Social Movements Will Not Free Us (part one)
Why did the Arab Spring uprisings of 2011 lead (with the exception of Tunisia) to counter-revolutions? Why did they result in regimes that were even more repressive than before? This article draws on Asef Bayat’s Revolution Without Revolutionaries: Making Sense of the Arab Spring (Stanford University Press, 2017). Bayat’s description of the facts of what happened is broadly similar to Jack Shenker’s more journalistically detailed The Egyptians: A Radical Story (Penguin Books, 2016), but his own politics and his assessment of the politics of the leading political activists are quite different.
Bayat Criticizes the Occupy Wall Street type Politics of Arab Spring Protesters.
Shenker provides excellent accounts of the struggles of three main social actors – (1) striking or work-to-rule industrial (but also public sector) workers pushing towards worker control and changes in regime-linked owner/management in workplaces, sometimes actively supported by surrounding communities of workers; (2) communities using a mix of lawsuit and occupation tactics to fight over land and the destruction of Nature and the privatizing of the Commons; (3) the mostly (but by no means exclusively) educated middle class activists who raised political demands (for more democracy and liberty, and less repression, and more precisely for the dictator Mubarak to resign) in Cairo’s Tahrir square. He sees all three groups as fighting for a single underlying agenda, a decentralized and democratic autonomy in a very large number of different social spaces -- self rule and democratization and what he calls ‘New Ways’ (a progressive social modernization that upholds the rights of women, gays, religious and racial minorities etc to equal treatment and to live according to their own cultural values). Shenker also makes a briefer mention of a fourth group, (4) the urban slumdwellers who survive in a grey economy outside formal wage labour.
For a discussion of Shenker’s book that presents many of his key stories about the Arab Spring uprising in Egypt see Half A Revolution is Better Than None.
Shenker’s and Bayat’s books came out within a year of one another and neither references the other, but I will highlight the ways in which Bayat’s analysis is different. More specifically, I take as a starting point that Shenker expresses the autonomist Occupy Wall Street politics that is (still) predominant in the radical left flank of the overall left in most countries, not just rich but also poor ones like those in the Middle East. Bayat supports the Arab Spring uprisings, and the courageous activists and people across Egypt who fought in the streets with them, but he draws attention to what he regards as the literally fatal flaws in the activists’ strategic stance. In doing so, he is taking aim at the politics of decentralized and autonomous self-rule (achieved directly and without the mediation of taking power in the State and economy) that Shenker salutes.
We Have Not Yet Replaced the Leninist Strategy for Revolutionary in Scope Change with a Better One.
Bayat appears to have been a youthful revolutionary left activist in the 1979 Iranian Revolution that challenged the Ayatollah Khomeini led (anti-monarchy and culturally anti Western imperialism) Islamists at the grassroots level. The fight was never close, but it lasted for many months before the left lost out decisively, and large numbers were either arrested/killed or fled the country. Bayat contrasts the politics of the radical left in Iran at the end of the long 1960s, when some variant of the Marxist-Leninist approach to revolution was still predominant (especially, but not only, in the Third World and among racialized peoples in rich countries), to the politics of the 2011 Middle East left radicals.
Bayat is not saying that the Arab Spring uprisings should have gone back to the Marxist-Leninist approach that has been implicitly rejected by the entire left since at least the Fall of Communism in 1989-91 in Russia, Eastern Europe and China. But he declares that the approach of the Middle East Left to radical change in 2011 was no better, and in many ways was significantly worse. He is evidently raising these questions as a sympathetic critic, as someone who is also searching for a new approach to revolution, but feels that our current approach is definitely not (yet) it.
Middle East Radicals Were Caught Between Reform and Revolution, and Achieved Neither.
Bayat argues that the Middle East radicals had a strategy that was neither for liberal Reform nor for political Revolution but for what he calls “Refolution”. He summarizes what he means by this by saying that the radicals, intentionally or not, engendered a revolution in terms of mobilization, but they neither demanded nor made any progress towards winning a revolution in terms of changes:
“First, the Arab revolutions lacked any associated intellectual anchor. Revolutions usually both inspire and are informed by certain intellectual productions – a set of ideas, concepts, and philosophies – that come to inform the ideational subconsciousness of the rebels, affecting their vision or the choice of strategies and type of leadership… But no visionary intellectual current seemed to accompany the Arab Spring.
Second, the Arab revolutions lacked the kind of radicalism – in political and economic outlook – that marked most other twentieth-century revolutions. Unlike the revolutions of the 1970s that espoused a powerful socialist, anti-imperialist, anticapitalist and social justice impulse, Arab revolutionaries were preoccupied more with the broad issues of human rights, political accountability, and legal reform. The prevailing voices, secular and Islamist alike, took free market property relations and neoliberal rationality for granted – an uncritical worldview that would pay only lip service to the genuine concerns of the masses for social justice and [re]distribution. Finally, and most important, there was no break from the old order. Except for Libya, little changed in the structure of power and the governing modes of the old regimes. The incumbent elites and their networks of patronage, along with the key institutions of governance such as the judiciary, police, intelligence apparatus, and the military, remained more or less unaltered” (p11).
All of Us on the Left are Neoliberalized Subjects. We Think that There Is No Alternative to Capitalism.
The problem is not that the Arab left failed to win power and a new regime this time around. It is that they were not even trying to win these things. Everyone on the left – whether they tended to a neo-anarchism like Shenker or a neo-Marxism like Bayat, or an electoral democratic socialist view – could agree that a revolutionary society would be one marked by individual liberty, social equality and ‘democracy from below’. But the Arab left had no practical conception of how that would be achieved in a set of institutions and policies, and had no strategy or organizations for winning the power needed to get them there. Even worse than that – and I take this to be Bayat’s most powerful point – all social and political actors on both sides in the Arab Spring, including the radical left, were/are neoliberalized subjects who conduct their public struggles as if they believed that There Is No Alternative (TINA) to the capitalist social system.
In my view, this is true for the predominant ways of thinking and acting in the left of the left worldwide.
I had planned for this to be the second of two articles on the Arab Spring, where I would draw on Bayat’s book to critique Shenker’s political perspectives, precisely because they are hegemonic in the left of the left, and have been for decades. I have actually just done that, because Bayat’s quote is the main thesis of the book. There are other points that Bayat makes that are worth mentioning, but I have decided to defer them until future posts. The remainder of this article will take off from Bayat’s critique to put out a few of my own ideas about what is problematic with the dominant common sense in today’s left everywhere.
Four Things Define a Coherent Politics: Analyses of Problems, Solutions, Strategies, Tactics.
Bayat is right. In my view, we are neoliberalized subjects:
(1) Theory/Analysis of Problems: We operate off ideological assumptions that are indistinguishable from the dominant liberal individualist ideology of contemporary capitalism;
(2) Basis of Unity/Programme of Solutions/Goals: We lack any shared political programme of long-term, medium-term and short-term demands that puts flesh on the bones of the institutions and policies that might prevail in an Alternative Society to world capitalism;
(3) Strategy for Who to Mobilize In What Kinds of Mass Struggles Against What Opponents in order to Win What Power Where and How: We do not have any strategy for winning struggles (i.e. winning our policy and change demands, to directly change society for the better). Nor do we have a strategy to win increased powers (to win greater future leverage, a better overall balance or ratio of powers relative to our opponents and their system) step by step in the four main ways that we will need to win powers, if we wish to use those powers to change society in more transformative ways.
(4) Tactics for Educating and Training Leaders of Mass Struggles and Tactics for Winning Those Struggles: We do not have a conception of tactics that serves clearly defined strategic objectives, that is centered on going out to educate and train people to develop and lead their own organizations of mass (not merely activist elite) struggle. We do not have a plan for using demand-winning and power-winning tactics to carry out a strategy for power.
Why is this the case? Let me put it in as simple a way as possible. For those of us who seek radical system-level leftward changes, we are afraid of building a Movement that leads to a new social system that is like the Stalinist USSR. We may agree with Marx’s analysis of what is wrong with capitalism, but we reject all the historical examples of revolutionary Marxist societies that have existed to date. We reject all versions of democratic socialism that involve actually replacing capitalism with a fully public ownership economy (even if combined with various attempts at workers control). And we reject the Marxist-Leninist strategy for defeating capitalism, in particular the idea of a single political vanguard party, because we believe that this leads inevitably to a one-party state.
Why Can’t the Left Unite Politically? Because We Fear that We Will Repeat Stalinism.
There are three main wings of the radical left today – neo-Marxist, neo-anarchist and democratic socialist electoralist. Neo-anarchism predominates in the extraparliamentary protest movements (although people do not necessarily think of their politics as anarchist, see below), but many people combine this with a secondary attachment to left electoralism. Many of the few Marxist groups around are remnants of pre-1980 classic Marxism rather than ones that subject classic Marxism-Leninism in whatever version (including Trotskyism) to a fundamental critique and rethink. The electoral groups, whether overtly socialist parties like Syriza or left populist ones like Podemos, distinguish themselves as being both further left and different in various ways from what social democratic parties have become, and perhaps always were.
(Note that I am talking about the left of the left here. Most social movement activists and supporters, especially in rich countries, don’t even really think in terms of capitalism and imperialism and replacing the overall (patriarchal, systemically racist etc) social system. In practice they support those systems, operate within the limits of them as the range of the possible and desirable. Their leftism is specific to this or that issue or policy, to the extent that it is even left-wing at all. And the vast majority of the public has never been exposed to a genuinely radical left critique, let alone a set of ‘new system’ left alternatives. Not surprisingly, they only consider conventional pro-system liberalism and conservatism – except for some who are attracted to the rising far right, precisely because it is radical and provides a scapegoating outlet to a strong sense of grievance.)
We All Want to Build a Pluralist New Society That is Free, Egalitarian and Democratic but We Disagree on How to Get There. Let Us Try Multiple Strategies and Support One Another.
Let me state clearly that my purpose in what follows is not to declare one of these three versions of left to be the only true one, in order to call for a Movement that excludes the other two. If we are serious about achieving a revolutionary post-capitalist egalitarian society that is pluralist and democratic, then we need to work consciously to build a Movement that includes all perspectives promoted by those who sincerely want the long-term goals we basically share. Having said that, I think that one perspective (neo-Marxist) is a better basic approach than the other two, and will try to demonstrate why. And history shows that as any social or political struggle intensifies, and gets closer to winning, the people in that situation will want to follow one general approach and have a single united leadership. The trick, so I think, is to have built the Movement in such a way that whichever group and perspective wins out in getting the most popular support in any particular context, they will move immediately to create a system where all perspectives may share in power and be able to argue their approach.
Let me also say that I approach these issues from two main foundational frameworks, as a philosophical (dialectical) materialist and as a (conflict) sociologist.
As a materialist, I think that humans are animals driven mainly by needs and wants/desires, by intuitive judgments and powerful emotions (subconscious ‘reasoning’). Over millions of years we have evolved as a species. We have developed a capacity for more complicated thinking (consciousness) that is partly proactive and logical/rational, as we have developed more complicated ways of doing and reflecting on that doing. We have developed the very capacity to form concepts and understand other people and physical Nature through language-mediated communication with others. But even now, at our stage of evolution (which for us is less due to natural selection, and more due to human-made history as thinking beings with a collectively developed and shared set of cultures, than it is for other animals) a great deal of our consciousness (thinking, culture of values, beliefs and norms) is emotion based ideology that rationalizes more than reasons.
Our Subconscious Thinking Drives Us. But Conscious Thinking Tested Out in Practice Can Free Us.
Our practice can improve our thinking and accumulated culture/knowledge and vice-versa. But practice is more powerful than consciousness/thinking both for the good (all science and social science and humanistic understandings are grounded in knowledge from practice, albeit guided by cultural concepts) and not so good (our subconscious intuitions/drives and ideology-saturated thinking can lead us to do things we would rather not do otherwise). The main conclusion I draw from this: We need to recognize how crucially important developing good thinking that accurately grasps our physical and human/social worlds is, because we need such accurate thinking to guide our actions to achieved desired outcomes. But achieving it is difficult, very difficult, because we have strong biologically-based and ideological/rationalizing thinking based factors that blind and mislead us. It is through constant reflective and self-critical practice (what Marxists call praxis, sensuously perceptive and conceptually conscious practice) that we progress.
As a sociologist, I think that the human society we seek to change is created and re-created every minute as humans interact (mainly through communicating meanings, and by behaviours directed at one another and with consequences for one another). Society is made up of three main things. First, social structures (repeated patterned practices in relation to others to achieve desired ends, i.e. institutions like families and businesses and schools). All social structures are saturated with inequalities of multiple kinds, and advantage some people in particular social positions (statuses) performing a particular set of activities/functions (roles) differently. There are inherent conflicts in all social structures.
Society is Composed of Multiple Social Structures, Cultures and Agencies. We Need to Work on Changing All Three.
Second, society is also culture, which for sociologists is composed of values, beliefs and norms (social rules that guide behaviour). (Some would add practices and/or habits and/or techniques -- but these are also part of a constantly-being-created-and-re-created social structure because they are actions). Culture is unequally distributed (social actors in different statuses and roles typically think and feel differently in significant respects), but it is mostly a common guidebook and toolkit. Perhaps most important for social change activists, cultures that are dominant in any given institutional context tend to have a strong ideological component that expresses the way dominant groups see things and rationalizes the unequal social structures. People in disadvantaged or subordinate positions still have their own subcultural values, beliefs and norms that depart from the dominant one, but mostly they pragmatically work within the dominant culture values, understandings and rules.
Third, society is agency, individual and collective (not all sociologists add agency to social structure and culture, since social structure is human practice/action, but I add it to distinguish praxis-type action that seeks to create something new from action that reproduces the existing social structure in line with the situation-specific dominant culture). Social and political movements, social conflicts and struggles, individual leadership and followership within movements and struggles – we activists love the language of agency. We want to think that we have total free will to create whatever new social structures and cultures we desire. All that it requires, we tell ourselves, is the individual and/or collective will. Just do it.
Sociologists do not agree. Agency is crucial to change but it is never free from circumstances and historical-over-time context that are in various ways both enabling and constraining. Success in changing society requires theoretical analysis of social structures and cultures in circumstance/context. It requires new ideas for different structures and cultures (a programme of solutions or alternatives to what exists now). It requires strategies and tactics that act on social structures and cultures as well as on people, who in a real sense carry those structures and cultures inside them.
Okay, so much for my axiomatic understandings as a materialist and sociologist. Your understandings will differ in some respects, but that is of course normal. I want you to understand what I am taking as axiomatic or given in what follows.
Arab Spring Radicals Tried to Make a (Liberal Democratic) Revolution Without a Revolutionary Theory or Strategy.
Bayat argues that the Arab Spring uprisings failed for multiple reasons. A key one is that the leading activists were trying to make at least some kind of revolution (maybe just a liberal democratic one) without themselves acting as revolutionaries (hence the title of the book). As the quote from Bayat cited above states, this translates into three main things being lacking. In order, they correspond to the first three of the headings for what I see as lacking in today’s left.
First, there is no revolutionary theory and analysis, no new thinking relevant to their specific societies that would guide their choices of strategy or types of leadership.
Second, their general outlook lacked any kind of economic or political radicalism. They were neoliberalized subjects trapped within the truisms and common sense of pro-capitalist (or at least ‘accept capitalist’ because There Is No Alternative) liberalism. They raised no demands beyond getting rid of the dictator and liberal democratizing the society. They did not call for any version of socialism (or even a more vague post-capitalism). They did not raise anti-imperialist demands to break from their country and region’s neo-colonial masters. They did not even give any emphasis to demands for redistribution that might have addressed the needs of people outside the middle classes (although they did go out to poor neighbourhoods to encourage them to join the anti-dictator uprising, and various groups did support more localized struggles in working class and slum neighbourhoods and workplaces). Again, this is not because the activists themselves were necessarily non-radical liberals. But it was their public politics – their actually applied theory/analysis, programme of demands, strategy and tactics. Bayat implies that this is mainly a consequence of 40 years of neoliberal ideology hegemony that leads even left radicals to a defacto TINA position.
Bayat’s Points About the Arab Spring Apply Equally to the Left Everywhere.
Third, there was no break from the old order. The leaders of the Arab Spring uprisings did not seek any changes in the existing State law and order machinery (judiciary, police, intelligence agencies, military) or in the democratic decision-making part of the State (in Egypt, they went along with the SCAF military proposals for a revised constitution and parliamentary elections). Instead, they adopted a stance of ‘staying on the outside’ of the State. They wanted a new set of rulers to replace the existing dictator and confined themselves, beyond general platitudes about wanting more liberty and democracy, to asking the ruling class to reform itself, to pick new people who were more pro-democracy and pro-liberty. The result was a promotion of trust in the rulers (often the ‘professional and non-political military’) to do the right thing as long as democratic pressure from outside and from below was maintained. The outcome was counter-revolution everywhere except Tunisia. This was likely unavoidable because of the overall balance of forces between people and rulers, left and right. But the activists did very little to prepare the people they were inciting to protest, or even themselves, for what they should have seen coming.
I think that Bayat’s observations about the Arab Spring left apply to the left everywhere today. The way that I would put the same general critique is the title of this article: Social Movements Will Not Free Us. Mass popular struggles will be the decisive means for winning a better social system. Autonomous social movements and social movement organizations will be one of the types of vehicle of mass struggle. I believe that they can and should (if they choose) remain autonomous and self-ruling. Strength in diversity. But what we have now is a Social Movements Only strategy. It is maintaining the hegemony of liberal ideology and a TINA perspective, for the same reasons that the Arab Spring activist strategy maintained it for them.
We Could Unite At Least the Left of Today’s Movements Around the Core Principles for a New Society and Practical Efforts to Make the Left Alternative Visible to the Public.
What we need – and this is my main point – is to reconfigure the broad left of organizations of all kinds into a big-M Movement of movements that is not just a mega Social Movement, but is a New System and Power Seeking Political Movement, one that (1) is grounded in radical theories and analyses; (2) is united around a shared (but adaptable, and expected to be differently interpreted and applied) political programme of long, medium and short-term changes sought; (3) pursues a Gramscian strategy of doing two main things to change the relative power of dominant and subordinate groups -- aiming to win more popular leverage/power step by step in the course of struggles to win demands, and proactively doing agitprop to change the dominant ways of thinking about society and politics; (4) promotes tactics that serve the Gramscian power-and-claims seeking strategy by giving priority to Educating and Training the Organizers of Mass Struggles.
This is not a proposal to build a single Leninist vanguard party. It is a proposal to learn from our radical history, and to build a political leaderships (plural) led Movement in a different way. In an earlier post, I called this the Billy Graham approach to uniting the overall Movement (see XXXX). What Graham did was bring together a coalition of evangelical theologians and mass-audience preachers that went out to the many different denominations and churches and related organizations to get them to sign on to an agreed-upon core theology and strategy. Graham and others would organize nation-wide and international crusades that the local church groups would come together to get their supporters to attend. The preachers would attract large crowds of people, many of whom were not already active in any church, and aim mainly to revive religious enthusiasm for the core ideas of Protestant theology that most churches shared despite their many other differences.
The crusades would produce large numbers of converts, and would get lapsed or not very active church parishioners to renew their enthusiasm – both groups would end up as new(ly active) members of one or another of the local churches. The churches could take the core theology (reducible to ‘Jesus saves’) and interpret and apply it as they wanted. All the churches would benefit individually, and they benefited collectively because they were now part of a much more visible, and ostensibly much more united, overall single Movement.
Billy Graham Got Churches That Disagreed On a Lot to Support Crusades That Promoted What They Did Agree On. It Helped Every Church and Their Whole Movement.
I am proposing that left groups support the putting together of a coalition of groups to take on the task of spelling out the ‘core theology’ of today’s left, a first, and necessarily still sketchy, general political programme of long-term, medium-term and short-term social and political change goals. At this time, it would probably be something as general as the ten point programme that I suggested in an earlier post ( see XXXX). There is no need to reinvent the wheel here. Progressive International already exists. It has had congresses where it has adopted motions that spell out some of the same sorts of principles (see XXXX). Why not start a campaign to get as many groups as possible in your country to join Progressive International and be supportive of some kind of process to define a relatively short and clear set of principles for the kind of alternative society that we are trying to build. Each of our groups, or set of groups, is like the denominations and churches in my Billy Graham crusade analogy. We all reserve the right to interpret and apply this set of core social and political change goals to our own activist work.
But our goal is to build a progressively more united and more organized overall Political Movement together. More precisely, we want to put our movements in the position to be able to do our own Gramscian ‘crusades’, to build a new dimension into all of our regular organizing and our single-issue coalition campaigns – to politically educate and practically train organizers who can then be better equipped to organize mass struggles in whatever social location they are in (regardless of what ‘church’ they are in, or whether they are in any ‘church’ at all). They in turn can build in doing political education and training into the work that they do in their institutional or local setting (school, workplace, neighbourhood, social movement organization etc). The goal is to increase the number of politically educated and trained activists by a very big and ever increasing number, and to spread out to locate and educate/train activists in as wide a range of social locations as possible.
What’s Coming in Parts Two and Three: What’s Wrong with the ‘Strengthening Civil Society’ Strategy? What’s Right with the Idea of Waging a Gramscian Campaign?
Okay. That is the main conclusion and proposal that I make that aligns with Bayat’s critique of the Arab Spring left activists. Here are some of the main points that will be in the next two parts of this article:
--- What I mean by a Social Movements Only strategy prevailing in the overall left around the world. Why it is a strategy that will ensure defeat after defeat. (Hint: It is incompatible with any kind of Gramscian counter-hegemony struggle, as Gramsci himself conceived it. It also leaves movements defenceless against the superior organization and powers (economic, political, military and ideological) of the State and the Economy and the Culture power institutions. It is also 50 to 60 years out of date – circumstances and contexts have changed since 1956-64 when this strategy emerged in the US civil rights movement.)
-- A critique of a variant on the more or less exact same strategy that is popular among mainstream liberals and conservatives as well as leftists – the idea of Strengthening Civil Society (voluntary associations, interest groups, advocacy groups) in order to make liberal democracy ever more democratic.
-- Given the two previous critiques, how a Gramscian power-and-claims Political Movement strategy-tactics is different, and why it is better.