The following announcement for a meeting of the Detroit Workers' Voice Discussion Group gives an overall view of what's happening in the Arab Spring. -- Joseph Green, [email protected]
Solidarity with the Syrian uprising and the other continuing struggles of the Arab Spring! Every day brings more news about Syria. The uprising spreads despite thousands upon thousands of deaths as the regime strikes back at villages and cities with heavy weapons: tanks, artillery, helicopter gunships, etc. The uprising has spread from villages to periods of fighting in Syria's capital Damascus, and now to Syria's main commercial center and largest city, Aleppo. The heroic determination of the Syrian people, and their hatred for the decades of tyranny and torture, has undermined the dictatorship of the Ba'ath Party under Bashar al-Assad. The despotic regime is still able to carry out massacres, but its grip on power fades from day to day. In Egypt, a different type of struggle is taking place. The tyrant Mubarak was toppled from power, but the "deep state" behind the Mubarak regime -- the generals, senior bureaucrats, and privileged business kleptocrats who were the base of Mubarak's power -- still have most of their power, and they are seeking to make their power permanent. Meanwhile the variegated mass front that opposed Mubarak has divided: the bourgeois Islamists, having won the parliamentary and presidential elections, are seeking their own rule; many Egyptian bourgeois liberals have been supporting the "deep state" in fear of the Islamists; and the more radical section of the masses are not sufficiently organized. The euphoria of victory over Mubarak has been replaced by a struggle over whether there will be Mubarakism without Mubarak. Syria and Egypt represent two different aspects of the Arab Spring. In most countries, struggles continue with the aim of overthrowing entrenched regimes that trampled people's rights for years. But in Egypt, Mubarak was overthrown; in Tunisia, Ben Ali fled; and in Libya, the Qadaffi dictatorship was smashed. In these countries, the euphoria of victory has been replaced in varying degrees by concern over what comes next. Different classes and political forces have different ideas about democratic movements. The bourgeois market-fundamentalists want to use the overthrow of tyranny to speed up market reforms, and they would like to see the "deep states" of the dictators remain the behind-the-scenes power. The petty-bourgeois democrats believe that democratic reforms mean the complete economic and political liberation of the masses; they idealize the democratic struggles they support and fail to see the need for an independent working-class movement which has goals that go beyond democratic reforms, or, when they see the actual mixed and gritty character of a particular democratic struggle, they regard it as a fraud. The Trotskyists preach that the struggles of the Arab Spring will amount to nothing unless they lead directly to workers' power or socialist revolution. In contrast, Marxism-Leninism holds that the democratic struggle leads not to utopia, but to an intensification of the class struggle. It is not the socialist revolution, and yet it is of vital importance to the exploited masses. The democratic struggle can lead to a more conscious political life among the masses, and to greater knowledge by the working class of its own interests and of the exploitative nature of the bourgeoisie. The setbacks and zigzags that follow the overthrow of the tyrants; the breakup of the old coalitions; and the development of new alignments are not just difficulties: they are a situation in which people learn to recognize and fight the real aims of the various exploiting classes and of outside imperialisms. There was never a chance that the Arab Spring was going to lead to immediate workers' power in Egypt, Tunisia, or Libya. In the Middle East and North Africa, as elsewhere in the world, the working class is too disorganized and the revolutionary movement is too much in crisis, for this to be an immediate possibility. Nevertheless the Arab Spring will help bring the world closer to socialist revolution. It is bringing new life to the working masses of the region. The democratic uprisings can help the masses to their feet; help prepare the masses for the intensifying class struggle of the coming years; and help clarify the nature of different political forces. The experience of the democratic movement can help show the working class the need to form or strengthen its own independent class movement. The working class is the only class force that consistently fights for the most radical democratic reforms and the maximum destruction of the oppressive institutions of the old "deep state", but it also has aims that go beyond democratic revolution and lead all the way to the end of capitalist exploitation itself. The situation in various countries may -- and will -- go through harsh and prolonged zigzags; it won't simply get better and better. But the uprisings of the Arab Spring are marking the end of long decades of political stagnation in much of the region; whatever the outcome of individual uprisings, the situation in the Middle East and North Africa will never again be the same. Last year we discussed the Arab Spring in the Detroit Workers' Voice Discussion Group. We looked at the divided and complex nature of the insurgent movement and noted that: "The present upsurge is shaking the old Middle East. But it has its particular conditions. Everywhere the insurgent masses are split up into disparate groupings, and nowhere is the uprising led by a solid revolutionary movement. Everywhere different class factions take part in the struggle, and everywhere different class interests are expressed." And we said that "The result is that the Arab Spring will be only one step in a long struggle for liberation, albeit an important step that revitalizes the mass struggle in the Middle East and North Africa and reverberates around the world." (1) In this meeting, we discuss take the balance-sheet of the last year of the Arab Spring. We are not disillusioned at its outcome. On the contrary, we see that it has continued to reverberate around the world. And we see that the Marxist view of the democratic struggle and of its role in the working-class movement provides insight into the new developments in the Arab Spring. Marx, writing over 150 years ago about a radical democrat of his day, said: "Whereas we say to the workers: 'You will have to go through 15, 20, 50 years of civil wars and national struggles not only to bring about a change in society but also to change yourselves, and prepare yourselves for the exercise of political power', you say on the contrary: 'Either we seize power at once, or else we might as well just take to our beds.' " (2) The Arab Spring is part of this preparation. Those advocates of "permanent revolution" who thought it would bring immediate workers' power don't have the faintest idea of the radical changes needed to build a new revolutionary workers movement. The transformation of the working class movement won't take 50 years, but it will require that the masses go through a series of struggles. But the advocates of "permanent revolution" preach that the Arab Spring will have amounted to nothing unless socialism comes immediately, and so they have continually been disappointed about the Arab Spring. Indeed, some of the Trotskyist advocates of "permanent revolution" have joined with the Stalinist supporters of state-capitalist tyranny and been skeptical of, or condemned, various of the uprisings, such as those in Libya or Syria. We, however, say that the overthrow of the old tyrannies is a great step forward, and that the participation of the working class in these struggles will contribute to the building of a class movement for the ending of all exploitation. Notes: (1) DWVDG meeting notice, 17 June 2011. (2)"Revelations Concerning the Communist Trial in Cologne", Karl Marx, 1853. Section 1. Preliminaries. <> _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
