March 5 – February 20, 1917: Bakeries

The next day, people ransack bakeries in several parts of Petrograd.

March 4 – February 19, 1917: Bread

Within a few days after rationing starts, people – mostly women – mass around Petrograd shops demanding bread.

March 1 – February 16, 1917: Bread Rationing

Authorities issue cards for rationing bread in Petrograd. Food shortages were widespread in Russia during World War I. Not only had many agricultural workers been conscripted into the armies, but the armies themselves still had to be fed.

February 27 – February 14, 1917: Last State Duma

The last State Duma assembles. The Duma had first been convened in May 1906 as part of a program of civil and political reforms addressing the issues raised by the failed 1905 revolution. Tsar Nicholas II granted this elective body certain legislative and oversight functions. However, he retained all executive powers, including the power to appoint state ministers and to dismiss the Duma itself. The Russian state remained effectively an autocracy.

The workers were already aroused. Some 90,000 were on strike in Petrograd, and others had closed plants in Moscow.

What the Secretary-General Said…

…about “political clocks” not running backwards applies in spades when the times are revolutionary. In fact, in such times, this is a necessary law of historical dialectics. The law applies precisely to the counter-revolutionary moments (in the sense of turnings, as of a pendulum) that follow moments of revolutionary synthesis.

The Brotherhood’s revolution represented such a synthesis. It stood as an endpoint of the actions of all the revolutionary parties of the Arab Spring in Egypt when it achieved fundamental, thus revolutionary, change in the state. But the Brotherhood’s grasp of the state apparatus never grew strong, and at the same time, its basis as a revolution of the whole people grew narrower. The resulting contradictions – on the one side between the Brotherhood and the pre- or counter-revolutionary state apparatus, and on the other side between them and the secular/liberal revolutionists – created a new synthesis, and this was the lever El Sissi pulled.

The lever the Brotherhood pulled in the first place, the lever that came into existence in Tahrir Square, doesn’t exist anymore. Perforce it can’t be pulled again. That is, as the Secretary-General says, in politics you can’t go backwards.

The Brotherhood did not pause at disbelief before going over to anger, and they would do well to move on to acceptance equally quickly. Staying with anger will not restore the former situation. They need a new synthesis, and they can’t do it by holding onto old contradictions with elements that will only become more opposed the longer opposition is kept up. They’re already in danger of being outlawed again.  

Frankly, the longer the Brotherhood stays in the past and fails to seek a new revolutionary synthesis, the surer the success of the counter-revolution.

The Counter-Revolution Puts Forth Its Strength

One of the things you can say about counter-revolutions is that they are often bloodier than revolutions. A spike in the effusion of human blood is almost always a sign that the counter-revolution is putting forth its strength. And that’s just because the strength of the reaction normally consists in control over armed elements of the former, pre-revolutionary state.

When this sort of thing starts happening, any revolutionary elements the counter-revolution happens to be aligned with for the time being start to look like a front, a puppet, a dupe, a tool, or an accomplice. What they as individuals actually are depends on their own subjective relations with the forces of reaction, and on the kinds and degree of objective control the latter exercises over them. All this can play out in many ways, but for now, in Egypt, the police, the military, and the courts are the players, not the interim executive, nor the disbanded legislature.

Did I say they were dupes? The reaction didn’t dupe El Baradei for long. And now that they’ve entered on the path for freeing Mubarak altogether, nobody can be fooled any longer. Only the tools and accomplices are left.

Look for the counter-revolution to assume a face. It’s a little early yet, but if it does, it will already be too late for the revolution, because that will be the face of the next strongman.

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.