the Edo school and the Arab Street

I was quite excited this time last year reading articles by Tariq 'Ali about the South American awakening from its neo-liberal slumber and one cannot help (well, one if you consider 'one' as being a leftist prophesier) but see events in the Middle East as a similar sort of shake-up. But then again the left has never been too good at judging between a disparate batch of resistance movements and the regional collapse of Capitalist hegemony. To be more accurate, I would wager to say that historical analysis would be called in to help.

I don't really know what I'm talking about, but in order to make a solid analysis of the revolutionary potential of 'Arabs' I think you would have to better understand the extent of their proletarianization vis-a-vis urbanization and commodification of work/social relations/etc. I mean, what the hell do Arabs do all day? If you are a small independent retail merchant selling chocolate bars and bottled water, besides resources being stolen from under your feet ( which, I must say, has a certain immagined community ring to it), how is surplus value being stolen from you by Western Powers. How is time spent listlessly staring into the street and arguing over not accepting crumpled bills count as socially necessary abstract labor-time. It certainly is abstract, and certainly is time, but do see my point?

I have only spent a small and largely superficial amount of time in the Middle East, but from I seen I would say that the proletarianization of Arabs is patch-work. They live within the global consumer chain (though many cannot afford most commodities), they are totally loyal to the model with regards to always keeping a large reserve army of labor (especially with youth unemployment), etc. I guess this is all sort of old stomping grounds for dependency theory. But I want to know how revolutionary potential is fomented based on the the internal social dynamics in a periphery region, which has a supplanted patchwork form of capitalist society.

I guess we can substitute Lenin's "The history of all countries bears out the fact that through their own powers alone, the working class can develop only a trade-union consciousness" with "The history of all Arab countries bears out the fact that through their own powers alone, the working class can only develop a radical-anti-zionist-religious-zeal-resistance consciousess" I am not denying ba'athism and the Marxist parties in Palestine, I am just saying that there is something elusive about the Middle East that makes simple class struggle politics a little hazy. Do you get that feeling? In Mexico, it seems like you could turn a teachers' strike (oaxaca) or a failed egocentric presidential bid (AMLO) into class war with a few red arm bands, the blessings of the PT, and students with some extra time on their hands. The historical legacy of Leftist political struggle in the Middle East seems so disconnected, forgotten, or perhaps more accurately, suppressed. I have even heard people ask before why there never was a leftist wave in the Middle East.

With so much emphasis on religion, a contrivance used to discount resistance movements as fanatic (which so ofter becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy) , it sort of make sense that secular resistance movements take a back seat in the narrative of Middle East violence and conflict. But getting back to the original question, how does the real relationships of exploitation work between Arabs and to Arabs? At the national level I can see tangible economic relationships of exploitation between places like Saudi Arabia and the gulf states, Israel/Palestine, but on the micro-level, away from political domineering and conspiracy theories, what is the daily grind of individual exploitation entail upon which a nexus of resistance could emerge? Perhaps it is just a myopic hope to think that any group of unlucky people, much less Arabs, can be isolated from the Global capitalist system and that beyond wars for oil, neo-colonialism, regional hegemony wars and all other consequences of the capitalist system, that there is some fundamental economic relationship between all Arab proletariats and some demonized other that neatly abstracts surplus value from each on a daily basis, and furthermore that could be magically revealed "like a bolt of lightening from the clear blue sky" that would suddenly shake off the religious overtones and then suddenly all of these movements would be a mass class consciousness awakening.

I could see this soliloquy going on and on and so I will propose one final little theory. I would wager, If I had to, and I think whether right or wrong one could make a strong case, that if one were to compare why liberation theology in Latin America was still just leftist struggle while political movements in the Middle East so quickly get condemned as Islamic terrorism is based on the vast arsenal of orientalism readily at hand for those wishing to discredit resistantce movements in the Middle East. Like I said, a self-fulfilling prophecy. Secular (and I'm not talking fatah) anti-zionist movements in Palestine have receded because of the emphasis always being placed on religious dimensions, with the intent to demonize and delegitimize green terrors. This feeds into a desire by resistance movements to feed into those fears and use the power of these created myths to build strong ideological rallying points of resistance. I don't know the specifics of this historical process, or even really the general points, but if I am an evil nefarious Western power trying to counter resistance movements across the globe, I would just imagine that demonizing spooky Islam would be easier than demonizing el Salvadorian priests.

But that still begs the question of how social relations of production work in the patchwork world of taxi-drivers, shop-owners, bakers, etc. in the Arab street. But then again...I agree with the Edo school in thinking that das Kapital functions on three levels of abstraction, and maybe I just haven't spent enough time thinking about it. Or maybe I've just spent too much time thinking about it.

Condolezza Rice Was Right: A New Middle East is Being Born

By Alberto Cruz

The Doha Agreement for Lebanon has clarified a new re-ordering of the map of the Middle East. US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was correct when, during the Israeli war against Lebanon in the summer of 2006, while Israeli planes bombed that Arab country's civilian areas, especially Shi'ite barrios of Beirut and the country's southern cities, she justified the massacre saying that it was assisting "the birth pangs of a new Middle East". What Rice never dreamt was that with Hizbollah's victory over Israel, that new Middle East was going to be one very different from the imperialist design, one that little by little would move away from the tutelage of the United States and its regional agents, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan.

Just as is happening in Latin America, there is an awakening in the Arab world. To the Iraqi, Lebanese and Palestinian struggles one can add that of workers in Egypt and, to a lesser extent but still worth highlighting, that of Jordanian workers against their government's neoliberal, IMF-friendly policies. It is indeed the birth of a new Middle East, that of its peoples.