Wednesday, February 23, 2011

Revolution on the March

The people of the Middle East are pulling off one of the most amazing feats in human history, toppling a seemingly impregnable series of corrupt, bloodthirsty neoliberal dictatorships with record speed. It took a month for Tunisians to send Ben-Ali packing, and it took 21 days for the people of Egypt to topple Mubarak.

Now Libya has picked up the pace. Within a single week, the people of Libya have risen up against Qaddafi's neoliberal gangster-ocracy. It started with three days of horrifying state repression against peaceful demonstrators, but it didn't end there. Inspired by the examples of Tunisia and Egypt, the eastern cities rose up and threw off their chains. Knowing full well that the rebellion would be crushed if it remained local, activists creatively refunctioned Libya's limited social media networks, spreading the sparks of rebellion to the rest of Libya. The regime's only response was to broadcast some the most bone-crushingly idiotic and patently absurd state propaganda ever emitted by a dying autocracy, while unleashing foreign mercenaries to murder its citizens en masse. This brutality has allowed it to retain limited control over parts of Tripoli, but has only served to enrage ordinary Libyans. Pro-democracy militias and army units are now converging on the city for the final showdown. 

The city of Benghazi, epicenter of the eastern rebellion, has been running the only live video feed currently available from the country. The Revolution Cam just ran its first webcast, an improvised pre-Qaddafi flag (red, black and green) prominent in the background -- the insignia which will undoubtedly become the official symbol of the free, democratic Libya of the future:

http://www.livestream.com/libya17feb

The best source of news:

http://feb17.info/

Robert Fisk weighs in on the approaching end:

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/tripoli-a-city-in-the-shadow-of-death-2223977.html

Friday, February 18, 2011

Masrzilla

January 25, 2011 may well go down in history as the zero-hour of a new geopolitical entity in the Middle East, the first true developmental state of the Arabic-speaking region: Masrzilla.

In many ways, Egypt's postcolonial history is a combination of post-WW II Latin America and postcolonial Southeastern Asia: a period of decolonization carried out by nationalist military officers, followed by the era of Nasser's firebrand pan-Arabism and the construction of an import-substitution economy -- a blend of Indonesia's Sukarno and Peron's Argentina, as it were.

However, while the Nasser regime did bring about limited social reforms, it was unable to industrialize the country, resolve the glaring social inequities of Egyptian society, or create a democratic national polity. The result was political crisis and economic stagnation. Egypt sank into Sadat's neocolonial
authoritarianism, and finally into Mubarak's kleptocratic neoliberalism.


Beginning in the late 1990s, neoliberal regimes through the industrializing world began to implode under the accumulated weight of their own internal contradictions. Venezuela led the way in 1998, quickly followed by Russia, Argentina, Turkey and Brazil. For their part, China and India never fully embraced neoliberal policies, and pragmatically steered towards regulated mixed economies 2004.

Two factors prevented the Egyptian regime from imploding until now. First, Egyptian workers flocked to Middle Eastern oil-producing states during the post-1979 oil shocks and also began to emigrate in significant numbers to the European Community, forerunner of the European Union. The remittances these workers sent home stabilized Egypt's economy, very much as remittances stabilized the Philippines during the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos. Second, the US pumped tens of billions of dollars into Egypt as a reward for signing a peace treaty with Israel.

By 2011, however, the game was up. The world economic crisis crimped remittances, and US military aid was no longer large enough to finance the investment needs of a population of 80 million citizens. The result was not just one of the great democratic revolutions of the 21st century, but the first openly anti-neoliberal revolution of our time.

Ironically, this delay is why Egypt may well become a developmental state and an economic motor for the entire region in record time. It took Brazil twenty years to manage the transition from the democratic revolution of the early 1980s to the economic democratization of the Lula-Dilma era; it took Russia ten years to translate the political freedoms of 1991 into the genuine economic development of the Putin-Medvedev era. But Egypt can achieve the same feat within a couple of years, assuming it can make the transition to a full-fledged democracy (and all the signs are promising).

The key is not, as neoliberal observers chatter, the attitude of the military. The key is the extensive industrial networks of Egypt's military-owned industries. These are the crucial engine for Egypt's economic revival. The first step will be to seize the ill-gotten assets of the Mubarak family and selected oligarchs. Next, transform the military enterprises into state champions, and use their surplus-profits to finance education and social services. Finally, pursue a UNASUR-style foreign policy of regional democratization and economic integration, and help free Palestine from Israeli colonization (and encourage Israel to free itself from the monstrous Israelo-apartheid which so terribly disfigures and warps its society).

Tuesday, February 1, 2011

The Semiperiphery Explodes

Like many nations of the semi-periphery, Egypt is one of the oldest of human cultures, and the newest of nation-states.
Like many nations of the semi-periphery, Egypt heroically threw off the yoke of colonialism, only to fall under the sway of postcolonial elites who gradually forgot their popular roots, and devolved into corrupt underlings of Wall Street neoliberalism. Typically, their rule was administered by client states armed and financed by the US Empire.
But in the late 1990s, the nations of the semi-periphery began to rebel against the economics of neoliberalism and the politics of neocolonialism. The power of tanks, guns and jails fell to far mightier powers: the power of the pen, the website, the video-clip and the ballot box. It happened in Venezuela and Indonesia in 1998, Russia in 1999, Argentina in 2001, Turkey in 2002, Brazil in 2003, India in 2004, etc.
One by one, former US client states melted away, in an uncanny echo of the collapse of the Soviet client states of Eastern Europe in 1990-91.
And now the people of Egypt have joined the party, upsetting the last bastion of US neoimperial rule over the world. It's the end of the Arabic-region autocracies, the end of Israelo-apartheid (aided and abetted by corrupt regional elites), and the beginning of true democracy everywhere in the Middle East -- in Egypt, in Israel, in Palestine.
The revolution will be live and online.