From Tunis to Beijing, tyrants are shuddering on their thrones, as one oppressed people after another challenges and overthrows one autocracy after another. This outbreak of the contagion of revolution calls to mind those other great years of revolution -- 1848, 1917-19, 1948-49, 1968, and 1989 -- when ordinary people made history so dramatically. In this series of diaries, which will appear in the anti-capitalist chat, members of the anti-capitalist meet-up propose to examine the ongoing revolutions of 2011, so that those of us on the progressive left can assist them constructively, while avoiding support for policies that, regardless of how helpful they might appear to be, can serve only to undermine the cause of people's power. Some liberals may support the revolutions of 2011 only to the extent of their agreement with the aims or programs of the revolutionaries, or may rationalize support for foreign intervention (for example in Libya) as a way of saving lives. Those positions, however sincerely held, can yield only defeat for those revolutions -- and for our own progressive causes here in the US.
In the course of this series, the following three major points, along with many others, will be made:
1. The revolutions of 2011, and the upsurge in left/labor consciousness in the West (i.e., Wisconsin, riots in Greece, etc.) share the same ultimate cause: the ongoing crisis of capitalism revealed by the 2008 market crashes. Stripped to its barest essentials, what has happened is that the major players in international finance -- including large investment banks, large state-controlled national banks, the IMF and the World Bank -- led everyone into a strategy of high debt that was supposed to lead to prosperity, and when the system came crashing down, they demanded reimbursement for their follies! Rather than allow the private banks to fail, governments in the leading nations, including the US, gave billions to the banks and their private investors, and are now demanding "austerity" from their citizens. In Europe last year, working people responded with strikes, marches and riots, while here in the US, Republican governors are using this budget "crisis," as a pretext for attacking public employees, as in Wisconsin.
In countries like Tunisia and Egypt, the IMF has imposed multifaceted "austerity" programs, including requiring debtor governments to privatize state owned enterprises, slash wages and cut subsidies that kept the price of food, fuel and other essentials low. In places like this, "austerity" means food shortages, rising prices, and flat or declining wages. Remember, the Tunisian Revolution started with a protest against food shortages there, and the Egyptian Revolution succeeded in ousting Mubarak only when the countries' industrial workers became involved. These revolutions are about political democracy because the people believe that democratically elected and accountable governments would push back against austerity. Those who'd like to characterize these revolutions as seeking no more than political democracy must explain why these people have risen up now, after decades of autocracy.
The Revolutions of 2011 constitute local manifestations of the same struggle on the part of working people to protest the neoliberal policies of bailouts for the rich and austerity for everyone else. Therefore, the successes of any of these revolutions benefits all of them, as they all bring pressure against the same bad policies and their local advocates.
2. Sharing the same ultimate cause, and the same enemy, these national movements will succeed best by governing themselves democratically and supporting one another internationally. In supporting one another internationally, activists in all countries, and especially those of us from the US and other "advanced" nations, must be willing to give our allies in other countries, such as Egypt or Libya, a great deal of leeway in working out the course of their own revolutions. This may seem self-evident, but we must remember that the US and its allies are not popular in the Middle East. To maintain access to the region’s vast natural resources, over the past 50 years or so the US has propped up violent dictatorships in the region. It has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to buy politicians and influence elections. It has carried out countless covert operations—sabotage, assassinations, etc.—to undermine movements that have resisted U.S. domination. It has armed the colonial-settler state of Israel to the teeth, allowing it to strike out against its Arab neighbors and oppress the Palestinian people. In light of that history, is it any wonder that, far from being fascinated by Europe and the United States, working people of the region hold some anti-US views?
Nevertheless, many Arabs participating in the revolutions have recognized their common cause with Americans struggling against "austerity." Thus workers in Egypt have publicly announced their support for the protesters in Wisconsin, and they have not placed any political conditions on that support.
As these revolutions progress, they will at times express anti-capitalist and anti-US messages, and some in the US, including liberals, will begin not only to criticize them, but to express support for some sort of US intervention to limit their "radicalism." Out of decent respect for the people of these countries, who are risking their lives in this fight, we must resist any and all such calls. Just as we would not welcome the criticism of Egyptians on how we're handling the protests in Madison, so too do the people of the Middle East have the right to expect our respect for their political judgments.
3. US/NATO military intervention in these revolutions can only derail them and undermine their allies (us) in the West.
As a US general recently said of the US military presence in the Pech Valley of Afghanistan, "“What we figured out is that people in the Pech really aren’t anti-U.S. or anti-anything; they just want to be left alone. Our presence is what’s destabilizing this area.” Likewise with Libya, Tunisia, etc. If the US intervenes militarily in any of these revolutions, it will only harm the revolutions. The "no-fly zone" proposal for Libya, which some on Daily Kos have misguidedly supported, is really an opportunity for the US and its allies to get control of the governmental transition and future Libyan policies by taking over the airspace and, if possible, military bases and oilfields, especially the ones that have fallen into the hands of the rebels. Then the US would be in a position to present its own demands to the rebels and protesters. Does anyone really think the US would just stand aside and allow any of these revolutions to chart a course that might injure the oil companies? Does anyone really think that the Libyan people are really so helpless that they need outside help? Notice, too, how the Libyans calling for intervention against Gadhafi are mainly men who were happily serving in Gadhafi's cabinet just days ago: like the caretaker interim leaderships of Tunisia and Egypt, they aren't trying to assist the revolution, they are trying to short circuit it.
Going forward, the continued spread of the Revolutions of 2011 through the Arab world and beyond may be of great assistance to progressive causes and movements, but only if we support those revolutions and see through the attempts of the US government, which for years has been comfortably allied with autocracies around the world, to deflect them into channels that fail to challenge the dishonesty and theft underlying the neoliberal offensive of wealth for the wealthy and austerity for the rest of us. Our support of these peoples' rights of national self-determination could prove pivotal to how much assistance the Revolutions of 2011 can provide, not only for the peoples making them, but for people throughout the world.