Missing revolution (2024)

Book Review from the November 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard 

If We Burn. The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution. By Vincent Bevins. Wildfire, 2023. 336pp.

The years 2010 to 2020 saw a possible record number of protest movements over a single decade in different parts of the globe. In many places change of one kind or another was being sought. This book chronicles and seeks to make sense of many of the movements in that ‘mass protest decade’. These include protests that took place in the so-called ‘Arab Spring’ countries (Egypt, Tunisia, Bahrain, Yemen), in Latin America (Brazil, Chile), in Hong Kong, South Korea, Ukraine and Turkey, and also, if fleetingly, in Algeria, Bolivia, Syria and Libya as well as via the Occupy Wall Street movement. What is found by the author as a common feature of almost all of them is that they ‘failed’, in the sense that the activists didn’t get what they wanted and in some instances (eg, Egypt, Brazil, Hong Kong) unleashed outcomes that were worse than what existed before. The author’s detailed knowledge of these events arises from his actually being present on the ground in some countries in his role as a foreign journalist for an American newspaper (The Los Angeles Times) but also of multiple personal interviews conducted later in many countries with key protagonists of the happenings in question. This result is a wickedly intricate account that takes us fascinatingly close to the lived experience of those directly involved.

In searching for answers to the failures he catalogues, the factors the author tends to see as most important are faulty methods of organisations and too much ‘horizontalism’ (ie, lack of hierarchical leadership). But, despite the grasp he has of the social and historical background of the territories in question, both through research and personal experience, and his presence on the ground in some of them, this book suffers from a failure on the part of the author to get to the bottom of the underlying nature of and reasons for these protests. He seems determined to frame them as attempts at fundamental social change, even revolution, on the part of those involved, yet if examined closely, a better explanation for the protests and the street demonstrations is a far less radical one. They are largely attempts by people feeling oppressed, disadvantaged or outraged by one aspect or another of how their society is run to try and push those who govern into ways of managing the system they live under more benignly, more ‘fairly’. But key is the reality that they are looking for that system – capitalism – to be reformed, not overthrown.

Throughout the history of capitalism, in different parts of the world, such protests seeking piecemeal changes have come and gone and will continue to do so, sometimes achieving small improvements but, inevitably, failing to change the basic nature of the system we live under. Their precise targets vary, but what unites them is that they involve tinkering at the edges of the ongoing problems and crises that capitalism throws up. Above all, they do not stem from a consciousness that the buying and selling system needs to be replaced by a different one of voluntary cooperation and free access to all goods and services – which we would call socialism. So the decade of false dawns the author delves into here is only actually part of a century or more of similar campaigns aimed at trying to make capitalism work in ways that run counter to its needs and its nature.

A further reservation this reviewer would have is the author’s ‘sloppy’ use of the words ‘socialism’ and ‘socialist’, employed as a kind of catch-all to mean either some form of state capitalism or any kind of protest or revolt looking to reform certain aspects of capitalism — to make the lives of workers, the majority class, more liveable within it. So we are told, for example that: the Students for a Democratic Society movement in the US in the 1960s ‘advocated for a more socialist economy’; the fall of the Soviet union led to ‘the rapid collapse of allied socialist states’; Tunisia had taken on ‘elements of Nasser’s socialist model’ and was not the same since ‘the end of Arab Socialism’; and in Hong Kong ‘the movement contained elements that … defended aspects of the old socialist system’.

Despite this, there are moments in this book where the author does show a clear understanding of the system we are up against, one whose purpose, in his own words, is ‘to make all the world’s states porous to international capital and open up all the planet’s resources for extraction and commodification’. And he does also come close to glimpsing the kind of world marketless, leaderless society that would transcend the kinds of problems, constantly and inevitably thrown up by capitalism, that the protests examined here focus on. That glimpse can be found, for example, when he talks about ‘constructing a movement that can stand the test of time, in addition to remaining democratic and accountable’ and ‘a world when artificial distinctions and narrowly self-interested activities melt away’ and … ‘our society truly is participatory’.

Howard Moss

Pathfinders: Double Bubble Trouble (2011)

The Pathfinders Column from the March 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

The ‘peoplequake’ currently tearing up streets across North Africa is not just about dictatorial rulers and lack of democracy, it’s also about poverty, unemployment, corruption, social exclusion, simmering religious tensions and, significantly, rising food prices.

World wheat prices rocketed by 50 percent during 2010, and countries which are net importers of wheat, and whose populations spend on average a third or more of their income on food, are the most badly hit by these rises. The Japanese investment firm Nomura has created a Food Vulnerability Index (NFVI) of 80 countries in its report The Coming Surge in Food Prices. In the top 10 of these countries are Egypt, Algeria and Morocco, as well as Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Hong Kong. In the top 20 are Tunisia, Romania, Ukraine and Libya. If another surge in prices is imminent, as Nomura predicts, the NFVI may suggest where the political heat will burn hottest.

Let us however dispose of one misconception at the outset – the volatility of food prices does not correspond with a similar volatility in the supply of food. The 80 percent increase in global wheat prices in 2008 occurred during a ‘super-harvest’ of American wheat and has been blamed squarely on speculators in Chicago and Minneapolis who have only recently converged like locusts on the world’s farm crops (see for instance ‘How Wall Street starved millions and got away with it’ by Frederick Kaufman, Harper’s Magazine, July 2010). That speculators were entirely responsible for creating a financial ‘food bubble’, as Kaufman claims, is frostily denied by Goldman Sachs, the chief bad-guy of his essay, but also disputed by several other independent reports, citing other factors such as the 40 percent crop loss due to the Russian drought, as well as floods in Pakistan and China, and the spike in oil prices which nowadays correlate closely with food prices. Nevertheless, speculator-frenzy was sufficient to alarm the Indian government into banning all agricultural futures trading in 2008.

Another misconception is that population is causing food prices to rise. Global population has been rising steadily for decades while real food prices have been falling since 1970. World population is expected to reach around 9.5bn by 2100 but a recent report from the UK Institution of Mechanical Engineers argues that the anticipated food demand can be met with current engineering methods and that the barriers are largely political. They point to the 25 percent wastage of post-purchase food in developed countries, and the staggering 50 percent average post-harvest crop loss in developing countries because of poor storage and management: “It is evident that the barriers to deploying solutions are not technological. The issue is often one of implementation and in this area action should be taken by society and political leaders at national, regional and local levels” (Population: One Planet, Too Many People? p.40).

Meanwhile, other researchers are less optimistic, citing the unsustainable exhaustion of non-replaceable water supplies driving much of current global food production. In China an estimated 130m people rely on food produced through overpumping groundwater, in India around 175m, while Saudi Arabia, currently self-sufficient in wheat, has almost drained its fossil aquifers and next year’s harvest may be its last (New Scientist, 5 February). Agriculture accounts for 70-85 percent of global water consumption and half the world’s population live in countries with falling water tables. Lester Brown, president of the Earth Policy Institute, argues that this environmental ‘food bubble’ could burst at any time, with catastrophic consequences: “No civilization has survived the ongoing destruction of its natural support systems. Nor will ours….. the world is only one poor harvest away from chaos” (‘When Will the Food Bubble Burst?’, Earth-Policy.org, 12 January).

The UK engineers agree over the problem: “Indeed if there is one common factor that [we have] identified in the issues relating to water around the world, it is the unsustainable abstraction of groundwater at a higher rate than natural replenishment allows” (Population report, p.24) but they point out that this does not need to be so: “Given current techniques and capabilities there is no valid reason why there should be a shortage of water for human use. Fundamentally, there is no shortage of water on the planet to meet the anticipated rise in consumption of 30 percent by 2030. There is however, a spatial and temporal misalignment of supply and demand” (p.5). China, whose water is mostly in the south and population centres in the north, is currently dealing with this ‘misalignment’ in a refreshingly low-tech way, with a big canal. Other countries, given the removal of economic and political barriers, could theoretically do the same.

World food supply is affected by a number of factors, including population growth and rampant urbanisation, land and water depletion, invasive species, pollution, climate change and El Nino events. But prices are a function of the market system and volatility here is also driven by protectionism, speculation, oil costs and consequent biofuel demand, and plain old fashioned hoarding to inflate prices. The problem with the forecasts of Nomura, the engineers and the Earth Policy Institute, is that they are obliged to think within the capitalist box, and as far as solutions go that box is pretty much empty. Socialists can only hope that the world doesn’t have to starve half its population to death before coming to the conclusion that leaders are not going to change anything and that capitalism is the real bubble that needs bursting.

Paddy Shannon

Tiny Tips (2011)

The Tiny Tips column from the March 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

A quarter of all of Britain’s income tax revenues this year will be paid by just one per cent of earners, according to official data:

[Dead Link.]

The British crime map doesn’t feature corporate crime so it is a bit like a British flood map that registers only bathroom floods:

[Link.]

Egypt’s secret police, long accused of torturing suspects and intimidating political opponents of President Hosni Mubarak, received training at the FBI’s facility in Quantico, Virginia, even as US diplomats compiled allegations of brutality against them, according to US State Department cables released by WikiLeaks:

[Dead Link.]

Four decades after the Green Revolution seemed to be solving India’s food problems, nearly half of Indian children age 5 or younger are malnourished. And soaring food prices, a problem around the world, are especially acute in India:

[Link.]

In one of the deadliest strikes on the Pakistan army, a schoolboy suicide bomber sneaked into a heavily-guarded Pakistani army training centre in the country’s north-west today and blew himself up in the midst of a parade, killing 31 soldiers and leaving 40 more wounded. “It was a suicide attack by a 12-year old bomber in school uniform,” top police officer Mr Abdullah Khan said:

[Dead Link.]

A jury in western New York deliberated for only an hour on Monday before finding a television producer, who ran a cable studio designed to promote understanding of his Muslim culture, guilty of beheading his wife:

[Dead Link.]

It seems President Hosni Mubarak isn’t the only leader who has grown out of touch with ordinary people following an extended period in power. Tony Blair has praised the Egyptian dictator as a “force for good”. Appearing on Piers Morgan Tonight on CNN, the former British PM said: “Where you stand on [Mubarak] depends on whether you’ve worked with him from the outside or on the inside. “I’ve worked with him on the Middle East peace process between the Israelis and the Palestinians and on that issue, I have to say, he’s been immensely courageous and a force for good.”

[Dead Link.]

Joe Biden says Egypt’s Mubarak no dictator, he shouldn’t step down…and wonders what the Egyptian protesters want:

[Link.]

Editorial: Resistance is not enough (2021)

Editorial from the March 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

A decade has passed since a tidal wave of revolt swept across the Middle East and North Africa washing away autocratic regimes in its wake. That this happened seemed to have not only taken the local dictators by surprise, but also the rest of the world. And yet it should not have done. After years of state repression combined with economic hardship that had been made worse by the 2008 financial crisis, working people had had enough and rose up to fight for political democracy. High unemployment, especially among young workers, and poor economic prospects were the tinderbox. The suicide of a street seller in Tunisia was the spark.

We can see similar dynamics recently working themselves out in Russia and Myanmar. In January, Alexey Navalny, a long-time opponent of Putin, returned to Russia after being treated for nerve agent poisoning in Berlin. He was arrested and imprisoned on a charge of violating his parole conditions relating to a suspended sentence he received in 2014 for embezzlement. This sparked rallies and protests across Russia. Some have descended into violence as the police cracked down heavily on the demonstrators.

On 1st February in Myanmar, the military, after alleging that voter fraud had helped the National League of Democracy (Aung San Suu Kyi’s party) to secure a landslide victory in the November 2020 general election, deposed and detained the elected civilian rulers, including Suu Kyi, and declared direct military rule for one year. In response mass protests have erupted, which have elicited a severe crackdown by the police and the military. Public servants, health workers, teachers and other workers have gone on strike in an attempt to end military rule and restore civilian government.

What is common to these protests is the deteriorating living standards suffered by workers which has been exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic and popular disenchantment with the corrupt capitalist rulers who have been accumulating greater amounts of wealth. We can only sympathise with these workers struggling to obtain democratic rights. However, we believe it would be a mistake for them to put their trust in political leaders such Navalny and Aung San Suu Kyi. Notwithstanding their particular flaws – Navalny is a Russian nationalist and harbours anti-immigrant positions, and Suu Kyi, while in power, has defended the state persecution of the Rohingya Muslims – they are both committed to upholding the capitalist system which is the source of workers’ social problems. They would be overseeing the exploitation of the working class.

Sadly, the uprising of the Arab Spring ten years ago did not bring about democracy for the workers. With the possible exception of Tunisia, autocratic dictatorships still prevail in the region. This does not mean that workers should give up the political fight. On the contrary, we urge workers to fight not just for political democracy but for a fundamental change in how we organise society. What is needed is a class-conscious working class to organise globally to capture political power democratically to rid the planet of capitalism and establish genuine socialism, a worldwide society without national borders, money or social classes, where everyone can participate equally and enjoy free access to social wealth.

Tunisia – people power, but . . . (2011)

From the March 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

The new regime won’t be able to improve the lot of the population.

The lightning rapidity and relative ease with which Zine El Abidine Ben Ali was chased out of Tunisia in January, is a clear testimony not only of the power of the masses but also (though unknown to many) how vulnerable and cowardly many a dictator is. Hours before his ignominious flight, Ben Ali appeared on television visibly shaken and pleading with the people to give him time to address their problems. Too late; the masses were already up in arms. It is said that the capitalist system digs its own grave. But it does not do so willingly. It is an inevitable fate that it must fulfil; it developed the internet to enhance its insatiable crave for profits but, ironically, it is the same internet that the masses will use as a collective organiser to mobilise the exploited to bury the system. The present upheavals in the Arab countries are one such example.

Elsewhere in the Arab lands, this defiant action of the Tunisians sent frosty shivers down the spines of the other dictators and, apprehensive of a possible domino effect, some of these rulers started making jittery reforms to avert a similar (and deserved) fall.

In Tunisia, discontent with the government was deep and widespread, cutting across class lines. The low income earners had no hope of escaping poverty because the government had no way of providing them with jobs. The middle income earners had little chance to improve its lot because the government had so badly sapped the economy that there were few government services and the development of business was virtually impossible except for the few who had close ties with top officials. Many of those who did no more than merely question or complain about injustice were thrown into jail. Many useful people were turned into beggars.

Pernicious adulation
These dramatic events in the Arab lands (and they are still unfolding) also reveal, in black and white, the negative role that the corporate media play in the struggle for the emancipation of mankind. On the eve of the uprising, one would have thought, going by what the media wanted the world to believe, that Tunisia was a kind of heaven-on-earth. For instance, in 2002, a number of ‘Special Reports’ on Tunisia were published in New African – so far the leading English language magazine in continental Africa –  that need some paraphrasing and scrutiny here. They were, in the main, prepared by one, Anver Versi.

According to him, visionary political leaders like Ben Ali are saviours and so when Ben Ali took charge of the country 15 years ago, he called the process The Change. Many at that time took the words at their literal value; most at that time did not fully grasp what he meant. When one looks at Tunisia at that time and what it has become today, one feels the full, stunning impact of the words,

The Change:

“These 15 years have seen one of the most remarkable transformations in modern history of the world. From a country teetering on the brink of social economic and political collapse, Tunisia today is on the threshold of entering developed world status. And this was achieved without any miraculous discovery of gold or oil. The country has also not borrowed heavily to finance its growth, neither has there been any ‘Marshall Aid’ from wealthy nations. Growth has been maintained at a steady 5% per annum despite a four-year drought. Industrial efficiency has been gained without the loss of employment. The infrastructure has quadrupled. Education is universal and incomes have increased by 400%. Eight out of ten households own their homes and there is hardly any poverty. The rights of children are protected by law. An advanced social security programme is in place.”

Versi wrote further that “in Tunisia the term ‘solidarity’ is not a political slogan for organised groups. It stands for the principle ‘one for all and all for one’. ‘Solidarity’ means that you are never alone; your problems are not yours only; you are not isolated but part of an intricate chain. Since a chain is as weak as its weakest link, it is everybody’s duty to ensure that the weak links become stronger with each passing day.” Versi added that according to Ben Ali, the National Solidarity Fund, which is the vehicle used to reintegrate marginalised groups, has been so spectacularly successful that delegations from virtually all corners of the globe arrive almost every week to study how it works. It is a remarkable journey undertaken at a dizzying speed. A miracle indeed!

The above pernicious adulation typifies the mercenary media’s manipulation of public opinion which, unfortunately, is swallowed hook, line and sinker by many. But even if that was actually the reality in Tunisia only a few years ago, how could the situation of the majority of the people be so messy today? To be able to reconcile this rather bizarre equation, one needs to consider the inner workings of the trap set for Tunisia (and indeed all peripheral states) by the capitalist system..

Free trade with the EU
Tunisia was the first country to sign an Association Agreement with the European Union. According to the terms of the Agreement, the EU and its Association partners would introduce a Free Trade Zone in 2010. This would mean that tariffs and other protective barriers would be eliminated. This was way back in July 1995. The Agreement provided that Tunisia would be given enough time and room to adjust its national structures to fit into the partnership. It would also not surrender its competitive advantages, such as its cheap labour. Naturally, a less developed nation joining an advanced economic market such as the EU has as many advantages accruing from it as there are dangerous pitfalls. One thing, however, is clear: removal of tariffs and deregulation always leads to the importing of cheap goods from the West which greatly damages local production.

But the Tunisian rulers, and that is always the bait, were made to believe that with time they could compete on an equal footing with their European counterparts. The Agreement also provided for a 12-year transition period after which it would come into force for the implementation of the free trade arrangement. However, Tunisia had started dismantling tariffs on industrial goods in 1996, two years before the agreement came into force in 1998. It would therefore be able to enter the Free Trade Zone by 2008.

The EU opened an office in Tunis and the grants started flowing in. A 40-strong team from the European Commission flew in. Its function was to carry out EU policies and co-ordinate with Tunisian authorities. They would work together with the Tunisian Ministry of Co-operation and Investment and provide technical management assistance to improve productivity. They were also to budget aid money against reforms and disburse funds after checking that targets had been met. They would also link with lending institutions like the World Bank for more loans. The office then proceeded to open up trade services such as insurance, banking and other commercial and professional set-ups.

That marked the beginning of the end. The government failed to understand that the tighter the grip of the capitalists on industry, the more intense is the poverty of the masses and the more marked are the riches of the few.

Decorated donkeys
Coming back to the crisis, the demonstrations continued in spite of the ignominious flight of Ben Ali. This is understandable because those individuals who, in one way or the other, helped mess up the lives of the ordinary people were the same who came back as the interim government; a clear case of the decorated donkey still being an ass.

But one thing is obvious; no matter who are brought in to assume leadership of the country, the plight of the ordinary Tunisian will not see any significant improvement. The so-called opposition are no better than the likes of Ben Ali. At the beginning of 2002, for instance, the opposition parties and some civil organisations were invited to contribute to the framing of a draft constitution before it was put to the public to vote on. Later, the secretary-general of the Popular Unity Party (PUP) one of the six opposition parties, Mohammed Bouchiha, gleefully commented that the reforms marked the crossing of the Rubicon and signified a point of no return in the development of modern Tunisia. “The system has now been changed as we demanded,” he said.

On the issue of the reforms dropping the limitation on presidential terms, Bouchiha said, defending the open system, “That was an irrelevancy; the clause was brought in when President Ben Ali revoked the President-for-Life system introduced in the latter stages of Habib Bourghiba’s administration. But if the electoral system is fair, why should the public be denied the opportunity to vote in the candidate of their choice as many times as possible?”

Now, observers across the anti-capitalist spectrum may enthusiastically welcome the courageous action of the people but the fact is that the opposition is not a unified ideological entity. It is a random collection of (often irreconcilable) groups whose interest in getting rid of the government only happens to coincide now. Though such an amorphous group may be able to seize power, they can hardly help the masses as they do not have any common and well-thought-out agenda except that they want to see the back of the leader. And even if they are able to hammer out some sort of radical programme, they will soon be forced to make concessions to the same ruinous capitalist world around them as there is virtually no possibility that massive foreign aid will be offered them to alleviate the poverty of the populace.

Thus, the untold hardship visited on the masses and which necessitated the mass action can only be possible (and will always be so) under the capitalist system. This system is based on an insignificant minority of the world owning all the means of production and distribution of wealth i.e. land, factories, transport and communication networks, the media, etc. These few individuals control all the wealth of the world whereas the majority have nothing and have to work for the owning class to continue making their profits. It is this sort of relations that is the source of all the suffering in the world.

Therefore, it is only when this profit-driven system is abolished and replaced with a system that is operated on the basis of ownership of the world’s resources by the whole of humanity that such uncalled for situations in society can be done away with. But this cannot be achieved except when there is a concerted action on a global scale. Individual countries may rise up and chase away their leaders but it does not solve the problem. It is only when the majority of mankind and in particular the working class understand the capitalist system and, based upon this understanding, decide to do away with capitalism and replace it with a better mode of organising society (call it socialism) that the human race will be really human. For, such a socialist system will be run on the basis of collective ownership of the world’s resources for the use and benefit of all.

Suhuyini

2011 – A Year of Change (2011)

From the December 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

As another year in the capitalist madhouse comes to a close it’s time to review the maladies, and some of the medicine its inmates have had to stomach

January marked the beginning of the end for a trio of North African leaders in what has been dubbed the “Arab Spring”. Just a few months earlier these men where embraced and cosseted by Western leaders and their docile media. Transformation can happen quickly inside the madhouse. Our erstwhile friends and allies once considered sane have now been diagnosed as mad dogs, tyrannical torturers, and despotic murderers.

Zine El Abidine Ben Ali of Tunisia was the first on his toes. Once a beloved partner of the EU, now just another fallen idol. The aftermath of the fall of Ben Ali culminated in the Islamist Ennahda party winning 41.47 per cent of votes. Rioting followed in Sidi Bouzid, the site of the uprising that deposed Ben Ali. The Daily Mail (24 October) reported the insights of ‘Belhussein al-Maliki, 27, who said that he’d fought in the January uprising. “We are jobless, we have nothing and we won’t vote.  Everything is the same, the world is the way it is, and the world will stay the way it is.”  

Next it was Egypt’s turn. Egyptians in their tens of thousands took to the streets, perhaps, encouraged by the speed and unambiguous exit of Ben Ali.  What is certain is that they’d had enough of Mubarak and his “Clan”. Like leaders before him Mubarak turned Egypt into his own personal thiefdom.  And it wasn’t just those on the streets that resented this. Obama and his cronies, who dispensed the aid that Mubarak pilfered, dithered, waiting to see which way the wind was blowing. But the hurricane from the street proved too powerful and Mubarak fled to his villa in Sharm el-Sheikh. An inconclusive trial, of sorts, followed. The aftermath once again was violent and began in Tahrir Square: “bloody scenes prompted fears that Egypt is drawing ever closer to a sustained religious conflict that cannot be controlled. There were reports of violence erupting in several Egyptian towns and cities with large Christian populations in the aftermath of the pandemonium in Cairo” (Daily Telegraph, 9 October). Divide and conquer? Election dates are still under discussion. The time-frame to elect a president put forward by the ruling military council remains nebulous: “perhaps the end of 2012, or early 2013”.

Regime-change in Libya came next. The same socio/economic reasons underpinned the uprising by Libyans but in contrast to Tunisia and Egypt the conclusion didn’t look so clear cut to Western leaders. Thus, under the charade of a humanitarian mission Western planes and missiles bombed General Gaddafi’s forces so that the outcome would become predictable. Another example of  how quickly a friend becomes your foe under capitalism—and why—was when the BBC reported (25 March 2004) the amicable meeting between Qaddafi and Tony Blair in 2004, supposedly for Qaddafi to join the West in its fight against terrorism. However, as discussions took place “it was announced Anglo-Dutch oil giant Shell had signed a deal worth up to £550m for gas exploration rights off the Libyan coast.”

On September 8, Naji Barakat, the Health Minister of the National Transitional Council, stated “that about 30,000 people were killed during the war. At least 50,000 war-wounded, about 20,000 with serious injuries . . . but this estimate was expected to rise” (Wikipedia). Six weeks later the New Statesman reported that “running up the Stars and Stripes in “liberated” Tripoli last month, US ambassador Gene Cretz blurted out: “We know that oil is the jewel in the crown of Libyan natural resources!”. Not wanting to miss out on the profits scramble Philip Hammond, British Defence Secretary advised that, “British executives should be “packing their suitcases” and heading to Libya to win contracts” (Daily Telegraph, 4 November). The ongoing conflicts in Syria, Bahrain, and Yemen didn’t warrant humanitarian intervention. However, intervention carries on unabated in Afghanistan. IPS (2 November) reports that: “US Special Operations Forces (SOF) killed well over 1,500 civilians in night raids in less than 10 months in 2010 and early 2011”. That’s just SOF. And at night.

Only an insane profit-driven system would site nuclear plants in an area prone to earthquakes. In March an earthquake and tsunami devastated the north-eastern coast of Honshu, Japan, killing tens of thousands. Six months on and the Mayor of Rikuzentakata, one of the towns to feel the full force of the tsunami could state that, “the government has said it will give us funds for reconstruction, but we haven’t received any money yet” (BBC, 12 September). More inmates reduced to begging from their political masters.

On 1 May the world was notified that it could sleep easily in its bed with the assassination of the world’s number one bogeyman: Bin Laden. America was deliriously happy, Pakistan less so. Throughout the year stories of phone hacking by Murdoch’s hacks continually made the front pages. Newsnight was besotted by it. The broadsheets wrote piously about it. On 11 July that citadel of great British hackery, The News of the World, ceased printing. Then came the pantomime of the big bad wolf, Murdoch himself, and his slavering young cub of a son having to appear in front of a flock of pious MPs. Liars, cheats, fraudsters and hypocrites have been implicated in these revelations – and that’s just the police involvement.  How long before the Sun on Sunday appears?

The police were also involved in August in ‘The Riots’. Yes, surprise, surprise, we had rioting in London. Must have been our turn. LA next? Chicago? Paris?  The media has been hard at work trying to uncover why. Perhaps the risibly named Ministry of Justice figures might help: “90% of those brought before the courts were aged under 21. Only 5% were over the age of 40. Thirty-five percent were claiming out-of-work benefits, which compares to a national average of 12%. Of the young people involved, 42% were in receipt of free school meals compared to an average of 16%. Three-quarters of all those who appeared in court had a previous conviction or caution. For adults the figure was 80% and for juveniles it was 62%. Seventy-five percent of the young people in court were classed as having some form of special educational need, compared to 21% for the national average”. What the capitalist asylum excels at is converting children into criminals.

Famine in Africa was once again worth some newsprint and the usual pleas for money. Absurdly, reformers beg for money to alleviate poverty when its existence is the root cause of poverty. On September 25th the good King Abdullah, of that bastion of freedom and justice, Saudi Arabia, granted women the right to vote. However, they’ll still need to be driven to the polling station as its illegal for them to drive or to be seen in public without a male chaperone watching over them.

Very little ink has been wasted on climate change. But Reuters (23 October) provided this snippet: “global temperature rise could exceed “safe” levels of two degrees Celsius in some parts of the world in many of our lifetimes, if greenhouse gas emissions continue to increase, two research papers published in the journal Nature warned”.   Got kids? Grandkids? Content to sit on your arse?

As a backdrop to the above events we have “The Crisis”, which is gaining momentum, rather than abating as most of capitalism’s gurus envisaged. Bank of England governor Mervyn King said, “this is the most serious financial crisis we’ve seen at least since the 1930s, if not ever” (BBC, 7 October). And nearly “15% of the US population relied on food stamps in August, as the number of recipients hit 45.8 million” (Wall Street Journal, 1 November). People in every country are struggling with the repercussions of “The Crisis”. This has led to class conflict – the dynamic of change. What began in Tunisia in January has evolved in to a different type of struggle – one that is still evolving. It’s a struggle to see through the bourgeois opacity that Anton Pannekoek described as: “the power of the inherited and confused ideas, the formidable spiritual power of the middle-class world, enveloping their minds into a thick cloud of beliefs and ideologies, dividing them, and making them uncertain and confused”.

If a fiction writer had to plot a path to socialism, Chapter One might include: a socio/economic backdrop that exacerbates the gulf between the classes; a growing distrust, dislike and willingness to take on politicians, and those that enforce the states’ laws; an embryonic distrust of academia and the media; a generalised growth of discontent with the status quo; a meeting-up of people with divergent ideas in a central area where discussion could take place; the technology to instantly exchange ideas and arrange meetings locally and globally; an exponential growth of these leaderless movements across continents; the veil of morality that bourgeois ideology hides behind falling ever further to reveal more and more of its contradictions and hypocrisies.  Chapter Two—Reclamation.  Understanding socialism is relatively easy. Understanding capitalism, first, is the hard part. All socialists had to undergo that process.

The New York Times (26 November 2006) reported Warren Buffet as saying, “there’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning”. And he’s right. We are losing. But only a battle, in a war of ideas. 2011 has been memorable. Those actively engaged in the struggle deserve our respect and admiration. Perhaps 2012 could be the year that we can puncture Warren Buffet and his class’s smugness. A year to give our class cause for optimism. There isn’t an infinite amount of time in which to win this war. The madhouse is becoming increasingly mad. Now is the time for those who’ve been content to sit on the sidelines to become active. If not, then the war could be lost. And the mad will have won.

Andy Matthews

Letters: Socialism and the Media (2012)

Letters to the Editors from the February 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

Socialism and the Media

Dear Editors

The Leveson Enquiry is currently looking into the malpractices of the newspapers but it goes deeper than that. In capitalism there is at present the very large Goliath of capitalist inspired policies and practices and the very small David of socialist education. The same goes for the media. Newspaper, periodicals and other electronic media are overwhelmingly owned and controlled by capitalist interests. They hardly ever mention the s-word and when they do they invariably equate it with nationalisation or what happened in the former Soviet Union.

In socialism education will be for life and life-long. There will likely be a closing of the gap between teacher and taught. In some cases there will be an interchange of roles. For example the same individual may for a time be a teacher in a subject of which they may have made a special study, while at other times they may learn from others who have different specialisms.

People will derive meaning and satisfaction from the varied contributions they make to the material, intellectual, social and cultural world in which they live. Of course  skills and expertise will still need to be taught and learned. But not how to be a professional killer, a persuasive salesperson or a maker of money (except perhaps how to preserve specimens of it in a museum).

In any modern society the media are a reflection of, and a significant part of, the world in which they are located. Regarding the various forms of media in a socialist future, it is easier to say what won’t be in them rather than what will be. Property based crime won’t be reported and discussed because there won’t be any. That doesn’t mean to say that no one will ever behave in an anti-social way or that disputes will never arise, but how these will be coped with is another matter. The salacious events in the lives of media-created ‘celebrities’ seem unlikely to outlast a capitalist-dominated world. We shall have to work for the growth of socialist media to see what will take their place.

In recent years there has been a rapid increase in technological – and especially electronic – invention and gadgetry. We don’t know what the socialist future will bring in this regard. But we can say for sure that there won’t be such things as commercially-inspired advertising, product placement or incitement to consumer addiction. Information about what is or could be made available would be freely accessible by all.

Stan Parker, 

London SW8

Something in the air

Dear Editors

Thank you for the articles in the January Socialist Standard on the Occupy Movement and the radio series Capitalism on Trial. There’s definitely something in the air, and

I was reminded of a comment in an article in the Standard last year – that you know capitalism is in trouble when people start talking about capitalism. And aren’t they just? It’s as though it’s suddenly been noticed that there are obscenely rich people in the world and that the most important division is between them and the rest of us. People are now prepared to talk about the social system as a whole rather than some particular aspect of it, and it’s significant that many of the movements responding to current capitalism have stuck to democratic instincts rather than allowing leaders to emerge from their midst and lead them astray. Moreover, the idea that political problems require a global solution (which the Socialist Party strove for years to propagate, in the face of much ridicule) is now a commonplace.

Of course, all the present unrest may come to nothing. The Occupy movements and the Arab spring movements may lapse into a preoccupation with trying to patch up aspects of the existing society and so become mired in futile reformism. But what should be encouraging for socialists is just the evidence that people can change: they can cease to take for granted what they have accepted so far, they can develop critical attitudes to what has previously been unquestioned, and all of this may come out of the blue. That’s a heartening thought in the context of the present miserable phase of capitalist society.

Keith Graham

Erratum

Re January Pathfinders, Brian Cox writes: “Good article. Only one fact check. I didn’t co-author Things Can Only Get Better. It was written by Peter Cunnah and Jamie Petri.” 

Apologies for the grievous misattribution.

Syria: Bashar Lives Up to His Name (2012)

From the April 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

Anybody can claim to be an opponent of the present Syrian government, but what kind of a regime is it proposed to establish in its place?

They have been calling it “the Arab Spring”. Various dictators around the Mediterranean have been overthrown, and successor regimes, more or less distinct from the ones that went before, have been installed. Tunisia’s dictator was thrown out first, to be followed by the dictators of Egypt, Libya, and the Yemen. Now there is a more or less open rebellion in Syria, aimed at overthrowing Bashar al-Assad, the local despot.

The lands stretching across from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf were among the earliest areas to develop what is often called “civilization” – that is, human beings living en masse in larger and larger cities. The Syrian city of Aleppo, for example, has been continuously inhabited for at least five thousand years, and Damascus probably for nearly as long. Several religions trace their origins to this part of the world. Fervent believers in the book of Genesis have often speculated that the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve, the talkative serpent, and the extremely fertile tree which produced “knowledge” as well as apples were located somewhere in the vicinity. This move to city-dwelling was the result of the spread of the idea of private property, where the land and trading concerns, and anything else which produced wealth, belonged to a small upper class, while the rest of the population, virtually propertyless, worked for the benefit of this group of owners.

Separate states came into being, each ruled by a group of owners. Inevitably, violence became common as people tried to seize economic and political power for themselves within a state, and as each state tried to impose its power on neighbouring states. And so the human race began to know organized warfare. As societies based on private property became more common there was more strife and more violence, and the lands to the east of the Mediterranean became the scene of repeated conflicts. Surrounded by great land masses – Asia to the east, Africa to the south-west, and Europe to the north-west – invading forces came repeatedly from all directions; great armies murdered, looted, raped, and destroyed; empires rose and fell. The result was a great hotchpotch of peoples, each believing themselves to be racially different from those around them, and having different and hostile religious beliefs and loyalties.

Imperialist carve-up

A hundred years ago, this area was part of the Ottoman Empire, ruled by Turkey. Then came the First World War of 1914-18, which the allied powers claimed was to protect the rights of small nations, but which turned out in the end (as you might have expected) to be more about extending the rights of big nations – or the rulers of those nations, at any rate. The Ottoman Empire was on the losing side in that war, and so was carved up at the end of it for the benefit of the victors. The lands between the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf were shared between two of the victorious Allies, Britain and France. Britain got (for example) a stretch of territory which it divided up into three separate states, Iraq, Transjordan, and Palestine; and France divided up its share into Syria and Lebanon – the latter was kept separate because it seemed it might well have a Catholic majority (like France).

After the share-out at the Treaty of Versailles, both Britain and France had to deal with rebellions in the newly acquired territories. Iraqis who objected to the British take-over were bombed into submission. One Arthur Harris was a young squadron-leader there.  He had found how effective (and risk-free) it was to bomb obnoxious tribesmen on the North-West Frontier in India, and now he did the same in Iraq, helped by the fact that the rebellious Iraqis had no aircraft or anti-aircraft defences. The young airman is supposed to have said, “the only thing the Arab understands is the heavy hand.”

Bomber Harris was able to put these lessons to good use in the Second World War when he organized the carpet bombing of working-class areas in German cities – that was where the factory workers lived; the houses were smaller and closer together, and of course bombing richer areas would not kill or injure so many of the people who actually did the work. The French had the same problems in Syria as the British did in Iraq; Syria saw a widespread revolt in 1925-7. Fortunately the French were able to bring in troops with much better modern armaments against the lightly armed Syrians, so they were able to establish their superiority.

Coups and counter-coups

Then came the Second World War, which revealed that both Britain and France had now fallen into the ranks of second-class powers, and neither was able to keep up its colonial empire. Iraq became independent, and so did Syria. The prize of forming the government of Syria and ruling it on behalf of its native upper class was vigorously contested. Coups and counter-coups were constant: in the ten years between 1946 and 1956 there were twenty different governments and four newly-drafted constitutions. The same story of violent take-overs continued, even including a “union” with Egypt in 1958, which fell apart in 1961. But such regular upheavals are not good for business; and in 1963 the so-called “Arab Ba’ath Socialist Party” took over. It was not Socialist at all, of course; it had a programme under which the state would run industries and would enforce stability without bothering too much about free speech and so forth.

For a time the fighting for office continued, but now the hostilities were between factions within the Ba’ath Party. A new group seized power in 1966. One of the successful plotters, Hafez al-Assad, became Minister for Defence. After four years and a final capture of authority: Hafez al-Assad became President, and, in fact, dictator. (The two leading members of the former government went to jail.) Hafez was an Alawite, that is, a member of a Shia Muslim sect, and before long Alawites were put in positions of control in the army and in every government body. This was particularly necessary, because most Muslims in Syria are Sunnis, and many Sunnis regard the Alawites as heretics. Any opposition was dealt with as every dictator deals with it: imprisonment, torture, death. Hafez is accused of carrying out thousands of extra-judicial killings. An attempted assassination in 1980 failed: the machine-gun missed. Within hours, 1,200 Islamists held in jail had been slaughtered in their cells at Tadmor Prison by armed groups led by Rifaat al-Assad, the dictator’s brother. But after the confusion and uncertainty of the previous decades most of the Syrian upper class was happy to go along with the new regime. As for the ordinary Syrians, with Hafez, now in control of the newspapers, the radio, and every other means of information, was able to create a nationwide feeling that stability was better than the disorder and constant shifts of the past and began building up his own personality cult. As the Russians had been propagandized into supporting Stalin and the Germans brainwashed into supporting Hitler, so the Syrians were now conned into supporting Hafez.

There was still trouble from some malcontents, especially from those who fancied becoming the rulers themselves. In 1982 there was an insurrection in the city of Hama led by the Muslim Brotherhood who wanted to establish a stricter form of Islam. Hafez ordered the troops in – picked formations commanded by his brother Rifaat – who bombarded Hama, destroying much of the old city and killing (estimates differ) between 15,000 and 40,000 Syrians, nearly all civilians. Rifaat, it seems, later boasted that he had killed 38,000 people in Hama. Two years afterwards Rifaat tried a coup of his own, aiming to replace his brother; it failed, and Rifaat now lives in exile in London. But being the brother of the dictator he had been able to assemble extensive business interests, and he now lives in some comfort in a ten million pound mansion off Park Lane. If you kill one person you will probably end up in jail; but killing thousands seems to have fewer repercussions.

Hereditary despot

Like many dictators, Hafez wanted to be the boss even after he was dead. He had several sons, and the eldest, Bassel, was groomed to succeed him. His second son, Bashar, was allowed to go his own way, and he became a doctor. In 1992 he came to England and studied to become an ophthalmologist – an eye specialist. Then in 1994 Bassel was killed in a car crash. Without asking the Syrians or (apparently) even his own family Hafez now decided that Bashar would have to be the next strong man. And when Hafez died in 2000 the tame Syrian parliament that had previously passed an Act to say the President had to be at least 40 now hurriedly passed another Act to say that he had to be at least 34, which, by great good luck, was exactly Bashar’s age. So Bashar was promoted to field-marshal, which is a rank not many eye doctors have reached, and took over as dictator. There was a “vote”, of course, in which Bashar was the only candidate, and it was announced that 97.3 percent of the Syrians had voted for him. (An improbable result: in our discordant society it is unlikely that 97 percent of voters would agree what day of the week it was). He ruled for seven years, and then another “vote” was held.  This time the officials in charge thought it would be a good idea to claim an even better result, so they said that 97.6 percent had supported the dictator.

Bashar has proved to be a chip off the old block: dissent is dealt with by torture, imprisonment, and death. When early in 2011 a big demonstration was held against his rule, the demonstrators were chased away by the security forces. The regime announced first that there had been no demonstration, and second that there had been a demonstration in favour of Bashar. Protests continued in many towns and cities across the country; soldiers began deserting and taking their guns with them.  Now Syria appears to be on the brink of civil war, with the army moving in to kill any who oppose Bashar and bringing up artillery to pound any supposedly disloyal areas. Districts regained by government forces are decorated with corpses, either with their throats cut or decapitated. Some estimates of the dead put the total as high as 8,000. Many other countries have decided that Bashar cannot survive and regularly issue statements deploring Bashar’s excesses, though Russia and China, in both of which democracy is a rude word, cannot apparently see anything wrong with Bashar’s dictatorship. It is curious to hear the American government, rulers of a country which killed at least 100,000 Iraqis (many think the death toll was at least half a million, or even a million) claiming how shocked they are by a death toll so much smaller than the one they have achieved.

Some people in Syria still support Bashar. They include Alawites, since the privileged position they have held since Hafez took power may provoke revenge if Bashar falls; the Druze, an unorthodox Muslim sect; and the Christians of half a dozen different denominations. All of them fear that if Bashar is succeeded by a Sunni government extreme Islamists may persecute minorities. And, of course, Bashar’s close friends and relatives back him to the hilt.  Bashar’s wife is called Asma. Her parents were Syrians living in London, and she was brought up in England.  And while Bashar’s trusted soldiers and militias polish up new ways to torture and murder the regime’s opponents, Asma has been ordering luxury goods from Paris, including a £10,000 consignment of chandeliers and silver candlesticks.  Why shouldn’t Bashar’s inner circle champion him?

The opponents of Bashar are from every point in the political spectrum, including some who, if they gained power, might well establish a regime compared with which Bashar would look like Little Bo Peep. Those who opposed Stalin included loathsome dictators like Hitler; those who opposed Hitler included loathsome dictators like Stalin. Anybody can claim, probably with absolute sincerity, to be a zealous opponent of the present Syrian Government; but a much more significant question is this – what kind of a regime is it proposed to establish in place of Bashar’s? There are those who think that if Bashar was killed out of hand like Gaddafi of Libya, or hanged like Saddam Hussein of Iraq, or put on trial like Mubarak of Egypt, or chased away into exile like Ben Ali of Tunisia, then democracy with free speech and free elections would miraculously appear fully formed. That may, to say the least, be over-optimistic. No one knows exactly what the future holds; but it is certain that at the present time anybody or any group replacing the present rulers of Syria will continue to run Syrian capitalism for the benefit of the Syrian capitalists, whatever cosmetic reforms they may think it necessary to make.

Alwyn Edgar

The Socialist Party Summer School: Protest (2012)

Party News from the May 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

6 - 8 July 2012, Harborne Hall, Birmingham

Worldwide, people have reacted to the political and economic crisis with new forms of protest. From the Arab Spring uprisings to the Occupy Movement, activists are rejecting traditional forms of political assembly, and are looking for new ways of organisation. But what will be the consequences of these new battles in the class war? Will these protests result in any lasting, positive change for the working class? Could they point towards a revolution? Or will they go the way of all reformism and just prolong the capitalist system which traps us all? The Socialist Party’s weekend of talks and discussion will examine protests in all its forms - its aims, methods and effects. 

Talks include: 

• The Occupy Movement: Ian Barker (Occupy Norwich) & Stair (SPGB) 
• The Arab Spring: capitalism, imperialism and religion or democracy?: Janet Surman 
• What did the Romans do for us? Bill Martin 
• Protest and the Environment: Glenn Morris 
• Policing the Protests: Mike Foster 

Full residential cost (including accommodation and meals Friday evening to Sunday afternoon) is £140. Concessions are available. 

To book a place, send a cheque (payable to The Socialist Party of Great Britain) to Flat 2, 24 Tedstone Road, Quinton, Birmingham B32 2PD. E-mail spgbschool@yahoo.co.uk with any enquiries

War in Syria (2016)

Book Review from the August 2016 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Burning Country: Syrians in Revolution and War’, by Robin Yassin-Kassab and Leila Al-Shami (Pluto Press, 2016)

Of all the countries swept by the ‘Arab Spring’ of 2011, Syria has been the most unfortunate. The sole response of the Assad regime to peaceful popular protest was ruthless violent repression, eventually resulting in a devastating many-sided civil war, intervention by rival regional and world powers, and massive flows of refugees within the country and across its borders. The authors have drawn on a variety of sources, including interviews with direct participants in the events, to produce an illuminating and often harrowing account from an anti-authoritarian left-wing perspective.

The book begins with necessary historical background, focusing mainly on the various divisions within Syrian society and on the origin and evolution of the Ba’ath (Arab nationalist) regime under Hafez Assad and then his son Bashar. Chapters 3-4 portray the nonviolent phase of the ‘revolution from below’; Chapter 5 explains how resistance to the regime – inevitably under the circumstances – came to assume a primarily military form. Chapter 6 discusses the growth of the initially weak Islamist forces. Chapter 7 (‘Dispossession and Exile’) describes how millions of Syrians became refugees. Chapter 8 highlights the cultural renaissance that accompanied the uprising. Chapter 9 deals with the failure of old opponents of the Ba’ath regime inside and outside the country to play a significant role. The last chapter analyzes the attitudes of the international left toward events in Syria. An epilogue brings the story up to date as of October 2015.

Yassin-Kassab and Al-Shami give a preview of their analysis in the Preface. In the areas where the government machine broke down ordinary people began to run their own affairs: ‘For a few brief moments the people changed everything.’). But then

 ‘the counter-revolutions ground them down. The regime’s scorched earth strategy drove millions from the country; those who remained in the liberated zones were forced to focus on survival. Syria became the site of proxy wars, of Sunni-Shia rivalries, of foreign interventions. Iranian and transnational Shia forces backed the regime; foreign Sunni extremists flocked to join the Islamic State… Nobody supported the revolutionaries. ‘

Note that the authors perceive not one but two counter-revolutions – the one represented by the regime and its foreign backers (Iran and later Russia), the other by the Islamic State (IS) and its wealthy patrons in the Gulf States. They even find covert links between these two forces: Assad assisted the growth of Islamism by releasing many Islamist militants from prison. Islamist predominance in the anti-regime camp is very much to the advantage of Assad, enabling him to present himself to a confused world as ‘the lesser evil.’

There is evidently widespread bitterness among non-Islamist oppositionists that they have received so little material and moral support from the West and from the international left. It is true that the slogans of the uprising initially emphasized ‘Western ideals’ like ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy.’ Western politicians, however, are at best ambivalent about ideals; what they need is clients who can be trusted to serve the interests of the West and its regional allies. There is good reason to doubt the reliability in this capacity of Syrian ‘revolutionaries’ who, for instance, criticize Assad for insufficient militancy in the face of the Israeli enemy.

As for the international left, most of it – under the influence of its Bolshevik core – is inclined to support (‘critically’ or otherwise) the Assad regime. That is because ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’ – their ‘enemy’ being not the world capitalist system but merely ‘US imperialism’ and its Zionist ally. Such is the stance, for example, of the Stop the War Coalition. It is only in the circles of the anti-authoritarian left that Syrian democrats can hope to find sympathy.

Although clearly written and coherently organized, this is a demanding book to read for anyone not already familiar with the complexities of Syrian society and the many political trends and movements within it. But if you want to understand what has been happening in ‘the burning country’ it is well worth the effort.

Stefan

Proper Gander: Living The Dream (2016)

The Proper Gander column from the December 2016 issue of the Socialist Standard

It might sound obvious, but the way we react to global events depends on what information we have about them. In his latest epic polemic, Adam Curtis takes this simple point and turns it into something deeper and more unsettling. He argues that the way we have come to see the world is through a process of ‘Hypernormalisation’, also the name of his film, available through the BBC iPlayer.

The title comes from Alexei Yurchak’s book Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More, which analysed the mood in the Soviet Union during its last decades. Yurchak coined the term ‘hypernormalised’ to describe the strange way that Soviet society was perceived by its populace at the time. Official pronouncements about matters like rates of commodity production were recognised as unreliable by most people every time they went to an empty shop or joined a food queue. But without alternative explanations, everybody had to act as if the official story was real, distorting their sense of reality. An analogy familiar from many workplaces is how targets and outcomes are measured, which everyone involved realises are manipulated and fake, but which we all pretend are objective and accurate. We’ve bought into a ‘dreamworld’, shaped from the top by politicians and financiers, as a way of covering up how they don’t have control over events, from suicide bombings to Brexit, from corruption to migration. The aim is to maintain as much stability as possible in an unstable world.

The political and social climate in which this shift in perception has taken place developed from the mid-70s. Then, according to Curtis, the way authority was exercised changed from old-fashioned political negotiation to new-style power through money and threats. Two examples he gives are from 1975, when in America, banks stopped lending to businesses, and took authority away from politicians, and in Syria, where President Assad’s attempts to unite Arab nations were scotched by the then US Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger. He used an approach he called ‘Constructive Ambiguity’ to fracture alliances between Arab states by misleading them about the details of treaties between other nations. This succeeded in disuniting the Middle East and infuriating Assad. These events helped shape the world we live in now, of tensions between Islamic states and a West still facing a financial crisis. Being unable to control the situation has meant that governments focus on manipulating our understanding of them, through other tactics like ‘Perception Management’. One example of this was the American government and armed forces engineering the UFO phenomenon. Curtis argues that they spread disinformation that the strange lights and shapes people were seeing in the skies could be alien spacecraft, to cover-up their real explanation as experimental military planes.

The strategy of Perception Management is more than just telling lies, though. Its ‘highest achievement’ was when George W Bush and Tony Blair turned to Colonel Gaddafi of Libya for help with the situation in Iraq. The Public Relations industry, espionage and most academics all contributed to Gaddafi’s reinvention as an ally, having been demonised by the West for years. Gaddafi pretended to dismantle weapons of mass destruction he didn’t have, and took the blame for the Lockerbie bombing in exchange for sanctions against Libya being lifted, introducing the odd notion of accepting responsibility for something you don’t admit doing. Gaddafi’s role and persona has been remodelled by Western states, regardless of the truth about him, whatever that is.

The government and media personified conflict in the Middle East with ‘evil people’ like Saddam Hussein, Assad of Syria and, sometimes, Colonel Gaddafi. This distracted us from how the conflict was really shaped, as described in Curtis’ previous broadcast (see Socialist Standard, March 2015). In Bitter Lake, he argued that American and European military and economic involvement in the Middle East fuelled jihadism and suicide bombings, which in turn fuelled more Western involvement, creating a feedback loop.

In Russia, perception has been manipulated through the work of ‘Political Technologists’, such as Vladislav Surkov, now working as a personal adviser to President Putin. Surkov sponsored fascist groups, and anti-fascist groups, and parties opposed to Putin. Then he let it be known that he was doing this, so that no-one could tell how real these organisations were.

When so much about the outside world is confusing and contradictory, we’ve turned to cyberspace to find some reassurance. But the algorithms behind social media mean that we get pulled to online content which isn’t likely to challenge our views. According to Curtis, in an age of individualism, we find security in having ourselves reflected back at us.

Radical politics has also changed to fit with our uncertain times, and now tries to influence people’s thinking through personal expression, not through collective action. So, singers, artists, comedians and writers (including Curtis himself) voice radical ideas which may empower them and produce great, perceptive works, but they can’t change the world because that relies on working together. Curtis says that radicalism now doesn’t involve people giving themselves to a collective project as much as those in the 1960s civil rights movement did.

He discusses the two recent movements which did involve people acting collectively: the Arab Spring and Occupy. He argues that the Occupy movement set out to make real the original aim of the internet, as a leaderless space, free from politics and hierarchies. The sharing and spreading of ideas which the internet enables means that it could be used to organise a revolution without leaders, and it contributed to both how the Occupy movement and Arab Spring operated. However, after using social media to organise themselves, radicals in the Arab Spring ground to a halt without having a vision of what they wanted society to be. Hard-line Islamists did have a plan for the future, though, and this gave them the drive to gain power. In the West, the Occupy movement lacked a programme to really change society, and instead became confused and dominated by meetings. Its members had no vision of a future world, so instead the movement was less about ideas than how to manage situations.

In interviews, Curtis has emphasised that not seeing a better, future society is central to the problem of our ‘hypernormal’ perception of capitalism. We’ve lost the ‘thrill’ of wanting to jump into an unknown future, and find reassurance in accepting the version of reality presented by (and suited to) the capitalist class and its apologists.

Rulers manipulating the ‘truth’ is nothing new. The difference now is the sophistication with which this is done, whether through Perception Management, Constructive Ambiguity, Political Technologists or algorithms. Curtis’ argument isn’t just that these approaches are used to keep control of us, but also to cover up the lack of control each section of the ruling class has over global events. His aim is to help us see through the ‘hypernormalised’ version of reality we are fed, to raise awareness of our awareness.

Mike Foster

Egypt: Why Did the Generals Depose Morsi? (2013)

From the August 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

For most of the year of Mohamed Morsi’s presidency, government in Egypt was based on an understanding between the generals (represented by the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces) and the leadership of the Moslem Brotherhood. The understanding seems to have been in place well before the elections, which the generals helped the Moslem Brotherhood to win – for instance, by tolerating numerous reported irregularities.

Protecting military interests

As president, Morsi made a great effort to return the favour and protect military interests:

- The new constitution sponsored by the Moslem Brotherhood enshrined the position of the armed forces as ‘a state within the state’ by entrusting military affairs to a council dominated by officers and unaccountable to parliament.  

- Morsi gave the military and the police legal immunity. After a presidential commission implicated senior officers in the killing and torture of demonstrators, he described the claims as ‘insults’ and rewarded those concerned with promotions.

- Morsi did nothing that might threaten the interests of the armed forces as a capitalist corporation. This corporation owns an estimated 25-40 per cent of the country’s economy, including vast tracts of land, and exploits conscripts as slave labour. The privatisation of state industry never extended to military property. (For more on these points, see Hesham Sallam and Zeinab Abul-Magd at www.jadaliyya.com.)

However, Morsi did not wholly support the generals’ policy of maintaining the flow of US military aid by fully cooperating with Israel and the United States. According to Brigadier General Ayman Salama of the Cairo Military Academy, the army thought that Morsi was being too helpful to his fellow Islamists in the Hamas regime in Gaza, thereby undermining security in the Sinai (BBC World Service, 5 July). Indeed, no sooner was Morsi deposed than the border with Gaza was sealed off.

Another complaint of the generals against Morsi was that his government was spending $1.5 billion a month too much, rapidly depleting the country’s financial reserves (Guardian Weekly, 12 July).

A means to a goal

Finally, the military were highly dissatisfied with the growing isolation of Morsi’s Moslem Brotherhood-dominated government from all other political forces. The understanding with the Moslem Brotherhood was not an end in itself for the generals. It was a means to their goal of stabilising the social and political situation in Egypt in such a way as to safeguard military interests.

In order to optimise the chance of achieving this goal, they seek to co-opt ‘realistic’ politicians from both the secular and Islamist camps who are prepared to accept military privileges while marginalising political forces committed to ‘continuing the revolution’ until full democratic rights are won for all citizens. But Morsi was alienating the very politicians whom the generals would like to co-opt.

One process that alienated many people was the so-called ‘ikhwanisation’ of government institutions – the replacement of incumbent officials by Moslem Brotherhood activists (‘ikhwan’ means ‘brothers’ in Arabic). This was a way to reward ‘brothers’ for selfless service to the organisation through the long years of persecution, but aroused the resentment of those displaced.

In fact, under different leadership the Moslem Brotherhood might have proven more flexible and managed to stay in government. One leading ‘brother’ – the physician Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh – was forced out of the Moslem Brotherhood together with his followers in 2011, but stood as an independent candidate in the presidential elections. He did quite well, coming fourth in the first round with 17.5 per cent of the vote. In July 2012 he founded the Strong Egypt Party. Fotouh represented a ‘left-liberal’ trend within the Moslem Brotherhood – he is more conciliatory toward the secular section of society and talks about ‘social justice’.

Cross-cutting divisions

The presence of cross-cutting divisions within society makes the political situation in Egypt hard to understand, let alone predict. A ‘left-right’ division on economic issues exists, but – for the time being at least – it is overshadowed by the split between Islamists and secularists.

In 2012 over 35 secularist groups came together to form the National Front for Salvation of the Revolution (also known as the National Salvation Front or National Rescue Front), coordinated by Mohamed El Baradei. These groups include pro-business ‘liberal’ parties as well as a profusion of ‘socialist’ organisations. This apparently strange alliance is held together by fear of the Islamists – not just the Moslem Brotherhood but especially the even more intolerant ‘salafis’ (fundamentalists) who seek immediate implementation of Islamic law.

Trade union activists tend to align themselves with the secularist camp, as do people concerned with the emancipation of women, cultural and intellectual freedom and human rights in general, and also non-Moslem minorities, the largest being the 10 per cent of the population who are Coptic Christians.

The class of private capitalists is also divided between the two camps, ensuring them both a flow of funds. The ‘liberal’ Free Egyptians Party was set up by Naguib Sawiris, one of the world’s richest individuals, while the Moslem Brotherhood has been financially dependent on the wealthy businessman Khairat El-Shater (furniture and textiles). Only the ‘socialist’ groups are less well provided for.

The division between secularists and Islamists partly overlaps with the division between city and countryside. Secularists and especially ‘leftists’ are concentrated in the larger cities. This enables them to stage bigger demonstrations, creating an exaggerated impression of their preponderance at the national level. In the last presidential election, the ‘left-wing’ (Nasserist) presidential candidate Hamdeen Sabbahi won the metropolitan areas of Cairo, Alexandria, Port Said, Suez and Giza (Adel Iskandar, Egypt in Flux: Essays on an Unfinished Revolution, AUC Press 2013, p. 106), while in the country as a whole, however, he finished third with 21.5 per cent of the vote.

Stefan

Egypt: The hard road to political democracy (2011)

From the March 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

What will happen in Egypt now? Will the army keep control until a new leader acceptable to the West emerges?

At the time of going to press, the “revolution of anger” in Egypt seems to be entering a new phase. Tahrir Square has been reopened to traffic and commerce. Massive political demonstrations are over, at least for the time being, but strikes and protests by various groups of workers continue. The employees of the National Bank of Egypt have forced the resignation of its chairman, a Mubarak ally. Ambulance drivers, public transport workers, and even the police are demonstrating for better wages and conditions.

Many Egyptians are dissatisfied with what has been achieved so far, and with good reason. Mubarak has gone. But what sort of democrat is the man who took over from him on 31 January – Omar Suleiman, assassin and torturer-in-chief of the dreaded Mukhabarat (General Intelligence Service)? The demand to suspend the emergency law that permits detention without charge has not been met, nor have political prisoners been released. The ruling military council has set no firm timetable for elections and transition to civilian rule. They have made plenty of promises, but who is naïve enough to trust them?

To understand what is happening in Egypt, we must first understand the nature of the ruling regime.

A military oligarchy
The regime is not a personal dictatorship. It can survive the removal of Mubarak or any other specific figure. It is a military oligarchy. The main power centre is the supreme command of the armed forces (the eleventh largest in the world). In addition, there is a ruling party – under Nasser the Arab Socialist Union, renamed by Sadat the National Democratic Party – but its role is secondary.

The military regime has its origins in the Free Officers’ Movement, which overthrew the British colonial puppet king Farouk in 1952. Its domestic and foreign policy has changed over time, under the successive leadership of Nasser, Sadat and Mubarak, but the regime itself has remained the same. It has never been in the least bit democratic.

Why then does the Trotskyist International Socialist Review tell us that Egypt “has been ruled by a dictatorship for 30 years, with arrests and torture a constant occurrence” (socialistworker.org/2011/02/11)? Only 30 years? Didn’t Nasser too jail thousands of political opponents? Ah, but those were “progressive” and “anti-imperialist” jails – and that makes all the difference, doesn’t it?

Before regaining independence, Egypt was ruled by a succession of empires. Before that it endured the despotism of the pharaohs. Mubarak too was popularly known as “the Pharaoh”. Egypt has been a dictatorship for 11,000 years.

From Nasser to Sadat and Mubarak
This is not to deny important differences between the Nasser and post-Nasser periods.

Nasser conducted a protectionist policy on behalf of national capital. A state-owned iron and steel industry was created. The Aswan Dam was built. In 1956 the Suez Canal was nationalised, leading to armed invasion by Britain, France and Israel. Social reforms were undertaken. Land was redistributed and rents paid by tenant farmers controlled. A minimum wage was established. There were also reforms in the areas of housing, health, education, women’s rights and family planning. In foreign policy Egypt was formally non-aligned; in reality it became a client state of the Soviet Union.

Nasser’s successor Sadat expelled Soviet advisers, realigned Egypt with the West (and eventually with Israel), and replaced protectionism by an “open-door” policy. Currency controls were loosened and foreign companies invited to invest in tax-free “enterprise zones”. Mubarak went further in the same direction. Cheap food imports were allowed to flood the country, ruining Egyptian farmers. The gap between rich and poor widened. The country fell deeply in debt to the international financial institutions and became financially dependent on US aid.

Much of state industry was privatised. As was later to occur in post-Soviet Russia, valuable state assets were acquired on the cheap by a handful of businessmen with inside connections. That is how Ahmed Ezz, a close friend of Mubarak’s son Gamal, emerged overnight as a wealthy steel tycoon.

Another lucrative scam was the legal requirement that a foreign investor must give (not sell) a local partner a 20 percent stake in his venture. The “local partner” always happened to be a general or high official.

Mubarak and his family were themselves the greatest beneficiaries of this “crony capitalism”. The family fortune has been rumoured to be as much as $70 billion (£43.5 billion). Both of Mubarak’s sons are billionaires in their own right. Most of this money is held in British and Swiss banks or invested in American real estate.

It should be noted that under Mubarak the regime did not serve the interests of the whole capitalist class. Some businessmen did very well, while others lost out. For example, Ezz used his political clout to force other businessmen to buy his steel rather than importing cheaper steel from China. Similarly, it was difficult for businessmen lacking inside connections to obtain bank loans. This helps explain why some businessmen back the opposition.

The clan and the regime
While most Egyptians want an end to the military regime, the immediate target of the “revolution of anger” was the “Mubarak clan” – Mubarak, his family and their closest allies and associates. The demonstrators wisely took care not to offend the military as an institution. According to some analysts, the Mubarak clan had powerful enemies inside the regime (resentful, perhaps, that they were not getting their fair share of the loot) who used the protests to mount a “half-coup” – meaning a coup against the clan but not the regime. Perhaps this is to overstate tensions inside the regime. It is clear, however, that there were people in the ruling group who did not belong to the Mubarak clan and who were prepared to sacrifice it in order to save the regime. (Apparently they were encouraged to take this step by the Obama administration.)

This was one reason why no attempt was made to use the army to suppress the protests. Another likely reason was that the generals judged that the soldiers and junior officers could not be relied upon to obey orders to shoot into the crowds. The security police – the “thugs” who mysteriously appeared “out of nowhere” riding horses and camels – could be used, because they were more isolated from ordinary people and more effectively under clan control, but there were too few of them to scare off the enormous masses of demonstrators.

Youth movements and trade unions
The key role in organising the demonstrations seems to have been played initially by the April 6 Youth Movement. This organisation began as a Facebook group set up to call on all workers to stay at home on 6 April 2008 in solidarity with striking textile workers. (There has now emerged a new umbrella organisation called the Youth Coalition for the Revolution of Anger.)

So the demonstration organisers appear to have been closely connected with the workers’ movement and, in particular, with the campaign to create independent trade unions to replace the old state-controlled Egyptian Trade Union Federation. The textile workers tried to establish an independent union in 2006–2008, but large-scale arrests of activists made this impossible at that time. One of the major gains of the “revolution” was achieved on 30 January, when an independent trade union movement finally emerged in the form of the Federation of Egyptian Trade Unions.

An important point that media coverage fails to convey is that the mass political demonstrations are only part of the upheaval. There are also numerous strikes and protests over “bread and butter” issues. That is not surprising when you consider the rising prices of staple foods and the fact that 40 percent of Egyptians have to survive on under $2 (£1.30) a day. While political demands are uppermost in Cairo, it seems that material demands are much more prominent in other cities. In Port Said, for instance, crowds angry over the shortage of housing set fire to the local state security headquarters, the governor’s office and the main post office.

The opposition parties
The regime selectively and intermittently allowed opposition parties to exist but restricted their activity. As a result, these parties are all very small – except for the Moslem Brothers, who despite being illegal were able (like Islamists in other countries) to take shelter in the mosques. Observers estimate that only 5 percent of Egyptians support any of the parties.

Almost all of the opposition parties belong to one of three categories.

First, there are several liberal capitalist parties that advocate civil rights and “free enterprise.” An example is the New Wafd Party. These parties are backed by a number of prominent businessmen.

Second, there are various Islamist parties. The Moslem Brotherhood is the largest of these, but not the only one.

Third, there are parties that regard themselves as leftist or socialist. What this usually means in the Egyptian context is loyalty to the legacy of Nasser, so it is more accurate to call these Nasserite parties. Thus, the National Progressive Unionist Party (known for short as Tagammu) “defends the principles of the 1952 revolution”.

Some parties combine Nasserite with Islamist ideas. For example, the Umma Party stands for “socialist democracy with Sharia (Islamic law) as the main source of legislation” (!). Finally, there is also an environmentalist Green Party.

It is hard to see what can come out of the negotiations that Suleiman is conducting on behalf of the regime with leaders of various opposition parties. None of the parties played any part in organising the “revolution” and few demonstrators regarded the parties as representing them. In fact, due to popular suspicion the negotiations may further weaken the parties’ base of support. A report from Suez mentions mass resignations from the parties participating in the negotiations, including Wafd and Tagammu, and connects this development with the creation of a Council to Protect the Revolution in Al-Arish (near the border with Gaza).

Who would win free elections?
The weakness of the parties makes it very difficult to predict who would win free elections if they were held today. As the theme of social justice has been prominent in the upheaval, the popular appeal of the liberal opposition may be limited. Social protest can work to the advantage of either Islamists or the left. Given the secular nature of the protests (not only were Islamic slogans conspicuous by their absence: there were also slogans in support of Moslem-Christian unity), the left may do quite well. The Moslem Brothers obviously have considerable support, but they themselves apparently do not think they are strong enough to gain power at this stage.

The existing left-wing opposition parties, however, are handicapped by their Nasserite orientation. To the extent that the demonstrators are against the military regime and committed to democracy, they might hesitate to vote for parties that hark back to an earlier form of the same anti-democratic regime. And, of course, only the older generation has direct memories of the Nasser period. So conditions may be favourable for the emergence of a new democratic left, possibly linked to the independent trade unions. There may even be potential for the spread of genuine socialist ideas.

Dragging out the transition
The uncertain outcome of elections is one reason why the generals aim to delay the transition to democracy as long as they can. They may also seek to retain a power of veto and other prerogatives even after a civilian government takes office, as well as an ability to reassert control whenever they consider it necessary – as in the “Turkish model”.

The wish to delay democratisation is clearly shared by the American and European governments on whom the Egyptian generals depend. These governments are great champions of elections, but only provided that the outcome is predictable and acceptable to them. They need time to prepare the ground for such an acceptable outcome – in particular, to select parties and politicians who can be trusted to respect Western interests and then give them financial, PR and other aid to help them win. Candidates for this role – El-Baradei, for instance – are well aware that pleasing Egypt’s Western patrons is at least as vital to their prospects as pleasing their fellow citizens.

How much time is needed? Statements from the ruling military council hint that six months may not be enough. German chancellor Angela Merkel has drawn a parallel between the transition in Egypt and the process of German reunification, suggesting that a whole year may be needed. And just in case the results of political engineering are disappointing, the generals and their patrons probably want to keep open the option of dragging out the transition indefinitely, perhaps co-opting a few handpicked opposition figures into what remains basically a military regime.

In the meantime, it is the job of the regime to restore and maintain “order” and “normality”. Ordinary people must stop making trouble and get back to work! To achieve that, the regime can be expected to combine – or perhaps alternate between – sweet talk and arrests, appeasement and repression. Neither approach will easily succeed.

As socialists, we do not regard political democracy in itself as sufficient to emancipate humanity. But we do recognise that it provides by far the best conditions for the development of the socialist movement. That is why we wish those well struggling for political democracy in Egypt – and, indeed, throughout the world

Stefan