Bashar has a dream…

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

Revolution Against Revolution

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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.

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….