On the absence of Arab intellectuals: counter-revolution and the state

A civilian looks at a destroyed home in Aleppo, Syria. Andoni Lubaki/AP/Press Association Images. All rights reserved. Counter-revolution
in the Arab world has been in the ascendance. From Egypt, where the military regime
has all but vanquished its opponents; to Syria, where the regime, at the
horrific cost of literally destroying Syria, has managed to shift the tide of
war in its favor.

Even though counter-revolution was always superior in the material sense, it has shown a
marked weakness ideologically; a feature that it has in common with its
revolutionary opponents – a marked failure, that is, in producing an encompassing vision of the society that they are promoting.

There has been
a marked reliance on defining themselves in relation to their opponents,
labelling the opposition everything from “terrorist” to “anarchist” without
offering justification for their right to rule. Rather than offering a credible
alternative to the opposition, they remain in a myriad of the rhetoric of
“security”, “war on terror” and the constant demonization of their opponents. As
such, both the forces of the status quo and the opposition are rejectionist in
nature.

The counter-revolutionary
forces share the same weak roots in intellectual development as the revolutionary
forces, namely the weakness of capitalist development in the Arab World. As I
have discussed often in this column, capitalism was largely imported during the colonial
period, which distorted the local development of native capitalism.

This distortion
led to the development of a weak bourgeois, which was unable to challenge the
state, and resulted in a weak development of class consciousness amongst the
masses and the bourgeois. This condition also had another side effect, namely,
the lack of separation between, what Charles Tilly aptly calls, the wielders of coercion and
the wielders of capital. Those that controlled the state and its coercive
apparatus were also in control of national capital, creating a total merger
between the Arab capitalist class and the apparatus of the state, with its
violence and coercion.

This is clear
in the case of Egypt, where the military not only controls a large part of the
economy, it also directly controls the organs of the state. This direct control
means that the need to provide ideological justification for the rule of the
Arab military capitalist class switched from providing a vision for societal
development and the creation of cross-class alliance, to invoking the purpose
of the existence of the state, namely the provision of “security”. Thus, the
use of conspiracy theories, terrorist threats, and fights against foreign power became a staple of counter-revolutionary rhetoric.

On the other
hand, this state of affairs inhibited the development of class-consciousness of
the capitalist military class, due to the lack of prolonged class conflict and
the need to build cross class alliance. This was replaced with institutional
consciousness, where the ruling elites self-defined themselves as the state
itself, which has been taken to represent the nation.

This has been
reflected in the rhetoric used by the counter-revolution to discredit its
opponents. It spread fear, not of social change, which is undesirable in itself,
but of the destruction of the state by the forces of chaos. The battle is
framed as the struggle between the forces of “chaos” and “order”, not two
competing social visions.

Based on this,
the need for intellectual development becomes rather limited. The existence of
the state does not need sophisticated justification, due its deep roots in the
modern collective psyche. The ruing elites also deliberately mix the state with
the nation, so an attack on the current order becomes an attack on the state
and by extension the nation.

This level of
intellectual poverty has created a cult of state worship mixed with extreme
nationalism amongst the elite as well as their middle class supporters. The
ideological base of Arab autocratic regimes has become the same as the
ideological justification for the existence of the state, namely, the provision
of security and avoiding, what Hobbes called, a brutish, short life of all
against all. In other words, the ruling elites have adopted the view that
without them the state would collapse, opening up the way for chaos.

As such,
political opposition does not only become an act of treason, it becomes a call
to barbarism and anarchy, which the forces of order must suppress at all costs
– making the battle existential. At the same time, there is no need to develop
a cohesive ideological framework, since, simply put, what is at stake is the
existence of organized society itself and under such conditions, the form of
this society does not matter much.              

This sense of
consciousness, has not only had an impact on the intellectual development of
the status quo forces, it has also affected the policies of repression being
followed by those regimes.

The most
prominent example of which is the case of Syria, where the regime has embarked
on a literal war on its opponents that has not only destroyed Syrian society, but
severely curtailed the ability of the regime to govern as well as the ability
of the ruling Syrian class to extract resources and accumulate wealth.

From a class
perspective, this policy seems to be almost suicidal. The regime opted for an all-out
war rather than a possible compromise with its opponents, which would have
guaranteed the ability of the ruling elites to continue to accumulate wealth.
Even if the regime is able to win the war, the local governance apparatus that
the regime has relied on has been destroyed in most parts of Syria, as for
example in the city of Idlib.

From an
outsider’s perspective, the Syrian ruling class has opted for something that is
contrary to its rational class interest. This, once again, stems from the lack
of class-consciousness of the ruling elite. They see themselves as the state with
all its manifestation of power, rather than a social class that is mainly concerned
with capital accumulation. From that perspective, opposition is equivalent
to anarchy and the need to crush it becomes paramount.

Another example
of such self-destructive policies can be found in Egypt. The military regime
has advocated economic policies that have pushed the country into a full-blown
fiscal crisis. The Egyptian pound is rapidly de-valuating, which is pushing
inflation and rapidly increasing the cost of living.

This crisis
stems from the aggrandizement of the military’s economic empire, which
has not only crowded out the private sector, but also depleted the country’s
foreign reserves in massive, economically useless, infrastructure projects that
benefit the military as it is directly involved in these construction projects.

This, once
again, seems to move against the class interest of the military caste, which
should revolve around the stabilization of the Egyptian economy and the
creation of conditions conducive to capital accumulation. However, this has been trumped by this class seeing itself as the state. As
such, anything that benefits it is essentially beneficial to the state, and therefore the nation. This policy is compounded by an increase in defence spending,
which has depleted whatever was left of the hard currency reserves. This spending
spree made Egypt the fourth largest arms purchaser, worldwide, in
2015.

The weakness of
the counter-revolution’s intellectual development has created a strong dilemma.
The philosopher Miguel Unamuno captured this in a letter to a friend during the Spanish
civil war in 1936. He discussed the sweeping victories of Franco and the
Spanish right, and wrote, “In this way there will never be peace. They will win
but they will never convince; they will conquer but they will never convert”.  

The inability of the
counter-revolutionary forces to appeal to more than the need for security, and attachment to the state, means that the current political order can only be
maintained through the use of coercion and violence.

This, in the end, will not
only negatively affect other classes, it will also affect the ability of the
ruling classes to accumulate wealth as the autocratic regime tears societies
apart, due to their overreliance on violence in pursuit of the
interests of a quite mythical figure: the state!