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.”

Morsi shows his hand…

…it’s a revolution based on party, but in his party, class interests are submerged, or at any rate entangled, in religious interests. One can say that, in the end, he might do about as well as Cromwell did.

Which isn’t so bad because, even after the reaction in favor of the Stuart monarchy deprived the Puritans of the state, the Glorious Revolution restored or confirmed their political rights and religious freedom as Dissenters from the state religion. The political solution then reached is still the basis of the British constitutional monarchy.

Other than Cromwell’s, it’s difficult to find examples of revolutions by or in favor of religious parties. Does Lutheranism count? No, because the German princes adopted Lutheranism, really on behalf of their states – it gave them independence from the papacy.

The Huguenots didn’t start as a revolutionary party, but rather as a legitimate party in the Estates-General of France. Though they became involved in a struggle for the state, a struggle that gained them for a time the control of some of the provinces, its grounds were mainly dynastic and factional rather than revolutionary. Yet they, like the Dissenters, numbered many petit bourgeoisie among their faithful.

Other instances match up even less well. The first establishment of the Caliphate was more in the nature of conquest than revolution. It was no more revolution than the Israelites establishing themselves in the Holy Land. Anyhow it’s hard to see how you could have a revolution in favor of anything resembling the Caliphate. Neither did the first Xians aim at control of the state through revolution but rather gained it much later, and not at revolutionary speed but through conversion.

So there’s little guidance from history on the question about the fate of a revolution conducted by a religious party. Now, to show that that is what we are dealing with, I have to show that Morsi has left the path of revolution based on objective class interests. It may also be possible to show that the interests of a religious party as such are not objective in the same sense, if at all – but that would be for another post.

The move to claim vacant or vacated powers was necessary, as I claimed in a post some time ago, to forestall the judiciary, the armed forces already having withdrawn their opposition to the Brotherhood’s revolution and their claim to control of the state. Morsi offered this particular explanation of his action in approximately these terms at one subsequent point. At another point, I seem to recall, he expressed regrets at the appearance of impropriety the appropriation of power gave. Yet the judiciary were prevented from dissolving the constitutional convention in the way they’d dissolved parliament. I believe this, not absolutism, was Morsi’s primary, even his only, aim.

It was not necessary use the appropriated powers to forestall the secular parties, as they had already absented themselves, perhaps not entirely, but sufficient to the purpose, from the process. To the extent Morsi named the Brotherhood and its allies to fill vacant seats and offices, to the extent his original or acquired powers as president were used to stack the convention and control its outcomes, then, he was carrying out the revolution of a religious party, and not a revolution more broadly based on objective class interests.

Nobody ever reported whether Salafists were named to any such vacant seats, the journalists apparently preferring to lump them with the Brotherhood. I have argued that failing to make distinctions on this point is a mistake, and probably an item of Western prejudice, and I am still wondering whether any Salafists had a hand in drafting or approving the constitution, and if so, which if any of their positions were incorporated to it.

So the instrument was hurriedly approved through a process the seculars could not interfere with. And the seculars, having read it, at last found unity, but too late. It’s like what Lenin did to the Kerensky government. It’s like what the German kings did while the German parliament argued with itself after 1848, until the counter-revolution reestablished its state. If the Founding Fathers had conducted themselves the way the secular parties in Egypt have….

Maybe you get my point. There’s a time for talk, but if you’re still talking while another party is taking concrete steps to gain the state, then…you’re free to continue talking after that party becomes the state – maybe. I suppose in this case, since Morsi let them vote, he will also let them talk, if not agitate. The decisive actions have already been taken and the result is what the Brotherhood wanted it to be.

So now the seculars are united, even if only negatively, and they have begun another round of revolutionary agitation. Meanwhile steps are being taken to implement the constitution the people – some of them – voted to adopt. The Shura Council seems to have been given and to be exercising some of the vacant legislative powers, either permanently or during the interim until a new parliament is elected. And they were substantially reappointed by Morsi from his party and in preference both to the minions of the former regime and the seculars – more evidence that the Egyptian revolution has lately been appropriated to the agenda of that religious party.

The seculars thus face an unpleasant choice between trying to get themselves elected under an Islamist constitution, or sitting out the election and trying to make a revolution against the revolution. I guess the French did this a few times during their revolution, but only because it was able, in addition to obliterating the previous regime, to consume itself. I don’t detect that kind of ruthlessness in El Baradei or the people he represents – but who can say?

The Crisis

In a crisis, a revolutionary must know what to do. One of the things to know is whether it is really a crisis, and not to be panicked by an unexpected reverse or mere threat. This much speculative philosophy can also know. But to predict the result is beyond its power, precisely because it is the time for individuals to act, and philosophy cannot predict even the action, much less the result, of the determinations of individual subjectivity.

It’s good to know that, even in the time of crisis, the Egyptian revolution is still behaving like a revolution. And more particularly that it recognizes the counter-revolution for what it is, and is able to see the courts and the military as the face or maybe the agent of the counter-revolution.

It’s a crisis because the counter-revolution brought it on. Consider their actions, words, and decrees:

·    The courts dissolved the body that was charged with making a new constitution, on grounds of what is left of the old constitution. Logically, to say nothing of the political meaning of the decree, it’s begging the question, which is what the constitution and the state should and will be. (I understand the convention had already become frustrated with itself, and so nothing was done at the time.)

·    The military too are using what is left of the old constitution, that is, the instrument created by the state the revolution was against, to justify their efforts to crush the revolution.

·    The courts have dissolved parliament. What if parliament dissolves the courts? Seems to me the French solved a similar problem in a similar way.

·    Meanwhile, all the functions the courts have taken away from the revolution, including the legislative power, they have given to the military.

·    Thus the military will appoint the constitutional convention, they say. What if the president appoints his own? Suppose further two constitutions are drawn up. Then who decides?

·    And the military want to write themselves an existence separate from and alongside the civil state into the constitution, to include their own budget under their sole control. How will they fund it? Why don’t they give themselves the power of taxation to boot?

All that’s left undone is “firmness,” fraud, arrests, violent confrontation, and a coup – in that order. There’s no reason a really efficient despotism can’t be oligarchic. Burma, for instance.

All this – the counter-revolution putting forth its strength – suddenly makes the revolution seem rather weak. It once looked (to me at least) as if the Brotherhood might be able to leverage the parliament and the presidency together to complete the revolution. It’s now apparent that the revolution never gained control over the state apparatus, nor any part of it. Even if parliament refuses to dissolve itself, it has no physical assets with which to oppose the counter-revolution.

So now the only thing to do is return to the Square. Unfortunately the police are one of the state elements that did not come under the revolution’s control. Thus begins the cycle of fraud, arrests, violence.

Someone could ask, will the secular revolutionaries go to the Square? Maybe they have gone. Or does the counter-revolution seem to them the lesser of two evils? At least some of them must have voted for Shafiq. Poor fools! Soon they may find their reward.

Unfortunately, you can’t dissolve the military. But sweeping the courts out of existence, or at least denying that they exist, is the right thing to do. The revolution can judge through its own tribunals. It’s been done. Here’s a case in which, in order to take the state into its own hands, the revolution has to take the law into its own hands.

Moving to the Left

The liberal/secular vote, split in the first presidential round between two candidates with about 20% each, from here looks now to be the largest bloc of uncommitted voters in Egypt. One can’t say simply they are the largest bloc of voters, for that would mean they should have outpolled the Brotherhood for control of parliament. Neither can one say whether some of them will sit out the election either, even though that would resemble left adventurism.

Yet, had these parties settled on a single candidate, that candidate would be running against Morsi, rather than the counter-revolutionary Shafiq. It’s a typical failing of liberal revolutionists – allowing relatively minor differences of policy to create a split, rather than pursuing a sounder, unified political and electoral strategy. I am thinking of the German parliament after the 1848.

As it is, their opportunities are not entirely lost, as both remaining candidates are moving to the left in order to gain adherents in their bloc. For Morsi, this means less Sharia, more civil liberty. For Shafiq, it means dissembling, as he can have no real intention other than to govern in behalf of the big bourgeoisie.

Meanwhile the courts continue to display their alignment with counter-revolutionary elements. Acquitting the police, letting Mubarak and his family – just barely – live, failing to punish the despoliation of Egypt by Mubarak’s big bourgeois friends: this just energizes the revolution. A revolution with energy is not likely to be defeated if allowed to go to the polls.

Then what? Even the Western journalists are beginning to see how difficult it will be for Morsi to govern. And without a new constitution, the revolution itself will not have been won.

The vision of the Arab Spring perhaps out shines this reality – but that’s what visions do, don’t they? It’s harder to envision the courts taking Shafiq off the ballot than it is to envision people in the Square agitating against a ballot with his name on it. But if the courts did, and the name weren’t, the whole election would take a giant step leftward.

The People of Egypt Cast Their Votes

[Draft completed May 24, but I did not post it because I thought it might take a few days to count the votes. Posted now without further comment.]

I could wait until after the votes are counted and post on the results, but since this is speculative philosophy…. Anyway, a lot of anecdotal evidence is ready to hand. A few things it suggests follow.

·    Many of the Brotherhood’s voters are poor, and some are voting specifically economic interests. Overall this is favorable to the revolution. The fact that a few of them think Allah will provide jobs just illustrates the contradiction analyzed in an earlier post.

·    Just guessing, but about half the Brotherhood’s voters among the poor are women. So have no fear they would ever curtail the political liberties of women. What party would ever disenfranchise its own political base?

·    Given the choice of candidates, the vote can be expected to reveal splits in the Brotherhood bloc. This gives the liberal/secular parties an opportunity to gain concessions, possibly in matters of civil liberty and religious law. There’s still a constitution to be written.

·    It’s unclear how the individual elected through this process will govern. There is no new constitution, nor a proposal that can be put to a vote, nor even it appears a process for drafting one anymore – this latter thanks in part to the interference of the courts. So the revolution is incomplete, and the election of a president, even a revolutionary one, will do comparatively little in itself to complete it.

·    If you want to complete the revolution, you also have to reduce the military to obedience to the revolution via a constitution. Certain candidates won’t do this. Others might, but I can’t say from here whether any of them are on the record in this sense. The military’s claim to a special role or status under the constitution has an historical basis, but that is one of the things the revolution was made against. Without a constitution, this battle will be the president’s to fight – or not.

·    And so it’s easy to see that the people of Egypt have a choice between a president who will personally fight the courts and military, and one who will not. In other words, a choice between revolution and counter-revolution. I continue to maintain the Brotherhood is a sound revolutionary party on these points, a little Islamic law more or less not to the contrary.

·    Yes, they have a party plank for making Islamic law one of the principles of the constitution. This causes a great deal of hand-wringing among Western journalists. But their wishes are not under consideration.

All this presupposes a result in which the Brotherhood have not split so much they cannot elect their candidate in the next round. You can’t rule out a run-off between the leading liberal/secular candidate and a Brotherhood candidate either until they count the votes in the current round. One can say the revolution will roundly defeat any of the candidates from the former regime in the run-off, or it will look and feel like fraud – whatever Mr. Carter happens to observe – and the revolution will have to start over from Square one.

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.

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.

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.

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….