, a study that helped him write his book on Louis Bonaparte and his missives to that self-same New York Times. I’m just mining some of it.

But I did find insight in a few of the articles the Journal Sentinel published, insights crucial to the operations of speculative philosophy. Seems these were mostly authored by Shadid, and reproduced locally by permission of the Times. Such insights are hard to come by, even as subtext, and usually have to be read into the journalism – a process that is prone to the errors I am well aware I have not avoided. So I will miss him personally.

Seems also there are a lot of ways to die that would look like an asthma attack….

If you wanted to assassinate the judges and officials of a despotic regime with which you were at war, you would do well to have inside information on their whereabouts. The elementary inference that this may already have happened has certainly been made by the juvenile Bashar. What is the upshot?

Well, now perhaps Bashar cannot trust, and therefore has to fear, even those close associates who have been deeply involved in his crimes. Whether they or their subordinates might be informants only affects the degree, not the subjective possibility, of suspicion and fear. Now, with that kind of help, even he could become the target of the Free Syrian Army. Worse still, anyone who would help your enemies assassinate your minions, might nearly as likely, in their own proper persons, try to assassinate you.

When I say “nearly” as likely, I am speaking of the merely subjective calculations of an individual, in this case an individual who is already under a lot of stress. Fear is coming back around. Maybe the despot will begin to purge his inner circle. Maybe some of them will purge him first, particularly if they fear to become a target in a purge. They can calculate too.

Concerns were expressed at as high a level as the Cabinet about how Al Qaida might profit by the “destabilization” of the Assad regime. But they’re not concerns about the revolutionary progress of the Syrian people, are they? Neither could Al Qaida hope to destabilize this distracted nation measurably more than it already is, and to profit thereby. Just fishing in troubled waters, without any real chance, as in, say, Yemen or Somalia, of obtaining a legal or quasi-legal status as an arm of or party to the (legitimate?) government.

No, just stealing weapons they’d try to use against the West in general and the U.S. in particular. Acts of terror of the kind Al Qaida is capable of are as flea bites on the Syrian revolution. They can hold no terror for people who no longer fear the physical power of a despot stronger by several orders of magnitude.

The fears expressed by U.S. officials are petty and pusillanimous by comparison.

Speaking of fear, how about Damascus? Is it really possible the middle classes are no longer afraid to demonstrate in the streets against the excesses of the regime?

Of all the bad news Bashar has had this month, this might be the worst – no, it’s a lot worse to know you have to fear even your partners in crime.

The last item is, where’d Bashar get the ordnance for the redoubled violence of this new assault? Were the journalists watching the ports? Did the ship come in from Russia? from Iran? Maybe all the buzz in the Straights of Hormuz was a cover for a shipment of death to the Syrian people. Yet, it’d be easier to get through the Bosporus than the Suez unnoticed, wouldn’t it? Don’t know how long it would take to go around by the Cape of Good Hope. Or sail from, say, Shanghai. How long has it been since Bashar has been able to loose so many shells per day, per hour, per household?

Egyptians in Parliament: The Salafists

The Muslim Brotherhood, even if the perception that it represents conservative Islam is true, is nevertheless by definition a revolutionary party. The same applies to the Salafists, though there can be no doubt about their deep ideological conservatism.

Having once been outlawed, the now legal position of these parties in the formation of the new sate represents a revolution in the old state. According to my working definition, a revolution is an extralegal (usually violent) action against the state for the purpose of obliterating it, replacing it, or changing it fundamentally. It differs from counter-revolution because the latter, even when it would like to obliterate the state, would do so in favor of the few, or for the restoration of the former state, or one essentially the same.

The Brotherhood, and with them the Salafists, achieved their revolution in the fundamental law of the legal status of parties: they helped establish a new political liberty. That makes them revolutionary parties. Maybe that’s as far in revolution as the Salafist ideology will allow them to go. As I understand it, it’s already hypocrisy for a Salafist even to vote. The only reason they could stoop to participate in such an innovation is that it gives them a chance to restore the Caliphate. Which makes them right opportunists, correct? And, if that’s the only reason for their revolution, counter-revolutionaries.

Now the people can vote for them, so they can restore the Caliphate – a condition under which it would be illegal to vote for anything else. Or indeed to vote at all, once the Caliphate had been reestablished.

Or again, there can be only one caliph, can’t there? A caliphate is, in other words, a despotism, and, worse still, a caliph is a religious as well as a political figure. Voting against the caliph, even if it were somehow possible, would be a sin as well as a crime.

The Shariah presents the same kind of difficulty. When one would like to appeal to the courts, who can appeal to a higher authority than God? Using priests for judges is the kind of category confusion that prevailed in simpler, but not necessarily more humane times.

If this is counter-revolution, how does it serve the few? For that is what the class analysis expects. In general, for a despot to become wealthy, he has to sell favors to someone. A caliph could become, and they did become, wealthy in the same way. (It helps too if people consider it a religious duty to give you money.) The previous Egyptian despot was a secular, but that would not prevent the few from…embracing the Shariah – unless they were concerned about their wives, daughters, and sisters for some reason.

The big bourgeoisie were comfortable with secular despotism. Could they get in bed with the caliph? The question answers itself. They’ve done worse things in the history of the modern world than manipulate bigoted religious sentiment. They’ve taken worse risks than the one they would take by backing a Salafist caliphate.

So…where are the levers by which the Salafists could be manipulated? But there’s no need; the contradictions are too great. There are other and likelier levers to pull – and they no doubt are being pulled.

Egyptians in Parliament

The media were not so interested in Egypt when the violence was only occasional and at a low level. Then came the soccer riot, with its aftermath, and so that got some attention – a lot more than their parliament, busy as it is with the comparatively mundane matters of forming a coalition to govern, and convening a body to write a constitution.

You could see the former as an extended metaphor for the latter, where the real interest lies. This is a vital passage for the revolution, so it’s a shame for the student of revolutions to have to speculate – not as in speculative philosophy, which reasons by the application of principles to a (usually fairly small) set of determinate facts – but just to wonder what the case might be as the Muslim Brotherhood goes about its business.

Enough has been reported to know that the initiative lies with them, and that they represent a centrist, near majority element between the (right opportunist?) Salafist party and the (left adventurist?) secular parties. Maybe we know there are waverings too, as I’ve already posted, and maybe we can speculate where party coalitions or splits might arise. So I’ve projected a series of three new posts, on the Salafists, the seculars, and the Brotherhood in parliament.

Hopefully the coverage will catch up with my speculations. Meanwhile, there are imponderables, including the discontinuity between objective economic and political interests, and the state as an instrument or expression of mere belief.

In a Dangerous Place

Libya is in a dangerous place. Some countries seem too need a strong man who is strong enough to keep them from flying apart from the outside in. That situation has been reached by the revolutionary militias and their rivals, which are local, in some cases tribal, and in the worst cases, still loyal to the family of the despot.

At least Libya has oil. Oil grounds the possibilities of the middle class, which in turn grounds the possibilities for political and civil liberties in Libya.

This much can’t be said for Yemen. It was chosen by al Qaida for the same reason they choose all their other bolt holes (Iraq excepted, but Iraq was a mistake): it has little or no economic life. Tribal and regional rivalries antedate the Saleh regime – by centuries, even millennia. They drove the very course of the revolution. Saleh’s mastery of those relations was the prime reason he was so difficult to oust.

Worse still, with Saleh gone, what does the revolution do next? Is there anything on its agenda, the demand for which is strong enough to overcome the tendency to relapse into conflicts based on ancient rivalries? The people still carry rifles so they can protect their water holes from rival bands and tribes. Even if the revolution could coalesce around principles and programs, would it be able to govern until they were achieved?

All of which just goes to show that the departure of the despot in normally closer to the beginning than the end of a revolution – particularly a successful one.

“The Strong Man is Strongest…”

It’s a good thing speculative philosophy is never of the person. It would quickly become lost in the infinite dialectics of the individual subject, and begin to resemble nothing more than the punditry of international politics.

The juvenile Bashar is a case in point. The process that began by strengthening his enemies could be understood dialectically. As the process nears its end, the strategy of the counter-revolution has become impenetrable, lacking under class analysis even the appearance of an objective basis. All that is left is empty words, and emptier, if increasingly reckless and violent, actions.

How can one understand his denunciation of the sanctions of the Arab League as the action of foreign agitators? He got one part right: they’re foreigners, Arab, Muslim foreigners. If that were not enough to alienate him from the League, his subsequent acts of violence before their very (so delegated) eyes ought to suffice.

It was also intriguing to learn through Ms. Walters some weeks ago that those who committed the political murders to that date acted without his authority. And what of the murders since? The lonely child is truly alone when even his police and army defy him.

So he’s alienated himself from the last supports of his regime, especially if they were just obeying orders – which leaves the excessively timid middle classes in the capital considerably less to fear. At the same time, the generals might reasonably consider they are best served by getting rid of their accuser.

It’s all very hard to understand. It’s bizarre.

“…when alone” completes the saying at the top, attributed to Adolf Hitler. Of course, Hitler ended up putting a bullet in his own head. Maybe Bashar will too. That would save his generals the trouble.

Waverings in Egypt

Dialectical movement can be detected in Egypt; there is wavering on the principal fronts of the revolution. The action of the revolutionary parties is in the open; they remain very strong.

What is behind the contrary action? The journalists don’t seem to know what it is; they may have suspicions, but nothing that can be proven. But it can scarcely hide from speculative philosophy.

Two examples: the stance of the army, and the trial of the former despot. There was also wavering about the elections, but the revolution itself shared in this.

The only sound result for the revolution is a military wholly subservient to the civil power. It’s only slightly better for a member of the military to become head of state than for the military to become the state itself. To ask whether the military should guard the constitution is the same as to ask whether it should interfere in politics at all. The answer to both questions is No, but to date, the army hasn’t unequivocally embraced this answer.

The army’s record is mixed. When only a few are found in the Square, it may try to disperse them. When there are many, it might defend them from thugs dressed as policemen. It might beat a woman alone, but fear to do the same to thousands or tens of thousands.

It’s not just the numbers. On the one hand, they punish the revolution and its values. Confronted with its strength, they tend actually to defend it.

Same with the courts. Do they intend to convict Mubarak or not? and of what? and on what evidence? Does he really have to be present in court? The fact is, a full hearing of the evidence, and maybe in particular the evidence of the defense, would implicate others in the crimes alleged against the despot. The revolution earnestly wants to truth to come out. These ”others,” perhaps, do not. But who are they?

We know through dialectics that they must belong to a class entity of some considerable strength, otherwise they could not cause state institutions – the military and the courts – to waver in the face of the revolution’s strength. I suggest, the whole argument suggests, the big bourgeoisie, operating in their typically clandestine manner, are that entity. The Islamist subclasses are the only other entity strong enough, and they might have similar interests, but they would act openly, wouldn’t they? And maybe their attitude is already apparent to observers on the scene.

So the counter-revolution has taken up arms. The fight is joined. Control of the state and its apparatus hangs in the balance.

Revolution in Flux

A redaction in part of my last post on the Egyptian revolution is in order, as events and evidence of their causes have been reported from the scene.

First, is the military really planning to supplant the revolution? If so, only for a time – but the time is not theirs to spend. Do they really seek to split the revolutionary parties, hoping to profit by aligning themselves with one revolutionary faction, to the disadvantage of the others? There is evidence of that, because going ahead with the elections now is thought to favor the Islamist parties. The secularists aren’t even sure whether they will vote, though they are sure they’d like the vote to be delayed.

And if the vote does take place, and the Islamists win, but the secularists sit out, wouldn’t that split the revolution? The people who occupy Tahrir Square would then be in revolution against the winners of the election.

It’s right opportunism pitted against left adventurism all over again. The right hand of the revolution sees the opportunity of political gain, even a majority in the lower house of parliament for Islamist principles. It’s partial, immediate, therefore opportunist victory; political liberties may alone be in sight (and there may even be a hidden agenda against certain forms of civil liberty).

So the adventure in left adventurism is whether to vote. And if you don’t, whether to create a definite split in the revolution. Which leads where? to another adventure?

There’re signs cooler heads will prevail. One report says the Islamists have sent their cadres to the Square. Whether to give their support to the secular left of the revolution, or just to keep an eye on them, who can say? And certainly whether to vote is not a closed question on the left, though compelling the military to step back is the preferred option.

I can see pretty clearly now that any potential for cleavage is grounded in class differences between the two groups of parties: the right representing an underclass that is not quite proletarian; and the left representing a petit bourgeois who will not be satisfied by anything less than the full range of political and civil liberties. Since the vote of the underclass demographic, if cast, would predominate in the Arab world, elections can pretty much be expected largely to go their way. That’s why constitution framing is so important.

Revolutionists: Save the splits for the constitutional convention itself!

The physical situation also poses dangers. One of the things that makes it look like the military caretaker government is, or feels like it could be, allied with the revolutionary right is their common concern, for example, for the Palestinian state: the one because it enhances their prestige as a card for Egypt to play in any disagreement with Israel; the other because of religious and nationalist sympathies and hostilities. Here the two political programs coincide.

But perhaps I gave the military too much credit when I said “guardians of the constitution” has a subtext. Really both the phrase, and the overall political touch, now seem just clumsy. Their appeal to a putative “silent majority” is lame. The Field Marshall in charge would have moved much faster if he had anything personally in common with Mubarak, or Sadat, or Nasser.

The physical fact is, the army stands between the revolution – the left revolution – and a more open and perhaps more serious threat. The black-shirted police have the looks of the horse and camel riders who had their butts handed to them last winter in Tahrir Square. (I thought I recognized one or two of them in recent video.) They, rather than the military, explicitly constitute the physical projection of counter-revolutionary interests.

The question is: whose interests? Who gives them orders? Who bankrolls their pay and equipment? It’s clever that they use U.S.-made tear gas. Nominally, the police are within the Ministry of the Interior. Nominally the military is the caretaker government. Who’s taking care of the Ministry? There’s intelligence and purpose here that reeks of the big bourgeoisie. Are they really in a position to defy the military?

Anyway, the revolution already beat the thugs once. Are the latter any stronger now? How does the revolutionary right, not confronting them in the Square, feel about them?

Things will change again soon enough. But the revolution in Egypt is strong. And now it knows for sure its work is just begun…

…and supposedly, the elections are starting tomorrow.

Questions about Egypt

What if you ask the same series of questions about Egypt?

You don’t get very far, do you? Because…

1.       Did the interim government really behave as an interim government?

A: The interim government is more or less openly exercising and consolidating its power at the expense of the revolution and its principles.

2.       Did the parties so organized have platforms? or programs? If so, what’s in them?

A: I’m certainly having trouble understanding the class orientation of the Islamist parties. But it’s clear in Egypt they’re just as alarmed by the attitudes and action of the military as any of the secular revolutionary parties are. This means they feel the danger to the political liberties they’d like to exercise. It doesn’t necessarily mean they’d like to exercise those liberties in favor of the full range of civil liberties, for the full range of citizens – not excluding women and non-believers. But…

3.       Did they have a fair chance to campaign on their programs?

A: …before we could find out, they’d have to start exercising them first. Elections draw near. Has anybody made the actual, threatened, potential, or imaginary encroachments of the military an issue? Demonstrations are a fact; are parties soliciting votes on that ground?

4.       Do the parties or programs have any identifiable class orientation or content? 5. How strong politically are the classes the (secular) revolutionary parties represent

A: To answer these questions with a question: Is there any evidence the military is playing class-oriented politics? Or again, have they any real basis of support other than the mere fact of power? I suspect the answer to both is: no.

6.       The leading Islamist party is thought to be the strongest of all the parties. Can they be considered tolerant?

A: At least, and probably at most, it’s clear the military is secularist. So…

7.       We are afraid of Sharia. Should we be afraid of Egypt on that account?

A: …they would not be comfortable within a state organized along fundamentalist lines. And maybe we can say they would not allow that to happen – but unfortunately that would be saying too much. Government by secular despotism founded on military power has become a tradition in Egypt. Yet the notion Islamist democracy is fractured with contradictions. Are these really the only two choices?

8.       What are the parties’ attitudes towards the West?

A: I’d like to reserve this question, because it remains to be seen what the attitude of the military towards Egypt is. It’s a very short step from protecting one’s interests to projecting them. Someone led the military from defending the revolution to monitoring it. Look for an identifiable figure, with an identifiable program, to come forward.

In the meantime, what’s really missing is any acknowledgement of the subordination of the military to the civil power. On the contrary, the military wants to be the “guardian of the constitution.” Since there is none at this point, one could ask what they would be willing to guard.

But it’s not that difficult a statement to unpack, is it? The military could be the guardian, say in a democracy, of the “people.” Or, in a despotism, of the state. It might be termed the guardian of the “country” or the “nation,” by which both the people and their lands are meant. But to be guardian of the “constitution” could mean nothing but to take strictly civil or political threats under their guard: in short, to substitute the judgment of military for civilian authorities on what constitutes such a threat. Once allowed that standing, in nearly all cases, the first step, or the last step, is the appointment of a dictator from the ranks. Napoleon is only the most prominent example.

The Egyptian revolution would have been better served to write a constitution that places the civil over the military power first, and deal with the malefactors afterwards. Now they must confront the military if they wish to recover that ground. Meantime the military has not been taught to obey the civil power (that’s a Western idea anyway, isn’t it?), which puts its commitment to protect the revolution into question. Or again, the revolution never made itself a power (except in and through the courts), and so there was nothing for the military (who cannot be, or at least have not been, brought before the courts) to obey.

In today’s paper it says the military want to go forward with the elections. And they intend to see they are not disturbed by unrest. This could easily be made an excuse to put them off, and place the blame on the revolution.

And whose orders are the police following anyway?

Questions about Tunisia

Tunisia appears to have gone about things in a manner calculated to secure the revolution. They allowed parties time to organize and campaign, and elected in the first instance a constitutional convention, rather than putting something or someone in place, to whom the convention would become more or less a threat. And who would find plenty of reasons to interfere with its deliberations.

So the questions are:

1.       Did the interim government really behave as an interim government?

A: It focused on making the elections possible, not on stealing the outcomes. At least that was the outcome.

2.       Did the parties so organized have platforms? or programs? If so, what’s in them?

A: They campaigned – and given the amount of time allowed, meaningfully – on recognizably different platforms, and even against each other’s platforms so recognized.

3.       Did they have a fair chance to campaign on their programs?

A: Yes, “impartial” international observers thought so, and those people do seem to know the difference.

4.       Do the parties or programs have any identifiable class orientation or content?

A: There were explicitly revolutionary parties on the ballot. The parties criticized each other’s relative standing and role in the revolution…

5.       How strong politically are the classes the (secular) revolutionary parties represent?

A: …so there is enough strength to contend for the principles of the revolution themselves…

6.       The leading Islamist party has proven to be the strongest of all the parties. Can they be considered tolerant?

A: …and enough strength to earn a place in the governing coalition. So the government will include a party with specifically revolutionary credentials even as opposed to Islamic credentials. To that extent, the plurality party is behaving with tolerance…

7.       We are afraid of Sharia. Should we be afraid of Tunisia on that account?

A: …and they have to recognize specifically bourgeois expectations. The question of women, for example, is open and near the top of the agenda. Under these circumstances, Sharia could be realized, if at all, only to limited extent.

8.       What are the parties’ attitudes towards the West? That is, and specifically, their neighbors across the Mediterranean?

A: Of course it would be counter-productive to run on a platform to adopt Western values, but neither could the unemployed rationally support a platform that rejects Western capital (in spite of the strings attached). There is nothing in the result to make me abandon my view that Tunisia is naturally and geographically a Mediterranean state rather than an Arab state.

The result is that the revolution goes well. No element has come forward openly against the hope of the people for civil and political liberty. They can still rely, justifiably, on what they already have to prevent it from being taken away.

Between Iraq and Tunisia lies the ground where the Arab Spring was sown. The whole region, with one or two notable exceptions, had been subject to despots. Now, it may be, the path of democracy will follow the path of revolution.

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….

Revolutionary Vengeance

What a lot of ways there are to go wrong when a revolution begins seeking vengeance! And most of them just clear the path for the next strongman.

So why would this be the first thing a revolution would want to do once it had got control of the state?

The people one would initially like to punish are normally, as in the current Egyptian case, charged with specific, notorious crimes: economic crimes that occurred before, and occasioned, the revolution, or crimes of violence, etc., in the attempt to suppress it. Those who commit the former crimes place themselves above the laws they violate; those who commit the latter, use a lawful power wrongly.

It’s easy for a revolution to identify its principal opponents and specify the crimes of these individuals. What’s difficult is to decide when, and with which individuals, the passion for vengeance must stop. The difference between a high-official thief and the people he does business with is only a matter of degree, as is the difference between the general who gives orders and the officers and soldiers who obey them.

The question is, how far will revolutionary vengeance pursue the accomplices of the principal criminals – not just the willing accomplices who are thieves or brutes themselves, but also the unwilling accomplices, and those who are merely similarly situated and are guilty only by association?

There are two questions really, and the second one is, how many enemies, real or imagined, does the revolution want to make? Because if you imagine an enemy where there is none, not only does that one become a real enemy, but anyone who can imagine you making the same mistake about them might too. That is the tendency of fears, and people begin with a certain natural fear of revolutions.

It’s at this point that the vengeance of revolutions begins a dialectical movement, one that can be fatal to the revolution if it is weak.

A few historical instances may help to illustrate the principle.

Many a tumult goes by the name of revolution until the capital is taken and it gains control of the state, but that is when the strongman comes forth and, beginning with the formal enemies of the “revolution” (those who were in power), continues to practice revolutionary vengeance until all his rivals (including some of his former colleagues) are consumed by it. This doesn’t happen in Latin America much anymore, but it still happens in Africa. I’m afraid Che Guevara himself was involved in one such revolution, until he realized it was a fake and went home to Cuba. They’ve had any number of fake revolutions and real purges in the Congo since then.

In these cases revolutionary vengeance leads directly to the establishment of the strongman as despot, and so it is not really “revolutionary” at all, but rather personal.

The Terror of the French Revolution epitomizes another species of revolutionary vengeance, in which, starting with regicide, and having disposed of all the real criminals, the revolution begins to dispose of other supposed criminals on the basis of status alone, that is, revolutionary vengeance as an extension or instrument of class war. And so, aristocrats or high churchmen might be sent to the guillotine without ever having raised a hand against the revolution.

Some aristocrats, like Lafayette, were immune on grounds of their revolutionary credentials; others were condemned merely because their near relations were in exile and known to be negotiating combinations and raising troops among foreign powers. It got so that all the aristocrats were suspect, if only because their forebears had profited from the arrangements under the Ancien Regime for as many generations as they themselves could claim noble birth. At length the Terror began consuming the Revolution itself – Danton, for example – and finally, when Robespierre was executed, the Terror itself.

And so vengeance passed from the notoriously guilty, to the possibly guilty, to those guilty by inference, to those guilty by association, to those who at first were not guilty at all, but later became guilty in the eyes of the revengers, who themselves became liable to the same judgment.

It’s a dangerous path, and not just a slippery slope, but a law of dialectics. For it leads to…

…the reappearance of the strongman as the only remedy for fear and uncertainty – though to be sure, Napoleon was more than that besides.

In the example of the Russian Revolution, revolutionary vengeance becomes a state institution, and political acts become crimes, crimes against the state, or merely against the interests of the individual strongman who happens to be at the head of the state, rather than the laws. This includes:

·         Stalin and the NEPmen – in which the privileged position certain businessmen enjoyed under Lenin to rebuild the Russian economy became a status crime under Stalin, who was rebuilding it again as a centrally-planned Soviet economy.

·         Stalin and the army – a purge, if I’m not mistaken, of left-opposition elements in the Red Army still loyal to their commander in the civil war of the Reds and the Whites, the exiled Trotsky.

On the other hand, we also know how the Radical Republications punished the leaders, military and political, of the Confederacy. Truly they – and not the Confederates, who were merely rebels – were the revolutionaries of that epoch. But they did not take their vengeance in blood, and took it only after the power to resist of the class being punished had been destroyed.

Nor did the Fathers of the first American Revolution, unlike the Radical Republications, find it necessary to deprive Tory Loyalists even of ordinary political rights, much less life and property.

For this is the dialectical risk of revolutionary vengeance: as an object of fear, it tends to make enemies for the revolution among any class whose members are being punished. When a revolution is weak, the difference between a passive enemy and an active counter-revolutionary can be very small. When a revolution is strong, can it have any real need to punish the mere accomplices of the biggest thieves? Those guilty by association? Those guilty only of what I have called “status crimes”?

The institutionalization of revolutionary vengeance in Stalinist and Maoist states is only a symptom of more fundamental contradictions in such states – contradictions that are out-of-scope for this blog. But the consequences of pressing vengeance too prematurely or too hard is not.

The big bourgeoisie makes a good example. They are, most of them, very likely the accomplices of the Arab despots. (One such is ready to be tried in Egypt.) They also have resources sufficient to make them formidable if they were to instigate or join a counter-revolution. Moreover, they are influential with people who would like to think they are or might become big bourgeoisie, and those people are susceptible to fear – the more so as they are the weaker.

The further you work down the list, from known accomplices, to people who fit the same description as the people who associate with possible accomplices, the greater the risk of adding to the possibility or strength of the counter-revolution. It is still worse too do this before the objects of the revolution – civil and political liberties – are well in hand, because in that case people who might worry about being subjected to revolutionary vengeance have two fewer reasons to side with the revolution.

Vengeance on the persons of those even notoriously guilty of crimes against the revolution is not, strictly speaking, a class interest of the revolutionary classes: it has no direct bearing on their economic activity. Getting the money back from the thieves, on the other hand, does.

And so does securing the political and civil liberties the middle classes have always found necessary to their growth as economic beings. Anything that damages the prospects for these gains should in principle be put off until they are won.

Bashar's Latest Tantrum

Bashar’s latest tantrum – calling out lumpenproletarians to vandalize the United States and French embassies in Damascus – is doubtless his most juvenile action yet. A bully is only as big as the schoolyard he terrorizes. He forgot our embassy is not in his schoolyard – either metaphorically or legally.

What was he thinking? Are his mobs a substitute for diplomacy? Whom did he think he would be able to frighten? Did he think he could induce the Administration to change its policy in favor of revolutionary values?

He must have forgotten that they are American values: civil and political liberty. French values too.

About the best result he could expect is what he got: that the Ambassador, and his superiors in the State Department, did not call for his immediate resignation unconditionally…

…I guess there are still a few more diplomatic steps between here and there. But what’s the point? This child needs to have his ears boxed.

And today this tantrum is not the latest news from Syria. Seems Bashar is growing…devious. A juvenile bully often matures to find more subtle ways to turn his brutality to his advantage. There is more to be learned about the mutilated Alawites whose corpses set off the latest round of killings.

It’s summer…

…and the Arab Spring draws to its close.

An item some weeks ago informed that the former finance minister of Egypt got 30 years for malfeasance in office. Does this mean their judicial system is “not broken”? that the army is keeping its hands off? that the mood for punishment is still strong, but the action not precipitate?

For a time, this was the only kind of report coming out of Egypt: the abasement of the Mubarak family before the law – that sort of thing. But don’t the people need a bill of rights? Seems as if they did have  one, they’d have a functioning judiciary that might have the courage to enforce it.

Then the last round of demonstrations expressed suspicions both of the judiciary and the military: the pace of prosecutions is too slow; the police have been allowed to reorganize. The demonstrations were broken up with some considerable force.

And this raises the question of the passion for revolutionary vengeance. The pace of justice does not seem to me too fast or too slow. But of course my passions are not involved. Not knowing which class elements participated in the demonstrations, it is difficult to find a starting point for dialectical analysis of this particular case. But there are historical instances that shed some light, and I have another such post in the works.

There is evidence that the revolution in Tunisia can succeed – is succeeding.

I am thinking mostly of the report that elections have been delayed from summer to the fall. This is good for the newer parties, as they will have longer to organize and proselytize. And the newer parties are presumably those born in and through the revolution, and therefore the ones most likely to hold revolutionary values and carry forward the revolutionary agenda.

The former despot Ben Ali has been convicted with what appears to be all deliberate speed – a sign as in Egypt of an independent and functional judiciary. That there is “unrest” might indicate only that the right of assembly is being tolerated.

Now Jordan is carrying out changes that advance the constitutional side of the constitutional monarchy at the expense of the monarchical. And this without upheaval, and under the compulsion only of wanting to do what’s right at a suitable time – and the friendly suasion of the American President.

But Bahrain will do no such thing and instead hands out sentences for merely political crimes, like Mao or Stalin. Our government has talked to the Khalifa oligarchs too.

The revolution in Libya has been stalled internally pending the outcome of the civil war. Though its external relations and prospects are improving.

It remains to be seen whether the bomb blast that wounded Saleh will be decisive in Yemen. It doesn’t seem to have produced movement yet, though it has put a stop to that despot’s restless activity. It’s difficult to say which of the parties, al Qaida excepted, will be able to take advantage of this circumstance.

And that leaves Syria….

“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.