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.”

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.

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.

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.

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?