Written by Keith Hart
Saul Wainwright commented on the previous post in this series, CLR James
and the idea of an African revolution:
“I have been wondering about how to tie the Egyptian revolution into the
larger world system. I was not aware that CLR thought there would be two
more revolutions, one being Russian and other being American. Yet, as you
rightly point out, the America that we understand extends beyond the
borders of the geographic America. What does this mean for the potential
of a second American revolution? Where would it be triggered? Much as
the Egyptian revolution was triggered by the events in Tunisia it is possible
that America’s revolution would be triggered from a far-off land.”
Saul, Now that the Egyptian revolution is definite, we can pose your
question in a new light. Everyone likens events there now to 1989, not least
Obama, who also links Egypt to Gandhi, King and the Ghana revolution. If
the fall of the Berlin Wall was the beginning of the second Russian
revolution, could Tahrir Square be the beginning of the second American
revolution? After all, it wasn’t Russians who started the former, but Germans
and Czechs, the Eastern European victims of the Soviet empire.
We know that the American empire was launched by World War 2 and has
gone through two phases since. The French called the first les trente
glorieuses from 1945 to roughly 1975, which was the heyday of the Cold
War, but also a period marked by a developmental state on both sides of
the Cold War committed to expanding public services and the purchasing
power of working people. It was also the time when European empire was
abolished by the anti-colonial revolution. After the watershed of the 1970s,
we went through three decades of what came to be known as neoliberal
globalization in which the power of big money to organize the world for its
own benefit was unfettered. The end of the Cold War, the rise of China,
India and Brazil as economic powers and the digital revolution in
communications speeded up the formation of world society under
American hegemony, even as these developments undermined it. This
ended with the financial crisis of 2008 and we are now in the uncharted
waters of the third period which might take in a full-scale depression, world
war, a global democratic revolution, the end of life on earth, who knows?
Whatever happens, it will be different.
The second phase of the American empire was put in place during the
energy crisis of the 1970s. The US economy depends on Middle East oil.
Just as the British empire yoked England to India, the US and the Middle
East are a single political entity. When the British and French made their
botched attempt to seize the Suez Canal in 1956, the Americans let them
fail. First they built up Israel as their proxy in the region, a strategy that
culminated in the six-day war of 1967. But the Egyptians and Syrians
launched a surprise attack on Israel in the Yom Kippur war of 1973 to which
the US, fearful of nuclear confrontation with the Soviet Union, brokered a
negotiated settlement. Egypt signed a peace treaty with Israel in 1979 in
return for the Sinai peninsular and Israel kept Gaza on hold for a future
Palestinian state. 1973 also saw the reinforcement of OPEC and a big oil
price hike which brought the Saudis into the Middle Eastern settlement as
the leaders of a new oil cartel. In the last decade we have seen the
installation of US armed forces in Iraq, the second largest oil producer, and
a protracted campaign in Afghanistan (Afpak) which has the advantage of
diverting attention from the Middle East and of starting a shooting war at
the intersection of China, India, Russia and the Muslim world.
It is clear that Obama/Clinton were under strong pressure at the start of the
Egyptian protests (themselves a response to the Tunisian revolution, as you
say) to support the status quo, that is Mubarak or a stooge from his circle.
The house of cards built up in the Middle East was only apparently stable.
The Israelis have been increasingly intransigent with impunity, since they
could count on the US, Egypt and the Saudis to keep a lid on things, a
certainty increased by the formation of Iraq as an American armed camp
within the region and the demonization of Iran as the Shiite bogeyman with
“nuclear” capacity. And political security led to the accumulation of massive
personal fortunes by the ruling elites, mirroring the financial excesses of the
credit boom everywhere. This cascading inequality became more acute
after the crash of September 2008. Demand in the world economy took a
big hit, despite the use of taxpayers’ money in the major capitalist countries
to bail out the banks and flood asset markets (but not consumer demand)
with hot money. This has cushioned the blow for the time being in America,
Europe and Japan at the risk of a sovereign debt crisis, but in many parts of
the world unemployment, food prices and energy costs have all risen,
making the social legacy of neoliberalism intolerable to the better
educated, wired youth whose families are suffering and who see no future
for themsleves under the status quo.
There are many scenarios out of 11th February 2011, several of them
extremely unpleasant. It is not likely that Americans themselves would take
the lead in a world revolution which potentially removes the free credit that
the dollar’s hegemony has guaranteed for decades. But if the situation
escalates, as seems likely, Americans will find themselves involved in a
shooting war on more fronts than they can imagine now, not just the
Middle East. Obama at last found the words to say something he probably
believes after the Egyptians threw out Mubarak all by themselves. The first
American revolution provides the rhetoric and even the substance of the
second. American society is Janus-faced, pulled between its heritage as the
only genuinely democratic polity on the planet and the imperial plutocracy
it has become since. It is already deeply divided, as has been noted by the
media of late. But the causes of this division cannot be understood within
the parochial limits of American society itself. Who knows what will happen
inside America once the impact of the Egyptian revolution spreads?
The Russians dismantled their own coercive bureaucracy instantly and with
almost no loss of life. I have always believed in the American people’s
practical good sense and love of freedom. The last few decades have seen a
massive deterioration in the quality of American public culture, but the
United States is still the home of modern democracy and the class that
controls politics and the media today will not easily survive the turmoil
unleashed in the world from now on. We are witnessing the end of a social
form that I call “national capitalsim”. It was lanched in the 1860s by a series
of political revolutions of which the American civil war was the most
decisive. I would not be surprised if a world revolution triggers serious
conflict within the US too.
I have been blogging here for years about the possibility of us launching a
third World War soon (see “Conversations with Abdul Aziz“). This is not
inevitable, but it is more likely if we don’t even talk about it and have no
means of heading it off. I am greatly heartened by the non-violent strategy
of the Egyptian protesters and the ease with which seemingly solid power
structures have melted away in North Africa, as in eastern Europe in 1989. It
is interesting that both regions form the immediate periphery of Western
Europe which is not in great shape itself right now. If we embrace the
possibility of a global democratic revolution now, rather than after a world
war, the direst scenarios may not come to pass.
In American Civilization, CLR James argued that there was a growing
conflict between the concentration of power at the top of society and the
aspirations of people everywhere for democracy to be extended into all
areas of their lives. This conflict was most advanced in America. The
struggle was for civilization or barbarism, for individual freedom within new
and expanded conceptions of social life (democracy) or a fragmented and
repressed subjectivity stifled by coercive bureaucracies (totalitarianism). The
intellectuals, he thought, were caught between the expansion of
bureaucracy and the growing power and presence of people as a force in
world society. Unable to recognize that people’s lives mattered more than
their own ideas, they oscillated between an introspective individualism
(psychoanalysis) and service to the ruling powers, whether of the right
(fascism) or left (Stalinism). As a result, the traditional role of the intellectual
as an independent witness and critic standing unequivocally for truth had
been seriously compromised. The absorption of the bulk of intellectuals as
wage slaves and pensioners of academic bureaucracy not only removed
their independence but separated their specialized activities from social life.
If the Egyptian revolution has done nothing else, it has issued a wake up
call to intellectuals everywhere. It is not outlandish to suggest that this may
be the beginning of the second American revolution that James predicted,
just possibly the world’s last.
Published by
Neil Turner
