The People Want: A Radical Exploration of the Arab Uprising - Softcover

Achcar, Gilbert

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0520280512 ISBN 13: 9780520280519

Verlag: UNIV OF CALIFORNIA PR, 2013

Inhaltsangabe

“The people want . . .”: This first half of slogans chanted by millions of Arab protesters since 2011 revealed a long-repressed craving for democracy. But huge social and economic problems were also laid bare by the protestors’ demands.

Simplistic interpretations of the uprising that has been shaking the Arab world since a young street vendor set himself on fire in Central Tunisia, on 17 December 2010, seek to portray it as purely political, or explain it by culture, age, religion, if not conspiracy theories. Instead, Gilbert Achcar locates the deep roots of the upheaval in the specific economic features that hamper the region’s development and lead to dramatic social consequences, including massive youth unemployment. Intertwined with despotism, nepotism, and corruption, these features, produced an explosive situation that was aggravated by post-9/11 U.S. policies. The sponsoring of the Muslim Brotherhood by the Emirate of Qatar and its influential satellite channel, Al Jazeera, contributed to shaping the prelude to the uprising. But the explosion’s deep roots, asserts Achcar, mean that what happened until now is but the beginning of a revolutionary process likely to extend for many more years to come.

The author identifies the actors and dynamics of the revolutionary process: the role of various social and political movements, the emergence of young actors making intensive use of new information and communication technologies, and the nature of power elites and existing state apparatuses that determine different conditions for regime overthrow in each case. Drawing a balance-sheet of the uprising in the countries that have been most affected by it until now, i.e. Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain, Libya and Syria, Achcar sheds special light on the nature and role of the movements that use Islam as a political banner. He scrutinizes attempts at co-opting the uprising by these movements and by the oil monarchies that sponsor them, as well as by the protector of these same monarchies: the U.S. government. Underlining the limitations of the “Islamic Tsunami” that some have used as a pretext to denigrate the whole uprising, Gilbert Achcar points to the requirements for a lasting solution to the social crisis and the contours of a progressive political alternative.

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Gilbert Achcar is Professor at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS, University of London). He grew up in Lebanon. His books include The Clash of Barbarisms, translated into thirteen languages; Perilous Power: The Middle East and U.S. Foreign Policy, co-authored with Noam Chomsky; and the critically acclaimed The Arabs and the Holocaust.

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"One of the best analysts of the contemporary Arab world" —Le Monde

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"One of the best analysts of the contemporary Arab world" Le Monde

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The People Want

A Radical Exploration of the Arab Uprising

By Gilbert Achcar, G. M. Goshgarian

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Copyright © 2013 The Regents of the University of California
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-520-28051-9

Contents

Figures and Tables, vii, 
Acknowledgments, ix, 
Preliminary Notes, xi, 
Introduction: Uprisings and Revolutions, 1, 
1. Fettered Development, 7, 
2. The Peculiar Modalities of Capitalism in the Arab Region, 38, 
3. Regional Political Factors, 76, 
4. Actors and Parameters of the Revolution, 114, 
5. A Provisional Balance Sheet of the Arab Uprising, 144, 
6. Co-opting the Uprising, 188, 
Notes, 243, 
References and Sources, 281, 
Index, 303, 

CHAPTER 1

Fettered Development

At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production.... From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. —Karl Marx, 1859, Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy

When a revolutionary upheaval is not an isolated phenomenon attributable to specific political conditions in a particular country, but constitutes a shock wave that goes beyond the merely episodic to initiate a veritable sociopolitical transformation in a whole group of countries with similar socioeconomic structures, Marx's thesis cited above takes on its full significance. From this perspective, the "bourgeois" revolutions at the heart of the Age of Revolution—from the sixteenth-century Dutch War of Independence and the seventeenth-century English Revolution through the long process comprising the French Revolution to the 1848 European Revolutions sometimes called the Spring of Nations—appear as a series of earthquakes triggered by the collision of the two tectonic plates Marx identified as developing productive forces and existing relations of production. The latter are represented by what the author of Das Kapital calls the "legal and political superstructure," with the state at its core. These revolutions accelerated the transformation of the predominantly agrarian societies of the late feudal period into societies dominated by the urban bourgeoisie. They thus paved the way for capitalist industrialization.

A comparable instance of the existing relations of production blocking the development of the forces of production was at the origin of the shock wave that, beginning with Poland in 1980, overturned all the Central and Eastern European "communist" regimes and culminated in the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union (USSR). This shock wave put an end to the bureaucratic mode of production of the USSR and Eastern Europe, undermined by stagnation at its very center, and put a "market economy" in its place. With that, the process of capitalist globalization was essentially completed. It has not been sufficiently stressed just how striking an illustration of Marx's thesis this historic turn provides—a new irony of history, since the overturned regimes claimed to take their inspiration from his "doctrine." Yet it was a Marxist critic of the Soviet regime, Leon Trotsky, who was the first to predict—in 1936, at a time when the "socialist fatherland" was posting record growth rates—that the bureaucratic command economy would ultimately founder on the "problem of quality." Trotsky thus anticipated the period beginning in the early 1970s, later named the Era of Stagnation, which culminated in the collapse of the regimes descended from Stalinism.

Is what we have been witnessing in the Arab region since 2011 an "era of social revolution" brought on by a blockage impeding the development of productive forces? If so, is this blockage due to factors common to the countries of the region and specific to them, as in the two historical cases just mentioned? The question is worth asking, if only because the tremor running through the region has affected the whole of it, from Mauritania and Morocco to the Arab-Iranian Gulf. That, moreover, is why observers have compared the upheaval under way in the Arab countries with the shock wave that traversed Eastern Europe in the 1980s. Yet this upheaval has not—at any rate, not yet—brought about a radical change in the mode of production. There seems to be no change on the horizon of the revolutionary process unfolding today in the Arabic-speaking region profound enough to invite comparison with the great upheaval that ultimately integrated the "communist" countries into globalized capitalism.

Whereas the European upheaval of the 1980s resulted from a crisis at the very heart of the bureaucratic mode of production, the crisis in the Arab region affects only one of the peripheral zones of today's globalized capitalist mode of production. Hence it cannot, by itself, be regarded as a manifestation of a general blockage of this mode of production, nor even—since capitalism continues to generate development in other peripheral zones—a blockage confined to the capitalist periphery. Indeed, even if the crisis currently besetting the highly developed economies central to the world system (the European economies, above all) eventually proves to be the expression of an insurmountable block-age leading to sociopolitical upheaval, the coincidence of this crisis with that rocking the Arabic-speaking region can hardly be interpreted in terms of cause and effect.

The fact that the crisis in Arab countries is clearly limited to them as far as its peculiar modalities are concerned plainly shows that specific factors are at work. It is neither a symptom of the general crisis of globalized capitalism, nor even a symptom of the crisis of "neoliberalism," the dominant management mode in the current phase of capitalist globalization. To identify the specific factors at work, we must compare the Arabic-speaking region with others on the periphery of the world economic system—particularly the countries of the Afro-Asian group of which the Arab region is a part.

Nevertheless, Marx's paradigmatic thesis on revolution should not be ignored when explaining the ongoing upheaval in the Arab world. Simply, we have to derive variants that are less sweeping in historical scope: the development of productive forces can be stalled, not by the relations of production constitutive of a generic mode of production (such as the relation between capital and wage labor in the capitalist mode of production), but, rather, by a specific modality of that generic mode of production. In such cases, it is not always necessary to replace the basic mode of production in order to overcome the blockage. A change in modality or "mode of regulation" does, however, have to occur.

Such changes do not necessarily presuppose social or even political revolutions. They can result from economic crises that induce the economically dominant class to change tack. Capital has negotiated more than one such turn in the course of its history. Both the 1930s Great Depression, followed by World War II, and the generalized recession of the 1970s precipitated sharp changes of tack, leading in two diametrically opposed directions. Certainly, the social balance of forces entered into the equation in both cases: the workers' movement was strengthened by the first crisis, weakened by the second. But these were not periods of social revolution or counterrevolution in the proper sense.

These changes in the management mode occurring...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: UNIV OF CALIFORNIA PR
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2013
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0520280512
• ISBN 13: 9780520280519
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 310
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar