People Want: A Radical Exploration of the Arab Uprising

People Want: A Radical Exploration of the Arab Uprising
by Gilbert Achcar – Saqi Books, London

8 December, 2013 – Review by Farooq Sulehria – Socialist Resistance

Brushing aside a host of fashionable narratives to explain the Arab spring, Gilbert Achcar’s recent book, ‘The People Want: A Radical Exploration of the Arab Uprising’ offers a radically different perspective.

Instead of over-optimistically glorifying the uprising or pessimistically ridiculing the temporary lull as ‘Arab winter’, he views the Arab spring as a protracted or long-term revolutionary process which may continue to unfold for another couple of decades. In fact, the recent coup in Egypt weeks was a timely endorsement of Achcar’s thesis on the Arab spring.

His prophetic analysis, informed by a Marxist outlook, springs from rigorous research and deep knowledge of Arab realities. Instead of offering Facebook explanations, demographic analysis or ascribing the latest Arab upheaval to middle class democratic aspirations, he identifies “the deep roots of the uprising” because “there can be no lasting solution to the crisis unless those roots are transformed”.

The breadth of the Arab spring shows that its causes are neither confined to the political realm nor limited to linguistic factors. In his view, revolution-by-contagion occurs when “there is favourable ground…a predisposition to revolution”. Even importantly: “Despotism by itself…can hardly be sufficient cause for the outbreak and subsequent success of a democratic revolution.”

One should look for the underlying socioeconomic factors to explain why the Arab spring “triumphed when it did: why 2011, after decades of despotism in the Arab region? Why 1789 in France, after a long history of Absolutism and peasant revolts? Why 1989 in Eastern Europe, rather than, say, 1953-56?”

To solve the puzzle, he delves into history. A series of European revolutions also caused ripple effects. These socio-political earthquakes were, in the words of Achcar, “triggered by the collision of the two tectonic plates” ie “developing productive forces and existing relations of production”. The latter, Marx thought, constitute “legal and political superstructures” with the state at its core.

While this contradiction between the rising bourgeoisie and feudal ‘superstructures’ – translating into revolutions – paved the way for Europe’s capitalist industrialisation, a precisely “comparable instance of the existing relations of production blocking the development of the forces of production was at the origin of the shock wave” that, according to Achcar, culminated in collapse of the USSR.

However, unlike juvenile Marxists, Achcar does not issue any sweeping judgements based on “Marx’s paradigmatic thesis on revolution” he himself invokes to explain European revolutions. This is because every crisis does not constitute a revolutionary situation. Similarly, every revolutionary situation does not lead to a revolution. Therefore, Achcar suggests to cautiously “derive variants” from Marxist thesis that are “less sweeping in historical scope” to describe the Arab spring.

Chalking out both revolutionary possibilities and limitation impregnating a system, he points out: “the development of productive forces can be stalled, not by the relations of production constitutive of a generic mode of production (such as the relation between capital and wage-labour in the capitalist mode of production), but, rather, by a specific modality of that generic mode of production. In such cases, it is not always necessary to replace the basic mode of production in order to overcome the blockage. A change in modality or ‘mode of regulation’ does, however, have to occur”. …more